Month: October 2017

‘Battlefront II’ Impressions after the Beta Test: I can’t wait for November 14th

I always feel that I must apologize for covering a light topic especially when there is so much going on in the world around us, but we do have to live. We do have to manage our stresses. And we must find the things in life that make us happy, and for me Star Wars is something that works—especially when we are talking about a new video game. Then regarding that topic, I think much of the world that’s coming, the politics, the structure, the science can be seen with each new video game update from the industry because most of the engineers and designers of the future out there are playing these massive online games. While it’s true that ratings are down in the NFL and some of that is certainly due to the politics surrounding the flag, most of the change in attitude toward football in general is because of this new age of entertainment where people can live entire secondary lives online in their video game avatars. I find it all extremely fascinating, and optimistic and it helps me fight through some of the most complex problems that any one human being could be expected to fight through. With all that said, I have been very excited for the next generation Star Wars: Battlefront II which comes out in November. For a long time there was talk of a beta run in early October so I did my pre-order and signed up for the top version of the game and had marked on my calendar October 4th because that’s when the beta opened for the new game by Electronic Arts/Dice.

My first impression of the beta compared to the full game of the original Battlefront with its bright white backgrounds was that it was missing an optimism that made the original very THX-1138 fun and futuristic. The menu boards on Battlefront II were mostly all in blacks and that made it seem like a lesser quality experience to me. Because of this I was disappointed, but once I started playing the various modes I quickly forgave the game because it was a lot of fun. From October 4th to October 9th I played as much as I could and leveled up to somewhere around 10 or 11. I didn’t pay much attention as I was mostly trying to get a feel for everything. A large part of the weekend my grandson was over and we played the new arcade mode a lot. It was clearly his favorite mode and I thought was a big addition to the overall game, a way to learn the maps and get a feel for the various builds in the game. I also thought the Star Card system was much improved, it reminded me a lot of the Fantasy Flight Games board games in this way, which makes those games infinitely interesting. Bringing that Star Card aspect to a video game made for a very compelling experience and I could see quickly that I would soon spend many hours playing with different cards to figure out the best combination, and then trying them out in the Arcade Mode to learn to use them. From just what the game developers showed on their beta test, there are endless opportunities for variety in Battlefront II once the game is released in November.

Before I get too far into this you do know dear reader about the cultural significance of all this, don’t you? After all, the new Star Wars: The Last Jedi trailer was released during halftime on Monday Night Football. And the moment that the beta ended for Battlefront II Forbes had a nice little article seen below about their criticism of the loot box system. The whole play to win debate in the video game community is a big deal because it brings many people into the realities of capitalism in ways their public educations never did. To be good at these games you must put in the hours, and the money. You can get by only doing one of those things, but to be great, you have to spend time, money and diligence to get the most out of the game. People who are from the ANTIFA crowd of course are out there playing these games and their basic philosophy is confronted with the realities of such a big business as Battlefront II is tapping into. Star Wars is just the entry point to these kinds of experiences. They become a lifestyle for many people in a similar way that adults have traditionally been in bowling leagues or played golf. It is not uncommon in the spirit of competition to get a new bowling ball or a set of titanium clubs for golf to get an edge over your rivals and that is what the loot box system does in Battlefront II. The writer for the Forbes article obviously didn’t like it. I did, my grandson and I had a lot of fun with the loot boxes. It was like gambling in Vegas, you never really knew what you were going to get and it was fun working toward an opportunity to have a chance at something cool. Games like this are all about the proper risk rewards system.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/insertcoin/2017/10/08/star-wars-battlefront-2s-loot-boxes-seem-like-theyre-going-to-be-a-serious-problem/#1707a80a6323

For me the best part of the new Battlefront II game was the Starfighter Assault modes. It took me a minute to get used to things because they changed the mechanics quite a lot. On the previous edition of Battlefront I was one of those 50 kills per game people. I was very good at it and it was a dream come true for me to fly those ships around in space in combat situations. I can tell that I will be spending many hours playing just that mode. I would say that the new game is worth it just for the Starfighter Assault modes. As readers here know I love the Fantasy Flight Games offerings of X-Wing and Armada so putting a pilot into a scenario that is objective based around giant capital ships and individualized dog fighting is an incredible experience. Even for a beta test the frame rates were high and the details were amazing. Some of the cut-scenes were sloppy on my giant 4K television but I’m sure the final release of the game will be a major improvement on that. As I seem to say with each of these big video game releases, whether it is Uncharted 4 for the Playstation, or Zelda for the Nintendo Switch, this Battlefront II game is the next technical evolution that turns living rooms into combat zones and works our minds in ways we couldn’t duplicate under any other situation.

Probably the best improvement however on Battlefront II is the class system where there are four different categories of player. I found due to my aggressive style the Heavy Class to be most to my liking. But what’s better is that you aren’t stuck to that class for the whole round of play. If you need to lighten things up for more stealth or sniper ability you can during a round, and those strategic options are like gold raining from heaven to a guy like me who literally spends all my down time thinking of strategic options. I think of strategic options even when it comes to what grocery store to go to, so a game like this with all these random elements playing against each other is just food for my brain. So I’m really looking forward to November 14th when the whole game is released to the public. Like I said, I held nothing back on this version. I did preorder the game so I could play it with the early access. And I did by the deluxe version of it so I could get every little benefit. On the first one I came late to the game because I was made at The Force Awakens for killing Han Solo and not respecting the continuity of the previous novels. It took me a year to finally give it a shot after radio host Matt Clark bugged me about it every week for that entire year. Once I did start playing however I exploded and quickly maxed out my level at 100. There were a few weekends around last Christmas where I was off work and I played the starfighter modes for 48 straight hours—because it was that fun. With Battlefront II being noticeably an improvement on the game play mechanics, I will likely go even deeper into the game, so I am starting with the deluxe package and from there I will support the game in whatever fashion they come up with. It’s not only a work of art and technical marvel, but it’s just some of the best fun you can have from a top end entertainment system. I can’t think of a better way to live life than to blow stuff up and hear all the wonderful sounds from a Bose sound system that puts you in the middle of the most intense battles a mind could think of. I am really, really, really looking forward to November 14th. Battlefront II will be a winner and the beta was just a taste of the great things to come.

Rich Hoffman

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The Democrat John Kasich: How ‘The Big Lie’ and State Central Committee have changed the political landscape

 

I don’t think John Kasich knows where he is or what’s going on.  I think he’s become a complete idiot.  Over this past week he threatened to leave the Republican Party if they didn’t get their act together…………………………..he left the Republican Party on his own when he signed the Medicaid expansion for Obamacare exchanges going against the Tea Party sponsored Health Care Freedom Amendment.  He also left the Party once he came under fire for the way he dealt with a tornado that tore through Eastern Ohio.  How is he the go-to guy in the Republican Party for how Puerto Rico should be dealt with?  And as far as getting things done, Kasich never regained his footing after he lost the SB5 fight.  Looking back on it now, even though I met the guy during all that and he looked me in the eye promising he was doing everything he could to support the Tea Party movement, I think he never was a reform minded person. He and his friend on 700 WLW Bill Cunningham was never Tea Party supporters—they were just actors playing the part to get elected.  The guy we see today still crying over how he lost the nomination of the Republican Party to Donald Trump is not the same guy I heard at VOA Park back in 2010 speaking to Tea Party groups.  Nor was he  the same guy who spoke in my back yard at the Carriage Hill Barn the night before the election of 2012 where so many critical issues were decided the next day.  He was likely always a loser saying whatever to get elected, but what he is today is clearly a Democrat.  He’s no Republican.  That is clear.

Because of people like John Kasich, once the warning signs were obvious, the Tea Party that everyone has always been so unhappy about in the establishment made a very key, strategic decision.  Yes they attacked candidates like John Boehner openly and it had an effect.  Eric Canter lost his seat to a more reform minded candidate and John Boehner left his speaker job to become a lobbyists and make some money while he still could.  Many other candidates of traditional establishment have found themselves now looking in from the outside.  But that’s not the only success the Tea Party had—the real success was much more permanent.  Tea Party leaders ran for State Central Committee seats and started challenging the establishment from the inside out, and after a few years of that they are now running the Party in a way that the newspapers still don’t udnerstand.   John Kasich for a lot of us was the last straw.  When he went bad people pulled together and made some decisions.  That is why Kasich was unable to keep Donald Trump from winning Ohio, because the Party kicked Kasich to the side, even though he was the sitting governor.   Kasich lost his power because he turned away from the people who put him in office.  He’s not going to leave the Republican Party.  He was already removed during the election period of 2016 based on his horrendous performance as a Republican governor.  Progressives like him, conservatives do not.  The Party moved on without John Kasich.

Now Kasich is the go-to guy on all the liberal network stations.  Progressives are hoping with all their chips on the table that John can make a comeback, but there is no chance of that happening.  Once Kasich lost people like me, he lost the only people who could give him a platform into politics in the future.  He’s done and he won’t be coming back in 2020 as an independent.  The world was poised to change, and he pretended he wanted to be a part of that change.  When he showed that he wasn’t, we found people who would and that’s the end of the story on Kasich.

When those same Tea Party supporters told me their plan I wasn’t sure it could be done at the time, but the people doing it were ambitious and smart.  It took real discipline and tenacity to win all those Central Committee seats.   I was asked to be one of them, but I just couldn’t put the time in, but I have been really impressed by how well their plan worked.  And it has made a difference in the nature of politics within the Republican Party.  This is just the start.  Now that it has been successful more people who are of the Tea Party mind are putting themselves in these Central Committee seats and voting with the reformers.  Kasich will have even a less chance in two years of doing anything in the Republican Party than he does now, because he is a liar, a cheat, and a wimp.  The Party was taken away from Kasich.  He didn’t leave it willingly.  They aren’t telling people that on CNN.

This is also why Democrats are all flipped out with these radicalized groups they have, like ANTIFA.  The old games aren’t working.  I’m just going to spell it out for those who don’t keep track of the inner workings of politics, Dinesh  D’Souza’s recent book, The Big Lie has obliterated the political left’s foundational tactics.  Currently only smart people have read the book and are acting on what has been presented, but over the next eight years the contents will spread into the Democratic playbook and literally destroy all the avenues they’ve used to recruit interest to the Party over the last 100 years.  Of course this isn’t D’Souza’s first entry into this kind of thing, but I think The Big Lie is the most damaging to the Democrats.  Coming out when it did while Trump is in the White House is a game changer in politics.  The book is that good, and that influential.  Just like with the Central Committee efforts I spoke about in Ohio, once the smart people get their teeth into something, the change that follows is inevitable.  Democrats don’t have similar smart people on their side; all they have ever had is fear to invoke political passions.  In this ever-increasing information based society, fear is beaten by knowledge.  And people without knowledge cannot beat people with it—even though they may currently outnumber them—stupid people know how to march in the street, but they don’t know how to get themselves organized into something like a State Central Committee takeover.  That’s where real party decisions are made and Democrats have stacks of very emotional people who are willing to join together for a fight, but to fight what?  They need someone to tell them that and nobody can articulate the issue.  Emotional efforts aren’t aren’t working anymore, so they have no more plan B.

That’s why Kasich is now on the outside.  It is embarrassing to watch him attempt to position himself for a 2020 run as an independent, or perhaps even as a Democrat.  Looking at the Democrats there really isn’t anybody who can challenge Trump in 2020, so Kasich being the kind of guy he is—certainly not a Republican—just a hired gun that turned out to not have any bullets metaphorically speaking, might try to run as a Democrat and he’s setting the stage on CNN.  He wants to be president so badly, he is likely considering it.  But he doesn’t have the heart to win that fight.  He’s a weak person who has made so many people angry that he can’t run from it forever.  It’s already caught up to him which is why he looks so oblivious to the reality around him.  He’s already a man without a Party.  He didn’t make that decision.  It was made for him by those who previously supported him.

Rich Hoffman

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The Root Cause of the Gun Control Problem: We need less control and more guns

I found it amazing to see Tweets like the one below immediately after the Las Vegas shooting.  There was something about this one that was different for me.  I found the attacks on the NRA reprehensible.  October is normally the month that I renew my membership to the NRA and I did so proudly a few days ago knowing how so many people who call themselves Americans jumped quickly to blame the gun rights group for the violence in Las Vegas.   At this point it looks like liberalism was the primary cause of the mass shooting in Vegas—so under their premise of accusatory proclamations—they are far more responsible for what happened.   There was teeth to this latest blame game toward the NRA however that I personally haven’t seen before—almost desperation connected to the Trump presidency where their raw feelings were more revealed than usual.  I was particularly surprised by the late night comedy people who so openly came out specifically against the NRA.  I realized after listening to these idiots for over a week after the deadly shooting that gun supporters needed a new approach.  It’s not enough to just defend gun rights and the Second Amendment—but we need to go on the offense to a much greater degree than we have in the past.  We need to sell the benefits of a well armed society instead of just defending the merits.

I get paid professionally to solve very complex problems, and to identify root causes quickly, I’m very good at doing such things.  Without being modest since it should be pretty self-evident that I have a much higher than average intelligence, I have to throw out that disclaimer before continuing because there is a perception that advocating in favor of firearms is connected to people who lack intelligence.  That couldn’t be further from the truth, but I do find that many gun supporters aren’t so good at articulating their thoughts on this matter because the right words don’t come so easy to them.  The words do come easy to me and some of that is God-given ability; but most of it has been developed over a lifetime of hard work where I’ve fed that intelligence a steady stream of education that has gone on well past my high school and college years.  I personally live a life where I don’t drink or smoke—my consumption of beer is less than ten cans per year—every year—so I enjoy a clear mind not numbed by prescription drugs and pain killers as well.  I have the benefit of one of the clearest and best working minds that there is—and when I look at this Vegas shooting and develop a root cause analysis I see the need for more guns not less, and a much more intellectual discussion about the merits of gun ownership that needs to be sold to the American public.  Not a defensive position on “butt stock” legislation just to make all the wimpy people in the world feel good about doing something completely irrelevant in the wake of a national tragedy.

Liberalism appears yet again to be the primary political affiliation of this latest shooter, and we also find that the Vegas shooter had problems with his father.  What we see most common with all mass shooters over the last few years is that they come from homes where the father either wasn’t present, or had serious problems of their own.  In this case the Vegas shooter’s father was on the FBI list for being a bank robber.  Not the average dad who cuts grass on the weekends and has words of advice about how to throw a football or not scrape your knee running down a sidewalk.  We are talking about real family breakdowns that are directly related to these mass shooters which under any root cause analysis would be one of the first identifying conditions.  From there we would examine the next stage of such a cause which would be liberalism—since that political philosophy has largely contributed to the destruction of the American family by diminishing the role that men have in it.  Most of the feminist positions that have emerged out of the progressive movement attached to the Democratic Party have put forth their strategies without really thinking about what it might cause by way of damage to the family structure for which we all live under.   They only thought that it would be best to make people more dependent on centralized government by removing the traditionally strong male role from the homes of young people—and putting women in charge completely by radicalizing them against “white male privilege” without really understanding what that meant.

I am also a student of history.  I enjoy the topic naturally and understand the context of what a miracle life in the United States truly was to emerge the way it did to bring about the opportunities we all see today.  Other countries around the world have had their periods of national identity.  England during the age of Norman Conquest solidified their knightly culture into the type of society they are known for presently.  Japan for all their history is defined by their feudal period—that is a rally point for their national identity.  China will always be known for its Ming dynasty—and so we could go around the world and show that most places have some big historical moment in their thousands of years of history that define them as a culture—from their food to their core belief system.  And in America it was clearly the age of westward expansion.  It was a case where the Occident met the orient in a philosophical struggle—and the east lost.  They were conquered largely due to the gun and a new kind of society emerged.  Guns in America paved the way for decentralized power and the emergence of capitalism for which the world still points to with extreme jealousy and calls their enemy.  Those forces know that so long as individuals have guns that they don’t stand a chance of gaining individual control of the American citizen for the aims of progressive advancement of their global political ideologies.  They are too quick to ignore the well-known lessons from history and to continue with their failures by spreading them to American society which is the opposite of what they should be doing.

So to provide the best answer to all those who aren’t so equipped with a knowledge of history or the ability to draw forth a proper root cause analysis of how violence erupts in any society—the reason that civilians need “assault weapons” is because that is the safety net of protection when institutions fail to resolve problems, or create them to begin with—in this case when a liberal shooter decides that he wants to take the lives of others through a breakdown not caused by individual behavior, but institutional failure.  If the governments of the world fail, in America, citizens can provide defense of their property themselves in whatever capacity is needed.  If more civilians had been armed in Las Vegas once it was realized that the shooter was firing from a broken window from a hotel, the assailant could have been engaged earlier—and fewer people would have been harmed.  But even so, the shooter may have been deterred from doing such a thing in the first place.  He knew that all he had to do was prevent the police from getting to him, so he was free to act unmolested as a terrorist for many minutes.  He didn’t have to worry about civilians shooting through the hotel walls at him, only of the police gathering in the hallway which he monitored by his video feeds.  The police did a pretty good job in Vegas, but they have lots of safety protocols they have to live under preventing fast action—which was needed at the time.  To conclude a root cause positioning statement on the matter, more guns would have saved more lives in Las Vegas—and they do anywhere where there are lots of guns on private people.

I’ve always been a defender of the NRA and of the Second Amendment.  But after watching the behavior of anti-American forces after the Vegas shooting I’m convinced that much more than the NRA needs to emerge to sell gun rights to these many generations who have been trained to think against guns by those same anti-American forces.  When Jimmy Kimmel blasted the NRA on his show saying that supporters of that group were responsible for the shooting he was wrong to say we are all Americans.  I would go so far to say that if you do not support guns in America then you don’t have a right to call yourself an American.  Being an American doesn’t mean you can think all things about everything.  There are some basic ground rules to living in American society.  You must for instance support capitalism because that is the economic means of our nation.  And I would say that you must support the Second Amendment for not just “hunting” but for what it’s for, to regain control over failed institutions when needed.  If those intuitions fail and must be replaced and they are protected by a military industrial complex, then civilians need equal armament to regain civilian control. That is the answer to the question asked in the above Tweet.   We trust our institutions to do the job of providing safety in places like Las Vegas.  But that next line of defense is private firearm ownership and if there had been more of a presence of firearms in Vegas, more people would have lived.

With firearms comes responsibly—and my life is an example of how serious people like me should take the use of them.  For instance, I propose that people should be as free to wear their guns around on their hips as they do a tie with a nice suit.  But they also shouldn’t drink in public and do anything to lose their mental acuity.  I am not a supporter of mind altering drugs of any kind—even prescription medicine because it might affect the decision-making process when we need to decide to use a gun or not.  And I’m willing to live that kind of life to make firearms on private people more abundant—to serve as a deterrent in large population centers to prevent mass shootings like the one in Vegas—by a liberalized terrorist.   Surrendering any part of the private right to own firearms and their “assault” characteristics is not acceptable—because that is not part of the solution to the root cause of mass killings.  Fear is the objective of a mass shooter, and more guns means much less fear for a society that understands the philosophic necessity for individual freedom under the conditions of duress.  And it is time as gun owners that we stop trying to defend ourselves from the stupid and purposely ignorant.  It’s time to take that fight to their poorly founded thoughts and to sell the merits of gun ownership in ways that haven’t been done for years—which is exactly what I intend to do from this day forward.

Rich Hoffman

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The Hollywood Sacrifice of Harvey Weinstein: Knowing the real story takes some work

So, how does it feel, “fat boy?”  Harvey Weinstein has been caught doing far more than Bill O’Reilly did and for a far longer duration—yet he had the blind eye of justice turned away from him for over three decades while people at the center of his abuse of women stood on stages and protested their hatred of Donald Trump.  Yes, there is a lot going on here.  The New York Times who broke the story didn’t all of a sudden become America’s best friend.  The liberals who are trying to apologize for Harvey’s behavior now can’t because they’ve already said too much about Donald Trump and Bill O’Reilly, have painted themselves in a corner. And only now does the rest of the world learn what I’ve been telling them for several decades now.  The below paragraph from Breitbart says everything you need to know about how the entertainment industry has been working and why there is a double standard.  Harvey Weinstein isn’t the only liberal movie producer acting this way—the entire industry does—and they give so much money to the Democrats that nobody says anything about it.  When you pull the women away from the situation—especially people like Ashley Judd who has been so critical of Donald Trump—remember her at his inauguration, they’ll tell you many sad stories.  The situation is as I said it was.  Most actresses in Hollywood are glorified prostitutes.  They know they have to give producers like Weinstein blow jobs or let those fat slobs ride them like horses in their make-up trailers for all to know if they want to work in movies.  That’s why they essentially become man hating feminists once they get into their thirties and aren’t nearly as cute.  This little paragraph tells everyone what anybody needs to know about how Hollywood works.  Harvey is just the latest.

But here is the thing; according to Peter Biskind’s 2004 non-fiction book Down and Dirty Pictures: Miramax, Sundance, and the Rise of Independent Film, Weinstein manipulated and pocketed the entertainment media in extraordinary ways. He hired countless “journalists” to work for his company in various capacities, offered them glamorous opportunities, and oftentimes threatened to pull advertising from publications working on negative stories. An entertainment media starved for Oscar campaign dollars simply could not afford to lose Hollywood’s most prolific Oscar-winner and advertiser.

 

http://www.breitbart.com/big-hollywood/2017/10/06/silence-complicity-powerful-said-nothing-harvey-weinsteins-alleged-victims-piled/amp/

For the moment and likely forever Harvey Weinstein is out of a job from a studio he created by rules he molded to use against his political enemies.  Again, I can’t say I didn’t predict all this was going to happen just as it is.  Weinstein is a major Hollywood producer and he is certainly a large part of the severe turn toward liberalism of that industry.  It is guys like him who have helped turn Hollywood away from anything conservative and shoved away the actors that conservatives like, such as Mel Gibson, Bruce Willis, and Tim Allen and replaced them with douche bag cry babies like George Clooney, and Johnny Depp.  Those male actors are no less porn stars than their female actor friends.  Harvey might not ask for a blow job from the guys, but he expects them to go out into America and sell liberalism if they want to work in his movies.  There is no way to go on any of the late night comedy shows like Fallen and Kimmel and utter conservative viewpoints and still expect to be cast into the next movie produced by Weinstein.  That’s why nobody said anything—because they all wanted a chance to act.  They could talk about Republicans, but they had to leave Democrats like Weinstein alone—even though he was much worse than anyone on the conservative side.

As I usually do, I have some experience with Hollywood when I write articles like this one.  For about ten years I was actively working on the edges of that entertainment industry as a writer pitching projects and doing little bit work because of my professional uniqueness with bullwhips.  So I have some up-close experience with actors and actresses and have had the opportunity to spend time with them off camera in Glendale where they can let their hair down and behave like normal people.  If America understood what these people go through to become actors, they’d understand why people like Ashely Judd become such liberal feminists later in life once that life caught up with them.  Madonna thought it was cute when she was younger to wrap Warren Beatty around her finger with voluminous amounts of unrestricted sex—but once she got “old” Beatty is still producing movies, and she’s a used tire in the garage that nobody wants to touch, and it is scary to them—so they become feminists hoping to get back some of what they whored away when they were younger.

But why do these women, and men, feel like they have to become the personal prostitutes to movie producers like Harvey Weinstein?  Well, let me just say that if you are an actor in Hollywood in any capacity—you have to be a prostitute to some degree and many figure that they can live somewhat normal lives if they can get into the pants of a powerful producer instead of slutting it up with the porn industry producers.  Because if the A List women who work for Weinstein don’t put out—there are literally thousands of girls working in the valley who will.  Many of them go to Hollywood to get discovered and become rich.  They find out when they get there that there aren’t many opportunities to become the next Ashley Judd or Nichole Kidman.  All there is for them is a porn job—if they are lucky.  The sets I have been on where extras were brought in to fill background shots always had young girls, nearly 100% who were willing to do anything to get a part in a movie.  Many of them were already doing porn just to get by from week to week and looking for a break into a legitimate role.  They will sleep with a producer and literally do anything with anybody hoping that whoever they are doing it with might put in a good name about them to somebody like the assistant of the assistant to Harvey Weinstein.  They know they either do that or they will literally be stuck screwing some scum bags in a rented storage unit for a fifteen minute online porn piece just so they can pay their rent in an overpriced dump of a shoe box.  Everyone knows that you either put up and put out with people like Harvey Weinstein, or you put out for cheap porn—and that’s the reality for the beautiful people.  The not so attractive girls have to do far worse just for the chance to hold a clip board on a movie set so they can work in the industry.

That is why they all become such indignant liberals who want to change the world, and instead of looking toward their own lives and the people in them they defer everything to the Republicans.  It’s the only way they can get back at people like Harvey Weinstein for making them do so much embarrassing “stuff” yet still have a chance to work in his movies.   When they get mad at people like Bill O’Reilly and Donald Trump it’s not really the conservatives they have a problem with, its people on their own side who have forced them to live like dogs for a chance to make a living.  Once they’ve made their money and people like Harvey aren’t trying to grab their ass every five seconds they then become righteously indignant.  They only do it then because the power of sex doesn’t sell any more so they have to turn toward activism to stay relevant with Harvey who gives a lot of money to Democrats.  You have to remember, actors get paid to be other people all the time, so it is nothing to them to adopt whatever social causes there are out there just for a chance to get a movie role.   There’s other fresh young girls looking to become the next millionaire actress who was already in Harvey’s pants—so what do they have to do as old hags but take their anger out on people like Trump?  They mean to lash out at Harvey, but they don’t want to completely burn their bridges because there might just be a movie role for them as somebody’s grandma/  They put up with everything and shut up entirely just to have a chance to work.   That is how the movie business works and why it has declined so intensely.  Almost every young actress you see on-screen today has had to do things she is ashamed of.  There are great producers like Steven Spielberg who aren’t like Weinstein at all, but the percentages are not even worth mentioning.  Most of Hollywood is filled with little Weinsteins—and it has literally destroyed the industry and the people who are responsible for building it.  My limited experience on movie sets ruined my love of movies and the business and made me look to other industries to make a good, honest living.  Yes, it is that bad.  Nothing is sacred in that business—it’s pretty disgusting.

Just for an example let me tell a little story about a lunch I had with a very beautiful young actress who was working her way up in the world, doing movies with Robert De Niro and other A-listers.   She wanted to produce a script I had written because it featured a lead position she wanted to build for herself.  So we were having a nice talk about how to get the thing done and the whole problem came down to funding.  It was a conservative story I had written.  She certainly wasn’t a conservative girl, she was a Manhattan liberal, but when talking to me she was all about George Bush—baseball, hot dogs and apple pie.  If I asked her to strip down naked right there and paint herself with body paint showing the American flag, she would have done it in a second and been happy about it—because I had something she wanted.  She would have told me anything to get me to move toward her position.  The finance backers wanted to completely change the story into something much more “Pulp Fiction” because that was the hot ticket at Miramax at the time—ironically where Weinstein was.  I thought about it because the writing credit and the money would have been good.  This girl was basically willing to say anything I wanted her to say to get the job done and advance the project—and sex was certainly on the table if needed.  Ultimately we couldn’t come to an agreement fast enough and her people moved on to a more agreeable writer—not that I was disagreeable or hard to work with—but windows open and close quick in Hollywood.  So if you don’t bend toward their brand of liberalism—you won’t get the money for the project.  I was shocked how quickly this girl would mold herself to anything I said.  I’m sure she did that with everyone.  I couldn’t help but wonder what it would be like to be in a relationship with her—as to whether she really knew who she was or not.  I mean if you dated her—who would she be?  I realized that was probably why actors and actresses have very volatile relationships and usually end up with three or four marriages before ending up as bitter cat ladies later in life.  The lesson is that it’s easy to see why actors become such volatile liberals in Hollywood.  That’s what gets them work.  Conservative people just haven’t figured out that they could get their message out best by funding movies in Hollywood.  For a long time it’s only been liberals controlling the whole town like a massive mob.

The big question that should be on everyone’s mind is why did The New York Times do this story on Weinstein to begin with?  Aren’t they all brothers and sisters to the cause?  Well, this is all part of Trump’s making America great again effort—the Times is struggling and has alienated its readership to only liberals.  Before Trump’s election even people like me would read that paper to see what was happening in the world.  Well, not anymore.  With them becoming so anti-Trump, I haven’t read a single article from them in all of 2017 when in the past I might have read one or two per day.  I just can’t stand their bias, and I’m not the only one who feels that way.  They have taken a major hit in readership and they need to get some of that back if they hope to survive as a paper outside of the New York market—which they need.  Trump has outlasted them so they need to peel away from the Trump stuff and recover credibility.  Hollywood is the next target because the numbers are down for that entire industry.  Harvey was in trouble before any of this broke and to save themselves the money guys in the movie industry need to get some of these radical movie producers out-of-the-way so that more conservative pictures can be green lit, otherwise there won’t be a movie industry in a few years.   I think it’s already too late.   So Harvey Weinstein was a proper sacrificial victim.  He’s old and wealthy—they just need to get him out-of-the-way to make room for the new—so The New York Times did their hit piece hoping to win back some readership since many of the Trump stories have gone cold and all these hurricanes have driven the public narrative on the president in a positive direction.  So the time is up, the Times needs readership back and movie money men need to turn a profit—and Harvey has been holding back the industry drowning on its own liberal ideology.  That tells us all what we need to know about how things are going.  In many ways, it is because of Trump that this story broke at all.  The pressure of his presidency is forcing these issues to the surface—and it’s nice to see for a change.

Rich Hoffman

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The Most Effective Argument in favor of Guns in Soceity: What everyone misses about the need for the Second Amendment–Institituions cannot be trusted

The support for an armed society is a philosophical one, not one of just emotional attachments to tradition. There is a reason the Second Amendment was inserted into the Bill of Rights and was so important to the Anti-Federalists in the 1790-time period of American history that is just as relevant today as it was then. The human race has not “progressed to a certain level where a one world government like the utopian Star Fleet Command is running everything on earth—and it never will. The reason is that there are traits to human beings that so long as they exist prevent the complete trust of individuals into all institutions created by society. To properly have a check and balance against absolute power, individuals must have the ability to overthrow their institutions before they get too big, and too power hungry to handle the affairs of civilization properly. Guns are that fine line of control which keeps our institutions in check with the fear always in the back of their minds that at any moment the population could remove them from office under armed rebellion and replace them. The issue has never been about “assault weapons” or “bump stocks.” It’s about the nature of people and what they do when they have power over other people. Those who want more power over more people obviously are those who support removing guns from society—to whatever degree. But the essence of the argument is that we would be fools to completely trust any institution created by the minds of man. The gun allows us to manage that power we give those institutions—and without that management assistance, institutions by their nature spiral out of control and become oppressive. Because at the heart of most humans who crave power is a laziness that always retreats to default mode and would rather run society as a bunch of compliant automatons rather than free thinking variables.

To put the issue in the most simplistic forms I will provide an example that I have used actually quite often. To provide a little background about myself I am a person who loves personal freedom likely more than most people, and I have always built my life around the ability to be free of institutional control. In my youth I was a martial artist and had developed the personal ability to defend myself no matter what was presented. Growing up I never had the feeling that anybody could “kick my ass” and I still feel that way. I don’t care how big the person is or how skilled, I made a point physically to be the top of the pecking order in regard to fighting in hand to hand combat and that allowed me a certain freedom to think properly about these matters of institutional control. But melee weapons are one thing, if a person approaches you with a gun physical confrontation is not the best way to deal with a threat like that. You really need a gun no matter how skilled you may be in disarming people. The best way to prevent a threat is to show them you have a gun and give them a choice as to whether or not to continue.

For a short while I was a repo man in my early years and I was shot at on occasion. That was back in the old days before there were the kind of rules that there are today. Back then the bank would let you do quite a few things to recover an asset, so I know what it feels like to be a bit of a thief sneaking up on a car to take it away from a hostile person likely armed. I even know what it feels like to break into a home knowing a person was armed to get the car keys. This wasn’t an accepted practice but it’s always better to ask for forgiveness than permission when dealing with bureaucracies and if I could get my hands on the keys, it meant doing less damage to the asset to retrieve it so breaking into a home to get the keys was forgivable—if you were successful. But people did get mad and they did shoot to kill. So in speaking about this kind of stuff I understand it from both sides very well.

I’ve also been to Europe and can report that the people there are pretty much a defeated people. Their gun laws and progressive societies have destroyed individual initiative and expectation. They live in small homes that are too expensive and do not have an expectation of personal sanctity the way that Americans do—and this really does trace back to gun ownership. In Europe the chances of being robbed in your home are much, much greater than in the United States because thieves know that nobody is armed in the home. They think nothing of breaking and entering to steal a person’s possessions even if they are there—because being shot is not on their minds. If they have managed to get a gun off the black market then they suddenly have become the strongest person around and they use that force to their advantage—because that’s what most human beings do when they acquire power—they tend to abuse it unless they are governed by a personal constitution of morality and valor. Without those elements they become tyrants quickly—whether they control a vast institution, or are just petty street criminals. It’s all the same human dysfunction on the micro or macro levels.

The person who trained me in martial arts during my teenage years was a thug. He was a lot like the karate school owner in the movie Karate Kid. His sole purpose for the school was to teach young strong males to be killers so that they’d go to tournaments and win trophies for his wall, so that he could then charge high fees to provide instruction. I thought of him as an evil person and he eventually was busted for many crimes and did jail time, but I learned a lot from the guy. I learned that it wasn’t hard to kill a person with your hands, in fact it was pretty easy and once you learned the basics you had leverage over every other human being that didn’t know that information. Most of his students went on to become terrors—and they got into nearly as much trouble as he did. Once they had the power to literally kill with their bare hands they had no fear of anybody and they began to be bullies that nobody could stop. It was the same concept as the robber with a gun who had something everyone else was missing. Outlawing a gun doesn’t change the nature of dominating others as a human predilection. Until that problem is solved, where humans wish to dominate others, whether it’s the liberal using institutionalism to control individual behavior, or a common street thug beating people over the head with a pipe to steal $25 dollars—the desire to rule over other individuals is the problem that must be solved. No institutional laws will have any effect—because the problem at its core is an institutional issue.

More times than even I can recollect I’ve used the threat of violence to keep peace. If someone is robbing you the way to handle it best is to say, “Hay man,” show them the gun under your jacket “you don’t have to die today. I won’t even call the cops. If you keep walking you can go to sleep tonight.” It’s that simple. Just say that, have the gun to show them—even if they are pointing one at you, letting them know you have a gun and are willing to use it, will most of the time cause them to leave you alone. These things don’t happen like they do in the movies. Criminals want a nice easy hit on someone. They don’t want to die or risk injury. If they have to risk that with you, they’ll move on most of the time. That also goes with hired killers. I’ve also known several of them as well, and deep down inside they are just people like anybody else. They don’t want to die. They know that just because you shoot someone they don’t die instantly. They know if you have a gun on you that you could still shoot them even if wounded. Because of guns in our country, we see much less crime than we otherwise would because nobody really knows who has guns in the house and who doesn’t. That secures our private property in the correct way and allows for Americans to think differently than other people around the world do because private property and ownership is the essence of personal responsibility—and protecting those elements makes for a much more civil discourse at the macro level.

Any person advancing gun control measures of any kind, even the “bump stock” debate after the Las Vegas massacre are avoiding the real issue in human failure in dealing with one another. Human desire to control other humans and their thoughts is the problem and until respect at a fundamental level is established for individual sanctity, violence will always be a threat. Those threats often come from institutions because responsibility for individual behavior is disguised. However, gun ownership is more than just symbolic, they are a proper check against the human tendency to inflict through force beliefs of one group against another. The gun creates a level playing field and forces people to respect each other—which is the first foundation of proper human interaction. There is a fine line between fear and respect, and the gun helps society get there better than any law that human beings could invent. And that is the key to a properly managed society. There is nothing barbaric about gun ownership. In fact, the concept is quite a sophisticated one because it takes the human race to a level of thought that has never been achieved before in the history of the world, and the United States is the evidence that it works. Not in the presence of an active gun culture, but in the type of society and options that Americans enjoy that nobody else around the world has. Guns are key to advancing our civilization in very positive ways because they take the bullies out of contention and allow average people to rule their own lives however they see fit. And if their institutions get out of control, then people have guns to retake control, and that is the most important thing of all. Just having the gun does wonders. Hopefully nobody ever needs to use them. But I can say from personal experience that guns work very well at keeping things……..peaceful. Better than anything else ever could hope to. Institutions want to believe they can, but they can’t. They can’t control individual behavior at its core. They can influence it, but they can’t manage it without the occasional madman emerging to destroy innocent people over any little thing.

When I hold a gun, or buy a new gun, I am making an investment into the kind of human freedom that only a gun can provide. And that is not a symbol of violence. It’s a declaration of independence that is philosophical and unique to our species.

Rich Hoffman

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West Chester is on Money Magazine’s Top 100 List: Who to vote for in 2017’s trustee election

I know I I’m very proud of West Chester for remaining one of the top places to live in the entire United States yet again by Money Magazine.  Since George Lang has been a trustee he has contributed greatly to this rise in national profile and he is now moving to become a state rep in Columbus so he can do the same thing for Ohio on a much larger scale, and don’t doubt for a moment that he will be successful.  George knows how to work “it,” and I look forward to his results quickly in the next few years.  Things in West Chester have really improved over the last several years since George and Mark Welch have been running things as the one, two vote for the West Chester trustees.  A quick look at the history of the Money Magazine rankings below will show just how much success they’ve had.  The consistency ranging from this year all the way back to 2014, the first full year after Mark’s election, provides the unrequited testimony to the success the two have had in spite of Lee Wong’s efforts at community socialism to make West Chester such a destination of success and opportunity.

WEST CHESTER TWP. — West Chester Twp. is, once again, named among the best places to live in America.

That’s according to Money Magazine, which today released its list of “100 Best Place to Live in America” with the growing Butler County township as No. 56 on that list.

West Chester Twp. was previously ranked No. 49 in 2016’s “America’s Top 50 Places to Live,” No. 30 in 2014, No. 97 in a list of “Top 100 Places to Live” in 2012, No. 32 in 2010 and No. 45 in 2005, according to Money Magazine.

Released on Monday, this year’s list focuses on communities with populations from 10,000 to 100,000.

http://www.whio.com/news/west-chester-lands-best-places-live-america/WHFDzYMsBOyP5j2KEnpkxJ/

For perspective there are 267 cities currently in America that feature populations less than 100,000 people, so to be in the top 100 is quite impressive.  There are many more small towns and localities, but for a managed population with such a great number of residents that have to balance out tax burdens, zoning, livability, future outlook and day-to-day management, West Chester is a fine example of how it should be done. Of course with all that success there are lots of coat-tail riders who want to make a name for themselves as the next generation of West Chester trustees.  This particular year is unique because not only is George’s seat up for candidates because he is moving to the state position, but Mark Welch’s seat is up for re-election as well.  Lee Wong is the third seat and it is also up to be challenged.  Under a normal year to keep things running the way they have been in West Chester, only one of those seats would need to be defended from the incumbent personalities seeking to make a name for themselves.  This year, two seats must be defended.  It would be nice to get all three with conservative minded people, but looking at the list of people running there are a lot of liberals running as Republicans but are in fact major RINOs so we need to clear things up for the voters who don’t know the difference between the people with all the big signs so that they can know who they need to elect to keep West Chester in that top ranking with Money Magazine.  After all, what it comes down to is investments and for people who want to protect their investments in their community they must elect the right people this time around to maintain stability otherwise everything could go to hell quickly.

My picks for the West Chester trustee race is to re-elect Mark Welch.  He’s most responsible of all the candidates for the great Money Magazine reviews that have been unleashed during his term in office.  Ann Becker is my second pick; she is clearly the best next person to work with Mark to keep West Chester running correctly.  I’d like to see Lee Wong lose, because he’s an idiot, and a socialist.  His third vote isn’t too damaging so long as two real conservatives are on the other side.  It would be good to try out a new name to replace Lee and see if someone can emerge.  A new name would be best, not the tax and spend names from the old Lakota school board.  If I had to pick my poison Lynda O’Conner would beat out Joan the Hutt, (Joan Powell)  Both women have election experience and access to some money which is why they have some big signs, but neither one of them are conservatives.  They have both supported high taxes in the past but of the two Lynda is clearly far better than Joan.  Honestly voters would do better to elect the lady who makes sushi at Kroger before trying either of the Lakota school board people.  At least she knows how to make something good for a decent price.  But she’s not running unfortunately.  Everyone else running is a gamble.

Mark and Ann are the sure money to maintaining West Chester’s high profile and country-wide expectation.  If both of them are not elected together than anything can happen.  Money Magazine likely won’t be including West Chester on their future lists.  A lot of people take for granted good management when they have it, but miss it desperately once it’s gone.  Mark’s track record is stout and needs no explanation.  Ann Becker for those who don’t know her can easily make up for experience with her thinking.  I’ve known her for years and she is at the center of almost everything political in Southern Ohio.  She like George Lang knows how to “work” things behind the scenes without going negative.  She is a naturally gifted personality and I think being a woman helps her tremendously in perhaps even improving the Money Magazine ranking in the future.  She knows how to sell conservative ideas without the typical defensive posture that most business oriented conservative men do.  Not that it matters, but most people who have been successful in business have been taught that they have to apologize for their success so they get defensive with the media when they talk, or they avoid talking at all.  Ann is great with the media, she’s on 55 KRC every week speaking with Brian Thomas and she’s done a lot of television.  She has connections to CNN and many other major national networks, so she brings a lot to the table and is the best opportunity for West Chester to either maintain the Money Magazine ranking, or improve on it.  Nobody else running has a chance.

It is a tremendous honor to have such a large community like West Chester continuously ranked on that list. I love West Chester.  I have traveled a lot and have been to some of the most far-reaching places on earth and there isn’t anywhere that I can think of that’s better than West Chester.  From all the offerings along Cox Road to the Union Central Blvd exit, West Chester is a very dynamic place.  You can do just about anything in West Chester.  From Entertrainment Junction to the great VOA Park, people could live in West Chester every day and never go anywhere else and still have more to do then in resort cities like Orlando Florida, or Las Vegas—and would never miss an opportunity.  That is saying a lot.  I consider most of my Saturday’s and Sundays to be like a vacation, but it’s all within my home town.  Between IKEA where my mother-in-law comes in from out-of-town to shop at, like a lot of people do, to Top Golf where it’s a dream destination for business clients visiting from far off places, West Chester has it all.  But it needs to continue to have good management—we can’t take these things for granted.  It’s a delicate balance, so be sure to vote in November for Mark and Ann—and take your chances on that third name.  But make sure two of them are the people I mentioned.

Rich Hoffman

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Las Vegas wasn’t a Terrorist Act, it’s a Battlefield: What’s missing determins the guilt of the Deep State

 

My view of the Las Vegas massacre is not one of terrorism or even derangement syndrome from Stephen Paddock—the millionaire who shot at people from a hotel window into a crowd of country music concert participants. It’s that of a battlefield in this ideological civil war that our country is now locked in. We are clearly not one country of one people focused on a future we can all share together, but a divided country of left and right-thinking philosophies which are not cohesive. One side will win and one side will lose and will be forced to retreat. The calls for peace for which the political left is so well-known for are only to disarm us all for their social incursions. They do not intend to live in peace with conservative Americans, and mean to destroy us, and it is there for which we must begin this discussion. The Las Vegas massacre is a battlefield, not a murder. It is obviously about destroying part of an ideology not in just randomly killing people for a personal objective and this is the reason authorities have not been so forthright about the killer’s motives.
I think the most telling evidence of this assumption is that we actually pause when the FBI says that this was not a terrorist incident, yet we are inclined to believe the ISIS claims that it was responsible—even though this guy was white, older, and affluent. Stephen Paddock doesn’t fit any of our assumptions about terrorism, yet he just committed the largest shooting incident in American history and he went to great effort to buy himself enough time to kill as many people as possible. His hotel suit was strategically selected. He had advanced cameras stationed to give him warning of incoming officers—the whole effort looked more like the ending of the movie Fight Club than anything else. There was an ideological story present that was not being revealed early in the investigation. In a time of massive media footprints from Facebook to Twitter—there is surprisingly nothing known at this point about Stephen Paddock except that he was a retired accountant who was a high rolling gambler that had an Asian girlfriend.

So what we have to go on is to examine what has been erased to draw our conclusions. The attack was against supposed Trump supporters. The gun grabbers were quick to exploit the tragedy and some members of the media actually showed hostility toward the victims because they were believed to be Trump voters. We have seen the Deep State react very violently toward the Trump presidency and even if conspiracy theories are not entertained, we must look at what President Trump has had to endure over the last 9 months and wonder how many of the most farfetched thoughts really are. Some people believe that there are means to control the weather with advanced scientific mechanisms. Three major hurricanes in just a few weeks when we’ve never seen anything like that before have hit the United States. Unprecedented investigations into the affairs of the Trump family when the Obamas and Clintons have been given a free pass—even in the face of great evidence. War being stoked by all the villains of the world, close calls with Russia, North Korea, Syria, Iran and constant pressure from every regime to lash out at the United States at the slightest provocation. Trump has had to terminate more employees than any previous administration at a faster rate than at any point in history due to the constant leaks to the press—some of which have come from the ex-FBI director himself. And now on Trump’s watch is the deadliest shooting ever when the President ran on a pro-gun platform. If only one of those things could be tied to the Deep State control of our government and the shadow instigators who hide there, we have an obvious problem. These are not random occurrences, they are deliberately solicited to evoke social change—at least some of them. They are being unleashed to overload this president and the sentiment of his voters into not making such bold assertions in the future. They have declared war against America—these Deep State activists and I don’t think I’m going out on a limb here in saying it, but I bet this investigation into Stephen Paddock leads straight to the door of the Deep State itself. The bread crumbs have been deliberately picked up too obviously. It’s what we don’t see that tells us most about what’s really there. Nobody goes to that much trouble to kill so many people unless there is an ideological purpose, and that ideology was obviously against Trump and his supporters, and that to me means war.

No, this is not the time to consider gun restrictions—not by any means. The first reason would be that we can’t trust our centralized authorities. If the Deep State has so much power that they can so openly harass a rightfully elected president, then they can harass the rest of us at will. They don’t care about laws, they certainly don’t care about respect and obviously collateral damage is something they are willing to utilize to keep their grip on power. The only thing that stands between their complete takeover of American life is our rights to own guns—to stop such a thing from happening. If they were successful in making America a gun free zone then there would be nothing to stop them from running the country. All they need is to make people shake their heads yes to obvious evil such as this Las Vegas shooting to start the ball rolling. They don’t care how many people they must kill to get us to say yes—and that tells us everything we need to know.

Was Stephen Paddock insane—maybe. Maybe he did it for the girlfriend. But he had enough thought in his mind to prepare the battlefield for a game changing moment and we must understand why he would spend so much time, money and even give his life to such a thing. Those reasons don’t point to insanity, they point to warfare and ideological activism that obviously leads to the Deep State. How do we know, well, the evidence has been erased leading there, because the floor is too clean to the door of that Deep State. And that means we need more guns, not less. You don’t give your weapons over to the enemy, and yes, that is how we must view these insurgents.

After Trump was elected many people thought that they didn’t need to buy as many guns, and that they might let their support of the NRA drift in neglect—but trust me dear reader, the time for that support has never been stronger. We need guns now more than ever and we need the NRA. We are not living in a civil society. We are in a time of civil war and in moments like those in Las Vegas the bullets became real more than just ideological. The fuel that cast them into the bodies of so many people was not the guns themselves, but the thoughts behind them. And there is no law for addressing a broken ideology which seeks to destroy people to make a point. Until that war is won by us in the conservative movement, then we must have plenty of guns and the desire to use them to defend ourselves from the villains of our society. And that includes the members of the Deep State—because it’s obvious that they are in a killing mood—and the only way to rectify that is with force of our own—which is sadly the only language they understand.

Rich Hoffman

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Everyone Has a Plan Until they Get Hit in the Mouth: Why Donald Trump and Jim Renacci are the future of politics

 

You can really tell how sick something is when you apply some basic measurements that work perfectly well in one known environment then apply those same rules to a lesser understood situation.   That is certainly the case in regard to President Trump’s business experience compared to the falsehoods of political theater.  With Trump expectations of completed tasks have rocked Washington D.C. culture with something they’ve apparently never seen in the modern era—firings.  And they’ve also never seen somebody work as hard as Donald Trump does. That combination of things has really put the pressure on the political establishment to show how bad and ineffective they’ve always been leaving only to point to the president and declare that he works too fast on too many things and that the turn-over at his White House has been too extreme.  With the resignation of Tom Price Trump has gone through more employees than any previous administration has and that is likely to continue.  What did people think was going to happen from a president who became known on television for firing people?   But honestly, this is the way it typically is, when you do any endeavor some people will adhere to the philosophy of whoever is running things, and some won’t make it.  Those that don’t will find themselves on the outside looking in and that’s how things work in the real world.

It is astonishing how limited most people live their lives.  When they assume that Trump for instance cannot deal with three major hurricanes, a war with North Korea, a health care reform package, a tax cut and a hostile media and still not have time to Tweet about the NFL’s disgrace of our flag then still take time to conduct social occasions at the White House are people who clearly don’t understand what multitasking is all about.   When I campaigned for Trump this is exactly the kind of president I wanted, someone who would work on all the major issues of the day and do so seven days a week 24 hours a day.  For those who don’t understand the difference between Trump and Obama playing golf, Obama played golf to show that he was one of the big guys who had made it in life.  Trump does it to make deals—which is why it’s the game of business transaction.  It also helps that he owns golf courses and can go there to work and get away from Beltway politics.  But with Trump, he works day and night no matter where he is and this is simply something Washington D.C. has never seen before and they really don’t know how to interpret any of it.

The firings and resignations at the White House under Trump’s administration do not surprise me at all.  I have personally hired hundreds of people and whenever I start a new project I have enthusiasm for each and every one of them.  But often you can tell within a month or a year who will be around for the future and who won’t.  Everything looks great on paper, but when reality hits you quickly find out who was talking a good game during an interview and who can actually live up to what they sold of themselves.  With Trump the people he hired for his administration all seemed competent relative to the way things were before he took office.  Well, just a few months into the years of Trump things have changed and everyone is feeling the pressure, and this is no surprise to me.  I had a feeling this was exactly what would happen and I never had any expectations that Trump’s cabinet would stay intact.  Over the pressure of expectations some would last and some would not.  I will go as far to say that there will be many more firings and resignations over the next eight years because the daily grind will mandate performance and it is Trump who sets the standard—and few people will find that they can live up to that standard.

Part of the problem is that people have previously viewed government work as a kind of lifetime appointment and expectations were never really associated with the work. That attracted the worst of our civilization to public office because there they could hide their incompetency from the world but still demand the highest wages available in those fields of endeavor as administrators.   By bringing in private business people into government however naturally this age-old sentiment is being challenged and the results are predictably good.  In my hometown of Cincinnati, Ohio the affluent community of West Chester has been run by a couple of pro business politicians who have private industry backgrounds and things have really taken off.  This has been part of a national trend that really has been emerging since 2009 when the Tea Party movement started taking shape and affluent people stopped looking to give their money to politicians and instead started getting involved themselves—in many ways like the Founding Fathers of our nation did in the beginning.  Why give some useless politician your money when you can just do the work yourself?  So we are seeing all across the country these politicians with actual business experience running for offices and winning—and they are actually fixing things for the first time that we’ve ever been able to see in American politics.

That’s certainly the case with Jim Renacci in Ohio who is running to replace Governor Kasich next year.  Jim is my kind of guy, he’s self made, he’s became rich doing good hard work and running several businesses and now he’s looking for kind of a retirement job to give something back to the state he has worked in for so long.  Being personally successful in many endeavors from  a financial consultant to running Harley Davidson dealerships in the Columbus area he is the Donald Trump of Ohio pouring $4 million dollars of his own money into his campaign for governor.  Anybody but Jim would be a status quo vote and the same old people who served the governor’s administration would still be around long after the next few elections because that’s how it typically is in government.  They create jobs for themselves and they take in money from lobbyists and financial backers who work against the will of the voters.  Someone like Jim Renacci and Donald Trump are already wealthy so they aren’t looking to get rich off schmoozing in politics.  Management is in their blood and they are attracted to these governor and president jobs because they are the ultimate management challenges and these guys like to be in the heat of the battle. That’s what sets them apart from the typical politician.

That trend is going to continue and most of the Beltway media just hasn’t been able to wrap their mind around these changes.  The changes came because performance was expected and the lies of the past just won’t work going into the future.  I’m getting exactly what I expected out of Trump and I would expect nothing short of the same from Jim Renacci in Ohio.  I want these types of people as local trustees.  I want them on my school board. I want them as county commissioners.  I’ve told the story of my dealings with Hamilton County commissioner Todd Portune before—people like him are abundant for pennies on the dollar-they are what we have had to accept as the political class.  It used to be that business guys would give people like Portune money for their elections, and would hope that rules could be made to help the business community, but those politicians often cost businesses in other ways with higher taxes, or they just fiscally run their communities into the ground.  So people like Trump and Renacci instead of taking their lifetime of earnings and retiring to luxury in Florida—as they may have in the past are finding in politics a nice retirement gig.  They’ve already made their money and solidified their reputations.  But if they still want to smell the flames of battle regarding management of resources as they did in their businesses from years past, they are running for office—and I think that is a wonderful thing.  That’s how it was always supposed to be.  The best and brightest among us should seek political office and bring that vast experience that made them successful into the management of our country’s affairs.  And if people get fired, so what.  The goal of government isn’t to create jobs that people sit in over their lifetimes.  It’s to do the work of the people who elect representatives into government to take care of business.  And it should be people good at business who sits in those seats.

Everyone has a plan until you get hit in the face.  Mike Tyson said that years ago when he was the defending world champion of boxing and its very true.  Politicians are good at making plans but nobody until recently ever expected them to implement those plans.  Once life hit them in the face they sort of went back to their offices and planned their lunch break—and they’ve been doing that for years.  What we expect now is that once a plan goes south, and we get hit in the face, that we have people in office that hit back and make whatever adjustments need to be made so that success can become the norm.  That means often people who are hired for a job will fall short of what’s expected of them and they will need to be replaced.  When those circumstances arise, we don’t want politicians who don’t have experience in hiring and firing people to be in charge—we want people who do have such experience.  And that is what Donald Trump is doing and he’s doing a fantastic job of it.  My only wish is that we didn’t have him ten years ago—but I’m glad we have him now.

Rich Hoffman

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We Need More Guns: What the Las Vegas mass shooting has taught us about the failures of progressive society

The only way to stop the mass shooting that took place in Las Vegas by the 64-year-old Stephen Paddock was to have other armed people nearby who could have shot him dead. Ideally, personally armed people could have killed him from the balcony from which he rained down terror well before he took the lives of over 50 innocent people and more than 500 concert goers. There is no law or any centralized planning that could have stopped this crime. And if it hadn’t been a gun a person like Stephen Paddock could have used a vehicle. There is always danger when people are so tightly packed together anywhere under any circumstances. The best safety for all involved is to have other people there with weapons to stop the crime before the authorities arrived. As it stands Paddock was able to shoot unmolested for over 20 minutes—and that is simply too long to take action.

LAS VEGAS, Oct 2 (Reuters) – A 64-year-old man armed with more than 10 rifles rained down gunfire on a Las Vegas country music festival on Sunday, slaughtering at least 50 people in the largest mass shooting in U.S. history before killing himself.

The barrage from a 32nd-floor window in the Mandalay Bay hotel into a crowd of 22,000 people lasted several minutes, causing panic. Some fleeing fans trampled each other as police scrambled to find the gunman. More than 400 people were injured.

Police identified the gunman as Stephen Paddock, who lived in a retirement community in Mesquite, Nevada, and said they had no sense of what prompted his attack. The Islamic State militant group claimed responsibility for the massacre, but U.S. officials expressed skepticism of that claim.

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/breakingnews/gunman-mows-down-at-least-50-people-in-las-vegas-concert-attack/ar-AAsLPFk?ocid=spartanntp

What we know now is that this guy, Paddock was a mild-mannered fellow prior to this event and I’m sure there will be a lot of talk about his background and speculation into why he would do such a thing. Could it be some kind of false flag deal to harass the Trump administration with just one more thing? Conspiracies are relevant to the fact-finding of an issue no matter how far fetched they might seem. Given what we know about our own government, who knows what they might do to turn public sentiment onto a topic of their design. What matters is that somehow this guy managed to get a lot of automatic weapons and a lot of very expensive ammunition to commit this heinous act which is very suspicious. Trump said it best when he said that it was an evil act—because no matter how you slice it—it was evil.

And that places this issue at a very philosophical place—can we trust centralized authority to protect us or do we fully utilize the Second Amendment to make every citizen a first responder in a violent world where people like Paddock could bring death to us in any moment? Can authorities stop the Paddocks of the world? I would say no. The only solution would be to have everyone in that concert armed, to have people in that hotel armed and to have people always ready to stop evil when it appears. There isn’t any other solution. Progressives have an ultimate failure that they are specifically responsible for, they have tried to centralize our society to the point where people don’t think for themselves anymore and the solution to a mass murder like this Vegas shooting is to decentralize the means to stop it.

Progressives like to talk about the kind of laissez-faire gun control that I propose as living in the Wild West—as if that were a bad thing. What they fail to understand is that there is a natural morality associated with personal firearm protection that actually elevates our society into mutual respect. There is nothing in the world that makes people more equal than a gun. A weak woman is as strong as the stoutest man if she has a gun. Guns make the races, and people of age all on equal footing and it forces people to be respectful of one another. In a society where guns are on every hip, Stephen Paddock would have been killed within a minute instead of many more—and many fewer people would be dead and hurt. Progressives are the ones who regulated everything and centralized the safety of our world, and when it fails, the blood is on their hands. In Las Vegas the failures of progressive society failed miserably.

At gun events I never worry about anybody shooting guns at other people because a mutual respect is established between everyone else since everyone is equally armed. Guns are only scary when other people have them and you don’t. Because of the progressive educations we have all experienced where guns were demonized people of our time have been made to fear guns when instead they should look to them as equalizers in a dangerous world—that by having them guarantees respect from those who might have evil intentions. Guns make the world safer, not more dangerous. It is only when guns are in the hands of bad guys, or people who lose their mind for whatever reason that the balance of equality shifts toward evil and the innocent become the bottom of the food chain. One more law or 200,000 cannot stop evil from committing crime when respect is vacant from our society. Guns create respect where it isn’t naturally applicable.

In a free society the best way to achieve equality and respect is with a gun. The more guns the better and in as many places as possible. A centralized state may have good intentions but they were powerless to stop someone like Paddock. And there are no metal detectors and security checkpoints in the world that can stop evil when it decides to act. God forbid we turn Vegas into another airport terminal of neurotic security to overreact to this tragedy when the real answer is to arm more people, not less of them. I’m not a big fan of Las Vegas but it is one of the most laissez-faire places in the world and it would be a shame to allow clueless government bureaucrats to overact by instituting more security when all they really need to do is to make it easier for good people to carry guns openly so that people like Paddock couldn’t kill so many so easily.

One of the most attractive aspects of the Wild Wild West for me is that it was a time before progressives came to existence to latch to our governments and ruin our world with overly centralized planning. The period of westward expansion was a time of great human enterprise and philosophic contemplation. Slavery was ended and most of America’s wealth was created in those years and much of who we are was established in that period. Progressives wanted to “progress” beyond that thinking, and they have the ruin of lives in their wake to demonstrate their lack of virtue. And that has never been more obvious than in the debate over guns, where in Vegas they got what they wanted—a society of people standing around listening to a concert generally unarmed and enjoying an evening in “Sin City.” But all it took was one person to shoot guns into a packed crowd to change their lives forever. And Paddock didn’t have a right to do that. If it hadn’t been for progressive influence, there would have been someone there to shoot that old man. And if they had, many more people would have lived.

Rich Hoffman

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The Problem in Puerto Rico: No monster trucks or bass boats there to save Democrats

 

I’m all for making Puerto Rico the 51st state, but as we’ve talked about here on several occasions, their $73 billion dollars of debt that have bankrupted that very small United States territory of only 3 million people was a major problem before Hurricane Maria destroyed the island as a catastrophic category 4 storm.  It was the third major hurricane to hit the United States just in 2017.  Previously all of Florida had been hit by a major storm, and before that Texas.  Trump dealt with both of those crises so well that the hungry media looking for criticism had nothing to say in both cases, even though the personal damage was in many cases much more extensive in dollar value. But when Puerto Rico happened something was very different.  The reason for the mountainous debt, and the cause of so much devastation was that the island was ran by Democrats and they were ill prepared for the disaster—as they always are.  Trump’s FEMA supplies came to the San Juan docks but there was nobody there to take the supplies inland causing the media to criticize the federal efforts.  But behind their criticisms were something else, a fear they wished to hide from the public about the politics of the situation and it is quite telling to explore the cause of that fear.

http://money.cnn.com/2017/09/27/investing/puerto-rico-debt-who-owns-trump/index.html

I’ve done hurricane relief before.  I remember very well how bad Hurricane Fran was when it hit Chapel Hill, North Carolina as a category 3 storm an hour inland from the coast.  The power was knocked out for two weeks and I was one of the guys there pulling trees off the homes and it was a real struggle just working in that environment let alone being a resident living in the heavy humidity trying to get insurance adjusters to come and give them back some normalcy to their lives.  The National Guard had to clear the highways so that those insurance adjusters could even get to town, and then the wait was extreme as everyone had something to put on a claim.  You learn really quick all the things we normally take for granted like running water, air conditioning, refrigeration—and an open and well stocked grocery story.   Maybe one of the weirdest things I’ve ever seen in my life was a grocery superstore completely empty because everyone had ransacked it and it hadn’t been restocked for weeks because delivery trucks couldn’t get to it.   And this was in a very conservative area where people were pretty smart, generally, and there weren’t a lot of people living off the federal government.  Many of the people I was dealing with lived in nice homes and had good jobs at either NCU or Duke University across town—so at least there was money as a foundation to all the misery.  It was a mess, and that was the United States mainland where military bases and a very advanced highway structure were there to provide the quickest relief possible.

Of course Puerto Rico is a different story, it’s an island to the southeast of Cuba so it’s not connected to the United States mainland in any way, nor is it even close. It’s nearly as remote as a territory as Hawaii or Guam is.  Getting to Puerto Rico isn’t easy under the most optimal conditions, let alone when all the infrastructure was wiped away by a major hurricane that touched 100% of the island.   Being so far in debt the power grid was in a poor state to begin with and the people living there had very little money.  Most of their homes were disgraceful places just a few steps out of a third world country.  The Democrat governor, Ricardo Antonio Rosselló Nevares is a member of the New Progressive Party—which is just another name for Communist Party USA and points directly to why Puerto Rico had a debt problem to begin with.  The Governor seems like a pretty decent human being, but his politics are horrendously misguided—so he wasn’t prepared for a storm that completely destroyed the island leaving the 3 million residence completely vulnerable.  Then to make matters worse the mayor of San Juan, where the major port is located to get supplies to people inland was ran by Carmen Yulín Cruz Soto—an even bigger liberal than the governor.  Between them they had no plan of action or understanding of basic management skills which left them to not only ask for federal help by way of supplies like FEMA had conducted in Florida and Texas recently.  But they were asking for the infrastructure to deliver them as well—a considerably more difficult proposal given the remoteness of Puerto Rico.

With Texas and Florida being Republican lead states with governors who knew what they were doing federal help was able to bring in supplies and from there plenty of self-sufficient volunteers used their monster trucks and fishing boats to get those supplies to the people who needed them until the basic necessities of life could be somewhat resumed.  It will take many years to even hope to return to normalcy, but few people died and the people in those regions got back on their feet quickly.  They were success stories defying the tragedy due to the inherit self-reliance of the people most affected.  The people in those places were conservative minded which is how Republican governors were elected in those states to begin with.  Not so in Puerto Rico where I think the only Republican on the island will be President Trump when he visits to examine the extensive damage for himself.  In Puerto Rico the people who elected the progressive Democrats into office think much differently than those people in Texas and Florida.  They had no boats or monster trucks to help with the volunteer effort.  They were mostly poor people made worse by their addiction to government services and socialist local management of resources.  The people there didn’t rally to solve their problem, they sat on their porches waiting for someone to turn their power back on, and to bring them food and water.  The supplies were in the port at San Juan to distribute inland, but there was no effort to take those supplies to the people who needed them because nobody thought to do it for themselves—hence their tendency to vote for Democrats in office and to be poor, and in perpetual debt.

And that’s why the Democrats around the country are attacking Trump so viciously, because they have to hide the big difference in why Puerto Rico is so dissimilar from the major disasters that crippled Texas and Florida just weeks before.  Everyone can tell for themselves how differently the Puerto Ricans reacted to a major tragedy compared to the bass boats and monster trucks in Houston who fought bravely to restore order to their communities.  Liberals know what the problem is and they can’t let that become the story so they are attacking the Trump administration for essentially the same things they attacked President Bush for after Katrina wiped out New Orleans. But the problem was never the reaction of the Republican presidents; it was the type of people who were inflicted.  In Republican run states where the political bases were much more self-reliant the federal government and the people worked well together to manage the crises.  But in Democrat lead areas where liberal mayors and governors were in charge, everything was a disaster.  The FEMA people could bring the supplies, but the locals expected those supplies to literally be poured down their mouths because intellectually they are a too depended on government services to think for themselves.  That’s generally why they were poor to begin with.  Being poor isn’t just something that happens, it reflects the way people manage their lives.  Hard working people tend to have jobs and therefore money to work with.  They may even have a nice bass boat in their driveway to use if they find themselves flooded out. But poor people are usually those who are apathetic and always looking to do the minimum in life—which is why they don’t have many resources to work with when something bad happens. Puerto Rico had a lot of poor people by its demographic nature which is why they’re in terrible debt to begin with.

Trump’s tough talk about Puerto Rico is perfectly justified.  The federal government can’t just come along and bail them out of the $73 billion dollars in debt then pay for the complete rebuilding of the entire island.  The people there are going to have to change fundamentally into a more conservative base of philosophy otherwise they’ll be in trouble again during the next crises and they won’t bring anything to the table as an American state. The way to get Puerto Rico back on its feet is to create some free enterprise zones to make the island attractive to some of the high-tech businesses that are emerging in the new Trump economy—so that the place can become something like a new Silicone Valley.  But the nature of the people must change because even if Trump brings jobs back to Puerto Rico someone has to actually deliver on the effort.  They can’t sit in the port at San Juan and wait for someone to unload them.  Puerto Ricans need to learn from these crises and change their ways.  They must learn to help themselves—and to stop electing Democrats to run things so that prosperity can actually take root.  Democrats hope that nobody notices their failures in Puerto Rico and that they can hide their mistakes behind the other storms of the year and build a case that racism is somehow the problem.  But it’s not, the biggest difference is that Democrats are idiots who don’t understand basic economics and when pressed in life they always buckle—because their basic foundations of thought doesn’t prepare them for reality–leaving them always in need of a subsidy to fuel their political thoughts which have foundations of moral bankruptcy.  They only know how to just consume the resources thrown in their direction under every circumstance.  The problems in Puerto Rico are and have always been the failure of Democrats—and for that they can only blame themselves.

Rich Hoffman

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