Category: Covid-19

Aliens Attacking Earth in November: Why the Epstein story is suddenly hot

It’s been all over the news, but what are we supposed to think about it?  Harvard astrophysicists Avi Loeb and Adam Hibberd, along with Adam Crawl from the Initiative for Interstellar Studies in London, hypothesized that an interstellar object, 31/ATLAS, recently discovered on July 1, 2025, was an alien spacecraft due to its unusual trajectory and speed.  And that they were coming to attack Earth in November.  Coming from any kind of source, that was a surprising story, and it has certainly soaked up the news cycle.  But I wouldn’t worry about it very much.  To all those who are concerned, I would bet that the likelihood of the visit isn’t conquest or aggression, but rather a ballot drop of mail-in ballots for Democrats ahead of the next election.  Since Trump has pushed illegal immigration back and is deporting so many of them, Democrats need new voters.  So whether it’s illegal aliens or aliens from outer space, Democrats can’t win elections if they don’t cheat.  And in the case of this story, I’d say it was created by Democrats looking to preserve Democrat ideas about the way the world should work.  And its timing does not surprise me. Instead, it’s expected.  There are a lot of people in the world who consistently turn to alien stories when they want to scare the public into some sort of government expansion argument, and there are desperate people at every level of society who want to stop the Trump agenda.  And I would not doubt it if aliens are one of them.  If these guys think this is an alien ship, it’s not the first time they have visited Earth.  And it certainly won’t be the last.  But to assume that this is an alien attack like the ID4 movie, or some catastrophe film like War of the Worlds, is a yearning for the politics of old to avoid being washed away by the new. 

And this brings up another issue that certainly involves the Deep State and its desperation to hold power and control.  We are going to see a lot of strange things over the coming months and years, so we’ll have to use a lot of rationality to get through it.  There are many crackpots and losers like these Harvard physicists who often make such claims, but why did this one, which was posted on the arXiv preprint server as a non-peer-reviewed paper, gain public attention on July 16th 2025?  That’s when you have to ask yourself why this story, as ridiculous as it is, suddenly had legs and made it into the established news cycle.  Well, it’s for the same reason that the Epstein list is suddenly hot.  The way our intelligence departments work, who are trying to hold onto power, use fear of the unknown all the time to justify their continued secretive work without any budget accountability.  And they are trying to maintain control during a very bullish Trump administration, where many things are changing in ways they don’t like.  I think they always had this poison pill story to unleash on the public regarding Trump, because they saw how he paused a bit when Elon Musk suggested that the Epstein list wasn’t released because Trump was on it.  Truly, if anybody had any dirt on Trump at all, they would have used it far before now.  But if intelligence agencies can split up the MAGA party against Trump in some way, they are certainly going to try.  So fear and ambiguity are their weapons of choice, and undermining people’s confidence in people who are a threat to Deep State control over all of humanity through administrative bureaucracy is their means to do so.

There has suddenly been shown footage of Trump judging beauty pageants of very young girls, and they are trying to tie that to a relationship with Jeffrey Epstein and the Lolita Express trips to sexual escapades with young women.  And Trump did indeed know Epstein, and he did live a playboy life for a time.  Young women are often a part of beauty because attractiveness is fleeting, and if we are going to discuss beautiful women, young women are certainly part of the conversation.  However, Trump did own the Miss Universe pageant, which included Miss Teen USA, and he was very active in managing the operation.  For Trump, it was more of an aesthetic appreciation of beauty, the way people judge high school cheerleading competitions, rather than the kind of illicit sexual practices that it looks like Jeffrey Epstein was a part of.  So, with Trump on the list, there are likely many people who were part of high society who were also.  But that doesn’t mean all of them were falling for the temptations of illicit sex for blackmail that Epstein was trafficking, likely for the same intelligence agencies who let out this recent story about the aliens attacking Earth.  The goal isn’t the truth, but instead starting rumors that might instigate discontent and undermine unity among peers.  And the hope has been for a while that if these intelligence agencies could use some of this old footage of Trump to create a lack of trust, they’d do it.  So, of course, they will try.  But if there were any there to the story, they would have used it long before now.  Liking beautiful women, who are typically young, isn’t the same as sexually abusing them and having that information used by intelligence agencies to control influential personalities for fear of those stories getting out.

In all likelihood, alien intelligence has constantly been communicating with human beings from the beginning of time.  And I would argue that modern-day America has all the power in the world, politically, to destroy the society of any attacking aliens.  I do not think, as H.G. Wells did, that a sophisticated society of high technology could beat us all in war, only to die of convenience of disease upon contact with human beings and lacking an immune system to fight off diseases that are earth-born.  And more so, alien communication likely occurs all the time through multidimensional considerations, as many shamans throughout the world have been doing for many thousands of years.  So, a couple of Harvard geeks trying to apply their favorite science fiction movie to their anxiety over government funding for their projects being cut, with Trump in the White House, doesn’t mean they understand the nature of conflict with alien societies.  That they would spin it to fit their worldview, likely shaped by science fiction movies and video games.  However, the intelligence groups that leaked the story to the public are another matter.  It’s the same strategy that has suddenly made the Epstein story hot, while it was very cool all through the Biden years.  Why is it a story six months into Trump’s wildly successful second term?  Because it’s an attempt to manipulate a gullible public, this just shows how little they respect any of us.  Suppose the spacecraft is a group of aliens coming to Earth. In that case, I think the most likely scenario is that they are bringing illegal ballots from illegal aliens, this time from space, to help Democrats in the upcoming election.  Because you know what I say, if Democrats can’t cheat, they can’t win.  And if they can’t count on illegal aliens to keep them in office, then they will have to turn to aliens from outer space.  But as far as attacking the earth, that is fear talk as usual by the people we are supposed to trust.  But obviously can’t.

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

Violance in Downtown Cincinnati: The political result of using racism as a weapon of social unrest

It’s one of those incidents where soft policy on minority communities baked into skin color profiles and years of Democrat radicalism caused a lot of harm.  After the Cincinnati Music Festival downtown at the corner of West Fourth Street and Elm Street on July 26th, 2025, a massive fight broke out where obvious violence toward a white couple by a large gathering of people of color exploded due to a very light police presence, and it went on for way too long.  This mob hurt people, and the mob under any conditions shouldn’t have been allowed to grow like that into such a menace.  People from the scene have said that the fight broke out due to racial comments, but there isn’t anything that could have been said that justified the violence that was captured by hundreds of cell phones and was distributed online, beating all the mainstream news outlets in content.  In the video I provide, I took one of the best clips of the violence that I saw and walk people through it for context.  It was out of control, and it was a violent episode perpetuated by a large group of people who felt entitled due to their skin color, and the social acceptance of violence perpetuated by political efforts to present a degraded condition in a part of downtown Cincinnati that is supposed to be one of the best in the area.  This site was just up from the sports stadiums, so it’s a part of town where the economic situation has been a priority, and here was a massive fight that showed obvious racial violence getting national news in a very embarrassing way.  The incident itself was bad on many fronts, but under any conditions, no matter what was said by anybody, public displays of violence like this have no place in our society, and the Cincinnati Police Department, the Mayor, and the City Council are going to have to explain all this.  Because in a lot of ways, they lit the fuse to this violence through their racial policies by feeding that monster for many years leading up to this unfortunate event. 

https://twitter.com/CollinRugg/status/1949431682060189731

I was very proud of the Covington Police Department, which fought against the ICE protesters trying to shut down the bridge over into Kentucky, just a short distance from where this big fight broke out.  But what was missing was the police arresting people and beating them up for disturbing the peace.  The City of Cincinnati made great news around the nation for showing intolerance for violence in trying to shut down an important bridge and vandalizing property by a group of socialist radicals who had no right to do so.  But given the nature of any music festival that combines alcohol and late nights without much of a police presence, bad things were bound to happen, and by the way things transpired, it almost looks like the political figures involved with Cincinnati City Council wanted this kind of violence to take place.  And when it did, there was an unspoken agreement between them and the mob.  I can promise one thing about all involved in that violence: none of them were Republicans.  Law and Order, GOP voters don’t behave like that.  But Democrats who have been bred into their social positions through color revolution propaganda, where outside money pours into minority communities to create instability, the results are mobs who behave with such violence as we saw in Cincinnati during late July 2025.  The only way to describe the people doing all the punching and repeated kicks to the head was the same kind of people who would support ANTIFA rallies, or protest in flash riots after a police shooting.  And even though the police union won’t want to admit it, they might blame the light police coverage on budget restrictions, workforce supply, and other issues, the unspoken truth is that this music festival was going to involve a lot of people of color, and nobody wants that kind of controversy on their record, so they went light on the coverage and violence exploded anyway.

We need to have law and order for everyone, and everyone must play by the same rules.  We can’t allow progressive talking points to allow one set of behavior for one group of people and to let another group of people off the hook because of the color of their skin, and the propensity for public relations nightmares to happen if someone from that demographic group gets arrested and shown all over national television for roughing up minorities.  To avoid such controversy, the police would rather roll the dice and hope nothing bad happens than to have something bad happen that would attach them to international news.  And when violence like what we saw here does break out, I’m sure there is relief among their police ranks that at least it wasn’t one of their members involved in that video footage.  It was better to let it play out, watch the video, and arrest the people involved after everything cooled off.  But the fight went on for far too long.  The media didn’t want to cover the story because it was a no-win situation.  And the lack of justice only makes it easier in the future for people to get away with worse, because they didn’t get punished the first time.  In many ways, the lack of punishment for past wrongs led to this complete social breakdown because the participants felt entitled to conduct violence, due to the politics involved.

However, here’s the thing: when people wonder why people move to the suburbs, this is your reason.  They don’t want to be around gangs of thugs who behave like this.  Cincinnati has made an effort to make downtown friendly, encouraging young people to make Over-the-Rhine a cool and hip destination.  But looming among the population, there is a lot of crime and a lot of bad racial violence that happens but gets underreported because nobody wants it to explode across the nightly news.  If cars get broken into while visiting the economic zones, the news doesn’t report on it because they don’t want to destabilize the radical groups who live in the area.  And that is the genuine fault here: the failure to realize that many of the people we are luring in for economic reasons can interact with the dinosaurs, and we expect them not to be eaten by the dangerous animals is unrealistic.  And if we aren’t going to have better security than what we saw at that Cincinnati Music Festival, then we shouldn’t have events downtown.  It is because of a fear of this very thing that, after a Bengals game or the Reds, people get back in their cars and go back to the suburbs.  Because they don’t want to be attacked by wild animals, encouraged by Democrat politics to riot over anything and everything.  And now Cincinnati has a major black eye that I find embarrassing.  The police should have been there to beat the hell out of all the malcontents, no matter what their skin color was.  And their failure to support law and order under all conditions paved the way for this violence to happen.  Ultimately, that falls on the city’s politics.  They created the environment that allowed for that violence to occur because the participants had no fear at all of law enforcement.  And that is why things broke out so violently.  The footage shows clearly, no matter what was said, nobody deserved to be beaten like what that couple was, especially the woman with the dress on who was cold cocked in the face and knocked out unconscious in the middle of the street.  Those images will cause a lot more trouble than if the police had arrested troublemakers early and dealt with the political fallout later.  But it was Democratic policies that made the whole fire ready to burn, which is why people tend to avoid going downtown for anything if they can, because there is always the potential for violence, which nobody wants to deal with.

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

Lakota’s ‘Rumor Has It’: Government schools are run by expensive lawyers and PR firms

I’d rather not think of Lakota schools, ever.  However, they are in my community and serve as a great example of everything that’s wrong with the public education system.  And they’ve had it for a while, but recently they’ve updated it with some content that many people have pointed out to me as a reaction to me personally.  I have to address it, even though there are many other things to consider in the world.  The biggest problem with government schools is that they assume they have the moral authority to collect property tax money because they have been given, by law, the expectation to provide for the upbringing of children in our society.  So they presume to have a moral foundation that defies criticism from the public, much like a parent might say to a child that they must do as they say, not as they do.  Meaning their authority is not to be questioned, and that is certainly the premise of their “Rumor Has It” section on the school website, which seeks to address rumors that might damage the image they want to nurture with the public.  My suggestion to them is that if they want to maintain a lofty image with the public, they should live a life befitting that image.  And don’t attend education conventions and get drunk, making fools of yourselves.  Or, cover up for bad behavior once you discover it because you fear that the public won’t want to give you tax money from their very valuable real estate transactions.   Be good, do good, and provide a positive role model for kids, and there wouldn’t need to be a damage control page on their website.  But when they act as they do, then try to control the narrative that gets out to the public, they leave themselves wide open to criticisms because they suck a quarter of a billion dollars out of our local economy to advance essentially Democrat political platforms that the rest of the community find reprehensible, such as transgender bathrooms, and woke social policies.

https://www.lakotaonline.com/resources/community-resources/rumor-has-it

I’m certainly not the only one; there are many more people these days who are critical of public schools than when I first started discussing these issues three decades ago.  And for really good reasons.  Public schools are going to change dramatically over the next few years, as I have explicitly warned everyone during that period.  And that is because people no longer find the value in them the way they used to, as a free babysitting service for their children while they are busy at work doing adult things.  That whole experience is something that this most recent generation of moms is dealing with, including the lack of fulfillment in their careers and the social implications of being paid the same as a man, for instance.  That is something that Democrats care about politically.  But biologically, women want a man to be a man, and women don’t want to do the jobs of everyone just to justify some government assumption about dual-income families that they can generate even more tax revenue from.  Many people are rethinking everything, including how schools should teach children and what they should teach.  And many of the people who have chosen to work in the public school system are far behind the curve on the direction education is taking early in the present century.  But what it has been has not given us a society of bright intellects.  It hasn’t produced many Thomas Edisons or Albert Einsteins. Instead, it has given us people who can barely put two sentences together and balance their family budgets.  And they have no moral authority to lecture anybody about anything. 

In the video provided here, I address many of the Rumor Has It bullet points with some context.  The essence of the issue is that there are two main problems with government schools, such as Lakota. One issue is that they have too many lawyers who make excessive profits from the system, and a properly functioning school board is not possible under the current conditions.  The second problem is that PR firms are too heavily involved in their communication process, including the Rumor Has It page.  They are much more interested in controlling the narrative with the community than in listening to and acting on it, and that, over time, has significantly eroded any trust that anybody had in them.  And they did that to themselves.  I think one of the most interesting statements that they make on their Rumor Has It page is the first item, “Lakota Local Schools is committed to being transparent and providing factual information to our community.”  Then immediately after it, they say, “Some of the loudest and most misleading rumors can taint even the strongest of school districts.”  There is a lot said there, but in essence, they have an impression of their social role that they don’t want to be challenged, and they are intent on pushing away any contrary opinions that might not give them the social respect they are seeking.  And to maintain that illusion, a significant amount of money is wasted in the process, including the money spent on PR firms to create a social illusion about the value of government schools, when reality tells an opposite story. 

Ultimately, what it always boils down to with the kind of people who support the John Dewey Public Education utopian vision, which the Democratic Party has built its platform on, is psychological validity in terms of the meaning of life, as well as an assumed parental role.  And parents want to be the parents to their children; they don’t want shared custody with a government school system, and that is at the heart of all education issues and how much we are willing to pay for that service.  Busy parents need someone to watch their kids while they are at work.  Teachers want to think that they can bring meaning to other people’s lives through the education process.  Most administrators are relatively empty individuals and seek to fill that void with social engagement built on big government ideas that earn them community respect they couldn’t obtain any other way.  The creators of public education had socialism and communism from Karl Marx in mind when they attacked property tax as a way to fund a new generation of social indoctrination among the youth, and destroy the concept of private property as the foundation of our entire country.  And once the smoke clears on all that, government schools like Lakota aren’t proud of their American heritage; they are intent on progressive politics that normal people find repulsive.  And the more criticism they have experienced, the deeper they have dug in, making the problem even worse.  I did find one thing very interesting on their Rumor Has It page, where they were backtracking on the proposed levy increases that they had been discussing for the fall election.  They say on their Rumor Has It page that the bond issues to fund the Lakota Master Facilities Plan have not yet been determined.  And I’m sure they said that because of some of my very popular articles on the matter.  Well, I knew they were trying to find an open window to put these levies on the ballot, and they announced it through Michael Clark, their staff reporter, who happens to work for the Journal News.  And he announced the $506 million sweeping facilities plan, which would be issued with two levies on July 1, 2025.  So, like a lot of things on their Rumor Has It page, it’s not a rumor.  However, instead of a PR document trying to control a narrative they don’t like, due to the public reaction to their actions, the article Clark wrote, which typically comes straight from Julie Shaffer’s mouth on the Lakota School Board, indicated two tax hikes on the fall ballot. 

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

The Firing Squad is the Only Suitable Punishment: Crimes Obama and his intelligence administration committed that were treasonous and knowing seditition

So now is the time we have all been dreading, which has been building for a long time.  We can’t just let Obama, a former president, live and let live.  We have to arrest him, and prosecute him for treason, and execute him by firing squad in a public square—at a minimum.  And we have to come to a reckoning with all the devices in our minds that have told us such an idea is radical and even primal.  And that we are a more sophisticated society, we should never think of doing such a thing, especially to a person of color.  But Obama was always a terrorist; never forget that he was put into place in politics in the living room of Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn at the University of Chicago, the former members of the domestic terrorist group The Weather Underground.  And that the Obama birth certificate was never resolved, they never did produce one that showed that he was born in Hawaii.  What they did produce after a lot of pressure, which President Trump was one of the advocates, was a digital document that had layers of information embedded in the birth certificate that Sheriff Arpaio of Arizona uncovered as a fraud.  There was no ability in 1961 to digitally layer a PDF file of any kind, so a level of corruption and manipulation from a Deep State that wanted domestic terrorist organizations like the Weather Underground to show themselves in ways we had never thought possible, was well at hand.  Then there are the claims that Obama made as an international student when he attended Columbia University, so you can’t be both—a citizen born in Honolulu on August 4, 1961, and an international student from Jakarta, Indonesia.  Regardless of who he was or what he is, Obama attended school from the ages of 6 to 10 in Jakarta, Indonesia, which is a highly unusual way for an American president to have been educated. 

There shouldn’t be any conspiracies about Obama’s origins, which have not been cleared up to this day.  And the problem with that is the charges that were dropped against Bill Ayers, as well as the continued denials that Ayers and Obama knew each other, which never sat well with people, leaving many to believe that Obama couldn’t be trusted on anything.  He was a creation of the Deep State to do the business of them in running American politics.  And he was imposed on America because of the color of his skin to turn the United States into Cuba, essentially.  And once he was put in power, he never wanted to go away, leading to the monstrosity of intelligence manipulation that went on with the Russian Dossier to destroy President Trump, once free people elected him to undo the mess that Obama had put us all in.  And now we know through Tulsi Gabbard that there was never an ability by the Russians to tamper with the American election the way that Comey, Clapper, Brennan and many others tried to advance and what emerges is a very sinister plot to rule over Americans from a Deep State perspective ran by intelligence agencies, and not a representative republic who maintains their government through elections.  The elections have been rigged for a long time, and during all this Obama activity, and the cover-up of how he emerged into politics, we have learned the actual depth of the monstrosity.  Obama and his administration, running all these intel agencies at the FBI, CIA, Homeland Security, all of them, were willing to commit treason against America to maintain a Deep State control over what was supposed to be free people in charge of their government.  The actions of Obama and others intended to suppress that assumption at every opportunity.

Let’s never forget how they funneled the Steele Dossier into America through John McCain after the senator had dispatched his associate, David Kramer, to London to meet with Steele and bring a copy back to America to give to James Comey on December 9th, 2016, after Trump had just been elected.  All parties knew at the time that the whole thing had been fabricated, and their purpose was to undermine the kind of government the country’s people had just elected.  And they were using John McCain as a Never Trumper to build bipartisan support in the Republican Party toward a coup against the new President.  This is the same level of intelligence manipulation that assassinated President Kennedy and drove Nixon out of office.  They were intent on demonstrating their authority at every opportunity.  And they were ruthless.  Never forget what they did to General Flynn, Peter Navarro, Steve Bannon, Roger Stone, and many others.  Especially President Trump and his entire family.  Remember the perp walk of Steve Bannon in handcuffs as he showed defiance against the January 6th committee that failed to recognize his rights as a member of the former Trump White House.  Then add to all that the very little that we know about the people who did try to assassinate Trump literally, especially the questionable circumstances leading up to the shooting in Butler, Pennsylvania.  It all started in a lot of ways from Obama himself not wanting to leave office, or recognize that people were so angry at the socialist direction he had turned our country to, that he openly used the powers of government to hold power and drive away the people’s pick for president. 

Never forget that the Ukraine war was started as a cover story for this Russian complicity that the Obama administration entirely made up.  Once they had made a bad guy out of Russia, they had to destroy Putin so this story would never get out, so they drew him into a conflict with Ukraine, knowing that NATO was the hot button that would do it.  And that hasn’t worked out as planned either.  But think of the number of people who died in the process.  And then there is Dr. Fauci and what his relationship was to the DOD weapon created in Wuhan, China, to infect America so that they could rig an election in 2020 with emergency rules that would allow them to get rid of Trump finally.  Millions of people have died because of Obama and a Deep State that put him in power, and wanted to keep him in power, for their own interests.  And it has been a not-so-silent war that has gone on for six to seven decades.  And now that we know, we have not just to punish these people.  We have to make an example of them.  They cannot be allowed to exist after committing these grave crimes against our nation, a set of ideas rooted in the cause of justice for all, and the rules to build a civilized society.  So when we say that Obama and members of his intelligence community administration need to be prosecuted and executed for treason and sedition at the highest level, and with the most deadly intent, we aren’t kidding.  It’s not a political statement of anger, but a country’s position on the foundations of law and order.  We cannot allow this mess to continue, and it has to be punished with death.  And not just some lethal injection that painlessly puts the executed to sleep.  No, it needs to be a violent public execution, similar to what the Italians did to Mussolini.  People need to express themselves correctly, and from as bad as things are with this case, death by firing squad only begins to get us there.  These are some of the worst and most violent criminals in the history of the world.  And we need to treat them that way.

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

Showing Courage on Ohio Property Taxation: It was always a socialist game that should have never started

It takes a lot of guts to try to override a governor’s veto, and that is just what Matt Huffman and the House Republicans are poised to do on July 21st, 2025, in Columbus, Ohio.  They have been trying to reform property taxes in House Bill 96 in three key areas, eliminating replacement levies, which often lead to tax increases.  Republicans want to phase them out.  The second thing is that they wish to implement county-level cuts, giving county budget commissions the authority to lower property taxes if the local governments or schools collect more than they need.  Then the third thing is to adjust the 20-mill floor, changing how the formula is calculated to reduce school funding as property values continue to rise, potentially.  DeWine vetoed these parts of the bill, arguing that they’d create enormous problems for schools by disrupting funding stability.  It takes a lot of guts for Huffman and other Republicans, including the Ohio Chamber of Commerce, to stand behind these reforms and push for a 60-vote majority.  It will be close.  If the House can get it over to the Senate, the Senate has the votes, so it really will come down to whether Republicans dare to part with DeWine and override him as they should.  Many people talk tough on the campaign trail, and this is one of those times when real courage is needed.  It would be beneficial if Republicans could step up and take the lead at this critical juncture.  Many people would take pride in a good government headed in the right direction.  Because what DeWine is protecting is loaded with bad government misery that is headed for reform regardless.  There is no stopping the reforms to private property that are going to take place. 

I feel like everywhere these days, I have to say it, and there are a lot of people who don’t think about these things very much who don’t want to hear it.  However, I’ve been pointing it out for years, so the road to this July 21st vote is a very long one.  And it’s just the start of many things to come.  The next governor, Vivek Ramaswamy, whom I had the chance to discuss this very topic with just a few weeks ago, is looking at major reforms on private property taxation.   President Trump is discussing the same concept, namely, the elimination of private property taxation all together.  It will take several years to get there, but that’s where the current sentiment is headed.  And people like Mike DeWine, who have been a part of building that old system, know that it will disrupt the way they envisioned funding for government and services.  However, those old trends are what have put us in our current budgetary situation.  We are going to have some tough discussions, just as we are currently with the Federal Reserve.  A group of independent bankers can’t be allowed to strangle billions of dollars of opportunity cost out of our economy just to protect lenders’ profit margins, when the growth potential of reform could generate so much more than the old static measures.  For those who think that punishing property ownership is the way to fund the level of government we may want as a society, it essentially comes down to choice: do you trust the free market, or the minds of humanity to impose burdens to pay for government services, such as school funding?  For DeWine, he’s just never going to be ready to admit that years and years of socialism are behind the creation of property tax penalties to pay for public education.  And, of course, the teachers’ unions control that entire industry, leading to cost overruns that our out-of-control local governments must deal with, leaving behind expensive chaos.

So you can’t help but talk about socialism, communism, and Marxism in general when we discuss how taxation against private property came into our culture to begin with, because we have gone through a period where Democrats and soft shelled Republicans didn’t want to believe to what level Karl Marx influenced legislative policy making going back to the beginning of the last century.  Much of the American expansion period, from 1850 on, saw a significant influx of European socialists who entered the country and introduced their Karl Marx-inspired ideas, which ultimately infected our free enterprise system with penalties against private property.  And it has gone on for so long that we just assumed that’s the way it has to be.  However, this has led to runaway costs, as we have seen in public schools currently, and penalties against those who own property, as they pay more for the same services than, say, an apartment dweller who requires far more tax services, far more than they pay.  It’s a very unfair system that undermines the premise of private property, destroying the American idea, and it was baked into all the progressive taxation policies that came with the creation of the Fed in 1913, a mistake at its inception that has only worsened over time.  There are old politicians, like DeWine, who have carried these mistaken ideas throughout their entire political life, and they are trying to preserve them for all kinds of unhealthy reasons.  However, the temperament lies in reforming that basic concept. 

Of course, what would replace these revenue devices would be a use tax of some kind, as well as sales tax in general.  However, that relies on the market’s growth mechanisms, similar to Trump’s tariffs.  People were against those for the same reason, and only now, a few months into his second term, are people beginning to see the logic, fruitfully.  After a few years of Trump, many significant economic developments will become a reality that people cannot see now.  Yet, as with the trend on private property, we should incentivize people to own as much private property as possible.  The taxes on it are part of a socialist scheme from the beginning that was always part of the plan to grow government.  There is no way to determine the correct funding model for public schools if property owners bear the burden for the benefit of those who can’t afford property.  It’s a wealth redistribution scam that’s baked into the policy of collecting taxes to grow government in ways that nobody can reliably control, because it’s a tax against the few for the needs of the many.  And it takes away the incentive to invest and create.  What we know now is that encouraging growth would generate significantly more revenue through optimism, as opposed to the current system of oppression.  In short, take the socialism, communism, and Marxism out of the legislative process, and the economy works far better, and at that point, you can see what your actual revenue stream would be, and can make much better decisions for how to construct society, such as elements of school funding and per-pupil budget needs.  With the system as it is, we can’t even have the discussion.  There is a significant chance for the Ohio House to take a bold, Trump-like action.  However, the trend, regardless, is working against old politicians like DeWine and is moving away from penalizing private property ownership.  Whether that happens on July 21st, 2025, or at a later time, the taxation of private property is headed for significant reform and disruption of the current methods.  It would be better sooner if people could find the courage.  But eventually, it’s happening anyway, and there’s nothing anyone can do to stop it.  Because it never should have been created in the first place.

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

Bernie Moreno is Doing Great as a Senator: The Fed interest rate should be at 2%, not 4

I am pleased with the work that my new Senator, Bernie Moreno, is doing in Washington, D.C. It’s almost a shame that Trump is doing such a good job that great people like Bernie Moreno are being overlooked amidst all the goodness.  But that’s a good problem to have.  Bernie, in particular, has been great at keeping up the pressure on the Fed, and specifically, Jerome Powell.  So, let’s answer a common question first: No, our Federal Reserve doesn’t need to be independent of politics.  That is the dumbest thing perhaps ever said.  That our political system needs to be separate from our fiscal policy is an entirely dumb idea that needs to be destroyed in our era.  The Fed’s independence is only suitable for one entity, and that is the banks.  It’s there for their protection and nothing else. And because of that assumption, banks and all financial institutions have gained way too much power in the world, and they need their teeth knocked out in substantial ways.  Old man Jerome Powell and all the rest who came before him at the Federal Reserve need a reality check, and I’m more than happy to see that Bernie Moreno has been leading the charge to reform.  Warren Davidson, my congressman, has also been excellent on this issue.  Criticism of the Fed is a very good thing, and here’s why.  I have recently received more education than I ever wanted regarding banking practices, and the more you learn, the more obvious it becomes that many of these banking types have been influenced by comfortable terms that have inspired very anti-American activity.  The way the Fed was created was outside our Constitution, and the belief over the years that it should be separate from other social concerns has only benefited banks by providing a stable environment for them, even if harm is being inflicted on the people who are voting. 

This idea that our elected government would not have direct control over fiscal policy is an absolute joke, but that has been the assumption.  When people say that Bernie Moreno, Warren Davidson, or President Trump should respect an independent Fed, they are smoking crack.  Currently, the economy is humming along nicely, with excellent job reports, energy costs coming down, and a significant amount of money being generated from tariffs. However, this activity has not had the intended effect of raising fears of inflation, as the Fed had anticipated.  Inflation, generally speaking, is when you have too much money chasing too few goods.  The Fed has been accused of printing too much money, which causes inflation to saturate the market.  The Biden administration had too many rules, which constricted market saturation for desired goods and services, leading to inflation.  Inflation is usually caused by standing in the way of human enthusiasm.  Price breaks occur due to market saturation, revealing the actual price that a person is willing to pay for a product or service.  You can usually figure that out if you have four fast food restaurants selling their version of a hamburger.  If you have only one, they can charge whatever they want for a hamburger.  However, if you have four places to choose from, then they must compete for your attention.  Therefore, when a government effectively removes barriers to market entry, a tangible value can be expressed.  However, when a government creates obstacles, we can say that we witness inflated values due to the restriction of that enthusiasm.  And that is precisely what the Fed is currently guilty of doing. 

Currently, the rates set by the Federal Open Market Committee, FOMC, are in the range of 4.25% to 4.5% which equates to about $600 billion of money generated for lenders.  Nobody is saying that banks and other financial institutions shouldn’t pay a fair wage.  Credit card companies make it extremely easy to spend money with the swiping machines and chips that we have today, where nearly every transaction for a mature adult is monitored by their computer systems, making it easy for all of us to spend money.  That is a valuable service, but it is currently being done at an artificially high rate because the Fed policy protects lenders at the expense of the public, the voters.  As Trump and Bernie Moreno have been saying, we are probably sitting on at least two interest rate points too high for what this Red-Hot American economy should be, holding back over a trillion dollars from money flowing into our financial system.  The excuse from Jerome Powell for keeping interest rates as high as they are is to keep inflation in check.  However, as it stands, the Fed has been contributing to inflation, rather than preventing it.  And that has been grotesquely obvious with their sinful relationship with BlackRock.  The Fed printed too much money, which was then distributed through Wall Street, as seen through people like Larry Fink, and this money was used to acquire companies, effectively taking away private ownership and control, which is why I have been discussing this issue so intensely.  The foundation of communism is to abolish the concept of private property, and the Fed has been facilitating the subversion of this foundation at the bank level in very detrimental ways.  And when we have tried to address it, we keep hearing that the Fed needs to be independent of political theater.  No, that’s only good for one party, the banks.

Trump’s approach to the economy has been brilliant.  Usually, we rarely find political figures who understand fiscal policy as well as banks do, so there is always an unfair advantage.  But in Bernie’s case, and Trump’s, they have had to slug it out with banks in the past and understand the games as opposed to the typical loser politician who has done nothing else in their life but get elected to a public position.  And once you know that the name of the game is to take away as much risk as possible from banks and to give them enormous power in the process, then the errors become very obvious.  If we got rid of Jerome Powell at the Fed and put in someone who truly represented the Trump administration, and would bring down interest rates into the 2% range, we would see wealth creation beyond the scope of what anybody thought previously to be possible.  And everyone would make a lot of money in the process, including the banks.  However, this 4.5% approach is excessively restrictive and primarily focuses on exerting power over the political process and securing international financing.  And no, the Fed doesn’t have to be independent of our elected representatives.  We need a monetary policy in America that is representative of the people, who seek representatives to run their government on their behalf.  And the Fed is only suitable for shielding international banks from the whims of political sentiment.  The only people profiting from these high interest rates are the banks.  However, in the process, they restrict economic output, such as having only one place to buy a hamburger, as opposed to four.  And if Powell wants to fight it out to hold his term to its close, he should feel the pressure that people hate him for artificially restricting their options.  Interest rates should be at 2%, not 4%.  And when that happens, the grip that socialism and communism around the world have on all this centralized banking will lose control over mass populations, and a real era of prosperity can begin.  And Bernie Moreno gets it, and I’m proud that he does.  The Fed stronghold is breaking, as it should.  And we are seeing the light on the other side, perhaps for the first time in all human history.

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

Banks Trying to Destroy Private Ownership of Businesses: The ruthlessness is in the rules, and is purposefully anti-America

It is a case that could have been taken off the script pages of the Yellowstone television show, but I have had a front row seat to it, and I’m sure there will be years of legal action in the aftermath, because there are so many bad things done by so many bad people that shaking hands and walking in separate ways at the end of it just won’t be possible.  But to answer a question I have had about why there is not enough private ownership of businesses these days, and to understand why so many companies have sought the shelter of being publicly traded, or to hide behind large staffs of a board of directors to shield themselves from the pain of private enterprise, my question has been are the banking practices we see today purposefully predatory, and the confirmation couldn’t be more explicit than with a Wells Fargo case I know about regarding a tech company in Northern Cincinnati.  I have spoken to everyone about this case, and it seems that a large bank like Wells Fargo would not intentionally engage in practices that are meant to essentially harm a business and bleed it dry for their own interests. This appears to break every fiduciary assumption that the finance industry would consider itself bound by.  However, I’ve spoken to people who have served on the Federal Reserve and been CEOs of local community banks, and they weren’t fazed by what they were hearing about big bank practices.  Which alarmed me, because what would normal people do in these kinds of situations, who own companies targeted by hostile banking practices to force them to sell so that they could take over the carcass for a value only they understand.  As I drive around Ohio, and see a lot of businesses that are now empty, how many of them fell that way through mismanagement, and how many were forced into that condition by banking policies that have written into their financial markets an absolute hatred of capitalism and a desire to punish private ownership through lending practices that were inspired by Karl Marx and has the same level of radicalism behind their management practices.

This is a more literal view of how society is actually structured. Rules just hide the bad guys from the world

It’s the same kind of logic that we’re currently experiencing with Trump in the White House, where the Fed has interest rates set between 4.25% and 4.50%.  The cost to the American economy is approximately $600 billion per 1%, so Trump would like to see interest rates lowered into the 2% range to stimulate the economy by over a trillion dollars.  However, the Fed doesn’t care about the people who vote; they represent the interests of their banks. With Trump’s red-hot economy, they want to make money off their investments, so the policy is set for them, not for the good of the country.  They are concerned about their long-term bondholders, the banks in general, and other creditors and lenders.  Nobody is saying they shouldn’t be making money off the services they provide, but in the case of the Fed, they have rates set too high to maintain their control over the market.  In their view, presidents come and go and can kiss babies and pat dogs on the head at holiday parades.  So long as they stay out of their breadbasket and keep financial management separate from political considerations.  And baked into all that is how many of these banks have become overtly corrupt, and even evil.  And feel untouchable to any political scrutiny.  I’ve read about plenty of stories, but with this Northern Cincinnati case, I had not yet seen it firsthand.  And what I have witnessed has been outrageously corrupt. 

Before you can have this, you have to stop the parasitic banking practices that are destroying everything in the background.

In the case of the tech company in Northern Cincinnati, the bank fell sideways with a CFO there and they essentially targeted the privately held company for collapse by withholding funds the company needed to run its business, audaciously insisting on spending huge fees onto a consulting firm that works for the bank to essentially steer the company over a cliff to destruction, not caring at all what might happen to all the customers that company had in the process.  And no amount of logic could be talked into those characters because they had a preconditioned outcome in mind that certainly did not support privately held businesses.  And that was when the policies of the big banks themselves were implemented to make it very difficult to maintain private ownership of anything, regardless of the company’s size.  Smaller community banks are, of course, the way to go if you can get them.  However, they have tight financial markers as well and are very prone to risk, so it’s another situation where monetary policy is one of the most significant barriers to inspiring business growth.  There is a hatred of private ownership that large institutions are keen to destroy for very political reasons.  The Fed person I spoke to thinks it’s just a fair in love and war condition.  However, as I have been involved in the story, it’s a clear case where the menace is written into the policymaking.  And suppose any society wants to have an excellent economy with private ownership taking risks to create jobs. In that case, there must be policies in place to prevent parasitic banking practices, which is the case with this Northern Cincinnati company and a large institutional bank.  They feed off risk takers in ways that punish the practice. 

When I tell the story to people, they assume, just as we do with the Federal Reserve, that the participants understand what they do to people, and that if they did, they would care.  That nobody is that overtly evil.  Yet, as interest rates are set to feed off the masses, a barrage of easy money, essentially, most people working in finance are not the kind who like to work very hard at anything.  So, they are parasitic in their fundamental work ethics and don’t like scrappy, privately held companies, because they don’t treasure such freedoms and feel perfectly justified in abusing their power for personal gain under the guise of following the rules.  The rules they created were designed to make it easy for them to be parasitic lenders.  And if the carcass dies, they sell it off and move to the next target.  And in that way, there is a Marxist fantasy that is unleashed in their hatred of private enterprise, which is ruthless.  And very scheming.  And all too common, which we don’t even know how to talk about, until we experience a case like this for ourselves.  In the case I’m talking about, I don’t think the bank understood the mess it was getting itself into, and many of the bottom feeders involved in these kinds of things, who are professional parasites, clearly underestimated the situation and are going to feel a lot of pain they could have avoided.  But to answer the question as to the ruthlessness of it, it’s evident that its quite common and that most companies undergoing the same level of hostility by a banking partner would never survive and that if we truly want an excellent economy in Ohio, and in the nation, that we are going to have to bust up these financial institutions with their anti-American, and anti-private ownership radicalism.  Most companies lack the kind of tenacity that has been present in this case.  But the question about methods couldn’t be more obvious.  And that there is a financial institution’s aversion to privately held companies is not something they want to protect, just as the Fed is guilty of setting interest rates at the cost to society in general, in defense of their interests.  Their approach is short-sighted and lazy.  And purposefully ruthless to feed the essence of their natures, which is the question before us.  What do we do with such people when we clearly can’t have them pacesetting our economy?  Because, if left to their own devices, they will maliciously destroy everything they touch. 

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

I Would Have Shot Them: No protestor has a right to throw rocks, under any conditions

I would have shot them, the protestors who were throwing rocks at the ICE vehicles leaving the illegal immigration raid on the pot farm in California.  Rocks are considered a deadly weapon, and any federal agent who is hit by a rock is no different than having some lunatic lunge at them with a knife, or to fire a shot from a gun.  And throwing rocks into the driver’s side window of a Federal vehicle, shatter-resistant or not, is solid enough ground to use deadly force to stop.  With shatterproof glass, once a window starts to become compromised, and some of those vehicles were, continued impacts in the same area could allow the rocks to get through, and those could have been deadly.  The ICE agents did not have an obligation to flee, which they were trained to do, and that is part of the problem.  We are a stand-and-fight country, especially when it comes to law enforcement.   Those agents were just doing their jobs, and those rock-throwing ICE protestors were crossing the line with encouraged violence.  And part of that encouragement was that they did not think that the ICE agents would fight back, which encouraged the violence in the first place.  The reason many of these protests are so violent and dangerous is that there has grown an expectation that all government employees have been trained to flee rather than fight, and this has caused unwarranted aggression to grow with the expectation that violence would only flow one way.  And it would be far healthier for society to understand that impeding government operations with deadly force opens the door for a deadly response.  And as hard as those protestors were throwing those rocks at those fleeing vehicles, their deadly motivations couldn’t have been presented more obviously. 

I know it’s a pain in the neck to fill out the forms when you do shoot someone, but this California case called for it.  And it would have made future protestors think twice before doing it again.  All they would have had to do upon a rock impact striking the driver’s side window was to get out of the car and open fire into the nearest perpetrator, shooting to kill.  The paperwork processing would have been fine.  I know that the bosses of the ICE agents, trained under years of progressive understanding, have been taught to use non-lethal force and to play patty cake with these kinds of people, and none of them want to kill protestors on their watch.  So they put these ICE agents out knowing that the environment is more dangerous because of their policy decisions, because they encourage violence by not meeting it when it presents itself.  And now an entire generation of protestor types believe they can exert deadly force without having it turn back on them, and nobody takes it seriously any longer.  Nobody should think that throwing a rock at anybody is appropriate under any condition.  And at some point, ICE agents need to fight back.  Rubber bullets and stun guns just aren’t enough to use against stringy-haired socialists and radical left-wing America haters.  Before a protester arrives on the scene to throw a rock, they need to be aware of the potential consequences.  And these kids in California had no such fear, even to the point of running right up to the passenger’s side window of fleeing vehicles and tossing big rocks with all their force into windows they didn’t know were shatter-resistant or not.  At the least, they cause a lot of property damage that taxpayers are on the hook for, and the preservation of their mangy lives wasn’t worth it.  Once they decided to throw a rock, all consideration for their preservation was no longer relevant.

And is this what we’re talking about preserving, as far as the jobs illegal immigration performs, to work as underage pot pickers on a farm that provides marijuana to an already sketchy market?  I love the work ethic of immigrant labor.  I always appreciate hard workers.  But we’re supposed to believe that we have to accept tens of millions of illegal immigrants to cover jobs like this pot farm in California?  These are the kinds of jobs that I find personally useless, and if that’s what it takes to bring down the price of pot in legal states, then let the prices fall off the rocker.  Clean operations that are financially solid wouldn’t need illegal immigration to perform basic tasks.  And now watching some of the ridiculous comments from some of these ICE protestors, such as the current L.A. Mayor, are grotesquely overstated.  Even going so far as to say that we won’t be able to get our cars washed if we deport all these illegals.  If we deported tens of millions of illegals, it’s evident that legitimate businesses would be just fine, and people would not notice.  But what would be impacted are all the illegitimate businesses that are operating under the table, and that sounds like a good thing, not a bad thing.  Eliminating under-the-table labor would force many companies to clean up their current employment practices, which the California facility was found to be guilty of.  And defending that way of life was why rocks were justified in being thrown?  I don’t think so.  This isn’t a free speech issue; it’s an insistence on breaking the law issue, and ultimately comes down to law enforcement and whether everyone respects the basic premise of law and order. 

So I would have shot those protestors on the spot after the first rock had been thrown.  Granted, my profile type would likely keep me from any kind of federal employment.  I am a very aggressive concealed carry individual.  I openly walk around ready for violence all the time, and everyone knows it.  I would prefer not to shoot people, but I am always prepared to do so as soon as danger presents itself.  And my thinking on that is to call a spade what it is, and not to feed the perpetuation of violence with passive presentation of my livelihood.  And if everyone had that attitude, there would be a lot more respect for federal agents than we currently have.  However, the kind of administrative personnel we put in these jobs do not hire people like me; they have made a lot of DEI hires who would prefer not to blame people when bad things happen.  So that’s certainly part of the problem.  But until we do start seeing people shot for perpetuating violence into an otherwise peaceful society, we’ll see increases in violence that we just can’t tolerate, such as in the ICE raid on that California pot farm, a place of business that shouldn’t have been operating on a good day.  To keep a company like that alive is only making society worse upstream by producing the product it does.  So it would have been good for the government ICE agents to stand and fight, rather than flee and retreat as rocks were being thrown at their vehicles.  The moment a rock struck a car, the entire engagement changed, and deadly force should have been used.  We have to stop playing nice with these anti-American forces.  I would even go so far to say that lethal force should be used upon the burning of the American flag because such a jesture isn’t a free speech right, it’s a purposeful display that the laws of America are being cast aside, which makes the people doing so very dangerous, and in need of removal to maintain the peace.  And those are the discussions we need to be having.  And if I were driving those cars, there would have been less rock throwing, because those protestors would have been shot where they stood.  I would have gladly filled out the paperwork and still been home in time for dinner without a second thought.

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

Lipstick on a Pig: Is it fair to refer to the Lakota school board as swine?

Since I wrote about the ridiculous levy request from Lakota schools to build a bunch of new schools while tearing down the old ones, to the cost of 500 million dollars, people have been suggesting to me that maybe I was being too hard on the perpetrators, the Lakota school board by referring to them as pigs, that they were no better than swine.  However, I think that is the polite word for them, and the proper way to say it.  People who tend to have moral bankruptcy, as a group, tend to think that cosmetic improvements will hide the horrendous decisions they make in their lives, which often end up costing a lot of money.  This is precisely why Democrats, when elected, tend to run their communities into the ground.  And yes, all these people on the Lakota school board are Democrats.  It will be a lot better for people in the future when school board people have to run through the filter of a political party, so people know who they are voting for.  However, they currently hide behind a façade of neutrality.  Four out of five of the Lakota school board members are very liberal, and they spend money the way that liberals always do.  But that’s not the worst of it.  Now, the fifth school board member, Isaac Adi, I haven’t been too crazy about him, even though he’s considered a Republican.  What he did to Darbi Boddy was unforgivable.   But he and I talked for a long time in Senator Lang’s office, and we can at least work together.  So I’m not surprised that he voted no on this latest Lakota boondoggle.  However, referring to what they want to do as putting lipstick on a pig, because the pig will still be a pig, is the correct way to describe this situation. 

And I wish them luck; I hope they can find voters for their tax increase as effectively as they find their clothes after a night of hard drinking at education conferences.  Everyone knows the stories; there is nothing secret about it.  These aren’t very high-quality people, and that showed itself during the last school superintendent drama, where he got caught offering his wife on Craigslist while they were traveling out of town to music concerts, for group sex parties.  That superintendent had to resign because the community was upset about it, and this school board could only look at those of us who were upset about it and declare that we should have kept it all a secret, so people never found out, for the good of the children, of course.  We went through a lot of drama over that issue because, essentially, the superintendent and his wife talked about sexual fantasies with students who went to Lakota, where he was supposed to be in charge, and that is a major no-no.  And I wouldn’t say that we were getting all this information second-hand through rumors, but from the ex-wife herself.  It was never a question as to whether her husband, the Lakota superintendent, had an overly sexualized lifestyle.  He did.  It was whether or not he was allowed to have such a private life as a public figure.  Like a lot of really radically liberal people, he thought he could be one thing in public and be something completely different in private, but that’s not how things cook in the kitchen.  People in leadership roles are judged based on the entirety of their lives, and even if you are talking about little kids as sexual objects in just “pillow talk,” it still shows intent. 

I did talk to prosecutors about the Lakota case and why there was reluctance to go after him for child endangerment, because the ex-wife was reliable testimony, and there was a police report where he admitted it.  So it was pretty clear-cut.  And the answer I got would melt your face with anger.  Because the truth is, we have a very pornographic society, and this Lakota administrator isn’t the only one doing this kind of stuff.  It’s a common behavior, the overly sexual lives of people who have too much personal income, so that they can indulge in porn addictions.  And Lakota schools, as do most schools with high population densities, have a lot of bored employees who think too much about sex.  And it’s just a dangerous combination to put coming-of-age kids in passive roles with adults thinking way too much about sex.  As it turned out, nobody cared about the former Lakota school superintendent because most people didn’t see that he was doing anything wrong.  Because they were either doing it too, or they were thinking about it. I have never been a big fan of public schools, but after the Lakota school superintendent case and the behavior of this same school board, which tried to cover it all up as best they could, I’m a hard no on anything they propose.  We can’t trust anything they say.  At best, building new schools for these types of people is just putting lipstick on a pig, and in many cases, that pig is already at the slaughterhouse with a severed head, because of the school choice expansion that came out of Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill.  These same people want to invest this much money in an education system that will have to undergo significant changes in the coming years.

But people will say that all the buildings they want to tear down are old and outdated.  For Lakota to recruit the right kind of future employees, they need better buildings that can accommodate comfortable class sizes.  If Lakota wants to have the best employees, we must provide better buildings for them to work in.  Well, that is the lipstick on the pig talking.  They have no idea what makes education work with kids.  They are teaching kids all the wrong things for a society with changing priorities, and they are way behind the curve, out of touch at best.  On a good day, they are teaching progressive social values, such as transgender bathrooms, and the 1619 Project, which is all over their website.  That isn’t the kind of thing a community that voted for President Trump by overwhelming margins wants its children learning.  The world is changing in ways they don’t like, and now they want to spend half a billion dollars to counteract it.  They are out of their minds.  And at the core of it, knowing many of the school board members personally, I wouldn’t trust a word they said if they were giving me directions to a highway while standing on the on-ramp.  How can we believe them when they say that we need to spend all this money on new schools when they have spent years screwing up the old schools?  I think it is very polite to refer to them as swine, so the lipstick on a pig metaphor is the right one for people of such low quality.  They think that some fresh paint and new plaster will present them in a more favorable light to the public.  But to accomplish that, a billion dollars wouldn’t be enough.  Because a pig is still a pig, no matter how much lipstick you put on it.

Rich Hoffman

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Its a Command, not a Request: Smart TVs that aren’t so smart

I don’t think I’m becoming an anti-technology, cruddy old man because the world is leaving me behind as it goes faster and faster and is designed for much younger people.  I expect things to work, and as I have been wrapped up in some severe trouble lately, dealing with bone-crushing topics, at the end of the day, I hope the television at least works.  However, the TV in our bedroom is supposed to be a high-tech, smart TV that is very sophisticated. However, it makes me mad all the time because it is completely wireless, and when my wife walks into the room, she always scrambles the signal.  It’s a long story, but my wife has unusual electromagnetic imprints on the world.  It’s always been a problem, but back in the old days, these televisions were hard-wired into the wall.  But not anymore. These days, everything is wireless, and I’ve found that none of it works as well as the old stuff, which is getting on my nerves.  The other day, I was enjoying a show when my wife came into the room. The TV lost its signal and showed a spinning death icon, saying, “Please wait.”  Then, after a few minutes, it simply stopped and informed me that “it couldn’t process the request at this time.”  I was so mad that I just about threw the whole thing through the nearby window and out into the front yard.  I didn’t “request” anything.  I commanded the television to show me a channel, and it was failing to perform its basic task.  And who did that stupid television think it was?  But what was worse was the message code that framed the operation of the television as a “request,” as if the TV had an option to choose to do what I asked of it.  And that’s part of a much larger problem that I am seeing across all of society, and it’s a significant one.

People were taken advantage of by technology as tech bros tried to capture market share with control mechanisms that suited their needs. The quest to make things easier has only given us things that are too intrusive into our lives, as they are constantly collecting information on us, which can be irritating.  However, the technology never really works, and the by-product of the effort probably should never have been utilized to begin with.  However, we are people who like to put our generational stamp on things, and technology is a means of making a new generation feel better about themselves by gaining market dominance over the previous one.  But at a certain point, coffee is coffee, a phone is a phone, and an elevator does one primary thing.  You might add some fancy buttons that display different colors, but you don’t change their function.  However, in the world of business, we have transitioned from note-taking to computer processing. When systems fail, instead of completing tasks the old-fashioned way, as we have in the past, we have become a culture that accepts failure and waits patiently for resolution.  When you are talking to other businesses out there and trying to process a PO, or manage inventory, or send supporting paperwork with a shipment, most of the time there is a system failure in the chain and the people involved are waiting for IT to resolve it so that the world can resume its business.  This arrangement has simply not been working.  We tried to make it all easier, but it’s ended up being much less effective. 

There are some large companies that I am aware of, which are attempting to move away from their computerized management systems and return to taking notes on paper.  The paper notes don’t give you failure messages like my TV, which assumes that the technology has an option to perform or not.  If we are going to have technology in our lives, we need to let it know who’s boss.  And that when we tell it to do something, it does it, and does it quickly.  All this week, I had heard countless examples of ERP systems that were down, and people were waiting for them to come back up so that parts could be shipped. The kind of geeks who work in IT are about as out of touch as human beings on earth could be.  They would take things more seriously if they were playing the game Fortnite.  However, real-life things are much less interesting to them.  They are the kind of people who sit at a table of 12 but prefer to interact with a computer screen rather than with real people.  And those same personality types are what programming these cause codes in these TVs think are appropriate answers.  I used language a few times this week to them while on the phone with them that I did with that stupid television, and you would have thought I ran over their dog.  They are such pasty people, way too sheltered from reality, and they are in charge of how this technology forms in our society, even down to our TVs.  To me, if the technology doesn’t perform, get rid of it and get something else.  And you could tell that the young people were using technology to hide in the world and to conceal their poor performance behind it.  And it ticked me off.

I’m not against technology.  If something is invented that’s better, great.  However, if it’s not improving our lives, or we’re trying to accommodate technology when we should reject it, as in the case of smart TVs that aren’t so smart, we should discard them.  Because what I see happening is that technology has been used to hide the bad performance of lazy losers who are trying to hide in the background.  And it’s lowering the performance standards of our society as a whole.  I attended a substantial event the other day that included valet parking.  I didn’t feel like dealing with people, but the young fellows doing the valet parking were sharp and ambitious.  And after seeing numerous technological failures throughout the week, it was refreshing to see the competence of ambitious young people trying to earn a few bucks.  And after a hard day, you want to hear Yes, sir, and No, sir, and Here are your keys.  You don’t want to hear from technology that it has lost your keys, requiring you to wait for it to process your request.  Or anything that takes away the performance standard.  It was raining outside, and those kids were working in it, not bumping cars into each other or making guests wait.  They were running to get the cars so people wouldn’t have to wait.  And it was good to see.  Not the kind of service that computers are giving us these days.  And perhaps we should reconsider many aspects of it.  I gave the young men a twenty as a tip just because I appreciated the level of competency, and they were a little shocked.  But they had no idea what kind of week I had just survived and how much technology had made it much more difficult, rather than easier.  I was just happy to deal with hungry human beings who wanted to do a good job.  When you need something done, it’s not a request; it’s a command, and we need to put an end to technology that isn’t respectful enough of our time, especially during our leisure time.

Rich Hoffman

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