Category: Education

Don’t Cry for Obama: They opened the door for punishment of their many crimes

Don’t cry for Obama; he put himself in this mess.  And certainly don’t think that Obama is too privileged to do a perp walk in handcuffs in front of the media.  I will never forget it, or forgive it, when they marched Steve Bannon, Trump’s former chief strategist, down a hall in handcuffs and put him in jail for four months, as they did Peter Navarro.  I will never forget the Trump mug shot when they booked him in Fulton County.  And when they did everything they could to destroy him with legal cases meant to kill his entire family, I will never forget what they did to Alex Jones, to Roger Stone, to Rudi Guiliani, Sydney Powell, and General Flynn.  What I watched happen over the last several years was nothing short of a coup against our form of government, and it was a communist revolutionary type like Barack Obama who was dead set to use all the powers of government to destroy our government in just the same way that Che and Fidel Castro did in Cuba.  Or any communist revolution for that matter, around the world, whether it be in China or Russia.  What they tried to do in the United States was every bit as bad, and they went for our jugular.  So now the shoe is on the other foot.  We have extensive evidence of what Obama directly did as president, which only confirms what we already suspected.  The evidence is significantly worse.  They didn’t just talk about destroying the people around Trump; they tried actually to do it, and where they could, they did.  So yes, when people ask me if it’s even possible to prosecute Barack Obama, a former president, it is because Democrats already opened the door to the possibility in the way they handled Trump.  Remember, the goal here is to define who runs our country, and if we let Obama and his gang of thugs loose, we surrender to their domestic terrorism in a way that will encourage others to do so in the future.  So I would argue that we can’t afford to let them get away with it.

After Trump made his feelings very clear about what Tulsi Gabbard had released to the public about what Obama’s role in the Russiagate scandal was, Obama released a statement essentially trying to hide his crime behind the dignity of the Oval Office, just as it was expected that the Deep State would hide his terrorist intentions behind his skin color.  Obama was created to undo the notion of a free country run by free people who picked their elected representatives.  And there are a whole bunch of malicious characters behind Barack Obama who need to be snuffed out and destroyed within American society.  It doesn’t just end with Obama.  But, Obama was caught trying to hold power as he was a sitting president, and he orchestrated a coup against the incoming administration that was every bit as radical as when the Castro brothers overtook Cuban society.  And Comey, Clapper, Clinton, Brennan, and many, many others deep within the CIA and FBI were in on it, and they paid for a doctored-up dossier working with foreign governments to undo a sitting president.  They broke every kind of protocol to destroy the results of a free election.  And all those involved must be punished because they didn’t respect our system the first time.  They laughed at our sense of justice and counted on their ability to hold office and control the legal outcome.  And when they had power, which people took away from them in the 2024 election, they abused their power, making it so that a counteraction is now mandated.  It’s not compassionate to let them go with all we know; it would be foolish.

There was always a notion behind the crimes Obama committed during his presidency that by the time everything caught up to him and his partners, America would be a different country.  In no scenario did they think that a person like Trump would become president, let alone twice.  And there were no calculations that Trump would survive all they threw at him to stop him from running for a second term.  Because they understand this, they know they have been winning elections through election fraud for years, and they are aware of what I have been saying about elections, whether we are talking about 2020, 2024, or any of the upcoming elections, such as 2026 or 2028.  If we keep Democrats from cheating, or make it harder for them, they can’t win elections because they are a dramatic minority, just as in the communist uprisings around the world had been, minorities taking control of majorities through the illusion of force.  And that was tried here in the United States by many members of our intelligence departments, and Obama was put in place to be the inserted wrecking ball, hiding his communist intentions behind his skin color, so that we couldn’t have an opinion on his actions because we had to prove we weren’t a racist country.  Or that we couldn’t prosecute him for what he did during his term, or as a puppeteer during the Biden years, because of some respectability of the office he held as a former president.  Trump was a former president, and they tried to destroy him and all his associates ruthlessly.  So now that the shoe is clearly on the other foot, we must have justice, and that means Obama in handcuffs, a mug shot, and jail time for the gross abuses of government he used to keep his party in power.

Don’t forget, if not for the whole Russiagate issue that Obama started, there would not be a war between Russia and Ukraine right now.  It was because of this deteriorated relationship with Russia that diplomacy crumbled, and a war was started that has killed many millions of people.  The war was always a cover story for the Steele Dossier and the people behind it, who were guilty of committing treason against our country to remove an elected president from office.  Trump isn’t the first time; they did it to Nixon, and they outright killed President Kennedy. Many of us have long suspected that those things happened, but now we have the proof, and we can’t just turn away from it.  We can’t allow a Deep State to think it’s in charge of our government.  And we have to punish their agents as we catch them, and Obama has been caught, without question.  Trump didn’t enter office looking to punish his political rivals.  However, he can’t disregard the crimes committed against him leading up to this point.  He has no obligation to turn away from justice, and that’s what we elected him to do.  People want to run a self-ruled government.  They don’t want a bunch of loser Deep Staters running their country for the benefit of globalism.  We have been too lenient in the past, which has given these people a false sense of security, leading them to believe they could get away with anything.  So yes, we have to send a message.  But don’t fret over the methods.  Obama and many others already went too far with Trump, and now the shoe is on the other foot.  So don’t cry for Obama.  It won’t start color revolutions in the streets to see him arrested and marched down the street in chains.  He did it to himself, and now he and many others must pay for the crimes they committed.  And no amount of fancy talk will help him now.  He’s busted!  And if people take to the streets to protest the arrest of Obama, we will bust them too, arrest by arrest, and if they get violent, with bone-crushing force. 

Rich Hoffman

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

Thank Goodness Kristi Noem Thought to Ask the Question: We don’t have to take our shoes off at the airport anymore

Thank goodness Kristi Noem thought to ask the question, because many things in government are just like this.  Someone comes up with a stupid rule, and we end up following it for the rest of our lives without question, even though it was dumb to begin with.  And that was certainly the case when it came to the security measures that were implemented after 9/11.  Our FBI and CIA didn’t do a very good job in detecting a terrorist cell within the United States training to fly planes in Florida, but not caring to land them, and our security got caught napping, so those terrorists were able to get onto commercial planes and use them as weapons of war.  And the crises of that moment made people clamor for corrective action, which human beings most often overreact to.  And the Department of Homeland Security was created, giving us the TSA, and the dumb policy of removing shoes at the airport while going through security.  Now, over twenty years later, it hasn’t saved anyone anything, but it has certainly cost a lot of time and misery.  And until Kristi Noem was put in charge of Homeland Security and asked everyone working there why we were still taking off our shoes at security checks, nobody had an answer.  The only thing they could say was that we were doing it because we had always done it.  Never was the question asked whether we should be doing it at all.  Thankfully, Kristi Noem, due to the weak reaction to that question, changed the policy, and we no longer have to remove our shoes at airport security checkpoints.  It’s a significant step toward addressing many issues that amusement parks have already identified.  An overreaction to security to cover the impediment of actually doing the job the first time is a dumb idea, and it’s good to see that policy go.

It has been terrible to deal with the security procedures since the 9/11 terrorist attacks.  The entire creation of the unionized TSA has been a disaster, making traveling by plane a miserable experience.  I try not to do it unless I have to travel overseas, because essentially it takes all day to travel.  I never feel comfortable arriving at the airport less than two hours before a flight because many things can go wrong, especially at security.  Nobody is saying that we don’t want security on flights.  However, it’s the kind of overcompensation that we see with the TSA that’s the problem.  Private security would be much better than unionized labor, which often fails to perform effectively in any field.  There is plenty of technology these days that can detect bomb making equipment just through a quick scan.  We don’t need to take off half our clothes through the demeaning process of vulnerability in front of hundreds of other people.  This idea of stripping away your identity into a near locker room vulnerability is just dumb and lazy.  And it never made us a safer society.  It just made us feel that way.  If people just did their jobs the first time, many of the well-known terrorist attempts that we know of on airplanes wouldn’t have happened.  However, these days, the technology is so advanced and intrusive that there’s no need to take off all your clothes to board an airplane.  With domestic flights, and I fly out of Cincinnati, if the destination is east of the Mississippi River, it’s much better and faster to drive.  And because of that, think of how much money airlines lose because of the TSA rules.

People don’t talk about it as much as they should. Think how much money Homeland Security has cost airline companies by being such a pain in the neck that people don’t buy plane tickets.  It’s a massive opportunity cost.  Before the creation of Homeland Security and the introduction of the TSA’s overly restrictive rules, many airlines had significantly larger hubs.  Delta operated a central hub that served numerous destinations from Cincinnati well into the 1990s.  Because flying was easy and not so intrusive, people chose to do it.  Once they turned the experience into essentially a locker room at the YMCA, it has cost airlines a lot of money in lost opportunity cost.  Some of the low-cost carriers have found a way to adapt somewhat.  However, the experience of flying has deteriorated significantly.  If you want to dress up and go somewhere to show the best version of you to the world, you don’t fly in a plane.  Because it’s such a demeaning experience.  And for a long time, amusement parks were just as bad.  However, they have recently upgraded their scanners, and as a result, they wave everyone through much faster.  The scanners can practically see through your clothing, leaving nothing to the imagination.  But at least you don’t have to strip down almost naked to go through security.  We live in a society that needs to do things faster, not slower, or safer.  We need people to do their jobs better the first time, and everything would work so much better.  And to Kristi Noem’s point, nobody had even thought to ask the question, “Why are we doing this dumb thing?” all this time.  When the answer was, “because we have always done it.” 

The convenience of flying and getting somewhere far away quickly has become a ridiculous compromise of personal merit, and it never should have been.  The airport’s safety policies have ruined the experience of traveling with others because people often show up in their pajamas, knowing that their travel day is going to be intrusive and demeaning. When you pay that much money for something, it shouldn’t feel the way it does.  It should be fun and rewarding.  People should dress nicely when going to the airport.  By default, due to excessive regulations, airports have become unpleasant places with excessive security, ineffective communication systems, and dirty and uncomfortable seats.  And the staff treat the whole experience like you’re lucky to be there, rather than being grateful that you bought a ticket that funded all their jobs.  The concept of prioritizing safety over profits, when in reality it was always laziness that was the real problem, has made owning an airline too complicated and a draining experience for customers.  And if not for Homeland Security and the TSA specifically, we’d have many more consumer options in airports that are much better for us than what we currently have.  And most of the time, it always starts with asking the right questions from leadership. “Why are we doing this dumb thing?”  And when nobody can answer it, you eliminate the policy.  Thank goodness, because of Kristi Noem, we no longer have to take our shoes off at the airport.  And hopefully, we can roll back many other misguided ideas that were implemented in haste to make people feel safe, when the reality was far from the case.  In all things economic, whether it’s amusement parks or airports, faster is better, and more options are always preferred.  And we don’t want dumb, mindless rules to ruin economic activity that should bring us joy and opportunity.  Just because lazy security guards don’t take their jobs very seriously and have to be turned into a union-led monstrosity to give an illusion of effectiveness, the truth is very far from it.

Rich Hoffman

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

Beat the Hell Out of Them: Crushing the socialist protestors at the Roebling Bridge in Cincinnati

As I said, the ICE agents who had rocks thrown at them in California, detaining illegal aliens from that pot farm, should have shot them.  They had every right to do so.  So I was thrilled to see that the Covington, Kentucky police physically bloodied a bunch of stringy-haired protestors as they tried to close the Roebling Suspension Bridge over a protest of Ayman Soliman, the former Cincinnati Children’s Hospital chaplain, detained by ICE on July 9th, 2025.  For some ridiculous reason, someone has told these loser socialists that shutting down highways and bridges was a thing they could do to express free speech.  It is not.  And certainly not in my town. I use that bridge all the time, and it should not be closed down by a bunch of protestors cheering on illegal activity.  I have no tolerance for it.  We hire law enforcement to enforce laws.  And when the protestors dug in and started getting pushy, the Covington Police beat the hell out of those protestors and arrested them like the scrappy losers that they are.  It’s one thing to see these things happening in some far away place like California, where their politics has fallen off the edge of the earth with liberalism.  It’s quite another to see something like that happen in the heartland city of Cincinnati, not in my town.  I want to see our highways, bridges, and sidewalks open at all costs, despite the impediments of protestors.  They do not have the right to shut down anything in protest, and it’s about time they are taught a lesson about impeding traffic.  When it comes to using violence to maintain law and order, I’m 100% for it.  As the videos of this violence at the bridge went viral, I was very proud of the Covington, Kentucky, police department. 

The protestors crossed the line when they tried to stop a black SUV driven by an out-of-town tourist, as the insurgents were banging on the hood and vandalizing the vehicle as it attempted to push through the crowd.  Police issued warnings and tried to be as kind as possible, but they ended up arresting 15 of the 100 or so protesters at the site, including two CityBeat journalists, Madeline Fening and Lucas Griffith.  The charges include felony rioting, unlawful assembly, failure to disperse, obstructing a highway, criminal mischief, disorderly conduct, and resisting arrest.  The Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America claimed that the police “violently broke up” the protest, alleging some of the arrestees were beaten and required medical treatment.  An attorney for the miscreants, Benjamin Pugh, argued that the police escalated the situation and did not give sufficient time to disperse.  So that is the cast of characters involved, and I have no sympathy for the CityBeat journalists.  As I have said about them for many decades, they exist to breed these kinds of losers in our youth culture, so they are as guilty of why those protestors thought they could get away with this kind of thing in the first place, as anybody.  There’s plenty of bad to go around, and it’s good that the Covington Police did not allow these individuals to embarrass our city of Greater Cincinnati in front of the nation.  The message we want to send to all these socialist and communist sympathizers is zero tolerance for their view of the world.  That’s where we are these days, as I have been saying for a long time.  These aren’t just Democrats with differing political views.  These are people who want to overthrow our society, which is why they are upset at the ICE deportations, because all those illegal immigrants are part of their strategy to destroy our law and order society.

However, here is a statement for attorneys like Mr. Pugh, who involved himself in this case: the public’s right to free egress exceeds the right of one individual to express their free speech.  People can say and hold whatever opinion they want about anything.  But they don’t have the right to force someone else to have that opinion.  And stopping traffic is an expression of a free speech opinion by force.  The protesters are saying, ‘Join me in my opinion; otherwise, I’m not going to let you use this bridge or travel down this highway.’  Time is an essential thing, and people in a free society cannot have others impose restrictions on their movement to coerce their opinions politically.  The protesters could have written an article, or spoken on YouTube or TikTok about the deportation of the Egyptian Ayman Soliman.  However, they did not have the right to block traffic to get attention or put their hands on the car of someone trying to cross the bridge.  This Marxist notion of damaging private property to communicate political opinions just isn’t going to fly.  We are a private property country.  A mob of losers does not get to override every principle of personal freedom that we have in our society, and one of the fundamental rights that we have is the right to egress.  The right to move around unimpeded and the freedom to enjoy our lives.  That’s why the bridge exists, so that people can travel from one place to another.  That’s why the roads exist.  A protester does not have the right to take that freedom away from people to force their opinions on an issue, due to having no other option but violence to get their point across. 

Once the protestors made a move to close the road, the Convington Police had a right and obligation to remove them and restore that freedom of egress.  There is no group sentiment, such as the Ignite Peace Cincy group, that has the right to close down any roads or even make someone walk around them on a sidewalk.  Any imposition on the personal freedoms of anybody warrants a violent removal of that impediment.  There is no right to Free Speech, which means people who don’t share those opinions have to be inconvenienced by any method.  People ultimately have a choice, and if that choice is removed from them, including the option to listen to socialist protestors or not, or to read that socialist social magazine, CityBeat, or not, the frustrated advocates of a political position don’t get to threaten free people and their private property in any way at all.  Especially trying to stop them from crossing a bridge and vandalizing their property, as if the group mob decided what was valuable socially, or what was acceptable.  And in this case, Ayman Soliman might have been a nice guy who fled persecution in his homeland in 2014 for his work as a freelance journalist covering the Arab Spring.  He was granted asylum in 2018, but that was revoked in June of 2025, leading to his arrest by ICE on July 9th.  He was a Muslim chaplain at Cincinnati Children’s and a board member at the Clifton Mosque, so a lot is happening with him that aligns with the profile of the Democrat Party and the way they want to shape our country politically.  But when people don’t want to hear what they have to say, they don’t get to take away choice from people, so that they do.  Any attempt to do that warrants violence against the protestors attempting it.   And no compassion for individual circumstances justifies anything done at the Roebling bridge, other than the police shutting it down and arresting with violence the perpetrators.  And I would have fully supported much more violence.  Because when I want to use that bridge, which happens often, I don’t want stringy-haired hippie socialists blocking the way.   Get them off the road, by any means necessary.

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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