Category: Education

Why Standing With Israel is Good: Western Civilization is worth defending from those who want to stay primitive and fight against human progress

So why stand with Israel and against the Palestinian position of destruction?  I thought it was interesting in my neighborhood this morning to drive by a home with a flag of the Palestinians in the front yard blowing along proudly in the breeze.  They also had a sign for Julie Shaffer, the liberal school board member on the corrupt Lakota school board.  Why did those things go together? Because they do, and why should people have an opinion on the matter even though it’s a conflict on the other side of the world?  Well, the first thing I would say is that we are primarily lucky to have been born in the United States, those reading this.  If you have traveled any of the world, it is not as nice of a place to live.  I have been to quite a few places worldwide, and there is never a better moment than landing back in America.  I did this recently late on a Saturday night.  It was just me traveling on that trip so I was alone with my car, which needed gas.  It had been over a week since I had my favorite drink in the world, a Mello Yello, so I stopped at one of the gas stations across the highway from CVG airport for both things.  There was a Mexican attendant who was blaring country music and watching some Latino talk show on his computer who was the attendant and it was just us late at night.  The world was pretty quiet, and I felt fortunate to call America home from where I had been to where I was.  And that happens to me every time I travel, even to places like Paris and London.  No matter where in the civilized world or the primitive, there is no place like home, truly. 

One of the reasons I like the Bible so much is that it has very clear standards.  It’s not just religious utterances, but it has a story about the progress of the necessity for cleanliness and has an overall decision about the state of nature as a whole.  Yahweh is my kind of God.  For people who know me, and this goes back a very long time, to when I was a little kid, well before my first conscious Bible school studies, which I did have through the 8th grade, I don’t like human stuff.  I don’t like belching, farting, or any references to animal traits.  When I drink from a class, I do not let the part of the liquid that touches my lips run down the glass.  I wipe it away.  In short, I am a very clean person.  I don’t like bad breath.  I don’t like unshowered people.  I don’t like hairy armpits on women.  I don’t like sloppy men with fat stomachs.  I like to see humans maintain themselves and live at a level above nature.  And to show dominion over it.  The Bible tells the story of a chosen people who were supposed to live an elevated existence and step above the level of gutter rats.  I do judge others and judge often, and I am very proud of it.  I have compassion for people like that guy at the gas station who are reaching for the American dream but weren’t born into it.  I was lucky enough to be born an American.  I love to see people working to be more Western in their lives, and I will always show them the way.  But I am much more judgmental of human behavior than even Yahweh.  I love civilization and excellence and am always reaching for personal betterment.  But I detest humans who do not go for the stars and surrender to their animal instincts.  I despise them, honestly. 

The history of Israel was an intentional injection of a regional problem where the Palestinians, in the form of the Canaanites, in the region where Israel is now, were child-sacrificing barbarians worshipping ancient gods that demanded blood, a lot of it.  They were a superstitious group of people who had been around by the stories of the region for more than 450,000 years, and they were never able to advance as a civilization because of their need to worship such corrupt and flawed personalities in their deities.  So along came a god that called himself king of all the pantheon, Yahweh, and gave them the Ten Commandments, which are rules for good living, and the nation of Israel was created.  As a result, humanity stepped into a better world, and Western civilization was built.  The fight to this day is from the lazy, the vicious, the scandalous, the desire for blood and human sacrifice to prevail in the region as it has for tens of thousands of years, and it shows.  When traveling to such places there are many in the world, such as the border between Israel and the Gaza Strip, for instance, where Marxism has been accepted over capitalism, where the drastic differences between the two societies are grossly noticeable.  The Palestinians are not a civilized, clean people.  They are barely getting along, which is evident by their housing, cars, and youth’s lifestyles.  I typically feel sorry for such people, but sympathy goes out the window very quickly when they start belching, farting, and looking like they want to hump the leg of every passerby.  They are essentially fighting for the right to be a douchebag, which is the same as saying that they don’t want to advance to the finer things that come from human imagination and expectation. 

Always in the background of the indigenous people’s argument, which for the Palestinians is similar to the Indians of North America is the argument that the greedy capitalists have interrupted the previous civilization that was crawling around in the dirt and worshipping nature with human sacrifice.  In my view, the invention of competitive cultures that may be better has improved the world everywhere it is utilized and because of that competition, the world is a much better place.  Because if left to their own devices, people would continue to get along and feed themselves barely and have a deficient standard of living.  So, I view the advent of Israel as extremely good for the region’s people; it has forced them to be better than they otherwise would be.  The same with the Indians in North America.  The standard of living improved for all people, even them.  Playing in the mud, worshiping a bunch of dirty nature gods, and not having a culture driven by quality and science is not a good life.  That is the difference between capitalist and Marxist cultures.  Or cultures that thrive from biblical context under the laws of Yahweh or those surrendering to an animal condition.  The Palestinians are not striving for excellence; they want to live as they did in the brutal past and are fighting for the right to continue those animal-driven lifestyles at the expense of human progress.  Which is a horrible idea.  Western Civilization was a great invention driven by the Bible, and the world would be much better off if everyone adopted it.  But as long as people fight against it, there will be conflict.  And in such disputes, the efforts at betterment through Western Civilization is a noticeable improvement over what previously was, in every case.

Rich Hoffman

I Still Like Sidney Powell: A corrupt court and the Tortures of Terror meant to beat out a confession from innocent people

I still like Sidney Powell. She took the plea deal on the Georgia election fraud prosecution, and people are mad at her. But I get it. She’s broke and doesn’t have much money or the potential to get more money. This is part of the strategy by a corrupt Marxist ideologue such as Fani Willis to prosecute so many people who were part of President Trump’s inner circle, which Sidney Powell was undoubtedly a part of. And what has happened to Sidney since she essentially rooted out the radicalism of the intelligence community in how they have been committing election fraud for many years is what authority regimes have done through all of human history. Regarding this case, the stretch racks in the Tower of London come to mind. The point of such torture was to pull people apart until they confessed to a crime, whether they committed it or not. Then, to use that confession to steer public sentiment in the direction of the agents of tyranny. Fani’s goal is to get people close to Trump to flip on him, get a confession letter and testimony against Trump that she can then use for her real target, taking down an American president. For Sidney Powell, who is out of money and has been on the stretch rack of federal prosecution for many years now, she’s ready to say uncle and get taken off the torture rack. For her six years of probation, a six thousand dollar fine with a few thousand dollars of restitution sounds like a pretty good deal. At this point, she wants the pain to stop. All she has to do is confess to sins she never committed. That is the point of the torture, to begin with.

In America, we are supposed to have an assumption of innocence where the court has the burden to prove you are guilty.  But that’s not how our courts work these days.  Sidney Powell and all of the people in Trump’s circle were considered guilty by association and, once indicted, had to rush to defend themselves from the associated guilt.  There are only two ways to deal with that condition.  To throw money at it, many thousands of dollars, sometimes millions.  Or to self-represent and blow up the internal court workings, which is my favorite method.  But either way, Marxism has moved into our judicial system for many years, and the assumption of guilt that abandons the Bill of Rights purposely.  Sidney Powell had to prove she wasn’t guilty, which cost a lot of money.  Now, if you can afford to play the legal game with lots of expensive lawyers like Trump, you can prove to the court that you aren’t guilty.  But that’s the game: if you don’t have the money to pay off the lawyers for long periods, you can’t win a court case.  That’s not fair.  But that’s not the game these days.  You either disrupt the court’s comfort zone by interrupting their procedural expectations or throw money at the problem with lawyers who negotiate on your behalf.  However, assuming that there is an assumption of justice is the wrong way to think.  Going to court is war, and you must treat it that way.  Their goal is to drain their enemy of resources and resolve until they get what they want out of you. In this case, all Fani wanted out of Sidney Powell was a confession letter and apology, which makes her fake case suddenly have merit against Trump.

Fani Willis and the Georgia prosecution overcharged with the clear intent to drain Sidney Powell and the rest of the Trump inner circle and force an admission by taking a misdemeanor charge instead of all the initial jail time on the table.  When you add up the cost of a trial to prove that you are innocent, you may do so in the end, but you’ll spend a lot of money, which only feeds the corrupt court system.  You might spend millions of dollars to prove you are not guilty, which is corrupt beyond acceptance.  That is not how our legal system is supposed to work.  It contradicts everything our Bill of Rights is supposed to stand for.  But for a Marxist like Fani Willis, who wants to destroy the American Constitution, that is no problem.  I just went through Fulton County, Georgia, so I understand the region’s politics, and Marxism is undoubtedly part of the culture that the courts are now representing.  They know Sidney Powell won’t be the only one to take the plea deal.  Getting her to take it is equivalent to letting the following people in line hear the screams of the tortured victim.  More will be willing to take the deal before ever getting to court, giving this phony prosecution more confession letters and apologies to dangle in front of Trump.  It’s a rigged game beyond corruption, but complaining about it now won’t do any good.  For people who think they would hold up better than Sidney Powell, I don’t think so.  They wore her down just as torture victims have over all of history.  People have their breaking point, and Sidney hit hers.  And there will be many more.  I would advise Sidney otherwise, but she is a good lawyer herself.  Her law license means something to her, so she wants to play by the rules, but to play by the rules means you must willingly get on the stretch rack in the Tower of London and let them torture you.  My method would be to burn it all down and everyone involved, to take them out of their comfort zones and not let them hide behind such a corrupt system. 

It won’t matter when it comes to Trump because the same Marxist activism behind this judicial corruption will also be the prosecution’s downfall.  To present these confession letters to the court and jury doesn’t validate the individual integrity of President Trump himself.  The weakness of Marxism is in its dependency on collective judgment, but Trump’s case is his own.  Without question, Fani’s strategy is to show these confession letters to the jury to give merit to her assertion that election fraud didn’t happen in Georgia, which we know it did.  What will end up being displayed as a result of the case is the gross overcharging that was applied to these innocent people to beat a confession out of them to attempt to turn reality into their own making.  To say that election fraud didn’t occur when it did.  And the Trump team is prepared to show that it did beyond a reasonable doubt.  So, in the end, it won’t matter what Sidney Powell did.  The judicial system tortured her to exploit corrupt activism with political assassinations of presidential politics as its primary objective.  And to hide an actual crime of election fraud behind confessions received from the process of legal torture.  It is not precisely a society of law and order, but rather the same means that communist countries use to prosecute their political enemies.  And Sidney Powell was overcharged to achieve just what they received.  She gets her life back.  And the prosecution gets a confession, which they hope gives them some foundation for a phony case that never had any real merit.

Rich Hoffman

The Scapegoat of Yom Kippur: Why the bad guys expect Israel to be destroyed, and President Trump

The acceptance level of sacrifice indicates in any society the ratio of liberalism we are dealing with.  The belief that by appeasing some greater power through sacrifice, redemption for some mistake can be made is at the heart of all liberal policies in the world.  And that notion is also used to control people.  So it was no accident that the Hamas attack was initiated against Israel during their festivities of Yom Kippur which is a direct association with the two goat ritual, which is the origin for the term “scapegoat” that we often say all the time without knowing its meaning.  In that ritual, one goat is offered for killing in the usual way, so a high priest would slaughter it and sprinkle its blood appropriately on an altar as an offering.  The other high priest would put their hands on and dedicate the nation’s sins, then send the goat into the wilderness to carry those sins away.  The insertion of the Jesus stories into the Bible was always meant to represent him as the ultimate scapegoat.  As an innocent man, his social role was to take away the guilt of the nation killing him, and through his crucifixion, he would carry that guilt into the afterlife.  So over the years, very evil cultures have built into people this accepted belief that they are not responsible for their actions, but can redeem themselves through Christ by sacrificing him or innocence to the needs of a corrupt society.  With that in mind, Hamas, who is dedicated to the destruction of the Jewish people, felt that they would be protected from retaliation if they struck on that Day of Atonement Holiday so that the sins would be carried away in the usual sacrificial manner.  That is why many of us watched, astonished in the aftermath, as such attacks were expected to be part of the sacrifice.  Israel wasn’t supposed to strike back, they were supposed to be the willing participants in the notion of sacrifice, which was being exploited at this particular time for purely political reasons. 

Of course, Israel has a right to attack the Palestinians who have been plotting their destruction.  The only logical rationalization resulting from the horrendous Hamas attack against Israel is the destruction of all those who stand against the Kingdom of God.  Not just because religions say so but because we now have a history that shows the benefits of Western Civilization, and we must defend it for the perpetuation of the human race.  Yet, even religions we like have apparent traces of the concept of sacrifice that are part of a much larger problem.  And that assumption was evident in the days after the attack in protests worldwide that didn’t expect the goat to fight back.  It was supposed to go quietly into history and carry away the sins of corrupt nations and religions seeking global domination.  So now we have protests from the attackers against the country that was supposed to be their scapegoat.  An enemy on paper and policy, but functionally in pursuing the ever after, the carrier of sins from those most guilty of reprehensible behavior.  The belief is that evil conduct can be committed just by the nature of living and that those sins can be placed with blame upon whoever will serve as the scapegoat for that society.  And everyone else will live happily ever after.  That is the absurdity of the belief that Israel must be like Jesus, to accept the role of international scapegoat, take its slaughter and the blame, and carry it away from those most guilty. 

This is the essential Deep State plan against President Trump.  The Government Gangsters so well flushed out in the excellent book by Kash Patel made President Trump their target for the carrying away of their sins, and it is expected that he will serve that purpose, which was the intent of the J6 controversy, the Russia hoax, the FBI spying and all the tampering of a fourth branch of government and its desire for sustainable power as a creature of liberalism and the perpetuation of the Liberal World Order.  What most people have in common is some notion of religion, and at the core of that belief system, no matter what gods are celebrated is a notion of sacrifice for some greater good that can then override whatever individual input might get in the way.  When personal responsibility is not a value system of a culture, then these kinds of beliefs can then be used to mass control entire civilizations into a guilt shedder and encourage sinful behavior with the knowledge that the gods can be appeased in the rituals of mass sacrifice.  This is how we constantly see this Democrat notion that what they are guilty of can be erased away by the creation of some social scapegoat.  They could kill and destroy individuals as long as they identified them as a scapegoat for their culture and could justify the violence as a redemption process.  That’s also why the Romans were sure to include Jesus in the context of the Bible because what was important to them was to have the entire story wrapped up in a sacrifice.  Once people are willing to sacrifice to a god, they will be open to the next best thing on earth: sacrifice to the state.  That’s what the Romans were after, and the Arab world was as well with their expansion of the Quran, written by many people because Muhammad didn’t know how to read or write.  But many of his Christian friends did, so he would have them write for him; after all, their results were all for the same purpose: creating scapegoats in a social context to wash away the sins of evil nations looking to justify their vile actions.

Like many things lately, people are watching this apparent evil and scratching their heads.  But it has been at the heart of all liberal ideas since the beginning of time, and this is the essential Democrat playbook and that of the uniparty antics many have become so frustrated with.  Of course, individuals have a right to defend themselves when attacked by some antagonizers.  That is the heart of the concept of the American Second Amendment.  And, of course, Israel can defend itself when attacked by terrorist ideas.  But to those looking for a scapegoat for their sins, the belief is that individuals and even nations should sacrifice themselves for the greater good, just as Jesus did, or any other character that suffered through martyrdom the sins of mass society.  And if the masses desire the eradication of their sworn enemies, enemies because they have expectations of good conduct, then those scapegoats are to happily offer themselves to the mob for consumption, which is how the world’s evils have always spread.  Personal behavior is never improved because the mass population believes that a scapegoat concept will wash away those sins without correcting the detrimental behavior holding back that society.  And you get the kind of mess we see daily on the nightly news.  And we see the attackers of Israel, then protesting not at the country itself but in not accepting their role as the sacrificial scapegoat that was expected of them by a corrupt and evil Liberal World Order. 

Rich Hoffman

The Spoiled Brat Government Gangsters: RINOs and Democrats love corruption and are fighting to keep it

I don’t have a problem with the Speaker drama in Congress.  I could care less about the structured order of things because whenever the game is known and predictable, there will always be scandalous characters willing to exploit it for their personal gain.  And that is certainly the case when it comes to Washington D.C. politics.  With all the attempts to get Jim Jordan over the finish line to be the new Speaker of the House, the truth is that the process has exposed the real problems we have in government, that there are more than 20 Republicans in Congress who are not what people voted for.  They are Democrats more than they are Republicans, and rather than give up the excellent gig they have, where money is attached to the power they have acquired, they are perfectly willing to side with the Democrats to preserve a system many of us want to destroy.  If the government isn’t representing the people who vote but is instead representing lobbyists and other special interests, then who cares if we have a Speaker of the House?  Everything they do is simply ceremonial and worthless anyway.  So, I see a great benefit in a locked-up government that isn’t doing anything.  I’m certainly not in a rush to have Congress get together to show unity for Israel.  I can get a dog to do something like that.  The only good Congress can do is make sure that the fiscal strings of the nation are healthy and they haven’t been doing that for a long time, so to me, they are next to worthless, with worthless being an actual positive value relative to their true condition.  The panic from the media and others to get back to the established optics of the government scam is to get the machine going for all those who are sucking off the system to enrich themselves with worthless antics and the real value is watching them squirm.

I’ll review Kash Patel’s new book Government Gangsters soon, which is quite good.  But that title is the key to understanding what has been going on with our government, which we are working out now.  When the election was stolen in 2020, I started explaining to people the truth of the matter, because people were scared and unsure that what they saw was real.  I explained that one of the reasons you don’t hear much about the mob anymore is that the mob moved into government jobs and away from the private sector.  The kind of people who were in the mob found it much better to be in charge of the law instead of running from it, so yes, the government is filled with a gangster mentality, and they dare anybody to come after them.  Because these days, they are the law.  It’s not like the FBI and other law enforcement officials work for the people, as they used to.  And would crack down on illegal mob mentality.  Now, they are the Government Gangsters.  And the Kash Patel book lays it all out in ways that most readers don’t even come close to touching.  Of course, I would know because I’ve done work for mobster personalities in my youth and I see them for what they are.  They aren’t typically the scary Al Capone types who beat in the head of someone who betrayed them with a baseball bat at a dinner table as they show in mob movies like The Untouchables.  Rather, they are much more passive-aggressive than that.  They are every bit as brutal, but when they want to bash in someone’s head, they hide behind lawyers and process controls rather than actually doing the work of swinging a bat themselves and getting all dirty.  In many ways, these Government Gangsters are like spoiled brat teenage kids protecting their right to be douchebags, and they feel they are entitled to lash out when things don’t go their way.

You can tell kids growing up in a single-parent home where a mom is trying to appease their teenage sons and no stable man is around.  The same loser government gangsters who have been telling us for years that women can get divorced and that they could turn their kids over to the government to raise have been suckered.  And the product that has come out of those arrangements is a lot of loser kids who grow up to be loser adults.  Most of the fools you meet on K-Street who work for some money padding operation could be said to come from such family environments where they have mothers who overly cuddled them, and they are simply unable to deal with the reality of adult life.  So they seek government jobs to hide in the role of a Government Gangster, who essentially becomes a grown-up spoiled brat teenager who is untested in life and needs a good ass kicking.  It’s bad enough when you get one or two of these types of people involved in anything.  But when you build your entire government off those types of personalities, there is no hope of anything good happening.  And that’s what has become obvious in the post-Trump years.  Before Trump was president, we suspected these things about our government.  But in the wake of it, we have had everything confirmed. 

And that’s what we are getting from the news culture, the Beltway thieves, and the established Republican and Democrat circles.  They are government gangsters of essentially spoiled brat teenage kids raised by weak mothers void of fatherly power and wisdom, and it has left them vacant of morality and ethics.  And to cover up their flawed personalities, they have thrown money at the problem which is represented in our national debt.  And all of Washington D.C. has been built around this government gangster mentality.  So it doesn’t matter who the Speaker of the House is.  It’s a collection of thieving losers intent to rob and steal from the American people, and they want their scam back.  This journey to find a Speaker of the House has simply revealed the true nature of who these government gangsters are and what they have been doing all along.  I see the same struggles in local politics as well.  Actual voters expect a government that represents them when it has been formed to enrich with easy money spoiled brat adults lacking a moral compass for many immature reasons.  And they don’t want anybody to disrupt their easy money gig of acquiring office and then selling it to those willing to pay the most.  Then, if anybody challenges them, they destroy them in court with laws they control to preserve their scam.  This mess wasn’t created overnight and won’t be fixed quickly.  But at least we are discussing it in ways we haven’t before.  And the illusion of a Speaker of the House hasn’t been able to hide all this detrimental behavior behind a veil of polite society.  These were always losers, spoiled brat grown-ups using the government to conceal their worthless natures.  But now people see the truth, which is why a paralyzed government is the best.  America will function just fine without many spoiled teenage kids running the show for their self-enrichment, which is true of most world governments in general, which is now becoming more evident to people who previously thought otherwise.

Rich Hoffman

The Best Way to Fight Terrorism is to Buy a Gun: Israel should have had private gun ownership

I think my wife’s reaction to the attack on Israel is similar to most people.  She is such a sweet, loving person, and not some radical ideologue, that her opinion represents the majority.   And as we watched the footage of all the poor young women being beaten and raped by the thugs of Palestine, she turned to me and said, “I want to buy more guns.”  I asked her how many guns she wanted because we weren’t lacking in that department.  For my concealed carry, I always have my .50 caliber Desert Eagle.  When people ask me about my leather vests, I always wear them because it’s the only thing I can wear that conceals that gun in public.  Additionally, I carry with me at all times a Smith & Wesson .500 Magnum with an extra long barrel to keep the recoil down when firing.  Some people think that is too much heat in a civilized country like America, but I have much experience that says otherwise.  The default mode for all humans is just above that of a wild animal.  The only thing that brings about civility is good laws through a decent religion.  Governments have never been able to install a philosophy that protects people from a centralized state.  So, the key to a civilized society that ensures destruction from a villainous perpetrator is gun rights.  And instinctively, my wife understood that as she watched the carnage from the news coverage and heartbreaking reports.  So I told her we could go up to the gun store at the end of our street and buy as many guns as she wanted.  I’m always good for a few more guns.  They are the best votes you can make in a society that you want to be civil and law-driven. 

Israel’s most significant problem that facilitated all this carnage is that they don’t have gun rights for individuals, which opened them up to this attack.  They have a good military and generally a decent government, which is a deterrent in most cases.  But their lack of personal gun ownership allowed the house-to-house raids in Israel and the Hamas checkpoints, which stopped and slaughtered entire families.  I would further add that if not for individual gun rights, there would have already been terrorist raids like we saw in Israel in the United States.  I do not doubt that there will be attempts by some radical terrorist cells to bring similar horrors to our communities.  That is the intention of the open border policy people.  Hamas is just another terrorist weapon that agents of evil in the world can tap into at will to inspire fear and death for political advantage, and this attack in Israel was far from a spontaneous event.  It was the result of a culture that built into it the vulnerabilities of a liberal world order on purpose so that mass control of the population through fear would be easy to achieve.  I get the ability to travel extensively, and I can report that countries that do not have personal firearm protections and functional religions are ingredients for outright destruction.  Without personal protections and military-grade defense of private property, society cascades into chaos quickly.  The people of that society are either too compliant to be inventive and economically potent or too dangerous to coexist with other people.  Only through the maintenance of private property and a standard of value everyone can share does success in a social regard begin to function correctly. 

I could tell many personal stories I have had from my past where carrying such large caliber weapons makes perfect sense, even if it’s not the shared experience of the everyday business person or soccer mom hauling their kids around to sporting events.  On more than one occasion, I have learned how dangerous people can be just one carload away at a traffic light, so I keep myself prepared for the worst they can offer.  Government rules do not deter villainy; instead, they attract malicious characters like flies on a hot summer in July.  The more guns a culture has, the safer that society is.  And that would be my recommendation based on a lot of personal experience as a lesson from this attack on Israel.  Any government that says it wants to control the private ownership of guns is setting up that culture for personal violence, especially in the United States, where the open border policy in the south has purposefully allowed so many characters with a bad reputation into our country.  The same people telling us they want to take our guns are also creating a policy where Hamas-level terrorists are moving into our cities and communities with just as much hostile intention as they attacked Israel during Yom Kippur.  Only fools would follow such ridiculous instructions.  If they could, they would have attacked already and are always looking for a vulnerability to exploit.  Should society always be that close to complete mayhem?  Well, that’s up to the people’s values, and religion is a means to regulate society into some mutually agreed sentiment of value.  But in an open society with free expression, where governments tend to be corrupt on a good day, people must be able to protect themselves.  Because the government won’t, can’t, and is inspired to evil on its own.

So, if you are considering getting a gun, I would say to do so.  I would also say to carry one with you all the time.  Everywhere.  Do not trust the government to protect you.  It’s great if they do.  But don’t be a sucker and expect it by default.  I told my wife she can buy as many guns as she wants.  I recommend purchasing a new weapon every month and supporting our gun manufacturers.  With more than 300 million guns in America, I want to see more than a billion in private ownership.  And the bigger, the better.  Criminals break the rules, and there is something to steal wherever there is value.  Something to bring harm to.  Israel is a country of value in a pit of vipers who live a substandard, collective existence.  To adequately protect their people, they should have had private gun ownership for those days when Hamas would attack them and perform such acts of terror as we have just witnessed.  It can happen in America, too, and while you can’t remove such intentions from the mind of the malicious, you can stop them once they start shooting and minimize the carnage.  To have a free society that protects private property from even the government gangsters, which, even under the best circumstances, they are, you must always carry firearms with you.  You must have your house filled with them.  And if you want to vote for true prosperity, you can buy lots and lots of guns to let the world know you are more than prepared for anything that might come your way from dangerous personalities.  Buying guns is an act of civility and law and order.  Without the maintenance of every individual in a culture toward that objective, there is no hope to wrestle away from the villains of a stable society of mutual respect.  Only with superior firepower can a society hope to thrive from those despotes of civilization that always want to crawl back into the cave and retreat and stop human progress to fear every approaching thunderstorm that streaks across the sky, unleashed by the gods because somebody forgot to sacrifice a goat.

 Rich Hoffman

World War III, Armageddon, and the Fight Against Israel: It’s just the attempt of Marxists to control lazy people through their own stupidity

I would say to everyone to relax.  The fears about this being another World War or that we are living through Armageddon are hardly the case.  Hamas’s latest attack in Israel is just the latest failure of globalism, just as is the case of Ukraine being invaded by Russia, and the threats of China invading Taiwan.  To understand the problem, you must admit to what point globalism is the villain and always has been.  The people at the World Economic Forum, the old Socialist International people.  The climate terrorists.  The secret societies.  International finance.  All doors of trouble have the pathways of discontent leading to their door from all these troubled regions, and these veiled activists leave behind the fingerprints of evil.  But it all points to one essential thing: the right to be lazy by the Marxists behind all these movements, and that is certainly the case behind the Palestinians who are dedicated to wiping away Israel from the face of the earth.  And that is always the position of the indigenous people’s argument.  Islam was not even created until 610 AD in an attempt to make the polytheism of the Arab world more reflective of the Christian and Jewish world.  The Jewish people had been in Israel for over 1000 years before the Muslims attacked Israel in 638 AD, just twenty years after the start of their religion.  Before that, Israel had been invaded many times, first by the Mesopotamians, and then the Egyptians.  Then, by the Romans.  The Israelites had been displaced many times leading up to any discussion of the modern tensions, mostly propped up by the winds of war and who blows on them to ignite their energy.  If you take away the outside antagonisms, there would be no threat of war because the characters advocating for war are actually after something else, and it isn’t the end of the world as we know it. 

The Israelites have always been a dynamic people and have had a prosperous society; they have managed to stay alive long enough to be the most extended community of people on the face of the earth, and obviously the most persecuted.  But their existence came about due to the rules of a prosperous country. What makes a nation great are the philosophies of value that it beholds, and the laws that came from the line of Abraham, then down into Moses, and many since then have shown the world what the success of Western Civilization can bring everywhere.  Many tricky characters have been involved in the interpretation of history on all sides, and they have purposefully released versions of history to control exclusively mass populations.  For instance, in the Near East which the Greeks interpreted, there isn’t much mention about where Jesus was leading up to his teachings in the Holy Land.  Or what many think happened after he was hung on the cross, with nobody to witness.  Studying the old Silk Road brings about a lot of much-needed perspective on the spread of Buddhism into the Holy Land through Jesus.  But before that, Soloman’s empire extended all the way to Japan, as I have pointed out before with the Tombs of Kufan all over the Osaka region, along that same Silk Road.  Before Solomon and his father King David, we have the son of King Saul, Gad, who founded the city of Kandahar in Afghanistan. So many of the events we read about in the Bible were purposely edited to confine these movements from our understanding of global politics that has been thriving for many thousands of years, well before the tempers of the modern era are attempting to cry foul for the purposes of global domination. 

Laziness is behind much of the trouble, an attempt to spread the Marxist messages of economic terrorism behind the façade of religious definitions to disguise the attempt.  But the object of their real menace is laziness and protecting their right to it.  Marxists do not want productive people in the world, and since the Jewish people have embraced productivity as a value system of their culture, they have always been the subject of attack before European Masons, descending from the Knight’s Templars, invented Marxism to control the world through international finance.  Attacking people over their desire to work is much more complicated, and even international finance people appreciate a culture that works hard.  So, they passively aggressively attack value in the world behind a religious façade, hoping that other lazy people will never do the work of investigation to see what a sham it all is.  Rather than attack nations of people, because they work hard, the attack is over history interpreted by the same forces that want to rule the world through their version of the story.  And that is certainly the case with Islam.  If you read the Quran, it becomes clear what it was quickly: a political book, not a religious one, meant to gain power over what was left of the Romans who had ruled the region for a long time and destroy the forces of progress at that time which had reached into the Arab world, the descendants of the polytheism of ancient Mesopotamia and the gods of Baal, Moloch, and Ishtar, along with many others who would end up showing themselves as the gods of Greek society, renamed.  And the Romans tried to unite their empire through Christianity.  All along these historical efforts, and with the tampering of eastern thought always looming in the background along the Silk Road where supposedly Jesus was a king in Kashmir after his supporters broke him free from his tomb to be healed in the Himalayas where his grave resides to this day, have kept the world stirred up in controlled ways that are obvious in conflicts like the one in modern-day Israel. 

Why does anybody think the modern wars of Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, and China are filled with political volatility?  And especially in the Middle East?  I would propose that the contemporary governments of globalism stir up those wars to keep the past from people’s minds so they can maintain the power over weak, lazy people with the interpretation of history they have formed to enrich themselves.  And if people were actually to connect all these dots, which isn’t hard, then they would see who is actually pulling the strings in the world for the exploitation of labor, and the spread of Marxism to the enticed lazy people of all cultures for the ultimate, centralized control over all of them.  Yet to know these things would be to take away the manipulators’ power, which is very easy to do.  But World War III?  Armageddon?  No, just the attempt by global manipulators to take advantage of lazy people they want to rule over and tap into their superstitious beliefs about the end of the world which has been looming in the background of most religions for tens of thousands of years.  When globalism and its economic attempts at Marxism came along, it showed how controlling people through selected history and filtered through religious interpretation that this new ability to rule through secrecy became such a desired trait of shadow governments.  And once you realize that, you will see clearly that the fight between the Palestinians and their Hamas terrorists is just a disguised attempt to impose Marxism on regions that still show positive attributes of independence and national productivity.  Ultimately, the motivation for such antagonisms is the greatest threat to the world that anybody has known: the exploitation of lazy people for the right to rule over them through ignorance.  But the truth is always just a few layers deep and easy to expose where the real villains have been hiding all along. 

Rich Hoffman

The Covid Attack to Impose Marxism: Pull and Push systems imposed through health policy instead of politics

I’ve argued against it for over 30 years, this whole dumb idea of push/pull systems.  People in the world need to be pushed.  When you go to Europe and ask the waiter to hurry up, and they say, “Why, don’t be in such a hurry, take your time.  Make love not war, enjoy the smell of the roses, and drink some fine wine,” you are listening to the effects of a socialist from a country infused with Marxism.  Not someone trying to be their most productive self, and that is the heart of the argument between push systems of manufacturing and pull.  Pushing is where product flow goes downstream and puts pressure on the weakest links to pick up the pace.  Pull is where the lowest links send the demand signal upstream, and everything gets built around the identity of the constraints.  Push systems force your most honest understanding of what a true constraint is.  Pull systems yield to the weakest interpretation and build around that false assumption.  Pull systems work pretty well in places like Japan because they have a society that genuinely tries to do an excellent job at all levels.  But in Western cultures, for many reasons, people need to be motivated to do good things, and they certainly need to be pushed.  Because their default personality is to be lazy and do as little as possible, any culture that does not enjoy hard work is prone to this condition, so trusting them to define their constraints is a fool’s game.  It’s also why we know that Covid was a fake plot created by radical elements of the world’s economic manipulations to convert the world to Marxism hidden behind a health crisis manufactured in a Wuhan lab in China during a critical election year.  How do we know, well, by economic measures. 

I’ve been talking about a recent trip I took my family on to Disney World, which was a long time in the planning phase.  In 2019, my wife and I took a scouting trip there to plan for the larger group: our kids, grandkids, husbands, dogs, lodging, and various factors.   Of course, as soon as we returned, COVID-19 hit, and it has been nearly four years to get everything back on schedule.  Due to Covid rules at Disney, such as social distancing and mask mandates, they were very slow to return to normal, and we weren’t going to go until that happened.  Some of my kids are so anti-mask and anti-vaccine that anything close to those regulations at Disney World was a hard pass, no.  So we had to wait a while for Disney to get its act together, and this year of 2023 was the first year of that normalcy.  Disney is an excellent example because it’s a uniquely American economic experience, so it’s a good barometer for general economic behavior, and measuring from 2019 to 2023 was an excellent way to compare before-COVID and after-COVID realities.  And what I was able to see easily was obvious in supply chains across the world.  Hidden in the health policies of COVID was outright Marxism that is still permeating the employee marketplace.  What we ended up with in 2023 was a lot of the Democrat policies that were only talked about in 2019, such as wage rates.  After COVID-19, employers had to throw money at employees to get them to come to work because COVID-19 had destroyed the value system entirely for all employees.  Why go to work when the government would pay you to stay home?  And why work harder if the wage rates were artificially propped up for everyone?  Even now, too many employees still want to work from home because they fear they have Covid, leaving employers stuck trying to fill production gaps with new weak links in the supply chain, not knowing if people are going to show up for work, and what they could do about it.

It was clear Disney was suffering from this very problem: their lines were less productive, their employees were much less engaged, and many things were broken that wouldn’t have been damaged or long in 2019.  I went to several restaurants selling souvenir glasses, expecting to buy them, only to be told they were out of stock and they had no idea when they would be.  In 2019, that wouldn’t have been the answer.  Even for Disney they were having difficulty getting parts of their supply chain to perform reliably.  And, of course, they were dealing with the same staffing shortages the rest of the world was: people who didn’t show up for work, believing that COVID recommendations would still get them out of work as good as a doctor’s note.  And there was nothing they could say about it.  The new message from Disney, which wasn’t the case in 2019, was that it would be expensive to vacation there.  And we will do our best.  Instead of expecting the best, they’d at least try.  It was that old Marxism acceptance of yielding to constraints instead of pushing them through competition to solve those problems.  And Covid was the means of forcing mass society to accept those constraints.  Previously, the supply chain would be pushed to ensure the market’s satisfaction.  Now, the market would have to wait and be happy with it.

People have been slow to admit to themselves that COVID was a weapon of global Marxism to do what they couldn’t do politically through health policy.  Yet the proof is everywhere, and behind some blatant lies of Bidenomics trying to hide horrendous economic news is the imposed Marxism that has slid under the door to just about every part of the global economy.  I see it everywhere. I just traveled through the Toronto International Airport, where they were trying to rid themselves of any memory of Covid policy, yet their employees were still functioning from the call-off effects, the unstable management of their workforce, and knowing who was going to be at work, how long they’d be there, and whether or not they could even hire enough people to staff their positions.  The holes were evident, and everyone was supposed to look the other way and pretend everything was fine, just like at Disney, and not even ask the question.  The world had imposed on it during COVID this Marxist pull system where the constraints were artificially created to serve that radical economic theory.  It wasn’t voted for; it was built into the COVID policy from the beginning and was undoubtedly one of its goals, which nobody saw coming.  But because of that aspect alone, there should be massive prosecutions of everyone who played their part in this global insurrection.  The evidence has been left behind and is evident to those with the eyes to see it.  And it was never about health.  Marxism was always the motivation for COVID-19, and it still lingers economically until people wise up to it and scrap the entire footprint it has left behind.  That’s a hard admission for many, but the reality is that for a proper economy to work genuinely, Marxism must be pushed out of it.  And until that happens, we will be left with a less-than-optimal economy and a general state of unhappiness always associated with Marxism.

Rich Hoffman

Turning off Lynda O’Conner’s Mic: When the excuses are removed, you see what people really are

Well, of course, the criticism of Lakota School Board President Lynda O’Conner is perfectly warranted, and a couple of political PACs have formed to speak out against her.  A campaign to “turn off her mic” is perfectly justified, which is a reaction to her behavior over the last year, where she has sought to completely control public speech and criticism of her performance as a management body at Lakota.  Too often, people involved in politics forget that after all the election stuff, political people are supposed actually to do a good job.  If it’s a first-time office holder, there is usually some forgiveness for not knowing what they are doing.  But for someone who has been around for 16 years or more, such as Lynda O’Conner has, good performance is expected.  This is a political problem; getting elected is a kind of popularity contest with the ultimate social euphoria, like being elected homecoming king or queen.  The public affirmation is addicting, and it’s nice to be picked by the public to do something.  But then there is the actual problem of doing the job.  This is what is going on with Congress these days, where people are tired of lip service from the Speaker of the House role.  People are tired of broken promises and lackluster performance in their representative government. Over the years, the trend has been pointing toward increased scrutiny as more people are paying more attention to political topics than they used to, especially in public education.  There used to be an assumption that public schools were okay, that kids were getting good, respectable instructions.  Not the actual reality that they are learning centers for Hamas and abortion activism.  Now that people have had to reluctantly admit, in the post-Covid years, public schools have not been tolerant of conservative values when school board members get caught in that crossfire by default, they don’t want to get seen carrying water for liberal causes, which is precisely what Lynda O’Conner was found doing.

One of those political PACs that has come forth against her during this election of 2023, where Lynda is on the party ticket for re-election after doing the job for a very long time, has produced a video showing the primary problem. In the footage, Lynda had the mic turned off of a local advocate giving public statements. Lynda was functioning from bad legal advice from the same kind of people who caused the problem, to begin with, school administrative officers who had behaved detrimentally in public and caused great harm to the school’s reputation. To cover up that damage, Lynda became the most prominent advocate for getting rid of free speech, which is critical to the maintenance of public schools, where the taxpayers fund the entire process. A community representative, which all school board members are, does not get to limit the public’s opinions and openly keeps those beliefs quiet to preserve an idea of Lakota schools, which it did not earn. There exhibited many problems regarding abuse of power that Lynda O’Conner showed during 2022 and 2023 when much of this public drama unfolded, but the biggest problem is found in that video: how she managed public crises that Lakota administrative employees caused. That was enough to cause a lot of people who formally supported her to withdraw that support. And if Lynda wanted to do what was right for the local Republican Party, she never would have put them in this awkward position by running in the next election after all the controversy.

Of course, the problems extend well beyond the cosmetic trouble of abusing power by attempting to cut off public criticism of school board management. And this is more where I am on this topic. Lynda was given a three-vote majority and completely screwed it up with uncovered activism. Before that last election, which saw the successful campaigns of Darbi Boddy and Isaac Adi elected as endorsed Republican representatives, Lynda was given by “us” members of the community who wanted to help her what she said she wanted, which was a majority vote on the board so she wasn’t always the lone victimized voice. For context, many people would tell me about my relationship with Lynda, that she was a RINO and was a liberal. Of course, I would reply, “I will stand by Lynda until she proves otherwise.” Lynda would complain that she was the only one willing to vote for conservative ideas on the Lakota school board in a conservative district. So, some of us got together and gave her the requested help. But rather than rejoice over the matter, Lynda had been exposed as the liberal everyone warned me she was. Because now that she had the votes, she would be uncovered. She was pleased to double-talk with Julie Shaffer and Kelly Casper while having public spats with Brad Lovell to sell her conservative brand to the community. But it was all show business. When Lynda was handed the President role with a majority vote, she had no further excuses for performance, so she immediately picked a fight with Darbi Boddy over nonsense political issues and moved to separate Isaac Adi from Darbi, which has resulted in a lot of chaos meant to disguise her liberal inclinations.

Darbi Boddy became the scapegoat for Lynda’s sins as a liberal posing as a conservative to win public support between election cycles. As long as Lynda was a victim, she could always say, “Look, I’m being outvoted. I can do nothing to stop the out-of-control spending, the genderless bathrooms, and social degradation from the teacher’s union.” But once those excuses were taken away, suddenly the new reason was, “Darbi isn’t professional and is bringing harm to our efforts through negative news stories,” which, of course, Lynda and Julie leaked to their contacts to drive the narrative, all while turning off the microphone to the public so they could attempt to contain public opinion. Truthfully, the Republican Party endorsed her out of friendships, the kind of sympathy formed by the challenges of the popularity contest of elected office. And compassion that politics is changing and the public expects a decent performance from their representatives. So Lynda put them all in the wrong place, and being so politically astute, she should have known better. I don’t see any political difference between Julie Shaffer and Doug Horten, who is also running. The only school board candidate I can support in this election is Russ Loges, who seems sincere and willing to work hard. But we know what we are getting with Lynda. And I didn’t suddenly become a Julie Shaffer fan. Everyone is asking me why I haven’t put up the video on so many phones of bad behavior showing Julie in compromising positions. You can’t pay me enough to look at that trainwreck in such compromised states. I’d instead rather not think about it personally, everyone by now knows the stories. These people are disasters, and we could do a lot better as a community, and we did have options. And instead of those options working for the Republican Party healthily and productively, they are now on the outside working to expose bad behavior, which is expected from politics once the elections are over. We hope people actually to be conservative and stand for constitutional values. And Lynda hasn’t done any of those things.

Rich Hoffman

Thinking of Steve Bannon: Pirates, values, and the foundation of American life

I decoded a long time ago what was on Walt Disney’s mind when he designed the Magic Kingdom, along with specific themes hidden behind the current culture of management that conceals it. And so I took an afternoon to really relish it; after all, it was my vacation and I was thinking about a lot of big stuff. And I was catching up on time with my daughters, one of whom had an obsessive need to ride Pirates of the Caribbean with me to fulfill a quest from her youth. It had been twenty years prior when I had taken all the kids, nieces, and nephews onto several late-night rides of that particular attraction and she had missed it due to a personal problem. And she is the one who grew up with a powerful love of pirates probably as a result of it, because she missed that opportunity. Both of my daughters have extreme reverence for piracy because a lot of what I taught them as little girls was respect for rebellion, leaving them obsessed with skulls. To this day, skulls are a massive part of their lives and mine, and much of that interest traces back to my love of pirate history, the ride at Disney World Pirates of the Caribbean, and many, many, many hours of me talking to them about the need for pirates in the world and what role they played in the formation of the United States. For instance, one of my favorite founding fathers is John Paul Jones, who is also the inspiration for Steve Bannon, the current popular podcaster and former strategist for President Trump—and many other things. And while one of my daughters was doing something extraordinary with her daughter, my granddaughter, I went off with my other daughter to put a bookend to that formally broken Pirates of the Caribbean experience. And I thought about Steve Bannon the entire time I was on that ride.

I have a lot of Steve Bannons in my life, several in my local neighborhood and I value them in the same way I do pirates. That doesn’t mean I support state-sponsored terrorism from which piracy was born, but I see them, as Walt Disney did, as critical to a free society because they are natural hedges against tyranny. Disney when he designed his park, put entirely on purpose the Pirate ride next to his Frontier Land and Liberty Square to remind people of these things for the sustenance of American life. And I had a chance to experience how Disney designed all this on this particular day with my daughter alone at the Magic Kingdom for the first time. The rest of our group, my wife, the rest of the kids, and my daughter’s husbands were back at our camp at Fort Wilderness preparing dinner and swimming to refresh themselves while we took my granddaughter to buy a dress so she could be photographed at the castle. For those who don’t know there is a famous dress store just behind the castle, and for little girls fortunate enough to attend that place with parental figures with deep pockets, you can buy a princess dress and wear it around the park, and the employees know to refer to her as a “princess” whenever they interact with her. And this was what we were up to, for her very young mind. She’s under ten, and this is the prime time of her life to set big goals for herself and create standards that would last a lifetime.

Standards are critical for young people, especially young girls. Women have tremendous power, primarily based on their sexual nature, so good decisions are massively important to their future, how they pick people in their lives, and the consequences of those decisions. So, to get it right, I encourage the young girls in my family to set very high standards in their lives, and this was a day my granddaughter would never forget. A day when she was an actual princess and treated that way by every employee at Disney World. I wanted her never to ignore it, so my daughter and I went out of our way to elevate that experience for her. So we let her buy a dress, put it on in the bathrooms between Frontier Land and Adventure Land, and had quite an excellent time soaking up the exotic environment while my granddaughter was gushing with pride and excitement. High standards—live a good life. While my granddaughter’s mother wanted to go and photograph this experience in front of the castle, a few feet away from all this, my other daughter wanted to catch up on that Pirates of the Caribbean ride. While all this was happening, I was in a texting frenzy with many of my pirate cells all over the country working on real projects that could only be described as rebellions against the established order, modern piracy perfectly and healthily. As we rode that ride, I was glad to think about Steve Bannon and his inspiration of John Paul Jones doing wonderful things that reminded me that after all this smoke cleared, America was going to be much better and so much healthier, not because of the rules and procedures of Washington D.C. but because of the pirate nature of the founding of the country itself and the continued actions of just such people.

It was a special day; we enjoyed the ride, and I had philosophy pouring through my mind, which is when I am happiest. I answered another 25 text messages from many pirates at many levels of society doing great work, and my daughter was elated to have had that personal, one-on-one experience with me, which was beyond her dreams. She had thought about that moment for two decades, and it came out better than she expected, so it was all great. We finished our business there and then left the Magic Kingdom to catch the monorail for the Epcot Center, where we met up with the rest of our group for an ambitious night in that park, which was a wonderful experience. For context, we had spent that entire morning at the Animal Kingdom, so that was our third park of the day, so everyone’s heads were spinning. And it is just such a pace that I am happiest. But the best part was seeing this whole cycle of value and defense of that value. First, you set in an individual’s mind a personal goal, a heightened awareness of expectation. Then, you create a political system that removes barriers to that heightened state. Pirates must constantly push against static methods to allow dynamic personalities to advance culture. And in that way, pirate activity was critical to the formation of America. And it is also crucial to keep exceptional people free to move society in productive ways, which is what Steve Bannon and the Warroom are doing on the national and international stage. And what other rag-tag patriots are doing in their local communities nationwide, which I am very proud to know of. The Pirates of the Caribbean is more than a ride to me and my daughter; it’s a temple. And on that day at that particular time, it was just the recharge I had been looking for.

Rich Hoffman

The Mystery of Ishi-no-Hoden: foundations of Any Successful soceity

It is one of the most mysterious sites in the world, the megalithic site of Ishi-no-Hoden just south of Osaka, Japan. And I happened to be in the neighborhood and wanted to see it myself. The dates are ridiculous; many say it is 14,000 years old, which would put it in the Ice Age period and that of Gobeki Tepe in Turkey. There is plenty of evidence, and Ishi-no-Hoden is one of them, of a global culture that mass communicated and worked with large stones for purposes we are just beginning to scratch the surface of. Our previous assumptions have been pretty much shattered on this idea of evolutionary science that progressed through trade and a slow awakening of the human race. Ishi-no-Hoden shatters those beliefs, which is why it is one of the holiest sites in Japan and certainly one of their most mysterious places. So I wanted to see it for myself. Some of the most pervasive thoughts were that the creators tried to mimic a spaceship that landed in that part of the world many years ago but never finished carving it out of the rock. In that region of the world, a few miles south of Kobe, in a very dense area of suburbs along the coast, as bullet trains flash across the landscape, this strange enigma reminded me of the monolith from the 2001 Space Odyssey. It was there, and nobody understood it, so the people of Japan set up a Shinto shrine to worship it, which I witnessed several people do while I was present. It consisted of washing your hands outside from a dragon’s mouth; then you stepped into the shrine, clapping a few times, bowing a bit, and then clapping again before stepping inside. And to what god, to what force? That much isn’t all that important to the people of Japan. But showing respect and reverence was necessary, which is the real takeaway of this spectacular mystery.

I haven’t been to everything I want to see in life, all the things I have read about in books. But I’ve been to enough far-flung places in the world to see a pattern emerging that you get through diverse and voluminous reading. Then, it is validated through an actual site visit, which was undoubtedly the case with Ishi-no-Hoden. We are looking at a lost art of working rugged rock and transporting it over vast distances for unknown reasons. There are plenty of places in the world where these things have been significantly studied, but not so much in the oriental cultures of Japan, China, the Koreas, and down into India. Due to political currents and their religious nature, they don’t approach these kinds of mysteries like we do in the West, so putting the puzzle together has been slow. But the path to Ishi-no-Hoden is essentially a single-lane road that zig zags through numerous suburbs of very compact living by the Japanese people. Access to such an area is intended for tiny cars without much traffic. But once we did arrive at the site, it was pretty unspectacular from the outside. Not much of a parking lot and some industrial buildings in the surrounding vicinity. Ishi-no-Hoden was a project of carving this massive structure out of the mountainside, as many such quarries have been conducted in that precise region to get the foundation stones for the many castles and temples built all over Japan. If such a site had been in America or England, it would have had an amusement park entrance, much like Stonehenge. This site is just as spectacular as any place in the world. Yet, it is undoubtedly not presumptuous.

I love the amusement park-like tourism at Stonehenge. I think it’s good for science to make it so that so many people can visit it and get involved in its mystery. But there is nothing like that at Ishi-no-Hoden. There is nothing much on its history or relevancy. Only a shrine, the emphasis was on worship rather than understanding, which is good and bad, depending on what you want to take from the experience. During my visit to the area and interacting with the people, knowing what was happening around my home, I distinctly appreciated this site and its Japanese reaction. Ishi-no-Hoden has no relationship to modern-day Japanese culture, and they have not claimed it. Only to pay it respect, which says a lot about them as a people. It is just as logical to say that aliens landed from the planet Sirus, which many believe because of the high diet of ocean goods and reverence for dragons that are distinct from Western viewpoints, or to say that a race of giants was making some mechanical device that was to be used in some vast structure. When you see Ishi-no-Hoden and put your hands on it, its dimensions are exact and purposeful. And not applicable to the kind of cultures we have been studying throughout our historical understanding. Which is why I wanted to visit this site mainly. It is one of those places where you can still put your hands on the object and consider it as it was constructed, not as humans have attempted to interpret it meagerly.

I’ve been to Japan before, but this particular time, I couldn’t help but compare it to other places in the world that I’ve been and notice how polite and together the people of Japan are. As I interacted a lot with Kobe just to the north of Ishi-no-Hoden, I saw a lot of shrines with incense burning right in the heart of town. And the people are so polite, crime is way down, and the people themselves are good to deal with. These are cultural traits that come straight from their Shinto-Buddhist beliefs. I get along best with these people because I understand their firm convictions. In the West, we should have the same kind of reverence for our Bible. It’s not so much in believing that what you believe is correct but that you have some foundation of thought rooted in a belief in something. Visiting Ishi-no-Hoden and seeing these beliefs play out with so many people was interesting. The function of their rituals gave their souls comfort, leading to a productive society in all aspects, from business to buying a Coke in Chinatown. All the transactions with the Japanese people were respectful and effective, which comes directly from their belief systems. It doesn’t matter that Ishi-no-Hoden is connected to their Shinto religion. But what matters is that it is an object of mystery and deserves respect. Which they then functionally give it. And in that transaction of care, the essential elements of their culture are revealed in very productive ways. For them, it doesn’t matter where Ishi-no-Hoden came from. What does matter is that they honor its existence with respect, which comes from a culture that believes such things are essential because they are. The lesson of places like Ishi-no-Hoden, which can be applied worldwide, and to many different religions, isn’t the truth about the past, but in respecting what it has taught us, and using that knowledge for our future. And that belief is always paved with respect as the basic foundation, and from there, whatever happens, will at least be rooted in value.

Rich Hoffman