Category: Exopolitics

Frank Herbert’s ‘Dune’: The kind of political philosophy that will take mankind into a space economy

I spend a lot of time thinking about the challenges of becoming an interplanetary civilization.  When people ask me why I do what I do, I tell them it’s not for money, it’s not for popularity, and it’s certainly not for a platform for politics.  I am interested in philosophy as Socrates exhibited it, specifically, the thinking it will take to move humanity off the Earth and become a multi-planetary species.  This past week, two things happened that reminded me of this task. The first was the Starship launch, which was very successful with SpaceX.  The second Dune movie did very well at the box office, showing continued interest, which I think is terrific because it gives people access to the old Frank Herbert books, which I think are masterpieces on a biblical scale, as opposed to just science fiction.  I have been thinking a lot about Frank and his books lately, the six he wrote, then the final two in the original series that his son continued to conclusion. 

If we want to be an interplanetary civilization, we must first solve some fundamental problems. One of those is the problem of power and why people crave it. One great example of exploring that problem is the novels by Frank Herbert in, Dune, the eight-book analysis introduced to the world through the latest movies, which are very good. But just the start of quite a journey.  More people would better understand our current circumstances if they read Frank Herbert’s books because he deals with a lot of serious stuff in that fantastic series.  Yes, as in the movies, they are dealing with the human race as they have colonized space, all over the universe space, not just a regional galaxy, 10,000 years in the future.  The politics are very similar to the concerns of the Old Testament, with bloodlines and kingdoms at the heart of the story.  Frank is very concerned with the nature of politics, so these Dune books are more about sociology and politics than they are about science or fiction. In the movies, the one from 1984 and now these recent ones, the lead character rises to greatness to become the new emperor, and that’s the end of the story.  That fits a typical narrative for a Hollywood movie.  But Dune is much more than these things, so these stories have been hard to make into movies.  The point in building up the lead story and characters is that the rest of the book rips them apart in a kind of libertarian study of the human race and how power corrupts, or does it?  One thing that Frank does that I am very interested in, that very few anybodies has ever touched, is how the spirit world influences the politics of humanity.  It’s an offering of the kind of Divine Council discussed in Psalms 82 and certainly reflects what Paul talked about in Ephesians.  Who rules us from beyond the grave, and how far down the rabbit hole does it go?  In those Dune books, Herbert even calls his work a prediction, not fiction, as he sets out to study ecology.  I think of our political life as just the surface reflections of much deeper forces at work, not all of them human as we think of the word.  And not just spiritual as we think of Casper the ghost or the Holy Spirit.  We must look at the spirit world as it strives to exist outside our known universe and expect that they are using self-interest to manipulate our lives to their advantage.  Frank Herbert deals with that level of political management, and it’s fantastic and can’t really be captured in the movies. 

As crazy as our political system is, I consider it a healthy necessity.  What America is going through is needed for global management of political systems that can then carry over into off-world colonies, which are coming at us much faster than people realize.  And we must solve some of these problems before we come to that impasse.  We must have a political system based on a healthy understanding of capitalism before we start moon colonies and cities on Mars.  Too much micromanagement of adventures into space will stop progress, and as Herbert assumes in his books, humanity reverts to the biblical necessity of royal bloodlines through the Vico Cycle.  I disagree with a lot about Herbert, especially regarding drug use.  But like the work of Graham Hancock that I have talked about in using ayahuasca to communicate with the spirit world, the spice in Dune is essentially the same kind of thing, and I think Herbert is on to something essential as far back as 1965.  Many of the Baal worshipers of Canaan also used psychedelics in their rituals, and in that context, it is likely the cause of the frequent turning away from God that is a majority of the narrative in the Bible.  Frank Herbert in Dune explores why this is the case and when drugs are used to speak to other spirit beings, who they are, and what they are motivated by.  And by coming to terms with that, you can then understand the kind of evil that is loose in the world now, and understand it with some perspective. 

Herbert goes so far as to place political motivations for spiritual influence in his many Dune books and migrates beyond universal influence, which is pretty impressive as a work of fiction.  I would put it on the level of Atlas Shrugged and other Ayn Rand works.  I don’t agree with everything she does either, but the thought process is beneficial.  Somewhere in these intellectual works are the answers we need to become an interplanetary species, so I don’t get too excited about transitory elections.  What we are all fighting against each other to achieve is the war of ideas that survive into the future, and I tend to think of these efforts in the most extensive picture possible. The trajectory of change will far exceed standard election cycles.  It’s why people win that matters, why certain people are attracted to power, and how power corrupts or is helpful to society.  And how a tyrant today might be a benefactor tomorrow.  Morality is often not so much determined by what we see but by what we are growing to understand and how that understanding is influential across over 22 dimensions.  And as we continue to build nations and colonies in space, what kind of political system should they have to accommodate with all considerations available, as we can know them, through science or fiction.  The Dune books have some magnificent things to say along those lines, and I think it is wonderful that the movies are doing well and that people are learning about the books for the first time.   One thing that space travel needs is a healthy appreciation of government systems that embrace capitalism.  Future religions must be joined at the hip; otherwise, their value will fall apart.  So, it’s not enough to build a Starship and start moving people into a new space economy.  We must work on the deep philosophical problems that have permeated the human race since the beginning.  And we have to solve them with something fresh, and America is the leader of that movement.  In the long run, it will make much more sense for people.

 

Rich Hoffman

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

Zandaya at the ‘Dune II’ Premier: There is hope for the human race yet

With all that’s going on in the world, there are traces of some fascinating things, and one that certainly attracted my attention was the premier of Dune II in London.  It’s not just because it’s a great science fiction story from 1965 put exceptionally well into a movie format, which people have been trying to do for many years.  They have tried it before with David Lynch.   A lot of people didn’t like that earlier movie.  I did like it and thought it was an exciting interpretation of Frank Herbert’s original story.  The first movie came out a few years ago and did quite well, being recognized as a cinematic masterpiece, where even critics agreed with the fans that Dune was something special.  The buzz for Dune II of course has been looming in the background because it’s essentially Part II of the original first book.  Dune is a massive story that takes place across six original books by Herbert. Then, after his death, his sons completed the story with two additional books, which span across the entire universe and involve thousands of years, and the whole thing isn’t just about science fiction but about the problems with power and how living things have difficulty managing it.  It’s very sophisticated and it looks like the producers of Dune understand the content of the story very well, and finally digital set design has caught up to the ambitions of the film and something really special ended up on screen.  But that’s not what dazzled me as a fan of the books and Herbert himself.  Zandaya showed up in a stunning robot outfit that reminded me of many things I had been thinking about lately.  And she made a bold proclamation that certainly did set the world on fire in more ways than one. 

The outfit itself was ultra sexy with cutouts that exposed the sexual areas of a female body in ways that reminded me of a Heavy Metal magazine cover from when I was growing up that put high science fiction concepts into sex appeal to young adolescent boys.  But I had never seen a young woman on such a widespread scale as Zandaya do something like that before.  It wasn’t slutty like something Madonna would do, or even Lady Gaga.  It was bold, innovative, and classy yet very ambitious.  I follow the launch of every Starship from SpaceX very closely, and another launch is coming up, the third for actual flights into space. The first thing I thought of was that her outfit matched the ambitions of these civilian space flights, and I instantly thought of the beautiful statues from the great novel Fountainhead as the perfect embodiment of this current time, when corporate communism and global fascism from that sector of the economy was spreading terror all over the world, A.I. was making people weary with worry about being controlled by machines.  Space travel was displacing all the philosophies and religions of the world with the uncomfortable reality of life on other planets.  Politically, the world was in a populist revolt.  And there was Zandaya boldly managing it all with a very knowledgeable understanding of it all by showing up to that movie premiere dressed in that outfit, which is what I would have expected as a young 12-year-old looking into the future of 2024 and considering what life should have been like.   She certainly understands the director of the film Dune and what he’s trying to do.  And she clearly understands the author of the book, Frank Herbert.  He certainly was not a socialist like H.G. Wells and some of those early European writers.  He was a small government kind of guy who appreciated the founding fathers, and that went into the extensive work of his Dune project, with all the books being between 600 and 800 pages each.  It was a very ambitious work, so there was a lot going on. 

And there were a few times over the last few years when I thought nothing like this would ever happen again, especially a young woman like Zandaya openly expressing her femininity and sex appeal without being raunchy about it.  Not after the Covid lockdowns destroyed the movie industry, and a firm commitment to socialism pretty much provided the final nail in the coffin.  I never thought I would see something like that again or for the first time.  I had all the Heavy Metal magazines for several years, and I loved the ambitious art.  I also loved the animated movie when I was a kid.  This Dune premier was all those magazine covers coming to life.  I think Zandaya is a pretty good kid.  She is younger than my daughters.  I thought she was perfect in the latest Spiderman movies, and she showed up at the end of the first Dune movie.  She’s a singer and a high fashion model who grew up as a Disney talent.  Despite all her early success, I think she has a pretty good head on her shoulders, which came out in interviews with Tom Holland while promoting the Spiderman films.  Unlike other Hollywood types, she is a good entertainment representative for this upcoming generation.  At least so far.  She didn’t have to show up to that premier with that outfit.  But that she did shows she understands far more about the nature of our current reality than most people do, and she was bold about it. 

What a gift she provided to the director of Dune, Denis Villeneuve.  He should be ecstatic with excitement that one of his stars from the new film so openly embraced the overall vision of the Herbert books, which is not to spoil it for anybody, but that Zandaya’s look explores what Frank thought was the background of the entire universe.  But that fashion model of Zandaya knew how to look and express the totality of Frank Herbert’s work with just a few simple gazes, and I felt the entire human race had just leveled up a bit.  Because of the Dune movies, more people will understand the point of Dune, which is a very anti-tyrannical effort that questions the nature of all life and how power flows down to every form of it.  With all the bad news that has been going on in the world, I saw this premiere for this movie as a bold rebellion against those vile forces.  In much the way that I was surprised by the Godzilla Minus One movie.  With all the bits of tyranny that have emerged, these little bits of hope are emerging from the human race.  And sometimes, someone like Zandaya captures the effort with high art and fashion in ways that seem iniquitous, even unintentional.  But you can’t go into public dressed like that, yet face everything down with such boldness without the intent being purposeful and intelligent, without scrutiny being applied.  And with the production of Dune, the launch of the Starships, and the political landscape lashing out at fascism the way it is, many elements came together in human expression that refused to be a victim to it all, which was very encouraging and a sign of a lot of good things to come.  I would say there is hope for the human race yet!

Rich Hoffman

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

“Your Mom is a Whore”: How government grows and why people let it

One thing we don’t talk about enough, and we should, is the cause of big government in the first place.  It’s one thing to point it out, and to complain about, and to blame some secondary condition, such as the evils of the World Economic Forum or the secrecy and malice of the CIA.  But in truth, I would say the number one reason that Bill Cooper was killed on his front porch by a couple of Arizona law enforcement had more to do with one of the most intelligent statements I have ever read in a book, which William Cooper accurately put his finger on as the root cause of all conspiracy theory, and the evils that follow.  In his book Behold a Pale Horse, Cooper pointed out what caused most of the problems in the world, which was devastating to all the people and groups out there who want those problems to continue so that they will have power over people in general, especially from government expansion and the abuse that comes with it.  And it wasn’t the talk about UFOs enslaving civilization, which is undoubtedly in that book, or the secrecy of power groups who operate in the shadows with a tax-eating shadow government.  Those are all true things, but not the reason I think they killed Bill Cooper. Instead, what he said about the natural psychological state of children and their parents that was the secret sauce that resides behind all government power.  And it is the biggest challenge to creating a country like America.  And that the way to destroy America was to exploit this weakness.  To strengthen it would be to help people with this essential problem of self-fulfillment and reliance on individual behavior instead of social collectivism.  Bill Cooper’s analysis in that famous conspiracy theory book is one of the most intelligent and powerful statements ever put on paper regarding mass society. 

The essential problem is this, and it’s a specific human issue in that people spend 18 years learning things, and most adults don’t live stable lives raising children over those 18 years.  They may do well at raising kids initially when all the rules are straightforward, and children depend entirely on their parents to function.  This is as opposed to other animals, such as young deer, that can stand up and run around just minutes after birth.  Humans have vast, complicated intellects not designed to be the drivers of mere animal behavior, basic sustenance, the acquisition of food, procreation, and shelter during heavy rains.  Humans take time to make, not their biological bodies but their minds.  At any point during those 18 years, even though their bodies may be ready to reproduce at 12 to 13 years old, their needs for thoughtful expression and social function continue into their 20s.  It takes a long time to build a human being, and then they don’t last very long after all that emotional investment; they are usually dead by age 70 to 80, with all that effort lost to time and what insecurities that bring to the effort of such an endeavor.  Many adults look at life and say, “Why try so hard if it’s all going to be over so fast.”  So they don’t do their jobs in instructing the youth, and the youth end up carrying on that trait to their children, then their children, and more children perpetually for infinity, leaving the world in the mess we have been talking about throughout human history.  Almost nobody gets this process right, which is the root cause of most trouble in the universe.  Suppose we were talking to aliens from the other side of the galaxy living in a type 1 or 2 civilization. They likely would have the same frustrations that they have been unable to overcome in their highly advanced technical society. 

We have tried to compensate for this problem in various ways, but none have worked, especially on the education frontier.  The social answer to this problem is to have the state educate society for its perpetuation of power as a collective entity of its own, viewing the people of society in much the way individual people might look at the cells of their body, as communal heaps of life that work together for the function of a living being.  The government was created to fulfill these needs and insecurities and thinks of itself as an individual, as “the state.”  And it expects people to fall in line to the service and maintenance of it as an organism in the plots of life as we know it, everywhere in the universe.  And as much as people talk about personal freedom and self-expression under Constitutional law, most people never develop individually to live that kind of life because they grew up with unhealthy relationships with their parents.  They often do not get the type of security and reliability of thought that humans require from their insecure parents, so that trait of confidence is never passed on to the children.  And they grow up to perpetuate the mistakes of their parents, who essentially got where they did in life through the same flawed method. 

Often, kids get loving parents who confuse their role in providing security with being afraid of everything that threatens it.  Then, by the time those children become teenagers, their puberty hard-wired behavior becomes their escape velocity only to become independent of their parents to learn life is hard, and they fall flat on their faces only to run back to the arms of a parental figure that can help them.  Since they can’t run back to their parents for that security, often, they create a big government and its various tyrannies to duplicate that infantile parental experience to give them a barrier to the dangers of life.  And those who want to be perpetual parents, always telling people what to do to mask the fact that they don’t know much themselves, use government to continue this dysfunctional relationship to keep the solution off the table.  We have identified the problem in works of philosophy, such as the founding documents of America clearly express.  But often, the people’s minds are not prepared for the responsibility of self-government because of all this sabotage of the parental role that produces such dependent children perpetually in need of parental roles that the government seeks to grow and expand for their own survival.  By weakening children’s minds, the defective parent can disguise love for the menace of keeping those children dependent on their parental fulfillment, realizing that the children never grow up and move away or that the children might surpass them in some way or another.  This vital part of the human relationship between parents and children sets up all the world’s tyrannies.  While parents might grow old and die away, freeing the children of their bonds to the traditional terror of low-intellect relationships, the government only changes the roles of the parental players.  The personalities might come and go, but the entity itself only continues to grow from one generation to the next, worsening until it either collapses or forces rebellion against its tyrannies from the minds who learn better what should be and refuse to accept what is, which is where we find ourselves on this razor thin precipice with the future gazing at us as a challenge.  How we handle that challenge is the cause of some of the most ostentatious fear that permeates the universe, which is conducting itself into a grand fortissimo in this current time in a fascinating way to watch.  What made Bill Cooper such a threat to the order of things was that with him essentially pointing out to his readers that their “mom was a whore,” he was undercutting the desire that mother government had to continue a relationship that benefited her at the expense of all the children.  Which couldn’t stand, so she plotted to get rid of him so that her children would never learn what she was doing to them with dependency disguised as safety.  And at the center of it all is the cause of most problems in the world.

Rich Hoffman

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

War from the Unseen Realm: How the Murder of good people paves the way the Politics of the Divine Council

I was disappointed to learn that Michael Heiser, the author of The Unseen Realm, had passed away in February of 2023. I do not want to go into massive conspiracy theory territory, but the first thought that came to my mind about his very rapid and specific pancreatic cancer diagnosis was that “they” wanted to get rid of him.  And by “they,” as we often refer when speaking about things just beyond our visual spectrum, have best been captured in literature and human thought by the Hebrew word, Elohim.  I am quite a fan of Dr. Heiser’s work, his series of books on the subject I came to as I was thinking about things along the same line for several decades, essentially going back to my Sunday School days and catechism.  His books started with success, selling around 100,000 to much more by the time he died.  Not exactly the New York Times bestseller’s list, which would be regarded as mainstream, but certainly successful among Christian authors.  The shame was that he was not an old man by any measure but relatively young, at just 60 years old.  His death reminded me of what happened to Michael Landin from Little House on the Prairie and Highway to Heaven a few decades ago, who died of almost the same thing, and it brought to my mind an eternal war that is the actual theme of the Bible, which most everyone misses.  Best thought of as the Elohim they are rebelling against Yahweh’s plans for earth and the people on it; there are real wars between them and us humans that have been there from the beginning.  Most cultures seek to appease this unseen power and the politics of the Divine Council with some form of sacrifice, especially today.  If you dig enough, you will uncover that this very attribute is the core of the Climate Change radicalism of communist desire all around the world.  And yes, these Elohim, as the Hebrew Bible calls them, do kill people with premature diseases and other ailments because they have an agenda, and they don’t like whistleblowers who alert the world as to what they are up to. 

Of course, the CIA and other intelligence agencies have their way of killing people who are in their way, most notably what they did to President Kennedy and President Nixon, as well as President Trump.  Killing can come in many forms, and over time, because of the messy press, killing has morphed more into social castigation, the preferred method of communist governments, which China has been exporting for over 40 years now using The Art of War as their deployment method which has been chronicled explicitly in the book Unrestricted Warfare if you’d like to reference it.  The CIA has their heart attack guns that can put people into cardiac arrest, making the murder look like natural causes.  Steve Bannon from the Warroom thinks that the killing of Andrew Breitbart was a natural occurrence because he had other health issues.  But I’ve always looked at it as a combo murder, a spiritual weapon that loaded him with health concerns that were then triggered by physical weapons by assassins who thought they could get rid of him and mask the whole thing as death by natural causes.  What doesn’t get talked about is how all these good people end up with these mysterious diseases that they quickly die of, while truly detrimental people live wild, crazy lives of excess, and they never get sick by anything.  It’s a pattern of behavior that is impossible to ignore if you are paying attention.

I would go further to indicate that the Elohim are a wild group of characters who exist within our understanding of quantum mechanics and are every bit as stupid, power-hungry, and malicious as anybody we know in politics or business on Earth.  The point of the more than 1500 years of history indicated in the Bible written by many people over such vast periods is to tell a story about their downfall, even if it’s fictional in its overall plot line, hopeful in its delivery.  The point of the Bible is to complete the story of the fall in the garden with the resurrection of Christ and the forgiveness of that original sin, eating from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil as opposed to the Tree of Eternal Life.  If you read carefully, what God is saying in the Bible over the entire span of it is that he very much wants human beings to be his partners in bringing Heaven to Earth but is perpetually frustrated that they never seem to listen and instead fall for all the lessor gods of the Divine Council and their politics of Heaven that is every bit as vicious as what we see on Earth.  And it doesn’t matter if you are a four-dimensional individual like we are or a character from the fifth, sixth, or eleventh dimension; we are all competing lifeforms fighting for either the right to goodness or appeasement toward unseen forces hellbent on control over all life, everywhere.  We are not wise to think that just because a menace comes from a dimensional space outside our experience, they are working toward our benefit.  I would say they are as power-hungry and malicious as any human counterpart.  And they maintain their power like our current shadow governments, beyond our visual spectrum.  And they like it that way. 

So my first thought, based on a lot of experience in seeing the same thing happen to many other people, was that Dr. Heiser was killed for what he was reporting.  His books take a scholarly approach to the subject of The Unseen Realm as indicated from the Bible in the ways that humans could understand the perpetual war that is quite vicious and on a scale that we don’t have terms to define.  I think it’s pretty remarkable that several people, under the weight of massive political pressure of empires and time, could capture such a vision as intact as it is in the Bible.  But in truth, we are just scratching the surface, and people like Dr. Heiser were unique, making him a target of the malicious.  And when the enemy from that Unseen Realm is threatened by what people do that might alter their plans for people on earth, they do as all governments do who think they have infinite power: they seek to eliminate them.  And one way to do that is to destroy people from the inside out.  After all, the Democrat Party and cancer cells work the same way, just on different scales.  Both pretend to be one thing while they overtake healthy tissue to destroy it from within.  On a quantum level, to kill a person, you just have to turn their immune system against the body it is supposed to be defending, and soon the body dies from an invasion of diseases that are always present but are defended against to maintain a healthy body.  After all, isn’t that what we see happening with the border invasion and the general policies of Joe Biden?  It’s the same method of murder, and the perpetrators aren’t necessarily human but vessels of deceit propagated from eternity for the elimination of goodness.  And God always warned us of them and wished to fight against them since appeals to their mercy were not followed.  But before you can fight them, you must understand them, and yes, they are killers.  Malicious, unsympathetic killers and they are everywhere all the time. 

Rich Hoffman

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

‘The Wuhan Cover-Up’: ‘Behold a Pale Horse’

As I was reading it, I kept thinking about Behold a Pale Horse, a classic conspiracy book that is considered a Bible for “truthers.” But the moment that an advanced copy of The Wuhan Cover-Up by Robert F. Kennedy arrived, well over a year behind schedule, I started reading it. I finished it 20 hours later as the sun was coming up the next day filled with anger. I didn’t want William Cooper to be right. I read many books, and I enjoy books on conspiracy theories because they are imaginative, more than I would consider them factual. And Behold a Pale Horse is a monster of a book, that has always been disconcerting in the background. What are the world’s elite, and why do they think they have so much power? As I read the Cooper book way back in the 90s in a little breakfast place facing the Kroger in Clifton on the U.C. campus in Cincinnati I thought it was wild, and would best be summed up by the first Matrix movie. Who was really in charge of all civilization? My omelet tasted great as I thought about those kinds of deep and complex things when Bill Clinton was in his first term. And when Covid came along, I thought first about all that Cooper had said in that book and others like him who were already part of the “truther” movement, the kind of people who thought that the CIA and FBI had orchestrated with radicle Islam the attack on 9/11. “No,” I said to myself. There is no way that our own people would try to kill us in order to drive a massive expansion of the government and its power. I didn’t want to think such things, but the moment Covid hit, there was no more denying it. It was evident that all the conspiracies were true, at least most of them. There was a government operating beyond our elected government, we were calling it the Deep State. And they were vile killers working to appease forces not talked about on the nightly news, and they were a menace to all civilization.

This book has the goods!

I couldn’t stop reading The Wuhan Cover-Up, and as I did, reports started floating around the internet that Robert F. Kennedy, who is a Democrat running for president as an independent who takes more votes away from Biden than Trump, had spent time on flights with Jeffery Epstein. And that Kennedy’s wife had a relationship with Ghislaine Maxwell. That by itself didn’t bother me, it was the timing of it that did. There were a lot of people caught up in the Epstein extortion racket, and the temptation to eat the forbidden fruit was too much for people to resist. I find that people who fall in such a way often look to redeem themselves in other ways, and Kennedy has been great on issues involving government intrusions into medicine. He’s still a Democrat, though, so I don’t expect much from him morally or ethically. It doesn’t surprise me to learn that he flew on Epstein’s plane that naturally involved underaged girls serving the powerful elite, or at least that’s how they like to think of themselves. Rather, why was that information coming out now? Kennedy has written other books, very controversial ones such as the recent The Real Anthony Fauci, which The Wuhan Cover-Up is a sequel. But this latest one is different. The Real Anthony Fauci was dangerous because it clearly showed a behavior pattern that would easily stand up in court with raw facts. Fauci and Bill Gates knew what they were doing, and they worked to suppress a proper response to COVID by attacking countermeasures known early in the process, such as hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin, and millions of people died. As a result, the world essentially adopted the United Nations climate change approach to medicine to deal with COVID-19, and the big government expanded its tyrannical authority globally, just as predicted in Cooper’s classic book. It was a power grab that was so ostentatious that nobody could believe it was happening, just as it has taken them a long time to admit it.

This is a serious story, but why is it coming out now? They think you are stupid

But what The Wuhan Cover-Up does that hasn’t been done yet in other books about the Covid crisis that was entirely manufactured by the same kind of people described in Cooper’s exposé of doom and gloom that it shows the who, what, where, why, and when’s on the malicious intent of the governments and their financial backers on the biggest crime in the history of the world, the purposeful murder of millions and the deliberate harm of many more for control and centralized authority.  As The Wuhan Cover-Up establishes, chain of custody was a bioweapons program that had been utilized in America, but as its dangers were pointed out, it was moved to less restrictive markets in China with the full knowledge of everyone involved, especially people like Dr. Fauci and Bill Gates.  Once this bioweapons research was in Wuhan, it got out, either by accident or on purpose.  As I read The Wuhan Cover-Up word for word, it’s pretty straightforward, based on the evidence, that it was purposeful, and that’s where the script shifts to books like Behold a Pale Horse.  2020 was the year that the Deep State was making its move at the World Economic Forum. They wanted control of the global economy through The Great Reset, and they weren’t going to put up with another term of Trump. 

These are killers who have no respect for the American rule of law or the Constitution.  They believe they operate with the full authority of the forces talked about in the Cooper classic, and the truth is worse.  Kennedy firmly established that he believed the CIA killed his uncle, based on firm evidence that remains classified but has been leaked, President Kennedy, and after what we watched happened to Nixon, Reagan, and now Trump, it is pretty evident that the intelligence community, the same people who are always trying to debunk UFOs, are not working for American sovereignty, but some fourth branch of government that justifies itself under the guise of “national security.”  Look out for the little green men, and give us endless black budgets funded by a corrupt Federal Reserve that prints infinite money accountable to nobody for global domination by invisible forces.  Those forces made themselves known with the bioweapon of COVID-19, which was just a test for them.  And they can now see how much they can get away with in the future.  Murder and mass extinction events are certainly part of their strategy.  I closed the book, The Wuhan Cover-Up, around 4:30 AM the following morning in the way I had completed the book on Behold a Pale Horse in the little eatery on that college campus thirty-five years earlier.  Realization is quite evident in those moments.  Everyone needed to read this book by Robert F. Kennedy, and I couldn’t wait to talk about it and share the information with as many people as possible.  It’s a book with good content and should be a priority for everyone in my audience.  Get it, read it, use it, and give it out as a Christmas present.  The more people who read The Wuhan Cover-Up, the better.  It’s not a crazy conspiracy theory book, and the bad guys don’t want people to read it, which is part of the delaying process, and why the story about Epstein was released, to attempt to discredit Kennedy before this book made the waves.  But it’s a packed book filled with facts and many footnotes.  It’s designed for lawyers to prosecute the greatest crime in history in court.  But it’s accessible enough for everyone who wants to understand what happened to us and by whom.  Even though they are in the millions, the perpetrators must be punished. Otherwise, they will do it again.  We don’t want the world talked about in Behold a Pale Horse.  Because, as of now, we do. 

I know this is tough to deal with, most people just want to live life, buy groceries, watch a movie with their spouse, and raise their kids. I personally like people like William Cooper, the author of Behold a Pale Horse. I think it’s a shame that he died in a shootout with authorities. There were probably better ways to deal with that subject. But asking questions against a tyrannical insurgent that likely hides deeply in the shadows of our reality is dangerous business. But it’s not their world, and people like Cooper had a right to ask tough questions, even if he was given a lot of nonsense to hold and drive the control narrative in the way that the power players wanted it to be shaped. Ultimately, when the power people lose their patience, or things don’t work out the way they hope and plan, they turn to violence, and that was how things ended for William Cooper in a bloody gunfight. And when Covid was unleashed, it was the same kind of bloodthirsty ruthlessness. But that’s the truth of things, let’s not have any illusions about it. What matters for our present time is to understand that these maniacal lunatics hide in the shadows for a reason because they don’t want you to know what kind of people they are or what they are up to. And when they feel their grip on power losing control, they do kill. They always kill. And kill they did when they built the COVID-19 virus and unleashed it upon the world in 2020. The proof is in the book The Wuhan Cover-Up and The Terrifying Bioweapons Arms Race. What they did to William Cooper, they have no problem doing to every one of us. And they won’t shed a tear.

Rich Hoffman

2024 is Time for Harvest: Separating Good from Evil

As romantic of a notion as conspiracies might be, and they are, ultimately, many of the dark rituals to come from the following of astrology were related to the acquisition of food, such as knowing when it was time for harvest and preparing for the upcoming winter. And specifically to food supply, the production of wheat, and its use in the human diet. We forget these days just how stressful it was to wake up every day and figure out where your food would come from because food is an assumption for us in these modern times. It’s easy for us and in all varieties. But for thousands of years, right up until around 100 years ago, food was a very stressful problem, even for the rich and famous. So nurturing a good crop of wheat to the harvest was a significant undertaking, and it’s why such societies were able to make judgments of good and bad more directly because, literally, their food supply depended on value judgments just to survive. This is what the Parable of the Weeds is all about in Matthew 13:24-29 when Jesus said, “The kingdom of heaven is likened unto a man which sowed good seed in his field: but while men slept, his enemy came and sowed tares among the wheat, and went his way. An enemy hath done this. The servants said unto him, Wilt thou then that we go and gather them up? But he said, Nay; lest while ye gather up the tares, ye root up also the wheat with them.” Jesus essentially said to let the weeds grow with the wheat and not try to pull them up together; otherwise, you will destroy your crop in the process. Jesus was talking about tares, which are weeds, and specifically darnel, which looks like wheat during the early stages of growth. In this case, the best way to save your crop would be to separate the weeds from the crop at harvest time, not necessarily during the growth of the good wheat. And under such a metaphor, we can look at our times and say, “It’s time for the harvest.”

Can’t let the weeds sink roots

We have allowed a lot of weeds to grow in our culture, largely out of compassion, because we live in a time when perhaps we thought we could let everything grow together. That we could co-exist with evil and that demands on our survival would not be challenged. But that was incorrect. Instead, we have allowed many weeds to take over our gardens of life and now we cannot separate good and evil so easily. Like the darnel, evil looked a lot like good, and now their roots have intertwined together as parasites threatening to kill the host crop if we were to attempt to remove those weeds as they have been growing. And like the darnel, the weeds looked like the wheat we wanted, so we left it alone to grow, unmolested. This is the problem with having a society that does not cast value judgments on the wicked and estranged intellect. Letting a multitude of terrible menaces grow into a healthy society has destroyed our culture and stunted its growth outrageously. Of course, we took it for granted because we have lost touch with the necessity of using value judgments for survival. We have entertained this fantasy that we could all get along if only we respected each other’s place in the garden. Yet in so doing, we have only harmed what’s good and allowed what’s evil to perpetuate and grow in strength, leaving our only means of dealing with such a problem to a hope that everything might survive until a harvest.

We have a lot of darnel in our society

I would point to the year 2024 and the re-election of Trump as the harvest time of our present generation.  Of course, the weeds who have been surviving as parasites of the good will have great anxiety as the intentions of the harvest are revealed, the separation of the wheat from the weeds.  The darnel of our culture, which is vast and in many forms, knows that their time as parasites is ending, and they are naturally terrified.  After all, they are a lifeform too, and they were created to be parasites living off the good, to disguise themselves to even look like the wheat of our desire so that we might not know what they are until it’s too late.  Until they are in our schools teaching children to be transexual maniacs and sexually obsessed losers.  Until our national deficit is over 34 trillion dollars, with 1 trillion added in the last business quarter of 2023.  That drugs would be sought after to numb our minds from the terrors we see, that hidden tyrannies hidden in our technology would give us no peace in seclusion.  The war against good and evil would turn everything we thought we could trust into a pitched-fork devil of ill intent.  Everywhere we look, we see weeds, and it’s so bad that we can no longer tell what is good for us or bad.  We can’t know the wheat for the weeds because, at this point, everything looks the same.  We have not tended to our gardens; we have let the weeds deceive us into thinking they were wheat, and we allow them to grow and wrap their roots around the roots of our good crop, daring us to pull them and, in so doing, to destroy everything we value.

But it’s harvest time, time to pull up everything, wheat and all.  It will be a messy process, but our fields must be cleared in the aftermath.  At that time, the darnel can be removed from the wheat, and we can distinguish value from the parasites.  Because we have yet to separate the weeds from our garden early in the process, the field has become overgrown, and there are more weeds than wheat.  So we have quite a mess to deal with.  But once the job is done, we have a clear field, and we have determined the wheat from the darnel, separating the good from the bad, we’ll have a chance to start over.  We nurture our crops by keeping the weeds out of our garden before they wrap their roots around what we value.  Always after harvest, when we see our clean fields and a healthy food supply, can perspective begin to bring sanity to our concerns.  And when it does, we must protect our wheat from infancy and not let evil wrap around our values to feed off them for its sustenance.  The weeds must be pulled before they can ever take root.  That is why we must tend our gardens and have value judgments on the good and the bad.  We must get rid of the bad before it matures into a parasite that is dangerous to the things we value, such as a food supply.  It is also in understanding such parables that evil wants to eradicate the Bible from a culture so that we can’t tell the difference, allowing evil to grow unmolested.  Such an idea was always a bad one, and during this time of harvest, one that we should never neglect again.  The Bible is full of such wisdom and has contributed to all productive human cultures.  And we’d be wise to listen before it’s too late.  

Rich Hoffman

The RINOs Who Helped Pass Issue 1 and Issue 2 in Ohio: Freedom of choice to hide the real evil hiding in the background

After more than 24 hours of review on why Issues 1 and 2 passed in Ohio, the right to kill babies and the pot head legalization measures that were passed by essentially the same margins on Election Night, November 7th, 2023, a clear pattern emerges which is wonderfully represented in the picture below. A guy I call Skippy, who has always loomed in the background of our county politics like a lot of people who think similarly, felt entitled to let me know after the election that he was a “freedom” Republican and that my view of the world was authoritarian. And that he voted for “freedom of choice.” And, of course, my response is that with Republicans like him, who needs Democrats? I live in a very conservative area, but I go to plenty of events, some with that guy, and they drink and smoke openly like a bunch of derelicts and quite honestly, it has always bothered me. I don’t encourage drinking and I certainly don’t smoke, anything. I don’t even take aspirin when I get a cold. I despise drugs and those who use them. So I’m not surprised by those kinds of comments, but it certainly isn’t a rationalization for why Issue 2, the legalization of marijuana in Ohio, passed. There are a lot of weak people in the world, and a lot of people who abuse various drugs, alcohol included who I think make the world a much worse place because of their weak politics. The people who put the abortion issue forward, the attackers of our state of Ohio with a lot of outside money reflecting progressive causes, knew the attack vector, and they know people like Skippy here will vote in their direction because they like their drugs. So they attached it to the baby-killing law and snuck it across the finish line. Sure, the Democrats are vile and evil. But so are many who call themselves Republicans because they have their vices, and the bad guys are always able to exploit them for the perpetuation of evil.

Freedom of choice is actually presented as the right to make bad choices that impact other people with the degradation of the aftermath

I warned everyone prior to the election, quite a few weeks ahead, that Issues 1 and 2 would pass with around 56% to 57% of the vote, which is exactly what happened. It was essentially the same margin as we saw in August when we tried to raise the threshold of the constitution to 60% over what it is now at 50+1 to add amendments to the Ohio Constitution. Outside radicals, after they lost Roe v. Wade, turned their progressive intentions toward the states and saw that Ohio had a weak threshold, so they attacked, and now we know the result. By the time Republicans noticed the vulnerability it was already too late. The bad guys put marijuana on the same ballot as abortion purposely in the same way that candy is placed along the checkout line, encouraging temptations for last-minute purchases. If Republicans weren’t so busy smoking and drinking, they might have noticed a long time ago the threat. But they got suckered and played because there are way too many liberals in the Republican party who are soft on all issues, so they water down the defense of truly ethical problems, keep their minds focused on business only, and maintain a socially soft stance on morality which lets vast amounts of evil flourish in the back door of our society. And they are quite proud of it, even haughty. But when it is wondered why abortion passed in Ohio, and how attackers of our state were able to gain so much support, thank your local RINOs for being lured to the dark side and helping evil seed itself into our great state, which is now an embarrassment.

Generally, my favorite places in the state voted my way; they did not support Issue 1 or 2 in the northwest, Midwest (such as Darke County), and all of southwest Ohio flowing over into the east. But Dayton, Columbus, and all of Cleveland and Akron flowing over to the Pennsylvania border and along the coast of Lake Erie voted to smoke dope and kill babies, and that’s not surprising. There are a lot of RINOs in those areas and certainly plenty of scum-bag Democrats who tend to run those liberal cities. And that’s how the margins became what they were, which voter turnout was higher than usual. If Trump had been on the ticket, the ratio might have been better for real conservatives. But as it was, it didn’t surprise me and was a shame to watch. Anyone pushing drugs in a culture of any kind is causing the degradation of intellect and the destruction of your society from within. It has nothing to do with “freedom” of choice. Such things are hidden behind popular sentiments to hide their intentions, which is essentially a military attack to destroy us from within. History is filled with compliant fools who drank their way toward personal destruction, and now can Cheech and Chong laugh at the social degradation that they have now let into our culture to be, as the Pink Floyd song says, “comfortably numb.” Meanwhile, while everyone is numb, they expect you to walk compliantly into a slaughterhouse with a smile on your face because you have your drugs to numb any thoughts you might have about your actual condition. Drugs are poison that are intended to destroy the enemy with evil; that is why they are encouraged in any society that the bad guys want to kill.

I would remind everyone upset about these baby killers and pot smokers that the best way to defeat them is not to follow the rules they create to frame the argument. I say it to people dozens of times a week, and it certainly applies here: never let your enemies define the rules you live by. Laws, often as they are put forth, are constructed for people with bad intentions to perpetuate some ill will behind government power. The abortion issue isn’t about whether or not a baby is a baby at 12 weeks or nine months. A killing is a killing and evil, the same evil that caused God to give Canaan to Abraham, and abortion is murder, and pot and other drugs are inventions to numb the guilt people feel when they live immoral lives and make bad choices. And that’s what RINO Republicans did when they joined vile Democrats to pass both Issue 1 and Issue 2. They have the right to choose, even if those choices are wrong. They want the right to be diabolical scumbags if they so choose, and they use ballot language to hide their narrative of choice behind the real intention of vice for the sake of sin. That’s always why these same types of people didn’t have moral convictions when it came to the Lakota problems, where administrators were displaying a tendency to have sex with children or teach students alternative sexual lifestyles. It’s all the same moral depravity, and there are plenty of Republicans who live lives filled with bad choices. And when you combine them with diabolical Democrats, you get 57% who will vote to kill babies and do drugs without fear of prosecution. Because they want “freedom of choice,” as some vile libertarian argues it. The choice to be a scumbag, the choice to be child molesters or sexual swingers desecrating their marriage covenant in the eyes of God, or dope addicts stoned to Pink Floyd songs. And if such bad decisions produce a baby with some unwanted sexual union, they want the ability to kill that baby to erase the mistakes they made so they are free to smoke, drink, and be wastes of human flesh in a world in solid need of intellect.

Smart people get it

Rich Hoffman

Don’t Talk About Party Loyalty: Lynda O’Connor lost because she was disloyal to her base support

They keep saying we are a small, but loud minority of radicals, as if to say, critics aren’t important. But all that did was fuel the opposition against Lynda.

It wasn’t a surprise that Lynda O’Connor had an embarrassing defeat on the Lakota school board. She shouldn’t have run for another term after the mess she caused over the last few years. Her brand was down in a big way and instead of trying to right the ship, she dug in and alienated all the people she should have been working with. The voter turnout was unusually high for a Lakota school board race, but that is largely due to the increased interest from the scum bags and pot-smoking losers who voted to kill babies and legalize drugs, who went in the direction of Julie Shaffer and Doug Horton. During the election, I saw all of them as the same, but it was Lynda who I felt had personally betrayed me, and I couldn’t support her. This hold your nose, and voting for someone who has done a lousy job isn’t an excellent way to conduct elections. Lynda deviated from the original plan and decided to move to the hard left and work against Darbi Boddy, and after two years of mismanagement, the results were evident in the election. Unfortunately, Lynda dragged Russ Loges down on the ticket because the GOP was split and not united behind the candidates. When you don’t have the Central Committee lined up with the desired outcome, it’s never a good thing. And it’s even worse to tell them to deal with the party leadership picks and to accept bad behavior. Lynda O’Conn0r was horrible as a school board president, especially after all the support that was thrown her way. She used people to get power, then abused that power overtly to destroy a popularly picked school board member in Darbi Boddy and cause problems between her and Issac Adi. And the results were evident well before voters cast a vote on how election night was going to turn out.

This is why Lynda O’Connor Lost the Lakota School Board. The Republican Party doesn’t run the voters. The voters run the party. The RINOs aren’t in charge.

I was in Japan, far away from Ohio when it became apparent to me what the cost of Lynda seeking re-election was going to have on Butler County politics. Over the previous two years, we had seen a couple of incidents where party leaders had abused their power to attack upcoming talent or long-standing respected leaders. Such a case was what Sherrif Jones did to Roger Reynolds, essentially sticking the label of a felon onto the former auditor for entirely personal reasons, which then of course alienated the base of the Republican Party. Then, of course, Darbi was a popular pick, and Lynda went on a campaign of personal destruction against her, which resulted in two years of bad branding. I told Lynda on a phone call about a year ago how to fix it, and she ignored the advice. She dug in and name-dropped a few people she thought was important then continued to support horrendous behavior on the school board and aligned herself closer to Julie Shaffer and Kelly Casper. And in the process, she made herself indistinguishable. People who don’t understand these things so well put their support behind her believing they had control of the party and the people in it like some kingly aristocrat and they resorted to a lot of pushing and shoving to get everyone aligned, which was not going to work with the Tea Party types in the Republican Party. Then, to make matters worse, they sought to destroy the Tea Party of West Chester to make their point more vocal, which essentially sealed the fate of Lynda O’Connor in politics. She had used the West Chester Tea Party to advance herself as a brand for the Lakota school board. And when she turned against those values, she lost the only real support she ever had.

After I returned, I attended a Central Committee meeting in Liberty Township after there were some political shenanigans in West Chester with their Central Committee, and it was obvious that the establishment types were going to screw everything up. The RINOs wanted appeasement, and the MAGA types wanted authenticity, so there was going to be an impasse, and it was just going to have to play out. Republicans everywhere, locally and nationally, have gotten into a lot of trouble trying to appease evil, and it has caused them to work with Democrats on all kinds of Marxist issues and has essentially pulled the country away from its foundation and more toward socialism and Marxism all because they wanted to “hold their nose and support the party.” For the preservation of a party that only wanted to live, not actually to represent voters’ values. That has left people who have values and want to see those values supported in politics hungry for accurate representation. That’s why Trump is running for president as opposed to all the other Republican offerings they have tried to give us over the last few decades. And with all the excellent work that has been done, a lot of people in the Republican Party didn’t get it. I explain it to them voluminously, but they don’t have the mind to listen. They think they know better, and the best they can give you is to hold your nose and put up with what your “betters” can provide you. They emphasized that they knew better what that was, and everyone should get in line and deal with it. Support Lynda because she didn’t want to challenge Ann Becker for the open West Chester trustee position because Ann was in trouble over trans rights, so Lynda screwed up and ran again after two years of serious mistakes, and everyone thought it was going to work out great?

A political party either represents voters, or it doesn’t. There have been times that I have loved being affiliated with the Republican Party and have been very proud of what we have had in Butler County. But then, after these last few years, since Trump has been out of office and everyone has snapped back into their true natures, we have seen a lot of embarrassment that reminds me of the old Bob Shelly days with Michael Fox. Party politics, arm twisting, deception, all the kinds of things that made people run to Ross Perot or Donald Trump. And they will continue to run because they don’t want to support the politics of the machine. I’m not interested in politics to hold my nose and vote for some loser, all for the “party.” I want to see things run well with constitutional value. But don’t lecture anybody on supporting the endorsed candidates as a base of loyalty to the Republican Party. Lynda went after Darbi, and the party should have helped the “Republican Endorsed” person. And Sheriff Jones worked to destroy the life of a very popular Republican in Roger Reynolds, and nobody stepped in to help him. And nobody stepped in to save the West Chester Tea Party when a media campaign went against them and essentially destroyed them for the time being, at least their meeting venue. When the RINOs decide to fight the actual base and future of the party, nobody should have expected good results for Lynda. Lynda had to earn those votes. Instead, she went on a crusade of personal destruction and acted as if she were entitled to the position purely off the backs of party affiliation. And some of the back-bending endorsements from people I know were concerned that they would be cut off from the money machine, were reprehensible. And the results reflect just how bad it was. When the approach to an election was filled with such ridiculously stupid behavior, the results should surprise nobody.

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

How to Make a Good Team in Sports and Politics: The point of everything is to give voters options

It will continue to be one of the universe’s great mysteries why people can look at sports teams and have opinions about what they should be doing, but they can’t apply those same methods to their lives.  This is a prominent issue every year in pre-season football with the mini camps as teams figure out which players they will cut and which will make their final roster.  Good teams figure out the right players and get them all pointed in the right direction for the success or failure of a season.  If the players are allowed to pick their fellow players, teams tend not to do so well.  It takes good leadership to figure it out and put people together who likely wouldn’t figure it out for themselves.  Good teams tend to have players playing together who wouldn’t otherwise be friends.  One of the mysterious qualities of leadership is to see things of value beyond the choice of friendships, and when it comes to sports, most people get it.  They understand what makes success and have many opinions about it.  But they can’t do it when it comes time to utilize those same skills in their lives.  That is certainly the situation in business.  And it is undoubtedly the case in politics.  The goal of all these endeavors is to figure out what success looks like, whether it be winning a Super Bowl, having a great business quarter, or providing a great political party to the voting public; once success is understood, then leadership needs to do what it must to give that result.  It’s not complicated.  Yet, it remains one of the least utilized factors in human interaction. 

There is only one correct measure to winning in politics; it is in a political party providing the voting public with good people they can vote for.  Any other action is missing the point.  If a political party is not focused on those attributes, then they aren’t trying to be a good political party.  I would say this is a problem all over America, in every aspect of county politics, no matter where we talk about it.  And that is certainly the case with the Butler County Republican Party in Ohio, where I live.  I can say that I know many people at that party, and I personally liked them all in some way or another.  If you sit down and talk to people, I can usually find something I like about just about anybody.  But the problem is, do they make an excellent political party just because you want them?  And in most cases, that is not the reality.  Politics should only aim to provide voters and taxpayers with good people to represent them best.  When political parties lose sight of that strategy, things go wrong.  And that is how RINOs in the Republican Party come to be.  Most people get into politics for ideological reasons.  However, the concessions they make to get along with other people become detrimental to their representation of the voter base, which is the value of the party brand.  If people have good representation in politics, then the brand of the party could be said to be good.  If voters don’t, they start to lose faith in the system, voter engagement lowers, and the direction of victory in politics changes dramatically.  When voters feel that the people they elect don’t represent them, we could say that politics has failed.

It’s just like the comparison with the sports team that desires to put a winning team on the field so people come to the games and feel good about the chances for a victory, so they buy beer and overpriced hot dogs at the concessions, which is really how the team makes their money, how they measure their value to the customer base.  If the team isn’t winning, there are fewer fans to buy hot dogs, to put it simply.  The same holds in politics.  I know many people who want to run for office within the Butler County Republican Party.  But, they do not feel they can remain people of integrity because of the restrictions of party politics.  So, we end up with the wrong people running for office while much better candidates that the public would love to have representing them are sitting on the sidelines.  This is a case where the players on the field pick people they like and are comfortable with, not the leadership of the voting public deciding how that team would shape out.  Too often, and this year of 2023 is undoubtedly a good example, many good people are not participating in the political process because they have learned that they aren’t in the cool kids club and will never be invited.  Because the party is picking the members, not the voters.  And instead of letting the voters shape the party, the players are forming the team; then they wonder why many fans are not supporting their losing effort.

Not everyone gets into politics for the same reasons.  I understand that some feel that getting into politics protects their business interests from a corrosive government and provides a barrier to their efforts to keep their businesses healthy.  These are not ideological people but practical ones who see government as dangerous to their interests in business, so they get involved in politics to protect their efforts.  And those people are trying to play nice in the sandbox with ideologically based people who enter politics for reasons of genuine philosophy.  And those kinds of people are scary to those looking for political stability.  I get it.  Just like a wide receiver on a football team being upset that a new tight end is playing the slot receiver role, the wide receiver might feel like the coaching staff is trampling on their turf.  But so what? Maybe that is the best way to become a winning team.  That doesn’t mean that the tight end should be run off the team to make the wide receiver feel like they have job security and aren’t threatened by challengers.  Challenges make the team better.  But then better for whom?  For the players or the fans?  That is what must be decided, and what I have seen from the GOP in general, especially since Trump has been out of office, is a party for the players, not for the voters.  It’s the players making the teams they want to play with.  They are not trying to give the voting public the best representatives they can get.  And if a political party isn’t doing that, they aren’t trying to be the best they can be for their communities.  While such a concept may not be complicated, it remains the biggest stumbling block to any successful venture within human endeavor.   And that is certainly the case in politics.  Some great people want to participate, but they have been told in so many words or less that politics is about maintaining friendships and that everyone needs to stay in their lane and behave.  But that is not what voters want, and until political parties listen, the public will continue to be let down by the result.

Rich Hoffman