Category: Gaming

Once You Win, Now What: Learning to deal with the pressure of being on top

So, now that we’ve won some crucial elections, and Trump is going to be back in office and will make it a priority for America to win again, what happens now?  Winning is tricky, not just in winning once or twice here and there but in having a winning attitude every day, no matter what is happening in your life.  And to answer another question I get asked all the time, why do I participate in so many competitive events throughout the year, especially in shooting sports?  What’s the point?  Well, to have this conversation, actually, and this is a point I make abundantly in my Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, winning is very difficult because once you win a time or two, you end up on everyone’s target list for personal destruction.  The social ostracization begins with the masses who don’t win very much and it can get pretty tough.  So I compete a lot, not for the fun of it but for the practice of staying sharp in maintaining a winning way of thinking, which then cascades into other parts of my life.  But for many, winning is easy.  As an outsider, you put all your efforts into something.  You win, then become the king of the hill.  Then what do you do? You now have people looking at you as the one to topple.  A lot of people suffer greatly when they win in politics because once the shoe is on the other foot, and your competitive enemy now looks at you with the obsession of beating you, you might likely find yourself spending most of your time looking over your shoulder instead of maintaining a winning attitude which caused you to win in the first place. 

Since I compete a lot, I get to see the ugly side of people working hard to win at anything, from bowling to golf.  A win over peers makes life a little bit better and makes all the mundane things we do in a day just a little sweeter when we win.  Humans are competitive people, which works best in capitalism when people compete for market share.  But I can tell you, especially in shooting sports, that some people you compete against get pretty crazy when they think obsessively about beating you once you establish yourself as the one to beat, and if they can’t beat you, they get pretty mad.  Learning to deal with that pressure is a large part of the battle because everyone can win a time or two just by random luck.  But how do people manage the expectations of being a winner?  That can be a bone-crushing, soul-draining endeavor.  Maintaining a winning attitude once you become the king of the hill that everyone wants to knock off takes a lot of work and personal motivation.  It would be easy for me just to put trophies on the wall and say, I won a lot and was pretty good.  But continuing to grind through more and more wins isn’t for me about winning; it’s about dealing with all the people who want to knock me off and dealing with that pressure.  Even if it’s a little thing.  The competition from people who always want to beat you sharpens you up for life’s real battles.  If the pressure under leisure bothers you, then real stuff, where it counts, can destroy you.

I was at Top Golf recently with many people, and you wouldn’t believe how competitive everyone was in getting the best score.  I don’t golf much, but I was doing very well.  And there were people there who golf all the time.  It’s the primary recreational activity they do in life, and they were losing and were mad about it.  My strategy to compensate for my lack of finesse with the various wedges was to use the driver to hit the ball as hard as possible toward the 300 point holes in the back of the course.  And most of them were going in.  And it was driving my competitors crazy.  I often have the same reaction in a fast draw.  I have a very fast draw where I shoot right out of the holster at my hip.  And it’s hard for people who have been shooting for a long time to deal with that because the core skill is going a little slower to go fast, which is the opposite of driving a golf ball by relying on hitting it hard every time.  Typically, people who win a lot find something they can excel at, and they leverage that against variability and emotion for consistency of performance.  And they usually end up winning more than average against other people.  That was certainly the case with several political campaigns.  One of the reasons Trump has been so dominant in politics is because he learned to win in life, so defending his king of the hill perspective was nearly impossible for losers who wanted to use mass collectivism to hide their incompetency, such as was the entire campaign of Kamala Harris.  Once she showed herself as a loser who didn’t know how to win anything, she was easy to beat, even with the media trying to cheerlead her on.  Democrats weren’t prepared for an honest election where they had to win.  They had built their entire political platform on cheating and couldn’t handle the pressure down the stretch, no matter how much money they spent, just like the guy who buys all the fancy golf clubs competing against a person who handles the pressure of winning better.  Money can’t solve the problem. 

A lot of people in life can’t handle the pressure of being a winner.  So all they ever really achieve is the rock-chucking part of wearing down an opponent.  Whoever is the king of the hill at that time makes themselves an easy target for all the rock chuckers.  Someone recently told me, “Do you know how much people hate you?”  It was as if it was my social obligation to be liked and to lose to make them feel better about themselves.  Because they were too lazy to become winners, they resorted to the classic peer pressure application of saying, “You should let me win if you want to be my friend.”  Well, why would anybody want to be friends with a loser?  What’s the fun in that?  I like seeing people working hard to beat me at things because it improves them.  I think, especially in a capitalist culture, that people are forced to make themselves better by making me a target for their perfection.  And if they sneak away a win here and there, I am usually happy for them.  I have a lot of trophies, so I like to see other people enjoy victory, especially if the competition makes everyone better.  That’s the name of the game.  But once you are a winner, you must expect everyone to come after you.  And that will undoubtedly be the case with these political wins.  Don’t be happy to put the trophy on the wall and rest on your laurels.  Once you win, you must continue to win and strive at it with every breath in your body, every day.  And by making winning a daily practice, you will find that it helps you in everything you do.  And that the world around you will benefit from the competition. 

Rich Hoffman

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

Atlantis Giants in Butler County Ohio: The Hilltop Earthwork of the Constellation Aries at Pyramid Hill, from 5000 years ago

I can’t tell you how happy I was to walk into the office at Pyramid Hill as I was asking about the status of the project that has been going on for a few years now and to get the look of concealment that I did. The workers that day were young people who weren’t sure how to answer the question, so they referred me to the Ancient Sculpture Museum, which is concealed deep in the woods down a large hill in a place that feels like it’s not even on this earth. It’s one of those little secrets in Butler County, Ohio, and is a treasure within a treasure. Noticing their cryptic reference, my wife and I proceeded to the museum and stepped into the first room and noticed immediately that finally, since 1836, when the site was first surveyed, finally the Butler County Hilltop Work was getting the attention it has always deserved. I’ve looked at that strange mound, which is around 250 ft tall and sits across from Joe Nuxhall Way on the west side of the Great Miami River, about 3 miles from downtown Hamilton, and always marveled at it. The museum staff already had an excellent display set up for an early 2023 opening that will connect the Pyramid Hill complex to this new massive ancient mound they plan to call the Fortified Hill. Sounds better than Butler County Hilltop Work. The staff person on hand that day told my wife and me that they were planning to open everything in January of 2023 if everything went well, which explained the cryptic looks at the main office when I mentioned it. There are very few people in the world who even know that the strange hill that looms large in Butler County, with thousands and thousands of people living around it, and driving by it every day, that it’s one of the most mysterious lost, ancient works of an advanced culture on earth. And yet, it’s been there before Christ was born as if dated celestially; it’s around 5000 years old. 

What makes it so exceptional in the world is that it essentially is dedicated to the constellation Aries that through stellar precession, shows a specific movement from the constellation Taurus through the Pleiades and into the age of Aries at a time when we have previously thought only of Indians marching in a steady stream toward civilization from hunters and gatherers and into city dwelling humans. I’m not one to disparage scientists, even the bureaucratic nonsense that often trails behind academia like the tail of a doomsday comet, because if not for them, there wouldn’t have been an attempt to preserve the Butler County Hilltop Work and opening it as a park would never have been possible. But science has been slow to acknowledge who these people really were who settled in Ohio as the center of a very advanced culture, who had an obsession with the stars and built all over southwestern Ohio many copies of earthworks that mimicked the constellations in the heavens on earth. These works are every bit as mysterious as the Nazca lines from Peru or even the Pyramids of Giza. Primarily, the reason for the big mystery is that they didn’t just build one of these sites that so accurately reflects an advanced knowledge of astrology. Still, the evidence is pointing increasingly to this same region, and that specific mound location, along with Serpent Mound off to the east, as the basket of an advanced culture that was eradicated likely during the Younger Dryas cataclysm, around 11,600 years ago. And what was left of these people who were interacting globally with all countries before the cataclysm is what we see during this late archaic presence in the Ohio Valley, which ended up a larger part of the Mississippi culture. These were the survivors of that cataclysm, and they marked the ground with a star map of the heavens with these massive depictions of, in this case, a wild boar, which they associated with the Aries constellation. 

Further, on top of the hill is where things get really interesting because the entrance to the effigy, to the north, has a maze that forces the participant to navigate it much the way that the spring equinox had to navigate the Pleiades constellation on its journey from the constellation Taurus into Aries. While on top of the earthwork, which you can see for miles in every direction, it becomes very obvious how difficult it was to shape that natural hill into the shape of a boar to match their celestial observations of the zodiac character of Aries. This was no small effort by any means. It was a massive undertaking, and for what purpose? Well, as I say a lot, remember Plato’s references to Atlantis, where the first god/king of their land was Atlas. And we all know from myth and mystery that Atlas was the creator of Astrology. And here was an obviously advanced culture that had enough leisure time not just to hunt, gather, and reproduce but to build all these magnificent earthworks all over Ohio. They seemed to connect into one grand mythology meant to be seen from the sky. A society obsessed with astrology, obsessed with an equatorial procession along the heavenly zodiacal belt where ages move by overhead every 2,160 years for a total zodiac year of 25,920 years. Society would have to be around for a long time to understand those kinds of time movements of the stars in a reliable way, to understand that their movements were not just coincidental, but over that length of time, were as reliable as a clock. These people did not spend their entire day trying to hunt a deer so they could eat by dinner time.  We have all had an image given to us by Hollywood and the progressive history of what an Indian is, a Native American or even an “indigenous person.” In truth, the reality is far more complicated, and by referencing the many books on Atlantis by Lewis Spence, a respected commentator on such things, or Giambittisto Vico of the great Vico Cycle, or the Bible, we know that very large people that smaller people called giants roamed the earth everywhere. We know Norse mythology had them, the Greeks called them Titans, the Bible referenced to them often living in the land of Canaan, and large people were everywhere dating back to the precise period of the earthworks in Ohio, precisely the one in Butler County formerly known as the Butler County Hilltop Works. Burial mounds all up and down the Great Miami River have reported the bones of people from 7 feet tall up to 10 feet many times, which can be found in Ross Hamilton’s outstanding academic paper called A Tradition of Giants: The Elite Social Hierarchy of American Prehistory which is available for free online. Just look up that title and print it out for yourself. It’s well researched and corresponds to the reports mentioned above about large people buried in the earthworks of Ohio, not just occasionally, but abundantly. I know of a case of a 7-foot person buried in a mound in downtown Hamilton as it was being built. It has been said in many of Spence’s reports on Atlantis that they were a large people and that once the Greeks and Egyptians inherited many of the myths of the lost Atlantis, their concept of the gods was forged in their cultures. Yet, those myths also talk of the Atlanteans coming from the west, and with them, they brought the pagan gods of astrology. There are mounds on the Butler County Hilltop Work site, just off from the top. In them, indeed, just as there is in the Middletown Mound up the river a few miles, then again at Miamisburg, even a few miles more up the same river, there are giant skeletons in them, and science has had a tough time dealing with the knowledge. Because it doesn’t fit our perceptions of who lived in America before America was what it is today. Instead, it looks like those who did live here moved all over the earth and took with them a massive religion of astrology to the far corners of the planet. And they did so long before Europeans were even thinking about building boats. And the natives of America that we call them today were likely global citizens 10,000 years ago, and the proof of their culture is there looming over Butler County like a ghost that is no longer invisible to the casual spectator, thanks to the great scientists and volunteer efforts to open it to the public with a great spectacle finally. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

My Defense of the ‘Star Wars’ Hotel: If it brings joy to people, which is does, its worth doing

I think it’s a huge story, even if it only concerns a small part of the overall population. After all, the topic of the day is shareholder capitalism that is attempting to be destroyed by the Desacrators of Davos strategy of stakeholder capitalism. And few companies are a bigger target for them than Disney Entertainment in the United States. Progressives have jumped all over the Disney Company. And now the Star Wars property they purchased from George Lucas in 2012 reflects the attack accurately from the Desecrators of Davos, the progressive incursion into all our lives not through the front door of politics, but through the backdoor of finance and business. Star Wars is an excellent meter to measure this kind of thing. It started out from the mind of George Lucas as a warning to 8 to 12-year-old boys how not to grow up to become evil. And today, it is the very definition of state control and authority to the compliance of the nanny state; everything Star Wars wasn’t. Naturally, fans are very upset about it and are letting Disney know. And now, after working on it for a decade and spending over a billion dollars developing their live Star Wars experiences at Disney World and Disneyland, the much talked about Star Wars hotel called, The Galactic Starcruiser is open for business, and all eyes have been on it. Many Star Wars fans are hating it and have been speaking out against it. So I have been watching it closely, and I have thoughts on it that are very much relevant to all our corporate problems in America. The challenge of wrestling away from the Desecrators of Davos insurgents our American concepts of capitalism from the imposition of state-controlled stakeholder capitalism is the challenge. Ironically, this Star Wars hotel finds itself right in the middle as a form of art displayed for all the world to see.

Star Wars is all about fighting back against institutionalized systems. But under Disney, they are all about yielding to that institutionalization. That was the critical error Bob Iger, and Kathy Kennedy made with Star Wars under the ownership of Disney. They should have followed the George Lucas plan. Instead, they ended up with a massive mess that will never be fixed. That is sad, but it’s why fans are so angry at Disney. However, I see some good in it all, and I think personally, Galaxy’s Edge in Disney World is one of the most fantastic things I’ve ever experienced. I will never forget my vacation there in 2019 with my wife. We had about two or three days of the best time I’ve ever had visiting the Star Wars park there at Hollywood Studios and other attractions. It was the first time she and I had been kid-free in about two decades, and we were able to enjoy all that just as a couple. So I am still grateful for that experience, and I can see why people would want to go to the Galactic Starcruiser, which is essentially a Star Wars cruise in space. It’s very ambitious; it costs around 4 to 6 thousand per person to do and is essentially a Fantasy Island experience.   For three days and two nights, you enter the world of Star Wars all immersively and practically live a live Star Wars novel, which I think is pretty cool. Now I’m a gun at my hip kind of Star Wars fan. Not a sit around and play games kind of guy, and eat food and listen to music. If I don’t get to wear a DL-44 on my hip and go laser tagging, it’s not a lot of fun for me. It would cost me about $100K to take my clan. I checked it out, thought about it, and decided they’d like it, but not for that price. But, I know quite a few employees at Disney, many at the executive level, and I understand what they’ve done. They did their best. I also follow quite a few influencers on YouTube who work in the Orlando region, and they love the Starcruiser. They are much more social butterflies than I am, and I think it’s great in the world we are living in today that there is something like the Starcruiser for them. And in that context, I hope the Starcruiser is successful for Disney. Because I’d like to see, it remain an option. 

While at the Cincinnati Comic-Con this past September, I had a chance to talk to Timothy Zahn about this modern Star Wars stuff, and he’s pretty much where I am. He’s the guy responsible for all the great novels that came from Star Wars, going all the way back to the 90s when he started the trend. My wife and I have read well over 200 Star Wars novels. We are not fans of the new stuff since Disney bought Lucasfilm and turned radically more progressive. But at that Comic-Con, as Zahn signed a few books for me because I do love his books, we talked about the joy of those comic cons. There are people there who have had bad childhoods, society has let them down, religion has let them down, and they find refuge in Star Wars. They like to dress up and escape the world’s disappointments with some form of art, and Star Wars gives them that refuge. And I remember how it was in Hollywood Studios in the early days before Disney bought Lucasfilm. There were Star Wars weekends in May that were actual celebrations. I can’t blame Disney for wanting to give those fans what they dreamed of, a Star Wars land all their own, and even a hotel experience that allowed people to cosplay for three full days eating, thinking, and living Star Wars in a much better way than they would a comic con. That’s one of the reasons I read so many Star Wars books. In my crazy, very stressful life, those books were great places to relax and think about big concepts. I love them or have loved them. The Star Wars hotel was a chance to throw away the disappointments of politics, life itself, and live a fantasy. And that I think is a very useful thing. 

Even with all the politics, I might still do it with my family at some point. Seeing what Disney has done, they have tried hard to thread the needle and give everyone what they want, which usually means everyone is a little disappointed. But, knowing what we do about the world, I think we should all feel proud that we have a culture that can actually pull off something like this for this amount of money and commit resources to even attempting to do it. The Galactic Starcruiser is enormously ambitious, and if it survives, it could evolve over time in a positive direction. My grandchildren would get quite a kick out of it because the experience is essentially an escape room, a broadway play, and a novel all wrapped up into one experience. I can think of people who are very sick and dying of cancer, who are kids who would love for this to be the very last thing they did in life. They would die happy. They want to escape their problems, and art does that for human beings at its highest form. It’s not so much hiding from the pains of life as much as it gives the mind emotional distance from massive disappointments. And if this Starcruiser experience can do that for people, at any cost, then I think that’s a wonderful thing. And I hope that Disney can keep it going because there sure was a lot of love that went into it for all the right reasons. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Why People Don’t Crash Into Each Other All The Time: Adam Smith’s ‘Wealth of Nations’ and the “Invisible Hand”

The Invisible Hand, Why People Don’t Crash Into Each Other With Their Cars

To me, there is no question.  But the Biden administration and the Obama administration before it was all about Keynesian economics, which was a disaster from the outset of the Red Decade when the socialist John Maynard Keynes implemented it in England.  When you hear Biden or any Davos billionaire talk up Keynesian economics, what you are hearing is utter destruction by macroeconomic socialists and students of Karl Marx intending to give government entirely too much power, which is why the most power-hungry of our society like it so much.  Billionaires want this system because they can always control politicians with their money, which ultimately lets them rule the world from the shadows.  It was a disaster from day one.  When Keynes first spoke about it, failure was already percolating, and it is even more so today.  The only reason people don’t have a stronger opinion about Keynesian economics is that it’s the only kind of economics they teach in college, really, and all the colleges of the world, for that matter. It’s the only thing Joe Biden knows, and when he says the world’s top minds all agree with is infrastructure plan, he’s essentially saying they all studied Keynesian economics at the same schools by the same loser teachers, for all the same reasons.  And they never figured it out, and they continue to stand by their Keynesian economics in the way that they promote vaccines for Covid when we all know that they do nothing for treatment.  Only methods like hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin effectively treat Covid.  Yet, the government insists on failed methods to cover up their sheer stupidity from the outset.  The government never wants to admit that they were wrong on economics or disease control.  That is why they can’t be trusted and must be heavily managed by the public.  Because government always tends to go astray. 

Of course, my position is not one that I reject everything.  But I reject much of what the progressive era has produced, including the work of Sigmond Freud, Carl Jung, the positions of the media and politics over that span, and most of what people have been taught in university.  It’s not all garbage, but we used to know better.  And the answers are there. The progressive era was essentially the creation of Karl Marks and Edward Bellamy, where they made a global move to micromanage people with centralized control, and it’s been a disaster.  To this day, many still cling to it, but that’s because they are stupid and have forgotten how things really work in the world. When it comes to economics, and America was essentially its creation, the book I most treasure and have read countless times is The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith.  It’s what all economic theories should be based on. We can see the benefits of American culture as it relates to the rest of the world. It has been the undisputed champion of the great economic theories of our times, including Greek, Roman, and Egyptian societies.  Never did something work so well as the ideas of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations.  Progressives didn’t like it because they wanted central control. Smith’s invisible hand is a repulsive concept to those who want to micromanage others for all kinds of psychologically wrong reasons. 

When I explain The Wealth of Nations to people and the concept of the “invisible hand,” I often talk about America’s car culture.  I tell the story in the video above of me driving my family through the Smokey Mountains with our RV in the fast lane of I-40.  Next to us is a logging truck.  In front of us was a dump truck.  All around them are numerous cars and trucks of all shapes and sizes winding through the mountains and tunnels at 70 MPH.

In many cases, there are only a few feet between us and the next car.  Next to us on the left side is a concrete wall, and beyond that is the opposite lane of traffic going the other way at the same speed.  The whole journey is perilous if looking at how the government looks at things or the Keynesian economic theory.  If anyone person makes the slightest mistake, there could be a 50 car pile up and hundreds of people killed.  But truly, seldom do crashes ever happen, and statistically, we might go through our whole lives with many hours of opportunity for errors to occur and only have a few crashes.  As a society, we have accepted the risk and enjoy the rewards.  If you leave in the morning with your car, you are most of the time going to come home safe and sound at the end of the day because it is in everyone’s self-interest to preserve their property.  So crashes seldom occur—that is the nature of the “Invisible Hand.” Self-interest governs behavior for the benefit of all—the key to understanding The Wealth of Nations and the general success of America as a global superpower. 

Keynesian economics is like the subway, public bus, or the public toilet with people making a mess and never cleaning it up.  When people don’t own the property, they don’t take care of it because it replaces self-interest with shared benefit.  And that means that the lowest value always wins.  If the person dressed in a nice suit is sitting next to some barely surviving bum who hasn’t washed their clothes in weeks, the nicely dressed person has everything to lose in the investment while the bum loses nothing.  They can only gain from such an exchange.  So the net result is that public transportation is dirty, uncomfortable, too expensive, and it never gets you where you want to go because other people determine your travel route.  Everything is centrally planned, so the net result is that everyone is just a bit unhappy with the shared experience.  It’s not by accident that liberals like public transportation for the same reasons, and conservatives love their cars.  They want independence to decide where they want to go and when they will get there.  And they don’t like to share their space with people who aren’t equally invested in their appearance. 

When people are free to come and go as they please and have a stake in getting there, they tend not to run into each other, which might damage their property or their life.  When you look at a highway at 3 AM and wonder where all those people are going at all hours of the day, all days of the week, no central government could provide instruction for all those little details.  Only self-interest could drive such ambition, and out of that activity comes a tremendous economic benefit. I’ve driven all over the United States at all hours of the day, and seldom, even in the most remote section of the country, was I ever alone on the road for long.   That is the essence of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations.  It is the economic means of American life, it should be studied exclusively in high school, starting in the fifth grade, and nothing else matters.  I will never say that Adam Smith was the final word on economic theory. I’m sure future improvements will be made as necessity dictates.  But Keynesian economics was not that improvement.  It was an attack on the free market by centralized planners who wanted an administrative state.  Not people who wish to support or understand why any country is better when people are turned loose to act on behalf of their own self-interest freely.  But we see the magic every day, in our cars, on our roads, anywhere where people travel freely with an extension of themselves with private transportation.  Any trace of Keynesian economics in American society or any society for that matter should be eradicated from our minds forever and remembered for its stupidity and malice for which it was constructed.  We need to stick with what works and has worked.  Not what only gives power to the most insecure and unintelligent among us, the modern progressives. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Do Not Fear the ‘Metaverse’: Remember Facebook cheated in the 2020 election the old fashioned way, they aren’t that powerful

Do Not Fear Meta, They are More Bark than Bite

I’m not going to say that we shouldn’t worry about this new “Metaverse” concept that Facebook has changed its name to.  But I will say that it’s not going to work out the way they have planned.  Of course, this is referencing the rebranding of Facebook after they have been caught in election fraud, as outlined in the Molly Hemmingway book Rigged, and have undergone a significant name change that they say will incorporate virtual reality.  There has been a lot of talk about this move and fear about it because the tech companies, in general, have acquired entirely too much power in our lives, which we’ve given to them willingly.  They have made communication with other people over vast distances possible.  I remember not that long ago where long-distance phone calls were a very real thing, so to go to what we have now, where you can speak to anybody anywhere in the world free of charge over the internet, it’s quite astonishing.  Then to have what we can see coming on the horizon, to engage other people in virtual environments all hours of the day, anywhere in the world is attractive.  But we all knew that the villains of the world would attack us from that front at some point.  The definitions are still dripping wet, so much of what we have seen over this last decade caught many by surprise.  Tyranny was always going to attempt to attack from that sector of the economy through all this new technology, and to date, many think it has won. 

Yet, I have different thoughts about the nature of technology and the technocrats who have looked to use it to become the new masters of the universe.  Mark Zuckerberg and his Facebook company were always about information collection, and that is undoubtedly what they are hoping to do with this new move toward a “Metaverse.” They want you in it because they want to control as much of your life as possible, as any company would who want to make the consumer relationship easier on themselves.  I noticed the start of this concept of being everywhere anytime actually, the last time I was at Disney World a few years ago, and used their bracelet system to get into all the parks and take care of purchases along the way.  Obviously, this concept was sold to us out of convenience. Still, the companies using the technology wanted out of it to be the biggest brother in our lives they could get away with so they could control the customer experience well outside the jurisdiction of the amusement parks themselves. Facebook’s Metaverse looks to take their wall platform where you can talk to all the people in your life that you’ve ever known and carry it over to an all-encompassing virtual environment that will embody artificial intelligence and the future of bioengineering.  It sounds big and scary at first, but there are significant limits associated with technology that many aren’t considering, even if it did get away from us the way many fear and become the plot of some Terminator movie.  The problem with technology is that it’s soulless and will continue to be.  And to fulfill that gap, companies like Facebook and Disney expect to trade-off convenience for the lack of customer experience that ultimately will follow. 

The great fear is that we are moving behind the human experience of existence. Soon, computers and programs, in general, will be so advanced that they will exceed human intellect and rule us all without our control.  Many within Facebook’s Metaverse and Google’s many data collection platforms believe they have successfully mapped out the behavior of human beings to the point where artificial intelligence will take over the world.  But let me remind everyone that they, even with all their ability to map out the human experience with “like” buttons and comments on their homepages, have been analyzed to scrutiny beyond reason, were not able to stop people from voting for Donald Trump for president.  Or to stop the MAGA movement and populism in general around the world with all their technology.  Facebook, in fact, out of a promise to its employees, ensured the 2020 election would be taken from President Trump and that the tech companies themselves held all the power now over elections.  Of course, the young millennials lacking experience in the world believed Zuckerberg and the climate freaks at Google.  It still took half a billion Zuckerbucks to buy off voters on the ground one carload at a time to stuff ballots and tamper with paper votes.  Facebook didn’t have near the influence over the population they had been selling to the public, and much of what they were doing for shareholders was smoke and mirrors.  What we learned was that people liked to send pictures of themselves to grandma halfway across the country on Facebook and that they might hit the like button on her recently baked pie. Still, there is much about human beings that they hide from these data collection devices.  As it turns out, all Google, Facebook, Twitter, and many others could muster was inspiring the animal instincts of human beings and nothing more. Indeed not the eternal aspects of human behavior, their hopes, and dreams beyond their desires for food, sex, and economic fulfillment. 

I love video games, and I love virtual reality, but I have to say, and this is undoubtedly the case on popular multiplayer games like Call of Duty, which I play a lot; it always feels like a condom as opposed to an authentic experience.  Programers and the artificial reality that results from massive computers analyzing all our online moves only capture what a programmer thought to identify as a value.  And the artificial intelligence that follows only builds its perception of the world based on those limits.  I can move a lot better in real life than in Call of Duty.  It’s an exciting environment worth the technology, but it does not account for many human attributes such as imagination which has connections to many-dimensional aspects of experience.  The soul of a human exists way beyond the life of the body we inhabit, and this is still a mystery to the tech dictators at Google and Facebook.  Therefore, behavior still is and will continue to be a problem for them well into the future.  All their data collection only helps them understand the consumer experience. It has no way of understanding such things as to why people voted for Donald Trump despite their efforts to stop him or us from voting for a populist movement.  Much of the reason they had to conduct so much censorship during the last election and the use of medicines to fight off Covid-19 was that they had to hide from the world their limits because investors were watching.  Zuckerberg and Facebook already had this Metaverse all mapped out as part of their future, but as it turned out, it had severe limits and would continue to because it was soulless.  It lacked the elements that the soul of human beings truly desires, and that little secret only expands as the math problem of artificial intelligence programming expounds. If you get intelligence wrong at its birthplace, it only exacerbates the situation the more you use it.  So instead of artificial intelligence taking over the world as the newest power-hungry dictator, what you end up with is a nuisance.

The power of technology will be in its computing power, in being a beneficial, powerful calculator. It will not be the next excellent football star who can throw a ball down the field between two defenders for a touchdown with only seconds to think.  Because humanity has imagination, and artificial intelligence requires humans to explain imagination and the soul before writing a program to make it.   Yet, the humans programming these things don’t understand it themselves even though they may experience it.  They can’t identify it or its value.  So it doesn’t get measured and programmed, leaving all technology woefully dull and limited in what it can do.  So before you panic over artificial intelligence taking over the world, remember, they couldn’t stop Trump or us from voting for him.  They had to cheat like Democrats have been doing the old-fashioned way for over a hundred years, and for Mark Zuckerberg and the other tech dictators, they know that’s their ultimate weakness.

Rich Hoffman

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China is at War with America: Through their guilt, we see their footprints in the wet paint

The Way China Fights War

The first thing people must understand about war is that for most people, they barely notice.  For instance, during the American Revolution, it was just a few miles to the north of Philadelphia. Americans and British offers commingled at parties and other social events just as Washington’s troops froze at their encampment in Valley Forge.  The residence of Philadelphia primarily played both sides so they could survive whoever eventually won the war.  Just as we see now with the American war with China, it’s an undeclared war, and that’s the way China wants it.  There is a lot of commingling because ordinary people know they need to survive and find a way to appease whoever wins.  And currently, most people, as they did with England during the Revolution, are planning for China to succeed.  So they play along to get along.  There is still open trade between the countries; there are still ownerships that extend between the nations.  The war that China wants to have with America is not one with troops and tanks but in culture.  Their strategy is to replace our culture with their own, so they plan to convince those average people to embrace their culture gradually and through that means to undo America and replace it with Chinese communism. China’s premier book on strategy, The Art of War, lays it all out for everyone to see.  They don’t mean to be friends with us or anyone in the West.  They intend to conquer us and rule over us, implementing their culture at all costs. 

Warfare changed in the world the moment that the radio was invented.  World War II and the various conflicts in the east and Mideast involving communism were carryovers, but war changed.  Before mass communication around the world, which we have today, the goal was to use sheer force to force an opponent into capitulation.  Now, such a surrender of culture can occur through the media, which is why China has invested so heavily into buying up American media and using it to shape our opinions against American capitalism and toward Chinese communism.  Since most of us think of war as planes, tanks, missiles, and troops, we never declared war formally because the war with China has always been about other kinds of means to instigate a capitulation.  Remember the power of Voice of America during the Cold War.  By sending in media to the U.S.S.R from the United States, considerably eroded everyday citizens belief in communism and caused a massive erosion in support for the mother government.  Combined with the outrageous spending Russia involved themselves in to keep up with Reagan’s military buildup, it crushed the nation and communism from that part of the world. 

China and many others worldwide have studied that playbook and are attempting to use it against America.  They have loaned us money to control our debt obligations.  They have purchased property in America to have a vested interest in what goes on in our country.  They have a massive spy network of honeypots raised from unwanted little girls in their culture to subvert the politics of our republic.  They have been hard at work for decades, infiltrating our institutions and bending them toward communism at every turn.  I often tell the story of the Children’s Museum in Indianapolis, Indiana, where one of their most significant exhibits is essentially a brochure for China and their eventual domination of the world’s markets.  The exhibit essentially states, “China will be the next world superpower; better get on board.” People have gradually accepted this to be accurate, making the conquest that much easier. 

The primary strategy they wish to provoke against us is frustration in our republic form of government.  We have designed our way of government in America to work slow, not get in the way of business and commerce too much.  That is one of the keys to our fantastic GDP.  Government works too slow to get into the form of our economic engine.  But communists want to show how efficient a central party rule can be if they go total authoritarian.  Where decisions are made by a few people and are imposed on everyone else without debate.  China wants to tie up our courts; they want to see Republicans fighting Democrats.  They want to see our media in chaos because they want to see our internal strife bringing down capitalism from these forces they have infected with their ideas so that the collapse comes from within, giving them plausible deniability. 

But things have not been good on the China front; they have been caught tampering with our elections in America because they went too far with their tampering.  They don’t care to break American laws.  But in their haste, China has left behind their footprints in the paint they have surrounded themselves with into a corner.  And of course, they have been caught on Covid-19, a manufactured virus they produced in the now-famous Wuhan lab with Dr. Fauci.  They have tried to contain the story with their global media partners of Google and Facebook, but the story has gotten out, just as the information did back in the days of Voice of America. News still gets out, and China has its hands on all kinds of duplicitous activity.  America can’t afford to call them out on it because of our debts, because China has the goods on so many of our politicians and their relationships to the spy network.  There has been a lot of commingling.  I pointed out that during the Revolution, Benedict Arnold was one of Washington’s favorite generals.  But during all that commingling with the British officers, Arnold met a nice girl very sympathetic to England.  So out of love or lust, or both, he betrayed Washington and fought on the side of the English.  It happens all the time.  The only thing that has changed is the way we fight.  Not the intent of the fight.  Many in our present congress have had such relationships, and they are compromised to China, and they can’t fight back, not anymore.  Their hearts are not clean. 

Yet never confuse the matter, the Chinese want to show how slow our republic form of government is and how fast their communist government can act because the flaw in their belief is that government can produce.  That is the failure of all Marxist ideologies.  Marx never figured out that centralized authority could not force fairness on people while still producing on a mass scale.  Marxism never accounted for the personal autonomy of individual free will.  America discovered that and developed it in its own unique way, and the communist government of China knows it cannot win face to face.  They have had to resort to all this double-dealing and internal insurrection as their only means to accomplish their objective.  One of the reasons their mistakes have increased, and they have been exposed is because the Trump economy was threatening to get too far in front of them, destroying their goals of becoming the world’s most dominant economy.  So, they had to take out Trump and did anything they could to do so, starting with the manufactured Covid virus and the election fraud that we are now seeing on the various electronic voting machines around America during the last election.  Ultimately, they plan to capitalize on people’s hatred of Joe Biden, a president they put in place, and to shove Americans toward communism for a solution to all the dysfunction they hear about in the news, much of which is now owned by corporate media loyal to the Chinese change state.  And that is where we are, at war with China and their intent to rule the world with communism.  And nothing else. 

Rich Hoffman

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Larry Elder is Going to Win in California: Its all about punishing Gavin Newsom, and more will follow

Larry Elder is going to Win in California

Hey, don’t fret so much. Don’t let the opposition to America make you feel like the situation is desperate.  Remember, I told everyone at the start of all this, the day after the Election of 2020, that we’d sort all this out and things would make sense.  But the panic, purposely driven, would outpace the solutions.  It would take time to untangle the mess, but we certainly would, and now we are starting to see some of those sentiments emerging.  Gavin Newsom is losing in California; everything points to a recall of his terrible state handling.  He knows it, the Biden administration knows it, and the media knows it, which is why the pressure against Larry Elder is cranking up so intensely.  But I’m saying it’s too late.  Short of the actual election and the very real reality of election fraud, the hatred of Gavin Newsom in what he created himself is set in stone. That’s why there’s a recall election because Newsom has done such a terrible job as governor, and he abused people too much during the Covid pandemic.  He used his power, and now it’s time to pay for it.  Even though what the media is showing is the latest from Don Henley’s “Dirty Laundry,” the truth is that good people are finally getting a chance to stick up for themselves with a vote.   Even Democrats are jumping away from Newsom in these final days of his administration.  And because of that, and no matter what Larry Elder may or may not have done in his life, he’s the one with the name ID, and in a race with over 40 other contenders, he’s by default going to be the one who gets the most votes in that California system.  So he’ll likely be the governor within a few weeks, and California can join Texas, Florida, and South Dakota as some of the best Republican-run states and save themselves from liberal doom, endless forest fires, degrading economics, and an out of control social safety net. 

Newsom is poised to be the first of many governors to pay for their mistakes made during Covid.  Americans are tolerant because they are free, and they are law and order types who will do what’s right so long as they trust the people defining right.  When Trump was President, and he locked down the economy because Dr. Fauci and Bill Gates told him he needed to, people listened.  They did the social distancing.  They put on the dumb masks.  They did what the government led by Mike Pence’s special team told them to do.  The Trump team wanted to solve the problem of Covid, and they bought the CDC approach of spending 15 days to stop the spread at the time.  Trump was trying to get the economy opened by Easter of 2020. People followed out of their good nature because they sincerely believed that Covid was a legitimate issue needing government supervision.  But as we quickly learned, Covid was an invention of the World Health Organization guided by China itself who had our own NIH wrapped around their finger.  Covid wasn’t about a virus at all, but it was all about the Davos plan to provoke a great economic reset, as they termed it, and several liberal governors knew all about it ahead of time.  Gavin Newsom was one of them, and he quickly took his state in a radical left direction.  Mike DeWine from Ohio was another, surprising only that he called himself a Republican.  Other governors such as Andrew Cuomo from New York also turned full tyrant. These governors locked down their people and their economies in unreasonable ways well into the summer and into the fall, well past the election. 

We all learned too late that the goal in America was to use Covid to change the rules of the election, which gave Democrats an opportunity to cheat in massive ways.  Earlier in the year, Mike DeWine did that very thing with a Republican primary that he was indifferent to the cost to the candidates, which sent chills down the spines of people who could see what was happening.  It was a dark time indeed and was very scary.  It still is because we learned that we couldn’t trust people we thought we could.  In Newsom’s case, he might have been a Democrat. Still, the hypocrisy that he displayed and his hunger for power went well beyond party lines and into the soul of the average American who distains that kind of display publically.  It scared people, the influence these governors utilized so quickly under the guise of Covid safety protocols.  And people went to their corners to plot the demise of these governors because they weren’t going to put up with that kind of behavior any time.  For the governors, they had bought the momentum of the Great Reset and thought that the change state of Covid would be permanent and that there would be a new normal for which they would escape prosecution.  But in Ohio, the senate got together early in 2021 and took away DeWine’s power through emergency health orders which are why Ohio hasn’t been forced to adopt all the current CDC nonsense.  And other states are doing similar acts to cap off the power of their out-of-control powers.  Last week, Andy Beshear of Kentucky had to remove his mask mandates due to the Supreme Court stepping in and forcing him to do so.  Now California, out of all places, which is a stronghold of liberalism, is turning against their governor to remove him from office. 

When California goes down, and New York has already lost their governor to sexual abuse issues, think what that will do to Democrats everywhere.  When Kamala Harris doesn’t hit the campaign trail to help Newsom out, it tells you everything you need to know.  Of course, the Biden administration wants to hide behind a mask and the debacle of Afghanistan.  The honesty of their incompetence is too much for them.  Not that they screwed Afghanistan up so badly on purpose, but like in the case of Andrew Cuomo getting busted for sexual harassment, it is better than being removed from office for nursing home murders.   Nobody wants to think of the families of their loved ones who had to watch behind windows forbid to even hold their hands into death because of CDC Covid restrictions.  Cuomo getting out of office over grabbing some ass is a concession that is too good for any governor.  But justice is happening; it’s just not occurring in some cinematic fashion.  We expect things to be tied up in a nice knot as we see in our movies, but in reality, it’s more like a book.  The endings are complicated over several chapters, not just the last 15 minutes of a 2-hour film.  I knew we’d get to this point, and the bad guys are going to be punished.  In the case of Newsom, his state will recall him from power because he abused his authority.  And the people do and will exercise that power within the law if they have the chance.  If that chance is taken from them, then they’ll do it at gunpoint.  January 6th was nothing.  And the government has grossly abused its power in holding people without due process in that case.  These things are only stacking up, but payment will be demanded by those who employ these politicians.  They won’t put up with being pushed around.  California is just the first.  There will be more, and that is the state of the future.  

Rich Hoffman

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Yes, the National Parks are Full: That’s what happens when government tampers with the economy

One unmistakable thing is that if you get a chance to travel this summer as I have been doing, the National Parks are packed.  They were filled way over capacity, everywhere.  Park Rangers are perplexed with the number of people they are suddenly dealing with and are complaining that there needs to be a reservation system at the National Parks to help them manage the capacity.  Now that is a very “government” thing to do; rather than embrace the surge in National Park interest, they are looking for ways to turn them into a BMV where visitors need to take a number before visiting to see their favorite tree.  In the video above, I talk about the several parks my family visited recently and the news report about Zion in Utah.  The story was from Idaho, which I saw on a television screen while staying there; the capacity problem was a direct byproduct of the government screw-up on Covid, where people were confined in their homes for a year. Now that they are free, they are doing all the things they wanted to do over that period, and the surge is the reaction, which government doesn’t know how to handle. 

I tend to have a soft spot for park rangers and anybody who works in the park systems.  We have an America the Beautiful pass, which I am very proud of.  This year, we have used it a lot, which essentially waives the 35 dollar fee that it takes to get into all the parks.  As this story about National Park capacity was breaking, we visited Yellowstone, one of the biggest ones.  We were in the Tetons.  We even went down into Dinosaur National Monument, and there are fees to get into all those parks covered by America The Beautiful passes.  I am typically in a pretty good mood when I’m visiting a National Park, so I overlook more than often the apparent liberalism of the government employees, including park rangers.  But I heard more bitching from them than I cared to.  Even over at the Yellowstone lodges at Old Faithful, workers complained about the number of people at the park because I was there in a midweek setting, and the employees expected an easy day.  Instead, at 9 AM, they had rushes of people that resembled 2 PM on a Saturday, and they were not happy about it. 

I deal with these kinds of things by getting up at 6 AM and getting everywhere before everyone else does.  The crowds didn’t bother me much until we were leaving.  The crowds can be managed if you think out of the box.  But if you think you’re going to wake up at noon and hit the parks, you can forget it, which is why Zion has already implemented an appointment system.  They had an appointment system at Dinosaur National Monument as well, which irritated me.  We were so early in the morning that it didn’t matter, but in the middle of Utah, they were seeing surges that the park rangers were having a hard time dealing with.  It was both fun to watch and grossly sick because they were essentially upset that they had to work, which they aren’t used to.  Other parks are feeling the pressure.  Thankfully when we were there, Yellowstone hadn’t yet done such a thing as a reservation system.  It defies the purpose of spontaneous adventure when you must check in with a park ranger to see a geyser.  But these are new problems caused by the government that government is not prepared to deal with.

What I find interesting is the human reaction to the problem.  The Covid lockdowns were pretty scary stuff.  The idea that a government that didn’t want to control the virus that came from China could destroy the economy, lock people in their homes and expect some tame result at the end of it is unfathomably ignorant.  There were solutions that were ignored, such as hydroxychloroquine and zinc.  Covid-19 was a self-imposed stupidity because there were ways to solve the problem.  The government ignored them, hoping to control people until this July 4th Holiday under the Biden administration.  But the dam broke this spring as people pushed their governors to ignore the CDC rules and reopen their economies, and thus, out came this rush of interest in the National Parks.  It looked for a time that the new standard would remain and that we would never return to a time in America without masks and social distancing.  But much to our credit, people got sick of being lied to, and they just started to ignore the government, and now there is this massive surge in National Park attendance.  People spent their time in isolation thinking about the things they’d like to do, like going to Yellowstone, and the moment they could, they did. 

We saw the same thing at Jenny Lake in the Tetons.  It was early in the morning when we arrived, and cars had already filled the parking lot and were piled up down the road toward Jackson for miles.  Now Jenny Lake is very nice; they have great accommodations.  Once we finally arrived in the little village, they have there like restrooms, a visitor center, and a gift shop at the foot of the magnificent mountains; it looked like Disney World with people occupying almost every bit of the available sidewalk.  It was packed.  The employees at those places had a kind of blasted look on their faces.  I was glad to see it.  I think it was good for people to get out and see such magnificent places.  I think it’s also good for the employees to be challenged a bit.  Maybe they got jobs with the National Park Service because they were liberal and didn’t want to work very hard, but this was a good reality check.  Whatever the viewpoint, the only reason can come from people leaving their homes and seeing their national parks, even if they were crowded.  I didn’t mind the crowds at all, but there were significant crowds that would have just been worse if there was a reservation system. 

The lesson is that this is what happens when government tampers with the will of the people.  Unforeseen circumstances are bound to arise.  This built-up serge of interest in National Parks was not planned. The reaction by the public has taken the government quite by shock; they were very flat-footed in dealing with the market needs.  And since the government does not make decisions based on market forces but bureaucratic sentiment, they were clueless about the outcome.  But that problem isn’t for us, the visitors. They’re going to have to figure it all out, the government. They’ll have to complain to someone else because we don’t want to hear it.  In the future, when they think of shutting down society and the economy that fuels it, they need to think of these mistakes.  These surges may last for years.  Things may never get back to normal for the National Parks as the lockdowns look to have triggered people’s desire to do something in their life they used to put off.  I suspect that the new normal that everyone has been talking about isn’t accepting lockdowns and more government regulations on personal behavior. Instead, an increase in people not putting off what they could do today might have otherwise been inclined to wait until tomorrow.  Because with government, they may screw up everything tomorrow, leaving today as the only choice to do something.

Rich Hoffman

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Edward Snowden Predicted it All: Election fraud by our intelligence agencies is a real problem

Snowden was Right

It was interesting to see the movie Snowden again after the 2020 election.  The film by Oliver Stone first came out in 2016, and when I saw it then, Trump was just about to enter his first term of office.  This was before we learned about the FISA court abuse from the FBI, the tyranny of the Mueller Report, the payment of the Steele Dossier by the Democrat Party.  The two impeachment trials by Democrats of President Trump.  The China-driven Covid scandal to affect our elections.  The election fraud that we are learning about during the 2020 elections.  All of that was predicted in the Snowden movie about the CIA computer analyst Edward Snowden who fled for Russia to avoid prosecution for secrets revealed about the vast reach the NSA has into all global people, especially in America. I was skeptical back then about the ability of our intelligence agencies to have so much control over our election process.  But watching the movie again, it’s evident that our intelligence agencies always planned to control elections, to take that chaotic process away from voters, and turn it over to government management of their kind of people.  And that’s how Joe Biden ended up president.  Edward Snowden did try to warn us.  We didn’t listen.

Cliffhanger the Overmanwarrior


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The Dream of Being Awake: Vivek Ramaswamy and his book ‘Woke, Inc’

Vivek Ramaswamy

I had an excellent opportunity to meet Vivek Ramaswamy, talking about his upcoming book, Woke, Inc., at a Butler County event sponsored by several great Republicans.  Butler County Treasurer Nancy Nix and her husband are a few of the best people anybody could imagine. They were responsible for setting up the event, which features a discussion on the problem of “wokeness” in American business and is a topic I am very concerned with.  I always appreciate when I have an opportunity to learn something new, and I did as Vivek spoke for an hour and a half at the Republican Victory Center in Middletown, Ohio.  He said that the definition of “woke” was waking up from the dream of being an American, which startled me as a metaphor.  I suppose it’s an obvious definition, but the way Vivek presented it was pretty alarming.  Ramaswamy, you might know from Fox Business and Fox News in general, he’s on several shows regularly, specifically Tucker Carlson.  So it was quite a treat to get him for an evening all to ourselves to discuss this critical issue as I talk about below.

Talking about Woke, Inc.

Cliffhanger the Overmanwarrior


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