Category: Political Theroy

Why Kids Like to Play Shoot with Toy Guns: The Mandalorian is all about cool gun fights

Another reason The Mandalorian is such a great show is because it’s the first that I can think of where gun fights are embraced in a very long time. Watching these episodes, I can’t help but think of all the radio broadcasts I had done at WAAM talking about this very subject with a guy who loved Disney so much that he left radio to work for the company. We were perplexed that Disney had a policy at the parks that did not allow for guns on costumes due to the very progressive stand the company had toward the Second Amendment. All in the name of security. Well, and I’m very happy to see it, but all that is out the window now. The Mandalorian isn’t just a show about the nobility of violence, but its also about gunfights in ways that only classic television westerns were, and this is a good sign of many great things to come.

When I was growing up I play fought all the time. At recess me and the other kids of my class would pretend anything was a gun and we’d shoot at each other religiously. Of course none of us grew up to be mass killers, play fighting is a natural state for young people, especially boys. So the primal necessity of having gunfights in The Mandalorian is an admission of sorts from the Disney Company that they understand that what will follow, as they have Star Wars events at their theme parks and the general nature of the cosplay culture that fans will be dressing up as their favorite Mandalorian and their guns, and there won’t be much that Disney can do about having their name on it. They bought Star Wars and guns are a huge part of the property, so if they want to get the value out of their purchase, they have to embrace that culture and know that little kids have a need to play fight with each other for needs that they will need to understand once they become adults.

What’s even better in The Mandalorian is that the fights are not confused with the nobility of Jedi fighting with lightsabers. Its all about guns. Watching through the first three episodes and noticing the online reaction to them that primal need is alive and well with people. Even though public education has sought to drive the desire for such recreation out of the mind of their students, the play fighting that was always so important to me growing up using combs, rulers and our own hands to pretend to shoot guns, has moved online to the video game world. The people making The Mandalorian obviously have been playing Star Wars: Battlefront II and other shooting games that are much more popular than many people in politics are willing to admit. This whole notion of gun control politically is going against the tide of human desire. Disney has had to come to terms with that, and the rest of the world will soon follow. The Mandalorian is just the product coming about to support a market need. The need was always there, but it was politics that slowed down the fulfillment as social experiments to the contrary were fully in place.

The Mandalorian is so good in fact that I can’t imagine that millions of young people, boys and girls, are going to rush out to buy some version of their favorite gun from the series. And I understand. I have hanging from the mantel of my fireplace in my home, right next to my reading chair, my DL-44 in its official Han Solo holster complete with all the little greebles that only hard-core Star Wars fans would understand. It’s a toy, but I like looking at it so I keep it out so I can see it every day. When I was a kid, the toy Han Solo gun was one of my favorite things to have and over the years that was my first introduction to guns which is still a very healthy hobby of mine. What they have today is much cooler, so young people have so many more options than I did. I can’t imagine how exciting it is for them that they can not only have such weapons, but that they can turn around and play Battlefront II all weekend when they aren’t in school with all their friends in a squad. In so many ways, play fighting has never been easier, or more popular than it is today, which is saying a lot.

Entertainment companies like Disney have had to come to terms with their responsibility in the whole political order. In entertainment, all companies have an obligation to the market needs of the consumers, for which young people want guns to play with for all kinds of very legitimate psychological reasons. The politics against guns is due to an infantile desire for the political class to have power over others and by promoting the disarming of society due to safety concerns, they are in the end seeking to make their jobs easier. The effort has nothing to do with making a better and more peaceful society, its just seeking to suppress human need for freedom so that earlier in their lives, children will learn to behave to a higher authority.

Obedience doesn’t sell very well in a free and open marketplace. There is a reason pop culture music is rebellious by nature and there is a reason kids like to play at violence and fighting. The fantasy in both cases is to break away from the social norms of existence so that something new might be carved out of the effort. In most cases, the children will grow up and become nice little conformists. However, when they are young and full of dreams, they play shoot hoping to be that cowboy, that Mandalorian, or that desperate smuggler from Star Wars looking to break free of the system and to create some heroic adventure in the process for themselves. They aren’t looking to be conformists to the social norm. Play fighting is to become good at overcoming oppression so that they might have the courage to do the same when it really matters later in their life.

Of course, a Disney theme park with all kinds of safety concerns, political parasites trying to extract money from them all the time, and insurance adjusters making everything a potential lawsuit, the easiest thing they can do is eliminate the temptation for something dangerous to happen. So they come up with their no gun policies in regard to cosplay and if there are guns they have to have those stupid orange colors on the barrels or the entire guns so that police don’t confuse them for the real thing. It’s easier on the political class, but terror on the kids who want to play with the guns and learn the basics about shooting through their leisure.

During those referred to radio broadcasts, I thought it was a pointless endeavor for Disney, and that has turned out to be right. If anything the need was only suppressed and now that the cat is out of the bag, I anticipate a steep increase in young people admitting to the world that they want to play shoot guns and they want their guns to look cool and realistic. Even though they are only toys, it is good to be thinking about these things as early as possible because there is honesty and hope in that kind of play that the political class has sought to destroy, and if their feelings get hurt in the process, so be it. They should have never attempted to tamper with the necessities of human development to begin with. They instead should have done their jobs and not sought to make it easier on themselves by altering the way kids play, and why they play it.

Rich Hoffman

Baby Yoda and the Mandalorian: Guilds, fraternities and organizations are no match for a good smuggler

Needless to say it, but I am very happy with The Mandalorian, the latest Star Wars show revealed on the new Disney+ streaming service. I think it’s the best show I’ve seen on television in quite a while, and I don’t just say that as a Star Wars fan. The first three episodes have completely captured pop culture with the revelation of the now famous baby Yoda and suddenly we have something very special on our hands that is bringing people together in a time where Democrats are trying to impeach President Trump so that they don’t have to run against him in 2020. Knowing how politically active the modern Disney Company is I was surprised that they even allowed for The Mandalorian to be made since the plot is essentially a “lone gunman” fighting his way for life after the events of Return of the Jedi and the fall of the Empire. There are lots of gunfighters and the way the episodes are filmed are very reminiscent of early Clint Eastwood westerns. But Disney more than anything is about making money, which they should be, and after the let downs of political tampering so far in the Kathy Kennedy era Star Wars shows, everyone seems to have learned their lesson and is making The Mandalorian in a way to make up all that to the fans. Needless to say, I’m a fan.

As all this is happening my wife and I are planning a trip to Disney World, its about time for me. I’ve always loved Disney because of their more traditional programming, such as Zorro and Davy Crockett which are both available on Disney+ and I have been watching them for the memories. Disney World and all those Florida theme parks are intended to be such optimistic places which a person like me feeds off of. But being the big corporate target that they are, not all management at Disney gets it and they do pander to Democrat and more dangerous progressive ideas way too often such as they had with Star Wars which I have covered here voluminously. Frozen II is out and doing good business, but it has several political messages that will be considered dated in the near future, especially in regard to gay and transvestite concerns and that’s a shame. So there is bad with the good and Disney as a company is trying to make money off everyone, so the Disney products are not traditionally safe and family friendly as we’d assume them to be, and I find that problematic. Frozen II was green lit a few years ago, before Trump was elected, so I can understand their mistakes, even though the box office has yet to reveal it to them. The Mandalorian however shows that at least Disney listens and is looking to make a course correction with Star Wars.

Disney as a company has always been about ideas and that is obvious in the theme parks. Their films and television shows generate sentiment, but it is the theme parks that drive the mythology home and make those ideas into something you can see and touch. I’ve always thought of their entertainment vision as bold and beautiful. I look at Liberty Square in Disney World as a temple of American reverence and it would not exist if not for the greater appeal of Disney as a company. To a point I’m willing to overlook political work like Frozen II or the lectures about global warming from a company that took a swamp in central Florida and completely reformed it for the benefit of amusement, because the end product is very good. In many ways The Mandalorian is the embodiment of the Disney Company itself and the metaphor has not been lost to me. At the start of the show the bounty hunter was well respected and wealthy. But along the way it has had to undergo some transformation that has inspired it to find the now famous baby Yoda and save it from the clutches of an evil Empire seeking to restore itself to power. To do so, The Mandalorian must turn against the Bounty Hunter Guild to do the right thing. Pretty good stuff.

As far as Star Wars mythology goes I had been liking The Mandalorian as a character when he was presented as the lone gunman type, but all this attachment to his Mandalorian culture is not something I admire. This “way” they keep talking about is not something I can relate to. But Star Wars has a lot of things for a lot of people and for me, the “smuggler” class still is far superior. They are not held to the rules of an organization the way these bounty hunters appear to be so I find their efforts far superior as a philosophy, and that is obviously understood by Disney as well as they have made their theme park attraction Galaxy’s Edge at Hollywood Studios a dedication to those types of people in the Star Wars storytelling experience. Even when the big organizations fail, such as the Empire did, or the First Order is attempting to restore, or the Rebellion succeeded but failed to properly organize a replacement government leaving the Resistance to attempt to stand up to the First Order, or the Mandalorians are trying to reestablish themselves in the wake of war, it is the smugglers and outlaws who manage to see the reality of such things due to their lack of investment into the social order of things, and that is very much a sentiment I can relate with.

There’s a lot going on and media and the things people enjoy coming from it is happening at a rapid pace. Political sentiments that were started in 2015 look like ancient history by 2020 so for a company like Disney trying to be all things to all people, its hard to pin down and I’ll give them a little room for that. By what has so far been seen of The Mandalorian Disney at least has shown that they aren’t so committed to Democrat talking points that they’ll penalize themselves as a profitable company. If Disney can continue to put out the kind of content that they are with The Mandalorian there is a bright future for Star Wars even if they have stumbled through much of this present decade. There is a lot of room to repair that relationship and they are off to a good start with baby Yoda and The Mandalorian.

More specifically I do not find The Mandalorian such an admirable character as he is more attached to his culture than I would like to see. Belonging to a guild, a fraternity, or club is a social security blanket that many people can’t see beyond, so I understand the reason its part of the story. I prefer the lone gunfighters who are also smugglers and don’t crave the company of others to make them feel a sense of belonging. But The Mandalorian is great in all other aspects and I look forward each week to the new episodes. It is certainly some of the best television I have seen in a number of years. And it looks like that is only going to increase.

Rich Hoffman

Stand Your Ground in Ohio: There is never a “duty to retreat,” the law is wrong

It tells you all you need to know about gun control, especially in states like Ohio where gun rights are very explicitly covered in its own Constitution, that all subsequent gun legislation has been designed to drive people toward more government central authority and not the individual rights guns protect. And that is certainly true of the liberal resistance, even by the current Republican governor of all forms of “stand your ground” laws that move through the legislature. There is another attempt at this now floating around Columbus, Ohio by lawmakers and the debate that it has spawned has been predictable. But for me, it is simply the legislature that is trying to catch up to the reality and intent of the original Constitution. This “duty to retreat” stuff is completely wrong. When assaulted with a threat, no human being has a duty to retreat, under any circumstance just to protect some hippie view of some collective existence being more important than individual ownership and the maintenance of private property.

Listening to the current crop of Democrats and open socialists running for president, all who support gun control and therefor the destruction of individual rights in favor of group affiliations, it makes me sick to think that we paid a lot of money for their educations only to have them grow up and become……that. Joe Biden isn’t going anywhere in the presidential election, but he’s been in the top job and knows better, yet when he talks about restricting gun magazines that can feed a gun in a firefight, he is way off his rocker. Citizens can’t have inferior weaponry to the state-controlled military. Who controls a potential out of control military if the wrong people are running things from the White House? People have to be able to stand up to corruption and abuse of power, and you can’t be shooting BB guns when they come knocking on your door to confiscate your property because they want it, or to throw you in jail because you are representing the wrong political party. (Roger Stone)

Our military and police are not a one stop shop of honor and protection. They must ultimately be managed by the people who pay them, and if the power goes to their heads and they are the ones with all the heavy weapons, silencers, and high capacity magazines, then they have leverage over the population and that is not their job. And when politicians fail us, such as they did during the Trump election, someone must have the power to keep them in check. No matter what anybody thinks of Donald Trump, his election revealed massive corruption at the top of the food chain, particularly among the Democrat Party and their scandals planted in Ukraine for their own enrichment. It goes far beyond Joe Biden. When the FBI is willing to edit FISA warrants and use the law for their own political desires, they will do anything else to harm private citizens and it is for that reason that any law in any state has a duty to retreat, to give the bad guys the advantage over the good, pure and simple. We know that we can’t trust government. We need government to manage affairs, but we know the power goes to their heads often, and we need to defend ourselves when it does.

In one of my published works, The Symposium of Justice the book starts out by the police letting a rapist out of jail to go after a young girl in the community. The police have a levy on the ballot for more money so they want to remind people how much the police are needed by letting a rapist out of jail and driving him by the home of a young teenage girl to “nudge” him into making her into a target that will ultimately panic the public into voting for more police funds. Just short of the attack a vigilant shows up and beats the rapist up to near death ruining the plans the police had and saving the girl from disgrace. A lot of people who have read my book think all that sounded like fiction and conspiracy theory dribble, but I can report that the entire first scene, including the vigilante action is nearly biographical and based on my own experience with the police department in Mason, Ohio while I was raising my family there and we became complicated with a marijuana distribution ring that the police were protecting, going all the way up to the mayor at the time. So don’t ever tell me I have some moral obligation to “retreat” when threatened. If you know how the game works you have a right and duty to justice to stand your ground, and nothing else. That is why my book was called The Symposium of Justice, because it was a look at what justice really is as opposed to what political tides want it to be.

American society and the culture of Ohio as a state shouldn’t not have anywhere in any of its laws a duty to retreat from a threat leaving action to the authorities. We shouldn’t give power to politically motivated prosecutors and loser lawyers to prosecute individuals who protect themselves and others with a gun, there are far more dangerous crimes out there to worry about. But to allow guns to be villains because they give power to individuals is the wrong sentiment and has no place written or implied in law. Rather, the key to a great society is when individuals can protect what they build and work for when danger comes to alter their momentum. For instance, if a businessman is taking his wife out for a nice dinner and they pull up somewhere for leisure and a robber is looking to enrich themselves at the expense of the couple, the businessman should be able to shoot the bandit dead on the spot without question, then continue their night of enjoyment unhindered. The businessman and his wife should not be subjected to embarrassment and plunder while the authorities waste countless amounts of tax dollars tracking down the villain, especially if it is found out that the businessman is a political contributor to a rival party and the bandit was sent to embarrass the businessman and force him down into a hole to hide in with disgrace from being robbed. This happens more than people are willing to admit. But regardless, its not the job of the robbed to retreat. That is just ridiculous.

There should never be in any legal writing any right to retreat, it goes against the very nature of a good society itself. Such a thing only helps the ill intent of villains, never the good people that are just trying to live their lives. The intent of such a law is to attempt to regulate good behavior to the words on a page and the promise of an oath to God, and these days, neither mean much to the villains of our society. But the barrel of a gun does, and it is that which truly keeps our world good and peaceful. Every person has a right to stand their ground, and nothing else, under no other pretense. Especially in Ohio!

Rich Hoffman

The Hit Job: Understanding the impeachment attempt and the crimes behind it

I’ve said it all along, and so have many others, and now the start of a massive bombshell is starting to reveal itself to a sleepy public. The Trump impeachment hearings and attempt have always been about only one thing, trying to get rid of Trump so that he loses his ability to uncover the real conspiracy, that is the Obama White House is who tampered with the 2016 election attempting to put things in favor of Hillary Clinton. And they used their powers of government through the various intelligence agencies to weaponize their political intentions—which is way worse than Trump’s Ukraine call they are so up in arms about. The amount of villainy shown by Democrats in general, connected to the previous administration is absolutely so unbelievable that its difficult for most people to get their minds around. But the proof is coming out, specifically the evidence uncovered by Inspector General Michael Horowitz that an FBI lawyer manipulated a key investigative document related to the secretive surveillance of a former Trump campaign adviser.

To make matters worse, since it was the Democrats who have been bringing up the Watergate scandal lately, trying to apply it to Trump for which there is absolutely no connection. If the cover-up in Watergate was the real crime, then what do you call an entire political party and previous presidential administration that has spent the last three years trying to pin every false narrative that they could to overthrow an election while covering up their own crimes in the attempt, and their massive corruption in dealing with Ukraine that consists of many people. I don’t know that there has ever been a bigger cover-up of crimes involving so many people than this case of the Democrats against President Trump. The only reason they have been so embolden has been because they have controlled the law. And now with the Trump administration, they control the Justice Department and it is terrifying to them that they will be found out. That is why they are coming after the President so hard.

If anybody cares to read the documents that were recently released on the Kennedy assassination, it will become very clear that our own government played a part in the execution of a president. Its no longer a conspiracy theory, and for a long time that fear is what kept presidents from looking too closely at things. Elected presidents were expected to play their part, do their ceremonial duties, and stay out of the business of the career politicians and unelected bureaucrats. The intelligence community has not been shy about it, they want everyone to make sure that they know who is really in charge and if presidents get in the way, they will be eliminated.

The political hits that are conducted by our intelligence agencies whether they get into the head of some lone gunman with daddy issues and drug problems and plant the seeds of destruction through psychological mechanisms or they do the work themselves, they have new methods of assassination these days that don’t connect so directly back to their fingerprints. In some ways the character assassinations they do these days are worse than just blowing the head off the president in a motorcade car. The sissy strategies of today’s metrosexual males and power climbing females are to assassinate characters, not people. Its cleaner, and less obvious. Killing a character isn’t technically against the law since they are public people usually anyway. Killing a person is, so this new strategy of killing characters is their new preferred method and the intelligence agencies committed to stopping Trump from getting elected were doing everything they could to manipulate that election, then blame their actions on everyone that wasn’t involved.

But if they could just make Trump disappear, don’t think they wouldn’t. These days with the improved secret service, and high visibility media culture, it is much harder to spin a story that a lone gunman took an assassination shot from some open window. So those avenues are not much of an option, instead they have resorted to actually trying to overturn elections which in many ways is an attack on our entire system as a republic. Its far more dangerous for them to assume so much power and to act on it than to just attempt to arrange the physical assassinations of the president and their people. It’s the intent here that we should all be concerned about, and the attempt to cover up the evidence through malicious means and the destruction of people’s character no matter what it costs. What we have witnessed from our government over the last three years should scare everyone, to the Supreme Court fights, to the fake Russian investigation, to this impeachment trial. It says a lot that Trump has had such a clean life that nobody has really been able to pin any kind of scandal to him. Probably the best result of putting a president in the White House that was used to celebrity and living under a magnifying glass for his entire life. In the end, that is probably the best skill Trump has had for this job, to protect himself from the character assassinations taking away that weapon from these new age assassins.

For myself, I don’t trust any of these institutions, especially now. If we ever want to repair that relationship, then they are going to have to come clean. As Horowitz has discovered, if an FBI employee is willing to modify a FISA document to falsely surveil a political target this time, they’ve done it before and likely many people have done the same thing, only they didn’t get caught. So how can we trust any of them ever for any case whatsoever, anywhere? We can’t, and that is the problem. We could apply the same standard to the Michael Flynn case where it appears that the FBI manipulated official records against the former general and national security adviser. If they will do it to Flynn, they certainly wouldn’t hesitate to do the same against you and me dear reader. These are bad, vicious people who have political revolution in mind, and they will do anything to see their intentions through. Anything.

So that is the story of this whole impeachment case. Its not that Trump did anything wrong, its all about trying to pin on him what the accusers have done themselves. They have been caught in an insurrection and their best way out of it is to destroy the administration that could bring justice to their doorstep, especially now that they’ve made an enemy of him. Things might not have gone so dark if they could have kept Comey close to President Trump and they just endured each other for a while, but Trump was smart and started firing everyone he suspected of sedition, and now things are starting to become clear with the bureaucrats out of the way, we are seeing the truth for the first time with hard evidence. These are dirty people sucking our taxpayer money up for their insidious deeds and a fight with them is inevitable. But we don’t need to take up arms against them. We can beat them at their own game as the first option, and that ladies and gentlemen, is what is about to happen. Enjoy!

Rich Hoffman

America Should Support the Rebels of Hong Kong: The need to break the back of communism in China, for good

One of the saddest events I think in history was when in 1949, the communists took over China and brought tyranny of the highest order to that country and its people after America worked so hard to prevent it. I read with great horror the specifics in Joseph Campbell’s Oriental Mythology the hard reported events of that communist take over and also read in the great book Way of the Fighter by my favorite military general, Claire Lee Chennault the warnings of the communist take over that would eventually lead to the Korean and Vietnam Wars—and the long cold war we are currently experiencing. With an educated opinion on the matter provided by these books and many others, I am convinced that the same types of people who are in the American government going after Donald Trump’s presidency are the same ones who pushed presidents then like Roosevelt, Truman and Eisenhower into allowing communism to seep into Asia and to use it as a platform for global domination, and it pisses me off something awful. It always has, but now in the context of the protestors in Hong Kong, a proper context within history is clear for all to see.

It is my position, which requires all Americans to take one, that America support the rebels in China once the election of 2020 has concluded, because it would be the right thing to do. China, as a communist state has been a threat from day one, and it has only been recently that the cracks in their carefully crafted façade have been broken. There are of course agents around the world, many sitting on the boards of some of American’s greatest corporations who are indifferent to communism. Most corporations have their fair share of socialist sentiments, so its not a far stretch for them anyway. But that doesn’t make it right and never has. The people of Hong Kong want to be free. They are looking toward America for guidance. Their black market is giving them exposure to American concepts and products and they need support for their own freedom. And the least we can do is to back them as a continued stab at communism as we have endeavored for most of the last century. Why stop now?

While its quite obvious that pro communist forces in the American government didn’t want Claire Chennault to be successful in protecting China from the communist invasion coming out of the Soviet Union. They only wanted to protect China from the Japanese. Once it was clear that American forces were going to be successful against Japan, Chennault had his hands tied behind his back by General Stilwell who was put in place after the famous Flying Tigers had done their deeds of protecting China in the opening days of American involvement in World War II. Any careful scholar comparing these days to those days will see clearly that the point of World War II, and of propping up Hitler and so many other ruthless dictators around the world was to create a power vacuum for which the United Nations would fill, and communism was going to be their mode of government. It didn’t work of course, and the seeds of that intention lasted for the rest of the 20th century, even into the present. A few years ago, these things would have been considered conspiracy theories, but by the evidence we have about the attempted Trump impeachment proceedings we now have evidence as to how the deep state has always worked, and why they believed the things they have. Communism in China was always going to be the way the rest of the world came to that political ideology, and our American corporations like Google, Nike, and the NBA were going to deliver us all to that doorstep. That was always the intention.

You could see it even in small, normally unrecognized issues in entertainment where production companies were weary of pissing off the communists of Chinese censor boards who are careful not to allow western influences into their country by way of film. That left giant companies like Disney trying to have it both ways, to get their products into the Chinese market of over a billion people while still putting on their happy face of branding. In the movie Kong: Skull Island, the pandering toward communism was too obvious, and American audiences hated it. The film didn’t do well, just as the obvious communist sentiment from Godzilla: King of the Monsters didn’t do well either intending Asian markets to love the film while still pandering to western audiences. The result wasn’t very good. Production companies have been chasing a ghost in China, the black market is far more reaching than the traditional theater presentations. There is more money to be made in China through the black market than in the communist endorsed primaries, which is what is fueling this rebellion in Hong Kong. For the purpose of defeating communism, America should support that greater rebellion into the mainland for the sake of those plus billion people, and break communism once and for all.

Silently, most of the big American corporations have been steering consumers toward communism so that they could have access to that large market in China. But what they have been willing to give up in freedoms and intellectual property to get a boost to quarterly results have been devastating, especially when you measure the results in decades instead of years. You can see the results everywhere as corporations have agreed to make a compliant society where China has set the rules for their own benefit, to gain knowledge they couldn’t produce in their society under communism by robbing creativity from the western cultures. You can see from any Chinese knock off that they lack imagination which only thrives under a free culture. The compliance culture that so much impead American business these days and has been bolstered by the communist loving academia culture in the west that has already been conquered by the Chinese long ago, have further pushed business into compliance toward the communists of Asia. Where else would they go, the plan was always to limit their options so that China could benefit with their sheer size of population. The gig worked until President Trump turned everything on its head, and now the people of Hong Kong see their chance to make a move, or never at all.

America is responsible for the people of Hong Kong, not just through the western influences that have found their way to the black markets and into the homes of many people looking for hope, but for our abandonment of China when the communists took over in the first place. Many of our own people contributed to that evil and its time to reverse the decision in favor of justice. So it would not be unreasonable to stand behind the rebellion now, once the election is done of course. China is not good as it is now, and communism is an ever-present threat to capitalism, which requires diligence on our part to defeat it from both foreign and domestic enemies. And make no mistake about it, they are our enemies.

Rich Hoffman

 

Choice, The Fear of all Communists and Democrats: What attempts at impeachment and the protests in Hong Kong have in common

One new outlet for news coverage that I enjoy is the Spectrum News Channel from my cable provider. Sure, they are liberal as hell, but I enjoy watching how and why other people think things and I find them infinitely fascinating. Most of my readers here have probably cut cords to their cable subscriptions by now and probably don’t know about the Spectrum Channel. There are so many entertainment options these days that I wouldn’t fault anybody for their lack of experience. However, I do tend to give them about 15 minutes of my time each night before I wonder off into slumber to see what they think of the world, and what I saw the other night was hilarious. I’ve heard it elsewhere since then, but the crux of it all is that the wild, lunatic, institutionalists had such a bad week with their impeachment trial of President Trump that they are already making excuses for its failure, and get this, they just discovered what you and I have known for over a decade.

The blame for the poor performance by Democrats to gain ANY traction against President Trump was placed on consumers having too many options. The Spectrum News Channel explained that during the Nixon impeachment and that of Clinton, the big three television stations were pretty much the gate keepers on information and were able to control the narrative. They rationalized that these days with social media, talk radio, blogs, video broadcasts of all kinds that the mainstream media is nowhere near as influential. Well, duh. There was a news flash. I can’t imagine that anybody has said that before. Just kidding, I’ve been saying that for the last 30 years. It is so ridiculous looking back in hindsight that the mainstream media types thought that if they drove Glenn Beck off the air at Fox, Bill O’Reilly, and Alex Jones, and many like them, that the narrative would go back to their side of things.

The trend, just as it is with gun ownership, freedom from public schools, and even the protests in Hong Kong are that people desire to be free and to have options. That was the reason for the foundation of America, and that is why social media was even invented, to fulfil a market need that the state-controlled media couldn’t fill. And ultimately that’s why we voted for Donald Trump, the very first social media president who was a huge part of the invention of reality television. Its not that Trump coerced people into voting for him, they did it on their own free will. Just as they wait in line for hours to see one of his rallies and are happy to do it, because it represents their free will as an enterprise. The trend of human history is to have more freedom, not less and what liberals have a hard time believing is that they were not picked.

Liberals thought all along that they were for the people, but what they have found out is that the people don’t like them, or their thoughts. They don’t want to share their space with their local liberal. They want to be away from them, and that has hurt their feelings. Even when they have gained great political power, they still have a hard time understanding that people don’t want them in charge of their life. People are not inclined to trade security for freedom. There are times in most people’s life where they will, but they don’t like it. When given a chance, they will pick freedom every single time. That is especially true when it comes to the news media. Spectrum may be a little cable start-up, but they certainly represent the trend of media types working in the industry, and they are perplexed why more people don’t believe the same things they do. But instead will voice their concerns on social media.

Democrats hate choice as a result because people don’t choose them. They are frustrated that there are too many choices and they can’t compete with any of them. Most media companies have had to learn this the hard way and are still slow to react. They must deal with reality or be put out of business. And the grim reality for them is that even if they did control the media completely like they wish, and could gain control of the Internet, and all the social media platforms, that people would still vote for options, and they would still vote for Trump, because they want an option. The protests in Hong Kong are made of the same kind of stuff. The communists can attempt to scare the protestors, but Hong Kong has tasted a little bit of capitalist freedom, and they aren’t giving it back to live under the tyranny and restriction of a communist society. That is why the Chinese communists are so terrified of options, especially coming out of the west. Options give people hope and ideas, which communists want to remove. And we have the same kind of types of people in the Democrat party, people who loved Cuban communism and many college academics who lick the feet of every communist dictator praying for sanctimony for the common good as they define it.

You know something is truly good if somebody chooses you over other options. If you are a good movie, and people rush out to see that movie and it makes a billion dollars at the box office, it was made that way because people chose it as an option. The same with a restaurant, if the food is good, people will choose to go there. Choice is the centerpiece of all western civilization and it forces everyone to be better as a result. And because America has a First Amendment, if the traditional sources of media suck, other forms will emerge. The same with presidents, if the political class sucks, as it has for a long time, people will choose an alternative. You can’t impeach your way into forcing people to love your stupid way of thinking. You can’t force a woman or a man to love you by taking away all their options in life. That is what liberals are trying to do, force us to love them by taking away our options. That is what China is trying to do with the protestors of Hong Kong. And that is certainly why Democrats are trying to impeach President Trump. After a week of trying to win the hearts of Americans, by the end of it the reality was that even with all the power the media thought it had, nothing changed in public sentiment, and now they are all holding their pitch forks but nobody is cheering them on. Instead, they look stupid and lost. And they should, because they attempted to be gallant at the expense of choice assuming they knew better for us than we do. Which was a tragic mistake—for them.

Rich Hoffman

No Outrage Toward College Sports Sexual Abuse: Yet Ambassador Yovanovitch feels threatened, Roger Stone was convicted and the NFL suspends the great Miles Garrett–explaining it all to you

Without question there is a lot going on, however people’s interpretation on it depends on how much they have been broken, like some horse due to their exposure to institutionalism. As an example, and you can see this in most any office environment where people proudly display their continued loyalty to the college they graduated from, and will put on their garments ahead of a big weekend football game with genuine excitement. In my part of the country it is common to see such references to many colleges, especially Purdue and Ohio State, whereas in the North East its Harvard, Princeton, MIT and other such listings. Yet when bad news comes out that the sports doctor for Ohio State had been molesting athletes for decades and people knew about it, nobody knew what to say. The same quandary occurred and still lingers over the Penn State sports program due to the massive amount of homosexual molestation that was going on in their sports program. And in so many ways the events of Friday November 15th 2019 were so earth shattering that the institutionalists who are so trained to think only in that fashion were completely lost.

I am of course referring to the impeachment trial of President Trump as given by Ambassador Yovanovitch, the guilty conviction against Roger Stone, the president’s first campaign manager and behind the scenes confidant, and the massive fight that took place between the Pittsburg Steelers and the Cleveland Browns where the Browns player, Myles Garrett ripped the helmet off the Steelers quarterback Mason Rudolph. The world watched in horror as if the entire event came straight out of Westworld where the robots revealed that they were aggressive and potentially dangerous. The trial and conviction of Roger Stone is that institutional way to pretend that all is safe, that the parameters of danger could be controlled by the processes put in place by the institutions and these occasional outbreaks of violence and rebellion, such as the election of President Trump, the fights that happen between NFL players on and off the field could be controlled. And when the evidence is so overwhelming in just how evil the institutions truly are, such as the sexual molestations of student athletes in college sports programs there are no thought processes to prepare them for that reality, so they just ignore the information and stare at their college swag, their coffee mugs dedicated to Ohio State, their photos of a Saturday game and pretend that all is well.

I didn’t see anything wrong with what Myles Garrett did. What does anybody expect? With the level of trash talking that goes on and the expectations to win, tempers are bound to flare up. I’m sure Myles and Rudolph will be friends again. In fact, if the event didn’t happen on television in front of millions of people, they likely would have gone to dinner together an hour later and made up. They are guys, and that’s how guys are with each other. But this window into a primal world for which the NFL has placed itself where safety and good social conduct are supposed to take place over a priority on winning, the fans are noticeably not happy with that direction of the business model. Even though these kids playing football all come from these institutional colleges and were the best that came from those sports programs even knowing all the bad things that go on behind the scenes, fans in the stands are never supposed to see the inmates rebel with such examples of blood letting as was seen in that Pittsburg/Cleveland game. I have seen fights like that in the stands of a Pittsburg/Bengal game between the fans. Football is a violent game and fans love it. Why the NFL or anybody else is so outraged is a bit of a mystery, unless you understand the dysfunction of institutionalism itself.

Such a dysfunctional understanding about the way the world works was obvious during Ambassador Yovanovitch’s testimony against her experience with President Trump. Here was a career bureaucrat that had been released of her duty by Trump for being an Obama era holdover that he didn’t want in the position and the crux of the entire questioning revolved on the termination of government employees from one administration to another. Most people in the position of the President have been broken into thinking that the system is greater than their opinions so that they don’t go and try to change that system. Trump has shown that he doesn’t need any of them to help him make a decision which is just reprehensible to the institutionalist. They are aghast about the entire process and the lack of respect that Trump and his supporters have shown for their value. They are so upset about it that they have been attacking anybody close to Trump, such as Roger Stone as a warning. Stone’s conviction isn’t about doing anything wrong, its about being close to the President and daring to work against the established system of institutional control.

The behavior traces back to any average public education high school environment where peer pressure is used to control all participants so long as the objective is agreed upon by the institutional rules and regulations. For example, molesting children, labor union activism, and transgender bathrooms are outside the scope of institutional instruction as progressive society is establishing those issues as part of their greater agenda of destroying the American family, or families in general so that borders between homes are lowered and the parental aims of government can then replace such sentiments of tradition. However, if an individual wears the wrong shirt to school or shows anger toward some established norm, like gun possession, the enjoyment of a non-establishment form of music, or does not like the local college sports team, then the institution supports violence of any kind to apply peer pressure toward those individuals. They will either be destroyed or converted, but they are not allowed to have their own thoughts for things. Even the most robust anarchist plays their part in the process, they are used most by the institutional to drive peer pressure, they are supported as the threat of enforcement from being socially castigated. They are used in the same way that the government used ISIS and terrorism in general, to say, “see, you need our protection from those bandits, (that we helped to create) join us, or die.” And that is what the institutional told Trump, “follow us or we will put all your friends and even you out on the street. We control the courts, we control the rules and regulations, and we ultimately control you, not some measly election by a bunch of NFL lovers who would rather see a fight than a good old handshake at the end of a game between rivals.

Rather than be upset about it though, it is fascinating to watch and I’m intrigued to watch this social monstrosity, known as intuitionalism die this death of the ages. These are not new thoughts, they’ve have been around since the city states of Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley and the long history of ancient Egypt. But America was born with all the nationalities of the world to rise against that trend, not to preserve it. And that is beyond the scope of their learning, the “institutionalists.” They are process driven due to their natural timidity exacerbated by their life-long journey toward institutional instruction and in this modern age of rebellion, by people not so broken that they know enough to vote for President Trump, the impact of that resolution is far beyond them. They only know that they should punish Myles Garrett and throw Roger Stone in jail and hope that institutional controls will outlast this rebellion as it has for many, many centuries. But I don’t think so. Rather what I think is that I am going to go out and buy myself a Myles Garrett jersey. Because after that game the other night, I think I am more of a fan of the Cleveland Browns as a result.

Rich Hoffman

The Professional Nerds: They want impeachment to hide their uselessness

One thing that everyone must deal with if you achieve any level of success at life are the professional nerds who ride the coat tails of previous achievement and always establish some kind of coup to claim ownership from the bold who came before them. That was certainly on display in Washington D.C. during the so-called impeachment hearings led by the former prosecutor Adam Schiff. Now prosecutors have never scared me, nor do depositions. In times past when pressed I have done my own legal work and quite enjoy tearing to shreds losers like Adam Schiff who are the very embodiment of that professional nerd culture that has essentially taken over in the Beltway and everywhere else where performance is measured by the layers of bureaucracy established. They are the modern metrosexuals who are afraid of flies and mosquitos and would let Rome burn to the ground while they come up with some consensus driven procedure to save it. Getting rid of them from our government is exactly what we mean when we say “drain the swamp.” If that is the best that Adam Schiff can do given all the resources he has extracted from taxpayers to do it, its pretty pathetic.

I mention the legal scenario of acting as one’s own attorney because I’ve seen this kind of arrogance plenty of times from this class of loser people. They think they have some information that they’ve read from a book, some boon like Prometheus might have obtained in gaining fire from the sun to return it back to earth after Zeus had hid it away. They don’t expect to encounter someone who can read more than them, experience more than them and is smarter than them. Their understanding of the law is formed within the Bar Association and the rules of conduct that they utilize. So anyone outside of that little clan they think of as ignorant, leaving them baseless to deal with reality when confronted. I find it enjoyable to stumble such arrogant people within their professional efforts because their intent is always malicious, even if they hide them behind good deeds. Their malice for effort is easy to exploit because their true philosophy in life isn’t a joy in intellect, it is through group association that doesn’t raise the bar for their personal performance, it just lowers it to uncover a laziness that they are so good at hiding that they don’t even see it in themselves.

Bureaucrats are the creation of this social veil because as timid souls they must conceal their lack of achievement by looting off people who do things so that they can share ownership. That is the entire root of their entire existence. They think that by getting some degree in college and reading a few books here and there that they can have the right to make important decisions, yet when they find out that they aren’t the smartest people in the room, it destroys their basic grip on reality. So long as they belong to some unique guild, like the Bar Association, they can hide behind that veil and they can trick people into respecting them. But once you learn its all a farce, as I learned very young by getting into so much trouble that I had gone to court more times than years on my age by double, the patterns of deceit are clear to see. And it was easy to see at that impeachment hearing by the dubious Adam Schiff. You would think that an attempted coup by a Democrat in congress would have smarter people involved, some ultimate movie villain that we see often on the silver screen. But much to our disappointment, in reality, these villains are just stupid professional nerds who gained their notoriety in life by boot licking and claim jumping. And while under pressure, they fold every time.

It was always clear to me, but now it should be clear to everyone else that the hatred of President Trump spawns from his competency in rooting out losers like Adam Schiff. Not that it was a malicious deed by the president but it always happens when a competent person of experience meets a professional nerd who are the come lately thieves who steal away the achievement of those who came before them and actually build a career off that effort by putting rules and regulations between them and their targets. A guy like Trump who has spent a lifetime taking risks and enjoying the winnings has exploited this ruse just by his election, and his actions throughout the years he’s been in office have further confirmed that all along it wasn’t some special sauce of leadership coming out of West Point, or the most elite Ivy League schools that makes a great president, its guts, and experience that do, which has shattered the world of the professional nerd. Anytime you want to see it and some lawyer demands action from you within a court of law, you’ll see them melt when they learn that you know their secret language meant to hide their incompetence—and that you aren’t a member of the Bar Association, or of congress.

Much of the testimony provided in the hearing on impeachment was of the nature of dissidents who were upset that Trump did not need them to perform his job. Normally, consultants are brought in to advise a president, but being a man of action, Trump doesn’t need them, so they have played along with this Adam Schiff attack willingly in hopes that the professional nerds could resume their ruse through impeachment. Their hatred for Trump is the same hatred that their type always has for people of achievement. While they need such people more than they need food and water, they secretly resent them because the dependence is so one sided, especially when it is put on trial. They need their victims to thank them for looting them with big words and obscure terminology that they have studied all their lives. What the professional nerds are terrified of is that the people they deal with don’t seek their counsel or interpretations but act anyway on their own such has Trump has. He hasn’t needed the generals, the advisors, and all the other professional nerds which has left them standing around waiting for someone to acknowledge them. And before people learn how useless they truly are they are trying to impeach President Trump so to preserve themselves for the future.

But its too late. It has been for me for many years now. I learned early in my life thankfully just how useless these people are. And now everyone can see it. Yet even I am a little disappointed that Adam Schiff couldn’t put on a better show than what he did. As a looter he clearly depends 100% off others for his sustenance and when he is forced to do anything on his own merit, he fails. He certainly did fail on the impeachment trial, which was clear on day one. Its not just a partisan interpretation of the events, it’s the accurate observation, and reminder that professional nerds have built up a scandal that was concealed so long as people never asked questions of them. They needed the exchange to be one sided only and when it wasn’t, they fail every single time.

Rich Hoffman

The Value of Thinking like a 12-Year-Old: How we should improve our education system

Every time I do a bunch of education articles, such as I did recently for the election of 2019 critics write me and ask me for what solution I would support since I think that the current public education system is so screwed up. I often say these days that I think kids would be better off living in the woods without a public education classroom if the goal for them was to get smarter rather than sticking with what we have now. Government schools are so dysfunctional that they really should be considered a menace. For as much time and money that we put into the education of children too many of them enter adulthood ill prepared for the reality which should tell us everything we need to know. Therefore, people who are critical of me are only upset that I bring it up. But to answer their question, lets get to the basic foundation of the problem.

Recently I was reviewing some 3P techniques for a project I’m working on, its one of those Lean applications that are part of the long evolution of the Toyota systems research that has been going on for a long time yet has had lots of trouble taking root in the United States. That is actually the subject of a new book I’m working on called The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business. I’m not willing to throw the baby out with the bathwater like many might be willing to do, but we do need to understand why these things tend to work in Japan and China and not in the United States. Or do they really work at all, or is the key really just naturally engaged employees. And if so, then why are they engaged while others aren’t? I have it all worked out, but explaining it to people who are functioning from the wrong definitions of things is a bit more of a challenge. To be blunt, our public educations have taught our entire society all the wrong things and now we have a mess to clean up that will take centuries. So we might as well start somewhere.

The meaning of life is not to be born, learn how to read, write and perform rational thought only to throw all that out the window at puberty to get a mate, have sex, pop out a few kids then gradually die as the flower of our bodies wilt away into old age where even the universe spits at us once we’ve passed the years of reproduction. All that is wrong—and that is the basic pattern of understanding around the world of the cycles of life. Rather, we are born, we are given the opportunity to learn all we can before we are on the clock of responsibility, and we spend the rest of our lives functioning from what is left of that perfect period of childhood that we all have an opportunity to experience. However, most people don’t get such great childhoods and they grow up and into bitter adults who can’t problem solve their way out of a paper bag and end up intellectually crippled for life.

We should look at childhood as one of our highest states of consciousness and figure out why we are trying so hard as a civilization to grow up and away from this outlook. On that recent 3P investigation one of the key takeaways was that the classroom participants were told that they needed to reconnect with their 12-year-old self, because it was at this time that most of us were still open minded about problem solving and generally thinking outside the box. And that is the case with most children, they all start off pretty equal. As open books on brain development they all learn along a similar path and with great optimism. Just look at the kind of books that we provide to children seen at any bookstore. They are full of colors and positive images meant to inspire next step learning, to lure them to good new things to think about rather than boring, stagnant images. Then kids hit puberty, public schools are trying to teach sex in the fourth grade and earlier these days, and once kids are told that sex is their primary function and their social status within the classroom culture will determine who they get to mate with, that person begins a long decline that lasts the rest of their lives, and it is very tragic.

The 3P people observed from the Toyota culture in Japan that they are a playful people, and this is obvious while at the Tokyo airport. The billboard colors there are very positive and even their television in Japan is very childlike, meaning its experimental and positive about most everything. It has taken the Lean community many years of western thinking to get close to unlocking the real secrets of the Toyota culture. Its not just that they are organized and engaged in Japan, but that they don’t get hung up on silly stuff, they are much more like children than what we’d call adults in America. Children will try things and play with ideas where adults usually try to bend reality to their mode of thinking. Whatever it is that they learned and whoever they learned it from tends to limit the western mind rather than unleash it toward continued growth or at least sustaining what they were when they were children.

This is why I see so much positive growth in the geek culture in America where adults go to science fiction conventions dressed in cosplay and have fun going to midnight movies and making amusement parks part of their lifestyles. It’s the Peter Pan lesson of the approach that Tom Hanks showed in the movie Big where an actual kid was very successful in business because he thought like a child. We have been thinking about this problem for a long time, but still what holds us back is this assumption that by growing up we are supposed to get rid of our childhoods rather than trying to have the best one possible then carrying those memories throughout our entire life with the fuel to sustain us. The way we approach things now we empty ourselves of everything we built until puberty then seek to throw it all away so we can join some lifecycle mating custom that essentially ends by the time we are all aged 30. There is a lot of life to live after that age but most of us just don’t know what to do with ourselves so the gradual decline begins and we find ourselves stagnant and ineffective for the rest of our lives.

Our education system should be looking to make an Einstein out of every young mind. By the time kids leave the 12th grade if they maintained the rate of learning that they did up until around age 10, we should have lots of geniuses running around doing great things. Instead we end up with a bunch of flat thinkers who have to be told as 40 and 50 year olds that they need to reconnect with their 12-year-old selves so they can be effective at their jobs. If I had a nickel for every time someone told me to grow up, I’d have a lot of nickels. Many millions worth. But I’ve always bulked at that notion and am very happy to say that I never stopped thinking like a 12-year-old. Ever. I have always viewed the typical definition of adulthood as a loss of something valuable that we had as children but lost too soon in a premature death. So I’ve held onto mine as a treasure and that has certainly helped me in life be much more effective than in embracing the traditional trajectory of the aging process. And we do need to fix that notion. If our education system started looking at children as the highest level of thought out of the starting gate and could harness that energy instead of seeking to destroy it, I would feel differently. Until then, I’m dead set against the modern concepts of education, because they are not sufficient enough, and do not teach the right things.

Rich Hoffman

The Tyranny of Safety: Fortune favors the bold and reckless as the foundation of innovation

With all the election coverage that really was needed recently, I didn’t have time to work through some of the concepts that I care about a great deal, which are being flushed out in my new book, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, so for the next couple of these I promised myself to make some time. When I write about things here, usually its due to my understanding of a needed change agency impasse. If a concept isn’t introduced that is key to a greater thought, then any potential audience might miss it. So you need to start early on these things, especially if the concept is truly revolutionary and contrary to contemporary thought. One of those things is the false nature that safety is what everyone is looking for, and that compliance to that culture is the only way to function. Quite the opposite, even in business where safety is always being leveraged against, fortune favors the bold and unsafe in ways that are keys to any successful culture. And those who are timid usually attempt to create rules of safety to preserve themselves for that inevitability. Safety is not a state we should all yearn for, its rather the shield that the timid use to hide their own aversion to the rules of the universe.

I’m speaking from experience; I have never done anything in my life that might be considered “safe.” Rather, I have lived an extremely reckless life and always when I start to get too comfortable, I always end up doing something on the deep end of crazy to keep myself honest. And that was not to sabotage psychologically some level of success, but rather an understanding of how the true pulse of the universe really works. I have been talking about words that are normally associated with me such as “respectable.” Well, another is Teflon, many have wondered over the years why I have not ended up in jail to rot away in solitary confinement instead of being something of a respectable character, no matter what sort of path of destruction has ended up running in my wake. The reason that such controversy and reckless abandon has not stuck to me is not due to some magical Teflon help, but rather in the nature of life itself, where fortune favors the bold, and the observers in life who do preserve safety over treasure tend to always cheer on those willing to do what they are not.

It was easy for me to make this observation because I never wanted to be a normal human being, rather I endeavored to be a stunt man or daredevil. That was in fact my very first inkling for a career that went back beyond kindergarten. As a kid I would jump out of any tree, ride a bike through any obstacle and my heroes that I most looked up to were not people associated with my very nice and structured family, they were daredevils like Eval Knieval and escape artists like Harry Houdini. As a child I noticed very early, even when going to the circus that people who did things like stick their head into a lion’s mouth or walked on a tight rope without nets or harnesses below them were the ones that people clapped for. Part of them wanted to see a human being spit in the face of danger. Its not that they rooted for the big crash, or the death by a crazed animal, its that they wanted to see someone overcome the natural fears we all have so that innovation of some kind could come from the result.

This is another reason that a concept like communism and socialism are so reprehensible. They may be attractive to the type of people who fill an audience. People watching dangerous things do want the safety of observation. Yet when a society penalizes a tight rope walker with helmets and support ropes, the magic of the challenge is diminished tremendously. That’s why communist and socialist countries don’t tend to produce the kind of people who jump motorcycles over fountains in Las Vegas or to go over Niagara Falls in a barrel. A society that is full of an audience but no show to watch becomes stagnant and boring, and eventually fails as a culture. However, when people are free to think and push the limits of their culture, we find that it flourishes in ways that cause great growth, and this is certainly the case in businesses of all kinds.

People are much more forgiving of a tight rope walker who almost falls and has to catch themselves from hitting the ground with an imperfect show because the attempt itself is what they really want to see. They will forgive Sea World for the occasional Orca attack that kills the whale trainers because the point of the show was to demonstrate mastery over the primal instincts of a wild animal. Without the show, the antics of a whale eating, mating and just swimming around are pretty boring. The audiences of life want to see somebody risking something, because they are too timid to do such things in life. But they do love to see other people doing it.

Whether in the court room, the board room, or even at the stock exchange, fortune favors the bold and playfully reckless. Owners of businesses who can’t afford to lose everything they have worked so hard for truly appreciate those like Harry Houdini who will throw chains upon themselves and be submerged underwater with the lid locked shut and only two minutes to hold their breath to attempt to escape before a massive bomb goes off on stage while the audience watches in horror. In all the books there are on business, and specifically program management they instruct their readers to mitigate risk and to run from it into the audience where everyone else is sitting. But talk to any finance person over lunch as they talk about how they want you to mitigate risk and protect the money they are lending you, they’ll also be the first ones to sit in the first row of a show where a daredevil will challenge death itself to lighten up the content of their boring day. They say they want a safe world, but they are the first to indicate they know daredevils are what make them money. Playing it safe in the back row doesn’t get any endeavor there, somewhere along the line of any investment a daredevil is needed to sign on the dotted line and take the plunge to perform under pressure or else.

Most of the rules of society are built for the timid, so not to hurt their feelings that they are not one of those daredevil types in an attempt to make the world appear more equal. The more we have explored socialism in our own culture, the more willing we have been to put safety helmets on our children as they ride their bicycles and listen to every warning label an insurance company gives us so that they won’t have to pay a costly payout when some kid breaks their arm falling off the roof of their house. But making children overly safe, we have also killed in them the daring percentage who will make it into adulthood fearless of the real performances the human race wants to see, and we end up with a bunch of people sitting in the audience waiting for a good show, but no Harry Houdini strapped in chains upside down in a vault of water. We want to see someone overcome such things and in all things that we consider successful and respectable, we have some nature of a daredevil there to show us that something can be done. This trait is useful in asking a member of the opposite sex out for a date, which for many people is very difficult, or in landing a big business deal against all odds where a lot of time, money, and people’s jobs are at great risk. People want to know that you are so confident in your craft that you will walk the tight rope without fearing falling because you are so good. They want to know that you aren’t afraid, because they are and they like knowing that you don’t wear a helmet because you don’t fear crashing. Those who cleave to safety are those sitting in the audience waiting to see that somebody can overcome death and worse to achieve something. And once they see it for themselves, they can then possibly not be ruled by fear, but can rather live more freely than otherwise would have been possible and to get more out of life than was previously thought.

Rich Hoffman