Category: Rich Hoffman

Why Donald Trump is a Genius: The history of how we arrived where we are, intellectually

From the times of at least the Mesolithic era humans have built ritualistic centers of symbolic significance to integrate the experiences of the individual with the greater collection of society. The roots of communism and socialism in 2018 point back to this innate desire of humans to be accepted by their peers. There may not have been ever in politics at a high level a person like Donald Trump who is so self-assured that he doesn’t require the approval of others to function. He enjoys approval, but he does not require it to make decisions, and that is a very new thing relatively speaking in human development over the ages. And to those who control the transfer of power, or rather, have controlled it—this is a scary time. When they’ve needed to deny Trump social authority to keep him under control from their perspective, the United States President has proceeded on without them showing remarkable self confidence—which culminated in gasps of horror when the political left threw all their bets into a new Michael Wolff book about Trump hoping to paint him as insane—to stir up congressional sentiment to remove the president from office using the 25th Amendment. Instead, Trump stood with the leaders of congress and declared that he was so smart that he was a genius which is something a person just doesn’t publicly declare about themselves. Humans are not supposed to be that vain; they must await that assessment by others—aren’t they?

I didn’t talk about it at the time but on April 24th of 2017 the great American philosopher Robert Pirsig died at his home at the age of 88. Pirsig was a great thinker and created the metaphysics of quality philosophy which in the business world I consider much more important than the business shift to Lean manufacturing. Pirsig had a lot in common with the transcendentalist William James and his two books Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and Lila were classics that stand up to even the greatest thinkers of philosophy. But life was not always good to Pirsig—his philosophy was forged from a hard life. Shortly after his second child was born Pirsig suffered a nervous breakdown and spent time in and out of psychiatric hospitals. As part of his treatment for what they called paranoid schizophrenia and clinical depression he was treated with electroconvulsive therapy. It was a rough go for Pirsig—his wife left him and he had to start all over as his children were growing. Less than ten years later Pirsig found himself on a motorcycle dealing with his schizophrenia taking a road trip with one of his sons. The result of this trip became Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. The book was a hit catapulting Pirsig into the upper echelons of thoughtful Americans then in 1979 the son who went on the trip with him was killed in San Francisco, stabbed to death after a mugging. Although the work he produced in many cases was considered genius, everything he did was a product of his mind collapsing on itself and falling into insanity for a period, if not the entire time.

Just six years after the publication of the fantastic work by Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra the German philosopher was hugging a horse outside his home trying to stop it from being flogged with a whip. He wasn’t even 40 years of age yet and the great man was having a mental breakdown for which he never recovered. His much maligned sister cared for him after the suicide of her own husband and it was under her care that essentially the Nazi party emerged. Not long after Nietzsche died did Adolf Hitler emerge who loved the work of the German philosopher so much that he built much of his ideology around it. How much of Nietzsche’s work was genius and how much was pure insanity is hard to tell because the definition of sanity is shaped by the masses. Those who step out beyond what is considered normal are what shape the thoughts of tomorrow, not compliance to a previous order. Yet to move too far from the norm means that a human mind is on its own—it loses the support of its peers which biologically has always been a concern.

And so it has gone for many generations, mankind has pushed against the psychological needs of society to conduct mass rituals publicly ordained and to align the yearnings of the human soul to an authentic experience specific to itself—and much of the time insanity has followed. In Nietzsche’s case his desire for anti-institutional mechanisms to free individuality from group think actually became the foundations for socialism in Nazi Germany and fascism in Italy—because mankind fell short of the high mark objectives of those uniquely new philosophies. And certainly the work of Robert Pirsig still is giving the world fits in how they could possibly bring together the two philosophies of East and West to arrive at a definition of quality that goes well beyond the subject-object scientific method. Just because the kids in the front of the class get good grades in school, it doesn’t mean they will become the best elements of our society—it may actually be them who become the destroyers of civilization—yet we continue to conduct our society in the fashion of such insanity—even though we have the books and understanding to know better. It’s like knowing you have diabetes and yet you eat a whole cake and a twelve pack of sugary soda anyway—then wonder why you have to cut off your legs because of nerve damage. One thing causes the other yet it is difficult for our group think to accept such a radical change in living pattern—so we continue on with the destructive behavior.

The genius of Donald Trump is that he has emerged through his life and all the tragedies that come with it, as a remarkably complete and self-assured man. Part of his genius is that he is able to act without the collective approval of the society at large—which keeps him from being manipulated by lesser minds. He’s been able to do this where so many others have failed before him—people we consider great in hindsight. However, we’re not yet ready to say that what Trump does is a genius because he does not let the second-handers come along for the ride like previous voyagers into thought have done. Trump is truly his own man and can function completely on his own. Although he does like approval of his peers, he is not crippled into inaction if he doesn’t get it, and that is something new. New for the human race—while there are certainly free thinkers functioning in the world, they have not made it into such a high office before. In that regard what Trump is doing is what Zarathustra was attempting to do in Nietzsche’s famous book. And that’s not insanity. The only insanity that is going on is the group thinkers trying to reconcile their collective yearnings to this new individualized standard. But the standard itself set by Trump is actually the sanest thing in the world and if he doesn’t say so—who will?

Human beings for over 300,000 to perhaps millions of years have required group think to accept a new idea and this has kept mankind from ever breaking a cycle of birth and death for which has loomed over all our efforts since the beginning of recorded time. It has held us back tremendously and it was only when the United States declared its independence from the world and survived the War of 1812 that a new philosophy emerged that climaxed long after Nietzsche, Marx and many others came and went. Robert Pirsig was onto it, and he went crazy trying to develop it—because it was essentially the first time in the history of the world that a human being scratched away at the protections of group think to see what might reside outside of our intellectual bubbles. The result has been and is Donald Trump—a character that essentially stepped out of the pages of Ayn Rand and the ministry of Norman Vincent Peale—and emerged from a uniquely American city to become it’s master of capitalism and the morality of money. Then for Trump to be voted into the White House to bring those values to the rest of America—the action becoming one of the greatest events in world history—not in a political sense, but a philosophical one. In that regard Donald Trump is a vessel of immense intellectual capacity, only it’s different from what came before. This time it is individually based whereas everything that came before was of a collective consciousness and we can see now that the madness was never in the individual yearning from the freedom of institutional controls, but the institutions themselves trying to hold back the individual from discovering their true potential all along.

(And for the record, it is quite obvious that humans and Neanderthals evolved separately, not in succession. The fossil record and radio-carbon dating of many human developments go well back to pre-Ice Age establishments. At this point science is saying that humans are much older than we previously thought.)

Rich Hoffman

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Stephen Miller’s Take down of Jake Tapper: Fighting back in the right way

To see the wonderful interview by Stephen Miller on Jake Tapper’s CNN show; here it is.  Enjoy, and share it with a friend.

Rich Hoffman

Sign up for Second Call Defense here:  http://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707  Use my name to get added benefits.

A Review of ‘Fire and Fury’: The profound sadness that emerges at the end of the controversial book

My first thought about the new Michael Wolff book Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House is sadness.  My second thought is that it is good for the book publishing business and that I think it’s wonderful that people are reading it.  At least they are reading something.  I went down to my Barnes and Noble store at precisely 9 am when they opened to buy it.  They had two copies for promotion and were able to release them once the publisher moved up the publication date, due to Trump’s cease and desist order, so it was one of the more dramatic books to hit the shelves in a long time—and that is a good thing.  But after going through it my opinion of Trump only solidified.  It was obvious to me that Wolff took a calculated risk that will make him forever wealthy—but will always place him in the category of a tabloid writer.  He threw away his reputation to exploit this one unique chance in history and that is what lead me to feel the sadness—not just for him, but the people who said the things about Trump that they did.  It was a grim reminder to me of how small people most of the time think—and that is a real tragedy that I hope diminishes with each year that Trump is in office.

Of course Melania cried when her husband won the presidency.  She’s a young woman still who could walk the streets of New York with her son and go to a store or restaurant and enjoy some anonymity.  With Trump’s successful election she lost all that in a moment for the rest of her life and there is no question that it was a real punch in the gut for her.  What shocked me about Wolff’s book, as a writer, was his complete disregard for those types of little moments and what they really mean.  He simply took a Never Trump vantage point of all the events of the book and interviewed people who were ankle biters.  Ankle biters are those second-hand people, who usually constitute most of our society, who need a leader to show them how to do something once, then they try to associate themselves with the original idea through group think and try to claim jump in some respect for shared ownership.  You can know them by the type of people who stand around the coffee machine in any given morning talking about nothing until the boss walks through.  The boss might say a thing or two about current events for which the ankle biters will laugh and agree with.  Then the moment the boss leaves those people retreat into small-minded topics talking about the boss and how stupid he or she may be—and how they could do a better job if they were in charge.

Trump dealt with ankle biters all his life from his various businesses.  However, given his later celebrity status and the role his children played at the top of his company, Trump had some insulation from them.  In public life the ankle biters are much worse because there is a feeling of entitlement that often comes with their jobs and when Trump took office those second-hand people where literally everywhere.  It took Trump about five months of working in the White House to start to get his stride and figure out who was doing what.  He learned enough to figure out that Comey was a leaker on the intelligence side, but the people closest to him were harder to detect. Trump sincerely tried to show everyone in Washington D.C. that he had no plans of being a tyrant so he went to dinner with Mitt Romney, and put people on his staff that he hoped would bridge the gap between the Never Trumpers and the rest of the GOP—conventional choices that would make passing a legislative agenda a higher probability.  Those people, and Steve Bannon turned out to be one of them, assumed that Trump’s attempt to do this meant that the new president had no idea how to go about his job.  In their minds they fantasized that they could do a better job, so they were not loyal, and they found the ear of another second-hander in Wolff and their gossipy recollections produced the contents of this book.

Trump being the eternal optimist figured he could bounce though anything, so he didn’t mind taking the gamble, and when it began to be clear by May of 2017 that he’d need to get rid of quite of few people from the White House staff and replace them with new hires—he did it. Trump also obviously hoped to convert the Obama holdovers around the country who had been working on the previous administration.  I found myself sympathizing with Trump quite a lot in Wolff’s book because I’ve been in similar situations—where you take over management of other people’s problems and you try to reform them with your much better personal philosophy—but they don’t get it and you eventually have to let them go.  Trump at his core is a really nice guy.  I’ve met him a few times and he truly is an eternal optimist and he and I have that in common.  There are lots of places where we are different, but on that topic, I feel a real connection to this president.  He is always hopeful and that is a unique trait, one that is making America great again.  On the day that this book was released, the Dow exploded up over 25,000 for the first time ever which is astonishing.  That is purely because of Trump, because the investors out there understand what this Trump presidency means.  They are leaders in their fields and not the ankle biter types—so the economy reflects better than any other indicator how good this president is for the world.  That’s where I felt a real sadness for Michael Wolff in this book, and Steve Bannon ironically.  Their vantage point of reporting their opinions—as was the case of most of the quotes, was from that of a defeated state of mind.  Wolff didn’t surprise me because there are a lot of people like him out there.  But Steve Bannon did.

As Wolff stated the essential theme of his book was that everyone concluded Trump was essentially a man child—that he made everything about him all the time.  I’ve heard this one before also, and that is why as I closed the book I felt a profound sadness for a lot of people in it.  We start out lives as children with endless imagination and optimism.  We learn all we can in a short time—usually before the age of 5 and it is a real miracle of the human mind that we do so much in such a limited time.  But most of us—like more than 99.99999%–don’t make it past our teens and into our twenties with the gift of childhood intact.  Slowly over many years we fall into adult habits of steady bed times, we learn what works and what doesn’t so we regulate ourselves to reality and thus find ourselves shaped by the weakest links of our society and their lack of ambition.  Trump as a president still has that energy of a child who wants to build a tent in the living room—only he has spent most of his adult life building actual skyscrapers.  To do something like that requires endless optimism—like children have. The great motivating pastor from New York City, Norman Vincent Peale in his book The Power of Positive Thinking attributed a genius status to those adults who carry that childlike quality of thinking throughout their lives.  It is why Trump can see and do things that most people can’t and it is his best quality.  However, Wolff presents it as a detriment and that is unfortunately what is wrong with most people psychologically these days.  People see in Trump a quality they have long-lost and they feel resentment toward him reminding them of what it was.  That hatred is not just politically ideological, it is visceral.  It’s a mode of self-preservation that is not related to the performance of Trump—but the state of mind for which the readers and interviews of the book were conducted.

That visceral platform is what shines through in the end.  Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House I thought only strengthened the Trump administration because it clearly places on the table the type of people who have been against him.  Trump can now crack down on all his enemies—which happen to be the primary villains of American ideas—and he can say he tried.  This book is the testimony of that effort.  When it comes to people like Steve Bannon there are always people like him who fly too close to the sun and have their wings melt away.  Most humans don’t handle power very well—the Lord of the Rings books can attest to that—power can corrupt the weak minds—and often does.  But for those who do carry power with the mind of young people who just want to do and learn great things in life—power doesn’t corrupt—and Trump is at a place in his life where a hamburger in bed with three televisions on is his idea of a great life.  He’s accomplished all the things most people associate with success and he is now a president who is in the White House incorruptible.  What I learned from Fire and Fury is that Trump is far better than even I thought he was—but the people around him were not nearly equipped as such.  They were mere mortals who have not yet touched the face of eternity—which most children do possess until they learn to stop listening.  And that realization comes with it a profound sadness.

If you’d like to read the book but can’t get your hands on a copy, here it is in full PDF.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Bt6BSc-kxJeTUpMEoJkkbEgEZaSmPjA3/view

Rich Hoffman

Sign up for Second Call Defense here:  http://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707  Use my name to get added benefits.

The Pussies of the World: Trump is the only reason Kim Jong-un is talking to South Korea

It is astonishing how many modern people are just pussies (people who invite themselves to get fu**ed by bullies) and support political parties to hide their nature behind collective authority. It is as if they assumed that just because there are millions of pussies functioning in the world today, that somehow that changes the nature of what they are. When a bully of any kind presents themselves either on the world stage as North Korea has, just a bunch of punk kids vandalizing neighborhoods—you must stand up to them or else you invite more of the tyrannical behavior. Appeasement never works with a bully, it just gives you more of the behavior—which is how North Korea got so out of control in the first place—the world tried to appease their aggression—and they created a monster. Thankfully, with Trump in the White House, the United States isn’t in that appeasement business any longer and that has driven North Korea to actually sit down with South Korea for the first time in a long time. Trump’s tough talk has worked and so have the sanctions leaving North Korea with little choice.

I’ve said it many times, North Korea does not have the money or resources to conduct a nuclear war. It is amazing that many smart, college educated journalists took literally the empty words of Kim Jong-un when he said on Near Year’s Day that he had a nuclear button on his desk and that he would use it against America. They accepted at face value that it was the truth. Yet when Trump answered that he had a bigger button, and that his worked, the literal faces of the left-winged media in America melted off as if nuclear proliferation were going to happen. No, it was just Trump calling a bluff and playing the bad cop in a complicated international strategy to let Kim Jong-un seek the path of less resistance to peace on the Korean peninsula. It’s a starting point in the peace process and one that is more than justifiable for a stupid kid not yet 30 who thinks the way to communist prosperity is through intimidation. Every rocket he has fired to try to scare the world into giving him more money has only robbed food from his people and there are defectors fleeing across the South Korean border in increasing numbers, so the kid doesn’t have a choice but to come to terms with South Korea. But to save face he had to threaten Trump—which of course Trump playing the bad cop had to answer appropriately. But there aren’t any nuclear weapons—heck, there are hardly rockets to launch for testing. The whole thing on behalf of North Korea has been a ruse and it is shameful that the American media bought into the notion so naively.

Sadly, this incident shows how far our nation has fallen. Not all mind you, but most Americans today are pussies not able to stand up to bullies, or even to recognize them when they present themselves. I would go so far to say that this is a by-product of the feminization of our free market society—where masculinity has been chastised and feminine approaches to problems propped up falsely to provide the illusion that “girl power” is a sustainable strategy in dealing with bullies in the future. It takes more than a sign and a pussy hat at a protest to deal with people like Kim Jong-un. You can’t make movies about 110 pound girls beating the crap out of 240 pound men and expect that to transfer over into reality. No matter how great the fighting techniques of a small woman—in a real fight there wouldn’t be a contest and that is what reality has to say on the matter. The entire premise of “girl power” and the feminization of the human race is a fantasy from the imagination of political radicals who essentially want to stop humanity from advancing—yielding to the efforts of mother nature. This whole thing is a 50-year-phase that will die out and return to the good ol’ days where men were men, and women were women, and both enjoyed their roles in creating families. But currently, it is having an impact on our foreign policy. Trump represents the traditional masculinity that half the nation expects. The other half have lost their minds and want men to sit and cry when losers like Kim Jong-un threaten us. That is after all the typical female reaction, to sit around crying and talking about the problem when the real solution is to kick the shit out of the little fat punk.

Sorry to be so politically incorrect, but any criticism of Trump’s handling of North Korea is completely unwarranted. Kim Jong-un has become accustomed to dealing with a feminized world where even the men sit around cowering in fear because they have been submitted by the “girl power” movement. Talking to some ruthless dictator is like a single mom trying to enforce the rule of law on an unruly male kid—it usually doesn’t work. In some cases, it does, but just look at a typical black neighborhood in America where there are no fathers in the home and the women have children by two, three or four fathers. Those kids become thugs—most of the time—and violence around the neighborhood escalate. If only there were a stable father figure in the lives of the children things would turn out much differently. Kim Jong-un is that figure of a global communist dictator who has been coddled by too many world leaders functioning from a feminized social trend that is destined for failure.

Feminists can say what they want about fair treatment and equality—but if you really dig into their subconscious they still expect men to “figure them out.” As they bitch and complain about their worthless men not taking out the trash, or watching too much football and complain to their girl friends how much better the world would be if women ran the world—they still really want to be chained to a bed blindfolded as a force of masculine power takes over her body. And there’s nothing wrong with that—it’s a purely biological function. But when losers like fat boy Kim Jong-un who can only get laid because he runs a country think that the world will sit around and let him push everyone around because girls are running everything—he’s got another thing coming. Can you imagine that fat kid trying to pick up chicks at an American shopping mall—he’s be laughed at until he couldn’t show himself in public. But as a communist dictator, girls have to do what he says—so he thinks that’s the way it is elsewhere in the world. By launching rockets he tries to use the same fear tactics that work in North Korea to essentially pick up chicks. Feminists have given him that illusion—until Trump became that father figure for the world to fear once again. Now everyone must behave, or they’ll get a spanking. Trump gave Kim Jong-un a spanking which he deserved. And now the North Korean dictator has to come to the table with South Korea or he’s going to bed without his dinner. For a fat kid like the North Korean dictator who likes his food—sanctions are cramping his lifestyle—which is all he really cared about to begin with.

So to the pussies out there, fear not. Men are taking care of the problem—at least the ones who are still left in the world.

Rich Hoffman

Sign up for Second Call Defense here:  http://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707  Use my name to get added benefits.

Pot Users are the Clear and Present Enemy: The real reason California legalized recreational marijuana

There is nothing that comes good out of the legalization of pot, and it was quite astonishing to see how much exuberance there was on New Year’s Day when California made legal the recreational use of the vile drug marijuana. All of human civilization is built upon thought, no matter what the political predilections of the people—thinking is the core element in all society. Without thought there simply is no society and if you track the paths of the supporters of pot, you will find they nearly perfectly line up with abortion fanatics, global warming losers and other anti-capitalists of the political left. They are a contradictory lot of people who can be proven so by their support of every turtle crossing to hold up new roads and railways in California and their severe climate restrictions on new housing, but they support the utter destruction of the human mind with mind altering substances like pot. The reason they support the legalization of marijuana is that they are anti-human and are earth first fanatics who see the human race as a threat to the furtherance of our home planet. They are the natural extensions of the Marxist hippies which splashed on the scene halfway through the last century and they are intellectually aligned with anything that takes the human race back to the sun worshiping primitives of yesteryear.

The legalization of pot is the sign of a declining civilization and it reminds me of the many shopping malls around the country that are losing their brick and mortar stores to online shopping. I can think of one such mall in Cincinnati near where I live that was a thriving escapade of energy and excitement just a decade ago. Now it sits abandoned and decaying rapidly—and the reason is that the mall management failed to take proper action when they could have to save the enterprise. When their numbers began to decline at the start of the online shopping revolution, the mall management turned toward the youth to save it. They allowed for many nightclubs to infest its halls and they had late hours at the movie theater and gaming area to attract young people. Well, the mall was near several black neighborhoods where money was not easy to come by and there were many white neighborhoods nearby that were also poor, so turf wars erupted at the mall which scared away all the nice families who might otherwise spend their money there. Once mall management realized the error of their ways it was too late. The clientele of that establishment had found better places to spend their money and the customers never came back.

In a lot of ways that is what these states are doing when they legalize pot—they are looking for that short-term boost to their tax collecting endeavors while appealing to the young and the reckless. The youth to get more party laws enacted might therefore be expected to vote for Democrats to keep the fun going—but what they don’t see is that people move with their feet and soon there won’t be any economical means to help the state stay open for business. The logic of having a society that can function on drug activity is not realistic. Drug users of course will point to Amsterdam in Europe and Denmark as examples where this type of live and let live activity can thrive—but that’s in Europe—and it’s a very short-term social position. It cannot endure well into the future. When a state like California has to compete with Texas, Ohio, or Wyoming the people who support those high taxed states have options where in Europe they don’t. If you move from Amsterdam, the next socialist country like France and Germany have just as many problems. England is hardly a refuge, the housing prices are ridiculously high and the options for young people are quite bleak, because of their poor economic philosophies rooted in the work of Karl Marx.

Young people and those saddled with a lack of intelligence tend to view history by decades and often think of things that happened 30 years ago as being old. That is largely a condition of the political left in our modern era that teaches in public school that kids know more than their parents and that youth trumps experience—which of course it doesn’t. That is why they think from the vantage point of youth that they can legalize marijuana and that a society can thrive productively. It can’t, just as a drunk can’t be expected invent the next great step in human endeavor. A society of people stoned on pot are not going to advance civilization. No great society every sustained itself on intoxication—and it won’t start in California. There is nothing funny about intoxication—it is simply a step toward a culture in decline. The proper way to view civilization and the rules that govern each society is in the long view of 500 years or more. The question should be asked if any policy of social concern can enrich that society from the present to roughly 500 years in the future—and if it can, that is something to pursue. But to look at a society of pot users and think it could endure for even 50 years is a stretch. Pot use equates to a destroyed society and there is no flexibility in that assessment. It is a sure conclusion.

Many liberals who support the killing of humans through abortion—because they secretly think that the human species is something that should be nearly wiped away to protect the earth—also think that the American Indian is something special in the history of North America. The truth is that they were never Native Americans—they might be called rather native Chinese living in North America—or perhaps Vikings, Phoenicians—even Africans, but they came to be just as Americans did—they migrated from somewhere to start a life in a new world and they brought with them lots of stupid ideas. When George Washington was being inaugurated the various Indian nations were already in decline. If left to their own devices, they would have retreated into the primitive state of their ancestors as they emerged from the Ice Age. Their society was rooted heavily in sacrifice to the various gods of their mythology and they took mind altering substances as part of their socializing. The net result was that they were easy to beat when it came time to conduct Westward Expansion. Once beaten it was a tactic to get them addicted to alcohol due to their natural predilection for substance abuse and that pretty much sealed the deal on their claim to anything in North America. Many who support trends of less human intervention on earth are now seeking to turn the tables on Western Civilization by destroying the minds of our youth so that they are too stoned and drunk to further advance mankind into a Type 1 civilization—and that is precisely what is happening in California and these other places that are legalizing pot.

People will say that there are exceptions to this person or that who have smoked dope all their life and they were still bright functioning human beings. I suppose that may be true, although I have known many people who smoked a lot of pot (I never have and never will as it disgusts me) and all those people ended up dead beat losers—every one of them. I have watched so many lives be destroyed by pot use, and other drugs—alcohol included, that I have no faith that a society that accepts such intoxication can advance into the future. 100 years from now, the society that accepts pot as their recreation will be wiped away from the earth—which for progressives is the point. They will surely point to a possibility that Shakespeare smoked pot and declare that the intoxicant helps the mind—but they’d be wrong. There are no circumstances that pot is good for a human being looking forward to a fruitful future. It is a drug of decline and hopelessness. Every road that comes from pot leads to an end against a brick wall of human evolution and it’s a pathetic ingredient. It is in itself death which soothes an otherwise active mind to sleep perpetually giving victory to those aggressors in the world that hate the human race. It is not a coincidence that California will go out of its way to protect a rare fish, a forest of trees or even a specific kind of grass—but will support the destruction of human beings through the legalization of pot. That’s because they know pot will destroy the human race—its what they want. They want husks of human beings dead and vanquished like the poor fetuses of terminated pregnancies—yet they don’t want the guilt of actually killing anyone—so they have put their efforts behind pot to kill all humans and save the planet earth just long enough for it to be consumed by our own sun in a few billion years. Pot supports by their very nature don’t care about billions of years or even a 100 years. They are impatient ideologues of leftist philosophy with no concept of history—and they want only what they can see and touch right now which is a condition made worse by pot use. For those of us who do want to see a tomorrow—pot users are the clear and present enemy.

Rich Hoffman

Sign up for Second Call Defense here:  http://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707  Use my name to get added benefits.

The Protests in Iran: What you need to know about why North Korea wants to blow everyone up–a brief history of Marxism for 2018 predictions

You might wonder dear reader why there has not been much coverage of the Iranian protests by young people demanding that things change in that hostile country which is one of the largest state sponsors of terror throughout the world.  Over the New Year of 2018 protests were abundant yet the media was silent on the matter because the history of the Iranian Revolution of 1979 was one conducted by various Marxist and communist groups oriented to the left of the political spectrum and their basic philosophy has imposed disaster economically there.  Prior governments in Iran were very friendly to Western culture and were rich with oil reserves—but Marxist Islamists like the  Mojahedin-e Khalq sought to push out Western influences in their country so they had a revolution not unlike the one where communism took over in Russia and the rest is history.  Within a roughly 50 year period communism driven by Marxist philosophy spread around the world, first in Russia by the 1920s, then to China and most of Asia in 1949, then to the Middle East in 1979.  In America our culture bent but didn’t completely break by adopting FDR’s The New Deal, but literally the rest of the world fell to Karl Marx and his disastrous ideas.  Of course Cuba, Mexico and Central then South America followed these movements into the 1980s—which is why they are all economic disasters today.

When we speak of the political left and the academia that fuels their efforts we are talking about people who subscribe to this global unification of the Marxist platform which was created essentially in the mid 1850s based on ideas that go all the way back to Sir Thomas More’s book Utopia.  Regardless of how traditional the Marxists of Iran try to disguise their intentions, their political and social platform is still a product of Europe, just as the communism of China is. All the countries that adopted that European disaster have tossed away their traditions and history to accept these collectivist ideas about humanity.  To date the only place in the world where Marx’s philosophy appears to be conducting a stable society is in Scandinavia—particularly Denmark.  There the people are pretty happy, but we are talking about a culture descended from the Vikings who are nothing like their ancestors.  They are a thoroughly defeated culture that has had to resign themselves to the lack of options present in their cold northern climate.  They don’t work much there and have decided to live a leisurely life with extremely high taxes—they are no longer the ambitious culture that launched the Vikings—and it shows.  It is that region of the world that the academics point to and proclaim that Sir Thomas More’s vision is possible.  But to have it mankind has to turn off their ambitions and treat life as a platform for death—and that just isn’t very appealing to young people when it comes down to it.

That brings us to the protests in Iran.  Like oil rich Venezuela—Iran has very high unemployment, there are very few cultural options for the young people and things never have manifested the way the revolutionaries predicted. Marxism has been a dismal failure and the leftist groups that imposed the revolution upon Iran are looking pretty stupid—and to save themselves from the embarrassments of their folly they sponsor terrorism to keep anybody from looking too deeply at their inner workings.   Ultimately this is why all these leftist countries fail and why they all try to use nuclear proliferation to threaten the world with economic instability because their own cultures look horrible in relation to competing markets.  That is certainly the case with North Korea which is a communist dictatorship.  Like Iran they want access to nuclear missiles so that they can threaten to blow up anybody who is doing better economically than they are.  In the Middle East its Israel which is very friendly to the West and makes everyone else in the region look terrible by any economic measure.  Then in North Korea its first South Korea then the United States and Japan that threaten the fat little kid running the communist country these days.

As we have clearly seen after Donald Trump was elected in the United States these same Marxist ideas have deep roots in our own Beltway politics and the media is a part of that culture.  My theory on the matter is essentially that The Communist Manifesto by Marx is an easy read.  Marxist ideas flow naturally with the empathy that women naturally bring to any decision-making process.  Men wanted to bed these women so adopted those basic philosophies essentially to improve their sex life and that’s how this stuff spreads like such a terrible disease.  I’ve read all those major books on economics including the Marx masterwork Das Kapital—and the German philosopher reveals himself to be essentially a victim to the motors of the world instead of the driver.  That is why Marxism fails everywhere except where people are resigned to any inner ambitions.  Marxism roots itself in exploitation of resources rather than in the productive utilization of what the human mind produces which is the essence of the work I much prefer and find infinitely more fascinating, the great philosophy of Adam Smith in his Wealth of Nations, which became the economic driver of The United States from the very beginning in 1776.  Marxism is all about victimization which is appealing to the lazy, corrupt, and emotionally weak of the human species whereas Smith’s capitalism is about empowerment and individualized realization.   The two ideas don’t mix.

The obvious reason that the media did not report the protests in the streets of Iran over the New Year is because they can’t admit to themselves that the premise for which the Marxism that overthrew the Western friendly leadership in Iran in 1979 never has worked and now people want something else. This anxiety goes back to the primary reasons Donald Trump was elected president to begin with—it was a base rejection of the Marxist platform that has destroyed so many American cities, like Detroit, Chicago (economically) and states like California, Illinois, and New York.  The political left is attempting to keep their whole platform together with masking tape and glue by ignoring the basic problem—that Marxism is not a philosophy that people really want when it comes down to it.  In Denmark where their youth are content to drink, have sex, and essentially behave as retired people in their prime income years—Marxism can work—but people have to yield their ambitions in life to such a mentality.  Aside from Bluetooth technology, Scandinavia isn’t exactly lighting up the stage of world culture—they are consumers of the great music, movies and fashion of the West, but they don’t do much to advance anything—due to their Marxist platform of socialism mixed with just enough capitalism to participate in free trade.  Literally everywhere around the world from North Korea, Iran, Mexico, South America all of Africa, and all the countries that touch the Mediterranean Sea except for Israel are drowning in their adoption of Marx as their basic left leaning philosophy—and the American media that is also very Marxist from their college training is embarrassed.

Once the people in Iran topple the Marxists that have been in power there for the last forty years one of the last great hopes of the political left will fall into the sunset of philosophic thought.  Marxism is doomed to fail—it always has been.  But for people who only know and understand it because they learned it in college where they had other good experiences and hold onto those memories as one connected enterprise it’s hard to admit that Marxism is such a disaster.  For them it’s like admitting your mother is a whore even while you live in the next room and hear her faking organisms to pay the bills.  Nobody wants to admit such things about something they care about—but that don’t change the reality about Marxism.  Karl Marx has destroyed the minds and economies of all the people who have followed him and the evidence is abundantly obvious.  Iran is the latest, but won’t be the last.  When people see there are options, they will want to participate.  The leftists who understand that options are their enemy will always try to use fear to attempt to push reality further into the distance, but in 2018 that all falls apart for them.  Iran and North Korea are in the first to fall from the pressure—but the American media will be the next.  And that is why they didn’t cover the protests—because they know they are next.

Rich Hoffman

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Tom Steyer’s “Novacaine” Moment: Democrats learn ‘How to Live as Ghosts’

I hadn’t been paying much attention to Tom Steyer’s multimillion dollar campaign to impeach President Trump—because I don’t watch much television—so I didn’t see his ads.  With Netflix, Amazon Prime, new movie releases at the theater—countless books—family activities, a busy professional life followed by needed time for myself—my life and Tom Steyer’s just didn’t connect. Aside from that, I think he’s a loser and I only have room for a minimum number of losers in my life and he’s not on the list.  But I did catch one of his ads over the Holiday and was pretty amazed at his audacity.  What makes him think someone like me is going to let him get away with impeaching Trump?  If such a thing were to happen doesn’t that open the door to do things the other way—using violence if necessary?

Tom Steyer is exactly the reason we needed Trump in the first place.  There are all these billionaires out there who are very liberal, who don’t want competition—like Steyer, Soros—Zuckerberg, Gates, Buffett, Bloomberg and many others who have thrown their money at candidates America hates to take the country in a direction traditionalists don’t want to go.  They are used to controlling Hollywood, they are used to controlling the publishing industry, the mainstream media and virtually everything we see and hear—so it drives them crazy that a fellow billionaire was able to run for office and win—and he doesn’t need their money so is beyond their control.  And now they are getting desperate.  Steyer might otherwise throw his money behind Democrats in 2018, but guess what—there aren’t any worth spending money on so all they have as progressives is the hope that they might be able to push Trump out of office.  Obviously, because they aren’t very smart, they haven’t thought things through to their conclusions.  What they do now sets a tone for the future and they’ll have to live with the consequences.  Speaking for myself, I’m not going to get behind anything that Tom Steyer is involved in.  It’s just not going to happen.  Even by some remote fantasy Steyer and his progressives were to impeach Trump—does he really think we’re going to turn in our guns and say—“well, I guess you guys won.”  LOL, not a chance, they are cheating and those progressives have opened themselves to really bad times in the future if they persist.

There is a lot of unneeded concern about how the Democrats might do in 2018.  Let me remind everyone that I predicted an end to the Democratic Party within a few years, and they are right on track.  The desperation that billionaire donors like Steyer are exhibiting now are due to their lack of options and their ads sound foolish in reflecting that.  Trump had every right to fire James Comey—there was no obstruction of justice for a phony campaign created by Democrats to try to stop the inauguration of a justifiably legal election that Trump won.  Where FISA warrants were granted based on inflammatory and bogus information meant to unmask legitimate members of the Trump campaign. The Democrats and their progressive supporters have broken so many laws and made such embarrassments of our legal system that trust will never go back into their direction. That pendulum has shifted forever and Steyer apparently is so corrupted by ideology that he doesn’t see it.  But you know what bothers people like him even more—his money suddenly has no power—as it once did—and that has all these types of people terrified.

The other benefit to Donald Trump is that he largely made his money off his charisma—they guy is an all in one package master communicator.  These other guys, including Zuckerberg from Facebook are stiff nerds who come across on camera as idiots—and their money can’t protect them any longer.  They can’t compete with Trump and they can’t buy people who can for the first time in their lives.  In the past we’ve tried on the political right to elect our own wealthy people—like Steve Forbes and Ross Perot, but they were too much like Tom Steyer—they didn’t have great screen presence the way a very charismatic actor would.  Their political campaigns came out flat, and that’s what’s happening now with progressives.  They are discovering that with all their control of the media, with all their manipulation of the Beltway that now people have a choice, they don’t have candidates in their stables to compete with the world that Trump has established.  That is why they are in a panic, because they know the world as they have controlled it, is now over.

Trump’s New Year’s celebration bringing in 2018 was a rebirth of American spirit in many ways that we haven’t seen in this country since the Golden Days of Hollywood.  It was optimistic in all the ways you’d expect from a nation born by Adam Smith’s philosophy of economic morality articulated in The Wealth of Nations.  That is what people like Steyer have been trying to keep away from the American people yet it is happening regardless.  It’s only been one year of the Trump administration and he has accomplished quite a lot.  He’s on par with my expectations and has set up a 2018 that will be even greater, because now he has had a chance to put his feet in the water and started swimming.  The Republican Party needed to be united after a difficult 2015—and that essentially happened with the tax cuts at the end of 2017.  The Democrats have not had their come to Jesus moment.  They have people like Steyer and Soros ready to write them checks, but there is nobody worth spending the money on, only ghosts from the past.  Progressive ideas and Democratic Party platform concepts have been rejected and that is part of a new trend which is emerging.

Calls for impeachment based on loose accusations while the other side actually did break many laws aren’t going to cut it in this new age.  Watching Tom Steyer’s commercials against Trump is like watching the ghosts from the music video by 10 Years called “Novacaine.”  It’s a song from their album called How to Live as Ghosts and I think it fits quite accurately the condition of the current Democratic Party.  They are chasing ghosts, things that worked in the past but are no longer relevant in the world and they keep going through the same failures over and over ad infinitum.  No matter how many checks Steyer and his progressive insurgents write, he is still going through the same routine over and over going nowhere only to come back to the beginning and wondering if anything happened at all.  Meanwhile, Republicans are moving forward with a fresh guilt free philosophy of renewed interest in capitalism.

I personally consider Tom Steyer’s attempts to be an insult to my vote—but I have more faith in our government this year with Trump in control of it than I did last year when Obama was hanging on to power with everything he could utilize to stop 2017 from happening.  I know for myself if our government ever tries to present what they have, knowing what we do today, that I will exercise my rights to overthrow them—because they are not competent to run my government.  Now that I know how dirty the progressives really are in America, I have no desire to share my country with them.  They need to leave and go someplace else—like Europe if they want all the socialism that they seem to enjoy so much.  To Steyer, he is fine with socialism because he figures he can control the parties at play with his money, so he will always have a seat of aristocracy to enjoy.  But that just isn’t acceptable to the American way of life where anybody willing to work hard can have a shot at the highest levels of power.  To achieve those needs we had to have a president like Trump who didn’t need to appease people like Steyer, or even Mark Cuban, Bezos—really a countless list of very wealthy people who fundamentally want to change America into something else that limits opportunities for other people.  I am pleased to see that like the music video “Novacaine,” that Tom Steyer is already a ghost replaying his failed philosophy over and over again as the rest of the living world moves on without him—and that is a truly beautiful thing.

Rich Hoffman

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Immersive VR Education’s Apollo 11: A technological achievement that brings a moon landing to your livingroom

I treated myself to some catching up by New Year’s Eve to welcome 2018 with as clean a slate as possible.  I finished reading seven books over the last two weeks, some of them quite difficult reads—and I did it by not turning on the Playstation 4 except for once.  As everyone had parties celebrating the New Year I took a trip to the moon utilizing Immersive’s VR Education LTD fine triumph—their Apollo 11 VR experience.  I’ve talked about this before and have been excited about it—but until recently hadn’t had time to get into it.  The project was a big one, and was mostly funded with private Kick Starter investment that was credited at the end.  It was an educational documentary virtual reality experience that put you in the left seat of the Apollo 11 launch vehicle out of Kennedy Space center and into the command module during the approach to the moon.  Then landing on the moon you are in the left seat of the Lander standing next to Neil Armstrong.  Once there you get to stand on the moon and have a look at the Sea of Tranquility like it’s never been shown in a museum exhibit that I’ve seen.  It was simply amazing.  You also get to witness the return to earth and the perspective of the astronauts as they reentered the atmosphere awaiting splashdown.

I think where the 3D environments of the Playstation VR system really shine is within cockpits, such as cars and aircraft.  I have been amazed by the graphic displays of games like Battlefront VR and Driveclub where every little toggle switch is shown just as it would in a vehicle with such photorealistic display that you feel you can reach out and touch them.  So the same method works brilliantly in the Apollo 11 experience.  Graphics that might otherwise look terrible in 2D are easily forgivable in 3D so the ride up the elevator to the top of the rocket at the Kennedy Space Center was something I thought was also very impressive.  I’ve been there several times and know what things look like and even though a lot of details were missing, the overall feel of the area was certainly captured. Getting the feel of the height and the relationship to the surrounding terrain was what mattered and once inside the Apollo capsule awaiting launch that is where the VR part of the experience really shined.

As the launch occurred you could see out the windows as the rocket blasted through the various cloud layers and watch the earth fall behind.  Out the front window you could also see the sky go from a blue to black as stars gradually came into view—just as it would.  You could look at all the dancing lights on the control panel and look over at the other two astronauts as they answered alarms shaking in their seats from the momentum.  The radio chatter was ever-present and was synced up to the mouths of the pilots.  Occasionally I’d find myself staring at their faces and they’d look you in the eye as if they knew you were there pulling you into the experience.  It was all very thrilling and unexpectedly brilliant.

http://immersivevreducation.com/

Questions I’ve always had like where is the moon in relation to their perspective on the actual trip and how did it look were easily confirmed by me just by looking out the windows like a kid in the car first arriving at Disney World.  I was free to look out any window I could to see the relative positioning of the vessel as it plunged through space toward the moon.  Once on the moon I enjoyed much more than I would have expected at looking up into the earth as it just floated there in the dark of space. I’ve seen many picture of the earth from the moon in good resolution, but the presentation in VR was so much better—because it gave depth to the craters and the mountains surrounding the landing site that pictures just couldn’t capture in any way. I’ve also heard all the recordings of this epic landing seemingly hundreds of times, but being there in a VR world was a much better way to experience them.  First the speech by Kennedy at the beginning sounded like I had heard it for the first time.  It was presented in a very unusual way that sounded fresh to me.  Then the well-known speech of Neil Armstrong stepping onto the moon for the first time was particularly gripping as I was already out of the vessel watching him do it and looking all around me for perspective.  Shockingly I heard the voice of Nixon as he called from the Oval Office to talk about the experience.  As he spoke I was looking at the earth trying to see if Washington D.C. was pointed at us as he spoke considering the distance in between.  It was very easy to get caught up in the whole thing.  What this VR experience did particularly well was give depth and scale to the world we were exploring, which I think really opens up the way we can educate ourselves in the future.

Education is essentially the strength of this new VR technology.  The ability to go to places from the comfort of your living room and see things on a grand scale and interact with objects of history are the keys to our future.  What Immersive Education is doing I think is one of the most powerful education tools I’ve seen yet ever presented.  I often advocate that there is nothing that teaches better than a good book, because reading requires work and personal investment so that the information tends to stay with you longer as a participant.  Passively watching a television documentary doesn’t have the same effect.  It can still be good, but it’s not as effective.  However, with the kind of work Immersive Education is doing, you have no choice but to participate, because your mind actually thinks you are in those environments.  Even poorly rendered graphics in VR become sellable realities because the way our eyes participate in reality lends strength to the technology.  I can see the future of learning foreign languages within the countries of origin, and interaction with environments that would otherwise be exotic to be the strengths of this exciting new technology.  There is real potential here that is extremely new and creates so many options.

I would have never thought that I’d be able to spend a New Year’s Eve going to the moon then still having time to usher in the New Year in the traditional way.  But that is the world we are living in now.  Technology brings us options that curious minds can indulge in, and I consider that a real privilege.  For as many times as I’ve heard about man’s first trip to the moon, and heard the various speeches, Immersive Education managed to make it a fresh experience which was thrilling for any science buff.  But for the general public it is a real gift that can be easily downloaded into any living room that has a Playstation VR device.  I would go so far to say that I’d buy a Playstation VR just to take this one trip to the moon; it is that good, and revolutionary.  And what thrills me more is that it is just a sign of things yet to come.

Rich Hoffman

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Karoshi: The difference between efficiency and a lack of ability

Recently I’ve written a few articles on the scam which is Lean manufacturing.  It’s not that the work of Womack, Jones and Roos in The Machine that Changed the World is inaccurate in its observations of mass production cultures versus lean manufacturing strategies—but that their academic lenses failed to identify the crucial ingredient that made Asian efforts superior to those in the West.  In essence, it is the Japanese word Karoshi which allowed for the explosion on the scene of the revolutionary work ethic for which those three observers tried to capture in a bottle to save the West from itself and start a new kind of industrial revolution based on Lean manufacturing methods.  The Japanese specifically are willing to outwork the rest of the world and put country before self even over small things, which is why the comparisons in The Machine that Changed the World made traditional mass producers look so terrible in side by side productivity comparisons—yet nowhere in their book did they successfully make that point.  The closest they came was in declaring that the transplant operations in America were more successful when they had Japanese managers as opposed to American.  With all things considered equal, American workers, American labor laws, and American supply chains, Lean manufacturing did show dramatic improvements in American productivity—only they typically only worked best when the manufacturing plant was conducted by Japanese leadership as opposed to those of Westerners.  If you break that down even father it is because of the Japanese tendency toward Karoshi that one was more successful than another—the willingness to put in the time to build such a Lean culture at the management level.

For whatever reason at the end of the 2017 calendar year a lot of people have been pushing me to discover what my next book will be.  Honestly, I have a number of fiction projects brewing on the back burner but at this point in my life it’s all about business.  To many people from the outside they look at my life and think I, like the Japanese, are functioning from Karoshi—which is their word for burnout—or death by work.  After all I do work with people from those far-flung places on the other side of the world and even by their standards I work longer days and compress more into my 24 hour day than they can imagine.  What makes me different from other people is that I have this background in Western arts, (a form of martial art) that has also made me a very efficient person—personally, which for Christmas this year I shared with some of my employees for their benefit.  (click to view)  Working harder isn’t necessarily good—but working smarter is.  My lessons to others about the nature of the bullwhip is about more than just a novelty act—it’s an actual philosophy for which I run my life—and without it I’d be in the same boat as everyone else.  And now for the last couple of years I have been experimenting with Cowboy Fast Draw which has led me to several conclusions regarding Lean manufacturing—and that my next book will likely deal with these Western methods of approaching business that are of the next generation of thinking.  I need to tweak a few things first before committing them to paper—but my next literary project will likely have to do with this crucial issue.

One thing that led me to Cowboy Fast Draw to begin with was my engagement with many American manufacturers who were getting frustrated with my methods as we were setting up a massive supply chain together and many of them put up a lot of resistance—which ran counter to my way of thinking. Most of these people were classic mass production people—which I think still has a lot of merit to it from a traditional standpoint.  Their companies have made them adapt Lean techniques so being the typical students of Western education systems they went and memorized all the charts and graphs—and the Japanese words for things without understanding the core philosophy of what Lean manufacturing did.  When they ran up against me they would frustratingly utter that I’m all too willing to “shoot from the hip” too often which led to a name they called me behind my back as a “gunslinger” which to their minds was an insult.  We call quarterbacks in football gunslingers when we want to insult their impatience in the pocket to throw too many risky passes.  Only the risk isn’t that all that risky to my mind.  Using bullwhips and now shooting techniques that do not involve aiming I am extremely accurate and fast in those hobbies and naturally I carry those elements over into my personal life.  Just because you can make fast decisions on critical elements without a process map to guide you, it doesn’t make you risky, only “ultra efficient.”

With the help of Womack and many others Japan has been placed at the top of manufacturing respectability for the last half of a century and why not, they earned it. But there has been a cost.  Their very industrious culture in Japan is suffering from Karoshi to the point where 1 in every 5 people are suffering tremendously from it—and if you subtract females and elderly people, that leaves most of the adult males from age 20 to age 50 pressed with overburdened stress that actually makes them less productive.  Of course the slack-jawed hippies and micromanaging academics think that the solution for the entire industrial world is to force companies to regulate their workers to a 40 hour work week—which is pretty stupid.  That is no solution—because the work demand is a product of production necessity.  There is a need for the work, otherwise it wouldn’t exist.  And forcing workers to only work 60 hours a week forces payrolls higher which hurts companies because they have to add to their overhead—which academics don’t care about because that’s their solution to everything—being that’s their role within education societies.  The work is needed and you can’t just throw bodies at the problem because all those bodies are not equal—everyone can’t perform work at the same level.  But we can focus on performing work in the most efficient manner possible, and doing that we can greatly reduce the need to overwork ourselves.

I personally work 60 to 70 hours per week and I still have time for many things in my life.  Outsiders might look at my pace and declare that I’m at risk of Karoshi myself—but they don’t understand.  To explain it to them I’d use one of my bullwhip tricks in putting out a candle with it to show how speed, accuracy and judgment can all come together to project focused efficiency into very tight target radius.  Or in the case of Cowboy Fast Draw where a gun has to be drawn from a holster and shot into a target in under a half a second—the work still gets down.  If the goal is to shoot a gun into a target, that task can be done whether it takes a half a second or up to a minute as the shooter takes their time aiming the weapon and firing.  The fast draw artist is obviously much more efficient at performing that basic task.  They might be able to shoot that same target 20 or 30 times while the cumbersome minded shooter wastes huge amounts of time pointing and aiming. The aiming is only a task needed for those who lack the faith in themselves to perform the task.  So in essence, the reason that countries like Japan have so much trouble with Karoshi is that they have brought in so much work—their society cannot process it all on time using the methods of approaching that work which they are utilizing now.  They need methods that still perform the work, but only much faster and still have the accuracy needed.

When I hear some inefficient person—whether it’s the president of a company that is filled with inefficient workers and is struggling to meet quotas, or an old-fashioned engineer who says we are working too fast to not make mistakes I get pretty mad.  What they are really saying is that I should bend my life to their limits because I can do all those things fast and accurate.  Speed does not mean a lack of quality—it’s only a detriment if the person performing the task is an inefficient human being.  And that is the essence of human behavior that Womack never addressed in his Lean manufacturing work—and why I’m not a big fan of the guy.  The reason the Japanese beat the West in manufacturing over the last several decades is not because of Lean methods.  It’s because they simply were willing to outwork the world to climb back on top after they lost World War II.  It was their path to redemption.  Now however that the world has looked to them for the method to perform work, the pressure is crushing their culture with high incidents of Karoshi.  And I’m saying there is a better way, one that still has all the efficiencies—but puts more of an emphasis on speed so that productivity doesn’t stack up behind the incompetent—but that the good manager can figure out who can do more in less time than the sluggish mind of those less capable.  That is how we solve the problem of being overworked even as the world demands more productivity at a much more rapid pace.  We can’t say no to that challenge—we simply have to figure out a better way to do it—which I’m thinking seriously of helping to formulate.

Rich Hoffman

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Steven Spielberg: Just another Hollywood political hack

It pains me to say this, I love Steven Spielberg, I love John Williams, I even like Amazon’s Jeff Bezos—so what on earth are these idiots talking about regarding the merit of the “free press.”  In his new movie The Post, Spielberg, Tom Hanks and the eternally liberal feminist Meryl Streep act like they are changing the world with this rush job loser of a movie yet they had to get it out before the close of 2017 to qualify for the awards season.  Aside from the obvious political message the film is very sloppy—like it was made by college students—not the most successful filmmaker in the history of mankind.  The story is amazingly political.  The premise suggested by the movie—that the free press is our only vanguard against corrupt presidencies is completely ridiculous.  The Washington Post—the newspaper currently owned by Jeff Bezos isn’t a free press—it’s a liberal mouthpiece for the political left and a tool for trying to eliminate conservative politicians from races of consideration.  They are as corrupt as any K-Street lobbyists and couldn’t be considered trustworthy by any stretch of the imagination.  It’s amazing to me that Spielberg and Hanks would even suggest that there is some moral authority for which The Post had to speak from—because such a thought is one of the biggest fantasies in Spielberg’s long career at making movies—and that includes his version of Peter Pan in the movie Hook.

Like most things on the political left the foundations of thinking are rooted in disjointed emotions and a viewpoint from the bubble of the liberal neighborhoods they currently live in. The Obama administration as we have learned very late in the game was one of the most corrupt administrations in the history of the world—you’d have to go back to the Roman emperor Nero for a comparison—and The Washington Post has been silent on the matter—yet it has fully advanced the false notion that Russians are the reason Donald Trump won the presidency.  The American people don’t have faith in the left leaning “free press” of The Washington Post, The New York Times, and CNN.  Liberal people do because those outlets say what they want to hear just as Fox News traditionally might feed the political right a viewpoint favorable to their sentiments.  But facts are facts and many news outlets including Disney owned ABC has deliberately sat on stories to prevent the political left from looking bad.

Before Donald Trump’s election to the presidency I would occasionally buy a New York Times newspaper at my local Barnes and Nobel bookstore just to thumb through the pages and see what was going on in the world from the viewpoint of New York City.  I was able to overlook their obvious liberal bias because it wasn’t nearly as “in your face” as today’s anti-Trump media has been.  I even would read The New Yorker from time to time to keep up with the cultural drivers of our time—so I’m hardly a closed-minded Republican.  I’m a Ohio conservative so I am used to dealing with propaganda from the political left, even Fox News is now owned by the Disney Company so if I want to participate in the world, I have to deal with liberals.  But my beliefs aren’t just regional—because I was born in a conservative area, had conservative parents, and conservative grandparents—etc.  I’ve navigated through my adult life as an avid reader of history.  I never get drunk for any kind of entertainment as I love my mind more than anything in the world—and I enjoy feeding it good things—so my thoughts on things are formed by evidence as it plays out in the world—not what “people” and their viewpoints think of it.  For instance, for the third time in my life I am reading the big version of Adam Smith’s An Inquiry in the Nature and Causes of The Wealth of Nations shown in the included picture.  All the books in that stack for instance are my January 2018 projects and I will have them all read before the upcoming Super Bowl.  That stack is a continuous one that resides next to my reading chair.  The contents of the stack are ever-changing, but the stack is always there.  The point of the matter is that I am not drawing my conclusions about the nature of the “free press” based on any kind of pop culture sentiment—it is through the long view of historical perspective—so it deeply surprises me that Steve Spielberg—as an artist would allow himself to get so caught up in the local vantage points of his liberal Hollywood friends—because if they think the current Washington Post is anything more than a blog for the liberal views of Jeff Bezos—they are smoking crack and should be arrested immediately.

When the free press becomes part of the problem as it is now, we have no choice but to fight them.  We have watched them actively hide crimes from our faces much more severe than The Pentagon Papers ever were.  If that is the criteria of merit as shown in The Post—then where is the outrage over the crimes Hillary Clinton herself committed?  What about the FBI using the press as a way to hide their crimes and manipulate public opinion in ways they approved of?  What about that smidgen of evidence which continues to pour out of the Obama White House when it used the powers of government to crush political opponents and unmask competing administrations as they came into power?  The Trump administration was just trying to put together their team when Obama and his activist Justice Department was unmasking members of the transition team as a way to destroy them before they ever got started.  What they learned they leaked to that “free press” to work in cahoots with the aims of the political left to advance a sentiment for which the American public had just voted against–so much for a “righteous” Washington Post.

The essential premise of the movie, The Post is completely ridiculous and I’d expect much more out of these seasoned filmmakers than to propose that the free press especially in this modern era is anything less than another potential villain of misinformation with an agenda.  I’ve been involved in some of those little parties where some ditzy blond starlet yaks on and on about animal rights, women in the work place, and how wonderful Bill Clinton was in the White House with her tits falling out of her dress, drunk hoping to seduce her way into a movie role.  That is the world of Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg—they are bombarded by those types of people almost every day.  And actresses like that don’t really care about animal rights.  If by some chance she thought the film producers were conservative, she’d go on and on about the greatness of the NRA and how tax cuts helped her buy a new car as she was trying to make ends meet until her next movie role—(wink—look at my boobies).  But we expect more out of filmmakers who are as seasoned as Spielberg is.  Sadly it appears he’s become caught up in all this anti-Trump Hollywood sentiment and he is looking for another Oscar by appeasing those liberal members of the Academy with some red meat to fulfill their fantasies.  Yet all he’s really shown us is that he can’t be trusted to tell the truth either—as an artist.  He has become just another political hack, like the rest of them.

Rich Hoffman

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