Category: Steampunk

China’s Purchase of Deliberate Incompetence: Remember more than 10,000 people died at Tiananmen Square

Shrill, unfettered incompetence is a national security threat. And when a known enemy purchases that incompetence, it’s far, far worse. And that is the proof that Peter Schweizer put together in his book Red Handed, the number 1 bestseller that is out presently. I’ve read lots of books, and I’ll have to say that after I read Red Handed that I went on to read 15 other books as direct spawns to confirm for myself the bombs of information that Peter Schweizer revealed. And what we end up with is a sad story of purchased incompetence. China wants desperately to become the world’s number one superpower. The “only” superpower. China has spent so much money buying up our political and entertainment icons to the point where it’s just ridiculous. In the book, there is a story about Tim Cook from Apple sucking up to President Xi Jinping when the Chinese dictator visited the Microsoft headquarters in Seattle, Washington, while on a diplomacy tour in the United States to see Obama. I don’t think that I can ever own an Apple again because of what I learned. My next phone will have to be something else. After shaking Xi’s hand, Cook said, “did you feel the room shake.” Referring to the remarkable presence of Xi, clearly sucking up. Tim reflects the rest of the Desecrators that have taken money or done business with China in that way, especially in the tech industries. They have been seduced into disparaging America and investing that desecration into China with money created by the American capitalist system as the ultimate trojan horse, and it is sickening. A team of investigators extensively researched Peter’s book, and it all holds up. I checked much of it myself, so it’s a safe testimony into a trial we must have on the incompetent fools who have taken China’s money and turned their sheer stupidity against America on purpose for the result of our destruction, which is pretty serious stuff.

However, I do have a different take on the motivations of everyone, specifically China. Xi desperately wants to restore China’s honor in the world after the embarrassments from 200 years ago during the Opium Wars. Xi plans to have by 2050 the complete destruction of the West and be the global leader in everything, including the currency standard and government example, which he has dangled in front of the Party of Davos to lure in trillions of dollars in investments. BlackRock, which has been on my radar for many reasons, currently controls over 10 trillion dollars as the world’s largest asset manager. That is a lot more money than the entire economy of Russia, for perspective. Peter doesn’t cover it in his book how Larry Fink gained his muscle that he now applies to the world to impose climate change standards from the hard left. All that information is in other books, many other books ranging from Vivek Ramaswamy’s Woke Inc to Christopher Leonard’s Lords of Easy Money. Essentially the American Federal Reserve, obviously on purpose, has built up Larry Fink directly and BlackRock and other Wall Street money management firms to bring great harm to American infrastructure, crippling them while transitioning all financial transactions into China. BlackRock is the first money management firm in the world to gain access to the Chinese market and not without a cost. Larry isn’t such an activist for China. In fact, he’s laying down at their feet over every rule they wish to impose on him and his company. As Larry has said, “BlackRock is a Chinese company when doing business with China,” to put the fears away that loyalty to America or Wall Street specifically might compromise their relationship and violate their trust. 

BlackRock is important because they gained all this global muscle by buying up assets that dropped in value to virtually nothing after the Crash of 2008. In a special relationship with the Fed and Ben Bernanke at the time, the policy of quantitative easing was started to pump in cash to save those assets. Over the next ten years, the Fed has created a massive asset bubble that turned BlackRock and others into an enormous weapon of international finance. They have used their leverage to control many boards in America into imposing extreme leftist policies through ESG scores and other catastrophic measures to productive enterprise. BlackRock showed its cards in dealing with China and has shown themselves to be enemies of America in so many ways. Traditionally we would have said of this relationship to be one of national security. It has even given George Soros a reason to blush who has been against Larry Fink in the cozy relationship he has with China. If it not Fink from BlackRock, or LeBron James, Mitch McConnell, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, who actually asked Xi to name his baby, and countless other traders to America for the price of some looted money, what we have learned about the relationship China has and desires with the United States is essentially that of a step-parent marrying into all our families while pushing the dads out to the curb through a divorce. 

That is essentially what China wants to gain respect for, but they have that little problem with the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989. I remember it well, but I didn’t remember that there were reports that over 10,000 people were killed when the Chinese government put down a student protest at Tiananmen Square. The way the media reported it, I always thought of it as a much smaller event, such as the tragedy of the Who concert in Cincinnati back in the 70s. As reported in Red Handed, the number was much, much higher, leaving many in America who wanted desperately to do business in China because of the massive amount of people they have there, willingly ignoring the cost of the massacre. That was certainly the position of the Kissinger and the Bush family. What happened at Tiananmen Square certainly messed up all the bridge-building Nixon had started with China. And Xi knows that the only way to put that event behind them is to tear down the rest of the world and show how bad their cultures are too. That is the origin of many of the Woke cultures we are dealing with in America presently. It’s a declaration by China that the West has its own problems as if pointing out negatives could erase their embarrassment at Tiananmen Square. And knowing that has revealed a vulnerability that I had forgotten about. It’s what China most wants to forget, so we should never let them do so as a policy going forward. It is the reason that they have spent so much money buying up most of our politicians in some way or another so that they can purchase incompetence and our eventual destruction, what they call “decapitating leadership.” The more I learned, the less powerful I realized that China actually was. Their power comes from our own people, like Larry Fink, and ultimately the Fed in creating the money that China is using to buy off so many politicians and entertainment figures. But at least we can see how vulnerable they truly are, what they fear the most, which is the memory of Tiananmen Square, and how we can reverse these trends. Yet, we cannot ignore those who sold us all out and acted against our country. For them, we can only call it treason, and they took the money without ever thinking that there would be an eventual cost, which is a problem they’ll have to resolve with themselves as we Drain the Swamp and leave them all without a place to hide, and exposed for the world to see.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

The Best Option for Dry Fire Practice: Having a great relationship with your firearm

Not to take anything away from one of the most incredible people in the world, Tommie, the owner of Premier Shooting in West Chester, but I am excited to report on a great new dry fire technology that many people may not know about. I mention Tommie because she told me about her exciting new dry fire range at Premier, the latest craze in shooting, for a good reason. Much of the time, dry firing involves a laser in the gun instead of a bullet and can be measured against a target by some electronic method. It’s becoming more common to use a smartphone for dry fire action. More sophisticated dry fire can be utilized like they do at Premier. There is still nothing like live fire with a real bullet striking a real target. But dry fire can be a great way to stay proficient with a gun without all the expense of firing live ammunition and can be every bit as enjoyable. Well, I have found that practicing for my Cowboy Fast Draw events a wonderful invention sold by the Cowboy Fast Draw Association called the Gunslinger Mark IV laser targeting system that I finally treated myself to, and I’m in love with it. It has been around in the fast draw community for several years but has only recently been perfected to a near-perfect system, as shown in the video above. I can’t think of anything better than this as a dry fire option for people looking for a home dry fire solution to their shooting needs. Practicing with one of these dry fire systems makes the range time much more valuable. I’m certainly not saying gun enthusiasts should replace range time for dry fire time. But that dry fire will make that range time much more useful. 

As I say all the time, especially these days, it’s essential to have a relationship with our Constitution, specifically the Second Amendment. Some people lose touch with the Constitution because they live in areas where they get used to concessions to utilize Constitutional rights in favor of collective need. For instance, in urban areas where it’s almost impossible to shoot every day in the backyard, it’s hard to maintain a relationship with your favorite firearms because they stay locked up all the time. One of the things that I like most about Cowboy Fast Draw is that it allows me to have a wax firing range in my workshop that makes it possible to shoot every day. When I want to fire real lead bullets, I go down and see Tommie at the range. But it’s not possible to shoot every day for me, because of time really, so having a range in my home makes it that much more practical. For many years now, I have enjoyed going into my shop and shooting at my strike plate range. But, for me, that wasn’t enough. I want to shoot while sitting in my reading chair and watching movies and football games. So I had been looking to get one of these Mark IV laser targeting systems, which essentially does everything my strike plate range does, except fire actual primers. Firing live fire rounds in the house and having wax bullets explode all over the living room just was not possible. But with a laser, I can shoot all day and all night long, as much as I want without the expense of using up rounds of ammunition. 

This particular unit is unique because it was invented by the Cowboy Fast Draw Association for the specific problem of fast fire and the need to register the hit in thousands of a second. Much dry fire activity is specific to just hitting a target and seeing how you do from shot to shot. The added element of speed is something special. Whenever the laser hits within the 8″ circle on the target system, it picks up a hit and measures it within fractions of a second. The light blinks three times in practice mode to let you know that your shot is coming. Then the light comes on solid and counts the time it takes you to hit the target. I not only use my target system for fast draw for all types of target shooting. I shoot from 30′, 21′, 15′ down to 5′ like I did in the video, up close so that the camera could pick up the gun and the hit in the same frame and still see the indicator. Even better, the unit is free from an internet connection, so nobody is snooping around on you while you are target shooting. It’s free of internet control, leaving target shooting the personal relationship between you and the practice and nobody else. Other types of dry fire where the smartphone is involved are giving vast amounts of information on all of us to some data collection company. So while convenient and neat, there is a cost to the technology. The Cowboy Fast Draw Association people make the Mark IV advance the sport. So, it’s a trusted source of shooting applications that makes using the Mark IV a much better experience. 

Best yet, the Mark IV Laser system allows shooters to have that daily relationship with their guns. It takes away a lot of the taboo that politics has placed on guns over the years and will enable users to use their firearms more for sport than just self-defense. Practicing with dry fire lasers has the feel of shooting baskets in the driveway. Shooting is a sport just like basketball or football—even golf. But until dry fire technology evolved to the level it is now; it wasn’t possible to practice with firearms virtually anywhere at any time of day. With the Mark IV, as I showed I was using inside my RV, shooting can be done anywhere. Even in a McDonald’s parking lot in Vail, Colorado, while you are waiting for the grandkids to get a Happy Meal and use the restroom. And the system is so reliable that it works perfectly every time. Once you have one of the Laser Training Cartridges that ignite the laser and allow the shot to fire down the barrel, you can shoot all the time, with the only cost being batteries for the cartridge. The total cost of the whole setup is around $800 for the laser and the targeting system and can all be purchased from CowboyFastDraw.com. I buy from them all the time, and they are always good about delivering high-quality items. I even recently ordered from them on New Year’s Eve, and they fulfilled the order that very night. They are like dealing with the way America used to be, always attentive to the customer’s needs, and competent. So overall, I can’t recommend one of these dry fire units more for all the reasons I mentioned and more. The best thing about it is that it takes shooting into the realm of every day and allows shooters to become much more proficient with copious amounts of practice than they could get otherwise. And making better shooters with much more handling only helps everything, from Constitutional consideration to the advancement of shooting sports, because more people can now participate. There is no downside, and for shooters everywhere, knowing that something like this is out there is something that could be life-changing in a good way.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

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

Do Not Fear Meta, They are More Bark than Bite

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

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

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

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

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

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Matt Huffman Understands Good Government: Conflict is critical to a properly run republic

People like the Title to my New Book, for good reason

First, I have to say that I appreciate all the kind words I’ve received over the title of my new book, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business.  As I said in the video above, they have been whispering to me their enjoyment, almost as if they were afraid to say it in public because the word “gun” is in it.  Yet, that is entirely on purpose.  A lot in The Gunfighter’s Guide will challenge previous assumptions, the most of which is the nature of conflict in business and why we as a culture need to embrace that conflict more as we have in years past.  For a long time now, where we have been going has led to so much corruption because the value systems have not been on success, but in getting along.  Strangely enough, I was at an event with Matt Huffman, the President of the Ohio Senate, and he gave an excellent speech that displayed his understanding of this very need for conflict in any civil exchange.  Politics is a blood sport and was always intended as such.  They fight so that we don’t have to in general society.  But this is also the expectation in business as well.  If there isn’t conflict in a discussion, then why have the conversation.  All the consensus-building efforts that we have seen coming out of our academia are out of step with the American way of doing things.  It’s like telling us that American football shouldn’t be about putting on pads and hitting the other guy as hard as you can to stop them from scoring a touchdown, but that we should all play flag football, and that scoring isn’t all that important.  The title of my book evokes a truth that many people understand, and I appreciate that this early in the process, people already understand the need for a philosophic presentation of this very American concept.

Matt Huffman has done great in Ohio as President of the Senate

I had wanted to tell Senator Huffman how proud I was of him and the Ohio Senate in general for passage of Senate Bill 22, which took away Governor DeWine’s health directives over Covid-19 and future overreaches with legislative control.  If Huffman, George Lang, Terry Johnston, and much of the senate body had not moved to pass S.B. 22, Ohio would have been impeded by the recent Biden push for mass closures and mask mandates over the recent Delta Variant.  I thought it was a big deal when the Senate did what they did, and the House followed quickly.  DeWine had cut the entire legislature out of any covid protocols allowing the Governor to become a ruthless dictator over rights of health decisions which put white coat bureaucrats entirely in charge of all our lives.  And it went on for way too long, essentially because nobody wanted to have a conflict with the Governor.  Yet nightly at the Ohio capital, on other things, there were riots and vandalism over social causes that nobody wanted to deal with, and times were looking very bleak.  Trump was being pushed out of office by a group of radicals who were not afraid of conflict. Conservatives were not being met in the same fashion, allowing activists to roll over logic and goodness without fear of reprisal.   You might remember around Christmas of 2020 going into 2021 when I mentioned that Matt Huffman might be the next president of the Senate and that Governor DeWine’s powers would finally be quelled after a year of behaving like a complete tyrant off the rails and out of control. That’s what happened, Huffman was sworn in during the early months of 2021, and he went right to work doing what the legislature had been hoping to do for a long time, stand up to DeWine and return Ohio to civility with a proper government. 

Huffman told his story a bit of how contentious it was standing up to Governor DeWine, who did not want a fellow Republican senate to override his veto of S.B. 22.  DeWine tried to use the necessity of a single point of action to manage emergencies, which was always part of the poison pill of Covid-19.  It was presented as beyond legislative control where the Dr. Fauci types would manage our lives instead of our elected government because of an emergency health crisis.  But our constitutions do not indicate that liberty and freedom are only temporary factors of our daily life.  Even during an emergency such as tornado impacts, hurricanes, or health crises, all people still have their rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  And sometimes, we have to fight to maintain those rights.  This is what Huffman, Lang, and the rest of the Senate did when they told Mike DeWine to pound sand and suck it up.  They were going to override the Governor’s veto and take away his health directives.  DeWine had abused his power, and he needed a slap down.  It was an example of how proper government should look. It was the suitable alternative to open warfare with people storming the capital to retake their rights over the Covid restrictions.  In every state, the House and Senate must fight like that on our behalf, and in Ohio, it happened.  Fighting is not a bad thing.  When fighting turns to permanent damage, that’s another story, but people who enter the bloodsport of politics should understand that’s the nature of the game.

That is, after all, the theme of my book and why people are saying under their breath that they like the title so much.  It alludes to the American understanding that conflict is at the heart of our “republic.” When the law wasn’t present in times past of western expansion, the gunfighter’s brought some form of order to those far-flung regions.  Many people were killed in cold blood and drunken violence, but the presence of conflict was the first foundation for law and order.  If someone did something to someone, the threat of a gunfight was a genuine menace, and people thought twice about it.  And if they were caught killing in cold blood, the community often hung people right there on the spot, killing them.  Many times, innocent people were hung.  But people did think twice before engaging in destructive behavior because people were not afraid of conflict as they are today.  In so many ways, you have to look at our academic approach to conflict during the last century and question whether or not we have all been poisoned with the pill of globalism so that our republic would fall under those same conditions.  So it is certainly my goal with The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business to resurrect the sentiment that conflict is good and healthy for maintaining a proper republic.  Not necessarily with violence, but in how Matt Huffman, George Lang, and others did with S.B. 22 in 2021, which has saved Ohio from a tyrannical Biden administration looking for ground cover for their many scandals.  Without the conflict with DeWine, Ohio would still be imprisoned by the white coats of bureaucracy.  It seems rare these days to see such conflict and courage, but it does happen; there are Matt Huffman’s out there who understand good government and utilize it to the proper effect.  And people understand that in my title, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, something important has been missing in our business and political cultures that need to be dusted off and resurrected to full effect.  And then, and only then, is when America is back and will sustain itself for the world well into the future.   

Rich Hoffman

The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business
Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

The Great Option of Homeschooling: To see just how bad public schools are, walk the halls of Lakota

Saving Kids by Homeschooling Them

Just to let you know how bad it is, the pictures included here were taken in one of the 22 schools within my school district of Lakota.  As you’ll see, it’s all about Critical Race Theory, all the time with them.  So much so I would consider them a danger to any child.  I would never in a million years send any kid of mine to a public school these days.  If you want to know what’s wrong with public schools, take a walk through the halls of Lakota in Cincinnati, Ohio, and you’ll get a good idea.  I never thought they were any good, but now, they are just horrendous.  Ironically, just as revealing as those pictures were, I had the chance to meet up with some old friends at the Annie Oakley Wild West Show I’ve been involved in for over a few decades.  They have a swarm of kids I’ve watched grow up, and now they are all bloomed.  I only see them once a year, so it has been fascinating watching them grow, and I can only say that they are such intelligent and fully developed kids.  They are super nice kids, very gifted, socially extremely confident.  They don’t have that beat-down look on their faces that most children have these days, 22 and under.  Taking those kids out of the cesspool of public education has been great for them. The results show after looking at those pictures from the walls of Lakota schools, which is reflective of all public schools all over the country, it’s easy to see why parents are upset.  They have a right to be. But at least there is a silver lining I’ve known about but haven’t had much exposure to.  Like the kids I mentioned who have homeschooled their entire lives, more and more parents are taking advantage of that option.  My kids are a few of them, and they were over this week showing me the learning material they have for starting this school year, and I have to say, I was very impressed. 

This is what is in the Halls of Lakota Schools

I remember what it was like; as I told in the story above, public schools have been garbage for decades.  They weren’t very good when I was in school.  They were terrible when my kids were going to school, so much so that we homeschooled for one of their years, and in their last two years, they finished their courses online and graduated at home.  Both of my children graduated early and spent time in Europe learning about the world while their classmates from Lakota were still trying to get a date for the prom.  And as for today, I would say, if you love your children at all, do not send them to the garbage heap that is public school for the life of you.  It’s no accident at Lakota and many other schools that they have started All Day Kindergarten because that is all that government schools are to parents, a free babysitting service ran by radical progressive activists paid for by the taxpayers.  That is why they are also pushing pre-school options because parents have kids, but they need to get back to work.  So they drop their kids off at these government schools to raise because they need the free babysitting, then wonder 12 years later why their kids are all screwed up as young adults.  Well, it doesn’t have to be that way, and my kids love their kids, so they’ve been looking for options, and what they brought me to show me was some of the most wonderful homeschooling material I’ve ever seen.  There was a time when my wife and I homeschooled our kids because the public school at the time, Mason, wanted to teach sex education in the 4th grade by putting a condom on a cucumber.  Well, these were my kids; they were little and were never going to have an opportunity to need to learn to put a condom on a penis.  My kids were going to be little and learning as much as they could as long as I could fight off the evils of the world to let their childhoods be as good as possible.  The school freaked out when my wife and I wouldn’t sign the permission slip, and a fight ensued that got quite bad.  It resulted in us pulling our kids from school and homeschooling for a year, which at that time was one of the hardest things we had ever done.

CRT at Lakota Schools

It wasn’t the education that was hard; it was the social stigma.  I never cared, but it mattered to my wife.  We were in our 30s at the time, and we did not have the support of our parents.  For our parents and society in general, public school was about dances, school jackets, and class rings.  They were the kind of people who went to their class reunions at five and 10-year intervals.  The friends they made in public school lasted a lifetime.  It was like the movie Grease, the school was about friends and memories, and they hated that we were robbing our children of those great things.

They Have Groups for Everything, But American Appreciation at Lakota

Only, school had changed since their days, and they had no idea what was going on.  When the Department of Education was put in place by teacher union lobbying in 1979, I was in the 2nd or 3rd grade at the time.  I was able to watch firsthand how that old view of public education changed into a radical political cesspool controlled by labor unions and their leftist desires.  I hated school more and more each year I was there; it was stifling to creativity and involved too much group think.   By the time my kids went to school, it was worse.  Not in the first few years, but by the time they were trying to push off sex education to 4th graders, it had gotten out of control.  Most of the kids were going home to empty houses from the school’s logic, and the kids were having sex until the parents got home from their jobs.  But that wasn’t fair to the kids who went home to a loving parent or two and had good lives at home.  Those kids didn’t need to be destroyed by such education methods of social rendering at the expense of innocence.  So the only real option was to homeschool them, but back then, when my kids were of that age, there wasn’t great social support. 

The Future is Women, so think of all the Young White Boys, what are they Supposed to do?

Now that has changed, my kids will teach all their kids at home, and all their Instagram friends think it’s great.  Of course, they have parental support from us, but more than that, most of their friends are saying now that they wish they could afford to teach their kids at home instead of sending them to these terrible public schools.  The branding of public schools has gone south over the years.  Most adults who have kids wish they made enough money to either send their kids to private schools or take advantage of the tremendous network of homeschool resources available now.  They feel the same way the rest of us think about public schools, except they don’t have the option of staying home because they have jobs to teach their kids at home.  My kids have built their life around the matter, and I’m proud of them, even more so now that I’ve seen what kind of resources my grandchildren will have to work with. I’ve seen the results of homeschooled children.  Every kid in America should have such a chance at a good education.  But they just aren’t going to get it at these misrun government schools as they are today.  If you love your kid, you will not send them to any of them.  Because if there is anything genuinely equal in this world, it’s that public schools are all equally bad.  If the government runs them, they are terrible for your kid, and you should do everything you can to avoid those places at all costs.      

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Steampunk and the Future of Technology

My readers here might have noticed my new mask which is kind of Steampunkish and likely wondered what the deal with it was. Well, I was shopping with my family in the famous Charleston City Market which has been around since 1804. One of the booths had kind of a Steampunk theme which my kids are into. I haven’t paid much attention to the movement because to me it represented a time that never occurred and was rooted in “what ifs” instead of factual observation and an understanding of history. Steampunk however has turned out to be very aligned with what I want to do with my new book, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business so through buying this mask it gave me several good ideas to build off of, so I started using it on my social media platforms because I think its pretty cool.

Death and life have very much been a part of my thinking lately, I’ve had some sick family, my own aging process and all this constant news about artificial intelligence taking over the human race–becoming actually a terminator type of conflict that seems much more possible today than it did when that popular movie first came out—has been on my mind. The mask to me is a clear indication that we can enhance our own flesh now, and the future looks to be even more of a case for it. So even when our flesh dies of natural causes we can continue to live on through various mechanical means, and this new mask of mind makes me think of those potentials and consequences, so I was very excited to get it. And in talking with my kids about Steampunk as an art movement that’s when it became clear that my argument for going back into the Wild West period to look at our value systems, which is key to my own efforts, was the same in bridging those values with the technology of the future.

As kind of a prerequisite to buying that mask my wife and I spent some time in Gatlinburg, Tennessee looking at grandfather clocks, which have always been on my radar. There is a very nice store on the main strip there that we have always gone in and contemplated. Even though these days a digital display clock is often better and far, far cheaper, there has always been a charm for me in the craftsmanship that goes into a grandfather clock that I crave. And at the height of the Victorian era for which the Wild West period was a part of that is why the stylized outfits and fonts looked the way they did. It was a very exciting time where guns became very reliable and could be used to shape a culture as the Victorian designs immigrated from Europe and moved with the expanding train system into the wild frontier of western expansion. These days many of our smartest people, people who enjoy thinking, are finding that they enjoy the values of that period and would like to see a return to those values. But we are all on the technological frontier of so many other positive elements that we must find a way to bridge these values, which is how Steampunk came to be as an art form.

Its not at all a mainstream thing yet, or if it ever will be. But one thing is quite clear, it was mainstream enough to have that mask I bought displayed at the very popular Charleston City Market and people walking by all stopped to look at the crafts displayed at that booth, so there is some very obvious curiosity by most people about this type of art, whether they understand it consciously or not. I suspect that subconsciously most people are thinking the same thing, they don’t want to lose themselves as individuals in the technology of the future, and they very much want to be in command of that relationship. We don’t want to lose our lives to technology, but rather want to see humans continue to set the agenda—but one way or the other, tech is here, and we must find our way with it. So suddenly, I’m quite a fan of Steampunk.

This mask is appropriate for me because honestly, I have no intentions of every dying. Now the nature of life may change, but my essence I suspect will live on in various forms forever, and as I get older, I am quite open into whatever enhancements I need to utilize to continue enjoying life. After all think about it, I have written so much that it will float around in cyberspace or whatever form of that space exists well into the future, that it will likely go on forever as defined by universal life spans. Even if all that is left is a skull, I will get all I can out of life because that is how I approach these kinds of things. While I do advocate for the values of the past, of the Victorian era Wild West values of pure capitalism and frontier justice, I think very much that those values not only work here on earth, but will work as we colonize space whether it is the moon, Mars or the moons of Jupiter. If I could live 20,000 years to see all those advancements happen or to help them along, I’ll do it whether the form is a living entity, legacy memories, or as a variation of that mask, a biological entity more machine than traditional life that exists without losing the basics of humanity.

Coming back from Charleston I had been listening to Rush Limbaugh while staying in the very nice Mt. Pleasant area and looking at all the sites and thinking about how Google was being thought of as evil, and that Facebook was capturing so much of us to build an artificial intelligence that it was forcing tough political and economic decisions for the future. For me the solution was in Steampunk, or at least the first doors to solving those complex problems and that mask gave me a reference point. But when it came time to come back home and I punched in my address to my Google Map app on my phone it stated at 5:30 AM in the morning that I would arrive back at my home in 10 hrs. and 16 minutes. Thinking about Rush Limbaugh’s radio shows and some by Alex Jones that I had been listening to online when everyone else had gone to bed I wanted to try an experiment knowing that Google had a profile of my habits that it had been collecting about me for many years. I decided to leave my phone plugged in so that I wouldn’t reset my destination forcing Google to recalculate my destination time.

On the way home I traveled with one of my daughters, her kids and my wife so there were lots of variables. We didn’t leave at 5:30 but the time really didn’t change from when we actually did so the Google Maps had figured out all our stops, our pace of driving and the traffic conditions from Mt Pleasant to our home address and all the surprises that can happen along the way. Outside of Columbia, South Carolina we stopped at a Cracker Barrel for breakfast. At the North Carolina line we switched around some drivers. Just outside of Ashville we stopped to let the kids use the restroom. In the heart of the mountains near the tunnels just before the Tennessee border we stopped to get some more food. In Knoxville we stopped to get more gas. Ahead of Jellico Mountain we stopped by McDonalds just to stretch and get a snack. On the other side of the mountain from Jellico to London, KY we had lots of single lane traffic and some serious traffic delays. We pulled off the highway to use the restroom yet again and we fiddled around for an additional 15 minutes because we were all tired of driving and didn’t want to rush only to sit in traffic again. We stopped just north of Lexington just to stretch because we were tired and wanted to get home but were getting impatient. Then we hit traffic in Florence that lasted all the way through the city of Cincinnati. By the time we got to our driveway the time on the trip back was 10 hrs. and 17 minutes. One minute longer than Google Maps had predicted originally, which I thought was astonishing.

Technology can be our friends or our enemies, what it becomes will largely be up to the values we bring to it. I for one plan to embrace it with an eye toward longevity and accomplishing more in a lifetime than typical biological existence would otherwise allow. And even the sad stories of family sicknesses prove that technology is on the cusp of solving many of those problems. But then what? Well, that is up to us to figure out, and that is my focus in helping to shape. And for me, that is a very exciting prospect and what I think about when I see that new mask found at the Charleston City Market. To me its not a scary thing, but something that will help us live beyond the terminal existence of yesteryear, but if we hold the values from the past that worked best and combined them with the future, we wouldn’t just get Steampunk art, but perhaps a new reality that matches what Jesus said when he walked the earth, “heaven is all around us, only men do not see it.” Well, maybe its time that we start looking at it.

Rich Hoffman

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