Who Cares about John McCain’s Brain Tumor: Having the courage to repeal Obamacare

Who cares that John McCain has a brain tumor? Why would it surprise anyone that an 80-year-old man who has been in bad health since his 20s would have some ailment—and why was Barack Obama so quick to comment about it? Of course, I don’t wish anything bad on John McCain, but just because he’s sick doesn’t make him any less of a part of the problem. Let’s not forget that it was McCain who got involved in the scandalous dossier on Donald Trump giving it to James Comey and that at every turn the former Republican presidential candidate behaves more like a Democrat that wants war all over the world than a tightly controlled spending conservative. Could it be that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama know that McCain is that critical 50th vote in repealing Obamacare and that if they can turn the nation’s sympathies toward a sick old senator who happens to need “healthcare” at the moment that they might undo Trump’s work at removing the government from healthcare all together with a repeal of Obama’s signature legislation of socialist medicine. I wasn’t born yesterday—I’ve been around the block a few times and that’s the only reason so many people poured on the juice of sympathy for old John McCain. McCain is the plug in the swamp and you have to get rid of people like him to drain that swamp. It’s one thing to feel sorry for a person with a brain tumor. It’s quite another to use him as a shield of sympathy to protect Obamacare from repeal in a cowardly senate.

Rob Portman is another disgrace. To think that I actually once knew him and campaigned for him back when he first won his seat for the second congressional district back in 1993. Back then like a lot of young politicians Rob was full of conviction and wanted to do the right things. When he first won that seat, Rob was a virtuous character who operated like a Tea Party candidate—he in fact hung around with the Ross Perot Reform Party voters who obviously became Donald Trump supporters many years later. Now that he’s a beltway boy he hangs with RINOs like John McCain and John Kasich who want to spread Medicaid in the states and deepen that entitlement to the point where people are hooked and can never get off it. They are like drug dealers seeking to get people addicted to government so they will forever be dependent—so that government will always have a part to play in people’s lives centering from the Beltway. Portman is another no vote for the repeal of Obamacare because it was in Ohio where Kasich expanded Medicaid making Barack Obama very happy. All it took for John to cave was a serious defeat of Senate Bill 5 and a golf game with Obama and Biden to lose his nerve and become a major loser. And Portman has his back as a “compassionate conservative” from the land of Ohio. But the Republican party doesn’t belong to Kasich any more in Ohio. It belongs to Trump. Those boys are on the wrong side of history.

Then there are the three Republican women, Susan Collins, Shelley Moore Capito and Lisa Murkowski who talked tough and voted to repeal Obamacare when they all knew that Obama would veto the effort. Now that Trump will sign it, they are acting like—well—a bunch of girls. They can’t make a decision, they don’t want to pick a side, and they lack the courage to stand by their convictions. Just like John McCain’s brain tumor, it’s not their fault they are of the female sex—but it is their fault if they yield to the stereotype and fit the bill for being a bunch of confused idiots. They want to sound like tough conservatives until they have to make a decision. What they really want is to appeal to everyone—just like a typical loser Democrat and that is holding up very needed legislation to put free market influence back into the medical profession.

Is some of what I said a bit too harsh—about John McCain, Rob Portman and the weak girls of the Senate—maybe if we were more concerned with being sensitive than in doing what is right. All these people hide behind some demographic factor to conceal their liberal natures—McCain a sick old war veteran, Portman a guy who found out his kid was gay, and the ladies, people who as women have some mythical right to see all sides of a story so that nobody can ever make a decision—we are supposed to give them a pass because they are women?

There are a million excuses from these very weak people not to act on the massive insurrection that Obamacare always was—some hide behind their illnesses, some hide behind challenges to their conservative thinking by family members, and some hide behind their sex—but they are all wrong and hiding fundamental flaws in their personalities. They are using “circumstances” to avoid making hard decisions about matters critical to our country and it was disgraceful that one of the first people to do so was the former president of the United States, Barack Obama protecting his pathetic socialist care entitlement designed to crush our free market health care system—which has so far been successful.

Brain tumor or not, McCain has a job to do. We don’t need a bunch of fluffy memorials to distract us from the needs at hand. McCain needs to vote to repeal Obamacare, not to use his condition to delay a vote further and hope that everyone will lose their resolve and move on to something else while the world of finance around health care burns into oblivion, because that’s happening right now. McCain’s brain tumor is just a medical condition. It should not stop the wheels of progress by any means.

I have news for those standing against the Trump agenda. If you consider where things were one year ago from this writing then project another year of progress from this date into the future, people like McCain, Portman, Kasich and Collins—along with other never-Trump types like Glenn Beck and all of Hollywood—they are all missing the boat. Trump is moving on and doing so rapidly. He doesn’t take vacations. He doesn’t sleep. He never gets tired and he thinks of ideas a mile a minute—ever day—even on Sundays. He’s doing many good things and has literally changed the political world in only a year. Another year of this and things will be completely different. Silly tricks like this health care stunt and hoping to put a story on John McCain for a week or so to delay a healthcare vote in the Senate just isn’t going to work. Trump won’t let it go. This idea is not going to fade off into the sunset only to be consumed and buried in the Washington swamp. If they were smart, they’d vote to repeal now and consolidate their efforts behind President Trump. If McCain wants to fix his brain tumor, then fix it. But vote—and vote Republican. Otherwise, get the hell out-of-the-way. At 80 years old, nobody expects a specimen of health—but we do expect a Republican if you put an “R” next to your name. And with that “R” we expect courage—not a bunch of wishy-washy liberals.

Rich Hoffman

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Lakota is Paying Matt Miller $169,900 Per Year: We need new school board members–if you want to run, I’ll help you

It was in fact Governor Kasich’s super PAC that got into the heads of the feeble-minded senators at a critical time of the health care debate on repealing Obamacare. The Ohio Governor is of course trying to undermine the Trump presidency for his own run in 2020. But for such a character in politics, as a public employee Kasich only gets paid around $150,000—more or less. That’s for being a big player on the national stage of politics. His Lt. Governor makes a bit more, but not much. I think we’d all agree that whether we like him or not, the Governor is the big job in Ohio from a public perspective and is well compensated. However, and I told them not to do this—but they did it anyway, the Lakota school board hired a new superintendent—a kid from Price Hill and paid him $169,000 as a base salary—well over what the governor of Ohio makes. Lakota is the eighth largest school district in the state of Ohio and it is in one of the most affluent areas of the country—and its located where my home is—so I care a bit about this issue. Already if West Chester residents look at their tax bill the entire township of West Chester—where half of Lakota is located—they pay roughly 21% to them. They pay a whopping 61%–roughly—to the Lakota school system and that school is just throwing away money on these overly paid administrative employees—who make more than the radical progressive governor of our state.

http://www.wcpo.com/news/local-news/butler-county/liberty-township/lakota-school-board-selects-matt-miller-as-superintendent-

http://dailycaller.com/2017/07/18/kasich-super-pac-capitalize-off-gop-chaos/

Obviously, the scaling is way off in these unionized public-sector schools. While the administrators aren’t typically formally part of the union they often come out of that system and have pay expectations formed by their experiences in the public sector which has been roughly 30% too high for several decades now. I mean it’s not Miller’s fault he’s been told he’s worth more than he really is—it’s our school board who thinks they need to pay this money to meet some invisible standard that the public education system has created in the industry to “compete.” But in public education there isn’t any competition. Builders build homes. Real estate agents sell the homes and support school levy’s to attract new “family aged’ buyers. The cycle runs its course. And over the next twenty years new homes are built elsewhere and people move to those new districts and wherever that is becomes the new “hot” school district.

Lakota is not a “hot” community anymore—as far as education. It may be a stable excellent community but it is not the latest thing in the real estate world. It has more people living within the district that do not have children attending the school system than it does new families moving to the area to buy a new house freshly built on previously productive farmland. So the necessities have changed for the community as a whole where the school system is just one of the reasons for moving or maintaining property within the Lakota school district which encompasses Liberty Township and West Chester Township, Ohio. Among the top reasons for living in the area are highway access, standard of living—many of our neighbors have household incomes over 100K a year so we don’t have to deal with too many slack-jawed losers while pumping gas and eating at restaurants. There are great commercial offerings and the government is small enough to not pillage the homeowner continuously—except for the big open hands of the top heavy over scale pay of the unionized Lakota school system. People put up with them out of sentimental value, but that only goes so far and news reports that they were paying a superintendent—which is mostly a political role anyway–$169,000 per year doesn’t help. The job is at best worth half that for a 45-year-old employee such as Matt Miller. If we paid him more than $85K per year we’d be getting ripped off.

Well, it just so happens that this year there are several school board members who have seats expiring—and it’s safe to say that none of them are exactly conservative bastions of valor. They care about Lakota itself as a microcosm but have been part of that culture that asks for a lot more than Lakota really plays in the success of the community for which it resides. The people who make Liberty Township and West Chester Township great places to live are the people who live there—the community is not great because of Lakota schools. The school board members who are up for re-election just don’t seem to understand that. So this is an opportunity to run against them and challenge the board to have more people properly representative of our district helping to manage the finances. There are lots of people I know who would be good for doing this job but most of them are older and really don’t want the pain in the ass of attending all the ridiculous meetings and the procedural lunacy that usually takes place. But for those inclined to number crunching and wanting to help with the situation, I’ll make a deal with you. If you guys will run, I’ll help you with the campaign. There are three seats open and I’ll help three candidates as a team if we can find the right people. But it would have to be hard working good people who think correctly about this matter. If those people are willing to come forward I’ll help with making it not so scary to run and win the seats.

The filing deadline for prospective candidates is August 9^th, which isn’t much time from this writing. I was catching up on summer news over the weekend and Lakota is somewhere down around #400 on my priority list (only because they cost me money) so I didn’t notice that the hit piece reporter Michael Clark had moved to the Journal News and I hadn’t followed up on the Lakota hire for superintendent. I spoke to a few school board members over the winter and they seemed like they had a good read on the situation so I left them to their business. But after catching up on the news about Lakota over this previous weekend it was obvious to me that these people haven’t learned anything and they need better management of such a volatile and expensive resource in the Lakota school system. They are used to runaway train budgets saved only for the fact that Lakota has a projected decline in enrollment which takes the pressure off an immediate levy request. But these people just don’t know how to budget a check book and the proof is in throwing money at this new superintendent hire. If they’ll over pay for him they’ll do it for everything.

http://www.journal-news.com/news/local-education/some-butler-county-school-board-races-seeing-more-candidates/8harrwPWtlfKu1nZWdrMIK/

I know most of the normal people around Lakota’s district view a lot of this as a serious pain in the ass. But Lakota charges so much money for what they provide that we have to deal with them before they are too problematic. The ideal candidate for school board would be people who have some evenings to give each month to this monstrosity of educational burden and a genuine love of numbers and how they roll together. Jenni Logan does a good job as treasurer at Lakota and is good to work with, but it’s the system itself that needs to have a re-calibration of thought and some good sound conservatives sitting on the board to keep the costs down. I’m offering to help and that help won’t stop once elected. I’ll help fight the union more than willingly and keep them at bay so good management of our tax payer resources can be applied. But we need smart people to sit in those seats. I’ll ensure that you are not alone and exposed—but we need formal positions filled to manage the budget properly. If we don’t then Lakota will be asking for a levy again soon because they don’t have control of their costs. The costs control them—and we just can’t have that.

Rich Hoffman

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The Beauty of a Long Goodbye: Institutional failure and a new kind of day

I think the best way to explain it is that we are now in a generation of people—mostly youth driven—who grew up entirely with The Simpsons, South Park, and The Daily Show. Those people went to college, were fed large doses of Marxist influence, graduated from some form of journalism and are now working in the media and other culture shapers within our professional institutions. Their cynicism and hatred of Donald Trump comes from some foreign place for sure. For instance, we are now on over a week of the whole Russia, Donald Trump Jr. story—which is nothing yet the ferocity for which the media presents the information is truly amazing. The subconscious message to the Trump family has been that they did not use the professional pundits, lawyers, and inside the box thinkers—and pay them accordingly during the presidential campaign, so they feel entitled to pounce on the Trumps for their inexperience. But if a few controversies emerge from saving the kind of money Trump did during the election with just good ol’ fashion hard work, then why not. That is the biggest difference between the parades of phonies that typically would act as a foreign representative to major events. President Trump is doing a great job—and he’s doing it rather easily. At the Bastille Day parade the newly elected French President Emmanuel Macron and his wife had a very sincere reaction to President Trump and Melania’s departure resulting in a long handshake that virtually everyone made fun of who presented it through the media. I thought it was a beautiful thing—four people with very important jobs who are normally very fake with one another in similar circumstances were overflowing with positive emotion. It showed me that Macron might be a guy who will actually do a decent job in socialist France—but to the media, they saw nothing but negativity and they pounced in a way that was clearly out-of-touch with the flow of modern observation.

When Trump was running for president and I was so vocally supportive it was fun to watch these establishment types squirm in dealing with Trump. It is fascinating to me because it is a microcosm of a much more systemic problem and I always knew that if a sincere businessman as opposed to a person breed within the political institutions—a person from Harvard—the typical Skull and Bones initiate—a military guy, or a senator formed within the fraternity of Capital Hlll—or even a state governor who was at least a part of an association, ran for any politically powerful position that they would excel because business has a way of forcing people to deal with reality and they’d do a far more superior job. So I knew Trump would be very effective and I wanted to see that change. What is happening with the stock market having all the incredible gains it is producing and the global reaction to President Trump’s natural charisma was something I counted on. Trump as a personality has always loved controversy and attention, but under it all he’s always been smart. Just read a few of his books and its very obvious that Trump knows exactly what he’s doing, including the whole controversy of the Don Jr. story. Trump isn’t the only one with these skills—most people who are good at business have similar abilities and they get them outside of the institutional systems that we have in America—but that was always the point.

Clearly Jeffery Zucker who is running things at CNN is deeply jealous of Donald Trump. He wants to think that he made Trump through The Apprentice when he was head of NBC Universal. Now he’s the president of CNN Worldwide and the evidence that it wasn’t him who was so successful, but was the talent around him has been a harsh reality. He’s failing miserably because he has gone after Trump in a way to sink the President in a very personal way. For a guy whom Trump spoke so highly of in the book Think like a Billionaire, Zucker hates Trump because the evidence within the circles of business is so obvious. As they parted ways leaving Zucker to run CNN in 2013 and Trump to run for president in 2015 there was nobody for the former NBC head to hide behind. Zucker fell from grace quickly as just another overpaid institutionalist while Trump no matter what anybody threw at him continued to succeed. Nobody understood it at the time, but the situation was obvious. People build the institutions, the institutions do not make people—that is a basic law that all successful people understand. I knew that if someone who had always made things work behind the institutional façade that they’d be great in politics for a change—and that is what is going on with Trump. He’s always been good at anything he does because he loves to work, he’s intellectually curious about the world around him, and he has a natural love of life that emerges from whatever he’s involved with. Once people had a taste of that, they’d never go back to the old institutional model—but business people would from now on be the choice of every political office, from school board members to future presidents. The mold has effectively been destroyed and now everyone involved can see that it was always people like Trump who made the Jeff Zucker’s in life, not the other way around.

Ayn Rand wrote about this phenomena many years ago, it was obvious to her how institutions fail and how it is individuals who constantly carry them as a value. Without strong individuals institutions always fail. They are only propped up by a kind of social ignorance which has always been used as a collective way to hide the truth from human beings. Whether the institution was a church, a television network, or a political party their effectiveness is always a mask hiding the reality that there must always be a strong individual who is doing all the heavy lifting that makes the institutions successful. It is never the collective whole that does it. Trump will always be successful whether he’s working at NBC with Jeff Zucker or running the Republican Party as he his now—but Zucker cannot be successful on his own without someone to carry him. Within just four years of running CNN Jeff Zucker has nearly destroyed that network. It may not be so obvious now, but they’ll never recover from his terrible management where he went after a popular president in very personal ways just to prove that it was the institutions that made Trump, not the other way around. The failure of The New York Times, CNN, and NBC to recognize the basic talents of Trump is proving to be their undoing—and these young people who grew up over the last twenty years watching The Simpsons and South Park have been taught to either trust institutions too much, or to make fun of them without offering solutions. Virtually everyone has missed the point except for those who understand that individuals make institutions, institutions do not make individuals. Pouring hundreds of thousands of dollars into any institution, whether it be a college, a network or even a religion cannot make success. Only individuals who have mastered basic elements of life can do that and that reality is essentially what people are upset about in Trump.

It’s not always easy to see but the reaction that foreign leaders have in Trump whether it’s Russia, Saudi Arabia, China or the newly elected president of France, displays clearly the skills of a person at the top of his game in communication. That’s because Donald Trump is a real person—a star of his own making. The institutions tried to keep him at NBC working on a television show, but as a self-made person not really interested in millions of dollars for hosting a popular show, he wanted to apply his skills at the highest level and he walked away from the money. Money is usually used to soften up individuals so that they never challenge the supremacy of the institutional controls that are used to mask the individual contributions of their talent. Trump stepped away from one institution to another—one that had previously been forbidden. He won and is now doing such a marvelous job and the institutions themselves have no other means of correcting the situation except for resorting to an infantile rejection of the behavior. But the results can’t be ignored and the evidence was on full display between Macaron and Trump. The French President didn’t want Trump to leave—that much was obvious. Institutions can be scary because in them are a lot of little people like Jeffery Zucker who want to take credit for what good individuals do—but when someone like Trump comes along, things aren’t nearly so scary because it’s obvious that he’s the source of success and people want to be close to it, including the French president. The truth has been revealed and all the institutions can do in defense of themselves is to use their young employees to verbally assault Trump hoping to protect themselves from further embarrassments. But it’s too late.

Rich Hoffman

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D23 Reveals the new Star Wars Land: Where science and technology meets mythology and imagination

I’ve been saying it for quite a long time and for fun you should go back and read what I first said about this topic way back in October of 2012—but this year at the D23 Expo in Anaheim, California Disney finally unveiled their elaborate plans for Star Wars Land. The immense impact that I think this has on the human race is incalculable. It’s not just another revenue stream for Disney’s massive media company, it is a launching point for new ways in thinking about mankind’s role in the cosmos and it is a jaw dropping culmination of imagination, engineering and philosophical debate all splashed down into a reality created from myth to be shaped by minds into an actual future. What they revealed to me at D23 exceeded my expectations by a lot and it is certainly worth talking about.

I remember when I was a kid what it was like to ride the submarine at Disney World way back in the early 80s for the 20 Thousand Leagues Under the Sea exhibit. It was I thought really well done. I loved that Jules Verne classic both in novelization and the Disney film and it was very fascinating to me as a young pre-teen to see that ship in some scale that represented reality. To be up close to it, to touch it, to ride inside it as it went slightly under water was something I’ll never forget. And that was the case for much of Disney World back then, I had seen all these movies and at the early days of the Disney World’s Magic Kingdom before even the Epcot Center was built really launched me into adult pursuits mixed with adventure, a very detailed love of engineering, entrepreneurship, and literacy. Even though I knew the exhibits were not real it always fascinated me to the level that Disney Imagineering was able to simulate what the imagination could create and apply real engineering marvel to those creations taking our minds from conception to reality.

I’ve always loved Star Wars maybe more because of how the movies were made than in what the stories actually said. Most of my youth I watched and read of how my favorite movies were made and Star Wars filled my mind with technical details of how simple things were made into big things to make those films appear to be set in a galaxy far, far away a long time ago. Largely, Star Wars was shaped by the Imagineering at Disney World because what they were able to do early on at Disney was carried directly into the production of Star Wars so the enormous market potential created by Disney Imagineering is really incalculable. It is extremely difficult to know how deeply our modern society has been affected by just the very rudimentary exposure that we’ve seen in technology from 1970 until the present. So by applying the same trajectory of thought, what they have been exploring in “Imagineering” at Disney over just the last decade is truly uncharted ground. There are literally millions of young people inspired into the sciences by their experiences at these amusement parks.

When Universal Studios did their multipark Harry Potter experience I knew that we were unlocking a whole new theme park experience. If Disney World set the stage for how these theme parks took movie magic and made them into a reality then Universal Studios took things to the next level and what they did in Orlando at Universal Studios with the literature of Harry Potter, first from the books then to the movie experience was just phenomenal, and it continues to be. A visit to Universal Studios in Orlando is a trip into the imaginary worlds that Jules Verne and H.G. Wells could have never comprehended as a reality for young people. And if you visit the NASA complex at the Kennedy Space Center you’ll quickly see how much reverence they have for the author Jules Verne. The book From the Earth to the Moon framed early engineers and scientists at NASA and the rocket program before the space agency was created, into flying to the moon. The human imagination is a very powerful tool and many of the products we see today are a direct result of our ability to think then make those imaginings into some sort of reality.

Well, Star Wars went several steps further in what had previously been done with imaginative thinking and once Disney acquired the property I had a feeling they would do something with Star Wars that would put it on a grand scale. And now, at D23, they have shown us the model of what they are building—a 14 acre deep dive into the depths of extreme imagination. The Disney Imagineers have been given a free hand to create something with Lucasfilm that will take visitors not only into the films that are so popular, but into a story they can then invest in themselves. These Disney people weren’t just trying to duplicate some memorable events from the movies but they are going several steps further—and what they are coming up with will have explosive results on our human population. I can only imagine what impact it will have on young minds visiting these Star Wars Lands in both Anaheim, and Orlando by having their minds ignited toward careers spawned from that experience.

You have to remember dear reader that while all this Star Wars stuff is going on at Disney, in new movies, theme park worlds and video games, NASA has been given the green light to return to space working with the private industry. President Trump literally wants to return to the moon just a year after Disney opens up this new Star Wars Land—so space is going to be on everyone’s minds very soon. I can say that I’m presently looking at what role I can play in this new space race as a grown adult. There will be opportunities to build hotels and factories in space, on the Moon and on Mars over the next twenty years so for me as an adult it will be very fun, and stimulating to visit Star Wars Land and bridge reality to what the imagination has come up with there. The idea of space ports interacting with many different species coming together over a vast galaxy is a strong philosophic concept that must be reconciled before actual science takes us to those places—and as the news of these phenomenal events begin to fill our basic reality soon, these fantastic theme parks are literally going to inspire us in ways that From the Earth to the Moon couldn’t. I don’t think these Star Wars Lands are just for fun and excess—I think they will actually advance our technology and science by inspiring young people in ways that we’ve never experienced as a species thus far in our evolution.

I always enjoy the news that comes out of D23 and other science and fantasy conventions whether the topics are theme parks or from Fantasy Flight Games where our imaginations are stretched out for comprehension of new ideas massaged in brand new ways. But this year is quite different. If you combine the science and imagination of what Disney has been planning now for over five years—from when I first wrote about this story—with the optimism of the Trump presidency—we are talking about some very special days ahead for us all. Even those who don’t think much of the Star Wars movies will find that the basic spill over of that fantasy will flow directly into our science of tomorrow—and THAT is a very exciting prospect that leaves me hungry for each new day and what might be revealed yet to come.

Rich Hoffman

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When the Lights Go Out: The difference between “us” and “them”

Did you ever notice how when either in a school or a place of business that when a storm comes and knocks out the lights some people clap? Then there are others—usually an extreme minority who try to continue to do their work next to a flashlight or a candle? This has always been a baffling concept to me, that people would be so happy to be relieved of their work that they could return their minds to a thoughtless existence talking about some television show, new pop song, or about some peer who isn’t present in the form of gossip. People who clap when the lights go out are people who are essentially afraid of action and thought because they don’t want the responsibility of accomplishment. They are essentially lazy people who struggle through life avoiding problems until the ultimate happens—all their problems catch up and destroy their life. Then they wonder why they are unhealthy, unhappy, and why nobody wants to be around them—because they are essentially negative people.

People who clap when the lights go out are people who are looking for an excuse not to live—which essentially makes them evil—(evil is live spelled backwards). They are anti-life and are the type of people who can’t be trusted with much of anything and are always looking to make trouble. Typically they are second-handers in life—those who live by the actions of others but usually they disguise their tendencies behind little emergencies like the lights going out, or they had a flat tire, or that it was raining. They work harder at not doing things than actually doing things because they find the threat of responsibility much more terrifying than the work in avoiding things.

You can often tell who will clap when the lights go out by those people who complain that it’s “Monday” or utter at 4 PM on a Friday, “TGIF.” They are the same people who put “hump day” on their Facebook posting revealing that they are happy the week is half over. These are the people in life who make it terrible for all those who enjoy life and have an optimistic view of it because it’s those who work hard even when the lights go out that carry the rest of those idiots while they hide their tendency toward inaction behind an emergency situation which they are always silently praying for.

These same people are the ones who say, “the devil is in the details,” because they hope to slow things down by getting everyone to look for that devil so they can stand to the side and avoid action. If they stall long enough maybe something will get pushed to Monday buying them a weekend to avoid the inevitable. And on Friday night they drink to forget and to ease the pain of their life from the pressure they always feel they are under. Those kids who grow up in school hoping the bus gets stuck in the snow, or clapping when there is a power outage are the same people who grow up drunk on the weekends because they can’t hack the pressure of living, and they don’t have the fortitude within them to always look for ways to solve problems no matter how bad things are.

People who like to work so much that they don’t let emergencies stop them are the people who make America great. It is not the people who clap when the lights go out. It is the people who look for a lighter in their pocket or a flashlight so they can continue reading or writing something when darkness arrives. They don’t let the darkness stop them. They work on weekends, they work in the middle of the week and Monday is just another day to them. A democracy will never work in any political system so long as there are people who clap when the lights go off, and there are only one or two people who pull out their flashlights to continue working. We are not all equal. Some of us look for every reason to not do something while others try to squeeze every moment of life for the richest possible of goodness available. Those who insist otherwise are those who clap when the lights go out. Or hope for a snow day to keep them from having to attend work.

There is a reason that professional sports are so popular. Sitting in the stands while other people perform on the field is the prefect job for people who clap when the lights go out. All they have to do is just sit there and watch other people do things—and that makes them happy. Some of them are so arrogant that they believe all that is required of them is that they buy a jersey and attend a game and that they have somehow made an investment toward the success of that franchise. When their team losses they get very upset and speak as if they made some grand investment that would justify their anger. But they are just sitting in the stands waiting for the lights to go out so they can hide the fact that they are fearful of life, and always hoping that they can jump on to someone elses success at the last moment and share in the heroic efforts. When a professional team is winning these fans say “we.” When those teams are losing they say, “they.”

Government is filled with people who love it when the lights go out. They love it when there are funding talks and government shut downs—because they like to not work and have someone else to blame for their lack of productivity. They hide in bureaucracy so that nobody would ever blame them for doing nothing because the invented details of muddled thinking allow them to appear majestic when they are essentially cowardly people waiting for death to ultimately take way the responsibility for living from them. They aim to slide through life from excuse to excuse until it all ends and they can then blame God, or even the universe for their sad, pathetic existence.

That anything happens at all it is from the private sector where there are handfuls of people who still work when the lights go out, or whether its Wednesday or Saturday—every day hold the promise of something new if only they can solve this, this and this problem. In fact solving problems is what makes them happy which is why they look for a light when they go out to continue working. It drives them. It is they who make the lights work in the first place. Without those types of people there would be perpetual darkness and a string of excuses from here until the dawn of mankind. Nothing would ever happen because always a majority of the people clap when the lights go out and only a very few look for alternatives to continue their work.

It is quite obvious what is going on with the Trump presidency—Trump and his family are a light. They always have been and the people of their core associations are of the same type. But Washington D.C. has a culture that is nearly entirely made up of people who always have clapped when the lights went out for whatever reason. And those people don’t like it that Trump is in the White House putting light everywhere and making people work even when the lights are turned off, and there are tornado warnings as well. Trump won’t let those who like to hide in the dark continue doing so, so they are doing everything they can to push back at the light. And that’s just not acceptable. Trump was elected by people who like to work to push away the influences of those who don’t from ruining the world further. It’s no longer fashionable to clap when the lights go out and no longer allowed to be one of those people who use chaos to hide their laziness. Those people have been exposed and are now required to act or be run over—and that is essentially what is driving our world today. And that’s not going to change.

Rich Hoffman

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The Innocence of Don Jr.: Why everyone should love the Trump family

Of course Donald Trump Jr. met with a person who claimed to have dirt on the candidate running against his father in the 2016 election. I’ve met with lots of people over the years under very similar conditions, so I can completely understand how many such meetings would be needed while running for president of the United States. Back then the Russian story which has been made up by the media to attempt to slow down the winner of the election from implementing tax reform, a repeal of Obamacare and the enforcement of immigration policies, wasn’t even a consideration. Back then it was unclear if Republicans would even get behind Trump at the convention so Don Jr was looking for a deal closer to unite the party around his father. Makes perfect sense. It was a nothing meeting, he acknowledged as much then he moved on. The media hoping to distract the senate from the healthcare debate however pounced on this story with everything they had during the weeks after the 4^th of July one year later as President Trump was having great success both overseas and domestically. They keyed on the Don Jr. story with great ferocity. But in so doing they have exposed themselves yet again.

The meeting between Loretta Lynch and former President Clinton that took place secretly at an Arizona tarmac occurred even more recently than the meeting Trump Jr. had with the Russian lawyer so it’s certainly still relevant. If the Trump case is a mandate for so much investigation and discussion then the Lynch case is enough to fill libraries of books on such matters, because that one is much, much more serious. Here you had the investigating attorney general at the Justice Department meeting with the husband of a candidate for president of the United States who was under investigation by the FBI for mishandling classified information. After the meeting James Comey clearly was called away from any incrimination into Hillary Clinton by his boss—Lorretta Lynch, giving Clinton a free pass to continue her presidential run without worrying about going to jail. The Democratic Party rallied behind the cause and defended all the parties involved culminating in one of the most contentious runs for president that we’ve ever seen in America. Even with all the effort and scheming involved the Democrats still lost to Trump deflating them terribly. They had gone all in—even to the point of breaking the law on several occasions—at the highest level—and they still came up empty.

In May and June of 2017 Comey revealed to a Senate committee that Loretta Lynch had put pressure on him to alter his investigative prerogatives. Once that information was revealed first in May, then made more elaborate in June, Trump fired Comey just a few days later of that May testimony. Obviously crimes were committed by Loretta Lynch and Comey played along with it taking this case to a much higher level than anybody ever anticipated. The crimes are quite serious and still pending as the nation struggles to wrap their minds around such majestic travesty. Because for a lot of good people, all this is just too much to comprehend. Great evil often hides behind unbelievable acts of bad conduct—and that is what we see so often in regards to the Hillary Clinton campaign and those who supported her, from Loretta Lynch to the basic protectors of the swamp from both parties in the House and Senate.

https://twitter.com/overmanwarrior/status/885670963307847681

We were told that all these crimes the Democrats committed were misunderstandings, and were at best conspiracy theories—yet when a much less act committed by Don Jr was revealed it was portrayed literally as the end of the political world. Do you see what’s cooking here dear reader? Don Jr. is completely innocent in this case and was functioning in the best interest of his father—who won the presidency fair and square. Trump was the better pick and the Democrats essentially lost because they had nobody to run against him. It was they who picked a woman who was under FBI investigation and had flubbed up a lot in her years of elected office. They hung their hats to her star and they lost big. And they have only themselves to blame.

But there is something else at work behind the Don Jr. case that is worth mentioning. There is a reason that President Trump is doing such a great job in spite of all these aggressive tactics. And if anybody wanted to discover why they’d go back and re-read some of the books that Donald Trump wrote over the years. For a person who is supposedly not very smart according to the political left, Trump has written more bestselling books and had a span of one of the most successful television shows in the history of entertainment in America. He knows a thing or two, and that’s not even how he became a billionaire. President Trump is and has always been that I can see, a person who not only wanted to be personally successful, but he wanted to inspire others to do the same. For a good example of this just read his book Think Like a Champion. Trump has been offering ways to improve the lives of everyday people most all of his life, and he’s used himself as a motivating factor to drive people toward success. But to the truly lazy and shallow minded they look at the targets Trump has set out there even before becoming president and they hate him because they are essentially too lazy to do the work. They hate Trump because the president asks them to do a little work just to be good people and this extends back through the years to their core dislike of Donald Trump to begin with. They don’t want to work hard. They just want to get by through life doing the bare minimum at everything. You don’t find too many Democrats who are fundamentally hard-working people. The philosophy of hard work and political mentality just don’t align.

This is the EXACT reason they viciously attack our family! They can't stand that we are extremely close and will ALWAYS support each other. https://t.co/1f7JqxScMr

— Eric Trump (@EricTrump) July 11, 2017

Making matters worse, Trump has a nice family. Don Jr., Eric, Ivanka and the rest of the kids are nice people. I’ve had the pleasure of meeting Eric at an event once and he was a sincerely nice young man. You don’t get the feeling that they are the kind of billionaire caricatures made up by the media to represent Mr. Burns from The Simpsons which are overbearing and intolerant billionaires out of touch with everyday people. The Trumps are everyday people in America and for years they have tried to share that experience with the rest of the country teaching them to also be successful. There is nothing pretentious about them. I think it took Donald Trump a while to figure out the right balance and as a result he went through a few marriages—but once he got it right, everything clicked into place for him. In a lot of ways I would give Melania Trump the credit for really bringing that family together—but regardless—they are good people who serve as the first family to the world marvelously well. Show me anybody anywhere in American culture better—because I’d bet you couldn’t. Trump has it going on every level and the Democrats can’t compete. All they can do is complain and try to stop the inevitable.

I liked the Trump family before they were the First Family. But after all they’ve endured I actually have a love for them. These are great people from the President all the way through to his 12-year-old son Barron. Melania has been fantastic in her role—in every phase and the kids are all just fabulous. I am proud that they represent our country—especially overseas. When Ivanka sat in for her dad for a short time at the G20 I thought she looked and acted just wonderfully competent. No complaints at all from me. But it is truly scary to think what would have happened if with all the law breaking the Democrats managed to get their person elected. That would not have been good. In that regard, I wouldn’t care if Don Jr. met with 100s of Russian lawyers to keep those Democratic idiots out of the White House. Because it would have been worth it. However, that wasn’t necessary. The Trumps won fair and square and it’s time for the political left to either get over it, or leave for a country more aligned with their insurrectionists ideologies. Because with the Trumps, good things are coming whether the Democrats are ready or not.

Rich Hoffman

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An Open Letter to Williamstown, Kentucky: How to develop Exit 154

I was impressed with the Ark Encounter exhibit in Williamstown, Kentucky located in Grant County between Lexington and Cincinnati, Ohio. For a religious oriented theme park in its infancy of development there was a lot to like. Ken Ham built the Ark there on a scale that certainly puts it on the map globally. When I visited at the one year anniversary of its opening, I noted cars from almost every state in America in the parking lot and the place was packed mid-week during the day. That provoked me to do a little research into the economic impact that the Ark Encounter has had on Williamstown over a short period of time when I ran across this video of Steve Wood, a judge-executive for Williamston who had such a terrible attitude that I have to try to help this guy out—for the sake of Grant County. There is no reason for Grant County to file for bankruptcy when such a wonderful tourist attraction like the Ark Encounter is in your neighborhood so let’s get into some basics on economic development discussion.

The first problem with what Steve Wood said was that he hoped that with the Ark that business would come pouring it. Dude, you have to soft sell the economic opportunities to investors. They aren’t going to just go to the Ark Encounter and say—hey, let’s build the next Chick-fil-A at this highway exit, or let’s locate the next car manufacturer at Williamstown. You have to at least promote the region and offer some incentives. You can’t just hope that things will drop in your lap. What Ken Ham did was just the first step—a $100 million dollar investment into a region that had nothing going for it before July of 2016. It’s only been a year and roughly a million or so people have visited the new attraction and of those people only about 1% of those visitors have any connection to the kind of investments needed to develop more economic impact into Williamstown. Of that roughly 10,000 potential investors even fewer are in a position to have enough liquid capital to make a move at this time, but when they are ready, you want them to have Grant County in mind.

My first thoughts when entering and leaving the Ark Encounter was that there was a gold mine of opportunity there. At Dry Ridge just one exit to the north there is a Cracker Barrel restaurant but south of that until Georgetown there isn’t much to provoke a traveler into stopping for gas, food, or anything else. There is no reason a new manufacturing plant blooming under the new Trump economy wouldn’t have its eye on Grant County for primarily the highway access, a friendly government environment and good Christian labor. My first thoughts were that the region likely had access to good, wholesome people who come from backgrounds of hard work and if they go to church dependably on Sunday then they are likely to show up for work during the week so they can earn enough money to give 10% back to the church. A good, reliable workforce is always a concern for any company. But this doesn’t happen overnight. If I’m thinking these things then so are those other 10,000 people mentioned. Among them there are probably five or six good leads that could save Grant County from bankruptcy. It is your job Steve Wood to protect them as they put their money down onto the table to embark on something that might take at least 5 years to develop from inception to ribbon cutting. By then you’ll have to trust Ken Ham to do his part and continue expanding his Christian amusement park to a scale that does rival something like a Universal Studios or a Disney World for the Bible Belt.

Before any of the big commercial enterprises come you must have restaurants and hotels because those bring people and tax money off the highway and into Williamstown. There needs to be a few hotel outfits that locate at that Ark Encounter exit to give all those people driving from Kansas, North Dakota and Montana somewhere to stay for the weekend and they need to be decent places. One thing that is very specific about Christian people, they are typically happy because they have the Lord to make decisions for them—so their minds are unencumbered with burden. They love to eat and talk so any hotel that comes to that region needs to feature good southern food and places for them to talk to each other for long periods of time. They typically have money in their pockets because they work but they don’t want to “rough it.” I would go so far to say that a good Christian bookstore free-standing would do well in that location—something like a Lifeway, supporting businesses that allow for a vacation experience that extends beyond the Ark Encounter borders. Another aspect that is unique to this particular exit is the large group of Amish who have come to perform work at the Ark Encounter. There would be quite a market for Amish home cooking and crafts there which could rival Amish Acres up in Northern Indiana. There is room for all these wholesome markets in our wonderful American economy. I personally love Amish Acres and would enjoy a second option locally. I am certain that people would drive up from Georgia and Tennessee to get their hands on good Amish craftsmanship—and they are already in place at Williamstown to build exhibits at the Ark Encounter. People can say what they want about the viability of the Ark Encounter in relation to science, but the wood working performed there in the various structures is some of the best in the world—thanks to the Amish.

http://www.amishacres.com/

I have watched with quite a lot of frustration the Kings Mills exit where Kings Island is located. That real estate is marvelous, its one exit up from the great commercial hub of Fields Ertle Road but the Kings Mills exit itself has struggled to really find a niche for itself—and that is because the politicians of Mason and the Kings Mills area were too short-sighted to develop it correctly. They have the usual fast food restaurants there but they have struggled with hotels and retail which they shouldn’t because Kings Island has great demographic numbers. However, what they have is chaos—every kind of person that is out there, old people, young people, all different races and ideologies visiting the popular Amusement Park. That makes it hard for investors to key in on the type of people who will use whatever business they are proposing. Many retail outlets have failed at that exit for that very reason. But down at Grant County in the Bible Belt, the target demographic are Christian people who are typically affluent. They aren’t knuckle-dragging slobs who have a hard time holding down a job. Gatlinburg, Tennessee is likely their favorite place on earth because it is somewhere they can go where they don’t have to hide their values. If the same attitude were presented at Exit 154 on I-75 they would flock there for the sheer enjoyment of it.

But these places aren’t going to just drop in the lap of Williamstown. They need to be wooed by the management of Williamstown. There are a lot of companies out there looking for all the things that Exit 154 has to offer but they need to know it’s there. The Ark Encounter hasn’t been open long enough, nor is it developed enough to really spark development at that exit as of yet. God isn’t going to do the work for you. You guys are going to have to go out and get it, There is no reason however to allow Grant County to go bankrupt. That is just ridiculous. All that is needed is a good plan and people excited enough to implement it, and a little patience to allow things to develop. With just a little work I can see Exit 154 being one of the great tourist destinations between Cincinnati, Lexington, and Louisville. It’s a great location just far enough away from everything to feel remote, but close enough to inspire weekend vacations and church expeditions. A few months of activity won’t be enough, it will take several years—but they are off to a good start. Ken Ham’s people have certainly done what they set out to do; now it is up to Grant County to sell it to a Trump economy that is full of optimism for the first time in decades. Failure is really a decision, not a fate and Williamstown can only prosper if it does just a little work—which is completely in their power to do.

Rich Hoffman

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Mark Welch for 2017 West Chester Trustee: Maintaining the great economic growth of a Cincinnati suburb correctly managed

I feel privileged to live in one of the best places in the United States, West Chester, Ohio. I remember when it was called Union Township and was much more rural as a kid, and have watched it grow into essentially a city without losing its spirit of accomplishment which is rare in the world. Over the years I could have moved anywhere and would have if I thought the opportunities for my family would have been better, but they aren’t. While I don’t live in West Chester, I do work there and it is a part of my daily life most days of the week. I have to credit George Lang with a lot of the government foundations which have allowed West Chester to become such a wonderful place. As a politician you have to know when to manage a situation and when to leave it alone and George has managed to do that over the years even when hostile liberals pretending to be Republicans operated openly in ways that usually destroy communities—people like Cathy Stoker and Lee Wong—so it hasn’t been easy. But George has done a very good job of being active where he needed to be and hands off depending on the situation and that style of government should be the model for the rest of the country. The best thing however that happened to West Chester from the perspective of government is when Mark Welch joined George as a trustee in 2013. Over the last four years West Chester has exploded with opportunity and a lot of that silent credit goes to those two guys who have removed the barriers of creation and investment into business and landed many great opportunities to such a thriving, and diverse community. If the benefits of Republican run government could be better shown anywhere in the United States I’d know about it—but that evidence has yet to present itself.

http://markwelchfortrustee.com/

I was having lunch with some friends at the new Chuy’s Tex-Mex restaurant that just opened in West Chester and had the opportunity to sit outside on a mild day that was very pleasant. From there the Top Golf facility towered over my head, the Main Event was thriving with business and Barnes and Noble sat proudly as one of the few area bookstores to have survived the hard transition of Amazon’s influence on the publishing industry. Across the highway hotels had sprung up much to my advantage because out-of-town guests now had many places to stay when they visited—I no longer had to drive them to downtown Cincinnati to stay in a decent place for the night when visiting on business. West Chester, the relatively new exit along I-75 had the optimistic feeling that I typically feel when I visit the Disney World complex in Orlando—the money is flowing which is the lifeblood of any economy and people were enjoying themselves on a daily basis with lifestyle options.

My kids had told me about Chuy’s and recommended that I try it out. We had all just returned from Canterbury, England where we had dinner at a Tex-Mex place they had in the center of town there—which we thought at the time was the best we had ever had. The decorations alone were extraordinary so we thought that type of experience was a once in the lifetime event. But then Chuy’s opened and it was everything and more that you’d expect from a Tex-Mex style of operation, so in that context I was quite impressed. As I turned around from my seat I could see the newly opened Deluth Trading company complex offering yet another shopping experience to West Chester guests. Behind Deluth IKEA loomed on the horizon and I had to think how many people it took to make all this happen—and the answer is a good Republican plan that transpired over many years to make it happen and attract all these investments from all over the world to build West Chester into such a world-class destination for commerce. George Lang and Mark Welch were smart enough to not inject themselves into the mechanisms and when they needed to they did a lot of soft selling to help push some of those deals over the top—and that really has been the difference.

I mentioned that I grew up around West Chester so I’ve had a front row seat to many of the positive things that have taken place over the last three decades of development. But my optimism doesn’t come from a lack of perspective. My observations from Chuy’s comes after I recently took my wife shopping at Harrod’s in London after having dinner at the Restaurant Gorden Ramsay in Chelsa just a few weeks prior to that experience. We also had plenty of experiences in Paris which most people swoon over—but I have to say, having lunch at Chuy’s with Deluth literally right next door was far better as an experience than anything I’ve seen overseas. I also recently had a trip to Japan where they have several facilities like Top Golf to serve as entertainment destinations in their land restricted environment—but none of them that I was able to see were as good as that West Chester facility. Top Golf is an entertainment destination that is a very high quality experience—quite remarkable. It is worth an out-of-town visit just to stay at that facility and play golf in such a unique way. Mark Welch didn’t build any of these places, but as a successful businessman and corporate sales executive prior to his own entrepreneurial activities he had the experience to get out-of-the-way when all these investment opportunities were considering utilizing what West Chester offered, economically, demographically, and in supported infrastructure.

But of course I’ve just been talking about one little part of what has become one of the top interstate exits in the Cincinnati region. Just north of these West Chester destinations are three more exits of the same type of explosive growth—everything from a new Cabela’s to the Cox Road shopping destinations. Which are extensive. For a community that still has a small town tradition it now has all the amenities of a big city including a great hospital. And in the middle of all this activity is one of the largest Metro Parks anywhere at the Voice of America, lots of top-level soccer fields, baseball fields, fishing, hiking, and boating—it is an astonishing place for something that is just a few hundred yards from the entrance to a Target, or a T.G.I Fridays across the street.

Mark Welch is up for election this year and has done so much in his first term that it would be crazy not to return him to the current position he holds which is president of the board of trustees. There are a lot of con artists out there who put the much-needed “R” in front of their political affiliation to get elected in Butler County, but Mark is the real deal. It isn’t easy to manage such a large township with so much fiscal wealth flowing into it, and still represent people the correct way. Not everyone gets what they want, but I have watched Mark balance some really intense debates over the last few years with great skill and still not discourage investment. Not an easy thing to do. I attribute a lot of that skill to his success as a private citizen well before he was ever a trustee. Now he has an opportunity to do it again for another term. It’s important to keep him in the role he is currently so that more opportunity even yet may continue to flourish in West Chester.

It is important for everyone involved to work toward the correct objectives in this upcoming election. After November, likely there will be a special election for another trustee seat and when that occurs we’ll need another strong Republican to work with Mark to keep the votes out of the hands of the many closet liberals who are lingering in the shadows looking for some way to get attention for themselves. So a clear strategy is needed to settle the minds of the many business opportunities that are looking at West Chester for stability and continued growth. The first objective of course is to get Mark re-elected. The second is to hold that second vote. The ability to do that will go a long way to maintaining the explosive opportunities that West Chester residents have gained over this last decade, and to carry great optimism into the next and beyond. West Chester is a unique place in the world and we should keep it that way with good government led by Mark Welch who truly understands how to go about it.

Rich Hoffman

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Donald Trump’s Tomorrowland: Making “Failure’s Not An Option” great again!

I kept looking for it but have yet to see any news really covering what Donald Trump’s administration has been doing in regard to American space exploration. It was only just before July 4^th 2017 that Trump signed an executive order reactivating the National Space Council at NASA and making Mike Pence the is the chairman of the board. Then just a few days after that great American Holiday Mike Pence was giving a speech at the Vehicle Assembly Building at Kennedy Space Center announcing that the first meeting of the new council would before summer ended. It was a big speech with grand national appeal but it was eclipsed behind Trump’s G20 visit and the first face to face meeting with Russia’s Vladimir Putin. The news media was completely consumed with the news of this oversea visit and the antics of Trump’s combat with the various news organizations—so they missed the announcements about America’s new role in space that sounded much more spectacular than when Kennedy gave in his famous challenge ahead of the Apollo program in the 60s. Trump was thinking bigger—much bigger and Mike Pence is about to make his mark as a very strong VP in the vastness of space.

As Trump and Pence were unleashing space once again the Wall Street Journal had a very interesting article which was quite familiar to me, that “smart medicine” was in fact the wave of the future and ultimate cure to illness on earth. And to what effect? We don’t need to get sick as humans and die of old age—we can fix all that now and until very, very recently–publications like the Wall Street Journal were not covering those regenerative technologies. I bring it up here because space exploration takes time and the best way to embark on such an adventure is to live the amount of time that Noah did from the Bible, to see many years of development to and from the vastness of space and to colonize the once unthinkable. We’ll want every human being and more available today for such adventures. There were so many magnificent quotes given in Trump’s speech then Pence’s speech at the Kennedy Space Center to be played back to history for many years. I thought many of those quotes were better than when Kennedy made his famous challenge to the American people when he announced that he intended to put man on the moon within a decade. In case you haven’t heard, Trump wants to do that by 2020. Trump then wants to be on Mars by 2024. Those are ambitious goals for a space agency that has literally been turned off to study climate science and Islamic contributions to science. Trump’s commitment to space is actually astonishing and will carry with it a new era in adventure, science, philosophy and politics.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-smart-medicine-solution-to-the-health-care-crisis-1499443449

I haven’t been down to our family retreat at Cape Canaveral for a few years now. I have often spoken glowingly about my visits there to my favorite beach in the world, Cocoa Beach and the many famous landmarks that evolved in the wake of the space program at NASA. From our condo we can see the Vehicle Assembly Building at Kennedy Space Center. My kids are especially in love with the place and have watched several launches from that four story balcony. They were there to see the last Space Shuttle mission return home under the Obama administration and they have recently seen the Space X rocket tests and have been enthusiastic about it still. But they don’t know it like I do—where Space Shuttles seemed to take off every month and we were on a fast track to life outside of earth. I love the optimism of space, the promise not only of adventure but of new discoveries and opportunities, such as mining Helium-3 off the moon for real nuclear power. There is great talk now of going to Mars in weeks not just months which of course would allow us to mine the moons of Jupiter and even Saturn realistically and carry our civilization toward a Type 1 classification—where we master our solar system for resources to advance our technology. Having that promise ripped away by the Obama administration and other previous presidents has been extremely disheartening.

It was my fault; back when my kids were getting more home school from my wife and I than anything they learned in ten years of school I took my children on a very special trip to Florida to visit the Kennedy Space Center then directly to Disney’s Epcot center. The entire trip was focused on science and technology showing them the possibilities that were in front of their lives. That was in 2003, George W. Bush was in the White House and I really thought he was serious about returning America back to the moon. So I took my kids to the family condo at Cape Canaveral and let them meet astronauts at the Space Center and literally turned their imaginations loose. Since then there really hasn’t been any ambition for space by virtually anybody. This has been reflected in a few very forward-looking movies, like Tomorrowland based on the Disney attraction at Magic Kingdom and the very good Christopher Nolan movie, Intersteller. I was very surprised to learn from my oldest daughter that her favorite movie so far in her life is Intersteller. It made me a little sad because it was I who planted those seeds so long ago and in her life nothing had so far came from it. So many kids in her generation have had their minds turned off and now they look at the world inwardly instead of outwardly. Their vision is small because they have their faces pressed into the feces of their own existence and that folly is literally destroying mankind with remarkable swiftness. And bright thinkers like my daughters—ignited by an overly optimistic dad have seen little to match that zeal from their generation. When Trump said that in the vastness of space many of our problems would seem small—he’s right. The solution to much that sickens us as a species will be solved in space and in the journey of mastering it.

It was during that trip that I bought a t-shirt from the NASA shop stating “Failure is not an option” which was the classic line from the Apollo 13 mission that was made into a movie by the great movie director, Ron Howard. I wore it everywhere because it matched my optimism for everything. Anyone who deals with me knows that this is my basic philosophy. Failure is never an option for me—and never has been. It is kind of an innate instinct that I have always had, but the space program in America framed the spirit in a way I have always fed from. It was quite remarkable to wear that shirt to Epcot Center the next day with my kids asking questions and taking them to Tomorrowland to see all the optimism contained there for our future. Even though my kids were impressed, I was frustrated because I felt we could be doing so much more as a country—but from the very top—in the White House we lacked vision and the great dreamers had been grounded, seemingly on purpose.

If you’ve ever been through a NADCAP audit dear reader you’ll understand what I’m talking about. For many decades now government has imposed so many rules and regulations onto the aerospace industry that we’ve stifled creativity and brave innovations with so much bureaucratic red tape that the love for adventure that used to be present even in engineers has been stuffed into a bottle and sealed up tight. The days where World War II fighter pilots were the test pilots and advisors for NASA are over—they have been replaced by pin headed politicians and paper pushers whose only adventure in life is to decide who will make the coffee run to Starbucks. The industry bureaucrats have replaced the type of horse sense innovation that actually invented space travel with static manufacturing plans designed to take the thinking away from production leaving us all with a cold—dead work environment of people disconnected from the passion that can be garnered from being a part of the industry. Aerospace today from the top to the bottom look for reasons not to do things than in how to do them because the regulatory zeal placed upon it by government has crushed the desire to achieve things. The good news of Trump’s commitment to space means so much more than just going back to the moon—it means uncovering that American spirit that put us there in the first place and going back to what worked—and allowing young people to dream of a work culture that stated “Failure is Not an Option” and spent every last breath of their lives articulating that type of thinking.

It was as if there were a cloud of negativity that has taken over the world and until Trump unleashed his big ideas that cloud has been in full rebellion. It doesn’t want Trump to succeed in these quests and it has been so thick that even the magnanimity of the two speeches done after the 4^th of July 2017 by first the President then the Vice President down at Kennedy Space Center that nobody heard about these events. They were probably the most important news stories of the week, yet nobody covered them—not even Fox News. Even supporters of Trump’s administration like Jessie Watters and Eric Boiling didn’t make a mention of these bold speeches on their coverage that I could see watching them through the following weekend—the news was all about CNN’s fake news coverage and the G20 Summit. Nothing about America’s new commitment to space or the wonderful science that will come from it—we are talking about a new dawn for the human race while the attention is on keeping our heads in the waste of our lives by cowardly bureaucrats who want to keep our feet firmly in concrete sealed to the shallow history of European stagnation.

Everyone should have seen this coming, after all Trump is all about thinking big, and by the time he is done our previous visits to space will seem like distant history—not to be forgotten, but certainly not the focus of future visits of people to the Kennedy Space Center. Based on what Mike Pence said, Cape Canaveral is poised to be a true space port where private sector and government truly work properly toward the goal of expanding mankind into the vast cosmos above our heads. Instead of saying “remember that” we will be making t-shirts of what was just said in a board room off in the corner of the Vehicle Assembly Building as some engineering problem revealed major headaches for everyone. It is in the thrill of overcoming those obstacles that the adventure of space happens—not from the losers who throw their hands up in because the word “the” is placed in the wrong place in a manufacturing plan.

But that those plans will be written once more as discovery happens and innovation dictates light feet and an indomitable spirit. Yes, Trump’s commitment to space is the best thing to happen in America over many years and I am proud once again of our space program. It won’t take long to see the results even though at this point very few people are talking about it. Soon however, that won’t be the case. It will prove to be one of the biggest things to have ever happened to the human race and its happening right now. And not a moment too soon! We’ve needed this, and now Donald Trump is starting that train of successes in science moving again and the results will be positive for every single human being on planet earth—and that’s not an understatement.

Rich Hoffman

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

Critics of the Ark Encounter and the Trump Presidency: A collision of east and western thought

While doing a little research on the Ark Encounter for an article reporting my recent visit there I ran across a number of really disturbing trends which correlate perfectly to the Trump presidency. It’s no secret that evangelicals supported Donald Trump massively in the last election and that they would continue to be a solidifying electorate base—so obviously the criticism leveled at the type of evangelicals who were behind the Ark Encounter project were the same who wanted to end the Trump presidency with bizarre conspiracy theories and constant small-minded thinking—especially in the example below from the lunatic making fun of not only the Ark Encounter, but the type of people who live in Kentucky. What we are seeing is a classic battle between traditionalists and the progressives from the coastal territories and the urban viewpoints that their culture is superior from a European mindset, contains all the arrogance which articulates our current crises in America—and they are of course dead wrong.

I am not a “young earth” believer and I see many flaws in the foundation beliefs of the Ark Encounter presentation. I watched with great effort the great debate at the Ark Encounter between Bill Nye, the Science Guy and the amusement park’s founder, Ken Ham. My view is that both were functioning from a mythic perspective represented by their two foundational philosophies. I admired Ken Ham’s passion and his beliefs even though I think there is more evidence that is needed to tell the story. After all, my father-in-law is a geology professor and I have many friends around the world who are archaeologists, historians, and paleontologists and many of the sciences they are working on is showing that earthly civilizations are much older than 6000 years, that human societies are millions of years old and that a Vico cycle has dominated human thought for many cycles over that time for which the Noah story is all but the most recent one. But I also reserve the right that everyone might be wrong and that evidence may come forward that shines light in a totally new direction—so from my perspective the stories of these cultures—including our present one provide some of the best insight that we have to work with and serves as a proper starting point for any discussion. But with Bill Nye—he’s clearly functioning from the European Marxism which has crippled western civilization from the start and the foundation of his entire premise is rooted in global warming being the dominate threat of all mankind. So as radical as he wants to make Ken Ham out to be for the Ark Encounter’s “young earth” debates both sides are essentially arguing over basic religious views. The modern progressive is proposing a new religion in earth worship to correct obvious flaws in their traditional thinking and to do that they have to eliminate people like Ken Ham from the discussion to make their own pieces of thought fit and that is why they are so hostile.

I think the Ark Encounter is actually a wonderful place to provoke actual philosophic debate that is badly needed. I compared it to not only the movie Jurassic Park, but also the Universal Studios attraction which is based on hard science but has many fictional elements added to psychologically tell a story our human minds need to deal with, real philosophical challenges provided by DNA manipulation and other modern concerns, There is incredible value in that particular modern mythology that cannot be taken factually, but as part of an immersive story. The Ark Encounter’s value is not in its factual elements—whether Noah built the Ark in 2200 BC and that once all the waters of the world receded from the Biblical flood the vessel ended up on top of Mt Ararat in Turkey. It’s in the study of good and evil and how decisions on the furtherance of mankind should be articulated in relation to the primal actions of biological urges. Should human beings allow themselves to be basic primal organisms eating, drinking, and procreating as a blob of cellular activity or should human thinking exceed biological necessity? As primal as many might blame Ken Ham’s evangelical perspective it is actually the basic foundation which asks the question of mankind—shouldn’t we be more than just a biological mechanism of earth’s many life forms? If mankind is actually unique in that spectrum and has a special place in a universe created by God on the sixth day of a grand construction project—than shouldn’t we act on an elevated platform? Such discussion are meant for the temples of the world but at the Ark Encounter Ken Ham has actually revisited the great debates known to Greek society back into the modern world and the effect is quite dramatic—and valuable. Scholarship shouldn’t be afraid of the truth—because in debating these things, we learn a lot about ourselves and our positions. The real value isn’t always in the facts which are hard to know when evidence is slow to emerge from science—but the stories that are told contain elements of a hidden truth that our psychology requires to behold advanced concepts beyond the primal necessity of our biological requirements.

As sophisticated as Bill Nye’s reliance on actual science might appear his basic premise is that we live, we die, we leave behind other collective organisms to continue our species—but that humans are not particularly special compared to dogs, cats or ocean animals—and that the greatest threat facing our modern times is man-made global warming. It is from the Bill Nye type of thinkers that the NASA program was all but shut down in the past and that they don’t want humans thinking too much about themselves intellectually but instead need to find their happy place on planet earth and learn to live there in harmony with nature. The evolution of this progressive thinking actually comes from medieval Europe where the Christian church proposed by the remnants of the Roman Empire had been adopted by that society which actually came from oriental sentiment considered in India at the time and collided with the individual thinking of the Troubadours and Arthurian romances already in bloom. The two vantage points never fit together correctly and Europe has been fragmented in its thinking for well over a thousand years now and that essential problem is at the heart of everything concerning conflict between the eastern and western worlds. The people of the Middle East will admit that they are collectivists so it’s easy for them to submit themselves to angry gods who rule from the heavens. Eastern societies are also collectivists and will sacrifice their individuality in a moment to the higher powers of celestial involvement. However Europe was already asking hard questions about the role of the individual soul well before Roman brought that eastern religion of Christianity to its empire and people didn’t agree, and they still don’t leaving us with a very fragmented religious element that still desires to put the individual at the front of thought while the collective nature of all religion seeks to remain the superior force.

The critics of The Ark Encounter fail because they essentially insist that the new religion of earth worship be the dominate bond that unites America with the rest of the world in “progressive” thought. Their religion is actually one that the Nazi movement was based heavily on—a kind of Celtic reinvention from a time before the Roman Empire used Christianity to unit its empire with common thought. But, the Celtics were not the Troubadours so there are factions of people who uniquely professed to the world that individuality was important and that our souls were special in the role of the universe—that God would have Noah be the keeper of the world’s animals and that he alone with his three sons and their wives would save all mankind on earth for another round on the Vico cycle. To me it’s a story that says a lot more than history can put its finger on at the moment. To others it is the path to eternal life to harbor their individual souls spiritually. To others it’s a threat to that classic European problem—an eastern religion mixed with western thought to provide so much conflict and pain, that ancient religions long destroyed by the Roman Empire are still desired behind the mask of “earth worship.”

What’s important is the discussions that pour forth and who would have ever known that little Williamstown, Kentucky would be such a center for philosophic discussion. It’s not New York or Chicago or even London that is the center of modern debate such as Athens served in the past—but a little exit along I-75 where Ken Ham built a massive recreation of Noah’s Ark and invited debate on a campus designed to spark discussion. That is the aspect to all this that is beautiful and those who don’t want the debate—but just want to lazily accept the conclusions of religions that came before us as fact of course don’t want those debates to occur—just as they don’t want Donald Trump to Make America Great Again. They just want to live, die, and be forgotten so that the Earth can live its life as a celestial sphere only to eventually die itself as the sun runs out of fuel and the universe will never know that we ever had a human race that thought, built and contemplated new ways of thinking aside from the inherit violence of a universe expanding, contracting, and dying itself for reasons that defy reasoning. At least at the Ark Encounter there is a defined purpose for living that is presented and that maybe the greatest threat of all.

Rich Hoffman

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