Category: Taxes

Trump Was Right About Iran: How political consultants have caused war and are to blame for the deaths in the Middle East

It was always disingenuous to suggest that President Trump did not have a strategy when he ordered the end of Iran’s top terrorist general. The constant suggestion of recklessness about that decision and the media emphasis that it would cause World War III was dubious at best from the outset. Wiser minds knew better. Iran is a third world country ran by small minded people who for a period of time had first world money due to their oil. They are not capable of conducting a war with the United States and everyone smart knew it. Yet there is an advisor class who make a lot of money off politicians in Washington and within the media culture who inject themselves into the situation with their take essentially to make money off of chaos. And for them to continue making money off the Iranian instability in the Middle East, they need the world to believe that Iran is more than it truly is, a real threat globally that can only be dealt with by some fictional academic elite forged from our liberal universities and who think in groups, instead of individual leadership.

In reality, Iran has barely been hanging on politically for a long time and their people are ready for another revolution. The communist one of 1979 has not worked out for them and now this new generation is thinking of better things, western influenced. Trump being one of us—people who live in the world by the merits of our own decisions—understood that by removing a person that Iran counted on with competency to inflict harm to the world, that the incompetency of the Iranian culture stagnated due to their totalitarian view of the world, would be at a loss. It is shameful to see that Iran did shoot down an airliner headed for Ukraine carrying many innocent lives out of Tehran shortly after sending a missile barrage at U.S. airbases—but not surprising. Incompetent people make mistakes when their leadership is absent. It happens in businesses, and it happens in countries—it happens everywhere that organizations suffer by a loss of leadership and they do not have a culture that inspires the next generation of leadership. So when a senior leader is removed, and there is nobody to replace them because totalitarian leaders often are getting rid of their future competition, not nurturing them, then a leadership vacuum always follows. So yes, President Trump knew exactly what he was doing, and he had a strategy. It just wasn’t a strategy that the boot lickers of our society wanted to see, because they can’t make money off Trump’s way. Its as simple as that.

Innocent people should never lose their lives due to the incompetency of their governments. However, for the lives lost due to Iran shooting down that airliner killing all onboard, the Iranian people were granted a rare admission of guilt from their government, which had no choice due to the hard position Trump had put them in, forcing their own incompetency to be revealed to the world on live television. They were provoked to attack America to save face from their embarrassments, and they overacted to the civilian airliner headed for destinations of innocence because they expected attacks from America in response. Instead, Trump played it cool, sent out a tweet saying all was well, leaving Iran to face itself with honesty for perhaps the first time in decades. The Iranian government failed to poise themselves as the grand threat on the world stage and revealed themselves to be simply a terrified regional gang. And now their people want a change.

Trump’s plan never included more troops to the region the way the boot lickers who act as consultants suggested. Killing Iran’s top general was never going to be the start of a new war. It had a plan, it just wasn’t a plan that the consultant class understood, because it didn’t mean any new work for them. Of course, they hate Trump, he doesn’t need them to consult him. He can make decisions on his own, like any great business executive can. People like Trump have real life experience that easily beats political hacks around the world and those too dependent on consultants to tell them how to proceed next. The plan was, and continues to be, to act decisively based on Trump’s experience which turns out to be superior to the consultant class. The criticism is meant to tell the opposite story, that only they have the answer which is critical to them because that’s how they make a living.

However, in many ways the lives of those poor people on that destroyed airliner shot down in Iran is the fault of that same group of people, the consultants who artificially propped up Iran to look like a first world superpower. Giving Iran false power has endangered so many people over the years, and countless people have died as a direct result. True, they are sad that Trump has solved the problem in Iran setting force a new revolution that the Iranian people will conduct on their own, without American troops to help. Any recklessness that has transpired had already occurred before Trump was even in office by the political consultants who have for so many decades made Iran feel tough, and embolden to be terrors across the world, leaving many innocent people to die needlessly. That is the real crime. Trump ended that threat with a simple decision on one guy. That has left Iran exposed for what it always was, and now lots of people are upset, and they deserve to be. Because they were cheering for the wrong side all along, for all the wrong reasons.

Unlike the show that consultants wanted to occur where proper strategy only gave them more to do, more work to whisper in the ears of their paying clients, Trump’s strategy was to solve the problem. And that’s what he has done and why Iran is now poised to stop being a threat to the entire world. Any leverage of terror they had before they shot down that airliner is now gone and forever, they will be known as a lying regime to their own people. Many of us on the outside already knew that, but the people of Iran weren’t so sure. Now they know. And so does the world. And Trump exposed them just by pressing his position and forcing Iran to act in ways they weren’t competent to respond. The pressure got to them and they made a huge international mistake that they had to admit to, since the evidence was so overwhelming. Yes, Trump had a strategy and it worked. He didn’t need a bunch of people to tell him how to do it, he already knew from hundreds if not thousands of business deals in the past. Dealing with Iran isn’t any more complicated. It may have higher stakes, but the skills in understanding the strategy are the same. That is why the world is a lot safer now than it was before Iran’s top general was killed by an American drone strike, ordered by President Trump. That is always why the world is starting to feel empowered to challenge their authoritarian governments. The results are far better than leaving billions of dollars on a runway for terror to thrive. Trump’s strategy made people much safer, and gave more people hope than ever before. Which is why he’s a great president. We are lucky to have him.

Rich Hoffman

Who Cares About Michael Bloomberg’s Billion Dollars: It won’t help him win 1 percentage point

There seems to be a lot of concern about Michael Bloomberg’s commitment to spending a billion dollars to defeat President Trump in the next election. Some of that money was constantly seen during the NFL playoffs trying to prop up the New York socialist with favorable light. Then the Sunday political shows were deeply concerned because as many of them said, it was Bloomberg money that converted the House from a Republican majority to a Democrat majority for which many current problems have spawned forward. So for clarity here, let’s put some sanity into the equation, no, Bloomberg did not cost Republicans the House, it was the Never Trumper Republicans who retired leaving Democrats to fill those voids since many in those districts were still moderates at the time. A few years later with such a great economy being what it is, those demographics have changed for the better. And considering Michael Bloomberg’s billion dollars, you can polish up a turd to look like some nice piece of gold, but its still crap. People see what’s going on. I would say that Bloomberg at this point could spend 2, or 3 billion dollars but he would be unable to move numbers against Trump one percentage point and for him and the rest of the Democrats, that has to be very frustrating and they are fixing to learn some very hard lessons in 2020.

Democrats still haven’t learned their lessons, and Bloomberg is the same guy who thought that big government had a right to regulate the size of a soft drink that we could all have. They just don’t understand what I have been saying about the great psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmiahalyi’s important work on “Flow” that came out of the University of Chicago. It really pains me to see the state of modern day academia allowing themselves to be a propaganda arm of socialist politics because I personally enjoy the great works of very profound thinkers from academia quite a lot, people such as Mihaly Csikszentmiahalyi who see emerging trends in human consciousness well before pop culture and politics recognize them. Trump isn’t just a person, but it’s a global trend. You can see it in Brexit, we can see it in Iran, Hong Kong, even in the Star Wars movies for which Disney’s pop culture is draped off of. When people roll their eyes when I’m talking about the new Rise of the Resistance ride at Disney World even that is built of the same stuff from Mihaly Csikszentmiahalyi’s concepts about psychological Flow. We live in a world where personal decisions crave to be freer not more restricted. People want less rules and much more creativity about their private lives, not more restriction.

Democrats and their commitment to socialism whether it is openly stated or just supported in policy by a different name is all about less options, not more. They are all about less creativity personally in all our lives, not more. Their definitions of freedom are constructed in old 60s communist propaganda uttered in Beatles songs, not in the realities of our day with the freedom that smart phones give us and the infinite shopping options of Amazon.com. We live in an age where commercial space travel is becoming a reality, and here is Michael Bloomberg suggesting that we need more rules on soft drinks, and the Democrats want to do for health care what they have done to public education, turn it into a dirty uncared for bathroom at a public park managed by government for the utilization of government, without private enterprise there to keep quality on the up and up. Even in the realm of health care we are looking at cures for cancer and the complete biological restructuring of a body in a few years to cure illnesses, where standard doctor’s visits won’t even be a thing, it will likely happen by computer and from the comfort of our homes.

That is the trend that President Trump represents in the world, freedom and personal choice. That is what the Republican Party as a whole now represents and there is nothing that the Democrats can do to repair that image. No amount of money can change that message now that Democrats are committed to that branding. And that will be the lesson of all the Bloomberg money he is spending and plans to. His message and the one in general for the Democrat Party is one that people are rejecting at every level of their lives. No matter how many times they hear from Bloomberg during the playoffs and world series, audiences will tune him out while they go to the kitchen to get more nachos, and it certainly won’t change how they vote. In many ways that is why nothing they have thrown at Trump has stopped support of him up to this point, because its not the man himself that people are voting for, but it’s the idea behind him, that personal freedom and wealth can be increased. Only now, after three years in office, people are seeing bigger paychecks and more jobs, and that will ultimately decide the election, no matter how much money is spent.

The lesson here is that messaging does not control behavior, it simply reflects it. That is why President Trump was able to be elected even though Hillary Clinton outspent him by quite a large amount. It was the message President Trump provided that resonated with voters, and specifically the right kind of voters. He didn’t need to cheat with the illegal California immigration vote either, he was able to get those votes outside the measurements of standard polling and to overcome celebrity endorsements for Hillary, the Deep State manipulations at the Department of Justice and a lot of money from the consultant class working against him at every turn. In the end it didn’t matter because Trump promised to give people “Flow” back to their lives, or to a larger degree than they had ever experienced before. He did it with a great economy that provides opportunities for people who want them. He has done it through deregulation giving more people more creative options for business than in worrying so much about compliance—which soaks up intellectual bandwidth to an even higher degree than high taxes. Personal freedom and more options are what this next election are all about, not paid for messaging. When the rubber hits the road, freedom and personal options are what give traction to political forces, and really, nothing else. To understand all the reasons, I simply must refer the curious reader to the great work of Mihaly Csikszentmiahalyi.

The arrogance of Michael Bloomberg, Nancy Pelosi, even to the degree that Joe Biden refuses to understand just how out of step he truly is in the world with his constant rantings about controlling the amount of ammunition guns can hold, as if that was an important issue to anybody except the most crazy socialists and gun grabbing communists cheering for Iran to beat Trump in some way to hurt the president during an election year, is that they insist on a mode of political theater that the public has long ago rejected, and has been trending in that direction for decades now. Instead of looking at the true science of the moment they are instead insisting that reality is not what it is, and that people are so stupid that their thoughts can be purchased. They can’t be. People will vote for those who give them more freedom, and more resources, and Trump is the only one with a track record showing anything close to that need. Money can’t buy freedom, and that is the lesson Bloomberg will learn very soon, and all those who still have not received the memo because they refuse to take hold of it. A billion dollars or more isn’t close to enough to change minds, because those minds are already made up—and nothing will change that at this point.

Rich Hoffman

Marriage Story: An important lesson on the birds and the bees and the nature of relationships

It was far better than the old tent pole movie Kramer vs. Kramer which splashed into our culture about divorce in modern America many years ago. Marriage Story, which is on Netflix and can be watched by everyone without an excuse is a fantastic film about the creation of families and how they can disintegrate over little issues. Its one of the best that I can think of and should be a must watch for anybody over ten years old. If you can watch the movie, it may be the best thing you could do for yourself today. The movie directed and produced by Noah Baumbach is a labor of love that tackles divorce in a startling way with humor, hope and tragedy rolled all up into one well done package that is more beneficial than just another offering for entertainment.

Even more stunning was that these big name actors, like Adam Driver, Scarlett Johansson, Laura Dern and Alan Alda set loose a story that really shows in this day and age what happens when a mother puts a career in front of her family and expects everything to work out. Without question Adam Driver’s character of Charlie was the victim. He hadn’t done much to provoke the divorce, it was mostly Scarlett Johansson’s character who was seeking her own identity after doing what happens to most couples, finding a guy she liked, landing him, then trying to change him. When he continued to eclipse her socially, she wanted out of the marriage which a lot of women in this #metoo age feel pressured to do. The results are often divorces like the one shown in Marriage Story.

Rather than give a regular review for a film like this, other than to say, SEE IT, I’ll instead give a much needed lesson on the birds and the bees because so many people just don’t understand, including poor Charlie in this movie. He had sex with his girlfriend who became his wife. She got pregnant and he worked hard to be a good dad. So what in the world went wrong? A lot of people are asking those questions these days and our society does very little to explain it to them. That’s why movies like this can be so important, and why everyone should see this movie.

Forget about political correctness for the duration of this article, the nature of all human beings at a very biological level is to eat and reproduce. Young girls are pretty as humans define them because they are like flowers just blooming. The pretty ones attract the best DNA in male bees seeking to pollinate the most attractive females so that those DNA matchups are optimal and good children are produced. That is the divine way of the universe, we are all programmed to think in such a way. As women start to wilt beyond age 25 they come to understand that their value as females is going away. They had been taught that sex was their power since puberty, and they are about to lose that power so they enter a phase of crisis which in the modern sense of things is to replace their sexuality with a career.

Men are programmed to be ready anytime a woman is ready to be pollinated, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Often men get married so that they don’t have to waste time looking for sex, so they can do other things with their life like develop hobbies, and spend time with friends. Even after thousands of years of evolution they have not learned that you don’t get married to have sex. You get married to be a stabile biological contributor to a woman’s offspring and once she is pollinated, and wilting rapidly thereafter, sex is the last thing she cares about. She wants to raise her children and she wants resources. Men go from being showered with attention while the woman wants to be pollinated, to being a very low priority in the scheme of the family and they never seem to understand why. Charlie in the Marriage Story didn’t, and he had a really wonderful breakdown toward the end of the movie that was honest in ways I’ve never seen before, yet most of us go through it in some form during our lives. Because it is the story of all marriages. The only differences are that some learn to deal with it while most never do.

We’ve tried to turn marriage into some Disney fairy tale where people live happily ever after and that just isn’t an intellectual argument that belongs outside of the mind of a 7-year-old. Marriage is only about making a family. Happy couples who stay married learn to do things together that they both enjoy. But couples working in different directions don’t stay married because it just doesn’t work for the human mind. People are drawn together by common goals. If a couple does not have common goals, marriage is all but impossible. For most marriages obviously the production of children is enough to keep people working at a marriage to construct a family. Many people struggle to stay married once there are no longer children as the common goal, but in the case of the Marriage Story, it was the mom who needed something of her own identity as she could feel herself wilting as a flower and she wanted to replace that sinking feeling with a career. That was certainly the case of her friend and attorney, Laura Dern’s character who played a wonderfully accurate busy body modern day feminist who was a disaster of a personality. There are so many people like her functioning in the world its no wonder so many families break up and why so many kids are growing up messes of people.

The way its supposed to work is that a woman marries a man while she is still a nice-looking flower to pollinate. The man seeks to protect that image for the rest of his life even if he has to dehydrate the flower to preserve it in a book or something. It may look gross to outsiders, but the man remembers the flower he pollinated and the children that came from the experience and he tries to protect it for the rest of his life. But when we add complex social experiments to the nature of biology and psychology then we get variations of success in the experience of a happy life, leaving most people miserable. That’s when people start cheating on each other or seek to divorce so they can get that pollination feeling again, because they didn’t take the time the first time around to enjoy the experience. But its never the same the second time, or the third, fourth, or fifth.  Humans just aren’t built to have that many complex relationships in their lives, it destroys them at a core level every time they do it because the goal of the entire experience is to produce children. Not to have the fulfilment of an individual experience.

Couples who learn to play together at life, do things together are the ones who are happiest. By design, after 20 years of raising kids, there should be enough there to have a decent marriage. But men who leave their wives for younger women are doing so because they failed to launch past their biological necessities as the pollinators of young flowers. Maybe when they were young the attractive flowers wouldn’t give them the time of day and now that they are older with more money, they can get the attention of the flowers in full bloom with all their nice colors and thin stims. But it doesn’t last long, and the male soon finds themselves in the same cycle. Sex is used to secure the relationship and if kids aren’t produced there is no reason for the initial union, and the relationship dissolves.

We’re not supposed to talk about these things because we are supposed to have gay marriages legalized, and men and women are supposed to have their own careers and leave their kids to the state to raise in public schools, and its all supposed to work out. But that’s all hog wash. I’ve been married over 30 years and I know lots of people who have been married for 50 or more years. Take a little advice, watch a Marriage Story and learn from it. Avoid the mistakes because you’ll wish later that you listened and learned what the true nature of marriage was, and to build your life appropriately around it. If you want sex, don’t get married, rent a whore, find a knothole in the fence somewhere, or stay in your mom’s house and go to skank shacks at night picking up wilted flowers that spray-paint themselves up to look fresh under dim lights that are dying fast. But if you want to raise a family, which everyone should strive for in my opinion, take a number, be very patient and learn that nothing you do in a marriage is about you—its mostly for what you can build with someone else after the sex of youth has long gone, and what lasts in the realm of immortality, the things you do while you are alive that people remember.

Watch Marriage Story, its simply fantastic!

Rich Hoffman

Rise of Skywalker hits the Billion Dollar Club: Star Wars in the age of Trump

The final verdict for me on the new Star Wars movie the Rise of Skywalker is that I’m happy it crossed over the billion-dollar mark for the weekend. Disney needed that number to justify everything they had put into the effort, and that means more for the future, which is a good thing. I could rip the movie apart technically, and continue to be upset that Lucasfilm under Disney’s guidance veered away from the source material that was there for them for the plunder. We will never get the Jaina Solo that the series deserved and who lived dear to many people’s hearts before The Force Awakens ever appeared. But with all the mistakes made, I felt Disney turned the corner with Solo: A Star Wars Story and reached out to the fans who didn’t reach back. So Disney redoubled their efforts to win back fans with this latest movie with obvious hat in hand. That was enough for me. The most important thing to come out of this latest film is that it is one of the most positive movies I’ve seen in a very long time, everything is above the line and positive, which ultimately is what Star Wars is always about. And why people love to see the movies. We all understand reality and the nature of it. What we want to see in movies is hope, and optimism, and that is what Rise of Skywalker is all about.

The critical reception of the film I have said, and continue to, is solidified in the politics of our times and can be seen in the election of Donald Trump. For all the reasons that some people hate Trump they hate Star Wars. Some people don’t like optimism, they want artistic interpretations for the problems of their lives, not a “can do” spirit to take on anything and to win with perseverance. I think demographically, many fans of Star Wars are also Trump supporters even though Vanity Fair wants to believe that these movies are all about the resistance to Trump. The comparisons to modern politics and the way people vote with their money at the box office is synonymous. Where the rubber hits the road people pay to see hope and to walk away from a movie theater feeling good. And that is what Disney gave audiences finally after messing with the formula with experimental film makers several times in previous attempts. If Disney had just listened to George Lucas at the start of this journey, they’d be a lot better off, but at least they were able to make a recovery with these latest two films, Solo and Rise of Skywalker. Thankfully for them and the rest of us, they weren’t pig headed about it.

Even more importantly, the new ride at Disney World, The Rise of the Resistance continues to show enthusiastic support from a hungry audience. After going to Disney World the week after the ride opened at Hollywood Studios to ride it, my concern was that the movie would come out and people wouldn’t like it making the billion dollar investment that Disney made in the new Star Wars land not worth the effort. I was concerned that it was too little too late and that the brand damage to the property was too far gone. But still, well past the holidays people are showing up in the mornings to ride the most technical ride in the world and its selling out within an hour of the park opening still, meaning that the enthusiasm for Star Wars is still very high.

The most important part of the movie, Rise of Skywalker I think is at the end when Rey goes to the old farm of Luke to bury the lightsabers there for future generations. When Rey rides down the little sand dune as she did in the first movie it showed that J.J. Abrams and other writers for this latest movie understand that Star Wars isn’t about change, its about surviving and living to have a better day tomorrow. With all the events of the films in this recent trilogy Rey had shown that she was still that hopeful girl from the first movie unchanged by the tragedies she had endured. Even though Rey should have been Jaina Solo, and The Force Awakens shouldn’t have ruined the main characters from the original by dumbing them down into stumbling fathers or failed Jedi masters, or women who put their careers before their families only to breed the next generation of galaxy killers, acts like the one with Rey at the end are what Star Wars has always been about, and its great to see it get back on course.

My interest in all this is of course cultural. I don’t get much from a movie like Star Wars that inspires new thoughts in my mind. The movies are meant for children. I want the movies to do well for kids to have something to grab on to for a future where expansion into space and taking values with them for goodness late into their lives is key to establishing a wonderful future. Star Wars is key to that future, so I am very interested in how Disney uses the brand to shape goodness, and optimism in our society. But after The Last Jedi, which I liked because it had some interesting things in it, I wasn’t sure Disney would ever figure out what to do with the George Lucas creation.

But after visiting Galaxy’s Edge in Disney World and seeing The Rise of Skywalker several times at the movie theater, I can say that I am happy with the results and the mythic imprint it has on our society. There are a lot of very positive messages that are spawning off these efforts that will shape the intent of this next century so its all very exciting. It would have been a very sad story to see the brand disintegrate due to all the progressive political experimentation that has been going on, all the #METOO gestures in an attempt to win over the girls away from the boys in the audience. Star Wars is still a movie for boys ages 8 to 13. Girls can come, but its made for boy problems and no matter how much Disney wanted to change that, it was never meant to be. So at least The Rise of Skywalker returned to those roots as best they could, and the box office rewarded them with another billion-dollar money maker which they needed desperately.

Corporate filmmaking is a very different thing from a young George Lucas going to the bank to get the money to make Empire Strikes Back with all his hopes and dreams on the line, which showed in the final cut of the film. We may never see ambitions like that again in Star Wars due to the need of the films to make so much money to cover the corporate expenses. But there was a lot at stake with Rise of Skywalker even though Disney certainly has plenty of money to work with on a budget and advertising. It was good to see that a big company like Disney can gamble in a big way and come up winners when so many people need the win. Disney continues to show they don’t always understand what a winner looks like, as most big companies don’t, but they are always on the lookout for them, and they win more than they lose. And this time, its good that they won, because Star Wars will have new life, which I think is great for our future in many ways that are still undefined mythologically.

Rich Hoffman

The Obscurities of Exsistance: Understanding differences between results people and process driven bureaucrats

I am pretty happy these days, we are having what I think is a very healthy growth period for the human race. That was quite evident while listening to Rush Limbaugh’s January 9, 2020 show which can be watched below in its entirety. I would suggest to all to take a little time to watch it this weekend for the content which in a lot of ways is revolutionary. Rush Limbaugh always does good shows whether or not the listener happens to be a conservative. There are few places anywhere on planet earth where these kinds of topics are discussed and analyzed that have such far reaching consequences. I am of course talking about the aftermath of the Iran situation and the killing of their top general, and how Trump did everything so decisively leaving lots of sloppy minds in his wake. Congress reacted by attempting to limit his powers, but what they are really saying is that they just want to slow him down because he’s such a fast and decisive thinker that it makes them look bad. While Trump was saying as much he had guests in the White House behind him in a speech and they were laughing to themselves at the situation as many do these days all across the country, and that is because of this issue that Rush spoke about, the big difference between people of action, and people of process.

I have always been a fast driver; I enjoy best a road with nobody in front of me. I hate most traffic. I am not a patient driver when on a highway only going 15 mph. I prefer to go 100 mph or more with no cars in front of me and I don’t look back at whoever is behind. There is nothing more arrogant than some loser who pulls out in front of you if you are cruising down a street at 50 or so and they get in front of you and only go 35 or worse. They may stick ride to the speed limit and stay there in front of you almost smiling to themselves that they are slowing you down and that its for your own good, because they think speed kills or something ridiculous. This is the mentality of our regulatory class of people who are process driven and are the direct products of our current education system which is obviously deficient.

I heard recently that Boeing employees were mocking the FAA on approval of the 737 Max with little new training for pilots. It was the New York Times reporting it as process driven social malcontents because in their world, regulations and process is what protects them from a world that demands results. They of course sympathize with the government workers at the FAA because they are those slow minded losers who pull out in front of us on the highways and hold up traffic to the speed limit or less. Speed limits as I say all the time, I hate them so passionately that I wrote an entire book on the subject called Tail of the Dragon, are for the weakest links of our society, not the best. Not the fastest. Certainly not the most competent.

I’m not saying we live in a lawless world, or a world that doesn’t need FAA regulators, or even people who drive the speed limit. We do need those people for things. But we should not like them. There is nothing wrong with mocking them just as the people behind Trump snickered at how stupid the rest of the world was while Trump was talking. People get it, they know the process drivers of life are slow, dim-wits who should not be in charge. We can use them to test our skills and advance our civilization. But we should not let them limit us creatively in the realm of business. Trump has shown why it was always important to have a business guy in elected office instead of process drivers who are overly educated in process, but not in results.

Businesspeople are used to results where as Rush pointed out, government types are used to processes. They hide their lack of courage and personal timidity behind processes and so long as the world stays under the speed limits that they set; they can feel like they are important to the growth of the world. But they aren’t, usually what happens is that they are those slow losers who pull out in front of us and ruin our drive by slowing us down ridiculously and they are smug about it because it forces us to live within their limits instead of them reaching up to ours.

Trump by the nature of his existence is forcing this discussion in ways that just weren’t possible a decade ago. Rush was right, if you really take the reason that people don’t like Trump in Washington its because he’s a results driver as most good executives are in business. He’s exposing the compliance and process class of people who have been running things for many decades for what they are, slow people who never expect to accomplish anything and to get paid well for no results. They go home at the end of everyday whether or not the work was done, they meet friends for drinks even if the world is on fire, and they could care less. They are safe in the processes that we have created for ourselves, and so long as they stay under those speed limits, they feel safe. But for the rest of us, we feel fury at the lack of results that are produced, and at the cost of such bad results.

My happiness comes from having this discussion finally after many years of observing this trend and my own personal feelings about this matter. I’ve always had a thing for speed limits and compared them to our processes in a social context. These processes greatly limit the human imagination and it makes me sick to see. I enjoy most to see free minds thinking and striving at whatever pace they can handle. I don’t want to see them running over others and killing them, but I want to see what people can do if they push themselves and processes prevent that kind of thinking and place everyone into the same box of performance based on some arbitrary speed limit that a bureaucrat conceives is “safe.”

As I tell people all the time, processes and speed limits can be used to make you better, so they aren’t all bad. We do need FAA regulators to check our quality and to maintain standards. But they should never be allowed to be the pace setters for society. If they pull in front of you on the road, you should pass them. And in the Trump presidency, he does just that and the workers behind Trump gave their knowing smiles because they understand that. So did all the people later that night in Toledo, Ohio who lined up to watch him speak in a stuffed venue in the middle of the work week. None of the Democrat candidates could draw a crowd like that even if they paid people. The process people just don’t understand because things are happening faster than they think and are willing to function. Leaving them in the dust, permanently. And for the rest of us who have felt unnecessarily restricted by these process driven lunatics for many years, finally we can see changes happening much to our relief.

Rich Hoffman

As Iran Fired Missiles, I Slept Very Well: Having a very good president in the White House

It was over before it even started as I announced in earlier articles. Trump had destroyed Iran’s “queen” in the great chess game and the war was over even as Fox News broke into its coverage to show missiles in the air headed for American occupied bases in Iraq. Every station had in fact started covering the revenge from Iran on live television and the situation looked ominous. I laughed to myself and went to bed. I was not at all surprised to wake up the next morning with a text from President Trump saying all was well, no American lives were lost. As a matter of fact, as the day evolved, we learned that the Iranians had been telling us that they were firing missiles essentially to appease their political base, but they weren’t aimed at any Americans. And they told us when they were done. They really didn’t want any action from America, that was obvious. They just wanted to show some missiles in the air flying around to show on State television to save some face after the embarrassing end to one of their top military minds. It’s not that I didn’t care about the results, but I can do math. Iran as I have said over and over again cannot fight a war. They do not have the resources for anything beyond regional terrorism. So, they weren’t going to sign their own death warrant. I slept well even as the missiles where in the air flying around in the desert.

The media was caught red handed on this one because the fuel of the entire exercise was their coverage, made up as they went along. Like many of us have been saying for decades, the media has ran many of these wars covering movements, reporting them on air, then forcing presidents and generals to adapt to the broadcasts as if it were a sporting event. This has been going on since television became a common thing. And now that we have a president who understands the game, he doesn’t get played by it, but he certainly plays the players. The drums of war were being beaten by the media for an event that couldn’t even take place if the Iranians even wanted it to. They simply don’t have the resources, which left all the broadcasters reeling to justify their panic driven coverage in the aftermath.

If you are a reporter, or a network executive, you should at least be a little intellectually curious as to the nature of war and strategy, and to know that Iran only has about 200 to 300 Scud missiles and about 100 Shahab-3 medium range ballistic missiles. Their entire strategy is to use terrorism as a leverage point to show power, because they don’t actually have any power. They have an unstable government hanging on to an old communist idea that has eroded away into Islamic ideology leaving them with very little in financial options. And without finances they can’t even buy new weapons or think about building nuclear ones. They have nothing to work with, so no possibility of a war with anybody. The energy and cost to fire off those few missiles they did in revenge of their slain leader cost them a fortune that they didn’t have, and they have no appetite to do it anymore. We aren’t talking about kids firing off Nerf guns in their back yard, it costs a lot to fire off any kind of missile and Iran just doesn’t have the financial resources to conduct a war of any kind. That is why I went to bed, because what the news was broadcasting was pure nonsense. It was a ruse from the start and any news organization should have known that. What they were broadcasting was a fiction, and they likely knew it. If they didn’t know it, they were incompetent and shouldn’t even be on the air.

I slept well because for the first time in my life I knew there was a guy in the White House who could see through the illusions and to not allow a bunch of panicky generals and advisors to poke him into war with an enemy that was about as harmful as a common house fly. Now a house fly can land in some shit and then land on your food and cause trouble, but in all reality, their intent is pretty iniquitous but not very dangerous. And Trump’s speech to the country was along those lines. Be careful with flies landing in shit and crawling on you, but for now, we will leave them alone by keeping the door shut. Trump’s speech addressing the issue was the best that I can remember. He shut down the drums for war quickly and addressed the truly minimalist situation for what it was properly, giving people an honest assessment for what was one of the few in history. Most of these kinds of things are draped in drama meant to add a fearful narrative that has a big government subtext to it, letting people know that government will keep them safe. Not in Trump’s speech. He essentially said, nothing to worry about. Its cool. Go enjoy your families. Only with him, it wasn’t a lie meant to lull people back to sleep, but to get them back to living good productive lives without the worry of some flies landing on their food with feet dripping in shit.

This is what competency looks like, it doesn’t need to fear the actions of losers. Losers do not rule the world, as the media would like you to believe. To properly reflect this new age of living, the media is going to have to adjust, they’ll have to get better. They’ll need to figure out how to cover a 24-hour news cycle without talking about war, impeachment, or some FBI scandal against our president. Eventually they’ll have to come up with fresh content all on their own that doesn’t rely on scaring everyone to death to stay relevant. I would say that time has passed, but there is no time like the present. For myself, it was the first time I went to bed when some national incident was occurring, because I have learned the falseness of it all well and could see the signs from the very first moments. And the next day, most of the country had to admit the same, even CNN. As we all learn to be more competent, and focus our efforts on productive things, the news will have to grow with us and that will be a real challenge for them. The same old tricks will not work in the future as they have since the advent of televisions into our living rooms. They could all learn some lessons from Trump himself who is the Master of Media. He was before he became president, he won because of his knowledge. And now as a president, he only has sharpened that mastery. I trust him more than I trust television executives, so I went to bed until I heard from Trump. I didn’t want to hear from all the lesser people covering things they didn’t know just trying to frighten people into staying tuned. And that not just for me, but for many people, is a very new thing.

Rich Hoffman

Leave Kings Island Alone: Let them build more roller coasters, stay open later, longer and give them lots of money!

For most of the recent December I spent it on vacation in one form or another, primarily going to Disney World and visiting all four of the parks that they have enjoying them immensely. During that span also I spent at least two visits to Kings Island to enjoy their Winterfest which I had said compared very well to the Disney Park experiences. I continue to be impressed with the way Cedar Fair Amusements has managed Kings Island since buying it over a decade ago now. For all the well-deserved hype that the Disney Parks get for their high quality experiences, the amusement parks in Ohio are some of the best in the world, between Cedar Point and Kings Island and those of us who live in the area of those places should consider ourselves very lucky. I do, I spend much of the spring, summer and fall—especially on Friday evenings at Kings Island meeting my wife after a hard day of work to relieve stress, which I do by riding roller coasters. Part of the reason I went to Disney World in December was due to the cold temperatures shutting down most of the rides at Kings Island, and riding roller coasters is part of the way I manage stress throughout the year.

Of course, I am ecstatic for the opportunity to ride the new giga coaster Orion at Kings Island in just a few short months. I watch the progress of its construction eagerly, once a day if possible, just for the prospect of seeing some new bit of news. I can’t wait to ride it and once it opens, it likely will join Diamondback and Mystic Timbers as my wife and my new Friday night ritual through the summer months to meet at Kings Island, have food under the Eiffel Tower and enjoy the fountain mist after a long hard day then ride those rides before going home and going to bed. Roller coasters and their extremes for me are like a shower that washes away the stress and anxiety that rolls off human interaction under intense conditions, and they are very therapeutic. Roller coasters are for the human imagination a huge middle finger to the impositions of existence which otherwise try to carve you into a blocky loser of anxiety due to the nature of reality. And utilizing the creativity of human thought to rebel against that tendency in the form of a roller coaster is really a tremendous psychological statement for the human race and I simply could never get enough of them, especially when they are built with the fabulous engineering that is going into Orion.

Yet recently neighbors in and around the Kings Island Amusement Park complex have been complaining about the noise of these coasters. During Winterfest the park has been running Mystic Timbers which was great fun. And during October the park stayed open until 1 AM during the Haunt weekends running all the roller coasters. It was great to ride the Diamondback at 12:30 AM on a Friday night in October with my kids and to enjoy doing those kinds of things at the small hours of the morning, yet neighbors who built their homes near the park have been complaining about the noise and are seeking to crack down on the Mason ordinance against those types of creative exploits, which I find reprehensible. I really don’t care how long someone has lived in the Kings Mills area. For what Kings Island does for Mason, Kings Mills and Cincinnati in general, I would expect the people of the area to appreciate it and to get on board with what Kings Island needs to do to be one of the best parks in the world.

I noticed it this time more than others, the Disney Parks are so wonderful because they are built on property that is so far removed from the outside world. You don’t see massive housing complexes near any of them for miles around and that is how they are able to produce such a wonderful customer experience. People need amusement parks. Maybe not to the degree that I use them to manage stress, but people in general absorb the pressures of reality to a point where they are toxic and generally complain about everything. That is part of the reason that such places were invented, to fill a market need. When a customer parks their car at an amusement park, they are husks of what they started out in the day as usually and they are looking for happiness. The people complaining about the noise of Kings Island late at night are people who will complain about their food at a fast food restaurant, or about the traffic on a highway, or even the color of a car they bought. They complain about their families, they complain about movies that are out at the multiplex, and they complain when a quarterback doesn’t do what they want in the NFL playoffs. They complain about everything all the time. That is why they need amusement parks, to throw off their worries and to enjoy a little bit of life. And staying open until 1 AM in October is part of the fun. People will complain, but its up to wiser heads to understand the nature of their antics. They need more fun in their lives, not less, and their precious sleep isn’t more valuable than the screams and cheers of a captive audience fresh off a roller coaster eating a funnel cake at 1 AM on a crisp autumn night under a well-lit moon. The experience that Kings Island offers to the community is far more valuable than some mundane sleep schedule or routine life within the four walls of a house. For most of its life, Kings Island was alone at that Kings Mills exit. Now there are lots of homes, they don’t have a right to complain now, because they moved there to be near Kings Island, and to reap the benefits. Now is not the time to turn against it.

For all the reasons mention, and a whole lot more, I want Kings Island to have the ability to make so much money that they can continue to give us great roller coasters like Orion well into the future. I would love again to have at Kings Island record breakers that last for decades with the unused land they have at the park, and they shouldn’t have to worry about a bunch of complaining neighbors. And to afford that, Kings Island needs more of the kinds of advantages that Disney has, where they can operate through as much of the year as possible instead of just during the summer, and for as much of the clock as possible, such as to 1 AM. People complain about Disney too, they are too crowded, they are too hot, they are too expensive, they are too much like a corporate empire, the complaints go on and on and on. But those complaints are not valuable customer feedback, they are really just people who need to shut up and go ride a roller coaster and to enjoy a funnel cake. People need to do a lot less complaining and let themselves enjoy the great things that Kings Island is offering consumers. Because those things are a lot more valuable than some sleep at 1 AM for some routine, drab life. Roller coasters are good for happiness, and the world needs a lot more of it, far longer in the day, more times a year and Kings Island needs to give us a lot more happiness. Not less.

Rich Hoffman

Not Giving Domestic Enemies in the American Press a Free Pass: Making a hard decision that is required of our times

It’s time that we have a conversation about domestic enemies and their use of the First Amendment to attempt to bring tyrannical revolution to America through the guise of freedom. It’s an old trick that has now worn away into obviousness especially in light of the recent killing of Iran’s top general. The domestic enemies of America have shown themselves under the banner of free speech by proposing that America and President Trump in general was wrong in the act of defending itself from a leftist aggressor. So much was made of the stampede that occurred at the funeral of that general which left 30 dead because there were over a million people attending. But that’s not so impressive, what else were those people going to do? It’s not like Iran has a thriving economy that is keeping everyone entertained with plenty to do. In most cases the people in Iran are left with only pictures of the supreme commander to look at as they count dust blowing across their roads. So a funeral is a welcomed distraction for them, yet to many in America’s media, they sought to make more of it than was true, for all the reasons that a domestic enemy might endeavor.

When we talk about the Second Amendment many people think that all sorts of restrictions can be placed on that one. They seek to limit where we can carry guns, how many we can buy, they try to tax ammunition to discourage buying more and they look for all sorts of ways to take that right away from us. But when it comes to the First Amendment, if you are on the wrong side of the political spectrum, they seek to ban you from Google searches, YouTube and even Twitter. But for them, they can say anything about everyone anytime they wish. They call it free speech to criticize Trump’s actions against Iran, or China or even want to impeach him over a Ukrainian conversation, yet they see no problem in siding with known tyrannical regimes to weaken the United States domestically so that power players all over the globe can be emboldened. That is a real problem and they have really shown themselves in the wake of the latest Iran incident picking sides with anybody standing opposed to President Trump.

Well, we all take an oath to the American Constitution to protect it from foreign and domestic enemies and these abusers of the First Amendment are clearly acting as agents of destruction toward American ideals and we should take action against them. There is nothing wrong with it, we aren’t violating any of their Constitutional rights. They do not have a right to be a voice against American policy if their intent is not to make a vantage point stronger, but to weaken it into collapse. And if they are cheerleading an enemy against America, then we need to deal with that in the fashion it deserves.

I wouldn’t say I’m suggesting that we round these people up in the middle of the night and throw them in jail for speaking out against American ideas by supporting Iranian positions. They certainly want to do that to Second Amendment supporters, and just ask Roger Stone about illegal searches and violations against his Constitutional rights when he was arrested and thrown in jail just for knowing the President. But I am saying that we need to slap these people down and knock them off their platforms without our endorsement of subscriptions and ratings. We simply can’t let domestic enemies’ function in the open within our society and get away with it with a smug smile on their faces. We need to knock that smugness off right now.

Iran isn’t dangerous, all they have as a weapon is fear of some terrorist act. When our own media is the sheath that carries that weapon, we have a problem. Take that away, and Iran has nothing. They have no money to fight a war. They have no complicated political position, just a few tyrants who run everything as is common in any authoritarian regime. They are all paper tigers only propped up by the worlds media who desire to bring down the governments of capitalism from the preponderance of fear that any terrorist soaked in ideology might dream of. And we should not allow it to continue unchecked. Its one thing to be critical of a management style of a governing body. Its quite another to encourage enemies to appear stronger than they are so that our government makes bad decisions. This has been going on for a long time and until President Trump came along, we had entire presidential administrations who listened to these unelected domestic enemies and set policy to their opinions, and that has only made the world more dangerous, not less so. It has allowed Iran and North Korea, and many other places to believe that America is an easy target, and that has propped them up to bring harm where it otherwise wouldn’t have. That is worthy of prosecution all by itself.

Free speech isn’t free, there are consequences. Just as we have the right to bear arms, yet we can’t just carry around guns anywhere we want, we have decided as a society that there are limits. Now if we want to say there are no limits to these things, then let me know and I’ll carry a gun everywhere I want to, churches, government buildings, sporting events—everywhere. But don’t tell me that there are restrictions to one amendment, but unrestricted interpretation to all the other so long as it serves the needs of domestic enemies. We must admit to ourselves that America does have domestic enemies, and they teach our schools, they work in our government, and they run many of our networks. We are not all equal and we don’t all like being American. We are crazy if we allow domestic enemies hide behind American law while they work every opportunity to chop down our system in favor of tyrants around the world, which is precisely what has happened in the wake of the killing of Iran’s top general.

I would say that Iran is not a threat, but our domestic enemies are, they are cheering for some terrorist act to embarrass our president for purely political purposes and they are doing it to the point where they are opening the door hoping to let the insurgents in undetected. The most dangerous occurrence to come from this latest Iranian crisis is that our media reports might embolden some terrorist loser to act so that they might at least get positive press coverage upon their sacrifice. Its not that the government of Iran would organize it, because they can’t, they are incompetent. But some rogue cell of bandits and outlaws might by the encouragement of our own American press. And it wouldn’t be by accident, but on purpose. And they think they can get by with it because they are protected by the First Amendment and think they are untouchable as domestic enemies. Which is a disgrace to us all, knowing that they feel the way they do about our country and the ideas of freedom that it has always represented. This crisis demands that we take a position of making a decision between domestic enemies and Americans as a unified whole. Because they are not the same thing.

 

Rich Hoffman

George Lang: Donald Trump’s kind of senator in Ohio

Welcome to 2020, a decade that will forever be known for a certain swagger back toward capitalism and where Marxism will continue to erode from the face of the earth as it first arrived over 100 years ago to North America to attempt to beat down the original roaring 20s. Well, Trump and the people who have supported him are no longer outsiders. We may have been in the previous two or three decades, but not anymore. Trump in spite of all the scary stuff those falling out of power want you to think about him is the new norm and that standard will be around for a while. So, thinking about this upcoming election in Butler County for the 4th State Senate Seat in Ohio it was Trump who I was thinking about and how there is only one candidate out of all the wanna bes who can hold the seat. It’s not just because of his competency, but its because we are in the new 20s and it is the decade of Trump and people who are only a few phone calls away from the White House, like George Lang are right for the job.

What matters in a seat like the one in Ohio for senate is not just personal philosophy and accomplishments, but in being on the side of history and showing the kind of resolve that makes him the kind of person who fits in the Trump Republican Party. Out of the other candidates such as the socialist trustee from West Chester posing as a Republican like Lee Wong—when Trump comes to town, which he does often, Lee has shown that he is against President Trump on many issues. And the other Republican running for that same senate seat, Candace Keller is likely to be one of the people waiting in line for Trump holding a sign, but George Lang will be behind the curtain there to greet him. There are people who are wish they weres, and then there are people who are the real deal and that is George Lang. George is the kind of guy who can get in touch with Trump whereas people like Candace wave to him from the side of the road. And that is all the difference anybody needs to consider in this upcoming election.

After the Republican primaries are voted on in March a liberal lady by the name of Kathy Wyenandt, plans to run against George as a Democrat. I often say to her that she should run as a Republican, but she won’t listen. The trouble with her approach is that there are like two Democrats in Butler County. Actually, there are a few more, but that might as well be the number. The 4th District in Ohio is not a liberal one and as I pointed out, between Kathy, Candace, and Lee, only George is a Trump supporter to the level where he can say he’s a part of the Trump White House. The world has turned upside-down a bit, the insiders are now the outsiders and the outsiders are now the insiders. George is an insider and not in a bad way. Bad for those who want to challenge him for an elected seat, but not bad for those who share with Trump the kind of vision for America that we have wanted for many years. And now its time.

Kathy will try to beat George by killing with kindness and winning over what she thinks are moderates. She has befriended lots of flip flop Republicans trying to whittle away at a base that no longer exists, something the Democrats thought was the key to beating Republicans during the Bush administrations. Those Republican friends of hers would like to take George out for their own future shots at an office because they understand that Lang is now the establishment, as if perpetual rebellion was the only course for the future. When Democrats are in office, they are Tea Party people, when Republicans are in office, they pick at the structure hoping to make a name for themselves. And Kathy is happy to ride that wave hoping that the numbers of division will help her poultry Democrat Party of school levy supporters and other tax advocates gain a surprise in turnout in her favor. Even that strategy fails to understand that we elected Donald Trump to take over our government and now from the White House we are filling many new federal, state and local seats with the kind of people who put Trump in power. And Trump doesn’t forget those who supported him early on.

I remember meeting Trump with George Lang early in the primaries in 2016 when Trump was still being laughed at all across the country. Many area Republicans in Butler County were still supporting John Kasich, who at that time was the face of the party. Well, for me, Kasich was entirely too liberal, more like Kathy Wyenandt and Lee Wong. Trump was too much for them, too crazy from their moderate point of view. But Lang was always a pro-business guy who wanted to help businesses and individual people get all they could out of life and he shared with Trump a vision for America. In those early days, I was certainly there with Trump—on day one. And so was George Lang, with his heart and soul. And now, he gets to reap the benefits of that friendship. He’s an insider in the best way possible.

Now I would never say that Trump’s ideas are crazy, because I don’t think they are or ever were. The mainstream as it used to be for me was entirely too soft, and boring. I like this new world of Trump and I can see myself functioning happily within it. There is a difference when you are an outsider who thinks you can do better than the insider which gives that person a bad name easily. But at some point, you most of the time get a chance to be the insider and when you do, you should do the things that you think are better for the world. Most people never feel comfortable being anything but an outsider, so they perpetually complain and bitch and become do nothings. But that’s not George. He fought as an outsider to become an insider, and now he’s part of the Trump America and is the only one who is. The rest of his challengers are just complainers and perpetual outsiders because that’s all they want to know. They want the prestige but not the responsibility and Trump doesn’t respect people like that. And in the future, especially in Butler County, Trump will call on Republicans to help, and George will be one of them. Trump won’t call those other candidates. He may ask Candice for a campaign donation because she might have bought a t-shirt, but nothing else. At some point, we win and we get to pick good people like George Lang to be our representative. And instead of getting a do nothing loser, we can expect in George a real champion for people and their success. And to support businesses and personal freedom. He’s what we’ve always wanted in a powerful position under a Trump White House. And to his very heart, he’s an unapologetic Trump supporter that was there when it wasn’t cool, and that means everything in the world.

Rich Hoffman

A Review on the Fantastic HBO Miniseries Chernobyl: Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi was never better illustrated

As I watched the fantastic HBO miniseries on Chernobyl I couldn’t help but think of someone I admire quite a lot, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the author of the great pinnacle work on human psychology called ‘Flow.’ I finally was able to watch the five part series after many people kept recommending it to me and I have to say at every level of that experience, from the writer by Craig Mazin to the direction of Johan Renck—and everyone in between from the great acting to the executives who put the deal together ‘Chernobyl’ was a bold undertaking on an epic scale. These are not the filmmakers of the 80s and 90s where The Hollywood Reporter measured success by the size of their pay checks, and overall box office, but this trend we have now of streaming projects on the scale of Chernobyl are bringing forth creative filmmakers who are functioning from Csikszentmihalyi’s ‘Flow’ on several projects that are giving the world so many new entertainment options, from projects like Stranger Things to The Mandalorian. But this Chernobyl effort was on a scale of Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List, which is one of my all time favorite films. But there won’t be big Academy Awards for this labor of love, or big Hollywood contracts. I don’t know what the makers of Chernobyl made as far as a paycheck, but its obvious they made this series out of pure love of the content, and the hard truths that come from it.

I don’t think Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi meant to reveal why communism doesn’t work in his own studies, but he did and that footprint of human effort was stamped all over Chernobyl. The film series brilliantly walked the line between the heroics of every day “working” people as Karl Marx fantasized to represent and cast a very bright light into every aspect and social level of Soviet society. The apartments were small and dingy, even the offices of the chief coordinators were skanky and shrill. No wonder everyone was so willing to lie about the status of things because nobody wanted to jeopardize a promotion into something improved. Conditions were so terrible for everyday people in Russia during this period of Chernobyl, which for those who don’t know was the site of the worst nuclear accident in the history of the world and continues to be a blight on Ukrainian politics. Even to this day, Ukraine is in the news and is at the center of an impeachment attempt by modern Democrats in America. For everyday people around the world who don’t know history or geography, the kind of corruption that these old Soviet regions bred is unfathomable.

Comparing lifestyles from the same period such as in the film Wall Street it becomes quite clear that the Soviet Union was so terrified of their people learning about the great gifts that the West might inspire into their society that they put all their efforts into publicity of the state for the purposes of the state robbing people of their natural free will so what the entire country ended up with was a massive economy filled with the Parkinson’s Law. Not the disease but the trend in human beings to fill schedule targets with procrastination when loose parameters to fulfillment are allowed and lazy ambitions fill the void. Where Chernobyl told the stories of many brave people it was only when the tragedy of the moment was able to tap into people’s natural Flow as Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi often discussed. When left to their own devices into service to the “state” people took their sweet time, did only what they had to in order not to be shot by the KGB, and the result was a society of peeling paint, small apartments, boxy cars that all looked a like and very little retail options to speak of. Because the entire society was only doing what it had to because their Flow and love of life itself was so micromanaged.

The Chernobyl story could be told in any communist or socialist country and it is ironic that the American left is so enchanted with these efforts and want that for our own society. It is an unfathomably stupid idea unless people just don’t understand the concepts behind the work of very serious modern phycologists such as Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Modern China is suffering through exactly the same trials and tribulations as the Soviet Union was during this period of Chernobyl. It is the perception of power that they have and only that. That is the reason the state must control information flow so vigorously. The same in modern day Iran. Any society where people live in sloppy conditions and there are economic struggles we will find the elements of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s observations, once you take away the flow of ambition from people and force them to serve institutionalism, you get from them a natural Parkinson’s Law. I use that term to abbreviate Csikszentmihalyi’s teachings, which of course does the trick. This was precisely why the test at the Chernobyl plant was done in spite of the need to shut down for 12 hours to meet the output quotas for the end of the month needs. That Soviet society needed to push quotas on people in such a way says everything about their society, people weren’t naturally inclined to produce, or even motivated to “over produce” as we might see in Western cultures, but they had to be coaxed a gunpoint to do so and there is all the problem with Chernobyl or any communist society.

What was remarkable about the HBO miniseries on Chernobyl is it was done by very creative people functioning from Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow ideas reporting on why communism was a massive failure because it robbed Russian society of their Flow. Whether or not this was intentional we may never know. It could just be a happy accident as events provided these filmmakers with the opportunity of a lifetime. But one thing is for sure, they seized on it and created one of the most magnificent narratives about a global tragedy that anybody has ever seen. And the work left in their wake is worth serious scientific study. Terms like Parkinson’s Law have not been around until fairly recently, certainly not as long as the peasant ambitions of Karl Marx over a hundred and fifty years ago. There are still a lot of discoveries that we need to make as a society as to what works and what doesn’t. For now we know that Western ideas do better economically, where these notions of collectivism tend to create Parkinson’s Law when Flow is robbed from individual people. We see it in manufacturing all the time no matter where in the world we are conducting it. Tight, micromanaged establishments tend to get a lot of Parkinson’s Law whereas free flowing creative efforts like at Pixar or Apple generate massive intellectual output. The results are unmistakable.

Chernobyl is the kind of program that every human being should watch once. That something like that is available to HBO subscribers or those with Amazon Prime accounts to me is a modern miracle. Such a great history lesson is available from the comfort of our living rooms any time of day in any length of time that you may wish to view it. We live in a modern world that has always craved Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow. He didn’t invent the desire, he simply observed it and noted conditions when Flow was restricted in people. But seldom is there ever a film series that shows not only what caused a tragedy on an epic scale because of Flow problems created by a government that is more relevant today than even when the event occurred. That’s what we have with Chernobyl. A massive undertaking created by wonderful Flow by the filmmakers about a society that had terrible Flow and ultimately why it’s important without being preachy. Chernobyl is ultimately about the gifts that come from a free society, the ability to look at ourselves and improve to get the desired results, something we all take for granted way too often. And we do so because of Parkinson’s Law, because we always fill the work to fill the comforts of a schedule, we see no horizon on, and think we have all the time in the world to fix it. But we don’t.

Rich Hoffman