Category: Taxes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rich Hoffman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rich Hoffman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rich Hoffman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rich Hoffman

The Communist “Red for Ed” Teachers of Indiana: Working against America and using children as a hostage

The only thing I could think of as I watched the teachers of Indiana conduct their “Red for Ed” march showing force and solidarity toward the state legislature demanding more money, was that they’d have a lot more money if they didn’t eat so much and weren’t so monstrously fat. I mean, wow, what a bunch of fat slobs. Just contemplating the average weight of the protestors was enough to give scales everywhere room to pause with mechanical anxiety. And I can hear you now dear reader, that’s not very nice to say about teachers. After all, most of us know someone who is in the teaching profession and we don’t think of them as enemies of the state. They are our babysitters while we are off working and we want to think of them as good people, to ease our own minds. But make no mistake about it, these people are not our friends. What they want to teach our kids is not good, or healthy. The red part of their march is for the communism behind the teacher’s union movement, their core philosophy for which they want to teach our children. And the rest of it, the money they are demanding is to feed their fat faces while they sit on their asses all summer spending it on desserts, mixed drinks, and lattés.

All these participants of “Red for Ed” are public employees out of control advocating communism, and they are enemies of American life. When they say they are marching for “the children” they are lying to you. They are marching to take more money from taxpayers so that they can feed themselves with abundance doing as little as possible to earn that money. And most of us are just as guilty, we have given them control over our children just to get access to the free babysitting service that public education gives people, while they busy themselves with other things in life, ruining the minds of children everywhere. Most of us are products of public education, so we are shy about being critical of it, because in so doing, we must be a little critical of ourselves. But the whole scam has been a mess, and these losers are exacerbating it in ways that look to me to be threatening, and actions against our nation as domestic enemies.

Of course, pay is one of their concerns, but testing is another. The teacher’s union is against measures of success for which they are judged. Its hard for many to believe but that nice, bubbly teacher who lives down the road is a communist and enemy of the state because we envision that such villains would have a thin mustache and some uniform of the Soviet Union to designate them as such menaces, but their red t-shirts tell the same story. Just not one that we have been so inclined to identify due to our own need to avoid conflict on the matter. We could after all say the same thing about one of the worsts socialists that we have ever witnessed, Adolph Hitler. I’m sure someone loved him, he had a mom and dad and friends. He had a woman who loved him, heck, most of Germany loved him for a period of time. But he was still an evil socialist just as these “Red for Ed” teachers are blatant communists. What makes them dangerous is their ideas, and these days they are not shy about admitting so much. Their choice of the color red tells the whole story.

Their march in Indiana was intended to be a show of force, to show how they could bring the state to their knees much the way they did in Kentucky recently. It was intended as a threat to show how many free baby-sitting services would be lost to voters if the teachers walked off the job. More money or the children would suffer was their message and to many panic driven parents, they believe it. When parents put their children’s lives in the hands of communists willing to extort money from the taxpayers for a silly job that lasts only 9 months out of the year, the danger of these people could not be underestimated. They are not likely to blatantly torcher their students on some rack of pain, but rather their intentions are to destroy the minds of the youth and rob them of their wings of free-thinking flight. How else to explain the terrible international comparisons for American education measured against the world. For what we spend on public education, we should be the top. Instead, we are nowhere close, in most cases everyone is better than the American education system, and these losers want less measures, less testing, and even less children and hours in the classroom.

And who says that if they want to make a certain amount of money that they shouldn’t work a second job. For as little as they do work, they have plenty of time to do it. Why should they get paid well to sit on their asses for most of a 24-hour day? That is what they are demanding, a level of pay that their jobs clearly don’t deserve, and they want less testing so that nobody will really know how little they really do. I have to point out that when I’ve said these things to my local school system they offered to let me teach a classroom for a day, which I accepted. I even said that I would be willing to teach four classes at once, and of course they turned me down, because the teaching profession is easy compared to other things out there. Teachers aren’t sacrificing anything for our children. Teaching is a profession for those who generally don’t want to “do” in society. Those who teach can’t do you might say, otherwise they’d do something that pays them the money they are looking for to feed their voracious diets and expectations for leisure hours.

If they were just lazy fat slobs, as most of them appear to be, it wouldn’t be so enraging. But to make matters worse, they are openly advocating for communism, not by naming it, but by color. They are not even hiding their motivations anymore, and when they put it in front of our face like that, they are taking hostile actions against a Constitution that I love and cherish. I’m a person who has copies of the Federalist Papers, the Anti Federalist Papers and the Ohio Constitution right next to my reading chair that I go through leisurely at least once or twice a week while watching television, after I’ve read them all many times thoroughly. In the context of the philosophies of American life, represented in those documents, the “Red for Ed” teachers are hostile agents of villainy that want to clip the wings of our children’s intellectual growth, and they want us to pay them more money to do it, which is sheer insanity. And to make it even worse, they give us these huge asses to look at and squeaky mouths with turkey necks of fat dangling from their faces and expect even more from the taxpayer. At some point we have to say, enough is enough. We need a choice, a better system of education that does not involve a communist inspired teachers union, and we need people who care enough not to take a day off to threaten state legislators who should be representing the Constitutions of the states and federal level of government instead of listening to a bunch of government paid insurgents.

Rich Hoffman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rich Hoffman

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rich Hoffman

The Nature of Rules: Conformity, compliance and innovation often do not get along

The project I am currently working on, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business is really an idea I’ve been exploring my entire life. It’s on my mind because I’ve spent the last week enjoying all the various Star Wars mythologies that are spawning out of Disney, the new Mandalorian tv series, the video game Jedi: Fallen Order, the new book Resistance Reborn which is setting up the new Star Wars movie, The Rise of Skywalker. All while planning my trip to the Galaxy’s Edge at Disney World with my wife. I remember how it was in the beginning when I was just a young 20 something hanging out in Washington D.C. at the Smithsonian with the Joseph Campbell Foundation for which George Lucas was on the board of directors and seeing the models from the films which had filled my imagination all during my youth. Joseph Campbell had done for mythology what I want to do for business, and after half a century of work, those mythic efforts are finally starting to shape our culture in a positive, and measurable way.

Campbell taught at the little maverick school Sarah Lawrence College where he was free to conduct his outside the box academics to his liking, and to be truthful, if he hadn’t, Star Wars likely would have never happened. But it was a slow go on an obscure topic that took a long time to form roots. And in many ways, I consider Joseph Campbell one of my primary influences growing up. I’ve read all his books many, many times and listened to his various lectures most of my life. And my plans for my own life have been similar, but very different from his. My subject matter goes many steps beyond his study of cultures and comparative religion, but to the source of all activity among the human species. That is why my focus is on business and why this book I’m working on is such a big step that keeps getting deeper and deeper the longer I work on it.

The theme of my two previously published books, The Symposium of Justice and The Tail of the Dragon explore the nature of rules in our society and what their usefulness is. Nobody would argue that having a society of rules is what keeps everything we build together and that is certainly true in business. But rules by their nature prevent innovation, which is the key to all business expansion. My pick of the gunfighter period of the American West, around the 1870s to the 1890s is due to the lawless period of the American experiment that brought forth so much upcoming economic activity, which then created so many opportunities for people who otherwise wouldn’t have had them. The Great Gatsby by Fitzgerald captured some of this very well, the idea of old money and new money. The old money was from the aristocratic class migrating from Europe while the new money was made in America by new innovations spawning from this Wild West period. While shortly after the Gatsby novel Ayn Rand wrote her classics, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged which did a good job of getting to the meat of the American experience as opposed to other influences around the world.

I grew up with a natural, and healthy hatred of rules. For as long as I have memories, I despised the limits others placed on me and dedicated myself to solitude and the treasures that could be found there. My best friend growing up was my books, especially the works of Joseph Campbell and Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche. Once I figured out the nature of rules when I was still under ten years old, I stopped caring about them. Teachers and their homework assignments would take a back seat if I had something better to do. Society and their rules for going up and down escalators, speed limits, or not standing too close to a steep edge were all open invitations to me to break those rules to see what society was trying to keep me from. When I could drive a car, I routinely always drove 100 MPH everywhere. Functioning under the speed limit to me was forcing me to live by the averages of mundane people who weren’t interested in pushing any limits but confined to live within the limits of very average, and boring people. And yes, I was involved in several fiery crashes at those speeds. Not where I was driving, but other people, so I know what it feels like and after each one, I resolved to go even faster and defy death even more.

I could tell stories from here to some distant planet well outside our solar system about the many perilous adventures that have spawned off this tribute to pushing limits and questioning every rule that there is. I am far from an anarchist so I do like rules to a point, but I think a culture should always be pushing up against them and that insurance agents and politicians should not be limiting our intellects with stupid conformity to concepts invented by lazy minded losers. So putting all these thoughts together into this Gunfighter’s Guide to Business has turned out to be incredibly revelatory. I have gone back through all the education of the years that brought me to this point in my life, the rules based education of Lean thinking, of college MBA programs, of the kind of talking down that goes on in those endeavors and have crippled the scope of business to this very day, and am flipping all those concepts on their heads. But like all rules, you don’t throw the baby out with the bath water. You don’t break all the rules only to have anarchy allowing for open theft of possessions by the destitute. There has to be some structure to it all that is conducive to risk-taking and risk mitigation.

Guns are the perfect combination of the two necessities so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that they are part of American culture the way they are. If you are reckless with a gun you can hurt lots of people, including yourself. But in shooting you unlock all kinds of gut instinct mechanisms that are obscure to the mind under any other condition, which is the nature of rule breaking so that innovation can flourish. By the time I’m done with this, I think it will have a very Joseph Campbell effect, not on mythology which was his thing, but on business, which is my thing. Looking at something differently than 5000 to 10,000 years of human evolution is a tough undertaking, but it takes being willing to break the very rules of assumptions by their very essence to get there. And that is what I am excited to see percolating out of obscurity in a very unique way. Rules are too often not put into place to help, but to hinder. The rule makers tend to be unenlightened and create the rules to keep challengers from dethroning them from some position of power they have acquired by learning the rules better than their competition. But rules in themselves don’t open the doors to the future, thinking outside of the rules does, so that new rules for new ways of thinking can then be applied. While we can’t have chaos, we can’t allow rules to hold us back from innovation. And that, once its understood has a marvelous potential that I am very, very excited about.

Rich Hoffman

A $1000 Check to Saugus High School: The social decay that leads to school shootings nobody is talking about

After a recent shooting at Saugus High School in California where the 16-year-old birthday boy Nathaniel Berhow shot at five students early in the morning killing two before shooting himself in the head, a local woman donated $1000 toward the school which I found perplexing. The donation was an obvious act of rebellion from the woman toward the trend toward violence among young people who are using guns to inflict harm in the pressure cooker that is public education. The woman obviously wanted it to be known that she stands by her support of the school and would go to extreme acts to show her solidarity with the students. But as we know who have been fighting the trends of public education for a long time that $1000 check was next to useless, as the teacher’s union would quickly consume it. For the overall problem, it was a simple gesture no different than a rain drop in the ocean, but it obviously made the woman feel good to write the check, and it gave the news a nice feel good story about community unity and public education support in the face of grave danger.

I’ll say it again, teacher’s need to carry guns so they can put down attackers like this depressed kid quickly when they make a move to attack. This school shooting didn’t last long, and the targets were obviously selected for a reason. The news outlets won’t say it, but I will, high school is all about peer pressure and what kind of person is formed from that pressure. The social circles that are formed can be quite intense, relationships are complicated among human beings and foundations of betrayal can be quite ominous. And to any 16-year old, a girl who likes this guy and not you, or a girl who is with this friend and not you can be tragic, and even very melodramatic, especially if the adults in their lives aren’t providing the proper level of wisdom to navigate the crises. And ultimately, that’s what we find in this shooting case at Saugus High School.

We need guns because our society is making these types of people who are dangerous. I’m sure people thought of Nathaniel Berhow as a nice kid who would never do such a thing, but in moments of anguish, people do a lot of dumb things without really meaning to. I would say we are a culture of guns which has derived from our cultural need for them. As America evolved to allow individuals to reach the limits of their abilities, there are always parasites who are seeking to claim jump success, and guns are needed to protect the property of the ambitious, so that they will keep trying to try at success. Its our system of civilization and these public education institutions are running against that tide. The woman who gave the $1000 check is likely a nice person, but her belief system is faulty as to what that check represents. I know a few people like her, wealthy people who want to throw money at something like these tragedies because it makes them feel good to do it, like they are helping. But what is always ignored is why the kid thought his 16-year-old birthday was so dire that his only option was to lash out at fellow students before killing himself in the process. There was so much life to live, why cut it short so soon?

That’s where our social system fails. The public education institution has eroded away at the parental role in the lives of these kids then everyone wonders why parents can’t help when things get so bad. The premise, the cause and corrective action that needs to be acknowledged is that the public education system can’t do the job. The teacher’s unions who work in these schools are radical, and lazy. The politicians who set the agenda for what is taught are corrupt and stupid. And while the parents are trusting that system to teach their kids saving them the burden, they are living reckless lives having affairs, getting divorced and indulging in too much lackluster leadership under the roof of their own homes. That is why kids like this Nathaniel Berhow shoot themselves on their birthdays, and desire to go out in a blaze of glory to hurt the people who have hurt them. Hurt of course is a perceptual exchange. What one person considers hurtful, others may not. That’s why adult mentorship is so important to help with biological perception changes that mind steer the teenage mind in the wrong direction.

Removing guns from our society simply ignores the root cause of these greater social problems. It buys time for the society that has helped create this mess to continue believing in the failed system just a bit longer so long as the public focuses on those $1000 checks and not the real problem in public education. Public schools don’t work. They are weak attempts at social engineering that fail often and with these kinds of catastrophic results. And from the media, and the political class, there is no leadership to change what we are seeing openly and with frequent occurrence. Its only a matter of time before another school shooting happens near all of us. Its not the guns that are the problem, it’s the desire to use them to solve these kinds of problems that are. ABC News owned by the Disney Company especially are bad on this topic. Their belief, which is the same as most progressives in this modern age is to take away the temptation, that having so many guns makes these events easier. But Nathaniel Berhow had an unregistered gun. What would ABC like to see, the uninventing of guns? Even if all the gun manufactures in the world were put out of business, any machine shop around could build the parts. The black market will always have guns, so any law created won’t change that fact. Chicago still has more shootings than anyplace in the United States. Guns are illegal there and populations are regulated with liberalism. Yet gun violence is as common as rain in a storm.

Any method of resolution will fail if it does not deal with the true problem of psychological trouble that spawns out of collective education services and the pressures that go with them. The failure in public education is deep and is in need of a complete overhaul and really if you get to the example of the woman who wrote that check and the media that gravitated to it as if it were made of gold and spoke of the good hearts that rose up to meet this tragedy with acts of kindness, the real evil was in writing the check and supporting that school in the first place. In supporting a failed institution that is leaving people so desperate and lost that they cannot solve simple problems as teenagers, and in allowing the parents to reside guilt free of responsibility for raising their children, further danger is assured. When the news tells us that they do not know why a shooter like Nathaniel Bernhow did what he did, what they really mean is that they can’t admit their role in it, and therefor can’t talk about it. Its not so simple as leaving behind a note, or in having some other form of confession. The real villain is in the construction of the minds who can’t deal with the trouble and how public education makes those conditions worse, not better. And that is what we should all be talking about.

Rich Hoffman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rich Hoffman