Tag: 10th Amendment

Observational Realities: What the premier of ‘Solo’ in Los Angeles tells us about the future

I am the type of person who could write a novel about the reason that a person might change the way they hold a fork. Observational changes in nonverbal communication are an obsession with me and are a constant companion. I would have to say that nothing happens that I don’t notice. I am always on the lookout for why someone might have changes to their eye movement, or the tip of a head as it’s positioned on the shoulders, does it drop more than usual, or is it cantered off to the left or right more than typical. Is there an unusual emphasis on words when somebody is speaking and if there is, what does it mean—those types of things. So I enjoy big pop culture events because of all the mass information available to the way I think. I love going to baseball games where there are lots of people, because it tells me so much about the temperature of our culture, and I love big entertainment movie premiers—especially for projects that I am excited about like this new Star Wars movie, Solo: A Star Wars Story because there are always important things that can be learned about the nature of our society. And the thing that I thought was most compelling at the Solo premier in Hollywood this past Thursday wasn’t the usual fanfare that comes from most Disney productions that they know going in will turn in big box office numbers—it was that Bob Iger wasn’t there. I would encourage you dear reader to watch the whole red-carpet coverage. It was quite impressive.

Going even further was the lack of VIP formality at the event, even after the premier. The after party mixed cosplayers and celebrity actors together in ways that were very unusual for Hollywood which is kind of a theme with this new Solo movie. Freedom from social pretension is the underlying message of this new Star Wars movie and the absence of authority figures in our lives is the goal of Han Solo, and Disney wisely embraced that during this premier. This Star Wars movie is quite different from any other in the past, and it reaches back to recapture that feeling so many people had in 1977 when the first film came out where a much younger George Lucas put out a very unusual movie he had made with his wife in what were some very happy days for the fledgling filmmaker. Not happy on the business side, or the marital side, but from the ideological position where observations made were translated into unique characters placed into the Star Wars movies, like Han Solo—maybe one of the most independent characters ever put into film. That revulsion for authority figures was actually quietly part of the Disney movie premier. There were no special speeches by anybody from Disney or Lucasfilm before the three theaters started playing Solo: A Star Wars Story—all that happened were that the lights dimmed, the movie started, people had a good time, and afterwards everyone mingled together no matter what their social standing was. If you were at the premier, you were someone and therefore welcome to interact with anybody, anywhere within the scope of the premier. It was all very unusual. The richest person in the world was at the premier, but nobody made much mention of it. At the after party mixing with fans dressed in their favorite Star Wars outfits was a bald guy introducing himself as, “HI, I’m Jeff.” No pretension what-so-ever.

What these movies about Han Solo do for the Disney franchise of what is coming in 2020 and thereafter is that they use the main character to open up the entire galaxy to new stories. Solo is the thread that is connecting the massive mythology that is being planned by Lucasfilm and that is important in many ways. Lately I have been talking a lot about the scientific changes that are coming to us in real society, like the Uber Elevate sky cars, the missions to Mars by NASA and Elon Musk’s Space X, and just yesterday The Boring Company finished digging a tunnel under Los Angeles meant to carry traffic under the busy city with car pods and Hyperloops. Currently there is a video from Boston Dynamics that is freaking people out displaying a robot running across a park and jumping over a log in much the way a human does, so we are seeing a competitive species of a living thing that humans have invented moving into our world and it is causing some anxiety. There are a lot of things changing and what I see in pop culture are ways to intellectually deal with them that are emerging in our art, like in these Star Wars movies. For many people they need science fiction and fantasy to open their minds to the explosion of new ideas that are coming to the human race in a very rapid fashion and companies like Disney are trying to embrace their role in the whole thing in a proactive way.

Humans need conceptual tools to help them navigate ideas—in much the way that Star Wars needs Han Solo to open up the context of future stories, the elements of the films—the space travel between planets, the way that space travel is conducted, the type of people who will do it, and even the tools that humans use while doing all these things—like robots, religion, and even the type of “can do” spirit that everything takes are part of movies like Solo: A Star Wars Story. The movie exists to make money for Disney and all the merchandise retailers, but of course there is a deeper meaning that people like Bob Iger may not be consciously aware of, but the greater purpose is certainly part of the overall strategy. I watched very carefully the interview with the two Kasdens who wrote this new Solo movie and just like Larry was when he wrote the great film Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Empire Strikes Back, he knew what he was doing with his son on this latest film. It is just the kind of movie that people are looking for at this particular time in our lives where technology once again, as it was in 1977—is taking over and we are wondering what our place is in all of it. The original Star Wars movies told us it was OK to embrace the future and what we ended up with was the fabulous 1980s. I think the Donald Trump presidency had a lot to do with why the original Solo movie directors were fired, because Disney had planned a certain kind of Guardians of the Galaxy Star Wars film featuring Han Solo, but that wasn’t going to work in a post Donald Trump world and Kathy Kennedy wisely made the change to more of a traditional western as opposed to a color popping change that might have been a much more progressive film. I noticed that Disney has been very careful not to put Woody Harrelson on the red-carpet interviews, because he is a major pot supporter. He’s done a few interviews, but not much—he’s not even featured in the Denny’s cards from the promotional tour—and that says something.

Everything means something and there is a lot going on with Solo: A Star Wars Story. Disney is giving fans what they want in a Star Wars movie even if they don’t personally like the direction the franchise is going, because they have their eye on the bigger prize—the furtherment of human civilization as a whole, and the part they play in it as artists. While the company of Disney may not want to do a modern cowboy movie with hot rod spaceships, the fans want it, and that’s what drives merchandise sales and brings people into the parks where the real magic happens for Disney. That’s also where new technology gets its cutting-edge tests for public consumption, and directly leads to the world we are all stepping into. We are all going to space and our daily lives are changing with all this new technology. As humans we are looking for ways to process all this information into the context of stories, which is what we have always done when processing new observational realities. And it’s all very exciting!

Rich Hoffman

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Vote For Jim Renacci Tomorrow: Maintaining a republic means more than just flying flags, you have to make educated votes–even in primaries

It’s not enough to fly American flags in your front yard and to make sure your NRA membership cards are in your wallets. Voting in the primary, especially these days, is a big part of the battle for our modern Republic and it requires your participation. With that said, Donald Trump has been a very active president in moving around the chess pieces for his administration, which I think is a good thing strategically for the Republican Party. Just today one day ahead of the Tuesday vote Trump has come out against Don Blankenship in West Virginia because he’s thinking ahead to the fall elections in unseating an entrenched Democrat. Yet over the weekend Trump came to a roundtable discussion essentially to throw his full weight behind Jim Renacci for the U.S. Senate seat that is designed to unseat another entrenched Democrat in Sharrod Brown. I am a supporter of Jim Renacci, a very enthusiastic supporter in fact, so I was particularly impressed with all that is going on with Donald Trump in his very active presidency that he took the time to come to Cleveland to help Jim out.

I don’t think Renacci needs help, but in a primary election that typically has a low turnout, you never know. It’s best to take nothing for granted. Renacci is really the only person running for the Senate not only in Ohio, but all around the country who could beat someone like Sharrod Brown who is as progressive as they get. He’s equivalent to someone like Elizabeth Warren and the recently ousted Al Franken. Brown has his hooks deep into the Ohio labor unions and they will do as they typically do, show up to support politicians willing to toss huge amounts of money at them. Although I did notice in northern Ohio a drastic change in 2016, those labor unions were supporting Donald Trump for a change, and with Renacci in the race, there is a chance to divide that labor vote getting some to support a Republican for a change. That by itself would be a phenomenal undertaking.

I had a chance to listen to Mike Gibbens on 55 KRC who is challenging Jim Renacci and seems like a nice guy, but he obviously doesn’t have the horsepower to do much in the Republican Party and the Trump administration overall. I admire that he touts himself as an outsider and a business guy, but he’s a bit too naive to fight in the hard battles that are coming to a head for that particular Senate seat. He certainly doesn’t have the Republican Party behind him which if that were a few years ago, I would say would be to his benefit. But a lot has changed, and that Republican Party is Trump’s to lead now, and he’s a guy who knows how to lead, and he’s building his team and Mike Gibbens isn’t on it.

That is the same kind of deal with Don Blankenship in West Virginia. I personally like Don, but Trump knows what he needs, and Blankenship is a little too crazy to win in a standard election. If he were as charismatic as Donald Trump, then some of that craziness would work to his advantage, but like Roy Moore who had made a splash when he touted his gun on stage at one particular event, he was never able to come out from under the pressure of the sex scandal that the Democrats unleashed to destroy him as a person—true or not. Trump has been aggressive in supporting certain kinds of candidates because he’s building a team within the Republican Party and his track record so far has been very consistent.

Also in Ohio is the big decision between Mike DeWine and Mary Taylor for governor. I’m a Mary Taylor kind of guy, it could be argued that DeWine knows how the government works, but that he is also a creature of the swamp. I think if the ballots were cast right now that DeWine would win with the conventional vote, so if you are looking for a change, then Mary will need your vote. If the turnout is low, Mike will likely win. If Mary’s people get out, then she has a chance to win and to challenge the Democrat for the Governor of Ohio this fall. In that election, I think Mary will have the advantage, but to get there she must win tomorrow. As I said, if you stay home and don’t participate, you won’t have a say in how this election turns out—so it’s really important to vote so that a properly elected representative of our Republic is put in place to do what is needed, instead of just an active sector of the Republican Party either defending the swamp or in looking for a pump to dump it.

Yet don’t kid yourself when it comes to Trump. When he gets behind someone as he has with Jim Renacci, he means business. Strategy is the operative word here and after these fall primaries you can bet that Trump is trying to get the seats in congress up over what he needs for votes on his agenda—and Renacci is part of that plan. As usual, Ohio is playing a tremendous role in national politics so voters there play a bigger part in the grand scheme of things and that is something to take very seriously. Don’t assume that the next person will do the job for you, you must assume that your vote may be the deciding factor in many ways, so don’t take it for granted in the least. When the smoke clears, the person you vote for, or the policy you throw your support behind may not win, but you can at least say you did what you had to do by voting. While elections are very emotional things, the essence of the participation is what is required to maintaining a proper representative Republic.

Personally, I am very, very proud of Jim Renacci to have been handpicked by President Trump to go after the Brown seat and that it is important enough for the president to take time out of his weekend to throw his full support behind Renacci. I’ve watched Jim’s campaign from the very start and he has a quiet way of dominating whatever he does, whether it’s in business or in politics and he plays a good compliment to the character of Donald Trump. So I’m very excited for Jim to win the primary and move on to the bigger challenge of beating Sharrod Brown. As I said, I think Mike Gibbens is a pretty good guy, but he just doesn’t have it in the tank to beat someone like Brown. In the primary against Renacci, Jim never really went negative on his opposition whereas Gibbens did. Usually a loser in a race is the one who has to go negative unless they are counter punching, and that wasn’t the case with Gibbens. He was an outsider who needed to make a splash and it never really worked out. I’d like to see Mike Gibbens somewhere in politics in the future, but not for this senate seat in Ohio.

Rich Hoffman

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The Millennium Falcon Experience was SOLD OUT: What everything tells us about what type of society we want to be

In case you hadn’t noticed dear reader, there is a lot going on out there in the world. Even as the White House Correspondents Dinner over the weekend of April 28th showed truly how much we are living in a society well declined, a large number of really big Supreme Court cases are about to have decisions made that will shape American society for the next century. Primary elections are happening in May that will have a major impact on the midterms this upcoming fall, and the Korean peninsula is uniting for the first time in over 70 years. I’ve been writing on this blog site for around a decade now and things are happening so fast that they have defied intellectual saturation, but I have noticed one thing lately that simply amazed me and the start of it came as we were having Millennium Falcon waffles at my house before leaving to visit again the Millennium Falcon Experience at NKU. The new Avengers movie called Infinity War made over $250,000 domestically breaking all kinds of box office records and that was important for a number of reasons in relation to the grand scheme of things. If Jim Cameron was hoping that superhero movies were about to fizzle out, this news would upset him greatly, and many who have tried to use the film industry as a propaganda arm of the liberal left.

The plan was always to take the larger part of my family down to see the Millennium Falcon Experience on Sunday morning at 9 AM—which is why we scouted the event on Friday to figure out how we could take a large group through it. My family was very excited to go see the reproduction of parts of the Millennium Falcon and get some good pictures. One of my daughters is a professional photographer so we wanted to get some great pictures at the Millennium Falcon Experience since we are all Star Wars fans—its seemed like a good opportunity for us. Plus, the character of Han Solo has always been my favorite and without him in a movie, Star Wars has never really been Star Wars. I have been very critical of the new Star Wars movies, except for Rogue One, so I have been nervous about what Lucasfilm and Disney would do to my favorite Star Wars character. Han Solo certainly isn’t a liberal character by any measure, so my concern was that Disney would push to water him down to make it part of their overall liberal agenda at the company these days. However, indications are that the exact opposite will be happening. It appears that Lucasfilm has been listening to their fans since the Force Awakens problems in killing off the character, and the direction they had taken him. This new movie Solo: A Star Wars Story looks like they understand what the character is supposed to be and to what impact that will have on our society as a whole.

Like I always say, my favorite topic isn’t politics, funding challenges, or even scientific endeavor, although I do talk about those things a lot—my favorite topic is mythology. I am mildly obsessed with the way cultures form and what mythologies are used to bring people together, what themes work and which ones don’t. Han Solo is the most popular character in the Star Wars series for a reason, he is a very traditional alpha male who is reckless and in pursuit of his own independence often at whatever cost. I’m sure the progressives within the Disney Company and at Lucasfilm have discussed Solo at great length, and I think much of the reason that Ron Howard was brought in to take over the directing duties was because Donald Trump was elected and wisely Lucasfilm knew they needed to change a few things that were becoming obvious about the world after President Trump moved into the White House.

I was in London while Solo: A Star Wars Story was shooting at Pinewood and I was watching the protests against Donald Trump in those opening months and I listened carefully to the two original Solo movie directors show great support for the movement against Trump. While I don’t think that Kathy Kennedy is a conservative by any measure, the tide of movies that were going to make money certainly had to accept that Trump voters were going to decide if a film succeeded or failed at the box office. So they made some adjustments on the Solo set and brought in Ron Howard who understood that this movie about Han Solo was more about American Graffiti meets A Fistful of Dollars than a space version of 21 Jump Street. Han Solo actually means something to a lot of people, not just me, and Lucasfilm recognized that and decided to make the movie that needed to be made to pay respect to Han Solo, not the movie they wanted to make about Han Solo as a bunch of social progressives, and that is a very important distinction.

This Millennium Falcon Experience was meant to tour city to city with three sections of set reproductions from the Solo movie to generate interest in the film. My wife and I along with two of our grandchildren went to the opening of the event on Friday April 27th and I was impressed with the crowd. I saw what was going on pretty fast, on the public relations side, the event had printed a limited number of tickets that they gave out for free and when they were gone, they were gone which would get people talking about the whole thing on social media, sharing pictures, and generating interest in the new Han Solo movie that would come out on May 25th. The Millennium Falcon Experience would start in Northern Kentucky at NKU, then travel the following weekend to Atlanta, then to Denver before settling in Los Angeles ahead of the premier for the movie. My scouting report, which is seldom ever wrong, which I conveyed to my two daughters was that the big Star Wars geeks would hit this event on Friday and the thing would fizzle out by Sunday after a weekend of being open. After all, there were only so many Star Wars fans out there. Our plan was to show up at 9 AM on Sunday morning when the tickets would be issued, and we’d walk onto the exhibit, get our pictures, then go somewhere nice for breakfast. That’s not what happened.

We arrived at precisely 9:07 AM and found out that all the tickets were gone. People had started lining up at 4:30 AM that morning and the line had wrapped around the building of the BB&T Arena and the whole day sold out well before the event even started. The crew hosting the event wasn’t prepared for such a large crowd, so they issued the tickets so that people could get their tour times and leave, since there were no bathroom facilities. The event was open from 9 to 5 PM and tickets were given at intervals that would allow for about ten minutes of personal touring for each ticket which was good for five people. So doing the math, a lot of people didn’t get a ticket who wanted one. If we hadn’t gone down to the exhibit on Friday, we wouldn’t have been able to see it at all, which just mesmerized me. The opposite of what I thought was going to happen, happened. The Millennium Falcon Experience had more interest in it by day 3 than it did on day one, which I thought was remarkable given the fact that it was a free exhibit for a movie about Han Solo that didn’t come out for another month. There are many in the industry who think that people are going to get Star Wars saturation given that this is the second Star Wars movie within a year, the first was The Last Jedi. But like the Avengers Infinity War, audiences were hungrier than ever for mythological products like these movies—and that said something very important.

Both films talked about here are products of the Disney Company and while the overall movie industry is declining, Disney at least has kept their ear to the ground to give audiences what they need in the characters produced in these movies. There is a theme which all these movie characters represent that speaks to the yearning people have for individualized freedom. Han Solo is certainly all about that restless lust for personal freedom and that Millennium Falcon Experience spoke to that yearning directly. People weren’t just watching it in a movie, they were able to put their hands on it and that hunger surprised even me. I pay really close attention to these kinds of things and this went well beyond the passion I thought was out there. With that in mind I think that by the time this Solo movie hits at the end of May, after Infinity War had been out for over a month, there will be some cultural influences from these movies that will percolate into our society as a whole, in the fields of science, fashion, art and entertainment—in everything, and those things will be happening at a time when the Supreme Court will make decisions on some big cases that will affect us all. I think we are in a world that is changing dramatically, and not for the worst. I think we have been there already and are on the way out of it. But more than that, I think the movies reflect more about what we want to change into than what we just want to participate in as escapist fantasy. And that is a very interesting occurrence for our modern-day experience.

Rich Hoffman

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Lakota’s School Board Approves a Reckless LEA Contract: The new average teacher salary will be $73,000!

It’s a very hard thing to do, to sit in front of a person, or a group of people when you are an employer and tell someone they are not worth as much money in employment as they think they are. I would say it is one of the hardest things in the world, and most managers aren’t good at it. Yet in the private sector managers must do it every day to keep books balanced in relation to the income they are dealing with. But in government seldom if ever does an elected manager push themselves to endure the ridicule of such a situation and that’s what happened at Lakota schools on Monday April 23rd 2018. A radical teacher’s union sat in front of the school board hoping for an approval of their LEA contract which provided raises of 3.5% for the first year, 3.25 for year two and 3.25 for year three—this after they had received a 1.9% cost of living increase plus bonuses. Surely the recent teacher uprisings in Kentucky were on the minds of the board and they had no stomach for a strike—which should never happen when children are involved, yet the threat had been made by the Lakota teachers under the whispers of insurrection. Lakota had been operating with a nice budget surplus, and they are actively looking for ways to compete with other districts for a limited number of teaching positions—no doubt all that played out when the deciding vote from the conservative Todd Parnell cast in favor of the contract. Yet the massive irresponsibility that transpired could be applied to every government position in America, what was happening at Lakota was happening in every city and county and is a trend that must be stopped, otherwise everything will come to a terrible end soon.

At first glance the conditions of this Lakota teacher’s contract seem reasonable. After all, roughly 3% in raises is on par for most cost of living projections. The problem is a little deeper than that when we find out 3% of what? 3.5% of $45,000 a year would be reasonable for a public-school teacher which is essentially a glorified babysitter these days. It could easily be argued, and it should, that teachers in the modern age are doing more damage to children with liberalized educations than they help because children will have to undo all that mess at some point in their adulthoods. But for the babysitting service for busy parents, $45,000 per year to hold 26 children in a classroom environment may be worth the cost. But that’s not what we are talking about in the case of Lakota. Currently the average cost of teachers within the Lakota district is $70,000 per year. While some teachers may be worth that much money the number is likely under 5%. The other 95% of all employees at Lakota are likely worth a figure under $50,000 per year based on the value of the teaching profession to the world at large. Market value considerations should be applied, but because we are talking about government schools, no such value is ever applied. Instead, teacher unions collectively bargain to rack up huge cost impositions against property tax payers of those schools in the district of their residence and as a result, these parasitic labor unions destroy any sense of reality when it comes to labor negotiations. The only negotiating they do is demand more money as teachers, or they walk off the job leaving kids to fend for themselves while those busy parents seek some way to have someone watch their children while the teachers are demanding more money. Not a good system by any measure.

The net result of the Todd Parnell vote is that the average wage for Lakota teachers went up from $70,000 per year to $73,000 by the end of the contract and that is just reprehensible. As I have said, probably only 5% of the teachers are worth that much money. An even fewer percentage are probably worth more, but a vast majority likely aren’t even worth $50,000 and they only make that because of the radicalized collective bargaining negotiations that take place due to the government unions that have infested all these government schools. Parnell should have voted against the contract but as he looked out at all those teachers in the audience, it is hard to stand against such a tide. After all those employees don’t really care about the students because they threaten at every turn to walk off a job if they don’t get their collective bargaining. At best such tactics by the unions are terrorism and obviously Parnell as a school board member didn’t want to be responsible for setting off a labor incident at Lakota. I’ll have to give credit to Lynda O’Connor, she did hold strong on the school board, but she was the only one.

Obviously to pay for those raises Lakota is eyeing a tax levy because once you give union employees something they never go backwards and will continue to ask for more and more until the entire system is bankrupt. When Lakota does ask for the next levy I will use this incident to explain why the government school doesn’t deserve it. Very few voters can sympathize with a bunch of government employees upset about a levy passage when they make over $73,000 per year on average. That is a ridiculously high wage rate for job positions that are simply glorified babysitters. In the past when school board members like Julie Shafer have attacked me for standing against school levies what they really are mad at are the bad decisions they made in the past that required levy passage to sustain a budget—because they want to throw money at teachers and be the good guys with their peers instead of doing the hard work of management and telling those employees that they aren’t worth the money. Let those unhappy teachers go to some other district and lower the payroll of the Lakota budget. Hire fresh teachers right out of college who only make $45K per year. If they want to make more, leave and let Lakota hire some new fresh faces. That is what you do in management. But if you don’t know what you are doing with people and employees, you think that experience is worth the money. Often it isn’t. Youth and vigor are often what children need to learn new things, not some old over paid coffee sipping teacher just milking the system because the union protects their lack of ambition behind collective bargaining. I would bet that most of the teachers in the Lakota school system fall in this mediocre category, and it is the responsibility of the school board to do the hard job when they can to keep those costs down by pushing those old budget busters away.

The problem of budget busting happens when nobody wants to be the bad guy and tell employees that they aren’t worth what they think they are. Schools need to operate more like the private sector does because after all that is what we are supposed to be preparing kids for. The goal isn’t to prepare kids for some socialist indoctrination center called college any more. That scam has been fully revealed to be extremely destructive to the education process. Most kids would be better off not going to college so to keep their minds intact—and reluctantly voters are starting to admit that to themselves—as hard has it is to come to terms with. Many parents save for a long time to send their children to college with life savings that would be better spent elsewhere—so it is hard to acknowledge that colleges are only indoctrination centers and the prep work happens in public schools paid for through a socialist practice of taxing private property. Even knowing all that nobody wants the public school to fail in their community because the schools attach themselves to businesses and homes in an unhealthy way, and until that changes school board members like Todd Parnell will find themselves split. Parents don’t want to lose that free baby-sitting service while they are out in the world doing what they think is important stuff—to pay for their kids to go to college. That whole problem is far too philosophically challenging for them. But I know this, in Lakota there are a lot more residents with kids out of the schools than in them, so if Lakota wants an embarrassing bloodbath at the ballot box, I suppose that’s what they’ll get due to their poor management of tax payer resources.

Rich Hoffman
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Going Outside In Spite of a Jealous Mother: Virgin Galactic’s milestone with the VSS Unity

It’s taken a few years to get back in the air after the crash of 2014 but Virgin Galactic put up its commercial space vehicle to a successful rocket powered flight on April 5th above Mach 1 to an altitude of 85,000 feet. The VSS Unity went through all its powered tests well creating a milestone for space travel that is considerable. While the rest of the world is thinking small and is locked in the turmoil of yesterday’s political struggles, whether it be the threats of Syria, the attacks of ISIS, the unpredictability of South Korea or even the latest revelations of America’s Deep State out of control federal government hungry for power and global domination, mankind is going to space without the nations of the world slowing the process down for a change. Because of this VSS Unity’s powered flight the schedule of taking civilian guests into space in a few months is proceeding marking a major change in the opportunities offered to our species.

I’ve been a fan of Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic enterprise since the start and its been frustrating for me to watch the pain they’ve had to go through to reobtain their FAA licensing for commercial space flight. I understand the rigorous need for scrutiny when it comes to aviation, but not at the cost of innovation and adventure. As usual once federal authorities get involved, the speed of business becomes mired by comb over politicians and their lack luster view of the world. So it was nothing short of a miracle that the VSS Unity was able to get back into the air at all. Here is a bit of the story that Virgin Galactic had to endure to get back to where they were before the crash in 2014.

Initial investigations found that the engine and propellant tanks were intact, showing that there had not been a fuel explosion. Telemetry data and cockpit video showed that instead, the air braking system appeared to have deployed incorrectly and too early, for unknown reasons, and that the craft had violently broken apart in midair seconds later.

U.S. National Transportation Safety Board Chairman Christopher Hart said on 2 November 2014 that investigators had determined SpaceShipTwo’s tail system was supposed to have been released for deployment as the craft was traveling about 1.4 times the speed of sound; instead, the tail section began pivoting when the vehicle was flying at Mach 1. “I’m not stating that this is the cause of the mishap. We have months and months of investigation to determine what the cause was.” Asked if pilot error was a possible factor, Hart said: “We are looking at all of these issues to determine what was the root cause of this mishap.” He noted that it was also unclear how the tail mechanism began to rotate once it was unlocked, since that maneuver requires a separate pilot command that was never given, and whether the craft’s position in the air and its speed somehow enabled the tail section to swing free on its own.[32]

In November 2014, Branson and Virgin Galactic came under criticism for their attempts to distance the company from the disaster by referring to the test pilots as Scaled Composites employees.[33] Virgin Galactic’s official statement on 31 October 2014 said: “Virgin Galactic’s partner Scaled Composites conducted a powered test flight of SpaceShipTwo earlier today. […] Local authorities have confirmed that one of the two Scaled Composites pilots died during the accident”.[34] This was in strong contrast to public communications previously released concerning the group’s successful flights, which had routinely presented pilots, craft, and projects within the same organizational structures, as being “Virgin Galactic” flights or activities of “the Galactic team”.[33][35][36] The BBC’s David Shukman commented that: “Even as details emerge of what went wrong, this is clearly a massive setback to a company hoping to pioneer a new industry of space tourism. Confidence is everything and this will not encourage the long list of celebrity and millionaire customers waiting for their first flight”.[28][37]

At a hearing in Washington D.C. on 28 July 2015,[38][39] and a press release on the same day[40] the NTSB cited inadequate design safeguards, poor pilot training, lack of rigorous FAA oversight and a potentially anxious co-pilot without recent flight experience as important factors in the 2014 crash. They determined that the co-pilot, who died in the accident, prematurely unlocked a movable tail section some ten seconds after SpaceShip Two fired its rocket engine and was breaking the sound barrier, resulting in the craft’s breaking apart. But the Board also found that the Scaled Composites unit of Northrop Grumman, which designed and flew the prototype space tourism vehicle, didn’t properly prepare for potential human slip-ups by providing a fail-safe system that could have guarded against such premature deployment. “A single-point human failure has to be anticipated,” board member Robert Sumwalt said. Instead, Scaled Composites “put all their eggs in the basket of the pilots doing it correctly.”

NTSB Chairman Christopher Hart emphasized that consideration of human factors, which was not emphasized in the design, safety assessment, and operation of SpaceShipTwo’s feather system, is critical to safe manned spaceflight to mitigate the potential consequences of human error. “Manned commercial spaceflight is a new frontier, with many unknown risks and hazards. In such an environment, safety margins around known hazards must be rigorously established and, where possible, expanded. For commercial spaceflight to successfully mature, we must meticulously seek out and mitigate known hazards, as a prerequisite to identifying and mitigating new hazards.”[40] In its submission to the NTSB, Virgin Galactic reports that the second SS2, currently nearing completion, has been modified with an automatic mechanical inhibit device to prevent locking or unlocking of the feather during safety-critical phases. An explicit warning about the dangers of premature unlocking has also been added to the checklist and operating handbook, and a formalized crew resource management (CRM) approach, already used by Virgin for its WK2 operations, is being adopted for SS2. However, despite CRM issues being cited as a likely contributing cause, Virgin confirmed that it would not modify the cockpit display system.[41]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgin_Galactic

WASHINGTON — As Virgin Galactic prepares to resume testing of its SpaceShipTwo suborbital spaceplane, the company announced Aug. 1 that it has received a launch license for those tests from the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration.

The license, dated July 29, covers test flights of SpaceShipTwo from the Mojave Air and Space Port in California over a two-year period. On those tests, SpaceShipTwo is carried aloft by its carrier aircraft, WhiteKnightTwo, from which it is released and fires its hybrid rocket engine for a suborbital flight, gliding back to a runway landing.

While Virgin Galactic ultimately plans to use SpaceShipTwo to carry space tourists, the license awarded by the FAA restricts the company to transporting only “non-deployed scientific, experimental, or inert payloads” on flights carried out under the license.

The license prohibits Virgin Galactic from flying what are officially classified as “spaceflight participants” on SpaceShipTwo until the company can “successfully verify the integrated performance” of SpaceShipTwo and WhiteKnightTwo. “Verification must include flight testing, and the results must be provided to the FAA prior to conducting a mission with a space flight participant on board,” the license states.

Virgin Galactic opted to receive the launch license, with those restrictions, over an alternative known as an experimental permit. Such permits allow for testing of suborbital reusable launch vehicles under a more streamlined regulatory environment, but prohibit the company holding the permit from using the vehicle for any commercial application. Blue Origin, for example, has an experimental permit for test flights of its New Shepard suborbital vehicle.

http://spacenews.com/virgin-galactic-receives-faa-license-for-spaceshiptwo-tests/

Civilian space travel is more than a giant step for the human race. Mixed in with all the safety precautions leveled at Virgin Galactic is a jealousy of those who strive for adventure and discover that it persists in everything a federal government is involved with. The sad thing about it is that the United States is faster than most places around the world for endeavors like this. There really isn’t any other place in the world where something like Virgin Galactic could even exist. Rules don’t always exist to protect people from the dangers of a new endeavor, they are often put in place to preserve the static thinking of yesterday from the challenges of tomorrow and they are incentivized to delay that tomorrow as long as they can—and they think of it as a victory to do so.

It was far more than just a technical feat to get the VSS Unity back into the air under powered flight conditions, pushing up against the edges of space so soon after their tragic crash in 2014. I think in the scheme of things that crashes will happen and people will die, but the most dangerous thing that can happen to a space program like the one at Virgin Galactic is when the bureaucrats get involved. They by nature want to keep mankind chained to their papers and their courts so any excuse they can obtain to limit the imagination of any human to bypass the governments of the world and step into space is something they are all too eager to exploit. With that understanding, Virgin Galactic is poised to resume their commercial flights into space by the end of 2018 and that is a tremendous opportunity for everyone. Not only is space the opportunity for entire new economies to develop but for the essential philosophy of mankind to change for the better. It’s time for a major change in the way everyone looks at even basic human endeavors and the potential of space puts that opportunity within reach. First it will be the very privileged who can spend $250,000 to travel out of earth’s grasp and away from the clutches of the jealous aristocrats who have ruled mankind for thousands and thousands of years. It’s not just mother earth that we are all escaping from, that overbearing parent who won’t even let us go outside when its raining. It’s the jealous brothers and sisters who seek to appease that mother with small thinking and way too many rules. But finally, the door is opening and the big new adventure of space is just outside, and now we can go. Which is wonderful news!

Rich Hoffman

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Getting to Know Jim Renacci: Why he’s the best guy to unseat Sharrod Brown in Ohio

The last time I had seen Jim Renacci was when he was stepping off Air Force One with President Trump shortly after being asked directly by the president to run for the very important Senate seat in Ohio against the very liberal Sharrod Brown. Brown’s mission has been from the beginning several decades ago to turn Ohio from a red state to blue and after decades in public office has managed to help make it the color purple. Trump recognized that, and he looked at the map at where Senate seats could be picked up to help his agenda, and Sharrod Brown’s seat became part of his ambitious plan. When it was then considered who might have the fortitude and raw talent to take on such an entrenched incumbent the only name the President focused on was that of Jim Renacci—a self-made businessman with a background similar to Trump’s. Even more importantly to all that, Renacci like Trump has a history of winning what he does so for Jim to make a decision to abandon his run to become Ohio’s next governor he stepped up to the considerably harder task of unseating Sharrod Brown in what will prove to be one of the hottest national races in the upcoming midterm election. Before that happens though there is a primary to win and a lot of planning to do, so Renacci was in Mason, Ohio speaking to a very small, but important group of area Republicans.

As readers here know I’m not an autograph seeking, name dropping, picture-taking kind of person when it comes to people of celebrity and social importance. I’ve personally met President Trump on several occasions as well as Newt Gingrich and several other top-tier politicians and I didn’t go out of my way to have a picture taken with them, but Jim Renacci is different. He’s a very tenacious guy whom I believe is extremely sincere in what gaining that Brown Senate seat means to the nation and I respect him as a person for it. Getting to know Renacci as a candidate over the last several months, first as a person challenging the governor’s seat, and now under President Trump’s direct request, running for the valued Senate seat in Ohio to share one of the two available. Rob Portman is the other Senator, so there is a real opportunity here to gain someone in the Senate of Jim’s caliber and to further the Trump agenda with business people who understand it. The videos below are from this meeting which was only a few people listening to Jim speak in a private kitchen. Recording this meeting was a rare opportunity for others to get to know Jim Renacci without the Fox Business Channel cameras, the big rallies, or the interpretations of a left-leaning media filtering out the information they think important. In these two videos Jim just talks about his background and why he is the best candidate of all the Republican challengers to unseat Sharrod Brown.

One of the last questions in this meeting was directed at what Renacci specifically has regarding talent to perform this important historic journey and Jim modestly didn’t answer the question as fully as he could. Being a business guy, he is happy to let his record speak for itself because he honestly likes the other Republicans who are also running for the opportunity to take on Sharrod Brown. After all, only Renacci has been personally endorsed by the President of the United States, so he let that question linger softly—but I’ll be happy to answer it on his behalf. One thing that Jim has that others don’t is that he’s good on television. He is a frequent guest on the Fox Business Channel and MSNBC—among many others and in this modern era of television communication, Jim is good on camera. He knows how to speak the language of television, which is in how to communicate in short segments and with using all the range that a blocked off face can deliver to a direct audience in their living rooms. When running against an entrenched incumbent that has the power of the entire Democratic Party using a friendly press to preserve their position, it takes being not just a great candidate to win a race like this—it will take someone who is fantastic on television, and Renacci is.

In those videos Renacci told the story of how he came into politics in the first place, and it’s a good one that everyone should hear. Jim could easily live a good life as a self-made person and stay out of the political theater, but like Trump he found himself entering politics to offer his unique skills where they were needed most. Jim had a Chevy dealership around the time that General Motors went bankrupt and at the time many dealerships were being forced to be closed. This activity had nothing to do with Jim’s business skills, as he had been very successful, it was simply that he was selected to be closed which went against everything he understood about how things should work. So he reached out to his local congressman for help only to have that person vote against his dealership. The congressman was a Democrat and from there Jim challenged that seat in the next election and won. He has been in congress ever since facing down severe oppositions in the process.

There were many more stories than that communicated in that cozy kitchen in Mason which no media outlet would cover. There isn’t time or enough print for most media to dedicate to those types of stories, leaving voters often mystified about the actual people running. That left this little event to have quite great importance to those lucky enough to attend. To me there isn’t a better positioned person for that Senate job, and Jim certainly has the right level of fight in him to be successful. He will do what needs to be done to win, much like Trump did in his election against Hillary Clinton. Ohio may be purple now politically, but as Jim said in his speech, its going back to red and this upcoming election for this particular Senate seat is the battle that will define that political movement. However, even more important than all that is that it will solidify Trump’s agenda with more help at the federal level with the kind of Republicans that Trump is bringing to the Party as a whole.

I’ve been in the Renacci camp for most of a year now, first as a candidate for governor, and now in his run for Senate. Few politicians excite me the way that Jim does, which is why I did take a picture next to him. I did it because I was proud of him for taking on this big role and I want to help him any way possible. It is my hope that once he is elected that more business professionals at the height of their careers, like Trump was and now Renacci will follow in their footsteps and offer their skills to the world of politics. When we complain that politics is full of unsavory characters it is because many of them are not battle hardened in the rules of business. They are simply referees in the games of life, they are not the superstars who make their livings accomplishing things. Renacci is a new kind of candidate that are emerging under the years of Trump to bring the best of American enterprise into the role of managing our federal government. And that is a great opportunity for America to finally be politically what it has been in all other sectors of private endeavor, which is why getting excited about Jim Renacci for the Ohio Senate seat in Washington D.C. is very easy to do.

Rich Hoffman

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There’s Nothing Special about the March for Our Lives Kids: They are tomorrow’s domestic enemies

I keep hearing how special these gun control activists are who protested in the many March for Our Lives rallies across the county—as if this were the issue of their day—that they were the future voters who were going to change it all. There is nothing special about these kids. They have been trained to execute a military objective as designed by the political left. They have been taught with our tax money in public schools to lash out at American society’s 2nd Amendment in the same way that we used to send kids off to war in Vietnam, Korea, and World War II. Over the years we have purposely stunted their growth in many ways to make it appear amazing that such young people would have such articulate thoughts on some social issue, but in reality, most people reach their peak years at the age of 15 and most of the adults herding these kids on television and around society in general are in the same condition. These kids are at their peak years physically and intellectually and they have been trained for this new war since the day they were born. The only people proud of their antics are the Frankenstein creators on the political left who are rejoicing at the little monsters they’ve made the way a mother goes crazy the first time their little babies shit on themselves—“oh look, they are alive. Isn’t that precious.”

What I see as I listened to the many speeches on Saturday, March 24 2018 are a bunch of future zombies who have some distant understanding that they are going to form the same kind of mobs to go to each of our homes in the future looking for food, shelter, violence. I see in them not the gangs in the streets that might be seen in big cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, or Detroit, but the young menaces from The Clockwork Orange prone to violence from years of playing Grand Theft Auto and watching society disarm themselves so that everyone is easy pickings and at the mercy of any mob. That is after all what kids do learn in public school—how to create mobs against those for which they disagree.

In the future of these very same young people will be an economy that will leave them behind. Being taught socialism and demanding high wages for simply existing, those entry-level jobs that were always there for you and I dear reader won’t be present. Robots will replace those positions because too many young people will have insisted on making $15 per hour that fast food chains looking to keep their margins and a steady workforce will replace those workers with automation—so there will be many such jobs that simply will not be staffed by a living person—because too many of them will have made themselves unemployable. So where will these youth, trained in violence and mob relations go to get their money? Well, they are going to rob it.

What is to stop an angry mob of young people from gathering in suburban neighborhoods just as they did for March for Our Lives and instead of asking for gun control, demanding all the food we have, or our electricity. Or even a spare room with an online connection so that they can play their video games? Already when adults live in areas of high concentrations of youth car break-ins are common, sharp words in the streets are frequent, and toilet paper hanging from porches due to vandalism are expected. Young, untested and with what they think are their entire lives ahead of them—young people can go from America’s most valuable asset to an internal villain that is a domestic threat to the Constitution of the United States in just a few short years. Their minds lack depth of knowledge so they have no context to reality—all they know is what they’ve been taught which in this case is leftist radicalism. It’s no miracle that they gathered to protest guns, it’s simply act one of a military strategy imposed by domestic terrorists hungry to overthrow the United States and reunite it with Europe after 200 years of jealous empathy. The only way that can happen and all of America’s enemies know it is to disarm that free country so that the youth can do what the armies of the world could not.

Yes they will be motivated to do so, the young people with many lost opportunities are coming into a world riddled with debt. They have no reason to work since home ownership and even having a car are no longer their prime objectives. They haven’t been encouraged to marry and start their own families and to put up a white picket fence to call their own. There is literally nothing for them to sink roots into intellectually. The only thing that they really care about are their video games and their cell phones, both of which change constantly. A video game played today will be considered old and outdated in just two years, and the same can be said for their phone apps and their Facebook friends which they invest far more into than real people. Take away opportunity, take away morality, and take away the guns of a society and what we end up with are a pack of wolves looking to take everything that America has built-in value over the centuries and leaving it a husk in ruin. Look at places like Venezuela, or even Detroit where hopeless youth with no future at all roam the streets raping and pillaging innocent people and you can see the future of America without guns. It’s what the political left wants, the Steven Spielberg’s, the George Clooney types, the little Arianda Grande chicks—what’s to keep her from licking all the donates at the local grocery in a world without guns? She has been known to do that—the answer is nothing. Even though it may appear to be a little thing, the ability to destroy property and terrorize individuals who are not associated with the latest mob goes completely unchecked and what may appear to be a civilized society today becomes a mob infested landscape overnight.

This future can be seen in any teenage infested house when the parents go for a vacation and leave the home to the youth. We’ve all seen what they do to it—the children have a house party where half the school shows up to destroy the dwelling slowly with malicious sex in the beds of the parents, every room fills with cigarette smoke and the side rooms become drug induced hells as the history of the house that raised that child is ceremoniously destroyed to initiate the youth into the welcomed arms of the mob. The parents halfway know that something like these parties will occur, they feel they need to sacrifice their assets to putting their children into the acceptance of group rebellion—so they go on vacation, do their duty and tell the young people not to have a party, and the moment the plane leaves the tarmac at the airport, malicious young people are in the home taking it over—pissing on the carpet, going through all the treasures of the family in their private places, and otherwise showing complete disrespect for everything the owners of the home worked their entire lives for. The whole “let’s party” idea wasn’t a creation of capitalism, it came from communist run Russia and was injected into American culture by KGB agents looking to infect the education system in the United States with a slow, controlled destruction from the inside out. Fifty years after the radical events of the 1960s the political left have their army and they are on the march for our guns, so that the next step is the overthrow of everything our nation has built, just like we see in a typical house party. The notion of such parties is never good, only a domination of the house culture to the whims of the mob.

When the question was asked many times over the course of the Fight for Our Lives event that we are supposed to care about the lives of these little menaces so much we are supposed to give up our guns. Well, speaking honestly, I don’t care about those young lives, they are likely the people I’m going to have to fight in the future. I can’t say that I honestly want to help them along to be able to gather in such a way where I have to fight them, because that is the only option for me. If I see a couple of dopy teenagers walking in front of my house I find some means to run them off, and they don’t get the point if you ask nicely. They may have the potential to be the next great mind in society, but if they are demanding our guns, and thus the things those guns protect, they will be useless to me in a social context. Hurt them now or hurt them later, regardless, they will be hurt if I have to make a decision between my personal assets or their life.

I raised two girls who suffered all the pressures of public school culture. And we never had an unsupervised house party for them—never. In fact, I did everything in my power—which was considerable—to keep them from making those mistakes just to be tossed into the category of “cool kids.” Now that they are grown up those pressures are no longer part of their lives as they are now mature, but when they were teenagers the peer pressure for group acceptance was incredible and to be a cool parent you were expected to yield to the wants of the mob. The same sweet kids who just a few years prior would come to your kid’s birthday parties with Smurf themes or some other cute pop culture reference now wanted to bring games from Spencer’s gifts selling adult sex toys and to dirty up your children with illicit sex practices and mind-altering substances. And as a parent we were expected to just go along to get along. If we let the mob into our homes to molest our children we’d be spared the eggs thrown at our cars and the cat calls from the streets. Well, I never yielded to those pressures then, and I certainly won’t now. Speaking for myself if a mob of young people show up in my neighborhood, they will be met with great force—and they won’t know what hit them. They’ll wish that life was so simple as it was in the days where each home was protected by the Second Amendment, because if they change the rules through future elections and expect people like me to go along with it—they have another thing coming.

Rich Hoffman

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Video Games are to Blame for the Parkland Shooting: A neighbor reported that Nikolas Cruz played online shooters 15 hours per day

Gun confiscation is a goal of the political left, but in regard to these school shootings any gun control measure will have little effect because as I’d argue, there is a new element to our society that is much more to blame. About twenty years ago a video game called Goldeneye, based on the recent James Bond movie of the same name hit the Nintendo 64 home video game console. It was considered the first real “first person shooter” game which changed the industry forever. For the first-time players could play multiplayer death matches in the way that is common today with poplar games like Call of Duty, Battlefront, and even Grand Theft Auto. Two years after Goldeneye was released, there was the infamous Columbine School shooting in Colorado—and there have been occasional mass school shootings since. The connection to the video game industry is much more guilt associated than with the gun industry because there were guns before all this happened. What was new and different was the ability of young people to shoot guns in the world of computer gaming where the typical skills of learning to shoot and the consequences that were once taught to young people have been removed. These modern video games are slick, and fast. The guns fire ballistically in a very similar fashion. I used to tell my daughters who grew up on the next generation of that Goldeneye game experience, Perfect Dark, that what they shot on video games was the cheapest shooting that they’d ever do. And for most kids, they can handle it—but they love to shoot at each other in first person shooters. I’d say that there is an intellectual need people have to play this way. But for a kid that is just a little crazy, it is far too tempting to live out the fantasy created in the video game culture of gunning down lots of people, because for a fleeting bit of moments, it makes them infinitely powerful. And for some kids trading that moment of power for their lives either in jail or in death is a worthy one.

We learned from USA Today that the shooter in Parkland, Florida was a heavy video game player. A neighbor of accused shooter Nikolas Cruz told the Miami Herald that Cruz “escaped his misery” by playing video games for as much as 15 hours a day. “It was kill, kill, kill, blow up something, and kill some more, all day,” he said. Well, that really hasn’t been talked about in the news—the only line of thought that has been this proposal to confiscate guns. The biggest problem with that besides it being flat-out unconstitutional is it’s also not relevant to solving the problem. What is even worse, the way the media used those kids from the Parkland shooting to advance their liberal gun agenda, in the same way that Michael Moore did when he released the film Bowling for Columbine hoping to press the nation into a gun confiscation policy similar to Australia—the media completely ignored the video game problem. Most of the kids they were parading out in front of the cameras were shooters themselves in the world of video games. Because these days, most kids are. Most young people don’t learn about guns from their grandpa or their fathers anymore where they really feel the gun shoot, understand the recoil, and the expense of firing a lead projectile at a target—they only see them in video games under the new social world of online multiplayer battles—which are as common as the milkshake was to teenage kids in the 1950s at the local car hoop. Talk to just about any high school kid and they are playing games online at home.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2018/02/20/after-parkland-video-games-back-critics-crosshairs/356654002/

I know a little bit about this world because I am still very much a part of it. I have always played lots of video games and I’ve watched this evolution, and personally I love it. The PlayStation network for which I’m a member reported to me the following stats for the year of 2017. I was a little shocked by them because as people know, I am a very busy guy. I work professionally 60 to 70 hors per week. I read at least one book every week. I shoot real guns often as well as fulfil many interests that I have. In addition I spend a lot of personal time with my family so I didn’t think it was possible to play as many hours as my PlayStation gamer tag said I did last year. Here’s a bit of the report:

Over the months of 2017, you played
768 hours

over 17 different games, while making the most progress in November with 118 hours of gameplay.
The average PlayStation gamer played for
218 hours

The most-active month in 2017 for PlayStation gamers was July with 1.13 billion hours.

So I played roughly three times more gaming on PlayStation than the average video gamer. And as seen by their own stats, people play about 1 billion hours a month in online gaming, most of which are first person shooters like Call of Duty. My thing is Star Wars: Battlefront. Now consider that these stats are just for PlayStation. Xbox has an equally vibrant following as does Nintendo. Presently in our house we have both the PlayStation and the new Nintendo Switch which get tremendous workouts all hours of the day. Video games are the number one past time of young people these days so if any reforms should be tackled, it is in what happens in the world of online shooters. That is the first place to start.

A gun ban will do nothing to curb the violence because the desire to violence is nurtured in online gaming. The need for a human being to decimate other live players is something very inherent in us all, which is what first person shooters are all about. Until that desire is eliminated from all human beings, there will be mass violence occurring. For well over 99% of the population they can play these games and not go out into the world and engage in mass violence. But for some the temptation to do in real life what they can do in the video game world is just too enticing—so they carry out the fantasy like Nikolas Cruz did in Parkland.

These video games are a global phenomenon, people are playing them in Europe and Asia as well, in live time. Guns aren’t so easy to get in those places so the killings that occur are other methods, knives, cars, bombs—whatever terrorists can get their hands on. I would be willing to bet that if most ISIS terrorists were tracked down to their gamer tags, we’d find that they play all these video games religiously in their countries of origin. I’m sure PlayStation and Xbox know who is playing what and how often. If they are tracking me, they are tracking everyone. And you can bet the NSA and the FBI have profiles on certain players and their online abilities and connections.

In real life one of the measurement systems I use to make multimillion dollar assessments of something is the lean manufacturing technique of Gage R&R which is a type of MSA—Measurement System Analysis. Gage R&R (repeatability and reproducibility) are typically only 30% to 50% accurate even with the best inputs that can be acquired so getting the best information to collect is of utmost importance. If I were to run a Gage R&R on mass school shootings putting all the data into a nice big beautiful spreadsheet taking into account the age of the shooter, the back ground of the shooters, the types of guns used, the social circumstances for which they functioned, the political beliefs, the amount of times they had sex with females—was their a father in the home, etc., we’d find that it was none of those elements that would point us to the obvious problem of what causes school shootings. What they’d all have in common to some degree or another was the direct result of the video game industry and the romance that gun violence has been perpetuated by the Hollywood product. Even the music industry would show up on our Gage R&R to show a repeatable influence over the last two decades for desensitizing people to the realities of the world and encouraging violence to instigate social change. The fault of school shootings statistically speaking have nothing to do with gun manufacturers or the NRA—it has everything to do with Nintendo, PlayStation and Xbox. The MSA analysis points only to the video game industry followed closely by movies and television as the prime drivers of social violence. Even if all guns were confiscated and the NRA were out of existence today, mass killings would still occur because the cause of the violence has not been yet dealt with. The desire to kill lots of people can be done with a gun or a car, but it’s the problem of our modern society that such desires are there to begin with—and video games assist that desire with a role-playing element that makes the weakest and less disciplined of us seek out that sensation in real life.

You will never hear from me to ban video games. I love them too much and I am willing to put up with the occasional violence that we see because I think there are benefits to what video games bring to people. Violence is a byproduct, but so is the thinking that goes on which is changing us as a species and allowing us to process information so much faster than we ever did before. There is much more good about video games than bad. But if there is something to blame for the Parkland school shooting, it was video games that Nikolas Cruz played which likely pushed him over the edge. If you are harboring resentments in an aggressive setting and losing grips with reality—killing hundreds of people a day online is likely to create the fantasy of doing it in real life. Most of us know how to turn off that switch and to only keep that desire in the video game reality. Obviously, Cruz didn’t have that switch. But if people really want to solve the problem of school shootings, you have to start with the video game industry. Because there are a lot of Nikolas Cruz kids out there just waiting to snap. I think we are headed for a period over the next two decades where there will be many more killing attempts—because kids like Cruz play kill so much online that they want to try it in real life. And because they don’t have strong fathers to hold them together, or a family structure, a church, or even good media influences to look up to, there is nothing to keep them from testing themselves in reality once they have grown tired of killing in the world of video games. Not being able to buy a gun at Dick’s sporting goods or the Kroger stores won’t prevent them from some other method. If they want to kill, they are going to find some way to do it, and when they do, we have to be ready for them.

Rich Hoffman

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

The Kislyak Conundrum: Everything you need to know about the Russia Investigation into the Trump campaign

Let’s face it, the Russia story as it has been instilled to the Donald Trump presidency had nothing to do with justice, or any kind of pursuit of the truth. Otherwise the advocates of injustice would see the clear hypocrisy, and I don’t think they do. It’s safe to say at this point that nobody in the Donald Trump campaign for president nor his transition team conspired with the Russians to win the election in the United States and even if they had, the Russians couldn’t have helped them. The Russians did not and still do not have the methods or tactics to inflict change in an American republic. Any conversations with the Russian ambassador Kislyak were harmless exchanges that any member of an incoming administration would speak with to pave the way for more formal talks later. Functionaries working in such positions talk to lots of ambassadors of many nations, so it is ridiculous to assume that the correspondence did anything to alter in any way the American election. Yet the hatred of Donald Trump’s victory by some go much further than any one person could possibly fathom. The Beltway culture that is most in opposition of Trump is a professional class of bureaucrats more interested in job security than in solving problems, and they see in Trump and in the way he was elected by pure democratic methods as a violation to everything they stand for and for them this first year of his presidency was their last stand. The Kislyak story was only one last hope for them to keep things the way they were. Meanwhile the real collusion story occurred under terms of massive law breaking and manipulation by our top law enforcement—something many people like me suggested—and now we know it was the truth bringing us all to the infinite precipice of decision-making.

The whole Russian case was laid out by Franklin Foer in Slate on July 4th 2016. At that time Brexit was all the talk in Europe, Hillary Clinton had turned in her destroyed evidence to the FBI and had her unsworn testimony contributed to the record, and the police were at my house because I had launched a firework show that had terrified some of my neighbors too far down the road to know me very well. Foer wrote the story to plant a seed just in case Trump gained much ground in the upcoming election. At that point Trump was going to be the Republican nominee and people opposing him were getting worried. Foer got the idea for the article himself when Trump feeling good about getting down to just a few remaining Republican challengers to win the nomination held a press conference and asked the Russians to give us the deleted emails of Hillary Clinton which was threatening to destroy her candidacy before her own nomination process at the Democratic Convention. He was kidding of course. At the time it wasn’t looking good for Hillary. The DNC had been caught rigging the election in her favor pushing out Bernie Sanders and Wikileaks was unloading many emails from the Clinton Campaign that was very disturbing and painting a picture of the Democratic candidate that would put chills down the spine of anybody. So to try to even the field and create some kind of controversy that Trump would have to deal with, Foer used his imagination to connect the dots to the Russians and the Trump campaign. Likely, he figured that at the very least Trump wouldn’t ask the Russians to unleash the Clinton emails any more just in case they really had them—because it would put the presidential candidate on his heels in defense.

On January 6, 2017 nearly six months to the day of the Slate article the CIA, FBI, and NSA announced in a joint conclusion that “Vladimir Putin had ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the U.S. presidential election.” Their statement was produced based on the provocation of the Democrat funded Christopher Steele dossier and leaks from the U.S. intelligence community. And by “leaks by U.S. intelligence we are talking about pussy hat wearing anti-Trump lunatic feminists working at the DOJ who would do and say anything to keep the Republican challenger out of the White House—even if it meant abusing their power. After all, as women with these new fangs of sexual harassment that they make every five seconds they leveraged in their minds that nobody would call them on their bogus leaks—especially if their notorious feminist leader Hillary Clinton was in the White House. So what did they have to lose? They threw their credibility behind the Slate article in a last-ditch effort to wreck the Trump presidency before inauguration day within a few weeks of the joint statement on Russia and Trump.

It was that same dossier which we now know led to the FISA abuse and spying that went on looking for any way to trap any member of the Trump campaign and destroy them entirely to preserve their comfortable Beltway structure—the life at the Four Season and those who had not yet earned the right to dine there. They had created a Kislyak conundrum that was far too complicated for average Americans to digest designed to cover their crimes of actually trying to overthrow an elected representative into the White House—and they did this knowing they were breaking the law and betting that they’d get away with it, which proposes the obvious question as to why. Why would they go to all this trouble?

Trump brought to Washington a management method developed in his business practices which terrify most human beings. Our education methods utilize front of the class learning where authority figures such as parents and teachers instruct us what to do, when to do it and how. In these exchanges the sharing of information between peers is highly encouraged, but a strict chain of command is also meant to keep everything in line based on authority figures. Managers like Trump are very laissez-faire seeking to get the most out of people based on identifying the self-interest of their employees and align them with those interests. That to a structured person, and by means of “structure” a person trained to function within the pecking order of classic education methods—top down enforcement of information flow through the rank and file—but the threat from any member of the private sector trying to bring such recklessness to Washington D.C. politics is a real threat to their lives—to everything they know. When Trump was elected basically by following his own gut instincts and pushing aside all the advice of lawyers, professional strategists and the pundits who make a living selling access to the Beltway everyone in Washington who made a living off that crazy system found Trump to be a threat to their very way of life—so they proposed to join together no matter which side of politics they were all on and destroy him.

It didn’t matter if there was an ounce of truth in what they accused Trump of, they figured that the American people would just write everything off as the same kind of conspiracies that were leveled at Obama, the birth certificate issue, the connection to Islam, and the desire to throw America to Socialist International and be ruled by the United Nations. But this time it was different, because the Trump case wasn’t even connected to any truth, it was just a made-up Slate article designed to take the heat off the Clinton campaign at a critical time. What’s really embarrassing is that in a last-ditch effort to keep Trump out of the White House our supposedly neutral intelligence agencies with all the resources at their disposal retreated back to that silly Slate article that Foer had written as their last-ditch effort not to save the nation, but to save themselves, which is incredibly pathetic. And those are the facts.

Rich Hoffman
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If You Support Drug Legalization You are a Domestic Terrorist: Why Jeff Sessions and the Trump administration are right on their stance against marijuana

 

I seldom listen to WLW anymore, but I happened to have it on the other day and heard the pot advocate Scott Sloan ramble on about how bad Attorney General Jeff Sessions was for his reversal of Obama era polices on the prosecutions of marijuana.  Essentially the Trump administration is imposing federal guidelines on pot while going against states rights—where most small government advocates find this a reprehensible situation.  I myself am a states’ rights person over federal imposition.  However, I am emphatically in support of Jeff Sessions on this issue and the Trump administration in general.  I think pot should be illegal in every way, shape, and form and I want the harshest prosecutions for anybody possessing it or selling it to anybody under any conditions.  Marijuana is poison for the mind—just as alcohol is.  For the record, I’m not a fan of any mind altering substance.   I occasionally enjoy a caffeinated beverage such as a Coke or Mello Yello, but I mostly drink either water or milk—and that’s it.  No coffee, tea, or wine. If I’m out on a special occasion, I might have a beer or two but intoxication is always off-limits for me.  I think the entire premise is stupid, of intoxication, and I certainly think it is destructive to inhale a toxic substance that alters brain activity—so under no conditions do I support pot use—not even to make a rope out of the hemp. I hate the plant and all the products that come from it.

Anybody who supports drug use in any culture is an enemy of that society.  If history is studied there isn’t any culture that survived for more than a few hundred years if they abused drugs or participated in mind altering experiments—and this includes shamans from hunting and gathering cultures.  One thing that is for certain, if you look back at the Indians of North America or the witch doctors of voodoo, mind altering substances were part of their societies and religious perspectives—and they have led in every instance to a declining culture.  There is no future in America where a society of pot smokers will build on the moon, or spread into the vastness of space with great innovations if intoxication is the aim of their leisure activity.

While libertarians like Rand Paul think of themselves as fiscally conservative, but socially liberal, point to the billions of dollars that the pot industry can produce in tax revenue their aims are shortsighted because the industrial loss to other market sectors that require intellectual ambition will decline over time.  A thriving pot industry anywhere means that it is at the expense of social ambition.  Pot is an enemy to thought, it is to surrender our natural faculties to the numbness provided by a toxic ingredient.  It is for the weak at heart and those with low ambition in life.  It is poison to any hope at sustained productivity.

History for many people is only a few decades deep and many will say that during the Prohibition period that the government created the alcohol industry by making it illegal, and there is some truth to that.  By making something a forbidden fruit, you make it enticing to the natural rebellion which makes humans, human.  The need we all have to push the barriers and to see what might happen if we do this or that is part of the fun of drug abuse for people.  But consider this, this intoxication culture that we have today is only 100 years old.  While there have been saloons and pubs for centuries they were considered something of an oddity in most family lives—something that happened in towns, and there has always been destructive attributes associated with alcohol.  Many marriages have been destroyed by alcohol and a lot of children’s lives were ruined by it—and there are arguments that any government that might want to have a productive society would want to keep its people from destroying themselves with intoxication.  But we live in a free society, so this isn’t a government problem, but an ethical one.  People shouldn’t want to become intoxicated.  In the values that we all share one of them should be a sentiment which respects thought over intoxication.  We don’t know what impact our last century will have on our future—but looking at it the seeds for destruction are already planted.  Will our society endure for another 100 years with the intoxication culture that we presently have—I’d say not?  I’d say it’s impossible to advance beyond where we are now with a culture of adults and young people who crave to destroy their minds with intoxication.  People who support pot legalization and alcohol abuse are obviously thinking in the short-term of a few hundred years where my concerns are in the thousands.

If you study any ancient culture there is always a pattern that I refer to quite a lot, the Vico cycle which is a term James Joyce used in his great work Finnegan’s Wake. That term comes from Giambattista Vico who essentially mused that all societies go through four basic phases, first as a theocracy, then an aristocracy, followed by democracy then anarchy.  We can see traces of all four of these phases around the world right now depending on the development of each society. Because of air travel and the internet we have the unusual condition of all these various stages around the world clashing at the same time with one another.  We have politicians for instance who think of themselves as an aristocracy, while we have people striving for democracy.  Then we have these ANTIFA groups of Marxists who are demanding anarchy—while we have Islamic terrorists attempting to impose a global theocracy.  Our concern in this present age should be to move beyond this vicious cycle, but we are unable to reconcile it, so we have turned to mind altering substances to come to terms with these primitive forces.  Our biology tells us to retreat into the Vico cycle, our intellects say move forward and that conflict has created the need to shut down the voices with numbness.  In so doing we will surrender our opportunity to advance and will yield to the forces of history and simply vanish to begin again as we have all over the world so many countless times.

The Trump administration understands what I’m saying and they are acting on that knowledge for good or ill.  What good is state sovereignty if there aren’t any states in a few years to be sovereign?  What good is a new industry that produces billions of dollars in new revenue if it destroys the GDP of a nation by the trillions?  How can any tattooed, dope smoking, nose piercing libertarian think that entertainment options such as pornography and pot can lead to a stable and constructive family life?   If families are not the priority of conservatives and society in general, then what’s the point?  Without families there isn’t any future, because that’s how we transfer values across the centuries, to our children, grandchildren, ad ifinitum.  All pot supporters are willing to trade the short-term fun of intoxication for the long-term aims of social structure that can endure into the future. Pot supporters don’t have vision that extends them beyond their current century, they figure they won’t be around, so who cares?  And that’s why anybody who loves America and wants to see it endure even if its unpopular to do, will ridicule pot and the practice of destroying minds just to have a little fun.  Anybody who truly loves America would take a stand against drugs of all kinds—even alcohol.  And because of that I admire Jeff Sessions and the Trump administration for doing just that.  Trump doesn’t drink and that’s part of what makes him great.  And he certainly doesn’t smoke dope.  A lot of his enemies wished he did, because it would make him easier to beat.  But because he doesn’t they can’t.  That should be a lesson for the rest of America—nobody should ever seek intoxication of any kind, and instead should feed their minds with good things that help it grow and take our civilization to the next great step for the first time in history.

Rich Hoffman

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