Tag: 700 WLW

Why EdChoice is so Beneficial: Removing Parkinson’s Law from the public education debate in Ohio

I’ve been watching and listening to the whole debate about EdChoice in Ohio with great interest. Of course, the Ohio Senate had to vote to delay the implementation of Ed Choice which was scheduled to take effect the day of this writing, until April 1st 2020. The public schools in particular have responded terribly to it, including the school in my own district which I’ve written a lot about, Lakota. It has been nothing short of embarrassing to listen to Lakota’s superintendent complain about the funding model that is coming whether they like it or not and move the entire district into a victimized status so quickly on the issue. The report back from some financial news from Lakota has not been good and they are floating the idea for another levy which would be a terrible, anti-growth tax increase just to supplement their mismanaged spending habits, so the news was bad enough. This EdChoice debate has only made things worse. Dealing with professional educators to me is the worst experience that there is in professional politics because they are so entitled and unrealistic about what they think their financial requirements should be, so we’ll deal with some of that here, and in the coming months. Listening to politicians attempt to put their minds around what to do about EdChoice, which is simply a grading system that inspires the financial contributions of the state to follow the student of that failing school to the school of their choice. This of course leaves variability in public school budgets for money they have been used to getting now going to an unpredictable number of students who may decide to go somewhere else with that precious state money.

I listened to Bill Cunningham and Representative Bill Seitz talk about this EdChoice problem on WLW and every word made me cringe. Here were two people who call themselves rock ribbed Republicans missing the whole point of the public education debate. Now, my history with these two is that they are on the wrong side of many issues. They mean well like a lot of people do, but their perspective has been tainted by years of acceptance of a system initiated by people like John Dewey during an experimentation of many things during the progressive era at the turn of the last century and like many have accepted that that’s just the way things are and the way they will always be. Money goes to the school from the state to teach children living in that district not just skills for a future job, but to turn them into democratic citizens with an emphasis on social change. In hindsight this has been a complete disaster, look at the products of the schools, which many of us are. People aren’t very smart, and they don’t set their sights very high in life. Dewey’s mistake was in attempting to steer society away from republic representation and more toward democratic majority rule, which we all know now is a disaster at the epistemological level.

For the two Bills talking on WLW about EdChoice, they are both people in their 60s and 70s now, to them public school is about sports programs, learning to follow orders so that kids learn to live in a civil society, and in establishing much needed social connections with peers. Way back, many decades ago when my wife and I pulled our kids out of public schools for a year to teach them at home because the results were just so disappointing we had family members literally melt under the news because they were afraid my kids would turn into complete social outcasts, because they believed after so many years of this Dewey philosophy that the goal of public schools was to establish these mental applications. Of course, those sentiments were completely fear based, just as about everything in public education is. We have learned to just accept the failure that is evident because that’s always the way we have done things. People like the “Bills” on WLW enjoy the idea that their public school is the holder of real-estate value, and that Friday Night Lights football in the fall months of every year make for great conversation. But it was flawed from the beginning and never was poised to do what Dewey wanted because his fundamental problem was in thinking that the state as a central authority should be in charge. It was a progressive experiment, but not a very “Republican” thing to do.

Schools like Lakota and many others who are complaining about the insecurity in their funding model should be looking at the situation like any business would instead of some free-loader sitting in a bird nest of a rich district and opening their mouths for tax money to flow in. They should be working to be the best school with the best options in a free market society. No matter what the report card states in giving families the choice of a school they’d like to go to, Lakota should feel confident that kids would want to go to their school for all the reasons that anybody would, to get a good education, be near a good sports program, or just to be around other students who aren’t problems coming from broken families. Students should have a choice and if Lakota wants those students, they should have to work to attract them.

The most tragic thing I have noticed, looking at the situation professionally, is that all public schools have become addicted to the natural state of Parkinson’s Law that has contaminated their budgeting structures. Everyone who has been involved professionally in process improvements understands that Parkinson’s Law is an adage that states “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion,” meaning that a work schedule blankly stated will allow a worker to fill that time allotment from beginning to end by the nature of human interaction. If you give someone an hour to do a 5-minute job, they’ll take the whole hour. Process improvement demands to understand how long it actually takes to do a job, and to work out the tendencies of Parkinson’s Law to misstate labor needs. Well, that same tendency is at the center of the public education debate all across the country, and is why the EdChoice trend is so badly needed. Budgets have been filled to their maximum to accommodate whatever the state provides and to what extent local school district tax payers will put up with in increased levies driven by labor unions looking to use Parkinson’s Law to attach need to student performance by using the chaos of money going to the schools, not the student, to keep the process centrally controlled and with a false understanding of what education per student should cost, leaving the real state funding model perpetually broken, which is just how the labor unions and lazy superintendents like it.

Clearly what we have had hasn’t worked. Education needs reformed and the centralized aspects of it need to be removed. Free market solutions are the only way to improve schools and the students that come from them. People should have the option to vote with their feet putting schools into the same competitive situation that every restaurant, shopping complex and entertainment destination must do, compete for the dollars available. Education is not so sacred to not be attached to competitive market conditions, end of story. A quick look at our students declares that trying something new wouldn’t hurt, because we couldn’t do worse. And ultimately that is the direction of education anyway, just as the trends of the world are declaring. People want more choices in life, not less, and it’s a matter of time anyway where money for education shouldn’t even come from the state. But while it does, it should go to the students so they can vote with their feet. Not to hold them to a school that doesn’t feel it has to earn their business. If Lakota is such a great school, or any government school for that matter, don’t tell us how good you are. Make yourself one of those schools that people want to go to. Make it so that you are so crowded that you must turn people away, which only increases the value of the product. Sure, it makes the current way that schools do business chaotic, it forces them to understand how much Parkinson’s Law is in their processes. It forces the teacher unions to think differently for sure. But that is their problem, not ours. And the state will never know how much it should spend on students so long as Parkinson’s Law is contaminating their assumptions. That is the key to this whole discussion and we’re going to have it now or in a few years, but the way things have been are not the way things are going to be. The old Dewey model was poised from the outset to fail. But these days, life happens too fast and there is just too much to learn to attempt to squeeze everything into the traditional classroom setting that we have been attempting to do. The times and this new economy are forcing us to change, so let’s get at it and solve this problem once and for all by looking at the entire concept differently.

Rich Hoffman

President Trump is a Lifelong NRA Member: Understanding the nature and history of Genius and the relationship to guns

This attempt to paint National Rifle Association members as some fringe group, especially leading up to the big protest this week that occurred in Virginia is just as insulting as the Democrats attempting to impeach President Trump, spending literally millions of dollars of tax payer money over the simple issue that they are not prepared for the 2020 election with a proper, electable philosophy, or a platform that reflects America in a modern sense. I’m not big on memberships but my NRA membership is something I take great pride in, and yes, it’s very much mainstream. It shouldn’t be surprising for anybody to know but President Trump is a life member of the NRA, and he has joined Ulysses S. Grant, Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, and Richard Nixon as presidents who all had NRA memberships. Then of course there was Ronald Reagan who embodied great respect for his membership as a shared value with the American people. The fringe element of gun control rather has been the exception all this time, not the mainstream, yet the attempts to overthrow this assumption has made things look quite the opposite.

As readers here know I have been working on a philosophy/business book called The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business for a while now. It’s not the writing that has been the problem, but rather the scope of the work. I see gun ownership as a fundamental philosophy to the success of American life—which of course extends into business. So, getting the themes down for this work has been interesting. To take complicated sentiments and paint them with words into a mainstream read that reflects life during one of America’s greatest defining moments, the period of 1870 to 1890 has pushed me into many re-writes which has been enjoyable. But the theme has been largely unexplored, and it really paints a value on the NRA as an organization and national treasure. Without the NRA, the domestic enemies that want to change the nature of American life would have long ago succeeded. And they are still at it which is why the NRA has been under so much attack. But in the scheme of things, most of our best presidents have found a lot of value in the NRA including our current one.

Many people just don’t know their history very well, and I have pointed to this wild west period as a point of great significance for a reason. It is clear that the ability of settlers to cross the western frontier with a gun at their hip gave way for the greatest expansion not just of human settlement, but of intellectual monstrosity. It was this very culture that produced Thomas Edison, one of the greatest inventors of any age. It was during this period that Henry Ford came to be, and aviation first flew from a couple of bicycle manufactures in Dayton, Ohio. When we think of the wild west, we think of gunfighters, and I would argue that it was they who carved a path to great intellectual expansion by what professor Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi the great psychologists would term “flow.” For one of the first times in all of human history government was small enough not to get in the way of intellectual genius, and the rapidly expanding market needs of a growing nation with three major wars behind it, The Revolution, the War of 1812, and the Civil War finally was coming into its own philosophically, and industrially. There would have been no time prior in history where a Thomas Alva Edison could have lived without being killed by the churches of Europe, or crushed by intelligentsia seeking to make aristocrats of themselves by holding society under their “in the box” thinking. It was in the wake of the gunfighters and the stories on the wild frontiers that Edison was able to live in something of a vacuum that gave light and radio waves to the world—and many other things that essentially built the world we live in today.

Its not that Thomas Edison was a huge supporter of guns, but he was of the philosopher Thomas Paine, who would be the figure who essentially launched the “American” idea and started the Revolution. But Edison much like Benjamin Franklin was a spirit that was born from the freedoms that came from being an American. It may take millions of tobacco spitting cowboys fighting it out in the dust and rain on an open plain to make one Thomas Edison, but the work was worth it. And without gun ownership, such figures would never find their way into the world. That is clear in my research and has emerged as the primary theme of my new book. The understanding of what makes genius is very much at the core of the issue and how we understand such things to come to be. I would point to the work Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi as one of the greatest breakthroughs, which has been very recent, as the primary cause of genius that we find in people like Thomas Edison, or even modern day examples such as Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Bill Gates. What makes genius is proper intellectual flow, not the stale embodiments of social conformity glued together by authoritarian rules and regulation. But rather the freedom to think and have a gun in the home to keep away those who might seek to bring chaos to your doorstep and interrupt the flow of thoughts by a mind on fire with its own passions.

Edison was a unique personality who was able to match his tireless energy and intellect to the needs of a rapidly expanding market due to western expansion and a government that hadn’t figured out how to stick their noses into everyone’s life yet. It was a perfect storm that created a genius that still is giving us gifts today. Although the world has shrunk since then and government has now figured out how to stick their noses into our business in every aspect. It is no wonder that we don’t have more people like Thomas Edison and Albert Einstein emerging today. Regulation and too much interdependence does not produce genius, it repels it. Guns give genius a barrier from the idiot to the budding intellect and is a key part of American success that no other culture on the face of the earth has duplicated. The reason is complicated and elusive and is the subject of my new book. But the key is clearly something that the NRA understands of itself, and very smart people who have been presidents of the United States at least could sense about the importance. Guns aren’t so much for shooting people, but in preventing natural, intellectual looters so wonderfully displayed in Ayn Rand’s classic American novels, from taking over the efforts of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s “flow.” Some people find their flow in life, some people struggle with it always. But for those who do, we occasionally get a Thomas Edison, and from there great things happen.

I see a world where we could unleash many Thomas Edisons and the way to make them is not with our university system, but rather with NRA memberships who keep the looters away and free minds to think and be creative based on their own inertia. Not to force a mind to comply with inferior intellects, but to free them to the possibilities of tomorrow by asking the right questions and not being afraid of those who don’t want the answers revealed, because there is power for them in the ignorance of mankind. To get flow out of our society we need guns to serve as the barrier to allow genius to flourish. Politicians may join the NRA because they have an understanding that its important even though they may not know why. But I think we are coming to a time where we can define those needs better. And that could pave the way for a very exciting future.

Rich Hoffman

The Schiff Show: Those who are most guilty are the ones pushing for impeachment

After watching the impeachment proceedings in the senate, it is quite clear not just because it is an attack on a president that I voted for, and therefore an attack on me, but that Adam Schiff has more at stake than just a hatred politically for President Trump. It’s obviously personal for them. They obviously don’t think that they can beat him in the upcoming election, so that is the cause of these theatrics of impeachment. There is something much more sinister going on that they are seeking to hide from the public with these antics. Peter Schweizer’s book ‘Profiles in Corruption’ came out a few days ago and I picked it up for a quick read and I am convinced by the arguments made in that book that Peter is on to something big. So big in fact that nobody will cover it because so many people are guilty of the crimes. If only a small percentage of the claims made in ‘Profiles in Corruption’ are true, then we have a huge problem in both houses of congress, which I think is certainly the case. And the proof is in the hatred of Trump and the direct attack on him to defer away from the real crimes that have been committed.

I watched carefully, and without emotion the prosecution in the case, particularly Nadler and Schiff. Nadler has a long history of hating Trump personally, and he is quite clearly abusing his power in office to erect some aspect of revenge against the President for personal reasons. To enough of a degree that Nadler should be removed from office for such bad judgement alone. But the Adam Schiff story is worse, because it looks like he is covering his own layers of corruption for the benefits of his party not just to survive through the 2020 election, but to keep the dogs off his own connections to many lines of corruption, that extend well beyond Ukraine. If anybody looked and acted guilty by all the signs of nonverbal communication, its Adam Schiff.

I would suggest that the Republican approach to this case is all wrong, playing along with the legal grounds as if this were a real trial, and evoking that the “senate” is some kind of stately power that is beyond the quells of politics is not going to work. We are dealing with real criminals protecting a political class that is deeply involved with severe criminal mischief, white collar crimes that go well beyond similar white-collar prosecutions of mass corruption. These criminals are using their powerful statues as law makers to erase away their crimes, and they are willing to bring down a presidency to cover their actions—which should shock everyone, no matter what your political affiliation. The more I watched, the more insulting it was, especially once opening day arguments extended past midnight. All this effort for what—to try to pin their own crimes on a president just asking a question about corruption from the other side. The real issue was why the president felt he needed to ask—that is the cover-up.

Yet Democrats came out swinging throwing out indefensible accusations from the start saying that McConnell was running a corrupt proceeding. The obvious attempt was to make Republicans look weak in response to such aggressive statements that just might tilt the balance in a fall election—if all went well. But the true magic trick here was to keep anybody from even asking the question, “Mr. Schiff, how many of these deals were you involved in with Hunter Biden and his father.” By making it so that even asking a question could evoke so much trouble, who would dare to go further? That is the subtle message here and something only people willing to do the proper study of the situation, like Peter Schweizer, would even think to ask. The evidence is clear that something is wrong and the attack on Trump is far deeper than even election meddling for the 2020 elections, its to cover up crimes committed by many of the people in that senate chamber, and I would bet that everyone there knows it. That’s why they don’t ask those deeper questions, because they too would be implicated.

The purpose of the show is to even help Republicans in the senate appear to make the whole thing appear more lofty than it really is, the proceedings with John “Obamacare” Roberts proceeding as a stately judge hammering his gavel for recess is meant to make them all look like they are in command. That the whole thing isn’t a farce covering up massive international crimes for which Trump’s administration is uncovering just by its existence. What I watched in the hearings from all sides were people either guilty of those mass crimes, or people who knew about them but were worried that if that knowledge hit the public, a complete erosion of their trust in our government institutions would cascade into outright rebellion. Many of those people might disagree in that chamber, but they have lunch together, they golf together, they have formed bonds that it would be painful to expose. They may be political enemies, but all too often they are personal friends, and as most humans are reluctant to do, they don’t want to hurt them. So, they have all agreed to some extent to this ridiculous, and expensive display designed not to seek justice through impeachment of an elected president, but to hide crimes of personal enrichment. And to use their control of the law to cover for their villainy. And they actually have the audacity to stand before us all during all hours of the day, soaking up the news cycle in such an audacious, and selfish way for their personal vanity and desires for destruction of other people so long as the aims of investigation to not point to them.

Like the slob who farts and then cries out, “who passed gas” when they know clearly it was them, but by the smell of it, it could have been anybody in the room. They hope to declare their innocence just by being the first ones to say anything. Yet the fart came from them and nobody else. Others might suspect as much, but because they are friends, they wouldn’t want to embarrass them in public, so they keep their mouth shout and play along. That is what the senate has been doing for Democrats, and it is pathetic. The real crime has not been discussed, and it should be. The real villains are the ones making the accusations, and without a doubt to my notice, Adam Schiff is one of the guiltiest and most corrupt people on the face of the earth. And he is so corrupt that he knows nobody would believe it, so he further covers his trial by being the one doing the accusing so that he is not the one accused. That is the purpose of this impeachment and the voracity of its utilization. And even for the attempt of it, we should all be very angry. Even more than that, we need to look at a serious employment change of these very representatives because we cannot turn a blind eye to this. Justice is begging for attention and our eyes need to reside on the accusers, not the accused.

Rich Hoffman

And People Wonder Why Americans Need Guns: The evidence is all around us–impeachment, abuse of power, and massive corruption

Oh, I don’t know why anybody would question the rights to gun owners to have weapons that can defend itself against a domestic military, or why we might need to carry them even in the streets everywhere we go. After all, the Democrats through a little trickery on a low voter year took both houses in Virginia and went quickly to abuse their power as fast as they could by attacking the Second Amendment. Or even as gun rights advocates marched on the capital in Richmond against those incursions, the House Democrats in Washington D.C. were trying to impeach a president that we voted for to represent us instead of turning to guns to take back our government. Without those tools, the guns that are part of American life to its very core, imagine the level of corruption that Ralphie the Governor of Virginia would embark on. Imagine the world Nancy Pelosi would envision for the rest of us, and just think how much abuse Michael Bloomberg’s billions could purchase with George Soros—a utopia of their infantile state and an all-powerful government that could crush anybody. And these are the people who tell us to trust them and to give up our guns and accept control by the state forever. No thanks. And that was the message at the pro-gun rally at Richmond on Martin Luther King Day of 2020.

Reports are indicating that around 20,000 people showed up to protest the incursions that the Democrats are trying to push through the legalization process there to essentially ban weapons from private ownership. To many reporters, that is a lot of people, but to me, its just a Trump rally. What many people have not yet learned to accept is that Trump, guns and the trend of the world is toward more options, more freedom, and much less government control on everything—and even if Democrats did manage to ban all guns from society, and could impeach President Trump from office so that they wouldn’t have to run against him in November, that the causes that put those things in place would somehow fall in line and the world would be happy. Its like a kid wishing for some magical present on Christmas and prior to that day thinking how great it will be if only someone bought them that special present. Yet when the day arrived, they open it, are happy to see that they finally that that special something. Then two hours later, now that the wanting of it is gone, its just a thing to be forgotten. And the mind moves on to something else. Even in a more primitive mode, sex offers the precise same experience, the thinking about it is much more exciting than what you get. And after the act is over, you are left with the consequences, the children that are born, the hurt feelings, the psychological attachments, the house, the shared cars, the shared refrigerator. Those are things that people often don’t think about until afterwards, and that is clearly what Democrats have been thinking about regarding gun control. They want the laws, they want to think about a society of disarmed people, but they have never really thought about what comes next.

People want options and they don’t want a government imposing on them telling them what soft drinks they can have, how many clips they can put into their guns, or even where they will get their health care. They want you to spend the money they send in taxes wisely and to leave them alone to live their lives. They don’t want potholes in the highways, because that means the state has wasted their money. They don’t want a welfare state, because that means the government is paying people not to work off the backs of those working. They don’t want to waste money on public education if the schools are just going to teach a liberalized curriculum to influential young minds. And as time has gone on government has not earned more respect for a job well done, it has gotten considerably worse. And it is in this environment that politicians think they are going to sell gun confiscation and changes to human behavior. If anything, people will hold their guns closer, not further, because its their only recourse for a change if things go wrong. Obviously, with the Trump impeachment attempts, Democrats do not respect elections. So, what will they respect? And as in the case in Virginia, when Democrats do manage to win elections, look what they do with it—they immediately move to abuse their power.

What is laughable is that Democrats looked at those 20,000 protestors who showed up mostly armed to give warning to law makers of the next steps and they pointed to their recent election in November, as if that gave them permission to move toward a gun ban with 2 million voters putting them in power. There are around 5,660,969 voters in Virginia so nearly 50% showed up to vote for the Democrats, especially in the north where Washington D.C. spill overs are having the same type of demographic change at the polls as illegal aliens are in California. Republicans have to be cautious not to stay home and trust that everything will be alright. Bloomberg’s money inspired Democrats to vote, and they did gain the House and Senate in that state giving the governor a dream scenario for their far left reaching ideas on gun control. And now we have a fight that could have easily been avoided with a simple vote on election night. But those same Democrats claiming elections have consequences are the same ones saying that Trump should be impeached because they don’t like that they lost. They don’t get to have it both ways, and they expect to.

That’s why protestors showed up with guns and why there are actually millions of those people all over the United States. Any overreach by government will be met with armed force as a last resort and that was the message in Richmond. Politicians can squabble all they want about what the numbers mean, but the bottom line is that people are not going to give up their guns, they’ll use them to push back a government looking to inflict less choice in our country. Its as simple as that. The attempts by the governor to paint the pro-gun protestors as potential violent thugs like the leftist ANTIFA goons have been is just wrong. Gun supporters in America are just like those protestors. They don’t need to bloviate for power, because they already have it and know it. It’s in their hands so there is no reason to show off with violence. And they are the majority. They need to learn from this Virginia mishap and vote in November, and not trust that other people will cover their voice—because what happens is that one side out votes the other, and soon you will have to grab your guns just to defend your basic rights. And we shouldn’t have to do that.

But it wouldn’t take much for gun owners to completely retake the American government, so long as we still have our guns, and that may be what it comes to if we learn that elections don’t matter to Democrats. What happened in Richmond is just a small example. Look how long it has taken to fight a war in Afghanistan. How in the world would any Democrat government run the United States in a civil war with so many elements that are beyond their control, even with the full utilization of our military. And that is the balance of power that we must maintain, for the sake of our country. But we first need to fully use the power of elections, just to give the option before the bullets fly. And yes, that is what we are talking about. We are at that place where that discussion must happen because of the actions Democrats are showing in Virginia and now in the Senate in Washington against President Trump. Compliance is less important than freedom and that’s where we are folks. The Democrats want to unwrap that present on gun control and they have not thought through what happens next. Hopefully, they will come to their senses before someone gets hurt.

Rich Hoffman

Richard Jewell, the Movie Review: To understand what’s happening now everyone should watch this great film by Clint Eastwood

The movie, Richard Jewell is certainly one of those that every Trump supporter should see, and those considering becoming one. No wonder it has not done well at the box office, the last time I saw such an antagonistic hatred of a movie was the Atlas Shrugged films for many of the same reasons. Critics hated the movie, it essentially comes down to institutionalism against individual rights when movies take the side of individuals, the college trained movie critics become synonymous with anger at those who challenge their understanding of the world, which was forged in such places as Harvard, Yale, Oxford and Princeton, or some of their copy cats teaching those who didn’t do so well on their ACT tests. When people want to know why the media and our government rally to each other’s needs so often, and so quickly, well, they were all taught in the same places to march to whims of the institutions while those who didn’t enjoy the experience become everybody else. But the best products of our modern education systems, our unionized government schools or our best colleges essentially become guys like the featured FBI agent played by Jon Hamm’s Tom Shaw or the newspaper reporter hot to get any story and generally bored with life, Olivia Wilde’s Kathy Scruggs. And it was those two who were playing around with each other sexually who came up with the whole story against Richard Jewell, because they needed somebody to be the face of terrorism, even if the guy was completely innocent.

There is a Kathy Scruggs in every newsroom from all sides of the sexes. There are guy versions, but this one played by Olivia Wilde was fantastic, and very close to many of the people I have known in the media. 89-year-old Clint Eastwood, who directed this picture with the experience of a man who has been around and seen everything is likely the only person who could have directed Olivia Wilde with such realism. She reminded me of a not so disgusting scum bag as Eastwood showed in his Dirty Harry film Sudden Impact, the bar whore who was the central figure behind the rapes of the two leading girls. For these characters wreaking other people’s lives is a kind of game that they love playing. It fills a void in their lives that they work very hard to hide from other people and they are dangerous. But make no mistake about it, there is a Kathy Scruggs in every newsroom to some extent or another. She is not an exceptionally evil person, she is as common as a raindrop in the world of the media, and it takes a director like Clint Eastwood to pull that kind of performance out of an actress who might otherwise not feel comfortable going to such a dark place.

We all know the story, but as I was watching this movie, I was thinking that this is exactly what has been happening to the Trump administration. Kathy Scruggs might as well have been Lisa Page in the middle of the FBI investigation against President Trump. Sexual manipulation is not a new thing for women to play against horny, stupid men, and Peter Strzok was no exception. Not all people are as flamboyant about their behavior as Scruggs was, they hide their actions better. But these kinds of things are happening all the time at every level of our society, and if you get in the way of their actions, another Richard Jewell is born. We only know of Richard Jewell because the profile of the case was a big one. There are Richard Jewell types losing their jobs every day, or being denied promotions for all the same reasons. What Trump captured of the FBI and the media in Richard Jewell was an examination into the kinds of people who are really part of these classes of people, and it wasn’t pretty.

What happened to Richard Jewell, with the attempted entrapments by the FBI was exactly what happened to Roger Stone in the early morning raid of his home at 5 AM with the CNN reporter tipped off and waiting to capture the images of an arrested Trump confidant to splash on the television at the earliest moment. Or what about pinning down Michael Flynn without a lawyer while attempting to get him to give false testimony by pretending to be his friend in the early days of the White House transition? You can’t lie to an FBI agent, it’s against the law—but they sure can lie to you, or control the evidence in such a way to make you look bad if it makes them look good in the process. This movie Richard Jewell showed how those things happen in a very legally valid way. We should all question ourselves in why we have given the government so much power over us. Well, I’d say it’s because there’s a bit of Richard Jewell in all of us, a do gooder who just wants to live a good life and we don’t want to think that people are so dishonest as Tom Shaw or Kathy Scruggs.

The problem with institutionalists like the villains in the movie Richard Jewell is that the villains see value for themselves in supporting the institutions at all cost, even at the price of humanity. And to the rest of us, we can’t even comprehend such evil, yet we face it every day. Occasionally we get fighters who know the system better than the bad guys like the attorney in the film played by Sam Rockwell, Watson Bryant. President Trump comes to mind as a person who has made so much money in life and seen every trick in the book that he can sidestep the institutionalists easily. But those not so experienced around Trump were not so difficult to pluck into the trash bins of trouble. One little misstatement at that level and you are going to jail, while gang members, thugs, and illegal aliens roam our streets unimpeded. If you lie to an FBI agent when they set up the deceit themselves to trap you in it, and you are going to jail to show their power. It’s a bad, nasty game that many fear almost more than death, and it’s sad that we have allowed it to take such a hold of all our lives.

The problem though isn’t that we are stupid, its that we have been short to admit to ourselves that people are as bad as Kathy Scruggs and Tom Shaw. We find it astonishing that they would take it for granted that we’d just naturally believe them and that we’d put up with their evil ways because we all want to believe in the good in people. But some people just don’t have it in them. They adhere so well to the institutions because as people they are broken likely from birth, and there is nothing to hold them together but the rigid rules for which they control. Whether it’s the FBI or the media, the rules are built to serve the institutions and when they need some diversion, they can always pick on the latest Richard Jewell—the good guy who is so well intentioned that he can’t see the evil that is at work right in front of his face. Yet we all see it, and its not just in the Jewell case, but it’s happening right now to our president by that same FBI. Only that story is a much bigger one that many just aren’t ready to admit has been happening. But to see it for all its possibilities, everyone should see Richard Jewell. Its one of those types of movies for our times.

Rich Hoffman

The Value of Thinking like a 12-Year-Old: How we should improve our education system

Every time I do a bunch of education articles, such as I did recently for the election of 2019 critics write me and ask me for what solution I would support since I think that the current public education system is so screwed up. I often say these days that I think kids would be better off living in the woods without a public education classroom if the goal for them was to get smarter rather than sticking with what we have now. Government schools are so dysfunctional that they really should be considered a menace. For as much time and money that we put into the education of children too many of them enter adulthood ill prepared for the reality which should tell us everything we need to know. Therefore, people who are critical of me are only upset that I bring it up. But to answer their question, lets get to the basic foundation of the problem.

Recently I was reviewing some 3P techniques for a project I’m working on, its one of those Lean applications that are part of the long evolution of the Toyota systems research that has been going on for a long time yet has had lots of trouble taking root in the United States. That is actually the subject of a new book I’m working on called The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business. I’m not willing to throw the baby out with the bathwater like many might be willing to do, but we do need to understand why these things tend to work in Japan and China and not in the United States. Or do they really work at all, or is the key really just naturally engaged employees. And if so, then why are they engaged while others aren’t? I have it all worked out, but explaining it to people who are functioning from the wrong definitions of things is a bit more of a challenge. To be blunt, our public educations have taught our entire society all the wrong things and now we have a mess to clean up that will take centuries. So we might as well start somewhere.

The meaning of life is not to be born, learn how to read, write and perform rational thought only to throw all that out the window at puberty to get a mate, have sex, pop out a few kids then gradually die as the flower of our bodies wilt away into old age where even the universe spits at us once we’ve passed the years of reproduction. All that is wrong—and that is the basic pattern of understanding around the world of the cycles of life. Rather, we are born, we are given the opportunity to learn all we can before we are on the clock of responsibility, and we spend the rest of our lives functioning from what is left of that perfect period of childhood that we all have an opportunity to experience. However, most people don’t get such great childhoods and they grow up and into bitter adults who can’t problem solve their way out of a paper bag and end up intellectually crippled for life.

We should look at childhood as one of our highest states of consciousness and figure out why we are trying so hard as a civilization to grow up and away from this outlook. On that recent 3P investigation one of the key takeaways was that the classroom participants were told that they needed to reconnect with their 12-year-old self, because it was at this time that most of us were still open minded about problem solving and generally thinking outside the box. And that is the case with most children, they all start off pretty equal. As open books on brain development they all learn along a similar path and with great optimism. Just look at the kind of books that we provide to children seen at any bookstore. They are full of colors and positive images meant to inspire next step learning, to lure them to good new things to think about rather than boring, stagnant images. Then kids hit puberty, public schools are trying to teach sex in the fourth grade and earlier these days, and once kids are told that sex is their primary function and their social status within the classroom culture will determine who they get to mate with, that person begins a long decline that lasts the rest of their lives, and it is very tragic.

The 3P people observed from the Toyota culture in Japan that they are a playful people, and this is obvious while at the Tokyo airport. The billboard colors there are very positive and even their television in Japan is very childlike, meaning its experimental and positive about most everything. It has taken the Lean community many years of western thinking to get close to unlocking the real secrets of the Toyota culture. Its not just that they are organized and engaged in Japan, but that they don’t get hung up on silly stuff, they are much more like children than what we’d call adults in America. Children will try things and play with ideas where adults usually try to bend reality to their mode of thinking. Whatever it is that they learned and whoever they learned it from tends to limit the western mind rather than unleash it toward continued growth or at least sustaining what they were when they were children.

This is why I see so much positive growth in the geek culture in America where adults go to science fiction conventions dressed in cosplay and have fun going to midnight movies and making amusement parks part of their lifestyles. It’s the Peter Pan lesson of the approach that Tom Hanks showed in the movie Big where an actual kid was very successful in business because he thought like a child. We have been thinking about this problem for a long time, but still what holds us back is this assumption that by growing up we are supposed to get rid of our childhoods rather than trying to have the best one possible then carrying those memories throughout our entire life with the fuel to sustain us. The way we approach things now we empty ourselves of everything we built until puberty then seek to throw it all away so we can join some lifecycle mating custom that essentially ends by the time we are all aged 30. There is a lot of life to live after that age but most of us just don’t know what to do with ourselves so the gradual decline begins and we find ourselves stagnant and ineffective for the rest of our lives.

Our education system should be looking to make an Einstein out of every young mind. By the time kids leave the 12th grade if they maintained the rate of learning that they did up until around age 10, we should have lots of geniuses running around doing great things. Instead we end up with a bunch of flat thinkers who have to be told as 40 and 50 year olds that they need to reconnect with their 12-year-old selves so they can be effective at their jobs. If I had a nickel for every time someone told me to grow up, I’d have a lot of nickels. Many millions worth. But I’ve always bulked at that notion and am very happy to say that I never stopped thinking like a 12-year-old. Ever. I have always viewed the typical definition of adulthood as a loss of something valuable that we had as children but lost too soon in a premature death. So I’ve held onto mine as a treasure and that has certainly helped me in life be much more effective than in embracing the traditional trajectory of the aging process. And we do need to fix that notion. If our education system started looking at children as the highest level of thought out of the starting gate and could harness that energy instead of seeking to destroy it, I would feel differently. Until then, I’m dead set against the modern concepts of education, because they are not sufficient enough, and do not teach the right things.

Rich Hoffman

Creating Crises for Change Agency: Why so many are so angry about Syria

It is truly scary to think how close we came to having Mitt Romney as president in 2012, Mr. Pierre Delecto. If you add him to John Kasich who was governor of Ohio during that election, its no wonder the GOP lost all the time. Those guys just suck. Horrible representatives of conservative values and in the scheme of things, before there was a Donald Trump in politics, they were the good guys. We all suspected how deep the deep state was, and why we had troops all over the world supporting make work wars just for the benefit of having something to do and always a crisis to manage. You would think that more Democrats would be happy that Trump is pulling our troops out of Syria and asking other countries to pay their own way in matters of conflict, but nobody in government is happy about it, because essentially it exposes them for not really having anything better to do. They create the crises, then they send resources to manage the crises, all the while enriching themselves in the process. And now that we have a president that is exposing that scheme people like Romney are apocalyptic. If there is anything good coming of it, it is that conservative radio and talk shows are finally starting to see how the game has been played all along. Rush Limbaugh had a particularly good show about it, seen below, as did Laura Ingraham on Fox.

One of the first rules of change agency is to create a false crisis, a situation where people in a panic will make decisions, they otherwise wouldn’t make to usher in a change state to their daily lives. And nothing provokes change more than a war without end. I would think that the Hollywood anti-war protestors would be supporters of President Trump due to his desire to turn away from that chaos of global war machine politics. Instead they have turned toward the next crises, an invented diatribes like “climate change.” They are hoping to see the President impeached before the swamp is drained and all their tricks for creating crises are exposed. Wars used in this modern era, as we have clearly witnessed by the evidence, are make work programs for the lazy, and institutionalized thinkers, such as the Harvard educated Mitt Romney. Trump’s election has turned the world he thought he understood on its head leaving us all thankful that the common sense of the American people made an important change in electing Trump before it was too late, which in 2012 was at the precipice. Many in the Tea Party movement were seeing the writing on the wall, much earlier even than 2009 when things really started to get heated. But the panic now, for losers like “Pierre Delecto,” is that their make work wars have been exposed and that the world will forever be changed, and that they don’t understand their place in it.

Rush was correct, these political class players used our love of military, patriotism, and country to create a military complex that we would cheerfully send over seas to manage other people’s problems all in the name of crises management. Yet the crises were created by hidden agents operating behind the curtain, infusing a little anger here in some socialist cell in the Middle East, or making it so that America couldn’t fly into space but through Russian agents due to cutbacks at NASA. And we were all supposed to accept these ridiculous limits and provocations and like it. Then when we elected a different kind of politician that would turn the GOP into a true Republican Party, politicians like Mitt Romney and John Kasich fell into an all-out panic. They had spent their lives learning the rules and now the rules were all thrown out the window. If we had elected Romney, the Republican Party would essentially slide more to the left and become what the Democrats would like to be about now.

You can see the weakness of these arrogant institutionalists when pressed, Mr. Pierre Delecto uttered “C’est moi,” just to show everyone how educated and “New English” he is while confirming his clandestine Twitter account so critical of President Trump. He was so eager for some reporter at Slate to sniff at his breadcrumbs and tell the world that Romney wasn’t such a boring guy after all, and that he really hated the president desperately, because essentially, he had lost at his chance. He’d rather have someone in the White House that he understands even if they are from the other party. Sounds a lot like James Comey as he talked about drinking wine while leaving Washington after being fired from his job by Trump as another worthless beltway bureaucrat. These people, who we used to call conservatives are simply coastal liberals who have no idea what makes the rest of the country tick, and they have no desire to learn because they are representatives of institutionalism, and that behavior seeks to justify themselves through chaos and crises. They never did want any solutions to any problems, they just wanted problems so they could appear to do things about it, while making themselves wealthy off the process. A quick look at how much incoming senators make as opposed to what they make leaving office tells the whole story. It is insulting that these types of people were upset with Trump for wanting to host the G7 at Doral. I still think he should.

If not for the Trump election none of this would have been exposed, but it is now. Better yet, conservative outlets are no longer treating the subject as a vast conspiracy, but as real news, as it always was. The best thing that could happen is that people like Mitt Romney and John Kasich be flushed from conservative thinking and that the GOP form under the small government tendencies of the Trump administration. The hypocrisy couldn’t be more obvious, even from a giant media company like Disney who should love the Trump administration for its anti-war stance, its solution-based trade wars, and economic sanctions which hit villains in the pocketbook, not in innocent collateral damage. If it’s not obvious by now, our military is not exactly a bastion of conservatism. They are by nature big government bureaucrats which Trump learned while trying to put them in his administration. Troops might vote for Republicans, but generals are very liberal in their thinking, and they love to have perpetual wars with no solutions in sight because it keeps everyone fed with make work programs and reasons to celebrate with dinner parties for the heroes of the movement. You would think that more people would support pulling back the troops but now that someone in the Executive Branch is actually planning to do it, without asking for permission, the outrage is rather explosive, and for our benefit, very revealing. There is nothing new about it, but we do now see a truth that has always been there. And it’s a good thing that we finally did, and that news types, such as Rush Limbaugh are finally addressing it for what it is. We had to admit that our GOP was not fully conservative and that our former politicians were just as corrupt as the Democrats. To me, Trump’s anti-war stance is a liberal one, and he is not what I would call a strong conservative. But next to Mitt Romney and John Kasich, and many others, Trump is the most conservative politician to ever sit in the White House, or anywhere for that matter.

Rich Hoffman

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For a Stupid “B”: The solution to Lakota’s budget problems

I’d like to take the high road and not do a series of stories about school board members who go to hotel conferences and drink so much that they pass out face down in the bathroom with their underwear nowhere to be found. That might be embarrassing to the whole district and damaging during a political campaign. Rather, I’d like to discuss the facts and that it is clear to me that in the very large Lakota school district with over 16,000 students that the spending by the liberal school board is out of control and needs some common sense applied. Due to their reckless handling of the radical teacher’s union throwing most of the money from the 2013 tax increase toward teacher salaries, they are poised to do it again. Lucky for the Lakota school district, we have an election coming up, and we have a potential third vote solution to the spending problem, James Hahn.

Listening to the many problems uttered at the Lakota school board, if we were doing a business analysis of their problem it’s that they are overspending on their budget. We are paying extraordinary six figure salaries to too many employees and they simply aren’t worth the money. From the measure of the state, Lakota received a report card of a “B” which simply isn’t acceptable. For all the cheerleading that Julie Shaffer and Brad Lovell, who has a wife working as an administrator, have illustrated, that if only we gave teachers a raise, that we could maintain our A+ excellent ratings–people buying homes in the area and investing in businesses would have nothing to worry about. But they have failed and failed miserably. As elected officials they have enjoyed too much the drinks at those seminars more than doing the business of the district and now the failing grades are starting to show, even as declining enrollment if managed properly could have kept more tax increases off the ballot.

When they ask as a school board for a tax levy they are essentially saying that they have no desire to manage their employees. They would of course say that their collective bargaining agreements are what drive up the costs. They would then say that the reason they want to overpay teachers and yield to their threats for strikes if they don’t get even more ridiculous raises is that Lakota wants to retain their employees so they can get the good grades from the state. But guess what, that isn’t happening. A grade of a “B” isn’t good enough for our district especially for what we are paying.

To have average salaries of $70K to $80K per employee one might argue that its worth it to give kids the best opportunity for success. The trouble is, in comparison, other schools that are competing with Lakota who also have high rates of teacher salary, supposedly the best in the business are getting As on their report card. Lakota is paying for mediocrity. What obviously needs to happen is that Lakota needs to cut away their overpriced teachers who care more about gender neutrality and other leftist causes and bring in new talent that can flip the pay scale. What is there to lose if Lakota is already getting a “B” in its grade rating? Why wouldn’t we dump half of the teaching staff and start over with fresh young talent to balance the books?

Well, that is called management and currently three of the two school board members just aren’t willing to do that hard work. Currently Lynda O’Connor and Todd Parnell are functioning as conservatives trying to implement some management controls, and they are feeling the heat from it. What they need is a third vote on the Board, in this case James Hahn. I had the opportunity to meet James recently and he is a sharp, business guy. He understands how things should work and functioning in a three-vote majority, he could do some good, especially partnered with Lynda. I have known Lynda for a long time and at first, I was skeptical of her. But over time she has proven herself to be a solid conservative who wants to do the right thing. What she has needed and continues to need is that critical third vote.

Before we burn down the district with another levy vote and do all the television, radio and newspaper coverage that could be very hard on our district regarding its reputation, we have a chance to vote for James Hahn to actually manage the district at the Board of Education for the first real time in my lifetime, and I’ve been around Lakota for decades. This is a rare opportunity and the Republican Party is backing Jim and Lynda for this very important race during the upcoming election. But it won’t be easy. The levy activists and unionized radicals who hide behind children and declare that great harm will come to their minds if we don’t just throw endless amounts of money at them forever will do whatever they can to prop up Julie. She will get a lot of votes just because she is perceived as a lay down candidate for the teacher’s union who want their money at the expense of the rest of us.

This particular election is one of the most important in Butler County because it’s a chance not only to put fiscal responsibility in charge of one of the largest public budgets in the state, but that the failure to do so could easily cost most of us many more thousands and thousands of dollars a year for nothing. And by nothing, I mean a report card of a “B.” An average at best rating for a top level pay level that is detrimental to our future development. The big scam was to pay the teachers so we could keep our school system at a high grade so that people would continue to move in and buy homes and invest in businesses. But what we are seeing is the opposite, businesses are concerned about the high taxation and who wants to invest in a home in Lakota for a “B” when they can go to Mason with the same dollars and get an “A?”

Of course, Julie and her liberals on the school board want to keep things as they are, they are for big union contracts and the same old teacher problems, like wasting time and money on entertaining transgender bathrooms. And when their treasurer says that they are operating at a budget surplus they don’t think that’s a sign for them to tighten up their budget and spend better. For them it only means they must seek a tax increase and that their energy goes into how to make voters pass it rather than doing their jobs of managing the budget they do have, drive away the expensive teachers and bring in the new. For the grade of a “B,” why not? I personally am happy that finally we have a candidate in James Hahn who thinks correctly about these matters. And if only we could get him elected, we may finally solve many of the problems at Lakota. Hopefully we can, before the politics of the matter get truly nasty. I’d rather talk about budgets and not about the stories of bad conduct that easily could be justified.

Rich Hoffman

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An old picture, its much worse now. 

There is a Storm Coming: Lakota better have a boat

I think the best thing that could happen is that Julie Shaffer would lose her seat to a new school board candidate in this upcoming fall 2019 election. Jim Hahn is a potential for that, he’s running and is a business guy, and if the Lakota school board could pick him up and keep Todd Parnell, and Lynda O’Conner, there would finally be a three vote conservative presence that could avert the current levy plans that are in place for attempts beginning as early as 2020. If there is another tax attempt, I will say right now that I am all on board to resume the fight against it, and I understand that others are also interested. A gentle message to Lakota and all the real estate agents that spawn off the school system, there is a storm coming, so I hope you have built a boat, because the next levy attempt will be a bloodbath. The liberal activities of Brad Lovell Kelley Casper and of course Julie Shaffer along with the very disappointing sentiments that have evolved from the new superintendent Matt Miller, they have squandered a very good opportunity, a great budget with declining enrollment that has even further inflated the payroll for teachers who clearly aren’t worth the money, and they have been caught in gross mismanagement. The two conservative school board members have shown a bit of hope in properly managing the district, but the school board itself hasn’t gone far enough—the liberal activism is still a problem in the management of the government school.

I have no love for Julie Shaffer, we have a history together. When she couldn’t defeat my arguments back in 2012 she had to turn to identity politics to separate the No Lakota Levy group I represented for their 2013 attempt which they ended up winning by a very narrow margin. But it wasn’t Lakota who did anything to turn the tide, it was Sheriff Jones who wanted to put armed cops in the schools to protect them from mass shooters, or the potential. As it turned out, just as I said it would be, the whole thing was a scam, the money from the levy wasn’t used to cover cops or even security. Lakota did do those things, but ultimately the money was only to give teachers raises for their very high wages. My argument back then was that it didn’t bother me that Lakota had several teachers with six figure salaries, but that through collective bargaining the labor union wanted everyone to have those extraordinary salaries and back then the average wage was over 70K per year. We always hear stories about how low teachers are paid, well that’s not the case at Lakota, the teachers are well paid and the union props them all up and makes it nearly impossible to fire problem employees like the recent drama witnessed by the ex-Lakota employee, the transgender activist Emily Osterling. She sued the district for her proposed termination, and she won a settlement of $175,000 which the tax payers had to cough up ultimately.

Lakota is in my back yard so I want them to do well, but only until they become a pain in the ass in asking for too much money. I am proud of Lakota as long as they aren’t asking for money and by looking at their annual budget of over $220 million per year it is clear that the school board has not managed the money correctly. Now to their defense, the collective bargaining agreements by the union make normal value stream assessments nearly impossible. It takes three solid votes to really manage a district when there are five board members. It has taken a long time to get the two good ones that we have now and a lot of pushing and shoving. I have been asked many, many times to take on the job, but for my part, I have no desire to negotiate with a labor union all the time and I think the education system should be completely dismantled and recreated with a school choice competitive option. So its not a job for me, but we do need smart people who understand value creation to do the job. In that regard, there is an option in Jim Hahn.

However, the union vote will come out for their own preservation and they will vote this November for Julie Shaffer, so it will be a tough climb for Jim Hahn. He’s going to need some help and a good turnout. The union will not want him on the school board because they are against anything that does not stop the upward mismanagement of financial resources that are set to run out by 2023. Most of that $220 million budget is all in teacher salaries and that is just ridiculous. In an age where kids are learning more from hand held devices such as smart phones and personal computers, physical teachers are going the way of the drive-in. The test results just do not show that a teacher in the classroom make or break much in a student’s life. Most of the feel good stories are propaganda by the unions which young people are prone to be sucked in to, but are shallow in credibility at best. Just take a look at the Lakota website and their reported financials. They are short on substance but are flashy with surface points and comparisons to other districts who are every bit as much of a disaster as they are—because they are all driven by unionized employees hungry for inflated wages and as little work to do as possible.

The bloodbath that I am promising will be simple value stream analysis of what Lakota really does for our community, which is very little. The high school football games are only important to the students and their families, the other 100,000 people who live in the Lakota school system could care less and people like me without kids in the school system go through our daily days not even noticing the school buildings or their occupants. Life is busy and there is a lot for people like me to do that has nothing to do with the school system, and people like me are in the majority. All it takes is to get them to show up to vote, and they can easily out vote the union radicals which is why it takes Lakota an average of three levy attempts to get a tax increase passed. And to do that they have to resort to guerrilla warfare, not the goodness of people’s hearts. I would personally rather have the bloodbath rather than harm future business growth in our region with another Lakota tax increase, and argued that way, the way all businesses are measured, the story is quite clear. Lakota is not a value to our community, but a hindrance and the product they produce is failing and will continue to fail until the unions no longer run the government schools. That is, unless a third conservative is elected to the school board, and the budget crises that is coming can be averted. The value of the district won’t change but the bad reputation that will put Lakota through a lot of pain could be averted. And I would think that to be a good thing.

Rich Hoffman

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ΜΟΛΩΝ ΛΑΒΕ: Understanding why America has a gun culture and to the level that it needs

Not that I ever questioned the meanings of our various constitutions, the United States one, and the one from my home state of Ohio, but it was good to read them anyway fresh off the calls for gun control that occurred recently in Texas and Ohio, even by members of the Republican Party. In some cases, it was even Trump supporters who were trying to justify new bans for “assault weapons” and mental health red flag laws. I’m glad that I particularly read the Ohio Constitution again because it is written so beautifully and is so clear on the matter. Guns were never gifted out by a nice government for target practice recreation. They are part of our constitutions both state and federal because there is likely going to occur many times in the history of our country a period where we would need guns to take back our government and instill new management. And with them controlling our military, people would need equal firepower to rise up against them and stop them. That is why there are 100 round magazines available for people to purchase and why there are silencers that sell next to beef jerky. Because we may need them to rip our government out of the hands of bad people and return it to a constitutional republic instead of some chaos driven democratic socialism that is hell bent on anarchy then total control of our way of life.

I am not one of those ΜΟΛΩΝ ΛΑΒΕ types who are tattooing the words on my body or flying a flag in my garage warning off the government with the words “come and take it,” asking for a fight. The Greek phrase comes from the Battle of Thermopylae, which was recently popularized by the movie 300. It’s the battle where the Persian Empire of Xerxes was attacking Greece out of revenge for the previous defeat of a Persian emperor and they were met with a small force that did well as they were greatly outnumbered but ultimately fought to the death. Our modern equivalent to that statement and sentiment is “Remember the Alamo” for much the same reasons. In both of those cases the emphasis is on death and being outnumbered and I reject both of those ideas. In our present state, we outnumber them by a lot and I have no plans on dying. When you are better than they are, smarter than they are, and all other things are equal, why would we be the ones to die in such an engagement? So I am not one of those who use such phrases to articulate my position on guns. I’d rather them not come and try to take it because I wouldn’t want to hurt anybody.

However, what is being proposed by all sides of the political discourse on gun control as a result of these mass shootings is talk of government buy backs, and expanded back ground checks by the same government that obviously is doing everything it can to get rid of Donald Trump as president just aren’t on the table. For them to be we would have to trust our current government completely and just do whatever they tell us which obviously would be a dumb idea. I would argue that we are in a civil war right now. Donald Trump is the result of that war from my side against the government forces who have been making a joke of America for a long time. I prefer the election method as opposed to the armed opposition to something like what we have learned about the FBI, that they have been dirty cops picking winners and losers in the political theater, and they have been caught only because Trump was president. Many of us have known for a long time that such a thing was possible, but now we have proof. Gun control and more legislative turmoil isn’t even in the realm of consideration. We are one election away from open and hostile conflict similar to the first Civil War, the people against the government forces rather than North and South, so especially now, it is not the time to talk about gun control. We are presently fighting to keep our Republic intact from a socialist incursion. That is essentially the case of the mass shootings and why they are happening more often, the results of social decline similar to what we have seen in Venezuela. The gun violence is there to mask the Democrat failures just as Nicolas Maduro does in Venezuela.

It’s not that a liberal dog whistle was cast to inspire these Manchurian candidate type shooters to go on mass shooting rampages just hours a part in a period where Democrats are obviously losing in a big way to the Trump administration, and they needed to change the story. But all the kids who led these attacks are products of our liberalized public education system and are fringe leftists with limited intellectual development that I would consider deliberately functioning from clipped wings of brain development in our young people with bad educations, addictions to sex, and an over reliance on drugs, illegal and prescribed. Most of these modern victims won’t grow up to be mass shooters, but liberals know a certain percentage will, even if they don’t know them personally. It’s a numbers game and when those kids snap, Democrats are ready to make the tragedy an advantage for their side, and way too many Republicans are willing to share in the guilt and go along with the proposals to look like they are playing a bipartisan game. But its not about cooperation at all, its war and everyone knows that deep down inside. And if our government fails to protect our interests from internal domestic enemies, then we have to rely on our guns to hold our ground and take back what belongs to us—our country.

In my interactions with people, as I’ve said, I can read the Ohio Constitution or the federal Bill of Rights and understand the intent without a supreme court justice telling me what they mean. I get it, and I participate in the political system to keep the peace. I write on this blog and do many other things to do my part to keep things from getting out of hand, but to ensure that my side wins. And when I say my side, I mean the side of our founding documents and a rejection of progressive politics and the generalities of global liberalism. I also know that there are vast amounts of people who are tattooing ΜΟΛΩΝ ΛΑΒΕ on their arms and across their backs and they mean it when they say, “come and take it.” Undoubtably when the police come to try to take their weapons away because they may be victims of some future “red flag” law they will turn them over without incident. But some of them will make the Waco incident and Ruby Ridge looking like a preschool coloring book project. There isn’t any outcome where America does like Australia or New Zealand, or anywhere in Europe and just gives over their guns and puts their blind trust into a government when we know better. Its just not going to happen.

What needs to happen as a result of these shootings is an educational issue, not a physical law that puts everyone back to sleep and gradually erodes the Second Amendment. Our founding documents specifically warn against just these kinds of intrusions on our liberties, especially by a political class that is so full of hatred and class warfare as the Democrats are. It was their activism that has turned up the pressure for which these shooters acted, whether we are talking about the psychedelic effects of marijuana legalization, broken homes where the mothers are married to government welfare checks instead of good, solid male role models, or failed liberal policies that have turned up the tension to the degree that potential mass shooters want to do something to help their “people” such as the Dayton shooter did. But their activism becomes our problem when one of these pimple-popping young people takes up guns and tries to kill a bunch of innocent bystanders. When that happens we have an obligation to stop them. And clearly the state is not equipped to protect us from such acts. We need expanded carry laws so that we can all defend each other on a moment’s notice. Because these killers are just getting started. I predict much more carnage rather than less, and the fault is in our education systems, not in the guns themselves. We have a failure of government and we are at a point where we need to replace it. We have taken steps to do so with Donald Trump. But that may not be enough. If that proves to be the case, we will need a lot more guns, a lot more ammunition capacity in our clips, and more power behind them.

Rich Hoffman

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