Tag: Arizona Law

Why Democrats Hate Trump and Republicans in General: The choice between being a winner or a loser

It took a few days for it all to settle in, the debacle for the Democrats in Iowa, the terrible reaction to the State of the Union address President Trump gave this week, and the acquittal in the senate of the failed impeachment attempt of that same president, but the essence of the failures of the Democrat Party are deep and reflect an America most people despise, that of the loser. Its one thing to have compassion for people who are born losers, its quite another to allow ourselves to be controlled by them. We don’t want losers telling us what to do, and we certainly don’t want our lives limited by them. And what we saw this week by Democrats under great pressure, because the Republican Party under President Trump’s leadership is working very well, are members of the other party that just can’t compete, and they are fully aware of it. All their attempts to “equalize” the situation failed leaving them essentially to be a heaving mess of below the line thinking that nobody finds attractive. It reminded me why I simply don’t like Democrats, its not due to their race, their sex, or even their essential philosophy they say is steeped in compassion for other people, the planet, or even the less talented, its because their view of the world is rooted in negative victimization and nothing else, and that was never what becoming an American or staying an American was ever supposed to be about.

Plenty has been said by lots of smart people regarding the events of this past week, but nothing says incompetency like the Iowa caucuses. When people asked me about it, and these other events my reply was to compare it to a football game. Any quarterback from even a high school team can hit a running receiver in stride 30 yards down the field if they know where they will be at precisely the correct time that the ball is released from their hand, so long as they have 5 seconds or more to make the decision to throw. However, when a quarterback must play against a good defense and the line of the opposition is pressing down on that quarterback in 2.5 seconds or less, then even good quarterbacks will look like bumbling fools on the field of play. The Democrats are used to having all the time in the world to throw the ball, Republicans in the past have not pressed them out of some gentlemanly agreement to be equally deficient in performance. That is until President Trump came along from the private sector and started applying expectations to government—which is the source of their hatred of him. Suddenly there were expectations on Democrats that they just were not ready to deal with, and instead of trying to get better over the last three years, they have bet everything on getting rid of the expectation, symbolized in President Trump.

The media has gone along with the game allowing the Democrats to feel empowered as a political class to some level of competency so long as there was never any real measure. But Trump brought measures with him to Washington D.C., the same kind of measures that all private industry is judged by and the essence of it is that Democrats just weren’t ready. And when it was showtime in Iowa, it was an embarrassing mess. And when the State of the Union speech was given by President Trump, the Democrats could only sit there and listen as they spent all their time and energy being the opposition to Trump’s measures that they couldn’t share any joy in the long list of accomplishments that the President spoke about for over an hour straight. All they could do is sit there like the victims they have chosen to be, or to protest all together by not showing up, wearing white outfits to reflect the women’s suffrage movement from the turn of the last century, or do as Nancy Pelosi did at the end of the speech, rip it up because they had found themselves behind on all of it.

Then of course the next day, Republicans in the senate, except for the chameleon Mitt Romney, voted to acquit the President of the attempted coup by Democrats by quelling impeachment dashing any hopes of removing Trump from office before the election in November. That is what having a winning attitude will do for a person or a party, people tend to unite behind it and bask in its joy. But when your entire platform is about being a victim, that’s not at all an attractive prospect. People may see themselves as losers, but few people are happy staying that way and that’s all the Democrats are offering, which is why as a party, they are failing so epically. I hate to say it again, but I predicted all this many years ago and sure enough, its happing right on schedule. It’s not that Trump himself did it all, he was but the vehicle. It really comes down to personal beliefs, if they are above or below the line. You can’t build a great anything if the participants have a loser attitude. Trump was elected by an excited base because they recognize in Trump someone who wants to win. They do too, and so the Trump base was born. Its not hard to figure out, its something that evolved out of a natural trajectory of thought.

What you will find dear reader when talking to the “other side” whether its in an elevator at an apartment complex in Hyde Park which is full of anti-Trump socialites who know more about wine than they do politics, or the angry mother at Kroger shopping for weekend snacks for her family while running all three of her kids from one sporting event to another and doesn’t have time to know what’s going on in the outside world aside from what she sees on Yahoo’s front page of news, is that people who dislike Trump or Republicans in general are angry at their own lack of understanding about the world and their laziness to do the work in learning more so they could be more informed. They want to remain below the line people, people obsessed with what they can’t do, or what they can’t be. They want to relish in their victimhood because they just don’t have the ambition to take a positive position in their own lives on anything, and the Republicans of Trump make them feel the pressure to be more, and they hate it.

When people say they hate Trump what they are really saying is that they are too lazy to keep up and that they want to go back to the days where they didn’t feel so much pressure. Where they could give a little statement to the press about something and the media would run with it, but nobody really expected anybody to do anything about it. Democrats had likely the worst week they have had in years not because anything changed for them, but now there are measures to compare to, and that pressure is something they are not used to dealing with. It should be expected that people wanting to remain victims in life would be unhappy with the sudden growth of the country under the Trump presidency which expects good results about everything. Ripping up the SOTU speech the way Nancy Pelosi did was no different than all the attempts to impeach Trump, or to convict him just because he had expectations, they were too lazy to live with. Instead they kept their eyes on victimization when the Trump administration was bringing empowerment and before they could blink, the Democrats had lost their base almost completely. And now its too late for them to do anything about it.

Rich Hoffman

The Buckeye Firearms Association Endorses George Lang: Getting HB 178 passed

The best hope for a continuation of House Bill 178 getting passed in the Senate is to have George Lang there to help convince Mike DeWine to sign the bill, which modifies weapons law, permitting concealed carry without a license, and many other positive reforms. While many are still in debate about to what extent the Second Amendment can or should be regulated, the crazy leftist who shot up a night spot in Dayton has many conservatives weak-kneed and in need of some hand holding in the aftermath. Of the people running for the 4th District Senate Seat in the upcoming primary between George Lang, Candice Keller and Ding Dong Lee Wong, only George Lang has the clout and ability to help Mike DeWine get off the fence and back to the table to sign such a bill as HB 178. As we get closer to the primary in March, its important that voters understand the strategy and best options for the issues they are most passionate about, and in Ohio the gun rights concerns are a big topic, so a bit of context is worth our time and consideration.

Candice Keller has been asked by the GOP to step down for her comments made in August in reaction to mass shootings in general. I think many people who are logical understood that much of what she said is true, about fatherless homes, and drug users being the cause of many mass shootings, but what hurt her is that she brought up Nazi language and tousled into the gay rights debate in a way that was completely unnecessary, and it hurt the GOP brand, and her stance on Second Amendment rights, which she has been a strong supporter. But she also walked right into the poo poo by giving opponents of bills like HB 178 a face to throw darts at, and therefor a great excuse for Mike DeWine to move away from signing it. So long as Candice was a face of Second Amendment rights in Columbus then she is hurting all the politicians who support the bill but had the political skill to stay out of trouble when pressed by the media for reaction to such catastrophes like the shooting in Dayton last year. This is another reason that the media has given Candice so much prominent coverage—most of it negative, because it has forced this issue underground again and made her look like a front runner in the 4th Seat Senate race. But there is a better option, a much better one in George Lang who is every bit as much of a Second Amendment supporter, I think more so, however, he has the political skill to unite people around the bill in the Senate to the Governor that Candice just doesn’t have. And even if she did, it will take her years to rebuild her political clout within the GOP to be effective in those types of discussions.

The media would like to make the race for that senate seat look much tighter ahead of the primary with its secret hopes that enough people might vote for Candice so that she can be elected to that seat only to waste it on more political scandal, which would then effectively kill HB 178 for many years. However, running for a big office seat like those in the senate takes politicians who can raise money, advertise, and then not step in it when pushed by the media for comments, who can stay on target literally with their message under great stress. And to that point only George Lang has any remote possibility of being an effective senator in the 4th District. In the financial reports for the candidates that were due on Friday of last week, George Lang had cash reserves of well over $200,000 where Candice only had $12,000. So that leaves her only strategy to hope to stay relevant is to be a rock chucker and hope that she can get some headlines and free coverage to get her message out. But the problem is, the GOP wants her to resign, so any coverage she gets is always going to be negative.

Meanwhile the Buckeye Firearms Association has endorsed George Lang for Ohio’s 4th Senate district and by mid-February the NRA is going to give its support as well. George’s record and ability has the recognized strength to advance gun rights as a senator and that momentum should not be wasted by anybody who wants to see bills like HB 178 become law without becoming so watered down by passage that it would be virtually worthless. I would encourage Candice whom I think genuinely cares about gun rights to get behind George as the best option to represent the 4th District in this great debate. But more than that, George has the ability to put that needed arm around Governor DeWine’s neck to get the signature needed to make HB 178 a reality. Those are the kinds of political skills that go well beyond a simple vote in the chamber and how things really happen in any political body.

Candice due to her lack of political skill, not necessarily her fault—time will fix a lot of that—but she’s had to take some of these extreme positions on her Facebook page to try to cover her lack of connections to secure funding for a campaign. It’s a page out of the Trump playbook, but he was rich and didn’t need to raise money for advertising in the traditional way. New media can take a creative politician far, but not that far, and her lack of ability to gather a crowd that will give her thousands of dollars in donations is something that can’t be overcome with political theater alone. There needs to be other layers to the reach of a senator in any district and that range and donation ability is the kind of leverage that gets you a lunch date with the governor to even pitch the ideas outside of chamber protocol. Everything is about political clout and that is how after this 2020 election cycle HB 178 has the best chance to get back out into the voting cycle.

The NRA knows George is the best chance and so does the Buckeye Firearms Association, and others who are sure to follow. If the true goal is to get pro firearm legislation solidified in Ohio then George is the best option. If the goal is simply to get elected into the senate by any means possible and Candice has to be forced to show all these extreme cards to get the free publicity, then she can’t truly say that she wants HB 178 to pass, because she has no ability to help advance it as a senator or as a member of the House. The GOP is distancing themselves from her and I would say to Candice that her political future isn’t over, it needs repaired. Helping to get HP 178 to a senator who can help on the other side and secure sentiment with the governor would go a long way to repairing that relationship. And that would take more guts for all the right reasons than destroying everything from the inside out just to get a political win for the short run.

Rich Hoffman

George Lang Attracts Larger Crowd in West Chester than Democrat Presidential Candidates: The activism of media coverage and what they don’t tell you

Over the weekend I was able to catch up on some of the Democrat coverage of the presidential candidates while campaigning in Iowa head of their primary and it became very obvious that the Trump rally we had in West Chester last week where George Lang, Warren Davidson, Sheriff Jones and Steve Buckingham from the Trump campaign drew larger crowds. You can see those crowds in the following Twitter coverage from that event. I didn’t think about it much at the time because I was just enjoying the festivities. Everyone had a great time and it seemed to bring out the best in people Between the Butler County GOP and the Trump team they brought in Chick fil-a to feed everyone and the event was a top notch rally in so many respects. But the people coming didn’t know that and they showed up just to hear people just talking about Trump and in large numbers. Before the rally many of us talked to the press, Channel 5 came out and covered it, and so did WLW radio, but not many others. The response we received was that “you guys love Trump in Butler County, where’s the story?” After the rally once the pictures started going up from people who where there, it became obvious what the story was, the media didn’t want to cover more people coming to hear these guys talk than who are going to see the leading presidential candidate for the Democrats. For the proof of that I would like to point you dear reader to the following article by the Cincinnati Enquirer talking about an upcoming senate race between Kathy Wyenandt and Candice Keller for the 4th District of Ohio. Its very, very interesting.

https://www.cincinnati.com/story/news/2019/08/09/kathy-wyenandt-meet-democrat-who-wants-challenge-candice-keller-senate-race/1954587001/

I don’t like to point at media bias as some below the line reason for something, but to the average person who doesn’t know much about politics, the Cincinnati Enquirer attempted to paint the scandal ridden Republican whom the party is asking to step down from her office over several very misplaced comments to Kathy Wyenandt, the Democrat that they are trying to flip a seat to blue in the very conservative Butler County—a long held objective among the liberal news room directors and newspaper heads. Its not the news they care about, it’s the political objective which they quite openly these days advocate. The truth of that article was that there are two other candidates running for that Republican seat, George Lang and Ding Dong Wong. But the Enquirer left them out of the article and tried to paint the whole race for senate between the two women—one of which is as good as toast even within her own party.

That article was written back in August of 2019 while the news of Candace Keller’s latest scandal was hot on the press—so the intent was clear to the Enquirer’s readership, promote the Republican that is in trouble so people remember her name while promoting the Democrat woman who normally wouldn’t have a snow balls chance in Hell of making it to the freezer for preservation. Both must be artificially propped up to look like front runners in that upcoming election and the Cincinnati Enquirer was happy to play that role. So fast forward a few months to this rally for Trump in West Chester held on a night when he couldn’t even come, because he was in Iowa doing another rally ahead of the Democrats and their primary there drawing huge crowds as usual, and people showed up to see George Lang and Warren Davidson speak and the enthusiasm for those two was incredible. That was the news story that none of the outlets wanted to cover because it goes against their desires for the upcoming election for which they are desperate to shape the story.

The rally was held in very large space that none of us thought we’d come close to filling, yet the pit in front of the stage was at least double any event that Joe Biden was able to attract over the week leading up to the primary. If the news wanted to truly report the news, they’d be interested in that little fact. Instead however of reporting how many people in Butler County and specifically West Chester were interested in attending a rally where these local politicians were speaking, one of them being the frontrunner in that 4th Senate Seat race, they would have at least covered it from that perspective. “West Chester rally for local GOP candidates outdraw Democrats for presidential candidates in Iowa.” Because that was the truth of the matter. I mentioned that observation to a few people while at that rally but it wasn’t until later and listing to the speech by Sheriff Jones where he had the crowd chanting “USA, USA, USA” that it became apparent just how many people were there.

I think based on what I saw that George Lang could draw a bigger crowd within his district than any of the presidential candidates who are leading in the polls could anywhere in the country. There is more enthusiasm for George from the base of Republicans who support him than there are for any Democrat. I might have thought that before that West Chester rally, but after, there is no question. Knowing that Trump wasn’t going to be at that rally, people showed up to hear what they considered the next best thing, George Lang and Warren Davidson speak to an excited audience. And the Cincinnati Enquirer skipped out on the opportunity to cover it because they didn’t like the story. It went against their activism of trying to paint the disgraced Candace Keller as the leader who would go against the Democrat in Butler County. What they were really up to was attempting to convince the un-informed masses to clear the deck chairs for a conversion of a deep red district into a blue one by removing the biggest red piece in the puzzle from the board all together. And if they had covered the West Chester rally, it would undo the way they have poised the story to continue into the primary in March.

The Journal in Hamilton isn’t any different. The activism on their part is rampant as well, it’s the reason that all these newspapers have made themselves irrelevant. The news happens faster than they can report it, they have a bias that does not reflect the views of their readership, and they are uninteresting. I used to contribute many articles to the Western Star when I lived in Warren County for a number of years. Back then, it was the news of record locally. But now its out of business because when people want to read a news story about these things, they just open up their phone and are free to get whatever information they want. The Enquirer and The Journal never have properly adapted. If it wasn’t for the people over 60 years of age, they’d be out of business right now. All newspapers are headed over the cliff and this is the reason. But blogs like this one report these events and its much easier for a consumer of information to click here and retrieve the information months from now than it is to get a little 400 word article that is all about political activism on their part, into the mind of a busy consumer. So there you have it, since they didn’t report what a great event the West Chester rally was, now you can see it for yourself and also know that Candace Keller is not the face of the primary election, she’s the one that Republicans are trying to get out of the way due to her radicalized comments. And that is the truth of the matter that the Enquirer tried to promote in favor of their handpicked stooge, Kathy Wyenandt.

Rich Hoffman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rich Hoffman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rich Hoffman

REVENGE: Before we talk about violance against Democrats, let’s vote

It took me a while to cool down enough to even talk about the congressional impeachment vote they held on December 18th, a few decades to the exact day that Bill Clinton was impeached. The date and precise timing of the effort was obvious revenge for that vote which was then held by Republicans, only for a much more justified reason. Bill Clinton had actually perjured himself and broke the law. For this one against Trump, and all those of us who voted for him, this impeachment vote was a shit shot in the dark for a losing party on their heels falling out of bounds. Sure, sometimes the ball does go in the basket, only these idiots weren’t even on the right basketball court where the game was being played, so their shot had no chance of scoring any points. It was in all aspects a resolution to a prediction I had made many years ago on WAAM radio in Ann Arbor, Michigan where I predicted the end of the Democrat Party as we knew it. Well, this was the end for them, and for that, perspective took some time to come to.

To be fair I watched the debates prior to the impeachment vote just as I did two decades ago for the Clinton hearing, and for the truth of it, the intellect of the Democrats has dropped considerably. They were always bad, Dick Gephardt was never a vestige of intellect. Back then they did a much better job of hiding their socialism for which is at the heart of all their party philosophy. But at least there was an assumption of law and order, and of fairness. We all had much higher expectations of congresspeople and senators at that time. Well, not anymore. The people talking for the Trump impeachment were lost, mindless, blind ideologues of a failed philosophy who really didn’t know what to do next. Impeaching the president was a political move meant to put a black mark on his resume prior to the next election hoping that it would cost him voters. Their short-sighted virtue meant that they had lowered the bar on impeachment to anything. When another Obama type was president in the future, this case provided a means of swift removal the next time Republicans held the House and Senate as they did in 2012 and could have ripped Barack Obama from the White House rather easily for the scandals that were obvious, not to mention the ones that weren’t.

Then more reality came into a clearer focus for me. I had recently vacationed in Disney World and stepped out of my daily grind to see how normal people live, who don’t pay so much attention to politics like you and I do dear reader. As I watched those idiots talk it was clear that they didn’t know that the latest episode of The Mandalorian was released on Disney+ and that a new Star Wars film was being released this week and that pop culture was entirely focused on these events. Nobody cared about impeachment of the president. All they cared about was whether they had money in their wallets and enough credit to buy a new car. Congress had lost its credibility a long time ago with most people and Trump understood that as he took the stage in Michigan to an overflow crowd in Battlecreek to berate the attempts made against him.

And on cue, the same losers who thought the new Star Wars film didn’t have enough lesbian sex in it, or progressive political stances, because Disney did listen and wanted to fix things with the fans, so they rated the film poorly hoping to hurt its financial success, they had up the impeachment articles hoping to shape the narrative against Trump, as they had planned with the Democrat Party for years. Only Baby Yoda was still trending higher than impeachment perplexing those on the left who for the life of them couldn’t understand why. The Democrats and their supporters were just out of ideas and the world has moved on without them, and for all the reasons that they feel they have to cheat to win elections, such as tampering with the 2020 one to even have a shot with this impeachment attempt, they are completely disconnected as to what people want in a president or their elected representatives. Most people have already moved on from them and don’t pay them any attention, at all. I think that is dangerous for a republic, but it’s a grim reality.

My first thoughts during the impeachment vote was to inflict violence against them and overtake our government back into reasonable hands. It wouldn’t take much for a person like me to organize and I spent much of the 18th thinking in just such a fashion, until it became obvious that these idiots didn’t have the slightest clue as to what they were doing. They were pretentious and disconnected from reality, and in the long game, that was a good thing. Their vote essentially sealed their own fate as a party, because for those who did care, and were watching and not thinking about the latest iTunes download from Tayler Swift, the next election would be hell for them because the Democrats had just pissed off all the people who still do care, and they were failing to bring people over into their cause. There were fewer stars from Hollywood willing to make political stands in 2020 than there were even in 2016 and this impeachment effort wasn’t rallying people toward their side, it was pushing them away.

Most people only have time for so much in their lives, and people these days don’t have time or energy for this impeachment attempt by loser Democrats who they can see can’t compete with Donald Trump in the upcoming election. The writing is quite clear on the wall, and apparently everyone can see it but the Democrats who are still stuck on the impeachment revenge of December 18th, 1998 of Clinton, their knight in shining armor. And if they have been upset about that very justified event, what do they think is going to happen over the next 30 years after this Trump attempt? Do they think we’ll just all go to sleep and forget about it? Hell no, people like me will want to paint our homes in their blood for many years to come, they will never get off the hook and that is something they seem to never have considered. Perhaps they are just too stupid to think about it, but whatever it is, they have stamped themselves to it forever, and to their own detriment.

So I would offer that the best revenge is to activate the votes for all Republicans in the next election and to show up in droves to put them in office and knock out the Democrats from every position up and down the line. It is better to take them out of office than to think about putting bullets in their heads with a bloody rebellion. Why get all dirty when all you have to do is show up and vote? Now if we find out that the Democrats find a way to massively tamper with the elections, which I wouldn’t put it past them to try, then we can talk about violence. But for now, we have all the cards to play with and they have nothing. The best thing is to beat them in elections, which at this point should be easy. Then lets talk about the future.

Rich Hoffman

Anger and Revenge: Democrats impeachment vote is a shot at us all

The only thing that comes to my mind regarding the current congress of Democrats voting to impeach President Trump is anger and a necessity for revenge. When I think back to when Republicans had both the House and Senate and could have impeached President Obama on many more accounts, now that this ridiculous standard against Trump has been set, it is clear that we should have. We could have impeached Obama over Benghazi, Fast and Furious, the IRS scandal, the off the mic promises to the Russians that he’d give them more support after the election, we could have thrown Obama out of office before the end of his first term.

Instead of calling for violence against our government for participating in this coup, I’m going to think about more pleasant things for a few days while I cool down. Its not enough to call this impeachment vote a joke, because at the heart of it is aggression against everyone who voted for Trump, and that isn’t OK.

Rich Hoffman

Democrats Aren’t Very Smart: McConnell is doing the right thing

Let me explain something to all Democrats, the same thing I have been saying to family and associates at all these Holiday events, congresspeople should consider themselves lucky that Mitch McConnell is working with the White House on this impeachment trial in the senate. As I’ve said on many occasions, I do not hate Democrats. But I do look at them as undeveloped people who require more learning in the ways of life. We are not all equal, some of us work harder than others, some of us are smarter than others, and some of us care a whole hell of a lot more than others. Democrats are far behind on the evolutionary instruction that it takes to be a complete person. They do not have a right to destroy our republic just because they cannot create a viable candidate to run for the office of president—which is all this congressional impeachment attempt has been. Democrats are lucky that they aren’t being beaten in the streets with a war, rather just having McConnell state that the impeachment is going nowhere in the senate. Because if that wasn’t the case, then violence against participating Democrats is the next step, and they don’t want that.

People do not have a right to ruin your life, and that is what Democrats are attempting to do by removing President Trump. The Dow Jones this past week closed at over 28,000 and has the potential of going into the mid-30s once Trump is re-elected in 2020. I’ve spelled it out in these articles that I have done over the last decade. I was the one who said what would happen to our economy if we just took away all the ridiculous, self-imposed regulatory burdens that were stifling our way of life. There was a very interesting article in the Wall Street Journal on December 14th titled, “Economists Got the Decade All Wrong. They’re Trying to Figure Out Why.” Well, I explained it with hundreds of articles on the matter. Everyone was predicting a recession; this is the first one we’ve had in America where a recession did not happen. Well, its due to Trump unleashing the market. That alone makes him one of the greatest presidents that we’ve ever had. And really, we could point to many hundreds of real accomplishments as to why he should be re-elected. Who cares what party he’s from? Democrats have benefited from the Trump presidency as much as anybody, yet they can’t admit it because they are just too stupid for their own good.

The Trump economy is great because he didn’t follow the advice of all the micro managers who cause economic downturns. Trump ignored the cycles and concentrated on positive pro-growth influences and the results are unmistakable, and far from an accident. Since the Trump election, consumer confidence in the markets has exploded and have continued in spite of all the attempts at bad news by the Democrats over the last three years. We should all be angry at the attempted coup by the FBI—ran by Democrats. We should deeply resent this impeachment attempt, since the FBI coup failed. And we should hate the attempts to sabotage the markets with so much negativity and second guessing that went on with the Chinese trade dispute. In spite of everything we still have a strong economy with the potential of much, much better days ahead. So why should we care about Democrats and their desire to impeach Trump because as a party they are trying to attack our way of life? Its insane to think we should care.

I’m not one who thinks everyone deserves a seat at the table out of fairness if the other participants haven’t worked very hard to understand how life works. Even that the Wall Street Journal would consider exploring why the economy did not behave the way they predicted should say everything about why Democrats are not prepared for this election, because they don’t understand market forces and how the psychology of human behavior works the way it does. I sympathize that not everyone thinks about these things as much as I do for instance. When I talk to people, especially at these holiday settings, I am shocked by how much people like to drink and to forget, as opposed to stimulate their intellects so that they can make better decisions. I don’t talk to people much because its often a hindrance to furtherance, so I just let everyone else gabble on sipping on their stupid alcoholic drinks and rolling in the mud of their own ignorance trying to sound smart when the only way they can do so is to get everyone drunk around them to create the illusion. If that’s what they want to do, have at it, but don’t expect the rest of the world to cater to your weaknesses. That is precisely what Democrats expect out of this impeachment trial and once McConnell signaled that he wasn’t going to play along, the wind went out of their sails quickly, as it should have.

Republicans and Democrats are not equal sides of some American philosophy, Democrats are typically stupid people not very intellectually curious about the ways of the world. It doesn’t say much that most educators are Democrats, because they have simply attempted to dumb down the system to match their scope. But they aren’t very smart, they don’t know much about history, they aren’t very smart on understanding markets, they don’t know much about business, or even international philosophy of intertwining cultures. If they did know more, they would likely end up being Republicans. I would say that Trump used to be a Democrat and the more he learned about life, the more he became a Republican. I’ve said often that Ronald Reagan once thought about communist ideas and was a supporter of socialism when he was a young actor. As he grew up he became more of a conservative and eventually became a great Republican. The difference between the two, is not that they are equals, but rather evolutionary states of being. Democrats are lazy thinkers and that’s why they are stupid. They may be nice people who shop at the GAP and spend money going out to dinner, but they are not great characters of intellect who have any answers, let alone equal points of view.

And that’s what’s at stake with this impeachment, it’s the stupid people versus the smart people. Smart people generally aren’t born that way, they work to be in that state. Stupid people decide to be stupid because they are either too lazy to do the work, or they are just not courageous enough to step out of the crowd to establish themselves as people of intellect when the tides stand against it. That in itself doesn’t make them bad people, just people who are not far enough along their evolutionary tract to qualify to make decisions within a republic for which we all stand. Being a Republican is an evolutionary path more than just a side of the pyramid for which everyone has their own point of view that must be compromised. McConnell and the rest of the Republicans have an obligation to stand with Trump, and that lesson is what Democrats are going to have to face and they should consider themselves lucky. They could experience great violence, and if we had a less civil republic, they likely wouldn’t be walking around in a healthy condition.

Rich Hoffman

Lisa Page, the Latte Sipping Prostitute: Whores come in all types, even in the FBI

I’ve had a lot of them, but one of the best phrases I’ve ever come up with to describe a certain sector of the voting population is that of the infamous Latte Sipping Prostitute. It’s a kind of woman who uses her sexuality to control men toward political measures to satisfy their instinctual needs at motherhood and all the neurosis of a panic driven imbecile and the men go along with these antics because they don’t want to make these women unhappy denying them sex when desired. Where a bar whore or a street walker might sell sex for dope, or even a place to stay for the night, the latte sipping prostitute does much the same for reasons just as malicious, only society doesn’t have a proper measure, so the antics are often overlooked, at least until I came up with that term several years ago to describe school levy supporters. The term could apply to just about any socialite, and certainly tells a proper story about those kinds of women who otherwise are looked at falsely as stewards of good conduct. As a white man, I’m not supposed to have such opinions, yet I do, and they are entirely accurate ways to portray the kind of political element that we encounter often, especially when it comes to the FBI lawyer Lisa Page who was sleeping with the FBI investigator Peter Strzok at the highest levels of the case against Hillary Clinton and would eventually seek through pillow talk and texts the overthrow of an American election. No small matter.

And as Trump mocked the two lovers at a recent rally, he had a right. The two FBI agents abused their power and were driven to crimes and rightly brought to ruin. But not because of some ethical conduct on behalf of the FBI, who tried to cover up the affair and their political activism, but because Strzok’s wife found the text messages and let them out to the public. Page was married, so was Strzok and when the wife approached Page, she behaved mystified that the jealous woman had misunderstood the nature of their affair. After all, what’s a few sleepovers at a local hotel? Just sex, not necessarily an affair. That was after all how Lisa Page reacted before the world knew her name and all the intimate details of her relationship with an FBI lover. And after many months more of embarrassing nightly reminders of that mistake, and surely a husband of her own very jealous, the pressure is getting to her and she wants it to stop.

Yet she never should have played the game. She along with her boyfriend tried to overturn an election, and she used sex to manipulate an FBI agent to act against his better judgment. Sure, its his fault to fall for it, but she was certainly acting as a latte sipping prostitute as I have defined it in previous cases. It may not be a politically correct term, but it is an accurate one. People like her do this kind of thing all the time. Yet when they get caught, they attempt to hide behind society’s lack of definitions for this activity. She may regret what she had done now, it certainly wasn’t a smart career move. However she did play it and now the consequences are hard to deal with which should be expected.

To call these types of people a whore is what is debated, of course by other latte sipping prostitutes who want to look in the mirror and think of themselves as good people and outstanding community members. Just as Lisa Page, according to her own text messages to her lover was perplexed as to why Peter’s wife would think they were having an affair just because they were sleeping with one another is equivalent to a bar whore not thinking of the sex they sell as a relationship but as a product. Most people in their lives are selling something. My measure for the authenticity of it or not can be determined by the fine work of Mihaly Csikszentmilhalyi’s great book Flow. If what you are doing for a living is purely for the exchange of money or some power connected to it, then to some degree or another you are no different than a prostitute selling sex for money, or in doing as Lisa Page was attempting, to use sex to manipulate an FBI agent into overthrowing an American election. All the behavior is the same. Going back to the origins of the latte sipping prostitute title I have given so many, such people use sex and their power of entry to it to sway their spouses into supporting school levies and other tax measures, so the behavior is no different and is just another level of prostituting themselves to gain something not quite authentic.

Even a whore wants to think of their profession as something beneficial even going to such measures of thinking that they help relationships where bed rituals are suffering. Anybody can justify anything, and clearly that was what Lisa Page was in the business of doing at the level of the FBI. The scary thing about it is that she obviously was not alone but was simply one who was caught due to the large visibility at the top of American politics with eyes on the situation where it took a jealous wife to unleash the evidence. Without question, there are many more latte sipping prostitutes functioning in the open within what we call the Beltway swamp, and they are dangerous to our American republic.

What a person chooses to do with their ethical standards is not the business of the American people until they try to use their bodies and female resources to alter laws, taxation, or elections. At that point, they are a detriment to our entire social order and they deserve derogatory terms as a reference to their illicit services. What they don’t deserve is respect even if they wear feathers, furs, or expensive jewelry to disguise their function. A whore is a whore whether they sell their bodies in a bar, on a street, or in bedrooms of loveless marriages for the purposes of manipulating their spouses toward political means. Its all whoring.

Men whore too, they sell themselves for stupid things all the time for much the same reasons that we associate with whores. They can be latte sipping prostitutes as well. I can think of a long list of beta men who fit that category perfectly. And in many ways Lisa Page’s boyfriend in the FBI was a whore of a different kind. He was sucking up to his superiors to play the political assassin for a group of swamp creature radicals who wanted to do anything to stop Trump from becoming president. If he could do it and get a little on the side by a swamp whore sipping lattes instead of drunken ale, that was even better. But if not her, a trip down K-Street would do, and often does for many of those types. That is the truth of the matter and its important that we don’t confuse their actions with the merit of a civilized society. They are all prostitutes, but their vices come in all shapes and sizes but their worth is all the same.

Rich Hoffman