Tag: Atlas Shrugged

The Buccaneers Fired Dirk Koetter and the Bengals Finally Fired Marvin Lewis: To win you have to get rid of a problem, especially in areas of management

One of the reasons I am still a Tampa Bay Buccaneer fan after many seasons of losing is because the organization as ran by the Glazer family is always on a quest to find the right combination of coaching to match with the players they have on the field to be victorious. If they fall short, they do not hesitate to fire their coaches such as they did Sunday afternoon at the end of their season after losing to the Atlanta Falcons. Dirk Koetter had been with the team for three years but it was obvious with all the weapons the Bucs had on the field to use that the coaches just didn’t have an approach, and they ended the season with just five wins, most of them coming at the beginning. I thought Dirk Koetter was a pretty good guy, not the worst coach in the world, but even after victories after he’d hand out game balls to star players, there was something not quite right about him, and that surely turned up on the field. The Bucs organization is quick to determine that someone is working out and they fire them when its apparent that things just aren’t going to change which is precisely why I continue to love the Tampa Bay Buccaneer organization as a whole. They may not win every game, but at least they try to.

That is why the Bengals in Cincinnati should have terminated their relationship with Marvin Lewis years ago. The guy just doesn’t get it. They have stuck with him for 16 lackluster seasons and the results have never been good. He should have been fired many years ago because it was disrespectful to the Bengals fans who pay premium money for the NFL experience to expect them to put up with Marginal Marvin for so long. The resentment was obvious at the stadium even under the best of circumstances. I had gone to the game this year with good club seat tickets to watch Tampa Bay play the Bengals in Cincinnati on a beautiful October day just before Halloween. It was an absolutely perfect day for the NFL experience in a big city with real playoff implications, because at the time both teams were in the hunt. And the Bengals won that day so everyone should have been happy. But virtually everyone from the vendors selling beer to the men in the restroom talking to each other about the game across urinals were talking about how they were surprised that Marvin Lewis hadn’t found a way to blow the game. Any kind of respect for Marvin Lewis had left Cincinnati a long time ago, yet Mike Brown had stuck with him perpetually with no end in sight.

In any kind of successful organization, you can’t be trigger happy either. You have to give a new coach time to implement a change culture of winning from losing, and that should take a year or two. But in the NFL fans are the ones paying the bills, its unrealistic to expect them to put up with a bad team for more than a few years and still retain their season ticket packages. A lot of people say that Mike Brown doesn’t care about such things so long as he has a profitable television contract which I find hard to believe. As a businessman of any kind it is stupid to leave any money on the table and you don’t get to be as rich as the Brown family is by being stupid. I just don’t think they know what they are doing as football people. The father Paul Brown did understand, but his family didn’t and it shows.

The Bengals have been living in the past, they have had a couple of Superbowl appearances in the 1980s but nothing since and they are hanging their hat on that one achievement. Meanwhile the Tampa Bay Buccaneers won a Superbowl back in 2003 for a great 2002 season which had been many years in the making. But that was then, the world we live in is very much a what have you done for me lately reality. While at that Bengals game I wore my 2002 Superbowl victory hat for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and people kept saying to me that it was silly to wear that hat because it was a long time ago. I would then say to them with friendly banter that I would be happy to wear the Bengals Superbowl victory hat if they could get me one. Of course, that was when laughter from both sides exploded at the absurdity of it. But why should it be absurd?

The NFL is designed to give every city with an NFL team a shot at victory. I view much of the NFL structure as an entirely socialist enterprise where winners are penalized, and losers are boosted up, particularly in regard to draft picks. But this is because the goal of the NFL is to sell tickets and merchandise and if a team doesn’t make it to the big dance at least once a decade their fan base cools it in regard to spending. People generally support their home town team, but they don’t necessarily dream of a new football jersey for Christmas for a losing team. They want to at least thing that there is a chance at victory. Those are the basics of business. Yet in Cincinnati we have been asked to put up with losing as a reality and that goes against so many raw emotions for which the NFL experience depends. To stick with a coach like Marvin Lewis for so long because he’s a nice guy, which he is, or because he’s a progressive employment option that earns street credibility with the very progressive NFL isn’t enough to justify what they have asked fans to endure. You don’t keep a coach because of being nice or black, but because they win. That is the only objective in playing professional football—winning.

I would love to cheer on the Cincinnati Bengals. But I will always love the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and will spend quite a lot of money flying down to a game or two from time to time to blow many thousands of dollars on the Tampa economy because the Glazer family are always trying to do what they have to do to win. If the Bucs don’t win a single game in the whole season, I will still cheer them on. It didn’t surprise me at all that just a few hours after losing to Atlanta that Dirk Koetter was terminated as the head coach. It would have surprised me if he hadn’t been fired. But after the Bengals lost against the dreaded Steelers, YET AGAIN, it wouldn’t have surprised me if the Bengals had signed Lewis to a 150 year contract extension—but under tremendous public pressure, they finally fired Marvin Lewis. Because the Bengals have become synonymous to losers, and that is a terrible thing to bestow on a city that has supported that team through many years of lackluster performance. It’s a terrible disrespect to a community that doesn’t deserve it and I do feel sorry for Bengal fans. At least for me I can look forward to positive changes in the Buccaneer organization which gives me hope for an upcoming season of victory. That season may be over by the upcoming October, but at least they are trying. The Bengals are like drunken gamblers who have lost their life savings at a slot machine. They just keep pulling the lever and hoping for a new car. But all they ever get are lemons. Hopefully their next coach will be a real one.

Rich Hoffman

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What Trump has in Common with ‘The Shape of Water’: learning the nature of villians and the hopes of the good

What we are seeing isn’t specific to a particular political party or even a specific point in time. I can say that it’s always been something I have been keenly aware of. I remember as a little kid staying up way too late to watch the Academy Awards in 1983 to see if E.T. The Extraterrestrial would win Best Picture and feeling terribly deflated when Gandhi won instead. That’s when I learned the hard way that institutions are not in pursuit of goodness, but the status quo in almost every category because it allows the people working within those organizational frameworks to live modest, safe lives seldom challenged by any exceptional expectations. I was actually blown away and physically sick that E.T. failed to win Best Picture. Clearly there wasn’t any justice in the world as at that time I only ever wanted to be a film director when I grew up. In the year prior, I had gone through the same ceremonial castigation, Raiders of the Lost Ark was poised to win Best Picture and lost to the film Chariots of Fire. Something was very wrong and now almost 40 years later I sat watching the Academy Awards knowing full well there was a major liberal spin to the whole show, which is why I wasn’t a film director and no longer had a desire to be, when The Shape of Water won best picture essentially because it featured a female hero, she had nude scenes in it including masturbation, but in most other respects was a modern update to E.T. It was a stunning revelation that remained consistently bad, and points to a much deeper, darker problem.

And in so many ways, even in the serious world of politics, we are seeing the same thing that went on with E.T. at the Academy Awards in 1982 and 1983, happening now with the FBI and Justice Departments of the Obama Administration playing the same role. Even though I would argue that The Shape of Water could have easily have been made without the sex and nudity, or the F words in a film that children would have benefited from seeing in the theaters, the government agent in the film was wonderfully representative of the kind of parasitic order for which those modern institutions function. Richard Strickland in that film epitomized the ambitions of institutional control and in maintaining an order where the exceptional are locked away and tortured so that the stagnant expectations of below the line thinking could remain unchallenged. In that way The Trump administration under the direction of the FBI and DOJ were treated as the amphibious creature from The Shape of Water, tortured just for being there and seeking to be destroyed because the potential for life changing inspiration was something that institutions couldn’t allow to happen otherwise, they’d all be expected to increase their expectations for their own lives by default.

The crimes against not only Trump but against his supporters, most of whom are just as innocent as my 13-year-old self-staying up on a school night to hope beyond hope that justice would give the movie E.T. The Extraterrestrial the Best Picture award, are profound. There is so much more to the story than just the sad attempts at using the law as a weapon to beat down inspiring change, but in the abundant mechanisms for which all institutions function to preserve their salty ambitions anchored to the ground well below any above the line expectations. The corruption in society as a whole was deeper than any ocean on earth and the hopes and dreams of all mankind had been tossed to the bottom and kept their by the hostile depths too hard to dive by any mechanical means, or even the yearnings of the superhuman efforts, because sharks of every kind protect that bar from ever being raised to a level where the masses might ever be expected to perform from the merits of goodness.

A world where an Academy Award is given to a film that features a woman masturbating in a bathtub “a lot” is the same world castigating Trump for wanting to build a border wall, to create a dividing line between value and a lack of value, between a capitalist culture that has expectations of performance and a socialist one that informs people to not stick their heads up too high otherwise they will be beat down in response. That same world looks at Melania Trump and endlessly criticizes everything she wears and how she wears it but when Michelle Obama wears boots on national television that would make the Wicked Witch from The Wizard of Oz blush, she is hailed as an expert on fashion. The reason is that the static order doesn’t want little girls to grow up to be like Melania, a woman who is as close to a perfect “10” as anybody might find in our current culture. But to be like Michelle Obama, an average looking woman filled with personality flaws and genetic mutations. Melania is attacked because she is too good, she as a change agent has raised the level of expectation among the voting population and the institutions are not happy about it.

Many years later I realized that instead of trying to make things work as a film director in a liberal town that certainly didn’t want to deal with a midwestern conservative that I’d turn toward business. When I was paid a salary instead of an hourly wage to officially announce that I was no longer just a floor worker, the expectations were quite severe on me to work within the parameters of a static order. I typically had always worked 12 hours a day or more but now that I was working with as a salaried member of management—and this was many years ago—but I was supposed to assume a certain order of conduct understanding that I work only what I was paid for. And salary people were only paid for 8.5 hours of their work day. So at precisely 5 PM I was expected to drop everything and go home. But when I didn’t do that and instead continued to work as I always had, until 7 PM or even 8 PM the other salaried staff were very angry with me. They would watch closely what time I clocked in and when I clocked out and eventually built up the courage to ask me why I was trying to make them look bad. My answer of course that I wasn’t, and that if they looked bad it’s because they weren’t willing to fulfill the parameters of expectation for which production required. Well, those were fighting words and long rivalries filled with animosity percolated from that time on, yet I never changed my behavior because I was simply not going to surrender my capability to the Academies out there that would pick Gandhi over E.T. or the FBI over President Trump. Those were simply not options.

The case against Trump isn’t about justice, or even politics—its about expectation. Trump as a change agent is being attacked to preserve the right of below the line thinking that has defined Washington D.C. culture in general and politics specifically. Much the way the sea creature in The Shape of Water was tortured and abused just for existing, Trump represents a raising of the bar for all future expectation, and the static order has demanded his destruction with all the animated ambition as Richard Strickland. The world cannot hold both characters, and traditionally the good have been beat down so that the bad do not have to rise to any occasions. And that is a dark little secret that continues to permeate all our lives, and the yearning to change it is certainly there. Even the Academy of Arts and Sciences can be touched by such hopes even if the medicine to make it go down are sex scenes and nudity. But the showdown between Trump and the FBI is not about legalisms, it’s about the hopes and dreams of all mankind, and that battle is happening right now. And for the first time in history, hope is winning out over stagnation, and that is very interesting to watch for me. I am rooting for hope and increased expectations, perhaps this time the villains won’t win.

Rich Hoffman

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The Great Visionary President Trump: Causing his enemies to continue throwing themselves against rocks and over cliffs

It is time to have this discussion, most of our political order in the United States has been defined by idiots, everything from the lowly school board member to the President of the United States. Dumb, inefficient people have been inserted into these jobs by fools who don’t really know what they are doing. That is why it is totally ridiculous that these same people are trying to define what a successful president looks like in modern times, and that Trump to them is some kind of buffoon. Let me make something quite clear about Trump and other CEO types who come from private business and have been previously very successful as branding change agents from their own organizations, their genius is not in what they physically do, its in how they can take complex topics and bring them down to one- or two-line vision statements. In that regard President Trump will go down in history as the greatest president the United States ever experienced. Vision statements for a lot of people are one of the most difficult things to do because they lack the intelligence and imagination to do them, but Trump is great at them and that is precisely why he can do so much more with less.

Much of the world is very confused about the nature of leadership, they foolishly confuse it with management which is to say that processes are what inspire people. That is why critics of President Trump believe that a Chief of Staff or a Secretary of State are such important characters in an administration. Yet the White House is the people’s house and if its occupant can take complicated matters and communicate them to the people who really are supposed to run the government, the voters, then all that management formality is for nothing. Trump and his Tweets are the best thing to come from the modern age because it has allowed a great leader and communicator in Trump to articulate directly to voters the matters of great complication which normally befuddle most people, and it unifies the vision productively for the country.

The enemies of these methods are those of course who benefit from the current system of chaos. They like the old management structure because somewhere in their past they were taught by institutions that such things were flowed through processes of bureaucracy not through the raw leadership of simplicity. They were taught that to be successful you make lots of paperwork and coordinate lots of people through procedural interpretation rather than to rally behind the abilities of a great leader to break down complicated matters into a few sentences of vision. This is a common trait of all visionaries from Walt Disney to George Lucas, Donald Trump whether or not people like him is a great visionary and that is why the Trump Organization is such a good one. The value in Trump is not whether or not he has had affairs with women as a billionaire playboy, or whether he was a great WWE promoter at his casinos, what matters is that he was and continues to be a great leader who can simplify messaging to the masses with relative ease. If you took Trump out of the White House and put him in charge of General Motors, or Microsoft, he would be instantly successful in those companies because he can produce effective visions to all the employees involved. Most successful people have these traits, but they are rather uncommon among our population because the ability is not something that is taught well in our scholastic environments, but is an innate ability nurtured through unique character traits.

If you went to all the modern top companies, from Amazon to Pixar Entertainment you’d find similar traits among their leadership, the ability to provide vision statements to their employees which unify the efforts of the organization. In private practice we see such examples of leadership emerge out of market necessity. But in politics we have allowed and in some cases insisted on some old broken European model of aristocracy among political leaders that is not conducive to reality. Such as in Nancy Pelosi leaving Washington D.C. during a government shut down and taking a vacation in Hawaii. She is apparently clueless as to how the optics of such a thing is providing a very negative vision statement to her own party and their ability to negotiate with Trump over the border wall. She’s not even playing in the same league as Trump who stayed in Washington D.C. and continued to work through the Holiday season gaining the high ground in the matter and providing vision statements to the public that no Democrat will be able to overcome. Nancy Pelosi and her new congress will return with their standardized agenda driven by process and discover that they have no answer for the leadership Trump has already provided and they’ll stay on their heels for most of 2019 before crushing themselves under the weight of their own stupidity once they start throwing candidates for the 2020 run for presidency in the mix. They will all fail because they do not have Trump’s ability to create vision statements.

When you have raw leadership ability you do not have to have read the most books in the room, you don’t even need to be the smartest person. Intelligence contrary to popular opinion does not increase by the amount of people added to the decision-making process. The ability to create a good one liner in the form of a vision statement is far more valuable to team building than a whole room of Harvard MBAs working on a problem. All the Harvard people may be smart, but they lack leadership in its raw form. A bunch of smart people are useless if they can’t communicate what they need to do to the masses clearly so others can follow. In the rock, paper, scissors game of management hierarchy, the ability to produce vision statements is far more important than the ability to manage 10,000 people through procedural implementation. A president who can do such a thing doesn’t need a Chief of Staff or other traditional positions because he can do a lot more with less just because of the raw leadership ability of providing clear vision statements to his followers.

That is specifically why Trump is succeeding and his political enemies are just fumbling over themselves like the coyote in a classic Road Runner cartoon, or Bugs Bunny confronting the villainy of the Tasmanian Devil. Trump has the unique ability to make complex matters seem digestible and that is why he has been successful and why no matter what he does, success is there for him. It’s not luck or some magic power given from the gods, it’s just raw leadership ability in the form of powerful vision statements, such as “if you’re going to be thinking, it might as well be big.” In the role of a Commander and Chief it is obvious that the hope of the Founding Fathers was always to have someone from American society filling the presidential role like Donald Trump, but so far very few have made it through the political process to arrive at such a lofty height untouched by procedural corruption. But Trump did make it, and we should all be thankful. Because of his ability America is really thriving and there isn’t anything his political enemies can do about it. The harder they try, the more spectacularly they fail. Road Runner would be proud of Donald Trump, he is making all his enemies look as dumb as the Coyote in those old Road Runner cartoons. And the funny thing is, they keep doing it to themselves over and over again, because they don’t understand why President Trump is so successful. That is precisely why they keep launching themselves into a cliff face, or crushing themselves with a giant rock. Because they lack the natural leadership ability of a visionary, and they have nobody even close who call themselves Democrats. And that is truly funny.

Rich Hoffman

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Predicting the Future in 2019: A lot to be excited about

Regarding the stock market and all the record movements, and where it will end up. Investors, feel free to take what I am saying here and go make millions of more dollars because you can literally take it to the bank. But the interesting aspect of it is in the revelation of values that are now maturing under the Trump administration which has been badly needed for so many years and 2019 will be a good year because of it. The part of it that will take some getting used to is that the usual panic button issues aren’t going to work this time and like the spell that kept Sleeping Beauty locked into a coma for so many years broken only by the kiss of a prince of a true love, the markets have been kissed by Trump and that value is escalating by the moment. The sabotage that the global chess game tried to impose have not only backfired, but fed the current optimism. Things are looking quite good indeed.

First of all, no real people care about the government shut down. Most of the jobs are nonessential and could easily be replaced by technology, so nobody is missing them, nor will they at any point in the future. The market fluctuations that have occurred since the election of 2018 are largely inspired by the volatility of the government with Democrats running the House of Representatives once again. Many fear that the good days from the last two years are coming to an end so they have moved their money in the markets. It hasn’t helped that we’ve learned about the various tech stocks in the Dow becoming liberal activists in the political process, which has turned off many investors. But that is a temporary condition that will improve as we move out of the Holiday season. Less government is better economics and people generally see that. The longer the shut down goes on the more obvious it will become and that will paralyze the Democrats going into 2019.

There has been a lot of talk about all the investigations that the Democrats are going to use against the Trump administration. Notice how since the looming shutdown approached and has now arrived that there hasn’t been much talk about the nothing there case of the Mueller investigation? Democrats had planned to spend the next two years impeaching Trump over breadcrumbs falling off the table but now coming into January they have to negotiate with him over the wall he’s building and where the money will come from. Trump has captured the narrative once again and has the potential to control it throughout all of next year. Democrats on their heels usually fall all over themselves and that will be the situation this time as well. The shutdown is good harmless leverage that the Democrats have no answer for. They are used to Republicans caving under the pressure but not this time. Being the party of government employees the Democrats will lose supporters quickly as the usual tactics fail and they are forced to watch the wall be built anyway which will be quite a demoralizing attribute to the current circumstances.

Trump’s refusal to punish the slain reporter from The Washington Post is starting to pay off as well. Fuel prices are low, the Saudis are considering themselves lucky to only be hit by the United States with low oil prices, which under any other circumstance would have been difficult to convince them of otherwise. The result for the American economy has been excellent fourth quarter sales and economic growth over 3%. Holiday sales are up and jobs are abundant driving up incomes. There is a lot to be happy about in the Trump economy which will continue to explode into 2019 on sheer momentum. The reality of the tariff battles is that China has had to make concessions as they are overly dependent on exports to the United States, so they have lost their leverage and will never get it back. Trump’s plan to deal with the huge deficit that the United States now has can be attacked through these shifting exports. There is a lot of money to be gained in renegotiating these trade deals and the results are finally going to hit the markets in the upcoming year. Mexico will pay for the wall in profit losses to the United States, and they will like it.

The Federal Reserve has been behaving poorly with their attempts to stave off inflation with interest rate hikes, that’s what they say anyway. In all reality the Fed has been trying to pad the pockets of bankers hungry for revenue with increased interest rates so they can make their money in what everyone has been considering a Bull Market. In the Fed’s way of thinking the Bear is right around the corner so they need to make their money while they can, which has put on the brakes to the potential growth that has been possible, much to Trump’s consternation. Its kind of like trying to drive a 1000 HP car with the brakes on. But the Fed has been confronted by the President which of course scared investors because nobody in the past has ever done such a thing and the markets were affected in the short run especially on Christmas Eve. But its all about negotiation and the market rallied back a thousand points the day after Christmas as a result. If everyone leaves things alone and the Fed keeps interest rates down, the Dow will head back to 26,000 and beyond, because the real market value is there. It’s more than a symptom of optimism from investors riding the trends. The value is real and growing in an expanding economy.

Then of course there are new markets entering the value stream, such as space tourism and regenerative medicine, industries I have discussed on this site for a long time. Finally, they are coming to fruition under the deregulatory environment of the Trump administration. There hasn’t been enough bandwidth for the media which hates President Trump to talk about all the great things that have been happening on these fronts since their goal has been to remove him from office. But with the government shutdown soaking up the news cycle which favors Trump the good news coming from the new market fronts will have room on the front pages and those industries will blossom for good in the coming years. How do you pay off a 21 trillion-dollar debt, you introduce new value markets that actually expand economic activity while putting money in the pockets of the people who will continue expanding it. And once they have a taste of that, they won’t want to give it back. Trump will win re-election easily in 2020 and the Democrats will struggle to even find a candidate to run against him. The government shutdown will further destroy the Democrats as their bluff is called and people discover that they really don’t need all those government workers. And the markets will rebound to their true value position once the artificial fears subside, because those fears were never rooted in reality anyway. Most fears never are. And that sets us all up for a good year, so long as we have the courage to live it.

Rich Hoffman

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I’m Glad Christmas is Over This Year: Re-thinking the nature of the Holiday season

I did not enjoy Christmas this year, perhaps it is the net result of writing too much and having worked out answers to the problems that socially are desired to keep a ruling class of people in place of our species and knowing better. Or that I have just read too many damn books and the things that regular people say to me seem stupid and self-defeating. They don’t want their problems solved, they want their problems so they can have an excuse to fail, and thus, not have to build up the courage to do things in their lives and its all too obvious to me. Or it was the season itself, the way that CNN berated President Trump for the way he talked to children on the night before Christmas wondering if a 7-year-old still believed in Santa. Or the way religious leaders insisted that mankind had lost touch with Christ and were too focused on material goods through the Holiday season. The emphasis on belief instead of logic seemed louder this year and I didn’t like it. Or perhaps it was just that Christmas is mostly for the children and that I’m in my 50s now and a grandpa and old age seems to be taking tickets to the afterlife with too much enthusiasm and I really don’t like the bad breath of the grim reaper looming like such a negative decaying force ready to harvest more souls miserable and lost from lives lived poorly.

What made me the sickest on the whole event was that the entire season was built upon people waiting for something to happen to them instead of making things happen. Kids wait to open presents while adults try to line up their schedules so they can get together and talk about nothing. Each event of the day was tied to some rigorous schedule attached to a lot of people who only cared if you were there or not by the pictures they took and put on Facebook or some other social media platform. My experiences with my family were fine, but in general Christmas was a day that I wasn’t in control of my own schedule and I’m not used to that. I’m not a fan of estrogen fests where clots of females arrange gatherings based on their most neurotic impulses and then expect me to drop all thinking to satisfy their whims of bitching and mayhem. They have the best of intentions in these endeavors but it always seems to come out as gatherings of squares that need to be pushed through circles in a board and the fit is never applicable, yet we try to force it anyway.

The best part of the day are of course the presents. That is where you can learn a lot about what people think about one another and there are real psychological factors at play that have great meaning. I do get excited about hearing to what degree Christmas retail sales have spiked. But then our entertainment of the season is fixated on sacrifice which seems to be the way we have all accepted that Christmas is supposed to be. Even I said several times that Christmas is for the kids to have a moment of optimism in their lives to remember forever before the world tries to henpeck their souls back into some kind of egg to live the rest of their lives. We encourage children to dream and put on quite a show for them only to have all those hopes smashed upon adolescences when kids learn that all the things, they believed in was a ruse for which society has no desire to live up to. And in that great disappointment they learn their place at the table of misery with everyone else.

I went to bed at 8 PM on Christmas night feeling like every part of my essence had been twisted and plucked clean like a Wal-Mart Black Friday bin five minutes into the opening of the store for special sales. I couldn’t wait to get to bed and put the rest of the world back to my own schedule. And I couldn’t wait to get up the next day and get back to work where logic and skill guide my days in productive ways and all the naysayers could go back to the cracks, they live in not to be heard from until the next year. I normally wouldn’t let myself think this way but I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately about below and above the line thinking and as a naturally positive person, Christmas is a very negative Holiday. I love the façade of positive aspects of it, but it never lives up to the image. People generally don’t like each other and logic loses itself in the season as people spend money on all the wrong things. People don’t like each other because they are functioning from different value systems and that is something that we are expected to put away at Christmas and be like Christ—open and forgiving. But to do that we have to forget what people are, and what they have done and that doesn’t make any sense to me whatsoever.

I think it was easier to put these thoughts away in the past because it seemed like there would always be endless tomorrows. Next year was always an option but at the age I am now where I hear the word grandpa a lot I am reminded again with that glee of a grim reaper’s bad breath that are many fewer tomorrows than yesterdays and with each year they will get worse, and that is a very negative aspect of living that is not conducive with my way of thinking. I’ve always had hope that Christmas would someday bring out the best in people but I don’t see it, and the nature of it doesn’t lend itself to anything good. It is built on belief and a passive position of having things happen to you. And the best of Christmas involves give of yourself rather than receiving which is a socialist mantra from the words of Karl Marx and all the buffoons of philosophy that have sat on the edge of religion since before there was ever a Christ. The idea that sacrifice is the way to a productive existence is just stupid.

I’m glad its over, I am happy to be back in charge of everything and to be free of other people’s schedules. I’m also happy to be able to shape optimism back into my life and to leave many of my phone messages unanswered because the person on the other end endlessly needs something, they aren’t giving themselves in their life. They are perpetual looters of value lacking it themselves and always craving it from others. Christmas was an invention by them for them and certainly not for the most productive among us. Christmas was a day where like Halloween the belief in giving is thrust upon us like a villain robbing a bank. We are expected to participate or else and I’m at a place where I don’t think its such a good idea. I think Christmas brings out the worst in people, not the best and that the purpose of it is malicious, not hopeful. And I’m glad its over.

Rich Hoffman

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It is Good to See General Mattis Fired: Terminations of employement are signs of good managment and should be done more often

It is good to fire people from time to time, in fact, if you aren’t doing it when it’s needed, you aren’t doing a very good job of management. It’s not something that should make you happy, or should be doing just to be doing it, but if you are in a leadership position and don’t get rid of people who aren’t adopting the philosophy you are trying to instill, then you have to do it. Failure to do so weakens whatever it is you are doing. Contrary to the popular modern belief that jobs are entitlements, firing people is healthy for an organization, its like trimming trees or pulling weeds in a flower bed—it’s something that must be done in order to make things better. As we have all learned in the Theory of Constraints you can only be as good as your weakest links, so when you identify them, they must either be strengthened or removed for the health of your organization. And that is certainly the case with the position General Mattis held under President Trump as Secretary of Defense.

You don’t always know about a person until they are battle tested. With every new hire comes optimism that they will fit into your vision for whatever the endeavor is, and its generally a cause for celebration. After all, when you start something you should be excited and so should the people who were hired. When Trump hired all the people of his cabinet, being an optimist I’m sure he wanted everyone to work out. But of course they don’t always do and the Trump administration specifically in just two years has terminated more staff than any administration in the history of the United States. However, that’s not a negative, it’s very much a good thing. In the case of General “Mad Dog” Mattis Trump learned that the “generals” he had hired to help his administration were entirely too process oriented and not quick thinkers on their feet, so he has had to get rid of them. Especially in the case of Mattis, they were groomed in big government environments and under the pressure of reality are more Democrat than Republican leaving them with little to do in the future.

When Trump said at the beginning of his administration that he didn’t want to have troops fighting all over the world for nothing, he meant it. General Mattis had the job of ending the wars in Afghanistan and Syria and he hasn’t developed an exit strategy in the first two years that was acceptable, so Trump is moving on. Yet to hear the media report the story you’d think that Trump had no right to fire Mattis or to eliminate anyone from his administration. The outrage expressed is interesting because it shows truly how little most people know about leadership and what the role of the president is supposed to be. Government isn’t supposed to be a job creator, its supposed to be effective in accomplishing the task the job was created for. If the person isn’t accomplishing that task they should be fired.

Trump became an international celebrity with his television show essentially firing someone after each episode, the people who voted for him knew what they were getting. It doesn’t matter who you are, if you aren’t getting the job done, you should be terminated from your job. The trouble with modern sentiment is that they have been taught in their public schools, and other social circles that nobody should ever be fired or that expectations of employment are meant to be ignored that is the real problem. Like school teachers, police officers, fire departments and all other federal workers functioning under union control there is a basic assumption that the “people” are in charge and that management’s job is to issue paychecks to their employees who can pretty much do whatever they want when they want to do it. For instance, when President Trump fired James Comey the shock came more in the form that nobody ever fired a unionized worker in government because such a thing just wasn’t done—ever. So Trump must be guilty of something. That is the mentality that we are dealing with.

That is also why government is so ineffective at everything, because they are run by labor unions who make terminations difficult for management. It’s nearly impossible for a school board to fire a school teacher so as a result, we get lots of bad teachers teaching our children a lot of socialist nonsense and they have no fear of losing their jobs because they are protected by the union. The FBI became radicalized and was trying to tilt the election of 2016 in favor of Hillary Clinton and they functioned under a “protected” assumption which was part of the problem. And the people who promised President Trump that they’d do this or that in his administration were expected to perform. When they didn’t Trump has broken the trend of complacency and terminated those guilty of average results. That is a good thing, something that should be celebrated, not chastised.

There has to be consequences for failure and in a capitalist country losing the opportunity to perform is the most obvious reaction to weak links and General Mattis was a weak link in the Trump administration. The panic that the enemies of the president have exhibited were due to that understanding. They want the Trump administration to fail, so they are not inspired to see him remove weaknesses from it. But even worse for them is the fear that such expectations will translate to their own jobs. In General Mattis’ resignation letter he was less than graceful toward the president which then accelerated his exit to the start of the new year instead of waiting until February. Again, it is under the grace of the office that anybody serves, jobs are not entitlements. Why waste two more months of payroll on somebody who is not part of the future? Good management says you don’t, and Trump acted correctly on those principles.

In any successful enterprise there is always a visionary leader who communicates their needs to a large population workforce to be implemented uniformly. Employment is not a democracy—the mob does not rule. Most of the media, especially on television are part of a labor union as well so the foundation concepts of their employment are under a socialist premise that jobs are meant to be created but never managed. Only the union handles matters of structural management—which is the same as saying that nothing is ever managed. Because they are radicals, they feel it is in their own interests to call the Trump administration chaotic and out of control because so many people have been terminated under the current White House. But honestly, I would expect nothing less. Trump is doing exactly what I want to see. I think he was very fair to General Mattis, he gave him a few years and when he failed to produce results, Trump pushed him out the door for someone else to take a shot at success. And there is nothing wrong with that. The labor unions in government don’t like it, nor in the entertainment and news industry, but tough luck. Terminations are a good thing and its good to see that Trump is bringing that practice back to life in government where it should have always been the general practice. Because if the goal is to get good results, punishment is needed for those who don’t deliver. And that is the way of the world.

Rich Hoffman
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Take the Shutdown: It could be a lot worse

Shut it down! Shut down the government, forever as far as I care, and build the wall! Build the wall tall, and wide and draw that line in the sand and stick to it. It is time for an impasse and to stop the Democrats from dancing in Washington bars to the music of American Pie, driving our Chevys to the levy but the levy is dry. The levy is dry and the Chevys are out of business and its time to have the real conversations that should have always been going on, walls mean a recognition of American values and those values aren’t in expanding government as a primary employer of so many non-essential employees. The government is too big, too expensive, and too damn slow and it needs to be cut back, and budget showdowns like the one we are dealing with are just the ticket. Bravo President Trump!

There was a lot made about the flexibility of president Trump to cave into what Chuck Schumer called the “hard right” where voices like Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter and even me were pretty hard on the president not to cave to the pressures of the Hill, to pass another budget impasse and kick the can down the road into January. But that is typically the role of any CEO, they listen to all the conditions and make the best deal for their side of things. Trump is always willing to listen, so he changes positions a lot. But when a radio personality like Rush Limbaugh makes a statement, its hard not to pay attention because he does have his finger on the pulse of the world. Limbaugh has conservatively 14 million weekly listeners, more than that if you count hour by hour ratings through the week. That more than most magazines and television shows, and is a huge platform to speak from. But those listeners don’t come out of thin air, they are a very real population sector that isn’t represented by other forms of entertainment, and they effectively make up the Trump base. Why shouldn’t Trump listen when the noise of Washington D.C. is attempting to use chaos as a cover for pork belly money projects that exacerbate the problem of out of control budgets?

And what bleeds our budget in the U.S. economy more than a lack of border security? Sure if people want to buy drugs they’ll find a way to get them, but why make it easy for enemies of America to poison our work force? Personally speaking I am an employer and I hire hundreds of people every year, if I want to hire 5 traditionally white American citizens, 3 of them will fail their drug test. It’s a massive problem and the enemies of America have been successful in poisoning the traditional workforce with the product they smuggle across the Mexican border with North America. I would go so far to call it a detrimental circumstance. Now also as an employer, I have my needs and they will be fulfilled, but it requires every company to think outside the box to deal with that problem. So why make it easy for such malicious characters to continue shipping the poison into America?

Without question, Democrats are all about open borders and dissolving the sovereignty of nations so that there can be one global government managed by the United Nations. That has been their plan for a long time and now that things are coming unraveled due to the Trump presidency, the strings are showing. It wasn’t so obvious to most people before because they believed all this garbage about continuing budget resolutions and monstrous government projects that just employ people to play on Facebook all day getting paid for doing nothing. Government didn’t listen when people were speaking. I have been speaking about this lunacy for years, all of my adult life. Trump was elected because many people like me stopped listening to the bullshit and started demanding results. Trump is in the White House because of the Rush Limbaugh audience and the NRA members, and the Sean Hannity audience then to a smaller extent the Fox News audience, the people who still like Clint Eastwood and John Wayne movies, the products of old Hollywood. And the pain that Democrats and Rino Republicans are feeling is that they tried to institute a change agency culture from the perspective of the Beltway and people have rejected it.

There are places in California and in New England that have subscribed to this Beltway culture of big government progressivism renamed from its previous communist terminology. Seattle and Portland are cities that are openly embracing socialism for instance. But most of the rest of North America isn’t going for it and the momentum is shifting away from them and they can feel it. There was literal desperation in Nancy Pelosi’s voice when they reacted to Trump’s proposal to shut down the government over Christmas if he didn’t get his border wall money. Because if he is successful, they will lose forever their leverage of public sentiment and that will literally destroy their base, which is already in trouble from young radicals wanting to pull the entire party further to the political left. What all of Washington D.C. culture has been espousing for decades has been out of touch with the people who put them in office and Trump was sent to the White House to clean it up. All Rush Limbaugh did was remind President Trump of that.

I did my own personal bits on the matter and we all should, after all if President Trump doesn’t have our support when he needs it most the options for us are a bloody one, and nobody wants to see that. I don’t want bloodshed, I always prefer a legal means of solving a problem. But we can’t give our country away to a world desperate to loot off our progress and to insist on socialist forms under a global flag. If the world wants help becoming independent and more capitalist in nature, I’m all for helping them out. But I am not going to allow America to be destroyed because the world’s education institutions produced a false philosophy rooted in Karl Marx and Immanuel Kant instead of the great late Adam Smith. Adam Smith’s thoughts on capitalism are far more powerful and the proof is in America. To protect that value for the world to see we need a border wall which is exactly what Democrats are afraid of revealing, the obvious differences between capitalism and socialism. If drug dealers and Marxist revolutionaries cannot flood the American population with Trojan horse insurgents, then how does the Democrat party survive in the future? The answer is that they don’t.

So I applaud the stand the Trump administration is taking. I fully support it. I don’t care if thousands of government workers are at the homeless shelters out of work, because its better than armed insurrection. A lot less blood will be spilled this way, which is how the system is supposed to work. But a word of caution to the big government types, the CIA, the FBI and all the losers who watch every little thing I do as well as others like me who listen to Rush Limbaugh, are proud NRA members and are severely anti-drug, anti-illegal immigration and Trump supporters through thick and thin—be happy Trump is protecting you from a real judgement day. Take the government shut down and shut the hell up—for your own good.

Rich Hoffman

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Why the World Needs Trump’s Border Wall: Defining values that make for good and bad lives

Yes, the United States must have a wall between the Mexican and American border, a real, physical barrier that people can see and which prevents unwanted crossings. And the reason why is more than just a political discussion, it’s a deep philosophical difference that is required to be recognized for the benefit of existence. Not all people in the world are equal, some feed thoughts that are quite disastrous to themselves and those around them while others are quite productive and leave in their life wake benefits that cascade into those around them. But due to the freedom of human beings to engage in free thought, the quality of their thinking produces people of differing values. When you magnify the results of many people in such a situation then it can be said that entire nations have radically different values which then become apparent at places like the Mexican/American border.

On the American side of that border is a capitalist country that uses a monetary system to determine values from everything to what kind of house people choose to live in to the more tangible elements of success and failure. On the Mexican side are the results of a failed Marxist revolution that has left in its wake a collectivist mindset impoverished and in a primitive state. The people are the same on both sides of the border, they are human with one head, two arms and two legs. But what makes them different is in what they think about. And of course, what one thinks about is what one becomes. When basic survival is the primary concern embarked on in Mexico it should come as no surprise that they live in dreadful habitats close to mud huts, and in some cases they do. Food, and sex are their primary concerns, then in raising the products of those thoughts, the children that spawn from them.

In America there is more to the culture because capitalism has provided more options to think about, thus there are more conditions for which to build a life from. Houses are different, the cars are different, the people dress different, act different, there are more food choices—all this because capitalism provides more avenues of thought other than just basic survival. When these results are multiplied across the range of human experience for that country the net gains generated from thought are obvious to even a casual observer.

Enemies of capitalism of course recognize this problem and they have every intention in the world of trying to blend the lines between the two so that one side does not feel superior to the other, because their advocacy is for a more socialist world. So the capitalist mode of thinking must be attacked in two basic ways, through the promotion of no barriers, and through the easy flow of drugs which at the high level of strategy between global interests, are intended to poison the minds of the capitalists so that they can no longer think such beautiful thoughts which make such a great American country. So the smuggling of narcotics into the American country is part of a globalist strategy to ruin the minds of the residents so that the distinction between the two countries, Mexico and America, are not so obvious. Drugs keep the people who use them in a state of primitive ambition which puts them on the same level as the typical socialist, and that is the strategic goal. The tactical application is the dealing in actual drugs to the customer base in the capitalist zones. Therefor, a country that wishes to retain its intellectual virtue must make that process difficult.

Individual liberty is surrendered when the choices that are made have an impact on the individual sanctity of those around them. This is why I am not a “libertarian.” Unfortunately, everything affects everything else, so the drug user who is in their home doing drugs for their own enjoyment is actually destroying quite a lot on the outside world, especially if they are raising children with the same reckless values. So a nation has a right to make drugs illegal if they rob a country of the ability to protect individuals from the incursions of impositions created by the drug induced. The illiterate drunk standing on the street corner is a similar villain because their presence lowers the thinking of those around them. There is nothing more disgusting than a perfectly healthy adult puking on the side of a bar after drinking too much and people having to observe such a thing thinking about it the rest of their night. Such observations lower the appeal of a capitalist society and bring people’s thoughts to lower quality ambitions by default.

The freedom to live, and think is a universal appeal but what is left for us to define is the quality of those definitions. The people of Mexico are living, and a bum in the desert is thinking and living freely while they exist in the back of a 50-year-old mobile home with the doors barely hanging from their hinges. But if such a thing were placed into the middle of a neighborhood where the average home value was $500,000 it could easily be displayed that the quality of thought for the entire community would be lowered. Having to look at such a monstrosity or talk to such a free-wheeling person at the community pool would lower the expectations of all the other residents and those thoughts would bring down the entire social structure of the ambitious capitalist culture and evoke negative judgment. So while we can say that everything and everyone should be free, the monetary value of some measurement must be applied to create the law and order that government can never provide.

To protect that value, we must have a barrier of some kind to disguise good thought from bad, and to make it much harder for the bad to influence the good. What the enemies of capitalism want is to remove value from society so that they can redefine it under collectivists assumptions. That is their objective and why they are so against Trump’s border wall proposals doing anything they can to prevent it from happening. Their desire is to blend the cultures so that the quality of thinking on one side is diminished and the other side uplifted because they can have access to the more advanced culture. But the barrier is needed to inspire one culture to look at what put them in such a dismal place and to correct the behavior. The determining factor as to what one side does and one side doesn’t do well is determined by the value of economic means—which are produced by the quality of the thinking that produced those attributes. The culture that doesn’t have such benefits might wan to point across the border and declare the people living in million-dollar homes as villains because they spent most of their lives having 20 children by five different women, and not learning who to do things that mattered economically, but that doesn’t change the nature of reality. The border wall is for the benefit of those on both sides. Those living in bad circumstances need to come to terms with it instead of focusing all their attention onto fleeing into a capitalist country that has opportunity. They need to make opportunity for themselves. And until there is a physical barrier illustrating the difference definitively, they won’t be inspired to do so.

Rich Hoffman

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Comey is Shit out of Luck: The FBI allowed for the destruction of 19,000 text messages laying out the biggest case of corruption in American history

Did you see that dear reader, James Comey after his testimony in front of congress is revealing the really radical bias that was always there under his command of the FBI. The pressure is getting to the former Director as all his tentacles of influence have yet failed to remove President Trump from office and now that we know that over 19,000 text messages were deleted under the careful watch of Bob Mueller, Comey’s friend and special counsel investigator, that real trouble is on the horizon. The Republicans that Comey is pleading to for help are the ones who are dying off and retiring, because they can’t hack the game. The new Republicans are the ones that were always there, but did not have a voice. Market circumstances in the world of politics have changed that ratio however, and now they are showing up to pass judgment, and Comey clearly doesn’t like it. His blame of these new ways of looking at things is misplaced on Trump and his supporters. Comey forgets that one didn’t make the other, its only that the protective blankets for which he had operated have been pulled away leaving him exposed, and like a child having those covers stripped away in the middle of the night in a dark, cold room, it’s a terrifying proposal.

You have to consider what Comey was really expressing when he spoke to reporters after the hearings on December 17th 2018, he wanted a step back into the good ol’ days where Republicans were lap dogs to radically disguised Democrats operating as conservatives and setting the agenda of thought. And those Republicans didn’t ever do anything to upset the apple cart even though there were many good reasons for doing so. Such an approach allowed Jim Comey and his friends in the intelligence community to believe that they were philosopher kings of political discourse and operated immune from performance or scrutiny so that they could define what was good in the world and protect that good even if it meant breaking the law on occasion—or perhaps often. Of course, when you are the law enforcement’s top cops, they were functioning under the assumption that anything they did was lawful, because they knew better than anybody else.

When I did a CNN segment on the truthfulness of James Comey a few years ago I knew then there was something very fishy about the guy. I wanted to believe him, like most of America did. He looked the part of a top cop and he seemed polite and considerate, the way you’d expect someone given great powers to behave. But it seemed like a ruse based on little things that he said that didn’t quite make sense and what evolved over the subsequent months was a guy who had been a public servant, and a kind of beta man to his wife and daughters within his family to a sudden celebrity allowed to come out from under a rock and get a taste of the lime light, and he liked it. So the Hillary Case gave him a place on the front pages of history with presidential candidates and the highest echelons of politics and he let the appeal of it all suck him in.

He tampered with the evidence probably to make his wife happy, who was a Hillary Clinton supporter, and it probably made him a big man within his family for a while. He likely also enjoyed the ass kissing people from both sides awarded him with in the days leading up to the election. He had allowed his agents reporting directly to him to become radicalized into overturning the results of the election and they had to cover it up. But now they’ve been caught and he would desperately like to erase his part in it all. His first mistake was when he allowed the Attorney General Loretta Lynch to take a secret meeting with Bill Clinton and turn it into a deal to erase the Hillary Clinton email investigation as if it never happened. So under pressure he came out and spelled the case out so that he could maintain his reputation as the honest Boy Scout within the ranks of the FBI, but also tell the world there was nothing to see. As he said, no reasonable prosecutor would seek a case against Hillary because she was covered by the Obama White House and nobody would want their record tarnished with an impossible case. So with that Comey hoped everything would just ride off into the sunset and the FBI and himself would live happily ever after.

But Trump won the election………………….

Now the FBI had to play clean up because their fingerprints were all over the email corruption as they had allowed for the destruction of evidence and a behavioral practice of picking winners and losers in the election. If Trump really meant what he said to Hillary during the debates about locking her up, and by the way the Trump supporters had behaved at political rallies, there was a real danger to the FBI in getting caught. So Comey directed his agents to use the FISA courts to spy on the Trump transition team so that they could gather some kind of dirt to bust the incoming administration on anything they could discover so that Trump himself would never be able to conduct a proper investigation into what the FBI had done. Using the Russian dossier paid for by the DNC Comey sought to use it to extort Trump into a compliant relationship with the FBI. And just in case the plan went south Comey leaked his confrontations with President Trump to the media so that a special investigation against the Trump administration could occur in case Comey was fired for his activism, which he was in May of 2017.

By now Trump was supposed to be crushed and his administration in shambles, but it hasn’t turned out that way. The midterms did not go strongly for Democrats. Sure they filled some seats being vacated by Rino Republicans who were largely Never Trumpers, but they didn’t make any real ground as hoped, and things look very strong for Trump in 2020. There aren’t any Democrats to run against him and his approval ratings are great in spite of the constant negative press. People just aren’t listening, so the old tricks haven’t work leaving Comey wondering what’s next. He has literally tried to do everything to keep investigations into his investigators on their heels and wrapped in chaos. And now we know the Mueller team actually destroyed more evidence, so Comey’s plans have come unraveled rather spectacularly. His activism is now unleashed, and raw and real trouble is on the horizon for him, even though the Washington D.C. culture is more than willing to run cover for him as long as they can. Because after all, if Comey goes down, most of Washington D.C. will as well as they are all guilty of government activism on some level or another. And that leaves James Comey, shit out of luck.

You can see it on his face too. He knows it, he’s not stupid. He’s just corrupt, corrupted in many ways. He is and was the well-intentioned radical who thought government ran the people and that the FBI ran the government. He lost his place in history and his grip on reality. Because now he knows the hard way that his assumptions about things were completely wrong, and that old Boy Scout innocence that he has used all these years just doesn’t work anymore, because we know the truth about him. And he has nowhere left to hide.

Rich Hoffman

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The Amazing VSS Unity: History was made this week and the implications are enormous

In case you didn’t hear it, big news occurred this past week, Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic company became the first to send commercial astronauts into space. It looks like within six months Branson himself will be going up as well making 2019 the year space travel became commercialized and a whole new economy was unleashed. Even though Richard Branson is a liberal a big thing happened that will redefine the parameters of political thinking and it’s quite exciting to watch. Even with all the negative news that is out there is a silver lining to it all. An old static order is giving way to exciting new adventures and Virgin Galactic has taken the unlikely step of being the facilitator of great change. The Virgin Galactic efforts weren’t as big of news as the moon landing, but it was close. Its one thing for a government to use all its resources in a space race against another government. It’s quite another to have a small, nimble company taking off from the ground of a desert runway and launching a vessel into space without the violent escape velocity of an earth-bound rocket.

The VSS Unity spacecraft is actually a brilliant design that leaves a lot of modifications open to future growth. The variations of that type of space travel is quite extensive which essentially makes it so that travelers can literally leave a ground-based space station and ride comfortably off the runway into a deep space destination without the violent thrust of a rocket launch. While the rockets that Blue Origin and SpaceX are designing are very much-needed for payload off planet, the Virgin design is a game changer that makes becoming an astronaut something everyday people can experience. And I couldn’t help but think of how much of the current chaos in the news is necessary so that this new race into space can happen. As twisted as things can sometimes look it is an amazing trait of human intelligence to know how to give itself a self-fulfilled prophesy.

I was at a Game Stop the other day buying Christmas presents when I overheard several conversations going on around me as I browsed video game titles on the shelf. The sheer variety of inventory items in that story that were related to new mythological sequences of thought were astounding. If you considered where things were in the Middle Ages where the printing press had just come along and gave people the ability to print copies of Bibles to read, the Enlightenment period wasn’t far off due to the sudden ability of people to actually be able to own a book and to read it. Now in a simple store like Game Stop there was so much intellectual material available for just pleasant consumption that the bridge from way back there to here was quite long and dangerous. While the Midlevel Bible reader couldn’t even contemplate space travel, Game Stop shoppers literally had infinite possibilities to consider just such thoughts, and that is a very new phenomena. When you add that to the Weekly Standard magazine going out of business, as well a much of the current media culture soon to follow, and the absolute erosion of the Washington D.C. lobby culture happening under President Trump. Much of the conflict between the president of the United States and the world is very much-needed for this exciting new stage that is occurring presently.

In the business world there are lots of consultants, some good, most bad, who sell themselves as change agents for the production culture. This dynamic force is needed to clear out the stagnate elements of a company that keep it from growing. So even bad consultants can have a positive impact on a culture due to their dynamic effect against static resistance. What makes some bad and good is relative to how well those changes stick, or how the moment the consultants leave, the previous culture reverts back to its old ways of doing things. Change isn’t just good, it’s necessary to always keep innovation moving in a positive direction. Currently in our political system Donald Trump is a radical force that is clearing out all the siloed thinking that has ruined most of America’s institutions and allowed a very static world to hold innovation down to a level they could still control for their own benefit. But that doesn’t help any of us advance. So relative to the timing of this new commercial space race the Trump presidency couldn’t have come sooner. The current policies of deregulation, economic expansion and general positive outlook and support for NASA has literally unleashed a pent-up potential that is quite explosive, and the effects will be extensive. Richard Branson couldn’t have hoped for a better fortune in the current circumstances because the media is so focused on Trump that the primitive naysayers to everything innovative don’t have time to pick these new space companies apart, much the way they did in the days after the moon landing.

Just like in a typical business culture there are always two forces at work, one that has a reverence for how things have been, the primitive—the static forces. Then there are the dynamic forces, the people who want change, who love to invent and be creative. When America launched man to the moon for the first time in 1969 the primitive revelers were getting ready to have the music festival Woodstock which represented the old static order. On the surface they appeared to be the crazy anarchists wanting to change America’s traditional culture into something much more socialist. But this was a ruse, the real intent was to keep America and the world from becoming a more technological place that wanted to grow up and leave the comfort of mother earth. So thus, the need for change agents and when one never came along the world was plunged back into the Dark Ages. For a short time, Ronald Regan brought forth the kind of optimism we are starting to see again now, but it quickly was crushed by the fifth year of his presidency. The Space Shuttle program that had already been started during the great space race withered away and died, and we never went back to the moon.

It’s not enough to just invent space travel for commercial enterprises, the culture itself has to be made ready to accept it and from what I can see it is happening. From Donald Trump to the changes in entertainment culture, specifically video games, the VSS Unity has had the barriers to thought removed so that the technical aspects could be worked out and now we have commercial space travel, just like that. And regardless of what happens politically, and within the entertainment culture, what Virgin Galactic is doing and is about to do will change everything we know about our relationship with earth. While many of the entertainment leftists that have the money to ride Virgin Galactic and see space for the first time as private citizens, they think they will love the earth more. But they will discover that space has so many more opportunities that once humans can touch it, entirely new vantage points of thought and economics will spring forth, and that is so exciting as well as very much-needed.

Rich Hoffman

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