Tag: Atlas Shrugged

The Morality of being a Gunfighter: How guns make America a more intellectual culture–and improve lives

From the anti-gun people, especially after the Vegas mass shooting there has been this constant term they use “you don’t need so many guns.” They say it as if they were the authority on living and had the complications of life all figured out as a superior philosophic matrix. Yet I look at their lives, the losers on Saturday Night Live, the Hollywood industry, the open criminals like Hillary Clinton and the DNC workers of 2016 and I must conclude, who on earth would take advice from people so messed up? Who are these people to give us advice about anything? I wouldn’t trust them to tell me where the corner deli is in New York city that could sell me a pack of gum, let alone advise me on how many guns I should have or even why I should have them. Even worse, their declarations that guns should be made illegal in any form indicates a complete lack of respect for the kind of living we have in the Midwest of the country—essentially the Red State middle of the entire country. Essentially only the coastal regions have these liberal losers driving policy. Guns for everyone else is a fact of life. They are certainly a big part of my life. Here is video of what I do almost every night for exercise. It’s how I practice Cowboy Fast Draw in my private range. The goal of this activity is to draw and fire my Ruger Vaquero as fast as I can once the target light blinks on solid. Once the target blinks three times it lets me know that the next time the light comes on that I need to draw and fire. My time is registered on a display on my workbench. It’s a fun activity that really sharpens your mind, and I enjoy doing it almost every night at least for 15 to 30 minutes.

When people say that we don’t need guns, well I’d say, we don’t need footballs, golf clubs, or baseball bats either. All of those things could be used as weapons if people were so inclined, but in a civil society nobody would even think of such a problem. Most of the people I know have guns and nobody goes out on a killing spree after dinner. When shooting in my private range I never think to use those guns on other people. Always my use of them is to increase my speed and accuracy in shooting a target under conditions of duress. The process of doing that helps me in other parts of my life. Now to the pot smoking loser on Saturday Night Live who does things during the after party that they’d never want to tell their parents, I wouldn’t expect them to understand my love of guns. Because they are still looking for mechanisms in life to help them manage all the pressures they experience. I look at their lives where they smoke, drink or have too much sex and would say that those are all factors contributing to the problems they have in their lives. I don’t have those problems. Instead I shoot and spend time in my range working out solutions to very complicated problems. Shooting helps me and many others live a better life.

If you visit England presently you will find everywhere some visage to their Norman period where knights were part of their national identity. It doesn’t mean that people want to go cut off the heads of their enemies when they hold a wooden sword from a gift shop in London—it’s just means that people are paying regional respect to an order which built the identity of the nation. If you go to Japan you find much of the same, everywhere is some visage to the samurai culture and behind that is the constant symbol of the sword. Even going to a hibachi grill to get some very expensive Kobe Beef you will see the cooks emulating the ghosts of their samurai heritage as they prepare food in front of you. It is very important to them and is a huge part of their national character. You don’t see radical leftists attacking these countries for their history of violence and the modern respect that is still given regarding the weapons which forged their nations.

In America it is the cowboy which created the nature of our country. And behind the cowboy was the six-gun and the mythology of dueling. The reason that dueling is still such a romantic idea in the period of the Old West is that it is respectable that people would face off against each other to settle a value judgment. To have a value that people were willing to defend to the death is actually a noble idea—especially in these complicated days of leftist interpretation into the events that leave people always feeling empty. In that emptiness they seek to fill the void with bad habits—such as the smoking, drinking and over charged sex. Regarding sex, if you spend more than a half hour per day thinking about sex—you are wasting your time. When you are young and always looking for some flower to pollinate, maybe you spend more time thinking about it if you are a male. If you are a female you likely won’t because you are in charge of the sexual experience and can decide when and how often, but nobody should spend more time on average than a half an hour per day. Anything more is an obsessive activity that degrades the experience. People who do think about it more than that allotted time need to develop more hobbies.

I view shooting in America as a deeply philosophic experience. The political left has successfully painted an opposite picture, that gun users in America are a bunch of dumb hillbillies who can’t speak in words longer than two syllables. Yet the opposite is true, liberals who criticize the gun culture are the dumb people, they are ones who can’t change their own oil, or fix a leak in their sink. They are the ones who fall apart whenever there is a death in the family or run to substance abuse when they feel insecure about something. People I know who shoot guns, especially people in the Cowboy Fast Draw Association, or in SASS are some of the nicest and well-rounded people I’ve met anywhere—including in those European and Asian countries that people think have so much “rich” culture. I would argue that in America we have our own rich culture built on westward expansion—which was a very “moral” enterprise in the scope of history—and guns were the backbone of that culture that we should all be proud of.

In the video the times I was recording were in the .450 range. I’m not happy with those numbers and the purpose of the slow motion is to show myself that I need to fire the gun much sooner out of the holster instead of pushing the gun forward. That is what makes that kind of training so satisfying, and worth pursuing. Shown in regular speed everything happens very fast. But when you slow it down, I can see where I need to improve, and that requires training my mind to think that much faster. In applying those techniques to my life that I learn at the gun range, it makes me a much better person in my day to day life. I think much faster when there are problems to solve and my thinking is much more accurate. After all, the brain doesn’t know if you are trying to solve the problem of hitting a target or trying to solve global economic problems. It sees everything in context, so by practicing something productive like “shooting” it helps the mind solve other problems not directly connected to the shooting sports. That is why shooting is a good thing for all Americans to do, and if more people did, especially the coastal liberals, they’d find that they could lead better lives and would have a lot fewer problems.

I’m not personally going to allow people who are broken intellectually—which most liberals are—and have them beat on gun owners anymore. My experience with guns is a very positive one and violence has nothing to do with it. Guns may have been invented to expedite the experience of death, or make people more efficient in killing others—but as tools of intellect, they are more useful in making a respectful class of people who think independently, and can manage their affairs in a superior way over their liberal protestors. I see nothing negative about my experiences on my private gun range in the sport of Cowboy Fast Draw. The practice of it makes me more efficient as a person and gives me an outlet for the stresses in my life that shooting baskets in my driveway or playing golf don’t quite reach. People who speak against guns just don’t understand why they are important culturally, and there are likely a lot of reasons for it. Maybe they had crappy parents. Maybe they didn’t have grandparents around to teach them important lessons when they were younger. Maybe they are just losers in life. Whatever it is, it’s not the problem of gun owners to bend their habits to these broken people. Broken people are not allowed to create the standard for what America is. And gun owners are not the broken people. It’s the people who criticize that culture who are in true need of a different way of thinking. A trip to the gun range would help a lot of them. But for the rest, they need a lot more.

I am proud to call myself a gunfighter. For me it’s no different from training to be a boxer, a martial artist or an MMA fighter—it’s a sport. And becoming good at that sport has a carryover effect into other things in life that are more important to good living. That is why the anti-gun people are so wrong on the gun culture in America. They don’t like America even though they try to sell their ideas by saying they are part of our culture—they clearly aren’t and seek to change it in everything they do. For them it starts by pissing on a bar wall outside drunk off their young asses and it ends with them becoming radical progressives in congress, or heads of major networks. They are all equally wrong. To speak against guns is to speak against the concept and intentions of American life. Part of that life is displayed in the sports we use to articulate our culture. Being a gunfighter isn’t the same as being a killer. These days it means a person is building foundation skills to become more precise and quicker in their life—and it’s a personal challenge worth the undertaking. It’s certainly not something to be outlawed because the more sensitive and less intellectual people on the west and east coasts are afraid of guns. What they really fear is what they might learn about themselves if they were to embark on a journey where they had to become better at something and challenge themselves. What they might learn in that process is what they are running from—and that is all the reason why guns should be more prevalent in America, instead of less.

Rich Hoffman
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Jimmy Kimmel the big liberal Pussy: How guns are important to American morality

 

Who is this Jimmy Kimmel pussy crying about things in front of his audience of what’s supposed to be a nightly comedy show?  I was so angry about his monologue right after the Las Vegas shooting demanding more gun control legislation that I waited to respond just to keep my volatile thoughts about him in check.   Kimmel is one of those west coast softies who have obviously been coddled through life and had the fortune to be put into a high platform in the entertainment culture—and he feels he has the right to lecture the rest of America about guns going so far to say that “no American should be able to own an M-16,” and he further went on to berate the NRA for supporting efforts to knock back more legislation from panicky politicians screaming for some short-term fix to a long-term problem.  I think I’ve had enough of these east and west coast liberal losers inflicting on my American culture a value system that is as foreign to this country as an alien visiting here from Mars might be.  Guns in America are important and are at the core of our independence—and every bit as important as any other Amendment, especially the First.  Americans should be able to own anything they want, and when bad guys do bad things with guns, more laws won’t do the trick.  The problem is much more complicated than what Jimmy Kimmel the pussy is advocating.

I had an extraordinarily bad week of last where hundreds of people I have been dealing with and millions of dollars in investment were on a razor’s edge of peril and it took every skill I had in the tool box to keep everything on track.  It was a brutal life that could easily crush anybody’s resolve.  But one thing I do to manage all that stress is to balance it out with things I enjoy and to that effect I had a chance to visit with my family the Neiderman Family Farm down the road from my house in Liberty Township.  I shot guns all through the week on my Cowboy Fast Draw target range.

Then on the weekend we visited a family retreat in central Kentucky where I had the opportunity to do some four wheeling and some shooting of the big guns to blow off some steam.   All those places added up to a lot of good sanity maintenance for me—they reminded me what was important as the storm clouds swirled around me professionally and as usual, I had everything sorted out by Monday morning—because of the way I manage my stress.  Guns are a huge part of that personal maintenance.

When I talk about the big guns, I am specifically talking about my favorite gun, my Smith & Wesson .500 Magnum.  I brought the 500 grain cartridges which are getting close to the top load you can fire out of a handgun.  The S&W .500 is the most powerful handgun manufactured in the world.   With the smell of a campfire blowing my way as a spectacular sunset cast it’s gaze upon my shooting position on a hilltop the punishing satisfaction of firing such a massive bullet at a steel plate target from 30 yards away is something specifically American and uniquely manly.  I wasn’t with a bunch of drunken heathens the way Hollywood might paint that picture

I just described, nearby the women were sitting around a campfire eating camp food and talking about domestic concerns.  My niece was there with me shooting a new gun for her concealed carry endeavors.  Her husband was shooting with me also while my brother-in-law was showing me his new collection of guns.  It was very much a family event and everyone was having a good time.  When I fired my big .500 it hit the steel plate so hard that it broke the chain that was hanging the target and we all marveled at the tremendous impact and firepower of the S&W .500.  For me holding that big gun I think about the great engineering that went into making something that powerful so safe.  Aside from the fact that you need to be pretty strong to hold the gun because of the massive recoil, holding that much power in the palm of your hand to me is a miracle of modern industry—and that’s what I think about when using that marvelous gun.

But some idiot like Jimmy Kimmel would never understand what that moment was like, or those methods of personal management.  They’d say that no civilian human being should be able to own such a magnificent weapon.  Why should I be allowed to have something so powerful—according to the same culture that produces monsters like Harvey Weinstein and the Hollywood pedophiles?   Two days earlier at the Niederman Farm where my family attended the Fall Festival it was all about country living, big barns, lots of animals, tractors, and homemade jellies and apple ciders.  On the way to the family retreat down in Kentucky we stopped by Dry Ridge to eat at the Cracker Barrel there and of course the place was packed.  All the people there were similar to the people at the Niederman Farm.

They were Christian people happy with the simple things in life.  Most of them were gun advocates to some degree or another, and of course in the Cracker Barrel are signs and homage’s to the Second Amendment, from antique rifles displayed on the wall to paraphernalia sold in their famous gift shops.  It was one of the best breakfasts I’ve had in a while, and after such a rough week it really calmed me down.  But honestly it was the environment and the people who did it—it was the southern hospitality that people like Jimmy Kimmel make fun of as vigorously as the they do the gun culture that emerges from it.  Let’s face it; the NRA doesn’t have many impassioned members in Los Angeles.  But at the Cracker Barrel in Dry Ridge, Kentucky I could have stood on a table and read from the latest American Rifleman magazine and the customers would have been enthusiastically supportive.

Did I need to own and fire such a huge weapon which was right there with me while I was at the Cracker Barrel, because we were on our way down to the family retreat?  According to Jimmy Kimmel and the cast of Saturday Night Live I didn’t.  In their west and east coast viewpoints it is more moral to piss in the alley of a bar at 3 AM in New York City and to have sex with strange women which are part of their culture than to go shooting with close family members in the middle of God’s country in the American south.  I could easily look at Jimmy Kimmel’s personal life and pick it to pieces.  I’m sure I could declare a lot of things he likes to do illegal and destructive to a good American life.  At any time I could use that big gun to cause all kinds of damage, but it never crossed my mind because in having such a huge weapon it requires responsibility.  Once you act responsibly with a firearm people find that they act responsibly with other things in their lives as well.   That’s the way you find most people who are huge NRA supporters and concealed carry permit holders—they are some of the nicest people there are in the world—and they are honest.  Owning guns tends to bring out the best in people because the foundation of owning firearms is in responsibility.  Once people accept responsibility for something like a gun, they find they can apply the same values to other things and it makes them vastly better people as a result.

The problems that caused that liberal loser in Vegas to shoot up all those people are more systemic than in the right to own firearms.  Kimmel completely missed the point of the Second Amendment and it was painful to listen to him articulate all the stupid Hollywood dinner party talking points without knowing the reality of what the gun culture is.  I would argue that liberalism is the cause of such breakdowns, and that if we really wanted to solve the problems in our society—then we’d make liberalism illegal, not the physical firearms.  I shoot a lot and I love my guns—they are very therapeutic to me.   I like owning large, powerful weapons because they exercise a level of control that makes people better because of that responsibility.   I know and deal with people all over the world and I can report honestly that there isn’t anywhere quite like a gun range or a Cracker Barrel.  It’s not just I grew up with these ideas around me from my home in Liberty Township to the many times I’ve been shooting with family members.  I routinely deal with people of Hindu faith, people who are devote Buddhists—many people from every corner of the globe and I get along well with all of them.  But what’s missing from their various cultures is the kind of independence and positive American spirit that you find in places like that Dry Ridge Cracker Barrel.

The Niederman Family Farm is an expensive ticket, but it is in Liberty Township where most of the homes these days are well over a quarter million dollars.  It’s not uncommon anymore for a home in my neck of the woods to be close to a million dollars—and for the people who move to Liberty Township they want the best of both worlds.  They want access to the great industry that is common to the area in very capitalist friendly political zones, and they like being able to take their families to the Niederman Farm on holidays.  With the money they make at the Niederman Farm they pay their taxes and they improve the property every year so everyone wins.  As I ate a hot dog there during a setting sun with my grandchildren and sipped on drink I thought of Jimmy Kimmel and realized that he was a lost guy who was stuck in a bubble of Hollywood culture that didn’t like people who eat at the Cracker Barrel.  They didn’t like NRA members because guns are beyond their experience.  They are big government socialists who want to mold the world into the image of the rest of the world, which is in a lot of trouble.  I would rather eat at the Cracker Barrel in Dry Ridge or shoot my big .500 Magnum against a setting sun with the smell of wood smoke fresh from a raging camp fire than to eat noodles in Tokyo or sip wine in Venice.  That is what these gun grabbing cry babies are really scared of.  It’s not the guns, but the attitude and independence of the people who use guns to maintain a philosophy that is rooted in individualism instead of collectivism.  Jimmy Kimmel is a pussy because the weight and sorrow of the collective tragedy of Las Vegas was just too much for him.  He had no mechanisms of intellect to deal with his feelings of despair that he felt in realizing that the institution of Americanism couldn’t keep people from harm—and he wants even more laws to support his false belief in the merits of institutionalism.  But for me, and many people who carry and use guns a lot, especially big guns—it is in the focus on personal responsibility in having such things that make us hold the door open for ladies at the Dry Ridge Cracker Barrel while everyone waits in line to just be seated—and they are happy to do it, because they are generally happy people treating their fellow Americans with reverence and respect.  What drives liberals’ crazy is that the respect starts with gun ownership and is the backbone of a civil society—and that is why they cry like a bunch of dwindling pussies on a quest for their own destruction every chance they get, which is why liberalism should be illegal well before guns ever are.

Oh, and remember when I said I practiced Cowboy Fast Draw in my private range?  Well, this is what it looks like.  To me it’s like practicing a golf swing–it’s a sport–a way to test yourself against the forces of nature.  And its pretty cool and a lot better than anything liberals like Jimmy Kimmel do for fun.

Rich Hoffman

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All the Reasons to vote for Mark Welch for Trustee: The “invisible hand” of West Chester

With all the talk about education and how much money should be spent on it, and has been within America, there are a lot of people who are in dire need of a vast education.  Most of the people needing it are those functioning as pundits and news reporters—especially politicians who are doing important jobs but don’t have the intellect to do that job correctly.  That has been the case so far during Donald Trump’s entire time spent in the White House. People who should know better are surprised that he has done such a good job so far and has led an economic approach that is breaking records in the stock market—as I write this the Dow Jones is currently 300 points about 23,000!  And the reason is basic economics.  Trump is providing a hands off approach to government allowing investment to prosper and for our capitalist exchanges to be trustful, so people are putting their money to work instead of hiding it away to protect it from radical politicians who want to redistribute it to their voter base essentially to buy elections.   Trump’s approach works and it always has for those bold enough to utilize a less restrictive business environment and we know that because Trump hasn’t been the first to try such things.  In West Chester, Ohio Mark Welch has been utilizing a very pro business strategy that has been very successful and now four years after he was first elected West Chester is booming in similar ways that the Dow Jones is currently.  It’s all about a pro business strategy that allows for growth, and now that Mark is up for re-election of his seat the facts are there for all to witness.  Below is a collection of video segments from a West Chester Tea Party forum conducted to feature the candidates for this year’s election.  Mark as expected, performed very well, and gave great answers to the questions provided to him which should put everyone’s mind at ease about electing him for a second term to continue the good job he has been doing.

I suppose where the education failure starts it is that most people just don’t understand the basic concepts of Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations.  I mean, modern advocates for thought—and that includes everyone from the most highly paid attorney working for Beltway politics to the NFL player protesting on one knee during the National Anthem should understand well the idea of the “invisible hand” described in Smith’s epic work on economics.  The basic premise that self-interest regulates behavior far better than authoritative Theory X oriented fear of government—such as what occurred under Mark Welch when he first became a trustee in regards to zoning regulations.   Before Mark came along zoning was a radicalized venture in West Chester.  I can recall a case where a business was destroyed by West Chester zoning because they hosted Tea Party events on Tuesday nights and the rules of zoning were used to push it out of existence.  The heavy hand of government penalized this place of business for some signage displays on Sunday’s where a similar business right across the street was given a free pass—because it was a popular meeting place for Lakota school levy supporters.  It only took a few months once there was bad publicity unleashed for that place of business to close its doors—and that is just one example that government can destroy businesses by limiting the movement of Adam Smith’s free hand.   That building is still sitting empty years later, destroyed by government essentially.  The same story could be told all across America and when Mark talks in the video about beating an entrenched incumbent in the 2013 election, that’s why he won.  He has not disappointed West Chester, he’s made it much better over the last four years.

When self-interest goes from a focus on profitability and instead resides purely on survival it is then clear that we are living in a restrictive society confined to the artificial barriers imposed by government for the purpose of ideological control rooted in poor philosophic thinking.  It is hard enough to be in business competing in an industry without the hand of government sticking its nose into every little aspect of strategic implementation.  To an extent government is there to make sure that the game of business is played fairly, but they should not impose themselves on that climate, otherwise you destroy the “invisible hand.”  When government is too involved, that invisible hand stays in a pocket and doesn’t do what it should and that’s a bad thing.  Mark Welch certainly understands the concept of “the invisible hand” and West Chester is thriving in 2017 beyond anybody’s expectations.  Donald Trump is doing the same on a large national level.  Anybody who understood how these things work could do the same, but unfortunately such people are hard to find.

Maybe it’s because liberals—especially academic liberals, are inherently lazy in their thinking.  The works of Karl Marx is much smaller than Adam Smith’s works so perhaps it’s because it’s easier to read that liberals gravitate to Marxism and cower in fear of Smith. Most liberals that I have known love to smoke pot, have reckless sex with dirty unwashed people covered in tattoos and body piercings, and are weak people who like to hide in the safety of a crowd—so Adam Smith’s invisible hand is pretty scary to them—because they are scared people to begin with.   But that doesn’t mean you can build your society around their thinking.  Anybody who is in public office needs to understand the basics of Adam Smith’s concepts.  Under Trump’s presidency we can now all see how the Wealth of Nations is built.  It goes from concept in a large volume beautiful book to actual practice as represented by the Dow Jones records currently being broken by the day.  But before Donald Trump was Mark Welch in West Chester, Ohio who understood the invisible hand of Adam Smith from day one of his election during the first term.  The wealth of West Chester has exploded, and it’s not a mystery.  It’s all very predictable.  But Wes Chester is unique because it has had politicians like Mark who knew when to leave things alone—which is harder than a lot of people think.

Many years ago and up to very recently, in leadership training of people who need to learn those skills a common practice is to have a person stand on an elevated platform and to allow themselves to fall backwards into a group of waiting arms from your teammates to teach trust to the subconscious.  The thinking is to trust that the invisible hands of your team to know that they won’t let you fall because it’s in their self-interest not to let you.  For instance, if you are a smart person who holds the keys to their strategic success in life, you don’t have to worry about them backstabbing you from all types of success in life, because they need you for their own fulfillment.  So they won’t tend to let things happen to you if they find you falling.  Building that trust is one of those elementary practices in leadership training.  The people who are always terrible at this exercise are those cowering liberals who are afraid of their own shadows in life, so it is very difficult to fall back and trust other people because they don’t naturally trust anything—because of what they know about themselves if you really want to break it down correctly.  Let alone trust some invisible hand that is not controlled by government.  But their dysfunction cannot be the standard we all live with as a nation, or a community, because what they are experiencing is a psychosis not a healthy deduction of reason.  So when you get someone like Mark Welch, you grab on tight, because he is unique in the political world.  Hopefully with Trump’s successes on the larger stage more people like Mark will emerge.  But currently, people should be very grateful that Mark Welch is running for such an important trustee position, because he understands innately the nature of Adam Smith’s invisible hand, and it has been that hand which has loaded West Chester, Ohio with such magnificent options toward the enjoyment of life.

I was at Cabela’s in West Chester just yesterday buying up ammunition for some weekend shooting and I had to marvel at the work of the invisible hand that has been doing a good job in West Chester.  To have the option of visiting Cabela’s on a wonderful October day then heading down to Jags for a nice steak lunch with important people to make decisions that would increase the fortunes of many people.  Then to top off the night at Top Golf and enjoy the sunset of a fall evening—but before leaving to walk over to Barnes and Noble for some new books to read are all miracles of the invisible hand of Adam Smith’s capitalism.  Everyone should read Adam Smith’s work because they would find such things much better miracles for which they are.  They’d also understand that much of that lifestyle I mentioned is a result of Mark Welch’s proper management of West Chester as a trustee—to build the trust that investors need to fall back into the waiting arms of West Chester’s government to protect them without meddling into their work.  The trust goes both ways, government has to trust business to catch it when they fall back into their arms, and the same for the businesses who must take a leap of faith with their investments to make magical things happen in the realm of capitalism.  It sounds easy, but unfortunately most people just don’t get it.  Mark Welch does, and that is the primary reason that people should vote for him on November 7th 2017. The invisible hand of Adam Smith is alive in West Chester, and it’s beautiful to look at when you can see what it leaves behind.  But trusting that hand is hard, and lucky for West Chester, Mark Welch does, and the results have been explosively delightful, and something everyone—even  loser liberals—can benefit from.

Rich Hoffman

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The Proper Use of Executive Orders: Why Trump is a hero and Obama was a loser

First of all, a note to the Democrats, the way Obamacare was created was as illegal as anything I’ve ever seen in my life.  The vote during Christmas of 2010 when everyone was looking the other way, the coercion—we have to pass the bill to see what’s in it, the weak Supreme Court ruling by identifying it as a tax when the Obama administration lied about the nature of it from the beginning—were all devious acts.  The notion that you can keep your doctor if you like your doctor when all along the Obamanites on Capitol Hill intended to destroy health care all together and give rise to a single payer system in the United States bringing one more socialist program to the freest nation on earth.   There were plenty of lies and manipulations congress did to bring Obamacare to life, then to have losers like John McCain force us like scandalous children to stay at the table of Obamacare just because of his silly vote was preposterous.  Given all that massive government dysfunction and intent to destroy free markets, Trump’s executive order to destroy subsidies into Obamacare was a much different thing than the typical executive orders of Obama regarding the impatient use of White House power to go around congress to get something done.   These powers were given to the president for just this kind of purpose.

Executive orders are not law.  What Trump did will need to still be made law at some point in the future.  But he can at least give the world a demonstration of what free market options look like while he works to get enough senate support to get real reform passed.  For that to happen John McCain likely will have to die in office and be replaced with a real conservative.  Other senators who were never Trumpers during the campaign, like Ben Sasse and several others will need to be removed from office and be replaced with more Trump oriented Republicans—and that appears to be exactly what the President is going to do.  Just because those never Trumpers put an “R” next to their names doesn’t mean they are the right kind of Republicans.  I know a lot of people who call themselves “Republicans” when in fact they are just Democrats in hiding—because they live in conservative areas of the country and couldn’t get elected any other way.

I watched the righteous indignation toward President Trump over his health care executive orders with great satisfaction.  Now that the shoe is on the other foot all the talk is about Constitutional respect and the value of checks and balances.  Yet when Chuck Schumer watched Barack Obama abuse his power to go around congress it was “heroic” and necessary.  Give me a break.  Trump’s executive orders are to fulfill a campaign promise in regards to Obamacare.  He can’t let congress stand in the way of a promise he was elected on—just so they can appease the lobbyists who have made them rich as public servants.   The original sin was created by Obama and his Republican friends in the Swamp who have secretly all joined together to carry America toward a single payer healthcare system which of course is a pay to play scheme for those remaining insurers who can use the lack of competition to solidify their costs with guaranteed subsidies.  It’s good for them and the politicians but terrible for the people it is supposed to serve.  So Donald Trump did the right thing and undid the whole mess so that everything can collapse and force everyone to the negotiating table which is a very different thing from what Obama had done.

Trump’s executive orders are not to subvert congress, they are to force everyone to the negotiating table to take positive action, and that is a proper use of executive privilege.  It’s why we should be electing more people in the future with real world business experience rather than community activists who have radical ideas constructed for them in academia.  Our current intellectual class of people around the world have subscribed to poor Marxist oriented philosophies and have been caught in advising the world toward disaster and that needs to change fast.  Trump is part of that answer.  Putting people into politics that are proven success stories is the trend of the future, not losers who are filled only with theories concocted in the dank old rooms of Oxford, then passed off to a bunch of oily skinned pubescents at Harvard, Princeton and Cambridge—who then carry those stupid ideas out into the world with disguised merit because they were spoken about from respected houses of academia.  Power and respect do not come from brick rooms and institutional hallways—they come from success and a reputation based on history.  Academia has ruined their reputations by teaching the wrong kind of things to their students.  Barry Obama learned the wrong things at the University of Chicago where progressivism was being launched from that particular institution to change the world from one thing to another.  Obamacare is every bit about that desire to change and academia has been proven wrong in their assumptions—yet they have insisted to carry all of us forward regardless of the facts—which is why they are being knocked out of power now.

It’s not that Trump happened to them.  It’s not that Trump had Russian help to win an election or used his celebrity to beat a loser of a Democratic candidate.  It’s that Trump has a track record of success in getting things done that spans four decades, and voters wanted to see something get done for a change—and they are tired of corrupt politicians ramming things down their throats like this single payer health care initiative that even Republicans are trying to steer us all to.  Trump promised free market solutions so we voted for him and expected him to deliver.  When congress didn’t play ball and sought to run out the clock on Trump by slowing everything down on Capitol Hill people recognized what was happening, so they support the actions of the president.  Of course liberals are mad, but who cares.  Their plots are coming undone under Trump and that is specifically why people voted for him.  That’s not Trump’s fault.  He’s just the messenger.  The reason he was elected in the first place is the fault of Democrats and the RINO Republicans who have not put American interests at the front of their considerations.   Instead they put forth plans created by a Marxist inspired academia around the world, and they expected that failure to solidify due to the lack of options they deliberately were providing to us.  With Trump now, free market solutions will at least see the light of day.  It will still be up to us, the voters, to advance that competitive formula into law over the years to come.  And that is the biggest difference between Obama’s executive orders and Trump’s.  Obama’s were radical ideas designed to change the nature of American life.  Trump’s are to force negotiations by creating options to consider.  And that’s why Trump is a great president while Obama was and will always be considered an insurgent who intended to destroy American sovereignty with one more crippling socialist program intent to put restrictive chains on our economy.   For academia health care was a Trojan Horse designed to destroy the American economy so it was a dream for them.  But it was a nightmare for the people of the United States—happily now because of Trump—we are waking up from the nightmare, and the new day is looking pretty good.

Rich Hoffman

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Where Are the Pink Pussy Hats Now: The death of Hollywood over terrible customer service

It was roughly a year ago that the Access Hollywood recordings of Donald Trump were released intending to sink his potential presidency.  When I first heard the comments I couldn’t help but feel the hypocrisy because let’s face it, men and women talk that way to each other all the time.  Women most of the time like the attention of men and men are by their biological design built to pollinate females to procreate our species.  All these silly new rules of conduct of men being chastised for wanting to stick parts of themselves into females are artificial and counterproductive.  But  when the people of Hollywood tried to use these new, stupid rules of male to female conduct to destroy Donald Trump when in fact it was they who perpetrated and actually exacerbated the bad behavior to begin with I thought was astonishing.  After all, Hollywood’s product used to be a good back when they made westerns and big sweeping epics like Ben Hur.  Men treated women with respect in those old productions and all was well with the world until movie producers like Harvey Weinstein made a joke out of the industry abusing his power so he could look at the boobies of the young women who wanted more than anything in the world to become stars on the silver screen.   It was obvious that if the same standard that was applied to Trump a year ago were to be turned around on the entire entertainment culture that a lot of people probably wouldn’t survive, and that’s what’s happening now.  Hollywood just killed itself with its own weapons.  Sean Hannity did a remarkable job of positioning the reasons why Hollywood will never be the same in the following video.

I always liked the Hollywood product and the industry as a whole.  But for a long time they have moved so far to the political left that what used to be an event I enjoyed—the Academy Awards were now just another inward looking celebration by a bunch of liberals congratulating themselves on being anti-American insurgents.  If you weren’t liberal you weren’t going to work on a Weinstein movie and in a lot of ways Harvey Weinstein was bigger than Steven Spielberg in Hollywood—by the volume of his work and the number of Academy Awards he amassed.   As one of the leading spokesmen for progressivism, his platform in the entertainment industry was unparalleled and it seems ironic that all that could be torn down with these outrageous claims toward him that are in some cases over twenty years old.  I say they are outrageous because many of the women who are now accusing Weinstein of rape are now forty-year old women who are no longer sex symbols.  They used sex to get into movies when they were in their twenties and only when men stopped looking at them as possible places to pollinate did they suddenly become “outraged.”  But the fact remains that dealing with people like Harvey Weinstein turned them into the man hating feminists that they are today as their lives are now filled with regret on what they had to do to climb the ladder in Hollywood to become a leading lady A-lister.

Yet the way they all collectively pounced on Donald Trump over the Access Hollywood tape was remarkably hypocritical.  They created the industry and the rules.  What Trump was talking about in his famous lines to Billy Bush was the effect of celebrity which he had just learned about late in life with his success with The Apprentice.  Trump was enjoying the kind of attention by women that movie starts like Ben Affleck and Matt Damon had always enjoyed, and being a smart guy he was pontificating about it to Billy Bush.   Yes, women will do just about anything to be near powerful men—it’s a deeply biological response to the mating game.  But unlike most of those Hollywood hot shots, Trump had a nice wife who kept him grounded and the temptations of flesh that are often thrown at movie stars by the opposite sex just to have access to a memory with their idols was managed and Trump moved on to bigger and better things.  By the time the Access Hollywood tape was released Trump was a different kind of man largely shaped by his decision to marry Melania Trump.   But the desire for entertainment executives and major political pundits to go after Trump, and to try to destroy him over these new age male and female roles which they had perpetrated was always  dangerous because they also made up the rules of power playing the opposite sex into compromising positions just to work in the industry.   You don’t get to the level of being a leading Hollywood actress at the level of Angelina Jolie or Gwyneth Paltrow without showing somebody your tits.  Not when there is a line of young women from Santa Monica to Paris willing to do anything to be the next Hollywood star.  People like Harvey Weinstein made themselves the gate keepers to success essentially so they could see titties—and everyone knew it.   So who were they to criticize Trump?

After Trump was elected president and was sworn in, the Academy Awards ceremony to me was unwatchable.  The way they ridiculed President Trump just because he was the Republican in the White House was disgusting and it made me wonder if they knew who their audience actually was, because there are a lot of Trump supporters who are like me–they love to watch movies.  But if the movies and the people who made them were so anti-Trump, they’d be forced to go somewhere else for their entertainment and that’s what has happened.   Hollywood has had their worst box office performance in 25 years and they are down an incredible 16% just from the previous year of 2016.  That was before the Harvey Weinstein story broke which virtually connects every major star in the industry to all the ugly stuff they complained about in Trump.  Except with Trump it was largely made up and overblown, but in Hollywood they were actually doing the things they accused Trump of—and to a far worse degree.

http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2017/09/liberal-hollywood-worst-box-office-numbers-25-years/

Where were the pink pussy hats that the Hollywood stars wore in protest to the Inauguration after Trump spent his first days in the White House?  Former stars of the Hollywood machine ran by people like Weinstein were protesting Trump so they set the gauge by which they are all now choking.  If the same standards they were trying to apply to Trump were turned back on them, then what did they think was going to happen?   The Trump supporting public already voted with their feet, just like they have with the NFL.  The great American game of football is down 30% just because those stars in the NFL thought they were bigger than they were.  They learned a hard lesson; people in the stands don’t care about them if they are going to throw off the shared elements of our culture, like the American flag.  Fans of the NFL turned on those stars of sports in a moment which has been a harsh reality to all professional sports.  They forgot who their audience was and in their hatred of Trump they drew a line between themselves and the fan base that enjoyed their product.  They have a major customer service problem as a result.  And that is precisely what happened to Hollywood in 2017.  They are down at least 16% because of the way Hollywood came out against a popular president.  People who voted for Trump largely knew the Access Hollywood tape was a set-up job and that Hollywood was guilty of much worse.  Now that we have the truth, that movie industry is changed forever.  They’ll never bounce back because they have lost the trust of the public.  Ultimately it’s not people like Harvey Weinstein who make projects succeed or fail, it is the public that buys the tickets—and they have been voting against Hollywood for a while now.  Now that Hollywood has alienated most of the country in their hatred of Trump, the hypocrisy on full display in the wake of the Harvey Weinstein sexual meltdown will sink the entire industry—and that’s a good thing.

America can’t be great again if the art and entertainment community is so vitriolic toward a president that half the country wanted.   When they showed up against Trump during his Inauguration in 2017 and protested him as a sexual predator they set the bar impossibly high for themselves as a result and now they are being crushed under their own standard—because they can’t live up to any of it. As actors and film moguls they live in the make-believe world of their own creations but under Trump’s presidency illusions are being shattered out of necessity, and now these people are exposed, and they are burning in front of our faces.  Hollywood will never recover as an industry.  Sure there will be new forms of entertainment that will emerge, but the Wilshire Blvd culture for which Hollywood has built its own kind of Wall Street is dying right in front of our eyes, and because they made themselves into a political weapon of the left, I’m glad to see it.  They have let us all down and now it’s time to pay.

Rich Hoffman

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The Real Gríma Wormtongue: Why we should all be proud of Donald Trump

What the Fu** is that piece of crap video Eminem did about Donald Trump? Doesn’t that idiot know that pumping the Black Panther fit to the air like he did in that video is a communist symbol, and that what he said and how he connected the world together had no semblance into reality? He can’t be that stupid, because if he is somebody owes us some money for his terrible public education. Everything about this video was pathetic including the little tag alongs standing in the background of a city destroyed by socialism—Detroit. Hell, I could stand in a parking garage and yell about all the things I don’t like about the world. At least when I did a similar video about what I didn’t like about Obama’s vision, I did some bull whip tricks that actually displayed some real talent. This stupid kid Eminem just stood there and yelled like a dumbass. And this guy was a celebrity? For what? Couldn’t he do something better and more creative than just yelling about things he obviously knows nothing about?

I am so proud of Donald Trump right now that I can’t hardly contain my enthusiasm. As I write this he just signed an executive order to unwind Obamacare paving the way for sweeping changes to health-insurance regulations. That’s a good thing because obviously the Republicans in the Senate who have taken millions of dollars from the insurance lobby refused to act hoping to paint the president in on a loser so they could force him to break a campaign promise and be rid of him by 2020. Those Republicans were more than happy to let all of our insurance premiums rise while they remained under federal protection insulated from the realities of their failures—but Trump went around them. Trump’s attack is a twofold event, first he will show the public what happens under an executive order where competition is introduced to the insurance exchanges—driving down rates over state lines. Secondly, he is going to outlast the Republicans who stood against him, and when he knocks them out of office there will be a Trump friendly Senator there ready to take the vacant seat. It might take a few years, but Trump will get his votes to make all this legal during his terms in office to make everything official by law. But standing around waiting for losers like John McCain just isn’t going to work, and Trump’s not waiting. Instead he is taking his message to the American people like he did last night in Pennsylvania. I watched that speech and the interview he did in front of a live audience at that same event with Sean Hannity with and swelling pride that I can’t remember ever happening. This is what it looks like to win, and to push back against the villains of our world.

These events as they are happening, the Vegas shooting and the lack of clear investigative evidence forthcoming from the authorities there, the treachery of John McCain, the chidings of Ben Sasse, the manipulations of Mitch McConnel—the lack of effort by Paul Ryan, the utterances of the broken Hillary Clinton and all her Democrats remind me of the fictional character of Gríma Wormtongue from the Lord of the Rings novels by J.R.R. Tolkien. You really must turn to the vast imaginings of fiction to behold the scale of the evil that is on full display and to understand what a miracle it is that Donald Trump is willing to stand against it unfettered with regret, fear or even the slightest bit of doubt. Donald Trump knows the game and he’s exposing it in ways nobody could have imagined. Even the events of the Hollywood meltdown over Harvey Weinstein can be attributed to the pressure Trump applies to the world around him. The liberal media had no choice but to go after Weinstein since they’ve spent the last year in full attack mode against the Trump family. Nothing stuck to the Trump’s but that same media had to then look to their own—and there was a lot of dirty rotten ugliness that was exposed very quickly. Just consider the case of Hillary Clinton, her top aide’s husband is now in jail for his sexual exploits with underaged girls. One of her top Hollywood donors is now fleeing the country due to three decades of severe sexual abuse of women he conducted and likely he raped others, which means he could be facing charges. How could anybody look at Trump with the anger Eminem articulated and not see the vast evil surrounding Hillary Clinton? Forget about partisanship interpretations. At the most fundamental human level, how could anybody see anything other than vast villainy on behalf of the Democrats? And Trump just by refusing to buckle under the pressure is flushing out all these Wormtongues who are falling by the day lately. It’s a dream come true for me.

It’s been seven years since I did the Whip Stunt to Save America video shown below. It didn’t get seen by as many people as Eminem’s crap did. You can bet that Google, Yahoo, and MSN have me on every kind of blacklist they can put on their search engines, but the right people still listened to what I had to say. The message does get out because my target audience is smart people, and they understand what we are fighting, which is a kind of evil only defined in Biblical context or in our most extravagant fantasies. I’ve been naming the Wormtongues for a long time and it costs me plenty. You never really know how something will work out, all you really can do is identify a problem and hope that enough people act on your truth to make a difference. In my wildest fantasies I never expected a Donald Trump to come along and to become such a wonderful president. I never thought it possible that all these problems could be solved without a violent revolution. I mean I never planned to let losers like Eminem ruin my country the way they ruined their city of Detroit, or even Chicago. In the past I had a chance to work with people like Harvey Weinstein and to make millions of dollars as a writer in movies—but I didn’t because I couldn’t break bread with those people. It was never an option to take the money and run and to be a part of destroying my country in the process. I made that decision a long time ago and for me it all came to a point with that video. It was within a week of that video that I started this blog site—to help educate the right people to think the right way about things and to essentially build a resistance against the progressive insurgents I saw taking over everything.

Now those insurgents—the anti-American forces in the NFL, Hollywood, the music industry, and the media in general are on the run and for a change–they are actually terrified, and they deserve to be. You can see that fear on Eminem’s bitchy little face. They have been bad people who were attempting to take over our country. I knew it a long time ago and now it’s more obvious than ever. I can’t say enough about Trump. He likely has saved so many lives by avoiding an all-out civil war—and I appreciate him so much for it. Typically, presidents don’t get credit for avoiding wars—only in winning them. But Trump has turned our culture war into one that has been fought by words rather than bullets—and we’re on the winning side for a change. That makes me very appreciative of what he’s doing. Obviously, a lot of people don’t see it yet, but history will certainly not be blind to the fact of the Trump legacy. Everyone will be a lot better off once he’s finished.

Rich Hoffman
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The HBO ‘Spielberg’ Documentary: What used to be good about Hollywood

I eagerly awaiting the time when HBO released its newest documentary titled simply as Spielberg. It was a Saturday night on October 7th when I was finally able to see it after waiting months for it to air, and I enjoyed it immensely. With all the recent discussion about Harvey Weinstein and the current decline of Hollywood, this Spielberg documentary was an interesting looking into everything that has been good about the movie industry. Clearly, and I’ve always felt this way, without Steven Spielberg as a great producer and writer, all of our lives would be much less optimistic. What the HBO documentary did that most DVD interviews have failed to do is pin point what drove Steven Spielberg and how that raw ambition touched the lives of so many people. It’s hard to watch anything on television or at the movies that Steven Spielberg has not touched in a good way. I always loved that filmmaker’s natural optimism and enjoyed how he could take incredibly dark topics like Schindler’s List and find the good in such a terrible story. Personally, 1993 was a year of really intense emotions. I was being sued many times over for a business deal that went south. Bill Clinton had just become president when I campaigned hard for Ross Perot and I literally felt like the world was coming to an end in everything that was going on around me. Then I saw Jurassic Park where several brilliant shots in that movie by Spielberg blew the doors off the future of visual effects—namely the attack at the T-Rex paddock in a downpour of rain in a lush tropical jungle to a booming symphonic musical score that I have never forgotten. Then just a few months later Schindler’s List was released and it became one of my favorite movies. As a very young person I was ready to be a filmmaker myself because Spielberg inspired me to do so. But what I learned harshly over the next 15 years was that I was more intended to the subject of movies rather than the maker of them. Some people are meant to be behind the camera, others are meant to be in front of them. Steven Spielberg was uniquely gifted in life to be behind the camera where everything made much more sense to him, and we are all better for it.

http://www.rollingstone.com/tv/news/10-things-we-learned-from-hbos-spielberg-documentary-w506623

What made Spielberg tick was his overly optimistic approach to life mixed with his natural fears that were more defined than most people were aware of. Spielberg used movies as his natural therapy to work out things in life that were beating him down. The only time Steven Spielberg was a fearless human being was when he was behind the camera where he was able to work things out in a way that allowed them to be captured on film. I learned about myself much later that I didn’t like the collaborative process of making movies the way Spielberg did and that I didn’t live my life like he did his. I wasn’t insecure about anything and that doesn’t make for very compelling stories—only the characters within stories as they interact with the outside world. Understanding that made me appreciate what Steven Spielberg did that much more over his lifetime.

I have enjoyed Spielberg’s movies since that magical year of 1993, but never to the same extent as before that date and I think he’s happy with things that way. Hollywood beat up on him for being such a Peter Pan type of personality and they wouldn’t give him credit for being the best director in film history until he made more “adult” dramas which he has. With a new wife to support him, Steven Spielberg went on to make a number of very serious and ambitious movies that many respect, but never tickled the box office quite the same. The Hollywood communists were happy, but the movie industry as a whole wasn’t but who could be mad at Spielberg. He certainly did his part to invent the industry from virtually nothing in the 1970s with a handful of other filmmakers including George Lucas. I’ve always known it but the HBO documentary really captured how unique the movie brats for which Spielberg was a member truly was. I’m glad to have grown up in a time when those types of filmmakers were making movies in Hollywood. I thought it might go on for a long time, but it really only lasted about 20 years. As I was working to get into that business it was obvious the door had closed and people like Harvey Weinstein were in charge of Hollywood and the doors to the next generation of movie brats were not open to conservatives.

Filmmakers like Steven Spielberg and George Lucas are not what we’d consider today to be conservative, but they came from a time when father was supposed to know best and rectifying that disappointment took their characters in film to great places. But the foundation of conservativism was there because they grew up in small towns and had fathers who worked hard and were successful in their own ways. They came from intact families and those foundations are present in their movies, from Star Wars to E.T. The magic of those types of movies from those types of filmmakers are so rare now. I thought it was amazing the way the world stopped for a moment just to watch the preview to the new Star Wars movie The Last Jedi during Monday Night Football on October 9th just a few days after the Spielberg documentary was released on HBO. Star Wars is all about family or the lack of it and people are so desperate for a sense of family these days, because liberalism has essentially crushed the notion. That is what separates Spielberg’s movie brats from the lost kids of today. There are no filmmakers like Spielberg out there or coming up, because the American family has essentially been destroyed. If you really want to breakdown what’s sick in Hollywood it is that they don’t tell stories about families anymore. They tell stories about why families are so messed up which robs the viewers of their products of the sanctification they are seeking with the price of a movie ticket.

Even Brian DePalma’s film Scarface which I was surprised to learn Spielberg actually worked on, was about family. Without the family element Tony Montana was just a thug. But in the context of his actions, we could sympathize and like the cocaine mogul because he was in essence a guy who wanted to take care of his family and start one of his own crawling out from under the communist regime in Cuba. Becoming a cocaine dealer was his only real path—a premise that was elaborated on later with the Breaking Bad series. But to come up with these stories from scratch the original movie brats for which Spielberg was the undisputed leader is something we may never see again. I’m glad to have seen it once, but it really is sad that we likely will never get it again for a long time. The conditions that make someone like Steven Spielberg just aren’t there for a new generation of movie makers. The material that young people have to work with now are the products of people like Weinstein where with Spielberg and Lucas it was John Ford and Alfred Hitchcock. The idea of a young Spielberg camping out illegally on the Universal lot just to learn how to make movies is something that the institution of filmmaking today just wouldn’t allow with their obsession with rules and regulations—and that is truly sad.

But the documentary was a marvelous look into one of the most fascinating people in human history, Steve Spielberg who was able to take his natural optimism, massive creative intellect and disappointments toward the nature of family life and put them into a series of marvelous movies that have lasted for decades and will stand the tests of time. I will always have a soft spot for Steven Spielberg even though later in life he has become more of a Democrat and supported politicians like Barack Obama. I’m sure if I sat down at lunch with him I’d have far more in common than not. What has always made Spielberg great is that he understood the American family and refused to be tainted by the disappointments of our times. And instead he put up on the big silver screen all the optimism his vast imagination could conceive and it made our world far better off.

Rich Hoffman

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‘Battlefront II’ Impressions after the Beta Test: I can’t wait for November 14th

I always feel that I must apologize for covering a light topic especially when there is so much going on in the world around us, but we do have to live. We do have to manage our stresses. And we must find the things in life that make us happy, and for me Star Wars is something that works—especially when we are talking about a new video game. Then regarding that topic, I think much of the world that’s coming, the politics, the structure, the science can be seen with each new video game update from the industry because most of the engineers and designers of the future out there are playing these massive online games. While it’s true that ratings are down in the NFL and some of that is certainly due to the politics surrounding the flag, most of the change in attitude toward football in general is because of this new age of entertainment where people can live entire secondary lives online in their video game avatars. I find it all extremely fascinating, and optimistic and it helps me fight through some of the most complex problems that any one human being could be expected to fight through. With all that said, I have been very excited for the next generation Star Wars: Battlefront II which comes out in November. For a long time there was talk of a beta run in early October so I did my pre-order and signed up for the top version of the game and had marked on my calendar October 4th because that’s when the beta opened for the new game by Electronic Arts/Dice.

My first impression of the beta compared to the full game of the original Battlefront with its bright white backgrounds was that it was missing an optimism that made the original very THX-1138 fun and futuristic. The menu boards on Battlefront II were mostly all in blacks and that made it seem like a lesser quality experience to me. Because of this I was disappointed, but once I started playing the various modes I quickly forgave the game because it was a lot of fun. From October 4th to October 9th I played as much as I could and leveled up to somewhere around 10 or 11. I didn’t pay much attention as I was mostly trying to get a feel for everything. A large part of the weekend my grandson was over and we played the new arcade mode a lot. It was clearly his favorite mode and I thought was a big addition to the overall game, a way to learn the maps and get a feel for the various builds in the game. I also thought the Star Card system was much improved, it reminded me a lot of the Fantasy Flight Games board games in this way, which makes those games infinitely interesting. Bringing that Star Card aspect to a video game made for a very compelling experience and I could see quickly that I would soon spend many hours playing with different cards to figure out the best combination, and then trying them out in the Arcade Mode to learn to use them. From just what the game developers showed on their beta test, there are endless opportunities for variety in Battlefront II once the game is released in November.

Before I get too far into this you do know dear reader about the cultural significance of all this, don’t you? After all, the new Star Wars: The Last Jedi trailer was released during halftime on Monday Night Football. And the moment that the beta ended for Battlefront II Forbes had a nice little article seen below about their criticism of the loot box system. The whole play to win debate in the video game community is a big deal because it brings many people into the realities of capitalism in ways their public educations never did. To be good at these games you must put in the hours, and the money. You can get by only doing one of those things, but to be great, you have to spend time, money and diligence to get the most out of the game. People who are from the ANTIFA crowd of course are out there playing these games and their basic philosophy is confronted with the realities of such a big business as Battlefront II is tapping into. Star Wars is just the entry point to these kinds of experiences. They become a lifestyle for many people in a similar way that adults have traditionally been in bowling leagues or played golf. It is not uncommon in the spirit of competition to get a new bowling ball or a set of titanium clubs for golf to get an edge over your rivals and that is what the loot box system does in Battlefront II. The writer for the Forbes article obviously didn’t like it. I did, my grandson and I had a lot of fun with the loot boxes. It was like gambling in Vegas, you never really knew what you were going to get and it was fun working toward an opportunity to have a chance at something cool. Games like this are all about the proper risk rewards system.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/insertcoin/2017/10/08/star-wars-battlefront-2s-loot-boxes-seem-like-theyre-going-to-be-a-serious-problem/#1707a80a6323

For me the best part of the new Battlefront II game was the Starfighter Assault modes. It took me a minute to get used to things because they changed the mechanics quite a lot. On the previous edition of Battlefront I was one of those 50 kills per game people. I was very good at it and it was a dream come true for me to fly those ships around in space in combat situations. I can tell that I will be spending many hours playing just that mode. I would say that the new game is worth it just for the Starfighter Assault modes. As readers here know I love the Fantasy Flight Games offerings of X-Wing and Armada so putting a pilot into a scenario that is objective based around giant capital ships and individualized dog fighting is an incredible experience. Even for a beta test the frame rates were high and the details were amazing. Some of the cut-scenes were sloppy on my giant 4K television but I’m sure the final release of the game will be a major improvement on that. As I seem to say with each of these big video game releases, whether it is Uncharted 4 for the Playstation, or Zelda for the Nintendo Switch, this Battlefront II game is the next technical evolution that turns living rooms into combat zones and works our minds in ways we couldn’t duplicate under any other situation.

Probably the best improvement however on Battlefront II is the class system where there are four different categories of player. I found due to my aggressive style the Heavy Class to be most to my liking. But what’s better is that you aren’t stuck to that class for the whole round of play. If you need to lighten things up for more stealth or sniper ability you can during a round, and those strategic options are like gold raining from heaven to a guy like me who literally spends all my down time thinking of strategic options. I think of strategic options even when it comes to what grocery store to go to, so a game like this with all these random elements playing against each other is just food for my brain. So I’m really looking forward to November 14th when the whole game is released to the public. Like I said, I held nothing back on this version. I did preorder the game so I could play it with the early access. And I did by the deluxe version of it so I could get every little benefit. On the first one I came late to the game because I was made at The Force Awakens for killing Han Solo and not respecting the continuity of the previous novels. It took me a year to finally give it a shot after radio host Matt Clark bugged me about it every week for that entire year. Once I did start playing however I exploded and quickly maxed out my level at 100. There were a few weekends around last Christmas where I was off work and I played the starfighter modes for 48 straight hours—because it was that fun. With Battlefront II being noticeably an improvement on the game play mechanics, I will likely go even deeper into the game, so I am starting with the deluxe package and from there I will support the game in whatever fashion they come up with. It’s not only a work of art and technical marvel, but it’s just some of the best fun you can have from a top end entertainment system. I can’t think of a better way to live life than to blow stuff up and hear all the wonderful sounds from a Bose sound system that puts you in the middle of the most intense battles a mind could think of. I am really, really, really looking forward to November 14th. Battlefront II will be a winner and the beta was just a taste of the great things to come.

Rich Hoffman

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The Root Cause of the Gun Control Problem: We need less control and more guns

I found it amazing to see Tweets like the one below immediately after the Las Vegas shooting.  There was something about this one that was different for me.  I found the attacks on the NRA reprehensible.  October is normally the month that I renew my membership to the NRA and I did so proudly a few days ago knowing how so many people who call themselves Americans jumped quickly to blame the gun rights group for the violence in Las Vegas.   At this point it looks like liberalism was the primary cause of the mass shooting in Vegas—so under their premise of accusatory proclamations—they are far more responsible for what happened.   There was teeth to this latest blame game toward the NRA however that I personally haven’t seen before—almost desperation connected to the Trump presidency where their raw feelings were more revealed than usual.  I was particularly surprised by the late night comedy people who so openly came out specifically against the NRA.  I realized after listening to these idiots for over a week after the deadly shooting that gun supporters needed a new approach.  It’s not enough to just defend gun rights and the Second Amendment—but we need to go on the offense to a much greater degree than we have in the past.  We need to sell the benefits of a well armed society instead of just defending the merits.

I get paid professionally to solve very complex problems, and to identify root causes quickly, I’m very good at doing such things.  Without being modest since it should be pretty self-evident that I have a much higher than average intelligence, I have to throw out that disclaimer before continuing because there is a perception that advocating in favor of firearms is connected to people who lack intelligence.  That couldn’t be further from the truth, but I do find that many gun supporters aren’t so good at articulating their thoughts on this matter because the right words don’t come so easy to them.  The words do come easy to me and some of that is God-given ability; but most of it has been developed over a lifetime of hard work where I’ve fed that intelligence a steady stream of education that has gone on well past my high school and college years.  I personally live a life where I don’t drink or smoke—my consumption of beer is less than ten cans per year—every year—so I enjoy a clear mind not numbed by prescription drugs and pain killers as well.  I have the benefit of one of the clearest and best working minds that there is—and when I look at this Vegas shooting and develop a root cause analysis I see the need for more guns not less, and a much more intellectual discussion about the merits of gun ownership that needs to be sold to the American public.  Not a defensive position on “butt stock” legislation just to make all the wimpy people in the world feel good about doing something completely irrelevant in the wake of a national tragedy.

Liberalism appears yet again to be the primary political affiliation of this latest shooter, and we also find that the Vegas shooter had problems with his father.  What we see most common with all mass shooters over the last few years is that they come from homes where the father either wasn’t present, or had serious problems of their own.  In this case the Vegas shooter’s father was on the FBI list for being a bank robber.  Not the average dad who cuts grass on the weekends and has words of advice about how to throw a football or not scrape your knee running down a sidewalk.  We are talking about real family breakdowns that are directly related to these mass shooters which under any root cause analysis would be one of the first identifying conditions.  From there we would examine the next stage of such a cause which would be liberalism—since that political philosophy has largely contributed to the destruction of the American family by diminishing the role that men have in it.  Most of the feminist positions that have emerged out of the progressive movement attached to the Democratic Party have put forth their strategies without really thinking about what it might cause by way of damage to the family structure for which we all live under.   They only thought that it would be best to make people more dependent on centralized government by removing the traditionally strong male role from the homes of young people—and putting women in charge completely by radicalizing them against “white male privilege” without really understanding what that meant.

I am also a student of history.  I enjoy the topic naturally and understand the context of what a miracle life in the United States truly was to emerge the way it did to bring about the opportunities we all see today.  Other countries around the world have had their periods of national identity.  England during the age of Norman Conquest solidified their knightly culture into the type of society they are known for presently.  Japan for all their history is defined by their feudal period—that is a rally point for their national identity.  China will always be known for its Ming dynasty—and so we could go around the world and show that most places have some big historical moment in their thousands of years of history that define them as a culture—from their food to their core belief system.  And in America it was clearly the age of westward expansion.  It was a case where the Occident met the orient in a philosophical struggle—and the east lost.  They were conquered largely due to the gun and a new kind of society emerged.  Guns in America paved the way for decentralized power and the emergence of capitalism for which the world still points to with extreme jealousy and calls their enemy.  Those forces know that so long as individuals have guns that they don’t stand a chance of gaining individual control of the American citizen for the aims of progressive advancement of their global political ideologies.  They are too quick to ignore the well-known lessons from history and to continue with their failures by spreading them to American society which is the opposite of what they should be doing.

So to provide the best answer to all those who aren’t so equipped with a knowledge of history or the ability to draw forth a proper root cause analysis of how violence erupts in any society—the reason that civilians need “assault weapons” is because that is the safety net of protection when institutions fail to resolve problems, or create them to begin with—in this case when a liberal shooter decides that he wants to take the lives of others through a breakdown not caused by individual behavior, but institutional failure.  If the governments of the world fail, in America, citizens can provide defense of their property themselves in whatever capacity is needed.  If more civilians had been armed in Las Vegas once it was realized that the shooter was firing from a broken window from a hotel, the assailant could have been engaged earlier—and fewer people would have been harmed.  But even so, the shooter may have been deterred from doing such a thing in the first place.  He knew that all he had to do was prevent the police from getting to him, so he was free to act unmolested as a terrorist for many minutes.  He didn’t have to worry about civilians shooting through the hotel walls at him, only of the police gathering in the hallway which he monitored by his video feeds.  The police did a pretty good job in Vegas, but they have lots of safety protocols they have to live under preventing fast action—which was needed at the time.  To conclude a root cause positioning statement on the matter, more guns would have saved more lives in Las Vegas—and they do anywhere where there are lots of guns on private people.

I’ve always been a defender of the NRA and of the Second Amendment.  But after watching the behavior of anti-American forces after the Vegas shooting I’m convinced that much more than the NRA needs to emerge to sell gun rights to these many generations who have been trained to think against guns by those same anti-American forces.  When Jimmy Kimmel blasted the NRA on his show saying that supporters of that group were responsible for the shooting he was wrong to say we are all Americans.  I would go so far to say that if you do not support guns in America then you don’t have a right to call yourself an American.  Being an American doesn’t mean you can think all things about everything.  There are some basic ground rules to living in American society.  You must for instance support capitalism because that is the economic means of our nation.  And I would say that you must support the Second Amendment for not just “hunting” but for what it’s for, to regain control over failed institutions when needed.  If those intuitions fail and must be replaced and they are protected by a military industrial complex, then civilians need equal armament to regain civilian control. That is the answer to the question asked in the above Tweet.   We trust our institutions to do the job of providing safety in places like Las Vegas.  But that next line of defense is private firearm ownership and if there had been more of a presence of firearms in Vegas, more people would have lived.

With firearms comes responsibly—and my life is an example of how serious people like me should take the use of them.  For instance, I propose that people should be as free to wear their guns around on their hips as they do a tie with a nice suit.  But they also shouldn’t drink in public and do anything to lose their mental acuity.  I am not a supporter of mind altering drugs of any kind—even prescription medicine because it might affect the decision-making process when we need to decide to use a gun or not.  And I’m willing to live that kind of life to make firearms on private people more abundant—to serve as a deterrent in large population centers to prevent mass shootings like the one in Vegas—by a liberalized terrorist.   Surrendering any part of the private right to own firearms and their “assault” characteristics is not acceptable—because that is not part of the solution to the root cause of mass killings.  Fear is the objective of a mass shooter, and more guns means much less fear for a society that understands the philosophic necessity for individual freedom under the conditions of duress.  And it is time as gun owners that we stop trying to defend ourselves from the stupid and purposely ignorant.  It’s time to take that fight to their poorly founded thoughts and to sell the merits of gun ownership in ways that haven’t been done for years—which is exactly what I intend to do from this day forward.

Rich Hoffman

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Everyone Has a Plan Until they Get Hit in the Mouth: Why Donald Trump and Jim Renacci are the future of politics

 

You can really tell how sick something is when you apply some basic measurements that work perfectly well in one known environment then apply those same rules to a lesser understood situation.   That is certainly the case in regard to President Trump’s business experience compared to the falsehoods of political theater.  With Trump expectations of completed tasks have rocked Washington D.C. culture with something they’ve apparently never seen in the modern era—firings.  And they’ve also never seen somebody work as hard as Donald Trump does. That combination of things has really put the pressure on the political establishment to show how bad and ineffective they’ve always been leaving only to point to the president and declare that he works too fast on too many things and that the turn-over at his White House has been too extreme.  With the resignation of Tom Price Trump has gone through more employees than any previous administration has and that is likely to continue.  What did people think was going to happen from a president who became known on television for firing people?   But honestly, this is the way it typically is, when you do any endeavor some people will adhere to the philosophy of whoever is running things, and some won’t make it.  Those that don’t will find themselves on the outside looking in and that’s how things work in the real world.

It is astonishing how limited most people live their lives.  When they assume that Trump for instance cannot deal with three major hurricanes, a war with North Korea, a health care reform package, a tax cut and a hostile media and still not have time to Tweet about the NFL’s disgrace of our flag then still take time to conduct social occasions at the White House are people who clearly don’t understand what multitasking is all about.   When I campaigned for Trump this is exactly the kind of president I wanted, someone who would work on all the major issues of the day and do so seven days a week 24 hours a day.  For those who don’t understand the difference between Trump and Obama playing golf, Obama played golf to show that he was one of the big guys who had made it in life.  Trump does it to make deals—which is why it’s the game of business transaction.  It also helps that he owns golf courses and can go there to work and get away from Beltway politics.  But with Trump, he works day and night no matter where he is and this is simply something Washington D.C. has never seen before and they really don’t know how to interpret any of it.

The firings and resignations at the White House under Trump’s administration do not surprise me at all.  I have personally hired hundreds of people and whenever I start a new project I have enthusiasm for each and every one of them.  But often you can tell within a month or a year who will be around for the future and who won’t.  Everything looks great on paper, but when reality hits you quickly find out who was talking a good game during an interview and who can actually live up to what they sold of themselves.  With Trump the people he hired for his administration all seemed competent relative to the way things were before he took office.  Well, just a few months into the years of Trump things have changed and everyone is feeling the pressure, and this is no surprise to me.  I had a feeling this was exactly what would happen and I never had any expectations that Trump’s cabinet would stay intact.  Over the pressure of expectations some would last and some would not.  I will go as far to say that there will be many more firings and resignations over the next eight years because the daily grind will mandate performance and it is Trump who sets the standard—and few people will find that they can live up to that standard.

Part of the problem is that people have previously viewed government work as a kind of lifetime appointment and expectations were never really associated with the work. That attracted the worst of our civilization to public office because there they could hide their incompetency from the world but still demand the highest wages available in those fields of endeavor as administrators.   By bringing in private business people into government however naturally this age-old sentiment is being challenged and the results are predictably good.  In my hometown of Cincinnati, Ohio the affluent community of West Chester has been run by a couple of pro business politicians who have private industry backgrounds and things have really taken off.  This has been part of a national trend that really has been emerging since 2009 when the Tea Party movement started taking shape and affluent people stopped looking to give their money to politicians and instead started getting involved themselves—in many ways like the Founding Fathers of our nation did in the beginning.  Why give some useless politician your money when you can just do the work yourself?  So we are seeing all across the country these politicians with actual business experience running for offices and winning—and they are actually fixing things for the first time that we’ve ever been able to see in American politics.

That’s certainly the case with Jim Renacci in Ohio who is running to replace Governor Kasich next year.  Jim is my kind of guy, he’s self made, he’s became rich doing good hard work and running several businesses and now he’s looking for kind of a retirement job to give something back to the state he has worked in for so long.  Being personally successful in many endeavors from  a financial consultant to running Harley Davidson dealerships in the Columbus area he is the Donald Trump of Ohio pouring $4 million dollars of his own money into his campaign for governor.  Anybody but Jim would be a status quo vote and the same old people who served the governor’s administration would still be around long after the next few elections because that’s how it typically is in government.  They create jobs for themselves and they take in money from lobbyists and financial backers who work against the will of the voters.  Someone like Jim Renacci and Donald Trump are already wealthy so they aren’t looking to get rich off schmoozing in politics.  Management is in their blood and they are attracted to these governor and president jobs because they are the ultimate management challenges and these guys like to be in the heat of the battle. That’s what sets them apart from the typical politician.

That trend is going to continue and most of the Beltway media just hasn’t been able to wrap their mind around these changes.  The changes came because performance was expected and the lies of the past just won’t work going into the future.  I’m getting exactly what I expected out of Trump and I would expect nothing short of the same from Jim Renacci in Ohio.  I want these types of people as local trustees.  I want them on my school board. I want them as county commissioners.  I’ve told the story of my dealings with Hamilton County commissioner Todd Portune before—people like him are abundant for pennies on the dollar-they are what we have had to accept as the political class.  It used to be that business guys would give people like Portune money for their elections, and would hope that rules could be made to help the business community, but those politicians often cost businesses in other ways with higher taxes, or they just fiscally run their communities into the ground.  So people like Trump and Renacci instead of taking their lifetime of earnings and retiring to luxury in Florida—as they may have in the past are finding in politics a nice retirement gig.  They’ve already made their money and solidified their reputations.  But if they still want to smell the flames of battle regarding management of resources as they did in their businesses from years past, they are running for office—and I think that is a wonderful thing.  That’s how it was always supposed to be.  The best and brightest among us should seek political office and bring that vast experience that made them successful into the management of our country’s affairs.  And if people get fired, so what.  The goal of government isn’t to create jobs that people sit in over their lifetimes.  It’s to do the work of the people who elect representatives into government to take care of business.  And it should be people good at business who sits in those seats.

Everyone has a plan until you get hit in the face.  Mike Tyson said that years ago when he was the defending world champion of boxing and its very true.  Politicians are good at making plans but nobody until recently ever expected them to implement those plans.  Once life hit them in the face they sort of went back to their offices and planned their lunch break—and they’ve been doing that for years.  What we expect now is that once a plan goes south, and we get hit in the face, that we have people in office that hit back and make whatever adjustments need to be made so that success can become the norm.  That means often people who are hired for a job will fall short of what’s expected of them and they will need to be replaced.  When those circumstances arise, we don’t want politicians who don’t have experience in hiring and firing people to be in charge—we want people who do have such experience.  And that is what Donald Trump is doing and he’s doing a fantastic job of it.  My only wish is that we didn’t have him ten years ago—but I’m glad we have him now.

Rich Hoffman

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