Tag: Ayn Rand

The Political Spectrum: Understanding how to measure widom in a culture where free will is a motivator

I say this in all fairness, but in regards to the political spectrum, all values are not equal. Liberalism is not an equal philosophy to be debated for instance with understandings of conservativism as viewed by Americans. They are not all equal ideas depending on perspective, but ones that are in a state of evolution depending on the interpretation of the holder of those values. While regional beliefs do largely shape the politics of an individual, it is in practice that the theories of belief are tested, and in every circumstance since Sir Thomas More contemplated a Utopia, or Plato considered the implications of a Republic, liberalism fails. As an individual becomes more aware of the wisdom of life, they therefor become more what Americans call, conservative. And yes, there are right and wrong answers in life, only degrees of variability depending on one’s emotional evolution along that political spectrum. Someone may have a right to believe differently about something, but it is not the conditions of existence to bend the will of correctness to the fallibilities of philosophic understanding.

This is a topic of some great concern these days, since we can see through polling that the nation is evenly split between American Democrats and Republicans with the conservative party just barely holding out against liberalism. And there are currently great fears that socialism as it is taught in public schools might make a strong running for political domination as it has in other places around the world. I would offer that the situation is not so scary, and that if you travel around the world you will find that not everyone has the same view of what a conservative is or a liberal. So I tend to think about those things on one political spectrum that we can all agree upon, and our politics isn’t just related to regional values, but of understandings of graduation along that spectrum. For instance, a conservative in England if compared to a political spectrum to one living in the United States likely would be far to the left. I might think of a tea sipping conservative in England as a bleeding heart liberal in the states, and the cause of that is more in personal education than in a true value system. I would argue that as people gain freedoms in life away from their political and social structures, that the wiser they become in life and therefor, the more conservative they are. When given choices, they tend to move further to the right. Political beliefs on the left are rooted their by barriers to knowledge, not in choice. If given a choice to believe something different, people naturally pull to the right and become more conservative.

Conservatism is therefore more a measure of intelligence and understanding rather than sentiment. I often talk about Democrats as having mental deficiencies because many of their beliefs are rooted in paradoxes, such as declaring that a woman’s right to choose is actually a license to kill a baby. What dumb people think of as an option is in reality murder. Let’s call it what it is. The same irrational comment is put forth over gun control, we have the Second Amendment to protect our gains in society from those who screw up and let us down. In that eventuality, we may need to take back our government, but the government is the one with the military that we payed for. But since they control the law and the utilization of that military how could we remove them from power if we don’t have guns, if we’ve given them all to that government to manage? It’s a really dumb idea that is rooted on lazy trust in bureaucrats rather than in a conservative philosophy. When we talk about liberals, or people who have liberal sentiment, we are talking about people who have not come to logic yet in their life on that particular topic. They may be mentally handicapped for one reason or another to reaching those conclusions on their own, so various states of liberalism may keep them too far to the left on the political spectrum. As they learn more about the way life works, the tend to move more to the right. President Trump could tell a story about his life in this fashion. So could Ronald Reagan.

I have a lot of experience with liberal people going way back into my youth. I have been invited to their social parties and watched them upclose and with the barriers down, and can report that in all cases they were liberal due to some mental deficiency not yet gained through the experiences of life. You don’t often find people going in the other direction unless they hit some period of their lives where tragedy overtakes their logic and they become overly sentimental with failure and seek liberalism to hide their own low bar that they have adjusted in their lives to justify their intellectual status. Wherever you go around the world people are people, they want pretty much the same things. However, they may have very restrictive governments, or family structures that hold back their emotional development more to the side of liberalism, but as they gain more freedoms in life and continue to learn more, they always become more conservative. The political spectrum is not conducive to Einstein’s thoughts on relativity. Your thoughts about something do not change depending on where you are, but your understanding of the political spectrum may be limited to the knowledge you have access to. The spectrum is the spectrum, but a person’s place on it is bound by intelligence and understanding. This is true in Europe as it is in Kentucky within the United States. Regional beliefs may have started conservative or liberal depending on who your neighbors are, but those foundations may have a head start on the political spectrum based on the personal freedoms of that culture relative to the factors that allow thought to move to the right. But thought always wants to move to the right on the political spectrum. No logical person could argue otherwise.

Some will try however, to argue that liberalism is taught in our education institutions and that some of the best in the world are the caretakers of philosophy, but that would all be wrong. People can be taught to be comfortable on a particular place on a political spectrum and to stay there because their friends or neighbors have given themselves the same limits. Or even family members hold people to places of belief that they might not otherwise have. I have family members who think of themselves as very conservative who to me are extremely liberal, and the cause is not logic, its in a lack of understanding about the ways of the world, a lack of wisdom and exposure that built that wisdom more than actual belief. The more people learn about life, and the wiser they are, the further to the right of that political spectrum they become, whether they are a monk living on a mountaintop in the Himalayas, a drug dealer in Mexico, a priest in Kansas, a lottery ticket buyer in Las Vegas, or some wealthy billionaire in the middle of nowhere closed off from the world and enjoying the merits of their productivity. Regional beliefs can hold a person to a position along the political spectrum, but they don’t dictate the merits of wisdom and a person’s journey from liberal to conservative throughout their lifetimes.

In regard to the state of America and its split down the middle politically, that is because roughly half the nation has a lot more to learn. Its not that they have an equal seat at the table. What it does mean is that they need to hit the books and to learn more things about the world so that they can advance further to the right. There is no mixing of the ideas, there is only the degree from which a person functions along the proper trajectory of political thought, with the word “political” being functional with intellectual measurement, not belief. With that in mind, as we move deeper into the election season and people say what they will about what beliefs are politically, the context needs to be clear that politics is more a measure of wisdom than of sentiment. And depending on what values you vote on says a lot about the level of wisdom you have as a functioning person. So the smarter people become, the more they vote to the right. The less wise, the further to the left they will be. It may not always be their fault, but it is the true condition of their intellect.

Rich Hoffman

FISA Court Says it can’t Trust the FBI or DOJ on Anything: Impeachment to hide crimes and other problems of democracy

As I have been saying about the Democrats impeachment attempt from the outset the desire comes more from self-protection than out of any sense of justice. Many of the Democrats in the House and Senate are themselves involved in the kind of mess that Joe Biden and his family have been, selling access to the office for cash. They need a distraction to not just save their jobs, but to keep from going to jail. To that exact point, Tom Fitton from the very aggressive, and orthodox Judicial Watch has been pulling documents into the light of day proving just that, and recently they have had several breakthroughs that paint the picture even grander than I have been saying. As Tom was saying recently all this impeachment stuff, and the entire nature of the Russian scandal was only about one thing, protecting Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden from their access selling schemes in the Clinton Foundation and other networks. Watching Adam Schiff talk all day this past week over impeachment prosecution it is obvious that he’s covering for fellow Democrats trying to keep the news cycle focused on everything but what they are guilty of.

Well, yesterday it broke that the DOJ disavowed two spy warrants that were targeting President Trump during the 2016 campaign and that they directly violated the constitutional rights of Carter Page with documents signed by James Comey, who is in a whole lot of trouble by Attorney General Barr. This is a whole heap of trouble for Democrats who were in on the overthrow of an American election and were trying to use a fake Russia story as their cover for the crime. Now that President Trump has put in place a real attorney general at the Department of Justice, the Democrats have lost their influence over that branch of government which it looks like they enjoyed since the first George Bush was in the White House. The fear they have now is that they can’t manipulate the DOJ as they have in the past to cover crimes they have been committing for a long time and now they are exposed, which is why they are pushing for some distraction now, hoping to do anything to change the game in their favor.

I suppose nothing surprises me, but I do spend much of my time in the company of pretty smart people, so when I run into “normal” people I have been confounded at how easily they are manipulated by their propensity for small thinking. Not to get to far into it, but I have been involved in discussions that involve President Trump and I continue to get the question, “but what if he is impeached? Will you still do this, or do that?” I can’t help but just to gaze at them for a minute. Why would they think such a thing? Is it because their only view to the outside world is Channel 5 in Cincinnati, and the Cincinnati Enquirer? Why would they think that President Trump would be impeached unless they are hopelessly gullible? And at those times I can’t help but think of one of my favorite books, Plato’s ‘Republic.’ The story of the shadow people broadcast against the cave wall from firelight within an underground sanctuary with prisoners of thought tied to poles only facing the wall and trying to guess what the shapes on the wall mean from the images cast from behind them. It is astonishing that so many people are willing to live in that state of existence, and obviously the Democrats count on that tendency. That is their whole point in impeachment, is to carry those types of minds toward a sense of hopelessness that might convince them that its not they who are the corrupt ones, but those who took power away from them and now run the Department of Justice.

I would tell anybody that the best guard against that behavior is to read a lot of books. People who practice that very simple thing are likely to be able to see through this criminal activity by the Democrats because they haven’t lost the ability to think. I read an average of two books a week, each over 65,000 words or more, and I find it very enjoyable. It’s a form of exercise for me and I’ve done that for more than 30 years. I get along best with people who read in those quantities. I know people who read even more than that, and their minds are very active. But I do feel somewhat sorry for people who allow their minds to become almost spongy soft due to a lack of exercised intellect, where they just plop down on a Saturday and watch sports programming on NBC and believe everything they hear against President Trump as that network obviously has major problems with the president. I’ve noticed it myself when I do watch it for a football game or some other event, the news is presented in a way that makes dumb people feel good. But people with exercised intellects won’t find much there beneficial. But that isn’t the target audience, it’s the people who are too lazy to think who they feel they can turn to their side of things with sheer quantity of information. If they present a lot of information, then people not so smart won’t have any excess capacity to think anything but what they have been told. And to a large degree, among normal people who don’t read very much, it works.

Because of this I have been thinking back to an old high school class I had called “Problems of Democracy” that was taught by a raging long haired hippie I couldn’t stand. He was an obvious communist sympathizer who would rather have smoked a lot of pot and had unprotected sex with a pile of human flesh no matter what their gender than to have any deep thoughts about the direction of existence and he always made me sick to listen to. But the essence of that class was his embodiment, people like him were the problem with Democracy. Democrats still believe that if they can make a lot of people stupid, or scared, that they can get by with crimes. And when they are guilty, they attack others for the crimes they are most guilty of and they count on the sheer numbers to acquit them. That is the problem with Democracy, and why we are a Republic as a nation, not a bunch of slack jawed anarchists winning elections with just sheer numbers. We need to have more thought that goes into these things. And for these advocates of impeachment, they are using this playbook to hide their own criminal misconduct—or trying to.

But it hasn’t worked, with this FISA Court ruling against the FBI and the Obama era DOJ there is a major problem that is much, much bigger and more problematic than this impeachment attempt. But the wall to wall coverage by the mainstream media is trying to overwhelm the not so smart with feelings of doubt and the crimes are placed on a scale that unintelligent people can’t even fathom. For those who watch NBC and worry that President Trump might have actually done something wrong the real problem is in their lack of intellect, not in the facts of the case. The facts of the case are sadly beyond their lazy minds, their willingness to look at the shadows of Plato’s cave walls. The real crime is unraveling right in front of us day by day, and this impeachment is designed to conceal the truth for as long as possible, perhaps to the election. It is the last hope of a guilty group who have committed major crimes as domestic enemies and justice is hungry. And in spite of what you hear on television and the kind of people who don’t read very much, we are about to see a feeding frenzy on a scale the world has never seen before. And it’s about time!

Rich Hoffman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rich Hoffman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rich Hoffman

Lakota Alums Complain about EdChoice: School superintendents show they aren’t anything like CEOs, they just don’t have the skills

“I’m OK with choice and options for your kids. I’m not okay with public tax dollars going to the private schools,” said Matt Miller, the superintendent of Lakota Schools in reaction to this year’s expansion of Ohio’s EdChoice program. And across town at Hamilton City School’s Mike Holbrook the former Lakota principal and complainer-in-chief who is now the superintendent there, he’s back to complaining about money because this EdChoice challenges his district which has a report card of a “C” into making better decisions instead of just continuing to ask for more and more budget to fund failure. These Lakota school alums have spent some time lately complaining that the Ohio voucher program is getting more aggressive, which I have always said that it would, and its forcing them to control their budgets better, and they just don’t like it. I find their statements amazing because after all these years, we have been told that a school superintendent is like a CEO at a public school. Yet all they really have done is lobby for more money. Anybody can do anything with infinite amounts of money to work with, but only in public schools is it assumed that more money gets better results. Yet in Hamilton City and at Lakota Schools, that clearly is not the case. Those districts are not getting A+ grades and we pay them fortunes. So why not attach the state funding to children and allow competition to make everyone better? A CEO would certainly understand that, and these guys show in their statements on this EdChoice debate that they are clearly not up to the task.

This is what happens to a governing body when they are allowed to inflate their budgets with union contracts and overpay their staff without a funding model that lives within the scope of their resources. I have written about Mike Holbrook before when he was just a Lakota principal, you can see his comments after a levy defeat by clicking here. He has a long history of complaining about money, which public schools have allowed to be the role of superintendents. These guys want respect and to be treated as top managers, but they don’t want to do the work. They coddle the teacher’s union during contract negotiations and drive up their costs then expect taxpayers to bail out their failure. Hamilton certainly isn’t anything to be proud of with their “C” grade report card. But Lakota isn’t much better, and we did pass a levy in 2013 after a lot of debate, and guess what. They did just what I said they would, they gave the money to the teachers in the form of raises and performance went down. The school’s performance worsened. Paying top dollar for the so-called best teachers did not promise Lakota an A+ report card, and it should have.

The best way to secure the best scores is with vouchers, where tax money is attached to the kids. If parents don’t like the school, they should be able to take their tax money and pick another school. And if the schools want to be in business, they need to do a better job. That is the job of a CEO, to make sure that parents want to send their kids to their schools, and to make themselves that choice. They need to work at it, and if you have a six-figure income, that is your job to figure out guys. These token superintendent jobs were never intended to be levy cheerleading positions where you just spend and spend and spend and have guaranteed security due to the kinds of people living in your district. You should want to work for better kids, better parents, and better results. Not some state definition of success, but one that is market driven

.

Senator Bill Coley, whom I’ve known for a long time and who cares about this voucher issue a great deal, tried to explain it to these superintendents in ways they might understand. The school district still has tax money coming in from every home and business and those values are continuing to appreciate, the revenue continues to increase every year in an area like Butler County. What’s the problem? Well, the problem is they have gotten used to not having to manage the money. That’s the issue. They are used to it always being there and most of the problems have been solved with coffee talks. Schools like Lakota took away busing to save money. Parents have gotten used to driving their kids to school. So why wouldn’t they just drive their kid to school somewhere else if they had a choice? And why should Lakota get all their money just because that student lives in the district? If the money is for education why shouldn’t that money follow the student, and the performance that the customer expects?

Of course, we all know the answer, public schools and their labor unions depend on these fixed numbers to manage their collective bargaining agreements. But wouldn’t the unions get what they want with this EdChoice? Teachers would get smaller class sizes due to declining enrollment in failing schools, those only getting “Bs” and “Cs” are failing based on marketplace analytics. If parents want the best for their students, that would be an A+ on the report card. If a district can’t get that, get rid of the teachers and get better. Oh, you can’t do that because the union contract won’t allow it. Well, there is your problem and so long as the tax money is locked to the school, not the student, we will continue to fund failure.

Only by having such a competitive element, such as EdChoice will school superintendents be forced to do the job they were hired to do in the way that schools need to do it. The word “public” assumes that there is some community right to money and the education of kids. We have seen over the last century that public education is not the best way to teach a kid, and parents who understand that private schools are clearly better for children are already paying for that improvement. Why should their tax money go to appeasing failure? But as Senator Coley has said, Lakota will still get their money, so will Hamilton. They’ll lose a little but they’ll also lose some class size. Everyone should be happy. Property values continue to go up in this Trump economy. A CEO would understand how to make those elements work, but apparently all the Lakota alums want to do is complain that they don’t have enough.

Any real CEO of an organization would love to have the problems of these public schools, they have guaranteed income, they have nice new buildings, and they have sports programs to distract the base and keep team building exercises active in the community. It’s a dream job for anybody with half a brain so it is extremely disappointing to see these guys crying like babies. Manage your contracts, let the complainers leave with their poison to other districts because it hasn’t helped your report card anyway and pull up your bootstraps. Don’t ask for more money with levies because that’s lazy, work with what you have. And work to be better and to make yourself an EdChoice destination instead of a repellant. And if you can’t, cut your losses and be happy being a “B” or “C” player in the world. That’s life. The trend is in choice, choice in entertainment, choice in food, choice in government, and especially choice in education.

Property values unlike what people may have thought ten years ago are not so intricately linked to the public school in their districts. They are linked to choice, the kinds of jobs there are, the entertainment options, the overall quality of life. Most people in Lakota don’t even know that there are football games on Friday nights. They could care less; Netflix has all the options they need and the carryout down the road has dinner. I would suggest to these superintendents that they start acting more like the CEOs they want to believe they are instead of union stooges padding the way for continuous contract increases to their labor rates. Choice in performance will demand them to get with the program, EdChoice is just the beginning.

Rich Hoffman

The Virginia Anti-Gun Law Politicians: Don’t shoot them, embarass them

Of course, there is this Second Amendment rally in Richmond on Monday in direct reaction to Governor Northam’s aggressive attack on gun rights. Now that Democrats have taken the majorities of both the House and Senate there they are taking their campaign donations from radical leftists such as Michael Bloomberg and are enacting what they think will result into laws that will move toward a gunless society. They have bills nearly ready to be signed that contain a very aggressive assault weapons ban worded in ways to mean just about everything but a BB gun. They are attacking even the ability to train with guns on anything other than government property. And they have thought of everything, these Democrats, they are even attacking compliance among their police officers by dangling out there penalties on law enforcement who refuse to enforce their new gun laws by attacking their pensions. For those interested in just how aggressive the gun laws are I have placed good videos here that explain the details. For the concerns of this article, understand that Ralphie and his minions are out for blood and are baiting people to do something wrong. It was good that already the leader of the Republicans in the House, Todd Gilbert has distanced themselves from Neo-Nazi groups and any other radicals who are approaching this situation with a “cold dead hands strategy.” That is not the way to deal with this. Rather, hit them where it really hurts, and remove them from office in the next several elections. Take this newfound power away from them, because that’s the only thing they really fear. So give it to them in large doses.

I was reading some of the NRA material on this matter and it’s the same argument. Without question the rally will be more of that type of thing. Now, without question, the NRA knows their business and without them, gun laws would have been taken away years ago by these menacing politicians. You can’t have a logical argument with them. They don’t care about crime statistics. They don’t care about safety—even though that’s why they say they are doing all this. We all know social breakdowns and bad reactions to marijuana are larger contributors to gun violence than anything else, but Democrats do not care. While we are trying to have a reasonable argument with them, they are making plans to smear gun owners at every turn, and they play very dirty. So before we talk about taking out guns to the capital and running them out of office, lets use the tools for that are applicable to a stable society, such as elections to change the hands of power for long term fixes, and for the short run, play dirtier than they do.

I would say, take the fight to them, bury them with ink on forums, blogs, podcasts, radio, everywhere. Expose everything they do and make it personal. Every time they even wink at a waitress at the local café, publish it somewhere. Take the fight into their personal lives and embarrass them to the ends of the earth. They are willing to do that to us, so give it back to them ten times harder. Don’t sit on your heels and grab your guns. Get pictures of their ugly naked bodies and put them out for all to see. Pick them apart in every aspect of their lives and embarrass them completely. That is what Democrats care about, and that is how you get their attention. Don’t let them hide in the shadows or behind a judge’s gavel. They have rigged all those engagements with layers of case law. Instead, hit them where they care the most, their social butterfly status and be ruthless about it.

To answer the show of force that has certainly got their attention, no, we don’t trust the democratic process. They still think this is a majority rule society and that their strategy of flooding red states with purple people eaters is the way to win elections, which they were successful in Virginia after the 2019 election. But don’t forget, there is another election in 2020 and really every year after that. Bloomberg has helped a lot of candidates so understand how the game is played and play it harder than they have. Put your efforts at winning elections before you start shooting up enforcers who come to your homes to take your guns because you let them push you into saying something stupid giving them the justification. They will certainly try to do that to the leadership of this gun rally. So, don’t give them the chance. Instead, put them on their heels and looking over their shoulders.

The message should be clear, and President Trump was quick to point it out over this issue, don’t elect Democrats because they will try to do these kinds of things. Look what they have done at the federal level once they gained the House, they went to impeach the President. They don’t care about any logical arguments; they just want to smear him to the point where he might have trouble getting elected. So, take a page out of their own playbook and give them Hell and then some. While the NRA is trying to get them to pay attention to crime statistics, they are making reservations for the next wine tasting where they can brag to their liberal friends that they are changing America to the utopia they have always envisioned. Instead of them having that conversation, make them have the one defending the naked pictures that were released about them, or the prostitutes they have slept with. Make it personal and take away their anonymity.

Look at the Megixt situation in England where Harry and Megan the actress went to the Queen begging to be relieved of their palace duties. They just want to get out of the spotlight and live their lives. They don’t like the constant pressure of being in the public eye. Make every Democrat in Virginia feel the same. All liberal people have a weakness for craving public approval. Take that away from them to the point where they can’t even go outside. Do worse than get in their faces at restaurants—like they have done to us, get in their faces everywhere, and publish everything. Give them no air until they choke, and then some. Don’t let up, don’t join with them in compassion. Don’t make friends with them. Destroy them not with guns, but with the First Amendment to protect the Second.

Personalize the fight, don’t allow it to be conducted on their terms, with legal processes they control, with government resources that they manage with our money. Don’t allow yourselves to be a victim. Get to know the politicians who wrote and voted on these anti-gun bills and learn everything you can about them, and get that out to the public. Embarrass them to the point where they are retiring from office just to get their life back. Make it so they can’t even go to a wine tasting without having everyone there with some knowledge of a cross town tryst with a banana or some shoe fetish that only the most deranged lunatic would understand. Get it all out there and take the fight to them instead of trying to defend yourselves from the latest law. Fight dirty, its better than bullets, and much more effective than death. That is how we win these fights, not on terms they decide, but on the ones they care about most—their connections to people. Don’t just attack them at the ballot box, make it so that they want to retire before the election even happens, then replace their seats with a Republican one. That is how you win fights like these.

Rich Hoffman

Dear Lisa Page: Where did you go?

The common attack from guilty people is always to attempt to divert attention away from their crime onto someone else, and that is very much a part of the Nancy Pelosi attempt at impeachment of President Trump. Normal people only have so much bandwidth and they know that. So, it is in their best interest to keep the news cycles so busy with anything but their guilt so that they might escape unnoticed into the pages of history. But we’re not going to allow that to happen. Every magician in the world understands this game of diversion because that’s how they pull the rabbit out of the hat or saw a woman in two on stage and trick you into believing in the illusions is that they give you information they want you to look at while they do something else. And in American politics if impeachment is the trick you are supposed to see, what is really going on behind the stage, where is Lisa Page?

Remember when Lisa Page came out in December declaring that she was “coming out” swinging, or something like that? She went on that one cable show which was covered by nobody, for that one dude on MSNBC and acted as if she were about to do a tell all. She even activated a Twitter account to speak directly to the public. Well, that whole thing died on the vine immediately and fell off the front pages before the paper was even purchased for a printer. A quick look at her Twitter comments reveals how quickly the wind has gone out of her sails. The Twitter thing is hard for a girl like her, you must actually have thoughts to say, and it takes work—neither of which she seems to have time for. Her story was killed, and quite on purpose, and she seems confused by it.

On her Twitter page she talks on January 3rd about how smart Iran is and how they are everywhere, all over the world, and that they are proud of their 5000 year old culture and that she was afraid they were going to hit back at the United States for aggressions against them. Out of all the things she talks about on her new Twitter page, this one says the most about who Lisa Page truly was and why she was so easily seduced by fellow FBI agent Peter Strzok. Her knowledge of history sounds like it came from the bar of the wine club at a Cooper’s Hawk on a Friday night. “Oh yes, darling, Iran is so dangerous. Let’s sip some wine and talk about it some more. Does your wine pair correctly with your bread?” Everything is scary to people who call themselves wine connoisseurs and society types who talk at each other instead of to people. As I have said many times as a student of history that goes way back before the times of Zoroastrianism in that Iran region, that country and their attempts at communism have left them a dust pit of Islamic extremism with no money in the bank and a lot of people unhappy with their government, and the place is ripe for an overthrow. You’d expect an FBI lawyer screwing one of the top agents in the business working all the big cases, the investigation into Russian collusion against Trump, the Hillary Clinton investigation, and even the laptop of Huma Abedin with all of her congressman husband’s porn on it, you’d expect her to be just a little bit smarter. But she isn’t.

As a matter of fact it was the guys in these cases, Peter Strzok the FBI agent and Anthony Weiner who both showed excessive bad judgment as both had very high positions in government who fell quickly head over heels in love with targets of their adultery, essentially putting our country at risk with their access to classified material while they pursued sexual liaisons. And the women of their lives, Lisa Page for Peter the FBI agent, and Huma for her husband Weiner created an environment of validation for these liberal men to allow them to believe that this behavior was normal, because to their dense understanding of the world, everyone does these things.

And to that effect Peter Strzok was found to have seriously brought to question the trust that the public has in the FBI because he was so in love with Lisa Page that he deliberately let Huma and Anthony off the hook by not taking seriously the Clinton emails that were likely on that laptop with all that Weiner porn, and was the key evidence to the Hillary Clinton case that the FBI was investigating, and trying to destroy so that she could run for president. That part of the insurance policy that Peter promised to his lover Lisa was in those very bits of evidence for which he helped destroy to keep Clinton from being indicted by the Department of Justice which extended straight into the Obama White House. Nothing to see here—move along.

Yet we’re supposed to believe that over Trump’s simple phone call looking into corruption by Joe Biden and his son, that we are supposed to accept impeachment. While the real crimes were covered up by the FBI and the DOJ by a former administration assisted by the media, and this poor girl Lisa Page was taken advantage of and she wanted to fight back. Only the magicians in the media don’t want her talking. They want to maintain the illusion that Trump did something so that nobody sees all the chopped-up bodies behind the curtain from the magic tricks gone wrong and have been hidden from the audience. And for people too stupid to understand the real threat of Iran, or the true nature of government corruption, or that it really doesn’t matter what wine you drink with a hamburger, the real threat to us all are all the things that we aren’t talking about.

I’m sure Lisa Page is a nice young lady. What our modern education system put into her head and the world she believes in isn’t completely her fault. She is just getting along to go along. She like so many like her are social butterflies who sleep with these sleezy Democrat men who have all kinds of emotional problems, even the best of them at the top jobs, and they have validated completely why we can’t put all our trust into any government. They are not capable of doing the job without resisting the temptations of corruption and we must always keep our eyes on them. Someone needs to do the job, but we must always be cautious. That is the real story here, and the reason that Lisa Page’s coming out party died before it opened. Nobody wants to talk about that, yet they want to get rid of the guy we sent to Washington to clean them up, which is why there is an impeachment attempt in the first place. Its not to seek justice, its to hide many massive crimes that threaten the entire world of people like Lisa Page, for which she is but a snowflake in the snowstorm that we know as the Beltway. And that is a truth we still all must deal with.

Rich Hoffman

Jeffrey Epstein and Democrats are all the Same: The evil of ‘Sex Island’ and Pelosi’s attempts at impeachment

In so many ways what we are learning about the Jeffrey Epstein sex island in the wake of his death, is that the Democrat Party, which was participating wildly in the orgies hosted by the New York billionaire on that island, for which many secrets are desperately being secured from the investigation, are all a lot alike. The modes of sex trafficking, which could be said to be the case everywhere in the world is psychologically very close to the way that Democrats recruit new members and attempt to hang on to their old ones. The abuse is simply more mental than physical. Of course, I have been talking about losers like Jeffrey Epstein for years, while the rest of the world is just now catching on. Better late than never I suppose. So, take it to heart that what I am saying about the way Democrats behaved during their attempted election of 2020 sabotage against President Trump was out of the same playbook as Jeffrey Epstein. Mitch McConnell did a good job on the Senate floor not in making such a comparison as I am about to, but in discovering the bad, and bizarre behavior of the Democrats after they signed the impeachment documents and attempted to apply some logic, for which there wasn’t any.

It really does sum up as attempted abuse, the entire impeachment push, from the media to the local politicians espousing the same. And none of it is any different from what Jeffrey Epstein attempted and in many cases did to young girls as young as 12 years old, as we are now discovering from the evidence retrieved from that vile island of abusive sex and partying by the powerful elite who manipulated those circumstances for their pure pleasure. The reason we consider rape and sexual abuse such a vile crime ultimately is that it robs a woman of her choices and that is what went on at those sex orgies. Epstein took away the choices of the girls, took their cell phones, took their passports, took everything until all they had left was drugs and sex to drown out the pain of it all. They were lured there with opportunities for modeling jobs and other lures of wealth, but gradually, Epstein and his officers on the isolated islands stripped the girls of all hope until they were willing participates in their own misery. Aren’t the parallels obvious?

Democrats, especially Nancy Pelosi have in the promised this, then that, especially with healthcare’s “we have to sign the bill to find out what’s in it” she has lied, we have watched it openly and studied her shaky hands attempt to manipulate us all in the same way that slime balls like Jeffrey Epstein lured young girls to his island with promises of great days ahead. Only when they get there, they discover that gradually all their freedoms are taken from them until all they have left as options are compliance to a higher authority. That is the Democrat playbook so it shouldn’t be surprising that they hung out with Epstein and enjoyed his orgies because its not just a job for them, it’s a lifestyle. They think in this abusive fashion in every aspect of their lives. The only difference in the abuse approach is that one is sex with underage girls, the other is mass abuse on a voter scale that is so massive that nobody can believe that anybody is that evil, and sinister.

I’m sure Nancey Pelosi doesn’t look in the mirror every day and think of herself as the political equivalent of Jeffrey Epstein. But I doubt that Epstein thought he was doing anything bad either. He probably convinced himself that he was giving the girls opportunities they’d never have otherwise and that they should thank him for the experience. This is typical of deranged people who lose touch with reality. Yet, what makes them all vile, evil people is that in order to function in the world, they must limit the choices of others to sustain their mental depravity. Anywhere where choices are eliminated in people, for whatever reason, we can say that the efforts involved are evil, whether or not we openly admit to the breaking of laws, or whether the evil is so vast that it defies legal parameters of understanding. To stand in front of the public and say that congress takes impeachment very seriously and to be a somber occasion, then to deliver pens from the signing on a literal silver platter and to pass them out in celebration is to celebrate an evil. They were happy to limit a choice election with some profundity that they made up to give their side an advantage. That is no different than Epstein drugging girls for sex or cutting them off from their families so he can destroy them in seclusion for the joy of his guests. Its all evil because it all celebrates limiting the choices of people in some way or fashion.

Most people struggled to find the words of why they were angry at this attempt against Trump and to watch Democrats actually celebrate the occasion with such audacity. That’s because most people aren’t evil. And most people couldn’t go to a sex island owned by Jeffrey Epstein and have sex with underaged girls who see no other way out of their situation except to cooperate. Because all their other options for hope had been taken from them. Most of us aren’t evil in these ways and we just don’t have the vocabulary to understand why our emotions find these things so repulsive. So, I’ve made the situation easy for you dear reader, I’ve named the beast. Now you can work with it now that we’ve said it. It’s the lack of choice that we find so repulsive, and how it works at many levels to add up to mass abuse. Most of us can agree that sex with minor girls is abusive and should be against the law, but we often don’t consider that the reason we find it so despicable is that the girls involved are stripped of their individual rights and robbed of choice until there is nothing left but to cooperate. And that was exactly what Nancy and the gang of congressional thugs were celebrating with their impeachment attempt, taking away choice in the upcoming election—they hope.

The behavior in both cases, with Epstein’s sex island and with Nancy Pelosi and her Democrats—they think its funny and joyous to limit choices to the point where people must turn to their captors and beg for elements of freedom. Nancy did it before with Obamacare, and many other congressional proposals. That is why all those people are against guns in society, because they don’t want people to defend themselves. That’s why Jeffrey Epstein took away the cell phones of the sex slaves on his island if they didn’t behave, because he couldn’t have them calling their parents for help, or friends back in the states. He had to isolate them, drug them with mind impairments so they would have bad judgment, then force them to look to only him as a way out of their circumstances. That is abuse in the worst way, but in all reality, it’s no different than what the modern Democrats as a whole are proposing. Its all abusive, except one is so evil that we can’t even comprehend its audacity. And that one isn’t the one involving sex.

Rich Hoffman

Who Cares About Michael Bloomberg’s Billion Dollars: It won’t help him win 1 percentage point

There seems to be a lot of concern about Michael Bloomberg’s commitment to spending a billion dollars to defeat President Trump in the next election. Some of that money was constantly seen during the NFL playoffs trying to prop up the New York socialist with favorable light. Then the Sunday political shows were deeply concerned because as many of them said, it was Bloomberg money that converted the House from a Republican majority to a Democrat majority for which many current problems have spawned forward. So for clarity here, let’s put some sanity into the equation, no, Bloomberg did not cost Republicans the House, it was the Never Trumper Republicans who retired leaving Democrats to fill those voids since many in those districts were still moderates at the time. A few years later with such a great economy being what it is, those demographics have changed for the better. And considering Michael Bloomberg’s billion dollars, you can polish up a turd to look like some nice piece of gold, but its still crap. People see what’s going on. I would say that Bloomberg at this point could spend 2, or 3 billion dollars but he would be unable to move numbers against Trump one percentage point and for him and the rest of the Democrats, that has to be very frustrating and they are fixing to learn some very hard lessons in 2020.

Democrats still haven’t learned their lessons, and Bloomberg is the same guy who thought that big government had a right to regulate the size of a soft drink that we could all have. They just don’t understand what I have been saying about the great psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmiahalyi’s important work on “Flow” that came out of the University of Chicago. It really pains me to see the state of modern day academia allowing themselves to be a propaganda arm of socialist politics because I personally enjoy the great works of very profound thinkers from academia quite a lot, people such as Mihaly Csikszentmiahalyi who see emerging trends in human consciousness well before pop culture and politics recognize them. Trump isn’t just a person, but it’s a global trend. You can see it in Brexit, we can see it in Iran, Hong Kong, even in the Star Wars movies for which Disney’s pop culture is draped off of. When people roll their eyes when I’m talking about the new Rise of the Resistance ride at Disney World even that is built of the same stuff from Mihaly Csikszentmiahalyi’s concepts about psychological Flow. We live in a world where personal decisions crave to be freer not more restricted. People want less rules and much more creativity about their private lives, not more restriction.

Democrats and their commitment to socialism whether it is openly stated or just supported in policy by a different name is all about less options, not more. They are all about less creativity personally in all our lives, not more. Their definitions of freedom are constructed in old 60s communist propaganda uttered in Beatles songs, not in the realities of our day with the freedom that smart phones give us and the infinite shopping options of Amazon.com. We live in an age where commercial space travel is becoming a reality, and here is Michael Bloomberg suggesting that we need more rules on soft drinks, and the Democrats want to do for health care what they have done to public education, turn it into a dirty uncared for bathroom at a public park managed by government for the utilization of government, without private enterprise there to keep quality on the up and up. Even in the realm of health care we are looking at cures for cancer and the complete biological restructuring of a body in a few years to cure illnesses, where standard doctor’s visits won’t even be a thing, it will likely happen by computer and from the comfort of our homes.

That is the trend that President Trump represents in the world, freedom and personal choice. That is what the Republican Party as a whole now represents and there is nothing that the Democrats can do to repair that image. No amount of money can change that message now that Democrats are committed to that branding. And that will be the lesson of all the Bloomberg money he is spending and plans to. His message and the one in general for the Democrat Party is one that people are rejecting at every level of their lives. No matter how many times they hear from Bloomberg during the playoffs and world series, audiences will tune him out while they go to the kitchen to get more nachos, and it certainly won’t change how they vote. In many ways that is why nothing they have thrown at Trump has stopped support of him up to this point, because its not the man himself that people are voting for, but it’s the idea behind him, that personal freedom and wealth can be increased. Only now, after three years in office, people are seeing bigger paychecks and more jobs, and that will ultimately decide the election, no matter how much money is spent.

The lesson here is that messaging does not control behavior, it simply reflects it. That is why President Trump was able to be elected even though Hillary Clinton outspent him by quite a large amount. It was the message President Trump provided that resonated with voters, and specifically the right kind of voters. He didn’t need to cheat with the illegal California immigration vote either, he was able to get those votes outside the measurements of standard polling and to overcome celebrity endorsements for Hillary, the Deep State manipulations at the Department of Justice and a lot of money from the consultant class working against him at every turn. In the end it didn’t matter because Trump promised to give people “Flow” back to their lives, or to a larger degree than they had ever experienced before. He did it with a great economy that provides opportunities for people who want them. He has done it through deregulation giving more people more creative options for business than in worrying so much about compliance—which soaks up intellectual bandwidth to an even higher degree than high taxes. Personal freedom and more options are what this next election are all about, not paid for messaging. When the rubber hits the road, freedom and personal options are what give traction to political forces, and really, nothing else. To understand all the reasons, I simply must refer the curious reader to the great work of Mihaly Csikszentmiahalyi.

The arrogance of Michael Bloomberg, Nancy Pelosi, even to the degree that Joe Biden refuses to understand just how out of step he truly is in the world with his constant rantings about controlling the amount of ammunition guns can hold, as if that was an important issue to anybody except the most crazy socialists and gun grabbing communists cheering for Iran to beat Trump in some way to hurt the president during an election year, is that they insist on a mode of political theater that the public has long ago rejected, and has been trending in that direction for decades now. Instead of looking at the true science of the moment they are instead insisting that reality is not what it is, and that people are so stupid that their thoughts can be purchased. They can’t be. People will vote for those who give them more freedom, and more resources, and Trump is the only one with a track record showing anything close to that need. Money can’t buy freedom, and that is the lesson Bloomberg will learn very soon, and all those who still have not received the memo because they refuse to take hold of it. A billion dollars or more isn’t close to enough to change minds, because those minds are already made up—and nothing will change that at this point.

Rich Hoffman

Marriage Story: An important lesson on the birds and the bees and the nature of relationships

It was far better than the old tent pole movie Kramer vs. Kramer which splashed into our culture about divorce in modern America many years ago. Marriage Story, which is on Netflix and can be watched by everyone without an excuse is a fantastic film about the creation of families and how they can disintegrate over little issues. Its one of the best that I can think of and should be a must watch for anybody over ten years old. If you can watch the movie, it may be the best thing you could do for yourself today. The movie directed and produced by Noah Baumbach is a labor of love that tackles divorce in a startling way with humor, hope and tragedy rolled all up into one well done package that is more beneficial than just another offering for entertainment.

Even more stunning was that these big name actors, like Adam Driver, Scarlett Johansson, Laura Dern and Alan Alda set loose a story that really shows in this day and age what happens when a mother puts a career in front of her family and expects everything to work out. Without question Adam Driver’s character of Charlie was the victim. He hadn’t done much to provoke the divorce, it was mostly Scarlett Johansson’s character who was seeking her own identity after doing what happens to most couples, finding a guy she liked, landing him, then trying to change him. When he continued to eclipse her socially, she wanted out of the marriage which a lot of women in this #metoo age feel pressured to do. The results are often divorces like the one shown in Marriage Story.

Rather than give a regular review for a film like this, other than to say, SEE IT, I’ll instead give a much needed lesson on the birds and the bees because so many people just don’t understand, including poor Charlie in this movie. He had sex with his girlfriend who became his wife. She got pregnant and he worked hard to be a good dad. So what in the world went wrong? A lot of people are asking those questions these days and our society does very little to explain it to them. That’s why movies like this can be so important, and why everyone should see this movie.

Forget about political correctness for the duration of this article, the nature of all human beings at a very biological level is to eat and reproduce. Young girls are pretty as humans define them because they are like flowers just blooming. The pretty ones attract the best DNA in male bees seeking to pollinate the most attractive females so that those DNA matchups are optimal and good children are produced. That is the divine way of the universe, we are all programmed to think in such a way. As women start to wilt beyond age 25 they come to understand that their value as females is going away. They had been taught that sex was their power since puberty, and they are about to lose that power so they enter a phase of crisis which in the modern sense of things is to replace their sexuality with a career.

Men are programmed to be ready anytime a woman is ready to be pollinated, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Often men get married so that they don’t have to waste time looking for sex, so they can do other things with their life like develop hobbies, and spend time with friends. Even after thousands of years of evolution they have not learned that you don’t get married to have sex. You get married to be a stabile biological contributor to a woman’s offspring and once she is pollinated, and wilting rapidly thereafter, sex is the last thing she cares about. She wants to raise her children and she wants resources. Men go from being showered with attention while the woman wants to be pollinated, to being a very low priority in the scheme of the family and they never seem to understand why. Charlie in the Marriage Story didn’t, and he had a really wonderful breakdown toward the end of the movie that was honest in ways I’ve never seen before, yet most of us go through it in some form during our lives. Because it is the story of all marriages. The only differences are that some learn to deal with it while most never do.

We’ve tried to turn marriage into some Disney fairy tale where people live happily ever after and that just isn’t an intellectual argument that belongs outside of the mind of a 7-year-old. Marriage is only about making a family. Happy couples who stay married learn to do things together that they both enjoy. But couples working in different directions don’t stay married because it just doesn’t work for the human mind. People are drawn together by common goals. If a couple does not have common goals, marriage is all but impossible. For most marriages obviously the production of children is enough to keep people working at a marriage to construct a family. Many people struggle to stay married once there are no longer children as the common goal, but in the case of the Marriage Story, it was the mom who needed something of her own identity as she could feel herself wilting as a flower and she wanted to replace that sinking feeling with a career. That was certainly the case of her friend and attorney, Laura Dern’s character who played a wonderfully accurate busy body modern day feminist who was a disaster of a personality. There are so many people like her functioning in the world its no wonder so many families break up and why so many kids are growing up messes of people.

The way its supposed to work is that a woman marries a man while she is still a nice-looking flower to pollinate. The man seeks to protect that image for the rest of his life even if he has to dehydrate the flower to preserve it in a book or something. It may look gross to outsiders, but the man remembers the flower he pollinated and the children that came from the experience and he tries to protect it for the rest of his life. But when we add complex social experiments to the nature of biology and psychology then we get variations of success in the experience of a happy life, leaving most people miserable. That’s when people start cheating on each other or seek to divorce so they can get that pollination feeling again, because they didn’t take the time the first time around to enjoy the experience. But its never the same the second time, or the third, fourth, or fifth.  Humans just aren’t built to have that many complex relationships in their lives, it destroys them at a core level every time they do it because the goal of the entire experience is to produce children. Not to have the fulfilment of an individual experience.

Couples who learn to play together at life, do things together are the ones who are happiest. By design, after 20 years of raising kids, there should be enough there to have a decent marriage. But men who leave their wives for younger women are doing so because they failed to launch past their biological necessities as the pollinators of young flowers. Maybe when they were young the attractive flowers wouldn’t give them the time of day and now that they are older with more money, they can get the attention of the flowers in full bloom with all their nice colors and thin stims. But it doesn’t last long, and the male soon finds themselves in the same cycle. Sex is used to secure the relationship and if kids aren’t produced there is no reason for the initial union, and the relationship dissolves.

We’re not supposed to talk about these things because we are supposed to have gay marriages legalized, and men and women are supposed to have their own careers and leave their kids to the state to raise in public schools, and its all supposed to work out. But that’s all hog wash. I’ve been married over 30 years and I know lots of people who have been married for 50 or more years. Take a little advice, watch a Marriage Story and learn from it. Avoid the mistakes because you’ll wish later that you listened and learned what the true nature of marriage was, and to build your life appropriately around it. If you want sex, don’t get married, rent a whore, find a knothole in the fence somewhere, or stay in your mom’s house and go to skank shacks at night picking up wilted flowers that spray-paint themselves up to look fresh under dim lights that are dying fast. But if you want to raise a family, which everyone should strive for in my opinion, take a number, be very patient and learn that nothing you do in a marriage is about you—its mostly for what you can build with someone else after the sex of youth has long gone, and what lasts in the realm of immortality, the things you do while you are alive that people remember.

Watch Marriage Story, its simply fantastic!

Rich Hoffman