Tag: Ayn Rand

Using the Gun to Defend Intellect: Below the line thinking will do anything to avoid accountablity, even if it means destroying other people

As I said the other day I have been working on a project and have been going through old books to refresh myself on their material and one of them was The Oz Principle which first came out way back in 1994. In it the concept of The Wizard of Oz is used to great effect to describe ways of thinking in companies, and in life of above and below the line thinking regarding personal responsibility. Above the line thinkers are very responsible and are close to their own personal accountability, whereas below the line thinkers look for all the ways they can’t be held responsible for something. The contents of the book were so obvious to me that I had forgotten that it was one of my reading topics over twenty years ago, so when it came up in a discussion a few days ago it all came back to me as I read it again. The essential summation of the book which is quite powerful is that any company that wishes to survive and prosper must change the thinking of its below the line employee body, because only in personal responsibility can anything really change and become better. Such a concept can work with anything that has a lot of people in it who contribute to the health of an organization. Donald Trump as a business guy who has written many best-selling books in the business self-help genre understands these types of things which makes him a great president. During the government shutdown of 2018 Trump stayed at the White House over Christmas while the rest of congress retreated back to their states to celebrate the Holiday. Trump was functioning from what we would call above the line thinking while everyone else was functioning below. It could easily be said that in order for the concept of an American republic to work, most of the participants would have to function above the line, otherwise the government would fall apart.

But there is always of course more to the story which is why I have been working on my own concepts for dealing with this very issue for a few years now. It’s often not enough to just be an above the line thinker, someone who takes personal responsibility for the things they do in life and doesn’t seek to hide their true fears in life behind finger-pointing and the blame game. Most of us just finished Christmas dinners with family we only see once or twice a year and I’d say its safe to determine that we all encountered most of those participants who were below the line thinkers. They are as common as snowflakes in a snowstorm. In fact, it could easily be said that the entire television industry is targeted to appeal to below the line thinkers as every storyline and commercial is targeted to such positions. It wouldn’t take much to make the declaration that since the advent of television that below the line thinking has exploded as a common occurrence in our American culture so there’s a lot of work that must be done to fix that attribute.

Such below the line thinking would include blaming your parents for a bad childhood which is why modern successes are elusive to someone, or that they were born poor and thus didn’t have the opportunity to get an education, a new car, or even a house. Below the line thinking is actually a human condition brought on by a person’s fears of personal accountability so they use the masses to hide their cowardness from the world by deflecting blame for anything that happens in their lives. Ironically, I have never been such a person. By nature, and upbringing, and the kinds of examples I grew up being attracted to I have always been an above the line thinker where everything was in my wheelhouse of responsibility. Personal accountability is one of the most primary traits of leadership, and good leaders must be above the line thinkers.

This brings us to my original problem that I had reported I was working out over the last several years. It’s not enough to just be a positive thinker or to be a great example of above the line thinking. It is easy to be a naturally positive example when you are in a position of leadership, such as running a company or as President Trump is doing by running a country. But it is quite difficult to have such a position when you are working under the authority of below the line thinkers such as when you have a bad boss, or bad people who are above you in the seniority pull, or even bad people running government. Because below the line thinkers actively seek to destroy above the line thinkers just because they don’t want a culture of higher thinking to force them out of their blame game mentality because it would then require courage to fuel their actions for which they are vacant. Otherwise they wouldn’t be below the line thinkers to begin with. That’s where the Second Amendment comes into the picture, a country that wants to function above the line has to allow their people to prosper under conditions where below the line people cannot attack them for trying to be better. The right to self-defense isn’t just to protect homes, cars, wives and children from the harms of villains, but to keep villains from stealing something much more valuable, above the line thinking with threats of social castigation and even physical violence.

I get asked several times a week, sometimes several times a day, mostly from people who don’t know me well, if I worry about getting into trouble over this blog site, such as in the message above that I put on Instagram. To their thinking I am very critical of big powerful groups, such as the FBI, large media organizations, even individual people who are killers. Their question to me is what happens if you make them mad and they hunt you down an assassinate you to keep you from saying the things you do? That is a valid question after all because as we all know either literally or instinctively, below the line thinkers will do just about anything to maintain their positions, because they lack personal courage so in their terror, they will attack above the line thinkers just to maintain that insulation between reality and their fears. In public schools this is precisely why there are bullies, below the line thinkers which are much more numerous than above the line thinkers use peer pressure to maintain a safety blanket in society from the realities of accountability. So long as many more people think something then below the line thinkers can maintain the illusion that their blame game lifestyle is a valid position, and to do that they must maintain power over above the line thinking. If someone is going to be a leader and try to elevate everyone around them with positive attributes the below the line thinkers functioning from fear will want to destroy such people.

That is why I think personal firearm ownership is needed in any society that wishes to operate above the line. It’s not enough to just think something, you have to be able to defend it. When a bully comes up to you and says that they wish to essentially stay in a victim state and that if you try to force them to change into a role of accountability—such as getting off welfare, food stamps, using medical ailments to limit successful function in the world then they might inspire a mob of militants to come to your house and kill you—when they do that then if you have a gun, you can easily defend yourself, especially if you know how to use it. I see that before anyone can actually have an above the line attitude in life that they must develop a way to protect themselves from all the below the line thinkers in the world who want to destroy them just for raising the bars of expectation.

I could tell stories all day long of when I was a perpetual above the line thinker when I wasn’t in charge of everything where life was constantly made difficult because below the line thinkers had power over some aspect of my life and it was a constant fight. The fight for them is in keeping the expectations low for themselves so they attack above the line people because they are too lazy or too cowardly to step up to a new level and they will get quite violent to preserve their happy place below the line. That is something that a lot of these self-help books about personal accountability and business improvement ignore, how to deal with the masses that will try to show up with pitch forks and flaming crosses to hang you on it if you let them because they don’t want to think above the line. But gun ownership takes that argument off the table. When below the line thinkers realize that they can’t find a fear in you to prevent you from raising the bar, they have no choice but to step up and that is what I think the missing ingredient is in our modern culture, that recognition of fact. We need the Second Amendment not just to possibly overthrow a corrupt government or to protect our private property. We need guns to protect the intellectual nature of our American republic so that above the line thinkers can emerge and lead people out of the self-fulfilled darkness of victimhood thinking. Without that threat below the line thinkers have no incentive to become better so long as they can tear down those around them with threats and intimidation so to preserve the things they most fear in the entire world, accountability for their own actions. If you can defend yourself from the peer pressure of below the line thinkers, then you can be free to function without being impeded, which is the main cause for why more people do not think above the line to begin with, because its lonely there and the mob mentality of below the line thinkers can appear scary—but they really are quite cowardly and ineffective, like the wicked witch from The Wizard of Oz who was destroy just by having water thrown on them to reveal how small they always really were.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rich Hoffman

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The Primary Problem of all Government: They don’t function from any value judgements, and they need to

One of my many professional tasks is that of a Value Stream facilitator where value to a customer base is communicated to a large organization through a visual management method. I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately because many people have been asking me to run for public office and there is nothing appealing to it for me at all. But in all actuality that shouldn’t be the case honestly, and the reason is essentially at the heart of the entire argument regarding political discourse. The experiment of Donald Trump as President of the United States has said enough in my mind to pin point some problems with government that are essential to rectifying the situation, and why the thought of any public office disgusts me. I’m glad to have friends who are in public office, but honestly, I look at those jobs as something beneath my intelligence. I find interacting with elected officials and government workers painful, like going to a Christmas dinner with hostile family members. It’s certainly something I can endure, but I don’t look forward to it. However, I have enjoyed the Trump presidency because he has brought some of the business sense that I am used to applying to a government position and that has ignited in me the thought that its time for some change agency in our approach to government. Instead of just pointing out the problem, its time to evoke solutions. Otherwise, a person like me would never in a million years last one meeting in a public office setting, I am simply too good to put myself through such an experience, it would be a waste of my time.

In private industry particularly in capitalist countries companies go to great measures to unlock the secrets of efficiency because they need a competitive method of survival in their given markets so they can advance beyond their rivals. And there is a real beauty when such efficiencies are reached. Of those methods companies employ are variations of Six Sigma, Lean, PDSA, The Theory of Constraints, Agile, just to name a few and the goal of Value Stream Mapping is to communicate the efficiencies to large groups of people particularly at the upper management level. In such exercises Gemba walks are of utmost importance to gather proper information so that the top of an organization understands what happens in the meat and potatoes part of it succinctly. And in government, all government none of these methods are used to achieve anything, nobody in any government jobs wants to know anything about efficiency and that really bothers me. Government is so disconnected from reality, which is unleashed in capitalist countries through the value of money evoked by the businesses that produce wealth, that for a person who thinks about efficiencies all the time it is just repulsive to sit through a government meeting while they discuss spending millions of tax payer dollars. I have developed over time a real hatred for them because there are rules to making and spending money that all government ignores, and unfortunately, most people smart about such things want nothing to do with government, when in fact they should.

Most of the people against Trump are no different from the people within an organization who hate a dynamic force that has been introduced to shake them into thinking efficiently. The resentment is real and there have been hundreds of serious books written on the subject of overcoming just such oppositions. You could say there is a real science to overcoming opposition and being an agent of change within an organization, which has often been my role for the last two decades in several ambitions. When it comes to change agents, the goal isn’t to get along, its to shake things up, but to do it in a way that most of the time is done with a smile on your face. There isn’t a need to be forceful when you have the leverage of being right. Yet when interacting with government, those rules seem to go out the window and to my mind, they are the only ones that matter.

The purpose of Value Stream Mapping for any organization is to evoke value for the customer within the organization and to cut out wasted efforts so that a company can be a good supplier to a customer who will value the effort. The value is for the customer so that the utilizer can survive well and be there to produce goods for a marketplace in need. From that vantage point it all sounds very simple, but in practice it is extremely difficult because human beings bring with them into their lives which percolate within any work culture their internal demons and other deficiencies, which must be overcome to flow as productive contributors to whatever strategic necessity a company may have as a producer in the world. In government interactions they never feel they owe any value to anything, not to a customer, (other countries, or even their own people) to their suppliers, (tax payers) or even to themselves, (government employees). For some reason they feel they are exempt from all value judgments when in fact value judgments are all that ever matter, otherwise the money issued and traded are worthless. That’s how we end up with a 21 trillion-dollar deficit and a government that wants to do anything to keep the government open through the Holidays just so everyone can have a nice Christmas, when a shut downs and massive layoffs are really needed.

Without value judgements a government can’t even do basic assessments of itself to correct the bad behaviors other businesses conduct just to be competitive. Government feels that they are above it all and do not have to do such things, when in fact the reality is the opposite. I have many friends who are in various public offices and they mention to me that I should join them, but due to this lack of value judgments, when in my professional life that’s essentially all I think about, the two worlds just don’t mesh. They don’t mesh for me and they certainly don’t for anybody else. Government is a huge consumer of resources in any country, but they don’t feel that their value is anybody’s business and that is the essence of their problem. And any force that tries to bring value judgements to them, such as what President Trump has done to Washington D.C. culture becomes their mortal enemy.

I think its time to look at government differently, not as something grandfathered in as an inefficient entity of aristocrats who couldn’t do work in the private sector successfully—but to expect them to perform the way any business does. It’s time to measure government value not as a siloed top down management system, but as an organization that is applying the tools of business to solve real problems that require solutions, not just lip service. I think its time to turn the scope of government back on itself instead of allowing them to build their walls and hide within them while they blow millions of dollars from the people, they are supposed to serve like gamblers drunk off their ass in a casino spending the last cents of their latest paychecks. It’s time the same rules we all live with get applied to them, and that their opposition to that value judgment be destroyed, utterly. And until that culture is in motion, I won’t be running for any public office because the insanity of it all would drive me nuts.

Rich Hoffman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rich Hoffman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rich Hoffman

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There is No Justice: The F.B.I and much of the legal world is up to no good as the Cohen case proves

So Michael Cohen is going to jail on March 6th for three years just because he was the attorney for President Trump. We have to remember what went on here, the F.B.I. kicked in the door of a sitting president’s lawyer to ransack the place in order to look for information for which they could extract to remove that elected president from office. And when they didn’t find that information they leaned on someone close to the president, in this case his personal attorney, to squeeze anything they could out in testimony so that they could build a case of getting rid of that. And when all they found were a few sketchy financial transactions they sent the attorney to jail for 3 years pretty much as a warning shot to anybody they‘d come after in the future—until President Trump was out of office. It’s a blood thirsty game and is deeply corrupt. And it is proof that there are many kinds of justice, and money can’t buy them all. The level of justice we are witnessing when the legal profession attacks one of its own in Michael Cohen and puts him in jail so that they can try to kick out the president sitting in the White House is as dirty as it gets especially in the context of history.

Remember when the “birther” movement was in full steam, when there were constitutional questions about whether or not Barack Obama could actually be president because it was unknown if he was actually born in the United States? As a kid he grew up in Indonesia and was raised by a globetrotting mother who associated openly with communists and radical thinkers and there is a lot of debate whether or not Obama actually knows who his dad is. He thinks he does but it’s highly likely that not even he is sure of it all. So how could the nation? It was a legitimate question to bring up and opponents to Obama did. But even for asking the question we were called “birthers.” The liberal contention was that it didn’t matter where Obama was born. He was a black man. He was president. To them it didn’t matter if Obama was born on the Moon, they would argue that nothing was going to remove their president from office, and they attacked anybody who thought otherwise.

Where are the same passions from the conservative side of things? What the intelligence agencies have been doing to Trump is all by itself very criminal, to the level of organized crime. A typical mafia boss has more ethics than the DNC and the F.B.I. based on what we’ve seen. The more we have learned about James Comey the more we understand how terrible the leadership of the F.B.I. truly was and this whole Mueller special investigation is a direct spawn of Comey’s radical antics, of actually stealing material from the Oval Office and leaking it to the press. Of wire tapping the transition team at Trump Tower and lying to FISA courts to attempt to undo an American election. All this stuff is so much more serious than questioning whether or not Obama was born in the United States. Yet the case against his birth in America is far stronger than any Russian collusion story.

Sure, Michael Cohen was a little slimy, in all reality, what attorney isn’t? The legal system itself is slimy, so why wouldn’t a good one be on the shady side? Personally speaking I could never defend a murder suspect or someone engaged in questionable activities as an attorney because I couldn’t put my ethical standards up for sale like that. If I didn’t believe in the client, I couldn’t do the work. Any attorney that can I think is slimy. Ethical defense is not up for sale and the way the legal system is presently states quite clearly that money can by such a thing. Obviously Donald Trump the billionaire working in a slimy town of New York where corruption ran everything had to conduct slimy activities to be in any kind of business and that’s why lawyers were hired, to handle slimy details. Cohen offered himself as just such a person so nobody is expecting a highly ethical figure in Trump’s attorney. Nobody ever did.

Yet the legal system understands that rule which is why they went after Cohen in the first place. In their need to find dirt on President Trump they went to the slimy figures in his life that are there by business necessity knowing that if they wanted to make some kind of case against the president, that they should start there. So they broke into Michael Cohen’s office sending a direct message to the President of the United States that nothing around him was safe. And the point of the Comey leaking of documents to inspire the investigation of his friend Bob Mueller was to set up the hope of impeachment if Democrats managed to take the House of Representatives at some point. Which was a reasonable calculation considering many Never-Trumper Republicans wanted to retire leaving so many seats vulnerable to Democrats. The whole game as been a scam and abuse of power and has resembled nothing regarding law and order. It’s all about power and politics. None of these legal actions have been about justice, only about retaining power and pushing out of power representatives elected within the context of the republic of America.

If we’ve learned anything from all this it is that the legal system is largely a travesty created only to control the flow of power to those who truly want to deny that America is a republic instead of a majority ruled democracy. Therefor they cannot accept that Donald Trump was elected president to upset that entire legal apple cart so they have used every dirty trick available at the highest level of politics to destroy the Trump presidency, which has not been successful and it won’t be. Every year since he jumped on the scene, I have liked Donald Trump more and more. I started out supporting him because of his business background and he had a chance to bring business logic to politics. I didn’t care that he was an over the top playboy over the years, I only cared that he bring business level decisions to the Executive Branch. But as I’ve watched him under fire and withstanding the heat, I like him more and more—and so do most Americans. People know what’s going on here, but even knowing it doesn’t prepare you for the audacious reality once it’s presented in all its ugliness. And the Cohen case is ugly. At best it is gross abuse of power by the highest powers in our political system and it deserve severe punishment for all the actors involved. I know where I am personally with all this, but I keep wondering when everyone else will catch on. I have no faith in the F.B.I. or the CIA, or even Homeland Security. I think those organizations are filled with perverts, power-hungry despots and general losers—which is why they seek government work instead of the bold frontier of private sector efforts. But this Cohen case only confirms what I have long suspected, and it can’t be allowed to stand. I’m not OK with it, I’ll say that much. In my view government works for the people who put them in power and I’m not a happy employer.

Rich Hoffman

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Shut Down the Government: We don’t need most of those employees anyway

Shut down the government, do us all a favor. What they are talking about shutting down if a budget resolution isn’t reached is essentially a much-needed layoff of employees that aren’t needed anyway. They call them in government “non-essential” employees because the world continues to spin whether or not they are at work. They aren’t needed. And the last time this happened where an actual shut down occurred the parks services was cut so national parks were closed as a unionized extortion tactic meant to put pain on the public to provide political support for their cause as well. To that I say shut them all down too. The government shouldn’t be in the park business anyway, turn them over to private control and get the government out of the way at the Grand Canyon, the Smoky Mountains and elsewhere, shut them all down and turn over management to private enterprise, as they should have always been. It is amazing that after all these years there has never been a Republican who could withstand a shutdown showdown with the lowly Democrats. Not even Newt Gingrich managed to be successful during the Clinton years. Bill Clinton easily waited out Newt and Bob Dole while he carried on an affair with Monica Lewinsky instead. It was no skin off his back and Republicans came running back to him within a few weeks, and Democrats have had the high ground on the argument ever since. That is, until December 11th, 2018.

Of course I fully support President Trump’s efforts to shut down the government and to take that power away from Democrats. Most of the government workers effected do not vote Republican anyway so why not do it? What is there to lose by sending home employees the government doesn’t need anyway. All essential functions will continue to operate so where is the problem? Any small government advocate should be very excited to see such a thing happen. After all, there isn’t any better way to shrink the size of government than by getting rid of the people working in it that you don’t need. Once people realize that a government shutdown really doesn’t affect them then they’ll move on to something else, so why not do it?

I’ve never liked government employees. I know a lot of people who do work in government and they are to my judgment lazy people who are too slow in life to really advance the human cause. I put up with them out of kindness, but when talking to them and discovering their values they disgust me. I can’t wait to get away from them generally. It doesn’t matter if they are F.B.I. agents or just clerks at the BMV. They are what I term slow people lacking ambition, which is why they work in the protective umbrella of government services. The pay is artificially good because it isn’t set by any kind of market value giving wages an artificial ceiling that can’t be supported by reality and the requirements for performing a task are nearly nonexistent. The postal worker who spends most of his day drunk and off work because his liver is so polluted from all the years of drinking that he’s now sick all the time still gets a raise. It’s a pathetic system that only people in government benefit from.
These are generalities of course. It could be argued that every military service person is a government employee and we all know that we are supposed to salute them for their willingness to die for us at every juncture. Some would argue that the military is essential personnel that is negatively affected by government shutdowns, but to that I’d say we accomplish more around the world with contracted work. That is where the real dirty stuff happens anyway, not the front-line soldier sweeping a mine field in some hostile land who probably shouldn’t be there to begin with. It’s the soldiers of fortune who do the real work most of the time, and they get paid. Believe me, they get paid well—and during a government shutdown, those signatures still get made.

The kind of little fight that Trump had with the liberal progressives Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi is precisely why I voted for the President. I don’t want a bunch of back slapping and “getting along.” I want someone who will sit in the Oval Office and fight on my behalf. Not some wishy-washy get along loser like we’ve had for several decades now who lets inferior government workers run all over them in the form of the Democrat party. These calls for civility in public discourse are the same idiots who want the game to continue because they profit off the chaos in some fashion or another. The government should never be such a large employer and there is no way at this point to create incentives for nonessential people to leave government work unless it becomes a destabilized employer anyway. We all know that there isn’t any management in government work so what hope of reform is there unless we have more of these government shutdowns. We need to get those people affected into some other line of employment and what better way to do it.

What is most disgusting is that during a shut down most of those affected workers will get paid anyway for sitting at home on their asses. Not right away, but once the shutdown is resolved, they get a check whether or not they have done anything which is a disgusting system that only government could come up with. Government is the ultimate socialist experiment which by its nature avoids proper market adjustment conditions because the entire system is built of sentiment, not necessity. People seem to forget that France is and has been a socialist country for many years. After weeks of protesting taxes on gasoline prices to protect the environment on a made-up global warming initiative designed to incite panic among progressives, and thus foolish legislation and artificial tax collections, the President of France Emmanuel Macron proposed a raise for all workers of 100 euros and an exemption on overtime pay as well as social security for retirees. How did he come up with that number? Those labor costs aren’t set by any market circumstances, they are an artificial reaction to an artificial problem and all that does is inflate the value of labor costs for the entire country. How can a government just set a wage price to appeal to a bunch of protestors running around the streets of Paris overturning cars and burning garbage cans? The answer is he can’t, not without destroying the economic value of what France produces. This is the problem with all governments who set prices with the failed socialist notion that such things are best managed in such a way avoiding market realities.

It should be extraordinary, but it was and I hope to see a lot more off it where President Trump has these open fights with congressional Democrats. He’s doing essentially what I’d like to do and I voted for him to do just such a thing. And for the record, because everyone keeps saying it on all sides of the argument, we do not have a democracy in America. A bunch of thugs can’t just run around the streets overturning cars and vandalizing street signs and get a raise. We have a representative republic. We elect people to do jobs for us and that is how Trump was elected, even though the government system still refuses to accept that premise and have been working very hard to erase that election. But that’s the system we have and more fights like what happened in the White House over the funding of the government and the funding of the border wall need to occur. Additionally, we need to shut down the government more often so to push people out of that work that we don’t need so we don’t have to pay them for “nonessential” work. What a preposterous notion—paying people for things we don’t need as a nation just so that the government can count itself as a major employer. That is not the way of a capitalist nation, only a socialist one, and it should have never been introduced into the American concept to begin with. So people shouldn’t cry when it goes away. Shut down the government and move on to the next topic.

Rich Hoffman

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Breaking the Vico Cycle: Capitalism is the key to the truth

Another aspect of the direction of our curiosity that we will have to come to terms with, as a human race, is that we’ve been here before. We are on the Vico cycle and honestly, I’d like to see us break that trend and not make the mistakes of that past that were made. That is the reason behind most conspiracies, is that the ruling powers don’t want to admit that they are on the same trajectory. They want to believe that their government, their religion, their political philosophy is the latest and greatest and that this time they have it different. I have spent much of the last thirty years studying ancient cultures and comparative mythologies so my opinions are built on a vast understanding of the problem which most people and institutions wish not to think about. As much as I love NASA, the Republican Party and even the Christian religion, I understand their limits which are going to come undone now that information is decentralized and adventure is again becoming monetized. Without question once we allow for space tourism that cat will be out of the bag, we will discover ourselves on the face of the moon, and along the old ancient sea shores of Mars. We will find the source of many of our ancient mythologies and it will be difficult to come to terms with. Our institutions will struggle to find their relevancy, our religions will blow apart, and our politics will collapse in on itself with the realization that we’ve done it all before.

That is why it is important to understand that the only real value that there is in the entire universe is that which is created through human productivity. Of course the governments of the world have had a tough time sending rovers to Mars and taking pictures of the moon and having to scrub the photos of archaeological evidence of previous cultures already there. For me personally there were three main things that brought my mind to this obvious reality, the first was in learning about the Cholula pyramid in Mexico south of Teotihuacan. It is the largest pyramid by volume known so far in the world and it is nearly completely covered with dirt that makes it look like a natural hill over 200 ft tall. On its top is a Catholic church Iglesia de Nuestra Señora de los Remedios, built there by the Spanish conquistadors to make their mark and attempt to erase the religions of their predecessors as they made themselves the change agent of Mayan and Aztec life.

The second was the realization that in my area of Ohio, within the United States there used to be a vast kingdom of giant humans, people over 7 ft tall, who inhabited the area and were buried in many of the giant mound complexes so known to the region. One such mound is just down the road from my home, about 5 miles or so and is of a similar size as the Silbury Hill complex at Avebury in England. The top of the mound had been looted many years ago but has otherwise not been properly excavated even through the very nice college of Miami University is just down the road. Up the Great Miami River is a twin of this mound called the Miamisburg Mound which is of a similar size and scope. It had an excavation at the end of the 1800s, they found a few bones and nobody has touched it again since.

There is no desire to touch it again by our institutional knowledge. Instead our political system has used the American Indian as an excuse to do nothing creating an artificial constraint called the NAGPRA. The third thing was in reading the great James Joyce classic novel, Finnegan’s Wake. That’s where the whole Vico cycle came alive to me and I realized that Joyce had written the book in a coded language to hide its contents from the political and religious powers of our times, so that only clever, smart people could unlock them. Knowing just those three things—and there are many others, but for me those three things confirmed my suspicions beyond any reasonable doubt that we will find our own history in outer space and learn that life on earth was just one more conquered frontier on our quest to survive.

Human society didn’t just do one thing for millions of years then suddenly blossom into thriving civilizations building magnificent pyramids and telling stories of monsters and gods battling it out in the cosmos. Those stories were told before a long time ago in places beyond earth. What is hard to admit to ourselves is that our political order and our institutions in general are more interested in their own power than they are in the science of discovery. Even the puritanical scientist that claims they want to save the whale, the polar ice caps, or even the history of the moon and Mars are hungry to make their sponsors happy with their results which of course come from institutions and politics that desire to keep all this information from the public so that they can hold power for just a little while longer. At least you can trust the healthy industrialist which seeks to monetize discovery because the value of that ambition is a measurable claim, we can all trust. Science we cannot because they are often funded by the political order of our day and their results often are skewed so that they can gather up money for efforts that don’t contribute to any real productivity, which leaves them always at the mercy of those who are willing to give them money to publish results the current political order desires.

That is why they make fun of those who point to Mars and to other celestial bodies and say that the origin of mankind didn’t come from some monkey in the desert or on the plains of Africa, but they fled from some tragedy out there beyond the barriers of earth and they sought refuge in a new and vast world after they lost their homelands due to circumstances that are yet to be revealed. And now we are plotting a course to return and to discover the truth of it all, which we always needed to know, but for which our present politics just couldn’t fathom. To study how even the F.B.I. could seek to destroy President Trump because he was truly elected a people’s president and is as independent of the old order as the modern age would allow us to get, then it isn’t hard to understand why NASA must scrub photos from the moon and Mars that show signs of life for which their bosses have said, the public will learn of it when they are ready, when their religions will allow them to grasp the truth. But in reality what they really mean is that they want to hold power for as long as possible because once humans colonize the planet, they will no longer care about what politicians or church leaders think on earth. They will be on the frontier experiencing a whole new way of life, one that is determined by the value of productivity, not ancient reverence to dying ideas.

If you want to know the truth about science consider that what they are saying they are seeing on Mars has already been covered up right here on earth, at Cholula, at the Ohio mounds, within the book Finnegan’s Wake. If we can’t deal with the reality right in front of us, what are we going to do when there is no civilization to hide it through a barrier of civility? That is why values have to be determined now and finally—a system of understanding reached that is divorced of past sins. Capitalism is the only real truth that there ever was and once we bring that to the stars we can’t allow for the suppression of the obvious. We have to come to terms with it and not make the same mistakes again. Its time for the Vico cycle to end.

Rich Hoffman

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The Meaning of Life: How to accept the new roles of colonizing distant planets in relation to governing policies

You know, philosophy and science didn’t end with the American inputs of William James, Robert Pirsig and Ayn Rand. Even though the institutions of our modern society are tempted to think that they are the end of the line and that they must now teach what they have learned to anybody willing to pay them $100 thousand for an education that really it’s the labor unions supporting them that’s talking, again from a long dead philosopher in Karl Marx who is irrelevant to modern thought, because his beliefs were more a wish for the lazy than an observed fact of existence. No, there is a lot more to learn and to think about and as it so happens to be, we are living in the most dynamic time for that kind of thought in the history of the entire world. So if you are like me, which is conducive to the reality of the moment, the old static thoughts of old need to give way to the dynamic intellectualism of the creative moment and for that I’m going to say something very important, something that nobody else will tell you presently on the face of earth, but it is the most solid footing that mankind could hope to have, and that is in the rock, paper, scissor game of human development, the way to determine the value in something is in how we can monetize it, because that determines the value of something. Science by its very nature is needed to study where we’ve been but they cannot be allowed to step in the way of human advancement.

I’m thinking of space and colonizing Mars, the Moon, and several other moons circling the moons of the big gas giants at the center of our solar system. In their natural state they are just there doing nothing waiting for the sun to explode destroying everything in its gravitational pull. Humans have been given a tight window to develop life of just a few million years and we need to take full advantage of it presently. That means that all the scientific protestors like Green Peace and PETA, along with the political protestors such as the Karl Marx inspired ANTIFA must either be destroyed or given a seat at the back of the bus and told to shut up. They may have rights to express themselves under the American Constitution and if other countries want to adopt the philosophy of American thought and create laws based on that, so be it. But soon we are going to be returning to the wild, wild west of space travel and frontier pushing that will last pretty much for the rest of human existence, for many millions of years to come and always there will be a frontier to push. It is the nature of human thought to use the necessity of adventure to advance human needs and desires and the governing practice that keeps everything in check are not the laws of institutional thinking, it is the value of the conduct.

I used to read National Geographic magazines and books voraciously. Going to the museum for me in Washington D.C. was like visiting heaven on earth. But over the years I have grown to understand that they have a very limited perspective on the world and of human existence altogether. What makes human beings so important over other life forms is the creative impulse to see what is around the corner and to use their imaginations to get there. No other animal anywhere does this and it can be argued through applied scientific observation that this is the meaning of life—of all life—to feed this trend in existence. National Geographic still has the progressive vision of its founders, Alexander Graham Bell and many others who weren’t wrong to ask questions about the role science played in human experience, but the value of their work only has relevancy to people. Give a National Geographic magazine to an elk in Alaska or a beaver in Colorado and they’ll just look at it. The animal rights activists that might learn something from reading National Geographic are wrong to assume that they are meant to act on behalf of nature because again the ability to contemplate the “nature” of things is purely human. The forces that made the Rocky Mountains could and would destroy every last human being ever created without giving anything a thought. So the contemplation of value is purely human. When in the very well-produced television series titled Mars, produced by National Geographic the assumption is made that there needs to be a governing body in space just as there is on earth, they’d be incorrect. Value is determined by what humans do with the nature that is around them—at every level. A turtle can’t dig in the ground and pull out raw ore and make something economically valuable about it. Only humans can, and thus on the wild frontier of space where huge companies will set up residence and take over the colonization of Mars and many other planets at a rapid pace, science and conservation must take a back seat. The scientists cannot be allowed to become governing elements in the dynamic need to destroy static assumptions. When we get to Mars and set up huge cities of minors and construction workers, the science of understanding what happened to Mars takes a back seat. The funding for their science comes from business investment and economic expansion, so they need to accept that and get away from assuming that their static reality of observation can be allowed to slow down even a little the curiosity of mankind and its never-ending quest for economic development.

Monetizing a planet, or a moon is not an evil thing, it’s quite the opposite. When something is monetized it is suddenly graced with a value that it didn’t have before. Mars in the state that it is now is just sitting there with all its history. The scientist might find all that fascinating just as they may enjoy watching Humpback wales breeding off the coast of California. So what, when did a whale or a dolphin ever build a space ship to colonize a distant star? The value of existence isn’t just in doing what some version of God started as a pattern of life, to breed, to eat, to reproduce then to die in a long cycle of existence, it is accepting that jump-start into consciousness, then to do something with the intellect that emerges. Death or preparing for death for the rest of our lives as the Buddhists do is not a value conducive to the human experience, nor is living in harmony with nature. The meaning of life as defined by human beings is to accept their role of a dynamic force in a very static universe. It is not for the scientist to sit in the back of a caboose studying history, it is in the entrepreneur at the front of the train, at the cutting edge as Robert Pirsig put it in his work so well, that is where the value for all things are.

At the heart of all this is the debate on gun control. As humans move into the vast frontiers of space away from the governments on earth that central question of who controls who and how and why comes up. In America the right to have guns and to use them has decentralized the process of justice. People can live in the middle of nowhere and not expect to be robbed of their values because they have guns to defend themselves. The same application of order will be used heavily on the far distance bases in orbit around Jupiter or scattered all over Mars as a continuous stream of rockets full of payload travels between the earth and those destinations raising the stakes with each visit as those environments become much more earth like in their living conditions. And as all this happens there will be no room for the nosey scientist or the environmental protestors who assumes that their work is the most important to conduct in the universe. The way to determine that is to measure the value that work has in the scope of human progress. If it isn’t valuable, then it must be discarded for something that is, because it is the tools we come to use as humans that matter as we reach out and expand our curiosity to the next corner of the galaxy. It may be interesting to consider where things have been historically, but what matters is tomorrow, and our always driven yearning to find it. That is the meaning of life.

Rich Hoffman

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