Tag: Ayn Rand

Why Trump is Very Mentally Stable: The poor definitions for leadership that robs so many people of success, logic, and victory

Thinking even further about the assumptions made in the anti-Trump Michael Wolff book about life in the new White House the definitions for winning, and victory are not the same from each side. Liberals clearly do not understand what “winning” means because they are not a performance based political party. Trump’s methods of negotiating are foreign to them and the means of achieving wins is as well—which is very apparent by the kinds of things that the people around Trump said about him to the fly-on-the-wall writer. Steven Bannon in particular obviously was looking at the president and thinking, “I can do this, and I should be.” But that is a common mistake made by second-hander people. What they don’t understand is that the master negotiator, and the person who often wins most of their engagements are not the types of people who spike the football in people’s faces. They are the ones who build up those around them and teach other people how to win as the residual effects migrate into the circumstances of the leader whoever they may be—in this case Donald Trump.

Trump said a lot when he said that he makes winning look easy. Winning is a skill as much as it’s a strategic result. Most people don’t know how to win, but there is no question that there are people who always find themselves knocking on the door to victory time and time again while others consider it a mystery and an opportunity given only by luck. Anyone who has read Trump’s books, especially books by Trump University like Trump 101: The Way to Success, understand that there is a lot more going on with Trump than just powering his way into beating his opponents at whatever objective he seeks to accomplish. From day one in the Trump White House—even before, this is how the new president went about his work—learning what all sides on a matter wanted, then learning how to use that knowledge to achieve his objective.

Winning is not about out powering your opponent, or even check-mating them into submission. Often when it comes to negotiations you want the other party to feel good about what they are doing—even if its losing. Winning and crushing your opponent into oblivion is not synonymous with success. Sometimes it is—but often not. Winning is about achieving your objectives while letting everyone else feel that they were a part of the process—and that is why Trump ran, and still does to a large extent, a loose White House. People need to be comfortable, so they can reveal their needs to you, so that you can use that information to help build in their minds the parameters of victory.

From its inception in the modern sense—as in from the Dark Ages to the present, occupational responsibilities in Western cultures tend to be focused on specializations. In oriental cultures it is expected that an individual will become somewhat curious about many fields, but in the West we are projected to learn one thing and to stick to that relying on the next specialization to do their job correctly and if they don’t we throw up our arms and blame that person for failing. People who constantly win however are usually good at many things in life, and are curious about many others. What they have in common is that they tend to not be overly specialized, but have developed within themselves many skills for which to use in improvisational context to solve problems and build support for their viewpoints among other people.

What we have going on regarding Donald Trump in the White House is a fear from the majority in Washington D.C. that function from a specialized trade that a multitalented businessman will forever raise the bar of expectations for them. For those who voted for Donald Trump, that is exactly what we wanted, but for those who believe in a specialized skill conducted through institutional protections, Donald Trump is a nightmare. For Washington D.C. to work the way they learned it does requires that the formula of specialization be maintained. But for Trump to do his thing he needs to be part psychologist, part inspirational speaker, part numbers cruncher, part fashion model, part strategist and to be able to recognize in everyone he speaks with what their specializations are, so he can turn them to his advantage. The way to do this is to let people have a free rein and study their behavior so that it is easy to ascertain their characteristic tendencies. Saying that Donald Trump is stupid, or insane—or anything resembling an unstable personality is more of a wish than a statement. For the institutional addicts who need the structure of specialization to be maintained Trump is “unstable” because their definition of stability is to keep personalities within the specialization of their institutional expectations. Yet Trump is results driven which does not adhere to a structure—because often the structure stands in the way of the needed results—otherwise there wouldn’t be a need to fix anything—which is what the opposition against Trump is really after.

To those who have mastered the art of just about everything they have no need for advice—at least in the traditional sense. Trump has shown that he does listen to people, but not in the way that people hope—where their specializations are respected. Trump listens to what people say then he uses his experience to make gut judgment calls based on his unique leadership skills. This is something that most people in the world do not have the ability to do—including most major presidents throughout history. It’s not that Trump did anything wrong, it’s just that our current society doesn’t understand the nature of leadership very well—and why only a very few people per capita seem inclined to proper leadership. Leadership isn’t about following the rules of an established institution, it’s about getting good results even when the institutions let us down with poor resolutions. Solving those problems isn’t about doing so within the context of institutional boundaries, it’s about discovering the correct solution and then bringing about the conditions to implement those solutions. To be free to make decisions on your own is to be able to more quickly ascertain the needed objectives. If the problem is in the people who are advising, to protect their specialized roles within the institution, then speaking with them about their opinions won’t solve the problem, and this is why Trump has achieved so much in such a short period of time. He is not hindered by the limits of other people who don’t strive so far as he does.

In the traditional sense of presidential roles within the nation of America—it is expected that the Executive Branch be treated like the Monarchy in England—as kind of a figurehead that acts as the face of the nation while the specialized experts do their thing for whatever purpose is identified on their institutional charters. But most Americans during this last election saw that the process just wasn’t working, so we voted against the institutions themselves and put a CEO in charge instead of just another political hack. To a certain extent it is understood that people will have problems with that approach because they don’t have the definitions in their lives which explain why Trump is successful. They only know that Trump does not respect the institutional parameters for which they exist. Stupidity in this regard is a matter of perspective—and as history will chronicle, it is the institutionalists who will be shown as lacking. Trump is a change, a demand in real leadership—not token sentiments meant to protect the Skull and Bones Society, or the charters of the FBI, CIA and Homeland Security. Nor the secret societies, hate groups, or ideologies of long dead philosophers. Trump was hired to solve problems and that is what he’s doing, and history will respect what he did even if it does piss everyone off. The more he does piss off, the better our nation will be in the end.

Rich Hoffman

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Revoking Franklin Delano Roosevelt from History: His friends Hitler and Mussolini would approve of the communism he helped nurture in China

After reading the very good book, The Big Lie during 2017 it settled an issue that has bothered me for years about one of my favorite books, The Way of the Fighter by my favorite military general Claire Lee Chennault. The year of the publication was 1949 as communism was sweeping into China for which Chennault had been commissioned to protect from Japanese aggression. Reading that book it always concerned me that Franklin Delano Roosevelt only supplied 100 P-40Bs to the American Volunteer Group commissioned to China for such a defense—and as World War II raged on, how General Stilwell in spite of all the great heroics Chennault squeezed out of his young pilots and crew seemed always to be undercutting the efforts in China to “just win enough.” Based on what I’m about to say, knowing more than the average knows about this subject from piecing together the kind of evidence that has deliberately been erased from history, that it is time to revoke the status of good presidency that is given to the radical leftist who brought socialism to America—FDR.

As we live in an age where the political left wants to remove Trump from office it is only fair to apply their same complaints back the other way on their own political leaders. After all, it is now irrefutable that the Obama administration used the powers of government to manipulate everything from the high court laws to the ground activism that has shown itself to be so violent. For many years there has been great controversy as to whether or not Franklin Delano Roosevelt knew that the Japanese were going to attack Pearl Harbor, and I think we can now conclude that he did—and that he hoped it would allow America to be pulled into the war so that he wouldn’t be forced to go against his friends on the political left, Bonito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler. For it was well-known during the entire 1930s that the three of them together represented a new kind of global socialism that was pouring forth throughout Europe and Roosevelt in many ways was the leader of the three. Hitler and Mussolini studied the American president and copied many of his tactics as a foundation for their own actions in Germany and Italy. The media even back then was well on board the socialist train and openly supported those three dictators—Roosevelt was clearly inclined toward those types of sentiments based on his policy actions.

The world had changed, General Patton was reprimanded by the future president General Eisenhower for slapping two soldiers who were having a nervous breakdown in Sicily which nearly had him fired—emotional polices that had been started by the Roosevelt administration. Ike to his credit punished Patton but did not fire him because the politics of that new age was understood. Ike knew they needed Patton to win the war in Europe even though it is now clear that Roosevelt only was committed to the war cosmetically. He felt sympathy for the Nazi and the Italian fascists and the constraints on victory that were placed on his generals like Patton, and Chennault in the Asian theater were deliberate. It is appalling to consider how many people died because of FDRs policy of protection of the Nazi regime. Remember, America only entered the war after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. Japan was being used to soften up China for the communists to move in after the wreckage of war prepared it for change.

Claire Chennault it is obvious in hind sight was never supposed to do so well at his job. The token P-40s that Roosevelt sent to him with American volunteers to stop the advance of Japan into China was only supposed to slow down the job so that the Communists in the north-east waiting for the outcome of the war to take its toll could make their move. It appears that all Chennault was to do in China was to slow down the progress and deplete the Japanese so that when the eventual communist invasion took place on recently conquered Chinese soil, that Moa Zedong would make fast action of conquest—which is what happened when the war was over and the Americans were pulled out of the region.

In the last chapter of The Way of the Fighter was a very upset Claire Chennault warning of what would happen if communism were allowed to rise up in China after all the hard work they had done to defend the nation from the Japanese. By then FDR was dead, but his polices had been firmly put in place just as Barack Obama’s destruction still continues even as Trump has spent the last year trying to undo them. Harry Truman was not such an aggressive type as President Trump—so the world that FDR put in motion during four terms as a United States president carried over to an easy communist victory in China once the Japanese surrendered and the war-torn country had no defense. The communists rolled to an easy victory after the war and everything that Chennault predicted in his last chapter of that great book came true. America ended up in two wars with communists, one in Vietnam and another in North Korea but they were only half fought cosmetic wars because the administrations of power in the Beltway wanted global communism. America was never supposed to win those wars, and nobody was going to let a rebellious general like Claire Chennault actually win in the traditional sense as he had in China with very little resources and a lot of out of the box thinking. It is sad to say that portions of the United States government—which had helped Mussolini and Hitler to power, were deliberately letting the spread of communism occur throughout Asia and they were willing to kill many thousands of people to make it happen.

The political left has been at open war with traditional America for nearly 200 years—and when I say traditional America I’m talking about the kind of people who formed this country from the 1770s to the Transcendentalist period just prior to the writing in Europe of The Communist Manifesto. Where transcendentalism was concerned about the purity and happiness of the human soul without the clutter of institutionalism, and Adam Smith’s great work The Wealth of Nations was exploding among economic theorists—tested in America for the first time—the intelligentsia movement was headed in the other direction, toward Kant and Marx. This clash of ideas exploded during the Teddy Roosevelt administrations and eventually gave rise to the Woodrow Wilson era of progressivism. These radical intellectuals thought they knew more than the rest of us and put to use their vile mechanisms of tyranny tied in knots through group think—and they didn’t care how many individuals they killed in the process so long as the greater good was achieved—to their view, global communism. FDR was of that mind and we see it in his New Deal which still corrupts us all to this very day. What I didn’t know until I read The Big Lie by Dinesh D’Souza was how closely Roosevelt, Hitler and Mussolini were to each other—and how they all attempted to use left-winged politics to essentially take over the world. In that regard I am certain that what socialism and fascism wasn’t doing in Europe Roosevelt intended the harsher communism for Asia—and he got it by working the Americans and the Japanese against each other to pave the way for the communists. It was all by design.

As we are going through a period of history where we are tearing down statues and terminating the careers of men who touch the boobies of women, we should consider ridding ourselves of the history of FDR and all his socialist policies to erase the memory of his massive scandals from history. I remember vividly how the former owner of the Cincinnati Reds, Marge Schott was driven from the public eye when she suggested a favorable historical perspective of Adolf Hitler. Yet we had a president in FDR who worked with those European dictators to change the world to socialism and communism and many people died as a result. So why don’t we apply the same logic to him? Why don’t we finally admit to ourselves that the political left hates America and wants to kill anyone who believes in those original American ideas of individualism over group think institutionalism? The evidence is abundant if only we had the courage as a nation to look at it. To confirm what I’ve said here only two sources need to be researched—The Big Lie and The Way of the Fighter. There are of course many more outlets, but those two would be a great place to start.

Rich Hoffman

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Blame Fat Asian Chicks: The terrible numbers for the ‘Star Wars’ future

As I was saying about the movie math of The Last Jedi before the Christmas holiday weekend—they are in trouble. And it doesn’t make me happy to say it, because something like this has massive cultural ramifications for the future—and its clear that people were front loaded on the film. They went to see it when it first came out. But as Luke faded away at the end of the film, so did the fan base. You can’t go kill off all the original characters and expect to keep this thing alive unless the new characters are every bit as charismatic—and they clearly aren’t. Kylo Ren is the most exciting character and he’s the bad guy—everyone else is just wall paste and that’s a real problem. The movie will make its money, but the problem is, will people still love this film in 2040—like they do the originals? No. Even in the year of 2050 people will still love the original films, but will be indifferent of the prequels and the sequels—and that is truly sad.

I made a decision not too long ago that I would support the Star Wars franchise mainly because of my grandchildren and children. After The Force Awakens I didn’t want to talk about Star Wars for an entire year, and my kids missed it. They like to bounce morality themes off me decorated with Star Wars plots and not having the ability to do that wore on their minds. So it is more destructive to say no to it than to accept what good does come from it. When the new Star Wars land opens in Disney World we’ll go to it, and I’m sure we’ll love it. But as far as enthusiasm for what comes next from the Lucasfilm group—the magic is clearly gone and that was an avoidable circumstance. It was a bad idea to assume that Star Wars stories could be created in group think instead of that classical way Lucas used which was just a piece of paper and a pencil—and one human mind.

I recently reread the book by Norman Vincent Peale The Power of Positive Thinking. I was provoked into this endeavor by watching recently The Founder, the story of Ray Kroc who started the McDonald’s franchise. When he was an up and coming traveling salesman, he listened to a book version of the Peale book to motivate him each day. The book was very popular in that late 50s early 60s period and I can imagine George Lucas having access to it, because a lot of what is in that book are some of the best lines of dialogue from the Star Wars movie The Empire Strikes Back. I do know something about George Lucas as he was on the board of The Joseph Campbell Foundation when I was a member—and I’m sure that Peale played a part of influence on the young George Lucas. He may not admit to it today as all his liberal friends would likely berate him for it, but The Power of Positive Thinking is every bit as strong in the core of American value as it was when it was written. That kind of element is what’s missing from these new Star Wars movies—Luke being the pessimist, the lack of an eternally optimistic Han Solo character who doesn’t get pushed around by the girls in the movies. Star Wars was and always will be a throwback film to the kind of America that was the 1940s through the 1950s—just as Disney World reflects that same optimism from its founder in its amusement parks. People aren’t going to pay good money and buy lots of merchandise for something that makes them depressed and all these new Star Wars films have a premise set in sacrifice, not in proactive action.

I had a reading marathon over the Christmas break, I read three books in three days and I utilized the entire clock to do so—and I loved it. The Power of Positive Thinking was an easy read for me, but it took some time, around 10 hours, and I had it timed to the arrival of my next book, The 15:17 to Paris, which is about the terrorist attack that was stopped by three heroes riding a train from Amsterdam to Paris when an ISIS sympathizer launched an attack with 500 people on board. As I was finishing Peale’s book at 1:57 PM on December 26th, 2017 a notification came up on my computer saying that The 15:17 to Paris had arrived at my house. So I closed the Peale book just as the dogs were barking and noticed a mail truck stuffing the book into my mailbox as the snow was falling. I walked out in my bare feet to retrieve the book as snow blew across our driveway. I grabbed the book and went back to my chair and opened it up—only about five minutes transpired, and I started reading that book and within 6 pages the mother of Spencer Stone was praying for her child to be safe in France ahead of the terrorist attack. I knew as I read that under Clint Eastwood’s direction that this movie was going to be a hit, because America is still that hopeful and faithful nation. Disney has decided to go against that traditional message and it is hurting them—unnecessarily. After all, wasn’t that the whole point of the movie Dumbo—believing in yourself even when your symbols have been striped away?

The original Star Wars movies were very much about hope, and how positive thinking could overcome anything—no matter the odds. These new films are very progressive and clearly about sacrifice. Who wants to go to the movies to hear a fat Asian girl rattle on about animal rights? If Disney wants to show that average people can be heroes too, there are other ways to do that, but Star Wars is not about those kinds of people. The characters of Star Wars are about the exceptional, not the bland. I bet there will be lots of Rose Star Wars figures on clearance this summer at Target. Who will want that one for their collection? At the end of The Last Jedi the new girl power had pretty much destroyed their resistance showing themselves to be completely incompetent. It’s one thing to be outmatched as the Rebellion always was, but this Resistance is an official branch of the governing power. How could the female generals screw it up so bad? Those are the kinds of questions that people left the theater thinking. They certainly weren’t passionate enough about the film to go see it a second time, or a third—which is what it needed.

This is all important because it says much more about our culture overall. Star Wars is a big part of that culture and now we can see that the magic that made the originals good, just isn’t there in the modern sense and that can be traced back to our divided country politically and on matters of religion. Hollywood is a depressed culture full of losers, drug addicts, promiscuous cape riders, cheats, low-life’s and hopeless degenerates. I noticed that my copy of The 15:17 to Paris shipped from a book store in Van Nuys, California since it was out of print awaiting the updated version that is set to come out with the release of the Eastwood movie in early February. But I didn’t want to wait so I found a new copy of the book in that little town which is a suburb of Los Angeles essentially—just a few miles down the road from where Star Wars was originally partially filmed, where Industrial Light and Magic started as a special effects company for the Star Wars movies. As I watched my package move across the country I thought about how different California was from when Star Wars was first made. The hints of progressivism were already there, but there were enough people not yet corrupted that it wasn’t noticeable unless you really picked up the curtain. Now, it’s a very different place and the people who have helped make it so progressive are now the people making Star Wars movies, and they don’t get it. They don’t understand what made Star Wars great in the first place and they don’t understand American audiences—at all. And that is a damn shame. Nothing against fat Asian chicks—there is a place for them in the world—but forcing them into a plot just to do it says that the filmmakers have no idea what they are doing. Which is directly reflected by the box office numbers.

Rich Hoffman

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Why Lean Manufacturing is Dead: The Trump tax cuts change everything

Before moving on to more positive topics there need to be some additional information as to why Lean manufacturing is dead, and why it is more cult than fact.  Every company I’ve been associated with for the last twenty years has bought into the nonsense James Womack articulated in The Machine that Changed the World—which is an incredibly negative book about western manufacturing techniques.  While there is a lot to Lean manufacturing that is very worthwhile and should be looked at as the next generation of improved thought over mass production roots imitated in America—it certainly isn’t a silver bullet in solving everything as it was sold to American management.  It really comes down to a battle between two cultures where the obvious favoritism goes toward the Japanese market.

Nearly every fifth page of The Machine that Changed the World Womack and his pals criticize as inferior Western methods with an obvious academic lens of hatred.  The real purpose for the book wasn’t to make American business more profitable on an individual bases—but to make them more global—as the authors played their part in the grand scheme of wealth redistribution that was so common at the time. And for their part, they were very successful, large companies like Boeing, GE, Ford and so many others looked at their competition, the Japanese, and sought to beat them—but honestly it was too late.  I knew that when I worked at Cincinnati Milacron as one of their crack staff of Lean advisors.  They took me to their South Lebanon facility late in 1999 to study these methods by Womack and the gang so to save them from closure.  But before I had a chance to read all the materials they had dumped in my lap, the Oakley plant had almost completely closed down and they refocused their business to just delivery of CNC units as opposed to actually building machining centers. The South Lebanon facility closed in the early 2000s just a few years later. When our crack team of Lean manufacturing surgeons were gathered to save Milacron it was already too late—like the Titanic had already hit the iceberg.  Only it hadn’t sunk yet but those of us smart enough to look at the damage below decks knew it was going down.  A wound like that couldn’t be repaired at sea just as the culture at Milacron couldn’t be fixed by reading a few books too late in the process.

I currently work with a very smart engineer from Wichita, Kansas who could nearly tell the same story of the Boeing plant that closed down there.  While they were sinking they made him a Six Sigma Black Belt hoping to save their own fate from such a tragic end, but it didn’t work.  The employees just couldn’t make the change, they weren’t Japanese—the cultures were just too radically different.  And to Womack’s credit he is correct about most of his observations regarding Western approaches—we all saw what happened to General Motors.  The writing was on the wall way back in 1990 when The Machine that Changed the World was first published.  One of my daughters was born that year and it shocks me that she isn’t yet thirty years old, yet this Lean manufacturing stuff has been sold to the manufacturing world as some voodoo remedy that could stop all these plant closures when in reality it was just one culture dominating another.  I watched before my eyes the economy of southern Ohio cities like Norwood and Hamilton, Ohio evaporate.  The shopping mall I visited most as a child, the Middletown Mall turned into a ghost town within a few years and nearly every major industry died except for AK Steel which still operated as a traditional mass producer with heavily leveraged unionized labor holding it back from being better than it was.  Middletown, Ohio died and so did the people who lived within it. To the west all Trenton had going for it was the Miller Brewery plant which made the safe product of beer.  The tradeoff was again high cost employees protected by a union.  Many companies adopted Lean manufacturing to help get their labor unions under control but the bottom line was that American workers expected too much money for their productive output while Japanese based employees were willing to work for less in exchange for job security for a lifetime.

When you visit a Japanese plant you find that everyone dresses the same, in most cases.  When Westerners visit in their suits and ties they are given hats to wear to show all the other employees that these visitors are equal to the people on the shop floor.  They refer to their upper management as seniors because literally they are the people who have been at the company the longest.  The floor workers in Japan know that if they stay with the company, they will move up the latter so they are content with this reality.  While this solves problems that unions typically are concerned with, the security and income trajectory of their workforce makes a stable investment understandable, while in the West literally labor costs can fluctuate all over the place depending on the type of people who are running those organizations at any given time.  It is possible in America for instance for a sharp tack in the box to become a high level manager in their mid thirties if they worked hard and climbed the ladder at a fortunate company—while this would be very unlikely in Japan.  There, due to Lean manufacturing, that employee would have started on the shop floor as an assembler and might still be working their way into a management job due to their years of service and experience garnered.  This is the primary reason American companies have failed in their Lean offerings—they go through the motions, but they aren’t willing to go all the way and become like the Japanese.  There is more to Lean manufacturing than just a bunch of charts and Japanese words for things—it’s a philosophical approach to manufacturing that is part of the workplace culture.

Obviously in The Machine that Changed the World Womach and his buddies Jones and Roos were a bunch of statistical academics who bought into this global economy garbage and they thought the Japanese were going to dominate that push—which isn’t what happened.  While the Asian work ethic is something that is to be admired compared to the beaten down lethargicism that we find in the West these days—even the Japanese had their problems with just in time delivery when they became the global leaders at the front of the train.  They’ve had their own troubles leading from the top so as the smoke cleared it was obvious that the biggest difference between East and Western practices in manufacturing was cultural and that assumption was that if America wanted to play ball, they needed to become like the rest of the world.  Well, that too is a shifting dynamic that will change as early as 2018.

To act as a companion to The Machine that Changed the World coming straight out of academic circles and into politics was the notion of wealth redistribution.  America raised its corporate tax rate to up over 30% which pushed many American companies into foreign markets.  To the lesser educated minds the work of Womach appear to be genius.  We were led to believe that these companies were leaving because America was so inefficient when in reality it was really due to high taxes.  Politicians were selling globalism to Americans while they skimmed off excess for the IRS to fund all their progressive causes in the process of destroying American manufacturing.  President Trump knew all too well what was going on and before the close of the year in 2017 had the tax rates changed for corporations down to 21% and now we will see the truth that was there all along.  Jobs were mostly inventions of America and the high costs associated with them were due to American labor being higher than in places around the rest of the world.  But the reason for their leaving the United States was artificial due to high taxation.  Where Womach was pushing for a new global economy lead by the Japanese Lean manufacturing system that kept prices down and expectations for employee advancement low—and manageable—everything changed in December of 2017 when Trump signed the tax reform package which lowered corporate rates.

The nationalism Womach criticized so heavily in The Machine that Changed the World is now the economical method of our time.  With the tax rates lowered we find that Lean manufacturing was really just a scam designed to move wealth from one place to another using common sense improvements of traditional mass production utilizing a very competitive workforce by people who think differently than Americans.  Part of the American lifestyle is the assumption that everyone can have a piece of the dream, a house, a yard—a few cars and money in the bank where in other places they hope to have a bed to sleep in and a job to go to—because the rest of their lives aren’t very good.  There is a lifestyle expectation in America that is part of the consideration factor for which Womach completely ignores.  Even the Japanese who transplant to America formulate their lives around it so new methods of manufacturing improvement are due to be revolutionized to meet these market demands.  And Lean isn’t it.

For so many years we’ve all been told that the Decline in the West is inevitable and that it was they who had to change—but nothing could be further from the truth.  The decline of the west was manipulated by people like Womach to sell globalism to everyone as capitalism was the hidden driver of invention within The United States that made the jobs and created the markets to begin with—a little fact ignored by nearly everyone in every sector of academia—from anthropologists to the most astute economists.  America made the necessity for jobs and the markets for income flow—and the spillover effect is why they even have cell phones in places like Vietnam.  Without America nobody would have anything and that is the key to the next generation of manufacturing thinking.  It’s not to elsewhere that the keys reside—it is right in the homeland of America that we must look—and it is there where the great next movements of manufacturing will emerge.

Rich Hoffman

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Why Trump Should Never Stop Using Twitter: If we really want to fix the problems, we have to talk about them

I keep hearing this ridiculous notion that President Trump should stop Tweeting.  Everyone says it, even his supporters—yet they miss that Twitter is the key, and the essence of the American President.  Without it, he would have never been elected to begin with, and because of it, the Deep State is being exposed in ways that no court system would even dare.  Even with the mountains of evidence witnessed about FBI corruption, Jeff Sessions is reluctant to do anything that might draw fire from the establishment and he’s a handpicked Trump guy.  Imagine how bad things really were when Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch were in those activist seats at the head of the Department of Justice. An honest, talkative president is exactly what this country needed, and a platform to speak from because the rest of the institutional elements of our modern society from the press down to the most ardent government employee function in ways that prevent analysis of their purposeless existence.

The President should never stop Tweeting!  The reason so many people are upset about it, and about the times of day that Trump does it is that it shows the establishment that they do not have control of this president—and control is what they were used to.  I remember specifically about George W. Bush, when he was first in office he stated that he hoped to bring the Norman Rockwell paintings that reflected American life back to the forefront of consideration.  Yet within a few months of getting into office he became just another mouthpiece of mundane representation and drifted quickly into the background.  The heads of each department of our government quickly took over and the media filtered the results to us leaving the importance of the presidential role in our country to be largely ceremonial—such as giving pardon to the Turkey during times of Thanksgiving and occasionally signing a bill once congress presented one.  It didn’t matter if the president was a Republican or a Democrat; they were all molded by the establishment into kind of the same neutered presence.  They were to do what they were told and the media would tell the story.  In that way the press was given the impression that they were running things because elected officials accepted that they had to appease the journalists if they wanted to show a track record of success.

Trump as a negotiator is clearly using his skills to push and pull positions which are unique in any elected office.  Trump is a salesman first and the only way he can really discover the position of the opposition is to put out probing ideas and to see how people react to it.  I knew what I was voting for when I cast my ballot for Trump.  I expect him to be malleable on specifics, but resolute on core philosophy and when it comes to him—the thing he cares about most is winning his engagements.  Business people often engage in contentious debate but then settle things over a game of golf or a nice dinner.  That is not how politicians do things—they often present a contentious front to satisfy their donor base, but like big time wrestlers they are all talk and now shows regarding philosophy.  They have no expectation of victory, only to show through the media a track record that keeps them in office with each new election.  They are like assembly line workers who never quite accomplish a task who are leveraging for overtime by saying that if I had just one more hour, they could complete the task.  Yet they never quite get there so they keep asking for more and more and more, then blame the system for why they can never achieve their objective.  Voters are typically too busy to pay close attention to the details and that’s how we end up with the mess we see now—a corrupt government used to doing nothing, running up debt, and ruining the lives of us all with their inside the Beltway priorities.

Most politicians seek to build off a perceived victory but Trump knows that the name of the game is stagnation, so when he does accomplish something big—like enacting deregulation, or rolling back Net Neutrality—or even recommitting America back to the space race—he’ll drop a Tweet picking a fight with someone so that the resources of the “system” fixate on his subject which diverts legislative terrorists from sending in suicide squads to destroy his agenda items—and it works well.  Trump has managed to do a remarkable number of things in his first year and he protects them by keeping antagonists talking about the “small stuff.”  It would be nice if we lived in a world where achievement was respected, and even sought after—but we’re not.  Too many people have a stake in stagnation—it’s actually their livelihood so reform is not in their thoughts.

The sum of all this is of course is that change is happening because for the first time I think in our nation’s history we are talking about things.  Without Trump’s Tweets, the FBI would not be exposed as they are now.  That’s why Chuck Schumer is so upset with Trump’s “Tweets.”  Remember in the beginning of the Trump presidency when Chuck Schumer threatened that the newcomer to politics mind his mouth otherwise the American intelligence agencies would take notice?  That was a threat, and one that has been used on many presidents in the past and other civilians—because don’t forget a president is not a king—they are simply elected civilians who are put in charge of one branch of government—and given the keys to the military so to appease the public with the fantasy that they are the ones in control of that awesome power. In reality the Deep State works for the politicians and the donors and everyone was getting their marching orders from K-Street behind the glitzy prostitutes who show up after the sun goes down.  All the little know-nothing attorneys who become lobbyists and sit in the bars along that stretch of road just outside the reach of the White House have always thought that they were contributing little unelected tid-bits to the realities of our Republic, but not anymore.  Now there is a guy from the civilian sector willing to call them out on Twitter and that scares them literally.

The Deep State assumed that they’d play their game and that Trump would have been destroyed by last summer—because for most people that’s what would have happened.  But when Trump defended himself and fought back—the way anybody should have—the methods which have controlled so many presidents of the past for the entire history of our nation, stopped working. And the house of cards for which they had built their temples of governmental worship fell down quickly as if a child had built the whole thing in a play room before their mother pressed them to dinner.  The entire institution for which our nation was built on the backs of corruption and malice was exposed as just a flimsy plaything for the old aristocrats of Europe who came to America to keep us all tied to the motherland of history.  However, that was never Trump’s mission. His task was to win, not only the seat in the White House, but to win the whole game and give it back to the American people, which is exactly what he’s doing.  And if it wasn’t for Twitter, nothing would be happening.  Trump should never quit using Twitter—and saying the things he says.  We can’t allow the establishment to hide malice behind politeness and rules of engagement that they control.  If we really want to fix the problems of our nation we have to attack them where they truly reside and for Trump—Twitter has been the means of delivery.  The goal of an American president should never be to get along with the media, congress, the FBI, K-Street or even the nations of the world.  The only goal should be to keep America a great nation the best way they can during their time in office.  A lot of them step into the White House with each new election and assume that they are going to change the world for the better—but they soon learn what limited powers they really have.  Within a few months of office they become just placeholders for history and they finish their terms in that role.  Trump is the first president perhaps in the history of the world who is changing that notion on behalf of the people who elected him.  And Twitter is the key to his success in this day and time of 2018.  In the future it will probably be something else but for now, Twitter is the means of restoring America to the greatness that was always there—which likely really pisses off the people who run Twitter because they are hardly a bastion of conservatism.

Rich Hoffman

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The Biggest Tax Cut in History: It looks like we’ll have a nice, “green” Christmas–and we deserve it!

I am excessively proud of everyone who stayed late on Friday night and passed the largest tax cuts in American history sending the bill into reconciliation next week.  That keeps the tax cuts on course for President Trump to sign the legislation into law likely on Christmas Eve in quite dramatic fashion.  In this day and age something like this is excessively rare, and not to take anything away from those in the Senate who did and would always support this president, but for those who have been actively working against him, this was a significant thing for them to do at a critical time. The forces against this tax cut were monumental—as all day long during the debate period news against Trump was released attempting to derail the entire process—including the plea deal with General Flynn.  But the Flynn case is going nowhere; of course he was directed to talk to Russians—and many other countries AFTER winning the election—not before.  That would have been his job—so that is the end of that story.  Yet the way the Senate stayed on the road and avoided distractions to do something that essentially is one of the biggest days in American history is to be commended.

One thing that was exposed during this whole ordeal was just how ignorant many people these days are about the basic nature of economics.  I often point around the world to show how poorly places we typically think of as great countries struggle in comparison to the United States.  How much time have I spent on the radio, television, and writing literally hundreds of articles on the topic of economics trying to teach people why they should support something like what happened on December 2, 2017 at 2 am in the morning?  If I added it all up it would come out to years of my life dedicated to the cause of just educating people on basic economic principles.  Yet so many people are taught incorrectly about how money works and what the value of capitalism is, that they just don’t understand why this tax cut was so significant.

It was stunning leading up to the big vote that the Dow Jones stayed over 24,000.  That is trillions more added to the United States economy in just the few weeks that we thought it was a miracle to see the record high of 23,000.  How high can this thing go?  30,000, is that even possible?  I think it is. Once you add deregulation with reduced corporate rates we are talking about a recipe for success unlike anything that has been seen in America—or anywhere—in human history.  If Trump retired today from the White House he would go down in history as the greatest of all our presidents—essentially because of his work at putting our economy back on track.  With these tax cuts and the tremendous amount of money pouring into the stock market coming essentially from investors who have been sitting on their money for years, I predict we will see economic growth in the United States of over 6%.  I actually think it will be much higher than that, but declaring such a thing at this point is pretty astronomical—so for credibility reasons, I’ll have to stick to the parameters of history. How do you pay down the horrendous national debt that we’ve had that is up to over $20 trillion dollars—you have 6-10% growth for a few years and the flow of money back into the United States takes care of all that and touches literally the lives of every single person.

I remember what it was like the last time America experienced that type of economic growth.  I was a young guy just entering the world of adulthood and I was making a lot of money.  I was making more than my dad was after years at the top of management at the company he worked at for decades, and I was doing it right out of high school.  For a person like me willing to work, there were boundless opportunities.  I was doing so well I was looking for a condo separate from my primary residence just as a bachelor pad so I didn’t have a bunch of girls fighting each other at my front door.  That all changed of course when I found the perfect girl for me and we married on the backs of that very strong Reagan economy.  The world seemed like it had endless possibilities to us and I always felt I could support my family by working whatever jobs I needed to so everyone had what they needed.  Then the 90s came with the global tampering of George Bush, then with Bill Clinton—and America entered a dark period of decline due to high taxes and over regulation.

By the time Obama was in the White House the global plot for America was obvious.  The capitalism of our great nation was fully under attack and a major wealth redistribution scheme was well underway, just as Ross Perot had warned during the 1992 election.  Yet it was even worse than Perot had said.  As a last-ditch reaction, the Tea Party movement emerged and over the next five to six years a major shift in philosophy toward economic and moral matters exploded on the scene which resulted eventually in the election of Donald J. Trump—the mastermind behind the popular television show, The Apprentice, and now the rest is literally history.

Trump is the whole package; he made himself into a celebrity combining entertainment with excessive fiscal knowledge making his billions the hard way.  That has poised him for just these kinds of battles and now in a spectacular fashion he was able to pull people together with masterful negotiating skills and open up our economy on the eve of Christmas 2017.  It was the Christmas of 2010 that the Obamanites in congress unleashed their Obamacare bill which took over a fifth of our economy.  But late last night, and likely to survive the reconciliation process is the heart of Obamacare, the individual mandate.  Without that individual mandate the socialization of our health care industry has no teeth, and this puts competitive dollars back at work to bring all costs down for the first time over that nearly decade long process.  It was one of the saddest Christmases that I can remember reading the newspapers on Christmas morning 2010 as congress took advantage of everyone’s Holiday distractions to essentially inject socialism into our American economy in a purposely crippling way.  At Christmas dinner that year my family contemplated the unthinkable—violence to take back our government—or a miracle of a politician in the White House.

With this kind of positive news 2018 will be a noticeably different year.  When it comes to economies, it’s your industry that makes GDP.  You have to have jobs in order for wages to increase.  And you can’t create jobs that pay well off the backs of tax payers, the way it has been for some time now.  Corporations, as much as socialists like to yak about Wall Street and faceless boards of directors and the profits generated—are what give individuals wealth.  Giving individuals a few hundred bucks in tax cuts won’t do much for your economy, but giving job creators tax cuts unleashes a tremendous amount of potential, and for Trump and the Republicans to stay focused on that says a lot about their fiscal understandings.  It is too early to know if we will all have a white Christmas—but one thing we can all be sure about assuming that congress continues on their path of approval, is that this year we’ll certainly have a “green” Christmas—and it will go down in history as one of the most significant we’ve ever had, or ever will.  This tax decrease is a historic game changer!

Rich Hoffman
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The Pervert Matt Lauer: What happens when good guys are there to keep the bad guys in check

This is why it was so laughable that anybody on the political left thought they could even hang Donald Trump with that Access Hollywood tape, because as we are now learning, especially with the recent firing of Matt Lauer, most men—especially liberal men—use their power over women to exploit them for sexual pleasure. Trump of course did the right thing and declared that what he was engaged in was locker room talk, because that’s all it was. Trump has had hundreds if not thousands of women who have worked for him and there wasn’t anything credible that has ever come out about his behavior with them. And if he was engaged in pussy talk with another guy it was in the eyes of most sane people, no big deal. We all know what goes on between men and women. But the most vocal voices who sought to condemn Trump for that silly little tape we now know were engaged in much, much worst. Just what we are learning about the behavior of Matt Lauer is downright shocking. He’s not talking about just grabbing the pussy of women who throw themselves at powerful men looking for a competitive advantage over other women as they make their own climbs for power—like Trump was discussing—Lauer’s just downright creepy. NBC sat silent knowing full well what they were dealing with as they hypocritically went after President Trump. I never watch NBC, but with exchanges like this one below with Anne Hathaway and the hot mic utterances with Katie Couric—this guy should have been fired a long time ago.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/tv/news/awkward-matt-lauer-tv-moments-resurface-in-wake-of-firing/ar-BBFWtiB?li=BBmkt5R&ocid=spartandhp

What I remember most about Katie Couric is when she did that anti-gun town hall with a bunch of 2nd Amendment advocates and chopped up the editing trying to make them look stupid. She is a major progressive but taken in the context of her relationship with Matt Lauer over the years it’s no wonder she turned toward liberalism looking for help—or women’s empowerment as a hope that she could live in a world where she didn’t have to get pinched on the ass a lot just to have a job. Here’s a news flash for everyone, all men are not like these idiots. Yet the major networks and the entire entertainment industry has pushed out good guys and kept losers like Matt Lauer around to abuse women in every way imaginable for a reason. That’s why good guys have been pushed out of those industries so that creeps like Lauer could run the herds.
Even as the entire news industry celebrated when Bill O’Reilly was fired from Fox News, and Roger Ailes was terminated just before his death—everyone apparently knew about people like Matt Lauer and Charlie Rose who were icons of the news media and how they sexually harassed not just a few women, but virtually everyone. I have serious doubts that Bill O’Reilly’s accusers were authentic, but even if they were, the level of sexual misconduct that Matt Lauer showed is incredible, for a guy who was at the top of his game in the news industry. His behavior is beyond reckless and in order to sustain that behavior he would need a lot of help. Obviously, you could see by Anne Hathaway’s reaction that she felt she had to endure the incident. She did after all have an obligation to promote her film—and she knew that everyone behind the cameras were tag assing wherever they could get away with it, and she was constantly hit on by men in the industry—so if she wanted to continue working, she had to put up with it. My long-term readers here know that I’ve said for many years that a woman doesn’t get an Academy Award in Hollywood until she takes off her cloths and shows the goods. Producers then pass around the tape and they enjoy their power over these young girls. When the women get up in years a bit and can then leverage their success, actresses like Anne Hathaway feel they can push back a bit which she did in that interview, very well. She handled the situation as best she could, but she also knew not to slap back too hard at Matt if she wanted to continue to work in movies. Because some producer like Harvey Weinstein would never hire her if she became known as a pain in the ass.
I hate to see that women have had to endure these types of situations. Just because the industry has stacked liberal men like Lauer in positions of power within entertainment, it does not mean that all men are that way. I know a lot of men who handle themselves and power very professionally, and that’s how it should be. But these liberals have painted themselves into this corner all on their own. They created an impossible standard and tried to stick it to people like Trump and Bill O’Reilly. Yet when that standard came back at them—they were far guiltier than anybody they were accusing.

There is a line from the movie, The Lost World where Vince Vaughn’s character says to Jeff Goldblum something to the effect that he gets involved in liberal causes because the chicks are hot. Well, there is some truth to that, there are a lot of men who identify with women’s issues so that they can get a sympathetic back door to the emotions of women, so they can sleep with them—or at least play with them a little. They pretend to be champions for women’s rights and to vote for Obama, or Hillary because they want access to beautiful women. Most women are much more liberal than men, they empathize with others in ways men don’t, and if men want access to those women they tell them what they want to hear so they can grab their asses without getting slapped—and the women forgive them because they tend to be of that nature. Women do forgive because they have empathy which often drives them toward compassion. Men like Matt Lauer and Charlie Rose were obviously taking advantage of that nature. The women who obviously bonded with the creepy men because they either felt sorry for them or had just rationalized their relationship with them out of necessity—the way a lot of women do who are in bad marriages—they turned to liberalism even further seeking protections from the behavior. And what we are seeing right now is the vicious cycle consuming itself.

Trump was correct to blow off the attempt to paint him as some kind of diabolical menace to women—like Matt Lauer and many others did with that Access Hollywood tape. When Trump refused to accept guilt, he put the standard back on his accusers who were up to much worse. Trump was after all a celebrity and lots of women sought to use their assets to gain access, and that can be very tempting until you get used to it. Trump at that time in his life was getting used to it. Trump may have let women near him when he wanted them, but that’s not the same as using his power to make them do things they didn’t want to do, like Matt Lauer was doing. There is a big difference. And it is good to see justice finally coming their way. They certainly deserve everything they have coming.

Rich Hoffman
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The Great Carl Rullmann and Melania Trump’s Wondrous Christmas Trees: Stumps of life that give meaning to existence

As I was admiring the magnificent Christmas decorations at the White House by the gifted fashion eye of Melania Trump I received the notification from his widow that one of my long-time friend and readers Carl Rullmann had died on Monday November 20th. She went on to say that even in his final days when he could no longer read himself, she would read my articles to him. She elaborated that Carl looked forward to everything I had to say about everything which was a nice way to put it. Because I do literally write about everything, and often deeply, which is my inclination. I first met Carl over eight years ago when I was at a meeting and he rushed over to tell me how much he enjoyed my segments on 700 WLW radio and we have been friends ever since. He often would send me private emails wanting to talk more explicitly about things I had written that he took issue with, as a deeply religious man. I enjoyed the banter and understood what role some of that interaction played in his life as he suffered through several illnesses over the last couple of years culminating in his event on the 20th. I felt sorry for his wife Rita immediately as it had to have taken a lot of personal courage for her to contact me in the way she did just seven days after. But I view death differently than most people and I found the beauty of Carl’s life to be a similar reflection as what Melania Trump was doing at the White House, and instead of feeling sorrow for a lost friend, I found joy.

This year was the first my wife and I bought a real tree for Christmas. You have to understand, my wife and I are people who keep our emotions close in check all the time and we have enjoyed over the decades the knowledge that after New Year’s celebrations are complete and we head into those cold January days with nothing much to look forward to until spring arrives, that our Christmas tree would go into a box in our basement to be resurrected the next year. She came from a wealthy family and that’s how they did things, mainly for the convenience of it. So when we were married way back in 1988 we did much the same thing, getting artificial trees that were easy to put up and take down without a lot of emotional pomp and circumstance. What I didn’t know, that really didn’t emerge until our children were fully grown and we started having lots of grandchildren to deal with, was that deep down inside she always wanted to have a live tree for Christmas.

I grew up with a live tree, each year my family had bought one going through the ritual of picking one out and then putting it up. The whole experience climaxed on Christmas Day when the whole mythology came alive to a nice end. It was always sad to take the tree down, but always extraordinarily exciting to put them up. I never remember a Christmas from my childhood that wasn’t an exciting period of my life—and the live Christmas tree was always the centerpiece. It always seemed odd to me that after Christmas my dad would take the tree out to our burn pile and we’d burn it sometime around late January and February. I’d look at it dormant on its side out in the cold covered in snow with the branches all brown and dry and wonder if it was the same magnificent thing that had been in our living room bringing so much joy.

My wife and I mutually didn’t want the emotional roller coaster of a live tree during our marriage. It gave us counsel to know that the centerpiece of our Holiday joy was always in our basement—yet the experience never seemed quite authentic. So it was much to my surprise when we were out shopping for early Christmas items when she declared, “let’s get a live tree this year.” Well, it didn’t take much for me to agree to it. We are after all empty nesters. Our kids come over for Christmas and it’s always nice, but they have their own lives these days and we are often only in it when they can find the time and will to get together. Our Christmas mornings now are very lonely and for us that is devastating, because we both always loved to have children in the house to bring mornings like Christmas to life in such grand ways. Now there are grandchildren, but we get about a half hour and it’s nowhere near the same. So buying a live tree for Christmas with all the emotion that can be involved for that Holiday I thought was a bold move for her.

I’ve watched the various presidents over the years in how they decorated the White House for Christmas because it says a lot about who they are. Back with the Clintons in the 90s there were utterances that they hung condoms on their Christmas tree because as progressives, they were actively pushing politically to replace Christianity as a guiding light for the masses. The Bush White House was more traditional and a welcome sign after the debacle that was the Clintons but that particular White House was too careful and sensitive to the progressive movement seeking to accommodate them more than traditionalists like me would have liked. Then there was the Happy Holidays of the Obama era—which was not as anti-Christian as the Clintons, but certainly wasn’t what we would call “traditional” in America. They sort of went through the motions and everyone could tell. But it wasn’t until Melania was able to design the decorating in the White House that we could see for the first time how magnificent the Executive Branch could be in leading the charge to restore Christmas to its proper place in American culture. Melania’s use of live trees and lighting was simply phenomenal, and it actually made me proud that my wife and I had decided to do a live tree this year as our personal tree has had the same kind of effect on our personal household. Because it was my wife’s first live tree she has put a lot of extra love in it knowing that the life of the tree deserved the extra attention. As she put it the whole reason the tree was raised and cut down was to serve this one purpose for just one little month of our lifetimes. Melania on the grand scale did much the same and the combined result to me was spectacular and filled me with pride and patriotism.

Of course it will be sad to take down our tree this year. And it will be sad to take down all the great trees in the White House. But the joy they provide for that very short time I think is a proper metaphor for all our lives. We are talking about the four seasons of course, Winter, Spring, Summer and Fall, or conception, birth, life and death metaphorically for us all. These Christmas trees represent life in the dead of winter when life ends and renews on the first day of the New Year. It’s a lifecycle and during Christmas in addition to celebrating the birth of Jesus Christ, we have constructed our holidays to serve a more appropriate and modern-day relevancy to our own existence, and Christmas trees are at the center of that mythology. They are a symbol and celebration of life in the time of death—winter. And in the case of my friend Carl Rullmann who lived a great life and was eager to learn something new right up until the end, he like our Christmas trees are wonderful to look at and appreciate. For the radiance of life that flowed through them does end and the body of the lifeform does diminish and fall away. In the case of Christmas trees we toss them out after the Holiday season for disposal, just like the dead of our human species. But it’s the celebration of their life in the times of Christmas all lit up and displayed with honor that is the point of living. Carl was one of those people and during life his lights and ornaments representing his experiences will carry on in our memories. Yes the body does die but all our lives are better because of our experiences with each other. And that is what I will always think of for now on when I see a live Christmas tree. They are beautiful things!

Safe travels Carl Rullmann on the next adventures of existence. Because like the Christmas trees we are all cut off at the stem and drinking water out of a little pot that keeps us alive just long enough. It is when we transcend that limit and drink from the waters of eternal life that our real adventure begins. And that is a beautiful thing as wall, in many ways more beautiful than life itself.

Rich Hoffman

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William Bradford’s ‘Of Plymouth Plantation’: How the pilgrims invented capitalism to have the first Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving is for me one of the best days of the year, I like it more than I do Christmas because it gets to the heart of things without all the pressure of gift giving.  It is an American holiday like none other in the world and I simply love it.  My feelings about it have been compounded since I was able to stand in the jail cell at the West Gate in Canterbury, England where Robert Cushman was kept due to the crossfire of politics from the Church of England that his puritans were involved in.  It was in that spot where Cushman had decided he and his followers wanted to be free of the constant struggles between the Church and the king to pursue something different, a new life in the recently discovered continent far off to the west across the great ocean to live as they saw fit.  If not for that moment America may never have come to be because the journey they were about to undertake as puritans established a philosophy that took another 100 years to flush out, but eventually became America.  If not for the actions of Robert Cushman in commissioning the Mayflower for that purpose, the settlement of America by the kings of the world would have simply duplicated the failures of Europe.  But Cushman and his Pilgrims did not have the clear lens of history to guide their philosophic advances—all they had was the collectivism typical of religious life and the great work by Plato in his book, the Republic to start with and it is there that our story begins as Americans.  It’s really quite enchanting.

https://fee.org/articles/how-communism-almost-ruined-the-first-thanksgiving/

It wasn’t called communism yet, but the Pilgrim were essentially intent to apply the methods of the kind of collectivism articulated by Plato’s Republic in this New World utopian colony.  Karl Marx wouldn’t call it communism for another two centuries but the plan from Cushman and his crew as chronicled by Governor William Bradford was to essentially operate free of private property and to share the collective wealth of everything produced by the colony.  As fantastic as that might sound to the sentiments of emotion, the reality was quite another thing. The Indians which the pilgrims encountered were of the same type of hive mind approach as the collectivism from their original cultures which were from the Far East reflected the efforts of the early colonists.  But the Indians were not industrialized, they did not know of the markets in Canterbury or the great cathedral there—or anything about the king.  They didn’t build houses like these European settlers.  They had become refugees after the great treasure ships from Zheng He dropped them off all over the world on behalf of emperor Zhu Di.  Some of the Chinese adventurers bred with the great cultures of the Aztec in Mexico, some with the descendents of the Bering Strait migration, some with the Vikings who had been coming for hundreds of years as well.  All these cultures were interacting with what was left of the great culture of giants which had come out of the Middle East thousands of years earlier and all these societies had failed, so there was nothing to indicate that these pilgrims would fare any better.

The great insult that was taught to all of us in our public education experiences was to hide these communist beginnings and to make it sound as though the Indians rescued the colony by teaching them how to farm—as if Cushman and his followers were too stupid to figure out how to care for themselves after they had shown the great ambition to even charter the journey to begin with.  Quite the opposite, the pilgrims were quite smart and hardy.  Even though many of them died within a few years of their journey they were able to think and apply what they learned to the world around them with innovation.  The Indians were watching, they were a culture of nomads who had long ago given up on private property ownership and the result was that they didn’t build houses and conduct all the fancy mathematics which had been common to the Mound Builders of the Midwest—they were content to dedicate their lives to the new goddess of earth, so they had little to do with Thanksgiving except to attend dinner with the pilgrims after the survivors of the new colony had figured out the puzzle which had been hampering the world up to that point.

As William Bradford chronicled in his Of Plymouth Plantation it took a few years but through necessity the pilgrims rejected the concept of communism as Plato had envisioned it and evolved into a free market system.  They were able to do this because they had no institutions to confine them to a set philosophy.  They were free of the ominous pressure of the church and the kings always fighting them for power over the people, the pilgrims were able to create the first free market system of capitalism the world had ever seen.  It was the combination of the industrious nature of the Europeans whom had come from a background of accomplishment—they knew what was possible so they had a foundation of intellect to begin with.  But what made the pilgrim capitalism possible was that they had all the tools to be successful, what they needed was a way to strip away all their institutionalized concepts so that the necessity of survival would surpass their desires to continue as all humans had in every endeavor previously known to mankind and that was to function within the confines of the orthodox, and to be regulated by that commitment.  That was certainly the case with the Vikings, it was also of the giants from the Bible lands, the Chinese were already functioning from the rise and fall of many oriental cultures—and what was left of all of them were the Indians who were just a mix of everyone chained to the superstitions of the past rooted to institutionalized behavior that imprisoned the mind of mankind from the beginning of time.  The pilgrims were making the same mistakes and they were dying off, until they changed course and decided to try something different while they still could.  They invented capitalism.

Once the pilgrims allowed for private property and structured their society on individualized survival they began to see after the first couple of doomed years that their colony was producing a surplus.  For the first time they had more food than they needed, and they were able to take their minds beyond the needs of daily survival—and to think about other things on a grander scale.  This is why there was a first Thanksgiving, because the puritans of the Plymouth colony were able to produce more than they needed resulting in a feast.  As ironic as it may sound, the Pilgrims were able to be successful where others hadn’t because they were smart enough to change their behavior before their failures had become accepted as institutional thinking.  Had they the rigid structure of the church there to enforce their will, or a king to confide them to the patriotism of national order, the pilgrims would have been stuck to the way of thinking which had imprisoned mankind for thousands of years.  But because they had the tools of modern thinking, and literacy, they were able to make adjustments that stepped beyond the thinking of Plato at the time and invent something new—a way of thinking that would launch a new nation.

That is why I love Thanksgiving so much.  I love Black Friday and all the advertisements that come out in the paper that day.  It is appropriate that capitalism is such a big part of our Thanksgiving holiday because it’s not just the food or the friendship with the Indians that made the annual event so special, it was the means to recognize private incentive as the fuel that propelled mankind into the future, for really the first time. The excess that was produced by the early Plymouth colony was a discovery of what human ambition could produce if left alone and not micro managed by institutionalized thinking, such as churches and governments.  And that is why Thanksgiving in America is such a special time, and they never get old. I love every one of them.

Rich Hoffman
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Liberal Men Just Can’t Keep Their Hands off Boobies: Trump is forcing errors in his opposition that is healthy for America

 

Again, if we rewind to Inauguration Day, 2017 where newly elected President Trump was ceremoniously being ushered in as the 45th occupant of the White House as socialists, Marxist college students and a barrage of angry women took to the streets to protest sometimes violently the election, where we saw something very unique happen in all of history.  I had a feeling it was coming, but just having someone like Trump in the middle of establishment politics has literally brought down the pillars of the corrupt old progressive institutionalism for the first time in over 100 years and we can all see a light at the end of the tunnel now. What we are learning is that when Madonna and Ashley Judd gave their animated speeches about how much they didn’t like Donald Trump, what they were really saying was that they had become bitter in their lives due to sexual abuse by really creepy men like Harvey Weinstein, John Lasseter, and Charlie Rose.  For Madonna she thought it was cute to seduce Hollywood moguls like Warren Betty and many others until she became just another aging woman.  When the sex no longer worked for her, she turned to progressive strategies embroiled in feminism, and sought justice for how unfair the world was—because she could no longer shake her ass and get all of Hollywood to jump on it.  Once they stood on that stage and proclaimed fairness, but nothing stuck to Trump or other conservatives, the women who had really been sexually harassed by people like Al Franken, John Conyers, and Kevin Spacey started to emerge.  If not for the Trump election, all these women would have stayed out of the spotlight and these secrets would have remained.  But because of all the voice and celebrity that was given by the liberal media to women who accused Trump and politicians like Roy Moore of sexual misconduct for purely political purposes, then the real villains were poised to be revealed by a barrage of scandals which had been building since men and women started working together.  It was bound to happen sooner or later, and when it did, liberal men in particular would be most vulnerable due to their reckless personal philosophies and lack of personal self-control.

In the same way that you don’t find NRA members out there committing mass shootings, conservative men tend to be respectful and don’t do things that get them into trouble with women.  By their nature, conservatives are old-fashioned like that, and that keeps them from bad conduct when it comes to the often confusing nature of dealing with the opposite sex.  Liberal men though, they are used to being impulsive and shunning personal responsibility so to them reckless sexual behavior is conducive to their lifestyle.  That is after all why they are liberal, because they lack personal restraints and need institutions to keep them in line.  And never forget that one of the strategies of feminists all along was to inject women into the workplace as a hostile takeover of labor.  For the most radical of women this was always a plan of theirs, to flirt with men, entrap them into bad conduct, then to take over their jobs as a gender.  Even as all these Hollywood men go down in flames, the most ardent bra burning feminists are scheming to take over those jobs with “girl power.”  However, once they have that power and find that there are no more scapegoats to hide behind, they won’t like it.  Be careful what you wish for ladies.  But the essence of the problem is the way that liberal men have behaved once they were put in close proximity to women in the work place. The lines between professionalism and sexual pursuit for many proved impossible to avoid, especially men who considered themselves progressive.

Now it’s like a raging brush fire, these sexual misconduct allegations are the flavor of the year as virtually every major Hollywood star, business tycoon, and politician has some situation of abuse, especially if they were liberal.  All that pent-up emotion that everyone makes fun of Republicans for having, well, this is why they pent-up their emotions.  You are kinda supposed to control yourself in life.  You are not supposed to be an open book that acts on every impulse.  You can’t just grab women by their boobies and run your hands up their skirts.  Even if they tell you it’s alright, you still shouldn’t do it.  It’s only a matter of time before they change their mind and will say later that the conduct was not consensual.  Usually they are just one new boyfriend away from such statements.  I mean in the case of John Lasseter at Disney, he is a smart guy who is good at what he does.  But biologically, he’s a liberal man working next to boobies and if there isn’t some code of ethics that he functions from, it would be very easy to take things out of context if he has a habit of hugging people all the time and letting his true feelings about things be known.  This is why men used to be “stoic” in their dealings with the world.  Watch an old western movie from Hollywood and you’ll see what I mean.  Being a modern man who expresses feelings, and cries, and does all that crap that they think women want to see and hear set themselves up for the day when the women change their mind and decide to come after you for sexual misconduct—because they want your job.

Of course most women just want to work and go home to their families, but the confusing rules of conduct between men and women have made it nearly impossible, because liberal men have through the media culture established the values.  Conservative men may think about it, but they don’t often do it, because by the nature of their personal philosophies, they restrain themselves—so we aren’t seeing them in trouble the way these liberal men are enduring now. The best thing to do is to treat all people equally no matter what sex or race they come from.  All people essentially want the same things out of life, they want to make a little money to fuel their lives at home—and usually there are kids, spouses, sex partners, parents—all kinds of things that are important to them.  They want to go to work, do what they need to do, and get home to their life without incident, and anybody in a position of power should understand and help them achieve those goals.  But when the message is that men should show their emotions, that they should be spontaneous, and even that they should use their power acquired through years of service to get what they want—then particularly liberal men will be vulnerable to…..as John Lasseter put it………”missteps.”

What we’ll end up with after all these losers flame out is a better society that understands the rules of engagement much better.  Everyone will be happier with the results.  Women will learn what they need to learn.  Men will learn not to be such a bunch of emotional pussies yielding to their emotional predilections.  And politics will flush out their power players and will have a chance to replace them with truly sincere people.  None of this would have been possible if not for Trump.  The pressure of Trump forced all these errors in the liberal community, just like a baseball player might overthrow first base when a speedy runner is racing toward it. The pressure of a competent person in the White House is exposing all these weaknesses in our society and it is wonderful to see them all being uncovered.  We always knew these things were there, but nobody was able to do anything about them because the issues were elusive to our discussions.  But not anymore.  Finally, people are talking about these things and that is the first step to correcting them.

Rich Hoffman
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