Guns Teach Responsiblity, if we want a safe world, ban liberalism

I was just a little impressed that my youngest grandson wanted desperately to see what I was doing at my workbench and decided to help me reload some ammunition for my Cowboy Fast Draw practices. It’s kind of a reload 101 type of thing that isn’t difficult for an adult to learn, but for a 2-year-old, I wouldn’t expect him to put a wax bullet into a .45 caliber casing then put a primer in place for shooting. I thought it was just a little advanced. But the young guy wanted nothing to do but what I was so he sat up on my bench stool and went to work helping me eventually taking over all together loading up 50 rounds all by himself. We had a great experience together and so it has been like that in American life really since the beginning. Young people learning from older people the basics of survival in the world and having fun with the exchange of information. It was a reminder to me exactly what guns mean to our culture and how important they have traditionally been in teaching young people basic values and skills in life.

Guns have been in a lot of talks lately and most of the diatribes I have found disgusting, especially the case where the liberal Colorado legislature has voted in a Red Flag law for which the governor is expected to sign. Sheriff Steven Reams from Weld County has indicated that as a member of law enforcement, he will refuse to enforce the law even if he must go to jail for it. I would hate to see that happen, but the Sheriff’s position is the correct one, the Colorado Red Flag law is an abomination of legal abuse, grossly anti-American Constitution in its premise and deserves serious scrutiny on a national level. The premise for the Red Flag law is that judges would be allowed to take guns away from people who are found to be a danger to themselves or others. The provocation of such a status would purely be the word of mouth of family, friends or neighbors. So if some such person recommends that you are a menace in some way, a judge can take away your guns and put you as a gun owner in a position to prove your innocence just to maintain them.

This law literally comes from a state that has gone to pot. Colorado as everyone knows by now has turned into a state turning toward recreational marijuana to raise additional revenue but also to fulfill a long time progressive dream, the legalization of mind altering substances such as pot which in my opinion is far more dangerous than any gun would be. Sure, guns shoot bullets that could kill people, but destroying a person’s mind is far more catastrophic toward the ambitions of mankind than any gun could or would be. That makes this Red Flag law in Colorado that much worse because it likely won’t be a sane person making assessments about the danger of an individual and whether or not a judge should get involved in gun ownership, but the chances are it will be some drug crazed lunatic high on life with a barely functioning mind induced by the effects of marijuana. Imagine the illusion this gives the typical stoner, handing them judicial power over their neighbor so that protection of private property would be stripped away in favor of the loser hippie and their fenceless world view of free love, free education, and free money. All these pieces fit into the same ugly puzzle so its good to see a sheriff willing to put up a fight. But the real punches have to come from the nation at large. Colorado used to be a nice state, but it is becoming like California more and more, just a cesspool of liberalism that is going out of fashion, but not fast enough to leave behind some residual damage.

Ohio is getting gun laws right with its own approaches which is moving toward not even needing a permit to carry a gun. I personally don’t see any danger in guns, they are the paramount foundation of western civilization and they protect intellectually the premise of our republic. (We are not a democracy) Gun ownership has typically been the foundation of good family upbringing and served as a natural bond between generations such as the example I proved regarding my grandson. That activity is a normal thing for an American family to do together and it has been since the start of our country. The people who are against guns happen also to be against families and are pro-abortion. They are for drug use. They are for wealth confiscation and redistribution. They are for open borders and a loss of American sovereignty in the world. Essentially, they are against everything that makes America a great country because they want to undo the nature of it and change it into something much more European.

Guns should be carried everywhere and used when needed to stop bad guys from ruining the world. Sure there is great responsibility in gun ownership but that’s part of the beauty of it. The act of learning about guns from a responsible adult has been paramount in shaping the young minds of particularly boys in our culture. When things go wrong such as they do during mass shootings it’s not hard to identify why people become lunatics and use guns to hurt people maliciously, the failures are often in liberalism, in defunct fatherless homes where a loose mother loses control of her son because there is no father, or the men in the young boy’s life are losers that can’t help the young person affirm himself into adulthood. Or that the people who have lost their minds put too much trust into public education, public wealth redistribution, and functioning as a mindless automaton high on drugs and not taking responsibility for their own lives. The real solutions to a dangerous society is to ban liberalism, inspire families to stay together for the sake of the family as a whole unit, and to put guns in the hands of children as soon as possible and teach them how to use them and make that understanding one of their first acts of responsibility in the world. Once they learn to handle guns correctly from a father, a grandfather, an uncle or even a family friend, they will then as young men and women be able to go out into the world and act responsibly in other aspects of life. That’s how things are supposed to work and Colorado is going in the wrong direction.

It was for me nice to see the lights coming on in my grandson. For him sitting at his grandpas work bench reloading ammunition and watching me shoot a bit was a treasure he’ll carry with him for the rest of his life and he’ll likely continue to want as much of it as he can get. And it is my job to make sure he gets it and gets it right. Guns aren’t dangerous, they are great teaching instruments of how to live responsibly in the world. We can’t look to government to decide what kind of world we should live in the way that liberals propose it. It’s not a judge’s responsibility to take away guns off the whim of some pot head’s opinion. And it’s not for government to step into a family and rob them of the intellectual discourse that often does happen when the older generation teaches the young how to live in the world with the basic skills learned during the transaction. At the heart of the gun control debate is on how we control danger in our world. Liberals want more centralized control. Conservatives want more individualized control. But what we end up with shouldn’t be a combination of the two which most case-law on the Second Amendment comes to. There is a right and wrong answer. Both sides aren’t partially correct. And you can see that correct answer on my grandson’s face, and that is all lawmakers need to know.

Rich Hoffman

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An Open Letter to Alan Horn at Diseny, More ‘Solo’ Please

This article is a bit different from my usual quandaries into the depths of human imagination, behavior, and cultural ramifications because it’s not directed at a general readership, but as a person I admire quite a lot, Alan Horn, the Chairman of The Walt Disney Studios Film Division. Horn unlike me is a liberal in Hollywood functioning from his known parameters which I was thinking about a lot yesterday as I was at a Tractor Supply. To a large degree the surface of our political natures comes from our regional influences. I grew up around guns, farmers and old westerns on television so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that I am now very much a Trump country conservative. Horn and his Hollywood friends have spent most of their lives around people who want to save the planet and protest straws in the ocean. But getting deeper into the motivations of the human race I find that I have a lot in common with people like Alan Horn. I have known them and still do when I was active with the Joseph Campbell Foundation years ago, because it is in my real love of mythology that I respect the work that Horn does. And it is in that regard that I want to ask him to climb out on the limb and find a way to make a few more Han Solo films. Solo: A Star Wars Story was a great movie, it has held up well over this year and deserves another crack at becoming a major part of the Star Wars cannon. I don’t care about it so much for myself, but for my grandchildren. One of my grandsons is absolutely obsessed with Solo: A Star Wars Story and I think for his sake, more myths from the line of stories would be a wonderful thing and Horn is in a position to pull the trigger on that type of endeavor.

I have had my problems with Disney’s handling of the EU in Star Wars, but I’ll make another one of my big predictions, the Episode 9 that is currently wrapping up for a December release is going to be a champion that will heal a lot of the Star Wars trouble that has erupted over the last several years. I have been paying attention to the Fantasy Flight Games X-Wing game and of course the projected opening of Galaxy’s Edge at the Disney Parks and thinking about my background in mythology and comparative religious studies, I see a great enlightenment movement emerging that is unparalleled in all of human history. Star Wars and the films that come from them as I have said many, many times over multi-thousand word articles is many people’s gateway to the sciences. Every day I deal with very smart people all over the world, especially well-educated engineers and they all have in common a love for Star Wars, for the most part. The concepts introduced to them in those movies inspired them to get into the field of engineering, so that they could figure out how to build all the cool things they see in those movies. And of course on the serious side of economics and politics, our culture requires more smart people with playful spirits to emerge into careers that develop new technology. And the way those people are created is with films like Star Wars, so I view what Alan Horn does to be very important to the building of our culture.

My grandson which I referred to, has an obsession with the Millennium Falcon which has carried over into actual space travel. His favorite current activity at the age of 2 going onto 3 is in watching rocket launches on YouTube. When he’s not watching those rocket launches he watches over and over and over again the Kessel Run from the movie Solo: A Star Wars Story. I can see igniting in him all the things that will make a future genius and it starts with that childlike love that is generated by a good story full of new ideas. Even as my wife and I plan to visit Disney World at the opening of the new Galaxy’s Edge to see the full-scale Millennium Falcon and to actually go into it and fly it is to me mind-blowing considering the evolution of myth through human experience from stories told around a campfire to actual experiences like what Disney will offer in their new Star Wars land. It is putting thought on a scale that we’ve never seen before on earth. I think of that kind of thing often because I spend most of my time contemplating about mythologies, religion, and politics. To me they are all connected, they are what build culture. And to have such young minds able to participate in myth the way that young people currently do is very, very exciting.

There were lots of reasons that Solo: A Star Wars Story didn’t make a billion dollars at the box office. Mary Poppins Returns didn’t even come as close to a decent ROI than Solo did, so for Horn, the film business is tricky. The real problem, especially with the oversea markets was the rejection of a Star Wars film that was so rooted in the values of Western Civilization. That was the reason China rejected the film, but so what. A good film finds a way and through Blue Ray sales and Netflix, Solo has done a great job for the Star Wars franchise. I’m sure that other kids are doing just as my grandson is doing, watching it over and over all day long for weeks on end. They aren’t doing that with other movies, that’s for sure. I think J.J. Abrams will fix a lot of the Star Wars problems in the next film and on the backs of that, there is room for more Han Solo stories that can unleash so many countless adventures and other movies.

The end result of all this of course is the expansion of the human intellect which is and has always been an obsession of mine. I think we are all better and smarter when we have good things to think about, and these Star Wars movies are good foundations for thinking about the right kinds of things, such as exploring Mars, what kind of religion we will all have once we discover that there was life there and that the moon has been visited often by life from far away destinations. When we are no longer calling angels from our Bible stories such superficial references and come to understand that there were always life forms that our primitive people encountered but had no name for, a lot of those problems get explored in science fiction. And with Galaxy’s Edge about to open with a new Star Wars film this year on the back of a great Solo movie playing on Netflix for kids to watch over and over again, I can see a lot of these problems being solved by our civilization of tomorrow. The ability to go and touch that Star Wars world that is going to be offered by the Disney Company is a technical achievement that mythology has never had the ability to render up to this point so effectively.

So Alan Horn, I hope you will get another Solo movie into the pipeline. There is room for it and I still think it could be a billion dollar winner at the box office. If the fan base can be united behind Episode 9 and the problems of the EU fixed, there is great opportunity for more Han Solo movies, and many others. But for my grandson’s sake, he would greatly benefit from more exciting adventures in the Millennium Falcon. And I’m sure he’s not the only one out there. It’s probably the safest bet you could make.

Rich Hoffman

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There Will Not Be A Recession in the United States while a Trump is in the White House

There is a reason while after all these years so many smart people read this blog and follow its advice, it’s because you can trace back through history and see how many times I was correct about something that nobody could yet see on the horizon. And that trend continues to this very day. Stupid people look at my articles and they think they are too long, because essentially people don’t read any more so long articles are discouraging to lazy people. But I don’t write for the stupid and passive, but for the aggressive and wise which of course pays off for the right kinds of minds. So with that little prelude I am happy to state that there will not be a recession economically so long as there is a Trump in the White House, which will probably be for the next 12 years or so, after the 2020 election which readers here know I have already predicted will go to a second Trump term. After the next four years of Donald J. Trump I predict that Don Jr. will run and win the presidency and the economic foundations that have been planted in these early first term strategies will pay off tactically in 2020 and beyond. These fears of recession are simply that, and based on no evidence other than political hopes by the other side that something will stop the Trump administration. With the Mueller investigation out of the way, there is nothing to stop Trump in the White House and the red-hot economy that has come with him.

Many people just don’t understand what makes up an economy, including many economists who have learned all the wrong rules about market fluctuations. The expansions and contractions of economic behavior are not set in stone by the rules of academia, but are rather quite reflective of the cultural temperament of our world. By studying any culture ancient or modern their rise and falls are determined along a known trajectory of over tightened regulation or loose autonomous freedom. There is a reason that great minds for instance come to the United States to develop projects from all over the world while China has to steal technology just to compete in the marketplace, it’s because of the nature of human beings and the cultures they create. Economic expansion is a reaction to those cultural elements, not the ebb and flow of emotional responses to it.

So to put it simply, so long as mankind is advancing, not regressing, which has been quite a danger in the past—just as any great culture rises and falls, somebody in the world will be the benefactor of that expansion. For a number of years Europe and Asia have been propped up by overregulation in the United States which allowed for explosive growth in China. But under the Trump administration which is an America first platform, the economic expansion is occurring at the point of consumption. It is in North America where a vast majority of economic transaction is taking place making it once again the provider and consumer of expanding economic activity. With space markets emerging and traditional markets moving from eastern to western manufacturing the United States is in a safe spot to enjoy continued economic expansion. Countries however that have been artificially propped up by global markets, such as communist China are vulnerable and will see declining influence. But that influence is not indicative of the markets in general, only in the artificial manipulation of those markets by wishes to make communism appear more effective than it is. In all reality, that desire has been a restraint on our global demands for products and services. By transferring those elements back to the United States, markets can increase based on true demand, which will then unleash more economic expansion.

In Europe their economic expansion has been limited by their commitment to socialism. All the major economic contributors to the EU are of some brand or another socialist in nature. That has had a devastating impact on economic growth as all socialist countries experience. The growth that Europe had seen, as small as it was, had more to do with United States policies to raise taxes and burden on itself to push companies into Europe and China. The actual growth was not real, it was completely artificial created only by stealing the value from America and sending it overseas. It had nothing to do with actual market forces. It was simply wealth redistribution. The wealth was created by a cultural demand among human populations. The fulfillment of that wealth need was artificially distributed. It wasn’t Europe that created the market need so watching forecasts which indicate growth or decline in those markets will not tell any investor anything, other than Europe isn’t a safe place to put money, which is why they are declining.

Literally there is nowhere else in the world that is producing positive market growth due to their overly regulatory elements. China doesn’t care about poisoning the planet at all, but under their communist rule, they limit the development of autonomous people who will become the next great drivers of economic activity. The kind of people a society produces has a lot to do with continued economic expansion. Of course, any economy needs people to buy cars, purses and fast food—a consumer class. But if a society is top-heavy in those kinds of people, they will have big trouble if they aren’t artificially propped up in some way by a friend or neighbor. What a strong economy needs most are people who design those cars, purses and new kinds of fast food. Engineers, entrepreneurs, and a business class level of bankers and investors. In cultures who hate banks and money it should be no surprise that they have limited economic opportunity, especially if the politics of financial transference is shut off from their consumption rate.

For an economy to work well, it needs freedom, people need to be free to think and create then market their attributes to the elements of economic expansion. I would recommend to anyone who can to visit the great Louvre in Paris and to witness all the great works of art there. From that one museum you can essentially witness much of the cultural activity of the last 2000 years. It is quite a phenomenal place. But you can also see the cracks that have formed in Western Civilization that are the direct result of socialism and communism, of overly managed societies and their impacts directly on the world around them. The Louvre for all its greatness of collections and majesties doesn’t have enough bathrooms, and its dining options are severely limited. They need to learn a thing or two from Disney World where customer service and options are among the best in the world. In France they don’t understand their history, they only know that it happened. They clearly don’t understand the rise and decline of their culture and the museum pieces they have on collection. All they know is that those things happened, they don’t know why.

Just yesterday I was with my family at Chick fil-A at Bridgewater Falls in Butler County and at 2:30 PM well past lunch and well before dinner, the place was packed, the dining room full and the drive thru was wrapped around the building in a double line. Why? Because Chick-fil-A goes the extra steps of above the line thinking, they put out fresh flowers on the tables, are polite to their guests and they are willing to fight for that market share by giving people what they can’t get at home, attention. Some good conduct at the business end of anything can generate market share all its own and it really is that simple.

To understand where the American economy is going and why a recession is not even on the horizon is to understand the rate for which our human culture is expanding and the limited cast of characters on the world stage that can actually participate on the supply side. As consumers, there is virtually an unlimited supply of need, but there has to be contributors to actually building those economies. And under the Trump administration and policies, there is no place on earth more friendly to economic expansion than the United States. China will continue to hemorrhage value because they never created it to begin with. It was given to them as part of a smoke and mirror show to support communism. It was never a real value. And Europe is in the same situation. Yet the market need for economic expansion is real, and so far only the United States has endeavored to fulfill that need. And so long as that is the case, which certainly is true for the foreseeable future, there will only be positive growth in the United States. And you can take that to the bank.

Rich Hoffman

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‘The Post’ Was a Pretty Good Movie, but what do you do when the media helps the powerful?

I had been holding off on watching the movie, The Post, directed by Steven Spielberg because it was an obvious attempt to link the press in our modern age to the liberalized impression of Donald Trump in the White House. The argument based on the 1971 case where the Washington Post published the Pentagon Papers after a court injunction prevented The New York Times from going public with their sources. The Pentagon Papers cited of course that America could not win the Vietnam War all through the sixties but committed troops anyway through many presidential administrations. Spielberg following the liberal lead in Hollywood rushed the film into production to make an argument as to why the press was needed to preserve America from tyranny making obvious comparisons of Nixon to President Trump, at least from the bubble perspective of Hollywood in Los Angeles.

However, and this doesn’t happen often, I found that the movie, The Post actually made the argument which supports the Trump Administration, that the media has become the enemy of the people, not its champion, and that the press is very guilty of buddying up with powerful people and even taking activist stances in an attempt to conceal information from the public, not the other way around. I thought the film was wonderfully shot, and was quite good, which anybody would expect from Spielberg. But like the film Lincoln, The Post was honest with itself. It showed exactly how the Beltway culture operates behind the scenes and from the perspective of this film it’s not hard to imagine the characters replaced by modern counterparts such as Lois Lerner, Barack Obama, James Comey and Hillary Clinton.

I thought it was an odd choice however to end the film on the raid of the Watergate Hotel of the DNC headquarters as if the future of The Washington Post had survived the Pentagon Papers only to report such a minor crime that would eventually lead to Nixon resigning, because it snapped me right back into the reality of our day. As I watched the movie, I was waiting for more details of the Mueller investigation to become clear. I watched The Post as a kind of celebration to the Mueller investigation being over vindicating Trump on all charges, so I was feeling good enough to watch a liberal film that I had been wondering about. So as details were emerging, I watched the Spielberg film without any defensiveness because it was clear that the liberals had lost yet again. So there was no harm in trying to understand their perspective.

If the argument, which was made by liberal Hollywood’s best and brightest, of The Post is to be accepted, then the major newspapers and news outlets of our current circumstances are truly just as bad as President Trump has said they are. There is far more evidence of crimes being committed by the Democrats in the 2016 election than anything Republicans are guilty of, even in their worst-case scenario of Watergate. If that is the standard, then Democrats have a lot of trouble on their hands. Imagine what a movie about The Dossier would look like? It would be much more vicious and conspiratorial than anything in The Post, that’s for sure. If that is what liberals think justify the content of such a movie, imagine what they’d feel if they considered the present reality.

The Pentagon Papers are an interesting debacle they are the opinions of a government that did not have the will to defeat communism in Asia and Southeast Asia. So they are true, there wasn’t a way to win the war in Vietnam, but the public expected to win as America always had. They didn’t understand and couldn’t that the Vietnam War was a front for all the changes the government had been working behind the scenes, for a communist transition in America that would unify the world. So while the Vietnam War was a front to appease the appetites of Americans to fight communism, the government wanted it to advance in Southeast Asia and to become a global powerhouse. Of course, the Vietnam War could not be won. The objectives of the fighters and the government were different. The premise of the movie The Post were that even if it was illegal, the American people had a right to let the public know about the intentions and assessment of the government of its own ambitions in Vietnam. On that I agree, I think it was a bold and proper move for The Washington Post to publish the Pentagon Papers.

But apply to that the sudden mandate to insist that the Mueller investigation be published in full as if some conspiracy existed there for which nobody has yet uncovered, but to then not insist on the same transparency when it comes to the Hillary Clinton email scandal, or the cover-ups at Benghazi. Or the tragedy of Fast and Furious along the Mexican border. Or the Iranian payoffs, the money that was funneled into Hezbollah from the Obama administration in South America. Pick any one of those cases and you have a much bigger story than the one told in the movie The Post, which was supposed to be the liberal calling card into why the press needed to be free to do its job to keep the powerful in check. Yet the powerful were buddies with the press as was obvious in The Post, and that problem is likely much more serious today than it was then. So who is really watching the powerful and keeping order in our government? Certainly not the press.

It would be my argument that the election of President Trump is that checks and balances system. Those of us out of the Beltway see how the game is being played and we wanted to go in a different direction, so we elected Trump—a guy who had been there and done everything and wouldn’t be lured to evil by shiny lights and other government plundered temptations. He already had all that, so he couldn’t be toyed with. That is what was needed to extract the evil that is in our current government and that is precisely what has been happening. If Trump had not been elected the ruse would continue and many of us who have understood from the beginning how the game is really played would be still frustrated and looking for alternatives to a violent rebellion. Like the Pentagon Papers, our current government has been committed to a global rise of socialism and communism. They tell us what we want to hear, but they do the opposite to rub shoulders with the interests that are not American in their roots. I thought The Post showed quite well how that process occurred with the dinner parties and after-hours correspondence of the liberals involved in the media and government. Based on what we know, the situation is much worse today.

So The Post is worth watching and it makes a good argument I think in favor of the Trump administration for truly rooting out the evils of our current government and why it’s necessary to root out the powerful who have built their reputations on the backs of confiscated wealth and not actual merit. It certainly reminded me of why I voted for Donald J. Trump. I don’t think that was their intention, but Spielberg is an honest filmmaker with a big eye on history and even when trying to make a love letter to the liberal base of the Democrat party, he couldn’t help himself but to tell the truth. If the story of The Post is noteworthy of an Oscar, then just consider the stories of this modern age. Someone needs to tell those stories, even though they are still being written. We can’t trust the press obviously. But we can trust President Trump because it was “we” who put him in a position to help the situation truly, and for all time.

Rich Hoffman

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Guns and the Meaning of Life

It continues to be frustrating to read gun defenders getting tricked into arguing the merits of gun ownership against the position of the liberal aggressiveness that has far-reaching implications which I established in an article I wrote yesterday on the real fight in the world between eastern and western civilizations. The intent by liberals to enact gun control is to achieve their not so thinly veiled objective and that is to destroy all of Western Civilization and to replace it with the values of the orient. This has never been in dispute yet many people just don’t seem to understand the big picture, so they can’t defend it in an argument. To do so you have to understand the big game that the East has always been playing and to deal with them on those terms. It was last year that I visited the Indianapolis Children’s Museum and noted that they had an entire section dedicated to just the country of China, as if we were all going to be adopting to that reality soon anyway, so they were there to instruct visitors to what that world would look like. It can’t be argued that this is the world that the political left and even many on the right want for the United States, a gradual surrender economically to China and the spread of their communist system from there to here.

It’s all about state control over individual activity. When I talk about Western Culture I’m talking about a long boil of ideas that were in conflict with each other through many thousands of years, something that didn’t occur in the orient. Even within that Western culture the best of it was the sentiments of individualism that came out of works of art such as in Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Arthurian romances, specifically of the Parzival Grail quest. There are some really wonderful passengers about individualism that emerged quite radically against the state control of kings and territorial oversears typical in 13th century Europe that evolved over time into what the American gunfighter mythologies on the western frontier of North America evolved into that are worth protecting. That is after all why gun rights in America are necessary and need to be less restrictive, not more so. To find the Grail castle and eventually the Grail itself, the night Parzival had to ride his horse with the reigns limp and to find these treasures through authenticity to himself not to the obedience to a social system. That is a very important distinction that is at the core of all Western thought. And it is that which having gun ownership is meant to protect.

We have allowed the enemy to define the grounds for which we fight, which is to allow gun rights to become a safety issue, and that we should all give them up for the benefits of more security. But to do that we have to yield more power to the state, and to apply the Parzival metaphor to the situation, to guide the horse more directly and to seek the Grail Castle through institutionalized inquiry, for which it would always remain invisible to us. The harder you look, the less you find especially in the context of institutionalized perspective. But as we know through history, this always leads to collapse of society in one fashion or another. There is never any real safety in such a quest in life so the issue is never about safety, it’s about preserving ideas and concepts that were strictly part of western civilization for thousands of years of evolution. The moment that those ideas aren’t protected, the state controlled sentiments of the East desire to creep in and destroy everything humanity has worked so hard to build for thousands of years of trial and error.

The way it has been framed, the gunfighter of the American west was a whore and gambler representing the worst of us and is an image we should run from, not to. But I see them quite differently, as the latest additions to Eschenbach’s quest to define individual authenticity to the mandates of institutionalism. The individual effort of America’s gunfighters both in real life and through the emergence of Hollywood westerns is quite a statement about individuality and the merits that such contributions have on society as a whole is quite astonishing, and important. But without the gun, it wouldn’t have been possible. It was the gun after all that destroyed the Indians, who were the representatives of the orient in place within North America as immigrants of their own centuries before. I wouldn’t go so far to call them domesticated inhabitants. The strange culture of the Adena people with their obsession with Ancient Alien conspiracies, their elongated heads, their sometimes unusually tall stature with obvious roots from the Middle East and the Salisbury Plain and excessively sophisticated mathematics were not the same people as the Shawnee who were the Indians who fought the first stages of westward expansion in my home state of Ohio on the very ground that my home sits to this day. Not by a long shot. There is a deep and distant past that has many complex cultures coming in and out of it that have nothing to do with “indigenous” people. The Indians had their chance and they failed like all cultures around the world to get their grips into reality and to sustain the growing ambitions of mankind with fresh new philosophic concepts. But in Western Culture, such thoughts did percolate. Often the perpetrator would find themselves beheaded in Europe, or burnt at the stake, or even hung on a cross, but the effort was there and ideas did evolve. It was the gun and the American frontiersman who actually found the Grail Castle of Eschenbach in North America, not in some Heavenly light of Utopia but in the casinos and whore houses of upstart towns high in the mountains of South Dakota and California. The individual behavior may have been disgusting, but it was authentic and behind that effort came the greatest economy and civilization yet to emerge from human minds. And it all started with personal autonomy and the gun that protected that right.

A vast majority of our fellow human beings are much like Parzival. Often by accident while they are reckless in their youth treating life with their hands on the reigns loosely, they find their Grail Castle. But they do as Parzival did, they don’t ask questions when they should or act authentically to their nature, so they get kicked out of the kingdom even though they still stand where they always stood. The keys to the great Heavens are not as Jesus said, out there somewhere but are all around us. We must find them ourselves through our own authenticity which is the meaning of life, which can be and is often different for each one of us as individuals. Only by living an authentic and individual life can we find our own meaning and then give the value of that meaning to those of our civilization. And while we are searching for this individual meaning there are always villains who come along to pull us back to the mandates of institutionalism. For the first time in all human history there were very charismatic individuals roaming around the American West much the way Parzival did under King Author’s knighthood. The goal of such knights wasn’t loyalty to the court but honor in the individualized efforts of personal authenticity. Maybe only less than 1% of all people find such a Grail Castle in their lifetimes, but the treasure that springs forth from such a society is literally boundless, and worth the trouble. And to protect that opportunity in the face of mankind’s tendency toward detriment, we need personal guns to keep the effort alive, and deep into the future.

Rich Hoffman

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The Elephant in the Room, a History Lesson for those who need it on why President Trump is Desperately Needed

We need to talk about the nature of cooperation for a minute, especially in regards to political debate. The assumption has been that gental professionals could argue out issues without things coming to gunfire and violence within the framework of the republic, and to a large degree that has worked well through the first 200 years of America as a nation. But modern Democrats and some Republicans of a more progressive nature aren’t interested in preserving the American republic into the future, but they entertain leaving their own mark into the foundational emergence of a new Constitution. Let’s just talk about the elephant in the room. In modern politics, they are actively seeking to make government, for which they are a part of that managing body bigger and more powerful, so their hostilities toward the American Constitution is quite obvious. And that has never been more obvious than in this year’s crop of Democrat hopefuls for the American presidency. They, and the party that supports them are openly hostile to the kind of American government that we’ve had. They are only interested in changing it, not living with it and those of us who have been in this country all our lives and love it the way it is. They want to take from us to fill themselves. They aren’t interested in getting along or being respectful. They are by every definition domestic enemies of our Constitution and need to be treated that way, not rationed with.

The position that many Republicans have taken over the years has been embarrassing, and I have seen this up close on more than one occasion. Conservatives wanting to make that mind-numbing tight rope walk between their churches and the foundations of conservative values have made themselves into lots of Dr. Jekylls and Mr. Hydes. Christianity, especially how it emerged into the Roman Catholoic Church is very much an oriental concept that has from the beginning sought to bring an end to western civilization, the kind of advances which gave birth to Greek and Roman society. And the tide of aggression that has moved from east to west has been full throttle since Alexander the Great stopped his eastward conquest with some Buddhist monks in the vicinity of India. Since then western civilization has been attacked by the orient not with weapons but through their ideas as the church took over kingdoms and Europe fought over those ideas for the next 2000 years, even up until this very day where it is being counted on by Islam to become the next dominate religion so that all then nations of the world can unite under a theocracy and a system of communism very similar to what is currently in China. Republicans were taught to turn the other cheek in a fight and they have been getting their asses kicked regularly ever since.

Protestants fled the church in England to seek religious freedom in America. The Indian nations encountered were very much of the oriental religions but they were unorganized and on a declining path socially so the effects were not the same as they had been in Europe where confusing mixed messages about religion and politics were prevalent. The kind of Christians who emerged in pursuit of freedom were a far cry from the docile church goer in Europe who had conservative personal values but was taught by the church that there are many more things in life bigger than the self and that sacrificing that to the needs of the many was a very Jesus kind of thing to do. The more civilized America became in the years after the American Revolution, the more those confusing European ideas of conservative values emerged, which is what Protestants were running from in the first place, so those old oriental ideas about church and state have returned to our present world and the battle is quite vicious.

Don’t kid yourself, the battle is obvious. I have known for a long time that for conservative values to survive in the United States that we needed a spokesman in the White House like a Donald Trump, a person who would hit back when struck in the face, and not turn the other cheek. It is a dumb idea to not hit back when someone hits you. Who cares if its not a “Christian” thing to do? Christ in his early years obviously encountered the eastern religion of Buddhism and he brought that into his teachings which of course jostled the control the Roman Empire wanted for the west bank of the Mediterranean. The Jews had things under control there so the churches were very much part of the control mechanism of keeping the Empire united, even though the Romans themselves had many ancient gods they worshipped. The ideas of conquest are to allow those acquired territories to worship whoever they had before so long as the control of the churches paid homage to the greater power of government. That is after all the theme of the great book, The Canterbury Tales written in 1483 by Geoffrey Chaucer, in the years after Saint Thomas Becket was slaughtered by the King’s men in the Canterbury Cathedral. The idea of rebellion proposed against the tyranny of the state was to visit the spot of Becket’s murder, but to not drift outside of the control mechanism of the relationship of the church and the state, but to function within it. I consider The Canterbury Tales to be one of the most important works of European literature and it shows quite effectively this dysfunctional relationship that western culture has with itself, for which the concept of America was the solution. I had with me a copy of the American Constitution and to read the words of that little book while standing on the spot where Thomas Becket was slaughtered was for me quite an experience because I understood all the relationships that occurred in that spot and what led up to them and what the eventual answer was. Western expansion in America was the ultimate fight between east and west and as we all know, the “west” won. And I am very glad they did. I spent several days in the streets of Canterbury after my visit to Becket’s murder marked in the floor of the Canterbury Cathedral and read through my copy of The Canterbury Tales to let it all wash over me in a very intellectual way. I wish I could take every member of congress on that little intellectual journey so they could see how the pieces fit together, but most of them have no idea. They lack the intellectual fortitude, so they are victims to what they have been taught.

There is no making peace with the enemy and the modern Democrats are the enemy, they are the latest representatives of eastern culture that want more than anything else to wipe away the very concept of an American republic built on individual freedom as opposed to sacrifice to the gods of state control. For liberals that control of religion could be anything from Islam to global warming—an entirely made up new age religion to unify the minds of the youth movement to the causes of sacrificial liberalism—obedience to the state. Thomas Becket as a representative of church control was killed by his friend Henry II as the battle between church and state raged on in Europe, between individual value and those of the institutionalized opinion of a king or emperor. The orient had not had this philosophical battle, for them everything was yielding toward the end of personal existence so it was proper to let the self go into a rapture of selfless existence, therefor the citizen of the orient, which persists to this very day is happy to yield their thinking to a ruler because they’ll be dead soon anyway, so why not. But in the west it was a different story. What was the meaning of life but to have an individual life developed by a personal journey and to unleash the gifts upon the world that resulted from that journey? That is the battle being fought today in modern politics, especially in America. Around the rest of the world, most of them have already fallen to the diatribes of eastern philosophy through their various religions. If people have lost their way with Christianity, they can find themselves in Islam. But for the leaders of those societies, they want people to pick one of the two, just so long as they learn to take orders and instruction from a higher power. On earth that is the regional governor, or politician.

Democrats in that regard want to destroy what is left of Western Civilization that has been doing extraordinarily well in America. But make no mistake, they don’t want to live with the effects of that effort, they want to destroy it. They don’t want to have tea with people who think differently than they do. They don’t want to live in harmony. They want to destroy the American Constitution and bring oriental concepts into western culture by any means so to fulfill a long sought after goal that really extends back to the roots of human history. East and west cannot live together in harmony, the ideas are just too radically different, in the west it is individual merit that is valued, in the east, its sacrifice to the state with the state being the ladder to god. If you want to get to Heaven then you better obey the state. And that is where our modern conservatives fail, they are supposed to fight that assumption, not turn their cheek to surrender. They have been tricked by their own ignorance and lack of historical perspective. Most of them have probably never read The Canterbury Tales, which isn’t an easy read. But it’s a kid’s book compared to James Joyce in his great book Finnegans Wake, which is concerned with the same kind of problem—the role of the individual in an increasingly collective based culture that repeatedly spins on itself with the Vico cycle. The values of our day are not to get along, but to fight—not just the concept in America of Republicans and Democrats, but the values of eastern ideas and western. Both can’t coexist, because the east doesn’t have any intention of doing so. They have intended conquest since the Roman Empire decided to be united by Christianity because it was their last hope of unifying their people. But to do so they had to surrender to the whims of the eastern religions that had always threatened their control west of the lands along the old Silk Road into the orient. This fight isn’t new, its as old as time. But modern Republicans who don’t understand why President Trump is important to the preservation of Western Civilization either need a history lesson or they need to just shut up and get behind us who do. But no longer are they going to be allowed to pull that Trojan Horse into our American culture only to have radicalized Muslims, communists and Eastern religion soothsayers sneak out into the night while we sleep and end our society one rule at a time. That just won’t be permissible.

Rich Hoffman

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The World Needs to be Thanking White, Affluent Men–Not attacking them

As I have said many many times, there are few people who deal with as many diverse people every day than I do, I deal extensively with people of color, people from other countries and I have interactions with lots of women and there is nothing about any of that which makes me anxious as a white, affluent, male in America. I would go so far to say that I have zero insecurities about my masculinity or role in the world. None, perhaps even less than that. But it is ridiculous for progressive advocates to believe that they are going to get away with attempting to attack me because I’m a man and white and not get push back for it, and that I’m going to go sit in the corner and let the world turn. Listening to the Brie Larson controversies over the Captain Marvel film and the media sentiment applied to quickly to the liberal shooter in New Zealand attempting to chain every white man in the world to the terror act, some hard facts about the state of things needs to be articulated.

There is of course a lot more to the story, it’s not specifically white men of any kind of affluent nature that is the real target, not ideologically. They are the tactical target of a much larger strategic desire that is global in its assumption. The hatred that we are seeing right now is essentially global jealousy for the successes of Western Civilization. White males with a tendency toward affluence and the creation of successful economies stand in the way of global socialism so that is the goal of the hatred toward that specific demographic. But that hatred cannot mask reality. There is a reason that Oriental civilizations in the east are always lurking behind western cultures. While the orient has had their share of success, and were likely some of the first in the world to build great ships which navigated the world well before the Vikings or Christopher Columbus ever stepped on a boat, the authoritarian regimes of the east prevented their cultures from achieving greatness.

The idea for America emerged over a great deal of time as Europeans like Martin Luther challenged assumptions of power that were passed from age to age over thousands of years. Such a philosophical push didn’t occur anywhere else on planet earth in a sustainable way. There may have been rebels here and there in cultures in Africa or South America who showed promise of advancing their societies, but their cultures were not stable enough to move forward with a history that could drive it. It took a long time for the concepts that made America into a great country. It didn’t happen by accident. And as to America there aren’t many places in the world where so much diversity in people make up a country. It’s not white males so much who are identified as Americans, but it was them who formed the philosophical concepts that freed so many people and built the world’s largest and most successful economy. It wasn’t the Russians who did that, it wasn’t the Ethiopians, and it certainly wasn’t the Indians. It wasn’t China, less than a hundred years ago they were begging the United States to save them from the aggressions of Japan. Only the Americans were able to do anything to help the world and that trend was started by affluent white males.

America has a chance to teach the world how to have a better life. But to demonize white males is disingenuous toward the nature of reality. It isn’t that white males are superior physically, or spiritually, but culturally, it was their culture who built a western civilization that ignited so many great things in the world. Nobody else has come close. The attempts to repackage successful cultural attributes and apply them to people of skin color or their sex is ignoring the elements that make a successful culture, and is doomed to fail. Success as a country, or as a person is not based on skin color or reproductive designations, but in the behavior and the values of that culture.

The belief is that by attacking white males that the insurgents of socialism can have a chance to try their hand at micromanaging the global sphere of economic means. Currently the United States is moving ahead of the rest of the world culturally and economically leaving those old jealousies to evolve in a raw way that is starting to panic. With the election of President Trump and the ignition of Western Civilization’s commercial space ventures there is a real threat to those old stagnant cultures around the world struggling to keep up. I’ve been around the world a few times and I can say that my own eyes have witnessed a great death all across the earth that doesn’t wake back up until an airplane gets over the soil of North America. That’s not a racist comment, its an assertion of truth. It is not the fault of wealthy white men that there isn’t great horse races in India, or Formula One Racing in China. It’s not the fault of the United States that there isn’t an NFL option in China. It’s not the fault of Hollywood that the world doesn’t rush to the box office to see the latest Chinese and Indian films—or what about that latest blockbuster out of Kenya? Culture is everything and the ideas that build culture are critical to any level of success. And the culture has to be strong enough to last for centuries not just decades. Is it because of white privilege that the three people leading the current space race are all white men from different places around the world? Why aren’t there blacks? Why aren’t there women? It’s a free market? The reason is because it’s the ideas that built the men which gave them the intellect to solve the problems of commercial space travel. It’s the books, the movies, the music and the political beliefs of their culture which propelled them toward greatness, or to yearn for it. The strength of an idea must carry a culture forward to mature into something like the United States which is no easy task. It has to survive wars, philosophic challenges, every kind of adversity and to progress economically into something the world values. For that it was a long string of white affluent males who have that success to put on their resume.

There is room for everyone in the world to have success, people of all color and circumstances. But eliminating white males from the equation is like unplugging the power to a television. Without them the thing just sits there and does nothing. Its not that other cultures can’t do it, its just that their cultural maturity isn’t strong enough to cut through all the opposition that it takes to build a society. Without those affluent white males, the engine of the world shuts down and everyone regresses back to tents and buggies. It’s a fact of reality. It has nothing to do with any other factor than the quality of the ideas of the culture from which people spring forth.

So I’m a little tired of lesser developed people with terrible ideas criticizing white men, I happen to be one and it’s starting to really bring forth a lot of anger. Not only is it irritating, but its dishonest, and unappreciative. Things just don’t happen, it takes individuals functioning within a culture to bring them forth with great effort. And the white men of western civilization have given the world many gifts and continue to do so. Getting rid of them on the world stage won’t suddenly make socialism more successful or give other people a chance at success. Eliminating competition of the best idea makers won’t suddenly give South Africa an opportunity to become inventors of the next great technology. Only an advance culture can do that and the people who make up that culture. If the focus on such cultures are just to survive or bang together a few pots and pans to scare away a demon threatening to overtake a family home, then don’t be surprised when things don’t work out so well when the white men aren’t around to make everything good and exciting for everyone. Success isn’t an element of nature, it is pounded out through lots of hard work and the ideas of people diligent enough to emerge them forth from existence.

Rich Hoffman
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The Vico Cycle is Hard at Work in the Killing of Innocent People in New Zealand

Only the path of the overman can allow what I’m about to say about the shooting in New Zealand to be understood. I understand that all the people more interested in getting drunk, smelling the farts of their friends, and chasing after the wife of their neighbor won’t get the big picture. They just don’t have a mind for it. Most people don’t and won’t see the big picture required to know the truth about why Brenton Tarrant opened fire into a mosque in Christchurch New Zealand killing 50 or so and wounding many others. It’s not a matter of conspiracy, but in understanding the subtilties of human history, the direction of evolutionary society, and the nature of mankind’s natural autonomy. It has nothing to do with skin color, sex, or even politics. It’s all about control however and containing within the imagination of the human being the limits so that massive crimes against intellect can continue unimpeded for a great sin that has been with us since before Adam and Eve plucked fruit from a forbidden tree. For those left in the dust of conceptual knowledge regarding Brenton Tarrant, I suggest reading some James Joyce, particularly one of my favorites in Finnegan’s Wake then understand that in the Vico Cycle we’ve been here before and history dictates we do something new or risk reducing ourselves back into a fetal position. Then at that point we can have an intelligent conversation about what really needs to happen. Gun laws won’t change a thing. The foundations of human civilization are where we must begin and end on this journey of future state intentions.

To those who don’t travel much, especially outside of the United States these days, the world is pretty much a dump from a conservative point of view. Even the great cities of the world that are featured in our favorite movies and are traditionally destination targets of our best literature are already deeply committed to their part of the Vico Cycle, they are regressing back to a theocratic time abandoning the progress of all civilization in favor of what has been, which was war, war, and more war topped off with scandal, suppression and intellectual stagnation. To most of the world these days, due to the efforts of Socialist International people politically if measured correctly are far to the left of Karl Marx. The mother of Brenton Tarrant was one of those people so it is not as if the gunman was a bastion of right wing thinking. When he announced in his manifesto that he was following in the footsteps of several right-winged terrorists the nature and concern of them are still far to the left of the typical American. They are not even on the same scale as the ones the world functions from so the vantage point of Tarrant was corrupted from the very beginning.

I’m not so sure that Tarrant isn’t a far left lunatic deeply in love with Pakistan and the Middle East adopting this character he displayed at the mosque. I think based on the evidence I’ve so far seen that Brenton Tarrant was performing his role in the scheme of things as a double agent type of personality, what he said and did was the opposite of his sensibilities and was designed to have the opposite effect of what he claimed to protest. Anybody could write a manifesto like the one he did even if his mind was the opposite in its intended targets. Instead of wanting to really stop mass immigration he was trying to accelerate it by putting those opposed to it on their heels in defense of their positions, paving the way for more of a global invasion of ideas and archaic religions meant to carry mankind back to before the stone ages where theocracy limited our understanding to gods throwing lightning bolts at each other and sleeping with our wives when we weren’t looking. I don’t believe Brenton Tarrant was a right winged activist, quite the opposite. He was an actor playing the part of a terrorist to put pressure on American politics to let down its guard and allow the invasion to continue unmolested. That is why he mentioned Candace Owens and Donald Trump in his multipage statement, to put pressure on them to stop doing what they do, not to support them.

During the loss of his father in 2010 Tarrent took his inheritance and started to travel the world and it is on this journey that he fell in love with areas in the Middle East. Obviously, he became radicalized during this period but as a person of western heritage he approached the problem of convincing the world to move further to the political left by masking his terrorist intentions behind a personality that reflected the fears of all civilization. Brenton is too loose with his terms “fascist” in his manifesto to the point where it sounds contrived and too closely associated with the antics of Nazi Germany. And by mentioning Candace and President Trump in the same written document which the media of the globe would savagely contemplate it would force all such supporters to hide their true opinions and change their stance on immigration and the mixing of cultures to the point where the accelerated intentions of the most radical leftist might be finally realized.

The reactions of the world were predictable and known before the terrorist attack was taken. In New Zealand gun laws require a license to have firearms so they are not exactly easy to get. I would compare their stringent requirements to the difficulty of buying suppressors in the States, a real pain in the ass. But of course the prime minister of New Zealand immediately went to a measure of stricter gun laws to prevent something like this from ever happening again. Brenton Tarrent knew all this would happen and it was part of his terrorist act to ignite the discussion. New Zealand is a peaceful country with very little crime, so by targeting this part of the world, it would capture everyone’s attention and continue to put pressure on the United States to reform their gun policies and immigration positions to accepting more left leaning direction toward a theocracy for which the governments of the world could more adequately protect their secrets.

That is the true intention here, the governments in their disorganized bluster of neurotic intentions are quite ominous in their desires for control. Even to the point that a president of the United States can’t get a straight answer on alien interactions, because nobody will tell them the truth, the real powers that seek to control mankind are hard at work trying to keep us all on the Vico Cycle and after the anarchy of our present age desire quite lustfully to carry us all back to a theocracy. That is the preferred state of governments who want most to rule over the human race from a position of strength, they want to use religion to connect us to god for which they control the path, just as has been the case through every major civilization in known history. The Muslim faith is just as theocratic as a Christian one and if the world is at war over which one will prevail, then the real discoveries that are in front of us in this new space age might be averted. From Brenton Tarrent’s point of view, if he could accelerate a war between the religions, then he could also stabilize the control governments have over the minds of the globe’s residents. Like a true fascist which he claimed to be, his goals were far to the left of the typical conservative in the United States.

There is no more powerful country in the world than the United States and much like Rome the barbarian hoards of the conquered domains were jealous and vengeful that their cultures did not tap into the power of western civilization the way the Roman Empire did. So they fought hard to chip away at Rome politically and militarily until eventually the will to maintain Rome fell away and the stupid barbarians ransacked all the intelligence gained under the banner of advanced culture and Europe was plunged into the Dark Ages. That is the goal here, but only this time globally. The world desperately wants the United States to fall economically, and morally so that they can all revert back together to a time of theocracy and guns are banned so that nobody can protect themselves from the government that can’t rub two sticks together to make a sound, yet want to control us all in every manner of what we eat, what we learn, and what we own. The terrorist attack in New Zealand had nothing to do with what Brenton Tarrant said it was for, but rather all the things he didn’t even mention.

Rich Hoffman

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The Overman

Lately there is a need for a lot of context and as I have said on many occasions, here and elsewhere, the battle of our times is not political, its psychological. The insane are trying to hide their ailments from the world behind a veil of chaos, and often they aren’t doing it maliciously, but for their own survival. For me the Michael Jackson documentary on HBO was an event to attempt to destroy the good work that the musical artist did, and for many reasons the same tactics are being applied to President Trump. I see a much bigger picture occurring than what is being covered these days and for me a lot of this contemplation was ignited over a discussion on the radio about great movies from the past. One that came up was Pale Rider and a joke emerged about what happened to the Clint Eastwood character at the end. There was a period in the 80s that Donald Trump was clearly a part of, Michael Jackson was helping to forge, President Reagan was attempting to live up to and even music was quite obsessed with it, but where mankind was attempting to tap into Friedrich Nietzsche’s overman idea, or as he called it, the Übermensch. There was a long deep line of opponents to it, everything from political leaders to religious scholars and the overall conflict essentially was the above the line and below the line thinking that I’m always talking about. Nietzsche wanted for mankind to rise above the line while most of the world wanted to stay below and that is the conflict of our day. In our art, in the 80s the overman ideas was taking root, but we lost it during the Clinton administration. And now with Trump as president it is coming back again and everyone against such an idea is having a complete meltdown.

I didn’t grow up with Nietzsche. I came to him much later in my life, during my twenties through my extensive reading of Joseph Campbell. The anti-institutionalism of the German philosopher was something I could relate to so that’s how I came to enjoy his magna opus of philosophy, Thus Spoke Zarathustra and this idea of an overman, for which this site is aptly named. I think when I did read Thus Spoke Zarathustra I was 25 and everything in my life was literally trying to kill me, which didn’t seem very fair. But instead of committing suicide I read a lot of books. At that time I was being sued over a business venture, I was then sued over a real estate transaction and I was fighting to keep my family together as many outside elements were very hostile to my marriage to my wife. And we’re not talking about a little hostile, it was quite excessive and much of that hostility was due to my very solid beliefs about the way things should be, and they just didn’t like it or feel comfortable with. I had a very terrible relationship with a brother-in-law at the time which would repeat with many other people over the next 15 years for all the same reasons, and his goal was to outright destroy my marriage into the family in ways that would make the novel The Great Gatsby seem like a Winnie the Poo story. To say life was rough would be a severe understatement.

While I sorted out all the elements and hostilities, I even got hit by the IRS for taxes on a business that lost a lot of money that I had to settle by working three full-time jobs and we only had one car, so I rode a bicycle to all those jobs on a daily 20 mile loop that I started at 4:30 AM in the morning and ended at 11:30 PM at night and I did that for many, many years. This included Saturday and Sunday.  I was averaging about 110 hours a week just to keep my family above water without help from anybody, no family and certainly no government.  Most of my trouble came quite honestly because I always insisted on being an above the line person. That’s why the Nietzsche stuff was so attractive to me. While I was struggling to survive the basics at life I really only had my breaks at work to look forward to, my books that I’d get to read in these little 10 to 15 minute segments. That doesn’t sound like much but out of my whole day I was getting about an hour and a half of breaks and those were completely filled with reading books, so I learned a lot in a very short period of time. Sure, I was in hell, but I learned to enjoy it.

The problems with my marriage and brother-in-law, started when he realized that I wasn’t interested in being a cool kid with him. He liked to smoke pot and was an early advocate of it. He was and still is a very below the line person yearning constantly for the minimums in life. He was older than me so when I first met him I tried to not let him know that I thought he was a loser, but he was constantly comparing himself to me and his aggression became quite intense to the point where he was constantly working behind the scenes to destroy my marriage basically so he wouldn’t have to deal with me at dinners and family get togethers. I came to see him as a great destroyer, a person who had no desire to do anything in his life above the line and sought to bring everyone around him down so that he wouldn’t have to look in the mirror and see a complete loser, because he’d have plenty of company. I wasn’t mad at him however, even though I had every right to be, because I saw that people like him were as common as raindrops in a hurricane. The world was filled with them and they work at every level of our society. To see them all you have to do is look for the little signs they give off indicating that they want to function below the line in everything they do.

Going back even further you might understand why my brother-in-law didn’t like me, because a lot of people felt as he did. From my earliest memories—I have very vivid memories as early as two years of age—I never could stand people who belched and farted because to me they were reminders of how gross humans could be. Both of my grandparents had farms so when we’d visit there was always dog shit, cow shit, chicken shit—shit of some kind everywhere and I’d freak out if some of it got stuck to my shoes. I hated the idea of it lodged in the tread of my tennis shoes which persists to this day. That is why I either wear shoes with wide tread that is easy to clean or flat bottom boots with no tread at all so that shit and other things can’t be carried around my day with me. I have always frowned down on anybody who farts or belches with an audible indication. I don’t want to smell or hear of an idea of human waste and to be honest sex is nearly just as gross. As a kid and teenager those were my rules, even in my car I had a sign in it that indicated no smoking which was highly unusual for a teenager. Not to mention my violent opposition to drug use. Once a person farted in my car and the thought of the poop particles embedding themselves into my leather seats angered me to the point where I beat the shit out of the guy who was at that time a good friend and threw him out of my car in the middle of a highway. I got into a lot of fights and had many rough relationships all through my life because of my insistence to function always above the line, even when I had every excuse to blame the world and god for my circumstances. And in the case of “god”, and this is as true today as it was back then, I saw god as an idiot because he or “it” created all these losers in the first place and ultimately left them to us to deal with. Anybody who creates losers who crave below the line thinking in any manner to me is an imperfect creature that certainly doesn’t deserve respect. My wife and I had just such a discussion the other day where I told her that god was an idiot for making the kind of losers we deal with on a routine basis. She likes to think of god as a perfect creature of an all-knowing nature. I think he’s just stupid and needs to be overcome.

So I grew to find accurate definitions that applied to my outlook on life in Nietzsche’s work. While interpretations of Nietzsche’s overman vary wildly, here is one of his quotations from Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Prologue, §§3–4):

I teach you the overman. Man is something that shall be overcome. What have you done to overcome him?… All beings so far have created something beyond themselves; and do you want to be the ebb of this great flood, and even go back to the beasts rather than overcome man? What is ape to man? A laughing-stock or painful embarrassment. And man shall be that to overman: a laughing-stock or painful embarrassment. You have made your way from worm to man, and much in you is still worm. Once you were apes, and even now, too, man is more ape than any ape… The overman is the meaning of the earth. Let your will say: the overman shall be the meaning of the earth… Man is a rope, tied between beast and overman—a rope over an abyss … what is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end.

It is good to have standards. Some might say that I have impossibly high standards and the lazy losers out there have a choice to not even attempt to live up to them. But this is a fight I’ve fought all my life and I certainly won’t be yielding to anything now. I’ve come this far, I plan to go even further. And that is why I have sympathy for people who have tried to embrace the overman concept even if they have failed, people like Michael Jackson and Donald Trump. Trump as a president is probably the closest that there is in the world to getting what I have always been fighting for. Intellectually he’s not curious enough to master all the elements of being an overman, but he gets the basic concept which is why everyone hates him who want to function below the line. Because Trump keeps raising it. And one thing that holds true no matter what your vantage point, if you try to live up to an above the line standard, people are just going to hate you for it. And if you want to survive, you’ll learn to love their hate for you, because it tells you that you are doing all the right things in life.

Rich Hoffman

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The Nothing Part 2 and Michael Jackson

Way back in March of 2013 I wrote an article called “The Nothing” which was a term used in the kid’s fantasy movie, Neverending Story to describe the kind of evil that destroys people. I used the term The Nothing to describe what I saw happening in public education and emerging into the world at large and of course as is always the case, I turned out to be one hundred percent right. However, unfortunately as is always the case too, people were too slow to understand and now our world is much more of a mess. Some people listen, but most don’t, and they have to find out the hard way everything. And that is where we find ourselves today, wondering why socialism is making noise in our political world, why our national debt is up over $22 trillion dollars, and why the HBO movie Leaving Neverland was even made.

I watched at least part one of Leaving Neverland which is about the child molestation of several young boys under the seduction of the pop star Michael Jackson and couldn’t help but see The Nothing hard at work. There were so many things wrong with that entire story that the reality of it is nearly mind-blowing. I still like Michael Jackson by the way. The movie didn’t change my opinion of him. Rather it elaborated the kind of insanity that I believe he fell into as a result of his life. It looks obvious to me that Michael Jackson started regressing into a much more childlike personality during the release of his album, “Bad.” He was clearly missing some screws and those screws came loose in a major way in the years after that hit album and the release of Black or White.

I think Leaving Neverland is a really good documentary about how screwed up our society is under the influence of The Nothing. The parents of the supposedly molested kids ruined their lives in pursuit of the kind of fame that being close to Michael Jackson gave them. Do I believe them, that Michael Jackson was sneaking out of his house in the back seat of a typical Los Angeles family car to play at a kids house away from the spotlight in the way that a typical 6-year-old might? Maybe, which indicates serious problems emotionally in Michael Jackson which wouldn’t surprise me. But he’s also not around to defend himself and I don’t know that I trust any of the interviews shown in Leaving Neverland. I think there are elements of truth in them but the whole story certainly isn’t told. But none of that really matters because the real villain is The Nothing in all actuality. The Nothing obviously overwhelmed the very sensitive talent in Michael Jackson who wanted to be a kind of overman but just couldn’t deal with the amount of evil in the world. A quick review of the Michael Jackson video “Speed Demon” will show this collision of a young overman wanted to deal with the shackles of fame and fortune as it sought to feed off him.

Jackson was at the top of the world and what he found there was a kind of hell on earth of depleted characters that weren’t worth spit and it appears to have shocked him to his core. His “Smooth Criminal” character had lost his smoothness and he went deep inside his own childlike yearnings to find redemption. He sought to start all over again where people made sense before adulthoods wiped away the purity of a living soul. What Jackson was seeking with his costumes and way of living was what I often talk about in the great book The Oz Principle where the remarkable work by Roger Connors, Tom Smith and Craig Hickman used another fantasy story, The Wizard of Oz to describe above the line and below the line conduct. To mix metaphors here, properly, The Nothing wants for nothing more in the entire world but to pull people into Below the Line Thinking. It seeks the destruction of everything trying to climb above the line so that the laws of expectations in existence are so low that nobody even tries to do anything.

And if you really get down to it, that is why we have a $22 trillion debt, because government has encouraged too many people to use government services so that they essentially wouldn’t want to step above the line in their lives, but live below where they were easy to control by a centralized government. Government doing the work of The Nothing wants people dependent on them, it wants them on welfare, it wants them on government health care like CareSource and Medicaid. It want’s senior citizens on poultry Social Security and it seeks at every turn to destroy the positive effects of capitalism so that the crushing effects of socialism can be delivered. Our national debt is what happens when you have both capitalism and socialism fighting for the same country. And it’s why the Beltway wants to destroy Donald Trump, because he represents positive capitalism resisting crushing steps of centralized socialism. President Trump himself is a lot like Michael Jackson, not the child molester, but the energized spirit who wants to be an overman, to step above the line and to carry all of society on his back to take them there. Michael Jackson thought he could do it with his art and collapsed in on himself when he failed. Donald Trump is trying to do the same but with economics—something people can actually build their life with. But the forces against Trump are ominous and are inspired by The Nothing to destroy everything so that the entire world collapses below the line and stays there for good. That is the conflict of our modern times.

I watched the Oprah event after the Leaving Neverland HBO documentary and noticed that she was effectively there doing the work of The Nothing. With Michael Jackson dead now, it was easy to resurrect these old child molestation cases because the effort was never to protect the kids, but it was to destroy Jackson himself. Michael Jackson realized he was falling off the top star block and that the continued investigations into his life were jeopardizing his livelihood, so he made a very progressive album in Black or White to attempt to appeal to the progressive community. But they wanted him off the above the line art and entertainment sector and into the pits of tabloid news and speculation. President Trump is stronger than Jackson, but the intentions with him is the same as it is with figures like Jackson, to pull them off their mountaintops and into below the line thinking so that the parasites of existence can pluck them of their worth and then some. The Jackson story, the national debt and the antics of President Trump are essentially the content of the Friedrich Nietzsche novel Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Only Jackson never made it back to his mountain top hideaway to live out his days away from the parasites of below the line thinking. And Trump is too stubborn to give up, because he feels that it’s the last great thing he can do on this earth. But The Nothing wants to do nothing literally but destroy and it is that tendency in us all that feeds such a thing and makes monsters out of heroes and general misery throughout all of mankind. And it thinks its winning.

Rich Hoffman

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