Tag: Bullwhips

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Below the Line Thinking of Carl Liddy: ‘The Oz Principle’ and the slut’s diamond necklace

It’s always interesting to observe the way people function. I’ve been to several events this year where people of importance specific to politics gathered and this guy wasn’t there. So it is always amazing to ponder where they get their authority and how they attempt to frame a reality which they desire in their minds. But through a lot of cigar smoke I did hear that there were a few people like this harassing friends of mine in a public shaming campaign that often goes on not just with me, but with people who challenge as some sort of change agent, the static order of the day. What is even more telling about these types of people is that they claim to know more about your reality than you do such as in this example below. How could this person possibly know all the people I come in contact with that personally asked me on the very day of the comment to run for some public office in 2019 or 2020? At least 15 different people asked me that very question on the day of this comment yet this loser sends me this:

No one really wants you to run for public office. You’re a joke and an embarrassment to local GOP officials. Your belief that people want you to run is a further sign of your very sad delusions of grandeur. You need to get help.

Carl Liddy
carlliddy236@hotmail.com
71.64.193.29

Ironically on that very day I had just completed a reread of the classic business book on social conduct called The Oz Principle which is incredibly telling about human nature. The book uses the many metaphors of the even more classic story of The Wizard of Oz to explain above and below the line thinking regarding personal accountability and a general approach to life. When someone picks a fight with me, I have a policy to never let it sit, but it also doesn’t mean that you make a belt out of the person either so a response is always required of some kind and the reason I function that way is expressed in that very good book. I have been on a project so revisiting some of these very American literary classics that are direct products of American capitalism has been a wonderful experience, books like John Kotter’s Leading Change and all the works by Eliyahu Goldratt, and Getting to Yes by Roger Fisher all have in them a common theme, they attempt to remove a “loser” attituded from the reader so that they can be successful. Now for me when I read them they only affirm what I have already known, because I have lived the principles they teach every day of my life all my life. But it was The Oz Principle that made me think of this loser Carl Liddy who is obviously a below the line thinker. Who is this greasy sloth to go around lobbying people not to read my blog and to cast aspersions about my name to fulfil a narrative that only exists in his own mind so that an illusionary existence can be maintained from his personal frame of reference, which is certainly below the line under any definition of conduct?

To call me a joke to the local GOP is a desire of his not a reality of mine and The Oz Principle covers these types of subjects nicely. The way that The Oz Principle is used in that great business book is that companies in need of change so that they can be successful are usually filled with below the line thinkers, people who desire to sabotage success and the convenient cover of other people so they can participate in blame games when something doesn’t go correctly. Any organization that wants to improve their circumstances must get rid of such people, or teach them to think differently. For instance, one of the reasons I write this blog every day is because I realize most people can’t read as fast as I do, or don’t have the tools to live life and extract from it the good things that I have. So I use Kotter’s methods of change agency to shape the landscape not just to my favor but one that is conducive to reality. If our present circumstances have been corrupted by below the line thinkers for instance, which we know is quite common in our human interactions, then the way to change that is through recognizing the condition and letting people see it and correct the behavior. And it has been working, since I started this journey a long time ago change has occurred and the people who count have benefited by these words greatly. I don’t expect anybody to admit it in the light of day, but their actions in the political realm is all the thanks I require.

Below the line thinkers need the approval of other people because they require other people to confirm their version of reality. Humans being social creatures tend to shape their conversations to whomever is present, such as for instance a woman is trying to figure out what man she is going to let pick her up at a bar for a night-cap and several approach her. One man talks about football and the upcoming playoffs. The girl likes the guy physically, but he’s greasy in his demeanor so she wants to blow him off.  After all, who needs another dumb jock wanna’ be in their lives?  She went along with the football talk trying to figure him out but concluded that beyond his fantasy football picks that the guy was a loser going nowhere, so sleeping with him wasn’t even on the table. The next guy isn’t very good-looking but he seems to know a lot about local politics so he might know someone who knows someone who might do something for him and in a round about way give her a new diamond necklace, so she considers him after she has had another nine drinks.

So the two make fun of the previous guy and his knowledge of football teams. She lets the guy take her home and she sleeps with him but something doesn’t seem right. She finds out he’s married, and after two days of dating he is ready to divorce his wife and marry her. This girl goes along for the ride hoping to get a diamond necklace out of it somewhere, because she and he are excessively below the line thinkers and they seek to justify their value with material objects which is the primary reason they have such bad quality relationships in their lives. It’s also why it’s so easy to double or even triple talk about people behind their backs. About five months later its Christmas and the guy is still going through his divorce. The girl finds out that her fiancé is going to lose half of his assets in the divorce but to keep her interested the guy is going to buy her that diamond necklace. So they are at the jeweler and she sees that first guy there buying something who was interested in the football playoffs which are now underway. She asks him very nicely and politely what he has been up to as she introduces him to her new fiancée and he politely says that he is buying rings for his professional football team commemorating their journey into the NFL playoffs. That’s when she learns that he is the owner of their local professional football team that is on their way to the Super Bowl. Suddenly that diamond necklace doesn’t seem so shiny—or good.

We see the same kind of thing in politics every day, where below the line thinking has attracted people like this Carl Liddy loser who is just another dreamer trying to make something out of their miserable existence by looting off the value of people in politics who are in the arena. They sit in the stands and arm-chair quarterback all the happenings as if they were a part of history but in reality, they are just trying to throw gifts at people so that someone will talk to them, because they are losers and everyone knows it. And rather than let the words of a blog like this help them become better people they are at war with reality itself so that they can maintain an illusion of a value they play in the whole thing, but like the characters in The Wizard of Oz, the world is the illusion, it is their hero’s journey to discover that everything they always needed was within them all along. The example of the girl, all she had to do was not let below the line thinking contaminate an opportunity for her, she could have been dating the NFL owner, but instead she went for the typical loser who showed all the right things, but in reality, didn’t have any depth, and the two of them lived miserably until their next divorces. Reality isn’t always measured based on what you see, its in what is truly there and below the line people can’t make themselves more valuable tearing other people down. It just makes them bigger losers and everyone knows it. They may not publicly say so and in private they might tear down whomever is not in the room, but what people do and say in the privacy of their own minds tells the whole story, and that story is changing for the better day by day. And I’m happy with my role in helping it along.

Rich Hoffman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rich Hoffman

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

Corporations Should be in Charge of Mars: Governments can’t even control themselves, let alone space

As I have been enjoying the National Geographic series, Mars on their network station the latest episode from this past week hit on really the philosophic difference between a liberal and a conservative and further defined my assertion that the two cannot share in governing responsibilities of anything. And now with the very real possibility of settling people on Mars, which I’m all for, we have to look in the mirror and come to some terms within ourselves once and for all. Because this problem is literally in everything, we do hour by hour every day of the week—and that is who is in charge of society. Liberals turn to government, conservatives turn toward money—generally speaking. One reverts back to primitive notions of controlling and regulating society, the other turns toward money measurements and the bottom line. Both wan to assert value into the management of whatever we are talking about. In the case of Mars, this particular episode that I’m referring to offered that we must be cautious to not let evil corporations take over the work of exploring Mars, and that we should preserve Mars for academia to explore at their back of the train pace and that the entire purpose for going there would be to learn about it, not to exploit its natural resources. So there is already an argument as to who will control Mars, just s there is on earth as to who should drill for oil, and who should not and by what methods.

I personally get tired of hearing that all corporations are evil because they want to make a profit and that they should be tightly controlled by government. Yet there is no proof in the entire history of the world that government does much of anything right no matter what country they represent or economical means they pick. Governments are slow and generally feel they shouldn’t exist by any performance measurements. However, corporations are constantly measured by many factions, if not by their share holders directly, by their internal need to compete with some other company. They can’t get away with being a bad company making bad products because market forces regulate them in the mutually agreed value of money. Governments resent this value because they simply resist the need to be measured. The proposal on the National Geographic Channel regarding Mars was that it was our first task as viewed by science to understand Mars and preserve it, not to exploit it the way mining companies are sure to do as ran by corporations.

This is why I personally dislike government workers, because no matter where they are, they generally feel that performance is not something that should be measured in whatever they do. School teachers in public school certainly don’t want to be judged on their performance, and neither does the FBI. It was just a few days ago that we learned that Robert Mueller knew about the destruction of evidence on Lisa Page and Peter Strzok’s cell phones by DOJ officials so not to incriminate any of the Obama intelligence officials in the attempted coup of the next elected president. Some of the worst corruption by any government in the world was revealed in the wake of the Trump election. Whether or not the readers here voted for President Trump or not, or like him or not, what was exposed was absolute proof that government shouldn’t be in charge of anything, because they can’t handle the temptations to not operate from a corrupt vantage point. The checks and balances do not work in government because they have no regulatory controls themselves. All we have as a society to keep government under control is the voting booth and the threat of owning guns to take over that government at gunpoint should things get really bad. So why should government be in charge of anything? Especially Mars.

Even going back to Plato’s very good book, The Republic, people have struggled to come to terms with who should be in charge of society. In American culture under capitalism market forces have turned out to be our best bet. People who work for corporations at least have some context to pursuing goodness in life. Sure they try to cheat on occasion to get competitive advantage over their rivals but market forces do a remarkably good job of sifting out value. A bad company seldom ever survives far into the future if they can’t figure out how to make money within their organizations and that value cascades throughout their organization and into their customers. When a liberal says that all corporations care about is the “bottom line” I say, well of course they do. At least they care about something. Government doesn’t care about anything.

Without companies getting involved and chasing after the value of money so they can make some of it, Mars is just sitting up there doing nothing. The rocks and minerals that might have some economic value are stuck in a static phase and have been apparently for millions of years. They will remain until either some new natural disaster such as a planetary collision or our own sun runs out of fuel and eventually overtakes our entire solar system with gravitational forces that literally destroy everything into a super powerful gravitational trash compactor, or humans through corporate investment might use some of those tools to advance society beyond a Type 1 civilization. Eventually if humans want to survive into the future, we have to not only leave the solar system, but the universe itself. There isn’t anything to preserve in life because everything is always in motion and if the value of money is providing guidance into the value of whatever activity is being undertaken, then the efforts are wasted.

Money is not evil as government generally attempt to propose. Corporations put a lot of money into politics essentially because there isn’t anything else to trade that has any real value but money. Ethics is a value but not one that can be traded for building relationships, so if money isn’t the root of everything that is good on planet earth, than what is? It was liberals who stated that money was the root of all evil because they are in denial of what makes all elements of civilizations tick. We have studied the world and can see many ancient cities that were building magnificent buildings and aspiring to becoming great economic powers. That is of course what we consider to be first-rate societies, what kind of economic power they had. A spear chucker from some third world country doesn’t have much value no matter how much National Geographic photographs their naked bodies, because they are not advancing mankind beyond its present state. Only some method of advancement is acceptable and under capitalism the value of money is turned loose to provide that much-needed value assessment that everything requires. If something is good, people will pay for it, and that money then fuels all other activities which advance the corporations and thus the human race. Governments do not do that, they only hold advancements down because they function without a value system to guide them.

Global warming isn’t a value system, it’s a religious belief. It’s not enough to state that a planet or a migratory species should be saved by the antics of evil corporations unless money is injected into the mix to bring value to the conversation. Money is the invention that mankind has invented to sort out good activity from bad. Nature by itself is just there. To have value humans invented money to extract value from nature. So the real argument is whether or not human life should just be like other life and just live and die like everything else, or should it seek to advance itself to not only save itself from the natural disasters that are sure to come anyway, and possibly save many other lives along the way. Because left alone, nothing but death will happen to everything. For anything to have a chance as sustainable life into the future, money has to be the minimal measurement of success or failure. Because government is part of the problem due to their lack of internal measurements and tendency to act corruptly because of it. They can’t be in charge of Mars, the moon, or anything in space. They can’t even govern themselves.

Rich Hoffman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rich Hoffman

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The Illegal FBI Activism Against General Flynn: It could happen to any of us

How bad is it you might wonder, as we have previously considered the implications of the attorney for Michael Cohen’s sentencing by the FBI, and Paul Manafort, both people close to the president in some way or another. Well, the General Flynn case paints an accurate picture of just how out of control the FBI was and still is in regard to attempting to overthrow a president elected the correct way into occupying the White House. In a recent onstage interview James Comey who was leading the FBI at the time explained how he sent a couple of FBI agents into the White House to interview General Flynn and obtain incriminating information that was actually a crime created by an investigation that Flynn wasn’t even sure was happening as he was in a friendly mood during the transition and hadn’t yet learned the activism against him. And Comey attempted to lay all the blame at the feet of an unorganized Trump White House as he revered the good ol’ days of President Bush and President Obama who were very professional and procedural in their handling of management. And in that simple statement James Comey justified everything illegal that he personally assisted with in trying to overthrow the presidency by using the FBI to do so, including the seed he planted with the Mueller investigation.

Michael Flynn is a retired general from the United States Army with over 30 years of experience. These days people should be falling all over themselves to honor him, but due to his relationship with President Trump, it made him a target for anybody and everyone who wanted to bring down the Executive Branch. The intent of the FBI was clear, they sought to entrap the general into incriminating evidence by going into the White House and pretending all was well during the transitional phase then using that information later during the Mueller investigation to leverage him into working against the president, just as was attempted by Michael Cohen and Paul Manafort. Cohen the lawyer of course will say anything if the price is right, which is why he’s a lawyer, so he turned on Trump and would say anything. But Flynn turned out to have nothing incriminating to offer but, in the process, he has lost nearly every material possession he had worked a lifetime to get just to cover his legal expenses.

The radicals at the FBI had no problem following Comey’s orders which were clearly in rebellion to the new president simply because he didn’t feel that the people had made the right decision and that Trump just wasn’t going to be allowed to be in the White House. Using the tools of the FBI Comey openly sought to overturn the election. And in his arrogance, he has had the audacity to call himself a hero by implication. As Trump discovered the level of Comey’s role as a FBI director and possible leaker to the press, the President fired him and for that Comey has said it was obstruction of justice. Comey claims it was obstruction because a phony investigation into Russian tampering into the 2016 election had been initiated by Democrats to essentially keep Trump on his heels and keep the forces against him in their jobs. There was never any Russian tampering, but because of the DNC funded dossier which claimed Russian connections and prostitutes pissing in a bed the Obamas had slept in, the FBI figured that the best way to keep all their dirty hands from being noticed was through a false accusation at Trump and force him to defend it—which would keep them all in their jobs.

It was one of the first things Comey brought up to Trump was that Russian dossier and he did it to gain emotional leverage on the matter, and to protect his job. If Trump discovered what Comey had been up to then the leaked documents the FBI director had leaked to the press would inspire a special investigation completely politically motivated to further hinder the president in the efforts he had been elected to conduct. The FBI thought they knew better than the people who elected Trump and they worked to abuse their power to obtain FISA warrants to spy on the incoming administration and help them pave a possible trail to prosecuting members of the transition into being compromised. That is how Flynn became wrapped up in the whole ordeal to begin with. When the FBI spoke to him at the White House Flynn thought it was just members of the same team chatting about the circumstances of the world. Not that the FBI would use everything against him which only turned out to be in how Flynn remembered some dates that were irrelevant to anything in the matter. The whole conversation was a perjury trap.

If that was all there was to it, we might just say that the law is the law and that Flynn should have been more careful, so he gets what he gets. But that’s not how it is, we know that the FBI helped cover up the events of the DNC, such as Bill Clinton meeting with Loretta Lynch to discuss how the FBI would handle his wife’s case on the illegal email server they were investigating. Or in allowing Hillary Clinton and her staff members to destroy their cell phones and laptops prior to turning them over to the FBI during their investigation. Or Comey trying to merge the law into the Department of Justice decision not to prosecute the presidential nominee without undermining the rule of law his agents expected to live by simply because Lynch had decided to call off the investigation so that Hillary could run for president of the United States. The Democrats surrounding Hillary Clinton broke many laws, much worse than anything General Flynn had done, or Michael Cohen yet nothing happened to any of them. The FBI only went after Trump Republicans allowing themselves to become weapons of a political nature which is not what they were ever supposed to be.

What has happened to General Flynn just for being associated with President Trump is a travesty of justice. And we are all warned not to mess around with the FBI and cast our opinions otherwise the same fate might befall us too. If you mess with America’s intelligence agencies, they have the power to destroy your lives, and that is the message behind Comey’s activism. Because even if a member of the team gets fired, the system will rally behind the fallen soldier and destroy the life of whoever did such a thing. In Comey’s case his wife was a Hillary supporter and he obviously was operating as a Democrat, even though he has attempted to misdirect people into thinking otherwise. Just as he has covered his role in all these illegal activities by trying to associate them with justice instead of overthrow and election tampering. It was never the Russians who tampered with the election, it was Comey and his employees. Yet to cover their tracks they would rather start World War III if it made the President look bad and fulfil their political objectives for future elections. The FBI was in the business of overthrow and they are the ones guilty of espionage and election tampering. Certainly not General Flynn. He has been a pawn in the game that nobody really knew was being played, but at least now we do. The question is, what are we going to do about it?

Rich Hoffman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rich Hoffman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rich Hoffman

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The Next Big Thing: Cheering on Richard Branson and his wonderful company Virgin Galactic

Putting politics aside which is hard to do because ultimately everything is political, but considering our modern conditions, those definitions are changing by the moment. I am and have always been a very excited person for everything new little thing that comes along as I am very much in love with the things that humans imagine. Nature is nice too, but I really like what humans do with the tools provided by nature and to see how civilization can advance. While many look at cell phones and the hyper communications that come with them as dangerous to the old order of doing things I think it’s all part of our natural evolution as a species accelerating toward some yet to be known destination. While everyone who knows me understands how much I love tradition particularly the American western mythologies and concepts, I am very much an achievement driven person excited for tomorrow in so many ways. And that is why despite his politics, I have been very much a fan of Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic endeavors. And according to him from the interview shown below, he still plans to get his space airline into space before Christmas of this year, which would be a great feat. I am very much hopeful that he will be successful.

It’s been coming along for a while now, but if it is considered the sheer amount of information that is coming at us so fast and furious these days as opposed to when man landed on the moon in 1969 the human race is scratching at a huge change in thought and processing. As I was catching up on what Virgin Galactic was up to and if they were going to meet their timeline one of the lead stories on the Microsoft News dashboard was the newly recorded sounds of Mars as captured by the recent rover that just landed there. Much of this past week due to the very good series on the National Geographic Channel about colonizing Mars radio broadcasts across the country were contemplating what the steps to such an act would look like and what we’d all do once we got there. Elon Musk has after all been turning up the heat for his own departure from earth to live on the ancient red planet. I see many of his antics such as the smoking pot incident on a recent podcast as his teenage moment of creating enough escape velocity for himself to make the journey. He is sabotaging his own relationship with the earth so that he can psychologically make that journey to be the first to live on Mars. Jeff Bezos of Amazon is about to unleash a series of space endeavors that are quite ambitious with his Blue Origin company. Between all these adventurous billionaires fueled by childhood loves of movies like Star Wars and Star Trek compounded by a strong deregulatory economy by the Trump administration—the primer is set for some very exciting technological breakthroughs on the frontier of space.

As I was playing Red Dead Redemption 2 by Rockstar Games on my PlayStation 4 and started messing around with the online play with many thousands of other players all over the world simultaneously, I couldn’t help but think of how subconsciously as a human species this visit to the western genre was necessary for our current age to accept what was about to happen. It’s not the safety of the herd that the human race is after, it’s the rough existence away from the support of civilization for which adventure promises great rewards and many opportunities for death. This next generation needs to be someone reckless and masochistic in order to endure the rigors of a dynamic shift in human consciousness, leaving the comfort of our earth and scratching at the unlimited barriers of space travel. Presently we call space anything over 62 miles, or anybody who travels over 50 miles and astronaut. We think of the moon as a long way away, and Mars prohibitively distant. But all those definitions are about to change just as they did in the period of American westward expansion once electricity and phone communications shrunk the world with power. The main observation I had about that great video game was that human beings needed to revisit that last period of adventure and see what it looked like so that they could take this next big journey.

I don’t really like the term “collective consciousness” because it assumes that we are all functioning out of one great well of wisdom which is not what I think is going on. Rather, there are certain rational decisions that are common to reality so it is bound to be a mathematical probability that all humans will come to similar conclusions just by the mandate of deductive reasoning. And that is why texting is more interesting than talking to an actual person for most people, the human mind to seek out the rapid communication forms that come from something like a modern smart phone as opposed to a very static conversation with one single human being is needed for the world of tomorrow, where information must be process quickly as our knowledge base explodes from what was previously understood. Young people especially will have to think much faster than humans do today and be shocked by much fewer discovers than previous generations just to keep up with all the news stories that will began to demand our attention as the frontiers of space are unzipped.

Aerospace is one of my favorite industries due to its exploratory nature. I desire to be a part of it as much as possible and to be quite honest, I love every day of my life because I am. I love to help build the vehicles that take humans to the frontiers of our imagination and I have had a front row seat to many of these new developments. So out of a love of adventure which transcends politics, I am happily cheering on the events of these coming days. Richard Branson has worked hard with his team to get into space first and if he doesn’t make it soon, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos will overtake Virgin Galactic. So he doesn’t have all the time in the world, competition and capitalism demand results and the pressure is certainly on. If Branson can get into space by Christmas of 2018 it would be a life changing moment for many people around the world. But if Christmas comes and goes and Virgin Galactic is still mired in testing, then Blue Origin or SpaceX will get there first. This new space race isn’t between nations and governments, it between billionaires and capitalist mandates and that is redefining everything rapidly.

Humans are such conceptual creatures and once we get an idea in our heads reality has a way of growing around it. And from what I see that growth will spawn entirely new industries and lifestyles. There is great reason to be optimistic. Once space tourism is unleashed, likely by Virgin Galactic first, our conceptual knowledge will expand at such a pace that the world has never witnessed. We have been preparing ourselves for this age for years with the rapid digestion of so much information. It’s not by accident or greed, it’s all by necessity. As I’ve said many times my goal in a very busy life is to read at least one book a week, but I am even feeling the pressure to read not just one, but five. So grudgingly I have turned to audio books for some of them because by necessity I need the information coming at me faster than I could possibly read everything and still do everything else needed in an 18-hour work day which is pretty typical. We are all going through a similar transition and that’s what it takes to live and grow in an expanding economy driven by human adventure and curiosity. And much of that next phase starts when Richard Branson gets his Virgin Galactic space tourism over that 50-mile line where humans become technically astronauts.

Rich Hoffman

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The Cause of the Wagner Murders: Being dumb is just as dangerous as any weapon

Let’s get something straight, judging people is good. It’s really good. The current world may say judge not and ye not be judged and I say to that, bull shit. I make my living being very judgmental and I will never starve, nor will my family because of it. Judgement is what makes us as human beings different from say a………………………………rock. So before anybody says to me, “how dare you judge people so negatively” I will say to them, shut the hell up and go get a basic education, then lets talk. Passing judgment is the way humans navigate through their existence and if you don’t do it, you might as well cut off your arms and legs because judgment is just as important to anyone and everyone. And with that in mind I watched the arraignment of the various Wagner family members intensely as they were charged with the execution style murders of eight Rhoden family members. Each of them had their own court appearance, Billy Wagner being the last, all 6’ 6” of him at 274 pounds and covered in tattoos. His wife Angela and their sons Jake and George leading up to the climax as the public saw them really for the first time. It was quite an event to look at people who could even consider murdering people in such a violent way, and all over a child custody battle. But it wasn’t just them who were part of the exhibition, it was the family who had gathered in the audience which told more of the story, one that is worth noting for posterity.

What I saw in the various arraignments was a family who liked each other and were sad that they would likely never see each other again. Their lives were ruined and essentially over and particularly in Angela, the wife, that reality had hit her hard. They looking like a nice family that probably enjoyed being around other members of their family and had hopes and dreams that lasted until that crushing moment that they decided to go kill the family that had disputed them in a custody battle over a child that was shared between them. Literature is filled with the rage of passion that comes from such emotions—Romeo and Juliet come to mind. It’s not like history doesn’t have something to say on these matters and the purpose of education is so that we learn from history, even from the fiction that authors come up with to deal with raw emotions that sometimes do erupt under tenuous circumstances.

As I watched the body language of each of them, especially Billy I couldn’t help but think that it was stupidity that had brought them all to that moment and it was such a tragedy. Being stupid in modern America is a choice and in rural Ohio a long way to the east of Cincinnati there isn’t much of a daily need for books and such. Billy likely made his way through life using his size as leverage in negotiating with other people intimidating them into compliance, so he didn’t have to put much thought into things. As he got older, he tattooed himself up because it looked scary and gave him even more capital when he needed to frighten people into doing what he said. So he didn’t have much experience in problem solving—most things in life he could solve in eastern Ohio by looking scary. That was until one of his boys impregnated the daughter of the Rhoden family that was deep into illegal activity. Between their chop shop on the family compound, their illegal cock-fighting games, and their marijuana growing operation, the Rhodens were a ruling family in that part of the world and their capital assets were their access to power. The police obviously knew what was going on and was probably involved to some extent. So when the Wagners decided that they couldn’t rely on the courts to help them with their custody case they resorted to the only means of communication they understood, brute strength and intimidation. After all, a big guy like Billy didn’t want to hear his ol’ lady bitch about some chick that his son had screwed for the rest of his life and the granddaughter that they had limited access to because the Rhodens were politically much more powerful. So he rationalized that he just kill them all so he wouldn’t have to hear about it anymore.

I’m sure the situation I described isn’t far from reality based on what we have learned so far in the case. Many families could tell the same story, they just usually don’t end up killing a rival family. As we are considering this case here on these pages, many families are thinking of Christmas and there are a lot of women getting themselves worked up over some girl their boys are dating, or some affair that someone had with someone else that is tainting the Holiday experience, or some in-law that they don’t like. Unfortunately, the Holidays for most people are filled with people they don’t like, but are nice to out of the necessity for civility. But in the car ride home the bitching never stops and it goes on incessantly and if you are a big boy like Billy who had up to that point in his life solved most problems with brute force, there really isn’t a good way to shut up the voices of dissent that come from family interactions with people who don’t share your immediate values. A big, dumb man covered in tattoos, limited reading ability and a terrible education to reference anything against is pretty defenseless in a world that requires intellect and thoughtful consideration and the sad thing about the Wagner situation is that they were all just too dumb to solve their problems with the Rhodens any other way.

As brutal as the Wagner massacre of the Rhoden family was, there is a very Christian like morality layered under it all that naturally comes from life in the Bible belt, a morality on the benefits of young children who were spared in the killings. But to any intelligent observation from the outside world, it’s not the custody of the child that was the problem. It was their level of intellectual ability that would surely destroy any child spawned from such dumb people. Being dumb is a choice, it’s not the same as being intellectually handicapped because of some birth defect. It’s a choice not to learn to read and write properly and not to use history as a guide on how to maneuver through the future. To just solve a problem the way that Shakespeare wrote about over 400 years ago is dumb because it is ignoring 500 years of human evolution in rational discourse. And if the truth were told, that is the cause of these terrible murders—sheer dumbness, purposeful lack of intellect displayed upon the upbringing of a defenseless child. Because even if the murders didn’t occur the poor kid would grow up to be just as dumb as its parents, bitching about the same dumb problems every Holiday about the same dumb people they ran into in town. And the kid would over eat and become fat like the rest of them because they were too dumb to correct the behavioral characteristics of destructive living because their brains were all underdeveloped and trying to look at the world through a pinhole that their tiny little brains had barely managed to poke through a cardboard box. And when a conflict came to pass, they solved it with the same brand of rationality. And lots of people died for no reason at all and a family that could have lived a fairly decent life given their circumstances of intellect are now going to die in prison and never see each other again—which is pretty damn stupid.

Rich Hoffman

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