Tag: corruption

What Disney Calls Magic is what Chick Fil A Calls Competency: Taking away the excusses to happiness

People have been wondering why as a grown man who could go anywhere in the world why my wife and I went to Disney World for vacation, without any kids. Well, there were a lot of reasons, but one of the main ones is something I don’t hear a lot of people talking about, but its at the core of their theme park business model, and its very similar to Chick Fil A. What Disney sells is happiness, its in their mission statement which is clear the moment you enter the property in Orlando welcoming you to the happiest place on earth. Obviously the first thing that cynical people think of in Disney are the huge expenses and the long lines, but there is a reason everything costs so much yet is so extraordinarily crowded. Its essentially for the same reason that Chick Fil A is crowded every afternoon just for selling chicken, it’s because as a company, they don’t make excuses for failure and have a can do spirit on everything, and that is precisely what people are looking for at the Disney Parks, and why I specifically wanted to vacation there. I’m a very positive person and professionally everywhere I have turned over the last year and a half was some drag asser looking for every little excuse not to do something, and it was driving me crazy. It had been time for a Disney vacation.

That doesn’t mean that what you get at Disney is happiness. I watched carefully during my vacation the other people who were looking for the same thing as me, but obviously were not so inclined to experience such a product as Disney calls “magic.” Magic is the word for it, because in reality, its only the performance of illusions, not some mystical energy created to manipulate the impossible. Magic to create happiness is a series of tricks designed to evoke in the user a feeling they couldn’t get anywhere else, but not all people are prepared to experience it. So they can go to Disney World and spend many tens of thousands of dollars, they can have their magic bands and take the shuttle from the airport to the parks without paying all the tolls on the highways between the two, and all they’ll see are long lines and misery. They’ll complain later that Disney World is all about just making a buck and is for kids as they seek some psychological distance between their present reality and any future attempt at happiness. For many people, they do not want to be happy, because there is responsibility in it, so even going to Disney World can’t do it for them. But on this trip, I wanted particularly to study Disney as a company and how they maintained their brand so I was watching with different eyes than I normally would in times past.

One thing that was obvious, and likely the key to their success at Disney was that all of their employees were taught to buy into the philosophy, like Chick Fil A. You don’t go to Disney to hear excuses about why this or that can’t or won’t happen. With them anything is possible. Any request from a customer is entertained, and it’s done so with a smile on their faces. As I went everywhere and asked lots of questions of what they call “cast members” a personality trait emerged that was part of their employee development. The customer was always right, and the employees of Disney were taught never to complain, or to let it out that they disagreed with those very valuable customers. Everything was on time; no rides or attractions were shut down because they didn’t have enough employees to operate the activities. Nothing stopped at Disney World due to massive call offs of a weak labor pool to draw from. To make the parks work magically each day, it literally took tens of thousands of park employees to make the massive operation run. If 10% of their work force didn’t show up for work on time there would be big problems in selling that happiness, yet Disney didn’t have that problem at all. The reason why is the key to the answer.

To conduct my experiments my wife and I stayed in Kissimmee and spent some time out of the park interacting with the various work cultures there to draw some long-held conclusions that I have had. In years past, whenever we went to central Florida, we would meet at the family condo over in Cape Canaveral, and a fair amount of socializing was always part of the trip. This time, we didn’t talk to anybody, we just conducted my experiment spending a lot of time at all four Disney Parks, eating and interacting with their various resorts, and crawling over every inch of their Disney Springs development. We used all their various transportation systems and even talked to the janitors who walked around the park cleaning up the trash. I purposely looked for the ugly side of Disney, any peeled paint, any decaying wood, any sign of shortcuts toward the magic illusions that Disney was so obsessed with creating. Then once the parks closed, or before they opened, we would eat and shop down in Kissimmee and the differences in culture were obvious.

We were staying only two miles from the entrance to Animal Kingdom and Hollywood Studios the entire time along RT 192 which had a lot of great Gatlinburg types of tourist traps that I love so much. Only the employees almost everywhere we went sucked, and I mean, they sucked big time. We went to Joe’s Crab Shack which was just a stone’s throw to the south of Animal Kingdom, off the Disney property and it was obviously mismanaged in a terrible way. It took 15 minutes for someone to even ask to seat us, even with most of the place full of empty tables. Then we were told it would take an additional 15 minutes to seat us. When I asked why, they told us that they had a few call-offs and that they were running behind. Disney operates hundreds of restaurants, hotels, rides, and other vendors and I don’t think they would permit any of their employees from making such a ridiculous statement. Why would a business make their mismanagement problems the problems of the paying customer? Its an absurd concept, so we left Joe’s Crab Shack and looked for other options. And we found the same behavior everywhere else, including a Cracker Barrel

Our hotel had half dead slugs running the place, the room cleaners kept forgetting to give us new towels, coffee packs and whatever we asked for because they were not engaged in maintaining our happiness. They were just going through the motions like the rest of the world. Disney by contrast didn’t permit such excuses and that was obviously part of what they called magic. From the airport in Orlando to the surrounding establishments around the Disney World property, the contrasts were obvious, and a key to the success story. It really came down to a management decision to take away the excuses of unhappiness. If people wanted to see the strings and hidden chambers of the magic show, they could. But Disney would not be responsible for it. Their whole thing was to take away the excuses to be miserable. If people chose to be miserable anyway, that was on them.

I am one who likes to be happy, so it didn’t take much for me to enjoy that level of competency. In such a “can do” culture it doesn’t take much for me to respect such a thing. The cast members no matter how important their roles were in the customer experience held to the company motto and it was obviously successful. It shows what can be done when a company has expectations from their employees to behave a certain way and to ensure that the customer experience from their side is positive and excuse free. And in that, there are lots of lessons for the outside world to come to grips with, which is precisely why I chose this vacation over other options, which I’m glad I did.

Rich Hoffman

Democrats Aren’t Very Smart: McConnell is doing the right thing

Let me explain something to all Democrats, the same thing I have been saying to family and associates at all these Holiday events, congresspeople should consider themselves lucky that Mitch McConnell is working with the White House on this impeachment trial in the senate. As I’ve said on many occasions, I do not hate Democrats. But I do look at them as undeveloped people who require more learning in the ways of life. We are not all equal, some of us work harder than others, some of us are smarter than others, and some of us care a whole hell of a lot more than others. Democrats are far behind on the evolutionary instruction that it takes to be a complete person. They do not have a right to destroy our republic just because they cannot create a viable candidate to run for the office of president—which is all this congressional impeachment attempt has been. Democrats are lucky that they aren’t being beaten in the streets with a war, rather just having McConnell state that the impeachment is going nowhere in the senate. Because if that wasn’t the case, then violence against participating Democrats is the next step, and they don’t want that.

People do not have a right to ruin your life, and that is what Democrats are attempting to do by removing President Trump. The Dow Jones this past week closed at over 28,000 and has the potential of going into the mid-30s once Trump is re-elected in 2020. I’ve spelled it out in these articles that I have done over the last decade. I was the one who said what would happen to our economy if we just took away all the ridiculous, self-imposed regulatory burdens that were stifling our way of life. There was a very interesting article in the Wall Street Journal on December 14th titled, “Economists Got the Decade All Wrong. They’re Trying to Figure Out Why.” Well, I explained it with hundreds of articles on the matter. Everyone was predicting a recession; this is the first one we’ve had in America where a recession did not happen. Well, its due to Trump unleashing the market. That alone makes him one of the greatest presidents that we’ve ever had. And really, we could point to many hundreds of real accomplishments as to why he should be re-elected. Who cares what party he’s from? Democrats have benefited from the Trump presidency as much as anybody, yet they can’t admit it because they are just too stupid for their own good.

The Trump economy is great because he didn’t follow the advice of all the micro managers who cause economic downturns. Trump ignored the cycles and concentrated on positive pro-growth influences and the results are unmistakable, and far from an accident. Since the Trump election, consumer confidence in the markets has exploded and have continued in spite of all the attempts at bad news by the Democrats over the last three years. We should all be angry at the attempted coup by the FBI—ran by Democrats. We should deeply resent this impeachment attempt, since the FBI coup failed. And we should hate the attempts to sabotage the markets with so much negativity and second guessing that went on with the Chinese trade dispute. In spite of everything we still have a strong economy with the potential of much, much better days ahead. So why should we care about Democrats and their desire to impeach Trump because as a party they are trying to attack our way of life? Its insane to think we should care.

I’m not one who thinks everyone deserves a seat at the table out of fairness if the other participants haven’t worked very hard to understand how life works. Even that the Wall Street Journal would consider exploring why the economy did not behave the way they predicted should say everything about why Democrats are not prepared for this election, because they don’t understand market forces and how the psychology of human behavior works the way it does. I sympathize that not everyone thinks about these things as much as I do for instance. When I talk to people, especially at these holiday settings, I am shocked by how much people like to drink and to forget, as opposed to stimulate their intellects so that they can make better decisions. I don’t talk to people much because its often a hindrance to furtherance, so I just let everyone else gabble on sipping on their stupid alcoholic drinks and rolling in the mud of their own ignorance trying to sound smart when the only way they can do so is to get everyone drunk around them to create the illusion. If that’s what they want to do, have at it, but don’t expect the rest of the world to cater to your weaknesses. That is precisely what Democrats expect out of this impeachment trial and once McConnell signaled that he wasn’t going to play along, the wind went out of their sails quickly, as it should have.

Republicans and Democrats are not equal sides of some American philosophy, Democrats are typically stupid people not very intellectually curious about the ways of the world. It doesn’t say much that most educators are Democrats, because they have simply attempted to dumb down the system to match their scope. But they aren’t very smart, they don’t know much about history, they aren’t very smart on understanding markets, they don’t know much about business, or even international philosophy of intertwining cultures. If they did know more, they would likely end up being Republicans. I would say that Trump used to be a Democrat and the more he learned about life, the more he became a Republican. I’ve said often that Ronald Reagan once thought about communist ideas and was a supporter of socialism when he was a young actor. As he grew up he became more of a conservative and eventually became a great Republican. The difference between the two, is not that they are equals, but rather evolutionary states of being. Democrats are lazy thinkers and that’s why they are stupid. They may be nice people who shop at the GAP and spend money going out to dinner, but they are not great characters of intellect who have any answers, let alone equal points of view.

And that’s what’s at stake with this impeachment, it’s the stupid people versus the smart people. Smart people generally aren’t born that way, they work to be in that state. Stupid people decide to be stupid because they are either too lazy to do the work, or they are just not courageous enough to step out of the crowd to establish themselves as people of intellect when the tides stand against it. That in itself doesn’t make them bad people, just people who are not far enough along their evolutionary tract to qualify to make decisions within a republic for which we all stand. Being a Republican is an evolutionary path more than just a side of the pyramid for which everyone has their own point of view that must be compromised. McConnell and the rest of the Republicans have an obligation to stand with Trump, and that lesson is what Democrats are going to have to face and they should consider themselves lucky. They could experience great violence, and if we had a less civil republic, they likely wouldn’t be walking around in a healthy condition.

Rich Hoffman

The IG Report Has Come and Gone: So what does it all mean?

I’ve had a lot of requests for my opinion on the IG Report released last week, while I was on vacation at Disney World. I could have written something on the matter, but I felt I had already said much of the nature of it prior to my vacation. Perhaps not on the IG Report specifically, but on the nature of the government and where all this activity was headed. I watched the report while on the move on vacation at the Orlando International Airport and my thoughts were that it was what was expected. While it was disappointing to see that Michael Horowitz did not have the guts to go against the institutions of government who had committed crimes of spying against the Trump administration directed by the Obama administration, the “evidence” that would link everything was ignored or destroyed in the process of the investigation. So the emphasis of the report was that nobody admitted to the evidence so therefor conclusions couldn’t be made. This allowed the FBI to fall on the sword and admit to procedural errors, while taking the edge off the deeper problems of corruption that would bring down so many of our government institutions.

The reason they didn’t find bias is because they refused to look at it, even though it was right in front of all their faces, because as every lawyer knows, especially those who defend criminals in murder cases, you can never admit to something because once you do, you are culpable. That’s why they always advise clients to plead “not guilty” even if they believe them to be guilty as hell. Because once you admit to something, you own it. But if you don’t you force the evidence to be put forth, and if the FBI and other government agencies destroy the evidence along the way and refuse to properly document it, then they know it can never be proven in a court of law. So why admit to it. What the IG Report states emphatically is that the Obama FBI deliberately misled the FISA Court to spy on incoming President Trump with an intention to build a coup against him and remove him from office. The fact that no political bias was found in the multitude of documents reviewed was because nobody admitted to it. Its that simple.

The light tone of the report was just too complicated for most American people busy with their lives to understand. And the government is counting on that to keep their institutions in check. Michael Horowitz and many in his office, and connected to the report including Trump himself understand that this case could easily destroy public faith in the FBI, the DOJ, and everything connected up to the White House. There is a real danger of the further implications as to what has happened that may destroy our faith in them forever so by admitting to the political bias there is a real fear of what that might cost the established institutions as they are functioning today.

It was interesting to watch James Comey attempt to spin the IG Report into a forgiveness effort of the FBI which he handled so poorly. He felt it was giving him a way out of actually having to go to jail for the crimes that were implied, and were so egregious that justice would destroy everything our government was built on. To go back in time and admit that the Obama White House went so far is unfathomable to the institutions so the hope remains that all this will blow over without jail time and a collapse of the FBI from the top down. If anything, the IG Report makes it so that Comey and his FBI look even worse, but the truth of it is hidden in lawyerly words that do not say in bold letters, THE FBI COMMITTED A CRIME. Instead, it requires reading the report and understanding that the investigation was done by the people who were largely guilty of the crime. Of course, they aren’t going to come out and admit to their bias, that would admit to guilt and nobody in their right mind—legally would do that—thinking as lawyers do. It might be ethically correct to admit to such a thing, but we aren’t talking about ethical people in this case.

After getting off my plane and heading over to Disney Springs to kill some time before the check in to our hotel a few hours later I had some time to read the report and watch some coverage of it on my phone while sipping on some drinks at Jock Lindsey’s Hanger Bar with a nice view of the lake there. Nobody in that packed place or in the surrounding areas cared about the IG Report or about the Democrat impeachment attempt. And as much as that bothers me, because people should care that these government types broke the law and would throw the book and anything else they could at any of us if the situation was reversed. How can you have 17 errors by the FBI in the very simple FISA court process and not have someone get in trouble over it? According to the government, sloppiness is not a criminal misconduct. Try telling that to a cop when they want to search your car for a gun when you tell them you don’t have one, then they search and find one under the seat. A sloppiness defense would not be acceptable. A night in jail would be imminent.

The corruption that is evident in the IG Report is so bad that it is simply beyond belief for most people. People, especially at that place reported, from the very busy airport over to the Disney Springs shopping complex couldn’t care less about Comey, the IG Report, the FBI or what President Obama might have done or when he did it. All they cared about was whether or not they had money to spend there and if they could have an opportunity to make more. And with President Trump, the economy is great and getting better, and in the end of all this, that is all anybody is ever going to care about. That realization was disappointing to me and certainly didn’t inspire me to write a response while on my vacation, but it’s the truth. I’d love to see people go to jail, because they should. But Trump is going to get re-elected and the following four years I have a feeling will bring forth justice in ways the Democrats can’t even fathom yet.

I think for myself I am more interested in justice than in improved finances. I have made that decision in my own life many, many times. But that is not the way people are, they want what they want, when they want it, and what they want is Trump and his great economy. They don’t care about the IG Report which gives losers like these old FBI agents such as Comey a free pass to lie to our faces and claim they are not guilty, so that they don’t have to pay for their crimes since there is no stomach to press them on it by anybody. It still doesn’t change the crimes that were committed in the IG Report. Those crimes were real, and they did happen even though nobody is admitting to it, because nobody has the guts.

Rich Hoffman

The Full Sized Millennium Falcon at Hollywood Studios: A dream come true

I’ve been writing these articles every day for the last ten years, except for a month of two here and there. And during that entire time, I occasionally do these Millennium Falcon articles about that fictional ship from Star Wars because simply put, I’ve been in love that that vessel most of my life. When I was little it captured my imagination in many positive ways and has been a very important part of my life. It has always represented to me what could be instead of what is, and the excitement of such an intergalactic hot rod that is like a deep space RV has always been something of a goal of mine to see as a reality. I have thought of building one myself. I have supported other people who have attempted to do so. And whenever there has been some kind of movie prop or promotional material regarding the Millennium Falcon, I would go way out of my way to see it. Recently when Disney was promoting Solo: A Star Wars Story at NKU in the Cincinnati area, I took a very rare day off work to go see it. I am not a guy who stands in lines for much of anything, but for that one I showed up many hours early just to see an exhibit in a cargo container set up in the university parking lot. So you might imagine dear reader what it was like for me to finally see the Millennium Falcon in real life at Disney’s Hollywood Studios and to actually get the opportunity to fly the thing in a simulator environment. I would call it a religious experience above seeing Moses come down off Mount Sinai to present the Ten Commandments. For me, it was bigger than that.

Over 20 years ago I was invited with a special contingent of people to attend a unique viewing of Star Wars at the Smithsonian in Washington D.C. It was a museum dedication to the costumes and model props from the actual films and how the power of myth had helped shape our society. It was a big deal for me, I was there with the Joseph Campbell Foundation for which George Lucas himself was on the board of directors. I had at that point spent most of a decade reading Joseph Campbell and much of his source material from Nietzsche, to Thomas Mann, Carl Jung, James Joyce including Finnegan’s Wake which has turned out to be one of my favorite books ever, and many, many others—so this was a very scholarly group I was meeting in Washington D.C. I was able to meet Joseph Campbell’s wife Jean at this event and I had brought my wife and kids so the weekend was promising to be very intellectual and a great networking event. Publishers were there, filmmakers, producers, it was a good group.

I got to the event at the Smithsonian and we stopped at the actual model of the Millennium Falcon, the big one, from The Empire Strikes back that was over two feet long. I froze there looking at it for what turned out to be the rest of the day. Everyone else moved on, but I stayed there looking at that model close up for the first time for the rest of the day, and what turned out to be the rest of the weekend. I didn’t meet up with everyone later, but instead spent the rest of the weekend looking at the rest of the exhibit with my family and returning back to that Millennium Falcon model over and over again taking countless pictures of it from every angle in a time when you still had to develop film, before anybody had digital cameras or even a hint at an iPhone. I never forgot every little detail on that model and have been thinking about it every day since. So seeing the full sized model of the Millennium Falcon that the Imagineers had built at Galaxy’s Edge at Hollywood Studios, Florida was well beyond a mind bending experience for me. It was God himself sitting there for me to indulge in until my heart’s content. It was a massive collision of imagination and engineering wrapped up into infinite possibilities that for me were beyond exciting.

I have talked about how excited I was to be finally at Galaxy’s Edge to walk around in the world of Star Wars. Well, I do have a voluminous vocabulary, and I don’t have words for how I felt about this experience, of seeing the Millennium Falcon aaaaaannnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnddddddd, being able to go inside it and fly it. It was the most exciting thing I can ever remember doing, not just in the function, but in the possibility of it in thinking that such a thing would never have been possible. If there is anything of a heaven in my life, I could put that experience on loop for all eternity and not feel like I missed any other opportunity at happiness. That experience for me was the definition of happiness and my only regret is that I can’t have that experience every day for the rest of my life,

I can only thank the Imagineers and for Disney as a company for building such a thing. I might even buy some Disney stock after this wonderful vacation experience. For all the talk about social justice from Disney ruining Star Wars, this experience went a long way for me to forgive them for their mistakes. Disney could have gone cheap on this attraction and done something on much less of a scale, like the AT AT at Star Tours which I’ve always loved, but wished had been full sized. That full-sized model of the Falcon was as detailed if not more so as the Smithsonian model I fell in love with all those years ago. It was so special to see it up close, to eat near it, to walk inside it, to be a part of it in a reality created by Disney Imagineers for the love of people like me. They didn’t have to go that far, but they did, and I feel so much better for the experience of it.

I’m a very positive person, I have lived through lots and lots of very distinct disappointments that likely would have killed most people. But I never remember going to bed at night and waking up the next day without hope in thinking that today could be the best day of my life. In a lot of ways my source of inspiration was always the Millennium Falcon, a beat up old ship that everyone thought was junk that always ended up saving the day, and by the time it has arrived to these new movies, is the last hope for everyone in surviving to a new day. That has always been my relationship to that fictional spacecraft. And to that effect, I can say that no matter how tough life has ever been, no matter how disappointing days could sometimes be, it was worth waking up each day to arrive at a point in life where seeing this full-sized Millennium Falcon was possible. To say that I am filled with exuberance is an understatement. Seeing that thing that is much more than a movie prop in symbology is one of those things that I will always say was one of the best things I’ve ever had the privilege to experience. And that in itself is saying quite a lot.  It is a reminder that no matter how bad things get in life, its worth pushing through because somedays you have days like the ones I’ve just had where dreams do come true.  The fight is worth it just to have such opportunities.  So you should never cut yourself short and give up when things get tough, because they can always get better so long as you keep trying and working at it.

Rich Hoffman

The Great Work of Disney Imagineers at Disney Springs: Every zoning board in America should pay attention to the good work there

One of the things I was most curious about, regarding the Disney Springs renovation from what used to be called Downtown Disney, to its present form, was why the Imagineers felt they had to create a fictional back-story about what is essentially a shopping and entertainment destination. I have always loved Downtown Disney and when Disney bought Lucasfilm back in 2012 I had a strong feeling they would do good things with the Indiana Jones property and was excited to see what it might be. I was a little surprised that the creation of Jock Lindsey’s Hanger Bar was one of their first projects so upon landing in Florida during a recent vacation it was the very first place I went. I couldn’t wait to get there as I had been watching the re-construction of Downtown Disney into Disney Springs for much of the last decade and I had to see, smell and touch everything.

My point of reference for these kinds of places is Atlantis from the great book Atlas Shrugged, the kind of world that if human creativity was left alone to do its thing, what kind of great things could we make. The closest I can think of anywhere in the world is the Disney managed properties of Disney World, for which Disney Springs is a part. I don’t care that things are so enormously expensive there, because like the book Atlas Shrugged, the value for money and any other currency is in the product themselves. Disney sells happiness, and if you have enough money, you can buy some. Their Imagineers are happy to give you happiness, so if you can afford it, you can purchase for yourself. But its not free. So using that as my guide, I was delighted to visit the place and compare it to other places around the country that I admire, particularly a shopping complex in my hometown called Liberty Center which I love quite a lot.

But what mystified me, even as a person who understands the importance of mythology in everything, is that Disney created this fake backstory about Disney Springs and even Jock Lindsey’s Hanger Bar and that as guests we were supposed to accept it in the same way we might accept some reality from the theme parks they are so known for. In fact, just about every new hotel and construction experience on the Disney property in Florida these days has some kind of made-up backstory which I found perplexing until I visited the place for myself. Even watching the construction updates from a distance for several years really couldn’t bring context to the effort until you physically visited a place like that.

Upon seeing the creation of the springs at Disney Springs I understood immediately what the Imagineers were going for, its what I would call a “conceptual faculty,” the ability to see an abstract concept in your mind so that you can bring it forth into a reality. By creating all these back stories for stores and restaurants at Disney Springs the designers were able to use mythology to elevate the construction and its psychological impact on the consumers. Normally it would be up to the companies who become tenants at such a place to set the tone of a project, but in this case the backstory of the concept allowed all participants to align the scope of the project to a unified vision, and it was pulled off brilliantly. For me it was quite a magical moment to spend the afternoon in Jock Lindsey’s looking at all the relics from his past in chasing Indiana Jones all over the world and to stroll a few short steps from that front door to the fantastic springs of Disney Springs with all the commercial activity situated around it.

The thing that struck me most about Disney Springs is that in no way in the world would any zoning board trained at today’s colleges approve such a plan and allow an entertainment district like Disney Springs to be built along the many natural springs that are found all over Florida. The political bureaucracy would be mind bending dull and laborious. It just wouldn’t happen. So to sidestep that little problem, Disney Imagineers just created their own lakes and springs so that commercial development could take place around it, and the result would be spectacularly beautiful. The result as I could see it was essentially John Galt’s Atlantis where great creations from great people were on full display without the imprint of local and state governments regulating fun beyond recognition. That is largely because Disney controls what happens on their property to the most extent that any modern company could. I don’t think it would be possible to build something like a Disney Springs off the Disney controlled property due to local regulations picking it apart until there was nothing left.

Even at Galaxy’s Edge, the new Star Wars land which I will be talking about alot, the backstory that was created for it as a project gave the Imagineers something to build to, a way to conceptualize the project and overcome whatever problems came before it. Such a method of approaching a construction project had really improved Disney Springs since my last visit and the overall approach of the entire network of theme parks. This point hit me hard while traveling on the new Skyliner system of gondolas that are now connecting Hollywood Studios with the Epcot Center. Many of the hotel complexes that had been created recently along that gondola path all had similar backstories as were used to create Disney Springs and the elevated mythology had propelled the scope of the projects to a much higher level than would have otherwise been achieved using traditional building methods at the development stage. This ability Disney has been using with its Imagineering department to help guide all their construction departments had yielded results in the final presentation they wouldn’t have achieved any other way.

To that effect I was greatly impressed by the work at Disney Springs. I would say that the complex alone would deserve its own vacation destination, but for me it was only one very small part of my trip experience into enjoying the fantastic work of the Disney Imagineers. Locals obviously were taking the place for granted, but it was clear to me that what was happening there was very unique. It would be great to see other places utilize the same methods to push up their own projects to such bold levels. Like John Galt’s Atlantis the mind of mankind has shown time and time again that it can do better than nature, and if nature is in the way, that we can simply build over it and do a much better job. As a company I’m sure Disney wants to appease the climate activists, but clearly as an organization their ability to put story before sentiment has helped their creative people in the Imagineering department do things they otherwise wouldn’t be able to do. The results are obvious and very exciting. Even if I was a little skeptical, it quickly became clear that this approach was something everyone should be doing, and it was a wave of the future that was not so obvious except in seeing the results firsthand.

Rich Hoffman

A Look Behind the Democrat Veil: There is nothing but smoke, not even a mirror

My history with lunatics, sword swallowers, and magicians helps me more often than all the people I know with doctorates and master’s degrees in understanding the truly life ending behavior of the Democrats, which might not be covered by anybody else in the entire world, even Rush Limbaugh. And so it went that the strategy of the entire DNC was on full display Thursday, December 5th as Nancy Pelosi announced that her congress would move forward with impeachment of President Trump. The less observed truth to their entire strategy was revealed by a fight at a rally for Mayor Pete, Joe Biden called a guy “fat” as he sparred with him over his own corruption scandal in Ukraine, and Hillary Clinton attempted to reset her dismal personality on the Howard Stern Show, almost simultaneously. In short, the objective is to get rid of Trump with impeachment so that one of the DNC candidates can make some ground, then try to create their own Trump moments to capture the attention of voters. The only problem is, they have no idea what they are doing or why people voted for Trump in the first place.

Democrats are trying to be Trump without having the authenticity of character that made so many people vote for him for president in 2016. They think they can play act some of his character traits, like going onto Howard Stern and “winging” it with flamboyance and bravado and that suddenly it might catapult them into the hearts and minds of America. But the crowds tell the whole story, what was astonishing in both Joe Biden’s townhall where he fought with the old man at that event challenging him to a push up contest and calling him names, or at the Mayor Pete event that sounded like it only had about four people there including the old lady who tried to hit a protestor with her walker. There just isn’t any excitement for these people yet the media who are fully in on the act, are trying to make them appear legitimate, but its not working.

In Biden’s case, the entire impeachment premise that the Democrats have put forth assume that Joe Biden was Donald Trump’s rival for the 2020 seat. But that guy isn’t in the running, he’s certainly not in first place. After watching him over these last several weeks, the polls that show him as the front runner must be phony, because if that is the best that the DNC have, (which I think he is) then they are in real trouble. Talk about a gaffe driven loser, between his comments about kids jumping in his lap and wanting to rub his hairy legs, then this mess with calling this guy at his townhall fat, Biden will never survive the one on one debates with Trump. And apparently everyone knows it, which is why they are trying to at least tarnish Trump with some impeachment scandal that is completely phony, so they can hope to have a shit shots chance in Hell at getting some votes in the next election. But I say it’s over for them before they can even get started because what they are trying to do is way too obvious. They don’t have any original ideas of their own, or personalities that inspire leadership, so they are copying elements of Trump without understanding why it worked in the first place. It’s one of the most pathetic things that I’ve ever seen, especially taken not individually, but rather in the context of the DNC presidential strategy for which they are all trying to play some part.

Hillary was right about some parts of Trump’s success, he did do interviews with anybody anywhere, even in his pajamas. His access to the media was explosive, but even if she had done the same, she still wouldn’t have won, and here’s why. Nobody cared about what she had to say. Nobody wanted to hear about her stupid glass ceiling of victimization womanhood, nobody wanted to hear her cough every five seconds. And nobody wanted to hear the way she really screws up saying “R’s.” She’s the crazy working mom that nobody wants to play at her house, because she’s so overbearing, stiff, and unimaginative. And she’s what the Democrats thought of as their best.

We’ve watched for a few years now the Democrats attempt put out on the market what they think voters want espousing issues that they hope people care about, like marijuana legalization, socialism for all, and open borders. Yet their people are really just used up pot heads who don’t have any pizzazz because they are cardboard cut-outs of what they think are real people. Trump is a complete person with a big personality who is where he is in life due to his wild life and many wins that have shaped him into an interesting character who can get things done. People want an achiever, not a copycat—they want authenticity. What’s insulting is that these people, Joe Biden, Clinton, Mayor Pete—and all the rest of them both in front of the camera and behind—and with all their educations, professional experience, and power in politics—they can’t come up with anything better. And that is the sad truth for them.

Then what’s worse is that while they feel they have to copy elements of Trump from 2016 to win some votes and get their base excited about something, they have conspired with a phony claim of corruption, for which Joe Biden is actually guilty of, to remove Trump from office before the election even happens because they have no other cards to play. If you think of things that way, the whole situation is entirely pathetic. That they think we are all that stupid is even worse. Because they do think that little of us.

You can tell a lot about people when the pressure is on, how they manage the stress. Biden folds like a piece of wet paper. He will never be able to go toe to toe with anybody in prime time, he can’t even do it when the media is rigged in his favor. Hillary already failed to match Trump in an election. She tried, but she was exhausted. In hindsight, she may want to do more interviews, and attend more campaign stops to match the Trump effort, but she just doesn’t have the health and stamina to do it. Talking about it is one thing, doing it is quite another. It takes a lot more than just going on Howard Stern, you must have something to say that people actually want to hear. And the rest of the DNC candidates aren’t any better off. Nancy Pelosi is even in on the game trying to copy elements of the Tea Party in her impeachment delivery sounding more like Butters from South Park than some historian evoking the sentiment of our founding documents. She misses the mark as bad if not worse than the rest of them because she thinks that by copying the Tea Party, which is where Donald Trump came from in the first place, that she will inspire action toward her Democrats. Which of course is the worst miscalculation in the history of politics. Taken all together the DNC is a disaster without a plan, character, or original ideas. And copying what does work won’t save them.

Rich Hoffman

Lisa Page, the Latte Sipping Prostitute: Whores come in all types, even in the FBI

I’ve had a lot of them, but one of the best phrases I’ve ever come up with to describe a certain sector of the voting population is that of the infamous Latte Sipping Prostitute. It’s a kind of woman who uses her sexuality to control men toward political measures to satisfy their instinctual needs at motherhood and all the neurosis of a panic driven imbecile and the men go along with these antics because they don’t want to make these women unhappy denying them sex when desired. Where a bar whore or a street walker might sell sex for dope, or even a place to stay for the night, the latte sipping prostitute does much the same for reasons just as malicious, only society doesn’t have a proper measure, so the antics are often overlooked, at least until I came up with that term several years ago to describe school levy supporters. The term could apply to just about any socialite, and certainly tells a proper story about those kinds of women who otherwise are looked at falsely as stewards of good conduct. As a white man, I’m not supposed to have such opinions, yet I do, and they are entirely accurate ways to portray the kind of political element that we encounter often, especially when it comes to the FBI lawyer Lisa Page who was sleeping with the FBI investigator Peter Strzok at the highest levels of the case against Hillary Clinton and would eventually seek through pillow talk and texts the overthrow of an American election. No small matter.

And as Trump mocked the two lovers at a recent rally, he had a right. The two FBI agents abused their power and were driven to crimes and rightly brought to ruin. But not because of some ethical conduct on behalf of the FBI, who tried to cover up the affair and their political activism, but because Strzok’s wife found the text messages and let them out to the public. Page was married, so was Strzok and when the wife approached Page, she behaved mystified that the jealous woman had misunderstood the nature of their affair. After all, what’s a few sleepovers at a local hotel? Just sex, not necessarily an affair. That was after all how Lisa Page reacted before the world knew her name and all the intimate details of her relationship with an FBI lover. And after many months more of embarrassing nightly reminders of that mistake, and surely a husband of her own very jealous, the pressure is getting to her and she wants it to stop.

Yet she never should have played the game. She along with her boyfriend tried to overturn an election, and she used sex to manipulate an FBI agent to act against his better judgment. Sure, its his fault to fall for it, but she was certainly acting as a latte sipping prostitute as I have defined it in previous cases. It may not be a politically correct term, but it is an accurate one. People like her do this kind of thing all the time. Yet when they get caught, they attempt to hide behind society’s lack of definitions for this activity. She may regret what she had done now, it certainly wasn’t a smart career move. However she did play it and now the consequences are hard to deal with which should be expected.

To call these types of people a whore is what is debated, of course by other latte sipping prostitutes who want to look in the mirror and think of themselves as good people and outstanding community members. Just as Lisa Page, according to her own text messages to her lover was perplexed as to why Peter’s wife would think they were having an affair just because they were sleeping with one another is equivalent to a bar whore not thinking of the sex they sell as a relationship but as a product. Most people in their lives are selling something. My measure for the authenticity of it or not can be determined by the fine work of Mihaly Csikszentmilhalyi’s great book Flow. If what you are doing for a living is purely for the exchange of money or some power connected to it, then to some degree or another you are no different than a prostitute selling sex for money, or in doing as Lisa Page was attempting, to use sex to manipulate an FBI agent into overthrowing an American election. All the behavior is the same. Going back to the origins of the latte sipping prostitute title I have given so many, such people use sex and their power of entry to it to sway their spouses into supporting school levies and other tax measures, so the behavior is no different and is just another level of prostituting themselves to gain something not quite authentic.

Even a whore wants to think of their profession as something beneficial even going to such measures of thinking that they help relationships where bed rituals are suffering. Anybody can justify anything, and clearly that was what Lisa Page was in the business of doing at the level of the FBI. The scary thing about it is that she obviously was not alone but was simply one who was caught due to the large visibility at the top of American politics with eyes on the situation where it took a jealous wife to unleash the evidence. Without question, there are many more latte sipping prostitutes functioning in the open within what we call the Beltway swamp, and they are dangerous to our American republic.

What a person chooses to do with their ethical standards is not the business of the American people until they try to use their bodies and female resources to alter laws, taxation, or elections. At that point, they are a detriment to our entire social order and they deserve derogatory terms as a reference to their illicit services. What they don’t deserve is respect even if they wear feathers, furs, or expensive jewelry to disguise their function. A whore is a whore whether they sell their bodies in a bar, on a street, or in bedrooms of loveless marriages for the purposes of manipulating their spouses toward political means. Its all whoring.

Men whore too, they sell themselves for stupid things all the time for much the same reasons that we associate with whores. They can be latte sipping prostitutes as well. I can think of a long list of beta men who fit that category perfectly. And in many ways Lisa Page’s boyfriend in the FBI was a whore of a different kind. He was sucking up to his superiors to play the political assassin for a group of swamp creature radicals who wanted to do anything to stop Trump from becoming president. If he could do it and get a little on the side by a swamp whore sipping lattes instead of drunken ale, that was even better. But if not her, a trip down K-Street would do, and often does for many of those types. That is the truth of the matter and its important that we don’t confuse their actions with the merit of a civilized society. They are all prostitutes, but their vices come in all shapes and sizes but their worth is all the same.

Rich Hoffman

The Coastal Communists of Michael Bloomberg: Understanding what makes America and why we must defend it

I don’t watch normal television much. I still carry cable because I want the option, especially like it was over the Holidays where I had more time than usual to watch television, especially football games. And it was there that I saw Michael Bloomberg advertisements for President, and it had the feel of coming from some other country. If there is one thing, I learned from my hard motorcycle riding days which took up about a decade of my life, its that my measure of political validity is that if it doesn’t pass the smell test of Deadwood, South Dakota, then its not American. Back then I was thinking of doing a documentary about motorcycle riders and why they think the things they do, and why so many people were drawn to places like Sturgis Motorcycle rallies which Deadwood is certainly on the to-do list. That region of the world produced interesting American characters such as Wild Bill Hickock, Seth Bullock and Teddy Roosevelt, and it remains today an accurate measurement of political temperament. Viewed with the lenses of options, the communist attempts of the American left are obvious, and candidates like Michael Bloomberg are easy to understand as opposed to the coastal areas of North America that is easily consumed by unsophisticated concerns so long as they can go to the beach somewhere nearby.

The Bloomberg advertisement was a sharp reminder of just how divided we are as a country, where the coastal communists seek to impose themselves on the Deadwood lovers of the midlands, and their desire to ride free and die hard. The gap couldn’t be more pronounced. It also said a lot about how poorly the political left understands their position. Bloomberg thinks because he’s a billionaire that he will be able to duplicate Trump’s 2016 run, except from the vantagepoint of the communist left. The people who watch the network television stations are typically soft minded types open to other ideas because they have little firm convictions themselves, so he mistakenly measures that his ad time will boost him in the polls which I would think it won’t. Likely, not at all. The fact that he would think so and would pay the best in the business that money can buy to allow him to spend on such an ad says that nobody on the left really has a clue as to what is going on. They are still on point, for their leftist agenda. They don’t see or understand that the 2016 election was a rebellion, not just luck and money.

I agree, my views are hardline options that are scary to moderates. My thoughts were forged from experience, including many hours on motorcycles traveling the country and thinking about these things, and writing books about my opinions and gauging the reaction of the public. I wouldn’t consider myself a bestselling writer by any measure, but over the years I have developed a nice autograph signature that came as a result of book signings. I have sold enough books to develop an autograph signature and that was something I had to explain recently while signing Christmas cards professionally. And when you can say such a thing about yourself where a signature is actually sought, you earn the right to have opinions that are outside the norm as a change agent, which is what I would call my role. The trend is that more people think the way I do than they don’t which is reflected by the recent elections. Its also why you will never see someone like Michael Bloomberg campaigning in Deadwood, South Dakota where Trump would be carried around like a king on a throne. The communists in our country are trying to change opinions and most good people will give them a listen. But once they find out what they have been up to, they get mad. I feel I have a right to be very angry at communists like Michael Bloomberg, who is at the very least a sympathizer to Chinese communism. Or our school systems funded by tax money who wish to convert our children into future Michael Bloombergs. They are attacking our American lifestyle, and that earns the right to anger. So there is nothing wrong with coming out on one side of it, especially if you are like me and have made a point to draw attention to it using whatever platform one might have earned in life.

In the context of those motorcycle riding days where you see and taste this fine country from the back of an unprotected 1500cc beast through raging rain storms, hard snowstorms, and intense heat, when you find out the plans of the political left, you see it as an attack. Michael Bloomberg and his leftist New York friends want the kind of communism that China has for America or the kind of socialism that Scandinavia has presently. Both are born from the mind of Karl Marx which came about toward the end of the Victorian Era and is how that type of thinking entered New York under the name of progressivism, ultimately by the same Teddy Roosevelt I praised from hanging out in Deadwood during his pre-presidential days. It was always an attack on America and the minds that made it great. Roosevelt surrendered to it after his many days in the White House and his roots as an aristocrat in New York got the better of him eventually. Teddy traveled out to Deadwood to spend time with people like Seth Bullock to get his mind right. But at the turn of the century, not even that helped him, and he eventually ended his life thinking more like Michael Bloomberg.

Know that it is our minds and lifestyles that are under attack by these communist infiltrators, we all have a right to be a little pissed off. In fact, we have a right to be a lot pissed off! The kind of communism that runs China is exactly what Michael Bloomberg wants, and it is astonishing to see that the main networks of television have fallen lockstep into that effort, as most of them are based in New York where much of this thought movement entered our country like a Trojan horse ready for battle. As many think I’m too critical, too colorful in my hatred, and too resistant to the works of Marx as a philosophy, I would say otherwise. Based on the foundations of this country, which can still be seen in places like Deadwood, South Dakota, or Liberty Square in Disney World, I don’t think my opinions are too strong at all. And we were not wrong in voting for Trump. And the world that Bloomberg wants to go is one that we have already rejected, that his money won’t be able to buy. So, in a lot of ways, its good that he’s running. He will put a dagger through the heart of communism in America once and for all, without meaning to do it. But never forget what they intended to do, and still do even to this latest hour. Bloomberg doesn’t just want to take away your soda drinks, your straws, your money, and your guns, but the very nature of your American life. What he needs as a result is a good ass kicking at the polls and I think he’ll get it. But what a vision of the world it is to see it firsthand instead of just implied inuendo. That is when you realize just how close we all came in 2016 to the end of our country, because these relics still don’t realize they lost, and are still saying the same things that destroyed them in the first place.

Rich Hoffman

The False Nature of Teams: Reflections on the Ohio State win over Michigan

I saw some of the most bizarre behavior during the Ohio State football game at Michigan in Ann Arbor over the weekend that its worth some observational notes. I don’t watch much college football all though I enjoy the ambiance of all fall football. The details are often too boring. The students are not yet perfected to the level of the pros and I don’t enjoy watching them. I think colleges hold back people; it doesn’t enhance them. They are good for educating people into procedures and to be good employees, but not so good in turning out unusual thinkers willing to push the limits and during the game my concerns were more than confirmed. If the goal is to find one’s place into some pecking order of procedural thinking, colleges do what people spend their money on. But they do not make leaders—I find that colleges openly lie about this objective and they charge way too much money for it, yet they convince people to pay it due to these sports programs.

Watching the Michigan side, complete with Tom Brady providing commentary in favor of the “Blue” of his former school there were these bizarre statements about teamwork, and that the team is greater than any individual, any player, any coach, anything. This was astonishing to me because I hear that come out of the mouths of many people all through my professional life from the statehouses across the country to the intimate business meetings that happen hour by hour. People say these really dumb things and it makes you wonder where they get this information. Well, I know that the colleges have become in America excessive liberal factories trying to program political activism into their students and charging a lot of money for the opportunity. In trade, most companies, especially large ones agree to hire the kids from the colleges because secretly they just want nice employees who won’t rock the boat with new, breaking thoughts. They will just do what they are told and suppress any frustrations that might arise from the arrangement. But here, at the Ohio State game was lies about the arrangement, that no individual is more important than the team and that’s just not how the world works. The snake oil salesmen have obviously been hard at work in the broadcast booths of our nation’s college football games.

In the end the game was a blowout in favor of Ohio State winning 56-27. The point of the whole exercise was to make people who have attended these universities over the years, which is the point of all college sports programs, is to give those who have graduated, a continued value for their money spent. These days its like getting DLC content for a completed video game. It gives the participants a feeling of unity and a kind of family atmosphere in those massive 100,000 people stadiums where these games are played. But right after the game is done and everyone goes home, the specifics are forgotten and its off to the next thing. The whole experience is to unify people into the team concept of college sports and to coax them into continuing to spend money on the perceived results. For the amount of money that we are talking the whole scam is pretty pathetic.

So it went at the start of the game and during all this fluffy commentary about team work being so much greater than any individual, yet the results of the game was all about individuals being better than others, and the rest of the team sat on the sideline cheering them on along with the people in the stands. The terms, “we won” as was the common term used after the game, or “we lost this one,” were ludicrous. Ohio State had better individual players who picked up the team and took them to victory. In this particular game the quarterback and the running back were the two main positions where exceptional play took place, but most of the rest of the game was just a bunch of average people fulfilling their positions. Sure, the quarterback needs someone to throw the ball to, and the running back needs blockers—but in those positions, most anybody can play those roles, which is normal for the college experience. Most any graduate can be hired or replaced, and nobody would notice. But, the exceptional players J.K. Dobbins finding holes to run through or some of those deep, accurate passes from Justin Fields weren’t part of some team other than they needed to follow the instructions of the leaders in running the proper routes and getting open to make a play. The individual efforts were far more important than any collective message about unity.

Tom Brady’s comments in support of Michigan were bizarre as well. Let’s try an experiment, let’s take Tom Brady off the New England Patriots professional football team and see how many games they win. Or let’s take away their now famous coach. The lie that a team is what wins football games is told everywhere in modern culture, people buy it completely due to these kinds of recreation events justifying their comments, but reality is not being observed. The hard work that Tom Brady has always put into the game is why his teams have changed the players but they always continue to win. He is the stabilizing factor; the players come and go but the victories are the results of the many extra hours of hard work that Brady does to stay ahead of the competition. The teams under him get the ability to win a Super Bowl ring by sitting on the bench as opposed to playing for some other team where they might be expected as individuals to do more. But the truth is, they are irrelevant to the winning process, but Tom Brady is the key to a chance—and nobody else.

And it wasn’t Michigan who made Tom Brady who he is. They didn’t give him his natural talents. They gave him a chance to show it off but Brady didn’t come out of his big win over Ohio State a number one draft pick. He had to work his way up and work harder than everyone else, and still to this day he does that. That’s why he’s over 40 and still has a starting job in the NFL. Who else is going to be better than him? In the end, it comes down to the exceptional who carry the masses—always, in sports, in business, in politics—in everything. Everything. The colleges lie to justify their roles, and the masses buy the lie so that they can feel like they are part of a winning formula. But it always comes down to individual effort that leads teams to victory. Not the other way around. Everytime someone says something so stupid as the “team” is bigger than any one person you can always know that the person saying it has no idea how the world really works, and they are faking leadership. Because leadership is not about team victories, its about doing what leaders tell you and riding their coattails to success. And like I said, a good quarterback, running back, or business partner needs someone to throw the ball to. But wins and losses do not happen as a team, they happen as a result of leadership by individuals over those hungry to be led somewhere for an effort they couldn’t get any other way. That is a truth many aren’t prepared to contemplate, yet it’s the true essence of this ever-present reality.

Rich Hoffman

The Smart School Board of Indian Creek in Ohio: With a vote of 5-0 the kids are much safer

Not every school system in the world is insane. The Indian Creek School District in Jefferson County, Ohio passed this week just ahead of Thanksgiving Day a resolution by their school board to allow teachers to carry guns by a vote of 5-0. Now what is wonderful about Jefferson County and many other rural areas in the midlands of America is that they still have people in them who haven’t been ruined with progressive thoughts and can still think for themselves. Their parents taught them how to open a can of beans with a can opener and they can still change their own oil in their cars, so when they vote on important issues, they still have a bit of self-reliance left in them and can imagine how a teacher might be competent enough to carry a gun and stop a hostile assailant without hiding in the corner and waiting to be killed. Where city thinking has permeated, these types of self-reliant options are not so obvious. But its still good to see that not every school district is filled with losers setting children up for danger to claim them at the slightest provocation.

I know from more information than experience that my school district of Lakota does not have such courage. A few of the school board members do, but the majority are weak-minded people who are panicky parents themselves, or have spouses who work in the school and they have been drinking the helpless cool-aid for a long time, which is common when institutionalism eats at the mind like corn on the cob during one of those Thanksgiving Dinners. What’s left isn’t pretty. They tend to be weak people who can’t hold their liquor at education conferences, can’t manage their own finances, or are just liberal hacks seeking justification for their existence on the backs of extorted money from a government school. So their modes of thinking are not challenged by reality, leaving them dangers to themselves and others. In that regard they can’t imagine that teachers might be responsible enough to carry a gun in school to stop a mass shooter, as an extra safety measure. They can’t trust themselves so how could they trust anybody else.

That is usually what we find in city government offices, panicky people afraid of their own shadows who want to believe that safety can be legislated into validation with words on a paper and that they can gamble with people’s lives with the same odds that a lottery ticket buyer plays for a big pot of money. And that’s how budgets get out of control because with fearful people comes big spending, especially when its other people’s money. That is how all these anti-gun thoughts seep into society, by these weak-minded losers who find personal management difficult. How else would you describe people who vote for these kinds of things in schools who spend their recreation facedown drunk in public with half their clothes missing? And that’s not a specific reference, but a common one. You can hear such stories from most school districts from such people, and it is they who decide how safe or unsafe we are from attacks.

It’s refreshing to hear from real people in real districts like the Indian Creek School District along the waters of the Ohio River with West Virginia just on the eastern horizon. In places like that most everyone has shot a gun, they know how to use them, and criminals don’t have much of a feeding ground as a result. You don’t find much crime happening in communities like that because the people are self-reliant and respect each other’s property. Part of the resolution on gun carrying that passed there was teachers would have to complete a training course and get re-certified on a yearly basis. That’s reasonable, and it’s a sure bet that a mass shooting won’t happen there. This debate has been going on for a long time and nobody is saying that we just put guns on teachers and send them into classrooms without support. But the real issue at hand is that everyone must understand that blind trust in a system ran by the worst and weakest of our civilization is not conducive to a safe world. If you want that, you must give it to yourself on an individual basis. If a teacher wants a safe classroom, they must give it to themselves. If voters want to live in a safe world where they can defend themselves from attacks, they must carry guns and call the police to clean up the mess. None of this “duty to retreat” garbage. Guns represent an equal playing field much more than any other measure, and those that have them can stop violence when the odds fall on people’s fate.

It really comes down to the quality of people, rural areas preserve the quality of people’s minds because they are left alone from the daily concerns of group linked activities more so than in cities where collective concerns are a much more dominate consideration, from traffic lights to grocery stores. When people get some space to think, they tend to think better and more oriented to their individual needs, which is why people flock to the rural areas to begin with, so they can be away from snoopy neighbors, drunk losers who hide behind school board positions, and generally lazy minded people who want to hide in the crowd so people don’t see their true character. People from the country don’t have anybody to hide behind, so they tend to carry guns and defend themselves when pressed in ways that institutionalism has been trying to eradicate for thousands of years. After all, institutions of all kinds do not want independent people, they want dependents who cleave to them like babies seeking a mother’s milk dripping from a worn-out nipple.

You have to drive a few miles to get there but I would rationalize that if parents wanted to send their kids to a decent school, and if we had School Choice which we don’t, then the Indian Creek School District in Jefferson County, Ohio would be a good place to send your kids to school. But that is exactly why we don’t have School Choice, because losers who know they can’t compete with better managed districts want more than anything to remain in the background and hide in collectivism hoping like any drunk would, that if only they odds worked in their favor through sheer mass, that nobody would discover they don’t have a damn clue how to actually solve a problem, or defend our most valuable assets, children. They are hoping that the odds of being a victim of a mass shooter are the same as the state lottery and that their spouses won’t find out what they really do at education conferences once the drinks start flowing. In Indian Creek, if a school board member were found drunk on their faces in a public forum, the whole town would know about it because there isn’t as much noise there to hide the scandal, so behavior tends to be better, and so at least it is somewhere. And that’s better than nothing.

Rich Hoffman