Tag: corruption

How Game of Thrones got it Wrong: The truth about democracy and nature of power

To say that I was disappointed with the final two episodes of the Game of Thrones would be an understatement. Here they were, the creative minds behind the popular HBO series had set up this really spectacular argument for what generates the nature of power and lust for it only to turn the whole thing into a diatribe for democracy while putting an all seeing eye into the central seat of power. To say that the show missed the mark after essentially 8 years of build up would be an understatement. It took 73 episodes of over an hour each to end with a very cliched metaphor on power that corrupts leaving the ever hopeful and wise character of Daenerys Targaryen to be murdered by the star of the series, Jon Snow. It’s a shame that all those liberal arts majors who work in film, television production, producers and the entertainment media have it all wrong on the nature of power. Shakespeare wrote some good plays on the topic as viewed from his day, but I think we were all hoping that someone noble and good would take the Iron Throne and show how leadership should really look. My thoughts on the Game of Thrones finale are very well represented by Grace in the following video.

This nature that power corrupts is essentially that old sentiment that we all have to provide an excuse for regressing back into the stone age as a civilization and in our entertainment I think it’s safe to say that we all yearn to see our fantasy characters do what real life often fails to give us. Does power have to be corrupt and are we all truly better off in a democracy, where the metaphor didn’t escape me to our current worldly situation. Do we really want cripples and midget philosophers running our world while the bold and brash of us win the wars then are murdered in sleep so that the tag alongs can rule? Is that really a better system? Most of us are not prepared to answer that question, our religions and educations have told us since we could first utter a word that power corrupts and that we should only trust institutions, and at the end of Game of Thrones, that was the conclusion. That the state should be handled by the weak and even the most parasitic while the best always fall to corruption 100% of the time.

I smell a hoax and a line of very bad thinking permeating out of pop culture in quite an audacious way. Ultimately, its just a story, but to us human beings, stories matter. And the trend is that we must walk away from something that usually feels good, like the Game of Thrones and be thrown back to the reality that all people are fallible, and the only protection we have against it is democracy. We don’t want to break the wheel; we want to stay on it perpetually. Even though we may be miserable on it, we are terrified to break from it and its sad that our entertainment culture feels that to be authentic to their art, that they must preserve the wheel.

After all, isn’t that why so many Democrats are upset that Donald Trump won the election for President in 2016. In the United States, we decided to break the wheel and so far, so good, the old myths about everyone who gains power becoming corrupted is being tossed out of the window. Donald Trump is no Daenerys Targaryen going crazy and killing people for no reason, even though her whole life up to that point she behaved nobly in pretty much every situation. We have taught ourselves that such a person doesn’t exist and that when they touch power, they all fall. That was the theme of the Lord of the Rings stories, that the ring corrupted everyone. And that is the story here, that the very nature of an Iron Throne to rule everyone corrupted all who sat on it without exception. But why? An answer is never given, we are just supposed to accept that power corrupts. End of story.

And at the end of the show I couldn’t help but think of Donald Trump. Heroes are supposed to do like Jon Snow and retreat from the world and hide somewhere until danger is about. At that time and those times only, the stragglers are to rule. The stories of corruption are spread by them to keep the best among us hiding away from the seats of power so that there isn’t any competition for the thrones they seek. The people of a democracy who end up in charge then start wars that need people like Jon Snow and they are happy to let them fight. They will even give them awards for their valor on the battlefield. But the manipulators of justice hope in the back of their minds that the heroes will die in combat so that they won’t challenge their lust for power. That was the message of the Game of Thrones in the end and I think most people watching were insulted because they see the scam that is going on. They may not be the powerful warriors themselves that they would like to be, but they’d like to think that we live in a world where such people can exist. Game of Thrones said with a fist punch into the dirt that “NO” the levers of the world belong to the least capable, and here’s why. Because power always corrupts, even the incorruptible Daenerys Targaryen. Not even she could stand up to its powerful call. And the hero that slew her was imprisoned and cast away until needed again. The people really in charge are the ones playing the games quietly while everyone else was fighting.

Yeah, the Game of Thrones was a major let down. And it shows just why the Hollywood types who are mostly Democrats hate the Trump presidency. They assumed that he would sit in the Oval Office and become corrupted into a mad king, that’s what they told us anyway. Instead it was all the Tyrion Lannisters and Bran Starks in the media, the Democrat Party, and the FBI who orchestrated an insurrection against him without any provocation to their suspicions but what they believe themselves about power, that it corrupts all individuals. The only protection any of us have is that of institutional controls governed by the most manipulative of us all in the form of a democracy while the heroes hide in wait to be called upon not by their own action, but for the needs of the many.

In my experience power is not for everyone. But its not for us to surrender ourselves to a democracy run by idiots either. Some people have it, and some don’t, and just because they get power, they aren’t doomed to fall like Daenerys Targaryen did, or Gollum from Lord of the Rings. We tell the stories about our culture that we most believe and this concept of how power comes about and what it does to people is as old as time. But I don’t think we have through art fully understood what it is or why its even needed. And we hope often that the next great stories that come along can put their arms around it and match our hopes and dreams. After all that time we all hoped that the Game of Thrones would unpack that mystery and tell us that power can be captured and wielded justly. Like we are seeing with the presidency of Donald Trump. But in the end they let us down with just another piece of crap concept taken straight out of the pages of the middle ages. The message that power corrupts, when in the back of our minds we hope not and yearn to see an example where it doesn’t.

Rich Hoffman

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The Poker in Red Dead Redemption 2 Online is Great!

I had a nice talk with a friend recently while we were reflecting on the Tea Party days and the direction of today’s youth. By normal visual standards, the socialized instruction in public schools, and PC counterculture has everyone strapped to the body of Moby Dick at the end of that old story. And the drug use that has permeated everything that young people do, by conventional measure things look pretty hopeless. But two things happened over the weekend that I continue to be impressed with and they will certainly have an impact on how our culture is measured.

The first was a visit to Kings Island where the Festhaus was hosting a professional video game tournament. The place was packed to the brim and young people were everywhere and were quite happy competing on stage against each other with popular titles like Fortnite, and other video games that are part of a culture a lot of people over 30 don’t even understand. As I watched the activity I was thinking of a report that friend had said to me about Mason schools going even further into removing competitive events and statues from their public school—the everyone gets a trophy or none of them do type of thinking—and it was obvious that the politics might be moving in that direction. But the video game culture gets it. There are more opportunities for competition there than when I was a kid. Traditional sports are not the only ways to compete in life, or to learn to. Video games are all about capitalism and they are the preferred medium of young people’s entertainment experiences.

For instance, one of my favorite video games not just of last year, but ever is Red Dead Redemption 2. When that game first came out I was so excited about it that I took a week off work to play it, and for me it was a kind of vacation. It’s a western by Rockstar Games and for me it was like going to the West World of the popular HBO series. These video games are so immersive that they begin to simulate reality. They are different than the passive experience of movies so their impact on culture is something we just aren’t measuring yet. But in the case of Red Dead Redemption 2, it sold 24 million copies in just three days which amassed $725 million, and is still climbing. The earnings report for these video game companies are actually higher than many movie and television studios. Take-Two which is involved in Red Dead Redemption reported a Fiscal Year 2019 earnings report confirming so far $2.66 billion. Those are Disney type of numbers so this is not a market of entertainment that is obscure by any measure.

Red Dead Redemption 2 came out in October of 2018 and I played it several times a week through the turn of the year. I spent about a hundred hours playing it on story mode then I played the Beta development mode for the Online portion of the game. I had to capitalize that because their online concept for the game is a thing of itself. It’s quite an extraordinary attempt at hosting a very brutal and capitalist natured arena. In that meeting with the same friend we reflected on the near elimination of dodgeball from our society deeming it politically toxic. Dodgeball for us when we were kids was something that happened every day. Well for the kids of today, its these online arenas. A great video game must at least have online content where players can compete against each other in player versus player situations which are much more intense than dodgeball. The biggest difference is that one is virtual while the other was physical. But the mentality is the same.

I played the Beta for a while but I couldn’t give the game the kind of time it demanded to be good in that mode so I backed off and moved on to other things. Well, this past weekend Rockstar Games finally finished with their Online offering for Red Dead 2 and put it up on their latest update, which meant the official game went live, around six months or so after the original release, which of course keeps people buying copies of the game and keeping it going which is something to say about how video games tell their stories, over much longer periods of time than movies or other forms of entertainment. So I played the game again to see how things were going and was very happy and surprised to learn that the many bars of gold that I had during the Beta phase and all the money I earned carried over into the official release. And also I was very happy to learn that they had opened up the ability to play poker with other live players which is really the purpose of me writing this article. I was immensely pleased with the way the game was set up and I spent most of the weekend playing just that game mode.

I would not call myself a gambler or even a card player the way that people think of such things. I’m not a drinker, a womanizer or any of the things that are associated with the game of playing poker, which in my understanding of history has been advanced by socialists to attempt to demean the games of the Western frontier so that culturally people would be inspired to move away from those activities, so not to celebrate them. But I do love poker. I love watching it. I love playing it. And I love its history as an American game developed in the frontier days of New Orleans and spreading westward with the gunfighter culture. The game and the mind of gunfighting in the American West are synonymous and I love it for that attribute. Playing poker is a fun game that is uniquely very American, and I love it and including it so prominently in the online version of Red Dead Redemption was a technical feat that really impressed me.

Playing poker was part of the original game, the story mode as they call it these days. And I enjoyed it immensely. I am not the kind of guy who likes to gamble money so I’m not a guy who enjoys hanging out in casinos at all. But I do enjoy the function of the game and the way its played so just gambling the chips is enough for me. I like the way poker chips feel in my hands and how they are used strategically to win or lose the game. It’s a very fascinating game and I spent many, many hours playing it against NPCs in the story mode. But having an online poker game is a whole separate situation. You have random players always coming and going and everyone has to play their hand and getting all that rolled into a fluid video game experience is difficult. The way that Rockstar set up their poker games in actual saloons in their various towns and cities was visually stunning and functionally very satisfying. I played a lot of poker over the weekend and I didn’t even have to leave my home.

As I played and saw how many people were playing the Online Red Dead Redemption 2 game, from poker to all the PVP combat that is involved it was obvious to me that this is where the world is at. Many kids wouldn’t even learn how to play poker if not for a game like this, or would they learn anything about westerns since they’ve been nearly eradicated from American culture. But in the world of video games, the western is alive and well and millions of young people are participating in that world and enjoying it. And with billions of dollars at stake in this growing industry, I don’t think anything that is politically underway to dismantle the American way of life is going to stick. Capitalism is alive and well, especially in the saloons and towns of Red Dead Redemption 2.

Rich Hoffman
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Politics and the Banned Books of the Bible

I think the most interesting thing in the world is not how we all evolved out of some single celled creature swimming in the sea, or were molded literally out of dirt by a god and cattle prodded into existence while mating with our brothers and sisters, but in why mankind has a perpetual need to regress. And that is the trend if you look back over the many years to the beginnings of things. For instance, even while we may marvel as I have at the antics at Stonehenge and Avebury in England the Egyptians and Sumerians were conducting life not so different from our modern day needs and desires in America. Then visiting those same places today, the Middle East has not progressed from accomplishment to accomplishment always building higher, but is now considerably less sophisticated and much less economically viable. Places around the world do not evolve at the same rate, while one part of it may be on the cutting edge of technology the other parts of it has clans of rock throwers and superstitious psychotics sacrificing their first born daughters to some gods hoping to make it rain so they don’t all starve to death.

Then there is the problem as to why we desire to hide that reality from ourselves behind veils of culture, religion, economics, even history. One thing that has always really bothered me about the Bible in the Christian tradition is that the book was essentially conceived around 100 AD, a century after Christ had died. A few hundred years after that the Roman emperor Constantine wanted to unite his empire using Christianity as the glue so the first Bibles were organized and over the next several hundred years scriptural scholars decided what books to put in the Bible and which ones to leave out. For instance in the days of Jesus he was known to have been well versed with scripture, but what scripture are we talking about if the nature of the Christian religion in the New Testament is all about him. The Old Testament had been picked through by so many “authorities” that it really doesn’t hold any historical reference any longer. The scripture that Jesus had studied is obviously long, long gone. There is a long section of Biblical history that is just ignored, especially if you go back and read the banned books of the Bible, the Book of Jasher, the Book of Enoch, and the Book of Jubilees.

For all we know the ancient books of the Bible were passed down for millenniums and mankind had been coming and going for all that time scratching at the surface of civilization while continued pockets of failures went back to being spear chuckers and forgetting about the massive ziggurats they had built with great effort to satisfy somebody somewhere. That span of time could have been three of four thousand years to tens of thousands of years. Yet if you go to the National Geographic Museum in Washington D.C. they will insist that all over the world we all developed as hunters, then planters, then city builders to where we are today. But then using modern science to peer back under the veil of history we see that all over the world, especially in regions today that we might call “third world” we see the evidence for massive lost civilizations that just don’t follow that assumption. All along the Amazon River we see evidence of major cities buried under the jungle canopy waiting to tell us their stories that occurred long before the Inca were even thinking of building their empire in South America.

We are learning that the Maya were much older and much bigger than we ever thought they were. What we know about all these cultures is really only captured in stone and stories. How much truth is there in the myths of all world cultures and how much of it is made up fantasy to represent metaphorically a need that minds had, like the modern myth of Star Wars. There are deep human needs in most mythologies that are revealed in those stories, but how much of them are truth and how much based on desire? All we really have are guesses and deduction from looking at some pottery and making assumptions based on our modern life. How many Göbekli Tepe temples are there buried under a hill in Turkey out there all through the Middle East and extending into Asia, even North America? The date for that location is well accepted now by mainstream science to extend back to the 10th millennium BCE which would indicate that life there was an advanced culture in the area of the Biblical regions well before the Temple of Solomon was built, or the City of David had laid its first stone. We tend to walk the streets of Jerusalem and think of the Old City as…..old. But when you consider the evidence of Göbekli Tepe as being five to perhaps even ten thousand years older it makes you wonder how many other places around the world might view Göbekli Tepeas the newcomer.

I grew up with Bible study, my family attended church often and I enjoyed learning about religion in the Christian context but as I grew older I started studying comparative religion and wondering about how so many different versions of the same stories percolated out into our nation building. Then I couldn’t help but wonder how much of our myths and legends were actually true, how much of the tall tails were in all actuality laced with fact. And by just a casual observance you learn really quick that most of the governments of the world do not want to know the truth. And they will actually use violence to keep anybody from discovering our true historical context to the distant past. Every culture wants to think they are the first to arrive at some grand conclusion and are therefor the authority to follow. But in reality, they are just the latest, many have tried before and that will continue well into the future. My question is and remains, how do we stop the cycle?

I have some pretty good ideas on the matter, and I have my thoughts on the past and the future that I have discussed in some detail. My interest in politics and economics have spawned off this basic question as to why societies rise and fall so often and unlearn everything they worked so hard to develop. Is this the first time for instance that a world culture has developed the means to leave the planet and head to space? I don’t think so. In the politics of Democrats for instance I hear in them a deep yearning to crawl back into the cave and to paint images of a deer hunt onto the dark walls of Lascaux. Even among most Republicans is the desire to use capitalism to advance mankind into a hopeful future of discovery and triumph, but while hanging on to parts of Biblical history that insist they were the first and only attempts at civilization and that we not deviate from the pages of a book built by the Roman Empire to control their territories. To my study nobody really wants to “get it” and that is the biggest mystery of all, and something that deserves some consideration. Because in that answer is a treasure trove of understanding that holds a key we all could benefit from. And it only takes a little courage to unlock.

Rich Hoffman

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Why Marijuana is so Devastating to Any Human Culture

Regarding this marijuana dispensary that is opening in Lebanon, Ohio and the sentiment in the city of Cincinnati to decriminalize pot, that is not a victory. It is simply yielding to the pull of below the line thinking and the lazy desires of the masses to erode away expectations so that they don’t feel so bad about themselves. That is the overall trend of the average pot user, to hide in the shadows and to escape the pressure of expectation which drives all of civilization forward. To answer Chris Smitherman’s comment about the sensibility of continued criminalization of marijuana, the value system that is against pot use is the same one that advances our society in every way, it’s a standard that the human race requires to develop. Saying no to pot and all drugs really is saying yes to civilization and its growth. But you can’t have both. Pot advocates will point to history and say the Egyptians used drugs, that Shakespeare used even marijuana to evoke his literary classics, but I say, where are they now? If you want a society that works and advances, you can’t have a society that endorses drug use. The two just don’t go together and it forces us to make a choice. In a nutshell, that is why I’m against drug use and advocate for their continued criminalization.

Over the last couple of years, I have really developed a respect for the game of golf and baseball. Its not that I have time for it now, but golf is a game that takes time to play and I like the above the line nature of it. Often at courses there are rules that players must have collars on their shirts and even that their shirts must be tucked in. What you don’t see typically on a golf course are a bunch of losers smoking pot. The same in baseball to a large extent. People aren’t going to be smoking a lot of pot and expect to hit a 95-mph baseball. And in golf, drugs and accuracy just aren’t conducive to one another. I like those sports because they force people to rise up to their natures rather than to bow down to their below the line animal sentiments.

When I was younger and the concept of even being able to play golf was a far-off objective, because I couldn’t afford to spend the money to play the game, and I certainly didn’t have the free time to play. For the first thirty years of my adult life I literally worked 7 days a week, so I didn’t have any four hour windows to play such a game. But in the back of my mind I always enjoyed the above the line nature of the game, the well-tended landscaping. The good dress of the players and participants. I did marry a country club girl in the heyday of the Beckett Ridge Country Club. In fact our wedding reception was held at the club as her parents were members of good standing back then. But I was always a bit of a rebel and always wanted to do my own thing. Rules weren’t then and still aren’t attractive, but I do appreciate as a baseline a standard of behavior that sets goals high and forces others to live up to them.

In that regard as society has shown less respect for a value system, to me golf courses and country clubs are much more appealing than they used to be for me. And probably because I’m in a period of my life where I can actually participate, that likely is the biggest reason. And I would argue that the same trend trajectory is present in pot advocate supporters, only in reverse. They look at their lives and see where they have made all these mistakes along the way and they know, or at least feel, that they will never be able to get into a country club, or be able to play golf with some friends and they instead advocate for the removal of standards so that they don’t have to feel so bad about themselves. That pot facility in Lebanon is supposed to be a medical marijuana dispensary that requires a doctor’s prescription. But drug users know they can get a glaucoma diagnosis from any second-rate doctor and they are all set to buy. But to even get the drugs it encourages people to yield to their weaknesses rather than overcoming them and that is the source of the whole marijuana debate. Even if we take away the pot smoke and just look at the consumption of mariuman in any way for pain relief, what we are doing is yielding to our weaknesses and seeking a below the line judgment to hide behind, rather than forcing ourselves to do better and work harder at life. That is the ultimate price of any society that embraces drugs to cut away the tensions of their lives. Tensions are created by expectation. Not having the ability to manage those expectations is the larger social problem that is worsened by the use of pot.

The more that our society rejects standards of good conduct, the more my rebellious side wants to embrace those standards so these days the uppity trends of golf are very appealing as opposed to the grungy, dirty freaks of below the line counterculture. When people make fun of the standards that are quite common in golf, what they are really saying is that they are too lazy to live up to them so they’d rather hide behind excuses to not participate because they fear they will never measure up to the standard. And pot helps them hide that fear through intoxication and social stigma. So to get back to the question, what does it hurt if people in Cincinnati are carrying around bags of pot? Well, it accepts a lower standard in our culture which will ultimately destroy it. Its one thing to have laws on the books and to not enforce them because there is no jail space and the cops don’t really have the heart to do so. But decriminalizing it means that the standard is ripped away and that society can then accept the below the line behavioral target. And that is where things literally fall apart.

I was listening to 96 Rock this morning and they were very excited about the opening of the Lebanon medical marijuana dispensary. Their reaction to it was relief because they will admit that they aren’t the brightest tacks in the box. And as musical rock advocates they have no ambition in life to be anything great, they don’t want to invent the next boon that saves mankind from its perpetual quest to always regress along the Vico Cycle. In a world of standards, they are OK with saying to it, we are the losers, get used to it. But with the legalization of pot, suddenly that stigma is removed for them and they are now in the mainstream. And they find they are enjoying that, because the standard of behavior has been removed and now anybody can join. That is what happens to failing country clubs when they relax their dress codes and suddenly let anybody play under any conditions. The club will go out of business quickly thereafter. Standards are what bring value to society. Without those standards, everything is in retreat and that is why marijuana or even medical marijuana is a sign of a society on the decline. That that is all the argument that is needed about why decriminalization is such a travesty.

Rich Hoffman

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Nobody But Losers Want to Have Sex with Alyssa Milano

It’s hard to believe, but I think we can all agree that her sex strike against the new anti-abortion bill in Georgia is a step in the right direction. After all, if women really want to control reproductive rights, they should do as Alyssa Milano suggested, just don’t have sex. That’s how you don’t get pregnant and end up in a situation where abortions are even a consideration. The female rights that abortion activists are after are reckless sex with no consequences ending up in a decision to choose death over commitment. And yes, it is that simple. Yet Hollywood and its pretentious actors and producers thought for a second that they would leverage Georgia into abandoning their anti-abortion bill following states like Ohio in standing for life. Alabama followed with their own version which makes it a felony for doctors in the state to perform abortions in all cases, with the only exception being when the life of the mother is threatened.

The tough talk lasted for a few hours but once production companies had to realize what was at stake, the 30% tax credits that Georgia gives to production companies to film there, business and logic took precedence over emotional vitriol. There weren’t many takers for the proposed boycott, and we can all see where this is going. These new bills will be challenged in court and Roe v. Wade is going to get a second look, and will likely be overturned, as it should have always been. Abortion is murder and it is rather astonishing that these high profile actors and entertainers could even think to stand against the tide of half the nation who is clearly against abortion, and would still drop money to watch movies of these radicals at the local theater, or on Netflix.

The insanity that abortion is even considered a women’s right is the first problem. It paints all women as murderers just so that they can have reckless sexual relationships and cheapens all life without even the considerations of death in the mix. And of course not all women are such crazy supporters of this feminist issue. The true ugliness of the advocates can’t be avoided and climaxed its lunacy when Alyssa Milano suggested her sex strike. What kind of threat is that, does she really think that people are lining up to have sex with her that she has leverage to shape law and order? Remember the article presented here where just before the Trump election Madonna offered free oral sex to anybody who voted for Hillary Clinton. These people are crazy, these actresses assume too much to think that their industry of entertainment can withstand the stigma they’ve attached to themselves. Championing the right to murder life is not a good business model. Just a bit of friendly advice.

For perspective the latest Avenger movies by Disney are shot in Georgia specifically the Atlanta region and have produced roughly $9.5 billion in economic impact a year. The tax subsidy is much lower than that as far as a cost, so the credit for Georgia is obvious. But it is the production companies saving that 30% off the top who can then make such big productions with their increasing budget demands who benefit. There is a reason Hollywood is moving to Georgia, they are running from the high taxes of California, which has been going on for many years now. The power of Hollywood is a lot like their productions, only in sets and memories, not in practice. Wilshire Blvd isn’t what it used to be, neither is Beverly Hills. The power of fame only had an impact when people wanted the product that came with the fame and those days are long over. While a big movie like Avengers: Endgame had a production budget of over $300 million it would have cost a lot more without the tax credit making it impossible to put all those stars into a film with their exploding union scale costs. Companies like Disney really have no other choice but to do business with Georgia. Obviously, these actors don’t know much about economics.

But then to expect big production companies like those of J.J. Abrams and Disney to put their name next to abortion as a protest is a suicide task. Sure, Disney and Abrams are big time liberals these days, but they know their audiences are not radical leftists. Many of them are people who stand against abortion rather passionately and once they get a whiff of production companies making themselves activists for abortion, they will lose those customers. And that is the most sobering statistic of them all, that people won’t support Hollywood if Hollywood doesn’t represent the box office contributors. The answer to the question does Hollywood make culture or does culture make Hollywood is rather obvious. It all comes down to where and what people are willing to spend money on. People will not consume a product if they feel it doesn’t represent them even in an entertaining way. And nobody really wants to have sex with Alyssa Milano.

We all know that the radical left senses that abortion is on its way to becoming criminalized, as it should have been for years. They knew when America elected Donald Trump that changes were coming which is why they freaked out and continue to do so. Now states are behaving the way they wanted to all along and are passing these anti-abortion measures so they can clean themselves of that vile state sponsored murder, and who could blame them? It was insane leftist activism that brought Roe v. Wade to us not that long ago, along with legalized pot, and socialism taught in our public schools and the bet was that America would change and yield to the pressure. But what happened was that traditional values went underground and stayed there until the pendulum swung the other way, which it is doing now. And the leftists who sipped their wine and engaged in their whoring parties and reckless lifestyles gambled that people would follow them into the gates of Hell itself. But that didn’t happen.

In order for a boycott to work, people have to want the product so badly that the extortion will have some weight in the lost product. However, in truth, everyone has their own production company these days with their iPhones and YouTube that the Hollywood product has to put out $300 million budgeted pictures just to get people’s attention, because there are so many other options these days. There are thousands of Alyssa Milanos working as waitresses and store clerks all across the world, and a good producer could make a star out of any one of them. There is nothing special about her or any of the Hollywood stars demanding Georgia support abortion or else. Or else what? Actors are paid to say what people tell them to and for some stupid reason many of them have adopted these liberal views just so that they could stay employed in Hollywood. Only Hollywood isn’t in Hollywood anymore. It’s in the conservative state of Georgia and that is a reality they all need to come to terms with.

Rich Hoffman

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Don’t Let China Scare You

Don’t let them scare you about China. You have to consider dear reader that much of the American media has been bought up by the Chinese or has been influenced greatly by it. Previous administrations had put all their chips on the table that China would overtake the American economy as a communist country and that they would be running us all, so the bootlicking started decades ago. But in truth, China depends almost entirely on the United States for their economic sustenance, and President Trump knows it. The current tariff war as many are calling it is simply a one-sided affair and Trump is calling the Chinese bluff. China is projecting a GDP growth in 2019 of 6.6% roughly. With Trump’s tariffs that growth will be much lower and that leverage means everything in this conflict. And the Chinese literally don’t have a leg to stand on.

The Chinese are not ones to bolster about what they will do or brag about their positions so you can tell they are rattled by Trump’s strategy by the way that Wei Jianguo expressed the view of the Chinese government to the South China Morning Post this past Monday when he said, “China will not only act as a kung fu master in response to U.S. tricks, but also as an experienced boxer and can deliver a deadly punch at the end.” He went on to express that China would target parts of the American economy that would hurt the Trump voter base, namely the wheat markets, and corn production along with pork. But the result of all this banter will be that China will be the first to blink because they need what they import from America, especially by way of food. The communist country like all governments who have adopted that position can’t do for themselves, so they are heavily leveraged on imports, which was their weakness all along. However, until Trump came along, nobody had the nerve to call them on it.

It’s a number’s game ultimately. China imports from the United States only about $120 billion which consists of mainly commercial aircraft, soybeans and automobiles. Well, China has made it clear that they are going to build their own planes so that number will go down leaving them to scamper about on how to feed their massive population without the help of American farming, which they won’t be able to do. And they really don’t care about American auto markets, they can get their cars elsewhere so all that they buy from America has already been on the chopping block for a number of years. Meanwhile in American exports of new energy markets that measly $100 billion in goods can easily be found in the growing American markets. Meanwhile in America we have been importing from China $540 billion. Take that a way and there is no way China reaches 6.6% GDP growth this year which is excessively important to them. That is part of the Trump plan of course and why the White House has all the leverage on this matter.

A lot of that $540 billion that is imported could easily be made in America again, items like apparel and footwear, cell phones and computers. $77 billion alone of that figure is just in computer manufacture so if you are looking to create more American jobs, as Trump is, what we aren’t getting from China is going to net American jobs because the necessity for the products are certainly there. With the United States emerging as the global leader in energy exports, we can suddenly command our position in the world which has not yet caught up to the idea. For many decades internal policies that essentially gave away America’s wealth to other countries are being reversed and the miracles of Adam Smith’s capitalism are now being unleashed once again, and more spectacularly than ever before. Does anybody think that Trump doesn’t know what he’s doing with this essentially being election year politics? The Chinese have no leg to stand on and this whole thing will be over well before the election. The American economy probably won’t even notice.

It happened far faster than anybody imagined as the mechanisms were already in place. You could hear that in Bill DeBlasio’s speech the other day in Trump Tower essentially attempting to hang the Green New Deal of repackaged communism around the American economy’s neck, as they have in the past while the communist country of China continues on polluting the world with those same idiots cheerleading them on. In America we have a freedom of expression that allows for dissidents to act that way, but they don’t have a right to destroy America for the rest of us. In China they don’t have such public voices. If someone speaks against the state, they are simply imprisoned or killed. China in the state they are in presently are not the friends of the world. They have been given power through regulation and policy, and they have been attempting to use that power to destroy us all into a kind of Bill DeBlasio world and thankfully Trump has put a stop to it.

The stock market had a sell-off, big deal. It probably will continue throughout the week. As I’ve said before, when other people are panicking, this is the time to buy, so go buy up the losses. The strength of the present American economy has shown that it wants to be at a Dow measure above 26,000 and will return there the moment China capitulates, which they’ll have to. Nobody expects them to like to be being beaten in this way but they simply have no other cards to play. Trump holds them all. They don’t buy much from us, but we buy a lot from them. They need us. We don’t need them. That is the bottom line. Once panicky investors realize that China has no teeth, they won’t be afraid of the bark which is all they have at this point.

Ultimately it will be the limits of an overly managed society in communism that will stop the economic growth of China. Their people are overall poor per capita, and they lack intellectual aptitude. That’s not to say that they aren’t smart, but as we know in all socialist and communist societies people don’t do things for the state, they do things to enrich themselves. When you take away the profit motive, creative thought toward industry stops and over reliance on other cultures permeate the politics. That was fine with China so long as the world was steering all countries in their direction through crippling environmental policies and taxation. But Trump has called that bluff and he has two aces and there is a third in the “river.” The American economy is now an exporter of energy, the best in the world. That replaces the lost revenue that China would have given us in trade. The Chinese care more about the statistics of their economic growth than they do of the realities of feeding their own people, so they can’t last long in a trade dispute. And we knew China was cutting what they were going to buy from America anyway, especially in commercial plane manufacture, so why not pull the trigger on it now as opposed to when they were actually on their feet? Why give them time to cut their orders from Boeing? The answer is, there is no reason to wait. Let the trade war begin now, so that Trump can end it before the next election, and the world sees who really knows what’s going on and who has the greatest economy. And it won’t be China.

Rich Hoffman

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“Quality Time” The Art of Invincibility

It’s been a while since I looked at it but my grandkids have discovered an old video of me called “Quality Time” which was a demo reel of some of my whip work from about 15 years ago. While the quality of the video itself certainly isn’t great it was fun to watch it with them again. It was that video that actually did create some opportunities to work in Hollywood a bit and it was fun to reflect upon all those events that were in those videos. I had written a book called The Symposium of Justice so the demo reel was to set up book signings and all the other kinds of activities that go along with publishing a book. But my problem with the book was that I wanted to be the character of Cliffhanger in real life, so what followed these days of bullwhip work for me was doing in real life what I wrote about in the book. I didn’t want to grow up to be one of those pin headed authors who just thought and wrote about things. I wanted to actually do the things I wrote about, so that set my course into the politics that I have been so well known for. Yet again, things do evolve over time and now that I have grandchildren, and they are eager for knowledge of any kind, they are having fun discovering my past, and I’m having fun sharing it with them.

My daughters were in that video as little girls and so is my son in law before he married my oldest daughter. Bullwhips in my family has always been a thing and there was never anything fringe about it. For us it was part of our lifestyle and it was for me a way to encourage my kids about traditional American values. These kinds of things have always meant a lot to me so it was quite a wonderful thing to have my grandkids, all of them, suddenly have this interest in my work with bullwhips over the years and wanting to suddenly learn all they could. My oldest grandson especially is at that age where he’s starting to wonder what kind of person he might become, so he is starting to show a desire to learn bullwhip work. I have a tendency to let people come to their own way in life, but I won’t disguise my happiness that he is showing an interest and asking a lot of questions. He’s already showing great poise in the activity which for any kid is a great thing to learn.

Before my leap into political matters there was a lot of discussion on the family end about getting involved. Our life at the time was film festivals and invites to Hollywood events so why get involved in political activity? Because in doing so it would surely have an impact on my good bullwhip life and the future publication of books I wanted to write. Yet in my mind I had to know that I could be as authentic in real life as the characters I was writing about, otherwise I would feel like a phony. It’s not like I hadn’t been in lots of fights before and I felt I could take on anybody, anywhere, at anytime. And I did have a past with knowing hitmen who killed people for a living. Knowing politicians and corrupt judges who would jail one person for spitting on the sidewalk but let murderers go free only to kill again because they were friends of the political establishment wasn’t enough for me. Many of those people I actually knew in my even wilder days of my late teens ended up in my book The Symposium of Justice. However the lingering thought in my mind was I wanted a real challenge, I wanted to take on an established social system that was behaving as a villain, and to get through it. I always felt my use of bullwhips would carry me through anything, but I had to know for sure.

Happily, I can report that in the 15 years or so since many of the events in that demo reel occurred the whip has never let me down. People often say that a gun can trump a bullwhip in a combat situation but to my experience that just isn’t the case. While everyone knows I am a big advocate of the 2nd Amendment my first love will always be bullwhips. When I have one in my hand I don’t think any person or any group of people can launch a fantasy of attack against me. And that is a great feeling of freedom to have, to be able to function in the world without worrying about the intentions of other people. If you can do two things in life, maintain great intelligence where you can outthink your opponents, and then defend yourself from physical harm when they realize they can’t beat you any other way, then you can be truly free as a person. You can only give this to yourself. No government can give that freedom to you. In the East they have their version of martial arts. In the West we have ours, and I know enough to feel I can make myself invincible to any kind of melee attack. And that is the point in learning those types of things, not so you can go around beating people up, but so that you can gain the freedom of defending yourself.

And that’s the way it should be, I’m now at an age where I have something very valuable to offer young people and I can actually teach it beyond any kind of theory. The attribute that has plagued our societies over the years is this trend to bully people into doing things they don’t want to do, and governments are some of the biggest perpetrators. Prior to 2011 nobody had the stomach to take on the big government labor unions, they would threaten you with physical violence, and complete social castigation. They would vandalize your home, destroy your car, anything they could to bring harm to you if you stood in the way of getting what they wanted. And yes, when I became the face of standing against those activities they did try all those things and I did what I do. I felt I was uniquely positioned to stand up to them, and I am happy to have those stories to tell now as not just a writer’s theory but a practitioners expertise. There is a great freedom in being a master of something that everyone knows they can’t duplicate to use against you.

In that regard it gives me great joy to pass this stuff along to this new generation. Its nice that they are interested but its even better to know that they are learning the art of invincibility in the process. The old stories that there is somebody out there who is always faster, stronger, and better than you are falsehoods. It is possible to be the best and to stay that way. And with that comes a respect that can’t be bought or taken from you no matter how much others want to work to do so. Admittingly, it has been an obsession of mine to put myself in the worst case scenarios possible and see if I still land on my feet. In that video I had accomplished so much up to that point, enough to make a nice demo reel. But I didn’t really want to be just another writer, actor, or celebrity. I wanted to be the real deal. And the benefit of that is that I can honestly tell this new generation how to get through life honestly and without any paralyzing fear, which is the best freedom that there is. I may have traded some fame and fortune for the experience, but believe me, it was very much worth every bit of it.

Rich Hoffman

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Transgender Politics was the cause of the Colorodo School Shooting–So Why is Anybody Talking about Gun Control?

This is the trend of how we are all supposed to respond to danger. I wish the kid had survived but what he did is the very American thing to do, when a hostile loser with his hair colored oddly and black finger nails stepped into his school classroom to open fire, Kendrick Castillo Joshua Jones, and Brendan Bialy rushed the gunman and stopped the carnage. Castillo was killed, and the other young men took a few bullets, but the carnage was stopped right then and there, as it should always be. And that is the story that should be and will continue to be told. When there is danger, we always need heroes and it was a wonderful thing to see that a few young people in a Colorado school decided not to be victims. Even better, when gun control advocates tried to politicize the event at a vigil held to memorialize the event, students got up and walked out in protest. There is hope in all this tragedy yet.

The killers were a couple of losers that are quite common these days and were obviously inspired by movies to enact what they thought was revenge for being bullied in school themselves. Devon Erickson and his girl friend Maya McKinney referring herself as a himself “Alec” came into the STEM School Highlands Ranch with a gun tucked away in a guitar case meaning to unleash violence. This is something that has been done in several movies that I can think of and was obviously a fantasy of the two kids. I would go on to say that the two attackers were people functioning in the world created by liberal thinking and were just as nuts as the rest of them, but rather than accept that it was they who were imposing themselves on others, it was the fault of everyone else for their continued failures in life so they sought to kill those they disagreed with. It should be noted that Maya McKinney was one of these transgender people that was going from a girl to a boy and felt obviously entitled to make the transition without any kind of social fall out. Obviously that’s not what happened so the result was carnage and violence—not unexpectantly.

For gun control to even become the first thing out of everyone’s mouth was reprehensible. As many have been saying for a long time, violence like this will always happen. What we need are people at the point of the attack who will stop the violence, which was certainly the case at this particular school shooting, and was the situation at the recent California synagogue shooting where a border patrol attendee had been carrying his gun by the Rabbi’s urging. In all those cases and any in the future, the body count will be noticeably different when violence is confronted rather than avoided. More people die when victims run away than when they attack. That is a fact of life. I would go on to say that such behavior should be expected among Americans who are born free and live in a culture that should respect it. I hate to hear that Kendrick Castillo lost his life in the process but on the other hand, what a great life he lived. It’s better to have such a life cut short than to live for the next 50 or 60 years wishing he had done something when the time arrived. What a good kid.

But let’s stick to the real issue, which has nothing to do with gun control, rather the real need we have which is liberalization control. Both the initiators of violence in this case were messed up kids who obviously were taking liberal positions of gender neutrality and attempting to live their lives as promised by those beliefs which were obviously in conflict with the sentiment of the community. We are all told to turn off our sensibilities to these kinds of issues, such as Devon Erickson and his colored hair and finger nails and this Maya McKinney thing who was a girl wanting to be a boy. And they had worked themselves up into such a froth of victimization that they actually wanted to kill their classmates in a school they were soon graduating from. They were the ones putting their sexual preferences out in front of everyone else to accept yet they felt so entitled due to their hurt feelings at not being accepted that they chose to actually kill people who disagreed with them. That sounds an awful lot like the current Democrat party to be honest. Where do we think these kids learned this behavior? It certainly wasn’t the NRA or anybody in the Republican party. Guns didn’t just jump into that guitar case in a “Desperado” fashion to invoke terror on all the people who didn’t like transgender politics thrown into their faces everyday. Most of those kids just wanted to go to school and live their lives. The real villain is a mental health question, but the specificity of the ailment is the feeding of a liberalized view of the world in conflict with a traditional one. And who has been fueling that fire—liberals.

Then when a school shooting occurs everyone is surprised that a person here and there snaps under the pressure and seeks to get revenge on those who persecute them, because those people have been taught that they are victims, not initiators. What was the point of Devon Erickson painting his fingernails black? Was he looking for acceptance or pushing his beliefs onto those around him? And why was this Maya thing so intent to change their sexual identification? I mean in the bedroom it could be a girl or boy in their sexual context, who the hell cares. But she, he, or it wanted to change the way the world looks at such things, so they were looking for social acceptance by pushing themselves onto the environment around them. Who is doing what to whom?

The heart of the matter is not gun control, its liberal politics and more specifically this whole gender neutrality uprising pushed by that sector of the political spectrum. The instigation of violence by the victims of their own fate is the cause of the school violence, not the access to guns. It was in making the two gunman victims in the social spectrum in the first place than their belief that they had a right to punish those who didn’t agree with them. People like the kids who saved many lives by rushing the gunman decided not to be victims of violence and they engaged at the point of the attack. But the cause was the two loser kids themselves, sexually confused young people who decided they were so self-empowered to impose themselves on the world around them that they decided to kill to maintain their illusion. Ultimately they are the result of liberalism. The desire by Democrats to deflect blame is obvious, so they immediately seek gun control as the means to stop such things in the future. But the real answer is to limit the effect liberalism has on young minds, and that more people need to be armed and ready to stop such carnage in the future well before more lives are lost. Because liberals are a part of our world and to maintain their illusions of mental health, they will attack again.

Rich Hoffman

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Why All School Levy Supporters are Stupid

There were a lot of stupid people in Ohio on election day, May 7th 2019, but that shouldn’t surprise anybody. The school districts, which are ran by radical labor unions, count on stupid people to pass their tax increases to support their runaway labor costs, and May ballots always have a lower turnout than fall elections. The stupid people are too stupid to do anything else and they show up while the smart people are off doing other things. So its no surprise that 76% of all school levies in Ohio passed during Tuesday’s election. It’s a known formula that works. But I was happy to see that local schools near me, Lebanon and Milford both rejected their tax increase attempts and it is the why and the margin of victory for the “No” voters that are intriguing and worth analysis.

For those new to school levies and these pages I write upon, Darryl Parks from WLW radio and I have a long-standing term for people who work to pass school levies, that they’re stupid. The reason is that school levies are driven by escalating labor costs that consume most of the budget. Collective bargaining agreements jack up the costs because all employees get paid equally no matter how good they are—their jobs are not merit driven. So, the costs for labor are excessively high and the labor unions essentially take away the school board management of the resources making all public schools messes to manage. The parents with kids in the school don’t care because most of the time they just want the free baby-sitting service. Often, they are too busy with life to care what goes on in the schools so long as someone is watching their kids, so the mess continues into escalating out of control costs. To make matters worse, because children are involved, real estate agents have chained themselves to sales of homes based on the grade of a school district, which is completely a made-up statistic which then shields all the radical labor union activity. These are the same type of elements that have sunk companies like General Motors and the only way that the government schools get away with the whole scam is by throwing constantly more money at the situation with tax increases on property owners. That is why anybody who votes for a school levy is stupid.

But people often settle down once their kids grow up and move out of the house becoming much more reasonable at the voting booth. Once they don’t need that free babysitting service, they tend to vote away from government school support. After all, the product the government schools provide is terrible. I would argue that kids would be better raised in the jungles of South America by monkeys than to attend any public school with a highly liberalized agenda. The monkeys would destroy the mind of young people far less. Once people raise their kids, they tend to become much more conservative with their money and they vote that way. I am proud to say however that I have never supported school levies because for me the education they offered was always a bad product that I couldn’t support.

In Lebanon and Milford, you can see the trend clearly. Both districts are about 10 years into their prime real estate markets for new housing. There are other places in Ohio that have the new growth and likely that is one of the biggest contributors to the school levies that did pass. Many of those homes are in situations where the kids have grown up and away from their community leaving behind the parents who suddenly don’t feel shackled to their local public school, so they care less and less what goes on there. In Milford the tax increase proposal was defeated 57-43, which wasn’t even close even for a May election. And in Lebanon the vote was 56-44 which was ironically almost precisely the same. I would attribute that to the fact that both communities saw their boom surges in the housing market at nearly the same time, so their demographic makeup is nearly the same.

Mason, Lakota, and even Fairfield which are near those school districts have nearly the same demographic situation, there isn’t a lot of new home building going on. There are new students who move into the districts and enter the school system, but not nearly as much as when entire neighborhood sprung up out of corn fields and sent thousands of new students, and panicky parents to the voting booth each year. In essence, the student populations of each of those districts is declining while the home ownership is stabilizing with older and more mature property owners not so invested in their local schools. That means that the reliability of the public-school funding model depends completely on the explosive growth of a community and the amount of children a family typically produces in its life cycle. If parents are only having 1.5 children per family these days as opposed to two or three as it has been in the past, then there is no way that government school districts can continue to even think about getting enough votes to continue throwing money at the dumpster fire that is the present school funding system. And the unions won’t be able to do anything about it. They have already burnt their bridges with many supporters and people are tired of hearing them cry for money that most people don’t get in their own jobs. They have lost the support of a sympathetic public.

I am one who have thought for years that teachers make too much money under their union contracts. I’ve seen the job they do up close and I’m not impressed. And speaking to the kids graduating I’m even less impressed. Teachers for the job they are doing shouldn’t be making more than $40,000 per year for a good one. Because what they are teaching kids is actually bad for them in overly liberalized curriculums and the actuality of the job is just a glorified baby sitter anyway. I’ve never been against people who want to use schools for the baby-sitting service so they can go fulfill their career objectives. But don’t ask me to pay for it. And that is the attitude of an increasing number of voters year by year. The situation is even clearer today than it was back when Darryl Parks and I were talking about how stupid voters were who passed school levies on WLW radio. The reason for the clarity is because of the maturation of the school districts, which older neighborhoods now housing more voters who don’t have young kids in the district are a dominating factor.

The unionized funding model of continued pay increases paid for on the backs of property owners is exactly the same model that assumed General Motors would always be the top of the food chain in the car making market, but of course that proved not to be the case. Once there was a break in the supply side of those funds, everything fell apart and that is where the public-school funding path is headed. I would say the signs are already there, especially in how Lebanon and Milford voted. But there are still a lot of stupid people out there voting. But not enough to carry this mess far into the future. And that is great news for a change.

Rich Hoffman

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1.6 Trillion in College Debt–More of a Reason to Rethink the Whole Issue

As the college scandal has revealed recently in Hollywood, it wasn’t just Felicity Huffman and Lori Lughlin who believed that college was a stepping stone culturally into a better life and that all it took to get there was money. I can think of literally thousands of people I have personally spoken with over the last three decades who thought just as they did. They didn’t care what their kids really learned in college, only that they attended and that the name alone would take them to great places in life. To accept that premise you have to accept that it doesn’t matter what you do in life, its who you know. And that in knowing people that there is power in that. I of course have a completely opposite view of what makes what in the world and I have had those notions early in my life. I started to see the clarity of the scam as far back as the sixth grade and the older I became, the more my thoughts were confirmed. I attended college, I lived on the University of Cincinnati campus for a while and nothing about any of those experiences changed my mind. They only confirmed what I already knew and over the years more people are coming to realize that what I have been saying all along was true and now they are ready to admit that the 1.6 trillion in student loan debt that our country currently has, which is crushing for a lot of people, wasn’t worth it. In fact, it was just the latest scam in a long list of snake oil salesman type tactics that have been unleashed on the human race, and people have a right to be angry about it.

I have written extensively about the college experience and how it came to hold such a prominent, if undeserved place in our social pantheon. Click here to review. I feel I can say that because I would consider myself an academic. There are likely few people anywhere who study as much as I have and continues to. The difference is that I see institutional knowledge as a limiting factor as opposed to individualized exploration. My beef with college is that it costs too much and is the wrong kind of knowledge that is being offered to students in relation to the world we are living it. It’s not the work certainly. My view of college is that it’s a huge waste of time because of all the drinking and socializing that goes on there. I think there are two things that ruin people for most of their lives, puberty, and their post high school years where all the choices of the world are open to them, and they end up picking one of three meat headed options, death by college, death by the military, or death by a non-college degreed middle class life in a factory and learn at age 18 and 19 to never set their sites for the stars but for some rusty truck for which they are the third owners with 200,000 miles on it, and are happy about it. All three of those paths are the embodiments of ancient institutionalism that has permeated our human culture from the dawn of mankind, and they all suck. There are many more paths available to individuals, but it takes courage to walk them. And to be honest, that path is not for the weak at heart.

But the nature of the scam of college was that people like Felicity Huffman, who was a Hollywood lightweight intellectually, a neurotic suburbanite who likely puts a bicycle helmet on her kids just to go to the end of the driveway and lives her whole life in that fearful bubble were told by the institutions that if only they paid a lot of money to the colleges, then there overly pampered children could grow up and be good people with good jobs and that their terrible parenting would go undetected. Well, obviously that has not been the case. I suppose I had the good fortune to learn all this very early which opened the door to me on how things really worked in the world. I was bored with college, out of my mind bored. If I could have taken the average four your course and compressed it into one quarter I would have. So in those years I got myself into a lot of trouble, in the business world, and it was fun. I learned a lot, far more than any class on business. I met a lot of multimillionaires and became friends with them. I was invited to several lunches where these guys dropped $11,000 for lunch and didn’t even think about the cost. I had never seen a $2,000 tip stuffed down the shirt of a waitress before and with these guys it happened all the time, and the waitresses were always very happy to see them. But I learned from them how things really worked, which I had suspected all along. I was around 22 years old at the time so it was a very interesting time for me. College was pretty boring in comparison. And I was with these guys because I understood their language. It was all about risk taking and having the guts to ride out when those risks failed. But you had to take a shot. The risk reward ratio was what it was all about—and you can’t buy that with a college degree.

The degree would prepare people to work for one of those guys, but it didn’t make you one of those people, so my contention has always been, why would you do it. In all honesty, I probably have paid over a half a million dollars for my education, if opportunity cost were a factor. I certainly took the path through the forest with the most thorns, snakes, and other treacheries, but there was always more gold there too, and well worth the journey. But I’d rather pay that than to be six figures in debt to a stupid college that is running a scam that it sells with their sports programs then has nothing for their students to do when they graduate. For some people getting their foot into the door of a real job makes that big investment worthwhile, but the real education starts when you begin that job. Everyone knows the game whether they want to admit it to themselves or not, which they don’t. But Lori Lughlin was only doing what everyone else was, buying her kids social prestige. Only because she had more expendable income than other parents did she take it steps too far. What she did ruins the snake oil sales appeal, so our society had to draw a line somewhere, especially since so many people are now on the hook for a college degree that costs as much as a house, and they don’t have a job that justifies it.

I admire anybody who gets an education and completes what they start. But the college costs have been leveraged out of range of their real worth do to their monopoly on what they were really selling, social status, a position that our political structure nurtured along for their own objectives of institutional control. Now I understand that not everyone is meant to be like those guys I talked about having lunch with when I was 22, or the people I most enjoy associating with now. Those are the real titans who make or break economies. Everyone else is just trying to get a job with them. And that isn’t worth over 1.6 trillion in national debt.

Rich Hoffman

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