Tag: corruption

The Problem in Puerto Rico: No monster trucks or bass boats there to save Democrats

 

I’m all for making Puerto Rico the 51st state, but as we’ve talked about here on several occasions, their $73 billion dollars of debt that have bankrupted that very small United States territory of only 3 million people was a major problem before Hurricane Maria destroyed the island as a catastrophic category 4 storm.  It was the third major hurricane to hit the United States just in 2017.  Previously all of Florida had been hit by a major storm, and before that Texas.  Trump dealt with both of those crises so well that the hungry media looking for criticism had nothing to say in both cases, even though the personal damage was in many cases much more extensive in dollar value. But when Puerto Rico happened something was very different.  The reason for the mountainous debt, and the cause of so much devastation was that the island was ran by Democrats and they were ill prepared for the disaster—as they always are.  Trump’s FEMA supplies came to the San Juan docks but there was nobody there to take the supplies inland causing the media to criticize the federal efforts.  But behind their criticisms were something else, a fear they wished to hide from the public about the politics of the situation and it is quite telling to explore the cause of that fear.

http://money.cnn.com/2017/09/27/investing/puerto-rico-debt-who-owns-trump/index.html

I’ve done hurricane relief before.  I remember very well how bad Hurricane Fran was when it hit Chapel Hill, North Carolina as a category 3 storm an hour inland from the coast.  The power was knocked out for two weeks and I was one of the guys there pulling trees off the homes and it was a real struggle just working in that environment let alone being a resident living in the heavy humidity trying to get insurance adjusters to come and give them back some normalcy to their lives.  The National Guard had to clear the highways so that those insurance adjusters could even get to town, and then the wait was extreme as everyone had something to put on a claim.  You learn really quick all the things we normally take for granted like running water, air conditioning, refrigeration—and an open and well stocked grocery story.   Maybe one of the weirdest things I’ve ever seen in my life was a grocery superstore completely empty because everyone had ransacked it and it hadn’t been restocked for weeks because delivery trucks couldn’t get to it.   And this was in a very conservative area where people were pretty smart, generally, and there weren’t a lot of people living off the federal government.  Many of the people I was dealing with lived in nice homes and had good jobs at either NCU or Duke University across town—so at least there was money as a foundation to all the misery.  It was a mess, and that was the United States mainland where military bases and a very advanced highway structure were there to provide the quickest relief possible.

Of course Puerto Rico is a different story, it’s an island to the southeast of Cuba so it’s not connected to the United States mainland in any way, nor is it even close. It’s nearly as remote as a territory as Hawaii or Guam is.  Getting to Puerto Rico isn’t easy under the most optimal conditions, let alone when all the infrastructure was wiped away by a major hurricane that touched 100% of the island.   Being so far in debt the power grid was in a poor state to begin with and the people living there had very little money.  Most of their homes were disgraceful places just a few steps out of a third world country.  The Democrat governor, Ricardo Antonio Rosselló Nevares is a member of the New Progressive Party—which is just another name for Communist Party USA and points directly to why Puerto Rico had a debt problem to begin with.  The Governor seems like a pretty decent human being, but his politics are horrendously misguided—so he wasn’t prepared for a storm that completely destroyed the island leaving the 3 million residence completely vulnerable.  Then to make matters worse the mayor of San Juan, where the major port is located to get supplies to people inland was ran by Carmen Yulín Cruz Soto—an even bigger liberal than the governor.  Between them they had no plan of action or understanding of basic management skills which left them to not only ask for federal help by way of supplies like FEMA had conducted in Florida and Texas recently.  But they were asking for the infrastructure to deliver them as well—a considerably more difficult proposal given the remoteness of Puerto Rico.

With Texas and Florida being Republican lead states with governors who knew what they were doing federal help was able to bring in supplies and from there plenty of self-sufficient volunteers used their monster trucks and fishing boats to get those supplies to the people who needed them until the basic necessities of life could be somewhat resumed.  It will take many years to even hope to return to normalcy, but few people died and the people in those regions got back on their feet quickly.  They were success stories defying the tragedy due to the inherit self-reliance of the people most affected.  The people in those places were conservative minded which is how Republican governors were elected in those states to begin with.  Not so in Puerto Rico where I think the only Republican on the island will be President Trump when he visits to examine the extensive damage for himself.  In Puerto Rico the people who elected the progressive Democrats into office think much differently than those people in Texas and Florida.  They had no boats or monster trucks to help with the volunteer effort.  They were mostly poor people made worse by their addiction to government services and socialist local management of resources.  The people there didn’t rally to solve their problem, they sat on their porches waiting for someone to turn their power back on, and to bring them food and water.  The supplies were in the port at San Juan to distribute inland, but there was no effort to take those supplies to the people who needed them because nobody thought to do it for themselves—hence their tendency to vote for Democrats in office and to be poor, and in perpetual debt.

And that’s why the Democrats around the country are attacking Trump so viciously, because they have to hide the big difference in why Puerto Rico is so dissimilar from the major disasters that crippled Texas and Florida just weeks before.  Everyone can tell for themselves how differently the Puerto Ricans reacted to a major tragedy compared to the bass boats and monster trucks in Houston who fought bravely to restore order to their communities.  Liberals know what the problem is and they can’t let that become the story so they are attacking the Trump administration for essentially the same things they attacked President Bush for after Katrina wiped out New Orleans. But the problem was never the reaction of the Republican presidents; it was the type of people who were inflicted.  In Republican run states where the political bases were much more self-reliant the federal government and the people worked well together to manage the crises.  But in Democrat lead areas where liberal mayors and governors were in charge, everything was a disaster.  The FEMA people could bring the supplies, but the locals expected those supplies to literally be poured down their mouths because intellectually they are a too depended on government services to think for themselves.  That’s generally why they were poor to begin with.  Being poor isn’t just something that happens, it reflects the way people manage their lives.  Hard working people tend to have jobs and therefore money to work with.  They may even have a nice bass boat in their driveway to use if they find themselves flooded out. But poor people are usually those who are apathetic and always looking to do the minimum in life—which is why they don’t have many resources to work with when something bad happens. Puerto Rico had a lot of poor people by its demographic nature which is why they’re in terrible debt to begin with.

Trump’s tough talk about Puerto Rico is perfectly justified.  The federal government can’t just come along and bail them out of the $73 billion dollars in debt then pay for the complete rebuilding of the entire island.  The people there are going to have to change fundamentally into a more conservative base of philosophy otherwise they’ll be in trouble again during the next crises and they won’t bring anything to the table as an American state. The way to get Puerto Rico back on its feet is to create some free enterprise zones to make the island attractive to some of the high-tech businesses that are emerging in the new Trump economy—so that the place can become something like a new Silicone Valley.  But the nature of the people must change because even if Trump brings jobs back to Puerto Rico someone has to actually deliver on the effort.  They can’t sit in the port at San Juan and wait for someone to unload them.  Puerto Ricans need to learn from these crises and change their ways.  They must learn to help themselves—and to stop electing Democrats to run things so that prosperity can actually take root.  Democrats hope that nobody notices their failures in Puerto Rico and that they can hide their mistakes behind the other storms of the year and build a case that racism is somehow the problem.  But it’s not, the biggest difference is that Democrats are idiots who don’t understand basic economics and when pressed in life they always buckle—because their basic foundations of thought doesn’t prepare them for reality–leaving them always in need of a subsidy to fuel their political thoughts which have foundations of moral bankruptcy.  They only know how to just consume the resources thrown in their direction under every circumstance.  The problems in Puerto Rico are and have always been the failure of Democrats—and for that they can only blame themselves.

Rich Hoffman

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The Pittsburg Steelers Suck: How “group think” is destroying the NFL

I will forever now hate the Pittsburg Steelers for the way they handled the National Anthem and their individual player Alejandro Villanueva who was the only person who came out of the player’s tunnel to pay respect to the flag during last Sunday’s game.  In the past I’ve been supportive of the head coach Mike Tomlin but now under this national crisis he’s shown himself to be one of the villains, and I have no place in my life for a person like that.  I’m not going to watch any more Steelers games in the NFL, I can tell you that.  To watch how excited people were that Villanueva was the only one to stand for the anthem, then to take that away with a weak apology to the “team” the way events occurred the next day displayed everything that is wrong with football.  Obviously Tomlin and the Steelers teammates had gotten to Villanueva forcing the guy to wipe everything good he had done away completely for the good of the “group think” concept of team sports, and I think it’s disgusting.

As much positive that I’ve written about American football, and how it is a game of capitalism, there has always been that one little thing that has bothered me about “the game.”  And that is and was for me the culture of the locker room.  Now to that effect the best comments I have heard on this subject came from Chris Carter shown below in a video.  But for all the passion Chris showed toward the locker room culture that is precisely what always turned me off to team sports.  If I could have just played the game and embarked in the heroics of what happened on the field—I would have loved to play football and other team sports.  When I was in school I was heavily recruited by many coaches and my parents really pushed me to participate.  I was a very fast kid, a strong kid and a naturally gifted athlete.  I healed quickly, my body responded well in the weight room by putting on muscle when needed in a few days—everything about my physical body was what coaches wanted except for one thing, I thought the whole experience of the team concept was stupid.

When I was in the fifth grade I had a physical education teacher who really was encouraging me to be a multiple sport athlete because it was obvious to him that I was the fastest and strongest for my size of anybody in school.  But in sixth grade the next gym teacher was an arrogant prick who was all about group think, and I was opposed to everything that guy stood for.  I can say I hated that person before we ever spoke to each other because his value system was so diametrically opposed to mine.  However, let’s back up before going on—because this is important to the situation we are seeing now.  Even more than physical ability I was gifted with clarity of thought that extended beyond any parental teaching that anybody could give me.  Some might say that God walked with me very closely and guided me—which I think takes away from the actual value of my own decision making—but I always had very clear thoughts about how things should be, and had the courage to act on them—so when I was being groomed for being the next hot athlete in grade school, I resisted because I was opposed to all forms of “group think” that were presented to me—and public education was all about “group think” and “peer pressure.”  Ultimately what changed Alejandro Villanueva from a solitary figure pledging allegiance in the player’s tunnel and capturing America’s pride for about 24 hours but then reducing him to s slobbering apologist surrendering his big body to the rights of the “team” was that peer pressure instruction which had molded him into a professional football player in the NFL.  All those players at that level are governed by the same rules and those rules greatly restrict them as human beings which is why I never developed into an athlete outside of gym class.  I always fought peer pressure from day one in public school and that made the experience miserable for me.  I am thankful to this very day that I was aware of it from such a young age.  Group think is the worst aspect of human nature and I was always immune to it which then allowed me to see things without the emotion of worrying about what other people thought about it.  You can’t be a truly free person in life until you have made that personal decision not to worry about the opinions of other people.

I had a long talk with my gym teacher in the fifth grade when the subject of showers came up.  It was a purely voluntary thing to strip down and shower with the other kids after gym class but I wasn’t about to take off my cloths and share my naked body in the presence of my classmates.  I didn’t like those kids and I surely wasn’t going to reveal myself in a naked form to assimilate with them.  My parents then got involved and they all spoke to me that once we started doing sports in the seventh and eighth grades, that showering would be mandatory.  The more they pushed, the more I dug in.  I always saw the shower thing as a way to strip away the natural defenses of clothing and to symbolize removing our individuality into the naked truth of kinship where everyone was equally naked and sharing that experience together.  I wasn’t going to do it and that was all there was to it.  A lot of people were disappointed in me and they let me know it through peer pressure.  Yet the more they pushed, the more I dug in and the only place I found relief was in books, video games, and adventures outside of the school environment.  Since I didn’t waste an ounce of my time on satisfying other people’s peer pressure, I was free to do many other things leading me to a very colorful life full of unique experiences.  It all started by refusing to shower with other kids in school.

As a lot of these professional athletes grew into the specimens of perfection that they must be to play in the NFL at some point in the past they had to assimilate to that group think mentality which is what quickly controlled the behavior of Alejandro Villanueva.  These players are bigger, stronger, faster and tougher than the average person, but they are weak in the mind and can easily be controlled by little people like Mike Tomlin because of their preponderance to “group think.”  Groups are never more powerful than individuals and that is essentially the opposite message that the concept of team sports tries to convey.  Parents push their kids into team sports always hoping that their kid will win the lottery and become one of these professional athletes and live a good life under the protection of “group think” but you know what, I would never curse anybody I loved with such a limited vision for life.  I would never tell a kid I loved to take that first step in a locker room to become equal and bonded through nudity surrendering their individuality to a group called a “team.”  Not that the showering situation is about being gay, which I think is somewhat of a problem.  Athletes often have a “bros before hoes” clause in their psychological pacts with each other which I am adamantly against—and that mentality starts in the locker room culture—the all for one and one for all mentality of group think.

That’s why this whole NFL protest concept is so dangerous, because here you have millionaire athletes who are public celebrities behaving so quickly to the peer pressure of group think that they are easily used to sell social justice radicalism to their fans without understanding really what they are doing.  Trump is right about what he said about NFL owners being afraid of their players.  And coaches like Mike Tomlin was trying to get in front of that fear by uniting his team through group think, even though what Alejandro Villanueva did was good for the country.  But it wasn’t good for his team so guess what he did—he put Villanueva on the spot to protect the reputation of the team.  Obviously he tried to back track his vitriol once there were reports that Steelers fans were burning their jerseys and Terrible Towels.  Because here’s the secret to the whole thing, fans of the NFL love to watch team sports and root for the collective efforts of the team they have picked in an artificial war on the field of play.  But if you listen to them talk at tail gating parties before the games you hear the recitation of individual stats.  Those individuals are picked for Fantasy Football teams based on their individual performance.  So to the fans, it’s all about individualism and Alejandro Villanueva embodied that spirit gloriously before the game which caused all this trouble.  Once people were reminded that Alejandro Villanueva was just another “team player” yielding to the peer pressures of the world he became no better than anybody else—certainly not someone to celebrate.  And that is why the NFL is dying before our eyes.

When Aaron Rogers tried to get the Green Bay Packers fans to lock arms at Lambeau Field during a Thursday Night Football game on a national stage he was embarrassed to find that almost nobody did it.  As a jock trained to think in group assimilation he assumed the fans would follow him like all the other idiots he knew from his locker room.  People do not like to share themselves with people who do not possess the same value systems.  This is why team sports is such a big part of public education, because the goal is to create a class structure where athletes are considered elite people who then impose peer pressure on the rest of the world to satisfy the objectives of the government institution.  That might work conceptually, but it doesn’t work intellectually—and the effort failed.  But the attempt to even try it reveals the ugly side of the NFL which makes it easy for fans to turn away from the moment that it doesn’t give them what they want—which is relief from politics and the anxieties of our days.  When athletes show themselves to be simple automatons subject to group think instead of dynamic individuals that might be on the next insurance commercial, then the magic of football leaves and something else will replace it.  And the Pittsburg Steelers have really shot themselves in the foot assuming that people would be with them no matter what.  Now they have to live with their bad decision, which won’t be easy for them to do.  Speaking for myself, I will never watch another football game where the Steelers are playing.  I have better things to do than to waste my time on them.

Rich Hoffman

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

The Church Shooting in Tennesse: Guns are the only thing that makes us all equal

If the gunman were not a black foreign immigrant who invaded a Tennessee church shooting and maiming innocent people within the congregation—the story would have appeared everywhere for days. But as it stands the story has been lightly covered because it turns out to be a very good one for those who advocate the necessity of the Second Amendment. For whatever his motivations the Sudanese shooter, Emanuel K. Samson brought his troubled recollections to the innocent lives of the masses, and people needed to defend themselves. If not for the actions of another young man, Robert Engle, Samson would have massacred many more people. Here is how The Washington Post reported the story—which is hardly a conservative publication. The facts speak for themselves:

Authorities have not said what motivated the gunman to execute the shooting. Emanuel K. Samson, who used to attend the church, has been charged with murder.

The shooting has shaken this relatively diverse pocket of Nashville, a community now fearful that Samson’s attack on a predominately white church could disturb a sense of racial harmony here.

Samson, 25, is a native of Sudan but resettled in the United States in 1996. Nashville police and federal investigators haven’t publicly identified a motive for the attack, but the U.S. attorney’s office in Nashville has launched a civil rights investigation and federal authorities have opened a hate-crime investigation.

“Everyone is saying don’t jump to conclusions and he was a nice guy but I think it was planned,” Goad said. “He knew what he was doing and picked out a place he knew where everybody was elderly, and didn’t expect to encounter anyone who was armed.”

After Samson shot Spann and the other parishioners, another man inside the church, Robert Caleb Engle, confronted him. As the two men struggled, police said, Samson’s gun went off, hitting him in the chest, and he fell to the floor. Engle then retrieved his own handgun and stood over Samson until police arrived.

 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/wounded-minister-in-tennessee-church-shooting-describes-chaos/2017/09/26/6aa229b0-a305-11e7-b14f-f41773cd5a14_story.html?utm_term=.7cdc39822148

No matter how much progressive thinking people believe that cultural assimilation is a productive thing to do, their thoughts are deeply flawed. We are not living in the times when kingdoms were united by a simple marriage. In those days people had to swear fealty to a king, so the responsibility for their thoughts and actions were not their own, meaning people of different value systems could be united out of fear of punishment by a centralized figure. But that’s not the way it works in America. People are free here and we do not bend our beliefs to a centralized figure, or even an institution. That puts the burden of social order on the strength of our values and when a group of people are suddenly thrust into a group of another people who have different value systems, then the first primal reaction to it is to inflict violence upon the other so that a challenge of their value systems is not so obvious. That is technically why we have ever had every war the human race has seen.

Now that progressive society has mixed up so many people of different values and put them all in each other’s faces—to force conflict in many cases—now they have to deal with the ramifications of that bad decision. As it stands the strong values of American tradition will prevail simply because they have worked in the past and those challenging those values come from failed states of thought where the roots of belief are very shallow—meaning their foundations are easily eroded away. That would certainly be the case of the Muslim faith and those who reside in poor communities where reading and wealth are not priorities. Their value systems are nurtured due largely to laziness—where other people work out the details and they simply grab on as the trend of the day—which is obviously the case of these young people looking for their way in the world and discovering that there are challenges to their emotional testaments. Without knowing the details of Emanuel K. Samson we can look at the situation and conclude that he was a young man who was finding the challenges of living in America difficult and he had developed enough rage to lash out in a murderous way toward those whose value systems were much different than his. So he grabbed a gun to inflict terror on those different from him. That’s an easy thing to do when the assumption is that the victims will be unarmed.

This kind of thing will of course continue—and will likely get worse as the failed experiments of progressivism fizzle out over the next fifty years. Americans are rediscovering themselves and there are many people like the young Engle who will need to wrestle bandits to the ground under gunfire in the future. Concealed carry holders will be more important than ever before. Personal firearm protection is an increasing need, not a diminishing one. The way to maintain a civil society is not to put the burden on an already overburdened “state” but to allow individuals to help the state by being the first responder to violence—then shielding those individuals from the burdens of legal activism in the wake. As many young men like Samson will discover in a world where capitalism forces values to be well defined—their foundations of belief from wherever they came from may come into conflict with the world around them. Their default reaction will be to inflict violence—so we need to be a well-armed society to protect ourselves from the psychological breakdown of these personal catastrophes, where immigrants finding the beliefs they had were failing to take root among free people—and them not knowing what to do about it other than kill those who are different from them.

To all those who preach equality, nothing makes people equal better than a gun. Personal firearm protection is something that needs to be the wave of the future for all those who wish to live in a free and equal society. Putting more trust in the state certainly hasn’t worked, nor will it ever work. The only thing that does is to have people personally armed so that when people like Samson pull out their guns, we can pull out ours and shoot them dead. Banning guns doesn’t work because Samson would have then just went to a knife or some other raw weapon of malice. Uninventing the gun won’t work either. We have to deal with the values of our people everywhere—and that is something the progressives ignored from the start of their movement. They never thought this thing through, this mixing of people in the ways we are seeing where value systems collide without an answer to heal it, and now we are seeing the ramifications. The only solution is to have personal firearms to deter the violence, and when it does occur, those threats can be quickly removed. Ignoring the situation will not fix it.

I would suggest everyone reading this to obtain a concealed carry permit and to carry a firearm everywhere you legally can. Hopefully you never have to use it. But if you do, you can be ready to blast people like this Samson kid into oblivion. He gave up all his individual rights when he walked into a Tennessee church and put bullets into innocent people. At that point he couldn’t be shot and decommissioned soon enough. Forget about the trails, forget about his human rights. Forget about the social ramifications. Once he made that decision to take the lives of other people—for whatever reason—he gave up his rights to live on planet earth. And only the gun can serve as judge, jury, and executioner in a society of clashing values. Only the gun makes them all equal.

Rich Hoffman

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

New Rules to the Game of Power: From Henry the VIII to the NFL–the world is changed forever

If you know anything about European history, or actually the history of anything human—you will find extensive evidence of people worshipping other people as their rulers.  It is something that is wired into our DNA—we seek masters to rule over us.  Even in America virtually every place of business has some semblance to their own version of the Game of Thrones—Which George R.R. Martin actually based on the War of the Roses in Europe.  People will do almost anything to gain a title that they can then use to acquire power over others and typically that is the name of the game.  When people acquire those titles and that power they have a right to rule over the minds of mankind in whatever capacity the title gives them as defined by our human history.  Such as, a village chief makes all the executive decisions that concern the culture of the people connected to that collection of people.  A CEO at a company performs the same type of function, and of course there are underlings who are always plotting and scheming to nock that person out of their seat so they can then acquire control of a company.   If people cannot become the CEO then they will usually do anything to acquire some seat of power under the CEO—in whatever capacity they can get—because the behavior is toward power acquisition and naturally assumes that the structure of that particular society will obey mindlessly the unspoken conformance to the rules of conduct that has been with us since the beginning of time.  In that pecking order politicians have always assumed that they were greater than say a CEO and thus ruled over all others because they controlled the rules in society that the CEO had to live by, and often this forces the businessman to contribute donations to the cause of the politician to gain assistance with the law giving the impression to all that in the rock, paper, scissor game of life, the politician was superior to the businessman, and that all people under those titles were to mindlessly follow their “betters” without question.

America, or the concept of it anyway, decided to revolt against this trend and provide people with the freedom to choose for themselves to rule themselves and this introduced a very confusing dynamic to the scheme of human endeavor.  It’s only been a few hundred years since this idea was created and compared to the many thousands of years of history within the human race, it shouldn’t be surprising that we are just now getting used to the idea.   Donald Trump is essentially the first president to ever be elected to a position of power based purely on the merit of his life—a free man living by his own inclinations and not given some seat of power by boot licking and heredity.  His political enemies have tried to frame his rise to power in that fashion, but it doesn’t stick because Trump is a man of his own making.  That makes him the most unique world leader in all of human history—which is the source of the anguish against him.

There is a lot of fear leveled at Donald Trump by those who have been playing their own version of Game of Thrones for years and have always thought that if they did this, or that—they’d acquire a seat of power and would then be given some authority over their peers—which they seek desperately.  There are a lot of psychological reasons for the insecurity that drives people to seek these seats of power, but for the context of this article, we must focus strictly on the desire to acquire power.   Donald Trump has changed the rules to the overall game of politics—and that has every establishment person upset because all the rules are changing to the “game” and they don’t want to adapt to it.

There is a secret to those who seek the most power through the acquisition of titles—most of them are notably lazy people.   They want to gain some title for which they can sit and boss other people around without being the smartest, fastest, strongest or most qualified person—and they count on fear to force everyone into compliance.  If merit becomes the dominating factor in acquiring power—as it should always have been—then new rules for acquiring power become mainstream and the lazy people of our species are at a loss.  That is why the establishment is and has always been against Donald Trump.  It is also why people will stick next to Trump no matter what he says or does, because Trump has a track record of success and he acquired his power based on it.

In the past people were so easy to destroy who had these positions of power because they always acquired their power through some sentiment—or some connection to others.  This gave the groupthink people leverage over the title seeker in case they ever stepped out of line.  If a politician slept with some woman while on the campaign trail and later they got out of control with their donors, or they voted incorrectly on something the violator could quickly be dispelled by scandal because what was given by emotional invisible rules could be easily destroyed by the same.  In the days of Henry the VIII if he wanted to overthrow the Roman Catholic Church from controlling his kingdom through the Pope he would marry a protestant rebel and use her to give rise to the movement against the church.  Then after the king had England’s politics wrestled away from the Pope and he was tired of his queen and wanted to change her to another he simply dreamed up chargers of infidelity against her so that he could cut off her head and marry a new woman.  What was given by sentiment and emotion was easily taken away—you see dear reader.

In politics the media has played their own version of kingdom building, they build people up, they tear them down and they use that leverage to control who has power and who doesn’t.  But that doesn’t work on Trump because the former Apprentice star has been through the fires of merit and has earned everything he became.   The media came to Trump to boost their ratings but to their dismay they never gained control of him because what was given was done so to acquire power from the natural aptitude of Trump.  The Apprentice went on to become a big success and introduced reality TV to an unsuspecting audience and would change entertainment forever.  Trump wasn’t cast to the top of the heap because of a bunch of executive producers.  He was already there.  NBC snuggled up to Trump always thinking that they’d gain control of him in some way like they did everyone else in history but it never happened.  Trump went on to become president because of his natural inclinations and is completely free of lobbyists, media influence, or peer groups which is the most terrifying aspect of his presidency to those who have spent their lives playing the games of power only to find out now all the rules have changed.

All the things Trump has said this previous week, from the Rocketman comment regarding North Korea to the blasting of the NFL for not requiring their players to stand during the National Anthem the president has done as a free person—and that is new to the stage of human achievement.  We like that Trump says those things because we feel those things ourselves, but have not had a seat at the table of power to communicate to others.  But in America we elect a president to represent us to the world, we don’t elect a king or a noble overlord—we elect a representative, and Trump represents all those who strive to have a merit based system of power acquisition so that we can actually solve problems in our government, not just to have a class of aristocrats to admire from afar who enchant us with entertainment as our “betters.”  I recognize no person on earth as my “better.”  And the people supporting Trump through thick and thin are of the same mind.  On the stage of history this is the first time this has happened, and it’s scaring the crap out of the world that has never had to deal with this elected phenomena.  Democracies have always paid lip service to this idea of a freely elected person to represent the masses, but always that person was easily controlled by traditional methods.   Now with Trump those rules are changed forever.  Our society will never be able to go back to the way it was—because the way it is, is so much better.  That is the pain you hear on the news from those who have always thought that if they did this or that they would be rewarded with seats of power.  Now those seats are meaningless making their lives meaningless because they have put so much of their lazy selves into that game that now they are left empty and staring into an abyss of future values that are beyond them.  Which is a very good thing.

Rich Hoffman

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Donald Trump’s ‘Atlas Shrugged’ Moment: Venezuela’s epic failure due to their commitment to socialism

 

I know, I write about Donald Trump a lot these days.  Yes there are many other things going on in the world—especially local issues,  but as I see it we are witnessing the greatest political trend change that the history of the world has ever seen—and I can’t think of anything more important.  It dosen’t do any good to chase the tail of something as long and elusive as our current social trends which are like a very long snake.  What Trump does today will have a tremendous effect on tomorrow, so it is important to capture those little moments as they occur.  Specifically it was the great United Nations speech that Donald Trump gave which illustrated so many positive things for American culture, but none as great as when the topic of Venezuelan socialism was brought forth and put on the world stage for all to see.

I was surprised years ago when so many people were upset that the great American novel Atlas Shrugged was being made into a movie.  I knew the filmmakers, and was a friend of the crew throughout the production and for them it was a love project.  They had a small budget in order to tell a gigantic story—an epic on the scale of Game of Thrones.  Yet Hollywood wouldn’t touch the project through a legitimate studio with A-list actors essentially because the media companies were so deeply contaminated with socialist and communist supporters that such a pro-capitalist story like Atlas Shrugged was never going to get “green-lit.”

Hollywood has always been a little left but it has only been recently that they were so overtly advocated out-right socialist—as a general philosophy.  Their A-list actors, even people like Harrison Ford, have stepped out of reality and onto the socialist band wagon because it is the social trend of Santa Monica valley these days.  If you go into a bar there by the pier talking about the merits of capitalism those weak-kneed she-males and braless bitches will be ready for a fight—they believe in socialism that much.  So when the independent filmmakers of the new Atlas Distribution Company wanted to make a movie out of one of the great American novels for which Atlas Shrugged is and has always been, all the studios laughed at them.  Many years before the studios laughed at Star Wars too, but that’s another story.  I only say that because “group think” does not understand how to make good movies, or how to detect social trends.  Individuals do.  Remember that.

I thought the movie attempt at Atlas Shrugged was ambitious and they managed to do a pretty good job getting the high points down in a visual form.  I would like to see a big budget Netflix series done for Atlas Shrugged that spans for 10 one hour episodes, because I think that’s what it would take to properly tell the story—but it was a bold attempt even as the entertainment unions pushed back hard on anybody associated with the project.  The production could not keep actors from one film to the next as the movies were divided out into three parts.  The actors were beat on so much by the rest of the Hollywood community that all three movies had a different cast and the only ones who signed up were actors looking for something to do.  It was a real challenge and showed me how bad Hollywood really had become.  All the friendly meetings I had with various people over the years flew right out the window as their true intentions were revealed during the production of Atlas Shrugged.

For those who have read the book you know what I’m talking about.  The modern situation in Venezuela is essentially the plot of the book.  A successful country (the United States in the story) is pushed into socialism by their government and the world plunges into darkness.  Once the government establishes things like price controls and root themselves into a severe crony capitalist market, the world falls apart and it is the point of Atlas Shrugged to identify why.  Essentially the “engines” of the world go on strike and that leaves everyone else starving—literally.  The beauty of Atlas Shrugged is that it does something that Karl Marx never achieved—it identified why some people make everything happen while others destroy the world around them—so if the makers of the world fail to participate, economies fail and countries wither away into dust.   The political Left has never come to grips with this phenomenon and this is the aspect of our civilization that is most important to our continuation into the future.  Marxism and all the fruits that fell from it like socialism, communism and fascism all turned out to be rotten short-lived fantasies first breathed by Sir Thomas More in his classic book Utopia—that were destroyed during westward expansion in the United States.   While Marx and his followers were pushing for labor unions to take over the world by controlling the means of production the railroads, the gold rush and the promise of private property in America used capitalism to fill the sky lines of the worlds next great cities like New York, Chicago and Los Angeles which until that period was just a border town–until the gold rush then the movie industry gave people a reason to live there.

Venezuela had been a pretty good place to live; it was a thriving country living off its oil reserves until Hugo Chavez brought socialism to their economy.   Once Chavez died a member of his inner circle Nicolás Maduro, a former bus driver (seriously) rose to power as a union leader and became the next president.  If you want to see what happens when labor unions get their way by controlling the “means” of production, just look what happened to Venezuela in just a few short years. As the state took over more and more of its industry, they became much less productive and their economy essentially died right in front of the world.  Now the people of Venezuela are starving—literally, and nobody seems to understand why, at least those who have advocated for socialism. Yet it is the nearly seventy year old book Atlas Shrugged that provided an almost page by page analysis for all to read—but the world watched and let it happen to Venezuela anyway.

What was remarkable about Donald Trump’s speech was that most of the people in that general assembly at the United Nations have emotional connections to socialism.  They are either members of Socialist International or they have been thinking about it.  Only the United States has maintained a defense of capitalism and our economy shows it.  The way for more countries around the world to prevent more people from being poor or from having terrible GDP numbers is to unleash capitalism and reject communism.  China’s communism only works if it attaches itself to a capitalist country and can keep the other nations around them poor so that they can maintain some form of price controls.  But if a country to the south like Vietnam were to adopt capitalism, or Cambodia, India or even North Korea—Russia and those types of places—China’s economy would sink because of their communist system.  What happened to Venezuela was that the price of oil went down and they couldn’t compete. That is all the unsaid story before, and no American president would strongly defend capitalism allowing everyone to shrug their shoulders as if they had nothing to do with anything happening to countries like Venezuela.  But when Donald Trump said what he did it put the issue on the front burner in a way nobody was prepared for, and it properly articulated the problem—boldly, people had to listen.  And that was a significant moment in the history of the world that will be remembered for many centuries.  I thought it was tremendous and it will prove to be bigger than anything that happens on the local level because that culture change will flow into the rest of the country rather rapidly.  And I love it!

Rich Hoffman

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Guns and Books: The keys to a happy and free civilization–Samantha Power’s guilt

I say it quite a lot these days, and I’ll continue to do so. If you have two main things in your life you can consider yourself a free person. The first is the ability to read and to use it to consume many books over your lifetime. Having the ability to read and use the knowledge gained from books can make a person nearly invincible—95% of the time. If you are smart, you can get through most anything in life, even physical threats—just with what you learn from books. If you put a smart person in an MMA ring with a beast of a world-class fighter—I will bet on the smart person every time. Because there are more tools to beating brute force that come from intelligence that severally put people who rely on just physical strength to get by in life. Then for that last 5% of the time—you need to own and know how to use firearms. The gun is the great equalizer in life, so by having that you can keep villainy away no matter what anybody may throw at you. That’s why in American society, those two things are what I’d say are the two most important elements to living a free life.

To prove my point just look at the mess Samantha Power is in, who used to be the UN Ambassador under the Obama administration. The academic radical used her position to spy on political rivals and essentially brought in most of our intelligence agencies in the process into a grand scheme that showed just how dangerous collectivism in any capacity can be. Most everyone involved in the federal government activity under the Obama administration told the same story revealed by the Power unmasking of Trump political players—which was the modern equivalent to a witch hunt as we’ve ever seen. Many pundits including Rush Limbaugh did a fabulous job of exploring the who, what, when and hows of this story—so my point here would be on the “why” it is necessary to never trust any institutional system that uses collective force to enforce a philosophy. Having the ability to read and to shoot takes away that power from these types of people and are paramount in stopping villainy as we detect it.

It should come as no surprise that fascists—such as the type the Democratic Party have always inspired to become were in the business of book banning and controlling knowledge—because they needed stupid people to follow them. Smart people who are well-informed would never follow these losers who rallied behind Samantha Power to unmask people connected to the newly elected President Trump. If it can happen to a sitting president with made-up chargers created to justify wiretapping, or any other spying the government wished to conduct on their quest to control political dialogue—then it can happen to any of us. What stops that behavior is of course a well-informed society where internet information is free and easy to access, books of all kinds are available on the open market, and people are free to assemble as the Tea Party did to share educational treasures uncovered during intellectual quests that inspire others to also gain knowledge.

The same people who want to limit what people read, and watch on television under the umbrella of free speech, are the same as those who are always demanding a control on firearms and want to ban personal guns. I personally think that people should be able to carry guns everywhere—that we should be able to wear them on our hips everywhere we go, even to weddings and to court appearances. If someone doesn’t have ill intentions toward you, nor you toward them—it keeps everyone honest. The gun banning people want to put themselves between you and a potential rival as a mediator taking away the responsibility for two parties to actually work out their problems allowing passive-aggressive activity to take control of the process of peaceful exchange replacing mutual respect for fear of the law.

It is highly unlikely that a person would pick a fight with another person if that other person was wearing a gun. It doesn’t matter how big they are, or what sex they may be—when people see a gun on their hip, respect for what that gun can do is the first thing on everyone’s mind—which forces all dealings with that person to be done at an elevated level of respect. If you take that respect away and replace it with fear of prosecution, then those who think they can buy and twist the laws of our land to their advantage may not be so hesitant to do something corrupt. This is clearly what we see in the case of the Obama administration using Samantha Power to commission the many weapons of government to attempt a coup against an American election. They did it because they didn’t fear that anybody would shoot them, and they figured they controlled the strings of government so what was a person like Trump going to do to them—so long as the media played along? That’s the kind of world you get when you take respect for other people out of the equation and replace it with an adhesion to fear. The more fearless, or less moral of the human species will always think they can gain an advantage over others if they are stupid, and unarmed. That’s why Samantha and her partners under the Obama administration thought they would get away with what they did. They never expected they’d ever get caught because at the time they controlled the law and most of the people they deal with were either stupid, or unarmed—likely both.

Carrying a gun isn’t about killing other people, its more about preventing other people from killing you. Just having it does most of the work for you which then frees up your mind to pursue more intellectual pursuits. When you don’t always have to worry about some power-hungry fool coming into your life to disrupt you in some way, you can then read books and contemplate bigger ideas. Some of the best people you’ll ever meet in life are those who read more than fifty books a year and also do a lot of shooting—like people in Montana, Wyoming, Idaho and in the Dakotas. They are not stupid people and they are mostly all heavily armed. You don’t see their cities being shaken to the ground in protests, and you certainly don’t associate them with any kind of crime. There’s a reason for that—and it starts with the gun and ends with the average intelligence of the people who tend to read more than other places in the country. Books and guns are the keys to a healthy and happy life and those who best utilize those two very simple things are those who end up most successful at the very foundations of existence. The proof is clear, and where those things are missing—such as in our Beltway culture, the worst that comes out of the human experience is prevalent. That is why Obama and the Democrats in general always look for ways to impose gun control. That is also why they have problems with free speech. They need people unarmed and stupid so that they can rule your minds. Once people are armed with knowledge and weapons, people like Samantha Power are just pests who can quickly be swatted aside, and that’s exactly what is happening in the age of Trump.

Rich Hoffman
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The Piracy of St. Louis Protesters: It’s a behavior problem, not one of law and order

It’s important to understand what is going on at the St. Louis riots over the weekend of 9/15 2017.  We’re not talking about a free speech case where protesters were just upset over the ruling from a court case where a police officer shot a man of color during an attempted arrest—we are dealing with communist trained radicals who fundamentally want to change the nature of American life.  After the acquittal of the police officer due to a lack of evidence, the Black Lives Matter people along with ANTIFA took to the streets to vandalize the mayor’s home and commit violence against police officers and journalists hiding the action behind free speech—when in fact all it truly was could only be considered open insurrection.  It’s time that we properly define things so that we can deal with them.  People who are working against the American way of life don’t get to tear down the institutional judgment of protections under the 1st Amendment and even the 2nd Amendment, then hide behind them to commit violence, loot stores, break people’s bones and generally become a menace against society.  We don’t have a system of law and order which allows for mob justice-such as what these communist oriented protestors are advocating—that if you don’t like a court ruling, you get to destroy things built by a capitalist society.  That behavior just isn’t acceptable and deserves to be met with violence of its own.

The suspected drug dealer who was shot in this case by a panicky police officer is an old story and it won’t be the last time.  If you are a thug who shows no respect for the law you are giving an open invitation to the police to shoot you.  If I acted the way that guy did when the officers tried to arrest him, using a car as a possible projectile to run the officers over, they’d shoot at me also.  It has nothing to do with being black—but everything to do with having law and order on the side of the police who are commissioned to walk a fine line between justice and anarchy.  Without police, people like these protestors would turn our society into some rotten destination of human degradation—and when they get the police on their heels paralyzing them from action, which is precisely what happens they change the nature of our society into a much greater negative.  Of course that is part of the strategy behind the anti-capitalist groups that sponsor these race riots such as what we saw in St. Louis and many other places recently.  But it’s important to remember that it isn’t a race situation at all, it’s a behavior problem.  The police will shoot at a white person under the same conditions as they will a black person.  The difference is that the black person has been taught from their youth in many cases to function in a victimized state and that the law doesn’t apply to them whereas the typical white criminal shows much more restraint when dealing with the police—so they get shot a lot less often.

Additionally, it’s the location of these shootings, usually in inner city dwellings and city streets where crimes are statistically higher because of the demographic circumstances.  The Democratic failures of applying people of low value into concentrated dwellings has produced a society of crime where the only way to advance their lives is through criminal conduct.  If you take young black men and give them mentors, and raise them in the suburbs where there are good neighbors, things to do, and reading isn’t considered a negative—they tend to grow up somewhat successful and they don’t get shot by cops because they aren’t in trouble to find themselves in that situation.  It’s not a color problem it’s a behavior problem.   The way to fix it is to change the way that people live in cities and under what conditions.  Throwing money at them isn’t enough; you have to change their behavior from the ground up.  The people participating in the St. Louis riots this past weekend are not interested in law and order; they are conducting themselves as communist insurgents looking to rule society through mob influence.  If they don’t get what they want they are looking to the violence of a mob to change the conditions of the world around them—and that is an essentially anti-American activity.  We can define that by characterizing the nature of the rule of law toward individual behavior as opposed to mob justice-which is a distinctly different thing.  Mob practices are associated with communist and socialist countries, not American culture, so to apply it to this case complete with flag burning voids the warranty so to speak of constitutional protection.

As a society we cannot allow ourselves to be paralyzed by people who have no intention on living within the parameters of a capitalist nation.  You can’t have a nation of communists within a nation of capitalists and expect everything to work out OK.  That’s just not possible.  Just like you can’t have a bunch of people protesting the values of the United States flag by not standing for the National Anthem or burning the American Flag then claiming that the activity is protected by that same flag under the Bill of Rights.  It’s just preposterous.  When we stand for the flag or put it up our flag pole, we are saying to one another that we adhere to the values for which that flag represents.  You can’t protest those values then when trouble breaks out run to the protection of that flag, even as you burn it in the city streets of St. Louis.  You also don’t have a right to protest that flag if you are currently taking money from the government for which that flag has been instituted—and most everyone participating in those St. Louis riots have their hand in the government cookie jar—so we need to look at this situation with the correct lenses.

Vile groups who hate America are using these protestors and the issue of race to fundamentally change the nature of American culture.   Back in the glory days of the pirates off American coasts where looting nations were hauling gold back to Europe from the conquered Central and South American regions, it was customary to fly the flag of whatever ship you wanted to raid.  As you got closer, as a pirate and earned their trust so they would not fire on you prematurely, pirates would then run up the Jolly Roger flag to let the victim know that they were about to be attacked and by then it was too late to flee or prepare the cannons.  That’s how pirates took over vessels to loot them of their worth without being blown from the water.  Communist groups are doing the same thing in St. Louis; they are using black people, poor people, stupid people and out-right criminals to get close enough to the law of our times to take over institutions under a condition of social paralysis.  It’s not a case of free speech; it’s an act of piracy.  The only way to quell that violence is with violence because reason has left the battlefield.  It’s a behavior problem which causes these situations, but its insurgent activity which fuels the violence afterwards with an aim of changing our nation from a capitalist society to a communist one.  That is what these rioters are really after, so we should treat them accordingly—and stop treating these insurgents as if they have a right to do what they are doing.

Rich Hoffman

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Now Lynda O’Conner wants to be a West Chester Trustee: Old Lakota tax and spenders ride the cape of Mark Welsh

 

Unfortunately none of the smart people who I know are running for the various school board seats at Lakota this fall as the old board members are now in a race to become the next West Chester trustees.  Since Lee Wong failed to get enough support to move into another seat he’ll likely be back in West Chester as a trustee just because of his name recognition as an incumbent.  Mark Welsh is defending his seat from an onslaught of unionized radicals—like the former Lakota school board president—Joan” the Hutt” Powell.  And now that George Lang is moving into a congressional seat in Ohio, more people have decided to run for West Chester trustee, specifically Lynda O’Conner.  There are also other candidates, but Lynda jumped out to me because she has been by far the most conservative school board member at Lakota—which leaves open that spot for more unionized representatives.  This situation is maturing into a not very good scenario.

I know Lynda pretty well and to be honest her being on the school board at Lakota has helped me take my own fangs out of it.  She has made it a better place—a functioning body of government, especially after Joan Powell left. However she has supported tax increases at Lakota which makes her a bad fit for the West Chester trustee positions.  I consider those trustee seats to be much more important than the Lakota school system positions.  All public schools are liberal institutions, so having a tax and spender there that even pays a little bit of lip service to an actual budget is pretty remarkable.  But that doesn’t mean they translate well over into the general business community that makes all the money for which a region functions.  Lynda in her role at Lakota has been caught many times playing all sides.   As a trustee of West Chester, she might as well be as liberal as Joan Powell and Lee Wong.

This won’t be the first or last fight we’ll have with those types of tag along politicians—who come into a seat thinking that they’ll be as good as their predecessors.  But it is unfortunate, the two guys running West Chester for the last four years have done a very good job and it would have been great to see that continue. But the odds of Mark Welsh becoming a minority vote are looming now into a much more hostile government body toward the merits of logic.  To people like Lynda and Joan Powell the hard work of managing West Chester are in place and they think it will be easy.  But since the only experiences they have are running big liberal government schools, they’ll only have those experiences to stand on while essentially running a city of 100,000 people.  The difference between running a large industrious township and a silly school is that it’s not the radical neurotic moms who you have to please who feel guilt over how little time they spend with their children—it’s the business community who view the school as just another unnecessary expense hooking into their pockets that they have to appease with a tribute otherwise they’ll find themselves splashed on the cover of a newspaper by Joan Powell’s reporter friends and Chamber Alliance stooges.  There’s a big difference between being pleasant to people for the sake of friendly tolerance and having a true relationship with them—and that’s what those former school board members will learn should they get one of these trustee seats.  There is a lot of hostility toward them deservedly so for their support of higher taxes in the past, then bringing that to a currently well-managed West Chester Township that has staved off the temptation to expand government while staying small and nimble to attract business to the area will nurture resentment quickly.

A lot of people forget that Joan Powell was an advocate of committing West Chester into a city status—which of course would have added a city council, a mayor and many other big government expansion  positions that go along with the liberal philosophy her type of people have.  West Chester currently functions very well with just three trustees—actually only two—Lee Wong doesn’t count.  Union contracts have been worked out, taxes are low, zoning is fluid and functional—things have been going well and it shows.  I had guests this past week flying in from overseas to see me.  It was a late trip by necessity—not one planned out months in advance—so when they tried to book a place to stay overnight, they could not get a room in West Chester.  Every room was filled in the middle of a week in September with nothing really special going on.  Over the past few years West Chester has added a lot of nice hotels to the community—at least 10 that I can think of off the top of my head.  My out-of-town guys couldn’t find a single room in any of them—they had to stay in Blue Ash to find a room two weeks ahead of their impromptu flight.  Now why were all those hotels booked?  It certainly wasn’t for IKEA—not in the middle of the week.  And it wasn’t for Top Golf—although some of it was.  It was because there are literally thousands and thousands of people doing business and West Chester has become the hub of Cincinnati for business conduct.  Low taxes, lots of things to do, highway access, and a small government that isn’t sticking its nose into the complex world of commerce with a sidewalk every five minutes so some homeless person can feed some ducks like you find in a lot of other places.  Or a sidewalk so Lee Wong can sneak in the back door of Sushi Monk from his house and beg for free food.  Out of all the names announcing themselves as an option for West Chester trustee it looks like now Mark will be the only conservative.  The rest are all tax and spend liberals as proven by their track record, certainly Lee Wong, ostentatiously, Joan Powell, and of course Lynda O’Conner who has always supported the tax increases at Lakota.   West Chester is headed for trouble.

The question begs to be answered why more conservative names don’t rise to the top and run for some of these seats.  Well, it’s because most of the smart people out there make a lot more money for their productive week and they don’t have the time unless they are retired to waste on these government seats.  But that’s a shame, because a failure to put the right people in the school board seats and trustee seats ends up costing a lot of us a lot of money.  While these liberals play house managing these school boards and trustee positions they always cave into the demands of other government departments seeking perpetual pay increases.  Until George Lang and Mark Welsh brought their business experience to the West Chester trustee seats and started saying no to the hand outs and government expansion that Lee Wong and Cathy Stoker wanted to implement, such management from a government position was unheard of.  It was a good ride and an example that proper management of government resources could take place.  But there just aren’t enough people like those guys out there to keep it rolling—and that’s too bad.  I know I don’t have the time to give to it at this point in my life and I know many other people in the business community are in the same boat.  That leaves those who don’t have anything else to do to run for those office seats and they’ll likely get that second critical vote over Mark because of it.  That means for everyone doing business with West Chester the potential for higher taxes is on the horizon–because they did it at Lakota.  And they’ll do it again on a larger platform for sure—because it’s the easiest thing to do, and when pressed, they’ll give in within a New York minute.

Rich Hoffman

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A Note to NFL Players: Understand your role, social causes are not one of them

Let’s get something straight, this is football.

This is not:

I thought it was rather stunning that the CBS Sports staff on the Sunday pregame show for the opening of the NFL season at noon spent at least 15 minutes talking about a player who isn’t even on an NFL team, Colin Kaepernick. It is truly an awesome display of ignorance that the studio heads of the major networks would look at the NFL ratings and not draw a parallel to the amount of players who have followed Kaepernick into kneeling during the National Anthem ceremonies before games. People who pay over $200 per seat by the time you total up the whole NFL experience don’t want to have some 20 something kid lecture them about social injustice. They want a break from the world which is why they show up to spend so much money on a simple game. But for people connected to the NFL media to openly endorse anti-American behavior is a reckless enterprise that shows they have no idea who their audience is, or how much that audience will put up with to spend money on their game.

I look forward to the NFL season each year—I enjoy the game as a capitalist enterprise that makes a lot of people happy. The NFL experience is a good one, especially on an October Sunday where the air is cool, the humidity is down and all of downtown is thriving at 10 AM in the morning with festivities awaiting the big game at 1 PM. I’ve been to several NFL games around the country and have more than once spent large amounts of money on experiences in the club section and I always enjoy it—more on a macro level as opposed to the intimacy of a local team. I think football is good for America and is an appropriate metaphor for the capitalist system of economics that makes our country the most successful on planet earth. Its good in that regard to indulge in the spectacle of football.

But then you have a player’s union rooted in Marxism that seeks to work against capitalism by its very nature—you have a lot of kids who grew up in impoverished socialist cities who only found in football a way out of their self-imposed misery—who really don’t understand the greater world outside of the rules of the game who are thrust onto the front pages of magazines and television cameras for a short five or six years of their young lives. Then when the game is done with them they are thrown back into society to do something—usually to fail. You have the various progressive groups who want to rename teams into things less “offensive” or to make the game “safer” by making movies attacking the concussion protocol, and other issues. Like CNN did with Sea World, many in the entertainment business see the NFL as a capitalist icon that should be brought down and they use social welfare causes to attack the institution of football, which is having an effect. Then you have some kid like Kaepernick who takes all the fun out of the game by not honoring the National Anthem and forcing people to deal with a social cause everyone wants to forget about for the three-hour span of a game. Most people watching football want to drink and knock the edge off the stresses in their life, and they want to watch violence as their team marches toward a meaningless victory that will be forgotten 24 hours later in the middle of a Monday. When Kaepernick started these protests during the 2016 season and other players followed him, the NFL ratings plummeted. And that is carrying over into the 2017 season which should concern everyone involved. But mysteriously, people close to the game, like television game hosts are sticking with the protest narrative as if Kaepernick has some kind of right to be anti-American while the team he is on is supposed to honor the American system for which football is a game of proper metaphors.

It really shouldn’t even be a debate. The NFL owners understand what the intention is—it’s to make money. Without money the players don’t get paid, their cities don’t get the needed revenue they need to support stadiums in their downtowns, and many of the bars and restaurants that are satellite businesses to the NFL lose huge portions of their revenue. I hate to say it but if you are an NFL player, you are an employee of something much larger—and you need to shut your mouth and play your role in the entertainment for which you have been commissioned. You are not some God on the field of dreams, you are an instrument to be played to the liking of the mob—and you better get used to it. You sacrifice your personal sovereignty the way a soldier does for the US military—you are to follow orders and do what they tell you to—and to like it. When you are done playing the game, you get your life back—and that’s what players sign up for in exchange for the massive paychecks. They are to sacrifice their bodies and their lives while they are playing to the needs of football.

When I was younger every coach wanted me to play on their team, but I never did because I knew as a younger person that football was a means to losing my individual sovereignty and I didn’t want to do that. I wasn’t willing to give that up for the fame, the girls, the power of local celebrity—but some people were. They had pretty positive experiences until they were injured or found they could no longer play the game. I think it’s a reasonable trade-off, and for those who choose to play, they need to understand the rules. They don’t get to change them the way that Kaepernick has tried to do—by assuming that football is so big, and that he was so good that his social messages would have to be listened to by a public half drunk and miserable in their daily lives. He obviously was wrong.

It was really amazing how many social causes attach themselves to the game of football these days, from cancer treatments to hurricane relief—football—especially in the NFL has become more about social causes than about smashing the other guy into oblivion and winning a game for the pride of your local city. But on a Sunday where two hurricanes had just hit the US mainland and one of those hurricanes shut down the opening of two NFL teams in Florida there were a lot more important stories pertinent to the game of NFL football than Colin Kaepernick who is without a team because he’s so toxic and whether or not he should be playing due to his social justice crusade. People don’t care, nor do they want to be reminded of such a thing when they are spending over $1000 on beer, nachos, and hot dogs hoping their team will give them in return a victory they can enjoy for the afternoon and forget all the troubles on their plate at that moment.

Rich Hoffman

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Why the Star Wars Movies Keep Losing Directors: The Pizza Hutt delivery driver

It was my oldest grandson’s birthday party and it was a Star Wars themed event so my youngest daughter who is the mother of the young man put heart and soul into giving him the party of a lifetime.  She personally decorated the house for this party with creations she mostly made from scratch and it was quite spectacular.  To match her efforts she wanted all of us to dress up so the first time that I can ever remember I put together a costume of my favorite Star Wars character—Han Solo, and had a lot of fun doing it. In the process I learned some things that are worth sharing.  One thing that became obvious to me as I acquired all the Han Solo costume pieces needed to get everything together for this party was how similar it was to the kind of equipment needed for Cowboy Fast Draw and that while wearing it, I felt more like a western character than a science fiction icon—which Han Solo has always been.IMG_5166.JPG

Naturally through small talk I have been asked why I like Star Wars so much and my reply is usually because it’s the best western that movie makers can produce these days.  As much as George Lucas wanted   tell a story about a hippie idea of eastern religion defeating western greed through the “force of others” his creation of Han Solo really is the key to the entire Star Wars universe.  The character so wonderfully played by Harrison Ford is an Ayn Rand kind of superstar who advances the story wonderfully, and gives everything resonance.  George Lucas always intended Luke Skywalker to be the hero of the movies, but it was Han Solo that really took over the story as the central and most popular character.  I knew all this before I put together as authentic of a costume as I could, but wearing it complete with the gun belt instantly knew where I was.  The gun belt was the key, it felt as good as my rig for Cowboy Fast Draw and remanded me that it’s not lightsabers and talk about The Force, but Star Wars is more about “having a good blaster at your side” than anything.  Lucas may have intended for Han Solo to be redeemed by the end of A New Hope into the kind of unselfish character that hippies were wanting to portray in 1970’s San Francisco—but the love that the director had of fast cars and Saturday Morning Republic serials featuring cowboys won the day and it was those influences that turned Star Wars into a simple science fiction drama and placed it into the realm of something truly special.  Star Wars is the best western movie made in the modern era—and by that I mean the last 40 years.IMG_5259

I don’t think George Lucas meant to make Han Solo such a powerful character but as the story evolved it was the old smuggler and that capitalist sector of characters from bounty hunters down to crime lords who took over as the featured plot lines that most captured the imaginations of fans.  People didn’t want to grow up so much to become Jedi in the temple fighting the Sith—they wanted to be the smuggler and hot-shot pilot flying the Millennium Falcon and solely saving the galaxy.  In his best moments Han Solo is not a team player but is someone always used to being in charge and finds a way to be successful even when the odds were terribly stacked against him.  When they tried to water Han Solo down into a group think character, he loses much of his power and I think this was something that mystified George Lucas a lot over the evolution of that character.  George Lucas the hippie who knew mostly dope smokers and San Francisco radicals found it an unintended consequence.  But the little boy who grew up watching serialized westerns and swashbuckling action adventure movies found in Han Solo a trusted voice from the past—and wisely Lucas went with it out of the needs of his new company Lucasfilm to pay all the bills of his various projects—even though it bothered him that Luke wasn’t the star of the movie as it was always intended.

I bought 21 pizzas from Pizza Hut for this party to be served on a table in front of Jabba the Hutt. It was a cute idea that my daughter had to tie the two things together so when the pizza delivery guy arrived he found himself pulled into the Star Wars universe by default, and he was having a good time.  While I was paying the guy and walking him back to his truck we talked about Star Wars and why the new Han Solo movie and now Episode 9 had lost their directors.  In fact, since Lucasfilm announced their slate of 6 new Star Wars movies four directors for those projects have bitten the dust and either been fired, or have quit.  The trade media for Hollywood really hasn’t understood why but this is where the rebel George Lucas always shinned brightest.   In spite of his liberal tendencies, Lucas at heart was a small business guy whose father owned a stationery store in Modesto, California.  Naturally, Lucas hated the studio system because of their static approach to filmmaking.  And it was that part of him who shinned through Han Solo—the do whatever he wants, guy—which made Star Wars so special and Ayn Randish.  These modern kids raised in the studio system may have loved Star Wars growing up, but that doesn’t mean they “get it” when it comes to putting what they love up on-screen.  Kathy Kennedy who runs Lucasfilm now apprenticed under George Lucas for most of her adult life and she has an understanding of what makes Star Wars work even if it’s difficult to put into words.  She knew instinctively why her new film directors weren’t having success in developing their Star Wars stories—for instance reports from the new Han Solo movie set which is coming out in May of 2018 were that the directors were turning the story more into an Ace Ventura comedy instead of a western set in space.  So Kathy brought in Ron Howard who has been around long enough to know at least how to mimic what George Lucas had stumbled upon so many years before.   The pizza guy agreed with me, Star Wars to work had to pay tribute to its western-like background—without it the storylines flounder and fail—much like many people felt the prequel films did.  I personally liked them because I like politics, but without the swashbuckling element of the matinee idols of the 1950s, Star Wars is pretty boring.  I know that, obviously Kathy Kennedy understands that much—but more importantly, the Pizza Hutt delivery guy understood it.

The exchange of values has always been something I could share with my kids through Star Wars and obviously that is getting passed on down to a new generation.  As the kids dressed up there were a lot of Kylo Ren costumes, and even some of the adults wore Kylo Ren t-shirts.  Little do they know that by the time we get to Episode 9 that Han Solo’s now infamous son will turn back to good and help Rey restore goodness to the imaginative galaxy set a long time ago, far, far away.  Kylo Ren will turn out to be a good guy—which I think is a very good thing.  Again, it goes back to Han Solo again, without him and his redemptive qualities, Star Wars falls apart as something special in our human culture.  For me its fun to be able to share these values on a platform that allows for at least the discussion and Star Wars does that better than anything else out there presently.  That wasn’t always the case, back when George Lucas was growing up, there were a lot of things like Star Wars out there that communicated value effectively and our culture reflected it.  These days, not the case—values have been cast aside by movie directors trying to make movies about socialism, which people don’t like, instead of capitalist westerns which people do, and they are often mystified as to why people like the Pizza Hutt delivery guy don’t like their product.  (Hey, I gave the pizza delivery guy a huge tip for his capitalist appreciations and enthusiasm.  He understood.)  Wearing the authentic Han Solo costume for me told the whole story—it took what I had only thought of before and applied it to reality.  Han Solo was a gunfighter and that is a concept specifically unique to American culture and was the heart of every good western.  That is what makes Star Wars work, and why it is such a good device to teach morality stories about good versus evil.  It is those values which I’m glad I can share with these new generations which was on full display at my grandson’s birthday party. It was a lot of fun to be a part of.

Rich Hoffman

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