Tag: Doc Thompson

Why I am Thankful for Microsoft Office: Watching the tech company climb to a value of a trillion dollars

I have to say something about the news that Microsoft looks to be headed to becoming the first company to capture the worth of a trillion dollars. I’m not crazy that a lot of the people who run some of these big companies that I like so much, companies like Apple, Space X, Microsoft, Amazon, and Disney are run by liberal-minded people. However, what they have all done, in earnest is expand the power of the human being in magnificent new ways. Recently while I was reviewing the improvements of the Disney hotel complex at the Contemporary I felt Walt Disney would have been very proud of this particular line of steps marching up into our next future phase. What they did at the Disney Contemporary Hotel is to me nothing short of jaw dropping. It is the hint of where all this great technology could take every single person on the face of plant earth. Sitting in the hotel lobby as the monorail comes and goes to the various Disney Parks while working on laptops running Microsoft Office 365 is a powerful combination of the best human beings have the potential to do in wealth creation and pondering the vast resources available to the human imagination. As the Contemporary re-opened displaying all its greatness at Disney World it seemed to me appropriate to take a moment to thank Microsoft for their contribution to this wonderful world. You can appreciate Microsoft from anywhere in the world—but combining the effective use of their Office software while utilizing vacation time in what is arguably Disney World’s best vacation offering really elevates the optimism that is available to the potential that is coming.

While I respect deeply the origins of the United States as a philosophic opportunity to create a free enterprise system to unleash all these great companies, the challenge of tomorrow will be ti convince the rest of plant earth to follow the American lead. Much the way Disney World under the leadership of Walt Disney took a bunch of raw swampy land in central Florida and turned it into all the beautiful wonders that surround the Contemporary Hotel at the Disney World complex, I think the same opportunities are there for the entire earth and the next great frontiers will be frequent visits into space—and not just within our solar system, but well beyond. The opportunity for much of that rapid expansion in human development comes from Microsoft and how much potential they have freed from human beings. I can say quite confidently that I use Microsoft Office more than most people anywhere in this world, at any income level. I use some program from Microsoft Office every single day of a week, month, and year. Most days I use them for many hours, and I use that program on multiple devices. I am currently very happy with the Microsoft use of Cloud technology because it makes my iPhone such a powerful companion in the world of business.

When Microsoft says “we have more power at our fingertips than entire generations that came before us,” they aren’t kidding. It’s a very true statement and that power has led to great wealth creation for which that trillion dollars of value seems so high, I can easily see a day when earth will become a world of trillionaires and many lives will be greatly improved because of it. Being a millionaire won’t be such a rare thing anymore as it will become the new “middle class” and billionaires won’t be such an anomaly. It will take that to move humanity into space, and those first steps essentially start with Microsoft. I deal with people all over the world every day from several time zones and what we all share is communication through Microsoft Office. Every country has their own version of it that easily translates several languages into easily comprehensive data sharing which is the most ominous task of translation. Being able to put so many cultures with equal opportunities at information exchange has done more for wealth creation than any gold rush or oil discovery has previously.

Over the weekend I had several discussions with people about the tendency of so many children these days to have hyperactive disorders, for which I take offense. I don’t think that hyperactivity as defined by today’s public education institutions is correct. I think children are adapting to the world coming at them in a rapid way, so the worse thing that could happen would be to put them on drugs to level them out to the average displayed in classroom analysis. Being hyperactive is a gift, not a detriment. Anybody who looked at my life and my daily rituals would think that I have various hyperactive disorders, but of course that would be wrong. Just because I tend to work 12 to 15 hours of a day, I play a lot of video games, write books, am very active in politics and I still give my family unlimited amounts of my time—I watch a lot of entertainment, read a lot of books and I don’t really ever feel tired–that isn’t a bad thing. I think humans are evolving into such active creatures because for the first time in human history the means of communicating all their active thoughts are available to them at a speed that encourages more of that behavior. The kids on their phones all the time, or who play multiplayer games online while they are doing their homework and talking to other kids on social media platforms are learning to process information at the speed of future business. That world of tomorrow that is on display at the Disney Parks especially from the vantage point of the Contemporary Hotel is what the rest of the world could look like as more people use their natural inclinations to launch thoughts and dreams into our economies. Microsoft Office is the best mechanism for unleashing that vast power into the world.

I was working on a patent recently and was very surprised that while going though the final steps with the Patent Office Examiner in Washington D.C. that they still largely share information there with a fax machine. My comment to the examiner and the several lawyers on the phone was that it was no wonder it took government so long to do anything—because the speed of business was being artificially regulated to the limits of prior technology. The same could be said in dealing with companies who don’t all have the most updated versions of Microsoft Office. I am running Office 16 most of the time and Office 365 all other times across many different computers and it gets frustrating to deal with companies that aren’t yet doing so, because it slows everything down. Yet the tools are there for everyone and people come to them at their own pace. It’s not the task of the fastest to slow down to the slowest, it’s the other way around, and it is due to that opportunity why Microsoft is knocking on the door to becoming a trillion-dollar company.

More speed and more leisure time is the wave of the future. A 40-hour work week isn’t necessarily the most efficient way to make money. It is kind of the rule of the day, of the 20th Century, but certainly not of the 21st Century. I work close to 80 hours a week, but I also have entertainment and personal growth mixed into my work so that everything gets integrated in a healthy way, and nothing helps my life more than Microsoft Office achieve so many wonderful things in a day. To best see that potential a trip to Disney World at the Contemporary Hotel while taking a working vacation, meaning you still talk to all the people you need to while you are in line for Space Mountain in the World of Tomorrow at Disney World is still possible. Or that you can put together a Power Point from the hotel while getting ready for a big meeting at the convention center at the Contemporary to make a pitch to participants who want to hear what you have to say about something—and while you wait for the big moment you get on the monorail and go over to Epcot and experience the best the world has to offer for lunch while thinking of all the great inventions that are coming to the human race on display there. Working and playing become more intertwined unleashing vast potential through imagination which gets captured best on the various Microsoft Office platforms. There really aren’t any excuses these days for not achieving something, because the means to all creativity is literally at our fingertips, and the effect is now obvious to all. There is no going back at this point, and I think that’s wonderful. I enjoy every day of my life and Microsoft Office is a big part of that enjoyment. I love them as a company and I continue to look forward to each new thing that they do. They have certainly made life very exciting by taking away the limits that used to slow things down so much.

Rich Hoffman

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Mexico Doesn’t Have a Good Heritage: The history of why we need a border wall

It is always good to know what we are dealing with and all the factors which helped shape circumstances. As President Trump bit by bit builds his wall which Mexico will pay for in drug confiscation alone, by the time its completed the pressure is really increasing on the forces which are behind the open border movement. A group called M.A.M.O.N. (Monitor Against Mexicans Over Nationwide) made a satirical fantasy sci-fi short film that explores with black humor and consequences of Donald Trump´s plan of banning immigration and building an enormous wall on the Mexico – US border. As a Trump supporter I thought it was pretty funny to see how “they” (Mexicans) see him and how they see themselves—as Mexicans. They obviously don’t know their history, but they also aren’t at fault being born in such a bad place as Mexico. They had no control over that part of their lives, and nobody could blame them from wanting to come into the United States to have some kind of life. But by doing it illegally, and assuming that they could do so, and that they would be operating on Donald Trump as a surgeon is pretty ridiculous, which is the premise for this short 5-minute short film.

Obviously, there are some major problems with the story, for instance, if Donald Trump was on the operating table having open heart surgery performed on him by an illegal alien who was deported during his surgery, then how could the president have been in the giant robot Donald Trump who was attacking all the illegals after they were deported. And how did the chicken Quetzalcoatl blow up the giant robot if we saw feathers from its destruction in the previous scene? It’s still pretty funny and well done even with those obvious little problems. I think the discrepancies tell us more than their complaint about Trump. One thing that the filmmakers did do a good job of was capturing the chaotic nature of what the Mexican people have always been. Once you understand the origin of Mexico and what the open border people are really after, then much more clarity is brought to this subject.

Personally, speaking I think the most moral thing that we could do as Americans for Mexico is to simply make it one of the next states within America. That would solve many problems and give the people of Mexico a chance at a much better life. Essentially when the Spanish took over Mexico from the conquered Mayans and Aztec people and integrated them into their society, but then attempted their own kind of revolution for independence, they were soundly defeated by Sam Houston and many others which caused the borders to be what they are today. If you know the great story of Kit Carson and his friend John Fremont who were sent by President Polk to win the land of California away from the Mexican government, it is obvious that what is happening now is revenge from the forces of Europe who are still upset at the assumption Americans had for Manifest Destiny. Fremont would eventually become the first Republican senator for California as he and Kit Carson united the territory to rise up against the Mexican forces with a series of small skirmishes all across New Mexico, Arizona and California by uniting American farmers to stand up for their work and fight back against the forces of oppression which refused them ownership of their hard work. These were good people in California who fought the Mexicans and made a state out of that former Mexican territory. Kit Carson and John Fremont would eventually fight in the Civil War on the side of the Union as they were both abolitionists who endeavored to keep slavery out of the West.

The way that John Fremont specifically used the farmers of California as members of a future army to repel Mexican forces is obviously what people who want to erase those chapters of successful American history are trying to do in present day illegal immigration politics. They hope to use illegal immigrants to undo American Manifest Destiny and to undo all the gains made in North America through wars legitimately won. When I say legitimately, I mean to say that Mexico was a defeated nation even before it formed—and the results are what present day Mexico is, a miss mash of cultures all still rooted in either the collectivism of Europe or the collectivism of the former Mayan and Aztec cultures. They did not have among them people of the kind of caliber Kit Carson and John Fremont were, or even President Polk for that matter. America was a nation of laws, and of philosophy. For as much as modern American haters take up the plight of the black slaves from Africa, the Indians, or the Mexicans, without people like Polk, Fremont, and Carson the American West would have never happened and slavery would have likely remained in America as it was a practice known throughout the world. The Indians had been living in North America as they were refugees from all over the world at the time—particularly from China and they weren’t able to do anything with the resources of the nation before the Americans arrived. Just as many today point at the wealth of California, which became the 5th largest economy in the world and call it looted wealth. In all truth none of those previous cultures knew what to do with the wealth they were living on. They had no means of taking the natural resources of America and turning them into valuable goods to trade with the rest of the world. If left to their own, North America would look like present day Mexico, a mess of different cultures stumbling calling itself a country when in reality it is just a big gang of organized crime that is less sophisticated than what it was before Santa Anna tried to maintain land north of the Rio Grande for Mexico.

You can’t go back into history and undo the things you don’t like, which is what the open borders advocates are trying to do today. Westward expansion and the Manifest Destiny of American civilization into the Rocky Mountains and into California was a good moral thing to have happened. The Americans didn’t steal anything from the Mexican government. If not for the Spanish there would not have been a Mexico, and if not for the Spanish the Aztecs and Maya might have remained as the rulers of Central America. The blacks brought in for slavery might have stayed in Africa only to become today’s socialists and Marxist revolutionaries which currently have the economy of a kid’s lemonade stand. The freed slaves in America became the pacesetters for the rest of the world where abolition of the slavery practice was born. And no Indian or Mexican would have been able to unlock the great potential of California because they were not a free people able to use their intellect to take something out of the ground and do something big with it. They knew how to survive as tribes of nomads, and that was all.

Even in the modern sense when Mexicans try to assume that they are equal to the efforts of the American people their arguments fall short in the jokes they make about their own confusing existence. They really think that they have rights to the ownership of American labor, to what we’ve done in California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas because the real history is just too painful for them to understand. They were always a defeated people, whether they come from the heritage of the Aztec or the Spanish, both sides were up to no good and were blood thirsty cultures intent on domination. Lucky for the world good people like Kit Carson and John Fremont were pathfinding through the American West and putting that vast territory to good use because the morality of Westward Expansion put a light to the world of what freedom could look like, in why slavery should have been abolished, and instead of worshipping foolish gods like Quetzalcoatl mankind in America could actually do something productive and advance as a civilization. You didn’t see Indians building skyscrapers, railroads and using gold to advance society. You certainly didn’t see Mexicans doing anything with their land. They currently sit on some of the greatest resources in the world yet most of their people are struggling with poverty—because they don’t think correctly about the world around them. And that makes all the difference—and is why Trump’s border wall is needed so much. It is important to show the world the definition of values which became America instead of letting the chaos of multiculturalism blur the lines of morality for all to see and witness.

Rich Hoffman
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Wayne LaPierre’s April American Rifleman Article: We should take away federal money from any school who teaches Karl Marx

I get it. Not everyone was born into a nice family in a nice area with opportunities raining on them from access to prosperity. I am very forgiving of people who have a little liberalism in them from starting out in life not understanding the glory of Adam Smith’s capitalism, because their upbringing didn’t give them exposure to it. However, in America, even the worst prepared of anybody can climb to the tops of society if they are willing to work hard enough, and that is something worth fighting for—with guns protecting those basic foundations. It was with those ideas in mind that I was enjoying the latest American Rifleman magazine that I look so forward to each month from the NRA. I was reading Wayne LaPierre’s pg. 12 column titled “Our Colleges are Breeding Grounds for Socialists Who Will Take Our Guns.” I’ve been saying that for many, many years—well before mainstream commentators like Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, and Sean Hannity have been willing to go so far. I’ve been saying it since the days when Ronald Reagan was president—yet nobody wanted to admit to it. Well, these days its pretty obvious and it was a little surprising to see the executive vice-president of the NRA state so much in writing. You can read the article for yourself at the link below, it is quite telling.

http://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/nra/si_201804/index.php?startid=12#/14

All education both public and private shared in common with guns the promise of equality. If guns gave people of all types, shapes, sizes, color and creeds the equal ability to defend their private property—most spectacularly their very lives, education was supposed to give everyone an equal shot at knowledge and wisdom, and it was a lofty idea to make it part of the American experience. Public education is paid for by the American tax payers off the backs of private property, so it was a socialist concept from the start, but of course it was started with the promise of big social rewards—like everything always is. Only in America within the context of our tradition of freedom, there was a chance to truly make education a good thing if students were taught the correct things.

Even for me I was shocked by a couple of things that Wayne LaPierre reported in his article, such that The Communist Manifesto ranks third among most assigned texts in college. I can see that happening yet hearing it as a statistic was astonishing. There isn’t any place in American culture for Karl Marx yet in colleges today he is the most referred to economist in assignments. I can see letting students study Marx in philosophy class along with other thinkers so that they can draw their own conclusions, but for economics, if you are trying to teach students how to function in the American economy you must start with Adam Smith and his Wealth of Nations. Without that starting point, the experience of teaching and learning is worthless. But according to LaPierre Marx is the go to guy in serious study of economic matters and that is actually dangerous.

I’ve read Marx—and I hated it, but I did it to learn how the other side thinks. To wash it out of my system I had to read Smith over again several times just to get the experience out of my mind. I think Karl Marx was an idiot and his philosophy is dangerous—dangerous to the world. I’ve been to the Great Reading Room at the British Museum where Marx worked, and I wasn’t impressed. I like the room, but the content studied there was not the right stuff and no university in the world should be studying it. Marxism is an economic philosophy of class warfare and poverty. It leads to repressed societies in every situation and should never be taught as the thing to do for a society.

I was also surprised that liberal college professors outnumbered conservative professors by a ratio of 33.5 to 1. I hadn’t checked in a while, but this was much higher than even I thought it was. That is a terrible statistic considering that many of our education institutions are funded with tax payer investments. Clearly what is happening is that we are funding these Marxist loving liberals to change our kids into socialists from the traditional backgrounds we instilled upon them as parents. It has been one of the biggest scams of our lives, to save up six figures worth of money to send to these colleges only to have them try to scramble the minds of our young people into this socialist indoctrination. I’ve written many articles about the start of the Russian Revolution, the Chinese Revolution, the Mexican Revolution—revolutions all over the globe and they all start with indoctrinated children not yet equipped with wisdom who take over political parties and destroy countries from within. What I saw in the March for Our Lives rallies over the last weekend of March 2018 were the same kind of brain washed masses taught incorrect concepts in public schools that we all paid for, only to have those kids turned into weapons of war to fight us ideologically in the streets of our neighborhoods. Wayne LaPierre wasn’t exaggerating—our schools have become institutions of socialism intent to change the way we live in America—everything from gun control to economic communism and socialism. It’s a bad situation with no clear way to turn back the damage.

However, I would start by saying this, any school that is teaching the works of Karl Marx should have their federal money cut—because they obviously aren’t preparing kids to live in an American economy. It’s not a free speech right to teach kids to be insurgents against the American Constitution and anything being taught by Marx, or Marxism in general should be considered anti-American in its basic intent. Colleges can teach whatever they want, but they shouldn’t get our money to pay for it. So long as we allow this socialism to go on in our schools, we will deal with a declining society—and its an avoidable situation. But first we have to admit that it’s a problem.

A lot of people, many reading this, have a little socialism in them. I happened to listen to Bill Cunningham on WLW radio talk about how emotional he was that his high school of Deer Park finally won a state championship. Cunningham thinks of himself as a conservative, at least he plays one on the radio, but his alliance to a public school—and all public education in general gives away the socialism that he was taught as a very young person who grew up without a father and a single mother trying to raise him. He’s in his late sixties now, but those emotions never really went away, so much so that several decades later, five to be specific, when Deer Park won a state championship, he felt he was one with the community. Many people think that’s a good thing, but it’s the entry to thinking like socialists. The reason we never deal with the socialism in our schools is because we fall in love with their sports programs and we spend the rest of our lives rooting for those programs long after we’ve graduated. Meanwhile, the institutions themselves have committed themselves to Marxism and the changing of students into radicals to do the work of collectivism around the world.

Yet the truth of what makes America great is not in its sports heroes that might play college football or basketball, its in the individuals who live and work where the cameras aren’t and what they protect with the guns in their homes. To really understand what makes America tick you must get rid of all references to socialism and to look toward the magic of capitalism—and it is the gun that makes capitalism possible. That is why the Marxists in these schools want gun control so bad, because they know what the plan has always been. To corrupt the youth into little bits of socialism until they march in the streets to give away their rights to defend themselves and to turn over their economies to the tenured professors who sip coffee all day and study the works of Karl Marx. Secretly they have always wanted to rule the world and they are taking that chance at the expense of the American tax payer. Now they figure they have enough students under their command to make their move—and they are doing it. Their first real target of course is the gun. They have to get guns out of American society before they can bring Marxism fully into America. They already have most of our population looking the other way by choice, because nobody wants to admit that their colleges and high schools were actually dangerous places destroying the future of mankind. But with a careful study of the students of our modern age, how can any conclusion otherwise be made?

Rich Hoffman

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The Forces that want to Overthrow America: Mueller’s investigation, Affairs, and Stormy Daniels back fat

I know I’m coming to it late, but my wife and I have been binge watching the television show, The Americans. Its been on my radar for a while and our schedules cleared enough to start watching it. I am completely convinced that the whole idea for the Russian collusion story is because many liberals came up with it after watching that popular show. I am also convinced that the strategy of the deep state was revealed during the racket ball scene during season one between the lead FBI agent and his next-door neighbor, the KGB super spy. Overwhelm your target into making a mistake. Even though the show is fiction mostly, there are realistic elements to it and it only reminded me just how fragile governments can really be. The episode where President Reagan was shot was very interesting because Russia was terrified Alexander Haig was going to step in and take control of the country which of course wasn’t about to happen. The Russians assumed that things would happen in America the way they would in Russia and even though they had lived in the states for many years still couldn’t get the basic concept of how American life worked. Even as they worked really hard to overthrow it at every opportunity. I’ve known about these spies for a long time, I’ve written about them and discussed them on several radio shows, but watching The Americans really shows things in a dramatic way of how fragile things truly are behind the scenes.

Watching how sympathetic the media was to the KGB spies in The Americans and how the FBI operated on that show, it is easy to see how the plot against President Trump was hatched to force him into mistakes, which I think is why he signed that omnibus bill on Friday. I’m certainly not going to apologize for him. We should have had a government shutdown on the issue, but the enemies of our Republic are applying a lot of pressure on him, and he’s making mistakes that he is designed to take. I don’t think there is anybody currently out there better than Trump who could withstand all these forces. At least with Trump, mistakes and all, we can see just how many bad guys there are out there and what they are up to. When Trump was elected he and all his supporters thought they were playing a straight game. Obviously not, the forces already embedded in America were already too deep to fight legitimately through executive orders and populism. As right-thinking Americans, it was all we had to combat the vast tyranny on full display now except for coming to this fight with guns blazing. If Trump can hang on and keep doing his thing we will see improvements, but it won’t be pretty. Let me just say that. I never thought it would, but I am personally surprised that he has held up this long.

The Mueller investigation clearly isn’t about Russian collusion, it’s just a story that the deep state is using to sell their means of overthrowing the American presidency. As I said, the entire story is meant to align with what the public sees on television, shows like The Americans. The truth is far worse. There are many more forces working against American capitalism than what is showed on any television show—the attempted tyranny and the reasons behind it are far more severe, much more so than any Hollywood writer could even begin to put their finger on. To get an idea about that I’d advise you dear reader to read Peter Schweizer’s new book Secret Empires. He’s the guy who wrote Clinton Cash which proved to be way ahead of its time. If you added Secret Empires to the television show The Americans I think you can begin to see what is really going on with the Mueller Investigation. It’s not about truth, justice, and the American way—its about overthrowing capitalism in the world and literally looting off the tax payers to feed these many empires at conflict with each other on the streets of Washington D.C. Most people just want to live their lives, but these many forces at war with the American way of life—many of them are in our FBI, our congressional seats, and in our media and they want an end to all of it—any way possible.

And they really think we are stupid. Think of the absurdity of these controversies with the old Trump girlfriends. I knew when I elected Donald Trump that in the 80s, 90s and early 2000s that he was the very definition of a playboy. If Hugh Hefner was an old man with a collection of many beautiful women to play with—Donald Trump was the living embodiment of that image. It was the main turn-off for me when he first announced that he was running. But I knew fully what I was getting in Donald Trump and I personally think he should say about Karen McDougal that sure, he had an affair that lasted nearly a year and that he screwed her many times in many different ways. Most men, and women surprisingly, would admire and respect him for it—because that’s how people are. Nobody is surprised to learn that Trump has slept with all these women. He was never a choir boy. Trump fully intended to live a James Bond womanizing lifestyle and Melania knew what kind of man he was, and it took her years to calm him down. He had all these girlfriends while she was dating him and even when he finally put a ring on her finger some of those old flames were still burning, and some new flames starting. I’ve met Melania in person and she is a very beautiful woman, and she’s not stupid in any way. She was the one who convinced Trump to marry her and to move her into a golden palace at the top of the New York social world. And now she’s in the White House after being born into a communist country with little opportunity. Don’t cry for Melania, she knows what she’s doing and she makes Trump a much better person. In a lot of ways, I credit her with his presidency. But she’s not going to go to pieces over a bunch of old girlfriends looking for one last shot at the spotlight now that they are too old to pose for Playboy, and nobody cares about them physically any more.

The media is obsessed with Stormy Daniels because like the idiots in The Americans who thought Alexander Haig was going to take over the country after Ronald Reagan was shot think that the Christian conservatives will move away from Trump if they find out he has slept with all these women. Nobody cares. We all stopped caring about those kinds of things after Bill Clinton was in office. What made Slick Willy such a bad person was that he lied about it. Trump at least indicates that he isn’t living under the weight of shame. That gives him a fighting chance to withstand all these opposing forces. But the media, these are the same people pushing same-sex marriage, loose sex and a life of no judgments, yet they fully expect the Stormy Daniels story to sink Trump. If Trump is ashamed of anything regarding Daniels it’s that she is too fat of a girl to brag about. Looking at her with the lights on and the cameras at full aperture Trump would probably like to forget about that one. But it’s not for the reasons that the media hopes to catch him on. She’s just over his preferred weight class.

We are witnessing at every front a country of insurgents who work in trusted positions at all levels of our social classes to overthrow our nation in favor of something else. They want gun control so we can’t shoot them when they break down our doors once they’ve bankrupted our country for everything that could be sold, and they’ll be looking for the last scraps of food at such a time not caring at all for our wellness. They have already sold us out and now that the heat is on in their direction too, they are making their share of mistakes as well. Trump isn’t the only one screwing up—the hits are going the other way for a change—and that’s a great thing. I wouldn’t care if a tape came out showing Trump in a massive orgy with 50 chicks sucking on him like Karen McDougal. I would care if there were some dudes in on the action with him—that would certainly cheapen him in my eyes, but I don’t think that’s a concern. A man can do those kinds of things with hundreds of women so long as the women are alright with it—which in most cases they are. Women are often willing to share a top-level man so long as they get a piece of the action. But such a man can’t go stick his dip stick into the caboose of some other dude. That just isn’t acceptable. And with that said, the media doesn’t have a story because most people feel that way. The media have nothing to stop Trump which scares them to death. And for a change, it’s a good thing to see.

Rich Hoffman

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Surrender is Not an Option: I will never give up my guns, not to the Stayin’ Alive Hogg kid, or anybody……

After watching the various speeches from the March for Our Lives rally, especially the one with the “Staying Alive” kid David Hogg there are a few things that need to be said for the health of our country. It is quite obvious that the people behind the rally have in mind a quiet overthrow of the American way of life. They are clearly intent on being insurgents, and speaking for myself, they are attacking the values I have. When they attack the NRA, I see that they are attacking me, personally—and I take offense to that. Now, up to this point, I think most of us can agree that the laws of our nation are something we can generally agree with. With that understanding we live in a commonly peaceful society free of daily concerns, and I think that’s great. If the police pull you over for speeding, you should be cooperative. If they need to look in your back yard for a fugitive, then you should let them have a look. And if they come over to your house because a neighbor complains about your fireworks on the Fourth of July, you should give them some respect—maybe even given them a hot dog from the grill. If protestors like these anti-gun kids have something to say, we should let them have their First Amendment rights. And we should try to be as fair to as many people as possible. I do not see America as a nation of white people with privilege. Every American born in this country no matter what sex, color, or ideology has upward mobility if one chooses to unleash it and that is a very special thing worth protecting. However, the only way to protect that open opportunity world isn’t with any law, its only with the threat of an armed society.

My new concealed carry gun I decided after watching Hogg speak on Saturday March 24th 2018 is going to be a .50 caliber Desert Eagle from Magnum Research. I hope I never have to use it under contentious circumstances, but I’m going to have it just in case because I see a world emerging for which these little socialist insurgents are looking to change my country into something else and they seek to do it by shaming gun owners into giving up the very defense which prevents such a mass revolution within North America. Guns to me are an honorable device which keeps society on the up and up. What David Hogg is attacking in the NRA as a gun lobby group is essentially attacking me, because I support that gun lobby group to protect the basic foundations of American life. Not as a white male of privilege, but as a way to keep America free so that people of all colors and backgrounds can have a chance at the American dream. Without guns in the background of that protection America simply doesn’t exist. And even if Hogg and his youth are successful in changing out politicians I have to remind him that it has been members of the political left who have broken many laws—specifically illegal immigration and drug enforcement that has openly undermined the American society I love so much. So even if Hogg got his way and outlawed all our guns and ammunition I can say quite openly that I will not surrender my guns to anybody anywhere at any time. And I certainly won’t comply with a world led by people like David Hogg. No matter how many their number there is no force in the world that can make me change my mind. I’m smarter than they are, and so are a lot of people and there won’t be an “oh gosh” moment where a guy like me lives under a flag taken over by insurgents where the meanings of America is changed without there being trouble. I could live quite happily as an outlaw, if that’s what they want. They should be careful what they wish for.

Even as a conservative I am not pro police all the time. I think the thin blue line is necessary for a productive society but I dread the day some officer comes to my house the way they did in New Orleans during the Katrina hurricane and demands to confiscate my guns because I’ll have to say no. And when I say no the police will try to assume control over my individuality for which I won’t yield, and there will be trouble. The police will say they are only following orders for which I’ll have to say those orders don’t matter to me because I don’t have faith in the society that gave those orders. If the politicians who gave the orders to the police were put in power by people like the Hogg youth, then I have to say I don’t support that society and will openly go to war with it. That’s what war is after all, its not about complying with laws. A lawful society is one where people generally agree to follow the same common laws, but liberals of today have openly declared that they are not willing to follow the laws of immigration—they insist on breaking the law with sanctuary cities and other acts of defiance. It was even against the law for Rosa Parks to stand against southern white Democrats and the laws they had for segregation. The law that I follow is the one in the Constitution. Any deviation from that Constitution, any attempt to erode it and to take away the Bill of Rights to me indicates the necessity for a war to protect those rights, and in war there is death. And that will be ugly.

In many ways I wrote my book The Tail of the Dragon to lay out this precise case, when the law enforcement community is not representing traditional America what are we to do? The character in that story decided he wasn’t going to be compelled in such a way to surrender blindly to the authority of the state and as an individual he goes to war with the American military complex starting with police officers and ending with the military. I wrote that book to defend my future self in a court of law for when our society finally breaks and I will be forced to choose. With the Trump election I have a hope that I might avoid that future life. However, living under the changed laws of a David Hogg society is not an option. Even if his youth get what they want and change our society and our gun culture the way that liberals have prodded them into attempting, it doesn’t mean that the gun culture is going to just say, “ah, shucks—here you go. Here are all my guns.” The compliance with officers today is only in the context of an understanding that our society still values the Second Amendment. The minute that disappears, which given the actions of the FBI against Trump has indicated, that time has passed. The weapon I choose to carry needs to be able to deal with all the modern challenges, and these little pea shooters with insufficient muzzle velocities won’t cut it.

The essence of my thoughts on the March for Our Lives rally is that I see it as an attack. If they do succeed in voting out representatives put in place by my gun lobby—because I am the NRA—then the violence that follows will be their responsibility. The NRA is there to protect guns which then protect the rule of law as established by the original Constitution. We know why mass school shootings happen, we know why there are problems in modern society, we know who the villains are. And getting rid of guns will not solve those problems. Instead, it will make America more socialist and much less capitalist, and that’s where I draw the line. I’ll obey the laws as they stand today. But if they change tomorrow, and guns were to be made illegal, then I’d decide at that moment that our society based on historical context is headed in the wrong direction and the only way to defend my life and my country is with a gun—in fact—lots of guns. I’d prefer to live in a peaceful life with other people, and I have shown that I can live well even around people who don’t think exactly the way I do. But surrendering my guns isn’t an option for me. I simply won’t do it, and I have no intention on just sitting around and being a victim. If its war they want, then they’ll get it, and I can promise this much, I have no intention on losing under any condition. The only thing that keeps a truly orderly society is a gun to defend yourself from anything the temptations of power might corrupt in our political system. They must fear what you might do with your guns, because in a world not functioning from the laws of man, or a God who granted rights of freedom to those people—there is only the fear of death which keeps bad people in line.

Rich Hoffman

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Joe Biden and the Nature of Gun Control: The mobs of March for our Lives

As we prepare for the March for Our Lives event across the country where students inspired by their radical public educations are demanding gun control—Joe Biden said again at Miami University, Florida that he wanted to beat up Donald Trump. As we all know most of the mass shooters in America are left leaning political activists, CLICK HERE FOR REVIEW. This is because it is the political left who are the collectivists and require submission to their group think—and the way they enforce that need for their philosophy is through force. If they cannot inspire violence and thus fear of what might happen to people who don’t join their group, they are powerless. That is why the political left wants gun control and also why they have pushed the March for Our Lives events. It is also why Joe Biden feels he needs to rally the Democratic base with threats of violence against the current President. Trump’s response to Biden was appropriate understanding the real motivations. The way to beat collectivists is to take away the threats and to force them to debate the ethics of a situation—for which they are always at a disadvantage.

The gun debate isn’t a debate at all, it’s an essential philosophy of freedom to live one’s life outside of group pressures. To own a gun is to have the ability to stand against a mob who expects through a democracy to alter our lives against our individual wills. So it is ironic that leftist progressives are advocating marching against guns because it is just such mobs that the guns are intended to protect American civilization from. If a horde of people arrives at your theoretical doorstep at some future time demanding milk, cows, a bed, or even your spouse and children, you must have some means of fighting them off. If one of their leaders happens to be in congress at the time, or the White House, then they will expect to bend the laws of the land to their efforts, and we would all be defenseless at that point to the intentions of the democratic mob.

The assumption is that majorities rule in spite of the intelligence involved. As the rules of mobs go it doesn’t matter if the contents of the mob have an IQ of “0.” What does matter to them is the amount of people in the mob. So if there are thousands of people in the mob the belief is that there is intelligence there which surpasses the individual intelligence of any single person. Quantity matters, not quality—which is the biggest problem of any democracy and why all democracies taken at their face value lead to periods of anarchy only to reset society much later with a devolution back to theocracy. Joe Biden reminded us this past week what the real juice behind their movement is, the threat of violence if things don’t go as Democrats want. They want essentially gun control so that they can have a chance to take people behind the woodshed and beat them into submission. That is the way of the Democrats—it always has been and continues to this day.

Speaking personally, I love to fight—I have all my life. I’ve never been for anything that groups enjoy doing—I have always been happiest on the fringes of social thinking. It just so happens that more of my personal philosophies are at play with Donald Trump in the White House, but it’s usually not that way. I never liked public education because I quickly realized that the whole point of it was to assimilate kids into group think. I never liked college because it wasn’t about learning, but in learning how not to think—or to put it more accurately how to think what the group wants, not necessarily what’s correct. I’ve been involved in all kinds of unique situations and what they all have in common is a love of fighting bullies who try to impose group think on other people. I personally love fighting people like Joe Biden as I meet them. I enjoy driving them into the ground as far as they can go, because I have an obvious dislike for their core characters. People like me will never yield to the pressures of a group—I don’t care if there are 20 million people outside my home chanting toward me to think a certain way. It will never, ever happen.

When people tell you that you must change because a majority of the people here and there think this way or that way, they are essentially declaring war against your individual thoughts. And to me that is a major assault that is something that merits defense by the gun. There are obviously thousands of steps to exercise peacefully first, but ultimately if the other side threatens death or else, you have to be able to respond. Collectivists all essentially believe the same thing, that what’s best for the majority is best for society. The measure is never what the quality of thoughts are for the masses—for instance if the collective associations are all idiots, the merit of the group is still considered by Democrats to be superior—which is the ultimate mistake. If you are a good person, and you work to have a proper—thinking mind—why should I or anybody change that to the whims of stupidity just because the stupid outnumber the intelligent? That would be a disgrace to the human species as a whole. In the nature of human beings, it is the single sperm out of thousands that penetrates the egg during conception where life begins. All the other little sperms that don’t break the circumference of the egg don’t get a consolation prize. They just don’t get the opportunity to make a living being. The same is said about the single person defending their individual rights with a gun pointed toward the masses. The masses are not superior to the individual. They are not correct because there are more of them. And they don’t have a right to enforce violence against others to drive home their theft of intelligence.

Joe Biden said it not just once now, but twice. As a spokesman for his party he is articulating the basic essence of his Democratic Party. All for one, one for all—and if you don’t follow us, we’ll beat you up. Well, finally we have a president in Donald Trump who is willing to fight back against such threats and I’m glad, because it saves me the wasted time in doing it myself. Because there will never be a time where I surrender to any Democrat—anything. They can think what they want, but I am not compelled to follow them, and neither are you dear reader. Yet without that threat against us, they have nothing. They want to believe that by taking guns we won’t have the option to stand against them in the future, so they have used these children taught in our public schools as weapons against us. But it doesn’t matter. A mob is a mob and they don’t have a right to stamp out intelligence just for an adherence to their political ideology due to a lack of other options. They desire to destroy the options so that the masses have nowhere to turn but to the mob—and that is how they plan to always acquire power and how to keep it—which isn’t acceptable.

Rich Hoffman

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A Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow: The new toy Millennium Falcon, Star Wars land in Orlando, Trump, and resolving cognitive dissidence

I understand why President Trump is frustrated with the negative slant of all media coverage, the kind of America he is trying to resurrect is a lot like the one I used to watch on The Wonderful World of Disney shows that came on every Sunday night when I was a kid, of which my favorites were the World of Tomorrow episodes. I am an extremely positive person—the world could literally be on fire and the demons of hell decapitating people in the streets with no hope for anyone anywhere and I’d find something positive to attribute to it. And I would attribute that to Walt Disney and how open I was to his message very early in my life. But when it comes to dealing with other people, I am quick to get rid of people in my life who are not positive people—who drag on a culture and I think Trump is a person of the same type of mind—a very positive person who wants to share with America that same sentiment. Yet when you are a president of everyone, even those who hate you, it can be a real challenge.

I see hope everywhere I look however, as dire as things may seem at the time. For instance, I don’t see in people’s addictions to cell phones as being a major problem. I see an education system that is not aligned with the needs of modern people—which because of that villain John Dewey attempted to instruct children into the merits of collectivism instead of individualism. Technology, especially phone apps and computer games are all about re-centering the individual needs to its consumers and that puts most people into a schizophrenic relationship with themselves. They have this very negative self that is against their individual tastes which measures everything against the values of the group, then there are the natural needs of the individual that are always crying for attention. I most recently saw this in the movie reviews of the new Tomb Raider film where reviews where pretty negative but the film itself was quite a crowd pleaser. The duality that we see in the media and in politics is a short-term aspect of a society reclaiming itself and the world of tomorrow is shaping up to be quite extraordinary. To that observation I have to turn once again to what we are seeing from Disney’s Star Wars franchise. I’m not talking about the progressive board of directors’ approach of appeasing all their gay creative talent with left winged sentiment, but the old hooks into ancient mythology and the most creative aspects of human achievement that comes out in each new project.

I’ll admit that I am very excited about the new movie, Solo: A Star Wars Story which comes out in May of 2018. I’ve long talked about my love of The Millennium Falcon as a movie icon that I relate a lot with. In this new movie The Millennium Falcon is a much younger ship than the one from the classic series and it has a new design to the front of it that I find very interesting. Recently at the New York Toy Fair Hasbro released a lot of the new toys for the new Solo film and I found myself enchanted with the new Millennium Falcon toy, which I will surely get the moment I can get my hands on it. I just recently spent the weekend playing Star Wars figures with my grandkids and we had a great time. They love playing with my collection of Star Wars toys and I enjoy sharing that experience with them. And with each new movie is a chance to communicate with those kids something new and exciting, so I really enjoy the positive energy of Star Wars products because they are very classical in how Wal Disney thought of things. I really think the love of the Millennium Falcon that people have for it will greatly influence real spaceship design over the next several decades and these toys are creating in the minds of so many people young and old alike new engineers that aren’t nearly as stuffy as the older generation. The same day that I was watching footage of the New York toy show I had hired a really sharp engineer for a project I have been working on. The kid had a master’s and was wanting to go further but he had no pretentious aspect to himself. He was just sharp and in love with engineering. He is very much a product of these modern Star Wars influences. He loves to solve problems and young kids like him are the kind of geeks that have Millennium Falcons all over their work cubicles. They are the kind of kids who wear t-shirts saying, “My other vehicle is The Millennium Falcon,” as they show up to work in a piece of junk car. Even though they are paid well and could afford a Corvette, they could care less about impressing members of the opposite sex, the way people did thirty years ago. They save all their money for Jabba’s Sail Barge, also shown at the same toy fair. And to be honest, I may buy one myself—because its pretty damn cool.

I see people of today accelerating in the kinds of things they want to learn much, much faster—much faster than the media can keep up with. In some ways people are dumber—socially, and politically. But individually, they are asking questions of the world around them that has never before occurred, and a lot of it has to do with the astonishing exposure they are getting from their movies, home streamed video content, personal communication devices, the Internet and of course movies. The motion picture industry as a whole is collapsing, and it really can’t be saved at this point. The future is very much what Disney is doing where a two-hour movie introduces content that plays out over multiple platforms, books, comics, television shows, and video games—toys, etc. But the real product is in generating imaginative cognitive essence—the ability to think creatively, like children do but were taught against over the last four decades of public education.

Right after the New York Toy Fair Disney released drone footage of their new Star Wars lands in Orlando and California. To have a place like that where people can go and play out a fantasy of thought against the illusion of reality is really a work of art for cognitive dissidence. The negativism that the Trump administration is at war with will work itself out I think over the next ten years and things like the opening of that Star Wars land in the Disney parks will take giant steps in launching humanity toward a new phase of development. Playing with Star Wars toys for me was very important when I was a kid—it really launched my imagination into a place that helps me every single day of my current life. Having a great attitude about life and always finding something positive about it combined with a boundless imagination has given me a great life and lets me share that with other people. But playing with my grandkids with all the tools I’ve had combined with the ones they have which are new, and I see something really special happening. What a simple toy can do to the imagination can’t be understated, and the desire to play with that toy as a young person comes from these movies and video games. But also, to walk around and interact in those actual environments is bound to unlock potential that we never thought possible as human beings.

The conflicts of today will not be the conflicts of tomorrow. The bra-burning feminists, the gay rights cries to make everyone into a rainbow, and the fights between liberalism and conservatism will fall away to this next age. Our thoughts and imaginations are inventing tomorrow right before our eyes and the story of our species is being written fast. So fast that no newspaper or television company in the world has managed to get their arms around the true potential. But I see that glimmer of hope and potential in the simplest things, like that new Millennium Falcon toy shown at the Hasbro booth. In the methods of play, even as adults, we work out complicated problems, and the most intelligent people I have come to know in some of the advanced technical fields are the types of people who would much rather watch footage from the New York Toy Fair than to watch video porn of some people having sex. The toys are much more exciting and in that realizing, there is great hope for our future—if we can just last long enough to get there.

Rich Hoffman

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Firing Andrew McCabe was a Great Thing: Restoring confidence away from a corrupt government for which he was just a part

It shouldn’t feel so good but it does. When it happened late Friday night on March 16, 2018 that Andrew McCabe was being fired from the FBI rather than just allowed to retire at the tender age of 49 years with a multimillion dollar pension, there was a sense of justice that flowed across our nation like a nice warm blanket on a snow filled afternoon. This is just another great reason for the election of Donald Trump and is what it looks like when a guy like him hits his stride in understanding how things work in Washington D.C.–or at least have worked. Of course, not everyone in the FBI was crooked, but due to the nature of such powerful employment positions it is clear from the love stuck text messages of FBI agents Lisa Page and Peter Strzok who worked directly under McCabe, who then worked directly under James Comey that the tax payer funded FBI had become radicalized toward a certain type of political party. I’m not going to say that their idea candidates were liberals like Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren, but the FBI idea of conservatives were people like the Bush family and John McCain—people they could control as an institution.

There was a time only a few years ago that the word RINO was denied to even exist among the voting public. But after the election of Donald Trump they are now very obvious. In local southern Ohio politics people who are obvious Democrats like Lee Wong who is running for county commissioner within Butler County as a Republican, are reacting to the national trend set by Trump. Lee wants to join the former Democrat Don Dixon there who is a politician that had to move to the political right to have a career as a politician—both of those guys are what could be termed RINOs because they are truly Republican In Name Only, because they know they could never win an election in those conservative areas unless they showed themselves more politically conservative than they were. And that was clearly the case with the young man elected in Pennsylvania this past week, Conor Lamb who essentially ran as a Republican only he called himself a Democrat which pulled the party in that direction to win against an entrenched Republican. The proper definitions for behavior has been put to the test and this has caused very positive consternation at the highest political levels. What was once covered in secrecy is now well out in the open and people can finally see the true nature of these political candidates for what they’ve always been. And in many ways the FBI was able to hide a lot of bad political radicalism behind a similar veil.

As the gun debate has raged over the last several months while liberals tried to use the usual tricks to spark emotions toward gun confiscation, we have learned why we really need to take guns in the opposite direction. We know that the top members of most of our government institutions have become radicalized against the type of life that formed in America, the yearning for freedom and independence that tend to be the foundations of Republican government. Only even under Republican government, there was an unquestioned trust in government officials that they would always do the right thing, even though it was incredibly obvious that they didn’t. Lois Lerner at the IRS was one of the first obvious signs of what was poisoning the well in Washington D.C. People in general were too busy to care that Lois Lerner had weaponized the IRS to work against political groups, and she was caught and plead the 5th, doing just what McCabe had tried to do, retire and escape into the background with a healthy government pension taking the crimes they committed for the “greater good” to the grave. Only that “greater good” had nothing to do with the American people, it was all about the collective entity of the various institutions they represented. Lerner with the IRS or McCabe with the FBI.

Then came the report also this week that involves the acting FBI deputy director David Bowdich testifying that the Dept. of Justice (headed by former AG Loretta Lynch) forced the FBI to delete over half a million fugitives from the gun background check system. Why you might ask? Well so that criminals could get a hold of guns who clearly shouldn’t have had them so that gun violence would occur, and the Obama administration could then use those deaths politically to advocate for gun removal from society. This was the type of FBI that Andrew McCabe and James Comey were running under the direction of Loretta Lynch and Eric Holder. And it was this kind of justification of resources that put the might of the FBI behind Hillary Clinton with all guns literally blazing. A corrupt government had put all their bets on the house winning the 2016 election and the house lost for a change exposing them all. That house didn’t care who it had to kill or harm to preserve itself, and it had been functioning that way for many years. Only the election of Donald Trump forced it out into the open. Who could count the amount of lives destroyed by the FBI over a long period of time who attack people like General Flynn when the government organization themselves were guilty of far worst, and many times over.

https://breaking.americanewscentral.com/2018/03/16/bombshell-500000-fugitives-deleted-gun-background-check-database-points-back-obama/?utm_source=anh&utm_medium=facebook&utm_campaign=anhcampaign

What good is a FBI background check on firearms if an attorney general like Lorretta Lynch, under the direction of a president of the United States can manipulate the way the FBI does its background check in order to inspire more violence killing untold thousands of people with guns, so that they as a collective administration can move the political needle more to the left? If such a thing can happen on little things it can certainly happen on big things, like tampering with the election of an American president by the people who wanted a change from this behavior. And McCabe got caught, as did James Comey—and they were both fired. Comey was fired early by Trump himself. McCabe only when the evidence became so grotesquely obvious that action had to be made. To let McCabe ride off into the sunset the way Lois Lerner did would be a crime in and of itself. Without bringing justice to these obvious law breakers we could never hope to restore our trust into role the FBI was supposed to play in our government.

In regard to gun control, how can we even propose reasonable measures when it is clear that our government was running away from the American people and serving a tyrannical administration as activists? It is just against those types of corrupt elements that the 2nd Amendment was designed to protect us from them. We gave the FBI enormous power, and once that power was abused as it obviously was under James Comey then what is the next step? When the FBI can be directed to put guns in the hands of criminals so that gun violence can increase creating political pressure to confiscate guns as a societal norm, then how can there ever be trust? Then those same people tried to attack a president that half the country wanted as a solution to this mess using all the mechanisms of power to create a scandal—and they expected to get away with it because all their people controlled the power they used to commit those corrupt acts—and what did they think would happen if they were caught?

Years of service are meaningless of during those years a government employee becomes so out of touch that they can be used as extensions of criminal conduct by the hands of power in Washington D.C. The moment however long ago that McCabe and Comey allowed themselves to be instruments of manipulation by political power players they made their service to the FBI worthless. They certainly weren’t “serving” the needs of you and I dear reader, they served the instruments of political power which is why they felt justified in attacking the Trump administration with illegally obtained FISA warrants, illegal surveillance, and a network of fake news generation that was born out of their gun control methods of creating negative stories designed to move the political needle. McCabe was one big part of a weaponized FBI that was only stopped because of an election. If the election had not worked then many Americans would have been forced to entrench themselves in their homes with the Second Amendment as their last line of defense against an out of control government. Because as the FBI was under Comey and McCabe, it was clearly abusive, weaponized, and dangerous. The firing of Andrew McCabe felt good because it showed everyone that justice wasn’t out of the question for such abuses restoring some confidence that our system of checks and balances still work. Which was something that everyone who pays attention to such things needed to see.

Rich Hoffman

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Tomb Raider: How little things can and often do add up to big things

My daughter is still young, she’s not even thirty years of age and she’s literally already been all over the world. To say she travels a lot would be an understatement. She and her husband just returned from Banff in Canada where they went on a nice little holiday for the fun of it. She’s a professional photographer so that trip was to get some nice portfolio shots. But that for them was just a little trip. They’ve been to Europe, Iceland, New York, Chicago and out west just over the last half of a year or so and every other week it seems they are going on a new journey. But while she had a free moment she wanted to see the new Tomb Raider movie with me and her mom. Tomb Raider was something I introduced her to as a little girl. I always knew how much she loved the character but I was reminded of just how much when this new film starring Alicia Vikander as the newest Tomb Raider action star taking over for what used to be the sacred ground of Angelina Jolie, came out. Of course, the movie was fabulous, I thought it would be, but was even better than I originally considered. Even more than that it was a reminder for me just how little bitty things can really have an impact on kids which shape them into adults. My daughter in every respect as viewed by other people on the outside world has everything, and they wonder how she got that way often. Sometimes it can be the smallest thing that inspires someone to step into greatness and for my daughter it was the inspiration of Lara Croft.

It’s always been my policy personally, and I passed that on to my children, that if the adults around you let you down that its good and even healthy to find fictional characters to invest in so to set the bar high on personal behavior. I always had good people around me growing up from an adult perspective, people who were positive to emulate, but they fell short of my personal goals. They didn’t reach as far as I would have like to have seen them, so I looked to big characters in movies to shape many of the personality traits I have today. And it worked, But I had an interesting challenge raising my own children, I had two girls and the world didn’t offer them much by way of cool inspirational characters who knew how to embrace their femininity yet strove to push the limits of themselves through the world in a positive way.

It was literally twenty years ago when I was working on a project for an early Amazon.com fulfillment center building conveyor systems. I was working second shift with a lot of other young people who were struggling with the long hard hours and trying to maintain good lives with wives and girlfriends even while we worked 12 hours a day six-day a week for well over a year. I helped a lot of people get through that tough period and when it came Christmas time, I received a lot of gifts from appreciative people who had come to depend on my encouragement. One guy actually gave me a samurai sword because I had talked him out of suicide once he found out his girlfriend had left him compounding a series of other problems in his life largely due to the long hours we were working. He listened to my advice and within six months he went from trying to kill himself to become wonderfully successful. So he presented me that Christmas with a very nice samurai sword. Another guy gave me a copy of the famous Japanese book, The Book of Five Rings because he said that I spoke like the author of that book and that he hoped I would see that and do great things with my talent. Then another guy gave me a copy of the new Tomb Raider III video game, which I had never played but had thought about trying.

My daughter told me the story while we waited for the new Tomb Raider movie to begin at Cinebistro in Liberty Township of how I came home the day I received that old Tomb Raider video game and pretended to shoot up our house with fake guns. She apparently had never forgotten the energy of that moment. I told her at the time that I thought she might like this game because the action hero in it was a girl named Lara Croft, which was like a modern Indiana Jones. She and I went to playing it over the long Holiday weekend and we had one of those daddy, daughter moments that has lasted now for two decades. My daughter liked the game so much that she has spent all that time reading every comic and novel that has been produced about Lara Croft and playing every new video game. When the previous Tomb Raider movies came out back in the 2000s with Angelina Jolie starring as Lara Croft I built those times up and we went to see them as a family together and had a great time which she soaked up. And like I said she has built her life up as her own person but it is amazing how much those influences pushed her to live a quite extraordinary life of her own.

She’s seen more of the world than most people do in an entire lifetime, she’s been married for ten years already and they have a nice house in Liberty Township with a respectable amount of land in what is one of the hottest real estate areas in the United States. And she has a child of her own now as well as a growing client list that is willing to pay her a lot of money for the unique way that she takes pictures. Yet a lot of it was born in just one weekend long ago when she was only around seven years old and we played that Tomb Raider game together during that one memorable Christmas. You just never really know what kids will latch onto as a parent so it’s good to try lots of things. But even what may seem like very small things at the time can lead to big life changing elements, for good or bad. In the case of my daughter her experience with Lara Croft was very positive and it let her set her own personal objectives very high which has led her to a wonderful life so far.

To make it even better the new Tomb Raider was a very good movie. It was not disappointing at all, which was a concern of mine going to see it. My daughter and I had a wonderful time. It’s not often that she gets to go to the movies with just me and her mom these days, because she has a life of her own now and her time is in high demand. Her client list keeps her busy almost every week so getting a window to do something together is pretty rare. I was thinking about it while we were seeing Tomb Raider. There might be four or five times like this over our entire lives so I was determined to make the best of it, and we did. But what was best for me was that I thought of all the other little girls out there who could watch this new Tomb Raider and have such a positive experience that it might inspire them the way it did my daughter. And that made it truly a special event. One that many people including myself will never forget.

Rich Hoffman

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The Crime of the West Virginia Teacher Strike: Its time to replace radical school employees with Alexa

What a disaster that was in West Virginia. The teacher’s union strike that went on for 9 days as public employees used children to extort for themselves higher wages showed precisely why the Supreme Count is poised to outlaw public sector unions to begin with. The deal struck with the West Virginia governor is to give every public employee 5% in raises every year from here on which is a completely destructive approach to managing tax payer money. What the government of West Virginia signed up for are huge increases in pay for all their public employees that take no consideration into changing economic circumstances which essentially paint themselves into a long-term corner for which there will be no escape. The public-sector unions did the reprehensible, they shut down the productive tasks they were supposed to be commissioned to perform to demand out of tax payers a bottomless pit of income that essentially comes from every tax payer their system touches.

But what was the rush? The union radicles will say that their main issue is that they have poor insurance coverage but what they are clamoring for is something that doesn’t exist for people outside the public sector either. Insurance coverage in general is in a state of change and market forces are polished off and reintroduced to the process. What’s unusual in West Virginia is that the unions do not have collective bargaining power. Average wages for a West Virginia teacher are around $45,000 per year. With their sudden 5 percent increase that is several thousands of additional dollars per year for as long as they are employed, which is a lot of money. To many people that might seem like a lot, but public-sector employees complain about such high rates because they are comparing them to other places around the country—like across the border where average rates are about the same in Ohio, but in districts like mine at Lakota the average pay is much higher.

Really what should have happened was that every teacher who walked out and participated in the strike should have been terminated. Every public employee who helped with this mess should also be terminated, including the police. But in this case the employees felt they were in a do or die situation and their strongest position was now to take action so enough of them walked off the job across the state to shut down every school leaving kids stuck at home using them as bargaining chips to essentially extort more money away from the public trust. Because of the large increase that they received, school managements across the country will see more of this behavior in the coming months so a plan needs to be in place to deal with it.

The real pressure to act now is the knowledge that the Supreme Court is about to release a decision on public sector unions by June, and it looks like the strength of those organizations will decrease tremendously. That made West Virginia a strategic hot spot for a strike to attempt to get other unions to follow as a final protest hoping to rock the vote at the Supreme Court with this ominous warning. Since West Virginia didn’t have collective bargaining power what good would the upcoming Supreme Court ruling have to prevent similar strikes in the future? The leverage the unions wanted to put on display was that there simply wasn’t enough replacement teachers available to step into the classroom to cover for these striking teachers which is why West Virginia government buckled in just 9 days to the demands of their public-sector insurgents.

It will take time even assuming that the Supreme Court outlaws public union’s power to extort money from coerced membership, for the culture to change. Many of these striking employees don’t see themselves as radical insurgents, but as a culture they behave that way because teachers as a profession have been molded as progressive instructors so they don’t see any reason not to use children as bargaining chips for their own gains. That means that the profession of teaching needs to change into something else while these old relics are phased out and new, fresh thoughts can be introduced. States are going to have to prepare for massive walk offs from the teaching profession by these trained radicals. The West Virginia teachers knew that the vacancies for new teachers were low so what did they have to lose in walking off the job? Nothing. There just aren’t enough potential employees to threaten their employment with.

The way to break a strike is to replace the workers striking with new employees. When those employee positions are all getting their money from the same source—the tax payer—it gives them leverage for a walk off. The way to beat that is to decentralize those efforts into a more privatized endeavor. There should always be a certain percentage of non-union employees in schools ready to take over if the unionized teachers walk off the job to protest some turtle crossing—the business of teaching should never stop. And we do live in an age where teachers could be replaced by machines. And automated teaching system should be utilized in case a physical teacher isn’t in the classroom. If teachers refuse to work, then something like Amazon’s Echo or Google’s Home should be put into each classroom to replace those teachers while the non-union staff of administrators ensure that business as usual continues.

In a lot of ways, I think Amazon’s Echo is far superior to an average teacher in the classroom. Some teachers are exceptional, and I think those are people who wouldn’t chose to be protesting at a statehouse for higher wages anyway—they are probably worth whatever money we pay them. But for some slug like many of those teachers protesting in West Virginia I would encourage those school districts suffering to replace them with their own Alexa. If you know anything about those systems they are much better than a real teacher, and far cheaper. They can answer questions, provide scheduled assignments and collect information. They can even provide lectures for topics that are needed. If public schools utilized this technology better they wouldn’t be in such bad positions to waiting for teachers to fill their needed positions. With the economy producing such low unemployment anyway, the traditional way of staffing so many positions with live people really isn’t practical, especially if they are only going to go on strike anyway knowing that there isn’t a deep bench to replace them if they decide to walk off the job for 9 days demanding a pay increase. The great thing about Alexa is that it doesn’t have legs and will never run out of energy. It doesn’t take coffer breaks or bitch about their pay. They don’t eat and smell like coffee and decaying teeth when you ask them a question. In a lot of ways, I think they should be the future of teaching.

Since the teaching profession is changing anyway—as the Supreme Court will eventually mandate, we might as well come up with a plan to deal with the really good problems that we are facing. If there is a teacher shortage and the ones we do have want too much money and expect these extravagant insurance plans, let’s just use Alexa to teach classrooms. We don’t have to pay them insurance, heck, they don’t ever get sick and they do essentially the same thing. So what are we waiting for?

Rich Hoffman
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