Tag: Doc Thompson

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rich Hoffman

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Why the World Needs Trump’s Border Wall: Defining values that make for good and bad lives

Yes, the United States must have a wall between the Mexican and American border, a real, physical barrier that people can see and which prevents unwanted crossings. And the reason why is more than just a political discussion, it’s a deep philosophical difference that is required to be recognized for the benefit of existence. Not all people in the world are equal, some feed thoughts that are quite disastrous to themselves and those around them while others are quite productive and leave in their life wake benefits that cascade into those around them. But due to the freedom of human beings to engage in free thought, the quality of their thinking produces people of differing values. When you magnify the results of many people in such a situation then it can be said that entire nations have radically different values which then become apparent at places like the Mexican/American border.

On the American side of that border is a capitalist country that uses a monetary system to determine values from everything to what kind of house people choose to live in to the more tangible elements of success and failure. On the Mexican side are the results of a failed Marxist revolution that has left in its wake a collectivist mindset impoverished and in a primitive state. The people are the same on both sides of the border, they are human with one head, two arms and two legs. But what makes them different is in what they think about. And of course, what one thinks about is what one becomes. When basic survival is the primary concern embarked on in Mexico it should come as no surprise that they live in dreadful habitats close to mud huts, and in some cases they do. Food, and sex are their primary concerns, then in raising the products of those thoughts, the children that spawn from them.

In America there is more to the culture because capitalism has provided more options to think about, thus there are more conditions for which to build a life from. Houses are different, the cars are different, the people dress different, act different, there are more food choices—all this because capitalism provides more avenues of thought other than just basic survival. When these results are multiplied across the range of human experience for that country the net gains generated from thought are obvious to even a casual observer.

Enemies of capitalism of course recognize this problem and they have every intention in the world of trying to blend the lines between the two so that one side does not feel superior to the other, because their advocacy is for a more socialist world. So the capitalist mode of thinking must be attacked in two basic ways, through the promotion of no barriers, and through the easy flow of drugs which at the high level of strategy between global interests, are intended to poison the minds of the capitalists so that they can no longer think such beautiful thoughts which make such a great American country. So the smuggling of narcotics into the American country is part of a globalist strategy to ruin the minds of the residents so that the distinction between the two countries, Mexico and America, are not so obvious. Drugs keep the people who use them in a state of primitive ambition which puts them on the same level as the typical socialist, and that is the strategic goal. The tactical application is the dealing in actual drugs to the customer base in the capitalist zones. Therefor, a country that wishes to retain its intellectual virtue must make that process difficult.

Individual liberty is surrendered when the choices that are made have an impact on the individual sanctity of those around them. This is why I am not a “libertarian.” Unfortunately, everything affects everything else, so the drug user who is in their home doing drugs for their own enjoyment is actually destroying quite a lot on the outside world, especially if they are raising children with the same reckless values. So a nation has a right to make drugs illegal if they rob a country of the ability to protect individuals from the incursions of impositions created by the drug induced. The illiterate drunk standing on the street corner is a similar villain because their presence lowers the thinking of those around them. There is nothing more disgusting than a perfectly healthy adult puking on the side of a bar after drinking too much and people having to observe such a thing thinking about it the rest of their night. Such observations lower the appeal of a capitalist society and bring people’s thoughts to lower quality ambitions by default.

The freedom to live, and think is a universal appeal but what is left for us to define is the quality of those definitions. The people of Mexico are living, and a bum in the desert is thinking and living freely while they exist in the back of a 50-year-old mobile home with the doors barely hanging from their hinges. But if such a thing were placed into the middle of a neighborhood where the average home value was $500,000 it could easily be displayed that the quality of thought for the entire community would be lowered. Having to look at such a monstrosity or talk to such a free-wheeling person at the community pool would lower the expectations of all the other residents and those thoughts would bring down the entire social structure of the ambitious capitalist culture and evoke negative judgment. So while we can say that everything and everyone should be free, the monetary value of some measurement must be applied to create the law and order that government can never provide.

To protect that value, we must have a barrier of some kind to disguise good thought from bad, and to make it much harder for the bad to influence the good. What the enemies of capitalism want is to remove value from society so that they can redefine it under collectivists assumptions. That is their objective and why they are so against Trump’s border wall proposals doing anything they can to prevent it from happening. Their desire is to blend the cultures so that the quality of thinking on one side is diminished and the other side uplifted because they can have access to the more advanced culture. But the barrier is needed to inspire one culture to look at what put them in such a dismal place and to correct the behavior. The determining factor as to what one side does and one side doesn’t do well is determined by the value of economic means—which are produced by the quality of the thinking that produced those attributes. The culture that doesn’t have such benefits might wan to point across the border and declare the people living in million-dollar homes as villains because they spent most of their lives having 20 children by five different women, and not learning who to do things that mattered economically, but that doesn’t change the nature of reality. The border wall is for the benefit of those on both sides. Those living in bad circumstances need to come to terms with it instead of focusing all their attention onto fleeing into a capitalist country that has opportunity. They need to make opportunity for themselves. And until there is a physical barrier illustrating the difference definitively, they won’t be inspired to do so.

Rich Hoffman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rich Hoffman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rich Hoffman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rich Hoffman

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Shut Down the Government: We don’t need most of those employees anyway

Shut down the government, do us all a favor. What they are talking about shutting down if a budget resolution isn’t reached is essentially a much-needed layoff of employees that aren’t needed anyway. They call them in government “non-essential” employees because the world continues to spin whether or not they are at work. They aren’t needed. And the last time this happened where an actual shut down occurred the parks services was cut so national parks were closed as a unionized extortion tactic meant to put pain on the public to provide political support for their cause as well. To that I say shut them all down too. The government shouldn’t be in the park business anyway, turn them over to private control and get the government out of the way at the Grand Canyon, the Smoky Mountains and elsewhere, shut them all down and turn over management to private enterprise, as they should have always been. It is amazing that after all these years there has never been a Republican who could withstand a shutdown showdown with the lowly Democrats. Not even Newt Gingrich managed to be successful during the Clinton years. Bill Clinton easily waited out Newt and Bob Dole while he carried on an affair with Monica Lewinsky instead. It was no skin off his back and Republicans came running back to him within a few weeks, and Democrats have had the high ground on the argument ever since. That is, until December 11th, 2018.

Of course I fully support President Trump’s efforts to shut down the government and to take that power away from Democrats. Most of the government workers effected do not vote Republican anyway so why not do it? What is there to lose by sending home employees the government doesn’t need anyway. All essential functions will continue to operate so where is the problem? Any small government advocate should be very excited to see such a thing happen. After all, there isn’t any better way to shrink the size of government than by getting rid of the people working in it that you don’t need. Once people realize that a government shutdown really doesn’t affect them then they’ll move on to something else, so why not do it?

I’ve never liked government employees. I know a lot of people who do work in government and they are to my judgment lazy people who are too slow in life to really advance the human cause. I put up with them out of kindness, but when talking to them and discovering their values they disgust me. I can’t wait to get away from them generally. It doesn’t matter if they are F.B.I. agents or just clerks at the BMV. They are what I term slow people lacking ambition, which is why they work in the protective umbrella of government services. The pay is artificially good because it isn’t set by any kind of market value giving wages an artificial ceiling that can’t be supported by reality and the requirements for performing a task are nearly nonexistent. The postal worker who spends most of his day drunk and off work because his liver is so polluted from all the years of drinking that he’s now sick all the time still gets a raise. It’s a pathetic system that only people in government benefit from.
These are generalities of course. It could be argued that every military service person is a government employee and we all know that we are supposed to salute them for their willingness to die for us at every juncture. Some would argue that the military is essential personnel that is negatively affected by government shutdowns, but to that I’d say we accomplish more around the world with contracted work. That is where the real dirty stuff happens anyway, not the front-line soldier sweeping a mine field in some hostile land who probably shouldn’t be there to begin with. It’s the soldiers of fortune who do the real work most of the time, and they get paid. Believe me, they get paid well—and during a government shutdown, those signatures still get made.

The kind of little fight that Trump had with the liberal progressives Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi is precisely why I voted for the President. I don’t want a bunch of back slapping and “getting along.” I want someone who will sit in the Oval Office and fight on my behalf. Not some wishy-washy get along loser like we’ve had for several decades now who lets inferior government workers run all over them in the form of the Democrat party. These calls for civility in public discourse are the same idiots who want the game to continue because they profit off the chaos in some fashion or another. The government should never be such a large employer and there is no way at this point to create incentives for nonessential people to leave government work unless it becomes a destabilized employer anyway. We all know that there isn’t any management in government work so what hope of reform is there unless we have more of these government shutdowns. We need to get those people affected into some other line of employment and what better way to do it.

What is most disgusting is that during a shut down most of those affected workers will get paid anyway for sitting at home on their asses. Not right away, but once the shutdown is resolved, they get a check whether or not they have done anything which is a disgusting system that only government could come up with. Government is the ultimate socialist experiment which by its nature avoids proper market adjustment conditions because the entire system is built of sentiment, not necessity. People seem to forget that France is and has been a socialist country for many years. After weeks of protesting taxes on gasoline prices to protect the environment on a made-up global warming initiative designed to incite panic among progressives, and thus foolish legislation and artificial tax collections, the President of France Emmanuel Macron proposed a raise for all workers of 100 euros and an exemption on overtime pay as well as social security for retirees. How did he come up with that number? Those labor costs aren’t set by any market circumstances, they are an artificial reaction to an artificial problem and all that does is inflate the value of labor costs for the entire country. How can a government just set a wage price to appeal to a bunch of protestors running around the streets of Paris overturning cars and burning garbage cans? The answer is he can’t, not without destroying the economic value of what France produces. This is the problem with all governments who set prices with the failed socialist notion that such things are best managed in such a way avoiding market realities.

It should be extraordinary, but it was and I hope to see a lot more off it where President Trump has these open fights with congressional Democrats. He’s doing essentially what I’d like to do and I voted for him to do just such a thing. And for the record, because everyone keeps saying it on all sides of the argument, we do not have a democracy in America. A bunch of thugs can’t just run around the streets overturning cars and vandalizing street signs and get a raise. We have a representative republic. We elect people to do jobs for us and that is how Trump was elected, even though the government system still refuses to accept that premise and have been working very hard to erase that election. But that’s the system we have and more fights like what happened in the White House over the funding of the government and the funding of the border wall need to occur. Additionally, we need to shut down the government more often so to push people out of that work that we don’t need so we don’t have to pay them for “nonessential” work. What a preposterous notion—paying people for things we don’t need as a nation just so that the government can count itself as a major employer. That is not the way of a capitalist nation, only a socialist one, and it should have never been introduced into the American concept to begin with. So people shouldn’t cry when it goes away. Shut down the government and move on to the next topic.

Rich Hoffman

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People Who Work in Government are Generally Stupid: Watch the movies ‘American Made’ and ‘Chappaquiddick’ to understand why they hate Trump

I recommend you do two things right now dear reader, go on Netflix and watch Chappaquiddick and watch wherever you can find it, American Made with Tom Cruise. I watched it on HBO. They were both remarkable films. Chappaquiddick of course is about how Ted Kennedy left a young girl riding in a car with him to die when he accidentally drove off the road in an inebriated condition in a bay where she drowned, and he escaped, mysteriously. What was astonishing about this movie even if it did attempt to paint Ted Kennedy in the best possible light was that he was so enormously stupid and incompetent. For a guy who was being groomed to be president of the United States the way his “handlers” treated him was astonishing. It was a really interesting look at life behind the scenes of a crises regarding people at the highest level of politics. It then becomes very clear why all those people who have come to handle presidents of the United States over the years have come to resent President Trump, a man who is street smart, instinctive and does not want their advice. Then you will really have your doors blown off when you watch American Made, about Barry Seal, the ex-TWA pilot who was coaxed by the CIA to become a drug smuggler for Pablo Escobar.

I knew a lot of this information but I never really thought of Barry Seal the smuggler being at the center of the Iran Contra affair, the Clinton scandals in Arkansas and being the payoff man to Manuel Noriega. Looking at these distinctly 1980s events knowing what we do about how the FBI and the Department of Justice handled the Clinton email scandal and their attempts to remove Trump from presidential office before he even set foot in the White House it made the movie American Made that much more powerful. The two things that bothered me was the way that the CIA picked Barry Seal for the job, knowing he would become a drug smuggler, and actually allowing it to happen so that they could prop up a flood of cocaine into the United States and prop up insurgents in Central America with cash. Barry was a bit of a daredevil, so the CIA set him up with his own airport in Arkansas overlooked by Governor Clinton specifically and they gave him plenty of property to build a smuggling empire.

Much like Chappaquiddick when Ted Kennedy had just accidentally killed a young woman and was making calls the morning after from the desk of the sheriff’s office—because the Kennedy’s controlled all of politics in that region, there was a scene in American Made where Barry had just been arrested by the local law enforcement, the F.B.I. the ATF and other agencies and was hauled up before the state attorney general to spend many lifetimes in jail when President Clinton called her and commanded her to release the drug smuggler. I’m sure many of the scenes in the movie were exaggerated to compress time and events, but it was really strange to see it happening in a historical context. Then to have that same drug smuggler in the White House as an advisor to Oliver North and the Reagan initiative against drugs called “Just Say No.” They used Barry Seal to conduct a sting operation against Pablo Escobar which worked. But Escobar sent a hit squad into the United States to kill Barry Seal. Once assassinated the White House needed a new way to get guns to freedom fighters and drug runners in Central America so they used the Iranians, which spawned the Iran Contra Affair.

I have read books and books on all these topics individually but until the movie used Barry Seal to string them all together did it really click how things worked. It helps to look back in hindsight and knowing what we do today of course, but I thought it was amazing to put all these elements into one movie that had so much to do with how the world has been shaped today. It doesn’t take much of a fantastic mind to imagine that even today the people in politics who support open borders are doing so to help the drug trade funnel drugs into the United States. After all, the CIA was clearly involved at a high level into the whole operation and one can only imagine what the sinister desire was to allow it to happen. But on the most basic level it was to funnel cash into impoverished areas to act as change agents against communism and other anti-capitalist forces. Perhaps a good idea in intent, but a disaster into practice.

When I was a kid, even up to my mid 20s really, I thought of people in the F.B.I. and CIA as being elite law enforcement types who were the best of the best. The fully grown adult in me knows now that they are just people like anybody else and usually, they aren’t very smart. In fact, most people working in government are pretty stupid, which is why they are attracted to government and not the private sector. That is very disappointing, but a grim reality. Yet they struggle to maintain that illusion not just to themselves, that they are smart and important, that they go to GREAT effort to only allow puppet presidents of the people to be in the White House so not to shatter their reality with evidence. The real action is out there in the people like Barry Seal who do the work of these agencies, then are expendable when their work is done. We see the same kind of activity in our modern times around this whole attempt to destroy President Trump while real crimes were openly committed by these very same agencies. We don’t want to believe they could possibly do such a thing, but they obviously did.

Its one thing to know something, and I’ve heard stories from conspiracy theorists for years about the CIA drug smuggling and gun running operations—heck, that’s how ISIS was started by the Obama administration. Obama was in support of the Muslim Brotherhood caliphate all around the Mediterranean and Assad was standing in the way. In Syria the Assad family had previously fought the Muslim Brotherhood for control and weren’t about to allow some Islamic radicals to take control of the country from the family rule. So Assad gassed his own people and the Obama White House ran with the story to bring international pressure down on Assad. When that didn’t work the United States started funneling guns to rebels who then became ISIS. This is a very old story that happens over and over again. But what we all must ask ourselves is why it continues to happen.

The hatred of Trump is that he is truly a people’s president elected outside of the controls that were obviously in place in the two films I mentioned. In those movies, the presidents or potential presidents were just pawns of the greater politics involved, where the so-called Deep State operated. In the case of American Made, the Deep State was the CIA breaking the law for what they considered a greater good. Barry Seal was a criminal completely propped up by the CIA to make the drug runners in Columbia extremely wealthy so that they could destabilize the communism that was in fashion in Central America. And you can hear the same rationalizations from James Comey today about Trump, trying to justify why he broke the law to keep a people’s president out of the White House…. essentially because he felt he knew better than the rest of us how to deal with world affairs. And that is how these disasters happen.

I remember the events of my youth well, the Chappaquiddick situation and the antics of Barry Seal and I’m not going back to that. I voted for President Trump because I have lost faith in the F.B.I. and the CIA—in the Presidency itself. I am not going to sleep just so that losers in those intelligence agencies can give us the illusion of a Republic while they work behind the scenes under great illegal circumstances to overthrow our way of government. I do not find those options acceptable, and Trump is my solution to that long-standing problem. And if you want context dear reader, then watch those two movies and apply what you learn to our modern circumstances. And many answers will become quite clear for you.

Rich Hoffman

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The Meaning of Life: How to accept the new roles of colonizing distant planets in relation to governing policies

You know, philosophy and science didn’t end with the American inputs of William James, Robert Pirsig and Ayn Rand. Even though the institutions of our modern society are tempted to think that they are the end of the line and that they must now teach what they have learned to anybody willing to pay them $100 thousand for an education that really it’s the labor unions supporting them that’s talking, again from a long dead philosopher in Karl Marx who is irrelevant to modern thought, because his beliefs were more a wish for the lazy than an observed fact of existence. No, there is a lot more to learn and to think about and as it so happens to be, we are living in the most dynamic time for that kind of thought in the history of the entire world. So if you are like me, which is conducive to the reality of the moment, the old static thoughts of old need to give way to the dynamic intellectualism of the creative moment and for that I’m going to say something very important, something that nobody else will tell you presently on the face of earth, but it is the most solid footing that mankind could hope to have, and that is in the rock, paper, scissor game of human development, the way to determine the value in something is in how we can monetize it, because that determines the value of something. Science by its very nature is needed to study where we’ve been but they cannot be allowed to step in the way of human advancement.

I’m thinking of space and colonizing Mars, the Moon, and several other moons circling the moons of the big gas giants at the center of our solar system. In their natural state they are just there doing nothing waiting for the sun to explode destroying everything in its gravitational pull. Humans have been given a tight window to develop life of just a few million years and we need to take full advantage of it presently. That means that all the scientific protestors like Green Peace and PETA, along with the political protestors such as the Karl Marx inspired ANTIFA must either be destroyed or given a seat at the back of the bus and told to shut up. They may have rights to express themselves under the American Constitution and if other countries want to adopt the philosophy of American thought and create laws based on that, so be it. But soon we are going to be returning to the wild, wild west of space travel and frontier pushing that will last pretty much for the rest of human existence, for many millions of years to come and always there will be a frontier to push. It is the nature of human thought to use the necessity of adventure to advance human needs and desires and the governing practice that keeps everything in check are not the laws of institutional thinking, it is the value of the conduct.

I used to read National Geographic magazines and books voraciously. Going to the museum for me in Washington D.C. was like visiting heaven on earth. But over the years I have grown to understand that they have a very limited perspective on the world and of human existence altogether. What makes human beings so important over other life forms is the creative impulse to see what is around the corner and to use their imaginations to get there. No other animal anywhere does this and it can be argued through applied scientific observation that this is the meaning of life—of all life—to feed this trend in existence. National Geographic still has the progressive vision of its founders, Alexander Graham Bell and many others who weren’t wrong to ask questions about the role science played in human experience, but the value of their work only has relevancy to people. Give a National Geographic magazine to an elk in Alaska or a beaver in Colorado and they’ll just look at it. The animal rights activists that might learn something from reading National Geographic are wrong to assume that they are meant to act on behalf of nature because again the ability to contemplate the “nature” of things is purely human. The forces that made the Rocky Mountains could and would destroy every last human being ever created without giving anything a thought. So the contemplation of value is purely human. When in the very well-produced television series titled Mars, produced by National Geographic the assumption is made that there needs to be a governing body in space just as there is on earth, they’d be incorrect. Value is determined by what humans do with the nature that is around them—at every level. A turtle can’t dig in the ground and pull out raw ore and make something economically valuable about it. Only humans can, and thus on the wild frontier of space where huge companies will set up residence and take over the colonization of Mars and many other planets at a rapid pace, science and conservation must take a back seat. The scientists cannot be allowed to become governing elements in the dynamic need to destroy static assumptions. When we get to Mars and set up huge cities of minors and construction workers, the science of understanding what happened to Mars takes a back seat. The funding for their science comes from business investment and economic expansion, so they need to accept that and get away from assuming that their static reality of observation can be allowed to slow down even a little the curiosity of mankind and its never-ending quest for economic development.

Monetizing a planet, or a moon is not an evil thing, it’s quite the opposite. When something is monetized it is suddenly graced with a value that it didn’t have before. Mars in the state that it is now is just sitting there with all its history. The scientist might find all that fascinating just as they may enjoy watching Humpback wales breeding off the coast of California. So what, when did a whale or a dolphin ever build a space ship to colonize a distant star? The value of existence isn’t just in doing what some version of God started as a pattern of life, to breed, to eat, to reproduce then to die in a long cycle of existence, it is accepting that jump-start into consciousness, then to do something with the intellect that emerges. Death or preparing for death for the rest of our lives as the Buddhists do is not a value conducive to the human experience, nor is living in harmony with nature. The meaning of life as defined by human beings is to accept their role of a dynamic force in a very static universe. It is not for the scientist to sit in the back of a caboose studying history, it is in the entrepreneur at the front of the train, at the cutting edge as Robert Pirsig put it in his work so well, that is where the value for all things are.

At the heart of all this is the debate on gun control. As humans move into the vast frontiers of space away from the governments on earth that central question of who controls who and how and why comes up. In America the right to have guns and to use them has decentralized the process of justice. People can live in the middle of nowhere and not expect to be robbed of their values because they have guns to defend themselves. The same application of order will be used heavily on the far distance bases in orbit around Jupiter or scattered all over Mars as a continuous stream of rockets full of payload travels between the earth and those destinations raising the stakes with each visit as those environments become much more earth like in their living conditions. And as all this happens there will be no room for the nosey scientist or the environmental protestors who assumes that their work is the most important to conduct in the universe. The way to determine that is to measure the value that work has in the scope of human progress. If it isn’t valuable, then it must be discarded for something that is, because it is the tools we come to use as humans that matter as we reach out and expand our curiosity to the next corner of the galaxy. It may be interesting to consider where things have been historically, but what matters is tomorrow, and our always driven yearning to find it. That is the meaning of life.

Rich Hoffman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rich Hoffman

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The Funeral of George H. W. Bush: It was a lot like the movie Soylent Green

The funeral of Bush 41 I thought was nice. I always liked George Bush the senior, and the younger, 43 as he is often termed—as people. But I do not think they were very good presidents, at least in the way I would expect out of a Republican in the White House. But I didn’t dislike them, although I remember very well how much the media did. So I shared with many the observations that the media was all too friendly toward George Bush in his death, very much contrary to what they had been during his life. That of course provoked the question as to why. As odd as it was to see the Trumps sitting with the Obamas and the Clintons and to even have Jimmy Carter there as well it was also institutionally satisfying, and it was good that President Trump attended and said nice things along the way. But the invisible strings of conformity that stirred about the entire event reminded me an awful lot of the old movie Soylent Green. Through life the people are harvested as commodities of the state, but upon their death they were ushered into the afterlife with warm music and revelry before being eaten by society itself.

The aspects of the Bush funeral which I fundamentally disagree with, and which the press and seemingly everyone celebrated was that the former president was a sacrificial person who gave his life to service for others, and now that he was no longer a threat to the order of things as a Republican, it was OK to honor him. All the attributes that were celebrated mostly are concepts that are anti-individual and pro collectivist which is the subtle undertone to the entire exercise. The message to all other Republicans by the press, the not so subtle part of their message was that if you want to be liked by the media, then the attributes of George Bush that involved self-sacrifice, service and humility are the way to get there. While those traits are largely Christian tenants of value, that doesn’t mean that the old foe of Marxism isn’t present. To understand that idea you have to understand European history and the role that the Catholic Church played on controlling so many people’s lives, in a very negative way. Then you’d have to know that Karl Marx desired to exploit that inbreed trait into the targets of his philosophy work so much inspired by Immanuel Kant. To focus thoughts on others is the way to eternal redemption. To focus on yourself is the way of the evil vices of capitalism!

George Bush was a rich man who inherited a lot of money from his father and sought to dispel the guilt that a Marxist leaning society injected upon him with service in the military, then in government for much of his life. He wanted very much to be a good man and he was, unfortunately the way that good was defined for him meant that he needed to be a collectivist. So his great wealth created a paradox for him and his extended family that was deliberately hard to negotiate. The minefield however was set up by the institutional culture for which the media represents. Their value system is subservience to the needs of the machine, sacrifice and honor as determined by the amount of sacrifice an individual makes toward the institutions they occupy.

This institutional element has become much more pronounced now in the age of Trump because so many of them are coming unraveled, and it is the source of the hatred of the current President. The odd exchange of the Trumps sitting down next to law breakers and social reformers hell-bent on taking society toward infinite collectivism was a clash of ideas that were unavoidable, yet they were brought together out of respect for a presidency that is the lead seat of American institutionalism looked at in entirely different ways. The paradox was revealed in the life of George Bush as his son George W. Bush conducted the eulogy of his father’s life and what a great job he did. While summarizing the merits of such a sacrificial being he managed to paint a picture of quite an interesting character who still sky dived late in his life and loved to watch cop dramas on television. For me I found those aspects appealing. To the institutionalists it was the sacrifice. But everyone was generally brought together by some notion of a recently deceased American president.

The media in this case are the institutional representatives that look at the life of all conservatives as bacteria in the body of collective experience. But anybody familiar with biology knows that bacteria is a useful element, its villainy is purely relative. The media hated the Bush family because they were Republicans but as the country grew away from that kind of conservative thought, the public has grown tired of the media. It was an odd thing to hear Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple lecture the world that any form of hate had no place on their platforms. As much as I love Apple products—and I do, and I know Rush Limbaugh does as well, clearly Tim Cook would view my support of the Second Amendment and liberal activism as hate speech and is suggesting that I’m not welcome to the company. But it’s not lost on me that most people who call themselves liberals, especially the creative types, use Apple as their primary functionary to interact with cyberspace. And most of them participate in hate speech. I have no doubt that if a survey of ANTIFA members were taken as to what phone system they used most it would be Apple if they could actually afford the product. Is Apple as a company talking to them?

The harassment of the Bush family by the media over all the years created Donald Trump. George W. Bush and his dad and brother took a terrible beating needlessly by just the same kind of people who tend to buy Apple products, the Hollywood left, the media culture, the hipsters and saggy assed getto thugs, the drug mules who cross the border then claim that America owes them something as illegal immigrants. It was their collective ooze for which the media pronounced was civil conduct and once George Bush the senior was laid to rest, it was OK to pay respect to him in that sacrificed state, as an essence of life to be consumed by the masses, a throw back to the days before there was a Donald Trump in the White House, rather than the man who loved his wife dearly and was a damn good father to his kids. There is a lot very evil about the process, the way that all the good things about George H. W. Bush were punished and all the bad things about him adored. It was quite an interesting paradox which comes from a society that has a schizophrenic relationship with itself. It was very clear to me, that the institutions of our modern life values death and consumption far more than productivity and effort. And that is the hard lesson that was very much on full display at the funeral of the 41st President of the United States.

Rich Hoffman

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