Tag: Donald Trump

China Can’t Even Afford iPhones: Understanding how the game has been played and will be in the future

I warned everyone, China the big communist country had nothing without the United States. They would have no leverage in trade talks and their inflating economy was purely fictional, created by global efforts to prop them up. I’ve especially pointed this out when box office talks about movie releases have studios paying more attention than they should about the communist country’s ability to make or break a movie. Back when a big movie like E.T. The Extraterrestrial came out in the 1980s nobody cared if anybody in China saw the movie and it was considered a success. So what has changed in the three decades since is purely an internal communist push through American education to give China a seat at the economic table that was entirely made up by political forces trying to change the kind of world we all live in. They wanted to say, “look, China is killing all of us, so we need to be more like them.” And that was how communism was being pushed into western culture. If everyone wanted to compete in the modern economic world, they’d have to get on board with that line of thought. But, as I said from the very beginning, it was all made up crap.

I can see why everyone believes that China is or was going to be the big world power to chase. The Children’s Museum in Indianapolis as in other places as well has a huge dedication to the new China economy tying to prepare young people on how to live in that type of world. By the time I had seen the exhibit it was already aging so it was a little easier for me to see than the millions of visitors who had been there before me. If the topic of economic power and global politics was not the topic of the average family’s dinner table, then most people wouldn’t think much of it. However, in essence, the Chinese economy was never going to be all scary and domineering of all cultures on earth. The way our school systems proposed the problem was a lie from the start, China was never going to dictate the way we live life in American and that smoky reality that they had been trying to create with our young people came to a crashing end with the rise to power of President Trump, who knew better. Anyone who understands markets and money could see the problem but often those types of people are not allowed anywhere near political policy making, that is until one of them managed to get elected into the Executive Branch, which destroyed near six decades of planning by the political insurgents working against American sovereignty in full pursuit of globalism managed by China.

Personally, I love Apple products, my wife just bought the latest iPhone from them. They are an American company that has been pushing great technically innovations. They are too liberal for me, and I don’t think Tim Cook is a very good CEO, but the company itself is a good one as it was created by Steve Jobs. And I get it, there are only so many Americans who can buy iPhones, so the billions of people in China is a lucrative market, just as movie companies have fallen into that trap, but the entire industry is built as a sand castle meant to look impressive long enough to trick the world into accepting communism before the real waves of economic power came along and washed it all away. Thank goodness that happened much earlier than projected with the election of President Trump. Due to the continuing trade war the Chinese people just aren’t riding the wave of extra money that had been fueling a fifth of all iPhone sales pushing Apple stocks down 5.1% for the week as investors had to brace for the loss in projections. When people don’t have the expendable income to buy an iPhone it is an excellent measure of their economic health so there is no way that the “state” of China can hide the problem because the sales are published by an American company.

Of course, Apple’s not happy about it, they feel they need to have a rate of growth that can continue to support their trillion-dollar evaluation and in order to do that they literally need to touch everyone on planet earth in some way or another, so it’s a tough gig. Apple can’t afford to have too many political opinions and to divide up their bases. They trust that conservatives will buy their product because what they have is the best, so they do lean left. And like Google, all the big tech companies had been thinking that China was the way the world was going so they started kissing up to them over a decade ago. But Apple should have never counted on a fifth of their entire market to come from that region of the world. Apple phones are too expensive for a country that relies on its economic power to be stolen from other places and given to them through politics, which is exactly what has happened. American companies were penalized with burdensome regulation so they fled to Asia and took those jobs to those economies. But the origin market was North America where the goods were really purchased. The only big difference was that instead of products being made in America and then being sold back to America, the products were made in other parts of the world and sold back to America. Trump fixed that problem by stopping the cause, over regulation and tax incentives which is why over 300,000 jobs were created in December with a GDP rate of nearly 4% to finish out the year. Meanwhile, China can’t even afford to buy iPhones.

There were a lot of villains in on the game but that’s not important now. China has to steal intellectual property because their communist system does not spawn creativity just as it doesn’t elsewhere in the world. Great thinkers and dreamers like to get paid for their unique visions. They don’t do it for free which is why China has a major creativity problem. All things in business come from creativity, so a society that isn’t very creative is not going to have a strong economy. China could never steal enough intellectual property to stay relevant in an economy now led by the United States again. They are going to gradually fall further and further behind because all their economic gains were created by stifling America with policy and regulation and giving that opportunity cost to China so that the chess board of the world could change. But it was all built on phony values and now Trump has played the card everyone was afraid he would, and China is falling apart.

China always depended on the American economy for its sustenance. What they had was not real value but stolen. And that’s what everyone is having a hard time coming to terms with. China was not a superior culture dominating economics, they were just a third world country artificially made first world with looted wealth from the west so that the idea of communism would be accepted by all global markets. Apple knew it, so does Google, and now they are paying the price for hedging their bets. If Tim Cook were a good CEO he would have started backing off expectations the moment that Trump entered office because anybody aware of the situation knew what was going to happen. Now its time to pay, and likely time to get a new CEO.

Rich Hoffman

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The Loser Rashida Tiaib Attempts at Impeachment: Obviuosly, she hasn’t thought things through

News flash, what does Rashida Tiaib think is going to happen if her brand of socialist radicals impeach President Trump and take over all three branches of government with their insurgents? They are going to be destroyed. It’s not going to be allowed to happen, violence will erupt and many people will die. This idea that liberals have about taking over government by force, intimidation and ANTIFA radicalism hasn’t been thought through very well. There is a reason Donald Trump was elected president. It’s not his fault, it’s the people who put him there who Rashida Tiaib should be concerned about, and calling them a bunch of white racists isn’t going to help make a case for civility either. When push comes to shove, bodies will be lying around in the streets and any fantasy of a socialist takeover will end rather fast. It’s one thing to have an ANTIFA protest on a college campus or a very liberal town full of welfare recipients who have no passions in the matter. But it’s quite another to stroll into Deadwood South Dakota and demand socialism. Uhhhh, before the mob moved one city block I’d predict about 90,000 bullet holes and some of them coming unofficially from the sheriff’s office. Any attempt to impeach President Trump, let me just say—will start a war that Rashida Tiaib isn’t prepared for—or any Democrat for that matter.

I’m at a place in my life where I want to address this problem more deeply that it just being a liberal against conservative problem. As Mitt Romney proved, and even some local people in my own town have clearly demonstrated, they are just as much losers as Democrats are. So I am thinking more these days about a more appropriate and universal understanding of the problem, designating winners and losers instead of Republicans and Democrats and here is the reason, and again I’ll refer back to The Oz Principle, everything really comes down to above the line and below the line thinking. Winners think above the line, losers think below the line. Pretty simple, right? So let’s look at this Rashida Tiaib phenomena through the lens of being a loser or a winner. Obviously, her intentions for wanting to impeach Trump is to bring victory to her party’s ambitions to take control of government. But because she is a severe case of below the line thinking she hasn’t even conceived what it might look like if that reality were to manifest—how the American people in the real world would react to it. And that is the classic problem with all below the line thinkers.

Below the line thinking essentially consists of victim hood, in explaining why someone can’t advance themselves in life. Racism under any definition is classic below the line thinking and any government that supports it, is contributing severely to a loser mindset. In any business that is trying to improve its cultural footprint organizationally, the challenge is to get more people thinking above the line than below, and that is how you essentially start getting a winning mindset across the entire organization. To put it in crayon so that everyone can understand it, this is precisely the purpose of sports within our capitalist country. We watch teams bring in certain players who are supposed to excel in whatever position they play in a particular sport and we cheer on their efforts to win more games than other cities. It’s a fun game for all of us, but the real essence of it is to find that magic combination of winners and leaders who can inspire victory. Nobody has much tolerance for a sports player who is hurt all the time or underperforms. It doesn’t matter if the fans are liberals or conservatives, most people have an open disdain for a sport figure that is not living up to the expectations that the fan base has for wins and losses.

For a lot of reasons, we have allowed as a culture way too many people who are below the line thinkers to get government jobs and to shape that employment culture in a very negative way. The government labor unions are another victimhood-based organization, full of below the line thinkers and they actually incentivize that type of culture making most government workers the type of people who are extremely inefficient. Unlike most business environments which are performance based and are always trying to look for ways to keep below the line thinking from hindering a winning culture, government looks for more below the line thinking to justify their loser attitude about everything, and to satisfy that trend they want to always grow, because that’s what losers do, they love to hide their faults in the masses so their errors aren’t so obvious.

If I were working in government as a TSA agent, or a National Park Ranger, I would make sure human resources had my number correct and would tell them to call me when funding had been restored, if ever. I would never sit around waiting for somebody else to do something so that I could pay more rent or a mortgage. I would get a second job, or even a third job and I would take care of my financial obligations. That is an example of above the line thinking, and it’s the way more people need to start thinking if we really want America to remain such a great country. Lucky for us, in the rural parts of the nation that type of thinking is quite common—particularly among farmers. When they hit a drought, or the get a flat tire on a tractor they don’t sit around crying about racism or how unfair God is to them that day, they fix the tire. And they do their best with the drought. They survive. I can say that I am an above the line thinker with the employment status example because I’ve done that before several times, went to get second and third jobs to cover my expenses. Sometimes I didn’t even have a second car, I had to ride a bicycle to work just to get there and I never bitched about it. To me that was the kind of thinking that was needed. I don’t feel sorry for a single government worker not getting a paycheck during the government shutdown. I say to them, get another job, pay your bills, and stop complaining. The airlines themselves covered their own security costs before there was ever a unionized TSA organization and it wouldn’t be hard to get back to that mode of thinking.

The fight that Rashida Tiaib is really advocating is essentially for the right to use victimhood as a calling card to the masses who are also functioning below the line to rise up and take over government. But the attitude is a loser one, you could hear it in her voice when she spoke at the bar and in the people cheering. Those weren’t people trying to win at life, those were people cheering for an excuse to remain a loser. Their hatred of Trump isn’t that he’s a bad president, but a good one that is all about setting standards and building value. But losers don’t ever think of the next steps, they only view the world below the line where they seek to join other like-minded losers to justify their lack of ambition by pointing at numbers of similar losers and declaring they are the majority and thus the pace setters for civilization. However, that is not how people think, they want to be winners even if they don’t have the personal courage and below the line thinking only destroys society, it doesn’t build it, and should Rashida ever get what she really desires in an impeachment of President Trump, she will learn rather violently how badly people love winners and hate losers.

Rich Hoffman

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We Should Terminate all 800,000 Government Workers from the Shutdown: All federal labor unions should be illegal

One of the things I’m not going to do anymore is provide an equal argument to the inefficiencies of government, to ponder why they are so slow, inefficient and corrupt when we all know why. So why waste the time? The important elements are in identifying the problem, teaching people why its unacceptable, and correcting the situation for real in the future. And the government shutdown is one of those things that happen from time to time when reality meets the fantasy of government, and no legitimate business person in the world could look at the proposals of government and even suggest sanity. The assumptions made that people care about a government shutdown are preposterous. The rate of pay is also preposterous, many of the 800,000 jobs who are not receiving a pay check over the government shutdown would be eliminated in the private sector due to business needs anyway. Much of the demand is artificial. When I hear Democrats trying to pull on our heart-strings that those 800,000 workers are not able to pay their mortgage or their car payments and that we should be willing to toss away billions of dollars and re-open the government just so they can do so, I hear the efforts at lunacy only. It’s an insane proposal that they are making. The government shouldn’t be opening to accommodate those 800,000 jobs, those jobs should be eliminated. They should seek new jobs in the growing economy and in the private sector. That is the real issue, yet nobody has come close to addressing it.

For so many years on this site I have provided instances where government workers make a lot more than private sector workers, on average. Where CEOs do make millions on occasion, average government workers functioning under a socialist labor union are artificially inflated by their wage rate. True market conditions do not have a say in the matter because the money is stolen from the tax payers and distributed insanely to their work force, who often are extremely inefficient. In private business there is a kind of subculture of what we call “fix it men and women” who go into an organization and straighten them out in all matters of production, and the companies thrive as a result. The current replacement for General Mattis as Defense Secretary is Patrick Shanahan who was a “fix it man” at Boeing. The assumption was that General Mattis, or “Mad Dog” as they were calling him was a far superior candidate because of his military service while Shanahan wouldn’t know what he was doing. In reality the situation is quite the opposite. Private industry experiences where lean manufacturing techniques are applied to increase the efficiency of an enterprise are far better than a military general who learns authority driven process controls and constant yielding to authority, for which politics often is the typical holder of power.

The problem with Mattis turned out that he was a “mad dog” as in he turned out to be a Democrat. You don’t always know this about people until you get to know them but that left leaning political philosophy comes with it inefficiency and apathy by the nature of their existence. It’s easy to talk a good game about how to remove troops from the Middle East or the perpetual war in Afghanistan, but after a few years of no results and asking why, that is when the Democrat side of people come out, such as with terms like “compassion,” “troop strength,” and “we’ll solve the problem next year.” Only government can get away with such below the line thinking, in fact government was entirely constructed to give below the line people a means to make livings and compete in the world. In all my years of doing lots of things with government I seldom find above the line people working among their below the line ranks. OF course, by using such terms I’m referring to The Oz Principle, which is a fairly famous book on business management and the types of people who contribute to productive enterprise, and those who must be overcome.

For days now regarding the government shutdown and the replacement of Mattis as the Secretary of Defense and putting the private industry guru Shanahan in charge, Democrats have continued to insist that we all had an obligation to the inefficiencies of the past, that we shouldn’t even ask if the 800,000 workers missing out on a paycheck during the shutdown were even needed. Of course, they aren’t, we could discharge them tomorrow and nobody would even notice. So why do we have them, just to pay them a pay check? And why are there any government unions attached to these workers saying anything about anything? All government labor unions should be made illegal, immediately. They only drive up the costs to tax payers without any added benefit. A lot of times “fix it” people in private practice have to go into a union shop and break up the command that “the people” have over management and to reinvigorate management to engage with employees in ways that offset the benefits they get from a labor union. It can be tricky business, but the job gets done and organizations most often live happily ever after. But in government no such thing ever occurs. The unions run everything and there is no real management of anything. If there was one thing that people in Washington D.C. really hated about Trump it’s that he is a manager functioning from the White House. Government workers don’t want management or any expectation of success, they just want their overly high paycheck and to use it to live a life of unrewarded excess, meaning they live large, but they didn’t earn that right. Which is how they end up corrupt.

In a book store you can find countless books on how to make business work better, but not a single book on how to make a government job more efficient. That’s because we have allowed the government worker to become insulated from reality. And since they have no competition, they actually think they can stand in front of us and declare how important they are when 800,000 workers are suddenly out of a paycheck and demanding to reopen the government. I would say to them, consider those jobs gone. Those 800,000 should be getting private sector jobs and moving on in life instead of waiting around for the government to reopen. If we really wanted to solve the problem of government inefficiency, we would start behaving in such a way and get rid of these ridiculous labor unions which only exist because the tax payers are forced to fund them due to no other options available. Its like being forced to buy a car from General Motors while the quality is terrible because the employees are smoking pot on every break and don’t care about the product. We have government workers who are just as bad and they are in that 800,000 number, and technically they shouldn’t have a job. Their labor unions have made management of their positions impossible and made them too expensive for what we get in services. And this government shutdown finally reveals the truth of how little we really need them. Which is why Trump needs to hold out for his border wall money. People need to know that all these government positions weren’t really needed to begin with. And instead of reopening the government just so they can get a paycheck, we should eliminate their positions all together. And this is one way to do it.

Rich Hoffman

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No, the Government can Stay Closed: Trump needs to build the wall

It is astonishing how stupid people can be. That they actually thought the Democrat led House would magically wave a wand and all of a sudden, the government would reopen, and the wall debate would be wiped away. That people are that dumb, because some did believe it, should concern us all. Also, one of the big government labor unions is suing President Trump for not getting paid during the shutdown as illegal. So according to the union the only legal option is to always pay government workers even if there is no money? Seriously? Where do these people come from? Where did they go to school? Because they act like they landed here from some other place not understanding how civilization works, the assumptions they make are based on a childlike understanding of the world. In reality the government can shut down forever, and the border wall is a must. Trump can’t and won’t budge on it because it is something that has to be done. And the Democrats don’t have nor will they ever have leverage on the matter. Nobody cares about government workers. They make too much money anyway.

Commentator after commentator on all networks pondered what President Trump was up to in regard to border wall negotiations. It was unfathomable to them that he would actually hold out on reopening the government to get the money from congress. Likely the issue is that they are millennials largely who are used to quick fixes to everything. The idea of a month or six-month budget fight just isn’t in their vocabulary. Then of course many of them also are part of the new borderless world concept which is a trend started by globalists to inspire a one world government of no countries only people in regions. Of course that is a not so clever fantasy of communism where values between different people are ignored and they all serve a central authority, such as the United Nations. In other places in the world it’s not so obvious the difference between one country and another, but on the Mexican/American border the contradictions are bold and obvious. You can’t have a society in need desperately the way Mexico is and put them next to a society of plenty, like America and not expect major problems. It’s not that America wants to deny the people of Mexico the advantages of capitalism. But what matters is that Mexico needs to adopt that philosophy for themselves, not expect a spillover from America for even their most basic needs.

The border wall is basically about showing that difference so that the values are separated. Open looting is not a permissible strategy, yet it is the only strategy of the Mexican government. They can only hope to openly assimilate with the United States because their Marxist revolution has been a dismal failure, so they want open borders to prevent that obvious fact to remain concealed. It’s also about fueling the illegal drug trade to bring American money south and to poison the minds of the American people so that they can be easily conquered. Make no mistake about it, Nancy Pelosi and her open border supporters want the poisoning of American youth to continue through drugs from Mexico. She and they want to fuel that market to growth, not contraction. A border wall would make that effort much harder. Drugs would still get into the country, but not at the level it is presently. Drugs are a major problem in American society, everything from alcohol to cocaine, and the Mexican government delights in seeing so many Americans hooked on a product they produce so that avenues to hide their failed Marxism can remain. To understand the situation, you have to understand the game.

There is absolutely no reason for Trump to compromise with Nancy Pelosi on the border wall funding. The minute this issue is off the table, and the government reopens, the Democrats in the House will launch a barrage of investigations into Trump intended to hammer him out of office by 2020. They don’t care about the government, the border, or the national debt. They only care about trying to get a president in the White House in 2020, so everything they do is to that end. Trump could hold out reopening the government for the next two years hanging it on the Democrats and he’d be just fine. But Nancy and the gang won’t be. Their base of support are all mushy short-term thinkers who expect easy victories. When they see that those victories don’t come, and that people really don’t care about their issues, they will find themselves in a bad position. It is they who have the obligation to negotiate, not President Trump.

It’s one thing to know that people aren’t very smart, or to have watched over time the decline of western civilization as more people have accepted Marxism and communism over time, especially in our university system. Without question we are a fragmented nation in North America. But that’s not a bad thing. We are a republic, not a democracy for this very reason. In America logical thought is given the ability to prevail over the ambitions of the mob and at the essence of it, that is what the border fight is all about. Nancy Pelosi is functioning form a mob mentality hoping to apply peer pressure on President Trump to score an early victory for her House members and to launch their ambitions for 2020 elections. But Trump has all the power in the world to stop that desire. So why wouldn’t he? That is obviously a consideration that none of the pundits on television had been thinking about. Their assumption as it always is was that Trump had the obligation to yield as good Republicans usually do, and to feed the power of mob rule as proposed by Democrats.

There is actually a lot to be revealed by Mitt Romney’s quick challenge to President Trump, trying immediately to put pressure on him to negotiate with the House and to drop the border wall funding issue. That is because Romney wants another crack at running for president and if Trump wins again, he won’t get another chance. But more than that, he is philosophically more aligned with Nancy Pelosi than with President Trump’s GOP. The idea of a borderless world is appealing to them for many reasons. But more than anything, continuing to allow Mexico to loot value off of America gives them power in allowing it. The only people seeking to go from America to Mexico are criminals and tourists looking for some excitement they can’t get in America. You don’t see them crossing the border under machine gun fire. But in Mexico you do, they will go to great measures to get into America. Why? Because what is in America is valuable to them. So why can’t they have those opportunities in Mexico? Because Marxism has ruined their economy and the borderless world advocates want to hide that reality from everyone, and the best way to do that is to mix everyone together before anybody really notices. And that is exactly why there is a border wall fight, and Trump has all the time in the world to hold to it. Because he has the high ground and he’d be crazy to relinquish it. Yet Nancy Pelosi has no time to make her case, the pressure to reopen the government is complete on her, and as the heat cranks up, she won’t be able to handle it. Watch and see!

Rich Hoffman

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What Trump has in Common with ‘The Shape of Water’: learning the nature of villians and the hopes of the good

What we are seeing isn’t specific to a particular political party or even a specific point in time. I can say that it’s always been something I have been keenly aware of. I remember as a little kid staying up way too late to watch the Academy Awards in 1983 to see if E.T. The Extraterrestrial would win Best Picture and feeling terribly deflated when Gandhi won instead. That’s when I learned the hard way that institutions are not in pursuit of goodness, but the status quo in almost every category because it allows the people working within those organizational frameworks to live modest, safe lives seldom challenged by any exceptional expectations. I was actually blown away and physically sick that E.T. failed to win Best Picture. Clearly there wasn’t any justice in the world as at that time I only ever wanted to be a film director when I grew up. In the year prior, I had gone through the same ceremonial castigation, Raiders of the Lost Ark was poised to win Best Picture and lost to the film Chariots of Fire. Something was very wrong and now almost 40 years later I sat watching the Academy Awards knowing full well there was a major liberal spin to the whole show, which is why I wasn’t a film director and no longer had a desire to be, when The Shape of Water won best picture essentially because it featured a female hero, she had nude scenes in it including masturbation, but in most other respects was a modern update to E.T. It was a stunning revelation that remained consistently bad, and points to a much deeper, darker problem.

And in so many ways, even in the serious world of politics, we are seeing the same thing that went on with E.T. at the Academy Awards in 1982 and 1983, happening now with the FBI and Justice Departments of the Obama Administration playing the same role. Even though I would argue that The Shape of Water could have easily have been made without the sex and nudity, or the F words in a film that children would have benefited from seeing in the theaters, the government agent in the film was wonderfully representative of the kind of parasitic order for which those modern institutions function. Richard Strickland in that film epitomized the ambitions of institutional control and in maintaining an order where the exceptional are locked away and tortured so that the stagnant expectations of below the line thinking could remain unchallenged. In that way The Trump administration under the direction of the FBI and DOJ were treated as the amphibious creature from The Shape of Water, tortured just for being there and seeking to be destroyed because the potential for life changing inspiration was something that institutions couldn’t allow to happen otherwise, they’d all be expected to increase their expectations for their own lives by default.

The crimes against not only Trump but against his supporters, most of whom are just as innocent as my 13-year-old self-staying up on a school night to hope beyond hope that justice would give the movie E.T. The Extraterrestrial the Best Picture award, are profound. There is so much more to the story than just the sad attempts at using the law as a weapon to beat down inspiring change, but in the abundant mechanisms for which all institutions function to preserve their salty ambitions anchored to the ground well below any above the line expectations. The corruption in society as a whole was deeper than any ocean on earth and the hopes and dreams of all mankind had been tossed to the bottom and kept their by the hostile depths too hard to dive by any mechanical means, or even the yearnings of the superhuman efforts, because sharks of every kind protect that bar from ever being raised to a level where the masses might ever be expected to perform from the merits of goodness.

A world where an Academy Award is given to a film that features a woman masturbating in a bathtub “a lot” is the same world castigating Trump for wanting to build a border wall, to create a dividing line between value and a lack of value, between a capitalist culture that has expectations of performance and a socialist one that informs people to not stick their heads up too high otherwise they will be beat down in response. That same world looks at Melania Trump and endlessly criticizes everything she wears and how she wears it but when Michelle Obama wears boots on national television that would make the Wicked Witch from The Wizard of Oz blush, she is hailed as an expert on fashion. The reason is that the static order doesn’t want little girls to grow up to be like Melania, a woman who is as close to a perfect “10” as anybody might find in our current culture. But to be like Michelle Obama, an average looking woman filled with personality flaws and genetic mutations. Melania is attacked because she is too good, she as a change agent has raised the level of expectation among the voting population and the institutions are not happy about it.

Many years later I realized that instead of trying to make things work as a film director in a liberal town that certainly didn’t want to deal with a midwestern conservative that I’d turn toward business. When I was paid a salary instead of an hourly wage to officially announce that I was no longer just a floor worker, the expectations were quite severe on me to work within the parameters of a static order. I typically had always worked 12 hours a day or more but now that I was working with as a salaried member of management—and this was many years ago—but I was supposed to assume a certain order of conduct understanding that I work only what I was paid for. And salary people were only paid for 8.5 hours of their work day. So at precisely 5 PM I was expected to drop everything and go home. But when I didn’t do that and instead continued to work as I always had, until 7 PM or even 8 PM the other salaried staff were very angry with me. They would watch closely what time I clocked in and when I clocked out and eventually built up the courage to ask me why I was trying to make them look bad. My answer of course that I wasn’t, and that if they looked bad it’s because they weren’t willing to fulfill the parameters of expectation for which production required. Well, those were fighting words and long rivalries filled with animosity percolated from that time on, yet I never changed my behavior because I was simply not going to surrender my capability to the Academies out there that would pick Gandhi over E.T. or the FBI over President Trump. Those were simply not options.

The case against Trump isn’t about justice, or even politics—its about expectation. Trump as a change agent is being attacked to preserve the right of below the line thinking that has defined Washington D.C. culture in general and politics specifically. Much the way the sea creature in The Shape of Water was tortured and abused just for existing, Trump represents a raising of the bar for all future expectation, and the static order has demanded his destruction with all the animated ambition as Richard Strickland. The world cannot hold both characters, and traditionally the good have been beat down so that the bad do not have to rise to any occasions. And that is a dark little secret that continues to permeate all our lives, and the yearning to change it is certainly there. Even the Academy of Arts and Sciences can be touched by such hopes even if the medicine to make it go down are sex scenes and nudity. But the showdown between Trump and the FBI is not about legalisms, it’s about the hopes and dreams of all mankind, and that battle is happening right now. And for the first time in history, hope is winning out over stagnation, and that is very interesting to watch for me. I am rooting for hope and increased expectations, perhaps this time the villains won’t win.

Rich Hoffman

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The Great Visionary President Trump: Causing his enemies to continue throwing themselves against rocks and over cliffs

It is time to have this discussion, most of our political order in the United States has been defined by idiots, everything from the lowly school board member to the President of the United States. Dumb, inefficient people have been inserted into these jobs by fools who don’t really know what they are doing. That is why it is totally ridiculous that these same people are trying to define what a successful president looks like in modern times, and that Trump to them is some kind of buffoon. Let me make something quite clear about Trump and other CEO types who come from private business and have been previously very successful as branding change agents from their own organizations, their genius is not in what they physically do, its in how they can take complex topics and bring them down to one- or two-line vision statements. In that regard President Trump will go down in history as the greatest president the United States ever experienced. Vision statements for a lot of people are one of the most difficult things to do because they lack the intelligence and imagination to do them, but Trump is great at them and that is precisely why he can do so much more with less.

Much of the world is very confused about the nature of leadership, they foolishly confuse it with management which is to say that processes are what inspire people. That is why critics of President Trump believe that a Chief of Staff or a Secretary of State are such important characters in an administration. Yet the White House is the people’s house and if its occupant can take complicated matters and communicate them to the people who really are supposed to run the government, the voters, then all that management formality is for nothing. Trump and his Tweets are the best thing to come from the modern age because it has allowed a great leader and communicator in Trump to articulate directly to voters the matters of great complication which normally befuddle most people, and it unifies the vision productively for the country.

The enemies of these methods are those of course who benefit from the current system of chaos. They like the old management structure because somewhere in their past they were taught by institutions that such things were flowed through processes of bureaucracy not through the raw leadership of simplicity. They were taught that to be successful you make lots of paperwork and coordinate lots of people through procedural interpretation rather than to rally behind the abilities of a great leader to break down complicated matters into a few sentences of vision. This is a common trait of all visionaries from Walt Disney to George Lucas, Donald Trump whether or not people like him is a great visionary and that is why the Trump Organization is such a good one. The value in Trump is not whether or not he has had affairs with women as a billionaire playboy, or whether he was a great WWE promoter at his casinos, what matters is that he was and continues to be a great leader who can simplify messaging to the masses with relative ease. If you took Trump out of the White House and put him in charge of General Motors, or Microsoft, he would be instantly successful in those companies because he can produce effective visions to all the employees involved. Most successful people have these traits, but they are rather uncommon among our population because the ability is not something that is taught well in our scholastic environments, but is an innate ability nurtured through unique character traits.

If you went to all the modern top companies, from Amazon to Pixar Entertainment you’d find similar traits among their leadership, the ability to provide vision statements to their employees which unify the efforts of the organization. In private practice we see such examples of leadership emerge out of market necessity. But in politics we have allowed and in some cases insisted on some old broken European model of aristocracy among political leaders that is not conducive to reality. Such as in Nancy Pelosi leaving Washington D.C. during a government shut down and taking a vacation in Hawaii. She is apparently clueless as to how the optics of such a thing is providing a very negative vision statement to her own party and their ability to negotiate with Trump over the border wall. She’s not even playing in the same league as Trump who stayed in Washington D.C. and continued to work through the Holiday season gaining the high ground in the matter and providing vision statements to the public that no Democrat will be able to overcome. Nancy Pelosi and her new congress will return with their standardized agenda driven by process and discover that they have no answer for the leadership Trump has already provided and they’ll stay on their heels for most of 2019 before crushing themselves under the weight of their own stupidity once they start throwing candidates for the 2020 run for presidency in the mix. They will all fail because they do not have Trump’s ability to create vision statements.

When you have raw leadership ability you do not have to have read the most books in the room, you don’t even need to be the smartest person. Intelligence contrary to popular opinion does not increase by the amount of people added to the decision-making process. The ability to create a good one liner in the form of a vision statement is far more valuable to team building than a whole room of Harvard MBAs working on a problem. All the Harvard people may be smart, but they lack leadership in its raw form. A bunch of smart people are useless if they can’t communicate what they need to do to the masses clearly so others can follow. In the rock, paper, scissors game of management hierarchy, the ability to produce vision statements is far more important than the ability to manage 10,000 people through procedural implementation. A president who can do such a thing doesn’t need a Chief of Staff or other traditional positions because he can do a lot more with less just because of the raw leadership ability of providing clear vision statements to his followers.

That is specifically why Trump is succeeding and his political enemies are just fumbling over themselves like the coyote in a classic Road Runner cartoon, or Bugs Bunny confronting the villainy of the Tasmanian Devil. Trump has the unique ability to make complex matters seem digestible and that is why he has been successful and why no matter what he does, success is there for him. It’s not luck or some magic power given from the gods, it’s just raw leadership ability in the form of powerful vision statements, such as “if you’re going to be thinking, it might as well be big.” In the role of a Commander and Chief it is obvious that the hope of the Founding Fathers was always to have someone from American society filling the presidential role like Donald Trump, but so far very few have made it through the political process to arrive at such a lofty height untouched by procedural corruption. But Trump did make it, and we should all be thankful. Because of his ability America is really thriving and there isn’t anything his political enemies can do about it. The harder they try, the more spectacularly they fail. Road Runner would be proud of Donald Trump, he is making all his enemies look as dumb as the Coyote in those old Road Runner cartoons. And the funny thing is, they keep doing it to themselves over and over again, because they don’t understand why President Trump is so successful. That is precisely why they keep launching themselves into a cliff face, or crushing themselves with a giant rock. Because they lack the natural leadership ability of a visionary, and they have nobody even close who call themselves Democrats. And that is truly funny.

Rich Hoffman

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Trump the Change Agent: Why we have to have a bloody fight that hurts lots of people, because its healthy

Now the panic is really setting in, Democrats have drawn a line in the sand over the border wall debate and the government has been left unfunded causing a partial shutdown that has no resolution on the horizon. In companies that are really in trouble it is common to hire a new CEO or some other form of “change agent” and disrupt the siloed culture that caused the problems for the company and now Washington D.C. from the lowly reporter to the radical activist in Congress is learning why people elected Donald Trump into the White House. Reverting back to how things were never was on the table. Many people like me want Trump to fight the Democrats on this funding issue and to force their hand finally into revealing what parasites they have been all along. To the culture that has been in power I’m sure the events of today are very scary and disconcerting. But it had to happen, and should have happened a long time ago. Yet because it didn’t, we are having that fight now.

The hatred of everything Trump does is natural from a culture that has decided it never wanted to change. The Beltway as it is called is filled with people looting off the taxpayer and making great livings as government ants pushing and pulling paperwork around from desk top to desk top in a world that has gone digital. Many of the government workers that are attached to operating an ineffective government aren’t needed but are simply there for the whims of the aristocrats who want to believe they are more than they are and are paramount cogs in a wheel of progress managing the affairs of mankind. Even the Fox News pundits and news reporters operating on the Hill have expectations consistent with accepting a defunct culture that is entirely too expensive and is in tremendous need of change.

When a change agent enters a scenario especially in business, the walls go up quickly as nobody wants to be rooted out as incompetent. If they can make the life of the change agent miserable and attack them before it is discovered just how terrible the previous culture was, they will do it with every passive aggressive weapon devised from the imaginations of civilization. If you ever want to see the face of true evil tell a group of corporate executives that they have been spending too much time next to the water cooler talking about irrelevant events, or that the corner office with the nice window is going to be changed into a bathroom. Their faces will literally melt and the resistance is always fierce.

In the great book Leading Change by John Kotter centering on his Harvard Business ideas of the eight ways to change, most corporate cultures like political ones are not aware that they need to change and there is a great need to overcome their resistance and to build a consensus toward more productive results. But putting up with deficient thinking is simply not an option. Change is always needed as conditions are always evolving. Yet when methods of evoking change to meet market conditions are removed what you end up with in every situation is massive corruption, such as we see not only in our own federal government but all governments. The more barriers to change such as in totalitarian regimes, the less opportunities for change. Some would argue that everything is fine so why change it, what is ignored in such contemplations is that market conditions are always moving forward and that change is always needed to meet those conditions. It’s not an if question but a “when.” Not even the best football team in the world can escape this reality, every year change must take place to make their organizations conducive to any hope of victory. What a team did five years ago can’t be the same as is required for the upcoming season.

Yet in our government the corrupt money has been working against our Constitution, the open border craze is in full bloom and most of the legal minds and their apprentices have accepted the very un-American concept of a borderless world. The current culture of the Beltway is built on the money that pours into political campaigns from all types of sources and the assumptions that have been made have been directed away from national sovereignty into a mixed bag of values thrown together haphazardly like a kind of stew to be consumed by those willing to be the first in line to eat it. By the time it gets to the rest of us very little will remain and that is the grand ruse that has been going on for quite some time. The Washington D.C. culture has not had American interests in mind, they have rather put their own weaknesses and corrupt principles into the decision-making mechanisms and the result is a government that does not represent the people of America, but rather exploits them for the political power provided to those most corrupted by the status quo.

Change has been needed in American government for a very long time and that was the reason Donald Trump was elected. He promised to be a change agent and so far he has lived up to it, and where the previously corrupt culture on all political sides of the spectrum are guilty, they all equally hate the idea that that coveted corner office will be turned into a bathroom. The rules of power acquisition are being turned on their heads and none of them like it. But it has to be done even if they all grow so miserable that they commit suicide in their reluctance to accept the necessity for change. Getting rid of Trump from office won’t solve their problem just as firing a change agent in a corporate culture won’t take away the needs for change. But to their underdeveloped minds, it’s the only reality they can accept because they are so ruined that they can think of nothing else.

James Comey is just such a figure, listening to him speak of his “Washington D.C.” “Beltway” culture you will get a glimpse of nightlife on a Friday or Saturday sipping wine and listening to live bands playing 70s rock songs in tightly packed bars filled with like-minded, and over perfumed government workers insulated from reality by their larger than average pay checks and the vacuum of protections awarded them as members of the elite culture. It didn’t matter that Comey was an FBI Director, he could have been a college intern trying to sleep with their boss after too many drinks in one of those evenings, the culture is just as corrupt from top to bottom and the essence of the evil is that they expect the rest of us to pay for their entitlements without giving anything back. They want to rule us all, live the dream of aristocratic assumptions, but they want none of the downsides, especially when it comes to responsibility. They are happy to sell us all out to whomever is paying the checks because they have accepted unprincipled lives hidden beyond grand philosophic yearnings but their method of interacting with those conditions is to pass responsibility for it all to those not present which of course is the foundations to all corruption. In such an environment even the most well-intentioned soul becomes the vilest human being in the world.

This fight has to happen, and bodies need to be left in the wake. It needs to hurt because change is needed and that is precisely why Donald Trump was sent to Washington D.C. It is not acceptable to listen to those resisting that needed change try to remove him from office, or to bust him for made up political crimes, because his job is and will always be a change agent elected to conduct a service to the people of the United States. And that is a hard reality that the Beltway culture is going to have to live with. It doesn’t matter if over a million workers don’t get their pay checks, or how much political donors cry about a border wall that hurts their bottom line because its harder for drugs to get into the United States driving up their costs of doing business, what matters is what the people of America want. And corruption in Washington D.C. from the media to the seats in Congress are not viable realities of acceptability.

Rich Hoffman

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Predicting the Future in 2019: A lot to be excited about

Regarding the stock market and all the record movements, and where it will end up. Investors, feel free to take what I am saying here and go make millions of more dollars because you can literally take it to the bank. But the interesting aspect of it is in the revelation of values that are now maturing under the Trump administration which has been badly needed for so many years and 2019 will be a good year because of it. The part of it that will take some getting used to is that the usual panic button issues aren’t going to work this time and like the spell that kept Sleeping Beauty locked into a coma for so many years broken only by the kiss of a prince of a true love, the markets have been kissed by Trump and that value is escalating by the moment. The sabotage that the global chess game tried to impose have not only backfired, but fed the current optimism. Things are looking quite good indeed.

First of all, no real people care about the government shut down. Most of the jobs are nonessential and could easily be replaced by technology, so nobody is missing them, nor will they at any point in the future. The market fluctuations that have occurred since the election of 2018 are largely inspired by the volatility of the government with Democrats running the House of Representatives once again. Many fear that the good days from the last two years are coming to an end so they have moved their money in the markets. It hasn’t helped that we’ve learned about the various tech stocks in the Dow becoming liberal activists in the political process, which has turned off many investors. But that is a temporary condition that will improve as we move out of the Holiday season. Less government is better economics and people generally see that. The longer the shut down goes on the more obvious it will become and that will paralyze the Democrats going into 2019.

There has been a lot of talk about all the investigations that the Democrats are going to use against the Trump administration. Notice how since the looming shutdown approached and has now arrived that there hasn’t been much talk about the nothing there case of the Mueller investigation? Democrats had planned to spend the next two years impeaching Trump over breadcrumbs falling off the table but now coming into January they have to negotiate with him over the wall he’s building and where the money will come from. Trump has captured the narrative once again and has the potential to control it throughout all of next year. Democrats on their heels usually fall all over themselves and that will be the situation this time as well. The shutdown is good harmless leverage that the Democrats have no answer for. They are used to Republicans caving under the pressure but not this time. Being the party of government employees the Democrats will lose supporters quickly as the usual tactics fail and they are forced to watch the wall be built anyway which will be quite a demoralizing attribute to the current circumstances.

Trump’s refusal to punish the slain reporter from The Washington Post is starting to pay off as well. Fuel prices are low, the Saudis are considering themselves lucky to only be hit by the United States with low oil prices, which under any other circumstance would have been difficult to convince them of otherwise. The result for the American economy has been excellent fourth quarter sales and economic growth over 3%. Holiday sales are up and jobs are abundant driving up incomes. There is a lot to be happy about in the Trump economy which will continue to explode into 2019 on sheer momentum. The reality of the tariff battles is that China has had to make concessions as they are overly dependent on exports to the United States, so they have lost their leverage and will never get it back. Trump’s plan to deal with the huge deficit that the United States now has can be attacked through these shifting exports. There is a lot of money to be gained in renegotiating these trade deals and the results are finally going to hit the markets in the upcoming year. Mexico will pay for the wall in profit losses to the United States, and they will like it.

The Federal Reserve has been behaving poorly with their attempts to stave off inflation with interest rate hikes, that’s what they say anyway. In all reality the Fed has been trying to pad the pockets of bankers hungry for revenue with increased interest rates so they can make their money in what everyone has been considering a Bull Market. In the Fed’s way of thinking the Bear is right around the corner so they need to make their money while they can, which has put on the brakes to the potential growth that has been possible, much to Trump’s consternation. Its kind of like trying to drive a 1000 HP car with the brakes on. But the Fed has been confronted by the President which of course scared investors because nobody in the past has ever done such a thing and the markets were affected in the short run especially on Christmas Eve. But its all about negotiation and the market rallied back a thousand points the day after Christmas as a result. If everyone leaves things alone and the Fed keeps interest rates down, the Dow will head back to 26,000 and beyond, because the real market value is there. It’s more than a symptom of optimism from investors riding the trends. The value is real and growing in an expanding economy.

Then of course there are new markets entering the value stream, such as space tourism and regenerative medicine, industries I have discussed on this site for a long time. Finally, they are coming to fruition under the deregulatory environment of the Trump administration. There hasn’t been enough bandwidth for the media which hates President Trump to talk about all the great things that have been happening on these fronts since their goal has been to remove him from office. But with the government shutdown soaking up the news cycle which favors Trump the good news coming from the new market fronts will have room on the front pages and those industries will blossom for good in the coming years. How do you pay off a 21 trillion-dollar debt, you introduce new value markets that actually expand economic activity while putting money in the pockets of the people who will continue expanding it. And once they have a taste of that, they won’t want to give it back. Trump will win re-election easily in 2020 and the Democrats will struggle to even find a candidate to run against him. The government shutdown will further destroy the Democrats as their bluff is called and people discover that they really don’t need all those government workers. And the markets will rebound to their true value position once the artificial fears subside, because those fears were never rooted in reality anyway. Most fears never are. And that sets us all up for a good year, so long as we have the courage to live it.

Rich Hoffman

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I’m Glad Christmas is Over This Year: Re-thinking the nature of the Holiday season

I did not enjoy Christmas this year, perhaps it is the net result of writing too much and having worked out answers to the problems that socially are desired to keep a ruling class of people in place of our species and knowing better. Or that I have just read too many damn books and the things that regular people say to me seem stupid and self-defeating. They don’t want their problems solved, they want their problems so they can have an excuse to fail, and thus, not have to build up the courage to do things in their lives and its all too obvious to me. Or it was the season itself, the way that CNN berated President Trump for the way he talked to children on the night before Christmas wondering if a 7-year-old still believed in Santa. Or the way religious leaders insisted that mankind had lost touch with Christ and were too focused on material goods through the Holiday season. The emphasis on belief instead of logic seemed louder this year and I didn’t like it. Or perhaps it was just that Christmas is mostly for the children and that I’m in my 50s now and a grandpa and old age seems to be taking tickets to the afterlife with too much enthusiasm and I really don’t like the bad breath of the grim reaper looming like such a negative decaying force ready to harvest more souls miserable and lost from lives lived poorly.

What made me the sickest on the whole event was that the entire season was built upon people waiting for something to happen to them instead of making things happen. Kids wait to open presents while adults try to line up their schedules so they can get together and talk about nothing. Each event of the day was tied to some rigorous schedule attached to a lot of people who only cared if you were there or not by the pictures they took and put on Facebook or some other social media platform. My experiences with my family were fine, but in general Christmas was a day that I wasn’t in control of my own schedule and I’m not used to that. I’m not a fan of estrogen fests where clots of females arrange gatherings based on their most neurotic impulses and then expect me to drop all thinking to satisfy their whims of bitching and mayhem. They have the best of intentions in these endeavors but it always seems to come out as gatherings of squares that need to be pushed through circles in a board and the fit is never applicable, yet we try to force it anyway.

The best part of the day are of course the presents. That is where you can learn a lot about what people think about one another and there are real psychological factors at play that have great meaning. I do get excited about hearing to what degree Christmas retail sales have spiked. But then our entertainment of the season is fixated on sacrifice which seems to be the way we have all accepted that Christmas is supposed to be. Even I said several times that Christmas is for the kids to have a moment of optimism in their lives to remember forever before the world tries to henpeck their souls back into some kind of egg to live the rest of their lives. We encourage children to dream and put on quite a show for them only to have all those hopes smashed upon adolescences when kids learn that all the things, they believed in was a ruse for which society has no desire to live up to. And in that great disappointment they learn their place at the table of misery with everyone else.

I went to bed at 8 PM on Christmas night feeling like every part of my essence had been twisted and plucked clean like a Wal-Mart Black Friday bin five minutes into the opening of the store for special sales. I couldn’t wait to get to bed and put the rest of the world back to my own schedule. And I couldn’t wait to get up the next day and get back to work where logic and skill guide my days in productive ways and all the naysayers could go back to the cracks, they live in not to be heard from until the next year. I normally wouldn’t let myself think this way but I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately about below and above the line thinking and as a naturally positive person, Christmas is a very negative Holiday. I love the façade of positive aspects of it, but it never lives up to the image. People generally don’t like each other and logic loses itself in the season as people spend money on all the wrong things. People don’t like each other because they are functioning from different value systems and that is something that we are expected to put away at Christmas and be like Christ—open and forgiving. But to do that we have to forget what people are, and what they have done and that doesn’t make any sense to me whatsoever.

I think it was easier to put these thoughts away in the past because it seemed like there would always be endless tomorrows. Next year was always an option but at the age I am now where I hear the word grandpa a lot I am reminded again with that glee of a grim reaper’s bad breath that are many fewer tomorrows than yesterdays and with each year they will get worse, and that is a very negative aspect of living that is not conducive with my way of thinking. I’ve always had hope that Christmas would someday bring out the best in people but I don’t see it, and the nature of it doesn’t lend itself to anything good. It is built on belief and a passive position of having things happen to you. And the best of Christmas involves give of yourself rather than receiving which is a socialist mantra from the words of Karl Marx and all the buffoons of philosophy that have sat on the edge of religion since before there was ever a Christ. The idea that sacrifice is the way to a productive existence is just stupid.

I’m glad its over, I am happy to be back in charge of everything and to be free of other people’s schedules. I’m also happy to be able to shape optimism back into my life and to leave many of my phone messages unanswered because the person on the other end endlessly needs something, they aren’t giving themselves in their life. They are perpetual looters of value lacking it themselves and always craving it from others. Christmas was an invention by them for them and certainly not for the most productive among us. Christmas was a day where like Halloween the belief in giving is thrust upon us like a villain robbing a bank. We are expected to participate or else and I’m at a place where I don’t think its such a good idea. I think Christmas brings out the worst in people, not the best and that the purpose of it is malicious, not hopeful. And I’m glad its over.

Rich Hoffman

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Using the Gun to Defend Intellect: Below the line thinking will do anything to avoid accountablity, even if it means destroying other people

As I said the other day I have been working on a project and have been going through old books to refresh myself on their material and one of them was The Oz Principle which first came out way back in 1994. In it the concept of The Wizard of Oz is used to great effect to describe ways of thinking in companies, and in life of above and below the line thinking regarding personal responsibility. Above the line thinkers are very responsible and are close to their own personal accountability, whereas below the line thinkers look for all the ways they can’t be held responsible for something. The contents of the book were so obvious to me that I had forgotten that it was one of my reading topics over twenty years ago, so when it came up in a discussion a few days ago it all came back to me as I read it again. The essential summation of the book which is quite powerful is that any company that wishes to survive and prosper must change the thinking of its below the line employee body, because only in personal responsibility can anything really change and become better. Such a concept can work with anything that has a lot of people in it who contribute to the health of an organization. Donald Trump as a business guy who has written many best-selling books in the business self-help genre understands these types of things which makes him a great president. During the government shutdown of 2018 Trump stayed at the White House over Christmas while the rest of congress retreated back to their states to celebrate the Holiday. Trump was functioning from what we would call above the line thinking while everyone else was functioning below. It could easily be said that in order for the concept of an American republic to work, most of the participants would have to function above the line, otherwise the government would fall apart.

But there is always of course more to the story which is why I have been working on my own concepts for dealing with this very issue for a few years now. It’s often not enough to just be an above the line thinker, someone who takes personal responsibility for the things they do in life and doesn’t seek to hide their true fears in life behind finger-pointing and the blame game. Most of us just finished Christmas dinners with family we only see once or twice a year and I’d say its safe to determine that we all encountered most of those participants who were below the line thinkers. They are as common as snowflakes in a snowstorm. In fact, it could easily be said that the entire television industry is targeted to appeal to below the line thinkers as every storyline and commercial is targeted to such positions. It wouldn’t take much to make the declaration that since the advent of television that below the line thinking has exploded as a common occurrence in our American culture so there’s a lot of work that must be done to fix that attribute.

Such below the line thinking would include blaming your parents for a bad childhood which is why modern successes are elusive to someone, or that they were born poor and thus didn’t have the opportunity to get an education, a new car, or even a house. Below the line thinking is actually a human condition brought on by a person’s fears of personal accountability so they use the masses to hide their cowardness from the world by deflecting blame for anything that happens in their lives. Ironically, I have never been such a person. By nature, and upbringing, and the kinds of examples I grew up being attracted to I have always been an above the line thinker where everything was in my wheelhouse of responsibility. Personal accountability is one of the most primary traits of leadership, and good leaders must be above the line thinkers.

This brings us to my original problem that I had reported I was working out over the last several years. It’s not enough to just be a positive thinker or to be a great example of above the line thinking. It is easy to be a naturally positive example when you are in a position of leadership, such as running a company or as President Trump is doing by running a country. But it is quite difficult to have such a position when you are working under the authority of below the line thinkers such as when you have a bad boss, or bad people who are above you in the seniority pull, or even bad people running government. Because below the line thinkers actively seek to destroy above the line thinkers just because they don’t want a culture of higher thinking to force them out of their blame game mentality because it would then require courage to fuel their actions for which they are vacant. Otherwise they wouldn’t be below the line thinkers to begin with. That’s where the Second Amendment comes into the picture, a country that wants to function above the line has to allow their people to prosper under conditions where below the line people cannot attack them for trying to be better. The right to self-defense isn’t just to protect homes, cars, wives and children from the harms of villains, but to keep villains from stealing something much more valuable, above the line thinking with threats of social castigation and even physical violence.

I get asked several times a week, sometimes several times a day, mostly from people who don’t know me well, if I worry about getting into trouble over this blog site, such as in the message above that I put on Instagram. To their thinking I am very critical of big powerful groups, such as the FBI, large media organizations, even individual people who are killers. Their question to me is what happens if you make them mad and they hunt you down an assassinate you to keep you from saying the things you do? That is a valid question after all because as we all know either literally or instinctively, below the line thinkers will do just about anything to maintain their positions, because they lack personal courage so in their terror, they will attack above the line thinkers just to maintain that insulation between reality and their fears. In public schools this is precisely why there are bullies, below the line thinkers which are much more numerous than above the line thinkers use peer pressure to maintain a safety blanket in society from the realities of accountability. So long as many more people think something then below the line thinkers can maintain the illusion that their blame game lifestyle is a valid position, and to do that they must maintain power over above the line thinking. If someone is going to be a leader and try to elevate everyone around them with positive attributes the below the line thinkers functioning from fear will want to destroy such people.

That is why I think personal firearm ownership is needed in any society that wishes to operate above the line. It’s not enough to just think something, you have to be able to defend it. When a bully comes up to you and says that they wish to essentially stay in a victim state and that if you try to force them to change into a role of accountability—such as getting off welfare, food stamps, using medical ailments to limit successful function in the world then they might inspire a mob of militants to come to your house and kill you—when they do that then if you have a gun, you can easily defend yourself, especially if you know how to use it. I see that before anyone can actually have an above the line attitude in life that they must develop a way to protect themselves from all the below the line thinkers in the world who want to destroy them just for raising the bars of expectation.

I could tell stories all day long of when I was a perpetual above the line thinker when I wasn’t in charge of everything where life was constantly made difficult because below the line thinkers had power over some aspect of my life and it was a constant fight. The fight for them is in keeping the expectations low for themselves so they attack above the line people because they are too lazy or too cowardly to step up to a new level and they will get quite violent to preserve their happy place below the line. That is something that a lot of these self-help books about personal accountability and business improvement ignore, how to deal with the masses that will try to show up with pitch forks and flaming crosses to hang you on it if you let them because they don’t want to think above the line. But gun ownership takes that argument off the table. When below the line thinkers realize that they can’t find a fear in you to prevent you from raising the bar, they have no choice but to step up and that is what I think the missing ingredient is in our modern culture, that recognition of fact. We need the Second Amendment not just to possibly overthrow a corrupt government or to protect our private property. We need guns to protect the intellectual nature of our American republic so that above the line thinkers can emerge and lead people out of the self-fulfilled darkness of victimhood thinking. Without that threat below the line thinkers have no incentive to become better so long as they can tear down those around them with threats and intimidation so to preserve the things they most fear in the entire world, accountability for their own actions. If you can defend yourself from the peer pressure of below the line thinkers, then you can be free to function without being impeded, which is the main cause for why more people do not think above the line to begin with, because its lonely there and the mob mentality of below the line thinkers can appear scary—but they really are quite cowardly and ineffective, like the wicked witch from The Wizard of Oz who was destroy just by having water thrown on them to reveal how small they always really were.

Rich Hoffman
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