Tag: Down the Rabbit Hole

The Four Stages of Change: How ‘Saturday Night Live’ is showing where Democrats are on that path

Clearly as we track this culture war that the United States is involved with currently, one year after the great election of 2016, where the political left learned harshly that a majority of the people were not behind their movement, we have entered the third phase of the four stages of change.  At first of course there was denial which we have witnessed, followed closely by resistance.  With the ANTIFA movement and various leftists groups like Black Lives Matters threatening to overthrow the new establishment that resistance has now migrated into exploration.  That much was clear on the October 14th airing of Saturday Night Live where they did two skits attempting to rectify this exploration idea.  It was a fascinating exchange to conceive of the writers and the producers at Saturday Night Live in the wake of the NFL and Harvey Weinstein controversies to look at the Trump presidency and explore the ways they can live within these new value assessments.

The first one shown here about Kellyanne Conway acting as the clown in the recent retread movie IT was very revealing in how the political left sees the world.   Their hero, Anderson Cooper is terrorized by Kellyanne Conway trying to get on television to represent the White House point of view as she has successfully done over the last year.   The political left, represented by the SNL writing team metaphorically views Kellyanne as the scary IT clown.  They are terrorized by her ability to always come out on top on her conversations with Anderson Cooper to the point where he doesn’t want to put her on television anymore.   While their depiction of Pennywise the Dancing Clown from IT is an insult to Kellyanne Conway who is hardly a terrible person—her effect on the media has been truly scary because they are overwhelmingly liberal—and are losing.  The change they had been resisting they are now exploring ways to rectify, so from a psychological point of view, it was a fascinating skit.

The second skit that was very revealing was the assumption that Melania Trump—whom the writers obviously aren’t sure how to deal with the feelings of respect they have for her, would call a Pakistani call center for spiritual advice.  Beneath the writers assumptions are the beliefs that capitalism is a hollow endeavor and that in her quest as a gold digger with a heart, Melania finds life in the White House so lacking fulfillment that she would confide herself into the ears of a perfect stranger on the other side of the world.   Of course the premise is blown out of proportion based on a faulty idea of capitalism.  But the revelation of how they think of Melania is quite intriguing.  I’m certain that Melania is a huge part of the strength behind Donald Trump from day-to-day, and that she doesn’t need the spiritual advice from some Pakistani call center worker, but the ponderings of the political left into what makes the Trump White House tick in an interesting observation.

The political left is obviously watching the efforts of their candidate Barack Obama come undone under Trump even though they have created a monstrosity of bureaucratic intention in our federal government to prevent reform once they start the wheels in motion.     Yes our federal government is designed to move slowly, and the insurgents counted on a congress to protect their extreme implements such as Obamacare to take effect before action could be taken to reverse the trends.  Trump with his recent executive orders undid that effort essentially by reversing the nature of the game the Democrats and Republicans had been playing with Obamacare.  While the Republicans pretended to work against the Democrats and all of them took money from the insurance lobby socialist insurgents like Obama could steer our society toward a single payer option and everyone could get what they wanted—except the American people.  The Saturday Night Live writers assumed that America was lock step with them, but since they lived in New York they were isolated from the sentiments of the rest of the country.   Now all of them involved in these little tyrannies are learning how out-of-step they really were all along.  So they are “exploring” their role in this new world of thinking.

The next phase of course is commitment and from here the political left will find themselves divided.  Some will merge with the president and his thinking because they’ll realize that behind Trump is a vast American population that he represents in this great republic.  Democracy is not what they thought it was, and the nature of Republicanism is showing them how a representative republic truly functions.  After all, before now there weren’t many examples to follow.  There was a lot of theory that looked good on paper and in philosophical testimonials from Aristotle to Ayn Rand, but not much history to build with.  Those who can’t commit to this course change will be destroyed by their own inflexibility.  This is what Trump knows is coming and why he is so confident that unlike Obama who abused his executive orders, Trump will get his signed into law because the political landscape will change over the coming months enormously.

As we’ve watched these four stages of change occur along very predictable lines of ascension, it is easy to plot out where we’ll be in the early stages of 2018, and beyond.  Obviously the SNL writers are beginning to see that ascension for the true value that has been obvious all along for those who view the world without political lenses.  The hate and vitriol are still there but people are survivors and they will adapt to the changing world due to their own self-interest.  That is why business people are good for politics—instead of contributing to the funds of lesser people known as politicians, the wise minds of business should just do it themselves.  They do after all understand these cycles of change because they go through the four steps every time they need to implement some strategic change in their places of business.  The difference is that in corporate America, culture building is the responsibility of the CEO or president.  In politics it comes from the know nothing losers who usually go to public office because the private sector has scared them and that has left us all vulnerable to these socialist insurgents, like the writers at SNL.  So the better experience at changing a culture come from those who have been successful in corporate America, like Trump.  And the results are predictably on schedule—and everyone knows it.

A good leader understands these four stages of change and they know how to weather the complaints and bitching that often come each time a new idea is put forth.  A good leader also understands that most of those people will come around to the right way to think out of their own needs to survive—and that is where the real reform from Trump comes from.  I’m sure it’s been hard for him, since day one, the political left has made his life a living hell in the White House.  But Trump is a good leader and he knows how to use the four stages of change to his advantage and the first sign of his success is what we saw this week on SNL.  They may not want to admit it, and they’ll deny it if asked directly.  But SNL is now in stage three—and that means that the storm is breaking and they have no choice but to figure out their place in a changing world—for which we are the ones deciding how that world looks.  That is something everyone reading here should consider as a good thing.

Rich Hoffman

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The Proper Use of Executive Orders: Why Trump is a hero and Obama was a loser

First of all, a note to the Democrats, the way Obamacare was created was as illegal as anything I’ve ever seen in my life.  The vote during Christmas of 2010 when everyone was looking the other way, the coercion—we have to pass the bill to see what’s in it, the weak Supreme Court ruling by identifying it as a tax when the Obama administration lied about the nature of it from the beginning—were all devious acts.  The notion that you can keep your doctor if you like your doctor when all along the Obamanites on Capitol Hill intended to destroy health care all together and give rise to a single payer system in the United States bringing one more socialist program to the freest nation on earth.   There were plenty of lies and manipulations congress did to bring Obamacare to life, then to have losers like John McCain force us like scandalous children to stay at the table of Obamacare just because of his silly vote was preposterous.  Given all that massive government dysfunction and intent to destroy free markets, Trump’s executive order to destroy subsidies into Obamacare was a much different thing than the typical executive orders of Obama regarding the impatient use of White House power to go around congress to get something done.   These powers were given to the president for just this kind of purpose.

Executive orders are not law.  What Trump did will need to still be made law at some point in the future.  But he can at least give the world a demonstration of what free market options look like while he works to get enough senate support to get real reform passed.  For that to happen John McCain likely will have to die in office and be replaced with a real conservative.  Other senators who were never Trumpers during the campaign, like Ben Sasse and several others will need to be removed from office and be replaced with more Trump oriented Republicans—and that appears to be exactly what the President is going to do.  Just because those never Trumpers put an “R” next to their names doesn’t mean they are the right kind of Republicans.  I know a lot of people who call themselves “Republicans” when in fact they are just Democrats in hiding—because they live in conservative areas of the country and couldn’t get elected any other way.

I watched the righteous indignation toward President Trump over his health care executive orders with great satisfaction.  Now that the shoe is on the other foot all the talk is about Constitutional respect and the value of checks and balances.  Yet when Chuck Schumer watched Barack Obama abuse his power to go around congress it was “heroic” and necessary.  Give me a break.  Trump’s executive orders are to fulfill a campaign promise in regards to Obamacare.  He can’t let congress stand in the way of a promise he was elected on—just so they can appease the lobbyists who have made them rich as public servants.   The original sin was created by Obama and his Republican friends in the Swamp who have secretly all joined together to carry America toward a single payer healthcare system which of course is a pay to play scheme for those remaining insurers who can use the lack of competition to solidify their costs with guaranteed subsidies.  It’s good for them and the politicians but terrible for the people it is supposed to serve.  So Donald Trump did the right thing and undid the whole mess so that everything can collapse and force everyone to the negotiating table which is a very different thing from what Obama had done.

Trump’s executive orders are not to subvert congress, they are to force everyone to the negotiating table to take positive action, and that is a proper use of executive privilege.  It’s why we should be electing more people in the future with real world business experience rather than community activists who have radical ideas constructed for them in academia.  Our current intellectual class of people around the world have subscribed to poor Marxist oriented philosophies and have been caught in advising the world toward disaster and that needs to change fast.  Trump is part of that answer.  Putting people into politics that are proven success stories is the trend of the future, not losers who are filled only with theories concocted in the dank old rooms of Oxford, then passed off to a bunch of oily skinned pubescents at Harvard, Princeton and Cambridge—who then carry those stupid ideas out into the world with disguised merit because they were spoken about from respected houses of academia.  Power and respect do not come from brick rooms and institutional hallways—they come from success and a reputation based on history.  Academia has ruined their reputations by teaching the wrong kind of things to their students.  Barry Obama learned the wrong things at the University of Chicago where progressivism was being launched from that particular institution to change the world from one thing to another.  Obamacare is every bit about that desire to change and academia has been proven wrong in their assumptions—yet they have insisted to carry all of us forward regardless of the facts—which is why they are being knocked out of power now.

It’s not that Trump happened to them.  It’s not that Trump had Russian help to win an election or used his celebrity to beat a loser of a Democratic candidate.  It’s that Trump has a track record of success in getting things done that spans four decades, and voters wanted to see something get done for a change—and they are tired of corrupt politicians ramming things down their throats like this single payer health care initiative that even Republicans are trying to steer us all to.  Trump promised free market solutions so we voted for him and expected him to deliver.  When congress didn’t play ball and sought to run out the clock on Trump by slowing everything down on Capitol Hill people recognized what was happening, so they support the actions of the president.  Of course liberals are mad, but who cares.  Their plots are coming undone under Trump and that is specifically why people voted for him.  That’s not Trump’s fault.  He’s just the messenger.  The reason he was elected in the first place is the fault of Democrats and the RINO Republicans who have not put American interests at the front of their considerations.   Instead they put forth plans created by a Marxist inspired academia around the world, and they expected that failure to solidify due to the lack of options they deliberately were providing to us.  With Trump now, free market solutions will at least see the light of day.  It will still be up to us, the voters, to advance that competitive formula into law over the years to come.  And that is the biggest difference between Obama’s executive orders and Trump’s.  Obama’s were radical ideas designed to change the nature of American life.  Trump’s are to force negotiations by creating options to consider.  And that’s why Trump is a great president while Obama was and will always be considered an insurgent who intended to destroy American sovereignty with one more crippling socialist program intent to put restrictive chains on our economy.   For academia health care was a Trojan Horse designed to destroy the American economy so it was a dream for them.  But it was a nightmare for the people of the United States—happily now because of Trump—we are waking up from the nightmare, and the new day is looking pretty good.

Rich Hoffman

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Where Are the Pink Pussy Hats Now: The death of Hollywood over terrible customer service

It was roughly a year ago that the Access Hollywood recordings of Donald Trump were released intending to sink his potential presidency.  When I first heard the comments I couldn’t help but feel the hypocrisy because let’s face it, men and women talk that way to each other all the time.  Women most of the time like the attention of men and men are by their biological design built to pollinate females to procreate our species.  All these silly new rules of conduct of men being chastised for wanting to stick parts of themselves into females are artificial and counterproductive.  But  when the people of Hollywood tried to use these new, stupid rules of male to female conduct to destroy Donald Trump when in fact it was they who perpetrated and actually exacerbated the bad behavior to begin with I thought was astonishing.  After all, Hollywood’s product used to be a good back when they made westerns and big sweeping epics like Ben Hur.  Men treated women with respect in those old productions and all was well with the world until movie producers like Harvey Weinstein made a joke out of the industry abusing his power so he could look at the boobies of the young women who wanted more than anything in the world to become stars on the silver screen.   It was obvious that if the same standard that was applied to Trump a year ago were to be turned around on the entire entertainment culture that a lot of people probably wouldn’t survive, and that’s what’s happening now.  Hollywood just killed itself with its own weapons.  Sean Hannity did a remarkable job of positioning the reasons why Hollywood will never be the same in the following video.

I always liked the Hollywood product and the industry as a whole.  But for a long time they have moved so far to the political left that what used to be an event I enjoyed—the Academy Awards were now just another inward looking celebration by a bunch of liberals congratulating themselves on being anti-American insurgents.  If you weren’t liberal you weren’t going to work on a Weinstein movie and in a lot of ways Harvey Weinstein was bigger than Steven Spielberg in Hollywood—by the volume of his work and the number of Academy Awards he amassed.   As one of the leading spokesmen for progressivism, his platform in the entertainment industry was unparalleled and it seems ironic that all that could be torn down with these outrageous claims toward him that are in some cases over twenty years old.  I say they are outrageous because many of the women who are now accusing Weinstein of rape are now forty-year old women who are no longer sex symbols.  They used sex to get into movies when they were in their twenties and only when men stopped looking at them as possible places to pollinate did they suddenly become “outraged.”  But the fact remains that dealing with people like Harvey Weinstein turned them into the man hating feminists that they are today as their lives are now filled with regret on what they had to do to climb the ladder in Hollywood to become a leading lady A-lister.

Yet the way they all collectively pounced on Donald Trump over the Access Hollywood tape was remarkably hypocritical.  They created the industry and the rules.  What Trump was talking about in his famous lines to Billy Bush was the effect of celebrity which he had just learned about late in life with his success with The Apprentice.  Trump was enjoying the kind of attention by women that movie starts like Ben Affleck and Matt Damon had always enjoyed, and being a smart guy he was pontificating about it to Billy Bush.   Yes, women will do just about anything to be near powerful men—it’s a deeply biological response to the mating game.  But unlike most of those Hollywood hot shots, Trump had a nice wife who kept him grounded and the temptations of flesh that are often thrown at movie stars by the opposite sex just to have access to a memory with their idols was managed and Trump moved on to bigger and better things.  By the time the Access Hollywood tape was released Trump was a different kind of man largely shaped by his decision to marry Melania Trump.   But the desire for entertainment executives and major political pundits to go after Trump, and to try to destroy him over these new age male and female roles which they had perpetrated was always  dangerous because they also made up the rules of power playing the opposite sex into compromising positions just to work in the industry.   You don’t get to the level of being a leading Hollywood actress at the level of Angelina Jolie or Gwyneth Paltrow without showing somebody your tits.  Not when there is a line of young women from Santa Monica to Paris willing to do anything to be the next Hollywood star.  People like Harvey Weinstein made themselves the gate keepers to success essentially so they could see titties—and everyone knew it.   So who were they to criticize Trump?

After Trump was elected president and was sworn in, the Academy Awards ceremony to me was unwatchable.  The way they ridiculed President Trump just because he was the Republican in the White House was disgusting and it made me wonder if they knew who their audience actually was, because there are a lot of Trump supporters who are like me–they love to watch movies.  But if the movies and the people who made them were so anti-Trump, they’d be forced to go somewhere else for their entertainment and that’s what has happened.   Hollywood has had their worst box office performance in 25 years and they are down an incredible 16% just from the previous year of 2016.  That was before the Harvey Weinstein story broke which virtually connects every major star in the industry to all the ugly stuff they complained about in Trump.  Except with Trump it was largely made up and overblown, but in Hollywood they were actually doing the things they accused Trump of—and to a far worse degree.

http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2017/09/liberal-hollywood-worst-box-office-numbers-25-years/

Where were the pink pussy hats that the Hollywood stars wore in protest to the Inauguration after Trump spent his first days in the White House?  Former stars of the Hollywood machine ran by people like Weinstein were protesting Trump so they set the gauge by which they are all now choking.  If the same standards they were trying to apply to Trump were turned back on them, then what did they think was going to happen?   The Trump supporting public already voted with their feet, just like they have with the NFL.  The great American game of football is down 30% just because those stars in the NFL thought they were bigger than they were.  They learned a hard lesson; people in the stands don’t care about them if they are going to throw off the shared elements of our culture, like the American flag.  Fans of the NFL turned on those stars of sports in a moment which has been a harsh reality to all professional sports.  They forgot who their audience was and in their hatred of Trump they drew a line between themselves and the fan base that enjoyed their product.  They have a major customer service problem as a result.  And that is precisely what happened to Hollywood in 2017.  They are down at least 16% because of the way Hollywood came out against a popular president.  People who voted for Trump largely knew the Access Hollywood tape was a set-up job and that Hollywood was guilty of much worse.  Now that we have the truth, that movie industry is changed forever.  They’ll never bounce back because they have lost the trust of the public.  Ultimately it’s not people like Harvey Weinstein who make projects succeed or fail, it is the public that buys the tickets—and they have been voting against Hollywood for a while now.  Now that Hollywood has alienated most of the country in their hatred of Trump, the hypocrisy on full display in the wake of the Harvey Weinstein sexual meltdown will sink the entire industry—and that’s a good thing.

America can’t be great again if the art and entertainment community is so vitriolic toward a president that half the country wanted.   When they showed up against Trump during his Inauguration in 2017 and protested him as a sexual predator they set the bar impossibly high for themselves as a result and now they are being crushed under their own standard—because they can’t live up to any of it. As actors and film moguls they live in the make-believe world of their own creations but under Trump’s presidency illusions are being shattered out of necessity, and now these people are exposed, and they are burning in front of our faces.  Hollywood will never recover as an industry.  Sure there will be new forms of entertainment that will emerge, but the Wilshire Blvd culture for which Hollywood has built its own kind of Wall Street is dying right in front of our eyes, and because they made themselves into a political weapon of the left, I’m glad to see it.  They have let us all down and now it’s time to pay.

Rich Hoffman

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The HBO ‘Spielberg’ Documentary: What used to be good about Hollywood

I eagerly awaiting the time when HBO released its newest documentary titled simply as Spielberg. It was a Saturday night on October 7th when I was finally able to see it after waiting months for it to air, and I enjoyed it immensely. With all the recent discussion about Harvey Weinstein and the current decline of Hollywood, this Spielberg documentary was an interesting looking into everything that has been good about the movie industry. Clearly, and I’ve always felt this way, without Steven Spielberg as a great producer and writer, all of our lives would be much less optimistic. What the HBO documentary did that most DVD interviews have failed to do is pin point what drove Steven Spielberg and how that raw ambition touched the lives of so many people. It’s hard to watch anything on television or at the movies that Steven Spielberg has not touched in a good way. I always loved that filmmaker’s natural optimism and enjoyed how he could take incredibly dark topics like Schindler’s List and find the good in such a terrible story. Personally, 1993 was a year of really intense emotions. I was being sued many times over for a business deal that went south. Bill Clinton had just become president when I campaigned hard for Ross Perot and I literally felt like the world was coming to an end in everything that was going on around me. Then I saw Jurassic Park where several brilliant shots in that movie by Spielberg blew the doors off the future of visual effects—namely the attack at the T-Rex paddock in a downpour of rain in a lush tropical jungle to a booming symphonic musical score that I have never forgotten. Then just a few months later Schindler’s List was released and it became one of my favorite movies. As a very young person I was ready to be a filmmaker myself because Spielberg inspired me to do so. But what I learned harshly over the next 15 years was that I was more intended to the subject of movies rather than the maker of them. Some people are meant to be behind the camera, others are meant to be in front of them. Steven Spielberg was uniquely gifted in life to be behind the camera where everything made much more sense to him, and we are all better for it.

http://www.rollingstone.com/tv/news/10-things-we-learned-from-hbos-spielberg-documentary-w506623

What made Spielberg tick was his overly optimistic approach to life mixed with his natural fears that were more defined than most people were aware of. Spielberg used movies as his natural therapy to work out things in life that were beating him down. The only time Steven Spielberg was a fearless human being was when he was behind the camera where he was able to work things out in a way that allowed them to be captured on film. I learned about myself much later that I didn’t like the collaborative process of making movies the way Spielberg did and that I didn’t live my life like he did his. I wasn’t insecure about anything and that doesn’t make for very compelling stories—only the characters within stories as they interact with the outside world. Understanding that made me appreciate what Steven Spielberg did that much more over his lifetime.

I have enjoyed Spielberg’s movies since that magical year of 1993, but never to the same extent as before that date and I think he’s happy with things that way. Hollywood beat up on him for being such a Peter Pan type of personality and they wouldn’t give him credit for being the best director in film history until he made more “adult” dramas which he has. With a new wife to support him, Steven Spielberg went on to make a number of very serious and ambitious movies that many respect, but never tickled the box office quite the same. The Hollywood communists were happy, but the movie industry as a whole wasn’t but who could be mad at Spielberg. He certainly did his part to invent the industry from virtually nothing in the 1970s with a handful of other filmmakers including George Lucas. I’ve always known it but the HBO documentary really captured how unique the movie brats for which Spielberg was a member truly was. I’m glad to have grown up in a time when those types of filmmakers were making movies in Hollywood. I thought it might go on for a long time, but it really only lasted about 20 years. As I was working to get into that business it was obvious the door had closed and people like Harvey Weinstein were in charge of Hollywood and the doors to the next generation of movie brats were not open to conservatives.

Filmmakers like Steven Spielberg and George Lucas are not what we’d consider today to be conservative, but they came from a time when father was supposed to know best and rectifying that disappointment took their characters in film to great places. But the foundation of conservativism was there because they grew up in small towns and had fathers who worked hard and were successful in their own ways. They came from intact families and those foundations are present in their movies, from Star Wars to E.T. The magic of those types of movies from those types of filmmakers are so rare now. I thought it was amazing the way the world stopped for a moment just to watch the preview to the new Star Wars movie The Last Jedi during Monday Night Football on October 9th just a few days after the Spielberg documentary was released on HBO. Star Wars is all about family or the lack of it and people are so desperate for a sense of family these days, because liberalism has essentially crushed the notion. That is what separates Spielberg’s movie brats from the lost kids of today. There are no filmmakers like Spielberg out there or coming up, because the American family has essentially been destroyed. If you really want to breakdown what’s sick in Hollywood it is that they don’t tell stories about families anymore. They tell stories about why families are so messed up which robs the viewers of their products of the sanctification they are seeking with the price of a movie ticket.

Even Brian DePalma’s film Scarface which I was surprised to learn Spielberg actually worked on, was about family. Without the family element Tony Montana was just a thug. But in the context of his actions, we could sympathize and like the cocaine mogul because he was in essence a guy who wanted to take care of his family and start one of his own crawling out from under the communist regime in Cuba. Becoming a cocaine dealer was his only real path—a premise that was elaborated on later with the Breaking Bad series. But to come up with these stories from scratch the original movie brats for which Spielberg was the undisputed leader is something we may never see again. I’m glad to have seen it once, but it really is sad that we likely will never get it again for a long time. The conditions that make someone like Steven Spielberg just aren’t there for a new generation of movie makers. The material that young people have to work with now are the products of people like Weinstein where with Spielberg and Lucas it was John Ford and Alfred Hitchcock. The idea of a young Spielberg camping out illegally on the Universal lot just to learn how to make movies is something that the institution of filmmaking today just wouldn’t allow with their obsession with rules and regulations—and that is truly sad.

But the documentary was a marvelous look into one of the most fascinating people in human history, Steve Spielberg who was able to take his natural optimism, massive creative intellect and disappointments toward the nature of family life and put them into a series of marvelous movies that have lasted for decades and will stand the tests of time. I will always have a soft spot for Steven Spielberg even though later in life he has become more of a Democrat and supported politicians like Barack Obama. I’m sure if I sat down at lunch with him I’d have far more in common than not. What has always made Spielberg great is that he understood the American family and refused to be tainted by the disappointments of our times. And instead he put up on the big silver screen all the optimism his vast imagination could conceive and it made our world far better off.

Rich Hoffman

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‘Battlefront II’ Impressions after the Beta Test: I can’t wait for November 14th

I always feel that I must apologize for covering a light topic especially when there is so much going on in the world around us, but we do have to live. We do have to manage our stresses. And we must find the things in life that make us happy, and for me Star Wars is something that works—especially when we are talking about a new video game. Then regarding that topic, I think much of the world that’s coming, the politics, the structure, the science can be seen with each new video game update from the industry because most of the engineers and designers of the future out there are playing these massive online games. While it’s true that ratings are down in the NFL and some of that is certainly due to the politics surrounding the flag, most of the change in attitude toward football in general is because of this new age of entertainment where people can live entire secondary lives online in their video game avatars. I find it all extremely fascinating, and optimistic and it helps me fight through some of the most complex problems that any one human being could be expected to fight through. With all that said, I have been very excited for the next generation Star Wars: Battlefront II which comes out in November. For a long time there was talk of a beta run in early October so I did my pre-order and signed up for the top version of the game and had marked on my calendar October 4th because that’s when the beta opened for the new game by Electronic Arts/Dice.

My first impression of the beta compared to the full game of the original Battlefront with its bright white backgrounds was that it was missing an optimism that made the original very THX-1138 fun and futuristic. The menu boards on Battlefront II were mostly all in blacks and that made it seem like a lesser quality experience to me. Because of this I was disappointed, but once I started playing the various modes I quickly forgave the game because it was a lot of fun. From October 4th to October 9th I played as much as I could and leveled up to somewhere around 10 or 11. I didn’t pay much attention as I was mostly trying to get a feel for everything. A large part of the weekend my grandson was over and we played the new arcade mode a lot. It was clearly his favorite mode and I thought was a big addition to the overall game, a way to learn the maps and get a feel for the various builds in the game. I also thought the Star Card system was much improved, it reminded me a lot of the Fantasy Flight Games board games in this way, which makes those games infinitely interesting. Bringing that Star Card aspect to a video game made for a very compelling experience and I could see quickly that I would soon spend many hours playing with different cards to figure out the best combination, and then trying them out in the Arcade Mode to learn to use them. From just what the game developers showed on their beta test, there are endless opportunities for variety in Battlefront II once the game is released in November.

Before I get too far into this you do know dear reader about the cultural significance of all this, don’t you? After all, the new Star Wars: The Last Jedi trailer was released during halftime on Monday Night Football. And the moment that the beta ended for Battlefront II Forbes had a nice little article seen below about their criticism of the loot box system. The whole play to win debate in the video game community is a big deal because it brings many people into the realities of capitalism in ways their public educations never did. To be good at these games you must put in the hours, and the money. You can get by only doing one of those things, but to be great, you have to spend time, money and diligence to get the most out of the game. People who are from the ANTIFA crowd of course are out there playing these games and their basic philosophy is confronted with the realities of such a big business as Battlefront II is tapping into. Star Wars is just the entry point to these kinds of experiences. They become a lifestyle for many people in a similar way that adults have traditionally been in bowling leagues or played golf. It is not uncommon in the spirit of competition to get a new bowling ball or a set of titanium clubs for golf to get an edge over your rivals and that is what the loot box system does in Battlefront II. The writer for the Forbes article obviously didn’t like it. I did, my grandson and I had a lot of fun with the loot boxes. It was like gambling in Vegas, you never really knew what you were going to get and it was fun working toward an opportunity to have a chance at something cool. Games like this are all about the proper risk rewards system.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/insertcoin/2017/10/08/star-wars-battlefront-2s-loot-boxes-seem-like-theyre-going-to-be-a-serious-problem/#1707a80a6323

For me the best part of the new Battlefront II game was the Starfighter Assault modes. It took me a minute to get used to things because they changed the mechanics quite a lot. On the previous edition of Battlefront I was one of those 50 kills per game people. I was very good at it and it was a dream come true for me to fly those ships around in space in combat situations. I can tell that I will be spending many hours playing just that mode. I would say that the new game is worth it just for the Starfighter Assault modes. As readers here know I love the Fantasy Flight Games offerings of X-Wing and Armada so putting a pilot into a scenario that is objective based around giant capital ships and individualized dog fighting is an incredible experience. Even for a beta test the frame rates were high and the details were amazing. Some of the cut-scenes were sloppy on my giant 4K television but I’m sure the final release of the game will be a major improvement on that. As I seem to say with each of these big video game releases, whether it is Uncharted 4 for the Playstation, or Zelda for the Nintendo Switch, this Battlefront II game is the next technical evolution that turns living rooms into combat zones and works our minds in ways we couldn’t duplicate under any other situation.

Probably the best improvement however on Battlefront II is the class system where there are four different categories of player. I found due to my aggressive style the Heavy Class to be most to my liking. But what’s better is that you aren’t stuck to that class for the whole round of play. If you need to lighten things up for more stealth or sniper ability you can during a round, and those strategic options are like gold raining from heaven to a guy like me who literally spends all my down time thinking of strategic options. I think of strategic options even when it comes to what grocery store to go to, so a game like this with all these random elements playing against each other is just food for my brain. So I’m really looking forward to November 14th when the whole game is released to the public. Like I said, I held nothing back on this version. I did preorder the game so I could play it with the early access. And I did by the deluxe version of it so I could get every little benefit. On the first one I came late to the game because I was made at The Force Awakens for killing Han Solo and not respecting the continuity of the previous novels. It took me a year to finally give it a shot after radio host Matt Clark bugged me about it every week for that entire year. Once I did start playing however I exploded and quickly maxed out my level at 100. There were a few weekends around last Christmas where I was off work and I played the starfighter modes for 48 straight hours—because it was that fun. With Battlefront II being noticeably an improvement on the game play mechanics, I will likely go even deeper into the game, so I am starting with the deluxe package and from there I will support the game in whatever fashion they come up with. It’s not only a work of art and technical marvel, but it’s just some of the best fun you can have from a top end entertainment system. I can’t think of a better way to live life than to blow stuff up and hear all the wonderful sounds from a Bose sound system that puts you in the middle of the most intense battles a mind could think of. I am really, really, really looking forward to November 14th. Battlefront II will be a winner and the beta was just a taste of the great things to come.

Rich Hoffman

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The Root Cause of the Gun Control Problem: We need less control and more guns

I found it amazing to see Tweets like the one below immediately after the Las Vegas shooting.  There was something about this one that was different for me.  I found the attacks on the NRA reprehensible.  October is normally the month that I renew my membership to the NRA and I did so proudly a few days ago knowing how so many people who call themselves Americans jumped quickly to blame the gun rights group for the violence in Las Vegas.   At this point it looks like liberalism was the primary cause of the mass shooting in Vegas—so under their premise of accusatory proclamations—they are far more responsible for what happened.   There was teeth to this latest blame game toward the NRA however that I personally haven’t seen before—almost desperation connected to the Trump presidency where their raw feelings were more revealed than usual.  I was particularly surprised by the late night comedy people who so openly came out specifically against the NRA.  I realized after listening to these idiots for over a week after the deadly shooting that gun supporters needed a new approach.  It’s not enough to just defend gun rights and the Second Amendment—but we need to go on the offense to a much greater degree than we have in the past.  We need to sell the benefits of a well armed society instead of just defending the merits.

I get paid professionally to solve very complex problems, and to identify root causes quickly, I’m very good at doing such things.  Without being modest since it should be pretty self-evident that I have a much higher than average intelligence, I have to throw out that disclaimer before continuing because there is a perception that advocating in favor of firearms is connected to people who lack intelligence.  That couldn’t be further from the truth, but I do find that many gun supporters aren’t so good at articulating their thoughts on this matter because the right words don’t come so easy to them.  The words do come easy to me and some of that is God-given ability; but most of it has been developed over a lifetime of hard work where I’ve fed that intelligence a steady stream of education that has gone on well past my high school and college years.  I personally live a life where I don’t drink or smoke—my consumption of beer is less than ten cans per year—every year—so I enjoy a clear mind not numbed by prescription drugs and pain killers as well.  I have the benefit of one of the clearest and best working minds that there is—and when I look at this Vegas shooting and develop a root cause analysis I see the need for more guns not less, and a much more intellectual discussion about the merits of gun ownership that needs to be sold to the American public.  Not a defensive position on “butt stock” legislation just to make all the wimpy people in the world feel good about doing something completely irrelevant in the wake of a national tragedy.

Liberalism appears yet again to be the primary political affiliation of this latest shooter, and we also find that the Vegas shooter had problems with his father.  What we see most common with all mass shooters over the last few years is that they come from homes where the father either wasn’t present, or had serious problems of their own.  In this case the Vegas shooter’s father was on the FBI list for being a bank robber.  Not the average dad who cuts grass on the weekends and has words of advice about how to throw a football or not scrape your knee running down a sidewalk.  We are talking about real family breakdowns that are directly related to these mass shooters which under any root cause analysis would be one of the first identifying conditions.  From there we would examine the next stage of such a cause which would be liberalism—since that political philosophy has largely contributed to the destruction of the American family by diminishing the role that men have in it.  Most of the feminist positions that have emerged out of the progressive movement attached to the Democratic Party have put forth their strategies without really thinking about what it might cause by way of damage to the family structure for which we all live under.   They only thought that it would be best to make people more dependent on centralized government by removing the traditionally strong male role from the homes of young people—and putting women in charge completely by radicalizing them against “white male privilege” without really understanding what that meant.

I am also a student of history.  I enjoy the topic naturally and understand the context of what a miracle life in the United States truly was to emerge the way it did to bring about the opportunities we all see today.  Other countries around the world have had their periods of national identity.  England during the age of Norman Conquest solidified their knightly culture into the type of society they are known for presently.  Japan for all their history is defined by their feudal period—that is a rally point for their national identity.  China will always be known for its Ming dynasty—and so we could go around the world and show that most places have some big historical moment in their thousands of years of history that define them as a culture—from their food to their core belief system.  And in America it was clearly the age of westward expansion.  It was a case where the Occident met the orient in a philosophical struggle—and the east lost.  They were conquered largely due to the gun and a new kind of society emerged.  Guns in America paved the way for decentralized power and the emergence of capitalism for which the world still points to with extreme jealousy and calls their enemy.  Those forces know that so long as individuals have guns that they don’t stand a chance of gaining individual control of the American citizen for the aims of progressive advancement of their global political ideologies.  They are too quick to ignore the well-known lessons from history and to continue with their failures by spreading them to American society which is the opposite of what they should be doing.

So to provide the best answer to all those who aren’t so equipped with a knowledge of history or the ability to draw forth a proper root cause analysis of how violence erupts in any society—the reason that civilians need “assault weapons” is because that is the safety net of protection when institutions fail to resolve problems, or create them to begin with—in this case when a liberal shooter decides that he wants to take the lives of others through a breakdown not caused by individual behavior, but institutional failure.  If the governments of the world fail, in America, citizens can provide defense of their property themselves in whatever capacity is needed.  If more civilians had been armed in Las Vegas once it was realized that the shooter was firing from a broken window from a hotel, the assailant could have been engaged earlier—and fewer people would have been harmed.  But even so, the shooter may have been deterred from doing such a thing in the first place.  He knew that all he had to do was prevent the police from getting to him, so he was free to act unmolested as a terrorist for many minutes.  He didn’t have to worry about civilians shooting through the hotel walls at him, only of the police gathering in the hallway which he monitored by his video feeds.  The police did a pretty good job in Vegas, but they have lots of safety protocols they have to live under preventing fast action—which was needed at the time.  To conclude a root cause positioning statement on the matter, more guns would have saved more lives in Las Vegas—and they do anywhere where there are lots of guns on private people.

I’ve always been a defender of the NRA and of the Second Amendment.  But after watching the behavior of anti-American forces after the Vegas shooting I’m convinced that much more than the NRA needs to emerge to sell gun rights to these many generations who have been trained to think against guns by those same anti-American forces.  When Jimmy Kimmel blasted the NRA on his show saying that supporters of that group were responsible for the shooting he was wrong to say we are all Americans.  I would go so far to say that if you do not support guns in America then you don’t have a right to call yourself an American.  Being an American doesn’t mean you can think all things about everything.  There are some basic ground rules to living in American society.  You must for instance support capitalism because that is the economic means of our nation.  And I would say that you must support the Second Amendment for not just “hunting” but for what it’s for, to regain control over failed institutions when needed.  If those intuitions fail and must be replaced and they are protected by a military industrial complex, then civilians need equal armament to regain civilian control. That is the answer to the question asked in the above Tweet.   We trust our institutions to do the job of providing safety in places like Las Vegas.  But that next line of defense is private firearm ownership and if there had been more of a presence of firearms in Vegas, more people would have lived.

With firearms comes responsibly—and my life is an example of how serious people like me should take the use of them.  For instance, I propose that people should be as free to wear their guns around on their hips as they do a tie with a nice suit.  But they also shouldn’t drink in public and do anything to lose their mental acuity.  I am not a supporter of mind altering drugs of any kind—even prescription medicine because it might affect the decision-making process when we need to decide to use a gun or not.  And I’m willing to live that kind of life to make firearms on private people more abundant—to serve as a deterrent in large population centers to prevent mass shootings like the one in Vegas—by a liberalized terrorist.   Surrendering any part of the private right to own firearms and their “assault” characteristics is not acceptable—because that is not part of the solution to the root cause of mass killings.  Fear is the objective of a mass shooter, and more guns means much less fear for a society that understands the philosophic necessity for individual freedom under the conditions of duress.  And it is time as gun owners that we stop trying to defend ourselves from the stupid and purposely ignorant.  It’s time to take that fight to their poorly founded thoughts and to sell the merits of gun ownership in ways that haven’t been done for years—which is exactly what I intend to do from this day forward.

Rich Hoffman

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The Hollywood Sacrifice of Harvey Weinstein: Knowing the real story takes some work

So, how does it feel, “fat boy?”  Harvey Weinstein has been caught doing far more than Bill O’Reilly did and for a far longer duration—yet he had the blind eye of justice turned away from him for over three decades while people at the center of his abuse of women stood on stages and protested their hatred of Donald Trump.  Yes, there is a lot going on here.  The New York Times who broke the story didn’t all of a sudden become America’s best friend.  The liberals who are trying to apologize for Harvey’s behavior now can’t because they’ve already said too much about Donald Trump and Bill O’Reilly, have painted themselves in a corner. And only now does the rest of the world learn what I’ve been telling them for several decades now.  The below paragraph from Breitbart says everything you need to know about how the entertainment industry has been working and why there is a double standard.  Harvey Weinstein isn’t the only liberal movie producer acting this way—the entire industry does—and they give so much money to the Democrats that nobody says anything about it.  When you pull the women away from the situation—especially people like Ashley Judd who has been so critical of Donald Trump—remember her at his inauguration, they’ll tell you many sad stories.  The situation is as I said it was.  Most actresses in Hollywood are glorified prostitutes.  They know they have to give producers like Weinstein blow jobs or let those fat slobs ride them like horses in their make-up trailers for all to know if they want to work in movies.  That’s why they essentially become man hating feminists once they get into their thirties and aren’t nearly as cute.  This little paragraph tells everyone what anybody needs to know about how Hollywood works.  Harvey is just the latest.

But here is the thing; according to Peter Biskind’s 2004 non-fiction book Down and Dirty Pictures: Miramax, Sundance, and the Rise of Independent Film, Weinstein manipulated and pocketed the entertainment media in extraordinary ways. He hired countless “journalists” to work for his company in various capacities, offered them glamorous opportunities, and oftentimes threatened to pull advertising from publications working on negative stories. An entertainment media starved for Oscar campaign dollars simply could not afford to lose Hollywood’s most prolific Oscar-winner and advertiser.

 

http://www.breitbart.com/big-hollywood/2017/10/06/silence-complicity-powerful-said-nothing-harvey-weinsteins-alleged-victims-piled/amp/

For the moment and likely forever Harvey Weinstein is out of a job from a studio he created by rules he molded to use against his political enemies.  Again, I can’t say I didn’t predict all this was going to happen just as it is.  Weinstein is a major Hollywood producer and he is certainly a large part of the severe turn toward liberalism of that industry.  It is guys like him who have helped turn Hollywood away from anything conservative and shoved away the actors that conservatives like, such as Mel Gibson, Bruce Willis, and Tim Allen and replaced them with douche bag cry babies like George Clooney, and Johnny Depp.  Those male actors are no less porn stars than their female actor friends.  Harvey might not ask for a blow job from the guys, but he expects them to go out into America and sell liberalism if they want to work in his movies.  There is no way to go on any of the late night comedy shows like Fallen and Kimmel and utter conservative viewpoints and still expect to be cast into the next movie produced by Weinstein.  That’s why nobody said anything—because they all wanted a chance to act.  They could talk about Republicans, but they had to leave Democrats like Weinstein alone—even though he was much worse than anyone on the conservative side.

As I usually do, I have some experience with Hollywood when I write articles like this one.  For about ten years I was actively working on the edges of that entertainment industry as a writer pitching projects and doing little bit work because of my professional uniqueness with bullwhips.  So I have some up-close experience with actors and actresses and have had the opportunity to spend time with them off camera in Glendale where they can let their hair down and behave like normal people.  If America understood what these people go through to become actors, they’d understand why people like Ashely Judd become such liberal feminists later in life once that life caught up with them.  Madonna thought it was cute when she was younger to wrap Warren Beatty around her finger with voluminous amounts of unrestricted sex—but once she got “old” Beatty is still producing movies, and she’s a used tire in the garage that nobody wants to touch, and it is scary to them—so they become feminists hoping to get back some of what they whored away when they were younger.

But why do these women, and men, feel like they have to become the personal prostitutes to movie producers like Harvey Weinstein?  Well, let me just say that if you are an actor in Hollywood in any capacity—you have to be a prostitute to some degree and many figure that they can live somewhat normal lives if they can get into the pants of a powerful producer instead of slutting it up with the porn industry producers.  Because if the A List women who work for Weinstein don’t put out—there are literally thousands of girls working in the valley who will.  Many of them go to Hollywood to get discovered and become rich.  They find out when they get there that there aren’t many opportunities to become the next Ashley Judd or Nichole Kidman.  All there is for them is a porn job—if they are lucky.  The sets I have been on where extras were brought in to fill background shots always had young girls, nearly 100% who were willing to do anything to get a part in a movie.  Many of them were already doing porn just to get by from week to week and looking for a break into a legitimate role.  They will sleep with a producer and literally do anything with anybody hoping that whoever they are doing it with might put in a good name about them to somebody like the assistant of the assistant to Harvey Weinstein.  They know they either do that or they will literally be stuck screwing some scum bags in a rented storage unit for a fifteen minute online porn piece just so they can pay their rent in an overpriced dump of a shoe box.  Everyone knows that you either put up and put out with people like Harvey Weinstein, or you put out for cheap porn—and that’s the reality for the beautiful people.  The not so attractive girls have to do far worse just for the chance to hold a clip board on a movie set so they can work in the industry.

That is why they all become such indignant liberals who want to change the world, and instead of looking toward their own lives and the people in them they defer everything to the Republicans.  It’s the only way they can get back at people like Harvey Weinstein for making them do so much embarrassing “stuff” yet still have a chance to work in his movies.   When they get mad at people like Bill O’Reilly and Donald Trump it’s not really the conservatives they have a problem with, its people on their own side who have forced them to live like dogs for a chance to make a living.  Once they’ve made their money and people like Harvey aren’t trying to grab their ass every five seconds they then become righteously indignant.  They only do it then because the power of sex doesn’t sell any more so they have to turn toward activism to stay relevant with Harvey who gives a lot of money to Democrats.  You have to remember, actors get paid to be other people all the time, so it is nothing to them to adopt whatever social causes there are out there just for a chance to get a movie role.   There’s other fresh young girls looking to become the next millionaire actress who was already in Harvey’s pants—so what do they have to do as old hags but take their anger out on people like Trump?  They mean to lash out at Harvey, but they don’t want to completely burn their bridges because there might just be a movie role for them as somebody’s grandma/  They put up with everything and shut up entirely just to have a chance to work.   That is how the movie business works and why it has declined so intensely.  Almost every young actress you see on-screen today has had to do things she is ashamed of.  There are great producers like Steven Spielberg who aren’t like Weinstein at all, but the percentages are not even worth mentioning.  Most of Hollywood is filled with little Weinsteins—and it has literally destroyed the industry and the people who are responsible for building it.  My limited experience on movie sets ruined my love of movies and the business and made me look to other industries to make a good, honest living.  Yes, it is that bad.  Nothing is sacred in that business—it’s pretty disgusting.

Just for an example let me tell a little story about a lunch I had with a very beautiful young actress who was working her way up in the world, doing movies with Robert De Niro and other A-listers.   She wanted to produce a script I had written because it featured a lead position she wanted to build for herself.  So we were having a nice talk about how to get the thing done and the whole problem came down to funding.  It was a conservative story I had written.  She certainly wasn’t a conservative girl, she was a Manhattan liberal, but when talking to me she was all about George Bush—baseball, hot dogs and apple pie.  If I asked her to strip down naked right there and paint herself with body paint showing the American flag, she would have done it in a second and been happy about it—because I had something she wanted.  She would have told me anything to get me to move toward her position.  The finance backers wanted to completely change the story into something much more “Pulp Fiction” because that was the hot ticket at Miramax at the time—ironically where Weinstein was.  I thought about it because the writing credit and the money would have been good.  This girl was basically willing to say anything I wanted her to say to get the job done and advance the project—and sex was certainly on the table if needed.  Ultimately we couldn’t come to an agreement fast enough and her people moved on to a more agreeable writer—not that I was disagreeable or hard to work with—but windows open and close quick in Hollywood.  So if you don’t bend toward their brand of liberalism—you won’t get the money for the project.  I was shocked how quickly this girl would mold herself to anything I said.  I’m sure she did that with everyone.  I couldn’t help but wonder what it would be like to be in a relationship with her—as to whether she really knew who she was or not.  I mean if you dated her—who would she be?  I realized that was probably why actors and actresses have very volatile relationships and usually end up with three or four marriages before ending up as bitter cat ladies later in life.  The lesson is that it’s easy to see why actors become such volatile liberals in Hollywood.  That’s what gets them work.  Conservative people just haven’t figured out that they could get their message out best by funding movies in Hollywood.  For a long time it’s only been liberals controlling the whole town like a massive mob.

The big question that should be on everyone’s mind is why did The New York Times do this story on Weinstein to begin with?  Aren’t they all brothers and sisters to the cause?  Well, this is all part of Trump’s making America great again effort—the Times is struggling and has alienated its readership to only liberals.  Before Trump’s election even people like me would read that paper to see what was happening in the world.  Well, not anymore.  With them becoming so anti-Trump, I haven’t read a single article from them in all of 2017 when in the past I might have read one or two per day.  I just can’t stand their bias, and I’m not the only one who feels that way.  They have taken a major hit in readership and they need to get some of that back if they hope to survive as a paper outside of the New York market—which they need.  Trump has outlasted them so they need to peel away from the Trump stuff and recover credibility.  Hollywood is the next target because the numbers are down for that entire industry.  Harvey was in trouble before any of this broke and to save themselves the money guys in the movie industry need to get some of these radical movie producers out-of-the-way so that more conservative pictures can be green lit, otherwise there won’t be a movie industry in a few years.   I think it’s already too late.   So Harvey Weinstein was a proper sacrificial victim.  He’s old and wealthy—they just need to get him out-of-the-way to make room for the new—so The New York Times did their hit piece hoping to win back some readership since many of the Trump stories have gone cold and all these hurricanes have driven the public narrative on the president in a positive direction.  So the time is up, the Times needs readership back and movie money men need to turn a profit—and Harvey has been holding back the industry drowning on its own liberal ideology.  That tells us all what we need to know about how things are going.  In many ways, it is because of Trump that this story broke at all.  The pressure of his presidency is forcing these issues to the surface—and it’s nice to see for a change.

Rich Hoffman

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The Most Effective Argument in favor of Guns in Soceity: What everyone misses about the need for the Second Amendment–Institituions cannot be trusted

The support for an armed society is a philosophical one, not one of just emotional attachments to tradition. There is a reason the Second Amendment was inserted into the Bill of Rights and was so important to the Anti-Federalists in the 1790-time period of American history that is just as relevant today as it was then. The human race has not “progressed to a certain level where a one world government like the utopian Star Fleet Command is running everything on earth—and it never will. The reason is that there are traits to human beings that so long as they exist prevent the complete trust of individuals into all institutions created by society. To properly have a check and balance against absolute power, individuals must have the ability to overthrow their institutions before they get too big, and too power hungry to handle the affairs of civilization properly. Guns are that fine line of control which keeps our institutions in check with the fear always in the back of their minds that at any moment the population could remove them from office under armed rebellion and replace them. The issue has never been about “assault weapons” or “bump stocks.” It’s about the nature of people and what they do when they have power over other people. Those who want more power over more people obviously are those who support removing guns from society—to whatever degree. But the essence of the argument is that we would be fools to completely trust any institution created by the minds of man. The gun allows us to manage that power we give those institutions—and without that management assistance, institutions by their nature spiral out of control and become oppressive. Because at the heart of most humans who crave power is a laziness that always retreats to default mode and would rather run society as a bunch of compliant automatons rather than free thinking variables.

To put the issue in the most simplistic forms I will provide an example that I have used actually quite often. To provide a little background about myself I am a person who loves personal freedom likely more than most people, and I have always built my life around the ability to be free of institutional control. In my youth I was a martial artist and had developed the personal ability to defend myself no matter what was presented. Growing up I never had the feeling that anybody could “kick my ass” and I still feel that way. I don’t care how big the person is or how skilled, I made a point physically to be the top of the pecking order in regard to fighting in hand to hand combat and that allowed me a certain freedom to think properly about these matters of institutional control. But melee weapons are one thing, if a person approaches you with a gun physical confrontation is not the best way to deal with a threat like that. You really need a gun no matter how skilled you may be in disarming people. The best way to prevent a threat is to show them you have a gun and give them a choice as to whether or not to continue.

For a short while I was a repo man in my early years and I was shot at on occasion. That was back in the old days before there were the kind of rules that there are today. Back then the bank would let you do quite a few things to recover an asset, so I know what it feels like to be a bit of a thief sneaking up on a car to take it away from a hostile person likely armed. I even know what it feels like to break into a home knowing a person was armed to get the car keys. This wasn’t an accepted practice but it’s always better to ask for forgiveness than permission when dealing with bureaucracies and if I could get my hands on the keys, it meant doing less damage to the asset to retrieve it so breaking into a home to get the keys was forgivable—if you were successful. But people did get mad and they did shoot to kill. So in speaking about this kind of stuff I understand it from both sides very well.

I’ve also been to Europe and can report that the people there are pretty much a defeated people. Their gun laws and progressive societies have destroyed individual initiative and expectation. They live in small homes that are too expensive and do not have an expectation of personal sanctity the way that Americans do—and this really does trace back to gun ownership. In Europe the chances of being robbed in your home are much, much greater than in the United States because thieves know that nobody is armed in the home. They think nothing of breaking and entering to steal a person’s possessions even if they are there—because being shot is not on their minds. If they have managed to get a gun off the black market then they suddenly have become the strongest person around and they use that force to their advantage—because that’s what most human beings do when they acquire power—they tend to abuse it unless they are governed by a personal constitution of morality and valor. Without those elements they become tyrants quickly—whether they control a vast institution, or are just petty street criminals. It’s all the same human dysfunction on the micro or macro levels.

The person who trained me in martial arts during my teenage years was a thug. He was a lot like the karate school owner in the movie Karate Kid. His sole purpose for the school was to teach young strong males to be killers so that they’d go to tournaments and win trophies for his wall, so that he could then charge high fees to provide instruction. I thought of him as an evil person and he eventually was busted for many crimes and did jail time, but I learned a lot from the guy. I learned that it wasn’t hard to kill a person with your hands, in fact it was pretty easy and once you learned the basics you had leverage over every other human being that didn’t know that information. Most of his students went on to become terrors—and they got into nearly as much trouble as he did. Once they had the power to literally kill with their bare hands they had no fear of anybody and they began to be bullies that nobody could stop. It was the same concept as the robber with a gun who had something everyone else was missing. Outlawing a gun doesn’t change the nature of dominating others as a human predilection. Until that problem is solved, where humans wish to dominate others, whether it’s the liberal using institutionalism to control individual behavior, or a common street thug beating people over the head with a pipe to steal $25 dollars—the desire to rule over other individuals is the problem that must be solved. No institutional laws will have any effect—because the problem at its core is an institutional issue.

More times than even I can recollect I’ve used the threat of violence to keep peace. If someone is robbing you the way to handle it best is to say, “Hay man,” show them the gun under your jacket “you don’t have to die today. I won’t even call the cops. If you keep walking you can go to sleep tonight.” It’s that simple. Just say that, have the gun to show them—even if they are pointing one at you, letting them know you have a gun and are willing to use it, will most of the time cause them to leave you alone. These things don’t happen like they do in the movies. Criminals want a nice easy hit on someone. They don’t want to die or risk injury. If they have to risk that with you, they’ll move on most of the time. That also goes with hired killers. I’ve also known several of them as well, and deep down inside they are just people like anybody else. They don’t want to die. They know that just because you shoot someone they don’t die instantly. They know if you have a gun on you that you could still shoot them even if wounded. Because of guns in our country, we see much less crime than we otherwise would because nobody really knows who has guns in the house and who doesn’t. That secures our private property in the correct way and allows for Americans to think differently than other people around the world do because private property and ownership is the essence of personal responsibility—and protecting those elements makes for a much more civil discourse at the macro level.

Any person advancing gun control measures of any kind, even the “bump stock” debate after the Las Vegas massacre are avoiding the real issue in human failure in dealing with one another. Human desire to control other humans and their thoughts is the problem and until respect at a fundamental level is established for individual sanctity, violence will always be a threat. Those threats often come from institutions because responsibility for individual behavior is disguised. However, gun ownership is more than just symbolic, they are a proper check against the human tendency to inflict through force beliefs of one group against another. The gun creates a level playing field and forces people to respect each other—which is the first foundation of proper human interaction. There is a fine line between fear and respect, and the gun helps society get there better than any law that human beings could invent. And that is the key to a properly managed society. There is nothing barbaric about gun ownership. In fact, the concept is quite a sophisticated one because it takes the human race to a level of thought that has never been achieved before in the history of the world, and the United States is the evidence that it works. Not in the presence of an active gun culture, but in the type of society and options that Americans enjoy that nobody else around the world has. Guns are key to advancing our civilization in very positive ways because they take the bullies out of contention and allow average people to rule their own lives however they see fit. And if their institutions get out of control, then people have guns to retake control, and that is the most important thing of all. Just having the gun does wonders. Hopefully nobody ever needs to use them. But I can say from personal experience that guns work very well at keeping things……..peaceful. Better than anything else ever could hope to. Institutions want to believe they can, but they can’t. They can’t control individual behavior at its core. They can influence it, but they can’t manage it without the occasional madman emerging to destroy innocent people over any little thing.

When I hold a gun, or buy a new gun, I am making an investment into the kind of human freedom that only a gun can provide. And that is not a symbol of violence. It’s a declaration of independence that is philosophical and unique to our species.

Rich Hoffman

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West Chester is on Money Magazine’s Top 100 List: Who to vote for in 2017’s trustee election

I know I I’m very proud of West Chester for remaining one of the top places to live in the entire United States yet again by Money Magazine.  Since George Lang has been a trustee he has contributed greatly to this rise in national profile and he is now moving to become a state rep in Columbus so he can do the same thing for Ohio on a much larger scale, and don’t doubt for a moment that he will be successful.  George knows how to work “it,” and I look forward to his results quickly in the next few years.  Things in West Chester have really improved over the last several years since George and Mark Welch have been running things as the one, two vote for the West Chester trustees.  A quick look at the history of the Money Magazine rankings below will show just how much success they’ve had.  The consistency ranging from this year all the way back to 2014, the first full year after Mark’s election, provides the unrequited testimony to the success the two have had in spite of Lee Wong’s efforts at community socialism to make West Chester such a destination of success and opportunity.

WEST CHESTER TWP. — West Chester Twp. is, once again, named among the best places to live in America.

That’s according to Money Magazine, which today released its list of “100 Best Place to Live in America” with the growing Butler County township as No. 56 on that list.

West Chester Twp. was previously ranked No. 49 in 2016’s “America’s Top 50 Places to Live,” No. 30 in 2014, No. 97 in a list of “Top 100 Places to Live” in 2012, No. 32 in 2010 and No. 45 in 2005, according to Money Magazine.

Released on Monday, this year’s list focuses on communities with populations from 10,000 to 100,000.

http://www.whio.com/news/west-chester-lands-best-places-live-america/WHFDzYMsBOyP5j2KEnpkxJ/

For perspective there are 267 cities currently in America that feature populations less than 100,000 people, so to be in the top 100 is quite impressive.  There are many more small towns and localities, but for a managed population with such a great number of residents that have to balance out tax burdens, zoning, livability, future outlook and day-to-day management, West Chester is a fine example of how it should be done. Of course with all that success there are lots of coat-tail riders who want to make a name for themselves as the next generation of West Chester trustees.  This particular year is unique because not only is George’s seat up for candidates because he is moving to the state position, but Mark Welch’s seat is up for re-election as well.  Lee Wong is the third seat and it is also up to be challenged.  Under a normal year to keep things running the way they have been in West Chester, only one of those seats would need to be defended from the incumbent personalities seeking to make a name for themselves.  This year, two seats must be defended.  It would be nice to get all three with conservative minded people, but looking at the list of people running there are a lot of liberals running as Republicans but are in fact major RINOs so we need to clear things up for the voters who don’t know the difference between the people with all the big signs so that they can know who they need to elect to keep West Chester in that top ranking with Money Magazine.  After all, what it comes down to is investments and for people who want to protect their investments in their community they must elect the right people this time around to maintain stability otherwise everything could go to hell quickly.

My picks for the West Chester trustee race is to re-elect Mark Welch.  He’s most responsible of all the candidates for the great Money Magazine reviews that have been unleashed during his term in office.  Ann Becker is my second pick; she is clearly the best next person to work with Mark to keep West Chester running correctly.  I’d like to see Lee Wong lose, because he’s an idiot, and a socialist.  His third vote isn’t too damaging so long as two real conservatives are on the other side.  It would be good to try out a new name to replace Lee and see if someone can emerge.  A new name would be best, not the tax and spend names from the old Lakota school board.  If I had to pick my poison Lynda O’Conner would beat out Joan the Hutt, (Joan Powell)  Both women have election experience and access to some money which is why they have some big signs, but neither one of them are conservatives.  They have both supported high taxes in the past but of the two Lynda is clearly far better than Joan.  Honestly voters would do better to elect the lady who makes sushi at Kroger before trying either of the Lakota school board people.  At least she knows how to make something good for a decent price.  But she’s not running unfortunately.  Everyone else running is a gamble.

Mark and Ann are the sure money to maintaining West Chester’s high profile and country-wide expectation.  If both of them are not elected together than anything can happen.  Money Magazine likely won’t be including West Chester on their future lists.  A lot of people take for granted good management when they have it, but miss it desperately once it’s gone.  Mark’s track record is stout and needs no explanation.  Ann Becker for those who don’t know her can easily make up for experience with her thinking.  I’ve known her for years and she is at the center of almost everything political in Southern Ohio.  She like George Lang knows how to “work” things behind the scenes without going negative.  She is a naturally gifted personality and I think being a woman helps her tremendously in perhaps even improving the Money Magazine ranking in the future.  She knows how to sell conservative ideas without the typical defensive posture that most business oriented conservative men do.  Not that it matters, but most people who have been successful in business have been taught that they have to apologize for their success so they get defensive with the media when they talk, or they avoid talking at all.  Ann is great with the media, she’s on 55 KRC every week speaking with Brian Thomas and she’s done a lot of television.  She has connections to CNN and many other major national networks, so she brings a lot to the table and is the best opportunity for West Chester to either maintain the Money Magazine ranking, or improve on it.  Nobody else running has a chance.

It is a tremendous honor to have such a large community like West Chester continuously ranked on that list. I love West Chester.  I have traveled a lot and have been to some of the most far-reaching places on earth and there isn’t anywhere that I can think of that’s better than West Chester.  From all the offerings along Cox Road to the Union Central Blvd exit, West Chester is a very dynamic place.  You can do just about anything in West Chester.  From Entertrainment Junction to the great VOA Park, people could live in West Chester every day and never go anywhere else and still have more to do then in resort cities like Orlando Florida, or Las Vegas—and would never miss an opportunity.  That is saying a lot.  I consider most of my Saturday’s and Sundays to be like a vacation, but it’s all within my home town.  Between IKEA where my mother-in-law comes in from out-of-town to shop at, like a lot of people do, to Top Golf where it’s a dream destination for business clients visiting from far off places, West Chester has it all.  But it needs to continue to have good management—we can’t take these things for granted.  It’s a delicate balance, so be sure to vote in November for Mark and Ann—and take your chances on that third name.  But make sure two of them are the people I mentioned.

Rich Hoffman

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Las Vegas wasn’t a Terrorist Act, it’s a Battlefield: What’s missing determins the guilt of the Deep State

 

My view of the Las Vegas massacre is not one of terrorism or even derangement syndrome from Stephen Paddock—the millionaire who shot at people from a hotel window into a crowd of country music concert participants. It’s that of a battlefield in this ideological civil war that our country is now locked in. We are clearly not one country of one people focused on a future we can all share together, but a divided country of left and right-thinking philosophies which are not cohesive. One side will win and one side will lose and will be forced to retreat. The calls for peace for which the political left is so well-known for are only to disarm us all for their social incursions. They do not intend to live in peace with conservative Americans, and mean to destroy us, and it is there for which we must begin this discussion. The Las Vegas massacre is a battlefield, not a murder. It is obviously about destroying part of an ideology not in just randomly killing people for a personal objective and this is the reason authorities have not been so forthright about the killer’s motives.
I think the most telling evidence of this assumption is that we actually pause when the FBI says that this was not a terrorist incident, yet we are inclined to believe the ISIS claims that it was responsible—even though this guy was white, older, and affluent. Stephen Paddock doesn’t fit any of our assumptions about terrorism, yet he just committed the largest shooting incident in American history and he went to great effort to buy himself enough time to kill as many people as possible. His hotel suit was strategically selected. He had advanced cameras stationed to give him warning of incoming officers—the whole effort looked more like the ending of the movie Fight Club than anything else. There was an ideological story present that was not being revealed early in the investigation. In a time of massive media footprints from Facebook to Twitter—there is surprisingly nothing known at this point about Stephen Paddock except that he was a retired accountant who was a high rolling gambler that had an Asian girlfriend.

So what we have to go on is to examine what has been erased to draw our conclusions. The attack was against supposed Trump supporters. The gun grabbers were quick to exploit the tragedy and some members of the media actually showed hostility toward the victims because they were believed to be Trump voters. We have seen the Deep State react very violently toward the Trump presidency and even if conspiracy theories are not entertained, we must look at what President Trump has had to endure over the last 9 months and wonder how many of the most farfetched thoughts really are. Some people believe that there are means to control the weather with advanced scientific mechanisms. Three major hurricanes in just a few weeks when we’ve never seen anything like that before have hit the United States. Unprecedented investigations into the affairs of the Trump family when the Obamas and Clintons have been given a free pass—even in the face of great evidence. War being stoked by all the villains of the world, close calls with Russia, North Korea, Syria, Iran and constant pressure from every regime to lash out at the United States at the slightest provocation. Trump has had to terminate more employees than any previous administration at a faster rate than at any point in history due to the constant leaks to the press—some of which have come from the ex-FBI director himself. And now on Trump’s watch is the deadliest shooting ever when the President ran on a pro-gun platform. If only one of those things could be tied to the Deep State control of our government and the shadow instigators who hide there, we have an obvious problem. These are not random occurrences, they are deliberately solicited to evoke social change—at least some of them. They are being unleashed to overload this president and the sentiment of his voters into not making such bold assertions in the future. They have declared war against America—these Deep State activists and I don’t think I’m going out on a limb here in saying it, but I bet this investigation into Stephen Paddock leads straight to the door of the Deep State itself. The bread crumbs have been deliberately picked up too obviously. It’s what we don’t see that tells us most about what’s really there. Nobody goes to that much trouble to kill so many people unless there is an ideological purpose, and that ideology was obviously against Trump and his supporters, and that to me means war.

No, this is not the time to consider gun restrictions—not by any means. The first reason would be that we can’t trust our centralized authorities. If the Deep State has so much power that they can so openly harass a rightfully elected president, then they can harass the rest of us at will. They don’t care about laws, they certainly don’t care about respect and obviously collateral damage is something they are willing to utilize to keep their grip on power. The only thing that stands between their complete takeover of American life is our rights to own guns—to stop such a thing from happening. If they were successful in making America a gun free zone then there would be nothing to stop them from running the country. All they need is to make people shake their heads yes to obvious evil such as this Las Vegas shooting to start the ball rolling. They don’t care how many people they must kill to get us to say yes—and that tells us everything we need to know.

Was Stephen Paddock insane—maybe. Maybe he did it for the girlfriend. But he had enough thought in his mind to prepare the battlefield for a game changing moment and we must understand why he would spend so much time, money and even give his life to such a thing. Those reasons don’t point to insanity, they point to warfare and ideological activism that obviously leads to the Deep State. How do we know, well, the evidence has been erased leading there, because the floor is too clean to the door of that Deep State. And that means we need more guns, not less. You don’t give your weapons over to the enemy, and yes, that is how we must view these insurgents.

After Trump was elected many people thought that they didn’t need to buy as many guns, and that they might let their support of the NRA drift in neglect—but trust me dear reader, the time for that support has never been stronger. We need guns now more than ever and we need the NRA. We are not living in a civil society. We are in a time of civil war and in moments like those in Las Vegas the bullets became real more than just ideological. The fuel that cast them into the bodies of so many people was not the guns themselves, but the thoughts behind them. And there is no law for addressing a broken ideology which seeks to destroy people to make a point. Until that war is won by us in the conservative movement, then we must have plenty of guns and the desire to use them to defend ourselves from the villains of our society. And that includes the members of the Deep State—because it’s obvious that they are in a killing mood—and the only way to rectify that is with force of our own—which is sadly the only language they understand.

Rich Hoffman

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