Tag: education funding

There is No Such Thing as Universal Health Care for All: It’s a dumb idea created by dumb, lazy people hungry to control us all

When we are born there is no right to healthcare. Other people are not burdened with our support for life, and there is no guarantee that, that industry will even be around for our lifetime. The socialist fantasy of universal healthcare like a universal living wage are ridiculous notions born of lazy, below the line thinking. The problems of course are that people cannot be compelled just because they live to care for other people other than themselves. But more than anything, the healthcare industry itself is a changing business model and in its current state needs a lot of work. There is more to the fantasy alignment of socialism politically and socialism in medicine. One thing about modern medicine is that it is a very socialist enterprise and I personally despise it. Demanding funding to fill that monster isn’t a good idea and that is truly at the heart of the matter.

I am normally a very healthy person. One of my best features that I am very proud of is my immune system. As a kid I had perfect attendance for years in school and was seldom ever sick. As an adult I almost never miss work for anything and bounce back quickly when something major does happen. But I am over 50 now and that brings with it new challenges to a body that is beyond its reproductive usefulness. Nature has a way of rejecting bodies it no longer needs and as we age we all deal with the consequences of this effect. The world has little need for a human body that is no longer reproductive or seeking to be, so disease and degradation are facts of life for any aging person. But I still don’t accept that I am powerless to not determine my own fate so I found myself deathly sick for about three weeks at the end of 2018 and wondering the aisles of Wal-Mart at 6:30 AM seeking a way to combat my multiple ailments. I was highly suspicious that I may have ingested some government formed mutation of the flu designed to kill me because I just couldn’t shake this sickness and there were moments when I wondered if I was actually going to die.

My children were very worried, and as we moved into the New Year there was pressure to get over the sickness, so I could resume my life and all the people who need me to do my thing for their own benefit. So I won’t get into the details of what I had to do to fix myself. It certainly didn’t involve illegal drugs which I would never do under any circumstance. But I’m not going to give any of my enemies any knowledge of what I know about medicine and how to overcome attacks to my body from either genetically modified viruses or nanotechnology, let’s just say that. But I know more than most people could imagine and that condition will remain. However, for a while, I was concerned and actually considered that if I got it wrong, I may have ended up dead. So things got pretty serious. Yet when faced with the worst of it, going to the doctor was not an option, for contextual purposes.

There are times and places for doctors, but the system is so corrupt that I will avoid going even in life and death circumstances. I would trust myself more to come up with a solution than a doctor. Doctors as they are now are designed to take a sickness and extend it so that people lose their individuality and independence turning to drugs instead of their own immune systems and that is the dark little secret to the medical profession and why Democrats and other progressives want universal healthcare. They don’t want to fix people, they want to make more people’s lives dependent on the healthcare industry for which government seeks to control. It’s a very malicious plan.

As I explained to my daughters at the height of my own sickness, if a doctor had the ability to diagnose my condition then they would find prostate problems, cancer cell counts that were high, spinal alignment trouble, heart pressure problems and many other factors for which they would attempt to advise prescriptions to remedy. Most people would follow their recommendations to their own graves. As I told my kids I wasn’t ready to surrender any of my personal independence to drug companies and would rather die in the process, which I almost did a few times. But that’s how serious I was about it. As I have said many times the entire medical industry is turning toward regenerative growth, and it is there that I turned to solve my own problems, and likely always will. It works, it’s not a bunch of hippie science but in using what our bodies have their entire lives to stay healthy. I trust my immune system to fight off anything. If unusually genetically modified assailants come in contact with it, then sometimes that immune system needs a boost, but ultimately, that immune system needs to stay fighting ready all the time, and to be healthy. Our modern healthcare industry unfortunately seeks to destroy that trend and make adults more dependent on drugs than their own systems and that is the real terror that is behind the progressive universal care fantasy that is being championed by today’s Democrats.

By accepting universal healthcare for all it would be like accepting a dial-up telephone as the end of technical innovation for the medical industry. Instead of pushing for the next iPhone in technical breakthroughs where people weren’t just treated for being sick, but to restore them to complete health so that doctors and medicine didn’t have a monopoly of control on their lives is the trend that is trying to be born. With more political involvement the desire from Democrats is to prevent that opportunity because their ultimate desire is to use the medical industry to control the population, because like open borders, when they control whether or not people will live or die, that tends to have an effect on the ballot box and so far I haven’t heard anybody talk about that aspect of this argument. The Democrats don’t want to save people with universal healthcare, they want to control them.

As I provided in my personal example, I’d literally rather die than give up that personal freedom. I do not trust the medical industry to have my best health in mind when advising me on critical health issues. I’d rather take care of it myself which should say a lot. I’m by far a paranoid person, but I see a trend in medicine which indicates very below the line thinking. As an employer I am not impressed with a doctor’s note from an employee that does not come to work. I have to honor it legally, but it certainly changes how I feel about the employee as an option of investment for the future. And I exercise my rights to have such an opinion. Doctor’s don’t run my life in any way, they don’t tell me what drugs to take, what surgeries to have, or how productive I’ll be. And I am certainly not open to giving them more power with a guaranteed government backing for their industry with universal healthcare. I think that is the dumbest idea in the history of ideas for an industry that needs much less bureaucratic elements and much more innovation. People need to be restored to health not dependent on more government and the current health care industry does not fix people properly, and that is the heart of the conversation, not a right to something that is bad for you to begin with.

Rich Hoffman

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The Losers Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer: More reason to keep the government shut down

More and more the only way to really describe the current political condition in the world is by above the line thinking and below the line. The Democrat response to President Trump’s border wall case made on national television on January 8th, 2019 was as below the line of anything I have seen in many years openly. Usually these types of negative, loser types conceal their intentions much more carefully, but not anymore. The Democrats empowered by what they think is a big victory in winning the House in 2018 are moving toward open socialism, which I have been warning about for many years. I remember when many below the line people in the Republican party thought I was being dramatic and even embarrassing in pointing the matter out with my bullwhips and YouTube videos, and my novels and media interviews. Back then many conservatives were reading from conservative publications that were caught in the grand socialism story themselves, and they thought they were too high brow to consider such a thing. But I saw it because to my perspective all the thinking was below the line, victimization and consolation of one another through group affiliation, both in Democrats and Republicans. Party politics for such below the line people wasn’t for some tactical implementation of political philosophy, it was for their own sanity maintenance. And like any below the line thinker, they seek to remain there and do not want to be challenged into any other concepts, even if reality dictates the necessity.

Watching the arrogance of such below the line people to keep the country hostage to such a mindset really angered me, because if you really listen to what Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi were saying in response to President Trump it was as bad as it gets in politics. It is they who are using the government worker shutdown as a bargaining chip. It is they who think that people will blame Trump for the loss in jobs and for the shut down in general. Don’t essentially stated that they weren’t going to budge at all, that they were clearly using this issue to try and knock the President out of office in 2020. And they are willing to go all the way with it. That’s why no matter what comes from Republicans, they are going to have to break the back of the Democrats on this shut down issue once and for all. Above the line thinking is going to have to destroy below the line thinking, there simply can’t be any other ending. Failure to do that will only get more of the behavior. There can be only a glorious defeat of Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer in 2019 over the border wall and the government shut down.

Any above the line thinker sees the situation clearly. The American people really don’t care about the government shutdown. It doesn’t affect them and they are too busy to care. It’s the middle of winter and people don’t care if the national parks are closed. People like me would argue that government workers shouldn’t even be tied to any of this. Airlines should cover their own security costs; the government shouldn’t be in a position to shut down anything in American commerce. Government job growth is and has been for years part of the problem. Government has inserted itself where it doesn’t belong and that is part of the issue. Government has created this below the line monster so that it could send out some of its sales people, like Schumer and Pelosi and beg to be fed like some homeless person sitting at the side of a highway intersection pulling on the heartstrings of those passing by. The leverage they seek is to not only grow government and its below the line influence, but to destroy the political order from any above the line thinking.

If you really were to peel back the onion and look at the open border suggestion that is at the heart of most of our modern media and political system, you would find that the real war is between above the line and below the line thinking. The goal is not peace and to help people from impoverished countries live better lives in America, but to overrun people in America who think above the line with depressing reminders of humanities loser mentality, drugs, cheap sex, graffiti, tattooed gang members—essentially an age of anarchy intent to send mankind back to the mentality of social order over 4000 years ago. Below the line thinkers do not like advancements in thought and they love to hide their misery behind collectivist endeavors so that is why they use politics to advance their loser state. For them they would oppose Donald Trump if he gave a speech on saving the world from hunger because they simply don’t want to give merit to any above the line thinker, because they don’t want to live up to the standard.

I learned a long time ago that most politicians don’t want to solve problems. I have the honor to know a few locally who do like to solve problems, and to live above the line, but they are a pretty recent phenomenon. I think there will be many more like them emerging in the years to come because there is a natural human desire to have their political order functioning above the line as opposed to below the line. Trump’s election in that context shouldn’t come as a surprise to anybody, but to Democrats not willing to accept that the movement is one of above the line thinking chose to see what they want. Democrats trying to run for office in 2020, especially for president think that the charm of Trump is that he can associate with anybody, which is why Elizabeth Warren thought drinking a beer on a social media video would gain her points with a base of political supporters. But what she and many of them are missing is that Trump’s selling point was always above the line thinking as opposed to loser victimhood and that’s what Americans wanted from the beginning. All Democrats are offering at any level is victimhood, and that is not appealing to voters.

It Republicans can hold together with that understanding of what this issue is really about, they can destroy the loser mentality that is driving the entire Democrat party, and they’ll win this government shutdown battle. Trump will have to get his border wall money from declaring a national emergency which will be risky, but he’ll have to do it because Democrats would rather die than give him anything close to a campaign promise, because they are losers and can only think in that fashion. Democrats are not for American growth and border security, they are about global assimilation so that the worst of us can bring down the best and the level of expectation for everyone be lowered to more below the line thinking, where they are most comfortable. To them they have nothing to lose because what they are fighting for is the right to be a loser and to do that, they just have to keep saying no. And that is what everyone needs to understand about this particular breed of Democrat.

Rich Hoffman

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It’s Good to be Hated: Consider it an honor

It is actually quite a compliment to be hated. Being hated is a very healthy thing. Its one thing to point to a big national figure like Donald Trump and say that people hate him, and for good reason. It’s quite another to look at a new executive in any business who brings in their wake great change and to say that they are hated. But in essence, the hatred is a needed element and is something that should be sought out, not avoided. If everyone loves you, you are doing something wrong, and not pushing the world around you as much as you should be to above the line thinking.

It never made any sense to me why we have taught people in our culture that the most important thing in the world was to seek being liked by our peers. I suppose for me it has taken roughly ten years of writing articles over 1000 words each coupled with many interesting life experiences to hone the issue down to simply Above the Line Thinking and Below the Line Thinking. I had to re-read The Oz Principle for a business need, which is a brilliant book. But after all the personal work that I have done, it really made a lot more sense to me now than it had previously. Its one thing to read a book like that and agree with it. It’s quite another to understand it at a deep philosophical level and be able to use it. Many of our problems in the world do simply come down to below the line thinking and above the line thinking as proposed in The Oz Principle.

But that wasn’t the first time that humans figured out the problem, The Oz Principle is a business take on The Wizard of Oz which was a very empowering story about not being a victim in life, and getting what you need at the end of a hero’s journey. Dorothy and her little dog didn’t do anything to be hated by the Wicked Witch but exist, much like the rest of us. All Dorothy did was get caught in a whirlwind and land on the sister of the Witch with her house. It was an accident, yet Dorothy was made to feel she owed something to the evil spinster. All Dorothy wanted to do was return to Kansas and help people along the way. Nobody in the world should have hated her for it, yet they did. It was unavoidable. It always is for people who are good to be hated by those who are bad.

So what is good and bad, well, simply bad people are below the line thinkers who scheme and plot to get others to join them there. Below the line thinking is victimhood mentality, thinking negatively about things, trying to keep the world suppressed to your weaknesses so that you as a below the line thinker are not outmatched by others. Below the line thinkers love the idea of equality for all because it gets them off the hook to perform. This is why politics is such a below the line activity, and why we instinctively think of it as an evil enterprise. Above the line however is where the good are, they are positive people always looking to improve the world around them. They take personal responsibility for actions and are always advancing intellectually because of it. Judging the good from the bad is simply that easy.

In the corporate world it happens all the time, a consultant is hired or a charismatic new CEO who comes in as an above the line thinker and changes the world of the below the liners, and it is safe to say that those employees hate that new element. They hate above the line thinkers because it demands on them performance, they are too lazy, or too corrupt to compete with. So the dominate emotion is sheer hatred. I grew up with a pretty good understanding of these things before I ever read The Oz Principle, but as I got older I understood the futility of making other people happy really early in my life. Instinctively I understood that if people disliked you, that you were doing something very right. Now in my life I understand that the more people do dislike me or hate me, the better I am doing in the world. If everybody loves you, then you are socializing with too many below the line thinkers and are becoming one of them yourself. Above the line thinkers, good people, are much fewer in number among populations because of the difficulty in being an above the line person. It is much easier to be scarecrows in life using The Wizard of Oz metaphor a bit, just doing our jobs and staying put where people tell us to be, then in going down the yellow brick road to a moment of self-discovery to find out all along we had everything we needed within ourselves. Its much easier to blame others for our problems than to take responsibility for them and to solve them. Most people spend their entire lives like the tin man or the scare crow blaming others for their withering condition when all they really need to do is to follow Dorothy to their own personal freedom. But guess what, they want to keep it that way, because it’s easy to just stand in a field and rot away. It takes a great effort to walk around and change your circumstances and when some above the line leaders crosses your path and evokes you to move along, great resentment and hatred do become the dominating emotions. But so what.

Once you understand that everything essentially comes down to above the line and below the line thinking, everything in the world makes much more sense, especially in politics. If the world believes that Donald Trump is a good president because lots of people love him then merit would be given to his faults due to so many below the line thinkers hating him. But as my way of thinking persists, since lots of people hate him, he is doing a great job as president because he is encouraging them to think above the line and they clearly don’t want to. That isn’t his problem, its theirs.

Everyone should aspire to be an above the line thinker, there is nothing good that comes out of below the line thinking. Forget about political affiliations, gender roles, skin color, nothing matters more than people who are above the line thinkers. Everyone should aspire to be one. Everyone, without exception. But so long as there are below the line people functioning in the world, there will be conflict and hatred. And that conflict is good, it’s needed, and its very healthy. Without above the line thinkers there would never be advancements in human society. And without them there would never be a challenge to evil. The true definition of the battles of good and evil come down to above and below the line thinking. The two are not compatible, they cannot negotiate together, and one must destroy the other. So the hatred that is directed at good, above the line thinkers is one of the greatest compliments that can be given. It means that you are doing it right, and good things do come about as a result—so long as you can teach yourself not to care about their opinions.

Rich Hoffman

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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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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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Two Bits of Advice in the New Year: The nature of leadership and political parties

I haven’t had a chance yet in a while but I plan to attend a West Chester Township Trustee meeting to confront a lap top loser who has been going around and trying to paint me as some kind of caricature of detriment to the Butler County GOP. This loser actually had some rationalization to indicate that I was the cause of embarrassment to a political party, which is to say a club of people who lend support to each other for elections and the ability to manage local affairs. In truth, anybody would be lucky to know me and unless someone is outperforming me in some manner of life, anything they say is fear-based illusions which brings us to a greater issue which will become a theme for me. Because to really solve problems it’s not enough to just point out where the errors are, you have to change the circumstances that cause those errors and that is something I do at many levels. And the byproduct of that change is usually anger. People thriving off a present system of chaos do not want to change and when someone comes along that represents change of any kind, deep resentments and hostilities always follow. There is nothing new there. If something I’m doing causes consternation among those happy with the way things are there’s usually a good reason. But my personal policy is not to let things go unsettled, and I certainly won’t when challenged by some loser who wants a political party to remain like it has been in the past when its clear improvements are needed in the future.

Whether in politics or business there are many people when groups of activity are considered who function below the line of positive thought and they are the causes of a need for change. It is baffling for instance that anybody would hate Donald Trump as much as they do for president. I had to get gas on New Year’s Eve ahead of 2019 and saw prices had dropped to $1,88. That by itself should be enough for people to love the President, but good performance is not what losers in the world want. Losers in this case are below the line thinkers, people functioning from perpetual negativity. What they fear most in the world is that some motivated person will come along and change everything for them, forcing the bar to be raised in expectations. So good people, since people, smart people, any people who by their very nature force others to improve themselves by default are hated. There is nothing they can do to change that reality because it goes against all the nature of human behavior.

We were all taught incorrectly in our government schools that we should spend a certain amount of time nurturing our relationships with other people no matter how dysfunctional they may be. For most the basic skills they learn in those formative years stay with them the rest of their lives. When there is a problem, they don’t first think how to solve the problem, instead they turn toward the social peer groups for support and whatever needs to be fixed languishes in purgatory waiting for leadership to come along and change the circumstances. But that never happens because leadership is not a group created attribute. Leadership can be channeled through people but it is not created by groups of people. It doesn’t come from the masses, it certainly doesn’t come from political parties. When political parties get together to raise money for a candidate or to strategically put up challengers for an upcoming election, the people participating could be said to be managing their objectives. Leadership happens when someone gives a motivating speech which pulls the objectives of everyone together for a common cause, it doesn’t happen as a default condition of group activity.

But like any group association where the members know the rules and have made sacrifices to their lives to live within them, the last thing they want to hear is that all those rules don’t matter and that some change in the form of leadership is challenging the order they have come to trust as a reality. They fall in love with the rules of conduct in group behaviors not because that conduct is good, but because they have come out on the plus side of it. In elements of the Republican party such as this loser I mention, they want a nice structured political group where the characters at play are controlled, the policies keep a progressive lean to them which has been there since the 1960s in America and any challenge to those assumptions are to be destroyed. For a normal person the value of the relationships in the group are their reason for being a part of the larger organization. But in my case, I just want things to work. So I could care less who says hi to me or who invites me to this or that. I go to things sometimes when invited if there is a good reason to go, but typically I don’t have the time. From my view, the relationships are irrelevant, they don’t do anything for me because I like to see good things happen and that usually means stepping over bad people who are in the way of something, so making friends never is my objective. Surprisingly, such a position makes far more friends than enemies because people like above the line people on an individual basis, but they find them repulsive in regards to group objectives.

As we step into yet another year, I have decided I’m not going to sugar coat little things like the criticisms that come from losers functioning from faulty positions when change is needed from a current approach. Regarding the GOP in Butler County I have watched many positive changes occur over the last decade and the results have made it better. Not just better for me, but better as a tactical political party. It doesn’t matter to me who gets mad in the process because making friends is not the objective, being successful is, and if losers think they can continue to contaminate success, they are living in a world that will be crashing down around them.

I gave two bits of advice to people on New Year’s Eve that are helpful to any general readership, the first is that no I’m not planning to run for office when there are lots of fun things to do in business at my particular age. Politics is something I consider serving the business world, so why would I do something in the service industry, because that’s what politics is. They certainly are rulers who give power to the office holders, and all too often that is how politicians view themselves, and would like to continue. But that’s not how it is. The other thing I said was that if you are the best at something you should never have to look over your back at those seeking an opportunity to ankle bite you out of existence. If you are the best who cares what other people are doing? If you really want to be successful you should never pay attention to what other people are doing. The moment you do care, is the moment that losers start controlling your life, and there are a lot of them. They were the ones who invented many of the problems of our modern age, because they have hidden the solution to problems within the limits of peer pressure. But if you are a person who excels in the things you do, there is nothing good that can come out of such a relationships. So why yield to it. The answer is, you don’t.

Rich Hoffman

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The Buccaneers Fired Dirk Koetter and the Bengals Finally Fired Marvin Lewis: To win you have to get rid of a problem, especially in areas of management

One of the reasons I am still a Tampa Bay Buccaneer fan after many seasons of losing is because the organization as ran by the Glazer family is always on a quest to find the right combination of coaching to match with the players they have on the field to be victorious. If they fall short, they do not hesitate to fire their coaches such as they did Sunday afternoon at the end of their season after losing to the Atlanta Falcons. Dirk Koetter had been with the team for three years but it was obvious with all the weapons the Bucs had on the field to use that the coaches just didn’t have an approach, and they ended the season with just five wins, most of them coming at the beginning. I thought Dirk Koetter was a pretty good guy, not the worst coach in the world, but even after victories after he’d hand out game balls to star players, there was something not quite right about him, and that surely turned up on the field. The Bucs organization is quick to determine that someone is working out and they fire them when its apparent that things just aren’t going to change which is precisely why I continue to love the Tampa Bay Buccaneer organization as a whole. They may not win every game, but at least they try to.

That is why the Bengals in Cincinnati should have terminated their relationship with Marvin Lewis years ago. The guy just doesn’t get it. They have stuck with him for 16 lackluster seasons and the results have never been good. He should have been fired many years ago because it was disrespectful to the Bengals fans who pay premium money for the NFL experience to expect them to put up with Marginal Marvin for so long. The resentment was obvious at the stadium even under the best of circumstances. I had gone to the game this year with good club seat tickets to watch Tampa Bay play the Bengals in Cincinnati on a beautiful October day just before Halloween. It was an absolutely perfect day for the NFL experience in a big city with real playoff implications, because at the time both teams were in the hunt. And the Bengals won that day so everyone should have been happy. But virtually everyone from the vendors selling beer to the men in the restroom talking to each other about the game across urinals were talking about how they were surprised that Marvin Lewis hadn’t found a way to blow the game. Any kind of respect for Marvin Lewis had left Cincinnati a long time ago, yet Mike Brown had stuck with him perpetually with no end in sight.

In any kind of successful organization, you can’t be trigger happy either. You have to give a new coach time to implement a change culture of winning from losing, and that should take a year or two. But in the NFL fans are the ones paying the bills, its unrealistic to expect them to put up with a bad team for more than a few years and still retain their season ticket packages. A lot of people say that Mike Brown doesn’t care about such things so long as he has a profitable television contract which I find hard to believe. As a businessman of any kind it is stupid to leave any money on the table and you don’t get to be as rich as the Brown family is by being stupid. I just don’t think they know what they are doing as football people. The father Paul Brown did understand, but his family didn’t and it shows.

The Bengals have been living in the past, they have had a couple of Superbowl appearances in the 1980s but nothing since and they are hanging their hat on that one achievement. Meanwhile the Tampa Bay Buccaneers won a Superbowl back in 2003 for a great 2002 season which had been many years in the making. But that was then, the world we live in is very much a what have you done for me lately reality. While at that Bengals game I wore my 2002 Superbowl victory hat for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and people kept saying to me that it was silly to wear that hat because it was a long time ago. I would then say to them with friendly banter that I would be happy to wear the Bengals Superbowl victory hat if they could get me one. Of course, that was when laughter from both sides exploded at the absurdity of it. But why should it be absurd?

The NFL is designed to give every city with an NFL team a shot at victory. I view much of the NFL structure as an entirely socialist enterprise where winners are penalized, and losers are boosted up, particularly in regard to draft picks. But this is because the goal of the NFL is to sell tickets and merchandise and if a team doesn’t make it to the big dance at least once a decade their fan base cools it in regard to spending. People generally support their home town team, but they don’t necessarily dream of a new football jersey for Christmas for a losing team. They want to at least thing that there is a chance at victory. Those are the basics of business. Yet in Cincinnati we have been asked to put up with losing as a reality and that goes against so many raw emotions for which the NFL experience depends. To stick with a coach like Marvin Lewis for so long because he’s a nice guy, which he is, or because he’s a progressive employment option that earns street credibility with the very progressive NFL isn’t enough to justify what they have asked fans to endure. You don’t keep a coach because of being nice or black, but because they win. That is the only objective in playing professional football—winning.

I would love to cheer on the Cincinnati Bengals. But I will always love the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and will spend quite a lot of money flying down to a game or two from time to time to blow many thousands of dollars on the Tampa economy because the Glazer family are always trying to do what they have to do to win. If the Bucs don’t win a single game in the whole season, I will still cheer them on. It didn’t surprise me at all that just a few hours after losing to Atlanta that Dirk Koetter was terminated as the head coach. It would have surprised me if he hadn’t been fired. But after the Bengals lost against the dreaded Steelers, YET AGAIN, it wouldn’t have surprised me if the Bengals had signed Lewis to a 150 year contract extension—but under tremendous public pressure, they finally fired Marvin Lewis. Because the Bengals have become synonymous to losers, and that is a terrible thing to bestow on a city that has supported that team through many years of lackluster performance. It’s a terrible disrespect to a community that doesn’t deserve it and I do feel sorry for Bengal fans. At least for me I can look forward to positive changes in the Buccaneer organization which gives me hope for an upcoming season of victory. That season may be over by the upcoming October, but at least they are trying. The Bengals are like drunken gamblers who have lost their life savings at a slot machine. They just keep pulling the lever and hoping for a new car. But all they ever get are lemons. Hopefully their next coach will be a real one.

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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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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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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