Tag: education funding

The Protests in Iran: What you need to know about why North Korea wants to blow everyone up–a brief history of Marxism for 2018 predictions

You might wonder dear reader why there has not been much coverage of the Iranian protests by young people demanding that things change in that hostile country which is one of the largest state sponsors of terror throughout the world.  Over the New Year of 2018 protests were abundant yet the media was silent on the matter because the history of the Iranian Revolution of 1979 was one conducted by various Marxist and communist groups oriented to the left of the political spectrum and their basic philosophy has imposed disaster economically there.  Prior governments in Iran were very friendly to Western culture and were rich with oil reserves—but Marxist Islamists like the  Mojahedin-e Khalq sought to push out Western influences in their country so they had a revolution not unlike the one where communism took over in Russia and the rest is history.  Within a roughly 50 year period communism driven by Marxist philosophy spread around the world, first in Russia by the 1920s, then to China and most of Asia in 1949, then to the Middle East in 1979.  In America our culture bent but didn’t completely break by adopting FDR’s The New Deal, but literally the rest of the world fell to Karl Marx and his disastrous ideas.  Of course Cuba, Mexico and Central then South America followed these movements into the 1980s—which is why they are all economic disasters today.

When we speak of the political left and the academia that fuels their efforts we are talking about people who subscribe to this global unification of the Marxist platform which was created essentially in the mid 1850s based on ideas that go all the way back to Sir Thomas More’s book Utopia.  Regardless of how traditional the Marxists of Iran try to disguise their intentions, their political and social platform is still a product of Europe, just as the communism of China is. All the countries that adopted that European disaster have tossed away their traditions and history to accept these collectivist ideas about humanity.  To date the only place in the world where Marx’s philosophy appears to be conducting a stable society is in Scandinavia—particularly Denmark.  There the people are pretty happy, but we are talking about a culture descended from the Vikings who are nothing like their ancestors.  They are a thoroughly defeated culture that has had to resign themselves to the lack of options present in their cold northern climate.  They don’t work much there and have decided to live a leisurely life with extremely high taxes—they are no longer the ambitious culture that launched the Vikings—and it shows.  It is that region of the world that the academics point to and proclaim that Sir Thomas More’s vision is possible.  But to have it mankind has to turn off their ambitions and treat life as a platform for death—and that just isn’t very appealing to young people when it comes down to it.

That brings us to the protests in Iran.  Like oil rich Venezuela—Iran has very high unemployment, there are very few cultural options for the young people and things never have manifested the way the revolutionaries predicted. Marxism has been a dismal failure and the leftist groups that imposed the revolution upon Iran are looking pretty stupid—and to save themselves from the embarrassments of their folly they sponsor terrorism to keep anybody from looking too deeply at their inner workings.   Ultimately this is why all these leftist countries fail and why they all try to use nuclear proliferation to threaten the world with economic instability because their own cultures look horrible in relation to competing markets.  That is certainly the case with North Korea which is a communist dictatorship.  Like Iran they want access to nuclear missiles so that they can threaten to blow up anybody who is doing better economically than they are.  In the Middle East its Israel which is very friendly to the West and makes everyone else in the region look terrible by any economic measure.  Then in North Korea its first South Korea then the United States and Japan that threaten the fat little kid running the communist country these days.

As we have clearly seen after Donald Trump was elected in the United States these same Marxist ideas have deep roots in our own Beltway politics and the media is a part of that culture.  My theory on the matter is essentially that The Communist Manifesto by Marx is an easy read.  Marxist ideas flow naturally with the empathy that women naturally bring to any decision-making process.  Men wanted to bed these women so adopted those basic philosophies essentially to improve their sex life and that’s how this stuff spreads like such a terrible disease.  I’ve read all those major books on economics including the Marx masterwork Das Kapital—and the German philosopher reveals himself to be essentially a victim to the motors of the world instead of the driver.  That is why Marxism fails everywhere except where people are resigned to any inner ambitions.  Marxism roots itself in exploitation of resources rather than in the productive utilization of what the human mind produces which is the essence of the work I much prefer and find infinitely more fascinating, the great philosophy of Adam Smith in his Wealth of Nations, which became the economic driver of The United States from the very beginning in 1776.  Marxism is all about victimization which is appealing to the lazy, corrupt, and emotionally weak of the human species whereas Smith’s capitalism is about empowerment and individualized realization.   The two ideas don’t mix.

The obvious reason that the media did not report the protests in the streets of Iran over the New Year is because they can’t admit to themselves that the premise for which the Marxism that overthrew the Western friendly leadership in Iran in 1979 never has worked and now people want something else. This anxiety goes back to the primary reasons Donald Trump was elected president to begin with—it was a base rejection of the Marxist platform that has destroyed so many American cities, like Detroit, Chicago (economically) and states like California, Illinois, and New York.  The political left is attempting to keep their whole platform together with masking tape and glue by ignoring the basic problem—that Marxism is not a philosophy that people really want when it comes down to it.  In Denmark where their youth are content to drink, have sex, and essentially behave as retired people in their prime income years—Marxism can work—but people have to yield their ambitions in life to such a mentality.  Aside from Bluetooth technology, Scandinavia isn’t exactly lighting up the stage of world culture—they are consumers of the great music, movies and fashion of the West, but they don’t do much to advance anything—due to their Marxist platform of socialism mixed with just enough capitalism to participate in free trade.  Literally everywhere around the world from North Korea, Iran, Mexico, South America all of Africa, and all the countries that touch the Mediterranean Sea except for Israel are drowning in their adoption of Marx as their basic left leaning philosophy—and the American media that is also very Marxist from their college training is embarrassed.

Once the people in Iran topple the Marxists that have been in power there for the last forty years one of the last great hopes of the political left will fall into the sunset of philosophic thought.  Marxism is doomed to fail—it always has been.  But for people who only know and understand it because they learned it in college where they had other good experiences and hold onto those memories as one connected enterprise it’s hard to admit that Marxism is such a disaster.  For them it’s like admitting your mother is a whore even while you live in the next room and hear her faking organisms to pay the bills.  Nobody wants to admit such things about something they care about—but that don’t change the reality about Marxism.  Karl Marx has destroyed the minds and economies of all the people who have followed him and the evidence is abundantly obvious.  Iran is the latest, but won’t be the last.  When people see there are options, they will want to participate.  The leftists who understand that options are their enemy will always try to use fear to attempt to push reality further into the distance, but in 2018 that all falls apart for them.  Iran and North Korea are in the first to fall from the pressure—but the American media will be the next.  And that is why they didn’t cover the protests—because they know they are next.

Rich Hoffman

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Immersive VR Education’s Apollo 11: A technological achievement that brings a moon landing to your livingroom

I treated myself to some catching up by New Year’s Eve to welcome 2018 with as clean a slate as possible.  I finished reading seven books over the last two weeks, some of them quite difficult reads—and I did it by not turning on the Playstation 4 except for once.  As everyone had parties celebrating the New Year I took a trip to the moon utilizing Immersive’s VR Education LTD fine triumph—their Apollo 11 VR experience.  I’ve talked about this before and have been excited about it—but until recently hadn’t had time to get into it.  The project was a big one, and was mostly funded with private Kick Starter investment that was credited at the end.  It was an educational documentary virtual reality experience that put you in the left seat of the Apollo 11 launch vehicle out of Kennedy Space center and into the command module during the approach to the moon.  Then landing on the moon you are in the left seat of the Lander standing next to Neil Armstrong.  Once there you get to stand on the moon and have a look at the Sea of Tranquility like it’s never been shown in a museum exhibit that I’ve seen.  It was simply amazing.  You also get to witness the return to earth and the perspective of the astronauts as they reentered the atmosphere awaiting splashdown.

I think where the 3D environments of the Playstation VR system really shine is within cockpits, such as cars and aircraft.  I have been amazed by the graphic displays of games like Battlefront VR and Driveclub where every little toggle switch is shown just as it would in a vehicle with such photorealistic display that you feel you can reach out and touch them.  So the same method works brilliantly in the Apollo 11 experience.  Graphics that might otherwise look terrible in 2D are easily forgivable in 3D so the ride up the elevator to the top of the rocket at the Kennedy Space Center was something I thought was also very impressive.  I’ve been there several times and know what things look like and even though a lot of details were missing, the overall feel of the area was certainly captured. Getting the feel of the height and the relationship to the surrounding terrain was what mattered and once inside the Apollo capsule awaiting launch that is where the VR part of the experience really shined.

As the launch occurred you could see out the windows as the rocket blasted through the various cloud layers and watch the earth fall behind.  Out the front window you could also see the sky go from a blue to black as stars gradually came into view—just as it would.  You could look at all the dancing lights on the control panel and look over at the other two astronauts as they answered alarms shaking in their seats from the momentum.  The radio chatter was ever-present and was synced up to the mouths of the pilots.  Occasionally I’d find myself staring at their faces and they’d look you in the eye as if they knew you were there pulling you into the experience.  It was all very thrilling and unexpectedly brilliant.

http://immersivevreducation.com/

Questions I’ve always had like where is the moon in relation to their perspective on the actual trip and how did it look were easily confirmed by me just by looking out the windows like a kid in the car first arriving at Disney World.  I was free to look out any window I could to see the relative positioning of the vessel as it plunged through space toward the moon.  Once on the moon I enjoyed much more than I would have expected at looking up into the earth as it just floated there in the dark of space. I’ve seen many picture of the earth from the moon in good resolution, but the presentation in VR was so much better—because it gave depth to the craters and the mountains surrounding the landing site that pictures just couldn’t capture in any way. I’ve also heard all the recordings of this epic landing seemingly hundreds of times, but being there in a VR world was a much better way to experience them.  First the speech by Kennedy at the beginning sounded like I had heard it for the first time.  It was presented in a very unusual way that sounded fresh to me.  Then the well-known speech of Neil Armstrong stepping onto the moon for the first time was particularly gripping as I was already out of the vessel watching him do it and looking all around me for perspective.  Shockingly I heard the voice of Nixon as he called from the Oval Office to talk about the experience.  As he spoke I was looking at the earth trying to see if Washington D.C. was pointed at us as he spoke considering the distance in between.  It was very easy to get caught up in the whole thing.  What this VR experience did particularly well was give depth and scale to the world we were exploring, which I think really opens up the way we can educate ourselves in the future.

Education is essentially the strength of this new VR technology.  The ability to go to places from the comfort of your living room and see things on a grand scale and interact with objects of history are the keys to our future.  What Immersive Education is doing I think is one of the most powerful education tools I’ve seen yet ever presented.  I often advocate that there is nothing that teaches better than a good book, because reading requires work and personal investment so that the information tends to stay with you longer as a participant.  Passively watching a television documentary doesn’t have the same effect.  It can still be good, but it’s not as effective.  However, with the kind of work Immersive Education is doing, you have no choice but to participate, because your mind actually thinks you are in those environments.  Even poorly rendered graphics in VR become sellable realities because the way our eyes participate in reality lends strength to the technology.  I can see the future of learning foreign languages within the countries of origin, and interaction with environments that would otherwise be exotic to be the strengths of this exciting new technology.  There is real potential here that is extremely new and creates so many options.

I would have never thought that I’d be able to spend a New Year’s Eve going to the moon then still having time to usher in the New Year in the traditional way.  But that is the world we are living in now.  Technology brings us options that curious minds can indulge in, and I consider that a real privilege.  For as many times as I’ve heard about man’s first trip to the moon, and heard the various speeches, Immersive Education managed to make it a fresh experience which was thrilling for any science buff.  But for the general public it is a real gift that can be easily downloaded into any living room that has a Playstation VR device.  I would go so far to say that I’d buy a Playstation VR just to take this one trip to the moon; it is that good, and revolutionary.  And what thrills me more is that it is just a sign of things yet to come.

Rich Hoffman

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Karoshi: The difference between efficiency and a lack of ability

Recently I’ve written a few articles on the scam which is Lean manufacturing.  It’s not that the work of Womack, Jones and Roos in The Machine that Changed the World is inaccurate in its observations of mass production cultures versus lean manufacturing strategies—but that their academic lenses failed to identify the crucial ingredient that made Asian efforts superior to those in the West.  In essence, it is the Japanese word Karoshi which allowed for the explosion on the scene of the revolutionary work ethic for which those three observers tried to capture in a bottle to save the West from itself and start a new kind of industrial revolution based on Lean manufacturing methods.  The Japanese specifically are willing to outwork the rest of the world and put country before self even over small things, which is why the comparisons in The Machine that Changed the World made traditional mass producers look so terrible in side by side productivity comparisons—yet nowhere in their book did they successfully make that point.  The closest they came was in declaring that the transplant operations in America were more successful when they had Japanese managers as opposed to American.  With all things considered equal, American workers, American labor laws, and American supply chains, Lean manufacturing did show dramatic improvements in American productivity—only they typically only worked best when the manufacturing plant was conducted by Japanese leadership as opposed to those of Westerners.  If you break that down even father it is because of the Japanese tendency toward Karoshi that one was more successful than another—the willingness to put in the time to build such a Lean culture at the management level.

For whatever reason at the end of the 2017 calendar year a lot of people have been pushing me to discover what my next book will be.  Honestly, I have a number of fiction projects brewing on the back burner but at this point in my life it’s all about business.  To many people from the outside they look at my life and think I, like the Japanese, are functioning from Karoshi—which is their word for burnout—or death by work.  After all I do work with people from those far-flung places on the other side of the world and even by their standards I work longer days and compress more into my 24 hour day than they can imagine.  What makes me different from other people is that I have this background in Western arts, (a form of martial art) that has also made me a very efficient person—personally, which for Christmas this year I shared with some of my employees for their benefit.  (click to view)  Working harder isn’t necessarily good—but working smarter is.  My lessons to others about the nature of the bullwhip is about more than just a novelty act—it’s an actual philosophy for which I run my life—and without it I’d be in the same boat as everyone else.  And now for the last couple of years I have been experimenting with Cowboy Fast Draw which has led me to several conclusions regarding Lean manufacturing—and that my next book will likely deal with these Western methods of approaching business that are of the next generation of thinking.  I need to tweak a few things first before committing them to paper—but my next literary project will likely have to do with this crucial issue.

One thing that led me to Cowboy Fast Draw to begin with was my engagement with many American manufacturers who were getting frustrated with my methods as we were setting up a massive supply chain together and many of them put up a lot of resistance—which ran counter to my way of thinking. Most of these people were classic mass production people—which I think still has a lot of merit to it from a traditional standpoint.  Their companies have made them adapt Lean techniques so being the typical students of Western education systems they went and memorized all the charts and graphs—and the Japanese words for things without understanding the core philosophy of what Lean manufacturing did.  When they ran up against me they would frustratingly utter that I’m all too willing to “shoot from the hip” too often which led to a name they called me behind my back as a “gunslinger” which to their minds was an insult.  We call quarterbacks in football gunslingers when we want to insult their impatience in the pocket to throw too many risky passes.  Only the risk isn’t that all that risky to my mind.  Using bullwhips and now shooting techniques that do not involve aiming I am extremely accurate and fast in those hobbies and naturally I carry those elements over into my personal life.  Just because you can make fast decisions on critical elements without a process map to guide you, it doesn’t make you risky, only “ultra efficient.”

With the help of Womack and many others Japan has been placed at the top of manufacturing respectability for the last half of a century and why not, they earned it. But there has been a cost.  Their very industrious culture in Japan is suffering from Karoshi to the point where 1 in every 5 people are suffering tremendously from it—and if you subtract females and elderly people, that leaves most of the adult males from age 20 to age 50 pressed with overburdened stress that actually makes them less productive.  Of course the slack-jawed hippies and micromanaging academics think that the solution for the entire industrial world is to force companies to regulate their workers to a 40 hour work week—which is pretty stupid.  That is no solution—because the work demand is a product of production necessity.  There is a need for the work, otherwise it wouldn’t exist.  And forcing workers to only work 60 hours a week forces payrolls higher which hurts companies because they have to add to their overhead—which academics don’t care about because that’s their solution to everything—being that’s their role within education societies.  The work is needed and you can’t just throw bodies at the problem because all those bodies are not equal—everyone can’t perform work at the same level.  But we can focus on performing work in the most efficient manner possible, and doing that we can greatly reduce the need to overwork ourselves.

I personally work 60 to 70 hours per week and I still have time for many things in my life.  Outsiders might look at my pace and declare that I’m at risk of Karoshi myself—but they don’t understand.  To explain it to them I’d use one of my bullwhip tricks in putting out a candle with it to show how speed, accuracy and judgment can all come together to project focused efficiency into very tight target radius.  Or in the case of Cowboy Fast Draw where a gun has to be drawn from a holster and shot into a target in under a half a second—the work still gets down.  If the goal is to shoot a gun into a target, that task can be done whether it takes a half a second or up to a minute as the shooter takes their time aiming the weapon and firing.  The fast draw artist is obviously much more efficient at performing that basic task.  They might be able to shoot that same target 20 or 30 times while the cumbersome minded shooter wastes huge amounts of time pointing and aiming. The aiming is only a task needed for those who lack the faith in themselves to perform the task.  So in essence, the reason that countries like Japan have so much trouble with Karoshi is that they have brought in so much work—their society cannot process it all on time using the methods of approaching that work which they are utilizing now.  They need methods that still perform the work, but only much faster and still have the accuracy needed.

When I hear some inefficient person—whether it’s the president of a company that is filled with inefficient workers and is struggling to meet quotas, or an old-fashioned engineer who says we are working too fast to not make mistakes I get pretty mad.  What they are really saying is that I should bend my life to their limits because I can do all those things fast and accurate.  Speed does not mean a lack of quality—it’s only a detriment if the person performing the task is an inefficient human being.  And that is the essence of human behavior that Womack never addressed in his Lean manufacturing work—and why I’m not a big fan of the guy.  The reason the Japanese beat the West in manufacturing over the last several decades is not because of Lean methods.  It’s because they simply were willing to outwork the world to climb back on top after they lost World War II.  It was their path to redemption.  Now however that the world has looked to them for the method to perform work, the pressure is crushing their culture with high incidents of Karoshi.  And I’m saying there is a better way, one that still has all the efficiencies—but puts more of an emphasis on speed so that productivity doesn’t stack up behind the incompetent—but that the good manager can figure out who can do more in less time than the sluggish mind of those less capable.  That is how we solve the problem of being overworked even as the world demands more productivity at a much more rapid pace.  We can’t say no to that challenge—we simply have to figure out a better way to do it—which I’m thinking seriously of helping to formulate.

Rich Hoffman

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The White House Should Get Behind, ‘The 15:17 to Paris’: What makes Americans so quick to take down terrorists–(the ultimate authority figures)

Just a hint to the Trump administration, after all the good things that happened in 2017, if I were them, I’d get behind this new Clint Eastwood film, The 15:17 to Paris. It’s coming out at the start of February, but I’m sure there will be advanced screenings at the end of January and after all the negative activity regarding the anti-Trump Spielberg movie with Tom Hanks about The Post, putting the seal of administration approval on this film will really launch 2018 in a positive pro-American light. After watching the preview and knowing Eastwood directed films nearly shot-by-shot, I knew enough about this story of three American young people on a train from Amsterdam to Paris that stopped a terrorist attack, to get excited about it. If a normal director handled the material, it might come off as a kind of television movie, but with Eastwood, there is a whole different layer that the master filmmaker taps into with great depth behind what on the surface seems to be very simple. And in this specific instance it answers the question—why do Americans have a tendency to stop terrorists outside of institutional reaction to these matters? Why not three French guys, or three English lads—or Germans? Why don’t we ever hear of those types of stories, why is it always Americans? Well, I know the answer and honestly this blog is about that topic almost daily. But I wanted to read the book of the movie to make sure that Eastwood’s source material contained that type of sentiment, like American Sniper did—and guess what—it does. Even better, it ends on a high note instead of the sad ending of American Sniper. I predict that this movie, The 15:17 to Paris will become the hottest film out of the gate in 2018 and will become many people’s favorite movie. I read the book over the last couple of days and it answered my questions very well and can report that this movie is the perfect companion in pop culture to the Trump presidency. It couldn’t have been slated for release at a better time—after the first full year of the Trump inauguration.

In a lot of ways the three heroes who stopped the terrorist Ayoub El-Khazzani (the ultimate authority figure who literally uses fear to invoke compliance)–Anthony Sadler, Alek Skarlatos, and Spencer Stone where social outcasts who had really hard times with authority figures. Their public-school experiences were miserable. Their teachers wanted to put them on attention deficit medicine, which Spencer’s mom became very angry about—to the extent that she pulled her son out of school and put him into a private church oriented school. Alek went with him and the two boys had daily problems with authority finding themselves always in the principal’s office. After a few years of that miserable failure the parents put the two kids back into a public school but one that they thought was better in the suburbs of Sacramento, California. There they met Anthony who taught the two misfits how to dress and think like other cool kids—which worked to a minimum effect and ended up bonding the three boys for life. After school Spencer and Alek bounced around. Spencer wanted to join the special forces but got bumped because essentially, he couldn’t learn to sew. He continued to get bumped down the military ladder as his classic problem with authority figures held him back tremendously. But as life does often, things stabilized and to try to outpace those resentments in their young lives the three boys managed to meet in Europe for a grand vacation while they still could, which is how they found themselves on The 15:17 to Paris.

The book arrived at my house on a nice day during a Christmas vacation as the snow was falling slowly outside. I had been reading several books that day, but I was really excited to get my hands on this one for a specific purpose. One thing that Eastwood knows that the rest of Hollywood has forgotten is what Americans are. In the case of these boys when they were in high school, they were not the popular kids. They did not take orders well. They were very rebellious, but in the essence of their core personalities, they were good kids. They just needed a chance to do something and they were always on the outlook for what that might be. So when it happened on a train to Paris, they were ready to pounce. I would say that the goal of every American is to be one of these types of people, but in our education system and then in our introductions to the outside world of employment we are always looking to put saddles on those wild horses breaking them into normalcy. But deep down inside we love the wild stallions of youth and we cheer that they might make it into adulthood free and happy—even as most of us yield to the pressure and tap out.

America hates authority figures even though all of our institutions are filled with them. We learn very early in public school to find our “peer group” and for kids like these, they never really do because they can’t yield authority to others who control those groups. What the institutions of American life fail to understand, including Hollywood these days, is that even those in the peer groups yearn to be as free as people like Spencer and Alek were. Of course the anxiety that young kids like Spencer, Alek and Anthony felt at not fitting into any particular peer group was enormous, what reality later tells is that all the world fantasizes about being one of those rogues in life who does what they want whenever they want to. I’ve personally never met a person whom I’ve spoken to one on one who doesn’t have at least a little of this individualistic fantasy in them—even in Europe and Asia. But in America we have a system that allows people like Spencer, Alek, and Anthony to have a good shot at success if they can figure out how to outsmart the system, and ironically some of the best and brightest of our culture are these types of people. But it’s not easy and in most cases people do die trying.

So here were three unbroken American stallions unsaddled roaming through the French countryside looking to make their mark in the world any way possible when this dumbass terrorist put the opportunity right in their lap. The fact that they were in their 20s and unbroken says a lot about the nature of American life—because even though it is hard to function in the world as a rugged individualist who hates authority—in America you can do it while still making a living and getting though the education process. Because of that, they were there when the world needed them. There are others like them, and they are a rare breed, but they are specifically an American creation. In other nations they would have been saddled in life one way or another and broken before they were 18 years of age—likely earlier.

Once I was able to get through the book I was able to see how Eastwood would shoot this movie. He understands this unsaddled sentiment, you can see it most in his movies like White Hunter Black Heart, Heartbreak Ridge, even going all the way back to the first western he directed, High Plains Drifter. Eastwood has never been a fan of authority figures, so it was obvious that his decision to put these young guys into the movie playing themelves was because he wanted to get that raw untamed element that is central to their characters on the screen for all to see. He understands the power of this kind of story and it looks to me like he held nothing back. As a person who is just mildly obsessed with this very specific American condition, that is why I am so excited about this project. And as a strategist of a good reputation this is a film that is very Trumpian. It would be wise for those who have the president’s ear….hint, hint……to have a nice screening at the White House with the stars and Eastwood there for a little dinner to launch this film. It is going to break box office records and will be big for Warner Bros—so why not help it strong out of the gate? Let the young men get their picture next to Trump—and more for their benefit, Melania. I think it represents all the reasons Trump was elected in the first place—and Eastwood understands that. Look for this one to be BIG in 2018.

Rich Hoffman

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Finally, I’m Proud of my Government: And Trump University was never a fraud

For the first time in my life when I look at the White House, I’m proud. That actually goes back to the days of Ronald Reagan—everything in Washington D.C. seemed dirty and corrupt to me, but now—now everything is different. The Trump White House has given me faith in an American government not as some ominous thing to be feared, but a partner in the great American experiment yearning for a better tomorrow. After passing the tax cuts through the House and Senate by midweek 2017 in a December looking toward Christmas, I witnessed something I thought would never be possible. I hoped it would honestly, but I had doubts it could—and that is to see business objectives applied to politics for the sake of changing the way the whole game will be played forever more. Donald Trump has brought an honesty to the White House and therefore all of Washington D.C. culture that has altered the course of the human race I think forever. This little evolutionary step we’ve seen in the year of 2017 will always be viewed as a special time that the world will reflect on and be thankful for.

I have to think back to the very dishonorable thing Mit Romney did when he came out against Trump in the primaries as the establishment GOP threw everything including the kitchen sink at Trump to stop his nomination process. Probably the hardest hitting criticism Romney leveled at Trump was about Trump University being a fraud. As I’ve said before, I’ve read all of Trump’s books over the years—as everyone should. If you really want to know who Donald Trump is, read the books he’s written—he is a very open person. Well before he was president of the United States he had a deep concern to help motivate people to greatness. Basically, he’s a high energy guy who loves to work, so he gets involved in lots of things in his life, and he loves to talk about them. He sets high standards for himself and always seeks to meet those standards. For instance, when he plays golf with other professional golfers, he doesn’t see himself as inferior to them. Instead he plays with them to get better himself, but he doesn’t consider himself an inferior talent, the way most people would. Whatever Trump has ever done he justifies that if he puts the time and effort into being good at it, that he can be as good if not better than everyone else.

Trump’s pursuit of greatness has given him a good life, and he’s been very open to sharing that good life always. Like a lot of us he looked around once his Celebrity Apprentice show took off at NBC and figured that lots of people wanted to learn from him—so he started Trump University. There are a lot of schools out there that are actual frauds, such as Yale, Harvard, Oxford, Princeton and many others—because what they sell is not what you are getting. In the established schools their intent isn’t to teach you about the world and how to live in it—they are there to program children into becoming liberals and adjusting student’s lives to socialism. They sell their services as helping people get good jobs, but what they are really after is programing children into liberalism. There are other schools like Liberty University that try to teach conservative studies, but they are typically looked at by the political left as institutions of fraudulent activity—because they aren’t part of the orthodox. That’s when Trump entered the fray with a university of his own located in one of his developments along the Hudson—and his intention was basically to share his experience with hungry minds wherever they came from.

As Mit Romney did his public comments against Trump criticizing Trump University specifically I was holding in my hand my copy of a book called Trump 101: The Way to Success—which was published by Trump University. How could Mit Romney say that Trump University was a fraud as I was holding one of the books produced by that endeavor that was clearly written to improve the lives of people in business—and in life? The answer was that he couldn’t. Trump University may not have taken off the way Trump wanted—but he certainly tried. Once Obama was elected in office and it was obvious to the rest of us that we had a real criminal enterprise moving into Washington D.C. Trump moved his efforts more to the Tea Party movement—like many of us right thinking people did—in 2009. After Obama personally called out Trump at the correspondent’s dinner in 2012 Trump had decided that he’d try for a presidential run and give the Tea Party movement the thrust it had been lacking. I think for him based on the books he had written, it was the ultimate challenge to some of his lifelong philosophies—and if he pulled it off, he would have a chance to actually save the nation.

I knew Trump was never a fraud and I was a supporter of his essentially from the time he announced he was running. I based my support on his books because I knew that if a guy who thought the way he did were ever to become president, then he’d be the greatest that we had ever had—that includes Lincoln, and George Washington himself. Trump has never been a bad guy who functioned from his flaws—he’s always sought to be better each day that he woke up. He was a little crazy with women for a while as he lived a genuine playboy life—which in his day was the way success was defined. But he obviously outgrew that over time and has arrived into his modern age better prepared than anybody to do the hard job of being President of the United States.

His first-year successes are straight off the pages of his books and I’m happy to say he hasn’t disappointed me in any way this entire time. Most people don’t think of him as an author, but he’s quite expressive and very inspiring—naturally, and I think his written works are some of his best attributes. I really look forward to reading the books about his presidency in the future—because there are some really wonderful things happening every day in his administration. For people who clearly wanted America to fail—of course they hate him. They hate all of us and have decided that they don’t want to live in a country with our values—they made that decision, not us. But until Trump came along to flip the tables, they had control of the narrative within the media. They don’t have it any longer, and it only took a year. Because of Trump and his successes, they are forced to reveal themselves—really for the first time, and people can see the maliciousness of their actions in the light of day. Trump has brought honor to the White House that will have a lasting effect—and I’m very proud of what his administration has been able to do in such a short time. Based on his books, I know this is all just the tip of the iceberg, there will be many more great things to come and soon people will forget about all the ugly stuff. And that will be the greatest thing of all—something that we will all carry deep into the future for all time.

Rich Hoffman
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The GOP Passes Tax Cuts: How this causes the Democratic Party to end

I’m not going to say who I said it to, but I can say that it was quite a few very influential people. I’m not a big tea and cookie socialite who works the circles of power to advance thoughts on a matter, but I do deal with people who do—and they do good work of advancing conservative philosophy. So I’ll say here what I’ve been saying to them—get this tax bill done and we have a real possibility of 6% growth by this upcoming summer of 2018. Go ahead and mark it on your calendars and we’ll talk about it when the time comes. Unfortunately, most people—especially politicians with backgrounds in the legal profession do not understand economics. Unless a person does enormous amounts of personal research and self-education our school systems both public and private do not teach proper understanding of basic economic concepts. The political establishment has adopted socialism for well over 100 years with only periods of market fluctuation due to tax reductions—and that has hindered the American economy enormously. With that in mind these tax cuts passed under the Trump administration have enormous implications for our future in a positive way—so what happened today is not just a victory for Republicans—it’s a cultural revolution at the most fundamental level of conservative philosophy.

What all the doomsayers don’t want the American public to know is that yes, trickle down economics works—it really is the only method. The fantasy of a wealth redistribution utopia that liberals have fantasized about since Sir Thomas Moore’s publication of Utopia is purely science fiction with no basis in reality. It is a made-up sentiment that is built on hope, not facts and liberals have distorted that hope into some very ugly moments in world history—the rise of the Nazi, the rise of Mussolini, the rise of the Castros in Cuba, the communization of China, Vietnam and North Korea. The destruction of Central America and South America—particularly Venezuela and the cannibalization of all Europe. Africa is a continent of warring tribes fueled by communist sentiments as is Iran in the Middle East. It was Marxists who took over Iran back in the 70s which make that country such a danger today. What they all have in common is a destructive sentiment toward liberalism—because people were all trained at the same liberal colleges and were raised by the same basic liberal elementary education. And for nearly 32 years, since Ronald Reagan left office essentially, America has tried to be a team player to go along with all these leftist ideas regarding economics and technological development—which has nearly destroyed us. That changes today.

The passage of the GOP Tax Cut and Reform Bill is a bold step away from the global trend toward tax and spend communism, which was always the intention of the wealth redistribution strategies which has hand cuffed our economy for years. Once the dust clears and people don’t die, and bank accounts fill up, while America starts filling some of those empty store fronts in strip malls again with viable businesses the truth will be there for all to see. The pent-up wealth that has been hiding in the world has now been given a safe harbor to dock in, and America will explode with renewed enthusiasm. Isn’t it nice to have a business guy as president, who understands money? I love it for a change. Ohio would be smart to hire Jim Renaicci as the next governor to bring that same kind of understanding to a state that needs it. This GOP would not have passed the bill if Trump had not framed the argument and set a time table—like all good managers do. Everyone knows that presidents are not supposed to create legislation, congress does, but from the Executive Branch and as the head of the Republican Party they do set the table—and Trump did. Without this, nothing would have happened.

It pained me to watch Savannah Guthrie on NBC interview Paul Ryan about economic matters because all her assumptions were incorrect. She cited Michael Bloomberg as an authority on business without mentioning that he is a major tax and spend liberal. He lists himself as independent because he’s actually a socialist like Bernie Sanders—a major contributor to the progressive caucus. It doesn’t matter that he’s a billionaire—look at George Soros, and Mark Zuckerberg—Warren Buffett, there are a lot of wealthy people who either don’t want more competition among their peers or they fell into their wealth by good luck—because they really aren’t very smart. That doesn’t make them business tycoons just because they are rich—yet people like Guthrie use them as ways to bridge their socialist theories to reality. What they all have in common on the political left is an inherent mistrust of human beings to do the right things—so they assume that the heavy hand of government should always be ready to enforce the laws of our nation and the basic assumption of fairness for which most of us all agree on. Liberals go wrong because they assume that people can’t be trusted—they as a political party have trust problems and that is a sickness of their own making. What Bloomberg really reveals in his tax answer is just what Soros would—they know that inside themselves to their very core they tend to lean toward evil intentions, so they assume that is the way everyone is. But that is not the case of reality. Hating corporations is not a viable strategy for economic growth. I am a job provider, and it is my experience that every car in the parking lot of my endeavor depends on me to fuel their economic lives. Their car payments, their mortgage, their entertainment—the children they raise—everything they do depends on good decisions made by their employer—in this case me. They need to be able to trust me and I need to be able to trust them. Since I am a person who does not have trust issues, I find the exchange is a very healthy one most of the time. And as I look around my community at all the businesses large and small that have to have that same relationship with their employees for the same reasons it is there that you can see “our economy.” Its not some magical thing that government controls, it exists on a microcosm of individual relationships successfully exchanged. Government is like introducing a third wife to a marriage—it doesn’t work—it introduces mistrust and more emotional liabilities rooted in the sum of their intellectual neurosis—the tendency to mistrust people. That mistrust contaminates everything involved in an employer/employee relationship. Guthrie and the people like her obviously don’t understand that basic premise—and why would they think otherwise since they’ve been taught socialist ideas from their infancy by the world at large.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/savannah-guthrie-to-paul-ryan-%E2%80%98are-you-living-in-a-fantasy-world%E2%80%99/ar-BBH3D4q?li=BBmkt5R&ocid=spartandhp

The boldness of the GOP plan goes against that insecurity that has been implicit during the entire progressive era—since Teddy Roosevelt switched from the Republican party to become the first presidential progressive candidate. Two decades later his nephew FDR, would become the second fascist to sit in the White House. The first was Woodrow Wilson. These people had emotional problems yet from the political left they shaped our education institutions with a false premise of basic mistrust in the “invisible hand” of Adam Smith’s ground-breaking examinations on capitalism. What we can always trust in humanity is that people generally act on behalf of their own self-interest. So when dealing with them, so long as self-interest is part of a calculation, you can trust the result—which is what is the key behind this tax cut plan of the GOP. Self-interest means employees leave companies if there is somewhere to go. Self-interest means corporations will pay more to retain their talent from a competitor. Self-interest means a company will locate to America so they can be near their families if the tax rates are equitable. Self interest keeps a person from jumping off a bridge where the railings are only hip level. If someone wanted to, they could jump over—and most people live within those guidelines except for the occasional idiot who has painted their lives into a corner with lots of bad decisions, then seek to committee suicide. This GOP tax cut puts trust back into people and that is truly terrifying for liberals, but what they will discover like the child who is terrified of the monster they think lives under their bed, is that there isn’t anything to be afraid of. And learning that scares them even more—because that is the foundation of their liberalism.

Rich Hoffman

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Equal Justice Under the Law: Why we should kick down the doors to the FBI and arrest Peter Strzok

If you didn’t catch Judge Jeanine’s segment on the FBI investigation led by Robert Mueller then you can see it below—or if you did you can see it again.  She does a really nice job of laying out the case of just how bad the FBI treated the incoming Trump presidency from the outset.  The reluctance that people who depend on these federal institutions is understandable do to their belief that FBI integrity keeps us safe from the bad guys out there in the world.  But once it is understood how serious all this is, and the depth of the crimes that were committed by the FBI, consciously—it becomes clear that the only recourse is to destroy that institution so that we can rebuild it better.  Trump said what we are all thinking, the FBI has lost its fine reputation and the ground agents allowed it to happen.  The people at the top were dreadfully corrupt, and the bootlickers below them did nothing about it because nobody wanted to jeopardize their opportunity for a promotion.  So we have a mess that needs to be fixed and we won’t do that playing patty cake with these guys.

As I write this I have full faith in the Trump White House to continue exposing this issue and shaming Capitol Hill into correcting the action.  But I have not forgotten how bad Eric Holder was during his years with the Obama administration.  I have not forgotten Loretta Lynch, or Lois Lehrer at the IRS.  I haven’t forgotten any of those things—and much more.  The only difference between now and then is that my kind of guy is in the White House and I’m hoping the situation can be corrected non violently and under the blind eyes of justice.  But for the record should I ever be deposed for some future actions—lets this little declarative statement cast light on my thoughts.  I’m not OK with Peter Strzok interviewing General Flynn and using that information to prosecute the guy ruining his life just because he was associated with the Trump campaign.  That same guy did not apply equal justice under the law to Hillary Clinton and her various associates.  It was he who gave them all a pass when serious crimes were committed.  And his activism was chronicled in text exchanges with his girlfriend who was working at the FBI as well.  When he stated to her that he intended to provide an insurance policy against the Trump election that was all any of us needed to hear.  He should not be working in human resources within the FBI until the smoke clears.  He needs to be at a minimum fired and likely put in jail—and everyone associated with him should be terminated as well.  Anything less would be criminal.

I’m not going to forget.  There won’t be some magical day ten years from now when all this will blow over and life at the FBI will return to normal.  No, it only gets worse from here.  The FBI, an unelected group of law enforcement officers, doesn’t get to decide who our president is or isn’t.  They are there to enforce the laws that congress creates-and that’s it.  They don’t get to go off and do their own thing and use the massive power we’ve given them to undercut the process.  People like me put up with Obama, Clinton, and many years of a government that certainly didn’t represent me.  We didn’t assassinate anyone or go into the streets with our guns to demand a better government.  We let the process run its course and we sought to fix the problems the correct and legal way—and it took a lot of time and who knows how many countless trillions of dollars of potential.  I could have easily have looked at the situation and said as Strzok did, that it was up to me to solve these problems for the good of the nation, because I knew better.  Only I don’t have a FBI at my disposal to manipulate things to my liking.  I have other things, but not control of a tax payer funded institution.  So under Strzok’s reasoning, it would be perfectly OK if I used violence and physical domination to turn the country back to the ideas that I think are appropriate—right?  That is the problem of Strzok, he opened up this mess and now we have to fix it.  Because if action is not taken against him, then there is no justice or trust in those institutions to correct themselves sending a clear message to the rest of us that if we really want to solve the problem, then we will have to do it with violence.

If that’s how the FBI wants it, I have no problem with that—violence.  Don’t think for a moment that anybody is going to come into my home kicking in doors and harassing my family in the middle of the night the way they treated Paul Manafort and that they’ll walk away alive that day.  It’s not going to happen, let me just say that.  I have no respect for a law enforcement agency that is guilty of crime themselves but don’t have that same treatment applied to them.  In my way of viewing the world Strzok should be arrested immediately, all his assets confiscated and he should be drug into the street naked and beaten into a bloody lump of flesh, until his jaw bone was dangling from his face with just a few pieces of skin—still alive, but a beating he would never forget.  That’s the only kind of justice I would respect after what he did.

Imagine you’re Paul Manafort—forget about any potential crime for a moment.  Paul is an insider who knew how the game was played and he was playing it.  The Clintons were playing the same game and so were the Podestas—so I don’t want to hear about any potential crimes that Manafort might have been engaged in.  If it was good for everyone else in the Beltway, it was good for Paul.  If it’s not good for Manafort, then I expect to see the same treatment for everyone else.  So let’s use that as a clarifying statement.  So there he was in bed with his wife and the FBI barges in with great urgency damaging property and wielding guns into their faces—in their private residence—as if the needs of the FBI were greater than the needs of Paul Manafort.  They call this a “no-knock” raid and in this case FBI agents picked the lock at 4:30 AM and barged into the residence to obtain documents that special investigator Mueller thought he needed for his case against a sitting president. I’m just saying, if I hear a sound at the door at 4:30 AM, there will be trouble.  And If I wake up to guns in my face, there will be even more trouble.  These types of raids are not permissible in the spirit of the United States idea.  The legal whizzes out there may have found a way to establish case-law precedent, but that doesn’t make them right.  The just thing would have been to gun down all the intruders on the spot because they were invading the sacred space of an American and his private property, which is the cornerstone to everything America represents.

https://michaelsavage.com/2017/10/30/manafort-charges-grew-out-of-records-seized-in-no-knock-raid/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2017/08/10/no-knock-raids-like-the-one-against-paul-manafort-are-more-common-than-you-think/?utm_term=.f79fc24a85a5

That’s where things get murky.  Manafort cooperated as the FBI thugs molested his wife and he turned over the documents—and Mueller spent another five months going over things before indicting Manafort costing him millions of dollars in losses.  If I were Manafort I would view the whole incident as something that ruined my life—I couldn’t live with that kind of imposition.  I’d have to get revenge on somebody and I’d require the skin off somebody’s back before I let the issue drift away.  If anybody points a gun in my wife’s face while she’s in bed, I’d have to do something—I don’t give a rat’s ass what the law says.  Just because guns are pointed at you that doesn’t mean you die.  Just because you get shot it doesn’t mean you die.  Pointed guns are not enough to stop violence.  Nothing out there in the world is more important than my castle, no social cause, not government, no “inclusive” concept about the “greater good.”  Nothing is better or more sacred than what goes on within the walls of my private kingdom–my personal residence.  To my way of thinking if you don’t have that there isn’t anything to live for to fight on another day—so why not give it everything you have right then and there?  What’s Manafort supposed to do now; he knows that the arrest was purely a political hit job.  His family has been abused in the process by the might of our government and he has had personal wealth stolen from him to feed an inefficient court system.  I feel a lot of passion about this, I actually wrote a book called The Tail of the Dragon which is about this very type of morality situation and with me it’s quite clear—we don’t protect ourselves enough from enemies within the state—and we damn well should.

Now though this case is well beyond the crimes against Manafort and Flynn, they are assaults to all of us who voted for Donald Trump.  I view the election of Donald Trump as the most important thing that’s happened politically in my lifetime.  True, it’s my point of view, but my point of view was in the majority this time—as the rules of the Electoral College mandate.  We played by the rules, we did the right things, and the FBI crossed the line—they broke the law and someone has to pay.  So is it appropriate under equal justice under the law to kick in the doors to the FBI guns wielding in the faces of these insurgents so that we can rip Peter Strzok out of his human resources job and ruin his life the way he has attempted to ruin the lives of others?  I say yes.  I’m willing to let the law do its thing, and I have hope that the process will work—I’d say it’s working right now.  But we won’t be going back to some good ol’ days within the bureau where these types of things got pushed under the rug.  We know too much, and we also know that because there isn’t equal justice that if we see FBI agents coming into our homes—then we have to defend ourselves.  After all if their agents are like Peter Strzok—what separates them from criminals breaking into our homes and stealing the fruits of our hard labor?  Nothing.

Rich Hoffman

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Embodiments of Good Culture: ‘The Last Jedi’ review as seen at the Liberty Township Cinebistro

Regarding the new Star Wars film, The Last Jedi0DC280AC-2650-4978-AF7B-AD3BA74C3987—I enjoyed it. It is the best movie of its kind made these days. To me it’s a long way off from George Lucas’ original vision and is much more progressive. When I say that I’m not knocking it for its various species and races working together for a common cause—its just the value system is very collective based—much more than it used to be and that makes the film step on itself often. But for kids 15 and under, Star Wars is magical stuff, and for everyone else—it’s the best pop culture eye candy that you can get anywhere with a stirring new John Williams score to go with it. So there is a lot to love and I did. Disney did a good job as far as movies made by committee go—and I thought Rian Johnson did a good job navigating all the needs of those committees quite well to even pull off something that did sometimes reflect the classic Star Wars film The Empire Strikes Back. Honestly, I wish there were more films like The Last Jedi because when it comes to the movie going experience my sentiments go to the theater owners who often get screwed by Hollywood for putting out a bunch of liberal crap that nobody wants to see. At least films like The Last Jedi give theater owners a chance to make some money—which they desperately need these days in the age of changing entertainment options.

Since I’m a Star Wars guy I was going to see it at the soonest opportunity and that came on a Thursday night before the film’s official release. Thursdays are rough for me because I usually have an oversea call with people on the opposite side of the world, so their 8 AM on a Friday is for me 6 PM Thursday. And of course my first responsibility was to the call. So at the conclusion my wife and I had plans to meet at the Cinebistro in Liberty Township to see Star Wars: The Last Jedi at 8 PM. It was on these kinds of evenings that excited me originally when I learned a Cinebistro was coming to my hometown—and since its arrival it’s really been the only movie theater we’ve gone to. I love every visit to that theater. But Star Wars is a special event and everything is elevated during those kinds of movie releases—so I was very grateful to leave my call meeting and arrive at the bar in Cinebistro with a nice overlook down into the square at the Liberty Center shopping complex and have a Ohio brewed Star Wars beer with my wife while we waited for our assigned seats to be called.D29EA4ED-8F8E-4BE7-A989-1C50576967D2

I was hungry, as we hadn’t eaten anything that day so it was quite a delight to be seated with all the politeness you expect at a nice restaurant by the staff at Cinebistro. Our waitress was a veteran who had been working at the Cinebistro since it opened and she was sharp as a tack which to my tired presence was very welcome. My wife and I ordered our food and within a few minutes our order started coming back at us and it was one of the best burgers I’ve had in a while made more so by how hungry I was. The movie hadn’t even started and it was already one of the best nights out to a movie that I could remember having in several years. Then the lights went down and The Last Jedi started and it was just a fun movie to sit there dead tired after 14 straight hours of working and enjoy.

My honest impression of the film was that it painted itself in a corner. There isn’t much reason to have an Episode 9 as most of the big climaxes that you would expect in a Star Wars film happened in The Last Jedi. There was a big standoff with Luke at the end as he faced down the might of the First Order stoically that was particularly powerful and made the worth of the entire movie valid in that one moment. But there were a lot of good moments that made this an above average film about science fiction. There were many times that I felt the filmmakers were secretly trying to make an anti-Trump film where they turned the Rebellion symbol into a calling sign to liberalism—and that bothered me. Hey guys, I was a Rebel before anyone else was who are making these movies now. Just for the record, and I’m certainly not a liberal. I have no sympathy for Kylo Ren or Darth Vader. I have never liked the bad guys in these films so I’m not sure the filmmakers really understand their modern audiences the way that George Lucas did. Instead, Lucasfilm and Disney are happy to just pick every demographic that’s out there and plop them into the plot and make all the white males the villains and hope that nobody gets pissed off and refuses to see their movie. I tried not to notice, but it was very distracting.DA1609EC-8629-457B-93C3-C7172250F5B8

Way back in the first Star Wars movie Han Solo says to Princess Leia—“now if we can avoid any female advice, we might be able to get outta here,” or something to that effect. Well, the members of the Resistance would have been wise to listen to that—because in this new film there is no Han Solo to keep all these crazy overly emotional women in check—and they’ve pretty much ruined the Resistance. The Poe Dameron character tries to fill in the shows of Han Solo’s pragmatism, but the women end up shooting him and incapacitating him into a feeble position several times demoting him and harassing him as if he were an imbecile—when really, he’s the best that they have. Han Solo always was the older guy and had a father knows best quality in regard to Luke and Leia. Now they are the ones in charge and Leia has ruined the Resistance and Luke is hiding on an island ready to die—to quit the world. Without thinking about things too much, the movie is still fun—but with a little analysis it doesn’t take much to sympathize with Ben Solo who essentially rebelled against all this stupidity and became seduced by Snoke to essentially run the First Order.

The First Order seems to have unlimited money and resources when the Resistance is supposed to be fighting for the Republic which is the current governing power. So the question I had for the whole movie is that if the First Order were so bad, how did they get such great wealth? There was an attempt to explain that a casino planet where many of the galaxies rich and famous resided was how the First Order obtained all its power—but honestly the point failed to be made. All I heard was some chubby Asian chick yack on about how evil money and wealth was while she and Finn tried to figure out how to save the Resistance for which her sister had given her life. I wanted to pull her aside and say—“hey little lady—try making a little money so that you can fund your rebellion and stop resting on ideas of hope and sympathy to get your point across. You might have more luck.”

That’s what makes these movies made by liberal San Francisco young people different from George Lucas who came from a small business background and made the Star Wars movies with great personal risk and cost to himself. Even though George was a political liberal he was a fiscal conservative when it came to making movies and the industry was better for it—and so were his characters. That is missing from the prequel films and these made by the next generation. These filmmakers have all the budgets and resources they need whereas Lucas didn’t and that certainly shows up in the final product. The special effects company Industrial Light & Magic got it reputation from the first Star Wars movies. Now everyone expects excellence, so there’s that element as well. It’s a lot harder to WOW an audience now than it used to be so the emphasis is obviously spent on doing that for fans. I see that it hurts the story, but that is an older guy speaking. Kids will love these movies and they should—they are the best morality tales available to young people, so the benefits are obvious.

The Last Jedi ended in a way that I thought probably should end all Star Wars movies, because there will never be a way to top that last scene with Luke. It was pretty magnificent. And I left the theater thinking about big lofty ideas about whether or not the dead and vanished would even care what goes on in the world of the living. In Star Wars they do, and it’s a fascinating concept that more than made up for some of the obvious liberalism. But even better than the movie was the experience of seeing it at the Cinebistro. They certainly did a good job there, and around the theater with all the Christmas decorations. For me that night was probably the climax of the entire Holiday season and I couldn’t have expected more. A good movie to watch in a top-class movie theater at a top-class entertainment district within my home town. It’s the way these kinds of experiences are supposed to be, and thankfully for one night everything was perfect and I’m very thankful for that.

Rich Hoffman

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Superman Doesn’t Do Drugs: Theory of a Deadman’s song, “Rx” (Medicate)

The best thing about art is that it should make you think about things and music certainly falls into that category.  That is clearly the case of the new song by Theory of a Deadman called “Rx” (Medicate).  I like the mood of the song, it’s sort of spaghetti westernish—however the lyrics absolutely disgust me.  I find almost every line of the song repulsive—yet fascinating.  If I had to apply a song to the age of Millennials which defines their era I think this song would be it.  As I looked into this song a bit I wasn’t surprised to learn that there was a message behind it as lead singer Tyler Connelly stated to Billboard.

“I really wanted to discuss how messed up America is with this prescription drug thing. When I got divorced, I went and saw a therapist and the first thing she said was, ‘I want to put you on some Beta blockers or some sort of anti-depressant stuff’ and I’m like, ‘No! No Way! What? How is that the first thing you want to do?’ I just feel like something’s wrong and I felt like the song needed to be written and people needed to hear it. It seems like every week something terrible is happening. I mean, Chris Cornell…and when we shot the video for it all these directors we talked to were like, ‘Oh yeah, I had a huge prescription drug problem, so this hits home’ and all that stuff. So it’s a really important song and I’m so happy we get to release it first.”

[Verse 1]
Wake up to a cloudy day
Dark rolls in, and it starts to rain
Staring out to the cage-like walls
Time goes by and the shadows crawl
Crushing candy, crushing pills
Got no job, mom pays my bills
Texting exes, get my fill
Sweating bullets, Netflix chills
World’s out there singing the blues
Twenty more dead on the evening news
Think to myself: “Really, what’s the use?”
I’m just like you, I was born to lose

[Pre-Chorus 1]
Why, oh, why can’t you just fix me?
When all I want’s to feel numb
But the medication’s all gone
Why, oh, why does God hate me?
When all I want’s to get high
And forget this so-called life

[Chorus]
I am so frickin’ bored
Nothing to do today
I guess I’ll sit around and medicate (medicate)
I am so frickin’ bored
Nothing to do today
I guess I’ll sit around and medicate (medicate)

[Verse 2]
Can’t wait to feel better than I ever will
Attack that shit like a kid on Benadryl
Chase it down with a hopeful smile
Hate myself, I can go for miles
They say family’s all you need
Someone to trust who can help you breathe
Inhale that drug, but you start to choke
You fall on the outs of an inside joke

[Pre-Chorus 2]
Why, oh, why can’t you just fix me?
When all I want’s to feel numb
But the medication’s all gone
Why, oh, why does God hate me?
Cause I’ve seen enough of it, heard enough of it, felt enough of it
Had enough of it!

[Chorus]
I am so frickin’ bored
Nothing to do today
I guess I’ll sit around and medicate (medicate)
I am so frickin’ bored
Nothing to do today
I guess I’ll sit around and medicate (medicate)

[Bridge]
Superman is a hero
But only when his mind is clear, though
He needs that fix like the rest of us
So he’s got no fear when he saves that bus
All the stars in the Hollywood Hills
Snapchat live while they pop them pills
All those flavors of the rainbow
Too bad that shit don’t work though

[Post-Bridge]
Your friends are high right now
Your parents are high right now
That hot chick’s high right now
That cop is high right now
The president’s high right now
Your priest is high right now
Everyone’s high as fuck right now
And no one’s ever coming down!

[Chorus]
I am so frickin’ bored
Nothing to do today
I guess I’ll sit around and medicate (medicate)
I am so frickin’ bored
Nothing to do today
I guess I’ll sit around and medicate (medicate)

[Outro]
I medicate

https://genius.com/Theory-of-a-deadman-rx-medicate-lyrics

The part that really bothered me in the lyrics was the section about Superman and in that the protagonist thinks that God hates him—that they were born to lose like everyone else.  What a terrible way to wake up and see the world.  That is about as far from my reality as there ever was, but then again I don’t do drugs of any kind.  I don’t do the doctor thing these days exclusively because all any of them ever want to do is put you on medication for every ailment.  Modern medicine has clearly become just a legalized industry of drug pushers—and I don’t do it.  I don’t even take aspirin if I can help it.  But I am also in the extreme minority.  Most people do take some form of a drug and it comes from their doctors as if that makes it all OK.  Superman would never take drugs, his mind is always clear—he doesn’t need false courage to save a bus.  But, from the perspective of a Millennial that has been raised in a society of three progressive presidents, Bill Clinton, George Bush and Barack Obama—where broken families are the norm, drug addiction is justified by prescriptions, economic mobility has been tightly regulated by an overzealous government—this song really is their experience. And that is terribly sad.

Just because I don’t want something to be true doesn’t mean it isn’t and unfortunately this song is the reality of way too many people.  I’d love to tell people to live more the way I do, but then that’s not their experience.  I’d say to them that the sum of your total life is precisely what you put into it by way of thoughts, and if when you wake up in the morning, you are depressed about something—you are headed toward loserville by natural inclination.  For anybody to be “so frickin’ bored” that they “need” to medicate is just a modern tragedy considering all the options an intellect has these days.  When I get up each day my biggest stress is accommodating all my interests.  I am never board, about anything.  There are just too many interesting things to do and think about—I like my mind sharp so I can do everything.  I can’t afford to have a period of “high” just to take away the pain of living.  Pain is part of living, and you have to be tough and willing to fight through that pain to get to the good stuff.  However, that isn’t the mode of living for most people in this modern age.

I would add that my support of Donald Trump from the beginning to now is largely due to this terrible swing of temperament we have moved to as a country.  For years everything has become so negative I think largely because so many people are on drugs—legal and illegal.  Just going to get a drink after work is a bad trend in my mind.  Trump doesn’t drink or do drugs.  If he has an addiction it has been to be productive—he has many interests like I do so I understand the guy.  He has brought great energy and awareness back to the public through sentiment—and I think that’s the only way out of this mess—is to have someone say from the top that drug use and addiction is a bad thing to do.  People really do need to hear it, and they need examples to live by.  That is also why I write these articles every day.  I want to help people and if something I write can do that—it is my hope that it does.

So good job to Theory of a Deadman for writing such a provocative song—I wish that reality which they are presenting in it wasn’t the case, but unfortunately it is.  We have several generations of this stuff to get through before we see a new generation that has some hope of living normal productive lives under a new day in America where unemployment is at or under 4%.  Where families might return to staying together and bank accounts will be filled with opportunities for dreams.  I really do think that the age of the Trump administrations may reverse some of these trends because the conditions of this song just isn’t acceptable.  I wouldn’t want this to be the reality for a single person anywhere in the world.  But it is however the trend—and the household standard for which everyone lives.  I can say this as an answer to the song.  I’m not “high” right now, and I never will be.  And Superman never takes drugs and that’s what I wake up expecting out of myself every single day—is to be superman.  Everyone should.

Rich Hoffman
Sign up for Second Call Defense here:  http://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707  Use my name to get added benefits.

FBI Director Christopher Wray’s Fantasy: Smoking out the bad guys from within the Deep State

I know FBI Director Christopher Wray is new on the job, but really, going into the public arena and making blanket statements about how great the FBI is just because it’s the hometown team was drastically unintelligent.   I think he thinks he is supposed to say those kinds of stupid things as the acting director, but he destroys any credibility he’s trying to assert—because the evidence says otherwise.  From what we know of the FBI agent Peter Strzok and the recently demoted Justice Department official Bruce G. Ohr, these intelligence agencies are spectacularly corrupt.  This event involving the FBI radicalization against the Trump administration will go down in history as one of the biggest stories of corruption in American history so it’s no mild manner.  The FBI has lost its credibility and is in tatters.  I don’t have faith in it anymore and that has nothing to do with President Trump.  I lost faith in it years ago even before they blew the case for Hillary Clinton’s emails by avoiding the prosecution of her.  It was obvious from a distance, so we can only imagine what things were really like up close.  Now we are discovering how politically weaponized the FBI had become by the revelation of the personalities involved.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-12-07/mueller-is-making-sure-his-investigation-will-live-on-even-if-he-s-fired

http://insider.foxnews.com/2017/12/07/louie-gohmert-fbi-trump-russia-probe-could-be-corrupted-beyond-hoover-wiretapping-mlk

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2017/12/07/top-doj-official-demoted-amid-probe-contacts-with-trump-dossier-firm.html

Any case of corruption or obstruction of justice that Democrats would ever want to make against Trump for his firing of James Comey will never see the light of day.  Even if he were guilty of it, Trump is in the clear just because of the overwhelming evidence that the FBI and the DOJ had been weaponized against his incoming administration.  Proving that President Trump had malicious intent in firing Comey would be next to impossible under any circumstance, but because all the people on the other side are so unreliable, it makes any testimony or evidence they could present completely irrelevant.  The trust has been broken well before President Trump took office and now that these investigations have lingered on so long with nothing to show for it, it’s obvious that we are just seeing two sides of a civil war in America emerging, and only one side will remain when it’s all done.

I’d like to remind everyone that I predicted an end to the Democratic Party sometime around the time period of 2020 and if you look around everything is shaping up to make that happen.  Democrats have no fundraising to speak of.  They have no platform that normal people can buy in to.  Their control over our education intuitions are failing and people are now on to them.  The complete takeover of the media industries is now falling apart—Hollywood is in shambles, the news media is losing its major stars to sexual harassment claims as power-hungry women are turning everything on its head as a kind of inner party coup using Democratic platform points to push out their male counterparts from powerful positions.  Women can be just as corrupt as men so the result of all that behavior will just amount to lower ratings and less public trust in those failing intuitions.  And now we’ve learned that our FBI and DOJ along with what we already knew about the IRS are corrupt and filled with political activists.  The men and women of the FBI may be nice people, they may be hard-working people, but they are part of a weaponized intelligence gathering population that can peer into our cell phones and computers at will and attack us based on political motivations.  That is clearly what was going on with the incoming Trump administration.  And if they are willing to do it to them, they are doing it to all of us.

When a fake dossier paid for by a political opponent is used by the FBI to obtain a FISA warrant to justify the spying on an incoming presidential administration—and that acquired intelligence is then used to entrap a person like General Flynn into a plea deal using the power of the unlimited arms of justice to exert political pressure and manipulate the circumstances to the advancement of the opposing political party—to fuel a completely made up narrative about Russian collusion to additionally hide the crimes of that sponsored political party—we have serious business going on here that is excessively corrupt.    Remember when on January 10th of 2017 when James Comey stepped up to the incoming President Trump and let him know about this dossier, which British MI6 agent Christopher Steele had written and Senator John McCain had personally helped bring into the United States.  What does anybody think Comey’s reasoning was behind informing Trump of such a salacious document which featured him in compromising situations meant to put him on the defensive?  The intent which would be easier to prove than Trump’s attempts at obstruction of justice—where to gain political leverage over Trump to shut his mouth as an incoming president and get control of him before he took office.  That dossier was known by the media as an organization since the week before the election but was held purposely to be revealed to the public just before the inauguration, to take the steam out of Trump’s train.  Before approaching the future president with the dossier content the FBI had been spying on the Trump team to get to know the players using that same dossier to obtain the FISA warrant which allowed them to do that spying.  But the entire thing was a made up concoction of the opposing political party meant to derail the election of Donald Trump in the first place.  And the FBI was using that salacious document to gain leverage over an elected president.  Do you see the problem dear reader?

Many people think that since Trump now controls the DOJ that he and Jeff Sessions should clean house, shut down these investigations and assign new special prosecutors.  However, Trump is doing a fine job of letting these losers expose themselves.  This is a delicate situation that involves most of the Beltway mechanisms from both political parties and the greatest weapon against them is not more investigations and throwing fuel on the fire even showing that hiding evidence may be in the back of Trump’s mind for firing Bob Mueller.  The best course of action is to let these idiots drown on their own incompetency which is what Trump appears to be doing.  If I had to advise him on the best political strategy, it would be to do just as he is—let them destroy themselves, as they are presently doing.  An incompetent cannot compete with a competent.  Most men in Trump’s situation if they acquired their power the traditional way—through the “power of pull” would have something in their past that they are ashamed of—so even if that dossier were inaccurate, the fear that real material might be uncovered would reside in the back of their mind and push them into inaction—which was why Comey was the one who delivered the information to Trump—as a leverage piece to gain power over the incoming administration.  Trump however is a self-made man, as self-made as they come—and he knows better.  Comey was fired five months later after it became clear what kind of guy he was and the leaks that came out of Trump’s new administration had to be stopped, and they ended literally at Comey’s door—which the disgraced FBI Director had admitted to in front of congress.  Comey was fired after that testimony and that was just the tip of the iceberg—we now know that Comey wasn’t alone in his political motivations within the FBI and the DOJ.  There were many others as well—there was a culture within the FBI that wanted Hillary Clinton to be president and they took action to either help her win by avoiding the evidence of severe crimes, or they tried to undermine an elected president against the American people who employ them.  In this case both statements are true and that means that the FBI is in big trouble—as they should be.

So for FBI Director Christopher Wray to testify how wonderful his agency is, is just more lies and deceit.  We all know better.  He would have had more credibility to say something to the effect, “I understand we have challenges to recover our reputation” or something along those lines. But to say that the FBI are all a bunch of A-political hard-working, trusted employees just isn’t true.  If the bosses at the top were politicized, then the underlings who were boot licking their way into promotions were also part of that weaponized culture.  We are lucky that against all odds Trump was elected because if he hadn’t been, none of this would be exposed now.  We might suspect that something was wrong, but the controls that were in place to protect the FBI from investigations of their own simply would not happen.  Congress would not be forcing documents to be turned over for analysis and the FBI would continue to be just another contributor of the Deep State which always intended to run things their own way by controlling American presidents with fear and loathing—as they have for most of the last 100 years.  Exposing them is tricky business and Trump is doing it the right way.  From within the President is slowly changing the culture at the FBI so not to throw the baby out with the bath water all the while smoking out the despots who have been corrupt all along.  And before it’s all said and done—there will be a lot more names emerging which are guilty of turning the FBI into the real disgrace that it presently is.

Rich Hoffman
Sign up for Second Call Defense here:  http://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707  Use my name to get added benefits.