Tag: education funding

The Innocence of Don Jr.: Why everyone should love the Trump family

Of course Donald Trump Jr. met with a person who claimed to have dirt on the candidate running against his father in the 2016 election. I’ve met with lots of people over the years under very similar conditions, so I can completely understand how many such meetings would be needed while running for president of the United States.  Back then the Russian story which has been made up by the media to attempt to slow down the winner of the election from implementing tax reform, a repeal of Obamacare and the enforcement of immigration policies, wasn’t even a consideration.  Back then it was unclear if Republicans would even get behind Trump at the convention so Don Jr was looking for a deal closer to unite the party around his father. Makes perfect sense.  It was a nothing meeting, he acknowledged as much then he moved on.  The media hoping to distract the senate from the healthcare debate however pounced on this story with everything they had during the weeks after the 4th of July one year later as President Trump was having great success both overseas and domestically.  They keyed on the Don Jr. story with great ferocity.  But in so doing they have exposed themselves yet again.

The meeting between Loretta Lynch and former President Clinton that took place secretly at an Arizona tarmac occurred even more recently than the meeting Trump Jr. had with the Russian lawyer so it’s certainly still relevant. If the Trump case is a mandate for so much investigation and discussion then the Lynch case is enough to fill libraries of books on such matters, because that one is much, much more serious.  Here you had the investigating attorney general at the Justice Department meeting with the husband of a candidate for president of the United States who was under investigation by the FBI for mishandling classified information.  After the meeting James Comey clearly was called away from any incrimination into Hillary Clinton by his boss—Lorretta Lynch, giving Clinton a free pass to continue her presidential run without worrying about going to jail.  The Democratic Party rallied behind the cause and defended all the parties involved culminating in one of the most contentious runs for president that we’ve ever seen in America. Even with all the effort and scheming involved the Democrats still lost to Trump deflating them terribly.  They had gone all in—even to the point of breaking the law on several occasions—at the highest level—and they still came up empty.

In May and June of 2017 Comey revealed to a Senate committee that Loretta Lynch had put pressure on him to alter his investigative prerogatives. Once that information was revealed first in May, then made more elaborate in June, Trump fired Comey just a few days later of that May testimony.  Obviously crimes were committed by Loretta Lynch and Comey played along with it taking this case to a much higher level than anybody ever anticipated.  The crimes are quite serious and still pending as the nation struggles to wrap their minds around such majestic travesty. Because for a lot of good people, all this is just too much to comprehend.  Great evil often hides behind unbelievable acts of bad conduct—and that is what we see so often in regards to the Hillary Clinton campaign and those who supported her, from Loretta Lynch to the basic protectors of the swamp from both parties in the House and Senate.

https://twitter.com/overmanwarrior/status/885670963307847681

We were told that all these crimes the Democrats committed were misunderstandings, and were at best conspiracy theories—yet when a much less act committed by Don Jr was revealed it was portrayed literally as the end of the political world. Do you see what’s cooking here dear reader?  Don Jr. is completely innocent in this case and was functioning in the best interest of his father—who won the presidency fair and square.  Trump was the better pick and the Democrats essentially lost because they had nobody to run against him.  It was they who picked a woman who was under FBI investigation and had flubbed up a lot in her years of elected office.  They hung their hats to her star and they lost big.  And they have only themselves to blame.

But there is something else at work behind the Don Jr. case that is worth mentioning. There is a reason that President Trump is doing such a great job in spite of all these aggressive tactics.  And if anybody wanted to discover why they’d go back and re-read some of the books that Donald Trump wrote over the years.  For a person who is supposedly not very smart according to the political left, Trump has written more bestselling books and had a span of one of the most successful television shows in the history of entertainment in America.  He knows a thing or two, and that’s not even how he became a billionaire.  President Trump is and has always been that I can see, a person who not only wanted to be personally successful, but he wanted to inspire others to do the same.  For a good example of this just read his book Think Like a Champion.  Trump has been offering ways to improve the lives of everyday people most all of his life, and he’s used himself as a motivating factor to drive people toward success.  But to the truly lazy and shallow minded they look at the targets Trump has set out there even before becoming president and they hate him because they are essentially too lazy to do the work.  They hate Trump because the president asks them to do a little work just to be good people and this extends back through the years to their core dislike of Donald Trump to begin with.   They don’t want to work hard.  They just want to get by through life doing the bare minimum at everything.  You don’t find too many Democrats who are fundamentally hard-working people.  The philosophy of hard work and political mentality just don’t align.

Making matters worse, Trump has a nice family. Don Jr., Eric, Ivanka and the rest of the kids are nice people. I’ve had the pleasure of meeting Eric at an event once and he was a sincerely nice young man.  You don’t get the feeling that they are the kind of billionaire caricatures made up by the media to represent Mr. Burns from The Simpsons which are overbearing and intolerant billionaires out of touch with everyday people.  The Trumps are everyday people in America and for years they have tried to share that experience with the rest of the country teaching them to also be successful.  There is nothing pretentious about them.  I think it took Donald Trump a while to figure out the right balance and as a result he went through a few marriages—but once he got it right, everything clicked into place for him. In a lot of ways I would give Melania Trump the credit for really bringing that family together—but regardless—they are good people who serve as the first family to the world marvelously well. Show me anybody anywhere in American culture better—because I’d bet you couldn’t.  Trump has it going on every level and the Democrats can’t compete.  All they can do is complain and try to stop the inevitable.

I liked the Trump family before they were the First Family. But after all they’ve endured I actually have a love for them.  These are great people from the President all the way through to his 12-year-old son Barron.  Melania has been fantastic in her role—in every phase and the kids are all just fabulous. I am proud that they represent our country—especially overseas.  When Ivanka sat in for her dad for a short time at the G20 I thought she looked and acted just wonderfully competent.  No complaints at all from me.  But it is truly scary to think what would have happened if with all the law breaking the Democrats managed to get their person elected.  That would not have been good. In that regard, I wouldn’t care if Don Jr. met with 100s of Russian lawyers to keep those Democratic idiots out of the White House.  Because it would have been worth it. However, that wasn’t necessary. The Trumps won fair and square and it’s time for the political left to either get over it, or leave for a country more aligned with their insurrectionists ideologies.  Because with the Trumps, good things are coming whether the Democrats are ready or not.

Rich Hoffman

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Mark Welch for 2017 West Chester Trustee: Maintaining the great economic growth of a Cincinnati suburb correctly managed

IMG_4719.JPGI feel privileged to live in one of the best places in the United States, West Chester, Ohio.  I remember when it was called Union Township and was much more rural as a kid, and have watched it grow into essentially a city without losing its spirit of accomplishment which is rare in the world.  Over the years I could have moved anywhere and would have if I thought the opportunities for my family would have been better, but they aren’t.  While I don’t live in West Chester, I do work there and it is a part of my daily life most days of the week.   I have to credit George Lang with a lot of the government foundations which have allowed West Chester to become such a wonderful place.  As a politician you have to know when to manage a situation and when to leave it alone and George has managed to do that over the years even when hostile liberals pretending to be Republicans operated openly in ways that usually destroy communities—people like Cathy Stoker and Lee Wong—so it hasn’t been easy.   But George has done a very good job of being active where he needed to be and hands off depending on the situation and that style of government should be the model for the rest of the country.  The best thing however that happened to West Chester from the perspective of government is when Mark Welch joined George as a trustee in 2013. Over the last four years West Chester has exploded with opportunity and a lot of that silent credit goes to those two guys who have removed the barriers of creation and investment into business and landed many great opportunities to such a thriving, and diverse community.  If the benefits of Republican run government could be better shown anywhere in the United States I’d know about it—but that evidence has yet to present itself.

http://markwelchfortrustee.com/

I was having lunch with some friends at the new Chuy’s Tex-Mex restaurant that just opened in West Chester and had the opportunity to sit outside on a mild day that was very pleasant.   From there the Top Golf facility towered over my head, the Main Event was thriving with business and Barnes and Noble sat proudly as one of the few area bookstores to have survived the hard transition of Amazon’s influence on the publishing industry. Across the highway hotels had sprung up much to my advantage because out-of-town guests now had many places to stay when they visited—I no longer had to drive them to downtown Cincinnati to stay in a decent place for the night when visiting on business.  West Chester, the relatively new exit along I-75 had the optimistic feeling that I typically feel when I visit the Disney World complex in Orlando—the money is flowing which is the lifeblood of any economy and people were enjoying themselves on a daily basis with lifestyle options.

My kids had told me about Chuy’s and recommended that I try it out.  We had all just returned from Canterbury, England where we had dinner at a Tex-Mex place they had in the center of town there—which we thought at the time was the best we had ever had.  The decorations alone were extraordinary so we thought that type of experience was a once in the lifetime event.   But then Chuy’s opened and it was everything and more that you’d expect from a Tex-Mex style of operation, so in that context I was quite impressed.  As I turned around from my seat I could see the newly opened Deluth Trading company complex offering yet another shopping experience to West Chester guests.  Behind Deluth IKEA loomed on the horizon and I had to think how many people it took to make all this happen—and the answer is a good Republican plan that transpired over many years to make it happen and attract all these investments from all over the world to build West Chester into such a world-class destination for commerce.  George Lang and Mark Welch were smart enough to not inject themselves into the mechanisms and when they needed to they did a lot of soft selling to help push some of those deals over the top—and that really has been the difference.

I mentioned that I grew up around West Chester so I’ve had a front row seat to many of the positive things that have taken place over the last three decades of development.  But my optimism doesn’t come from a lack of perspective.   My observations from Chuy’s comes after I recently took my wife shopping at Harrod’s in London after having dinner at the Restaurant Gorden Ramsay in Chelsa just a few weeks prior to that experience.  We also had plenty of experiences in Paris which most people swoon over—but I have to say, having lunch at Chuy’s with Deluth literally right next door was far better as an experience than anything I’ve seen overseas.   I also recently had a trip to Japan where they have several facilities like Top Golf to serve as entertainment destinations in their land restricted environment—but none of them that I was able to see were as good as that West Chester facility.  Top Golf is an entertainment destination that is a very high quality experience—quite remarkable.  It is worth an out-of-town visit just to stay at that facility and play golf in such a unique way.   Mark Welch didn’t build any of these places, but as a successful businessman and corporate sales executive prior to his own entrepreneurial activities he had the experience to get out-of-the-way when all these investment opportunities were considering utilizing what West Chester offered, economically, demographically, and in supported infrastructure.

But of course I’ve just been talking about one little part of what has become one of the top interstate exits in the Cincinnati region.  Just north of these West Chester destinations are three more exits of the same type of explosive growth—everything from a new Cabela’s to the Cox Road shopping destinations. Which are extensive.  For a community that still has a small town tradition it now has all the amenities of a big city including a great hospital.  And in the middle of all this activity is one of the largest Metro Parks anywhere at the Voice of America, lots of top-level soccer fields, baseball fields, fishing, hiking, and boating—it is an astonishing place for something that is just a few hundred yards from the entrance to a Target, or a T.G.I Fridays across the street.

Mark Welch is up for election this year and has done so much in his first term that it would be crazy not to return him to the current position he holds which is president of the board of trustees.   There are a lot of con artists out there who put the much-needed “R” in front of their political affiliation to get elected in Butler County, but Mark is the real deal.  It isn’t easy to manage such a large township with so much fiscal wealth flowing into it, and still represent people the correct way.  Not everyone gets what they want, but I have watched Mark balance some really intense debates over the last few years with great skill and still not discourage investment.  Not an easy thing to do.  I attribute a lot of that skill to his success as a private citizen well before he was ever a trustee.  Now he has an opportunity to do it again for another term.   It’s important to keep him in the role he is currently so that more opportunity even yet may continue to flourish in West Chester.

It is important for everyone involved to work toward the correct objectives in this upcoming election.  After November, likely there will be a special election for another trustee seat and when that occurs we’ll need another strong Republican to work with Mark to keep the votes out of the hands of the many closet liberals who are lingering in the shadows looking for some way to get attention for themselves. So a clear strategy is needed to settle the minds of the many business opportunities that are looking at West Chester for stability and continued growth.   The first objective of course is to get Mark re-elected.  The second is to hold that second vote.  The ability to do that will go a long way to maintaining the explosive opportunities that West Chester residents have gained over this last decade, and to carry great optimism into the next and beyond.  West Chester is a unique place in the world and we should keep it that way with good government led by Mark Welch who truly understands how to go about it.

Rich Hoffman

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Donald Trump’s Tomorrowland: Making “Failure’s Not An Option” great again!

I kept looking for it but have yet to see any news really covering what Donald Trump’s administration has been doing in regard to American space exploration.  It was only just before July 4th 2017 that Trump signed an executive order reactivating the National Space Council at NASA and  making Mike Pence the is the chairman of the board.  Then just a few days after that great American Holiday Mike Pence was giving a speech at the Vehicle Assembly Building at Kennedy Space Center announcing that the first meeting of the new council would before summer ended.  It was a big speech with grand national appeal but it was eclipsed behind Trump’s G20 visit and the first face to face meeting with Russia’s Vladimir Putin.  The news media was completely consumed with the news of this oversea visit and the antics of Trump’s combat with the various news organizations—so they missed the announcements about America’s new role in space that sounded much more spectacular than when Kennedy gave in his famous challenge ahead of the Apollo program in the 60s.  Trump was thinking bigger—much bigger and Mike Pence is about to make his mark as a very strong VP in the vastness of space.

As Trump and Pence were unleashing space once again the Wall Street Journal had a very interesting article which was quite familiar to me, that “smart medicine” was in fact the wave of the future and ultimate cure to illness on earth.  And to what effect?  We don’t need to get sick as humans and die of old age—we can fix all that now and until very, very recently–publications like the Wall Street Journal were not covering those regenerative technologies.   I bring it up here because space exploration takes time and the best way to embark on such an adventure is to live the amount of time that Noah did from the Bible, to see many years of development to and from the vastness of space and to colonize the once unthinkable.  We’ll want every human being and more available today for such adventures. There were so many magnificent quotes given in Trump’s speech then Pence’s speech at the Kennedy Space Center to be played back to history for many years.  I thought many of those quotes were better than when Kennedy made his famous challenge to the American people when he announced that he intended to put man on the moon within a decade.   In case you haven’t heard, Trump wants to do that by 2020.  Trump then wants to be on Mars by 2024.  Those are ambitious goals for a space agency that has literally been turned off to study climate science and Islamic contributions to science.  Trump’s commitment to space is actually astonishing and will carry with it a new era in adventure, science, philosophy and politics.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-smart-medicine-solution-to-the-health-care-crisis-1499443449

I haven’t been down to our family retreat at Cape Canaveral for a few years now.  I have often spoken glowingly about my visits there to my favorite beach in the world, Cocoa Beach and the many famous landmarks that evolved in the wake of the space program at NASA.  From our condo we can see the Vehicle Assembly Building at Kennedy Space Center.  My kids are especially in love with the place and have watched several launches from that four story balcony.  They were there to see the last Space Shuttle mission return home under the Obama administration and they have recently seen the Space X rocket tests and have been enthusiastic about it still.  But they don’t know it like I do—where Space Shuttles seemed to take off every month and we were on a fast track to life outside of earth.  I love the optimism of space, the promise not only of adventure but of new discoveries and opportunities, such as mining Helium-3 off the moon for real nuclear power.   There is great talk now of going to Mars in weeks not just months which of course would allow us to mine the moons of Jupiter and even Saturn realistically and carry our civilization toward a Type 1 classification—where we master our solar system for resources to advance our technology.  Having that promise ripped away by the Obama administration and other previous presidents has been extremely disheartening.

It was my fault; back when my kids were getting more home school from my wife and I than anything they learned in ten years of school I took my children on a very special trip to Florida to visit the Kennedy Space Center then directly to Disney’s Epcot center.  The entire trip was focused on science and technology showing them the possibilities that were in front of their lives.  That was in 2003, George W. Bush was in the White House and I really thought he was serious about returning America back to the moon.   So I took my kids to the family condo at Cape Canaveral and let them meet astronauts at the Space Center and literally turned their imaginations loose.   Since then there really hasn’t been any ambition for space by virtually anybody.  This has been reflected in a few very forward-looking movies, like Tomorrowland based on the Disney attraction at Magic Kingdom and the very good Christopher Nolan movie, Intersteller.   I was very surprised to learn from my oldest daughter that her favorite movie so far in her life is Intersteller.  It made me a little sad because it was I who planted those seeds so long ago and in her life nothing had so far came from it.  So many kids in her generation have had their minds turned off and now they look at the world inwardly instead of outwardly.  Their vision is small because they have their faces pressed into the feces of their own existence and that folly is literally destroying mankind with remarkable swiftness.  And bright thinkers like my daughters—ignited by an overly optimistic dad have seen little to match that zeal from their generation.  When Trump said that in the vastness of space many of our problems would seem small—he’s right.  The solution to much that sickens us as a species will be solved in space and in the journey of mastering it.

It was during that trip that I bought a t-shirt from the NASA shop stating “Failure is not an option” which was the classic line from the Apollo 13 mission that was made into a movie by the great movie director, Ron Howard.  I wore it everywhere because it matched my optimism for everything.  Anyone who deals with me knows that this is my basic philosophy.  Failure is never an option for me—and never has been.  It is kind of an innate instinct that I have always had, but the space program in America framed the spirit in a way I have always fed from.   It was quite remarkable to wear that shirt to Epcot Center the next day with my kids asking questions and taking them to Tomorrowland to see all the optimism contained there for our future.   Even though my kids were impressed, I was frustrated because I felt we could be doing so much more as a country—but from the very top—in the White House we lacked vision and the great dreamers had been grounded, seemingly on purpose.

If you’ve ever been through a NADCAP audit dear reader you’ll understand what I’m talking about.  For many decades now government has imposed so many rules and regulations onto the aerospace industry that we’ve stifled creativity and brave innovations with so much bureaucratic red tape that the love for adventure that used to be present even in engineers has been stuffed into a bottle and sealed up tight.  The days where World War II fighter pilots were the test pilots and advisors for NASA are over—they have been replaced by pin headed politicians and paper pushers whose only adventure in life is to decide who will make the coffee run to Starbucks.  The industry bureaucrats have replaced the type of horse sense innovation that actually invented space travel with static manufacturing plans designed to take the thinking away from production leaving us all with a cold—dead work environment of people disconnected from the passion that can be garnered from being a part of the industry.   Aerospace today from the top to the bottom look for reasons not to do things than in how to do them because the regulatory zeal placed upon it by government has crushed the desire to achieve things.  The good news of Trump’s commitment to space means so much more than just going back to the moon—it means uncovering that American spirit that put us there in the first place and going back to what worked—and allowing young people to dream of a work culture that stated “Failure is Not an Option” and spent every last breath of their lives articulating that type of thinking.

It was as if there were a cloud of negativity that has taken over the world and until Trump unleashed his big ideas that cloud has been in full rebellion.  It doesn’t want Trump to succeed in these quests and it has been so thick that even the magnanimity of the two speeches done after the 4th of July 2017 by first the President then the Vice President down at Kennedy Space Center that nobody heard about these events.  They were probably the most important news stories of the week, yet nobody covered them—not even Fox News.  Even supporters of Trump’s administration like Jessie Watters and Eric Boiling didn’t make a mention of these bold speeches on their coverage that I could see watching them through the following weekend—the news was all about CNN’s fake news coverage and the G20 Summit.  Nothing about America’s new commitment to space or the wonderful science that will come from it—we are talking about a new dawn for the human race while the attention is on keeping our heads in the waste of our lives by cowardly bureaucrats who want to keep our feet firmly in concrete sealed to the shallow history of European stagnation.

Everyone should have seen this coming, after all Trump is all about thinking big, and by the time he is done our previous visits to space will seem like distant history—not to be forgotten, but certainly not the focus of future visits of people to the Kennedy Space Center. Based on what Mike Pence said, Cape Canaveral is poised to be a true space port where private sector and government truly work properly toward the goal of expanding mankind into the vast cosmos above our heads. Instead of saying “remember that” we will be making t-shirts of what was just said in a board room off in the corner of the Vehicle Assembly Building as some engineering problem revealed major headaches for everyone.   It is in the thrill of overcoming those obstacles that the adventure of space happens—not from the losers who throw their hands up in because the word “the” is placed in the wrong place in a manufacturing plan.

But that those plans will be written once more as discovery happens and innovation dictates light feet and an indomitable spirit.  Yes, Trump’s commitment to space is the best thing to happen in America over many years and I am proud once again of our space program.  It won’t take long to see the results even though at this point very few people are talking about it.  Soon however, that won’t be the case.  It will prove to be one of the biggest things to have ever happened to the human race and its happening right now. And not a moment too soon!  We’ve needed this, and now Donald Trump is starting that train of successes in science moving again and the results will be positive for every single human being on planet earth—and that’s not an understatement.

Rich Hoffman

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White Supremacy is not a Conservative Value: Using the 4th of July to measure American evolution for the better

I remember what it was like to not have a representative in the White House. Last year during the 4th of July in 2016 I was able to start seeing a light at the end of the tunnel as it was obvious that Trump was going to be the Republican nominee. The Brexit vote shocked the world and FBI Director James Comey revealed the extent of Hillary Clinton’s crimes during a press conference. So I was feeling pretty good about things politically for the first time in my adult life. Of course now that Trump is president everything is happening just as I expected it to and I’m happy. He’s done more in his first half-year as president than anyone in history and he’s just getting started. Yet it is still stunning to see how narrow-minded the political left is. Their opinions of Trump are rooted in complete hatred which I can understand to some extent. After all, I have hated the people they’ve had in the White House for many decades. I didn’t stop enjoying life because of it though—which is what is going on with them. While watching President Trump and Melania speak at a 4th of July picnic to a normal person there was nothing to be upset about. Like him or not, Trump represented the office of president nicely, and with respect. But the vile hatred that was exhibited was quite astonishing—especially in Melania’s case.

During the long weekend, I was able to watch a few documentaries that I noticed on Netflix about the Ruby Ridge incident, and the Oklahoma City Bombing which umbrellaed Ruby Ridge, Waco, and then climaxing into Oklahoma City with a PBS spin on the whole thing—essentially from the vantage point of the political left. It’s been a while but It surprised me how much the white supremacist groups played a part in those terrorist attacks that were very much a part of the 90s. Essentially, as the Clinton administration tried very hard to strip away individual liberty and firearms rights it was the neo-Nazi groups on the so-called “fringe right” that were most enraged. I couldn’t help but conclude that many of the radical religious views of the white supremacists were a lot like those of ISIS—where they take an extremist view of religion and use it to justify violence.

Clearly the Clinton administration was cramming its values down on those people to incite them to violence—poking their fingers in their eyes hoping to get them fighting so they could justify federal action in destroying them. Obviously, they didn’t succeed because the political left found itself out of power anyway and those neo-Nazi’s are still out there in the countryside of rural counties all over America. Generally, this is how it goes, the further away from big cities that you get in America the less tolerant people are toward diversity—and more literal the interpretation of the Constitution will be displayed in conjunction with religious texts. The closer to a city that people live the more progressive they will be, and it is there that Hillary Clinton found almost her entire voter base in 2017. It is important to remember with these neo-Nazis that the NAZI order was a socialist one, so to a person like me—these white supremacist groups don’t get it. They are acting purely out of fear from the perspective of their race and are missing the fine points of the current Constitutional philosophy. The PBS filmmakers obviously wanted to sum up the issue that anyone who wasn’t like them—urban progressive—were more like these neo-Nazi groups and that gun shows were the breeding ground for violence.

Well, I know a lot of people and I spend a lot of time around guns and I can say that I don’t know anybody like those neo-Nazi groups that were featured in the Waco, Oklahoma City, or Ruby Ridge incidents as background characters. And anyone who knows me knows I’m certainly no racist. I probably associate with more people foreign-born on a friendly basis than any ten people who you know dear reader so the PBS filmmakers and the political left in general obviously do not understand what makes up the conservative right. I would hardly call neo-Nazis the “far right” because by their own definitions they are way too collectivist based to be considered properly conservative. They have more in common with the political left than they do with someone like me—and other Trump voters. Trump certainly isn’t in that neo-Nazi category. The political left just lacks the proper definitions so they have made them up. Trump’s supporter base is a far cry from the kind of people who were involved ultimately in the bombing of Oklahoma City.

But, one thing to note, the further away from cities that people in America are—the less they trust the government and rely on their own individuality to get through life. Only a very small percentage of them are like the white supremacist groups shown on PBS. The white supremacy activism is just a byproduct of ignorance that emerges when the outside world is too far removed to color their thoughts with options—much like ISIS might emerge in the middle of the desert in the Middle East without a local movie theater there to bring culture to their region—and something else to think about besides Mohammed’s rules and virgins in the afterlife once they’ve already mutilated the women here on earth. Extremism happens when ignorance is cultivated. We clearly see this in the inner-city cultures where Democrats run the failing—bankrupt cities—like Chicago and Detroit. Extremism on all sides happen because people have limited understandings of things happening outside of their regions—and lack a basic curiosity to discover them.

Trump is certainly no neo-Nazi white supremacist. His ability to communicate is quite extraordinary and I found his speeches on the Fourth of July to be refreshing. I would have thought that even if I weren’t a supporter. So yes, it was astonishing to see that people disliked Donald Trump so much even though he was clearly not trying to stoke the flames against his political rivals. That tells me something very important—that people like those who made those PBS videos are upset that their attempt to categorize Trump supporters as some ignorant white supremacists had failed completely—because that’s why they were so upset. It had nothing to do with anything the First Family had said—it was that they didn’t fit the narrative that had been created over a long period of time. Trump the billionaire and his supermodel wife had more in common with the rural American than the PBS producer who investigated radicalism on the political right in an effort to advance progressive agendas to a public guilted into compliance without conflict. Watching those documentaries now as opposed to a year ago, it was like they were made in a different America where the standard modes of framing debate would hold to the scrutiny of reality. Fear and loathing is no longer the accepted mode of control that can be used to steer the population into a particular direction. The red state which has traditionally shaken its head at the city dwellers who voted for a bunch of nonsense feel good sentiment had taken back the country. Trump was their representative and the change is very obvious and will last a very long time.

Rich Hoffman

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Group Evil: How villainy hides itself in institutional thinking

I was born in 1968, just a few months after Task Force Barker moved into the villages of MyLai in Vietnam and killed roughly six hundred women, children and old men looking for Vietcong soldiers who had been harassing the American military for many months culminating in booby trapping the paths to their latrines.  American soldiers couldn’t even use the rest room without worrying about having their legs blown off.  A deep hatred developed through that psychological warfare which erupted in that period of time into mass murder and a complete insurrection of American culture.  It was just a few days before I was born that Martin Luther King was assassinated.  When the Kent State Massacre happened on May 4th 1970 I was two years old and watched intently the news and I remember it quite distinctly, Twenty-nine guardsmen fired into a bunch of hippie student protesters killing four of them and wounding nine others–in some cases terribly.  I did in fact remember the moon landing the year before as my mother sat me in front of the television as a one year old and told me that what I was watching was important.  For whatever reason I remembered things right after birth and I always had the feeling that God had sent me to earth to fight this terrible evil which was erupting around the world—and that evil has chased me around all my life.  But it never found a way to settle into any part of me.  It was clearly in people around me whom I cared about, but it never found its way into me. The only way I was able to combat it was with a remarkable clarity of opinion which I was literally born with.  I didn’t need to be taught to stand against evil; I just always have as if it were preprogrammed into me before birth—as if it were my job to help people deal with evil and to remove it from their lives by my help and influence.  Now as a man of nearly 50 years I have developed an extensive vocabulary to explain these phenomena and as I observed the events of July 4th 2017 I think it’s time to start a serious discussion about the nature of evil starting with group assimilations—because to me that is the worst way that evil moves through our society.  I’ve spent a lot of time over the years talking about the effects of group evil, but have avoided getting into the details because honestly, people just weren’t ready for it.  But now perhaps they are.  The Trump White House has created a unique opportunity to go further down the Rabbit Hole of thought so let’s go.

It was never their fault but I’ve never felt compelled to honor a soldier from the military or to yield my sovereignty to a police officer.  I understand the necessity of their roles in life, but I instinctually did not like them because they were simply members of “group think.” I don’t like fraternities; I don’t like 4-H Clubs.  I don’t like Boy Scouts, organized sports, even home owners organizations.  I don’t even like corporate structures of companies.  I only like them when I’m in charge, not when other people are for obvious reasons.  Yet, throughout my life I have been deeply involved with all these and more with unusually clean thoughts.  I remember a fight I was in at the Van Gordon farm with some school bullies.  I was in a 4-H Club for small engine repair when I was 11 years old.  The kids in that group weren’t going to amount to anything in life and they knew it.  All they had was this little knowledge of engine repair yet I built mine and completed all the tasks with nearly a month to spare before the Butler County Fair so all the kids in my group ganged up on me when the adults were otherwise busy to beat me up—just because I was there—and was smarter than them and kept pretty much to myself.  I had no desire to participate in fart jokes, or to use curse words—so to them I was very weird.  I never did use a curse word until I was 19 years old and decided that they were needed to communicate to lower IQ people just like I couldn’t expect to travel to France and not know a few French words to establish basic communication.  So to those kids—I was peculiar.  I had no desire to be in their group, I showed no pain in being on the outside of their approval process, and as a result I finished my engine much faster than they did and they didn’t like that I was setting a standard which forced them to perform at a higher level.  So they tried to beat me up.  I fought all seven of those kids including the main bully by punching him hard enough in the nose to draw blood.  The rest of the fight I just blocked my face and torso and kept to my feet so they couldn’t get on top of me until the adults came back to the barn to break up the fight.

I had the same experiences in public school obviously and once I learned how to fight properly was easily able to turn the tables on those types of events.  For me it was martial arts and my development of mastering the bull whip.  Once I learned to defend myself it was never a problem to avoid getting beaten up.  The evil which invokes those conflicts essentially doesn’t understand how to deal with free thinking individuals and it doesn’t matter if it’s an entire army of military men or a small group of 4-H slack-jawed losers behind a truck on a farm.  All group evil is motivated by the same things and have the same weaknesses.

To understand group evil just think of your work environment—how you make a living.  All organizations are rooted in institutional thinking where we place our trust in the higher concept of the institution to guide our thoughts.  Essentially this is a lazy way to approach life and evil latches onto it at every opportunity.  For instance, think of the Task Force Barker boys at MyLai who committed terrible evil to so many people.  Well, it wasn’t their fault; they were just following orders—from their “superiors,” right?  And those superiors were just following orders from the Pentagon—right?  And the Pentagon has numerous departments that consider such things and none of them are connected directly to the end evil of a massacre so they can always say—that’s not my decision, I was just following orders.  The Pentagon ultimately would point to the White House and blame the president’s administration.  Then the president will blame the voters and say that he was mandated to act on behalf of them.  Of course the voters never agree on anything in a democracy so they can always say that they didn’t vote for anything that created the evil at MyLai.  And that is how evil hides in virtually every institution from 4-H Clubs to military action.  It’s not so much the individuals involved, it is in the collective lack of personal responsibility that it occurs.  Group associations allow for the mindless spread of evil through institutionalism and that is essentially how it moves through our world.

Groups fail because it takes away the burden of individual responsibility.  If you ever study a group of people they are much more immature when they are together than when you speak to them individually.  A group of women at a bachelorette party are much different together than when you speak to them each individually.  Together in the group they’ll do all kinds of embarrassing things which they would never do if they were alone that provides a contextual definition to why all groups which build institutions fail to fight off the influence of evil.  Evil seeks to hide in collectivism and erode the mandate of the individual by sheer force through various modes of coercion.  That is why all union activity has in it an institutional evil which destroys productive output and individual merit—no matter what it is—from laying bricks to teaching children.  All union activity is inherently evil because of the way that evil takes away personal responsibility from the people in the group and allows them to blame some blob like element within their group associations.

So I don’t mindlessly salute the soldier for their service or the cop for their institutional commitment to use force if ordered to subdue an individual of their merit.  I don’t trust the institutions for which they fight for because evil is at the core of them.  All institutions have within them the drivers of evil by the nature of their psychological impact on the individuals which make up those groups.  The kid that picked a fight with me at the 4-H event was a pretty nice kid as an individual, but put him in a group environment the mob ruled his mandates and he wanted to show off—he wanted to be the leader of the group by challenging someone the group mutually hated—me—because I had no desire to eat with them, talk with them, and I constantly out performed them.

The reason that democracies always fail—100% of the time is that human beings do not want to lead their own lives—most are happy to fall in behind the leadership of the less than 1% of our earthly population.  Behind every evil act is the basic desire to be lazy—and with laziness comes the lack of ability to think.  People in groups don’t want to think for themselves which is why they joined the group in the first place. They want someone to think for them so they can follow along.  Then if something goes wrong, they can say—“I was just following orders.” That is how evil rules our world.  It happens in churches, it happens in governments, and it happens in our jobs. The desire to be led by a leader allows our civilization to never take responsibility for the things it decides to do.  And those who are inclined to be leaders are often not aware of the role they play in mass evil spreading everywhere because they don’t realize that the people following them have actually set them up to be the ultimate scapegoat.  “The People” have no desire to make a decision so they let the leader do it—then when something goes wrong they of course blame the person most responsible—the leader.

Obviously this is a very serious and complicated problem which requires us all to rethink completely how the human race conducts its business.  But “group think” doesn’t work—it is only the soil that breeds evil in the world.  The Kent State Massacre from every angle was the work of evil—it started with the communist loving professors who incited their students to protest Nixon’s Cambodian Campaign.  The American people didn’t care much about MyLai until it was obvious that Nixon wasn’t going to end the draft as he had promised so Americans were getting pulled into the war in Vietnam and were turning against the administration.  You see it was one thing for the kids who made up Task Force Barker to massacre the innocent people of MyLai—they were after all in most cases not the sharpest tacks in the box.  They could be forgiven for their stupidity—until the bright-eyed college kids and would be good kids of society were getting pulled into the fight by over-protective parents.  The parents at the time allowed for those radical communist insurgents to corrupt those young minds at Kent State hoping to passive aggressively put an end to the war because they didn’t want their “little Johnnys” to be drafted and that left the Ohio National Guard to deal with the situation.  Unfortunately, those National Guardsmen were essentially mostly draft dodgers who didn’t want to go to the foreign war themselves so what we had was a lot of people trying to avoid responsibility for something that should have never happened in the first place. Communism was allowed to spread from Russia into China then into Southeast Asia.  Ho Chi Minh would have never turned to communism in North Vietnam if Woodrow Wilson had only listened to him in Versailles, France.  Wilson didn’t have time to listen to the concerns of the soon to be Vietnamese leader who was at the time just a waiter in Paris.  So Ho Chi Minh turned toward the socialism of France then to the wider communism of Russia to help push the French out of Vietnam. After all, Ho Chi Minh only wanted independence from France. America stepped in to help the situation after France failed and thus we got pulled into the war to essentially stop communism which our European “friends” had helped cultivate “innocently.” All these evils were committed because no individual took responsibility for anything and hid the crimes of evil behind the merit of institutionalism—in every case.

As many people speak in concern about president Trump bringing down many of the institutions that have been part of American culture for a long time—this is the kind of evil that he is attacking on our behalf.  While we need a military to keep bad people from attacking us relentlessly, the role in foreign engagements will ultimately shift as economic power becomes the dominate negotiating force—essentially for the first time in American history.  The big picture is quite clear—we now have a person in the White House willing to take personal responsibility for things and the voters who put him in place are also willing to take responsibility for Trump—so there is a purity to what is going on that is truly rooted in goodness for what I think is really the first time.  Responsibility is the key to avoiding evil and to do that we have to get the institutions out-of-the-way that allow individuals to hide behind the leadership of a collective blob.  It is in the name of goodness that we must do this and it is a hard task.  Human beings have been trying to sort this stuff out for their entire existence but now we are at a point where we can actually consider such a thing.  Fighting evil is precisely why the evangelicals picked Trump in spite of his colorful past filled with sin.  Because Trump was willing to lead from the front and to take responsibility for fighting evil—not out of a commitment to a political party or any institutional obligation—but because it was the right thing to do.

Rich Hoffman

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Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg Have Lost Their Minds: The flawed Facebook data and advocacy of Universal Basic Income

I personally like Elon Musk so I’ll forgive him for his ridiculous support of this re-packaged communist proposal that lefties are so excited about, the idea of Universal Basic Income distribution.   Musk is doing good things with his billions of dollars so I can forgive dumb ideas based on his baseline left-leaning philosophies identifying that he has become slightly out-of-touch with reality due to his various projects which happen to be populated by Earth-first wackos.  Musk makes a great car and his SpaceX company is way out in front on driving the frontier of space in the direction that mankind needs to go.  But that stupid kid Mark Zuckerberg from Facebook I have no sympathy for.  He’s an idiot who made his money collecting vast amounts of data from the world population and selling it to intelligence agencies for their covert work.  He’s essentially a sell-out who came into a lot of money because he had no predilection for privacy invasion and he has been fed vast sums of money to keep doing what he’s doing—because the end game is just another modern version of communism disguised as something else for the tech age.

Universal Basic Income is a global idea being floated around that essentially gives everyone a no strings attached paycheck to live life. The big problem is—who pays?  Who pays for the entire world to have a paycheck without having to earn it?  Of course Zuckerberg will tell you that it is the “states” that will have to pay as we all must become one global government working toward the same goals.  Through his Facebook analysis he knows that a majority of the world is lazy and would rather not work a job toward productivity so he’s using this trend to launch this push toward Universal Basic Income.  After all, he’s a billionaire kid who clearly doesn’t understand the value of working at McDonald’s for the summer to buy a new car or earn a down payment on an apartment. Such a proposal as Universal Basic Income will never touch him and his vast wealth—so what does he care.   But he knows that a huge part of the population currently under 30 would rather stay home and play video games and talk on Facebook all day instead of being productive people toward goals of GDP.  Zuckerberg isn’t so smart—he’s not a great visionary.  He’s just a kid who won the lottery doing what other people wouldn’t because their conscious wouldn’t allow them to.  So what Zuckerberg and his other tech buddies are suggesting is an all out assault on our basic sovereignty and it should be challenged boldly.

I’ve made my feelings about Facebook clear. I think it’s vile, and evil.  I want nothing to do with it because it’s essentially a data collection operation designed to study personal habits and associates for sale to intelligence agencies and commercial enterprises.  Facebook wants to know what you know, who you know, how you interact with those people—how important some of those people are compared to other people and essentially what your daily habits are.  Facebook knows that humans are essentially social creatures so it uses a lot of code to exploit that need for the gains of the state.  So I don’t participate.  Facebook is different from other online activity opportunities because it’s a one stop shop of data collection.  Twitter isn’t nearly as invasive, and most other web activity forces data collection to cooperate with each other to build a profile—which is much harder than most people would think.  Facebook puts it all into one place for sale and distribution to those who want to use that information for their own needs.  Facebook isn’t revolutionary it’s just a big spider web designed to capture intellectual property from its users for others to consume at their leisure.

To assume that these advocates for Universal Basic Income are smart because they are part of the tech sector is a folly. As Zuckerberg and Musk both said recently, they think artificial intelligence and robotics are going to replace the human workforce so that gives justification toward Universal Basic Income because as they say, people will still need money in that changing economy.  All this is, is a dressed up new fear created by nothing to back it, to force people into a kind of communist thinking—that we will all be replaced by robots that these tech people are building—so we should listen to them because they have “hidden knowledge” we don’t have.  So we should all be grateful to them for sharing that information—and listen to their proposal.

I don’t mean to come across arrogantly, but I seriously doubt there is anybody in Silicone Valley who can see over the horizon better than I can—into the distant future.  I’d argue that even the best futurists couldn’t outthink me on the matter.  They may be as good, but better would be a statement based on lunacy.  I don’t typically beat people over the head with it—but in cases like this, I can see clearly elements to this puzzle that Zuckerberg and Musk don’t.  In Musk’s case, I think he’s enchanted a bit too much with the power he’s helping to create—but there is a diminishing return on all that he hasn’t yet factored in.  With Zuckerberg, I just think he’s a modern communist hiding his intentions behind modern terms and technology—and he doesn’t care.  What is being ignored which is represented directly by the GDP of a nation is the effect money has on the human soul and the necessity of productivity to extract it for the benefit of spiritual growth.  Humans need to be productive and in capitalist countries that necessity is obvious—and the culture expands at a rate that is very healthy for further development.  Thus, what is missing from these so-called “genius” billionaires is the basic reality that money by itself is worthless without productivity to back it up.  If you just give someone a paycheck—the value of it might buy them groceries, cars and lodging, but it denies them the merit of productive enterprise—or the incentive to be more productive so they could participate in more of life’s fabulous treasures acquired through financial surplus.

I heard a nice challenge to Mark Zuckerberg—if he believes in his Universal Basic Income plan than why don’t he put $1 billion of his so-called $60 billion in total net worth into a little village in Africa and watch what happens.  Give those people a pay check so they can live a basic life and put no demands on it.  Let automated electric cars donated by Elon Musk drive them everywhere they need to go and introduce the best of automation to run their fast food restaurants and their basic needs for manufacturing and measure what happens.  Within a few years the total sum of all that money would be gone and the region would be sucking for more investment but GDP would not contribute to any surplus leaving more investment needed and the rate of invention would decrease because there would be no real incentive to do so except for the back yard mechanics naturally inclined to tinker with things to make them work.  They’d regress as a mini society even from the point where the billion dollars was initially given.  Within a few years there’d be no trace of that billion dollar investment and the village would go back to its status of hut dwellings and chieftain hierarchy.  But why?

Out of all the data Facebook collects it is missing one important element. Facebook can track your associations with other people, your mood at various times of day, your career choices, what you like to eat, the type of music and movies you enjoy—just about everything except for what’s most important in your life—how productive are you.  Productive people don’t tend to spend much time playing on Facebook—but lazy worthless people do—so the data that Mark Zuckerberg is looking at and selling is tainted—it cannot predict the next great revolution in thought, economic, and practice.  And before humans are ever replaced by robots and artificial intelligence, they’ll find a way to excel in other fields where imagination and human input is needed—because at the core of the human experience is the need to be productive.

Now, not everyone feels this way. There are many sick human beings out there who are psychiatrically broken and laziness is part of the symptom of living these shattered lives as a bi-product.  I would go as far to say that likely 90% of our society at all levels is psychiatrically broken to some degree—and those idiots are on Facebook giving a lot of people bad, distorted data based on a whole host of mental illness—such as needing too much correspondence with other human beings to cover deeply personal problems that lay hidden.  That’s not to say those people are not valuable or beyond hope—but as far as functioning in a democracy they are unreliable because they will always seek socialism and other forms of mass collectivism to hide their dysfunctions not only from themselves, but from society as a whole.

It is productivity that is the best way to draw out mental health issues and to become a proper human being and the human race will never surrender productivity to robots, artificial intelligence and other emerging systems of technology just so they can sit around all day and play Call of Duty.  It’s just not going to happen.  There may be a lot of people who will desire such things so they can hide in the shadows and get a free paycheck so they don’t have to deal with real life issues—but giving everyone a free pay check without attaching to it some expected productive output will only lead to a mass psychosis in human activity and we will discover too late—(a hundred years from now) that machines couldn’t do half of what we thought they could because the mysterious human soul is still needed for imagination—and imagination is the first step in all productive output.

I am so certain about these things that you can mark it on your calendar and remember that I told you first—because I just did. Mark Zuckerberg has performed a con by over-sampling human deficiencies while ignoring what matters most to human beings—which is why he and people like Elon Musk are so terrified of artificial intelligence and robots.  Most liberals don’t understand the things I’ve presented here and I would go as far to say that everyone one of them on the liberal side of thinking is operating in some rendition of mental illness.  Even though they are part of shaping tomorrow technologically, they are still liberals who don’t understand the nature of productivity properly—thus they have nothing to contribute on the really big philosophical issues of our time.  And believe me, Universal Basic Income is not a part of any human future that thrives.  It would only contribute to the Vico cycle and destroy our present course because missing from its introduction is the crucial ingredient of productive enterprise that is at the core of all human development.

Rich Hoffman

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Donald Trump Making Looney Toons out of Everyone Else: Being poor is a choice in America

At this point it’s obvious, the Democrats are like the Looney Toons characters of Yosemite Sam and Wile E. Coyote compared to Donald Trump who is to them a combination of Bugs Bunny and Road Runner all rolled up into one terrifyingly president of the United States. Nobody out-thinks the “Trump” I suppose is the way the situation should be phrased.  Trump is playing chess while everyone else is playing some child’s game in the media and within the Beltway. Trump has totally turned upside down even the most terrifying Deep State insurgents and made them look stupid just five months into his presidency—and I’m so glad to see it.  I hoped this would happen, but Trump is even more successful than even my wildest imagination could articulate and I’m loving it.  Yet when Trump made a small remark about the kind of people he had in his administration who were handling the economy—for which the political left has been critical because Trump’s people are very wealthy—Trump said to an Iowa rally audience that he wanted rich people instead of poor people managing economic affairs and this was somehow controversial.  When I heard it I didn’t think anything about it until I saw the reaction of the media the next day, and I have to say I was shocked that they were so shocked.

In covering this episode of leftist babble Sean Hannity made a good point, he said on his Fox News show that out of all the jobs he had ever done in his life from busboy to radio station on air talent—he never worked for a poor person. As I thought about that it was obviously a correct statement.  I reflected on my own colorful past of work experience and it was true, I never did work for a poor person.  I can think of one guy who did struggle to pay for his monthly bills but that wasn’t because he didn’t have access to financial resources—it was because he was reckless with his money.  After all he had just spent $23,0000 dollars on a stripper in Newport, Kentucky—so that did soak up some of his expendable cash during that time period.  But nobody was ever poor who signed a pay check to me—and there’s a reason for that.  Job creators are those who have financial resources beyond what they can handle themselves to manage—they have access to productivity which places them in a category of understanding that is beyond the concepts of a poor person.

As the poor are described Biblically, as people with limited resources who were not part of the political structure of their times, I can understand the nobility of being free and clear spiritually to live life simply and close to God. But the term is no longer relevant today with the invention of the United States of America.  In America, you can be religious and wealthy and there is nothing wrong with it.  It’s not like you have to live in sin to appease the Roman Empire or the Pharisees to hold wealth.  America made it so that any person who wanted to work hard regardless of their social stature could become wealthy and that is essentially what is wrong with liberals today—they don’t understand that.  They still want to apply merit to the poor because like most churches, it holds people’s minds to socialism and communism.  Poor people to the socialist is a badge of honor.  To an American conservative who loves their guns and their Bible—they are just lazy pot smoking losers.

There is no reason to be poor in America. There is always a job that needs to be done in a productive society and if you want to hold three or four jobs to climb out of a financial hole, you can do that.  I know I have.  I also know that Sean Hannity has.  The main reason I enjoy listening to Sean Hannity is because he has a similar background experience as I do.  I have nothing in common with news commentators who get up and go to work around 9 am and are pretty much done for the day by 3 pm.  I get up at 5 am every day and I go to bet around 11:30 pm and I work pretty much all day on and off.  Even in my leisure I’m still working on something—and that’s how it’s been for me for four decades now.  Sean Hannity always worked hard, and so does Donald Trump—even now.  The primary reason he’s running circles around everyone is that he’s used to this pace, and the swamp in Washington isn’t—and they look like fools trying to compete with him—because they aren’t prepared.  People who are poor in America are that way because they made a choice to limit their income to only 40 hours a week—or less.  There are 168 hours in a week and people who are poor likely are only being productive a quarter of that time.  For those under that ratio—they are even worse off—and that is by their own inclination.

To dig out of a financial hole I once worked 96 hours a week at a regular job then on weekends I had a paper route and I worked for a tree trimming business. Essentially, I worked seven days a week on a primary job, then in weekend slots I trimmed trees all over Cincinnati and my wife and I shared several paper routes and that was the time we spent together.  I was in my late 20s and 30s when I was doing all this.  And I still found time to spend with my kids.  We still went to see movies together.  We still went out to eat and took nice vacations.  We had Kings Island season passes and went often—we made it work.  I never felt like I wasn’t getting enough sleep.  I read at least a book a week still and I felt I lived a very good and productive life—and we weren’t poor—that’s for sure.  We didn’t have unlimited money to throw at things and had to manage it, but we had to do that with every hour of our work day.  When my kids need braces or musical instruments we bought them.  Whatever they needed, we took care of it and we never used any form of welfare or government assistance to get through life—even though we could have.  If we needed more money—I just took on another job.

In that context, I have no sympathy for the poor or those who complain about not having enough money. Being poor in America is a choice and there isn’t merit to it when you drag all your loved ones through a depressed lifestyle just because you are too lazy to work.  The Bible for such people is often used as a mask—they might say something stupid like, “well you can’t take ‘it’ with you,” meaning material possessions and other justifications to explain away their inherit lazy nature—but it’s only an excuse for laziness.  I don’t admire the mountain man or the monk who decides to quit life and retreat to their thoughts on top of a mountain and devote themselves to poverty and lack of possession.  But I do admire the person who works 18 hours per day and employees over a 100 people—because they are the keys to being a productive society.  Those are the type of people who should be in charge of the economy.  Not some driveling idiot who hates money, wealth, and production. And in that context, we should all thank God that Donald Trump is finally in charge so we can talk about these things properly instead of with a bunch of emotional flap designed to hide a lack of personal ambition.

It’s not against the law to be lazy, or poor. If that is what people want to do, then let them have it.  But, they don’t have a right to skunk up the works of a perfectly successful, and wonderful capitalist economy where the natural spillover of productivity makes even the poorest people in America far better off than some of the richest in the godforsaken third world countries of the world—where political connections and aristocracy still rule the who has from the wish they dids. In America, it’s a choice and that is what makes America such a beautiful and moral country.  The best of the best are the job creators—because they bring opportunity to those who enjoy working hard.  By their very nature, they are not poor.  Rich people give jobs because they have produced an excess in their lives—poor people do not.  So to Trump’s point it’s quite clear he understands the difference—and for that we should celebrate with the flare of a Bugs Bunny as the stupidity of Yosemite Sam blows up his carefully laid plans in his face yet again as America cruises one more day toward a prosperity that was attempted to be robbed from future generations—but in a nick of time—wasn’t.

.Rich Hoffman

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The Truth About Stonehenge: Comments about the absurdity of summer solstice rituals

Visiting Stonehenge for me recently was one of the most important things I’ve ever done. It wasn’t just a bucket list item that I wanted to see at least once in my life—it was crucial. I have read so many books starting at a very young age where Stonehenge was contemplated that I needed to see the place in person. But to get to it you have to make a trip to England—and to do that you have to see a lot of other things and London usually has some part to play in such an expedition—so enough time in a schedule is necessary to accommodate such a task. However, this year I was able to get there and it was everything I expected and more. More than anything I was extremely impressed by the position the Neolithic complex held on the high plains of western England and the relation that all the mounds in the surrounding countryside had with the ancient stone ritual center. I think Stonehenge is remarkable in many different ways and its history is quite vast—much deeper than what the type of people who showed up at the summer solstice events which happen every year where druid loving people watch the sun rise on the longest day of the year.

I watched the events that these types of people participate in and it actually makes me pretty mad. The druids were not in any way involved with building Stonehenge. Their Celtic heritage is just another rendition of the modern nature worshipping hippie—the earth first losers who plague our modern politics with wishy-washy sentiment rooted in a new religion—making Mother Earth the new Yahweh or Shiva. For them and their followers of the modern age—Stonehenge is an earth worshipping symbol that a bunch of second handers from the region of Germany adopted to have sex parties and conduct themselves foolishly while under the ground dating back over 10,000 years were the relics of civilizations’ origins waiting still to be discovered. The reasons for Stonehenge’s alignments to the sun and other celestial bodies go far beyond the natural worshipping druids.

Yet like the American Indian the true meaning of the people who built Stonehenge goes undetected because intellectual curiosity cannot get past the necessity for spiritual redemption. Even the people studying Stonehenge cannot help but be pulled into the earth worship distortion that people like these druid lovers bring to the site during real archaeological study. When I was there the obvious layers of observation was distinctly obvious. On the surface, you have all these conclusions that are wrapped up in the methods of druid mythology which has always been associated with the site—unjustifiably. The druids came along many centuries after the final stages of construction at Stonehenge in 2500 BC. But to look properly at Stonehenge you have to be willing to look at Old Sarum to the south and Avebury to the north—as well as many hundreds of earthworks over the 50 miles of regional coverage. There was a lot going on in that region of England dating from the end of the last Ice Age to the relative present of 4000 years ago. For many millenniums—much longer than our present age—the Stonehenge region was very important and it goes well beyond the need to worship the earth.

Dating back 10,000 years—at least, are the skeletons of many sacrificed animals. What we know of Stonehenge and its modern rocks were built on the sacrificial site of these animal bones. Even in recent years—the last stages of Stonehenge after final construction, human sacrifices where happening with frequency—many of them quite brutal. I’m inclined to think that the stone alignments with the various solstices had less to do with celestial worship and more to do with keeping track of their progress throughout the year—likely to mark the points in time where interactions with important events occurred—such as when it became known how to calculate complicated mathematical concepts among a bunch of supposed nomads hunting and gathering for their entire lives and doing nothing else. Somewhere along the line of this 10,000-year span something happened that made people do remarkable things in that rather unremarkable landscape.

Then there is the problem of understanding that the builders of Stonehenge were not a regional phenomenon, but a global one. I am quite convinced after visiting Stonehenge and seeing things with my own eyes that the same people who built that place were also in North America building the many similar structures still seen all over the Americas. We are likely looking at a society that was much more advanced than we give it credit for, and was likely part of the culture that existed all over the world prior to the time the Book of Genesis was written. Many calculate that the Great Deluge took place around 2348 BCE which is just a few hundred years after the final touches of Stonehenge so we are dealing with more than just mythology and Earth worshiping killers. We’re dealing with a particularly potent hidden history that is right in front of our faces—yet we hide the truth behind our recent religious inventions—and that is compelling.

Evidence of life—even giant stones like what we see at Stonehenge do not last very long. Once you apply 20 or 30,000 years of wear to anything it often becomes unrecognizable and that to me is the most compelling aspect of the Neolithic monuments surrounding the Stonehenge area. Without question to me the same culture that built Stonehenge ended up in some way in North America and likely China. Without question, there were global sea trade routes moving all around the world at a time when we think of the people of Stonehenge as being separate and rising independently. The evidence simply doesn’t support that if you look at everything instead of just the Stonehenge complex. And then there is the case of the American Indian—they are obviously from the China region and settled in North America as a separate transaction of migration and they were interacting with these Stonehenge people—whoever they were—well before the druids walked out of Germany. All this is very revolutionary and certainly changes what we know about our own history. That’s why I so badly wanted to visit the site in person as opposed to reading about it as I have so much. It is clear that even lifelong researchers into Stonehenge are trying to fit it into what we know about science, instead of letting history properly tell its story with us being a willing audience. We’ve tried too hard to shape the narrative to fit our comfort level.

The biggest question about Stonehenge is—why there, and likely that answer is due to events that occurred before the Ice Age even happened. The uneventful plain of land in western England did not suddenly just pop up all these really remarkable monuments—something inspired people to do these things at a great cost to themselves—and that is where we need answers—and we’re not going to get it by watching a bunch of hippies worship the sun. I think the reason the sun was so important to all these ancient people clearly marks their need to demonstrate to the political masses a way to tell time. The sacrificial elements that often come out of collapsing societies tend to be what we study but the initial cause is where the focus should be. Why, and why there?

The mathematics involved alone extend well beyond the achievements of Greek study—it is time to accept that Greek and Roman empires were only ages and that all this had come before in times long forgotten. I think Stonehenge says to us that society wasn’t so primitive—at least aspects of it. People may have come from the surrounding countryside to become part of something bigger, and wiser at Stonehenge, and Avebury, but the people who built all these things were far less nomadic than we want to admit. They were rather advanced and that is something we need to deal with. They were a global society, not a regional one. It may take us 100 to 200 more years to find enough evidence to support some of the things I’ve said here, but the evidence is stacking up, and much of this is obvious. We just need more evidence before re-writing history books. But mark what I’m saying here, these druid rituals are just a bunch of left leaning hippies who are trying to use history to justify their religion of Mother Earth worship. They are as loony as the fools who sacrificed other human beings at Stonehenge trying to make it rain. They are not the builders of Stonehenge, or the causes for why it’s there to begin with. They are just more of a second-hand civilization riding the coattails of greatness and hoping that they can loot the credit for it over the lens of history. So far it has worked for them, but the evidence emerging is telling us the truth, and they are certainly blind to it.

Rich Hoffman
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‘The Book of Henry’: More than a film review–but an articulation of the very nature of evil

I was stunned by the movie reviews for The Book of Henry—they were illustriously bad.  In fact, they were so bad that there was often hatred in the utterances of the reviews.  Some people just hated this movie.  Yet, I have been very excited about it and did go and see it on the opening weekend—and I thought it was an absolutely brilliant film.  It wasn’t just a little good—it was great and in any other time, it would win many awards.  So how could all the critics be so wrong—well, to get to that let’s study the reaction to just the trailer that Grace Randolph from Beyond the Trailer provided when she reviewed the preview back in March.  I’m not picking on Grace, I usually lover her opinions even when I don’t agree—but this reaction is one of those raw–primal hatreds that certainly influenced all the negative reviews and that is why this is such a brilliant film.  Watch closely.

I think it said a lot about Colin Trevorrow that he wanted to even make this movie between the blockbusters of Jurassic World and the ninth Star Wars film upcoming.  He could have made any movie he wanted yet he picked The Book of Henry, which features a boy genius, 11 years of age who knows that there is great evil in the world and he spends much of his time contemplating how to stop it.  Trevorrow brought in some great talent, wonderful editing, great composer, great actors, great cinematography—great film business people from top to bottom and gave a project like The Book of Henry a top notch indie film treatment.  It’s a movie with a lot of heart but it has a judgment and that is what has people so outrageously upset with the movie and seek to punish it with their own needs to deflect their own guilt for the theme for which the movie is about.

The little girl next door to where Henry lives with his single mom and his little brother is being sexually abused by her step father who happens to be the police commissioner. So let’s answer Grace’s question from above, because her reaction was pretty innocent but some of the people in the film review business, from Variety to Rolling Stone are no doubt like the Sarah Silverman character—whom I don’t like as a political activist.  But she played a wonderful normal person in this movie—a person that likely 90 percent of our population could identify with.  She’s a loser, a hard-core drinker who misses work too much and has an ugly tattoo on her breast which she shows off most of the movie—she is the best friend of Naomi Watts who plays Henry’s mom.  And what a poor creature she is—she represents another large segment of the population who have lost her way in life.  She’s not a bad person, but she’s afraid to make her mark on the world and she drinks and plays too many video games to hide from that inclination—and she is totally dependent on her oldest son Henry who is an impeccable genius.

Most of the reviewers have commented that Henry seems otherworldly and un-relatable. After all, there just aren’t 11-year-olds out there who are as mature and wise as Henry.  But movies are supposed to take us to places we can’t go in normal life and meet people worth the hard work that usually goes into making movies.  And lucky for me, I completely understand Henry.  I knew people like him and there are parts of him that I can directly understand.  There is a scene in the movie that I thought was particularly powerful, it’s where Henry, his brother and his mom are at the grocery and they see a guy beating his girlfriend as they are having an argument. Nobody does anything to help the woman, but Henry is inclined to get involved and his mom stops him telling him its none of their business.  “Don’t get involved.”   Later that night Henry and his mom are in bed talking (innocently because the mother still reads books to her boys even though they are probably too old) and Henry tries to explain how disappointed he was in his mother for not wanting to get involved in the argument between the couple at the grocery store.  Of course his mother uses the excuse that she didn’t want to become embroiled in a violent episode.  Then Henry explains to her that violence isn’t always the worst thing.  Curious, his mother asked the young man what is the worst thing in the world.  Henry pauses for a second and answers, “apathy.”

When Grace Randolph was so outraged that The Book of Henry relied so heavily on a child genius to tell a rather ordinary story about revenge, redemption and family assimilation she made the mistake to assume that these things are normally very obvious to people—and they are in the third person.  After all, we are used to watching other people in the god-like position of viewer, with television and movies where we often have more information about what’s going on than the characters on the screen do and the drama we experience is in hoping that people we care about learn what we do in time to save themselves.  But in real life where stories are not broken down into typical three act plays, introduction, articulation of the conflict, then wrapped up nicely and on que to climax—events do not hold to that structure and because we have trained our minds in such a fashion—we often do not see evil sitting right in front of us.  Evil comes at us in subtle ways through loved ones, our jobs, our politics—even the kid who wants to mow our grass, install our cable, or check out our food at Wal-Mart.  We as human beings trust our structures and our institutions.  But most of the things that happen in the world happens outside of those organized elements and in the case of The Book of Henry, we see a society stuck in its structures and trust in institutional figures—such as the police chief next door who complains that the leaves of his single parent mother neighbor keep blowing into his yard giving him psychological leverage over her to hide his real crime—that he is sexually molesting his step daughter and using the institutions of government to keep inquiries away from him.  It takes someone free of those institutions—someone bigger than what human kind has to offer at that moment to see the evil—and that is why it was necessary to have Henry in this film be a brilliant kid.  Without that genius, nobody would have the courage to step beyond the veil of adulthood with all its trickery and diversion tactics meant to deceive themselves into believing they were living good lives—to see the truth.  That the police commissioner was destroying this poor little girl for extremely selfish reasons he deserved a style of justice that has nearly been outlawed in America. The Book of Henry nails all this and more making it a remarkable work of art.  That it has pissed off so many reviewers say more about them than the movie—for they are like the institutionalists in the film who failed the little girl while only Henry thought to act and took action to start the process. There are a lot of little girls—and little boys in the world who need someone to see how much trouble they are in but unfortunately their plight is invisible to most of our adult population.

The Book of Henry is a rare film that like all great art shows us what is difficult to see and in this case the plot device is genius to show it to an audience stuck in life much like the Naomi Watts character—not a bad person, but a person stuck in hundreds of bad decisions holding her down in life.  Her son Henry is pure and free of such things and it is through him that she comes to see the world for what it really is—and is compelled to act accordingly.  Even with some of the truly tragic story lines in this film it is an uplifting tale of optimism and genuine love of life. It is a truly remarkable work and something everyone should see at least once.  The reviews don’t like the film because it’s a bad movie—but because it makes them look at things they are partially guilty of creating—so that should not be a reason to avoid the picture.  Rather, The Book of Henry should be watched with open hearts and open minds and an honest assessment to what role the viewer might play on the side of villainy so that they can correct the situation for the good of everyone. The Book of Henry nails it and is certainly one of the great films of history and should still be remembered many years from now.

Rich Hoffman

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Oskar Eustis and his Poor Understanding of History: The director of New York’s Julius Ceaser gets everything wrong

Oskar Eustis as the “artistic director” of the controversial Julius Ceaser play at the Shakespeare in the Park in New York City doesn’t even understand what kind of country America is, let alone have a proper commentary on translating the 400 year old play to contemporary subject matter.  He’s the guy who thought it smart to dress up Julius Ceaser as a modern-day Donald Trump and have the character murdered on stage by a “diverse” senate filled with women, people of color and many others stabbed to death by a mob.  We are a republic Oskar, not a stupid, mind numb democracy.  This play has nothing to do with America—in fact our mode of government was an invention to step away from this kind of mob driven drivel.  Shakespeare’s Julius Ceaser play is about revenge, murder and political conspiracy—and all that plot driven nonsense—but its relevancy to Donald Trump for which you made him the lead character in this modern rendition—with Trump Tower leering on the skyline in full view of the audience is an attempt to taint the waters of the ignorant into poking their unsophisticated asses into open insurrection—and it isn’t forgivable.

I feel like I say this all the time about way too many subjects but I know something about William Shakespeare. My favorite of his plays is Titus Andronicus which is a character I understand completely.  I love the way it reads and to date Julie Taymor has done the best job of taking the play to film with Anthony Hopkins doing a phenomenal job as Titus.  Many creative people have applied their hand to Shakespeare and for good reason, the material is rich and it forces actors to really dig deep in understanding theater from a long ago time in a language that is almost completely foreign to us now.  So it was an insult to me to hear how this latest New York modern rendition of Julius Ceaser was abusing its artistic power and trying to explain it away once Bank of America pulled out as a sponsor for wistfully putting Donald Trump into the contemporary role of “protagonist” brutally murdered by a bunch of conniving senators. You don’t have to look too far to understand that the play’s director in this case is rooting for the Chuck Schumers of the world to plot the same kind of assassination in modern politics and that his grasp on this modern history is as shallow as a dry lake bed in Nevada.

When Oskar Eustis said in his remarks on his play that “democracy depends on the conflict of different points of view, nobody owns the truth, we all own the culture,” he displayed a predilection toward insanity that I found quite alarming.  People clapped because they figured he was an art guy who knows more than they do about these matters, but honestly the lack of understanding displayed by Eustis of this material is shocking.  It is because democracy is unreliable that we even have a republic in America—and the analysis that William Shakespeare was constantly obsessed with about the Roman republic failures in his plays are explorations in mob violence for the sake of theater and the compelling subject matter it evokes.  The Donald Trump presidency is actually an evolution beyond this kind of animalistic chaos.  Trump is not power-hungry in the way that Julius Ceaser was and he is not a person who would ever be in a position to allow a mob of conniving senators access to him in a way they could commit murder.  Trump is much more strategic, and a lot smarter than people think he is.  I would warn people not to assume that they can “outthink” the Trump—which is one of the appealing aspects of his presidency for which people like me voted for him.  I don’t want a Shakespearian White House for a change.  I want an evolution beyond it—and I have found it in Trump.

https://publictheater.org/Tickets/Calendar/PlayDetailsCollection/SITP/Julius-Caesar/

We are not all equal in a democratic America.  Some of us work a lot harder than others and thus we need the representation of a republic to prevent the mob from running the show—because the lazy, the drug obsessed, and the sexually manipulative need to be kept at a distance from the legislative process as much as possible—and the hardest working among us should be the ones running things.  We can only determine value through merit so as far as owning the truth—it doesn’t all belong to us equally.  And regarding the political left, democracy has already defeated the progressive offerings philosophically and they don’t like it and have turned toward these violent threats to stay relevant in the world.  Oskar Eustis can play word gymnastics all he wants in an attempt to take the edge off what he did—which was an open plea for the modern senate to assassinate Donald Trump.  Eustis knew that most people wouldn’t understand the words spoken in the play and that most people haven’t worked hard to gain the meanings of Shakespeare’s language.  But dress up Ceaser in Donald Trump looking suits and make his wife sound just like Melania Trump and even the dumbest people in the audience will understand and that will be what they remember.  And at the pot parties before and after the big show—which always go on with creative people the stoned losers hope that out there in the audience is a James Hodgkinson who might be a committed enough leftist with nothing to lose in life who might sacrifice themselves for the cause of “democracy” otherwise known as “mob rule.”  Don’t kid yourself in thinking that this kind of talk is not happening.  Listen to what leftists say in public—what they say when the cameras are not on is much worse.

I found it particularly insulting that Oskar Eustis on the front page of their website actually said “Act Three, Scene One of Shakespeare’s JULIUS CAESAR takes place on the Ides of March, 44 B.C. By the time that scene is over, democracy will have vanished from the face of the earth for almost two millennia, until some English colonists on the eastern seaboard of North America start throwing tea into Boston Harbor.”  This open appeal toward the conservative movement to connect his play with the efforts of the American Revolution were disgusting—and again it’s not democracy that we’re analyzing, it’s a republic—a representative republic that requires the participation of the engaged and wise and allows the fools and addicts to beg for money on the sidewalk as “unequal” participants in history. There is quite a difference between the players on the field of a sporting event and those who just sit in the stands and watch.  Those who participate in our republic are on the field whether they vote, or become part of the mechanisms of government.  The mob is in the stands cheering or booing depending on how things go—but they are not equal participants.  People who smoke dope and study 400-year old plays about violence and the darkest of human emotions are not equal to the law student who spends 18 hours a day preparing their mind for a big case and will eventually become a senator perhaps after a successful career over many years.  They are not equal people.

Additionally I would offer that Donald Trump is a superior offering to anything that William Shakespeare ever conceived in his plays.  Understanding Donald Trump’s White House is beyond the grasp of people like Oskar Eustis and his thin understanding of history.  We are looking at an evolutionary design for which history will record and will be thankful for over the coming millennia.  To put Trump into the shoes of Julius Caesar is to try to take a full-grown adult and put baby shoes on them—Trump is far more evolved than anything Rome ever created as an emperor. The very stupid of our society may not understand how or why yet because history is being written with each moment that we breathe—but Trump is an idea that will change history for the better.  All Eustis could see as a director of a play was a way to try to hold those animalistic concepts of human nature to a White House that is moving well beyond the reach of the political left and their failed ideas.  All they have is the threat of violence to attempt to stay relevant in this tragedy of modern politics.  They are not equal in this American republic because their liberal concepts for our reality have been rejected in the theater of debate and all they have left is to attempt to redefine the definitions of fairness and the recollections of history to suit their current crises—and to hope that by calling our American system a democracy that enough dumb people will believe them in an effort to get out the vote and ignite their base for the 2018 midterms between the haze of marijuana smoke and a drug induced orgy of dirty, smelly, tattooed covered liberals laced with body piercings and a lack of deodorant forgotten due to their spending the day bitching about Donald Trump instead of getting a job and jumping on the many opportunities this administration has created for them to be more successful.  They like most liberals would rather complain, and plot murder so that they could keep their welfare checks and government jobs intact hoping beyond hope that Karl Marx will find his way into the philosophy of American politics before all the old hippies die off.  But in America its Adam Smith who set the stage and it’s not Julius Ceaser who runs our Republic—its Donald Trump, and he is a creation beyond the reach of classic literature.  That book is being written before our eyes for the first time in history—and it’s much more exciting than anything the human race has ever created before.

Rich Hoffman

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

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