Tag: education

Dancing to the Songs of the Universe: The girl in the white hat and her fiddle

I am always touched, no matter where in the world it is, when I see one of these street performers giving everything they have for a chance at getting noticed. Many of them are extremely talented and if only Hollywood or the record industry would just discover them, life would be great! But that’s not often how it happens and scenes like this one with the young girl performing in an open European market street are common, especially in Europe. Yet I really love watching this girl perform. That video was actually from over a year ago, but every time I see it I am enchanted with her raw ambition and lust for life. I could listen to her play music all day long and never tire.

It’s not a secret that I love children. It’s also no secret that I am not a big fan of teenagers and young twenty somethings. Out of all the ages of human development I have always hated those stages of people’s lives, the sexual age. With children, like the girl in the video playing wonderful music for tips, ambition and dreams are still alive. With teenagers and young adults many of the dreams of childhood surrender themselves to the impulse of nature to simply find a mate and to reproduce. With children their minds are coming alive and their individual ambitions are ignited. But once puberty kicks in nature is taking over and it is the liberal reminder that individuals serve nature, not the mind over nature itself. While kids have their minds growing, they are at the best that humans can ever hope to achieve. The sad story is that once they surrender that growth to nature, then it is seldom that they ever recover and they grow into adults that are constantly yearning to return to their youth, for the rest of their miserable lives.

Then occasionally you see a girl like this street performer will show up with her little hat and a fiddle and throw her dreams to the wind and hope that the shared experience will lead to good fortune. But in the honesty of most children there is just the lust to experience life in some profound way and share that expression with great ambition and talent, which is obvious in her performance. This girl reminds me of a young lady I saw who was about ten years older perform on the streets of Canterbury several years ago. My thoughts on seeing her was that she should be on America’s Got Talent, or some other high-level broadcast. But if every such person would be so discovered we couldn’t hold them back from filling a country of their very own, which is in a lot of ways why America was born. Every village around the world from India to the Congo have similar young people bursting with talent until they start giving birth to kids of their own and their dreams of ambition are lost to the pressures of reality. Sometimes, which I am always encouraging young people to hang on to, they get into their upper years with that ambition still attached, or they resurrect them. But often the case is that such ambitions are lost once the yielding to nature occurs, then such people are forever changed, and they never return.

I love seeing that these people are out there and I do cheer on that this bright young girl might hold her talents close even if Hollywood or some other entertainment market doesn’t give her a job, that she continues to perform like this for the raw ambition of protesting against nature and instead remain as humans were designed, playing their brand of music against the backdrop of the universe and whatever songs spring forth.

I am also a person who doesn’t like dancing, I don’t do it. The reason is that the music is reminiscent to me of nature and most music worth dancing to is of the low intellect pubescent variety. The music is made by people in their young adult phase and the goal is to get people into the mating rituals, the low thinking of sexual frustrations and hunger. It has often made me weary to go to dance halls, night clubs and those types of environments and watch bright young people surrender away their guarded bodies to the mosh pit of a mob that grinds against them in sexual ways in full view of the public as primitives would in a village orgy. We are not talking about the songs of the universe in this case, but the lower standards of the human desire to breed then die like some springtime flower that has done its duty, flowered, then bake away in the summer sun until its just a wrinkled up mound of vegetation dead by the first freeze of autumn. That is where that kind of dancing takes everyone, and its very sad for me to see, if I must admit as much.

But the music this girl is playing to, and dancing is of another kind. Its not intended to be sexualized, or even provocative, but is an affirmation of a musical score that was provided to her life for which she put her own spin on with her fiddle. That to me is the essence of what human life is and why it could have so much potential if only people would behold it and interact with it honestly. While most of these street performers in the world are hoping to get noticed, or to earn enough tips for the day to pay their way through that day of life, it is the last vestiges of childhood dreams that I see. These people are resisting to get that life crushing job, that boss that just doesn’t get it, for a chance to hang on to the dreams of childhood just a little bit longer before rent payments and healthcare dominate their thoughts, while their childhood lives and the freedom of thought that came with them are still there.

Here is this girl, defiant against the changes coming to her life playing music to the songs of the universe and all the hopes and dreams that come from an independent mind squaring off against reality itself. And the crowd gathering knows what they see. They have long surrendered to those pressures but they give the girl a tip because in some small way, that is one of their last acts of rebellion against the forces that are ruining their own lives in the vast wasteland of their existence, to give that girl a small tip of support and hope for her sake that the world might notice. And for the range of that little song the girl in her bright white hat and her sandals playing in the streets of a big city her declaration that she is independent and free, and not just putting her life in conjunction with human ambition in changing nature to a musical score of thought—but she is in command of it.

We might be thinking that once the music stops the bite of nature will come after her, and rip her to shreds like what happens to most people. But as she bows at the conclusion and people clap, we suppose that the grim reaper is just around the corner. However, I think that so long as she has that fiddle in her closet, or under her bed, no matter how many kids she has, or how many loved ones she knows who lose their life to the ailments of nature, that she will be alright. She may never taste fame or fortune, but so long as she can play music like that, she will always be a free person and will be among the most wealthy among us in the history of the human race.

Rich Hoffman

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The 25/25 Rule: Get better, don’t yield to weaknesses

A lot of the methods of business have been on my mind lately due to the work I’m putting into a new book I’m working on called the Gunfighter’s Guide to Business. In it there is a chapter on the International Journal of Production Research’s 25/25 rule and it is just another example of how the private sector is always trying to improve themselves so that they can make more money and stay relevant longer in a business environment. Yet government at any level never does and it shows in what their final products are. We joke about how inefficient government is, and people do desire jobs in the government sectors because performance standards are not part of the vocabulary, but it doesn’t take an accountant to realize that for every hour worked in a to heavy government environment that it is costing the taxpayer a tremendous amount of money because something like the 25/25 rule is not being utilized, and its very disingenuous to everyone forced to contribute to the madness through the tyranny of the IRS.

The 25/25 rule essentially states that you take the 25% of your business portfolio and not focus on it so that you can give attention to all your top customers. The effort was created to attempt to give more focus on organizational support for the best of your customers and requires a judgement call. The rule also assumes that there is always another 25% of your company portfolio that can be improved with cutting out non-value-added tasks. Can you imagine a school board meeting where such a conversation would take place? The teacher’s union which really runs all public schools would be up in arms and protesting in seconds, since the goal of any employee run management is to be as inefficient as possible so that the bar of expectations cannot be lowered, just ever inflated so that the “collective” is not pressured too much in any task. That is problem number one.

Yet even in relation to the private sector I think the 25/25 rule doesn’t go nearly far enough and is a very disrespectful way to treat customers if they don’t happen to be in that upper tier of a company’s portfolio. It’s not their fault that you as a business have focus problems and need to find ways to internally prioritize effort. While I do agree that there is always 25% of an organization that could almost always be eliminated in unnecessary process flow and streamlined operations, I also think that the task of every organization is that they need to get 25% better on their portfolios, not to ignore 25% of their current load so they can focus on their best and most important customers. A top-level organization is always doing that and getting better so that they can show off their capacity to handle pressure for future state growth opportunities.

What I find happening in organizations using the 25/25 rule is that its giving bad management another tier of excuses to use until they are forced to look in the mirror and admit what a bunch of losers they are. The intent of the 25% portfolio reduction is to manage overbooked businesses with a steadier workflow, with the notion that its better late than never getting it at all. To me this is reprehensible thinking and is the nature of that particular chapter in my book. The difference between the East and the West is that winning matters and some of the parameters of western thinking that determine victory is speed and accuracy—the drive thru window with everything in the bag that you ordered—the first time through. We want it fast and we want it accurate. This whole 25/25 rule had me thinking of the bullwhip competitions that I’ve been in over the years where you are supposed to be 7’ from the five targets in the Speed and Accuracy competitions. You are timed how quickly you can use a 6’ bullwhip to crack out the ten targets. For every miss, there is a 5 second penalty. Learning to do that competitive event is a good way to step beyond the 25/25 rule and instead to focus on improving yourself by 25% not passing along your inability to some down the line customer.

We see it all the time, we’re picking up some food at a drive thru, the restaurant is obviously understaffed for the level of business they have and lines are wrapped around the building with everyone waiting on their food. Additionally, the people who don’t want to wait in that long line go inside to order at the counter, hoping to step around the mess. But standard practice in every fast food restaurant is to use that 25/25 rule to deal with such carnage, and the first thing that goes is worrying about the dining room because it is the drive thru windows that have the timers on them and is how they are measured as a successful business. Such a place could be said to have a capacity problem and the managers will blame their high call-off rates and blame the weak condition of their employees as the reason for their victimized status.

I would argue that the capacity constraints are not in the machinery, since most fast food restaurants are built to do the business, its in the high turnover and generally unreliable nature of the employees they hire that causes all the problems. I find the fault in the managers who have such a bad staff that calls off too much, or the kind of people they hired to begin with, in not determining at the interview that their employees might turn in to unreliable employees, and that the management culture allowed the employees to call off often without consequences which is why restaurants sometimes are slammed and unprepared to deal with their customer bases. Hiring the right kind of people through the interview process then developing those people through proper management practices is the key to successful staffing which then solves the capacity challenges that are not related to the equipment itself.

The 25/25 rule tends to give bad management the excuse to hide behind this measurement system and give them a victimized status to explain away their failure. “My employees called off, so I couldn’t successfully handle the customer demands.” Yet it was the reason all their employees called off that the management system didn’t deal with, which is why there is a problem in the first place. The company should focus instead on having a 25% increase in hiring efficiency where their new employees have better attendance. Or the drive thru window workers get 25% faster than the less experienced newbs. Or that you can run the whole operation with 25% less people. Those should be the targets and people who do things like that bullwhip competition that I mentioned understand that process because it simply wouldn’t be permissible to complain that the competition was too hard and that they didn’t have the speed and accuracy to compete. That is the nature of my new book, is to change the thinking about these kinds of things from a victimized status to a proactive one. If you want to do something, don’t blame the conditions. Get better, and acquire the skills needed for success.

Of course, the obvious hatred for President Trump by protectors of the status quo, the government employees who have been sucking off the system hiding behind a lack of standards reviews, or the government labor unions who have their own rules, such as a 99/99 rule. Unions are only willing to give 1% toward performance review, or a process improvement. They aren’t willing to sign up for any performance expectations because they don’t want the bar set where their lazy employees have to live up to. While that makes for a nice job for them where they get paid whether or not they actually do anything, the benefit to the end use customer is us, in that they cost too much money. At least with President Trump a part of our government is starting to think more like the private sector, and that’s the way it should always have been.

Rich Hoffman
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The 25/25 Rule: Using Bullwhips to understand Overcapacity problems

I have enough for my book to include this small sample from the upcoming Gunfighter’s Guide to Business.  There is still a lot of editing to conduct and it will likely be a 2020 project at this point, but thought my audience here would enjoy it, since so many people have been asking how it is coming along.  So enjoy this short sample:

The 25/25 Rule

There are many rules of practice that businesses use to manage their capacity, such as Warren Buffett’s 25/5 rule, or the International Journal of Production Research’s 25/25 rule. With Buffett, he states that out of the top 25 things that you want to do in life, you should only focus on the top five, until you’ve completed them. And with the 25/25 rule the goal is to reduce focus on the bottom 25% of your workload and to squeeze improvements in process out of another 25%. Thinking like a gunfighter however, these measurements in business are only new ways to present targets to hit and have their own sets of problems that unless looked at correctly, are useless. As I have spoke about, there are many weapons that gunfighters can use to do their business, guns are just one of them. Another is the bullwhip which I find has many direct correlations that apply to conceptual business matrixes such at the 25/25 rule.

As I have said about the bullwhip and in fast draw shooting in general, the primary objective is to do the most work with the most power in the shortest and most accurate time span possible. With bullwhips, to get the maximum impact out of the end of the weapon with the minimum effort it requires the handler to project that effort toward a target at a proper moment where the crack will occur in space and time. It is really quite an effort in physics to be able to crack out the flame on a candle with a bullwhip which among those who can call themselves experts, is a common act. When hitting targets with a bullwhip the effort looks effortless when done correctly as most of the action happens within a second’s time of measure. But there are many small steps within that second that must occur correctly to make such a thing happen, especially under the burden of timed pressure. Yet even just cracking out a flame on a candle with all the time to do it in the world takes a very timed approach to inflict the minimal effort to get the maximum results of cracking the whip so near the candle that the sonic boom created blows out the flame.

When companies utilize the 25/25 rule essentially what they are saying is that they are over capacity due to their sales departments over booking the facility and that they are picking the bottom end of their 25% of business portfolio to ignore so that they can focus on their top percent of valuable customers. The problem with this approach is that it allows bad management to hide behind a method of measurement and to use the analysis to disguise bad approaches to solving the problem. In the Cowboy Fast Draw competitions and Wild West Arts work that is like saying that the weapon handler needs more time to do a good job. But as we know in gun fights, the fastest and most accurate were the ones who won the duels. There were no rules for taking time to deal with the incompetence of the duelists. If the gunfighters were incompetent, they were killed. And the same holds true in business.

The aim of the Western Arts isn’t just to enjoy the historical nature of traditional weapons used in war within American culture but is to represent the necessities of living within a western society. The needs of American business is one of those requirements, and not connecting those proper metaphors to the function of business can lead to detriment, which for too many companies is a common occurrence. Such as the case with the 25/25 rule the way it has been proposed to help companies with their problems of overcapacity. The solution to those problems are experienced in western competition where speed and accuracy are measured. There are many very good shooters in the world and very good bullwhip artists who have trouble with the fast draw competitions of Western Arts. They look great when performing for audiences until the pressure of time is added, then things get tough and people start reacting poorly under duress, which is the point.

Most consultants in the United States and Europe are following similar methods of reducing push systems and instead incorporating pull, where one element of a supply chain does not ship until the downstream source is needed. The 25/25 rule is an element of this thinking and it essentially dances around the true villain which is incompetence. If a manager either upstream or downstream just can’t handle the pressure and has a hard time recruiting and retaining good employees, they will obviously have trouble doing the required job. The 25/25 rule gives them some cover to then focus only on their valuable customers and letting the less valuable fall off the portfolio. This might look great for the internal measures of a production environment, but it doesn’t equal the task of the sales department that is trying to book work and help a company profile with new business. The incompetent managers within an organization might be angry toward sales for bringing in more work than they feel comfortable handling. And that is the core of the problem. Many of the Lean consultants do have good ideas but they try to use peer pressure to level load a facilities production output instead of focusing on making the individual contributors better.

I have seen many really good bullwhip artists struggle with the speed and accuracy competitions that are in the Western Arts events, because the rhythm and pressure of a timed competition throws off everything and they would argue that if the rules were not so rigorous, if only they had more time, they could do better. Well, who couldn’t? The point of timed pressure is to sort out the good from the bad and in business that is certainly the case. Thinking like a gunfighter, anything less than fast and accurate would mean death, and it does to businesses also.

It is up to the weapon handler, such as in the case of the bullwhip artist to get better and to acclimate themselves to the conditions of the battlefield. If doing a speed and accuracy competition with bullwhips between 15 to 12 seconds is the parameters needed to win, then that is up to the bullwhip artists to get better to compete in those parameters. In the case of businesses where sales provide jobs and the various program managers within the organization determine that the scope of work fits within the company portfolio it is not up to the weaknesses of production to decide that they can’t live up to the expectations. They must get better to meet the needs, not hide behind some bounty hunter rules created to make their business thrive while the businesses that hire them suffer under their own incompetence. Rather than try to force the industry to deal with the artificial constraints created by bad management, companies should strive to get 25% better to meet those market needs and to create value for their customers. What if a town sheriff stated to the population looking to them for protection that to be a good representative of the law that the criminals needed to be 25% slower in their threats and actions of aggression so that the sheriff could handle the danger? Instead, it is up to the sheriff to get faster, and to be better. And if more bandits come to town, and are smarter and faster yet, it is up to the law to get better to keep the peace. So, it is with any business. The customer needs what they need, it is up to the company to give it to them, or to figure out how to without going out of business in the practice. And that only happens when you force everyone to get better, not playing to the weaknesses of the workforce managed poorly by the incompetent.

Rich Hoffman

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Don’t Shop At Walmart: Anyone against guns is against the idea of America and is an advocate of domestic terrorism

Do you know what the difference is between “us” and “them” the political right and the political left, both of which cannot have a stake in the future of America because the philosophies of living are just too dramatically far apart? “We” talk about doing things and “they” do them. Such is the case with “us” talking about making Antifa a terrorist organization, which it clearly is, then the San Francisco Board of Supervisors passing a resolution declaring the National Rifle Association a “domestic terrorist organization.” While the resolution is purely a political stunt, what is at stake is the branding of guns in general and any group or individuals who defend the right to have them—as terrorists. This as Antifa members beat people senseless, harass elderly flag waving veterans, and espouse brown shirt socialism from their corner Starbucks with outward threats of violence and mayhem. Even the now wimpy Walmart is in on the game of banning ammunition and pistols from their inventory refusing to sell them to their customers under pressure from these same forces.

The same mode of attack is at play as Andrew McCabe and Peter Strzok suing the FBI for wrongful termination even though they are the ones who committed the crimes, or the school levy supporter who advocates to boycott any business that does not support their mandatory tax increases, or the drug advocate who wants to ignore that all these mass shooters were depressed fatherless young people who by their indicated states had altered their mental acuity into dangerous assassins. The political left doesn’t care if 5 people are killed in a mass shooting or 50. Much higher numbers are shot and killed every weekend in Chicago. The goal for the left isn’t to eliminate shootings and mass killing. If they were for life, they wouldn’t be supporters of abortion which kills many more people every year. So do car accidents, and stabbings. For them mass killings, which they have their hand in the philosophies that cause them completely, are opportunities to exploit their real aim, the abandonment of the Constitution the re-invention of America, and the acquiring of power for a large central government over an independent republic.

My advice to you dear reader is not to shop at Walmart due to their activism against guns, which is the backbone of American life in so many ways. I am writing a book on that subject as a matter of fact and I could easily fill it with content as large as War and Peace. Of course, that would be too long, so editorial considerations must be made in the process, and I’m certainly not going to try to define it here, in these little 1200-word articles. Its beyond the scope of this subject. However, Walmart has built an empire off the American lifestyle and once they turn against guns and their users, they are headed in the wrong direction and are victims of the radicals rather than helpers of a better world.

My wife has to drag me to a Walmart every time we go. She likes it, has a loyalty to them for offering goods at the lowest price possible. But what I see is an ocean of mediocrity and I like to avoid the place and the smell. My thoughts on the matter are that low prices tend to bring out low expectations in life, so in a lot of ways, Walmart has hurt people, not helped them. Lowering the bar for living a good life may not be the best thing. After all, what good is an expensive item gained cheaply if you cheat the real value. The only way to pull off that hat trick is to actually lower the value of the product itself which is the case with Walmart. The value of Walmart to a person like me is that I can buy guns and ammunition while my wife shops for groceries. If I can’t do that, then I have no value for Walmart.

And that’s the way it always is, it’s always conservatives who move toward a position that the left claims—its never the other way around and that is because conservatives are such nice people. They are just and they do have empathy while the left is like that spoiled teenager that can never be made happy. What we never talk about is why they are never happy. Its not because they don’t want to be happy, but because they use their unhappiness to change policy for themselves, so they can get one more hour on their curfew, or the keys to the family car for a night out on the town. The left throws fits of rage for the hell of it, so they can bring hell to the rest of us. They expect us to compromise while they do nothing to meet us halfway. So why in the world would we do it knowing that?

The reason is that conservatives are smarter than liberals and are naturally averse to conflict. They would rather use other aspects of their intellect to solve a problem than fight and that is what the left exploits, because like a spoiled teenager of loving parents, or guilty parents, they know they can get away with it. That is precisely how Antifa expects to inflict terrorism on us, and why the FBI drifted away from justice and became radicalized. They knew they could get away with the effort, so they went for the aggression, because nobody was standing in their way.

I am a proud member of the NRA. I just renewed my membership which I do every year at this time just so I can have the privilege of renewing it. I like knowing that I am a member, so the renewal is my way of keeping it fresh in my mind. And within that membership I see and hear from the true backbone of America, and I like those people. I take offense to it when they are called names and when my organization is attacked and called a terrorist organization. To whom? The actual domestic terrorists within our borders—the political left?

For me I do have other tools to fight with than violence and I spend most of my life using those tools. But unlike other conservatives I am not against meeting violence with violence. If that’s the only language that the left can speak, well I can assure them that I can shout louder than they can. I am not OK with Walmart turning anti-American, I am not OK with my group being called a terrorist organization. And I am not a supporter of Antifa terrorism, radical levy moms and their boycotts of businesses, teacher union losers striking for more money when kids need someone to watch them while their parents are working, and I’m not OK with an FBI that tampered with the last American election and expects to get away with it. Guns mean that my life will not be controlled by those kinds of people. Removing guns from society means those types of people will decide how I live and that isn’t acceptable. The debate isn’t one of gun control, its about what kind of America we want. Mass shootings are caused and exploited by left leaning political activists for their own brand of terrorism, and it is not the task of the political right to appease them unopposed. Since we can’t trust politicians, we have the NRA, which people like me make up. And when it is attacked, I consider it an attack on me. And that is not a good strategy on behalf of the real domestic terrorists, the political left.

Rich Hoffman
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Failure is Never an Option: Trump is right, bad companies blame the tariffs, not themselves

I’m glad President Trump said it, its true, badly run companies are using the tariff war with China as an excuse for their poor performance. I agree with him. That is usually the case any time an organization is caught performing bad, they will use any excuse to hide their own behavior. In public school systems they always blame the unfunded mandates of the state, or the allocation of the state money, but what is usually the case, its their lazy union employees who are the cause of poor performance and the unwillingness of the school boards to fight them. In the private sector the same kind of blame game goes on, only in business there are constant exercises in management review that exploits the real problems. Not all companies, in fact most companies, are not well run so price increases due to the China trade war or long lead times from suppliers is an easy target for losers to blame for their own problems. So, it was good to see that we finally have a president who has run businesses, and understands how things really work, instead of some out of touch politician who believes everything advisors tell him.

Good management is to close gaps when it is obvious that they need to be closed, such as in the trade deficit with China. For all the bellyaching that is made about how bad the trade war is hurting farmers in America, Trump has moved $16 billion collected from the realignment of the new tariffs on Chinese goods and sent them straight to the farmers since they have been targeted by China. And as Trump pointed out, there are many more billions of dollars that we are collecting now that we weren’t before, so the farmer issue in losing to China isn’t even a consideration. And neither are the complaints where price increases are being blamed by the tariffs. As far as revenue collection, the United States is making money. As far as supply chain management, companies always knew the risks of doing business with a communist country, and they should have had contingency plans. That they didn’t says a lot about the kind of companies that they are, lazy and unprepared, so the tariffs are an easy target for the incompetent.

Almost before the trade war started between Trump and China I heard business insiders starting to blame the poor condition of their supply chains as an excuse to either push out lead times or jack up their prices. But if they were actually a well-run company, they would have already thought about those things, even a year out and they would not be affected by a trade war with China. Blaming the tariffs for anything is the first sign of people who don’t know better, and are bad managers of the elements of their life which interact with business. Before Trump came along nobody said such obvious things so we should all be grateful that Trump is willing to take on big communist currency manipulators like China but also the big companies in America who love to hide their out of control management on politics. Most of the time, the fault is theirs and theirs alone.

Every organization that runs a budget, whether it is the large government schools of nearly every community in North America or a large corporation like Apple, they are expected by reality to produce and to do so well. The challenges that come along whether its unfunded mandates or the supply of metals are tasks that all management is supposed to deal with. Nobody wants to hear excuses; they just want results and that is ultimately the value that companies bring to their markets. An excuse is not a value, it is simply a means to explain away failure. But from my perspective, and this has always been the case, failure is never an option.

I was very encouraged the other day; I was at a stop light and a large tractor trailer pulled up alongside me. On the trailer was a company motto stating, “failure is not an option.” I thought to myself, there is a great company. Any company or organization that puts that as part of their branding is at least trying to avoid the blame game of failure that is part of their business. Someone is always failing them, the question is, will they accept that failure or overcome the imposition? A company that does not accept failure but simply moves on from it is one that is trying to be successful. But a company that says, our business is hurt by the tariffs with China, or the interest rates that are at play, or we are having a hard time hiring people because everyone is on oxycontin these days, those are all loser statements. They may have roots in reality but accepting them for poor performance is detrimental to any organizational behavior.

A great football team doesn’t stop trying to win if their star player goes down, or if the referees call a bad game against them. Those things might actually cause a team to lose, but blaming those elements are loser statements. Accepting that failure is the first step in losing and any company that blames things for their poor performance is acting as a loser, and not taking the steps that success requires. To win at anything overcoming barriers to success are expected. If a company doesn’t have the talent to do so, or the will to do it, then failure may happen. To explain their inadequacy to their share holders and other carriers of the public trust, they might blame tariffs or supply problems. But in all honesty, it was their job all along to overcome whatever opposition to success that there was, and to win the game, whatever it may have been. When people say that “it’s not whether you win or lose, its how you play the game,” they are partially right. How you play the game is all important in whether or not you will experience success. But even in that popular statement are the seeds for failure planted. It implies that even if you lose, if you played a good game, then you are off the hook. Bad companies have become very good at looking like they are playing the game well with lots of nice charts and excuses, but ultimately it is how you play the game, and whether you win or not. Nobody likes second place. Everyone loves a winner. The goal is always to win and to overcome impediments.

Excuses are for those who are lazy or stupid, incompetent or up to no good. I often decry labor unions because they are often to blame for a company’s lack of management, or the organization as a whole of something like a public school where the inmates run the asylum. Management at these places often throw their hands up and say things like, we failed because none of the union workers wanted to work the weekend, or we had a strike and couldn’t bring in raw materials. But what they are really saying is that they have no control of their business and weren’t thinking far enough ahead to have contingency plans. Such companies are blaming the tariffs for their poor performance and they make Trump a target for their failure, but in all reality, they own that failure. And nobody else.

Rich Hoffman

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I’ll Take The Art of the Deal over The Art of War: China has already lost the trade war

You can go back a long ways, even to the time where Doc Thompson and I talked about the China problem on WLW radio frequently. You can Google me or him on the topic of China and discover that this issue is not a new one. Long before there was a President Trump, people like us were trying to wake people up to the fact that modern warfare was not in tanks, guns and troops, it was economies and China was seeking to knock America off the ladder and to become the dominate player in the world as a communist country of everything financial. And they almost got away with it. I would vote for Donald Trump again, and again, and again if only to get out of his entire presidency this one thing, taking on China and halting the incursion into our lives that was well at play before his election. What people don’t seem to realize is that China was sucking out of the American economy over $500 billion per year in trade deficits. When we talk about the United States operating at a trillion dollars per year deficit, that is where half the money is going. If Trump hadn’t come along when he did, we’d all be in big trouble right now, Obama and Bush were all in on the deal. China was going to rule the world as a communist power, and even members of our own government were seeking to make it happen.

I was pretty furious that the public school in my home district of Lakota was sending teachers to China in exchange programs intent to learn how we could be more like them, because as an education institution, it should have been the other way around. I was even more furious when visiting the Children’s Museum in Indianapolis that they had an entire exhibit dedicated to learning about the Chinese way of doing things, as if preparing American students for the inevitable takeover. The United States was poised by a lot of dumb politicians prior to President Trump to give away American wealth to the Chinese and they were going to be handed the keys to the world just for showing up as a global communist power that leftist economists wanted to breathe to being since the same experiment in Russia, and Vietnam had failed.

China was never as powerful as authorities told us. As a communist tyranny their society naturally lacks imagination and deep philosophic thinking, and that is clear in their culture, as it is in every communist society. That is not a political statement, it’s a human one. It doesn’t matter if the subject is the sad housewife who spent her entire life serving her family only to see them all grow up and away giving her little back in return or the business professional that has poured their entire life into their company serving their bosses then dying one year after retirement, people are happiest when they are free to act and think what they want when they want to. Capitalism allows for more of this behavior than centralized controlled societies. That society may be the contents of a marriage between two people where one clearly dominates the other, and the other is a miserable wreck of a person, or a company and its employees, where top down authority is more important than horizontal harmony. China as a power is too centralized for their billion plus people to think for themselves. They have the workers, but they don’t think freely which is a huge impediment to an expanding economy built off wealth production.

The whole trick worked so long as America could be coaxed into giving away their wealth so that China could have it. So long as America followed green agenda points with over regulation while China could do anything to the environment and nobody would say anything—especially the climate science activists who secretly knew the name of the game was and will always be for them, global communism. They want a welfare state so they can sit around collecting a government check while their lazy asses play video games all day, and they vote accordingly. But they do not represent the intellect of America, that’s why we voted for Trump. To avoid this downward spiral.

Its time to say all this because this issue as I said has been around a long time. My friend Doc Thompson was recently killed by an Amtrack train, which I still find uncharacteristically odd, but whatever. He’s not around any more, but this China problem is exactly as he and I said it would be nearly ten years ago. And I for one am extremely happy with how President Trump is playing the situation for American advantage. The Chinese are exposed. The American economy will start to see plus revenue as the money flows out of China and back into the United States. That isn’t to say that we don’t have to solve our spending problem in America, but Trump isn’t president to do that. He’s there to put money back in the jar. We’ll fight later about how to spend it. His job is to stop the bleeding and he is certainly doing that.

There are a few YouTube videos confirming what I’m saying, and a few business analysist types on cable news who agree with me, but I have found it shocking that with all the great intellect that we have in America that more people just don’t understand the problem with China and what they have been up to. However, I did spend about ten years of my life reading The Art of War not just in the words that were printed on the page, but in soaking up their meaning in the way that the Chinese think. The book itself dates back to around 500 BC to the Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu and clearly that has been the way that the Chinese not only came to power after World War II where America did all the fighting for them only to lose the entire East to communism, in Korea and Vietnam. Was it on purpose, I think so. Our government wanted communism in the East and it looks now that FDR and his partners in government wanted communism, not to hinder it. One of the people I most admire in the world was Claire Lee Chennault, the leader of the Flying Tigers who was tasked with defending China from the Japanese. After reading his book, the Way of the Fighter its clear to me that the United States military only wanted him to preserve China for the obvious communist invasion coming out of the Soviet Union. People disliked Ronald Reagan for standing up to Russia in the same way that they hate Trump for standing up to China, because they wanted communism to rule the world, and that has always been the fight. Its not new, but is to those who don’t read books, and haven’t been screaming about this issue from the rooftops on national radio shows for years, or writing about it as extensively, and solitarily, as I have.

For a change America has its own book on strategy, The Art of the Deal and the author of that book is the guy in the White House. The Chinese wish they had back Sun Tzu but all they can do is read his words. For America, the sequel to The Art of the Deal is applying those tactics to real life as we speak, and the result will be an end to Chinese communism. Trump knows that the financial status of China is all paper tigers and shadows on the wall made to look bigger than they really are. The reality is that they are going to collapse the longer they fight, and that is why these protests in Hong Kong are happening now. The people there know that this is their best shot at freedom so they are taking it. And I am so proud to have Trump in the White House fighting this fight even though many of the people around him in Washington D.C. are cheering on the Chinese. Their betrayal tells us who they were all along.

Rich Hoffman

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Its all about Branding: Trump Doesn’t Need Fox News

Of course, the rules are the same for every local candidate as it is in presidential elections, a public official like Donald Trump has a right to protect their brand, for it was their brand that we voted for and continue to support. When that brand is attacked, a public official has a right to protect it. Like most businesspeople, President Trump understands his brand and has done a great job over the years of building it, so it is with no small concern that he would seek to lash out at those trying to destroy his brand. Yes, he has a right to allow his supporters in the White House to dig up dirt from The New York Times reporters who have been activists against him and to seek to destroy them. Why not? And in the great relationship between Trump and Fox News, if the cable news station wavers, as it has under new leadership post Roger Ailes, then yes, Trump has a right to go after them. This nonsense about “journalistic integrity” is a lot of garbage. There is no integrity in the news business, especially in corporate media. It’s all entertainment based and designed toward ratings and for that, they should be very grateful toward the Trump brand.

It was embarrassing to listen to Brit Hume sound off about how Fox News does not work for the president, especially after Trump has given unfettered access to Fox News over the last four years or so. He’s been around long enough to know the game and he comes across sounding like an idiot. To consider that Fox News or anybody in journalism is “protecting” the public with a free and open press is foolish, and for people not to be upset about attacking Trump’s brand when that is what they voted for is disingenuous. I’ve never liked the part of Fox News that has Brit Hume in it, or Juan Williams, the disgraced NPR personality who was brought to Fox by people like Bill O’Reilly out of fairness and friendship. With Ailes out and O’Reilly out and the hiring of Donna Brazile there are obvious signs that the network is turning to the left because they think that’s where the future audience is. But it isn’t.

I never enjoyed the commentary of Charles Krauthammer for that matter when he would appear on Bret Baier. I have watched Fox News because they cover more that concerns me than other stations, but they aren’t nearly conservative enough for me. I would sit through the Krauthammer segments cringing at his institutional diatribes and do something else until he was done. Fox would claim itself to be fair and balanced, and I think that is generally true, but what they have been doing lately under the guidance of their new CEO Suzanne Scott is a sharp turn toward progressivism. And that isn’t much different from before, during the O’Reilly days where Fox News started the horse race with Hillary Clinton two years before the election. They wanted to tell the story of the Democrats and they have been soft on them even when crimes were committed. I would never say that Fox was a hard-hitting news organization. They just didn’t do as bad as the rest of them.

Where was the coverage of the Epstein molestations ten years ago when it mattered, when news outlets like Alex Jones were reporting what was going on and who was involved. Today Jones is de-platformed, you can’t watch his shows except on his website while outlets like Fox and CNN continue to be the dominate forces in news. But look at what they’ve gotten wrong, or rather, what they haven’t covered that has contributed to so much evil. If they really wanted to be fair and balanced, and unafraid, they would have not covered the Epstein rapes and connections to Bill Clinton conspiracy theories but would have followed the evidence to the real villains.

The same could be said of the FBI scandal where the attempt to overturn the Trump election was pushed to small segments and very little activism. We’re talking about a story bigger than Watergate, but nobody wants to touch it, essentially because most of the corporate news world is in on the action in some form or another, either from ties to government leakers or the Washington parties that are hard to get invites to. Fox News lets Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson do their rants on television, and they turn loose a few reporters to dig up the stories because it does feed the Trump base which is a huge part of the Fox News audience, but they never drive the story to a conclusion that would otherwise force resignations or public outcry. They do enough reporting to get people to have an emotional response, but not enough to cause change, so Brit Hume isn’t checking the powerful and holding them accountable. Fox News is just pointing things out and letting them drift into history the next day.

So, what right do they have to attack Donald Trump’s brand, but not to have him and his people shoot back? Why would anybody in the media think such a thing was viable, or even acceptable? Then for others to warn Trump not to upset Fox News because they might not cover his rallies and other events giving him a platform to the public. To suggest such a thing is to propose that it was the media that made Trump. But what nobody is talking about is that it was Trump’s brand that made Fox. Does anybody know what happened to Megan Kelly? She locked horns with the Trump brand and where did that get her? Out.

I wouldn’t say that it is just Trump’s brand, it could be anybody who has worked hard to build their name. They may use media to get there, but it isn’t the media that makes them, they are simply the benefactors of good television drama. They don’t make or break people the way that media operators want to believe. They need the brand of the dynamic in order to put content on their stations and that is the secret they don’t want anybody to know. But Trump understands it, and so do his supporters.

These same rules apply to the local press, wherever in the country you may live dear reader. They are all pretty much the same. They need you more than you need them. In this day and age where there are so many more options to get your name out and to build up your brand, you don’t need Fox News, or even NBC News. You don’t need to suck up to the Disney network of ABC and whisper in the ear of the local newspaper reporters, because nobody reads them anymore, because the content is boring. But they do need you, and Fox needs Trump. Trump doesn’t need Fox. That is the way the game goes and its time everyone realizes it. Especially that media. They are not the makers of the world and those who keep it in check. Rather, it is the branding of politicians that do the most good, because they do have to protect their brand, and that keeps them honest. Not the reporter or their networks. Sorry Brit Hume, but you aren’t very relevant to the scheme of things. And more and more, you are just a boring addition to a network that has added more boring people, not gotten better over time.

Rich Hoffman
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I Think of Sean Hannity as a Long Haired Hippie: Republicans need to stick together and vote in the upcoming election

One thing is for sure. I think of Sean Hannity as kind of a middle of the road guy, he loves his police, he loves his military, and he loves teachers and like President Trump, is willing to continue to give those government workers infinite amounts of money and to call it patriotic. That’s not me. That is where the debate is, its not in the difference between Democrats and Republicans. The discussions in the form of management by elected officials is varying degrees of conservatism where big government types like Sean Hannity and Donald Trump have battles over resource management with people like me who think that every assumption should be challenged and squeezed for all its worth. And now that we are in election season its time that we have that hard discussion and put the best people in place to help manage our government with the least resources that we can find. It’s not that I don’t support people like Trump in the presidency or Hannity on his Fox News show, but there are things they say and do from time to time, largely because they both come out of a very progressive state and city in New York, that make me cringe with exposure to liberalism. If we really want to solve the problems of our age, there are going to be some fights, and to waste time on those fights, the right people need to be fighting, not some liberal losers who shouldn’t even be part of the discussion.

I’m talking about the various school board races that are up this year, and the various township and state races that ultimately shape the government of our states. We’ve had plenty of experiments with social causes and engineering by now to determine that our colleges, public schools and cities in general that are all run by Democrats have spiraled out of control and are placing those institutions on the brink of disaster. And in addressing those issues conservatives won’t go far enough in just taking up positions behind Trump and Sean Hannity, or Bill Cunningham in Cincinnati for that matter. They all talk a good game that is certainly better than any Democrat, but ultimately, they still want big government in the form of schoolteachers and police that inflate their community budgets and drive up taxes, without ever really asking whether or not those employees are worth it.

It’s not the teacher who teaches but it’s the state that decides what and how they teach that is the danger. If a teacher utters conservative values, they tend to be ridiculed by their unions and will find themselves out of step with the state. But if they preach abortion support, gay rights and otherwise calamitous despotism toward American ideas, then they are often rewarded as “teacher of the year” and paid to continue such activism which of course their students copy as one of their first worldly experiences. The system obviously hasn’t worked, the products of our modern times can show that clearly, so it should provoke us to act with each new election. There is no promise that our votes will give us 100% of a clone of our own values, but it is a lot better than nothing. And nothing is what happens when conservatives aren’t elected because liberals get their unchallenged activists into the city councils and school boards and spend our tax money as if there is no tomorrow, because often they don’t intend there to be.

I have lots of disagreements with conservatives, but I have yet to speak to them in person and find a person I don’t like. I have met President Trump and I love the guy. There are a lot of things that he has done in life and still does and thinks that I would never do, but overall, I can find more in common with him than not. I think we both love the American flag and can build a relationship off that as a foundation. The same with Sean Hannity. He comes across to me like some long-haired hippie who loves police way too much. I agree that our society is better off with cops than without them, but I don’t think we should trust them without question the way he advocates. Cops lie like any employee does and they need to be managed by exception not through collective bargaining, because they aren’t all equally valuable, just like schoolteachers. We need to have the discussion of their value and to do that we need the right kind of people to have those discussions. Democrats have proven that they just aren’t capable.

So it is up to us to have these various discussions and to sift out the good from the bad and sometimes that means that people’s feelings will get hurt a little bit when they find out that they aren’t valuable just for showing up for work, but are measured in how effective they do their jobs. Giving a blank check of approval to any sector of our economy is just foolish and some Republicans are foolish. Yet the discussion we have about value needs to happen with them, not the people who have screwed up everything for the last thirty to forty years. In every election we need to pick the best people we can get to help manage our political affairs. We may not like everything about them, we may even have some differences with them, especially regarding school boards. But we need to vote for them and help them get into a position to have a discussion at some point. Talking to a liberal on a school board is just a waste of time. They need to be replaced with every decent conservative that we can find so that we can have a debate. Currently no debate is possible, we get unfunded mandates from the state, nobody challenges them and due to their helplessness, they create liberal cultures within our schools where the next generation gets brainwashed into Democrat thinking. And that has turned out to be terrible for our children.

My advice to you dear reader is to treat this election with some seriousness. There is some sanity that is returning to the political system, largely for Trump to take the credit, but its time to raise the bar to a level that Democrats can’t live up to, and that needs to happen for the benefit of us all. We can no longer afford to keep that lowered bar down where they can participate just so we can call everything equal. We need to focus on actually doing something and electing good people to do good jobs in their elected positions. It is not bad to have disagreements with people, what is bad is that no common ground can be found because the political values are so extreme that basic conversation cannot even take place and the battlefields are yielded to Democrats just to avoid dealing with them because they are such a pain in the neck. Support Republicans and other conservatives even if they are to the left of where you are. Having a debate with them is better than a debate with someone who isn’t even from the same planet. And that is how you must look at these types of elections.

Rich Hoffman
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D23 and Star Wars: Liberal ideas are rejected everywhere, especially in a galaxy far, far away

It’s important because it involves so many parts of our culture, but as I occasionally do write about Star Wars it is interesting to watch as how its meaning has changed for people over time. Personally, when people ask me how I’m able to do so much on such a range of things, it’s because I use mythology to grasp concepts so that there is room for ideas to be conceived and to grow. I would compare it to a bowl to hold something like popcorn in, the bigger the bowl, the more ideas you can hold. Mythology is how the human race holds ideas that it can then grasp and work with, and the bigger the ideas, the better functioning the society. In a lot of ways young people have more than ever lots of vehicles to invest ideas into, not just the movies that we all grew up on, but video games, a lot of literature, and all the streaming services that are available such as Amazon Prime and Netflix. And to make those streaming services flourish there has to be a lot of content and Hollywood, as I have been saying for years, is struggling to produce. We live in one of the most creative times in human history, but we have more than ever also witnessed how liberalism in general in a culture of mass competition for ideas shows the trends of society and nothing more vividly displays that trend like Star Wars, because it is at least a cultural measure that everyone can pretty much agree is a standard mythology of our culture. Not everyone likes it, but it manages to touch most people in some way or another making a great platform for analysis.

So to catch everyone up on where Star Wars is, there is a movie coming out this December, it’s the last film of the nine part series that has been going on for 40 years. It’s an important key to whether or not Star Wars survives into the future because as of now, it only has nostalgic value. Young people don’t necessarily like it on its own, its more something that they can share with their parents and grandparents, so the brand is struggling. Watching all the D23 news from Disney over this past weekend there is a lot to look forward to from arguably the largest media company in the world. But the evidence that as a very progressive company that has lost their way into making new and fresh ideas is obvious. Disney as a company is living off their legacy properties and what they’ve done many years ago, not what they have been able to do lately. With the exception of the Marvel movies, there hasn’t been anything fresh from Disney for years as they have taken for granted that people will buy into their products even though they are spewing with progressive political causes, such as race diversity, sex issues such as feminism, and elements of gay rights that most people just aren’t comfortable with. Disney as a company has tried to hide their massive appetite for capitalism behind progressive causes and it has hurt them tremendously—because they weren’t honest about it. They would have been better off to proclaim that they are happy to make money and not ashamed of it one bit instead of trying to sell themselves off as progressive activists laboring for every liberal cause known to mankind. Not so much at the stock exchange rate yet, but that is coming just as I stated years ago after the first new age Star Wars film came out, that Disney has really screwed up the multi billion dollar franchise leaving them desperate to fix it, which is what they are promising to do on several fronts starting with the new film coming out this December in addition to several live action television shows coming to their new streaming service, such as The Mandalorian, and a new show just about Obi-Wan Kenobi played by Ewen McGregor which fans have wanted for over 20 years.

Star Wars, especially the best parts of it such as the cantina scenes where Obi-Wan cuts off the arm of an assailant in A New Hope, then shortly thereafter Han Solo kills the bounty hunter Greedo in a blaze of gun fire, these modern progressive filmmakers thought that what they had made with Star Wars could be that bowl I was talking about that could hold lots of ideas including copious amounts of progressive sentiment. Even with the billions of dollars that Disney has put into Star Wars the fans have responded flat which was most notable with the most recent Star Wars movie, which I loved, Solo: A Star Wars Story. After The Last Jedi, which I enjoyed, fans had shown they had enough of Disney tampering with something they loved and they were rejecting the Disneyification of Star Wars outright, and not buying the toys, and merchandise at the levels that Disney needed them to in order to justify their investment. This has been obvious now that the big Star Wars lands that have opened in California and now in Disney World in Orlando and people aren’t that interested. I warned everyone way back in 2015 on radio and several articles, that the key to the franchise wasn’t Luke Skywalker, it was Han Solo, the space cowboy that reflected the American values of Ayn Rand and John Wayne, which has always been at the heart of Star Wars. Star Wars for people is best when it has those elements, not actors that were cast because they were Latino, or because they were women—but because the characters were good and the actors fit the part. When Disney essentially killed off the angry white guy characters and failed to replace them with new ones, they lost their audience. The Last Jedi was essentially a movie where all the white men were killed and the crazy progressive women were all in charge and people, real people who are out there voting for Donald Trump don’t want to see movies and stories about that kind of topic, and it has really hurt the Star Wars brand.

But I am encouraged, this year at D23 Disney is showing that they can take their money and do great things with it. I am rooting for them to get it right, I want their Star Wars Land of Galaxy’s Edge to be successful, I want to see Star Wars make a strong comeback for that next generation because it is still one of the best things out there to take our culture from where it was to where it needs to go in science and thought. There is room for big ideas in Star Wars, which is what I use it for as a mythology. It’s a big story with lots of bold concepts, but at its heart it was and continues to be a space western. So long as that formula is stuck to, Star Wars will be successful. If progressive concepts are placed above that formula, then its over for Disney and they seem to understand that now, after a decade of hard lessons.

I was enjoying all the news coming out of D23 and I sort of celebrated by picking up the Lenovo Star Wars Jedi Challenges video game which converts your smart phone into an augmented reality simulator and I have to say it is extremely impressive. But you can see clearly the hit Star Wars has taken to their brand. The unit just a year ago was being sold at Target for $200 and I picked it up this week for less than $50. I figured that for that much money I could take a risk and buy the Disney product and I’m glad I did. But considering what they had done to the legacy fans with the books and previous comics and other merchandise then gave those same fans a mess of a movie in The Force Awakens, which essentially killed all the old white guys and put progressive diversity in charge only to lose over and over again to a very inept First Order, not even I would pay that much money for a new Star Wars game. That’s unfortunate, because the game itself is just amazing, a real technical marvel and exhibition of mythology pushed to its absolute limits. Big ideas, big fun, and a major advancement of the story telling experience.

The lesson here is that progressive, or even liberal ideas cannot fill up that bowl of thought, and people won’t just accept those concepts because they like Star Wars. They like Star Wars because it represents values that most people share, small government, independence, and you gotta have guns. The anti-gun policies and hippie like love your neighbor stuff doesn’t go well with a franchise that is all about war and why wars happen. When you can’t even where a gun on your hip in cosplay to the new Star Wars land in Florida because everyone is crazy over weapons and terrorism, Disney has to understand that you can’t tell a story about peace, love, and trusting the government without weapons, and expect people to spend millions of dollars of their hard earned money on it, just so they can eat colored popcorn and drink blue milk. Star Wars is about fighting for independence, especially personal independence. In all Star Wars stories that are good are examples of institutional failure, even among the Jedi Council, and that is the heart of the entire franchise. Unfortunately, Disney was a part of that institutional thinking and it took them a long time to come close to figuring out the problem. I just hope its not too late. It would be a shame if it is.

Rich Hoffman

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How the Deep State Works: Whispers from beyond the veil

It’s not that Patrick Byrne is a hero or anything for coming out on live television and taking Fox News hosts off guard by revealing that he had done clandestine “deep state” work directly for the FBI’s Peter Strzok. The old hippie, Grateful Dead fan who was the CEO of Overstock.com had to resign because the William Barr investigation that is about to unveil the greatest scandal in world history is about to turn election year politics into a meat grinder for the Democrat Party, and he’s in the middle of it all. He has a fiduciary responsibility to the stockholders so he did the right thing and stepped down while he could without the company tanking during the upcoming trials. None of that was surprising to me, but what was a little bit was the public reaction to it, particularly in the mainstream media. If you ever wanted to know about the nature and power of the “deep state” then what wasn’t said was far more powerful than what was.

The “deep state” essentially is nothing more than the static patterns of established society and their acceptance of the handful of options given to them socially out of their grade school days. As I have said for many years, and even the hero of the left Bill Ayers has said, the purpose of public education is not to teach people things, it’s to place them into categories of peer groups for which they will spend the rest of their lives. The deep state is the undemocratic official control mechanism that holds those groups together. So while we officially have a republic as a country, and many liberal media outlooks like to talk about our “democracy” and socialists like AOC “Cortez” are seeking to change the election system from an electoral college to a popular vote so they can count all their illegal aliens and other criminals for Democrat votes, the real power rests outside of that understanding and obviously members of the FBI were functioning from that understanding, especially Peter Strzok who was uncharacteristically caught.

This is nothing new, its just that the nature of President Trump, who is functioning outside of the normal controls of peer groups that are built in our public education system is wrecking the whole order of things because he is binding people together who normally wouldn’t associate with one another, and that makes him very dangerous to this “deep state,” and they apparently understood it from the very beginning. The Deep State themselves, whom Patrick Byrne calls the Men in Black don’t often do things directly, they get other people to do them—compromised people. And to avoid prosecution they get them to do things they otherwise wouldn’t do. Then if things go wrong, the perpetrator takes the fall and the deep state continues in the shadows operating behind the legal curtain.

It’s not a conspiracy theory to assume that deep state actors inspire young influential people like these recent mass shooters to do some act of violence that might push legislators to embrace gun control measures. The deep state was caught trying to overturn a presidential election, so nothing is off the table for them. Patrick Byrne didn’t come across as particularly sane in his Fox interviews, but then again, who really is? The guy was nervous, obviously, he has probably done a fair share of drugs in his life if he’s the Dead Head he claims to be, which as a CEO of a company for twenty years leaves a lot of opportunity to have the deep state extort you for bad conduct. So, I can see how his story played out and it was hard to come out and talk about it on television when obviously the hosts were not ready for the information. It wasn’t part of the script, that was for sure. The story should have been the biggest thing to hit television in years, but less than 12 hours later, it was barely talked about except for the usual “conspiracy” channels like talk radio and a few YouTube accounts.

Yet that is precisely how the deep state operates and how it continues to remain behind the scenes. It’s not that they are some powerful organization that uses mind control to remain anonymous, but that they rely on the education system that we have to keep anybody from really seeing them, even when the evidence is right in front of everyone’s face. I’ve seen this method of concealment work several times, and I’ve told the stories here before, but will repeat them again for the sake of demonstration. At one of my high school reunions I was there with my kids and we were doing those contests where the people who were married the longest got a reward, and who had the most kids, who had visited the most places in the world, that kind of thing. I was the winner of something like six out of the ten categories out of my entire class yet there wasn’t much fanfare when I stepped up to get the awards. It was like I was invisible, and it wasn’t because people didn’t know me. In school I was one of those kids who didn’t fit into any class category and I rejected any attempt to put me in one. That led to, let’s just say, a very turbulent time in grade school. Counselors didn’t know what to do with me. Teachers couldn’t reach me because I thought of all of them as too stupid to give me any advice. I wasn’t afraid of the authority structure and was constantly in trouble and in the principal’s office, like every week. Getting my parents involved didn’t help. There was no peer group that I responded to. Nothing worked, and I liked it that way. The treasure in all that was that I grew up independent of any peer group and that is still the case to this very day. But the cost is that people only typically respond to stimulants that support their chosen peer groups for which they have accepted their roles during their grade school years. That means anything outside of their peer groups is invisible to them. So even though in our class reunion I had done more, seen more and lived a lot of life that would normally be talked about, because I wasn’t’ in one of the accepted peer groups the effects were pretty much overlooked.

A few years later I was involved in a big presentation in front of Cincinnati City Council that would determine the future for the Banks Project. My group that was doing the presentation were all of the same type of people I was, outsiders and proud of it. Not affiliated with any of the peer groups developed in our education system but free thinkers and charismatic individualists untethered to conformity. We gave a very dramatic presentation that would eventually become The Banks, only twenty years before it was designed and built. We knew we had done a good job but after not a single politician or developer came up to us to inquire more on our ideas. Now we could say that we were young people, and nobody was going to listen to us, only that most of the ideas presented that day ended up in the final design. So, it was obvious that they were listening. That presentation was a competition from the public and by no close measure, ours was the best and most dramatic. Yet we were painted out of the coverage and never even made the cut on television. That is how the deep state works. People only respond to what they understand and if they are presented with something outside of their realm of understanding, they’ll rationalize it into something they can understand. Such as the cargo cults of primitive tribes when they see an airplane, they might call it a bird and refer to it not as a miracle of science, but as an act of nature confusing the nature of flight entirely. And for such people if they encounter people outside of their peer experience, they may only see aspects of them that they can relate to within their peer group, but not the entire essence and until they can, they will view such people as entirely invisible.

And that is what’s going on with Patrick Byrne and actually the entire Trump presidency. None of this activity fits within the framework of our education system and the peer groups we have adopted as a society. It’s not that the events aren’t happening, they just aren’t happening within the context of experience that most people can understand and that is where the deep state does their work. They have been letting us believe we have a republic but in fact they intend to have a dictatorship of a sorts and they use our own ignorance as their greatest weapon, our need to be in a peer group and to function within its rules and regulations. In that regard, the deep state can rule forever, or so they believe. Until they must deal with elements that don’t adhere to the peer group system. Then they have trouble which is how this whole story is even coming into fruition to begin with. If not for the Trump presidency, we wouldn’t know anything about Patrick Byrne or any other deep state operatives. And the members of the media, even on Fox, anybody getting a paycheck to be part of the media culture, they are part of the peer groups that keep this kind of information from getting out. They are paid to ostracize the Patrick Byrnes of the world once they have stepped down as a CEO of a popular company and to consume them until they are no longer a danger. So this is all very interesting, and it’s going to get a lot better. Stay tuned! Many people, to use Patrick Byrne’s metaphor, are going to learn that Soylent Green is people, and that has always been the way that the deep state has viewed us all, until people start to learn the rules and threaten the entire structure.

Rich Hoffman

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