Tag: Free Will

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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There is a Storm Coming: Lakota better have a boat

I think the best thing that could happen is that Julie Shaffer would lose her seat to a new school board candidate in this upcoming fall 2019 election. Jim Hahn is a potential for that, he’s running and is a business guy, and if the Lakota school board could pick him up and keep Todd Parnell, and Lynda O’Conner, there would finally be a three vote conservative presence that could avert the current levy plans that are in place for attempts beginning as early as 2020. If there is another tax attempt, I will say right now that I am all on board to resume the fight against it, and I understand that others are also interested. A gentle message to Lakota and all the real estate agents that spawn off the school system, there is a storm coming, so I hope you have built a boat, because the next levy attempt will be a bloodbath. The liberal activities of Brad Lovell Kelley Casper and of course Julie Shaffer along with the very disappointing sentiments that have evolved from the new superintendent Matt Miller, they have squandered a very good opportunity, a great budget with declining enrollment that has even further inflated the payroll for teachers who clearly aren’t worth the money, and they have been caught in gross mismanagement. The two conservative school board members have shown a bit of hope in properly managing the district, but the school board itself hasn’t gone far enough—the liberal activism is still a problem in the management of the government school.

I have no love for Julie Shaffer, we have a history together. When she couldn’t defeat my arguments back in 2012 she had to turn to identity politics to separate the No Lakota Levy group I represented for their 2013 attempt which they ended up winning by a very narrow margin. But it wasn’t Lakota who did anything to turn the tide, it was Sheriff Jones who wanted to put armed cops in the schools to protect them from mass shooters, or the potential. As it turned out, just as I said it would be, the whole thing was a scam, the money from the levy wasn’t used to cover cops or even security. Lakota did do those things, but ultimately the money was only to give teachers raises for their very high wages. My argument back then was that it didn’t bother me that Lakota had several teachers with six figure salaries, but that through collective bargaining the labor union wanted everyone to have those extraordinary salaries and back then the average wage was over 70K per year. We always hear stories about how low teachers are paid, well that’s not the case at Lakota, the teachers are well paid and the union props them all up and makes it nearly impossible to fire problem employees like the recent drama witnessed by the ex-Lakota employee, the transgender activist Emily Osterling. She sued the district for her proposed termination, and she won a settlement of $175,000 which the tax payers had to cough up ultimately.

Lakota is in my back yard so I want them to do well, but only until they become a pain in the ass in asking for too much money. I am proud of Lakota as long as they aren’t asking for money and by looking at their annual budget of over $220 million per year it is clear that the school board has not managed the money correctly. Now to their defense, the collective bargaining agreements by the union make normal value stream assessments nearly impossible. It takes three solid votes to really manage a district when there are five board members. It has taken a long time to get the two good ones that we have now and a lot of pushing and shoving. I have been asked many, many times to take on the job, but for my part, I have no desire to negotiate with a labor union all the time and I think the education system should be completely dismantled and recreated with a school choice competitive option. So its not a job for me, but we do need smart people who understand value creation to do the job. In that regard, there is an option in Jim Hahn.

However, the union vote will come out for their own preservation and they will vote this November for Julie Shaffer, so it will be a tough climb for Jim Hahn. He’s going to need some help and a good turnout. The union will not want him on the school board because they are against anything that does not stop the upward mismanagement of financial resources that are set to run out by 2023. Most of that $220 million budget is all in teacher salaries and that is just ridiculous. In an age where kids are learning more from hand held devices such as smart phones and personal computers, physical teachers are going the way of the drive-in. The test results just do not show that a teacher in the classroom make or break much in a student’s life. Most of the feel good stories are propaganda by the unions which young people are prone to be sucked in to, but are shallow in credibility at best. Just take a look at the Lakota website and their reported financials. They are short on substance but are flashy with surface points and comparisons to other districts who are every bit as much of a disaster as they are—because they are all driven by unionized employees hungry for inflated wages and as little work to do as possible.

The bloodbath that I am promising will be simple value stream analysis of what Lakota really does for our community, which is very little. The high school football games are only important to the students and their families, the other 100,000 people who live in the Lakota school system could care less and people like me without kids in the school system go through our daily days not even noticing the school buildings or their occupants. Life is busy and there is a lot for people like me to do that has nothing to do with the school system, and people like me are in the majority. All it takes is to get them to show up to vote, and they can easily out vote the union radicals which is why it takes Lakota an average of three levy attempts to get a tax increase passed. And to do that they have to resort to guerrilla warfare, not the goodness of people’s hearts. I would personally rather have the bloodbath rather than harm future business growth in our region with another Lakota tax increase, and argued that way, the way all businesses are measured, the story is quite clear. Lakota is not a value to our community, but a hindrance and the product they produce is failing and will continue to fail until the unions no longer run the government schools. That is, unless a third conservative is elected to the school board, and the budget crises that is coming can be averted. The value of the district won’t change but the bad reputation that will put Lakota through a lot of pain could be averted. And I would think that to be a good thing.

Rich Hoffman

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I Love Being Right: James Comey should go to jail

Not to brag or anything, some people are good at certain things. Some people can throw a football downfield accurately and under pressure, some people can dance on their toes and appear light as a feather, and some people are great at math. We all have our things that we are good at, and some of us work hard throughout our lives to become better at more things. For me, my thing has always been the ability to break down people upon meeting them for a short time, and to structure conditions based on that relationship. I can tell most of what I need to know about people within a few minutes of talking to them, and it is with a great amount of pride that I figured out James Comey very fast. Due to the nature of this recent Inspector General report from the Department of Justice I am enjoying more of the “I told you so’s” because it implicates James Comey, the former director of the FBI as a liar and cheat who was an activist against an incoming president of the United States and grossly abused his power to instigate the overthrow of an election. Then tried to blame it on the Russians. Thinking back just three years ago I was particularly proud of myself for my comments on CNN during Anderson Cooper’s show when I stated on air that Comey had lied during his testimony and should go to jail.

Of course, for television I didn’t want to be that hard on him even though the host wanted me to say so much. At the time even considering such a thing was extremely scandalous and we had only had Donald Trump as president for a few months. We really hadn’t had a chance to see Trump operate under pressure and all we knew about Comey was that he was projected as an honorable man. But I watched his testimony with the CNN crew the entire time and my thoughts about the guy afterwards wasn’t that it implicated Trump, but that it did the entire FBI, and at that moment, nobody was ready to accept that thought.

CNN had brought a bunch of Trump supporters, me included, to Rick’s Tavern in Fairfield, Ohio to watch the entire event as it unfolded on live television then to get our reaction to see if our support would wane for Trump. It was quite shocking to the CNN crew afterwards that none of us had pulled our support for Trump and that some of us, like me, were convinced that Comey was guilty of some bad crimes. The behind the scenes talk that day made me feel a little bad about it because the thought at the time was that such a consideration was so outlandish that it was in the realm of tin foil hatted conspiracy theory. Yet I am pretty good at these things, so I said what I did on television anyway and it was painful at first, because a lot of people saw it. But I had to stand by what I thought, and as it turned out, I was more than correct.

And it goes to say that I was right about all the others too, that the Justice Department was covering for the Clinton family and their many crimes. That like the Epstein scandal the private server had a lot of embarrassing information on it which is why Hillary had it to begin with. The FBI certainly didn’t want all that information out. They did their part to create the illusion of a republic while all the while steering our government toward a Democrat run dictatorship that would eventually melt into the United Nations as a governing body. All that was in place and people like James Comey felt that helping those things along was part of his “higher calling.”

I hate to say it but once you’ve known them in some form or another you’ve known them all. I know the kind of parties that James Comey and his wife went to in the back yards of their expensive government paid for homes with friends and neighbors, all of whom were connoisseurs of wines and fashion, and who planned long couples vacations to Europe for shopping trips in Paris and Venice just for the hell of it. They could tell you the vintage of an exotic wine with their pinky held out, but couldn’t tell anybody much about the names of gunfighters popular during western expansion, because to them that part of American history was to be erased and reset to a new world order. Comey thought that attribute honorable, the destruction of America into a global order, so lying about it was not a problem. It was considered to him collateral damage. Of course, the White House ran by Obama knew about all this, they are the ones who provoked it. And the arrogance in getting caught you can see now that they are no different from typical unionized activist caught by their employers for doing something wrong. For Andrew McCabe and Peter Strzok to think about suing the FBI for wrongful termination, and Comey for insisting that he is owed an apology is just another page out of the union playbook for disgruntled, and spoiled workers who have lost touch with reality. That playbook states that when guilty, attack to keep the investigation off the details, just as in football when the other team blitzes, you throw the ball down field because someone will be open. Only in this game we are finally on to it, and these guys are guilty of some very bad things, domestic terrorism at the very least.

I am used to playing poker with these thoughts of mine simply because the audience that hears them isn’t always ready for the truth. The truth is the truth, but there is power in controlling the way that people come to it which is far more powerful than any concealed carry permit. Knowing things about people and understanding how to use that power is very helpful as a skill, so I don’t always blurt out what I am up to. That would be stupid. But it is good to say something so controversial on television so far ahead of the truth and to rub people’s noses in it a bit. It’s very “satisfying.” Of course, there are many ways to speak the truth, you don’t always want to blurt out in raw form what you think. Sometimes you do, it depends on the circumstance. But on a big national issue where at the time nobody felt comfortable in agreeing with me, the report from the IG was very satisfying. Now I would encourage you dear reader to continue reading what I have said with this understanding and to prepare your life accordingly. Because a country where the President ran by Obama thought it could use the levers of power in the way it did to overthrow the Trump election is a country already too far gone to ignore. We can’t just trust elections anymore, we must consider everything is against us, and to be vigilant. It may take more than just electing Trump to set things right. And that is a hard truth we all must face.

 

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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Why Government Health Care is Bad: Johnson & Johnson ordered to pay $572 Million to fight opioids in Oklahoma

There are many more lawsuits ahead for Johnson & Johnson, one particular in Ohio coming in October that will likely end the same way as the one in Oklahoma did which granted $572 million in damages to help the state pay for its opioid crises. Of course, Johnson & Johnson will appeal and will try to settle out of court as many cases as they can. But what cannot be appealed or staved off in any way is the cause of the opioid crises itself, which is essentially the entire medical industry from the local doctor and pharmacy to the multibillion-dollar pharmaceutical companies that thrive of death and pain. Now that there is a roadmap to prosecute a company like Johnson & Johnson for their role and marketing dangerous pain killers to the public, then neglecting to mention the terrible side effects just so they could sell mass quantities of the drugs, many more states will start to get similar judgements and if the high courts grant payment and reject the appeals, then many of these big companies are done for. Which wouldn’t be a bad thing.

This is the big problem when government and corporations get together against the public good and don’t allow capitalist competition to rule the day. People must understand that the argument over health care isn’t to make people better, it’s to fight over who will get paid off of people’s pain. When there is profit in pain, this is the kind of effect everyone can expect. The solution of course to medical insurance is to have less people sick, for our medical system to repair people, not to prolong their death just so that they can be prescribed medicine to ease their pain. At the heart of the opioid crises is a problem that is the foundation of our entire civilization, are we going to go forward and evolve or will we just decline into dust and be one silly little page in history. The crux of the debate is upon us and it is the result of this latest drug company lawsuit.

Unfortunately, while many of us crave personal freedom about what television shows we want to watch, what cars we drive, who we marry, what schools we go to, what we like to eat on a Friday night, we surrender our lives to doctors almost entirely. We assume they know best because we were taught in school that they did, and we take their advice on everything, how to live our lives, whether or not we can work or be on disability, or what drugs we will put into our bodies which could change everything about us. As a matter of fact, every mass shooter recently had one thing in common besides broken homes, they all were on anti-depressant medicine—which of course taken with marijuana and alcohol can have devastating effects on sanity. But doctors enjoy the free vacations to Hawaii and other exotic places because their name appears as drug dealers from the local Walgreens and they get rewarded for writing the prescriptions. And so long as the trust in doctors is there and they desire to profit off the sick, we will always have this problem.

Personally, I avoid any kind of drug, even when I’m sick. The desire to alleviate pain is to attempt to shut out part of living. If something is painful it needs to be fixed and if you just numb the pain, you will never fix the problem. The purpose of pain is to solve it, not to suppress it. Instead of an insurance industry that pays for all these drugs to suppress pain, our focus should be to get people healthy to the point where they don’t have pain because they aren’t sick. But the massive imprint of the big pharms that drive up the cost of insurance and medical care in general is far too great and the only way to get out from under them is to essentially put them out of business in the way that Oklahoma and Ohio are striving to do. The amount of money at stake in the medical industry is staggering, to the point where $572 million is really just a small fee to pay. Johnson & Johnson would rather not pay it, but that alone isn’t enough to alter their operations. And there are far too many politicians who, like the doctors that prescribe the medicine, profit off of people’s pain.

For all the same reasons that there are political factions who are against President Trump’s attempts to make friends with North Korea or Iran, and to fight China with trade wars, that is because those factions represent those who profit off the suffering caused by the conflict. You don’t have to look very hard to see that dear reader. It’s as obvious as a sunrise in a cloudless, desert sky. The opioid crises was caused for all the same reasons, because there is profit in pain and death, and short term, small minded people would gladly trade in their immortality for a beach house in Florida for twenty years of their gradually diseased life. There is no Republican health care plan that could be unleashed so long as this is the state of the medical industry, to profit off of pain and to drag out the effects of death to give pharmaceuticals a market longer into the lifespan of the average person. It’s not the quality of life that health insurance is seeking to cover, it’s to maintain dependency so the drug companies can flourish, which is why they support politicians who argue for universal health care.

Human beings are just biological machines, there is nothing about them that cannot be fixed or maintained at a certain healthy level. If they were healthy once, they could be healthy again. But our medical industry is not interested in healthy people who do not need them. They need the sick, and ever dying. It is a short-sighted profit path for the partnership between government and corporations and has nothing to do with capitalism. The entire system plays to the worst of human nature, to remain short sighted, and to avoid pain suppressing problems instead of solving them.

If Trump had not been elected president these fights wouldn’t be happening. It is in the lack of a government health care solution that there are any signs in any courts to even consider taking on big pharma, because the lobby money is lucrative. But Trump has changed politics and politicians are seeing the benefits of the long view as opposed to the short and science is finally starting to put courage in the minds of the sick. More and more people are realizing that they don’t have to listen to their doctor, that maybe if they stay healthy, that they can avoid the doctor all together. And when that happens a real freedom can be realized that most people never thought possible. But to have it they can’t be on drugs and under the influence of a medical system that wants to ride them, not to set them free. When we talk about government health care what we are talking about is prolonging this problem and when we talk about suing big pharma, we are actually seeking to free ourselves from their influence. And that is a great thing that couldn’t come fast enough. Then once it does, we can really get started as a species because if there is anything that is truly holding us all back it’s the nonsense about life and death and sickness and health. We can do better and if big pharma goes down, we can have something much, much better.

Rich Hoffman

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People’s Desire for Freedom Overtakes Their Need for Institutionalism: Why the Fox Polls don’t matter and why Star Wars must turn things around

There is certainly a lot to learn from an event like the D23 Expo, especially in regard to a pop culture entertainment like Star Wars is. At that event, it was obvious that Disney and Lucasfilm in general are finally doing what they should have all along, and that is get the franchise back to what it was in the beginning, a story about the dangers of too much institutionalism and the higher spiritual essence of individualism. But why did it take so long, because the answer is of course the same one Donald Trump is asking about why Fox News has turned toward the left, and why so many politicians think that gun control is an option in the future. In the case of Disney and Star Wars, something that should have been full proof, before they came out with their version of a third trilogy, they thought they could put all these progressive themes into the movies and that people would still buy into the concept. Disney thought Star Wars was all about old puppet props and blue milk, not the excitement of a shootout in a cantina and rugged individualists cutting their own way on the frontiers of space, such as what is obvious about the new Star Wars show coming to their streaming network, The Mandalorian.

Over this last decade with literally millions and millions of dollars of payroll to work with nobody within the Disney organization was able to put their finger on why Star Wars was successful and what it would take to bring the fans back to the franchise after they had alienated them with their progressive approach to the material. At the 2019 D23 it was obvious that Disney was trying to fix that problem and who could blame them? They didn’t see all this coming, the planning for all these movies was taking place before Donald Trump was president, before the economy in America spiked off in a positive direction and before Hong Kong decided they loved America more than China. The world as they thought it would be under a Clinton presidency never happened and that has been reflected in the Star Wars movies—and pop culture in general.

Because of D23 there was a triple XP weekend on Star Wars Battlefront II, the video game and my grandson and I were having fun raking up points on the multiplayer mode. I play the game more than most people do in my position in life, but not nearly as much as I’d like and in playing this past weekend I was thinking about gun control. The reports are indicating that the video game generation of these current young people are growing up to be quite aggressive capitalists and you can see that in the video game markets. Video games especially in multiplayer modes whether its Battlefront II or Fortnite is all about rewards for the work done and video game players are coming to expect the same thing in real life. Even the most recent Madden offering is loaded with lots of unlocks and special features that you can only get to after you’ve played the game for many hundreds of hours. The socialism that was taught in schools to kids growing up in the 90s with the grunge rock bands out of Seattle are not the kids of Fortnite. The contrasts are quite obvious and finally the people at Disney are seeing it too. They have no choice if they want to stay relevant in the future of entertainment. I would argue that its too late for them, but I don’t want to see them lose the game because I think they bring a lot to the table culturally. I just wish they had listened initially when people like me were screaming it at them.

The same type of over thinkers and academic idiots who worked at Disney and thought it was smart to alienate most of the Star Wars audience are the same losers who think Donald Trump is bad for America as a president and don’t understand why he continues to survive no matter what the political left has thrown at him. They are also the same people who think that gun control is a topic that people care about. Let me say something about guns, the video game generations love guns, they think about them all the time, just differently than when I might have been a kid. These kids are playing with guns in video games all the time and they are likely to have a greater appetite for guns than even past generation did. That is something that Disney completely missed when they were setting up their new theme park attractions to not have guns, even with Woody from Toy Story. I always thought it was weird that Woody had a holster but never a gun, and Disney went along thinking that was appropriate in this sensitive age of political correctness. But Star Wars fans saw through that phony behavior as just another mechanism of institutionalism gone crazy. Its not the blue milk that people wanted to feel at the new Star Wars Land called Galaxy’s Edge, it’s the feeling of being an outlaw of the system and on the run from the “establishment.” That is the fantasy element that makes Star Wars everything it is, just as Pirates of the Caribbean was all about being a rebel and outcast from the rest of society and finding treasure and living from one raid to another.

Ultimately that’s why President Trump is president and why he will continue to be president, because that’s what real people want and the institutions of our society cannot see it for all the same reasons that all the highly paid experts at Disney couldn’t see what Star Wars was all about even though it was right in front of their faces. Human beings don’t want to hold hands and join together to live in a sanctimonious society of shared rules and regulations. They want to explore the reaches of space under their own guidance and want the freedom to live their own lives on their own terms, and that’s fine for any society that is constantly inventing and exploring. Its bad if that society is stagnant, which we all have been since westward expansion and turning places like Hawaii and Alaska into states. That sentiment does not show up in the Fox News polls or the ABC Morning News with an ex-Clinton aid hosting. But it does show up online while playing Fortnite and Battlefront II.

For a long time, giant media companies like Disney wanted to believe that they shaped culture, and that people would follow their products to the ends of the earth. What they have learned, painfully is that their influence is minimal, while they can shape opinions in the short run, the essence of human beings is rooted in rebellion and they want to feel untethered to rules as much as is safely possible. Rather media produced as movies, books or television shows should reflect the society they are offered to, not to seek to change their opinions about things like gay rights or identity politics. To do so is to gamble with something that people love and that can easily backfire as people not only learned at Disney but also in the political establishment as people continue to support President Trump no matter what happens. Star Wars used to have supporters like that, but not anymore. And its up to the media companies to learn those trends and to ride them. Not to change the waves that drive them though.

Rich Hoffman

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Soylent Green is People: Overstock.com CEO, Patrick Byrne spills the goods

Rich Hoffman
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The Good Gardener: Understanding the importance of the Amazonian wildfires and nature in general

It is really interesting to gauge how liberals view events like the current Amazonian wildfires as a catastrophe when in all reality they are quite a common occurrence on planet earth. Fires start all the time, especially by lightening, however these in the Amazon that are raging currently were largely set by farmers trying to clear their land and have gotten out of control. It has even gotten to the point where the new Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro is claiming that is political enemies are setting the fires on purpose to make him look bad as he is more to the conservative side of political thinking that Brazil typically has avoided, to their own detriment. So far in 2019 there have been 74,000 wildfires along the Amazon valley which is up from previous years and the blame is going to farming, and logging companies. So called “experts” which is the same as saying that people who have read the progressive National Geographic since they were kids and grew up to be college institute liberal activists, are warning that these actions “could” cause a stop to the world’s oxygen supply and begin to emit carbon and speed up climate change further. “OH NO!”

Well, all of that is garbage, there is an actual psychology to this pathological nonsense that needs to be understood before we have any real intelligent discussions on the matter. Of course by now we all can at least agree that liberals by their nature have attached climate science to their long established goals for communism and socialism using something everyone can agree on, such as climate conditions as a vehicle to launch their political ideology with urgency for action, to vote for them in office. And most of the time they believe their own arguments turning their plight into something that might make the plotline for a new Avatar movie where they are the heroes and all things capitalist are the villains.

That is after all what liberals are protesting in all wildfires is that imprint of human thought and action, farmers trying to grow crops, or industrialists wanting to turn trees into lumber to build homes and more businesses, are bad. Liberals want a world where nature rules, but the quandary to their effort is a scandal all its own, because what they are arguing for is to allow the world to remain sick when it is taken over by disease. Imagine a human body that accepted every little disease or cancer attempt where the immune system just accepted the intrusion and allowed the bodily parasites to take over and kill the whole body. That is what liberals are advocating, because in a lot of ways they see themselves as the parasites which want to thrive off all healthy activity and consume it into chaos, like the underbrush of a rainforest.

Trees are a renewable resource; they grow quite fast. Like all plant life they consume what we dispelled and what they give off, we consume. We have a wonderful symbiotic relationship with plant life as humans. And the more humans and human activity, the better it is for plant life. And following Adam Smith’s economic philosophies, forests are wonderful examples of the invisible hand and survival of the fittest. The best and most healthy plants grow and flourish where the weak and sickly perish into underbrush. It is that underbrush that occasionally needs to be burnt away from the good living life forms through forest fires. Naturally, liberals have an affinity for the underbrush because in the world of human life and functions that is what they are, and the thought of tragedy coming along to burn them all away is a constant fear for them. Every time there is a mass shooting, or an earthquake the first thing that is consumed is liberal ideas. Bravery, self-reliance, and proper philosophies for survival become the most urgent thoughts. Just as in mass forest fires, where the best rooted and strongest trees survive in some form while everything else is consumed.

Take the liberal gardener who lets plants grow everywhere and doesn’t tend to them properly. They always look like a mess. Compare that to the astute and meticulous gardener who plants certain kinds of plants here and there and trims back the dead limbs and shapes the growth of their garden with care and precision. The effort of the human influence to shape the garden makes it either esthetically pleasing or not, based on the interpretive mind of the human being. The gardener makes a choice to rid the world of undesirables like weeds and dead limbs and carves out beauty as a form of art, which is to say a way of thinking. A philosophy of thought, a value system that says some plants are beneficial to the garden, while others are detriments is critical to a good garden, or a good society. What makes a weed a weed? The value system that places it at a lower value than say a well-trimmed Japanese maple tree. A good gardener hopes that all plants do well, but once the garden grows, we must make decisions on what works and what doesn’t and change the behavior into something more conducive to a good garden.

Rainforests are messy, and hot. Life is growing everywhere, and it is unmanaged. Nature’s management is that occasional catastrophes like fires come along and clean up the mess. But ideally, mankind was born to think and make decisions to carve out nature for the best benefit, whether the need is for farming, or industry, the human mind is just another force of nature, and its disciplines are meant to create esthetic harmony by bringing nature under control for the use of higher needs, instead of some random nonsense of a bunch of animals living and dying in trees and underbrush that only are born, eat, reproduce and die. The human mind brings a higher meaning to all life and it is a force of nature in and of itself.

The typical liberal cannot see themselves in that higher plan because they know that in the great gardens of the world that they are the weeds, the underbrush, the diseases infecting a healthy body and that they must be eradicated in order for healthy conduct at life to occur. They may want to have a roll in the scheme of things but since they are parasitic in nature, their philosophies mandate that they must be destroyed in order for better things to live. That is why they cry so much when there are forest fires and try to threaten us all with a terminal life on planet earth, so to protect them from termination within the philosophy of politics and world conduct. They are the weeds and cancers fighting for their right to survive, but we know good health cannot support everything. As humans we must choose, just as our immune systems must choose healthy cells over diseased ones. To live and be healthy we must choose life sometimes over other life. A nice tree over a weed. A healthy body over a diseased one. And not to discriminate, but to discourage people from becoming weeds, from becoming liberals and help them in life find their way toward good thought and conduct. That is the most humane way to deal with political gardening. And the way to do it in the world such as along the Amazon is to burn away the garbage so the people of Brazil can use the land for something more than just decay and nonsense. Clear the land for farmland. Log for more lumber and develop the resources of that country so that people who are barely living in huts and on city streets can live better and longer for the purpose of existence which is not up for debate. Give them a better life in our world garden. The trees will grow back. But the weeds and underbrush need to go.

Rich Hoffman
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Hate Crime Legislation to Ban Guns: The Government attempting to disarm the Second Amendment to cover for their own crimes committed

One of the gun control measures that congress intends to pursue when everyone gets back in session and is being floated around more and more recently is to take guns away from people convicted for a hate crime. In fact, it was Columbia, South Carolina of all places who just enacted a first pass hate crime ordinance which is going in the same direction as what is being floated on the federal level, and it is just ridiculous. The trouble with the proposal is that it is purely reactive to the current circumstances of mass shootings, which I have said many times are the result of Democrat policies as an origin, and that it just opens the door for banning guns based on hate speech, which is entirely defined by whatever political party is in power at the time. Such a ban opens all kinds of doors toward future encouragement and abuse of the law no matter how good the intentions are of the people proposing these measures.

My brand of conservatism was common all through the twentieth century. It was the world that changed, not me, and that hard turn to the left that started really in the mid-1950s and culminated into the 60s was a bad decision based on the current condition of the world. I often say to people that I was born in 1968 as a solution to that left turn. I grew up knowing both of my farmer grandparents. Both of my parents stayed married and didn’t embark on that social experiment of divorces that was becoming so popular in the late 70s and 80s. And even more unusual, my mom was a stay at home mom, and she took all kinds of hell for doing it. She was a volunteer at my school to help the teachers with all the kid’s social events and all the other moms simply hated her, because she could be home with her children and had time during the day to do mom stuff. As a result, my view of America and Republican politics in general was not at all different from John Wayne’s America, or any of the typical westerns that were popular on television and at the movies during that period. So nothing I say is all that outlandish, only if it is compared to the screw ball politics of our current time, just as a disclosure for reference.

Hate crimes are a modern invention by Democrats to seek minority votes and to capitalize off tensions that always arise when cultures of different values are mixed together. Most of the time those tensions can be worked out with a little understanding but occasionally things get out of hand and bad things happen. Democrats especially are guilty of stoking those fires of discontent until someone snaps and thus, you have a hate crime. If everyone would just leave everyone else alone, there would be a lot less hate crime in the world. But activist politics pushes the issue and before you know it some panicked teenager raised in a house full of illiteracy is running their car through a crowd of progressive protestors committing a hate crime.

The trouble with hate crime is that it is entirely politically motivated, so that if an enemy political party wants to push your buttons as a target and you respond, you could be said to have committed a hate crime. And under these new hate crime proposals, the authorities have a right to then come and confiscate your guns. If that’s not bad enough, the natural next step is to extend that effort to hate speech, which essentially could be just about anything that President Trump says on a daily basis, because he is from the winning political party and the losers are hen pecking at him because they know of no other way to win an election. Because of that we are seeing massive amounts of banning going on social media platforms, such as Alex Jones has experienced along with many, many others. I understand shadow banning, that is certainly the case with me on Twitter and YouTube. I don’t worry about it too much, but I can see that it’s happening for sure. These are already dangerous elements in any society so we can clearly see that all this hate crime legislation opens the door for gun confiscation by whatever political party is in power, and it just can’t be allowed.

It is not radical to say that the reason we have guns, guns of all sizes and power is so that we can manage our own government. There may come a time, and it is obvious today, that we may have to take back control of our government through the use of guns. Government cannot be trusted without a check on their power, ultimately by the people of an electorate and the electoral system. Even with guns we have come perilously close to complete tyranny as the evidence of the last presidential election is testimony in itself. The FBI sought to help the Democrat party elect their presidential candidate and keep Donald Trump out of the White House, which didn’t work. But when he did, they actively played a part in subverting that election, the evidence is everywhere as revealed most explosively with the Bruce Ohr situation at the Department of Justice. That case is still unraveling, but it is very embarrassing to our government. Going back a few years we saw a similar situation involving the IRS where they targeted Tea Party groups as a way to punish them for existing, using tax laws to encumber the leadership. It was a gross abuse of power and nobody was ultimately held accountable. I was wrapped up in the middle of all that, so I saw it firsthand. It was abuse by our government, pure and simple and honestly, if I was not a gun owner, they probably would have come after me even harder. By my experience, I would say that my ownership of guns has preserved more liberty and saved more lives than if I had not had them. Let’s just say that.

As to the other proposals such as red flag laws, well the tools have always been there. Since the most recent mass shootings in El Paso and Dayton, Ohio police and the FBI are finally doing their jobs and picking people up for the messages they put online about announcing their mass shooting intentions. The red flags have always been there, but police and the FBI were just too lazy to act on them. There wasn’t a political will to enforce the laws that were on the books, otherwise the El Paso shooting and the one in Dayton would not have happened. The red flags were there, but the cops were out eating donuts and thinking about something else. That is another reason we can’t trust our government; they are not consistent and driven by performance. They are mostly inspired by politics and when something is hot, they act. When things cool off, they sleep, sit in their cars looking up pornography on their computers, and they have massive affairs with each other. (I know a lot of cops or have over the years. I know what I’m talking about.) They do a good job when pressed and people are looking. But left to their own devices, they aren’t the most motivated bunch.

We can’t trust government to define hate crimes or even hate speech and we certainly can’t surrender our guns to them. The guns are there to ultimately protect us not from thieves and despots, but from the tendencies of government itself, to cover their crimes when they commit them from the burdens of history. And if someone like you or I are witnesses to that burden, we will then become the targets, which is what all this hate crime legislation is opening up as a possibility, for which we all must say no. For myself, I live by the Cowboy Way, I treat everyone no matter what their sex, color or country of origin the same and with great respect. I don’t need a government that is always trending toward criminal behavior to define for me, “fairness.” I’ll keep my guns, and if someone wants to come and take them, then that will leave no other choice but to call for a change in the government itself and return to a time when John Wayne made a lot more sense instead of the race baiters and hustlers of our current times who seek to hide their own illegal activity behind more laws and regulation.

Rich Hoffman

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ANTIFA is a Terrorist Organization: Both White Nationalism and ANTIFA are elements of the left and stand against the American Constitution

Of course, ANTIFA should be labeled a terrorist group. That’s what they are and have been throughout history whenever an activist group like theirs comes about to promote socialist causes, whether it’s the Brownshirts of the NAZI or the Marxists of Lenin the purpose they serve is to attack the social order of their society and to replace it with anarchy and chaos so that change in their direction can take place. I would also say that regarding the recent Portland protests where members of ANTIFA and white supremacy groups clashed from the supposed “alt right” that both organizations are from the political left and are in themselves terrorist in nature. All the representation at the Portland protests were to the left of traditional conservatives in America and that is something worth discussing because we are all told to pick a side and that represents “us” as Americans, but nothing could be further from the truth.

This is not a First Amendment protection issue. Basically, in the case of the ANTIFA people, they are communists protesting the basic foundations of American life, so the First Amendment is something they are willingly giving up. And the White Supremacists that naturally spawn off these far-left groups are a natural reaction to being isolated by the progressive movement’s agenda but are in and of themselves a creation of it. Everyone knowns by now that it was Republicans who put down the white nationalists’ movements in America, who freed the slaves, and pushed for the equal treatment of all under the American flag. When they wave around the Confederate Flag at white nationalist events trying to go back to a time before the Civil War, they are too stating that they do not want to be a part of American law which considers everyone equal, no matter what skin color we have. If the issue wasn’t defined well enough when the original Constitution was signed, then it was made quite clear by the Civil War and the Amendments that followed that war. Essentially terrorism is the mode of operation of all these groups, and we need to look at them that way.

But for ANTIFA to call anybody a NAZI is to say that they are just a less severe version of Marxism. The Nazis were a socialist organization from Germany and their rise imposed themselves on the rest of the world with massive destruction and poor philosophy. The ANTIFA terrorists are even further to the political left and are pushing for harsh communism like what we’d find in modern China and North Korea—or even Iran. When they all start burning flags and spitting in the face of basic American ideas, its time to get rid of them as a terrorist organization by accepting that they are exactly that. The First Amendment can’t survive everything, and the line needs to be drawn at the American Flag. If everyone can’t at least agree to the Constitutional concepts that the flag represents, then whoever disagrees needs to be treated as a hostile foreign entity and a domestic enemy by the terms of modern citizenship.

To go further into this issue, the creation of a group like ANTIFA to begin with, we must blame the educations of these young people for arriving so far into their adult lives and thinking the things that they do which go against America. To consider that we have all paid massive amounts of money into the educations of these people only to have class curriculums teach anti-American sentiment which gives rise to this kind of radicalism is preposterous. And that even our modern media members are so stupid that they can’t even understand left from right thinking between ANTIFA, white nationalism, and normal Americans says a lot about their fundamental thought patterns created during their educations. And even so, some of them do understand, but by positioning the problem the way they have it forces normal Americans by default to endorse with their silence one side or the other even though neither side has anything to do with America as we have known it. I’m certainly nothing close to a white nationalist, and neither is the Trump administration, or anything connected to it. But once a stigma is created rather than solving the problem, we are forced to defend a narrative for which none of us ever played a part. To attach any conservative movement with the “alt right” of white nationalism is like calling a can of soda a glass of water. They may be both liquids, but they have nothing to do with each other. All white nationalists are advocating a form of socialism or fascism that were always born of liberalism, specifically the Democrat party as it evolved out of the early 20th century progressive movement in America.

Of course, a bunch of dumb kids raised poorly and educated to fail, because failure puts boots of radicalism on the streets to demand change, are going to want to fight someone. They must blame somebody for being losers in the world, and I place the blame on their educations which we all paid for and have proven to be destructive to the minds of young people. Which to me is just another form of inner bred terrorism. The white nationalists aren’t any smarter, they are looking to socialism and fascism for a reason, because they can’t think their way out of a paper bag soaked with water. So, they turn to collectivism to solve their social problems. The situation really is a mess and most people don’t have time to figure out all the players and how they became that way. Which if you look at how the media has positioned these stories to pick winners and losers both on the side of the left, the attempt against our American lives is obvious, which is yet another act of terrorism against our Constitution.

There is plenty of blame to go around, and there has been lots of unchecked terrorism that has been left to grow because law makers didn’t want to come across as harming the First Amendment. But all these characters in this play have forsaken the protections of the Constitution by spitting on the American flag in some fashion or another which is to say to the world that they don’t honor the Constitution for which it represents. In that regard declaring these groups and anybody for that matter who states that they despise the American Flag, we should then treat them as hostile to the American ideas and law for which our society demands we at least find common ground. If we don’t at least have that common ground, then what do we really have and what will be the outcome? We can’t just let ANTIFA act so badly in our city streets and bring harm to people all in the name of open communism. We do need to draw a line and I think the situation is quite clear. ANTIFA and all such organizations need to be labeled a terror group, no different from an organization like ISIS. And we need to run them off the face of the planet as domestic enemies to the American concept. And that’s the way it must be.

Rich Hoffman

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