Tag: Free Will

Fire Every “Red for Ed” Protesting Teacher: Public Education sucks, why pay teachers for a crappy–anti American, job

Every single teacher participating in the “Red for Ed” walkouts across Arizona, Oklahoma, and Kentucky—and anywhere else for that matter, should be fired for their radical behavior and recklessness in not doing what they are paid to do in their communities. In spite of what they will tell you their slogan means—the designation of red is a communist sentiment left over from the origins of the labor unions behind this radicalism and is the root cause of their demands for “worker’s rights.” Those rights they are talking about demanding excessively high wages and pension benefits for providing a service that has been very destructive to the education of all Americans is just ridiculous and in need of major reform. The best thing we could do for ourselves as a society is fire every teacher participating in these radical protests and replace them with one of the new automated information devices that are being produced by Google, and Amazon. I am quite serious when I say that Alexia could replace 95% of what teachers in front of a classroom provide and they don’t cost anywhere near the kind of money that an actual employee does. So fire every single one of the teachers and replace them with something much better, an Alexia. Those mechanical devices never strike, they don’t have sick days, and they don’t smell like coffee and bad perfume. Kids will learn a lot more from Alexia than they ever would some fat assed socialist teacher demanding a higher pension and pay for doing what a machine could do much better.

I would dare say that there is nobody reading this who enjoys education as much as I do. I love education so much that I hate the teachers of our modern education system because they teach people all the wrong things. Most adults functioning today are crippled from their youthful educations and their children are even more so. The situation has become increasingly worse each decade essentially starting in the 1930s when communism from FDR’s administration was seeping into the curriculum of public education. It took 30 years for that first communist wave to hit our population which unleashed the problems of the 1960s. Then 30 years after that the “no child left behind” efforts at not raising kids up, but by pulling the smart ones down to the level of the mob—up to the present. The protesting teachers are part of a very destructive process of a public education system designed by big government lovers not to unleash the power of individual thought, but to cripple minds to remain in a nicely manageable herd—easy to slaughter by those who seek to rule over others in society. Public education has been a very destructive endeavor in American society. The evidence of its crippling effects is everywhere. To see it best go to a gambling casino in Las Vegas or a Golden Coral smorgasbord.

There are plenty of opportunities to learn and that has been the bright spot in a capitalist society. There are alternatives to public education for which to learn much more effectively. Over this past weekend I was very delighted to go to The Children’s Museum in Indianapolis, Indiana and talk to some paleontologists there who were working on a T-Rex bone fresh from the Bad Lands. The lab where they worked was open to the public and you could reach in and touch the actual bone they were working on. I asked them why they allowed the oily fingers of people to actually interact with the raw bone of such a rare creature and they explained to me that at The Children’s Museum their policy is to let people interact with their exhibits—because that’s how people learn. That made me very happy to hear. Ecstatic actually, I love talking to people who are passionate about learning and discovering new things. The employees at The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis were passionate about learning and were to my mind the model of what education should all be about. I don’t like public education for the same reason that I’m not a fan of public parks, public restrooms, and public libraries—there is a value that is lacking in anything that doesn’t have private ownership as part of the institution. When any of the employees use collective bargaining as their means of acquiring compensation there simply is no way to properly balance a budget without driving the cost of the endeavor beyond the scope of the project. For instance, the two ladies who were working as paleontologists at the Indianapolis Children’s Museum I watched all day, from the start of their shift to the end. I spoke to them several times and they were as interested in their job at the end of the day as they were at the beginning. If I were running things I’d pay them six figures to keep doing what they were doing with the expertise that they displayed. But for a teacher who just shows up and complains about taking work home each night, doesn’t want to work weekends, doesn’t want to work more than 7 hours a day—I’d rather replace a live teacher with something like Alexa.

I was thinking about all these problems as we drove back from the Children’s Museum back to Cincinnati, Ohio. I used Google Maps on my iPhone to locate a Cracker Barrel outside of town, far enough away to thin out the rush hour traffic. As I plugged in my phone to my car my music played seamlessly while giving me directions to the highway street by street working far better than any atlas I ever owned. I was slow to accept Google Maps because I’ve always been naturally good at directions and reading maps, but I have to admit that Google Maps is far better than the atlas book I used to keep under my car seat. While I was driving people called me and the navigation system, the music, and the people I was talking to all seamlessly worked through my car’s speaker system and I was able to interact with everything without taking my hands off the wheel. That is a lot better than how things used to be, and education is no different. There are many better ways to educate people than the old system of a dominating authority figure in the front of the room designed to press students into a peer group—a concept invented to spread communism into American society during the 1930s under president FDR and his New “communist” Deal. That old way of education has crippled so many people intellectually, why would we continue to throw so much money at it? What are all these teachers thinking who are protesting now for higher pay and pension security? We aren’t living in that world any more just like nobody uses an atlas to navigate while traveling. It’s archaic to even think about it. Education has even more potential for reform than navigation and the only reason we haven’t yet gone there as a society is because these labor unions scare people into taking away their baby-sitting services. Because that’s all that’s happening in public schools, parents get to drop off their kids as a babysitter paid for by the state. In exchange the “state” gets to try to program children into the ways of big government communism, thus the “Red for Ed” campaign.

Most people don’t really want communism as the means to a social philosophy, even though that’s what they’ve learned in public school. I’d say that the quality of public education has been garbage rooted in Marxism that has been proven to be crippling to the human race and should be abandoned knowing what we do today about the nature of that social philosophy. But this article is about cost. Why should we pay so much money for something that produces such bad results as public education does? People obviously aren’t very smart coming from the public education experience. Observing the poor conditions that most adults live in intellectually, public education could be said to be as destructive as smoking, or alcoholism, crippling the mind of the participants to the point of uselessness. At this point anything would be better, and I actually think people would learn better with Alexia, or some other similar device. That means that every protesting teacher in Arizona, West Virginia, Kentucky, Oklahoma and everywhere else could be, and should be fired for any form of collective bargaining protest. Their education methods are not good. Their service to the community is old and outdated. And their epistemological foundation for the passion for learning is missing leaving their students crippled for their entire lives thereafter. So why should we spend all this money on public education? The answer is, we shouldn’t.

I’m willing to spend a lot of education. In my life I can say that my family has spent a small fortune on education, not institutional education, but the essence of education which is discovery and emotional exploration of personal intellect. I value speaking to other people who are very passionate about education as well, such as the two employees I mentioned from the Indianapolis Children’s Museum whom I promise conduct their work and never think about the money. They do a good job in their fields of endeavor regardless of how much money they get paid and that’s what I expect in a teacher. Compensation is for management to sort out in a capitalist country. If someone is valued a good manager will find a way to pay employees what they are worth. Bad employees are a dime a dozen and get a lot less money—and that’s how it should be. This collective bargaining nonsense is as useless today as an atlas under the car seat. It’s not good for the teaching profession and it’s not good for the recipients of the education. It makes the bad equal to the good and that is just stupid—and it shows. I don’t want to pay a fortune to teachers who complain about their work day, who complain about their work they have to do at home, or about the amount of kids they have to teach in a classroom. I want teachers who love to teach whether the room is filled with 26 students or 2000. I want teachers who are into the job 24 hours a day, seven days a week, all year-long. And I want teachers who spend their spare time reading and getting better, not sitting around watching sitcoms while making their assess even fatter with potato chips and nachos bitching about their bratty students to their friends on Facebook when the school day is done. Those types of people aren’t worth the money we spend on them. Alexia could do a much, much better job, and kids would learn more in the process.

Rich Hoffman

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The Answer to an Age Old Question: Expereince or imagination, which one is more important

One of my employees was in a meeting this past week with me and a lot of other very smart people when she told me about one of her graduate school assignments. She’s acquiring her master’s in business administration so the frequency of thought-provoking assignments has been increasing and she was talking to me about it with genuine inquiry—as if such matters were even a struggled presumption. The question for which she had been given 30 minutes to answer was what was more important in business, imagination or experience. I told her that the answer was very easy, it was imagination—clearly and unequivocally. Obviously, that had not been the theme of her classroom discussion so I’ll share my reasons so that others can come to learn the priorities for themselves and thus focus their energy in the proper places.

I’m obviously at a place in life where I have both imagination and experience so my daily performance develops along that trajectory of expectation. But that was not always the case. Without an imagination there really is no other means of developing any kind of project from conception to inception. Nothing happens in business or in anything unless the imagination first unleashes the concept of something—so without imagination nothing happens, making it clearly the most important thing in business. Imagination is the escape velocity that an idea has to have to leave the gravitational holdings of reality, to break through to something in an orbit all its own. The process is often violent and messy just like a rocket trying to escape the gravity of earth—until the weightlessness of space calms everything down and the rocket then becomes its own master.

Without imagination there is nothing for experience to do. Experience is a useless thing by itself because if the human race always keeps everything in a static development where experience rules all decision-making then nothing new develops. We’d just do the same things over and over again. But business is all about changing and developing—nothing is static in a capitalist society so an edge is always needed to perpetuate competitive advantages. Experience can take an idea and bring it to life, but it is the imagination that creates the idea.

Asking if something should be or how it might play against a present reality is a powerful conceptual device. Imagination is not just important in conceiving new concepts but in trouble-shooting, which is an essential part of even mature products. Asking what ifs when problems arise can be difficult and experience may limit the options if the reality of options are limited to what has been known. The problem may be something that has never been experienced leaving a conceptual faculty of thought needed to uncover what needs to be examined.

Socially this question has had devastating results on the development of our civilization. We do a great job with kids in developing their imaginations, but obviously in our education system we have put the emphasis on experience as the primary focus of business development, and that is incorrect. By focusing on experience, it has justified the long necessity for education because the selling point is that is how young students can gain experience. But in reality, most children are quite good at thinking out problems and solving them whereas most adults will linger on topics for too long because they get caught trying to bend situations toward their experience—which most of the time doesn’t have what it needs to solve new challenges.

Playing at life will make a far more effective business person than a straight-laced experienced practitioner of yesterday’s rules. If you have ever pursued a patent for a new invention this problem emerges quite explicitly. Inventors are usually very imaginative whereas the reviewers at the patent office are there to point out every static reality possible to ensure that what has been invented is truly new and not just a retread of an old idea. Both sides are often frustrated with the other because they are at cross purposes from one another. But without the imagination of new inventions there would be no reason for the other to exist. In order for experience to happen someone would have had to create the means of learning something to begin with, and without imagination nothing ever gets initiated. No wheel would have been constructed, no fire started for the first time, no kite flown to jostle loose the mechanisms of electricity. Or any experiments with radio waves to unleash the modern powers of communication. Just learning what was known and applying experience to maintaining it doesn’t advance anything. Only imagination can advance an idea from a thought into the birthplace of reality.

Critics of mine often say that I’m a “big picture guy” because my interests are mostly on conceptual development and outside the box thinking on everything. Even though I understand the need for experience, maintaining what has been known with static analysis isn’t very interesting to me—essentially because anybody can do those things. To those who are blind to such opportunities the big picture is a useless task of an artist that has little regard for the rules established by experience. Those who favor experience over imagination truly desire that things stay within the realm of their expertise so that they can be acknowledged as masters of their specific fields. These are the types of people who will give an opinion on a matter by saying that they aren’t an attorney, or they aren’t cooks, or they aren’t CPAs—shortchanging their comments just as they make them. To those types of people, they lack the imagination to think outside their field of professional endeavor so they refuse the responsibility to advance a thought if it falls outside of their expertise. But often this is just what’s needed. This problem is the equivalent to a person driving a car but having to pull off the side of the road because they have a flat tire and refusing to change that tire because that’s not their job as defined by experience. So they sit on the side of the road and call out for help from someone who only changes tires for a living.

To me it’s a very obvious situation and my experience tells me that imagination is far more important in any task. Imagination is needed to solve problems especially when they fall outside of what has been known previously, which is most things. Attempting to bend the rules of existence to the static confines of what has been known is probably one of the most destructive attributes of any society that yearns to call itself advanced. Any time I will listen to the advice of a free-thinker that is deeply imaginative over that static resistance of an experienced person, because experience can only articulate what has been known, it doesn’t produce what could be. Only imagination does that leaving imagination as the most important tool that not only business has to work with, but that human beings use to advance their cause. While we are teaching children the things they need to learn in life the best thing we could do for them is teach them to have an imagination and thus, to think. The worst thing we could do is to teach them to confine their operational reality to the limits of experience. To do so is to limit all opportunities to the realm of experience, and that isn’t conducive to anything new, only the old static problems that were there when experience was formed leaving advancement of any kind to be elusive, and unfulfilled.

Rich Hoffman

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Getting to Know Jim Renacci: Why he’s the best guy to unseat Sharrod Brown in Ohio

The last time I had seen Jim Renacci was when he was stepping off Air Force One with President Trump shortly after being asked directly by the president to run for the very important Senate seat in Ohio against the very liberal Sharrod Brown. Brown’s mission has been from the beginning several decades ago to turn Ohio from a red state to blue and after decades in public office has managed to help make it the color purple. Trump recognized that, and he looked at the map at where Senate seats could be picked up to help his agenda, and Sharrod Brown’s seat became part of his ambitious plan. When it was then considered who might have the fortitude and raw talent to take on such an entrenched incumbent the only name the President focused on was that of Jim Renacci—a self-made businessman with a background similar to Trump’s. Even more importantly to all that, Renacci like Trump has a history of winning what he does so for Jim to make a decision to abandon his run to become Ohio’s next governor he stepped up to the considerably harder task of unseating Sharrod Brown in what will prove to be one of the hottest national races in the upcoming midterm election. Before that happens though there is a primary to win and a lot of planning to do, so Renacci was in Mason, Ohio speaking to a very small, but important group of area Republicans.

As readers here know I’m not an autograph seeking, name dropping, picture-taking kind of person when it comes to people of celebrity and social importance. I’ve personally met President Trump on several occasions as well as Newt Gingrich and several other top-tier politicians and I didn’t go out of my way to have a picture taken with them, but Jim Renacci is different. He’s a very tenacious guy whom I believe is extremely sincere in what gaining that Brown Senate seat means to the nation and I respect him as a person for it. Getting to know Renacci as a candidate over the last several months, first as a person challenging the governor’s seat, and now under President Trump’s direct request, running for the valued Senate seat in Ohio to share one of the two available. Rob Portman is the other Senator, so there is a real opportunity here to gain someone in the Senate of Jim’s caliber and to further the Trump agenda with business people who understand it. The videos below are from this meeting which was only a few people listening to Jim speak in a private kitchen. Recording this meeting was a rare opportunity for others to get to know Jim Renacci without the Fox Business Channel cameras, the big rallies, or the interpretations of a left-leaning media filtering out the information they think important. In these two videos Jim just talks about his background and why he is the best candidate of all the Republican challengers to unseat Sharrod Brown.

One of the last questions in this meeting was directed at what Renacci specifically has regarding talent to perform this important historic journey and Jim modestly didn’t answer the question as fully as he could. Being a business guy, he is happy to let his record speak for itself because he honestly likes the other Republicans who are also running for the opportunity to take on Sharrod Brown. After all, only Renacci has been personally endorsed by the President of the United States, so he let that question linger softly—but I’ll be happy to answer it on his behalf. One thing that Jim has that others don’t is that he’s good on television. He is a frequent guest on the Fox Business Channel and MSNBC—among many others and in this modern era of television communication, Jim is good on camera. He knows how to speak the language of television, which is in how to communicate in short segments and with using all the range that a blocked off face can deliver to a direct audience in their living rooms. When running against an entrenched incumbent that has the power of the entire Democratic Party using a friendly press to preserve their position, it takes being not just a great candidate to win a race like this—it will take someone who is fantastic on television, and Renacci is.

In those videos Renacci told the story of how he came into politics in the first place, and it’s a good one that everyone should hear. Jim could easily live a good life as a self-made person and stay out of the political theater, but like Trump he found himself entering politics to offer his unique skills where they were needed most. Jim had a Chevy dealership around the time that General Motors went bankrupt and at the time many dealerships were being forced to be closed. This activity had nothing to do with Jim’s business skills, as he had been very successful, it was simply that he was selected to be closed which went against everything he understood about how things should work. So he reached out to his local congressman for help only to have that person vote against his dealership. The congressman was a Democrat and from there Jim challenged that seat in the next election and won. He has been in congress ever since facing down severe oppositions in the process.

There were many more stories than that communicated in that cozy kitchen in Mason which no media outlet would cover. There isn’t time or enough print for most media to dedicate to those types of stories, leaving voters often mystified about the actual people running. That left this little event to have quite great importance to those lucky enough to attend. To me there isn’t a better positioned person for that Senate job, and Jim certainly has the right level of fight in him to be successful. He will do what needs to be done to win, much like Trump did in his election against Hillary Clinton. Ohio may be purple now politically, but as Jim said in his speech, its going back to red and this upcoming election for this particular Senate seat is the battle that will define that political movement. However, even more important than all that is that it will solidify Trump’s agenda with more help at the federal level with the kind of Republicans that Trump is bringing to the Party as a whole.

I’ve been in the Renacci camp for most of a year now, first as a candidate for governor, and now in his run for Senate. Few politicians excite me the way that Jim does, which is why I did take a picture next to him. I did it because I was proud of him for taking on this big role and I want to help him any way possible. It is my hope that once he is elected that more business professionals at the height of their careers, like Trump was and now Renacci will follow in their footsteps and offer their skills to the world of politics. When we complain that politics is full of unsavory characters it is because many of them are not battle hardened in the rules of business. They are simply referees in the games of life, they are not the superstars who make their livings accomplishing things. Renacci is a new kind of candidate that are emerging under the years of Trump to bring the best of American enterprise into the role of managing our federal government. And that is a great opportunity for America to finally be politically what it has been in all other sectors of private endeavor, which is why getting excited about Jim Renacci for the Ohio Senate seat in Washington D.C. is very easy to do.

Rich Hoffman

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The Art of Holly Denham: Seeing hope beyond the facade of a negative reality

I think raising children is the most rewarding thing you can do. Raising my children was likely the happiest time of my life, and what they have become makes me infinitely proud. What they become largely is the complete responsibility of the parent and any little mistake made along the way can translate into massive problems later down the line. So to see my kids arrive into their late twenties being nice productive people unbroken by the realities of existence is something I never get tired of. Both of my children do unusual things creatively which for me was always my hope for them. Most parents just want their children to be successful and moderately happy in life, but I always expected more with some of the unusual experiences I introduced them to as kids. Then like all parents must—although most don’t accomplish it—you have to have the guts to keep your grubby hands out of their lives and let them live it as much as possible—so that they can authenticate their own way through a complicated world, and you have to trust that what you taught them along the way would give them what they need. My oldest daughter is a successful photographer and is doing great things very early in life. And now her sister is applying her own brand to the world of art which can be seen below.

My first impression of my youngest daughter’s Holly Denham Art platform was pride because she had moved her abilities well beyond just sketching basic pictures, which a lot of people can do, but do it at the level of a top illustrator. It was great to see her arrive at that level, and to witness her work on the many products displayed at the website below. But then peeling back the first impression at the depth of the work and noticing her interest levels, it was obvious not just because she was my kid, that she had developed a truly artistic outlook toward the world. Upon seeing these drawings, I reflected the drawings I had seen of Pablo Picasso recently at the British Museum in London that the famous painter had made about every day life, and I had to tell Holly that I thought she was better at this stage of her work. The reason was that she had managed to reach deeply into her subjects and pull out an optimism that is very distinct for her and show it in her work. Even if at first glance the subjects are dreary and in the style of the pessimism typical of most millennials, there is always a glimmer of hope in what she does that makes her stuff different from similar works of art.

http://hollydenham.bigcartel.com/

I remember how it was when I was her age, I used to hang around with all the crazy artists at 4 AM in the morning at the Perkins in Corryville at the University of Cincinnati campus, and then the Perkins in Montgomery where all the affluent rich kids who wanted to be nothing like their stiff parents came to express themselves with grunge art, music and literature over hamburgers and free refills of Coke all night. There were similar scenes played out all across the world, young people who thought they were the first to stumble out of childhood and into the injustice of the world rebelling with non-conformity—until the age of 30 came closer and the demands of children, house payments and a steady job forced them to do what they knew best, what they learned from watching their parents go through the same cycle. Thus, artists, even the really good ones, find themselves limited greatly by this cycle of observation—even Picasso’s sketches were very didactic in their worldview—featured so prominently at the greatest museums of the world. Most young artists while their window of free thinking is open to them, before the pressures of life close that window only get to the point where they ask questions and represent those questions in their art. It is therefore pretty rare to see an artist who can ask and answer some of those observational questions.

If an artist isn’t breaking through into some realization not obtained any other way, then it could be argued that the work is simply reflectional—and other than looking neat, is useless to the viewer. But capturing some hidden reality, obscured by the lenses of daily pressures is the difference between a good artist and an average one and to me it is quite clear that Holly is peaking at that goodness. Many of the pieces she has shown me recently are already there. I can only imagine what she will be like after another 2000 drawings, which she is well on her way to producing. She has always been a very interesting person and has had a need to express that uniqueness—so its very nice to see that wonder hatching early in the 21st Century for the world to enjoy.

For me however the pride is in elements that aren’t so obvious in the various sketches. Artists in order to be good need to have lived some life and been pushed to the breaking points a time or two, and most people inclined to such endeavors often turn to substance abuse to alleviate the pain of such moments where expectations don’t meet reality. In my daughter’s case, she has a vast intellect that is capable of a great deal—and because of that she can endure observations that are quite harsh without being broken emotionally, and thus can then articulate those elements onto a printed page. As a parent it is hard to let kids live and to defend them when the world thinks they should be doing something else. But the payoff is in the results which I am enjoying from her. Referencing all the “artistic” types that I’ve known over the years where they all fell short was that they become bitter and rather stagnant in their work. But the human mind craves more than anything optimism, the yearning to turn one more corner to get to a new reality and if a person can last long enough, they can achieve anything. Its one thing to identify what ails the world, it’s quite another to see it and work beyond those limits and I can see in Holly a path where she does this naturally, which puts her in a category of uniqueness that no school can teach—only the realities of a life well lived.

All life is about conflict, and the best of art shows those situations resolved, or the preparation of that resolution. Even the Da Vinci Mona Lisa is about that mysterious look captured in the midst of tumultuous times—that steady gaze from the mysteries of time peering at the future with a knowing smile. Exploring the Louvre in Paris the art shown there is mostly of this type and I don’t see it much differently from today’s comic book artists expressing themselves based on modern observational tendencies. Only today there are more options, and the artistic noise is much greater than it was in Da Vinci’s time. But the artistic process is very much the same, an individual witnesses’ life and puts to it hopes, fears, anxieties and even dreams that can punch through the imagination of a viewer to varying degrees. And to see any young person do that is a wonderful miracle of existence—especially when they turn out to be a kid that you’ve cared for from their very first moments to the present with lots of detail, yet without interrupting their own boons to self-awareness. Pride is a limited emotion to describe such a feeling, but it’s a start.

Rich Hoffman

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Why America Needs a Southern Border Wall: How Mexcio will pay for it

Even the most aggressive estimates of the Trump proposed border wall indicate that the cost will be at around $25 billion. When Trump has said that Mexico will pay for the border wall it is was always my assumption that the president wasn’t expecting a check from Mexico, but that the money to fund the wall would come from squeezing it out of the drug cartels. Over the past few decades drug cartels have become integrated into Mexico’s economy. Approximately 500 cities are directly engaged in drug trafficking and nearly 450,000 people are employed by drug cartels.[57] Additionally, the livelihood of 3.2 million people are dependent directly in Mexico on the drug cartels.[57] Between local and international sales, such as to Europe and the United States, drug cartels in Mexico see a $25–30bn yearly profit, a great deal of which circulates through international banks such as HSBC.[57] Drug cartels are fundamental to Mexican local economics. A percentage of the profits seen from the trade are invested in the local community.[57] While these cartels bring violence and hazards into communities, they create jobs and provide income for its many members.[57] This is precisely how Mexico will pay for the wall. By cutting down on the profits flowing back to Mexican manufacturers, the money will be confiscated at our border wall and put back into the costs to have built the wall to begin with, and it will force Mexico to get into another line of work. Drug cartels and the Mexican government are one and the same.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_drug_trade

There is nothing more disgusting than a drug dealer, legal or illegal. Talking to my mom about the potential to get knee replacements which she needs, she suggested that it wasn’t worth the effort. Every surgery she has had over the last twenty years has shown her that our medial industry is rotting away into incompetency. This has become the trend as the market indications were that liberals would be moving more toward socialism in the health care professions taking the competency that is generally associated with profit from the industry. This has delivered us a generation of lazy doctors who make too many mistakes during surgery, because they will get paid one way or another, and a trend to put their patients on too many pharmaceutical drugs to deal with the pain of lingering ailments. That is simply an embarrassment of American medicine, that average people no longer trust the system to fix their problems because of their history with botched dealings with doctors. This of course has been the primary cause of the current opioid crises where too many drugs have been prescribed by an all too trusting public—and now there are massive addictions in the American people. Some of the drugs are obtained legally, but many are not, and they come from Mexico to satisfy a market of drug addicts made that way through the failures of our health care system.

Yet even worse than that is the illegal trade where Mexico essentially has their entire economy built off the poisoning of American users. While it can be argued that supplying illegal drugs to Americans is a market driven need that the laws of supply and demand are engaged in, there is nothing that says that a government assigned to protect us from bad, illicit things should stand by and let it happen. If there was ever a threat to the American way of life, it is the illegal drug trade. The end users are poisoning themselves and the money is going to support a hostile Marxist government in Mexico that is filled with corruption. Nothing good comes out of the drug trade, legal and illegal. People get temporary relief from their ailments, but the world for which they live is slowly destroyed in the process. There are better ways and none of the drug manufacturers legal and illegal want those facts getting out to people, because they will lose a lot of money in the process. But for society to continue, we have to make those decisions anyway so why not now. Not even the most drug supporting libertarian can defend the enormous costs of destroying a human mind with drugs so the discussion of our times needs to move from should we judge those who desire to do drugs under their own free will, to a society that looks down on such people destroying their lives and those around them with paralyzing thought patterns rooted in mental escape from the realities of life—pain and all.

It is safe to say that the Mexican government is essentially the illegal drug trade and their desire for open borders is to make it much easier to ship illegal drugs into the United States to take care of their basic economic needs. Its an open secret but should there be even a slight disruption of that illegal drug trade which would be confiscated by the Trump administration’s border patrol, then there would be a major impact on Mexico’s economy. It would not take long to pay for the Trump wall with the confiscated wealth of the illegal drug trade. The wall itself is just a barrier. Drug dealers would still find a way to get drugs to their North American markets but the long-term goal is to make the process cost them more. Let them dig their tunnels. Force them into tight places at great cost which makes them far easier to catch. Force them into the air where they’d be easier to pick up at airports. Make them have to sweat it out at border crossings wit drug sniffing dogs going through their luggage. Anything is better than just walking across the Rio Grande and throwing drugs into the back of a waiting truck there along thousands of miles of open desert.

It doesn’t take much research to discover that the same people promoting open borders around the world are also the same people who want to legalize more mind-altering drugs to dumb down the societies of the users in order to give third world countries a seat at the tables of power. But in order for that scam to work, they have to destroy the power of the first worlds, and they plan to profit off the demise. Make no mistake about it, philanthropists like George Soros and his progressive friends are not interested in the United States surviving. If he could poison every American youth into being easily destroyed by the Marxist infiltrators coming across the southern border of the United States, he will gladly do it without losing any sleep. In the way of thinking militarily about such things, poisoning the enemy from the vantage point of Mexico and the progressive advocates of Central and South America funded by Soros types, makes sense. If the Americans want to poison themselves, the cartels of Mexico that has the government on their payroll are happy to provide that service while they build their crime empires.

We don’t like to talk about it much in the United States, especially in connection with gun control, but the gang network of MS-13 is a perfect example of why every home in American should be armed, because they are dangerous, and they have their foundations in Mexico—with Latino illegal immigration. Whenever you see some stupid kid covered in tattoos, especially neck tats, you are either seeing a MS-13 member, or a kid trying to look like one. The killings these gang members perform are beyond prosecution because they are largely so embroiled in illegal activity that jail is the least of their concerns. There is no way to prosecute such people living that far outside of the law and they are a real threat to the security of the United States. If they could go door to door and murder innocent people they would—which is why they form their gangs largely in cities where there are lots of gun control laws. They can thrive in such places because there isn’t anybody around to shoot them back. Not surprising the same people who are for open borders, expansion of drug use and even the destruction of American capitalism are also the same people who advocate for gun control. Imagine that?

A border wall that makes it harder for MS-13 and other gangs from getting money and drugs back and forth to Mexico would go a long way to starving out the criminal elements who are openly operating as a hostile force within the American nation. And by busting MS-13 the money confiscated that is meant to go back to the mother country of insurrection can go pay for the wall. So by the time its all said and done, Mexico will pay for the wall, and they will hurt because of it, which they should. The border wall is needed on the southern frontier of North America because of the hostile forces in Mexico that are intent to enrich themselves by poisoning American consumers. Without meeting these hostile forces with aggression, we are guaranteed to get more of the behavior. For the benefit of all, the border wall is the best option that gives Mexico time to find some more productive way of building an economy for themselves by taking away the temptation to support the illegal drug trade. By clamping down on the drug dealers in America operating as dangerous gangs, the money meant to be sent back to Mexico will pay for the wall, and that is a wonderful way to spend the money. The wall is absolutely necessary to add a major deterrent to all this illegal business which largely funds the entire GDP of Marxist Mexico. And those are the facts of the matter that enemies of the American way of life don’t want articulated. There are too many people making money off poisoning American people to stop doing it on their own. A border wall is the first step in changing that destructive culture, on both sides of it.

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

Why I am Thankful for Microsoft Office: Watching the tech company climb to a value of a trillion dollars

I have to say something about the news that Microsoft looks to be headed to becoming the first company to capture the worth of a trillion dollars. I’m not crazy that a lot of the people who run some of these big companies that I like so much, companies like Apple, Space X, Microsoft, Amazon, and Disney are run by liberal-minded people. However, what they have all done, in earnest is expand the power of the human being in magnificent new ways. Recently while I was reviewing the improvements of the Disney hotel complex at the Contemporary I felt Walt Disney would have been very proud of this particular line of steps marching up into our next future phase. What they did at the Disney Contemporary Hotel is to me nothing short of jaw dropping. It is the hint of where all this great technology could take every single person on the face of plant earth. Sitting in the hotel lobby as the monorail comes and goes to the various Disney Parks while working on laptops running Microsoft Office 365 is a powerful combination of the best human beings have the potential to do in wealth creation and pondering the vast resources available to the human imagination. As the Contemporary re-opened displaying all its greatness at Disney World it seemed to me appropriate to take a moment to thank Microsoft for their contribution to this wonderful world. You can appreciate Microsoft from anywhere in the world—but combining the effective use of their Office software while utilizing vacation time in what is arguably Disney World’s best vacation offering really elevates the optimism that is available to the potential that is coming.

While I respect deeply the origins of the United States as a philosophic opportunity to create a free enterprise system to unleash all these great companies, the challenge of tomorrow will be ti convince the rest of plant earth to follow the American lead. Much the way Disney World under the leadership of Walt Disney took a bunch of raw swampy land in central Florida and turned it into all the beautiful wonders that surround the Contemporary Hotel at the Disney World complex, I think the same opportunities are there for the entire earth and the next great frontiers will be frequent visits into space—and not just within our solar system, but well beyond. The opportunity for much of that rapid expansion in human development comes from Microsoft and how much potential they have freed from human beings. I can say quite confidently that I use Microsoft Office more than most people anywhere in this world, at any income level. I use some program from Microsoft Office every single day of a week, month, and year. Most days I use them for many hours, and I use that program on multiple devices. I am currently very happy with the Microsoft use of Cloud technology because it makes my iPhone such a powerful companion in the world of business.

When Microsoft says “we have more power at our fingertips than entire generations that came before us,” they aren’t kidding. It’s a very true statement and that power has led to great wealth creation for which that trillion dollars of value seems so high, I can easily see a day when earth will become a world of trillionaires and many lives will be greatly improved because of it. Being a millionaire won’t be such a rare thing anymore as it will become the new “middle class” and billionaires won’t be such an anomaly. It will take that to move humanity into space, and those first steps essentially start with Microsoft. I deal with people all over the world every day from several time zones and what we all share is communication through Microsoft Office. Every country has their own version of it that easily translates several languages into easily comprehensive data sharing which is the most ominous task of translation. Being able to put so many cultures with equal opportunities at information exchange has done more for wealth creation than any gold rush or oil discovery has previously.

Over the weekend I had several discussions with people about the tendency of so many children these days to have hyperactive disorders, for which I take offense. I don’t think that hyperactivity as defined by today’s public education institutions is correct. I think children are adapting to the world coming at them in a rapid way, so the worse thing that could happen would be to put them on drugs to level them out to the average displayed in classroom analysis. Being hyperactive is a gift, not a detriment. Anybody who looked at my life and my daily rituals would think that I have various hyperactive disorders, but of course that would be wrong. Just because I tend to work 12 to 15 hours of a day, I play a lot of video games, write books, am very active in politics and I still give my family unlimited amounts of my time—I watch a lot of entertainment, read a lot of books and I don’t really ever feel tired–that isn’t a bad thing. I think humans are evolving into such active creatures because for the first time in human history the means of communicating all their active thoughts are available to them at a speed that encourages more of that behavior. The kids on their phones all the time, or who play multiplayer games online while they are doing their homework and talking to other kids on social media platforms are learning to process information at the speed of future business. That world of tomorrow that is on display at the Disney Parks especially from the vantage point of the Contemporary Hotel is what the rest of the world could look like as more people use their natural inclinations to launch thoughts and dreams into our economies. Microsoft Office is the best mechanism for unleashing that vast power into the world.

I was working on a patent recently and was very surprised that while going though the final steps with the Patent Office Examiner in Washington D.C. that they still largely share information there with a fax machine. My comment to the examiner and the several lawyers on the phone was that it was no wonder it took government so long to do anything—because the speed of business was being artificially regulated to the limits of prior technology. The same could be said in dealing with companies who don’t all have the most updated versions of Microsoft Office. I am running Office 16 most of the time and Office 365 all other times across many different computers and it gets frustrating to deal with companies that aren’t yet doing so, because it slows everything down. Yet the tools are there for everyone and people come to them at their own pace. It’s not the task of the fastest to slow down to the slowest, it’s the other way around, and it is due to that opportunity why Microsoft is knocking on the door to becoming a trillion-dollar company.

More speed and more leisure time is the wave of the future. A 40-hour work week isn’t necessarily the most efficient way to make money. It is kind of the rule of the day, of the 20th Century, but certainly not of the 21st Century. I work close to 80 hours a week, but I also have entertainment and personal growth mixed into my work so that everything gets integrated in a healthy way, and nothing helps my life more than Microsoft Office achieve so many wonderful things in a day. To best see that potential a trip to Disney World at the Contemporary Hotel while taking a working vacation, meaning you still talk to all the people you need to while you are in line for Space Mountain in the World of Tomorrow at Disney World is still possible. Or that you can put together a Power Point from the hotel while getting ready for a big meeting at the convention center at the Contemporary to make a pitch to participants who want to hear what you have to say about something—and while you wait for the big moment you get on the monorail and go over to Epcot and experience the best the world has to offer for lunch while thinking of all the great inventions that are coming to the human race on display there. Working and playing become more intertwined unleashing vast potential through imagination which gets captured best on the various Microsoft Office platforms. There really aren’t any excuses these days for not achieving something, because the means to all creativity is literally at our fingertips, and the effect is now obvious to all. There is no going back at this point, and I think that’s wonderful. I enjoy every day of my life and Microsoft Office is a big part of that enjoyment. I love them as a company and I continue to look forward to each new thing that they do. They have certainly made life very exciting by taking away the limits that used to slow things down so much.

Rich Hoffman

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The Salk Institute: Declining new members at the country club of the everlasting

GE stock is tanking, as of this writing it is hovering just about the $13 dollar per share mark, which is embarrassing for one of America’s largest and most successful companies. But GE’s problems in a lot of way reflect America’s problems. GE as a legacy company controlled by labor unions for far too long, that used their sheer size to dominate their competition, pay their people too much and the people no longer working there are still on the payroll in the form of a pension. Since we are in a global economy and GE’s business model was formed in the years after the Korean War where really only America was making things the world wanted from appliances to avionics, GE could afford to be sloppy. The previous GE CEO Jeffery Immelt hedged the problems further into the future by befriending the Obama administration which was really the only move he had. The latest CEO, John Flannery is trying to straighten things out at the company now that it has a lot of divisions that are no longer competitive in the world, and that reality has contributed largely to the massive sell-offs of the stock. GE still does great things in the manufacturing world, but so does a lot of other companies, and so there isn’t any way to pay for all those top-heavy costs.

America too is at the same place. Our national debt is over $21 trillion. Trump’s plan to deal with it is to grow the economy by shutting off the rest of the world that is choking off American manufacturing while our government works out the problem of the legacy costs which is tying up most of the cash the United States has to work with through taxation. What America must deal with is ending the socialist program Social Security and solve the health care riddle by simply ending sickness. America cannot afford to have sick people who die and take their skills to the grave any longer. A sign of things to come can be seen in the Parkland radicals going after gun control in the wake of the tragic shooting there during February. If they are the future America won’t survive anyway. Not even with the promise of artificial intelligence will we survive. Most of the adults working today will need to work for at least another 100 to 200 years to retain the intellectual information they’ve acquire for the future economy which will be different. That is why the good people at the Salk Institute are working on ways to heal people through gene editing which has the real potential to cure cancer and many other human diseases, including old age. That is the key to not only solving America’s healthcare problems, but also the legacy burdens of socialist mistakes like Social Security. GE may have to break itself up or maybe even go out of business, but America can’t do that so solutions to the problem of legacy costs is the only answer.

I’ve been saying for a long time that regenerative medicine was the future of the medical profession. Why get old if you can just turn it off at the level of our DNA. And why should people even get sick at all? All of human development starts with the cell and ends with the cell. When we are born we grow everything we are ever going to need and the process of aging gradually takes away everything we acquire as children—which is a pretty stupid concept if you think about it. I am quite convinced that as we trace society back to a period well before the pyramids were built-in Egypt, well before Greek society—there was a period where humans lived a long time by either natural are artificial means and we lost that trait due to a philosophic introduction of ideas either through religion, or warfare that ended the practice, and we are still functioning from that depleted state. Noah lived over 900 years, so what happened and why to reduce our lives down to a mere 80 years? And if we could change it, should we?

My argument is of course. There is no profit in death. If the afterlife really wants new members at the country club of the everlasting then someone can come to the next board meeting and tell us, otherwise the human species led by the United States needs to dump Social Security with the trade-off of gene editing and other forms of regenerative medicine and to allow economies to expand around the world. As artificial intelligence contributes more and more to our rapid economic expansion since jobs are being invented quicker than humans can breed and meet those new jobs, we will be dealing with a new dynamic in work place maintenance. Humans essentially need to start thinking of themselves as machines which occasionally need to be repaired. What they have that is superior to the machines of our invention is the intellectual knowledge gained from lifetimes of experience. That is where everything is headed, it’s just a matter of admitting as much to ourselves.

The two things that hold us back from making the needed adjustments are religion and legacy habit. Like GE who is so big that so many employees have built their lives around outrageous pay packages and a company too big to move quickly on their feet to meet market demands, America is moving too slow to meet all the challenges of tomorrow and unfortunately the rest of the world is following our lead. The Chinese don’t do anything on their own without copying western civilization, so even with their rapid economy they aren’t exactly breaking any molds with new ideas. They just copy off the west and beat us to solutions because they have a communist system that doesn’t mind losing a few lives here and there to develop ideas. They make their livings with cheap knock-offs stolen from American patents. America is still the leader of everything and in the realm of science and biology it is companies like the Salk Institute who are paving the way for solutions tomorrow. It is up to our art and essential philosophy to structure our society in such a way to meet those challenges.

The advancements in just five years since I first started talking about these types of things has been astonishing. It has even exceeded my expectations and five years from now, while President Trump will likely still be in office, there will be a chance to make these new regenerative sciences mainstream. I think cures for cancer, extended life, and a cure for most diseases will be common practice instead of the drugs that are provided by pharmaceutical companies. They will soon be as primitive as a western frontier settler taking a swig of whiskey to solve the effects of the common cold. Everyone in the world should have access in the near future to a perfectly healthy 35-year-old body for the rest of time—however long time goes.

Obviously, earth isn’t big enough for all this activity—that is because we are meant to move into space as a human species. We are meant to work on the moon, Mars, and moons of Jupiter and Saturn and to move to and from the earth frequently. But humans are needed to settle the solar system and to harness the power of it to take those next great leaps of thoughtful development. I would argue that we are not meant to die a slow death like GE is currently undergoing because it has reached the top of its market and must now retract just to survive. We have the potential to reinvent ourselves for a new future that is not chained to the legacy mistakes of the past—and for everyone, a real chance at true equality. Nobody has to be old, nobody has to be sick and nobody would have to fight over the fledgling opportunities of a tomorrow that may never come, because tomorrow will always come. And humans can take that next step into an adventure of thought that can only be possible when intellectually the same people can see ideas mature over the span of thousands of years. That’s where we are, and that’s where we are headed.

Rich Hoffman

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As Conservatives, We Should Make our Own Movies, Music, and Social Media Platforms: I’m thinking seriously of becoming a movie producer

After this week I am seriously thinking of becoming a movie producer for my next big project. After considering the astonishing success of Rosanne’s return to television, the box office take of Tomb Raider overseas—especially in China, the controversy of Facebook data theft and the general liberalism of all the tech companies from Microsoft to Twitter—I am thinking that there is a serious need for a conservative voice in the world filling these entertainment markets. That is the ultimate solution after all. I have all these scripts sitting around from my Hollywood pitch days which went on from roughly 1995 to 2006 that I have sat on for a long time because only liberals were putting money into films. It was obvious to all of them that they wanted to go in this liberal direction and I didn’t fit at the time. But it hasn’t worked out for Hollywood and there are a lot of lost opportunities to make a lot of money and to make people in the world generally very happy. It really hit home for me this week while Steven Spielberg was doing press for his upcoming Ready Player One movie. He is well aware that he has lost his touch, because essentially epistemologically he has change. Spielberg directed some of the greatest gunfights in cinema history in Raiders of the Lost Ark, but he never has since as he found friends in Hollywood that he didn’t want to piss off. He is now one of those people who put $500,000 behind the March for Our Lives anti-gun march which was an excessively liberal crusade. As conservatives feel vindicated somewhat that Disney put Rosanne back on television as a “Trump supporter” there is an obvious starvation out there for the kind of movies that Hollywood used to make, to be made again, and rather than complain about it, some of us should just get together and fill that market void.

As a Star Wars fan I had to get The Last Jedi Blu-Ray when it came out this past Tuesday. I liked the movie and I thought Rian Johnson did some really good work as the writer and director. But, it has epistemological problems with its foundation philosophy. These new filmmakers are just so San Francisco liberal that it gets in the way of their stories. George Lucas when he made the original Star Wars movies was not a liberal. He might have spent all his time around liberals, but he had enough small-town conservative in him to detest Hollywood. When he took a big chance and went to the bank to fund The Empire Strikes Back with his own money—that was not a Hollywood communist doing the work, it was a passionate filmmaker and that effort showed up on the screen. Lucas may have had liberalism on his mind as a Vietnam protestor, but he like his friend Steven Spielberg grew up on classic westerns that were about good guys against bad guys and he wanted to tell a modern story about those ideas—so they followed the well stated philosophy to great box office success. But George Lucas is obviously missing from The Last Jedi and it was excessively noticeable in the bonus footage this time as opposed to The Force Awakens by J.J. Abrams. Abrams at least is something of a protégé of Lucas and Spielberg so he was able to recapture some of that on-set magic. Rian Johnson was simply a fanboy of Star Wars who was a modern Hollywood Trump hating liberal that was taking the foundations of Star Wars and making a progressive film on top of that foundation.

With all the attempts to show women empowerment and to put Asian actors in various roles in The Last Jedi the film was rejected by Chinese audiences, which Disney and Lucasfilm were obviously trying to cater to. All the female roles in The Last Jedi were liberal embodiments of what the political left thinks feminism is all about, and it comes across uncomfortably political, and it certainly hurt the film. Yet Tomb Raider is all about the magnificent empowerment of Lara Croft and she has guns in her movie, and she kills people and enjoys it—and the Chinese went crazy over it rewarding it surprising in oversea sales. I listened to the bonus footage of The Last Jedi and carefully noted that Rian Johnson thinks the Force is all about altruism and sacrifice, and that his good guys in this movie were all about blowing themselves up for a greater cause—he obviously missed the point of what heroics are classically about in movies. Han Solo is one of the most powerful characters in Star Wars, and he’s all about possession, he loves his ship, he loves his friend Chewbacca, and he loves his friends and would do just about anything for them. Even though in a pinch he is a giving character he is still portrayed as someone who has personal value for things and people due to his selfish need to be attached to them. But the Jedi as Lucas and many other filmmakers struggled with are supposed to get rid of attachments otherwise they become like Darth Vader and this is where their epistemological liberalism destroys their concepts. Those things aren’t at odds with one another, they are connected—personal value and heroics. If the Chinese wanted to hear a bunch of liberal propaganda they’ll just turn on the state-run television—so they weren’t excited for this latest Star Wars movie. But with Tomb Raider, now that is something they can’t get in China and they soaked it up like there was no tomorrow.

Like I said, I think Rian Johnson did a good job with The Last Jedi. It’s good science fiction. It’s no instant classic that people will love way into the future. But its better to have a world with Star Wars in it than not to have it at all. I know Rian Johnson is a Joseph Campbell fan—as I am. But I want to remind everyone that deep down inside, Joseph Campbell was a conservative—and very much an individualist. He would often say, “are you the light or are you the bulb” which liberals immediately associate with values of collectivism. Without the bulb, the light doesn’t come into the world, so the value in story telling is and should always be on the nature of the bulbs. When a light bulb goes out, the liberal thinking is that you just unscrew the old one and put in a new bulb and the light continues. But in reality, the bulbs of our lives are missed. At the end of The Last Jedi you can see the struggle the filmmakers have on this very subject—they are missing the light of Han Solo not just in the story, but in the Star Wars franchise itself. You can’t just unscrew Han Solo and screw in Poe Dameron–then have him get thrown around the room by a bunch of girls and expect audiences to go along with things. It doesn’t work, as liberalism doesn’t work in the world because of the epistemological failures of the basic concepts of the story telling process.

I will continue to cheer on the efforts of filmmakers like Rian Johnson and Lucasfilm in general. And hopefully Disney learns something from their production of Rosanne on television. But I think we as conservatives could make better movies, better music, and even better social media platforms. I certainly know I could. That’s why I’m thinking of doing just that for my next big thing. I’m in the middle of one of those big multimillion dollar projects now, but I’m coming up on a time where I want to do the next big thing in my life, and by the looks of things, I may just start producing some movies. Not from Hollywood mind you, I’d do it from Cincinnati. Back ten and twenty years ago that was an impossible idea, but these days, the rules have all changed. So why not?

Rich Hoffman

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There is No Society without the Second Amendment: Weeds in the garden and why we must remove them

Like we always knew it was, ANY form of gun control is a goal to eventually repeal the Second Amendment as former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens indicated on his New York Times op-ed piece after the March for Our Lives rallies the previous weekend. The same people who support murdering babies before they are born, the same people who support drug abuse, open boarders and have no respect for private property are the people who want to ban the Second Amendment. That is because the rights to possess firearms is to protect ourselves from those types of people as they emerge in any society—which they always do. Only in America we are meant to have a defense against them. Liberals are like weeds in a nice garden. If you don’t remove them from a well-cared for garden, they will eventually overwhelm all the nice flowers and bushes that are carefully placed there and in no time at all, a wonderful outdoor display ends up looking like a tattered mess. Guns are our means of maintaining our ability to clean out our garden should too many weeds arise to take over our healthy plants. Valueless weeds do not have the right to destroy what we put in our gardens that we value. Be it a shovel or a gun, we are talking about tools which allow us to retake what’s ours to begin with, and without the gun, there is no chance of that ever happening if society swings radically out of control.

The 93-year-old Stevens said a lot in his liberal New York Times piece—he basically stated what was behind all gun control measures. The implication is that government should be trusted therefore we have evolved as a society beyond the need to have a well-regulated militia. We have in the United States a wonderful military, the most powerful in the world—so we no longer need a militia to defend ourselves from foreign invasion, so its time to abandon the Second Amendment—and while we’re at it, probably the 4th, 5th, 6th the 10th, the 14th—and eventually the 1st. Heck, why not just re-write the entire Constitution with all these modern smart people like old man Stevens? That’s their assumption. To the liberal, the weeds of our society—they want to live just like any other plant in the garden and if there are more of them than the well cared for flowers of spring, so be it. Of course, as valueless weeds, they don’t have a problem with that.

But those of us who are really smart, who have worked hard to keep this Republic a nice garden full of wonderful diversity and esthetics understand that we can’t just let any willing nilly weed grow in our garden. We must have a set of rules to live by, which is our Constitution which says how the garden should be cared for—and anybody who wants to change it would be the weeds looking to overtake all the other plants for their own objectives. The difference in thinking couldn’t be clearer, travel to some place in the world that doesn’t have a gun culture and you will immediately see on the faces of their people the effect of growing up in a society of weeds. Their intellectual growth is stunted, the beauty of their culture hidden, and chaos is certainly ruling their lives. Even in downtown London such a thought is unavoidable. On the streets of Paris where the highest concepts of civilization realized through art danced on the imaginations of mankind, in their gun less society of today the weeds of liberalism have completely taken over. In Mexico they long ago had their own versions of John Paul Stevens and they have destroyed the lives of the people for any kind of prosperity—unless you are part of a criminal syndicate.

I will never accept a society that repeals the Second Amendment. I will go to war with any political insurgency that seeks to change one word of meaning in our current Constitution. The primary reason is that I do not see any evidence which states that we are a more sophisticated society today than we were in 1776. I have read Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations for which America was founded, and it is far more intelligent than the work of Karl Marx or any professor of economics seen in Harvard, Princeton or Oxford presently. In fact, I don’t think the university system has done a good job at all in the last 100 years of advancing society in any way. By my observation we have regressed, and that is because we have let the weeds take over the garden of human knowledge and they’ve brought with them lots of terrible ideas which is killing all the healthy plants of our society. The great minds that would otherwise be flourishing are being drowned out by the noise of the liberal left starting by thinkers like John Paul Stevens and drooling out of the side of the mouths of modern zombies like Sean Penn and Miley Cyrus.

As I watched Ariana Grande singing and dancing on stage at the March for Our Lives event in Washington D.C. I saw a weed sucking the lives away from the beautiful roses, and tulips of a spring time blossom. In the crowd were many potential great minds locked by the youthful sexuality of a pop star icon limiting their scope in life to her political ideology of collectivism and gun grabbing only to find themselves heading to a stunted existence for the rest of their lives. That’s not a good thing. We all know how the birds and the bees work in the procreation of the human race. Young women present themselves as blossoming flowers trying to attract the pollination process of potential males ready to discharge the ingredient B into the womb of ingredient A. When they are young bodies like Ariana Grande at the height of their sexual powers they attract a great many incumbents to their lairs of destruction. And too late many unsuspecting visitors find out that the tulip was really a Venus Flytrap—and their lives are sucked from them ensnared for eternity by the lures of sexuality—even weeds can look appealing at first glance. Twenty years from now nobody will care about Ariana Grande, she will just be another plant in the garden that will be plucked and replaced with something that will bloom in the spring with beauty as by that time she will have withered away into old age. That’s what the political left hates about capitalism and why they like weeds so much. In a competitive society, people have to always reinvent themselves and work to stay relevant beyond their sexual nature—their primal attributes. Intelligence is the real beauty of a capitalist society. Where weeds just want to grow and take what they can while they can. Liberals hate guns because they don’t want to live in a competitive world—because they require the looting of others just to survive the basics in life. They need to take value from others just to function.

Yet it’s the competitive world that generates all the greatness of society. It’s what caused the creation of iPhones and sent us into space. It’s the difference between an untended garden of weeds and a well-managed landscape. The value of that managed landscape is protected by the gun, as all things of life must have a way to protect themselves from the lazy parasites of existence. All life after all is not valuable. Some life yearns to advance, some life yearns to be parasitic in nature and to live off other lives—thus destroying what’s good in the other. Our value systems give us the ability to make that judgment call—to decide who are weeds and who are the plants in our garden that contribute to the aesthetic beauty of our landscape.

Of course, the eye of beauty is in the beholder and we are all left to our own versions of what type of gardens we wish to grow. We aren’t talking about social eugenics here, but personal preference based on our ownership of private property. If we don’t want a bunch of pot smokers in our garden, we can tell them to go away. If we don’t like a bunch of devil worshipping losers near us, we can tell them to go elsewhere. But we can’t do that if we can’t protect the value of our individual landscapes. We don’t have a right to tell them how to live, but we can certainly determine our own fates and that is why the gun is essential to American society. Without it the weeds of life will certainly seek to take over everything of value. So without the Second Amendment we don’t have an America. We would be no better than all the other dumps around the globe who have allowed the weeds to take over and the good that is within their cultures to be sucked dry of their value just as a withering flower fades away once youth has left it—only to be remembered by pictures, literature and a few passing spectators.

Rich Hoffman
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The Foundations of Good Government: It’s time to take a hard look at American politics

When a person is in the United States they should have some idea of what an American is. It doesn’t matter what sex a person is, what age or country of origin, an American should conger up some image of a common value system that is immediately recognizable. For instance, there are lots of different people in England who have lots of opinions that differ, but there is a kind of basic foundation of value that all English people share and we can term them as people of Britain. We could say the same about China, Japan, India, Mexico—pretty much anywhere in the world. Only in the United States is there an expectation that diversity is the key to a successful society when it clearly isn’t. And to that effect, Republicans and Democrats cannot live in the same country together and expect it to be run properly at the level of government so long as that American definition lingers. America is a big idea country but the nation cannot hold so many differing opinions about the very foundations of our thinking, as a people. It just doesn’t work and it never will. We cannot have such different political philosophies operating our country and expect it to survive. Further, it is easy to conclude that Democrats do not want America to survive as it has and they only care about changing the nature of the nation which is an assault on those who love it in the traditional sense so no matter what happens, somebody is going to be unhappy.

A common political philosophy is essential to any nation. Political philosophy is like the foundation of a house. With a foundation you know if you are going to have a basement in that house, and what the shape of the house will be based on how the foundation is dug out into the ground. You’ll know if the foundation is made of stone or is of poured concrete—but the foundation is something that everyone will have to agree on who are part of building the house that goes on top of it. Once a house is built people may differ on the kind of curtains that will hang in the house, what color the paint will be, what type of shingles will go on the roof. But the basic nature of the foundation of the whole building is constant and makes everything built on it possible. The political philosophy of our government has to have a foundation of belief that everyone can agree on otherwise building anything on top of it just isn’t possible.

Democrats don’t just want to argue over the nature of the cosmetics of a house of ideas, they want to change the fundamentals of the foundation itself. If our original house of our Republic was built-in Ohio for instance, complete with a basement Democrats want to move it to California and to have a slab foundation that makes the house much less stable but easier to rebuild after every earthquake. They have no intention of building a house on the foundation of our country, they want to change the location of it and change the basic design as well. We aren’t all talking about the same basic philosophy in how America should be run, let alone agreeing on even basic things because our value systems are just too radically different. Thus, there is no way to build a proper government for the people, by the people because all the people can’t agree on a basic foundation of philosophic thought. And in many ways, that is the point of attack that the political left has leveled at the United States. They never wanted to go along to get along. They always wanted to build the house in another place, a different way. They didn’t care to argue variations on a political philosophy such as a paint color, tile or wood flooring, or window shapes, they want a different house of political philosophy completely on an altered foundation and they are unyielding in that demand.

That is why I think war with those people is inevitable in America. We are currently in a new kind of civil war and both sides cannot and will not be able to live in the same house of a Republic together. It’s just not possible. We’re not talking about basic disagreements, we are talking about the most epistemological elements of a political philosophy. Every organized association regardless of the number of people within it requires a philosophy to unite their thoughts. It doesn’t matter if the organization is as small as a sports team, or it’s a community—there must be a basic philosophy that everyone follows. For instance, people know that if they move into a wealthy neighborhood, they will be expected to take care of their property, mow the grass, maintaining their cars and not run around naked in their streets. A poor neighborhood where people are addicted to government services would likely feature people who don’t care about how tall their grass is, or what they look like, or whether or not there are people running around naked. That’s why the neighborhood has a bad reputation because the people within it don’t have a philosophy that is conducive toward success. They are free to do and think what they want, but if they are competing in the world with a community that does have a foundation of successful thinking, they will lose in relation. If Democrats want to change America into something else while Republicans want to preserve the values that built the nation, how can the two function together?

There is always talk about how dysfunctional our congress is at not only the national level, but the state and local levels too. I doubt these days there is any city in America with reasonable council members who are plugged into reality on governing their municipalities. The reason is because they are not formed, and functioning based on the foundational philosophies that drive the capitalism of the rest of the nation. People who do not recognize the values of people who tend to live in America’s cities for instance, move out into the suburbs and essentially are running their own kind of country. This arrangement works until one group imposes itself on another and there is nowhere left to move to. Much or rural California is conservative, but the cities are very liberal taking the state into that direction governmentally and it has had a crippling effect on the state as a whole. They like Illinois have serious debt problems because they have governed themselves poorly in relation to the rest of the country and this is the essential cause of having two different political philosophies running the country. Its one thing to argue over curtains, flooring and paint the way the Founding Fathers envisioned. It’s quite another to argue foundations and the style of a house to live in. Our government could work if all Americans were functioning from a basic foundation philosophy—such as an agreement on the nature of our Constitution. But if one side wants to adhere to that foundational government and one wants to change the foundation of it, then there is no way the two sides can work out even easy problems because their philosophies are from different houses completely.

Before we can ask a government to work together well, we all have to get on the same page, and if we can’t do that, then we need to just admit that we are at war and one side will win and define the nature of America for all time. Dancing around the issue isn’t good for anybody. Pretending that liberals and conservatives can eat at the same Thanksgiving table is nonsense. Going along to get along isn’t solving anything—its just prolonging the inevitable. Before we can work down the debt, and even begin to ask congress to work together—we must all get onto a political philosophy that is built on a foundation we all agree to. Without that, we have nothing.

Rich Hoffman

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