Tag: quantum mechanics

Terrorism in New York City: More failures by academic progressives–guns are the only answer

It was just hours after the loser Sayfullo Saipov crashed a rented Home Depot truck into a crowd of innocent people in New York City killing and maiming them when some idiot on Twitter started yakking about the merits of gun control in that very progressive town. Truthfully, as I remarked, the idiot probably thought the pellet gun and the paint ball gun were assault weapons and he was doing something special with them as he ran around aimlessly after the deed was done waiting for police to shoot him and send him to his “god.” Coming from Uzbekistan where printed paper is an extreme luxury, a paint ball gun might appear to such an ignorant fool to be a weapon of mass destruction. We are not dealing with normal people here but radicals from destitute places and thrown them into modern civilization like dinosaurs from Jurassic Park. Ancient civilizations and modern ones just don’t mix and the progressive policies that have thrown us all together have been and continue to be dismal failures. Here is how Fox New reported the incident:

Investigators in New York City were left with a range of questions Tuesday after a driver plowed a pickup truck onto a bike path and into a crowd in Lower Manhattan, killing at least eight people and injuring 11.
The suspect, identified as Sayfullo Saipov, 29, is originally from Uzbekistan and is not a U.S. citizen, federal law enforcement sources have confirmed to Fox News.

The attack on a bright Halloween afternoon occurred not far from the new World Trade Center building and the site of the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Saipov had handwritten notes pledging his loyalty to the Islamic State terror network and shouted “Allahu akbar” (“God is great”) after the crash, law enforcement officials told Fox News.

Saipov, who was shot by police, was taken into custody and remained hospitalized.

The suspect had a green card, a source told Fox News. Saipov came to the U.S. in 2010, and, according to the Associated Press, has a Florida driver’s license but was said to be living in Paterson, N.J.

Saipov was an Uber driver who had passed a background check, the company told Fox News. It added that Saipov has now been banned from the app, and Uber has offered assistance to the FBI.

http://www.foxnews.com/us/2017/10/31/nyc-terror-attack-leaves-8-dead-several-injured-suspects-notes-pledged-isis-loyalty.html

In actuality, it took too long for an NYPD officer to engage the target. Luckily for us, Saipov only had harmless weapons so we could afford for him to run around for several minutes before the NYPD was able to disable him with a crippling gun shot. Ideally, there should have been a gun wielding NRA member who was concealed carrying a firearm at the point of the incursion and Saipov could have been shot immediately leaving the truck as he was yelling “Allahu akbar.” That statement alone should be enough to open fire as a threat assessment indication. Waiting for the “proper” authorities to put down a threat is risky business. It’s obvious that terrorist organizations around the world are relying on these low-tech acts of violence—we’ve seen them in France, England and many other places already, so we must assume that they will happen anywhere crowds of people gather. So as a reaction to that threat, we need to spread the use of firearms to every corner of our country, especially gun free zones like New York City so that terrorists like Saipov can be stopped as quickly as possible.

Getting lucky is not a strategy. Ryan Nash happened to be close to that location where the terrorist activity occurred and was able to engage the target fairly quickly as an NYPD officer. That makes for a good story, but the response time in the future needs to be even faster if these terrorist losers are going to use these strategies. What separates terrorism in the United States from more progressive countries like the UK and France is that our people can own guns and can help be first responders to such crises as this one in New York.

http://www.cnn.com/2017/11/01/us/ryan-nash-police-new-york-terror/index.html

I’m very tolerate of other people’s religions and lifestyles. I may find their beliefs to be complete lunacy, but I am still respectful of their right to believe things. But the line is crossed when some radical religious loser uses God to justify violence against other people. I wasn’t for it in the Crusades period, I certainly wasn’t for it when the Spanish conquered Central and South America, and I’m certainly against what the towel headed losers of ISIS are doing. Anybody who uses violence to push their religious views is evil, wrong, and deserving of swift justice as determined on an individual basis. And it doesn’t get any more individualized than an American carrying a firearm to be a first responder against terrorism. Respect for other people’s cultures and ideas goes out the window the moment they inflict violence on another culture to advance their ideology. That just isn’t permissible.

The great progressive failure is that many “academics” thought they could end wars on earth in response to the two World Wars by mixing people together. By making a great global melting pot, they thought they’d achieve world peace. They were idiots. What we ended up with was the opposite. It will take perhaps two to three hundred years of human evolution and likely a global focus on united goals to achieve world peace. For instance, the space race is a nice unifying idea that could help accelerate the process. But you can’t take some sappy ass loser like Sayfullo Saipov getting ISIS material at his mosque studying a medieval religion like Islam in its most radical form and expect him to assimilate with modern western culture in America, you are smoking crack if you think that will turn out OK. It just doesn’t work and the people who created the paperwork that allowed him into our country in the first place—like Chuck Schumer, don’t fundamentally understand the behavior patterns of human beings and they got caught playing with fire. People naturally chose to associate with people of their own beliefs. You can see it in typical families. Families with different foundation beliefs can’t even get along for Thanksgiving meals. What we have in common is football, Black Friday, and a love of food. But if we get off those topics things fall apart quickly. Some families like guns, some like college professors, some like Democrats, Republicans, and some like smoking dope, getting tattoos and pissing in the shower. Some like to have high standards for themselves and others want no standards at all—because they tend to be lazy and don’t want to wake up each day with any expectations placed upon them. Families tend to stick together when the world impresses itself upon them and they associate with their own kind to relax from the cultural expectations of the comparative societies. Liberals have tried to micromanage even the American family trying to take away those options as well thinking that if they force everyone to look at each other, then there will be no other option but peace. Instead, what has happened is that violence has escalated because families have lost their mechanisms for dealing with the world. That is on the micro level. This terrorism issue is on the macro—its part of a global failure by progressives to manage people and their cultures. It’s been a lack of respect given to each individual culture around the world and to work with their beliefs. Instead, progressives sought to destroy everything and create a new order built on combined respect. But their approach lacked respect so how did they think they’d ever achieve such a feat? The answer is that none of them thought it through—and now their failures are obvious. People are dying because of them, and still they fail to take responsibility for their terrible decisions over the last several decades.

The solution in the short-term is more guns in more places to respond quicker to the anxiety that has been created globally by the political leftists. Since America is more equipped to have more terrorist first responders than anywhere in the world, it is our obligation to show people how self-defense looks and to use that platform to change our behavior toward these radical terrorists who are functioning from a different time and by ideas that have long been considered archaic. It isn’t being “open minded” to take no action against terrorism. It’s just stupid. And it’s time for different people who aren’t so stupid to be running things—and to be carrying guns in more places so that losers like Saipov can be disabled much sooner before things really get out of control.

Rich Hoffman
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The Modern Notion of Good Management in Politics: Out with Bob Corker and Jeff Flake–in with Donald Trump–and many others

I guess it’s just sinking in to the mainstreamers, but a takeover has been afoot for a long time. How can I put this, let’s see, I come from a management background. The best managers if they are taking over a previous culture’s problems must approach the situation differently than if they were going to start from scratch. Building something from the ground up is much more fun than inheriting someone else’s mess. When you take something over you need to kind of sit back and see who does what for you—who’s loyal, who’s a problem and figure out how you can replace the bad people with good people following all the crazy rules that are out there these days in order to provide a positive margin index. In many ways that is what happens every time we elect someone new, we hope to put a manager in place who will fix the legacy failures of the previous administrations. Often however we find that the candidates who offer themselves don’t have much management experience, their backgrounds are more aligned with attorney skills, not management so they are clueless in how to solve the problems that we need them to tackle. Starting way back, people like me have been pushing the notion in politics of replacing candidates with an emphasis in legal opinion with people who are business savvy. That’s how people like Eric Canter were knocked out of their entrenched federal House seats and replaced with more value driven representatives. That is how Donald Trump ended up president. People know what needs to be done, and they are now voting with that knowledge intact. We don’t want someone to tell us everything is fine like some clawless CEO speaking to their panicky board of directors. We want someone who can get in there and take charge and actually change the culture using advanced management skills for the furtherance of the traditional American idea.

Understanding that trajectory of thought, Donald Trump is not splitting up the Republican Party threatening the House and Senate majorities. He is cleaning house of the losers and positioning winners to take over strengthening that majority. The Democrats have no threats out there of beating Republicans in their races and Trump knows it. So to get the right kind of Republicans to vote for his agenda Trump is removing the bad Republicans like Bob Corker and Jeff Flake from the mix. That is a great thing which is all part of the difficulties of management. The “Party” is not more important than the “individual” and currently Trump has been elected to “manage” the country’s affairs and specifically the do-nothing Republican Party. Like any good manager he started off nicely, treated everyone fair to get a feel for them. He watched and was patient, and he took notes. Once he realized who the bad Republicans were, he went to work to pressure them off the team—and that is exactly what he should do.

When this happens in business it always hurts somebody’s feelings. People always think they are worth the most of anybody, so being a manager is difficult because many times you must deflate the impression people have about themselves. But before you can see it, you have to let them be themselves around you so that they can reveal themselves as part of the problem. Once you know that, you then must take action to remove them from your “team.” This is often not easy because there are many laws which do not favor management and protect bad people. As a skilled manager you must discover some creative way to follow all the rules, but still get rid of the bad people so that good people can thrive.

Really bad managers let the power of their position go to their heads. Their first reaction is to let everyone know who the boss is regardless of the talent level of the people they are dealing with. They assume that all people are equal and thus can be interchanged easily with each other like Lego bricks. This is the typical approach of traditional politicians. They come into office as lawyers looking for a steady income—but they don’t really understand how people work, so they can’t manage the people around them and make good decisions. That leads them to following the previous administration for guidance who also made all the same mistakes and eventually you end up with just another idiot barking out orders and using the power of institutionalism to scare everyone into following those orders. In companies, that is when they start to die. In politics, that’s when lobbyists get the ear of the politician. Since voters often don’t respect such people, the politicians find the seductive respect given by the lobbyists validating, so that becomes their new influences and that’s when you end up with losers like Jeff Flake and Bob Corker. The reason those guys have such bad polling is because now people see they have a choice and they aren’t just voting for the guy with the “R” next to their name. Voters are looking for managers like Trump—and that will only increase the seats that Republicans hold. It won’t lessen them.

Of course all the insiders know this already, but they hope that the media will sell to Republicans the notion that there is a risk of losing the majority in 2018. Nothing could be further from the truth. After the tax reform passes and the stock market goes into the Near Year at previously unfathomable highs—nobody is going back to the Democrats. People aren’t stupid. They know how to solve these modern problems, they were just looking for the right people vote into office. The moment they get them, they are putting them in place—and they will be more traditional Republicans who have an understanding of management—not the kind who have failed us in the past.

Good managers are almost always hated, and they are used to that. People are always nice to your face of course because they wish to hide what they are really about. But good managers understand that trait and are able to function well without the approval of their peers. Being a good manager is a very lonely path—there are very few people out there who can tell you that you’re doing things right—because they don’t know. Often times they are either part of the problem or unwittingly helping the problem be successful, so they have no advice to give that is worth anything. Good managers function best alone taking in as much information as possible and making decisions based on their experience, and natural instincts which cannot be plotted on a Six Sigma graph or taught in college. You either have it or you don’t. You may be able to develop it with experience, but nobody can give it to you. You couldn’t buy good management ability for millions of dollars of education—don’t let anybody fool you. It comes from someplace beyond our terrestrial understanding and the only access to it is very hard work. Trump certainly has those traits. Many other people do as well, and those are the new fashion in politics.

Without question the old politicians are looking at these new politicians who are coming in as skilled managers in some cases, and they hate them. They will whisper to the media the way workers in a place of business might whisper gossip hoping to stop a head slicer from discovering how useless they really are and ending their jobs. People hate Trump because he’s good at his job, not because he’s bad. Smart people understand why there is gossip and anger about Trump. Stupid people listen to the gossip, and they show themselves to be part of the problem. That is why good managers are needed, so they can act independently of the noise to do the work they were assigned to do. We tried the other way, and maybe the political class thought it would go on forever. But that was never the plan. Like good managers, the voters waited and watched and when they had their chance, they acted. And that trend isn’t going to stop—it’s going to grow.

Rich Hoffman
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Trump’s Draft Deferments: Military service doesn’t always make for the best patriots–why sacrifice is a stupid value system

I don’t think it’s very American to die for one’s country. That is actually a very stupid thing to even suggest. To even say such a thing indicates that the state is superior to the individual and that institutionalism is to have more merit than personal sovereignty, and that’s just not right. I have never been willing to “die” for my country. My life is worth way too much. But, ask me to kill for my country and turn me loose to do so, and I’d have no problem facing down a 1000 villains if I could eliminate them without getting into trouble legally. But I would never engage an enemy and expect to die. I would expect to kill, but not to personally die—that’s just not in my thinking. Sacrifice is a stupid thing because the essence of human life is creation, and the villains of our existence are those who wish to deter creation in favor of stagnant barbarism—which has always been a force for evil the entire span of human evolution. If there were a military draft today, I would do everything I could to defer from it, because I just am not the kind of person who follows orders—from anybody. I’m happy to give them, but being drafted into the military to take orders from some institutional representative who has been instructed to break me into an order taking soldier was never an option for me.

http://abcnews.go.com/US/donald-trump-john-mccains-war-words-military-service/story?id=50657588

The news media seeking everything they can to defer the unfolding scandal involving the Clintons and the Uranium One deal with Russia has made a lot about President Trump’s call with the widow of a slain soldier killed recently in Niger, and even Senator John McCain’s comments about the days of the draft and eluding to the 5 deferments that Donald Trump had as a young man. The draft was a terrible period in American history, it was a very un-American thing to do, and for those who think we should have compulsory service of our young people into the military as the Israelis do, that would be a bad idea too. I would say that the most optimal path a young person could take is to develop themselves individually as much as possible, and avoid the college and military route if they are smart enough, and self-disciplined to carry themselves to success without yielding to institutional influence. The reason is that once a young mind is chained to some form of institutionalism, their minds are altered forever. Now of course that path isn’t for everyone, but often the best and brightest Americans who emerge from genius evolve without the guidance of institutionalism. As Americans we should always be looking for our brightest and best and should not be so willing to sacrifice them to the fires of evil wherever such threats arise. The expectation that lives lost are good for fueling America is just stupid.

I understand the position President Trump is in, and even General Kelly. When you are in charge of an institutional order, you have to protect the function of it, and the American military is a very important element to global politics. When soldiers die, it is good to respect their lives in the scope of a higher cause. But in reality, the notion of sacrifice for one’s country implies that what matters most is not the individual life of the soldier, but the sacrifice they make for the sake of everyone—and that is an old way of human thinking that is grossly outdated and is specifically very European. As I said, if I were given the task by my country to kill as many bad guys as possible, I’d do it in a second if I could be free of prosecution for the task. If I had to engage a 1000 losers on some strip of sand in the Middle East and it was only me or perhaps a few other similar people, I’d formulate a plan and would expect to be successful without losing my life. Embracing death is no way to live life. Some people might say that they are not Superman, so such expectations are unrealistic. I would say that being American means you should always think that way, or support people who do.

There is a lot of talk right now about the Battle of New Orleans, because President Trump reminds a lot of people of Andrew Jackson, and there is a new book out about Jackson and the famous American saving battle from the War of 1812. That battle along with many in the Revolutionary War, and even many in the Civil War, most of the most heroic acts were conducted by people with very limited military experience. Even the famous pirates of the Caribbean, the real ones like Henry Morgan and many others had great strategic victories against multiple odds of fearless institutionalism—soldiers perfectly willing to die for their various countries were often easily slaughtered by the loose acting pirates—so I would argue that being a soldier or having a regimented military is not the best thing in military victory. There are a lot of good people who served in the various armed forces, and I tend to like those people because they learn values in their service that is conducive to patriotism. But I would also argue that learning to take orders not based on merit, but on rank is a major problem in American thinking, making those people drags on our economic development instead of assets. I would also argue that the ability to think outside the box from one individual is more powerful than a whole army of compliant soldiers. Again, the value should always be in creation, never in sacrifice.

I listened to General Kelly defend Trump’s handling of the widow suffering from the ambush in Niger and while I admired his determined resolve—his constant talk about “dying for his country and the soldier knowing what he was getting into” disturbed me. I am all for an all-volunteer army where knowing what you are getting into is an option. I never did sign up for military service even thought I thought about it a lot. I wouldn’t have minded the aggressive parts of military life, but the structure was something I couldn’t have done. Even in sports I was like that, I always wanted to be the head coach, never just a player—and I wasn’t one that coaches found they could teach—because I was a know it all. I always have been. In that regard I didn’t play sports either in a structured organized way. But should our nation institute a draft where I didn’t have a choice, I would look for a way to defer any way possible. I could not surrender my life to the institution of military command under any circumstances. I would expect in any American system a better way to find soldiers for fighting than a draft. Just the concept of it is so European. Being compelled into service with the threat of imprisonment just isn’t motivating to a self-directed individual functioning from their own inner compass. The military is not built for such people.

Ironically this year my wife and I were both picked for jury duty, and I had a hard time with the language of the letter they sent me telling me the dates I was scheduled for. I’m the kind of person who would love to help on a jury to judge my peers. But I was instantly turned off by the way the letter started, “YOU ARE COMMANDED TO APPEAR.” Excuse me, I thought, who are these fools who think they can command me to do anything? I don’t bow to the flag waving merits of any institution. But if you thought my reaction was bad you should have heard my wife who called the Clerk of Courts office to complain about that first sentence. She and I didn’t plan it, or really talk about it, but when she opened her letter she immediately picked up the phone and unloaded on the people working at the court. I’m sure those people thought they had heard every excuse for why people wanted to get out of jury duty, and that is why they threaten people the way they do—to get people to participate in the system with the threat of imprisonment. That’s essentially what the draft was, which turned out to be a massive mistake. Our military went from an all voluntary affair to one of compulsion. My wife is like me, she would love to help a court with their cases, but the moment she learned that she could be imprisoned for not appearing she was PISSED OFF. It took away her natural enthusiasm for doing a community service and replaced it with a threat from the state that assumed ultimate power over the individual. Many people just assume that this is acceptable, because they have integrated John McCain’s soldier’s sacrifice creed into their daily life, that the whole is greater than the unit and that everything should subject itself to the authority of institutionalism. That’s not how it’s supposed to be, it never was. So this idea that patriotism is equal to self-sacrifice for the state is idiotic, and preposterous. There is no greater good than the merit of individual action and an adherence to the values exhibited by the morality of productive thought. None of that comes from any form of institutionalism, and therefore not by any work with the armed services. While they are valuable, and often good for young minds seeking direction in life, work as a veteran is not an automatic ticket toward lifelong merit status. Only good conduct can demand such a thing, and that conduct only comes from judgment on individual behavior within the context of performance.

Just because John McCain was a veteran captured and tortured during the Vietnam War, it doesn’t make him beyond judgment. The media that hates Trump and wishes that institutionalism could forever rule the minds of mankind—because that is what they need to survive—hopes that McCain will be the example that all should follow in sacrificing themselves to bigger causes—relative to their view-point. Trump has always been a self-absorbed person so being drafted into service where unfocused young people were expected to throw away their lives at the command of their “superior” just wasn’t an option. It would never be an option for me because I don’t acknowledge anyone as my superior. My life means more to me than surrendering it to the state for the causes of the state. To expect to die for my country is an unrealistic line of thought because honestly, I could do a better job on my own. Give me the weapons and let me kill the enemy, and I could do so and still be home for dinner. But to be told to run into gunfire and to be blown up on a landmine under orders given by some ranking leader just isn’t my bag—and it wasn’t Trump’s either. I don’t blame him at all from deferring. Choosing to do something isn’t the same as doing it under the duress of the state.

I would gladly run into a firefight if I could be free to win. I would always expect myself to be successful no matter what the odds were. But to be a pawn to the politics of statism is not a value system that should be attributed to Americanism. It is currently and that is leading to all kinds of confusing emotions. But the bottom line is that not serving as in the military forces is not a liability. The only people who think in such a way are those who need the structure of institutionalism to function responsibly in life—and many people are that way. But a gifted few do best on their own, and they are the ones you want to take orders from if you were so inclined. John McCain isn’t considered a better leader because he served in the armed forces and was tortured by the enemy. It was Trump who won the presidency because he took a different path in life—one driven by his own merit and if he had been drafted and accepted authority in any way—he wouldn’t be the kind of person who would eventually win the presidency. Trump doesn’t need to have been a soldier to oversee soldiers. He just needs to have a good mind—which he does. But better yet, a mind forged from his own unique individuality—which is what makes the best leaders known to mankind.

Rich Hoffman

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Ernest Gause for Lakota School Board: Bringing Lean ideas and lower taxes to a district screaming for improvments

Many people over the years have asked me what would it take to support a school levy at Lakota—as if the decision to spend more money were the problem. I have always said that good management is what I want to see at Lakota and to that effect I think Jenni Logan has done a really remarkable job as the treasurer—she is a first-class talent that has been very impressive over the years. Her addition and the reality of declining enrollment within the Lakota school district due to a peak in real estate growth, have resulted in a budget at Lakota that has been operating at a surplus, which is how it should be. Even if the 2013 levy which Joan Powell and Linda O’Conner supported had failed, Lakota would still be sitting pretty today with a surplus because of the fiscal management starting at the treasurer position. But other things have declined since, the old superintendent became sick and left the district, and many of the board members indicated they wanted off the train opening up a number of seats for this election year—and the report card has declined—which isn’t acceptable. So there is a lot at stake in this 2017 election. Lakota’s success will have a lot to do with the kind of school board we elect and without question the best candidate on my radar is Earnest Gause. I think he is the kind of improvement for Lakota as far as out-front thinking that is equitable to the impact Jenni Logan has had on the accounting side.

Ernest is a good guy, I’ve talked to him on several occasions and most recently at the School Board Forum of the West Chester Tea Party where he was a clear stand out with Todd Parnell during the debate. Ernest has a lot of new ideas that reflects his very impressive background which can be seen below from source material on his newly opened website, also linked below. As you read through the following information I am most excited to potentially see Ernest apply Lean techniques to the business of school board, because that would go a really long way to solving many of the over bloated problems that have been associated with such a big district in Ohio functioning as a government school crippled under imposing political standards and a selfish labor union. Lean manufacturing techniques would force all that garbage to the surface just like it does in every place of business that it’s applied to, and that would add much to the overall performance standards of Lakota. In public schools for too long labor unions run everything and politicians run everything else. I’ve always said that if business practices were applied to education that not only would children be better prepared for the real world, but many of the villains that drive up the cost of education would be exposed, and I am certain that with Ernest Gause at least good logical people would finally have their representative on the school board. Earnest is someone I could get behind and trust. Here is the background of Earnest Gause as indicated on his website:

Ernest Gause is a business consultant and owner of Source Consultant that specializes in HR Benefits, Diversity and Inclusion and HR Operation as well as an Executive Coach with over 25 years of experience. Mr. Gause is a Six Sigma Black Belt with a history of success working with Fortune 500 Companies in many different industries to include Retail, Banking, Manufacturing, and Call Centers. He has supported operationally over 40,000 employees across the United States and Canada to drive innovation, creativity, accountability, and revenue to achieve operational goals and objectives.

As a calculated risk-taker with deep human resources and operational knowledge, Mr. Gause has championed innovation and creativity in the organizations he has supported to streamlined IT systems to drive operations to increase customer satisfaction and employee engagement. Mr. Gause has put in place employment pipelines and recruiting efforts to support and promote key talent to build organizations business models to driving profitability to the bottom line.

Mr. Gause has 4 degrees, 2 masters and 2 bachelors in business and technology. Attending and graduating from the University of Nebraska and Bellevue University in pursuing master’s degree at the same time. It was pursuing his dream of mastering business and technology that he realized that we are a part of an evolving society and world that is getting smaller and smaller every day. After graduation, Mr. Gause began his career working in the financial industry for fortune 500 companies where he was to work a national product release, strategies and assist in developing the strategic direction of the organization.

With his business successes, Mr. Gause realized that you have to give back to the community that has been vested and invested in your success. Mr. Gause achieves this philanthropic work by partnering with school systems, private and public institutions to build educational, employment and technology pipelines to support the next generation of leaders in our community. To further support the next generation of leaders he has built consortiums of businesses, colleges and universities to drive that entrepreneur spirit to support, motivate, inspire and drive our future leaders to be the best version of themselves.

http://gauseforlakota.com/

Earnest is obviously very competent, and he’s a different kind of candidate than we’ve had in the past. For people who really want to solve the problems that I’ve complained about at Lakota for years, electing someone different is a step in the right direction. I think Earnest has some great ideas on a number of topics and that Lakota could score higher on future report cards just because of him setting higher priorities. I think he’d find a friend in Todd Parnell that would get a lot of good things done for a change. But the best thing that Earnest is talking about is an actual strategy for having a replacement levy to reduce taxes at Lakota. That is certainly a step in the right direction, and at Lakota it is possible. Because of the quality of the people who are already in the district and the declining enrollment that we are experiencing, a levy reduction strategy is a great thing to pursue. Earnest is thinking right about the matter!

Of course the real problem has always been the increased wage demands from the union each year, so at some point even with the surplus at Lakota, the union will seek more and more money until they force another levy on the community—when it’s all completely unnecessary with good management. Earnest brings that solution with him by way of personal experience. Lean manufacturing application to a public-school system is exactly what would bring all the ugly stuff Lakota likes to hide to the surface ultimately making it a much better district value wise at a reduced cost—just like it does in the business world. Anybody with a $200 million dollar a year budget like Lakota would be insane not to apply some version of Lean economics—and that is why the budgets are always so bloated. The way to correct that insanity is to put people on the school board who understand those types of things—and Earnest Gause does. I’ve spoken to him personally several times now and he impresses me each time. He’s the real deal and would be an instant improvement to the Lakota School Board. And he is the guy I’m voting for enthusiastically on November 7th 2017. I wish there were five Earnest Gause candidates that I could vote for this year. But there’s only one—and I’m happy to finally have a choice. Because Lakota is long overdue for someone of such a quality. He’s the best option on the ticket—and will be a real asset to the Lakota school system.

Rich Hoffman

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What We Learned about the West Chester Trustee Candidates for the 2017 Election: Ann Becker and Mark Welch are clearly the best picks

There weren’t really any second-place candidates who touched the levels of competency toward the open trustee seats in West Chester, Ohio than Mark Welch and Ann Becker as displayed during the West Chester Tea Party candidate forum at Indiana Wesleyan University on October 17th 2018. I mean there were other candidates there speaking that night, but Mark is the incumbent and the guy with the very successful track record—so much so that Democrats are rightfully terrified by him and have pulled out all the stops in an attempt to knock him off his seat. Then there is Ann Becker, Ms. Lady Liberty herself as she can be heard often on her 55 KRC radio segments on the very popular Brian Thomas show—who has been involved in just about every kind of politics in Butler County that there is. She is leaps and bounds above everyone else so she and Mark make a great team for two of the three trustee seats that are coming available. Of course, the focus for the purposes of preserving conservativism in West Chester relies on at least two conservatives being elected on November 7th and out of all the candidates running—many of them are good people—only Mark Welch and Ann Becker have the official backing of the Republican Party—and this year, that means a lot.

I think after watching all the other candidates speak if I had to pick a third person for those very important West Chester trustee seats it would be anybody but Lee or Powell. That third seat currently has belonged to the incumbent Lee Wong, but after his support of the Chinese spy scandal involving a Sherry Chen and her termination at the National Weather Service for alleged espionage, Lee has since dropped off the map. He embarrassingly protested on her behalf recently to help her get her job back and his defense of his friend revealed many disturbing traits about Lee Wong that many people hadn’t seen before. He tends to be aloof and disengaged when it comes to complicated issues, and he obviously has sided with organized labor locally—so he has lost his mask of Republican Party affiliation showing himself to be a lopsided liberal on almost every topic.

http://www.cincinnati.com/story/news/2017/03/14/disgraced-chinese-american-scientist-fights-get-her-job-back/99171480/

The other person running who is obviously not a conservative is Joan Powell who came to the West Chester forum knowing that the audience was very constitutionally minded, so she attempted to talk their language, and everything ended up coming out phony. I’ll give her credit for trying, but she clearly wasn’t the right candidate. After all, she had been supportive of West Chester becoming a city some years back which means a lot more government to manage things and always has in her thoughts and actions big government approaches to everything. I thought it was particularly interesting that she tried to distance herself from the terrible labor union negotiations she had been involved in over the years at Lakota by saying that she was supportive of Right to Work. That was odd because most of the reasonable conservatives of West Chester remember her for her tax increases as president of the Lakota Board of Education. By alienating the leftist union members who might otherwise vote for her in memory of her Lakota failures, who did she think was going to support her for trustee? There aren’t enough of the “girls” getting their hair done with Joan to put her over the top. She came across grossly out of touch and adhering to the politics of another century in the past. She certainly didn’t project herself as part of the future.

Everyone else falls below the prospect of viability. In the coming days I’ll put up specific videos from this West Chester event to paint a more articulate picture of the proceedings. But for the high-level viability of the two primary candidates, Ann Becker and Mark Welch they did a good job and the little ad displayed above indicates my feelings on their candidacy. I have a lot of hope for the two of them. For Mark I’d like to see him continue to do the great job he has done. With Cathy Stoker out-of-the-way and Lee Wong put on ice over the last several years West Chester has prospered dramatically. It was kind of like the effect Donald Trump has had on the stock market. There’s a reason the Dow is pushing up over 23,000 for the first time ever. Many investors who had been looking toward West Chester to build a business, or even to start a family felt inclined to move once Mark was elected and from there hotels have exploded on the scene, along with many new restaurants, shopping, shooting ranges and many other options that have improved the lifestyle choices of the West Chester community.

There were some interesting conversations at the trustee forum that represent distinct philosophical differences. For instance, Joan Powell espoused her view that schools are what make a community great—which is clearly not the case. You can spend all the money on education that you want and the quality of a school will not help it at all. Rather, schools tend to be great based on the quality of the people who live in an area. Good people produce good kids and therefore, good students. Mark clearly understands that formula and most everything he does centers on those basic philosophies. That’s why Democrats hate him so much, because revealing that formula is something they are absolutely terrified of. That’s also how you can know that people like Lee Wong and Joan Powell are not Republicans but are in fact liberal Democrats—because they miss the basic concept of foundational government as a representative management device of the public. A government school does not make kids great, their parents do. If you want a great community you need to have an environment conducive to the lifestyle of good people—good in this case being people who have jobs, raise their children with parameters of expectation—and do things as a family unit. For instance, if you go to the VOA Park in West Chester, the people you meet there are generally all good to each other, and conduct themselves well. Respect for themselves and each other is a prevalent theme and that reflects the general demographic of the region which tends to attract good people to it. West Chester has great access to good jobs. Great access to interesting things to do, and it has low taxation—all which attracts good families with values. When those kids go to school they are naturally good kids. If you spend the same money on communities where the parents are terrible, the school system will obviously reflect that. The idea that a school makes a community is a liberal organized labor myth built to inflate wages and benefits for the government employees—not to fulfill the necessities of the community. Mark and Ann understand that delicate balance. Liberals like Joan Powell and Lee Wong don’t.

It was good to see such a large crowd at this event. People care very much about this outcome and that is wonderful, that is what makes our country great—at the local level. That is also the role that the Tea Party has always had, educating the public about the matters that matter most to them. In that regard I’d say the only serious candidates running for those three seats were present in the video above. If candidates aren’t willing to go before the West Chester Tea Party, they really aren’t serious about running for office. Hopefully this article helps you sort out the names from all the confusion—and that really only two names essentially top out the first two seats, Ann Becker and Mark Welch.

Rich Hoffman
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The Tragedy of Kobe Steel: How the smoke is fading and mirrors are breaking on lean manufacturing–revealing a diabolical academic scheme that was always there

The truth is there isn’t any magic wand that takes manufacturing techniques and turns companies into winners at the bottom line. Just like going to college couldn’t turn a kid into a success story without extremely hard work to go with it.  The harsh reality that many people have come to face is that you can’t buy quality, and you can’t wish yourself into profitability.  If you want to be successful in life you have to be willing to work harder than a competitor and you’ll have to figure out the latest trends before everyone else does in an ever-changing world.  It’s not enough to memorize the work of Eliyahu M. Goldratt or to study really hard the techniques of James Womach so that you can call yourself a “black belt” of lean manufacturing.  It’s still the case and it always will be that innovation and creativity are ever-changing opportunities for market dominance.  And let’s face it, that’s the name of the game.  That’s also why this global tragedy involving Kobe Steel is such a case study into the temperature of the world regarding manufacturing that it merits our tenacious considerations.

Kobe Steel is a large producer of various industry metals, particularly aluminum and due to the nature of the world marketplace distributes their product all over the world to the largest companies currently in existence.   The assumption is that since the company is Japanese that they make high quality products at Kobe Steel—just because they are made in Japan.  That country has done a great job building up their brand with an eye toward quality—which is precisely why Womack, Roos and Daniel T. Jones featured them so prominently in the 1990s book The Machine that Changed the World.  In that classic book Womack had pretty much closed the case on western mass production techniques and very subtly implied the takeover of manufacturing practices being instituted right in front of our faces.  College academics were essentially attempting to use lean manufacturing practices revolutionized by Japan—specifically Toyota into a global revolution that would help pave the way to a one world global government by unifying all various markets under the flag of lean manufacturing.  And this failure at Kobe Steel, which is quite serious presently, has the fingerprints of failure rooted in this rapid expansion of manufacturing approach that has been taking over the world since the 1960s.

The attempted academic takeover of all industries has been going on for a long time and their goal is almost always the same.  Generally the academic believes in global collectivism and that the power of the individual is subservient to the needs of group think—and the view of American mass production was that a single foreman, and a single process engineer were things of the past and that hive behavior in the form of lean manufacturing developed from Japan would become the dominate way of doing business.  But the real villain was not American manufacturing; it was the kind of rugged individualism that often emerged in American car companies and steel manufacturers.  If you peel back the onion even more behind these academic reformers they were ahead of themselves on global wealth redistribution and they purposely worked their way into the various industries with mountains of paperwork for employers to fill out so that the tasks would become so cumbersome that companies would just flee overseas to run away from bureaucracy.  The subtext to all this academic insurrection for the last 50 years has always been lean manufacturing and that American companies better get with the pace of the rest of the world or they’d be out of a job.

I’m never one to throw out the baby with the bath water; there are some really good things that Womach and his buddies came up with in that aforementioned book.  And I’m a fan of the work by Eliyahu M. Goldratt.  I like those guys, but in relation to the problems of today, I have my own thoughts—and I dare say I often go much deeper than anything that came previously.  I’d say that you have to if you want to invent something new, otherwise how would you ever stand out in a world that is so competitive?   I can also say that I’ve been through many lean manufacturing seminars over the years and all those companies that sponsored those activities are now out of business, because what they did was attempt to copy what worked in Japan to an American market, and it clearly didn’t work.  I watched with disapproval as many companies tried to take the concepts in Womack’s book and applied them directly to manufacturing facilities where American workers resisted, and resented the efforts to the point where the company just folded—because nobody seemed to understand what was really going on.

The Japanese had a unique problem after World War II.  They had lost a war and needed to rebuild their economy from the ground up.  They also had an occupying force that changed all the rules of manufacture on them, and imposed on Japanese companies union friendly policies that made innovation so much more complicated.  Just like American manufacturing at the time was peaking because the mass production techniques had created in American workers this new idea of lifelong employment instead of just doing a job in the city then returning to their fields in the country to resume their independent life—socialist oriented labor unions took root and started managing things at manufacturing facilities across America.  At that time it was a trend so America forced Japan into the same box of thought for which they needed a way to get out.  So Japan offered a policy of lifelong employment to their employee but in going a step further than unions did in America, they adopted a decentralization of authority policy where wages and promotions were attached to tenure, not performance and that essentially stabilized their work culture into a nice predictable pattern that they were able to inject into a market share that essentially ruled for the next fifty years.  This was fine with the academics because it sapped the wealth from American manufacturing and relocated it to the orient and even into Europe.  As time passed and American companies still struggled with the concepts of lean manufacturing because at the core of it is a group think that purposely diffuses the merits of individualized behavior then more American companies became Chinese and Korean companies because people in those regions already were somewhat predisposed toward lean manufacturing thought—it’s an Asian thing.  For people who will eat the eyeball of a chicken as a snack it’s no big deal to stand at an assembly line and decentralize authority to the masses of group think.  But to the six-foot six ,300 pound redneck from Appalachia that has a Confederate Flag on the front of their pick-up truck, it’s quite difficult.

However, life was never all that great in Japan.  They were willing to work hard and long, but they were still an occupied country infused with western ideas on the collapse of their great empire which was destroyed at the end of World War II.  Before that they had the samurai culture which had been destroyed by the emerging new emperor—so the people were always ready and willing to fight for something but they had been shell-shocked over the centuries with a lot of disappointment.  If they could get back at the West by imposing lean manufacturing techniques on those “cowboys” then they’d be very happy, and thus they have been riding on that reputation now for many decades even though it took a lot of smoke and mirrors to maintain the illusion.  But those mirrors essentially broke with the release of this news from Kobe Steel.  To keep up their shipments and deal with the focus of the world on their products Kobe Steel had to fudge the paperwork they helped to create and due to the constant pressure from other Asian markets which have emerged over the last twenty years, Kobe Steel had to take short cuts on quality to stay relevant.  In essence, they became dominated by new, leaner and more ambitious manufacturing techniques just as mass production had been destroyed by lean manufacturing in the 80s and 90s.

I had a front row seat to all this activity, I worked at Cincinnati Milacron in the mid 1990s and it was going out of business by the day at that point in time.  They had us studying lean manufacturing techniques just to stay alive.  I could say the same about the Fisher Body planet in Fairfield, Ohio where my grandfather worked.  I could also say the same about the Camero plant in Norwood where I knew several people who worked there.  Now there is nothing left of those places, Milacron and the Camero plant were completely bulldozed away erasing their memory.  People visiting those locations today would never know that they ever existed.  In the final days of their manufacturing lives they had the same desperate anxiety about them that we can now see out of Kobe Steel—and it saddens me to see it, but it doesn’t surprise me.  These trajectories of failure are predictable and can be traced largely back to our academic institutions that impose themselves on the creativity of any industry that must move with much more nibble feet to compete in an ever-changing world.  By the time the academics get their published opinions out about global trends, they are too late and those who listen to them find themselves on the hot seat toward losing immediately.

I may tell my secrets later, but certainly not now.  Innovation didn’t stop with Womach.  Lean manufacturing has some good things to offer, but it certainly won’t deliver anybody to the Promised Land without a lot of hard work and a new take.  Just because you study the words of something it doesn’t mean that success is guaranteed, and so many people even today think that success can be bought.  For those who think such things just look at the Kobe Steel case—a Japanese company that is still struggling to find their place in a competitive world as their niche concept of lean manufacturing is proving to be more of a gimmick now than a justifiable strategy sold by academics for the purpose of destroying manufacturing in the West so that the East could spread communism to every corner of the planet.  That was always on the mind of the academic after all—that much should be clear to everyone now.  But lucky for us all, the wheels fell off at Kobe Steel before we went too far down that road—and the good news is that innovation and the next great things are still out there waiting for the world to copy them.  Until then, I’ll keep the smile on my face watching others try to figure out the latest riddle in the world of competitive manufacturing.

Rich Hoffman

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Where Are the Pink Pussy Hats Now: The death of Hollywood over terrible customer service

It was roughly a year ago that the Access Hollywood recordings of Donald Trump were released intending to sink his potential presidency.  When I first heard the comments I couldn’t help but feel the hypocrisy because let’s face it, men and women talk that way to each other all the time.  Women most of the time like the attention of men and men are by their biological design built to pollinate females to procreate our species.  All these silly new rules of conduct of men being chastised for wanting to stick parts of themselves into females are artificial and counterproductive.  But  when the people of Hollywood tried to use these new, stupid rules of male to female conduct to destroy Donald Trump when in fact it was they who perpetrated and actually exacerbated the bad behavior to begin with I thought was astonishing.  After all, Hollywood’s product used to be a good back when they made westerns and big sweeping epics like Ben Hur.  Men treated women with respect in those old productions and all was well with the world until movie producers like Harvey Weinstein made a joke out of the industry abusing his power so he could look at the boobies of the young women who wanted more than anything in the world to become stars on the silver screen.   It was obvious that if the same standard that was applied to Trump a year ago were to be turned around on the entire entertainment culture that a lot of people probably wouldn’t survive, and that’s what’s happening now.  Hollywood just killed itself with its own weapons.  Sean Hannity did a remarkable job of positioning the reasons why Hollywood will never be the same in the following video.

I always liked the Hollywood product and the industry as a whole.  But for a long time they have moved so far to the political left that what used to be an event I enjoyed—the Academy Awards were now just another inward looking celebration by a bunch of liberals congratulating themselves on being anti-American insurgents.  If you weren’t liberal you weren’t going to work on a Weinstein movie and in a lot of ways Harvey Weinstein was bigger than Steven Spielberg in Hollywood—by the volume of his work and the number of Academy Awards he amassed.   As one of the leading spokesmen for progressivism, his platform in the entertainment industry was unparalleled and it seems ironic that all that could be torn down with these outrageous claims toward him that are in some cases over twenty years old.  I say they are outrageous because many of the women who are now accusing Weinstein of rape are now forty-year old women who are no longer sex symbols.  They used sex to get into movies when they were in their twenties and only when men stopped looking at them as possible places to pollinate did they suddenly become “outraged.”  But the fact remains that dealing with people like Harvey Weinstein turned them into the man hating feminists that they are today as their lives are now filled with regret on what they had to do to climb the ladder in Hollywood to become a leading lady A-lister.

Yet the way they all collectively pounced on Donald Trump over the Access Hollywood tape was remarkably hypocritical.  They created the industry and the rules.  What Trump was talking about in his famous lines to Billy Bush was the effect of celebrity which he had just learned about late in life with his success with The Apprentice.  Trump was enjoying the kind of attention by women that movie starts like Ben Affleck and Matt Damon had always enjoyed, and being a smart guy he was pontificating about it to Billy Bush.   Yes, women will do just about anything to be near powerful men—it’s a deeply biological response to the mating game.  But unlike most of those Hollywood hot shots, Trump had a nice wife who kept him grounded and the temptations of flesh that are often thrown at movie stars by the opposite sex just to have access to a memory with their idols was managed and Trump moved on to bigger and better things.  By the time the Access Hollywood tape was released Trump was a different kind of man largely shaped by his decision to marry Melania Trump.   But the desire for entertainment executives and major political pundits to go after Trump, and to try to destroy him over these new age male and female roles which they had perpetrated was always  dangerous because they also made up the rules of power playing the opposite sex into compromising positions just to work in the industry.   You don’t get to the level of being a leading Hollywood actress at the level of Angelina Jolie or Gwyneth Paltrow without showing somebody your tits.  Not when there is a line of young women from Santa Monica to Paris willing to do anything to be the next Hollywood star.  People like Harvey Weinstein made themselves the gate keepers to success essentially so they could see titties—and everyone knew it.   So who were they to criticize Trump?

After Trump was elected president and was sworn in, the Academy Awards ceremony to me was unwatchable.  The way they ridiculed President Trump just because he was the Republican in the White House was disgusting and it made me wonder if they knew who their audience actually was, because there are a lot of Trump supporters who are like me–they love to watch movies.  But if the movies and the people who made them were so anti-Trump, they’d be forced to go somewhere else for their entertainment and that’s what has happened.   Hollywood has had their worst box office performance in 25 years and they are down an incredible 16% just from the previous year of 2016.  That was before the Harvey Weinstein story broke which virtually connects every major star in the industry to all the ugly stuff they complained about in Trump.  Except with Trump it was largely made up and overblown, but in Hollywood they were actually doing the things they accused Trump of—and to a far worse degree.

http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2017/09/liberal-hollywood-worst-box-office-numbers-25-years/

Where were the pink pussy hats that the Hollywood stars wore in protest to the Inauguration after Trump spent his first days in the White House?  Former stars of the Hollywood machine ran by people like Weinstein were protesting Trump so they set the gauge by which they are all now choking.  If the same standards they were trying to apply to Trump were turned back on them, then what did they think was going to happen?   The Trump supporting public already voted with their feet, just like they have with the NFL.  The great American game of football is down 30% just because those stars in the NFL thought they were bigger than they were.  They learned a hard lesson; people in the stands don’t care about them if they are going to throw off the shared elements of our culture, like the American flag.  Fans of the NFL turned on those stars of sports in a moment which has been a harsh reality to all professional sports.  They forgot who their audience was and in their hatred of Trump they drew a line between themselves and the fan base that enjoyed their product.  They have a major customer service problem as a result.  And that is precisely what happened to Hollywood in 2017.  They are down at least 16% because of the way Hollywood came out against a popular president.  People who voted for Trump largely knew the Access Hollywood tape was a set-up job and that Hollywood was guilty of much worse.  Now that we have the truth, that movie industry is changed forever.  They’ll never bounce back because they have lost the trust of the public.  Ultimately it’s not people like Harvey Weinstein who make projects succeed or fail, it is the public that buys the tickets—and they have been voting against Hollywood for a while now.  Now that Hollywood has alienated most of the country in their hatred of Trump, the hypocrisy on full display in the wake of the Harvey Weinstein sexual meltdown will sink the entire industry—and that’s a good thing.

America can’t be great again if the art and entertainment community is so vitriolic toward a president that half the country wanted.   When they showed up against Trump during his Inauguration in 2017 and protested him as a sexual predator they set the bar impossibly high for themselves as a result and now they are being crushed under their own standard—because they can’t live up to any of it. As actors and film moguls they live in the make-believe world of their own creations but under Trump’s presidency illusions are being shattered out of necessity, and now these people are exposed, and they are burning in front of our faces.  Hollywood will never recover as an industry.  Sure there will be new forms of entertainment that will emerge, but the Wilshire Blvd culture for which Hollywood has built its own kind of Wall Street is dying right in front of our eyes, and because they made themselves into a political weapon of the left, I’m glad to see it.  They have let us all down and now it’s time to pay.

Rich Hoffman

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The HBO ‘Spielberg’ Documentary: What used to be good about Hollywood

I eagerly awaiting the time when HBO released its newest documentary titled simply as Spielberg. It was a Saturday night on October 7th when I was finally able to see it after waiting months for it to air, and I enjoyed it immensely. With all the recent discussion about Harvey Weinstein and the current decline of Hollywood, this Spielberg documentary was an interesting looking into everything that has been good about the movie industry. Clearly, and I’ve always felt this way, without Steven Spielberg as a great producer and writer, all of our lives would be much less optimistic. What the HBO documentary did that most DVD interviews have failed to do is pin point what drove Steven Spielberg and how that raw ambition touched the lives of so many people. It’s hard to watch anything on television or at the movies that Steven Spielberg has not touched in a good way. I always loved that filmmaker’s natural optimism and enjoyed how he could take incredibly dark topics like Schindler’s List and find the good in such a terrible story. Personally, 1993 was a year of really intense emotions. I was being sued many times over for a business deal that went south. Bill Clinton had just become president when I campaigned hard for Ross Perot and I literally felt like the world was coming to an end in everything that was going on around me. Then I saw Jurassic Park where several brilliant shots in that movie by Spielberg blew the doors off the future of visual effects—namely the attack at the T-Rex paddock in a downpour of rain in a lush tropical jungle to a booming symphonic musical score that I have never forgotten. Then just a few months later Schindler’s List was released and it became one of my favorite movies. As a very young person I was ready to be a filmmaker myself because Spielberg inspired me to do so. But what I learned harshly over the next 15 years was that I was more intended to the subject of movies rather than the maker of them. Some people are meant to be behind the camera, others are meant to be in front of them. Steven Spielberg was uniquely gifted in life to be behind the camera where everything made much more sense to him, and we are all better for it.

http://www.rollingstone.com/tv/news/10-things-we-learned-from-hbos-spielberg-documentary-w506623

What made Spielberg tick was his overly optimistic approach to life mixed with his natural fears that were more defined than most people were aware of. Spielberg used movies as his natural therapy to work out things in life that were beating him down. The only time Steven Spielberg was a fearless human being was when he was behind the camera where he was able to work things out in a way that allowed them to be captured on film. I learned about myself much later that I didn’t like the collaborative process of making movies the way Spielberg did and that I didn’t live my life like he did his. I wasn’t insecure about anything and that doesn’t make for very compelling stories—only the characters within stories as they interact with the outside world. Understanding that made me appreciate what Steven Spielberg did that much more over his lifetime.

I have enjoyed Spielberg’s movies since that magical year of 1993, but never to the same extent as before that date and I think he’s happy with things that way. Hollywood beat up on him for being such a Peter Pan type of personality and they wouldn’t give him credit for being the best director in film history until he made more “adult” dramas which he has. With a new wife to support him, Steven Spielberg went on to make a number of very serious and ambitious movies that many respect, but never tickled the box office quite the same. The Hollywood communists were happy, but the movie industry as a whole wasn’t but who could be mad at Spielberg. He certainly did his part to invent the industry from virtually nothing in the 1970s with a handful of other filmmakers including George Lucas. I’ve always known it but the HBO documentary really captured how unique the movie brats for which Spielberg was a member truly was. I’m glad to have grown up in a time when those types of filmmakers were making movies in Hollywood. I thought it might go on for a long time, but it really only lasted about 20 years. As I was working to get into that business it was obvious the door had closed and people like Harvey Weinstein were in charge of Hollywood and the doors to the next generation of movie brats were not open to conservatives.

Filmmakers like Steven Spielberg and George Lucas are not what we’d consider today to be conservative, but they came from a time when father was supposed to know best and rectifying that disappointment took their characters in film to great places. But the foundation of conservativism was there because they grew up in small towns and had fathers who worked hard and were successful in their own ways. They came from intact families and those foundations are present in their movies, from Star Wars to E.T. The magic of those types of movies from those types of filmmakers are so rare now. I thought it was amazing the way the world stopped for a moment just to watch the preview to the new Star Wars movie The Last Jedi during Monday Night Football on October 9th just a few days after the Spielberg documentary was released on HBO. Star Wars is all about family or the lack of it and people are so desperate for a sense of family these days, because liberalism has essentially crushed the notion. That is what separates Spielberg’s movie brats from the lost kids of today. There are no filmmakers like Spielberg out there or coming up, because the American family has essentially been destroyed. If you really want to breakdown what’s sick in Hollywood it is that they don’t tell stories about families anymore. They tell stories about why families are so messed up which robs the viewers of their products of the sanctification they are seeking with the price of a movie ticket.

Even Brian DePalma’s film Scarface which I was surprised to learn Spielberg actually worked on, was about family. Without the family element Tony Montana was just a thug. But in the context of his actions, we could sympathize and like the cocaine mogul because he was in essence a guy who wanted to take care of his family and start one of his own crawling out from under the communist regime in Cuba. Becoming a cocaine dealer was his only real path—a premise that was elaborated on later with the Breaking Bad series. But to come up with these stories from scratch the original movie brats for which Spielberg was the undisputed leader is something we may never see again. I’m glad to have seen it once, but it really is sad that we likely will never get it again for a long time. The conditions that make someone like Steven Spielberg just aren’t there for a new generation of movie makers. The material that young people have to work with now are the products of people like Weinstein where with Spielberg and Lucas it was John Ford and Alfred Hitchcock. The idea of a young Spielberg camping out illegally on the Universal lot just to learn how to make movies is something that the institution of filmmaking today just wouldn’t allow with their obsession with rules and regulations—and that is truly sad.

But the documentary was a marvelous look into one of the most fascinating people in human history, Steve Spielberg who was able to take his natural optimism, massive creative intellect and disappointments toward the nature of family life and put them into a series of marvelous movies that have lasted for decades and will stand the tests of time. I will always have a soft spot for Steven Spielberg even though later in life he has become more of a Democrat and supported politicians like Barack Obama. I’m sure if I sat down at lunch with him I’d have far more in common than not. What has always made Spielberg great is that he understood the American family and refused to be tainted by the disappointments of our times. And instead he put up on the big silver screen all the optimism his vast imagination could conceive and it made our world far better off.

Rich Hoffman

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‘Battlefront II’ Impressions after the Beta Test: I can’t wait for November 14th

I always feel that I must apologize for covering a light topic especially when there is so much going on in the world around us, but we do have to live. We do have to manage our stresses. And we must find the things in life that make us happy, and for me Star Wars is something that works—especially when we are talking about a new video game. Then regarding that topic, I think much of the world that’s coming, the politics, the structure, the science can be seen with each new video game update from the industry because most of the engineers and designers of the future out there are playing these massive online games. While it’s true that ratings are down in the NFL and some of that is certainly due to the politics surrounding the flag, most of the change in attitude toward football in general is because of this new age of entertainment where people can live entire secondary lives online in their video game avatars. I find it all extremely fascinating, and optimistic and it helps me fight through some of the most complex problems that any one human being could be expected to fight through. With all that said, I have been very excited for the next generation Star Wars: Battlefront II which comes out in November. For a long time there was talk of a beta run in early October so I did my pre-order and signed up for the top version of the game and had marked on my calendar October 4th because that’s when the beta opened for the new game by Electronic Arts/Dice.

My first impression of the beta compared to the full game of the original Battlefront with its bright white backgrounds was that it was missing an optimism that made the original very THX-1138 fun and futuristic. The menu boards on Battlefront II were mostly all in blacks and that made it seem like a lesser quality experience to me. Because of this I was disappointed, but once I started playing the various modes I quickly forgave the game because it was a lot of fun. From October 4th to October 9th I played as much as I could and leveled up to somewhere around 10 or 11. I didn’t pay much attention as I was mostly trying to get a feel for everything. A large part of the weekend my grandson was over and we played the new arcade mode a lot. It was clearly his favorite mode and I thought was a big addition to the overall game, a way to learn the maps and get a feel for the various builds in the game. I also thought the Star Card system was much improved, it reminded me a lot of the Fantasy Flight Games board games in this way, which makes those games infinitely interesting. Bringing that Star Card aspect to a video game made for a very compelling experience and I could see quickly that I would soon spend many hours playing with different cards to figure out the best combination, and then trying them out in the Arcade Mode to learn to use them. From just what the game developers showed on their beta test, there are endless opportunities for variety in Battlefront II once the game is released in November.

Before I get too far into this you do know dear reader about the cultural significance of all this, don’t you? After all, the new Star Wars: The Last Jedi trailer was released during halftime on Monday Night Football. And the moment that the beta ended for Battlefront II Forbes had a nice little article seen below about their criticism of the loot box system. The whole play to win debate in the video game community is a big deal because it brings many people into the realities of capitalism in ways their public educations never did. To be good at these games you must put in the hours, and the money. You can get by only doing one of those things, but to be great, you have to spend time, money and diligence to get the most out of the game. People who are from the ANTIFA crowd of course are out there playing these games and their basic philosophy is confronted with the realities of such a big business as Battlefront II is tapping into. Star Wars is just the entry point to these kinds of experiences. They become a lifestyle for many people in a similar way that adults have traditionally been in bowling leagues or played golf. It is not uncommon in the spirit of competition to get a new bowling ball or a set of titanium clubs for golf to get an edge over your rivals and that is what the loot box system does in Battlefront II. The writer for the Forbes article obviously didn’t like it. I did, my grandson and I had a lot of fun with the loot boxes. It was like gambling in Vegas, you never really knew what you were going to get and it was fun working toward an opportunity to have a chance at something cool. Games like this are all about the proper risk rewards system.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/insertcoin/2017/10/08/star-wars-battlefront-2s-loot-boxes-seem-like-theyre-going-to-be-a-serious-problem/#1707a80a6323

For me the best part of the new Battlefront II game was the Starfighter Assault modes. It took me a minute to get used to things because they changed the mechanics quite a lot. On the previous edition of Battlefront I was one of those 50 kills per game people. I was very good at it and it was a dream come true for me to fly those ships around in space in combat situations. I can tell that I will be spending many hours playing just that mode. I would say that the new game is worth it just for the Starfighter Assault modes. As readers here know I love the Fantasy Flight Games offerings of X-Wing and Armada so putting a pilot into a scenario that is objective based around giant capital ships and individualized dog fighting is an incredible experience. Even for a beta test the frame rates were high and the details were amazing. Some of the cut-scenes were sloppy on my giant 4K television but I’m sure the final release of the game will be a major improvement on that. As I seem to say with each of these big video game releases, whether it is Uncharted 4 for the Playstation, or Zelda for the Nintendo Switch, this Battlefront II game is the next technical evolution that turns living rooms into combat zones and works our minds in ways we couldn’t duplicate under any other situation.

Probably the best improvement however on Battlefront II is the class system where there are four different categories of player. I found due to my aggressive style the Heavy Class to be most to my liking. But what’s better is that you aren’t stuck to that class for the whole round of play. If you need to lighten things up for more stealth or sniper ability you can during a round, and those strategic options are like gold raining from heaven to a guy like me who literally spends all my down time thinking of strategic options. I think of strategic options even when it comes to what grocery store to go to, so a game like this with all these random elements playing against each other is just food for my brain. So I’m really looking forward to November 14th when the whole game is released to the public. Like I said, I held nothing back on this version. I did preorder the game so I could play it with the early access. And I did by the deluxe version of it so I could get every little benefit. On the first one I came late to the game because I was made at The Force Awakens for killing Han Solo and not respecting the continuity of the previous novels. It took me a year to finally give it a shot after radio host Matt Clark bugged me about it every week for that entire year. Once I did start playing however I exploded and quickly maxed out my level at 100. There were a few weekends around last Christmas where I was off work and I played the starfighter modes for 48 straight hours—because it was that fun. With Battlefront II being noticeably an improvement on the game play mechanics, I will likely go even deeper into the game, so I am starting with the deluxe package and from there I will support the game in whatever fashion they come up with. It’s not only a work of art and technical marvel, but it’s just some of the best fun you can have from a top end entertainment system. I can’t think of a better way to live life than to blow stuff up and hear all the wonderful sounds from a Bose sound system that puts you in the middle of the most intense battles a mind could think of. I am really, really, really looking forward to November 14th. Battlefront II will be a winner and the beta was just a taste of the great things to come.

Rich Hoffman

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The Democrat John Kasich: How ‘The Big Lie’ and State Central Committee have changed the political landscape

 

I don’t think John Kasich knows where he is or what’s going on.  I think he’s become a complete idiot.  Over this past week he threatened to leave the Republican Party if they didn’t get their act together…………………………..he left the Republican Party on his own when he signed the Medicaid expansion for Obamacare exchanges going against the Tea Party sponsored Health Care Freedom Amendment.  He also left the Party once he came under fire for the way he dealt with a tornado that tore through Eastern Ohio.  How is he the go-to guy in the Republican Party for how Puerto Rico should be dealt with?  And as far as getting things done, Kasich never regained his footing after he lost the SB5 fight.  Looking back on it now, even though I met the guy during all that and he looked me in the eye promising he was doing everything he could to support the Tea Party movement, I think he never was a reform minded person. He and his friend on 700 WLW Bill Cunningham was never Tea Party supporters—they were just actors playing the part to get elected.  The guy we see today still crying over how he lost the nomination of the Republican Party to Donald Trump is not the same guy I heard at VOA Park back in 2010 speaking to Tea Party groups.  Nor was he  the same guy who spoke in my back yard at the Carriage Hill Barn the night before the election of 2012 where so many critical issues were decided the next day.  He was likely always a loser saying whatever to get elected, but what he is today is clearly a Democrat.  He’s no Republican.  That is clear.

Because of people like John Kasich, once the warning signs were obvious, the Tea Party that everyone has always been so unhappy about in the establishment made a very key, strategic decision.  Yes they attacked candidates like John Boehner openly and it had an effect.  Eric Canter lost his seat to a more reform minded candidate and John Boehner left his speaker job to become a lobbyists and make some money while he still could.  Many other candidates of traditional establishment have found themselves now looking in from the outside.  But that’s not the only success the Tea Party had—the real success was much more permanent.  Tea Party leaders ran for State Central Committee seats and started challenging the establishment from the inside out, and after a few years of that they are now running the Party in a way that the newspapers still don’t udnerstand.   John Kasich for a lot of us was the last straw.  When he went bad people pulled together and made some decisions.  That is why Kasich was unable to keep Donald Trump from winning Ohio, because the Party kicked Kasich to the side, even though he was the sitting governor.   Kasich lost his power because he turned away from the people who put him in office.  He’s not going to leave the Republican Party.  He was already removed during the election period of 2016 based on his horrendous performance as a Republican governor.  Progressives like him, conservatives do not.  The Party moved on without John Kasich.

Now Kasich is the go-to guy on all the liberal network stations.  Progressives are hoping with all their chips on the table that John can make a comeback, but there is no chance of that happening.  Once Kasich lost people like me, he lost the only people who could give him a platform into politics in the future.  He’s done and he won’t be coming back in 2020 as an independent.  The world was poised to change, and he pretended he wanted to be a part of that change.  When he showed that he wasn’t, we found people who would and that’s the end of the story on Kasich.

When those same Tea Party supporters told me their plan I wasn’t sure it could be done at the time, but the people doing it were ambitious and smart.  It took real discipline and tenacity to win all those Central Committee seats.   I was asked to be one of them, but I just couldn’t put the time in, but I have been really impressed by how well their plan worked.  And it has made a difference in the nature of politics within the Republican Party.  This is just the start.  Now that it has been successful more people who are of the Tea Party mind are putting themselves in these Central Committee seats and voting with the reformers.  Kasich will have even a less chance in two years of doing anything in the Republican Party than he does now, because he is a liar, a cheat, and a wimp.  The Party was taken away from Kasich.  He didn’t leave it willingly.  They aren’t telling people that on CNN.

This is also why Democrats are all flipped out with these radicalized groups they have, like ANTIFA.  The old games aren’t working.  I’m just going to spell it out for those who don’t keep track of the inner workings of politics, Dinesh  D’Souza’s recent book, The Big Lie has obliterated the political left’s foundational tactics.  Currently only smart people have read the book and are acting on what has been presented, but over the next eight years the contents will spread into the Democratic playbook and literally destroy all the avenues they’ve used to recruit interest to the Party over the last 100 years.  Of course this isn’t D’Souza’s first entry into this kind of thing, but I think The Big Lie is the most damaging to the Democrats.  Coming out when it did while Trump is in the White House is a game changer in politics.  The book is that good, and that influential.  Just like with the Central Committee efforts I spoke about in Ohio, once the smart people get their teeth into something, the change that follows is inevitable.  Democrats don’t have similar smart people on their side; all they have ever had is fear to invoke political passions.  In this ever-increasing information based society, fear is beaten by knowledge.  And people without knowledge cannot beat people with it—even though they may currently outnumber them—stupid people know how to march in the street, but they don’t know how to get themselves organized into something like a State Central Committee takeover.  That’s where real party decisions are made and Democrats have stacks of very emotional people who are willing to join together for a fight, but to fight what?  They need someone to tell them that and nobody can articulate the issue.  Emotional efforts aren’t aren’t working anymore, so they have no more plan B.

That’s why Kasich is now on the outside.  It is embarrassing to watch him attempt to position himself for a 2020 run as an independent, or perhaps even as a Democrat.  Looking at the Democrats there really isn’t anybody who can challenge Trump in 2020, so Kasich being the kind of guy he is—certainly not a Republican—just a hired gun that turned out to not have any bullets metaphorically speaking, might try to run as a Democrat and he’s setting the stage on CNN.  He wants to be president so badly, he is likely considering it.  But he doesn’t have the heart to win that fight.  He’s a weak person who has made so many people angry that he can’t run from it forever.  It’s already caught up to him which is why he looks so oblivious to the reality around him.  He’s already a man without a Party.  He didn’t make that decision.  It was made for him by those who previously supported him.

Rich Hoffman

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