Tag: Rich Hoffman

The FBI Broke the Law: Just because they know the names of fancy wines, it doesn’t make them good

I couldn’t list if I wanted to any wines of any worth. To me they all taste the same and are about as valuable in conversation as talking about doorknobs. I don’t drink much of anything, so I have no interest in alcoholic apparatuses that lead toward intellectual intoxication. That makes me a pretty boring dinner guest. I also don’t care much for classic rock bands or even pop culture bands for that matter. I have almost no interest in those types of things so I am pretty stiff at a dinner party. But I do know quite a few law enforcement people, at least I have through the years, and many of them were F.B.I agents. And they typically know everything there is to know about wines and rock bands. They can tell you off the top of their head when Don Henley left the Eagles but they know almost nothing about the great philosopher and economist Adam Smith. They can tell you everything about a bottle of wine from France but nothing about how that college they are working so hard to send their children to has socialist reprogramming intentions for the youth of the world. All they really care about in regards to the school is how much it costs, so they can brag about it to their friends, and what the football team did last season—and who was or will be the quarterback.

Given all that it didn’t surprise me that the dirty cops in the FBI actually started an investigation into Donald Trump being a Russian agent planting the seeds of insurrection of his presidency even before the election of 2016 was over. The problem in the FBI is not just a few bad cops at the top, its institutional—it’s in the things they like as a group, not so much in their abilities to investigate crimes. In general I learned over the years, to work in law enforcement, especially in the FBI it requires very below the line people, people who are victims of their own circumstances and emotionally not very strong. That’s why they seek employment in large collectivist organizations, and why they like classic rock bands way too late in their lives and sip wine at dinner parties while the world burns down around them, because they are happiest when they are blaming other people for the world’s problems and they are too drunk to notice.

Along comes the optimistic President Trump who believes anything is possible, so much so that in the lobby of his Las Vegas resort it says, “If you are going to be thinking anyway, think BIG.” Now he was elected president and this new president doesn’t drink, he doesn’t really care for classic rock, and he’s all about accountability and self-fulfillment—and the FBI in their role as protectors of institutional lifestyles just couldn’t have it, so they made up lies to attempt to derail him as a person. Yes, they tampered with the 2016 election in a much more sinister way than Russia ever contemplated, then they tried to blame everything on that country hoping to tap into people’s Cold War memories and the recent good ratings of the television show, The Americans. Being below the line thinkers they sought to unseat an American president so that they wouldn’t have to deal with a leader in the Executive Branch who wanted to bring above the line thinking to the White House.

And their greatest fears emerged right away once Trump was in the White House, deregulation, entrepreneurial support, tax cuts—a new way of thinking that empowered above the line people and made all the below the line culture of Washington D.C. much less significant. Suddenly it wasn’t important what a person knew about wines, what mattered was how much capital an enterprise could put their hands on for a new start-up. The stock market grew because above the line people could see something worth investing in and wasting time listening to classic rock in the back yard of a Georgetown home inebriated by $200 bottles of wine suddenly didn’t mean anything. So of course, they attacked Trump, they went for blood, not just unseating him—and they broke the law to do so.

James Comey and is direct employees were losers who were everything I described and more. But they didn’t care if they broke the law because they were the law. They decided who lived and who died in the world and as below the line thinkers that was the most important part of their jobs to them. They had socialized with colleagues who loved fancy wine and old rock songs about the oncoming European socialism, such as “Bye, Bye, Sweet American Pie” as they drove their Chevy’s (bankrupt) to the levy but the levy was dry (the American economy) saying, “this will be the day that I die.” (I absolutely hate that song and have since I was a little kid.) Such an incredibly negative song about below the line thinking, but in Georgetown on a Friday or Saturday night, it’s a common occurrence while party goers ponder just how great Eric Clapton was and is. That’s the world of Comey and his friends who truly want European socialism to become the new way of doing business in America and from the perspective of the FBI, and the DOJ as Loretta Lynch attended those same events slapping her knee to the beat of some progressive song from the early 1970s the justification for insurrection was in their minds for all our own good.

That is the real fight of course, again below the line thinking colliding with above the line thinking. What kind of country do we want to be? The FBI already made up their mind, they are actively attempting to shape the world in the image of their Saturday night block parties and they are happy about it so long as they know the names of the fancy wines. That’s a world they are comfortable with and want to live in. After all, if everyone is drunk on those wines, people might actually think they are smart. But for that to work everyone has to buy into that life. When Trump came along it was for the below the line thinkers a real danger because it showed them that they had no idea what people outside of the Beltway really liked. “You mean people don’t look up to us because we know rock bands from the 70s and the names of wines from France?”

You laugh dear reader, but it really is as stupid as that, these people are terrible. Why wouldn’t Trump question our own intelligence agencies given the level of competency that they displayed in his early days in office? Just because they are American doesn’t mean they know what they are talking about. Obviously, there is more to it than just having the best resources available to them because they are in America. The quality of their minds as institutions isn’t good, they value the wrong things, so how could anyone trust what they recommend. Trump was smart not to, and they really don’t have a right to be insulted. They have shown themselves to be below the line thinkers who value all the wrong things in life. Comey should have been fired and so should many, many others. They broke the law and aren’t worth the money we spend on them as tax payers. Because if that’s as good as they get, we’d be better off without any of them.

Rich Hoffman

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A Quiet Place: Hollywood’s disfunctional relationship with guns

I thought the 2018 movie; A Quiet Place was a really good horror film that was compelling. However, it was hard for me to sit through because if I had been in that story, I would have only have lasted about 30 seconds. In the movie the main characters revolve around a family that has survived some kind of alien invasion and the antagonists are some really terrifying creatures who are completely reliant on sound to move around. This leaves the survivors of earth to move about in complete silence to avoid being eaten by the creatures. I thought it was an interesting concept that made for an entertaining narrative experience, but I couldn’t help but ask the question, why didn’t the dad just shoot the creatures and kill them on day one? The movie would have been over in the opening scenes and many more people would have lived.

This movie reminded me why I’m not in the movie business. I had the same conversation after The Blair Witch Project came out many years ago where I asked similar questions. I never get lost so becoming lost in the woods and being hunted down by some strange monster is just something that I can’t relate to. In A Quiet Place if I had to deal with a situation like that defending my family against some strange creatures that suddenly appeared and ate people maliciously for every sound they made, I would have simply shot them with one of my big caliber guns. There was a scene at the end of The Quiet Place where I was literally jumping around my living room screaming at the television for Emily Blunt to shoot the alien creature as it had her family trapped in her basement. It was a compelling scene for anybody who isn’t used to firearms and for Emily who is a citizen of the United Kingdom she acted as if she were more terrified of the gun than the monster. All she had to do was pull the trigger and the thing would have been killed and her family would be safe.

I’ve been to some of those Santa Monica dinner parties and spent the evening with actors and actresses like Emily Blunt and listened to their diatribes about how guns are so bad and honestly, I couldn’t handle it. Associating with people like that wore me out. And I could see John Krasinski who directed the film working with the screenwriters Bryan Woods and Scott Beck to string out the narrative of the movie into a compelling two-hour event based on their experiences with the soft tissue Hollywood types that frequent those Santa Monica bars at midnight on any given day. It was just over halfway through the movie that we learned that the dad actually had a pump 12 gauge shot-gun hidden away in the house. But in reality, the dad should have had that gun with him for the entire film and been using it to kill the monsters.

Emily Blunt looked way too comfortable holding that gun on the monster at the end of the film and not pulling the trigger that it revealed so much about what is wrong with Hollywood today. The movies are made by scared, timid people who are lacking real experience with firearms, and it was pretty sad. Guns are not part of their culture so when one is put in their hands, they appeared to be more scared of the guns than the terrible monsters. But in reality, if guns were more a part of the story then the dramatic tension of the horror film itself would have been different. If a story like A Quite Place were real, people all across America would have just shot the things. There is no way those blind bastards would have taken over our country the way they did in the movie. Normal people just aren’t as terrified of guns as the Hollywood filmmakers were.

Prior to watching A Quiet Place I watched the Bruce Willis version of Death Wish, and that was a fun movie that was lacerated by the entertainment media because it was a very honest homage to the old Charles Bronson Death Wish movies. Now in those days I could have worked in Hollywood where the story tellers were not so terrified of guns, but understood them as a narrative advancement. For instance, Indiana Jones would have never have been the great character he was if not for that one scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark where Indiana Jones shoots the swordsman in cold blood just because he didn’t have time to run all over Cairo looking for his girlfriend if he was wasting it fighting him. Back then, George Lucas and Steven Spielberg were still on the outside looking in within the film industry so they could do things like that in movies. But once they were invited into the Hollywood social activist club they stopped doing those kinds of things in their movies and people gradually stopped watching. A Quiet Place walked that fine line between ultimately using the gun to solve the problem of the story but they took the entire movie to arrive there. Because the human sacrifice count was high enough the Hollywood community gave A Quiet Place a pass, but to me it was pretty disgusting. It was a movie made by Hollywood types about a world they are afraid of, but for the rest of America where guns are as common as a glass of water, the movie was a useless exercise in stupidity.

The dad played by the director was a pretty good character, but of course when he needed a weapon at the end of the movie, he didn’t have one and he was killed. If he had been carrying his shotgun around, that stupid monster would have been dead quickly, and efficiently and they all would have lived happily ever after. Guns are a huge part of American culture and when Hollywood shows their ignorance, movie goers let them know it. Even though A Quiet Place was considered a successful film critically and at the box office the real numbers show it only made $188 million domestically and $152 million internationally. $340 million is not very much money for a movie at the box office these days, the movie would have done better business if it had embraced the gun culture more instead of trying to appease the anti-gun Hollywood types.

The last scene of the movie A Quiet Place was a hoard of the alien monsters converging on the house as Emily Blunt smiled at her children with her cocked shotgun ready to shoot them all. OK, so where was that attitude at the beginning of the film? The point of the entire movie seems to be to get the parents to overcome their aversion to guns so that they can defend themselves. Because the sonic device that the deaf daughter only appeared to agitate the monsters, it didn’t kill them. Only the gun did. So that is my problem with this whole Hollywood vantage point. They literally want their cake and to eat it too. They want an anti-gun message when the gun is the only thing that people want to pay money to see. But to appease the Hollywood gods who drink too much in Santa Monica bars, the filmmakers have to avoid using the gun as much as possible, until the very end of course.

That’s the way you do it.  Death Wish was a great movie!

Rich Hoffman
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Of Course Sheriff Israel Should Have Been Suspended: Democrats fly to Puerto Rico during the government shutdown

Not to be overly simplistic but politics these days could be said to be of two representative groups, Republicans represent above the line thinking as defined in the great business book, The Oz Principle and Democrats representing below the line thinking. Of course, there are plenty of Republicans who are below the line thinkers but their social aims point in that direction, so let’s use this example to have a discussion. The issue of the new Governor DeSantis suspending the bumbling fool Scott Israel over the response during the Parkland massacre is a perfect example of what we are talking about.

In the world of a typical Democrat accountability for one’s actions are never part of the consideration, below the line thinkers are always victims who are never responsible for anything. Everything to below the line thinkers is someone else’s fault, so when Sheriff Israel was given a very expensive budget in one of Florida’s wealthiest counties to protect the people there, he blew it. The shooter who would eventually attack the school had a long-troubled past which the police knew about and when the guy finally instigated his intended violence toward the kids of Parkland High School Israel’s police force wasn’t ready and behaved less than gracious under fire. Many more people died as a result of Sheriff Israel’s incompetence than otherwise would and it was a truly sad situation.

But in the aftermath, it was Sheriff Israel who was leading the charge to have guns removed from society by attacking the NRA hoping to deflect responsibility away from him and his law enforcement department. His radicalism in advocating below the line positions was excessive and even political moderates were getting tired of the excuses from Sheriff Israel. After eight months of excuses once Governor DeSantis took the official office as Florida’s next governor, he did what most Republicans seek to do, and that is provide accountability to a situation—above the line thinking.

And that is where the real difficulty is in deciding what kind of country we want to be, because we can’t be both. Below the line thinking is easy and destructive, it is far easier to destroy than to make, so that is why Democrats with their below the line thinking and overall victimhood mentality attract so many losers and can activate them to advance on a cause so quickly, because their fear is always accountability so as long as there is chaos and blame, they are quick to hide their incompetence behind violence and mass driven protests.

Accountability is hard so its much more difficult to stand up and accept that responsibility when there is always a parade of below the line thinkers to throw more animosity in your direction deflecting that pressure away from them as much as possible. This is why it was hard for even staunch NRA defenders to advocate for sanity after the Parkland shooting because the mob of below the line thinking had taken over. There was power in the masses for below the line thinkers who shared together a fear of responsibility. There was power in victimhood, in using the death of the innocent to advance a below the line political idea, such as the confiscation of guns. Guns themselves didn’t kill people, they are tools for above the line people to take responsibility for their own safety and property. But for below the line people who would never dare use a gun to defend themselves because they don’t want the responsibility, its easy to call for the elimination of personal firearms and the expansion of the state with more laws. But in the case of Parkland there were police on the scene as the gunman was killing and they did not engage. Sheriff Israel had allowed their daily routine to become too soft they were not ready for the danger when it came. But rather than take responsibility for their ill prepared training, Scott Israel deflected all responsibly to gun possession and he helped launch a national campaign against them.

If we want an accountable, and successful nation, below the line thinking just can’t be allowed—which essentially eliminates one political party from the discussion. We can see the same example of how Democrats behaved in Mid-January after they had just returned to Capitol Hill to the House and Senate only to charter a plane to fly to Puerto Rico to watch the play Hamilton. President Trump as a businessman understands leadership and accountability so he purposely stayed at the White House as the government shutdown dragged on and debate over the border wall persisted. Democrats being below the line people devoid of personal accountability don’t want to see how their actions can have an impact on the world around them so they tried to coax Republicans into playing along, but under Trump’s leadership they stayed put. While the news stories went out that government workers weren’t getting paid due to the shutdown Trump was in the White House ready to make a deal but the Democrats just off a Christmas vacation took another luxury trip to Puerto Rico to attend a high brow play. Typically, Republicans get caught in these kinds of things trying to defend themselves from a negative position, but Trump kept the discussion on above the line topics with true leadership—leading by example.

That is truly the battle of our day, the difference between personal accountability, and below the line victimhood. Losers are known as losers because they are never responsible for anything in their life, they make themselves perpetual victims because they lack the courage of personal accountability. The reason that Democrats want to expand government so much is to cover up their notion of accountability deflection. The more people involved, the more chaotic the bureaucratic chain of decision gates, the less people know that the real game is in protecting below the line thinking so that political leaders can sneak off to a luxury play in the tropics during a government shutdown and nobody would notice. And that is exactly what Democrats did in trying to protect the incompetency of Scott Israel after the Parkland shooting. The NRA which is an organization all about above the line thinking, personal accountability and the defense of American ideas became the scape-goat by default. Above the line thinking was attacked because the masses were afraid of what role they played in the mess and would rather expand government and pay more people to stand in front of them and help redistribute the blame game to everything else.

Governor DeSantis like President Trump was making a point in suspending Sheriff Israel, the intent was to demonstrate above the line thinking, just as Trump stayed at the White House to show leadership under fire. Accountability is the key to all successful enterprises, and Democrats just don’t have it in them. By their nature they always seek below the line solutions to above the line needs, so there will never be peace and joy in politics so long as this is the case. Everyone in our nation needs to at least be working toward the same objectives. One part of the country can’t take responsibility for everything while all the below the line thinkers fly off to Puerto Rico to attend a play while bitching that the President won’t budge on his needs for border wall funding. And what Sheriff Israel did, which is typical of all below the line thinkers was reprehensible, he tried to blame the very good NRA for his own incompetence. And if he had been successful, it would have had a terrible effect. Its bad enough that many people died because of him, but what’s worse is that he refused to take responsibility. That is his crime and why he had to be suspended. He’s lucky that was all.

Rich Hoffman
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China Can’t Even Afford iPhones: Understanding how the game has been played and will be in the future

I warned everyone, China the big communist country had nothing without the United States. They would have no leverage in trade talks and their inflating economy was purely fictional, created by global efforts to prop them up. I’ve especially pointed this out when box office talks about movie releases have studios paying more attention than they should about the communist country’s ability to make or break a movie. Back when a big movie like E.T. The Extraterrestrial came out in the 1980s nobody cared if anybody in China saw the movie and it was considered a success. So what has changed in the three decades since is purely an internal communist push through American education to give China a seat at the economic table that was entirely made up by political forces trying to change the kind of world we all live in. They wanted to say, “look, China is killing all of us, so we need to be more like them.” And that was how communism was being pushed into western culture. If everyone wanted to compete in the modern economic world, they’d have to get on board with that line of thought. But, as I said from the very beginning, it was all made up crap.

I can see why everyone believes that China is or was going to be the big world power to chase. The Children’s Museum in Indianapolis as in other places as well has a huge dedication to the new China economy tying to prepare young people on how to live in that type of world. By the time I had seen the exhibit it was already aging so it was a little easier for me to see than the millions of visitors who had been there before me. If the topic of economic power and global politics was not the topic of the average family’s dinner table, then most people wouldn’t think much of it. However, in essence, the Chinese economy was never going to be all scary and domineering of all cultures on earth. The way our school systems proposed the problem was a lie from the start, China was never going to dictate the way we live life in American and that smoky reality that they had been trying to create with our young people came to a crashing end with the rise to power of President Trump, who knew better. Anyone who understands markets and money could see the problem but often those types of people are not allowed anywhere near political policy making, that is until one of them managed to get elected into the Executive Branch, which destroyed near six decades of planning by the political insurgents working against American sovereignty in full pursuit of globalism managed by China.

Personally, I love Apple products, my wife just bought the latest iPhone from them. They are an American company that has been pushing great technically innovations. They are too liberal for me, and I don’t think Tim Cook is a very good CEO, but the company itself is a good one as it was created by Steve Jobs. And I get it, there are only so many Americans who can buy iPhones, so the billions of people in China is a lucrative market, just as movie companies have fallen into that trap, but the entire industry is built as a sand castle meant to look impressive long enough to trick the world into accepting communism before the real waves of economic power came along and washed it all away. Thank goodness that happened much earlier than projected with the election of President Trump. Due to the continuing trade war the Chinese people just aren’t riding the wave of extra money that had been fueling a fifth of all iPhone sales pushing Apple stocks down 5.1% for the week as investors had to brace for the loss in projections. When people don’t have the expendable income to buy an iPhone it is an excellent measure of their economic health so there is no way that the “state” of China can hide the problem because the sales are published by an American company.

Of course, Apple’s not happy about it, they feel they need to have a rate of growth that can continue to support their trillion-dollar evaluation and in order to do that they literally need to touch everyone on planet earth in some way or another, so it’s a tough gig. Apple can’t afford to have too many political opinions and to divide up their bases. They trust that conservatives will buy their product because what they have is the best, so they do lean left. And like Google, all the big tech companies had been thinking that China was the way the world was going so they started kissing up to them over a decade ago. But Apple should have never counted on a fifth of their entire market to come from that region of the world. Apple phones are too expensive for a country that relies on its economic power to be stolen from other places and given to them through politics, which is exactly what has happened. American companies were penalized with burdensome regulation so they fled to Asia and took those jobs to those economies. But the origin market was North America where the goods were really purchased. The only big difference was that instead of products being made in America and then being sold back to America, the products were made in other parts of the world and sold back to America. Trump fixed that problem by stopping the cause, over regulation and tax incentives which is why over 300,000 jobs were created in December with a GDP rate of nearly 4% to finish out the year. Meanwhile, China can’t even afford to buy iPhones.

There were a lot of villains in on the game but that’s not important now. China has to steal intellectual property because their communist system does not spawn creativity just as it doesn’t elsewhere in the world. Great thinkers and dreamers like to get paid for their unique visions. They don’t do it for free which is why China has a major creativity problem. All things in business come from creativity, so a society that isn’t very creative is not going to have a strong economy. China could never steal enough intellectual property to stay relevant in an economy now led by the United States again. They are going to gradually fall further and further behind because all their economic gains were created by stifling America with policy and regulation and giving that opportunity cost to China so that the chess board of the world could change. But it was all built on phony values and now Trump has played the card everyone was afraid he would, and China is falling apart.

China always depended on the American economy for its sustenance. What they had was not real value but stolen. And that’s what everyone is having a hard time coming to terms with. China was not a superior culture dominating economics, they were just a third world country artificially made first world with looted wealth from the west so that the idea of communism would be accepted by all global markets. Apple knew it, so does Google, and now they are paying the price for hedging their bets. If Tim Cook were a good CEO he would have started backing off expectations the moment that Trump entered office because anybody aware of the situation knew what was going to happen. Now its time to pay, and likely time to get a new CEO.

Rich Hoffman

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The Loser Rashida Tiaib Attempts at Impeachment: Obviuosly, she hasn’t thought things through

News flash, what does Rashida Tiaib think is going to happen if her brand of socialist radicals impeach President Trump and take over all three branches of government with their insurgents? They are going to be destroyed. It’s not going to be allowed to happen, violence will erupt and many people will die. This idea that liberals have about taking over government by force, intimidation and ANTIFA radicalism hasn’t been thought through very well. There is a reason Donald Trump was elected president. It’s not his fault, it’s the people who put him there who Rashida Tiaib should be concerned about, and calling them a bunch of white racists isn’t going to help make a case for civility either. When push comes to shove, bodies will be lying around in the streets and any fantasy of a socialist takeover will end rather fast. It’s one thing to have an ANTIFA protest on a college campus or a very liberal town full of welfare recipients who have no passions in the matter. But it’s quite another to stroll into Deadwood South Dakota and demand socialism. Uhhhh, before the mob moved one city block I’d predict about 90,000 bullet holes and some of them coming unofficially from the sheriff’s office. Any attempt to impeach President Trump, let me just say—will start a war that Rashida Tiaib isn’t prepared for—or any Democrat for that matter.

I’m at a place in my life where I want to address this problem more deeply that it just being a liberal against conservative problem. As Mitt Romney proved, and even some local people in my own town have clearly demonstrated, they are just as much losers as Democrats are. So I am thinking more these days about a more appropriate and universal understanding of the problem, designating winners and losers instead of Republicans and Democrats and here is the reason, and again I’ll refer back to The Oz Principle, everything really comes down to above the line and below the line thinking. Winners think above the line, losers think below the line. Pretty simple, right? So let’s look at this Rashida Tiaib phenomena through the lens of being a loser or a winner. Obviously, her intentions for wanting to impeach Trump is to bring victory to her party’s ambitions to take control of government. But because she is a severe case of below the line thinking she hasn’t even conceived what it might look like if that reality were to manifest—how the American people in the real world would react to it. And that is the classic problem with all below the line thinkers.

Below the line thinking essentially consists of victim hood, in explaining why someone can’t advance themselves in life. Racism under any definition is classic below the line thinking and any government that supports it, is contributing severely to a loser mindset. In any business that is trying to improve its cultural footprint organizationally, the challenge is to get more people thinking above the line than below, and that is how you essentially start getting a winning mindset across the entire organization. To put it in crayon so that everyone can understand it, this is precisely the purpose of sports within our capitalist country. We watch teams bring in certain players who are supposed to excel in whatever position they play in a particular sport and we cheer on their efforts to win more games than other cities. It’s a fun game for all of us, but the real essence of it is to find that magic combination of winners and leaders who can inspire victory. Nobody has much tolerance for a sports player who is hurt all the time or underperforms. It doesn’t matter if the fans are liberals or conservatives, most people have an open disdain for a sport figure that is not living up to the expectations that the fan base has for wins and losses.

For a lot of reasons, we have allowed as a culture way too many people who are below the line thinkers to get government jobs and to shape that employment culture in a very negative way. The government labor unions are another victimhood-based organization, full of below the line thinkers and they actually incentivize that type of culture making most government workers the type of people who are extremely inefficient. Unlike most business environments which are performance based and are always trying to look for ways to keep below the line thinking from hindering a winning culture, government looks for more below the line thinking to justify their loser attitude about everything, and to satisfy that trend they want to always grow, because that’s what losers do, they love to hide their faults in the masses so their errors aren’t so obvious.

If I were working in government as a TSA agent, or a National Park Ranger, I would make sure human resources had my number correct and would tell them to call me when funding had been restored, if ever. I would never sit around waiting for somebody else to do something so that I could pay more rent or a mortgage. I would get a second job, or even a third job and I would take care of my financial obligations. That is an example of above the line thinking, and it’s the way more people need to start thinking if we really want America to remain such a great country. Lucky for us, in the rural parts of the nation that type of thinking is quite common—particularly among farmers. When they hit a drought, or the get a flat tire on a tractor they don’t sit around crying about racism or how unfair God is to them that day, they fix the tire. And they do their best with the drought. They survive. I can say that I am an above the line thinker with the employment status example because I’ve done that before several times, went to get second and third jobs to cover my expenses. Sometimes I didn’t even have a second car, I had to ride a bicycle to work just to get there and I never bitched about it. To me that was the kind of thinking that was needed. I don’t feel sorry for a single government worker not getting a paycheck during the government shutdown. I say to them, get another job, pay your bills, and stop complaining. The airlines themselves covered their own security costs before there was ever a unionized TSA organization and it wouldn’t be hard to get back to that mode of thinking.

The fight that Rashida Tiaib is really advocating is essentially for the right to use victimhood as a calling card to the masses who are also functioning below the line to rise up and take over government. But the attitude is a loser one, you could hear it in her voice when she spoke at the bar and in the people cheering. Those weren’t people trying to win at life, those were people cheering for an excuse to remain a loser. Their hatred of Trump isn’t that he’s a bad president, but a good one that is all about setting standards and building value. But losers don’t ever think of the next steps, they only view the world below the line where they seek to join other like-minded losers to justify their lack of ambition by pointing at numbers of similar losers and declaring they are the majority and thus the pace setters for civilization. However, that is not how people think, they want to be winners even if they don’t have the personal courage and below the line thinking only destroys society, it doesn’t build it, and should Rashida ever get what she really desires in an impeachment of President Trump, she will learn rather violently how badly people love winners and hate losers.

Rich Hoffman

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We Should Terminate all 800,000 Government Workers from the Shutdown: All federal labor unions should be illegal

One of the things I’m not going to do anymore is provide an equal argument to the inefficiencies of government, to ponder why they are so slow, inefficient and corrupt when we all know why. So why waste the time? The important elements are in identifying the problem, teaching people why its unacceptable, and correcting the situation for real in the future. And the government shutdown is one of those things that happen from time to time when reality meets the fantasy of government, and no legitimate business person in the world could look at the proposals of government and even suggest sanity. The assumptions made that people care about a government shutdown are preposterous. The rate of pay is also preposterous, many of the 800,000 jobs who are not receiving a pay check over the government shutdown would be eliminated in the private sector due to business needs anyway. Much of the demand is artificial. When I hear Democrats trying to pull on our heart-strings that those 800,000 workers are not able to pay their mortgage or their car payments and that we should be willing to toss away billions of dollars and re-open the government just so they can do so, I hear the efforts at lunacy only. It’s an insane proposal that they are making. The government shouldn’t be opening to accommodate those 800,000 jobs, those jobs should be eliminated. They should seek new jobs in the growing economy and in the private sector. That is the real issue, yet nobody has come close to addressing it.

For so many years on this site I have provided instances where government workers make a lot more than private sector workers, on average. Where CEOs do make millions on occasion, average government workers functioning under a socialist labor union are artificially inflated by their wage rate. True market conditions do not have a say in the matter because the money is stolen from the tax payers and distributed insanely to their work force, who often are extremely inefficient. In private business there is a kind of subculture of what we call “fix it men and women” who go into an organization and straighten them out in all matters of production, and the companies thrive as a result. The current replacement for General Mattis as Defense Secretary is Patrick Shanahan who was a “fix it man” at Boeing. The assumption was that General Mattis, or “Mad Dog” as they were calling him was a far superior candidate because of his military service while Shanahan wouldn’t know what he was doing. In reality the situation is quite the opposite. Private industry experiences where lean manufacturing techniques are applied to increase the efficiency of an enterprise are far better than a military general who learns authority driven process controls and constant yielding to authority, for which politics often is the typical holder of power.

The problem with Mattis turned out that he was a “mad dog” as in he turned out to be a Democrat. You don’t always know this about people until you get to know them but that left leaning political philosophy comes with it inefficiency and apathy by the nature of their existence. It’s easy to talk a good game about how to remove troops from the Middle East or the perpetual war in Afghanistan, but after a few years of no results and asking why, that is when the Democrat side of people come out, such as with terms like “compassion,” “troop strength,” and “we’ll solve the problem next year.” Only government can get away with such below the line thinking, in fact government was entirely constructed to give below the line people a means to make livings and compete in the world. In all my years of doing lots of things with government I seldom find above the line people working among their below the line ranks. OF course, by using such terms I’m referring to The Oz Principle, which is a fairly famous book on business management and the types of people who contribute to productive enterprise, and those who must be overcome.

For days now regarding the government shutdown and the replacement of Mattis as the Secretary of Defense and putting the private industry guru Shanahan in charge, Democrats have continued to insist that we all had an obligation to the inefficiencies of the past, that we shouldn’t even ask if the 800,000 workers missing out on a paycheck during the shutdown were even needed. Of course, they aren’t, we could discharge them tomorrow and nobody would even notice. So why do we have them, just to pay them a pay check? And why are there any government unions attached to these workers saying anything about anything? All government labor unions should be made illegal, immediately. They only drive up the costs to tax payers without any added benefit. A lot of times “fix it” people in private practice have to go into a union shop and break up the command that “the people” have over management and to reinvigorate management to engage with employees in ways that offset the benefits they get from a labor union. It can be tricky business, but the job gets done and organizations most often live happily ever after. But in government no such thing ever occurs. The unions run everything and there is no real management of anything. If there was one thing that people in Washington D.C. really hated about Trump it’s that he is a manager functioning from the White House. Government workers don’t want management or any expectation of success, they just want their overly high paycheck and to use it to live a life of unrewarded excess, meaning they live large, but they didn’t earn that right. Which is how they end up corrupt.

In a book store you can find countless books on how to make business work better, but not a single book on how to make a government job more efficient. That’s because we have allowed the government worker to become insulated from reality. And since they have no competition, they actually think they can stand in front of us and declare how important they are when 800,000 workers are suddenly out of a paycheck and demanding to reopen the government. I would say to them, consider those jobs gone. Those 800,000 should be getting private sector jobs and moving on in life instead of waiting around for the government to reopen. If we really wanted to solve the problem of government inefficiency, we would start behaving in such a way and get rid of these ridiculous labor unions which only exist because the tax payers are forced to fund them due to no other options available. Its like being forced to buy a car from General Motors while the quality is terrible because the employees are smoking pot on every break and don’t care about the product. We have government workers who are just as bad and they are in that 800,000 number, and technically they shouldn’t have a job. Their labor unions have made management of their positions impossible and made them too expensive for what we get in services. And this government shutdown finally reveals the truth of how little we really need them. Which is why Trump needs to hold out for his border wall money. People need to know that all these government positions weren’t really needed to begin with. And instead of reopening the government just so they can get a paycheck, we should eliminate their positions all together. And this is one way to do it.

Rich Hoffman

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No, the Government can Stay Closed: Trump needs to build the wall

It is astonishing how stupid people can be. That they actually thought the Democrat led House would magically wave a wand and all of a sudden, the government would reopen, and the wall debate would be wiped away. That people are that dumb, because some did believe it, should concern us all. Also, one of the big government labor unions is suing President Trump for not getting paid during the shutdown as illegal. So according to the union the only legal option is to always pay government workers even if there is no money? Seriously? Where do these people come from? Where did they go to school? Because they act like they landed here from some other place not understanding how civilization works, the assumptions they make are based on a childlike understanding of the world. In reality the government can shut down forever, and the border wall is a must. Trump can’t and won’t budge on it because it is something that has to be done. And the Democrats don’t have nor will they ever have leverage on the matter. Nobody cares about government workers. They make too much money anyway.

Commentator after commentator on all networks pondered what President Trump was up to in regard to border wall negotiations. It was unfathomable to them that he would actually hold out on reopening the government to get the money from congress. Likely the issue is that they are millennials largely who are used to quick fixes to everything. The idea of a month or six-month budget fight just isn’t in their vocabulary. Then of course many of them also are part of the new borderless world concept which is a trend started by globalists to inspire a one world government of no countries only people in regions. Of course that is a not so clever fantasy of communism where values between different people are ignored and they all serve a central authority, such as the United Nations. In other places in the world it’s not so obvious the difference between one country and another, but on the Mexican/American border the contradictions are bold and obvious. You can’t have a society in need desperately the way Mexico is and put them next to a society of plenty, like America and not expect major problems. It’s not that America wants to deny the people of Mexico the advantages of capitalism. But what matters is that Mexico needs to adopt that philosophy for themselves, not expect a spillover from America for even their most basic needs.

The border wall is basically about showing that difference so that the values are separated. Open looting is not a permissible strategy, yet it is the only strategy of the Mexican government. They can only hope to openly assimilate with the United States because their Marxist revolution has been a dismal failure, so they want open borders to prevent that obvious fact to remain concealed. It’s also about fueling the illegal drug trade to bring American money south and to poison the minds of the American people so that they can be easily conquered. Make no mistake about it, Nancy Pelosi and her open border supporters want the poisoning of American youth to continue through drugs from Mexico. She and they want to fuel that market to growth, not contraction. A border wall would make that effort much harder. Drugs would still get into the country, but not at the level it is presently. Drugs are a major problem in American society, everything from alcohol to cocaine, and the Mexican government delights in seeing so many Americans hooked on a product they produce so that avenues to hide their failed Marxism can remain. To understand the situation, you have to understand the game.

There is absolutely no reason for Trump to compromise with Nancy Pelosi on the border wall funding. The minute this issue is off the table, and the government reopens, the Democrats in the House will launch a barrage of investigations into Trump intended to hammer him out of office by 2020. They don’t care about the government, the border, or the national debt. They only care about trying to get a president in the White House in 2020, so everything they do is to that end. Trump could hold out reopening the government for the next two years hanging it on the Democrats and he’d be just fine. But Nancy and the gang won’t be. Their base of support are all mushy short-term thinkers who expect easy victories. When they see that those victories don’t come, and that people really don’t care about their issues, they will find themselves in a bad position. It is they who have the obligation to negotiate, not President Trump.

It’s one thing to know that people aren’t very smart, or to have watched over time the decline of western civilization as more people have accepted Marxism and communism over time, especially in our university system. Without question we are a fragmented nation in North America. But that’s not a bad thing. We are a republic, not a democracy for this very reason. In America logical thought is given the ability to prevail over the ambitions of the mob and at the essence of it, that is what the border fight is all about. Nancy Pelosi is functioning form a mob mentality hoping to apply peer pressure on President Trump to score an early victory for her House members and to launch their ambitions for 2020 elections. But Trump has all the power in the world to stop that desire. So why wouldn’t he? That is obviously a consideration that none of the pundits on television had been thinking about. Their assumption as it always is was that Trump had the obligation to yield as good Republicans usually do, and to feed the power of mob rule as proposed by Democrats.

There is actually a lot to be revealed by Mitt Romney’s quick challenge to President Trump, trying immediately to put pressure on him to negotiate with the House and to drop the border wall funding issue. That is because Romney wants another crack at running for president and if Trump wins again, he won’t get another chance. But more than that, he is philosophically more aligned with Nancy Pelosi than with President Trump’s GOP. The idea of a borderless world is appealing to them for many reasons. But more than anything, continuing to allow Mexico to loot value off of America gives them power in allowing it. The only people seeking to go from America to Mexico are criminals and tourists looking for some excitement they can’t get in America. You don’t see them crossing the border under machine gun fire. But in Mexico you do, they will go to great measures to get into America. Why? Because what is in America is valuable to them. So why can’t they have those opportunities in Mexico? Because Marxism has ruined their economy and the borderless world advocates want to hide that reality from everyone, and the best way to do that is to mix everyone together before anybody really notices. And that is exactly why there is a border wall fight, and Trump has all the time in the world to hold to it. Because he has the high ground and he’d be crazy to relinquish it. Yet Nancy Pelosi has no time to make her case, the pressure to reopen the government is complete on her, and as the heat cranks up, she won’t be able to handle it. Watch and see!

Rich Hoffman

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Disney Should make another Han Solo Movie: The executives messed up the profit distribution, but the fans liked the film–especially 2 year olds

It’s a shame that Disney mishandled the Star Wars film, Solo: A Star Wars Story, because it’s a pretty good science fiction movie. I have a 2-and-a-half-year-old grandson that loves the movie and wants to watch it over and over again. As a movie it does what its supposed to, it inspires young people to think about complicated engineering and physics problems while they are still conceptual kids framing their entire lives in front of them. Big colorful movies like that particular Star Wars film are great as change agents in our culture for positive outlooks. The movie is by far one of the best Star Wars films in general but unfortunately it looks like it will be the last one. By reading the many articles on a year in review for 2018 Solo: A Star Wars Story was considered a financial bomb by current analytical standards but what I see is a huge campaign by a bunch of screwy Disney executives to save their jobs because it was they who screwed up the movie in the short run. But in the context of history Solo: A Star Wars Story will be one of the better ones and will be remembered for many years to come. Disney if they were smart would make more of them while they can still get the actors.

Problem number one is that movies now are based on international box office results, which means many communist and socialist countries have a say in whether movies do well or not. I would argue that none of the original Star Wars movies or Indiana Jones films for that matter would have done well in a market that considered international box office as a driver of success. To do that a film has to represent all the people of the world in some way, and that isn’t easy to do. It’s an unrealistic expectation for a company like Disney to do it over and over again. In their titles that are directed specifically to children, all children of the world want the same kinds of things, so billion-dollar money makers are more obtainable. But a Star Wars film with mature content in them is a different story. I think the world would have eventually accepted Solo: A Star Wars Story but the ideas of Han Solo are not universally global, they are specifically American—so international markets have a difficult time relating. Disney should have had a longer view of what Solo was and not expected it to perform well on a first run in international markets.

The other thing is that Disney screwed up the Star Wars fan base. First they put out the new films not consistent with the books that fans grew up with—which was a real problem. Then they released The Last Jedi before Solo: A Star Wars Story. If they were going to mess with the formula of Star Wars, they should have given fans the traditional Star Wars story before changing the game on them with The Last Jedi. When Solo: A Star Wars Story came out 6 months after The Last Jedi people were still very angry at the trilogy film that embarked on the further journeys of Rey, Finn and Kylo Ryn. The direction of that film was too drastic, unsatisfying, and way too politically progressive. Not even my two-year-old grandson likes that movie. I have tried to show it to him, but its slow, the action scenes aren’t often enough, and it just has a heavy hand thematically. It’s not light on its feet the way Star Wars movies are supposed to be and it hurts the film. I personally think it’s a pretty good movie with ambitious ideas, but these movies have to realize that it is children who are their target audience, and to stick with it.

A huge mistake that was made in connection to the sequencing of releases was that Disney should not have tried to rush Solo: A Star Wars Story to theaters for a summer release. They should have waited until Christmas. Disney for whatever reason thought that a Mary Poppins sequel was going to be really successful. But as of the turn of the year the film has only made around $100 million domestically. Around $170 million internationally. Those are actually really bad numbers considering Disney wanted to clear the slate for Mary Poppins to do well over the holiday season. Auquaman didn’t do much better which was the other big release. These films aren’t exactly lighting it up at the box office and these are the best that studios are putting out. Disney should have put Solo out over Christmas and the numbers would have been much better. They needed time to repair the Star Wars brand after The Last Jedi and to take away the summer competition which had a lot of really good films to compete with including an Avengers film which soaked up the box office in the previous weekends then had another Jurassic World film hitting a few weeks after Solo. Too many movies and not enough dollars to spend on them all. In a world of such tight competition, people weren’t sure they were ready to see someone besides Harrison Ford play Han Solo, so they went to see other films instead. But that people weren’t ready doesn’t mean the movie was bad, it was just going to take some time to get used to.

I know there are some high-level Disney execs who read here and are curious as to what happened to them in 2018. I tried to tell you guys—don’t make movies at the back of the train, get to the front. Solo was a good movie and you should do more of them. Cut the budget to half what you had in the first film and just let the movies do their thing. Movies like that are change agents which set the industry standards. They don’t always have it built-in where they can make a market splash within two weeks on their way toward a billion dollars. Sometimes it takes people time to figure out that they love a movie and those are the ones that stick around. If you are going to make Star Wars movies look to change the rules of box office acquisition, don’t try to follow them. While we wait for more Star Wars films, it wouldn’t be a bad thing to have more movies with Han and Chewie to fill story gaps that will still be fun to watch thirty years from now. Just don’t spend a fortune on them and keep them lean on the business end and let them do their thing. I think Disney would find them to be enormously successful. Just don’t listen to the media critics, they don’t know what they are talking about. Show the films to 2-year olds and if they want to watch them over and over again, then you can know you have a good Star Wars movie. It’s not really any more complicated than that. So don’t make it that way. But you should do it quickly because those actors are getting old, and there are still some great fun stories about Han Chewie and the Millennium Falcon that need to be told.

Rich Hoffman

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Two Bits of Advice in the New Year: The nature of leadership and political parties

I haven’t had a chance yet in a while but I plan to attend a West Chester Township Trustee meeting to confront a lap top loser who has been going around and trying to paint me as some kind of caricature of detriment to the Butler County GOP. This loser actually had some rationalization to indicate that I was the cause of embarrassment to a political party, which is to say a club of people who lend support to each other for elections and the ability to manage local affairs. In truth, anybody would be lucky to know me and unless someone is outperforming me in some manner of life, anything they say is fear-based illusions which brings us to a greater issue which will become a theme for me. Because to really solve problems it’s not enough to just point out where the errors are, you have to change the circumstances that cause those errors and that is something I do at many levels. And the byproduct of that change is usually anger. People thriving off a present system of chaos do not want to change and when someone comes along that represents change of any kind, deep resentments and hostilities always follow. There is nothing new there. If something I’m doing causes consternation among those happy with the way things are there’s usually a good reason. But my personal policy is not to let things go unsettled, and I certainly won’t when challenged by some loser who wants a political party to remain like it has been in the past when its clear improvements are needed in the future.

Whether in politics or business there are many people when groups of activity are considered who function below the line of positive thought and they are the causes of a need for change. It is baffling for instance that anybody would hate Donald Trump as much as they do for president. I had to get gas on New Year’s Eve ahead of 2019 and saw prices had dropped to $1,88. That by itself should be enough for people to love the President, but good performance is not what losers in the world want. Losers in this case are below the line thinkers, people functioning from perpetual negativity. What they fear most in the world is that some motivated person will come along and change everything for them, forcing the bar to be raised in expectations. So good people, since people, smart people, any people who by their very nature force others to improve themselves by default are hated. There is nothing they can do to change that reality because it goes against all the nature of human behavior.

We were all taught incorrectly in our government schools that we should spend a certain amount of time nurturing our relationships with other people no matter how dysfunctional they may be. For most the basic skills they learn in those formative years stay with them the rest of their lives. When there is a problem, they don’t first think how to solve the problem, instead they turn toward the social peer groups for support and whatever needs to be fixed languishes in purgatory waiting for leadership to come along and change the circumstances. But that never happens because leadership is not a group created attribute. Leadership can be channeled through people but it is not created by groups of people. It doesn’t come from the masses, it certainly doesn’t come from political parties. When political parties get together to raise money for a candidate or to strategically put up challengers for an upcoming election, the people participating could be said to be managing their objectives. Leadership happens when someone gives a motivating speech which pulls the objectives of everyone together for a common cause, it doesn’t happen as a default condition of group activity.

But like any group association where the members know the rules and have made sacrifices to their lives to live within them, the last thing they want to hear is that all those rules don’t matter and that some change in the form of leadership is challenging the order they have come to trust as a reality. They fall in love with the rules of conduct in group behaviors not because that conduct is good, but because they have come out on the plus side of it. In elements of the Republican party such as this loser I mention, they want a nice structured political group where the characters at play are controlled, the policies keep a progressive lean to them which has been there since the 1960s in America and any challenge to those assumptions are to be destroyed. For a normal person the value of the relationships in the group are their reason for being a part of the larger organization. But in my case, I just want things to work. So I could care less who says hi to me or who invites me to this or that. I go to things sometimes when invited if there is a good reason to go, but typically I don’t have the time. From my view, the relationships are irrelevant, they don’t do anything for me because I like to see good things happen and that usually means stepping over bad people who are in the way of something, so making friends never is my objective. Surprisingly, such a position makes far more friends than enemies because people like above the line people on an individual basis, but they find them repulsive in regards to group objectives.

As we step into yet another year, I have decided I’m not going to sugar coat little things like the criticisms that come from losers functioning from faulty positions when change is needed from a current approach. Regarding the GOP in Butler County I have watched many positive changes occur over the last decade and the results have made it better. Not just better for me, but better as a tactical political party. It doesn’t matter to me who gets mad in the process because making friends is not the objective, being successful is, and if losers think they can continue to contaminate success, they are living in a world that will be crashing down around them.

I gave two bits of advice to people on New Year’s Eve that are helpful to any general readership, the first is that no I’m not planning to run for office when there are lots of fun things to do in business at my particular age. Politics is something I consider serving the business world, so why would I do something in the service industry, because that’s what politics is. They certainly are rulers who give power to the office holders, and all too often that is how politicians view themselves, and would like to continue. But that’s not how it is. The other thing I said was that if you are the best at something you should never have to look over your back at those seeking an opportunity to ankle bite you out of existence. If you are the best who cares what other people are doing? If you really want to be successful you should never pay attention to what other people are doing. The moment you do care, is the moment that losers start controlling your life, and there are a lot of them. They were the ones who invented many of the problems of our modern age, because they have hidden the solution to problems within the limits of peer pressure. But if you are a person who excels in the things you do, there is nothing good that can come out of such a relationships. So why yield to it. The answer is, you don’t.

Rich Hoffman

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The Buccaneers Fired Dirk Koetter and the Bengals Finally Fired Marvin Lewis: To win you have to get rid of a problem, especially in areas of management

One of the reasons I am still a Tampa Bay Buccaneer fan after many seasons of losing is because the organization as ran by the Glazer family is always on a quest to find the right combination of coaching to match with the players they have on the field to be victorious. If they fall short, they do not hesitate to fire their coaches such as they did Sunday afternoon at the end of their season after losing to the Atlanta Falcons. Dirk Koetter had been with the team for three years but it was obvious with all the weapons the Bucs had on the field to use that the coaches just didn’t have an approach, and they ended the season with just five wins, most of them coming at the beginning. I thought Dirk Koetter was a pretty good guy, not the worst coach in the world, but even after victories after he’d hand out game balls to star players, there was something not quite right about him, and that surely turned up on the field. The Bucs organization is quick to determine that someone is working out and they fire them when its apparent that things just aren’t going to change which is precisely why I continue to love the Tampa Bay Buccaneer organization as a whole. They may not win every game, but at least they try to.

That is why the Bengals in Cincinnati should have terminated their relationship with Marvin Lewis years ago. The guy just doesn’t get it. They have stuck with him for 16 lackluster seasons and the results have never been good. He should have been fired many years ago because it was disrespectful to the Bengals fans who pay premium money for the NFL experience to expect them to put up with Marginal Marvin for so long. The resentment was obvious at the stadium even under the best of circumstances. I had gone to the game this year with good club seat tickets to watch Tampa Bay play the Bengals in Cincinnati on a beautiful October day just before Halloween. It was an absolutely perfect day for the NFL experience in a big city with real playoff implications, because at the time both teams were in the hunt. And the Bengals won that day so everyone should have been happy. But virtually everyone from the vendors selling beer to the men in the restroom talking to each other about the game across urinals were talking about how they were surprised that Marvin Lewis hadn’t found a way to blow the game. Any kind of respect for Marvin Lewis had left Cincinnati a long time ago, yet Mike Brown had stuck with him perpetually with no end in sight.

In any kind of successful organization, you can’t be trigger happy either. You have to give a new coach time to implement a change culture of winning from losing, and that should take a year or two. But in the NFL fans are the ones paying the bills, its unrealistic to expect them to put up with a bad team for more than a few years and still retain their season ticket packages. A lot of people say that Mike Brown doesn’t care about such things so long as he has a profitable television contract which I find hard to believe. As a businessman of any kind it is stupid to leave any money on the table and you don’t get to be as rich as the Brown family is by being stupid. I just don’t think they know what they are doing as football people. The father Paul Brown did understand, but his family didn’t and it shows.

The Bengals have been living in the past, they have had a couple of Superbowl appearances in the 1980s but nothing since and they are hanging their hat on that one achievement. Meanwhile the Tampa Bay Buccaneers won a Superbowl back in 2003 for a great 2002 season which had been many years in the making. But that was then, the world we live in is very much a what have you done for me lately reality. While at that Bengals game I wore my 2002 Superbowl victory hat for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and people kept saying to me that it was silly to wear that hat because it was a long time ago. I would then say to them with friendly banter that I would be happy to wear the Bengals Superbowl victory hat if they could get me one. Of course, that was when laughter from both sides exploded at the absurdity of it. But why should it be absurd?

The NFL is designed to give every city with an NFL team a shot at victory. I view much of the NFL structure as an entirely socialist enterprise where winners are penalized, and losers are boosted up, particularly in regard to draft picks. But this is because the goal of the NFL is to sell tickets and merchandise and if a team doesn’t make it to the big dance at least once a decade their fan base cools it in regard to spending. People generally support their home town team, but they don’t necessarily dream of a new football jersey for Christmas for a losing team. They want to at least thing that there is a chance at victory. Those are the basics of business. Yet in Cincinnati we have been asked to put up with losing as a reality and that goes against so many raw emotions for which the NFL experience depends. To stick with a coach like Marvin Lewis for so long because he’s a nice guy, which he is, or because he’s a progressive employment option that earns street credibility with the very progressive NFL isn’t enough to justify what they have asked fans to endure. You don’t keep a coach because of being nice or black, but because they win. That is the only objective in playing professional football—winning.

I would love to cheer on the Cincinnati Bengals. But I will always love the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and will spend quite a lot of money flying down to a game or two from time to time to blow many thousands of dollars on the Tampa economy because the Glazer family are always trying to do what they have to do to win. If the Bucs don’t win a single game in the whole season, I will still cheer them on. It didn’t surprise me at all that just a few hours after losing to Atlanta that Dirk Koetter was terminated as the head coach. It would have surprised me if he hadn’t been fired. But after the Bengals lost against the dreaded Steelers, YET AGAIN, it wouldn’t have surprised me if the Bengals had signed Lewis to a 150 year contract extension—but under tremendous public pressure, they finally fired Marvin Lewis. Because the Bengals have become synonymous to losers, and that is a terrible thing to bestow on a city that has supported that team through many years of lackluster performance. It’s a terrible disrespect to a community that doesn’t deserve it and I do feel sorry for Bengal fans. At least for me I can look forward to positive changes in the Buccaneer organization which gives me hope for an upcoming season of victory. That season may be over by the upcoming October, but at least they are trying. The Bengals are like drunken gamblers who have lost their life savings at a slot machine. They just keep pulling the lever and hoping for a new car. But all they ever get are lemons. Hopefully their next coach will be a real one.

Rich Hoffman

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