Tag: Rich Hoffman

Steven Spielberg: Just another Hollywood political hack

It pains me to say this, I love Steven Spielberg, I love John Williams, I even like Amazon’s Jeff Bezos—so what on earth are these idiots talking about regarding the merit of the “free press.”  In his new movie The Post, Spielberg, Tom Hanks and the eternally liberal feminist Meryl Streep act like they are changing the world with this rush job loser of a movie yet they had to get it out before the close of 2017 to qualify for the awards season.  Aside from the obvious political message the film is very sloppy—like it was made by college students—not the most successful filmmaker in the history of mankind.  The story is amazingly political.  The premise suggested by the movie—that the free press is our only vanguard against corrupt presidencies is completely ridiculous.  The Washington Post—the newspaper currently owned by Jeff Bezos isn’t a free press—it’s a liberal mouthpiece for the political left and a tool for trying to eliminate conservative politicians from races of consideration.  They are as corrupt as any K-Street lobbyists and couldn’t be considered trustworthy by any stretch of the imagination.  It’s amazing to me that Spielberg and Hanks would even suggest that there is some moral authority for which The Post had to speak from—because such a thought is one of the biggest fantasies in Spielberg’s long career at making movies—and that includes his version of Peter Pan in the movie Hook.

Like most things on the political left the foundations of thinking are rooted in disjointed emotions and a viewpoint from the bubble of the liberal neighborhoods they currently live in. The Obama administration as we have learned very late in the game was one of the most corrupt administrations in the history of the world—you’d have to go back to the Roman emperor Nero for a comparison—and The Washington Post has been silent on the matter—yet it has fully advanced the false notion that Russians are the reason Donald Trump won the presidency.  The American people don’t have faith in the left leaning “free press” of The Washington Post, The New York Times, and CNN.  Liberal people do because those outlets say what they want to hear just as Fox News traditionally might feed the political right a viewpoint favorable to their sentiments.  But facts are facts and many news outlets including Disney owned ABC has deliberately sat on stories to prevent the political left from looking bad.

Before Donald Trump’s election to the presidency I would occasionally buy a New York Times newspaper at my local Barnes and Nobel bookstore just to thumb through the pages and see what was going on in the world from the viewpoint of New York City.  I was able to overlook their obvious liberal bias because it wasn’t nearly as “in your face” as today’s anti-Trump media has been.  I even would read The New Yorker from time to time to keep up with the cultural drivers of our time—so I’m hardly a closed-minded Republican.  I’m a Ohio conservative so I am used to dealing with propaganda from the political left, even Fox News is now owned by the Disney Company so if I want to participate in the world, I have to deal with liberals.  But my beliefs aren’t just regional—because I was born in a conservative area, had conservative parents, and conservative grandparents—etc.  I’ve navigated through my adult life as an avid reader of history.  I never get drunk for any kind of entertainment as I love my mind more than anything in the world—and I enjoy feeding it good things—so my thoughts on things are formed by evidence as it plays out in the world—not what “people” and their viewpoints think of it.  For instance, for the third time in my life I am reading the big version of Adam Smith’s An Inquiry in the Nature and Causes of The Wealth of Nations shown in the included picture.  All the books in that stack for instance are my January 2018 projects and I will have them all read before the upcoming Super Bowl.  That stack is a continuous one that resides next to my reading chair.  The contents of the stack are ever-changing, but the stack is always there.  The point of the matter is that I am not drawing my conclusions about the nature of the “free press” based on any kind of pop culture sentiment—it is through the long view of historical perspective—so it deeply surprises me that Steve Spielberg—as an artist would allow himself to get so caught up in the local vantage points of his liberal Hollywood friends—because if they think the current Washington Post is anything more than a blog for the liberal views of Jeff Bezos—they are smoking crack and should be arrested immediately.

When the free press becomes part of the problem as it is now, we have no choice but to fight them.  We have watched them actively hide crimes from our faces much more severe than The Pentagon Papers ever were.  If that is the criteria of merit as shown in The Post—then where is the outrage over the crimes Hillary Clinton herself committed?  What about the FBI using the press as a way to hide their crimes and manipulate public opinion in ways they approved of?  What about that smidgen of evidence which continues to pour out of the Obama White House when it used the powers of government to crush political opponents and unmask competing administrations as they came into power?  The Trump administration was just trying to put together their team when Obama and his activist Justice Department was unmasking members of the transition team as a way to destroy them before they ever got started.  What they learned they leaked to that “free press” to work in cahoots with the aims of the political left to advance a sentiment for which the American public had just voted against–so much for a “righteous” Washington Post.

The essential premise of the movie, The Post is completely ridiculous and I’d expect much more out of these seasoned filmmakers than to propose that the free press especially in this modern era is anything less than another potential villain of misinformation with an agenda.  I’ve been involved in some of those little parties where some ditzy blond starlet yaks on and on about animal rights, women in the work place, and how wonderful Bill Clinton was in the White House with her tits falling out of her dress, drunk hoping to seduce her way into a movie role.  That is the world of Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg—they are bombarded by those types of people almost every day.  And actresses like that don’t really care about animal rights.  If by some chance she thought the film producers were conservative, she’d go on and on about the greatness of the NRA and how tax cuts helped her buy a new car as she was trying to make ends meet until her next movie role—(wink—look at my boobies).  But we expect more out of filmmakers who are as seasoned as Spielberg is.  Sadly it appears he’s become caught up in all this anti-Trump Hollywood sentiment and he is looking for another Oscar by appeasing those liberal members of the Academy with some red meat to fulfill their fantasies.  Yet all he’s really shown us is that he can’t be trusted to tell the truth either—as an artist.  He has become just another political hack, like the rest of them.

Rich Hoffman

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Revoking Franklin Delano Roosevelt from History: His friends Hitler and Mussolini would approve of the communism he helped nurture in China

After reading the very good book, The Big Lie during 2017 it settled an issue that has bothered me for years about one of my favorite books, The Way of the Fighter by my favorite military general Claire Lee Chennault. The year of the publication was 1949 as communism was sweeping into China for which Chennault had been commissioned to protect from Japanese aggression. Reading that book it always concerned me that Franklin Delano Roosevelt only supplied 100 P-40Bs to the American Volunteer Group commissioned to China for such a defense—and as World War II raged on, how General Stilwell in spite of all the great heroics Chennault squeezed out of his young pilots and crew seemed always to be undercutting the efforts in China to “just win enough.” Based on what I’m about to say, knowing more than the average knows about this subject from piecing together the kind of evidence that has deliberately been erased from history, that it is time to revoke the status of good presidency that is given to the radical leftist who brought socialism to America—FDR.

As we live in an age where the political left wants to remove Trump from office it is only fair to apply their same complaints back the other way on their own political leaders. After all, it is now irrefutable that the Obama administration used the powers of government to manipulate everything from the high court laws to the ground activism that has shown itself to be so violent. For many years there has been great controversy as to whether or not Franklin Delano Roosevelt knew that the Japanese were going to attack Pearl Harbor, and I think we can now conclude that he did—and that he hoped it would allow America to be pulled into the war so that he wouldn’t be forced to go against his friends on the political left, Bonito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler. For it was well-known during the entire 1930s that the three of them together represented a new kind of global socialism that was pouring forth throughout Europe and Roosevelt in many ways was the leader of the three. Hitler and Mussolini studied the American president and copied many of his tactics as a foundation for their own actions in Germany and Italy. The media even back then was well on board the socialist train and openly supported those three dictators—Roosevelt was clearly inclined toward those types of sentiments based on his policy actions.

The world had changed, General Patton was reprimanded by the future president General Eisenhower for slapping two soldiers who were having a nervous breakdown in Sicily which nearly had him fired—emotional polices that had been started by the Roosevelt administration. Ike to his credit punished Patton but did not fire him because the politics of that new age was understood. Ike knew they needed Patton to win the war in Europe even though it is now clear that Roosevelt only was committed to the war cosmetically. He felt sympathy for the Nazi and the Italian fascists and the constraints on victory that were placed on his generals like Patton, and Chennault in the Asian theater were deliberate. It is appalling to consider how many people died because of FDRs policy of protection of the Nazi regime. Remember, America only entered the war after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. Japan was being used to soften up China for the communists to move in after the wreckage of war prepared it for change.

Claire Chennault it is obvious in hind sight was never supposed to do so well at his job. The token P-40s that Roosevelt sent to him with American volunteers to stop the advance of Japan into China was only supposed to slow down the job so that the Communists in the north-east waiting for the outcome of the war to take its toll could make their move. It appears that all Chennault was to do in China was to slow down the progress and deplete the Japanese so that when the eventual communist invasion took place on recently conquered Chinese soil, that Moa Zedong would make fast action of conquest—which is what happened when the war was over and the Americans were pulled out of the region.

In the last chapter of The Way of the Fighter was a very upset Claire Chennault warning of what would happen if communism were allowed to rise up in China after all the hard work they had done to defend the nation from the Japanese. By then FDR was dead, but his polices had been firmly put in place just as Barack Obama’s destruction still continues even as Trump has spent the last year trying to undo them. Harry Truman was not such an aggressive type as President Trump—so the world that FDR put in motion during four terms as a United States president carried over to an easy communist victory in China once the Japanese surrendered and the war-torn country had no defense. The communists rolled to an easy victory after the war and everything that Chennault predicted in his last chapter of that great book came true. America ended up in two wars with communists, one in Vietnam and another in North Korea but they were only half fought cosmetic wars because the administrations of power in the Beltway wanted global communism. America was never supposed to win those wars, and nobody was going to let a rebellious general like Claire Chennault actually win in the traditional sense as he had in China with very little resources and a lot of out of the box thinking. It is sad to say that portions of the United States government—which had helped Mussolini and Hitler to power, were deliberately letting the spread of communism occur throughout Asia and they were willing to kill many thousands of people to make it happen.

The political left has been at open war with traditional America for nearly 200 years—and when I say traditional America I’m talking about the kind of people who formed this country from the 1770s to the Transcendentalist period just prior to the writing in Europe of The Communist Manifesto. Where transcendentalism was concerned about the purity and happiness of the human soul without the clutter of institutionalism, and Adam Smith’s great work The Wealth of Nations was exploding among economic theorists—tested in America for the first time—the intelligentsia movement was headed in the other direction, toward Kant and Marx. This clash of ideas exploded during the Teddy Roosevelt administrations and eventually gave rise to the Woodrow Wilson era of progressivism. These radical intellectuals thought they knew more than the rest of us and put to use their vile mechanisms of tyranny tied in knots through group think—and they didn’t care how many individuals they killed in the process so long as the greater good was achieved—to their view, global communism. FDR was of that mind and we see it in his New Deal which still corrupts us all to this very day. What I didn’t know until I read The Big Lie by Dinesh D’Souza was how closely Roosevelt, Hitler and Mussolini were to each other—and how they all attempted to use left-winged politics to essentially take over the world. In that regard I am certain that what socialism and fascism wasn’t doing in Europe Roosevelt intended the harsher communism for Asia—and he got it by working the Americans and the Japanese against each other to pave the way for the communists. It was all by design.

As we are going through a period of history where we are tearing down statues and terminating the careers of men who touch the boobies of women, we should consider ridding ourselves of the history of FDR and all his socialist policies to erase the memory of his massive scandals from history. I remember vividly how the former owner of the Cincinnati Reds, Marge Schott was driven from the public eye when she suggested a favorable historical perspective of Adolf Hitler. Yet we had a president in FDR who worked with those European dictators to change the world to socialism and communism and many people died as a result. So why don’t we apply the same logic to him? Why don’t we finally admit to ourselves that the political left hates America and wants to kill anyone who believes in those original American ideas of individualism over group think institutionalism? The evidence is abundant if only we had the courage as a nation to look at it. To confirm what I’ve said here only two sources need to be researched—The Big Lie and The Way of the Fighter. There are of course many more outlets, but those two would be a great place to start.

Rich Hoffman

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Why Lean Manufacturing is Dead: The Trump tax cuts change everything

Before moving on to more positive topics there need to be some additional information as to why Lean manufacturing is dead, and why it is more cult than fact.  Every company I’ve been associated with for the last twenty years has bought into the nonsense James Womack articulated in The Machine that Changed the World—which is an incredibly negative book about western manufacturing techniques.  While there is a lot to Lean manufacturing that is very worthwhile and should be looked at as the next generation of improved thought over mass production roots imitated in America—it certainly isn’t a silver bullet in solving everything as it was sold to American management.  It really comes down to a battle between two cultures where the obvious favoritism goes toward the Japanese market.

Nearly every fifth page of The Machine that Changed the World Womack and his pals criticize as inferior Western methods with an obvious academic lens of hatred.  The real purpose for the book wasn’t to make American business more profitable on an individual bases—but to make them more global—as the authors played their part in the grand scheme of wealth redistribution that was so common at the time. And for their part, they were very successful, large companies like Boeing, GE, Ford and so many others looked at their competition, the Japanese, and sought to beat them—but honestly it was too late.  I knew that when I worked at Cincinnati Milacron as one of their crack staff of Lean advisors.  They took me to their South Lebanon facility late in 1999 to study these methods by Womack and the gang so to save them from closure.  But before I had a chance to read all the materials they had dumped in my lap, the Oakley plant had almost completely closed down and they refocused their business to just delivery of CNC units as opposed to actually building machining centers. The South Lebanon facility closed in the early 2000s just a few years later. When our crack team of Lean manufacturing surgeons were gathered to save Milacron it was already too late—like the Titanic had already hit the iceberg.  Only it hadn’t sunk yet but those of us smart enough to look at the damage below decks knew it was going down.  A wound like that couldn’t be repaired at sea just as the culture at Milacron couldn’t be fixed by reading a few books too late in the process.

I currently work with a very smart engineer from Wichita, Kansas who could nearly tell the same story of the Boeing plant that closed down there.  While they were sinking they made him a Six Sigma Black Belt hoping to save their own fate from such a tragic end, but it didn’t work.  The employees just couldn’t make the change, they weren’t Japanese—the cultures were just too radically different.  And to Womack’s credit he is correct about most of his observations regarding Western approaches—we all saw what happened to General Motors.  The writing was on the wall way back in 1990 when The Machine that Changed the World was first published.  One of my daughters was born that year and it shocks me that she isn’t yet thirty years old, yet this Lean manufacturing stuff has been sold to the manufacturing world as some voodoo remedy that could stop all these plant closures when in reality it was just one culture dominating another.  I watched before my eyes the economy of southern Ohio cities like Norwood and Hamilton, Ohio evaporate.  The shopping mall I visited most as a child, the Middletown Mall turned into a ghost town within a few years and nearly every major industry died except for AK Steel which still operated as a traditional mass producer with heavily leveraged unionized labor holding it back from being better than it was.  Middletown, Ohio died and so did the people who lived within it. To the west all Trenton had going for it was the Miller Brewery plant which made the safe product of beer.  The tradeoff was again high cost employees protected by a union.  Many companies adopted Lean manufacturing to help get their labor unions under control but the bottom line was that American workers expected too much money for their productive output while Japanese based employees were willing to work for less in exchange for job security for a lifetime.

When you visit a Japanese plant you find that everyone dresses the same, in most cases.  When Westerners visit in their suits and ties they are given hats to wear to show all the other employees that these visitors are equal to the people on the shop floor.  They refer to their upper management as seniors because literally they are the people who have been at the company the longest.  The floor workers in Japan know that if they stay with the company, they will move up the latter so they are content with this reality.  While this solves problems that unions typically are concerned with, the security and income trajectory of their workforce makes a stable investment understandable, while in the West literally labor costs can fluctuate all over the place depending on the type of people who are running those organizations at any given time.  It is possible in America for instance for a sharp tack in the box to become a high level manager in their mid thirties if they worked hard and climbed the ladder at a fortunate company—while this would be very unlikely in Japan.  There, due to Lean manufacturing, that employee would have started on the shop floor as an assembler and might still be working their way into a management job due to their years of service and experience garnered.  This is the primary reason American companies have failed in their Lean offerings—they go through the motions, but they aren’t willing to go all the way and become like the Japanese.  There is more to Lean manufacturing than just a bunch of charts and Japanese words for things—it’s a philosophical approach to manufacturing that is part of the workplace culture.

Obviously in The Machine that Changed the World Womach and his buddies Jones and Roos were a bunch of statistical academics who bought into this global economy garbage and they thought the Japanese were going to dominate that push—which isn’t what happened.  While the Asian work ethic is something that is to be admired compared to the beaten down lethargicism that we find in the West these days—even the Japanese had their problems with just in time delivery when they became the global leaders at the front of the train.  They’ve had their own troubles leading from the top so as the smoke cleared it was obvious that the biggest difference between East and Western practices in manufacturing was cultural and that assumption was that if America wanted to play ball, they needed to become like the rest of the world.  Well, that too is a shifting dynamic that will change as early as 2018.

To act as a companion to The Machine that Changed the World coming straight out of academic circles and into politics was the notion of wealth redistribution.  America raised its corporate tax rate to up over 30% which pushed many American companies into foreign markets.  To the lesser educated minds the work of Womach appear to be genius.  We were led to believe that these companies were leaving because America was so inefficient when in reality it was really due to high taxes.  Politicians were selling globalism to Americans while they skimmed off excess for the IRS to fund all their progressive causes in the process of destroying American manufacturing.  President Trump knew all too well what was going on and before the close of the year in 2017 had the tax rates changed for corporations down to 21% and now we will see the truth that was there all along.  Jobs were mostly inventions of America and the high costs associated with them were due to American labor being higher than in places around the rest of the world.  But the reason for their leaving the United States was artificial due to high taxation.  Where Womach was pushing for a new global economy lead by the Japanese Lean manufacturing system that kept prices down and expectations for employee advancement low—and manageable—everything changed in December of 2017 when Trump signed the tax reform package which lowered corporate rates.

The nationalism Womach criticized so heavily in The Machine that Changed the World is now the economical method of our time.  With the tax rates lowered we find that Lean manufacturing was really just a scam designed to move wealth from one place to another using common sense improvements of traditional mass production utilizing a very competitive workforce by people who think differently than Americans.  Part of the American lifestyle is the assumption that everyone can have a piece of the dream, a house, a yard—a few cars and money in the bank where in other places they hope to have a bed to sleep in and a job to go to—because the rest of their lives aren’t very good.  There is a lifestyle expectation in America that is part of the consideration factor for which Womach completely ignores.  Even the Japanese who transplant to America formulate their lives around it so new methods of manufacturing improvement are due to be revolutionized to meet these market demands.  And Lean isn’t it.

For so many years we’ve all been told that the Decline in the West is inevitable and that it was they who had to change—but nothing could be further from the truth.  The decline of the west was manipulated by people like Womach to sell globalism to everyone as capitalism was the hidden driver of invention within The United States that made the jobs and created the markets to begin with—a little fact ignored by nearly everyone in every sector of academia—from anthropologists to the most astute economists.  America made the necessity for jobs and the markets for income flow—and the spillover effect is why they even have cell phones in places like Vietnam.  Without America nobody would have anything and that is the key to the next generation of manufacturing thinking.  It’s not to elsewhere that the keys reside—it is right in the homeland of America that we must look—and it is there where the great next movements of manufacturing will emerge.

Rich Hoffman

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The Death of Lean Manufacturing: Self confidence and experience can’t be tracked on a graph–but they make everything possible

I normally don’t cross the streams of my projects but I had an experience recently that was worth sharing, and well heck, it’s Christmas and if I can help a few people today—then why not.  For professional reasons I had to re-read The Machine that Changed the World which was written by three college academics, Don Jones, Dan Ross, and Jim Womack.  I never liked the book even though there are some very good things about business within it.  Instinctively I hated the message of Lean manufacturing—to me it was like a cult—but being in manufacturing in a leadership capacity I obviously had to know as much about Lean manufacturing techniques as possible to talk the language with everyone else.  I needed to re-read the aforementioned book because the project I’m working on requires it heavily so I had to pull the baby out of it while disposing of the bathwater you might say.  To me the elements of that book that are good are guided largely by Mr. Womack and are things I learned instinctively by working really hard for a very long time.  I didn’t need Womack to tell me to decentralize my processes, or to have horizontal management systems.  Or to build as much of a product as close to the same room as every other process to maximize efficiency—or countless other similar things.  I’ve understood those concepts since before that book was written for a 1990s audience.  Rather I am quite certain that Womack and his friends sought to use academia to become part of the manufacturing world for their own self relevance in the late 1980s and that they’ve scammed many businesses into buying in to this Lean concept which was essentially to use common sense techniques sharpened after several decades of mass production methods as a base point, and to unite the world and its governments under a common manufacturing technique which would unleash globalism to the masses.  However, Womack and his academic buddies were wrong—and I’m here to declare that Lean manufacturing is dead—if it were ever alive really in the first place other than selling itself as a Frankenstein monster of copied techniques not really understood for why they worked, but only that they did.  The next method of global manufacturing technique is likely somewhere along the lines of what I presented to my manufacturing team as a Christmas present witnessed below.  It’s a radical idea which I think was always the essence of Lean manufacturing but will be further drawn out by necessity in the future—the role the individual plays in utilizing minimal force for maximum results as a cascading effect of influence which comes from The Power of Positive Thinking. It’s a major metaphysical shift in thought which takes the globalism out of manufacturing and instead recognizes the immense power that an individual plays in the utterances of productive output.  I provided a demonstration using my bullwhip as a metaphor for daily action.

Once I cleared childhood and the natural fears that come from being little in a big world—like loud noises, water, falling and speaking in front of people, I have been fear free most of my conscious life.  I have never been a person who functioned from fear; I never feared authority figures, bullies, or circumstances beyond the horizon of the living world.  And no matter how harsh the world was, I never backed down from it.  In spite of living a very aggressive life I’ve never had a moment of crises where I gave up and turned away.  I’ve certainly wanted to, but I never have had that experience of defeat in the face of a challenge.  I never thought to because nowhere in my mind was anything ever supposed to be easy. I never had that contamination of thought.  Even as I read more books than any contemporary I know, I also understood that such a practice was quite common in the year’s past.  As a young man not yet out of my twenties I took my family to Thomas Jefferson’s home in Monticello because I thought it was important for them to have that experience in life.  Privately when our guide explained to me that Jefferson’s library started the Library of Congress, and that the former president had read voraciously over 1000 books—I silently endeavored to outdo him.  It was a goal I set for myself, and a lofty one.  In that regard my formal education has never stopped as I now read books like Womack’s for lunch.  I am currently re-reading Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations just because I am sure the message of 2018 will be all about capitalism as the Trump presidency turns it loose once again—and my role in all this is to explain it to people.   I enjoy my role and I love my books—but most of what I know came from the unique circumstances for which I learned to live in the world—and the many hard jobs I have had while being completely fearless about the actions that would come at me from day to day.  Over a twenty year period of my life I did every kind of job imaginable, from cleaning toilets to being a great sales closer.  I worked in every kind of assembly environment and at every level.  And while I was doing all that I became a very respectable bullwhip artist—and in my head all those things do go together.

Having no fear means that I approach things without restrictions of thought.  For instance, the little presentation I did professionally was unique because most in my position would never risk the credibility to their reputation to start with.  What if I had missed that candle, or not delivered my speech correctly?  I could have done more damage than good.  But the most important element to my life that makes me unique and good at what I do is my self confidence.  I never worry about not achieving something because I have enough personal love for what I do and know to trust it.  I have been tested in every way that a human being can be, and fear has tried to work its way into my life for decades, but it has never found an unlocked door for which to color my thoughts with even a single self doubt.  Part of my presentation to those very nice people was to show them that part of what makes people good is that practice and confidence which can deliver them to the promise land of prosperity.  And that it doesn’t always take force, it just takes focus.

What made the Toyota method work in Womack’s analysis which launched the Lean approach to most things business these days, was that the Japanese had a samurai culture which bred this kind of self-confidence, but additionally as people from Asia naturally worked well together in a team setting.  After World War II they were an occupied country dominated by their former enemy, the United States.  So with the same vigor that they kamikazed American ships at sea with a never say die attitude toward conflict, they sought to exploit the weaknesses of American manufacturing’s mass production techniques and applied their own spin built from their ancient warrior codes.  Using the American Deming as a foundation they invented Lean manufacturing as a way to put themselves back on top of the world and recover their losses after the war—and college academics like Womack and his friends saw a vehicle toward globalism for which they could hang their star.  But they all missed the point.   Europe as well never quite understood Lean manufacturing.  They certainly understood the team concept of brothers before stars and all that—but they could not get the idea introduced by the Japanese of lifelong employment starting at the bottom and working your way to the very top—always staying at the same company to preserve the assets in training for which each individual brings to the table.

The next wave of manufacturing philosophy will embody some formal core element for which I shared with my business partners above—and which I share with you today.  It doesn’t matter to me whether or not I am talking to only 150 employees or 30,000, the message of concentrated individual effort is the same—and the trust in themselves to do whatever task is needed.  For my demonstration, putting out the candle in front of a crowd when I have everything to lose and very little to gain was more than a stunt for some Holiday cheer, it was a demonstration in self-confidence that I wished to share for a more profitable 2018.  Nobody who works for me is the type of people I want to be scared when I walk into a room.  I wish for every human being on planet earth the same reality I have—a no fear approach to everything, and if I can get them there with some instruction, I’ll do it every time there is an opportunity. However, the keys to good business is not from formalized education or in methods of team building that ignore that there is no I in team, but there is in win—but that victories large and small come from the individual focused on what they are doing and sprinkle into their productivity a self assuredness that was always in the underbelly of Lean manufacturing.  That confidence never came from a European style chain of command, but from living and being confident in what you do in a microcosm so that the macrocosm was better off for it—and that is the real trick.

Just as I explained that to put a candle out with a bullwhip requires placing the small sonic boom right in front of the flame—a good productive life is just as delicate.  In putting out candles to do it successfully requires many thousands of possible trajectories of movement to get that sonic boom to occur in just the right place. My experience and practice allow me to find that spot quickly and within a few attempts.  When I did my demonstration the way to assure more accuracy would have been to mark on the floor the exact distance from the candle.  But I didn’t do that, nor did I use a targeting fixture for which I was accustomed.  While those things might have given more closer to 100% accuracy, they would have been meaningless for my demonstration.  I simply went down to IKEA for lunch and picked up whatever candle arrangement they had for the Holiday season.  Everything was very spontaneous which forced me to react to those changing circumstances and illicit to my audience the self-confidence it takes to pull off something like that.  Once they had seen me do it, then in their own minds it unlocked the possibilities they likely all thought about—and it was my hope that it didn’t just make them better employees for me, but in every aspect of their lives.  And in that statement is the key to the next generation of manufacturing and all things related to production.

Rich Hoffman

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The ‘Star Wars’ Backlash: Disney’s choice to make progressive films has hurt their product sustainability for the future

Disney could have avoided the whole issue.  They will make their money regardless, but all the controversy surrounding their new Star Wars film The Last Jedi was completely unnecessary.  The movie will do good business in spite of a sharp drop off in the weeks after its release—but like The Force Awakens that came before it; it could have done much better.   Many will argue that these movies didn’t need to do anything—they are making more money than any other film in the history of planet earth.  But there are problems with sustainability here that are clear—especially in The Last Jedi.  These filmmakers decided to make a noticeably progressive film complete with an emphasis on girl power, the fair treatment of animals, interracial romance, and even trying to throw a bone toward the gay community by hiring Laura Dern—the girl who helped Ellen come out of the closet.  The white guys are the bad guys and everyone else is trying to climb out from under their wrath—which is the essential part of the story—so of course the critics loved it.  But the audience score is noticeably hovering at only 50% which was a stunner for many analysts in the week leading up to Christmas.  It really shouldn’t be—my thoughts about the film nearly reflect the review by Ben Shapiro below—which is sometimes very funny—because it’s true.

The original movies were conservative movies whether or not George Lucas intended them that way or not.  They were warnings of big government imposing its will on people. They were also warnings about how a group of leftists such as the Nazis could emerge in a society with “thunderous applause.”  So conservatives like myself and young Ben Shapiro tend to be drawn to Star Wars and the core message.  And yes, the Nazis were socialist radicals of a left leaning philosophy which they borrowed from the Democrats in America. That is all historically accurate, yet the modern progressive left is trying to suppress that history and attribute them all to the political right.  That mess of thought is what ends up in a movie like The Last Jedi—where all the major plot points only work because of nostalgia but all the actions of the characters seem goofy and foreign—which is forgivable in a kids film.  But these are not the kinds of stories that will be beloved for decades like the originals were.  The modern political left doesn’t know what it is or what it believes because everything they love is built on lies.  That trait is quite clear in most Hollywood productions now because the entire industry is functioning from the same neurosis.

As I said with The Force Awakens, Disney could have avoided all this by just sticking to the stories of George Lucas and the canon established by the Extended Universe.  It was all there for them—hard core fans would have embraced a new trilogy set 40 years after Return of the Jedi with Jaina Solo leading the way as the new protagonist—but Disney and Lucasfilm wanted to tell a more progressive story.  In the EU Luke had built a wonderful Jedi school that was defending the galaxy against threats even from outside the galaxy.  Han Solo was the every reliable dad who always knew best—and was a respectable grandfather.  And Princess Leia was learning to be a Jedi master.  Hard core fans would have been satisfied, and casual fans would have still enjoyed the stories for the reasons they like these new ones.  Instead Lucasfilm led by Kathy Kennedy and Bob Iger decided that gender was more important, that showing common people from anywhere could do anything was more important and that progressive concerns were the driving force of these new movies where traditionalists were the villains.  In the Kathy Kennedy movies Han Solo was a deadbeat dad who failed his son and ran away from his wife. Luke is a loser who tried to kill his student and when he failed he retreated to an island to hide from the responsibilities of the galaxy making everything that happened in the original trilogy pointless—in every regard.  So of course only half the audience coming out of the theaters like the new movie.  Critics only like the progressive elements, but the people who have been fans and kept the film franchise at the top for so long were certainly ignored—and they aren’t happy about it.

I gave up on loving these movies.  I enjoy them because my grandkids like them, and they aren’t so bad that they don’t do what good mythology is supposed to do, and that is inform young people about right and wrong.  For me just getting a new John Williams soundtrack is enough.  The music from The Last Jedi is absolutely stunning.  But I can’t help but think that The Last Jedi was the last real Star Wars movie because the modern filmmakers just don’t have it in the tank to know what made Star Wars great to begin with.  They are too liberal and really don’t understand history the way that George Lucas did and it shows in the writing.  The entire plot of Rose and Finn in The Last Jedi was a liberal diatribe on the evils of capitalism and the correct treatment of animals.  The climax of the whole exchange was to show that a chubby Asian girl could kiss a black guy after saving him from a pointless suicide mission.  All that might be fine for some show on Netflix but in Star Wars—don’t expect everyone to love the movie when that kind of obvious political garbage is being shoved down the audiences’ throat.  Sure it did what Disney wanted, and pulled great reviews out of the critics—but that only front loaded the anticipation.  When audiences got into the theater and saw all that crap, they were obviously let down—and that isn’t good for the future of Star Wars.

I won’t lose any sleep over any of it.  I’m an EU guy.  I’m trying to give these new movies a chance mainly because they are the movies of my grandchildren’s generation and I want to share these stories with them.  But they are really screwing it up for the future at Lucasfilm—and it was all so unnecessary.  I still think that Rey in the movie is the daughter of Han and Leia Solo—and at this point it’s the only thing that can really save the franchise.  I think that will be the big reveal in Episode 9.  If not that, Han and Leia Solo were the worst parents in the galaxy and all the events of the original trilogy were meaningless.  Disney could have had all the good stuff right out of the gate and gone much further if they had just stayed away from doing their own thing and ignoring the EU.  They chose to make some upfront money while sacrificing the whole thing down the road—they destroyed the sustainability of it.  And that is why there is a very real Star Wars backlash showing up in the audience scoring.  Those scores mean many millions of lost dollars and that is trouble down the road for everyone connected to these movies. They should have listened up front and not been so audacious to think they could change things and still get away with a beloved series.

Rich Hoffman

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Trump Makes Idiots out of the United Nations: Gold always rules, not bureaucrats

Boy we’ve come a long way in such a short time. You know dear reader what I’ve said for many years—that the purpose of public education is for people to assimilate into their peer groups and for the pressure of those groups to enforce behavior patterns for which centralized societies can more easily control. Public education was never intended to teach children how to read, and conduct math. There are other ways to achieve those same objectives. But schools use those necessities as a cover story for their real intention—to teach people to follow the direction of their peer groups. That is the entire purpose, and is the primary cause of most modern forms of neurosis. But it was only five years ago where smart meters and other Agenda 21 United Nations initiatives were causing so much consternation among sovereign Americans. Now under Trump the United Nations has received a death-blow of its own by a President Trump who shrugged them off as worthless one day after revolutionary tax cuts cleared a House vote. The U.N. foolishly tried to apply peer pressure on the Trump administration with a 128-9 vote against the American measure to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.

http://www.latimes.com/nation/sns-bc-un–united-nations-us-jerusalem-20171221-story.html

The United Nations budget is around $7.8 billion dollars and the United States contributes around 28% of that—or $2.8 billion. I learned a long time ago from a business deal I had with the head of Servatii Bakery in Cincinnati that “he who has the gold rules.” It was a hard lesson for me, I was only 25 years old and my proposal which involved the head of the popular Cincinnati bakery involved many millions of potential dollars and a lot of private upfront investment. Essentially, I was working with no cash but a lot of effort I had done in partnership with a small team of people the leg work in showing this business leader how to get a change of use plan approved through the Cincinnati Building Commission. Once he had that information he changed the deal on me—which cost me a lot. When he flew back in from Las Vegas to a have sit down meeting with me for what I thought would be good news—he dropped the bomb that for him it made more sense to take what he learned from me and apply that knowledge to a partner who had deep pockets on another deal which had much less personal risk for him. Of course, I felt betrayed and that’s when he told me that line—which I’ve never forgotten. The same applies to the United Nations—they don’t have any gold, they have a lot of utopian ideas, but no cash to work with—so they are at the mercy of those who do have the gold—and that is the facts of life. Like it or not, that’s the way the ball bounces in life.

If you want to lead and make decisions for yourself and others who may want to follow you, you have to get your hands on some gold. You have to be willing to do the work, to have the proper philosophy in your life to allow you to have gold, you have to compete with the world to get it. In the case of the United Nations, they are running most of their countries on socialist economies, so they have very little gold. America is a fabulous capitalist economy—so it has a lot of wealth to work with. Yet it makes no sense at all to fund 28% of the United nations budget—for what? What do we get out of it? Agenda 21 threats—smart meters, washing machines that spy on how much water we use? The United Nations can mind their own business—and I don’t want to give those idiots any of my money—I can tell you that. However, for years no politician listened to us—instead they caved into the pressure of the United Nations as if it were an equal partnership. It was never equal. If it wasn’t for the United States there wouldn’t even be a United Nations. So why would any of our past presidents bow to anyone within the United Nations?

It took me nearly a decade to recover from that deal with the head of Servatii, but I eventually did. For many years I hated that guy and if I had caught him in the street after that initial shock wore off, there would have been trouble. But he was at the top of the pyramid and had cash to burn. He came to America as a German immigrant and worked his way to the top. I had a few opportunities to go to lunch with him and a few other multimillionaires and learned how those people thought—which ultimately was much more valuable to me than if the business deal had actually concluded. They certainly weren’t what the political left thinks of them—people like the Scrooge, or the Grinch—interpretations of wealth by socialist minded artists. They were smart guys who liked to compete and make money, and they were good people. That’s why it was so shocking to me to feel that sting of betrayal. At one dinner I was at with these guys I saw that the check came back at $13,000 which was all the money in the world to me at the time. When they saw my reaction, the laughed and told me that was a normal lunch cost—they did that everyday. And they were serious. I never forgot that either. So many people depended on those guys to spend their money on things–they had gold, they were the ones who ruled what happened and what didn’t. After my deal went sour it took me ten years and many jobs, sometimes three at a time to make ends meet and recover. For a long time, my wife and I only had one car which I left for her in case the kids needed to get somewhere. I rode a bicycle everywhere—all over the city of Cincinnati to whatever job I was doing, and I did that for many years. For a solid four-year period, I held two full-time jobs—both of them demanding overtime minimums at times of at least 10 hours each—a lot of times demanding Saturdays as well. All that time I read books on my break times and always strived to get back on my feet. I worked harder than anybody I ever met, and eventually I pulled back out on top and those expensive meals are something I experience again. This is what the United Nations is about to go through, they have now been cut off from the gold and they don’t have a means on their own of obtaining it. Will they work hard to solve their problem like I did on the microcosm? Probably not—and the result is that they will be destroyed.

The United Nations assumption that they had some ruling power over the United States was simply preposterous. They learned a hard lesson with Trump that gold truly does rule the world, not bureaucrats—the aristocratic societies of the past are officially dead—and it was Trump that killed them all with just a simple strategy of letting them defund themselves. You see, Trump always meant to defund the United Nations—that is after all why people like me voted for him as president. If he did it on his own he would have been a villain, just like that Servatii bakery guy needed me to figure out how to solve his permit problem so that his real objective could be fulfilled. Trump knew the United Nations would scrutinize his decision to move the embassy to Jerusalem. So when they made idiots of themselves by voting against the measure at the U.N. they gave Trump a free pass to withdraw the huge amounts of money that the United States pours into it. And who will win in the end—who do you think? He who has the gold always rules—and it is they who define fairness in the morality of value exchange. And that’s life.

http://www.politifact.com/global-news/statements/2017/feb/01/rob-portman/us-contribution-un-22-percent/

Rich Hoffman

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‘The 15:17 to Paris’: A Clint Eastwood movie coming at just the right time

Since the heroics of Spencer Stone, Anthony Sadler and Alek Skarlatos on that fateful train to Paris where they stopped a terrorist attack, I have to admit that I have been hoping to have the same encounter whenever I travel.  It must have been a very gratifying experience to be able to beat the shit out of a terrorist.  That’s why I think the movie version of that famous event will do extraordinary business, because in America I think my feelings are quite common when it comes to terrorism, whether it was the neighbor to a church in Texas who stopped the shooter that unleashed a barrage of bullets into the innocent with a gun of his own, or the countless episodes in just the last few months where law enforcement and private citizens have done the same the moment they heard that, crack, pop, crack of .223 bullets splitting the air toward dreadful intentions.  Leave it to Clint Eastwood to capture that American gusto in his newest film The 15:17 to Paris, which is set to release on February 8th 2018.

I’ve ridden on trains through France, just as that trailer set up the story, and I experienced very much the same emotions—especially in regard to the European baby Cokes.  Eastwood is a master of the movie making craft at his mid-80s maturation and nobody does the little things better these days than him.  I said it at the time that when Eastwood decided to make a movie of the book written by the three heroes that he’d do great things with the project—and he did by casting the three guys to play themselves in the movie.  That took extraordinary confidence on his part and I think the result that ends up on-screen will be incredible.  America needs a story like this right now and especially under a Trump White House, the cultural phenomena that it has a chance to become are ripe for the exemplary.

It’s obvious that Eastwood is going to explore the how and why these three ordinary kids become the heroes they did—and I’m quite certain that the answer will reside in the philosophy of Americanism.  I remember when the guys were being praised after the event around the world for their heroism and thinking—why them?  There were over 500 people on that train that day, and why was it three Americans who stopped the terrorist?  Well, I know the answer, but the world has been banging its head against the rails trying to come to grips with it.  The reason of course is that we make Americans from the time they are little kids into their adulthoods with a sense of self-purpose—with an assumption that they can do and be whatever they want in life.  In Europe they are raised quite differently, because they have a history of bloodlines and aristocracy that keeps them from assuming that their destinies are largely in their own hands.

The idea that an individual can make a difference and do anything is an American concept.  Not everyone in America gets it obviously, but the concept is there for anyone to answer and in the case of Spencer Stone, Anthony Sadler and Alek Skarlatos, they certainly did and Eastwood’s direction for the film will no doubt explore that.  People inclined to fate might otherwise just sit there and let the events of terrorism do what they will do—and people will live or die accordingly.  But changing that fate is something that you can see in the eyes of Spencer Stone in that preview—which is what Eastwood was obviously after when he decided to cast them in a movie about themselves.  He wanted to show audiences what that looks like—to believe to their very core that if they wanted to change the fate of something, then individual action was the key to doing so.  Some wimpy actor can try to mimic that behavior, which is how Eastwood pulled off the great work he did for American Sniper.  But with something like this, in the age of terrorism—how best to combat terrorism but to teach people not to be so damn afraid of every little thing.  So bullets are coming at you.  Maybe some hit you.  So what?  But for a chance to beat the crap out of a terrorist and stop the death of hundreds of people who might otherwise have international consequences—who wouldn’t want the opportunity to do what these three guys did?  I’d love the chance.

Clint Eastwood as I’ve said before is my favorite movie director—he has been for a while and he’s only become better over time.  So I’d go see this movie regardless of what it was about and who was in it.  Every film he does could be his last, so he appears to be putting a lot of love into each one of them while he still can—which is very admirable.  But even for him the timing of this movie and the way it will be presented I don’t think could come under better circumstances.  America has had a year of Trump.  The economy is booming, tax cuts are coming, the Deep State is being exposed and cleansed of its activists—the world is respecting us again and terrorists are on their heels.  All that has largely happened because normal every day Americans have had the courage to do their part in Making America Great Again and Clint Eastwood has captured that in this film.

Warner Bros. will have a massive hit on their hands when they release this, because we are all feeling it, and we want this story.  Once we see this story it will only accelerate the process which explores what makes Americans different in a positive way—what makes them run toward danger when others cower and pray for mercy?  That’s what The 15:17 to Paris is all about.  As I said, I’ve been on a train across the French countryside, so I can relate to those opening shots.  And in Paris which many consider to be one of the greatest cities in the world—I can say that Americans are very easy to spot.  We think different, and not in a bad way.  We like our Cokes bigger, we enjoy more food—we tend to be bigger and stronger as a result—but more than anything we like what we like when we want it, because we come from a culture that feeds that nature in us.  We don’t like long lines—we don’t like public transportation—because we want to be in charge of our own destinies whenever possible—and we don’t like to be pushed around.  When someone points a gun in our face, we have more than a few of us who will charge that attacker for the glory and pride of doing so no matter what might happen afterwards because we were born free and recognize quickly around the world where tyrants look to oppress—and we naturally don’t like it.

I will be one of the first in line to see The 15:17 to Paris.  I can’t wait!

Rich Hoffman

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Trump the Destroyer and Beyond Pairs of Opposites: ‘The Last Jedi’s’ message to the 21st Century

There is nothing I enjoy more than a good discussion about very heady topics.  It really is the only thing that interests me so my mind is often open to these elements when I see them.  And before everyone complains that I’m writing another Star Wars article, it would be worth the time to follow through on this one, because we’re going to talk about some important stuff.  After the dust settled on The Last Jedi—once I had seen it and considered what Disney’s role in the whole thing was, and compared all that to these really massive investigations into the FBI and Donald Trump’s institution cleansing presidency—I have a few thoughts to share to those with a mind to listen.  So here it goes.

Taken up close, there is a lot to be angry about.  There’s a lot to fix, and most of us do not understand our role in the grand scheme of things.  We can call that grand scheme God if you’d like, but I’d prefer the term Grand Fortissimo—A term I acquired after reading the Joseph Campbell masterpieces The Masks of God many years ago for which that term was applied to the steady march and consideration  of the human race—from its inception to the present.  Art after all is the yearnings and toils of the mind and the imagination which fosters it—and Star Wars was always a work of modern art presented as myth to a hungry public needing more than what other forms of entertainment typically give us.  I’m not particularly happy with the direction Disney has taken the Star Wars stories—because taken at the ground level—these new films are very progressive in their values which makes them political in a negative way.  But………what separates Star Wars from the pack is that they are rooted in very ancient mythologies which have been always trying to answer the big meaning of life questions we all seek and to get there it is the orchestral music of John Williams which takes what might otherwise be average television plot lines and elevates them into the realm of modern myth.

As I was thinking about all this I listened to the new Last Jedi soundtrack by 85-year-old John Williams and if there was ever a person on earth that has the powers of God working through him, it is that guy.  Listening to the music with no images attached, just a good symphonic score pulled from the movie is just amazing.  What he put down on paper is something that would rival Mozart or Bach or Tchaikovsky any day.  That Ahch-To them from The Last Jedi which was introduced at the end of The Force Awakens I think represents the direction of the human race in the 21st century and John Williams is quite well aware of it.  It’s fully majestic and deeply philosophical and touches on all the classic myths of our imaginations and shines a light to where we are going.  For Williams to capture all that in just a few notes is nothing short of genius.  As I was listening to that little piece in my car with the windows up and the sound turned up as loud as I could get it to go I received a notification from my oldest daughter that NASA was sending up a copy of The Last Jedi for everyone to watch up on the International Space Station.  On another notification I received the Friday box office results which was tracking The Last Jedi to break over 200 million domestically by Sunday night—which is extraordinary.  Even though I thought the surface plot of The Last Jedi was pretty mediocre—almost descending into the plot of the latest stupid Star Trek movie, Into Darkness—the deeper elements of it are actually quite sophisticated, which is a serious nod of the hat to Rian Johnson, the director.  He chose to essentially make this Episode 8 movie a modern rendition of the classic Twin War Gods Navaho legend and it is quite effective.

Meanwhile Donald Trump is shaking up the entire world of the establishment.  Liberals might see Trump as Snoke from The Last Jedi and they are guarding themselves from the First Order of his creation.  Conservatives see Trump as the Rebellion fighting against an evil faceless Empire where the Deep State has all the power and might we see in the Star Wars movies as being something worth fighting.  The main them of The Last Jedi is the motif of most mythologies that we know of, and that is to move beyond the pairs of opposites—the yen and yang life.  The cultures of our past which built pyramids understood this all too well, you pick your side and work your way intellectually up to the point where you will have to meld with all the other sides of the pyramid.  Life forces you to pick sides, but once the roles we play in the conflict of living are concluded, all sides blend at the point.  At the end of The Last Jedi what Rian Johnson has done was essentially kill all the villains to merge the characters into this concept which was pretty bold stuff.  I am pretty sure that Donald Trump is a Star Wars fan, and I’d dare say he understands what I’m talking about and he knows his role in all this is a Shiva role—a destroyer of evil and a transformer upon our culture.  I remember when the Rogue One Blue-ray came out in April of this year Trump was playing it on Air Force One while reporters where talking to him.  Trump gets it—I’m quite sure of it.  His job is to clear away all the institutional hesitation for which Star Wars is conceptually introducing to the human race a tomorrow for which we presently aren’t prepared for.  That is clearly the intention of The Last Jedi—to bring mankind to the top of the pyramids and to now move beyond—which no culture in the history of the world has done so far—that we know of.  If they have in the past, they left earth long ago.

It was just this week that Trump announced the next steps for NASA which are going to once again use the space race to spur our economy along into uncharted waters.  Within a few decades we will all have to make a conscious decision as to whether or not we want to die—because we’ll be able to download ourselves into some form of A.I.  We’ll also be able to biologically heal ourselves—so there’s that as well. We are moving toward a time where dying for the honor of our flags, or our loved ones is really going to be robbed of its merit—and what are we going to do then?  How do we live beyond the pairs of opposites—once we’ve had reconciliation with the “father” whether it’s the God of the Christian Bible or the Sun from the Navaho legend?  We must have Shiva destroy the old world and to clear away all the smoke so that we can see the top of the pyramid, then we will complete that climb and move into that next age.  Star Wars is providing a road map of thought to help us through art and subconsciously we seem to understand. Donald Trump for the world right now is Shiva—and I say that in the most positive manner.  He is working beyond the villains of Star Wars for that moment on Ahch-To when Luke vanished at the end of The Last Jedi to join Yoda in the realm of the dead—which aren’t so dead—but willing participants in the theater of life.  Very interesting.

Donald Trump and Disney without really planning it in any way are serving as the two greatest influences that are shaping our culture of tomorrow in ways that many of us today still can’t fathom.  I saw a lot of people at my screening of The Last Jedi who are full-grown adults dressed up for the movie.  This stuff is a religion to them now, and that is taking us all to places that are uncharted in the human experience.  While our political assumptions are being destroyed—rightfully so, our art is providing us with a road map to renewed self-discovery.  Star Wars is not just a movie experience; it is amid all the sex scandals and the obvious destruction of Hollywood the best and only safe place that we can still trust.  It’s all around us at Target, Wal-Mart and even in our cars.  It’s fueling the imagination of NASA which has been given wings again under Trump and where we are all heading for is that grand fortissimo I was talking about.  It may take thirty or forty more years, but we’re going to be going somewhere we’ve never been before and I think that is absolutely wonderful.

Rich Hoffman

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Why Trump Should Never Stop Using Twitter: If we really want to fix the problems, we have to talk about them

I keep hearing this ridiculous notion that President Trump should stop Tweeting.  Everyone says it, even his supporters—yet they miss that Twitter is the key, and the essence of the American President.  Without it, he would have never been elected to begin with, and because of it, the Deep State is being exposed in ways that no court system would even dare.  Even with the mountains of evidence witnessed about FBI corruption, Jeff Sessions is reluctant to do anything that might draw fire from the establishment and he’s a handpicked Trump guy.  Imagine how bad things really were when Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch were in those activist seats at the head of the Department of Justice. An honest, talkative president is exactly what this country needed, and a platform to speak from because the rest of the institutional elements of our modern society from the press down to the most ardent government employee function in ways that prevent analysis of their purposeless existence.

The President should never stop Tweeting!  The reason so many people are upset about it, and about the times of day that Trump does it is that it shows the establishment that they do not have control of this president—and control is what they were used to.  I remember specifically about George W. Bush, when he was first in office he stated that he hoped to bring the Norman Rockwell paintings that reflected American life back to the forefront of consideration.  Yet within a few months of getting into office he became just another mouthpiece of mundane representation and drifted quickly into the background.  The heads of each department of our government quickly took over and the media filtered the results to us leaving the importance of the presidential role in our country to be largely ceremonial—such as giving pardon to the Turkey during times of Thanksgiving and occasionally signing a bill once congress presented one.  It didn’t matter if the president was a Republican or a Democrat; they were all molded by the establishment into kind of the same neutered presence.  They were to do what they were told and the media would tell the story.  In that way the press was given the impression that they were running things because elected officials accepted that they had to appease the journalists if they wanted to show a track record of success.

Trump as a negotiator is clearly using his skills to push and pull positions which are unique in any elected office.  Trump is a salesman first and the only way he can really discover the position of the opposition is to put out probing ideas and to see how people react to it.  I knew what I was voting for when I cast my ballot for Trump.  I expect him to be malleable on specifics, but resolute on core philosophy and when it comes to him—the thing he cares about most is winning his engagements.  Business people often engage in contentious debate but then settle things over a game of golf or a nice dinner.  That is not how politicians do things—they often present a contentious front to satisfy their donor base, but like big time wrestlers they are all talk and now shows regarding philosophy.  They have no expectation of victory, only to show through the media a track record that keeps them in office with each new election.  They are like assembly line workers who never quite accomplish a task who are leveraging for overtime by saying that if I had just one more hour, they could complete the task.  Yet they never quite get there so they keep asking for more and more and more, then blame the system for why they can never achieve their objective.  Voters are typically too busy to pay close attention to the details and that’s how we end up with the mess we see now—a corrupt government used to doing nothing, running up debt, and ruining the lives of us all with their inside the Beltway priorities.

Most politicians seek to build off a perceived victory but Trump knows that the name of the game is stagnation, so when he does accomplish something big—like enacting deregulation, or rolling back Net Neutrality—or even recommitting America back to the space race—he’ll drop a Tweet picking a fight with someone so that the resources of the “system” fixate on his subject which diverts legislative terrorists from sending in suicide squads to destroy his agenda items—and it works well.  Trump has managed to do a remarkable number of things in his first year and he protects them by keeping antagonists talking about the “small stuff.”  It would be nice if we lived in a world where achievement was respected, and even sought after—but we’re not.  Too many people have a stake in stagnation—it’s actually their livelihood so reform is not in their thoughts.

The sum of all this is of course is that change is happening because for the first time I think in our nation’s history we are talking about things.  Without Trump’s Tweets, the FBI would not be exposed as they are now.  That’s why Chuck Schumer is so upset with Trump’s “Tweets.”  Remember in the beginning of the Trump presidency when Chuck Schumer threatened that the newcomer to politics mind his mouth otherwise the American intelligence agencies would take notice?  That was a threat, and one that has been used on many presidents in the past and other civilians—because don’t forget a president is not a king—they are simply elected civilians who are put in charge of one branch of government—and given the keys to the military so to appease the public with the fantasy that they are the ones in control of that awesome power. In reality the Deep State works for the politicians and the donors and everyone was getting their marching orders from K-Street behind the glitzy prostitutes who show up after the sun goes down.  All the little know-nothing attorneys who become lobbyists and sit in the bars along that stretch of road just outside the reach of the White House have always thought that they were contributing little unelected tid-bits to the realities of our Republic, but not anymore.  Now there is a guy from the civilian sector willing to call them out on Twitter and that scares them literally.

The Deep State assumed that they’d play their game and that Trump would have been destroyed by last summer—because for most people that’s what would have happened.  But when Trump defended himself and fought back—the way anybody should have—the methods which have controlled so many presidents of the past for the entire history of our nation, stopped working. And the house of cards for which they had built their temples of governmental worship fell down quickly as if a child had built the whole thing in a play room before their mother pressed them to dinner.  The entire institution for which our nation was built on the backs of corruption and malice was exposed as just a flimsy plaything for the old aristocrats of Europe who came to America to keep us all tied to the motherland of history.  However, that was never Trump’s mission. His task was to win, not only the seat in the White House, but to win the whole game and give it back to the American people, which is exactly what he’s doing.  And if it wasn’t for Twitter, nothing would be happening.  Trump should never quit using Twitter—and saying the things he says.  We can’t allow the establishment to hide malice behind politeness and rules of engagement that they control.  If we really want to fix the problems of our nation we have to attack them where they truly reside and for Trump—Twitter has been the means of delivery.  The goal of an American president should never be to get along with the media, congress, the FBI, K-Street or even the nations of the world.  The only goal should be to keep America a great nation the best way they can during their time in office.  A lot of them step into the White House with each new election and assume that they are going to change the world for the better—but they soon learn what limited powers they really have.  Within a few months of office they become just placeholders for history and they finish their terms in that role.  Trump is the first president perhaps in the history of the world who is changing that notion on behalf of the people who elected him.  And Twitter is the key to his success in this day and time of 2018.  In the future it will probably be something else but for now, Twitter is the means of restoring America to the greatness that was always there—which likely really pisses off the people who run Twitter because they are hardly a bastion of conservatism.

Rich Hoffman

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Jim Renacci and ‘The Last Jedi’: Liberals and their Resistance are more alike than they know

One thing that I really like about Jim Renacci’s run for the governorship within the state of Ohio is that he is very light on his feet. As he had a press conference early in the week for which the new Star Wars movie The Last Jedi was released I thought it was cleaver that he was active on Twitter tying the needs of his campaign to the pop culture monstrosity. It was a hip move that was reminiscent to the light on his feet nature of Donald Trump. The big news of course was that Renacci was partnering up with Cincinnati councilwoman Amy Murray which was another smart move—and for most politicians that would have been their news highlight of the week. But what is noticeable about Jim Renacci is that he’s very competitive, and determined to win whatever he does which is why I’m supporting him for his run for governor—to replace the docile, and much maligned closet liberal—John Kasich.

https://twitter.com/JimRenacci/status/940374420601876480

The candidacy of Renacci is actually very much in line with the pop culture for which Star Wars represents to our society at large. I’ve seen The Last Jedi, the most recent Star Wars film at an early screening and it was good of course in its own way. I understand now that I’m a traditional Star Wars guy and that these new movies, books and televisions shows will never touch my heart the way they once did—which is fine. They are fun movies that are dealing with a lot of very contemporary mythology, but nobody did it better than George Lucas. Disney should have followed the Lucas stories and stayed away from these much more progressive adoptions created by the San Francisco kids at Lucasfilm. I’ll give a little review of course once the dust settles—because there is a lot to think about. But one take away that is directly connected to the politics of our real world is that the Resistance in the movie is very much reflective of today’s political left.

I’m a Rebellion guy from the first Star Wars led by Han Solo. When Solo was a general the Rebellion won and destroyed the Empire and it was a very Ayn Rand type of embodiment. In these new movies it’s not the Rebellion any more it’s the Resistance and the new Han Solo type of character is Poe Dameron. Led completely by women now, the Resistance is very progressive and as a result they are losing. In fact, they are not only losing, but they are dreadfully inefficient and nobody in the galaxy seems to be rallying to their cause. That is a far different thing from the first movies where hot-shot pilots like Biggs and Wedge were defecting from the Empire to fight for the Rebels. In The Last Jedi, the defectors are from the Resistance. Given how politically charged our current entertainment culture is I thought it was very telling that Carrie Fisher and Laura Dern berated Poe for being too reckless and not following orders—which is ironically how people who win a lot do so—by not following orders. Then when he wasn’t in the room they commented on the fact that they only kept Poe around because he was a good-looking guy. So that’s how these progressive women like Kathy Kennedy who is running all these Star Wars movies these days see the way the world of tomorrow will be? Sexual harassment will now be dished out by the women because they are now empowered? Not that I care really, but it is a very interesting thing to watch—the hypocrisy is hilarious.

Leading up to this Star Wars movie many people who are anti-Trump including many of the production staff and actors in The Last Jedi made it clear that the Resistance was reflective of their political ideology. Without question given the number of scenes where members of the Resistance made really desperate sacrifices we are seeing essentially what the political left believes is their plight in life. They think like that FBI agent Peter Strzok who felt it was their plight in life to do whatever needed to be done to keep Donald Trump out of office—as if they knew better than the rest of us what was right. I’m a person who hates bad guys in movies, but there were a lot of moments whether it was intentional or not, that Kylo Ren was the star of the film. He was the one who had it all together and was able to achieve objectives—and to get things done. Even to the point where nice girl Rey was tempted by his power. I felt that the makers of this Star Wars movie wonderfully directed by Rian Johnson meant to say one thing about the state of politics in our current world, but ended up saying something completely unintentional—like we know we’re losers and understand why.

In the original stories by George Lucas it was the pirate Han Solo who shook off the rules and helped the Rebellion start winning again that served as the guiding light of the entire franchise. He made the Empire look like a bunch of bumbling fools outwitting them time and time again in a classic good guys against bad guy fashion. Yet in these new Star Wars movies it is the First Order now led by Kylo Ren who makes the Resistance look pathetic and weak. I know the metaphor for these modern Hollywood artists is that the First Order is the modern equivalent of Hitler or President Trump—but its not the Resistance they really adore as artists—it’s the power of Kylo Ren. It’s like a woman who says she hates men with long hair who play in rock bands doing drugs day and night then turn around and leave their nice husbands and children for just such reckless characters. There is a unique scene in The Last Jedi where it’s a kind of upside down world from the Stranger Things television show. The schizophrenia that I’m talking about is on full display here and I think they think they’ve concealed their insecurities, but at the end of the movie when there is literally nobody left in the Resistance I couldn’t help but feel that the inner fear that all members of the Progressive caucus are experiencing now can be summed up at the end of the movie. They know that the demands of the story will pull the natural order of things toward Kylo Ren in the end with Rey helping to tame him toward the needs of existence. But the story is not Rey’s, it is clearly about Kylo Ren—Han Solo’s son that was seduced to evil off the superstitions of a Luke Skywalker who thought about killing the young lad in his sleep—and then propelled him to the Dark Side out of self-preservation.

You might ask what any of this has to do with Jim Renacci and his run for governorship. Other than the fact that he used a cleaver Star Wars ad to show how he was different from his competition the candidacy is enough to stir the concerns of the real Resistance that exists in our very tangible political world. The progressives and establishment types who now look at these days of Trump and think of themselves as the Resistance in Star Wars are more correct than they know. They may get little moments of victory—like in the case of the Alabama senate race—but like the events of The Last Jedi, their numbers are dwindling down into nothing while all the resources of a vast galaxy are going to the other side. The insecurity they all face is the same as the one in that movie where Kylo Ren is supposed to be the villain—but is he really in the ways of the Force? Maybe it’s the idiots in the Resistance who are so prone to kill themselves for stupid reasons who are the real villains and that is a thought that I couldn’t help but conclude as the lights came on and the movie was over. Good guys and bad guys are really a matter of perspective definition. But………….only one side is right and one side is wrong and when nobody is left on the other side—the answer becomes obvious. What I learned from The Last Jedi is that the Force hates the Resistance. And that appears to be what’s going on in real life politics too.

Rich Hoffman

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