Tag: Rich Hoffman

Ann Becker Sworn in as a West Chester Trustee: Everyone loves a winner

I thought it was ironic that the same day Donald Trump won his case in court for his appointment to head the CFPD that my friend Ann Becker was sworn in as the new West Chester Township Trustee. What they had in common was they were both ushered in on the backs of victory where opposing forces had once been hard lined against them.  The key wins in elected offices had solidified sentiment toward a productive outcome. Former political adversaries had been united under the banner of victory and that is truly something wonderful. I sat in the back of Ann’s swearing ceremony, which made the video below a little hard to hear, because I wanted a nice panoramic of the packed audience. There were many there to show their support for Ann who were certainly no fans of her just three years ago. But Ann had shown wonderful leadership in helping get people elected into key Central Committee positions and she was a paramount figure in helping Donald Trump get elected in southern Ohio with Sheriff Jones. From there the rest of the Republican Party put their differences aside to rally behind Ann when she ran for George Lang’s vacant seat as he went on to become a congressman for the State of Ohio. For this moment to arrive it took a lot of effort and careful politics, and for all that tenacity I am extremely proud of Ann Becker.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/business/wp/2017/11/28/while-the-white-house-battles-for-control-heres-whats-at-stake-for-the-cfpb/?utm_term=.7402db0acb62

Yes, the tide is changing and even people who reluctantly put their finger to the wind just months ago and thought that John Kasich’s brand of GOP would win out in Ohio now see that Trump is setting the agenda at the top and local politics is building that infrastructure at the ground level and people can now see the results. The victory for Trump at the CFPD represented a major blow to the kind of politics we are all used to. And as Ann Becker took her oath many of the people in the room who were there to welcome her into that new level of politics, had plans for her they hoped to shape. Whether those plans might be easy passage of the next police budget, or some favorable vote to use tax payer money on some private venture—Ann was the President of the Cincinnati Tea Party—so politics as usual was something that would be difficult for them to adjust to. Reform is in her every drop of blood. She is savvy enough to be nice about it, and to listen to all sides, but when the rubber hits the road, Ann is a major part of the countrywide revolution that took place over the last 10 years and now she’s on a career path as a powerful politician.

After the ceremony many of us went over to RJ’s Sports Pub to celebrate and I was surprised by how many people showed up. The waitress confided to me that they were nowhere near prepared for the onslaught of people who arrived. I don’t think Ann even thought so many people would show up to see her sworn in, let alone go to RJ’s after to celebrate with her. Winning has a unique way of unifying people. Everyone loves a winner. I remember a few years ago when secret tapes came out of the Republican Party of Butler County where the old guard was laminating against Ann Becker’s Tea Party oriented philosophy because back then conventional wisdom mandated that the Tea Party would fizzle out after the IRS crackdowns, and establishment Republicans all the way to the top were part of that conspiracy—they were part of the Swamp, part of the world that created government divisions like the CFPD to embed itself into our capitalist system and run everything from a centralized authority of Republicans and Democrats bringing to life FDR’s “Middle Way.” Ann didn’t appear to have a chance at ever being a formal candidate for anything—because her political outlook was just too pure for many establishment types to consider. But after her win to the State Central Committee and her gradual work from within, people began to see the light and like everything in life, once she proved herself to be a winner—they wanted to be near her.

We can see this phenomenon when a winning sports team is doing well, the community usually jumps on the bandwagon at the end and supports them with jersey purchases and an increase in ticket sales. Losing does not bring this kind of behavior about in people. Only winning. Winning can convert the most adversarial enemy over to your way of thinking by track record alone, and is the key to a strong negotiating position. Respect always accompanies winning, by the nature of human beings. After a year in office and all the powers of the press and politics to derail President Trump, he is a winner and is steamrolling right over everyone, friends and enemies alike. Because he’s a winner he can do things that nobody else can, which is why he is now the leader of the Republican Party. Ten years ago the Butler County Republican Party was much different from the one of today. No longer are the John Boehners and John Kasichs running things it’s people like Ann Becker and Mark Welch who are challenging their peers to the north in Liberty Township and to the west in Fairfield with a level of competency that has not been expected before—but is now. In that way the politics of Butler County changed quite a lot with the swearing-in of Ann Becker.

I’ve certainly not been a fan of Lee Wong, but even he was wearing the colors of change in his demeanor as he welcomed Ann to the board during the swearing-in. I don’t think Lee is a conservative at all by the way he legislates, but in the politics of Butler County there really isn’t a choice. The philosophy of Ann Becker has pulled the party much more to the right just as Donald Trump has at the federal level just by standing her ground and being authentic. That is a trait all winners possess, an unmistakable tenacity that brings people to you rather than you to them.

When Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer refused to come to the White House on the same day to talk budgets and taxes with Trump that was a first for the Democrats—it was something we hadn’t seen before. What it essentially amounts to is that they are losing the game and are refusing to finish. It is obvious now that the special prosecutor investigation is going nowhere, and momentum is completely on Trump’s side. Tax cuts are happening without their involvement or ability to stop it. Trump is appointing conservative judges, without their ability to stop him. Christmas has returned to the White House, without anybody in the media being able to stop it through ankle biting criticism. And good luck beating Trump on a government shutdown. Yes, times have changed a lot.

And that change was obvious with the election of Ann Becker as the newest member of the West Chester Trustees. By winning the winds of reform are at her back and all she needs to do to continue winning, is just to be herself. Everything else will take care of itself. For a young woman who just a few years ago had so many enemies she suddenly has lots of friends, and that is how real change is implemented. Change that Ann has fought hard for over a long period of time. And now she has an opportunity to really make a difference, and I’m very happy for her.

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

Power Does Not Corrupt, Fools Do: Institutions used Hitler, the Church, and fear to protect themseleves from the rise of “overmen”

I think we need to have a proper definition of what a fool is.  We often make such a frame of reference when we deal with people who don’t meet our expectations of competency.  But the term itself is often uttered when frustration has strangled our reason leaving us in moments of despair.  Through history the term “fool” has been tossed around a lot.  I’m not a big fan of the Fabian socialists George Bernard Shaw, but I tend not to look at things in hindsight with the lack of understanding.  After all, it is difficult to make the correct decisions while moving forward in uncharted waters and after the concept of the Übermensch in his stage play Man and Superman was explored, it is obvious that Shaw was at least asking the right questions.  He and his Nazi counterparts would completely misinterpret the great work of Friedrich Nietzsche in the pinnacle work of philosophy titled Thus Spoke Zarathustra.  The idea of an “overman” is a dangerous one.  Shaw was knocking on the door to truth when he used the word fool as the opposite of the superman idea to articulate the nature of power when he said, “power does not corrupt men; fools, however, if they get into a position of power, corrupt power.”  This is an important reference when considering the unleashing of the many sex scandals by household names recently in both politics and entertainment—places where power is often traded, not earned.  The result has been that fools are often in charge and they use power to articulate the corruption inherit in their minds which fall short of human necessity.

http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2017/11/16/eyes-wide-shut-actress-sexual-misconduct-in-hollywood-and-how-to-survive-in-world-full-harveys.html

A fool is therefore a person functioning from a lack of individualized values but instead yields to institutional concerns blindly accepting the values of the collective for the benefit of the faceless hordes of reality.   A fool is essentially a person too lazy to think who uses institutional values as a substitute for reason.   Where socialists like Shaw and fascists like Hitler missed the point was that they could not turn off their love of institutional thinking to develop the concept of being “more than human.”  They thought by making the concept of an Übermensch institutionalized, that they could advance mankind into a new century of thought and competency.  Yet all they accomplished was a new kind of tyranny which makes them villains in respect to history.  Shaw was so entrenched in institutionalized thinking that he actually performed his play before the Royal Court so it’s not like he was a fringe thinker. But his idea that a fool corrupts power rather than the other way around is a revolutionary idea and a proper designation of responsibility.

The falsehood that power is in itself the designation of corruption is the old definition of the institutions, politics and the church which sought to keep their flocks under control so they have suppressed us all by purposely putting fools in positions of power to protect the definition leaving always to turn toward them for protection from those in power.  That is the basic premise of the Star Wars movies, which I do not agree with.  But it’s a kid’s show, so teaching children the basics of how power and corruption can be dangerous is important.  It is better to be safe than sorry after all.  But for the rest of us, we seldom have any mechanisms to inform our developing minds of what the true nature of power is, or even what a fool is.  The two are left to linger so that they will find each other in popular culture and protect our institutions from the change that is really needed.

The idea that money corrupts is a popular fictionalization of the institutionalized protection of itself from the notions that individuals don’t need them, especially if they develop in a graduating characteristic of mankind.  Man might be termed as the embodiment of the reproduction cycle, birth, growth, procreation and death.  To be more than man is to extend one’s thoughts beyond these human necessities, such as to contemplate the nature of the universe or to dominate the elusive traits of leadership—an overman is a conscious state of mind to step beyond terrestrial definitions.  People in power obviously don’t want such a thing to happen so they have devised means though politics to clip all our wings through education, media, and religion to keep us all in a substitute of human experience.  And the way they have done that primarily is by putting fools in charge of things and spreading the rumor that the fools became that way because they were corrupted with power making us all fear falling to the same fate.  That is how the institutions protected themselves from us.

It has been safe to look at great minds of the past who might have sought to be overmen—which is kind of an English word for the Übermensch—the best that we have for such a state of existence and to pay respect from hindsight.  But when one exists in our modern times we tend to try to kill them and execute them to preserve our institutions whether it be the church or some country’s government.   That is how so many fools ended up in positions of power and why once they get there they cannot control their decent into corruption.  Because they are not fit for the power—power in and of itself is a value that has meaning in our existence.  Once you mix people who suddenly have this power but are intellectual fools—people like Harvey Weinstein and Charlie Rose—liberals addicted to institutionalized power, it’s not hard to see why the abuse happens—and it certainly isn’t surprising.

Donald Trump by his own nature has always sought to be more than just human.  As a wealthy man who fought his way through many stages of his life he seems to have arrived at a special place about halfway through his television show The Apprentice.  It took a few years but that show combined with being married to a good woman in Melania seems to have taken him intellectually to that next level.  His story actually reminds me of the story of Siddhārtha Gautama—the prince who would become the future Buddha and sit on the immovable spot under the tree of enlightenment.  Siddhārtha at the tender age of 29 became tired of all the dancing-girls at his father’s palace and so he left to find essentially the meaning of life.  His adventure had many pitfalls and terrors but ultimately he discovered his middle way and the rest is history.  The motivation for this trip was to find a way to deal with the various lifecycles previously mentioned so he sought philosophical atonement for the realities of life—a kind of early overman idea. Trump found his overman idea late in life after he had enjoyed all the sins and flesh of being on top of the food chain.  He had good parents and an intelligent mind so he had the power, but it never corrupted him.  He was a rare example on a public stage for the masses to see who was able to hold power without it corrupting him.  Many of the rumors about sexual misconduct come from institutions assuming that such things occurred because they are not used to people holding power without failing under its weight. Thus, the myth has been broken and people now see it.

This has created an environment where other people in power cannot now compete, because Trump has set such a suddenly high standard. Now that he’s president, which is head of our most beloved institutions of government recognized throughout the world, the comparison is beyond control at this point, and those corrupted by power are failing under the same public scrutiny that was intended to shoot down Trump.  The old institutions crave the stories of how Kennedy had blow jobs given to him in the White House swimming pool by hot young girls looking to use sex as a way to leverage the authenticity of an American president.  And until recently Bill Clinton was forgiven for his sexual proclivities because he defined the essence of the fool who holds power and is corrupted by it—which sent the masses to their churches asking god to save them from the vast evil of our world governments.  What they didn’t know was that the church and the state were essentially the same and both wanted to protect themselves from the overman by promoting the fool in place of the righteous people who were striving to get more out of life.

The fool has been very useful to modern society and you can see them in just about everything created by institutional thinking.  From Six Sigma management classes to the local manager at a McDonald’s the fool is often in charge.  You don’t often find that overman survive the purges they must endure, because society does not want them to emerge.  But when they do, they change everything and that is what we are seeing today.  The institutions that have put fools in their front offices and used the myth of power corrupting their minds are now being snuffed out and reality is taking on new meanings.  It was never power that corrupted.  Power is just a thing of value.  But fools cannot handle it and should never be allowed near it.  Overmen however do quite well and power has a way of finding them whether the world is ready or not for them.  So while Shaw was onto something with his early explorations into this matter of the Übermensch his position as a head of institutionalized thinking prevented him from getting the unified thought out to a public that wanted to rebel against the notion rather than embrace it.  Hitler also missed the mark copying from the American Democrats their segregation strategies to rid their German nation of undesirables that they thought were corrupt with power—because Hitler never understood the nature of power. He was a fool himself allowed to rise to the top because the institutions of the world wanted a fool to have the power, to keep all of Europe under their institutionalized umbrellas.  I’d go so far to say that the institutions wanted Hitler to validate their story of human declination under the influence of power to protect themselves from the kind of reform of thinking that Friedrich Nietzsche was advocating.

Never-the-less, we now know the truth, power does not in and of itself corrupt.  Fools are not equipped to handle power and should not be given access to it.  Fools should always be challenged when they make a grab for power.  But under America’s free market system where fools are often beaten easily by the competent, it was only a matter of time before an overman ended up in the White House.  That very act has changed the world for the better.  For the first time since George Bernard Shaw wrote his play about the nature of the superman, and our comic book media propelled that type of character into popular mainstream mythology, we now have a president who can operate without the fear of becoming corrupt, who is beyond concern and is punching through the limits of human intellect for the first time.  The results are destroying the fools, wherever they may have been hiding right out in the open.  And that is a wonderful thing.

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

The List of Accomplishments of the Trump Administration: After just one year, there is a lot to be thankful for

It’s hard to say how many articles I’ve written about the potential for a Donald Trump presidency, or the success of the events of his first year.  I have a million things to do each day it seems and little time to do any of them, but due to the truly corrupt forces that have always been at work against our nation the Donald Trump presidency was the first solution in my mind to putting those forces back into their place.  I saw the election of Donald Trump as a self-funded, outsider who strives pressure because he functions best with it to solve the many problems that we have leeched into our republic to overthrow it and cast us all back into the stone ages.  My reason for writing so much is that I don’t feel our professional media has the aptitude or reasoning to see the situation properly so that I must write about this president defending him righteously because there are so few outlets out there that will. I never expected Trump to be perfect but I did expect him to strive for perfection and he does.  After just one year since Trump was elected, when the major changes to our national outlook started to take place, the fine people at MAGAPill.com have compiled a list of all the accomplishments of the Trump administration for all to see at the following link.  It is well worth a look.

http://www.magapill.com/

That is an impressive list and as a student of history you will not find a single other president who has done more or even attempted so much.  Before Trump put his name in the ring at Trump Tower in Manhattan back in the summer of 2015 I was looking for a Calvin Coolidge type of president—someone who would bring hard work back to the White House and try to sell the idea of America back to the people who live around the world in a positive way.  It was obvious to me due to inside baseball experience that the two-party systems just couldn’t produce the right kind of person for the job so I had lost faith in the ability of our elections to find a suitable candidate.  To be president a person has to love all the things it takes to get there.  For instance, for me, as busy as I am, I don’t like it.  I love lots of private time.  I do enjoy doing television work, and talking on the radio—and standing in front of a crowd is something that comes naturally for me.  But to my very core I like my private thoughts and I hate dealing with stupid people.  A president has to actually enjoy people and all the ceremony of such a high-profile job.  But they must also like to do the hard work of reading, listening, and managing all the elements that come with such an important job.  People can say what they want about the politics of Trump, but what they can’t take from him is his enthusiasm for Americana and a genuine love of hard work.

Way too often we elect people into these responsible positions, John Kasich of Ohio comes to mind, where they come into an office with lots of ambition but quickly dissipate once they start running into the resistance of the establishment.  Being in any leadership position requires stamina and an inner drive that is unique among our human populations.  Very few establishment organizations so far in all of our history respect these traits of leadership and our education system certainly doesn’t know how to bring them about in our culture.  But we know it when we see it, like in champions of sports such as Michael Jordan, Tom Brady or tycoons of industry such as Alfred Sloan from General Motors or Elon Musk of our modern times—they all have an ingredient in their personal constitutions which drive them toward excellence. The great novelist Ayn Rand captured very well the essence of those types of people in her novels from the previous century and they are still very relevant today—but our culture is still hard pressed to understand how to invest their values into the ever-expanding consciousness of human enterprise and why it’s such an important consideration utilized across the tapestry of time and space. We often elect the wrong people to manage our governments, local, state and federal because we still don’t understand truly what we are looking for.

One thing that always bothers me about holiday-get-togethers and in speaking to family members that you don’t see very often is how they revert to the value systems of their peer groups.  Such as when people ask what my wife and I have been up to, especially the women, their first question is whether my wife is working or not.  Well, of course she works—but the next layer to their question is whether or not she is working for an employer—whether she gets a paycheck. Part of being married to me means my wife doesn’t have to sell her services to any group or organization outside of our home.  Her primary concern is the needs of our family and she likes it that way.  In our case our kids have moved out, but she is still there to help wherever a situation may arise so that the quality of our family experiences are managed by someone who truly loves everyone.  It’s a very traditional role, but one that I think is important to managing family affairs in a quality way. But other women who do not have such support are resentful and that comes out in our discussions in a very palatable way.  People don’t mean to, but most seek out the rules of a static institutional concept rather than creating their own.  Housewives have been targeted by progressive groups as a way to diminish the family experience casting individuals into getting parental support from institutional thinking, whether that entails a woman working for her own paycheck and having relationships outside the home, or in the way that we elect politicians first through our chambers of commerce, then through popular sentiment—resulting then in office holding where the concerns of donors are the first priority for party politics.  When women find out my wife is a full-time mother, grandmother and that each day she makes sure I have what I need at the end of a long day as traditional women often provided in the past, they are aghast.  You can even sense the hostility in them as they speak which of course makes the discussions difficult.  That hostility is there because biologically they are inclined to similar behavior but to survive in the modern world they have had to suppress those inclinations and to be the opposite, which of course nobody really wants.  Our institutions have adopted those traits as values so everyone ends up very confused until there is a base point of change for everyone to examine.  In our family my wife is that for everyone.

In politics we have needed to make a similar stand, where we had a politician who redefined that experience with outside the box thinking and came to office in a different way than the usual methods. Trump was and has been that guy. He was elected by what many considered a miracle, although I was never in doubt—I saw it a long way out.  But his behavior once he obtained office has been one of exceptionally hard work and a need to please those who elected him with an earnestness usually reserved for campaign donors.  While Trump may rub establishment types in the same way that modern women resent knowledge of a housewife when they meet them happily doing their work in the world, politicians hate Trump for many of the same reasons.  Trump represents a changing of the rules and institutions don’t like that.  They like to make the rules then live by them to the exclusion of new influences so that they can protect their lifestyles as they’ve lazily adopted them.  In women we expect them to work like men these days even if it’s obvious that the children of a family are in desperate need of love and attention and we see that someone needs to be there to provide that care.  And in politicians we expect them to be cheesy, corrupt, and to not serve our best interests—but when we meet one that is exceptional, it is hard to accept them because we have allowed ourselves to become institutionalized in our thinking.  Being exceptional is what we are really after and by the list showing the accomplishments of the Trump administration after just one year, it is obvious that we are living in a new world, thankfully.  I didn’t like the old one and changes had to be made for the sake of everyone.  However, it is nice to take a moment and think about how far we’ve come in just the last year.  The media like those jealous women I mentioned are reluctant to say good things about this president because they have to protect their own institutional investments, but the reality is telling another story, and the evidence is there for all to see.  To present that evidence is why I write—because few other places will and that information needs to get out there so that people can see it.

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

 

William Bradford’s ‘Of Plymouth Plantation’: How the pilgrims invented capitalism to have the first Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving is for me one of the best days of the year, I like it more than I do Christmas because it gets to the heart of things without all the pressure of gift giving.  It is an American holiday like none other in the world and I simply love it.  My feelings about it have been compounded since I was able to stand in the jail cell at the West Gate in Canterbury, England where Robert Cushman was kept due to the crossfire of politics from the Church of England that his puritans were involved in.  It was in that spot where Cushman had decided he and his followers wanted to be free of the constant struggles between the Church and the king to pursue something different, a new life in the recently discovered continent far off to the west across the great ocean to live as they saw fit.  If not for that moment America may never have come to be because the journey they were about to undertake as puritans established a philosophy that took another 100 years to flush out, but eventually became America.  If not for the actions of Robert Cushman in commissioning the Mayflower for that purpose, the settlement of America by the kings of the world would have simply duplicated the failures of Europe.  But Cushman and his Pilgrims did not have the clear lens of history to guide their philosophic advances—all they had was the collectivism typical of religious life and the great work by Plato in his book, the Republic to start with and it is there that our story begins as Americans.  It’s really quite enchanting.

https://fee.org/articles/how-communism-almost-ruined-the-first-thanksgiving/

It wasn’t called communism yet, but the Pilgrim were essentially intent to apply the methods of the kind of collectivism articulated by Plato’s Republic in this New World utopian colony.  Karl Marx wouldn’t call it communism for another two centuries but the plan from Cushman and his crew as chronicled by Governor William Bradford was to essentially operate free of private property and to share the collective wealth of everything produced by the colony.  As fantastic as that might sound to the sentiments of emotion, the reality was quite another thing. The Indians which the pilgrims encountered were of the same type of hive mind approach as the collectivism from their original cultures which were from the Far East reflected the efforts of the early colonists.  But the Indians were not industrialized, they did not know of the markets in Canterbury or the great cathedral there—or anything about the king.  They didn’t build houses like these European settlers.  They had become refugees after the great treasure ships from Zheng He dropped them off all over the world on behalf of emperor Zhu Di.  Some of the Chinese adventurers bred with the great cultures of the Aztec in Mexico, some with the descendents of the Bering Strait migration, some with the Vikings who had been coming for hundreds of years as well.  All these cultures were interacting with what was left of the great culture of giants which had come out of the Middle East thousands of years earlier and all these societies had failed, so there was nothing to indicate that these pilgrims would fare any better.

The great insult that was taught to all of us in our public education experiences was to hide these communist beginnings and to make it sound as though the Indians rescued the colony by teaching them how to farm—as if Cushman and his followers were too stupid to figure out how to care for themselves after they had shown the great ambition to even charter the journey to begin with.  Quite the opposite, the pilgrims were quite smart and hardy.  Even though many of them died within a few years of their journey they were able to think and apply what they learned to the world around them with innovation.  The Indians were watching, they were a culture of nomads who had long ago given up on private property ownership and the result was that they didn’t build houses and conduct all the fancy mathematics which had been common to the Mound Builders of the Midwest—they were content to dedicate their lives to the new goddess of earth, so they had little to do with Thanksgiving except to attend dinner with the pilgrims after the survivors of the new colony had figured out the puzzle which had been hampering the world up to that point.

As William Bradford chronicled in his Of Plymouth Plantation it took a few years but through necessity the pilgrims rejected the concept of communism as Plato had envisioned it and evolved into a free market system.  They were able to do this because they had no institutions to confine them to a set philosophy.  They were free of the ominous pressure of the church and the kings always fighting them for power over the people, the pilgrims were able to create the first free market system of capitalism the world had ever seen.  It was the combination of the industrious nature of the Europeans whom had come from a background of accomplishment—they knew what was possible so they had a foundation of intellect to begin with.  But what made the pilgrim capitalism possible was that they had all the tools to be successful, what they needed was a way to strip away all their institutionalized concepts so that the necessity of survival would surpass their desires to continue as all humans had in every endeavor previously known to mankind and that was to function within the confines of the orthodox, and to be regulated by that commitment.  That was certainly the case with the Vikings, it was also of the giants from the Bible lands, the Chinese were already functioning from the rise and fall of many oriental cultures—and what was left of all of them were the Indians who were just a mix of everyone chained to the superstitions of the past rooted to institutionalized behavior that imprisoned the mind of mankind from the beginning of time.  The pilgrims were making the same mistakes and they were dying off, until they changed course and decided to try something different while they still could.  They invented capitalism.

Once the pilgrims allowed for private property and structured their society on individualized survival they began to see after the first couple of doomed years that their colony was producing a surplus.  For the first time they had more food than they needed, and they were able to take their minds beyond the needs of daily survival—and to think about other things on a grander scale.  This is why there was a first Thanksgiving, because the puritans of the Plymouth colony were able to produce more than they needed resulting in a feast.  As ironic as it may sound, the Pilgrims were able to be successful where others hadn’t because they were smart enough to change their behavior before their failures had become accepted as institutional thinking.  Had they the rigid structure of the church there to enforce their will, or a king to confide them to the patriotism of national order, the pilgrims would have been stuck to the way of thinking which had imprisoned mankind for thousands of years.  But because they had the tools of modern thinking, and literacy, they were able to make adjustments that stepped beyond the thinking of Plato at the time and invent something new—a way of thinking that would launch a new nation.

That is why I love Thanksgiving so much.  I love Black Friday and all the advertisements that come out in the paper that day.  It is appropriate that capitalism is such a big part of our Thanksgiving holiday because it’s not just the food or the friendship with the Indians that made the annual event so special, it was the means to recognize private incentive as the fuel that propelled mankind into the future, for really the first time. The excess that was produced by the early Plymouth colony was a discovery of what human ambition could produce if left alone and not micro managed by institutionalized thinking, such as churches and governments.  And that is why Thanksgiving in America is such a special time, and they never get old. I love every one of them.

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

Criticism of ‘Battlefront 2’ is Completely Unwarranted: The challenges of marketing a capitalist product to Marxist losers

Like everything else in politics the level of hate we see today and the way that people react to a little pressure can be blamed on progressive public educations which have pretty much ruined the minds of several generations.  We can see it everywhere, in our entertainment culture, our jobs, and our politics especially; we now have an entire younger generation of Millennials who have such high expectations about everything and not a clue on how to get a happy result.  The entertainment press that is largely made up of these new types of people has control of entire industries through their editorial boards and their footprints in the sand are obvious.  As I said recently in my review of the new Justice League movie, if that film had been released in a different time, it would be considered a miracle of film making.  But today it is ridiculed for not being everything that a collective hive mind could dream of—so it is picked apart by a hostile press hoping to cannibalize the filmmakers like zombies from the latest Walking Dead episode.  I mean when did anybody consider a $93 million dollar opening weekend a problem—ahead of a four-day Thanksgiving weekend where most kids are off school and can go to the theater with their parents?  I mean Justice League is going to be more than profitable for the Warner Bros. studio that distributed it—yet somehow that’s not enough—the expectations by today’s youth is that everything should always increase and if it doesn’t then there are problems.  And that was never more clear than in the recently release of Battlefront 2 and the massive controversy about loot crates which are used to increase the performance and effectiveness of the in-game characters and vehicles used in the massive online Star Wars first person shooter just released a week ago.  The article below will set the stage for just how ridiculous the situation truly is.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2017-11-20-lucasfilm-reacts-to-star-wars-battlefront-2-loot-crate-controversy

Even though I am normally concerned with much more serious things, I often write a lot about Star Wars and video games because both are a tremendous part of our modern culture.  Without addressing those markets and their influence on modern people, we can’t really claim to be speaking with any relevance to the concerns of our times. In that lens of thought, I find this Battlefront 2 situation very fascinating and direct evidence to the state of our world today, and where it’s going.  But before I can say any more, I have to provide my foundation thoughts on what Battlefront 2 does and is.  As an older person I have watched the industry go from little pixellated dots on the screen of an Atari 2600 to this latest photo realistic offering from Electronic Arts putting players as directly as possible into the role of their favorite Star Wars characters and situations.  I was after all up at midnight the day the new game was released to play it as close to first as possible.  The game came out November 17th yet I had pre-ordered it so was given entry to the experience at midnight November 14th. The moment I started playing it, especially the Starfighter Assault modes which put players in very ambitious dogfights with other live players set in Star Wars environments on a truly epic scale, I was in love with it.  If this game came out with just Starfighter Assault as the offering I would have been amazed, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg, So why all this consternation about loot crates?

Let’s make one thing clear; the purpose of the Battlefront 2 game is to make money.  It makes money by offering a good product to a public that wants what they are selling.  It really isn’t complicated, and without the incentive to make a lot of money, there really is no reason to make such a beautiful game.  I have no doubt that the loot crate idea was hatched based on the Electronic Arts mobile app game called Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes.  It’s a free game, but to really get to the good stuff you either have to play the game a lot, or pay a lot of money-getting the right in-game currency to unlock the things players really want. Like to get the proper number of shards to unlock the members of Phoenix Squadron so that you can fly the Ghost in squadron combat you can pay $99 dollars for a bundle package hoping to get what you need.  In a lot of ways it was like the days of the old Topps movie cards that we could get as kids hoping to get that very special card to collect.  In the case of the Galaxy of Heroes game, a player could literally spend several thousand dollars getting their ranking up to an elite level.  I’ve done pretty well not spending a dime, but I’ve done the work—which is another option.  Based on their internal studies at EA they know that on a game like Battlefront 2 which is much more epic and detailed than a game on a phone app, players will be willing also to spend many thousands of dollars for an elite status that gives them an advantage over other players.  That was unquestionably the original plan with the loot crates in Battlefront 2—and I personally think they are fun.  I’ve only been playing the game a week so far and I find myself wanting to earn enough credits to unlock new cards within the game so that I can boost up my performance when playing against other players.  It’s very much a capitalist system and everyone comes out well in the exchange.

The problem comes from the fact that many people in the world today have been trained to be little socialists and they don’t want to compete against people willing to work harder at something than they are, and they certainly don’t want to compete against people who are willing to “pay to win” as they call it.  There are of course people out there in the world where Battlefront 2 is their calling in life, that’s all they have going on—they don’t have a family to worry about, they may have a cushy job that pays them a lot of money—and they don’t want to waste time on girlfriends and going out into the world to play golf, shoot guns, or even spend a couple thousand dollars on an NFL game, so they spend their money on video games.  If they can drop a few thousand dollars on the Battlefront 2 game to be considered elite at something in their life, they’ll do it and that is a good offering that any video game company could propose in a product.  But the players of these games have this entitled belief that the game somehow belongs to everyone—that Star Wars as a mythological institution is now part of the collective hive mind—and it’s not.  All players are not born equal in the game world, and all people are not equal in real life.  What players are criticizing EA over, and ultimately Disney as a parent company, is that they want to get to what they want in the game faster and without having to spend a lot of money—because the base game can cost up to $80 dollars.

Now to me, it’s a bargain.  I paid $80 dollars for a steak in a restaurant recently, so I have no problem paying that money for such a fun experience, and Battlefront 2 is FUN!  I find it a mild miracle still that I can play such an epic game with players from all over the world any time of day in my living room.  If I were a lazy person and wanted to get an advantage over other players by dropping a lot of money into the game to get more of these “loot crates” I’d have no problem with that option.  I mean a box of ammunition for my .500 magnum costs $65 dollars for just twenty shots. And I go through a box or so every couple of weeks because I like to go shooting at lunch to blow off the stress of my often very hectic days.  There are plenty of people like me that EA is trying to make some money off of so it’s their job to create something in their products to be appealing to me—and getting an advantage over other people is the name of the game.  That’s life.

That’s where the communism and socialism creeps into the discussion.  Star Wars is such a big cultural phenomenon around the world these days that is truly is a global reach for Disney.  They literally have to listen to everyone to market their products to them. And of course around the world especially in Europe, India, Australia, and many other places, people don’t have much money to spend on these kinds of entertainment options.  And young people in America have been so coddled for so long that they don’t think they should even have to work at anything to be able to play a game like Battlefront 2 without being dominated by players who pretty much spend their life on the game, or have purchased in-game bonuses to have an advantage.

As a general rule I don’t look to get an advantage in games by outspending other people.  I consider it a lazy approach—even in life.  I always do the work because if you can beat somebody using inferior equipment at a disadvantage, then you are really doing something—and when I’m in my leisure time having fun, always in the back of my mind is my desire to make myself better.  I don’t do anything to just waste time.  Even playing a phone app like Galaxy of Heroes for me is a way to work my mind strategically toward objectives that are pleasurable.  I may be doing business with VIPs spending money on $80 dollar steaks, but I have no problem taking a break from what I’m doing for a few minutes to run a quick battle on my phone just for the pleasure of winning something, then getting back to work. During the first week that Battlefront 2 was released I put over 60 hours into just the Starfighter Assault mode and I’ve become pretty good at it.  I am actually killing between 8 to 20 other pilots per round—which I expect to double soon—and I’ve earned some nice loot crate specialties that have really increased the performance of my starfighters.  It’s a lot of fun and I find myself often playing the game at 3 AM in the morning.  I stayed up all night two nights in a row last week playing the game because I think its fun.  It’s not as fun as winning in real life is, but I find that by winning in simulated environments that it conditions your mind to winning in real life—where things really count.  So I still love video games whether they are on my PS4 in my living room, or on a mobile app on my iPhone.  I find that games keep you on the balls of your feet staying mentally sharp when you need it most.

But way too many people these days want to just show up and have people give them things.  They want to be equal to everyone else and they want to treat Battlefront 2 as just another game of the week.  There are so many games out there that I can’t possibly play them all.  I’d love to, but I have to pick because I’m a busy guy.  The way Battlefront 2 is designed it seeks to consume as much of your time as possible, and it plans to still be a relevant game two years from now. Ultimately its purpose for the parent company Disney is to keep Star Wars fresh on the minds of their customer base until the next movies come out.  So the companies putting out this massive Battlefront 2 game, production companies like Electronic Arts, Lucasfilm, DICE and many others are always updating the content—and that all takes money.  Games, especially video games these days, are about more than just playing them, they are actual lifestyles—and that’s how they should be.  I find actually any criticism of the game by these cry baby Millennials to be unwarranted.

I personally love Battlefront 2 and I will be playing it often.  Of course my name on the game is Overmanwarrior so if you want to fight me, come and find me there.  If anybody had told me as a kid that I’d have access to something like it on a giant wall sized television with 4K definition and a Bose surround sound system to engulf my senses—I wouldn’t have believed them.  The game is a series of small miracles all culminating into quite an experience.  I think it’s beyond criticism for such a trend setting market that is still figuring out what it is.  The role these video games play in our cultural exchange is nothing short of an explosion of intellect and something Karl Marx never could have imagined.  We are literally in a whole new world—so the criticisms of Marxists, socialists and communists have no place in the discussion at all.  My advice to the makers of these games at EA, Lucasfilm, and Disney is not to listen.  Do your thing and let the chips fall where they may.  You’ll be a lot more profitable in the end, and everyone will be a lot better off.

Rich Hoffman
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Clipping the Wings of our Kids: Public education has been a purposeful disaster designed to usher in an era of communism in America

It doesn’t seem that long ago to me, but I suppose it is, that I wrote many articles, and did many radio shows talking about how public education and colleges were teaching socialism to our children.  I’ve actually been talking about it my entire adult life and even sooner.  I never liked public school not because I didn’t like learning.   In actuality I am far more educated than the average person; I have continued learning my entire adult life.  I did attend college, but I hated it—hated it passionately because I felt even back then that the institution was teaching anti-American ideas.  In my college days I read a lot of books, none of them were the kind professors wanted me to read and I spent enormous amounts of time in the Perkins at Clifton on the campus of the University of Cincinnati reading books I enjoyed, like those from Joseph Campbell.  So I came out of my “education” years protected by the primary afflictions that most American adults suffer through—the socialist indoctrination of our education system.  I had something to compare to because I did read a lot, so I was one of the few who never in my life not one time, felt that socialism was worth a try.  But in 99% of all education institutions K-12, then to college, communism and socialism have been taught and American traditions have been ridiculed and this has brought us all to a very dangerous place.  In my unique position I was clear eyed to point it out.  But only now do people finally see what I was talking about.

I always felt a little sorry for the reporters I dealt with over time when I’d tell them something about what was happening to our youth and they couldn’t get their minds wrapped around it.  This was especially problematic during the last decade when George W. Bush was president.  Socialism in public institutions was growing in an obvious way back then but people couldn’t get their minds around how much they had been taught to accept it—because it was too close to them.  It was like calling their mom fat.  It didn’t matter that she may have been, but to them it was their mom.  Their schools were places where they came to age on many aspects of their lives, where they obtained their first kiss, made their first friends, learned to color, read, and speak.  So people by their nature were very defensive of their schools.  They were even more protective of where they went to college because that brought to them many more coming of age experiences—so they’d defend the part they played with great protection, almost like their education experiences were like second parents and were beyond ridicule.  But I did it anyway and this caused much consternation—especially with members of the press.

Back when I was very involved in levy fights and public education issues while doing a lot of radio on 700 WLW in Cincinnati my political enemies would say to members of the media “why do you put him on the radio so much?  He’s in the newspaper too much and on television too much, you people in the media are giving him a platform to talk nonsense and conspiracy.”  Well, as it turned out, I was completely correct and when the media outlets did listen to my enemies, I simply turned to this blog site which has done so much more than their outlets to educate people on the truth of the matter and has been far more useful. However, what I was saying back then which was heavily scrutinized as a falsehood by mainstreamers has now been irrefutably validated.  We now know that socialism and communism have been the prime objectives of public education and now many of those long skeptical voices are talking about it toady where even ten years ago they wouldn’t touch it with a ten foot pole.  Now they are talking and finally people are starting to realize that their tax money has been used by the state to create this public education system that just isn’t reflective of the American experience.

To be honest many people wonder why I like people from other countries so much.  It’s true; I do love immigrants coming into America.  One of my son-in-law’s is an immigrant and I watched him go through the naturalization process which I thought was very impressive.  Most people who come from other places in the world and have not had their wings clipped by the American education system intellectually are much smarter than the average American today, and they work harder.  I find I have more in common with those people than I do with my neighbors of 30 to 40 years.  The person who has gone through the American naturalization process within the last decade knows more about America and its method of economy than the average grade school kids do graduating from the 12th grade. The immigrant knows more about capitalism than the American student does most of the time, so I find immigrants more relatable to the American experience which I personally love.  What’s so sad about this condition is that the naturalization process is relatively short, yet what it produces in people is a much better result than 12 years of public education and four years of college.  It takes most Americans over twenty years to unlearn all the garbage they learn in public schools and they do a lot of damage over that span of time.  What happens in public schools is that essentially people get their wings clipped so that they cannot fly away from the imposition of socialism.  Their minds are stunted purposely for the benefit of the state to manage them more effectively.  From the position of state control, it is much easier to organize a population that can’t fly away intellectually, so they clip the wings of their young so they can manage them better from their perspective.

Yet the worst is yet to come. Most young people today would prefer socialism and communism over capitalism and they are now starting to vote.  This was always the plan of the left, going way back to the start of the Department of Education, which bloomed under Ronald Reagan.  The DOE was never put in place to educate our young people.  They were always intent to program us all into the ways of communism from day one in 1979.  The communist conspiracy isn’t a local one where the public school in our neighborhoods lead the charge, the problem has always come from the state with unfunded mandates designed to pull us all into a black hole of recollection designed to frustrate local participation while the state continued to impose its will on the education system as a whole.  Overwhelming school boards in this top down way, it has allowed communist teachings to seep right into every school through the teacher unions—which was and always will be a communist method of socialized management providing an unfiltered path straight into the minds of our kids.  Even down to the concept of “sharing” that we all learn in the first grade, it’s a communist method of instruction from the minds of intellectuals who would rather see America assimilate into the European view of the world rather than the philosophy that evolved on the world stage just prior to westward expansion in North America. “Make sure to ‘share’ those crayons in your desk with that sloppy stinky kid you sit next to in class.”

Yes it’s good to hear mainstream broadcasts like Rush Limbaugh and Fox News finally talking about this important issue, and I think under the Trump administration that the trend will be reversed.  But it’s going to be a mess for a long time because so many kids who are now adults grew up with this open socialism and communism being taught in our primary places of learning.  It would in many ways have been better for most people to be raised in a barn without all the garbage that has been poured into their heads now than having to unlearn most that they know.  It really is the biggest tragedy of our times, the massive amount of ignorance that handicaps most people because of their educations.  For me personally I am enjoying the validation that what I have said for so long is finally being recognized.  I’m certainly not a conspiracy theorist.  When I get involved in something, I do it well and I always come out on top eventually, so it should have meant more to people when I lent my good name to this issue so long ago, because we could have alleviated so much pain and suffering.  Maybe next time they’ll listen.  At least I hope so for their sakes.

Rich Hoffman
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Liberal Men Just Can’t Keep Their Hands off Boobies: Trump is forcing errors in his opposition that is healthy for America

 

Again, if we rewind to Inauguration Day, 2017 where newly elected President Trump was ceremoniously being ushered in as the 45th occupant of the White House as socialists, Marxist college students and a barrage of angry women took to the streets to protest sometimes violently the election, where we saw something very unique happen in all of history.  I had a feeling it was coming, but just having someone like Trump in the middle of establishment politics has literally brought down the pillars of the corrupt old progressive institutionalism for the first time in over 100 years and we can all see a light at the end of the tunnel now. What we are learning is that when Madonna and Ashley Judd gave their animated speeches about how much they didn’t like Donald Trump, what they were really saying was that they had become bitter in their lives due to sexual abuse by really creepy men like Harvey Weinstein, John Lasseter, and Charlie Rose.  For Madonna she thought it was cute to seduce Hollywood moguls like Warren Betty and many others until she became just another aging woman.  When the sex no longer worked for her, she turned to progressive strategies embroiled in feminism, and sought justice for how unfair the world was—because she could no longer shake her ass and get all of Hollywood to jump on it.  Once they stood on that stage and proclaimed fairness, but nothing stuck to Trump or other conservatives, the women who had really been sexually harassed by people like Al Franken, John Conyers, and Kevin Spacey started to emerge.  If not for the Trump election, all these women would have stayed out of the spotlight and these secrets would have remained.  But because of all the voice and celebrity that was given by the liberal media to women who accused Trump and politicians like Roy Moore of sexual misconduct for purely political purposes, then the real villains were poised to be revealed by a barrage of scandals which had been building since men and women started working together.  It was bound to happen sooner or later, and when it did, liberal men in particular would be most vulnerable due to their reckless personal philosophies and lack of personal self-control.

In the same way that you don’t find NRA members out there committing mass shootings, conservative men tend to be respectful and don’t do things that get them into trouble with women.  By their nature, conservatives are old-fashioned like that, and that keeps them from bad conduct when it comes to the often confusing nature of dealing with the opposite sex.  Liberal men though, they are used to being impulsive and shunning personal responsibility so to them reckless sexual behavior is conducive to their lifestyle.  That is after all why they are liberal, because they lack personal restraints and need institutions to keep them in line.  And never forget that one of the strategies of feminists all along was to inject women into the workplace as a hostile takeover of labor.  For the most radical of women this was always a plan of theirs, to flirt with men, entrap them into bad conduct, then to take over their jobs as a gender.  Even as all these Hollywood men go down in flames, the most ardent bra burning feminists are scheming to take over those jobs with “girl power.”  However, once they have that power and find that there are no more scapegoats to hide behind, they won’t like it.  Be careful what you wish for ladies.  But the essence of the problem is the way that liberal men have behaved once they were put in close proximity to women in the work place. The lines between professionalism and sexual pursuit for many proved impossible to avoid, especially men who considered themselves progressive.

Now it’s like a raging brush fire, these sexual misconduct allegations are the flavor of the year as virtually every major Hollywood star, business tycoon, and politician has some situation of abuse, especially if they were liberal.  All that pent-up emotion that everyone makes fun of Republicans for having, well, this is why they pent-up their emotions.  You are kinda supposed to control yourself in life.  You are not supposed to be an open book that acts on every impulse.  You can’t just grab women by their boobies and run your hands up their skirts.  Even if they tell you it’s alright, you still shouldn’t do it.  It’s only a matter of time before they change their mind and will say later that the conduct was not consensual.  Usually they are just one new boyfriend away from such statements.  I mean in the case of John Lasseter at Disney, he is a smart guy who is good at what he does.  But biologically, he’s a liberal man working next to boobies and if there isn’t some code of ethics that he functions from, it would be very easy to take things out of context if he has a habit of hugging people all the time and letting his true feelings about things be known.  This is why men used to be “stoic” in their dealings with the world.  Watch an old western movie from Hollywood and you’ll see what I mean.  Being a modern man who expresses feelings, and cries, and does all that crap that they think women want to see and hear set themselves up for the day when the women change their mind and decide to come after you for sexual misconduct—because they want your job.

Of course most women just want to work and go home to their families, but the confusing rules of conduct between men and women have made it nearly impossible, because liberal men have through the media culture established the values.  Conservative men may think about it, but they don’t often do it, because by the nature of their personal philosophies, they restrain themselves—so we aren’t seeing them in trouble the way these liberal men are enduring now. The best thing to do is to treat all people equally no matter what sex or race they come from.  All people essentially want the same things out of life, they want to make a little money to fuel their lives at home—and usually there are kids, spouses, sex partners, parents—all kinds of things that are important to them.  They want to go to work, do what they need to do, and get home to their life without incident, and anybody in a position of power should understand and help them achieve those goals.  But when the message is that men should show their emotions, that they should be spontaneous, and even that they should use their power acquired through years of service to get what they want—then particularly liberal men will be vulnerable to…..as John Lasseter put it………”missteps.”

What we’ll end up with after all these losers flame out is a better society that understands the rules of engagement much better.  Everyone will be happier with the results.  Women will learn what they need to learn.  Men will learn not to be such a bunch of emotional pussies yielding to their emotional predilections.  And politics will flush out their power players and will have a chance to replace them with truly sincere people.  None of this would have been possible if not for Trump.  The pressure of Trump forced all these errors in the liberal community, just like a baseball player might overthrow first base when a speedy runner is racing toward it. The pressure of a competent person in the White House is exposing all these weaknesses in our society and it is wonderful to see them all being uncovered.  We always knew these things were there, but nobody was able to do anything about them because the issues were elusive to our discussions.  But not anymore.  Finally, people are talking about these things and that is the first step to correcting them.

Rich Hoffman
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Jesus Would Have Been a Communist: How Democrats have spread mass evil into every aspect of our lives

Even though this scene is from the fictional HBO show, Game of Thrones, it is based on real historical precedence.  Watch first before reading what follows.  In this scene the mother of the king, Cersie Lannister was stripped away of all her “material possessions” to be purified by the house of religion.  In all reality it was a power play by the church to take over the throne of power using her as a symbol of a conquered ruler.

I was having a very nice time at the Canterbury Cathedral book store.  Just hours earlier my family and I had a wonderful meal at Gordon Ramsey’s three Michelin Star restaurant in Chelsea and I was enjoying a life well lived from the opulence of that dining experience to the rugged, and bitter cold of a harsh London rain dumping enormous amounts of moisture from the Jet Stream above as it scooped up water out of the Atlantic in February and dumped it on my head as my wife and I strolled the streets of that ancient town and all its history.  3CDAB75F-D952-4E2B-9C53-0C3E50679143.jpegWe had toured the old cathedral which witnessed so much history over the last thousand years that I was a little bit in heaven walking through that book store with a mountain of books in my hands standing at the cashier as water droplets from the heavy rain outside still dripped off the brim of my leather cowboy hat.

I love life in the United States, but the bookstores are much better in Europe, especially England because people still read there as part of their daily life.  Television isn’t very good in England and most of the good movies are made in America, so England still has people who look at reading as a valuable trait, and I share with them that sentiment.  The cashier joked that she had not witnessed anybody yet in the year who bought as many books as I did which was more truth than customer pandering.  And to reward me for the large bill she rang up on the register she offered me a free book which she had stacked up on the table behind her.  It was called The Red Dean of Canterbury by John Butler and was a respectful biography of the communist advocate Hewlett Johnson who spread his message of a collective based Utopia from the very ground I was standing on and that message reached the ears of all the big communist leaders around the world from 1831 to 1963.  Johnson used essentially his high position within the Church of England to espouse the merits of communism as he paralleled the teaching of Christian belief with that of communism—as one in the same.  He used the church to advocate and strengthen the communist idea around the globe as he viewed God’s Kingdom of God on earth as the ultimate Marxist Utopia.  To him, and to many that he convinced over his life span, they were indistinguishable.

I knew much of the story of Hewlett Johnson before the cashier handed me that very good book.  I don’t mean that the content within the book was something I agreed with, I almost turned it away because of the content.  But the quality of the book was very good, the binding was excellent.  It had great weight which meant great paper quality and a lot of love had gone into its publication which I thought was odd for it to be offered for free to anyone who spent over $100 in their store. Because of my large order I joked with the lady as I held it instantly recognizing its fine quality if I could have six of them since my total was large enough to ask the question.  She of course took me too literally and seemed pained to tell me that there was a limit to one per customer.  I brushed it off realizing that my American humor was out of context here in the heart of the literary world, so I took the book and looked for the first opportunity to read it.

We met up with my daughter and her family at The Old Weavers restaurant for a bite before calling it a day.  That particular place was over 500 years old and had a very picturesque view of the River Stour which flows by directly outside the window.  To get into the place I had to duck my head as people were obviously much shorter in 1500 AD when The Old Weavers was built.  Across the street literally was the Franciscan friary of Canterbury where to this very day the Anglican Franciscan’s are still functioning much the way they had since 1200 AD.  So it was a good place to start reading John Butler’s fine book and I did so here and there the rest of the day.  Our diner turned into shopping in town so as I waited for the girls to do their collection of “bits” I sat on benches around town reading the first couple chapters of The Red Dean of Canterbury. I was a little surprised that the under Hewlett Johnson’s watch the old friary was sold to the Dean in 1959 and it has functioned in that original capacity since.  As I read my book and watched the modern monks helping the poor around town my first thoughts were that everything was good in the world.  Thank goodness for the good work and ministry that the monks performed, I thought it was quite a service.

But that was only on the surface.  Underneath all that good intention, which is something I have always felt about churches in general, is a collectivism that I rejected personally a long time ago.  Another book that I bought in Canterbury was a fabulous book about Martin Luther the rebellious protestant who challenged the Catholic Church and its vast European empire with a new decentralized version of religion.  I grew up Lutheran and was actually very close to my church’s pastor.  Most every Sunday I worked directly with the pastor from the front of the church pouring wine and feeding bread to members of the congregation as he went behind me blessing everyone. I was heavily involved in church scholarship from say 13 years old to about 16 so I’ve been a part of that life heavily before, but I was always skeptical of it.  Skeptical because the concepts never seemed right to me, all the notions of sacrifice and altruistic behavior seemed foreign to the concept of American capitalism.  And the church (my church) put itself often in perpetual peril with the bank that held their mortgage—much like the monks did in England.  They made a choice not to worship materialism and the money which represented value in capitalist societies—because to them the only value worth anything was the values of the church.  My dad was part of the church leadership and tried for over 30 years to keep the business end of the church flowing since none of the pastors or the members of the Lutheran leadership in Cincinnati had any love for money—they ultimately were destroyed over time to the notion that God would provide—when God didn’t.  Not all churches are short-sighted, some actually make a lot of money—which is good.  But my experience was very similar to what I witnessed in England with the modern monks and the history of the church at the center of all politics around the world starting essentially in those very places where I was reading The Red Dean of Canterbury.

Reading that book three decades after my own experiences with the Lutheran Church in America and having the ability to walk through so many historical sites in Canterbury as I considered them was very revealing to me.  I am, and continue to be, very weary of religion because most of them around the world originate in the east, including Christianity.  If Jesus Christ were born today he’d be a communist—or at least a socialist which is why all those damn hippies from the 60s were wearing their hair long and always talking about Jesus Christ being a superstar.  The tenets of global Christianity reject American capitalism and the money our “material” culture represents.  I can’t help but notice that the communist and socialist movements are undeniably an unspoken organization of Christian Marxists which have penetrated our societies in a very confusing ways.

The vast evils that the Democratic Party have been able to inflict on American society are that they exploit this duality for which most of the conservative right Bible thumping voting base functions.  For instance, most conservatives believe in personal property and the merit of making money.  But they also tend to believe in the messages spoken by the church which can be essentially termed Christian Marxism, shedding away personal property, the merit of community over individuality, sacrifice (like abortion which is mass murder on a grand scale), and a pandering to the poor.  Modern American Christian people find themselves in a paradox for which they are locked in indecision and Democrats exploit that indecision for their own desires to expand the influence of Marxism, even into the church so that congregations will take those values into their communities and attack the foundations of capitalism.

I purposely started off this article talking about my personal enjoyment of buying books, which are material items, eating at Gordon Ramsey’s very expensive restaurant in London, and shopping in Canterbury where my girls were able to indulge a bit while traveling—because those are all elements of capitalism which are good and far superior to Marxism.  Being able to pay $1500 for a meal at a 3 Michelin Star restaurant doesn’t mean I should be flogged in the streets by the poor because they want some of what I have.  There are few people in the world who work as hard as I do, so if I want to take my family to an expensive restaurant, or buy $600 worth of books in a Canterbury bookstore, I can.  Money is a tool to use in my life to live life and experience the many miracles of existence.  Being poor is largely a decision and if young people don’t learn to work hard and make money early in their lives, they will always be victims to the message of Marxism, all their lives.  That problem is compounded by the paradox that it is essentially Marxism that is taught in churches, even today.  Most of what goes on in Bible school can be found on the pages of Karl Marx’s works.

Church lost its appeal to me long ago when after many years of telling me that I was born into sin and that I needed an institution of an official religion to be saved from that nature.  I called bullshit.  I am not an atheist by any measure, but no church on earth goes to the extent that I do to satisfy my personal spiritual sanctity.  I am no sinner and just by being born I’m not condemned to such an insane policy.  I literally think that in America a new religion based on the Christian premise of decency should evolve as a kind of Power of Positive Thinking type of evolution, instead of the crimes of the rich against the poor and the transitory nature of all life with an ever-increasing eye on the afterlife.  Marxists have latched onto Christian concepts to help sell their European collectivism to a greater audience and one of the biggest advocates of that effort, Hewlett Johnson was not shy about it.  Most people in his position, like the current Pope of the Catholic Church won’t talk about how similar their religion is to Marxism.  They don’t figure that the comparison is applicable because Christianity has been around for a much longer period of time.  Marxism is relatively young by comparison, but they are alike.  They are born out of the same notion of sacrifice being the value of existence.  Sacrifice is not; productivity is—doing things, thinking things, and always inventing things. Morality emerges best in productivity, not in sacrifice which is quite an extraordinary thing to say because for 300,000 years, likely longer, mankind has never accepted the basics of that statement—except in the United States for about 100 years—from 1790 to 1890.  Like the monks in Canterbury, feeding the poor is equivalent to feeding the problem, yet we do it because we think Jesus will love us more for it.  But in actuality we are making the poor worse because we don’t encourage their individuality to excel, we teach them to retreat and turn toward the church for guidance—or the great congregation of society to rectify the situation.

It’s a complicated problem if we try to merge the values of politics with those of religion.  But that is essentially how the Democrats attack the conservative right, by exploiting this duality of values to the point where we all just blank out.  We love money in America; we love expensive vacations, nice cars, and our big televisions, cell phones and the commercialization of Christmas.  But we feel guilty because institutional churches still rooted in the philosophies that gave birth to Marxism in the first place tell us that the way to an afterlife is through Jesus, because we were all born into sin and he is the only way to eternal life. The Jesus of the institutions was a hippie loser who was basically one of the first communists in the world—according to our history books written by modern scholars—who are mostly all Marxists themselves.  Just as John Butler loves Hewlett Johnson and reveres him as a hero of the modern communist movement.  I doubt there is a bookstore in America who would give out copies of such a nicely made book like, The Red Dean of Canterbury.  The production values of the book alone would be cost prohibitive for American audiences.  But in England where those people have been conquered 1000s of times over the centuries, they looked toward the Dean of Canterbury for guidance and his advice which many listened to was to become nice Christian Marxists and get ready for the afterworld.  But I think they all miss the point, because American capitalism has evolved into the real answer.  If Jesus were alive today I think he would have voted for Donald Trump and would have liked the church the modern president attended as a child by Norman Vincent Peale.  There is a lot more good that comes from wealth and hard work than ever came from monks handing out donations to the poor.  Flowing altruism through institutions is the point of emphasis for the church and would ultimately become the focus of communist and socialist governments.  But in America we rejected that notion and it’s about time that we declare our independence not just from governments, but even Marxist philosophies no matter how they are presented to us.  I think it’s time that we make Jesus a capitalist and take away the values of the church from the Marxists who have set up camp in the houses of religion for the perpetuation of global domination of communism—and I think it’s time that we do that now.

Rich Hoffman

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Al Frankenstein Must Go: He helped write the rules–now he’s had his Anthony Weiner moment

Well, Al Franken—how are you feeling?  Are you comfortable? You know, you’ve been such a pain in the ass.  As a former writer for the very progressive Saturday Night Live and massive critic of Bill O’Reilly you now have to leave the senate.  Based on the radio interview that can be heard below by Leeann Tweeden, you sexually harassed her in a major way.  The proof is all there, it’s her audio testimony and she has pictorial evidence—so based on the rules of engagement that you helped create, you have to step down immediately.  You have to give up your Minnesota senate seat. You’ve called for other people who have done much less than you have to step down, so you have no other choice.  Have a listen to this interview.

http://www.kabc.com/2017/11/16/leeann-tweeden-on-senator-al-franken/

I was always surprised that Al Franken won a senate seat based on his star power off SNL.  And his little 5’ 6” ass has been a progressive monstrosity since.  The way he spoke to Jeff Sessions just a few months ago is enough to make your skin crawl, so it is ironic that he is going down the same way he went up.  What’s that saying they have………………be careful how you treat people going up because you’ll see them again on the way back down.  Well, this whole episode is born out of that statement.  What did he think Leeann Tweeden was going to do now that the flavor of the day of all women is to talk about their miserable moments with their male counterparts in the entertainment industry—which Al Franken actually encouraged?  He knew these stories were out there.  He knew the pictures were out there. And he and Tweeden were not on speaking terms after that Afghanistan trip.  So what did he think was going to happen?

When Donald Trump said last year that what happened on that Access Hollywood bus way back in 2005 was just locker room talk, this is what he meant.  People pretended to be shocked by what he said, but everyone knows that the kind of talk he was engaged in was the type of thing everyone says when they think they are alone, especially with other guys.  Women talk the same way, only from their point of view which is the constant recipient of sexual advances.  If a woman is less than 130 pounds chances are she is getting hit on with sexual advances all the time so women have their way of dealing with that constant barrage.  But among men, they are always talking about women and their potential sexual statuses.  Is it disgusting—hell yes it is.  I personally hate it.  Its small-minded talk and really stupid things to think about, but most of the human population engages in it.  Nobody should have expected anything more out of Al Franken than what they got, which was a pervert from SNL hitting on a girl who was well out of his league and using his celebrity power to attempt to bed her.  He wrote the script, he set the stage and he figured from experience that he’d get somewhere with Leeann Tweeden if he put the moves on her during their tour.

Now that the flood gates are open women like Tweeden have every right to say what they are saying.  In her case I feel sorry for her.  In the case of the accusers of Roy Moore, Donald Trump—or even Bill O’Reilly I think the women were just seeking fame.  But in Tweeden’s case she was just telling a story from the road and she has the pictures to prove it.  Should women have to sleep with producers and directors in entertainment to work in the industry?  No.  But do they, yes—it is pretty much expected. It wasn’t always that way but over the last 50 or 60 years it has been prevalent.  The question is, should women be free of this constant barrage, because that’s not how it has been.  People just didn’t talk about it.  Ironically people like Senator Franken have established that anyone who does engage in this activity should immediately step down and remove themselves from existence.  I’m good with that.  I can personally live up to that high standard.  I think Donald Trump can too.  He may have talked guy talk with the other guys, but he’s a pretty sensitive guy and he seems to have always treated women respectfully when dealing with them.  His Access Hollywood tape was more of commenting on his shock that women seem to throw themselves at celebrities which he was at that time with his new Apprentice show.  And he’s right, women do, and when they do, they really can’t come back later and claim sexual harassment—which in many of the cases we are hearing about now, it was great for them when they were young women in their 20s, like Ashley Judd—who used sex to secure roles.  Now that they are bitter bitches in their 40s that nobody wants to have sex with, of course now they can afford to have righteous indignation—because that’s the only way they can get attention.  When Madonna said she thought about blowing up the White House after Trump was elected, that is the beaten up old hag talking that men used to line up to have sex with.  Back then Madonna controlled those men with just a flirt.  She can’t do that now.  Men now look at her and her long line of lovers and think—gross.

But Leeann Tweeden is different.  She seems like a nice girl who went on a tour to inspire the troops and Franken had a crush on her the way any adolescent boy might have fantasies about his chances with the best looking girl in his junior high school.  Most of what I heard on that tape was pretty innocent stuff from a biological point of view.  But if you apply the progressive standard to it which Franken himself helped mold—then he should be executed on the spot for using the power of his position to attempt to force sex on an innocent woman.  Right?  It’s only fair.  I mean you can’t have it both ways.  You can’t go after Republicans for sexual harassment and seek to get them impeached or removed from office, then get to hide behind some committee hearing when we find out that someone like Franken has been guilty of far worse.  He has officially lost his moral authority and I suspect that we’ll come to learn that many more members of congress will have similar stories being tossed onto the heap before it’s all said and done.  And if that’s the kind of world we want to live in, I’m fine with it.  I have two daughters and a wife that would love to not be sexual harassed every five minutes when they are not in my company.  I can live in that world just fine, but can everyone else?

Al Frankenstein as Donald Trump is appropriately calling him as this crisis is exploding is having his Anthony Weiner moment.  If you’ll remember dear reader when he was first in congress Weiner was a firebrand using the mask of righteousness to conceal his sexual addiction.  He used his power as a congressman to increase his access to women. He’s now in jail falling from being a phone call away from Hillary Clinton and the top movers and shakers of the Democratic Party.  Now he’s sitting in a jail cell for his sexual addictions. What we are learning particularly about Democrats is that they are guilty mostly for which they find fault in others.  They call Republicans Nazis because it is actually their ideology which nurtured along the most terrifying form of fascism and tyranny the world has ever seen. They call Republicans racist because it was southern Democrats who actually formed the KKK and stood against assimilating Africans into American culture.  And now they have been trying to paint Trump and many others with a brush of sexual misconduct for which Democrats are most guilty of themselves.  In Franken’s case, he has done far worse than anything we have heard to date, writing scripts that allow him to forcibly kiss women and groping them while they sleep where there are pictures that prove it giving us all the evidence we could ever possibly need.  If Bill O’Reilly had to lose his job at Fox News over just allegations, Franken has much worse coming to him.  And he deserves it—as do many others who will soon fall in his wake.

Rich Hoffman

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Thoughts about ‘Battlefront II’: Stories told in a very impressive new way

 

On a lighter note we are living in some interesting times.  I have been very encouraged by the glimpses of the future that are emerging, especially the new Tesla tractor-trailer that has the potential to dramatically change the transportation industry.  I am a person who gets very excited when I see things come along that expand the imagination of the human race on a mass scale, like the latest Star Wars products—whether it’s a new toy, video game, or motion picture installment.  With each new addition to that fantasy/science fiction mythology the imagination of the human race is expanding dramatically.  And that has never been truer than in the new Battlefront II video game by DICE and Electronic Arts that expand the efforts of the first version of that game for all the major platform systems over what was released in 2015.  This 2017 edition is just marvelous, jaw dropping cool, and a seriously interesting look into the nature of politics and the human soul.  There are a lot of interesting things going on with Battlefront II that are indicative of some of the greatest art our culture has ever produced.

Nobody buys a game like this to play the single player campaign mode, they buy it to play online with thousands of potential people at all hours of the day and night all over the world.  People in cultures where guns are unfortunately banned can play a game like this and instantly they are playing the most modern version of cops and robbers that we all aspired to as kids, before public schools made it impossible for kids to even make a pretend gun with their hands.  Boys, girls, young and old are all thrown into these battles together and they force you to work toward team objectives to survive by heightening your individuality to the quickest reaction times and personal aptitude.  The desire to play such a game is a very primal one, and this game is certainly one of the best to date at making everything work well and allow players to just enjoy the experience.  I enjoy the ground based combat quite a lot, but it is the flight combat that I love the most.  I thought the first Battlefront was pure heaven for my personal tastes, but in this second installment, it’s so much better, better than I thought it could ever possibly be.  One of my favorite video games that I played as a kid was the Activison Star Wars game The Empire Strikes Back which was a blocky 2D Defender type of thing involving snow speeders and a constant wave of Imperial Walkers, each that required precisely 48 hits to kill unless you managed to hit a little sweet spot that sometimes appeared on the top of the shell.  So the aerial combat in Battlefront II is just beautiful to look at and participate in.  Stunning really.

But the real star to Battlefront II is their new story mode campaign that I was excessively impressed with.  Not only is it a nice story to add to the Star Wars canon fitting in with the movies nicely, but it’s some seriously good science fiction.  For instance, the Empire has a new weapon in this story which are satellites in space that fire into the cloud formations of planets to heat up the atmosphere and cause hurricane like storms on the ground to harass their enemies.  I thought that was a very interesting concept considering that this very year in real life we saw four major hurricanes hit the United States alone, three of which made ground fall as upper category storms.  Many conspiracy theorists believe our current government can do something similar to this now, so I found it interesting that a big platform game by Disney would even allow something like that into a Star Wars storyline.  But it worked and was very interesting.   Does it advance conspiracy theories or address a tyrannical problem indicative of world governments—I think it does a lot to get a conversation going about the temptation to use weather as a weapon against dissidents.   If the Romans could have done something similar, or the Nazis, they would have.  In Star Wars, the Empire does.

The other big surprise for me was a scene where Kylo Ryn was mind walking through the memories of a captor he’s interrogating.  It was a dreamy sequence that you play through as a participant and it reminded me of an old game called Shadowman—where you had to walk through the world of death to solve problems.  I thought it was very intelligent and exhibited great skill in advancing a pretty complicated story.  The game was already one of the best campaign story lines that I’ve ever played, so this last sequence was very interesting.  At that point the makers of the game I thought were just showing off.  They knew they had a great game and at that point were just putting an exclamation point on the end of it.  They could have played it safe, but then it wouldn’t be a Star Wars movie.  In Star Wars fans expect innovation and risk.  When science fiction fans watch something like Star Trek: Into Darkness we know we are seeing touchy, feeling content that is popcorn to the base fans—Star Wars seeks  to blow minds wherever possible with ever-expanding concepts—so it’s good to see that ambition still alive even under Disney control.

Battlefront II is a massive game with huge investments put into it.  Its targeted release was announced months ago for November 17th.  I preordered it which allowed me to start playing it on November 14th, three days early and I have to say, this is one of the best gaming experiences I’ve ever had so far.  Previous winners were of course Uncharted 4 and the latest Zelda game for the Nintendo Switch.  Battlefront II is a massive game with a lot to do and it holds that massive population of a world that wants to play it all at the same time very well.  The scope of the game is so big that I saw it being advertised on the NFL website heavily last weekend, and everywhere else that Disney felt they could penetrate popular culture.  But honestly, no wonder NFL ratings are down.  People may be turned off by the National Anthem issue, or the high salaries and spoiled brat attitudes of the players, the concussion protocols, and the softening of the game to appeal more to women but with competition like Battlefront II to occupy people’s time, a passive NFL experience is pretty boring.

If you are looking for a great video game to invest in, then this is it. It is released to the general public today in time for the Holiday season and is the perfect thing to do when it’s cold outside and the days are short.   With two new Star Wars movies coming out over the next six months, the announcement of a new trilogy and the Disney parks putting the finishing touches on their new Star Wars lands there is a lot to be excited about for even passive Star Wars fans.  Even as Hollywood is struggling massively; Star Wars is still good enough to keep the industry alive for a bit longer all by itself.  It won’t last of course.  The motion picture experience will likely give way completely to the small screen and video games like Battlefront II.   In many ways the video game industry is still able to tell stories in the classic way that great movies like THX-1138 did; only participants can actually be part of the story instead of just viewers.  That’s what makes Battlefront II such a great offering, because it is truly great science fiction and fantasy that we experience typically in great literature and it puts you in the action as a participant to interact with other people, and that makes it extremely unusual.  Not so unique for the kids who have grown up with these games, but for the tapestry of human history where information is exchanged through art–this is a real showpiece worthy of a great deal of respect.

Rich Hoffman

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