Tag: Rich Hoffman

We Need More Guns: What the Las Vegas mass shooting has taught us about the failures of progressive society

The only way to stop the mass shooting that took place in Las Vegas by the 64-year-old Stephen Paddock was to have other armed people nearby who could have shot him dead. Ideally, personally armed people could have killed him from the balcony from which he rained down terror well before he took the lives of over 50 innocent people and more than 500 concert goers. There is no law or any centralized planning that could have stopped this crime. And if it hadn’t been a gun a person like Stephen Paddock could have used a vehicle. There is always danger when people are so tightly packed together anywhere under any circumstances. The best safety for all involved is to have other people there with weapons to stop the crime before the authorities arrived. As it stands Paddock was able to shoot unmolested for over 20 minutes—and that is simply too long to take action.

LAS VEGAS, Oct 2 (Reuters) – A 64-year-old man armed with more than 10 rifles rained down gunfire on a Las Vegas country music festival on Sunday, slaughtering at least 50 people in the largest mass shooting in U.S. history before killing himself.

The barrage from a 32nd-floor window in the Mandalay Bay hotel into a crowd of 22,000 people lasted several minutes, causing panic. Some fleeing fans trampled each other as police scrambled to find the gunman. More than 400 people were injured.

Police identified the gunman as Stephen Paddock, who lived in a retirement community in Mesquite, Nevada, and said they had no sense of what prompted his attack. The Islamic State militant group claimed responsibility for the massacre, but U.S. officials expressed skepticism of that claim.

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/breakingnews/gunman-mows-down-at-least-50-people-in-las-vegas-concert-attack/ar-AAsLPFk?ocid=spartanntp

What we know now is that this guy, Paddock was a mild-mannered fellow prior to this event and I’m sure there will be a lot of talk about his background and speculation into why he would do such a thing. Could it be some kind of false flag deal to harass the Trump administration with just one more thing? Conspiracies are relevant to the fact-finding of an issue no matter how far fetched they might seem. Given what we know about our own government, who knows what they might do to turn public sentiment onto a topic of their design. What matters is that somehow this guy managed to get a lot of automatic weapons and a lot of very expensive ammunition to commit this heinous act which is very suspicious. Trump said it best when he said that it was an evil act—because no matter how you slice it—it was evil.

And that places this issue at a very philosophical place—can we trust centralized authority to protect us or do we fully utilize the Second Amendment to make every citizen a first responder in a violent world where people like Paddock could bring death to us in any moment? Can authorities stop the Paddocks of the world? I would say no. The only solution would be to have everyone in that concert armed, to have people in that hotel armed and to have people always ready to stop evil when it appears. There isn’t any other solution. Progressives have an ultimate failure that they are specifically responsible for, they have tried to centralize our society to the point where people don’t think for themselves anymore and the solution to a mass murder like this Vegas shooting is to decentralize the means to stop it.

Progressives like to talk about the kind of laissez-faire gun control that I propose as living in the Wild West—as if that were a bad thing. What they fail to understand is that there is a natural morality associated with personal firearm protection that actually elevates our society into mutual respect. There is nothing in the world that makes people more equal than a gun. A weak woman is as strong as the stoutest man if she has a gun. Guns make the races, and people of age all on equal footing and it forces people to be respectful of one another. In a society where guns are on every hip, Stephen Paddock would have been killed within a minute instead of many more—and many fewer people would be dead and hurt. Progressives are the ones who regulated everything and centralized the safety of our world, and when it fails, the blood is on their hands. In Las Vegas the failures of progressive society failed miserably.

At gun events I never worry about anybody shooting guns at other people because a mutual respect is established between everyone else since everyone is equally armed. Guns are only scary when other people have them and you don’t. Because of the progressive educations we have all experienced where guns were demonized people of our time have been made to fear guns when instead they should look to them as equalizers in a dangerous world—that by having them guarantees respect from those who might have evil intentions. Guns make the world safer, not more dangerous. It is only when guns are in the hands of bad guys, or people who lose their mind for whatever reason that the balance of equality shifts toward evil and the innocent become the bottom of the food chain. One more law or 200,000 cannot stop evil from committing crime when respect is vacant from our society. Guns create respect where it isn’t naturally applicable.

In a free society the best way to achieve equality and respect is with a gun. The more guns the better and in as many places as possible. A centralized state may have good intentions but they were powerless to stop someone like Paddock. And there are no metal detectors and security checkpoints in the world that can stop evil when it decides to act. God forbid we turn Vegas into another airport terminal of neurotic security to overreact to this tragedy when the real answer is to arm more people, not less of them. I’m not a big fan of Las Vegas but it is one of the most laissez-faire places in the world and it would be a shame to allow clueless government bureaucrats to overact by instituting more security when all they really need to do is to make it easier for good people to carry guns openly so that people like Paddock couldn’t kill so many so easily.

One of the most attractive aspects of the Wild Wild West for me is that it was a time before progressives came to existence to latch to our governments and ruin our world with overly centralized planning. The period of westward expansion was a time of great human enterprise and philosophic contemplation. Slavery was ended and most of America’s wealth was created in those years and much of who we are was established in that period. Progressives wanted to “progress” beyond that thinking, and they have the ruin of lives in their wake to demonstrate their lack of virtue. And that has never been more obvious than in the debate over guns, where in Vegas they got what they wanted—a society of people standing around listening to a concert generally unarmed and enjoying an evening in “Sin City.” But all it took was one person to shoot guns into a packed crowd to change their lives forever. And Paddock didn’t have a right to do that. If it hadn’t been for progressive influence, there would have been someone there to shoot that old man. And if they had, many more people would have lived.

Rich Hoffman

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The Problem in Puerto Rico: No monster trucks or bass boats there to save Democrats

 

I’m all for making Puerto Rico the 51st state, but as we’ve talked about here on several occasions, their $73 billion dollars of debt that have bankrupted that very small United States territory of only 3 million people was a major problem before Hurricane Maria destroyed the island as a catastrophic category 4 storm.  It was the third major hurricane to hit the United States just in 2017.  Previously all of Florida had been hit by a major storm, and before that Texas.  Trump dealt with both of those crises so well that the hungry media looking for criticism had nothing to say in both cases, even though the personal damage was in many cases much more extensive in dollar value. But when Puerto Rico happened something was very different.  The reason for the mountainous debt, and the cause of so much devastation was that the island was ran by Democrats and they were ill prepared for the disaster—as they always are.  Trump’s FEMA supplies came to the San Juan docks but there was nobody there to take the supplies inland causing the media to criticize the federal efforts.  But behind their criticisms were something else, a fear they wished to hide from the public about the politics of the situation and it is quite telling to explore the cause of that fear.

http://money.cnn.com/2017/09/27/investing/puerto-rico-debt-who-owns-trump/index.html

I’ve done hurricane relief before.  I remember very well how bad Hurricane Fran was when it hit Chapel Hill, North Carolina as a category 3 storm an hour inland from the coast.  The power was knocked out for two weeks and I was one of the guys there pulling trees off the homes and it was a real struggle just working in that environment let alone being a resident living in the heavy humidity trying to get insurance adjusters to come and give them back some normalcy to their lives.  The National Guard had to clear the highways so that those insurance adjusters could even get to town, and then the wait was extreme as everyone had something to put on a claim.  You learn really quick all the things we normally take for granted like running water, air conditioning, refrigeration—and an open and well stocked grocery story.   Maybe one of the weirdest things I’ve ever seen in my life was a grocery superstore completely empty because everyone had ransacked it and it hadn’t been restocked for weeks because delivery trucks couldn’t get to it.   And this was in a very conservative area where people were pretty smart, generally, and there weren’t a lot of people living off the federal government.  Many of the people I was dealing with lived in nice homes and had good jobs at either NCU or Duke University across town—so at least there was money as a foundation to all the misery.  It was a mess, and that was the United States mainland where military bases and a very advanced highway structure were there to provide the quickest relief possible.

Of course Puerto Rico is a different story, it’s an island to the southeast of Cuba so it’s not connected to the United States mainland in any way, nor is it even close. It’s nearly as remote as a territory as Hawaii or Guam is.  Getting to Puerto Rico isn’t easy under the most optimal conditions, let alone when all the infrastructure was wiped away by a major hurricane that touched 100% of the island.   Being so far in debt the power grid was in a poor state to begin with and the people living there had very little money.  Most of their homes were disgraceful places just a few steps out of a third world country.  The Democrat governor, Ricardo Antonio Rosselló Nevares is a member of the New Progressive Party—which is just another name for Communist Party USA and points directly to why Puerto Rico had a debt problem to begin with.  The Governor seems like a pretty decent human being, but his politics are horrendously misguided—so he wasn’t prepared for a storm that completely destroyed the island leaving the 3 million residence completely vulnerable.  Then to make matters worse the mayor of San Juan, where the major port is located to get supplies to people inland was ran by Carmen Yulín Cruz Soto—an even bigger liberal than the governor.  Between them they had no plan of action or understanding of basic management skills which left them to not only ask for federal help by way of supplies like FEMA had conducted in Florida and Texas recently.  But they were asking for the infrastructure to deliver them as well—a considerably more difficult proposal given the remoteness of Puerto Rico.

With Texas and Florida being Republican lead states with governors who knew what they were doing federal help was able to bring in supplies and from there plenty of self-sufficient volunteers used their monster trucks and fishing boats to get those supplies to the people who needed them until the basic necessities of life could be somewhat resumed.  It will take many years to even hope to return to normalcy, but few people died and the people in those regions got back on their feet quickly.  They were success stories defying the tragedy due to the inherit self-reliance of the people most affected.  The people in those places were conservative minded which is how Republican governors were elected in those states to begin with.  Not so in Puerto Rico where I think the only Republican on the island will be President Trump when he visits to examine the extensive damage for himself.  In Puerto Rico the people who elected the progressive Democrats into office think much differently than those people in Texas and Florida.  They had no boats or monster trucks to help with the volunteer effort.  They were mostly poor people made worse by their addiction to government services and socialist local management of resources.  The people there didn’t rally to solve their problem, they sat on their porches waiting for someone to turn their power back on, and to bring them food and water.  The supplies were in the port at San Juan to distribute inland, but there was no effort to take those supplies to the people who needed them because nobody thought to do it for themselves—hence their tendency to vote for Democrats in office and to be poor, and in perpetual debt.

And that’s why the Democrats around the country are attacking Trump so viciously, because they have to hide the big difference in why Puerto Rico is so dissimilar from the major disasters that crippled Texas and Florida just weeks before.  Everyone can tell for themselves how differently the Puerto Ricans reacted to a major tragedy compared to the bass boats and monster trucks in Houston who fought bravely to restore order to their communities.  Liberals know what the problem is and they can’t let that become the story so they are attacking the Trump administration for essentially the same things they attacked President Bush for after Katrina wiped out New Orleans. But the problem was never the reaction of the Republican presidents; it was the type of people who were inflicted.  In Republican run states where the political bases were much more self-reliant the federal government and the people worked well together to manage the crises.  But in Democrat lead areas where liberal mayors and governors were in charge, everything was a disaster.  The FEMA people could bring the supplies, but the locals expected those supplies to literally be poured down their mouths because intellectually they are a too depended on government services to think for themselves.  That’s generally why they were poor to begin with.  Being poor isn’t just something that happens, it reflects the way people manage their lives.  Hard working people tend to have jobs and therefore money to work with.  They may even have a nice bass boat in their driveway to use if they find themselves flooded out. But poor people are usually those who are apathetic and always looking to do the minimum in life—which is why they don’t have many resources to work with when something bad happens. Puerto Rico had a lot of poor people by its demographic nature which is why they’re in terrible debt to begin with.

Trump’s tough talk about Puerto Rico is perfectly justified.  The federal government can’t just come along and bail them out of the $73 billion dollars in debt then pay for the complete rebuilding of the entire island.  The people there are going to have to change fundamentally into a more conservative base of philosophy otherwise they’ll be in trouble again during the next crises and they won’t bring anything to the table as an American state. The way to get Puerto Rico back on its feet is to create some free enterprise zones to make the island attractive to some of the high-tech businesses that are emerging in the new Trump economy—so that the place can become something like a new Silicone Valley.  But the nature of the people must change because even if Trump brings jobs back to Puerto Rico someone has to actually deliver on the effort.  They can’t sit in the port at San Juan and wait for someone to unload them.  Puerto Ricans need to learn from these crises and change their ways.  They must learn to help themselves—and to stop electing Democrats to run things so that prosperity can actually take root.  Democrats hope that nobody notices their failures in Puerto Rico and that they can hide their mistakes behind the other storms of the year and build a case that racism is somehow the problem.  But it’s not, the biggest difference is that Democrats are idiots who don’t understand basic economics and when pressed in life they always buckle—because their basic foundations of thought doesn’t prepare them for reality–leaving them always in need of a subsidy to fuel their political thoughts which have foundations of moral bankruptcy.  They only know how to just consume the resources thrown in their direction under every circumstance.  The problems in Puerto Rico are and have always been the failure of Democrats—and for that they can only blame themselves.

Rich Hoffman

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The Pittsburg Steelers Suck: How “group think” is destroying the NFL

I will forever now hate the Pittsburg Steelers for the way they handled the National Anthem and their individual player Alejandro Villanueva who was the only person who came out of the player’s tunnel to pay respect to the flag during last Sunday’s game.  In the past I’ve been supportive of the head coach Mike Tomlin but now under this national crisis he’s shown himself to be one of the villains, and I have no place in my life for a person like that.  I’m not going to watch any more Steelers games in the NFL, I can tell you that.  To watch how excited people were that Villanueva was the only one to stand for the anthem, then to take that away with a weak apology to the “team” the way events occurred the next day displayed everything that is wrong with football.  Obviously Tomlin and the Steelers teammates had gotten to Villanueva forcing the guy to wipe everything good he had done away completely for the good of the “group think” concept of team sports, and I think it’s disgusting.

As much positive that I’ve written about American football, and how it is a game of capitalism, there has always been that one little thing that has bothered me about “the game.”  And that is and was for me the culture of the locker room.  Now to that effect the best comments I have heard on this subject came from Chris Carter shown below in a video.  But for all the passion Chris showed toward the locker room culture that is precisely what always turned me off to team sports.  If I could have just played the game and embarked in the heroics of what happened on the field—I would have loved to play football and other team sports.  When I was in school I was heavily recruited by many coaches and my parents really pushed me to participate.  I was a very fast kid, a strong kid and a naturally gifted athlete.  I healed quickly, my body responded well in the weight room by putting on muscle when needed in a few days—everything about my physical body was what coaches wanted except for one thing, I thought the whole experience of the team concept was stupid.

When I was in the fifth grade I had a physical education teacher who really was encouraging me to be a multiple sport athlete because it was obvious to him that I was the fastest and strongest for my size of anybody in school.  But in sixth grade the next gym teacher was an arrogant prick who was all about group think, and I was opposed to everything that guy stood for.  I can say I hated that person before we ever spoke to each other because his value system was so diametrically opposed to mine.  However, let’s back up before going on—because this is important to the situation we are seeing now.  Even more than physical ability I was gifted with clarity of thought that extended beyond any parental teaching that anybody could give me.  Some might say that God walked with me very closely and guided me—which I think takes away from the actual value of my own decision making—but I always had very clear thoughts about how things should be, and had the courage to act on them—so when I was being groomed for being the next hot athlete in grade school, I resisted because I was opposed to all forms of “group think” that were presented to me—and public education was all about “group think” and “peer pressure.”  Ultimately what changed Alejandro Villanueva from a solitary figure pledging allegiance in the player’s tunnel and capturing America’s pride for about 24 hours but then reducing him to s slobbering apologist surrendering his big body to the rights of the “team” was that peer pressure instruction which had molded him into a professional football player in the NFL.  All those players at that level are governed by the same rules and those rules greatly restrict them as human beings which is why I never developed into an athlete outside of gym class.  I always fought peer pressure from day one in public school and that made the experience miserable for me.  I am thankful to this very day that I was aware of it from such a young age.  Group think is the worst aspect of human nature and I was always immune to it which then allowed me to see things without the emotion of worrying about what other people thought about it.  You can’t be a truly free person in life until you have made that personal decision not to worry about the opinions of other people.

I had a long talk with my gym teacher in the fifth grade when the subject of showers came up.  It was a purely voluntary thing to strip down and shower with the other kids after gym class but I wasn’t about to take off my cloths and share my naked body in the presence of my classmates.  I didn’t like those kids and I surely wasn’t going to reveal myself in a naked form to assimilate with them.  My parents then got involved and they all spoke to me that once we started doing sports in the seventh and eighth grades, that showering would be mandatory.  The more they pushed, the more I dug in.  I always saw the shower thing as a way to strip away the natural defenses of clothing and to symbolize removing our individuality into the naked truth of kinship where everyone was equally naked and sharing that experience together.  I wasn’t going to do it and that was all there was to it.  A lot of people were disappointed in me and they let me know it through peer pressure.  Yet the more they pushed, the more I dug in and the only place I found relief was in books, video games, and adventures outside of the school environment.  Since I didn’t waste an ounce of my time on satisfying other people’s peer pressure, I was free to do many other things leading me to a very colorful life full of unique experiences.  It all started by refusing to shower with other kids in school.

As a lot of these professional athletes grew into the specimens of perfection that they must be to play in the NFL at some point in the past they had to assimilate to that group think mentality which is what quickly controlled the behavior of Alejandro Villanueva.  These players are bigger, stronger, faster and tougher than the average person, but they are weak in the mind and can easily be controlled by little people like Mike Tomlin because of their preponderance to “group think.”  Groups are never more powerful than individuals and that is essentially the opposite message that the concept of team sports tries to convey.  Parents push their kids into team sports always hoping that their kid will win the lottery and become one of these professional athletes and live a good life under the protection of “group think” but you know what, I would never curse anybody I loved with such a limited vision for life.  I would never tell a kid I loved to take that first step in a locker room to become equal and bonded through nudity surrendering their individuality to a group called a “team.”  Not that the showering situation is about being gay, which I think is somewhat of a problem.  Athletes often have a “bros before hoes” clause in their psychological pacts with each other which I am adamantly against—and that mentality starts in the locker room culture—the all for one and one for all mentality of group think.

That’s why this whole NFL protest concept is so dangerous, because here you have millionaire athletes who are public celebrities behaving so quickly to the peer pressure of group think that they are easily used to sell social justice radicalism to their fans without understanding really what they are doing.  Trump is right about what he said about NFL owners being afraid of their players.  And coaches like Mike Tomlin was trying to get in front of that fear by uniting his team through group think, even though what Alejandro Villanueva did was good for the country.  But it wasn’t good for his team so guess what he did—he put Villanueva on the spot to protect the reputation of the team.  Obviously he tried to back track his vitriol once there were reports that Steelers fans were burning their jerseys and Terrible Towels.  Because here’s the secret to the whole thing, fans of the NFL love to watch team sports and root for the collective efforts of the team they have picked in an artificial war on the field of play.  But if you listen to them talk at tail gating parties before the games you hear the recitation of individual stats.  Those individuals are picked for Fantasy Football teams based on their individual performance.  So to the fans, it’s all about individualism and Alejandro Villanueva embodied that spirit gloriously before the game which caused all this trouble.  Once people were reminded that Alejandro Villanueva was just another “team player” yielding to the peer pressures of the world he became no better than anybody else—certainly not someone to celebrate.  And that is why the NFL is dying before our eyes.

When Aaron Rogers tried to get the Green Bay Packers fans to lock arms at Lambeau Field during a Thursday Night Football game on a national stage he was embarrassed to find that almost nobody did it.  As a jock trained to think in group assimilation he assumed the fans would follow him like all the other idiots he knew from his locker room.  People do not like to share themselves with people who do not possess the same value systems.  This is why team sports is such a big part of public education, because the goal is to create a class structure where athletes are considered elite people who then impose peer pressure on the rest of the world to satisfy the objectives of the government institution.  That might work conceptually, but it doesn’t work intellectually—and the effort failed.  But the attempt to even try it reveals the ugly side of the NFL which makes it easy for fans to turn away from the moment that it doesn’t give them what they want—which is relief from politics and the anxieties of our days.  When athletes show themselves to be simple automatons subject to group think instead of dynamic individuals that might be on the next insurance commercial, then the magic of football leaves and something else will replace it.  And the Pittsburg Steelers have really shot themselves in the foot assuming that people would be with them no matter what.  Now they have to live with their bad decision, which won’t be easy for them to do.  Speaking for myself, I will never watch another football game where the Steelers are playing.  I have better things to do than to waste my time on them.

Rich Hoffman

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The Miracle of Reading: Why a book is the most powerful thing in the universe

I must take a moment to articulate something a lot of people take for granted—and that is the unique aspects of intelligence possessed by the human race and the ability we have to transfer knowledge to each other. I’m talking about reading specifically. The ability to put down marks on a page, or a rock, and to have some other person interpret the meaning of those marks into intelligent recollection is one of the greatest miracles of the universe. It bothers me to see criticisms of the human race as if nature were in some superior position, as if the construction of a planet or the vastness of space were more important than the ability to read a book. Because it’s not, there is nothing more important than the human ability to read. The ability to convey knowledge of many lifespans and to create cognitive associations based on marks on a page is one of the most important things to emerge from LIFE. The random biological nature of cells to do what they are programmed to do does not equate to the ability to think and to build on intelligence. The mysteries of gravity and the power of light do not hold a candle to the ability to reason through variables and to invent something from nothing.

I had these thoughts recently while on a call with a patent review officer in Washington D.C. while a very expensive lawyer was serving as a bridge between us all. The scope of the meeting was to put the final touches on a patent I’m associated with—something created from nothing which would be launched into the world forever to change a manufacturing technique. We were doing this work from a large conference room table with mountains of written material spread out so that barely any aspects of the wooden table underneath showed through. The amount of reading and writing it took for all of us to arrive at that moment with over 4 years of discussions and all the years of experience we all had amassed over many different careers coming to that point was to me a miracle of human existence, and was a subject of great excitement. The reviewer was a very smart man who had to have read mountains of previous material in order to speak on the conference call so fluidly and it was in that moment that I considered how far the human race had come in just a few thousand years of marking on rocks during the Neolithic period, or even the age of Iron. As humans we realized early on that the way to beat our natural lifespans was to read and write—so that we could cheat death and live on with what we intelligently acquired over a lifetime. Cows, chickens, birds or any other creature anywhere don’t do this. They simply live—do as they have been programmed to do through cellular construction, then they die and are returned to the earth. Only humans leave behind the mark of their lifetimes in the knowledge they acquire and after only a few thousand years of this here we were inventing something and making it all legal—again through the power of the written language.

The anger I have at stupidity is in this regard. I really hate dumb people—because it is a choice. To see humans waste their minds on stupidity, on collective cohesions, to deliberately intoxicate themselves or to develop addictions such as pornographic endeavor, over eating, or smoking is to deprive the miracle that is life from its full fruition and I think it is much more catastrophic than any environmental concern. The worst thing anybody could do in life is to be stupid, and to do it by choice. To not learn to read, to write, or to think. Just the words on this blog site are a miracle in themselves because I can take what’s on my mind, put those thoughts down here for all to read—just marks and symbols that we all agree mean something, and we can exchange knowledge. I can speak to my great, great, great, great, GREAT grandchildren as easily as I’m speaking to you now—and that is quite important—and powerful. That is far more important, and difficult than the reasons for the storm on Jupiter known as the Great Eye. Who cares why the eye happens and never goes away if it doesn’t lead to any knowledge. It is just something mechanical that happens. It doesn’t think or become anything. It just is. And humans are not like that.

The hippies, the climate freaks and the socialist losers out there will say to us that we should smoke dope and yield to the world around us, and to become harmonized with existence. I say that is all bull shit. What they are really saying is that they are too lazy to think, too lazy to read, and too lazy to contemplate invention on improving what is into something that could be. Learning to just live and die isn’t really living. Its surrendering. A thinking human being is the most powerful aspect of existence that there is—and we are meant to change the world around us by the necessity of invention. And we do that through the ability to read. The ability of one mind to put down on paper through symbols the contents of that thought and for some other mind to read those symbols and recollect the thoughts of the first person is amazing. It is the closest thing to actual telepathic utilization that we know in known science. And there is an immortal quality to it that advances all of civilization. A great Orca whale doesn’t sit down and write a book. They simply live, they are born, they seek out food., they mate, they become mentors to the youth, then they die. Virtually all life forms perform at existence this way and there is nothing special about it. There is nothing great about Mother Nature and the world around us—only what we can look at as human beings and improve upon—because we were meant to do so. To fully live is to improve the world around us, not to accept it as it was.

Books, written papers, blogs, articles of formality—these are miracles of human thought that will extend our reach of knowledge deep into the future and will result in even more invention through natural evolution. I say to every drunk, every pot smoker, to every person who deliberately attempts to make themselves stupid so to gain appeal among their peers who do not wish to be challenged by intelligence, that they are a disgrace to everything it means to be alive. To have the gift of cognition, to think above the status of animal behavior and then to turn away from it is simply unforgivable. The ability to think and communicate is the greatest achievement in the universe, even as vast as it is. We marvel at how dolphins can communicate under water, and how humpback whales sing long spooky songs that inspire topless heathens known as beach bums to proclaim them as evidence of a “greater intelligence.” But when was the last time a dolphin wrote a series like the Game of Thrones books by George R.R. Martin? The answer is obvious, and deserves considerable respect. It’s time we stop pandering to the superstitions of the past and begin to highlight what is best about life in general—and it begins with the ability to communicate. That small step from carving out an image on a rock to pass along some thought to other people started a chain reaction which has evolved into those piles of paper I described at our patent meeting—and from there to the essence of modern civilization—which is a wonderful thing. Only those seeking stupidity could argue otherwise—because what they fear is to become something greater than the rest of the universe—and to ponder what might come next.
There are a lot of things I love in life, but there is nothing I love more than a new book. They always excite me, more than anything else does and that is because of what potential each one holds—from the simplest kid’s book to the most sophisticated novel—they have within them a cognitive ability that is very specific to the human condition which strives to be more than our animal natures—and that is the most important thing in all of existence. I place the power and ability to read above the most fantastic forces known anywhere, even a black hole at the center of each galaxy. Those are just mechanical events operating under the rules of physics. The ability to think and ponder changing those rules into something better is what matters most. And that is the key.

Rich Hoffman

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Everything We Need to Know about the NFL’s Inevitable Death: The Global Citizen movement is attacking America through entertainment unions

Many aren’t aware of it, but there is a lot more to the NFL controversy about players taking a knee during the National Anthem. Many think that Trump shouldn’t be dealing with the issue, but then again, they clearly don’t understand the strategies of the anti-American forces invading our sovereignty. For those who don’t know the story visit the website linked below to the Global Citizen movement. That is the latest Socialist International effort to spread global communism to every reach of the globe. They simply changed the name to make it more inviting and stuck it to a bunch of stupid NFL players who think they are civil rights heroes. The NFL players are just uneducated participants easily pulled into the global events of our times as unsuspecting fools selling poison to an audience the NFL has come to take for granted. Trump was right to highlight the issue as a top priority. It may very well be the biggest issue of our day, more so than war with North Korea, our $20 trillion-dollar debt, or the three major hurricanes that have destroyed American cities over the last few weeks.

https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/

After what I saw this past weekend from the NFL, with many players taking a knee during the Nation Anthem, then watching Jerry Jones cave to the player’s movement by kneeling in the center of the field of the Monday Night game in Arizona locked arm and arm—I’m done. As many know, I have been a fan of the NFL during the whole duration of this blog site—but not anymore. What I see happening is a poplar game being exploited by a greedy socialist trade union that is working in conjunction with the other entertainment unions, SAG, DGA and many others to spread this Global Citizen movement and expecting unaware NFL lovers to go along with it because they love the game so much. Well, I think the NFL assumes too much. Fans are willing to put up with players who beat their wives, do drugs, and even kill people—but they won’t stand for a lack of patriotism. The National Anthem is part of the NFL experience and it allows people to feel good about the event—and without it, the game is a weakened exchange.

My wife and I were planning a trip to Tampa Bay on the weekend of November 12th for a long weekend, as we have in the past—to visit Raymond James Stadium, enjoy the beach, and have a great time at the Buccaneers football game against the Jets. After I saw Mike Evens take a knee at the Vikings game Sunday I cancelled all our plans in that moment. That was before they lost to the Vikings by the way. I don’t care how good Mike Evens is as a football player, he’s not so good he can’t stand for the National Anthem. If he’s not going to do that, I’m not spending my money on the team he plays on, and people who read here often know how much I love the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. But I don’t love them that much, not enough to put up with spoiled brat kids who are more willing to be cheer leaders of the Global Citizen movement than of the country for which the game of football is a spokesman. Without that game to play people like Mike Evens wouldn’t be a multimillion-dollar player to begin with—he’d be doing some regular job like everyone else, so the kid needs to learn his place in the world, and my money won’t contribute to his ignorance.

We budgeted around $5000 dollars for our trip and that would have covered the plane tickets, the hotel—a nice hotel suite, the game tickets, food for the weekend, a little shopping at the International Mall which we like to visit when we travel to that region, and of course spending money at the stadium—around a $1000 just for that. Some people might not think that’s much money, but I think it’s a tremendous amount of money just for a weekend football game. Now I don’t think I’ll even watch the game on television. Forget about the NFL pass on cable, I’m not going to pay that either. I’m not going to spend any money on the NFL this year because of all this. Normally through the year I might spend several thousand dollars. In years like this one where we plan out of state trips to watch the Buccaneers play, it might be $7000 per year spent during the whole season—including merchandise. Not this year, and maybe never again. I love football, but I don’t love it enough to put up with this kind of crap. If I can’t feel good about the money I’m spending, I’m not going to spend it. After all, Battlefront II comes out just a few days later and I’m very excited for that new video game release. Who needs football for entertainment when you have a Playstation? One is a passive experience, the other is an active one.

This is where the NFL has sided with the wrong groups. Obviously, they are backing their players union support of this Global Citizen movement because they want to expand the NFL market. A “flag first” policy does not help the strategic objectives of their global reach, and in order to get that, the NFL needs to accept more socialism—because let’s face it, the rest of the world is a very socialist place. All this solidarity crap is socialist speak to the leftists of the world whom the NFL is trying to reach. NFL executives figured they already had saturated the American market so there isn’t much left to acquire. To keep up with escalating payrolls for which the players union demands—especially with all the concussion protocols–the NFL must seek oversea markets so that is why they are supporting this anti flag movement.

The Global Citizen movement aims to remove sovereignty from all countries, especially the United States so that their objectives of a one world government can be met. Trump knows this better than anybody right now because he gets to talk to these people every day—which is why I’m sure he unleased this debate right after his United Nations speech. Global Citizenship is a buzz word right now in all progressive communities and if the president is trying to instill an American first message, then he has to attack the global movement where they are festering utterly undetected—behind America’s game of football.

This is where the NFL is going wrong—their American base of fan support isn’t as strong as it used to be. The new generation of young people won’t spend money on the games like my generation did, or the people of the generation that came before me. They won’t buy season tickets and commit to eight games per season, and they certainly won’t waste $5000 per game like I have from time to time to have a fun weekend out of town for a favorite football team in another city’s market. I’m 50 years old and honestly, I’d rather spend my Sundays playing Battlefront II where I get to be at the center of the action instead of watching millionaire players have all the fun. People younger than I am most certainly feel that way. There are far more things to do on a Sunday than watch NFL football. You can binge watch shows on Netflix or Amazon Prime, you can lose yourself in video games playing with people all over the world which is a lot more exciting than watching a football game. What the NFL doesn’t seem to realize through arrogance entirely of their own, is that once they lose their fans—they won’t be back. Once people turn off to football, they are gone forever. My generation will care some, but they’ll find something else to do. The next generations, they’re playing video games—by the millions. They don’t need the NFL.

I almost feel sorry for the NFL players for getting themselves wrapped up in this mess. They are cutting their own throats and they don’t even know it. They are destroying the game for future generations, and utterly cutting off their own revenue stream. Their NFL owners won’t be able to pay their gigantic payrolls soon, because the money simply won’t be there. To sustain what they currently are accustom to, the beer needs to flow, and be very overpriced, people need to buy lots of jerseys, and they need to fill those stadium seats. TV ratings have to be great, not good—but GREAT! That’s the only way advertisers will pay premium to market their products. If people turn off the game and revert to Playstation—which they were already doing before this controversy—then the NFL as a business dies. It won’t take long for it to happen—just a few years from now. Even under optimal conditions the NFL was going to have to adjust, but now they may lose their game forever to a public that has their entertainment appetites stimulated by other things. Nobody wants to watch flag football—and they certainly won’t plop down 5K for it not with all the other things out there to entertain us.

The players and the media should have listened to Trump. They are the ones who politicized the game and once the president called them out on it, they dug down deeper—and damaged themselves to a far greater magnitude. I am surprised that more smart people have not yet drawn these conclusions and connected these complicated dots, but perhaps that is because there is too much emotion associated with the NFL which has been with us for a long time. But to be honest, it’s a pretty young game in the scheme of things—something that has essentially lived and died during my generation. And when its gone forever, nobody will miss it—few will ever remember that it ever was.

Rich Hoffman

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George Lang Sworn in at the Ohio Statehouse: Chris Wunnenburg shows why the GOP is changing

I wouldn’t have expected anything less, everyone knows that the Republican Party of Butler County, Ohio is one of the most powerful, and draws from one the most conservative demographics in America, it has its own kind of Game of Thrones situation going on.  Congratulations should go to George Lang who was just sworn in for the 52nd Ohio House District seat that was recently given up by Margy Conditt.  George is the best that there is out there for something like that, he’s a genuinely good person to his core.  I’ve known him for quite a while and been with him in some tough times which is how you can tell a lot about a person’s character, and I am absolutely 100% sure that he will do a great job at his new state position.  George generally gets along with everybody—from Chris Wunnenburg to the reform minded Ann Becker—George is an authentic person that knows how to walk the fine lines in life without falling off-and that is a skill that is desperately needed in our Ohio statehouse.   So, nice job.

I mention Game of Thrones because my wife and I are just recently catching up on it as my kids have been telling me for years that we’d like it.  So we started watching the first three seasons and they were right, I find the politics very reflective of real life, so it’s compelling enough for me to spend some time on.  Chris Wunnenburg whom I know from my time with No Lakota Levy, got into some hot water recently because during the statement period where the Butler County GOP had to consider who to elect for that 52nd seat—which George ended up getting—Ann Becker was also running and was asked by Chris “how would you handle the workload and time commitment of a state (representative) while your children are still in school and require a lot of your time?”  I was very surprised by this because when I stated about some political rivals that they all had asses the size of car tires and diamond rings to match, Chris was one of the very first people to publicly criticize my comments as sexist.  I don’t normally get into identity politics, but he’s talking out of both sides of his mouth.  I can say that because I know the guy he represents what’s wrong with the old GOP politics.  I don’t need any money from Chris or his builder buddies, so I can be more objective about him in reporting the situation.

Ann Becker is one of those people who juggle it all and I’d dare say that her kids will grow up to be fantastic people.  They are presently getting an education that few children anywhere are getting—and they are lucky to have her for a mom. I’m a very traditional guy, my wife dedicates herself completely to our family, she stayed home when my kids were being raised and presently she is a stay-at-home grandmother, and I am glad she does all those things in the traditional manner.  But I understand people like Ann Becker who are so ambitious and constantly driven that they involve their kids in their industrious lives which is nonstop.  Likely her kids will be the kind of people who will work 110 hours per week and still enjoy going to the movies, that’s how Ann is and that kind of person doesn’t have the same limits, whereas people like Chris have done.  Not everyone can rub their belly and chew gum at the same time, and if they can’t, then children need to be the priority as they always should be.  But if a person can rub their belly, chew gum, build a house, read a book and discover new stars in our solar system all at the same time, then Chris should have just shut his mouth and not asked the question even if the real intent was to keep Ann out of positions of power to begin with.  It’s just a matter of time before she is the Party boss in Butler County.  Curve balls won’t stop her.  It’s not fair to Ann to hold her to Chris’ limits so long as traditional values are what is communicated.  The more Ann is involved in, the better off our world is.  Chris Wunnenberg, the Butler County GOP’s Central Committee chairman should resign if he really cares about the Republican Party.  If he was smart he would have stuck by me when it mattered, but he didn’t and the rest is history.  He’s holding back the potential of the party with his generation too-late thinking. People like Ann Becker are the future of the Party and people better get used to it.

http://www.journal-news.com/news/butler-gop-chair-only-asks-woman-how-she-balance-work-home-life-state-rep-some-republicans-are-fuming/EHNK3bWqfccMz8SipPJXZJ/

http://www.journal-news.com/news/local/george-lang-ohio-statehouse-appointment-what-really-going/DwJ3oUrhSa14otax8WQgNO/

The biggest problem with George getting that state seat however is that it leaves Mark Welsh alone as a West Chester trustee.  He’s now the only competent manager of that very important regional economic powerhouse.  Not only is George now gone but so is the township administrator Judi Boyko who recently left her post after 25 years of service to become Hamilton County’s assistant county administrator.   I’ve come to know Judi and she certainly earned my respect.  While I have a reputation for arguing against high wage public employees, like school teachers and all other unionized government workers who jack up their rates approximately 40% over their market value—Judi is someone I’d consider paying $500,000 per year—because she was worth it.  She did a great job in West Chester which does leave a big hole to fill there.  It won’t be easy to find a replacement for her as the trustees are leaving the vacancy largely to the Novak group to staff.  I think that’s a mistake, I’d personally take responsibility for that if I were them—but in that kind of decision I’d only trust Mark Welsh to interview the prospects.  Lee Wong is incompetent and not able to perform the task. And with it being unknown at this point who the trustees will be after the election—with so many variables now at play, the new township administrator will be the least of the worries. That combination of Mark Welsh, George Lang and Judi Boyko will be hard to duplicate under any conditions, so I anticipate many negative articles from me in the future about what’s going on in West Chester.

Nothing stays the same forever, and most of the pain is a short-term thing.  The GOP is changing and that is allowing people to move up leaving holes in the ranks that will be filled by people of various political philosophies.  That is certainly the main philosophic difference between Ann Becker and Chris Wunnenberg.  Ann is certainly a Donald Trump GOP type of person whereas Chris is a George Bush thinking establishment advocate.  When the fight gets tough Chris is nowhere to be found.  He’s only good in a district where everyone is basically a Republican, only to a different degree over or under others.  His white beard makes him appear wise and he is articulate, but he lacks courage.  He has money so people tend to eat out of his hand, but philosophically, he’s a powder puff and it’s only a matter of time before he’s replaced by somebody like Becker in the pecking order of things, which is why he asked her the question he did—to attempt to derail her climb up the ladders of power.  She’ll be there whether he likes it or not, and maybe he should watch the Game of Thrones to learn how to build alliances instead of taking hard-line stances on traditions that only serve the construction industry.  There is more to the GOP than just developer’s concerns and a failure to recognize that is a critical blow to the overall health of the Butler County GOP.

People like Chris tend to hold back the innovations needed to deal with the changing GOP.  George Lang is part of that change, and Chris to his credit wasn’t against supporting Lang, but as to the candidates from the GOP who are poised to run for governor to replace the pacifist John Kasich, traditional candidates like Mike DeWine and Jon Husted represent the stale old establishment.  Once it comes time to have the election, they won’t excite President Trump who will be looking for a partner in Ohio.  So my money is on Jim Renacci—whom Ann Becker is getting behind.  I was impressed to see that Renacci put $4 million dollars of his own money into the race which is how I think things should be done.  He thinks like Trump, he’s very pro business and that aligns with the goals George Lang has going to the state house, to make Ohio the most business friendly states that there is—which has very stiff competition from the surrounding states.  It’s a lofty ambition and will take someone like Renacci to pull it off.  Traditional Chris Wunnenberg GOP people just won’t slice the bacon of this new age of Republican needs.

I don’t see any of this as a problem so much as an opportunity.  The strongest aspects of conservative philosophy are setting new bars for which to live by. The Democratic Party I don’t see as a factor under the new Trump administration pushing them to call themselves even more often Republicans just to be viable for elections.  That will of course lead to more political battles such as what we’ve seen between Chris Wunnenberg and Ann Becker, or Lee Wong and Mark Welsh.  I know what kind of congressman Geroge Lang will be—and I’d bet my life on his success.  He is now in need of a good governor to work closely with the Trump administration to get Ohio off to a great start into the next decade as the very important GOP realigns itself with the values of the Party as it is today, not as it was ten years ago when it was essentially the Party of builders who dominated the GOP back then.  Times have changed and the old Tea Party is running things now, and that’s how it will continue.

Rich Hoffman

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New Rules to the Game of Power: From Henry the VIII to the NFL–the world is changed forever

If you know anything about European history, or actually the history of anything human—you will find extensive evidence of people worshipping other people as their rulers.  It is something that is wired into our DNA—we seek masters to rule over us.  Even in America virtually every place of business has some semblance to their own version of the Game of Thrones—Which George R.R. Martin actually based on the War of the Roses in Europe.  People will do almost anything to gain a title that they can then use to acquire power over others and typically that is the name of the game.  When people acquire those titles and that power they have a right to rule over the minds of mankind in whatever capacity the title gives them as defined by our human history.  Such as, a village chief makes all the executive decisions that concern the culture of the people connected to that collection of people.  A CEO at a company performs the same type of function, and of course there are underlings who are always plotting and scheming to nock that person out of their seat so they can then acquire control of a company.   If people cannot become the CEO then they will usually do anything to acquire some seat of power under the CEO—in whatever capacity they can get—because the behavior is toward power acquisition and naturally assumes that the structure of that particular society will obey mindlessly the unspoken conformance to the rules of conduct that has been with us since the beginning of time.  In that pecking order politicians have always assumed that they were greater than say a CEO and thus ruled over all others because they controlled the rules in society that the CEO had to live by, and often this forces the businessman to contribute donations to the cause of the politician to gain assistance with the law giving the impression to all that in the rock, paper, scissor game of life, the politician was superior to the businessman, and that all people under those titles were to mindlessly follow their “betters” without question.

America, or the concept of it anyway, decided to revolt against this trend and provide people with the freedom to choose for themselves to rule themselves and this introduced a very confusing dynamic to the scheme of human endeavor.  It’s only been a few hundred years since this idea was created and compared to the many thousands of years of history within the human race, it shouldn’t be surprising that we are just now getting used to the idea.   Donald Trump is essentially the first president to ever be elected to a position of power based purely on the merit of his life—a free man living by his own inclinations and not given some seat of power by boot licking and heredity.  His political enemies have tried to frame his rise to power in that fashion, but it doesn’t stick because Trump is a man of his own making.  That makes him the most unique world leader in all of human history—which is the source of the anguish against him.

There is a lot of fear leveled at Donald Trump by those who have been playing their own version of Game of Thrones for years and have always thought that if they did this, or that—they’d acquire a seat of power and would then be given some authority over their peers—which they seek desperately.  There are a lot of psychological reasons for the insecurity that drives people to seek these seats of power, but for the context of this article, we must focus strictly on the desire to acquire power.   Donald Trump has changed the rules to the overall game of politics—and that has every establishment person upset because all the rules are changing to the “game” and they don’t want to adapt to it.

There is a secret to those who seek the most power through the acquisition of titles—most of them are notably lazy people.   They want to gain some title for which they can sit and boss other people around without being the smartest, fastest, strongest or most qualified person—and they count on fear to force everyone into compliance.  If merit becomes the dominating factor in acquiring power—as it should always have been—then new rules for acquiring power become mainstream and the lazy people of our species are at a loss.  That is why the establishment is and has always been against Donald Trump.  It is also why people will stick next to Trump no matter what he says or does, because Trump has a track record of success and he acquired his power based on it.

In the past people were so easy to destroy who had these positions of power because they always acquired their power through some sentiment—or some connection to others.  This gave the groupthink people leverage over the title seeker in case they ever stepped out of line.  If a politician slept with some woman while on the campaign trail and later they got out of control with their donors, or they voted incorrectly on something the violator could quickly be dispelled by scandal because what was given by emotional invisible rules could be easily destroyed by the same.  In the days of Henry the VIII if he wanted to overthrow the Roman Catholic Church from controlling his kingdom through the Pope he would marry a protestant rebel and use her to give rise to the movement against the church.  Then after the king had England’s politics wrestled away from the Pope and he was tired of his queen and wanted to change her to another he simply dreamed up chargers of infidelity against her so that he could cut off her head and marry a new woman.  What was given by sentiment and emotion was easily taken away—you see dear reader.

In politics the media has played their own version of kingdom building, they build people up, they tear them down and they use that leverage to control who has power and who doesn’t.  But that doesn’t work on Trump because the former Apprentice star has been through the fires of merit and has earned everything he became.   The media came to Trump to boost their ratings but to their dismay they never gained control of him because what was given was done so to acquire power from the natural aptitude of Trump.  The Apprentice went on to become a big success and introduced reality TV to an unsuspecting audience and would change entertainment forever.  Trump wasn’t cast to the top of the heap because of a bunch of executive producers.  He was already there.  NBC snuggled up to Trump always thinking that they’d gain control of him in some way like they did everyone else in history but it never happened.  Trump went on to become president because of his natural inclinations and is completely free of lobbyists, media influence, or peer groups which is the most terrifying aspect of his presidency to those who have spent their lives playing the games of power only to find out now all the rules have changed.

All the things Trump has said this previous week, from the Rocketman comment regarding North Korea to the blasting of the NFL for not requiring their players to stand during the National Anthem the president has done as a free person—and that is new to the stage of human achievement.  We like that Trump says those things because we feel those things ourselves, but have not had a seat at the table of power to communicate to others.  But in America we elect a president to represent us to the world, we don’t elect a king or a noble overlord—we elect a representative, and Trump represents all those who strive to have a merit based system of power acquisition so that we can actually solve problems in our government, not just to have a class of aristocrats to admire from afar who enchant us with entertainment as our “betters.”  I recognize no person on earth as my “better.”  And the people supporting Trump through thick and thin are of the same mind.  On the stage of history this is the first time this has happened, and it’s scaring the crap out of the world that has never had to deal with this elected phenomena.  Democracies have always paid lip service to this idea of a freely elected person to represent the masses, but always that person was easily controlled by traditional methods.   Now with Trump those rules are changed forever.  Our society will never be able to go back to the way it was—because the way it is, is so much better.  That is the pain you hear on the news from those who have always thought that if they did this or that they would be rewarded with seats of power.  Now those seats are meaningless making their lives meaningless because they have put so much of their lazy selves into that game that now they are left empty and staring into an abyss of future values that are beyond them.  Which is a very good thing.

Rich Hoffman

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Donald Trump’s ‘Atlas Shrugged’ Moment: Venezuela’s epic failure due to their commitment to socialism

 

I know, I write about Donald Trump a lot these days.  Yes there are many other things going on in the world—especially local issues,  but as I see it we are witnessing the greatest political trend change that the history of the world has ever seen—and I can’t think of anything more important.  It dosen’t do any good to chase the tail of something as long and elusive as our current social trends which are like a very long snake.  What Trump does today will have a tremendous effect on tomorrow, so it is important to capture those little moments as they occur.  Specifically it was the great United Nations speech that Donald Trump gave which illustrated so many positive things for American culture, but none as great as when the topic of Venezuelan socialism was brought forth and put on the world stage for all to see.

I was surprised years ago when so many people were upset that the great American novel Atlas Shrugged was being made into a movie.  I knew the filmmakers, and was a friend of the crew throughout the production and for them it was a love project.  They had a small budget in order to tell a gigantic story—an epic on the scale of Game of Thrones.  Yet Hollywood wouldn’t touch the project through a legitimate studio with A-list actors essentially because the media companies were so deeply contaminated with socialist and communist supporters that such a pro-capitalist story like Atlas Shrugged was never going to get “green-lit.”

Hollywood has always been a little left but it has only been recently that they were so overtly advocated out-right socialist—as a general philosophy.  Their A-list actors, even people like Harrison Ford, have stepped out of reality and onto the socialist band wagon because it is the social trend of Santa Monica valley these days.  If you go into a bar there by the pier talking about the merits of capitalism those weak-kneed she-males and braless bitches will be ready for a fight—they believe in socialism that much.  So when the independent filmmakers of the new Atlas Distribution Company wanted to make a movie out of one of the great American novels for which Atlas Shrugged is and has always been, all the studios laughed at them.  Many years before the studios laughed at Star Wars too, but that’s another story.  I only say that because “group think” does not understand how to make good movies, or how to detect social trends.  Individuals do.  Remember that.

I thought the movie attempt at Atlas Shrugged was ambitious and they managed to do a pretty good job getting the high points down in a visual form.  I would like to see a big budget Netflix series done for Atlas Shrugged that spans for 10 one hour episodes, because I think that’s what it would take to properly tell the story—but it was a bold attempt even as the entertainment unions pushed back hard on anybody associated with the project.  The production could not keep actors from one film to the next as the movies were divided out into three parts.  The actors were beat on so much by the rest of the Hollywood community that all three movies had a different cast and the only ones who signed up were actors looking for something to do.  It was a real challenge and showed me how bad Hollywood really had become.  All the friendly meetings I had with various people over the years flew right out the window as their true intentions were revealed during the production of Atlas Shrugged.

For those who have read the book you know what I’m talking about.  The modern situation in Venezuela is essentially the plot of the book.  A successful country (the United States in the story) is pushed into socialism by their government and the world plunges into darkness.  Once the government establishes things like price controls and root themselves into a severe crony capitalist market, the world falls apart and it is the point of Atlas Shrugged to identify why.  Essentially the “engines” of the world go on strike and that leaves everyone else starving—literally.  The beauty of Atlas Shrugged is that it does something that Karl Marx never achieved—it identified why some people make everything happen while others destroy the world around them—so if the makers of the world fail to participate, economies fail and countries wither away into dust.   The political Left has never come to grips with this phenomenon and this is the aspect of our civilization that is most important to our continuation into the future.  Marxism and all the fruits that fell from it like socialism, communism and fascism all turned out to be rotten short-lived fantasies first breathed by Sir Thomas More in his classic book Utopia—that were destroyed during westward expansion in the United States.   While Marx and his followers were pushing for labor unions to take over the world by controlling the means of production the railroads, the gold rush and the promise of private property in America used capitalism to fill the sky lines of the worlds next great cities like New York, Chicago and Los Angeles which until that period was just a border town–until the gold rush then the movie industry gave people a reason to live there.

Venezuela had been a pretty good place to live; it was a thriving country living off its oil reserves until Hugo Chavez brought socialism to their economy.   Once Chavez died a member of his inner circle Nicolás Maduro, a former bus driver (seriously) rose to power as a union leader and became the next president.  If you want to see what happens when labor unions get their way by controlling the “means” of production, just look what happened to Venezuela in just a few short years. As the state took over more and more of its industry, they became much less productive and their economy essentially died right in front of the world.  Now the people of Venezuela are starving—literally, and nobody seems to understand why, at least those who have advocated for socialism. Yet it is the nearly seventy year old book Atlas Shrugged that provided an almost page by page analysis for all to read—but the world watched and let it happen to Venezuela anyway.

What was remarkable about Donald Trump’s speech was that most of the people in that general assembly at the United Nations have emotional connections to socialism.  They are either members of Socialist International or they have been thinking about it.  Only the United States has maintained a defense of capitalism and our economy shows it.  The way for more countries around the world to prevent more people from being poor or from having terrible GDP numbers is to unleash capitalism and reject communism.  China’s communism only works if it attaches itself to a capitalist country and can keep the other nations around them poor so that they can maintain some form of price controls.  But if a country to the south like Vietnam were to adopt capitalism, or Cambodia, India or even North Korea—Russia and those types of places—China’s economy would sink because of their communist system.  What happened to Venezuela was that the price of oil went down and they couldn’t compete. That is all the unsaid story before, and no American president would strongly defend capitalism allowing everyone to shrug their shoulders as if they had nothing to do with anything happening to countries like Venezuela.  But when Donald Trump said what he did it put the issue on the front burner in a way nobody was prepared for, and it properly articulated the problem—boldly, people had to listen.  And that was a significant moment in the history of the world that will be remembered for many centuries.  I thought it was tremendous and it will prove to be bigger than anything that happens on the local level because that culture change will flow into the rest of the country rather rapidly.  And I love it!

Rich Hoffman

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Guns and Books: The keys to a happy and free civilization–Samantha Power’s guilt

I say it quite a lot these days, and I’ll continue to do so. If you have two main things in your life you can consider yourself a free person. The first is the ability to read and to use it to consume many books over your lifetime. Having the ability to read and use the knowledge gained from books can make a person nearly invincible—95% of the time. If you are smart, you can get through most anything in life, even physical threats—just with what you learn from books. If you put a smart person in an MMA ring with a beast of a world-class fighter—I will bet on the smart person every time. Because there are more tools to beating brute force that come from intelligence that severally put people who rely on just physical strength to get by in life. Then for that last 5% of the time—you need to own and know how to use firearms. The gun is the great equalizer in life, so by having that you can keep villainy away no matter what anybody may throw at you. That’s why in American society, those two things are what I’d say are the two most important elements to living a free life.

To prove my point just look at the mess Samantha Power is in, who used to be the UN Ambassador under the Obama administration. The academic radical used her position to spy on political rivals and essentially brought in most of our intelligence agencies in the process into a grand scheme that showed just how dangerous collectivism in any capacity can be. Most everyone involved in the federal government activity under the Obama administration told the same story revealed by the Power unmasking of Trump political players—which was the modern equivalent to a witch hunt as we’ve ever seen. Many pundits including Rush Limbaugh did a fabulous job of exploring the who, what, when and hows of this story—so my point here would be on the “why” it is necessary to never trust any institutional system that uses collective force to enforce a philosophy. Having the ability to read and to shoot takes away that power from these types of people and are paramount in stopping villainy as we detect it.

It should come as no surprise that fascists—such as the type the Democratic Party have always inspired to become were in the business of book banning and controlling knowledge—because they needed stupid people to follow them. Smart people who are well-informed would never follow these losers who rallied behind Samantha Power to unmask people connected to the newly elected President Trump. If it can happen to a sitting president with made-up chargers created to justify wiretapping, or any other spying the government wished to conduct on their quest to control political dialogue—then it can happen to any of us. What stops that behavior is of course a well-informed society where internet information is free and easy to access, books of all kinds are available on the open market, and people are free to assemble as the Tea Party did to share educational treasures uncovered during intellectual quests that inspire others to also gain knowledge.

The same people who want to limit what people read, and watch on television under the umbrella of free speech, are the same as those who are always demanding a control on firearms and want to ban personal guns. I personally think that people should be able to carry guns everywhere—that we should be able to wear them on our hips everywhere we go, even to weddings and to court appearances. If someone doesn’t have ill intentions toward you, nor you toward them—it keeps everyone honest. The gun banning people want to put themselves between you and a potential rival as a mediator taking away the responsibility for two parties to actually work out their problems allowing passive-aggressive activity to take control of the process of peaceful exchange replacing mutual respect for fear of the law.

It is highly unlikely that a person would pick a fight with another person if that other person was wearing a gun. It doesn’t matter how big they are, or what sex they may be—when people see a gun on their hip, respect for what that gun can do is the first thing on everyone’s mind—which forces all dealings with that person to be done at an elevated level of respect. If you take that respect away and replace it with fear of prosecution, then those who think they can buy and twist the laws of our land to their advantage may not be so hesitant to do something corrupt. This is clearly what we see in the case of the Obama administration using Samantha Power to commission the many weapons of government to attempt a coup against an American election. They did it because they didn’t fear that anybody would shoot them, and they figured they controlled the strings of government so what was a person like Trump going to do to them—so long as the media played along? That’s the kind of world you get when you take respect for other people out of the equation and replace it with an adhesion to fear. The more fearless, or less moral of the human species will always think they can gain an advantage over others if they are stupid, and unarmed. That’s why Samantha and her partners under the Obama administration thought they would get away with what they did. They never expected they’d ever get caught because at the time they controlled the law and most of the people they deal with were either stupid, or unarmed—likely both.

Carrying a gun isn’t about killing other people, its more about preventing other people from killing you. Just having it does most of the work for you which then frees up your mind to pursue more intellectual pursuits. When you don’t always have to worry about some power-hungry fool coming into your life to disrupt you in some way, you can then read books and contemplate bigger ideas. Some of the best people you’ll ever meet in life are those who read more than fifty books a year and also do a lot of shooting—like people in Montana, Wyoming, Idaho and in the Dakotas. They are not stupid people and they are mostly all heavily armed. You don’t see their cities being shaken to the ground in protests, and you certainly don’t associate them with any kind of crime. There’s a reason for that—and it starts with the gun and ends with the average intelligence of the people who tend to read more than other places in the country. Books and guns are the keys to a healthy and happy life and those who best utilize those two very simple things are those who end up most successful at the very foundations of existence. The proof is clear, and where those things are missing—such as in our Beltway culture, the worst that comes out of the human experience is prevalent. That is why Obama and the Democrats in general always look for ways to impose gun control. That is also why they have problems with free speech. They need people unarmed and stupid so that they can rule your minds. Once people are armed with knowledge and weapons, people like Samantha Power are just pests who can quickly be swatted aside, and that’s exactly what is happening in the age of Trump.

Rich Hoffman
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“Rocket Man”: Ghost writing and the hidden value of being a voice in the dark

It was 2010 and I was meeting with my congressman John Boehner with a Power Point presentation I had put together about the United Nations and how much America put into it compared to other nations, and I was urging my representative to get out of that body of government because it was intrusive, out-of-touch, and seeking to end American sovereignty.   Of course the reaction I received from my proposal was a sneer and an attitude toward me of ignorance which pissed me off greatly—as if my little mind couldn’t grapple with the realities of the world.  It pissed me off so much that I immediately resolved to create this blog.  I was smarter than any of the people I met with, yet because I suggested ending the American participation into the United Nations I was treated with contempt and ignorance as if those things applied to me.  Well I’m still at it while Congressman Boehner is now a lobbyists in Washington D.C., as he essentially always was, and finally there is a new president of the United States who does understand as I always have what the United Nations really has been, and he gave a speech which properly represented my view points—and I enjoyed it greatly.  The best part of the speech was where Trump called the war mongering North Korean despot, “Rocket Man” for his constant threat of nuclear war.  The stunned chamber listened mostly in silence as a new kind of American bravado finally launched itself on the world stage and it gave me tremendous pride.

Critics of President Trump will say that he doesn’t read off the teleprompter very well, and that the magnanimity of that UN speech was written for him, and that he’s not sophisticated enough to come up with those line of sentences on his own.  But I’d say that it takes a lot of guts for someone like Trump to even read words written for him in front of such an audience because once he does they will forever be associated with him, and that is something different we haven’t seen before—a person in a major leadership position who will own that kind of dialogue on the world stage.  John Boehner certainly wouldn’t do it way back in 2010 and he was the closest person who I thought might.  Certainly John McCain who had just run for president in 2008 wouldn’t because he lectured our local radio celebrity Bill Cunningham on using too harsh of language against Barack Obama during a Cincinnati GOP rally—so even during elections where much was either gained or lost, the GOP leadership would not commit to the kind of terms that were needed to stand against a global tide seeking to end American sovereignty on its way to world domination of thought and deed—while we as Americans paid the bill.

A few years later when I needed them most, many local GOP people left me hanging on a vine as I had committed myself to harsh language at our political enemies and they wouldn’t stand with me.  They cowered in fear because they were not in politics to accomplish anything seriously; they simply wanted the titles and the money that came from crony capitalism and stirring the pot the way I wanted to, in order to fix the situation didn’t give them what they were looking for in politics, so villainy continued and they would look toward me and say behind my back, “he just doesn’t understand.”  Like hell if I never understood—I knew far better than they did what was happening because I could look at the situation objectively.  My career wasn’t tied to the stars of the senate or the House of Representatives.  I had no plans to be Washington lobbyist the way that Boehner did, so I had no fear of pissing anybody off.  I always thought that was the purpose of government—to represent the people who are really out there—not to become some party caricature for bridging business with money and hiding the whole escapade behind rules and procedural conduct.

I can say starting this blog has been one of the best things I’ve ever done.  Personally I’m quite a successful person, so there isn’t anything anybody can “give me” by being a nice, polite person who plays nice with others in the realm of politics.  Writing comes easy for me because I’ve spent a lifetime reading and thinking about things to a level most people just aren’t comfortable with.  So if I’m not looking to be the next George R.R. Martin or Steven King in the writing world, I have a substantial talent to apply to the hard work of intellectual reform that needs to take place regarding the role of government in our lives—and that work can then get done.  I write lots of articles—daily—and people voyeuristically read them.  Often times its speech writers and people in positions of power who get from what I write an affirmation of their own thoughts—but it helps them to hear it from someone else, and this gives them the license they need to act accordingly in their lives.  I don’t mind at all if something I say ends up in a speech somewhere spoken by some important person—I consider the exchange an act of ghost writing.  I don’t expect to be compensated just as I didn’t expect John Boehner all those years ago to credit me with ending the United Nations.  It became obvious to me that people like that guy needed to have everything spelled out for him so that actions could be taken, and if I waited for the publishing world to publish my books on the subject, the work just wouldn’t get done.  The liberalized attorneys and editors at the big New York firms who publish books these days would never give me a chance unless I had a cable news show that could push the product—and I had no plans of doing something like that—even though I probably could have.  From that time of meeting with Boehner to the present I’ve had a chance to host my own radio shows on major stations, but I didn’t take the jobs because honestly I make more money on my own than any of those studios were paying so I endeavored to put my thoughts out to the public and to keep the money out of it to keep the exchange as clean as possible.  I’d let the people who did have to write speeches, and give them on important matters take whatever inspiration I could give them to the next step—and it has been working—slowly and surely.

What went into that United Nations speech took a lot of people who spent time writing it and drawing inspiration from a number or sources to even string together the thoughts.  It wouldn’t surprise me if some of my own words were drawn from these very pages to help create the framework of that speech—because it’s those people who are behind the scenes for whom I write for most.   We live in a confusing world and it’s not easy to see things clearly when you have to bang champagne glasses together to keep fundraising going, or you are at a cigar gathering with other powerful people but still need the clarity to stay on point.  I offer to those people a flashlight in the dark by way of ghost writing that I hope moves the ball in the right direction—a direction that John Boehner clearly was afraid to advance himself.  All that behind the scenes stuff means nothing if we don’t have a spokesman willing to take the words and apply them to life and that is what makes Trump so magnificent.  There are many hundreds if not thousands of minds behind that speech, who have written as I have here, and many other places which culminated into the actual formulation of that speech.  But before such a thing could be read to a hesitant audience at the United Nations we needed someone who would take ownership of those words and to unleash them in a dramatic way.   Watching Trump deliver that speech was very satisfying to me, because it took a long time to get someone in an elected position who would actually say what needed to be said.  Ghost writing may help nurture an idea forward, and that’s always what I hope to do.  I whisper to people after they’ve read something I’ve written in the middle of the night when their minds quiet down, and it usually assists their own thoughts—but those thoughts go nowhere until that person acts and takes responsibility for advancing the cause.  Speaking personally, it was more satisfying to watch Trump give that speech to the United Nations than it would have been if a major publisher had given me several million dollars in royalties for all my writing on these matters.  It means more to me to hear Trump say these words than to have a public who enjoys reading these kinds of things, but spends no time in the world acting on them, throwing credit in my direction.  My millions came to me when Trump said “Rocket Man” to that U.N. assembly on September 19th, 2017.

Rich Hoffman

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