Tag: rules

Trump is Pardoning Pete Rose: Rewarding risk takers in our society is part of Making America Great Again

Making America Great Again is about more than President Trump waving a magic wand and suddenly making everything better.  It’s about an attitude and how Americans should feel about themselves that matters most, and breaking this terrible spell given to the world through the administrative state through woke policy making.  To that point, there has been a very silent killer lurking in the background of all our lives that has been looming over the fine line between success and failure, and that is the management of risk and rewards in a society and understanding how important those things are to a healthy culture.  So, for me, especially living in Cincinnati, I was not surprised by President Trump’s statements about Pete Rose and how he planned to pardon him ahead of the 2025 baseball season.  Pete Rose died in the fall of 2024, just ahead of the Trump election, ending a long battle with Major League Baseball, who had banned him for life for breaking a few laws the commissioners thought were important.  Rose had been caught betting on baseball games and had some tax problems with the IRS. The combination of those things effectively pushed out of the game the most popular player, and certainly one of the best, the hit king, out of the MLB and out of the Hall of Fame.  But the problem is, if Rose wasn’t in the Hall of Fame, then who should be?  Over the last forty years, it has been argued that banning Rose from the Hall of Fame of baseball cheapened it for everyone because if the best players weren’t there, why even have it?  Of course, there is more to the story, which is why Trump is getting involved.

Pete Rose isn’t the only sports figure to have something like this happen to them.  One of my favorite all time coaches for the NFL was Jon Gruden, who was kicked out of the NFL because some leaked emails about him talking disparagingly about the commissioner and other people got out to the public and with the new woke rules that administrative minded people everywhere thought would protect them from critical analysis, the NFL and my favorite football team, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers took Gruden down off the Ring of Honor at Raymond James Stadium and the world was looking pretty grim.  Only this past week, at the start of March 2025, did the Buccaneers start to rethink things and put Gruden’s name back up.  I personally like the Glazers; they run a good football organization.  You can find head coaches and position coaches all over the NFL who got their start in Tampa Bay because they have a winning culture.  But they have been anti-Trump and pro-Joe Biden much like the Murdoch family at Fox News has been, and they thought they understood where the world was going when they jumped all over the commissioner’s desires to remove Gruden from the NFL as punishment for violating unsaid woke rules limiting free speech dramatically.  The same traits that made Jon Gruden a great coach, full of risk-taking and passion, were also the same kind of thing that was harming him off the football field among polite society where the incompetent were protected from critical judgments by unsaid rules of conduct that protected Roger Goodell from opposing opinions.  Gruden had called the commissioner a homosexual reference, and Goodell didn’t like it, so he used woke rules to punish the Superbowl-winning coach, and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers followed like cowardly sheep, licking the boots of a corrupt shepherd. 

This is nearly identical to what happened to Pete Rose, the hit king of MLB Baseball.  It takes a unique mindset to be a great player like Rose, to take the kind of risks he did to stand in front of a crowd and hit a ball the pitcher is trying to keep you from making contact with.  Or stealing a base under pressure to score a run and diving into third base headfirst, as Pete Rose did, often obtaining the nickname, Charlie Hustle.  Pete Rose was rewarded for his risk-taking antics in sports, which is how people with such personalities are usually rewarded.  Fans love people like that in sports. It’s one of the best parts of cheering on a sports franchise because most audience members don’t have the guts to take big risks like we see in sports themselves.  So they enjoy watching sports heroes do it.  In the MLB, Pete Rose was getting old and was a manager of several teams, and he was fading, and it was hard for him not to be a player all the time.  So he transferred that energy into gambling, and he bet on himself when he did place bets.  It was a way for him to keep his player instincts alive and be an aggressive manager of his teams.  But that set up a revenge tour for the jealous administrators who had been watching Rose for years and looking for an opportunity to knock him down to size once his name was no longer filling the stands with fans.  So they used an early version of the woke rules to destroy Rose and throw away the key as a message to other players about who the King of Baseball was.

It was a mystery to many why commissioners like Bart Giamatti, Fay Vincent, Bud Selig, and Rob Manfred were so against Pete Rose when other players did far worse over their careers.  It all comes down to capitalism essentially and the goals of an administrative state to use Marxism to limit competitive enterprise.  Pete Rose had all the hot women, fame, and fortune and was celebrated wherever he went.  And administrators like the old and crusty Bart Giamatti could write and enforce rules to show that he has power over such characters which to his mind might bleed off some of that power and influence and get people to lick his boots the way many in a position like his hope for.  They hate people like Pete Rose and Jon Gruden, and I would even put Warren Sapp in there for good measure because of their risk-taking attitudes, which administrators like those mentioned commissioners don’t have.  How do you get the hot chicks to like you if you are afraid of risk?  Show them you have power over the people they like more, so that they’ll like you.  Administrative types adhere to rules to hide their timid natures and their lack of personal courage from the world.  So, they used the rules to destroy Pete Rose because they were jealous of him.  That is one prominent example of why regulations made by an administrative state have been, and are, so dangerous to society, even if we are talking about sports.  That same attitude could be said to be holding back significant industries in America right now, and Trump sees it from the front of the train.  And one way to break that spell is to reward Rose, even if he isn’t around anymore to see it.  Because the world sees it, we want to reward our risk takers in American society.  Even if it is just a baseball game, or stealing a base for just one game of the season that took a lot of guts and pain to attempt, risk takers are the key to Making America Great Again and taking away the power of the administrative state that might regulate them out of existence is a key part to our future success.  And now that times are changing, because we have another big risk taker in the White House that understands these things, worthless administrators who are timid of personal risk are losing power, and people who are good at risk, even addicted to it, are regaining respect.  This is the key to the future of our nation and a great sign of many good things to come.

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

The Snake and the Mouse: How to defeat the Liberal World Order

I was asked a few times during the North Coast Gunslinging Championships off of Lake Erie where I got my rattlesnake skin grips on my Ruger Vaquero and why I had them. It’s not enough to just say they are cool, for me, as there usually is a backstory. I explained that it was good to be a snake in life, which raised some eyebrows because we often think of snakes as maniacal devilish creatures that are the embodiments of Satan. So as a crowd gathered around my story, I explained that the Liberal World Order designed for snakes to be seen that way in our society because that’s how they see themselves. They get their ideas from Plato’s Republic regarding their ability to be the philosopher kings who rule all of society. One of their big concerns in life is to gain enough social prestige to be considered to be in that category, which is one of the primary aims of government, to be among the ruling class the way Plato envisioned it. They are fine for the rest of society to be scared of snakes because they are like the snake in the Genesis story, the possessors of knowledge of all good and evil who trick Eve into defying Adam and God to eat from the fruit of that tree and bring down the whole kingdom of everlasting life with the knowledge of good and evil, as defined by that ruling class. As I’ve explained many times about John Dewey and even going back to classics like the socialist propaganda book from 1888, Looking Backward, public education itself was designed around using peer pressure to control all the inhabitants of society to do as they are told and to be fearful of the opinions of the ruling class so not to fall out of favor. That is the purpose of the ruling class over all others, which is created for us very young in public education and politics. 

As I continued the story, I mentioned that I recently had watched a snake being groomed as a pet, eating a mouse thrown into its little aquarium enclosure, which I have seen many hundreds of times over the years, but it has always bothered me. Of course, the snake wants to eat. The mouse just wants to live. They are doing what nature designed them to do, one to eat the other. But it is troubling always that humans insert themselves into that process by capturing the snake and being an intermediary. The snake is now dependent on a human to feed it. And the mouse, once put into the cage, has no defense. When the snake decides it’s going to eat it, the mouse has no option but to accept its fate. It’s always a sad thing to watch. The poor little mouse, once thrown into the aquarium, knows it’s over the moment its placed there, and the creature will do everything it can to avoid the inevitable; it will try to dig its way under a water bowl or some other aquarium feature to survive, but there essentially is nothing it can do but wait for the snake to eat it. The only defense it has is to attempt to ignore the snake and live its life normally, hoping until that last moment that it will live life as long as possible. Thus, its only defense is to ignore the problem and pretend that its crisis is not a doomsday scenario.    

My life in this grooming process was never what the Liberal World Order expected. I never developed a care for what other people thought about me going way back to 2-3-and 4 years of age. Therefore, my public education experience was utterly divorced from Dewey’s purpose for it, which was to break down members of society into their various social groups, ultimately to be led by the philosopher kings, those with the highest liberal level of education in society, and to be like the mouse in life, to live in the aquarium of their own making and to accept our fate when the snake decides to eat. Of course, the philosopher kings of Plato see themselves as the snake and the rest of the world as their next meal. That is the purpose of all monarchies, secret societies, every bureaucratic organization, even sports. But what was unique about my life is that I never accepted such an absurd concept as a little kid, and of course, that caused a lot of consternation as I got older and didn’t fit into the socially constructed categories. I never accepted the liberal world order aquarium we were all thrown into. Several times in my life, this relationship with the established order and its expectations of it rattled the participants. In the video above, I tell a few personal stories that are comical where the people trained by the Liberal World Order were disarmed entirely as to how to deal with me. One was a 5-year class reunion for the public school I went to. The other was a big presentation I was a part of with the mayor of Cincinnati, city council, all the big media at the time, and all the powerful money people for what to do with the Banks Project back in the 90s. In both examples, I represented life outside the aquarium, and the rulers didn’t know what to do with me, so they ignored me as best they could, which is a typical reaction. To them, it’s earth-shattering because they think of themselves as the snake, but when they meet someone who does not follow their liberal world order rules, they realize that they are actually the mouse in life, and they freeze and try their best to pretend that their end is not near. And it’s terrifying to them.

The purpose of me telling that story to that small group of Trump flag-waving gunslingers on the shores of Lake Erie was to assure them that the Liberal World Order is not scary. They are easy to beat; all you have to do is not care what they think of you. And once you do, you will gain all the power in the relationship. They have been taught by the Liberal World Order that they are the snake in life and that everyone else is food for them. But when you do not care about their controls, they are powerless to do anything to control you, and in that way, the roles become reversed, and they become the food. Watching them go through their cycles of paralysis when they realize such things is always funny. And when it is wondered about what will happen next in the political world of our current life, that is the ultimate fate for them. They were never the snake but were always the mouse, and they are food to be consumed at our leisure. And now we’re hungry, so it’s only a matter of time. And that is what I told that group who asked about my gun grips. That is how I see myself, and my work with the guns is my own reminder of that fact and the vulnerabilities of the Liberal World Order. Like the snake in the aquarium, we can eat when we see fit, and that reality of the Liberal World Order is the most terrifying aspect in the world. They have trained all their lives that their role was the other way around, that they could use peer pressure to control all of existence. But the moment they run into someone who doesn’t care about their opinions and actually sees them as food, they lose all their power, which is the inevitable fate for them all in the months and years to come. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Why The New ‘Top Gun’ is So Popular: Americans like rule-breakers, not conformists

It is funny to hear industry analysts trying to figure out why the new Top Gun: Maverick movie is doing so well going into its third weekend. I’ve listened to and read several hundred reviews of the film at this point. Unlike other kinds of movies, I have not yet found anybody who understands why the American market is flocking to see it many times now. Is it patriotism and the lack of wokeness that is in the movie? Or is it Tom Cruise himself, which many in the trades would like to think is the case? Well, Tom Cruise was smart to make Top Gun the way it needed to be, especially coming out of the Covid years. The film was done well before there was ever a pandemic, and Paramount sat on it for several years because of the uncertainty of the future of Hollywood, Top Gun: Maverick has the feel of a movie made in a different time and a different country, all the way back to 2019. I remember being on an airplane flying out of Orlando and watching Comic-Con footage of the movie for a 2020 summer release, so it’s been out there for a long time. But the film was released during a market recovery in a post-Covid world, and all kinds of forces were at play that inspired Americans to return to the movie theaters to see a movie worth leaving the house to view. Yet, there is an element to Top Gun that is very much reminiscent of the 80s when Tom Cruise was making so many blockbuster films, along with other movie stars, that say more about Americans to the world than anybody has seen in a while. It is that element that was on raw display in the new movie and is why the film is doing well without the rest of the world driving a majority of the box office numbers, specifically the Chinese market. 

The character of Maverick is a rule-breaker, and that is a trait that Americans love. They don’t like someone who follows the rules to the letter. Americans want out-of-the-box characters who will bend or break the rules to accomplish something great in the world, even down to the name of the Tom Cruise character. Tom Cruise himself is not like Maverick. But he was wise to play a character like Maverick and let all the elements of a rebel within the military shine in many reckless ways. Just the name of the character, Maverick, indicates a loner, a rugged individualist, someone who goes their own way in life. And that is not how the rest of the world is. Only American cultures celebrate such traits. The stories other cultures put on the silver screen are conflicts with conformity as opposed to what we see in Top Gun, a character so reckless that he costs the military hundreds of millions of dollars in damage in just this one movie. Maverick crashes two very expensive aircraft and puts at risk many more in his exploits of individualism that are often audacious, unapologetic, and way over the top. In most cultures, Maverick would be in jail. But in America, he is considered the top navy pilot that the military has, and audiences love it.

Literally, in the movie, all the people who have trouble are those who follow the rules. There is a scene where all the best pilots are in a bar talking about the upcoming mission, and they wonder who will be able to teach them anything. And of course, it is Maverick who has been picked to lead the mission because for it to be successful, it will require someone willing to break all the rules and discover what nobody yet knows. There is a scene where Tom Cruise playing Maverick, stands in front of a giant American flag and tells his students to throw out the rule book because it’s what your enemy knows. To succeed in this movie, the characters must learn to “not think” and act on “instinct.” It’s really the message of the first Star Wars movie from way back in 1977 and is a yearning that most people often experience in their lives. The desire to be their own authentic person and not some caricature of social order. The only way a mission like the one featured in Top Gun: Maverick can be accomplished is by breaking all the rules because the enemy is stuck in rules and is their ultimate weakness. It’s not the military jets, the companionship, or even the music that makes people love movies like this one. They help sell the story, but the essence is that Americans love rule breakers. So does the rest of the world, but they can only experience such things in American movies, and that is precisely why all these woke politics have infected the industry to the extent they have. For the producers of Top Gun to turn loose a character like Maverick again into the movie business was a very deliberate act, and the results are apparent. 

In much the same way that ESG scores are failing the financial industry because the world does not value those measures, they have been artificially created to inspire liberal political change to a climate change fanatical religion. Real value is what people are encouraged to see in the movies, not just in the act of buying popcorn actually to see a movie just because it’s there. It’s what the story tells that matters to people, and in Top Gun, it’s about recklessness over logic. It’s about breaking the rules in a rigid military environment to do what the military itself can’t do. It’s thinking out of the box to solve the problems society at large gets stuck on. And that’s why this movie Top Gun: Maverick is doing such good business while other movies come and go, and people forget about them five minutes later. So there is much more going on with this new Top Gun movie than just great music, interesting visual effects, and a vintage throwback to the kind of movies made in America during the 80s. Americans love rule breakers, before and after Covid. Covid was everything that Americans didn’t want to be. They gave authority a chance in case it saved lives, but knowing what we do now in hindsight, they would never do it again. Instead, millions of Maverick types sit in a darkened theater cheering on the new Top Gun because they see themselves in the character. And they want characters like that to succeed, to win at all costs. That’s the American way of doing things, and the rest of the world is fascinated by it. Even though they can’t relate, they will still buy a movie ticket to see it in the fictional character of Tom Cruise’s Maverick. For them, it’s the closest thing they will ever get to a society that thumbs its nose at procedures and conformity and embraces adventure and the treasures found in recklessness. And like all great movies, because Maverick was so reckless, so brash, and such a rule-breaker, he saves society in the process, which says more about us all than any other measure of human achievement.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Rules and Regulations in Liberty Township Politics: Not the sexiest thing in the world, but certainly the most important

The word is out that the Biden administration is working with the World Health Organization to turn over American constitutional sovereignty to the Bill Gates-funded branch of the United Nations to give them control over health care decisions. Before anybody thinks of this as another conspiracy theory, I have said for many months now that the Biden administration does not plan to follow the constitution and that Democrats, in general, are hoping to erode away the founding concepts of America by the election of 2022, which is why they aren’t in a panic at the moment about the upcoming midterms. Polling shows that they will lose big in any honest election, but Democrats have not been participating in honest elections for decades. You can bet they have many tricks up their sleeve to hold on to power, and following the constitution won’t give them that power they are craving. Just watch 2000 Mules by Dinesh D’Souza, and the proof of how the 2020 election was stolen with Facebook money paying ballot stuffers to commit massive overvotes will become clear. So we are dealing with open violators of the law who want power at any cost; what they want to do with the WHO is just an extension of what they have done with Agenda 21, which I was reminded of while attending a trustee meeting in my home area of Liberty Township, Ohio. 

Because of Todd Minniear, the recently elected freedom-oriented trustee of Liberty Township, I have been more interested in the trustee meetings, so I went to a recent one to hear about a new concept that was being introduced, a “constitutional township.” A nice new government building recently opened where township business is conducted, which was weird for me. It’s always weird for me to go to these kinds of things and listen to people who think they are longtime residents who have built homes 30 years ago and think of themselves as veterans. I grew up less than a mile to the south of the new township building. I’ve been all over the world, I have lived in many places, but I live in Liberty Township because it literally is the best place to live in the world, in my opinion. And I remember when I had cows right next to the yard I played in. I still see the character of my home neighborhood even though almost every last bit of green space has a house on it now, which was the topic of the evening, the big Princeton Pike Church just to the north wanted to develop some of their large parcels of land, and neighboring residents who have been there for a while were worried about it. Several people were at the meeting to protest the development. They wanted the parcels of land to have their own road access so the new residents wouldn’t have to cut through their current neighborhood making traffic even heavier where kids often literally play in the streets. I’ve heard the arguments all my life, the debate between people who already live in Liberty Township and those who want to become part of it. Most of the time, nobody is ever completely happy.

This meeting was like the many I remember from the past. The trustees made it clear that all their power was to pass the zoning approval and kick the whole effort to a bureaucratic traffic study. The residents were in a bit of a panic because the government entities who do traffic studies are not accountable to anyone where the local trustees are, so it’s always disheartening for people to be told that their local government doesn’t have any real power. We have all surrendered our local government to the Agenda 21 types in faraway lands for many years. It is precisely that trend that makes members of the WHO think they can actually run all our lives across the world through health care, just as they had attempted to do with Covid, by superseding our American constitution with rules created by the United Nations. Many of the local zoning laws that the trustees were struggling with, including all the rules of procedural conduct, were written by members and fans of the United Nations global governance plan, so it’s certainly not a conspiracy theory. The election fraud of 2020 for those people was a small price to pay for their aims at global domination. The people at that Liberty Township Trustee meeting were just seeing the pass-down effects of laws written decades ago to set up this massive global power grab we were seeing now. The trustees were right; they didn’t have much power by the rules of trustee conduct. For the residents, after the meeting, they stood in the parking lot like lost children who had just found out that their parents had no authority to protect them from anything, and it was a scary concept to hear trustees say for the millionth time, “we have no power.”

In truth, trustees have a lot of power constitutionally, as do state and federal officials; if only they followed the founding documents and stopped allowing foreign entities to tamper with our governmental affairs through ridiculous rules and bureaucratic regulations.   That was precisely why Todd’s proposal for a constitutional township was so important. He was recently involved in a perfect utilization of its use by what he did with Liberty Center, the premier shopping area in the Cincinnati region. With this leadership from the local area idea in mind, the playground at the mall had been closed during the Covid outbreak, and the mall management wasn’t sure what the rules were to reopen it. Parents wanted to use the play area because it’s great for kids to get out of the house, and it brought life to the upstairs area by the food court. Without the playground, the lights were out, and it was a constant reminder of just how terrible the government had been over Covid restrictions. And since nobody in politics was sure what authority they had, nobody thought to tell Liberty Center that they could reopen the play area to help local businesses have life again. So the mall was waiting for someone to tell them they could reopen, which nobody did until Todd Menniear started asking questions. And within a few weeks of asking those questions, Liberty Center was able to reopen its playground area, which is wonderful for so many local residents. And just like that, we could see how a local trustee could bring leadership to the community and improve things dramatically.   Because if everyone were waiting for someone at the World Health Organization to tell them that the playground could reopen, it’s likely the playground never would. 

All local government has much more power than they believe they have. Many of the rules and regulations they are forced to follow are unconstitutional and would fall apart under any legal scrutiny. And when trustees like Todd Minniear start asking those obvious questions, well, then the ruse falls apart quickly, and we learn that many of the rules we have been following we never had to listen to in the first place. We should always ask from where the rules came from and who are the people who wrote them. It’s healthy to ask those questions, and we should because we have the same exact problem with school boards. They have all kinds of flow-down rules that come to them that constrain them in ways the community who elected them doesn’t want.   And some of them could and should be challenged with simple questions because upon asking; many will learn that the authority was never granted to the rule writers in the first place. They just did what they did because nobody questioned their authority. Listening to that meeting and the proposal Todd was introducing and thinking about the successful communication between government and private business at Liberty Center, a new trend in politics was quickly emerging for the better. And as I heard the news about the World Health Organization power grab, I worried about it a lot less because I know there are many like Todd Minniear emerging into local government who won’t just blindly accept unconstitutional mandates. And for the people of Liberty Township, that is some of the best news of the century.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Rules are Made by the Lazy: Socialism with a mask of safety to hide it

Rules are Made by the Lazy

It’s interesting to see what woke terms are considered “hostile.” The video above talks about a recent posting there, which got me banned for a few days. It’s a quote from The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business that says, “never forget that the cheaters and the lazy made the rules of the world, so to make things easier for themselves, not to serve justice.” Well, it’s an accurate statement that is describing a condition that needs to be fixed.  Yet for the Linkedin crowd, it was too harsh, which came to my mind is an experience I had over a recent weekend, which I’ll talk about later that is a real problem in America in a post-Covid world.  And I say “post” because the coronavirus is over and has been for a long time.  But political exploitation of it for a whole host of reasons isn’t. They’d like it to go on forever for all the reasons we’ll talk about here.  But in truth, I expect to get flagged, especially on social media, a lot.  It has been happening to this blog site increasingly for years, and when it comes to the book, well, I meant it to be as honest as possible, and there are many bad guys out there profiting off dishonesty.  So, of course, they won’t like it.  Yet it doesn’t change the nature of the comment, that the lazy are usually the ones who make all the rules the rest of us are expected to deal with.  You don’t often see the best in a field making many rules because they are good at doing what they do.  The rule-makers are the ones who are looking to handicap the good to give the weak a chance to win. 

In a perfect world, competition would determine who wins and who loses.  The objective would be well defined, and various parties would fight it out to see the best.  Someone would win, someone would lose, or a whole lot of people would lose.  The losers would know if they could practice and get better for the next competition, and in that way, everyone would get better, and the world would be a better place as a result.  However, and it’s certainly out of the bag now for mainstreamers, socialism and a mixed economy have taken their toll on our intellects over the years.  So much so that we no longer know the purpose of competition.  In the quest for equality, we have given rise to a society of rule makers who are always seeking to penalize the winners so that the losers in life can win more often.   Worse yet, the value of winning has been so much attacked that many don’t even want to win anything.  They don’t want to be targeted for various social attacks and the stigmas that come with it.  Granted, these positions are not innate to the human being.  Humans all want to strive for the best they can get in anything. Still, the social pressure to embrace meekness is incredible and has given us a society of lawmakers who enjoy controlling the mass of humanity with equality measures meant to cripple the best to prop up the worst. That has given us many of our modern problems. 

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Of course, the excuse for rules makers to always make more regulations is always the pursuit of safety.  The socialist always looking to conceal their loser tendencies wants desperately to take away opportunities for danger to avoid complex discussions about their timidity.  So rules and regulations in an overly litigious society are the perfect cover.  Under the undeclared socialism of our times, the banner of equality takes precedence over victory in every way, meaning that a safe society preserves human life in one fashion only to destroy them in thousands of other ways.  But for a community of rule makers, the more rules there are, the more value that losers have in the world.  I can think of a few blue pill examples of this kind of thing that most people would understand.  In the video above, I give a few examples of the NFL in how socialism has been generally accepted to make the game appeal to the overall mass audience of the product itself.  In 2003, after the Tampa Bay Buccaneers won the Super Bowl, there was a change to their invented Cover 2 defense against the Bump and Run rules.  The Buc defense used to be able to manhandle receivers constantly on their routes, but after that year, it was changed to 10 yards of coverage; the hands had to be off.  Now it wasn’t the Bucs who proclaimed this trend to be unfair.  They had just won a Superbowl.  The rest of the NFL was upset that the Bucs had such a dominant defense that caused the rule change.  And as a result, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers didn’t win another Super Bowl until 2021. That’s just one small example out of hundreds of thousands of similar rules tampering quandaries that we all deal with every day.  But in dealing with them with such frequency, we have forgotten what a life with many fewer rules looks like and how much better our society could be without those rules. 

That, of course, brings up the many rules of business and how rules are used to either crush competition or stabilize the best in dominating a market.  Once a company sticks its head up and shows itself as a contender of excellence, it comes to the parasites to either loot off the efforts or penalizes the company with more rules and regulations until they are worn down into complacency. That’s about the time that the management takes up their open collar shirts and deliberately shows the world that they aren’t so great because they hope to get off the radar of the rules and regulations class.  Too many rules inspire people not to play the games of life, and it is in the games that we find the most value for everything.  That, of course, is the point I make in the book, but on a professional site like Linkedin, you’d think that they would value such talk.  But then again, that’s what wokeness is all about.  Wokeness is about destroying the good and the best to make way for the average and the complacent.  It is just another byproduct of socialism, the quest for sameness, not perfection and dominance in a particular field.  Rules are sold to us through safety, but they intend to eliminate risk, which drives the world’s economies.  And once those who have acquired great wealth and no longer want to be challenged, they can then hire the rules makers of governments to prevent that competition from knocking them off their pedestal.  That is when rules and regulations are used to preserve the best and to allow them to become complacent because nobody is allowed to compete with them.  And that in itself is sheer evil that is allowed to be brewed right under our noses. 

Well, I’m OK with getting banned on all these various platforms. I’m going to do what I do, and the message does get out.  Maybe not to the extent that would be possible without all the rules and regulations tampering.  But the honesty of competition cannot be ignored.  When everyone wonders why the world has many of the problems that it does have, look no further than the impact that rules and regulations have on society as a whole, and you will find the beginning to your answer.   The way to fix any society is not with the burden of more regulators but with more competition.  Not in sameness but in uniqueness.   And once that idea is embraced, we will all see vast improvements in our social discourse.  The skinny jeans tech geeks who flag all these postings aren’t the arbiters of quality and performance.   Winning is. That’s how all societies grow and prosper, is in winning despite all the rules. 

Rich Hoffman

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Skycars are Ready: Yet we have to wait for stupid rules and regulations to catch up

If there is one thing that I’ve learned and developed over these many millions of words of contemplation and the questioning of virtually everything we assume in our political and social order, it is that we lose something very valuable in our teenage years for which we work so hard to develop as children, and that is fertile imaginations that take advantage of our very unusual brains and drive for improvement and creation. It would be my offering that developing that over a lifetime is the meaning of life for the human species. We were never meant to replicate nature and to learn to live within its rules. We were meant to question nature and to improve it the way an artist improves a blank canvass with strokes of paint and the thoughts that took a lifetime to build. And that any human invention of philosophy that has been put in place to restrict such an approach to life is evil, even if the intentions were good to start with, as we all know the path to Hell is paved with.

I was asked by several members of the business community about this new book of mine, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business as to why, earlier in 2019 when they learned I was doing it. As they asked, what could possibly be done new in that field that has not been done by thousands of other people already. Well, that has been the difficult aspect of it and is something I’m untangling due to my unusual life and experiences. Its not just about business that I’m concern, such as understanding why Lean Manufacturing is largely rejected by western cultures while eastern cultures thrive with it. Understanding why the original Walt Disney was a genius, or George Lucas was so successful while so many others try to copy but fail. The new film Ford vs. Ferrari is about the same kind of interesting characters who push the limits of social order in passionate ways for good new things to come forth. So was the great film produced by George Lucas about Tucker: A Man and His Dream. Or the Aviator by Leonardo DiCaprio. What makes genius in a culture and how can we protect it so we can get more of it? Then there is the piece of the puzzle that I think is most unique, tying that to the ownership of guns in a society and how that invention has allowed for minds to flourish and step away from tyranny so that imaginations could flourish. It’s not our education system that has produced such people, its in a mind free of fear either by daredevil minds or those growing up in households protected by family and friends with closets full of guns. My investigation has taken me to that precipice and its certainly virgin ground that has gotten deeper the more I probed. But it has been worth it. The quest has been very rewarding, and revolutionary.

It is in this context that I do much of what I do and think the same. Newcomers or occasional readers here might think that I am a mean, vicious person. However, the people who know me best understand that I am a very unencumbered person 24 hours a day. I wouldn’t say childlike. I would say rather I am unrestricted in my imagination which is vast and is the key to much of my problem-solving ability. People associate this way of thinking with a child, but to me children are learning to think like this, they don’t have the developed thoughts yet, the way an Einstein or a Nietzsche may have. Thinking is the thing that humans do, so doing it well is very much part of the puzzle and to people like me, the worst thing you can do to such people is put too many rules on them, to restrict them to people who don’t dare to think so deep or far. That is where destructive social orders come into play, the things we allow into our political discourse regardless of party affiliation. To me, if it restricts imagination, its evil. From the local zoning board that constricts the plans of a creative architect with stupid rules, or the inventor of a new mode of transportation that must wait for a cumbersome FFA to get their minds wrapped around an idea. To that last point is the subject of today’s article, but also the first step into a series of thoughts that I have on this matter that are paving the defined criteria of this new book of mine. But also serve as a contextual representation for the 21st century and the many challenges of this particular point in history.

For much longer than I’ve been writing here, or writing books I have been a big supporter of skycars. At first it was the Paul Moller Skycar M400 that I worked whatever political angles I could to help it along in the 1990s, where everyone laughed at it infuriating me tremendously. I was working for Cincinnati Milacron at the time and they were creating a kind of pre-Amazon parts delivery system to support their products all over the country, which at the time I was part of organizing with a fleet of vans to provide delivery within the day. Essentially a call would come in, we’d pick the part from inventory, carry it down to our vans, and drive to wherever they were in the country having the part to the customer that day, sometimes within a working shift. I tried to convince people that a Skycar could do the job much faster and due to the political response, I understood that it would take probably another 20 years to get the human race to catch up, and to me that was just stupid. Why weren’t people advanced enough to see the potential? That is the reason I used the M400 in my book The Symposium of Justice. I had Hollywood connections at that point in my life and I was hoping they would take the baton and run with it. But they didn’t. It was a very frustrating period for me to observe.

Well, now its that time and skycars are getting ready to hit the market. Dubai is bringing them into the mainstream in the next few years and the new electric concept called BlackFly is ready right now to fly from your driveway to work at the touch of a button. The problem is, and continues to be even in Dubai, that a political class protected by a lot of silly rules and regulations are standing in the way as they have for so many decades and that is what evokes my anger. The imaginations of the human species has done their job, but the weak and timid are holding back what we could all become due to their lackluster view of the world created artificially with restrictive, timid thoughts. While we justify the rules that are in our society as keeping people safe, the true nature of our beings is to be recklessly imaginative and to allow ambition to fuel product creation and implementation. Our regulatory culture is the problem, or obsession with silly rules to restrict imaginative growth is the problem and has been for a very long time. It is not the job of the unrestrictive imaginations to encumber themselves with those who have limited themselves to thoughts that keep them grounded and under control of the local masters who only want to hold their power given to them by the rules of the day. Its for everyone else to rise to the highwater marks set by the great thinkers who have worked their entire lives to become something unique. And the flying cars are the products of such thinking, and finally, they are ready for the market. Yet they wait for the lazy minded to get it. But first they’ll have to await the results of the Ohio State game against Michigan before they have room in their brains for the task, or some other college game where the small minded gather to reassure themselves that institutions are the boons of existence, and not the imaginations of the most daring. The point of my efforts is to give a scientific opinion on this obscurity, so that perhaps we can change it from what it is now in a highly regulatory business environment into something that allows such inventions to materialize in years instead of decades.

Rich Hoffman