Tag: Senate Bill 5

Tom Steyer’s “Novacaine” Moment: Democrats learn ‘How to Live as Ghosts’

I hadn’t been paying much attention to Tom Steyer’s multimillion dollar campaign to impeach President Trump—because I don’t watch much television—so I didn’t see his ads.  With Netflix, Amazon Prime, new movie releases at the theater—countless books—family activities, a busy professional life followed by needed time for myself—my life and Tom Steyer’s just didn’t connect. Aside from that, I think he’s a loser and I only have room for a minimum number of losers in my life and he’s not on the list.  But I did catch one of his ads over the Holiday and was pretty amazed at his audacity.  What makes him think someone like me is going to let him get away with impeaching Trump?  If such a thing were to happen doesn’t that open the door to do things the other way—using violence if necessary?

Tom Steyer is exactly the reason we needed Trump in the first place.  There are all these billionaires out there who are very liberal, who don’t want competition—like Steyer, Soros—Zuckerberg, Gates, Buffett, Bloomberg and many others who have thrown their money at candidates America hates to take the country in a direction traditionalists don’t want to go.  They are used to controlling Hollywood, they are used to controlling the publishing industry, the mainstream media and virtually everything we see and hear—so it drives them crazy that a fellow billionaire was able to run for office and win—and he doesn’t need their money so is beyond their control.  And now they are getting desperate.  Steyer might otherwise throw his money behind Democrats in 2018, but guess what—there aren’t any worth spending money on so all they have as progressives is the hope that they might be able to push Trump out of office.  Obviously, because they aren’t very smart, they haven’t thought things through to their conclusions.  What they do now sets a tone for the future and they’ll have to live with the consequences.  Speaking for myself, I’m not going to get behind anything that Tom Steyer is involved in.  It’s just not going to happen.  Even by some remote fantasy Steyer and his progressives were to impeach Trump—does he really think we’re going to turn in our guns and say—“well, I guess you guys won.”  LOL, not a chance, they are cheating and those progressives have opened themselves to really bad times in the future if they persist.

There is a lot of unneeded concern about how the Democrats might do in 2018.  Let me remind everyone that I predicted an end to the Democratic Party within a few years, and they are right on track.  The desperation that billionaire donors like Steyer are exhibiting now are due to their lack of options and their ads sound foolish in reflecting that.  Trump had every right to fire James Comey—there was no obstruction of justice for a phony campaign created by Democrats to try to stop the inauguration of a justifiably legal election that Trump won.  Where FISA warrants were granted based on inflammatory and bogus information meant to unmask legitimate members of the Trump campaign. The Democrats and their progressive supporters have broken so many laws and made such embarrassments of our legal system that trust will never go back into their direction. That pendulum has shifted forever and Steyer apparently is so corrupted by ideology that he doesn’t see it.  But you know what bothers people like him even more—his money suddenly has no power—as it once did—and that has all these types of people terrified.

The other benefit to Donald Trump is that he largely made his money off his charisma—they guy is an all in one package master communicator.  These other guys, including Zuckerberg from Facebook are stiff nerds who come across on camera as idiots—and their money can’t protect them any longer.  They can’t compete with Trump and they can’t buy people who can for the first time in their lives.  In the past we’ve tried on the political right to elect our own wealthy people—like Steve Forbes and Ross Perot, but they were too much like Tom Steyer—they didn’t have great screen presence the way a very charismatic actor would.  Their political campaigns came out flat, and that’s what’s happening now with progressives.  They are discovering that with all their control of the media, with all their manipulation of the Beltway that now people have a choice, they don’t have candidates in their stables to compete with the world that Trump has established.  That is why they are in a panic, because they know the world as they have controlled it, is now over.

Trump’s New Year’s celebration bringing in 2018 was a rebirth of American spirit in many ways that we haven’t seen in this country since the Golden Days of Hollywood.  It was optimistic in all the ways you’d expect from a nation born by Adam Smith’s philosophy of economic morality articulated in The Wealth of Nations.  That is what people like Steyer have been trying to keep away from the American people yet it is happening regardless.  It’s only been one year of the Trump administration and he has accomplished quite a lot.  He’s on par with my expectations and has set up a 2018 that will be even greater, because now he has had a chance to put his feet in the water and started swimming.  The Republican Party needed to be united after a difficult 2015—and that essentially happened with the tax cuts at the end of 2017.  The Democrats have not had their come to Jesus moment.  They have people like Steyer and Soros ready to write them checks, but there is nobody worth spending the money on, only ghosts from the past.  Progressive ideas and Democratic Party platform concepts have been rejected and that is part of a new trend which is emerging.

Calls for impeachment based on loose accusations while the other side actually did break many laws aren’t going to cut it in this new age.  Watching Tom Steyer’s commercials against Trump is like watching the ghosts from the music video by 10 Years called “Novacaine.”  It’s a song from their album called How to Live as Ghosts and I think it fits quite accurately the condition of the current Democratic Party.  They are chasing ghosts, things that worked in the past but are no longer relevant in the world and they keep going through the same failures over and over ad infinitum.  No matter how many checks Steyer and his progressive insurgents write, he is still going through the same routine over and over going nowhere only to come back to the beginning and wondering if anything happened at all.  Meanwhile, Republicans are moving forward with a fresh guilt free philosophy of renewed interest in capitalism.

I personally consider Tom Steyer’s attempts to be an insult to my vote—but I have more faith in our government this year with Trump in control of it than I did last year when Obama was hanging on to power with everything he could utilize to stop 2017 from happening.  I know for myself if our government ever tries to present what they have, knowing what we do today, that I will exercise my rights to overthrow them—because they are not competent to run my government.  Now that I know how dirty the progressives really are in America, I have no desire to share my country with them.  They need to leave and go someplace else—like Europe if they want all the socialism that they seem to enjoy so much.  To Steyer, he is fine with socialism because he figures he can control the parties at play with his money, so he will always have a seat of aristocracy to enjoy.  But that just isn’t acceptable to the American way of life where anybody willing to work hard can have a shot at the highest levels of power.  To achieve those needs we had to have a president like Trump who didn’t need to appease people like Steyer, or even Mark Cuban, Bezos—really a countless list of very wealthy people who fundamentally want to change America into something else that limits opportunities for other people.  I am pleased to see that like the music video “Novacaine,” that Tom Steyer is already a ghost replaying his failed philosophy over and over again as the rest of the living world moves on without him—and that is a truly beautiful thing.

Rich Hoffman

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The GOP Passes Tax Cuts: How this causes the Democratic Party to end

I’m not going to say who I said it to, but I can say that it was quite a few very influential people. I’m not a big tea and cookie socialite who works the circles of power to advance thoughts on a matter, but I do deal with people who do—and they do good work of advancing conservative philosophy. So I’ll say here what I’ve been saying to them—get this tax bill done and we have a real possibility of 6% growth by this upcoming summer of 2018. Go ahead and mark it on your calendars and we’ll talk about it when the time comes. Unfortunately, most people—especially politicians with backgrounds in the legal profession do not understand economics. Unless a person does enormous amounts of personal research and self-education our school systems both public and private do not teach proper understanding of basic economic concepts. The political establishment has adopted socialism for well over 100 years with only periods of market fluctuation due to tax reductions—and that has hindered the American economy enormously. With that in mind these tax cuts passed under the Trump administration have enormous implications for our future in a positive way—so what happened today is not just a victory for Republicans—it’s a cultural revolution at the most fundamental level of conservative philosophy.

What all the doomsayers don’t want the American public to know is that yes, trickle down economics works—it really is the only method. The fantasy of a wealth redistribution utopia that liberals have fantasized about since Sir Thomas Moore’s publication of Utopia is purely science fiction with no basis in reality. It is a made-up sentiment that is built on hope, not facts and liberals have distorted that hope into some very ugly moments in world history—the rise of the Nazi, the rise of Mussolini, the rise of the Castros in Cuba, the communization of China, Vietnam and North Korea. The destruction of Central America and South America—particularly Venezuela and the cannibalization of all Europe. Africa is a continent of warring tribes fueled by communist sentiments as is Iran in the Middle East. It was Marxists who took over Iran back in the 70s which make that country such a danger today. What they all have in common is a destructive sentiment toward liberalism—because people were all trained at the same liberal colleges and were raised by the same basic liberal elementary education. And for nearly 32 years, since Ronald Reagan left office essentially, America has tried to be a team player to go along with all these leftist ideas regarding economics and technological development—which has nearly destroyed us. That changes today.

The passage of the GOP Tax Cut and Reform Bill is a bold step away from the global trend toward tax and spend communism, which was always the intention of the wealth redistribution strategies which has hand cuffed our economy for years. Once the dust clears and people don’t die, and bank accounts fill up, while America starts filling some of those empty store fronts in strip malls again with viable businesses the truth will be there for all to see. The pent-up wealth that has been hiding in the world has now been given a safe harbor to dock in, and America will explode with renewed enthusiasm. Isn’t it nice to have a business guy as president, who understands money? I love it for a change. Ohio would be smart to hire Jim Renaicci as the next governor to bring that same kind of understanding to a state that needs it. This GOP would not have passed the bill if Trump had not framed the argument and set a time table—like all good managers do. Everyone knows that presidents are not supposed to create legislation, congress does, but from the Executive Branch and as the head of the Republican Party they do set the table—and Trump did. Without this, nothing would have happened.

It pained me to watch Savannah Guthrie on NBC interview Paul Ryan about economic matters because all her assumptions were incorrect. She cited Michael Bloomberg as an authority on business without mentioning that he is a major tax and spend liberal. He lists himself as independent because he’s actually a socialist like Bernie Sanders—a major contributor to the progressive caucus. It doesn’t matter that he’s a billionaire—look at George Soros, and Mark Zuckerberg—Warren Buffett, there are a lot of wealthy people who either don’t want more competition among their peers or they fell into their wealth by good luck—because they really aren’t very smart. That doesn’t make them business tycoons just because they are rich—yet people like Guthrie use them as ways to bridge their socialist theories to reality. What they all have in common on the political left is an inherent mistrust of human beings to do the right things—so they assume that the heavy hand of government should always be ready to enforce the laws of our nation and the basic assumption of fairness for which most of us all agree on. Liberals go wrong because they assume that people can’t be trusted—they as a political party have trust problems and that is a sickness of their own making. What Bloomberg really reveals in his tax answer is just what Soros would—they know that inside themselves to their very core they tend to lean toward evil intentions, so they assume that is the way everyone is. But that is not the case of reality. Hating corporations is not a viable strategy for economic growth. I am a job provider, and it is my experience that every car in the parking lot of my endeavor depends on me to fuel their economic lives. Their car payments, their mortgage, their entertainment—the children they raise—everything they do depends on good decisions made by their employer—in this case me. They need to be able to trust me and I need to be able to trust them. Since I am a person who does not have trust issues, I find the exchange is a very healthy one most of the time. And as I look around my community at all the businesses large and small that have to have that same relationship with their employees for the same reasons it is there that you can see “our economy.” Its not some magical thing that government controls, it exists on a microcosm of individual relationships successfully exchanged. Government is like introducing a third wife to a marriage—it doesn’t work—it introduces mistrust and more emotional liabilities rooted in the sum of their intellectual neurosis—the tendency to mistrust people. That mistrust contaminates everything involved in an employer/employee relationship. Guthrie and the people like her obviously don’t understand that basic premise—and why would they think otherwise since they’ve been taught socialist ideas from their infancy by the world at large.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/savannah-guthrie-to-paul-ryan-%E2%80%98are-you-living-in-a-fantasy-world%E2%80%99/ar-BBH3D4q?li=BBmkt5R&ocid=spartandhp

The boldness of the GOP plan goes against that insecurity that has been implicit during the entire progressive era—since Teddy Roosevelt switched from the Republican party to become the first presidential progressive candidate. Two decades later his nephew FDR, would become the second fascist to sit in the White House. The first was Woodrow Wilson. These people had emotional problems yet from the political left they shaped our education institutions with a false premise of basic mistrust in the “invisible hand” of Adam Smith’s ground-breaking examinations on capitalism. What we can always trust in humanity is that people generally act on behalf of their own self-interest. So when dealing with them, so long as self-interest is part of a calculation, you can trust the result—which is what is the key behind this tax cut plan of the GOP. Self-interest means employees leave companies if there is somewhere to go. Self-interest means corporations will pay more to retain their talent from a competitor. Self-interest means a company will locate to America so they can be near their families if the tax rates are equitable. Self interest keeps a person from jumping off a bridge where the railings are only hip level. If someone wanted to, they could jump over—and most people live within those guidelines except for the occasional idiot who has painted their lives into a corner with lots of bad decisions, then seek to committee suicide. This GOP tax cut puts trust back into people and that is truly terrifying for liberals, but what they will discover like the child who is terrified of the monster they think lives under their bed, is that there isn’t anything to be afraid of. And learning that scares them even more—because that is the foundation of their liberalism.

Rich Hoffman

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Equal Justice Under the Law: Why we should kick down the doors to the FBI and arrest Peter Strzok

If you didn’t catch Judge Jeanine’s segment on the FBI investigation led by Robert Mueller then you can see it below—or if you did you can see it again.  She does a really nice job of laying out the case of just how bad the FBI treated the incoming Trump presidency from the outset.  The reluctance that people who depend on these federal institutions is understandable do to their belief that FBI integrity keeps us safe from the bad guys out there in the world.  But once it is understood how serious all this is, and the depth of the crimes that were committed by the FBI, consciously—it becomes clear that the only recourse is to destroy that institution so that we can rebuild it better.  Trump said what we are all thinking, the FBI has lost its fine reputation and the ground agents allowed it to happen.  The people at the top were dreadfully corrupt, and the bootlickers below them did nothing about it because nobody wanted to jeopardize their opportunity for a promotion.  So we have a mess that needs to be fixed and we won’t do that playing patty cake with these guys.

As I write this I have full faith in the Trump White House to continue exposing this issue and shaming Capitol Hill into correcting the action.  But I have not forgotten how bad Eric Holder was during his years with the Obama administration.  I have not forgotten Loretta Lynch, or Lois Lehrer at the IRS.  I haven’t forgotten any of those things—and much more.  The only difference between now and then is that my kind of guy is in the White House and I’m hoping the situation can be corrected non violently and under the blind eyes of justice.  But for the record should I ever be deposed for some future actions—lets this little declarative statement cast light on my thoughts.  I’m not OK with Peter Strzok interviewing General Flynn and using that information to prosecute the guy ruining his life just because he was associated with the Trump campaign.  That same guy did not apply equal justice under the law to Hillary Clinton and her various associates.  It was he who gave them all a pass when serious crimes were committed.  And his activism was chronicled in text exchanges with his girlfriend who was working at the FBI as well.  When he stated to her that he intended to provide an insurance policy against the Trump election that was all any of us needed to hear.  He should not be working in human resources within the FBI until the smoke clears.  He needs to be at a minimum fired and likely put in jail—and everyone associated with him should be terminated as well.  Anything less would be criminal.

I’m not going to forget.  There won’t be some magical day ten years from now when all this will blow over and life at the FBI will return to normal.  No, it only gets worse from here.  The FBI, an unelected group of law enforcement officers, doesn’t get to decide who our president is or isn’t.  They are there to enforce the laws that congress creates-and that’s it.  They don’t get to go off and do their own thing and use the massive power we’ve given them to undercut the process.  People like me put up with Obama, Clinton, and many years of a government that certainly didn’t represent me.  We didn’t assassinate anyone or go into the streets with our guns to demand a better government.  We let the process run its course and we sought to fix the problems the correct and legal way—and it took a lot of time and who knows how many countless trillions of dollars of potential.  I could have easily have looked at the situation and said as Strzok did, that it was up to me to solve these problems for the good of the nation, because I knew better.  Only I don’t have a FBI at my disposal to manipulate things to my liking.  I have other things, but not control of a tax payer funded institution.  So under Strzok’s reasoning, it would be perfectly OK if I used violence and physical domination to turn the country back to the ideas that I think are appropriate—right?  That is the problem of Strzok, he opened up this mess and now we have to fix it.  Because if action is not taken against him, then there is no justice or trust in those institutions to correct themselves sending a clear message to the rest of us that if we really want to solve the problem, then we will have to do it with violence.

If that’s how the FBI wants it, I have no problem with that—violence.  Don’t think for a moment that anybody is going to come into my home kicking in doors and harassing my family in the middle of the night the way they treated Paul Manafort and that they’ll walk away alive that day.  It’s not going to happen, let me just say that.  I have no respect for a law enforcement agency that is guilty of crime themselves but don’t have that same treatment applied to them.  In my way of viewing the world Strzok should be arrested immediately, all his assets confiscated and he should be drug into the street naked and beaten into a bloody lump of flesh, until his jaw bone was dangling from his face with just a few pieces of skin—still alive, but a beating he would never forget.  That’s the only kind of justice I would respect after what he did.

Imagine you’re Paul Manafort—forget about any potential crime for a moment.  Paul is an insider who knew how the game was played and he was playing it.  The Clintons were playing the same game and so were the Podestas—so I don’t want to hear about any potential crimes that Manafort might have been engaged in.  If it was good for everyone else in the Beltway, it was good for Paul.  If it’s not good for Manafort, then I expect to see the same treatment for everyone else.  So let’s use that as a clarifying statement.  So there he was in bed with his wife and the FBI barges in with great urgency damaging property and wielding guns into their faces—in their private residence—as if the needs of the FBI were greater than the needs of Paul Manafort.  They call this a “no-knock” raid and in this case FBI agents picked the lock at 4:30 AM and barged into the residence to obtain documents that special investigator Mueller thought he needed for his case against a sitting president. I’m just saying, if I hear a sound at the door at 4:30 AM, there will be trouble.  And If I wake up to guns in my face, there will be even more trouble.  These types of raids are not permissible in the spirit of the United States idea.  The legal whizzes out there may have found a way to establish case-law precedent, but that doesn’t make them right.  The just thing would have been to gun down all the intruders on the spot because they were invading the sacred space of an American and his private property, which is the cornerstone to everything America represents.

https://michaelsavage.com/2017/10/30/manafort-charges-grew-out-of-records-seized-in-no-knock-raid/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2017/08/10/no-knock-raids-like-the-one-against-paul-manafort-are-more-common-than-you-think/?utm_term=.f79fc24a85a5

That’s where things get murky.  Manafort cooperated as the FBI thugs molested his wife and he turned over the documents—and Mueller spent another five months going over things before indicting Manafort costing him millions of dollars in losses.  If I were Manafort I would view the whole incident as something that ruined my life—I couldn’t live with that kind of imposition.  I’d have to get revenge on somebody and I’d require the skin off somebody’s back before I let the issue drift away.  If anybody points a gun in my wife’s face while she’s in bed, I’d have to do something—I don’t give a rat’s ass what the law says.  Just because guns are pointed at you that doesn’t mean you die.  Just because you get shot it doesn’t mean you die.  Pointed guns are not enough to stop violence.  Nothing out there in the world is more important than my castle, no social cause, not government, no “inclusive” concept about the “greater good.”  Nothing is better or more sacred than what goes on within the walls of my private kingdom–my personal residence.  To my way of thinking if you don’t have that there isn’t anything to live for to fight on another day—so why not give it everything you have right then and there?  What’s Manafort supposed to do now; he knows that the arrest was purely a political hit job.  His family has been abused in the process by the might of our government and he has had personal wealth stolen from him to feed an inefficient court system.  I feel a lot of passion about this, I actually wrote a book called The Tail of the Dragon which is about this very type of morality situation and with me it’s quite clear—we don’t protect ourselves enough from enemies within the state—and we damn well should.

Now though this case is well beyond the crimes against Manafort and Flynn, they are assaults to all of us who voted for Donald Trump.  I view the election of Donald Trump as the most important thing that’s happened politically in my lifetime.  True, it’s my point of view, but my point of view was in the majority this time—as the rules of the Electoral College mandate.  We played by the rules, we did the right things, and the FBI crossed the line—they broke the law and someone has to pay.  So is it appropriate under equal justice under the law to kick in the doors to the FBI guns wielding in the faces of these insurgents so that we can rip Peter Strzok out of his human resources job and ruin his life the way he has attempted to ruin the lives of others?  I say yes.  I’m willing to let the law do its thing, and I have hope that the process will work—I’d say it’s working right now.  But we won’t be going back to some good ol’ days within the bureau where these types of things got pushed under the rug.  We know too much, and we also know that because there isn’t equal justice that if we see FBI agents coming into our homes—then we have to defend ourselves.  After all if their agents are like Peter Strzok—what separates them from criminals breaking into our homes and stealing the fruits of our hard labor?  Nothing.

Rich Hoffman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rich Hoffman
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Women are the Carriers of a vast Evil called Liberalism: It may be politically incorrect, but behind the mask is the truth

I purposely spoke softly about liberalism in yesterday’s article because we all know them.  We know them at our Thanksgiving dinners, we know them as co-workers.  We know them as our favorite actors on television, motion pictures, and music.  We have no choice but to interact with them because they are so deeply embedded in our culture—they are metaphorically like the zombies from The Walking Dead—sick and beyond reason and in front of us dangerously every day to deal with.  I had to write that article to show that this little piece of writing isn’t from some radical right-winger beyond hope on an international stage of intolerance.  The political left usually labels such people as “Nazis” or “fascists” which is indicative of their actual state yet they often do not know the actual meanings of the words.  That’s because all liberals to some degree or another knowingly are guilty of a deliberate abandonment of reason and live their lives in a very emotional state.  That’s not to say that they are stupid, some do have high I.Qs and have the potential to be very smart.  But they are sick with liberalism and behind that is a commitment to death, destruction and everything negative that the human race represents.  Liberals are the antithesis of evil in our world and I’d go so far here today to say that they need to be destroyed as a political ideology before any of us can advance to the next stage of human development.  Before Elon Musk can put a settlement of people on Mars, or Donald Trump can Make America Great Again, we must deal with the problem of liberalism because it infects so many people that it is the primary cause of the current civil war that we are all engaged in—and until that war is won, advancement just isn’t possible.

Liberalism is such a vast sickness that most people have it to some degree, like an allergy or the common cold.  If left untreated, it utterly rots the brain and makes a person dangerous, because they can affect other people.  For instance, this is on display any time a person goes “clubbing” where dancing, and drinking are utilized to a mass effect.  The act of doing such a thing is undoubtedly liberal because the activity is clearly social, and reckless to the concept of individuality.  Anybody can dance in a room by themselves to music, but when you do it in such a public venue, you are there for the experience to do it with other people.  The music becomes the master of thought and individuals surrender to its beat in a collective manner.  In this way all dancers in a room become part of “group think” and the music becomes their master.  Therefore drinking becomes the accepted manner of accepting liberalism into the mind for an evening by drowning out thought and surrendering to the relief of “group think” mentality.   I say relief because under the condition of liberalism personal judgments are forgiven and actions can be accepted so long as individuals behave properly to the beat of peer pressure. We all feel the pressure of our individual lives and living against a constant tide that wears away at us in our jobs, our governments and our educations which then carries over into our life at home.  But when we go drinking and dancing we are relieved of these pressures for a time as we surrender to the “group think” of the club scene.

I use the dance club concept because it is one that most people can identify with.  People who don’t surrender to “group think” are often referred to as “stiffs.”  This insult is meant to penetrate the intellect of the individual who resists the pressures of “group think.”  The most common way that liberalism is sold to us is through sex, and obviously the females of our species.  Just like Aids is a typical homosexual disease transferred through reckless sex, once infected a carrier can contaminate many people even those who engage in traditional sexual practices.  Since women are the typical means of spreading Aids outside of homosexual circles where a married male may engage in sex with another contaminated male then have sex with his wife infecting her then from there it gets out into the mass population because she then carries it to other people through her interactions, not all of them sexual—the female becomes the host of destruction.  And that is the primary vehicle for which liberalism comes to the human race.  Women tend to be more compassionate and forgiving and through sex, they are the first entryway toward accepting “group think.”  For instance, in any middle school environment, it is the females who decide what is cool by the culture or not.  They are the bookends to the various classes of people who evolve in the public education environment.  If you want to date a popular girl for instance, you must do what she decides to get into that social category.  That means you must dress a certain way, play sports, and got to a great effort to maintain a number of friends which are also sharing in that experience.  Females are the glue that brings such people together for a common cause of “popular group think.”  The same holds true for the lower classes, it is the females who create the parameters of “group think” leaving all individuals to figure out which category they wish to invest themselves in.   We then take those habits into our adult lives which make us who we are and everything we become.

We all know someone who has joined an organization like Greenpeace or PETA so that they could date a girl. You don’t often find girls joining such organizations to meet boys.  It’s almost always the other way around.  The male being biologically predisposed toward molding their thoughts to the females around them have no problem surrendering their individual thoughts about a matter so that they can become potential mates to a female they have their eye on.  Males can date that female and convince themselves to care about environmental causes or the ethical treatment of animals if it gives them access to sex, then turn right around in their peer groups with other males and go hunting and fishing with no problem at all.  Therefore it is through females that the sickness of liberalism breeds and transfers from one person to another.  This is why it’s so important to liberals to put women into every institution of human endeavor because for their sickness to spread women must be the carriers.

Of course that is an incredibly politically incorrect thing to say—liberals have made it so.  It keeps the truth from the vast evil that is in the minds of every liberal from being exposed in the light of day because we can’t even have a conversation about it leaving the concept always very raw and unexplored.   This lets the evil of liberalism spread unmolested through our society providing cover for its erosion of thought with the justification of equality.  That is what makes liberalism so dangerous.  In so many ways Dinesh D’Souze did a great job of capturing the foot prints of liberalism in our society with his great book The Big Lie.  This isn’t some work of lunacy, it’s a modern examination of what liberalism truly is and you can buy the book anywhere, even at Costco.  While Dinesh D’Souze is a conservative he makes a good case why he thinks the way he does which serves as a baseline of logical human thought.  For instance in that book he covers the fact that Margret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood gave the Nazi regime the idea of euthanizing people.  Hitler and his minions didn’t come up with their idea to kill their Jewish population with mass extermination methods on their own; they got it from Planned Parenthood in the states as the Nazi were coming to power.  Sanger did what all liberals tend to do, and that is she used the notional of the female to penetrate our very thoughts of mass murder and to make it a “female right.”  Once Planned Parenthood’s abortion clinics established through our society as a “women’s right” it froze the males into accepting the concept or they would lose access to sex in those females.  So the males adopted the idea of mass murder as a means to not lose potential sex partners.   100 years later we generally accept abortion as a human right when in effect it is mass murder which inspired the Nazis to do it in a more direct fashion in their more male oriented structure.  What goes on in abortion clinics today is every bit as monstrous as the worst that we learned happened under the Nazis of Germany—but contextually, we are frozen from talking about it because our peer groups use liberalism to justify the murders under the guise of an individual right—which has a hidden appeal to us all.  Individual rights are the foundations of most of our motivations.   But in liberalism individual rights are always under attack, however are used as masks to advance the philosophy from concealment.

If a proper cause and corrective action is applied to any concept of liberalism, from “clubbing” to “abortion” we can trace the thinking back to an evil motive.  Evil uses liberalism to spread through human society.  The evidence does not support that conservatism is an equal contributor to such a preponderance of evil.  If a conservative is evil—they aren’t a real conservative.  Being conservative is a philosophical choice that supports individuality in all forms, which therefore supports values attributed to thinking.  Evil always involves the destruction of individuals for the greater good of “group think” which therefore holds us to the chains of the past where mankind struggled to light a fire or roll a rock across a field.   Evil does not want the human race to migrate into space or to drive an SUV to the shopping mall to buy $500 worth of cloths from Dillard’s so that individuals can look nice for that upcoming charity dinner.  Liberals prefer the young protester of SeaWorld and their torn cloths, their ears connected to the music of the moment through their iPhones and their minds seeking drugs, clubbing and sex to spread their agenda of “goodness” in protecting the Orca, or the rights of women to “choose.”  And that is precisely how we all get pulled into the vile evil that is liberalism–through accepting the people infected with it as a righteous participate in our Republic of thought in a culture of equals yielding toward sovereignty, when the reality is vile, despicable, and corrosive against everything it means to be human.

Rich Hoffman

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Mark Welch and Ann Becker Win as West Chester Trustees: The strategy of leadership and the hen-pecker “wish-they-were’s”

With all elections there are a lot of ups and downs. I would have liked to have seen Ed Gillespie win the governor race in Virginia. I would have liked to have seen Ernest Gause win a seat on my own district’s Lakota school board. But in the races, that strategically mattered, I am very happy with the results of the November 7th election in 2017. For many reasons that are complex in the tapestry of politics I viewed the race for the West Chester Trustees in Southern, Ohio to be the most important because of the players involved and the potential impact on things that come next. The people I most supported won, Ann Becker won George Lang’s old seat and Mark Welch held on to his for re-election. It was a bit of a surprise to me to see Lee Wong retain his seat with 32% of the vote. Mark won with 31%. It would have seemed logical that the progressive Joan Powell would have sucked votes away from Lee, but it appears that the target was on the frontrunner Mark. After all, it was only a few months ago when Lee Wong organized a union protest at a trustee meeting to put Mark on the spot in a very political way. Some of that anger was still out there in activism for Lee and against Mark which showed up in the vote tallies. But in the overall results, it had little effect but perhaps a few percentage points. Mark won easily and that says a lot about his strength and ability to endure controversy when the chips are truly down giving him great leeway to govern as he has.

http://www.whio.com/news/incumbents-welch-wong-win-election-west-chester-trustees/d6P1PFZ7ECd5RrfF8kZsYO/

http://www.journal-news.com/news/ann-becker-wins-race-replace-west-chester-trustee-george-lang/CK0AklA1gWDW3PhQi0RRZJ/

The combined talents of Mark Welch and Ann Becker is a very dynamic team and will bring great excitement to West Chester. They were very impressive down the stretch working together on a door to door campaign—even working Lakota high school football games as a team as opposed to individual candidates. That strategy paid off in the end as they beat a barrage of some fairly stout political heavy weights. Lynda O’Conner came in second to Ann’s seat and Joan Powell garnered a number of votes from her former levy supporters at Lakota to pose as a threat, so this was no easy race by any stretch of the imagination. But like most things the people who did the most work were the ones who won—except in Lee’s case. He simply rode in the wake of Mark driven largely by the controversy he created. That strategy will only work once now that it’s been exposed.

Leadership and politics are interesting things and the strategies for dealing with them are different depending on whether or not we are working with the public or private sector. Whenever you are the president of something, or the primary leader, the chicken littles will always be hen pecking at your heels trying to undermine you. No matter how good you are at your job or how nice you are to other people, the human disposition toward those with power is to knock them down a peg or two. Especially when a leader is obviously more skilled, there are always the cape riders who will try to leech off the good work of the skilled person, then at some opportune moment, they will make a move and try to take credit for everything good that was done. For Lee Wong, he made his move when he brought the union activists several months back to put Mark on a spot for running the trustee meeting. Mark couldn’t close the meeting procedurally by a scandalous move by Lee to keep it open. In the strategies of war, Lee had the high ground because he was not in the leadership position at the time—Mark was the president of the trustees. That allowed for Mark to be vulnerable regarding procedural parameters that Lee could then control with chaos—a popular tactic among liberals—especially when they are out of power. One way to destroy them is by turning those tables on them and giving them a dose of their own medicine. Let them be the president for a year and destroy them with mundane procedures—and let the public see how incompetent they really are.

Lee Wong has had the advantage of playing victim for over eight years, first with Cathy Stoker then as the third wheel behind Mark and George Lang. Anyone who might get angry at a decision Mark or George made could use Lee as their avatar. The way to defuse that trend is to take away the mystic of that avatar by letting reality choke it out. Power isn’t in titles, it’s in votes, and that should always be the focus. Let political rivals expose their docile minds to the world, and not hide behind the exceptional, and all things will work out best in the end. My assessment of why Lee Wong grabbed 32% of the vote was because he was riding the cape of Mark Welch and George Lang for a long time and people didn’t associate activity with him, only that he was part of a successful package—by default of being a trustee during very successful times for which Mark and George created.

Now it’s a new ball game. Ann Becker is not George Lang, she is a different kind of Republican. I was impressed with her ability to create optimism under pressure and to really be a cheerleader for West Chester during her campaign. If West Chester were going to take a step forward, Ann was the key to that improvement. Between her and Mark there are two very optimistic people holding the controlling votes as trustees and that is a great thing—there are no negatives involved. Lee is a harmless bystander and much easier to deal with than someone like Joan Powell. If we were to be stuck with either Lee or Joan, Lee is the lesser of the two progressive evils.

Thinking about Ann, I’ve known her for a long time now and been with her through some very tough times and I know her thoughts when nobody else has been around. She is very savvy, and very pure as a person. Dealing with her as a trustee is something anybody should consider a rare pleasure whether its politics, business, or community advancement—she is the best. She is no phony, that’s for sure. Mark has a good partner to work with under the best possible circumstances. Lee Wong may have earned a lot of votes, more than he deserved, but the cause is not anything good that he did, it’s purely his lack of responsibility that served him well in 2017. With a historical record where Mark Welch and George Lang did everything and Lee just went along for the ride, he had no controversy from a past decision to hinder his election—and if Mark had the benefit of the same, Welch might have gained an extra 10% in this election. But Mark endured a major controversy in regard to right-to-work and finished very strong, which is something he and everyone in West Chester should be very proud of.

Rich Hoffman

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Vote for Ernest Gause on November 7th 2017: Protecting a cash surplus at Lakota from the forces of chaos

 

If you ever wanted to see a guy who has his act together running for a school board position it’s Ernest Gause.  Watching this situation at Lakota schools in Southern Ohio for many years now and fighting many levies to keep taxes down, I’ve never witnessed a better person for a school board position than Ernest.  To get an idea of how on top of things he is just have a look at his website, specifically his press release section shown below.  In it Ernest breaks down the cash situation at Lakota schools and shows just where we are in 2017 to managing the Lakota school system for the next decade.  To do the job right, good school board members like Ernest Gause need to be in place to safely steer the district into the correct direction.  Gause is a school board candidate offering that not only wants to avoid future school levies, but he wants to have a replacement strategy which essentially means working within the budget parameters and decreasing the budget need over time—which has been unheard of by any school district anywhere.  And he plans to do all this by raising the expectations of Lakota as well through performance standards.

https://www.gauseforlakota.com/articles-and-press-releases

Essentially here’s the situation, Lakota has cash on hand through 2026 to avoid a school levy.  However the current school board members are reluctant to commit to that because they still spend more than they take in so the positive elements of their cash surpluses will eventually catch up to them.  Lakota has that cash surplus because they pushed for a levy they didn’t need in 2013 when they violated the deal they made with me to keep a levy off the ballot for two years after the levy defeat of 2012.  The school board at the time pushed for a levy all in the name of school security, but they really didn’t need it because of declining enrollment in our aging community, so they unnecessarily increased our property taxes into this abundance situation that we have now.  Unlike past school board candidates, Earnest actually has a plan to avoid school levies in the future but taking our current surplus and reducing the tax footprint that Lakota imposes on future development.   Here are more specifics off his website that articulate his position:

End dependencies of tax levies by creating levy replacement strategies.

As a community, we need to ask the question of why we need levies and what we can do as a community to ensure the school get what it need, our children are educated and the community (tax payers) get a return on our investment.

The answer is simple; we need transparency and full disclosure for every dollar spent.

There need to be the following:

  1. If there is going to be more busing, then which schools and how much.
  2. If there is going to be more technology, then which school and how much.
  3. If there is going to be small classes, more teachers and more resources, then which schools and how much.

Within Lakota there needs to be more transparency, more openness and better reporting to the community.

https://www.gauseforlakota.com/tax-levies

Our SUCCESS as a Community

Expand our footprint, when, where, why and how.

I am a firm believer in expanding out educational footprint. I believe a board member needs to be active in supporting education, partnering in education and an outspoken advocate of education. How do we support education? We support education by putting the work in and by supporting our teachers, administrators and our students. But in order to do that you have to educate yourself in knowing what is going on in your community and surrounding communities.

​

To make sure our students and our teachers are ready for the tools of the 21st century, six schools have demonstration classrooms. The classrooms are equipped with a variety of devices, including:
• 1-to-1 laptops
• A classroom projector
• A mini-projector
• Two aqua boards
• iPad and tablet sets
• A document camera
• A digital camera
• An AV rover
Champion Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics to compete on the world stage by partnering with Universities.

Enhance professional trade programs through business and university partnerships for electrician, plumbers, pipefitters, realtors, engineering, accounting and electronic trades.

Here is a fun quiz that can help you decide what is right for you.​
Just to be transparent, this site will ask you for your contact information!  It will give you some great insights into a trade you may be interested in.
​

CONTACT ME NOW

1. Technology Tools
2. Champion STEM
3. Trade Programs

Add blended learning opportunities for special needs students.

Prepare students for transition into post-secondary institutions of higher learning through increased Academic Resources and external Partnerships with corporations.

End dependencies of tax levies by creating levy replacement strategies.
As a community, we need to ask the question of why the need levies and what we can do as a community

4. Tax Levies = NO
5. Partnerships
6. Blended Learning
   8. Resources
7. Technology Integration

Bring state of the art technology to the classroom & integrate in daily curriculum, lessons & homework

11. Data Tracking

Track GPA’s year over year in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics to ensure progression and disclose at Board Meetings.   Transparency = Responsibility

Give our teachers additional resources on how to integrate technology into the classroom.

Provide Transportation to High Schools to reduce financial burden for working families.

9. Transportation
10. Distance Learning

Integrate distance learning into classrooms to attend college level courses.

12. Internships

Provide realistic job previews working with the business community for internships, summer work study and sponsorship.

https://www.gauseforlakota.com/platform

Lakota’s current treasurer Jenni Logan has done a good job with the budget, but I remember when they put her up front in 2012 to profess the fiscal cliff that Lakota was headed for justifying the tax increase the board wanted at the time.  Many who know how money works told Lakota then that if they could control their costs, largely their payroll, they wouldn’t need any more money—but they didn’t listen so presently they have on hand cash until 2020 where deficit spending is projected to begin, according to this article shown at the link below.   That’s the point where the step increases start taking over from where the board has been able in the past to hold them down due to all the public pressure.  The teacher’s union has had to keep a low profile over the last half decade namely because the public sentiment was not with them, and it will continue not to be.  That makes putting good management on the school board that is smarter than the negotiators for the union a priority so that deficit spending can be avoided.  Earnest is jus t that type of manager that we need on the school board for the next decade, to keep the cash managed while raising the expectations for the district.

http://www.journal-news.com/news/local/projection-lakota-budget-deficit-until-2020/S3GMVzMqKS4pKZqClEVJeO/

I think Todd Parnell is a decent board member, but if Earnest were added to the Lakota school board a trend of conservativism would finally emerge that could pave the way for a solid four vote majority by the next election term where Julie Schafer’s term would expire.   It takes time to build the right team because good candidates are hard to find.  In the case of Earnest I am very attracted to his lean manufacturing background and think the best way to keep their costs down at Lakota is by applying the same methods that are expected in business on the current teacher’s union.  One way that the labor unions for the automotive industry had to be brought into the modern age of thinking was to apply lean standards to them so that the unions couldn’t use the chaos of many different job classifications to justify outlandish wage expectations driving up the cost of the product.  Well, in this case the product is the education of children and I think the urgency of a proper approach is that much more important.  So obviously, we want good managers in place to handle the vast amounts of money that we send to Lakota and to keep them out of our pocket books in the years to come while giving kids good foundational skills they can apply for the rest of their lives through their education.  There is no reason that Lakota couldn’t be a trend setter and still drive down their payroll.  But we can’t get there unless we try something different, and Ernest Gause is a tremendous step in that direction.  So when you have to vote on Tuesday, make sure you pull the lever for that very good person on November 7th 2017

Rich Hoffman

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The Genie is out of the Bottle: Uranium One, the IRS, the fake Trump dossier–and we still have more wishes left!

The Genie is certainly out of the bottle now, and we still have a few more wishes  What’s happening now is everything I hoped for and more on Election Day of 2016.  If Donald Trump had not been elected we wouldn’t be seeing anything close to what we are now, and likely America would be over.  I said at the time that the idea of America may not have lived through the summer of 2017.  After all I had endorsed Donald Trump for president for precisely the reasons we are seeing today way back in 2015.  Donald Trump was saving America by standing against the tide of the criminal minded institutions using his own celebrity and wealth as leverage in a way that nobody had ever done before in world history.  Nobody knew what might happen—I had an idea, but there was no way to know what the impact might be until it happened.  Well, it’s all happening right now and the reach of villainy in our American institutions is presently unfathomable for many to deal with.   If I could have had any wish I wanted in 2015 when Donald Trump was tenaciously staying at the top of Republican polling disrupting all the traditional channels led by the Bush family and the vile Clintons, that Genie would have given me exactly what we are seeing now.

It was April 14th 2014 when what was left of the Liberty Township Tea Party met at the Elk’s Lodge to discuss the case against the IRS that the American Center for Law and Justice was conducting on our behalf against the IRS.  The Liberty Township Tea Party was one of the many targets of the IRS who had attacked those groups any way they could specifically on the 5013C status which was designed to slow down the movement and take the teeth out of reform which was sweeping the nation in 2012.  Establishment Republicans used the Tea Party from 2009 to 2012 to gain House and Senate seats, and they wanted their Party back.  Meanwhile Democrats were on their full assault toward socialism and they figured nobody was equipped to stop them.   While Republicans fought each other the Democrats were on a roll, and they controlled the Deep State emphatically.  We all knew it on that day in April at the Elk’s Lodge and all we had was essentially each other and some hope that if we did all the right things, things could come out well in the end.

I was in trouble for two videos I had done for the Liberty Township Tea Party.  Lucky for me I never do anything in politics that could be construed as payment.  When I do something “political” like this blog, or have dinner with a powerful politician money never changes hands.  I keep things as clean as possible.  It is often hard for investigators to believe that I’d do so much work for free, out of the goodness of my heart—because to their vantage point, nobody does anything like that.   Nobody just does things because it’s the right thing to do. But I do and soon after that fateful meeting Donald Trump would step out of his golden palace atop Trump Tower in Manhattan to essentially cast his resources into the fight for many of the same reasons—because it was the right thing to do.  We all knew then as we can see now that the IRS had been weaponized, but the media hardly covered the story and the Deep State had no fear of any of us, because they controlled all the politics, all the law, and all the money.  They figured that this little ACLJ lawsuit would just go away like so many things had in the past and they had nothing to worry about.

Well just this past week many things came to a boil and for those who resisted the efforts of the Deep State a turning point in that long civil war finally showed itself.  The IRS had to apologize for their behavior as the ACLJ had won their case and a very reluctant government institution had to rectify themselves ahead of the largest tax cut vote in the House which passed, in American history.  With the Dow Jones racing well over the 23,000 mark and Trump pinning down all the holdovers brilliantly forcing them to vote correctly on tax cuts, the IRS could do nothing but stand on the firing line and await their own terminations.  They had abused the American people and they had been caught and there was nothing they or their media cover could say to let them off the hook because an even bigger story was unfolding.   That is the story of the Washington Free Beacon funding the fake Trump dossier to stop him from winning the Republican nomination back in 2016.  That dossier would involve many Republicans and would unite politicians like John McCain and Hillary Clinton behind the common cause of stopping Trump any way they could and at the center of it all was the FBI director himself James Comey.  Comey of course would plot to completely let Clinton off her criminal charges during an election year to help her keep her footing—all which was highly illegal.  But if not for Trump being in the race there would have been no pressure on these people to do so much to reveal their inner workings.  These things would have remained hidden—which was what they all were counting on.

But even worse than that was the Uranium One deal.  That is the one where the Putin regime paid Bill Clinton $500,000 dollars for a single speech in Russia with the unannounced intention to secure U.S. government approval for its acquisition of Uranium One and with it tens of billions of dollars in U.S. uranium reserves.  This is the biggest scandal in the history of the United States, and it’s really too big to cover.  Normal people can’t get their minds around the level of treachery it takes to pull of something with this enormity.  But now we know why the Democrats were in such a hurry to try to create some scandal tying Trump to Russia.  Because they were the ones guilty of the act, not Trump—but they needed the light off them and onto someone challenging their Deep State control.  Yet in doing so they set their own standards for which they are presently choking—which is good.  Without Trump in the White House, this story would have gone nowhere and would have been covered by nobody.  It essentially involves the Obama administration in a very detrimental way as Hillary Clinton was running around the world selling access for personal enrichment and now they are all caught.

So what to do about all this, after all, can we put all these people in jail like they deserve?  To do that we’d have to put several former presidents in jail, many congressman, political candidates, attorneys, media personalities, former FBI directors—a whole lot of people who are guilty as Hell and now awkwardly exposed.   We knew it all along, but now we “KNOW” it.  Their downfall essentially started because they picked on the wrong people.  I mean seriously, the crap I had to go through just for two videos made for YouTube.  Not to mention the ordeal of the people who ran the Liberty Township Tea Party.  It took up a year of their time over nothing—meanwhile these scum bags were doing all this Uranium One activity and spending a lot of money to smear political opposition with fake stories and breaking many laws to obtain any information that could be used against people like Trump before they could ever throw their resources into the ring.   But now we know, and like I said, that Genie is still giving us wishes to grant.  And I have a feeling they will all come true in the weeks that come.

Rich Hoffman

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The Tragedy of Kobe Steel: How the smoke is fading and mirrors are breaking on lean manufacturing–revealing a diabolical academic scheme that was always there

The truth is there isn’t any magic wand that takes manufacturing techniques and turns companies into winners at the bottom line. Just like going to college couldn’t turn a kid into a success story without extremely hard work to go with it.  The harsh reality that many people have come to face is that you can’t buy quality, and you can’t wish yourself into profitability.  If you want to be successful in life you have to be willing to work harder than a competitor and you’ll have to figure out the latest trends before everyone else does in an ever-changing world.  It’s not enough to memorize the work of Eliyahu M. Goldratt or to study really hard the techniques of James Womach so that you can call yourself a “black belt” of lean manufacturing.  It’s still the case and it always will be that innovation and creativity are ever-changing opportunities for market dominance.  And let’s face it, that’s the name of the game.  That’s also why this global tragedy involving Kobe Steel is such a case study into the temperature of the world regarding manufacturing that it merits our tenacious considerations.

Kobe Steel is a large producer of various industry metals, particularly aluminum and due to the nature of the world marketplace distributes their product all over the world to the largest companies currently in existence.   The assumption is that since the company is Japanese that they make high quality products at Kobe Steel—just because they are made in Japan.  That country has done a great job building up their brand with an eye toward quality—which is precisely why Womack, Roos and Daniel T. Jones featured them so prominently in the 1990s book The Machine that Changed the World.  In that classic book Womack had pretty much closed the case on western mass production techniques and very subtly implied the takeover of manufacturing practices being instituted right in front of our faces.  College academics were essentially attempting to use lean manufacturing practices revolutionized by Japan—specifically Toyota into a global revolution that would help pave the way to a one world global government by unifying all various markets under the flag of lean manufacturing.  And this failure at Kobe Steel, which is quite serious presently, has the fingerprints of failure rooted in this rapid expansion of manufacturing approach that has been taking over the world since the 1960s.

The attempted academic takeover of all industries has been going on for a long time and their goal is almost always the same.  Generally the academic believes in global collectivism and that the power of the individual is subservient to the needs of group think—and the view of American mass production was that a single foreman, and a single process engineer were things of the past and that hive behavior in the form of lean manufacturing developed from Japan would become the dominate way of doing business.  But the real villain was not American manufacturing; it was the kind of rugged individualism that often emerged in American car companies and steel manufacturers.  If you peel back the onion even more behind these academic reformers they were ahead of themselves on global wealth redistribution and they purposely worked their way into the various industries with mountains of paperwork for employers to fill out so that the tasks would become so cumbersome that companies would just flee overseas to run away from bureaucracy.  The subtext to all this academic insurrection for the last 50 years has always been lean manufacturing and that American companies better get with the pace of the rest of the world or they’d be out of a job.

I’m never one to throw out the baby with the bath water; there are some really good things that Womach and his buddies came up with in that aforementioned book.  And I’m a fan of the work by Eliyahu M. Goldratt.  I like those guys, but in relation to the problems of today, I have my own thoughts—and I dare say I often go much deeper than anything that came previously.  I’d say that you have to if you want to invent something new, otherwise how would you ever stand out in a world that is so competitive?   I can also say that I’ve been through many lean manufacturing seminars over the years and all those companies that sponsored those activities are now out of business, because what they did was attempt to copy what worked in Japan to an American market, and it clearly didn’t work.  I watched with disapproval as many companies tried to take the concepts in Womack’s book and applied them directly to manufacturing facilities where American workers resisted, and resented the efforts to the point where the company just folded—because nobody seemed to understand what was really going on.

The Japanese had a unique problem after World War II.  They had lost a war and needed to rebuild their economy from the ground up.  They also had an occupying force that changed all the rules of manufacture on them, and imposed on Japanese companies union friendly policies that made innovation so much more complicated.  Just like American manufacturing at the time was peaking because the mass production techniques had created in American workers this new idea of lifelong employment instead of just doing a job in the city then returning to their fields in the country to resume their independent life—socialist oriented labor unions took root and started managing things at manufacturing facilities across America.  At that time it was a trend so America forced Japan into the same box of thought for which they needed a way to get out.  So Japan offered a policy of lifelong employment to their employee but in going a step further than unions did in America, they adopted a decentralization of authority policy where wages and promotions were attached to tenure, not performance and that essentially stabilized their work culture into a nice predictable pattern that they were able to inject into a market share that essentially ruled for the next fifty years.  This was fine with the academics because it sapped the wealth from American manufacturing and relocated it to the orient and even into Europe.  As time passed and American companies still struggled with the concepts of lean manufacturing because at the core of it is a group think that purposely diffuses the merits of individualized behavior then more American companies became Chinese and Korean companies because people in those regions already were somewhat predisposed toward lean manufacturing thought—it’s an Asian thing.  For people who will eat the eyeball of a chicken as a snack it’s no big deal to stand at an assembly line and decentralize authority to the masses of group think.  But to the six-foot six ,300 pound redneck from Appalachia that has a Confederate Flag on the front of their pick-up truck, it’s quite difficult.

However, life was never all that great in Japan.  They were willing to work hard and long, but they were still an occupied country infused with western ideas on the collapse of their great empire which was destroyed at the end of World War II.  Before that they had the samurai culture which had been destroyed by the emerging new emperor—so the people were always ready and willing to fight for something but they had been shell-shocked over the centuries with a lot of disappointment.  If they could get back at the West by imposing lean manufacturing techniques on those “cowboys” then they’d be very happy, and thus they have been riding on that reputation now for many decades even though it took a lot of smoke and mirrors to maintain the illusion.  But those mirrors essentially broke with the release of this news from Kobe Steel.  To keep up their shipments and deal with the focus of the world on their products Kobe Steel had to fudge the paperwork they helped to create and due to the constant pressure from other Asian markets which have emerged over the last twenty years, Kobe Steel had to take short cuts on quality to stay relevant.  In essence, they became dominated by new, leaner and more ambitious manufacturing techniques just as mass production had been destroyed by lean manufacturing in the 80s and 90s.

I had a front row seat to all this activity, I worked at Cincinnati Milacron in the mid 1990s and it was going out of business by the day at that point in time.  They had us studying lean manufacturing techniques just to stay alive.  I could say the same about the Fisher Body planet in Fairfield, Ohio where my grandfather worked.  I could also say the same about the Camero plant in Norwood where I knew several people who worked there.  Now there is nothing left of those places, Milacron and the Camero plant were completely bulldozed away erasing their memory.  People visiting those locations today would never know that they ever existed.  In the final days of their manufacturing lives they had the same desperate anxiety about them that we can now see out of Kobe Steel—and it saddens me to see it, but it doesn’t surprise me.  These trajectories of failure are predictable and can be traced largely back to our academic institutions that impose themselves on the creativity of any industry that must move with much more nibble feet to compete in an ever-changing world.  By the time the academics get their published opinions out about global trends, they are too late and those who listen to them find themselves on the hot seat toward losing immediately.

I may tell my secrets later, but certainly not now.  Innovation didn’t stop with Womach.  Lean manufacturing has some good things to offer, but it certainly won’t deliver anybody to the Promised Land without a lot of hard work and a new take.  Just because you study the words of something it doesn’t mean that success is guaranteed, and so many people even today think that success can be bought.  For those who think such things just look at the Kobe Steel case—a Japanese company that is still struggling to find their place in a competitive world as their niche concept of lean manufacturing is proving to be more of a gimmick now than a justifiable strategy sold by academics for the purpose of destroying manufacturing in the West so that the East could spread communism to every corner of the planet.  That was always on the mind of the academic after all—that much should be clear to everyone now.  But lucky for us all, the wheels fell off at Kobe Steel before we went too far down that road—and the good news is that innovation and the next great things are still out there waiting for the world to copy them.  Until then, I’ll keep the smile on my face watching others try to figure out the latest riddle in the world of competitive manufacturing.

Rich Hoffman

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