Tag: Stupid in America

Comey’s Crime is in Being a “Yes Dear”: The reason for the political divide in America

I had more than a few friends tell me this week that they just can’t take the political divisions in their country anymore, and that they were going to seek more positive things to do with their lives. As they said, the rhetoric is just too divisive to have proper discourse between people, and they were checking out. These are media people who work in the business and it is ironic that we heard pretty much the same thing when James Comey gave his interview with George Stephanopoulos on ABC’s 20/20 Sunday night. As book stores opened today, the day of this writing, I picked up Comey’s book and read it just to make sure my thoughts about the guy were correct—and of course they were. Essentially James Comey is like a lot of my friends in the media who were proclaiming that the world had shifted in a direction they didn’t understand, and they were refusing to participate. Comey after all had thought of himself as a reasonable person even though his wife and kids were rather radical leftists. If it had been Jeb Bush who was running against Hillary Clinton the only division in the Comey household would be whether or not a woman would become president, because institutionally, the two candidates were the same. But since it was Trump, there was nothing in James Comey’s background to prepare him intellectually for what that meant. And many people find themselves in the same quandary at this point of time and they are distressed by it.

James Comey protecting the way things were took it upon himself to alter the political landscape of the 2016 election. He meddled far more than any Russians, or fat slob hacker in the middle of Kansas—as Director of the FBI he tried to walk a fine line of keeping Hillary Clinton in the candidacy for president even though she essentially disqualified himself with the email scandal. Thinking in hindsight, Comey should have suggested prosecution of Hillary Clinton and let the DOJ refuse it. At least the DNC could have put up another candidate before the convention process. That would have been the right thing to do, but then Comey would have been blamed for eliminating the first woman potentially for president, which is what got him into trouble. That pressure likely came mostly from within his own home. Reading what he has said about the matter I am completely convinced that he did all that to make his wife and kids happy. To them, the first female president was far more important than the law, so Comey put himself in a bad spot based on family pressure. But it didn’t help that he was surrounded at the FBI by the same kind of Washington Beltway types who were ideologically far to the political left from the average American. They all thought the game they were playing was a different one from which produced Donald Trump as the head of the Republican Party and James Comey had no way to navigate that reality. That is clear in his book which is devastating for him personally. If these were normal circumstances, he’d be put in jail just for his testimony given in his book. But there is a long line of people who are in that line with him and I don’t know that there are enough jails for all of them, so who knows what will happen.

Comey obviously hated Donald Trump, but not for the reasons he has managed to articulate. After reading Comey’s book it is obvious from a psychological point of view that he resented Trump for not being as pussy whipped as he was, where his wife controlled him too much. Comey views his role in his marriage as a sacrificial sanctuary that takes precedence over his personal desires and here was a Donald Trump who did what he wanted, when he wanted to, who doesn’t appear to answer to anybody—even his wife, and to Comey this was something he just couldn’t get his mind around. So he developed a disdain for Donald Trump from the outset. Of course Trump’s hands were smaller than Comey’s. Comey is around 6’ 8.” But to Comey he had to build up his lack of inferiority to Trump any way he could justify so to preserve his own relationship with his long-time wife. Using his marriage to show moral superiority to Trump was the only way he could protect himself from the reality of Trump’s election and justify his radical behavior to attempt to impeach him. For Comey, that was the only way he could protect the world he understood it to be—even though that is obviously not the reality.

I can say that the palatable anger that my media friends are talking about come from a realization that many have not yet come to terms with—just as James Comey hasn’t. For at least 32 years, through all of Bill Clinton’s presidency, then George Bush, then 8 years of Barack Obama normal Americans quietly sat by and let the system work to the best of its ability. We didn’t protest every little thing. We didn’t seek the impeachment of the president every five seconds. I did take a case for the impeachment of Barack Obama down to John Boehner’s office where his people laughed at it—like it was such an impossibility that it wasn’t worth the paper it was printed on. So we worked really hard to put a change candidate for conservatism into the White House—after waiting all that time, and once the deed was done we did not receive the same respect for our guy. Now we see the political left pushing so hard against our choice with a constant barrage of disrespectful aggression that we are angry about it. And some Republicans that we thought we could trust have joined the left to preserve the institutions that we have come to hate due to our sudden mistrust.

Facebook is on fire with discontent, Twitter is rhetorically divisive, the comments sections of online newspapers are being shut down everywhere because the discourse is so volatile, and the reason is a good one. Normal Americans, for which I am one, have been lied to, manipulated, and used by people like James Comey for most of our lives and we aren’t happy about it. Jeb Bush and his brother were never our kind of Republican. James Comey was entirely too liberal for us, but we put up with him out of polite discourse and now that we have someone who truly does represent our part of the nation the same respect is not provided to our decision as we gave to the other side for three decades.

I announced on these pages many years ago that America was in a new civil war so none of this is a surprise to me. I think the hatred that is on display toward the political left these days is better than armed insurrection. It took a reality television star to really break down the ultimate reality television show—that which was driving our society politically at every level. Through Trump we have seen behind the scenes all the ugliness that was always there and we don’t like it. We always knew it was there, but we couldn’t be certain until Trump was elected. Then and only then did he metaphorically pull down the curtains, so we could all see the characters hiding there who were running everything we loved essentially into the ground. James Comey was one of the villains—a Boy Scout like figure who used his image to hide his political radicalism—which was largely formed by his “yes dear” relationship with his liberal wife. The same could have been said about the entire Hollywood industry, our favorite stores, and our music industry. Our country was being drug in a direction we didn’t like and when we put a stop to it we really saw the fangs of the other side and now instead of polite discourse, we have a fight. What did anybody really think was going to happen? Were we expected to stand down forever? We believed in the election process and now that appears to be in jeopardy, what are we to do—be happy about it and say, “yes dear?” No, that’s not how things work, especially in my world.

All that’s happening now is that my side is fighting back, they aren’t taking it any more the acceptance that the other side from Comey all the way over to the most radical leftist of the Communist Party USA have been very disrespectful to our part in the great Republic of America. Comey didn’t respect our “democracy” he tried to use his position as head of the FBI to pick his new boss—even if she grossly broke the law. He expected us to be civil about it? If you can’t trust the FBI, who can you trust? As we’ve seen the FBI has been weaponized against normal Americans, just as the IRS has been. Then to make matters worse, we elected our kind of guy into the most powerful position in the world and the FBI was audacious enough to break into the lawyer’s office of the President and steal information, so they could leak it to the press to instigate an impeachment case and we are supposed to be alright with that? If they’ll do it to the president, what would they do to the rest of us? So yes, we are mad, and no, we’re not going to take it anymore. And to those in charge within the media and in politics, you should all be extremely happy that its words and not bullets that we’ve chosen as our vehicles of justice. That could change in an instant if the political left continues to push it—which it seems obvious to me they are intent to attempt. That is their fault, they chose to disrespect us. Respect goes both ways; one side can’t give it all while the other pisses all over it. So they should expect to get everything they are getting and worse, because it’s what the political left chose. Yes, the situation has plenty of room to escalate. The lefties, for which Comey is a part, better decide if they really want to play at this bloodsport. Politeness should have never been identified as weakness. We simply waited for our turn and now that we have it, we aren’t going to put up with getting pushed around and lied to.

Rich Hoffman

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A Trip to Denny’s For Han Solo Merchendise: Why all the fuss?

It wasn’t just this that we did for my 50th birthday this past week, my family did a lot of things for me to show how much they appreciate me. But when they asked me what I wanted to do, I said that I wanted to find a Denny’s near our home so I could get a Millennium Falcon cup from the new movie Solo: A Star Wars Story, and the new Topps collecting cards that you can only get at the promotional event that they are doing at most Denny’s restaurants. And I wasn’t kidding about it. If we were planning to do a dinner for my birthday and go out somewhere anyway, I wanted to do something fun that I’d like, and could share with my kids and grandkids. After all, we all like Star Wars. I always used it in the way it was intended, as a modern mythology that had embedded in those kid’s films an essential epistemology in regard to philosophy that is needed in this fast-moving world, so one of my daughters found a nice one about an hour and a half outside of downtown Cincinnati, just outside the city limits of Indianapolis, Indiana. Han Solo was always my favorite character from the Star Wars movies so it was fun to make the Denny’s promotion a fun birthday event that everyone could enjoy. As an added benefit Disney had released the last trailer before the new movie opens on May 25th, just over a month from this writing so it made for an interesting birthday dinner at Denny’s. We didn’t hold back on the Solo merchandise!

I think Alden Ehrenreich will do a great job playing Han Solo as a younger man, a tough job to take over from one of the most iconic film roles Harrison Ford brought to life. It’s a tough job that everyone has in their head differently, so no matter what Ehrenreich does, someone isn’t going to like it. But, from what I’ve seen, the kid gets it—and that’s all that matters. It works for me and I hope it leads to a lot more Han Solo in movies that take place before the events of episode 4. I like the new pointy nose on the Millennium Falcon, I like the idea of new Star Wars music about to be released. I love the DLCs that will be downloaded on Star Wars: Battlefront 2. I love all the toys being released for the movie, its more generational stuff to share with my grandchildren for which all this is new to them so they are having fun with it for the first time. I see it all as very positive and it generally puts a smile on my face to have a new Han Solo movie because that character represents everything I love about Star Wars.

Of course, part of what makes 50th birthday celebrations what they are is in the reflection that you have about your life up to that moment and what might be ahead. For many it’s a time when they look at their life and consider that their best days are behind them. But not me. I have had a lot of very good days and I am sure there are a lot more ahead of me, and the Denny’s meal day was surprisingly fulfilling, not just from the Han Solo gear, but I enjoyed eating Denny’s food again after not having it for over 25 years. Denny’s was one of those places I used to go because they were open all night where I’d go to read after I’d get off work from my second shift jobs. When I was young and worked two fulltime jobs to make ends meet and our house was too small to leave a light on otherwise it would wake up the whole house at night, I’d read my books at all night restaurants like Waffle House, Perkins and Denny’s to make myself tired enough to wind down for bed. After a good meal and about 10 refills of a Coke at 2 am I’d go home and sleep for three or four hours and do it all again at the crack of dawn. Somewhere over that 25-year span Denny’s left the Cincinnati area so it was fun to have it again on my birthday. It was even more fun to have a Star Wars inspired menu with the new Han Solo on the cover. I had the “Two Moons Skillet” which was Heaven on earth for me.

All this of course led me to consider how much Star Wars had evolved over time and what role it plays in a modern sense. I’ve written many thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of words as to what Star Wars means culturally, but I think I’ve been leaving out the epistemological definition in referring to it. After all, I write about some pretty serious subjects most of the time, so when I switch gears and do these Star Wars articles, to some it seems out of character, but to me it all runs together. It’s relevant to the missile attacks of Syria this past weekend, the teacher strikes in Kentucky, Oklahoma and Arizona, the opioid epidemic—just about every topic one might consider can be traced back to the epistemological failures of modern society—and Star Wars was created, and does a good job of maintaining it for children a basic epistemology of values that are designed for modern life. The world is otherwise very confused, their religious values are all over the map, politically we have factions that want to take mankind back to a theology while others are wanting to plant flags into anarchy, democracy and those who presently have power want to keep everything in an aristocracy. We are moving to space as a species while the political powers in office want to cling to mother earth and environmental concerns because that is how their power bases were established—on earth with earthly rules. The truly wonderful thing about Star Wars is that it takes all the value of the world’s mythology and applies it into a modern context, which is why kids, and kids at heart love it so much. It’s a much different thing than other pop culture rituals. This one is actually very healthy for modern human beings. It’s meant for kids, but it works for adults too in very meaningful ways.

When I was in grade school showing a love for Star Wars was extremely taboo. I make no attempt to hide my contempt for the way public school operates—I often say that public school is like using a public restroom or a drinking fountain. Yeah, it does the basics, but not very well. In public school, too many people establish their basic epistemological essence in those public institutions because they don’t have reliable families at home to help them, or other positive influences. The school becomes the basic foundation for that while it was quite clear that George Lucas was intent to provide a competing epistemology for young people, so the pubic school system rejected the competition instead of embracing it, the way they should have. However, I was never one who backed down from a fight—never one day in my life. The more kids made fun of me for wearing my favorite Han Solo t-shirts to school, the more I did it, and my love for Star Wars actually got me into a lot of trouble. It’s not like that today, kids can show their enjoyment of such things without getting into fights over it, and that is actually some real progress. Concerning education, I see that Star Wars has given many people who missing epistemology that they should have been getting from school, or their families and the stories are keeping pace with the concerns of our modern age that is coming at us much faster than ever. It’s really the only thing that is—which to me makes it extremely important culturally.

One of my many hobbies is the study of world cultures and religions. It doesn’t pay much money otherwise I’d do that task fulltime because as I say here often, mythology is my favorite topic. I could talk about world culture all day long and what the pros and cons are. You can often read in hindsight why cultures failed if you know the details and why that’s important is so that you can prevent it in your own culture. It doesn’t matter if we are talking about the American Indian or Roman and Greek societies, you can see through the gifts of historical hindsight why they all failed, and I apply those lessons daily with the millions and millions of words I have provided for free to my readers—because I don’t want to see people fail. Professionally, I don’t have to read in a Denny’s at 2 AM anymore because the lights in the house keep everyone awake. I’m doing well at age 50, as is expected given my role in our family, and my community. So I don’t mind sharing things I love in writing and mythology if it might improve the life of one person—let alone helping many people. The human race in spite of all the faults we could list off for hours on end is actually plotting into positive uncharted territories for the first time in history and it is really only the epistemological values of Star Wars that are successfully preparing the minds of our modern age with the intellectual means to deal with everything in a positive way.

This morning I was at the Target department store near my house shopping for Han Solo toys and I couldn’t help but notice that The Last Jedi just hit the shelves from its Blue-Ray release, and here we are talking about another Star Wars movie being released in a month. The cultural values of the last Star Wars movie are still simmering, Lego hasn’t even put out their video game yet for The Last Jedi. And there are lots of beach towels and clothing out for consumers to enjoy and all this is happening as Space X and Virgin Galactic are taking over the civilian colonization of space and Amazon is delivering packages within hours of ordering from virtually anywhere in the world. Artificial intelligence is taking over as the new rudimentary task supplier in a rapidly expanding economy where there simply aren’t enough workers in the world to do all the jobs coming available. I’m not kidding when I say Alexia could take over the teaching profession. With a second Star Wars moving coming out and all that comes with it culturally, it will be interesting to see what happens. And that’s not all, there are at least eight more Star Wars movies in development right now, along with Star Wars television, video games, books, music and so many other items. What impact that has on the human race I think is a fascinating topic on the epistemological level of consciousness.

As I was paying the check at Denny’s it was a big one, and many of the Indiana farmers looked at me a little side-eyed. My oldest grandson and I were very openly showing our excitement at getting the Han Solo card in the stack I bought. I of course was hoping to get that particular entry. Those are the same kind of people who used to make fun of my Han Solo shirts on the school bus—they didn’t understand what all the fuss was about and thought I should be thinking about something more—real. But little did they know, or little did they know that day in Denny’s that what I was excited about was more real than just about anything they were considering and Han Solo has always best exemplified my excitement for it—the optimism of what is always potentially just around the corner. Han Solo is a very positive character who believes he can get out of anything he gets into under any circumstances and in so many ways, he represents the current position of mankind on planet earth in the early parts of the 21st century. That makes these movies more important than just an entertainment option. Even more than that, it made for me a really fun birthday!

Rich Hoffman

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Don’t Worry About War with Russia, Syria, Iran, or China: Cheaters on a test have no ground to stand on

Let me say regarding the Trump action in Syria that on many levels it is justified. There are people who think the president should not have been pulled into the conflict, and there are those who are terrified of war with Russia. Neither concern is warranted. Essentially, there will never be peace in the Middle East so long as Iran and Russia are propping up dictatorships in Syria. We can’t run from evil. It’s that simple. Like it or not for there to be peace in the world, the world is going to have to become more American. There will never be a world of differing opinions that just mesh together seamlessly. There must be an epistemological starting point for peace and that must come from at least basic shared ideas. Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran are all hostile communist nations—Russia still is in many ways, and until they truly join the world as free market capitalists their values will never match those of America or even Europe, and conflict will always be a threat. So there is no way for America to turn away from the gassing of the Syrian people and allow the Middle East to fall under the rule of ISIS terrorists and Russian manipulation.

There will be no war with Russia, like I’ve said about China and North Korea, none of these countries have the money for it. They are bullies who must act with force to get what they want—and so long as they are functioning in the world this way, there will be senseless death and destruction attached to random terrorism. Russia certainly doesn’t have the means to go to war with the United States. They are broke now let alone after any kind of military engagement with the United States. For years, especially during the Trump administration Russians have been provoking American troops whenever possible and over the last few weeks a lot of comments have been made. Trump has been standing up to the bullies of the region even though he’d rather think about something else. And when they crossed the line, he had to take action because when you tell a bully you are going to punch them in the nose, you had better do it if they don’t yield. Russia continued to back Syrian aggression so Trump had to send in the targeted military strikes.

But do not worry about provoking Russia. This is all part of draining the swamp. The Deep State has always used the threat of hostile nations to scare the American people into paralysis in believing that we all need those extra security offerings provided by the FBI, CIA, and Homeland security. To sell that threat they need people like Putin to be thriving in the world, so they go to great effort when our eyes are turned away to provoke hostile actors around the world to believe they have a seat at the table. But guess what, they don’t. I’d refer to Plato’s shadow man theory from his great book The Republic. The Deep State creates these shadows on the wall to keep our attentions on the scary practitioners of existence to essentially keep that Deep State in power. The Deep State even controls what we call political ideology, what the ideology of the political left and right are by manipulating over a long period of time the differences between the epistemologies of political theory in the United States. But the truth is to peek behind the curtain and eliminate the real threats, to take down the puppets and drain the swamp water where everyone in the Deep State is hiding.

Only when all the enemies of the world are conquered, which is very near a reality after just over a year of a Donald Trump presidency, will people come to know that the Deep State has been always the real threat. Without the Deep State there is no Putin, there is no China, and there is no trouble in the Middle East. And when I say “Deep State” I’m not talking about a bunch of black masked Bilderbergers of wealthy elite—they are just people like anybody else. I’m talking about the ancient yearning of people to desire to rule others as either kings, religious leaders, or military generals who truly desire to take mankind back to the days of the primitive—intellectually, so that they can rule the way they understand—through fear. They need deficits, they need villains, and they need a big strong police state to keep people from looking at anything too closely. In truth however, and this is what people are learning, all those threatening countries are not very strong unless the Americans prop them up to look meaner than they actually are. By Americans I’m talking about the CIA, and the FBI—the American media, and the other agencies who make their livings off protecting “us” from those same villains.

For over two years now we were led to believe that Russia’s President Putin hacked our election system and deposed the incompetent Hillary Clinton putting instead Trump in place. Well, Putin had nothing to do with me—it was people like me who voted for Trump and I’m no fan of Putin. If Putin wanted anybody to win the American election of 2016 it would have been the pushover loser, Hillary Clinton whom Russian had already smacked around plenty when she was Secretary of State. They certainly didn’t want a businessman in the White House who understands money, because it is money that truly does decide who the winners and losers are in the world. By defeating the remaining tyrants in the world through exposure and turning the formerly hostile countries into capitalist zones to truly compete with the United States in trade, that is the only real path to peace which would then allow America to turn back toward itself and not get stretched across the earth putting out every little fire that every bad actor known to mankind can ignite.

I think its great that American is bombing targets in Syria and is calling the bluff of Russia. I told everyone who reads here that there wouldn’t be a trade war with China, look how fast Xi caved on his tough talk. Do you know why dear reader? Because they need American imports much more than we need them. All communist countries have one fundamental problem, their societies do not produce citizens with imaginations, so they have serious intellectual property problems. That means they have to steal it from those who do, and that is how China has been making their living for a long time. Russia is in much the same boat, without the West to copy off of, they are left to their own devices. They are like that kid in school who didn’t study for a test and have to cheat off the person next to them for the answers. Well the person who did study and has all the answers has the leverage in that situation. Halfway through the test if they decide to put their hand over their paper, the cheater is stuck with no resources to complete the test. That is essentially what Trump is doing in China, what he has done in North Korea, and what he is about to do with Russia and Iran. When you have the power position you use it, especially if it creates an opportunity for peace. Which is precisely what is happening presently in Syria.

Rich Hoffman

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Mr. Marijuana, John Boehner: While draining the swamp we are learning what was always underneath

When John Boehner said nine years ago that “good people don’t smoke marijuana” he was trying to appeal to the kind of conservatives that live in his community—like me. Since then he has been rooted out of the Speaker of the House position as a RINO that the Tea Party wing of the party hated, and he has since become a gun for hire lobbyist who smokes and drinks too much. I would argue that he hung around Republicans but never really was one. He is more of a Never Trumper type of old style politician that is being put out of business by the new Trump control of the Republican Party as it is now. I would also argue that Paul Ryan doesn’t fit in that new conservative party that views marijuana as an assault on American sovereignty in similar ways that illegal immigration is. These new Republicans are self-made largely, like Trump and Jim Renacci are, they don’t smoke and drink a lot so they don’t have sympathy for those who do, and they are much more market based economic expansionists due to their business backgrounds than the old rule of Party domination of the private sector. While many of the same people who are mystified by Donald Trump’s presidency think that John Boehner’s joining Acreage Holdings as a marijuana legalization advocate is a shock, it’s not to me. Boehner is just what he has always been, a malleable figure that will mold to the powers of money wherever those sources come from.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/boehners-bombshell-weed-reversal-a-big-boost-for-marijuana/ar-AAvLQIu?OCID=ansmsnnews11

John Boehner lives in my neighborhood and he’s interacted with my family for a number of years. I supported him as Speaker of the House initially, but after a year and a half it was obvious that he wasn’t up to the job and that politics was changing under his feet. The definition of RINO was being articulated while he was in charge of the House of Representatives and he helped write it. But as far as RINOs in the Republican Party he certainly wasn’t the only one. I could write a long list of RINOs at the local level in Butler County where John Boehner lives all the way up to the current President. In fact, the battle of the RINOs and the new Republicans is what the Mueller investigation is all about with Trump—the old guard trying to preserve the meal tickets that come out of political life for which John Boehner entered as soon as he left public office. Acreage Holdings is just one of those meal tickets, a company that wants to use a former politician against legalization on their board to try to build public support for their product.

Yet what many of us have known for a while and many are learning day by day, people like Boehner are like characters from WWE wrestling. They are actors. That’s why it was important that Donald Trump get elected because that was the game all along and the conservative movement needed someone who could speak that language on behalf of real Republicans, not the RINOS—and that has disrupted the entire purpose of the political world that John Boehner thought would last for the rest of his life. For people like Boehner and Paul Ryan, they know they better get the goods now because those opportunities won’t be there in a few years.

To understand the difference in the philosophies and how to detect who from whom no matter which political party we are dealing with a definition of producers and moochers will serve best. There are plenty of people in politics today that have achieved and are self-sustaining people all their own, without the network of politics to drive them. Trump is a good example of this, and so is the senatorial candidate Jim Renacci in Ohio—these are guys who were successful in the private sector and politics is kind of a retirement job for them. Then you have people like Paul Ryan and John Boehner who were filled with good intentions but were in politics at a time in their lives when they should have been out in the world doing good business. With Ryan I had high hopes that he was an Ayn Rand fan so that his brand of conservatism would be conducive to trimming back the deficit. But the moment that Mit Romney put him on the presidential ticket in 2012, Ryan put away his love of Ayn Rand because it was a method to attack him by on the left and he became something of a Judas in the world of Objectivism. The same with John Boehner, he talked tough, and he made people read the Constitution on the first day that he took over as Speaker of the House, the third most powerful position in the world regarding politics, but when the pressures came and the temptations that come with such a powerful office spoke, he as a moocher in life couldn’t act out of his ethical desires—and that’s what makes guys like those two RINOs—or otherwise, political moochers.

There are at least 24 Republicans leaving Congress this year and several leaving the Senate which is increasing day by day—and to many who keep score cards on politics this seems devastating. But it’s really not. If you add up the effects of the Trump presidency and the vitriol coming from the political left—and the now revealed power of the Deep State, this isn’t a game many of these people were prepared for. For the people who thought they could talk their way through it and disguise their moocher natures so to enrich themselves in public office, this isn’t what they signed up for and they are getting out of the business—which I think is a great thing. After reading Peter Schweitzer’s Secret Empires there are a lot of crooked elements to both parties, so who cares if they retire? What good is a House and Senate majority if most of the people in those seats are really liberals trying to enrich themselves by moving laws into their favor, so they can get rich. If Boehner was such an anti-marijuana guy how he could have a change of heart in just nine years. The truth is that he thinks what the money tells him to think, and he is like that because he’s a moocher, not a producer.

This is what draining the swamp looks like. There is nowhere for people like John Boehner and Paul Ryan to hide, because there is now an expectation of performance that producers like Donald Trump require and that game is changing. Falling in love with the score card is not really accomplishing anything because the quality of the people in those political seats are still leveraged in favor of the moochers. With that said however I don’t see a Democratic wave hitting congress. I think the Democrats are even worse off so I wouldn’t lose any sleep. It is better to get rid of people who were never really conservative, so they can go lobby liberal issues like marijuana legalization, so we can know who they really are. That is far more important than the number of Rs and Ds in congress—because Boehner didn’t “evolve” as he says he did. He was always a short meeting and a paycheck away from seeing the other side’s point of view. The fact remains that good people don’t smoke marijuana. I don’t care how much pain they are in.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/ryan-poised-to-earn-millions-even-if-he-sheds-weekend-dad-role/ar-AAvNx5W?ocid=spartandhp

Legalizing marijuana as a compassionate medicine for people suffering ailments is ridiculous, because we have it in our means right now through regenerative medicine to eliminate the root cause of the ailments. Nobody needs the brain killing drug marijuana to have a better life. Just fix the person, don’t give them more drugs. But to the moochers out there who can’t think like a producer, that kind of talk is scary—because otherwise they don’t have a means to make money for themselves. And that is what drives them, fear of making a good living. Which is why they are so dangerous in politics to begin with. So let them go, let them quit and become lobbyists. Let them get what they can get while they can. Because the swamp is draining and it won’t be long before those options will go away all together.

Rich Hoffman
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Going Outside In Spite of a Jealous Mother: Virgin Galactic’s milestone with the VSS Unity

It’s taken a few years to get back in the air after the crash of 2014 but Virgin Galactic put up its commercial space vehicle to a successful rocket powered flight on April 5th above Mach 1 to an altitude of 85,000 feet. The VSS Unity went through all its powered tests well creating a milestone for space travel that is considerable. While the rest of the world is thinking small and is locked in the turmoil of yesterday’s political struggles, whether it be the threats of Syria, the attacks of ISIS, the unpredictability of South Korea or even the latest revelations of America’s Deep State out of control federal government hungry for power and global domination, mankind is going to space without the nations of the world slowing the process down for a change. Because of this VSS Unity’s powered flight the schedule of taking civilian guests into space in a few months is proceeding marking a major change in the opportunities offered to our species.

I’ve been a fan of Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic enterprise since the start and its been frustrating for me to watch the pain they’ve had to go through to reobtain their FAA licensing for commercial space flight. I understand the rigorous need for scrutiny when it comes to aviation, but not at the cost of innovation and adventure. As usual once federal authorities get involved, the speed of business becomes mired by comb over politicians and their lack luster view of the world. So it was nothing short of a miracle that the VSS Unity was able to get back into the air at all. Here is a bit of the story that Virgin Galactic had to endure to get back to where they were before the crash in 2014.

Initial investigations found that the engine and propellant tanks were intact, showing that there had not been a fuel explosion. Telemetry data and cockpit video showed that instead, the air braking system appeared to have deployed incorrectly and too early, for unknown reasons, and that the craft had violently broken apart in midair seconds later.

U.S. National Transportation Safety Board Chairman Christopher Hart said on 2 November 2014 that investigators had determined SpaceShipTwo’s tail system was supposed to have been released for deployment as the craft was traveling about 1.4 times the speed of sound; instead, the tail section began pivoting when the vehicle was flying at Mach 1. “I’m not stating that this is the cause of the mishap. We have months and months of investigation to determine what the cause was.” Asked if pilot error was a possible factor, Hart said: “We are looking at all of these issues to determine what was the root cause of this mishap.” He noted that it was also unclear how the tail mechanism began to rotate once it was unlocked, since that maneuver requires a separate pilot command that was never given, and whether the craft’s position in the air and its speed somehow enabled the tail section to swing free on its own.[32]

In November 2014, Branson and Virgin Galactic came under criticism for their attempts to distance the company from the disaster by referring to the test pilots as Scaled Composites employees.[33] Virgin Galactic’s official statement on 31 October 2014 said: “Virgin Galactic’s partner Scaled Composites conducted a powered test flight of SpaceShipTwo earlier today. […] Local authorities have confirmed that one of the two Scaled Composites pilots died during the accident”.[34] This was in strong contrast to public communications previously released concerning the group’s successful flights, which had routinely presented pilots, craft, and projects within the same organizational structures, as being “Virgin Galactic” flights or activities of “the Galactic team”.[33][35][36] The BBC’s David Shukman commented that: “Even as details emerge of what went wrong, this is clearly a massive setback to a company hoping to pioneer a new industry of space tourism. Confidence is everything and this will not encourage the long list of celebrity and millionaire customers waiting for their first flight”.[28][37]

At a hearing in Washington D.C. on 28 July 2015,[38][39] and a press release on the same day[40] the NTSB cited inadequate design safeguards, poor pilot training, lack of rigorous FAA oversight and a potentially anxious co-pilot without recent flight experience as important factors in the 2014 crash. They determined that the co-pilot, who died in the accident, prematurely unlocked a movable tail section some ten seconds after SpaceShip Two fired its rocket engine and was breaking the sound barrier, resulting in the craft’s breaking apart. But the Board also found that the Scaled Composites unit of Northrop Grumman, which designed and flew the prototype space tourism vehicle, didn’t properly prepare for potential human slip-ups by providing a fail-safe system that could have guarded against such premature deployment. “A single-point human failure has to be anticipated,” board member Robert Sumwalt said. Instead, Scaled Composites “put all their eggs in the basket of the pilots doing it correctly.”

NTSB Chairman Christopher Hart emphasized that consideration of human factors, which was not emphasized in the design, safety assessment, and operation of SpaceShipTwo’s feather system, is critical to safe manned spaceflight to mitigate the potential consequences of human error. “Manned commercial spaceflight is a new frontier, with many unknown risks and hazards. In such an environment, safety margins around known hazards must be rigorously established and, where possible, expanded. For commercial spaceflight to successfully mature, we must meticulously seek out and mitigate known hazards, as a prerequisite to identifying and mitigating new hazards.”[40] In its submission to the NTSB, Virgin Galactic reports that the second SS2, currently nearing completion, has been modified with an automatic mechanical inhibit device to prevent locking or unlocking of the feather during safety-critical phases. An explicit warning about the dangers of premature unlocking has also been added to the checklist and operating handbook, and a formalized crew resource management (CRM) approach, already used by Virgin for its WK2 operations, is being adopted for SS2. However, despite CRM issues being cited as a likely contributing cause, Virgin confirmed that it would not modify the cockpit display system.[41]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgin_Galactic

WASHINGTON — As Virgin Galactic prepares to resume testing of its SpaceShipTwo suborbital spaceplane, the company announced Aug. 1 that it has received a launch license for those tests from the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration.

The license, dated July 29, covers test flights of SpaceShipTwo from the Mojave Air and Space Port in California over a two-year period. On those tests, SpaceShipTwo is carried aloft by its carrier aircraft, WhiteKnightTwo, from which it is released and fires its hybrid rocket engine for a suborbital flight, gliding back to a runway landing.

While Virgin Galactic ultimately plans to use SpaceShipTwo to carry space tourists, the license awarded by the FAA restricts the company to transporting only “non-deployed scientific, experimental, or inert payloads” on flights carried out under the license.

The license prohibits Virgin Galactic from flying what are officially classified as “spaceflight participants” on SpaceShipTwo until the company can “successfully verify the integrated performance” of SpaceShipTwo and WhiteKnightTwo. “Verification must include flight testing, and the results must be provided to the FAA prior to conducting a mission with a space flight participant on board,” the license states.

Virgin Galactic opted to receive the launch license, with those restrictions, over an alternative known as an experimental permit. Such permits allow for testing of suborbital reusable launch vehicles under a more streamlined regulatory environment, but prohibit the company holding the permit from using the vehicle for any commercial application. Blue Origin, for example, has an experimental permit for test flights of its New Shepard suborbital vehicle.

http://spacenews.com/virgin-galactic-receives-faa-license-for-spaceshiptwo-tests/

Civilian space travel is more than a giant step for the human race. Mixed in with all the safety precautions leveled at Virgin Galactic is a jealousy of those who strive for adventure and discover that it persists in everything a federal government is involved with. The sad thing about it is that the United States is faster than most places around the world for endeavors like this. There really isn’t any other place in the world where something like Virgin Galactic could even exist. Rules don’t always exist to protect people from the dangers of a new endeavor, they are often put in place to preserve the static thinking of yesterday from the challenges of tomorrow and they are incentivized to delay that tomorrow as long as they can—and they think of it as a victory to do so.

It was far more than just a technical feat to get the VSS Unity back into the air under powered flight conditions, pushing up against the edges of space so soon after their tragic crash in 2014. I think in the scheme of things that crashes will happen and people will die, but the most dangerous thing that can happen to a space program like the one at Virgin Galactic is when the bureaucrats get involved. They by nature want to keep mankind chained to their papers and their courts so any excuse they can obtain to limit the imagination of any human to bypass the governments of the world and step into space is something they are all too eager to exploit. With that understanding, Virgin Galactic is poised to resume their commercial flights into space by the end of 2018 and that is a tremendous opportunity for everyone. Not only is space the opportunity for entire new economies to develop but for the essential philosophy of mankind to change for the better. It’s time for a major change in the way everyone looks at even basic human endeavors and the potential of space puts that opportunity within reach. First it will be the very privileged who can spend $250,000 to travel out of earth’s grasp and away from the clutches of the jealous aristocrats who have ruled mankind for thousands and thousands of years. It’s not just mother earth that we are all escaping from, that overbearing parent who won’t even let us go outside when its raining. It’s the jealous brothers and sisters who seek to appease that mother with small thinking and way too many rules. But finally, the door is opening and the big new adventure of space is just outside, and now we can go. Which is wonderful news!

Rich Hoffman

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The Answer to an Age Old Question: Expereince or imagination, which one is more important

One of my employees was in a meeting this past week with me and a lot of other very smart people when she told me about one of her graduate school assignments. She’s acquiring her master’s in business administration so the frequency of thought-provoking assignments has been increasing and she was talking to me about it with genuine inquiry—as if such matters were even a struggled presumption. The question for which she had been given 30 minutes to answer was what was more important in business, imagination or experience. I told her that the answer was very easy, it was imagination—clearly and unequivocally. Obviously, that had not been the theme of her classroom discussion so I’ll share my reasons so that others can come to learn the priorities for themselves and thus focus their energy in the proper places.

I’m obviously at a place in life where I have both imagination and experience so my daily performance develops along that trajectory of expectation. But that was not always the case. Without an imagination there really is no other means of developing any kind of project from conception to inception. Nothing happens in business or in anything unless the imagination first unleashes the concept of something—so without imagination nothing happens, making it clearly the most important thing in business. Imagination is the escape velocity that an idea has to have to leave the gravitational holdings of reality, to break through to something in an orbit all its own. The process is often violent and messy just like a rocket trying to escape the gravity of earth—until the weightlessness of space calms everything down and the rocket then becomes its own master.

Without imagination there is nothing for experience to do. Experience is a useless thing by itself because if the human race always keeps everything in a static development where experience rules all decision-making then nothing new develops. We’d just do the same things over and over again. But business is all about changing and developing—nothing is static in a capitalist society so an edge is always needed to perpetuate competitive advantages. Experience can take an idea and bring it to life, but it is the imagination that creates the idea.

Asking if something should be or how it might play against a present reality is a powerful conceptual device. Imagination is not just important in conceiving new concepts but in trouble-shooting, which is an essential part of even mature products. Asking what ifs when problems arise can be difficult and experience may limit the options if the reality of options are limited to what has been known. The problem may be something that has never been experienced leaving a conceptual faculty of thought needed to uncover what needs to be examined.

Socially this question has had devastating results on the development of our civilization. We do a great job with kids in developing their imaginations, but obviously in our education system we have put the emphasis on experience as the primary focus of business development, and that is incorrect. By focusing on experience, it has justified the long necessity for education because the selling point is that is how young students can gain experience. But in reality, most children are quite good at thinking out problems and solving them whereas most adults will linger on topics for too long because they get caught trying to bend situations toward their experience—which most of the time doesn’t have what it needs to solve new challenges.

Playing at life will make a far more effective business person than a straight-laced experienced practitioner of yesterday’s rules. If you have ever pursued a patent for a new invention this problem emerges quite explicitly. Inventors are usually very imaginative whereas the reviewers at the patent office are there to point out every static reality possible to ensure that what has been invented is truly new and not just a retread of an old idea. Both sides are often frustrated with the other because they are at cross purposes from one another. But without the imagination of new inventions there would be no reason for the other to exist. In order for experience to happen someone would have had to create the means of learning something to begin with, and without imagination nothing ever gets initiated. No wheel would have been constructed, no fire started for the first time, no kite flown to jostle loose the mechanisms of electricity. Or any experiments with radio waves to unleash the modern powers of communication. Just learning what was known and applying experience to maintaining it doesn’t advance anything. Only imagination can advance an idea from a thought into the birthplace of reality.

Critics of mine often say that I’m a “big picture guy” because my interests are mostly on conceptual development and outside the box thinking on everything. Even though I understand the need for experience, maintaining what has been known with static analysis isn’t very interesting to me—essentially because anybody can do those things. To those who are blind to such opportunities the big picture is a useless task of an artist that has little regard for the rules established by experience. Those who favor experience over imagination truly desire that things stay within the realm of their expertise so that they can be acknowledged as masters of their specific fields. These are the types of people who will give an opinion on a matter by saying that they aren’t an attorney, or they aren’t cooks, or they aren’t CPAs—shortchanging their comments just as they make them. To those types of people, they lack the imagination to think outside their field of professional endeavor so they refuse the responsibility to advance a thought if it falls outside of their expertise. But often this is just what’s needed. This problem is the equivalent to a person driving a car but having to pull off the side of the road because they have a flat tire and refusing to change that tire because that’s not their job as defined by experience. So they sit on the side of the road and call out for help from someone who only changes tires for a living.

To me it’s a very obvious situation and my experience tells me that imagination is far more important in any task. Imagination is needed to solve problems especially when they fall outside of what has been known previously, which is most things. Attempting to bend the rules of existence to the static confines of what has been known is probably one of the most destructive attributes of any society that yearns to call itself advanced. Any time I will listen to the advice of a free-thinker that is deeply imaginative over that static resistance of an experienced person, because experience can only articulate what has been known, it doesn’t produce what could be. Only imagination does that leaving imagination as the most important tool that not only business has to work with, but that human beings use to advance their cause. While we are teaching children the things they need to learn in life the best thing we could do for them is teach them to have an imagination and thus, to think. The worst thing we could do is to teach them to confine their operational reality to the limits of experience. To do so is to limit all opportunities to the realm of experience, and that isn’t conducive to anything new, only the old static problems that were there when experience was formed leaving advancement of any kind to be elusive, and unfulfilled.

Rich Hoffman

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The Liberal Loon Nasim Najafi Aghdam: Why all PETA activists are just a few bad experiences away from mass murder

So what happened to the Urmia, Iranian immigrant Nasim Najafi Aghdam to cause her to shoot up the YouTube headquarters just south of San Francisco—at the northern tip of Silicone Valley? In a bizarre attack on the Google led company she shot four innocent people before apparently killing herself thus ending a bizarre life of liberal crusades practicing veganism and the religious practices of Baha’I, for which her family reportedly fled Iran to practice spending roughly a year in Turkey two decades prior. She legally bought the gun she used, her family warned police who had spoken to her just 11 hours prior to the shooting and nothing set police off to look into Aghadam’s actions any further. Aghdam also didn’t know any of the YouTube employees—she just randomly selected them, so what gun law, or law of any kind could have helped the situation? What might we say was the cause and corrective action of this particular shooting?

The first thing I’d say about Nasim Najafi Aghdam is that she was obviously suffering from mental health issues, the way a lot of liberals currently are. The reason is that their view of the world is not conducive to what is actually happening. As a PETA activist Nghdam was crusading against the nature of life itself, where those at the top of the food chain eat those under them. To any rational person such an arrangement is insane and if the question of why god would ever design such an existence is legitimately asked, only insanity can begin to provide an answer. Most of us just accept that we are the superior life form and that if we want to eat another animal, then we do so. But to ask the question as to why, or to go so far to believe that one must be a crusader against the very nature of life to the extent that Aghdam was, then mental instability is the path such people usually find themselves on.

To satisfy the illusion of working against such a system of living, where people eat those cute little animals that were seen in Aghdam’s YouTube videos, the young liberal activist had to convince herself that the work she was doing through her art had merit. So using the First Amendment Aghdam made a series of bizarre videos dedicated to her 10,000 YouTube subscribers which paid her a little money and gave her a taste of American life. But the moment that was disrupted with a policy change her natural liberal tendencies formed in her home country of Iran clashed with the merits of American capitalism where everywhere she looked she could only see a slow killing evil—which is common to liberal people who hate capitalism—she felt her only option was to attack the company that brought her so much grief, which so happened to be the company that provided her with the vehicle of expression to begin with.

Of course, once the media learned that Nasim Najafi Aghdam was one of their target demographic groups—she was a foreigner from the enemy country of Iran, she was a young female, and she was a PETA activist, the story of her attempted murders jumped right off the front page within 24 hours. YouTube as a company touches most people in the world these days, so the public interest in the story was very great, but the story was pulled anyway because the gun control debate couldn’t be advanced otherwise. People like Aghdam face an American culture with only the objective of changing it and once they realize that they can’t they get frustrated and sometimes become very violent. The media on their part do not understand why it isn’t white NRA members who are attacking these places and shooting people up—because they don’t understand the essential meaning behind the NRA and the people who make up their membership. Yet it is the typical American heritage to use the gun to hunt for one’s own sustenance who fled European oppression, much the way Aghdam did in Iran. Only one side was in harmony with existence and the other was against it—trying to change that reality with activism.

The average PETA activist who takes off their cloths and puts themselves in cages in public are not that far away from the kind of murderous activity that Aghdam indulged in. Once they put animals at the same level of human beings and protest that all life is equal they are going against the laws of the entire universe and that can be very frustrating for them. The essential pitfalls of the typical liberal is that they fight for equality by trying to repress development, intellectual and scientific. That is the core argument behind all climate science and even religions that hope to deny science to support their ancient texts. Both approaches are seeking to bend reality to the desires of their observations and when those don’t align, mental instability is often the result. Not being in accord with life is to stand against the trajectory of its experience, and liberals are often guilty of that generality. Not all of them go so far as Aghdam did, but in her case she had not been in America long enough to understand how the country works at the epistemological level. She was using the concept of American capitalism provided by YouTube to communicate her radical ideas but the moment she lost that device, she couldn’t see any other way out but to commit murder.

Imagine Aghdam going to the target range learning to use her Smith & Wesson 9 mm knowing that she intended to use it to kill employees at YouTube, and speaking calmly to the police when they found her asleep in her car on her way to commit the murders—knowing that once she went that far that she would never have a normal life again, that she’d either be killed or put in jail for the rest of her life—yet her activism drove her on toward a level of radicalism that clearly crossed the line. Her desire to change the world superseded her desire to live within the context of existence.

Most conservatives that I know, particularly those who are in the NRA would never take such a radical step because they like life too much. They enjoy hunting, watching football games on Saturdays and Sundays while grilling out in the backyard. They by the nature of their values are aligned with existence, that we have to eat to live and that something has to die so we can continue on, and they find ways to deal with that universal conundrum—what makes us so special to be at the top of the food chain and thus able to decide what lives and dies? Such discussions are at the heart of the American experience and lots of people come to the United States so they can participate in that relationship. But for those like the liberal Aghdam, they don’t accept the basic concept of American life, so how can they assimilate to it? It is quite clear that a certain percentage of liberals are just crazy by the nature of their opposition to universal law. Not all of them kill people to bend those laws toward an equality that they dream might exist if only this happened or that happened. But I would say that all liberals who are activists against basic realities are prone to such meltdowns and should be considered dangerous. Any of them could be one disappointing event away from mass murder just because they don’t have any other way of interacting with the world except in protests and threats—and when those things don’t work, they have only murder to fall back on.

Rich Hoffman
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The Art of Holly Denham: Seeing hope beyond the facade of a negative reality

I think raising children is the most rewarding thing you can do. Raising my children was likely the happiest time of my life, and what they have become makes me infinitely proud. What they become largely is the complete responsibility of the parent and any little mistake made along the way can translate into massive problems later down the line. So to see my kids arrive into their late twenties being nice productive people unbroken by the realities of existence is something I never get tired of. Both of my children do unusual things creatively which for me was always my hope for them. Most parents just want their children to be successful and moderately happy in life, but I always expected more with some of the unusual experiences I introduced them to as kids. Then like all parents must—although most don’t accomplish it—you have to have the guts to keep your grubby hands out of their lives and let them live it as much as possible—so that they can authenticate their own way through a complicated world, and you have to trust that what you taught them along the way would give them what they need. My oldest daughter is a successful photographer and is doing great things very early in life. And now her sister is applying her own brand to the world of art which can be seen below.

My first impression of my youngest daughter’s Holly Denham Art platform was pride because she had moved her abilities well beyond just sketching basic pictures, which a lot of people can do, but do it at the level of a top illustrator. It was great to see her arrive at that level, and to witness her work on the many products displayed at the website below. But then peeling back the first impression at the depth of the work and noticing her interest levels, it was obvious not just because she was my kid, that she had developed a truly artistic outlook toward the world. Upon seeing these drawings, I reflected the drawings I had seen of Pablo Picasso recently at the British Museum in London that the famous painter had made about every day life, and I had to tell Holly that I thought she was better at this stage of her work. The reason was that she had managed to reach deeply into her subjects and pull out an optimism that is very distinct for her and show it in her work. Even if at first glance the subjects are dreary and in the style of the pessimism typical of most millennials, there is always a glimmer of hope in what she does that makes her stuff different from similar works of art.

http://hollydenham.bigcartel.com/

I remember how it was when I was her age, I used to hang around with all the crazy artists at 4 AM in the morning at the Perkins in Corryville at the University of Cincinnati campus, and then the Perkins in Montgomery where all the affluent rich kids who wanted to be nothing like their stiff parents came to express themselves with grunge art, music and literature over hamburgers and free refills of Coke all night. There were similar scenes played out all across the world, young people who thought they were the first to stumble out of childhood and into the injustice of the world rebelling with non-conformity—until the age of 30 came closer and the demands of children, house payments and a steady job forced them to do what they knew best, what they learned from watching their parents go through the same cycle. Thus, artists, even the really good ones, find themselves limited greatly by this cycle of observation—even Picasso’s sketches were very didactic in their worldview—featured so prominently at the greatest museums of the world. Most young artists while their window of free thinking is open to them, before the pressures of life close that window only get to the point where they ask questions and represent those questions in their art. It is therefore pretty rare to see an artist who can ask and answer some of those observational questions.

If an artist isn’t breaking through into some realization not obtained any other way, then it could be argued that the work is simply reflectional—and other than looking neat, is useless to the viewer. But capturing some hidden reality, obscured by the lenses of daily pressures is the difference between a good artist and an average one and to me it is quite clear that Holly is peaking at that goodness. Many of the pieces she has shown me recently are already there. I can only imagine what she will be like after another 2000 drawings, which she is well on her way to producing. She has always been a very interesting person and has had a need to express that uniqueness—so its very nice to see that wonder hatching early in the 21st Century for the world to enjoy.

For me however the pride is in elements that aren’t so obvious in the various sketches. Artists in order to be good need to have lived some life and been pushed to the breaking points a time or two, and most people inclined to such endeavors often turn to substance abuse to alleviate the pain of such moments where expectations don’t meet reality. In my daughter’s case, she has a vast intellect that is capable of a great deal—and because of that she can endure observations that are quite harsh without being broken emotionally, and thus can then articulate those elements onto a printed page. As a parent it is hard to let kids live and to defend them when the world thinks they should be doing something else. But the payoff is in the results which I am enjoying from her. Referencing all the “artistic” types that I’ve known over the years where they all fell short was that they become bitter and rather stagnant in their work. But the human mind craves more than anything optimism, the yearning to turn one more corner to get to a new reality and if a person can last long enough, they can achieve anything. Its one thing to identify what ails the world, it’s quite another to see it and work beyond those limits and I can see in Holly a path where she does this naturally, which puts her in a category of uniqueness that no school can teach—only the realities of a life well lived.

All life is about conflict, and the best of art shows those situations resolved, or the preparation of that resolution. Even the Da Vinci Mona Lisa is about that mysterious look captured in the midst of tumultuous times—that steady gaze from the mysteries of time peering at the future with a knowing smile. Exploring the Louvre in Paris the art shown there is mostly of this type and I don’t see it much differently from today’s comic book artists expressing themselves based on modern observational tendencies. Only today there are more options, and the artistic noise is much greater than it was in Da Vinci’s time. But the artistic process is very much the same, an individual witnesses’ life and puts to it hopes, fears, anxieties and even dreams that can punch through the imagination of a viewer to varying degrees. And to see any young person do that is a wonderful miracle of existence—especially when they turn out to be a kid that you’ve cared for from their very first moments to the present with lots of detail, yet without interrupting their own boons to self-awareness. Pride is a limited emotion to describe such a feeling, but it’s a start.

Rich Hoffman

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Idiots on Parade: Coverage of the anti-gun March for Our Lives losers

Infowars did a great job of covering the Austin March for Our Lives event on Saturday March 24th 2018. The evidence is quite obvious regarding the quality of the character of the type of people in the anti-gun movement. It’s important to study them so we can take the next steps. Watch these videos and share.

Rich Hoffman
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The Mind of Austin Bomber Mark Conditt: My experience in knowing people who wanted to blow up stuff

It doesn’t get the FBI off the hook for all the crimes they have committed in Washington D.C. or the many police organizations around the country who seek to preserve a protective barrier to allow a deep state to permeate our lives unimpeded—but the police work in Austin regarding the serial bomber there was what we all expect. Under great pressure, they did a wonderful job of figuring out who Mark Conditt was, as the 23-year-old terrorist bomber and how to pinpoint his location and stop the crimes giving the young kid no other option but to blow himself up saving us all a lot of money in legal costs and incarceration. The way they captured him was just as good as the fact that they did. Snuffed out of his hideaway hotel outside of Austin Conditt knew the cops were onto him so he tried to leave in his car noticing that they were following. He pulled over to blow himself up before he was caught. Conditt waited for the cops to get close enough before detonating the device hoping that he’d injure some of them with shattered glass, but the wounds were minimal, and the incident ended quickly—and in a good way. You could say the kid went to pieces over the incident.

Yet the most disturbing attribute to the case was something I have been warning about with more frequency. Conditt left behind a confessional video that showed what viewers called an “outcry from a very challenged young man.” From all outward appearances Mark Conditt looked like a nice all-American boy. But like the millions of kids who are growing up now in broken homes where it would be assumed that government schools and the many institutions of human endeavor could replace the need for strong families to raise children, that has turned out not to be the case. However in Conditt’s case, he had a conservative background, got along with his sisters, was renovating a house with his dad and worked at a semiconductor manufacturer. By all outward appearances, the kid had it together. So what could have possibly gone wrong?

I’m sure it will take time to get all the details out as to why this kid who seemed to have it all literally came apart in his car as authorities closed in to arrest him for terrorist activity, but I would add the suggestion that there is a quiet desperation emerging from all young males in this modern world which seems to be handing out opportunities to everyone but young white males these days—ostracizing them in the process with a sense of hopelessness. Conditt was oddly enough homeschooled which is unusual for a violent case of this kind but does bring up some interesting observations. Sometimes it is just as bad to know too much as it is to not know enough. It looks to me at these early stages that Austin Conditt knew too much about the way his future was shaping up and it generated anger in him that he destructively chose to unleash in this devastating way.

I knew a kid like Conditt once who grew up in a very conservative house in a very conservative community who ate lunch with me a million years ago in the cafeteria at Lakota schools. Every day we had a group of kids who sat at our table where we planned to set off a series of bombs on the last day of school in our freshmen year. I was the group leader who pulled everyone together for the endeavor, but my friend was the mastermind behind the various bomb devices. The intention wasn’t to kill anyone, but it was intended to show our disrespect for the education institution we all felt trapped in. This kid was a valedictorian in our freshmen class and at that time had the highest scores in any conceivable testing available at the time. After hanging out with me for the next three years though he dropped down into the top ten in our school because I was always telling him that all that ranking stuff was useless. The thing that plagued him most was that everyone around him, his family, his school, and even the state of Ohio had his life all planned out for him and his desire to blow things up stemmed from a quiet declaration to claim his own life for himself. I think his friendship with me kept him from really hurting anybody. Every day at lunch we planned for this big last day of school event, and when it finally came, instead of blowing up cars and entire buildings it turned out to be a nice compromise of a few fireworks launched by the buses—totally harmless and quite festive.

My concern as the day came near that if we actually blew things up that our entire summer would be ruined with court appearances, so I think what we ended up doing was a good thing in the end. The fireworks went off. People liked them. We all got on our buses and went home for the summer and we moved on. That kid spent the summer with me doing all kinds of adventures and by the next year was a different person no longer angry at the institution itself but was much more able to focus his anger. That lasted so long as we were friends. Many years later when we stopped having much in common to talk about he drifted back to that same self-destructive state. It wasn’t because there was anything wrong with him, other than he was so smart that he didn’t have filters to see things other than how they really were, and that was just too much pain for him.

I see in Mark Conditt a lot of the same kind of thing. He was born into a time when the Christian white male is being condemned in the media just for existing, and it can look to such a young person that there isn’t anything to live for. It also provokes a person to lash out at the system that is blaming him for just being alive. So for those guilty of it, there is a lot of danger in trying to redistribute the notion of privilege from one sector of civilization to another. When it is considered that opportunities are limited and one sector of society or another will have access to those opportunities, there will always be someone like Mark Conditt out there looking to lash out at how miserable their future forecasts are. The real problem is in the artificial limits that our present society has created for people, especially young people. There are opportunities for everyone if we would take away the regulations that prevent economic growth and allow the human imagination to expand our society in such a way that adventure in thought and action would give kids like Conditt and everyone else a shot at the dreams that can be achieved in America—instead of leaving them as hopeless husks of human flesh victimized by the limits of a progressive oriented society.

If we really want to solve these problems we have to deal with the philosophy that is delivering youth to these desperate outlooks. To become a terrorist bomber takes some real commitment, and the energy behind that commitment comes from somewhere. We have to understand that, because there isn’t any regulation on earth that can stop such a desire. Those who think that a more managed society is the answer they couldn’t be more wrong. The more that human beings are regulated, the more they desire to rebel. 95% of society may fall in line, but there will always be a dangerous few who will rebel on any side of the political spectrum. The real solution is in less social tampering and unleashing more opportunity to more in the world. If there is a theme to the violence of human civilization it is in the struggle for the perception of opportunity. Without the hope for opportunity, people—some people—will do desperate things. And so long as that is the case, dangerous people like Mark Conditt will always be out there.

Rich Hoffman
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