Tag: Tea Party

Red Dead Redemption 2: Defining the meaning of an American

There are so many things to talk about, but I consider the new video game Red Dead Redemption 2 on the big console home game systems to be one of the most paramount issues of our day. Not just because I love westerns and video games, but because the story itself is really at the core of our modern world and the confusing philosophies that we contend with every day—is big government better or small. I’ve always loved the “Red” games as the producer Rockstar has published them over vast amounts of time. The first Red Dead Redemption came out in 2010, and its sequel just this recent year of 2018, so a lot of time, money and effort goes into these things and they are truly epic for any scope of entertainment venue. But as I was playing Red Dead Redemption 2 I couldn’t help but think a thought I had been thinking for a long time, that the game was essentially Game of Thrones only set in a western instead of some unidentified middle ages of Europe. The essence of the game is to ask the question, “what does it mean to be an American.” The conflict of the game is when many different sectors of society unleash their understanding compared with the natural human tendency toward greed and violence. The result is a very compelling story that could easily fill up several seasons of a Netflix drama.

You can tell that the game is upsetting the progressive elements of our present society, they have lots of problems with some of the themes of the game. Red Dead Redemption 2 is set in 1899 just as the progressive movement is getting underway. In the game there are random characters that you meet many whom are part of the suffragette movement. As a player you can choose to help those people or harass them and many players are picking up these screaming feminists and putting them on railroad tracks to be run over by an oncoming train. And the game is providing awards for those actions, so the real progressives in our entertainment culture have serious problems with that. Additionally, the character you play in the game, Author Morgan is in a gang as kind of the heavy. The leader of the game is a guy named Dutch who is essentially a socialist philosopher. I don’t like the guy but it is a very interesting experiment in the fallacies of socialism that his vision is being destroyed moment by moment in the game driving him to lunacy because he can’t get socialism to work without being a criminal element in the larger context of society.

I thought Rockstar Games went out of their way not to insult progressives as many of the storylines within the game treated them fairly. But as the player you decided how relevant they were or weren’t, and that is what has progressives so angry. By the end of Author Morgan’s story in Red Dead Redemption 2 I had my good meter tapping out as high as it could go. That is a meter you get for doing good deeds for people, and mine was as good as it could get. And it was rewarding to do good as opposed to doing bad things which many players might be tempted to do. The whole thing is a very interesting experiment in human behavior that I thought went well beyond any previous entertainment exploration, whether it be a novel, a movie or a television show. This form of story telling I thought was very revolutionary, and powerful. I wouldn’t go so far to say that it is the literary equivalent to a Dicken’s novel, but Rockstar Games put a lot of effort into the whole presentation that there really has never been anything quite like it anywhere yet. I think of it as I often do with these massive video games, like its taking a resort vacation to an exotic place. On my 70” 4K television with a Bose sound system, its easy for me to forget that I’m just in my living room. The world is vast and well rendered in Red Dead Redemption 2, almost to the point of ridiculousness. That makes investing yourself into the stories that much more compelling, and powerful.

And again, by the end of Author Morgan’s storyline anyway, with the good meter at the highest point, because the character and those he interacts with changes depending on that meter, Author came to the point of what being an American really was. The game sifted through all the various elements of turn of the century North America and found the real heart and soul of American life quite wonderfully. It was a shame that his realization came all too late, but the point of the game is the tapestry that everything is set in more than the lives of the characters. I found the whole thing extremely refreshing. Its one of those things that everyone who can find the time should endeavor to experience.

I have always been around guns, but the first time I played Red Dead Redemption back in 2010 I had not yet purchased or became involved in Cowboy Fast Draw. But at the end of that game I decided that when things called down for me in life that I would. A few years later when an open window came I took 2K and had a custom fast draw holster made for myself and I bought my Ruger Vaquero. Since then I have been practicing Cowboy Fast Draw almost every day and I have become proficient. That is important because I see the gun, especially the way it was presented in American westerns to be even more symbolic to the life of free people as the samurai sword is to Japanese society—which is saying a lot. I usually dig a lot deeper into things than most people do so the first Red Dead game was something that built on thoughts I had been having for a long time. By the time this new game came out, I had a very good understanding of what Cowboy Fast Draw was all about so it was even more meaningful to me to be able to go around that vast world and gun fight other characters. I think any player would find the experience meaningful but for me and the kind of things I do in real life, it was even more so. It’s a world you simply don’t ever want to end.

That is why I think there is real opportunity here. We keep hearing about all these socialists that have been trained in our public-school system and are now making moves into larger official government positions. And that is in a class with the Trump economy and there is a lot of consternation about what will happen as a result. But the social experiment has already been simulated in Red Dead Redemption 2. And the socialists, like Dutch in the game, have no choice really when confronted with reality. Now, not to give too much away because Red Dead 2 is actually a prequel to the first Red Dead, but Dutch eventually has to jump off a cliff to kill himself because his views of the world just don’t match the reality of a new American idea. People followed Dutch because he was intelligent and well read, but that couldn’t solve his basic problem with his corrupted philosophy. And in a very complex story about many, many people, somehow Rockstar Games hit the nail right on the head, and it is truly a remarkable achievement in art and entertainment. And one that carries directly over into the politics of our modern times, in haunting ways that were quite intentional. There were moments in the game that were like the climax of every movie I’ve ever seen, only in the context of this game, they were better.

Rich Hoffman

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The Tree of Global Warming: California’s schizophrenic relationship with exsistance

I have to give President Trump credit for doing the unpopular thing and that is criticizing forest management in California while the wild fires were still blazing and destroying massive amounts of property and killing people in live time. Many thought it was insensitive to the firefighters who were still battling the blazes and sentiments quickly retreated back into the patriotism and sacrifice of those fighting the fire, but to Trump’s point, there shouldn’t have been wildfires to begin with. Like most things that he is dealing with in his presidency, everything from empowering North Korea and Iran to be boogeymen in the world to be feared to insurmountable debt attached to socialist legacy costs, Trump with his business background looked at the wildfires and determined the cause, which most people aren’t used to hearing from the political arena.

The cause of the multiple wildfires in California isn’t just the dry conditions due to extended droughts toward the end of each calendar year, its in the regulations that California has put on itself to preserve the habitats of plants and animals but allowing way too much underbrush to exist in forest regions which then become kindling for any fire that might arise. The environments for the species the laws were meant to protect end up killed anyway, but with it millions of dollars of property and lives who have built homes in those tree hugging regions only to be removed from the connection to begin with. We live in the modern world, wildlife management, especially near populated areas should be removing all the underbrush under a forest canopy to remove the fuel for any potential wildfires. That they didn’t is the cause of these massive fires ultimately. And regarding the dryness of the plant life, there are underground aquifers that could be tapped in to in order to act as a natural sprinkler system should the need arise in population centers. Not taking those proactive measurements is precisely what President Trump was talking about.

Even though part of me felt sorry for them it was almost comical to listen to the governor of California insist that the cause of the problem was global warming as celebrities stood among the ruins of their homes in Malibu. I mean they are the ones who built their homes in an area known for wild fires, and they are the ones who have taken positions favoring the preservation of nature against the efforts of mankind. You can’t have it both ways. If you build homes in the paths of hurricanes, earth quakes and forest fires, eventually you are going to get bitten. Especially if no measures are taken to prevent the tragedies in the first place. It’s insane to have regulations against preventative action because California is trying to preserve wildlife when by the lack of prevention causes more death and destruction not just for the humans involved, but the wildlife they were trying to save. The situation is an insane approach built by a schizophrenic society.

Like most backward thinking people who ironically in this case call themselves “progressives” they have regulated logic back to the actions of mystics, the blame they contend is the mythic realm of the gods, in this case “global warming.” That is the only way that California can get away with trying to have their cake and eat it too, by building their homes and businesses in areas where they are always in danger of natural disasters. And I say natural even though accidents often start these fires because they do exist in nature. If it isn’t a careless campfire or power company that starts the fires its often lightning. In their most primal function, forest fires exist to destroy competing undergrowth in a forest. It’s an act of nature and sometimes nature can be cruel and lots of innocent plant life and animals get caught in god’s often tragic stage play. But to build in an area and put mankind’s stamp on the effort but refuse to manage the volatile elements is a recipe for disaster.

This whole issue is nearly as stupid as when the media tried to make an issue of the poor people in Hawaii who had their homes destroyed by lava flows when a volcano erupted on the big island and destroyed so much property. Hey, they built their homes on a volcano. What did they think was going to happen? This is what progressives do all the time, they test the temper of nature then when they feel the sting of the mistake blame it on a lack of appeasement to the gods. Mother nature in the world of liberal politics is just another god coming from mankind’s mystical past. Rather than accept that mankind was put on earth to tame nature, we are told that we are to live in harmony with the rules of nature. But those rules are brutal and unsentimental. Nature doesn’t care if Lady Gaga’s home burns to the ground in a forest fire, especially if the wildlife growth is allowed to grow out of control.

Trump gave credit to the firefighters and other supporter services that were fighting the fires, but to Trump’s point, the fires should have never started to begin with. They should have been managed so that if a fire started, it would never have spread so quickly and out of control. Part of what makes those fires so deadly is that they simply have too much fuel to drive them, and if forest management had done their jobs, that undergrowth would have been removed well before a danger ever occurred. As forest management employed by the government, they aren’t used to hearing criticism which is quite common in private industry, but they need to get used to it. What Trump is saying is that they didn’t do their jobs and that caused the loss of life and the destruction of a lot of property, not some god of global warming. Its one thing to believe in supernatural entities because humans want to neglect their responsibilities to existence, but it’s quite another to let those beliefs actually kill people, and that is what has been happening in California, not just this year, but every year over many decades now.

If humans are going to build a house in a region known for wild fires, then preventative action is part of the process. You can’t impose yourself on the land then back off and call yourself a preservationist. If you make the decision to do something, do it. Do it all the way, not half in and half out. A large part of the problem with everything in California is that they want to be everything, they want to be the occupants of one of the world’s largest economies, but they also want to be a leftist utopia, a literal Garden of Eden. But if you remember that story, Eve listened to the snake and that was what got her, and Adam cast from the garden. And in politics there are a lot of snakes always trying to get people to eat from the fruit of their trees. The Tree of Global Warming is one of them and California has eaten from it and thus have lost their ability to live in paradise because they refuse the responsibility of managing it. So thus, they have the problems that they do, and it certainly wasn’t President Trump’s fault for pointing it out.

Rich Hoffman

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How Economics Work: Just look to the home of the Whopper

One thing that kept coming up during the election of 2018 was the Democrat notion of inside out economics, as if something grew from nothing to formulate economic activity. Clearly, the only way that economic development occurs is from the top down, starting with an idea, then its implementation, followed by creation, then employment followed by delivery. Jobs do not come from nowhere to suddenly start delivery. Only people who don’t understand the basic foundations of economics could think such a thing and it was Sherrod Brown the very liberal senator from Ohio who said it most when challenged by Jim Renacci—his Republican rival. The entire idea that government creates jobs is a ridiculous notion and it is at the center of all liberal politics. Only a top down approach works which is the general understanding of conservative thought.

A great example of the nature of job creation is in my local community. Near the intersection of Liberty Fairfield Road in Butler County, Ohio and Rt. 4, where I live is several developments that serve the local community such as a Kroger, many restaurants, hardware stores and a wonderful golf course called Elk Run. My wife and I are very busy so we eat out a lot and usually take our pick rotating around all the various food options that are located at that intersection, everything from a McDonald’s to Wendy’s and Frisch’s. There’s a Gold Star, and a Skyline Chili, a Penn Station, and Chinese food—there are so many options including a few pizza places, that there is always plenty of choices and that makes our location particularly attractive to live.

Left leaning people dislike too much development, they prefer lots of green space, which I understand. I like nature, but more than that I love to see the creations that humans come up with. So I enjoy watching new developments come to being. At that intersection there have been a few plots of land that I was hoping would become new restaurants to give us even more options than we already have, but they have sat empty for decades waiting for the right time. Again, left leaning people like to see a lack of development because they think nature is the thing to follow. But in areas where human beings have decided to reside, the ambitions of the human mind can be and to me is, a very beautiful thing. So it was quite a delight to my wife and I to learn that those two plots of land were finally going to become something other than scenery.

At one location across from the Elk Run neighborhood a Dairy Queen is being built, which is very exciting. I love Dairy Queen and this one will be within walking distance so I can take my grandchildren there easily for fun little memories as opportunities present themselves. The second I learned about from a good friend of mine who is in the restaurant creation business, and that is that a new Burger King will be built across from McDonald’s. That is fantastic news because I do love to eat a good Whopper occasionally. My family eats at McDonald’s probably about 5 to 8 times a week, but sometimes we get tired of it. Especially when they are going through management problems, as they are presently. Fast food workers are always high turnover groups by their nature and managers are always challenged with creating reliable staffs. If they get a manager of one of these restaurants who doesn’t get it, the lines are often long at the drive-thrus, and the orders get messed up. So its great to have options and that usually is Wendy’s which is down the street a bit to the southwest.

Burger King is just another great option for us and its creation is literally coming from a plot of land that wasn’t doing anything and is becoming something that gives people like me an option in dining. Its creation didn’t come from some government bureaucrat who looked at that location and thought, “I think people will be best served to have a hamburger place built here.” Rather an entrepreneurial type looked at the demographic data from the area, checked the available land and its pricing and looked hard at a forecast of the new Trump economy and thought that they might make some money at that location. So they put up their money, took a lot of risk, and started getting the permits to build a new restaurant so that a guy like me could visit and have unlimited options to buy a Whopper when I grew hungry. The restaurant builder was taking a chance that he could compete with the surrounding competition and initiated their endeavor based on their best information. There is nothing inside out about that process, only the top down.

The restaurant owners of these new businesses expect to make money, if they don’t then none of the effort would be worth it. It is in the potential of making money that makes all the hard work into building such a place possible. Without that incentive, step one would never happen. That is why socialism fails throughout the world because it is hard to build things, anything. There are so many considerations and without a motivation of profit to lure out the ambitious, nothing happens. Not everyone is equipped to be a restaurant builder or an entrepreneur. Such people often have to work 60 to 100 hours a week, so it’s not for everyone. But the potential to become wealthy with such work motivates the most ambitious to try their hand and that is the key to the American capitalist system. To me I enjoy the scenery of human development sometimes more than a nice mountain or a group of trees. What the human imagination does with wood and stone to create variety in the human experience is something that is very interesting to observe. I never get tired of driving through any town to see what human beings have built for themselves out of their attempts to create wealth. It can and often is a very beautiful thing to observe. It’s not so good when those buildings built with hopes and dreams end up bankrupt and empty. But when they work, they are great to see.

All those inventions of thought make a life-like mine more productive. When I am trying to catch up on the DVR recordings over a weekend and we need to grab a quick bite to eat, I enjoy having the option to get a Whopper and to spend a Sunday afternoon learning things I’ve recorded by people who made those programs with an effort at making money. Everyone’s ambitions come together for my benefit and that is the miracle of modern society. It’s also the nature of all economic activity. Businesses don’t exist to provide jobs, but the jobs are created to pave the way for wealth creation, expanded GDP. And that is something that no Democrat ever came to terms with. They just never understood that basic concept. And that fault is purely theirs. Economic theory is not a newly discovered science, we know the rules. Only liberals have decided to ignore the rules to bend the world to some ancient vision of Karl Marx who was creating the premise of Marxism before a McDonald’s was ever built. But in these days of wealth creation under a capitalist system, the rules are quite clear. And they are wonderful to see in areas experiencing economic growth. Because that is evidence of something even better happening and with every new place of business that opens, it says that the economy is expanding, not contracting and that is always something to celebrate.

Rich Hoffman

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The Weakest Ad in the History of Politics: Sherrod Brown’s attack on Jim Renacci’s hard work speaks of how tight the race really is

I’ve met Don Ksiezyk a few times and I love the guy. He’s a good person, and he’s smart. You generally have to be smart to be a pilot and he and I stood in the cold together last January waiting for Donald Trump and Jim Renacci to arrive at Lunkin Airport in Cincinnati. It took a while for the President to arrive on Air Force One so in that duration Don told me everything I’d ever need to know about airspace controls during Presidential flights. Congressman Jim Renacci had just been picked by Donald Trump to take on Sherrod Brown, the liberal senator from Ohio so the congressman was riding with Trump on this particular trip back from Washington giving Don a much-needed break. Usually when Renacci travels back to Ohio Don flies him on a private plane allowing the senatorial challenger to do his work in Washington while also doing work in his home district, which gave him the added ability to also be able to challenge that senate seat with the versatility of transportation to get back and forth. Private plane air travel costs about $2500 dollars per hour to operate, so it helps to know someone who can bring those costs down. And at a recent debate in Miami University Jim Renacci had hit Sherrod Brown so hard on multiple topics the only thing the liberal senator from Ohio could think to do was to criticize Renacci’s frequent travel by private plane trying to frame the situation as a rich man out of touch with the common people of the “middle class.”

But that didn’t work, people really didn’t care. Polls showed that Renacci was catching Brown quickly closing the gap in a frightening way for Democrats and early voting numbers for Republicans were even scarier. So Sherrod Brown had to dig deep and try a cheap shot to stay alive in order to hold his seat. So he ran a campaign ad picking on good ol’ Don Ksiezyk, Renacci’s pilot and confidant. That’s when you know the Democrats were out of bullets, because they had nothing else. Renacci hammered Brown on his lack of attention to the state of Ohio loving Washington D.C. much more than his home state, so Brown had no defense but to attack Renacci’s versatility in transportation.

The nature of the controversy was that Don was the owner of a couple of strip clubs in Cleveland, Ohio and that the plane in question was owned by Ksiezyk and American Nightlife Magazine. The hook they are trying to pin on Renacci from the Brown campaign is that the Republican challenger is a “family values” candidate so in theory Renacci is supposed to never affiliate himself with people who might call that into question. But deeper than that is the Brown hatred of money, wealth and industry, and strip clubs are a business like anything else. They are certainly much more progressive than traditional businesses, but young people don’t often get that wisdom until later in life, and when they do they are better people for it. When I met Don I saw a person who had made good with his life. Here he was a pilot for an important congressman, a man who had climbed some mountains in life, and like all good Christian people, Jim sees the person who has become something in life, not a person who lived at a lower level before. Some people never step away from those low-level places, but some people work to improve themselves, and Don is clearly one of those people.

Yet there is a vast hypocrisy at work here and its Jim Renacci who brought it up. Many years ago, over thirty years Sherrod Brown had a domestic violence case against him that was chronicled in court documents that went so far that he had to have a restraining order cast against him. Renacci has brought up that issue in the last three debates and ran ads exposing it, yet the same liberals who demanded that Brett Kavanaugh step down from his Supreme Court nomination do to a mere allegation by a few women about something that might have happened in high school, where applauding Sherrod Brown for telling Renacci to apologize for bringing up his old case as a campaign issue. The double standard was obvious, but Renacci really exposed it during the debates leaving Brown to turn to desperation. So right after the Miami debate the Brown campaign decided to attempt to paint Jim Renacci as a millionaire who flies around in private jets. Additionally, the pilot who flies Renacci around is a former strip club owner—so talking out of both sides of his mouth Sherrod Brown wanted to go after the pilot of a person Renacci knows yet Renacci wasn’t supposed to go into Brown’s past on an actual court documented problem. Doesn’t this tell the whole story?

Sherrod Brown out of desperation is trying to make a big deal about someone Jim Renacci knows who did things in his past that were not up to the moral standard of a family first Republican, but those same standards are not supposed to be applied to Brown. Yet the real target is to attack the whole corporate jet culture, which implies that successful people are not to be trusted, only big government types like Sherrod Brown. This is to fulfil the fantasy that Democrats like Brown have about economic activity. Brown wants to believe that economies are created from the inside out while reality says that its job creators who create and let the effects trickle down into the rest of society. Even a business like a strip club does more for a successful economy than a typical government job because the wealth creation is empowering, its empowering even for the women who work there and for the companies that provide concessions. So it is the subtle attack of many issues that Sherrod Brown is after here which are directly hypocritical to his own problems.

If the Brown ad against Renacci is to be considered than the domestic abuse case against Sherrod Brown is a huge issue in this campaign. Democrats can’t have it both ways. And if Jim Renacci owes Sherrod Brown an apology for bringing up the domestic violence problem, then Brown owes Don an apology. After all, Don Ksiezyk was an employer, he created jobs. Donald Trump used to run beauty pageants, and he also ran casinos, all businesses that I’d equate to running strip clubs. But people can and do improve over time and their decisions get better. That is certainly the case with Donald Trump who is now a great president and Don Ksiezyk is now a great pilot for a powerful Washington politician who needs to get around quickly. If you are a successful person flying commercial just takes too long, in the amount of time that it takes to get through security at a typical airport, a guy like Renacci with his great pilot Don can get back to Ohio and back to Washington often before the commercial flier gets on their plane.

Smart people who can avoid commercial travel utilize their time better by having such access to private planes and it’s a huge credit to Jim Renacci that he does. He is lucky to have a great pilot who is dedicated to the Renacci campaign in Don Ksiezyk who can get him all over the state and still do his work in Washington while Sherrod Brown has been left in the dust. The real issue in this Ohio senatorial campaign is that Jim Renacci simply outworked Sherrod Brown and it was Don Ksiezyk who helped make it possible. Brown is jealous and feeling the heat of a tight campaign, and all he knows to do is to try to demonize wealth creators. Jim Renacci worked hard to win the Ohio U.S. Senate seat that Sherrod Brown has held for three terms and Brown got caught taking things for granted, so he’s mad and using all kinds of hypocrisies to articulate his essential laziness, and misunderstandings of economic theory. That is one of the many reasons that Jim Renacci should win that seat. And for the record, Don Ksiezyk is a very good man.

Rich Hoffman

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The Fate of the 2nd Amendment is Not for Politicians to Decide: Mental health is a function of society and must be established by culture itself

Like a clock of utmost dependability, you could hear the political cries for more gun control after the terrible synagogue shooting in Pittsburg. Liberals and the politically disengaged point to all this gun violence such as the shooting that happened recently at a Kroger in Louisville, or the attack of the innocent at the Fifth Third on Fountain Square and declare that if only we had more gun control that all these problems would go away. Honestly, I’m getting pretty tired of explaining to people who gun control or any alteration of the 2nd Amendment is not on the table, by any member of the political class. I was further enraged recently while attending a debate between Jim Renacci and the very liberal Sherrod Brown at Miami University when the subject of gun control came up that the trend of the talking points was to examine what could be done to identify people of mental health and to determine whether or not they could have guns. My thought at that moment was who determines if someone is “mentally healthy,” the same people who tried to impeach President Trump just because he won the election in 2016, or the same people who have destroyed evidence before turning it over to the F.B.I. or even the same people who lied about international incidents and attempted to create false narratives to hide their own guilt? No, the government is there to represent us and the 2nd Amendment is there to keep politicians in line, they are not our rulers, they are our doers and they don’t decide who is mentally healthy and who isn’t.

A few years ago, there was a guy suing me and we were in court when the judge motioned against him for obvious reasons. This guy was hoping to get a lot of money and his lawyer had led him to believe that his case was easily a slam dunk so this fellow had overly optimistic ideas about his fortune that were torn away from him with the discharge of a judge’s gavel. Hope turned to despair and it could be said that the guy experienced a temporary moment of mental illness. When we were both out of the court room he and his attorney were waiting for me to get to my car and he jumped me in the parking lot and we had a fight. My thoughts at that moment was that I was going to have to kill that guy because he was desperate and I’d never get a good night’s sleep while he was alive. Fortunately for that guy the police were there to break it up and the violence was diminished quickly. If I had killed him out of self-defense I would have lost my rights to the 2nd Amendment, if even for a while as the courts sorted out the case, and that wouldn’t have been fair to me in the very least.

I figured that I needed to do something proactive rather than waiting for that guy to show up at my house wanting to fight again now that he had lost the opportunity to extract a lot of money out of me. My worry was that if the violence happened, as it seemed very clear that it would that I had to do everything possible to show that I had done everything legally possible to mitigate the possibility, so I went to the court to file a restraining order. During the hearing for that they declined the request because as they said to me, it would violate his Constitutional rights to carry a gun and put unnecessary restrictions on his freedom. They determined that our fight at the court-house wasn’t enough to violate his civil liberties. I was fine with their determination and I told them that if violence did erupt that I wanted it noted that I tried to mitigate it through the court system, which they of course honored. I thought the law handled itself well in that case, but it could have easily have gone bad, especially in a more liberal part of the country. Under the proposals created by liberals especially after every mass shooting, I could have lost my rights to own firearms and so could that guy. But the courts allowed cooler heads to prevail and nobody lost such a right and within a few weeks’ sanity was restored to my attacker and everyone lived somewhat happily ever after.

Now guns mean more to me than just personal protection, they are an actual lifestyle choice. They are very much a part of my everyday life, not in the manner of killing people, but for sport. My enjoyment of those recreational activities cannot be infringed by some panicky politician looking for more power every time a lunatic decides to kill a lot of people with a gun. The problem isn’t the gun, it is in the kind of society that produces so much mental health trouble. Mental health a lot of the times is like any other kind of health, it has to be maintained and when it isn’t people fly off the rails like that loser in Pittsburg who shot up that synagogue. Hate and intolerance can’t be nurtured to the point that they drive people insane, that is a responsibility issue. I often say, not joking, that being a Democrat is a form of mental illness. That is because to believe what they do about the benefits of liberalism there has to be some insanity at play because their thoughts are counter to the role of existence itself. By my interpretation should everyone Democrat be forbidden to carry a gun because I say all Democrats are insane? Of course not. And just because I beat the crap out of someone who attacks me in a parking garage who attacked me out of desperation, should I lose my rights to own guns over something I had no part in instigating but was forced to act? Of course not.

Politicians, not a single one of them, have a right to decide whether or not we own guns. The 2nd Amendment is bigger than our entire political system, and the court system that spawns off it. The 2nd Amendment is not to be infringed period. While its true that we live in a world where mental health is historically out of control and more violence is bound to happen as a result, gun control is not a means to controlling it. As a society we have to ride out this storm while focusing on ways to improve mental health going forward. I think that would start by opening doors for ladies again and being polite to fellow members of mankind just because you pass them here and there around town. Basic civility needs to be re-established and that will go a long way to preventing all the violence that is occurring these days. But the real answer to gun violence is to have more guns present not less, to have more people armed to deal with the point of assault quicker, not waiting for the police to arrive. The way to stop mass shootings is to have a good guy with a gun there to stop the threat in seconds, not minutes. It is actually insane to insist on any other method, and until we can all agree on that basic premise, we will take no steps forward in solving the problem.

Rich Hoffman

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What the Media Never Understood about the Tea Party Movement: Dirty tricks don’t work when you are smarter than they are

 

It’s still early but it looks like the suspected mail bomber arrested in Florida was Cesar Sayoc, a born again former Democrat who had found new life as a Trump supporter.  More details will come out and everything will make a lot more sense.  I was pretty fast in coming out with my thoughts on these bomb threats and the nature of the caravan in Mexico, and I stand by them.  Cesar Sayoc has a bad smell to him, there is a lot more to the story, I’m sure of it. I mean anyone with an intellect developed above the third grade sees what’s happening. They may not feel comfortable admitting it to themselves, because I think we all want to think that our fellow members of society are smarter than our suspicions, but the fact remains that in most cases our gut is correct. The media as an organism of liberalism was just too fast to blame Donald Trump over the bomb stories where someone mailed a bunch of fake bombs to well-known liberal activists. The obvious connection from the terrorist to the packages was just too obvious, CNN and many of the other liberal news outlets were much more concerned about what Donald Trump has said than in who sent the bombs. It was Chuck Todd at NBC that really blew the cover early in the process when audiences didn’t seem to give a rat’s ass about bombs mailed to a bunch of liberals, especially when it was obvious that they were fake, when he said that maybe the Russians were involved. That’s pretty much when any sane person turned off the television and just had to laugh. These people are idiots to think that anybody with a right mind might fall for this obvious hoax of election tampering. The bomb threat was just as I said it was, and later Rush Limbaugh along with others quickly joined the rising chorus, it was a liberal trick designed to evoke sympathy for Democrats and to rally their base. But like every other attempt by them, they had failed, it’s their last gasp at trying to do something to motive their voters ahead of the 2018 election, and it is falling flat.

Talk about election tampering, Democrats are doing anything they can to affect the election of 2018 whether it’s spurring on that sad caravan of immigrants heading for the southern American border walking over a 1000 miles in flip-flops and t-shirts for a chance at a better life. For those geographically challenged that’s like walking from Cincinnati, Ohio to Orlando, Florida. By the time many of the women, children and variety of desperate men arrive many will be very sick and in a seriously depleted condition. The focus on those poor people should be in helping their home countries become more like the United States since that is what all these illegal immigrants are hoping for. It’s not just in America’s national interest that those people have good homelands, but it is in the interests of those poor people to have American ideas spread into their governments so that the corruption and violence they are running from can improve their lives domestically. Not that the United States wants to be a bunch of interventionists, but if more people want to come to America to have a shot at the dreams of life in North America than it is only natural to promote those ideas to places hungry for the results, and that is happening under the Trump presidency, which is backfiring the vile strategists who are really behind the caravan. The goal from globalists was always to use communism and socialism to destroy economies and put them under state control and to use the desperation of fleeing people to overwhelm capitalist nations and to collapse those economies until the only method of getting out from under the chaos was to adopt socialism. That is the point of migrant immigrants and why these caravans are being sent to American borders, it’s an invasion hiding behind the innocence of people just wanting a better life. But the problem is why their lives were bad to begin with.

The Trump presidency is actually solving many of these problems and that has the leftist strategists in a panic because if they don’t win this election, Democrats are out of business so they are behaving just as a desperate political party would under the circumstances and it’s not hard to predict what they might do next. I mean just look at what they have done over the last two years of President Trump, they have attempted every dirty trick that was spelled out in the Saul Alinsky book Rules for Radicals. Many of us have been studying the books of the political left for years now, we know what to expect. When people want to associate the Tea Party movement with the terrorism of ANTIFA they couldn’t be more wrong. I was pretty heavy into the Tea Party activities of my community and still am when time permits, and I can say that what the Tea Party was all about was education. We used to meet and talk about books we read and we applied that knowledge to political activism. But the Tea Party was never ever about terrorism. Nobody I ever knew even at the national level ever talked about mailing bombs to anybody to incite fear into our rivals, and nobody ever talked about killing or hurting President Obama. We just wanted to get him out of office at the voting booth and our means of antagonism was books. The Tea Party movement was about getting smarter and Donald Trump very early on in the process designated himself as a candidate that could be trusted to help solve problems. Much of what we see today was started over a decade ago with the creation of the Tea Party movement and people learning about American history in ways that our public schools had stopped teaching, and the results are what we are seeing all around us today.

There is no amount of liberal activism that can stop that movement now because it is not led by Donald Trump—President Trump is the creation of the Tea Party movement and that is something that liberals never understood. There was never a leader of the Tea Party participants, it was an education-based movement that shared in common a love of learning. And as it evolved, those who had previously been guilty of trying to keep people stupid lost their power and influence over voters, so now that nothing has worked against Trump for over two years and the midterms are looking like a disaster for Democrats every dirty trick is being played by liberals, so their reaction is just too predictable. Including these fake bombs that were sent to try to tamper with the election of 2018. When the bomber is finally discovered it will be some Manchurian instigator for which the unspoken next step was taken gladly by the media as one last shot at stopping Trump from closing the deal to holding the House and Senate. CNN was all too happy to evacuate their building in New York and to give wall to wall coverage about how Donald Trump’s speeches were inciting violence among his base. Instead of reporting the truth that the Tea Party supporters of the last decade had made themselves aware of leftists’ tricks as Democrats attempted to gain power and stitch chaos into the fabric of American society. The liberalized media tried to tamper with the upcoming election with their old friend fear to give power to the hands of Democrats one last time. But everyone is on to the dirty tricks now and even casual observers of political theater know what to make of it, and they aren’t buying it. That has left a level of desperation that we’ve never seen in America before, and if you think its bad now, wait until the day after the election. That will be very interesting indeed.

Rich Hoffman

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The Murder of Jamal Khashoggi and Domestic Violance Case of Sherrod Brown: Understanding the media agenda on big news stories

So who cares if Jamal Khashoggi went to pieces, literally. The former Muslim Brotherhood reporter for the Washington Post disappeared in the Saudi Arabian consulate in Turkey several weeks ago and after being pressed on it his murder had been admitted to. Immediately 18 Saudis connected to the situation were arrested and the Crowned Prince has denied direct involvement, but who cares? It’s very strange that with all the violence in the world that this particular story has been front page news all week. I mean nobody wants to see people being killed, but don’t be naïve, it happens everywhere all the time. Why would this one guy, who has been buddies with Osama bin Laden and is certainly not a friend to peace in the world, be so important? Well, part of the answer comes from an article published Friday just ahead of the Saudi admission to the murder shown below. The only reason that anybody cares about Jamul Khashoggi is that he was a reporter, and reporters want to believe that they are part of a ruling class that has some immunity to the violence of the world, that they can cover stories without actually being connected to them, and without fear of becoming the story itself such as Jamal did.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/conservatives-mount-a-whisper-campaign-smearing-khashoggi-in-defense-of-trump/ar-BBOA6kY?ocid=spartandhp

Yet there is something even more fishy about this story of murder that has taken the world’s imagination by storm. Reporters knew a lot about it early in the process even down to the grotesque details of the torture of Khashoggi finger by finger as his body was cut up into little pieces and taken off site for who knows what next. And reporters have personally made President Trump connected to the story as if he had something to do with the actual murder himself by his friendly association with the Crowned Prince of Saudi Arabia. It was Turkish officials from Istanbul who leaked the story of Khashoggi’s dismemberment while his fiancé Hatice Cengiz waited over four hours outside before finally raising the alarm. There was a price on the head of the anti-reformist reporter who was at odds with the regime of the Crowned Prince’s administration, that is the number one purchaser of American military equipment in the world. Saudi Arabia is also the number one ally against the aggression of Iran and the efforts of Israel, so Jamal Khastoggi was hardly just another beat reporter covering news stories in the Middle East. He was an activist and he wanted to marry Cengiz, so he was there to pick up the papers that would allow him to do so, but he never came back out. He had walked into a place he knew would be dangerous for him almost daring his rivals to take action, and they did. So how is it President Trump’s problem?

This is a very similar story to the one that is taking place in Ohio where Sherrod Brown is a three-term senator that suddenly finds himself under scrutiny for domestic violence that occurred early in his life, but under the #METOO movement is suddenly a problem for him. Only the media doesn’t want to touch the story because they want Brown to win the election against his challenger Jim Renacci. The media is willing to put on blinders to the actions of a Democrat but if it involved a Republican, the story would be plastered all over the news. In the case of Sherrod Brown, the obvious bias is clear which makes it relevant to this murder story of Jamul Khashoggi. The media isn’t just reporting news, they are trying to make it.

What the media as an entity is trying to do is cause a disruption between the relationship President Trump has with Saudi Arabia ahead of the November elections hoping that the economy will be torpedoed and voters will be angry with Trump instead of enamored with him which will help with this mythical “blue wave” they keep talking about, which is turning out to be a mere ripple in a kid’s pool. Gas prices are low going into the election and people are enjoying the benefits of a very strong economy, and Saudi Arabia plays their part by keeping prices on barrels of oil low. They also help by keeping Iran on their heels bringing a period of peace to the Middle East that is unprecedented. But nobody has illusions that all the elements of the world are a kid’s game. To maintain that level of peace in one of the most hostile regions anywhere violence does occur—often.

The media is certainly fanning the flames of this murder to hurt President Trump and to put him in a position that would cause harm to the relationship he has with the Saudis. Trump has made great ground around the world eliminating threats and befriending just about everyone, and the media can’t stand it, because they want violence and turmoil. They want North Korea testing nuclear weapons, not thinking of building condos on their beaches. They want Iran strong and powerful, not withering under the feet of a U.S. backed Saudi Arabia. The media as an organization doesn’t want a successful President Trump, they want stories of discontent and rebellion so that they can inspire a socialist takeover of the American capitalist system. They want the midterms to knock Trump out of power and they will do anything to achieve it, even if it causes an international incident.

We often say on the conservative side of things that The Washington Post is the official blog of Jeff Bezos who is very much an anti-Trump activist. Jamal Khashoggi did some work for The Washington Post so his politics fell very much on the side of the average radical reporter that has been beating on president Trump since his inauguration. None of these reporters are interested in just reporting the news as it happens, they are activists employed by news organizations taking big liberal money to reshape the world. We aren’t talking about freedom of the press here, we are talking about aggressive action to overthrow regimes and inspire Marxist ideas to destabilize entire regions, if not the entire world. Trump and the Saudis are the enemy to such strategies, so the media is using the death of this Jamal Khashoggi as a sacrificial lamb to the media’s greater cause.

So what should President Trump do, or the United States for that matter? Well, the big picture must always stay in focus. Khashoggi, the Washington Post, CNN and many others pushing this story of murder were anti-Israel, pro Iran radicals who need to understand what kind of game we are playing here. In that game sometimes if you go into the consulate of a sovereign nation you have been provoking, you don’t come out, even if your soon to be wife is waiting outside. That’s just the way the ball bounces. And nobody should be afraid to say that, because it’s the truth. We aren’t playing patty cake here; the world is a dangerous place and the media isn’t interested in peace. They are trying to stage an overthrow of power on many levels by hiding behind their press passes and using the justification of their cowardice to declare a freedom of the press. The evidence is quite clear, we can see such massive coordination on easy cases like the Sherrod Brown situation in Ohio, where the media work well together to bury a story so they can achieve a greater political objective. Yet on something more obscure such as this case with Jamal Khashoggi, the pattern of behavior is just as predictable. Nobody in the media cares about the dismembered body of a murdered member of the Muslim Brotherhood and Washington Post reporter. All they care about is stopping Donald Trump any way possible. And if they can cause an international incident to derail the confidence of the President with allies he has worked hard to build—for which are helping fuel a great American economy, then so be it. They don’t care how many people die so long as the media gets their revolution of Marxist ideas out into the public, and that is the real truth behind this dangerous matter.

If I were President Trump I wouldn’t send sanctions to Saudi Arabia, I’d send them something better, a gift to show how strong our friendship still is, like maybe a free subscription to Amazon Prime. Or a poster of Jeff Bezos to hang on their palace wall. Because let’s face it, the world is at war. This won’t be the last death. What matters is that the right-side wins, and this time around, the Saudis are helping America bring stability to the Middle East. And if being friends with them makes that happen, then we shouldn’t let some little issue like this Khashoggi murder stop anything. And we should stand by those who are willing to do the dirty work where the rest of us would rather not be.

And while we are waiting for the body of this Washington Post reporter to turn up, remember, we are still waiting to see the body of Osama bin Landen.  We were told to just trust the Obama administration about the burial.  How is this any different?

Rich Hoffman

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The Trump Strategy: Changing the way politics is conducted forever

It was different this last time, when President Trump visited the Warren County Fairgrounds to deliver a speech in favor of several GOP candidates that were on the ballot for November 2018’s midterms. I’ve seen Trump in person a few times since he had been elected president in 2016 but this campaign rally at the very unusual building on the fairgrounds site provided an almost cinematic appeal as if some Hollywood production designer had brought all these strange elements together for the benefit of the story than just happenstance. It was a Friday night in the historic town of Lebanon, Ohio and it was lightly raining, with a snow mix falling with the raindrops and President Trump was stoking the minds of thousands of people who had packed into every available spot to listen to him give essentially the same speech over and over again. But nobody cared, they were happy to be there and didn’t seem to ever want the event to end. For this particular venue I had a really fantastic seat, one just outside the television cameras and on a high perch so I could see everything that was going on. I could even see the president arrive and leave from behind the show’s façade and for me it was perfect because it facilitated my high thoughts on the matter with great conductivity.

In the short run the threat was real, Republican voters needed to hit the voting booths and support the candidates that Trump was speaking for. But from my perspective a lot had changed since the last rally I attended at U.S. Bank Arena in October of 2016 and this one in Lebanon in October of 2018. For the first time in my lifetime Republicans had a good, positive brand and they had a President who could sell it. Trump has actually changed the way campaigns work—he has changed the rules of the game itself into something that Democrats will not be able to follow. They don’t have the energy or the message leaving Trump in command of the political process for what will turn out to be the first half of the 21st Century.

I think it’s quite amazing that Donald Trump is willing to attend so many rallies across the country in order to build a team that he can work with in 2019 on the legislative side. He’s almost acting like a college coach recruiting star athletes for a football team. The tireless work he has been willing to put into the effort is truly stunning for anybody. And that effort showed in the event organization and even the crowd. There was a lot to complain about. During the speech some people actually passed out and needed medical help. But the show went on as the medical staff gathered up the sick and took them away to be cared for. And nobody complained. The Secret Service didn’t overact. The crowd wasn’t overly dramatic, and Trump never even paused. The show just went on and everyone was focused on the success of the evening.

There is no way for the two sides of politics, the liberal view and the conservative view to work out differences between each other for a sustainable republic. The two sides are not equal, they do not have shared values to build a foundation of friendship from. In the Republican Party that has been the problem from the beginning, if there were any compromises that had to be made it was always from the Republicans because they were always the only side functioning from value to barter with. Liberals were all for the abandonment of values, so they never gave anything up and that left Republican supporters always feeling shortchanged. But now there some wins under Trump’s belt and there was more to this rally because the foundations of success were there to talk about, as opposed to just a bunch of theories from two years prior. Now there was a track record and the obvious view of many more things that could be accomplished. And the Democrats had nothing to offer but complaints and emotional desires to be considered equally important. Trump’s Republican Party was willing to stick its head up out of the ground and to actually emerge into the light of day unafraid and be pace setters and that is something you don’t see every day.

Yet the show itself was very slick, the volunteers were enthusiastic and the base of support was willing to do their part and show up at each of these rallies a whole day before just to get a good place in line. While people waited volunteers handed out swag to the audience all of it well-managed and constructed. The sheer logistics to pull off one of these shows by the support staff is quite staggering. What was involved for just the Lebanon event was enough to impress, but the very next night Trump was in Richmond, Kentucky doing nearly the same thing with a lightly modified speech. Trump had done several rallies during that week in different parts of the country all of them just as complex and with similar people willing to brave the elements and waiting times to attend. In the case of Lebanon, I noticed later that the local media markets were very happy with the Trump visit, they gave him great coverage for at least two days before and after. Trump’s changes to campaigning gave local media the two things they always wanted, so the coverage turned out to be fair and positive. First were the traffic shutdowns, the news loves to talk about traffic jams and the President’s motorcade shut down traffic during rush hour all the way from downtown Cincinnati to Lebanon, Ohio over 30 miles to the north. Then the second things were the feel-good stories about how the positive rallies made people feel to be near a sitting president. I could see a brilliance in Trump’s strategy that was always there for anybody to attempt, but now Trump has made it a Republican method.

And that brought the whole thing to a kind of grand fortissimo, the difference between Republicans and Democrats fundamentally. Democrats were essentially seeking to ride the Vico cycle into the future, the endless cycle of human endeavor going from theocracy, to aristocracy, to democracy then to anarchy only to return over and over again to the beginning. Republicans however are the opposite, they are about human pro-growth and continued expansion into the future. Democrats are the hippies of Woodstock while the Republicans are the scientists trying to expand mankind’s reach to the moon. The vision from each party is not conducive and are at odds with each other and a choice has to be made. We can’t have it both ways. For me personally, I’ve always been a pro-growth guy. It makes me very sad to think that all the work we’ve done through art, literature and engineering would be tossed away only to dig at the ground like a pathetic primitive and not understand the complexities of the universe. But until Trump, Republicans didn’t know how to sell a pro-growth agenda, so the plight of the primitives dominated politics leaving Republicans to chase after. But now those roles have been reversed and it looks like a great opportunity is unfolding in front of us, and at the center of it is the remarkable Manhattan builder himself who has a pro-growth message that people can finally relate to. And the effect is obvious, and lasting. It’s a very exciting time indeed.

Rich Hoffman

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Another Great Jobs Report: The horse race of economics doesn’t tell the whole story

It was another good jobs report, 134,000 jobs were created in the month of September with the unemployment rate trickling down to 3.7 percent, the lowest in 49 years! All that with a major hurricane hitting the mainland of America, which is pretty amazing. The Trump economy is ticking along nicely, and we are all feeling it these days, if it weren’t for the distracting Kavanaugh hearings, the fictitious Mueller investigation and the general poo pooing that comes out of the media every minute of every day, Americans could be said to be having the time of their lives. It is a time of great prosperity that has surpassed expectations in almost every fiscal way possible. Another consecutive month of positive reporting’s that have continued to increase since the tax cuts at the end of 2017.

Stocks did take a bit of a hit; home markets are down as the Fed has increased interest rates yet again. The Federal Reserve and other market analysts still do not seem to understand what is happening, to them they disbelieve that the market can be this bullish without a downturn as the tend to believe in cyclical tides of cash flow. But these kinds of positive indexes are not created by moving money around and social controls such as interest rate evaluations, they are born from real optimism and creative intellectual growth which comes from a culture that “makes wealth” not one who simply manages it.

Wealth creation is specifically a human trait. No other animal in the universe that we know of presently can do it. It is an act of imagination, the concept of product development for the use of other lifeforms is specifically confined to the roll of imagination which only humans possess to any degree of usability. Many scientists like to profess that dolphins and whales are very intelligent creatures, but when was the last time you saw a dolphin design a car? Being intelligent isn’t the only ingredient needed for wealth creation, it is important to have a vast imagination as a culture because what comes forth from it is the creation of new ideas. Wealth creation is simply a measure of that creativity.

On the same day that the jobs report came out for September it was reported that China was putting spy chips into Apple products and those sold by Amazon. That pushed stocks down for those companies, and the $15 minimum wage at Amazon certainly didn’t help. But this brings to mind the simple question about why China feels they must spy on Americans and attempt to sabotage American companies. Well, it comes back to the basic problem that all Chinese have in their culture, they lack an imagination. The nature of their communist culture has suppressed individual thought, their school systems collective obedience has not taught them how to think, only how to conform, not individual development, and that has destroyed their intellectual capacity as a nation. You can see the trend as China used their leveraged capitol gained in the pre-Trump years to purchase many studios in Hollywood and shifted the house movie picks more toward collectivist enterprises, the net result has been a decaying Hollywood product. The lack of imagination is obvious as sitcoms are reaching back into the 80s to resurrect comedies that worked, like Rosanne, and Murphy Brown. New content is hard to come by in a collectivist culture.

But due to the enterprising spirit of the Trump administration assisted by tax cuts many in America who still possess imaginations are creating products and delivering them to markets expanding the economy. Of those 134,000 jobs reported those are mostly private sector jobs where someone is making new flashlights, car batteries, and golf clubs. Not centrally planned state sponsored government jobs administratively focused. When jobs like that are created there is of course an overflow effect that grows into the following month as more jobs trickle down into every demographic group. When leftists attempt to suggest that there is no such thing as “trickle down economics” they are doing so with the same vigor that attempted to associate Brett Kavanaugh to gang rape. These are just not concepts rooted in reality.

I haven’t talked about Star Wars in a while, but I couldn’t help but think of all these concepts while watching the Blue Ray of Solo: A Star Wars Story, which I thought was one of the best Star Wars films I’ve seen since the 80s. But in going through the bonus content of the release it was obvious that the filmmakers were a long way away from the kind of filmmaker George Lucas was back then. Everyone was just going through the motions and trying to copy what the original filmmakers had created. There was nothing really original in that movie which is partly why Star Wars is losing its magic. In a lot of ways the left leaning politics of the modern employees at Lucasfilm and Disney are suffering from the same ailments as the country of China—a lack of imagination. In the case of Lucasfilm, they have so many tools to work with, yet they just can’t seem to get the job done because they are lacking intellectual imagination. Even though George Lucas admittingly copied off old television shows like Flash Gordon, there was a lot of imagination to provide fresh perspective to the old material. That is not the case now, all we get from Lucasfilm and Disney is an homage to our childhoods. Modern kids don’t care about our childhoods, they have so many other things to occupy their minds, especially video games. So what ends up on a movie screen is a copy of a copy of a copy made by people who are truly underdeveloped intellectually, and it shows in the product.

But Hollywood is the old world, the Trump economy is empowering many new companies that will replace the old models well into the future and that is truly exciting. With the kinds of jobs growth that we are seeing consistently now for many months it is easy to project where all this will end up. We’re not talking about a typical Bull Market, but a long sustainable growth market that will add trillions of dollars of new wealth that will be sustainable well into the future. That is exciting news, but you might not hear it presented that way on the mainstream news—and the reason would be due to the lack of a crises in the information. If you ever listen to a horse race announcer, you would have to understand that their job is not so different from a typical news reporter from the mainstream press. They have to talk up the downsides, such as stocks that dipped because of interest rate hikes, or tariff talk—but if you plot out the results from turn 4, usually the clear winner is easy for all to see and this jobs report is no different. With the creation of new jobs, it means that the imagination of America is being stirred again and those side effects will show up in all aspects of our culture, from our music to our movies—to even our clothing choices. There is a lot to be excited about, but the means of communicating that to mass audiences is missing, because it doesn’t tend to keep people tuned in to the horse race. But in essence, this September jobs reports says that our bets are safe and that the horse we have been rooting for is winning by a mile.

Rich Hoffman

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Jeff Bezos and His $15 An Hour Minimum Wage at Amazon: American workers have Donald J. Trump to thank and nobody else

Before anybody takes credit for Jeff Bezos of Amazon starting the initiative to pay all his employees a minimum of $15 per hour, we have to get a few things straight. It must be remembered that all this time, through all the Obama years, and the Bush years Jeff Bezos as the new richest man in the world thought he had the economy figured out. Nobody in their right mind—except for maybe me—thought that the American economy would ever see more than 4% GDP growth again. Those same people never thought unemployment would dip down to 3% in America either—because the manufacturing jobs had left the continent forever. That meant that if you had a job in the United States, that you should feel lucky that your employer paid you whatever they could. Bezos the big liberal thought he could use that situation to his advantage and hold his wages down to build his company into one of the most successful in the entire world—which he did. But like a typical Scooby Doo villain from that classic Hanna Barbera cartoon, Bezos found himself thwarted by the election of Donald Trump. Trump from the perspective of liberals who wanted to hold down the American economy and push business overseas to impoverished regions, like China and Africa, was going to make America great again, and that meant the economy was coming back and that jobs were going to bloom like flowers on a spring in the Midwest, and that places like Amazon were suddenly going to have to fight to keep their workforces intact if they wanted to maintain their global market dominance as a retail supplier.

Bernie Sanders and his Seattle socialists may want to credit themselves for putting pressure on Amazon to change their ways and move their minimum wage to the $15 an hour that has been demanded by those left leaning radicals. Tucker Carlson from Fox News has done much the same ironically, but it wasn’t any of those groups that pushed Bezos into the abyss, it was market competition. It’s what Donald Trump had been saying all through the campaign of 2016 when he said he wanted to be the greatest jobs president in the history of the world, this is what he meant. By lowering the unemployment rate it forces competition between companies for the best workers, and Amazon looked at how things were shaping up and he didn’t want to put his company at risk with high turnover from a strong American market, so he had to compromise. That is why he decided to make the move he did. It was because of President Trump. The number of $15 an hour is simply to try to appease the socialists who have been screaming for that wage level for a long time. Bezos probably figures that it will give him a competitive advantage over other employers for a while to set such a high minimum wage.

But don’t think for a second that Bezos had been rooting for Donald Trump to be successful, in fact the Amazon leader has been doing everything he could to destroy the Trump presidency before something like this very strong economy became a fact. Like many big corporations who long ago accepted the Bush-era New World Order where the United Nations would take over the management of human affairs, they put their bets in that corner and all their company assets then here comes Donald Trump talking about undoing it all. So of course, they got caught flat-footed after his election, and of course they wanted to defend themselves. But then again, they never should have bet against America in the first place. They had not just bet a few horses on the great race of politics, but they had bet the whole family farm and now they have to find a way to survive as Trump’s economy is poised to be the worlds most powerful for the foreseeable future.

I keep hearing about how patient the Chinese are and how superior they are to American strategies. Well, if they are so good, why do they have to steal all our intellectual material to attempt to compete? The truth is that the Chinese are not so great, they are a communist country filled with people who have individually been crushed. They are a society that has lost their individual imaginations and surrendered them to a collective consciousness. That makes them great workers, but not so great in the realm of thinking. So as a country they can only thrive if the rest of the world is artificially held down, as they had been during the last three American presidents, until Trump put a stop to the practice. Now that the big tech companies like Apple have to deal with jobs coming back to America—which was not on any consultant’s list of objectives in the near future, the strategy of everything has to change and workers can thank Donald J. Trump for that, and the people who have supported him. I can say that I knew all along what would happen if an American president had created an “America First” policy. But nobody was listening, so I put my support early on behind Donald Trump for this very reason, that by strengthening the economy all other troubles would suddenly be manageable around the world.

When a big, giant company like Amazon has to make concessions to keep their employees, especially when Bezos fought so hard to eliminate that competition by backing policies that would help destroy the American economy for a more global view, you can then know that America as a superpower has a new day to enjoy. But this time there aren’t any other superpowers to compete with because virtually every other country in the world has invested into this global scheme which suddenly has no value. It is a fascinating problem to observe. But nobody deserves credit for what Bezos has done but Donald Trump. Trump has won and fulfilled his promises and the average American worker is seeing the direct benefits, not just from the tax cuts, but in wage growth.

When people say that the tax cuts were for the rich, this is how they were wrong. Tax cuts for corporations and the upper crust wealthy has kept them in America. By staying in America, they now have to compete with all other industries for the same jobs. That means the average worker can demand more income as a result, it’s the basic law of supply and demand. Business owners were able to absorb those additional costs because of the tax cuts. Do you see now the magic dear reader? It’s basic economics 101—the kind of stuff you get in the first week of your first year of college economics. Yet nobody was following the rules but the billionaire from Queens, New York. He knew the obvious and was bold enough to stick to the formula and now the benefits are there for everyone to enjoy, except for the richest man in the world, Jeff Bezos. In the end if you can’t beat them, you join them, and that is how Trump is uniting the world—by being the best and forcing even the most reluctant to join him at the party. And the people who benefit most is the American worker.

I don’t like Jeff Bezos in a political way.  But I do love him as a visionary.  Welcome to the Trump Club, Jeff!

Rich Hoffman

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