Tag: western arts

The Illegal FBI Activism Against General Flynn: It could happen to any of us

How bad is it you might wonder, as we have previously considered the implications of the attorney for Michael Cohen’s sentencing by the FBI, and Paul Manafort, both people close to the president in some way or another. Well, the General Flynn case paints an accurate picture of just how out of control the FBI was and still is in regard to attempting to overthrow a president elected the correct way into occupying the White House. In a recent onstage interview James Comey who was leading the FBI at the time explained how he sent a couple of FBI agents into the White House to interview General Flynn and obtain incriminating information that was actually a crime created by an investigation that Flynn wasn’t even sure was happening as he was in a friendly mood during the transition and hadn’t yet learned the activism against him. And Comey attempted to lay all the blame at the feet of an unorganized Trump White House as he revered the good ol’ days of President Bush and President Obama who were very professional and procedural in their handling of management. And in that simple statement James Comey justified everything illegal that he personally assisted with in trying to overthrow the presidency by using the FBI to do so, including the seed he planted with the Mueller investigation.

Michael Flynn is a retired general from the United States Army with over 30 years of experience. These days people should be falling all over themselves to honor him, but due to his relationship with President Trump, it made him a target for anybody and everyone who wanted to bring down the Executive Branch. The intent of the FBI was clear, they sought to entrap the general into incriminating evidence by going into the White House and pretending all was well during the transitional phase then using that information later during the Mueller investigation to leverage him into working against the president, just as was attempted by Michael Cohen and Paul Manafort. Cohen the lawyer of course will say anything if the price is right, which is why he’s a lawyer, so he turned on Trump and would say anything. But Flynn turned out to have nothing incriminating to offer but, in the process, he has lost nearly every material possession he had worked a lifetime to get just to cover his legal expenses.

The radicals at the FBI had no problem following Comey’s orders which were clearly in rebellion to the new president simply because he didn’t feel that the people had made the right decision and that Trump just wasn’t going to be allowed to be in the White House. Using the tools of the FBI Comey openly sought to overturn the election. And in his arrogance, he has had the audacity to call himself a hero by implication. As Trump discovered the level of Comey’s role as a FBI director and possible leaker to the press, the President fired him and for that Comey has said it was obstruction of justice. Comey claims it was obstruction because a phony investigation into Russian tampering into the 2016 election had been initiated by Democrats to essentially keep Trump on his heels and keep the forces against him in their jobs. There was never any Russian tampering, but because of the DNC funded dossier which claimed Russian connections and prostitutes pissing in a bed the Obamas had slept in, the FBI figured that the best way to keep all their dirty hands from being noticed was through a false accusation at Trump and force him to defend it—which would keep them all in their jobs.

It was one of the first things Comey brought up to Trump was that Russian dossier and he did it to gain emotional leverage on the matter, and to protect his job. If Trump discovered what Comey had been up to then the leaked documents the FBI director had leaked to the press would inspire a special investigation completely politically motivated to further hinder the president in the efforts he had been elected to conduct. The FBI thought they knew better than the people who elected Trump and they worked to abuse their power to obtain FISA warrants to spy on the incoming administration and help them pave a possible trail to prosecuting members of the transition into being compromised. That is how Flynn became wrapped up in the whole ordeal to begin with. When the FBI spoke to him at the White House Flynn thought it was just members of the same team chatting about the circumstances of the world. Not that the FBI would use everything against him which only turned out to be in how Flynn remembered some dates that were irrelevant to anything in the matter. The whole conversation was a perjury trap.

If that was all there was to it, we might just say that the law is the law and that Flynn should have been more careful, so he gets what he gets. But that’s not how it is, we know that the FBI helped cover up the events of the DNC, such as Bill Clinton meeting with Loretta Lynch to discuss how the FBI would handle his wife’s case on the illegal email server they were investigating. Or in allowing Hillary Clinton and her staff members to destroy their cell phones and laptops prior to turning them over to the FBI during their investigation. Or Comey trying to merge the law into the Department of Justice decision not to prosecute the presidential nominee without undermining the rule of law his agents expected to live by simply because Lynch had decided to call off the investigation so that Hillary could run for president of the United States. The Democrats surrounding Hillary Clinton broke many laws, much worse than anything General Flynn had done, or Michael Cohen yet nothing happened to any of them. The FBI only went after Trump Republicans allowing themselves to become weapons of a political nature which is not what they were ever supposed to be.

What has happened to General Flynn just for being associated with President Trump is a travesty of justice. And we are all warned not to mess around with the FBI and cast our opinions otherwise the same fate might befall us too. If you mess with America’s intelligence agencies, they have the power to destroy your lives, and that is the message behind Comey’s activism. Because even if a member of the team gets fired, the system will rally behind the fallen soldier and destroy the life of whoever did such a thing. In Comey’s case his wife was a Hillary supporter and he obviously was operating as a Democrat, even though he has attempted to misdirect people into thinking otherwise. Just as he has covered his role in all these illegal activities by trying to associate them with justice instead of overthrow and election tampering. It was never the Russians who tampered with the election, it was Comey and his employees. Yet to cover their tracks they would rather start World War III if it made the President look bad and fulfil their political objectives for future elections. The FBI was in the business of overthrow and they are the ones guilty of espionage and election tampering. Certainly not General Flynn. He has been a pawn in the game that nobody really knew was being played, but at least now we do. The question is, what are we going to do about it?

Rich Hoffman

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There is No Justice: The F.B.I and much of the legal world is up to no good as the Cohen case proves

So Michael Cohen is going to jail on March 6th for three years just because he was the attorney for President Trump. We have to remember what went on here, the F.B.I. kicked in the door of a sitting president’s lawyer to ransack the place in order to look for information for which they could extract to remove that elected president from office. And when they didn’t find that information they leaned on someone close to the president, in this case his personal attorney, to squeeze anything they could out in testimony so that they could build a case of getting rid of that. And when all they found were a few sketchy financial transactions they sent the attorney to jail for 3 years pretty much as a warning shot to anybody they‘d come after in the future—until President Trump was out of office. It’s a blood thirsty game and is deeply corrupt. And it is proof that there are many kinds of justice, and money can’t buy them all. The level of justice we are witnessing when the legal profession attacks one of its own in Michael Cohen and puts him in jail so that they can try to kick out the president sitting in the White House is as dirty as it gets especially in the context of history.

Remember when the “birther” movement was in full steam, when there were constitutional questions about whether or not Barack Obama could actually be president because it was unknown if he was actually born in the United States? As a kid he grew up in Indonesia and was raised by a globetrotting mother who associated openly with communists and radical thinkers and there is a lot of debate whether or not Obama actually knows who his dad is. He thinks he does but it’s highly likely that not even he is sure of it all. So how could the nation? It was a legitimate question to bring up and opponents to Obama did. But even for asking the question we were called “birthers.” The liberal contention was that it didn’t matter where Obama was born. He was a black man. He was president. To them it didn’t matter if Obama was born on the Moon, they would argue that nothing was going to remove their president from office, and they attacked anybody who thought otherwise.

Where are the same passions from the conservative side of things? What the intelligence agencies have been doing to Trump is all by itself very criminal, to the level of organized crime. A typical mafia boss has more ethics than the DNC and the F.B.I. based on what we’ve seen. The more we have learned about James Comey the more we understand how terrible the leadership of the F.B.I. truly was and this whole Mueller special investigation is a direct spawn of Comey’s radical antics, of actually stealing material from the Oval Office and leaking it to the press. Of wire tapping the transition team at Trump Tower and lying to FISA courts to attempt to undo an American election. All this stuff is so much more serious than questioning whether or not Obama was born in the United States. Yet the case against his birth in America is far stronger than any Russian collusion story.

Sure, Michael Cohen was a little slimy, in all reality, what attorney isn’t? The legal system itself is slimy, so why wouldn’t a good one be on the shady side? Personally speaking I could never defend a murder suspect or someone engaged in questionable activities as an attorney because I couldn’t put my ethical standards up for sale like that. If I didn’t believe in the client, I couldn’t do the work. Any attorney that can I think is slimy. Ethical defense is not up for sale and the way the legal system is presently states quite clearly that money can by such a thing. Obviously Donald Trump the billionaire working in a slimy town of New York where corruption ran everything had to conduct slimy activities to be in any kind of business and that’s why lawyers were hired, to handle slimy details. Cohen offered himself as just such a person so nobody is expecting a highly ethical figure in Trump’s attorney. Nobody ever did.

Yet the legal system understands that rule which is why they went after Cohen in the first place. In their need to find dirt on President Trump they went to the slimy figures in his life that are there by business necessity knowing that if they wanted to make some kind of case against the president, that they should start there. So they broke into Michael Cohen’s office sending a direct message to the President of the United States that nothing around him was safe. And the point of the Comey leaking of documents to inspire the investigation of his friend Bob Mueller was to set up the hope of impeachment if Democrats managed to take the House of Representatives at some point. Which was a reasonable calculation considering many Never-Trumper Republicans wanted to retire leaving so many seats vulnerable to Democrats. The whole game as been a scam and abuse of power and has resembled nothing regarding law and order. It’s all about power and politics. None of these legal actions have been about justice, only about retaining power and pushing out of power representatives elected within the context of the republic of America.

If we’ve learned anything from all this it is that the legal system is largely a travesty created only to control the flow of power to those who truly want to deny that America is a republic instead of a majority ruled democracy. Therefor they cannot accept that Donald Trump was elected president to upset that entire legal apple cart so they have used every dirty trick available at the highest level of politics to destroy the Trump presidency, which has not been successful and it won’t be. Every year since he jumped on the scene, I have liked Donald Trump more and more. I started out supporting him because of his business background and he had a chance to bring business logic to politics. I didn’t care that he was an over the top playboy over the years, I only cared that he bring business level decisions to the Executive Branch. But as I’ve watched him under fire and withstanding the heat, I like him more and more—and so do most Americans. People know what’s going on here, but even knowing it doesn’t prepare you for the audacious reality once it’s presented in all its ugliness. And the Cohen case is ugly. At best it is gross abuse of power by the highest powers in our political system and it deserve severe punishment for all the actors involved. I know where I am personally with all this, but I keep wondering when everyone else will catch on. I have no faith in the F.B.I. or the CIA, or even Homeland Security. I think those organizations are filled with perverts, power-hungry despots and general losers—which is why they seek government work instead of the bold frontier of private sector efforts. But this Cohen case only confirms what I have long suspected, and it can’t be allowed to stand. I’m not OK with it, I’ll say that much. In my view government works for the people who put them in power and I’m not a happy employer.

Rich Hoffman

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People Who Work in Government are Generally Stupid: Watch the movies ‘American Made’ and ‘Chappaquiddick’ to understand why they hate Trump

I recommend you do two things right now dear reader, go on Netflix and watch Chappaquiddick and watch wherever you can find it, American Made with Tom Cruise. I watched it on HBO. They were both remarkable films. Chappaquiddick of course is about how Ted Kennedy left a young girl riding in a car with him to die when he accidentally drove off the road in an inebriated condition in a bay where she drowned, and he escaped, mysteriously. What was astonishing about this movie even if it did attempt to paint Ted Kennedy in the best possible light was that he was so enormously stupid and incompetent. For a guy who was being groomed to be president of the United States the way his “handlers” treated him was astonishing. It was a really interesting look at life behind the scenes of a crises regarding people at the highest level of politics. It then becomes very clear why all those people who have come to handle presidents of the United States over the years have come to resent President Trump, a man who is street smart, instinctive and does not want their advice. Then you will really have your doors blown off when you watch American Made, about Barry Seal, the ex-TWA pilot who was coaxed by the CIA to become a drug smuggler for Pablo Escobar.

I knew a lot of this information but I never really thought of Barry Seal the smuggler being at the center of the Iran Contra affair, the Clinton scandals in Arkansas and being the payoff man to Manuel Noriega. Looking at these distinctly 1980s events knowing what we do about how the FBI and the Department of Justice handled the Clinton email scandal and their attempts to remove Trump from presidential office before he even set foot in the White House it made the movie American Made that much more powerful. The two things that bothered me was the way that the CIA picked Barry Seal for the job, knowing he would become a drug smuggler, and actually allowing it to happen so that they could prop up a flood of cocaine into the United States and prop up insurgents in Central America with cash. Barry was a bit of a daredevil, so the CIA set him up with his own airport in Arkansas overlooked by Governor Clinton specifically and they gave him plenty of property to build a smuggling empire.

Much like Chappaquiddick when Ted Kennedy had just accidentally killed a young woman and was making calls the morning after from the desk of the sheriff’s office—because the Kennedy’s controlled all of politics in that region, there was a scene in American Made where Barry had just been arrested by the local law enforcement, the F.B.I. the ATF and other agencies and was hauled up before the state attorney general to spend many lifetimes in jail when President Clinton called her and commanded her to release the drug smuggler. I’m sure many of the scenes in the movie were exaggerated to compress time and events, but it was really strange to see it happening in a historical context. Then to have that same drug smuggler in the White House as an advisor to Oliver North and the Reagan initiative against drugs called “Just Say No.” They used Barry Seal to conduct a sting operation against Pablo Escobar which worked. But Escobar sent a hit squad into the United States to kill Barry Seal. Once assassinated the White House needed a new way to get guns to freedom fighters and drug runners in Central America so they used the Iranians, which spawned the Iran Contra Affair.

I have read books and books on all these topics individually but until the movie used Barry Seal to string them all together did it really click how things worked. It helps to look back in hindsight and knowing what we do today of course, but I thought it was amazing to put all these elements into one movie that had so much to do with how the world has been shaped today. It doesn’t take much of a fantastic mind to imagine that even today the people in politics who support open borders are doing so to help the drug trade funnel drugs into the United States. After all, the CIA was clearly involved at a high level into the whole operation and one can only imagine what the sinister desire was to allow it to happen. But on the most basic level it was to funnel cash into impoverished areas to act as change agents against communism and other anti-capitalist forces. Perhaps a good idea in intent, but a disaster into practice.

When I was a kid, even up to my mid 20s really, I thought of people in the F.B.I. and CIA as being elite law enforcement types who were the best of the best. The fully grown adult in me knows now that they are just people like anybody else and usually, they aren’t very smart. In fact, most people working in government are pretty stupid, which is why they are attracted to government and not the private sector. That is very disappointing, but a grim reality. Yet they struggle to maintain that illusion not just to themselves, that they are smart and important, that they go to GREAT effort to only allow puppet presidents of the people to be in the White House so not to shatter their reality with evidence. The real action is out there in the people like Barry Seal who do the work of these agencies, then are expendable when their work is done. We see the same kind of activity in our modern times around this whole attempt to destroy President Trump while real crimes were openly committed by these very same agencies. We don’t want to believe they could possibly do such a thing, but they obviously did.

Its one thing to know something, and I’ve heard stories from conspiracy theorists for years about the CIA drug smuggling and gun running operations—heck, that’s how ISIS was started by the Obama administration. Obama was in support of the Muslim Brotherhood caliphate all around the Mediterranean and Assad was standing in the way. In Syria the Assad family had previously fought the Muslim Brotherhood for control and weren’t about to allow some Islamic radicals to take control of the country from the family rule. So Assad gassed his own people and the Obama White House ran with the story to bring international pressure down on Assad. When that didn’t work the United States started funneling guns to rebels who then became ISIS. This is a very old story that happens over and over again. But what we all must ask ourselves is why it continues to happen.

The hatred of Trump is that he is truly a people’s president elected outside of the controls that were obviously in place in the two films I mentioned. In those movies, the presidents or potential presidents were just pawns of the greater politics involved, where the so-called Deep State operated. In the case of American Made, the Deep State was the CIA breaking the law for what they considered a greater good. Barry Seal was a criminal completely propped up by the CIA to make the drug runners in Columbia extremely wealthy so that they could destabilize the communism that was in fashion in Central America. And you can hear the same rationalizations from James Comey today about Trump, trying to justify why he broke the law to keep a people’s president out of the White House…. essentially because he felt he knew better than the rest of us how to deal with world affairs. And that is how these disasters happen.

I remember the events of my youth well, the Chappaquiddick situation and the antics of Barry Seal and I’m not going back to that. I voted for President Trump because I have lost faith in the F.B.I. and the CIA—in the Presidency itself. I am not going to sleep just so that losers in those intelligence agencies can give us the illusion of a Republic while they work behind the scenes under great illegal circumstances to overthrow our way of government. I do not find those options acceptable, and Trump is my solution to that long-standing problem. And if you want context dear reader, then watch those two movies and apply what you learn to our modern circumstances. And many answers will become quite clear for you.

Rich Hoffman

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The Meaning of Life: How to accept the new roles of colonizing distant planets in relation to governing policies

You know, philosophy and science didn’t end with the American inputs of William James, Robert Pirsig and Ayn Rand. Even though the institutions of our modern society are tempted to think that they are the end of the line and that they must now teach what they have learned to anybody willing to pay them $100 thousand for an education that really it’s the labor unions supporting them that’s talking, again from a long dead philosopher in Karl Marx who is irrelevant to modern thought, because his beliefs were more a wish for the lazy than an observed fact of existence. No, there is a lot more to learn and to think about and as it so happens to be, we are living in the most dynamic time for that kind of thought in the history of the entire world. So if you are like me, which is conducive to the reality of the moment, the old static thoughts of old need to give way to the dynamic intellectualism of the creative moment and for that I’m going to say something very important, something that nobody else will tell you presently on the face of earth, but it is the most solid footing that mankind could hope to have, and that is in the rock, paper, scissor game of human development, the way to determine the value in something is in how we can monetize it, because that determines the value of something. Science by its very nature is needed to study where we’ve been but they cannot be allowed to step in the way of human advancement.

I’m thinking of space and colonizing Mars, the Moon, and several other moons circling the moons of the big gas giants at the center of our solar system. In their natural state they are just there doing nothing waiting for the sun to explode destroying everything in its gravitational pull. Humans have been given a tight window to develop life of just a few million years and we need to take full advantage of it presently. That means that all the scientific protestors like Green Peace and PETA, along with the political protestors such as the Karl Marx inspired ANTIFA must either be destroyed or given a seat at the back of the bus and told to shut up. They may have rights to express themselves under the American Constitution and if other countries want to adopt the philosophy of American thought and create laws based on that, so be it. But soon we are going to be returning to the wild, wild west of space travel and frontier pushing that will last pretty much for the rest of human existence, for many millions of years to come and always there will be a frontier to push. It is the nature of human thought to use the necessity of adventure to advance human needs and desires and the governing practice that keeps everything in check are not the laws of institutional thinking, it is the value of the conduct.

I used to read National Geographic magazines and books voraciously. Going to the museum for me in Washington D.C. was like visiting heaven on earth. But over the years I have grown to understand that they have a very limited perspective on the world and of human existence altogether. What makes human beings so important over other life forms is the creative impulse to see what is around the corner and to use their imaginations to get there. No other animal anywhere does this and it can be argued through applied scientific observation that this is the meaning of life—of all life—to feed this trend in existence. National Geographic still has the progressive vision of its founders, Alexander Graham Bell and many others who weren’t wrong to ask questions about the role science played in human experience, but the value of their work only has relevancy to people. Give a National Geographic magazine to an elk in Alaska or a beaver in Colorado and they’ll just look at it. The animal rights activists that might learn something from reading National Geographic are wrong to assume that they are meant to act on behalf of nature because again the ability to contemplate the “nature” of things is purely human. The forces that made the Rocky Mountains could and would destroy every last human being ever created without giving anything a thought. So the contemplation of value is purely human. When in the very well-produced television series titled Mars, produced by National Geographic the assumption is made that there needs to be a governing body in space just as there is on earth, they’d be incorrect. Value is determined by what humans do with the nature that is around them—at every level. A turtle can’t dig in the ground and pull out raw ore and make something economically valuable about it. Only humans can, and thus on the wild frontier of space where huge companies will set up residence and take over the colonization of Mars and many other planets at a rapid pace, science and conservation must take a back seat. The scientists cannot be allowed to become governing elements in the dynamic need to destroy static assumptions. When we get to Mars and set up huge cities of minors and construction workers, the science of understanding what happened to Mars takes a back seat. The funding for their science comes from business investment and economic expansion, so they need to accept that and get away from assuming that their static reality of observation can be allowed to slow down even a little the curiosity of mankind and its never-ending quest for economic development.

Monetizing a planet, or a moon is not an evil thing, it’s quite the opposite. When something is monetized it is suddenly graced with a value that it didn’t have before. Mars in the state that it is now is just sitting there with all its history. The scientist might find all that fascinating just as they may enjoy watching Humpback wales breeding off the coast of California. So what, when did a whale or a dolphin ever build a space ship to colonize a distant star? The value of existence isn’t just in doing what some version of God started as a pattern of life, to breed, to eat, to reproduce then to die in a long cycle of existence, it is accepting that jump-start into consciousness, then to do something with the intellect that emerges. Death or preparing for death for the rest of our lives as the Buddhists do is not a value conducive to the human experience, nor is living in harmony with nature. The meaning of life as defined by human beings is to accept their role of a dynamic force in a very static universe. It is not for the scientist to sit in the back of a caboose studying history, it is in the entrepreneur at the front of the train, at the cutting edge as Robert Pirsig put it in his work so well, that is where the value for all things are.

At the heart of all this is the debate on gun control. As humans move into the vast frontiers of space away from the governments on earth that central question of who controls who and how and why comes up. In America the right to have guns and to use them has decentralized the process of justice. People can live in the middle of nowhere and not expect to be robbed of their values because they have guns to defend themselves. The same application of order will be used heavily on the far distance bases in orbit around Jupiter or scattered all over Mars as a continuous stream of rockets full of payload travels between the earth and those destinations raising the stakes with each visit as those environments become much more earth like in their living conditions. And as all this happens there will be no room for the nosey scientist or the environmental protestors who assumes that their work is the most important to conduct in the universe. The way to determine that is to measure the value that work has in the scope of human progress. If it isn’t valuable, then it must be discarded for something that is, because it is the tools we come to use as humans that matter as we reach out and expand our curiosity to the next corner of the galaxy. It may be interesting to consider where things have been historically, but what matters is tomorrow, and our always driven yearning to find it. That is the meaning of life.

Rich Hoffman

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The Next Big Thing: Cheering on Richard Branson and his wonderful company Virgin Galactic

Putting politics aside which is hard to do because ultimately everything is political, but considering our modern conditions, those definitions are changing by the moment. I am and have always been a very excited person for everything new little thing that comes along as I am very much in love with the things that humans imagine. Nature is nice too, but I really like what humans do with the tools provided by nature and to see how civilization can advance. While many look at cell phones and the hyper communications that come with them as dangerous to the old order of doing things I think it’s all part of our natural evolution as a species accelerating toward some yet to be known destination. While everyone who knows me understands how much I love tradition particularly the American western mythologies and concepts, I am very much an achievement driven person excited for tomorrow in so many ways. And that is why despite his politics, I have been very much a fan of Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic endeavors. And according to him from the interview shown below, he still plans to get his space airline into space before Christmas of this year, which would be a great feat. I am very much hopeful that he will be successful.

It’s been coming along for a while now, but if it is considered the sheer amount of information that is coming at us so fast and furious these days as opposed to when man landed on the moon in 1969 the human race is scratching at a huge change in thought and processing. As I was catching up on what Virgin Galactic was up to and if they were going to meet their timeline one of the lead stories on the Microsoft News dashboard was the newly recorded sounds of Mars as captured by the recent rover that just landed there. Much of this past week due to the very good series on the National Geographic Channel about colonizing Mars radio broadcasts across the country were contemplating what the steps to such an act would look like and what we’d all do once we got there. Elon Musk has after all been turning up the heat for his own departure from earth to live on the ancient red planet. I see many of his antics such as the smoking pot incident on a recent podcast as his teenage moment of creating enough escape velocity for himself to make the journey. He is sabotaging his own relationship with the earth so that he can psychologically make that journey to be the first to live on Mars. Jeff Bezos of Amazon is about to unleash a series of space endeavors that are quite ambitious with his Blue Origin company. Between all these adventurous billionaires fueled by childhood loves of movies like Star Wars and Star Trek compounded by a strong deregulatory economy by the Trump administration—the primer is set for some very exciting technological breakthroughs on the frontier of space.

As I was playing Red Dead Redemption 2 by Rockstar Games on my PlayStation 4 and started messing around with the online play with many thousands of other players all over the world simultaneously, I couldn’t help but think of how subconsciously as a human species this visit to the western genre was necessary for our current age to accept what was about to happen. It’s not the safety of the herd that the human race is after, it’s the rough existence away from the support of civilization for which adventure promises great rewards and many opportunities for death. This next generation needs to be someone reckless and masochistic in order to endure the rigors of a dynamic shift in human consciousness, leaving the comfort of our earth and scratching at the unlimited barriers of space travel. Presently we call space anything over 62 miles, or anybody who travels over 50 miles and astronaut. We think of the moon as a long way away, and Mars prohibitively distant. But all those definitions are about to change just as they did in the period of American westward expansion once electricity and phone communications shrunk the world with power. The main observation I had about that great video game was that human beings needed to revisit that last period of adventure and see what it looked like so that they could take this next big journey.

I don’t really like the term “collective consciousness” because it assumes that we are all functioning out of one great well of wisdom which is not what I think is going on. Rather, there are certain rational decisions that are common to reality so it is bound to be a mathematical probability that all humans will come to similar conclusions just by the mandate of deductive reasoning. And that is why texting is more interesting than talking to an actual person for most people, the human mind to seek out the rapid communication forms that come from something like a modern smart phone as opposed to a very static conversation with one single human being is needed for the world of tomorrow, where information must be process quickly as our knowledge base explodes from what was previously understood. Young people especially will have to think much faster than humans do today and be shocked by much fewer discovers than previous generations just to keep up with all the news stories that will began to demand our attention as the frontiers of space are unzipped.

Aerospace is one of my favorite industries due to its exploratory nature. I desire to be a part of it as much as possible and to be quite honest, I love every day of my life because I am. I love to help build the vehicles that take humans to the frontiers of our imagination and I have had a front row seat to many of these new developments. So out of a love of adventure which transcends politics, I am happily cheering on the events of these coming days. Richard Branson has worked hard with his team to get into space first and if he doesn’t make it soon, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos will overtake Virgin Galactic. So he doesn’t have all the time in the world, competition and capitalism demand results and the pressure is certainly on. If Branson can get into space by Christmas of 2018 it would be a life changing moment for many people around the world. But if Christmas comes and goes and Virgin Galactic is still mired in testing, then Blue Origin or SpaceX will get there first. This new space race isn’t between nations and governments, it between billionaires and capitalist mandates and that is redefining everything rapidly.

Humans are such conceptual creatures and once we get an idea in our heads reality has a way of growing around it. And from what I see that growth will spawn entirely new industries and lifestyles. There is great reason to be optimistic. Once space tourism is unleashed, likely by Virgin Galactic first, our conceptual knowledge will expand at such a pace that the world has never witnessed. We have been preparing ourselves for this age for years with the rapid digestion of so much information. It’s not by accident or greed, it’s all by necessity. As I’ve said many times my goal in a very busy life is to read at least one book a week, but I am even feeling the pressure to read not just one, but five. So grudgingly I have turned to audio books for some of them because by necessity I need the information coming at me faster than I could possibly read everything and still do everything else needed in an 18-hour work day which is pretty typical. We are all going through a similar transition and that’s what it takes to live and grow in an expanding economy driven by human adventure and curiosity. And much of that next phase starts when Richard Branson gets his Virgin Galactic space tourism over that 50-mile line where humans become technically astronauts.

Rich Hoffman

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The Cause of the Wagner Murders: Being dumb is just as dangerous as any weapon

Let’s get something straight, judging people is good. It’s really good. The current world may say judge not and ye not be judged and I say to that, bull shit. I make my living being very judgmental and I will never starve, nor will my family because of it. Judgement is what makes us as human beings different from say a………………………………rock. So before anybody says to me, “how dare you judge people so negatively” I will say to them, shut the hell up and go get a basic education, then lets talk. Passing judgment is the way humans navigate through their existence and if you don’t do it, you might as well cut off your arms and legs because judgment is just as important to anyone and everyone. And with that in mind I watched the arraignment of the various Wagner family members intensely as they were charged with the execution style murders of eight Rhoden family members. Each of them had their own court appearance, Billy Wagner being the last, all 6’ 6” of him at 274 pounds and covered in tattoos. His wife Angela and their sons Jake and George leading up to the climax as the public saw them really for the first time. It was quite an event to look at people who could even consider murdering people in such a violent way, and all over a child custody battle. But it wasn’t just them who were part of the exhibition, it was the family who had gathered in the audience which told more of the story, one that is worth noting for posterity.

What I saw in the various arraignments was a family who liked each other and were sad that they would likely never see each other again. Their lives were ruined and essentially over and particularly in Angela, the wife, that reality had hit her hard. They looking like a nice family that probably enjoyed being around other members of their family and had hopes and dreams that lasted until that crushing moment that they decided to go kill the family that had disputed them in a custody battle over a child that was shared between them. Literature is filled with the rage of passion that comes from such emotions—Romeo and Juliet come to mind. It’s not like history doesn’t have something to say on these matters and the purpose of education is so that we learn from history, even from the fiction that authors come up with to deal with raw emotions that sometimes do erupt under tenuous circumstances.

As I watched the body language of each of them, especially Billy I couldn’t help but think that it was stupidity that had brought them all to that moment and it was such a tragedy. Being stupid in modern America is a choice and in rural Ohio a long way to the east of Cincinnati there isn’t much of a daily need for books and such. Billy likely made his way through life using his size as leverage in negotiating with other people intimidating them into compliance, so he didn’t have to put much thought into things. As he got older, he tattooed himself up because it looked scary and gave him even more capital when he needed to frighten people into doing what he said. So he didn’t have much experience in problem solving—most things in life he could solve in eastern Ohio by looking scary. That was until one of his boys impregnated the daughter of the Rhoden family that was deep into illegal activity. Between their chop shop on the family compound, their illegal cock-fighting games, and their marijuana growing operation, the Rhodens were a ruling family in that part of the world and their capital assets were their access to power. The police obviously knew what was going on and was probably involved to some extent. So when the Wagners decided that they couldn’t rely on the courts to help them with their custody case they resorted to the only means of communication they understood, brute strength and intimidation. After all, a big guy like Billy didn’t want to hear his ol’ lady bitch about some chick that his son had screwed for the rest of his life and the granddaughter that they had limited access to because the Rhodens were politically much more powerful. So he rationalized that he just kill them all so he wouldn’t have to hear about it anymore.

I’m sure the situation I described isn’t far from reality based on what we have learned so far in the case. Many families could tell the same story, they just usually don’t end up killing a rival family. As we are considering this case here on these pages, many families are thinking of Christmas and there are a lot of women getting themselves worked up over some girl their boys are dating, or some affair that someone had with someone else that is tainting the Holiday experience, or some in-law that they don’t like. Unfortunately, the Holidays for most people are filled with people they don’t like, but are nice to out of the necessity for civility. But in the car ride home the bitching never stops and it goes on incessantly and if you are a big boy like Billy who had up to that point in his life solved most problems with brute force, there really isn’t a good way to shut up the voices of dissent that come from family interactions with people who don’t share your immediate values. A big, dumb man covered in tattoos, limited reading ability and a terrible education to reference anything against is pretty defenseless in a world that requires intellect and thoughtful consideration and the sad thing about the Wagner situation is that they were all just too dumb to solve their problems with the Rhodens any other way.

As brutal as the Wagner massacre of the Rhoden family was, there is a very Christian like morality layered under it all that naturally comes from life in the Bible belt, a morality on the benefits of young children who were spared in the killings. But to any intelligent observation from the outside world, it’s not the custody of the child that was the problem. It was their level of intellectual ability that would surely destroy any child spawned from such dumb people. Being dumb is a choice, it’s not the same as being intellectually handicapped because of some birth defect. It’s a choice not to learn to read and write properly and not to use history as a guide on how to maneuver through the future. To just solve a problem the way that Shakespeare wrote about over 400 years ago is dumb because it is ignoring 500 years of human evolution in rational discourse. And if the truth were told, that is the cause of these terrible murders—sheer dumbness, purposeful lack of intellect displayed upon the upbringing of a defenseless child. Because even if the murders didn’t occur the poor kid would grow up to be just as dumb as its parents, bitching about the same dumb problems every Holiday about the same dumb people they ran into in town. And the kid would over eat and become fat like the rest of them because they were too dumb to correct the behavioral characteristics of destructive living because their brains were all underdeveloped and trying to look at the world through a pinhole that their tiny little brains had barely managed to poke through a cardboard box. And when a conflict came to pass, they solved it with the same brand of rationality. And lots of people died for no reason at all and a family that could have lived a fairly decent life given their circumstances of intellect are now going to die in prison and never see each other again—which is pretty damn stupid.

Rich Hoffman

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It’s All About Gas Prices: Who cares about Khashoggi, for $20 I was able to fill up my whole tank

You have to understand what’s going on when you hear that all these United States Senators and the like are suddenly upset about the CIA report saying the crowned Prince of Saudi Arabia was directly involved in the execution of a Washington Post reporter in Istanbul. The righteous indignation is not over the death of a political activist reformer using his position as a reporter to incite challenges to Saudi Arabian rule, it is to make the gasoline lobby in Washington happy because they are very unhappy that President Trump has made America independent again at the gas pump and that has driven fuel prices under $2 per gallon where I live in Cincinnati, Ohio. This happening just as the Holiday season is in full gear giving American consumers millions and millions of extra dollars to spend on a fourth quarter spike to the 2018 economy. Those who profit from a less than great American economy are pretty pissed off, which all who are reading here should be very happy about.

I wasn’t paying much attention to the gas prices. I stopped by my usual place to get gas early in the morning before most people were up and decided to put $20 into the tank. Usually that gives me about a half tank that I use most of the rest of the week. When the pre-pay was complete, I put the gas nozzle back into its holster and jumped into the driver’s seat to go about my business. Out of habit I looked at the gas gauge just to make sure that it was reading the fuel that had just been applied to my vehicle’s tank and was surprised to see it was nearly full. That prompted me to look at the sign out by the main road at what the gas prices were and sure enough it said the price per gallon was $1.99. I thought that was simply astonishing given the world conditions. After all, that was precisely why Parisians were rioting in the streets that weekend, was due to excessively high gas prices due to too many environmental constraints.

President Trump had a plan and that was to make the American economy the strongest it has ever been, so one of the first things he did once sworn in was to make more supply of gas so that Saudi Arabia couldn’t dictate the supply exclusively essentially charging anything they wanted for a barrel of oil. Politics had created an artificial constraint to leverage favor toward the oil and gas lobby and that meant very favorable margins for them at the expense of the consumer. Trump took that away from that lobby and put the money back in the pockets of the consumer with competitive supply making America the largest oil-producing nation in just a few short years of his first term in office. A miraculous feat in and of itself. Of course, you won’t read about this miracle in the press and within the media culture because most of them still rely heavily on oil and gas money in advertising, and they certainly don’t want the public to know how fragile their existence truly was or how they have been price gouging people at the pumps for well over 50 years.

Of course, part of that equation was to keep Saudi Arabia as a supplier, because that competition leverages even American producers to keep their prices per barrel of oil down. So in a free market system that needs as many competitors as possible to get prices to a real market value, “what customers are willing to pay for gas” Trump leveraged the American fuel market to bring down the costs in Saudi Arabia and that effect has been a downward trend in gas prices since 2016, when Trump took office officially. Then of course the Crowned Prince appears to have killed off a rival in the press for which the world, particularly those in the media, wanted punishment for. But Saudi Arabia is a sovereign country. If he wants to kill people, that’s his business, right?

The way liberals work is they use peer pressure to leverage sentiment. In this case they wanted to trick Trump into going against Saudi Arabia which would really make the gas lobby happy, and it would give liberals what they want as well, a damaged president with a weak economy going into the 2020 election which would make him easier for them to beat. By excreting peer pressure on Trump they “the media run by the oil and gas lobby through advertising” could force him into a corner for which he could never get out of. But, Trump fortunately is a business guy and he isn’t so prone to emotional sentiment because he knows how the game is played, so he did the unexpected, he used his friendship with Saudi Arabia to leverage them to further reduce oil prices which is why gas prices are trending downward dramatically right in the meat of the Holiday season in America. This has pumped a lot of expendable income that would otherwise just go to oil companies in artificially inflated margins and put those dollars to use in the American economy. How about that—who would have figured?

People die all the time. For instance, a lot of people have died near the Clintons all through the years over lots of different types of issues. Benghazi comes to mind. Seth Rich does too. What if The New York Times and other newspapers put as much effort into discovering the conditions of murder of that Democrat operative who supposedly was leaking documents from the DNC directly to Wikileaks had an investigation done to the extent that they perform one for the murdered Washington Post reporter Jamal Khashoggi? Both were high-profile murders, but one directly involved Democrats and pointed to a smoking gun that was very embarrassing to them. The other took away the leverage President Trump had created with Saudi Arabia through friendship to keep gas prices down in the fourth and first quarter of a new year during the 2018 Holiday season. The media being against the Trump agenda almost violently is picking their stories to fit an agenda, one that makes their advertisers happy ultimately.

Of those paid participants in this grand conspiracy are senators like Bob Corker, the forever Never Trumper who wears a Republican title next to his name, but might as well be a Democrat operative in all reality. Corker and those like him in the senate who really hate everything about Trump because the president is independent of the usual Washington controls would love to see the American economy tank if it got rid of President Trump. They wouldn’t care if gas prices were $4 per gallon, which they were under previous administrations for which Bob Corker was still a senator because the gas lobby was happy and that money flowed back into the pockets of senators through indirect means, and the Washington establishment was very happy about it. I’m only picking on Bob Corker because he has put himself at the front of the Anti-Trump Saudi conspiracy. There are reasons for his Anti-Trumper behavior and you’d understand if you know anything about the guy. He is a compromised person, years ago he made a lot of his previous money in real estate, a lot of which went bad. As of 2008 he had a net worth of around $19 million and just ten years later its at $40 to $50 million on a job that only pays $174,000 per year. Math doesn’t lie even though senators often do, Republicans and Democrats.

Part Two: The Corruption of Bob Corker

I say all this because you have to know the game that is being played, not the one that the media is showing. The hatred of Trump isn’t because of the death of a Washington Post reporter, it’s because the economy is too good, and that Saudi Arabia has lost their leverage. By looking the other way on the Khashoggi death Saudi Arabia has to be very thankful to Trump, and gas prices are showing it, and will get even better as we get into the 2019 vacation months. After all, the Seth Rich death was overlooked, so why not Khashoggi? I mean if all deaths are equal, everyone should care about them no matter who they are. But the Khashoggi death is only out of a need to control the optics so that the gas lobby can attempt to regain control of the world market. But Trump didn’t fall for it and I’m happy because for $20, I was able to fill up my whole tank at the gas pump. And that is what really matters.

Rich Hoffman

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I Still Believe in Santa Claus: Why the magic of childhood is more important than the dissapointments of reality

It seems to be happening all across the country, particularly among substitute teachers but one at the Cedar Hill School in Montville, New Jersey was particularly disturbing since it was targeting 5 to 6-year-old kids, and that is the trend of telling them that there is no Santa and therefore, no hope in the world for them to look forward to. I haven’t yet read or heard any commentary on this topic that really dug into the root of the issue as it is so horrendous that normal people just can’t get their mind around why an adult of any kind would do such a thing. To understand the big picture of what is going on we have to understand why we have the mythologies of Santa and Easter Bunnies, and Tooth Fairies to begin with. We also must understand why teachers in public schools are against children’s expansion of knowledge for which all imaginative endeavors are designed to evoke. The quest to destroy Santa in the lives of young children is the progressive fulfillment of a much larger desire, the destruction of individual needs and the shared experience of collective endeavor. The notion of a Santa Claus fulfilling the wishes of individual children is a repulsive idea to most progressives, so they use the beat down over caffeinated employees of public education to do their bidding.

My oldest daughter and I had an interesting debate on Santa Claus a few years ago as she was inclined to think that she didn’t want her child to accept falsehoods of hope and become dependent on a jolly old man dressed in red to bring him presents for being a good little boy, “good” being defined by parameters she may or may not agree with. Such as if good meant complete compliance to the state then she couldn’t support such a thing, but if good meant acting in accordance with his individual integrity, then perhaps so. Due to the lack of understanding of what “good” meant at Christmas time, then she was inclined to pass on the mythic experience all together. But my thing to her was that all kids as they built conceptual knowledge in their brains needed mythic elements to elevate their consciousness. So the basic foundations of goodness and hope for which the Christmas season is so emphatic were healthy for a growing mind until they could afford to function on their own. After all, a child has no means of interacting with the world and their conceptual knowledge is lacking due to their limited experiences in life, so we create stories to help them arrive at those important foundations as their brains develop.

That is after all why we do the things we do for children. When they are young their minds are hopeful and filled with boundless optimism, and that is needed because they must overcome so many things just to arrive at 5 to 6 years old. They have to learn to walk, talk, read, interact with lots of other people, and they do so with optimism because that is the foundation needed for learning. If a child fell on their first opportunity to walk and just stayed flat on their face waiting for someone to pick them up, they’d be ruined for life and would never learn anything. They must have that desire to keep getting up and trying things over and over again until they succeed. That is the basis of all learning. Parents who rush to pick their children up after every little boo boo are actually destroying their minds. They mean well, but the point of growing up is to gain experience and if experience is denied then great harm comes to the children effected. It is good to let kids fall and get cut. It is good for them to run in the rain and get a little sick, so that their immune systems develop into a healthy defense of their bodies as they get older. It is good for children to stumble and fall because they will have a great wealth of knowledge to live as productive adults later on. Sometimes being a great parent is to let kids get cut up and battered a bit when they are kids so they know how to avoid much more dangerous things when they are older. The world today is filled with neurotic adults who were too coddled as children who cry at every little smashed insect and hurt feeling.

And that is why we give kids the magic of a positive and fulfilling childhood so that when they do become adults they can have as many tools to work with intellectually as possible and they can then in turn give good childhoods to their children. I would say that the quality of a childhood largely determines the quality of the adult. If a kid has a bad childhood, they will become damaged adults, so the mythologies of childhood are infinitely important to the furtherance of the human race. As adults its our jobs to provide as much knowledge and optimism as possible because at a certain point in their lives they stop being kids and become adults. The destructive teenage years are certainly that shattering of reality where life becomes disillusioning. But the process of life often is, so as humans we have mitigated that disappointment by providing children with wonderful ideas so that once they become adults they have good memories to endure them through the many disappointments. That’s not to say that children should always stay that way, at a young age their brains are not yet ready for the rigors of adult life, so we create intellectual tools to assist them during this critical period of their lives until mature brain development occurs and a human being is ready for the world. In that context Santa Claus is a wonderful conceptual invention of mythology and culture and it teaches young people the best about what life has to offer.

Of course, if you want to destroy a person the best way to do it is by removing their conceptual aptitude, take away their hopes and dreams so that they resort to the basic function of a non-thinking animal. And this is just what progressive types are looking for in creating compliant people for tomorrow’s authoritarian regimes of political masters, a voting population that will keep them in power because they are stupid, and hopeless. And without question that substitute teacher had at some point in their life had their hopes removed and was frustrated with the enthusiasm of youth because guilt was likely the emotion they had about their own lives and how poorly they’ve managed it. That hatred of the pure and innocent comes usually from people who have had all hope removed from their own lives and it is the ultimate act of selfishness to rob children of their own opportunities by adults who have obviously given up. It’s simply not fair to the children to have adults attempt to take from them hopes and dreams of a bigger and better world. Even though such an idea is a conceptual fantasy ultimately kids grow up to become what they thought about most. And thinking about Santa Claus at that magical time of innocence is one of the best things adults can do for helpless children still growing intellectually. And it is terribly evil for anybody to seek to rob kids of that opportunity. Especially those employed by the state as public-school teachers who put progressive objectives ahead of intellectual development. It is for all those reasons that I still believe in Santa, and likely always will!

Rich Hoffman

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So You’ve Played Red Dead Redemption 2 and Loved it: Be a gunslinger in real life, join the Cowboy Fast Draw Association

As much as I talk about other things, I am not completely lost like a lot of people my age might otherwise be on the magical world of video games and their relatively new impact on global entertainment. But let me just say to my usual readers, its big business. I finally finished the story mode of Red Dead Redemption 2 after around 100 hours of game play, taking my time when I could and I have to say that I was absolutely amazed by the result. The game is such an astonishing technical achievement and it is by far the best thing that could have ever happened to the entertainment format of the American Western. As a story and experience it really is like taking a real-life cowboy experience like the movie City Slickers and placing them into a 1960s spaghetti western with all the high drama of something like Game of Thrones. It is big, bold and beautiful in so many ways. And I knew that as I completed the game and all the epilogue missions that there was going to be a Red Dead online coming at the end of November. I planned to revisit the game at that time but wasn’t expecting much. But let me say that I have been pleasantly surprised. It looks like as massive as Red Dead Redemption 2 is as a game with sales well over a billion dollars already and something like 20 million copies sold before the Holiday season, that the purposed of the online play is to use the game as a kind of training experience for the online world that they have created. It is just vast and ultimately never-ending in what it allows players to do and interact with one another.

I couldn’t help but think as I was playing missions with other people the other day, most of them much younger than I am, that this game is really their only experience with a real American western and for many they are very touched by it. The game itself is a very moral story about good and bad and the many quandaries of the critical decisions that went into exploding life across the American frontier. But at its core it’s about gunfighting and is clearly one of the best arguments for the real-life problems of the Second Amendment. A lot of young people may not be paying attention to the real political problems going on in the outside world, but they sure care a lot about earning enough money in the game to purchase upgrades for their guns and dress in the coolest gunfighting outfits. But I couldn’t help notice that many of them probably didn’t know that they could do all the things they are doing in Read Dead Redemption in real life with Cowboy Fast Draw as seen at the following link:

http://www.COWBOYFASTDRAW.com

Belonging to the Cowboy Fast Draw Association is one of the groups I am most proud to affiliate with, they are really a good group of people who meet all over the United States to compete in real life fast draw competitions using real guns. It’s what I think of as one of the coolest sports in the world right now as other countries are trying to participate but have too strict of gun laws to actually do it. But in the good ol’ United States it is much easier to participate in. Yet I have noticed that most of the members are well over 40, largely because guns and holster rigs are expensive so it takes a little upfront investment to get involved. But once you do, it is infinitely rewarding. I enjoyed the original Red Dead Redemption enormously and getting my own fast draw rig was always something I had planned to do. But raising a family every last dollar that I made went into family needs, a car was always breaking down, a kid always needed a school fee or band instrument. Someone needed braces of a family member across the country wanted us to visit them, so there was always something for like twenty years that kept me from getting my own fast draw gun rig.

I ran across a substantial amount of money for a big job I had been working on so I treated myself to my gun rig and have been practicing at Cowboy Fast Draw for several years now, and am getting pretty good at it. After probably 30,000 to 35,000 shots at a fast draw target, I am starting to feel good about my speed and accuracy. It did take a while. It was something that had been on my mind well before I ever played the first Red Dead going way back into my twenties when I was going through a really tough time. Westerns and western music really kept the zest for life alive in me. On their most basic foundations westerns are about the meaning of life so they always had great appeal to me so when I grew up I wanted to be as much of a gunfighter as society could endure. Ironically, I had acquired my gun rig and some advanced fast draw skill before Red Dead Redemption 2 came out which had even more meaning for me because of the new hobby I had.

Traveling around the online world it has become very obvious that many young people are deeply touched by Red Dead Redemption 2 and likely would like to have a similar experience as I have. So let me put this little invite out there. If you are unsure of how to get involved in Cowboy Fast Draw because you are enjoying playing Red Dead Redemption but would like to take everything up a notch, don’t hesitate to ask me. I can help you get started on something that would be infinitely rewarding. While my regular audience here is much older than the people playing Red Dead Redemption 2 I would personally love to see more young people getting involved in Cowboy Fast Draw. It really isn’t any different from what you do in the game, but that it never ends. While the content of Red Dead Redemption does eventually run out, the challenges in real life never do.

In the Cowboy Fast Draw Association, you get to dress up as a gunslinger for real, and have a reason to do it. You have a reason to buy fancy guns for real and learn to take care of them. And the scoring format is safe and fun. Its one of the most satisfying things I’ve done in my life and I would recommend it to anybody. I had been thinking that membership in the cowboy sports may just flicker away because new generations just do not have many positive western entertainment venues that are cool enough to hold their attention, that is until Red Dead Redemption 2 came along and inspired millions of people to live in that world quite authentically. And for those who just want to climb into the world of Red Dead Redemption for real and live it in real life I’d point you to the Cowboy Fast Draw Association at the link shown here. If you have any questions, just ask. I’d love to help as many new people get involved in the sport as possible. While I personally love the world of Red Dead Redemption, it is no match for having a real fast draw rig on your hip which is an experience I have every day. And wouldn’t trade it for anything in the world.

Rich Hoffman

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The Greatest Weapon in the World: To always endeavor to be the smartest person in the room

There is a certain mentality that you must have if you want to be able to stand up to bullies like the current F.B.I. and all the power they have, or if in general you want to be a leader of people in whatever capacity. You, as a person must endeavor to be the smartest person in the room. If you are, no tyrannical bully can ever gain the leverage of fear against you and make silly threats for which you can never deal with. This is essentially why Donald Trump is so successful in whatever he does. Being the smartest person in the room in my experience doesn’t come from genetic inheritance as much as it comes from hard work. If you put in the time to become intelligent, you will have leveraged yourself into the most fundamental position any leader needs to be in. If you are the smartest person in the room, especially in America, you will ultimately become the decision maker for a lot of people because people will naturally follow you. So in that context you never have to fear the power of a corrupt law enforcement officer or a ruthless dictator, because intelligence most of the time all by itself is enough to wipe them out.

A lot of people assume that I’m the kind of person who would start shooting up bad guys at the first sign of trouble. But honestly, I have done a lot more damage to villainous people with my mind. When things do get bad, which doesn’t happen much, but over the years happens from time to time, I seldom have to use violence to make my point. Sometimes it evolves into that because the people you are dealing with are not very smart so they have no other weapons to work with but violence. However most of the time, just being the smartest person in the room is enough to diffuse anything and advance any topic.

From personal experience I have dealt with a lot of different people, some who would claim to be the richest and most powerful in all of Cincinnati financially. Others politically. My kids and I were talking the other day about how different Over-the-Rhine was today in downtown Cincinnati than it was almost thirty years ago when I lived on the campus of the University of Cincinnati for a while and accepted a dare to walk from Central Parkway up to Bogarts by way of Vine Street, which at that time was ripe with many, many criminal elements. I did so and not a single person bothered me. A lot of people looked at me very intensely, but not a single person engaged with me the way people might think would happen by way or robbery, or some other physical assault. I felt I could deal with any problem that anybody might throw at me and it showed in my personality which nobody wanted anything to do with. It wasn’t that I was a big guy, or that I was heavily armed. In fact, I didn’t have any weapons on me during that walk. All I had was what I knew. On a separate occasion a few years earlier, I was on a date in downtown Cincinnati where I am sure the intention was a robbery. I was taking my wife to a downtown restaurant but we parked near the courthouse because I felt that was a place where vandalism might be the least but on our way a large group of very scary looking inner city dwellers covered in gold chains and all the stereotypes of a rap video blocked our passage. After a quick qualifying conversation with a very large leader of the group, easily over 6’5” he decided that we weren’t worth the trouble. He asked me for our money, I told him we didn’t have any. He said to me that you don’t have a girl like “dat” without “no” kind of money.” My response was to ask him why not. That was probably the last thing he was prepared to hear. Most people obviously just gave him the money and went about their way. The fear of being hurt by him was enough. But when I asked him why it put the burden on him to respond with his true intentions. He elected to move on with his little gang of thugs because their imaginations as to why I was confident were running wild and it wasn’t worth the risk. I could tell an even worse story about Washington D.C. when I had to go out at 2 AM in a really bad part of the city to find milk for my kids as we were staying in a hotel nearby. I got the milk but no further trouble much to the shock of the people who heard about the story later.

I have had an unusual life in that I have been to court many, many times. I’ve nearly been put in jail more times than I can count. I have personally known hit men, famous Bengal players who were major drug dealers after their playing days were over. I used to repo cars for a living and have been shot at several times but I never was consumed by that lifestyle. I always lived outside of its grip. One time when all my friends were in jail on the campus of Miami University because we got into a huge fight with the football team at a bar there I was the only one not put in jail and I managed to talk reason to the officers to get a quick release of my friends, not that they deserved it over a weekend so they didn’t have to wait for an arraignment on the following Monday. On several occasions I’ve defended myself successfully in court as my own attorney because why hire someone not as smart as you to deal with something you have a stake in. And in saying all this I’m not saying that biologically I was ever the smartest, I have been friends with people with IQs near 200, I’m thinking of at least 2 people as I write this, which is very rare. I received my intelligence the old-fashioned way, through very hard work. I started reading as a young person not yet ten. As a teenager I continued that trend more than my peers. Then as a young adult I really took off starting a habit of at least one book a week of all different topics. After a few years you discover that no matter who you are dealing with, being well read gives you an advantage in almost any conflict. I have always had a personality that challenged authority which is why I got into so much trouble. But the more books I read the less trouble I found myself in which was an interesting ratio. I kept doing it and have found that after thirty years of that behavior, you can do the math. Nobody can really fight you if you know more about things than they do. Even if they resort to physical encounters, all those things you learn I think are far more powerful weapons than any gun. I’m an advocate of concealed carry but honestly, I doubt I would ever use it since I feel that I can defeat any situation without coming to that scenario. It helps to always be the smartest person in the room and if you commit yourself to that, you’d be surprised how safe in the world you really are.

I say all that because these are scary times, obviously in the world of politics the old world of brute force and stupidity—which I’d term the Robert Mueller investigation—is fighting the election of Donald Trump and those of us who put him into office. All they have is fear to use to defend their control on the world. If you know better, all their primary weapons are worthless. If you are the smartest person in the room there is no jail they can put you in, no gun they can draw, or legalism they can use to put pressure on you to flip to save your beloved family members. I feel sorry in a lot of ways for people like Paul Manafort, Michael Cohen and even General Flynn. They were smart and powerful guys in their specific professions, but when it comes to being smart about life, they are still prone to being victimized by an F.B.I. that thinks it has intelligence leverage over them, so they can make threats and get a desired response from those witnesses because they aren’t smart enough about more topics in the world to defend themselves. But in all honesty, I can at least report that the tactics used by the F.B.I. are those of very stupid people who have no case and are no different from those street thugs I mentioned who thought about robbing me many years ago in Cincinnati. They have size, strength and weapons, but not intelligence—because intelligence takes work to nature and most people don’t do it, leaving them always at a disadvantage to those who do. If you really want to be a tough person who can stand up to anything, then read a book. And not just one, but one ever week and you will discover dear reader that will be the most powerful weapon you can ever have, and guess what—nobody in the world can take it away from you.

Rich Hoffman

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