Rich Hoffman's Blog, page 230

Socialism is Taught in our Public Schools–so why are we surprised that its all kids know?

There was a recent poll that indicated 43% of people in North America support socialism which seems to be a surprise to many people. As everyone knows, I have been screaming this from the roof tops for many, many years—more like decades. This isn’t a new idea and if you take that poll and lay it over the same type of people who voted for Hillary Clinton and may support Joe Biden or Bernie Sanders they almost match perfectly. The new element is in accepting that the Democrat Party essentially is a part of socialists who have simply changed their name. And that evidence is quite clear in how that part of politics has taken over our public education system, which was finely exhibited in the New York City public school system with their recent ban of words that are consistent with above the line behavior, words like success, exceptionalism, and winning.

Many people don’t want to get involved in political matters, as our culture has successfully stigmatized it. It is far safer to talk about grilling hot dogs and talking about the statistics of hitting a ball with a baseball bat. And the people who want power like it that way. While we have been off appeasing everyone’s temperaments and worrying about hurting their feelings with aggressive words, they have taken over our public education system and sought to destroy the minds of our young people from their very foundations, and they have not been shy about it. We’ve let them get away with it by playing nice. And they have taken advantage of our niceness and set about ruining our nation from the inside out by controlling not only our education system, but what people learn, and this has occurred by allowing labor unions who are typically very progressive to run the school boards.

All that has changed is that Bernie Sanders and other very progressive elected officials have moved the political bar even further to the left leaving people like me, who have always been conservative looking in comparison to be some deranged lunatic by the measure of the political spectrum being analyzed. If prior to the 1960s the politics of the middle ground was exactly where a person like me is today, the victory of the communists, the hippies, and the leaning left Democrats ever more moved way away from the center and set a new benchmark that stated the new centralist views were radically to the left of what it used to be. And this has largely happened by a communist plan that started with the beginning of the Department of Education in 1980. It can be argued that public education worked better before a new department at the federal level got involved, and since it has, the entire country has moved further to the left.

I still remember what public school was like in 1980. I was in the sixth grade and I watched it quickly deteriorate. I can at least report a reference point to what it was like before and what it was like after, and each year thereafter from then until now has moved further and further to the political left. For those who say they don’t want to get involved in politics, because of hostile elements that have attacked our way of life, particularly in public education, none of us really have a choice. I have lost a lot of friends and family members over this very issue, which I’d do happily again. To me, what’s the point of talking about grilling out in the back yard, when entire parts of our population are being destroyed by liberalism in our public schools?

To my point of view this is one of the worst issues to confront us in the modern era. That we have allowed academia to be infested by liberalism only to eat up all the value of an education with political activism has been a major travesty on the action of learning. We have allowed intelligence to be stigmatized also with liberalism, and if we aren’t liberals, then we can’t claim to be academics. Through our American niceness, and through our Christian roots we turned the other cheek time and time again to allow these antagonizers to climb into the minds of our children and to take them from us, to attempt to destroy our families, to stand for death and the rights of some feminist version of womanhood as the only way.

Another recent poll that came out revealed that happily married women tended to be Republican in nature, which set off a torrent of anger from the political left. The threat to them was always in controlling the message of what being a woman really was. In their minds they accomplished two things, they keep mothers busy at work doing “things” in the pursuit of being equal to men. The other thing was that it pushed kids out of the house and into schools and pre-school day cares. This is also something I watched firsthand. My mom was a traditional housewife, one of the last of them. And she took a lot of grief for it being ridiculed by virtually everyone and it harmed her in many ways very deeply. She just wanted to care for her children and ironically, we all grew up very emotionally stable and productive. My wife actually followed in her path and for her the situation was even worse. Far worse actually. I watched all this with great curiosity, how could something so good, like loving kids, be considered socially so bad? Well, we were told in public education that liberalism was the way to go and they took our tax money to fund one sided political debate. And if you had a different point of view, then those individuals would be hunted down like the Salem Witch Trials and executed either literally or metaphorically. Whatever methods were used, the results were always clear. Destroy any hint at conservatism so that liberalism could grow.

It is actually surprising that more people don’t call themselves socialists these days with all the effort at attacking American that culture has gone into the promotion of that point of view. Capitalism and conservatism have held up remarkably well considering the efforts spent against it. But its time for us to turn the tide and to not be ashamed to admit what we value and to continue allowing liberalism to advance with our shut mouths and funding by turning our cheeks again and again until they’ve slapped away all the skin. Values can’t just be surrendered to a mob of trained socialists who believe they have a right to pluck us all dry to satisfy their whims. We need to focus on competition for the public education system so one brand of socialist instruction is not the only thing available to young people. By allowing that single source of failure to infect our children we are actually dooming them for life, and its time we stop that cycle. 1980 wasn’t that long ago and people have been educating themselves for many years. Well before the Department of Education came along with an agenda toward socialism. And until we change our thoughts on this, we will continue to see an erosion that eventually won’t be correctable. Time is certainly running out—I don’t think we are there yet, but we are getting close.

Rich Hoffman

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Elon Musk Doesn’t Give a Damn About Your Degree

This was a very interesting interview with Elon Musk about college degrees and the value of them. Its important to note due to the extraordinary costs of college that obtaining a degree is not an indicator of exceptional ability. It might make whomever has a college degree attractive to an employer looking for someone who won’t rock the boat and will give predictable results as an employee. But having the degree won’t by itself produce an employee who will change the world. Exceptional ability can’t be bought and to a large degree that has been the message. That college will produce better employees than those without a degree, and that simply isn’t true. Not in any way. People who are driven and are accomplished don’t need a college degree and its interesting that Musk who employs lots of technical people in his companies is willing to take a position on college, but I agree with him. To my experience a college degree holds people back, it doesn’t help them and is certainly an element to consider when the cost of obtaining one is so incredibly high.

Nobody wants to hear that all the hard work and money they spent on a college degree was a waste. Of course it’s going to hurt the feelings of the people who have a degree to hear that the world really doesn’t value them. But really the whole concept goes back to the Wizard of Oz story were at the end the main characters were given pieces of paper stating that they had a brain, or a heart and were therefore valuable to society. The suggestion that the college experience would take a nobody and make them into somebody is a falsehood that our governments have essentially perpetuated to keep everyone in a compliant culture. The person who works hard for the sake of discovery and self-preservation is more likely to be that exceptional employee that everyone is looking for.

But then again, not everyone is looking for an exceptional employee. Elon Musk certainly is, otherwise Tesla and Space X wouldn’t be such market drivers in modern science. But many companies, especially those with rigid cultures well established don’t want some crazy hard worker coming along that wants to change the world. They may well be looking for the drunk, the loser, the whore that embarrassed themselves in college so that they will fit well into their current culture of complacency. That after all is the big secret that most employers are dealing with. While the ownership and board may want the exceptional results that drive up value, the management does not. What most work cultures want is compliance and nothing more and for that, the college degree is perfect for them.

Elon Musk of course is coming from the perspective of a change agent in the technical fields. The proof is in cultures that are very top heavy in college graduates but are lacking in technical innovation. Take China for instance, a very compliant culture where education structure is well understood. There is a reason they have to steal so much technology from countries like the United States. That is what students learn in college, to copy what the professor instructs them, but they don’t learn to think. The college graduate is typically good at unpacking something that is already known, but they can’t invent it from scratch. That is fine if the results desired are not ambitious. But if the desire is to always push for innovation, then more of a gunslinger approach is needed, an individual who is quick on their feet, willing to take risks and push forward ideas and to explore their potentials fearlessly. In the United States we have great experience with this kind of business approach and many of the best in our entrepreneurial fields have not obtained success through college.

In truth colleges are filled with those who can’t do things in real life, that’s why they seek the safety of the university system to obtain employment. What they sell to potential students is simply the boon of a typical snake oil salesman. They are selling Dumbo’s feather to give false confidence into their recipients making them think that it is the feather that makes them fly, not their own ears. By the time a student leaves a four year degree, or a six, the world has changed yet again and they enter the workplace a half a decade behind the cutting edge trends. The ones who are on those trends are the bold and ambitious who get there the old-fashioned way, through tenacity and lots, and lots of hard work. You can’t fake success and you certainly can’t buy your way into it.

People are more willing to talk about the failures of the college system now than they were just a few years ago. Given the amount of college graduates that we have now, and the cost of college to begin with, we should all be beaming with intelligence. I have the advantage of watching my two daughters’ generation who just came out of this age. Many of their friends, a few that come to mind have been going to college for over a decade, have actually regressed intellectually. They entered their college years unfocused and changed their majors many times over and simply went because their parents told them to. So much of the money spent was to discover themselves and sure enough, in college there were many liberal professors there to show them the ways to liberalism and socialism. When my wife and I went we didn’t have a good time. I hated every stinking minute of it, because it was obvious to me that the whole thing was a scam. And with my wife, she went round and round with her professors who were far more interested in getting her to read the Quran and to re-write the history of the Revolutionary War to include the crime of slavery as the biggest concern instead of the liberty and independence of all people, which is what the war was all about. I was very offended personally by this activism. It’s not that learning about other cultures is a problem with me. Quite the opposite, there are probably few people out there who care about other cultures as much as I do. What I didn’t like about the college experience is that they were actively putting down American culture and that pissed me off 30 years ago and I feel no differently now. Colleges with just a few exceptions are incubators for liberalism and the longer kids spend there, the worse they become.

The most cutting edge of us have known it all along. The rest of the world is coming to it. But college is a scam that sells nothing but air. It’s like buying bottled water when you can get perfectly good water right out of the faucet. They declare that what you are getting in college is better, and cleaner. But water is water, and many of us don’t like the additives that do come in the bottled version. With college we are essentially programming people toward a compliance based political ideology. We aren’t teaching them to think, which an employer like Elon Musk is always on the lookout for. It’s only a matter of time before the need for bold and ambitious people in a marketplace that requires dynamics overrules the desire for compliance-based employees who do what you tell them to do, and nothing more. In the kind of exploding economy that we have now, we don’t have time to wait for students to leave college to enter the marketplace and we certainly don’t have a decade to wait for them to deprogram themselves into being reasonable people again. We need people to learn more things fast and with greater independence, and for that we will never get them in abundance from a college graduate.

Rich Hoffman

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How Game of Thrones got it Wrong: The truth about democracy and nature of power

To say that I was disappointed with the final two episodes of the Game of Thrones would be an understatement. Here they were, the creative minds behind the popular HBO series had set up this really spectacular argument for what generates the nature of power and lust for it only to turn the whole thing into a diatribe for democracy while putting an all seeing eye into the central seat of power. To say that the show missed the mark after essentially 8 years of build up would be an understatement. It took 73 episodes of over an hour each to end with a very cliched metaphor on power that corrupts leaving the ever hopeful and wise character of Daenerys Targaryen to be murdered by the star of the series, Jon Snow. It’s a shame that all those liberal arts majors who work in film, television production, producers and the entertainment media have it all wrong on the nature of power. Shakespeare wrote some good plays on the topic as viewed from his day, but I think we were all hoping that someone noble and good would take the Iron Throne and show how leadership should really look. My thoughts on the Game of Thrones finale are very well represented by Grace in the following video.

This nature that power corrupts is essentially that old sentiment that we all have to provide an excuse for regressing back into the stone age as a civilization and in our entertainment I think it’s safe to say that we all yearn to see our fantasy characters do what real life often fails to give us. Does power have to be corrupt and are we all truly better off in a democracy, where the metaphor didn’t escape me to our current worldly situation. Do we really want cripples and midget philosophers running our world while the bold and brash of us win the wars then are murdered in sleep so that the tag alongs can rule? Is that really a better system? Most of us are not prepared to answer that question, our religions and educations have told us since we could first utter a word that power corrupts and that we should only trust institutions, and at the end of Game of Thrones, that was the conclusion. That the state should be handled by the weak and even the most parasitic while the best always fall to corruption 100% of the time.

I smell a hoax and a line of very bad thinking permeating out of pop culture in quite an audacious way. Ultimately, its just a story, but to us human beings, stories matter. And the trend is that we must walk away from something that usually feels good, like the Game of Thrones and be thrown back to the reality that all people are fallible, and the only protection we have against it is democracy. We don’t want to break the wheel; we want to stay on it perpetually. Even though we may be miserable on it, we are terrified to break from it and its sad that our entertainment culture feels that to be authentic to their art, that they must preserve the wheel.

After all, isn’t that why so many Democrats are upset that Donald Trump won the election for President in 2016. In the United States, we decided to break the wheel and so far, so good, the old myths about everyone who gains power becoming corrupted is being tossed out of the window. Donald Trump is no Daenerys Targaryen going crazy and killing people for no reason, even though her whole life up to that point she behaved nobly in pretty much every situation. We have taught ourselves that such a person doesn’t exist and that when they touch power, they all fall. That was the theme of the Lord of the Rings stories, that the ring corrupted everyone. And that is the story here, that the very nature of an Iron Throne to rule everyone corrupted all who sat on it without exception. But why? An answer is never given, we are just supposed to accept that power corrupts. End of story.

And at the end of the show I couldn’t help but think of Donald Trump. Heroes are supposed to do like Jon Snow and retreat from the world and hide somewhere until danger is about. At that time and those times only, the stragglers are to rule. The stories of corruption are spread by them to keep the best among us hiding away from the seats of power so that there isn’t any competition for the thrones they seek. The people of a democracy who end up in charge then start wars that need people like Jon Snow and they are happy to let them fight. They will even give them awards for their valor on the battlefield. But the manipulators of justice hope in the back of their minds that the heroes will die in combat so that they won’t challenge their lust for power. That was the message of the Game of Thrones in the end and I think most people watching were insulted because they see the scam that is going on. They may not be the powerful warriors themselves that they would like to be, but they’d like to think that we live in a world where such people can exist. Game of Thrones said with a fist punch into the dirt that “NO” the levers of the world belong to the least capable, and here’s why. Because power always corrupts, even the incorruptible Daenerys Targaryen. Not even she could stand up to its powerful call. And the hero that slew her was imprisoned and cast away until needed again. The people really in charge are the ones playing the games quietly while everyone else was fighting.

Yeah, the Game of Thrones was a major let down. And it shows just why the Hollywood types who are mostly Democrats hate the Trump presidency. They assumed that he would sit in the Oval Office and become corrupted into a mad king, that’s what they told us anyway. Instead it was all the Tyrion Lannisters and Bran Starks in the media, the Democrat Party, and the FBI who orchestrated an insurrection against him without any provocation to their suspicions but what they believe themselves about power, that it corrupts all individuals. The only protection any of us have is that of institutional controls governed by the most manipulative of us all in the form of a democracy while the heroes hide in wait to be called upon not by their own action, but for the needs of the many.

In my experience power is not for everyone. But its not for us to surrender ourselves to a democracy run by idiots either. Some people have it, and some don’t, and just because they get power, they aren’t doomed to fall like Daenerys Targaryen did, or Gollum from Lord of the Rings. We tell the stories about our culture that we most believe and this concept of how power comes about and what it does to people is as old as time. But I don’t think we have through art fully understood what it is or why its even needed. And we hope often that the next great stories that come along can put their arms around it and match our hopes and dreams. After all that time we all hoped that the Game of Thrones would unpack that mystery and tell us that power can be captured and wielded justly. Like we are seeing with the presidency of Donald Trump. But in the end they let us down with just another piece of crap concept taken straight out of the pages of the middle ages. The message that power corrupts, when in the back of our minds we hope not and yearn to see an example where it doesn’t.

Rich Hoffman

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The Poker in Red Dead Redemption 2 Online is Great!

I had a nice talk with a friend recently while we were reflecting on the Tea Party days and the direction of today’s youth. By normal visual standards, the socialized instruction in public schools, and PC counterculture has everyone strapped to the body of Moby Dick at the end of that old story. And the drug use that has permeated everything that young people do, by conventional measure things look pretty hopeless. But two things happened over the weekend that I continue to be impressed with and they will certainly have an impact on how our culture is measured.

The first was a visit to Kings Island where the Festhaus was hosting a professional video game tournament. The place was packed to the brim and young people were everywhere and were quite happy competing on stage against each other with popular titles like Fortnite, and other video games that are part of a culture a lot of people over 30 don’t even understand. As I watched the activity I was thinking of a report that friend had said to me about Mason schools going even further into removing competitive events and statues from their public school—the everyone gets a trophy or none of them do type of thinking—and it was obvious that the politics might be moving in that direction. But the video game culture gets it. There are more opportunities for competition there than when I was a kid. Traditional sports are not the only ways to compete in life, or to learn to. Video games are all about capitalism and they are the preferred medium of young people’s entertainment experiences.

For instance, one of my favorite video games not just of last year, but ever is Red Dead Redemption 2. When that game first came out I was so excited about it that I took a week off work to play it, and for me it was a kind of vacation. It’s a western by Rockstar Games and for me it was like going to the West World of the popular HBO series. These video games are so immersive that they begin to simulate reality. They are different than the passive experience of movies so their impact on culture is something we just aren’t measuring yet. But in the case of Red Dead Redemption 2, it sold 24 million copies in just three days which amassed $725 million, and is still climbing. The earnings report for these video game companies are actually higher than many movie and television studios. Take-Two which is involved in Red Dead Redemption reported a Fiscal Year 2019 earnings report confirming so far $2.66 billion. Those are Disney type of numbers so this is not a market of entertainment that is obscure by any measure.

Red Dead Redemption 2 came out in October of 2018 and I played it several times a week through the turn of the year. I spent about a hundred hours playing it on story mode then I played the Beta development mode for the Online portion of the game. I had to capitalize that because their online concept for the game is a thing of itself. It’s quite an extraordinary attempt at hosting a very brutal and capitalist natured arena. In that meeting with the same friend we reflected on the near elimination of dodgeball from our society deeming it politically toxic. Dodgeball for us when we were kids was something that happened every day. Well for the kids of today, its these online arenas. A great video game must at least have online content where players can compete against each other in player versus player situations which are much more intense than dodgeball. The biggest difference is that one is virtual while the other was physical. But the mentality is the same.

I played the Beta for a while but I couldn’t give the game the kind of time it demanded to be good in that mode so I backed off and moved on to other things. Well, this past weekend Rockstar Games finally finished with their Online offering for Red Dead 2 and put it up on their latest update, which meant the official game went live, around six months or so after the original release, which of course keeps people buying copies of the game and keeping it going which is something to say about how video games tell their stories, over much longer periods of time than movies or other forms of entertainment. So I played the game again to see how things were going and was very happy and surprised to learn that the many bars of gold that I had during the Beta phase and all the money I earned carried over into the official release. And also I was very happy to learn that they had opened up the ability to play poker with other live players which is really the purpose of me writing this article. I was immensely pleased with the way the game was set up and I spent most of the weekend playing just that game mode.

I would not call myself a gambler or even a card player the way that people think of such things. I’m not a drinker, a womanizer or any of the things that are associated with the game of playing poker, which in my understanding of history has been advanced by socialists to attempt to demean the games of the Western frontier so that culturally people would be inspired to move away from those activities, so not to celebrate them. But I do love poker. I love watching it. I love playing it. And I love its history as an American game developed in the frontier days of New Orleans and spreading westward with the gunfighter culture. The game and the mind of gunfighting in the American West are synonymous and I love it for that attribute. Playing poker is a fun game that is uniquely very American, and I love it and including it so prominently in the online version of Red Dead Redemption was a technical feat that really impressed me.

Playing poker was part of the original game, the story mode as they call it these days. And I enjoyed it immensely. I am not the kind of guy who likes to gamble money so I’m not a guy who enjoys hanging out in casinos at all. But I do enjoy the function of the game and the way its played so just gambling the chips is enough for me. I like the way poker chips feel in my hands and how they are used strategically to win or lose the game. It’s a very fascinating game and I spent many, many hours playing it against NPCs in the story mode. But having an online poker game is a whole separate situation. You have random players always coming and going and everyone has to play their hand and getting all that rolled into a fluid video game experience is difficult. The way that Rockstar set up their poker games in actual saloons in their various towns and cities was visually stunning and functionally very satisfying. I played a lot of poker over the weekend and I didn’t even have to leave my home.

As I played and saw how many people were playing the Online Red Dead Redemption 2 game, from poker to all the PVP combat that is involved it was obvious to me that this is where the world is at. Many kids wouldn’t even learn how to play poker if not for a game like this, or would they learn anything about westerns since they’ve been nearly eradicated from American culture. But in the world of video games, the western is alive and well and millions of young people are participating in that world and enjoying it. And with billions of dollars at stake in this growing industry, I don’t think anything that is politically underway to dismantle the American way of life is going to stick. Capitalism is alive and well, especially in the saloons and towns of Red Dead Redemption 2.

Rich Hoffman

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Politics and the Banned Books of the Bible

I think the most interesting thing in the world is not how we all evolved out of some single celled creature swimming in the sea, or were molded literally out of dirt by a god and cattle prodded into existence while mating with our brothers and sisters, but in why mankind has a perpetual need to regress. And that is the trend if you look back over the many years to the beginnings of things. For instance, even while we may marvel as I have at the antics at Stonehenge and Avebury in England the Egyptians and Sumerians were conducting life not so different from our modern day needs and desires in America. Then visiting those same places today, the Middle East has not progressed from accomplishment to accomplishment always building higher, but is now considerably less sophisticated and much less economically viable. Places around the world do not evolve at the same rate, while one part of it may be on the cutting edge of technology the other parts of it has clans of rock throwers and superstitious psychotics sacrificing their first born daughters to some gods hoping to make it rain so they don’t all starve to death.

Then there is the problem as to why we desire to hide that reality from ourselves behind veils of culture, religion, economics, even history. One thing that has always really bothered me about the Bible in the Christian tradition is that the book was essentially conceived around 100 AD, a century after Christ had died. A few hundred years after that the Roman emperor Constantine wanted to unite his empire using Christianity as the glue so the first Bibles were organized and over the next several hundred years scriptural scholars decided what books to put in the Bible and which ones to leave out. For instance in the days of Jesus he was known to have been well versed with scripture, but what scripture are we talking about if the nature of the Christian religion in the New Testament is all about him. The Old Testament had been picked through by so many “authorities” that it really doesn’t hold any historical reference any longer. The scripture that Jesus had studied is obviously long, long gone. There is a long section of Biblical history that is just ignored, especially if you go back and read the banned books of the Bible, the Book of Jasher, the Book of Enoch, and the Book of Jubilees.

For all we know the ancient books of the Bible were passed down for millenniums and mankind had been coming and going for all that time scratching at the surface of civilization while continued pockets of failures went back to being spear chuckers and forgetting about the massive ziggurats they had built with great effort to satisfy somebody somewhere. That span of time could have been three of four thousand years to tens of thousands of years. Yet if you go to the National Geographic Museum in Washington D.C. they will insist that all over the world we all developed as hunters, then planters, then city builders to where we are today. But then using modern science to peer back under the veil of history we see that all over the world, especially in regions today that we might call “third world” we see the evidence for massive lost civilizations that just don’t follow that assumption. All along the Amazon River we see evidence of major cities buried under the jungle canopy waiting to tell us their stories that occurred long before the Inca were even thinking of building their empire in South America.

We are learning that the Maya were much older and much bigger than we ever thought they were. What we know about all these cultures is really only captured in stone and stories. How much truth is there in the myths of all world cultures and how much of it is made up fantasy to represent metaphorically a need that minds had, like the modern myth of Star Wars. There are deep human needs in most mythologies that are revealed in those stories, but how much of them are truth and how much based on desire? All we really have are guesses and deduction from looking at some pottery and making assumptions based on our modern life. How many Göbekli Tepe temples are there buried under a hill in Turkey out there all through the Middle East and extending into Asia, even North America? The date for that location is well accepted now by mainstream science to extend back to the 10th millennium BCE which would indicate that life there was an advanced culture in the area of the Biblical regions well before the Temple of Solomon was built, or the City of David had laid its first stone. We tend to walk the streets of Jerusalem and think of the Old City as…..old. But when you consider the evidence of Göbekli Tepe as being five to perhaps even ten thousand years older it makes you wonder how many other places around the world might view Göbekli Tepeas the newcomer.

I grew up with Bible study, my family attended church often and I enjoyed learning about religion in the Christian context but as I grew older I started studying comparative religion and wondering about how so many different versions of the same stories percolated out into our nation building. Then I couldn’t help but wonder how much of our myths and legends were actually true, how much of the tall tails were in all actuality laced with fact. And by just a casual observance you learn really quick that most of the governments of the world do not want to know the truth. And they will actually use violence to keep anybody from discovering our true historical context to the distant past. Every culture wants to think they are the first to arrive at some grand conclusion and are therefor the authority to follow. But in reality, they are just the latest, many have tried before and that will continue well into the future. My question is and remains, how do we stop the cycle?

I have some pretty good ideas on the matter, and I have my thoughts on the past and the future that I have discussed in some detail. My interest in politics and economics have spawned off this basic question as to why societies rise and fall so often and unlearn everything they worked so hard to develop. Is this the first time for instance that a world culture has developed the means to leave the planet and head to space? I don’t think so. In the politics of Democrats for instance I hear in them a deep yearning to crawl back into the cave and to paint images of a deer hunt onto the dark walls of Lascaux. Even among most Republicans is the desire to use capitalism to advance mankind into a hopeful future of discovery and triumph, but while hanging on to parts of Biblical history that insist they were the first and only attempts at civilization and that we not deviate from the pages of a book built by the Roman Empire to control their territories. To my study nobody really wants to “get it” and that is the biggest mystery of all, and something that deserves some consideration. Because in that answer is a treasure trove of understanding that holds a key we all could benefit from. And it only takes a little courage to unlock.

Rich Hoffman

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Why Marijuana is so Devastating to Any Human Culture

Regarding this marijuana dispensary that is opening in Lebanon, Ohio and the sentiment in the city of Cincinnati to decriminalize pot, that is not a victory. It is simply yielding to the pull of below the line thinking and the lazy desires of the masses to erode away expectations so that they don’t feel so bad about themselves. That is the overall trend of the average pot user, to hide in the shadows and to escape the pressure of expectation which drives all of civilization forward. To answer Chris Smitherman’s comment about the sensibility of continued criminalization of marijuana, the value system that is against pot use is the same one that advances our society in every way, it’s a standard that the human race requires to develop. Saying no to pot and all drugs really is saying yes to civilization and its growth. But you can’t have both. Pot advocates will point to history and say the Egyptians used drugs, that Shakespeare used even marijuana to evoke his literary classics, but I say, where are they now? If you want a society that works and advances, you can’t have a society that endorses drug use. The two just don’t go together and it forces us to make a choice. In a nutshell, that is why I’m against drug use and advocate for their continued criminalization.

Over the last couple of years, I have really developed a respect for the game of golf and baseball. Its not that I have time for it now, but golf is a game that takes time to play and I like the above the line nature of it. Often at courses there are rules that players must have collars on their shirts and even that their shirts must be tucked in. What you don’t see typically on a golf course are a bunch of losers smoking pot. The same in baseball to a large extent. People aren’t going to be smoking a lot of pot and expect to hit a 95-mph baseball. And in golf, drugs and accuracy just aren’t conducive to one another. I like those sports because they force people to rise up to their natures rather than to bow down to their below the line animal sentiments.

When I was younger and the concept of even being able to play golf was a far-off objective, because I couldn’t afford to spend the money to play the game, and I certainly didn’t have the free time to play. For the first thirty years of my adult life I literally worked 7 days a week, so I didn’t have any four hour windows to play such a game. But in the back of my mind I always enjoyed the above the line nature of the game, the well-tended landscaping. The good dress of the players and participants. I did marry a country club girl in the heyday of the Beckett Ridge Country Club. In fact our wedding reception was held at the club as her parents were members of good standing back then. But I was always a bit of a rebel and always wanted to do my own thing. Rules weren’t then and still aren’t attractive, but I do appreciate as a baseline a standard of behavior that sets goals high and forces others to live up to them.

In that regard as society has shown less respect for a value system, to me golf courses and country clubs are much more appealing than they used to be for me. And probably because I’m in a period of my life where I can actually participate, that likely is the biggest reason. And I would argue that the same trend trajectory is present in pot advocate supporters, only in reverse. They look at their lives and see where they have made all these mistakes along the way and they know, or at least feel, that they will never be able to get into a country club, or be able to play golf with some friends and they instead advocate for the removal of standards so that they don’t have to feel so bad about themselves. That pot facility in Lebanon is supposed to be a medical marijuana dispensary that requires a doctor’s prescription. But drug users know they can get a glaucoma diagnosis from any second-rate doctor and they are all set to buy. But to even get the drugs it encourages people to yield to their weaknesses rather than overcoming them and that is the source of the whole marijuana debate. Even if we take away the pot smoke and just look at the consumption of mariuman in any way for pain relief, what we are doing is yielding to our weaknesses and seeking a below the line judgment to hide behind, rather than forcing ourselves to do better and work harder at life. That is the ultimate price of any society that embraces drugs to cut away the tensions of their lives. Tensions are created by expectation. Not having the ability to manage those expectations is the larger social problem that is worsened by the use of pot.

The more that our society rejects standards of good conduct, the more my rebellious side wants to embrace those standards so these days the uppity trends of golf are very appealing as opposed to the grungy, dirty freaks of below the line counterculture. When people make fun of the standards that are quite common in golf, what they are really saying is that they are too lazy to live up to them so they’d rather hide behind excuses to not participate because they fear they will never measure up to the standard. And pot helps them hide that fear through intoxication and social stigma. So to get back to the question, what does it hurt if people in Cincinnati are carrying around bags of pot? Well, it accepts a lower standard in our culture which will ultimately destroy it. Its one thing to have laws on the books and to not enforce them because there is no jail space and the cops don’t really have the heart to do so. But decriminalizing it means that the standard is ripped away and that society can then accept the below the line behavioral target. And that is where things literally fall apart.

I was listening to 96 Rock this morning and they were very excited about the opening of the Lebanon medical marijuana dispensary. Their reaction to it was relief because they will admit that they aren’t the brightest tacks in the box. And as musical rock advocates they have no ambition in life to be anything great, they don’t want to invent the next boon that saves mankind from its perpetual quest to always regress along the Vico Cycle. In a world of standards, they are OK with saying to it, we are the losers, get used to it. But with the legalization of pot, suddenly that stigma is removed for them and they are now in the mainstream. And they find they are enjoying that, because the standard of behavior has been removed and now anybody can join. That is what happens to failing country clubs when they relax their dress codes and suddenly let anybody play under any conditions. The club will go out of business quickly thereafter. Standards are what bring value to society. Without those standards, everything is in retreat and that is why marijuana or even medical marijuana is a sign of a society on the decline. That that is all the argument that is needed about why decriminalization is such a travesty.

Rich Hoffman

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Nobody But Losers Want to Have Sex with Alyssa Milano

It’s hard to believe, but I think we can all agree that her sex strike against the new anti-abortion bill in Georgia is a step in the right direction. After all, if women really want to control reproductive rights, they should do as Alyssa Milano suggested, just don’t have sex. That’s how you don’t get pregnant and end up in a situation where abortions are even a consideration. The female rights that abortion activists are after are reckless sex with no consequences ending up in a decision to choose death over commitment. And yes, it is that simple. Yet Hollywood and its pretentious actors and producers thought for a second that they would leverage Georgia into abandoning their anti-abortion bill following states like Ohio in standing for life. Alabama followed with their own version which makes it a felony for doctors in the state to perform abortions in all cases, with the only exception being when the life of the mother is threatened.

The tough talk lasted for a few hours but once production companies had to realize what was at stake, the 30% tax credits that Georgia gives to production companies to film there, business and logic took precedence over emotional vitriol. There weren’t many takers for the proposed boycott, and we can all see where this is going. These new bills will be challenged in court and Roe v. Wade is going to get a second look, and will likely be overturned, as it should have always been. Abortion is murder and it is rather astonishing that these high profile actors and entertainers could even think to stand against the tide of half the nation who is clearly against abortion, and would still drop money to watch movies of these radicals at the local theater, or on Netflix.

The insanity that abortion is even considered a women’s right is the first problem. It paints all women as murderers just so that they can have reckless sexual relationships and cheapens all life without even the considerations of death in the mix. And of course not all women are such crazy supporters of this feminist issue. The true ugliness of the advocates can’t be avoided and climaxed its lunacy when Alyssa Milano suggested her sex strike. What kind of threat is that, does she really think that people are lining up to have sex with her that she has leverage to shape law and order? Remember the article presented here where just before the Trump election Madonna offered free oral sex to anybody who voted for Hillary Clinton. These people are crazy, these actresses assume too much to think that their industry of entertainment can withstand the stigma they’ve attached to themselves. Championing the right to murder life is not a good business model. Just a bit of friendly advice.

For perspective the latest Avenger movies by Disney are shot in Georgia specifically the Atlanta region and have produced roughly $9.5 billion in economic impact a year. The tax subsidy is much lower than that as far as a cost, so the credit for Georgia is obvious. But it is the production companies saving that 30% off the top who can then make such big productions with their increasing budget demands who benefit. There is a reason Hollywood is moving to Georgia, they are running from the high taxes of California, which has been going on for many years now. The power of Hollywood is a lot like their productions, only in sets and memories, not in practice. Wilshire Blvd isn’t what it used to be, neither is Beverly Hills. The power of fame only had an impact when people wanted the product that came with the fame and those days are long over. While a big movie like Avengers: Endgame had a production budget of over $300 million it would have cost a lot more without the tax credit making it impossible to put all those stars into a film with their exploding union scale costs. Companies like Disney really have no other choice but to do business with Georgia. Obviously, these actors don’t know much about economics.

But then to expect big production companies like those of J.J. Abrams and Disney to put their name next to abortion as a protest is a suicide task. Sure, Disney and Abrams are big time liberals these days, but they know their audiences are not radical leftists. Many of them are people who stand against abortion rather passionately and once they get a whiff of production companies making themselves activists for abortion, they will lose those customers. And that is the most sobering statistic of them all, that people won’t support Hollywood if Hollywood doesn’t represent the box office contributors. The answer to the question does Hollywood make culture or does culture make Hollywood is rather obvious. It all comes down to where and what people are willing to spend money on. People will not consume a product if they feel it doesn’t represent them even in an entertaining way. And nobody really wants to have sex with Alyssa Milano.

We all know that the radical left senses that abortion is on its way to becoming criminalized, as it should have been for years. They knew when America elected Donald Trump that changes were coming which is why they freaked out and continue to do so. Now states are behaving the way they wanted to all along and are passing these anti-abortion measures so they can clean themselves of that vile state sponsored murder, and who could blame them? It was insane leftist activism that brought Roe v. Wade to us not that long ago, along with legalized pot, and socialism taught in our public schools and the bet was that America would change and yield to the pressure. But what happened was that traditional values went underground and stayed there until the pendulum swung the other way, which it is doing now. And the leftists who sipped their wine and engaged in their whoring parties and reckless lifestyles gambled that people would follow them into the gates of Hell itself. But that didn’t happen.

In order for a boycott to work, people have to want the product so badly that the extortion will have some weight in the lost product. However, in truth, everyone has their own production company these days with their iPhones and YouTube that the Hollywood product has to put out $300 million budgeted pictures just to get people’s attention, because there are so many other options these days. There are thousands of Alyssa Milanos working as waitresses and store clerks all across the world, and a good producer could make a star out of any one of them. There is nothing special about her or any of the Hollywood stars demanding Georgia support abortion or else. Or else what? Actors are paid to say what people tell them to and for some stupid reason many of them have adopted these liberal views just so that they could stay employed in Hollywood. Only Hollywood isn’t in Hollywood anymore. It’s in the conservative state of Georgia and that is a reality they all need to come to terms with.

Rich Hoffman

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Ohio House Members Brigid Kelly and Jessica Miranda Fail to Identify the Real Cause of School Shootings

I would say that we have every right to be upset by the proposed legislation by a couple of Ohio House lawmakers who are so delusional by current circumstances to even think that they have the right or ability to lock up guns in the home to prevent school shootings. Guns have been a part of American culture since its inception over 200 years ago and it has only been very recently that maniacs have taken to the public to present themselves as mass menaces. To blame the gun is lazy, and purely political since it is the aim of progressives to rid society of guns so that their great coup of civilization can take place among the defenseless. Rather the real culprit for the cause of this sudden violence is persisting without comment and that should concern us all much, much more. The details of this situation can be witnessed from the WCPO report shown below along with the supporting links.

COLUMBUS — A pair of Ohio lawmakers from the Tri-State introduced legislation in the Ohio House requiring gun owners in the state to keep firearms in “safe storage, equipped with a tamper-resistant lock” if there are children in the home, according to a news release.

The Child Access Prevention law was introduced by State Rep. Brigid Kelly, a Cincinnati Democrat, and State Rep. Jessica Miranda, a Forest Park Democrat, this week.

The state representatives cite a 2018 study from Giffords Law Center which found 4.6 million minors live in U.S. homes with at least one loaded, unlocked firearm.

https://www.wcpo.com/news/state/state-ohio/local-lawmakers-propose-safe-storage-gun-law-in-ohio

https://healthimpactnews.com/2018/school-shootings-psychotropic-drug-use-by-school-shooters-merits-federal-investigation/

https://poppot.org/2018/07/03/marijuana-violence-know-connection/

The truth of the matter is its not guns that are the problem, but the sudden desire by troubled people to inflict so much pain and death on innocent people that must be investigated. If the guns are locked up, such deranged people will find some other means of killing lots of people, like cars, pipe bombs, or even poison. Locking up guns might make these panicky female legislators feel like they are being good moms to the stewards of Ohio, but in all reality, the are just being panicky moms putting bicycle helmets on their kids who just want to ride their bikes in the driveway. Locking up guns or dealing with guns in any way doesn’t even come close to solving the problem. The real problem is much more serious and is something nobody wants to talk about, which most of the recent mass shooters have in common, they are all pot smokers, and in many cases heavy users at that.

A path to the mass evidence that is available that pot and school shooters are synonymous can be found at the links provided, but the short of it is this, several years ago we started this practice for treating children for ADHD and other hyperactive disorders. The term disorder was an excuse to give many sudden psychiatrists something to do with all their studies since they had gone to college, obtained a useless degree and needed to justify all their hard work into a science that was still in its infancy. It was also an excuse to get pharmaceutical companies a steady revenue stream which made politicians happy because it paved the way for big donations to their campaigns, and it provided good jobs to people working in the industry. The meds as we called them were a new thing for the American child and it was the teachers who set the standard thinking purely of their need to stabilize the temperament of their classrooms since in reality they were not there to teach kids, but to be expensive baby sitters of 26 or so other students whom they simply wanted to be quit. Not to put it too bluntly for the uninitiated, but those are the facts. In our present time we have millions of kids addicted to their “meds” which now has taught their brains to rely on for their emotional temperament that they simply can’t function without.

An examination into many of the recent school shooters in the United States will show that the shooters were either coming down off their medications or they were not getting them in the amounts their brains had become accustomed. Then, as we have discussed in a recent article, there is a direct correlation between marijuana and psychiatric disorder. Of course, not everyone is so affected but for those who are already a little on the crazy side putting the dangerous THCs that come from marijuana into the brain of such people is an assured destruction of intellect and the worst of human nature is bound to reveal itself. Most of the recent mass shooters in North America had a history of smoking pot which obviously unleashed their already cryptic insecurities and exacerbated them into a public menace.

It used to be that guns were all over a house of just about any American family, but kids didn’t play with them because they were taught not to by kind and loving parents. It was also those same parents who listened to their complaining children who might indicate that they were depressed, and the parents would bluntly tell them, “what do you have to be depressed about, you’re a child. Go play outside.” They didn’t put them on all these crazy psychotic drugs that just numbed the growing minds but failed to deal with the real problems, that the children were growing up in broken families where the divorce rate was too high, or that both mom and dad were too busy working to pay them any attention. Modern parents can’t shoulder the responsibility for what they have done to destroy the lives of their children before they ever turned 18. Another look at all the shooters will show that they didn’t’ come from happy homes, but dysfunctional ones, which is sad to say, is most of them these days.

No, guns were not and will not be the problem in future school shootings. The real issue is that young people feel that mass murder is even an option at all. And so long as we fail to understand that legalizing pot in any way will likely produce out of every 100 users a few nut cases who are prone to mass murder, then we are kidding ourselves and these two guilt driven mothers in the Ohio legislature should know better. But instead of dealing with the real problem they are actually putting more kids at risk and increasing the occurrences for such vile circumstances to appear again in the form of a school shooting. The problem is in our lack of love given to our children and to replace that need for attention with psychotic drugs both legal and illegal. Once the growing mind stops relying on itself to balance out emotions and thoughts, and relies on these drugs for balance trouble is not far behind. Most of the kids won’t become mass murderers they may just sit quietly in a Starbucks on their lap tops with their black fingernails questioning their sexuality because that is the new fashion of our day thanks to the public education system. But a small percentage will and that is what we all must be concerned about. Locking up guns won’t solve that problem. Because we haven’t dealt with the cause of the problem which is parental structure, social failure and drugs.

Rich Hoffman

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Don’t Let China Scare You

Don’t let them scare you about China. You have to consider dear reader that much of the American media has been bought up by the Chinese or has been influenced greatly by it. Previous administrations had put all their chips on the table that China would overtake the American economy as a communist country and that they would be running us all, so the bootlicking started decades ago. But in truth, China depends almost entirely on the United States for their economic sustenance, and President Trump knows it. The current tariff war as many are calling it is simply a one-sided affair and Trump is calling the Chinese bluff. China is projecting a GDP growth in 2019 of 6.6% roughly. With Trump’s tariffs that growth will be much lower and that leverage means everything in this conflict. And the Chinese literally don’t have a leg to stand on.

The Chinese are not ones to bolster about what they will do or brag about their positions so you can tell they are rattled by Trump’s strategy by the way that Wei Jianguo expressed the view of the Chinese government to the South China Morning Post this past Monday when he said, “China will not only act as a kung fu master in response to U.S. tricks, but also as an experienced boxer and can deliver a deadly punch at the end.” He went on to express that China would target parts of the American economy that would hurt the Trump voter base, namely the wheat markets, and corn production along with pork. But the result of all this banter will be that China will be the first to blink because they need what they import from America, especially by way of food. The communist country like all governments who have adopted that position can’t do for themselves, so they are heavily leveraged on imports, which was their weakness all along. However, until Trump came along, nobody had the nerve to call them on it.

It’s a number’s game ultimately. China imports from the United States only about $120 billion which consists of mainly commercial aircraft, soybeans and automobiles. Well, China has made it clear that they are going to build their own planes so that number will go down leaving them to scamper about on how to feed their massive population without the help of American farming, which they won’t be able to do. And they really don’t care about American auto markets, they can get their cars elsewhere so all that they buy from America has already been on the chopping block for a number of years. Meanwhile in American exports of new energy markets that measly $100 billion in goods can easily be found in the growing American markets. Meanwhile in America we have been importing from China $540 billion. Take that a way and there is no way China reaches 6.6% GDP growth this year which is excessively important to them. That is part of the Trump plan of course and why the White House has all the leverage on this matter.

A lot of that $540 billion that is imported could easily be made in America again, items like apparel and footwear, cell phones and computers. $77 billion alone of that figure is just in computer manufacture so if you are looking to create more American jobs, as Trump is, what we aren’t getting from China is going to net American jobs because the necessity for the products are certainly there. With the United States emerging as the global leader in energy exports, we can suddenly command our position in the world which has not yet caught up to the idea. For many decades internal policies that essentially gave away America’s wealth to other countries are being reversed and the miracles of Adam Smith’s capitalism are now being unleashed once again, and more spectacularly than ever before. Does anybody think that Trump doesn’t know what he’s doing with this essentially being election year politics? The Chinese have no leg to stand on and this whole thing will be over well before the election. The American economy probably won’t even notice.

It happened far faster than anybody imagined as the mechanisms were already in place. You could hear that in Bill DeBlasio’s speech the other day in Trump Tower essentially attempting to hang the Green New Deal of repackaged communism around the American economy’s neck, as they have in the past while the communist country of China continues on polluting the world with those same idiots cheerleading them on. In America we have a freedom of expression that allows for dissidents to act that way, but they don’t have a right to destroy America for the rest of us. In China they don’t have such public voices. If someone speaks against the state, they are simply imprisoned or killed. China in the state they are in presently are not the friends of the world. They have been given power through regulation and policy, and they have been attempting to use that power to destroy us all into a kind of Bill DeBlasio world and thankfully Trump has put a stop to it.

The stock market had a sell-off, big deal. It probably will continue throughout the week. As I’ve said before, when other people are panicking, this is the time to buy, so go buy up the losses. The strength of the present American economy has shown that it wants to be at a Dow measure above 26,000 and will return there the moment China capitulates, which they’ll have to. Nobody expects them to like to be being beaten in this way but they simply have no other cards to play. Trump holds them all. They don’t buy much from us, but we buy a lot from them. They need us. We don’t need them. That is the bottom line. Once panicky investors realize that China has no teeth, they won’t be afraid of the bark which is all they have at this point.

Ultimately it will be the limits of an overly managed society in communism that will stop the economic growth of China. Their people are overall poor per capita, and they lack intellectual aptitude. That’s not to say that they aren’t smart, but as we know in all socialist and communist societies people don’t do things for the state, they do things to enrich themselves. When you take away the profit motive, creative thought toward industry stops and over reliance on other cultures permeate the politics. That was fine with China so long as the world was steering all countries in their direction through crippling environmental policies and taxation. But Trump has called that bluff and he has two aces and there is a third in the “river.” The American economy is now an exporter of energy, the best in the world. That replaces the lost revenue that China would have given us in trade. The Chinese care more about the statistics of their economic growth than they do of the realities of feeding their own people, so they can’t last long in a trade dispute. And we knew China was cutting what they were going to buy from America anyway, especially in commercial plane manufacture, so why not pull the trigger on it now as opposed to when they were actually on their feet? Why give them time to cut their orders from Boeing? The answer is, there is no reason to wait. Let the trade war begin now, so that Trump can end it before the next election, and the world sees who really knows what’s going on and who has the greatest economy. And it won’t be China.

Rich Hoffman

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“Quality Time” The Art of Invincibility

It’s been a while since I looked at it but my grandkids have discovered an old video of me called “Quality Time” which was a demo reel of some of my whip work from about 15 years ago. While the quality of the video itself certainly isn’t great it was fun to watch it with them again. It was that video that actually did create some opportunities to work in Hollywood a bit and it was fun to reflect upon all those events that were in those videos. I had written a book called The Symposium of Justice so the demo reel was to set up book signings and all the other kinds of activities that go along with publishing a book. But my problem with the book was that I wanted to be the character of Cliffhanger in real life, so what followed these days of bullwhip work for me was doing in real life what I wrote about in the book. I didn’t want to grow up to be one of those pin headed authors who just thought and wrote about things. I wanted to actually do the things I wrote about, so that set my course into the politics that I have been so well known for. Yet again, things do evolve over time and now that I have grandchildren, and they are eager for knowledge of any kind, they are having fun discovering my past, and I’m having fun sharing it with them.

My daughters were in that video as little girls and so is my son in law before he married my oldest daughter. Bullwhips in my family has always been a thing and there was never anything fringe about it. For us it was part of our lifestyle and it was for me a way to encourage my kids about traditional American values. These kinds of things have always meant a lot to me so it was quite a wonderful thing to have my grandkids, all of them, suddenly have this interest in my work with bullwhips over the years and wanting to suddenly learn all they could. My oldest grandson especially is at that age where he’s starting to wonder what kind of person he might become, so he is starting to show a desire to learn bullwhip work. I have a tendency to let people come to their own way in life, but I won’t disguise my happiness that he is showing an interest and asking a lot of questions. He’s already showing great poise in the activity which for any kid is a great thing to learn.

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Firewhips and family time! #bullwhips #westerns #family #life #grandkids #wildwest

A post shared by Rich Hoffman (@overmanwarrior) on May 11, 2019 at 6:09pm PDT

Before my leap into political matters there was a lot of discussion on the family end about getting involved. Our life at the time was film festivals and invites to Hollywood events so why get involved in political activity? Because in doing so it would surely have an impact on my good bullwhip life and the future publication of books I wanted to write. Yet in my mind I had to know that I could be as authentic in real life as the characters I was writing about, otherwise I would feel like a phony. It’s not like I hadn’t been in lots of fights before and I felt I could take on anybody, anywhere, at anytime. And I did have a past with knowing hitmen who killed people for a living. Knowing politicians and corrupt judges who would jail one person for spitting on the sidewalk but let murderers go free only to kill again because they were friends of the political establishment wasn’t enough for me. Many of those people I actually knew in my even wilder days of my late teens ended up in my book The Symposium of Justice. However the lingering thought in my mind was I wanted a real challenge, I wanted to take on an established social system that was behaving as a villain, and to get through it. I always felt my use of bullwhips would carry me through anything, but I had to know for sure.

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Quality time with my grandson #life #nra #family #guns #cowboy

A post shared by Rich Hoffman (@overmanwarrior) on May 11, 2019 at 6:03pm PDT

Happily, I can report that in the 15 years or so since many of the events in that demo reel occurred the whip has never let me down. People often say that a gun can trump a bullwhip in a combat situation but to my experience that just isn’t the case. While everyone knows I am a big advocate of the 2nd Amendment my first love will always be bullwhips. When I have one in my hand I don’t think any person or any group of people can launch a fantasy of attack against me. And that is a great feeling of freedom to have, to be able to function in the world without worrying about the intentions of other people. If you can do two things in life, maintain great intelligence where you can outthink your opponents, and then defend yourself from physical harm when they realize they can’t beat you any other way, then you can be truly free as a person. You can only give this to yourself. No government can give that freedom to you. In the East they have their version of martial arts. In the West we have ours, and I know enough to feel I can make myself invincible to any kind of melee attack. And that is the point in learning those types of things, not so you can go around beating people up, but so that you can gain the freedom of defending yourself.

And that’s the way it should be, I’m now at an age where I have something very valuable to offer young people and I can actually teach it beyond any kind of theory. The attribute that has plagued our societies over the years is this trend to bully people into doing things they don’t want to do, and governments are some of the biggest perpetrators. Prior to 2011 nobody had the stomach to take on the big government labor unions, they would threaten you with physical violence, and complete social castigation. They would vandalize your home, destroy your car, anything they could to bring harm to you if you stood in the way of getting what they wanted. And yes, when I became the face of standing against those activities they did try all those things and I did what I do. I felt I was uniquely positioned to stand up to them, and I am happy to have those stories to tell now as not just a writer’s theory but a practitioners expertise. There is a great freedom in being a master of something that everyone knows they can’t duplicate to use against you.

In that regard it gives me great joy to pass this stuff along to this new generation. Its nice that they are interested but its even better to know that they are learning the art of invincibility in the process. The old stories that there is somebody out there who is always faster, stronger, and better than you are falsehoods. It is possible to be the best and to stay that way. And with that comes a respect that can’t be bought or taken from you no matter how much others want to work to do so. Admittingly, it has been an obsession of mine to put myself in the worst case scenarios possible and see if I still land on my feet. In that video I had accomplished so much up to that point, enough to make a nice demo reel. But I didn’t really want to be just another writer, actor, or celebrity. I wanted to be the real deal. And the benefit of that is that I can honestly tell this new generation how to get through life honestly and without any paralyzing fear, which is the best freedom that there is. I may have traded some fame and fortune for the experience, but believe me, it was very much worth every bit of it.

Rich Hoffman

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