Rich Hoffman's Blog, page 231

We Should Never Legalize Marijuana in Any Way

Here’s the thing and I’ve been saying it for years. But don’t just take my word for it. Read the book by Alex Berenson, who is one of “those” people, a Yale graduate and former New York Times reporter, called Tell Your Children the Truth About Marijuana, Mental Illness, and Violence. There is nothing good about marijuana use or its legalization. Not even the supposed pain relief that can come from it. For such people, use something else, because there is nothing, and I mean nothing good about smoking pot, eating pot or smelling pot. It lowers IQs, it actually contributes to severe psychiatric detriment in a lot of people, and it generally lowers the general output of any society. It is one of the worst things a society could possibly legalize, and it is the business of every man woman and child not to be on some hippie libertarian point of view, but is a direct contributor to any society’s downfall. My position on “pot” has always been clear, but this very good book is the one for our ages. Everyone should read it……………everyone.

When we wonder why there are so many school shootings I would bet all the money in the world that the average school shooter, or any mass shooter for that matter, has had a history of marijuana use. While its true that not every user becomes a detrimental psychopath, there are a percentage of people who do suffer such mental breakdowns after using pot to make the argument that marijuana is a direct contributor to the most severe cases of mental illnesses in our country. And when some loser is sitting around feeling sorry for themselves because they have been picked on by students in a school, or some girl rejected their advancements for mating, and they are smoking a joint while listening to a bunch of depressing “dead head” music then decide they are going to get a gun and start shooting up a classroom somewhere, don’t think for a second that a society that endorses pot use is going to come and take away all our guns to make society safer by eliminating the Second Amendment.

Even for those who don’t become psychopaths while using pot, any sustained use does lower IQs and that is a trait that is clearly seen among our population. Yes the reports have been done on the subject and Berenson did the work of putting them in one place so everyone could read them for themselves. The politics of the matter is that governments have spent themselves into oblivion taking all the tax money they could get legally so they are looking for another revenue stream. And so are get rich quick investors who have signed up to put money into the legalization efforts that are so prominent in our society. Like any drug user they are looking for a quick hit to get more money into their spending pockets. For them its like a consumer with too much credit card dept who takes out another credit card just to by groceries for the week, because all their good money is going to interest. Legalizing pot is the worst thing that could be done because by making it another legal revenue stream to collect taxes on, they are ultimately destroying their good money revenue streams in the future. A society of pot users will not make a state or country’s GDP better, it will get worse, far worse.

There is nothing funny about pot use, or even the recreational use of being stoned at a music festival. It’s all bad stuff. Since it was introduced into our American society primarily during the counterculture movement, America has declined, morally, and economically. While our free market capitalism has hidden the fact from accountants and governments, it is only in the restrictions most countries have economically limited themselves to that has done most of the work in concealing the truth. America could have been doing much better if a major part of our social network was not regular pot users. The lack of social rejection for the product is a direct contributor to our generally poor performance as a country for a number of years now, especially going back into the 1960s. Even my neighbor, the former Speaker of the House, John Boehner is now an advocate of pot. As a former Republican, he would probably still call himself one, but he’s now a lobbyist in Washington for the legalization of the stuff, and people like him don’t want to know what’s in Alex’s book. Because its too inconvenient to those who want the marijuana revenue stream to contribute to their mounting debts, especially in states like Illinois and California. Those recreational marijuana users are not going to go out and start new businesses that contribute positively to the next great GDP contributors. They’re going to be sitting home trying to collect unemployment while laughing at the colors of their room and looking for a bag of Doritos.

And yet we sit around wondering why so many people are getting hooked on opioids and why our general intelligence is lacking in so many categories, and additionally, wonder why mental health has clearly been declining. We have a society that seeks to put kids on any form of drug for conditions like ADD or whatever else a school counselor can think of to make a teacher’s life easier in managing a classroom of kids without having their bored minds lashing out for attention. Just drug them to shut them up is our approach so it should be no surprise that they grow up smoking pot or wanting to. It is really easy for a non-user like me to see in people who are using the drug. The lower IQs are noticeable and that was never the point of public school, to lower intelligence. It was to increase it, but pot only lowers mental ability.

I could go on and on forever on the detriments of marijuana use. And you won’t hear me advocating for alcohol either. I think every attempt at mental impairment is a bad thing to do. But with marijuana there is the additional effects of psychosis that permeate the use. It’s not something we talk about often but we all know people who are just a little bit crazy. Marijuana makes it worse for those people and we aren’t discussing it because in politics they are looking to pot to cover the bottomless pit in taxation that they have created for themselves. That’s ultimately how John Boehner got involved in lobbying for the product. Like any K-Street whore, he is willing to speak on behalf of anybody who pays him. And so is most of the media, especially the entertainment media. However, there is nothing harmless about marijuana. It is bad stuff. I wouldn’t even call it a gateway drug because even if users never moved on to cocaine, or meth, marijuana is bad enough all by itself. In most cases it takes some time to bring about the bad elements, but that doesn’t make it any less deadly. Before I leave you on this subject I would encourage you to read the following little article. Then tell me what you think about the link between mass murderers and pot. While the percentage of people who smoke pot and then turn to psychotic violence is not in the masses, there is enough of an effect to point to the mental illness contributors primarily being evoked by the effects of marijuana use. And that makes it the business of all of us.

https://www.suncommunitynews.com/articles/the-vermont-eagle/shootings-and-thc/

Rich Hoffman

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If Trump Paid Zero in Taxes I would Respect him Even More

It’s interesting how new people come in and out of your life over the years and what they think of you as. A few decades ago if someone said bullwhips, my name was synonymous. Then it was my nickname of “Taxkiller” that carried with it a celebrity status that was inescapable, because of my work in reducing taxes in Ohio in the pre-Trump days of the presidency. And these days its more of a suit and tie relationship that I have that is a strange combination of guns, golf, and grandpaisms. Each decade had its own priorities and people come and go from your life, yet I have always been essentially the same person. But the world and the priorities of living in it do change and people do tend to define their memory of you based on some limiting definitions. In my “Taxkiller” days it was considered taboo to even talk about tax cuts, or in not paying them and I certainly did my part to change that culture for the better. Yet in all honesty, the moral conditions of taxation have always remained the same and the issue has returned to the surface now that congress has no other means of getting at President Trump but through the billionaire’s tax returns.

Paying taxes is like playing golf, which is why that game has sort of evolved into the game of the business person, the goal is to get the lowest score possible. Not the highest. To win at business and in life, you don’t want to over pay for things because to do so you are endorsing the value of it. Paying taxes means essentially that you are endorsing the way government spends money since they are the managing parties involved in the exchange. But we all know that’s not how it is, politicians are not good stewards of money and the only thing they really know to do is to ask for money like some chocolate bar obsessed child in a candy store always asking for more because they spend it like its going out of style. This is a well-known attribute in politics, that politicians do not spend money well, so it is inconceivable for a smart businessperson to throw money at those types of people knowing that the money will just be flushed down the toilet anyway.

What congress is trying to do to President Trump is hold the ridiculous position that there is some kind of moral rule that paying taxes is a duty to country and our system of government. So whatever is in Trump’s tax returns as a billionaire, which probably reflects the way the game is played in business, is to pay as little as possible, just like the game of golf requires the lowest score, the assumption of congress is that because Trump is rich, and because he sits in the executive branch that he is tied to some notion that government be fed tax money in measures of whatever they demand. And especially if you are rich, that a high percentage of that income be tossed to altruistic purposes that are managed by exactly the same kind of stupid people. Either way, the government view on taxes is to feed the machine infinitely and to like it.

My view on these things is that when you pay taxes you are endorsing the behavior of the management handling the money. If you continue giving government money they will grow proportionally. So if you are a small government guy, like I have always been—even from the time that I was a fetus—then paying more in taxes is an abomination. You should always seek to pay as little as possible, no matter how much money you make. I have been very active in the business world for all those decades mentioned above. Before the decade of my bullwhips I was known as something of a very reckless entrepreneur and I had a reputation for doing things that nobody else would even try. I was very young, something like 25 years old at the time—when I was in the Mayor’s office in Cincinnati working out solutions to complicated problems and I learned that the majesty of politics was simply left over garbage from our cultural inheritance from Europe, that it was too expensive and rather useless. The mayor at that time was the very liberal Roxanne Qualls so it didn’t take long for me to realize that all the tax money we would spend on people like her was just wasted anyway, so why should we work so hard only to throw it away on their governments. Not smart, so I learned very early to look at taxes as a waste of money and any intelligent person would always seek to pay as little to that vile system of government as possible.

I would be disappointed if Donald Trump paid too much on his taxes. It doesn’t matter to me that other presidents were elected but first submitted their tax returns. The only standard that measures is to what degree people blindly throw money to government, and very few prior presidents were like Trump, who came straight out of the business world. Measuring the value of a president based on his tax returns is one of the most ridiculous things I’ve ever heard. But in the case of congress it’s the only thing they have left to shoot after all their past efforts have failed against the President. However, and this is how it should be in all aspects of government, more businesspeople should be managing the money sent with taxes because the old system has failed. I didn’t just wake up one day and was known as the “Taxkiller.” My opinions about taxes formed over a very long period of time with great experience on the matter. And my books and other work that have taken me through other reputations were about themes formed while learning about how much waste government actually produces with our hard-earned money. I mean I like roads; I like the idea of an education—certainly not the way it’s done now—and I like police, military and even NASA. But not much else. Government wastes a lot of money and the more you know about the process the sicker you become about it. Any reasonable businessperson would find it reprehensible to consider how the IRS works as a strong arm of government to confiscate private property just to fulfil the spending zeal of the government. It’s a reprehensible process. So in business it is considered smart to pay as little as possible, because in over paying, you are essentially announcing to the world that you don’t know how to manage money. And in business management, that is the name of the game, not to overpay, but to keep costs down.

Who knows what other names I’ll be remembered for in the decades to come, but one thing will always be consistent for me, taxes are bad and inflate a government that I consider to be dangerous due to its size. I am proud to have a president who doesn’t think we should all pay the maximum amount of taxes as possible and that his means of generating revenue is in production. The world is a lot better with Trump in the White House. I don’t care if he paid zero in taxes over his past decades. It would tell me that he is as smart as I think he is. Only an idiot would think otherwise.

Rich Hoffman

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Transgender Politics was the cause of the Colorodo School Shooting–So Why is Anybody Talking about Gun Control?

This is the trend of how we are all supposed to respond to danger. I wish the kid had survived but what he did is the very American thing to do, when a hostile loser with his hair colored oddly and black finger nails stepped into his school classroom to open fire, Kendrick Castillo Joshua Jones, and Brendan Bialy rushed the gunman and stopped the carnage. Castillo was killed, and the other young men took a few bullets, but the carnage was stopped right then and there, as it should always be. And that is the story that should be and will continue to be told. When there is danger, we always need heroes and it was a wonderful thing to see that a few young people in a Colorado school decided not to be victims. Even better, when gun control advocates tried to politicize the event at a vigil held to memorialize the event, students got up and walked out in protest. There is hope in all this tragedy yet.

The killers were a couple of losers that are quite common these days and were obviously inspired by movies to enact what they thought was revenge for being bullied in school themselves. Devon Erickson and his girl friend Maya McKinney referring herself as a himself “Alec” came into the STEM School Highlands Ranch with a gun tucked away in a guitar case meaning to unleash violence. This is something that has been done in several movies that I can think of and was obviously a fantasy of the two kids. I would go on to say that the two attackers were people functioning in the world created by liberal thinking and were just as nuts as the rest of them, but rather than accept that it was they who were imposing themselves on others, it was the fault of everyone else for their continued failures in life so they sought to kill those they disagreed with. It should be noted that Maya McKinney was one of these transgender people that was going from a girl to a boy and felt obviously entitled to make the transition without any kind of social fall out. Obviously that’s not what happened so the result was carnage and violence—not unexpectantly.

For gun control to even become the first thing out of everyone’s mouth was reprehensible. As many have been saying for a long time, violence like this will always happen. What we need are people at the point of the attack who will stop the violence, which was certainly the case at this particular school shooting, and was the situation at the recent California synagogue shooting where a border patrol attendee had been carrying his gun by the Rabbi’s urging. In all those cases and any in the future, the body count will be noticeably different when violence is confronted rather than avoided. More people die when victims run away than when they attack. That is a fact of life. I would go on to say that such behavior should be expected among Americans who are born free and live in a culture that should respect it. I hate to hear that Kendrick Castillo lost his life in the process but on the other hand, what a great life he lived. It’s better to have such a life cut short than to live for the next 50 or 60 years wishing he had done something when the time arrived. What a good kid.

But let’s stick to the real issue, which has nothing to do with gun control, rather the real need we have which is liberalization control. Both the initiators of violence in this case were messed up kids who obviously were taking liberal positions of gender neutrality and attempting to live their lives as promised by those beliefs which were obviously in conflict with the sentiment of the community. We are all told to turn off our sensibilities to these kinds of issues, such as Devon Erickson and his colored hair and finger nails and this Maya McKinney thing who was a girl wanting to be a boy. And they had worked themselves up into such a froth of victimization that they actually wanted to kill their classmates in a school they were soon graduating from. They were the ones putting their sexual preferences out in front of everyone else to accept yet they felt so entitled due to their hurt feelings at not being accepted that they chose to actually kill people who disagreed with them. That sounds an awful lot like the current Democrat party to be honest. Where do we think these kids learned this behavior? It certainly wasn’t the NRA or anybody in the Republican party. Guns didn’t just jump into that guitar case in a “Desperado” fashion to invoke terror on all the people who didn’t like transgender politics thrown into their faces everyday. Most of those kids just wanted to go to school and live their lives. The real villain is a mental health question, but the specificity of the ailment is the feeding of a liberalized view of the world in conflict with a traditional one. And who has been fueling that fire—liberals.

Then when a school shooting occurs everyone is surprised that a person here and there snaps under the pressure and seeks to get revenge on those who persecute them, because those people have been taught that they are victims, not initiators. What was the point of Devon Erickson painting his fingernails black? Was he looking for acceptance or pushing his beliefs onto those around him? And why was this Maya thing so intent to change their sexual identification? I mean in the bedroom it could be a girl or boy in their sexual context, who the hell cares. But she, he, or it wanted to change the way the world looks at such things, so they were looking for social acceptance by pushing themselves onto the environment around them. Who is doing what to whom?

The heart of the matter is not gun control, its liberal politics and more specifically this whole gender neutrality uprising pushed by that sector of the political spectrum. The instigation of violence by the victims of their own fate is the cause of the school violence, not the access to guns. It was in making the two gunman victims in the social spectrum in the first place than their belief that they had a right to punish those who didn’t agree with them. People like the kids who saved many lives by rushing the gunman decided not to be victims of violence and they engaged at the point of the attack. But the cause was the two loser kids themselves, sexually confused young people who decided they were so self-empowered to impose themselves on the world around them that they decided to kill to maintain their illusion. Ultimately they are the result of liberalism. The desire by Democrats to deflect blame is obvious, so they immediately seek gun control as the means to stop such things in the future. But the real answer is to limit the effect liberalism has on young minds, and that more people need to be armed and ready to stop such carnage in the future well before more lives are lost. Because liberals are a part of our world and to maintain their illusions of mental health, they will attack again.

Rich Hoffman

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Why All School Levy Supporters are Stupid

There were a lot of stupid people in Ohio on election day, May 7th 2019, but that shouldn’t surprise anybody. The school districts, which are ran by radical labor unions, count on stupid people to pass their tax increases to support their runaway labor costs, and May ballots always have a lower turnout than fall elections. The stupid people are too stupid to do anything else and they show up while the smart people are off doing other things. So its no surprise that 76% of all school levies in Ohio passed during Tuesday’s election. It’s a known formula that works. But I was happy to see that local schools near me, Lebanon and Milford both rejected their tax increase attempts and it is the why and the margin of victory for the “No” voters that are intriguing and worth analysis.

For those new to school levies and these pages I write upon, Darryl Parks from WLW radio and I have a long-standing term for people who work to pass school levies, that they’re stupid. The reason is that school levies are driven by escalating labor costs that consume most of the budget. Collective bargaining agreements jack up the costs because all employees get paid equally no matter how good they are—their jobs are not merit driven. So, the costs for labor are excessively high and the labor unions essentially take away the school board management of the resources making all public schools messes to manage. The parents with kids in the school don’t care because most of the time they just want the free baby-sitting service. Often, they are too busy with life to care what goes on in the schools so long as someone is watching their kids, so the mess continues into escalating out of control costs. To make matters worse, because children are involved, real estate agents have chained themselves to sales of homes based on the grade of a school district, which is completely a made-up statistic which then shields all the radical labor union activity. These are the same type of elements that have sunk companies like General Motors and the only way that the government schools get away with the whole scam is by throwing constantly more money at the situation with tax increases on property owners. That is why anybody who votes for a school levy is stupid.

But people often settle down once their kids grow up and move out of the house becoming much more reasonable at the voting booth. Once they don’t need that free babysitting service, they tend to vote away from government school support. After all, the product the government schools provide is terrible. I would argue that kids would be better raised in the jungles of South America by monkeys than to attend any public school with a highly liberalized agenda. The monkeys would destroy the mind of young people far less. Once people raise their kids, they tend to become much more conservative with their money and they vote that way. I am proud to say however that I have never supported school levies because for me the education they offered was always a bad product that I couldn’t support.

In Lebanon and Milford, you can see the trend clearly. Both districts are about 10 years into their prime real estate markets for new housing. There are other places in Ohio that have the new growth and likely that is one of the biggest contributors to the school levies that did pass. Many of those homes are in situations where the kids have grown up and away from their community leaving behind the parents who suddenly don’t feel shackled to their local public school, so they care less and less what goes on there. In Milford the tax increase proposal was defeated 57-43, which wasn’t even close even for a May election. And in Lebanon the vote was 56-44 which was ironically almost precisely the same. I would attribute that to the fact that both communities saw their boom surges in the housing market at nearly the same time, so their demographic makeup is nearly the same.

Mason, Lakota, and even Fairfield which are near those school districts have nearly the same demographic situation, there isn’t a lot of new home building going on. There are new students who move into the districts and enter the school system, but not nearly as much as when entire neighborhood sprung up out of corn fields and sent thousands of new students, and panicky parents to the voting booth each year. In essence, the student populations of each of those districts is declining while the home ownership is stabilizing with older and more mature property owners not so invested in their local schools. That means that the reliability of the public-school funding model depends completely on the explosive growth of a community and the amount of children a family typically produces in its life cycle. If parents are only having 1.5 children per family these days as opposed to two or three as it has been in the past, then there is no way that government school districts can continue to even think about getting enough votes to continue throwing money at the dumpster fire that is the present school funding system. And the unions won’t be able to do anything about it. They have already burnt their bridges with many supporters and people are tired of hearing them cry for money that most people don’t get in their own jobs. They have lost the support of a sympathetic public.

I am one who have thought for years that teachers make too much money under their union contracts. I’ve seen the job they do up close and I’m not impressed. And speaking to the kids graduating I’m even less impressed. Teachers for the job they are doing shouldn’t be making more than $40,000 per year for a good one. Because what they are teaching kids is actually bad for them in overly liberalized curriculums and the actuality of the job is just a glorified baby sitter anyway. I’ve never been against people who want to use schools for the baby-sitting service so they can go fulfill their career objectives. But don’t ask me to pay for it. And that is the attitude of an increasing number of voters year by year. The situation is even clearer today than it was back when Darryl Parks and I were talking about how stupid voters were who passed school levies on WLW radio. The reason for the clarity is because of the maturation of the school districts, which older neighborhoods now housing more voters who don’t have young kids in the district are a dominating factor.

The unionized funding model of continued pay increases paid for on the backs of property owners is exactly the same model that assumed General Motors would always be the top of the food chain in the car making market, but of course that proved not to be the case. Once there was a break in the supply side of those funds, everything fell apart and that is where the public-school funding path is headed. I would say the signs are already there, especially in how Lebanon and Milford voted. But there are still a lot of stupid people out there voting. But not enough to carry this mess far into the future. And that is great news for a change.

Rich Hoffman

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The Real Bullies in the World, Liberals

Do you know why I hate liberals so much dear reader, as if the millions of words that I have now written about them up to this point didn’t make the situation clear? Because they are bullies. Their political philosophy without question requires the destruction of individual thought and to enforce it they are more than willing to use force. I have always been open with them, willing to sit down and listen, but they have not been that way with me and of course my policy is never to turn the other cheek. So my relationship with liberals has always been contentious, even when they called themselves Republicans. I have seen the ugly truth about liberals more than once and way too up close for my liking and it is always the same. They are like mobsters, even the suburbanite soccer moms who want their school levy support for free babysitting. They always seek to impose themselves on the world around them and if you get in their way, they will try to destroy you. Whether it is with physical force, or by attempting to destroy your career, or your place in a community, they will do anything to destroy someone they perceive to be in the way of what they want as a group. Liberals pose themselves as friendly, but their ruse is only skin deep. The essence of them is nothing short of the morality of a snake, and that is probably giving snakes a bad name undeserved.

All the proof you need is in how they are seeking to demonize William Barr who clearly acted correctly regarding the Mueller report. He was just put into office. He provided a summary of the Mueller report once it was turned in, then he put forth a redacted version. And an actual unredacted copy was offered to select members who would put forth the effort under controlled circumstances. But Democrats know they can’t beat President Trump in an election so they put all their chips onto this Mueller Report which tried as hard as they could to find something from nothing, and now that nothing has been found, Democrats are desperate. So what do they do, they seek to destroy the reputation of William Barr for going against their wishes. In the end, that’s all any of the talk of holding the new Attorney General in contempt of congress is. And the way they are trying to destroy him in the media, and in his career is a story we have seen over and over again.

I’ve seen this all many times but for me it hit hard during the Lakota school levy days in my neighborhood when I was leading a group of business owners to stop the tax increases suggested by the progressive tax advocates. I was the point person to give many of the business owners anonymity because they literally feared for their careers and social status if it got out that they didn’t support the tax increase for Lakota schools. One name did get out and the pro tax supporters did what all leftists did, they organized a boycott against the business and lobbied against it in the financial circles to literally get his business taken away from him. They tried the same thing against me about a year later when my continued radio appearances and debates against their side didn’t give them any wins. They figured they’d have to destroy me in every way that a person could be destroyed. Only I didn’t care about the things they normally extort which left them toothless. And when they tried the physical violence route, well, that was disastrous for them as well. They found that they couldn’t take anything from me so that fire was put out really fast. But they did try and for that I will always hold it against them. I have a thing against bullies. I have never yielded to them going way back into my school days. I believe so strongly about it that people have died in the process. So I’m not going to start accepting that behavior now. If anything, it sickens me more when I see it.

What is even worse is that we all know why they are going after William Barr, because now the new Attorney General has the power to come after them for all the crimes they committed, and this attack by liberals against Barr is simply to beat him to the punch. That is the way all liberals play, even the docile bra burning environmentalists. They are all bullies and con artists. Very little of their personal ideology contains any truth, only a Game of Thrones like lust for power within groups and they’ll run over anybody to get what they want. Liberals as I have said are all suffering to some degree or another a form of mental illness. And what makes them dangerous is that they wish to continue in that state. Rather than respect the Attorney General and the law he represents, they would seek to destroy him completely, just as they tried to do with Justice Kavanaugh. I’d like to think differently about them, but there is no evidence to the contrary.

The problem with liberals is that their philosophy about life is wrong and stands against the trajectory of time. So the only way they can compete is to destroy anyone and anything that presents facts to them. Liberals are dangerous because of their refusal to deal with the nature of reality itself, and their willingness to live life with blinders on and nothing else. For those who can actually see, they detest such people and will resort to violence to keep the effects of reality from coming into their minds. They hate people who can see them for what they are most of all, and if they can overcome such people with violence or other methods, they will do so and not care if the other person is destroyed or not, no different than classical mobsters used to behave.

The contempt for the law that all the liberals involved in the FBI coup against President Trump is appalling and is filled with thousands of bullies who are all trying to stand against the tides of history. And now that yielding to those bullies have not worked under the Trump administration, they are seeking to destroy his AG before the investigations into the real crimes can take place. And with liberals, they will do anything to put a stop to Barr’s plans. Just as liberals will instigate boycotts against businesses and advertisers whom they disagree with, always with them is the threat of violence or pain if the people they are targeting do not comply with their intended thoughts. They have no other way of obtaining favor but through force, which is why they stand against the 2nd Amendment, and why they are attempting to control the 1st with online censorship and “editorial” censorship. In many ways they have complete control over most human resource departments through government control of labor relations. And they never trust that their ideas are better, only that theirs are the only ones that survive. That’s all they care about and is completely reflective in the William Barr case. If he didn’t do what they wanted him to do, then they would bring pain to him any way they could. And in the past, this has worked for liberals. That is, until now where some are starting to fight back. As they should have all along.

Rich Hoffman

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1.6 Trillion in College Debt–More of a Reason to Rethink the Whole Issue

As the college scandal has revealed recently in Hollywood, it wasn’t just Felicity Huffman and Lori Lughlin who believed that college was a stepping stone culturally into a better life and that all it took to get there was money. I can think of literally thousands of people I have personally spoken with over the last three decades who thought just as they did. They didn’t care what their kids really learned in college, only that they attended and that the name alone would take them to great places in life. To accept that premise you have to accept that it doesn’t matter what you do in life, its who you know. And that in knowing people that there is power in that. I of course have a completely opposite view of what makes what in the world and I have had those notions early in my life. I started to see the clarity of the scam as far back as the sixth grade and the older I became, the more my thoughts were confirmed. I attended college, I lived on the University of Cincinnati campus for a while and nothing about any of those experiences changed my mind. They only confirmed what I already knew and over the years more people are coming to realize that what I have been saying all along was true and now they are ready to admit that the 1.6 trillion in student loan debt that our country currently has, which is crushing for a lot of people, wasn’t worth it. In fact, it was just the latest scam in a long list of snake oil salesman type tactics that have been unleashed on the human race, and people have a right to be angry about it.

I have written extensively about the college experience and how it came to hold such a prominent, if undeserved place in our social pantheon. Click here to review. I feel I can say that because I would consider myself an academic. There are likely few people anywhere who study as much as I have and continues to. The difference is that I see institutional knowledge as a limiting factor as opposed to individualized exploration. My beef with college is that it costs too much and is the wrong kind of knowledge that is being offered to students in relation to the world we are living it. It’s not the work certainly. My view of college is that it’s a huge waste of time because of all the drinking and socializing that goes on there. I think there are two things that ruin people for most of their lives, puberty, and their post high school years where all the choices of the world are open to them, and they end up picking one of three meat headed options, death by college, death by the military, or death by a non-college degreed middle class life in a factory and learn at age 18 and 19 to never set their sites for the stars but for some rusty truck for which they are the third owners with 200,000 miles on it, and are happy about it. All three of those paths are the embodiments of ancient institutionalism that has permeated our human culture from the dawn of mankind, and they all suck. There are many more paths available to individuals, but it takes courage to walk them. And to be honest, that path is not for the weak at heart.

But the nature of the scam of college was that people like Felicity Huffman, who was a Hollywood lightweight intellectually, a neurotic suburbanite who likely puts a bicycle helmet on her kids just to go to the end of the driveway and lives her whole life in that fearful bubble were told by the institutions that if only they paid a lot of money to the colleges, then there overly pampered children could grow up and be good people with good jobs and that their terrible parenting would go undetected. Well, obviously that has not been the case. I suppose I had the good fortune to learn all this very early which opened the door to me on how things really worked in the world. I was bored with college, out of my mind bored. If I could have taken the average four your course and compressed it into one quarter I would have. So in those years I got myself into a lot of trouble, in the business world, and it was fun. I learned a lot, far more than any class on business. I met a lot of multimillionaires and became friends with them. I was invited to several lunches where these guys dropped $11,000 for lunch and didn’t even think about the cost. I had never seen a $2,000 tip stuffed down the shirt of a waitress before and with these guys it happened all the time, and the waitresses were always very happy to see them. But I learned from them how things really worked, which I had suspected all along. I was around 22 years old at the time so it was a very interesting time for me. College was pretty boring in comparison. And I was with these guys because I understood their language. It was all about risk taking and having the guts to ride out when those risks failed. But you had to take a shot. The risk reward ratio was what it was all about—and you can’t buy that with a college degree.

The degree would prepare people to work for one of those guys, but it didn’t make you one of those people, so my contention has always been, why would you do it. In all honesty, I probably have paid over a half a million dollars for my education, if opportunity cost were a factor. I certainly took the path through the forest with the most thorns, snakes, and other treacheries, but there was always more gold there too, and well worth the journey. But I’d rather pay that than to be six figures in debt to a stupid college that is running a scam that it sells with their sports programs then has nothing for their students to do when they graduate. For some people getting their foot into the door of a real job makes that big investment worthwhile, but the real education starts when you begin that job. Everyone knows the game whether they want to admit it to themselves or not, which they don’t. But Lori Lughlin was only doing what everyone else was, buying her kids social prestige. Only because she had more expendable income than other parents did she take it steps too far. What she did ruins the snake oil sales appeal, so our society had to draw a line somewhere, especially since so many people are now on the hook for a college degree that costs as much as a house, and they don’t have a job that justifies it.

I admire anybody who gets an education and completes what they start. But the college costs have been leveraged out of range of their real worth do to their monopoly on what they were really selling, social status, a position that our political structure nurtured along for their own objectives of institutional control. Now I understand that not everyone is meant to be like those guys I talked about having lunch with when I was 22, or the people I most enjoy associating with now. Those are the real titans who make or break economies. Everyone else is just trying to get a job with them. And that isn’t worth over 1.6 trillion in national debt.

Rich Hoffman

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The Hope of Comics

Even though it’s not why I do it, because in the beginning I considered this blog to be a fun extension of my life and my many interests, it has become something bigger and much more literate. And with that come judgments from people who just aren’t very intellectual presently, or perhaps never will be which I consider worthless. The difference between me writing these many articles for myself, which I have for many, many years and sharing them in the form of a blog is that in the back of my mind I hope to help people realize that there is more to life than what they are presently living. I think by any measure I am a very well-balanced person and an excellent thinker. True, I could be another Alex Jones, I certainly have interests in that direction, but I could also be a sports star, or any number of things. But what I am is a lot of things and I like it that way. And I share those things with my audience purely for the sake of their own uses, certainly not mine. What I do for myself is know that I am trying to help people live better and more authentically, and when the refusal of that offer is openly rejected I do get mad about it. I don’t force people to do anything and they certainly shouldn’t expect such a thing from me. The things I do object to in life however is anything that leads to below the line thinking and when I see such a thing I do get pretty vocal about a need to rebel against it erupts. But sometimes even for me the disappointments about how people choose to live and paint themselves into a corner gets to be too much and on those moments I give myself a breath by going to my local comic book store.

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I did go out on Saturday to enjoy some Star Wars on May 4th and I’m glad I did. What great fun! #starwars #comics #comics #disney #lucasfilm

A post shared by Rich Hoffman (@overmanwarrior) on May 5, 2019 at 3:28am PDT

As I’ve said before, I like every sport there is. The reason I didn’t enter professional sports as a young person was that while I liked the objectives of winning, I didn’t like the compliance of building a team. I always related more to the coaches than the players and the elements of leadership so sports took up too much time and there were too many social stigmas about what success or failure meant and I had other things I wanted to spend time on. But I’m certainly not one who is an either or person, either the life of a jock or the life of the geek who hangs out in comic book stores avoiding life while others chase balls around and get headlines in the newspapers because of it. Those divisions were always absurd to me and still are. I enjoy reading all types of things, including comic books. They are usually full of ambition and the artwork is usually very energetic.

So it was with that zeal that my oldest daughter, my youngest grandson and my wife went to two comic book stores on Saturday which was a combination of Star Wars day and free comic book day. What I really wanted was the new comic about the new Star Wars land at their theme parks called Galaxy’s Edge. I’ve always been a Han Solo guy so I am quite excited that the plot of the new land was featuring him and that it was highlighted in the new comic, and I wanted to get it. I can’t recall the last time a theme park decided to tie modern mythology in this way and I found it very interesting. So for the history of it I wanted to collect it for reflection 50 or 60 years from now in the future. I was also curious how Disney would attempt to tie all these media platforms together into a big unified story.

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My loot from free comic book day! #comics #life #starwars #family

A post shared by Rich Hoffman (@overmanwarrior) on May 5, 2019 at 3:30am PDT

Much to my surprise they were sold out of the Galaxy’s Edge comic that I wanted at the first comic store, but otherwise it was a very bustling place. I didn’t see any kids there, but a lot of adults and they were all talking quite vibrantly about various comics, the recent Game of Thrones episode, the Avengers climax with Endgame and the upcoming Cincinnati Comic Con which my other daughter is planning to attend as an exhibitor. I couldn’t help but wonder if Socrates ever thought for a second that any culture on earth would have so much mythology produced and that people would gather in a comic book store to talk about them with such passion. I am encouraged by such places, they often restore my thoughts that people are worth saving when I read comics and see the bold desires there that are unfurled by obscure artists revealing their hopes and dreams through fantastic characters that are translated onto colorful pages full of art. There was more art produced just in that one comic book store than the entire Renaissance period of Europe, which I think is every bit as good.

We ultimately had to go to a comic book store in Mason to get my Galaxy’s Edge comic. I picked up far more than I had planned to and I enjoyed reading them later while I watched the Reds game on television and for me, all was right with the world. But more than anything I enjoyed the people. There were a lot more people participating in the free comic book day events than I would have thought which led to a lot of contemplation for me. My daughter and I discussed it over lunch. Her generation has grown up in a lot of hapless situations. The political system has let them down, their educations were a joke, their parental structure often broken. It was in their last hopes for participating in mankind that they go to the comic book store looking for heroes to believe in. Some people would say they were escaping from reality, but what I saw was that it was for their own good. Their love of comics was a survival mechanism to the disappointments of life and I saw in all those people a desire to not just accept a “bla” existence, but to at least learn through the mythology of fantasy characters that there was more to the human experience than just accepting defeat then eventually death.

To say I’m excited about Disney’s new Galaxy’s Edge would be a severe understatement. I read the comic pretty much in the car on the way home because I couldn’t wait to see how everything would be tied together and I was happy with the ambition of it all. I personally needed the break in thought myself. For me it’s never about going backwards. When I get disappointed in the ambitions of the human species, I too look for reasons to feel good about it all again and comic book stores do it for me. They are filled with hope not just in the artists who produce the content, but in the participants. In all their geekdom, they are essentially out for the same thing that the baseball player is, or the golf enthusiast, or Fantasy Football player, everyone wants a win. And if there are things that comics are typically selling, its victories of the human soul overcoming adversity. And unfortunately for most, such concepts are a fantasy. But at least they haven’t lost sight of the need for such a thing.

Rich Hoffman

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Golf and Guns

My problem in the world is that I enjoy too many things. But to be successful, traditionally, we have a culture that values specificity, where we immerse ourselves into one particular thing. For instance when it comes to this blog site, there is a political context and a narrative that has to be fulfilled for it to work. And since my audience is largely Trump supporters and Second Amendment advocates, going off the rails too far on a tangent doesn’t fulfil that market necessity. So I talk about guns and my love of Cowboy Fast Draw a lot as opposed to other kinds of sports, like baseball and golf. But to my mind they are all the same. In fact, I view Cowboy Fast Draw as another kind of game not at all unlike golf or bowling. We make games at life to represent our culture in various ways and to me they are all the same. The gun and their use is purely a sporting activity and are directly applicable to other sports. Truth be told, I enjoy every sport though. When I go to a sporting goods store, I am absolutely in heaven because every section is something I enjoy. I love baseball, I love football, I love the outdoor section, I love soccer, golf, I love everything. And to me they are all one big story.

I do resent being put into a classification with people who are limited in their scope of enjoyment of life though. I understand their limits and I hope that at some point they overcome them, but it certainly isn’t my task to yield myself to their handicaps. This is an issue that has come up more than once recently among several people. A politician friend recently asked me to take them out of a video they appeared in many years ago because their life had changed and they now had a much higher social profile, and political enemies were using it against them. One of the weapons that was used against this person was that I am a “gun advocate dressed to kill” which is shown on this blog site quite audaciously. But that’s not how I see it. To me a gun and holster rig with the gunfighting garb of Cowboy Fast Draw is no different from a group of people hitting the golf course with a dress code that would otherwise be laughed at during a visit to any local mall. Or a baseball player stepping off the field and without changing going to a nice restaurant. The baseball outfit would be considered odd in any other public setting except for a game. So the gunslinger outfit to me is something of an American heritage, no different from the Japanese reverence for their samurai or some other warrior reference that a culture wants to remember honorably. If you take away the politics all these sports are fun and have their place and I enjoy them all.

I was thinking about all this while I was looking for a nice golf bag and I found one, a really cool red, white and blue patriotic golf bag that I thought was really cool. Then I found a great baseball bat that was all decked out in patriotic colors, and so it went for several hours that day, I had a great visit to the sporting goods store. But I was also thinking about the objectives of those games and how they fit culturally into our society. And also specifically, they have a very unique style of dress for each of them. Something we have culturally come to accept. Except somehow the way I dress on this blog site was considered by some to be politically dangerous, and divisive. But the game of golf wasn’t? Both sports had the object of hitting targets. In shooting there are obviously targets to hit and you are measured by your success or failure in hitting them. And in golf the whole point of the game is to hit the target in as few strokes possible. Where is the problem with guns, other than they have been made politically volatile by a political class that has sought them out for their own purposes? In America guns are a sport like any other sport and I am personally offended that its even an issue.

One of my very good friends, an old radio guy, who was very talented had to completely erase his social media imprint into saving the Republic of America, which he felt very strongly about. But to work for this company they made him make a choice. A six-figure income or he couldn’t be promoted into this new position and as I held that American flag baseball bat I couldn’t help but think of how dangerous that offer really was. I understand the decision he made; he picked the money. A lot of people would. I obviously haven’t. I’ve had similar offers and I picked the blog, my books, my guns and the generalities of my life because in the end those are the things that the people who really matter to me care about. But such a choice should never have to be made, and honestly, we have been stupid as a civilization to let people make such divisiveness over anything, especially among our sports.

A visit to a sporting goods store shows just how rich our American culture is. I’d love to explore them all but unfortunately there is only time for a few of them. However to allow politics to ruin any of them is what I consider reprehensible. To allow a censorship of some with an emphasis on others is a further hypocrisy. Golf especially in the business world is considered a game for upper management, and I can see why. The goals of the game are very similar to those in the business world. Get to the goal in the shortest way possible using the various tools in your golf bag to get there. We don’t think about the people who actually kill other people with golf clubs every year when we play the game even though often the number is higher than with rifles. Yet liberals want to ban rifles and the game of golf is promoted, especially in business as if the two were radically different. But they aren’t different. Both sports, guns and golf are all about hitting targets. Both represent aspects of culture that are valuable and metaphorical, yet one is attacked and one is supported and that standard is very hypocritical.

I think we should enjoy everything, and I do. And I personally resent any judgments cast against me when what I do is part of the sport of shooting. The views that I value about an America that predates this liberal censorship trend that is going on in our media, companies and our politics is dangerous. That it is even considered radical to proudly display a gun rig that I am very proud of is a disgrace. Now if I was in a picture with that new golf bag which would cost about half as much as the gun and the holster rig then the world would be happy. That is not how things should be and it’s a shame we’ve let it become that way. I’m certainly not going to change the way I do things, but it’s a shame that so many people are forced to, just to fulfill a social norm that has been shaped by anti-American forces. It is my assertion that we shouldn’t have such limits.

Rich Hoffman

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The Socialist Failures in Seattle, and Everywhere Else

I tend to not think of political things as ideology and harmless thoughts cast into the swells of democracy, but in good or bad ideas. A bad idea is not a harmless thing, if a politician gets something wrong, lots of people suffer. People put a lot of faith into the people they elect, which is also a problem. But what they are asking is essentially a representative to conduct management on their behalf, so if they get it wrong and pick a bad manager, then the ramifications can be quite disastrous, so elections and the people who end up elected is no small matter. That is also why I care about these kinds of things so much. It’s not just about ideology and the beliefs that come from such endeavors, it is literally about success or failure. When put to practice you just can’t hide the results of bad ideas which is becoming obvious in American cities that are now overrun by liberal thoughts as conservatives retreated away from the high taxes of city living for the suburbs.

You might remember dear reader when many years ago I covered the election of Kshama Sawant onto the Seattle City Council. That event was notable because she was one of the first politicians in the country to openly call herself a socialist, and to be elected. Up until that point people like me were considered “radical” for even talking about the effects of socialism in our American political system because honestly the enemy was conducting themselves as a Trojan horse and nobody wanted to spook the guards, so they didn’t want anybody talking about it. But I was one who did and I remember covering the election of Sawant and warning everyone what would happen to Seattle.

I turned out to be correct, which doesn’t please me to say. Socialism is bad management and when you spring forth such elements the results will be noticed in the day-to-day conduct of whatever is being managed. Bad ideas do have consequences and the drug abuse, the homelessness and the general impression of the city of Seattle are now dangerously bad. They have real problems in Seattle that are a direct result of electing socialists into their management teams of city management. And now they can no longer live off their former reputations as some of the best cities in the world. Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles, San Francisco and many other cities come to mind in following the trajectory of failure that Seattle is currently on, so this isn’t a case of just one city failing. It’s about the failures of a proper management philosophy running the cities and how people suffer as a result.

And I’m not speaking from a vacuum of comfortable midwestern political beliefs developed in the suburbs of a very conservative part of the world. Some ideas work and some don’t, so it’s not a matter of respecting the opinions of people who elected losers like Mayor Catherine Push in Baltimore who has just resigned due to scandal. It’s about electing people who can bring success to a city and avoiding the mistakes. Seattle is an interesting examination because it started with some really good attributes. It has a lot going for it as far as resources, population, and location and that gave it a reputation as being a destination of desire. Until the elements that made it good were taken for granted and socialism parasitically picked away the value of the city and left it a bleeding husk of a previous life. The same could have been said of Detroit, a city where Motown produced some of the greatest music of the modern era, and the big automakers were producing cars the world wanted. Heck, even the Howdy Doody show was produced there. I was surprised to learn while I was doing a television gig in Dayton, Ohio to learn that the studio I was in was the former set of the Phil Donahue Show, which I had thought previously was produced in Hollywood somewhere, or New York. I thought the studio I was in was particularly run down, the part of town was a disaster, so I couldn’t imagine that anything inspiring popular culture the way that show did for a previous generation could have come from such a place. But it didn’t take long for Democrats who were elected to the regional politics to destroy the town, and it was obvious in the crumbling studio.

I’ve traveled to places around the world where the socialist failures are more mature because they had openly embraced socialism much earlier than we had in the United States, places like France for instance. Notice how the investigation into the burning down of Notre Dame has just fizzled into the background. That is because their policy of immigration has destroyed the city of Paris. And why did they turn to immigration as their ultimate fix to most of their problems, well, because their high taxes pushed out all the wealth as France itself has been openly socialist for a long time. That’s not to say that the French people are bad, but only that they had turned toward a failed political philosophy supposedly out of compassion and the results are obvious. To maintain their tax base they opened their doors to immigration and now they can’t support their traditions and have insurgents who are still angry about the First Crusade, and they are activists out for revenge, so the churches around Paris are being desecrated by those angry immigrants who have come from the Middle East. And look what they have done to their cities in Lebanon, and Syria. It shouldn’t come as any surprise that Paris is not holding up. Coming out of the train station in Paris from London the first thing I saw was a homeless man threatening to drop a concrete block on the head of another guy as they argued in French at each other some erratic emotional diatribe. They were literally right outside the door to the train station. No police were there to scurry them away to maintain order. Additionally, beggars were everywhere harassing anyone who would listen for a scrap of donation so they could eat. It was a two-mile walk from there to get into the tourist areas where Paris could still be seen.

I also stayed for a time in the English city of Canterbury where my son-in-law is from and saw first hand the homeless problem they have there. You literally have to step over them when walking around the old city which predates Roman occupation. In the name of compassion liberal management has created a situation that produces more people who end up homeless than a city that produces successful people who can actively live life with a real job and contribute to the world around them. In socialism the desire to work hard and have things in life gives way to the human trait of just letting someone else do all the work while the lazy mooch off the results. And some people are so lazy that they will sleep on the sidewalk if they can get just enough food to get by. For them life is so detrimental that they’d rather take drugs to avoid dealing with reality so under socialism they are empowered to yield toward the worst of their natures. And that is how Seattle has been going for a long time now, and the results are showing.

The video above is worth watching. It’s a little over an hour-long but its an honest look at a great American city that is now in decline. But this is not a unique problem to just America, it’s a problem of all socialist management systems and anywhere where it occurs, failure is not far off. When a city is failing it is because of bad management and one thing that is very much proven it’s that socialism in any form brings about failure. And that should be a warning to anybody who is heading in that direction, don’t do it. Because it doesn’t and never will work. Socialism always, 100% of the time leads to failure, even in Scandinavia. The only reason that people like Bernie Sanders don’t see that failure is because they put a fresh coat of paint on it. But if you look just a little under the surface you can see the same failures that are obvious now in Seattle. And it’s not pretty to look at.

Rich Hoffman

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