Rich Hoffman's Blog, page 270

How to End the Opioid Crises: Why people desire to do “drugs” and pursue “intoxication”

Very moving visit today – "Prescribed to Death" Opioid Memorial on the Ellipse is a worthwhile partnership between @WhiteHouse, @Interior & @NatlParkServuce. #StopEveryDayKillers pic.twitter.com/ciJ0W5PBnN

— Melania Trump (@FLOTUS) April 16, 2018

Everyone seems so concerned suddenly about the opioid crises that has been destroying American civilization for many years now—because the effects of such a society are just now becoming irreversibly evident. To date the best explanation, I have ran across understanding this crises came from Ayn Rand in her 1970 essay called “The Comprachicos.” Of course now that was 50 years ago so the damage is much worse than it was then, but it does go a long way into explaining how evident even in the early stages the devastating effects of opioid abuse truly was. One particular paragraph in that essay I think says it all, “drugs are not an escape from economic or political problems, they are not an escape from society, but from oneself. They are an escape from the unendurable state of a living being whose consciousness has been crippled, deformed, mutilated, but not eliminated, so that its mangled remnants are screaming that he cannot go on without it.” To my experience this is 100% true and should be the main thing taught in all institutions of learning.

You have to peel back the layers of life quite a lot to get to the notion that ruling humans desire to become Comprachicos over all others, and they have every intention of starting the process as early in childhood as possible. If you speak diligently to the busy soccer mom and school levy activists with a van full of kids at a Burger King on a Saturday afternoon after the morning games you would think by her conviction that everything she is doing is for her kids and their friends. She truly believes that she is sacrificing all her time and energy into doing what’s best for her children. That same type of person will work very hard with her husband of the moment to put away tens of thousands of hard-earned dollars to help pay for their children’s college tuition—so that their kids can have a shot at a good life. Most people, especially parents believe in these basic foundations of child raising, so they have no understanding of considering that the original intent of all of it was to cripple those young minds from the outset so that they would grow up and become adults living under the whims of a select number of rulers.

Yet if you have the right kind of mind—one that has learned to think from birth until a well-balanced adulthood, you can clearly see that the intention of public education, and the college experience from the outset was to cripple the minds of children instead of filling them with knowledge and the desire to think. A mind’s ability to process information is what makes the human being different from all other life in the universe, as best we can tell. Even when we do discover some form of bacteria on some moon in our Solar System that form of life is nothing compared to a thinking human being. A human being’s ability to think is quite extraordinary and I have no faith that A.I. will overcome the human brain’s complexities. Calculating information is one thing, conceptualizing it is quite another and that is what humans do best. Every living human being desires to think—it is evident as infants. The pain for most people is that the older they get, and the further away they get from those pure moments of youth where they were able to think without artificial restrictions placed upon their conceptual thinking, the unhappier they become. To anybody still left with the ability to think it is quite obvious that the purpose of all education as it has been developed in first world countries is to cripple the minds of young people into existing within the barriers placed there institutionally. A mind is crippled into thinking within the box of conceptual thought, not outside of it as humans were always designed to do.

The older a child becomes, and the more adult they strive to be, the more they must seek to numb themselves from the dueling realities at war in their minds. Inside their biological bodies is a mind that wants to think but functioning in the world that the body finds that the rules of existence require the mind to be numb to endure the stagnation of thought that confronts it. Sadly, kids with each year of their life gradually give up on their thoughts and fall back on the basic memorization of society’s rules of conduct to operate, and this pressure squeezes them until there is nothing left. By the time the kids hit the college years and go through their various initiations into adulthood, mostly involving alcohol and “partying” the minds of such people are lost usually for the rest of their lives—and the education system then can claim success in their original objective. Such people pick their political party affiliation—which those in charge rule covertly behind the curtain so that the illusion of “democracy” can be maintained—people believe they are contributing factors in the process of their lives. They pick their occupation which is often controlled by the same forces as their chosen politics. They pick their sexual mates—who are often molded to be gate keepers to this hidden world of compliance—to ensure that as people buy their homes, their cars, and mow their lawns, that the illusion of self-expression stays within the confines of social acceptability—molded by the same sexual mates which deliver a new crop of brainless youth to the next generation.

Yet deep down inside is that will to think which was there at birth, and the now grown adult must shut down those thoughts with drunkenness, and other forms of intoxication. If they can manage to convince their doctor to give them some “meds” for their achy back, or their stiff knee, or their kid who has a “hyperactive” disorder, they’ll take those drugs in a second and they’ll numb their brains on a Saturday afternoon blindly watching a college football game without a thought in the world except what is required to make a living so they can make their house and car payments.

Before we can do anything about the opioid crises, we must tackle the cause of it. Attacking the supply side isn’t enough because the desire is still there to shut down the mind so that it’s thinking isn’t in conflict with the rules of society. People desire to be thinking creatures—biologically, but our method of human development currently requires us to turn off our thoughts and to conform to a static system of rules where we endeavor to send our kids to pre-school, enroll them into sports running around all weekend to satisfy those requirements, and to send them off to college without considering that all those elements are meant to destroy the minds of our children instead of fulfilling them. That same levy fighting soccer mom can only find relief when she can get her lips on a glass of wine or some other intoxicant, and she craves it like a person in the desert dying of thirst craves water—for much the same reason. Her husband does the same with his beer and his mixed drinks. At another time in their lives or even occasionally with friends they might smoke a little pot to take the edge off. And what are their kids to think of their defeated parents? They can do only what they are taught, so they follow in their footsteps and before we can all blink, all these people are abusing every drug legal and illegal that was ever created to turn off their minds so that they can live without the conflict of their true desires at war with the socially imposed rules of conduct.

To solve the opioid crises, we must reinvent ourselves as human beings, and that is no small task. But it’s the only one that will do the job. The true problem with drug abuse is that the intellect of the human mind is not conducive to the institutional parameters of historical thinking. All human institutions were formed from previous notions of science and religion—and they are obviously not relevant in a healthy way to modern life. So our minds are locked in conflict and the best answer our social norms have come up with is to bend our minds to institutional thinking rather than what our vast imaginations are informing us is the real needs of the human race. And that is where we must focus.

Rich Hoffman

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

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

Very excited to get Han Solo cards at Denny’s with my grandson. pic.twitter.com/y2d2yKFVSO

— Rich Hoffman (@overmanwarrior) April 15, 2018

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

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

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

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

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

“If you come with me, you’re in this life for good.” Solo: A Star Wars Story is in theaters May 25. #HanSolo pic.twitter.com/3zUGQJ1a9W

— Star Wars (@starwars) April 15, 2018

[image error]

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

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

Rich Hoffman

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

.@Uncle_Jimbo: “President Trump did the right thing, he answered… Assad, Putin and the Iranians in their disregard of his previous warning.” pic.twitter.com/GfRynODJaO

— Fox News (@FoxNews) April 14, 2018

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rich Hoffman

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The Criminal FBI Agents Robert Mueller and James Comey: Once you’ve seen a teacher’s bare breasts, respect can’t be returned

I have a school aged grandson who is learning what its like to transform from an unrestricted young person acting on his own volition largely and integrating a portion of his daily habits to the mass hoards of society. He’s learning to stand in lines with other kids and how to go along to get along and its very painful for me knowing that many of the things that kids learn are completely wrong. The habits that young people learn are not conducive to making smart, useful adults—they are taught to make compliant future followers of whatever political order emerges out of a mixed economy driven largely by a Kantian tilted philosophy. The emphasis of human development thus is on social engineering and not individual needs. But you can’t hide kids away from the world either. They have to learn to navigate it without being social rejects, they have to learn to become leaders and they can’t do that unless they understand how people live and function—so they have to stand in lines and participate in mass events drawing out their own conclusions about how their individuality feels about what they witness. But like I said, its painful to watch. The results for many are what we see in our modern FBI now that they’ve been caught in some of the most criminal activity imaginable. If Trump had not been elected president the behavior they had been engaged in would have continued unfettered. Only because he was elected did it expose the FBI criminal network to those of us in society with a mind to see outside the lines at their true intentions. As a result, I lost my faith in the FBI two years ago. Now, I view them as part of an enemy force working against our Constitution in America which obliges me to protect it from them—and that’s a big change in opinion that is growing by the day. It has taken most people a long time to accept that reality, because we were all taught to stand in lines as kids, but with each week more are seeing the obvious. Robert Mueller and his friend James Comey are enemies of the state as it should be, and those who support them are guilty as well which has put us all in a very dangerous place.

I think it is stunning that Robert Mueller allowed under any connection to his out of control multimillion dollar investigation commissioned by never-Trump political opponents to overturn a legitimate election, and to raid the personal office of Michael Cohen—Trump’s personal lawyer to advance his stalled case by any means possible. It’s an obvious abuse of authority given to the FBI to conduct the nation’s business. Yet the FBI isn’t raiding the offices of anybody else, only political opponents to the established order of Washington D.C. That should send shock waves of concern to everyone, no matter what political side they are on. That type of FBI behavior coupled with what we have learned about Facebook this past week and the intrusion on our privacy that is possible with it shows all too clearly that outside the lines of our normal living are some very sinister elements which require a correction. The FBI is out of control and is acting as a villain, certainly not the white hatted law enforcement that we need in a civil society. They have been weaponized by political opponents to violate the lives of most of us, and the only reason they thought they could get away with it was because most of us learned to stand nicely in line while the authority figures kept us from looking too closely at what they were really up to.

I was never a kid who learned to stand in lines in school. I did of course what I had to in order to survive that public school culture, but I never liked it, instinctively. There was a gym teacher who was having an affair with one of the sixth-grade teachers. She was unmarried and young, he was older and married and we’d see them flirting with each other, and everyone knew what was going on. But they thought it was a secret and they often abused their authority to keep it that way. Anyone who snickered at their behavior found themselves overly scrutinized during gym class and even the lady would show aggression at students who let it be known they knew about the affair. Well I snuck out of lines a lot, and I snuck out of class a lot taking extended bathroom breaks so I could explore around the school and on one such trip I found those two in the process of having sex in a janitor’s closet, during school hours. The first reaction of the gym teacher was to tell me I didn’t see what I saw and that if I told anybody I’d be in big trouble. So you know what I did? I went straight from that closet and into the principal’s office and told on the two. I didn’t waist five minutes. But guess what, I was told that what I was saying was a very serious allegation and that they’d look into it—and I got into trouble for being out of class. I received several weeks of detention and was told that I needed to mind my own business—basically to stay in line and keep my eyes looking forward, and not to question those of authority around me. Me and that gym teacher developed a hatred for each other that we never got over. I had him for gym class for the next three years and there was always tension between us. Of course nothing ever happened to either of the teachers and they married by the time I was a freshman in High School. I was treated pretty harshly by the gym teacher from then on which spoiled any love for sports that I might have developed during that period because I couldn’t stand the guy who ran the sports programs. However, what I did learn was to always look outside the lines at the many crimes being committed in full view if only people could turn their heads and look at them—because there are a lot. That is precisely the case with Robert Mueller and the political thugs who support him. The crimes are quite audacious.

I learned early in life to always question authority figures because titles alone didn’t make them good. The FBI isn’t just good because they are part of American law enforcement just like teachers aren’t good just because they are employed by a good school. We put our trust into the institutions that these employees become a part of, but if they abuse that trust, then there are consequences. And with Robert Mueller, if he couldn’t find anything with the amount of money he has spent investigating Trump, he should have said so. But because the investigation was started out of revenge for firing his friend James Comey, the endeavor was never in pursuit of justice, but impeachment of the President. He certainly isn’t conducting this investigation into Trump to make me happy. But after a year to come up short and desperate then abusing his authority to have Trump’s lawyer raided is a major overreach. You don’t see the FBI raiding the offices of Obama’s lawyers, or the Clintons. You don’t see indictments of Loretta Lynch—which means everything that’s happening now is political. That means that you or I dear reader could be singled out for abuse by the FBI not for crimes committed, but because we aren’t on the side of the political establishment that people want us on and that is not an acceptable criteria. I have lost faith in the FBI. Just like that teacher in the sixth grade, once I saw her bare breasts and the gym teacher with his pants down around his ankles I lost respect for both of them and no amount of abuse could restore it. That is the pain of seeing things for how they are, but its important to do so whenever possible, even though we are all taught as little kids to keep our focus on what they tell us to, while the authority figures in our life commit many crimes—and expect to get away with it.

Rich Hoffman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rich Hoffman

Sign up for Second Call Defense here: http://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707 Use my name to get added benefits.

Fire Every “Red for Ed” Protesting Teacher: Public Education sucks, why pay teachers for a crappy–anti American, job

Every single teacher participating in the “Red for Ed” walkouts across Arizona, Oklahoma, and Kentucky—and anywhere else for that matter, should be fired for their radical behavior and recklessness in not doing what they are paid to do in their communities. In spite of what they will tell you their slogan means—the designation of red is a communist sentiment left over from the origins of the labor unions behind this radicalism and is the root cause of their demands for “worker’s rights.” Those rights they are talking about demanding excessively high wages and pension benefits for providing a service that has been very destructive to the education of all Americans is just ridiculous and in need of major reform. The best thing we could do for ourselves as a society is fire every teacher participating in these radical protests and replace them with one of the new automated information devices that are being produced by Google, and Amazon. I am quite serious when I say that Alexia could replace 95% of what teachers in front of a classroom provide and they don’t cost anywhere near the kind of money that an actual employee does. So fire every single one of the teachers and replace them with something much better, an Alexia. Those mechanical devices never strike, they don’t have sick days, and they don’t smell like coffee and bad perfume. Kids will learn a lot more from Alexia than they ever would some fat assed socialist teacher demanding a higher pension and pay for doing what a machine could do much better.

I would dare say that there is nobody reading this who enjoys education as much as I do. I love education so much that I hate the teachers of our modern education system because they teach people all the wrong things. Most adults functioning today are crippled from their youthful educations and their children are even more so. The situation has become increasingly worse each decade essentially starting in the 1930s when communism from FDR’s administration was seeping into the curriculum of public education. It took 30 years for that first communist wave to hit our population which unleashed the problems of the 1960s. Then 30 years after that the “no child left behind” efforts at not raising kids up, but by pulling the smart ones down to the level of the mob—up to the present. The protesting teachers are part of a very destructive process of a public education system designed by big government lovers not to unleash the power of individual thought, but to cripple minds to remain in a nicely manageable herd—easy to slaughter by those who seek to rule over others in society. Public education has been a very destructive endeavor in American society. The evidence of its crippling effects is everywhere. To see it best go to a gambling casino in Las Vegas or a Golden Coral smorgasbord.

There are plenty of opportunities to learn and that has been the bright spot in a capitalist society. There are alternatives to public education for which to learn much more effectively. Over this past weekend I was very delighted to go to The Children’s Museum in Indianapolis, Indiana and talk to some paleontologists there who were working on a T-Rex bone fresh from the Bad Lands. The lab where they worked was open to the public and you could reach in and touch the actual bone they were working on. I asked them why they allowed the oily fingers of people to actually interact with the raw bone of such a rare creature and they explained to me that at The Children’s Museum their policy is to let people interact with their exhibits—because that’s how people learn. That made me very happy to hear. Ecstatic actually, I love talking to people who are passionate about learning and discovering new things. The employees at The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis were passionate about learning and were to my mind the model of what education should all be about. I don’t like public education for the same reason that I’m not a fan of public parks, public restrooms, and public libraries—there is a value that is lacking in anything that doesn’t have private ownership as part of the institution. When any of the employees use collective bargaining as their means of acquiring compensation there simply is no way to properly balance a budget without driving the cost of the endeavor beyond the scope of the project. For instance, the two ladies who were working as paleontologists at the Indianapolis Children’s Museum I watched all day, from the start of their shift to the end. I spoke to them several times and they were as interested in their job at the end of the day as they were at the beginning. If I were running things I’d pay them six figures to keep doing what they were doing with the expertise that they displayed. But for a teacher who just shows up and complains about taking work home each night, doesn’t want to work weekends, doesn’t want to work more than 7 hours a day—I’d rather replace a live teacher with something like Alexia.

I was thinking about all these problems as we drove back from the Children’s Museum back to Cincinnati, Ohio. I used Google Maps on my iPhone to locate a Cracker Barrel outside of town, far enough away to thin out the rush hour traffic. As I plugged in my phone to my car my music played seamlessly while giving me directions to the highway street by street working far better than any atlas I ever owned. I was slow to accept Google Maps because I’ve always been naturally good at directions and reading maps, but I have to admit that Google Maps is far better than the atlas book I used to keep under my car seat. While I was driving people called me and the navigation system, the music, and the people I was talking to all seamlessly worked through my car’s speaker system and I was able to interact with everything without taking my hands off the wheel. That is a lot better than how things used to be, and education is no different. There are many better ways to educate people than the old system of a dominating authority figure in the front of the room designed to press students into a peer group—a concept invented to spread communism into American society during the 1930s under president FDR and his New “communist” Deal. That old way of education has crippled so many people intellectually, why would we continue to throw so much money at it? What are all these teachers thinking who are protesting now for higher pay and pension security? We aren’t living in that world any more just like nobody uses an atlas to navigate while traveling. It’s archaic to even think about it. Education has even more potential for reform than navigation and the only reason we haven’t yet gone there as a society is because these labor unions scare people into taking away their baby-sitting services. Because that’s all that’s happening in public schools, parents get to drop off their kids as a babysitter paid for by the state. In exchange the “state” gets to try to program children into the ways of big government communism, thus the “Red for Ed” campaign.

Most people don’t really want communism as the means to a social philosophy, even though that’s what they’ve learned in public school. I’d say that the quality of public education has been garbage rooted in Marxism that has been proven to be crippling to the human race and should be abandoned knowing what we do today about the nature of that social philosophy. But this article is about cost. Why should we pay so much money for something that produces such bad results as public education does? People obviously aren’t very smart coming from the public education experience. Observing the poor conditions that most adults live in intellectually, public education could be said to be as destructive as smoking, or alcoholism, crippling the mind of the participants to the point of uselessness. At this point anything would be better, and I actually think people would learn better with Alexia, or some other similar device. That means that every protesting teacher in Arizona, West Virginia, Kentucky, Oklahoma and everywhere else could be, and should be fired for any form of collective bargaining protest. Their education methods are not good. Their service to the community is old and outdated. And their epistemological foundation for the passion for learning is missing leaving their students crippled for their entire lives thereafter. So why should we spend all this money on public education? The answer is, we shouldn’t.

I’m willing to spend a lot of education. In my life I can say that my family has spent a small fortune on education, not institutional education, but the essence of education which is discovery and emotional exploration of personal intellect. I value speaking to other people who are very passionate about education as well, such as the two employees I mentioned from the Indianapolis Children’s Museum whom I promise conduct their work and never think about the money. They do a good job in their fields of endeavor regardless of how much money they get paid and that’s what I expect in a teacher. Compensation is for management to sort out in a capitalist country. If someone is valued a good manager will find a way to pay employees what they are worth. Bad employees are a dime a dozen and get a lot less money—and that’s how it should be. This collective bargaining nonsense is as useless today as an atlas under the car seat. It’s not good for the teaching profession and it’s not good for the recipients of the education. It makes the bad equal to the good and that is just stupid—and it shows. I don’t want to pay a fortune to teachers who complain about their work day, who complain about their work they have to do at home, or about the amount of kids they have to teach in a classroom. I want teachers who love to teach whether the room is filled with 26 students or 2000. I want teachers who are into the job 24 hours a day, seven days a week, all year-long. And I want teachers who spend their spare time reading and getting better, not sitting around watching sitcoms while making their assess even fatter with potato chips and nachos bitching about their bratty students to their friends on Facebook when the school day is done. Those types of people aren’t worth the money we spend on them. Alexia could do a much, much better job, and kids would learn more in the process.

Rich Hoffman

Sign up for Second Call Defense here: http://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707 Use my name to get added benefits.

Mueller Didn’t Just Attack Trump with Lawyer’s Raid: The FBI and many others in the Beltway are testing all of us

If the FBI had treated the Hillary Clinton and Loretta Lynch situation with the same vigor, I wouldn’t have any problem with the raiding to President Trump’s personal attorney on what is an obvious Deep State witch hunt to overthrow an American election. After all, if Trump was innocent, like I think he is, there wouldn’t be anything to worry about—except for the obvious violation of his personal sanctity which is a problem all its own for a separate discussion on unreasonable search and seizure. But they didn’t, in fact they did the exact opposite. There is a real problem with the FBI seizing through a secret raid on April 9th 2018 the office of Michael Cohen and his privileged communications with President Trump. What the whole incident evokes is cheating, where the referees of a game essentially penalize one team while allowing the other team to conduct their business unmolested in an attempt to give a win to one side at the expense of the other.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/‘a-bomb-on-trump’s-front-porch’-fbi’s-cohen-raids-hit-home-for-the-president/ar-AAvHeTw?ocid=spartandhp

I get that the other side doesn’t like Trump. I never liked Obama and I certainly felt that there were many issues that should have kept Obama from being in the White House, like his background with known American terrorists, his associations with communists that were on the FBI watch lists, and even his sketchy birth certificate that was never resolved to my eyes because what they produced was an obviously doctored document that had technology on it that did not exist in the 1960s. But Obama stayed president and I went to work to elect my own kind of president, which is how Trump ended up in the White House—because a lot of people like me came to the same conclusion. Trump is our answer to the obvious corruption that took place to keep Obama in the White House—even to the process that put him there to begin with.

But when the other side loses as badly has they have, and the refs try to snag away the advantages of the obviously superior team (the Trump team) and give it to the losers of yesteryear (the Deep State) then I have a problem with it. I’m not going to put up with it, let me just say that. Seeking evidence that the FBI can then leak to The New York Times, and The Washington Post, the way James Comey did which led to his termination as Director of the FBI—is simply not proper conduct. I’d go so far to say its illegal. For instance, for the FBI to cheat and take secret communications between Trump and his lawyer over the Stormy Daniels tabloid story so to alter the elections of 2018 is something that could happen to any of us. For the FBI to just take evidence that they are supposed to acquire through investigation means that they could use anything against us whether or not we exercise our right to remain silent. When the law can use evidence acquired by changing the rules of attainment as they go, the rules of any game are fluid to the point of ridiculousness. It’s like playing a game with a 5-year-old that makes up all the rules so that they can win no matter how poorly they play.

The Robert Mueller investigation was always a sham meant to exonerate the reputation of the poor way James Comey conducted himself during the election year of 2016. But the more that has come out the worse he and the FBI under him look, and so now the entire focus of the investigation is to keep the FBI out of court itself. What are we supposed to do when the top law enforcement in the land fails to investigate itself and when they will break into the office of the President’s private attorney and steal evidence they hope to leak to the press to make their case not look so bad by tearing down other people who do have the power to end their careers? Trump does have the power to end Mueller and everyone else attached to the top of the FBI and Justice Department and he probably should because they are out of control. But he won’t because the entire Republican Party is not behind him as they should be. Many of them hope to see Trump removed from power so they can have a chance at a power seat, so they allow this FBI to conduct an obviously illegal investigation with the same hopes that the political left is praying to, that it will push Trump into a mistake.

Trump figures he can outlast it all because of his innocence, but that doesn’t change that fact that none of this should be happening. The premise that is being established is excessively tyrannical and is a nightmare of Constitutional violation. A political Party should never have this kind of power, to manipulate the levers of government to entrench themselves to tax payer funded resources. The way that Hillary Clinton’s case was handled shows the bias, and anybody who thinks that Trump can be prosecuted for nothing when the Clinton case was about everything they are accusing the President of conducting is smoking crack if they think they’ll get away with it. What’s going to happen is that they’ll start a war with normal American people—which wouldn’t be a good idea.

I happened to read about this raid into Cohen’s office while we were celebrating my 50th birthday in the middle of Indiana at a Cracker Barrel. The short story with that is a lot of people care about me, particularly my daughters and we wanted to do something very unique for my 50th. I can promise that my experience was unique to just our family—nobody else out there could lay claim to sharing that experience with me. Just two days prior however I had the opportunity to spend time with some real Washington D.C. insiders so my particular experiences at life allow me to see things through the eyes of Beltway types and the kind of people who eat dinner at a Cracker Barrel in the middle of Indiana surrounded by farm country. It was a happy place for me to wait for my food and catch up on the day’s events with news clips on my iPhone. It was very apparent to me that Mueller wasn’t just testing how far he could get away with that kind of thing with Trump—but that he was testing all of us. And in that Cracker Barrel if they had to pick between the FBI and President Trump—they’d pick Trump. And as I say that I know the Beltway types have no idea why. That’s also why I was celebrating my 50th at a Cracker Barrel in the middle of nowhere and not at a $10,000 party at the Westin in downtown Cincinnati—or even in New York as had been discussed. We had a table near the fireplace and I could smell the wood smoke from my seat as a gentle snow fell outside and I was around the people I most cared about in the world. What more could you want? But the additional contribution to such an experience was perspective. I have perspective where many people lose it in the chaos of a day and that is a kind of birthday gift I give to myself. Many friends of mine were all twisted around an axle over the Cohen raid and the Ohio HB 478 bill that was being floated for passage. But I was sitting next to a nice fire, eating good food with people I care about and digesting the news surrounded by people who are the buckle of the Bible Belt.

If Trump were to be impeached for some silly thing, the people in Indiana wouldn’t suddenly become boot looking Washington D.C. lapdogs ignoring the politics of things like this FBI case just so they could keep a job, or their lives. People like Robert Mueller and James Comey forget that the reason Trump was in the White House in spite of his past reputation as a billionaire playboy was because of people who filled that Cracker Barrel on I-74 just 30 miles outside of Indianapolis. They are Christian soldiers in the purest sense of the word, but they have given up on honesty in politics. They simply want someone like Trump to drain the swamp of their capital city. They don’t want alligators and snakes like Comey and Mueller kicking down their doors and taking naked pictures of their wives and daughters and declaring the action “protection.” They want justice because they gave up trust in the FBI a long time ago. And if I had turned to them in that restaurant and asked who would be with me to stand against an out of control government—most of the men and a lot of the women would have signed up right then and there.

Rich Hoffman

Sign up for Second Call Defense here: http://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707 Use my name to get added benefits.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rich Hoffman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rich Hoffman

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Getting to Know Jim Renacci: Why he’s the best guy to unseat Sharrod Brown in Ohio

The last time I had seen Jim Renacci was when he was stepping off Air Force One with President Trump shortly after being asked directly by the president to run for the very important Senate seat in Ohio against the very liberal Sharrod Brown. Brown’s mission has been from the beginning several decades ago to turn Ohio from a red state to blue and after decades in public office has managed to help make it the color purple. Trump recognized that, and he looked at the map at where Senate seats could be picked up to help his agenda, and Sharrod Brown’s seat became part of his ambitious plan. When it was then considered who might have the fortitude and raw talent to take on such an entrenched incumbent the only name the President focused on was that of Jim Renacci—a self-made businessman with a background similar to Trump’s. Even more importantly to all that, Renacci like Trump has a history of winning what he does so for Jim to make a decision to abandon his run to become Ohio’s next governor he stepped up to the considerably harder task of unseating Sharrod Brown in what will prove to be one of the hottest national races in the upcoming midterm election. Before that happens though there is a primary to win and a lot of planning to do, so Renacci was in Mason, Ohio speaking to a very small, but important group of area Republicans.[image error]

As readers here know I’m not an autograph seeking, name dropping, picture-taking kind of person when it comes to people of celebrity and social importance. I’ve personally met President Trump on several occasions as well as Newt Gingrich and several other top-tier politicians and I didn’t go out of my way to have a picture taken with them, but Jim Renacci is different. He’s a very tenacious guy whom I believe is extremely sincere in what gaining that Brown Senate seat means to the nation and I respect him as a person for it. Getting to know Renacci as a candidate over the last several months, first as a person challenging the governor’s seat, and now under President Trump’s direct request, running for the valued Senate seat in Ohio to share one of the two available. Rob Portman is the other Senator, so there is a real opportunity here to gain someone in the Senate of Jim’s caliber and to further the Trump agenda with business people who understand it. The videos below are from this meeting which was only a few people listening to Jim speak in a private kitchen. Recording this meeting was a rare opportunity for others to get to know Jim Renacci without the Fox Business Channel cameras, the big rallies, or the interpretations of a left-leaning media filtering out the information they think important. In these two videos Jim just talks about his background and why he is the best candidate of all the Republican challengers to unseat Sharrod Brown.

One of the last questions in this meeting was directed at what Renacci specifically has regarding talent to perform this important historic journey and Jim modestly didn’t answer the question as fully as he could. Being a business guy, he is happy to let his record speak for itself because he honestly likes the other Republicans who are also running for the opportunity to take on Sharrod Brown. After all, only Renacci has been personally endorsed by the President of the United States, so he let that question linger softly—but I’ll be happy to answer it on his behalf. One thing that Jim has that others don’t is that he’s good on television. He is a frequent guest on the Fox Business Channel and MSNBC—among many others and in this modern era of television communication, Jim is good on camera. He knows how to speak the language of television, which is in how to communicate in short segments and with using all the range that a blocked off face can deliver to a direct audience in their living rooms. When running against an entrenched incumbent that has the power of the entire Democratic Party using a friendly press to preserve their position, it takes being not just a great candidate to win a race like this—it will take someone who is fantastic on television, and Renacci is.

In those videos Renacci told the story of how he came into politics in the first place, and it’s a good one that everyone should hear. Jim could easily live a good life as a self-made person and stay out of the political theater, but like Trump he found himself entering politics to offer his unique skills where they were needed most. Jim had a Chevy dealership around the time that General Motors went bankrupt and at the time many dealerships were being forced to be closed. This activity had nothing to do with Jim’s business skills, as he had been very successful, it was simply that he was selected to be closed which went against everything he understood about how things should work. So he reached out to his local congressman for help only to have that person vote against his dealership. The congressman was a Democrat and from there Jim challenged that seat in the next election and won. He has been in congress ever since facing down severe oppositions in the process.

There were many more stories than that communicated in that cozy kitchen in Mason which no media outlet would cover. There isn’t time or enough print for most media to dedicate to those types of stories, leaving voters often mystified about the actual people running. That left this little event to have quite great importance to those lucky enough to attend. To me there isn’t a better positioned person for that Senate job, and Jim certainly has the right level of fight in him to be successful. He will do what needs to be done to win, much like Trump did in his election against Hillary Clinton. Ohio may be purple now politically, but as Jim said in his speech, its going back to red and this upcoming election for this particular Senate seat is the battle that will define that political movement. However, even more important than all that is that it will solidify Trump’s agenda with more help at the federal level with the kind of Republicans that Trump is bringing to the Party as a whole.

I’ve been in the Renacci camp for most of a year now, first as a candidate for governor, and now in his run for Senate. Few politicians excite me the way that Jim does, which is why I did take a picture next to him. I did it because I was proud of him for taking on this big role and I want to help him any way possible. It is my hope that once he is elected that more business professionals at the height of their careers, like Trump was and now Renacci will follow in their footsteps and offer their skills to the world of politics. When we complain that politics is full of unsavory characters it is because many of them are not battle hardened in the rules of business. They are simply referees in the games of life, they are not the superstars who make their livings accomplishing things. Renacci is a new kind of candidate that are emerging under the years of Trump to bring the best of American enterprise into the role of managing our federal government. And that is a great opportunity for America to finally be politically what it has been in all other sectors of private endeavor, which is why getting excited about Jim Renacci for the Ohio Senate seat in Washington D.C. is very easy to do.

Rich Hoffman

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