Rich Hoffman's Blog, page 289

The Most Effective Argument in favor of Guns in Soceity: What everyone misses about the need for the Second Amendment–Institituions cannot be trusted

The support for an armed society is a philosophical one, not one of just emotional attachments to tradition. There is a reason the Second Amendment was inserted into the Bill of Rights and was so important to the Anti-Federalists in the 1790-time period of American history that is just as relevant today as it was then. The human race has not “progressed to a certain level where a one world government like the utopian Star Fleet Command is running everything on earth—and it never will. The reason is that there are traits to human beings that so long as they exist prevent the complete trust of individuals into all institutions created by society. To properly have a check and balance against absolute power, individuals must have the ability to overthrow their institutions before they get too big, and too power hungry to handle the affairs of civilization properly. Guns are that fine line of control which keeps our institutions in check with the fear always in the back of their minds that at any moment the population could remove them from office under armed rebellion and replace them. The issue has never been about “assault weapons” or “bump stocks.” It’s about the nature of people and what they do when they have power over other people. Those who want more power over more people obviously are those who support removing guns from society—to whatever degree. But the essence of the argument is that we would be fools to completely trust any institution created by the minds of man. The gun allows us to manage that power we give those institutions—and without that management assistance, institutions by their nature spiral out of control and become oppressive. Because at the heart of most humans who crave power is a laziness that always retreats to default mode and would rather run society as a bunch of compliant automatons rather than free thinking variables.

To put the issue in the most simplistic forms I will provide an example that I have used actually quite often. To provide a little background about myself I am a person who loves personal freedom likely more than most people, and I have always built my life around the ability to be free of institutional control. In my youth I was a martial artist and had developed the personal ability to defend myself no matter what was presented. Growing up I never had the feeling that anybody could “kick my ass” and I still feel that way. I don’t care how big the person is or how skilled, I made a point physically to be the top of the pecking order in regard to fighting in hand to hand combat and that allowed me a certain freedom to think properly about these matters of institutional control. But melee weapons are one thing, if a person approaches you with a gun physical confrontation is not the best way to deal with a threat like that. You really need a gun no matter how skilled you may be in disarming people. The best way to prevent a threat is to show them you have a gun and give them a choice as to whether or not to continue.

For a short while I was a repo man in my early years and I was shot at on occasion. That was back in the old days before there were the kind of rules that there are today. Back then the bank would let you do quite a few things to recover an asset, so I know what it feels like to be a bit of a thief sneaking up on a car to take it away from a hostile person likely armed. I even know what it feels like to break into a home knowing a person was armed to get the car keys. This wasn’t an accepted practice but it’s always better to ask for forgiveness than permission when dealing with bureaucracies and if I could get my hands on the keys, it meant doing less damage to the asset to retrieve it so breaking into a home to get the keys was forgivable—if you were successful. But people did get mad and they did shoot to kill. So in speaking about this kind of stuff I understand it from both sides very well.

I’ve also been to Europe and can report that the people there are pretty much a defeated people. Their gun laws and progressive societies have destroyed individual initiative and expectation. They live in small homes that are too expensive and do not have an expectation of personal sanctity the way that Americans do—and this really does trace back to gun ownership. In Europe the chances of being robbed in your home are much, much greater than in the United States because thieves know that nobody is armed in the home. They think nothing of breaking and entering to steal a person’s possessions even if they are there—because being shot is not on their minds. If they have managed to get a gun off the black market then they suddenly have become the strongest person around and they use that force to their advantage—because that’s what most human beings do when they acquire power—they tend to abuse it unless they are governed by a personal constitution of morality and valor. Without those elements they become tyrants quickly—whether they control a vast institution, or are just petty street criminals. It’s all the same human dysfunction on the micro or macro levels.

The person who trained me in martial arts during my teenage years was a thug. He was a lot like the karate school owner in the movie Karate Kid. His sole purpose for the school was to teach young strong males to be killers so that they’d go to tournaments and win trophies for his wall, so that he could then charge high fees to provide instruction. I thought of him as an evil person and he eventually was busted for many crimes and did jail time, but I learned a lot from the guy. I learned that it wasn’t hard to kill a person with your hands, in fact it was pretty easy and once you learned the basics you had leverage over every other human being that didn’t know that information. Most of his students went on to become terrors—and they got into nearly as much trouble as he did. Once they had the power to literally kill with their bare hands they had no fear of anybody and they began to be bullies that nobody could stop. It was the same concept as the robber with a gun who had something everyone else was missing. Outlawing a gun doesn’t change the nature of dominating others as a human predilection. Until that problem is solved, where humans wish to dominate others, whether it’s the liberal using institutionalism to control individual behavior, or a common street thug beating people over the head with a pipe to steal $25 dollars—the desire to rule over other individuals is the problem that must be solved. No institutional laws will have any effect—because the problem at its core is an institutional issue.

More times than even I can recollect I’ve used the threat of violence to keep peace. If someone is robbing you the way to handle it best is to say, “Hay man,” show them the gun under your jacket “you don’t have to die today. I won’t even call the cops. If you keep walking you can go to sleep tonight.” It’s that simple. Just say that, have the gun to show them—even if they are pointing one at you, letting them know you have a gun and are willing to use it, will most of the time cause them to leave you alone. These things don’t happen like they do in the movies. Criminals want a nice easy hit on someone. They don’t want to die or risk injury. If they have to risk that with you, they’ll move on most of the time. That also goes with hired killers. I’ve also known several of them as well, and deep down inside they are just people like anybody else. They don’t want to die. They know that just because you shoot someone they don’t die instantly. They know if you have a gun on you that you could still shoot them even if wounded. Because of guns in our country, we see much less crime than we otherwise would because nobody really knows who has guns in the house and who doesn’t. That secures our private property in the correct way and allows for Americans to think differently than other people around the world do because private property and ownership is the essence of personal responsibility—and protecting those elements makes for a much more civil discourse at the macro level.

Any person advancing gun control measures of any kind, even the “bump stock” debate after the Las Vegas massacre are avoiding the real issue in human failure in dealing with one another. Human desire to control other humans and their thoughts is the problem and until respect at a fundamental level is established for individual sanctity, violence will always be a threat. Those threats often come from institutions because responsibility for individual behavior is disguised. However, gun ownership is more than just symbolic, they are a proper check against the human tendency to inflict through force beliefs of one group against another. The gun creates a level playing field and forces people to respect each other—which is the first foundation of proper human interaction. There is a fine line between fear and respect, and the gun helps society get there better than any law that human beings could invent. And that is the key to a properly managed society. There is nothing barbaric about gun ownership. In fact, the concept is quite a sophisticated one because it takes the human race to a level of thought that has never been achieved before in the history of the world, and the United States is the evidence that it works. Not in the presence of an active gun culture, but in the type of society and options that Americans enjoy that nobody else around the world has. Guns are key to advancing our civilization in very positive ways because they take the bullies out of contention and allow average people to rule their own lives however they see fit. And if their institutions get out of control, then people have guns to retake control, and that is the most important thing of all. Just having the gun does wonders. Hopefully nobody ever needs to use them. But I can say from personal experience that guns work very well at keeping things……..peaceful. Better than anything else ever could hope to. Institutions want to believe they can, but they can’t. They can’t control individual behavior at its core. They can influence it, but they can’t manage it without the occasional madman emerging to destroy innocent people over any little thing.

When I hold a gun, or buy a new gun, I am making an investment into the kind of human freedom that only a gun can provide. And that is not a symbol of violence. It’s a declaration of independence that is philosophical and unique to our species.

Rich Hoffman

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West Chester is on Money Magazine’s Top 100 List: Who to vote for in 2017’s trustee election

I know I I’m very proud of West Chester for remaining one of the top places to live in the entire United States yet again by Money Magazine.  Since George Lang has been a trustee he has contributed greatly to this rise in national profile and he is now moving to become a state rep in Columbus so he can do the same thing for Ohio on a much larger scale, and don’t doubt for a moment that he will be successful.  George knows how to work “it,” and I look forward to his results quickly in the next few years.  Things in West Chester have really improved over the last several years since George and Mark Welch have been running things as the one, two vote for the West Chester trustees.  A quick look at the history of the Money Magazine rankings below will show just how much success they’ve had.  The consistency ranging from this year all the way back to 2014, the first full year after Mark’s election, provides the unrequited testimony to the success the two have had in spite of Lee Wong’s efforts at community socialism to make West Chester such a destination of success and opportunity.

WEST CHESTER TWP. — West Chester Twp. is, once again, named among the best places to live in America.

That’s according to Money Magazine, which today released its list of “100 Best Place to Live in America” with the growing Butler County township as No. 56 on that list.

West Chester Twp. was previously ranked No. 49 in 2016’s “America’s Top 50 Places to Live,” No. 30 in 2014, No. 97 in a list of “Top 100 Places to Live” in 2012, No. 32 in 2010 and No. 45 in 2005, according to Money Magazine.

Released on Monday, this year’s list focuses on communities with populations from 10,000 to 100,000.

http://www.whio.com/news/west-chester-lands-best-places-live-america/WHFDzYMsBOyP5j2KEnpkxJ/

For perspective there are 267 cities currently in America that feature populations less than 100,000 people, so to be in the top 100 is quite impressive.  There are many more small towns and localities, but for a managed population with such a great number of residents that have to balance out tax burdens, zoning, livability, future outlook and day-to-day management, West Chester is a fine example of how it should be done. Of course with all that success there are lots of coat-tail riders who want to make a name for themselves as the next generation of West Chester trustees.  This particular year is unique because not only is George’s seat up for candidates because he is moving to the state position, but Mark Welch’s seat is up for re-election as well.  Lee Wong is the third seat and it is also up to be challenged.  Under a normal year to keep things running the way they have been in West Chester, only one of those seats would need to be defended from the incumbent personalities seeking to make a name for themselves.  This year, two seats must be defended.  It would be nice to get all three with conservative minded people, but looking at the list of people running there are a lot of liberals running as Republicans but are in fact major RINOs so we need to clear things up for the voters who don’t know the difference between the people with all the big signs so that they can know who they need to elect to keep West Chester in that top ranking with Money Magazine.  After all, what it comes down to is investments and for people who want to protect their investments in their community they must elect the right people this time around to maintain stability otherwise everything could go to hell quickly.

My picks for the West Chester trustee race is to re-elect Mark Welch.  He’s most responsible of all the candidates for the great Money Magazine reviews that have been unleashed during his term in office.  Ann Becker is my second pick; she is clearly the best next person to work with Mark to keep West Chester running correctly.  I’d like to see Lee Wong lose, because he’s an idiot, and a socialist.  His third vote isn’t too damaging so long as two real conservatives are on the other side.  It would be good to try out a new name to replace Lee and see if someone can emerge.  A new name would be best, not the tax and spend names from the old Lakota school board.  If I had to pick my poison Lynda O’Conner would beat out Joan the Hutt, (Joan Powell)  Both women have election experience and access to some money which is why they have some big signs, but neither one of them are conservatives.  They have both supported high taxes in the past but of the two Lynda is clearly far better than Joan.  Honestly voters would do better to elect the lady who makes sushi at Kroger before trying either of the Lakota school board people.  At least she knows how to make something good for a decent price.  But she’s not running unfortunately.  Everyone else running is a gamble.

Mark and Ann are the sure money to maintaining West Chester’s high profile and country-wide expectation.  If both of them are not elected together than anything can happen.  Money Magazine likely won’t be including West Chester on their future lists.  A lot of people take for granted good management when they have it, but miss it desperately once it’s gone.  Mark’s track record is stout and needs no explanation.  Ann Becker for those who don’t know her can easily make up for experience with her thinking.  I’ve known her for years and she is at the center of almost everything political in Southern Ohio.  She like George Lang knows how to “work” things behind the scenes without going negative.  She is a naturally gifted personality and I think being a woman helps her tremendously in perhaps even improving the Money Magazine ranking in the future.  She knows how to sell conservative ideas without the typical defensive posture that most business oriented conservative men do.  Not that it matters, but most people who have been successful in business have been taught that they have to apologize for their success so they get defensive with the media when they talk, or they avoid talking at all.  Ann is great with the media, she’s on 55 KRC every week speaking with Brian Thomas and she’s done a lot of television.  She has connections to CNN and many other major national networks, so she brings a lot to the table and is the best opportunity for West Chester to either maintain the Money Magazine ranking, or improve on it.  Nobody else running has a chance.

It is a tremendous honor to have such a large community like West Chester continuously ranked on that list. I love West Chester.  I have traveled a lot and have been to some of the most far-reaching places on earth and there isn’t anywhere that I can think of that’s better than West Chester.  From all the offerings along Cox Road to the Union Central Blvd exit, West Chester is a very dynamic place.  You can do just about anything in West Chester.  From Entertrainment Junction to the great VOA Park, people could live in West Chester every day and never go anywhere else and still have more to do then in resort cities like Orlando Florida, or Las Vegas—and would never miss an opportunity.  That is saying a lot.  I consider most of my Saturday’s and Sundays to be like a vacation, but it’s all within my home town.  Between IKEA where my mother-in-law comes in from out-of-town to shop at, like a lot of people do, to Top Golf where it’s a dream destination for business clients visiting from far off places, West Chester has it all.  But it needs to continue to have good management—we can’t take these things for granted.  It’s a delicate balance, so be sure to vote in November for Mark and Ann—and take your chances on that third name.  But make sure two of them are the people I mentioned.

Rich Hoffman

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Las Vegas wasn’t a Terrorist Act, it’s a Battlefield: What’s missing determins the guilt of the Deep State

 

My view of the Las Vegas massacre is not one of terrorism or even derangement syndrome from Stephen Paddock—the millionaire who shot at people from a hotel window into a crowd of country music concert participants. It’s that of a battlefield in this ideological civil war that our country is now locked in. We are clearly not one country of one people focused on a future we can all share together, but a divided country of left and right-thinking philosophies which are not cohesive. One side will win and one side will lose and will be forced to retreat. The calls for peace for which the political left is so well-known for are only to disarm us all for their social incursions. They do not intend to live in peace with conservative Americans, and mean to destroy us, and it is there for which we must begin this discussion. The Las Vegas massacre is a battlefield, not a murder. It is obviously about destroying part of an ideology not in just randomly killing people for a personal objective and this is the reason authorities have not been so forthright about the killer’s motives.

I think the most telling evidence of this assumption is that we actually pause when the FBI says that this was not a terrorist incident, yet we are inclined to believe the ISIS claims that it was responsible—even though this guy was white, older, and affluent. Stephen Paddock doesn’t fit any of our assumptions about terrorism, yet he just committed the largest shooting incident in American history and he went to great effort to buy himself enough time to kill as many people as possible. His hotel suit was strategically selected. He had advanced cameras stationed to give him warning of incoming officers—the whole effort looked more like the ending of the movie Fight Club than anything else. There was an ideological story present that was not being revealed early in the investigation. In a time of massive media footprints from Facebook to Twitter—there is surprisingly nothing known at this point about Stephen Paddock except that he was a retired accountant who was a high rolling gambler that had an Asian girlfriend.

So what we have to go on is to examine what has been erased to draw our conclusions. The attack was against supposed Trump supporters. The gun grabbers were quick to exploit the tragedy and some members of the media actually showed hostility toward the victims because they were believed to be Trump voters. We have seen the Deep State react very violently toward the Trump presidency and even if conspiracy theories are not entertained, we must look at what President Trump has had to endure over the last 9 months and wonder how many of the most farfetched thoughts really are. Some people believe that there are means to control the weather with advanced scientific mechanisms. Three major hurricanes in just a few weeks when we’ve never seen anything like that before have hit the United States. Unprecedented investigations into the affairs of the Trump family when the Obamas and Clintons have been given a free pass—even in the face of great evidence. War being stoked by all the villains of the world, close calls with Russia, North Korea, Syria, Iran and constant pressure from every regime to lash out at the United States at the slightest provocation. Trump has had to terminate more employees than any previous administration at a faster rate than at any point in history due to the constant leaks to the press—some of which have come from the ex-FBI director himself. And now on Trump’s watch is the deadliest shooting ever when the President ran on a pro-gun platform. If only one of those things could be tied to the Deep State control of our government and the shadow instigators who hide there, we have an obvious problem. These are not random occurrences, they are deliberately solicited to evoke social change—at least some of them. They are being unleashed to overload this president and the sentiment of his voters into not making such bold assertions in the future. They have declared war against America—these Deep State activists and I don’t think I’m going out on a limb here in saying it, but I bet this investigation into Stephen Paddock leads straight to the door of the Deep State itself. The bread crumbs have been deliberately picked up too obviously. It’s what we don’t see that tells us most about what’s really there. Nobody goes to that much trouble to kill so many people unless there is an ideological purpose, and that ideology was obviously against Trump and his supporters, and that to me means war.

No, this is not the time to consider gun restrictions—not by any means. The first reason would be that we can’t trust our centralized authorities. If the Deep State has so much power that they can so openly harass a rightfully elected president, then they can harass the rest of us at will. They don’t care about laws, they certainly don’t care about respect and obviously collateral damage is something they are willing to utilize to keep their grip on power. The only thing that stands between their complete takeover of American life is our rights to own guns—to stop such a thing from happening. If they were successful in making America a gun free zone then there would be nothing to stop them from running the country. All they need is to make people shake their heads yes to obvious evil such as this Las Vegas shooting to start the ball rolling. They don’t care how many people they must kill to get us to say yes—and that tells us everything we need to know.

Was Stephen Paddock insane—maybe. Maybe he did it for the girlfriend. But he had enough thought in his mind to prepare the battlefield for a game changing moment and we must understand why he would spend so much time, money and even give his life to such a thing. Those reasons don’t point to insanity, they point to warfare and ideological activism that obviously leads to the Deep State. How do we know, well, the evidence has been erased leading there, because the floor is too clean to the door of that Deep State. And that means we need more guns, not less. You don’t give your weapons over to the enemy, and yes, that is how we must view these insurgents.

After Trump was elected many people thought that they didn’t need to buy as many guns, and that they might let their support of the NRA drift in neglect—but trust me dear reader, the time for that support has never been stronger. We need guns now more than ever and we need the NRA. We are not living in a civil society. We are in a time of civil war and in moments like those in Las Vegas the bullets became real more than just ideological. The fuel that cast them into the bodies of so many people was not the guns themselves, but the thoughts behind them. And there is no law for addressing a broken ideology which seeks to destroy people to make a point. Until that war is won by us in the conservative movement, then we must have plenty of guns and the desire to use them to defend ourselves from the villains of our society. And that includes the members of the Deep State—because it’s obvious that they are in a killing mood—and the only way to rectify that is with force of our own—which is sadly the only language they understand.

Rich Hoffman

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Everyone Has a Plan Until they Get Hit in the Mouth: Why Donald Trump and Jim Renacci are the future of politics

 

You can really tell how sick something is when you apply some basic measurements that work perfectly well in one known environment then apply those same rules to a lesser understood situation.   That is certainly the case in regard to President Trump’s business experience compared to the falsehoods of political theater.  With Trump expectations of completed tasks have rocked Washington D.C. culture with something they’ve apparently never seen in the modern era—firings.  And they’ve also never seen somebody work as hard as Donald Trump does. That combination of things has really put the pressure on the political establishment to show how bad and ineffective they’ve always been leaving only to point to the president and declare that he works too fast on too many things and that the turn-over at his White House has been too extreme.  With the resignation of Tom Price Trump has gone through more employees than any previous administration has and that is likely to continue.  What did people think was going to happen from a president who became known on television for firing people?   But honestly, this is the way it typically is, when you do any endeavor some people will adhere to the philosophy of whoever is running things, and some won’t make it.  Those that don’t will find themselves on the outside looking in and that’s how things work in the real world.

It is astonishing how limited most people live their lives.  When they assume that Trump for instance cannot deal with three major hurricanes, a war with North Korea, a health care reform package, a tax cut and a hostile media and still not have time to Tweet about the NFL’s disgrace of our flag then still take time to conduct social occasions at the White House are people who clearly don’t understand what multitasking is all about.   When I campaigned for Trump this is exactly the kind of president I wanted, someone who would work on all the major issues of the day and do so seven days a week 24 hours a day.  For those who don’t understand the difference between Trump and Obama playing golf, Obama played golf to show that he was one of the big guys who had made it in life.  Trump does it to make deals—which is why it’s the game of business transaction.  It also helps that he owns golf courses and can go there to work and get away from Beltway politics.  But with Trump, he works day and night no matter where he is and this is simply something Washington D.C. has never seen before and they really don’t know how to interpret any of it.

The firings and resignations at the White House under Trump’s administration do not surprise me at all.  I have personally hired hundreds of people and whenever I start a new project I have enthusiasm for each and every one of them.  But often you can tell within a month or a year who will be around for the future and who won’t.  Everything looks great on paper, but when reality hits you quickly find out who was talking a good game during an interview and who can actually live up to what they sold of themselves.  With Trump the people he hired for his administration all seemed competent relative to the way things were before he took office.  Well, just a few months into the years of Trump things have changed and everyone is feeling the pressure, and this is no surprise to me.  I had a feeling this was exactly what would happen and I never had any expectations that Trump’s cabinet would stay intact.  Over the pressure of expectations some would last and some would not.  I will go as far to say that there will be many more firings and resignations over the next eight years because the daily grind will mandate performance and it is Trump who sets the standard—and few people will find that they can live up to that standard.

Part of the problem is that people have previously viewed government work as a kind of lifetime appointment and expectations were never really associated with the work. That attracted the worst of our civilization to public office because there they could hide their incompetency from the world but still demand the highest wages available in those fields of endeavor as administrators.   By bringing in private business people into government however naturally this age-old sentiment is being challenged and the results are predictably good.  In my hometown of Cincinnati, Ohio the affluent community of West Chester has been run by a couple of pro business politicians who have private industry backgrounds and things have really taken off.  This has been part of a national trend that really has been emerging since 2009 when the Tea Party movement started taking shape and affluent people stopped looking to give their money to politicians and instead started getting involved themselves—in many ways like the Founding Fathers of our nation did in the beginning.  Why give some useless politician your money when you can just do the work yourself?  So we are seeing all across the country these politicians with actual business experience running for offices and winning—and they are actually fixing things for the first time that we’ve ever been able to see in American politics.

That’s certainly the case with Jim Renacci in Ohio who is running to replace Governor Kasich next year.  Jim is my kind of guy, he’s self made, he’s became rich doing good hard work and running several businesses and now he’s looking for kind of a retirement job to give something back to the state he has worked in for so long.  Being personally successful in many endeavors from  a financial consultant to running Harley Davidson dealerships in the Columbus area he is the Donald Trump of Ohio pouring $4 million dollars of his own money into his campaign for governor.  Anybody but Jim would be a status quo vote and the same old people who served the governor’s administration would still be around long after the next few elections because that’s how it typically is in government.  They create jobs for themselves and they take in money from lobbyists and financial backers who work against the will of the voters.  Someone like Jim Renacci and Donald Trump are already wealthy so they aren’t looking to get rich off schmoozing in politics.  Management is in their blood and they are attracted to these governor and president jobs because they are the ultimate management challenges and these guys like to be in the heat of the battle. That’s what sets them apart from the typical politician.

That trend is going to continue and most of the Beltway media just hasn’t been able to wrap their mind around these changes.  The changes came because performance was expected and the lies of the past just won’t work going into the future.  I’m getting exactly what I expected out of Trump and I would expect nothing short of the same from Jim Renacci in Ohio.  I want these types of people as local trustees.  I want them on my school board. I want them as county commissioners.  I’ve told the story of my dealings with Hamilton County commissioner Todd Portune before—people like him are abundant for pennies on the dollar-they are what we have had to accept as the political class.  It used to be that business guys would give people like Portune money for their elections, and would hope that rules could be made to help the business community, but those politicians often cost businesses in other ways with higher taxes, or they just fiscally run their communities into the ground.  So people like Trump and Renacci instead of taking their lifetime of earnings and retiring to luxury in Florida—as they may have in the past are finding in politics a nice retirement gig.  They’ve already made their money and solidified their reputations.  But if they still want to smell the flames of battle regarding management of resources as they did in their businesses from years past, they are running for office—and I think that is a wonderful thing.  That’s how it was always supposed to be.  The best and brightest among us should seek political office and bring that vast experience that made them successful into the management of our country’s affairs.  And if people get fired, so what.  The goal of government isn’t to create jobs that people sit in over their lifetimes.  It’s to do the work of the people who elect representatives into government to take care of business.  And it should be people good at business who sits in those seats.

Everyone has a plan until you get hit in the face.  Mike Tyson said that years ago when he was the defending world champion of boxing and its very true.  Politicians are good at making plans but nobody until recently ever expected them to implement those plans.  Once life hit them in the face they sort of went back to their offices and planned their lunch break—and they’ve been doing that for years.  What we expect now is that once a plan goes south, and we get hit in the face, that we have people in office that hit back and make whatever adjustments need to be made so that success can become the norm.  That means often people who are hired for a job will fall short of what’s expected of them and they will need to be replaced.  When those circumstances arise, we don’t want politicians who don’t have experience in hiring and firing people to be in charge—we want people who do have such experience.  And that is what Donald Trump is doing and he’s doing a fantastic job of it.  My only wish is that we didn’t have him ten years ago—but I’m glad we have him now.

Rich Hoffman

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We Need More Guns: What the Las Vegas mass shooting has taught us about the failures of progressive society

The only way to stop the mass shooting that took place in Las Vegas by the 64-year-old Stephen Paddock was to have other armed people nearby who could have shot him dead. Ideally, personally armed people could have killed him from the balcony from which he rained down terror well before he took the lives of over 50 innocent people and more than 500 concert goers. There is no law or any centralized planning that could have stopped this crime. And if it hadn’t been a gun a person like Stephen Paddock could have used a vehicle. There is always danger when people are so tightly packed together anywhere under any circumstances. The best safety for all involved is to have other people there with weapons to stop the crime before the authorities arrived. As it stands Paddock was able to shoot unmolested for over 20 minutes—and that is simply too long to take action.

LAS VEGAS, Oct 2 (Reuters) – A 64-year-old man armed with more than 10 rifles rained down gunfire on a Las Vegas country music festival on Sunday, slaughtering at least 50 people in the largest mass shooting in U.S. history before killing himself.

The barrage from a 32nd-floor window in the Mandalay Bay hotel into a crowd of 22,000 people lasted several minutes, causing panic. Some fleeing fans trampled each other as police scrambled to find the gunman. More than 400 people were injured.

Police identified the gunman as Stephen Paddock, who lived in a retirement community in Mesquite, Nevada, and said they had no sense of what prompted his attack. The Islamic State militant group claimed responsibility for the massacre, but U.S. officials expressed skepticism of that claim.

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/breakingnews/gunman-mows-down-at-least-50-people-in-las-vegas-concert-attack/ar-AAsLPFk?ocid=spartanntp

What we know now is that this guy, Paddock was a mild-mannered fellow prior to this event and I’m sure there will be a lot of talk about his background and speculation into why he would do such a thing. Could it be some kind of false flag deal to harass the Trump administration with just one more thing? Conspiracies are relevant to the fact-finding of an issue no matter how far fetched they might seem. Given what we know about our own government, who knows what they might do to turn public sentiment onto a topic of their design. What matters is that somehow this guy managed to get a lot of automatic weapons and a lot of very expensive ammunition to commit this heinous act which is very suspicious. Trump said it best when he said that it was an evil act—because no matter how you slice it—it was evil.

And that places this issue at a very philosophical place—can we trust centralized authority to protect us or do we fully utilize the Second Amendment to make every citizen a first responder in a violent world where people like Paddock could bring death to us in any moment? Can authorities stop the Paddocks of the world? I would say no. The only solution would be to have everyone in that concert armed, to have people in that hotel armed and to have people always ready to stop evil when it appears. There isn’t any other solution. Progressives have an ultimate failure that they are specifically responsible for, they have tried to centralize our society to the point where people don’t think for themselves anymore and the solution to a mass murder like this Vegas shooting is to decentralize the means to stop it.

Progressives like to talk about the kind of laissez-faire gun control that I propose as living in the Wild West—as if that were a bad thing. What they fail to understand is that there is a natural morality associated with personal firearm protection that actually elevates our society into mutual respect. There is nothing in the world that makes people more equal than a gun. A weak woman is as strong as the stoutest man if she has a gun. Guns make the races, and people of age all on equal footing and it forces people to be respectful of one another. In a society where guns are on every hip, Stephen Paddock would have been killed within a minute instead of many more—and many fewer people would be dead and hurt. Progressives are the ones who regulated everything and centralized the safety of our world, and when it fails, the blood is on their hands. In Las Vegas the failures of progressive society failed miserably.

At gun events I never worry about anybody shooting guns at other people because a mutual respect is established between everyone else since everyone is equally armed. Guns are only scary when other people have them and you don’t. Because of the progressive educations we have all experienced where guns were demonized people of our time have been made to fear guns when instead they should look to them as equalizers in a dangerous world—that by having them guarantees respect from those who might have evil intentions. Guns make the world safer, not more dangerous. It is only when guns are in the hands of bad guys, or people who lose their mind for whatever reason that the balance of equality shifts toward evil and the innocent become the bottom of the food chain. One more law or 200,000 cannot stop evil from committing crime when respect is vacant from our society. Guns create respect where it isn’t naturally applicable.

In a free society the best way to achieve equality and respect is with a gun. The more guns the better and in as many places as possible. A centralized state may have good intentions but they were powerless to stop someone like Paddock. And there are no metal detectors and security checkpoints in the world that can stop evil when it decides to act. God forbid we turn Vegas into another airport terminal of neurotic security to overreact to this tragedy when the real answer is to arm more people, not less of them. I’m not a big fan of Las Vegas but it is one of the most laissez-faire places in the world and it would be a shame to allow clueless government bureaucrats to overact by instituting more security when all they really need to do is to make it easier for good people to carry guns openly so that people like Paddock couldn’t kill so many so easily.

One of the most attractive aspects of the Wild Wild West for me is that it was a time before progressives came to existence to latch to our governments and ruin our world with overly centralized planning. The period of westward expansion was a time of great human enterprise and philosophic contemplation. Slavery was ended and most of America’s wealth was created in those years and much of who we are was established in that period. Progressives wanted to “progress” beyond that thinking, and they have the ruin of lives in their wake to demonstrate their lack of virtue. And that has never been more obvious than in the debate over guns, where in Vegas they got what they wanted—a society of people standing around listening to a concert generally unarmed and enjoying an evening in “Sin City.” But all it took was one person to shoot guns into a packed crowd to change their lives forever. And Paddock didn’t have a right to do that. If it hadn’t been for progressive influence, there would have been someone there to shoot that old man. And if they had, many more people would have lived.

Rich Hoffman

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The Problem in Puerto Rico: No monster trucks or bass boats there to save Democrats

 

I’m all for making Puerto Rico the 51st state, but as we’ve talked about here on several occasions, their $73 billion dollars of debt that have bankrupted that very small United States territory of only 3 million people was a major problem before Hurricane Maria destroyed the island as a catastrophic category 4 storm.  It was the third major hurricane to hit the United States just in 2017.  Previously all of Florida had been hit by a major storm, and before that Texas.  Trump dealt with both of those crises so well that the hungry media looking for criticism had nothing to say in both cases, even though the personal damage was in many cases much more extensive in dollar value. But when Puerto Rico happened something was very different.  The reason for the mountainous debt, and the cause of so much devastation was that the island was ran by Democrats and they were ill prepared for the disaster—as they always are.  Trump’s FEMA supplies came to the San Juan docks but there was nobody there to take the supplies inland causing the media to criticize the federal efforts.  But behind their criticisms were something else, a fear they wished to hide from the public about the politics of the situation and it is quite telling to explore the cause of that fear.

http://money.cnn.com/2017/09/27/investing/puerto-rico-debt-who-owns-trump/index.html

I’ve done hurricane relief before.  I remember very well how bad Hurricane Fran was when it hit Chapel Hill, North Carolina as a category 3 storm an hour inland from the coast.  The power was knocked out for two weeks and I was one of the guys there pulling trees off the homes and it was a real struggle just working in that environment let alone being a resident living in the heavy humidity trying to get insurance adjusters to come and give them back some normalcy to their lives.  The National Guard had to clear the highways so that those insurance adjusters could even get to town, and then the wait was extreme as everyone had something to put on a claim.  You learn really quick all the things we normally take for granted like running water, air conditioning, refrigeration—and an open and well stocked grocery story.   Maybe one of the weirdest things I’ve ever seen in my life was a grocery superstore completely empty because everyone had ransacked it and it hadn’t been restocked for weeks because delivery trucks couldn’t get to it.   And this was in a very conservative area where people were pretty smart, generally, and there weren’t a lot of people living off the federal government.  Many of the people I was dealing with lived in nice homes and had good jobs at either NCU or Duke University across town—so at least there was money as a foundation to all the misery.  It was a mess, and that was the United States mainland where military bases and a very advanced highway structure were there to provide the quickest relief possible.

Of course Puerto Rico is a different story, it’s an island to the southeast of Cuba so it’s not connected to the United States mainland in any way, nor is it even close. It’s nearly as remote as a territory as Hawaii or Guam is.  Getting to Puerto Rico isn’t easy under the most optimal conditions, let alone when all the infrastructure was wiped away by a major hurricane that touched 100% of the island.   Being so far in debt the power grid was in a poor state to begin with and the people living there had very little money.  Most of their homes were disgraceful places just a few steps out of a third world country.  The Democrat governor, Ricardo Antonio Rosselló Nevares is a member of the New Progressive Party—which is just another name for Communist Party USA and points directly to why Puerto Rico had a debt problem to begin with.  The Governor seems like a pretty decent human being, but his politics are horrendously misguided—so he wasn’t prepared for a storm that completely destroyed the island leaving the 3 million residence completely vulnerable.  Then to make matters worse the mayor of San Juan, where the major port is located to get supplies to people inland was ran by Carmen Yulín Cruz Soto—an even bigger liberal than the governor.  Between them they had no plan of action or understanding of basic management skills which left them to not only ask for federal help by way of supplies like FEMA had conducted in Florida and Texas recently.  But they were asking for the infrastructure to deliver them as well—a considerably more difficult proposal given the remoteness of Puerto Rico.

With Texas and Florida being Republican lead states with governors who knew what they were doing federal help was able to bring in supplies and from there plenty of self-sufficient volunteers used their monster trucks and fishing boats to get those supplies to the people who needed them until the basic necessities of life could be somewhat resumed.  It will take many years to even hope to return to normalcy, but few people died and the people in those regions got back on their feet quickly.  They were success stories defying the tragedy due to the inherit self-reliance of the people most affected.  The people in those places were conservative minded which is how Republican governors were elected in those states to begin with.  Not so in Puerto Rico where I think the only Republican on the island will be President Trump when he visits to examine the extensive damage for himself.  In Puerto Rico the people who elected the progressive Democrats into office think much differently than those people in Texas and Florida.  They had no boats or monster trucks to help with the volunteer effort.  They were mostly poor people made worse by their addiction to government services and socialist local management of resources.  The people there didn’t rally to solve their problem, they sat on their porches waiting for someone to turn their power back on, and to bring them food and water.  The supplies were in the port at San Juan to distribute inland, but there was no effort to take those supplies to the people who needed them because nobody thought to do it for themselves—hence their tendency to vote for Democrats in office and to be poor, and in perpetual debt.

And that’s why the Democrats around the country are attacking Trump so viciously, because they have to hide the big difference in why Puerto Rico is so dissimilar from the major disasters that crippled Texas and Florida just weeks before.  Everyone can tell for themselves how differently the Puerto Ricans reacted to a major tragedy compared to the bass boats and monster trucks in Houston who fought bravely to restore order to their communities.  Liberals know what the problem is and they can’t let that become the story so they are attacking the Trump administration for essentially the same things they attacked President Bush for after Katrina wiped out New Orleans. But the problem was never the reaction of the Republican presidents; it was the type of people who were inflicted.  In Republican run states where the political bases were much more self-reliant the federal government and the people worked well together to manage the crises.  But in Democrat lead areas where liberal mayors and governors were in charge, everything was a disaster.  The FEMA people could bring the supplies, but the locals expected those supplies to literally be poured down their mouths because intellectually they are a too depended on government services to think for themselves.  That’s generally why they were poor to begin with.  Being poor isn’t just something that happens, it reflects the way people manage their lives.  Hard working people tend to have jobs and therefore money to work with.  They may even have a nice bass boat in their driveway to use if they find themselves flooded out. But poor people are usually those who are apathetic and always looking to do the minimum in life—which is why they don’t have many resources to work with when something bad happens. Puerto Rico had a lot of poor people by its demographic nature which is why they’re in terrible debt to begin with.

Trump’s tough talk about Puerto Rico is perfectly justified.  The federal government can’t just come along and bail them out of the $73 billion dollars in debt then pay for the complete rebuilding of the entire island.  The people there are going to have to change fundamentally into a more conservative base of philosophy otherwise they’ll be in trouble again during the next crises and they won’t bring anything to the table as an American state. The way to get Puerto Rico back on its feet is to create some free enterprise zones to make the island attractive to some of the high-tech businesses that are emerging in the new Trump economy—so that the place can become something like a new Silicone Valley.  But the nature of the people must change because even if Trump brings jobs back to Puerto Rico someone has to actually deliver on the effort.  They can’t sit in the port at San Juan and wait for someone to unload them.  Puerto Ricans need to learn from these crises and change their ways.  They must learn to help themselves—and to stop electing Democrats to run things so that prosperity can actually take root.  Democrats hope that nobody notices their failures in Puerto Rico and that they can hide their mistakes behind the other storms of the year and build a case that racism is somehow the problem.  But it’s not, the biggest difference is that Democrats are idiots who don’t understand basic economics and when pressed in life they always buckle—because their basic foundations of thought doesn’t prepare them for reality–leaving them always in need of a subsidy to fuel their political thoughts which have foundations of moral bankruptcy.  They only know how to just consume the resources thrown in their direction under every circumstance.  The problems in Puerto Rico are and have always been the failure of Democrats—and for that they can only blame themselves.

Rich Hoffman

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The Pittsburg Steelers Suck: How “group think” is destroying the NFL

I will forever now hate the Pittsburg Steelers for the way they handled the National Anthem and their individual player Alejandro Villanueva who was the only person who came out of the player’s tunnel to pay respect to the flag during last Sunday’s game.  In the past I’ve been supportive of the head coach Mike Tomlin but now under this national crisis he’s shown himself to be one of the villains, and I have no place in my life for a person like that.  I’m not going to watch any more Steelers games in the NFL, I can tell you that.  To watch how excited people were that Villanueva was the only one to stand for the anthem, then to take that away with a weak apology to the “team” the way events occurred the next day displayed everything that is wrong with football.  Obviously Tomlin and the Steelers teammates had gotten to Villanueva forcing the guy to wipe everything good he had done away completely for the good of the “group think” concept of team sports, and I think it’s disgusting.

As much positive that I’ve written about American football, and how it is a game of capitalism, there has always been that one little thing that has bothered me about “the game.”  And that is and was for me the culture of the locker room.  Now to that effect the best comments I have heard on this subject came from Chris Carter shown below in a video.  But for all the passion Chris showed toward the locker room culture that is precisely what always turned me off to team sports.  If I could have just played the game and embarked in the heroics of what happened on the field—I would have loved to play football and other team sports.  When I was in school I was heavily recruited by many coaches and my parents really pushed me to participate.  I was a very fast kid, a strong kid and a naturally gifted athlete.  I healed quickly, my body responded well in the weight room by putting on muscle when needed in a few days—everything about my physical body was what coaches wanted except for one thing, I thought the whole experience of the team concept was stupid.

When I was in the fifth grade I had a physical education teacher who really was encouraging me to be a multiple sport athlete because it was obvious to him that I was the fastest and strongest for my size of anybody in school.  But in sixth grade the next gym teacher was an arrogant prick who was all about group think, and I was opposed to everything that guy stood for.  I can say I hated that person before we ever spoke to each other because his value system was so diametrically opposed to mine.  However, let’s back up before going on—because this is important to the situation we are seeing now.  Even more than physical ability I was gifted with clarity of thought that extended beyond any parental teaching that anybody could give me.  Some might say that God walked with me very closely and guided me—which I think takes away from the actual value of my own decision making—but I always had very clear thoughts about how things should be, and had the courage to act on them—so when I was being groomed for being the next hot athlete in grade school, I resisted because I was opposed to all forms of “group think” that were presented to me—and public education was all about “group think” and “peer pressure.”  Ultimately what changed Alejandro Villanueva from a solitary figure pledging allegiance in the player’s tunnel and capturing America’s pride for about 24 hours but then reducing him to s slobbering apologist surrendering his big body to the rights of the “team” was that peer pressure instruction which had molded him into a professional football player in the NFL.  All those players at that level are governed by the same rules and those rules greatly restrict them as human beings which is why I never developed into an athlete outside of gym class.  I always fought peer pressure from day one in public school and that made the experience miserable for me.  I am thankful to this very day that I was aware of it from such a young age.  Group think is the worst aspect of human nature and I was always immune to it which then allowed me to see things without the emotion of worrying about what other people thought about it.  You can’t be a truly free person in life until you have made that personal decision not to worry about the opinions of other people.

I had a long talk with my gym teacher in the fifth grade when the subject of showers came up.  It was a purely voluntary thing to strip down and shower with the other kids after gym class but I wasn’t about to take off my cloths and share my naked body in the presence of my classmates.  I didn’t like those kids and I surely wasn’t going to reveal myself in a naked form to assimilate with them.  My parents then got involved and they all spoke to me that once we started doing sports in the seventh and eighth grades, that showering would be mandatory.  The more they pushed, the more I dug in.  I always saw the shower thing as a way to strip away the natural defenses of clothing and to symbolize removing our individuality into the naked truth of kinship where everyone was equally naked and sharing that experience together.  I wasn’t going to do it and that was all there was to it.  A lot of people were disappointed in me and they let me know it through peer pressure.  Yet the more they pushed, the more I dug in and the only place I found relief was in books, video games, and adventures outside of the school environment.  Since I didn’t waste an ounce of my time on satisfying other people’s peer pressure, I was free to do many other things leading me to a very colorful life full of unique experiences.  It all started by refusing to shower with other kids in school.

As a lot of these professional athletes grew into the specimens of perfection that they must be to play in the NFL at some point in the past they had to assimilate to that group think mentality which is what quickly controlled the behavior of Alejandro Villanueva.  These players are bigger, stronger, faster and tougher than the average person, but they are weak in the mind and can easily be controlled by little people like Mike Tomlin because of their preponderance to “group think.”  Groups are never more powerful than individuals and that is essentially the opposite message that the concept of team sports tries to convey.  Parents push their kids into team sports always hoping that their kid will win the lottery and become one of these professional athletes and live a good life under the protection of “group think” but you know what, I would never curse anybody I loved with such a limited vision for life.  I would never tell a kid I loved to take that first step in a locker room to become equal and bonded through nudity surrendering their individuality to a group called a “team.”  Not that the showering situation is about being gay, which I think is somewhat of a problem.  Athletes often have a “bros before hoes” clause in their psychological pacts with each other which I am adamantly against—and that mentality starts in the locker room culture—the all for one and one for all mentality of group think.

That’s why this whole NFL protest concept is so dangerous, because here you have millionaire athletes who are public celebrities behaving so quickly to the peer pressure of group think that they are easily used to sell social justice radicalism to their fans without understanding really what they are doing.  Trump is right about what he said about NFL owners being afraid of their players.  And coaches like Mike Tomlin was trying to get in front of that fear by uniting his team through group think, even though what Alejandro Villanueva did was good for the country.  But it wasn’t good for his team so guess what he did—he put Villanueva on the spot to protect the reputation of the team.  Obviously he tried to back track his vitriol once there were reports that Steelers fans were burning their jerseys and Terrible Towels.  Because here’s the secret to the whole thing, fans of the NFL love to watch team sports and root for the collective efforts of the team they have picked in an artificial war on the field of play.  But if you listen to them talk at tail gating parties before the games you hear the recitation of individual stats.  Those individuals are picked for Fantasy Football teams based on their individual performance.  So to the fans, it’s all about individualism and Alejandro Villanueva embodied that spirit gloriously before the game which caused all this trouble.  Once people were reminded that Alejandro Villanueva was just another “team player” yielding to the peer pressures of the world he became no better than anybody else—certainly not someone to celebrate.  And that is why the NFL is dying before our eyes.

When Aaron Rogers tried to get the Green Bay Packers fans to lock arms at Lambeau Field during a Thursday Night Football game on a national stage he was embarrassed to find that almost nobody did it.  As a jock trained to think in group assimilation he assumed the fans would follow him like all the other idiots he knew from his locker room.  People do not like to share themselves with people who do not possess the same value systems.  This is why team sports is such a big part of public education, because the goal is to create a class structure where athletes are considered elite people who then impose peer pressure on the rest of the world to satisfy the objectives of the government institution.  That might work conceptually, but it doesn’t work intellectually—and the effort failed.  But the attempt to even try it reveals the ugly side of the NFL which makes it easy for fans to turn away from the moment that it doesn’t give them what they want—which is relief from politics and the anxieties of our days.  When athletes show themselves to be simple automatons subject to group think instead of dynamic individuals that might be on the next insurance commercial, then the magic of football leaves and something else will replace it.  And the Pittsburg Steelers have really shot themselves in the foot assuming that people would be with them no matter what.  Now they have to live with their bad decision, which won’t be easy for them to do.  Speaking for myself, I will never watch another football game where the Steelers are playing.  I have better things to do than to waste my time on them.

Rich Hoffman

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The Miracle of Reading: Why a book is the most powerful thing in the universe

I must take a moment to articulate something a lot of people take for granted—and that is the unique aspects of intelligence possessed by the human race and the ability we have to transfer knowledge to each other. I’m talking about reading specifically. The ability to put down marks on a page, or a rock, and to have some other person interpret the meaning of those marks into intelligent recollection is one of the greatest miracles of the universe. It bothers me to see criticisms of the human race as if nature were in some superior position, as if the construction of a planet or the vastness of space were more important than the ability to read a book. Because it’s not, there is nothing more important than the human ability to read. The ability to convey knowledge of many lifespans and to create cognitive associations based on marks on a page is one of the most important things to emerge from LIFE. The random biological nature of cells to do what they are programmed to do does not equate to the ability to think and to build on intelligence. The mysteries of gravity and the power of light do not hold a candle to the ability to reason through variables and to invent something from nothing.

I had these thoughts recently while on a call with a patent review officer in Washington D.C. while a very expensive lawyer was serving as a bridge between us all. The scope of the meeting was to put the final touches on a patent I’m associated with—something created from nothing which would be launched into the world forever to change a manufacturing technique. We were doing this work from a large conference room table with mountains of written material spread out so that barely any aspects of the wooden table underneath showed through. The amount of reading and writing it took for all of us to arrive at that moment with over 4 years of discussions and all the years of experience we all had amassed over many different careers coming to that point was to me a miracle of human existence, and was a subject of great excitement. [image error]The reviewer was a very smart man who had to have read mountains of previous material in order to speak on the conference call so fluidly and it was in that moment that I considered how far the human race had come in just a few thousand years of marking on rocks during the Neolithic period, or even the age of Iron. As humans we realized early on that the way to beat our natural lifespans was to read and write—so that we could cheat death and live on with what we intelligently acquired over a lifetime. Cows, chickens, birds or any other creature anywhere don’t do this. They simply live—do as they have been programmed to do through cellular construction, then they die and are returned to the earth. Only humans leave behind the mark of their lifetimes in the knowledge they acquire and after only a few thousand years of this here we were inventing something and making it all legal—again through the power of the written language.

The anger I have at stupidity is in this regard. I really hate dumb people—because it is a choice. To see humans waste their minds on stupidity, on collective cohesions, to deliberately intoxicate themselves or to develop addictions such as pornographic endeavor, over eating, or smoking is to deprive the miracle that is life from its full fruition and I think it is much more catastrophic than any environmental concern. The worst thing anybody could do in life is to be stupid, and to do it by choice. To not learn to read, to write, or to think. Just the words on this blog site are a miracle in themselves because I can take what’s on my mind, put those thoughts down here for all to read—just marks and symbols that we all agree mean something, and we can exchange knowledge. I can speak to my great, great, great, great, GREAT grandchildren as easily as I’m speaking to you now—and that is quite important—and powerful. That is far more important, and difficult than the reasons for the storm on Jupiter known as the Great Eye. Who cares why the eye happens and never goes away if it doesn’t lead to any knowledge. It is just something mechanical that happens. It doesn’t think or become anything. It just is. And humans are not like that.

The hippies, the climate freaks and the socialist losers out there will say to us that we should smoke dope and yield to the world around us, and to become harmonized with existence. I say that is all bull shit. What they are really saying is that they are too lazy to think, too lazy to read, and too lazy to contemplate invention on improving what is into something that could be. Learning to just live and die isn’t really living. Its surrendering. A thinking human being is the most powerful aspect of existence that there is—and we are meant to change the world around us by the necessity of invention. And we do that through the ability to read. The ability of one mind to put down on paper through symbols the contents of that thought and for some other mind to read those symbols and recollect the thoughts of the first person is amazing. It is the closest thing to actual telepathic utilization that we know in known science. And there is an immortal quality to it that advances all of civilization. A great Orca whale doesn’t sit down and write a book. They simply live, they are born, they seek out food., they mate, they become mentors to the youth, then they die. Virtually all life forms perform at existence this way and there is nothing special about it. There is nothing great about Mother Nature and the world around us—only what we can look at as human beings and improve upon—because we were meant to do so. To fully live is to improve the world around us, not to accept it as it was.

Books, written papers, blogs, articles of formality—these are miracles of human thought that will extend our reach of knowledge deep into the future and will result in even more invention through natural evolution. I say to every drunk, every pot smoker, to every person who deliberately attempts to make themselves stupid so to gain appeal among their peers who do not wish to be challenged by intelligence, that they are a disgrace to everything it means to be alive. To have the gift of cognition, to think above the status of animal behavior and then to turn away from it is simply unforgivable. The ability to think and communicate is the greatest achievement in the universe, even as vast as it is. We marvel at how dolphins can communicate under water, and how humpback whales sing long spooky songs that inspire topless heathens known as beach bums to proclaim them as evidence of a “greater intelligence.” But when was the last time a dolphin wrote a series like the Game of Thrones books by George R.R. Martin? The answer is obvious, and deserves considerable respect. It’s time we stop pandering to the superstitions of the past and begin to highlight what is best about life in general—and it begins with the ability to communicate. That small step from carving out an image on a rock to pass along some thought to other people started a chain reaction which has evolved into those piles of paper I described at our patent meeting—and from there to the essence of modern civilization—which is a wonderful thing. Only those seeking stupidity could argue otherwise—because what they fear is to become something greater than the rest of the universe—and to ponder what might come next.

There are a lot of things I love in life, but there is nothing I love more than a new book. They always excite me, more than anything else does and that is because of what potential each one holds—from the simplest kid’s book to the most sophisticated novel—they have within them a cognitive ability that is very specific to the human condition which strives to be more than our animal natures—and that is the most important thing in all of existence. I place the power and ability to read above the most fantastic forces known anywhere, even a black hole at the center of each galaxy. Those are just mechanical events operating under the rules of physics. The ability to think and ponder changing those rules into something better is what matters most. And that is the key.

Rich Hoffman

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Ann Becker for West Chester Trustee: Except for Mark Welch, everyone else is a wasted vote

 

Problem solved in West Chester, Ann Becker is running for that open trustee seat being left by George Lang and that should take care of everything—to keep the percolating rats from taking over the stable ship of economic development in West Chester.   Now the voters of West Chester just need to make it official.  As I’ve reported over the past several weeks several former and present school board members from Lakota want to become the next trustee to work with the very liberal Lee Wong on the board of trustees to be a second vote against Mark Welch, who is the current president.  For many years liberal Lee Wong and Cathy Stoker worked a two vote crusade against George Lang driving up public sector wages, building unnecessary sidewalks in places not needed essentially so Lee could walk from his home to get free food at Sushi Monk, and many other big government conspiracies that extend too far into the past to chronically completely.  That is until George managed to help get Mark Welsh elected to the board in 2013 and since then the township big enough to be a city has managed to get its finances aligned into surpluses, make a pro business environment for continued growth and generally shrink government showcasing the region as the envy of similar communities all over the country.  With George Lang moving to a state seat that has left all the liberals audacious enough to wear the masks of Republican to come forth to mooch off the successful results—which has been a concern until Ann came to the rescue to offer herself as the best candidate on the ticket.

As I write this Joan the Hutt (Joan Powell) is rummaging through tape of past board meetings featuring Mark Welch trying to help her friend Lee Wong out with some undercover political theater.  She is the pro-union, anti-business candidate in this race and she thinks she has enough old school levy supporters from her days as the Lakota school board president most responsible for the runaway budget to call in enough favors to run for one of these open trustee seats and she’s most targeting Mark Welch.   The problem with that strategy is that there is even more tape of her from her school board meetings which can easily be used against her in the same way.  The big difference is that she was a terrible president at Lakota, a big spender with a horrendous track record.  Mark has been very successful, so that is something that will sort itself out in the coming month.    Joan the Hutt will soon learn just how much people hate her and have not forgotten how terribly she managed the budget at Lakota schools.  Mark is ready to deal with her.

Lynda O’Conner is learning how the business community has not forgiven her either for her role in the past Lakota school levies.  Lynda is someone I have personally endorsed in the past, but her vote in favor of the last tax increase in 2013 shows where her budgetary sentiments really reside.  She is not what I’d call a conservative and if politicians are learning anything around the country in the wake of the Donald Trump presidency it’s that people are sick of the status quo.  The Alabama election of Judge Roy Moore over Luther Strange should come to everyone’s mind regarding this West Chester election.  Lynda is certainly an establishment type of candidate.  She’s better than the old battle axes like Joan Powell who are so out of touch they might as well be in a different solar system, but she’s nowhere near as nimble on her feet as Ann Becker—who is already into everything presently.  Being a board member would just formalize everything for Ann and the community in a positive way.  The Republican Party spent over 30 million dollars and had the endorsement of Donald Trump to elect Luther Strange yet voters picked Moore instead—the reform minded populist who had no problem brandishing a gun on stage to set himself apart from everyone else.  He won easily over the Party pick and I see similarities with Ann Becker.  Ann won’t pull out any guns on stage as she’s not crazy about firearms, but she is otherwise very much of the same mind as Donald Trump and Roy Moore as far as the type of reforms that need to take place in American politics—and West Chester is similar in sentiment to that Alabama election.  Lynda O’Conner has a pro tax track record that will prove to be her downfall under Ann.

One thing that I see likely to happen is that this plot Lee Wong has hatched to surround himself with trustees who want to build sidewalks and spend money like a drunken sailor in a brothel is that he may actually diffuse out the voters who would otherwise look at him.   Mark Welch as a very successful incumbent should easily win so long as he sticks to what he’s good at and not get pulled into Joan the Hutt’s pro union attacks.  However Lee’s base may be spread out between him, Joan and the other lesser knowns on the ballot.  Having Lynda on the ticket might actually knock him off.  It’s quite possible that Lynda and Ann could end up on the board with Mark making Lynda the new liberal in place of Lee.   Lee really screwed up when he encouraged a bunch of union radicals to overtake a trustee meeting showing his political colors in a very negative way, then just a few weeks later protesting in Cincinnati to save the job of a person accused of treason to China.  The lady may have been innocent—but then again she may have been guilty.  Lee showed bad judgment and even more radicalism in putting his name next to a person accused of treason and that will come back to bite him in this election. Just like the NFL players thought they were too big to fail, and could use their elevated platform to protest some social cause, the public sentiment was that people started burning their jerseys and cancelling their season tickets.  I know Lee calls himself a Republican and he likes to flaunt his military service as a mask of patriotism, but he behaves more as a Global Citizen movement supporter which led him to defend a person providing secrets to China.  Lee has shown similar acts of bad judgment all through his time as a trustee and this time with Lynda on the ticket he may well have pushed himself out of a seat.

The important thing to remember however through all the noise is that Mark needs to be re-elected and that Ann Becker becomes that important second vote in the wake of George Lang.  Ann is a different kind of person than George, but they are both cut from the same fiscal conservative cloth that has made West Chester great.   In a lot of ways Ann would be perfect for the next step for West Chester because she has a good mind for making a lot of people happy, which is a tough skill in politics.  She’s ideologically pure enough to vote well and hold a hard conservative line on most topics, but she’s also very creative and can think out of the box—which she does often.  With some of the problems that need to be solved in West Chester that could be just the right approach.  It certainly puts her at the top of the ticket in my book.  I’m very glad she is running—I couldn’t think of a better person to run and win a seat as a West Chester trustee.  Everyone else is just a wasted vote.

Rich Hoffman

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The Church Shooting in Tennesse: Guns are the only thing that makes us all equal

If the gunman were not a black foreign immigrant who invaded a Tennessee church shooting and maiming innocent people within the congregation—the story would have appeared everywhere for days. But as it stands the story has been lightly covered because it turns out to be a very good one for those who advocate the necessity of the Second Amendment. For whatever his motivations the Sudanese shooter, Emanuel K. Samson brought his troubled recollections to the innocent lives of the masses, and people needed to defend themselves. If not for the actions of another young man, Robert Engle, Samson would have massacred many more people. Here is how The Washington Post reported the story—which is hardly a conservative publication. The facts speak for themselves:

Authorities have not said what motivated the gunman to execute the shooting. Emanuel K. Samson, who used to attend the church, has been charged with murder.

The shooting has shaken this relatively diverse pocket of Nashville, a community now fearful that Samson’s attack on a predominately white church could disturb a sense of racial harmony here.

Samson, 25, is a native of Sudan but resettled in the United States in 1996. Nashville police and federal investigators haven’t publicly identified a motive for the attack, but the U.S. attorney’s office in Nashville has launched a civil rights investigation and federal authorities have opened a hate-crime investigation.

“Everyone is saying don’t jump to conclusions and he was a nice guy but I think it was planned,” Goad said. “He knew what he was doing and picked out a place he knew where everybody was elderly, and didn’t expect to encounter anyone who was armed.”

After Samson shot Spann and the other parishioners, another man inside the church, Robert Caleb Engle, confronted him. As the two men struggled, police said, Samson’s gun went off, hitting him in the chest, and he fell to the floor. Engle then retrieved his own handgun and stood over Samson until police arrived.

 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/wounded-minister-in-tennessee-church-shooting-describes-chaos/2017/09/26/6aa229b0-a305-11e7-b14f-f41773cd5a14_story.html?utm_term=.7cdc39822148

No matter how much progressive thinking people believe that cultural assimilation is a productive thing to do, their thoughts are deeply flawed. We are not living in the times when kingdoms were united by a simple marriage. In those days people had to swear fealty to a king, so the responsibility for their thoughts and actions were not their own, meaning people of different value systems could be united out of fear of punishment by a centralized figure. But that’s not the way it works in America. People are free here and we do not bend our beliefs to a centralized figure, or even an institution. That puts the burden of social order on the strength of our values and when a group of people are suddenly thrust into a group of another people who have different value systems, then the first primal reaction to it is to inflict violence upon the other so that a challenge of their value systems is not so obvious. That is technically why we have ever had every war the human race has seen.

Now that progressive society has mixed up so many people of different values and put them all in each other’s faces—to force conflict in many cases—now they have to deal with the ramifications of that bad decision. As it stands the strong values of American tradition will prevail simply because they have worked in the past and those challenging those values come from failed states of thought where the roots of belief are very shallow—meaning their foundations are easily eroded away. That would certainly be the case of the Muslim faith and those who reside in poor communities where reading and wealth are not priorities. Their value systems are nurtured due largely to laziness—where other people work out the details and they simply grab on as the trend of the day—which is obviously the case of these young people looking for their way in the world and discovering that there are challenges to their emotional testaments. Without knowing the details of Emanuel K. Samson we can look at the situation and conclude that he was a young man who was finding the challenges of living in America difficult and he had developed enough rage to lash out in a murderous way toward those whose value systems were much different than his. So he grabbed a gun to inflict terror on those different from him. That’s an easy thing to do when the assumption is that the victims will be unarmed.

This kind of thing will of course continue—and will likely get worse as the failed experiments of progressivism fizzle out over the next fifty years. Americans are rediscovering themselves and there are many people like the young Engle who will need to wrestle bandits to the ground under gunfire in the future. Concealed carry holders will be more important than ever before. Personal firearm protection is an increasing need, not a diminishing one. The way to maintain a civil society is not to put the burden on an already overburdened “state” but to allow individuals to help the state by being the first responder to violence—then shielding those individuals from the burdens of legal activism in the wake. As many young men like Samson will discover in a world where capitalism forces values to be well defined—their foundations of belief from wherever they came from may come into conflict with the world around them. Their default reaction will be to inflict violence—so we need to be a well-armed society to protect ourselves from the psychological breakdown of these personal catastrophes, where immigrants finding the beliefs they had were failing to take root among free people—and them not knowing what to do about it other than kill those who are different from them.

To all those who preach equality, nothing makes people equal better than a gun. Personal firearm protection is something that needs to be the wave of the future for all those who wish to live in a free and equal society. Putting more trust in the state certainly hasn’t worked, nor will it ever work. The only thing that does is to have people personally armed so that when people like Samson pull out their guns, we can pull out ours and shoot them dead. Banning guns doesn’t work because Samson would have then just went to a knife or some other raw weapon of malice. Uninventing the gun won’t work either. We have to deal with the values of our people everywhere—and that is something the progressives ignored from the start of their movement. They never thought this thing through, this mixing of people in the ways we are seeing where value systems collide without an answer to heal it, and now we are seeing the ramifications. The only solution is to have personal firearms to deter the violence, and when it does occur, those threats can be quickly removed. Ignoring the situation will not fix it.

I would suggest everyone reading this to obtain a concealed carry permit and to carry a firearm everywhere you legally can. Hopefully you never have to use it. But if you do, you can be ready to blast people like this Samson kid into oblivion. He gave up all his individual rights when he walked into a Tennessee church and put bullets into innocent people. At that point he couldn’t be shot and decommissioned soon enough. Forget about the trails, forget about his human rights. Forget about the social ramifications. Once he made that decision to take the lives of other people—for whatever reason—he gave up his rights to live on planet earth. And only the gun can serve as judge, jury, and executioner in a society of clashing values. Only the gun makes them all equal.

Rich Hoffman

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