Rich Hoffman's Blog, page 298

Mark Welch for 2017 West Chester Trustee: Maintaining the great economic growth of a Cincinnati suburb correctly managed

[image error]I feel privileged to live in one of the best places in the United States, West Chester, Ohio.  I remember when it was called Union Township and was much more rural as a kid, and have watched it grow into essentially a city without losing its spirit of accomplishment which is rare in the world.  Over the years I could have moved anywhere and would have if I thought the opportunities for my family would have been better, but they aren’t.  While I don’t live in West Chester, I do work there and it is a part of my daily life most days of the week.   I have to credit George Lang with a lot of the government foundations which have allowed West Chester to become such a wonderful place.  As a politician you have to know when to manage a situation and when to leave it alone and George has managed to do that over the years even when hostile liberals pretending to be Republicans operated openly in ways that usually destroy communities—people like Cathy Stoker and Lee Wong—so it hasn’t been easy.   But George has done a very good job of being active where he needed to be and hands off depending on the situation and that style of government should be the model for the rest of the country.  The best thing however that happened to West Chester from the perspective of government is when Mark Welch joined George as a trustee in 2013. Over the last four years West Chester has exploded with opportunity and a lot of that silent credit goes to those two guys who have removed the barriers of creation and investment into business and landed many great opportunities to such a thriving, and diverse community.  If the benefits of Republican run government could be better shown anywhere in the United States I’d know about it—but that evidence has yet to present itself.

http://markwelchfortrustee.com/

I was having lunch with some friends at the new Chuy’s Tex-Mex restaurant that just opened in West Chester and had the opportunity to sit outside on a mild day that was very pleasant.   From there the Top Golf facility towered over my head, the Main Event was thriving with business and Barnes and Noble sat proudly as one of the few area bookstores to have survived the hard transition of Amazon’s influence on the publishing industry. Across the highway hotels had sprung up much to my advantage because out-of-town guests now had many places to stay when they visited—I no longer had to drive them to downtown Cincinnati to stay in a decent place for the night when visiting on business.  West Chester, the relatively new exit along I-75 had the optimistic feeling that I typically feel when I visit the Disney World complex in Orlando—the money is flowing which is the lifeblood of any economy and people were enjoying themselves on a daily basis with lifestyle options.

My kids had told me about Chuy’s and recommended that I try it out.  We had all just returned from Canterbury, England where we had dinner at a Tex-Mex place they had in the center of town there—which we thought at the time was the best we had ever had.  The decorations alone were extraordinary so we thought that type of experience was a once in the lifetime event.   But then Chuy’s opened and it was everything and more that you’d expect from a Tex-Mex style of operation, so in that context I was quite impressed.  As I turned around from my seat I could see the newly opened Deluth Trading company complex offering yet another shopping experience to West Chester guests.  Behind Deluth IKEA loomed on the horizon and I had to think how many people it took to make all this happen—and the answer is a good Republican plan that transpired over many years to make it happen and attract all these investments from all over the world to build West Chester into such a world-class destination for commerce.  George Lang and Mark Welch were smart enough to not inject themselves into the mechanisms and when they needed to they did a lot of soft selling to help push some of those deals over the top—and that really has been the difference.

I mentioned that I grew up around West Chester so I’ve had a front row seat to many of the positive things that have taken place over the last three decades of development.  But my optimism doesn’t come from a lack of perspective.   My observations from Chuy’s comes after I recently took my wife shopping at Harrod’s in London after having dinner at the Restaurant Gorden Ramsay in Chelsa just a few weeks prior to that experience.  We also had plenty of experiences in Paris which most people swoon over—but I have to say, having lunch at Chuy’s with Deluth literally right next door was far better as an experience than anything I’ve seen overseas.   I also recently had a trip to Japan where they have several facilities like Top Golf to serve as entertainment destinations in their land restricted environment—but none of them that I was able to see were as good as that West Chester facility.  Top Golf is an entertainment destination that is a very high quality experience—quite remarkable.  It is worth an out-of-town visit just to stay at that facility and play golf in such a unique way.   Mark Welch didn’t build any of these places, but as a successful businessman and corporate sales executive prior to his own entrepreneurial activities he had the experience to get out-of-the-way when all these investment opportunities were considering utilizing what West Chester offered, economically, demographically, and in supported infrastructure.

But of course I’ve just been talking about one little part of what has become one of the top interstate exits in the Cincinnati region.  Just north of these West Chester destinations are three more exits of the same type of explosive growth—everything from a new Cabela’s to the Cox Road shopping destinations. Which are extensive.  For a community that still has a small town tradition it now has all the amenities of a big city including a great hospital.  And in the middle of all this activity is one of the largest Metro Parks anywhere at the Voice of America, lots of top-level soccer fields, baseball fields, fishing, hiking, and boating—it is an astonishing place for something that is just a few hundred yards from the entrance to a Target, or a T.G.I Fridays across the street.

Mark Welch is up for election this year and has done so much in his first term that it would be crazy not to return him to the current position he holds which is president of the board of trustees.   There are a lot of con artists out there who put the much-needed “R” in front of their political affiliation to get elected in Butler County, but Mark is the real deal.  It isn’t easy to manage such a large township with so much fiscal wealth flowing into it, and still represent people the correct way.  Not everyone gets what they want, but I have watched Mark balance some really intense debates over the last few years with great skill and still not discourage investment.  Not an easy thing to do.  I attribute a lot of that skill to his success as a private citizen well before he was ever a trustee.  Now he has an opportunity to do it again for another term.   It’s important to keep him in the role he is currently so that more opportunity even yet may continue to flourish in West Chester.

It is important for everyone involved to work toward the correct objectives in this upcoming election.  After November, likely there will be a special election for another trustee seat and when that occurs we’ll need another strong Republican to work with Mark to keep the votes out of the hands of the many closet liberals who are lingering in the shadows looking for some way to get attention for themselves. So a clear strategy is needed to settle the minds of the many business opportunities that are looking at West Chester for stability and continued growth.   The first objective of course is to get Mark re-elected.  The second is to hold that second vote.  The ability to do that will go a long way to maintaining the explosive opportunities that West Chester residents have gained over this last decade, and to carry great optimism into the next and beyond.  West Chester is a unique place in the world and we should keep it that way with good government led by Mark Welch who truly understands how to go about it.

Rich Hoffman

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Donald Trump’s Tomorrowland: Making “Failure’s Not An Option” great again!

I kept looking for it but have yet to see any news really covering what Donald Trump’s administration has been doing in regard to American space exploration.  It was only just before July 4th 2017 that Trump signed an executive order reactivating the National Space Council at NASA and  making Mike Pence the is the chairman of the board.  Then just a few days after that great American Holiday Mike Pence was giving a speech at the Vehicle Assembly Building at Kennedy Space Center announcing that the first meeting of the new council would before summer ended.  It was a big speech with grand national appeal but it was eclipsed behind Trump’s G20 visit and the first face to face meeting with Russia’s Vladimir Putin.  The news media was completely consumed with the news of this oversea visit and the antics of Trump’s combat with the various news organizations—so they missed the announcements about America’s new role in space that sounded much more spectacular than when Kennedy gave in his famous challenge ahead of the Apollo program in the 60s.  Trump was thinking bigger—much bigger and Mike Pence is about to make his mark as a very strong VP in the vastness of space.

As Trump and Pence were unleashing space once again the Wall Street Journal had a very interesting article which was quite familiar to me, that “smart medicine” was in fact the wave of the future and ultimate cure to illness on earth.  And to what effect?  We don’t need to get sick as humans and die of old age—we can fix all that now and until very, very recently–publications like the Wall Street Journal were not covering those regenerative technologies.   I bring it up here because space exploration takes time and the best way to embark on such an adventure is to live the amount of time that Noah did from the Bible, to see many years of development to and from the vastness of space and to colonize the once unthinkable.  We’ll want every human being and more available today for such adventures. There were so many magnificent quotes given in Trump’s speech then Pence’s speech at the Kennedy Space Center to be played back to history for many years.  I thought many of those quotes were better than when Kennedy made his famous challenge to the American people when he announced that he intended to put man on the moon within a decade.   In case you haven’t heard, Trump wants to do that by 2020.  Trump then wants to be on Mars by 2024.  Those are ambitious goals for a space agency that has literally been turned off to study climate science and Islamic contributions to science.  Trump’s commitment to space is actually astonishing and will carry with it a new era in adventure, science, philosophy and politics.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-smart-medicine-solution-to-the-health-care-crisis-1499443449

I haven’t been down to our family retreat at Cape Canaveral for a few years now.  I have often spoken glowingly about my visits there to my favorite beach in the world, Cocoa Beach and the many famous landmarks that evolved in the wake of the space program at NASA.  From our condo we can see the Vehicle Assembly Building at Kennedy Space Center.  My kids are especially in love with the place and have watched several launches from that four story balcony.  They were there to see the last Space Shuttle mission return home under the Obama administration and they have recently seen the Space X rocket tests and have been enthusiastic about it still.  But they don’t know it like I do—where Space Shuttles seemed to take off every month and we were on a fast track to life outside of earth.  I love the optimism of space, the promise not only of adventure but of new discoveries and opportunities, such as mining Helium-3 off the moon for real nuclear power.   There is great talk now of going to Mars in weeks not just months which of course would allow us to mine the moons of Jupiter and even Saturn realistically and carry our civilization toward a Type 1 classification—where we master our solar system for resources to advance our technology.  Having that promise ripped away by the Obama administration and other previous presidents has been extremely disheartening.

It was my fault; back when my kids were getting more home school from my wife and I than anything they learned in ten years of school I took my children on a very special trip to Florida to visit the Kennedy Space Center then directly to Disney’s Epcot center.  The entire trip was focused on science and technology showing them the possibilities that were in front of their lives.  That was in 2003, George W. Bush was in the White House and I really thought he was serious about returning America back to the moon.   So I took my kids to the family condo at Cape Canaveral and let them meet astronauts at the Space Center and literally turned their imaginations loose.   Since then there really hasn’t been any ambition for space by virtually anybody.  This has been reflected in a few very forward-looking movies, like Tomorrowland based on the Disney attraction at Magic Kingdom and the very good Christopher Nolan movie, Intersteller.   I was very surprised to learn from my oldest daughter that her favorite movie so far in her life is Intersteller.  It made me a little sad because it was I who planted those seeds so long ago and in her life nothing had so far came from it.  So many kids in her generation have had their minds turned off and now they look at the world inwardly instead of outwardly.  Their vision is small because they have their faces pressed into the feces of their own existence and that folly is literally destroying mankind with remarkable swiftness.  And bright thinkers like my daughters—ignited by an overly optimistic dad have seen little to match that zeal from their generation.  When Trump said that in the vastness of space many of our problems would seem small—he’s right.  The solution to much that sickens us as a species will be solved in space and in the journey of mastering it.

It was during that trip that I bought a t-shirt from the NASA shop stating “Failure is not an option” which was the classic line from the Apollo 13 mission that was made into a movie by the great movie director, Ron Howard.  I wore it everywhere because it matched my optimism for everything.  Anyone who deals with me knows that this is my basic philosophy.  Failure is never an option for me—and never has been.  It is kind of an innate instinct that I have always had, but the space program in America framed the spirit in a way I have always fed from.   It was quite remarkable to wear that shirt to Epcot Center the next day with my kids asking questions and taking them to Tomorrowland to see all the optimism contained there for our future.   Even though my kids were impressed, I was frustrated because I felt we could be doing so much more as a country—but from the very top—in the White House we lacked vision and the great dreamers had been grounded, seemingly on purpose.

If you’ve ever been through a NADCAP audit dear reader you’ll understand what I’m talking about.  For many decades now government has imposed so many rules and regulations onto the aerospace industry that we’ve stifled creativity and brave innovations with so much bureaucratic red tape that the love for adventure that used to be present even in engineers has been stuffed into a bottle and sealed up tight.  The days where World War II fighter pilots were the test pilots and advisors for NASA are over—they have been replaced by pin headed politicians and paper pushers whose only adventure in life is to decide who will make the coffee run to Starbucks.  The industry bureaucrats have replaced the type of horse sense innovation that actually invented space travel with static manufacturing plans designed to take the thinking away from production leaving us all with a cold—dead work environment of people disconnected from the passion that can be garnered from being a part of the industry.   Aerospace today from the top to the bottom look for reasons not to do things than in how to do them because the regulatory zeal placed upon it by government has crushed the desire to achieve things.  The good news of Trump’s commitment to space means so much more than just going back to the moon—it means uncovering that American spirit that put us there in the first place and going back to what worked—and allowing young people to dream of a work culture that stated “Failure is Not an Option” and spent every last breath of their lives articulating that type of thinking.

It was as if there were a cloud of negativity that has taken over the world and until Trump unleashed his big ideas that cloud has been in full rebellion.  It doesn’t want Trump to succeed in these quests and it has been so thick that even the magnanimity of the two speeches done after the 4th of July 2017 by first the President then the Vice President down at Kennedy Space Center that nobody heard about these events.  They were probably the most important news stories of the week, yet nobody covered them—not even Fox News.  Even supporters of Trump’s administration like Jessie Watters and Eric Boiling didn’t make a mention of these bold speeches on their coverage that I could see watching them through the following weekend—the news was all about CNN’s fake news coverage and the G20 Summit.  Nothing about America’s new commitment to space or the wonderful science that will come from it—we are talking about a new dawn for the human race while the attention is on keeping our heads in the waste of our lives by cowardly bureaucrats who want to keep our feet firmly in concrete sealed to the shallow history of European stagnation.

Everyone should have seen this coming, after all Trump is all about thinking big, and by the time he is done our previous visits to space will seem like distant history—not to be forgotten, but certainly not the focus of future visits of people to the Kennedy Space Center. Based on what Mike Pence said, Cape Canaveral is poised to be a true space port where private sector and government truly work properly toward the goal of expanding mankind into the vast cosmos above our heads. Instead of saying “remember that” we will be making t-shirts of what was just said in a board room off in the corner of the Vehicle Assembly Building as some engineering problem revealed major headaches for everyone.   It is in the thrill of overcoming those obstacles that the adventure of space happens—not from the losers who throw their hands up in because the word “the” is placed in the wrong place in a manufacturing plan.

But that those plans will be written once more as discovery happens and innovation dictates light feet and an indomitable spirit.  Yes, Trump’s commitment to space is the best thing to happen in America over many years and I am proud once again of our space program.  It won’t take long to see the results even though at this point very few people are talking about it.  Soon however, that won’t be the case.  It will prove to be one of the biggest things to have ever happened to the human race and its happening right now. And not a moment too soon!  We’ve needed this, and now Donald Trump is starting that train of successes in science moving again and the results will be positive for every single human being on planet earth—and that’s not an understatement.

Rich Hoffman

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Critics of the Ark Encounter and the Trump Presidency: A collision of east and western thought

While doing a little research on the Ark Encounter for an article reporting my recent visit there I ran across a number of really disturbing trends which correlate perfectly to the Trump presidency.   It’s no secret that evangelicals supported Donald Trump massively in the last election and that they would continue to be a solidifying electorate base—so obviously the criticism leveled at the type of evangelicals who were behind the Ark Encounter project were the same who wanted to end the Trump presidency with bizarre conspiracy theories and constant small-minded thinking—especially in the example below from the lunatic making fun of not only the Ark Encounter, but the type of people who live in Kentucky.  What we are seeing is a classic battle between traditionalists and the progressives from the coastal territories and the urban viewpoints that their culture is superior from a European mindset, contains all the arrogance which articulates our current crises in America—and they are of course dead wrong.

I am not a “young earth” believer and I see many flaws in the foundation beliefs of the Ark Encounter presentation.   I watched with great effort the great debate at the Ark Encounter between Bill Nye, the Science Guy and the amusement park’s founder, Ken Ham.  My view is that both were functioning from a mythic perspective represented by their two foundational philosophies.  I admired Ken Ham’s passion and his beliefs even though I think there is more evidence that is needed to tell the story.  After all, my father-in-law is a geology professor and I have many friends around the world who are archaeologists, historians, and paleontologists and many of the sciences they are working on is showing that earthly civilizations are much older than 6000 years, that human societies are millions of years old and that a Vico cycle has dominated human thought for many cycles over that time for which the Noah story is all but the most recent one.  But I also reserve the right that everyone might be wrong and that evidence may come forward that shines light in a totally new direction—so from my perspective the stories of these cultures—including our present one provide some of the best insight that we have to work with and serves as a proper starting point for any discussion.  But with Bill Nye—he’s clearly functioning from the European Marxism which has crippled western civilization from the start and the foundation of his entire premise is rooted in global warming being the dominate threat of all mankind.  So as radical as he wants to make Ken Ham out to be for the Ark Encounter’s “young earth” debates both sides are essentially arguing over basic religious views.  The modern progressive is proposing a new religion in earth worship to correct obvious flaws in their traditional thinking and to do that they have to eliminate people like Ken Ham from the discussion to make their own pieces of thought fit and that is why they are so hostile.

I think the Ark Encounter is actually a wonderful place to provoke actual philosophic debate that is badly needed.   I compared it to not only the movie Jurassic Park, but also the Universal Studios attraction which is based on hard science but has many fictional elements added to psychologically tell a story our human minds need to deal with, real philosophical challenges provided by DNA manipulation and other modern concerns,  There is incredible value in that particular modern mythology that cannot be taken factually, but as part of an immersive story.  The Ark Encounter’s value is not in its factual elements—whether Noah built the Ark in 2200 BC and that once all the waters of the world receded from the Biblical flood the vessel ended up on top of Mt Ararat in Turkey.   It’s in the study of good and evil and how decisions on the furtherance of mankind should be articulated in relation to the primal actions of biological urges.   Should human beings allow themselves to be basic primal organisms eating, drinking, and procreating as a blob of cellular activity or should human thinking exceed biological necessity?  As primal as many might blame Ken Ham’s evangelical perspective it is actually the basic foundation which asks the question of mankind—shouldn’t we be more than just a biological mechanism of earth’s many life forms?  If mankind is actually unique in that spectrum and has a special place in a universe created by God on the sixth day of a grand construction project—than shouldn’t we act on an elevated platform?   Such discussion are meant for the temples of the world but at the Ark Encounter Ken Ham has actually revisited the great debates known to Greek society back into the modern world and the effect is quite dramatic—and valuable.  Scholarship shouldn’t be afraid of the truth—because in debating these things, we learn a lot about ourselves and our positions.  The real value isn’t always in the facts which are hard to know when evidence is slow to emerge from science—but the stories that are told contain elements of a hidden truth that our psychology requires to behold advanced concepts beyond the primal necessity of our biological requirements.

As sophisticated as Bill Nye’s reliance on actual science might appear his basic premise is that we live, we die, we leave behind other collective organisms to continue our species—but that humans are not particularly special compared to dogs, cats or ocean animals—and that the greatest threat facing our modern times is man-made global warming.  It is from the Bill Nye type of thinkers that the NASA program was all but shut down in the past and that they don’t want humans thinking too much about themselves intellectually but instead need to find their happy place on planet earth and learn to live there in harmony with nature.   The evolution of this progressive thinking actually comes from medieval Europe where the Christian church proposed by the remnants of the Roman Empire had been adopted by that society which actually came from oriental sentiment considered in India at the time and collided with the individual thinking of the Troubadours and Arthurian romances already in bloom.  The two vantage points never fit together correctly and Europe has been fragmented in its thinking for well over a thousand years now and that essential problem is at the heart of everything concerning conflict between the eastern and western worlds.  The people of the Middle East will admit that they are collectivists so it’s easy for them to submit themselves to angry gods who rule from the heavens.  Eastern societies are also collectivists and will sacrifice their individuality in a moment to the higher powers of celestial involvement.  However Europe was already asking hard questions about the role of the individual soul well before Roman brought that eastern religion of Christianity to its empire and people didn’t agree, and they still don’t leaving us with a very fragmented religious element that still desires to put the individual at the front of thought while the collective nature of all religion seeks to remain the superior force.

The critics of The Ark Encounter fail because they essentially insist that the new religion of earth worship be the dominate bond that unites America with the rest of the world in “progressive” thought.  Their religion is actually one that the Nazi movement was based heavily on—a kind of Celtic reinvention from a time before the Roman Empire used Christianity to unit its empire with common thought.  But, the Celtics were not the Troubadours so there are factions of people who uniquely professed to the world that individuality was important and that our souls were special in the role of the universe—that God would have Noah be the keeper of the world’s animals and that he alone with his three sons and their wives would save all mankind on earth for another round on the Vico cycle.  To me it’s a story that says a lot more than history can put its finger on at the moment.  To others it is the path to eternal life to harbor their individual souls spiritually.  To others it’s a threat to that classic European problem—an eastern religion mixed with western thought to provide so much conflict and pain, that ancient religions long destroyed by the Roman Empire are still desired behind the mask of “earth worship.”

What’s important is the discussions that pour forth and who would have ever known that little Williamstown, Kentucky would be such a center for philosophic discussion.  It’s not New York or Chicago or even London that is the center of modern debate such as Athens served in the past—but a little exit along I-75 where Ken Ham built a massive recreation of Noah’s Ark and invited debate on a campus designed to spark discussion.   That is the aspect to all this that is beautiful and those who don’t want the debate—but just want to lazily accept the conclusions of religions that came before us as fact of course don’t want those debates to occur—just as they don’t want Donald Trump to Make America Great Again.  They just want to live, die, and be forgotten so that the Earth can live its life as a celestial sphere only to eventually die itself as the sun runs out of fuel and the universe will never know that we ever had a human race that thought, built and contemplated new ways of thinking aside from the inherit violence of a universe expanding, contracting, and dying itself for reasons that defy reasoning.  At least at the Ark Encounter there is a defined purpose for living that is presented and that maybe the greatest threat of all.

Rich Hoffman

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The Ark Encounter: A real life Jurassic Park with a noble goal of saving its guests from eternal damnation

[image error]After visiting many Buddhist shrines in Japan and having direct contact with their national culture it has been very obvious that the United States has been deeply damaged by the loss of Christianity as the primary, unifying religion.  In Japan they have at least a basic understanding of culture as a nation which unifies them toward basic tasks successfully.  So I have watched what Ken Ham has been doing down in Kentucky for quite some time with a hopeful eye.  I’m not a “young earth” believer but as any reader here knows I love functional mythologies and think that often there are great truths in the stories of culture that point to important needs all human beings have—so a functional mythology is essential to human existence.  By allowing Christianity to be pushed from our culture as a solidifying force, it has harmed the United States politically, economically—but most of all spiritually.  So When Ken Ham and his organization opened the Ark Experience a year ago as of this writing I was very intrigued.  I have been meaning to go but have been very busy with travels around the world—particularly a visit to the Canterbury Cathedral and Stonehenge that were high on my priority list.  However, a day shy of its one year anniversary my wife and I took a midweek Thursday afternoon trip to see the recreation of Noah’s Ark in the Kentucky hillsides and were quite astonished by what we found there relative to our travels.

My primary objective in going was to compare the size of the Ark to the Zheng He treasure ships of 1401 AD which were just a bit smaller than the massive 510 foot long, 51’ high Noah’s Ark recreation at Williamstown, Kentucky—one of those previously lonely exists on I-75 about halfway between Lexington and Cincinnati.  After all, a ship that big would clearly show how ancient cultures traveled the world well before Christopher Columbus so I was able to visit the Ark Experience with a clear understanding that much of our sciences are still in their infancy and are not correct about traditional historic formulations.   People have been building ships the size of Noah’s Ark for many years.

Lunch at the Ark Encounter. pic.twitter.com/TVl4TeTnar

— Rich Hoffman (@overmanwarrior) July 7, 2017

One of the reasons that the Christopher Columbus and Mayflower voyages were so miserable was that the ships were just so small.  Water was hard to come by and living quarters were cramped.  Zheng he was able to grow food on the decks of his massive fleet back in 1421 as he was circumnavigating the globe showing off the wealth of the Ming Dynasty to the world.  But even better was the access to all the fresh water that the big ships captured from rain at sea. The large decks could sustain a massive crew for quite a long time allowing travelers to navigate long voyages for a sustained period of time without hardship—and that was the key to ancient travel around the world much earlier than European historians wanted to admit.   So Ken Ham’s Ark and the details of how it worked was something I was interested in seeing.

What I discovered was that The Ark Encounter was essentially the emergence of a real life Jurassic Park which was all I could think of while visiting—only the theme was not resurrecting long dead dinosaurs—which ironically are part of the Ark Experience—but it was in resurrecting the Christian evangelicals into a theme park of their own by dusting off the 2000 year old religion into a modern functional mythology.  It was an ambitious enterprise to say the least.  After just returning from Stonehenge the way that Ken Ham had the whole park set up reminded me of how the English Heritage have set up that classic site to tourists.  All have taken a page out of the Disney playbook at the Magic Kingdom in that you can’t get to their attractions on foot; you have to be transported there to separate you from the outside world.  In the case of the Ark Experience tour busses take you from the parking lot to the Ark itself over a mile long road that carries you to the destination.   After buying our $40 dollar tickets and noticing that the parking lot was filled at just 10 AM in the morning with cars from every single state east of the Mississippi River—and many cars from well west, it was obvious that something very special was going on.  The way that you got onto the buses and arrived at Noah’s Ark reminded me of the way John Hammond took visitors to his fictional Jurassic Park in the now famous book and movie.

In doing a little research for The Ark Encounter it was obvious to me that Ken Ham was very much like a John Hammond type of person.  I always liked the Jurassic Park movies but I was always impressed with John Hammond’s character in the novel—which was given great respect in the first Jurassic Park movie with the charismatic Richard Attenborough.  It takes a lot to start a theme park in the middle of nowhere—especially when the cost of entry is so high.   At least the fictional John Hammond character of Jurassic Park had dinosaurs to lure in visitors. What the real life Ken Ham has done was significantly harder—he endeavored to create a $100 million dollar evangelical amusement park about essentially recruiting people back to Christ.  Using the Ark as a metaphor to tell the story of God’s first attempt to save mankind from sin by picking the favored Noah to be all that saves life on planet earth from the punishment of mankind’s wicked ways—the third floor inside the Ark delivers the essential message—that Christ is the second ark and all you have to do to ride it is accept Jesus Christ as your savior and all is good in the world.  It was nothing short of optimistic but as I watched the presentation which was very carefully planned to overcome whatever modern opposition a visitor might have had from the outside world it was easy to like what Ken Ham was doing.

Like Jurassic Park the Ark Encounter isn’t quite finished–but they had what counts—the massive Ark which is the largest wooden structure on earth currently.  It is worth the price of admission just to see it.  Built by Amish craftsman to the kind of perfection they are known for, it became obvious quickly that the entire site serves to inspire people toward Christianity with overwhelming optimism.   The park itself had construction going on everywhere and was led by a charismatic president of the operation who narrated the arrival with the kind of fanfare only seen previously in fiction.  By only hiring people of the faith, there are no gay people or sour employees who were covered in body piercings and experimenting with atheism to muddy the experience, the whole place had a workforce much like Chick-fil-A where they wanted to be there and enjoyed the visit by the guests.   They currently have open the Ark—which by itself is worth the money, but they also have a nice little zoo and a few gift shops.  There is a zipline experience to help bring a little adventure to the park with obvious big ideas blooming later as the park matures.  But I think where the Ark Experience really shined was at their very nice restaurant called Emzara’s.[image error]

The gift shop was very impressive at the back of the Ark.  In it was a lot of material designed to be keepsakes, but I thought the best of it was of course the book selections.  There is a lot of reading material to delve into.  I don’t think it’s important at a place like the Ark Encounter for everything to be factual—after all, I’ve been to the actual Jurassic Park at Universal Studios and nothing they had there was real—but people suspended belief long enough to enjoy a functional mythology designed to get visitors to at least ask the “what if” questions.  At the Ark Encounter there is an obvious message of evangelical scholarship that is going on.  Nobody is force feeding anything but the opportunities are obvious and they most bloom from that short walk from the back of the Ark into the wonderfully spacious Emzara’s restaurant.

The back of the giant Noah's Ark in Kentucky. pic.twitter.com/IDX1bu1eFD

— Rich Hoffman (@overmanwarrior) July 7, 2017

That place had a buffet style offering with abundant food to satisfy the sensibilities of southern expectations in America—and it’s big—designed to handle thousands of customers comfortably.  The building is two stories and also offers outside seating very spaciously provided.   That’s where my wife and I ate, away from the noise downstairs where things were a bit quieter on the second story.  It was up there where I saw several young people with open laptops off in the corner reading and doing Christian based research with their peers.  It was like church only at an amusement park with all the optimism that comes from such a place.  That’s where it was most obvious the brilliance of Ken Ham’s work there.   He has essentially created a Biblical refuge from the outside world where scholarship can be explored in the context of real scale to open up the thought process toward evangelical thinking.

Obviously, and it’s already happening, Ken Ham plans to make that 1-75 exit 154 an evangelical dedicated enterprise where the persecuted can gather to recharge together in the masses and return to the world to spread the word of God.  What he has created from nothing reminded me a lot of the early days of Disney World in Orlando.  It doesn’t take much imagination to see where things are going—rapidly.  The place is built to handle crowds and as I said, we were there on a Thursday afternoon just an hour after the place opened and the parking lot was full.  People were coming from more than 1000 miles in some cases to visit and I didn’t see a single beat up car in the parking lot.  The kind of people I saw visiting were good, hard-working people who were personally successful enough to have new cars to drive and families with two to four children who attend church regularly.  They were not the dregs of society let me put it that way–and they were willing to drive out of their way and spend a lot of money to see a life-sized Ark, shop at the abundant gift shop and eat at Emzara’s.  There is no pretense that you have to agree with Ken Ham’s “young earth” theories.  If viewed as a functioning mythology, there are a lot worse things for people to be thinking about.  But at least at the Ark Experience good people have been given an opportunity to spend some time around other good people with a soft sale of immortal enlightenment and let me tell you something folks—that’s a very powerful thing in our young American culture.  The Ark Experience is worth the trip, the money, and the hope it has for the soul of mankind and its “think big” massage is timely, and potent.  I predict big things happening in Williamstown, Kentucky over the next decade—and beyond.  And maybe, just maybe—we’ll find that America can find its national identity and return to a foundation rooted in Biblical scholarship which unifies our nation productively, and spiritually for the better.

Rich Hoffman

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Hollywood Down 8% in 2017: Trading politics for profit to destroy an industry

This is far more important than most people think—the movie box office for July of 2017 was down 8% from the same period a year ago.  Additionally Disney has lost around 4 million subscribers to its Disney Channels over the past three years as kids turn to other forms of entertainment.  More and more homes are cutting their cable service as it’s just too expensive for what people get,  and theater owners are struggling to survive with Hollywood giving them very little to work with to justify the big investment that a movie ticket costs these days.  That same home theater market is keeping people home more rather than go to the theater to see movies that could otherwise just be seen on Netflix.  If you couple all that with the Donald Trump versus the media battle—which will hurt traditional media extensively, the entertainment industry is in big trouble—which I have been saying for a long time.  All the stocks are down for the theater owners—which I feel sorry for.  The distributors have let them down by pushing a product that was just too liberal for mainstream American audiences and now they’ve all been hung out to dry.

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/box-office-hollywoods-franchise-crisis-worsens-july-fourth-1018493

http://www.tubefilter.com/2017/07/05/disney-channel-freeform-ratings-falling/

For about 20 years I bounced around with tentative meetings within Hollywood.  For me it was more than a treasure hunt, I really wanted to make movies and to contribute to the library of wonderful movies that I had grown up with.  The business end was something I didn’t have much patience for since most of the people running the industry were radically more liberal than I was.  So I’d get a project floating around out there but it would go cold.  The money guys were also liberal so the project proposals I suggested were either heavily scrutinized with extensive re-writes to soften them up, or they just weren’t getting off the ground.  In a few cases I was offered positions in the industry, but my wife didn’t want to move to California—and without living in such a way that you could network in that town, it was pretty much impossible to get any project off the ground.  I went to several film festivals, won a few screenwriting awards and ended up doing a few bull whip stunts for legitimate studios but the last time I flew back from Hollywood in 2008 I knew that the industry was in trouble from a business perspective.   They weren’t going to make it which made me sad, because I liked traditional Hollywood—I always liked Howard Hughes, George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, Albert Hitchcock, John Wayne and Clint Eastwood.  These new filmmakers in Hollywood were too political and I was from a flyover state so things just weren’t going to work out.  After that last trip I put my focus into other business opportunities and waited for the inevitable which is now upon us.

Movies cost too much to make, the labor unions which represent all the industry people has forced them all to think too collectively to stay in touch with the American people.  Reading with great interest how the Han Solo movie fell apart at Lucasfilm it’s obvious that the new generation is just too soft and manipulated by their director’s guilds—into liberal politics which the movie going audiences can’t stand.   Even though I warned of all this years ago, and have written extensively about it since, it still hurts to see an entire industry collapsing on itself.  The Hollywood product is now on life support with only a few big Disney releases carrying most of the industry.  Warner Bros. has done well with Wonder Woman, and Marvel had their usual hits with Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 2.   Small films like Baby Driver did respectable business, but big films like Pirates of the Caribbean 5 were down a quarter from the previous installment worldwide and that isn’t good news.   Critics have been hard on these new movies as they have an extreme political slant to most reviews and once the Rotten Tomatoes scores hit online people are so turned off they just don’t go see these films and that cycle is worsening.

Hollywood is about more than just the movies themselves—it’s about an entire industry from print media like Entertainment Weekly, The Hollywood Reporter, to the television shows Inside Edition and Entertainment Tonight.   Critics for the big newspapers have national audiences in some cases and they have abused their relationships and let that stardom go to their heads giving themselves the power to sink or swim a picture—so essentially they have cut off their own noses to spite their faces.  I remember a very specific day in Glendale, California where several day time television programs were set up on the same street to shoot exteriors and I was having lunch with some people who worked the trade publications who were full of themselves way too dangerously.  I tried to make them aware of the fragile eco system that was on full display and they had the kind of attitude that the gravy train was going to go on forever.  Well, within two years every one of those people was out of a job and their publications had folded.   They should have listened, but of course they didn’t.  Most of those big name trade publications won’t be around much longer because nobody really cares what they have to say. The media stars they talk about are today far more political than they used to be and they have aligned themselves against Trump who is set to be a very popular and successful president, and now there just aren’t enough fans of their material to carry them into the next decade.

There are going to be a lot of bankruptcies—and even the Disney Company will feel the squeeze.  While I continue to be very impressed with what Disney is doing at their parks and with the Star Wars movies as one giant mythology spanning many platforms—computer games, etc—they still rely too much on theater owners to distribute their core products and those theater owners need more than just Disney to stay afloat.   They need every weekend to have people wanting to go to the theaters to buy over-priced popcorn and soda to watch a movie they don’t want to wait for release on the home market where likely the televisions they have at home is far better than what is offered at the theater.  I will have to add that when my wife and I went to see The Book of Henry that the Regal Cinemas we went to had adjusted their prices down for popcorn and pop to a very reasonable level.  The theater owners out there are doing their jobs and adjusting to the marketplace, but Hollywood hasn’t.  They keep making the same crap and trying to repackage it instead of turning loose people with great ideas to constantly keep material fresh.  I know I wasn’t the only one trying to get new ideas to production companies—it was mainly a cultural problem.   Studio execs were too interested in getting laid at the multiple parties around town by telling chicks that they were for this liberal cause or that—so they were making decisions at the executive level in producing products that American audiences did not want to see.   Once they got their blow job they had already committed their studio to ten films for production the next year which nobody would want to see because of their overly liberalized political overtones.   Sure the chick who was giving blow jobs at the party liked the Matt Damon movie about fracking—but nobody in America wanted to see it and the budget was blown.

So the industry is toast—it won’t recover in its present form.  Of course there will be investment opportunities in new styles of media, but the Hollywood game is over.  The industry just hasn’t come to terms with it yet.  There are a few $1 billion dollar earners yet to be released in 2017 but it won’t be enough.  By the end of the year the gains will be so far down that they won’t even be worth discussing.   And life outside of Hollywood will go on.   All I can say to those people who were so haughty 10 years ago is that I sincerely tried to tell you this would happen, but you didn’t listen.  I wish you had.  So now it’s time to pay—and it will be painful.  But you people did it to yourselves.   America will be great again and Hollywood has removed itself from being a part of it—and that’s a damn shame.

Rich Hoffman

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White Supremacy is not a Conservative Value: Using the 4th of July to measure American evolution for the better

I remember what it was like to not have a representative in the White House. Last year during the 4th of July in 2016 I was able to start seeing a light at the end of the tunnel as it was obvious that Trump was going to be the Republican nominee. The Brexit vote shocked the world and FBI Director James Comey revealed the extent of Hillary Clinton’s crimes during a press conference. So I was feeling pretty good about things politically for the first time in my adult life. Of course now that Trump is president everything is happening just as I expected it to and I’m happy. He’s done more in his first half-year as president than anyone in history and he’s just getting started. Yet it is still stunning to see how narrow-minded the political left is. Their opinions of Trump are rooted in complete hatred which I can understand to some extent. After all, I have hated the people they’ve had in the White House for many decades. I didn’t stop enjoying life because of it though—which is what is going on with them. While watching President Trump and Melania speak at a 4th of July picnic to a normal person there was nothing to be upset about. Like him or not, Trump represented the office of president nicely, and with respect. But the vile hatred that was exhibited was quite astonishing—especially in Melania’s case.

During the long weekend, I was able to watch a few documentaries that I noticed on Netflix about the Ruby Ridge incident, and the Oklahoma City Bombing which umbrellaed Ruby Ridge, Waco, and then climaxing into Oklahoma City with a PBS spin on the whole thing—essentially from the vantage point of the political left. It’s been a while but It surprised me how much the white supremacist groups played a part in those terrorist attacks that were very much a part of the 90s. Essentially, as the Clinton administration tried very hard to strip away individual liberty and firearms rights it was the neo-Nazi groups on the so-called “fringe right” that were most enraged. I couldn’t help but conclude that many of the radical religious views of the white supremacists were a lot like those of ISIS—where they take an extremist view of religion and use it to justify violence.

Clearly the Clinton administration was cramming its values down on those people to incite them to violence—poking their fingers in their eyes hoping to get them fighting so they could justify federal action in destroying them. Obviously, they didn’t succeed because the political left found itself out of power anyway and those neo-Nazi’s are still out there in the countryside of rural counties all over America. Generally, this is how it goes, the further away from big cities that you get in America the less tolerant people are toward diversity—and more literal the interpretation of the Constitution will be displayed in conjunction with religious texts. The closer to a city that people live the more progressive they will be, and it is there that Hillary Clinton found almost her entire voter base in 2017. It is important to remember with these neo-Nazis that the NAZI order was a socialist one, so to a person like me—these white supremacist groups don’t get it. They are acting purely out of fear from the perspective of their race and are missing the fine points of the current Constitutional philosophy. The PBS filmmakers obviously wanted to sum up the issue that anyone who wasn’t like them—urban progressive—were more like these neo-Nazi groups and that gun shows were the breeding ground for violence.

Well, I know a lot of people and I spend a lot of time around guns and I can say that I don’t know anybody like those neo-Nazi groups that were featured in the Waco, Oklahoma City, or Ruby Ridge incidents as background characters. And anyone who knows me knows I’m certainly no racist. I probably associate with more people foreign-born on a friendly basis than any ten people who you know dear reader so the PBS filmmakers and the political left in general obviously do not understand what makes up the conservative right. I would hardly call neo-Nazis the “far right” because by their own definitions they are way too collectivist based to be considered properly conservative. They have more in common with the political left than they do with someone like me—and other Trump voters. Trump certainly isn’t in that neo-Nazi category. The political left just lacks the proper definitions so they have made them up. Trump’s supporter base is a far cry from the kind of people who were involved ultimately in the bombing of Oklahoma City.

But, one thing to note, the further away from cities that people in America are—the less they trust the government and rely on their own individuality to get through life. Only a very small percentage of them are like the white supremacist groups shown on PBS. The white supremacy activism is just a byproduct of ignorance that emerges when the outside world is too far removed to color their thoughts with options—much like ISIS might emerge in the middle of the desert in the Middle East without a local movie theater there to bring culture to their region—and something else to think about besides Mohammed’s rules and virgins in the afterlife once they’ve already mutilated the women here on earth. Extremism happens when ignorance is cultivated. We clearly see this in the inner-city cultures where Democrats run the failing—bankrupt cities—like Chicago and Detroit. Extremism on all sides happen because people have limited understandings of things happening outside of their regions—and lack a basic curiosity to discover them.

Trump is certainly no neo-Nazi white supremacist. His ability to communicate is quite extraordinary and I found his speeches on the Fourth of July to be refreshing. I would have thought that even if I weren’t a supporter. So yes, it was astonishing to see that people disliked Donald Trump so much even though he was clearly not trying to stoke the flames against his political rivals. That tells me something very important—that people like those who made those PBS videos are upset that their attempt to categorize Trump supporters as some ignorant white supremacists had failed completely—because that’s why they were so upset. It had nothing to do with anything the First Family had said—it was that they didn’t fit the narrative that had been created over a long period of time. Trump the billionaire and his supermodel wife had more in common with the rural American than the PBS producer who investigated radicalism on the political right in an effort to advance progressive agendas to a public guilted into compliance without conflict. Watching those documentaries now as opposed to a year ago, it was like they were made in a different America where the standard modes of framing debate would hold to the scrutiny of reality. Fear and loathing is no longer the accepted mode of control that can be used to steer the population into a particular direction. The red state which has traditionally shaken its head at the city dwellers who voted for a bunch of nonsense feel good sentiment had taken back the country. Trump was their representative and the change is very obvious and will last a very long time.

Rich Hoffman

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Group Evil: How villainy hides itself in institutional thinking

I was born in 1968, just a few months after Task Force Barker moved into the villages of MyLai in Vietnam and killed roughly six hundred women, children and old men looking for Vietcong soldiers who had been harassing the American military for many months culminating in booby trapping the paths to their latrines.  American soldiers couldn’t even use the rest room without worrying about having their legs blown off.  A deep hatred developed through that psychological warfare which erupted in that period of time into mass murder and a complete insurrection of American culture.  It was just a few days before I was born that Martin Luther King was assassinated.  When the Kent State Massacre happened on May 4th 1970 I was two years old and watched intently the news and I remember it quite distinctly, Twenty-nine guardsmen fired into a bunch of hippie student protesters killing four of them and wounding nine others–in some cases terribly.  I did in fact remember the moon landing the year before as my mother sat me in front of the television as a one year old and told me that what I was watching was important.  For whatever reason I remembered things right after birth and I always had the feeling that God had sent me to earth to fight this terrible evil which was erupting around the world—and that evil has chased me around all my life.  But it never found a way to settle into any part of me.  It was clearly in people around me whom I cared about, but it never found its way into me. The only way I was able to combat it was with a remarkable clarity of opinion which I was literally born with.  I didn’t need to be taught to stand against evil; I just always have as if it were preprogrammed into me before birth—as if it were my job to help people deal with evil and to remove it from their lives by my help and influence.  Now as a man of nearly 50 years I have developed an extensive vocabulary to explain these phenomena and as I observed the events of July 4th 2017 I think it’s time to start a serious discussion about the nature of evil starting with group assimilations—because to me that is the worst way that evil moves through our society.  I’ve spent a lot of time over the years talking about the effects of group evil, but have avoided getting into the details because honestly, people just weren’t ready for it.  But now perhaps they are.  The Trump White House has created a unique opportunity to go further down the Rabbit Hole of thought so let’s go.

It was never their fault but I’ve never felt compelled to honor a soldier from the military or to yield my sovereignty to a police officer.  I understand the necessity of their roles in life, but I instinctually did not like them because they were simply members of “group think.” I don’t like fraternities; I don’t like 4-H Clubs.  I don’t like Boy Scouts, organized sports, even home owners organizations.  I don’t even like corporate structures of companies.  I only like them when I’m in charge, not when other people are for obvious reasons.  Yet, throughout my life I have been deeply involved with all these and more with unusually clean thoughts.  I remember a fight I was in at the Van Gordon farm with some school bullies.  I was in a 4-H Club for small engine repair when I was 11 years old.  The kids in that group weren’t going to amount to anything in life and they knew it.  All they had was this little knowledge of engine repair yet I built mine and completed all the tasks with nearly a month to spare before the Butler County Fair so all the kids in my group ganged up on me when the adults were otherwise busy to beat me up—just because I was there—and was smarter than them and kept pretty much to myself.  I had no desire to participate in fart jokes, or to use curse words—so to them I was very weird.  I never did use a curse word until I was 19 years old and decided that they were needed to communicate to lower IQ people just like I couldn’t expect to travel to France and not know a few French words to establish basic communication.  So to those kids—I was peculiar.  I had no desire to be in their group, I showed no pain in being on the outside of their approval process, and as a result I finished my engine much faster than they did and they didn’t like that I was setting a standard which forced them to perform at a higher level.  So they tried to beat me up.  I fought all seven of those kids including the main bully by punching him hard enough in the nose to draw blood.  The rest of the fight I just blocked my face and torso and kept to my feet so they couldn’t get on top of me until the adults came back to the barn to break up the fight.

I had the same experiences in public school obviously and once I learned how to fight properly was easily able to turn the tables on those types of events.  For me it was martial arts and my development of mastering the bull whip.  Once I learned to defend myself it was never a problem to avoid getting beaten up.  The evil which invokes those conflicts essentially doesn’t understand how to deal with free thinking individuals and it doesn’t matter if it’s an entire army of military men or a small group of 4-H slack-jawed losers behind a truck on a farm.  All group evil is motivated by the same things and have the same weaknesses.

To understand group evil just think of your work environment—how you make a living.  All organizations are rooted in institutional thinking where we place our trust in the higher concept of the institution to guide our thoughts.  Essentially this is a lazy way to approach life and evil latches onto it at every opportunity.  For instance, think of the Task Force Barker boys at MyLai who committed terrible evil to so many people.  Well, it wasn’t their fault; they were just following orders—from their “superiors,” right?  And those superiors were just following orders from the Pentagon—right?  And the Pentagon has numerous departments that consider such things and none of them are connected directly to the end evil of a massacre so they can always say—that’s not my decision, I was just following orders.  The Pentagon ultimately would point to the White House and blame the president’s administration.  Then the president will blame the voters and say that he was mandated to act on behalf of them.  Of course the voters never agree on anything in a democracy so they can always say that they didn’t vote for anything that created the evil at MyLai.  And that is how evil hides in virtually every institution from 4-H Clubs to military action.  It’s not so much the individuals involved, it is in the collective lack of personal responsibility that it occurs.  Group associations allow for the mindless spread of evil through institutionalism and that is essentially how it moves through our world.

Groups fail because it takes away the burden of individual responsibility.  If you ever study a group of people they are much more immature when they are together than when you speak to them individually.  A group of women at a bachelorette party are much different together than when you speak to them each individually.  Together in the group they’ll do all kinds of embarrassing things which they would never do if they were alone that provides a contextual definition to why all groups which build institutions fail to fight off the influence of evil.  Evil seeks to hide in collectivism and erode the mandate of the individual by sheer force through various modes of coercion.  That is why all union activity has in it an institutional evil which destroys productive output and individual merit—no matter what it is—from laying bricks to teaching children.  All union activity is inherently evil because of the way that evil takes away personal responsibility from the people in the group and allows them to blame some blob like element within their group associations.

So I don’t mindlessly salute the soldier for their service or the cop for their institutional commitment to use force if ordered to subdue an individual of their merit.  I don’t trust the institutions for which they fight for because evil is at the core of them.  All institutions have within them the drivers of evil by the nature of their psychological impact on the individuals which make up those groups.  The kid that picked a fight with me at the 4-H event was a pretty nice kid as an individual, but put him in a group environment the mob ruled his mandates and he wanted to show off—he wanted to be the leader of the group by challenging someone the group mutually hated—me—because I had no desire to eat with them, talk with them, and I constantly out performed them.

The reason that democracies always fail—100% of the time is that human beings do not want to lead their own lives—most are happy to fall in behind the leadership of the less than 1% of our earthly population.  Behind every evil act is the basic desire to be lazy—and with laziness comes the lack of ability to think.  People in groups don’t want to think for themselves which is why they joined the group in the first place. They want someone to think for them so they can follow along.  Then if something goes wrong, they can say—“I was just following orders.” That is how evil rules our world.  It happens in churches, it happens in governments, and it happens in our jobs. The desire to be led by a leader allows our civilization to never take responsibility for the things it decides to do.  And those who are inclined to be leaders are often not aware of the role they play in mass evil spreading everywhere because they don’t realize that the people following them have actually set them up to be the ultimate scapegoat.  “The People” have no desire to make a decision so they let the leader do it—then when something goes wrong they of course blame the person most responsible—the leader.

Obviously this is a very serious and complicated problem which requires us all to rethink completely how the human race conducts its business.  But “group think” doesn’t work—it is only the soil that breeds evil in the world.  The Kent State Massacre from every angle was the work of evil—it started with the communist loving professors who incited their students to protest Nixon’s Cambodian Campaign.  The American people didn’t care much about MyLai until it was obvious that Nixon wasn’t going to end the draft as he had promised so Americans were getting pulled into the war in Vietnam and were turning against the administration.  You see it was one thing for the kids who made up Task Force Barker to massacre the innocent people of MyLai—they were after all in most cases not the sharpest tacks in the box.  They could be forgiven for their stupidity—until the bright-eyed college kids and would be good kids of society were getting pulled into the fight by over-protective parents.  The parents at the time allowed for those radical communist insurgents to corrupt those young minds at Kent State hoping to passive aggressively put an end to the war because they didn’t want their “little Johnnys” to be drafted and that left the Ohio National Guard to deal with the situation.  Unfortunately, those National Guardsmen were essentially mostly draft dodgers who didn’t want to go to the foreign war themselves so what we had was a lot of people trying to avoid responsibility for something that should have never happened in the first place. Communism was allowed to spread from Russia into China then into Southeast Asia.  Ho Chi Minh would have never turned to communism in North Vietnam if Woodrow Wilson had only listened to him in Versailles, France.  Wilson didn’t have time to listen to the concerns of the soon to be Vietnamese leader who was at the time just a waiter in Paris.  So Ho Chi Minh turned toward the socialism of France then to the wider communism of Russia to help push the French out of Vietnam. After all, Ho Chi Minh only wanted independence from France. America stepped in to help the situation after France failed and thus we got pulled into the war to essentially stop communism which our European “friends” had helped cultivate “innocently.” All these evils were committed because no individual took responsibility for anything and hid the crimes of evil behind the merit of institutionalism—in every case.

As many people speak in concern about president Trump bringing down many of the institutions that have been part of American culture for a long time—this is the kind of evil that he is attacking on our behalf.  While we need a military to keep bad people from attacking us relentlessly, the role in foreign engagements will ultimately shift as economic power becomes the dominate negotiating force—essentially for the first time in American history.  The big picture is quite clear—we now have a person in the White House willing to take personal responsibility for things and the voters who put him in place are also willing to take responsibility for Trump—so there is a purity to what is going on that is truly rooted in goodness for what I think is really the first time.  Responsibility is the key to avoiding evil and to do that we have to get the institutions out-of-the-way that allow individuals to hide behind the leadership of a collective blob.  It is in the name of goodness that we must do this and it is a hard task.  Human beings have been trying to sort this stuff out for their entire existence but now we are at a point where we can actually consider such a thing.  Fighting evil is precisely why the evangelicals picked Trump in spite of his colorful past filled with sin.  Because Trump was willing to lead from the front and to take responsibility for fighting evil—not out of a commitment to a political party or any institutional obligation—but because it was the right thing to do.

Rich Hoffman

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No, Donald Trump Doesn’t Need to be more “Mature”: There is no way to live in harmony with the political left

I gave up on Glenn Beck a long time ago. The only time I listen to his show is when he puts on Bill O’Reilly during Friday broadcasts because I like to see how the former Fox News star is doing.  But even with Bill, there are just things that he and Beck have always agreed on that just drove me nuts. And for the purpose of this article, their broadcast together on June 30th discussed everything I don’t like about either one of them.  They just don’t understand the whole Trump tweeting thing. They don’t get the need to fight back and are looking to the presidency for some kind of aristocratic leadership that just doesn’t belong in the office.  And as smart as they are both supposed to be, they seem to forget how we all got to the point where we are now in America—on the brink of a new civil war where both sides bitterly hate each other. They think its Donald Trump’s job to bring everyone together but they are wrong.  One side needs to be destroyed while the other flourishes and that is essentially the end of the debate.

Well before there was ever a Trump in the White House the political left made a very calculated incursion on American lifestyles.  To understand how dramatic that incursion of lefty philosophy was just watch any John Wayne movie from the Golden Age of Hollywood.  The values reflected in those cowboy movies were what essentially made America great and many generations grew up with the essential ideas exhibited in our American westerns.  Even if the audiences didn’t all want to grow up to be cowboys, a general understanding of right and wrong existed openly and we were clearly a better nation for it.  It doesn’t have to be entertainment that displays this issue, lately I have been re-reading some of the books by M. Scott Peck—the psychiatrist from the 80s who wrote a bunch of New York Times Best Sellers along the lines of The Road Less Traveled series.  It doesn’t seem that long ago to me, but to some it must be ancient history, the 80s were a very optimistic time in American history and if you read Peck’s books on psychiatry and the type of things that people were concerned with back then—then you could clearly trace a line from then to now to display how far we’ve all fallen as a civilization.  And anybody with half a brain could tell you that the course we’re on cannot continue.  Presently about half the nation sees that and to varying degrees wants to do something about it, and the other side is essentially hell=bent on their own destruction as well as everyone they know.

A lot of this change came from the political left and they were very aggressive about it.  When I was a kid the Department of Education became the central authority figure in public schools and the changes were sharp and quite clear—my mother was a room mom who volunteered at my school for everything—and the other kids in my class soaked her up desperately for any attention she could give them.  Even the meanest kids in my K-5 classes would melt to butter when she came to help with a Halloween party or a Christmas event.  Some of those kids back then would tell me I was the luckiest kid in the world to have a mom that was waiting for me to get off school and spend time with me. I grew up in a traditional household that worked. My dad worked hard.  My grandparents worked hard and everyone was very fiscally conservative—if they went out to eat—it was for a damn good reason.  So I was a little shocked that so many kids—all of them in the 70s and into the 80s had busy parents who were gone from home and just weren’t there to do the essential parenting that the kids needed.  Because I did have a traditional mom which was quite common just ten years earlier at home every day to talk to I had a front row seat to all this intellectual destruction that was going on.

My very first girlfriend—a real girlfriend who wanted to talk to me on the phone all the time was in the fifth grade.  She was very cute and very popular.  She was interested in me because it looked like I was going to be a star athlete so she was making her mark on the social ladder.  Back then I rode a bicycle everywhere, even over vast miles of country roads.  It drove my parents crazy but they let me do it because Liberty Township was a  very sparsely populated area then and you could drive down the road without worrying about people running you over or stealing you as a kid.  My parents let me ride over to her house to visit assuming there would be parental supervision—because they were naive about how far American culture had fallen themselves.  I was shocked to find that this girl didn’t have any parents who were home and wouldn’t be for several hours.  She didn’t have any brothers or sisters so she essentially took care of herself.  In fact, the neighborhood she lived in was quite a progressive utopia—it was a new mode of thinking that was being introduced.  It had a little community center called the White House where everyone gathered for social events which the parents spent a lot of their weekends using and all the kids were essentially growing up without parents.  The parents were too busy at their jobs and the socializing in this neighborhood to properly raise their kids and it showed. I was stunned to discover that this cute little 5th grade girl was already having sex and that she had let most of the boys in her neighborhood experiment on her.  From grade 4 to 5 she had gone from just play kissing to the real thing because really there wasn’t anything else for the kids to do.  They were bored and lonely and puberty was just starting to kick in.  We all had just learned about sex education in school so kids wanted to do it—and in that neighborhood they did.

My second girlfriend was in the sixth grade and she was a cute little thing who lived in another developing neighborhood.  My parents were suspicious of her because the homes were Homearoma homes that were very expensive.  She was a very smart little girl who I thought wouldn’t be near as wild as the first girlfriend.  I was stunned to find out that she was even more sexually experienced.  I couldn’t believe what she knew at such a young age—and like the first girlfriend, the parents were never home.  But one time on the weekend I was invited over to a pool party that her parents were hosting for some of their favorite neighbors.  So I rode my bike over there to attend only to find everyone in the back yard naked and skinny dipping in their pool—parents, neighbors, older brothers and of course my girlfriend.  It wasn’t lost to me that a pattern of behavior was emerging—first of all my taste in girls—and the situations I continued to find myself in and they all had in common these crazy girls who were hungry for attention because their parents had effectively abandoned them as children.  Using the power of sex, they were just learning how not to be alone—but the real problem was the parents adopting progressive lifestyles which had been placed socially over their value system.  In fact in the previous neighborhood I later discovered that it was quite common for homes there to have “key parties” among the adults—so no wonder the kids were so sex obsessed.  I decided that far back that I wasn’t playing.  Even at my young age I had seen enough and knew I didn’t want any part of it—which I knew better because I had traditional older people in my life that I could speak to about these things so I was able to avoid getting sucked in.  Every time I visited my grandparents on my mom’s side there was a John Wayne movie on and I’d watch them as a baseline of thought with my grandpa so I had a means of comparing the two value systems at a critical point in my life.

Now we’ve watched this situation get worse and worse every year since then.  Kids growing up today don’t even have a point of reference from a previous time—for all they know it was always this messed up—the way we socially engage each other and the value systems that drive us.  Many who have had the innocence of their childhoods robbed from them don’t know any better, and luckily there are enough people still alive in the world who remember the times before my childhood recollections where a loving parent was home to greet a child from school and they at least watched the Andy Griffin Show together.  They have held on their entire lives to a different kind of America that changed under their feet and the people who have been doing the changing have crossed the line many times to push the agenda which people resent.  For a long time due to the Christian nature of our country people minded their own business but the progressive incursions kept coming.

My wife and I are extremely unique these days to be doing what was once quite common in America—we raised our children traditionally.  My wife does not have a job outside the home because it has always been her role to make sure all the kids have whatever they need.  If they need to talk, she was always there and I made sure there was plenty of money in case the kids needed braces or a new saxophone for music class.  If we were short on money then I worked more.  There were times where we could only afford one car but at least there was always a parent around and now that they are all grown up the differences between them and everyone else in their age group is drastically obvious.  If more people did things the way we did—they’d be a lot better off and our country would be much, much stronger in every regard.  So when I hear things to the contrary, I know better—and it makes me really angry to see liberals insist on a course of social action that I know ruins people intellectually at first, but eventually destroys them in every way possible.

Donald Trump knows a time before all this happened—as I do.  When he was a kid even in New York City where all these changes in our nation started, he had similar experiences so he knows how to call it out now.  Even though he participated in that destruction as he moved into his adulthood he at least had a perspective that allowed for comparative analysis.  Now in the very mature years of his life he wants to do something about it and he’s fighting back and he has my full support.  That’s why I voted for him. But to assume that what he is doing is somehow not “mature” as Beck insisted to Bill O’Reilly is to not fully understand what is going on.  Who cares about the office of the presidency and its place in history if that history is being destroyed right in front of our faces?  What’s the point in White House honor if the world around it is crumbling from a lack of values?  There is nothing wrong with Donald Trump lashing out at virtually everyone who criticizes him from my standpoint because it is deserved.  There isn’t any honor in being “mature.”  Porn is meant for “mature” audiences—people who are above a certain age and assumedly no longer feel they must defend themselves from attacks in the peeking order of life.  Most “mature” people know their place in life and no longer strive to gain in it—they are defeated people who have given up.    That is the case with most “mature” people.   Donald Trump is not mature and neither am I.  If I had a penny for every time someone told me to be more mature I could have bought all of Manhattan by now.  What people really mean when they say such things is “why don’t you make it easy for me to beat you.”  They don’t want to get along with you, they don’t want to live in peace with you—they just want you either out of their way or they want you naked in a back yard pool comfortably numb.

Our media and entertainment culture has been very aggressive in pushing our society more and more toward the kind of culture I described with the girlfriends from my early years.  I was often criticized for wanting to marry so young, but I had already decided after those first two experiences that I wanted to live a traditional life—not these messes that I met through girlfriends in my school days.  I said it back then and I say it now with more conviction because I have a lot of knowledge to back it up—those parents of the girlfriends were idiots.  They ruined the lives of those little girls and most of the people they’d interact with for the rest of their lives and that is not something that people can live in harmony with.  I wanted off the train and my wife did as well so we stepped off and lived our lives traditionally and I am certain everyone would be far better off if they followed.  I elected Donald Trump to fight back—not to get along.  There is a lot more at stake than just living and letting live—we are talking about fighting an obvious evil at its roots.  We don’t want to make friends with it, and we don’t want to understand it.  We want to destroy it.

There isn’t one person reading this who will say that my opinions about the young girls having sex in the fifth grade and parents who taught them by having key parties, isn’t wrong.  But there are plenty of those same people who will justify those actions and even participate in them because they have learned to be “mature” and to just get along for the sake of peace.  Most of them weren’t as lucky as I was to have a mom at home as a kid, or traditional grandparents to learn from.  Most of them grew up bored at home with nothing to do from 4 to 6 pm every night so they experimented sexually with a neighbor.  They drank from their parent’s liquor cabinet and learned to become drunken fools and laugh about it to justify all that behavior to their failed lives—they gave it a name—they called it “mature.”  Well Glenn Beck, no thanks.  You may be a recovering drug abuser but you are unqualified to comment on this topic because you have been compromised as a person and are only trying to make good on it late in life.  If you aren’t fighting back against it like you used to—but are now trying to live in “accord” with it—you are useless.  Bill O’Reilly I give a little bit of a pass to.  He’s a nice guy who is smart and is a good reporter.  But his passivity essentially destroyed his life.  He didn’t see it coming and he allowed them to knock him off Fox News disgracefully.  Trump has never been knocked down like O’Reilly and Beck have—never in his life.  So why in the world should he listen to critics who say he should tone things down just because he’s president of the United States.  If anything, the opposite is true.  Fight everyone and do it often for the betterment of civilization—because a course correction is needed.  And the need to correct that course is more important than giving the appearance of “maturity” as the world burns itself into extinction.

Rich Hoffman

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The Press and “Dirty Laundry”: Trump literally body slams CNN to become the greatest president in history

It was September 15th of 2015 when I predicted that if Trump were ever elected president what kind of effect he would have on the nation when I said this:

Out of all his accomplishments, the sentiment that Trump is an inductee of the WWE in the celebrity wing of the Hall of Fame likely makes him most equipped to be President of the United States in the years following the embarrassments of Obama, Clinton and Bush more than anything else.

You can read the whole article at the link below because it is directly relevant to the tweet that Donald Trump put on his account Sunday morning July 2nd 2016 which ignited the world ablaze with bewilderment.  I am very proud of the President.  Extremely proud, because this is what it takes to make America great again.  It’s not his skill as a great leader, or his knowledge of business and deal making—or even his tireless work ethic.  The most valuable thing that Donald Trump brings to the White House is his induction into the WWE where he learned how to communicate with people in every spectrum of the known universe.

#FraudNewsCNN #FNN pic.twitter.com/WYUnHjjUjg

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 2, 2017

I love it! https://t.co/W4LDTV9bgG

— Rich Hoffman (@overmanwarrior) July 2, 2017

https://overmanwarrior.blog/2015/09/16/the-unconquered-donald-trump-cnns-debate-of-the-century-and-beyond/

I know moderates on the conservative side of things think this whole Trump twitter thing is disgusting-but that is only because they are part of the problem.  You show me a man who is in his sixties—which Trump was at the time of that video body slamming his friend Vince McMahon to the floor of a wrestling arena–without throwing their back out and you’ll see a more qualified person for the White House.  Because there isn’t one.  Sure the whole thing was staged between Trump and McMahon but the stunt was real and it is an added level of communication that has changed our American presidency for the better.

Gone are the aristocratic leanings of the Oval Office and thank God.  Nobody should care about the tea that the president drinks and from what room, or any of the ornamental elements of the office pageantry.  I recently came from Buckingham Palace and witnessed the formality of that culture and you can keep it.  I prefer a president who can body slam a 225 pound man flat against the ground and still get up and walk any day over some legal mumble jumble and slack-jawed wine banging over protocol.  CNN has been hard on the White House and Trump has a right to make his feelings known.  Holding back thoughts is what caused us to get into all these messes to begin with—it’s time to put everything out on the table and let everyone know how we feel about each other—because in not saying it—we have created immeasurable evil in this world with what was previously unsaid.  There are far worse things in life than in not stating what’s obvious because it allows for a pretense of civility where there clearly isn’t.  So we might as well get things out in the open so we can function from the truth.  Do we hate each other—yes.  What do we do about it remains to be seen, but at least we are being honest.

Here is why @POTUS @realDonaldTrump said, 'you guys are getting worse' to the media, in the Oval Office yesterday. (Great save by Keith!) pic.twitter.com/0hmCc8I9jn

— Dan Scavino Jr. (@Scavino45) July 1, 2017

I find it astonishing that clean thinking conservatives think it is actually appropriate to continue on letting people think that lying to people is a good thing—that the presidency should be “above” the squabbles of political theater.  Since we are saying that these news organizations want press passes to the White House under the guise of “free speech” so they can broadcast anger on the airwaves at the expense of the really good positive thinking that Trump has tried to bring to Washington D.C. culture—then why shouldn’t Trump give them more to talk about in the manner of theatrics such as what we often have seen in the WWE over the years. Isn’t it all the same thing?

What these complainers of Trump’s behavior really mean when they criticize the antics of the president is that they want it one way.  They want to take their shots but they don’t want anything coming back.  But isn’t that, and hasn’t that been a large part of the problem?  We’ve had these wimpy American presidents who yielded to the masses and they were effectively complacent place holders allowing every kind of intellectual insurgent to change our culture from the inside out?  And if Ronald Reagan was the great communicator who talked tough and had great one-liners through his terms—even he knew of the plans to insert communism into our public schools after the Department of Education was officially created in 1979.  Reagan knew about it all that time and did nothing—and it has always bothered me.  These other presidents from Bush to Obama lately have just been terrible.  They were all pushovers who invited the world to pick on us and take our money at will—and it is so nice to see that we are finally at a place where we have a guy in the White House who isn’t afraid to put a stop to it.

There is nothing wrong with thinking out of the box, and Trump was certainly doing that when he played his part in the WWE.  It was good theater and nothing more but for a businessman like Trump who made a lot of money legitimately—it was quite something to do.  The physical nature of it alone is something to talk about.  It was more than an act—it showed just how far Trump was willing to go—and it also shows his range of communication ability—even to the point of physical stunt work.  When you are the whole package—which he is—why not show it off or why not use it when needed?  After all, Project Veritas showed what goes on behind the scenes with the CNN producers and what they really think about people.  Why not go for the jugular if you are Trump?  I would say that one of the main reasons I voted for him was because I hoped that he would behave like this in the White House and wouldn’t take any lip from the world, or our domestic enemies—people who speak against the culture of America as it has been.

We are not talking about the rights of the press to cover Trump.  We are talking about the show and that show is getting in the way of Trump’s agenda.  Don Henley wrote a song about this very problem many years ago called “Dirty Laundry.”  Trump is by nature an extremely positive person and anything that keeps him from communicating that reality to people is a target for his wrath.  His goal is to get everyone—no matter who they are into a positive reflection of American sentiment and right now the media is the part of our government which refuses to cooperate—so he’s attacking them in the same way they have been attacking him.  What he has exposed over the last several months of his first year in office is essentially what Don Henley sung about way back in the 80s—that news as they have been are mostly concerned about entertainment and through this conflict with Trump—they have finally been exposed.  By putting out that old WWE video on his Twitter page, Trump just put an explanation point at the end of his grand sentence which everyone clearly heard.

If Trump stopped being president right now he would clearly go down as the greatest that we have ever had—but folks—he’s only six months into it.  We have a long way to go and the media is not going to survive the journey.  And for that I am very glad.  The media likes dirty laundry, but I don’t.  I want leadership from the White House that will make America great again.  Not a bunch of neurotic news people who are really just failed actors in entertainment. Remember where you heard it first.  I called it way back in 2015 and now I’m telling you now—Trump is and will be the greatest president of this current century, perhaps forever and we are seeing it all happen right in front of our faces.  It is a privilege to witness up close and personal!

Rich Hoffman

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The Mysterious Skull Cult of Göbekli Tepe: An 11,500 year old temple is just the beginning of the story

It was very interesting this week to see a press release from the German archaeologist Julia Gresky regarding an obvious skull cult at Göbekli Tepe dating back to around 11,500 years ago at the great stone temples discovered under a large mound in southern Turkey at the head waters of the Tigris Euphrates rivers.  Göbekli Tepe has been a mystery since it was first discovered in the mid 1990s as the 40 ton stone pillars built there with intricate carvings defy logic as measured against what we typically think of regarding human evolution from hunters and gathers, farmers, then city-state administrators. Rather, the temple is evidence that extremely advanced engineering, and astronomical understandings were present at the end of the last Ice Age and this is something that just wasn’t part of our understanding of human development up to this point. And now, with the announcement of this skull cult we have evidence of an elaborate understanding of a long gone religion that started in the cradle of civilization well before the Sumerians would rise to power further downstream many thousands of years later.  Göbekli Tepe is mysterious for a lot of reasons but one thing is absolutely known because of it—that we are just dipping our feet into the depths of history.  There is much more to discover and we must be open to those discoveries so that we can learn from that history and not follow the Vico cycle into what has obviously happened to mankind in the past—and keep making the same mistakes over and over each time the human mind makes some major advancement then collapse on itself out of sheer stupidity.

http://www.foxnews.com/science/2017/06/29/temple-doom-grisly-skull-cult-discovery-at-ancient-site.html

Göbekli Tepe is a fine example of how the Vico cycle has transpired over many thousands of years to see a declining culture transpire over time instead of an ever-present increase in thought which most of our sciences assume.  The mistake is in taking for granted that once a scientific discovery is made—such as fire—that forever it will remain in the catalogue of human behavior.  Once we learn it—we keep it so to say.  But this isn’t the case.  Just as in our present age where our political aspects lean toward regression we find that current generations of people are actually less equipped to care for intellectual knowledge than previous ones and thus the Vico cycle moves through its various phases, theocracy, aristocracy, democracy and then ultimately anarchy only to begin again to start completely over.  In some cases the process takes thousands of years.  In others it only takes a few hundred—but the human mind seems to be a prisoner to this trend by their own inclination.  At Göbekli Tepe the once advanced founders had their work buried and less equipped monuments were built upon the originals and this went on for a long time until the site was just buried under a massive mound that many thought was just a giant hillside.  We are learning only now that we must never take for granted any hillside that we see anywhere in the world because under some of them are the origins to many of our myths and legends which are awaiting discovery.  There is so much that we don’t understand.

My personal feelings about these discovers are perhaps more objective than even those of the scientists who discover these great finds because I am able to have my feet in many different worlds and have a perspective driven by freedom that they don’t enjoy—such as the archaeologist Julia Gresky.  I live in a very affluent area of the world where all the gifts of culture are presented from fine food to literature and advanced tools easily accessible through my local hardware stores.  I have access on a daily basis the greatest tools created by the human mind and I live in an economy that allows me to participate in those creations freely.  But as I’ve traveled to different places around the world it is very obvious that not everyone is so gifted and many cultures are essentially still hunters and gatherers.  Human advancement does not occur and give rise to all people everywhere. Many are limited by religious beliefs which prevent them from properly interacting with advanced cultures—or they for one reason or another are not economically able to engage in trade with a more advanced society.  For instance in present day America it is unlikely that a typical Santa Monica resident from California will interact with a village in Ghana, Africa.  The only way they might meet each other is if the Ghana resident shows up one day in Southern California looking for a job and is willing to leave behind their homeland for opportunities. Because the Santa Monica resident just won’t be giving up everything in their life to live in a hut in Ghana—they’d have to give up most everything they know about the world to even participate in such a thing.  So the exchange of knowledge won’t happen—and that is in our present day of global communication and easy travel from one place to another.  I am often surprised how primitive people become right out of big cities in Europe, Asia and even around the Americas.  It’s not hard for me to see how Neolithic people may have developed separately around the world such as at Göbekli Tepe while hunters and gatherers in England were freely walking across the English Channel into France hunting animals as nomads.  They may have run into and even traded with people from Göbekli Tepe and other advanced cultures who had developed engineering abilities but it may have taken many thousands of years for that intellectual information to find its way into the static cultures of their less advanced societies.  That is easy for me to see where scientists like Julia Gresky spend much of their time season after season begging for funding then digging and digging on a very focused site like Göbekli Tepe to bring about more information like this recent skull cult evidence—which was assumed very early on but only recently was confirmed with all her hard work.  Our evidence collection is slow at best but the assumptions of cause and effect can easily be made by global comparisons for those fortunate enough to have that exposure.

I continue to think that we are just scratching the surface in regards to our history.  I think we’ll find even more advanced temples and cities the deeper we dig that are even older than Göbekli Tepe.  I would offer that many of them are under water since ocean levels were vastly different during this post Ice Age period and over time we’ll discover them so long as we can avoid the effects of the Vico cycle.  I would offer that the many wars in the region of Göbekli Tepe are created to avoid the discovers which await us in the many mounds of the region showing us that societies like the Sumerians were just distant descendents to cultures who founded Göbekli Tepe.  We won’t know until we do proper archaeological investigation and you can’t do that so long as there are wars over regional interpretations of religion between Christianity and Islam texts identifying boundaries established by kings of recent memory.  Obviously the history extends well beyond those recent developments and the Vico cycle insists on destroying the past so that the current can survive and that is the element which drives the cycle of madness—and so long as that continues—we’ll never get anywhere.  Bu the evidence does keep coming in for those willing to look at it and the discovery of the skull cult at Göbekli Tepe is quite compelling.  We need to let the evidence take us where it will—because we still have a lot to learn and by learning it—we may save mankind once and for all which I think is a noble pursuit.

Rich Hoffman

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