Month: July 2018

The Best Article on Socialism that you will Ever Read: Trump will never experience a recesssion while he is president

When economists said that Trump was out of his mind to propose that the United States would ever have a GDP of over 3% again, they were speaking from the failed perspective of a socialist philosophy. Just because a majority of economists were all trained in the same places by the same socialist radicals it doesn’t mean that reality is shaped by a majority opinion that may want to promote socialism from the halls of academia, or network television. The same economists and promotional efforts to insist that they have intellectual knowledge worth listening to are the same as those who are putting the 28-year old girl Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on every media outlet that they can find hoping to promote democratic socialism before Donald Trump’s economy puts that fantasy out of reach forever. Donald Trump is a man from a real background in understanding how economies work. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is just another young radical stuck on the Marxist theories she learned in her education, like a lot of kids. But here’s the reality, Trump’s economy will continue to boom, there will not be a recession on the horizon, there will not be a slowdown of growth. So long as government is kept from tampering with the economy human enterprise will unleash tremendous economic growth and that is the reality of the 2018 election, for which Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez isn’t even elected yet. All she did was win a primary, but the media knowing that Trump’s economy is pulling ahead of their broadcasted fears are in a panic to put a young lady that they think is pretty in front of the cameras to promote their global intentions, and it’s not going to work.

I met the type of economists that have been declaring that Trump’s economy would fail or that even the good numbers of today are bound to have a major downturn while I was in college. I thought from day one that the economists in college were idiots. I had read several books on my own before getting to college so I had a reference point, but I also had a lot of real life experience. Prior to going to college, I did many fundraisers for the Boy Scouts of America, I worked for mobsters, I chauffeured celebrities, I was a repo man, a gunsmith, and a car salesman, a male model and I did all that before I was 19. So I had a lot of experience with money and commerce and at that time I started to read serious books on economic matters, so the ridiculous cycles that economists at the University of Cincinnati tried to teach were ridiculous. I knew it then, and I am even more sure of it now.

As a basic lesson of economic reality, I speak often about how much I enjoy the yearly Annie Oakley Western Showcase in Darke County, Ohio every year where we conduct bullwhip competitions for the public with the host Gery Deer. This example could apply to anything, but it speaks to the nature of human beings no matter what race, sex, or age—it is the way that humans are wired which obviously Karl Marx never understood. That’s why he died dirt poor and broke in London with just a few people attending his funeral. Because Karl Marx was an idiot, but the governments of the world thought that socialism and communism might be a good way to give themselves lots of power, they started promoting it, and whenever someone like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez could be used as a spokesman, they have tried. But all those efforts will fail because of the basic realities of the human experience. In our bullwhip competitions there used to be cash prizes and big trophies. That brought competitors from all over the world to our event to try to win something that they could put on their mantle at home and be proud of. After all, we all practiced very hard to get good with bullwhips so winning a prize, and or money was a vindication of those efforts. Not that I’m bragging, but I won most of the time, and so did Gery Deer. A handful of us tended to always be in the top rankings so people who didn’t win would get angry. Since Gery was always organizing these events the losers of the competitions would call him a “money grubbing charlatan” because they accused him of hosting these events just to make money. Sound familiar?

So to silence the critics my friend Gery Deer took away the prize money and the trophies and made it so that we would just compete out of the goodness of our hearts for the fun of it. Well, guess what happened, over the next five years attendance dropped from both the spectators but also the competitors. Most of those professional bullwhip artists who practiced so hard just had no ambition to attend a competition just for the fun of it. If there wasn’t money or a trophy involved, they decided to stay home, save the plane fare and do something else. But I still came and so did a few other people. I enjoyed the event for what it was and I really didn’t care if I won a trophy or not. That is what makes me in all things I do in life one of the 1% to 5% who always do things for the right reasons. I would say Donald Trump is a similar personality. He plays golf for many of the reasons I do bullwhip work, because he just enjoys the endeavor, and he likes playing and competing whether or not there is a trophy involved, because of the spirit of doing the task. But when you take away the personal recognition for a lot of people, they just aren’t interested in doing something, and that is why socialism will never work, as it has never worked.

The reason Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez can’t tell anybody how her democratic socialism would be paid for, how socialism could give people free college educations, how there could be free healthcare, how we could have a $15-dollar minimum raise is because socialism ignores the values of a task performed. The work of doing something is what generates value, just as resistance can generate electricity in a generator as magnets pass over coils. But if the reward for work is not individualized then the desire to put forth effort is lost. If everyone is going to get $15 dollars an hour, or everyone is going to get a trophy, or nobody is going to get a trophy, then people will do only what they have to, and that means that all the ambition for work is lost to the participants. Socialism under any form assumes that people will work hard and be productive just out of the goodness of their hearts, and that isn’t how people are wired. Socialists like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or some hippie college professors might think that humans should behave differently, but reality doesn’t indicate that such a thing will ever happen. Just as we took trophies and cash out of the Annie Oakley competitions the best whip artists in the world stopped coming and the sport itself has nearly gone extinct again. A few of us do the event still, but where we used to have 25 to 30 artists from as far away as Australia come to Ohio for the competitions, now there are only five or six a year. The same could be said about any professional endeavor from the medical industry to building cars. If you take away profit and a reward for achievement, you stop the economy. If you reward such things, then people will invent and work their asses off just for a little recognition—even if its minor in nature.

Trump clearly understands how economics works, better than most economists. The people who speak against him and his new economy want to ignore reality and assume that the socialism of Karl Marx might still happen if they could only plaster the young face of a girl voters might like on the front of it. But Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is just a kid. She’s a nice kid but she has a lot to learn and a lot of experience to gain. I was lucky to have had a lot of experience before I was 19, and it was easy for me to call bullshit on the professors I met in college. Now as a person with a lot of experience in many endeavors, I know the Trump economy is only going to increase. There will not be a recession during Trump’s years in office. The cause of recessions is government tampering and taking away incentives for excellence among a society’s participants. I am one of those people who will do the right thing whether or not there is money or a trophy involved, but I am also one of those 1% people. Karl Marx might have known people like me when he came up with his communism idea, but he didn’t apply it to reality. Most people, 99% of all people, will only do something if they get some opportunity at a personal reward, whether it’s a big wage increase, a new car, or an opportunity for sex. If those potentials are taken away, people stop trying and that is how recessions come about. If you open up the rewards, then there will never be a shortage of people who want a chance at those rewards. And that is what drives economies. More rewards, the bigger the economy. Less rewards the smaller the economy. And that is precisely why China is so worried, because as a communist country, they can only look like a global superpower so long as all other economies were artificially restricted, as the United States was. But under Trump and a new rewards system for innovation and effort, China doesn’t stand a chance.

Rich Hoffman
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Annie Oakely Western Showcase 2018: Adjusting to the heat in the kitchen

As I do every year I look forward to the Annie Oakley Western Showcase in Greenville, Ohio which took place over this past weekend. Most of the footage from this Gery Deer segment on Living Dayton came from me, which gives context to what a cool event it is.

The event was moved back to the Darke County fairgrounds this year and was set up a bit differently than it had been in the past, which was an improvement over previous years. As my time is usually very short due to a very full schedule I usually show up for the bullwhip competitions at 1 PM on Saturday afternoon and stay for a few hours than get back to my regular life. But most of the performers there stay for the entire weekend and it’s always good to see everyone even if it’s just for a little while. Gery Deer puts on this event every year and he’s about as busy as I am much of the time, but these kinds of things are his business so he’s usually there through the entire weekend. Whenever I arrive in Greenville I can’t help but think of it as the gateway to the west as history remembers it, the Treaty of Greenville after the Battle of Fallen Timbers and the efforts of western expansion that took place immediately after. It’s big sky country in that part of the world and its one of the few times I can walk around and eat funnel cakes with bullwhips and guns strapped to my hip and nobody thinks anything of it.

I felt very fast this year in the competitions which was good. Professionally I had just come off a really tough week. I had been thinking that even the biggest high stakes poker games broadcast on television did not have the pressure I was under. But I wouldn’t have it any other way, I like it in the kitchen with the heat turned up. The more pressure, the better I do. But to manage all that professional stress I rely on the Annie Oakley Western Showcase every year to recalibrate myself. The Ohio Fast Draw Association had their shooting range set up right across from our Showcase area and I spent time with them as well which has been my new thing of late, shooting Cowboy Fast draw which I practice nearly every day. Because of that everything was faster for me and I felt it in the bullwhip competitions.

We mostly do the competitions for the crowd because it gives a good narrative to the greater show that Gery Deer puts on each year. We keep things pretty loose and fun. But for me it’s a step out of a very intense business and political world that I normally live in where I get to wear my cowboy hat and be around genuinely good people who do things for all the right reasons. That for me is very refreshing and that one event satisfies me for the entire upcoming year. If I could make a good career living life in the manner that we do during that western showcase, I would. However, for me the drawback is that it would require being on the road all the time and with the size of my family, that just wouldn’t work.

Gery and I always talk about ideas for the future and how to expand on our experience, but with both of us being so busy the next year usually comes faster than we can call each other to make arrangements, but all that freezes for just a few hours on the last Saturday of the month of July when Darke County celebrates the life of Annie Oakley’s birthday in her home town. As Gery reported to me, every hotel and motel room was booked for the weekend, and under the new location, there was a very large crowd attending to watch us have a little fun with our bullwhips. As I’ve said, I use those competitions every year as a kind of gauge for myself to manage stress. I practice a lot in private but its good to get out in front of people and to perform because the added pressure provides context to all the hours of practicing.

One of the reasons I joined up with the Cowboy Fast Draw Association is to have more of these kinds of weekends in the future. The more intense my private life gets professionally the more I seek these Annie Oakley type of events to balance out all that pressure. I always like to strip things away to the most essential ingredients and nothing does it quite as well as eating a funnel cake under a clear blue sky after sweating profusely performing in front of a crowd with a gun strapped to your hip. I solve more problems under those conditions than I could under any other circumstance. When everything is going well in my head it shows in my performance which is why I enjoy the event so much. Among my bullwhip friends they really can be broken down into two categories, performers and competitors. Performers do the same show over and over again making minor changes, and they travel all over the country making their money off that raw talent. I am of the competitor orientation, because that’s the life I live. There is always someone competitive and pushing, so the pressure to always be the best is a daily thing, and to apply that to a unique skill such as bullwhip work, gives me a chance to work through the process of refining basic skills that carry over into everything.

This past year I had practiced cowboy fast draw nearly every day and that had improved my reaction times with the bullwhips. When your body and intellect is working well, it feels good, especially when you get up over 50 like I am now. You tend to take those things for granted when you’re younger, but life has a way of chipping away at you, so knocking off all that buildup so that your body and mind is functioning efficiently and in an optimal fashion is very satisfying. In that way I think it would be good if everyone found something like that to do, where they pushed themselves to perform better and carried over the results into their private and business life. What’s encouraging to me is that even after all this time, I’ve been going to the Annie Oakley Western Showcase for the past 15 years, there is still room to get better, faster, and to learn new things. Learning the cowboy fast draw had improved everything for me, and it felt good. And that’s why we do those events, to push ourselves and spend time with people who are doing their best to live the best life possible within the framework of traditional western arts. I am proud to know knife throwers, bullwhip artists, and gunslingers as some of my closest confidants. That was the way it was in the early days of Ohio as a state which was the gateway to western expansion and it still is. Sure technology and modernization add layers of complication to the modern life of business, but if you strip it all way to the basic essentials, those elements are always present at the Annie Oakley Western Showcase and I always leave there feeling recharged for more heat in the hot kitchen.

Rich Hoffman

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The End of Facebook: That is a very good thing

I first heard about Facebook while I was on a movie set in Hollywood, California. We were shooting an all night firewhip sequence for a studio project and since I was the expert bullwhip artist every take during that 12-hour shoot involved me. That left lots of time for the rest of the cast and crew to talk and it was during these many conversations that started and stopped so frequently that I first heard about Facebook. It was 2008 and Facebook had just come out and was competing with Myspace as a new social media platform. I had a pretty fancy Myspace page that featured my bullwhip work and since it had been invented essentially for start-up music bands to get noticed, it had also worked for me to get noticed by Hollywood. I understood the power of this new social media thing because it had literally made it possible for me to do work for Hollywood while still a resident of Cincinnati, Ohio. Typically, if you wanted to work for movies you had to live in the Los Angeles area to network, but not anymore. With social media celebrities could talk to anybody and people of all types of backgrounds could suddenly be in contact with each other.

Yet there was something I didn’t like about Mark Zuckerberg. One of the actresses on set who had recently done work for the Pirates of the Caribbean movies had been a tester for Facebook and she knew Mark. Facebook was recruiting celebrities to help push the new social media platform so to take out the previous Myspace rival and she was one of them. At that time, she was very enamored that the young 21-year old Zuckerberg was already a billionaire. I asked her why he was a billionaire for a free service for which she didn’t have an explanation. All she cared about was that Facebook could get her more work around town. As she said, a few sexy pictures of herself on Facebook would get her an opportunity to get meetings with dozens of producers for new movie projects and leap her ahead in the audition process. So she thought it was great and that Facebook was going to be the wave of the future.

I was upset to learn later that RealD 3D had no intention to use the movie footage we shot for the film but had sold it to CGI artists for movies like Iron Man 2 and The Immortals. I stayed in contact with many of the people who worked on that set for several years, especially the stunt coordinator. There was a real temptation to start a Facebook page and attach that actress as a friend which would have instantly put me on the doorstep of every entertainment figure in Hollywood which would have been worth millions of dollars in opportunity for me personally. But I couldn’t shake that Facebook seemed to me to be diabolically intrusive. I read their sign-up agreement and could not accept the data intrusion they were proposing. So I took myself out of that next wave of technology from the start.

In 2012 as I was releasing my new novel Tail of the Dragon, my publisher was telling me I needed to set up a Facebook page to promote it. Instead of setting one up myself my son-n-law did it for me, because he and my daughter were on Facebook so the damage was already done. It didn’t have any of my contacts in it, which made it pretty worthless, but it fulfilled my contractual obligations with the publisher. As I was doing radio promotion work for the book several of the talk show hosts who knew me well thought it was funny that I had set up a Facebook page, because they knew how I felt about it. But I had managed to do it in a way that kept my privacy under my control and that was just how it was going to stay. People could argue that Twitter and Google are just as bad, and I did make a transition over to those media platforms over time, but I don’t think anything is as bad as Facebook in exposing personal behavior patterns and contacts, then selling that information to companies and governments for all types of vile purposes.

Looking back on it that was quite a time in history. In the summer of 2008 while I was on that film shoot Barack Obama was running for president and those same Hollywood people were excited about him. I wasn’t excited about John McCain, but I certainly wasn’t going to support a Democrat. But the Hollywood people supported any Democrat because like Facebook it was a way to make first contact with the producers around the city. Supporting Democrats was the first requirement for working on any film or television project unless you were a specialist like me, who had a very unique talent. But even then, it only went so far. Turning away from that life by rejecting Facebook it allowed me to work for the Tea Party rebellion that eventually elected Donald Trump. Not having Facebook allowed me to operate incognito for the next decade and do some really good things, politically. The decision was an expensive one, but what good is a lot of money if you don’t have a country. Facebook to me was literally a battleground of ideology that was harmful to the rebellion that had to happen. Even though most everyone used it, including many of my Tea Party friends, and they used it to network with other like-minded people, I needed to operate off the grid, and because of it I was able to do some pretty high-level activity without leaving a crumb trail for the opposition to follow, and that was very important.

It doesn’t surprise me that the stock is tanking for Facebook. The value of the company is in extracting personal data from people and selling it. Now that they have been busted for doing just that and Mark Zuckerberg is trying to repair the public image of Facebook’s major privacy violations, the end is inevitable. Because Facebook cannot make everyone happy. They cannot give privacy to their users without making their investors angry. And they can’t give their investors what they want without violating their users, so Facebook can’t win, and they are on the decline. There is no way they can recover.

Who knows what social media platform will replace Facebook. Of course, something will but whatever it is, it won’t be like Facebook. Facebook took people by storm during an era of naiveté that will never come again. What people thought was just a free way to speak to family and friends over vast distances turned out to be a window into every part of our lives, and people will never let their guard down in quite the same way ever again. Many people are perfectly willing to trade privacy for enrichment at first glance, but it doesn’t take long for resentment to build. I was against it from the beginning and I could have made great use of it at the cutting edge, but if I had, my life would have been quite different. It is often better to operate off the grid than on it, especially when tactical reasons mandate social camouflage. So it doesn’t hurt my feelings to see Facebook going downhill. I think it’s a really good thing.

Rich Hoffman

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Trump Wins Re-election on November 4th 2020: An admission from The New York Times

I recently wrote about the EU deal with Trump to move in the direction of a no tariff world—a free trade relationship with Europe. Trump had won his hand and forced the EU to fold making it all happen. But as the print was still drying a remarkable opinion piece showed up in The New York Times of all places announcing a future Trump re-election victory as a post-election day analysis. I thought it was a stunning admission from the perspective of November 4th 2020 from a newspaper that had made itself the number one enemy of President Trump from the very beginning. In the article linked below, Bret Stephens put down a very likely case scenario of how the future election night would transpire and the events that led up to it. All the conditions mentioned within the article were obvious to Trump supporters but to hear it from the editorial scrutiny of The New York Times was something spectacular.

If I were to write that article myself I don’t think I would change anything, except for Elizabeth Warren’s running mate of Sherrod Brown. I think Brown will be defeated by Jim Renacci in the election of 2018 so he likely won’t be up for contention, but every thing else will be. Trump’s victory is nearly as clear at this point in 2018 as it will be then because as the article pointed out, the economy is great and that is credited to Trump—for good reason. And it’s that simple. People aren’t going to change their lifestyle and income for some social justice crusade for which the political left bet everything on. It’s not the way people work. Such things can be made to happen in a society that isn’t free, but if given a choice, people chose their own pocketbooks over everything else.

Trump is winning on every frontier and The New York Times article shows that even on the other side of the political ledger that people understand why. That begs to question why they are still committed to trying every day through every possible scandal to stop the Trump presidency. Ideologically they on the political left are in the minority and they are moving even further to the left—so what could they be thinking when it is well-known that people will vote in favor of the economic conditions we are presently experiencing? The only answer there is that they are hell-bent on self-destruction, which is fine with me. I think that there is only room in America for a right of center political philosophy and that the leftists have to be eradicated. They as people don’t necessarily have to be destroyed, but their minds must be changed toward reality. Reality is not a left of center position politically—reality is well right of center. The political scale for which we speak was invented by human beings. Reality is what it is, the political left can’t ignore reality to fulfil their illusions of social justice.

While most people have compassions, which is what the political left counts on, people will not choose to put their own self-interest ahead of public needs. Trump understands that people are very giving to charities and people of misfortune so long as they have money in their pockets. So the economy is king and people’s personal ability to acquire property is the determining factor as to how “giving” a society is. By securing the economy with growth pushing up against 4.1% GDP Trump essentially secured an election in 2020 and that is good for everyone, even liberals. They want a fairer world, the best way to achieve it is through the powers of capitalism. So everyone wins.

It is this fact that seems to be slowly settling on the leftists. The New York Times really doomed themselves by going to war with Donald Trump, and for them to essentially admit as much by printing that article on Trump’s 2020 re-election they are conceding to a reality they have been working against. As the article mentioned the Mueller investigation and how many Russian sympathizers were to be found in the Trump Organization prior to the 2016 election it should have been obvious that the Trump brand was an international feature in business, and it still is. Of course, they will know Russians and many other people from countries all over the world, that is the nature of international business. It was the Democrats who chose to frame Russia as a conspirator as a way to hopefully create doubt about those relationships to fuel old Cold War fantasies, which only a few years they themselves had dismissed. But they did so because it’s all they could attempt to muster against Trump, who was a global overachiever. Trump ran a beauty pageant in Moscow for a major network. Setting up such events in Russia was supposed to show great international relations and that we had achieved so much since the Cold War. Liberals attempted to redefine that effort in the context of their modern political problems and it just never stuck because people understood the situation.

Of course, there was nothing corrupt about Donald Trump and nothing that the millions of dollars of investigations could find on him. As a real playboy prior to running for office, none of the various scandals that the political left tried to pin on him mattered because it was all well-known prior. The leftists tried to redefine sexual values with Trump which they were guilty of destroying and found themselves at a loss to do anything about it. Melania Trump knew what kind of playboy Donald Trump was and understood the challenge of domesticating him. It looks as if she has done that to some degree, but likely turning 70 had far more to do with it. Trump’s playboy days are behind him finally making him free to throw his efforts fully into being a great president. Unlike Clinton or Kennedy, Trump doesn’t have to waste time chasing girls. He’s an old man now while those other presidents were in their 40s and at the height of their mid-life crises period. Trump was driving around a Lamborghini and was sleeping with hundreds of women in New York—and he was very rich when he was in his mid-life crises period. Voters understand, which is why ten-year-old stories about Trump’s sex life have gone nowhere.

Unlike other articles from The New York Times, this one I think we can all believe. It is a quiet admission that all the efforts to stop Trump were to no avail. The left had forced President Clinton and Barack Obama down our throats and had destroyed civil discourse in the meantime. So it should come as no surprise that conservatives learned from those years and put up our own candidate that would pull everything back into reality—and Trump was our president to do so. With great GDP numbers and a roaring economic forecast, Trump will win 2020 easily with more people than voted for him in 2016. And that should set up the next decade to be a roaring one. The roaring twenties will be back, and hopefully this time we can keep all the communists and socialists out of government so that they don’t cause a depression at the end of it. With Trump’s strong performance it may be possible to have members of his administration in the White House for the next 32 years, and that would go a long way to solving a lot of problems. And out of all sources, it was The New York Times to first admit it.

Rich Hoffman

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The Great Game of Poker: Lucky for us, President Trump knows how to make other countries fold

I am not what I’d consider to be a gambler. I’ve never lost once cent in a casino and I don’t put any faith in “fate” to provide any financial enrichment. But I have of late had quite an obsession with the card game of poker, for a lot of reasons. I suppose you could say that I’m at a juncture in my life that is inevitably linked with the popular gambler’s game that originated out of New Orleans just prior to westward expansion and became the modified representation of American capitalism. Poker is essentially a game of playing the cards you are dealt and making the most of them while forcing those around you to do things to your advantage. Poker is not about the cards, it’s about controlling the people who are playing the game. The chips that are bet in poker are currency which often become representative of actual cash, so the emergence of the game in America is a unique attribute that I have found myself studying of late because it fits my present lifestyle. We all play poker to some degree or another. The game just represents a frame of reference for casual play. Some are better at the game than others and it is to my great relief that we finally have a president who knows how to play it to win it all, when all the chips are on the table—he knows how to play the cards.

If you are in business of any kind the game of poker is being played, you have to use whatever cards you have to manage value against the marketplace. You are either getting played by the system or you play the system, and that’s the reality of capitalism. The by-product is worth it, but the process can be brutal. Wimpy soft minded people obviously are drawn to socialism because they don’t have the heart for that kind of game and those were the types of critics that were angry at President Trump for invoking his trade tariffs against the world markets. Yet when it came time to go all in with Europe Trump did it without blinking and the European Union blinked, and now we are suddenly talking about working toward zero tariffs in our trade with Europe starting with pharmaceuticals, medical products and soybeans—as announced by European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker. This was enormous news and it shows that Trump knows what he’s doing in regard to trade.

I think if more people in America understood the great game of poker they’d understand why President Trump is poised to win all these trade wars. The economics of the situation declares that all trade between nations be free and open, which is what conservatives have always wanted. The tariffs as they have been established through other administrations has been to leverage favoritism toward China, the EU and many other oversea markets to give them a shot at global dominance. But only free trade can truly do that when the value of the product traded sets the competitive circumstances of the exchange. The game between nations really isn’t any different from the game of poker, the values and strategies are the same, and Trump knows how to play it. So it is quite a relief that we finally have an American president who knows how to not only play the game, but to win it.

The aim of these tariff negotiations is to achieve a tariff free world where products can flow globally without modified value trying to shift favoritism to one country or another. If the value of the product is good, then the country trading it will benefit, naturally. Just as in poker, the values on the chips are universal throughout the game. But a $10,000 chip from one player can’t become a $100,000 chip when it comes in possession of another player and that is essentially what is happening under the present tariff system. Trump has been essentially calling the bets from the other players who clearly don’t have a hand better than what the President has, and the entire game is being reset.

What I find interesting about any game that human beings invent I find that most of them were created to fulfill a psychological relationship that the players have with the world they are living in. Such as poker emerged to play with the basic concept of capitalism as inherited from the Europeans during the 13th century where kings, queens and jokers were part of that Dark Ages world. On the river boats of the Mississippi in 1840 through 1950 the old European game evolved to incorporate American ideas about private property and having the ability to generate value and to use that value to push competitors into situations that the winner of the game desires. The trading of values through betting one value against another is what poker is all about and it’s the backbone of American business.

Politicians play poker all the time, and while they know the rules of the game, they don’t seem to be able to connect the game to real life largely because as government employees they don’t have to work very hard to generate value in their lives. When they bet something, they didn’t have to work very hard to earn it, so they don’t apply much risk to the game. For them smoking cigars and sipping on mixed drinks and talking with friends is what the game of poker is. They really don’t care who wins or loses because they are not personally invested in any of the values represented in the chips. That is essentially why traditional politicians are not good at doing what America needs done on the world stage and why we’ve been getting played more than we’ve played. Our presidents just didn’t understand the game that was being played against them so we ended up with all these terrible tariffs that other countries had placed on us and we’ve been getting short-changed when all along we have had the best cards at the table.

It took someone like Trump to know how to play our good cards, which is why Jean-Claude Juncker from the European Union is now leveraging toward a no tariff system. China isn’t far behind this decision and to understand the why and how, reporters and political commentators really need to understand the game of poker. My obsession with it is in recognizing the patterns and history of the game and how it applies to current events. That’s the reason we have games like this so that we can use leisure activity to inform us of the truly important things in the world. But when it comes to a high stakes game, whether it is for millions of dollars in a casino or a big business deal with even more value at stake, or its international political negotiations that Trump is conducting, the efforts and motions are all the same. And knowing how to win those engagements is more important than just the fun of casual play. If you are going to play, you should always play to win, and it is such a relief to find that Donald Trump is finally an American president who gets it and knows how to play poker. When the European Union folded yesterday, China is right behind them. Trump knows he has the cards to win, it’s just a matter of time before China has to reveal that they’ve been bluffing and will have to fold as well. It’s really that simple.

Rich Hoffman

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Join the NRA Today: Guns are the only hope for a civilized, and fair society

It’s always good to get a new American Rifleman from the NRA in the mailbox. More than the articles on various guns and their industry counterparts I enjoy the awareness of legislative activity regarding the Second Amendment. In the August 2018 magazine there were some really good columns once again by Wayne LaPierre, Oliver North, and Chris Cox which brought to my mind some very urgent reflections about defending the Second Amendment which has been lost behind the incredible news events of our current news cycle. I mean it should be noted that socialists are now defining the Democratic Party, which is good, because it is peeling back the false layers of civility which has hidden the Marxist roots of that political affiliation and their ultimate aims of repealing the Second Amendment and essentially destroying all the Constitutional amendments. With the media love of discovering the socialist from the Bronx Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez this Tweet below shows how shallow her political philosophy truly is, yet she’s really all the political left has, and its good to see the cracks forming. She’s just another young kid that is nice and speaks well that liberals hope will be a recruiter of more socialists to gain them a youth vote. But the same thing that makes socialists accept the Karl Marx concept of collective ownership of production means is the same thing that is destroying them as a party, they are lazy and unambitious. But to conceal their faith repealing the Second Amendment is their rally cry that none of us should ignore.

I have never thought that there was a difference between socialists and Democrats. People say that Democrats are more of a “centralist” vantage point along the political spectrum just as many of those same interpreters would say that I am a member of the hard right. I can say that my position has never moved, nor should it have. I have always been very conservative. It was the world that moved to the left including most Republicans. So call it whatever you want, it was socialists who injected their ideas into both political parties and pulled the entire spectrum of political philosophy to the left making the center where Americans a hundred years ago would consider the ultra, ultra-left. I grew up on Davy Crockett from the famous Walt Disney television show and westerns like Gunsmoke. Even at eight years old my mom said I reminded her of John Wayne because of my moral outlook on life, and back then that was quite common. What has changed was everyone else, and just because the masses moved to the left, that doesn’t mean it’s the correct thing to do. It just means that socialist radicals have gotten their way—at least up until this point.

And that is largely how the gun debate has also evolved, the political left has taken an aspect of American culture and moved the vantage point of analysis far to the political left to the point that the Second Amendment has been under serious threat. Even though many of those same socialist supporters who have been suddenly supporting Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as the new spokeswoman for the modern socialist movement support gun confiscation by the government they spend most of their time playing video games that feature guns, so the contradiction couldn’t be more pronounced. Yet the premise of what socialists are asking of the world states emphatically that guns will need to be more a part of the world’s future than ever before because there is a major flaw in the thinking on the left that nobody has been talking about.

In all our lives there has likely been a time and there will be again where we lose power for a sustained period. I recently wrote about the Yellowstone volcano that is bound to erupt with a major cataclysmic event, as it has in the past, and when it does, much of the United States will be without power and food for weeks if not months on end. Just as hurricanes and other disasters come and wipe away a lifetime of work occasionally, bad things do happen and when they do, the government cannot protect people. The looting that takes place after major tragedies is heartbreaking, and nothing makes it worse than not being able to protect what you do have after such tragedies—even it it’s just your life that you have left. The Second Amendment is not there to protect your rights and liberties only if there is sustainable power grids and times of peace. It’s there to keep civility for when things aren’t so good, such as when the entire infrastructure of civility breaks away leaving us all to fend for ourselves. When there is a major power disruption even to the point where phones don’t work, there are no police to keep the bad guys away. There is only you and your gun, and that is what makes America the best place to live in the world even when there are major snowstorms, flooding, and power outages. Most of the time civility is restored within a few days or weeks on the North American continent. In the case of the Yellowstone eruption when something like that does occur, it might be months, but without question America has the wealth and resources to get back on its feet, and it will. But the transition time will require individuals to maintain order while the government regains its footing.

What socialist are asking when they demand gun confiscation and restrictions is that we place our entire trust into a centralized government, which is the first thing that falls apart when tragedies do happen. There is nothing worse than losing power for several days and running your refrigerator on a generator than to have people less prepared walking down the road outside looking for food and seeing that you have lights on in your home. The only thing that keeps them from taking over your house so they can get access to food and water is your guns. The promise of death ends their fantasies of stealing your supplies is usually a good deterrent and peace is maintained. Just as the presence of police tend to keep people from killing each other from arguments, humans need a deterrent to keep them from acting in a hostile way toward other members of the human race. Socialists desire to ignore that human trait and to just put blind faith into government which has proven to have major flaws.

We’ve seen just in the debacle of the FBI in regards to their picking one political party over another and attempting to bend the law to manipulate elections that we can never truly depend on centralized government to do everything that we need as a society. They are prone to corruptions clearly and we can never trust them completely. They are not much different from the bandits hitting the streets during an extended power outage looking for food and water and they will attack their neighbors once civility is stripped away during tragic events. In those times only, the gun can protect individual rights from the desires of the mob.

While the current trend is to demand trust the implied aspect of that thought process is all the alarm bells we need to consider to protect the Second Amendment and it is good to see that the NRA is doing such a good job of keeping the pressure on. But it shouldn’t be viewed as an extreme right winged position. It is now only because the socialists have contaminated thought through the efforts of the lazy, who clearly outnumber the rest of the population in America these days that gun control through legislation and confiscation is even proposed. But like everything from the political left and the socialists who are driving their philosophy, they are missing the point and have not thought things through to their natural conclusions. They don’t have a plan when centralized government fails. But as we know, centralized government barely works in the most optimal conditions, and that is why guns must always be a part of any successful society, because it can and often truly is the only way to maintain civility. And without civility, no nation has any hope of building into the future.

Rich Hoffman

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They’ve Done it Before: Remember Benghazi–the anti-Islamic filmmaker–FISA is just the latest

Obviously by now I shouldn’t have to say it again. Now we all know that the FISA warrant obtained to spy on Donald Trump was paid for by the Clinton campaign and created by a foreign intelligence officer to create a storyline which would hopefully divert attention from crimes that American intelligence agencies weaponized toward election tampering. I am again proud to say that I was one of the first in the country to profess that this is what has been going on from the beginning, well before anybody else was willing to make such statements. But how did I know so early on, well, this is a mode of behavior that is not new for them, the Obama administration attempted to do the same thing with the Benghazi terrorist attack during Obama’s second election period and they tried to pin the whole thing on a small-time filmmaker who had supposedly irritated the Islamic community in Libya with an anti-Islam movie, and that was the cause of the attack. Many of the same characters were involved in this fake dossier of the Donald Trump story. They picked an innocent person, Carter Page who had a fascination with Russian culture and lived there for several years, who had a remote connection to the Trump campaign and attempted to plant the seeds of suspicion which would then keep all of Trump’s people on their heels allowing the real crimes committed by the Clinton campaign in conjunction with the FBI to percolate unimpeded. It is not hard to predict the future when people show you what they intend to do. In the case of Benghazi there was enough benefit of the doubt to let the story go. But in this FISA warrant issue in spying on Donald Trump to get dirt on the new president so that he could be removed from office, the FBI was caught red-handed.

I’ve said it over and over again and a few media personalities like Sean Hannity have joined in the drum beats for justice—this is by far the largest political scandal in American history. The only reason it hasn’t manifested into jail time yet is because most of our modern heads of law enforcement are caught in the whole thing. They got caught betting on Hillary Clinton being their next boss and they worked to make it that way in spite of her illegal deeds for which they were covering up to make it happen, so nobody is willing to fall on the sword as of yet. Half the nation is made up of Democrats and as it is quite clear now, the political left is taking a hard turn toward the hard left—out-right socialism and communism so there are lots of denials because liberals know that once they admit to what happened, the Democratic Party is done for as we know it and they still have hopes of gaining seats in congress in 2018. But the writing is on the wall.

Trump has done a good job of baiting his aggressors. While he could make moves to declassify all these documents and fire all the people responsible, he has shown that he would be a good fisherman if he were so inclined. He is letting the hook sink deeper into the mouth of his enemies not letting them wiggle free to rip it out. Trump is dragging the story out and letting everyone wear down so that he can reel them all into his boat for a nice dinner shortly. All these bad guys, Comey, Clapper, Brennan, Rice, and Obama have all been used to getting away with these crimes because nobody ever pressed them. Well now they are being pressed and we have testimony that they have outright lied. It brings my mind back to that moment I had on CNN when I was asked if I thought Comey—the recently fired FBI Director had lied, and I stated that he did which was very scandalous at that moment. Well, I was right even though it was far from clear at the time. Now we know he lied and so did everyone around him. Peter Strzok who worked directly for Comey and headed up the investigations into Clinton and Trump lied—clearly. Paul Manafort isn’t a great guy, but he’s rotting in jail right now just because he was close to Trump. Why are these people free? They have many hard days in front of them and they deserve every bit of what happens to them.

One thing is for sure, we can’t just forget about it. Its one thing to have political rivalries, but when one political party crosses the line and starts putting people in jail or trying to, its time to draw blood. If the Democrats had just left things alone and let the election take place letting the chips fall where they may, we wouldn’t have this crisis. But they did, just as they tried to pin the deaths of innocent Americans in Benghazi on a completely innocent filmmaker to keep the story subverted in the media and protect Obama’s re-election. Obama is just as guilty as James Comey is in all this, because he knew what kind of trouble Hillary Clinton was. He knew about her illegal server, so she could keep information out of any future house oversite committees. He knew she had bungled the Benghazi situation killing Americans on his presidential watch—during an election of all times—yet he told us all that Hillary Clinton was the most qualified person in the United States to run for president. He knew all these things, yet he said it anyway—how can we trust anything he has said about anything, ever?

And that holds true for all the characters wrapped up in the American intelligence debacle in obtaining the FISA warrant against Donald Trump who was doing well in the polls and might just become president of the United States. This obviously wasn’t their first rodeo, they had done this type of thing before. So how many times? The greatest thing that has happened in recent years is that Donald Trump did get elected and that caused these people to be caught—otherwise we’d never know. Many people like me suspected it all along, but we needed hard evidence, and because of Trump’s election, we now have it.

All this goes well beyond partisan politics, this is a case of basic law and order. If we can’t trust our top law enforcement officers—which we obviously can’t, then what are we to do about it? Each day that this Russian meddling story proceeds I get angrier, because just as these political activists tried to blame Benghazi on a filmmaker or the Trump election on a fake political funded dossier that describes disgusting sexual acts in an attempt to embarrass a new president into cuddling up to the FBI for safety, this Russian collusion story is to hide the real crime, that the DNC and FBI worked together to overthrow an American election and that is essentially the basic foundation of our American republic. Without basic law and order we have chaos—which explains many of the problems we are witnessing today. And the bad guys in our world like those mentioned in obtaining this very illegal FISA warrant would rather have death and chaos than justice for all, and that tells you all you need to know about this matter.

Rich Hoffman

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The Yellowstone Caldera is about to Blow: Global warming isn’t the problem, its the earth that wants to kill us

I continue to be amazed that the people living on Hawaii around the Kilauea volcano, which has been erupting since March of 2018 are stunned that the lava fields have destroyed their homes and destroyed infrastructure around the island. I can’t help but think of how many of those people living there tend to be liberals who believe in global warming and insist that manmade events are destroying the planet. Then when they see the rage of earth in all its glory they are surprised how violent the whole process is. I mean did they think that earth had gone thought millions of years of geological history and once the universities were invented by human beings that all history was placed into a vacuum and that was the way things were going to be forever. It only took 15 thousand years for the ocean levels to rise 400 ft from what they were during the last Ice Age to where they are today. When flying over any country and studying the mountain ranges, isn’t it obvious the violence that took place on the earth’s surface to cause them? Why would anybody think that the process of geological violence on earth has stopped? The reaction that people around the world have had in regard to the Kilauea volcano has made me really question our modern society’s ability to deal with major geological tragedies and that is a situation of great concern considering that a 100 ft fissure opened up in Grand Teton National Park closing down parts of the park to tourists.

The news outlets really haven’t covered this troubling situation, troubling because it indicates pressure relief from the massive volcano that resides under the Yellowstone National Park area which covers a massive area. For all the environmentalists who protest human influence on their sacred mother earth the fact remains that when the Yellowstone super volcano does erupt which could happen any time now as its due, the world will feel it. Most of North America will be covered in ash and it will be a major tragedy. Now I’m not saying that America won’t survive, but that it will be something that will take hundreds of years to recover from in North America. The eruption could happen tomorrow, or it could be centuries from now. But geologically speaking, the number is up and the caldera under Yellowstone is active with molten lava and an eruption is being established. It will happen and when it does massive global cooling will take place and crop development will be hampered for a long time making food supply a very difficult achievement.

People shouldn’t become a panicky mess over this inevitability. But they should be prepared. In addition to the unquestionable movement of the Yellowstone caldera as the magma chamber fills with pressure is the Juan de Fuca Plate that is moving under the North American Plate just off the coast of the Pacific Northwest. This is an incredibly liberal area politically and the inhabitants there are obviously not prepared for the tragedy that is mounting. These plates are all connected in ways that most humans don’t envision because human life spans and geological time spans are not conducive. Likely within the next hundred years, if not sooner, the Juan de Fuca plate will force the weaker North American plate upward snapping off the frictional surfaces allowing the continental plate to drop down several feet, pushing the city of Seattle under water, at least partially. It’s even possible for entire mountain ranges to sink beneath the earth when these types of tectonic collisions occur. And without question when that happens the stresses that are already present several hundred miles to the east from there at Yellowstone will react.

If such a massive earthquake were to happen off the Pacific Northwest it would likely help with the super volcano at Yellowstone by causing an early eruption. Left under its own power when the Yellowstone volcano erupts at least 2/3rds of North America will be thrown into darkness with over five feet of ash and blocked out sunlight. By taking the pressure away with a major earthquake, the violent forces might be peeled back a bit, but it must be noted that all these things are happening right now, the stage is being set. Mankind could regulate themselves back into a tent as hunter and gatherers and the world would still be destroyed by a few violent cataclysms which most of us alive today will see in our lifetime. While a giant earthquake might take some pressure off the super volcano, we are looking at events that will kill millions of people. We don’t need Bill Gates and his fellow billionaire manipulators like George Soros to kill off parts of the human population to save earth from overcrowding, mother nature will do it for us. We need as many humans alive as possible to keep from becoming extinct under such an event, which has likely happened to us in the past.

I have no intention on dying under such a tragedy, and neither should you dear reader. But we must be prepared and not let the greenie weenies who aren’t ready to consider the implications of this coming tragedy to keep us from dealing with the matter. I suspect that the reason for the lack of news coverage is that all they can think about is Donald Trump. Just a few years ago news outlets did stories on the Yellowstone situation, but this fissure breaking open in Grand Teton is pretty serious as far as news worthiness goes. I suppose the information is just too unpleasant to deal with, so its being ignored. But it shouldn’t be. Being ready is the best course of action, having a generator, making sure you have a year’s supply of food. Make sure to have guns to protect your personal property while there are extended power outages. It is entirely possible that a super volcano explosion in Yellowstone means that New York City might be covered in ash and have no power for an extended period of time. If you want to survive, you should have a way of making food and drinking water and protecting your means to do so.

It’s not global warming that is the biggest threat to human life, its earth itself. There will be many tragedies in the years to come, but the human spirit to always overcome must not be surrendered to the moments of panic that happen when hurricanes hit major cities and earthquakes eat those cities alive. We all know that New Orleans will have to move inland, that it cannot survive where it is now, and that most of the California coast is in danger of complete destruction. Nowhere in North America will it be safe if the Yellowstone volcano erupts. That is why we must move into space and take mankind away from its very jealous and overly medicated mother earth. It’s an unstable mother. Human life has found a window to grow in and we must leave before earth blows up yet again and kills everyone on its surface. If you want to live, you have to defy mother earth, not praise her. Because the earthquakes and volcanos are coming. There is no amount of capitalist regulation that will stop that from happening, but through invention and human enterprise, we might just survive it as a species.

Rich Hoffman
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El Mirador: Learning why centralized socieites fail and what we can do to change modern culture

I often make arguments that we should have never published our inquiries into history without knowing all the facts because our examinations into history are so shallow. Maybe after the field of archaeology and geology were older we might be better equipped to write history books, but we certainly aren’t there yet. The danger of course is that we have published incomplete results and then built religions and political philosophies around those assumptions, and they were incorrect all along. For instance, Europe was not the path for developing human invention incrementally from a hunter and gatherer state to building organized towns and cities moving through the Bronze Age, the Iron Age, the Dark Ages, the Renaissance, then the Industrial Revolution. That’s how it happened in Europe which was pretentious enough to assume that they were the center of the world but were in all reality way behind the times. While the builders of Stonehenge were building their monuments, the Egyptian culture was building advanced cities and likely trading with cultures all over the world. And there were likely very advanced cultures before the Egyptians such as the Sumerians which predated them by thousands of years. The evidence of this is being discovered all around the world in cities buried now by rising sea levels and jungle canopies. Such an example is the city of El Mirador in Guatemala just six miles from the Mexican border.

El Mirador isn’t older than Egypt, Sumer or the Indus Valley but the city which was about the size of Los Angeles predates any previously Mayan culture by over a thousand years. Starting at around 600 B.C. about the time that Buddhism was taking over the oriental world and gradually shaping the ideas that Jesus Christ would adopt to begin Christianity, El Mirador was a massive city functioning in many ways at a level that modern cities function. It was advanced in the way that we think of irrigation capabilities and food distribution along with science and global understanding. Prior to uncovering just the tip of the iceberg of secrets at El Mirador the assumption was that the Mayan people rose to power a thousand years after the birth of Christ, and that the Aztecs rose to power about a hundred to two hundred years before Christopher Columbus brought Europe to the New World. All that is wrong, the Maya have what they call a “Classic” period while the discovery of El Mirador has unleashed the need for a new category of understanding which we are now calling the pre-classic period. It was assumed that the Maya like many other civilizations gradually moved from hunter and gatherers into a more focused society centrally built around government, and what this shows at El Mirador was that the Maya were much more advanced much earlier than anybody would have previously guessed.

At the same time in North America there were apparently empires of giant people, likely from the Mediterranean area who had vast empires and traded with the Maya in Central America. And the same cultures from the Stonehenge region had migrated into North America much earlier than anybody had previously thought as well before Christ was even born. All these cultures were mixing and sharing mythologies and economies. The pyramids at El Mirador were obviously influenced by the cultures of Sumer and Egypt. There were pyramids in North America just as there we huge cultures of pyramid builders in Mexico and show a definite exchange of information with the developed world of the Middle East and Northern Egypt. For El Mirador to be such a large city in an area that did not even have a river near by requires extensive understandings of science that was much more sophisticated than what has been previously accepted by historical understanding.

Another thing that El Mirador makes obviously clear is that even such a large city complex dating much earlier than previously thought is buried in plain sight. The jungle has essentially taken over and made El Mirador look like a series of hills, when in fact the hills are giant pyramids. The rate of erosion and forest growth is such that in just a few thousand years all traces of that society are almost erased. There are likely hundreds if not thousands of cities all over the Americas in just the same situation and we have to also be open to the possibility that there were many cultures that were just as advanced if not more so traveling the world and trading goods and ideas well before the Egyptians. We just don’t see the evidence of their rise and fall because it occurred so long ago that the rate of erosion has wiped them away from the earth’s surface.

I was with my family recently at Ohio Caverns located just a bit north-west of Columbus and was examining a stalactite there that was over 200,000 years old. It had been there before the last Ice Age brought giant glaciers down over Ohio and changed the direction of many rivers and streams. It was there before the birth of Tecumseh or any Indian migrating from either China or England. It is entirely possible that in that range of time there were cultures that constantly rose and fell over and over again. The Egyptians were not the first but were likely just the latest for which evidence still exists. Because unless science seeks to preserve the remains of ancient cultures, they quickly end up becoming a society like El Mirador—covered by a jungle completely in just a few thousand years. Another two thousand years and it would be completely eroded away. And why not think so, the dates for the ancient monuments at Göbekli Tepe show occupation there from 9000 BCE to 7000 BCE just a few thousand years out of the Ice Age in the region of Turkey. Are we supposed to think that nothing was happening prior if we must accept that humans were showing advanced signs of culture that early in the process?

The point of this article is to convey that while many want to make politics out of the state of the American Indian and assume that they were a culture that had something taken from them the evidence shows that what we think of as tribes of Indians either in North America, or in the plains of Africa are always survivors of a previous attempt at civilization that rose and fell for whatever reason, usually the causes are that centralized societies collapse on themselves for all the political reasons we discuss in our own modern age. They may sustain themselves for several thousand years but eventually they fade into history only to rise again somewhere else in the world time and time again perhaps even longer than that stalagmite mentioned at Ohio Caverns. Just because we don’t see the evidence doesn’t mean it’s not there.

We should start considering that archaeological sites like El Mirador are young and that likely there were sites predating it either under the ruins or still waiting to be discovered under erosion, flooding, sandstorms, or natural tree growth from forest vegetation, like what we can see from El Mirador. The question that must be answered is one that I am pretty sure I know from my work in politics, it is that centralized societies fail when they don’t properly utilize individual development of their people and we see the Vico Cycle over and over again throughout history.

Where centralized societies are able to study from each other and build magnificent societies they never last and usually fall away into history within a few thousand years only to pop up somewhere else in another part of the world. The natural regression is just as we see in modern North America where groups of anarchists such as ANTIFA emerge to destroy the previous culture only to become a tribe of collectivists once again, which is what the North American Indians were when Europeans stumbled upon them in the late 1600s. The pyramids of massive cities such as Cahokia and the empires of the Maya who built El Mirador and were obviously trading with societies up and down the Mississippi River and the Ohio River valley when Christ was born had long been forgotten only to leave a bunch of little villages of hunters and gatherers to meet the Pilgrims from the Mayflower when they arrived at Plymouth Rock.

It is important to understand the cause and effect of centralized society, it’s not just a modern political issue. The reason to study these types of things is so that we can correct the behavior. When studying El Mirador we are so amazed that we have discovered that Mayan civilization predates our previous assumptions by over a thousand years that we forget to consider why they fell apart as a society. We look to the Greeks, the Romans, the English Empire, the Ming Dynasty, The Egyptians, the Mayans, Incans—we look everywhere in the world and we see the same elements over and over again. What causes the rise and fall of a civilization. Then we must attribute that to what we are living today, what makes America great and the rest of the world not so. And can we stop such a thing from happening in North America as it has happened everywhere else in the world time and time again? I think so, and that is my interest in these things. The key I would say is less centralization and more individualism, because we certainly don’t want some future society to find American cities under massive forests like we have discovered in regard to El Mirador and to go through the whole process yet again learning nothing and making mistakes over and over.

Rich Hoffman

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The Weaponized FBI: Who cares about any tapes Michael Cohen recorded on Trump

It was about midafternoon when I was in an important meeting and my phone started going off in a frenzy of alerts. Immediately I thought something was wrong thinking that someone was trying to text me an emergency. But I was relieved to find that it was just a bunch of notifications from Fox News, CNN and ABC News informing me that Michael Cohen had apparently recorded tapes between he and Donald Trump about paying off a Playboy model during the campaign. I kept reading the stories to see what could have possibly have provoked such a news response, but there was nothing more serious than that. I had to laugh that some editor out there thought this was a big story. As I have said many times, Donald Trump was the very definition of a Playboy. In his Apprentice years on NBC it wouldn’t surprise me if he had Playboy playmates in every town in the country begging to sleep with him. I’m honestly surprised there aren’t more women coming forward than there are. As a 72-year-old man now and a long marriage to Melania who I think has been key to settling down Trump and making his mind ripe for the White House, I think he has other things to think about besides being a playboy, so he is turning out to be a great president. Maybe not so much ten years earlier, but certainly is now.

It’s about as much of a nothing story as you could get yet there it was breaking like the world was coming to an end. Reporters were absolutely salivating at the potential that Trump’s former lawyer might turn on the president and reveal salacious details about some sexual encounter. This baffled me because logic said otherwise. Nobody cared about such things anymore, Bill Clinton saw to that. If anything, it would probably make Trump more popular with men and their wives who might just vote for him to fuel sexual fantasies of their own. These reporters were clearly grasping at straws hoping something might come along and soak up the news away from the other very serious issues happening, especially in regard to the FBI case in becoming weaponized in favor of a political candidate during the 2016 election. They keep saying that it was the Russians who committed all the crimes during the election but as it turned out it was the FBI under the apparent orders of the Obama White House who did all the election meddling, and they were caught. Now Trump was threatening to bring Russian President Putin to Washington D.C. in the fall pushing the media and the Deep State toward near insanity. So they floated this story about Trump being compromised by his former lawyer hoping to do something to derail the popular president from exposing that the Russian stories were giant nothing burgers.

The real problem had nothing to do with whether or not Cohen had secretly recorded tapes of Trump about a Playboy model, it’s that the same FBI that had committed election fraud against the Republican Party with outrageous meddling for which Lisa Page and Peter Strzok as FBI agents on Capitol Hill had just testified, that had broken into Cohen office and confiscated its contents to acquire anything that the Trump lawyer might have had, including compromising tapes. For me it’s not that the tapes might exist, it’s that they were stolen by the criminals who had tampered with the election of 2016 and that they were still weaponized and abusing the law to defend their own reputation by destroying the lives of the people around Trump to force the president to yield to their authority—which ultimately, he controls under the Executive Branch.

Of course, Michael Cohen doesn’t want to become the next General Flynn or Paul Manafort. The reason for the FBI raiding his office was to show Trump that the people around him would be squeezed until they coughed up compromising material on the president. The not so subtle implication was that the FBI had the power to destroy lives if they needed to, and they were going to get Trump one way or another. That was the only way that such tapes would be brought to the surface and leaked to the media to stop the Donald Trump presidency. That was the entire purpose of the Cohen office raid and that should piss off every American. Where was all this toughness from the FBI when Loretta Lynch was meeting Bill Clinton in a plane to cut a deal to have that same FBI not move forward with charges against his wife, Hillary Clinton over the email scandal? Where was that toughness when they picked through the computer of Carlos Danger—I mean Anthony Weiner—which contained classified information from Hillary Clinton herself while she had been Secretary of State under President Obama? Or what about the DNC rigging the election to put Hillary Clinton in the nomination for the Democrats over Bernie Sanders which we only knew about from leaked documents stolen by hackers? Where was the tough FBI in all those situations? Yet they can kick down the door of Michael Cohen and take his stuff looking for evidence against Trump, and they can make plea deals with the Podesta brothers to try to squeeze even further Paul Manafort into revealing something salacious on President Trump. Give me a break! And all they could come up with out of all that is that Trump might have paid some hush money to a Playboy model to keep controversy out of his presidential campaign that he might avoid. That the FBI and the media would think the Playboy story even had legs shows they have no idea what they are doing even with all the power they have to prosecute.

Two can certainly play at that game, imagine the secrets that we are uncovering moment by moment in the Uranium One deal or all the cash payments that were revealed under the Clinton Foundation? Think of all the cover ups involved just in the Benghazi case when the Obama administration tried to cover Hillary Clinton’s screwups in that terrorist attack by blaming everything on a filmmaker. There are enough stories of corruption between the FBI and the Democrats to make our skin crawl for centuries and all these stories will leak out for decades. I remember when I first heard the controversy that Franklin Roosevelt might have known that the Japanese were going to bomb Pearl Harbor and that he wanted the attack to happen so all the ships were parked in such a way at the harbor to make inviting targets. No carriers were in the harbor, they were all out to sea. The controversy goes that Roosevelt wanted to get American buy-in to the war which fulfilled his aims at confiscating American industry under his socialist fantasies, which is precisely what happened the moment that Japan bombed the military base in Hawaii. Compared to all these modern FBI stories, the Pearl Harbor case is small potatoes, yet it has dominated thoughts for most of a century. These FBI foils that centered around the 2016 election are much more severe and people won’t forget them. They will be talked about for many years as speculation drives millions of private investigations into the matter. Nobody will care about a Playboy model and her relationship to Trump. But they will care as to why the FBI broke into Cohen’s office to apply pressure to a president who truly wanted to change things in Washington D.C.

The Cohen office raid has angered me from day one, because it could happen to any of us. It was clearly inspired as a witch hunt to destroy Donald Trump by attacking the people around him in a desperate search for compromising information. If the FBI will do that to the president who is supposed to be in charge of the entire department, they won’t hesitate to do it to any of us. They are a weaponized organization that are paid for by our tax dollars to work against us. They aren’t our friends. It would be nice if we could trust them, but obviously we can’t. And that is the danger always in giving the government too much power in trade for security. When they control the law, not even lawyers are safe, or presidents of the United States, and that is a big problem.

Rich Hoffman

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