Tag: Regulations

The Police Report: Zero tolerance for liars and bullies

As I said in the video, the two things I have zero tolerance for are liars and bullies, whether individually or through institutions. And this whole case with Matt Miller, the superintendent of Lakota schools, is the result of both. And since trouble was first announced in August of 2022, the worst in people and those traits has only escalated the problem to the result of this police report, which is available through a public record request with the Butler County Sheriff’s Department. And given the pressure and emotion of a situation like this, I am impressed with the investigation and report. I wanted Matt Miller to be innocent; I didn’t want to believe what kind of information that a small army of friends connected to his ex-wife was reporting about his behavior during his marriage to her. They had all been triggered by watching how Matt was treating the school board member Darbi Boddy and what came from them to a friend of mine, Vennessa Wells, a former Lakota school board candidate, which I explain in detail in the video, were things that nobody wants to think about. When I saw it, because of the seriousness of it, I instantly recommended sending it to the police because this wasn’t tabloid stuff about who was sleeping with whom and for what salacious reason. This is an admission that sent their marriage into counseling and eventual termination because of its audaciousness. And when it comes to public employees, like Matt Miller is, who is the spokesperson for Lakota schools as a public figure, and everything is paid for with public money, the behavior in a bedroom when it deviates from standard husband/wife activities becomes everyone’s business, especially when it involves the kind of behavior that the officers interviewing both his ex-wife and Matt Miller himself revealed. 

The whole report is bad for the way I see things. It shows a history of a reckless sexual lifestyle that culminated in the point of the entire report, which the Lakota school board chose not to discuss with the public. They received this report on September 9th and have been reporting to the public that it cleared Matt Miller of any wrongdoing. When referring to the activities reported during an interview with the Lakota superintendent, initially, he said to the investigators that the activities he participated in did not involve minors but that they, as a couple, did participate in sexual encounters, as alluded to elsewhere in the report. Then, as the investigation continued, he admitted that they had “pillow talk” about role-playing, drugging, molesting, and recording on video sex acts with three juveniles. The police report also references the possession of images of underage nude children that could easily be obtained by correlating his phone at the time or through the carrier. This part of the report was odd because Matt Miller admitted to talking about sex with underage children with his wife as if “pillow talk” gave him the excuse of any liability. But as all child pornography tends to assume, the downloading of it, the planning of it, or the act of it tends to inspire very severe penalties. Yet under pressure from the investigators, he rationalized this behavior as acceptable social conduct, behavior we wouldn’t have known if his ex-wife and her friends had not come forward with information that they were inspired to through the treatment of the board of current school board member Darbi Boddy. It’s not like people were looking for dirt on Matt Miller’s lifestyle. It came forward through his social interactions and the power of his position.

When I first read all the Craigslist information and the many text messages between Miller and his wife, as she was feeling bad about everything, and he was not denying that anything she was saying had happened, I saw it immediately as a case for the authorities. They needed a chance to do the right thing and provide a proper investigation. I wanted this case to be about a messy divorce where an ex-spouse wanted to bring down her husband out of further vengeance for a marriage gone wrong. With the mention of children and their own child involved in “pillow talk,” I was hoping it all just to be salacious nonsense. But during the interview, Matt Miller admitted that they had talked about it as part of their fantasy talk in the bedroom, and that was it for me. All this occurred in 2019, and as of this writing, this is 2022. The only reason we know any of this is because of his ex-wife and her many friends who feel she was an abused person and wanted to defend her publicly. The superintendent’s actions against Darbi Boddy were their trigger mechanism to do so. But now we have to question what don’t we know. I would certainly hope that sexual fantasies with underage children are not common. A mind that allows itself to think such things are broken and needs help. They certainly don’t need to be in charge of 17,000 students behind locked security from the outside world that the superintendent controls exclusively. That doesn’t sound like a very “safe” environment. If little kids are the subject of “pillow talk,” Matt Miller probably shouldn’t have eyes on children under his care. 

Even worse is the school board’s reaction to this report. They read the same thing, yet they punted everything to a third-party investigation, just as they have for CRT. And from the teacher’s union at Lakota came a steady stream of denials that there was any evidence, even as everyone had this police report in their hands. They claimed that anything said against Matt Miller was unsubstantiated before they even knew that there was a police report. I received lots of hate mail from community activists who attacked Venessa and me and continued to spread all kinds of misinformation on various social media platforms trying to do damage control without knowing anything about the facts. I was bewildered as I saw some of these while holding pages and pages of evidence in my hand. I considered much of that evidence hearsay until the police did their investigation. I expected Matt Miller, when interviewed, to say something to the effect, even if he was lying, “no, no, I would never think of doing anything sexual to children.” I may not care much for the guy, but on a level of basic human decency, I would hope that he would at least not cross that line. But instead, he said it was “pillow talk.” For the police, is pillow talk illegal when it involves children? Possession of nude photos of children certainly is, and that would seem easy enough to get. We just saw that the Butler County Prosecutor’s Office had a family member sent to prison for the rest of his life because of child pornography, so we can only speculate why the words “at this time” concluded this report. I would agree with Lindsey Sheehan on the evidence; so far, it was a one-sided conversation that would need cross-referencing with carrier data, an inspection of Matt Miller’s computer, and further interviews with more witnesses. And who has the stomach for all that, especially on such a large and public case? And who needs all that when you have the superintendent himself admitting to what he did to the officers? That was bad enough. But worse, so many adults supposed to care anything for children were more concerned about protecting Matt Miller than what might be best for children. That certainly wasn’t their first priority, as shown by their actions.

Rich Hoffman

Why The New ‘Top Gun’ is So Popular: Americans like rule-breakers, not conformists

It is funny to hear industry analysts trying to figure out why the new Top Gun: Maverick movie is doing so well going into its third weekend. I’ve listened to and read several hundred reviews of the film at this point. Unlike other kinds of movies, I have not yet found anybody who understands why the American market is flocking to see it many times now. Is it patriotism and the lack of wokeness that is in the movie? Or is it Tom Cruise himself, which many in the trades would like to think is the case? Well, Tom Cruise was smart to make Top Gun the way it needed to be, especially coming out of the Covid years. The film was done well before there was ever a pandemic, and Paramount sat on it for several years because of the uncertainty of the future of Hollywood, Top Gun: Maverick has the feel of a movie made in a different time and a different country, all the way back to 2019. I remember being on an airplane flying out of Orlando and watching Comic-Con footage of the movie for a 2020 summer release, so it’s been out there for a long time. But the film was released during a market recovery in a post-Covid world, and all kinds of forces were at play that inspired Americans to return to the movie theaters to see a movie worth leaving the house to view. Yet, there is an element to Top Gun that is very much reminiscent of the 80s when Tom Cruise was making so many blockbuster films, along with other movie stars, that say more about Americans to the world than anybody has seen in a while. It is that element that was on raw display in the new movie and is why the film is doing well without the rest of the world driving a majority of the box office numbers, specifically the Chinese market. 

The character of Maverick is a rule-breaker, and that is a trait that Americans love. They don’t like someone who follows the rules to the letter. Americans want out-of-the-box characters who will bend or break the rules to accomplish something great in the world, even down to the name of the Tom Cruise character. Tom Cruise himself is not like Maverick. But he was wise to play a character like Maverick and let all the elements of a rebel within the military shine in many reckless ways. Just the name of the character, Maverick, indicates a loner, a rugged individualist, someone who goes their own way in life. And that is not how the rest of the world is. Only American cultures celebrate such traits. The stories other cultures put on the silver screen are conflicts with conformity as opposed to what we see in Top Gun, a character so reckless that he costs the military hundreds of millions of dollars in damage in just this one movie. Maverick crashes two very expensive aircraft and puts at risk many more in his exploits of individualism that are often audacious, unapologetic, and way over the top. In most cultures, Maverick would be in jail. But in America, he is considered the top navy pilot that the military has, and audiences love it.

Literally, in the movie, all the people who have trouble are those who follow the rules. There is a scene where all the best pilots are in a bar talking about the upcoming mission, and they wonder who will be able to teach them anything. And of course, it is Maverick who has been picked to lead the mission because for it to be successful, it will require someone willing to break all the rules and discover what nobody yet knows. There is a scene where Tom Cruise playing Maverick, stands in front of a giant American flag and tells his students to throw out the rule book because it’s what your enemy knows. To succeed in this movie, the characters must learn to “not think” and act on “instinct.” It’s really the message of the first Star Wars movie from way back in 1977 and is a yearning that most people often experience in their lives. The desire to be their own authentic person and not some caricature of social order. The only way a mission like the one featured in Top Gun: Maverick can be accomplished is by breaking all the rules because the enemy is stuck in rules and is their ultimate weakness. It’s not the military jets, the companionship, or even the music that makes people love movies like this one. They help sell the story, but the essence is that Americans love rule breakers. So does the rest of the world, but they can only experience such things in American movies, and that is precisely why all these woke politics have infected the industry to the extent they have. For the producers of Top Gun to turn loose a character like Maverick again into the movie business was a very deliberate act, and the results are apparent. 

In much the same way that ESG scores are failing the financial industry because the world does not value those measures, they have been artificially created to inspire liberal political change to a climate change fanatical religion. Real value is what people are encouraged to see in the movies, not just in the act of buying popcorn actually to see a movie just because it’s there. It’s what the story tells that matters to people, and in Top Gun, it’s about recklessness over logic. It’s about breaking the rules in a rigid military environment to do what the military itself can’t do. It’s thinking out of the box to solve the problems society at large gets stuck on. And that’s why this movie Top Gun: Maverick is doing such good business while other movies come and go, and people forget about them five minutes later. So there is much more going on with this new Top Gun movie than just great music, interesting visual effects, and a vintage throwback to the kind of movies made in America during the 80s. Americans love rule breakers, before and after Covid. Covid was everything that Americans didn’t want to be. They gave authority a chance in case it saved lives, but knowing what we do now in hindsight, they would never do it again. Instead, millions of Maverick types sit in a darkened theater cheering on the new Top Gun because they see themselves in the character. And they want characters like that to succeed, to win at all costs. That’s the American way of doing things, and the rest of the world is fascinated by it. Even though they can’t relate, they will still buy a movie ticket to see it in the fictional character of Tom Cruise’s Maverick. For them, it’s the closest thing they will ever get to a society that thumbs its nose at procedures and conformity and embraces adventure and the treasures found in recklessness. And like all great movies, because Maverick was so reckless, so brash, and such a rule-breaker, he saves society in the process, which says more about us all than any other measure of human achievement.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Rules and Regulations in Liberty Township Politics: Not the sexiest thing in the world, but certainly the most important

The word is out that the Biden administration is working with the World Health Organization to turn over American constitutional sovereignty to the Bill Gates-funded branch of the United Nations to give them control over health care decisions. Before anybody thinks of this as another conspiracy theory, I have said for many months now that the Biden administration does not plan to follow the constitution and that Democrats, in general, are hoping to erode away the founding concepts of America by the election of 2022, which is why they aren’t in a panic at the moment about the upcoming midterms. Polling shows that they will lose big in any honest election, but Democrats have not been participating in honest elections for decades. You can bet they have many tricks up their sleeve to hold on to power, and following the constitution won’t give them that power they are craving. Just watch 2000 Mules by Dinesh D’Souza, and the proof of how the 2020 election was stolen with Facebook money paying ballot stuffers to commit massive overvotes will become clear. So we are dealing with open violators of the law who want power at any cost; what they want to do with the WHO is just an extension of what they have done with Agenda 21, which I was reminded of while attending a trustee meeting in my home area of Liberty Township, Ohio. 

Because of Todd Minniear, the recently elected freedom-oriented trustee of Liberty Township, I have been more interested in the trustee meetings, so I went to a recent one to hear about a new concept that was being introduced, a “constitutional township.” A nice new government building recently opened where township business is conducted, which was weird for me. It’s always weird for me to go to these kinds of things and listen to people who think they are longtime residents who have built homes 30 years ago and think of themselves as veterans. I grew up less than a mile to the south of the new township building. I’ve been all over the world, I have lived in many places, but I live in Liberty Township because it literally is the best place to live in the world, in my opinion. And I remember when I had cows right next to the yard I played in. I still see the character of my home neighborhood even though almost every last bit of green space has a house on it now, which was the topic of the evening, the big Princeton Pike Church just to the north wanted to develop some of their large parcels of land, and neighboring residents who have been there for a while were worried about it. Several people were at the meeting to protest the development. They wanted the parcels of land to have their own road access so the new residents wouldn’t have to cut through their current neighborhood making traffic even heavier where kids often literally play in the streets. I’ve heard the arguments all my life, the debate between people who already live in Liberty Township and those who want to become part of it. Most of the time, nobody is ever completely happy.

This meeting was like the many I remember from the past. The trustees made it clear that all their power was to pass the zoning approval and kick the whole effort to a bureaucratic traffic study. The residents were in a bit of a panic because the government entities who do traffic studies are not accountable to anyone where the local trustees are, so it’s always disheartening for people to be told that their local government doesn’t have any real power. We have all surrendered our local government to the Agenda 21 types in faraway lands for many years. It is precisely that trend that makes members of the WHO think they can actually run all our lives across the world through health care, just as they had attempted to do with Covid, by superseding our American constitution with rules created by the United Nations. Many of the local zoning laws that the trustees were struggling with, including all the rules of procedural conduct, were written by members and fans of the United Nations global governance plan, so it’s certainly not a conspiracy theory. The election fraud of 2020 for those people was a small price to pay for their aims at global domination. The people at that Liberty Township Trustee meeting were just seeing the pass-down effects of laws written decades ago to set up this massive global power grab we were seeing now. The trustees were right; they didn’t have much power by the rules of trustee conduct. For the residents, after the meeting, they stood in the parking lot like lost children who had just found out that their parents had no authority to protect them from anything, and it was a scary concept to hear trustees say for the millionth time, “we have no power.”

In truth, trustees have a lot of power constitutionally, as do state and federal officials; if only they followed the founding documents and stopped allowing foreign entities to tamper with our governmental affairs through ridiculous rules and bureaucratic regulations.   That was precisely why Todd’s proposal for a constitutional township was so important. He was recently involved in a perfect utilization of its use by what he did with Liberty Center, the premier shopping area in the Cincinnati region. With this leadership from the local area idea in mind, the playground at the mall had been closed during the Covid outbreak, and the mall management wasn’t sure what the rules were to reopen it. Parents wanted to use the play area because it’s great for kids to get out of the house, and it brought life to the upstairs area by the food court. Without the playground, the lights were out, and it was a constant reminder of just how terrible the government had been over Covid restrictions. And since nobody in politics was sure what authority they had, nobody thought to tell Liberty Center that they could reopen the play area to help local businesses have life again. So the mall was waiting for someone to tell them they could reopen, which nobody did until Todd Menniear started asking questions. And within a few weeks of asking those questions, Liberty Center was able to reopen its playground area, which is wonderful for so many local residents. And just like that, we could see how a local trustee could bring leadership to the community and improve things dramatically.   Because if everyone were waiting for someone at the World Health Organization to tell them that the playground could reopen, it’s likely the playground never would. 

All local government has much more power than they believe they have. Many of the rules and regulations they are forced to follow are unconstitutional and would fall apart under any legal scrutiny. And when trustees like Todd Minniear start asking those obvious questions, well, then the ruse falls apart quickly, and we learn that many of the rules we have been following we never had to listen to in the first place. We should always ask from where the rules came from and who are the people who wrote them. It’s healthy to ask those questions, and we should because we have the same exact problem with school boards. They have all kinds of flow-down rules that come to them that constrain them in ways the community who elected them doesn’t want.   And some of them could and should be challenged with simple questions because upon asking; many will learn that the authority was never granted to the rule writers in the first place. They just did what they did because nobody questioned their authority. Listening to that meeting and the proposal Todd was introducing and thinking about the successful communication between government and private business at Liberty Center, a new trend in politics was quickly emerging for the better. And as I heard the news about the World Health Organization power grab, I worried about it a lot less because I know there are many like Todd Minniear emerging into local government who won’t just blindly accept unconstitutional mandates. And for the people of Liberty Township, that is some of the best news of the century.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Rules are Made by the Lazy: Socialism with a mask of safety to hide it

Rules are Made by the Lazy

It’s interesting to see what woke terms are considered “hostile.” The video above talks about a recent posting there, which got me banned for a few days. It’s a quote from The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business that says, “never forget that the cheaters and the lazy made the rules of the world, so to make things easier for themselves, not to serve justice.” Well, it’s an accurate statement that is describing a condition that needs to be fixed.  Yet for the Linkedin crowd, it was too harsh, which came to my mind is an experience I had over a recent weekend, which I’ll talk about later that is a real problem in America in a post-Covid world.  And I say “post” because the coronavirus is over and has been for a long time.  But political exploitation of it for a whole host of reasons isn’t. They’d like it to go on forever for all the reasons we’ll talk about here.  But in truth, I expect to get flagged, especially on social media, a lot.  It has been happening to this blog site increasingly for years, and when it comes to the book, well, I meant it to be as honest as possible, and there are many bad guys out there profiting off dishonesty.  So, of course, they won’t like it.  Yet it doesn’t change the nature of the comment, that the lazy are usually the ones who make all the rules the rest of us are expected to deal with.  You don’t often see the best in a field making many rules because they are good at doing what they do.  The rule-makers are the ones who are looking to handicap the good to give the weak a chance to win. 

In a perfect world, competition would determine who wins and who loses.  The objective would be well defined, and various parties would fight it out to see the best.  Someone would win, someone would lose, or a whole lot of people would lose.  The losers would know if they could practice and get better for the next competition, and in that way, everyone would get better, and the world would be a better place as a result.  However, and it’s certainly out of the bag now for mainstreamers, socialism and a mixed economy have taken their toll on our intellects over the years.  So much so that we no longer know the purpose of competition.  In the quest for equality, we have given rise to a society of rule makers who are always seeking to penalize the winners so that the losers in life can win more often.   Worse yet, the value of winning has been so much attacked that many don’t even want to win anything.  They don’t want to be targeted for various social attacks and the stigmas that come with it.  Granted, these positions are not innate to the human being.  Humans all want to strive for the best they can get in anything. Still, the social pressure to embrace meekness is incredible and has given us a society of lawmakers who enjoy controlling the mass of humanity with equality measures meant to cripple the best to prop up the worst. That has given us many of our modern problems. 

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Of course, the excuse for rules makers to always make more regulations is always the pursuit of safety.  The socialist always looking to conceal their loser tendencies wants desperately to take away opportunities for danger to avoid complex discussions about their timidity.  So rules and regulations in an overly litigious society are the perfect cover.  Under the undeclared socialism of our times, the banner of equality takes precedence over victory in every way, meaning that a safe society preserves human life in one fashion only to destroy them in thousands of other ways.  But for a community of rule makers, the more rules there are, the more value that losers have in the world.  I can think of a few blue pill examples of this kind of thing that most people would understand.  In the video above, I give a few examples of the NFL in how socialism has been generally accepted to make the game appeal to the overall mass audience of the product itself.  In 2003, after the Tampa Bay Buccaneers won the Super Bowl, there was a change to their invented Cover 2 defense against the Bump and Run rules.  The Buc defense used to be able to manhandle receivers constantly on their routes, but after that year, it was changed to 10 yards of coverage; the hands had to be off.  Now it wasn’t the Bucs who proclaimed this trend to be unfair.  They had just won a Superbowl.  The rest of the NFL was upset that the Bucs had such a dominant defense that caused the rule change.  And as a result, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers didn’t win another Super Bowl until 2021. That’s just one small example out of hundreds of thousands of similar rules tampering quandaries that we all deal with every day.  But in dealing with them with such frequency, we have forgotten what a life with many fewer rules looks like and how much better our society could be without those rules. 

That, of course, brings up the many rules of business and how rules are used to either crush competition or stabilize the best in dominating a market.  Once a company sticks its head up and shows itself as a contender of excellence, it comes to the parasites to either loot off the efforts or penalizes the company with more rules and regulations until they are worn down into complacency. That’s about the time that the management takes up their open collar shirts and deliberately shows the world that they aren’t so great because they hope to get off the radar of the rules and regulations class.  Too many rules inspire people not to play the games of life, and it is in the games that we find the most value for everything.  That, of course, is the point I make in the book, but on a professional site like Linkedin, you’d think that they would value such talk.  But then again, that’s what wokeness is all about.  Wokeness is about destroying the good and the best to make way for the average and the complacent.  It is just another byproduct of socialism, the quest for sameness, not perfection and dominance in a particular field.  Rules are sold to us through safety, but they intend to eliminate risk, which drives the world’s economies.  And once those who have acquired great wealth and no longer want to be challenged, they can then hire the rules makers of governments to prevent that competition from knocking them off their pedestal.  That is when rules and regulations are used to preserve the best and to allow them to become complacent because nobody is allowed to compete with them.  And that in itself is sheer evil that is allowed to be brewed right under our noses. 

Well, I’m OK with getting banned on all these various platforms. I’m going to do what I do, and the message does get out.  Maybe not to the extent that would be possible without all the rules and regulations tampering.  But the honesty of competition cannot be ignored.  When everyone wonders why the world has many of the problems that it does have, look no further than the impact that rules and regulations have on society as a whole, and you will find the beginning to your answer.   The way to fix any society is not with the burden of more regulators but with more competition.  Not in sameness but in uniqueness.   And once that idea is embraced, we will all see vast improvements in our social discourse.  The skinny jeans tech geeks who flag all these postings aren’t the arbiters of quality and performance.   Winning is. That’s how all societies grow and prosper, is in winning despite all the rules. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Skycars are Ready: Yet we have to wait for stupid rules and regulations to catch up

If there is one thing that I’ve learned and developed over these many millions of words of contemplation and the questioning of virtually everything we assume in our political and social order, it is that we lose something very valuable in our teenage years for which we work so hard to develop as children, and that is fertile imaginations that take advantage of our very unusual brains and drive for improvement and creation. It would be my offering that developing that over a lifetime is the meaning of life for the human species. We were never meant to replicate nature and to learn to live within its rules. We were meant to question nature and to improve it the way an artist improves a blank canvass with strokes of paint and the thoughts that took a lifetime to build. And that any human invention of philosophy that has been put in place to restrict such an approach to life is evil, even if the intentions were good to start with, as we all know the path to Hell is paved with.

I was asked by several members of the business community about this new book of mine, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business as to why, earlier in 2019 when they learned I was doing it. As they asked, what could possibly be done new in that field that has not been done by thousands of other people already. Well, that has been the difficult aspect of it and is something I’m untangling due to my unusual life and experiences. Its not just about business that I’m concern, such as understanding why Lean Manufacturing is largely rejected by western cultures while eastern cultures thrive with it. Understanding why the original Walt Disney was a genius, or George Lucas was so successful while so many others try to copy but fail. The new film Ford vs. Ferrari is about the same kind of interesting characters who push the limits of social order in passionate ways for good new things to come forth. So was the great film produced by George Lucas about Tucker: A Man and His Dream. Or the Aviator by Leonardo DiCaprio. What makes genius in a culture and how can we protect it so we can get more of it? Then there is the piece of the puzzle that I think is most unique, tying that to the ownership of guns in a society and how that invention has allowed for minds to flourish and step away from tyranny so that imaginations could flourish. It’s not our education system that has produced such people, its in a mind free of fear either by daredevil minds or those growing up in households protected by family and friends with closets full of guns. My investigation has taken me to that precipice and its certainly virgin ground that has gotten deeper the more I probed. But it has been worth it. The quest has been very rewarding, and revolutionary.

It is in this context that I do much of what I do and think the same. Newcomers or occasional readers here might think that I am a mean, vicious person. However, the people who know me best understand that I am a very unencumbered person 24 hours a day. I wouldn’t say childlike. I would say rather I am unrestricted in my imagination which is vast and is the key to much of my problem-solving ability. People associate this way of thinking with a child, but to me children are learning to think like this, they don’t have the developed thoughts yet, the way an Einstein or a Nietzsche may have. Thinking is the thing that humans do, so doing it well is very much part of the puzzle and to people like me, the worst thing you can do to such people is put too many rules on them, to restrict them to people who don’t dare to think so deep or far. That is where destructive social orders come into play, the things we allow into our political discourse regardless of party affiliation. To me, if it restricts imagination, its evil. From the local zoning board that constricts the plans of a creative architect with stupid rules, or the inventor of a new mode of transportation that must wait for a cumbersome FFA to get their minds wrapped around an idea. To that last point is the subject of today’s article, but also the first step into a series of thoughts that I have on this matter that are paving the defined criteria of this new book of mine. But also serve as a contextual representation for the 21st century and the many challenges of this particular point in history.

For much longer than I’ve been writing here, or writing books I have been a big supporter of skycars. At first it was the Paul Moller Skycar M400 that I worked whatever political angles I could to help it along in the 1990s, where everyone laughed at it infuriating me tremendously. I was working for Cincinnati Milacron at the time and they were creating a kind of pre-Amazon parts delivery system to support their products all over the country, which at the time I was part of organizing with a fleet of vans to provide delivery within the day. Essentially a call would come in, we’d pick the part from inventory, carry it down to our vans, and drive to wherever they were in the country having the part to the customer that day, sometimes within a working shift. I tried to convince people that a Skycar could do the job much faster and due to the political response, I understood that it would take probably another 20 years to get the human race to catch up, and to me that was just stupid. Why weren’t people advanced enough to see the potential? That is the reason I used the M400 in my book The Symposium of Justice. I had Hollywood connections at that point in my life and I was hoping they would take the baton and run with it. But they didn’t. It was a very frustrating period for me to observe.

Well, now its that time and skycars are getting ready to hit the market. Dubai is bringing them into the mainstream in the next few years and the new electric concept called BlackFly is ready right now to fly from your driveway to work at the touch of a button. The problem is, and continues to be even in Dubai, that a political class protected by a lot of silly rules and regulations are standing in the way as they have for so many decades and that is what evokes my anger. The imaginations of the human species has done their job, but the weak and timid are holding back what we could all become due to their lackluster view of the world created artificially with restrictive, timid thoughts. While we justify the rules that are in our society as keeping people safe, the true nature of our beings is to be recklessly imaginative and to allow ambition to fuel product creation and implementation. Our regulatory culture is the problem, or obsession with silly rules to restrict imaginative growth is the problem and has been for a very long time. It is not the job of the unrestrictive imaginations to encumber themselves with those who have limited themselves to thoughts that keep them grounded and under control of the local masters who only want to hold their power given to them by the rules of the day. Its for everyone else to rise to the highwater marks set by the great thinkers who have worked their entire lives to become something unique. And the flying cars are the products of such thinking, and finally, they are ready for the market. Yet they wait for the lazy minded to get it. But first they’ll have to await the results of the Ohio State game against Michigan before they have room in their brains for the task, or some other college game where the small minded gather to reassure themselves that institutions are the boons of existence, and not the imaginations of the most daring. The point of my efforts is to give a scientific opinion on this obscurity, so that perhaps we can change it from what it is now in a highly regulatory business environment into something that allows such inventions to materialize in years instead of decades.

Rich Hoffman

The Disease of Regulation: The Scam of Legalized Extortion

People ask me all the time why I ride a motorcycle in the snow and extreme cold.  When you have to spend the day within our court system, as I have this week, several things become extremely obvious, if you consider the situation with logic, regulations created from law makers are born and breed to employee people.  And when you realize how foolish that is, such trips in the snow help me see the truth of things. 

A court-house is filled with security, court clerks, bailiffs, administrators, judges, police officers and many other support personnel. The hallways around the court rooms fill with eager faces at exactly 8:30 to 9:00 pm waiting for their cases to be called. Attorneys walk purposefully with arms filled with documents, because this is their battlefield and are comfortable in the environment.

If one is punished with a case that extends for the entire day, or for multiple days, the pattern emerges. By 1 or 2 PM the busy court-house diminishes in its busyness and the hallways clear after tears are shed from some of the occupants, and congratulations occur on the other. These are palaces of high emotion and loaded with drama.

As I weighed out much of what was happening around me, including the case I was involved with, I had to measure how much of it had any true social merit. The answer was very little.

The system works like this, regulations are created by a law-maker someplace either locally, at the state, or the federal government, and the citizen out there in the world either knowingly or un-knowingly breaks those regulations. If someone chooses to hold the citizen accountable for breaking the regulation they can proceed to court. This can be instigated by a private citizen, or an officer of the law.

Lawyers try the cases in a courtroom and the wins and losses of these cases establish case-law, which forms the ebb and flow of the legal system.

The entire system is built to employee all parties that play supporting roles in that process. It could be argued that without that system many people would suffer injustice. But much of what I observed, including the case I was on, involved people seeking to abuse the system to work the case-law into their advantage in some way, and if some of those regulations were not in place, there wouldn’t be near so many cases on the court dockets, and a lot of the people who filled the parking garage in the morning wouldn’t need to be there.

You can see this first hand at your local court on virtually any day through the week. You can see it also in your state house for whatever state you live in. And of course you can see it in Washington to great effect. Much of what you see as far as employees rushing around like ants at an ant farm is unnecessary.

Therefore the goal of all this regulation is not to make a safer, more just society. It is to create jobs and a reason for people to show up to work.

That might seem preposterous, especially if you are one of the people who are in the process of regulation creation, or enforcement.

At the conclusion of many of these cases, the plaintiff attorneys and defense attorneys, locked in immortal combat shook hands at the end and wished each other well. The whole thing had the appeal of a game of football. While all these opposing forces are together, the clients walk behind their counsel like dogs on a leash. Nobody speaks to each other as invisible walls restrict it. Eyes do not meet between defense and plaintiffs. But attorneys treat the whole thing like a game, because it is.

Regulation costs us economically, and if the economy were allowed to expand on its own accord, jobs would be created as a natural by-product. But the kind of jobs that are created through regulation are the kind of desirable, well-paying jobs that exist between 9 to 5, which is how many want it. And the act of manipulating the nature of economics corrupts and restricts it in unnecessary ways.


Human nature will of course take advantage of the regulations because it allows the power behind the enforcement to make people stronger than they individually would be otherwise. A single, selfish, human being can take on an entire corporation with a simple accusation that should shoulder the burden of proof. But the defendant will have to hire counsel to defend themselves which can cost an extraordinary amount of money to prove their innocence, because the regulations are so incredibly great, that individual citizens and companies can handle their own legal affairs, because of the complexity. And as we’ve discussed here on this site, complexity means money. Whenever something is too complicated for an individual to do the work themselves, it is built to be that way so people can’t understand the foolishness behind the complexity. Because the intent behind the complexity is to support government oriented jobs that exist from 9 to 5. It’s that simple. 

Riding a motorcycle in the snow is something that this regulation society of ours doesn’t do.  And that’s why I do it every day.  Because spending days on end in court can turn you into something you don’t want to become.   

Rich Hoffman
http://twitter.com/#!/overmanwarrior
www.overmanwarrior.com