Month: April 2016

The Ploys of Communism: Defending Boeing from socialist insurgences stationed in Seattle

The commenter below actually said some decent things, so I’m not going to rake him over the coals.  He is the product of his modern environment shaped by public education, popular entertainment and political necessity.  In fact I agree with him on several issues—his comment is a welcome form of debate—and I like to see people thinking.  However, the context of capitalistic function is off and I will explain why after you’ve had a chance dear reader—to ponder over his words as he left them followed by the link to the 2013 article I wrote which initiated the small banter.  When I wrote that particular article Seattle, Washington had just elected an open socialist onto their city council and it was a sign of things to come.  Of course I was right in all aspects—within three years, we have an open socialist running for president and now they are coming out of the wood work everywhere.  They believe the stigma of socialism has been removed from our social context.  They are talking more openly about the topic which is good—because it allows us to finally deal with the excessive problem that collective based cultures face and how it impacts their national GDP.  Here is the comment as printed.

Paul Brar

Doesn’t Boeing earn a healthy profit every year? If so, why cannot they pay their workers decent wages and provide decent pension options. If a company was not profitable or earning low profits, then your article would be justifiable but when it come to very large corporation who make millions in profit every year, I think the workers should expect decent wages, working hours, good working conditions, etc. Further, please do not confuse Socialism with Communism, they are not interchangeable. For example, Social Democratic countries in Europe are mostly democratic capitalistic countries with social values that protect the workers from exploitation. That is the future and once we keep evolving, we will realize profits are not the main aim for humanity but evolution. Evolve to be able to travel to other planets, advances in medicine so that we can live for 400 – 800 years, where the whole planet is connected and basics needs are free for everyone (i.e. food, housing, clothing, etc.) and profits are made by advances in technology which compete with open source technologies. There is enough on this planet for double or even triple today’s population but greed has led to social/economic inequalities. We have to evolve as we are not much better than animals with basic technology. Reason for life would be to evolve as humanity, not hoard for the next generation.

https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2013/11/26/the-socialist-kshama-sawant-who-is-she-where-did-she-come-from-and-why-unions-are-bad/

 Here is the problem with what he said, Boeing has one primary objective, it makes airplanes—the best airplanes that it can and their profits are a product of the successful implementation of that objective.  The employees are there to serve the needs of the business so that Boeing can achieve its stated goals.  If Boeing needs to secure its workforce to retain their skills and reduce unneeded employee turnover, then the company needs to pay what they need to in market value to retain those employees—through benefits, work hours, etc.  Boeing does not exist to be a job provider—their primary purpose is not to provide sustainable jobs to the people who work for the company, and the employees are not equal partners in the productive enterprise.  They show up to work, punch the clock, do their task, and they return home to do whatever they desire with their earnings exchanged for their labor.  The mistake that socialists and communists make is that they assume that a job is collectively owned and that they are equal partners in providing labor to a marketplace.  They completely ignore the tendency of free-enterprise for which the founders and ownership of Boeing participate in to assume all the risk of a profitable venture and that any disproportionate rate of pay which might be enjoyed at the top—by CEOs and the board of directors, is that the risk of success or failure is completely on their shoulders so the greatest rewards are garnered by them alone.  In a capitalist society—which is what America is supposed to be—income is directly linked to the amount of risk assumed by an individual.  And by risk it is attributed to the level of responsibility for task completion that a worker possesses.

Under collective bargaining agreements unions have destroyed the value of a good wage because everyone gets it no matter what they bring to the table of productive enterprise or the level of risk assumed by individuals.  The lackluster sloth that only has a passion for video games once they are off work can make as much money as the person who desires to work through all their breaks to achieve more productivity at work and continues to work long after everyone sleeps for the night.  What happens as a result is that you get fewer of the latter and much, much more of the former regarding employee behavior.  If you have ever done business with a French company you get a taste of what I’m talking about.  In France, which is a heavily socialist country, the emphasis isn’t on productive output in most cases; it’s on personal time and vacation periods incurred.   There is very little passion among the French workforce to complete tasks because they take the products for which they manufacture for granted.  They believe they are all equal contributors to output.  As a result, most of their workforces are planning their two months of vacation each year instead of thinking about accomplishing the task of productive enterprise, and their nation suffers as a result.  Human beings are driven by the opportunity to profit and when employees see that they can get ahead in life and that profit is there for them if they do well; they tend to find ways to be productive.  But if they get paid regardless of whether strategic product objectives are fulfilled or not—they tend to perpetually plan for their lunch breaks and vast amounts of vacation time that they incur as a result of their socialist underpinnings.

All this European socialism which emerged from the communist plunge taken early in the last century is derived from Immanuel Kant’s philosophy which has spread like a disease across the world.  While many don’t consider the collectivist theory to be reminiscent of communism, it is a direct byproduct of small “c” communism without the ruthless dictators.  America’s plunge toward socialism is directly the fault of labor unions which have been functioning under communist oriented sentiment for decades and 7 years of a presidency that openly beholds the softer European versions of collective bargaining at the first sign of a sizeable profit margin.

The failure in understanding is that money is a unit of measure and not of actual value.  To fall in love with money or profit and base a philosophy on it is like basing the value of a measurement off a yard stick and not the thing being measured.  By itself a yard stick, a ruler, or anything resembling a measuring instrument has little value until it is used to measure the height and width of something.  In relation to those results, we might say something is bad or good based on the dimensional characteristics.   Profit is a measurement of a company’s’ financial success, it is not a pool of money meant to be equally distributed among a mass workforce.

Collective bargaining has muddied the water of free enterprise and made it so that companies hoard their profit to protect themselves from mass employee insurrections such as layoffs and disproportional yearly increases not rooted in value toward a company’s actual worth.  A line worker does not have equal value to the risk takers at the top.  They may physically work harder as the line worker, but they get to leave at the end of a work day relatively free of responsibility—so the input toward a company’s wealth is not equal.  The executive at the top of a company worries about the health of the company usually 24 hours a day 7 days a week.  Sure they play golf with clients, go out to eat and get to travel around the world, but it’s not all fun and games—the stress they endure is not proportionally distributed among those enjoying collective bargaining benefits.  That is why the executive likely earns six figures for a 50 to 60 hour work week while the hourly worker has to work 70 to 80 hours of overtime to receive the same.  However at Boeing, members of their machinist union are easily compensated at the six figure range as seen at the link below—and most of them are not exceptional employees by any measure—they are average and can only achieve such high rates of pay because the health of the company has been able to sustain it without leaving for another country where they can protect their profit margins.  The union and the collective bargaining that the company has to endure due to socialist policies never stops asking for more money and Boeing is at a point where they are seriously balancing out whether or not to out-source all their work because the collective bargaining agreements are too unreasonable—and they are at a tipping point.

http://www.payscale.com/research/US/Employer=The_Boeing_Company/Hourly_Rate

The concept of collective bargaining is a faulty one; it is a socialist concept that should not be in any American business.  It’s not wrong for a line worker to make six figures if they outwork all their peers—but when all boats are forced to rise together the incentive to be better than the next worker, or to learn and endure more for the productive enterprise of a successful business is taken away, what we get is lackluster performance that ultimately makes that company less competitive.  The only reason that the United States has endured with these socialist policies as long as they have is because most of the world isn’t any better off.  America is still the best option for a company like Boeing because it is close to the end-user of their products and the labor pool is relatively stable for the high-tech jobs they require.  But that doesn’t make it right and at some point in the near future we either have to reject outright the socialist collective bargaining concept for the good of our national GDP, or we will gradually lose more and more manufacturing until only service oriented businesses remain.  And that is where America stands in 2016—dangerously close to the edge of oblivion.

So while the commenter above was right about the tail end of his observations—about the direction of the human race—he isn’t quite there regarding the motivations for getting there.  If we expect entrepreneurs to continue evolving and driving the marketplace forward, we need to take the shackles off them and not expect them to carry all of society forward with little to no profit incentive.  Boeing does not owe its profits to the workers—the workers are compensated based on their value—at least they should be.  The collective bargaining agreements under their labor contracts are excessively burdensome and will eventually destroy the company just as insects acting as parasitic entities on a nice healthy tree will eventually kill it for their own sustenance.  Socialism is a concept that must be rejected at every level—especially at Boeing and the Seattle region in general.  Socialism only benefits the lazy and unproductive and holds back the efforts of the exceptional.  But it is the exceptional that drives mankind forward, and that is a concept that every socialist and student of if ignores—which is why under any name that they call it—collectivism destroys culture—it doesn’t enhance it.

Rich Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

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Holding out for a Hero: America’s final seconds–they need Donald Trump

I spent an entire hour talking about it on Matt Clark’s radio show over the weekend highlighting the necessity—but America is in a situation where it needs one last bit of hope at the last second.  Just like the heroics we sometimes see in sports where a three-point shot is drained at the buzzer, or a champion quarterback throws a ball from midfield into the end zone hoping that his guy catches it with no time left on the clock—or a batter steps off the bench to hit a home run with two outs in the ninth to win the game—we are there as a nation.  We aren’t talking about a sustainable nation anymore—we’ve mismanaged the entire last few decades and now we’re at the end.  Now all we can do is hope with one last shot by some miraculous hero who doesn’t know the word “quit” that we can sneak away with a victory as the years run out of the second decade of the 21st century.  Donald Trump is that big dreamer and flamboyant, reckless showman who might just have what it takes for a hail Mary victory before our  nation gets to 2020 and discovers that we lost 24 trillion in debt are being pushed around the world by deadly “wanna bes” and communist dictators.  The most extraordinary example of Donald Trump’s last second efforts was the Wollman Rink in New York—which I’ve written about before—but somebody unearthed this wonderful footage from the 80s just ahead of the Tuesday primary vote and is providing us some game film showing the possibilities.  

It takes a special kind of optimist to win consistently and it takes an even more unique personality to pull out victories when everyone else is ready to throw in the towel.  I’m a sports fan for only this reason—I’m always on the search for the miraculous—because it sometimes shows itself in our games.  But in real life, it is far harder to see—because we often do not have units of measure to capture such things since the ending of a clock and the parameters of success and failure are not so easily interpreted by rules everyone agrees on.  That is why the Wollman Rink lingered in disrepair for so long in New York City until the big dreamer Donald Trump stepped up and provided the much-needed private sector miracle that everyone needed—and as the video shows, it restored a bit of happiness to those who didn’t have it three months earlier.

The mayor of New York at the time was Ed Koch—seen in the video speaking.  He was a big time Democrat who didn’t like Donald Trump.  Trump had no choice but to work with the mayor for his various building projects, so the two had a contentious relationship.  It was with great reluctance that Ed let Donald Trump even touch the beloved rink—and to throw in the towel to allow the private sector to take a swing of the bat.  Donald Trump being the big thinker that he was immediately went to work thinking outside the box and talking to the right people so that he could make the right decisions.  If Trump was asked how he was going to do all the things needed before he did it, Trump couldn’t have told anybody because he didn’t know, just like a star athlete can’t put last-minute heroics down on a sheet of paper to show pin-headed bureaucrats how they can duplicate his success.  That is because the success starts with a state of mind and optimism derived from past accomplishments.  Then the execution of that optimism has to be communicated to others so that they can do the right things at the right time through unrestrained leadership.

Trump had no “plan” as politicians and other idiots at the back of the train regarding the “Metaphysics of Quality” CLICK TO REVIEW often require—he only had a trust in himself to do the right things at the right time—and that’s what he did the moment that Mayor Koch gave him the green light.  The first thing Trump did was talk to an ice maker who was in the business of making it for a Canadian hockey team instead of the current outfit that was located in Miami, Florida.  In hindsight it should have been obvious to the politicians involved that they should have had someone with great experience advising them on how to build the rink in the temperate outside climate of New York—but after seven years, they hadn’t yet figured it out collectivity.  They make the same mistakes in the military all the time, overpaying for things because nobody is competitively bidding and sources are usually generated behind political donations.  The same thing essentially happens to everything the government touches at any level—decisions are not made to work with the best and brightest because government is too focused on “equality” and opportunity to make decisions based on merit.  So they are weak to identify elements of success when they need to.

It is that system of government that Donald Trump has had to contribute to for so many years, and in the very liberal New York area—a Republican like Trump has had no choice but to pad the pockets of politicians to fund them away from tampering with his projects.  As Ted Cruz says, “Trump funded Harry Reid, Hillary Clinton and Chuck Schumer—along with many other Democrats” he’s speaking from extreme ignorance.  Well, that’s simply not true—Trump paid them to go away because that’s how politics work—they are second-handers always looking to take from those that have.  The best way to get them off your back is to pay them off and if you give them enough money they’ll help you no matter what political party you’re from.  In the field of battle there is no room for such ideological nonsense as Cruz utters.  Here is a guy who has never built anything—never created a single job who only understands political theory applied in the vacuum of conservative thought and he thinks he actually has the right to judge someone like Trump—who has been doing things on a big scale for three decades and knows just how to work the system to get what he wants out of it.  When Cruz speaks about this topic of political funding, it is disgusting because he has no experience for which to utter the words.

I don’t see any way out and I am an eternal optimist.  I am that guy who wakes up every morning and always believes he can win no matter what the odds.   I am all that and then some—and I’m saying America is at its end—we get this one election and that’s it.  We are losing in the world and our enemies are sensing it.  If we want the Republic of America to survive to 2020 we have to act now and hope that someone like Donald Trump can do for America what he did for the Wollman Rink.  To him it is simple; it just requires more advisors to speak with which he loves doing.  It will involve a whirlwind approach that has never been seen before in the White House.  Trump will work day and night and he won’t take vacations—and our many problems will get fixed quickly—relatively—just as the Wollman Rink was.  And if I’m the head coach trying to figure out who needs to be on the field in these last seconds—I want my best guy doing the job—not some political hacks who are responsible for us losing the game in the first place at this late stage.  I want the private sector guy who has a track record of doing the impossible—and Trump is that guy.  We just have to give him the opportunity and to get out of his way and hope for a miracle—because that’s where we are as a nation.

Rich Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

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Donald Trump is ‘The Fountainhead’: Individualism is a higher concept over collectivism

 

I thought it was the biggest story of the week, and I wouldn’t be completely forthcoming if I didn’t know why he said what he did—specifically.  (CLICK HERE TO SEE WHY) But what a bold proclamation it was for Donald Trump to be interviewed by the very liberal Kristen Powers of USA Today and for him to mention that he liked Ayn Rand and specifically, The Fountainhead and the hero of the story Howard Roark.  We know that Paul Ryan likes Atlas Shrugged, and that Ted Cruz is a fan of Rand’s work—not just that he likes it, but that he is inspired by it.  Yet only Donald Trump could say the things he did about Ayn Rand and have it not be the story of the week by the political left.  Here are just a few of the articles talking about Trump’s Rand comments.  It might be remembered that I’ve been on the radio with the guy who wrote The Federalist article and it was rather hilarious to see how bent out of shape he was over the Powers story.

http://thefederalist.com/2016/04/12/donald-trump-is-an-ayn-rand-villain/

http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2016/04/11/donald-trump-interview-elections-2016-ayn-rand-vp-pick-politics-column/82899566/

When I wrote my article about Donald Trump being quite a lot like the famous Ayn Rand hero of The Fountainhead way back in August there was a considerable amount of scorn about it from friends I have in the “Objectivist” community.  They couldn’t believe I said such a thing—because to them, Trump was a progressive—a statist—a tyrant in the making.  They couldn’t think of him as a Howard Roark or even attribute to him the kind of intelligence that would be most at home with Ayn Rand’s heroes.  But with Trump, that was all I could see and that he was the best opportunity to take the United States to a level of philosophic understanding that could only so far be found in an Ayn Rand novel.

Everybody thinks they are an expert—yet they get caught all too often in the superficial elements of Donald Trump’s personality.  I see in Trump a man who has paintings on his Trump Tower ceiling and has an apartment, and private airplane covered in real gold.  I see a guy who has a stunningly beautiful wife and a wonderful family and can notice a fingerprint on something he cares about from twenty feet away and it drives him crazy.  I hear in him a guy that says he is his only foreign policy advisor, and that he consults……himself—and I see a guy so much like Howard Roark that no other character in all of literary history comes close to describing the real Donald Trump—the guy who sleeps in Trump Tower and likes to put pictures of himself on the wall of his office.  Trump loves himself and is all about the “Pronoun I,” and to me that is extremely appealing.  CLICK HERE TO REFER TO A PAST ARTICLE ABOUT THIS VERY SITUATION AND THE NEED FOR IT IN POLITICS. 

I have spent millions and millions of words on these pages talking about how stupid collective assimilation is in anything—that the biggest mystery and key to success in most things is individually led leadership.  My favorite part of the novel, The Fountainhead was when Howard Roark declined to be on the architectural board for the World’s Fair.  He insisted that he contribute his designs as a solitary figure, not as a part of a collective board.  Ayn Rand was onto something very important there pertinent to the American economy and it was unique to her.  Liberals and the public in general think wrong on this matter—and it starts in public school and our churches.  The assumption is that two heads are better than one, and that fifty heads are even better yet is one of the biggest mistakes the human race has made so far in our written history.  I have yet to see a company that functions well under this philosophy.  Many movie production companies and many Silicone Valley operations believe in collective enterprise—but what they are presenting is an illusion—because most of their successful projects are still led by very strong individuals who are clever about the way they extract the individual effort out of their teams.  But it isn’t the collective mass of a board of directors or the worker bees of a project that lead to its success—like the striking fools at Verizon believe in their union behavior—it’s the solitary efforts of individuals.

I know exactly what Trump is doing with other people because I by default utilize many of his same strategies—so it’s easy for me to see the man behind the façade.  I do see in Trump a man who loves art, who enjoys the fine things in life as an individual and certainly marches to the beat of his own drum—but he has learned to pull other people into his vision with the opportunity to share with him greatness.  Most of what he does is utilize raw leadership tactics—which is why he’s popular to begin with and has a level of celebrity that is bullet proof—because his skills are so highly specialized and beyond the mechanisms our society has established to suppress challenges to its static system.

The world is burning with socialism—once you leave the shores of the United States, socialism is literally everywhere.  Collectivism is the mode of conduct that the world uses to establish its morality—and it’s wrong.  Nobody is more important than you dear reader.  However, you best serve others by serving yourself—and if you truly love others you seek to preserve them because it would hurt you to see them in demise.  I read just last night a comment about Republicans and Democrats that went something like this—“if the elephant and the donkey have let you down, turn to the lamb.”  It was a religious argument about politics essentially saying that Republicans and Democrats are one in the same, and that a person should turn toward the church—the sacrificial lamb.  Well, that is the dumbest thing I’ve heard in a long time—nobody should surrender their life to the whims of the galaxy or even the universe.  Jobs are made by individuals for other individuals to build their lives around, decisions are made by individuals for the impact that they might have on the world around them—humans are thinking creatures who make magnificent structures by thought alone and Donald Trump is one of the least apologetic yet most successful among us to utilize this essential function.  We have to stop this whole sacrificial notion—its barbaric.

When I hear Trump say that he’d like to marry his daughter and see that he uses the beauty of his wife Melania to club rivals over the head, I don’t see or hear a self-centered maniac who is selfishly dangerous in his sexual promiscuity—I see a guy who as an individual appreciates the beauty of a fine women as a work of art and loves how it inspires the individual in him to do better and work harder each day so that he can be near them—and I don’t think it’s a sexual thing.  When I hear him say that as a 70 year old man that he will be the healthiest specimen to ever hold the White House and that his big hands are evidence of a large penis that can bag and tag fine women and leave them happy about it—and that those same hands can drive a golf ball over 300 yards—I hear a man who won’t back down from any world leader for the sake of collective assimilation.   I hear a guy who will walk into the United Nations and say as Howard Roark did in The Fountainhead—you either do it my way, or I’m out.  To the consensus builders who think this approach is appalling, they’d be right from their point of view.  But their way has cost the United States everything and everyone else in the world very little—because they brought nothing to the table to begin with.  The battle of our day is literally over the benefits of collectivism and Individualism—and how the two are not compatible.  Trump stands by individualism vehemently and that is something that we’ve never seen attempt to enter the White House and I think we either find those traits in ourselves once again—if not for the very first time—or we perish into oblivion.  There is no middle ground and this philosophic argument is all about absolutes.

While progressives contemplate a world managed by a few elite academics who distribute fairness across civilization like butter on a piece of bread—Trump is nothing like any of them.  Yet he can sit down with the very liberal Kristen Powers and give USA Today an interview on Ayn Rand and the world didn’t melt into a whirlwind because honestly they haven’t caught up to the events of his previous day—or the things he does and says tomorrow.  Yet there it is, and I’m proud of him for saying it.  And it is my sincere dream that Donald Trump could step into the White House and treat it like Howard Roark—bringing to not only America, but the world, the values of The Fountainhead.  If there was ever a time for it—it is now.  If not now, then perhaps never again.  I don’t think we’ll get another shot before socialism destroys our civilization—globally.  As a I watch modern artists like James Cameron talk about his new hippie driven movies like Avatar and Disney make Star Wars into a much more progressive mythology—it is obvious that they are missing the secret ingredient that Ayn Rand so eloquently brought to life in her American novels—individuals trump collectivism.  The first Star Wars films were about this idea and even Cameron’s Titanic was about this issue—and ultimately the love between Jack and Rose was very Randian. 

Why did Jack let Rose lay on the door at the end of the movie essentially sacrificing himself—he did it because he loved her and to preserve that love he had to save her.  He didn’t do it to benefit society—he did it to save his love for her.  Ayn Rand called this the Virtue of Selfishness—which many people misinterpret—but it is the ultimate driver for how we work as a human species.  And nobody running for office understands that love better than Donald Trump.  Most modern artists get this delicate interpretation wrong—because they value the sacrificial lamb concept established by religions to falsely place value in the collective whole of society. But they miss the point of living entirely.  For there is only one reason that childbirth is such a traumatic experience, and an epic journey that launches us into existence—it’s because our individual lives mean something and we each can contribute something to the work of art that is “life.”  There are very few people who really understand such a delicate balance—and clearly Donald Trump is one of them.  We are in new territory philosophically with this election—and hopefully it’s not too late.

Rich Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

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Why I’d Give Billions of Dollars to Archaeologists: The undocumented ancient civilizations under San Francisco and the Cloud People

One of the reasons I feel the way I do about civilizations and the politics of them is that I have a long time interest in history.  When I was in the 7th grade and had to take an aptitude test designed to point students in a career direction, my three results were archaeologist, test pilot, and stunt man.  It was an unusual result and my teacher back then was quite animated about the findings—after all this was a year before there was ever an Indiana Jones movie and nobody in their right mind would want to be an archaeologist.  My teacher thought I should have more sustainable career options and that my interests were………not aligned to reality.  For one, there wasn’t much money in the archaeology occupation, and it’s not very good for families.  It requires one to travel all over the world often in hostile territories rife with political limitations.  Even when you do get a dig permit the limits on them don’t allow you to find much beyond a few pots and pans leaving speculation into the greater civilization behind the artifacts to be highly speculative.   From the time I could first read my mother bought me great books about the world’s great mysteries—likely the same ones that inspired George Lucas to make the Indiana Jones films, and that is how I learned to read.  I fell in love with history early and it was always something that I found as my foundation passion.  If I had it my way, we would spend billions of dollars per year in America learning about our past so that we could prevent the same mistakes in the future.  We know next to nothing about where we came from and what the people were like who founded our lineage.  My study of the ancient cultures we know about has shaped much of my view about politics and philosophy—and it is my belief that the primary reason that more isn’t studied, is because that knowledge is intended to remain suppressed—for the preservation of the static society we have inherited.  Knowledge otherwise might provoke too radical of a change and many just aren’t prepared for those changes—yet.

With all that said, I don’t think we are even close to understanding our “native” past in North America—or even South America.  There were apparently very complex societies in the high Andes region before there was ever an Incan Empire, and the Bay Area of San Francisco has ancient walled boundary lines which predate any known society and is a lot more sophisticated than the nomad Indian tribes that were found there during westward expansion.  In fact, it looks like most of Northern California was host to this ancient civilization for which we know nothing about.  The relics of their vast enterprise are covered by modern development—which is usually the case—those are the two enemies of archaeological understanding—war and development.  Whether it is the covered up ruins around San Francisco featured below or the “Cloud People” of Northern Peru—there is a lot we need to learn.  The history books have not been closed on our ancient past—rather, we haven’t even made it through chapter one yet—much to the dismay of the many museums depending on federal grants to stay open and who want to end the story now to preserve the integrity of their exhibits.  There are two reports that I found uniquely connected even though they are very far apart geographically presented as follows:

All over northern California specifically in the region of San Francisco are mysterious 6’ walls.  The walls of the East Bay traverse some 50 miles in a straight line from the Carquinez Strait to San Jose, and in some places another 20 miles inland to Mt. Diablo.  They are generally six feet high and so far have defied explanation, hence the title “mysterious.”  For nigh on 100 years they have been explored, thought about but today have been largely abandoned.  Theories on their origins range from Zheng Hue’s exploration fleet, giants, Native Americans, even farmers but so far little or no archaeological research has been done on them outside of the trying to document their history which apparently pre-dates western/Spanish activity in the area.

Rough estimates by a geologist put their age older than 400 years or circa late 1500’s which puts this anomaly in new territory and forces the dismissal of many common theories about European / Spanish farms.  Especially since in greater San Francisco region the Spaniards did not settle  until 1769 when an expedition lead by Don Gaspar de Portola and Fr. Juan Crespi began to settle what is now San Francisco.  There was the odd seafarer such as Sir Francis Drake, who was believed to have sailed through the area in 1579, but seeing as he was a privateer the notion that he and his men attempted to settle the region is highly suspect.

http://www.anomalies.net/east-bay-walls-enigmatic-feature-or-part-of-the-remnants-of-a-lost-civilization-in-northern-california/

Then many thousands of miles to the south high in the Andes region is a fortress apparently belonging to the “Cloud People” who had predated the Inca civilization and had joined the Spanish in conflict against their South American rivals.  When you hear reports from environmental activists that nothing good comes from deforestation tell them this story.  If not for deforestation, the ruins of these long forgotten “Cloud People” would have never been found. Trees grow back and the species of animals that live in rain forests can migrate and return, but the treasures lost under the overgrowth from past civilizations are lost until they are uncovered and this most recent discovery is evidence that points to the possibility of a lot more.

Remains have been found before but scientists have high hopes of the latest find, made by an expedition to the Jamalca district in Peru’s Utcubamba province, about 500 miles north-east of the capital, Lima.

Until recently, much of what was known about the lost civilization was from Inca legends.

Even the name they called themselves is unknown. The term Chachapoyas, or ‘Cloud People’, was given to them by the Incas.

Their culture is best known for the Kuellap fortress on the top of a mountain in Utcubamba, which can only be compared in scale to the Incas’ Machu Picchu retreat, built hundreds of years later

Radiocarbon dating samples show that construction of the structures started in the 6th century AD and the complex was occupied until the Early Colonial period (1532-1570). Through the pre-Columbian, conquest and colonial periods, there are only four brief written references to Kuelap. It was rediscovered in 1843.

That year Juan Crisóstomo Nieto, a judge in Chachapoyas, made a survey of the area and took note of Kuelap’s great size; he was guided by villagers who had known of the site for generations. Subsequently, Kuelap gained the attention of explorers, historians and archaeologists. Notable observers who helped publicize the site included Frenchman Louis Langlois (who wrote a description of Kuelap in the 1930s), Adolph Francis Alphonse Bandelier, Ernst Middendorf, Charles Wiener and Antonio Raimondi.

The fortress of Kuelap or Cuélap (Chachapoyas, Amazonas, Perú), associated with the Chachapoyas culture, consists of a walled city, with massive exterior stone walls surrounding more than four hundred buildings. The complex, situated on a ridge overlooking the Utcubamba Valley in northern Peru, is roughly 600 meters in length and 110 meters in width. It could have been built to defend against the Huari or other hostile peoples. However, evidence of these hostile groups at the site is minimal.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1091550/Ancient-city-discovered-deep-Amazonian-rainforest-linked-legendary-white-skinned-Cloud-People-Peru.html

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

I would propose that these two stories of recent discoveries and contemplations of an ancient past are only the tip of the iceberg.  As I said, if it were up to me, archaeologists would be well-funded in America—by private donations of course–to expose this lost past so we could better understand the circumstances of our present.  If I had the extra money of several billion dollars—I’d give them a check today.  I am inclined to think that these two aforementioned cultures, whoever they are, were not the first of their kind—that before them was likely another lost race of people.  Related to the Cloud People of South America it should be of great concern that they were known to be as “white” and fair-haired as typical Scandinavians or even Germans.  How did they get there so long ago?  That is a question that demands an answer.  But before we can have that answer we have to see the value in seeking it.  We have a long way to go before understanding our own history—and it should be a much greater priority.  Because within that answer is the key to understanding much of our modern world and the psychosis which seems attached to it. Before you can fix the future you have to understand the past and we are a long way from that.  Obviously we need to strive to do better.  The evidence is all around us.  All we need to do is be willing to look at it.

Rich Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

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The Guilt of Sean Payton: Murder, bounties, and the NFL hiding behind gun control

I don’t like Sean Payton, the head coach of the New Orleans Saints football team, mostly because I’m a Tampa Bay Buccaneer fan. I think he runs a dirty organization as was the evidence of his one year suspension a few seasons ago, and I think he leads a team of thugs.  That could be said of many NFL teams, but when a coach like Payton exploits that thug culture to squeeze out a few more wins for his own personal advancement I think he opens himself up to an extra level of scrutiny when something goes wrong.  And when an ex-star player of his, Will Smith was gunned down in the street on April 9th 2016 Payton didn’t blame the football players involved for their very bad behavior leading up to the tragedy—he blamed guns and took a progressive position socially to camouflage the failure of a culture which he has helped create—and that makes him a scum bag.

Former Saints DE Will Smith and his wife were out for a night dining with friends.  One of those friends just happened to be a cop who was involved in a shooting of the father of Smith’s future murderer—later that evening—ironically.    Smith had friends in law enforcement and he was a star football player and Super Bowl champion—so he had a sense of entitlement based on his behavior.  He was doing good things with his life and looked to be a good family man.  He had celebrity friends and was the star of whatever event he attended.  All was well until he started driving home and accidentally bumped into the very expensive Hummer driven by Cardell Hayes.

After Cardell Hayes lost his father to a police shooting the city of New Orleans paid the minor league football player a hefty sum of money for which he purchased a bright red Hummer.  It didn’t sit well with the football player to be rear ended on a late night Saturday while stopped in the road.  Hayes moved toward the sidewalk to get out of the way of traffic and settle the matter with the driver who hit him.  But instead of pulling up behind to exchange insurance information, like what was supposed to happen by law, and call the police to file a report, the car driven by Smith ran off invoking a hit and run incident.  Well, being a young football player who has had to scrap for everything on every play to get what he needs in life, watching that car run from the scene of the accident was apparently too much for Hayes who gunned off in pursuit of the fleeing vehicle.  It was unlikely known at the time that it was the famous Will Smith who had hit him and whom Hayes was chasing.  All Hayes knew was that someone had committed a crime against him and he was going to get the guy.  What Hayes should have done was write down the license plate number.  He would have had his justice and everyone would still be alive.  But instead Hayes torpedoed his car into Smith at a traffic light several blocks up the road and the two drivers met on the street for an angry brawl. One thing led to another and before anybody realized how serious the situation was, Hayes shot Smith in the chest six times killing the New Orleans football star.

Hayes stayed on the scene and admitted what he had done to police and everything was cleaned up and looked to be a pretty straight forward case of road rage. But it was in the aftermath that Sean Payton obviously missing his friend and speaking with a heart rooted in tragedy said that he hated guns, and that New Orleans was like the wild, wild, west.  Payton used the death of his friend to advance a progressive anti-gun stance without addressing the behavior that actually caused the violence in the first place, and that was disgraceful.  It made Payton an even worse person than I already thought he was and he appeared to think as Smith did that his level of celebrity could free him of the burden of judgment.  For instance, if Smith was as smart as news reports obviously wanted to portray him in this tragedy, why did he participate in a hit and run?  Was he counting on making a call to his friends on the police force to resolve the issue and to ensure that he was above justice because of his celebrity?  It certainly looked that way.  Payton seems to think that he can make reckless progressive statements because the people of Louisiana want another Super Bowl win so he calculated that they would just put up with his banter without question.

Most of the people I know in my neighborhood have guns and they often carry them.  Yet we never shoot each other—even when we get into traffic accidents.  It was only a few months ago that a lady hit me on my motorcycle nearly injuring me badly.  I was literally a half-inch away from losing my right leg.  We were both armed with guys, yet even in such a crises it never occurred to either one of us to shoot each other.  I simply yelled at her, and then once I saw how sorry she was, we quickly went to the business of settling the accident.  It was a very civil way to settle a tragedy.  It certainly didn’t devolve into the kind of violence that killed Will Smith.  That is because the problem isn’t guns, its behavioral science.  The football culture that Will Smith and Cardell Hayes lived within is built on primal valor and coaches like Sean Payton exploit that pent-up energy to win football games. For young people like Smith and Hayes—who often grow up fatherless, but find social redemption in popular gladiator sports the ethics on a football field often depend on an eye for an eye mentality.  There is a lot that goes on during a football game psychologically that never shows up on a television screen for which Smith and Hayes have made their livings and it’s not easy to turn all that off for civilian life.  Many football players have a hard time with that adjustment.  Will Smith was apparently attempting to do that and he was mostly successful.  But when you play a game where the alpha male rules the field and that an entire team depends on your ability to assert that dominance over other alpha males—the nature of the game doesn’t just leave the mind on the football field.  It sometimes carries over into the streets of whatever communities they live in.

Will Smith abused his rights as a private citizen when he attempted to roll away from the accident.  When he was challenged by another alpha male for attempting to flee likely they said things to each other that required in their minds an ultimate statement on who was the alpha male.  Hayes not having any other intellectual resources to guide his actions went for his gun and the rest his history.  But it wasn’t the gun that was the problem or that people carry them.  It is that we have a society that doesn’t understand how important alpha males are and how hungry young people are to either become them, or yield to them.  And for coaches like Payton who build alpha males for the benefit of football victories so that the people of New Orleans can feel good about themselves on a Sunday afternoon—he should have known better than to say the stupid things he did about guns.  In a lot of ways Payton was just as guilty of what happened in that murder as the gun was.  He breed and exploited the circumstances for which the violence was provoked in a road rage incident and like a coward—he deflected the blame to an inanimate object—instead of the behavior of the participants.  For a coach that paid players on his defensive teams, which Smith was a part from 2009 to 2011—to physically harm other players to take them out of a game, the morality of gun violence doesn’t hold much water when Payton helped create a culture that inspired violence against others.   

How guilty was Payton, well, for the NFL they came down on him hard—a $500,000 fine and a year suspension.  Considering the problems the NFL has had and how much they’ve let go over the years—Payton must have been pretty guilty.  If Payton had been a better coach and mentor, it is highly unlikely that Will Smith would have run away from a hit and run accident, or ran his mouth when cornered down the road by the victim.  We are all products of our environment and in the world of professional football; the head coach is the judge, jury and executioner of environmental influence.  Will Smith was a product of Sean Payton’s professional football teams and that product showed itself most when he crashed into Cardell Hayes then left the accident scene expecting to be relieved of the guilt.  Why shouldn’t Smith have expected to not be punished when he watched so many of his friends and fans forgive his head coach and push behind justice just so they could witness one more win in New Orleans on any given Sunday? The answer is, Smith didn’t know better and that was the fault of a culture who made him that way—and the guilt for most of what shaped that culture for Will Smith led right into the office of Sean Payton.

http://content.usatoday.com/communities/thehuddle/post/2012/03/sean-peyton-suspended-saints-fined-for-bounty-program/1#.Vw-3Wo-cHIU

 

http://www.msn.com/en-us/sports/nfl/new-details-from-police-help-shed-light-on-smiths-shooting/ar-BBrHtMU?ocid=ansmsnsports11

Rich Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

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I Hated ‘The Hateful 8’: A terrible movie by a failing Hollywood industry

There was a lot not to like about Quentin Tarantino’s latest film The Hateful Eight. I personally didn’t see it when it came out in theaters around Christmas of 2015 because of Tarantino’s political activism against police, but I put it on the checklist.  It was sold as a western shot in 70mm traditional wide—just as Ben Hur was many years ago—so I figured it would be worth watching.  My chance came once it was released to the home theater market and I was a little excited about it. But after two hours of movie realizing that the whole thing was going nowhere, I was very concerned that if Tarantino was the best that Hollywood had to offer—that they consider him a “modern” Shakespeare–that there is no wonder their movie industry was in trouble.  At that point there was still about 45 minutes of movie left to show and I was ready to turn it off—but didn’t because I already had too much time invested.

This is what happens when someone becomes so full of themselves—and have been told by hundreds of aspiring actors and progressive movie producers that they are the greatest thing to arrive since fire.  They forget that people actually will see their movies and that those people think very differently about the world than those tucked up against the mountains of California and the Pacific Ocean. The only good characters in The Hateful Eight was the Kurt Russell character.  Samuel Jackson wasn’t the greatest and once he revealed an oral sex scene with another guy—I decided I didn’t like him and didn’t want to invest any more time into learning about him.  Most of the movie took place inside a cabin getting to know all these characters who were telegraphed very early to being all completely killed off.  There was no point to their stories or the interaction between them because it all led to one place—death.

The Hateful Eight is like a person being walked to an execution getting to know all the people spitting on him along the way.  It just doesn’t make any sense because that person was going to be dead soon—so why waste the time?  It was just horrendously stupid.  Beautifully photographed, good soundtrack—most of the time—but just a stupid story—I can’t believe anybody read that script and thought it the work of a genius—and I can’t believe anybody gave Tarantino money to make that movie.

Coming from a guy who shares with me a love for the great movie, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, Tarantino obviously isn’t at the same level of Sergio Leone, and I went into The Hateful Eight hoping sincerely that he was.  Not even close—not even close to the sincerity of a spaghetti western, which I thought was the point of The Hateful Eight. It ended up being just another sign of a broken and declining culture that doesn’t make anything original anymore—even though all the tools were provided.  To suggest that The Hateful Eight is anything close to the masterpiece Hamlet, just because everyone ended up dead in the end is ridiculous.  There weren’t any sympathetic characters for which to hang a morality on in Tarantino’s movie.  All the characters were villains and none of them were people I’d want to get to know if they sat down next to me at a bar.

Even using the barroom metaphor with The Hateful Eight seems underwhelming.  Typically when a man wants to pick up a girl in a bar he engages in small talk to get her to reveal bits about herself.  Once she decides to talk about herself the conversation evolves into more personal matters.  Then as a climax and some trust won, the girl decides whether or not she wants to sleep with the guy.  It’s a little mating game that our species plays to make the experience not seem so cheap.  The Hateful Eight is like walking up to that girl and just flatly saying, “Let’s have sex.”  Then spending three hours talking about all the things you should have talked about before blurting out the obvious.  It was just despicable as a story—pathetic at every level.

I have liked other Tarantino movies—I thought Pulp Fiction was clever, and I enjoyed his work in other things—but I wouldn’t say he’s a master of anything.  He’s only smart compared to the very stupid people who now make up the Hollywood industry which these days are just a few rungs above raw porn in its creative impulse. I am really glad that I did not go to see this Tarantino western at the theater because I would have been angry at wasting the money. The Hateful Eight wasn’t a western; it was a monstrosity of undeveloped ideas from a director who obviously has personal problems holding back his artistic ability.

As an example of how all westerns should be presented these days, The Revenant is still the featured example.  If you are going to make a western, at least put in the work.  So what if someone stole the script to The Hateful Eight and that’s why Tarantino made it into a feature film.  The material wasn’t so good that an eight year old child couldn’t have written it—so whatever provoked big money donors to give Tarantino money for that piece of crap sadly overrated the ability of the troubled, progressive filmmaker.  The movie wasn’t just bad enough to write a poor review about, it was bad enough that I personally feel like I was robbed just by watching it, because I can’t get back my time.  It would have been a much better movie if Samuel Jackson hadn’t forced a naked man to perform oral sex on him, because in the last dying moments he was the only one left and I couldn’t help but think that he was the last person I wanted to see on the screen in the end.  Given that, he was the best character in the movie after Kurt Russell’s character died of poisoning.  The Hateful Eight was horrendous filmmaking and storytelling at its absolute lowest.  Sadly, it represents a new generation that thinks it’s the work of genius—because people are now so stupid and have such a low opinion of themselves that they don’t know any better.  People now can actually relate to these despicable characters.  And that’s the real problem with The Hateful Eight and the filmmakers who put that trash on the screen.

Rich Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

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The #NEVERTRUMP Geeks: A Party of Republicans who forgot why they exist

You can tell when I’m really angry about something because I usually prefer to talk about entertainment events– that topic is usually good non-emotional neutral territory discussion.  As probably was noted, I have spent the last three days talking about various entertainment observations as opposed to the hottest topic of the day, the betrayal of the GOP and their voters.  I do the same thing in one on one discussions, when people who know me observe that I start talking about entertainment—it is because I either find the politics of the person I’m talking to revolting and I’m looking for common ground to keep from wanting to snap their neck like a twig, or I have blown them off as irrelevant losers not worthy of any intellectual input other than entertainment appeasement.  And appalling is the word of the day for what has been happening.  (For the record, notice how I predicted this too, CLICK HERE TO REVIEW.)  Now several weeks later, many others are coming to exactly the same place that I have been—willing to quite the Republican Party after a lifetime commitment because of the evident corruption that has been exposed as a direct result of the Trump candidacy.  I have been feeling precisely like this old Colorado voter who burned up his registration for the Republican Party after a betraying visit to Colorado Springs.

Trump was wrong when he declared that the process which robbed him of all the Colorado’s delegates without a single vote cast was not very democratic.  He’s right about the democratic process, but America has never been a democracy—which is just a stepping stone toward open socialism.  America is a constitutional republic which should be better but in this case isn’t.  The voting process which was intended to select those representatives were sold to the public as being acquired through a democratic process—but in this case it was cut short and was sabotaged by the Republican Party.  That revelation has only served to substantiate the intense level of anger that has intensified during the primary campaign season.  Yes, the system is rigged, it always has been, and we all knew it.  But we didn’t know what the cost was to us because we had never seen another viable alternative that had gotten so far in the process other than Ross Perot many years ago.  Trump by his popular successes has forced the party leaders to outwardly show their protections for the first time to people who are learning about this whole process as it develops in front of them.  We should have learned all this in our public schools, but instead kids learned to riot and vote for socialism—so people are shocked by what they are seeing.

Among the #NEVERTRUMP clan, there is a feel of superiority over Trump and his supporters because those constitutional geeks work really hard to understand the Constitution and are legitimate nerds in a lot of ways.  They are like Star Wars fans who argue over little specifics of the movies because they know everything while the common viewer only see a fraction of what they do in casual viewings.  The #NEVERTRUMPs like the rules of the system because they worked really hard to learn that system—it gives them a feeling of superiority over everyone else—they are specialists on that topic and they secretly want to protect that specialty.  I know several of them personally.  So it gives them quite a charge to see that Trump is furious at losing delegates to Cruz.  They would argue that if Trump wanted to play the game, then he should have learned the rules.  But, what those #NEVERTRUMP geeks have forgotten is that Trump’s candidacy represents a large faction of the American population that have no desire to learn the rules of the game—because they hate the game—and the Republican Party has just solidified that sentiment epically.  They want a change in the rules, they want to play a different game, and they sure don’t have any desire to learn the old rules.

This notion that the Republican Party can do whatever it wants—that they can nominate anybody they care to is preposterous.  Sure they have their little club and they seem obsessed with controlling who is in it with them and where they stand in the peaking order in relation to others.  No question many of the party leaders want to be king makers deciding who county commissioners are, governors, and presidents—but that’s not the way it was supposed to be.  What they want to control is ultimately representatives of “the people” who elect them into a representative republic.  The Republican Party for instance isn’t bigger to me than myself, or my family, or my community.  It’s just a group of people who I either agree with or don’t.  I am not beholden to a sacrificial relationship with them in any way. So if they show themselves as philosophically deficient—as they are clearly in the run for presidency in 2016—I have a right, and obligation to reject them.  The “Party” does not have authority over “me” and is not empowered to provide “me” with a representative vetted by them for their own purposes.  Clearly the Republican Party interprets their role as such—but I along with many others completely reject that premise.  I will not vote for Paul Ryan for anything.  He screwed up in 2012 and he won’t get another chance by me.  I will not vote for John Kasich.  He is the governor of my state, and he has let me down—he’s turned out to be an idiot.  I will not vote for Mitt Romney—he has been a failure.  I will not vote for Ted Cruz—he’s just another attorney running for office.  I don’t want any more legal geeks messing with laws any more. I’m tired of the same old mess offered by the Republican Party and they either want to represent my philosophic conservatism, or they don’t.  If they don’t, I am not beholden to them to take whatever piece of crap they offer.

The Republican Party arrogantly believes that it is the end all of American politics—as if the matter has been settled long ago after the Civil War turned out in their favor.  They’d be incorrect, each age has its own challenges and the party leaders are either aligned with those challenges, or they will fail to lead their party to a position where it can be beneficial to the constitutional republic for which we are all a part.  That republic was always founded on the merits of individualism, not collective assimilation—and that is precisely where the Republican Party is going wrong—in assuming that the “party” is too big for any one individual.

Trump represents a public need to establish a return to individual association.  He is the ultimate pronoun “I” and that is what the people who vote for him want to see emerge in this year’s election cycle and obviously the Republican Party has a problem with that declaration.  That leaves Trump and his supporters without a party—which of course will give rise to a competing party to rival the Republicans and Democrats.  If 30% of the voting public doesn’t have a political party which represents them—or seeks to—then what are they to do?  Surrendering their beliefs to one of the two other options isn’t viable as individuals.  Yet the Republican Party seems inclined to insist on such a thing.  As Ted Cruz gloated about his legalese victories around the west, particularly Colorado—and the use of the party machine in Wisconsin to goad Donald Trump into throwing a fit because people weren’t voting for him—he is assuming that the masses are on his side.  Show me one time that Ted Cruz can fill a stadium with supporters like Trump does.  All Cruz has on his side are the political geeks, not the average people who make up our Republic.  They aren’t–wait until Cruz gets to New York, and Pennsylvania.  The masses are speaking, and they haven’t been picking Ted Cruz.  Cruz has been playing the legal game, but not winning the hearts of the masses.  When Kasich says that it’s the delegates that matter, he’s right from his perspective within the game of politics—but the party for which he belongs is supposed to serve the conservative interests of the republic and instead they serve a collective notion of consensus building which I would argue is un-American.  Want to see a national consensus established by the will of the people where they generally agree—go to a Trump rally.  Trump voters, me included, reject that collectivist philosophic position and the party should be listening, instead of working to hold society to a set of rules designed to protect a system they have learned to profit off of as public servants.

When the smoke clears, Trump will have won many more votes in the primary effort—yet the political party seeking to maintain their control of that system will attempt to ignore that fact and offer up the same old garbage as they have before.  And now that many of us have had a taste of what could be, we aren’t going to swallow that pill again—because it leads nowhere and we’ve learned.  It is not the voting public that has to learn a lesson here—it’s the Republicans.  They either get with the program, or they will be replaced.  It is they who are in the weakened position—the public holds all the cards because ultimately the “party” either serves the interests of the public—the conservative public—or they don’t.  And given their behavior against the popular front-runner Trump—it is obvious where all this is going.  When it gets there I’ll be joining that old man from Colorado.  I’m not going to hold my nose and vote for another Republican loser.  They either start winning—or I’m done too with them. And victories are measured by the popular vote in this primary race, not the legal gymnastics of lawyers and political geeks.

http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2016/04/colorado-gop-leader-disgruntled/

I’m at a point where I don’t think I could support Republicans even if they did get behind Trump all of a sudden. I think the process is so broken and the philosophies so displaced that there is no mending it.  As the link above describes the Colorado situation from the point of the of the GOP, the issue remains that the party leaders have made a system that ultimately they control, because it is rule heavy and requires a full-time staff to learn all those rules.  It puts the power of candidacy in pin-heads and political addicts instead of the best and most viable candidates and is the root cause for why the Republican Party has been so grossly ineffective for such a long time.

Rich Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

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

 

‘Star Wars: Rogue One’: Hope and perhaps a second chance

I was not a fan of The Force Awakens.  I still think it was a rip-off fan film and it wasn’t very good.  It’s obvious to me that Star Wars saw its best days under the control of George Lucas and that it will forever be in a declined state.  I was a tremendous fan of Star Wars because under Lucas they had established a nice storyline that embodied several video games, novels, comics and of course the movies themselves into on giant mythology—and that mythology had a conservative lean to it—rooted in Ayn Rand oriented individualism.  Now it is clear that when Lucasfilm under Kathy Kennedy released The Star Wars comic series about two years before the release of The Force Awakens that they were telegraphing what they were going to do with the many novels that had been written after The Return of the Jedi in 1983—they were going to rip them off and retell many of the stories because they thought they needed to be more Huffington Post oriented progressive stories instead of Ayn Ran.   In that comic series Lucasfilm took George Lucas’ original screenplay and turned into a comic to show how rough the story had been compared to what ended up on screen—as a ploy to justify what they were about to do to the Extended Universe.  Well, that’s all water under the bridge and Star Wars is forever ruined for me—because I had stayed with them through many years—and they let me down.  Now that I know that, I can at least appreciate what telling some of those old stories from the books to cinematic vision can do for a new generation desperate for some positive mythology and after seeing the trailer for the new Rogue One film by Garth Edwards, I am encouraged.  Lucasfilm might earn back a little respect with it because it looks nicely done.

The sad thing about that movie and premise is that it is essentially a retelling of the story of the video game Dark Forces and the name of the female lead is essentially a take on Kyle Katarn’s trusted ship captain.  Dark Forces was the first video game I ever played with my oldest daughter and it was a special story for us, and now Lucasfilm is going to screw that up too—but I think Edwards will do the story justice.  I suppose the sad thing for me is that there won’t be any new ideas coming out of Star Wars.  But the value of what has been told is important and to a new generation that is seeing some of this stuff for the first time—these movies are good for them.  This is consistent with the Disney Company that has taken stories told over time and put a modern take to them for their movies.  There is value in retelling a story, so to that extent I’m glad to see Star Wars doing what it’s doing.

It gives me hope that the future stand alone films featuring Han Solo and Boba Fett will be very good and dramatic—even though the topics have been covered in the novels of the past.  It is still fun to see these things put into a movie even if the story is better in the original novelizations.  Let’s face it, not many people read any more, so at least these stories will get told.   Rogue One, I would say will arguably in that case will be better than the original story of Dark Forces.  So if that’s what Disney is going to do, I suppose it’s better than nothing.  I see Star Wars as just another remake the way that Godzilla was recently retold with an updated spin on a classic story.  I am looking forward to Rogue One because it tips the hat toward the spirit of the original trilogy and I trust that director to do a good job.  It will be fun to visit that universe again by someone who obviously loved the original film as much as I did—if not more.

Still, I can’t help but think how special Star Wars could have been if they had stuck to the carefully planned books.  But Hollywood in general has lost its creative impulse—very few filmmakers these days have any imagination and those that do can’t get funded for their projects because backers are caught in a static pattern that is dangerous to their own industry.  All of Hollywood is stuck in this creative vacuum of copying off old books and comics to update stories for a more visual format.  I had the benefit of seeing Star Wars when everything was truly new and original and I wanted that freshness for this new generation.  But it can still be good.  Just not as good.

Since The Force Awakens I have been pretty staunchly anti-Star Wars.  My brother and kids have been a little sad that I can’t share my enthusiasm for it as I once did.  To me the death of Han Solo was essentially the death of Star Wars.  It will never mean the same to me, especially with the progressive direction that they are going.  I don’t care about the minority roles or the strong female characters—but the collectivism push is something I just can’t get into—stories where the individuals take a backseat for the collective benefit of everyone.  With Han Solo, everything was better, his selfishness epitomized Ayn Rand’s objectivist philosophy wonderfully.  It may have been unintentional by George Lucas, but it was very pro capitalist leaving A New Hope and Empire Strikes Back the best two movies likely to ever be made for the Star Wars saga.  It was exciting to see images of costumes, ships, sounds, and other elements of those two movies in the Rogue One preview—so I’m sure it will be enjoyable.  I may not enjoy it as much as I otherwise would, but Lucasfilm has a chance to win me back just a little.

To put things in perspective, since I was like 10 years old I bought every single video game that was ever released for Star Wars the first week it came out.  I loved every one of them, particularly the Dark Forces games, Force Unleashed, and Rebel Assault.  That lasted until essentially The Force Awakens.  I dropped Star Wars like a rock and pushed it out of my mind completely.  It was so bad that when we finally bought a Playstation 4, I had the option of buying one with the Star Wars: Battlefront option, or with the Call of Duty bundle—I picked Call of Duty.  I don’t want to play that game because I don’t want to play as a bad guy—because they force you to if you want to play online.  And I refuse to play any game that makes me shoot at the Millennium Falcon or Han Solo flying it.  So Battlefront is the first Star Wars video game that I haven’t bought.  I’ve even bought game systems to play specific Star Wars games.  I would love to play Battlefront as the rebellion.  But I have absolutely no interest in playing as the Empire.  To my mind, George Lucas was treading on shaking ground when he attempted to humanize the bad guys in his prequels.  But I thought there were good points to make, and I personally liked Obi-Wan enough to hang with Lucas through those stories.  But without a good guy to hang morality onto, Star Wars falls apart and becomes just another average story.

Fortunately, it looks like Garth Edwards understands what makes Star Wars good, so I am encouraged, and will likely see the new Star Wars film when it comes out in December.  I’ll give it a second chance to win my respect.  I think it was pathetic that The Force Awakens only made a bit over 2 billion dollars—it could have made more.  I’m sure Disney executives are happy, but they are obviously unaware of their short-sightedness.  So we’ll see.  We were so serious about Star Wars that my family had been planning to go to London this upcoming summer to attend the Star Wars Celebration there in 2016.  Those plans changed after Force Awakens quickly.  We’re not going.   It remains to be seen how good Rogue One turns out to be.  If it is respectful to Dark Forces, then I might be able to like it.  If it craps all over it, then that will likely be it for me.  My opinion is pending successful implementation.

Rich Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

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The rediculous ‘House of Cards’ Gay Agenda: Being a lion among sheep

Do you remember several weeks ago when I stated that my wife and I were done with watching the Netflix series, House of Cards because of the gratuitous sex—particularly the three-way at the end of season two which featured some gay sex by Frank Underwood and his secret service agent shared by his wife?  Well, we decided to give it a second chance because I was interested in the politics part of it and was relieved to find that season three seemed to put less emphasis on the sex.   After all, Frank Underwood had become the President of the United States and there wasn’t much time for power climbing and the sex that is often used to serve as rungs on that ladder.  However, there had been, and continued throughout all of season three a gay subplot to the new President—a soft side that craved the love of men.  This utterly made me sick because it was so misplaced as a human emotion that it left me feeling like the whole point of the House of Cards series wasn’t to convey politics, but to serve as a Trojan Horse of gay advocacy by presenting those types of plot points to a confused society hoping to advance the rainbow sentiments of guys who like to stick parts of themselves into a dirty ass.  By the end of season three, Frank Underwood was having a touching moment with his biographer and the two were holding hands like a couple of girls and my wife and I burst out laughing because of house stupid the scene was. The gay agenda was clear and House of Cards was attempting to normalize it—and it wasn’t working with us.

I’ve been saying it for a long time, when a motion picture company thinks that it will make one of its heroes gay, or Disney thinks that it will put out some musical featuring a gay couple that will make the kind of box office money that Frozen did—those executives should be fired for putting their companies at risk—because those movies will bomb in a theater.  Regarding House of Cards, it’s free—so it’s not much skin off my back to turn the show off.  It’s part of my subscription fee and I’m free to watch anything on Netflix—so I can literally vote in favor of the many other decisions.  But to drop good money on a movie or song that features gay sex as the driver—it’s just not going to happen no matter how much artists like Bruce Springsteen attempt to normalize it.  Gay sex isn’t normal—particularly with men.  I can see women having non sexual touchy relationships with other women, but desiring intercourse just doesn’t make biological sense and has to be evolved along the lines of some abnormality rooted in psychosis.  I can even understand when good friends have close relationships where sex isn’t even a factor of their relationship and they prefer each other’s company.  But the premise that closeness to another human being leads directly to sex is just a preposterous thing—and it’s simply not true.

Now we know emphatically why public schools and other social networks have been attempting to emasculate men for several decades now.  Now we know why men have been told that it’s OK to cry, and to share their emotions—because society established by an aristocratic political class of global micromanagers had fantasies of population control using gay rights as a means to manipulate the masses to stay focused on very primal instincts so that populations would be easier to control.  By changing the role of the sexes, progressives could then take the women out of the home and away from their children allowing the “state” to raise the following generations gradually.  It has always been the long plan of communism brewing for over a century in America to make everyone equal and in the House of Cards sexually, everyone is.  Frank Underwood was introduced as an open marriage womanizer which was fine with his wife so long as there was some tactical objective to the sex.  But then there was some affair that Frank had while attending the Citadel in South Carolina—where he had a gay lover—LOL.  This gay lover is in the background and the series kind of danced around the issue until it came back up again with full hand holding and finger caressing by the end of season three with Frank’s biographer.  There was no kissing in that scene but it was still radically foreign to me and was uncomfortable—it totally ruined the premise of the entire series.  My wife felt the same way.  It wasn’t “homophobia” that was driving that discomfort, it was fact that neither one of us has ever had any gay urges and the whole thing seemed comical to us.  I can honestly say that I’ve never seen some other male and thought, hmmmm, I’d like to “touch” that person to be closer to them.  It’s just not part of our human experience and it was strange.

Sex exists for one reason—biologically, and that is to procreate and continue the human race.  The point of all the emotions and the elements that the different sexes like in each other point toward that ultimate goal.  Sex is not necessarily a byproduct of a decent and healthy relationship.  You can have a close friend if you are mentally healthy and not want to have intercourse with them—which is something that House of Cards completely ignores—which is why the gay agenda is so ridiculous.  Gay sex is a primal behavior that requires a lack of sophistication to endure.  Intellectuals tend not to waste much time on sex because the very act itself—the whole mating game just takes too much time—and smart people tend not to waste time.  This whole notion of equality among the sexes is just a part of their communist agenda to put in people’s minds an eventuality of “state” control where sexual fulfillment is not rooted in procreation—because population control of such a “state-run” society is highly desired for resource management.  But it’s not natural, gay sex requires some mental deficiency to be successful.  That mental deficiency might be deep insecurities placed upon a mind at a young age, or abuse from a trusted family member—or it could be that a child was intellectually born broken—by no fault of its own.  But it’s not “normal.”  That doesn’t mean we treat them badly—but that doesn’t mean that we normalize our entire society for them either.

There is an old Joseph Campbell story that he used to tell in his lectures about “the lion and the sheep” that covered this difficult topic very nicely.  A young lion was abandoned by his family at birth and left alone in the wildness to survive on its own.  It comes along to a pack of sheep that it sees grazing and conjugating near a watering hole so it joins them.  The sheep of course are scared at first because lions eat sheep as carnivorous biological entities.  But when they realize that the lion is only a baby, they quickly warm up to the threat—because they are stupid sheep—collective masses of grazers.  Well, the little lion grows up among the sheep and thinks of itself as one of them.  It grazes like they do and drinks from the same watering hole and behaves like them.  Well, one day a magnificent lion—a strong male with a full mane of hair attacks the herd to hunt and in so doing spots the fellow lion.  He goes up to the creature and asks him what he’s doing.  Of course the young lion now grown up and living among the sheep can only reply, BaaaAAAaaaaaaAAAaa.  It doesn’t know any other term because it’s been raised by sheep and the little thing had been having a hard time because obviously it has a body that craves carnivorous substance to survive, so it’s become a sickly creature.  The old lion says to the young one, “Hey, you aren’t one of them; you should be hunting with me.  Look in the watering hole at your reflection and you’ll see it for yourself.  So the young lion does so and realizes that it was true, he wasn’t like the sheep, and that he was in fact a lion.  Of course the old lion slaughtered a few sheep and brought some meat to the confused young lion and said, “eat this, you’ll feel better.”  The young lion did and as soon as his system had meat in its body it began to make a difference, he immediately felt better, stronger, and less inclined to follow the others around in a herd.  Before long the young lion was able to let out a nice roar and to begin hunting like other lions and to take his rightful place as king of the pecking order within the food chain.

Young males in our society currently are like that little lion, they have been told by their school teachers, their media culture, and even their governments that gay sex is perfectly alright.  They were lied to.  Like the lion growing up among the sheep the reason society told them that was to make it easier to lead them to the slaughter-house eventually and control those free spirits by behaving in a herd.  Once males embarrass themselves with something, they are much easier to control socially by those who desire such things.  But gayness isn’t natural, it’s a learned behavior designed to manipulate mankind into a kind of herd animal that is far easier to manage than a bunch of roaming testosterone driven ego maniacs.  But I’m here to tell you people, look in the water, realize what you are, and turn your life back toward your biological impulses.  Don’t act like a sheep if you are a human being, be a lion.  If you are a man, be a man—don’t sit around crying or hugging other guys.  If you are a woman—be a woman—play the role and enjoy it.  Be what you are and don’t let political philosophies manipulate you into being a herd animal for their benefit.

House of Cards is ridiculous.  The kind of sex they portray in the show is not normal.  It’s an invented creation designed to advance a collectivist oriented social agenda.  But men, real men, do not behave like Frank Underwood.  They don’t seek to hold the hand of other men and they don’t do all that gay singing either.  Only broken people who were taught from an early age to be sheep—we can have sympathy for such people, but we can’t destroy our species to relieve them of guilt either—seem inclined to gayness.  We are not all in this together—all for one, and one for all.  We are in this game to win, and to be the top of the food chain—and to be human.  In the game of life we even can eat the lions because we are smart enough to invent tools to kill them if we so desire.  So we should be smart enough to think above sexual impulses and to behave as our sexes dictate—and those established biological rules dictate that men just don’t show emotion to other men in a way that weakens other aspects of their relationships with one another.  If you are a man and you want to show another man that you like them, punch them in the arm.  But don’t stroke their finger like Frank Underwood did in House of Cards at the end of season three.  That was just stupid—forced—and biologically improbable.

Rich Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

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

Dueling Needs to Make a Comeback: The American tiger in a cage being poked by “social justice warriors”

Anyone can see what the root cause of the problem witnessed in the following Alex Jones video was.  In it there was a group of people that we might call, “social justice warriors” who have grown up in a society deliberately softened to allow for their rise by a political class hell-bent on staying in power—no matter what.  These kids, and the adults that they will grow into, have been empowered by essentially removing the ramifications of their lunacy—the consequences of their personal assault against individual liberty.  The blame clearly falls on our global education system and the forces which gathered to perpetuate their stated curriculum. It has made me realize that a practice long forgotten for its perceived barbarity needs to be dusted off and inserted back into our American culture—the gentlemanly practice of dueling.  As radical as that may sound, we must find some version of it to emerge in this modern century otherwise we won’t make it into more advanced stages. To see why, watch this video then all of the following for substantiation.

A version of dueling still existed in the Old West as towns erupted across the vast frontier of North America guided by flimsy laws enforced by even flimsier sheriffs.  I practice that type of dueling nearly every day with a group I’m involved in called the Cowboy Fast Draw Association.  A friend of mine made a comment that I was thinking of while shooting that day and it was, “if dueling made a comeback, people these days would be a whole lot less offended.”  That’s when I thought of those snot-nosed, liberalized socialist losers in that Alex Jones video.  What was missing from their lives was the respect that comes from asserting an insult at individual integrity.  What those kids have been taught in that video—and anywhere these days that “socialist justice warriors” gather under storm clouds of collective effort—is ramifications for their individual mistakes.

The duel as it was inherited from Europe was widely practiced within the United States for quite a number of years by our early presidents and was a declaration of individual honor.  In that society from which our Constitution was written, an individual’s honor was required to have a civil society.  If some rogue threatened that sanctity then ramifications just outside the grip of the law were required to keep the peace and maintain an orderly society.  We all know about the famous Alexander Hamilton duel with Aaron Burr—which I think about quite a lot.  I was born in the Ohio city directly named after Hamilton who lost his duel with Burr and died.  I also think of President Jackson a lot when I think about duels and the kind of attitude which formed the country of America.  Dueling and honor went hand-in-hand which provided a foundation for our laws.

When I was growing up the Department of Education had just been enacted, so they didn’t have time to drive this trend out of our culture.  Even one hundred years after the Wild West, dueling was still a common practice among kids in my school of Lakota in Liberty Township, Ohio which was essentially settled by war heroes of the Revolutionary War.  When something which insulted individual honor fell outside the established law of the school or the society outside which controlled it, boys would settle the issue with a fight after school—which I found myself in a lot.  Failure to show up to one of these fights would lead to extreme scorn and a loss of respect up the pecking order of male influence among both sexes.  If you were challenged to one of these fights, you didn’t fail to show up.  I always did, and most of the time, just as it was when the dueling action was pistols—handshakes and respect were given out and sometimes friendships were forged.  People respect courage and when two people faced down each other over a dispute that couldn’t be legally worked out by putting a hand on the Bible and letting God sort through the details—individualized respect was the only real option which bound our society together.

Think about it, when you are in the grocery check-out, what keeps you from belting the person in front of you in the head and taking their place in line—is it fear of the law—of being arrested for assault?  Perhaps for most, that is their first reaction—but these days people have a lot less respect for the law as police officers and their methods of control have come into question.  So what is the next layer of defense which prevents you from acting—you look the person over and decide that you could physically overpower them and take their place in line.  What keeps you from doing it?  Essentially, fear…………….fear of what that person might do if you challenged them in some way.  If you push them they might turn around and clobber you, or they might have a gun and shoot you.  That threat forces you to respect their individual boundaries at a primal level which then paves the way for respect at the legal level.  Without a foundation of respect for individual integrity, no laws in any land can have real influence.

And that is the primary issue, public schools are in the business now of teaching collective rights, not individual ones.  As seen in that video, the Donald Trump supporters represented individual values whereas the social justice warriors represented collective values—and our society has put its priorities on the collective effort over the individual ones and that’s how we find ourselves in this current mess.  Those social justice warriors have no fear of individual retribution so they are free to attack anything, anywhere over anything.  They have grown up lacking respect for individual property or sanctity and are acting on behalf of collective efforts for achievements which extend beyond their personal gains.  The way to fix that whole problem is by empowering the individuals to defend their positions with actual respect–and unfortunately that means with all human beings—an imminent fear of being removed from the face of the earth so that a proper dialogue between two parties can emerge.

Years ago I was with a group that was buying a mechanical bull for a nightclub I was involved with and we were at one of those honkytonks to see it in action.  I had on my customary cowboy hat as I have since I was a little kid and I was standing in front of a couple of guys at the bar who were obviously drunk and looking for a quick ego boost to their reputations.  As I watched people ride the bull in question I felt something rub against the brim of my hat from behind, so I turned quickly and saw the hand of some sappy looking bastard removing his hand quickly hoping that he wouldn’t be caught.  Of course I confronted him angrily and I told him that if he did it again I’d beat the rat piss out of him.  He and his friend were two tobacco chewing rednecks who thought they were more authentic than me, and they didn’t need to wear hats to country bars—which essentially was what they told me.  My response was to take them outside and show them that they weren’t “shit,” both of them.  Of course they headed for the door to protect their honor as they were with women who were both at the bar urging them not to fight.  When we got outside they saw the anger on my face and realized that the fight was not going to go well for either of them.  A bouncer stood on the porch and watched, letting things play out respectfully.  Suddenly the two guys apologized for touching my hat and they were quick to want to make friends.  I accepted and we returned inside where they bought me a beer and were nice to me for the rest of the evening.  Their dates were grateful and everyone had a pretty good time the rest of the night.  When I left they even went out of their way to say goodbye and shake my hand.

Protests are getting out of control in our country as socialists, communists, and various anarchists raised in our public education system to not respect private property, personal integrity, or any level of valor have no fear of the law or the individual integrity for which laws were written to protect—and honestly, they need their asses kicked.  They are the result of what happens when you don’t retaliate for someone touching your hat, or insulting your personal name in a newspaper.  Without that basic respect for other human beings, there is no society to build from and everything plunges into chaos, which is exactly the goal of liberalized social justice warriors.  They aren’t warriors at all, only instigators who don’t expect to be punched back in the mouth once they’ve leveled their insults.  We live in a society now where they can touch my hat yet don’t expect to be punched in the mouth for it.  Once you do, they want to retreat to the law to settle their honor—which is essentially what has been happening at Trump rallies.  The society which created these losers doesn’t want to acknowledge that individual liberty is the key to holding all of society together.  They want to believe that it is the acceptance that the tapestry of a global society brings that will garner respect for each other—and they are miserably failing in their psychological assessment.  Just because they have de-clawed a tiger and removed its teeth, and even castrated it of its aggression, a tiger is still a tiger.  You can’t put a bunch of snot-nosed communists into a cage with it and let them poke it with a stick and not expect the tiger to attack those idiots.  At some point the individual temper of the tiger will break through the social constraints placed upon it.  And in many ways, there are a lot of people in this country who have been treated as such, castrated intellectually, and tied up individually to make the collective masses feel equal.  This has given rise to a period in our history where just about everyone is offended at something that somebody else says and that is leading us to a disaster—legally.  But, if the practice of dueling were to make an official comeback, and even become legalized again as it once was—then people these days would be a whole lot less offended, so easily.  And then, we might just find a way to work together toward achievements that require teamwork. First however, a respect for other individuals must be established, and that only occurs when acknowledgement of those other people is based on a foundation of integrity.  That is what the old duels established and that necessity is every bit as strong today as it was 300 years ago.  Only now we see what happens when we outlaw the mechanisms for achieving that respect—we have a mad, runaway society full of losers, imbeciles, and malcontents.

Rich Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

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