Category: Policial Science

House Bill 330 in North Carolina: Thankfully now protestors can be hit with your car

House Bill 330 in North Carolina approved by their house 67-48 is the proper response to what happened in Charlotte in 2016 where protesters blocked traffic across their highways regarding a civil matter.  The bill protects motorists who hit protesters with their cars so long as the drivers “exercise due care,” which seems reasonable enough.  It is the proper response toward disarming the radical notions that collectivist groups have in pulling innocent people into their black holes of insurrection through mass effort and it’s good that North Carolina is taking the side of the individual in this matter—as they should. Nobody should be allowed to even contemplate that by throwing their bodies into a roadway that they can stop the economic engine of a nation because the nature of these corrosive protests is at their very core—anti-American.  Under that statement for instance my time is worth more than the collective concerns of a mob—and that is the clear distinction protected by this North Carolina House Bill 330.

Protests are not the foundations of “our democracy.” Of course opponents to this bill will say so much because they fail to understand the root of the problem.  First of all, America is a republic, not a “democracy” so by protesting, what these types of people are hoping to do is tip the scales of justice toward the “squeaky wheel.”  That is essentially unfair under the terms of a republic because the essential ingredient that is abused is “time.”  Socialist protesters tend to have more time on their hands than a productive individual who is working hard, taking care of their families and is managing each hour of their day week after week as a good lawful citizen.  These protesters tend to be communist sympathizers, dope smokers, and social anarchists who thrive in life by wasting time.  They are often jobless, or work in occupations where nobody misses them making them disposable in regard to productivity and by coming together in mass—they hope to increase their value over the good and productive members of our republic with terrifying force—and that’s just wrong.

Time is what we are protecting here. I can’t think of anything more valuable—and our automobiles are our representatives to our time.   If I want to get from my home in Charlotte to the downtown region to buy tickets to an upcoming concert, that action has more value than the protesters who might seek to block the highway over a civil matter because in the protesters case, they are electing to waste their time with a collective show of force whereas the individual seeking tickets is perpetuating our economy and culture through individual decisions rooted in wealth building exercises for which entire industries are created. In that regard, the driver of a car on a lonely highway has much more value than a mass heap of socialist losers standing in a highway to stop traffic and leverage the law in their favor through force—or the threat of it.  Such people cannot be allowed to “stop our economy.”  Civil recourse is for the courts, not a protester on our nation’s highways.

So when one finds themselves caught in a situation where a line of anti-American protesters are blocking your car, and hitting it with their hands causing damage to your private property you should have the right and ability to escape that situation because your time is more valuable than that of the protesters, and if they get run over in the process—that is their misfortune, not yours. Your time and property have a value greater than that of the protester because such acts of aggression is a threat to the fundamental necessity of time management under a capitalist society and an abuse of power by attempting to tip the scales of justice toward mob rule through threats of violence for which the individual has no protected legal recourse.

A lack of protections from individuals with either guns or cars is the reason that these communist insurgents in many municipalities across the nation are able to conduct such vile road closures even in this modern age. No human being in possession of a one ton vehicle should have to yield to a bunch of anti-capitalists threatening to damage their property or alter their time management, because personal time is every bit as important as private property.  As productive citizens, our time is more important than the collective needs of the worthless.   Even if that time is to meet somebody across town for a tryst with another human being for the intention of sheer pleasure, it is more important than the efforts of the many in tipping the scales of justice with the threat of force.  The time of a productive person is more valuable than the wasted time of the unproductive—the loser who has nowhere to go but sip coffee at Starbucks and bitch about the capitalist nature of America.

It has been proven time and again that behind most of the protestor groups across America is the communist party either in heavy degrees or lighter degrees of campus socialism. We’re not talking about American loving citizens of excellent value—we’re talking about losers. Losers defined by their dependence on government programs, on their contributions toward economic expansion, and their decisions to waste the time that God gave them on meaningless social anarchy as if they were equal to those who work hard and squeeze all they can out of life from moment to moment—from reading a book with their kids to ensuring that their spouses are “satisfied” in marital activity.  The ability to conduct a good modern life productively requires individuals to use a car effectively—and not to be stopped needlessly in their efforts.  That is why this house bill in North Carolina is such a big deal.  It legally protects the drivers of those cars from the legal overreach of the mobs who have lately sought to block roads to acquire social benefits outside the scope of the law.

How we handle and define ourselves in times of turbulence will decide whether or not we thrive as a society or prosper. To prosper we need to protect the rights of individuals to excel in life and understand that it is the few that do most of the heavy lifting in farthing society.  In the same way that a single sperm penetrates the egg of a woman for life to begin a single individual may unlock the next great invention of human evolution.  The masses do not do such things naturally, and our society is reflected on the basis of our own human life cycles—so our laws must also reflect these basic understandings.  We must protect the time of individuals because its valuable over the wasted time of collectivists who hide their fears and insecurities behind the masses.  Thankfully, the North Carolina legislature understands these basic concepts, and they have acted accordingly.  Bravo.

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.

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Mystic Timber at Kings Island: A cross between Indiana Jones and a John Carpenter horror story

These are my favorite kinds of topics, the fun things that we can do to alleviate ourselves naturally from the toils of life where everything we sometimes do seems like an uphill battle deliberately made so to prevent our very existence.  It had been one of those nights even over the weekend where professionally I had been up all night working through a number of problems and sleep was scarcely an option until the next day.  But by noon after 36 straight hours of worry Saturday afternoon opened up and I had a rare moment of fresh air where I could breathe without concern as all the objectives had been met.  It’s not like that all the time but when those types of things do happen you just have to wrestle the issues to the ground until you get through it.  So feeling totally depleted and in need of a full charge physically and intellectually my wife and I did what usually comes first for us during the summer months—we went to Kings Island, this time to specifically ride the new roller coaster they have called Mystic Timbers.

I had been trying to get to Kings Island for weeks but the time just wasn’t there, until this particular weekend.  And it was the perfect thing because I had been curious about Mystic Timbers since I watched the press conference last fall from the public relations crew which I must say have been doing a fabulous job over the last several years at advancing the amusement park.  I consider Kings Island a real treasure for our area and feel very fortunate that I have something that nice so close to my home.  I think people have a tendency to take something like that for granted because they are used to it.  Well, let me just say, I was in Paris just a few weeks ago at the Eiffel Tower there and having some leisure time by the carousel they have between the tower and the river and it’s nowhere near as nice or dramatic as the one at Kings Island.  The one in France may be three times taller, but at Kings Island the little fantasy town on International Blvd along the fountain is better than anything in Europe.  It’s cleaner and much more optimistic so the moment I set foot in that region for the first time in 2017 after doing so for over 40 years now, it reminded me that sometimes the best things in life are right down the road.  Kings Island is a better tourist destination than traveling to Paris—forget the history, region for region, Kings Island is simply a better place where you can relax without worrying about nonsense.

Rivertown at Kings Island has always been my favorite part of the park; I like the dynamic relationship between the log ride, the train, the trees, the little creeks and lakes that span down to the great Beast roller coaster in the back of the park. It was originally supposed to be a kind of frontier town similar to what they did at Disney World but has evolved into its own thing over time and I like to go there to get fries at the Great Potato Works.  In recent years Kings Island has added the Diamondback roller coaster which I still think is one of the best in the world—its such an unusually good ride and covers so much real estate, if that’s all they had it would still be fabulous.  I mean in London—one of the great cities of the world—they have Chessington World Adventures which is England’s version of an amusement park and its nothing like Kings Island specifically at Rivertown.  Even though I’ve been going to that particular part of the park almost my entire life, I still enjoy it each time so when they built a new roller coaster within it I was very curious.

Much to my surprise the Mystic Timber roller coaster was a significant improvement to the Rivertown area.  The theme of the ride itself actually rivals some of the rides at Universal Studios and Disney World by way of “plot” which is a departure from what is typically done at Midwestern amusement parks.  Mystic Timbers has a story to tell and I’m not going to give away what’s in the shed but it reminded me of an Indiana Jones adventure in a way mixed with a John Carpenter horror film—Christine comes to mind.  The ride itself was something of a mix between The Beast and the Adventure Express.  It’s not a rough roller coaster, kind of a middle of the road ride for people who don’t want to ride something as crazy as the Beast—but it had its own charm and takes you on a nice ride through the woods back to essentially the train shed and back again.  It was well done and really captured the atmosphere of the Kings Mills area with a plot that was very Blair Witch—which is revealed in the illustrious shed.  I thought the ride was a bold move by Cedar Fair Amusements in not just building a roller coaster, but in adding a story to the park as part of its overall mythology.  It was a very good move and took a kind of dead space in Rivertown and really juiced it up.  Now that entire area from the Soak City water park all the way to the pavement of Rivertown is a very dynamic area between the Water Canyon, the train ride, and now Mystic Timber—there’s a lot going on.

In the scope of the entire ride, Kings Island spent some serious money on the “shed” experience which was simply a queue up area where the coaster waits for passengers ahead of it to leave the station.  Instead of putting up with the dead time at the end of the ride these coaster designers gave people something to look at and used that time to add a little thrill as a climax.  For an adult, it’s not much, but for kids 10 years old, it’s pretty freaking cool.  I thought it was a nice touch.  Kings Island didn’t need to add the coast to the coaster by building the shed, but they did it to just take the experience to the next level and by doing so they are stepping into the kind of territory that is normally reserved for the great Orlando parks, and that’s saying something.  I was impressed.

For that day as it often does, Kings Island put some life back into me in a very positive way. It was a wonderful experience that I’m sure I’ll do many more times.  As a stress management tool, Kings Island for me is the best during those nice summer months where you want to get outside, but don’t have the time to invest in a big trip.  There is nothing like actually traveling somewhere to see things in their native environment, but honestly, Kings Island is a treasure compared to anywhere in the world and we are lucky to have it in the Cincinnati area.  It’s good to see that the park management isn’t content to just ride the fence and surrender to the other great parks in the United States but is willing to compete with them for the title of greatest.  Mystic Timber isn’t the greatest roller coaster in the United States—but it’s a pretty good one at a park that is certainly one of the largest with the greatest collection.  But what Mystic Timber does is liven up the character of an amusement park that has been there for a while but is just now starting to break out into its own individuality.  And that was good to see.

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.

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Fire the Teachers at the Dayton Education Association: A LeapFrog tablet is a better learning tool

What are these idiots thinking at the Dayton Education Association, going on strike over wages and benefits in this day and age—when we know that public school teachers collectively make too much money for what they actually do? Here it is the end of the school year where they are going to be off work soon anyway for the whole summer and they are threatening the school board with a strike so they can feed their fat assed mouths more during a summer long vacation?  Obviously the negotiators think marijuana smoking is legal in Ohio—because only somebody on drugs could think that striking against the tax payers is the right move.  Apparently they didn’t get the memo at the DEA in Dayton, because those teaches aren’t needed for education—they are only needed as baby sitters.  If you want to teach your kid the important things, get them a LeapFrog tablet and some programs at the Target department store.  But if you need some slugs to watch your kids while you go to work all day leaving other people to raise your kids, then send them to public school.  With that criteria in mind, just about anybody could be a babysitter, so all these Dayton teachers are easy to replace.  Here’s how the situation was reported by WDTN in Dayton.

DAYTON, Ohio (WDTN) – The Dayton Education Association said Thursday its members voted in favor of authorizing a strike if the status of negotiations does not improve.

According to a release by the DEA, contract negotiations with the Dayton Public Schools Board of Education have been ongoing since January.

The DEA says since that time, nearly 20 days have been spent negotiating a collective bargaining agreement and an impasse has now been reached. As a result, according to the DEA, both sides have sought federal mediation.

“Despite over 150 hours at the table, the DEA is greatly troubled by the Board’s refusal to recognize their teachers as professionals and meet their teachers, even halfway, on several key provisions,” said David Romick, DEA president. “Tonight’s vote should sound an alarm: the Dayton Public Schools are in a crisis,” Romick cautioned.

The union says many items remain unresolved including wages and benefits.

http://wdtn.com/2017/05/04/dayton-teachers-vote-in-favor-of-a-strike-if-negotiations-do-not-improve/

I haven’t dealt with an education topic for a while because honestly, the case is closed in my opinion.  I’m looking toward the Trump administration to expand School Choice and to break up the monopolies of union backed public education because that is the real problem.  No competition and high labor costs for poor performance are the cause of their out-of-control costs.  If you want to ruin a kid, send them to public schools without a lot of parental guidance and you’ll destroy them for life.  For some parents, deep down inside, that may be what they want to do—to handicap their children so they never outshine the parents.  Sending a kid to public school unguided by parental mentorship is essentially clipping the intellectual wings of the child for life and they’ll never recover.  They’ll die old people still crippled by their public education experience.  I thought by now everyone understood that.  Nobody should pass a school levy for a union infested education environment because you’re just throwing good money at bad methods of teaching.

I am very impressed by the LeapFrog Learning systems available at Target of all places.  They do a better job of Pre-K through grade 5 education than anything they are doing in public schools if learning is the objective.  Parents might argue that by sending their kids to school they are learning social interaction skills—but I’d claim the aim of the government schools is to break the children into progressive soldiers for tomorrow’s culture war against American tradition. So that makes them an insurgency, not a valued member of the American education system.  Teachers like these losers in Dayton aren’t worth more money—they are worth a lot less.  If the Dayton school board wants I could hire replacements for every one of their lost positions if they could hold strong on the strike and let those idiots starve.  By the looks of them they could afford to lose some weight.  I’d be happy to help them hire replacements too, just let me know Dayton.  We could replace every job lost to the strike in a month.  So don’t worry about it.  If babysitters are what we want so that parents can drop off their kids to watch while tax payers cover the daycare costs, then hiring those types of people is easy.

But we don’t need these people, who want to strike while on a cushy government job where they are off all summer, to teach our kids some “worldly” crap.  Look, I just returned from Europe where I spent time at both the British Museum in London and at The Louvre in Paris.  I was stunned by how willing to learn the kids were in both of those places where school kids were given assignments and worked in groups to solve problems at the museum exhibits under the care of very studious mentors.  I love museums and environments where learning is conducive and I have never seen kids behave in the United States like these kids did in London and Paris—from destinations all around the globe.  There isn’t a single teacher striking in Dayton that is talking about teaching kids to be equivalent to what I saw at the Louvre and British Museum recently.  And knowing that they should be giving the city of Dayton a discount, not demanding more money—give me a break.

I’m all for education but I’ve heard these loser teachers talk for years and they complain about things I’d consider easy as if they are the most difficult things to do in the world.  For instance, they say they do a lot of grading papers at home, and that it’s hard to manage 27 kids over a 6 hour period, and that they have to be personal mentors for all of them.  Well, try doing that for several hundred people, and working 14 to 15 hours a day all year-long and even catching up paperwork on weekends.  That’s my life so I really don’t want to hear how difficult their work day is.  I’m not sympathetic.  For what those Dayton teachers are making per hour for babysitting, they are living a dream job compared to the rest of the world.  So the Dayton management would be wasting money to throw one dime at these ungrateful teachers.  Cut them loose and hire some new people for the Dayton school system and don’t lose a minute’s worth of sleep over it.

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.

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The Network Boycott of Donald Trump: Life is going on without them

It was a little astonishing that the television networks of ABC, CBS, NBC, and CNN refused to play the political ad from the Trump campaign highlighting the first 100 days accomplishments by the new president.  After all, they didn’t have a problem highlighting every little thing that Barack Obama did.  But Trump isn’t Obama and the networks are seeing the difference already.  They are being exposed for what they always were; liberal outlets designed to promote progressivism and are now discovering that people are willing to turn away from them really for the first time in their history over political ideology.  As everyone now knows ESPN is a dying network owned by the Disney Company and they are losing their conservative viewers due to their extremely liberal on-air positions.  ESPN President John Skipper, a former employee at left-wing Rolling Stone magazine, insisted that the network had little intention of putting on the brakes of its liberalism even in the wake of their viewership exodus saying:

“It is accurate that the Walt Disney Company and ESPN are committed to diversity and inclusion,” Skipper said. “These are long-standing values that drive fundamental fairness while providing us with the widest possible pool of talent to create the smartest and most creative staff. We do not view this as a political stance but as a human stance. We do not think tolerance is the domain of a particular political philosophy.”

 

http://www.breitbart.com/sports/2017/05/05/survey-of-viewership-in-swing-state-market-shows-republicans-abandoning-espn-in-droves/

Then Ellen DeGeneres said just yesterday that Donald Trump wasn’t welcomed on her show—as if that were going to somehow hurt the feelings of the president—or change what’s happening.  Stephen Cobert—the former Comedy Central liberal who openly has a night show directed at pot smokers unleashed a potty mouthed rant that could only be justified through definitions of insanity—yet CBS allowed it to air anyway which should have provoked attention by the FCC.  If Cobert had been a conservative, he’d be out of a job, but since he’s a liberal like most of the people in entertainment—he gets a free pass.  What we are seeing is unprecedented—the political left is drawing a line in the sand and hoping that we all love them enough to keep watching their programs.  But the evidence is already in that conservatives are finding other alternatives.

What is really scary to the networks is that Trump is actually better at the job of communicating than they even understand in the industry.  George Will the conservative commentator actually quit the Republican Party because he thinks President Trump chews up the English language in an illiterate fashion.  He clearly has taken the side of the liberal networks in thinking that he knows more than Trump does about communicating.   Yet Trump has had great success in entertainment and obviously knows more about communication than even the most seasoned Hollywood actor.  Trump doesn’t just speak, he communicates with his entire body when he gives a speech and people understand him.  He may not articulate the English language in a scholarly fashion, but he communicates better than most anybody in the public eye today and he can do it without an army of advisors and Hollywood producers to help him along.  While Obama used to seek counsel from Steven Spielberg and Jeffery Katzenberg, Trump takes care of things himself and is able to produce a video illustrating his first 100 days without the entertainment industry’s involvement—and it drives them crazy.

It’s in Trump’s independence that has exposed the leftist tendencies of the major networks and now half the country is looking for alternatives.  They are used to making or breaking people and they can’t have an impact on Trump in any way and they don’t know what to do about it except make asses of themselves.  Now they are taking positions they can’t walk back and it will eventually destroy them.  I warned the Disney Company about this years ago, and they didn’t listen.  They insisted on putting little gay characters in their entertainment products and force-fed liberalism into their productions, and their bottom line is going to take a hit.  ABC is owned by Disney so like ESPN they are committed to leftist ideologies which run against the current of modern American politics and they are positioning themselves for extinction.  Trump actually did work on NBC with the hit show The Apprentice and even now after 14 seasons the executives cannot figure out for the life of them why Trump was so much better at that show than some Hollywood actor who gets paid to say what other people think.

What’s even funnier is that the political left thinks that they are going to find their own Hollywood star to run against Trump in 2020.  They are throwing around names like George Clooney, Dwyane Johnson and even Disney’s Bob Iger—but they really don’t understand that it takes more than “celebrity” to win as a president.  Trump didn’t win the presidency because of his celebrity—he won it because he worked harder than anybody else.  Hillary Clinton rolled out the celebrities in her final days and they didn’t help her at all.  The power that the networks and media companies had with their celebrates has evaporated before their eyes and they really don’t know what to do about it which is what I have been saying all along in regard to the value of Donald Trump being president.  There’s not just his skills as a businessman, or the self-reliance of his celebrity—but it’s the presence of a Republican who can simply rob the political left of their stronghold on the media all by himself.  The Democrats don’t have anybody like Trump and with all their resources in Hollywood there isn’t one person who can compete with Trump on the stage in 2020 and they all know it now.  They might have the celebrity, but they don’t have the work ethic or an understanding of all the modes of communication that Trump has naturally.

Trump wasn’t made into a celebrity by others the way that George Clooney was—or any other actor who gets paid to read off a script.  Trump made himself and that is a different kind of political candidate and the failure of the networks to work with this new administration will be their end.  They won’t survive the change in demographic posture combined with the economic burden of the modern cord cutters—the people who have decided that they don’t want or need cable television in their lives.  Ellen and Stephen Cobert can’t afford to cut off half their audience the way they have—yet they have done just that.  And that decision will prove detrimental to them all.  People will still see Trump’s ad about his first 100 days regardless of the participation of the networks in showing it because they don’t have a monopoly any longer on information.  They can’t stop Trump by cutting him off the networks because he can reach many more people through new media.  The only people getting hurt by the network boycott of Trump are the networks.  They can’t survive off only half the country watching their programs.  They can’t appeal only to liberals and hope to lure advertisers to their channels.  Look what happened to Curt Schilling at ESPN.  He represented the kind of man who many of their viewership were themselves, and when they took him down for being a conservative, ESPN lost viewers. I used to love watching ESPN, but since they fired Schilling, I haven’t watched them since—because they didn’t have talent on their programs that spoke and thought the way I do.  So I turned them off and moved on to something else.

There is a lot to feel good about Trump, the stock market is soaring, money is coming back to the American economy and the president is well on his way to becoming simply the best occupant of the White House ever to reside there.  History is already starting to overshadow the cries of the liberal left and that’s where the networks are making a major mistake in not aligning themselves with history.  Rather, they are sticking with their ideology which will be their undoing.  Trump works harder and is good at so many different things that his presidency will be a new defining marker in history.  The old guard is quickly finding themselves on the outside looking in and they know it. Right now they are protesting with defiance, but they are rapidly learning that nobody really cares about them.  Nobody cares about the opinions of The View girls, and nobody cares about Ellen.  Trump is going to be a good president with or without them.  And that is the hard lesson that the world is learning—but I’ve said it all along.  Maybe next time they’ll listen—for those who survive long enough to have a next 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.

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In Trump We Must Trust: Now the senate has to do the right thing

Remember just a few days ago when the American media was contemplating the second failure of congress repealing Obamacare—and how devastating it would be for the Trump administration? Then as if out of nowhere, congress did the right thing and voted to repeal that legislative monstrosity and Trump had the Republicans firmly behind him at the White House announcing the victory of the first leg of that journey.  This is why we voted for Trump—because any other president would have let the issue go and would not have wrestled the challenges to the ground the way he did—and it is only because of him that the Republicans in congress were able to consolidate around something they could all get on board with—and the American media was awe-struck by the effectiveness of the deal it took to get the votes in such a short period of time.  The same kind of thing will take place in the senate. It’s still a long battle, but we are well on our way toward finally getting rid of Obamacare.

People can say what they want about Trump—that he’s not conservative enough, or that he’s not against a single payer system—but in regard to health care we are on a steep ledge with our insurance premiums for that industry. Dealing with health insurance providers every year I am amazed by how much they continue to rise—8 to 12% in a lot of cases with no sign of decreasing—and no politician has been willing to deal with it.  Obamacare made the situation much worse and was meant to collapse the system driving us all to a single payer mandate—which would essentially make health care a socialist right as they view it in Europe and Canada.  The health care in those places sucks so that is certainly not the model we should be following.  Changes have to be made toward making health care cheaper and more effective—not the opposite.  And if the ball didn’t get rolling in the first days of the Trump White House, it was never going to happen as the spiraling effect would destroy all hope of solving this problem with free market solutions.

Now with the debate in the senate, the president and the marketplace—there will be ideological differences. People like Rand Paul will want complete free market approaches, but to keep the health care providers we do have alive, they need help because of the last six years of government intrusions.  They can’t be cut off cold turkey—they’d fold otherwise.  So, it’s a complex problem made worse by the Obama White House.  To have a hope at a free market solution we have to put the problem in Trump’s hands and trust him to work the situation backwards over an 8-year period.  That is one of the biggest reasons to have a billionaire capitalist in the White House, to help make that deal a reality.  We can’t trust government to step out of the picture on their own.  We need a president to direct them out of it over the coming years while the health insurance industry grows its own legs again and can start to drive down premiums with options—like the phone industry did after deregulation.

The best hope we have of avoiding a single payer system is in trusting Trump—and Rand Paul is going to have to embrace that along with others in the senate who are economic puritans. Unfortunately, they are in the minority and this is a deal that will have to be walked back toward free market applications by a pro capitalists in the White House, congress, and senate letting the Democrats rot on their socialist stagnation.  The fear many have in repealing Obamacare is that this might empower Democrats to take back the house and senate during the next midterms, but that’s not going to happen if they stick close to Trump.  If anything, they’ll gain seats.  But they’re going to have to have courage and forge forward with boldness under the Trump flag otherwise the whole thing will come unraveled.  We are in uncharted territory and none of the news pundits know how to define things—so there is no guide on how to proceed.  So they will just have to trust in Trump.

That’s not to say that Trump is a dictator that should be followed blindly, but that he is a representation of free market associations and is but a guide toward that economic means of philosophic national understanding. In eight years Trump will not be president anymore, but his commitment toward capitalism should endure and that is essentially the same approach we all need to take regarding health care.  We need to trust the market, but we have to keep that market on life-support until it can leave the hospital so to speak—because Obamacare essentially shot it leaving it for dead in the streets.

Of course the socialist loving progressives were upset, and that was evident by the late night television people who dominate that European style thought process—and they are a growing infusion of failed policies that they intend to import against the individual based economic structure of our day. They didn’t think Trump would pull together everybody and they are now quite scared because socialized medicine is a big objective for them.  And how Trump did it scared them even worse, he caved on elements of the budget deal to keep everything running, and while the Democrats were celebrating, Trump was working out the health care issue in congress—and that was all a tactical decision coming from the White House.  Very clever, and masterly stuff from a strategic point of view. Given how everything occurred, you could hear real fear in the voices of the liberal leaning progressives after the fact—they know what this means and what’s at risk.

It is terribly hard to take away an entitlement which is why Democrats pushed through Obamacare in the first place—to get enough people addicted to it so that socialized medicine would become a mainstay in American politics. But, there is time to turn back the clock and Republicans have a very narrow window to do so—and it will take them all to see the vision clearly.  Trust the capitalist in the White House who has built a fortune building up brands and marketing goods for great profit.  He has to make health care a good free market enterprise for more insurers so that they can enter the market and compete to drive down those out of control costs.  That is the only way to really fix it—because doing nothing won’t get things done at this point, and socialized medicine will be even worse than those escalating premiums which increase because of the lack of insurers and the top-heavy need for coverage.  So there is a lot of work that has to be done, but I am very confident in Trump to do it.  It would be wise for the senate not to get caught up in ideological chest pounding, because this is a tight rope, and we must walk it now.  The sooner the better, because each day that passes, it gets more complicated and harder for a free market to be part of the future.  The public expectations for reality are too polluted and we have a young generation of socialists raised by our toxic public education system that will vote for the single payer route once they are over 30—and at that point free market options will not be on the table, coverage will be terrible, and the costs will be extraordinary.

Rich Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

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James Comey Makes the Case for Hillary Clinton’s Prosecution: The reason she really lost was that there just weren’t enough stupid people

I told you dear reader, and so did many other people—that F.B.I. director James Comey didn’t prosecute Hillary Clinton because of pressure from Loretta Lynch, and he revealed as much during his senate testimony on May 3rd 2017.  I thought that bit of information was jaw-dropping even though I was sure that was the case—hearing him say it was much more impactful.  And that wasn’t all, Comey went on throughout the day to reveal many blistering crimes committed at the highest level of our government that if truly grasped by our public would shatter our faith in those institutions.  I would argue that smart people already have that faith shattered—but stupid people, those who like Amy Schumer movies, those who do drugs, those on welfare, those who voted for Obama in 2012 and Hillary Clinton in 2016, those who act in Hollywood, those in the media, those who love European socialism, those waiting for slave reparations so they can stop working and drink from a bottle on a ghetto street corner bitching about “the man” holding them down for the rest of their lives—they are learning these things for the first time.  Yes, even stupid people could understand what James Comey was saying—it was that astonishing.

We have major crimes committed that were admitted to by the standing FBI director and he stated quite emphatically that his decisions not to pursue those cases were made because he feared destroying the FBI itself—because people would have lost faith in that law enforcement branch by learning the details. Hillary Clinton broke the law on several occasions and put him in a terrible position—politically.   Comey also knew that Loretta Lynch wouldn’t prosecute her friend after Bill Clinton met with her on a plane ahead of her testimony with the Attorney General over questions about her deleted emails.  There were so many laws broken over Hillary’s email situation that it’s actually a bit scary that she thought she was qualified to be commander and chief in the White House—just because she was a woman.  Amazing really—and astonishing that so many stupid people were willing to carry her to that position.

Watching those two fat assed louses sitting on that stage when Hillary announced that she had been winning the election until James Comey released his investigation intentions was insulting. If you slid those two women together and measured the radius of their thighs you’d get a couch.  How disgusting is that?  It’s not disgusting just because they are over-weight—but because they are those types of loud mouth progressives who hide their activism behind their gender and get fat living off the hard work of others—in Hillary’s case—as the ultimate second-hander.  Nothing she does is on her own—she simply robs and extorts her entire existence and to have her sit on that stage and with a straight face declare that James Comey cost her the election is just insulting to anybody with a brain.  Hillary lost the election because of her—and nobody else.  She was the idiot who set up an illegal server to destroy evidence because she intended to commit crimes as the Secretary of State and she planned to use her political clout to avoid prosecution.  That is the story—the one and only story.  My dog could have run against her and won—and I said so much over a year ago well before Trump ever was elected.  Good people—and they are still in the slight majority—in the end would never pull the lever for such a dishonest person and that’s why she lost.

In her mind she had everything worked out, the media was in her corner—unapologetically. Hollywood was eating out of her hand.  She could manipulate the law through Loretta Lynch, a personal friend of the family—so she figured all she had to do was flash the woman card and she’d be elected president.  But reality told a different story and she just wasn’t hearing it, and that was obvious over a year before we ever had the Election of 2016.  And with that arrogance she openly violated the law in many of the ways that we witnessed during the 90s when her husband was president.  Most of the time we only suspected these things were going on and talk radio was alive with the conspiracies, but in 2016 we finally had hard evidence because she got caught in two places, on her handling of the Benghazi debacle in 2012, then in her email scandal. When Comey stated that there were classified emails on Anthony Weiner’s laptop from Hillary again he revealed an offense that she committed perjury in front of congress by denying that she mishandled classified emails.  She was sending them to a pervert to have printed by a third-party for god’s sake!

I know Trump doesn’t want to put a former political candidate in jail, but the law is the law. After all, that’s how James Comey got into all this trouble to begin with.  He was dealing with political forces that were breaking the law so audaciously that they painted him into a corner.  If he revealed the violations he could shatter people’s faith in law enforcement forever.  But if he turned the other way, he’d violate the principles of his office—and this is essentially how the political left has achieved everything—by painting good people into a corner and neutralizing them in the face of impossible decisions.  In Comey’s world nobody should ever be so deceitful leaving him unarmed to deal with such terrible behavior at the highest levels of our government.  And Hillary along with her friends had no concerns about what they were doing to Comey—because they do it to everyone—and that’s the only way they have ever won anything.  They are bad people and they do anything they have to in order to obtain power.  And power under their definition is the ability to suck merit off other people for their own consumption. Hillary broke the law and those involved should all do some time in jail—because that’s the only outcome that would solve all these problems.

It’s not because Hillary said she won’t run for office again. That doesn’t matter.  She violated the law in really audacious ways and she has to be prosecuted.  Not running for office in the future doesn’t make a difference.  It’s what she did that does.  To answer Comey’s statement about losing faith in the law, I lost faith in it a long time ago.  Most smart people have and the only way to restore it would be to make things right legally.  There are many who worked for the Clinton campaign who would fall under that category of potential prosecution because those are the same people who have sought to undermine the Trump administration even before it started by illegally monitoring people in his transition team, and actually trying to start World War III just to provide a cover story for their personal political crimes in order to obtain or maintain power. If we learned anything over the last year surrounding the election of 2016 it’s how power-hungry some of these people particularly from the Hillary camp were—and that they were literally willing to do anything to obtain that power—even break the law.  And that’s what should be punished so we don’t have to go through this again in the future.  Failure to act now will only lead to violence in the future and if we can’t count on the law to do that—then we have to resort to other means of justice. And that wouldn’t be good.

Rich Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

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The Moon Rise of South Korea: Holding back socialists in Asia and the Democratic budget battle

It is a shame we don’t live in a more literate society.  It’s a shame so many school levies passed during the May elections where voter turnout was noticeably lower due to all the nice weather, and it’s a shame that more people don’t understand the strategy regarding the recent budget compromise on Capitol Hill.  Things that are complex in nature require a long view understanding and that is best achieved through literacy—because the process of reading develops in the mind the ability to comprehend layered strategies that exist beyond the immediate gratification most people are accustomed to dealing with.  And this was never more obvious than the situation with North and South Korea and the role that China is playing in a giant international chess game—for which Donald Trump is properly engaged.  Our shallow American media was shocked recently when Trump stated that he wanted South Korea to pick up the 1.2-billion-dollar price tag for the THAAD missile system placed there to protect them from a North Korean attack.  They didn’t report the rest of the story, so here it is.

Shortly South Korea is about to hold an election to replace their disgraced president recently outed over corruption charges and the leader of the pack is a socialist Democrat by the name of Moon Jae-in.  Moon wants to have good open relations with North Korea and China and in his campaign rhetoric is claiming that the “west” is interfering in the peace process of the Korean peninsula.  Of course Americans have forgotten why we fought the Korean War a half century ago, so they really don’t understand the politics.  Heck, most of them probably couldn’t find Korea on a map.  So they certainly can’t understand why America is interested in keeping South Korea protected from communist incursions to the north and to the west with China encouraging all the aggressions.

That is the role that North Korea plays in the region, they are there as communist antagonists to play the “bad cop” in the great negotiations game—while China plays the “good cop.”  Everyone understands that game reading this I hope.  South Korea is the only open market capitalist zone in that region except for Japan just to the east.  Losing Korea to a socialist in the upcoming election who is a global communist supporter would be bad for America as it would solidify the spread of communism. Most American’s think that communism died back in the 90s, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. China, North Korea and Vietnam to the south are all communist zones and are a serious burden on the freedoms enjoyed by capitalist nations like the United States.  Immigrants from those communist countries pour into the United States looking for opportunity while slowly changing the voting patterns from Republican to Democrat.  China understands all this and are currently in a waiting game hoping to crush capitalism in the west while using American markets to bolster their own economy.

When Xi Jinping visited Donald Trump at his Mar-a-Lago resort of course it was a nice meeting, Xi was playing the “good cop” and so was President Trump.  It was all strategy to set the stage for what was happening in the east Asian theater.  China wants South Korea under their flag, America wants to have a capitalist footprint in Asia essentially to protect Japan from further aggressions from their communist rivals across the Sea of Japan.  China supported North Korean aggressions, the United States sent in the THAAD system and several naval aircraft carriers.  Kim Jong-un to push back the Americans threatened nuclear war and resumed missile tests and each time they have done so recently the United States has blasted them out of the sky from space.  As the world beats the drums of war hoping to see hostilities escalate in the region—the media of course supported the communists, while capitalist nations hope America prevails—a silent stand-off has evolved.  North Korea has realized that they can’t launch any missiles anywhere due to American positions and therefore can’t threaten anybody on China’s behalf—which has exposed the communists in favor of Trump.

Now the hope of the entire region is that Moon Jae-in will win in South Korea in a few weeks and that will end the support of American involvement there and return the power of fear back to China while indirectly unifying all of Asia under communism.  They envision such a thing as when China took back Hong Kong from England at the turn of the 20th century and have used it as an “economic zone” under a communist flag.  They plan to do the same thing with South Korea and this Moon guy is receptive to that kind of thinking.

Trump knowing all this has offered to take the edge off by speaking well of China, and offering to talk to Kim Jung-un all the while charging South Korea for the THAAD system throwing bait in the water for Moon to stumble on during his last weeks of campaigning.  It’s really not that hard to understand—but due to the short attention spans of most Americans in the media, they just don’t understand how the pieces connect.  That’s why sites like this one exist, because I do understand and am happy to explain it to you dear reader.  That’s also why I’m not down on the way Trump handled the recent budget compromise with Democrats.  Like the situation in Korea, Trump has to expose the other side with “good cop” dialogue so that they will be the aggressors justifying action.  In the case of South Korea, the hostile action will be a trade war with the new liberal president Moon so that he can’t solidify people behind him toward socialist objectives, but to cut out the feet from under him before he can take roots—which is precisely what the global political left has been trying to do to Trump.  Only in the case of South Korea the leverage is completely in Trump’s hands.  He needed to bolster the military to take care of all the foreign policy issues immediately and without question he hoped to recruit some Democrats to get 60 votes in the senate to go against Schumer for upcoming legislation.  The most pressing issue of course was the military money so that Trump could hold back the villains in Asia, the Middle East and in regard to Russia—which then forced Putin to talk to Trump on the phone about peace plans yesterday.  Without that budget deal, Putin doesn’t participate because the military budget was the leverage he had been holding out for hoping Trump wouldn’t get it.

This is all very easy to understand if you understand The Art of War, the great literary classic on Asian warfare.  The American media certainly doesn’t get it, but some individuals who matter here and there do, and that’s all we really care about. Trump knows what he’s doing.  Results will take care of everything else.  I haven’t seen anything in his behavior that alarms me so long as the long view is taken into consideration.  This Moon guy in South Korea is a Obama type of liberal, so Trump would do well if he could cause the guy to stumble at the finish line of their elections. If not, then Samsung televisions and KIA cars will be facing some very hefty tariffs because the fight is still over the spread of communism and the Marxist ideologues of Asia need those fresh markets of Hong Kong and South Korea to justify themselves as second-handers.  Which is the only reason that Kim Jung-un has been allowed to exist.  But if Trump beats the South Korean socialist to the peace process in unifying the Korean Peninsula against the wishes of China—then all of them lose their leverage cards in future negotiations. But to do all this, Trump couldn’t have a budget battle with Democrats now—he needed the military money and the ability to show that he was willing to work with the Democrats.  He knew they’d reject him—but he had to try so that he’d have the high ground later.  And that is the difference between a good strategist and an idiot.  The media doesn’t know the difference but readers here do.

Rich Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

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The Disgraceful, Dishonest Press: Liberal losers in Hollywood and the media show how bad it really is

I deal with a lot of people and most of them don’t come as close to being the kind of conservative that I am. So the intolerance to other people’s opinions isn’t something that I understand.  Most of the time I am very disappointed in the people I meet, but I figure if they’ve gotten through 30 to 40 years of life and still have liberal leanings toward things—a five-minute conversation with me isn’t going to change much for them—so I don’t waste the time talking.  I deal with things as close to their level as I can allow myself and move on to the next topic without a thought.  If I didn’t do that I couldn’t speak to anybody—but that’s OK, because that type of thing doesn’t do much for me anyway.  But having an intolerance toward other points of view—if I functioned like that, I simply couldn’t live.  That’s why it is so disgusting to me to see how the White House Correspondents media behaved Saturday night as President Trump stiffed them by doing something else in a different city that night.  I don’t blame Trump at all—the media does cover him differently than say, President Obama.  In spite of all their talk about being a relevant part of “democracy” the press clearly didn’t hold Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and Eric Holder to the level of scrutiny that they do anybody in the Trump administration—so it is they who created this mess—and only they can clean it up.

I’ve told you dear reader before, the communist insurgents from the 1950s sought openly to take over Hollywood and the American media hoping to advance those collectivist ideas a half a century later and bring down the capitalist republic envied around the world so that a global order could rise from the ashes. Public schools have assisted in this enterprise and that is why on May first 2017 there were communist demonstrations in cities across America that we wouldn’t have seen ten or twenty years ago.  Those communist sympathizers are now in Hollywood and in our media and they have advanced that communist plot line.  Not that long ago there were a sizable number of conservatives in those fields.  There were always liberals in Hollywood and in the media, but they weren’t this obnoxious and insistent on shutting out conservative voices.  But these days conservatives are under attack which is most evident at Fox News where all the old timers are losing their jobs to more progressive liberals.  I felt sorry for Eric Bolling who had his new show debut at 5 PM on “May Day” and it was a disaster.  Why did he have on Mark Cuban?  He’s an idiot—I don’t want to hear from him.  In fact I didn’t want to hear from anybody but Eric on his show—more opinions don’t equate to better thinking.  But all Fox News could think to do in that time slot was another version of The Five.  I listen to liberals all day long—I don’t want to hear them on my news after working hard all day.  I’m open to other view points, but when it comes to my entertainment time—I’m going to choose people who are like-minded.  If Fox News doesn’t give me what I’m looking for I’ll find other alternatives—and that is the real reason for the misery displayed at the Correspondent’s Dinner Saturday

The country is moving back toward conservatism and the Hollywood types along with their partners in the media don’t like it. They are not open to people with other opinions and it shows in the way the covered Obama.  There were so many things they could have nailed him on, but because he was a black Democrat they literally gave him a free pass—but decided to put down the gauntlet for Trump and we all see it.  Who do they think they’re kidding?  They are the cause of all the divisiveness and when we don’t go along with their media plans—and just openly accept their stupid progressivism they think we are the ones who are intolerant.   Check out the riots just this year at Berkeley.  That will tell you everything you need to know.

For instance, I typically enjoy the Star Trek movies when they come out, so I watched the last one, Star Trek: Beyond.  It was horrendously stupid—overly progressive and ridiculously political.  They were more concerned with showing gay sex and multi-cultural civilization than in telling a good story—so the movie bombed.  It was rejected at the box office just like most projects are that are overly sexualized toward a progressive direction—because the United States as a market is not liberal.  When media companies start thinking their task is to make people into a certain thing by using art to take them there—they will likely fail if that art does not represent the demographic targeted by the art.  Star Trek: Beyond might represent the gay people at a Pride parade with all their rainbows and dudes dressed in drag—but it doesn’t register with some mechanic in Wichita, Kansas who is certainly not thinking of sticking any part of himself in the ass of some hairy assed man.  The media both in the press and in entertainment failed to understand their marketplace and thought they actually had the power to move culture instead of giving culture what it wants.

That is the big distinction, the liberals in the news media think they can shape the minds of their viewers and the hard reality tells them that people will leave and seek out other objectives. I seldom watched The Five on Fox because I didn’t want to hear from Jaun Williams or Bob Beckel.   It’s nothing personal, I just don’t want to hear their liberal voices—it’s a waste of my time.  It’s not that I’m intolerant, it’s that I don’t want to hear it—and that is what the media is missing now that we are in the age of Trump.  They are making themselves less relevant day by day and they still don’t know it.  By the way they behaved at the correspondent’s dinner—they really don’t understand America at all.  They only understand the progressive culture of New York, Washington D.C. and a few cities in California—but no place else who actually watch their programming—or not, depending on choices.

Since Fox New canned O’Reilly and really Roger Ailes over the summer, I only watch Lou Dobbs and Brett Baier at 6 pm on the Fox owned networks. I caught the Tucker Carlson segment shown above while I had breakfast because the headline caught my eye.  But I don’t have time to commit to a complete show if the people in it don’t represent what I want to see.  I don’t need a lecture from a bunch of artists and leftists who will take their clothes off for anybody and smoke dope every now and then—to “open” my mind to other points of view.  I know what works and what doesn’t and that’s pretty much it.  Maybe when I was in my twenties I had things to learn.  These days, nobody knows what I do because they don’t work as hard as I do for information—so there isn’t much for them to “teach” me.  I just want the news—not some 26-year-old kid crying about fairness.  I want to see reports on what’s going on in the world and if the press has to spin it at all, I want a conservative view-point.  I don’t want to listen to liberals cry about every little particle floating around the universe.

It was very disingenuous to listen to the press complain about Trump because honestly, I’m not sure they know where they live. All they really accomplished was that they confirmed they didn’t understand the average Trump voter who has loaded up government positions with conservatives at all levels.  It’s pretty bad that POLITICO released in its recent survey that no members of the press identify themselves as Republican—when the people they are covering most likely are—and the audience who wants their news.  When a majority of the press are openly Democrats it becomes a larger problem and we saw it during the Obama years and the Clinton election where they lost.  They didn’t understand what happened then, or why it was a problem, and they know even less now.  Yet for them the world will go on without them—because that’s how things work.  It’s just too bad their liberal college professors never taught them that so to save them from this present disgrace.

Rich Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

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The Unexpected Fun of Mario Kart 8: What a capitalist culture produces that’s good

If I sat and thought about it, there are a lot of things I deal with on a daily basis that I could claim drove me to depression or misery—where your expectations for things don’t match up with the real-world output. After all, that is the #1 cause of unhappiness.  Such things might be some distant family member that you care about. who got a new tattoo against your wishes, or some catastrophic expensive business disappointment—which happens all the time.  But I stay pretty happy all the time because of my personal means of management no matter what is going on—because I have a lot of hobbies that make me very happy.  One of those things I do is video gaming where I continue to be surprised at the technical achievements that are now coming almost quarterly from the industry—the latest great surprise being the Nintendo Switch counsel.  There have been 900,000 sold in the United States as of this writing and I consider myself lucky to have one of them.  It wasn’t easy to get—but once we did get one it has become a good friend to me.  I use it all the time and it has brought a lot of joy to my family after only a month.  The new Zelda game exclusively on Nintendo is for 2017 what Uncharted 4 was to last year’s game market for the PS4.  It is just a marvelous game on every front.  It’s like playing in a virtual Akira Kurasawa film—just something really special.

On Friday April 28th Mario Kart 8 was released and I didn’t realize how big of an event that was going to be.  My youngest grandson was about to have his 1st birthday party and a lot of family members were going to be there so I planned to bring along the Switch for everyone to play and of course Mario Kart is one of those great games for a crowd to play with. So I found myself at Target hoping to get a copy of the new Mario Kart 8 Deluxe that is simply a revamp of the 2014 game released on the Nintendo Wii.  I thought it would be a fun game and it was a priority for me because we did have a Switch, but I wasn’t prepared for the all-out display that Target had done for the new game on the new system.   Mario Kart 8 had its own display right at the cash register the way a hot new movie release might—which I thought was odd because likely very few people in the marketplace had a Nintendo Switch yet to justify such a roll-out.  But Target was absolutely committed to the new Nintendo game system and they were not shy about it.  I was impressed by that.

We had fun with the Mario Kart 8 game all weekend.  Another of my grandchildren stayed at our house and we played it until he went to bed and then again starting at 8 AM Sunday morning until about noon when his mother picked him up.  As we were saying good-bye to them I noticed she had McDonald’s Happy Meals in the front seat and on the boxes were advertisements for Mario Kart 8 on the Nintendo Switch.  Like Target, McDonald’s had jumped on the whole Mario Kart 8 release with great capitalist enthusiasm and it was fun.  I enjoyed with all the things going on in my life to have a delightful weekend playing with this fun new game system with my kids and grandkids sharing the enthusiasm that often comes from Nintendo products while being exposed to it everywhere I went.

Last week I went to great effort to convey why I liked the movie, The Founder so much.  McDonald’s is about more than food—on many occasions in the past they have infused themselves directly into our culture—as they did recently with the Mario Kart 8 game release for the Nintendo Switch.  As I say a lot, these video games are now part of our cultural heritage—they are updated story telling avenues that are in many cases replacing the effectiveness of movies and books—so I consider them significant.  And specifically, these efforts by Target, McDonald’s and all retail companies associated with Nintendo and the release of Mario Kart 8—a simple kids game that is just fun for anybody to play—are all creations of capitalism and convey the optimism that pours forth from creative enterprise that exists for the pleasure of past time indulgence.  That indulgence only happens in free societies led by capitalist monetary commitments.

I had to see a young lady at her office on the day that Mario Kart had been released and I was early for our meeting. So when I walked in on her she was looking sheepishly at her computer screen trying to hold back a laugh.  I knew she was hiding something so I walked behind her desk and saw that she was playing Mario Kart 8 on her Nintendo Switch and she was trying to hide it from people walking by her office window. I told her I understood and she proceeded to tell me that she went out for lunch to get the new game and she couldn’t wait to play it.  This was a grown woman with a pretty important job.  So Mario is for anyone and there isn’t any harm in blowing off a little steam with some fun—which is why this Switch game system is so powerful–culturally.

After my visit to Target I stopped by Gamestop to see if I could find an AC adaptor for taking the Switch on the run, so I could charge it up away from the docking station connected to my television.  While there the guy at the counter asked me if I had Mario Kart 8 yet—which of course I said I did because I had just bought it at Target from the big display they had there.  That’s when the sales clerk said “but do you have the steering wheels?’  I was a little shocked to see him present two Mario Kart steering wheels to use while playing the fun racing game and of course I couldn’t pass them up.  So It was a Mario weekend for me and I enjoyed it greatly in spite of having plenty to worry about in all other aspects of my life.  Being surrounded by the influence of one game for a game console few people had yet was enjoyable.  I spend a lot of time talking about cultures ancient and present—and Nintendo certainly has a place of honor in our modern myth making efforts as human beings.  I couldn’t help but be impressed because there really isn’t any downside to it.  It’s all a positive aspect of capitalism—you won’t find Mario Kart 8 bringing that kind of joy to places devoid of capitalism—places like Iran, Syria, Russia—Afghanistan and so on.  Only healthy countries functioning from good philosophy and positive money flow can enjoy these types of things and Nintendo was doing a good job of putting their product in the hands of the most people possible which was wonderful.  I’d love to see a world where kids in the middle of Africa could participate in the Mario Kart fun—but for them—they are lucky to find a stable meal because of the lack of capitalism in their countries.

Nintendo specifically is a good, clean company.  All their characters are wholesome and playful.  You don’t have to worry about illicit sex and mental depletion when it comes to Nintendo products.  In every instance I can think of they are child-like in their approach to gaming but revere intelligence in the actual game play. Mario Kart 8 is a smart little party game—and Zelda is very deep—but they all have in common that Nintendo fun of living life without the burdens of modern adulthood drowning in expectations.  Everything is optimistic—just like when we were all children—which is why many people are bringing these Nintendo Switches to work with them.  I don’t get mad when I see such things because I think it makes people more productive and that this video game element to our society is taking the place of more restrictive past times that used to be utilized during lunch hour.  It is a lot more productive to play Mario Kart 8 for an hour than going to BW3s and drinking a couple of beers.  The Mario Kart player will be ready to solve problems and tackle challenges after lunch while the beer drinker will struggle to stay awake and engaged for the rest of the day.  So I see no downside to all this capitalist excess because it helps our society in every phase, mental wellness, economic development, problem solving, enthusiasm endurance—when a simple game like Mario Kart can enhance the level of excitement when shopping at Target or buying Happy Meals at McDonald’s really—everyone wins.  There is no downside.

In that regard, the Nintendo Switch has turned out to be a little bit of a miracle. In just one month it sold over 2 million units worldwide which puts it up there with the PS4 and ahead of Xbox.  A few years ago Nintendo looked like it was falling off the map.  After watching the Superbowl commercial for the Nintendo Switch I was highly skeptical—but now I am a huge fan.  I love it.  It is a perfect marriage of incredible technology and innovative product development rolled up into one beautiful package that touches many aspects of our capitalist culture which advances human thought through entertainment and philosophy.  That to me is a big deal and is something to celebrate.  I certainly did.  After a weekend like I had with the Nintendo Switch, I felt privileged to be able to play a part in it.  Not only was it fun, but it was enhancing in ways I wouldn’t have thought possible even a few months ago.

Rich Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

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Trump’s 100 Days Speech: The media is completely lost as to where they are

It simply never has happened in my lifetime.  Usually presidents of the United States do everything they can to get the approval of the media and they end up giving the people of that profession the illusion that they are running the country. But not Donald Trump, as a man who doesn’t need to raise money constantly for his next campaign, he can afford to blow them off due to the way they conduct their business.  Instead of attending the White House Correspondents Dinner in Washington D.C. like everyone else has—Trump celebrated his first 100 days as president in Pennsylvania talking the same way he did during the campaign baffling everyone in the media who were forced to cover his event.  And guess what, Trump’s event was more popular, and much more interesting than a bunch of political insiders toasting the success of each other by using the president like a piñata.  At their event in Washington D.C. the media took their shots at Trump as expected even though nobody cared but themselves.  But this time Trump also took his shots at the media—and everyone noticed.  This was truly a different kind of president and business as usual is not on the menu.

I understand and support Donald Trump’s behavior toward the press completely.  Functioning just in Cincinnati, Ohio I have over thirty personal media contacts on my phone and have given many interviews over the years on television, radio and in the newspapers.  When I’m working on something that requires those relationships, I do a lot of media.  Over the last few years, the things I have been doing did not require media—but other skills.  And that’s good because in 2012 I had a pretty good blow up with one particular reporter from The Cincinnati Enquirer who took things I said in many different places and plucked them out of context for a hit article designed to help my political opponents purely for partisan reasons.  That guy was Michael Clark who was the education reporter for the Enquirer and what he did was flat-out manipulate the facts to support a liberal position—must like we have been seeing with Trump on a much higher platform.  I have firsthand experience and dealt my situation much the way Trump does now—only when I did it nobody had seen it before.  Even Trump was able to get good press back then because he was doing The Apprentice on NBC and the media needed Trump as much as Trump needed the media.  But when the time came to tear Trump down and keep him out of the White House, that’s when things got ugly as they usually do.

I was always nice to Michael Clark, when he needed a quote I always gave him one professionally no matter where I was in the world—to keep the ink flowing when he most needed it.  I gave him scoops and very articulate answers which helped him enormously because I gave him access to other stories just through association.  But when he played his part in one of those “mad mother” attack pieces—just like what happened to Trump on many occasions during the campaign, and recently happened to Bill O’Reilly, I cut him off after that.  He and I haven’t spoken since and we see each other sometimes around town—but in my book he’s done.  I won’t work with someone like that who is intellectually dishonest and he knows what he’s done. He thought what he did to me would finish me for life and he went for my jugular quite openly and nobody does that to me and gets away with it.  That’s a policy that I live by and it works and Clark apparently didn’t understand it.

Even back in 2012 people still read newspapers, but now many of the reporters I knew at that period are either out of business in 2017 or they are headed in that direction.  I used to read the Enquirer everyday early in the morning like a lot of people I know—but I can’t name a single reader now.  It’s not because of my incident—it’s just that the paper sucks and new media is taking over where the old media used to dominate.  Just covering my education issues back in 2012 there was a thing called the West Chester Buzz, and there was the Pulse Journal that was set up in the plaza owned by one of my old friends from No Lakota Levy at the Liberty Township Kroger Marketplace.  It’s an empty building now—because nobody reads that liberal crap in a conservative region any more.  I’m quite confident that more people read my blog site than those who read Michael Clark’s Enquirer articles because mine are a lot more interesting even if people don’t always agree.  And they can read my stuff anywhere, at home, on their phone, at work—anywhere.  But the Enquirer charges all kinds of fees and you can’t go back and archive information because they run out of server space—they are really pathetic and behind the times.

Donald Trump has experienced much more indignation than I have so his anger and means to strike back are on a much larger scale—so I can imagine what’s in his head and what he did in Pennsylvania will leave an impression.  I purposely went out of my way to let my reporter friends know I can write better than they can more often and with more varied content—just to drive the point home that they aren’t needed in the world.  And when they come after you, they are fair game.  Trump certainly drove that point home from his rally in Pennsylvania.  He addressed his political rivals who are largely in the media by overshadowing their little Washington D.C. event and it made them look pretty pathetic.  Trump knows what’s coming—in just a few years many of those Hollywood actors at that dinner will be out of a job, or just barely hanging on because the entertainment industry is changing just as newspapers were during my little 2012 incident.  ESPN just laid off over 100 personalities there and cable news is drying up.  Movies are largely losing propositions top-heavy with union labor costs meaning the talent they utilize makes more than they can produce in revenue.  Trump knows their business in entertainment and new reporting, but they don’t understand him.  In a few years, most of them will be out of work while Trump is ramping up for his second term and things will be much different then. So why eat out of their hands when he doesn’t need to?

If anybody doubted the effectiveness of Donald Trump those concerns should have been alleviated upon hearing that Pennsylvania speech.  Presidents of the United States just don’t do things like that—especially only 100 days in and given all the negative coverage Trump has had.  He was able to pack the house with an enthusiastic crowd who is turning away from the press.  From the perspective of the media who held a big elaborate annual event in our nation’s capital that should have had the world watching like the Academy Awards Trump sucked up all their hype denying them even that much.  But they deserved it, and I completely understand.  The media doesn’t run the country.  We elect people who do.  They like to think of themselves as protectors of the public from the corruption of the powerful—but all they really are is progressive insurgents trying to alter America’s capitalist system and most of us like our country—we don’t want to change.  I’ve seen it up close from personal experience and I understand why Trump needs to do what he’s doing.  And his strategy will be effective in advancing his needs leaving the current media scrambling to remain relevant.  For those who wonder if Trump will be a good president—that speech on his first 100 days says it all—and points to a time that will be even better which is all any of us can ask for.

Rich Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

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