Category: Progressive

The ‘Rogue One’ Review: A New Hope, not only for Star Wars, but the entire movie industry

For me it was an entirely magical experience.  I’ve always loved Star Wars, even though over the last few weeks I had been troubled with the makers at Lucasfilm who obviously were in despair that Donald Trump was the new President of the United States.  After a few weeks of “banter” it became obvious to me that the root of their problem was a regional one.  Lucasfilm is located in San Francisco at the old  Presido so their points of emphasis on all things political lean-to the left.  But prior to Rogue One being released on December 16th 2016 as the first standalone film to be presented in the Star Wars storyline I personally wished Chris Weitz and others at Lucasfilm luck with the opening because I felt that the direction of the series was growing up and going where George Lucas always intended—to be bigger than terrestrial politics and that this new film deserved fresh judgment.  Gareth Edwards as everyone who reads here knows, I think is a wonderful director—as assessed by the 2014 Godzilla film—so I was very eager to see Rogue One on opening night and once I had was met with a number of Star Wars characters in the lobby of my local theater just days before Christmas.  Outside of the Cobb Luxury Theater at Liberty Center, Ohio were brilliant Christmas lights lining the streets as Star Wars music blared from the park across the street in the harsh 20 degree cold.  A little Jawa and Imperial Trooper were outside adding to the excitement as seen in my Twitter update below from that moment.

Rogue One was a bold movie—certainly created by hard-core Star Wars fans and by committee which hurts it a little bit—but the love for the film by all those who made it was really a jaw dropping experience.  It was a fabulous film done with a classic Saturday morning serial style.  The title screen was very distracting at first because it was the first Star Wars film done without the crawl.  We’ve had seven Star Wars films with a grand opening followed by a crawl of text telling us where we were in the story and what was going on and with Rogue One, that was noticeably gone—on purpose.  It felt to me like this Star Wars movie was actually rebelling against our expectations to be its own thing even though by the ending it literally took us to the beginning of Episode IV the very first Star Wars movie from 1977.

I always wondered as a kid what that first major victory of the Rebellion was as mentioned in that text crawl and Rogue One nearly reflected my imagination remarkably well.  After all, A New Hope plunged us all into the middle of the story and we could only guess at the history of the situation based on what the characters told us about it.  The heroes of the Skywalker family and specifically Han Solo were larger than life manifestations of heroism propelled by unnerving optimism and that carried the saga into realms of mythology which has formed our society around philosophic concepts unparalleled in the history of storytelling.  Rogue One and the rebellion before those heroes entered the metaphorical stage noticeably is about average people daring to do extraordinary things under the collective assembly of a rebellion against the empire.  This was evident in the directorial approach of Rogue One which might have been tempted to retell a modern story with epic heroes which would continue on for generations—but instead they stuck to the mode of the story and the Michael Giacchino musical score never tried to outstrip the original John Williams score—even though I think he could compete with Williams if he wanted to.

One thing I know quite a lot about is John Williams music—I think I know every note from every film he’s ever done for every scene put to film.  I listen to John Williams music in my office almost every morning—it is my breakfast for starting a day and the music from A New Hope is so full and rich.  The themes for each character are so fleshed out and defined—it is an unquestioned masterpiece so it is quite a task to ask Michael Giacchino to step in with only about a month of time to score Rogue One which is a film designed to essentially be the first moments of A New Hope.  And the music has that rushed feel not in a bad way, but in the way of Rogue One itself—a band of incomplete and flawed people joining together in rebellion against a tyrannical empire also full of jaded and incomplete people not quite fleshed out as life forms to do battle on the epic planet of Scarif in a kind of grand crescendo.  I have listened very carefully to Michael Giacchino’s score and I think many of his tones are underplayed on purpose to be deliberately fleshed out in A New Hope as Luke Skywalker eventually enters the picture and finds his own guardian angel in the veritable Han Solo at the cantina in Mos Eisley space port.  That’s where the rebellion finally finds its true heroes which they can clip their star onto and finally overtake the empire in the movies we all know so well by now.  By the end of Rogue One the music coalesces into themes that sound nearly right out of the New Hope soundtrack.  Maybe that was on purpose, maybe it just took Giacchino time to find his Star Wars legs—but I think the small amount of time given to him was to evoke that kind of unorganized chaos that often happens with battle only to be brought to a finer point in movies we’ve already seen and that was quite brilliant.  In that way these standalone movies never have to be as good as George Lucas made the originals, or the John Williams music which accompanied our memories.  But the stories of how those events came to be are infinitely fascinating and in that regard Rogue One is a masterpiece of cinema.

Even bolder was the inclusion of old Star Wars characters who are either long passed from life on this earth or too old to ever possibly be seen again as a 19-year-old princess.  The decision to make lifelike full onscreen CGI characters in this day and age of 4K televisions was monstrously bold because every little flaw would be easy to detect.  But these makers of Rogue One had full scenes of the late Peter Cushing speaking to members of the empire under hard light and in close-up—which was bewildering.  Give the movie a standing ovation for not playing it safe.  And it works.  When Princess Leia speaks finally at the end for a brief second accompanied by the strings of Giacchino’s bold soundtrack I looked around me in the theater and there were tears streaming down the faces of the full crowd.  The audience looked as if they had Christmas lights on their faces which glittered in the reflection of the white interior of the Tantive IV—the ship which we first see at the start of A New Hope.  Then suddenly the film cut to credits not letting anybody linger in contemplation which gave the effect of wanting to see it again immediately.  This wasn’t just a movie, or a tip of the hat to a cinematic masterpiece—this was a bold rebellion of conventional cinema history declaring its independence to throw off convention and serve a timeless story with new installments to bridge mankind into the everlasting.

So dear reader, you might understand now the feeling I had when I shot that short video for the Twitter upload.  Until you’ve seen the movie, you won’t understand—it just sounds like music with some people dressed up in front of a movie theater.  But the unconscious connection that those characters had to our mood was very similar to that experience when you’re coming out of church after a particularly inspiring sermon to greet someone you otherwise wouldn’t talk to because you shared a common experience.  They understood how magical the movie was from behind their costumes and they could see the joy on our faces and they played right along.  Rogue One is a great movie without all those secondary considerations, but there is a magic to seeing one of these Star Wars movies on opening night as they now have such a hook into our human culture.  To make it better for me, my wife and I saw Rogue One at the Cinebistro and had a very nice dinner at the theater which I never get tired of.  So it was very nice that the theater management went to the extra step to bring in costumed Star Wars characters to patrol the lobby and had the foresight to set up a booth at the park pavilion at Liberty Center to blare Star Wars music down the street to mix with the Christmas festivities of Holiday shoppers vibrant on a cold December Friday evening.   Yes it was very magical.

I think those tears on the faces of the audience were of pure joy even though it was quite sad to see each member of the Rogue One team get picked apart by the ominous strength of imperial might.  The movie reminded me of The Magnificent Seven—the original starring Yul Brynner who were gunned down at the end trying to save the town.  But the film didn’t end there.  Getting those plans to Princess Leia was like a last-minute play in American football where the losing team had almost no chance of scoring an impossible needed touchdown as a superior opponent set up a tenacious defense.  It didn’t so much matter how many poor rebels were killed so long as before one died they handed the plans to the next so that they might just get the objective to the Tantive IV before Darth Vader killed them all.  The desperation was so evident and the end of the film felt the same as when a team goes into overtime in a football game—and at the end we’re not dealing with an outmatched opponent as we might have thought at the beginning, but two even teams about to do battle to the death in A New Hope (overtime).

I loved Rogue One, I’ll probably go see it many more times while at the theater and I will buy it on the first day its available on Blue-rey.  The film is a gift to the next generation.  My grandchildren will love these new Star Wars movies and I can clearly see the benefit of taking this series well into the future.  My wife and I did some Christmas shopping after the movie and sort of walked around sorting out our feelings about Rogue One.  One of my daughters called me to get my verdict of the film, as she and her husband had seen it already with an advance screening—and she was anxious about my opinions and wanted desperately to share her enthusiasm for the film.  She had to contain her feelings for our sake not to give anything away, and when she called, I was still in stoic mode.  I don’t get emotional about anything unless its extreme joy or anger—except for when I write.  So I mechanically went through the events of the movie with her that I liked, but didn’t come close to articulating the full impact of it until after I had slept on it.  That’s what kind of movie this is.  It’s a no brainer—everyone should see Rogue One.  It’s a special film for a special time and it not only leads to a classic story called A New Hope but it is in and of itself “a new hope” for the entire movie industry.  It’s a feat in and of itself that not only unites people of different political beliefs, world cultures, and young and old alike, but with our primordial past and the hope we all have to live free of tyranny against the natural inclinations by those whose faulty personal identifications seek to imprison us much like Galen Erso was.  That is after all the point of the movie.  Even under duress for his natural brilliance Galen Erso “rebelled” in the only way that he could and hoped that freedom would follow.  And in those tears in that audience I think that most people understood the situation that Galen was in—because in their lives—they are stuck in much the same scenario—thus the brilliance of cinema to reach our hearts in ways that no other mode can.  Rogue One does.  It wasn’t the best movie I’ve ever seen, but I’m a 50-year-old man.  For a lot of young people ages 4 through 15 though—this will be and it will become the standard they measure everything off of in the future.  And that is a very, very, very good thing.

Rich Hoffman

 

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Atlas Shrugged, the Sequel: The Trump Way

The best way to describe the situation now transpiring in Washington D.C. politics is as a sequel to the famed American novel Atlas Shrugged—where the engines of the world came down from their mountain hideaway to save society from the depots of statism—once of course that those politicians had surrendered their authority to John Galt at the climax of the novel.  As Rex Tillerson the CEO of Exxon was announced as the next Secretary of State as kind of bookend to the previous week’s nominations it was clear that what was about to happen under the Trump administration was a new classic American novel being written before our very eyes which would change the nature of politics and human philosophy for all time.

Watching the very good series The Crown on Netflix it captures wonderfully the problems of our thus far human history.  We most define our human existence with the thousand years or so of domination from Great Britain and how that island country shaped European history.  But essentially, they are a carryover of the Roman Empire which was a spawn of Greek, Egyptian and Mesopotamian life.  Then of course is the orient and their variety of god-like kings and queens who have ruled in much the way of the British monarchy—so by watching that one Netflix show—a novice viewer can get quite a grasp which was displayed I thought brilliantly during Queen Elizabeth’s coronation, of the trouble between religion, aristocracy and the management of government with the “commoner” stuck in the middle.

Communism was a philosophic invention along the lines of Immanuel Kant and had appeal to the “commoner” who simply wanted to be free of that impossible situation stuck between monarchies, state governments and religious institutions so they sought to level the playing field—justifiably so.  Governments of the day, at the end of the 19th century into the 20th recognized that communism would cripple the economies of their enemies, so they purposely shipped it to Russia to keep them out of future world wars and the land acquisition that came with kingdom building.  Then they sought to spread it around the world to pull free countries like the United States back into that control of the state, religion, and a society of aristocrats acting as “fighters for the people” when in fact they were just another royal class of despots seeking power on the backs of the “commoner.”  Atlas Shrugged was essentially an argument against this behavior whereas this new sequel under a Trump presidency is a proposal going forward for how things should be.

Of course people who sympathize with the communist philosophy do not like Atlas Shrugged or Donald Trump—but that’s good—because it has been their thinking which has threatened to throw the world backwards—essentially to the European middle-ages all along.  The new religion of their control is not Catholicism this time, but “environmental regulation” which is the modern term for religious control and statism typical of the monarchy driven European mentality so evident at the end of the Roman Empire and the start of the Inquisition.

In that context the political nomination of Rex Tillerson as Secretary of State is quite extraordinary.  As demonized as oil executives have been over the years, largely by the communist/environmentalist movement, to put one in charge of such an important diplomatic role from the Executive Branch is one of Donald Trump’s boldest picks yet.  Tillerson is one of those “engines of the world” a person who makes things happen and for the first time in known history—these kinds of people will be running the affairs of the United States—a young country that has deliberately turned away from the statism of Europe for an opportunity under capitalism to evoke a new philosophy utilized by the human race rooted in freedom.  In America aristocratic concerns don’t matter as merit defines worth and that is largely the type of people who are making up Trump’s cabinet.

Where up to this point the understanding of what built an economy or generated a nation’s GDP was ill-defined as would-be aristocrats hemorrhaging the political class of its ethics hid the truth behind Kantian philosophies—the big switch now is that it will be forever clear who and what those engines are—and there will be no going back. Currently the reaction from the liberal-minded is fear at Trump’s picks because they have been trained to be essentially stupid people—purposely handicapped to play their social roles—in much the way that Queen Elizabeth II in the Netflix show, The Queen was purposely educated only in matters of the Constitution and little else, to keep her properly in check within the various balances of power between the State and the Church.  Millions upon millions of children have been purposely handicapped through their public educations to be enormously stupid adults illiterate in basic functions to essentially prevent them from discovering the truth that the Trump presidency will reveal—that the engines of the world are businessmen and those engaged in commerce from first the creative side, then the ruthless competition which forges only the best to emerge followed by-product fulfillment—the boons it brings to a society are born.

Recently I was on a flight from Tokyo, Japan to Osaka and I sat next to a young Japanese girl who was quite impressed with the suit I was wearing.  You see, in Japan their youth had not been taught to hate business, but instead saw it as an extension of the samurai philosophy from their 1600 A.D. feudal period.  She bowed deeply before sitting next to me and thanked me for bringing business to her country.  She couldn’t have been any older than 21 or 22 years old, so she was just a kid, but I was quite surprised how sincere she was about seeing a businessman on an airplane. That goes a long way to explaining why the Japanese are so successful with a much smaller country than say China or even Korea—because they revere business and commerce as a natural extension to their warrior past, and they value it.  That value is reflected in their culture and young people don’t think anything of bowing to a foreigner on an airplane dressed in a suit because they have been taught that businessmen and women make the world move forward.  It is something to respect.  Now the fool might say the girl was looking for a sugar daddy, which couldn’t have been further from the truth.  People who think like that are stupid and there is no way to salvage their lives for goodness.

Watching Saturday Night Live since the Trump election it has been grotesquely obvious that our youth do not understand Trump, business, or the politics of economic necessity.  All they’ve ever been taught is to hate capitalism and to adhere to the new age religion of global warming—as a backdoor means of communism repackaged for our modern youth.  The jokes on Saturday Night Live have been horrendously flat because the writers and actors clearly do not understand the world revealed to them by the Trump election so they only know to grapple with it through demeaning means.  The root of their failure is that they don’t understand or respect merit—therefor they have no appreciation for value.  For instance, two weeks ago from this writing they proposed a skit about young children who desired a Fisher Price Wishing Well—gifted children who wanted to step over childhood and enter adulthood where they could announce their great achievements to the world perched atop a great balcony, and the wishing well was a toy meant to appease their anxiety at being trapped as children to inexperience.   Honestly, they were essentially attacking my own childhood, because I was living the punchline of their joke only it didn’t come out funny—it was spiteful, even to people who couldn’t personally identify.  SNL was mad at the type of children who know they are too smart and good for the social standard and couldn’t wait to grow up and become great John Galts.

This past Saturday was yet another really pathetic skit about a day in the life of Donald Trump where the writers completely failed to understand the president-elect except through the lens of having deficiencies which portrayed him as an out-of-touch bourgeoisie—the only public education definition given to them to understand wealth.  The sad irony is that before Trump the writers were free to make jokes about the political right because we don’t take things too serious.  After all, we’re used to not being represented in popular media, so we have no choice but to support liberal artists if we want some culture.  But the political left don’t know how to do the same for us because they’ve always functioned from the aristocratic assumption that their way of thinking was in the majority.   It wasn’t and now they are having a hard time understanding how to cope.

The truth of the matter is that it is extreme minorities who make everything in the world work—and those are the best of us determined to be so through intense competition, merit through education, and those who just out-work everyone else.  In Trump’s new world the engines of the world will be free to do their justice and those opponents which have guarded against innovation through statist controls are having their voice taken from them in a social context.  The engines of the world now carry the torch for the first time, and that is quite an achievement.  One that will have lasting, and deep consequences right out of the gate in 2017.  And that is a very exciting prospect.  For those who love the original Atlas Shrugged, novel, finally they get to write the sequel.  This time it won’t come to us through the great American novel, but through the Executive Branch.   And that will be a story that will literally change the world for the better.

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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10 Seconds of Sheer Bliss: ‘Star Wars’ transcending politics and the #dumpstarwars movement

Obviously, many of the makers of the new Star Wars film, Rogue One regionally identify with San Francisco politics, because after all, that is where George Lucas moved his Lucasfilm company just prior to selling his empire to Disney in 2012.  They are not Donald Trump fans and have foolishly engaged in a progressive campaign against the president-elect adopting the same slant as Saturday Night Live has—lampooning Trump and the supporters of the new rebellion in America which they’ve associated as racists, bigots, and homophobes.

Where they’ve gone wrong is in assuming—including Mark Hamill, (Luke Skywalker himself) is that the meaning of Star Wars was always about diversity and togetherness in a collective kind of ooze, as opposed to what the masses actually cleave to making it one of the most popular modern stories of all time.  They obviously don’t understand why Star Wars is successful, and they don’t necessarily need to so long as they stick to the formula that George Lucas started so many years ago.   Rogue One is a war movie inspired from the World War II era, and that involved European politics from a time when nations came together to combat the evil of Hitler—and that is a universal theme everyone can get behind.  I personally like Garth Edwards as a director—he did a great job on the recent Godzilla film, and now that I’ve heard the Michael Giacchino soundtrack for Rogue One, particularly the section shown below at the 1:40 mark, I am getting very excited for the new film.  I wish I could have an hour-long soundtrack of just that kind of music because it reflects how I personally think.  If you could put music to my way of thinking 24 hours a day seven days a week—it would sound like that—that’s it!

I’ve went to the trouble of warning these modern Star Wars makers, like the Rogue One writer, Chris Weitz to story group leader at Lucasfilm Pablo Hidalgo and the director of Episode 8 Rian Johnson through Twitter that they needed to can their opinions because they don’t understand Star Wars in an ethical way so far as it relates to the world outside of Lucasfilm—by way of its art.  I think they are too young and as natural second-handers to George Lucas, they don’t get the appeal because they live in a filmmaking bubble.  Even George Lucas didn’t understand it for most of his life—if he ever did.  In fact, Lucas may have only understood Star Wars after he survived the car crash that nearly killed him and ever since—he has been losing that understanding year by year.  As an artist, he tapped into something by accident and that became something that changed the world philosophically and when film industry employees seek to bring modern political meaning to Star Wars, they cheapen it.  For instance, as Chris Weitz stated about Trump supporters—foolishly—the empire from the Star Wars movies were racists white supremacists and that the villains from Rogue One were much like those who put the New York billionaire into the White House over the corrupt Hillary Clinton—whom many at Lucasfilm were openly supporting.  I reminded all those mentioned above that Finn was a black guy and that Captain Phasma was a woman and as my friend Matt Clark pointed out recently, all of the Clone Troopers were copied from the DNA of Jango Fett—who certainly wasn’t a “white guy.”  So I told Chris that if he thought that’s what made Rogue One tick as a movie—as the writer—then the film would likely suck.

http://www.businessinsider.com/trump-supporters-star-wars-rogue-one-boycott-2016-12

What those Lucasfilm employees obviously don’t understand is that most of the people I know who ran the Trump campaign on the ground level all loved Star Wars and that from their perspective the evil empire was the Democratic Party and the villains were clearly the Clintons.  The destruction of the second Death Star was election day 2016 and we celebrated by pulling down the statue of the evil empress Clinton in the city square of a metaphorical Coruscant.  So we are clearly at odds with each other and our definitions of things are defined by regional relationships—Lucasfilm by the progressive views of the coastal cities of New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles—and the Trump rebellion from the flyover states like Ohio, Georgia, Texas, Indiana and Michigan.  One thing that Star Wars taught me as a young person, which the modern Lucasfilm employees have not yet mastered is that the space opera is best defined on wings of art—the kind James Joyce participated in—which tapped into ancient roots of human experience and that it is there that the keys to understanding the power and success of Star Wars is best applied.

It was only because of Star Wars that I was inspired as a young twenty-something to read the great European classics like The Canterbury Tales and Finnegan’s Wake.  One of those is actually medieval literature while the other is an attempt at preservation of life before the Catholic takeover of Europe specifically in the British Isles.  Star Wars is all about that kind of thing mixed with oriental cultures.   Lucas properly took all of the world’s mythologies and placed them on an infinite tapestry of galactic magnitude and benefited it even more by setting the story long before our modern human history.  The genius of that was to remove the audience from the here and now and place it comfortably in the past so that reflection was possible without the immediacy of modern troubles.  So I literally have spent the last thirty years reading classic literature from around the world because I was inspired by Star Wars as a kid to do so—and I am far better off for it now.  With these new Star Wars films I am hopeful that the same thing happens to millions of other people over the coming decades because there is a real hope that I have that this art of Star Wars will carry mankind to a new level of understanding even in spite of Kathy Kennedy’s immediate desires to find female directors and stick progressive causes into Star Wars which rips the mind away from the transcendental nature which evokes the magic in the first place.  She and Lucasfilm in general understand I think enough to get by.

For instance, Rogue One is really a classic spin on an old World War II movie.  The upcoming Han Solo film which goes into production at the turn of the year 2017 has the art department looking at old Frederic Remington paintings to get the look of that movie to reflect a classic western, so these guys get it, and I look forward to seeing what they get up on the screen.  I understand that we will see a newer Millennium Falcon with some cool paint schemes on it, which will be wonderful as Han Solo is my favorite character.  He’s a very Ayn Rand type of hero.  I am so excited about that project that I’m planning to visit the studio where they are filming while they are there in the first quarter of 2017—because it’s wonderful as a work of art to see those types of elements being put together in something that will inspire the world.  I’m not saying anything more about the Millennium Falcon because it’s all kind of a secret and I respect that.  We’ll all see it soon enough.

The success of the new Han Solo movie will largely depend on how well Rogue One does, so I am rooting for the film to do well.  I won’t be boycotting Star Wars just because the filmmakers at Lucasfilm don’t understand the presidency or modern necessity of Donald Trump.  They’ll get it in hindsight, but if they don’t see it now—I won’t fault them for it.  They have an important job to do in my mind and they need to stick to it.  I will say that I am encouraged by what I’ve seen so far, like that Michael Giacchino film score, and the recent update to the video game Battlefront where there is a DLC featuring Rogue One events which came out this week.  I’ve been playing it and let me just say—it’s quite astonishing.  Additionally, this past week the new VR Mission for X-Wing came out on Playstation and it was jaw dropping cool.  The neatest video game experience I’ve ever had.  There isn’t even a close second and all this is a result of Star Wars newest film Rogue One which has resurrected the science and ambition those films evoked in the 1980s.  I never thought in my wildest imaginings that I’d be able to sit in the cockpit of an X-Wing Fighter and perform dogfighting with other ships around a massive Star Destroyer on the edge of an asteroid field in the most perfect 3D imagery I’ve ever seen.  I say that from the perspective of working with the RealD 3D guys back in 2008 when they were perfecting their cameras for the revolution we see now in movie theaters.  I can only imagine what kind of technical breakthroughs we will see over the next few years as Star Wars continues to inspire science and art to push human understanding and the Trump presidency opens up the purse strings of capitalism to make those ideas happen.  If everyone can’t yet see the big picture—I can deal with that.  But lack of vision doesn’t make people correct in their assumptions.  Chris would do his project and Lucasfilm a tremendous service if he’d just keep his mouth shut and do his job within that context.

Meanwhile I will be one of the first to see Rogue One.  I ordered the soundtrack from Michael Giacchino based exclusively on that clip.  I will now go listen to those few seconds of music at the 1:40 mark for the rest of the day because it’s that kind of thing which feeds my brain—which is my favorite part of my body—and it likes to eat.  Matt Clark and I are planning a Star Wars special on 1600 WAAM on New Year’s Eve and we’ll review the new Rogue One movie and elaborate on all these topics more, once we have had the benefit of seeing the movie and comparing it to the history of the franchise which are shaped in translation by the politics of our time.  So we’ll see.  I’m hopeful, but will reserve my judgment on the product presented.  And as of now, I’m enjoying the possibilities that come with Star Wars and the hope for the human race that often trails in its wake.  I will say this, thank you Michael for that 10 seconds of music shown in the Rogue One scoring session.  Because I love 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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Andrew F. Puzder is the Labor Secretary: Trump’s brilliance versus Teddy Roosevelt’s poor understanding of business

 

I happened to hear a bit of the Glenn Beck radio show recently where their faces were melting off over Trump’s “big government” ideas and were comparing him to the progressive Teddy Roosevelt.  Beck was also making fun of Sarah Palin because she had supported Trump and then she was outraged when the President-elect picked up the phone and worked with Carrier air conditioners to keep their jobs in Indiana.  It is amazing to me just how stupid people are out there about business which is disappointing in the case of Beck—because he’s rich.  But obviously, with him, it was luck, because if he understood business he’d have done better things with the money he acquired during his years with Fox New than he has because the biggest difference between Trump and Teddy Roosevelt is that Donald knows the value of money.  Teddy Roosevelt with all his hard work, all his books and efforts never really understood how his family’s fortune was made whereas Donald Trump not only figured it out, but he grew it.  This has been reflected in Trump’s cabinet picks, most of which I am very excited about.  But the most exciting one so far was that of Andrew F. Puzder, the CEO of CKE Restaurants.  You might recognize his work from the following commercials. 

Yeah, that’s my kind of guy and certainly not a friend of labor unions.  Glenn Beck should know better, you can’t have a Constitution if parasites like these labor unions are continuous imposing themselves on that political philosophy.  For the Constitution to work, capitalism must be free and open and only then can we have a true Constitutional Republic.  The danger of course is that you never want politicians to use big government to keep themselves in power, and with the Roosevelt family, both Teddy and Franklin, they were obsessed with power largely because they never in their lives understood the value of money.  Trump though, and people like Andrew Puzder do understand money and for them the Executive Branch is a “step down.”  If they wanted power and money they’d stay in the private industry and continue to pay off politicians to preserve their fortunes.  However, they are after a complete philosophy change in America that will take our Constitutional Republic to roots that it would otherwise never have had—and really never has. 

So I LOVVVVEEEE the pick of Andrew F. Puzder as the Secretary of Labor.  THAT is a dream come true for me!  I like having smart people in these positions for a change, because by their very nature, they will reduce the size of government because of their philosophy of pro economic growth techniques.  And few understand that needed swagger more than Andrew Puzder.  GREAT pick Donald Trump!  Great pick!  I am looking more and more forward to January 20th 2017!

Hey, hot models who eat hot dogs need jobs too, and now we have someone in a big job who understands that.

http://www.allenbwest.com/matt-palumbo/breaking-trump-labor-secretary-announced

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 Future of Politics in America: Conservatives split over philosophy, progressives fade in failure

As I said on WAAM radio with Matt Clark a long time ago, everything is now occurring just as I predicted it would.  The Democratic Party is coming to an official end, the last vestiges of it are dividing and separating themselves out as we speak here on December 4, 2016.  The upcoming Trump presidency will further destroy the party forcing old liberals to join Republicans who defect into a Libertarian Party.  Those who cannot make that leap will then become an extreme minority of old communist relics who no longer have a hook into the political world.  By necessity, the networks will have to adapt to the populism being broadcast from the White House leaving all the current liberal controls needing to adapt or lose their careers to fresh faces not corrupted with the downward looking limits of the Millennials employed by mass media.  The networks will use this change in populism to put fresh faces in front of the cameras so they can get younger and more attractive reporters in hopes of boosting their declining ratings which will continue to slide into new forms of media presentation over the coming decade.  Welcome to the new world in America which will put its stamp on the rest of the world in a uniting way.  But now let’s get more specific in these far looking predictions—because after all, there are tactical advantages in knowing these things that will benefit Republicans if they’ll listen and position themselves accordingly.

A few years ago when radio personalities like Glenn Beck and John Stossel were making it fashionable to call themselves “libertarians” many in the Tea Party movement migrated in that direction because they wanted a live and let live approach to all things in life—which sounds good until you get down into the details.  In Beck and Stossel’s case, both are former liberals who did drugs in their early days, and those aspects of their characters were rising to the surface to essentially form a new political party of people who were financially conservative, but essentially socially liberal.  The Trump administration will further exacerbate this difference by uniting America under the flag of fiscal responsibility and strong economic dollar performance forcing political identities to split along social parameters.  The good thing will be that both political parties will be united on the fiscal matters as Trump reverses the direction of the debt performance.

This is already evident in the sword rattling that is going on between China and America over Taiwan.  China using American debt and jobs invented in the United States to feed mostly capitalist markets have leveraged themselves into a superpower falsely propping up their communist government.  The big secret that Trump and his billionaire friends know is that the great fear China has is in America taking that economy away from them—because the Chinese as a culture do not have the ability to invent.  They can use the “Art of War” to steal other people’s inventions and economic power, but they cannot as a communist country of over a billion compliant souls invent things themselves.  Yet China has supported the communist rule of North Korea and the further stifling of economic activity in Vietnam and Cambodia where great sins in the markets of sex trafficking thrive in the vacuum of civility.

China poised falsely on its booming economy of stolen wealth is the greatest threat of war with Japan which of course costs America a lot of money to defend diplomatically, and literally.  So the way to put China back in its place and renegotiate trade deals, and interest rates is to take away their security and for Trump—that starts by making friends with Taiwan.  That is the first step of many in Making America Great Again starting with trade imbalances between America and China.  To the critics out there who fear war with China if provoked—China can’t afford war with America—so don’t worry about it.

Now with the smoke clear and the type of philosophy that Trump will bring to the Republican Party which he now controls, long time conservatives like Ann Coulter and Sarah Palin are beginning to be critical as their Tea Party libertarian roots prevent them from joining the new Republican Party.  Instead they will join with Stossel and Beck into the new liberal party in America for which many moderates left over from the current Democrats will find refuge. Granted Ann Coulter is not a libertarian but as things evolve, they will be more appealing to her sense of identity in much the way that she dated Andrew Stein a decade ago—a major liberal in New York.  People like Ann who have made their livings as pundits standing against the current administrations needs to be in a rebellion party, so as Trump reaches across the political battle lines that have been entrenched for several centuries and makes deals that puts fiscal conservativism on ground that everyone can agree with, the focus will then move to social big tent government republicanism and small government Constitutionally based philosophy which will pull Ann and those like her more toward the evolving Libertarians.

I’m not a pundit and do not make my living off opinion.  I offer those opinions to help people navigate more appropriately with the challenges of our day, but I don’t have a hook in the swamp of Washington D.C. or its connecting entities in the states.  But I am a manager of many things, and a good one at that, so the means to getting to a fiscally responsible country that broadcasts morality to the rest of the world is my concern.  If government gets too big and wants to suppress me, I have my Bill of Rights to use as a weapon against it, so I’m not afraid of anything when it comes to government.  A few years ago I took a test when libertarians were becoming fashionable because many people wanted to pull me into that tent of political thinking and I wasn’t about to go because essentially I have very hard-line views on drugs and ethical conduct at a national level.  I am not a “live and let live” guy on drug policy.  If a neighbor of mine smokes dope and I smell it, there will be trouble.

So as far as the war on drugs and stopping drug cartels in far away lands, the government and its military is something I can get behind if they are managing the finances properly.  After all, you can’t have a good moral country if everything is loose like they might be at a Grateful Dead concert.  Those types of philosophies do not go together.  I am all for advocating strength and military superiority to broadcast the nationalism to the far corners of the world to help them adapt capitalism and that won’t happen smoking dope with John Stossel on a street corner complaining about a long work week.  When I took that test I was somewhere in the range of 98% Republican as opposed to any kind of liberal view.  The manager in me often uses the structure of the rules of the day to tactically outmaneuver people so I can see how a Donald Trump would have success at the federal level where a loser like Barack Obama would become a tyrant.  Likely Donald Trump is probably between 50% and 75% Republican, I’m sure he has much softer views on things than I do, but the future of the Republican Party will be defined by him.  There will be things I don’t like—that are too soft, but I’ll be able to live with those because most people disappoint me anyway.  What I care about in the end are results, and Trump will get them.

Already I can see a huge political change locally in my home town of Cincinnati.  There was a great dinner that many of the leaders of the freedom movement attended several years ago, Matt Clark included.  CLICK HERE TO REVIEW.  Doc Thompson was there too, along with Ann Becker and many other movers and shakers of Southern Ohio politics which has very directly shaped the current political climate over the last eight years.  Of those people who were all united behind the effort to stop the liberalism of Barack Obama—the socialist slide over the abyss–under Trump many of them will soon be at odds with each other because that’s how the new party of conservativism will evolve.  Former friends will become enemies politically and America will hash out that evolving philosophy in a much more productive fashion than they have in the past.  But the old Democrats—those who can bend will join the Libertarians.  Those who can’t will simply break.  The Clintons and their progressivism are out.  Their funeral was the concession speech that Hillary Clinton gave and the faces in that room confirmed it.

The media also knows it.  The Saturday Night Live episode from 12-3-2016 confirms that the political left is lost in European liberalism and as the topography changes there will further castigate liberalism out of Europe.  Remember too what I said about the election of Francois Hollande as socialism took over completely the politics of France.  After just one five-year term which is up in 2017 he is out and the socialists do not have a replacement that can stop the rise of conservativism in France.  So, this is something that’s happening all around the world.  Brexit in the United Kingdom, Trump in America, and now a conservative eruption in France of all places.  The entire European Union is on the way toward dissolution and progressivism is out of fashion and from that new philosophies and political parties will emerge—forever.   

When the smoke clears, I will still be a committed Republican and the party will be stronger than it ever has been.  Many of my friends will be Libertarians and that movement will gain in strength as traditional Democrats simply fade away.  The evidence is already mounting, Democrats have bankrupted cities, schools, and states.  College institutions will have to completely rethink how they go about business because the structure that liberals have committed themselves to is gone.  The last vestiges of their world is chipping away by the second and it’s never coming back.  They are morally and philosophically bankrupt and now that they’ve been exposed in an election, the world is turning away from them for good.  Little do they know, but they’ll all be better off for it and soon former friends will become new political enemies as the story marches on in a chapter of American history not yet written.  And it will be exciting. 

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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Playstation VR: The future of education

I’ve had it for a while now but given all the news of the day haven’t really had a chance that was justifiable to discuss it, but I have to say, the new Playstation VR system is an absolutely stunning evolution for home video game play.  I have a rather insatiable appetite for adventure and violence with an emphasis on competitive necessity so video game play is actually a time management tool for me which I enjoy immensely.  For instance, I am proud to be a grown man with many intense responsibilities who can still reach level 90 on Star Wars: Battlefront and being one of the top players in the ship to ship combat even against the best in the entire world—who have nothing else to do in life but play video games.  I don’t have that luxury and I still manage in some games to have 30 or more kills per game—which is quite high.  Video games are a nice outlet for my aggressive nature so when Sony came out with the new Playstation VR in October I was one of the first to get it—because honestly, I couldn’t wait.  However, I was highly skeptical about how well it would actually work so let me report that it is absolutely mind-blowing.

For context, my video game playing days began almost 40 years ago with the Atari 2400 set up on a spare black and white television that had a very small 10” or so screen.  When my family wanted to do something really nice for me on a special weekend when I had friends over, or for a birthday, my dad would hook up that old Atari on a slightly larger 24” color television and we could see colors in our video games—so that was my point of reference.  Of those old Atari games one of my favorites was the game called Adventure—which was a story of dragon slaying and treasure hunting that needed a lot of imagination to buy into—since the game play was some really primitive graphics.  My other favorite game was The Empire Strikes Back which was essentially a Star Wars version of the popular game Defender.  So I was around at the beginning of home video game play and it’s been something I’ve done now for four decades.  I’ve never been one of those people who only play video games in what little spare time that I have—it’s always been a supplement to my life—but I have always enjoyed them.  I remember fondly growing up and playing games at the arcade for 25 cents each play then coming home and playing games on our home system.  So when Sony beat everyone else to the market with an affordable VR system for the counsole market, I had to get it mainly for the sentiment.  I didn’t expect it to work very well, and I thought it would have some bright spots—but my expectations were pretty low.

So I get this thing home and spent a lot of time setting it up—and getting to know it since much of the motion control stuff were things I wasn’t familiar with.  To be honest I bought the Playstation VR so that I could play the Star Wars: Battlefront VR mission that was coming out on December 6th, and at the time, that was still a few months away, so I wasn’t in any real hurry.  I picked up a few games to try out with it, like VR Worlds and a horror game called Rush Blood, but otherwise had my target on that extension of Battlefront during the upcoming Holiday Season.  Once it was all hooked up one of the first games I played was Ocean Decent on the VR Worlds disk and I was immediately enraptured.  The graphics were so jaw dropping real that I felt immediately that the concept of video game play had just changed forever.  By the time I played a game called The London Heist, I was sure of it.  The graphics were stunning, the game play intensely real and the entire platform truly did take your mind to a different place.  I took the headset off and put it down for a little while thinking of all the nice things I had said earlier in the year about the latest Uncharted game for Playstation and I found myself looking very much forward to the first wave of adventure games that surely would hit the market because the VR game play truly did put a player into another world while sitting in the middle of your living room.  You can easily be transported to another place and time with the Playstation VR because honestly, your mind doesn’t know the difference.  We are so used to accepting realities with our eyes and ears and the Playstation VR does a great job of giving those two senses enough information to convince your brain that what you are seeing is truly real.  It is quite astonishing.

I found the Playstation VR to be a real hit during our Thanksgiving celebrations as it was a real ice breaker.  People visiting our house for dinner were able to go on a deep ocean dive or battle robotic monstrosities in the safety of my couch and as each person took off the headset there was a look of wonder on their faces.  That alone would have made the cost of the whole enterprise worth it to me.  But coming up still was my Battlefront DLC so the adventure was just getting started.  It seemed unbelievable that such a thing would even be available for the home market.  It would seem that the VR technology should be so expensive that you could only get the experience at a place like Dave and Busters or the Main Event.

Recently I was at the Main Event in West Chester enjoying the video games they have there during a lunch break on a rather intense day of work and I couldn’t help but think that the Playstation VR made all the games exhibited there seem clunky.   What I had at my house far exceeded what the best of the video game market had to offer and that is saying something. I have been in contact with the people at VR Immersive Education who are about to present their Apollo 11 Experience to the Playstation market.  They already offer their VR documentary of an Apollo 11 moon landing on the Oculus Rift and HTC Hive systems.  They told me they plan to release their wonderful software to the Playstation community around Christmas time.  To me, projects like their Apollo 11 Experience are where VR really thrives and is certainly the future of that technology.  The games are fun, but what VR does best is put you into places that might otherwise be prohibitive, such as on a conference call with a contact in another country where you can see what they do and look around the room at things you couldn’t see unless you are actually there.   Or visit a city or museum in a far away place and look at things in the same fashion as you would if you were just strolling around.  That makes all VR technology extremely education oriented because it can put you in places you otherwise couldn’t get to.  Regarding this Apollo 11 VR Experience, it puts you on the moon realistically which is as close as you’re going to get aside from actually being there.

http://immersivevreducation.com/the-apollo-11-experience/

Not only is this new VR technology fun for gaming, it is the most powerful tool we have now for education.  On the Playstation VR headset there is voice activation, so this would be the best way to learn a new language, get a pilot’s license, learn to drive a car or interact with an environment that is not around your home.  The potential is just jaw dropping.  Needless to say, I am deeply impressed.  What I thought would just be a gimmick turned out to be a technical game changer.  I am still looking forward to the Star Wars: VR Mission coming up, but now more than anything I am looking forward to the education programs like Apollo 11 and voyages to Mars that are coming up for VR headsets.  For kids, there is no better ways to learn about space, or even the inner workings of the human body, geography, or human interactions through speech than with the VR technology that is being unleashed before us now.  My respect extends beyond evolutionary nostalgia derived from my first youthful aphorisms—it comes from the recognition that VR is the best education tool that we currently have for all ages of learning and it couldn’t have come at a better time.  To those who worked hard to bring that technology forth, fantastic job.  You have opened the world to everyone and made it so the only limit to filling our minds with good things is our own personal restrictions based on effort.  Because VR does most of the heavy lifting in a spectacular way.  Every home should have some version of a VR headset for education purposes primarily.  It is a fantastic invention that will fill minds with experiences it otherwise couldn’t get.

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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Trump and the Value of Money: What a history of Europe tells us about why liberals fail

The day Donald Trump announced that he had brokered a deal to keep Carrier in the United States, he also set the unprecedented standard of launching his official “thank you” tour in Cincinnati, Ohio returning to the US Bank Arena to announce that he was nominating Mad Dog Mattis to the Secretary of Defense position.  Never have the rifts between two political philosophies in America and throughout the world been so obvious, because later that same night at Harvard, one of Trump’s top advisors, Kellyanne Conway blasted members of the Clinton team who had lost the election recently when they continued to propose that values long-held since the beginning of human civilization still held merit.

Kellyanne and all members of the Trump team, including his supporters for which I am enthusiastically included proudly sunk the flag of capitalism deeply in the ground represented by the American flag and proposed that there would be no further wavering in the future.  The political left was dead and all that was left of them were these carcasses in denial.  An entirely new way of thinking in the human race was launching and we were seeing the beginning of it essentially in Cincinnati, Ohio.

I had been thinking of Thanksgiving and a lot about European history of late because my family is planning a trip to that part of the world soon—so the definitions presented were well in context. A lot of people don’t know it, but the leader of the pilgrims who came to Plymouth Rock for which we celebrate the Thanksgiving Day rituals and launched our capitalist version of the Holiday season in the states—which for me is always such an exciting time–was James Chilton who was born in the city of Canterbury, where my son-in-law is from in England.  It was he who commissioned the Mayflower to set sail for the New World to flee the politics of the of the Church of England and their rigid rules and ceremonies which were used by the King of England to unite the kingdom behind the great cathedral which loomed large over the town’s skyline.  Like my son-in-law looking for opportunities not tied to the limitations of state sponsored controls, James Chilton fled for reasons of religious freedom toward the unknown destinations of a savage land to be free of the limited scope of kingdom politics spoken through the efforts of the church.  As history well chronicled, it was that same cathedral in Canterbury where Sir Thomas Becket was assassinated by his former friend, King Henry the 2nd for which spawned the great literary classic, The Canterbury Tales.

You see dear reader, the goal of the mediaeval church, which is remarkably aligned with the modern progressive political movement—which is a direct evolution from communism—which descended of course from European mediaeval churches, which descended from the last remnants of the Roman Empire and so on—was to unite the masses behind statist mindsets for which solitary rulers and aristocrats rule over the minds of mankind.  The remnants of that thinking can be found on virtually every college campus, every political order around the world, and it originates in the period of European history where the Roman Empire pushed north to conquered the “barbarians” and “pagans” to leave behind the Catholic Church to institute state sponsored religion—which therefor controlled all aspects of human life.  When bishops developed a guilty complex at the Church of England in Canterbury, the king of the day whomever he may have been, killed the rebel and found a replacement who would do the king’s bidding behind a mask of God.  This is why the puritan James Chilton organized a movement to leave that picturesque town in England with all its security and solidifying ritual and migrated to the wild and woolly unknown of America to sit down with primitive Indians and carve out a new life for themselves.  After a few hundred years the descendants and followers of this puritan movement launched through rebellion the American concept led by philosophy shaped by Adam Smith economics and Thomas Paine’s conceptual thinking.  America was born out of a rejection of the European imposition of statism and the further conquests of the so-called nomads who lived in North America upon the arrival of the Europeans escaping this turmoil from their homeland which was a natural collision of cultures inevitably bound to occur—the West and the East.  The winner was those who followed the philosophy of Adam Smith.  The losers were those chained to collectivist philosophies rooted in statism—which the tribal nomads of North America were limited by through their Chinese and Siberian roots.  Out of anger against statism in Europe the more developed idea of free people evolved and the American culture spawned from that desire clashed with the nomads who had diffused from Asia into North America looking for food—but not inventing much of anything new philosophically—except a new form of religion—nature worship.

Understanding history in this way it is explained why modern progressives have aligned themselves with the crises of the vanquished Indian, whether it is in fighting the trademark of the NFL football team, the Washington Redskins, or the Dakota Access Pipeline where the media has sided with the Standing Rock Sioux Indians.  The real fight is against capitalism—the same capitalism proposed by Adam Smith—the capitalism and need for it which put Donald Trump in the White House.  For generations people saluted the flag and they took for granted the capitalism which made their lives so good in North America—and could solve many problems around the world, but after an increasing statist president in George W. Bush made that way through terrorism and war then an openly socialist president in Barack Obama, the American people had enough, and they turned to an unapologetic capitalist in Donald Trump—a guy who loved his large planes, his golden palace at the top of Trump Tower—and was the commander of the hit television show The Celebrity Apprentice who understood capitalism and how to make it work for America again.

Those on the other side, those against Trump in this election, are those who hate the value of money.  They don’t dislike what money can buy them, such as power, or luxury, but they despise that money represents value.  They hate what money means to an economy of individuals in the same way that the kings of England hated common people who dared to challenge their social status, or when the church dared to deviate away from being a voice of the state toward individual conciliation.  Progressives are against individual value and thus they hate that money is a means of representation of that value.  Trump’s ultimate audacity is that his wealth was built on “value,” as opposed to someone who gains wealth through an inheritance or through a state sponsored lottery.  If you put a million dollars in the pocket of a loser, they will lose all that money in a few years—which is how so many star athletes end up bankrupt a few years after their careers are over.  Money can’t give someone value, but it is a product of value.  For instance, a person of value can never be poor even if they lose all their money many times over.  But a person of little value can only camouflage their value with money to hide what losers they really are.  This is unfortunately from our European heritage—the progressive viewpoint—has been the dominate view of money and how it’s made.  It comes from those days where bishops held up the values of the kings and queens of England—and other places around Europe—until they fell out of favor with those monarchs.  The bishops thought they had power because they held the keys to religion.  The kings thought they had value because of some royal bloodline or social station when people like James Chilton and Sir Thomas Becket just wanted to be left alone to worship their God in peace and pursue their own prosperity—free of statist controls.

Trump standing on a stage in Cincinnati for the second time in two months was a direct product of that bold Mayflower move by Chilton so many years ago—and for the first time in human history was living free of any guilt generated by the state to control behavior.  Instead, Trump was growing beyond the state and the people of Ohio attending that rally were there to prop him up beyond those ancient limitations for the first time in any human being—to be in such a high office of political power.  So in the context of history, what Trump did on Thursday December 1st 2016 was remarkable.  There was a lot of effort which came before him and it culminated essentially with his long-needed election.  And now, from that poised platform we have a man who understands the value of money and how it builds a nation of people—and that the power comes from them, not the state.  Like the Bishop Becket from the long ago medieval Canterbury Cathedral he’s a rebel against the thrones of Europe.  He has transcended from a royal bloodline, or a religious leader into a creation of Adam Smith himself—and he is now in the most powerful high office in the world, and he’s not afraid to use it for good—as opposed to evil–defined by the values which govern money.

Liberals, those descendants of European statism, will claim that it is evil to not equally distribute wealth to the populations of the world—because to them, everyone has “equal” value as under the premise of collectivism for which kings rule, nobody is more powerful than their kings or queens be them President Obama or Hillary Clinton.  But in a free society, value is determined by merit and that is represented in a moral culture by money.  Not money stolen from someone else or given as a gift by someone else—but money earned through something produced—by being a productive citizen of the world. To those who work hard and long every day channeling their values into their efforts, they typically are wealthy if they do it long enough.  But the bum on the street will never be their equals if they spend their days chasing primal effects such as food and sex.  Such people will never be the equals to the captains of industry like those filling Donald Trump’s cabinet seats.  And he knows how to pick them, because he is like General Mattis—people who don’t understand what the word “failure” even means.  Trump’s White House team are the types of people ostracized by a progressive society pushed to the corners with rules and regulations in the same manner that Sir Thomas Becket was murdered for falling out of favor with King Henry the 2nd.  The hidden fear of all progressives is that the great secret of value will spew out revealing their belief in blood lines and aristocratic connections ruling the masses to be a hoax.  This is largely why my son-in-law left Canterbury as James Chilton had centuries before, for the hope of opportunity through freedom.  And it’s taken thousands of years to get their wish, but finally on a stage in Cincinnati on a cold December night—their dreams came true.  It was an extraordinary event.  Mankind will be changed forever.  Just watch!

Progressives and other liberals know what happened and they are in a state of panic because for the first time—ever—the rules of human conduct have changed and they no longer have anywhere to hide, and that’s a good thing.  The human race needs money to determine value and those who have stood in the way of that value need to be removed so that history no longer repeats itself in favor of aristocratic rule—but through the rule of the individual and the massive amount of work they produce when free from tyranny.  Work after all isn’t bad—it’s what happens when people are productive and for America to be Great Again, this long-held truth in North America must be instituted for all time—wrestled from the tight grasp of the progressives from history who are terrified of merit—because as a people—they know they have no real value without the mask of looted wealth to conceal their valueless traditions.

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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Celebrating Black Friday’s Capitalism: Fidel Castro dies while Donald Trump becomes a true “fountainhead” in The White House

I was enjoying the celebration of capitalism as news broke that Fidel Castro was dying in Cuba. It was after all Black Friday—an official holiday to celebrate American Capitalism so it was appropriate that the Cuban communist dictator died on that particular day.  With Trump now president there is finally an American president who could properly defend capitalism from all the socialists seeking to topple the capitalist system with overbearing altruism for the benefit of finishing what Castro started bedeviling seven American presidents during his lifetime.  Largely the immigration issue around the world, especially on America’s borders is the fault of poorly managed countries leaving dreamers with no place to go but into the United States to escape the oppression of communism, and Marxism.  The strategic goal of those global oriented governments was to deliberately overwhelm America’s financial power while forces within our government unnaturally restrained capitalism so that economic growth would be stunted for collapse.  Fidel Castro didn’t just command a Marxist regime just a few miles off the coast of Florida, but inspired communist revolutions all over Mexico, Central America and South America leaving to this very day a border surge for which the intention was always to topple our American republic during the early years of the 21st century.  So as one of my daughters was with me partaking in the festivities of American capitalism I turned on the radio to see what my old friend Doc Thompson was doing filling in on Glenn Beck’s national radio show which had been suffering because Beck had failed to get behind Donald Trump for president.  I was relieved to hear Doc promoting capitalism on the big show and with great enthusiasm.  For a change, it was good to hear something very optimistic about capitalism without the pretense of some dream–if only America could climb out from under the oppressive hands of the socialist Barack Obama, or the southern border menace Fidel Castro—the Marxist revolutionary which has been suppressing the lives of millions for most of a century.  Finally, capitalism was in fashion once again and this time America would be better prepared to defend it, and sell it to the rest of the world.  Truly, a new day was upon us, and it was something to be thankful for.

I know Doc Thompson is a lover of Ayn Rand’s novels, as I am, and for years we have promoted them over the radio and in any other way possible.  Donald Trump is really the first of his kind to ever enter the White House.  He has built an attractive brand around the world with an unyielding love for capitalism—and finally here was an American president who would defend our economic system from the Oval Office without being disarmed by Marxists and agents of Socialist International to apologize for our great economic success.  I will never forget the fine spring day on April 12th 2016 while I was having breakfast at the West Chester, Ohio McDonalds and reading USA Today which I had picked up at Barnes and Nobel with an actual hard copy paper which I was browsing through as the sun was coming up to its noon time apex.  It was an opinion article from the very liberal Democrat Kristen Powers on Donald Trump where the presidential frontrunner at the time admitted to being inspired by the Ayn Rand book The Fountainhead—which I thought was astonishing. A wild fantasy that evoked in me on that day erupted into excitement as I realized just how close an Ayn Rand type of President of the United States truly was to the White House.   At the time, Trump was easily going to beat Cruz and Kasich leaving him with only the flawed Hillary Clinton standing between him and success.  On that effort, my money was on Trump and that’s how it turned out of course.  But I thought it was astonishing that an America president would actually admit to loving Ayn Rand.

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

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/04/trumps-role-model-is-an-ayn-rand-character.html

Kristen Powers and many others of course missed the point to Ayn Rand’s great literary classic—which I think is one of the greatest novels written of all time, and I include in that my favorites, such as Finnegan’s Wake by James Joyce and the Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann.  Before any of you Democrats or hard-core Ayn Rand Objectivists cry foul understand that European literature has always been mired by oppressive religious judgment and aristocracy—including Shakespeare.  Ayn Rand as a Russian immigrant was one of the first to look at New York’s sky scrapers and see the beauty of capitalism.  Not even F. Scott Fitzgerald was able to capture that optimism in his Great Gatsby which focused entirely on the paradox of new money versus old money.  Ayn Rand was a standout in thinking.  She truly saw for perhaps the first time in the history of the world that it was the captains of capitalism who were the moral benefactors of justice because it was from their minds that good things happened—the “fountainheads” for which everything came forth.  To be successful, they needed complete independence and unfettered belief in themselves.  Those traits terrify Democrats and progressives from all walks of life so they frequently fail to understand The Fountainhead for all its glory.  And those who do read it, and understand it somewhat so, are the first to put a lid on its message as pre-adolescent fantasies of a superhero adulthood which is unrealistic in the modern world—because we’ve all been trained with the premise that we are all “flawed” characters who must give up such audacity to function properly in the world.  The Fountainhead and its sequel of sorts, Atlas Shrugged, are truly American novels about the American experience and it has taken time to sink into our inherited European thinking—for which most of us adhere to.

During Doc Thompson’s short stay in Cincinnati on WLW radio he and I formed a friendship which essentially centered around Ayn Rand.  The Tea Party movement was reading Atlas Shrugged and enjoying the independent film version that began showing in theaters around the country.  It was those readers who essentially put Donald Trump into the White House because it paved the way for the type of thinking we wanted as a president—and Kristen Powers had confirmed it on the pages of USA Today.  It was one of the few rays of light that many of us in the Tea Party movement had during those dark days.  When Mitt Romney picked Paul Ryan to be his VP many of us were excited that Ryan was an Ayn Rand fan—but he quickly distanced himself from that title afraid that the media would label him as a “radical.”  Interesting that liberals see Ayn Rand concepts as “Radical” yet Saul Alisnky is someone to be followed who actually wrote a silly little book that you can read during a lunch break called Rules for Radicals.  Even at the foundation of Marxism was a silly book that is even smaller called The Communist Manifesto.  Ayn Rand was writing these monstrous novels full of passion and challenges to a philosophical mode of thinking spanning back thousands of years, whereas Karl Marx was simply completing the work of Immanuel Kant—which our federal government through the imperfections of our education system had adopted as a security blanket from European literature.  While reading that USA Today article on Trump’s love for Ayn Rand I thought back even further to the time I lived on the campus of U.C. in Cincinnati.  I’d grab breakfast over in Clifton almost every day and read my books at a booth in the corner as literary students would come in and recite quotes from Ulysses pretending to be masters of the literary universe.  I’d ask them if they understood Finnegan’s Wake and they’d laugh proclaiming—“nobody did.”  But I did, and I say it’s an inferior work to Ayn Rand’s beautiful dedications to American capitalism and the morality which sprang forth.  I never thought I’d see it in my lifetime that a President of the United States would actually be in the White House who “identified” with Ayn Rand’s heroes.

At the start of the Trump campaign I was pretty good friends with quite a few die-hard Objectivists straight off the pages of Ayn Rand’s novels, and to them, Donald Trump was a monster who proposes to use the power of government to build roads, bridges, and a military which could then be turned back on us.  By the time I saw the USA Today article in April of 2016 we had stopped speaking to each other just as Doc Thompson and I stopped speaking, simply because Glenn Beck had not seen what I did in Donald Trump and it made it very hard to have conversations.  I turned completely away from The Blaze Radio because of Glenn Beck.  I saw an Ayn Rand character very similar to Howard Roark in Donald Trump.  Others saw Gail Wynand and they were freighted of such a man entering the most powerful office in the world.  But I had the opportunity to meet Trump a few times and I am a very good judge of character—extremely good in fact, and I see a Howard Roark type who shields himself from the prying eyes of the world by living like Gail Wynand.  His public persona is a Gail adoption, but in his heart, he’s certainly Howard Roark.  Trump has very nearly blown up several projects because they don’t conform to his innate vision.  But in some ways Trump has stepped beyond Rand, which as a 70-year-old man, I would expect.  We are observing a government led by a man who is accomplished and is truly a “fountainhead” in his own undefined way—and history will present that definition through actuality.

Doc Thompson’s broadcast on Glenn Beck’s Black Friday show was inspiring.  It’s something I’ve dreamed about for a long time and it was the old communists like Fidel Castro which prevented us from enjoying America’s economic system without guilt.  Our education institutions had also failed to teach capitalism and Ayn Rand to their students choosing instead to preach the virtues of Marxism to a bunch of drooling students who recited Ulysses during breakfasts at Clifton on the U.C. campus thinking they were masters of the literary world when in fact they were just unwashed college kids just learning to shave looking like bums hitchhiking for a ride during the drug induced 1970s.  They were taught the wrong things about most everything in life leaving those of us who knew better to be like Socrates being blamed for corrupting the youth of Greek society—with real innovation and a pre-Aristotelian concept of what a powerful Republic should be—as opposed to Plato’s pre-Kantian altruism.   I could have saved NASA a lot of money as directed by Barack Obama to study the contributions of Muslims to the sciences of the world and why they failed today to live up to those early promises—it was because Islam gave up Aristotle and embraced the self-sacrifice of Mohammed’s so-called visions.   And America had been failing in much the same fashion moving from a capitalist society that had built great sky scrapers in New York and across the United States and bent to the will of communists like Fidel Castro who represented the lazy intellectual needs of the worst of our society—who desired to be equal to the best only without doing all the hard work of a “fountainhead.”  Trump is a true fountainhead and the world will soon see that—and everyone will be a lot better off.  Howard Roark for President—yes, it actually happened.  Now a great novel never yet published will unfold before our eyes—and it will be very exciting.

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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Betsy DeVos: A person I am truely thankful for

So yes, I’m feeling pretty thankful, do you remember dear reader when I was at the center of this I-Team Report for Channel 9 seen below?  Auh, the memories.  I had spent a lot of political capital and personal reputation to challenge that premise of runaway costs in public education especially at the top, with the superintendents who were making more than the governors of most states.   I was taking them on as phony CEOs and the heat was on.  The Cincinnati media had a story they could get their teeth into.  Shannon Jones and Governor Kasich trying to ride the ground swell of opposition generated by these news stories signed Senate Bill 5 which provoked the powerful Ohio public sector unions to riot in the streets and the long hidden con game that is public education was exposed.  Yet there wasn’t really a solution, only the identification of the problem.  Of course the solution I supported seemed like a far-flung one, School Choice was presented only nobody at the level of The Department of Education would dare adopt such a controversial innovation in the field of public education.  Major changes at the very top were needed to brings costs down while increasing the results and the unions had all the politicians scared to even try leaving us all to fight it out on the ground without an end in sight.

I supported Donald Trump for president for many reasons, but the top of my list was the end game of public education innovation which I had been advocating for during many years, including that I-Team report which was quite alarming to regular people who otherwise didn’t know. When people wonder why I do a show from time to time with Matt Clark in Ann Arbor, Michigan they have to understand that I have been doing more than just looking for attention on the radio.  I can get attention and make money in many different ways—so my interest in doing radio and television has been for one primary reason, to inspire political addicts and those able to take the necessary action to position themselves for the needed changes.  In Cincinnati, we had things covered very well but we needed other regions also and Michigan was high on my list for tactical reasons.  Casual people fascinated with mainstream topics don’t normally listen to a program on WAAM radio, but those who run Republican Party activity in Michigan often do and one voice I hoped to reach directly or indirectly in that rust belt state was the Chairman of the Republican Party Betsy DeVos and wife to billionaire Dick DeVos—who were sympathetic to public education changes—such as School Choice.  I had heard that several years after that I-Team report into Ohio school superintendent pay that Betsy was warming up to School Choice as a public education option in 2013.  That stood the hairs up on the back of my neck—and she wasn’t the only one warming up to the idea—now if only we could somehow get those types of people into a position that mattered.  Obama certainly wasn’t open to the idea—so a major change would be needed at the top to free up the ground forces ready to implement innovation and competitive forces in public education because that was the only hope of an end game started by all of us public education reformers.

The day before Thanksgiving 2016 newly elected President Donald Trump announced that Betsy DeVos was going to be his pick for Secretary of Education and the teacher union of the NEA said this:

“Every day, educators use their voice to advocate for every student to reach his or her full potential. We believe that the chance for the success of a child should not depend on winning a charter lottery, being accepted by a private school, or living in the right ZIP code. We have, and will continue, to fight for all students to have a great public school in their community and the opportunity to succeed no matter their backgrounds or circumstances

“Betsy DeVos has consistently worked against these values, and her efforts over the years have done more to undermine public education than support students. She has lobbied for failed schemes, like vouchers — which take away funding and local control from our public schools — to fund private schools at taxpayers’ expense. These schemes do nothing to help our most-vulnerable students while they ignore or exacerbate glaring opportunity gaps. She has consistently pushed a corporate agenda to privatize, de-professionalize and impose cookie-cutter solutions to public education. By nominating Betsy DeVos, the Trump administration has demonstrated just how out of touch it is with what works best for students, parents, educators and communities.

“The National Education Association advocates for investing in smart strategies that we know help to improve the success of all our students, including creating more opportunities and equity for students, classes small enough for one-on-one attention, modern textbooks and a well-rounded curriculum for every student. We also know that the voices of educators — those who know the names of the students they educate — should always be present at the table when making decisions that impact student success. Educators will continue to focus on raising their voices in support of their students and against any effort by the Trump administration to undermine the educational opportunity of all public school students.”

http://www.pressreleasepoint.com/nea-president-reacts-betsy-devos-nomination-education-secretary

Otherwise, what the NEA is saying is that they are scared to death and know that changes to their power structure are imminent and with Donald Trump giving unwavering support to someone like Betsy DeVos, who is fearless in her efforts, competition is coming to public education and they will be powerless to stop it.  Betsy DeVos was my dream pick for solving this public education nightmare short of completely shutting down the DOE.  The scam the unions had worked out with the superintendents of these public schools was that boards of education who were just citizen members elected by the community to manage school affairs hired professional educators to perform the executive action of school management.  The unions through manipulative tactics ensured that the flow of money to those superintendents was extraordinary and they fed the egos of those people in an attempt to make them believe they were “real managers” when in fact there were just figureheads protecting the union activity of the teachers.  The large wages that the superintendents were making were essentially payoffs by the system to preserve it from reform—which is why the NEA is upset because “they” control politics locally, which must stop if public education is ever going to be fixed.  Running for school board isn’t enough—otherwise I would have done it.  You must change the priorities of the entire institution decentralizing it and putting an emphasis on competition.  That is the only way to break the monopoly the teacher unions have on public schools using children as human shields to prevent action.

Betsy DeVos is the end game I have been wanting to see and thankfully Donald Trump made that decision early.  Being independently wealthy, the DeVos family is free from the temptations of corruption since they don’t need money from back room deals meaning Betsy is free to act 100% on her consciousness, which genuinely cares about this public education issue—and she is not the kind of person who will accept failure.  A lot of things had to happen to make this possible.  I can’t say that while we were doing any of the television and radio broadcasts identifying the vast evils shown in public education that real solutions were more than a pipe dream.  But always in the back of my mind was the hope that if enough people learned of this problem, that they’d be inspired to do something about t.  And Betsy DeVos is the perfect type of person to take on the challenges presented in public education. 

That makes this particular Thanksgiving perhaps the one I am enjoying most.  For maybe the first time in my adult life—I am truly thankful that there are solutions to the many things that have held my country imprisoned behind stupidity and a lack of conviction.  Betsy DeVos is the kind of pick for Secretary of Education that would alone seal the fate of a successful Donald Trump presidency, and for him its only one thing.  But for me, it’s the biggest thing.  Happy Thanksgiving! 

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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Bullwhip Economics and Donald Trump: How small things lead to BIG things–Rich Hoffman hosting WAAM radio

There are a lot of unsung heroes behind the Trump election, most notably Kellyanne Conway, Steve Bannon, Jared Kushner just to name a few at the top including the incredible stamina that Donald Trump showed in those last two weeks simply out working everyone with a tenacity that has never been seen for a person seeking the presidency except for perhaps Theodore Roosevelt.  Essentially, the Trump campaign was built on only hopes and dreams until July of 2016 when an official campaign with the people mentioned above becoming part of it.  Before that moment in time it was the grass-roots people who put Trump in the front of the Republican pack—with the help of a media that wanted to sabotage the Republican candidates they viewed as more dangerous to provide the most unique political event in the history of the world.  The people behind that movement were fractured members of the Tea Party who had pushed hard against John Boehner’s speakership, John Kasich’s weak running of Ohio by siding with Obama on Medicaid expansion and other grass-roots rebels who were tired of being drug into progressive politics against their will for which I was one.  It was over six years ago that I started the bullwhip economics videos seen below which from a platform of southern Ohio politics empowered some of the most creative and bold grass-roots rebels to dare and change the system which ultimately prepped the nation for a Donald Trump candidacy.  I am very proud of the role I played in that effort, along with thousands of others.  I told the story of those early days and how my bullwhip economics made a small impact which escalated over the subsequent years into real change on a show I hosted for Matt Clark on WAAM on Saturday, November 19th, 2016.  The following broadcast out of all my years of doing guest radio for several stations from WLW in Cincinnati to The Blaze evolving into bit work with WAAM is the show I am most proud of.

https://soundcloud.com/clarkcast/november-19-2016-guest-hosted-by-rich-hoffman-11-19-2016-podcast

People thought I was crazy in 2010 when I put myself on the front page of The Cincinnati Enquirer holding my bullwhips complete with a cowboy hat after I had performed a three-layered attack which changed politics in southern Ohio, specifically Butler County.  I shot the video “A Whip Stunt to Save America” (seen below), I used it to explain why I was coming out against the monstrosity known as the Lakota levy where my local public school—one of the wealthiest and most highly populated districts in all of Ohio—wanted yet again to raise taxes on private property which was announced on the air through WLW broadcasting to over 500,000 people, then I joined with former rivals in the building industry to form No Lakota Levy—a political group that rocked the foundations of the Ohio Education Association to its very core.  I knew as the Enquirer photographers came to my house exactly where I shot the “Whip Stunt to Save America” video that I would be ridiculed and harassed to no end, so I put on a good show and embraced the controversy in a way that nobody up to that point had ever seen—until Donald Trump would essentially do the same thing on a national stage.  I am proud to have been a pioneer in that effort—especially in hind-sight because people who knew me back then were wondering if I had lost my mind.

After all, it’s not like I was some backwoods malcontent of the “alt-right” which is what they are calling it these days.  I was an area businessman who happened to be a professional bullwhip artist, a master at that, where only a few people in the entire world could lay claim to being able to perform the stunts I could with a bullwhip.  Just a few years before in 2008 I was flown out to Hollywood by Peter Facinelli to be his stunt double for a project he was producing.  (CLICK HERE TO REVIEW) I had met him at a film festival where he had seen my firewhip routine at a presentation for the World Stunt Organization in Cleveland, Ohio and wanted to develop a film off what he saw.  What evolved from that project with RealD 3D was the template every film uses when making a movie with firewhips, everything from Ironman 2 to Underworld—and most recently Doctor Strange.  I was also writing novels and had a seat at the table for a career in entertainment if I wanted it.  After all, I had a number of talents that were unique to only me—anywhere in the world, and people felt that I should have exploited those talents for great financial profit.  Instead I was using those talents to take on an unstoppable machine with no clear light at the end of the tunnel.  I was putting myself in an impossible position within the entertainment industry which I loved—because I was never going to work for them because of my outlandish conservative political beliefs.  Nobody was going to give me the time of day after I made “A Whip Stunt to Save America.”   I had deliberately type-cast myself as a “right-winger” and many thought I had wasted myself on politics needlessly.

Then I came out against Governor Kasich who had lost Issue 2 in 2011 with Senate Bill 5 which sought to take away the monopoly of public sector unions in Ohio.  I volunteered to continue the effort toward Right-to-Work in Ohio so the political knives came out hard against me by Republicans as well as Democrats and things really heated up.  Lakota still couldn’t pass a levy and now I was involved in Right-to-Work so those people had to stop me any way they could.  That’s when the strategy I had unleashed several years earlier with the “Whip Stunt to Save America” paid off.  Thugs from the political left normally harass people with physical violence, but what were those people going to do to me?  I’m a master bullwhip artist.  I could easily carve up a small army of their night goons so I had taken away their ability to physically bring harm to me, thus stopping my behavior—like they have done to thousands of people before me over decades.  My dad warned me that they’d come after me—which I expected—but like I said—I’m a bullwhip artist.  There isn’t anything they could do to scare me—because obviously, they’d be destroyed.

That left them to try to “out mouth” me, to “out think” me—but what they really didn’t know was that I am smarter and faster on my feet with my mind than I am with bullwhips, so that didn’t go very far—and I am very proud of holding my ground during some of those really difficult days where it would have been far easier to just say “uncle.”  But that’s not how I do anything–ever—so I stayed strong, continued writing, teaching and inspiring others—and Matt and I continued doing some really good radio broadcasts that are actually better than some of the stuff that can be heard on the big syndicated radio shows around the country.  I mentioned on the radio broadcast from November 19th the show Matt and I did on WAAM about The Naked Communist.  That was a great show that not many people heard by population density, but some of the really smart people out there—the real political junkies who were always my target audience—they did hear those shows and they have acted appropriately moving to create a Freedom Caucus in the House of Representatives and other places openly defying conventional politics.

For me it has been six long hard years of battle—I wrote on my Overmanwarrior’s Wisdom blog site every day during that period and over 800,000 visitors have read the words there.  Along the way I have essentially ran my own little media company never really putting an emphasis on profit acquisition, because the real targets were movers and shakers who actually take the time to read—not necessarily a consumer class.  I wasn’t going for the glitzy, but the top minds of politics hoping to give them a little encouragement to do something bold—for a change.  I could afford to be loose with my political endeavors because I am independently very successful professionally.  All along that was always at the core of my endeavors—it was a trick I learned from Don Diego from the old Zorro television series.  By day I was a businessman, by night a man of the people and I used my bullwhip to sell the ideas and my skills with it to disarm the Saul Alinsky thug tactics of the political left, and once other conservatives saw that Democrats could be beaten in this way—they became embolden.

Recently while at a Trump rally with Newt Gingrich standing just a few feet away shaking my wife’s hand the head of the Republican Party of Butler County asked me if I had my whip with me—because while establishment Republicans thought my antics were over-the-top, there was always a level of respect because of my skills.  To many of them, I looked a lot smarter with Donald Trump standing in front of us in 2016 than I did years before when they couldn’t see a path forward as I appeared proudly on the cover of The Cincinnati Enquirer offering myself as something of a bold joke that they were sure would lead to my personal destruction in 2012.   But that destruction never came and eventually a New York businessman who was prone to thinking outside the box politically and had amassed great personal wealth so that he could be truly free would take the fight to the next level in an epic way resulting in an election that I watched with great cheer with my family late on that fateful November 8th.  We didn’t’ sleep that night.  We celebrated with a nice breakfast and I took the whole family to Chilis for a meal I will never forget—because we had all earned it.  We had not been able to see the light at the end of the tunnel just a year before, but suddenly we were out of the tunnel all together on ground we only imagined.

My story wasn’t the only one that contributed to that great Trump victory, there are enough heroes from that battle to fill a library of stories, but like I said in the broadcast on WAAM, often its little things that lead to big things and that the first step is in trying.  I still would gladly trade all the potential success I could have earned in Hollywood and elsewhere to see Donald Trump elected—and I did.  What good is all that fame and fortune if the country is a wreck by the time you get it?  So I never cared or thought about what I was losing.  I just did what I was good at and hoped that enough smart people with the means to act would do so based on something I wrote or demonstrated.  Obviously, enough people did, and for that—I am deeply proud.  That pride was obvious in the show I hosted on WAAM because it was hard-earned.  It was the first show I did on radio since the election and after a few weeks, my enthusiasm hadn’t abated.  I will never forget what the Enquirer photographer had said to me way back in 2010—who literally had come from a photo shoot with the Cincinnati Bengals Chad Johnson to my house to film me and my bullwhip tricks—of which he stated was the coolest thing he had seen that year—he asked me if I really wanted to do this, because in his mind I was destroying my good name.  As he snapped the pictures I thought my good name and skills could take whatever comes.  And it did.  Donald Trump had taken the same plunge and acted on his belief in himself to outlast everything that the political machines could throw at him—and he prevailed.  In his taking of the White House he made my personal fights worth everything and more.  For the first time in my adult life—politically—I am enthusiastic for tomorrow.  The fight of course continues, but it was worth everything it cost and more.  Little things do add up to big things and they are always worth doing—especially when goodness and justice are the fuel that drives them.

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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