Category: Rich Hoffman

The Brilliance of Junkie XL: A review of ‘Fury Road’s’ soundtrack

I was just a bit stunned by the wonderful music I heard while watching the latest Mad Max film.  You can see a bit of why in the video clip below dedicated to the composer Junkie XL—who used to be a DJ in a previous life.  The music to me sounded remarkably like Hans Zimmer’s score on Man of Steel.  So I wondered if Zimmer knew that Junkie used some of his Man of Steel music in Fury Road.  After a quick check I discovered that the two composers have studios next to each other in Santa Monica and that they have become close friends.  So that explained why the music was so jaw dropping phenomenal.  The use of drums in Man of Steel for me was a major milestone in soundtrack design and I have been looking forward to other scores utilizing the same creative use.  Fury Road was that next film and the music is so heart pounding excellent that the moment the movie was over, my wife and I went on an incredible journey to find the soundtrack.

On May 15th I had long-planned to take the afternoon off my normal obligations and see Mad Max with my wife.  When we were dating I showed her all the Mad Max films along with Dirty Harry so we could see if we’d like each other enough to continue our relationship.  She of course loved them, so we got married.  For me, if a woman didn’t understand Mad Max and Dirty Harry, she wouldn’t be capable of sharing a life with me, so liking those films was a deal breaker.   For me it’s almost a religious experience to see a Mad Max film, so I blocked off the afternoon to see the move.  Before the film I was able to have lunch with my wife, one of my daughters and my grandson.  It put me in an exceptionally good mood for actually seeing the movie.  I knew I would like the film—I wasn’t sure how much—but it was overall leading up to the movie a very positive, long-planned experience.

After the movie my wife and I looked at each other knowing we had just watched a masterpiece for the first time and professed our love for the film until the last credit cleared the screen.  READ MY REVIEW BY CLICKING HERE.  But that soundtrack for Junkie XL was stuck in my head and I wanted the music.  I didn’t want to wait to receive it from Amazon.com.  I wanted it in the car for my ride home.  So we went on a journey all over Cincinnati to find it.  We checked Barnes and Nobel on Fields Ertle Road first—they didn’t have it.  Then we went to Target and Best Buy in that same area.  They didn’t have it.  We then hit the highway and headed to the Streets of West Chester to the Barnes and Nobel there.  They surprisingly didn’t have it either.  I was really getting frustrated.  So we were about to give up and go home.  But not wanting to surrender we hit one last spot, the Best Buy at Bridgewater Falls.

I love the Best Buy at that location because it’s full of new technology all the time.  It’s a big store relative to some of the others and always has a nice ambiance to it.  I’ve bought a lot of computer equipment, video games and appliances there, so I generally love my visits to the Best Buy at Bridgewater Falls.  After some frantic looking I found two copies of Fury Road stuck behind soundtracks to Pitch Perfect 2—and I beheld them as if they were treasures from the Sierra Madre.  We bought one of them and headed to our car where we spent the next hour listening to the music from our sound system.  It was a brilliant score well worth the purchase.  I didn’t stop the music over the whole duration of the following weekend.

The key to the success of the music is the inventiveness of the ambition behind the score that obviously is inspired by Hans Zimmer.  But Junkie XL brought a kind of rock and roll ambition to it that is strangely evocative of the dystopian world of George Miller.  Unlike the old Blade Runner soundtrack which is a favorite of mine, Fury Road is full of hope and energy.  I found it strangely compelling which is something I didn’t expect.

It didn’t take much time for me to get the soundtrack on my iPod where I proceeded to listen to it on a loop for several days.  By the time I wrote this little piece on it, I have heard it upwards of 25 complete times and I like it more each time I hear it.  It is another wonderful and often unappreciated journey into musical mayhem by some of the most creative people in the movie business.  I have included some videos on this article about Hans Zimmer and Junkie XL to provide some context as to why I love soundtracks so much—often more than the movies themselves.  As I’ve said before there isn’t one work of music on my iPod out of 8 gigs of storage ability that is not a soundtrack to some movie.  I love mythology, movies are modern mythology, and the music of movies is what holds those stories together.  Without a good soundtrack, a movie isn’t much.  But with a good soundtrack, a movie can tell its story on a scale that lasts.  For me one of those benchmarks was the Man of Steel soundtrack.  So it came to me as a surprise to learn that Hans Zimmer and his friend Junkie XL were working on the soundtrack to Dawn of Justice together, with Junkie handling the Batman tracks while Zimmer works the Superman needs.  Now that I’ve heard Junkie XL named more formally Tom Holkenborg, create such a masterpiece with Fury Road I am eagerly looking forward to the next Superman film by Zach Snyder.

Music is one of those things that stays with you long after the lights come up in a darkened theater.  If the story was a good one, the music of the movie can go with you anywhere you wish by the soundtrack of the film.  After Fury Road I couldn’t wait to keep my mind in that mythology because there were thoughts there that were pertinent to my observations—and the music helped usher those thoughts along.  So the journey was hard-fought and worth the effort, because the work that Junkie XL brought forth is indicative of a treasure that will continue giving for many years.  And for me, that means many more Friday afternoons with my wife and the treasures of cinema that come from blocked off mythology given to minds that love the stories they tell on the backs of really good music.

Rich Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

Listen to The Blaze Radio Network by CLICKING HERE.

Matt Clark and Rich Hoffman on WAAM: Understanding why the media is biased and the Clinton Foundation evil

You might have wondered what the cause of all the media bias is and how it came to be.  Well for answers to such questions there is one sure source, Matt Clark’s show on WAAM.  Over the weekend we covered an unusual number of topics in the broadcast that can be heard below.  It was also the first time that I was able to use the equipment that has essentially turned a room in my house into a radio studio.  The sound was clear which was just about as good as if I were in studio with Matt from several hundred miles south.  Obviously the equipment is primarily for when I stand in for Matt while he goes on his honeymoon for a few weekends in June.  But, it works so well, I’m sure we’ll conger up some other means for getting into some trouble with it. But that kind of trouble is different from the type that George Stephanopoulos is in as an undisclosed media donor to the Clinton Foundation.  Well, the Foundation reported the $75,000, but Stephanopoulos as a chief anchor didn’t—which is why he found himself in the specified hot water.

Even though we covered a lot of topics on that show—whether it be the conviction of the Boston Bomber, or the lunacy of Congressman Hank Johnson all the stories share in them the desire of one organization to rule over another using consensus to perform the task.  For instance, obviously with the Clinton Foundation the goal of the Clintons is to build relationships with people they can later use for some tactical advantage.  A fine example might be a sex party where everyone present is expected to get naked and do something embarrassing in front everyone else.  The immediate gratification might be interesting and enough to endure the apprehension, but the net result would end up being something you wouldn’t want to discuss at a fine dining occasion.  Then if one of the people—especially the host were at that fine dining opportunity with you, the trend would be to keep your opinions to yourself and to go along to get along because the other person is now in the power position over you.  They have dirt on you which prevent you from acting according to your own code of ethics.  Again, you might not agree with the host of the sex party on what they are trying to do, but they’ve seen you naked and compromised, so you don’t want to embarrass yourself by pissing them off.  So you go along with their plans even if they are maniacal and against your better judgment.

This is essentially why college fraternities have hazing rituals.  Groups want to see individuals assimilate themselves to the glob of the group by checking their values at the door and offering themselves uninhibited to the collective desires of the organization—even if that organization is just a handful of others.  Traveling road buddies want to know about that affair, or that over-night cheating opportunity.  They want to know you get intoxicated after four or five beers so that they can get emotional leverage on you’re at some future time.   They want you to be sure that you are not so high and mighty that you might think of stepping out on your own with your own line of thinking.  The group offers short-term rewards for long-term control.  With the Clintons it’s always about control whether it’s the sex orgies on Epsein’s private island of mischief or the donations given to the Clinton Foundation under the ruse of helping children. As a former president who has a wife next to the ear of the current president the Clintons used their name to sell influence.  A donation to them and their foundation under the auspices of goodness might feel good in the short run, but down the road the money is dirty and every contributor knows it.  They gave the money hoping to get a picture or an interview opportunity to build their own fame—but what they give up is the ability to hold the Clintons feet to the fire when they deserve to get burnt.

Even Fox News has given money to the Clinton Foundation and what the Clintons get out of the relationship is a dog with a soft bite because of the complicity. Fox News could rake the Clintons over the coals for any number of issues—especially the Epstein story.  But when the money you’ve given helps create an evil, it is far easier to put on the rose-colored glasses and go along to get along.  This is why the Clintons feel they only need to wait out the Benghazi storm, or the Epstein orgy island story—because most of the media is involved in the Clinton Foundation in some respect, and everyone knows that you have to pay to play.  If George Stephanopoulos is giving money at ABC News to maintain his relationship with his former pals, then he’ll get scoop interviews with the Clintons when a new book comes out, or get premier announcements of any political happenings as an exclusive.  But if other organizations like Fox News wants a shot at perhaps not an interview with the Clintons directly, but with at least James Carvel or John Podesta—then you better bring your donation to the next Clinton Foundation event.  If you don’t pay, you won’t be on the inside and thus won’t have the media credentials to cover any potential story. What would the mighty Fox News be without the ability to at least interview John Podesta from time to time?  Not very relevant when the other networks can get him on at will.  So everyone pays the money, commits some sin in front of everyone else to show that they can be trusted later and big stories get suppressed as a direct result.

I actually went through this on a smaller scale in my hometown of Liberty Township involving the Lakota levy, which I spoke about in brief during the radio discussion.  My guys in No Lakota Levy were largely developers who didn’t want to see their taxes go up on their investment properties, especially their holdings prior construction that weren’t making any money—but just sitting there waiting for a zoning hearing, or financing to line up.  They went to charity events usually hosted by school levy supporters so were largely handicapped into what they would say publicly about tax increases.  I always felt sorry for them because it was obvious their livelihood was in jeopardy based on their social connections within the community.  Without those connections, life would become much more difficult for them.  I was invited to these events, but I never went—because I didn’t want to break bread with the enemy—and those asking for higher taxes were the enemy.  The enemy was mystified as one by one they called in favors against my No Lakota Levy people starting with who they had primarily targeted, Mark Sennet who had been a previous public leader against tax increases and had a lot of properties to defend.  I never liked Mark even when we’d meet in person largely because of an animosity that occurred years ago when Trustee Bob Shelly was running things and rolled over to let Sennet scratch his belly over the United Dairy Farmers deal at the corner of Princeton and 747.  The last thing I was going to do was associate with him in a social setting.  It might affect my aim when it came time to make him a target—so I kept business in the proper categories until things got personal, which is when the relationship ended.  In this case the story came to a conclusion with the famous latté sipping prostitute utterance which formed the foundation of the Curse of Fort Seven Mile Cliffhanger stories.  I was able to keep things rolling longer than usual because I stayed out of the social circles involving the Chamber of Commerce, progressive tax increase professionals, and the business community all seeking a consensus on “helping the kids” by raising taxes on property values.  It was a scam.  The Clinton Foundation is the same, only on a global scale.

The goal of the Clinton Foundation is not to help children or impoverished nations lift their economies out of the gutter—it is to silence critics and to buy influence.  The best way to help poor areas of the world is to promote capitalism—but that’s not what this game is about.  It’s about control, not freedom and the Clintons are paving the way for all future ex-presidents.  Soon the President of the United States will no longer be the top job in the world; it will only be a stepping stone to United Nations influence by gigantic charity foundations like the Clinton Foundation.  If you give money to it, you get a picture with Bill, maybe Hillary and maybe a hug from their daughter.  If you don’t give money and you report negatively on them, they will call up your boss and shake you down for everything your worth.  You’ll lose your home, you’ll lose your mortgage, and you’ll lose any hope you have of a career within their social circles.  Once people like the Clintons make themselves the hub of the wheel, the direction of things will go where they decide—which we all know is toward the Scandinavian socialist model of northern Europe.

The same could be said for the other topics Matt and I discussed.  Even the Islamic story is functioning with the same overall strategy as the Clinton Foundation.  Play the game their way; you get to be on the inside.  Deviate from the path they establish and you will find yourself attacked, ridiculed and ostracized in negative ways.   To them the collective is much more important than individual rights.  That is what the Clinton Foundation and Islamic radicals have in common and why they are both dangerous.  They both are collective organizations, one political the other religious who desire to achieve the same objective, the conquest of individual will in support of collective assimilation.  The best way to achieve that is to get individuals to surrender their integrity in public which is equitable to a gag.  It is then that the secrets of the society from within are kept and why George Stephanopoulos paid $75,000 to his old friends to stay in their good graces.  As a head at ABC he does after all have a responsibility to the collective network to use his past influence to nab up all the hot interviews—after all, that’s why they hired him in the first place.  But to the Clintons, nobody is really their friend—unless you throw money at them to assist with the illusion of their charitable organization.  The real objective is global consensus as they seek to control their donors with all the mad zeal of the most tyrannical kings of historical memory.  And there’s nothing good about it.

Rich Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

Listen to The Blaze Radio Network by CLICKING HERE.

‘Fury Road’: Why the film is a work of George Miller genius

For all the reasons that Mad Max: Fury Road is a modern masterpiece on par with films like Citizen Kane, The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, and Ben Hur is to look at the film itself.  In 1981 if anyone would have predicted that the maker of the Road Warrior would 30 years in the future create such a scathing representation of human culture nobody would have believed it.  Yet our current society has devolved to such a degree that the evidence of such a future nightmare is fast upon us which brings a sort of exasperation at the end of the film.  Fury Road is many things all at the same time; it’s a modern morality western on wheels and can be enjoyed as popcorn entertainment.  This part of it was clear already in the previous Mad Max films.  But, there was always a hint at something deeper, which a younger director in George Miller probably wanted to utter, but didn’t yet have the whole package ready to wrap.  Fury Road dives deeper into the well of the human condition seamlessly like all great works of art.  It gives the viewer more of what they already know, and dares them to step beyond their comfort zone in a way that Picasso’s cubic paintings did.  But then again, Fury Road is deeper than even that—it jumps headlong into the vast depths of James Joyce’s literary masterpiece Finnegan’s Wake to play at Giambattista Vico’s four cycles of civilization.   When it is said that Fury Road is the work of genius, this would be the reason, it is modern art evoked in some of the most provocative ways ever put to film, and it is done so in a way that at the end viewers will wonder what the just saw.  Was the movie just another summer blockbuster in superhero clothing, or was it the genius of a new religion after mankind has fallen back to its beginnings as it has so many times before?

If George Miller was not a fan of Finnegan’s Wake, and had a firm understanding of the Vico cycle, I would be surprised—because that is clearly the theme of Fury Road.  Human beings have devolved from a race that once put satellites into the sky to a society clamoring over water.  Anarchy has given way to a new theocracy and at the end of the move, the last line shown on the screen before the end credits read like the first sentence in a new book of Genesis.  I can’t say that I have ever seen a critic rating of 98% on Rottentomatos.com for a movie, yet Fury Road had virtually everyone who had seen it eating out of its hand—something that certainly would not have been the case in 1982 when the Road Warrior came out.  Some radio movie reviewers on the Friday of the film’s release were actually giving the movie 5 out of 5 stars—which is something else I can’t ever recall happening.  Even great films typically get a 4 or a 4.5, but many critics were giving Fury Road a full unfettered five stars essentially calling it a perfect movie.  I don’t think Fury Road is a perfect movie.  It was on par to me to all the great western’s I have seen over the years—but it has the added dimension of hidden sophistication that all viewers sense which hangs in the air at the end of the movie.  It touches something very primal in us all and hints at long suppressed beliefs touched for the first time perhaps in some people’s lives.  Yes, the Vico cycle is well at hand.   In a time where nearly every movie is a retread from the past society has forgotten that all these retreads came from a period when our culture produced these kinds of stories every couple of months.  Just like the mixed up cars in Fury Road are representatives of a previous society which mass manufactured them, they are assembled on the screen hodgepodged together in bizarre and imaginative ways that still evoke a lesser society that inherited something great from the past yet didn’t quite know how to sustain them.  Fury Road is a metaphor of itself in a very tongue in cheek way.  There seems to be a very firm knowledge from George Miller of what he’s doing as he is clearly an artist at the top of his game.

Other progressive reviewers saw in Immortan Joe a greedy capitalist regulating vast resources to enslave people.  To their minds Immortan Joe was the Bilderberg bankers and Illuminati currency manipulators of the current times and the revolution of the people to overtake such a greedy bastard is communism so everyone can have equal share in the wonders of water stored in his magical pumps within his fortress Citadel.  Yet again, Fury Road is a deeper movie than that—it cuts to a primal rage contained within every human being—the desire to be free.  Immortan Joe might have been slain, and a new government might rule in his place—but the results would be the same.  So long as mankind follows the trends of the Vico cycle whoever is in power will always seek to suppress those under their control.  The reason the film has such high critical ratings is because of things like this, where the kinds of topics that are really important to people are expressed.  But like all great works of art, those people are limited by what they can see.  They may not have the ability to see too far, so they only see representations of feminism, or communism as factors for redemption—but there is clearly more going on.

I thought the most powerful part of the movie was a quiet scene where the characters named brilliantly, Toast the Knowing, Cheedo the Fragile, and the Capable were watching a star filled night sky as they saw a satellite flying across their view from horizon to horizon.  They contemplated the previous culture that actually made such things that could talk to people across the whole of the world.  They wondered who killed the world.  It’s not global warming which has done the destruction.  It was the Vico cycle—mankind’s innate desire to advance and regress along its formulated parameters.

As I bought my ticket for Fury Road the attendant whispered to himself, “Max, great choice.”  He locked knowing eyes with mine.  “I loved it.”  And that was the general feeling of everyone I bumped into who saw the movie.  They realized that they were seeing something that was strangely important, yet they didn’t really know why.  It is our present story played out in a way that they can easily see no matter what vantage point of political reality they approach the subject—because the road all leads to the same place.  It doesn’t matter if the vantage point is conservative, liberal, deeply socialist, fascist, or manically religious it all ends up in the same place, the cycle of Giambattista Vico, theocracy, aristocracy, democracy, followed by anarchy which has persisted in human lives for as long as we have had breath.  Most of us want to be Max or Furiosa, but know that they will always ever be at best like the old lady in Fury Road, the Keeper of the Seeds.  Worse yet, most people will spend their whole lives begging for water, or allowing themselves to be harvested for their bodies–their motherly milk, or their blind devotion to a male patriarchy more concerned with their place in a masculine peaking order than in inventing satellites to go to space.  Even though the world has gone mad Max at least has not surrendered himself to its cycle.  In the end he is the hero who carries those who want to back to a hope of advancing their cause instead of just retreating from it. It was a brilliant film by a brilliant director at the absolute top of his game.  The above and below line talent in the picture are all at the peak of film making genius and if there is any justice Fury Road will win many Oscars in 2016.  But that in and of itself will prove just how valid Fury Road truly is.  In a free culture capable of making all the stories it can deem possible, it is a retread from the past that is evoking so much of a response in a culture that subconsciously seems to realize it is slipping back into the abyss of anarchy and theocracy.   They don’t understand why or how—but know that it’s happening.  And the only way they can measure that slide is with a good ol’ Mad Max movie which shows them the map of how it’s happening, even if they are powerless to stop it.

Rich Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

Listen to The Blaze Radio Network by CLICKING HERE.

Obama’s Re-Education Camps: Why to be thankful for The Blaze

Shockingly, Obama essentially reiterated everything I have said about him for the last five years during a recent press conference. He amazingly revealed that he and his party intend to change the minds of their rivals by controlling the media. He pointed to John Boehner and Mitch McConnell as potential targets without considering that in conservative circles those names are considered as liberal as Obama is. But regardless, his statement was very revelatory in its suggestion. It fundamentally declared what the object of public education is, how the media has become so left-leaning, and why big government types are so adamant about putting children in pre-school as soon as possible and extending their educations well into their twenties—it is to re-educate the population into the brand of thinking represented by President Obama complete with a left-leaning communist utopia sprinkled with Marxist camps hidden behind the façade of public schools.

The whole exchange left me once again thankful that the Blaze Radio Network exists. Much of the modern media has been trained in those re-education camps called public school and colleges led by extreme liberals—so they can’t be trusted to accurately report the news. I have come to love The Blaze Radio as I listen to it every day that I can—particularly in the early morning. Doc Thompson’s Police Blotters are hilarious and are the highlight of my morning exercise. They defiantly set the day off in the correct fashion. Then there is Pat and Stu in the evenings, which is deceptively good. They have a unique opportunity to reiterate the talk show they do with Glenn Beck from nine to noon with updated information that is not only funny, but extremely informative.

What makes them so good is that they are very disconnected from the established press, which I trust as much as a puff of smoke. The Blaze Radio is everything opposite that Obama suggested the media should become, and I treasure it for that reason. There is a very fine line that exists between the stated goal of communists during the 1950s to infiltrate the United States media and political parties, and the very nature of a free press like The Blaze. They are always refreshingly disconnected to an established media credential. You won’t find The Blaze Radio with a press pass to the White House, or conducting an interview with the President before the Superbowl, so they are free to spell out the truth however it presents itself. That makes them great in my book.

Clearly the intention all along was just as the conspiracy theorists declared—public education was being used by government as a type of re-education camp as declared by Obama about a means to change the minds of conservatives into having values that are more progressive. The Blaze is about changing minds too, but in the opposite direction of the current progressive tendencies. Obama’s plan can only work so long as there is no other option. The complaint that Obama had about Fox News was that they are not committed enough into the fold of progressive politics—so the party line cannot control the message the way communists from the fifties must to maintain their illusions.   That was the source of his complaint.

Yet Fox News isn’t so conservative. They aren’t all that concerned about the big issues involving America, as they should be. They have been covering the 2016 presidential election for the last two years, which is as of this writing still two years away. They are not conservative enough for me leaving The Blaze alone to cover the topics that are remarkably free of modern political control. The Blaze doesn’t slide into the ocean of conspiracy radio either keeping a nice balance of hometown style that were more at home at the start of radio than the modern takeover which has occurred among mainstream FCC controlled stations.

That’s why it was so remarkable that Obama in a moment of frustration revealed the game plan that has always been present. But we should be thankful that he did, because it’s the media’s job to press public officials, not to fall in line with the party position. Obama would never admit that The Blaze exists—so instead he directed his anger at Fox News. But what keeps Fox News in line is the competition from outlets like The Blaze. Fox News know that if they aren’t conservative enough, they’ll lose their viewers to news outlets like The Blaze. Just the existence of The Blaze keeps the Obama plan of re-education camps stifled. So long as there is a Blaze Radio, there is a chance that at least some media source will still be honest and put the feet to the fire of politicians like Barack Obama. In a world where so much of the government has successfully taken over media operations, The Blaze is not one of them. And for that, we should all be grateful.

Rich Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

Listen to The Blaze Radio Network by CLICKING HERE.

A Gringo Like Me: A day that’s coming

A Gringo Like Me: Keep your hand on your gun! 

There is no other song played on my iPod more over the years than the one below. My favorite song of all time is “Desert Chase” by John Williams which is an orchestral piece without any lyrics. But even that I have not listened to more than the lyrical masterpiece by Ennio Morricone from the movie Gunfight at Red Sands done with Peter Tevis.   The lyrics are a masterpiece that captured the spirit of the typical mythology of the American western and represent a time and attitude that built what is now considered the Greatest Generation. I firmly believe that the music of a culture directly influences the mind of it and you can directly tell the direction of a society by the type of music it enjoys. When the song “Gringo Like Me” was made, this was the kind of America that westerns portrayed, and while the modern hippie would bulk at the violent suggestions of the lyrics, there is an honesty to it that I find infinitely refreshing.

Here are the lyrics in all their masterful glory.

 Keep your hand on your gun

Don’t you trust anyone

There’s just one kind of man That you can trust That’s a dead man…

Or a gringo like me

Be the first one to fire

Every man is a liar

There’s just one kind of man Who tells the truth That’s a dead man…

Or a gringo like me

Don’t be a fool for a smile or a kiss Or your a bullet might miss Keep your eye on your goal

There’s just one rule That can save you your life It’s a hand on your knife And the Devil in your soul

Keep your hand on your gun

Don’t you trust anyone

There’s just one kind of man That you can trust That’s a dead man…

Or a gringo like me

Keep your hand on your gun

Don’t you trust anyone

There’s just one kind of man That you can trust That’s a dead man…

Or a gringo like me…

Or a gringo like me..

Or a gringo like me… …like me…

 

As a guy who’s been around more than a block, and been in conflict with other human beings—many times—I can say that there is an honesty in that song that is very sincere, so I listen to it often. That kind of brutal honesty was represented in the westerns of the past and is only hinted at today in movies like Star Wars and Mad Max. For me though, there will never be a better time than the kind of values shown in those old westerns, and that song embodies all those values.

Even though the temperature of the day is to wear the peace sign on our clothing and sing about world unity—the direction of society is headed back in the opposite direction. The experiments into progressivism will leave in its wake a world on the precipice of Vico’s anarchy and theocracy—and violence will be in the futures of most of us. We may not like that reality, but it’s coming, and the best way to deal with it is with the kind of mythology that evoked values that worked—and to stick with it. As of this writing it is being reported that American birthrates are down meaning that the legacy costs of government within just a few short years will leave the world scrambling for dollars in a vast wasteland. That wasteland may look more like Mad Max than the Gunfight at Red Sands but it will be an untamed world governed by what’s left of human failure.

We can see that failure of society at virtually every turn today. There is no way a dumbed down public that values intoxication over logic, and sex over family sustenance can survive long into the future. The money that was spent by baby boomers born of that Greatest Generation mismanaged virtually everything, and the top-heavy bureaucracy they created will collapse in our lifetimes. I think for the world of tomorrow—with all the opportunities provided by wonderful inventions coming from Elon Musk, and the legacy of Steve Jobs will provide decision gates. But I think it will be more valuable for a young man in the future to learn to shoot a gun than to study at a four-year college—just to survive and keep what they have worked hard to obtain. That is why that song for me is honest, not because it reminds me of the cowboy values of yesterday, but of the values it will take to live and preserve capitalism in the future.

Westerns essentially were about preserving individual value and defending private property as they were made from the 1920s to the 1950s. Clint Eastwood’s westerns took the cowboy individualism to an Ayn Rand level overman largely dropping the social aspects in favor of individual power. The spaghetti westerns that Ennio Morricone wrote some of his most memorable music for were operas on individualism—and they are just wonderful. In a few years when the stand alone Star Wars film is made about the origin of Boba Fett, it will be those Clint Eastwood spaghetti westerns that will be the model used to make the film. Just as the new Fury Road is an update on the original Mad Max, which was essentially a cowboy film transposing horses for cars. The honor in individualism is all there—the raw solitary figure standing against insanity represented by a band of collective bandits is a classic western tale.

In the future there will be hoards of young people raised by failed public schools who won’t be able to own private property, because the means for doing so will be out of their reach. They won’t respect the private property of those who do have it. They won’t respect our cars, our children, or our spouses. We are quickly arriving at a desperate age where those who don’t have the intellectual aptitude for owning private property will want to take it from those who do. When that day comes, and the law of the land has been suppressed and legislated out of existence—where the courts are so overloaded with cases that they can’t process them all, and attorneys have made mockeries of those that do go to court, there will be only one defense on that day—that of the gun. There will be only one thing that stands between those with property and those that want to take it—and that is the gun.

At that time when society falls into such a shambles, you will want to keep your hand on your gun. You won’t want to trust anyone. In that time there will be only one kind of man who you can trust, and that’s a dead man. And it will be that way because progressives failed in their social experiments and left the world a wasteland of shattered dreams and desperate souls low in intellect but hungry for material goods they can obtain by the only means their government schools taught them—by stealing it.

Learn to shoot, and keep you hand on your gun……………..always. I will miss the days where it was possible to go somewhere without worrying about someone trying to threaten you in some way. It has been relatively nice for a long time. But progressives thought they could manage violence away from human beings with the same stupidity that they thought they could eradicate poverty. They thought that government instruction and management would solve all those problems. But all they succeeded in doing was in making more of the behavior and ultimately placing society on a collision course with collapse and devastation. It is then that the individual must turn to the gun to protect themselves from the encroaching mob of collective stupidity democratically mandated to steal from those who have, and kill those who resist. In such a time there is only one rule that will be sufficient—you must be the first one to fire. Because there’s only one kind of man who you can truly trust in that future—and that’s a dead man. That’s also why I love that old Ennio Morricone song so much and why it holds so much truth not as a relic from our cinematic past, but of the prophetic times to come.

Rich Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

Listen to The Blaze Radio Network by CLICKING HERE.

Why the Department of Education Should be Shut Down: Broadband for everyone!

This is why the Department of Education should be completely eliminated. It is grotesquely ineffective and agenda based politically. The aim of equality so boisterously proposed by government school advocates is only a thinly veiled attempt at state-run parenting. It’s an insult to have them in charge of education. For instance, I first saw the following article from Yahoo News, and found the source article after some checking. Essentially it’s a marketing ploy advocating in favor of two progressive agenda items—one Common Core, the other Net Neutrality and using children to advance both causes. I personally find it insulting that they actually think human beings are stupid enough to believe what they are saying. While many people may be, not everyone is, and while they strive for equality of stupidity for all people, I’m not going to comply, nor will the typical reader of this site. Here is how the article read:

Overall, 63 percent of public schools don’t have access to broadband speeds needed for digital learning. The problem is particularly acute in rural and low-income districts: Only 14 percent in those areas meet high-speed internet targets.

“It’s just very uneven all over the country,” Lan Neugent, executive director of the non-profit State Educational Technology Directors Association.

The Federal Communications Commission approved a $1.5 billion spending cap increase for school broadband and Wi-Fi last year that is expected to significantly boost connectivity. State grants linked to Common Core implementation and collaborations with tech and business leaders are also bridging the gap. But those initiatives could take a year or more to connect thousands of schools and testing started in 29 states and the District of Columbia for 12 million students this year.

In the meantime, they’re resorting to alternatives: Testing students in small groups, busing them to other schools and limiting all other internet access while exams are taken.

Ideally, technology can help eliminate achievement gaps between poor and rural students and their more affluent peers. The shift to online testing, however, reveals how wide the digital divide remains. Districts like Chicago Public Schools with large numbers of low-income students have raised questions about whether their students — who often don’t have access to a computer or the Internet at home — are at a disadvantage.

“The implementation of Common Core is bringing these issues more to the forefront,” said Brian Smith, executive director of the nonprofit Education Trust-West. “But this has been an issue that has plagued communities of color and low-income communities for years.”

 

http://www.usnews.com/news/technology/articles/2015/05/11/online-common-core-testing-lays-bare-tech-divide-in-schools

Problem number one, if technology is being used in public schools to the extent that they need WI-FI internet connections, then the institution itself is not needed. I already argue that modern technology as far as teaching is far superior to an actual union member public school teacher. Teachers may have some success in helping children who have bad parents, or limited financial opportunities, but for the masses of children, public school is ineffective as an institution—other than providing day care for children while parents work. Here is the Department of Education attempting to articulate that the internet is needed to provide education in a brick and mortar school—even to the extent that they are willing to spend money to bus students to locations with better WI-FI connections. People are supposed to actually sympathize with that nonsense. It’s an insult to assume that normal people are stupid enough to not see what is going on with that ridiculous assumption.

Secondly, the Department of Education ignores completely the Vico cycle of human devolution—which is historically as reliable as sunrises and sunsets. The reason that there are different portions of the country rural and urban as well as wealthy and poor is because different factions of people depending on their values progress along the Vico cycle at rates specific to them. For instance, those in poor neighborhoods are entering the anarchy phase while those in the suburbs may be at the aristocratic. Those phases are not compatible with one another—so there will be different types of people produced by them. CLICK HERE for a contemporary understanding of the Vico cycle. It would be thought that all the supposedly smart people at the Department of Education would understand the Vico cycle—but apparently not. Loses in internet connectivity has little to do with any other factor than whether or not an area is profitable. Internet providers are willing to incur the cost of service if there is money in it for them. They are not going to do it for the fun of it.   Ironically, Richard Branson with his Virgin Galactic company is planning to put satellites up that will bring internet coverage to even the most remote portions of Africa, so a day when such connectivity problems will still be an issue are on their way out—so long as government stays out-of-the-way. If Virgin Galactic is left alone, the problems of this entire article will evaporate like a puddle of water on a hot summer day. It won’t take long for there to be no trace of anything left behind.

Then of course is the not so subtle marketing of public education services by stating that technology can help erase the gaps between poor and affluent—as if government schools were the great equalizers of society. They aren’t. You could give a poor kid in South Chicago a brand new laptop and it would likely be destroyed within a few weeks, sold for drug money, or riddled with pornography because the parents of the poor child were terrible and instilled limited values on the unfortunate sapling. I’ve known lots of people from poor neighborhoods and tried to help them all. You can’t make bad people into good just by being nice to them, or giving them a fair shake. They have to change their values. A drunk has to value soberness to want to quit. The illiterate has to value reading to break their curse. A poor person has to want to be productive; otherwise they will continue to be poor. Until you work on the core values of a society, nothing can stop their progress on the Vico cycle. Nothing—no amount of money, no feel good public education experiment—no billions of dollars spent on the internet. The internet is useless without the desire to learn something from it. The internet doesn’t just magically make everyone equal with opportunity. Stupid people will use it for porn. Smart people will use it for knowledge. In order for everyone to be equal, everyone has to either want to be stupid or smart. Public education as indicated by the Department of Education has decided that the best way to make everyone equal is to make the smart into the stupid and then hope that government can manage the chaos of the Vico cycle that follows. But they can’t, and they will never learn to. Because the phase after anarchy is always theocracy, and when that happens the Department of Education will be eliminated anyway in favor of a new god to worship and the whole mess starts over again.

Well everyone isn’t stupid, or have plans on joining the ranks. For them, the Department of Education insulted their intelligence with such a stupid release of information flowed down to the orthodox media. It shows just how astonishingly ignorant those in charge at the Department of Education really are. I mean I don’t think much of them anyway, but to not understand the basic concepts of the Vico cycle—it’s just preposterous. Sad and ignorant that such people are employed by tax payer dollars. That—is the real insult.

Rich Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

Listen to The Blaze Radio Network by CLICKING HERE.

Hoffman Lenses on Scientology: The need for fathomglasses behind the veil

To use a James Joyce word, it takes fathomglasses often to see the world properly. Or more appropriately updated from the fine B-movie They Live by John Carpenter, it takes Hoffman Lenses. Out of all the names Carpenter could have used for the sunglasses that showed the wearer what was really going on behind the thin veil of reality it seems more than a convenient coincidence. Yet before that movie was made, it was normal for my view of the world to use fathomglasses to see well behind the aspects of society into the core of motivation, whether that motivation is the way cells behave toward one another during daily bodily maintenance, or how creatures of substance use their intellect to accomplish primordial tasks. Fathomglasses—“Hoffman Lenses,” are useful to understand the world in ways that are not so obvious. It takes work to wear them, but it is worth the effort.

When I was young and an upcoming writer I did the path toward progress that most writers go through. I took courses, mentored by established writers like Sol Stein and Linda Nagata, submitted to magazines of fiction and participated in the L. Ron Hubbard Writers of the Future contest which seemed like a good place for my type of pulp fiction. So it didn’t take long for members of the Church of Scientology to reach out to me which I looked into because of Tom Cruise. Upon my investigation it was quite clear to me that L. Ron Hubbard used his relationship with Jack Parsons, and the cult of Aleister Crowley to invent a new religion renaming some of the creatures and mythology of H.P. Lovecraft to support a growing New Age awareness of spiritual enlightenment into the hidden history of mankind which is slowly being revealed.

The Xenu character from Scientology is but one of the mythological characters that are potentials of the Lovecraft mythology regarding the origins not only of the universe, but specifically of mankind. There is no way for history to confirm that there was ever a Xenu who was the dictator of a Galactic Confederacy 75 million years ago just as there is no way to claim that there was ever a Jesus, Moses, or Abraham. All we know is that a writer put down a story and people decided to follow whatever prophet emerged from that particular mythology and place their faith into. More and more, I am convinced that the current history that we have all been following was designed to conceal the unusual background of mankind’s true origins, and the reason is the preservation of religious power as it currently shapes modern politics. Using fathomglasses to look deep into the veil of reality, it is quite clear that something is amiss regarding human history.

Ron Hubbard to his credit in his book Dianetics tries to help people find a healthy balance between Western technology and Oriental philosophy by dividing the mind into three parts, an analytical mind, a reflective mind, and a somatic mind. The essence of a person lives on for infinite rebirths so it’s kind of like the Hindu religion on overdrive. I think there was a sincere attempt to help people live in an awakened condition. But Hubbard ultimately was a collectivist who yearned to be a supreme leader of some order using his relationship with Parsons and witnessing the power of Crowley as a launch point. I continue to be stunned that Tom Cruise became a member of Scientology after his movie Eyes Wide Shut. You’d think he would have learned something on that movie shoot, but it’s his life and I ultimately think less of him because of his open worship of Hubbard. Once I learned all this I stepped back and away from the Writers of the Future events and made a decision that most of the people in the publishing industry were either open socialists, or Scientologists recruiting for their order. I didn’t want to be a part of their collective order in any regard.   With my fathomglasses, I see the followers of Jesus in much the same way as the followers of L. Ron Hubbard—they are organizing a cult they believe will take them to the next step beyond the veil—and they are largely missing the point—because they do not see the truth—because they are not allowing themselves to see the world through their own fathomglasses. They allow some leader to provide it to them—even knowing that the leader was a successful science fiction writer who wanted to advance his theory of Xenu worship. While I enjoy the Xenu mythology–until someone produces a DC-8 spaceship as a relic from millions of years ago, there is no way that anybody in their right mind would sign a billion year contract to Scientology. Anyone who would in my opinion is signing up for a cult.

It’s not that Hubbard and Lovecraft were incorrect about their pulp stories, which should be considered fiction that provokes possibilities rather than Biblical text. Fiction is a form of developing fathomglasses that can take the mind to good places of thought, so the practice of contemplation is healthy. When it gets unhealthy is when the leaders of an organization behave the way they were reported to in the supplied documentaries on Scientology—shown here. Whenever a group of people starts drawing lines between those on the inside and those on the out, they are trying to create a cult. When people try to report on that cult, or prevent them from leaving for whatever reason—or attempt to use the cult as a wedge against families, the line is crossed and the effectiveness of the mythology is greatly minimized. At that point the religious attempts of the cult have lost their intent at being a positive force, and have regulated themselves into the evils of collectivism.

But in a world where religion is used as a safety blanket to mask the harshness of only perceived realities, there is no shortage of prophets who want to be the next Jesus, or Buddha. Most people want to be remembered for something when they die away, and even those with very active imaginations yearn for the respect of the social masses placed upon them through collectivism. Yet the Hoffman Lenses say that the answer is not within those groups, associations, or prophets—but is yet deeper still where only fathomglasses into infinity can penetrate. I have found that I can see much deeper without any group associations, so I stopped caring about the Writers of the Future contests, or the published magazines. I decided to write from within and let the chips fall where they will mostly ignoring the world and its noise. Hubbard cared far too much for his place in the fabric of history to have seen the world with the proper fathomglasses, so to me he was only a science fiction writer who wanted the respect of a religion that he created. He may have had good intentions but the byproduct of those intentions were collectivism and that is the legacy of Scientology. There may be some truth to the auditing process, to the gradual revelation about Zenu, but like most religions that expect congregations to fall in to some sort of submission behind an established protocol of behavior—the individual is ignored and consumed in favor of the collective. Hubbard based his Scientology on portions of Oriental religion—which of course is based on mysticism. That aspect alone invalidates the authenticity of the endeavor.

Tom Cruise may get angry at my Hoffman Lenses, but he’d see the same if he truly viewed the world with the proper fathomglasses into reality—instead of trusting some human being quite capable of bad judgment and manipulated imagination. By that I mean that I mistrust any prophet who declares that something came to them in a dream, or was provided by some angel—or demon. If I look with the lenses of fathomglasses it is quite clear that the essence of evil and maleficent hunger brew many stage plays against the human race for designs not entirely visible to our spectrum of understanding. I don’t think there is a religion on earth capable of taking individual minds to the places that the Hoffman Lenses can see. They can try, but they all fall dreadfully short. The only way to cross that great gulf is through individual achievement. No collective endeavor can ferry the mind to such a place seen by the fathomglasses of reason. And that is the danger of following a cult, as opposed to truly walking the fine line between reality and the hidden mysteries deliberately concealed from us by those who least want us to know what is going on behind the veil.

Groups of people are easy to control, whereas individuals are loose cannons. The vile maleficent who hide in the shadows whether it be Zenu or Azathoth may try to inspire followers into the safe embrace of some prophet, but why? The answer of course is that once there, those followers can be steered into the direction of choosing. The answer to these mysteries will never be found in such directed places—and so long as they continue, mankind will continue to flip around on a dry dock as if just caught by some lowly fisherman sporting a past time and offering life in a mere bucket of water. The real answers are in the depths of the oceans, beyond the religion, the threats of sickness, insanity of all human limitations. And to reach those places you need fathomglasses worn by an individual to see them.

I love that move, They Live!  And for those who doubt this little report on Scientology watch the videos presented, and you too will begin to really see.

Rich Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

Listen to The Blaze Radio Network by CLICKING HERE.

The Rodizio Grill at Liberty Center: Why Bruce Springsteen is crack-smoking wrong

I spend a fair amount of time discussing the Giambattista Vico cycle as it pertains to the human race. You could say it’s a hobby of mine. That particular cycle effects mankind over a relatively short period of time lasting centuries to decades. However, for culture building, which is another hobby of mine, the Vico cycle can be seen easily in how money moves around any given city. Take for instance my hometown of Cincinnati. A century or so ago most of the good money and investment around the city was in the location of the current zoo, just north of downtown. Now those regions due to the insistent rule of micromanaged and mismanaged mayors and city councils demanding ever-increasing tax dollars, retreated into the suburbs, specifically the Springdale and Fairfield areas, along with parts of Sharonville. About thirty years ago, those were the parts of the city that were flourishing. But mismanagement drove out the good money there leaving behind high taxes and ruins. Now, and quite spectacularly, it is the West Chester and Mason area that has all the investment as those who create and drive culture have gathered in the rapidly developing West Chester corridor. Among those developments is the Liberty Center development with all the wonderful new commercial announcements coming from it. For me specifically, I am excited for the announcement of a new Rodizio Grill.

Like my love of Mad Max, CLICK HERE FOR REVIEW I am hoping that the Giambattista Vico cycle will be destroyed because honestly I like my home area and that is where this new Liberty Center is located. Unlike other people whom I am friends with I love new development. I am excited—REALLY excited about the new Liberty Center, and I am quite sure that I will eat at the Rodizio Grill—a lot. I will take my family there often, and likely business partners—because it’s cool, it’s the best that human civilization has so far produced by way of food and the way it’s presented for consumption. Liberty Center is about human culture and the creativity of that culture—and I find that more valuable than just raw nature—because human beings took various elements, put them together in an artistic way, and produced something wonderful like Liberty Center.

But there is of course a warning that twenty years from now, the Giambattista Vico cycle will strike. If taxes are allowed to migrate north and local governments lose sight of what the driving forces of the community truly are—the individuals like those behind the Rodizio Grill, the new Cabelas, and all the other new creations that are so exciting—and they start imposing unnecessary restrictions on creativity and penalize profit making—then all that will leave for more profitable destinations. What will remain is poverty and decline. Good people are often the first to leave from the corruption of bad people—so to avoid the Giambattista Vico cycle bad people require judgment and definition.

As we watch this new Liberty Center open, and everyone is excited for what will prove to be one of the finest examples of commercial development in the entire United States up to this point, it is important not to lose ourselves. It is important to understand that the hotels rising in West Chester by the Streets shopping complex and upcoming Bass Pro Shop are not there because of new investment so much. They located there because that’s where the profit is. There isn’t any profit in downtown Cincinnati because there isn’t any money there. Government is too intrusive and too costly meaning investment will always go elsewhere. But that investment money is not guaranteed, it is fragile. It can leave as fast as it came. It requires local government to keep their hands out of the cookie jar and to allow creativity to flourish.

Prosperity is possible for long periods of time if we are all willing to step away from the Giambattista Vico cycle. For Liberty Center and the developments to the south in West Chester, many generations of flourishing economic activity can commence if government resists the trend to regress backwards—as is always the trend when it comes to human beings. If West Chester can resist the temptation to become a city so that politicians can have supreme power over all this creative development—it has a chance to continue to grow. If the Lakota school system can hold off their radical government union and keep their unrealistic labor needs tucked away in a corner—keeping taxes on property reasonable—there is a chance that the Liberty Center will continue to fill its leased property and ever expand.

I remember well when Forest Fair Mall opened with great fanfare. The Tri County and Forest Park area was a boomtown of innovation and creativity. Now Tri County is loosing stores rapidly due largely to the quality of their clientele declining so intensely. And Forest Fair Mall which was once touted as the new Mall of America is nearly empty. The mall was mismanaged by allowing low quality people to take over driving the Giambattista Vico cycle toward anarchy. The dagger in their coffin occurred when they tried to turn the mall into an adult playground of sin—with nightclubs and other low intellect activity. Good money left, bad money stayed, and when the bad money was spent—the mall went bust and never recovered.

It’s an exciting time for those of us who live near the Liberty Center development. It will take time for the threat of Giambattista Vico to emerge. But once he does, it doesn’t take long, and I hope that government which currently is largely conservative to various degrees stays that way well into the future. Once democrats are allowed to corrupt the logic of creatively through development, it’s over, the Vico cycle will begin to destroy all that is currently being built. So for those who want to see the continued economic development of West Chester and Liberty Township flourish, an avoidance of the Vico cycle is absolutely essential. Never take for granted that everything will stay as it is presently. It will only continue to flourish so long as government takes a back seat and stays out-of-the-way of good people using good money to invest in new business opportunities, like the Rodizio Grill. When that place opens, I can see myself on its reservation list many evenings—and I hope well into the future.

You see dear reader here is the secret……people listen to songs from artists like Bruce Springsteen and his liberal ravings about the value of hometowns, but he fails utterly to understand what forces he is fighting against. He believes falsely that capitalists are the robber barons from his song “Death to my Hometown.” He thinks it is the developers, the bankers and the soothsaying realtors who destroy hometowns. But he’s wrong, and so is everyone else—because they don’t understand the cycle of Giambattista Vico. Hometowns don’t last without money, and money doesn’t stick around when government seeks to steal it and distribute it to low quality people in exchange for a vote. It is the Vico cycle which destroys hometowns, not developers, or capitalists. It is profit that is the blood of a hometown. Without profit, that blood leaves and the town dies. So Bruce Sprinsteen can dance on a stage with great fanfare and get millions of driveling idiots to follow his words, but until they step off the Giambattista Vico cycle hometowns will continue to die—and I don’t want to see that happen in my hometown.

Rich Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

Listen to The Blaze Radio Network by CLICKING HERE.

‘Fury Road’: Rebelling against Giambattista Vico

I have a general assumption about mankind that is quite opposite of typical academia. Civilizations rise on the backs of innovative individuals and flourishing capitalism. They decline with more centralized control and absorption of individual achievement into the fabric of a collective society. When an unworthy king or bureaucratic democracy takes over the direction of economic enterprise and invention, a society is in decline. It is due to the hard wiring of human beings trained from their infancy to follow the Giambattista Vico cycle always witnessing societies fall only to be born again in a much regimented pattern. This holds true no matter what the society, whether it be the Mayan people, the Inca, the Mongol, the Roman Empire—all societies so far have followed the Giambattista cycle. This is why anybody with any honesty looks at George Miller’s Mad Max films and declares him a genius. It’s also why it was more than symbolic that Mel Gibson showed up at the premier of Fury Road, the latest Mad Max film now staring Tom Hardy. Studios didn’t want Gibson in the film as the Vico cycle declares that what’s old must be recycled to make way for the young and new. But Gibson showed up to give the young Hardy a bit of support because any Mad Max fan knows that Mel Gibson will always be the iconic Road Warrior. It all started with this movie.

Our current world is not very far from the world of the first Mad Max movie. Police are now being openly murdered and Vico’s final phase of anarchy is fully at hand. What happens next is the rise of a theocratic society followed again by aristocratic, then democratic rule, followed by chaos once again. In the film Fury Road we find that in the period between the first Mad Max film society has devolved into the rise of theocratic civilization. No longer is society concerned with missions to Mars or inventing a new iWatch—now the primary concern as it has been in the past is to establish a new deity figure for the society at large.

I have always loved the Mad Max character because he maintains himself throughout the entire cycle as a constant reminder into the phase of the Gambattista cycle from which everything was taken from him, his wife, child, friend, career—everything he cherished from that time. Unlike the rest of the world he finds himself standing up against the tide of regression. He is a representation in these Mad Max films as Nietzsche’s ubermensch-otherwise translated as the overman. Nietzsche’s ubermensch is one who has graduated from mankind and stepped away from the Gambattista cycle all together—and has decided to advance their life based on individual creativity.   But this is a dangerous road, Hitler tried to take Nietzsche’s ubermensch and advance Germany, but failed in his interpretation and instead moved his country into a Karl Marx inspired socialist democracy—followed by war defined anarchy, then back to a theocratic/democratic existence where it currently finds itself in a European Union—otherwise a democracy that is once again plunging into anarchy now inspired by the failing economies of Greece.   Mad Max is the figure who refuses to submit to these tides of the world.

I have no doubt that George Miller would agree with this assessment. He knows all too well what he’s doing. He’s not just making a popcorn action thriller with great car stunts and bizarre characters. He’s making a rejection statement against Gambattista’s famed cycle. He may not have set out to be conscious about that statement but rather let his intellect drive those elements of the story along as evolution of the various aspects of the story evolved, but based on the presentation of Fury Road, it is clear he understands what he’s doing all too well. It’s also clear why so many people are excited to see such an apocalyptic story and why after all these years it’s so close to the hearts of so many people. This is not a typical summer blockbuster film.

So, how excited am I for the upcoming Fury Road? Well, let me tell you, I have dedicated this upcoming Friday to seeing it. I will certainly be one of the first, and I will likely see it several times. I love the action, I love Mad Max and all that he stands for, but more than anything I love seeing the Gambattista cycle challenged. The world may have went crazy in relation to the advanced days of invention when oil was being produced to propel cars from city to city, to instigate the growth of economies of various trade. All that can and will fall apart within just a few decades of human development—just like the Maya abandoned their cities apparently very fast—as if they just evaporated. It’s not that such people abandoned their cities because they left earth for alien destinations, the people of Ur did not suddenly become equivalent to the Neanderthal after building hanging gardens and massive temples—they regressed because they emerged into war then reinvented theocracy starting the Vico cycle fresh again losing all that they had gained before. Mad Max is that personality in these George Miller movies who in spite of everything that he has lost and continues to lose, refuses to give up on his heroic past and be the last representation of a time when mankind was truly great.

How many people do you know who would at the drop of a hat become one of the mindless followers of some future attempt at theocratic rule? The current Muslim obsession is but the latest. How many maniacs would kill the masses for a chance at everlasting life in the hereafter because some slug of a wanna’ be king dictated that such a thing would bring redemption to the soul? The answer is probably everyone that you know. Most of the people shopping at the grocery and working in a corner cubical would gladly trade in their suits and ties for a thong and Mohawk if some skull inspired death cult instructed them that through worship of his heavenly presence that someday they too might rise up to greatness if only they adhere to the tenets of collectivism.   Miller’s brilliance is that he was able to see such a clear vision from our present age. It’s not easy to see that overweight school levy supporter buying meat at the grocery as a future sex slave to a blood thirsty cult fighting over the worship of water—but Miller does, and with a grand design. It’s not easy to see that corrupt politician kissing babies and whatever else as the skull wearing Immortan Joe hunting down the wives who are desperate to leave him. But in Miller’s films, it is quickly recognizable that most people we know under similar conditions would find themselves as some character in that wasteland. It doesn’t take much to forgo everything we have ever been and throw it away in exchange for basic human necessities, like food, water, and sex.

I am excited for Fury Road, but for reasons that go well beyond the visual spectacle. I love it for the rebellion against Vico. On one hand the Vico cycle is shown in all its brutal honesty, but through the character of Max—using almost no dialogue—Miller beholds the ubermensch—a character that launched the career of Mel Gibson who in almost every movie refused to buckle under the pressure of Vico to decline—but always to advance. Whether it was Riggs from Lethal Weapon or William Wallace from Braveheart, Mel Gibson started as Mad Max, that hero from the past who punched through the Vico cycle with the throttle down and the skill of a Road Warrior as the rest of the world attempted to drag him back into the Stone Age. That’s why Fury Road is more important than a four-year degree in college studying history and the Vico cycle. Because Fury Road shows through art the results of that path—and how treacherously close we always are to falling off the edge of reality into an abyss controlled by maniacs like Immortan Joe—or the Toe Cutter.

Rich Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

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Keep Pam Geller Alive: Get wealthy while fighting terrorists–find out how

Not so oddly enough I know something of the two primary figures at the center of the AFDI Mahammad Art exhibit and contest in Garland, Texas which took place on May 3rd 2015. The winner of the art contest I have covered here before, Bosch Fawstin—who is the man behind the Pigman graphic novel whom I was made aware of as a potential partner for my own Cliffhanger stories. CLICK HERE FOR REVIEW.  Then of course I know a bit about Pam Geller, who organized the event. Pam is a long-standing Ayn Rand fan and is 100% all in when it comes to pushing back against radical Islam. When my novel Tail of the Dragon was being released I approached Pam about providing a blurb. She was willing until she realized that the novel didn’t deal directly with the problem of Islamic radicalism. She declined as she didn’t want to stray her attention away from the task at hand, bringing the public an awareness of radical Islam with the laser guided diligence that she has been providing for years. So it didn’t surprise me to see that these two characters were at the center of all this controversy. Fawstin won essentially by drawing a simple cartoon of Muhammad yelling to the viewer, “YOU CAN’T DRAW ME!” as the cartoonists states back with his pencil “THAT’S WHY I DRAW YOU.” For that simple drawing Fawstin has gone into hiding as Pam Geller had a Fatwa declared against her. To understand the lunacy behind the “fatwa” which is an issuance of death aimed at a target, this video will tell the story very well. This is what we are dealing with represented by Islamic Imam Anjem Choudary.

Watching that exchange pissed me off more than just a little. I personally thought Pam pushed it a bit by hosting the art show just as South Park a few years ago did something similar by putting Muhammad into their television show on Comedy Central. I’m pretty tolerant of people’s religious beliefs as I view them all as a kind of baby step toward universal understanding of the forces truly at work. To me Islam and this prophet Muhammad are just rip offs of Zoroastriansim. That particular religion dates back to around the early 2nd millennium BCE. The offshoots of Zoroastrianism were of course Christianity, Gnosticism,, and Islam as many different groups of people took their version of it and added a new religious mythology to suit their needs. I’m fine with whatever people need to do to understand their place in the universe—religion is fine, it’s a nice first step to bringing values to a person’s life—and I tend to like religious people more than people without it—because generally people who have religion in their lives have some sense of value that they try to live by. But to insist as these radical Muslims do, that all other religions and their references be eliminated in favor of a limited interpretation of reality is simply ridiculous. When Muslims have a general rule that their “prophet” cannot even be shown they are advocating in America something that just isn’t possible. Islam wasn’t even a religion until well over a thousand years after Zoroastrianism so much of the Islamic attempt to edit out what came before them, including Christianity are deliberate attempts at ignorance by shutting off their subjects to history deliberately insisting on turning off their minds to logic. Muslims deserve to be insulted when they collide with a culture in America where everything is up for debate and scrutiny.

The attempt of radical Islam is to force ignorance upon the world, and that in American culture is a much more serious crime than in drawing some prophet who ripped off aspects of Zoroastrianism to lash out against the wealthy clans of Mecca who feared the ancestral paganism that made them rich at that time. The creation of Islam is ironically a religious version of communism where the proletariat was given a psychological path toward anger against the bourgeoisie. Those too lazy to work very hard in life found in the religion an excuse to not be all that productive, so they jumped all in surrendering their lives to “Allah” then pointed to the Quran as the declaration of proof. Of course to keep their ruse alive they had to make Muhammad into a figure of respect as he was the author of their revered book, and to maintain the illusion of his prophet hood, they refused to even allow their subjects to depict the guy in any visual way. Well, that might work in some sand bitten, god forsaken region like the Middle East, but in America, that kind of behavior is just out of the question—as it should be. In a free society everything is fair game for debate and the illusion of Islam insisting that religious participants close off their minds to reality just isn’t going to happen, even under a penalty of death. Think about how stupid of a requirement it is in radical Islam to insist to not even show an image of Muhammad. Then to threaten death to anybody who questions it. See the problem?

Yet even as many have come out and criticized Pam Geller for poking a stick into the very intellectually limited cage of Islam, those same minds advocated tolerance for the defacement of Christian symbols, namely art exhibits where urine, defecation, and other vile acts were committed against Jesus Christ. It becomes quite clear quickly what is behind all this radical Islam nonsense and it’s just not going to be tolerated in the United States.   We are dealing with a religious war between two primary religions where the Islamic faction is hell-bent on the destruction of any rival under any condition. And that kind of intolerance just isn’t going to have legs in American society. It’s an information based culture that is going to do anything they are told not to—just because they can.

The two knuckle draggers who drove a 1000 miles to shoot up the art exhibit, Elton Simpson and his roommate Nadir Soofi from Phoenix, Arizona were way out of line. They showed up after such a long drive in body armor and military weapons to kill anybody they could. Expectedly, there were plenty of firearms on hand to put the two thugs down. Buy the 60-year-old police officer a beer for neutralizing the threats, and advancing on their location after he put them down to finish the job. That’s what every American should be able to do, and to perform the task, everyone should do their part by getting their concealed carry permit and arming themselves as heavily as possible. If one of these archaic idiots tries to do such a thing in public in the future, they need to be dealt with in the same way.

However the best way to eliminate the threat of these Islamic radicals is to use capitalism to destroy their culture—first starting in America, and then migrating it unapologetically to the Middle East. Currently the U.S. State Department is paying $20 million dollars to anyone who mails, emails or calls in information on four Islamic State commanders leading operations in Iraq and Syria. The State Department’s Rewards for Justice Program has paid out more than $125 million to more than 80 people since 1984 for actionable information that has put terrorists behind bars and prevented acts of terror. A person could become quite wealthy by coughing up information on Islamic radicals planning further hits on American targets—especially those against Pam or Bosch. The best way to strike back against these terrorists who insist on ignorance to advance their agenda is to rat them out of the holes they hide in and enrich yourself in the process. Here is the link, if you know of some radical Islamic loon that you think is planning something against any American activity on domestic soil—or anywhere in the world, click the link below and submit the tip. Buy yourself a new house, car, and cover your retirement for the rest of your life in the process. Enjoy the benefits of capitalism to the fullest extent and use it to crush this threat.

https://www.rewardsforjustice.net/

It is intolerable to even allow people like Pam and Bosch to be threatened for drawing a picture or hosting an art exhibit. Liberal advocates desiring to crush Christianity opened the door long ago to analysis of decency when they allowed the defacement of Jesus in art, and advocated on behalf of free speech to justify it. Pam simply did the same thing turning the hypocrisy against those advocates. Was it aggressive, sure, but we are at war with these ideological nutcases whether or not we want to be. So what has happened is set in stone and from here on out we have to deal with it. The first and best thing every American should do is—purchase a gun and carry it. Learn to use it and don’t get all panicky under stress.   Have it so you can use it the way the police officer in Garland did. When a target threatening the safety and security of any American is presented, neutralize that target as quickly as possible. The second and probably most enriching thing that you can do is rat out any jihadist thug hiding in the cracks of life wherever they might attempt to show themselves in the light of day. Don’t be afraid of those idiots—turn them in and let the guys at the Rewards for Justice sort out the good tips from the bad. You have a much better chance of winning some money with the Rewards for Justice Program than in winning the lottery or getting rich at a casino.

And while you’re at it thank Pam Geller for flushing out a couple of these scum bags. She did a good thing and she deserves the credit for having the brass to stick herself out there to fight these maniacs. You can thank her by keeping her alive, so get her potential assassins off the street by using the Rewards for Justice Program to scoop them up and drop them into a hole where they won’t be able to hurt anybody. And while you’re at it, get rich in the process. It’s the American way and unapologetically wonderful.

Rich Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

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