Tag: Atlas Shrugged

‘The Founder’, Movie Review: Why the battles of capitalism are worth all the blood they spill

I didn’t catch it when it was released in the theaters, but that didn’t stop me from buying the Blu-Ray at the first opportunity because I knew it would be a brilliant film—and it was.  The Founder starring Michael Keaton was just that—and it may well be the most important film you’ll see this year—or whenever you read this.  If you haven’t seen the film, do it now.  Don’t even finish reading this.  Just go see it.  I adored the film and personally I could relate to the type of character that Michael Keaton played as likely the most true to life rendition of Ray Kroc ever done—the founder of the McDonald’s franchise concept.  Readers here know I love McDonald’s; I make no secret of it.  I love a lot of things in life but I always have a special place for McDonald’s and the reason for my love was summed up extraordinarily well in the great movie directed by John Lee Hancock.

The Founder is all about innovation and American ingenuity.  It’s not always pretty, not always civil—but the engine that drives American capitalism specifically was captured so wonderfully well in this great movie that its worth watching and should be done in every American household.  Another favorite of my is the great Francis Ford Coppola classic, Tucker: The Man and his Dream—this movie might as well been the sequel to how innovative American enterprise was in the period from 1940 up until the 1960s.  The Founder is about nothing short than the invention of the fast food industry which has left the biggest mark on world culture that we’ve ever witnessed.

When I walk into a McDonald’s no matter where it is in the world I think of this creation story of Ray Kroc and his relationship to the fabulous McDonald brothers.  I simply love all those people even though as the story shows, Ray Kroc unethically outwitted them in the end to take possession of the company that featured their name—and that was likely a good thing for the invention of fast food.  In fact, I think the scene in The Founder where Kroc and two other people (one who would become his future wife) were discussing a new way to produce a milk shake.  It was one of the best scenes in film history because it captured so well the risk and innovation that was going on all the time during that post World War II period in America which we today all take for granted.  Imagine the skepticism that making a synthetic milkshake with powder was to the naiveté of the 1950s generation yet without people with the drive and charisma of Ray Kroc, we’d all still be eating a lot slower and living a lot less productively.  Anti-capitalists of course would love to go back to the days where it took 30 minutes to get a hamburger—instead of 30 seconds—but American society as we know it now was built on the extra productivity per capita that specifically came from the invention of fast food that started with McDonald’s.  To me that makes the company and this movie enormously relevant.

I’ve had McDonald’s in many countries around the world and to me it is always a piece of home.  Most dramatically my wife and I had a McDonald’s across the street from our hotel in Cancun which probably saved our lives.  We were both sick from our experience with a cenote inland on the Yucatan Peninsula where we were swimming on a very hot day.  The Mexicans use such places as their only relief from their terrible living conditions as most of them live in thatched huts.  I saw fish swimming around in the water so I figured it couldn’t be too bad, and it was clear water.   The local people were used to such bacterially infested water, we weren’t and the next day we were both terribly sick and massively dehydrated.  We lost trust in the local water supply even in such a popular resort town.  But we knew the quality control of the McDonald’s across the street was our best chance at a good meal—because many of the materials that made the material came from the United States.  So for the rest of our trip, we only ate at McDonald’s even though we had access to some of the best places to eat that the world offered.  We didn’t feel we could trust the water since our systems had been disrupted at the cenote.  Those Golden Arches were one of the best experiences I ever had eating.  I can say that my wife and I have had some fine dining in many of the best places in exotic cities and that McDonald’s meal for us was our best because we were so parched and in need of food familiar to our diet with tightly controlled filtered water.

Another time for me was in Japan.  I was so tired of eating seaweed and octopus.  I was trying to be respectful to their culture, but I woke up one morning really looking for some American food so I found a McDonald’s in the middle of the very nice city of Kobe.  Now consider I had just had authentic Kobe Beef the night before with some great wine and immaculate other dishes.  But at 7 AM in Japan after a hard week of work I wanted a Sausage and Egg McMuffin from McDonald’s with a nice big Coke.  When I found one I found a nice place to eat it off in the corner of the restaurant and it will always be one of the best meals I’ve ever had.  There is a lot to be said about the consistency of McDonald’s food because it is pretty much the same anywhere you go and someday when I visit the moon I plan to eat at McDonald’s because it will give a stable diet to my body in an unfamiliar environment—and sometimes that is better than the actual flavors of the food.  I find that when I’m doing hard things, whether they are exotic adventures or tough business engagements, or even intense competitions, McDonald’s provides stability in a diet that is consistent and that is often far more valuable.

A lot of those techniques that make McDonald’s food so constantly fast and reliable were developed by the McDonald’s brothers and marketed to the world by Ray Kroc and we are all better for it.  When I’m having a really rough week, it is not unusual for me to stop by and grab some McDonald’s breakfast on my way to do whatever I’m dreading, because it does bring me a lot of joy to have that food. So a story about how that remarkable place was born is a lot of fun to see, especially as honest of a movie as this is.  Essentially, the McDonald’s brothers developed a great idea and a means to make food fast.  But it was Ray Kroc who put them into every city and was able to take the chance to pound out the fast food concept as a chain of real estate transactions.  That was really the hinge point of the entire McDonald’s story, that the business concept of franchising wasn’t in the food itself, but in the real estate transactions involved, where McDonald’s owned the stores and franchise owners would lease the spots—which put the quality control firmly in the hands of the company—instead of the individual owners.  That was the key and it took someone like Ray Kroc to pound out the idea.  The McDonald brothers were simply too nice to make that next step plunge.

In the end the point of the movie was a clear definition of capitalism that was spelled out clearly.  When Kroc tells the McDonald brothers that his business was war and if he saw a competitor drowning—that he’d put a hose down their throat to finish them off.  Mac McDonald wouldn’t have done that and neither would his brother.  That essentially was why they failed to move beyond their initial concepts but no further.  To make projects work you need a Ray Kroc type of person or things just stall, and that is what makes capitalism such an elusive concept elsewhere in the world.  Every business needs their dreamers, and their concept people—but in the end they need someone who can bring persistence to whatever is being attempted.  Ray Kroc with all their faults was undaunted by the prospect of failure.  He had failed over and over through his entire life and in the end; he was speaking with Governor Reagan just before he was elected president as the most successful restaurateur in the world.

McDonald’s makes all of our lives more efficient.  My daughter often before she picks up her kids at our house brings them Happy Meals from McDonald’s to entice them to get into the car and go home.  It helps her to give them quick food while as a busy young parent time is often short.  The ability to get a Happy Meal frees her time up making her much more productive in other ways.  And the same story could be told for all of us, whether its breakfast on the go in the morning or a relief far from home while traveling on the other side of the world.  McDonald’s makes an essential thing we all must do in our lives—which is eat—faster making it so that we can do many other things in our 24 hour day possible.

This movie is just a champ—it captures the American Dream in ways I’m not sure even the filmmakers realized.  For instance, why was Ray Kroc so obsessed with the idea of franchising the McDonald’s concept when he had a nice wife, a nice house, and a membership into an exclusive country club with rich friends?  Isn’t that what people want in America?  And why did the McDonald brothers work so hard to find faster ways to make food more reliably?  The answer goes beyond the wealth that can be achieved by such endeavors.  It is in the hunt of doing them which makes this story different from any other.  Ray Kroc wasn’t about personal jets and boardrooms, even though those things did come to him over time—it was about the thrill of doing something impossible for the benefit of doing something that had never been done before.  That is what drove all the protagonists in this story and what’s wonderful about it is that it was a true story.  It is in that concept that American capitalism works so well and how when those battles are fought the benefits get sprinkled so wonderfully to the rest of the world.  The wars of capitalism are worth fighting because the byproduct of it makes all of society better.  Even though capitalism can be ruthless, the products that come about as a result advance civilization and it is people like Ray Kroc and the McDonald brothers who best exemplify the American Dream.  Not in their successes as much as in their eternal optimism to keep trying until they finally do win—or die trying.

Rich Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

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Canadian Socialism: WLW’s poor choice in selective advertising and how America isn’t going back

This is one of those snarky media things that really irritates me—because there is a presumption that they know more than the rest of us.  But in my case at least—they don’t.  I’m usually polite toward other people who don’t work as hard at knowing things as I do, but when you run into one of these little smart asses it deserves a review in front of the class.  First WLW radio put out a little story on Twitter seen below, about Canadians disparaging Trump as if that were some kind of story.  Now, everyone here knows my history with WLW—I think they are too liberal since the exit of Darryl Parks and I stopped listening to them or doing little things for their various shows way back then.  AM radio is a dying medium so they are useless to me. When I saw them say something nasty about Trump, I responded accordingly.  I worked hard for the Trump campaign in Ohio, and I continue to do so when necessary.  The nature of my comment was that seldom does any media outlet acknowledge the dirty little secret that Canadians are socialist and the only way their society even begins to have any decent standard of living is that they have a very low population to support with their socialism, and they get all the economic spillover that comes with being the northern neighbor of the United States.  If that Justin Trudeau kid was running a country south of Mexico, Canada would be in just as bad of a situation as Venezuela is currently.  But because Canada shares so much trade with the United States, because we share rivers and lakes with them, they get to enjoy the change that falls out of our pockets as a rich nation.  There is nothing brilliant about the Canadian economy or their commitment to socialism.  Let’s get that clear from the start here.  I’m not a fan of Canada because of their left-winged politics.

But our American media and most of our left-winged entertainment culture love Canada for all those socialist reasons—and they are supposedly educated people.  Enter this Chad Selweski guy who responded to my Tweet to WLW Radio with the following smart assed answer from what he calls a “centrist viewpoint” as a media guy with some experience.  The only reason I point this out is because he represents largely what the mainstream media thinks about things and you quickly get an idea about why our media is so screwed up.

By his own words, Chad Selweski is a freelance writer and blogger with a centrist point of view from suburban Detroit, Macomb County (population 870,000), home of the “Reagan Democrats.” Selweski worked as the political reporter for The Macomb Daily for 30 years.

At The Macomb Daily, Selweski:

  • Earned 50 journalism awards for the newspaper from organizations such as the Associated Press, United Press International, Michigan Press Association, Detroit Chapter of SPJ, Detroit Press Club, Suburban Newspapers of America, and the State Bar of Michigan.
  • Was named by Politico.com in 2014 as one of the “Media Stars” in seven political battleground states.
  • Received in 1998 the highest honor ever granted to a Macomb Daily journalist, the SNA’s National Suburban Journalist of the Year award.
  • Covered the 2000 presidential election recount in Florida, from Tallahassee and Palm Beach County.
  • Interviewed numerous national figures, including President George H.W. Bush, Hillary Clinton, Mitt Romney, Colin Powell, Rudy Giuliani, Al Gore, Nancy Pelosi, Howard Dean, Dennis Hastert, Reince Priebus, Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, Carly Fiorina, Gen. Wesley Clark, Peter Jennings, George Will, Steve Forbes, Mike Dukakis, Richard Gephardt and Gen. Barry McCaffery.

https://www.politicscentral.org/about/

Socialism isn’t funny or cute—yet it’s being taught by a majority of our current education institutions in spite of the terrible track record it has around the world and its people like this Chad Selweski guy who help defend it even in the face of failure.  To more thoroughly answer his question about the beer company making fun of Trump, what they are doing is precisely what Canada always does—they are second-handers to American culture and in this case are using the Trump name to attempt to sell a few extra cans of beer to the largely socialist audience of their visitors and residents.  They aren’t being clever—they are just using the name of a successful person who happens to be picked on in the American media because he’s a capitalist.  That beer company was hoping that they’d get some free publicity from loser media groups like WLW radio to advertise for them subtle messages that go against Trump.  Not particularly clever free market advertising.  Just parasitic—like the overall culture of Canada.

These guys in the media—from WLW radio to this Chad Selweski cape rider want in American politics the type of people who screwed everything up—and Trump is a departure from the world they helped create—and they don’t like it.  I can understand that, but here’s the deal.  We’re not going back to the Peter Jennings world where George Will defined conservatism—or the equal value of Canadian politics on the North American continent.  Their economy only produces 1.7 trillion dollars so they are hardly masters of the universe when it comes to politics or philosophy.  Nobody should be taking any lessons on how to run a country from them.  I worked in the Tea Party movement for nearly a decade now and I have watched the political trajectory culminate into Donald Trump being in the White House and I’m here to tell all these “centrists” who eye socialism with compassion—America has a taste now of what a capitalist loving nation can do for them—and they aren’t turning away and returning to the world of moderation and mixed economies.

The best thing that Trump has done in his first 100 days since the media is so excited to report all the things he hasn’t been able to get done, like healthcare reform, or tax reform—and all the big-ticket items that small-minded people key on who don’t understand the big picture—was deregulation.  Trump has the Keystone Pipeline moving forward. He has cut back on the EPA.  He has an AG who is cutting down on illegal border crossings and he has encouraged trillions of dollars of investment to come back into the United States and that money is going to work in the American economy as I write this.  In just a few months Trump with just his name has put more money into our stock market than Canada produces annually over a three-year period of time.  And we’re just getting started.  By the time there’s another election the political landscape will be much different.  We’re not going backwards.

Trump isn’t the cause of the political shift, he’s the result.  The cause could be seen in the rallies way back in 2009 when people like this Chad Selweski guy were calling Tea Party people “Tea Baggers” hoping to shame people into holding that “centrists” line, where Canada, Mexico and the United States could all sit at a table as equals and contemplate the direction of the human race.  Two socialists and a capitalist do not all get equal consideration under the banner of philosophic contemplation—because results are what matter—not theoretical Marxist commitment when we all know what the end results are.  Trump can come and go, but the movement toward an unapologetic capitalist American society goes all the way back to the last days of George W. Bush when he gave up on the free market to put down the clamps which eventually caused the crash of 2008.  Many of us were ready to try something new back then and because of his skin color, Barack Obama got a chance and what he brought to America was European style socialism and that was like throwing gas on the bon fire.  Trump put his name in the ring and we voted for him—and in the future, it might be him or someone else—but we’re not going back.

The Canadians can make fun of America with their stupid beer cans, and our American media can disparage Trump yearning for those good ol’ days where they understood our political landscape and felt they could control it.  But the reality is what we are dealing with here—socialism doesn’t work, and America is about to pull ahead of the rest of the world economically showing everyone that they should have been more committed to capitalism than they were.  And people like Chad Selweski will find freelancing much more difficult because his “centrist position” just became the extreme radical leftist fringe again—the way it used to be in America.  People are now more open in their opinions and those old George Bush Republicans (pick either Bush president—it doesn’t really matter) are no longer going to be tolerated.

It’s now a numbers game—the old Tea Party types will fight it out for philosophic supremacy as the political left gets lost in the dust as the world changes under their feet.  That will happen because poor countries like Mexico, Canada and all of Europe are no longer equal players in global politics.  Because Trump has taken all the oxygen in the room—and that’s the way we want it in an “America First” world.  The Canadians can make fun of it—but it’s because they are the losers lost in the wake—not the superior economic contributor which WLW tried to pawn off on their audience of half-wits waiting for the next Cincinnati Reds baseball game to come on the air.  Personally, I care about as much about what the Canadians think of America as I do piss in a toilet.  A simple flush takes it all away.

Trains in West Chester: The magic and exuberance of a thriving economy

For the second time in my life I had the strange privilege to gain the viewpoint of foreign visitors and their intense interests in American trains.  In America, we take the length of our trains for granted as most of the rest of the world, particularly Europe and the East do not have they type of freight trains that we do in the United States.  But I remember the magic of when my future son-in-law visited over a decade ago how he thought the length of our trains were simply amazing which surprised me because I took them more as a nuisance that was in my way when I wanted to cross a road.  Then over this past week I had visitors from Japan and we were in a new office space that overlooked a very active railroad line that moved through West Chester, Ohio and they were simply amazed by the length and frequency of the trains.  We were working on some very important things, but I had the seating in such a way that they were able to look out the windows, so they had a prime seat for several hours of the day to see how many trains moved along that track in both a north and south direction.

I noticed that they seemed very interested in what was going on outside the window which made me wonder if I had the seating arrangements correct—and after a few days of this they simply asked me how long those trains were.  My reply was that most of them looked to be a mile long—or 1.6 kilometers as they understand it.  Some of the trains were longer clearly.  This information was simply stunning to these guys who spend a lot of time in places like Tokyo and London—even France. The length of American trains told them a lot about our culture and it was worth taking a moment to consider.

I’ve always loved trains—and like a lot of old men who have train sets in their basements, and like to visit the popular tourist destination in West Chester—Entertrainment Junction which features some of the largest model trains in the world—trains have an essence of optimism about them that largely goes unexplored.  We love them, but often don’t understand why.  After visiting Europe recently with this topic fresh on my mind I have some unique thoughts on the matter which might unlock better our understanding of this condition.  From my vantage point in both Japan and England I admired their train systems which was mostly regulated to passenger transportation.  People needed to get someplace fast so they took the train and it worked pretty well.  I was impressed with the complex way the trains ran in England particularly around London.  However, what was missing was the way that trains are used in the United States—you don’t often see the magic of an American train any place else even in places that are supposed to be the most popular and largest cities in the world.

Over the last year I had some very nice lunches in both Tokyo and London over looking their train systems and neither was as impressive as that display in this new office space where I had these Japanese guests.  After all, it was a fabulous spring day on this occasion where my guests were so enamored with the trains going by my window—so we brought in some good ol’ American pizza from Donatos and you’d think I took these people to a 5 star restaurant.  One of these guys had said that during this business trip they wanted to try some authentic American pizza—so you can image the elation that was experienced with a stack of five different pizzas with all different toppings sitting there being enjoyed while watching three, mile long trains all traveling south by our window while having lunch with a brilliant sun pouring in making us enjoy life that much more.  Just a bit beyond the train tracks was the endless energy of the American highway system which was unique also in the world.  Our big cars and trucks pouring endlessly by all day and night was another thing unique to American culture and we sat for about an hour eating our pizza and talking about trains and trucks in a way that impressed me with its philosophic content.

Japan for a small island economy produces about 4.4.trillion dollars a year which is impressive. To achieve that their people work very hard and intensely 365 days a year—you can feel the energy when you land there.  The people are vigorous, industrious, and extremely well-mannered and it shows in what they make.  And England where London is certainly one of the most important financial centers in the world produces somewhere between 2.2 to 3 trillion dollars if you count all the coins in your pockets on a rainy day—to be generous.  You can feel the energy there too—but in both cases, you can tell something is missing from an American perspective.  I knew what it was as I poured garlic sauce all over my nice juicy pizza watching the traffic under that morning spring sun in Ohio—and my guests were getting the gist of it too.  The American economy produces an astonishing 18.5 trillion dollars over a larger land mass, but the effect was clear by counting the trains and trucks up on I-75 going by then multiplying that over the land mass then dividing it by the hours of the day.  What we were looking at was a vibrant economy which was a product of mankind in all its glorious creativity emerging unencumbered by the powerful locomotives pulling freight from the north to destinations in the south.

The trains were a large part of that 18 trillion-dollar economy as some of the cars were double stacked and loaded with product headed toward distribution centers awaiting shipment.  China has a nominal GDP of 11.3 trillion although they have a PPP projection of over 23 trillion this year which equates out to $11-15,000 per pupil.  All that sounds impressive until you consider that they have over 1 billion people and in the United States our per pupil capita is roughly $53,000—quite a bit higher and that’s with 7 million people still unemployed as of this writing.  What we could see from our vantage point looking at trains and highway traffic was a very efficient and productive country making a lot of money and our big trains were a tremendous part of that.  Even the big tractor trailers cruising by down the highways couldn’t move the sheer volume of product that was chugging along by our train system.  And none of us said it at the time, but the American economy has been stagnant for a long time functioning at only a fraction of its potential due to the weaknesses of several decades of American presidents and destructive politics seeking to duplicate Europe instead of continue on with the polices that built America in the first place.

The trains didn’t just represent massive power by the large diesel engines which propelled them—they were aspects of a very powerful economy and contained within them many hopes and dreams which spill over into the enthusiasm that old men who build train sets in their basements share with their grandchildren. It was the length and frequency of those trains that caught the attention of my guests.  It’s one thing to read about the powerful American economy in a trade publication, or to watch a news story about it on television—it’s quite another to see it up close and personal and to see those trains going by our window was to confirm the majestic nature of American capitalism and the land of abundance that it produces.  That’s exactly why we love our trains and they continue to hold a special place in our hearts.  Trains are vital arteries of American capitalism and they continue to be impressive as the world watches jealously at how we took a relatively small country and made it into such an economy powerhouse.  Many can hope through colleges and other liberal institutions to hide just how powerful the American economy is—but when they see our trains—they can’t escape the reality of it.  Trains in America isn’t so much about taking people from one place to another—but in taking big things to large markets for income producing utilization and that is their specific purpose which is truly unique in the world.  And that is a truly majestic concept worthy of all the imagination ushered forth by our human race.

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 Betrayal of Kirsten Powers: A grim reality surrounding all the women accusing Bill O’Reilly of sexual harassment

I always knew while watching The O’Reilly Factor that Kirsten Powers was bad news.  As a liberal political pundit from USA Today Bill O’Reilly put her on constantly and I often wondered if Bill put up with her because she was having occasional sex with him.  Otherwise, who would put up with that terrible mouth of hers, obviously not her husband whom she was only married to for a short time from 2010 to 2013.  Putting her on Fox News almost every night was dangerous in my opinion and given the way she piled on disrespectfully as Bill O’Reilly was pulled off the air at Fox during an Anderson Cooper interview—my instincts were certainly correct.  She sounded like a train wreck and her motives were clearly exposed.  What I saw speaking to Anderson Cooper was a spiteful woman who was in her middle years and not so cute any more that had pushed away everything good in her life—including Bill O’Reilly and she was resentful.  Ultimately that was the cost of trying to be fair and balanced on Fox—you put on spiteful, aging pundits who want to suddenly make a living without the aid of their youthful beauty—and they are scared.

And the same could be said of the several women who accused Bill O’Reilly and specifically Fox News for sexual harassment. Egged on by Media Matters behind the scenes and many liberal activists—the women took every opportunity to swipe at the older generation men who ran Fox News in an effort to make the place more progressive—and ultimately more like the other loser networks in competition—overly concerned with silly PC culture and modern nonsense that will be out of fashion with the very next generation.  What you find at the bottom of the complaints are a bunch of women who were fine to make good livings off their looks—but now that they are arriving at those middle ages where estrogen doesn’t come so naturally and skin wrinkles don’t look so good on 4K 70” televisions—a new generation of younger women doing just as they did twenty years ago is coming along and pushing them out of a job—and women like Kirsten call that “sexual harassment.”  I call it getting old.

If you peel the onion away that’s all that is really going on with the sexual harassment claims against Fox News. The women used their looks to get into the doors at Fox then they changed the rules of engagement mystifying the older men who came from a time when you could call women “blonds” even when they artificially dyed their hair to increase their supernormal sign stimuli to evoke the image.  The women’s complaints against O’Reilly and Fox News specifically are only defined by Obama era politics as harassment, when at any time prior or likely in the future will be considered normal human interaction.  The real hope of liberal ladies like Kirsten Powers is to stay relevant into her 50s so people will still want to listen to her without the visual quality behind someone who might lure men to sleep with them for attention.  Because lets face it, that was the only reason Bill put her on Fox News.  Whether or not he had occasional sex with any of these women it was important for the audience to wonder about such things because that’s what drove the ratings.  Nobody wanted to hear what Kirsten had to say from a fair and balanced point of view.  They wanted to think about what she looked like naked and in suggestive sexual positions.  Surely Kirsten understood that when she came on The O’Reilly Factor many times.

Women watch The View during the day, and other shows geared toward women—and that’s the only way that garbage heaps like Whoopi Goldberg and Joy Behar can make it in modern television—by bitching and squawking like a bunch of hungry baby birds that were knocked out of their nest during a heavy storm. People feel sorry for them, the might actually listen—but they aren’t going to change their behavior patterns—they’ll just watch.  Yet to the wider audience which might include men—there is no appeal.  Men and women are still and will always be—men and women.  Men biologically want to have sex with women and women will always look for ways to make their assets work to their advantage.  And that only works for them pre-menopausal.  After that, they become spectators in the games of life.  That may seem vicious, but take it up with God, because it’s the design of the universe.

Even knowing all this however it was shocking to hear Kirsten speak out so blatantly against Bill O’Reilly. I watched her so many times come on his show and eat out of his hand all the while I knew she was a nasty person waiting for a moment to strike like a snake. I used to tell my wife anytime she appeared that she reminded me of spit—because that’s just what she reminded me of.  The way she spoke, the way she made eye contact—her politics—virtually everything about her evoked something you’d want to spit out of your mouth—not put in it.  It actually made me trust O’Reilly less because he had her on so much.  I figured he was either having sex with her, or wanted to.  But so what?  Kirsten got exposure she never would have otherwise obtained—which she’ll never get again and she should be grateful.

In the demise of Fox News, these women accusers had some air time on all the major networks rejoicing that their rival had one of its major stars knocked off a prime time slot. But those same women have labeled themselves for life as a pain in the ass so we won’t see them again.  Kirsten is certainly done.  She might be praised now, but she’s still a woman approaching 50 who won’t be desired to be on television.  She may still write for USA Today for a while, but nobody is going to want to see her face or hear that terrible noise that comes out of her liberal mouth.  Because people tune into Fox not to see O’Reilly, or the hot chicks he had on as pundits—they are just visual icing for the cake.  They want conservative viewpoints on the news of the day.  Anybody else can come along and do the same job and if Fox moves into an even more progressive direction—some upstart will take over what they do now—because ultimately the audience is in charge—not the networks.  And nothing in the world can make people tune into a show they don’t want to watch to see a wrinkled up Kirsten Powers utter liberal nonsense.  They might put up with it to have her flirt with them as a youthful woman—but not as a serious political commentator.  There are plenty of ugly people who already do that work—one more used up old woman won’t change the conditions of the marketplace.

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 Value in Judging Other People: How a McDonald’s employee prevented murder

 

Steve Stevens, the cold-blooded murderer from Cleveland who killed an innocent man on Easter Sunday claiming to be emotionally deficient after breaking up with his girlfriend was in Erie, Pennsylvania ordering a 20 piece chicken nugget meal at McDonald’s. There a drive-thru employee spotted Stevens and after taking his money notified police.  The McDonald’s staff tried to stall the killer at the pick-up window, but the fugitive knew something was up and fled the scene without his French Fries.  Police were quick to get there and give chase leaving Stevens with no choice but to take his own life, just as the inmate murderer Aaron Hernandez just did hours after. When the law painted these thugs into a corner where there was no other option left to them—they simply killed themselves—which is a good thing.  The former professional football player facing life in prison hung himself knowing that his life was ruined forever for the murders he committed, and this Steve Stevens guy knew that the Facebook testimony he gave would see him convicted of murder for sure—so he shot himself in his car before authorities could arrest him.  The whole event was set off by a McDonald’s employee who was keenly aware of what was happening in the world.   Bravo.

http://www.abc15.com/news/national/mcdonalds-employee-recognized-steve-stephens-as-he-was-ordering-at-drive-thru

And that is really how crime is fought—by individuals doing the good work of observing their environments and taking action when necessary. Luckily in this case the citizen action didn’t require guns, but sometimes it may.  However by having eyes and ears on the ground level, police were able to pin down Stevens and force him to take his own life—which makes everyone happy.  Our society saves the money of prosecuting the loser, and further killings were avoided as this guy was obviously spiraling downhill fast.  If Stevens hadn’t been arrogant enough to go through a McDonald’s drive thru, there is no telling how long the ordeal would have transpired.  And in this case it was a slam dunk of a case—but if he had to be prosecuted the cost would have been enormous to the state of Ohio—and the media frenzy would have been very distracting.  Things are much better this way—with him killing himself.

The Aaron Hernandez case was never in question, yet it took the former Patriots tight-end turned murderer years to move through all the legal gates to arrive at his sentencing and eventual fate in a single cell prison. Once there and all the means of appeal exhausted, he had no other choice but to kill himself, which if he had done so sooner would have helped everyone out.  Hernandez committed a horrific crime, and there was no question of his guilt during the trail—and we could have all saved a lot of money if we had removed the hope he had of getting away with it.  If he had committed suicide years ago the entire legal profession would have been less strained.  But here’s the problem, there are so many parasites who work in the legal profession that make a lot of money off long celebrity trials like Aaron Hernandez’s case—that justice is not the objective—milking the crime for all that can be obtained is.

If this Facebook killer—Steve Stevens had been arrested, the same kind of long legal proceeding would have occurred—it would have taken years to get that guy in jail convicted for life. And if he turned out to be a death penalty case—he would have cost the state of Ohio many millions of dollars of maintenance for the next twenty years until the justice system could finally enact the penalty. But when the threat of quick justice is present it certainly puts pressure on fugitives from justice to either escape or to kill themselves before someone else beats them to it.  So without that McDonald’s employee’s sharp eyes, this terrible ordeal would have prolonged for many more years unnecessarily.

Citizen action is paramount to our free republic. Without it, we cannot have justice in the world.  You have to engage suspicious people and to always question intentions.  This of course goes against the progressive tendency against passing judgment on other people.  It is in fact our ability to judge that makes us a civilized nation.  For instance, if that McDonald’s employee had not judged that the drive-thru customer handing her money might be the killer of the elderly person from Cleveland on Easter Sunday, the killer would have driven away and he’d still be free to terrorize people.  But that’s not what happened.  The McDonald’s employee passed judgment on the physical features of Steve Stevens, the kind of car he was driving, the manner of his voice, the amount of eye contact that he made—and she acted accordingly.  That is the first line of defense in our society—judgment.  And when we pass judgment on bad guys, they often don’t expect to deal with civilians as part of their antagonism, or their escape plans.  It is absolutely true that a well-armed population in America prevents many lunatics like this Steve Stevens murderer from stepping into a farmhouse in the middle of nowhere and doing what they desire unimpeded.  There is no way that America as a vast rural landscape could ever hope that the police might defend each and every person.  Just like with all the police, FBI, and CIA that are out there spying on us constantly with input from the NSA and Homeland security, they can’t prevent us from harm.  They can discourage bad guys from doing bad things, but when people like Steve Stevens or Aaron Hernandez who realize that if they wanted to, they could pluck off a large part of society on a whim and nobody could do anything about it.  When people get involved and the bad guys are put on television complete with social judgment against them—there is no place for such people to go—not even a McDonald’s in Erie, Pennsylvania.

Villains depend on people to be terrified of them and to rely on the inefficient “state” to evoke justice. They also require that good people hide their thoughts from the court of public opinion so that progressive insurgents can hopefully get them off the hook when they do commit crime—which was the hope of Aaron Hernandez.  Once his fate was eventually sealed and he had to admit to himself that he was no O.J. Simpson—and that he was going to do hard time for the rest of his life—he killed himself—and for that we are all better off.  Steve Stevens was at least smart enough to know that the legal system would chew him up and spit him out because of the vast testimony he provided against himself—himself. The reason that statists and criminals alike push for society not to “judge” is so that they can roam about unmolested harming anybody they wish whenever they wish.  That’s also why those same people are against personal ownership of firearms.  However, when each and every citizen in the United States has the right to a firearm—and the power of judgment between right and wrong in their arsenal of living—they are very dangerous to bad guys.  And even a worker at McDonald’s can be a hero with just their judgment as their weapon and the courage to act on instinct.  That is how justice is enacted in the most efficient way possible.  People need to be involved, personally.  The cops are there to build a case.  They can’t always be there to prevent harm from happening and that must be understood in any civil society.  You can’t drive evil from the world with good intentions and a progressive education.  You need guns and people who are able to judge good from evil.

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 Last Jedi’ Movie Preview from Celebration, Orlando: Ending the Vico Cycle philosophically

IMG_4424I cover a lot of Star Wars news because, as I’ve said before, it’s the best mythological tool that the human race has right now—which sets it clearly apart from other movies.  It’s special and even though Star Wars these days is made by people who likely voted for Hillary Clinton 100%–the people who work at Lucasfilm are the best in the business of making movies on a commercial-scale.  The stories of Star Wars clearly extend beyond modern politics.  I think they are extremely important to our status as a culture on planet earth.  So I pay close attention to Star Wars and enjoy very much when they have their Celebration activities.   It just so happens that this year Celebration is in one of my favorite cities in the world—Orlando, and I find it creatively refreshing to hear the latest news from the Star Wars universe.  And this year, there was a lot of news, some of which is shown below.  But the biggest news was the release of the movie trailer for the next film due out this Christmas.

I’ve loved Star Wars most of my life—it actually opened a lot of doors for me.  I completely understand that Star Wars was intended for 12-year-old children, but in a lot of ways that part of me is still very much alive.  Even if I didn’t have grandkids, and my own kids didn’t still love Star Wars, I’d spend a considerable amount of time enjoying the art and ideas that come out of the Star Wars stories.  I understand why George Lucas made the films and what his source material was and I plunged myself into that world quite dramatically, not as the 12-year-old material for which became Star Wars, but the great literature of James Joyce, Thomas Mann, Joseph Campbell and many great literary figures for which Star Wars was based—including the Holy Bible. Star Wars for me was the gateway to much more serious literature and it has enhanced my life greatly.   So I’m quite open for my joy toward all things Star Wars.

Specifically, what I see in this new trailer for the film that is called The Last Jedi, is a philosophic contemplation on ending the Vico Cycle which is something that was heavily featured in the great literary classic Finnegan’s Wake.  I talk about the Vico Cycle a lot, because our present civilization is at one of those points in our history, so it doesn’t at all surprise me that Star Wars is addressing that very challenging philosophic concept.  George Lucas always said that if there were more Star Wars movies beyond Episode 6 that he’d deal with the philosophic challenges of the life battle between pairs of opposites.  It’s a motif that is as old as human civilization—probably longer.  So yes, Star Wars is all about making movies for kids—but there is more to them than that.  Adults could learn a lot too.

Obviously Han Solo is my favorite character and there is a lot of that guy in me. I saw Star Wars 40 years ago with my parents as a third grader and it stuck with me—especially the character of Han Solo.  I knew that was who I wanted to be when I grew up—and that is largely what happened.  As it turned out, I’m a lot smarter than Han Solo, but I can certainly relate to him.  For my recent 49th birthday my youngest daughter made me the picture featured above, which is what she does.  She’s a marvelous illustrator and this picture of Han Solo fighting it out with stormtroopers using dual pistols is an original picture that can’t be found anywhere else and to me it was quite an astonishing work of art.  She knows I’m excited for the new Han Solo movie coming up within a year or so, where the character is much younger—so she made the picture as a tribute to a much younger Han Solo.  As I’ve said many times also, Han Solo is essentially an Ayn Rand character within Star Wars—and that’s why he’s so popular.  George Lucas may have wanted to have Han transform into a compassionate human being by the end of the series, but the best elements of Han Solo are his Ayn Rand hero traits of acting out of self-interest.  And that is the brilliance of Star Wars—lots of competing ideas can fit into the storytelling and still have a role to play because they are grounded in historical motifs specific to the human race.

When Luke Skywalker says that it’s time for the Jedi to end—he’s talking about a very large idea of taking mankind beyond the pairs of opposites battle that has always been a part of our culture from the beginning. I’ve been thinking about that for a very long time because it is essentially the Vico Cycle, theocracy, aristocracy, democracy, anarchy then rebirth.  And that is a bigger concept than just making a movie for kids.  This stuff is important because it has the potential of taking us all to a new level—as a species.  It’s much more than just a movie or a way for Disney to make money.

For me it’s fun to see my grandkids getting into Star Wars because it at least gives me something to share with them.  My oldest grandson without a whole lot of encouragement has already gone to great lengths to learn all he can about it—which is a great way to have discussions about other topics.  During my birthday celebration, he couldn’t pull himself away from TV where I had Rogue One playing.  As a little boy the hand to hand battles with guns had his mind racing and he was running around the house pretending to shoot at invisible villains—which is very healthy and natural.  It’s a primal concern—especially with little boys.  I’ve spoken in the past also about the great little miracles that Nerf makes as far as Star Wars guns.  These are a lot better than what I grew up with and I have to say that my Han Solo Nerf Blaster is one of my favorite things that I play with around the house.  I will have countless hours of fun with my grandchildren shooting those things and if not for Star Wars—they wouldn’t exist.  The guns and action are part of the Star Wars experience.  Once you get into those, the deeper aspects of the stories become accessible, and if you really go down the rabbit hole—like I did—a whole new world of fresh ideas emerge—and that is a wonderful thing. Even though I’ve been hard on The Force Awakens, my favorite part of that movie is the Rathtar scene and when my grandson comes over he wants me to play the Lego game as Han Solo to beat the Rathtar level because the monsters are scary to him and he likes to see me defeat them.  He amazes me at all his observations even though he’s only four.

I’ve watched all the old Zorro movies and Flash Gordon serials that Star Wars was based on.  I’ve seen all the Akira Kurasawa movies that inspired the Star Wars movie, A New Hope.  But what George Lucas created and these new filmmakers at Lucasfilm under Disney’s ownership are doing is quite a lot more sophisticated.  I think most of the credit goes to Joseph Campbell than anybody—or even John Williams who has created so much wonderful symphonic music for our modern generations that Mozart and Beethoven aren’t even relevant any longer.  Our culture is much richer because of Star Wars than it otherwise would have been, and by the premise of the new movie, there is a lot to look forward to.

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 Morality of Confronting Evil: Donald Trump’s Indiana Jones moment

I’ve listened to the critics of Donald Trump’s Syrian airstrike for several days now and it’s time to put some clarity to the matter.  While I’m an America first kind of guy, the solution to many of the world’s problems is not to live and let live the failed cultures of the globe, but to impose on them our values for the sake of our own preservation.  Many would say “who are we to do such a thing when those places are sovereign countries?”  But here’s the reality, when people want so badly to come to America to the point where it might threaten our own sovereignty, then we have an obligation to confront evil around the world so that it’s effects don’t spill over our borders into our country.  Put another way, when you are the best and everyone wants what you have—you must expand your territory not only for your own preservation, but for the assistance of those who would love to join the American team only from their own homelands.

I have many times gotten myself into a lot of trouble “getting involved” in other people’s business for the sake of confronting evil.  When I know something bad is going on around my house, like drug sales, abused women, neglected children—or just scum bags living as parasites against others—I do get involved.  I’m not going to say what I do obviously—because that would be stupid to put down in writing.  But in short—bad guys don’t do well near my home.  If I see some dude beating the crap out of a woman—I don’t care how interventionist it might be to stop him—I do it and have done that for as long as I’ve been alive.  It’s a morality situation that does not fit well under the written laws of our societies.  The need to do the right thing does not fit well under the umbrella of the law because such a thing requires context and context can vary depending on what culture we are talking about.  What’s good for one culture may not be so for another.

Yet, there is a morality to the human race that is well-known at our most biological instincts which is perceived rather than learned under institutions of law.  When I saw what Donald Trump had done in Syria I thought of a scene from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom where a little child was being whipped.  Jones sees what is going on and even though he could have served himself well by minding his own business and leaving with his treasure he instead threw a rock at the villain not thinking of what might happen next.  This is an instinctive element to heroism which we all have and the Indian Jones movie articulated it well at a primal level.  Obviously Donald Trump was having his Indiana Jones moment and he was doing what was obviously right without thinking about what the world might say about it.  Kids were harmed by the Syrian government.  Trump had a rock to throw to stop it—so he did it.  I would have done the same thing.

When you walk down the street and you see a couple being robbed, do you just keep walking to mind your business?  Of course not, you step in and beat the shit out of whoever is doing the robbing and you save the people from harm.  That’s what human beings should do for each other.  That doesn’t mean you become a busy body always poking into other people’s business, but when you are confronted with evil as it is defined within our biological essence—you must fight it wherever it appears.  If I’m in a position to help someone I do it 100% of the time.  If you live under a code of valor—which everyone should—you can’t just turn your back to evil just because our laws don’t have a good way to define the context of how evil moves from culture to culture under the umbrella of sovereignty.  If America is generally accepted as the most moral country on earth—not defined by religion, but by individual values—then we have an obligation to spread that influence to those not so lucky to live in North America—because honestly we can’t support the whole world.  But we can teach the world to support itself.  That means that tyrannically charged regimes that stand in the way of that freedom will have to be deposed so that good people can live freely.

So how do we go about determining who is good and who is bad?  Well, it’s really not that complicated.   In Assad’s case, under no circumstances should chemical weapons be dropped onto innocent children.  The kids didn’t do anything to deserve such a thing and there is no way to justify it.  I often get accused of being judgmental regarding other people’s families who obviously don’t put as much into life as I do—and I really don’t care if it pisses them off.  If adults are openly ruining the lives of their children by putting stupidity into their heads, then I make it known my disdain and if those kids want my help—I help them.  I’ve gotten into a lot of trouble over that kind of thing but I never regret helping.  It is my moral duty to help those who cannot help themselves if through my actions I can improve their “individual” state.  Ultimately, I want people to be able to thrive as individuals no matter where they come from, so I always help if the situation arises—even when it’s not convenient.

In Syria, if people are so desperate to leave because Assad is such a terror, then his problem becomes Europe’s problem and America’s problem because refugees will flood our borders trying to get away.  If you turn them away as we must because we can’t risk terrorists hiding in their midst’s then you must stop the evil they are trying to run from.  If you see a robbery, you have an obligation to stop it.  If you see a 14-year-old girl prostituting herself out on K-Street—you have an obligation to hunt down her pimp and end the threat to her.  If you know a drug dealer is ruining the minds of kids down the road from your house—you have an obligation to stop the behavior—by whatever means—preferably legally.  And if a country is killing its people for some collective cause—America is the only place on earth capable of making a moral judgment on the matter—and it must step in and act.

The Syrian situation was clear.  There was no reason children should have been attacked with nerve gas. Trump did what I expect him to do—he attacked the evil that perpetrated the villainous behavior.  Yes, Rand Paul is right; congress must give permission for war—“legally.”  But sometimes when you see evil being conducted and you have access to a rock and can stop it—even temporarily—you do it.  Because it’s the right thing to do.  Doing what’s right isn’t always “legal.”  But it is always right.  And helping kids have a potential for a good life is always right.  In those cases you have to live and let die because there is good and evil in the world, and you must stand for what’s good.  There is no middle way in such matters.

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 Dying Democratic Donkey: Russians were not a factor in the 2016 Election

As if we didn’t already know, Evelyn Farkas, the former DOD Obama deputy told us everything we needed to know about the Trump case involving Russia.  Let’s review shall we, what we know about the case of Russian tampering of the Election of 2016—at a press conference shortly after Donald Trump wrapped up the Republican nomination for president he revealed that he hoped that the Russians had information about Hillary Clinton’s lost emails because Wikileaks had revealed very damaging information about the DNC and John Podesta himself on how they conducted their business.  The cause of all the commotion was Hillary Clinton herself who had obviously destroyed evidence and broken the law.  Yet to stay in the race, the Democrats needed some kind of diversion so they made a big deal about Trump’s obvious tongue in cheek statement about the Russians hoping something might stick.  Trump continued to feed that line of dialogue saying often that he could see himself meeting with Vladimir Putin before his inauguration just to stir up the pot in the final days ahead of the 2016 Election and the Russian president publicly stated that he supported Trump over Hillary. That’s it.  All this noise about Trump and Russia having some kind of relationship is complete nonsense.  Trump would never make a deal with Putin to win an election because the leverage game would have been too great in Putin’s favor and that’s where the proof of the case will take us.  And as Jessie Watters illustrated in the below clip, all Democrats are getting really desperate since the story isn’t sticking and now that Evelyn Farkas screwed up big time and ran her mouth on television about how the Obama White House spied on Trump—they all have big trouble and things are going to get worse for them.

Because the progressives in the swamp of Washington D.C. have built a giant coalition of global suck asses, talking to members foreign countries is a part of the job, and in the closing days of the election when it looked like Trump might actually win—according to Evelyn Farkas, the Obama White House advocated spying so they could get something on Trump since literally nothing else had worked even though they had thrown the kitchen sink and the soap at him.  They hoped since he was wealthy that somewhere someplace he was up to no good and that in his joking around Trump had revealed some secret into the release of all the Podesta Wiklileaks reports.

They couldn’t take responsibility for the situation themselves, so they had to somehow pin it on Trump—which of course he never allowed.  So only by abusing the rights of Trump’s transition team did the Obama Democrats think they had some chance at staying viable as a party after a crushing defeat.  After all, Obama would soon be out of office and he’d lose the ability to spy on enemies which his White House and Justice Department had continuously done all through his presidency. Remember Bill Ayers the domestic terrorist who launched Obama’s political life from his living room in Chicago?  This is what you get when you give such people power—they cheat, steal, and do whatever they must to advance their ideological causes. From the viewpoint of red state Republicans—which is most of the North American continent, Barack Obama was a domestic terrorist who simply used a different method of attack than Ayers did toward the American way of life. And now Obama has been caught.

Because Trump had stated that he thought he might get along with Russia, Trump’s people probed those potentials shortly after the election and that involved General Flynn but as it will turn out—it was nothing more than courtesy calls, no different from other discussions with other countries.  Trump had won the election on his own by capitalizing on Democratic mistakes.  Hillary Clinton made it easy because she had so much to hide and had made so many errors.  Additionally, Russia does not have nearly as much power as the Democrats are trying to advocate they do leaving them in a very bad place.  Now that Trump has been president for a measly 10 weeks, the direction of the country is going somewhere they can’t handle and they are literally freaking out.  Evelyn Farkas just happened to be someone from their team who revealed the playbook on an MSNBC show that nobody watched—so it took a month for the information to come out.

At this point it should be remembered that I predicted the end of the Democratic Party right before the election on the Matt Clark radio show, and all this noise about Russia by those same dying Democrats is the realization that the end is near for them.  They are a wounded animal that is bleeding out and they are surrounded by the hunters that will soon skin them down to the bone—and they are aware of it.  Now for them it’s tough because they have so many tentacles into so much of our modern world, especially through all the various media platforms that Democrats literally dominate.  But the Election of 2016 is as close as they will come to power again as Obama’s White House will always be known as the most corrupt America had ever known.  The abuses of power that have taken place will have come at a terrible cost for them and since they didn’t get their person in the White House—they are now out of power and dying of a bleeding they can’t stop.  This talk about Russia is the last cries of a dying animal who can feel the end closing around them.

Typically Republicans can’t walk and chew gum at the same time and much to the exasperation of the Democrats, who control the media, Trump is defending himself very well and the Russian distraction story isn’t stopping his White House.  This is precisely why I voted for Trump in the first place, because he was battle hardened and I always knew that the only way to get these vile insurgents out of our American politics was to fight and beat them out of it.  There is no coexistence with modern Democrats and that was their own choosing.  We are in a modern fight for our very lives and they are the ones bleeding out, soon to die as a party.  Trump is unusually passionate about winning everything he does which works out well for right-sided Republicans because after another year of this 2017 kind of White House, people won’t want to go back.  Trump does more in one week than Obama did during his entire terms of presidency and its all adding up very quick.

The swamp isn’t happy about any of this so they are colluding with that desperate media to do anything to sink Trump—but their efforts are pointless. Donald Trump has them on the ropes and he knows it.  And the facts are on his side and he knows that too.  He knows the Democratic Party is bleeding dry and he’s not going to lose that advantage.  It’s kind of like a champion team has the lead with just a quarter to play and its obvious the other team can’t do anything even with a miracle to come back.  Trump’s administration has the game won and they are beating everyone over the head with it—Republicans and Democrats.

I also predicted in that same radio show that the new two-party system would split between the current Republicans.  When Trump came out against the Freedom Caucus the battle lines were clear between the former “Never Trumpers” like Glenn Beck’s people, and the more moderate Ryan types.  Trump truly is not ideological—he just likes to win, so whoever gives him a repeal on Obamacare will be within his alliance—but doing right for Trump is only defined by winning.  That is the only way we’d even get a consideration of Obamacare repeal, because the swamp grows even under banners of indecision.  Holding a position of pure ideology doesn’t work when you get so many people in a room.  If that were the case we never would have had a Constitution to begin with.  Jefferson had to make lots of concessions to his ideology to get the votes needed to even have the Constitution that we do have today which I think is way too “Federalist.”  I much prefer the Anti-Federalist viewpoints so no matter how constitutionally pure the “Never Trumpers” pat themselves on the back for being—I’ll still be disappointed by the end result.  So I’m more inclined to support a winning strategy that walks things back over time than a stalemate that ends in a circling of the wagons and a loss by circular gunfire.  At this point Trump doesn’t care if Rand Paul gets his way or if it’s Paul Ryan.  Trump just wants results which is yet another spear in the side of Democrats and the Republicans like John McCain who desperately want the swamp to remain.  Trump was sent to Washington D.C. to drain the swamp, and that’s exactly what he’s doing.

When the smoke clears the Russian story will be a complete fabrication by a desperate party and the media that supports them to continue living.  The hard facts are that the Democrats destroyed themselves by constantly trying to rig the game and they finally got caught by it and their old tactics of trying to off load their problems onto the nice Republicans who have always taken away their burdens.  Trump just kicks their problems off the wagon and laughs about it—because that’s what he has done for many years and why he’s been so successful in real estate.  It’s why we should have actual business people in political office as opposed to political hacks because they are molded through real world achievement and not scholastic theory. The media that is using this Russian story as a narrative to destroy Trump will find that all they’ve done in the end was strengthen the President and weaken their place in the future.  People do love a winner and in spite of all the controversy, people love Trump.  If he ran for office right now his margin for victory would be even greater—because people know what’s going on deep down inside. It might be hard to articulate it through the current noise, but once that Democratic Donkey dies—everything will be very clear.

Alan Bean and Hip Hop: Why its likely migrations from Mars were a part of our past

The below article about a comment the astronaut Alan Bean gave, covered in The Huffington Post, bothered me intensely. Bean represents the current academic view point largely shaped by the National Geographic Society and the Smithsonian about the nature of life as we know it—and he’s dead wrong.  As I have said about the Cameo Night Club shooting in Cincinnati—and other things regarding politics in general, no society can sustain itself exhibiting the values we are today from different sectors of our global culture.  It just doesn’t work—the people who attend places like the Cameo Night Club are not productive people who can lead a civilization toward prosperity.  Rather they are something that seems to always arise in human beings that is programmed into us at the core of our very cells—a self-destructive predilection toward always starting over.  In the great novel Finnegan’s Wake we refer to this as the Vico Cycle.  Without question the hip hop culture and counter culture of socialism infused into America during the 1960s on up through today is an attack on the intellectual expansion that came from America during westward expansion and the Industrial Revolution.  The apogee of those human experienced peeked in the 1980s then began to recede back toward primal concerns—in spite of the invention of the Internet which became common in the 1990s.  The hip hop activity I illustrated in reaction to the Cameo Night Club shooting was something that has happened to the human race likely for many thousands of years—a cycle of theology, aristocracy, democracy, and then anarchy only to start over again and again.  My intention is to stop that cycle.  Human culture seems hell bent to repeat it with an eye on infinity—never breaking free.

That is why it’s important to read this Huffington Post article as I did for context. Please read the following very carefully:

When Bean retired from NASA in 1981, he became an excellent artist who paints the experiences of fellow astronaut-moonwalkers.

Astronaut Alan Bean holds a container of lunar soil collected during Apollo 12 extravehicular activity.

Bean’s spacefaring experiences have given him plenty of time to think about the question of whether earthlings are alone in the universe, and specifically, whether aliens have discovered us.

“I do not believe that anyone from outer space has ever visited the Earth,” Bean told the Australian news site news.com.au. “One of the reasons I don’t believe they have been here is that civilizations that are more advanced are more altruistic and friendly ― like Earth, which is better than it used to be ― so they would have landed and said, ‘We come in peace and we know from our studies you have cancer that kills people, we solved that problem 50 years ago, here’s the gadget we put on a person’s chest that will cure it, we will show you how to make it.’

“Just like someday, say, 1,000 years from now, when we can go to another star and see a planet, that’s what we would do, because we will know how to cure cancer, cure birth defects, so we would teach them.”

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/alan-bean-aliens_us_58dbe6d6e4b0cb23e65d9a12

I do believe that Alan Bean has taken up the very unhealthy habit of smoking Crack. Because no sane, rational mind could believe such things from a supposed educated position.  Bean believes, as many modern academics do, that human progress is linier so that once something like the wheel, or fire is discovered, mankind perpetually advances forward.  However, there is great evidence counter to that belief that is spewing out under every rock of modern archaeology, primarily that human kind rises from the ashes then advances to a certain point, then falls back to their beginnings over and over again.  And this process may very well have happened well before there was an Ice Age many times over.  For instance, consider that during the last Ice Age over 10,000 years ago ocean levels were 300 feet lower than they are today.  Forget about the mythical global warming theories perpetuated by modern politics to help with the Vico Cycle in taking mankind backwards intellectually—we’re talking about real science that has been proven.  That would mean that the entire English Channel would have been dry land—as well as many other places around the world.  Additionally, the land around Florida would be much larger meaning that much of the archaeology of that period would have been near the coast lines of that age.  That would put them underwater today.  Most of the archaeology that we study today from that time would have been deeply inland away from the vast water supplies and fish that being near the coast would have provided.  There are likely entire cities buried under that 300 feet of water now.  And this kind of thing could have happened many times over in the past.  After 10,000 years, a lot of the things that humans use and produce simply erode away into nothing.  Only something like stone can last the ages, but even then, the rate of erosion is very fast when compared to geologic time.

Due to the advanced arithmetic of the builders of Stonehenge and the various mound sites around the world, we are talking about people who learned these things from somewhere. They certainly didn’t learn them while hunting fish or catching game across the vast plains of grass during the last Ice Age.  There is some missing information that is likely buried under the oceans.  Just as New York City is built along an ocean front, mankind typically builds its largest metropolises on coastal regions, and during the last Ice Age, those coasts would have been very different from today.  The missing links to our modern understanding are likely located in those places.  Meanwhile, there are way too many reports about archaeology on the moon and Mars not to assume that there was life there at some point in time and likely they found their way to earth for either short periods of time, or for sustained stays.  Again, we won’t know until we visit these places for sure, but the evidence looks to be pretty convincing that we will find remnants of ancient civilizations on the moon and Mars when we set up settlements.  But like life on earth, they have went through their own Vico Cycles which we obviously have inherited in some yet to be discovered way.

If we look honestly into the past with an understanding of the Vico Cycle, we can see clearly what Alan Bean and many other intellectuals are missing. Just because a civilization is technical and masters certain aspects of interplanetary travel that doesn’t mean they can sustain themselves as a culture.  That doesn’t mean that people from an advanced culture once they are torn away from it won’t revert back to a primal state when forced to adapt to changing circumstances.  Take any of us in the present day of 2017.  Drop us off on a tropical island and we’d be forced to live as did our ancestors of Cro-Magnon from 10,000 BC.  We might have knowledge of our flat screen televisions, cars, flight and smart phones, but all those things would be useless to that reality of living on an island with no electricity or network signals to communicate with the outside world, and we’d revert back to primacy—quickly.

You can see that same primacy in modern cultures such as in Muslim groups, and in Hip Hop Clubs, even in motorcycle gangs—humans once they take their eye off greatness and forward achievement revert to an almost animal state and this always drives us backwards to the beginning of the Vico Cycle.

This seems much more logical than Alan Bean’s suggestion that an advanced society would be more altruistic and technically viable—and willing to help another culture along. Rather, the actual answer is that the Vico Cycle would send aliens to earth for help as a last refuge from whatever failure they endured elsewhere in the galaxy to start again.  If they were coming to earth they were likely fleeing for their lives—not brining cures for cancer.  Then they would mix and assimilate with whatever age of mankind they ran into—they’d mate and create new genetic pools assuming they were compatible through mitochondrial information and the Vico Cycle would start all over again. The assumption that mankind will always move forward is wrong.  A proper political philosophy must be in place before that can happen—it doesn’t occur in a natural state because if left alone—humans revert back to their origin state of animal behavior.  Just look at the conditions of any Hip Hop club and you will see the evidence.  That is not a society that will solve the problems of cancer or put people on Mars to live in a sustainable fashion. So just because Alan Bean walked on the moon that doesn’t make him an expert on all things historical.  It just makes him a guy who walked on the moon—just like we all will soon.  But before we can we must stop the trend to constantly reinvent ourselves through the Vico Cycle.  In that sense, I would say that America came the closest to breaking that Vico Cycle curse during westward expansion and the Hollywood westerns that followed.  That philosophic position of morality, exploration, and individual achievement was the closest that humans have ever come to breaking free of that perilous prison called the Vico Cycle.  When we stop that—mankind will advance and likely discover that out of the millions and millions of life forms floating around in the universe there is a very real possibility that we might be the first to break the code.  And that should not be an audacious thought for any of us.  But something expected.  In that regard, we should never listen to people like Alan Bean.  He just doesn’t get 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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“Snitches get Stitches”: Why black on black crimes go unsolved

I think we need to talk about something seriously, because as Michael Bennett of the Seattle Seahawks reminded me with his stupid Tweet regarding Tom Brady’s Super Bowl Jersey—the police in Cincinnati are chasing ghosts in regard to the Cameo Night Club shooting, which is the same kind of thing witnessed in the killings that Bennett brought up. With all the cameras at the Cameo Night Club on Saturday March 25th 2017 and the off duty cops outside, nobody seems to know who opened fire into a hip hop dance crowd shooting 17 and killing at least one.  The shooters got away and nobody is talking.  All police know as of this writing is that there were a few of them, but what’s unexplained is how the guns got into the club when people were scrutinized through security and why nobody has any real leads when it was also reported that the shooting appears to have erupted after a scuffle earlier that day between two groups of people.  Surely, we know the names of the people in those two groups?  Surely the bartenders, owner, and other people present knew somebody who knew somebody, who knew somebody.

The sad answer is that police do know who was involved, as does everyone at the club. Correctly the owner of the club surrendered his liquor license that following morning, so that Cameo Night Club is now officially out of business.  It should be remembered that as the global media pounced on the story that day before the sun even came up, they were talking about gun violence in an American night club in India for God’s sake.  CNN, FOX—everyone was covering the story in Cincinnati and to my knowledge I was the very first person in the world who told the real story early that same morning—because I’m from the area and know something about the history of Cameo.  It wasn’t guns that caused all the violence—it was the hip hop culture the club itself that did—and once that became evident—the story virtually died on the spot.   Nobody in the mainstream media wanted to talk about black on black violence for all the same reasons they don’t want to talk about it in Chicago or any other urban neighborhood where hip hop culture percolates.  When guns couldn’t easily be blamed, the media lost interest and that was that.

I stated the problem quite correctly on Sunday morning what the issue was and the police confirmed it as the investigation drug on for the entire next week. The people in the club were reluctant to rat out the shooters is basically what it came down to.  What do they say in da’ hood?  “Snitches get stitches” and so nobody said anything with any meaning pointing to an arrest.  It is utterly astonishing that police couldn’t gather up enough evidence to pull people into a series of arrests for the massive violence which did occur.  Instead what we got was a half-hearted vigil heavily promoted by the local news trying to pull on people’s heart strings in the suburbs enough to drive some sort of narrative against social gun violence.  But it didn’t work.

It’s not racist to say it—even though modern politics would seek to say otherwise—but people lost interest in the story because we have become used to violence associated with hip hop culture and normal people recognize that the thug culture that was commonly attending the Cameo Club were asking for trouble and when it happened—nobody was surprised. It’s not that everyone involved was black in skin color—it’s the behavior they exhibit which gave clear indications that violence is an expected part of the hip hop lifestyle and that for many in that culture, it’s a badge of honor.  So why would anybody rat out someone who gunned down a bunch of innocent people when that kind of behavior seems to be the goal of their movement.  Just listen to their music, the whole story is quite clear as to their social intentions.

So what is Michael Bennett referring to when he stated that Tom Brady managed to get his jersey back but there are still black on black crimes still not solved? Well, he’s assuming that when a rich white guy married to a supermodel wants something the world will bend over backwards to give it to him—which propels the myth about all this “white privilege” nonsense.  What Bennett is ignoring is that in “white” culture people generally cooperate with the law and seek to live with some sense of tolerance toward each other.  So getting Tom Brady’s Super Bowl jersey back from some Mexican peddler had a beginning, middle and end to that case that the FBI agents were able to focus on.  But in the case of the Cameo Night Club there was a beginning—people were shot dead innocently likely in most cases—but there was no second and third part.

There is no obvious way to identify the shooters because there were so many like-minded people present and the survivors were protecting the identity out of their urban culture code against cops.  So step two is very difficult.  But even if police do find out who the shooters were, what then?  The shooters won’t be able to obtain a lawyer so there isn’t any money for the legal system to make off the situation meaning all the costs of a trial will go to the state.  Then when they are prosecuted they’ll just go to the prison system where the cells are literally overflowing with people just like them for the same stupid stuff.  It is far less costly to keep them on the streets killing others of their kind unfortunately.  If they move out into the suburbs, then that becomes another matter.  But if the killings are in the “hood,” in our society it is an acceptable casualty statistic because the cost is great either way.  Whether the violence takes place in prison or on the streets, it is less cumbersome on our legal system to have the violence occur on the streets because there isn’t any solution in arrests.  If arrests are made the behavior won’t change and you stick tax payers with a burden they don’t want to pay for.  So the police are in sheer limbo so inaction is what happens.

To answer Michael Bennett, we don’t know who killed Tupac because the answer takes you to a bottomless pit of violent subhuman behavior that cannot be managed by our current legal system. It’s as simple as that. If you are a cop, by the time you sort through all the “baby mommas” and hostile welfare recipients who shut the door in your face all day long and get to some honest leads—you run into little street thugs who think it’s cool not to talk to police and they’d rather not rat out a member of their community—even if they are a rival.  Remember, snitches get stitches in their hip hop culture—so nobody talks.  Then when you do make an arrest some liberal loser becomes their public attorney and case-law ends up being written that screws up the legal system forever because of the case you are working on, so in a really dysfunctional way, the best thing to do is to let the villains stay free so that the responsibility for their correction doesn’t fall on state authority powerless to do anything about the situation.

Yeah, I know, what I said was really mean—but it’s the truth. Nobody wants to deal with a pain in the ass and the members of the hip hop community are just a huge pain in the ass that nobody can sympathize with.  When you try to treat them fairly they want more tax money, and they want reparations for slavery which was banned over a hundred years ago.  When you move out of their neighborhood because you don’t want to park next to a purple Cadillac with inner tubes on for tires and dressed out in all brass and gold trimmings they call you a racist.  Then when they are all together they shoot each other over baby momma rights and turf boundaries.  I can promise that the people at the Cameo Club were not NRA members, and even after we have thrown millions and millions of tax dollars at the people who were in that club its likely most of them there couldn’t have even spelled the name of the popular gun lobby group.  That is why Mr. Bennett that the black on black murders continue and nobody does anything about it.  Because when Tom Brady got back his Super Bowl jersey at least he said thank you.  When it comes to unsolved murders like Tupac or the shooting at Cameo’s—everyone just clams up and makes the job impossibly hard.  So the police lose interest because they are caught between a rock and a hard place both of which the politics of our day have put them in.  And that’s why nothing ever gets fixed and never will under this present system.

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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