Tag: Atlas Shrugged

The British Helped Obama with Spying on Trump: If a tree falls in the forest and nobody hears it–it still fell

Of course the NSA and the British Intelligence are going to deny publicly that they can spy on individuals at the provocation of the President. That’s supposed to be a secret that gives them an advantage over the “bad guys” as they see it.  Most of the testimony that FBI Director Comey gave regarding the Trump wiretap at Trump Tower before the election of 2016 was old language within the intelligence community and the kind of rules that held presidents accountable to the public.  The surveillance done today which Donald Trump phrased as “wiretapping” is much more sophisticated than the type that was commonplace during the 80s and 90s.   These days, as Judge Napolitano explains below, a president has a number of resources to draw from to spy on a rival, or anybody really, and the web of international connectivity among spy agencies is just complicated enough to hide their malice.  So when President Trump accused Obama of spying on him—that is what he was talking about.

However, for that little video Judge Napolitano was suspended from Fox News because likely the good Judge was flying too close to the sun.   The big connection between Fox News and English spies is the news organization Sky News which are both owned by Rupert Murdoch.  Murdoch also has a long history of backing moderates in the Labour Party like Tony Blair, and don’t forget Murdoch was caught up in a major controversy in England over the phone tapping scandal that severely damaged him and his family because they were complicit.  When you play the game at that level and get caught, you have to make deals, which is likely what is behind the suspension of Napolitano for pointing out that British Intelligence likely did Obama a favor and spied on Donald Trump so that the trail would not lead directly to the White House.

Constantly James Comey during his testimony on March 20th 2017 made mention that “there was no evidence that anybody spied on Donald Trump as a candidate in Trump Tower.”  However, and this is very important because Wikileaks has given us the truth—the Democrats from Obama to Hillary Clinton all the way down to the heads of the DNC were actively in the business of destroying evidence.  So if evidence is destroyed or if the crime is done in such a way to cover up a crime as its being committed, like Hillary and her personal server and Obama using British Intelligence to cover the surveillance of a rival candidate—then the law is still being broken.  The age-old question of whether “a tree falls down in a forest but nobody hears it—did it really fall,” dictates that we apply the same logic to this surveillance question.  Yes, if a tree falls, it fell whether or not people hear it.  Taking away the ability of people to hear the tree fall does not stop the tree from falling.  Taking away the ability of the FBI, the CIA, or the NSA from reporting that a crime is committed in spying on a future president does not mean a crime wasn’t committed.  It was, only the facts of the matter have been hidden in plain sight through chaos and political activism for which James Comey is clearly guilty.

Remember this is the same James Comey who played games with the wording of the San Bernardino terrorist attack, by the request of the White House indicating that the terrorism was not an act of a “larger” terrorist cell and that the participants acted alone—even though we know now and then that wasn’t true. This is also the same James Comey who released the crime scene of the terrorist’s apartment to reporters which destroyed countless bits of evidence linking those terrorists to a greater threat.  Then he complained that he couldn’t unlock the iPhone left by the terrorists which as we learned from Wikileaks was another lie—because the technology to unlock the phone had been there all along—they just wanted to act as an activist in forcing the hand of the Apple Company to get on board with data collection on their users.  So we are not talking about a good ol’ Boy Scout in Director James Comey.  The man is highly political.  He fumbled the Hillary Clinton email case and looks to have wanted to hand her the election by calling off the investigation into her days before the election. Then he provided testimony against Trump in front of congress that was obviously biased.  For instance, how could he know the thoughts of the Russians when he said there was no evidence connecting them to the Trump campaign then said they wanted Trump to win and Hillary to lose?  And this is just over the last few years, from December of 2015 to March of 2017.  If there was any justice in the world, Comey would be fired.  I thought he might be a good cop when he investigated Hillary Clinton in July of 2016 but when he kicked the case off to the side in the first weekend of November, he was playing the odds in favor of Hillary Clinton and was using the law to pick winners and losers.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2015/12/16/fbi-san-bernardino-attackers-didnt-show-public-support-for-jihad-on-social-media/?utm_term=.63153786fbb0

So what can you do when you can’t trust the cops, and the legal system behind them? Well, you vote for a new president and you clean house in government positions—like Comey’s.  You also pick media sources to get your information from those who have a track record of honesty in the face of fire, not those who are part of a wide net of corruption as Deep State contributors—like CNN, ABC News and the terrible NBC—people like Judge Napolitano.  When these vile political insurgents destroy evidence so that we can never trace back the intentions of the perpetrators you can tell who is telling the truth by the actions of others when they get caught taking action against someone, such as the suspension of Judge Napolitano for connecting the dots between the White House of Obama, the British spies and Trump which forced Fox News to take action against the one person who put all the dots together—because as a judge used to assembling the facts of a case to apply the scales of justice—the situation was obvious.  But that evidence needed to remain hidden, so punishment was administered and Murdoch agreed to it because of his past accusations by British authorities for wiretapping of his own—in the old-fashioned way.

Yet the media had a field day with the fake news that came from Comey’s mouth, about a Russian government who wanted to make it easy for Trump to win the presidency and declared that there was no evidence Obama ordered wiretapping in Trump Tower. For pointing out the injustice of it all, Trump was called a conspiracy theorist, just as they had called him back in 2012 over Obama’s birth certificate.  But Trump has been proven to be right much more often than the media will admit.  But that doesn’t matter, because Judge Napolitano has a very good record of telling the truth, and I’d be inclined to believe him over James Comey any day.  Because Comey doesn’t have a very good record. I imagine when the guards let the Trojan Horse into Troy one of the guards at the gate were probably like James Comey—sympathetic to the enemy and were admirers of the Horse’s construction.  So they let it in, and Troy fell in siege.  But what we have now that they didn’t have then was someone like Judge Napolitano willing to speak the truth even if it’s not popular and costs him at his job.

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.

cropped-img_0202.jpg

The Beauty of the NCAA Tournament: Evidence of a thriving culture with healthy roots

 

Just a footnote of contemplation, I couldn’t help but notice what a wonderfully vibrant culture America is on the evening of the first March Madness games of the NCAA tournament. Everywhere I went all during Thursday March 16th and into Friday March 17th, which happened to be Saint Patrick’s Day as well—it was a thriving culture full of energy and forward-looking optimism.  Donald Trump had just submitted his budget cuts to congress, Space X launched a rocket into space from Cape Canaveral and all of the American colleges who made it into the famous basketball tournament were competing for attention on the nation’s television stations in every restaurant, bar, and personal device.  It was wonderful to see.   For context I had just spent much of February in England with a little time in France and I watched a lot of their news—particularly Sky News and the BBC—and it was boring compared to the activity that was going on in the States.  For days on end I watched coverage of cricket, rugby and soccer and everything was kind of an anticlimax.  As I looked around, especially in London I would have expected a lot more energy—but everything was pretty flat—especially regarding sports.  If England was a first world country, then those poor people in second-rate and third-rate countries really had it bad.

If Europe is supposed to be the model we are all to be following in the world—as it certainly was under Barack Obama’s presidency, then that was a serious mistake. They have nothing to offer that matches the excitement from coast to coast as what we have in America with our Super Bowl, and NCAA games.  No matter where you went from California to New York, people were excited about the NCAA Tournament if even mildly.  It was quite a unique exhibition that I noticed more this year than in years past because I literally had just experienced a different culture in a supposedly first world nation that didn’t even come close.  I tend to watch a lot of news no matter where I am in the world.  I’ve experienced similar opinions while engaged in extended stays in Japan and it continues to amaze me how limited the artistic scope of places outside of the United States truly limit themselves to—and to me sports is a branch of artistic expression entwined with commercial enterprise.

All during the first days of the Tournament I had the games on with my multiple devices and even if I didn’t care much for the teams, I enjoyed the festivities immensely. What was even more stimulating was that for a time during the 16th I spent some time at home as Vanderbilt was trying to make a comeback and there was much excitement from the broadcasters—I had the game on so that I could hear it over my Playstation VR headset where I was playing Rush Blood—which is a really creepy haunted house shooting game and I was able to blow off some stress while still enjoying the game on television because with Playstation VR, you can pump all the video into your headset leaving the television free for another broadcast which I thought was pretty cool.

Little things like this matter to me because I spend a lot of time studying old forgotten cultures and when I see all these very dynamic interactions playing against a static global culture I get excited about the prospects of the world. In America in spite of the bad news that always seems to come from our newscasters, enthusiasm is oozing out of every crack.   And you can clearly see it when we have major sporting events where advertisers put up their products on television commercials, and restaurant sales spike because people gather together to have a few drinks and watch the games to measure their success on office pools.  I see it all in a very positive light.  The rest of the world isn’t like this, and it should be.  There is nothing wrong with America—the only fingers that point out the possibility are the jealous countries out there who call our success “excess” because they can’t compete at the same level.

I’ll admit it was nice to see a few of my hometown teams of Xavier and NKU win their first games and you could feel the sentiment on the radio broadcasts the next morning. The entire city of Cincinnati was stepping a little lighter across the day.  Sure there were budget problems in Cincinnati as Democrats had overspent to the point of deficits and cuts would have to be made, just as Trump is doing at the Federal level.  But that’s management, the sports events were what made our culture tick with the inflection of the net result of our place in the world.  Just as some teams had their worst days of their lives yesterday when they lost in the first round—as only 32 teams will advance to the next game.  32 other teams did advance to the next game and that is the joy and sorrow of capitalism and the reason the rest of the world doesn’t have such an experience is because they are functioning from the wrong political philosophies—which is a shame.  A thriving culture should be able to take the downside as well as the uptick.  Beer and hamburgers still taste the same when you have a down day, but on days of victory and celebration, they taste a little bit better and that’s the fun of it.

I can only say that I was thankful for the experience. Spring was in the air; the games were on the radio and television everywhere and optimism was pouring forth—which was more exciting for me because I had just been watching cricket highlights just a few weeks ago wondering how in the world those people were functioning on a day-to-day basis if that was evidence of a first world country.  In America NASCAR is roaring every weekend, basketball is being played everywhere, and baseball is about to start-up in just a few weeks.  What’s not to like.  I don’t care that much about sports but yet I still enjoy the sound of Marty Brennaman on a Saturday afternoon over the smell of freshly cut grass, pool chlorine and an outside grill cooking hamburgers.   It’s not so much if those teams are winning or losing—but it is about them trying to do so and tempting the fate of chance to do something extraordinary—which is the backbone of American culture and why we have all these sporting events to begin with—because it is inflective of our nature manifested through competitive events turned into commercial enterprise—and that is truly beautiful.

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.

cropped-img_0202.jpg

When Snowflakes Become a Blizzard: Looking for #FindMike, the New York Teacher and child molester

For seven years and under great public scrutiny for even saying it, I’ve pointed out the extreme travesty of our public education system and the unions that control our tax payer funded teachers. For many years prior to my public exhibition—for over twenty years—I had a very loose tongue about the state of our schools for their inadequacies.  Many people didn’t want to hear it and they were angry at me for even pointing it out—for which I haven’t cared even a little bit—because I do not want to live in a world where the snowflakes so evident today—these soft-minded tacos of ideological indecision born in our public education institutions for over two generations are the ones running everything—because they won’t be able to handle it.  They are not equipped, not because they are stupid, or bad people, but because they have had their minds stolen by the thieves of public education—corrupt teachers living under the protection of teacher unions, who are functioning from the most selfish desires imaginable.  Of course, not all teachers are of this kind, but way too many are and every school has their share—and the kids know who they are.  Yet they stay employed because the unions protect them, and if you ever had any doubt dear reader as to what I’ve been telling you for such a long time—watch the following video from Project Veritas seen below.

In the video we see Mitchell Rubinstein—the New York State United Teacher’s Counselor trying to seduce the interviewer by dazzling her with showers of forbidden information—which of course works to our advantage as education reformers. As enlightened as we are supposed to be as a society—and Project Veritas understands this for their important work at uncovering hidden escapades—hot women will get you a lot more information than a wiretap.  Guys and girls will say anything to a pretty face, and that’s what Rubinstein did—he let the goods loose on some teacher in New York named Mike who abused some of his male middle-school students with oral sex and obvious physical abuse.  The only way we know about it is because of Mitchell Rubinstein’s loose lips trying to pick up on the Project Veritas reporter.  The legal system did nothing for the kids and this bastard certainly didn’t do anything to bring justice to the teacher.  The abuse among teachers in public schools is a major problem and nobody has done anything about it for way too long.

The only real solution to the problem is to break up the monopoly that these teachers have over our children. The reason that “Mike” felt entitled to abuse his students was that he was protected by a powerful union and by a law where kids are forced into his classroom for his consumption.  If the kids don’t go to his school they’ll go to another one where someone like “Mike” is waiting.  The other teachers never say anything because many of them have their own demons—that’s why they are teaching and not doing in the world.  They spew out this crap that they want to “teach others to be better people” but in reality, they typically are timid types afraid of the world—so they hide in academia.  That’s fine for basic instruction, but we are crazy if we allow such people to command our futures without competitive involvement.  Teachers like this “Mike” child molester need competition from the free market.  When there are rumors of such “Mikes” as there always are, parents should have the ability to leave that school for another one and take their money with them.  The school, no matter where it is or what its reputation, should not have dominion over the children that attend there only to be victims to people like “Mike,” which is what has been happening.

The reason that nobody ever does anything about such rumors of child molesting teachers who abuse their students is because it’s so hard to fire or discipline a corrupt teacher. And by watching Mitchell Rubinstein who is pretty high up on the social totem pole—it is obvious that the intellect of these people is not very robust.  As I reported earlier, Rubinstein was bragging about this “Mike” situation to impress “chicks” by his own admission.  What a low-quality person—yet these are the people we are supposed to value—and throw limitless funds at to support.  No wonder our kids are so stupid these days.  It’s not so much their fault—its idiots like this Rubinstein guy and his client “Child Molesting Mike.”

I know by saying this stuff that its inconvenient, and that the trends of the day say to just play along to get along. But, I’m not willing to do that.  I don’t want to deal with all these idiot kids in my old age who are such pathetic snowflakes that they don’t have basic grips on reality because their educations were so terrible, and in some cases they were the victims of abuse themselves at the hands of some teacher like “Mike” at some point in their past.

Recently while my wife and I were in London she was absolutely horrified at several advertisements for sex dance clubs in that city that are becoming quite popular. These are different dance clubs than we all went to as kids in our 20s—at these you don’t just dance close and sometimes grind on each other, you actually have sex in front of everyone—completely uninhibited. And while we were down in the Tube on a Friday night where many of these people were packed like sardines into those underground transportation devices going from club to club I saw some of them—dressed for the act.  It was horrifying to my wife and she just didn’t get it.  I had to explain to her that most of these kids in London came from homes where there were high divorce rates and there were obviously sexual experimentation going on in their lives way too early, whether it came from a trusted adult—who had let them down, or some peer they grew up with.  By the time they were 21 years of age they were not looking to have children yet as housing prices were prohibitively too high, and the prospect of a family just out of the scope of consideration.  And their educations had been teaching them that loose sex with any gender was perfectly fine for many years so here was a bunch of young people piled into a dance club together not looking for serious relationships that lead to buying a house and raising a family—they just wanted to satisfy a primal urge so that they could get back to their Playstations or new Nintendo games which is what they really wanted to do with their time.  Those poor stupid kids will be train-wrecks as adults because the shame of what they’ve done will follow them for the rest of their lives when biologically they do desire to settle down and build a good life with someone.

In a valueless society taking care of a primal urge so that a person can do other things they’d rather be doing is a default mode of conduct.  But the cause is in destroying those values to begin with, and our education systems around the world are at fault.  Letting molesters like “Mike” into our schools harms our children by exposing them to things they shouldn’t even know about until they are well in their teenage years.  But the kids molested by “Mike” didn’t have a choice.  An authority figure abused his power and had kids come to his house and he made them perform oral sex—then this teacher union representative Mitchell bragged about it so that he could get laid by the Project Veritas reporter.

What a bunch of losers, but never ever say I didn’t tell you all about it before. This just confirms what I’ve always said—and that demands action on your part.  This is something none of us can afford to turn away from.  It deserves our highest priority as a society.

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.

cropped-img_0202.jpg

Advertisements

Occasionally, some of your visitors may see an advertisement here
You can hide these ads completely by upgrading to one of our paid plans.

UPGRADE NOW DISMISS MESSAGE

Edit

Post navigation

5 thoughts on “The Virtue of Material Acquisition and Spending Money: Defying thousands of years of wrongly framed thinking”

  1. Welcome home. Thanks for sharing your adventures. I enjoyed it. And this blog is right on. I like to mention to my friends who talk about God’s will that God made us in his image and he wants us to USE our minds to advance… that usually gives those who think some pause and some appreciation for those of us who enjoy using our “God Given” talents to acquire things that we want and value. Thanks for sharing your thoughts. Keep it up.

    Like

    Reply

  2. Thanks Mike. These are difficult concepts for a lot of people and travel does help sort through things by coming out of a comfort zone to provide new observations. And there is no place like America! That’s for sure.

    Like

    Reply

  3. Very Interesting.
    I definitely see your side and have always bought what we wanted but always with cash. No payments. We have a nice house, 10 cars including a vette, a farm and 18 other properties in different states. (investment)
    All payed for. My sister lives in the UK so I know what you’re experiencing.
    Since my parents came home from Florida and caring for them, I have a serious new appreciation for what it will take for retirement and that’s if you’re healthy! We were thinking 4 million. It’s always been our goal. We are WAYY off! And with this screwed up healthcare, it’s harder to gauge.
    You’re young. I have 9 years on you. As you get older (and after your 50’s) things move at lightening speed. You’ll process differently after 55. I’ve had conversations with friends and they did as well. I suppose it’s a wonderful natural progression. My husband is also a financial genius, but we curved our wants for the future a couple years back. We are completely happy and financially solid, until we’re not. That’s universal.
    Our strategy has always been to buy things that will value us later.
    As for the Iphone….I don’t want to own anything smart. I don’t have a smart meter anymore )i payed dearly for that), got rid of my Samsung smart phone, no smart car, no smart gun, refrigerator, thermostat, or anything else like that. Unlike others, my life is more interesting and better without those things.

    Keep it simple~

    Like

    Reply

    1. You are still a young woman, and you’re right about retirement. I wouldn’t even think about it with less than $10 million dollars in the bank and not spoken for anywhere. Because the health care costs are just out of control. Ridiculous!

      Like

      Reply

  4. I meant to mention because it’s important to my point…that I have complete POA of my parents financial and medical. We do not pay a dime as of now to care for them. But handling all of their affairs is a real eye-opener and an experience most children don’t get. He did a great job of providing for themselves, but you have to make sure those investments keep paying. Very scary and completely changed our strategy.
    Another difference is that we’ve been savers…always. As have they. Most people my age have not. Even scarier.
    Mind your pennies and the dollars will take care of themselves.
    True that!

    Like

    Reply

Leave a Reply

Movie Review of ‘Snowden”: Make the kid a deal and put him to work

I have often thought of Oliver Stone as a brilliant screenwriter, climaxing with the movie Scarface starring Al Pacino.  As a director, I liked JFK and Natural Born Killers—which I thought were very ambitious.  I also liked his movie The Doors for the style of his approach to the subject.  But too often, Stone fizzles out in the second act and his movies never live up to the hype.  Art and activism are tricky bedfellows and most of the time the result just isn’t very good—so when he brought out Snowden just before the 2016 election as an obvious appeal to get a pardon for Edward Snowden stuck in Moscow with his longtime girlfriend unable to return back to the United States due to charges of treason and espionage—I wasn’t all that excited to see it.  However, due to the recent Wikileaks dump from the CIA called Vault 7 I thought it was time to at least see what all the fuss was about and learn the back story of Snowden.  Disappointingly, the last act was flat, as most Oliver Stone movies have been for years where the big payoff sort of sputtered out the moment that Snowden learned that you could turn on a laptop and watch women undressing in their bedrooms.  After that the story was really about a young twenty something who had his sensibilities hurt and had lost his nerve.  A story that was meant to show Snowden as a hero instead showed to me a 29-year-old genius who didn’t know how to handle a veiled threat from the upper levels of the CIA.

When Snowden’s bosses at the CIA let the young contractor know that they had been watching him in his private time he showed a naiveté that couldn’t match his big brain and the two things crashed into each other. Snowden had been given too much access to too much at too early of an age.  That scene based on real life was essentially the moment from the John Grisham novel—The Firm where a bright young prospect is nurtured along by older and wiser mentors only to have them reveal that they have control over every aspect of his life.  It’s essentially a hazing ritual that goes on in just about every place on earth that deals with the flow of money—where gatekeepers want to let someone who might be able to knock them out of a job in a few years, know that they are in control until they decide to hand over the reins.  According to Stone’s movie on Snowden—the kid got cold feet and let his mind erode away his logic.  No, I don’t like that the CIA and FBI are spying on everything we do as Americans, but there is a better way to make the case than what Snowden did out of a neurotic grasp on reality.

One thing that did surprise me was how determined Snowden was to become a special forces trooper, and once he broke his legs joined the CIA. During his entry interview, he was asked what his influences were—artistically, and he stated pretty much verbatim what I would have said, Joseph Campbell, Star Wars, Ayn Rand and Thoreau.  I also didn’t know that Snowden was a pretty straight-laced conservative who didn’t drink or smoke. After the first act I was pretty excited about Edward Snowden—he seemed to me to be a freedom fighter of a reasonable caliber.

But after watching him with his liberal girlfriend who was a sweet girl, but dreadfully naive—then with his co-workers, I realized who the guy was—and he was no hero. He is an excessively smart guy who essentially flew too close to the sun, and his wings melted. Down to earth he fell as The Guardian newspaper from England broke the story which they knew would embarrass the United States who was obviously struggling with a rogue government that had become the Deep State.  There are a lot of parasites out there in the media who want with every fiber of their essence to see any American do anything to embarrass their country even if its justified.  Because they are jealous of America and its reach into and around the world.

Now that the act is done however, there are lessons of plenty to go around. Our intelligence people in the federal government have assumed that everyone wanted to make that deal for security which I illustrated recently in an article about James Comey—and I’m not one of those people.  I don’t need some pinhead in the CIA to protect me from a terrorist.  If I see one, I’ll take care of it—better and cleaner than those idiots.  I practically begged some terrorist in Paris recently to attack me—I was wearing my cowboy hat around a radical poverty-stricken Muslim neighborhood and there were no takers.  These terrorists aren’t nearly as tough as the people in the CIA want to make them out to appear.  The CIA dramatizes everything so that they can get funding and more power—just like everyone else.  And when Snowden was confronted with an invasion of his privacy at the start of the third act of the Stone movie—he should have turned the tables on his bosses.  That would have been the manly thing to do—I would have gathered up pictures of those CIA heads in every compromising position and published them for all to see with even the hint of a threat—instead of overreacting and doing the whole—“I’ll show you” thing and reveal every state secret.  Needless to say, I couldn’t relate to how Snowden handled things in the second part of the film—he went from being very much in control and determined, to being a beaten young man under the emotional manipulation of a liberal girlfriend.   As I said about her, she was sweet and would have been a good match for someone with a fraction of Snowden’s ambitions, and ultimately she likely changed him to the point that he didn’t have the sensibility to work for the CIA anymore seeing people blown up on deserted streets in Syria as designated terrorist cells complete with collateral damage.

The undercurrent of the Snowden film which could have been good—but wasn’t—was that America had no right meddling in other country’s affairs—which of course we do. When other countries don’t solve their own problems, their immigrants come knocking on our doorsteps—so to protect our own nation—we have to go into nations that still entertain socialism, communism, and extreme religions and do what we can to diffuse bad guys planning to harm Americans domestically—and if left alone to their own devices will steal planes and run them into buildings, or bomb us in our many public gatherings as a punishment for embracing capitalism.  Snowden as a conservative changed during the film into something of a millennial crybaby and Stone seized on that aspect of the young man rather than that earlier much more conservative person.  Snowden’s character arch went from something likable to something rather pathetic and I blame the CIA for being second-handers and latching onto the kid so fast because they were essentially out of ideas themselves.

I am all for dismantling the Deep State which was revealed by Snowden and most recently caught manipulating the Presidency of Donald Trump but I’m not willing to throw the baby out with the bath water. If I were Trump I’d make Snowden a deal, I’d prosecute him for sure under Jeff Sessions and make him go through the embarrassment of public scrutiny.  But I’d put him into community service as an intelligence operative for a fraction of the cost of what he’s worth as a brilliant mind for 30 years.  A little freedom cheaply paid is better than rotting in prison, and so long as he’s in Russia, or other places—he’s helping other bad guys out there beef up their personal security and he’s not working on behalf of the United States. With a mind like Snowden—he deserves a second chance not for his benefit, but for the benefit of our country.   But his work would have to be more community service at a low wage instead of being thrown in jail only to be useless.  It’s good to keep enemies close, and Snowden should be in the United States doing work toward the next generation of threats instead of letting people like Oliver Stone make movies like Snowden to support in an indirect way George Soros’ open border network.  Yes, it’s a complicated problem but the solution is very easy.  Make a deal with the kid and put him to work limiting his freedom for decades—and we’ll all be better off.

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.

cropped-img_0202.jpg

The Two Ingredients All Successful Societies Must Have: Guns and Books

As I spoke yesterday about the faults of James Comey’s speech on personal security within the United States now I feel I must identify the real answer to what is required for a free society.  I’ve been working out this little problem for a while now and it really took my recent trip to Europe for me to confirm with more than theory the proper contents of what it takes to have a self-governed society functioning healthily in a constitutional republic.  As I’ve said before on other topics, I wish sometimes that life could be so simple for me to have one solitary occupation which I could throw myself into that I could say—I am this—or that.  Such as someone who works as an engineer might say upon introductions—“I’m so and so and I’m an engineer,” my life is a lot more complicated.  And if given the opportunity to be a historian I would do it, because I have an unnaturally complicated relationship with history.  I pursue it for fun and often find myself thinking about it all hours of the day.  Given that, I know much more about history than the average person, so when I say that the two big drivers of misery in Europe throughout the Dark and Medieval ages was the absence of personal protection—weapons—and the ability to read—I would be saying specifically how we can solve these problems going forward and take mankind off the track of the Vico cycle which has plagued us all for tens of thousands of years.  With those two elements absent from those historic societies—for which much of the known world of today is based—battles between church and state dominated the lives of everyone leaving individuality to sacrifice itself to national security many times over.

One thing that astonished me about the many English people who I met during my travels was how literate they were and proud of it.  They like to read in England and they should, the concept was born there.  It’s only been fairly recently that the printing of individual books was even possible for common people.  It was from 1400 AD to really the reign of King Henry VIII that Bibles were printed for individual consumption bringing the word of God to every household and leaving the Church to feel very insecure about their ability to usher mankind through the gates of Heaven for the good of the State.  I felt quite privileged to walk among the ruins of various monasteries in England, such as the great St. Augustine’s Abby because in 1536 AD they were destroyed out of a need for money by the regime.  That left the monks who had previously provided all the intellectual work of translating the scripture to the people who attended their churches to be the symbols of thinking in the medieval world.  After destroying the various monasteries, a power vacuum occurred and the Reformation effort spread as people started to question the relationship between an often corrupt Roman Catholic Church clergy, the various kings, and God.  By the time the first Welsh Bible was published in print during 1567 a lot of discussion regarding the Mathew’s Bible printed in 1537 had taken place.  King Henry VIII was very anxious about letting the lower orders of society read the Bible for themselves because it had severe political and social consequences.

It was only a few years later that Robert Cushman commissioned the Mayflower to flee to America to escape the church’s ever increasing losing grip on the “commoners” such as what happened in Canterbury quite explicitly as Henry’s children struggled with the social changes that reading Bibles had introduced to their society.  This explosion of thought advanced to the days of the pirates over the next hundred years as the exploits of the great Henry Morgan came back to England from the Caribbean region as countries used privateers to rob other countries of the loot they were stealing from the Meso American region.  Democracy was invented on pirate ships as they were functioning governments far removed from the countries of their origin and mankind was turned loose for the first known time in the history of the world—and writers like John Locke were there to record the observations for people like Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin to expand upon later.  Secret societies like the Illuminati and the Scottish Rites developed a line of philosophy divorced from the English crown as the publication of books began to create a new kind of human being among the would-be intellectuals who could afford books that in previous centuries were either monks or members of the king’s court.

During the 1750s those inspired by the new books of Europe to flee to America to live as frontiersman erupted into westward expansion.  During the years of the French and Indian War then eventually the Revolutionary War—then the War of 1812, then the Civil War the full fruition of knowledge shared through books were matched with the possession of personal firearms which allowed for the kind of self-reliance that Ralph Waldo Emersion and his friend Henry David Thoreau contemplated as Transcendentalists.  It is important to remember that as of all the events that lead to the Civil War in America books had only been present for reading among human populations for about 250 years.  Personal books were not available outside of state-run institutions until this present time and it was books that led to the explosion in even contemplating individual liberty.

It was all the way up to the beginning of the 20th Century that personal firearms were the keys to American life.  After all, frontiersman and cowboys were able to hunt and forge a life for themselves anywhere in the world so long as they had a gun and a Bible to read by the firelight to their families to pass the time—and human consciousness expanded rapidly.   The American Indian didn’t have a chance against these European escapees armed with personal firearms and the knowledge they had acquired from books printed in New England and shipped west to markets emerging along the many rivers of the new nation.  Indians were a collective based society and they were much like the oriental forces that had been crushed under the expanding French and English empires that were dominating the world driven not by the great military leaders of Napoleon and the likes Wellington—but of those societies having access to the ability to read for the first time.  They were smarter than their opponents and the North American Indian may have been living in accord with nature, but mankind was conquering nature through contemplation derived by reading—and the Indians lost because they couldn’t think as individuals.  Reading is a very individual oriented type of activity.

That gave birth to the American Western—of the cowboy gunslinger, which represented to the world something new—an individual human being protected by their gun and functioning as a self-reliant entity that didn’t need a church for their spiritual awakening—because they could read—and they didn’t need a government to protect them because they had a gun.  It was those two things that created the American cowboy and which eventually led the rest of the world to contemplating personal liberty.  As of the present, the world has not yet accepted the superior philosophic position of the American gunslinger because there is a lot more to it than just having the ability to take the life of another human being, or being able to read a book on their own without the interpretation of a church clergy to tell them what it said.   This is why socialist statists deeply concerned about this wave of personal freedom happening in American like Barack Obama were so weary about the electorate holding on to their “God and their Guns.  They know that it is those two elements that prevented a society from falling in behind the old European model where political elites controlled the commoners through ignorance and superior might.  Modern progressives desire deeply to take society back to the time right before Henry VIII where people could be managed between the church and the state which is why they support so vehemently the introduction of Islamic radicalism into Europe and America because they desire to use that religion to reduce intellectual capacity and drive society back to a theocracy instead of an intellectual republic without central controls.  That is also why liberals are all about gun control regardless of what the stats say on the matter.

It is therefore the ability to read and the ability to own a personal firearm and even to carry it around with you that decentralizes all governments and puts the power truly into the people—and it’s really a new idea which has only flowered in America.  As I said, the English people are very literate and that was refreshing.  But they don’t have guns, and so as a result they still live much the way they did during the Middle-Ages. Currently it’s not the Catholic Church or even the monarchy which drives their society, but their history in those activities still bind their society to that foundation just as Japan still fashions itself to their samurai period.  That leaves them all with one ingredient toward personal freedom, but not the other.

Only in America and only with both the gun and the books of our culture has freedom advanced.  America actually is on over saturation because not only do we have books, but we have 1000s of channels of cable television, 100 years of motion pictures to watch, endless books and countless things to entertain ourselves with—so literacy isn’t as high of a priority as it should be in our society—but there is no way to go back.  Mankind will never surrender their freedoms back to the security of state-run centralized society such as those envisioned by Henry VIII’s friend Thomas More in his book Utopia.  Those days are gone forever because just the act of reading a book like Utopia, or The Communist Manifesto, lead eventually toward a human mind craving freedom.  It’s the Catch 22 for progressives who want to revert back to a theocracy they control whether it is Islam or environmentalism that is worshipped.  Human beings once they get a taste for it won’t go back and if you look at history, you can see clearly a trajectory of thought that leaves us either destroying ourselves or settling space—but we won’t go back.  And societies around the world will not advance on just books and knowledge alone.  They have to allow for personal firearms in order to truly unleash the potential of the human beings in their societies.  You cannot have the good intellectual stuff that comes from a free society without doing the things it takes to have a free society and owning personal firearms is just as important as literacy.  And those are the facts.  You need two things to have a society of free people thriving in a country—any country—they have to be literate with plenty of books and a desire to read them, and they must have guns—lots and lots of them.

Rich Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

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

cropped-img_0202.jpg

Journey into the Firelight: The life and death of Robert James Waller

I don’t typically acknowledge memorials because to me, you live, you die—it’s all transitory.  The spirit of someone is what matters and the body is just a vehicle they ride in.  So when a car stops working, I typically don’t attribute that to the end of a person.  However, in regards to what I think is one of America’s great authors, Robert James Waller who died quietly at his home in Texas yesterday at the age of 77, I’ll make an exception because it’s likely we won’t see any more of his very good literature.  Needless to say, I have been a fan of his since his breakthrough novel, The Bridges of Madison County.  I was quite ecstatic when Clint Eastwood took up the movie project at Warner Bros. to make that very interesting novel into a movie just two years after the novel was released as it was to me a modern Arthurian romance mythology about the nature of love—how duty destroys passion between couples and how to live authentically in the modern world.  Here was my favorite actor/director handling one of my favorite novels—so on the opening day of the film, I was the very first one in line—as if it were a Star Wars movie.  I loved the material and subsequently devoured each book that Waller wrote from then on as they were released.

That little collection is a uniquely western view of the world mixed with the type of mysticism associated with oriental cultures.  Waller captured perfectly the modern conflict of the esoteric and exoteric with out-of-the-box characters yearning like Ayn Rand’s characters always for more.  Waller’s characters were trapped against foundations of social convention and always seeking to flee into the firelight—as he put it often.  My favorite of his characters of course was Robert Kincaid who I always associated with—and was obviously autobiographical for Robert Waller himself.

The negative reviews of his work often confounded Waller, he really didn’t understand why the literary critics hated him so much, yet his novels did so well, especially The Bridges of Madison County.  It was a short book that many desperate women were screaming for as a voice beyond the veil of their social conventions cobbled up like a dry rotted sponge being tossed into an old bucket to wash away the dirt on a car that needed to be cleaned after a long winter on the first good spring day.  Pieces of that sponge of course fell off during the act and it showed culturally in the women and some men who read Bridges—and the critics hated it.  Waller’s Robert Kincaid is exactly the type of man who the literary critics were afraid of—he was too perfect, too powerful, too smart—and the idea that someone like him existed in pickup trucks all across the American landscape honestly terrified them.  For the weakened, defeated males of American culture it was also terrifying to them to consider that somebody like a Robert Kincaid could come along and steal their women by just asking for a cold drink on a hot day.  Waller was essentially writing about T.S. Elliot’s Wasteland in the context of small town America.  That wasteland is much more evident in the big cities, and it’s hard to put a finger on it in within the noise of a cityscape—because everyone is a little neurotic in those places—but to segregate the wasteland motif into the Iowa countryside was dangerous, and accurate.  And the literary gatekeepers let Waller know what they thought of him.

Lucky for us all, Warner Bros has some rebels that have worked there for many years in their film and book publishing divisions that have the imprint of the great Clint Eastwood on them to this day.  Eastwood made all his movies for the most part with Warner Bros. so he has had a large hand in shaping them as a company—culturally.  And to this day, especially in regard to the D.C. comic universe of the Batman, Superman, and Justice League movies, there are some rebel filmmakers who are obvious Ayn Rand fans—and that’s wonderful.  I’d attribute that same trait to the how and why The Bridges of Madison County was published and released with the backing of a major player in entertainment and the content took off brilliantly catapulting Robert James Waller into orbit as one of America’s great writers.  Critics don’t like much that comes out of Warner Bros. for many of the same reasons they don’t like Donald Trump.  It’s also why Warner Bros. still owns the rights to Ayn Rand’s Fountainhead and has Zach Snyder working on a treatment for a modern film about that topic, because Warner Bros. is still a studio that gets it—in the closed-door offices away from the entertainment media.  And Robert James Waller was one of their experiments—and a delightful one to emerge.

Waller was an economics professor and he understood business holding a PhD on the topic, but it was his art that he cherished most of all.  He had acute observations about things and had to get them out.  Unlike me, who lives in the days of the blog, Waller was one of the last writers to emerge before the computer generation exploded so getting access to his work required official publications of his written word.  But he wrote things for years fine tuning his thoughts which came to a very fine point in The Bridges of Madison County.  Robert Kincaid in that novel was essentially to an Iowa farmhouse lived in by the desperate love hungry wife of Francesca Johnson, what John Galt was to Dagny Taggart in the American classic Atlas Shrugged.

We are of course talking about “overman” characters here and that’s what critics didn’t like.  They wanted flawed people who were melting with guilt by their middle lives—and certainly not dripping with life passion as they moved beyond the age of 50.  Robert Kincaid was one of those characters and Waller managed to write about different variations of this uninhibited maleness in future novels, never to quite the same effect, but the characteristics were unmistakable.  But while Ayn Rand focused on the exoteric nature of things which eventually led to her creation of the Objectivist philosophy, Waller spent a lot of time with the esoteric, which women tend to reside in.  They love the idea of mystery and a connection to the unknown which is very oriental in its assumptions and the methods of Robert Kincaid were generally attributed to this esoteric nature.

Without question, Robert James Waller was one of the great American writers and I’ll miss the opportunity to read new work from him.  He lived a good life and his novels captured a bit of it in a way that was unique—and lasting.  So when it comes to the vehicle of Robert James Waller, I am sentimental about the many miles it drove and the quality for which it performed and as he dissolves into the esoteric nature of the universe I am glad that for a shining moment in the good ol’ firelight he was made terrestrial and formulated just enough exoteric language to share it with the world and give a voice to the wasteland which resides inside most people—if only for a fleeting moment.

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.

cropped-img_0202.jpg

Life in the Grail Castle: Unexpected treasures from a Canterbury bookstore

I suppose the best vacations are when you have the opportunity to do the things you enjoy most unhindered. If its fishing, hiking, shooting or sculpting—the ideal vacation is when you can do those things without thinking about doing other things as obligations.  And that was my experience recently while living in Canterbury, England for a few weeks in February 2017 shortly after the Trump election.  That’s important to note because I was invested in the election of Donald Trump considerably and if he had not won I was planning to hunker down for a very tough battle, politically, and physically.  But since he did win—I knew that things would be fixed which I recognized needed to be addressed politically before I ever invested in such a big trip—which I had been thinking about for a long time—because let’s face it—you don’t want to travel to the point of  yearning for home but not look forward to returning because the Obama administration constantly reminded you that they were trying to make America into Europe—as opposed to the other way around.  As it stood on this particular trip, Trump was saying exactly what I was saying about Paris as I was standing in the middle of it observing the reality—so it was extra sweet to return back through immigration in Charlotte North Carolina after being overseas for a lengthy period of time.  If Trump had not been in office, I would not have booked such a big trip.  But because he did win, I felt I could relax a bit and enjoy doing something I had been thinking about for a very long time.  It is under this vacation condition that I found myself at the very nice bookstore Waterstones in Canterbury admiring their fantastic selection of books when I saw a real treasure—a 2015 publication I didn’t know about from the Joseph Campbell Foundation called, Romance of the Grail.

I’ve mentioned before that I’ve been a member of the Joseph Campbell Foundation in the past even to the point of attending some of their events way back in the 90s—and I still get updates from them all the time which I enjoy reading. Somehow I had missed this book on Arthurian legends by Evans Lansing Smith written directly from Joseph Campbell lectures given before his death in 1987.  The reading of Joseph Campbell books is something that I cherish greatly and if I wasn’t a whole lot of other things—all action oriented—I would have been quite happy as a scholarly intellectual living off tenure so that I’d have infinite time and resources to read and think. That’s why the vacation to Canterbury was so important to me—for a few weeks I was able to step out of my normal life, read lots of books, look at maps, explore a lot, and attend some of the greatest museums of the world day after day—and honestly, I loved it.  I wrote and read a lot on this trip and every single day I found myself in some bookstore whether it be in London, Paris, or Canterbury looking at books to buy that were not for sale in the States and that’s when I saw that little treasure from the Joseph Campbell Foundation on Arthurian romance while looking through the comparative religion and mythology section of the great Waterstones bookstore which was three stories set in one of the most historic cities in the world—and most literate.  I can say that the day I bought that book it was one of the best days of my life.  Here was a Joseph Campbell book that I had not yet read—of relatively fresh material.  Sure I had heard much of it in old lectures, but having it in print was very nice.  And I was buying and reading it in a city where people loved to read and were sitting about drinking their tea and coffee looking down into the old Roman streets of Canterbury.  The whole thing felt very intellectual and I enjoyed it immensely.

Around the corner was a Burger King, which was much more my type of food, so my wife and I went there after our trip to Waterstones and I sifted through my treasures and started reading the new Joseph Campbell book. I was fully aware that this is exactly why many liberals are out of touch with the reality of the outside world.  It is quite enjoyable to sit on a pedestal and contemplate the mysteries of the universe with a full bank account and access to the luxuries of life without worrying about solving problems day-to-day that affect people’s lives extensively.  It was very pleasurable to read my new Joseph Campbell book without worrying about the time or the events of the world as I was about as removed from my normal circumstances as I could have been.  The only thing I had that reminded me of home was my new books and all the time to read that I wanted—so my Whopper at Burger King tasted fantastic, my new books were treasures that I wouldn’t have traded for a pile of gold and for the first time in a long time I didn’t worry about what was happening in the world—because Trump was on the job in the White House.  The Dow Jones was creeping up to 21,000 and my wife and I had plenty of money so not to worry about buying train tickets to London or Paris, or eating in any restaurant we fancied—so I had a taste of that intellectual life, and I liked it in the context of a vacation.

One of the things that made that particular book so exciting and refreshing was the nature of the story of Parzival by Wolfram von Eschenbach written literally in the setting that I was staying in, a city formed by the Middle Ages of 1200 A.D. I had heard the story of Parzival and read the Eschenbach poem years ago, but it had much more potency reading it in Canterbury for me—because I was surrounded by the landscape of that time period.  The Canterbury Cathedral was literally everywhere I looked as it dominated everything that happened in that town even to this very day—so it was very revealing to me to read through the updated Joseph Campbell book on Arthurian legends the story of Parzival once again there. Essentially a lot the way I do things was inspired by that story as I read it early enough to give meaning toward my natural inclination toward absolutely reckless behavior.  I understood why I did such things after I read the story of Parzival.  I knew it instinctively before, but I understood it intellectually after Joseph Campbell explained the metaphors of the Eschenbach version of Parzival.  The Arthur legends are very laissez-faire, for instance you only get to the Grail Castle to meet the Grail King by holding the reins on your horse very loose. You can only do such things in life by living authenticlly—by living of your own accord.  That’s what makes these old stories so important—they are the first of their kind which identifies the individual as an architect of their own destiny.  In the context of history, this was big stuff—so I absolutely treasure these Arthurian stories specifically of Parzival and the Grail Castle.

Given all that, it was a great vacation because of the literature and the ability for me to reach back to some of my roots away from the immediate catastrophe of every little thing that happens every single day. It was a window into how the intellectual class in our society lives, and I can see why they enjoy it.  But, vacations are not reality—the real effort is in productive enterprise, and when the vacation was over, it was over.  Yet gratitude is there in abundance for The Joseph Campbell Foundation for producing such a great book, and for Waterstones in Canterbury for being such a great bookstore set in such a fine, historical city.  And for Canterbury itself—for surviving over 2000 years of evolution to provide my wife and I a nice vacation from the realities of life.  It was a good trip, and I’m happy that books were able to be an important part of it.  In my own way, it was my own little Grail Castle, and I was able to bring it home with me.  And that is a real treasure.

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.

cropped-img_0202.jpg

The Deep State is in Deep Trouble: How Wikileaks is actually saving lives in America

Yes, the “Deep State” is in deep trouble, and now you know why dear reader that I was so proud to stand beneath the Wikileaks headquarters at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London to have my picture taken. I don’t normally pose for pictures like that but for Wikileaks I was happy to make an exception.  As Wikileaks provided a platform for someone within the United Sates intelligence apparatus to leak thousands of pages of very damaging reports as to what the CIA and FBI can do with our smart televisions, gaming consoles, and smart phones.  Many thought that revealing such information was traitorous—and that Wikileaks was acting in a hostile way toward the American government.  Well, let me tell you what’s hostile—a rogue government working behind the scenes of our election process trying to destroy a duly elected representative of the American people and attempting to start World War III with Russia as a scape goat to preserve their own power as a shadow government.  Yeah, that’s much worse of a crime against the constitutional republic that we have in America than the treachery committed by the leakers. I was proud to know that just above my head behind those windows in those small little rooms was Wikileaks doing real good in a very dangerous world by showing those Deep State insurgents that technology can work both ways.  Sure they can spy on us—know everything we do and build a profile on each of us to destroy everything that we hope to become with the push of a button at their discretion—but we can also spy on them and know where they are and what they are up to as well.  If they want to play that game—which they have been willing to do—then the tables can turn on them and Wikileaks has provided a platform to those who dare use them to undo these shadow governments around the world—and in this case one that is actively working against Donald Trump—who is sincerely trying to reform the way business is done in Washington D.C. for the better.  If John McCain is against Wikileaks you know you are on the right side of justice.  Better yet, if Facebook is against it—you really understand the magnitude of this new information which not only pulls away the cloak of deception that has hidden this Deep State in America—but it tears it away to reveal grotesque nudity.

I personally don’t worry about the spying because I know how to throw off their Deep State profile.   I’m still a guy who reads real books, not online downloads, so if I want to go dark on their profile building, or if I want to contaminate their mechanical data collection with rogue information to corrupt their data—I know how to do that—and I actually do put forth a considerable effort to corrupt their information gathering on me.  I came to that crises when I realized over 15 years ago that everything my wife and I did together—and everywhere we went—we were followed.  It took some getting used to in understanding that a closed door and a locked house didn’t save you from that “deep state.”  And that was well before everything we owned became a spy device for this shadow government.

How bad is it—well let me just elaborate that my daughter and I are probably two of the sanest and nicest people among all who claim such things on earth. We would never be terrorists or dangers to any state government that is legitimate by the standards of decency.  Yet while traveling around Europe and back to America guess who got pulled aside for “extra” security every single time when many more potential people were there to pick from—some of them obviously nefarious characters?  To some extinct I might understand security being concerned about me—but her?  Give me a break.  Yet, our names came up on their lists as people to watch and they let us know in subtle ways that they have their eyes on us.  As if I didn’t already know.  So pathetically small-minded.  But that’s who is on the other side of these listening devices, perverts, losers, people afraid of the real world—those are the types of people who find themselves in those “deep state” jobs to spy on people to preserve the shadow government that has been building itself up for many decades behind progressive policies. Donald Trump’s election for me, and it appears many others as well, was the hope that the “deep state” would finally be challenged and eventually eliminated—and that process is underway as we speak, and I am very happy about it.

It’s not a big deal to reveal to the rest of the world what our secrets are—because these were never secrets. Terrorists in the middle of Syria know that the United States has eyes in the sky that can see everything they are doing—yet they still do what they do.  It’s up to the political resolve of The United States to decide if courageous action will take place and under Obama and Bush—that seldom happened.  Under Trump—such as moving THAAD missiles into South Korea to protect it from North Korea proactive measures are back in style—thankfully.  But remember the terrorist case in San Bernardino where the FBI refused to call the act one of terrorism—until the leaks became too great—and when that same FBI let the media into the crime scene to destroy the evidence—and claimed that they needed Apple’s permission to gain access to one of the terrorist’s iPhones—which they already had—American intelligence has a failing grade at protecting us from terrorists.  With all the spying that is going on with all of us—does anybody believe that the intelligence community didn’t know that terrorist attempts were going to happen as the terrorists bought weapons and discussed the attempt in their house around the crib of their baby in San Bernardino?  I’m sure the Deep State knew.  And what about that loser in Orlando who shot up The Pulse nightclub with an obvious terrorist act?  The terrorist movements would have been witnessed from his phone position as he scouted out the location and discussed it with his wife—who tried to talk him out of it.   Yet the terrorist act wasn’t stopped—why?

All this intelligence gathering isn’t to keep us safe from terrorists—it is to keep the “deep state” safe from possible insurgents so that they can harass them before they become a real danger. It’s not to protect America—it’s to protect their shadow government.  So what Wikileaks did with the submission of an intelligence insider—likely a rogue Trump supporter is an act of patriotism.  That day outside of the Wikileaks headquarters, I thought seriously about bringing some food to Julian Assange who was trapped behind those curtains.  Without question, I’m sure they were inside there looking down on my head wondering what I was up to.  It was strange to be so close, yet so far away from a man at the center of modern history—but I wanted to respect his privacy as much as possible.  I just wanted to see the spot that was so important in shaping our modern world and really the only place standing up against these deep state insurgents around the world.  I am sure as hard as Donald Trump worked to become president, that without Wikileaks, the deep state would have won the election and we’d presently have Hillary Clinton as POTUS and likely there would be steps toward an armed civil war in America this early into 2017.  But because of Trump he’s fighting back from the Executive Branch and Wikileaks is providing the evidence that would otherwise be destroyed before it ever reached the public eye—and for that—we should all be extremely grateful.  Wikileaks has prevented open civil war in America—and that is an act of heroism.  Liberals who are now protesting Trump and his supporters have no idea how close they came to real violence—and perhaps might yet still see.  They better hope that Trump is successful.  The Deep State that watches me in the quiet hours of the morning understand why.  And there are millions just like me out in the plains of American sovereignty.  And the Deep State is afraid—as they should be.

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.

cropped-img_0202.jpg

To the Democrats Everyone Looks Tough: But the Russians are not even relevant–Obama bites down on the hook

It really is astonishing how far the Democrats have come in just five years with their view of Russians as being a superpower.  Remember when during the 2012 election Barack Obama made fun of Mitt Romany for suggesting that the Russians might be some lingering maniacal menace?  Then also remember when Barack Obama suggested to the Russians that he’d have move flexibility after the election obviously trying to appease Vladimir Putin despite the American people.  Now, in 2017, they seem to think that Russia is a powerhouse of activity able to manipulate the strings of the American government and that Donald Trump is a pawn to the power of the former communist country. And to prove their case they used the power of government to try to stop the forward advancement of Donald Trump winning the election in spite of all their efforts.  So for them the great tragedy of their loss is that someone else much be at fault—that Russia must be much more powerful than anybody ever thought possible—because otherwise Democrats would still be in power.

I knew it when I saw Trump’s Tweets on that early Saturday morning about his explosively angry reaction to discovering that Obama’s White House had wire tapped Trump Tower in the remaining days of the great November 8th election.  The Democrats, particularly Hillary Clinton was being killed by Wikileaks and the FBI probe into the now famous deleted emails, so the Democrats needed something to stop Donald Trump—so they wire tapped him using the power of the Federal government to spy on a political rival—which was a major violation of the law.  After winning, Trump showed great grace in his victory showing no signs that he wished to prosecute either Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama for the obvious transgressions against justice that they displayed during that election cycle.  After all, why rub their nose in it?

But the Democrats couldn’t leave things there—no they had a job to do. And that job was to continue destroying America from the inside out with progressive policies aimed at eliminating American sovereignty.  People like me had always referred to these people as running a “shadow government” and Trump always seemed sympathetic to those thoughts—but the proof was hard to pin down because these criminals also go well out of their way to destroy the evidence.  When caught they always say first, “show us the evidence,” because they know they’ve destroyed it, and thus cannot be caught. But this time was different.  Trump was never supposed to win, but since he had the rules of engagement had changed considerably.  Trump now controlled the Department of Justice and essentially all other branches of investigative government making it much harder for Democrats to operate their “shadow government” except for career bureaucrats that had been in government jobs for decades who could try to bring Trump down from the inside.

Then those same Democrats attempting to make themselves relevant before Jeff Sessions was able to dig into his new AG job and start investigating all the crimes the Democrats have been up to–conjured up a completely false narrative about the Trump campaign’s ties to the suddenly all powerful Russians hoping something might stick. It was for them a hail-marry attempt with no time left on the clock and most of us viewed it that way.  After all, Trump had just delivered a very popular speech and public support was soaring—and the Democrats had to try something.  But what they didn’t expect to happen was what occurred next.

Most people might go on the defensive and attempt to answer a negative being pulled into the typical political trap as Republicans had for decades—but not Trump. He has always been several steps ahead of the rest of the world—that’s why he’s rich.   So when he found out for certain that Obama had attempted to wiretap his sacred residence at Trump Tower—he had enough, and set to go to war with the former presidential administration that had been caught playing dirty. Of course, Trump waited to see who would control the Democratic Party and once Obama’s guy Tom Perez was elected last week, it was clear that Obama wouldn’t be going away and that he intended to maintain control of the party.  So Trump did what any good fisherman does with his bait in the water—he let the Democrats push on the false narrative of the Russian connection nibbling away at the hook, and at the right moment Trump pulled up on the reel and caught Obama hard by the mouth sinking that hook deep into his jaw.  There would be no escaping this time, and the liberal media knew it.  Trump knew it too.  Rather than elaborate he simply held onto the reel and resumed to let the fish tire itself into exhaustion—because the end was inevitable.

Later that night I watched Saturday Night Live—which I had been avoiding, but I had to see how they would handle the situation. Like I predicted, they were lost.  Their show has been accustomed to being the cultural driver of our society and now they looked like a bunch of high school kids who partied all weekend who were supposed to put on a play, but everything went wrong because nobody studied their lines.  Their show was terrible.  Even worse, the strains were showing at the Academy Awards the week before.  The Democrats in entertainment had lost their mojo to the new age of Trump—and they didn’t know how to deal with the strain.  The cracks were showing everywhere.

The Democrats are learning something which for them is too late—but the lesson is obvious and it’s what they fear most about all forms of capitalism. When someone is really good at something and they apply pressure, they can make you look bad just through their existence.  Someone like Trump can make people befuddle themselves with just a look, which is why Arnold Schwarzenegger left The Apprentice earlier this week.  It’s the difference between an actor and the real deal.  Trump is really a successful person, while Schwarzenegger is someone who pretends to be—he does whatever the script says.  Trump writes the script.  Trump is making the Democrats into monkeys by turning their world completely upside down and reaching for moments of desperation like the Russian story.

However, the Russians are not so sinister. They have less of an economy than the entire value of the American company Apple—so who is afraid of whom?  What are the Russians going to do to us, throw bread at Alaska across the Bering Strait?  Please, they are no menace.  If there was ever talk between Russian and Trump it would have been to help spread some wealth there—certainly not to help him get elected because as Trump would say—he’s not going to take advice from people who don’t know how to win.  The Democrats are in real trouble, as I predicted on the Matt Clark radio show right before the election in 2016 where I predicted they’d be extent within a few years.  Well, guess what?  I’m right on target—again.

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.

cropped-img_0202.jpg

Whispers from the Catacombs of Canterbury: The great work of the Time Team and B.C. trade between America and England

img_4188One of the wonderful discoveries I made while in the United Kingdom recently was the great archaeology that had been done over a fifteen year period by the Time Team.  They had managed to host  television shows featuring very aggressive digs over three-day periods at various sites around England, and elsewhere and putting them on television in an entertaining way.  Working fast as they did, the Time Team has managed to do an enormous amount of research that has culminated in tremendous work in England in understanding their pre-history cultures, the Vikings, Anglo Saxons, Romans, Normand’s, and the relatively recent Victorian Age settlements to better assemble a history of England that nobody really understood prior.  Personally the most explosive example of the Time Team’s value to the United Kingdom was the work they did in Canterbury as seen below.

My son-in-law is from that region so it had been a goal of ours to visit his homeland and get to know the elements of that place which helped shape him into the fine young man that he is now.  When I first met him I was happy to learn that he was from Canterbury because Canterbury Tales was one of my favorite classic pieces of literature.  Along with James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake, Canterbury Tales was one of those really hard books I pushed myself to read while living on campus at the University of Cincinnati in what I would call my days of breaking free of society’s intellectual shackles.  Nobody was doing things like that when I was 25 freely reading those great works of literature while eating my breakfast, lunch and dinner almost every day in the Perkins at Coryville just to the east of the main campus of the University of Cincinnati.  Now people did read them because their literature professors gave them homework assignments to do so, but nobody did it for fun, like I did.  Even though I had a car in those days, most of my time was spent walking between the apartment I was staying at and that Perkins reading my books, such as Canterbury Tales.  So it was quite odd for me that my daughter had out of all places in the world meet a young man from Canterbury and was intent to marry him.

Fast forward 25 years into the future from the time that I was readying Canterbury Tales at that Perkin’s restaurant in a college campus environment to doing nearly the same thing in Canterbury itself this time not just reading classic literature in a studious setting, but seeing the places where Thomas Beckett was actually slaughtered and visiting the pubs and inns that were put on the map because of the pilgrimages to Canterbury Cathedral to visit the tomb of the slain archbishop who had fallen out of political favor with Henry II.  Because the intent of the visit to Canterbury was to visit my son-in-law’s family and see how he grew up, we were staying in a flat in the 4th most expensive city in all of England just one street over from the Canterbury West train station.  It was the closest thing I had come in over two decades to living the “college kid” lifestyle that I had when I first read Canterbury Tales—and it was strange.  We actually lived in Canterbury as opposed to staying at a hotel.  At our flat we lived like we would at home doing laundry, preparing meals, and conducting life in general outside the mode of being on vacation.  There is quite a difference.  Over the course of February my wife and I discovered our favorite shopping spots for getting food and we developed a nice relationship with the pizza place directly across from the Westgate Towers—because we ate a lot of pizza.  Canterbury became a second home for us.

However, for the part of me who would have loved to have been an archaeologist if I could put my other interests and career paths in some other order—Canterbury was like living in a dig site.  With their long history of prehistoric people who were conquered by the Romans, the Anglo Saxons, then the Normans—before being dominated by Catholicism, the history of this particular city was extraordinary and something that I soaked up like a sponge.  Not to mention that it was just a short walk from our flat where the pilgrims began their journey to America—so there was plenty of history to investigate and that’s what my wife and I spent most of our time doing around Canterbury.  After reading so much about the place for such a long period of time I was finally able to put my eyes on the real things and touch history as it was—which for me was very satisfying.

Canterbury is a microcosm of what I think has happened to the rest of the world.  In the macrocosm of modern history wars have defined our understanding of things and caused a very shallow recollection of our roots toward civilization.  But the world is just too big and our sciences are too slow to truly get to the roots of things.  For instance, the Time Team tried to do a similar show in America on PBS but they just couldn’t get it off the ground.  America is a different audience and things are spread out differently.  And in regard to our mound culture in the States everything is protected by the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA).  So archaeology has become nearly impossible in America for that very reason making it so that there isn’t any quick study over three days of the most ancient mysteries so obvious to American audiences, like Cahokia, the Newark Mound complex and Serpent Mound.  But the Time Team wasn’t so constrained in the United Kingdom and what they were able to unlock in a relatively short period of time was short of extraordinary.  That left a lot to explore for a guy like me in Canterbury and I relished it immensely.

There were in Canterbury several mounds that I could see on an ancient map of the city dating back to the Romans,  burial mounds all over the place just the same as were found in Stonehenge and in the United States at Fort Ancient and they all date back to the same periods.  I saw physical evidence of two large ones, one at the St. Augustine’s Abby and another right next to the old Roman walls that was as tall as the Miamisburg Mound.  Archaeologists in the area attributed that mound to the Romans who moved into the area, but because of my history with the mounds of Ohio, I would associate it as being before the Romans and for the same reasons.  I think the Romans put their imprint on the mounds they found in Canterbury, but I don’t think they initiated them.  But what was astonishing was that they were there—part of the history of Canterbury and its many microcosm layers of history were there for all to see focused on that one point in the world.  There are very few places anywhere that so much history could be observed in such a preserved way in a relatively confined space.  What made Canterbury unique was that it was the target for many civilizations to make their mark as opposed to building cities here and there within twenty miles of each other.  At Canterbury each big revolutionary period of human consciousness along the present Vico cycle was layered on top of each other for future archaeologists such as the Time Team to reveal to the world in a glorious television production which contributed immensely to our understanding of these periods.

The Time Team would go on to write several very important books on archaeology namely Fancis Pryor’s Britain BC and Tim Taylor’s Guide to the Archaeological Sites of Britain and Ireland.  I picked up Tim’s book at the St. Augustine’s Abby site and I found Pryor’s book at Stonehenge which both made my entire trip worth it alone.  These are books that you can find online, but not as easy as you might think in the States because the two cultures just don’t work well together intellectually.  What Pryor has been doing is similar to the very independent work of Fritz Zimmerman in America but schools of thought haven’t yet put two and two together.  But that’s part of the fun of discovery.  Zimmerman is dealing with a political culture in the States that is using laws the way the Catholic Church imposed its will on private citizens to control thought and history in Canterbury for at least five centuries strongly and another five modestly—but now the Time Team finds itself in a unique place where the politics in England is conducive to archaeology because of the various progressive elements that are trying to rot away the foundations of the Church to overthrow their current society.  So for the members of the Time Team, they went to work in a short period of time and are continuing to do fantastic work which has expanded the historic knowledge of Canterbury and the surrounding English countryside.

One thing I did notice at Stonehenge was that there were many archaeologists working on the site presently as they had their cars, campers and tents set up away from the tourist areas.  In America it is rare to see this kind of aggressive investigation simply because universities have not made it a priority and the politics of the times have not been friendly toward investigation.  We really need to fix that in America because we could use our own version of the Time Team.  But after visiting Canterbury and seeing many things up close that I have long been curious about, I am more convinced than ever that the cultures of prehistory Canterbury and southern, central and western England were actively working with cultures in North America through sea trade that was much more advanced than anyone has previously committed true scientific thought to as of yet.

I am grateful for the chance to have gone to Canterbury having all the great work that the Time Team and many others have contributed so that my time as a born again college kid living on the campus of that ancient city could wander around the streets with my notebooks, books, and camera validating in the microcosm something that interests me greatly on the macro.  The evidence was there for everyone to see and it was fixated on that spot because for the western world, it was the cradle of civilization.  Literature by Geoffrey Chaucer first drew my eye to Canterbury and my daughter’s marriage to one of its sons was the second, but before these events Canterbury was already ancient and laced with a deep history that was covered by time and only unearthed by human ambition through war and profit.  And that made eating pizza across from the Westgate Towers much more meaningful and mysterious as the echoes of the past came to me uniquely through the circumstances of authentic living for just a short time in an ancient place dying to tell its story on a global scale through whispers in the wind and ghosts from its catacombs.

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.

cropped-img_0202.jpg