Tag: Ayn Rand

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.

The Terrible Customer Service of Airlines in America: United’s horrible public relations nightmare is just the tip of an incberg

We’ve all heard by now about the Poker playing doctor who was dragged off a United Airlines flight in Chicago because the airline company had overbooked the flight. The policy is ridiculous, the mistakes made by everyone numerous, and the degrading condition of airline travel in the United States made embarrassingly clear.  For what we pay for an airline ticket, the airlines should be a lot more appreciative.  Instead, they have come to treat the experience—especially in the economy class—as a miserable endeavor.  And it was on full display for everyone to see.

Here’s the main problem, that doctor should never have even been flying from Chicago to Louisville—it would have been quicker to drive the distance. The only time I’d fly such a short flight would be a connecting flight after a much longer journey—which often occurs when traveling overseas.  When doing such a thing most flights arrive domestically in Charlotte, Chicago, or Detroit then you have to catch a transfer flight to your home destination.  But for just flying from one city to another within the United States such as from Chicago to Louisville—a car is much faster by the time you waste all your time with the TSA and the booking process.  Airlines have lost their way and become entirely too callous to the service of their passengers.  Flying now is like riding on a public bus—and that is just a miserable state of affairs for something that should be a luxury experience.  So if I were that doctor who was singled out to lose his seat on an overbooked flight which the airlines have a right to do unfortunately—I would have taken the money and rented a car—and just drove down to Louisville.  I wouldn’t have allowed myself to be stuck in Chicago one more night waiting for another flight the next day.  That is just a ridiculous waste of time.  It’s only a four to five-hour drive from Chicago to Louisville taking your time—so the people on that flight had options that were much better than the violence that eventually occurred.

And that’s what I would suggest that people do—just don’t fly unless you have to. When I need to travel overseas, there isn’t much choice but recently on a trip back from Europe I noticed that the British Airways flight crew was top-notch while the American Airlines crew just sucked.  They had bad attitudes and were miserable to deal with—and that comes from their labor unions and essentially the lack of competition that the airlines have enjoyed for half a century.  Well, those days are coming to an end, other transportation modes will be competing with the airlines soon and that will change things significantly—such as the upcoming Hyperloop.  But even while in Europe I watched the flight attendants union for British Airways protesting at Heathrow for better wages and benefits which looked terrible.  All the employees in the commercial air professions have a lot to relearn about customer service—because presently it is just terrible and that is the first problem that United had with their policy which failed so spectacularly in Chicago.

The other major issue is the authority that the TSA and the airlines now have over individual sanctity—which is a direct cause of over-reaction to terrorism. The United States response to terrorism after 9/11 was just wrong to become a bunch of scardy cats afraid of their own shadows.  What should have been done then is what Trump is doing now—single out the terrorist activities and throw aggression at them making them think twice about attacking us again.  Airline travel should be as easy as the air shuttle is at Lunken Airport in Cincinnati.  The air shuttle there flies people to New York, Chicago, and Charlotte at just a little bit over what a commercial flight costs—but the hassle is much less.  They are very respectful of your time and person at Lunken and that makes it a much more desirable option.  They still work for people’s business there and don’t take it for granted that you have to do what they say.

On another flight, recently from overseas a flight attendant who thought she had way too much power was harassing a young couple who were trying to keep their baby quiet with videos on their smart phone. It was working and the noise level was next to nothing.  But that didn’t stop the woman from telling the young parents that they needed to put head phones on the baby because open sounds were not allowed on the plane.  Their response was that what they were doing was quieter than a screaming baby.  The stewardess very nearly pressed the issue—which under the airline rules, she had the authority to do.  Luckily, she let the situation slide, but not before tempting the desire to throw her weight around—which was considerable as she was an obviously union protected monstrosity who could barely fit down the aisle of the plane.  Not a good image for the airline to begin with.  Obviously, the tendency toward customer service was missing—customers these days are treated as a nuisance when they fly.  They are practically raped before getting on the plane and once there you are at the mercy of questionable pilots and power-hungry stewardesses who are well into their 40s and miserable because they feel guilty leaving their families behind to fly around the world for a living.  I mean really, if I want my mom to serve me drinks I can go to her house—part of the flying experience should be to be pampered a bit and to get where you want to go with a bit of adventure and zeal to it.  Not misery and some menopausal deformity with hairs coming out of their noses pouring you a Coke on a bumpy plane.  It’s a lot more palatable to have an attractive female in her mid-twenties tell you to fasten your seatbelt than some angry relic from the baby boomer generation.  I’m just being honest.  For what we pay, airlines are not giving us customer service and the issue is not looks—it’s just respect for the whole experience.  Ugly people as employees are just the icing on the cake—airlines don’t even go that far as to care about such things.  They are too busy overbooking flights and ripping people off airplanes to cover their management inefficiencies while the TSA is pulling down the paints of little boys and checking them for bombs they know aren’t there.  But the little pedophile in them hope to find something—likely unrelated.

I hate flying these days unless it’s in first class. Even then, the last time I flew overseas on a United flight in the nice seats they gave me a gay guy as an attendant.  My ticket cost as much as a car and that was all they could give me?  I mean it’s not about sex, it’s about taste—it is much nicer to have an attractive woman passing you drinks on a psychological level and working around you while you are trying to sleep than the hairy arm of some guy who acts like he wants to molest you.  Even for women, a flight to Japan or to a destination in Europe that isn’t encumbered with a PC culture of old people is more pleasant with a 25-year-old women full of wonderful estrogen handing you food—purely from a sanitation point of view because they at least care about their appearance so you can deduce that they at least washed their hands. And if airlines can’t at least give you decent looking people to serve you, then they should just leave you alone.  But flying is extremely intrusive and personally violating so with the uncomfortable burdens of jet lag and time zone adjustments—these added problems are just not worth the experience.  So whenever possible, I find some other way to travel these days—and that’s the best way to correct the behavior.  Take money out of their pockets and they’ll have to adjust.

For passengers of that United flight where the guy was drug off screaming like a trapped raccoon, they all should have been taking a car to Louisville—because the distance just doesn’t justify the extreme hardship of flying. By the time most of those passengers arrived at the airport, checked their baggage, went through security, found their gate terminal in that large airport—they could almost have driven to Louisville from Chicago.  Then there is the time it takes to taxi out and take off and actually fly to Northern Kentucky along the Ohio River, which is very fast—but still part of the process.  But that’s not all, once you land, find your bags, get a car—you could have long been at your hotel if you had just driven the distance.  And if I were you dear reader, that’s what I’d start doing.  Don’t give those slugs at United your money for a terrible experience. Don’t reward terrible behavior.  If they can’t give you something special for your time and money—then don’t give them the money.  It’s that simple, and if everyone did that United Airlines and the rest of them would be forced to become more customer friendly.  And from my vantage point—that is long overdue.

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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Syrians Thank President Trump: Little birds, cockroaches and knives

Obviously now, in the days after the Syrian air bombing by the Trump administration, does everyone understand what the real game plan of the political left has been—which was actually articulated within the secret Skull and Bones Society for which both Bush presidents were a part of. War for many decades now has not been used as an objective by globalists to win territory or even gain cultural expansion—it has been used to displace people and force them like cattle into a slaughter-house of the global orthodoxy’s choosing.   The way that Trump conducted the bombing exposed the progressive trend to use displaced people from destabilized regions to change the cultures of their destinations—such as the United States where it would be assumed that those people would become Democrats holding their hand out to the government to care for under our welfare system. When Syrians came out in favor of Trump’s actions against Assad in Syria—the liberal press and politicians like Hillary Clinton and Elizabeth Warren had very little to say in defense other than to utter the playbook of their open border campaign contributors.

Syrians if given a choice don’t want to flee into the United States—they want to stay in their homeland which completely dismantles the leftist open border position. Now more people than the typical reader here can see that all along the wars in these third world locations from the Middle East down into Africa—South America and over into Indo-China—India and Indonesia were created to force tribes of people into other zones of population to drive the open border mentality and manipulate the gene pool toward nefarious leftist Utopian dreams of a one world culture all mixed together in a stew they control to serve to unknown dinner guests.

Trump’s bombing campaign took away everyone’s excuses which was the genius of it—from just about every side of the argument. But most effective of all were the thanks that came from the Syrian people toward America for aiding their existence.  I have spoken a lot lately about this Trump move and the strategic importance of it—but additionally I have gone so far to examine the nature of being that nosy neighbor who helps defeat evil when it’s obvious that they can’t help themselves.  The “law” isn’t very good at defining such things—but let me illustrate it this way.  When I see some little bug stuck in a situation I stop and help it out of my pool, or free it from being stuck between the glass of a house window if I can. Life is life and I try to do what I can to help the little things live just a few hours longer if possible.  Just over the weekend, I was mowing my grass and a little bird had got its feet wrapped around some string somewhere and had managed to get all that wrapped up into a little tree where the thing was beating itself into oblivion in a panic to get away.  It didn’t help that the bird was stuck low to the ground and was within my eye line, so the mower was terrifying the bird.  It was shitting itself dry just scared nearly to death.

Now……………I had several decisions to make. I could just leave the bird and let some cat or coyote come along and eat the creature.  After all, life lives off life and the coyote and cat need to eat too. However, as a human being I have a mind that allows me to think beyond animal necessities and as a result I am the top of the food chain.  So it is truly in my power to decide the fate of the little bird.  Under that consideration I took out my knife and cut the string wrapped around the bird about two feet back from its foot and freed it so that it could at least limp away and chew away the rest of the string back in the safety of its nest—if it’s leg wasn’t broken.  And that appears to be what happened when the bird fell to the ground disoriented and with a new lease on life.  Once it realized that escape was a possibility the bird took off for some hidden away security that only birds know about.  I went back to mowing my grass.

The Rand Paul philosophy would have left the bird and not intervened. I run into the same problem with spider webs.  If I see some bug not yet completely stuck, I help it out.  But, the spider did go to a lot of trouble to spin a web so that things would fly into it—so the spider could eat.  If you let the bugs fly free, you are denying the spider needed food so something is always bad for something else.  And if spiders didn’t eat so many insects the world would be overcome with them.  So the non-interventionalist stays out of it things and for good reason.  But I’m also a free market guy and I think that by helping littler birds and bugs out from time to time that I improve the hunters who must drive themselves just a bit further to eat.  Sure they might be pissed off at me for taking away their easy meal, but in the end they’ll make themselves better for it—or they’ll die trying.  However, liberals are the types of people along with their progressive counterparts in all global political parties who deliberately set traps for birds so that they can evoke in my empathy action that they caused.  For instance, they might put that decision gate in front of me to drive an answer from my actions that are favorable to them—such as getting the bird stuck to the tree with some string and when I drive by doing nothing they might photograph it and use the experience to move me in some position of guilt.  Or when I stop to help the bird they might hope that I accidentally kill it so that they can call me a murderer even though they were the ones responsible for the bird’s situation—hypothetically speaking of course.  But the political left probably isn’t prepared for me to be carrying a nice, big, sharp knife that easily cut away the bird so that I could resume my grass mowing and listening to the Reds baseball game on the radio over my headphones.  What Trump did was pull out a knife in the form of missiles to help out the “bird” (Syria) and free it from what was trapping it.

Whatever fox or cat that might have been counting on that easy meal had to work harder that day. I decided that—and I stand by my decision as head of the food chain.  I can be ruthless to the fox and compassionate toward the bird if I want to—and the same goes for spiders.  And that is the role of America in the world—as a capitalist country it is our decision to be compassionate or ruthless depending on the point of view of who we are dealing with.  And when it comes to children—100% of the time, we must help them when they are caught—because they don’t deserve to be someone’s easy meal.  More than anything when we do such things we can see who the real villains are by those angry that the sweet little birds of our lives fly free.  Likely that sweet little bird will give me many nice songs this summer and will bring joy to the world in many ways that a cat or a fox doesn’t.  So I’ll take the side of the bird.

But I must say that a few hours later I saw a cockroach in my house sitting on the ceiling. I have a rule for cockroaches—because they are dirty characters that multiply rapidly and once they get out of control, you could end up with a massive population of them where you sleep.  So I caught the thing and flushed it down the toilet.  I didn’t smash it quickly to put it out of its misery because I wanted it to scream as it drowned in ways that only cockroaches can hear because I want all his friends to learn an important lesson.   (They can live underwater for quite a while)  I did not act out of compassion with the cockroach because of its nasty nature that is not compatible with my existence and as head of the food chain—it’s my right to decide if it lives or dies.  So, I killed it.  And most Democrats that I know—they are just like cockroaches and the same fate is the only one for them (metaphorically).  You do it without thinking about it because the role they play in our society is a negative one—and little birds deserve to live a good life not caught in the strings of traps placed by global elites for an objective no honest person wants.

That’s why what Trump did was a good, moral thing. And it’s nice to see the world realizing what a blessing it is to be cut loose from those progressive traps out there which is all that Assad really is.  Nobody expected Trump to pull out the knife and free them—which is why he is the master of manipulation for the good of the human race—and that is a very good thing for all life—even the cockroaches.

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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Rush Limbaugh Says We’re In A Civil War: He’s right, and what we need to do about it

I listen to Rush Limbaugh when I can, but not as often as I’d like. If I miss the show I try to catch the podcasts in my shop where I practice target shooting and doing gun repairs—which is soothing.  A long time ago when I worked at the “Mill” (Cincinnati Milacron in Oakley) Rush Limbaugh was on every day in every building on the shop floor.  You couldn’t go to the restroom without hearing Rush from 12 to 3 PM during the Clinton Years—so I have a point of reference to go on here.  But during yesterday’s broadcast Rush said something that I didn’t think he’d ever say.  I had said it about five years ago, but Rush finally said it and he was right.  Rush in my mind is mainstream.  Even though the radical loons from the left think Rush represents the “hard right” Limbaugh is in fact a moderate in my mind so for him to say that America was in another “civil war” was quite a statement.  Listen to the broadcast above specifically the second hour.  I consider that admission to be a turning point in this long war—because before you can fix something, you have to identify it.  Admitting that America is split into a civil war condition is the first step in solving the current national problem.  However, the next is in determining who wins—because obviously both sides are too far apart to ever come to agreements.   The philosophic positions are just too great and the political left isn’t interested—as they have demonstrated during the opening days of the Trump administration—at living peacefully together.

Rush asked a very hard question—how do you know who wins a civil war? Well, it comes down to one side recognizing the authority of the other and presently the political left is unwilling to do that—as Republicans have been so gracious in the past.  So there is no shame in pushing Democrats out of the political process because we gave them the table under the Obama presidency and they showed us what they were made of.  They abused their power and that caused Trump to be elected—to correct all those mistakes.  But Republicans can at least say they played by the rules.  Democrats have no such intention—and Limbaugh did a good job of pointing out the case as it stands.

That means that we have to not only beat Democrats in elections, but we have to beat them at their fundamental philosophy. To win this war we cannot have a “live and let live” attitude toward them in movies, music, and culture—we must challenge them at every phase of life and we must have a focus on “winning.”  Not just compromising, but beating those idiots into a pulp to the point where they must capitulate—or be utterly destroyed.  There is no reasoning with those people on the political left so we must beat them into submission intellectually until they either adopt our positions, or they are put to an end.  It’s as simple as that.

I’m not saying that we must impose physical violence on the political left, but when they start the fight, we must finish it. Otherwise, intellect is the weapon of today.  They cannot fight smart people, so it must be the smartest of the conservative base who must be the knights on this battlefield because it’s not cannons and arrows that will win—its superior strategic positioning and philosophic concept.  “The pen is truly mightier than the sword” as I’ve demonstrated repeatedly.  But that is only one weapon of war.  The use of the Second Amendment is one of the most powerful aspects of our position—because not even Hollywood can use the guilt game against conservatives—because without the gun, Hollywood would go bankrupt, which ironically is already happening.  Guns aren’t just for shooting, they are symbols of self-reliance and the political left hates that concept.  So just having a gun does a lot to undo the political left.  Using a gun as part of your recreational life does a lot more.  So one of the best ways to destroy the political left is to destroy their soft, snowflake sensibilities with “in your face” audacity.  They have certainly used that tactic on the abortion issue and many other leftist topics. Now is the time to turn that tide against them with conservative vantage points for a change—and the gun is the most effective weapon in that battle—not for shooting and killing—but for the self-reliance that they represent.

The political left does not represent America. They represent the stagnate old remains of Europe.  Recently while I was in Europe I saw clearly why progressives in America love Europe’s centralized control so much.  You could see it everywhere—Europeans are heavily encumbered by ridiculous rules intent to govern every part of their lives.  For instance, if you go to Burger King in London and you get a large drink with your meal—it’s like the size of a kids drink in America—because in England—and the rest of Europe there are many rules on serving sizes and ingredients designed to take the strain off their socialist health care systems.   Everything is small and served in reduced amounts—as opposed to America.  No wonder Michael Bloomberg thought he could limited the size of soft drinks in New York with similar rules that they have in the United Kingdom.  From his point of view Europe was already doing it and it really is all progressives want to do—is control other people’s lives.

From my little shop at my house I could make endless amounts of ammunition and maintain many firearms without the outside world having anything to do with any of it. I don’t need a store or a gun manufacturer to make guns.  A simple machine shop can make everything needed—and that is nice to know.  As I work out there I think about the political left and their stupidity in thinking that they can destroy the firearms market by taxing ammunition and putting tight restrictions on firearms manufacturers hoping to put them out of business—because that’s their intention.  That mentality doesn’t come from Americans it comes from European sympathizers who happen to have moved to America and been trained to think in a progressive fashion.  The best way to challenge them is to put it in their face and make them realize that there is nothing they can do to stop firearms in America—because the need for them arises from a philosophy that is specific to our culture.  It is not part of European culture, or even eastern culture—it is specific to America.

Just keep in mind that to win this war that you must do something. Letting the other side off the hook with silence won’t win the day. You must engage them with a shameless position toward your American philosophy and let them perish under its light like the devil might melt under Holy Water.  Whatever you do, don’t hide anymore.  Don’t give them the illusion that they are the only ones brave enough to be on the battlefield.  Join them there and outshine them.  Force them to retreat to their little liberal campus groups and pull out their hair in frustration.  Because Republicans—“conservatives” must now focus on winning this war.  It’s not enough to have Trump in the White House.  Now is the time to run liberals off the field of battle and force them into hiding for a change—and to bend to our will if we hope to save humanity.  That’s what’s at stake and what must be done.

Rich Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

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Turning the Corner in the War: Why Ted Kopple was really mad

I spent a few days thinking about this topic before addressing it, because it really does mark a turning point in this war. I first realized the scope of the war when I was pitching screenplays to Hollywood from 1995 until 2005.  I learned a lot about the “business” over that ten-year period which of course carries directly over to the experiences Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity had on the Ted Kopple interview shown by a recent CBS Sunday show.  I was obviously a conservative writer and I didn’t think it would matter that I didn’t think the way the people in the business thought.  I thought they’d find my perspectives fresh and perhaps a throwback to the period where Hollywood had great success.  But what I learned pretty much reflects the subtle pain that I heard in Rush’s voice all during Monday March 27, 2017.  Sean Hannity too seemed wounded by the outright rejection of the great Ted Kopple.  Of course, they played it down, but I could hear it in their voices, and I understood.  Intellectually, they always knew they were different than Ted, but on a human level—they are peers and wanted to at least participate in the arena of debate even if the people on the other side were wackos.  They honestly liked Ted and at some deep level, wanted his approval.  Ted Kopple represented to them the media and as sick as we all know that media to be—they wanted to help it be better with debate.  What Ted Kopple did was ignite one last bomb hoping to stop the loss that Democrats are experiencing.  It was like an ugly divorce where a person you thought you loved at one point in your life yells at you—“I never enjoyed making love to you because you have bad breath.”  That is essentially what Ted Kopple did to Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh on Sunday March 26th 2017 on his little morning show.

I call it a war because it was obvious to me that’s what it has been. “They” didn’t care what the casualties were—they certainly didn’t care about my wife and kids.  Once I put myself out there in an artistic way, then took very strong positions against casual sex and drugs—representing the Midwest in California—they didn’t care who they destroyed in my life so long as I felt the pain of it.  I have never seen so much hatred and vitriol as was expressed at me in such a passive aggressive manner than in those years mentions above.  In essence I was told that I would never write a book, or a movie, or do anything in the media and that nobody would see or hear from me because they controlled all the avenues in the media and I would never get through.  I never tried to force feed anything to them, I was just being my Midwestern Cincinnati self.  I would remind them that Steven Spielberg and Tom Cruise came from Cincinnati for which they would say that “they” became one of us instead of expecting us to become them.  Well, there was some truth to that—I did intend to change their point of view through creative debate which is how I thought things were supposed to be.  Instead I learned that they weren’t open to those types of experiences.   Instead, they were on a mission to convert all of us into bleeding heart liberals or else, and that was the focus of their agenda and the cause of this “war in America.”

It was a very disheartening thing to learn that Hollywood was not the place I grew up loving, or even the place that made all the great westerns I watched as a kid with my grandparents. It was a propaganda machine mostly that was hell-bent on liberal advocacy.  It was even worse than Robert Altman’s The Player—it was even more corrosive than what was revealed in that very good movie about Hollywood life and how to make it there.  The business wasn’t about producing the best script, or even being the best director—it was more about who you knew and what they could do for you—it was mass collectivism on overdrive and that wasn’t for me.  Naturally I toyed around with self-producing but to do that you have to come up with a lot of money and its always very risky.  I’m at a point where I will likely produce a film with a budget of 5 to 10 million range with an aim at Netflix now that more options for distribution are available with less union rules.  But I decided way back in 2005 that I wasn’t going to play the conventional game and that I would go it alone in everything because technology and the market had caught up to the business in a way that decentralized it.

Ted Kopple specifically mentioned that in his piece on Rush Limbaugh citing the “fairness doctrine” from 1987. In his mind if only the “system” could have stayed in control his news on CBS would still be relevant and Donald Trump wouldn’t be president.  But because of Sean Hannity, because of Rush Limbaugh and thousands of people like me who have taken advantage of deregulation of information—the old way of progressivism can’t compete and their world is coming to an end.  As I was at a film festival in 2006 doing whip stunts for producers who might use those techniques in films, I was already thinking of how things had changed and the gate keepers were no longer needed.  If you had talent and ambition, the technology was certainly there to step around the old guards—like Ted Kopple—and do your own thing.  That is why the political left is praising Google and Facebook for censorship because they hope that they will become the new gatekeepers.  But if either company commits too far into that realm, some other company will rise up to compete with them—that’s the beauty of this age of deregulation.

I was told no by those gatekeepers so many times that I relished this age where I can write all I want—novels, articles—films, anything I’d like to and I have a means of distribution that doesn’t involve anybody really. I can say honestly, I saw it coming a long time ago.  It is much harder to get wealthy off the entertainment industry because with freedom comes abundance and these days so many people are involved that the costs have come down to the extent where the buckets of gold for a well written novel just aren’t there.  But if you are a writer who wants to write such a thing for the benefit of doing it—you can.  For a guy like me, there are literally millions of ways to make a million dollars.  I don’t need to rely on one way to get there.  I can afford to write millions of words on daily articles and publish books around the gatekeepers which does have an impact on culture in a positive way—and that is how I decided to do what I did.  Sean Hannity in his way did the same thing as did Rush Limbaugh and many others.  Some make a lot of money at it, some not so much—but they do it because they have passion for the subject and they no longer are regulated by a gatekeeper in doing it—and that’s what’s different.  That’s what obviously frustrated Ted Kopple.

In many ways Donald Trump is like the rest of us—he felt he could do the job of president better so he put himself out there starting around 2010 to start that journey. He’s not doing the job to get rich, he’s doing it out of personal passion for the job because many people like myself, Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity have softened up the marketplace to consider new ideas that the old guard held down in the news rooms of Ted Kopple’s world, the movie producers in Hollywood, and the publishers in New York controlled largely by Publisher’s Weekly and The New York Times.  They aren’t running the show anymore and haven’t been for a while.  The big difference is that now in 2017 with Donald Trump in the White House, they can’t hide it anymore.  Now mainstream people are seeing it for the first time and people like Ted Kopple—and virtually every Hollywood producer is angry about it—because all their efforts at keeping a lid on the competition of ideas has failed and their life long quest has proven irrelevant.

So yes, we’ve turned a corner. Even though the focus today is on Republicans botching the health care issue, the progressive left which has controlled everything for so long is losing more ground every day and their complete and utter destruction is imminent. We are only a few months into the Trump presidency and its obvious what’s happening.  Open borders are closing, money is flowing again, the Keystone Pipeline is about to fill with oil, NASA is getting back to work and deregulation is the spirit of the White House daily.  The Supreme Court is about to be satisfied and things are happening that Ted Kopple never imagined could—because he thought things were under control and the “system” was in charge.  So he did his hit piece on Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh and blamed the “fairness doctrine” for why things went wrong.  But the writing on the wall was there long ago and people like me started chipping away at the wall instead of conforming to it—and that is why today is so different from yesterday.  And why tomorrow will be unrecognizable for them.  And I love it!

Rich Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

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Playstation VR is Simply Fantastic: ‘Rush of Blood’ pushes the market to a new game changing standard that is simply amazing

Even though the topics range often from one extremity to another, the basic theme of this information site is that of culture building—what makes us who we are in the realm of science, politics, art, history, and philosophy.  And these days one of the strongest influences on our culture is the video game industry and I find it infinitely fascinating to watch how innovation and achievement is transforming our society in very positive ways.  For instance, I am very impressed with the Leap Frog tablets which my grandchildren use for pre kindergarten learning.  I think it’s an amazing device that really is a game changer in the field of education.  I’m also very keen to get my hands on a Nintendo Switch which is next on my to-do list in the realm of video gaming.  But for the last six months I have been all about the new Playstation VR which I think is simply amazing.  It far exceeded my expectations upon getting it and now that the smoke has cleared my current favorite game over any of the personal entertainment systems is Until Dawn’s Rush of Blood VR.  What an experience that is and after playing it now since October of 2016 I think it’s time to talk about it in a very macro way—the impact it has on our culture going forward and what it means—because there’s a lot going on with it that I haven’t seen reflected in any review of the game as of yet.  It’s such a new thing that I don’t think anybody quite knows how to articulate the phenomenal impact that is going on with Playstation VR.

It started innocently enough, my wife and I during lunch one day in October just a few days after the official launch of the hot new Playstation VR game system which supplements the PS4 base unit, picked one up because I wanted to play two of the games, the upcoming Battlefront game for Star Wars where you get to fly an X-Wing into battle and this arcade shooter Rush of Blood which was kind of a mix of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom mixed with John Carpenters, The Thing from what I could tell.  Being a guy who likes to shoot guns, I thought this game would be a great way to try shooting in a virtual environment because Playstation has these cool little motion controllers that simulate guns very well.  We spent about $600 getting everything needed which was cheaper than a new gun, so I thought it was a pretty good deal.  I went home and set it all up not really sure what I was going to be experiencing and after playing Rush of Blood the first time my jaw was on the ground.  It was an incredible experience.

I don’t think the game is for everyone, but it does reflect the way I think—so I enjoy it immensely from a conceptual level.  For my readers, it you want to take a journey through my mind, play Rush of Blood levels 5 and 7 and you’ll know.  Watching videos of the events of the game really don’t pay the technology justice.  For instance, as seen on the level 5 video, the giant spider which is the main antagonist specifically designed to exploit the arachnophobia in all of us at a primal level, physically looks like it crawls up and over you.  The closest thing I’ve ever seen to something like this was in Orlando’s Universal Studios at the Spiderman ride.  For me that ride is a benchmark in 3D technology and physical effects because Spiderman physically interacts with you on the ride and it’s very convincing.  I’ve always been amazed by what they’ve done with 3D projections at Universal Studios and look forward to every visit there.  But Kings Island is where I spend most of my time in Cincinnati during the warm months.  I love the place and after hundreds of rides on The Adventure Express, I still like the feel of riding in those wooden roller coasters.  I particularly enjoy the October Haunts that they have at Kings Island where they combine haunted houses with roller coaster riding and if you combine that with the shooting gallery type rides they have at Universal, Kings Island and Disney World you essentially get what you experience with Rush of Blood mixed with the Spiderman ride at Universal Studios.  On that level 5 round the spiders climb into your car with you—the little roller coaster that you ride in during the game—and they are very convincing.  They look a lot better in VR than they do on a 2D YouTube screen.

And that’s what makes Rush of Blood so amazing—I’m comparing it to my experiences at Kings Island, Universal Studios, and Disney World yet the whole thing is available for the home entertainment market.  You literally get to bring an amusement park level experience to you PS4 home game console.  Also, keep in mind that I’m a guy who shoots real guns every day—literally, so the gun work in the game is very good.  The Playstation motion controllers work extremely well, shockingly so.  With all those elements combined, the technical leap that Supermassive Games utilized to make such a thing a reality is simply jaw dropping to me.  The graphics are just superb, the physics of the game amazing, and the sound design is insanely good.  What Playstation VR does that the big amusement parks in Orlando can’t is completely put their guests into an immersive environment.  Playstation VR covers your entire face comfortably, so you forget you are wearing a head set.  Then they have these stereoscopic 360 degree ear phones which provide sound from all around you in pure projection meaning there is no spillover noise the way you might get from a home theater system with surround sound. This is piped perfectly into your ears with great effect so noises behind you, or to your right and left are unnervingly realistic.

It took me several months to really think about this exciting new technology and I have to say that if Uncharted 4 was my favorite video game of 2016 this Rush of Blood is my current favorite for entirely different reasons.  It’s really in a category of its own.  It’s a theme park/haunted house right in your living room because you really do forget that you are on a couch instead of an actual roller coaster on a cold October evening at the Haunts at Kings Island.  And what’s even worse—or better in regard to Rush of Blood is that the monsters do invade your personal space they way real monsters at a haunted house can’t legally do—which is certainly unnerving.  I enjoy the chaos because it actually helps me practice staying calm under extreme pressure—because the monsters in Rush of Blood often get right in your face and the sounds that accompany them can be truly scary.  Your mind doesn’t know the difference between reality and fantasy when your senses are overloaded the way that Playstation VR can do.  The 3D environments are the best I’ve ever seen—there is real length, width, and depth to them instead of the flat planed look you get from most 3D movies.  In Rush of Blood, as well as other Playstation VR titles the graphics are photographically distinct meaning all the little details look the way they would in real life.  The graphics might look a bit cartoony, but it’s the proximity of things that sell it—such as a long corridor holding its depth in relation to our perspective the way it would in real life.  And as you go by rooms the depth of adjacent structures stream away and toward each other the way they do to the naked eye. I can’t imagine the computer calculations it takes to pull off this effect but Playstation VR so far in every title I’ve seen has pulled this off flawlessly, which makes Rush of Blood that much more terrifying because there aren’t little physics problems to give your mind a hint that this is only a game.  You have to consciously remind yourself of it because your subconscious accepts it as a reality which is a tremendous testament to the game designers.

What excites me as an adrenaline junkie—and let me say that is exactly why I love Rush of Blood—it’s not for everyone.  But for me, it is the perfect thing—just my speed.  I manage my stress in life with adrenaline.  I love taking chances and living on the edge—but to manage a productive life I need to get those experiences in ways that don’t wreck cars and destroy people’s lives.  So I go often to Kings Island to ride roller coasters and I get down to Florida to the Orlando parks when I can—and I play video games often.  I mean I’m an adult professional who shoots lots of guns, spends a lot of time with family and reads at least one book a week.  Professionally I work about 70 hours a week but I still have managed to put in about 840 hours into my Playstation 4 this year.  So that gives some indication of how important it is to me.  Rush of Blood lets me live at the highest adrenaline levels very personably—in a completely immersive environment and that lets me act responsibly in other parts of my life without having to give up that nature in myself—for the benefit of mankind.  This PS4 VR system really lets me live out a dangerous life without having to actually go to an amusement park—its literally in my living room now, so it will be interesting to see how other entertainment venues grapple with this new technology.  I am certainly a believer and I think Rush of Blood is the best of the best in regard to pushing the technology forward.  When I’m playing it, I’m convinced I’m there shooting inter-dimensional beings and giant monsters with all the swashbuckling appeal of the mine car chase from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.

Playstation was the first to game console market with their VR and it’s difficult to know how they might improve on it because if Rush of Blood is the starting point, where things will be two or three years from now is ungodly exciting.  And for the $600 or so, it was one of the best things I’ve bought in a while just because it feeds my inner adrenaline junkie copious amounts of joy.  The shooting alone is worth the money I’d save in real ammunition if I could ever sit in a real roller coaster and practice shooting from a moving condition at actual targets.  The process of shooting alone is enjoyable in Rush of Blood, let alone all the other elements.  I can only say that it’s a fun time to be alive where options like Rush of Blood for Playstation VR are available for a home market and not some special exhibit at the Epcot Center as a potential technology.  This technology is here and now, and it is just something special that I never thought I’d ever see—let alone to see it available in my living room.

Rich Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

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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.

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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.

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Socialism is Destroying The Louvre: Capitalism is the best way to preserve art and history

For a museum that opened in 1793 and had been used as a personal residence of King Francis I and many others after him serving around 10 million visitors a year and is one of the most celebrated of its kind in the world, I had high expectations for The Louvre in Paris. I love museums, I absolutely adore the one in Cincinnati which I visit several times a year called The Museum Center.  However, I have always assumed that places like The Louvre were far superior—after all, when one thinks of Paris they think of two things, the Eiffel Tower and The Louvre so my pilgrimage to that historic museum was something I had thought about for decades.  Perhaps it was because I had been spoiled by the various Heritage sites across the English Channel in England.  My wife and I are members of English Heritage which gives us free access to important historic sites all over England from Stonehenge to Dover Castle and everything in between.  Even relatively small sites like St. Augustine’s Abbey in Canterbury have wonderful museums that go along with their preservation sites.  I had spent a week leading up to my visit to The Louvre visiting Heritage sites and spending a lot of time at the British Museum in London—and I have to say, I was in heaven.  They were so wonderfully organized and put together and the literature they offered was immense and provided me with years of reading.

Yet when I arrived at The Louvre I was greeted with chaos and socialist mayhem. Let me begin by saying that if The Louvre had been in the United States, it would be the greatest attraction in the world, including Disney World.  The building itself was immaculate, stunning even.  And the museum collection acquired under Napoleon rivaled anything else in the world.  It was remarkable.  The combination of contemporary design with the ancient was everything I hoped it would be.  But the main problem with The Louvre was that it is being operated by socialists who have no idea what they are doing.  They have this wonderful museum with all these people coming to it—but they literally have screwed up every aspect of the enterprise starting at the front gate.

My family arrived surprised to see an hour-long line outside the pyramid. We naturally assumed that this was the line to purchase tickets. So we stood in the cold needing to use the restroom for just a little over an hour only to find out that the line we were in was just for security.  The Louvre had enough visitors on a Wednesday afternoon at lunch time to populate a football stadium in the United States, yet the security forced everyone to go through two lines of airport like security which took forever.  Everyone understands that The Louvre is a target for terrorist attacks, but they should have at least had 7 to 8 security lines to properly handle all the museum visitors.  By the time we all got through security we all had to use the restroom—badly.  One of the worst things in France is that they don’t know how to give people places to use the restroom.  They have these ridiculous public restrooms on the sidewalks that hardly work.  Every time I tried to use one it malfunctioned and the seat would come up and the door would come up to the outside letting everyone in the world see you.  So we didn’t use those.  I thought we were in luck by the major tourist attraction of Notre Dame.  We followed the signs to the “toilets” only to go down a series of steps to find a group of east Europeans sitting in a group behind a steel cage charging 1 Euro to go through turnstile just to use the restroom.  So guess what, we turned around and decided to wait until we got to The Louvre thinking it would be like the Museum Center in Cincinnati—and would have like rows of places to use the restroom.  By the time we arrived in that hour long line, we had to go badly and it was almost unbearable by the time we got through security.  There certainly wasn’t any place to go in the courtyard around the pyramid.  Now that we were through security we rushed to the restrooms before buying tickets and found a line there too—especially for the women.

I told my family that I’d step into the men’s room, use the restroom, then I’d get our tickets. By the time I got through that line I thought the girls would have a chance to get through that massive women’s line.  Now keep in mind that this was a Wednesday afternoon in February.  It wasn’t Saturday in the middle of the summer.  For a museum of this size, there was no way there should be lines like what we saw at The Louvre.  Going into the restroom it was pandemonium, and there were as many women in there as men.  It was sheer chaos.  And there were only four urinals.  I managed to use one and did as I said and went to stand in another line to get admission tickets.  After standing in lines for over two hours we had our tickets and were ready to see the museum.  My wife and daughter gave up on the women’s restroom not moving at all for over twenty minutes and used the men’s room under the guidance of my son-in-law.  That solved one problem, now we had another one, we needed to eat.

The plan was always to eat at The Louvre so we didn’t stop at any of the many little restaurants on our way. We figured we grab a bite to eat, spend about 10 minutes eating it, then we’d get into the museum and get to work.  But no, they had only like three restaurants and all of them had half hour lines.  My wife and I managed to get some food as my daughter and her husband waited for an additional 15 minutes to get the same type of food.  The food itself was pretty good, but the means to get it was horrendous.  The employees were slow and unmotivated.  They didn’t care how big the crowds were, they weren’t getting into any kind of hurry.  Service in France is just unfathomably terrible.  Nobody cares about anything and everyone just exists.  And at The Louvre, customer service was not a priority.

Once we got through all that we enjoyed the museum, but the way the experience started put a bad taste in our mouth. If The Louvre had been in America there would have been about 10 restaurants all around the grand room and plenty of seating and bathrooms. Getting tickets for a museum, using the restroom and obtaining food should be easy things for such a large tourist attraction so that visitors could spend their time learning and doing things.  But under the socialist country of France, they even managed to screw up a slam dunk of a great tourist attraction, and turn it into sheer misery.

The whole thing told the story of why socialism is so terrible and how capitalism services society so much better.  Even in England they get it, the Heritage people understand how they make their money to offer services to a public which funds the preservation of art and history.  But The Louvre, they are missing millions of dollars of opportunities and are just living off their reputation—which won’t last forever.  They need approximately ten times the bathroom capacity and that much equally in restaurant availability.  They certainly have the room for it, but obviously not the business sense.  If I were running The Louvre I’d seek out a partnership with McDonald’s—someone who knows how to serve massive amounts of customers quickly.  I’d also bring in other American fast-food chains who are just as good—obviously, the French don’t know how to do that on their own and I’d set them all up on some of those blank walls in the main area under the pyramid outside of the ticketing area.

It isn’t cool to provide bad service, and it certainly doesn’t place people above the bourgeoisie of society to drag ass everything.   Bad service is just disrespectful and it says to visitors of The Louvre that the management doesn’t give a rat’s ass if anyone visits or not.  And from what I saw, The Louvre really doesn’t care if anyone comes.  They think they are entitled to the business and they think that because there really isn’t much else to do in Paris except visit museums that they’ll get by with this kind of thing for the foreseeable future.  But I’m sure I’m not the only visitor to The Louvre to come away feeling disenchanted by their terrible service.   They have a lot of lessons to learn, and for their own sake, they better start learning them.

Rich Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

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

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