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.

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

Mike Malik

March 5, 2017 at 11:11 am Edit

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.

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overmanwarrior

March 5, 2017 at 1:43 pm Edit

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.

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Vicious

March 6, 2017 at 11:28 am Edit

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~

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1. overmanwarrior
  
  March 6, 2017 at 8:44 pm Edit
  
  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!
  
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Vicious

March 6, 2017 at 11:42 am Edit

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!

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

When you realize #DaylightSavings stole an hour of reading from you last night, so you have to catch up! What are your #weekendreads? pic.twitter.com/nMProbQvnI

— Barnes & Noble (@BNMarlton) March 12, 2017

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 20^th 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.

Lots of new releases this week to feed even the pickiest 📚+ 🐛! Here's an appetizer. Stop by & see the rest of the menu. #BNBuzz pic.twitter.com/Lc1wWcibJv

— Barnes & Noble (@BNMarlton) February 22, 2017

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.

The Real Problem with Illegal Immigration: Changing what people are running from in the first place

It was an interesting interview between Fox News host Tucker Carlson and Univision News anchor Jorge Ramos because it exhibited quite wonderfully the problem over illegal immigration. When Carlson asked—“do I not have a right to not like that the country does not look like the one I grew up in” he asked a very powerful question. Of course Ramos exhibited the modern George Soros open border viewpoint that the United States is changing and that these are facts of life that we should all just accept. But the real essence to the question is not whether or not America should look like a particular color of people—but that the idea of America be preserved no matter who the majority ethnic group might be—because the function of any people in moving to the United States over the last 400 years—likely much longer—was to get away from something to live better in North America. However, open border advocates assume that when people come to America through illegal and legal immigration that those new people have a right to bring the culture they are running from with them—and that just isn’t the case.

If an immigrant is coming from Venezuela, Nepal, Vietnam, India, Columbia, Mexico—or anywhere that has had their economy destroyed by communism and socialism—they do not have a right to bring that garbage into America to change the nature of our country. The situation is not one of skin color, or even sex—it’s all about the values that make up a society. America works as a capitalist nation and those coming to the United States for opportunity must respect that opportunity and they can’t bring the garbage they are running from with them. That is the essence of the immigration argument. People coming from someplace else have an obligation to assimilate to where they are going. They don’t have a right to change the nature of the American idea.

I know far more immigrants than I do people from Appalachia America—or in other words I know many more people who are not of white skin color than I do those of my own skin color, and I like those people because often they have good families and strong personal values. But I’m clear with them that I will respect them so long as what they want in life is to work hard and live the American dream. However, if they start voting for socialists in America and seek to turn our nation into some third world armpit of communism—then I have a problem with them. It has nothing to do with the color of their skin or their country of origin.

Additionally, I was just able to travel through Europe and I have seen firsthand the trouble I have been reading about and watching on the news for years. Europe is under siege from the former communist block of east European countries and the communist insurgency injected into the Middle East during the 1970s—which is hiding behind the religion of Muslim faith to penetrate the “west” for revenge over Sykes Picot and the centuries long battle of the first Crusades. Muslims are pouring into Paris and London at an alarming rate not to assimilate—but to change those great European cities from the inside out—and they have been attempting to do the same in America.

Unfortunately for open border advocates like Ramos there isn’t much Mexican history to go on to justify their society as a long-established entity. When there are claims that Texas was taken from Mexico or that there are open disputes along the border into Arizona and elsewhere the truth is that the Spanish conquered the Aztecs in 1519 and sacked the Mayan civilization around the same time—as well as the Incan Empire in South America. The Spanish looted all the treasure of those cultures and hauled them back to Europe leaving the French and English to fight over what was left—leaving Mexico, Central America and South American depleted and destroyed. The Spanish mixed with the beaten Aztec and Mayan people creating the people we see today and socialism replaced their former great economy under the Aztec Empire into one of a welfare state centered on Marxist ideas. So what does Mexico, Central America or any country in South America have to bring to the United States but ideas that would collapse our economy because the people born of those regions were created under the flag of conquest? We aren’t living in a world where everybody gets a trophy. In North America, the Indians were beaten in the war over land. So the rights go to the victor. In Mexico, the people were beaten. They don’t get rights to live equally in a world against a culture built on superior ideas. And that is the problem for people like Ramos. Admitting that the United States is a superior culture is something that nobody is willing to accept—yet there is a reason that people are willing to put themselves into danger to come to America in the first place—and those reasons need to be respected—and protected. In order for those people to have opportunity in America the preservation of what makes America special must be preserved.

Mexico never had their act together—they were built from a culture of conquest and pillaging—and they never got their feet set as a country of ideas from the time the Aztecs were beaten to the present—over 500 years later. That’s not something to celebrate. If anything, Mexico should be taking notes from America—not pouring into North America to bring socialism to our economy to turn it into the backwoods armpit that Mexico is presently. Mexico could be great, but under the current conditions, it is terrible and I feel sorry for the people imprisoned there. If they want to become United States citizens—I’m happy to welcoming them—but they aren’t allowed to destroy our culture in the process.

The North American Indian was not native to America—that falsehood was perpetuated by lazy science not willing to accept new discoveries made over the last 150 years that declare pre-Columbian archaeology had a much more advanced culture than what we typically associate with the nomads discovered by Columbus. And the same in Mexico, the Aztecs and whatever culture built the pyramids at Teotihuacan were far more advanced than the Spanish conquistadors who settled in the area and looted that culture into the despots we have now in that region. If open border advocates wish to acknowledge those historical aspects, then they might get some historical agreement from people like me. But they are defending conquered countries and insisting that the European translation of history serve as the backdrop of migration justification. For instance, the slave trade in America was a European inheritance that was eventually eliminated as a result of our American Revolution—but Europe committed far worse atrocities when they looted Central and South America of its former wealth—yet that is never discussed. But the evidence is still present in the people of today and they flee to America looking for hope and opportunity—but bring with them all the troubles they are trying to flee from. That is not a sane option.

Understanding all that, Europe is falling apart, Russia doesn’t even have an economy that exceeds the one American company like Apple, China is a communist nation, and Japan is struggling with debt and limited resources—who in the world can save the rest of it from their long histories of bad decisions currently holding down many people from living good lives. Is the answer to let all the world into America as immigrants so to topple the last free and just place on earth—or should the rest of the world take notes from the United States and start forming their cultures around what works in our nation? If open border supporters like Jorge Ramos really want to save their people in Mexico, Central America and into South America than how about proposing that those counties become more like America and embrace a capitalist form of economy abandoning what they have been doing which is causing so much misery. We can’t let the world bring communism and socialism into America and expect it to remain a place of hopes and dreams—because those immigrants will just turn our cities into the slums they are running from by nature—because they haven’t changed their patterns of behavior. Rather, those immigrants should in most cases stay put and adopt American ideas in the Middle East, in Mexico, in all of South America—India—Indonesia—Vietnam—everywhere so that opportunity could be found in their own backyard and not halfway around the world under illegal conditions. The real issue is that these places that immigrants are fleeing from should change their ways so people aren’t so eager to leave. That should be the concern of Jorge Ramos—because only when you fix that problem will everything else snap into place.

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.

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

One 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 4^th 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

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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

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The White Cliffs of Dover: Embracing adventure even when its not convenient

It was something that I had always wanted to see so when the opportunity came up to hike the White Cliffs of Dover at the point where France was closest to the United Kingdom I seized it. I knew when I was doing it that it was a unique opportunity not so much for the event in itself, but because my great photographer daughter was with me and was primed for a little adventure that she was feeling deprived of simply due to the realities of adult life. As a little girl we did this kind of thing all the time, but now we don’t get to see each other in this way very much because we are all busy adults. We get time together during a typical week to grab a bite to eat or go somewhere into town—but for adventures where we get to chase dreams, ideas, and the specter of “big thinking” there just aren’t many opportunities that allow for such things as grown-ups living different lives and raising families of their own. When my kids were little I was able to set the pace because I was the parent, now they are parents of their own and have spouses who have things they want to do and see so things get pretty complicated sometimes just to do simple things together. But, here my oldest daughter and I were in England together and everyone but us were tired from our previous visit to Dover Castle where the February temperature had dropped and a bank of cloudy fog had moved in choking off the rays of the sun into a dreary canopy that was freezing the other members of our group. But my daughter—the professional photographer that she is couldn’t resist to get some shots for her portfolio that included the nearby cliffs, but also the light of the deep fog bank. So we left our other members at the car and went for what we thought would be a 30 minute walk. We didn’t return until two and a half hours later. Here is a shortened video version of our hike down to the beach of the White Cliffs of Dover.

We were able to see our destination before the heavy fog rolled in so we had an idea where we were going before we really committed to the area. What surprised me was how vast everything was, because in England most things especially in the cities were so small. But they had built a nice park that reminded me of the kind in America where you could literally walk all day doing major hiking. In that regard we were unprepared as we started off and discovered the ferry link to France far below our feet which was transporting enormous amounts of cargo and large trucks over to the European mainland. Next to that was the English Channel looking very sinister in the cold of the day with the fog licking its surface and building up against the cliffs like a crowd waiting to get into a rock concert—anxious and frustrated—and thick. My daughter and I wanted to get down to the beach which was around 350 feet below to 300 feet and part of the trail system had a means of getting down there with a series of steps and ladders. So we were headed in that direction when the fog rolled in and took away all our visual reference points of the vast land.

It was easy to see why it was hard to invade England at this point, which was closest to the European mainland. For eight miles these cliffs faced their rivals over the centuries and fog like the one we were experiencing further frustrated such efforts. The advantage was certainly in favor of the English under any armed attack—which is why one of the biggest castles in all of Europe was there at Dover. What should have been a 30 minute walk turned out to be several hours because once you get atop of those cliffs and start walking east, they just go on and on. The trail system was good, but there weren’t signs to say exactly where you were, you had to follow a map, and again, the fog took away our visual references. So after a lot of walking and passing up the narrow corridor down to the beach a few times, we eventually found it. At one point in the video I held my camera over the edge to record how far down it was to the beach and the jagged rocks below. I am particularly proud of that shot not just because it showed the obvious danger of the cliffs. We were able to walk right to the edge of them and look over, which was dangerous because everything was slippery from the constant dew that was on everything all the time. But honestly, my new iPhone 7 Plus has a steadycam feature that made that shot possible. Just a few years ago an over the edge shot like that would have been too jittery to really see what was going on as such a small camera would shake all over the place—even your heartbeat would move the camera looking over such a vast crevasse. But with the new iPhone, the shot was easy which made recording such a thing so much more achievable spontaneously, which is what this little hike was all about.

Once we found the way down, we worked our way through to find eventually that the entire path had been washed out and destroyed by the erosion from above. A large rock had fallen and taken out the bridge that led over to the ladder which dropped everyone the additional forty feet down to the beach. So we stopped there and took our pictures and soaked up the moment. We had been walking around for an hour and a half just to get to that point and knew it would take a while to get back, and that the rest of our family was waiting for us with a newborn baby. But for that moment we didn’t worry about it. We were just a dad and daughter relishing an adventure that comes so seldom. We embraced the moment without regret. As we were looking at the ocean a little seal came up to the beach then retreated to the deep water again. It was a nice moment.

We returned to the car an hour later to find our family patiently waiting. We were covered in sweat and chalk from the cliffs as we had to climb back up and out. We had walked five miles and we felt it, especially the nearly vertical climb back up from the beach. And that moment became one for the record books. We won’t ever forget it because it was a fine example of the benefit of spontaneity. I have a reputation in my family of getting the most out of unplanned circumstances. I’m not one that likes to plan things out with too much detail because I don’t want to miss the hidden opportunities that might come up while exploring something. So I typically have a rough idea of what I want to do then improvise as I’m doing it adjusting to the situation as it presents itself. But adulthood is all about schedules and deadlines, so it can be tricky business to live the way I do and most adults don’t enjoy it. However, I raised my daughters with that kind of thinking so they crave it all the time—and most of the time are disappointed by the realities of life that does require plans and forethought. Personally, it would have been easier to stay in the car and do something more conventionally, especially after exploring the castle at Dover. But the opportunity was there so it’s good to take it when you can. Many times, the best things in life come when we don’t see them or plan for them. And that little moment in time with my oldest daughter was very special and a natural outgrowth of the spirit of adventure. By the time we returned to the car, we had both grown a little from the experience and the exhaustion that often comes with doing things outside of one’s comfort zones carried us to a new level that defies explanation—but it sure makes you sleep well at night.

Rich Hoffman

CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

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The Canterbury Cathedral: A step on the way to eternity

It was something I’ve wanted to see for many years because of its place at the center of western civilization. Standing for over a millennium to shape the ideology of the civilized world—to be one of the only lasting vestiges of the Roman Empire for which it was born and gave birth to the nation of England in the form we know it today—the Cathedral of Canterbury is an awesome thing to behold. It sits atop the highest point of that little pilgrimaging town protected by law not to have any rivals holding the progress of mankind to its history it still sits perched above all else in a way that just isn’t seen in America anywhere. In New York skyscrapers would have long overtaken such a structure, but not in Canterbury where its Cathedral is still the star of the show and will remain that way for the rest of the foreseeable future. In many ways the Canterbury Cathedral is the very definition of America’s desire to have a separation of “Church and State” as defined by our Constitution which essentially changed the world and launched the most productive country on earth because the pent-up abilities of the human race had been stuck for over two thousand years under the weight of places like the Canterbury Cathedral and the kings who held the throne in London—which evolved directly out of the Roman Empire in Italy.

The figure I’ve long admired was Thomas Beckett the Archbishop of Canterbury. If you’ve ever wondered why there is a piece called “bishop” in the game of chess—you’d have to understand the role they played in monarchal politics as for many centuries they were directly challenged by power-hungry kings for the right to rule the minds of mankind. And kings often used them to acquire power and to keep them busy so not to allow the church to impose itself on the aggressions of the monarchy. So bishops—especially archbishops, had their role in European politics that were quite spectacular from the perspective of a scholar, but a pain to the public stuck between the church and the state. In fact, it was in Canterbury that the pilgrims which left for America and started the Holiday Thanksgiving launched—because they had enough of being stuck between the church of Canterbury and the politics of London.

Henry the II had pushed Thomas Beckett beyond his limits and provoked four knights to seek out the big man at the Cathedral to murder him in cold blood to appease the king. The reason was that Beckett refused to allow the king to believe he was superior to the papacy. King Henry II really didn’t mean to, because Beckett had been his friend for a long time, but his quest for power overtook him to the point of murder. Beckett was killed right in the Cathedral which made it an interesting place to visit, I wanted to stand in the spot where the knights had spilled out his entrails and stained the floor with blood. I felt fortunate to go through the door where the knights had come through to kill Beckett and to stand and face a murder I had read about for years. To me it was like visiting the site of the murders of Helter Skelter—an event of such evil and propensity that to attempt to understand it, you have to see and touch the surroundings. After all, Beckett knew they were coming to kill him and he refused to lock the door to prevent it. And for the knights to approach the Cathedral knowing what they intended to do—I had to see it for myself.

Once Beckett had been buried at the Cathedral down in the crypt which I was also able to see, pilgrims began to flock to Canterbury to visit the tomb of the slain and beloved Archbishop. It was this action that provoked the entire novel, (poem) The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer which chronicled the many pilgrimages to Beckett’s tomb from all levels of society—and is one of my favorite works in literature. It was Chaucer in fact that launched the age of great literature which then launched the western world. For me it was interesting to walk the streets that Charles Dickens, Chaucer and many others had walked before to see the roots of their musings. But there was nothing like the Cathedral to lay eyes on because of the ruckus it caused in the minds of mankind in so many ways—and to see it, and touch it was something that was for me necessary.

As my wife and I went to visit the site it was obvious the church had long lost its power and what we were seeing was simply a ghost from the past. Canterbury is stuck in the shadow of its own history as immigration has fundamentally changed the nature of the old town into something less English and more European. The days of great literature were gone as the minds of the inhabitants either settled into those shadows or left for their own glory leaving behind directionless ambition to study the old monuments with open notebooks only to learn nothing applicable to the modern world. The caretakers of the Cathedral were quick to emphasize that the place was a nondenominational church now. In 1536 the Reformation was well underway and the government turned against the papacy once and for all. After a hundred years of that the pilgrims tired of the struggle between church and state left for North America to live as freely as they could. From the time of Beckett’s slaughter on December 29^th 1170 to the writing of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales in 1389 AD to the destruction and looting of Beckett’s tomb in 1538 a very careful and pointed ache of understanding had attached itself to the human race. The kings of England had lost their godly justification to rule and turned more toward war to keep their people busy colonizing the world with empire pride to unify their kingdom. These forces of course would collide once and for all in America—the pilgrims who had left centuries earlier with the immigrants fleeing the king’s influence now that the Reformation had destroyed the church which built their country and people became free for the first time in all of human civilization. It was something to walk about the Cathedral and see the tomb of Henry the IV, the Black Prince, and the spot in the crypts where Beckett had rested—along with many hundreds of others buried in that historic place haunting the modern world with a foot back in time to when human beings were still trying to invent themselves in the wake of the Romans, the Greeks, and the Minoans (Atlanteans)—The Sumerians, and whatever came before them which is likely long gone now to the eyes of history. The Canterbury Cathedral served as a testament to mankind’s history and eventual evolution so it was a place to visit that was necessary.

Whereas the church has lost its power in Europe the effort has not led to a gain of intelligence. It can’t be helped but to notice that people are not better off without the church and its influence, but worse. Their freedom from religion and the state has not given them boundless philosophic presence, but left them standing naked and exposed to the cosmos—and an anxiety has emerged that cannot be covered up with drunkenness or upward social mobility. At the Cathedral, monks spent their time reading and contemplating—thinking which was the real magic of the place. If you take away religion, the scholarship offered by the church made people better because it at least encouraged people to be smarter. These days the shaping of minds has moved from religion to our modern media—but the imprisonment of reason is the same. To understand it, it helps to walk an ancient cathedral and visit the tombs of the most powerful people of their day and see how small their highest aims at life really where. And to notice how the cathedral architecture aimed to be bigger than anything human beings should build for worldly affairs—to reach up and touch the majestic of something greater. But they missed the point, and not all to their fault. After all they were the first to get there and we today have the benefit of hindsight. It is in that context that I found the Cathedral not a tomb of the dead, or place of the murdered, or even the destination of many pilgrimages over the centuries—but a step on the way to a heaven that isn’t so much “out there,” but much more personal. It is certainly a place worth seeing, especially to those who love books and scholarship and the zeal to be greater than our terrestrial surroundings.

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.

Trump Gets an A+: Entertaining Prime Minister Abe the right way

Heading to Joint Base Andrews on #MarineOne with Prime Minister Shinzō earlier today. pic.twitter.com/4JFhyYdeHO

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 10, 2017

This is what negotiations look like. I have wanted to see this for years and I watched most of the day with all the wonders that my new iPhone 7 could provide. Let me just say that the iPhone 7 Plus is a fantastic device. It literally gives me the world in the palm of my hand better than anything ever has. I’m extremely impressed with it. Anyway, because of it, I was able to watch my president wine and dine the Japanese Prime Minister Abe nearly all of Friday and Saturday. After two days of observation, I gave President Trump an A+ on his accomplishments. Whoever was worried about tearing up the TPP deal severely underestimated Donald Trump. The man worked a magic that maybe a handful of people in the entire world understood as it was happening and it was a beautiful site. Let me explain.

After a day of treating Prime Minister Abe and his wife to the extensive trappings of the White House with a joint press conference around 1 PM Trump used the tax payer funded quarters to rain dignity on his Japanese guests. If the visit had ended there it would have matched the best of all previous efforts by other presidents not so gifted with Donald Trump’s other accomplishments, and the meeting would have been a success. But Donald Trump was just getting started. Here’s where things get interesting.

For dinner Trump didn’t hang around the White House to have a big banquette style state affair the way one might have expected—he flew in Melania who greeted them at the airport for a trip down to Mar-a-Lago—the “winter White House” as its now called for a very luxurious dinner in a much more exotic setting—which was fully owned by the President. The symbolism of this was quite stunning. Trump turned toward his own luxurious properties, not the tax payer funded White House to show Abe and his wife a nice weekend—which no doubt deeply impressed the Japanese Prime Minister. One thing you can say that is stereotypically complementary about the Japanese is that they admire personal achievement and the trappings of wealth won through extremely hard work—and Trump obviously understands that after years of successful negotiations. The best foot to stand on in negotiations isn’t fluffy exuberance exhibited on the coattails of those who came before you; it is through your own merit. That is a huge difference.

From there the two couples sat down for dinner at Mar-a-Lago and were joined at that table by Bob Craft, the owner of the recent Super Bowl champions the New England Patriots as they were surrounded with Trump’s luxurious personal resort and many truly successful people from American industry. After a day of Washington D.C. cold and fairly confined quarters within the few city blocks the White House sits on Trump had put Abe into the lush tropical reassurance of a warm Florida evening surrounded by competence—in the same day. The psychological impact of this is that this American president was bigger than just the tax payer supplies provided by the people and was functioning off the merits of his own personal successes.

After retiring for the night enchanted Trump took Abe out for some golf on his private course on Saturday further driving home the point that this American president was something special and brought with him into the White House vast experience and great wealth. After all, Abe had dinner the night before with a supermodel first lady, the winner of the latest Superbowl and the man who had just won the most shocking presidential election in American history at a resort not owned by some big donor friend—but by the president himself. He was his own man and everything around him had been built by him. And now Abe was out in the nice Florida sun playing golf with that same man leisurely talking about big, big things in the world from the psychological comfort of one of the best golf courses in the world.

Having a great time hosting Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in the United States! https://t.co/Fvjsac89qS https://t.co/OupKmRRuTI pic.twitter.com/smGrnWakWQ

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 11, 2017

How about all that trouble with North Korea—what to do about the currency devaluations in China, and how to apply a squeeze play on them over the South China Sea aggressions? Take a sip of water, admire the sun on the horizon of the well tended grass of the course and line up a shot for birdie. How about getting more Japanese investment into the “safe” lands of America as opposed to the very crowded mainland of Japan with aggressive neighbors and potential earthquakes threatening those investments back home—“how about making Japan the 51^st state and we can do this all the time—just kidding.” (cough) “maybe not, let’s get to the next hole, nice shooting.”

It would be impossible for Abe to leave back to Japan with his wife without this trip to visit Trump as being one of the best things he had ever done at any point in his life. A weekend visit to the White House then Mar-a-Lago under the premise of a very successful rock star celebrity like Trump and all the trappings of success earned well before the man ever became president of the United States would have been enough. But to walk away as friends who shared such an exuberant, and honest experience together are the kind of bonds that extend well beyond signatures on a treaty of any kind. There was honor earned in the experience which extends well into the diplomacy that runs the world and it was simply beautiful to witness.

There are lots of tactical reasons the United States would want to earn the real friendship of Japan. The Japanese are very hard working people and it’s always good to know such people on a friendly basis. And along the Asian corridor which is mostly communist led countries, like Vietnam, China and North Korea all united in the region toward collectivist—and hostile aims—Japan is the most like us. Also, a good friendship with them launches respectable relationships with Russia. And if friendship with Russia is achieved then China is cut off in its influence to the north and North Korea loses some of its important cover—and so does Iran. So there’s a lot going on with that simple golf trip on a Saturday afternoon at Mar-a-Lago.

But no president but Trump could have done it in the history of our republic and that makes it vastly different than the many golf trips Obama took where people were invited to play with him, but it was more out of celebrity than productivity. With Trump, he has been there and done that and Mar-a-lago served like an exhibition of a great hunters’ trophies on the wall to prove that the man talking had been to wonderful places and done great things providing a foundation for negotiations that were well beyond the earning trust phase—which Obama never achieved with any world leader in his entire eight years, or Bush achieved in his eight years—or Clinton ever hoped at any point. Each of those previous efforts came out looking like tax payer funded exuberance whereas Trump doesn’t even take a paycheck for this job he’s doing and Mar-a-lago was his own property, so essentially the expense was on him—at least the way it looks to a foreign dignitary. And the world was watching closely, in every corner of it—just as I was on my wonderful iPhone 7 Plus. It was really something to see for those with the wherewithal to examine what was happening and how different it was on the world stage this early in the 21^st Century.

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.

Betsy DeVos Confirmed: Finally an evolution beyond the teacher’s unions

.@BetsyDeVos' foes promise to make her job hell: “Don’t give up that outrage” https://t.co/vhQNaFH6ve pic.twitter.com/Q8nMwbkrAa

— POLITICO (@politico) February 8, 2017

What’s better than the great Superbowl from last Sunday night, or that Trump won the presidency—or even a new Star Wars movie? It was and is the confirmation by the senate of Betsy DeVos for the Secretary of Education under the Trump Administration. You might recall dear reader that I started this blog site as a means to promote School Choice and other reforms to public education and in a lot of ways, Betsy DeVos is the end game goal for me. Having her in place to take on the monopoly of the powerful teacher unions is a dream come true—so I am ecstatic. And in a lot of ways, only someone like Betsy could even think of doing this job because she’s a billionaire herself and can afford to be ostracized from the public for the next decade, because that’s what’s going to happen as she implements reforms to public education. But as my personal story shows, there is light at the end of the story and Betsy will come out of it fine even as the world around her crumbles down. It’s the only way that a job of this magnitude can get done. Here is just a preview from Fox News of the nature of the protests that will come from the teacher’s unions.

‏If her critics are to be believed, Education Secretary nominee Betsy DeVos is a danger to special education, could end public schooling and has plans that “will kill children.”

Think that’s hyperbole?

“That is not an exaggeration in any sense,” tweeted Vanity Fair film critic Richard Lawson, who fired off a series of tweets early Tuesday arguing that DeVos’ confirmation would be deadly for “queer and other at-risk kids” – because of DeVos’ support for voucher programs.

“Voucher programs will create systems in which queer kids have literally zero access to support apparatus bc they are in religious schools,” Lawson wrote. “Meaning voucher programs will lead to more suicides. Betsy DeVos’s policies will kill children.”

DeVos’ nomination is set for a noon vote in the Senate on Tuesday, and, despite the defection of two Republican senators, she’s likely to be confirmed – though by the slimmest of margins. Vice President Mike Pence is expected to cast the deciding vote in his role as president of the Senate.

But critics like Lawson have gone into overdrive in a bid to convince just one more senator to oppose the school choice advocate.

Democrats kept the Senate in session all night into Tuesday morning protesting the DeVos nomination on the floor. “The president’s decision to ask Betsy DeVos to run the Department of Education should offend every single American man, woman, and child who has benefitted from the public education system in this country,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said in a statement.

Schumer’s warning paled in comparison to some of the vitriol aimed at DeVos from the media.

“Betsy DeVos is the worst person to be around schoolbooks since Lee Harvey Oswald,” Bill Maher snarked on his “Real Time” show.

The New Republic urged readers not to “normalize Betsy Devos. Her views are simply much too dangerous.”

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2017/02/07/devos-foes-now-claiming-her-policies-could-kill-children-ruin-public-schools.html

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/senate-to-vote-today-on-confirmation-of-betsy-devos/ar-AAmH6OT?ocid=iehp

The things that excite me most in life are books and ideas—especially outside the box type stuff. When I step into a bookstore or anywhere there are large collections of books I see the various ideas and opinions of the human race hard at work. I also like children because when they are little they don’t know that things are impossible—so they learn more from age 1 to 5 than they will at any point in their lives, and that is exciting to me. It always has been. I like smart people, I personally enjoy using extensive vocabulary when speaking because being smart is fun, and is a privilege specific to the human condition. So education is probably more important to me than it is most people. But my idea of education is far different than the typical teacher union member or politician who takes money from their mobster-like organization.

When I was in school I hated it. I hated every day of every hour of it. I never liked one single year of it and was happier than I should have been to graduate from high school. I went to college because people told me I should—but I hated it worse. I felt the people around me were stupid and were not aiming to improve themselves in any regard—and that was the culture established by all public education from top to bottom under the flag of the Department of Education. Much of what I have learned in life I did on my own by reading books and pushing life to its limits outside of school. If I didn’t have to go to a public school, I would have likely done much more than I have which for a lot of people is incomprehensible. But that was my experience.

When it came time to send my own kids to school I didn’t like it. In fact, you could say I hated it. But I worked with my kids and taught them a lot. I’d say they learned more from me than they did all their teachers and friends in public school because I made our time together work and filled them with ideas that I had learned from the many books I had read and thought about. It was never that I hated education—it was that our American style of public education didn’t come anywhere near where I thought it should and it was making bright eyed nice kids into blithering idiots with each year of public school. My kids were homeschooled for a while and actually graduated a year early. Each of them spent their 18^th years in Europe while their classmates were still planning how to get drunk on their graduation nights. Both of my children today are exceptional in their abilities and headed toward very good things—one is a professional photographer that many think is the best in Cincinnati—the other is a magnificent illustrator on her way to many open doors which are now in sight and I can say that there wasn’t anything that public school or college did to make them that way. It was a combination of great parenting and their own natural inclinations that were not turned off by their mom and me. In fact we nurtured that aspect of their character and now that they are adults—it’s obvious, they are great people in every way.

So it came as some surprise that having raised two exceptional kids into adulthood that I offered my wisdom to other kids who I wanted to help grow up and become better adults. Because as I looked around there were so many stupid people walking around miserable that I felt compelled to help them. That led me to challenge the public education system which of course unleashed the teacher’s union against me—which in 2010 EVERYONE was afraid of. Having a history of taking on bullies I decided to fight back at them and I committed myself to that task and have been doing that for a number of years now. My thinking was that my reputation was such that I didn’t have to worry about the teacher’s union harming me. When they tried to attack me for being a back-woods hillbilly—the image didn’t stick because people who knew me understood that certainly wasn’t the kind of person I was. And when they tried violence—well that didn’t work either—because after all—I’m a master bullwhip handler. What were a bunch of teacher union radicals going to do to me? So I had them beat both ways and have spent the last 7 years taking them on—sometime quite spectacularly. I did many of the things Donald Trump is doing now well before anybody had seen it before—and the tactics worked—as I always expected them to.

I remember a trip I took to Disney World in 2013 when WLW called me after Sharon Poe had just been on the air talking about education problems. I was about to go into Hollywood Studios and was speaking to the producer in the parking lot over the phone. The teacher’s union for Mason and Lakota had been getting bold again and Sharon had warned them over WLW’s airwaves that Rich Hoffman would have something to say about it—which went out to over 500,000 people that morning. WLW called me for a comment for which I told their news department that if they (teacher’s unions) stuck their heads above the sand that I would crush them in Butler County. If they tried to strike, I’d come after them. If they didn’t stop pushing school levies to justify their step increases, I’d come after them. If they did anything to create a new levy in Lakota or Mason, I’d work with Sharon Poe to fight them to the point they could never show themselves. That’s when the producer asked me if I wanted to come on and talk about it on the radio and I told them it was up to them. But that I would likely cause them to hit the mute button a lot discussing how those fat assed bitches who were simply latté sipping prostitutes with diamond rings the size of car tires and asses to match were bringing great harm to the future of our civilization by destroying our children’s minds in exchange for a fat communist inspired paycheck and that they were detrimental to the public education process. I was about to go into Disney World after all with my family and I had said all this stuff before. But WLW wondered if I had mellowed out a bit over the years so they could reignite the issue. They declined to put me on which I was fine with. I felt I had said everything I could on the issue and wasn’t in the mood to play nice with the school boards and the unions that controlled them. I knew that only through elections could we hope to see the kind of next step corrections that were needed.

A few years later Trump threw his hat in the ring so I jumped on board because he was the next step I had been looking for—someone who would take all these regional fights we had been having to the next level. Trump of course won then did just what many of use reformers expected him to do—nominate someone like Bessy DeVos to the Department of Education. She was the end game I had been fighting for and now we can look forward to seeing all the school reforms that people like me had been striving for in an effort to save children from the stupidity of a public education system ran by the teacher unions.

All the things that the teacher unions are now saying about Betsy DeVos are things I have personally heard about myself—but we now know how to break their backs. I’ve done it and the blueprint is now there for everyone to study within these pages—which many in power today have read and modified to their own effect. I couldn’t be more proud to see Mike Pence cast that deciding vote in the Senate for Betsy DeVos. It is the greatest news I’ve heard in a long time and gives me great hope that future children—such as my own grandchildren, might finally get a public education experience that does not seek to make them into stupid people—but into thoughtful adults who can carry our civilization into new heights of expectation. Now good things can finally happen in public education and the unions won’t be able to stop it—and that is what’s good for kids. Children have a better chance of playing in the street of a freeway in Los Angeles and surviving unharmed than they do in surviving public education with intact minds if the parents at home are not engaged. And now, we can have a little hope that the danger of that reality will change for children once and for all.

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.

The Weakness of Judge James L. Robart’s Position: How to beat that bow tie wearing loser into oblivion and protect Trump’s E.O.

As we look around to the villains who have caused so much destruction to the American way of life over the last few decades the mechanisms of tyranny have certainly showed themselves publicly after Donald Trump’s inauguration. Many of us who voted for Trump suspected the depth of the situation, but I think we are all surprised at how radical and openly anti-American they truly have been—and the case of Judge James L. Robart is a perfect example. As an appointed U.S. District Judge from the socialist utopia of Seattle, Washington he took great pride in thumbing his nose at the civilian appointment of Donald Trump to the Executive Branch stopping the Executive Order temporarily that aggressively investigates refugees from terrorist inspired countries to prevent their border transfer like a Trojan Horse into our domestic concerns. And to read his reasoning as objectively as possible the only determination that can be made is that he’s simply a radical left-winged loon that has a sole function protecting the open border concerns of the globalist left-leaning insurgents who have targeted the United States as the last bastion of freedom. Two sources that talk about this issue are listed below to provide some backdrop along with some specific text to explain why the Department of Justice was blocked by an appeals court preserving the Judge’s attack on Trump’s Executive Order. Then I of course outline how this case can be won since the Department of Justice wavered in its oral arguments on February 3^rd. Since they can’t figure it out on their own I tell them how to win this case in favor of Donald Trump. (Get with the program people, these losers are easy to beat)

https://www.wsj.com/articles/seattle-judge-used-broad-power-to-halt-executive-order-1486232039

Judge James L. Robart did not have to actually rule on the legality of President Donald Trump’s executive order barring people from seven countries from entering the United States.

In granting a temporary restraining order, the judge essentially had to decide that the plaintiffs (the states of Washington and Minnesota):

were likely to succeed at a later date

that people in those states could suffer irreparable harm if the ban continued

that blocking the President’s order was in the public interest.

In other words, he decided there was more harm letting the ban continue than there was blocking it until the full case could be heard.

He questioned Department of Justice lawyer Michelle Bennett, who was representing the Trump administration, asking, “How many arrests have there been of foreign nationals from those seven countries since 9/11”?

The Sept. 11 attack was one of the rationales behind the executive order, according to the Trump administration.

“I don’t know the specific details of attacks or planned attacks,” said Bennett, who is from the DOJ’s Civil Division.

“The answer to that is none, as best I can tell,” said the judge.

“The rationale was not only 9/11,” Bennett said. “It was to protect the United States from the potential for terrorism.”

Congress gives the president wide latitude in foreign affairs, which includes granting visas.

“The court doesn’t get to look behind those determinations,” she added.

But the judge answered: “I’m also asked to look and determine if the executive order is rationally based. And rationally based, to some extent, means I have to find it grounded in fact instead of fiction.”

Temporary restraining orders generally last up to 14 days. They can be extended, but the idea is to hold a full hearing on an injunction instead. Of course, a higher court can overturn the restraining order in the meantime.

Robart has a history of saying what he thinks. He was nominated for the federal bench by President George W. Bush in 2003. He was confirmed unanimously in a 99-0 vote by the Senate in June 2004.

Before that, he was a lawyer in private practice in Seattle. He has worked with at-risk youth in that city and, before becoming a judge, Robart represented refugees from Southeast Asia.

Last year, Robart presided over a case alleging excessive force by Seattle police brought be the Obama administration’s Justice Department. During a hearing, he used FBI statistics to note that police use of deadly force in cities in the U.S. involved 41 percent of black people, despite them being only 20 percent of the population living in those cities.

Robart took a breath and said, “black lives matter.”

http://www.npr.org/2017/02/04/513446463/who-is-judge-james-l-robart-and-why-did-he-block-trumps-immigration-order

Essentially what all that means is that the swamp in Washington D.C. extends well beyond into every aspect of our legal system and has been corrupted there by many years of liberal instruction in our university system for which our law schools are grossly left-leaning. So the first step is in forcing radical judges to reveal themselves as this Robart guy has, then taking action to minimize their assault against American interests. People like this Judge Robart lunatic are like cat people who take in every stray animal on the street then wonder why they piss all over the house, and nobody wants to date them for the odor and narcosis of their bad decisions. As well-meaning as Robart thinks he is, the ultimate meaning behind his actions is defiance toward national sovereignty with an emphasis on spreading the world’s problems to every crevice of society. And if the first function of government is to protect the American people from threats foreign and domestic—which is what Trump has done with his Executive Order. The actions of this judge are a hostile action taken against our Constitutional government.

As is clear from the provided text in the NPR report Judge Robart is a “black lives matters” supporter which is another extreme radical organization sponsored by communist insurgents designed to overthrow order in our cities where the minority population of only 20 percent do most of the damage involving crime, murder, and consumption of law enforcement resources. So this Seattle judge has “change” in mind, not “order” while making a determination if Trump’s Executive Order is rooted in “fact” instead of “fiction” based on using 9/11 standards as the foundations for determining terrorist patterns of attack. The fact of the matter is that future terrorists will likely come from other places—such as the 7 scrutinized countries identified by Trump’s E.O. and not those from the past leaving strategic assessment to be based on incoming intelligence which Robart doesn’t have and could never have—so his scope of the facts are tainted negating him from even providing a judgment on the matter.

Not to tell Department of Justice lawyer Michelle Bennett how to do her job, but, seriously, Judge James L. Robart based his entire challenge on the foundations of fiction because only the Trump administration had the facts to make such determinations which created the language of the Executive Order mentioned. Some radical loon from Seattle doesn’t get to decide national security so the argument had nothing to do with an executive order being “rationally based” as determined by the cast of Saturday Night Live for which the Judge is obviously a fan. (He’s actually funnier) He has simply overstepped his authority, the appeals process has shown that it is in lockstep with the radicalism of these circuit judges—making decisions on activism desires and not legal necessity.

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/politics-government/national-politics/article130501609.html

If the Department of Justice would like me to argue the case for them I’d be happy to, and additionally would enjoy blasting the reputation of this fool Judge James L. Robart into oblivion in the process. I’m sure Michelle can turn this situation around now that the shock of the arrogance of this ruling has been revealed and the chess moves by the political left have been witnessed-from the press conference to the way outlets like CNN ran with the story. It is easy at this point to destroy the Robart case for his preservation of terrorist expansion from the war-torn regions of the world and onto our door steps because he’s working from a corrupted mind polluted with liberal values and talking points—like “black lives matters” rhetoric. Such a person shouldn’t even be on any government payroll because he fails to do the first function of government—protecting the American citizens. In order to do that you have to define America’s borders and begin from that basic foundation which leftists seek to erase allowing judges like Robart to act in such a way without detection of their true intentions. But now that this issue has been exposed, President Trump can act accordingly in his future judicial appointments. After all, we now know that James L. Robart was appointed by George W. Bush so over Trump’s years in office a lot of this radicalism can be undone with his future appointments. Bush was a globalist and part of the mistakes of the past and Trump has been the answer. Fixing these issues are part of draining the swamp—but as we can see—that process extends well beyond Washington D.C. into the target audience of the average Starbucks consumer—in Seattle, Washington where they are out of control under a socialist city council and a progressive civil war with the more rural residents of their state. And we are just getting started.

It is important to understand that Trump’s Executive Order was not unjustified; it was just weakly protected by Michelle Bennett from the Department of Justice. She obviously got jostled in her arguments by a bunch of radical lunatics. If she’d like help, just call me. I’d love to argue the beard off that fat face of a bow tie wearing bitch and disgrace him verbally to such an extent that he’d be haunted into the netherworld of the hereafter. The judge and the state did not base their opinion of the Executive Order based on the facts of the intelligence available to Donald J. Trump and that invalidates their criteria. So get in there on Monday and give these idiots hell, because they deserve it—and then some. Additionally, understand that you can never trust a person who wears a bow tie. Like mustaches, bow ties indicate that something is wrong with the person wearing it—so you cannot trust their sanity. Remember that during the next oral argument.

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

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The Weakness of Judge James L. Robart’s Position: How to beat that bow tie wearing loser into oblivion and protect Trump’s E.O.

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