Tag: Doc Thompson

Mystic Timber at Kings Island: A cross between Indiana Jones and a John Carpenter horror story

These are my favorite kinds of topics, the fun things that we can do to alleviate ourselves naturally from the toils of life where everything we sometimes do seems like an uphill battle deliberately made so to prevent our very existence.  It had been one of those nights even over the weekend where professionally I had been up all night working through a number of problems and sleep was scarcely an option until the next day.  But by noon after 36 straight hours of worry Saturday afternoon opened up and I had a rare moment of fresh air where I could breathe without concern as all the objectives had been met.  It’s not like that all the time but when those types of things do happen you just have to wrestle the issues to the ground until you get through it.  So feeling totally depleted and in need of a full charge physically and intellectually my wife and I did what usually comes first for us during the summer months—we went to Kings Island, this time to specifically ride the new roller coaster they have called Mystic Timbers.

I had been trying to get to Kings Island for weeks but the time just wasn’t there, until this particular weekend.  And it was the perfect thing because I had been curious about Mystic Timbers since I watched the press conference last fall from the public relations crew which I must say have been doing a fabulous job over the last several years at advancing the amusement park.  I consider Kings Island a real treasure for our area and feel very fortunate that I have something that nice so close to my home.  I think people have a tendency to take something like that for granted because they are used to it.  Well, let me just say, I was in Paris just a few weeks ago at the Eiffel Tower there and having some leisure time by the carousel they have between the tower and the river and it’s nowhere near as nice or dramatic as the one at Kings Island.  The one in France may be three times taller, but at Kings Island the little fantasy town on International Blvd along the fountain is better than anything in Europe.  It’s cleaner and much more optimistic so the moment I set foot in that region for the first time in 2017 after doing so for over 40 years now, it reminded me that sometimes the best things in life are right down the road.  Kings Island is a better tourist destination than traveling to Paris—forget the history, region for region, Kings Island is simply a better place where you can relax without worrying about nonsense.

Rivertown at Kings Island has always been my favorite part of the park; I like the dynamic relationship between the log ride, the train, the trees, the little creeks and lakes that span down to the great Beast roller coaster in the back of the park. It was originally supposed to be a kind of frontier town similar to what they did at Disney World but has evolved into its own thing over time and I like to go there to get fries at the Great Potato Works.  In recent years Kings Island has added the Diamondback roller coaster which I still think is one of the best in the world—its such an unusually good ride and covers so much real estate, if that’s all they had it would still be fabulous.  I mean in London—one of the great cities of the world—they have Chessington World Adventures which is England’s version of an amusement park and its nothing like Kings Island specifically at Rivertown.  Even though I’ve been going to that particular part of the park almost my entire life, I still enjoy it each time so when they built a new roller coaster within it I was very curious.

Much to my surprise the Mystic Timber roller coaster was a significant improvement to the Rivertown area.  The theme of the ride itself actually rivals some of the rides at Universal Studios and Disney World by way of “plot” which is a departure from what is typically done at Midwestern amusement parks.  Mystic Timbers has a story to tell and I’m not going to give away what’s in the shed but it reminded me of an Indiana Jones adventure in a way mixed with a John Carpenter horror film—Christine comes to mind.  The ride itself was something of a mix between The Beast and the Adventure Express.  It’s not a rough roller coaster, kind of a middle of the road ride for people who don’t want to ride something as crazy as the Beast—but it had its own charm and takes you on a nice ride through the woods back to essentially the train shed and back again.  It was well done and really captured the atmosphere of the Kings Mills area with a plot that was very Blair Witch—which is revealed in the illustrious shed.  I thought the ride was a bold move by Cedar Fair Amusements in not just building a roller coaster, but in adding a story to the park as part of its overall mythology.  It was a very good move and took a kind of dead space in Rivertown and really juiced it up.  Now that entire area from the Soak City water park all the way to the pavement of Rivertown is a very dynamic area between the Water Canyon, the train ride, and now Mystic Timber—there’s a lot going on.

In the scope of the entire ride, Kings Island spent some serious money on the “shed” experience which was simply a queue up area where the coaster waits for passengers ahead of it to leave the station.  Instead of putting up with the dead time at the end of the ride these coaster designers gave people something to look at and used that time to add a little thrill as a climax.  For an adult, it’s not much, but for kids 10 years old, it’s pretty freaking cool.  I thought it was a nice touch.  Kings Island didn’t need to add the coast to the coaster by building the shed, but they did it to just take the experience to the next level and by doing so they are stepping into the kind of territory that is normally reserved for the great Orlando parks, and that’s saying something.  I was impressed.

For that day as it often does, Kings Island put some life back into me in a very positive way. It was a wonderful experience that I’m sure I’ll do many more times.  As a stress management tool, Kings Island for me is the best during those nice summer months where you want to get outside, but don’t have the time to invest in a big trip.  There is nothing like actually traveling somewhere to see things in their native environment, but honestly, Kings Island is a treasure compared to anywhere in the world and we are lucky to have it in the Cincinnati area.  It’s good to see that the park management isn’t content to just ride the fence and surrender to the other great parks in the United States but is willing to compete with them for the title of greatest.  Mystic Timber isn’t the greatest roller coaster in the United States—but it’s a pretty good one at a park that is certainly one of the largest with the greatest collection.  But what Mystic Timber does is liven up the character of an amusement park that has been there for a while but is just now starting to break out into its own individuality.  And that was good to see.

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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Fire the Teachers at the Dayton Education Association: A LeapFrog tablet is a better learning tool

What are these idiots thinking at the Dayton Education Association, going on strike over wages and benefits in this day and age—when we know that public school teachers collectively make too much money for what they actually do? Here it is the end of the school year where they are going to be off work soon anyway for the whole summer and they are threatening the school board with a strike so they can feed their fat assed mouths more during a summer long vacation?  Obviously the negotiators think marijuana smoking is legal in Ohio—because only somebody on drugs could think that striking against the tax payers is the right move.  Apparently they didn’t get the memo at the DEA in Dayton, because those teaches aren’t needed for education—they are only needed as baby sitters.  If you want to teach your kid the important things, get them a LeapFrog tablet and some programs at the Target department store.  But if you need some slugs to watch your kids while you go to work all day leaving other people to raise your kids, then send them to public school.  With that criteria in mind, just about anybody could be a babysitter, so all these Dayton teachers are easy to replace.  Here’s how the situation was reported by WDTN in Dayton.

DAYTON, Ohio (WDTN) – The Dayton Education Association said Thursday its members voted in favor of authorizing a strike if the status of negotiations does not improve.

According to a release by the DEA, contract negotiations with the Dayton Public Schools Board of Education have been ongoing since January.

The DEA says since that time, nearly 20 days have been spent negotiating a collective bargaining agreement and an impasse has now been reached. As a result, according to the DEA, both sides have sought federal mediation.

“Despite over 150 hours at the table, the DEA is greatly troubled by the Board’s refusal to recognize their teachers as professionals and meet their teachers, even halfway, on several key provisions,” said David Romick, DEA president. “Tonight’s vote should sound an alarm: the Dayton Public Schools are in a crisis,” Romick cautioned.

The union says many items remain unresolved including wages and benefits.

http://wdtn.com/2017/05/04/dayton-teachers-vote-in-favor-of-a-strike-if-negotiations-do-not-improve/

I haven’t dealt with an education topic for a while because honestly, the case is closed in my opinion.  I’m looking toward the Trump administration to expand School Choice and to break up the monopolies of union backed public education because that is the real problem.  No competition and high labor costs for poor performance are the cause of their out-of-control costs.  If you want to ruin a kid, send them to public schools without a lot of parental guidance and you’ll destroy them for life.  For some parents, deep down inside, that may be what they want to do—to handicap their children so they never outshine the parents.  Sending a kid to public school unguided by parental mentorship is essentially clipping the intellectual wings of the child for life and they’ll never recover.  They’ll die old people still crippled by their public education experience.  I thought by now everyone understood that.  Nobody should pass a school levy for a union infested education environment because you’re just throwing good money at bad methods of teaching.

I am very impressed by the LeapFrog Learning systems available at Target of all places.  They do a better job of Pre-K through grade 5 education than anything they are doing in public schools if learning is the objective.  Parents might argue that by sending their kids to school they are learning social interaction skills—but I’d claim the aim of the government schools is to break the children into progressive soldiers for tomorrow’s culture war against American tradition. So that makes them an insurgency, not a valued member of the American education system.  Teachers like these losers in Dayton aren’t worth more money—they are worth a lot less.  If the Dayton school board wants I could hire replacements for every one of their lost positions if they could hold strong on the strike and let those idiots starve.  By the looks of them they could afford to lose some weight.  I’d be happy to help them hire replacements too, just let me know Dayton.  We could replace every job lost to the strike in a month.  So don’t worry about it.  If babysitters are what we want so that parents can drop off their kids to watch while tax payers cover the daycare costs, then hiring those types of people is easy.

But we don’t need these people, who want to strike while on a cushy government job where they are off all summer, to teach our kids some “worldly” crap.  Look, I just returned from Europe where I spent time at both the British Museum in London and at The Louvre in Paris.  I was stunned by how willing to learn the kids were in both of those places where school kids were given assignments and worked in groups to solve problems at the museum exhibits under the care of very studious mentors.  I love museums and environments where learning is conducive and I have never seen kids behave in the United States like these kids did in London and Paris—from destinations all around the globe.  There isn’t a single teacher striking in Dayton that is talking about teaching kids to be equivalent to what I saw at the Louvre and British Museum recently.  And knowing that they should be giving the city of Dayton a discount, not demanding more money—give me a break.

I’m all for education but I’ve heard these loser teachers talk for years and they complain about things I’d consider easy as if they are the most difficult things to do in the world.  For instance, they say they do a lot of grading papers at home, and that it’s hard to manage 27 kids over a 6 hour period, and that they have to be personal mentors for all of them.  Well, try doing that for several hundred people, and working 14 to 15 hours a day all year-long and even catching up paperwork on weekends.  That’s my life so I really don’t want to hear how difficult their work day is.  I’m not sympathetic.  For what those Dayton teachers are making per hour for babysitting, they are living a dream job compared to the rest of the world.  So the Dayton management would be wasting money to throw one dime at these ungrateful teachers.  Cut them loose and hire some new people for the Dayton school system and don’t lose a minute’s worth of sleep over it.

Rich Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

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

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The Network Boycott of Donald Trump: Life is going on without them

It was a little astonishing that the television networks of ABC, CBS, NBC, and CNN refused to play the political ad from the Trump campaign highlighting the first 100 days accomplishments by the new president.  After all, they didn’t have a problem highlighting every little thing that Barack Obama did.  But Trump isn’t Obama and the networks are seeing the difference already.  They are being exposed for what they always were; liberal outlets designed to promote progressivism and are now discovering that people are willing to turn away from them really for the first time in their history over political ideology.  As everyone now knows ESPN is a dying network owned by the Disney Company and they are losing their conservative viewers due to their extremely liberal on-air positions.  ESPN President John Skipper, a former employee at left-wing Rolling Stone magazine, insisted that the network had little intention of putting on the brakes of its liberalism even in the wake of their viewership exodus saying:

“It is accurate that the Walt Disney Company and ESPN are committed to diversity and inclusion,” Skipper said. “These are long-standing values that drive fundamental fairness while providing us with the widest possible pool of talent to create the smartest and most creative staff. We do not view this as a political stance but as a human stance. We do not think tolerance is the domain of a particular political philosophy.”

 

http://www.breitbart.com/sports/2017/05/05/survey-of-viewership-in-swing-state-market-shows-republicans-abandoning-espn-in-droves/

Then Ellen DeGeneres said just yesterday that Donald Trump wasn’t welcomed on her show—as if that were going to somehow hurt the feelings of the president—or change what’s happening.  Stephen Cobert—the former Comedy Central liberal who openly has a night show directed at pot smokers unleashed a potty mouthed rant that could only be justified through definitions of insanity—yet CBS allowed it to air anyway which should have provoked attention by the FCC.  If Cobert had been a conservative, he’d be out of a job, but since he’s a liberal like most of the people in entertainment—he gets a free pass.  What we are seeing is unprecedented—the political left is drawing a line in the sand and hoping that we all love them enough to keep watching their programs.  But the evidence is already in that conservatives are finding other alternatives.

What is really scary to the networks is that Trump is actually better at the job of communicating than they even understand in the industry.  George Will the conservative commentator actually quit the Republican Party because he thinks President Trump chews up the English language in an illiterate fashion.  He clearly has taken the side of the liberal networks in thinking that he knows more than Trump does about communicating.   Yet Trump has had great success in entertainment and obviously knows more about communication than even the most seasoned Hollywood actor.  Trump doesn’t just speak, he communicates with his entire body when he gives a speech and people understand him.  He may not articulate the English language in a scholarly fashion, but he communicates better than most anybody in the public eye today and he can do it without an army of advisors and Hollywood producers to help him along.  While Obama used to seek counsel from Steven Spielberg and Jeffery Katzenberg, Trump takes care of things himself and is able to produce a video illustrating his first 100 days without the entertainment industry’s involvement—and it drives them crazy.

It’s in Trump’s independence that has exposed the leftist tendencies of the major networks and now half the country is looking for alternatives.  They are used to making or breaking people and they can’t have an impact on Trump in any way and they don’t know what to do about it except make asses of themselves.  Now they are taking positions they can’t walk back and it will eventually destroy them.  I warned the Disney Company about this years ago, and they didn’t listen.  They insisted on putting little gay characters in their entertainment products and force-fed liberalism into their productions, and their bottom line is going to take a hit.  ABC is owned by Disney so like ESPN they are committed to leftist ideologies which run against the current of modern American politics and they are positioning themselves for extinction.  Trump actually did work on NBC with the hit show The Apprentice and even now after 14 seasons the executives cannot figure out for the life of them why Trump was so much better at that show than some Hollywood actor who gets paid to say what other people think.

What’s even funnier is that the political left thinks that they are going to find their own Hollywood star to run against Trump in 2020.  They are throwing around names like George Clooney, Dwyane Johnson and even Disney’s Bob Iger—but they really don’t understand that it takes more than “celebrity” to win as a president.  Trump didn’t win the presidency because of his celebrity—he won it because he worked harder than anybody else.  Hillary Clinton rolled out the celebrities in her final days and they didn’t help her at all.  The power that the networks and media companies had with their celebrates has evaporated before their eyes and they really don’t know what to do about it which is what I have been saying all along in regard to the value of Donald Trump being president.  There’s not just his skills as a businessman, or the self-reliance of his celebrity—but it’s the presence of a Republican who can simply rob the political left of their stronghold on the media all by himself.  The Democrats don’t have anybody like Trump and with all their resources in Hollywood there isn’t one person who can compete with Trump on the stage in 2020 and they all know it now.  They might have the celebrity, but they don’t have the work ethic or an understanding of all the modes of communication that Trump has naturally.

Trump wasn’t made into a celebrity by others the way that George Clooney was—or any other actor who gets paid to read off a script.  Trump made himself and that is a different kind of political candidate and the failure of the networks to work with this new administration will be their end.  They won’t survive the change in demographic posture combined with the economic burden of the modern cord cutters—the people who have decided that they don’t want or need cable television in their lives.  Ellen and Stephen Cobert can’t afford to cut off half their audience the way they have—yet they have done just that.  And that decision will prove detrimental to them all.  People will still see Trump’s ad about his first 100 days regardless of the participation of the networks in showing it because they don’t have a monopoly any longer on information.  They can’t stop Trump by cutting him off the networks because he can reach many more people through new media.  The only people getting hurt by the network boycott of Trump are the networks.  They can’t survive off only half the country watching their programs.  They can’t appeal only to liberals and hope to lure advertisers to their channels.  Look what happened to Curt Schilling at ESPN.  He represented the kind of man who many of their viewership were themselves, and when they took him down for being a conservative, ESPN lost viewers. I used to love watching ESPN, but since they fired Schilling, I haven’t watched them since—because they didn’t have talent on their programs that spoke and thought the way I do.  So I turned them off and moved on to something else.

There is a lot to feel good about Trump, the stock market is soaring, money is coming back to the American economy and the president is well on his way to becoming simply the best occupant of the White House ever to reside there.  History is already starting to overshadow the cries of the liberal left and that’s where the networks are making a major mistake in not aligning themselves with history.  Rather, they are sticking with their ideology which will be their undoing.  Trump works harder and is good at so many different things that his presidency will be a new defining marker in history.  The old guard is quickly finding themselves on the outside looking in and they know it. Right now they are protesting with defiance, but they are rapidly learning that nobody really cares about them.  Nobody cares about the opinions of The View girls, and nobody cares about Ellen.  Trump is going to be a good president with or without them.  And that is the hard lesson that the world is learning—but I’ve said it all along.  Maybe next time they’ll listen—for those who survive long enough to have a next time.

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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In Trump We Must Trust: Now the senate has to do the right thing

Remember just a few days ago when the American media was contemplating the second failure of congress repealing Obamacare—and how devastating it would be for the Trump administration? Then as if out of nowhere, congress did the right thing and voted to repeal that legislative monstrosity and Trump had the Republicans firmly behind him at the White House announcing the victory of the first leg of that journey.  This is why we voted for Trump—because any other president would have let the issue go and would not have wrestled the challenges to the ground the way he did—and it is only because of him that the Republicans in congress were able to consolidate around something they could all get on board with—and the American media was awe-struck by the effectiveness of the deal it took to get the votes in such a short period of time.  The same kind of thing will take place in the senate. It’s still a long battle, but we are well on our way toward finally getting rid of Obamacare.

People can say what they want about Trump—that he’s not conservative enough, or that he’s not against a single payer system—but in regard to health care we are on a steep ledge with our insurance premiums for that industry. Dealing with health insurance providers every year I am amazed by how much they continue to rise—8 to 12% in a lot of cases with no sign of decreasing—and no politician has been willing to deal with it.  Obamacare made the situation much worse and was meant to collapse the system driving us all to a single payer mandate—which would essentially make health care a socialist right as they view it in Europe and Canada.  The health care in those places sucks so that is certainly not the model we should be following.  Changes have to be made toward making health care cheaper and more effective—not the opposite.  And if the ball didn’t get rolling in the first days of the Trump White House, it was never going to happen as the spiraling effect would destroy all hope of solving this problem with free market solutions.

Now with the debate in the senate, the president and the marketplace—there will be ideological differences. People like Rand Paul will want complete free market approaches, but to keep the health care providers we do have alive, they need help because of the last six years of government intrusions.  They can’t be cut off cold turkey—they’d fold otherwise.  So, it’s a complex problem made worse by the Obama White House.  To have a hope at a free market solution we have to put the problem in Trump’s hands and trust him to work the situation backwards over an 8-year period.  That is one of the biggest reasons to have a billionaire capitalist in the White House, to help make that deal a reality.  We can’t trust government to step out of the picture on their own.  We need a president to direct them out of it over the coming years while the health insurance industry grows its own legs again and can start to drive down premiums with options—like the phone industry did after deregulation.

The best hope we have of avoiding a single payer system is in trusting Trump—and Rand Paul is going to have to embrace that along with others in the senate who are economic puritans. Unfortunately, they are in the minority and this is a deal that will have to be walked back toward free market applications by a pro capitalists in the White House, congress, and senate letting the Democrats rot on their socialist stagnation.  The fear many have in repealing Obamacare is that this might empower Democrats to take back the house and senate during the next midterms, but that’s not going to happen if they stick close to Trump.  If anything, they’ll gain seats.  But they’re going to have to have courage and forge forward with boldness under the Trump flag otherwise the whole thing will come unraveled.  We are in uncharted territory and none of the news pundits know how to define things—so there is no guide on how to proceed.  So they will just have to trust in Trump.

That’s not to say that Trump is a dictator that should be followed blindly, but that he is a representation of free market associations and is but a guide toward that economic means of philosophic national understanding. In eight years Trump will not be president anymore, but his commitment toward capitalism should endure and that is essentially the same approach we all need to take regarding health care.  We need to trust the market, but we have to keep that market on life-support until it can leave the hospital so to speak—because Obamacare essentially shot it leaving it for dead in the streets.

Of course the socialist loving progressives were upset, and that was evident by the late night television people who dominate that European style thought process—and they are a growing infusion of failed policies that they intend to import against the individual based economic structure of our day. They didn’t think Trump would pull together everybody and they are now quite scared because socialized medicine is a big objective for them.  And how Trump did it scared them even worse, he caved on elements of the budget deal to keep everything running, and while the Democrats were celebrating, Trump was working out the health care issue in congress—and that was all a tactical decision coming from the White House.  Very clever, and masterly stuff from a strategic point of view. Given how everything occurred, you could hear real fear in the voices of the liberal leaning progressives after the fact—they know what this means and what’s at risk.

It is terribly hard to take away an entitlement which is why Democrats pushed through Obamacare in the first place—to get enough people addicted to it so that socialized medicine would become a mainstay in American politics. But, there is time to turn back the clock and Republicans have a very narrow window to do so—and it will take them all to see the vision clearly.  Trust the capitalist in the White House who has built a fortune building up brands and marketing goods for great profit.  He has to make health care a good free market enterprise for more insurers so that they can enter the market and compete to drive down those out of control costs.  That is the only way to really fix it—because doing nothing won’t get things done at this point, and socialized medicine will be even worse than those escalating premiums which increase because of the lack of insurers and the top-heavy need for coverage.  So there is a lot of work that has to be done, but I am very confident in Trump to do it.  It would be wise for the senate not to get caught up in ideological chest pounding, because this is a tight rope, and we must walk it now.  The sooner the better, because each day that passes, it gets more complicated and harder for a free market to be part of the future.  The public expectations for reality are too polluted and we have a young generation of socialists raised by our toxic public education system that will vote for the single payer route once they are over 30—and at that point free market options will not be on the table, coverage will be terrible, and the costs will be extraordinary.

Rich Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

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

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The Disgraceful, Dishonest Press: Liberal losers in Hollywood and the media show how bad it really is

I deal with a lot of people and most of them don’t come as close to being the kind of conservative that I am. So the intolerance to other people’s opinions isn’t something that I understand.  Most of the time I am very disappointed in the people I meet, but I figure if they’ve gotten through 30 to 40 years of life and still have liberal leanings toward things—a five-minute conversation with me isn’t going to change much for them—so I don’t waste the time talking.  I deal with things as close to their level as I can allow myself and move on to the next topic without a thought.  If I didn’t do that I couldn’t speak to anybody—but that’s OK, because that type of thing doesn’t do much for me anyway.  But having an intolerance toward other points of view—if I functioned like that, I simply couldn’t live.  That’s why it is so disgusting to me to see how the White House Correspondents media behaved Saturday night as President Trump stiffed them by doing something else in a different city that night.  I don’t blame Trump at all—the media does cover him differently than say, President Obama.  In spite of all their talk about being a relevant part of “democracy” the press clearly didn’t hold Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and Eric Holder to the level of scrutiny that they do anybody in the Trump administration—so it is they who created this mess—and only they can clean it up.

I’ve told you dear reader before, the communist insurgents from the 1950s sought openly to take over Hollywood and the American media hoping to advance those collectivist ideas a half a century later and bring down the capitalist republic envied around the world so that a global order could rise from the ashes. Public schools have assisted in this enterprise and that is why on May first 2017 there were communist demonstrations in cities across America that we wouldn’t have seen ten or twenty years ago.  Those communist sympathizers are now in Hollywood and in our media and they have advanced that communist plot line.  Not that long ago there were a sizable number of conservatives in those fields.  There were always liberals in Hollywood and in the media, but they weren’t this obnoxious and insistent on shutting out conservative voices.  But these days conservatives are under attack which is most evident at Fox News where all the old timers are losing their jobs to more progressive liberals.  I felt sorry for Eric Bolling who had his new show debut at 5 PM on “May Day” and it was a disaster.  Why did he have on Mark Cuban?  He’s an idiot—I don’t want to hear from him.  In fact I didn’t want to hear from anybody but Eric on his show—more opinions don’t equate to better thinking.  But all Fox News could think to do in that time slot was another version of The Five.  I listen to liberals all day long—I don’t want to hear them on my news after working hard all day.  I’m open to other view points, but when it comes to my entertainment time—I’m going to choose people who are like-minded.  If Fox News doesn’t give me what I’m looking for I’ll find other alternatives—and that is the real reason for the misery displayed at the Correspondent’s Dinner Saturday

The country is moving back toward conservatism and the Hollywood types along with their partners in the media don’t like it. They are not open to people with other opinions and it shows in the way the covered Obama.  There were so many things they could have nailed him on, but because he was a black Democrat they literally gave him a free pass—but decided to put down the gauntlet for Trump and we all see it.  Who do they think they’re kidding?  They are the cause of all the divisiveness and when we don’t go along with their media plans—and just openly accept their stupid progressivism they think we are the ones who are intolerant.   Check out the riots just this year at Berkeley.  That will tell you everything you need to know.

For instance, I typically enjoy the Star Trek movies when they come out, so I watched the last one, Star Trek: Beyond.  It was horrendously stupid—overly progressive and ridiculously political.  They were more concerned with showing gay sex and multi-cultural civilization than in telling a good story—so the movie bombed.  It was rejected at the box office just like most projects are that are overly sexualized toward a progressive direction—because the United States as a market is not liberal.  When media companies start thinking their task is to make people into a certain thing by using art to take them there—they will likely fail if that art does not represent the demographic targeted by the art.  Star Trek: Beyond might represent the gay people at a Pride parade with all their rainbows and dudes dressed in drag—but it doesn’t register with some mechanic in Wichita, Kansas who is certainly not thinking of sticking any part of himself in the ass of some hairy assed man.  The media both in the press and in entertainment failed to understand their marketplace and thought they actually had the power to move culture instead of giving culture what it wants.

That is the big distinction, the liberals in the news media think they can shape the minds of their viewers and the hard reality tells them that people will leave and seek out other objectives. I seldom watched The Five on Fox because I didn’t want to hear from Jaun Williams or Bob Beckel.   It’s nothing personal, I just don’t want to hear their liberal voices—it’s a waste of my time.  It’s not that I’m intolerant, it’s that I don’t want to hear it—and that is what the media is missing now that we are in the age of Trump.  They are making themselves less relevant day by day and they still don’t know it.  By the way they behaved at the correspondent’s dinner—they really don’t understand America at all.  They only understand the progressive culture of New York, Washington D.C. and a few cities in California—but no place else who actually watch their programming—or not, depending on choices.

Since Fox New canned O’Reilly and really Roger Ailes over the summer, I only watch Lou Dobbs and Brett Baier at 6 pm on the Fox owned networks. I caught the Tucker Carlson segment shown above while I had breakfast because the headline caught my eye.  But I don’t have time to commit to a complete show if the people in it don’t represent what I want to see.  I don’t need a lecture from a bunch of artists and leftists who will take their clothes off for anybody and smoke dope every now and then—to “open” my mind to other points of view.  I know what works and what doesn’t and that’s pretty much it.  Maybe when I was in my twenties I had things to learn.  These days, nobody knows what I do because they don’t work as hard as I do for information—so there isn’t much for them to “teach” me.  I just want the news—not some 26-year-old kid crying about fairness.  I want to see reports on what’s going on in the world and if the press has to spin it at all, I want a conservative view-point.  I don’t want to listen to liberals cry about every little particle floating around the universe.

It was very disingenuous to listen to the press complain about Trump because honestly, I’m not sure they know where they live. All they really accomplished was that they confirmed they didn’t understand the average Trump voter who has loaded up government positions with conservatives at all levels.  It’s pretty bad that POLITICO released in its recent survey that no members of the press identify themselves as Republican—when the people they are covering most likely are—and the audience who wants their news.  When a majority of the press are openly Democrats it becomes a larger problem and we saw it during the Obama years and the Clinton election where they lost.  They didn’t understand what happened then, or why it was a problem, and they know even less now.  Yet for them the world will go on without them—because that’s how things work.  It’s just too bad their liberal college professors never taught them that so to save them from this present disgrace.

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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Trump’s 100 Days Speech: The media is completely lost as to where they are

It simply never has happened in my lifetime.  Usually presidents of the United States do everything they can to get the approval of the media and they end up giving the people of that profession the illusion that they are running the country. But not Donald Trump, as a man who doesn’t need to raise money constantly for his next campaign, he can afford to blow them off due to the way they conduct their business.  Instead of attending the White House Correspondents Dinner in Washington D.C. like everyone else has—Trump celebrated his first 100 days as president in Pennsylvania talking the same way he did during the campaign baffling everyone in the media who were forced to cover his event.  And guess what, Trump’s event was more popular, and much more interesting than a bunch of political insiders toasting the success of each other by using the president like a piñata.  At their event in Washington D.C. the media took their shots at Trump as expected even though nobody cared but themselves.  But this time Trump also took his shots at the media—and everyone noticed.  This was truly a different kind of president and business as usual is not on the menu.

I understand and support Donald Trump’s behavior toward the press completely.  Functioning just in Cincinnati, Ohio I have over thirty personal media contacts on my phone and have given many interviews over the years on television, radio and in the newspapers.  When I’m working on something that requires those relationships, I do a lot of media.  Over the last few years, the things I have been doing did not require media—but other skills.  And that’s good because in 2012 I had a pretty good blow up with one particular reporter from The Cincinnati Enquirer who took things I said in many different places and plucked them out of context for a hit article designed to help my political opponents purely for partisan reasons.  That guy was Michael Clark who was the education reporter for the Enquirer and what he did was flat-out manipulate the facts to support a liberal position—must like we have been seeing with Trump on a much higher platform.  I have firsthand experience and dealt my situation much the way Trump does now—only when I did it nobody had seen it before.  Even Trump was able to get good press back then because he was doing The Apprentice on NBC and the media needed Trump as much as Trump needed the media.  But when the time came to tear Trump down and keep him out of the White House, that’s when things got ugly as they usually do.

I was always nice to Michael Clark, when he needed a quote I always gave him one professionally no matter where I was in the world—to keep the ink flowing when he most needed it.  I gave him scoops and very articulate answers which helped him enormously because I gave him access to other stories just through association.  But when he played his part in one of those “mad mother” attack pieces—just like what happened to Trump on many occasions during the campaign, and recently happened to Bill O’Reilly, I cut him off after that.  He and I haven’t spoken since and we see each other sometimes around town—but in my book he’s done.  I won’t work with someone like that who is intellectually dishonest and he knows what he’s done. He thought what he did to me would finish me for life and he went for my jugular quite openly and nobody does that to me and gets away with it.  That’s a policy that I live by and it works and Clark apparently didn’t understand it.

Even back in 2012 people still read newspapers, but now many of the reporters I knew at that period are either out of business in 2017 or they are headed in that direction.  I used to read the Enquirer everyday early in the morning like a lot of people I know—but I can’t name a single reader now.  It’s not because of my incident—it’s just that the paper sucks and new media is taking over where the old media used to dominate.  Just covering my education issues back in 2012 there was a thing called the West Chester Buzz, and there was the Pulse Journal that was set up in the plaza owned by one of my old friends from No Lakota Levy at the Liberty Township Kroger Marketplace.  It’s an empty building now—because nobody reads that liberal crap in a conservative region any more.  I’m quite confident that more people read my blog site than those who read Michael Clark’s Enquirer articles because mine are a lot more interesting even if people don’t always agree.  And they can read my stuff anywhere, at home, on their phone, at work—anywhere.  But the Enquirer charges all kinds of fees and you can’t go back and archive information because they run out of server space—they are really pathetic and behind the times.

Donald Trump has experienced much more indignation than I have so his anger and means to strike back are on a much larger scale—so I can imagine what’s in his head and what he did in Pennsylvania will leave an impression.  I purposely went out of my way to let my reporter friends know I can write better than they can more often and with more varied content—just to drive the point home that they aren’t needed in the world.  And when they come after you, they are fair game.  Trump certainly drove that point home from his rally in Pennsylvania.  He addressed his political rivals who are largely in the media by overshadowing their little Washington D.C. event and it made them look pretty pathetic.  Trump knows what’s coming—in just a few years many of those Hollywood actors at that dinner will be out of a job, or just barely hanging on because the entertainment industry is changing just as newspapers were during my little 2012 incident.  ESPN just laid off over 100 personalities there and cable news is drying up.  Movies are largely losing propositions top-heavy with union labor costs meaning the talent they utilize makes more than they can produce in revenue.  Trump knows their business in entertainment and new reporting, but they don’t understand him.  In a few years, most of them will be out of work while Trump is ramping up for his second term and things will be much different then. So why eat out of their hands when he doesn’t need to?

If anybody doubted the effectiveness of Donald Trump those concerns should have been alleviated upon hearing that Pennsylvania speech.  Presidents of the United States just don’t do things like that—especially only 100 days in and given all the negative coverage Trump has had.  He was able to pack the house with an enthusiastic crowd who is turning away from the press.  From the perspective of the media who held a big elaborate annual event in our nation’s capital that should have had the world watching like the Academy Awards Trump sucked up all their hype denying them even that much.  But they deserved it, and I completely understand.  The media doesn’t run the country.  We elect people who do.  They like to think of themselves as protectors of the public from the corruption of the powerful—but all they really are is progressive insurgents trying to alter America’s capitalist system and most of us like our country—we don’t want to change.  I’ve seen it up close from personal experience and I understand why Trump needs to do what he’s doing.  And his strategy will be effective in advancing his needs leaving the current media scrambling to remain relevant.  For those who wonder if Trump will be a good president—that speech on his first 100 days says it all—and points to a time that will be even better which is all any of us can ask for.

Rich Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

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

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The Failure of Albert Einstein: Trump’s first 100 days as President

The most telling indicator of Trump’s first 100 days isn’t all the executive orders that he’s undone from the Obama era to take the chains away from American enterprise, or the unraveling around the world of the weak Obama foreign policy which the White House is facing down squarely on all fronts, but it’s in the fact that for the first time ever the Dow Jones spiked above 21,000 for a bit and is actually closing close to that mark. Money is flowing and optimism is high in such a brief period of time.  It has provided a clear window into what the future of America can look like. And for the first time that I’ve ever seen, the Democrats sound like old archaic socialists from some third world country that have no idea how economies work and that is largely due to the contrast they have with Donald Trump.

Wall Street is not a villainous enterprise. It should be remembered that when the World Trade Center was attacked—the goal was to bring down American capitalism because the rest of the world doesn’t have anything like it.  Enemies of America know that the way to beat us is to take away our financial means, and Democrats are the party intent to conduct that objective on behalf of the world.  I was surprised to learn some things new in the National Geographic series, Genius which was about the life of Albert Einstein because in it knowingly or unknowingly the Hollywood left and the progressive objectives of National Geographic revealed a lot about themselves in making Einstein their version of Jesus. In the beginning of the first episode Einstein is having sex with a woman with her back pressed against a chalkboard where he has some complicated equations written—which end up on her back.  After sex he casually wipes away the dust and rewrites them carefully while asking the girl to move in with him and his wife.  She refuses as she should where Einstein then gives a small lecture about monogamy not being natural.  Later, as the Nazis rise to power Einstein as a much younger man renounces his German citizenship to say that he is a man of the world and that Germany is full of temporary nationalists.  Even later his businessman father chastises the young, dreamy Einstein for not being focused on making a living where the two argue about the nature of capitalism for which Ron Howard clearly takes the side of the communist leaning Einstein.  The hopeful disguise is that the political left hopes through the lens of “genius” that viewers will be enchanted toward progressivism—after all, everyone knows that Albert Einstein was a “genius.”  Who could argue otherwise?

But after watching him more under the fine direction of Ron Howard was that Einstein was a bit of a little bitch complaining about everything and seeking for ways to daydream rather than do anything productive. Yes, the results of his daydreams was quite good and he advanced civilization—but he was quirky at best and hardly a fine example of human specimen.  Being smart doesn’t necessarily make a person good—it just makes them useful.  That was my takeaway from the National Geographic show about Albert Einstein—was that he was kind of a little bit of a bitch that you put up with because he did one thing really well—and that was articulate the realm of physics.  But he hardly had the keys to a constructive civilization or the understanding of transitory concerns for which we all live.  It’s not enough to only take the long view on things, but we must have both—the ability to see way over the horizon while we work in the here and now.  As Einstein’s wife said to him after his friend was assassinated by extremists of the rising Nazi party—“don’t hide in your work—you need to grieve.”  It doesn’t make a person great to hide in his genius and think about only big problems without doing the things in the here and now.  If that were the definition of greatness countless video game players who hide in their online activities would be considered “great” people instead of escapists unable to deal with reality.  But that is the problem of the political left, they worship people like Einstein without considering the faults of his compulsive desire to hide from the here and now by thinking about the infinite.  Just a few sentences prior Einstein’s wife addressed her husband’s infidelity for which he offered no apology—and she just accepted it the way most liberals do—as something that just happens.

These are the people who have been critical of Donald Trump—people who make movies about Albert Einstein on the very progressive National Geographic Channel and are functioning from a value system hiding out of reality—which is why they don’t understand money or the value of it. Money is a measure of morality in the value of something.  If something is worth a lot of money it’s because its value is desired by many.  Under that lens, the Wall Street stock markets are a measure of our economic horsepower which translates into many other good things which trickle off it.  Einstein might have figured out the theory of relativity, but the value of human achievement was clearly something that eluded him because he was fundamentally as a person detached from the value of such things.  He viewed such things as transitory—whereas they are mini miracles.  For instance—the planet Saturn never built a car.  The mechanisms of the universe may do many cool things across the mysteries of space and time—but with all the vast intelligence contained within it—the universe never invented an eraser to wipe away the chalk found on the back of Einstein’s sex partner.

A progressive would argue that an eraser only has value in the realm of human thought—but if you consider for a moment the value of that thought—isn’t it grander than the power of a black hole, or a quasar? Isn’t it a human mind who can figure out how to build a planet if they could gather up the proper resources as opposed to a bunch of forces that collide to form everything we see—would do so and perhaps even improve on the design of a “plant.”  How do we know that in the end of the quantum physics tunnel that it’s not a human mind that is steering everything—after all—we do typically associate our God figures as being recognizably human.

The New York Stock Exchange is a measure of human thought because the money that is produced by it through investments indicates the value of human concepts by way of invention and commerce. And under Trump that thought is expanding which is a miracle in itself and the greatest thing I’ve seen happen in Trump’s first 100 days as president of the United States.  Trump is beyond the nationalism that Hitler represented and Einstein feared so much—he is beyond even the universal accidents that seem to be happening all over the place in space—because Trump represents a step in human evolution that is directly seen emerging in the increased value of the American stock exchanges—the optimism of the pent-up potential of the human race.  That potential has eluded all societies for millions of years and under Trump it is emerging at a rapid pace—and expanding in ways that would have completely mystified Albert Einstein and his progressive subjects committed to a philosophy that died away with Immanuel Kant.  And Trump is doing it not because he himself is a great man—but because he knows enough to take away the limits to human potential and that along is a massive accomplishment of boundless value.  That concept all by itself is more important than any legislation that could have been created because laws do not make our society great.  Human invention through thought does.

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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Finally a Good Idea Coming out of Washington D.C.: Using El Chapo to pay for the border wall

There are a lot of scum bags out there, but to me one of the worst are those who peddle mind altering substances to people too stupid to know better. Drug gangs and Mexican cartels are in my book among the worst scum on planet earth and they deserve every bit of aggression given to them by any law enforcement organization.  They are essentially the cockroaches of our society—dirty, scummy insects that can survive anywhere and thrive in places left untended by care. I would even go so far to put bar tenders into that category even though alcohol is legal—to me it’s all the same thing.  But drug lords like El Chapo from Mexico who is now in jail awaiting trial in America after many years of eluding justice is the worst of the worst.  So it made me quite happy to hear that Ted Cruz had found a creative way to pay for Donald Trump’s border wall—and to make Mexico pay for it.  The following story is what government should be doing.  For a change, I like these people in Washington and the monuments of our nation’s capital seem more—prosperous—than they once did after eight years of Obama, eight years of Bush, eight years of Clinton, and four years of the elder Bush.   You have to go back a long way to get to a period where people could actually fell pride in their government and now that feeling is returning to me.

Texas Sen. Ted Cruz told Fox News’ “Tucker Carlson Tonight” that “there’s a justice” to his proposal that money seized from drug cartel capos be used to pay for President Trump’s promised border wall.

“These drug cartels are the ones crossing the border with impunity, smuggling drugs, smuggling narcotics, engaged in human trafficking,” the Republican told host Tucker Carlson. “They’re the ones violating our laws and it’s only fitting that their ill-gotten gains fund securing the border.”

Federal prosecutors are looking to seize $14 billion in drug profits from the Sinaloa Cartel leader, who is facing trial in the U.S. on a multitude of federal charges.

“Now, it so happens, coincidentally, that the estimated cost of the wall is between $14-20 billion,” Cruz said. “So, the legislation I filed yesterday was very simple.”

On Monday, Cruz introduced the Ensuring Lawful Collection of Hidden Assets to Provide Order (EL CHAPO) Act.

“It said any proceeds that are forfeited from El Chapo and from other drugs lords shall be spent building the wall and securing the border,” said Cruz, who also praised the Trump administration for their willingness to enforce immigration laws.

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2017/04/26/sen-ted-cruz-its-only-fitting-cartel-money-be-used-for-border-wall.html

I can’t think of any better way to prosecute El Chapo and all the terror he brought to the United States openly poisoning our youth with drugs than to crush his organization and use its vast wealth to fund the border wall between the United States and Mexico. Sure there are other drug dealers out there who have risen to the occasion in the wake of El Chapo, but why not use one drug lord to fund the destruction of all the others.  Sounds like a great plan to me!

The argument in favor of drugs by other scum bags is that the drug cartels are only fulfilling a market value—and that people will get it anywhere if they want to get stoned or otherwise mentally impaired. And to some extent that is true—you can’t legislate away stupidity.  But you don’t have to turn away from evil either.  Drug cartels operate as their own little country in Mexico and the exist largely beyond the law because so many people in the United States are seduced by the vile evil that comes from the drug trade. I have been against drugs of all kinds since I was a fetus so I have no compassion for the destruction of any industry that contributes to the destruction of the human mind—so I’m all about aggressive enforcement.  I don’t want my neighbors doing drugs next to my house.  I don’t want it in my neighborhoods and I have no problem taking action against people I know are doing such things.  Drug sellers and drug users are scum and worthless to the human race so we should as a nation take a strong position against the endless flow of drugs into our southern border.  Sure people will get “high” sniffing paint—but that’s another problem for a different article.  What we are talking about is the distribution of mind altering substances originating in an impoverished country where many abuses happen to innocent people to produce the ingredients.  And with that industry comes human trafficking and several declination behaviors toward the fulfillment of generational advancement.  The drug cartels are not about individual liberty in providing relief from the toils of life in the privacy of one’s home—they are selling poison to the stupid—weak, and evil—and it must be stopped as a practice in our country.

I can think of no better way to pay for Trump’s border wall than to take it out of the hide of the drug cartels. Put them out of business to pay for our American security against the severe mismanagement of the Mexican country as a whole, which is out of control.  Mexico needs to get their act together which they haven’t done since their socialist revolution at the turn of the last century and as a result they rely on the illegal drug trade as part of their shadow economy—as one of their major exports.  That is not a good way to make a living.  Even in the United States where there are many places to drink alcohol—which I don’t agree with—but they are there, our economy has great diversity so if you want to live outside of their influence you can.  But in Mexico they can’t.  If there is a drug cartel in the area—they become the law and ruling party—and you either do what they say, or you are killed.  If you happen to have an attractive daughter—she will be stolen as sure as you are reading this by these thugs and carted off to the sex trade.  Such girls if they are lucky end up in the sleaze palaces of sex in Cancun or Tajuana—and other resort towns.  But the worst are virtually sold into slavery to be consumed while they are young and to be destroyed by the age of 25 by vile people not fit for this earth.

So bravo to Ted Cruz for thinking correctly about how to pay for the border wall while sticking it to the Mexican drug cartels. Why not improve the life of American citizens off the looted wealth of the Mexican crime syndicate?  There isn’t a single reason not to. It’s a fabulous idea that should have been thought of and implemented long ago.  But with Donald Trump setting the stage and people like Ted Cruz putting on the show—we finally have a good idea out of Washington D.C. that encapsulates a sense of justice.   And it is long overdue!

Rich Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

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

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The Power of Positive Thinking: Persistance is the most important attribute of success

I have more to say about the recent Michael Keaton movie, The Founder than I did during a recent review (click here to read that).  The Founder was one of those unique movies that truly crosses many boundaries of intellectual thought and within it is a little hidden gem that I thought was remarkably well articulated.   Disguised as a simple movie The Founder captures in a bottle the essence of Norman Vincent Peale’s “Power of Positive Thinking” which is a very real thing.  I don’t know if I have it naturally because I grew up in many of the same places that Peale did and went to many of the same small churches in the Ohio region—specifically Cincinnati.  But it’s always been a part of my life this idea explored in the film—that persistence is the most valuable trait attributed to success that there is anywhere in the world and it is the magic ingredient that is unlocked through the philosophy of capitalism.

If Ray Kroc and Donald Trump turned to Norman Vincent Peale it was for me the 30-minute span of time in Raiders of the Lost Ark, where Indiana Jones was stuck in a tomb with snakes, to the point where he was about to be run over by a truck in the famous chase scene of that classic movie that did it for me.  I was always a positive person who never understood the word quit, but for me that movie set me on a life path of understanding of how important persistence was to the human condition.  When Indiana Jones a few scenes after the truck chase swam over to the Nazi submarine that for me was my version of Norman Vincent Peale.  But of course over time I have refined that type of thinking to make it my own.  But once you get it, it makes you a unique person for life however it comes to you, and it’s something very specific to American culture.

One thing I that really jumped out at me while staying in England for an extended period of time was the structured limitations they put on themselves as a country.  I love that they read, and that they speak well—but people who have a tenacious persistence toward objectives is lacking.  Their culture does not produce such people naturally.  They get their occasional Richard Branson, or their Gorden Ramsay but on the street level charismatic characters such as what makes people like Ray Kroc are missing.  I thought it was a very powerful moment while at a convention panel discussing the movie The Founder that Michael Keaton hit the nerve absolutely on the keys to American capitalism perfectly.  Keaton stated that people from other countries just didn’t get “it,” what made Ray Kroc more than an American villain—but a hero of capitalism.  People outside of America are often mystified by the tenacious quality of Americans which is born from culture, family and pre-kindergarten education.  Other countries are missing the element of personal freedom so the traits that breed persistence into people from the age of infants is missing. You could see the same comments from socialist oriented publications talking about The Founder—they all wanted to view Kroc as a villain when in fact he wasn’t.  His character was far more complicated than that.  In a socialist society the value of a human being might be interpreted by how much they sacrifice of themselves in service to others—whereas in the capitalist definition it is in how much war is won in the name of success which therefore translates directly to improving the lives of everyone.  In the film The Founder Kroc proposes to the McDonald brothers that if they didn’t want to franchise the McDonald’s brand for their own profit then they should do it for the good of America—which is precisely what ended up happening.  Kroc never took no for an answer and just kept coming at the McDonald brothers until they gave in—which is a trait of most successful enterprises.  Most success in life doesn’t come from lucky shots and instant millions in the bank account—it comes from decades of rejection where a person never gives up and preservers against all odds because they simply wear out the opposition.   That is a specifically American concept and it is so evident in people like the real Norman Vincent Peale and Donald Trump.  It’s also there in American culture in fictional characters like Indiana Jones—which is why those movies have such resonance in our culture many decades later.  Because it speaks to the hopeful child in all of us that if we just work harder and longer we will eventually punch through.   Most of the miserable people who Henry David Thoreau referred to when he said “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation, and go to the grave with the song still in them,” are your friends and neighbors who arrive at middle age sad, fat, and bored.  That is because what has died in them is that childlike persistence to attempt to walk, learn the alphabet, and learn to speak.   For people, lucky enough to preserve these traits in themselves into adulthood the world is a lot better off because of them.

Like they said in The Founder, which is what Michael Keaton was trying to frame within a global context during the aforementioned press conference, which many people just don’t understand—is that the most valuable trait to the pursuit of success is persistence.  You can have really smart people on a project, yet it won’t be successful if there is a lack of persistence present to drive things forward.  You can have strong people, beautiful people, or even conniving people, and a project won’t be successful unless there is someone there with vision fueled by persistence to accomplish a task.  (Robert Persig, Metaphysics of Quality)  For instance, Walt Disney is all about the story of persistence.  It’s not about talent, or even having a better idea than the next person.  Walt never quit trying hard for decades to get his ideas off the ground.  The same thing could be said of George Lucas and his Star Wars franchise.  He was “persistent” and if he hadn’t been there never would have been a Star Wars.  Persistence is the key to all endeavors.  If a person has persistence they are more valuable than people with great educations, great skills, and great beauty.   Persistence is the key to any successful enterprise and behind most stories of success, luck is not the driving factor, its persistence.  Luck sometimes happens, but persistence, the kind that Ray Kroc had in The Founder, is what defines success or failure.

People who have given up in life and turn to socialism for a means of feeding themselves without the shame of admitting what they’ve become hate people who are “persistent”  They may go watch an Indiana Jones movie and admire the persistence of the character and within the darkened theater, root for such people, but when they meet them in real life they hate them with a passion not because of the persistent people themselves, but because of what they’ve lost along the way that made them accept average results.  There are a lot of people in life who are like the McDonald brothers—successful people who figure out a better way to do simple things—but the world never hears from them because they stay in their little restaurants and live their little lives contently happy to remain there.  Then you have people like Ray Kroc who struggle most of their life to make it big from one idea to another always ready but never give up.  Because they never quit, and are persistent they are always in the game—much like the New England Patriots were in that great Super Bowl that wrapped up the 2016 season—never quitting, never yielding until they eventually ground out a win.  Or Donald Trump campaigning at 1 AM in the morning at Michigan the night before the massive American election in November of 2016.  Persistence equals wins—not every time, but the averages favor those who are always trying to win whether they are cleaning toilets or making multimillion dollar deals.

Persistance is not taught in our schools, but it is an aspect of American culture and explains why many people who are persistent are some of the greatest treasures to capitalism and our American economy that we have—and no school can lay claim to making them that way.  It’s created from deep inside during their infancy years.  I always had it, and I recognized it in Raiders of the Lost Ark when Indiana Jones just never stopped trying to get the Ark of the Covenant back from the Nazis.  In my life I purposely take on projects that would otherwise be impossible but for my endless persistence just to prove my thoughts true to all the people who have told me all my life that things are impossible.  My greatest thrill is in doing the impossible with sheer persistence.  I’ve done things in life that would have killed many people many times over from either suicide or public shame—and I have done them with an internal persistence that doesn’t come from any worldly reference.  It is beyond space and time even, and I consider it the greatest gift that a person can possess.  It should be the number one trait people list on a resume—but unfortunately most people don’t see it or understand it—otherwise they’d be better off.  But I can say that our American way of life makes more of them—and that alone makes the United States the most moral country on earth.  And that’s no small thing.

Rich Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rich Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

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