Tag: Doc Thompson

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rich Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

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

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The Virtue of Material Acquisition and Spending Money: Defying thousands of years of wrongly framed thinking

I am not suggesting that any person spend money like a bottomless pit buying anything everywhere to cover up some deep psychological problem.  That is a different issue from what I’m proposing.  Money is simply a representation of value so when someone spends money without considering the implication of cost they are essentially unable to grasp the concept of value because psychologically, they are lacking the basic foundations to do so.  However, and this is a uniquely American way to think which was drawn incredibly clear for me while traveling recently through London, Paris, Brighton and many other places in between and observing the people there and comparing them to those I have known back home in the United States.  Additionally, as one of my many occupations, I am an employer and am an expert in the breakdown of labor=productivity and the psychological implications of personality=quality+implied effort toward targeted outcomes, so what I’m about to say requires some advanced context—because it eludes most people living on the earth today—and my assertion of these concepts comes from very advanced knowledge earned the hard way, and in my view, the only way.

I had the fortune to grow up and know both of my grandparents very well.  Both were farmers and had obviously had their world outlook shaped by the Great Depression.  One was particularly keen about every penny spent and watched them like a hawk always afraid that some big wave would come and overtake them wiping them out forever into poverty. They were extremely hard-working people and were socially very honorable, but did reflect a constant fear that their money would be taken away by some unknown force be it a disaster or the aggressions of mankind through some form of robbery—so every penny was watched for their entire lives. The other set of grandparents were rather loose with their money.  If they wanted something they bought it and never gave much of a concern if something cost thousands of dollars even back in the 60s, 70s and 80s.  If they wanted it they’d do what they had to in order to obtain it—whether it be a farm, a particular car, or just a lifestyle.

While traveling around Europe there was this constant phantom in the back of every conversation I had with people I interacted with, from family, friends and mild acquaintances which were shocked that we did so much in such a short period of time while people who were regionally located had spent their whole lives 60 miles to 100 miles from the things we were doing as a family in Europe yet had never tried to do them themselves.  And it came up more than once at dinner tables that my youngest grandson who was at this point only 10 months of age had already been to Disney World once, and was now traveling around Europe with my daughter and her husband.  Additionally while he was still a fetus he traveled around Iceland the year before so before he was even a year old had experienced vast cultural influences which are the foundations of a very interesting coming life that he will have—but people hearing all this just didn’t understand.  “You spent how much at that Ramsay restaurant in Chelsea?”  “You took the Eurostar to Paris just to go to the Louvre?” “Why go all the way out to Stonehenge just to look at some old rocks?”  Those were the kind of questions we received just over the last few weeks by people mystified by the amount activities we reported through small talk which of course opened up a deeper sore which rests on the surface of most things human beings do in their lives.  What is the value of a human day and what does one wish to do with those days toward a value that is internally comprehended at the subconscious level?

That same daughter who traveled with me just recently purchased an iPhone 7 Plus after working with mine on that trip and I was proud of her because it’s the best on the market at this particular time and I like to see she does not compromise quality for the comfort of saving a few dollars.  Just like my view that if we are in London and my wife wants to go to the best restaurant that they have—why not do it?  Essentially if I really want something, I typically get it. I don’t feel that way about everything and I do go through a screening process.  Such as Stonehenge is something that I’ve mulled around for years, but the expense wasn’t worth the trip just for that endeavor.  But If I’m in London on business, or leisure, then I’ll find a way to get there—you better believe it.  I am not the kind of person content to just watch from my front porch others doing things and not doing them myself.  To me nothing on earth is off limits—if I want it, I’ll get it.  With that in mind, when I hear someone say that this is too expensive, or that is too far out of reach, I lose respect for those people because what they are really saying is that they are not willing to do the extra work to acquire the things their heart’s desire and are more than willing to yield to complacency.

Such people who do the minimum in life favoring the lazy position of being victims of circumstance are miserable human beings.  One thing that makes Donald Trump a uniquely American product is that he has the kind of mind that never felt limited by circumstances.  He dreamed big, lived big, and was more than happy to show off how much harder he was willing to work than his contemporaries.  Because after all what is a man really showing off when he arrives at an exclusive club in a Lamborghini with a hot woman on his arm looking very debonair?  He’s not saying he just inherited millions of dollars from his dad, or that he’s willing to waste large volumes of money on nothing—he’s saying that he is willing to outwork his peers and has obtained success and by fluffing his feathers declares himself above those around him so that he can have top access to the best that mankind has to offer—whether it be women, productivity, or leisure opportunity.  Those who point jealously at the man are those simply not willing to do what it takes to acquire such things.  They resort to socialism hoping to be equal to the man without having to do the work so that they essentially don’t have to feel the guilt of underperforming in a world which rewards people like the Lamborghini driver over those who watch every penny fearful that the penny might be taken from them at some point forcing them to work one hour longer to make it up in the future.  People who deliberately set low bars for themselves are constantly unhappy when they have to live in a world where people are free to work and gain all they can and this is the cause of much anxiety in the world. By having a guy like that Lamborghini driver in the White House the expectations for our national economy will naturally expand which I see no negative to at all.  People who are afraid of hard work won’t like it because the social bars of expectation will be raised out of their range of desired applied effort—but that’s good for America as a whole for obvious reasons of economic expansion.

What I observed in Europe was something completely foreign to me.  I knew about it, but actually spending significant time there the situation was glaringly obvious.  They think small in Europe.  They have too much vacation time-they sit and talk too much about nothing and are content to live with the limitations they inherited from their ancient ancestors and they have grown as a region to accept many restrictions which keep them from really living life.  I personally don’t have any of those limits in my life because honestly no matter how much I spend, I’m willing to work harder than anybody else to have what I desire.  I may not care to have a Lamborghini because I’m not interested in the social things that come with it.  I’m married and not looking for women, and I usually do things with my family so there isn’t a back seat for them to sit in when we go out to dinner so the value isn’t worth the cost to me.  But if I wanted one, I’d buy one and nothing would stop me from getting it.  There really aren’t many “things” I want in life because material objects don’t bring much value to me—intellectual things do like books—but “things” themselves don’t do it for me.  But when I want a particular gun, or a motorcycle, or an iPhone—or a television—I get the best of whatever it is and I don’t think about the cost because I am literally willing to work 24 hours a day 7 days a week to obtain whatever it is.

That leaves me with absolutely no sympathy for the person who holds onto their money because they either fear someone taking it from them through aggression, or that they just are afraid of hard work. The person who is afraid to take their wife out to a nice dinner isn’t being fiscally prudent as much as they are just being a wimp afraid of giving up their leisure time to make their spouse a little more happy and comfortable. To select the cheaper version of a car to save money is setting the bar lower for other things and such people are artificially restricting the quality of their life to preserve their internal laziness—in most cases.  And that’s a generally accurate way to identify much of what is currently sickening the world in regard to human beings. They want things that they see other people have, but they are not willing to do what it takes to have those things.  In many cases their religions have given them a free pass to be lazy by constantly castigating the wealthy by highlighting poverty as some kind of virtue.  And that has been a cleverly shrouded element in our society which has garnered little to no attention from our everyday life.

I fortunately was able to live in Canterbury for a good part of February 2017 and in that ancient city there are still monks who make the conscious decision to live in poverty—to essentially quit yearning for material objects so that they can earn their way into heaven.  Its one thing to read about such things, it’s quite another to meet them and see them in the streets of Canterbury which I did.  My wife and I even went to their little island in the Stour River to get a sense of how and why they live the way they do.  Additionally, there are quite a few homeless people in Canterbury who have obviously quit life yielding to the escape of alcoholism.  The two groups of purposely poor demographic groups had decided to set the bar so low for themselves that they were victims of circumstance and simply yielded their life to other controlling elements.  Compassion is not the word I would use to explain their circumstance upon meeting them and speaking directly to them about their manner of living.  They have quit life and have tossed it back to what they think “God” is—and by my definition for things are wasting themselves.  It’s not honorable to be poor or to sacrifice their life for some greater good when what they are really hiding is their sheer laziness to get up each day and battle toward personal goals set for the benefit of being alive.  Such as, you can’t take that car, that house and that nice watch with you into the next world.  But what you do take is the experience gained in obtaining those things because the effort expands your intellect which has resonance into the many dimensional planes of reality that your soul resides on.  So in essence, the work utilized in reaching for material goods and services has a natural byproduct that resonates across the universe into your eternal elements—and those monks in Canterbury are missing the point by deciding to live in poverty so to obtain the grace of God.  And regarding the homeless people, I’ve been at points in my life where compared to them, they were much wealthier than I was—but I never quite working.  A person like me would never be on the street without a house or the means to get one and to me there is no excuse in living on the street begging for food or enough scraps to get a bottle of alcohol to indulge in drunkenness.  They are people who lack the internal drive to fight through each day and make the best of it—let’s be honest.

So those are some things to think about in regard to money, value, virtue, and immortal spirit.  When my daughter told me she had bought a new iPhone 7 after working with mine I would say she did more for her eternal spirit than those Canterbury monks have done in 30 years of living deliberately impoverished in dedication to God—because the value isn’t in the material item—it’s in the productive output to acquire it.  The morality of a good economy does more for assisting the soul of its recipients than deliberate quitting of the world does by yielding to the old forces of intellectual control over those willing to submit themselves to every authority.  Doing what the heart desires for the right reasons is a more moral decision than sacrificing it to circumstance.  It is not honorable to say “I can’t do this because of that, or that I don’t have enough of that to do this.”  It is honorable to say I want that so I’m going to do this to have it because the virtue comes in the act of acquiring the means to perform the task.  For instance the virtue of spending over $1000 on a meal isn’t the food itself or the obvious consumable nature of it—it’s in acquiring the $1000 to spend and in sharing that experience with the people you care about for the memory of it—and the message to them that they are more valuable to you than just setting the bar too low for everyone and holding them prisoner to your low expectations for yourself.  Monks hide that low bar behind dedication to God. The homeless behind their lack of internal resolve to fight through personal challenges–and the lazy hide behind circumstances—whether they are too short, not smart enough, too weak, too something to be that guy who shows up to dinner in the Lamborghini with the hot chick on their arm—so reserve themselves to sitting on their front porch watching the world pass them by and claim that they are being “fiscally prudent.”  They are just being wimps.  And that is the harsh reality that so many people need to face—because they aren’t fooling anyone.

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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Even in Europe, People Love Trump: How using Saul Alinsky is making the Democrats extinct

No matter where I traveled in Europe during the month of February 2017, when people found out I was an American they wanted my opinion on Donald Trump. From the local pizza maker across from Westgate in Canterbury to the immigration officer in Paris—and literally everywhere in between, Donald Trump was on everyone’s mind.  On literally every television in every café and pub was the image of Donald Trump’s ruckus romp through the global authenticating of American values, and people everywhere were fascinated by him.  At Heathrow the rental car terminal driver had on a radio news station and all the talk was Donald Trump and as he saw my cowboy hat deduced that I was an American—and he was excited about how the new American president was sticking it to everyone.  “Gotta’ love that the man does what he says he’ll do,” he said to me.  “Do you like what he’s saying there in the States?”  Of course, my answer to all of them was similar, I said that Trump was something new and special—he’s not a politician, he’s a business guy, and the rules have changed for all of us for the better.  That was the most appropriate answer for these political novices in Europe who had simply never experienced someone like Donald Trump in their 2000 years of human history—and they were loving it.  For them Trump represented that courageous push back that they dared not do in their own cultures and it is behind all that which has Democrats in the States so worried.  Trump isn’t just being effective in America—his impact was resonating around the world in ways nobody had calculated—except for maybe me.

This whole business over the new Attorney General Jeff Sessions ties to Russia and other members of the Trump cabinet from Kellyanne Conway’s feet in the couch of the Oval Office furniture to Ivanka Trump’s clothing line has been an attempt to deflate the bombastic Donald Trump and wound this global influence before it’s too late. But I would argue that it’s way too late now.  I stood outside a Paris café waiting on my family to complete some souvenir acquisition tasks and watched a group of men gathered around a flat screen television high up on the wall sipping beverages and pointing at an image of Trump smiling.  It was some soccer match they would otherwise be watching, or a cricket highlight—or even rugby, but it was the American president Trump capturing the imagination of the world with an optimism that was unstoppable.  The broadcast came on the heels of a release from NASA that Trump wanted to go to go back to the moon by 2020, and that Trump was trying to close the “gender gap” while advancing help toward African American communities—which are all things that seem very un-Republican.  As Trump did these things the stock market Dow Jones index shot over 21,000 for the first time as over 3 trillion dollars of investment had flowed into the American economy in just two short months of the Trump presidency.  Something was going on that was capturing the world and there was no way to stop that momentum now, and the Democrats seem to be sensing their own end—and the desperation was becoming more palatable in their actions.

Even more comical was the notion that the same old Saul Alinsky playbook would work with Trump—so by alienating the people attached to him—that the foundations of Trump could be destroyed bringing down the president and putting him into a political version of a prevent defense. But that won’t work with Trump because he’s his own man.  If Jeff Sessions is taken out politically, Trump has a deep bench of people to replace him with and it won’t do anything to slow down the administration.  The biggest problem that current Democrats have is they don’t understand the situation—they believe Trump is defined by the typical middle-class white man who Saul Alinsky broke down in his Rules for Radicals book way back in the 70s—which was constructed by studying the mob and the effectiveness of their lore upon public opinion.  Yet Trump is an evolution beyond that kind of “man,” and even people in other cultures understand that.  The typical “white” male from European decent has never in the history of civilization stepped out of the common mold of human by being created in the vacuum of church and state to produce such a uniquely independent thinker.  So Saul Alinsky’s observations conducted through analysis of Al Capone’s mobsters won’t work because Trump has evolved beyond them.  As a builder in New York with an unusual independence streak, shaped with a family that loved him, a successful father who helped him get a solid start in life, then being sent to a military school to fine tune Trump’s unusual demeanor—as a businessman he has had to deal with unions, mobsters and radical leftist progressives just to get his projects done.  And he’s mastered those needs leaving him uniquely fashioned to sidestep the Saul Alinsky strategies applied to him by the present Democrats.  Even if all of Trump’s cabinet people were eliminated, he would still be successful as a president and would be unstoppable, because what drives him is not any association with groups.  Trump functions best independently and this is the real problem for Democrats who are not equipped for such a person in any of their strategies.

Europe looks at America with fascination anyways, the roads are huge as well as the cars. America makes the best movies and television and their food is limitless.  The lifestyle standard of the typical American far eclipses those of the European who is used to small places to live without dish washers, air conditioning, or large voluminous showers with bountiful quantities of hot water.  In Europe, they don’t tip so the service isn’t very good in restaurants and they still live under the looming control of their medieval churches even if they have turned to satanic cults and radical Islamic terrorism.  The root cause of their misery is their long history of submitting to the controls of the politicians of the state and the various religions and their power-hungry clergy.  People who came to America to get away from those kinds of controls eventually settled and became Republicans.  Democrats were those who came to America to make it more like Europe so collective submission to hokey pokie medieval concepts was their baseline behavior—which is why everything is a cult to them—environmental issues, union membership, political submission—etc.  So now they are dealing with a person who is not like them at all in Trump.   Yet the current president is one of the first of his kind born in America by a system of capitalism that has freed him of the guilt of his European heritage and is truly acting as a product of freedom for the first time at such a level in the history of the world.

There was a lot for the Europeans to be curious about regarding Trump. His behavior mystifies them and they were quite energetic to speak to me about him—not in a bad way, but curious at how a man like Trump could function so independently of collective input.  In America, at least half of us understand—and we typically call ourselves Republicans.  But elsewhere in the world people just don’t stand up against orthodox systems like Trump dose.  It just doesn’t happen.  But now it is and the Europeans trapped behind 2000 years of obedience are seeing for the first time what human potential looks like, because for once, it’s not defined by collective associations, but rather the integrity of the individual, in this case Donald Trump.  And what they are witnessing is more than history, entertainment, or even curiosity—it’s a philosophic transition from dependence to independence at the most fundamental level possible and the Democratic Party is going extinct because of 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 Wonderful Work of English Heritage at Stonehenge: Looking 8000 years into the past at a truly global culture

I am a hundred percent sure that when Saint Brendan’s mythic stories were told about sailing across the Atlantic into Canada around 512 AD—1000 years before Christopher Columbus—that the trade routes into the New World were already many thousands of years old. Saint Brendan was only one of the more recent visitors and I was able to confirm this by visiting the fabled wonder of the world—Stonehenge.  I’ve read and watched many documentaries about Stonehenge and the extremely mysterious earthworks all over the Salisbury Plain all the way up to Avebury including the famous Uffington White Horse and I’ve had my suspicions.  I knew there were mounds similar to what are in my home town of Ohio which are generally attributed to the Adena and Hopewell Indians—but upon arriving at the vast and newly refurbished Stonehenge Heritage site, it was clear beyond a reasonable doubt that the same culture of people who built the earthworks at Stonehenge were the same who built them in Ohio and the surrounding area within the United States meaning that there was trade and communication between Europe and America many thousands of years before modern times.  The evidence was extremely overwhelming.  As I stood at Stonehenge and looked 360 degrees in every direction I could see mound earthworks which all looked like those found in Fort Ancient, in Ohio.  And 20 miles north in Avebury was the Silbury Hill which was an even larger version of the Miamisburg Mound that I’ve spoken so much about.  At Stonehenge the great novel, Finnegan’s Wake came to life before my eyes as science merged with myth to confirm a reality that was all too distressing for the human race.IMG_3926.JPG

Before continuing, let me report something very positive. As much as my visit to The Louvre in Paris was extremely disappointing, the visit to the new Heritage Vistor’s Center at Stonehenge was completely positive in every way.  I continue to be extremely impressed with the Heritage people within the United Kingdom.  My membership with them is something that I will always treasure.  Everywhere I have gone from the Saint Augustine’s Abby, to Dover Castle, Old Sarum and several other sites, they always have a good staff on hand to promote the Heritage work and the featured site.  Most notably was the Old Sarum location just about 6 or 7 miles South of Stonehenge—which I will talk about in another article extensively because it was actually my target for exploration—not Stonehenge, and was absolutely spectacular.  That site was relatively remote yet the Heritage staff had a very nice acquaintance area with drinks, books, and even restrooms far better than The Louvre.  It was something to step across a long bridge over a deep ravine to come out on the other side and have a cozy little shed with the Heritage staff inside to get you off the windswept plains surrounding the magnificent monument.  But Stonehenge is kind of the capital monument for the Heritage team and the one that has received all the press over the years—so everyone knows it—and what those fine people did there was simply amazing.img_4010

The big improvement is that the road that used to run immediately through Stonehenge had been removed and replaced with an almost amusement park like setting with the visitor’s center over a mile away from the ancient ruins. In year’s past the viewing area for the megaliths were out near the concentric circle which has always surrounded the temple area.  However, not anymore.  Under the English Heritage leadership the viewing area now takes you right up next to the site without destroying the ground under foot.  And by moving the visitor’s center way down the road they have separated the incoming tourist traffic with the sacredness of analysis at the actual site.  I thought it was just brilliant because really for the first time you could stand in the middle of what used to be a modern public road and look out all around at the region and that’s where all the mounds surrounding Stonehenge were extremely obvious—more so than in any documentary that I’ve ever seen on the subject.  There were hundreds of them, all like those at Fort Ancient, Ohio in size and technique.  These two cultures knew of each other and practiced similar mythic rituals—and that was no prehistoric accident.img_3929

I photographed extensively, but all the earthworks around Stonehenge are just too massive to capture properly, only the human eye can put a scale to it properly. Much to my surprise archaeologists are now beginning to relax their apprehension to some of the extreme dates around Stonehenge—going back over 8000 years to some of the features—which is a whole new chapter on understanding human development particularly regarding the Stonehenge Cursus which is a very long runway type of earth feature that is over two miles long and 420 feet wide clearly meant to be seen from the sky at very high altitude.  On the ground it is nearly invisible, but it is so large and vast, that only from very high up can it really be seen.  It is every bit as mysterious as a Nazca line in Peru.  It would have been quite majestic to the ancient world and was a sign that a very ancient people knew how to make very straight lines over many miles from the vantage point of the ground which is not easy to do.  The way that the Heritage group was able to remove the road through the Stonehenge site allowed really for the first time a proper analysis of the entire area under modern scrutiny.  It’s one thing to look at some big rocks on the side of the road back when nearby Amesbury was being built 50 years ago and put all the emphasis on the stones.  But it is the surrounding mounds and earthworks that really tell the story—or begin to—which required someone to take the leadership to protect—which is what the English Heritage, the group, has been able to do over the last 10 years.

On the business side, Stonehenge was making a killing on a Sunday afternoon at the end of February. They had a fabulously large café with many people working the cash registers.  The gift shop was enormous and filled with people.  They had a great museum, not large, but effective.  And they had great bathrooms for an entertainment destination in a remote part of England, out on the edge of the western plains an hour outside of London.  It was cold outside and very wet, and breezy and the various commercial enterprises allowed for people to get out of the cold, which is actually a problem all through the year.  The style of the visitors center itself reminded me of the Space Port in New Mexico—meant to look integrated with the surrounding hillsides and unobtrusive.  From the parking lot my son-in-law thought the whole complex was a shack because it looked like a partially constructed giant barn of some kind with a very flat and waving roof.  But that was on purpose to fuse modern and ancient styles together into a unique work of art which was highly functional—and smart.  The complete opposite of The Louvre which is a place that had a lot more to work with, but lazily passed on the opportunity.  The English Heritage folks had made the most out of almost nothing and what they brought to the exhibit of Stonehenge was something that would have been at home at Disney World’s Epcot Center.  Making money helps preserve and uncover history and it is just so wonderful that at least in England they have the English Heritage people who are merging capitalism with historic preservation and unleashing the discoveries of the past at a record pace.  Put money into science and guess what, you get productivity.

But the most important aspect of Stonehenge which is now undeniable is the story around it—the vast complex of ancient earthworks that obviously migrated into North American and likely many other sites around the world. With all the criticism of western conquests and imperialism which we hear so much about in politics, if not for those attributes of an advanced civilization imposing itself on inferior ones—we wouldn’t have things like Stonehenge, and the British Museum.   If not for William the Conqueror making a mountaintop fortress out of Old Sarum to the south of Stonehenge, likely someone would have farmed up the ground and destroyed many of the earthworks which are still raw on the surface of the land.  But under the civilized guidance of England’s national superiority which expanded into a massive empire of its own eventually, such treasures would not be protected from the Vico cycle of terror that often comes when civilization moves from democracy, anarchy then back to theology.  It was England’s global superiority that has preserved Stonehenge for us all to see today.  Likely there were similar sites in China, Russia, all over the Middle East, and in North and South America—but the chaos of politics and land grabs have prevented adequate archaeology—which continues at Stonehenge.  That makes the English Heritage work to my mind one of the most important on planet earth because there at the site of Stonehenge is a glimpse into mankind’s real past which holds truths we are only beginning to admit to ourselves.  Because the big mystery is not why such an ancient people went to the trouble to move such large rocks from over 200 miles away to arrange them in the fashion they did at Stonehenge—it’s how they came to know how and why to do such things.  Additionally, who did they talk to and what was the real limit of their global influence?  That to me is the big question and the bookmark in history to the mystery of how civilization continues to follow the Vico cycle ever and ever again into the abyss of recreation.  And it is possible that the people of Stonehenge knew a lot of things that we have yet to learn, because they had already seen it many thousands of years before and like many people in search of the everlasting played their part in articulating the mysteries of the universe to put the brakes on human regional self-destruction through art revealed through great effort.

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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Donald Trump and Saint Augustine: Becoming a missionary of justice to fight off the pagan insurgents

It was intensely bizarre for me personally to be standing at the grave of St. Augustine in his demolished Abby while watching the media reaction to Donald Trump’s CPAC speech on my iPhone because in a lot of ways, what Trump and Steve Bannon are doing presently reflects accurately what St. Augustine did in 597 AD under the assignment of Pope Gregory. Rome had to withdraw its troops from Britain to protect its crumbling empire and Anglo Saxons had moved into south England bringing with them their pagan religions to corrupt the countryside away from Christianity, which had been brought to England by the Romans.  Augustine set up a mission in Canterbury and formed a friendship with the pagan king Æthelberht of Kent and within a few years the Roman Catholic Church was converting pagans to Christianity serving as the first of its kind anywhere in the world. What happened in Canterbury would be done to the far corners of the world in favor of the Catholic Church following the manner for which Augustine had conducted the enterprise.  Eventually during the reformation in England King Henry VIII would destroy the Abby and loot it of its wealth which left the place in ruins at Canterbury.  But the body of St. Augustine remained for me to observe as I finished watching the speech fall out by Donald Trump who was given a similar task, this time not by a Pope, but by the people of the United States to spread the message of Americanism to a world hell-bent on anti-capitalist objectives.

Trump’s message to the media during CPAC was firm, that they were no longer relevant and that the White House would not be moved off its objective of returning Americanism to the land of the free as opposed to the pagan chaos of the parasites that had moved in and taken refuge in the shadows of the weak leaders that have emerged over the last century due to a more global focus on philosophy and economics. Stunningly the whole speech was carried live in England from the start of it to the end and endless commentary spewed forth after.  Donald Trump like St. Augustine before him was a vessel for undoing the damage caused by poor thinking and the lack of structure adhered to by an advanced culture.  For instance, the moment the Romans moved out of England, the society reverted back to the tribalism of the Germanic people following perfectly the Vico cycle—where democracy turns to anarchy, then back to theology—and thus under St Augustine, then by the influence of the Nomads, the spreading of Christianity spread again and gave birth to a new age which lasted for over a thousand years.

Trump is engaged in the same kind of effort. The emphasis of his presidency is one with a long goal in mind, to change the culture of America back toward patriotism and to vanquish those who speak against it, which has been the entire world.  And the world cannot turn away because Trump is such a great topic to cover, they can’t help but put him on television.  Even as Jodi Foster held a rally against Trump and the attendees of the Oscars were winding up for a celebration of the black, gay film Moonlight—Trump was planning his own celebrations which would divide up the media coverage of what is often a monopoly held by Hollywood on Oscar night.  For the first time ever a sitting president wasn’t licking the heels of the Hollywood community, but was standing in defiance of them during Oscar night.  Even as Hollywood and their Academy members bent over backwards to put a film like Moonlight into the limelight—to show they aren’t racist elites in Santa Monica, Trump was beating a different drum and the world was listening—a national patriotism that was intent to convert people back to what built the country.

img_3820Our politicians in America and the media culture that followed it were a lot like the Germanic people who invaded England once the Roman Empire withdrew. That is always what happens when a powerful force from a superior culture takes away its influence.  The masses collapse on themselves and chaos ushers itself in.  This was the subject of the great Ayn Rand novel Atlas Shrugged, where the producers of society withdrew their talents and society quickly crumbled away.  What has been told to American culture was that we should embrace all these “Moonlight” values and establish our society on those foundations, which of course lead to a degradation of the human condition—as we see presently in Paris.  Even as all this news was spewing forth about the Oscars and Trump’s CPAC speech across Europe, President Hollande was complaining about how disrespectful Trump had been toward the city of Paris—and the news cycle did almost nothing but talk about it.

In the past lesser people would feel the burden of not being accepted by the actors of Hollywood, or the press, or even global socialists like Hollande, but Trump doesn’t care, because he is on a mission and his drive is not created from other people, it is generated from within. And that’s what the world doesn’t understand.  I could see it clearly watching the news while I toured the St. Augustine Abby and paid respect to the tomb of the Saint himself.  Trump was that modern voice who had to step into a pagan land of lawless behemoths and establish order among them.  Trump gets all his strength from within himself, in his faith in his ability.  Augustine put his faith in God so he was able to step into a hostile environment and establish the first Church of England.  Trump is doing something as we speak that will be talked about for thousands of years and that history is happening in the present—and it’s quite something to see.

It is during events like this which is why I love history so much, because understanding these types of things explain contemporary occurrences with context. Because once you understand the Vico cycle and the patterns of the human race, you can know the outcome of something that is happening which of course happened before.  Only instead of the topic being Christianity as it was in Augustine’s time, it is now the concept of Americanism, which to my eyes the world desperately needs.  The pagan losers in Hollywood like Jodi Foster, Casey Affleck and many others never understood the meaning of America, and are completely unable to define it.  And the kids in the media, all those entertainment writers and beat reporters who are under 30 years old and have a lifetime of lessons to learn before really being able to inform a public of a viewpoint beyond the facts of a matter—they are lost and rootless and will quickly convert to the Americanism that Trump and Steve Bannon are proposing.  Just as the skeptical Æthelberht listened to Augustine for his first years of missionary action then converted to Christianity from his pagan roots—the world too will do the same with Trump.  And Trump knows it.

The real fear that isn’t being said at the Oscars, in France, in the media and in the CNN newsrooms, the New York Times boardroom, and all the others who are finding themselves on the outside of Trump’s White House. They are aware of it too, that they are about to be extinct.  Trump is converting pagans to Americanism and his White House has more global influence than all of Hollywood and the modern press put together and it is driving them crazy to realize how irrelevant they are.   And that was the purpose of the old cathedrals, they were to impress upon the residents the power and majestic triumph of the Catholic Church which strengthened their faith into God and the Church’s role in statehood.  Trump is now doing that with the White House, using that majestic platform to spread the benefits of Americanism.  And the pagans know they are losing their grip on the American public because Trump doesn’t need anything from them leaving them completely powerless.   And that is a great thing!

Rich Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rich Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

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

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Mystery of the British Museum’s Crystal Skull: Why its not a fake, but many wish it were

It was one of the things I most wanted to see in London—the famous crystal skull at the British Museum. The idea that an ancient civilization was able to carve such a fine sculpture out of quartz without obvious machining marks in the 14th century, or even before, is quite remarkable so I wanted to see it for myself.   The artifact is famous because it is one of the few of its kind in the world and it was acquired by the British Museum at that magical time of early archaeology when the British empire still held sway and was able to gather important items around the world before a new generation of politics and war would further destroy the art and relics of the Middle East, Europe, and the Americas—especially in Mexico where their Mexican Revolution at the start of the 20th Century has all but destroyed their economy leaving the people there impoverished.  If any crystal skulls were found today in those regions they would without question be in private collections sold off by locals who needed to feed themselves.  It was remarkable that the crystal skull featured here even made it to the British Museum as it was acquired from the Tiffany and Co. from New York in 1897 after being owned originally by Eughen Boban who was an early fortune hunter able to gather up objects from digs before the Smithsonian, and the British Museum were able to lay claim to the historic record.  For something that old, it certainly couldn’t have seen modern methods of cutting a quartz structure so for anybody to go to such trouble to make a crystal skull there had to be a good reason for it.crystal-skull

The skull is in the “living and dying” wing of the museum stuck away in the corner much the way that the Cincinnati Tablet is at the Museum Center in my home town of Cincinnati—they really don’t know what to do with it because it doesn’t fit their narrative of a primitive people. In Cincinnati the tablet doesn’t fit the profile of the Adena Indians and at the British Museum which many contributes have already laid claim to their version of history and feel they possess the narrative of history by being the first to report it—the crystal skull is sort of a mystery—so they put it in the corner of the room leaving it in limbo.  In fact it was so unobtrusive I had to ask where it was.  I found a museum worker who pointed it out to me then felt the need to let me know that the skull was a “fake” which irritated me greatly.  There was no need for the additional commentary, but the guy felt he needed to make sure I knew his opinion of the crystal skull which revealed a lot about what I had long suspected about this particular museum.

The collection at the British Museum is one of the finest in the world and it could be argued that their imperialism which acquired all the artifacts there robbed the home countries of their “birth rights” to those cultures. But as we’ve seen in Cairo, Baghdad and other places around the world, especially in Mexico City where the ruins of an Aztec civilization were literally buried underneath—new cultures usually destroy old cultures and the British Museum was able to save those artifacts in time because of their audacity to take them from their domestic lands—which were unstable to the historical record.  The museum has an extensive membership list that is very active, and they depend on their donations to keep everything on the upside—and they are very successful.  However, to preserve that funding model they need to lay claim to the historical narrative created by the British Museum, so to preserve the integrity of their members and donors.  That concern was reflected in the museum worker’s proclamation to me that the crystal skull was a fake—because he didn’t want me to be one of those guys to further perpetuate the many theories that the skull may belong to an undiscovered culture not yet in the museum—which is highly likely—and was the source of my interest.crystal-skull-2

The failure of the premise that the British Museum established, for which the worker represented was that it was inconceivable that the Spanish conquest of Mexico in 1521 was interacting with a superior culture at the time since it has been established that European culture was the dominate one and that everyone they interacted with was inferior. We see this with the discovery of America by Columbus—even though the Chinese were obviously already in America and trading around the world—and that the Vikings were likely already in America several centuries earlier.  Even more perplexing, which is obvious to me, the mound builders of England, Ireland and likely Scandinavia likely were trading with the Phoenicians from the south, maybe even Egypt and were in the New World building mounds like those at Nework in Ohio well before Christ was born.  The British Museum ignores all these issues and sticks to their story that Europe conquered the world and thus making them the authors of history.  Relics like the crystal skull challenge that.crystal-skull-3

After looking at the skull closely with an electron microscope scan, there is evidence that some of the features were carved using a rotary cutting wheel of some kind.   Note the word, “some.”  There are many parts of the crystal skull that defy even modern methods of manufacture so there is still great mystery as to how the thing was even made by today’s standards, let along done at a time before the telephone existed.  And there is evidence that what Spain conquered in Mexico was far advanced in many ways to the Europeans, especially in canal building and astronomy.  So there is guilt in the statement—the “crystal skull is fake.”  Guilt that the very things the British Museum is supposed to guard against—the loss of information advanced by the many cultures of the world—the evidence says that a lot of the world’s cultures have been lost and the Europeans are very guilty of building their Catholic religion on top of conquests to erase the memory of what came before—which I think the crystal skull represents most.brisish-museum2

The science of history is in its infancy, even in the Room of Enlightenment—which was my favorite room in the museum—it is obvious that our grasp of history is rather shallow, and all we know is from the private collections of kings, or the little bits of junk acquired from dealers who looted tombs and cultures to sell on the black market. The best stuff is still out there locked away in private collections and museum basements lacking a proper explanation that fits with the story of history that has been told to us from our infancies.  History is much more complicated and to know it is to understand the crystal skull culture and other mysteries that are out there which have not been given a proper introduction to the world because too many people—especially of European decent—call things fake—when they are obviously not.  The crystal skull of the British Museum is more than just an artifact, it is a glimpse into the human race who had an obsession with death and wanted to face it literally—and an old habit of doing what should be impossible for the benefit of doing it and perplexing those from the future with the valor of their endeavors.britsh-museum

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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Plugging up America’s Intelligence Leaks with Julian Assange: What Donald Trump could do to help “really” drain the swamp

While my wife was shopping at Harrod’s in London I couldn’t resist but to walk just a few feet to the east and take a glance at the Ecuadorian Embassy where what I think is the most honest journalistic organization presently in the world is hiding the notorious Julian Assange behind the dainty curtains of the balcony I have watched so many historic press conferences. Assange cannot leave the embassy and due to a current Ecuadorian presidential race that may jeopardize his continued asylum there, I couldn’t help but think of ways where he could be more useful to a Trump administration being attacked from every corner—including its own intelligence community.  So I had my daughter take a rare tourist picture of me standing next to the window of the famous spot as I pondered ruthlessly the many ways that strategically this situation could be rectified better for the world at large.  Even with all the controversy surrounding Julian Assange—to me he is a similar character to American appeal that Wernher Von Braun was who converted as a Nazi rocket builder into one of the heads of NASA. Was America still the same country that could pull off something similar here—perhaps.  But it wouldn’t be easy.   As I listened to the world’s reaction to the Trump rally in Florida which went on just a few hours later that I watched live on my iPhone while my family continued to shop at Harrod’s—I couldn’t help but think Trump’s solution was just a few feet away from me hidden behind the windows of that Ecuadorian Embassy.assange

The media had already been aghast by Donald Trump’s fourth week in office before he had a rally in Melbourne. Florida where Melania Trump really stuck her thumb in the eye of the secular world by starting off a speech with the “Lord’s Prayer.” In the great classic book on military strategy The Art of War, it is important to unite people behind flags of commonality toward the great strategic objective of the enterprise, and clearly that was the purpose of Trump’s rally.   The media didn’t know what to do with it because their goal had been to chip away at him until there was nothing left causing a fissure between Trump supporters and the new president.  You see, the media sees itself as a fourth branch of government and they had decided long before Trump that they were going to carry America off a precipice of destruction for progressive goals.  After all, most of the media were somewhere between the ages of 40 for the really old people to about age 27, still just kids learning about how the world worked.  In their universities, they learned about progressive values and they were now expressing those values in their media occupations, and presently that meant they needed to destroy Donald Trump to preserve their century long task at maintaining their fourth branch of power.  Those checks and balances of course would be fine if their end goal was to preserve free speech and root out tyranny.  But that’s not what the American press was up to.  They were hell bent on shaping the world into a progressive philosophy formed many years ago toward globalism desires.  For instance, in England as I contemplated these things, a prime example of how a government looks to “nudge” people into the direction of their intentions is to alter behavior through inconvenience.  Such as—at Harrod’s, one of the most popular shopping areas in the world, it is very difficult to find a garbage can to throw away trash.  There is a reason for that—because the government wants its people to make decisions not to overly consume disposables so they make it hard to get rid of things.  Not to the point where people just throw things down in the street—but just enough to stave off careless purchases.  Also, when you go to an English restaurant of any kind, they don’t do refills like they do in America.  Obviously, that is to also stave off excess consumption.  Rather than create a rule like Michael Bloomberg attempted a few years ago in New York City with a soda tax to regulate consumption, progressives utilize inconvenience in their government processes to control human behavior and market conditions as they see the need.  The media, particularly in America, but also around the world is a bridge between government’s desires to control people and the people who change their behavior to accommodate the desired change.  People watch the news to hear the latest about Beyoncé’s pregnancy, or who won the latest award’s show of their favorite media artist, but then they stick around to hear news stories from a media trained by liberal institutions to sell progressivism in the byline stories.  It is that force which is presently attacking Donald Trump viciously—and why he had his Florida rally to step around a media quickly trying to box him in at the White House—ground they have up until this point controlled.assange-2

Trump has learned to spend his weekends at Mar-a-Lago in Florida to a property he has controlled for years, as opposed to the media haven at the White House where the press firmly has roots planted to over analyze everything Trump does. John McCain the so-called Republican senator has spent much of his recent life fighting everything Donald Trump does and the intelligence community has been doing much the same to preserve the swamp Trump wants to drain.  So with all these enemies, many which come from within the Republican Party, something needs to be done to reveal the ways that the intelligence community is hacking the White House to listen in on everything that is said—which then gets leaked to the press to use against Trump.  That whole process has to be stopped—which Trump has stated he intends to do.

Of course people like John McCain and the political left look at Julian Assange and see a villain, because Wikileaks threatens their very existence. The entire media empires of the world rely on this “nudging” that they do to shape people’s opinions in subtle ways, and they can’t compete with a news organization which seeks to put a blind eye toward reporting—the way things are actually supposed to be done.  Yes, I don’t like the secrets that were revealed by that Manning character—whatever “it” is, man or woman.  But I am more concerned about the behavior of my government revealed through the Wikileaks.  And to watch this latest election in America and the audacity that the media has attempted to put all the blame on the “Russians” even if it causes World War III says a lot about how much the media is terrified of Julian Assange.  So what I’d do if I were Trump is I’d find a way to legally grant Assange asylum and put him to work in solving the many leaks coming out of the intelligence community to root out the real villains operating under the cloak of media activism.  After watching the behavior of the media toward Michael Flynn who was forced to step down and the persistence to attack any member of the Trump team, from the little 10-year-old Barron Trump to Kellyanne Conway, something has to be done to strike back and if I were Trump, that alliance of aggression would be the Wikileaks founder.

If I were Trump I’d get Assange out of his situation and use his natural skills to “nudge” the media back to honest reporting which would favor Trump’s “sentimental honesty.” That type of honesty was what people showed up in Melbourne to hear and was the driving force behind the Trump White House, and was the target of the current media.  So Trump needs to attack that aggression directly, and Assange would make a wonderful ally.  For me, standing in front of that window of the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, the solution was as clear as it could be.  Give Wikileaks a real voice and free it from the confines it finds itself in, and use that ability to help root out the villains working against this current White House from within the NSA and other government organizations who are doing what we all feared years ago would be happening—that they’d use private information about us to “nudge” us all into a desired political behavior—just as you can’t get refills on drinks or have easy access to trash cans in England—US intelligence gathering does not favor freedom, it is to control our population toward the desires of liberalized senators like John McCain and many others who think they are smarter and better than all of us in a free market economy.

Clearly the markets are hoping that Trump is for real as the stock market is currently pushing new highs each and every week so far since he was elected. That money, that value is a pent-up desire to be free because the wealth created in a free market society requires a free press to keep everything honest, and right now Wikileaks is the only organization in the world that I know of which is attempting to provide that freedom to intellectual honesty.  Literally trillions of dollars which had been hidden away during the Obama years have suddenly flooded the marketplace and we are starting to see those effects around the world quite fast.  But before we can have the full effect and use that new-found wealth to pay down our national debt and infuse real economic growth into the American way of life—which the entire world depends on—the media has to be “nudged” back into honestly and for Trump, Assange is sitting right there poised to help in ways that are currently unimaginable.harrods

Yes there would be blowback, John McCain would be screaming about treason and every liberal in the world would be looking to get Donald Trump impeached by such a move toward Assange. But, they will do that anyway.  What Trump needs is a real offensive weapon against a corrupt media and the politicians that count on it to sustain their life in the swamp.  The leaks at the NSA, the FBI, and the CIA have to be plugged up and the media outlets themselves need to be exposed for their back-door tactics of progressive salesmanship.  And if not for Julian Assange and his Wikileaks organization, we wouldn’t know about CNN giving questions to Hillary Clinton for the debates, and we wouldn’t know about the Podesta “spirt cooking,” or even know how the heads of the major media companies gave money to the DNC and how bad things really were beyond our suspicions.  Without all that, we probably wouldn’t have a Donald Trump at all in the White House.  So why not go all the way and get Assange out of that Ecuadorian Embassy and let him do his thing honestly and openly—and apply his skills to really solving the problem of the many leaks coming out of the American government toward Trump?  What would we have to lose, really?

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 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

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

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Enemies at the Gate: CNN and SNL help terrorists by attack Trump women

You know when you are a target when Saturday Night Live goes from providing respectable satire to an outright hit piece lockstep with CNN on their weekly comedy show targeted for pop culture reflection.  People have been talking about it since Saturday, but SNL did one of the ugliest satires on Kellyanne Conway that I’ve ever seen—it was just despicable—not even close to reality as it portrayed her as a psycho.  Kellyanne has went on all the television shows defending Donald Trump for well over a year now and she has stood through the heat—maybe to the point where she needs a bit of vacation time.  When I heard her Bowling Green comments that’s what I thought—she needed a break—maybe a week or two.  Because the media she is dealing with is just hostile.  When Trump declared war with CNN calling them “fake news” which they are, he hit them where it hurt the worst, and that left Kellyanne Conway to stand in a fire that was just impossible to hold back.  Her interviews over the past week with Jake Trapper and other CNN members was rough, as shown below—and Saturday Night Live pounced—because they smelled blood and went for her jugular.  So much for women’s rights, and celebrating a strong female with great access to the president of the United States—from the progressive party platform they want Kellyanne destroyed hoping that by getting to her, they can put a dent in Trump.  And this SNL skit is just how things are done from those villains of the media.  Here is the hit piece on Kellyanne.

The anger was extreme when after all that happened Kellyanne refused to back down and like Trump dug deeper to the extent that she defended the issue of Ivanka Trump’s castigation from Nordstroms cutting off her clothing and jewelry line due to political intolerance.  So Kellyanne defended Ivanka which provoked an ethics investigation from the Utah do nothing Republican Jason Chaffetz who spent four years investigating Hillary Clinton with all the power and evidence sitting right in front of him—yet he failed to do anything to her.  But he promptly cracked down on the personal advisor to the President for an ethics violation when Kellyanne promoted Ivanka Trump’s fashion line because these are women close to Trump and they have been targeted—and Republicans and Democrats both want to destroy Donald Trump and all those attached to him.

Even knowing all that Kellyanne still went on all the shows and performed defiantly even under the hostilities CNN exhibited toward her.  Nicely, Stephen Miller pitch hit for Kellyanne so she could rest her pipes a bit.  But the game they are playing is clear, and it’s for blood.  The Trump administration had hit CNN and SNL where it hurt worst.  Most of the Saturday Night Live broadcast on Saturday February 11th was slanted anti Trump in the extreme including the Sean Spicer skit done by Melissa McCarthy—which was funny, but not even rooted in reality.  What was interesting was that it likely is how the political left does see the Trump administration and reveals just how soft those people really are.

You can learn a lot about your enemy by how they perform under stress.  CNN showed their fangs at Kellyanne Conway—who has given them hundreds of hours of coverage over the last year to discuss Donald Trump.  Without her, CNN wouldn’t be nearly as relevant as they think of themselves now.  If Kellyanne isn’t on their shows, they hurt more than she does.  She can go everywhere else—she doesn’t need them, but they need her.  There is a real fear in them and Saturday Night Live that if they don’t get right with the Trump administration then they have a real possibility of extinction.  I watched SNL very carefully for the first time in over a month, and moments were funny, but mostly they looked and acted scared that the world was leaving the station and they weren’t on the train.  The world was literally changing under their feet and they didn’t know how to deal with it but to lash out like a scared child.

By attacking the Trump women, Ivanka and Kellyanne, they are hoping to disarm Trump’s claims that they are “fake news” because ratings aren’t that great at SNL and CNN needs access to Trump in order to stay relevant for the next several years.  But Trump knows better.  When he talks about “fake news” he’s not just talking about the skimpy coverage that the mainstream provided to the Orlando terrorist attacks as well as many others—it is in the deliberate decision to cover the violence—but avoid identifying the cause—which was radical Islamic terrorism.  The mainstream desire to avoid any reference to Islamic terrorism and apply the actions to “gun violence” or immigrant discrimination is the source of the “fake news” designation, and CNN has certainly been guilty—even if Kellyanne Conway and the Trump administration hurt their feelings by saying it.  The news outlets did cover terrorist events, as Jake Trapper suggested, but they failed to identify the source of the terrorist problem, and attempted to soften the blow of the true reality, which has always been Trump’s point.

The media is guilty of attempting to let villains into our country by way of a Trojan Horse of terrorism hiding among the immigrant communities, and SNL, CNN and many others have been caught red handed.  Their attempt to paint terror with the colors of compassion is their crime for which justice is demanded and to prevent that fate, they are attacking the women close to Trump viciously hoping to barter a truce of some kind.  But that’s not how this story will end.  Kellyanne should take her vacation and rest a bit, because there is plenty to do for her in the coming months.  But in the short run, CNN, SNL, and essentially the entire NBC, ABC, and CBS networks bound together through the New York Times is on the ropes, and Trump knows what to do—and it won’t involve a sissy slap of warning.  They came after his women, so now it’s time to go for their jugular, and they won’t like that.  They need him.  Trump doesn’t need the media.  “They” think that a president like Trump can’t fight on all these fronts, but that’s only because they haven’t seen it before.  Yet Trump can and the way to understand what is happening is to read the ancient book of war written by Sun Tzu.  There we can all see what’s coming—and all SNL can do is hide behind their attack of women who are in Trump’s circle.

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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