Tag: education

Why You Should Dump Disney Stock Now: The mistakes made on ‘Force Awakens’ will compound the failure of ESPN

On a day where every media outlet in the world is declaring the new Star Wars film an earth shattering success, I’ll take a little pride in being the only one to point at the doom on the horizon.  In a lot of ways I’ll admit hope, as often does happen—more than you’d think—that some executive at Disney will read what I write here and make the market corrections needed—and save the only company in the world truly dedicated to family entertainment.  But they won’t.  Disney is not run by a strong CEO like it was when Walt Disney ran the company years ago.  It’s now run by committees of people—and within those committees are people who seek such a management method because they lack personal courage.  Without personal courage and risk, the market potency of a company and its products surrenders box office appeal, and ultimately profits.  That is essentially what is wrong with the new Star Wars film, The Force Awakens.  As much as I wanted to like the film—and still do in fact—the business side of my brain sees more alarms going off in the cockpit of this starship than it can withstand.  Destruction is imminent.  So I’m headed for an escape pod before the entire thing falls apart.  If you have Disney stock, you should sell it right now because the value will tank very shortly and it will never recover.

Out of all the possibilities and horsepower of Lucasfilm—with all the talent at their disposal—they as a company elected to treat their long line of New York Times bestselling novels like a story treatment for a Hollywood movie.  The writing was on the wall when they released the comic series The Star Wars two years ago by Dark Horse comics justifying their decisions to mine the expanded universe and re-write it putting their committee stamp on the material proclaiming that what they did was better.  Rather than sit down with a good writer like Lawrence Kasdan is and have him write completely new material, like he did for the Empire Strikes Back and Raiders of the Lost Ark, Lucasfilm under Kathy Kennedy decided to make a reboot of A New Hope and populate it with what the “Star Wars Story Group” thought was the greatest hits of the long series of novels which had been produced carefully with George Lucas over two decades.  When they released the comic series showing how the original Star Wars script had evolved over time and necessity they were trying to justify what they were about to do hoping to sell their work as authentic.  What they did was infinitely disappointing.  At that point in time I had been buying all the comics and books I could get and was reading them all.  But when I realized what was happening, I just stopped waiting to see if Disney would do as I feared and just mine the stories that meant something very wonderful to many of the hard-core fans, or if they’d actually continue the story into new territory—which for me was the only justifiable option.   They picked the most lazy path possible at a great insult to the fans who kept the market value of Star Wars alive for so long.

The Force Awakens of course made a lot of money—it shattered records that Hollywood may never see again.  There was tremendous pent-up multi generational desire to see a new Star Wars film. So everyone who could went to see the movie over its opening weekend.  If I didn’t know better I would have thought it was a good movie–it had all the elements present, but it was clearly missing something.  That something was the conviction that a risk taking proprietor brings to a project—a leader who has put their reputation and soul on the line to make a product which clearly marked the first two Star Wars films—was missing.  The makers of The Force Awakens were happy young people writing stories from the comfort of Lucasfilm employment and the politics of the very progressive city of San Francisco.  Like spoiled brats driving their dad’s Mercedes out for a night at the country club to socialize at a charity function thinking they were saving the world—they made Star Wars: The Force Awakens without taking any real risks and mining the material of risk takers who came before them hoping that nobody would notice.  I did, and so did many other hard-core Star Wars fans upon leaving the theater for the first time.  When the fun dies down and these fans will think about what they’ve seen, Disney will find that they now have a dreadfully divided audience because of their choices which will dramatically affect the market share potential of all the future Star Wars films.  It will hurt their book sales, their merchandise, and their box office take for all subsequent films.  What they essentially did was brought Star Wars down to the level of the latest Star Trek movies—or the Avengers films.  They might make decent money, but Disney executives are planning on insane money—and they’ll need it to survive—because other aspects of Disney’s business portfolio has been wavering in these changing economic times.

Here’s how the Hollywood Reporter announced the pending doom on Friday December 18th as The Force Awakens opened to hungry fans across the world:

Star Wars: Episode VII – The Force Awakens made $57 million domestically Thursday, enough to set a record but not to satiate Wall Street’s fears over Walt Disney’s television business.

In midday trading on Friday, Disney shares were off 4 percent, twice that of the broader markets, as the conglomerate was the topic of at least two negative research notes in the past two days.

On Friday, BTIG analyst Richard Greenfield downgraded Disney to “sell” and put a $90 price target on the stock, suggesting it will fall about 17 percent in the next 52 weeks or so.

“Even The Force cannot protect ESPN,” Greenfield wrote, accusing management of “overpaying for sports rights based on overly aggressive multichannel video subscriber projections.”

Greenfield says Disney’s cable network operating income will shrink in fiscal-year 2017, causing total Disney operating income to be flat.

He also says Disney damaged its long-term prospects for cable in general “by aggressively licensing content to SVOD platforms such as Netflix to prop up near-term earnings.”

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/walt-disney-stock-tumbles-as-850171

While the numbers look impressive at first glance, because of the changing market of the other business interests, such as ESPN and how cable subscribers are dumping their subscriptions in favor of Internet service for their smart phones the media empire of Disney is too reliant on Star Wars to save it from the downsides it’s facing.  The Marvel movies are beginning to fade as the newness of them is wearing away.  By the time Captain America: Civil War hits in 2016, the franchise will be in clear decline as a box office force.  The savor was always going to be Star Wars—and now they’ve screwed that up dividing the fan’s loyalties between a re-tread and the authentic novels.

It is always dangerous to base a movie off a book, because the reader often sees things differently than a film’s director.  As long as a movie producer stays close to the source material, often things are forgiven.  But regarding Star Wars, where the franchise was kept alive with cooperation between Del Rey publishing and Lucasfilm in close contact with George Lucas approving story details the novels were like the Bible and took on a meaning that Disney obviously didn’t understand.  After all, they had been re-writing great literary classics for years, so they had no problem changing things around to suit their market appraisal for the films they wanted to produce.

By insisting that the movies were cannon and not the books which were designed to connect the original movies with fresh material ultimately created by individual authors under the guidance of Lucasfilm—the creative team behind The Force Awakens assumed incorrectly that fans would forgive them.  Some will, but not everyone, and for Disney to succeed in this venture they needed everyone.  And when the smoke clears around The Force Awakens, they won’t have everyone.  And that means financial doom on the horizon within the next five years for Disney as a company.   Bob Iger will leave the next CEO at Disney with a terrible burden and there will be no recovery from it. With other aspects of the company losing money, such as ESPN based on inflated sports contracts, it needs a new explosion in growth which Star Wars was supposed to bring.

The Force Awakens felt like a small movie after reading about gigantic events in the novels over the years.  The sheer scale of the Star Wars novels would have had enormous production costs to duplicate on film.  I’m sure Lucasfilm made the decision to do what they did on The Force Awakens based on the vast number of characters that were in the Star Wars novels—which ultimately brings up the question should a novel be cannon or is the movie a superior product?  I clearly think what is written in a novel is the cannon in every case.  Movies are dumbed-down versions of books.  I can’t think of too many books that were made into movies that were overshadowed by the film version.   Star Wars started as a fresh movie experience, but it evolved into a literary journey which became much more powerful than the original films.  Lucasfilm made the mistake by trying to reverse that trend, and make a movie by committee instead of individuals and throwing out parts of the series which were too big to project on the silver screen.  Rather than trying to do that, they watered down a product that millions had fallen in love with and banked Disney’s future on the result.

Taken by itself Star Wars within Disney will hold its own financially.  The films will do fine, the merchandise will be respectable, and the other intellectual work will likely still sell for years to come.  But because of where the company as a whole is, with ESPN failing, the Avengers movies in decline, and the lack of new musicals coming from their children films every three years-Disney has serious problems.  It would have taken all the Star Wars fans to save them—and they clearly don’t have them all.  The Force Awakens proves it.  That problem won’t show itself immediately, but will begin to show up in their repeat business numbers within a month of the release.

Kathy Kennedy should have known better. On Twitter the Star Wars people put out a tag line when The Force Awakens opened showing Han Solo and Chewbacca in the Millennium Falcon declaring “we’re home.”   They were clearly marketing Harrison Ford’s return to the role of Han Solo to push the box office numbers over the top.  I replied to Kennedy’s tweet the reality of what I felt.  I said,” Yeah, we’re only home for the funeral.”  It was stunning to me with all their build-up that they killed off Han Solo, so to me, The Force Awakens became like going home to a funeral to visit family you hadn’t seen in a while—and likely may never see after.   We all knew that Han Solo would die in the movies at some point in time, but in the books he was still performing heroic acts 45 years after A New Hope, so if they had not gone back in time and killed off Han Solo and could have kept the heroics of his novel adventures intact in the canon, it would have been much more digestible.  Instead they not only killed Han Solo, but the best that hard-core Star Wars fans had fallen in love with–an epic story on a truly galactic scale.  What they gave us in The Force Awakens was the death of a favorite character and a highlight reel of the novels—stories we already knew—all chopped up and spit out with new names and a much smaller frame of reference.   Then to insist that an inferior product was the new canon spelled huge problems for the future of Star Wars which will compound into a much worse situation than what Disney is seeing currently with ESPN.   And I wish it wasn’t the case, because I love Disney and really wanted it to succeed.  But they made all the mistakes that they shouldn’t have—and arrogantly stood by those mistakes to the bitter end.

I don’t know if there is a way that Disney could fix the situation now.  I’m afraid it’s too late.  But maybe there is a way they can appeal to the hard-core fans before things get out of control.  They should try for the sake of everyone—mostly themselves.

Rich “Cliffhanger” Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

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

‘The Force Awakens’ Killed off Han Solo: Why the prequels were a lot better and how Disney blew it

Piiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiissssssed off, that is the feeling I have walking out of The Force Awakens.  

Sadly, the news I was so excited about three years ago regarding the new Star Wars film is tragic—the worst of what I feared might happen, did.  Taken by itself, The Force Awakens is a very good movie, the acting is good, the special effects everything that you’d expect, the directing, the writing all very good—then there’s the music by John Williams—upper level wonder.  Unfortunately for Disney, Star Wars is much more than one movie now and Disney did exactly the wrong thing.  Like rumored, they abandoned the Expanded Universe and they killed off Han Solo in the first movie of a three-part trilogy which was my favorite character.  While on the business side I can understand why they did—Harrison Ford was 73 at the start of The Force Awakens, so it’s not a bad idea to start planting the seeds for future characters.  However, killing off Solo without having the context of the greater story developed over the last two decades is extremely problematic for the Star Wars franchise.  Here’s why.

About 15 years ago a super Star Wars fan was talking to me about the novels that came out every few months and wondered why I wasn’t reading them.  I explained that if the books didn’t come straight from the mind of George Lucas that I didn’t consider them part of the Star Wars canon.  However, the novels leaned very much on the character of Han Solo and his marriage to Princess Leia and their three children Jaina Jacen and Anakin.  So figured I’d give the books a try.  I had tried the Thrawn trilogy by Timothy Zahn and couldn’t accept it, but decided to try again with Vector Prime.  It was a great book—although Chewbacca died—and I was hooked.  I have since read most of the Expanded Universe novels which have greatly over-shadowed the original movies in sheer content and emotional story arcs.

I thought there was a whale of a story developing at the end of Apocalypse involving The Abeloth and that The Force Awakens would be about that massive galactic conflict—which would have been great.  Disney could have given the hard-core Star Wars fans what they wanted while giving a new generation of fans what they wanted.  The old characters could have faded out leaving the new very strong character of Jaina Solo to have filled the boots of her father nicely—and that would have been appropriate.  Everyone could have had what they wanted out of Star Wars.  But that’s not what Disney did with the help of J.J. Abrams, and Kathleen Kennedy.  They thought they knew better than all the minds who had been guiding the Star Wars stories through three decades of New York Times best sellers so they screwed with the story with a progressive agenda which was the worst of my fears.

If they had stayed with the Expanded Universe storyline, they could have still had a Latino lead character, a black character and a strong female lead to reach all their target demographics.  But they did more than that—they weakened Han Solo considerably and made him a self-sacrificial parent who threw himself on the sword of Kylo Ren at the end.  He and his marriage to Leia obviously went bad and the kids were damaged leading to his son (Ben) turning to evil.  Suddenly the very strong characters of the Expanded Universe were modernized into dysfunctional parents who had screwed up their children and felt guilty about it.  At the end of The Force Awakens, “General Leia” is alone with no signs of family—except the daughter Rey to find out who she truly is.  This is probably the most disappointing aspect of The Force Awakens—in the novels the son of Han, Jacen falls to the dark side over many books and his intentions were always good.  Han stayed with his wife for many years and they had a pretty good family life.  Han was always a rock solid person in those stories giving Star Wars geeks the father figure they didn’t have in real life—and it worked well in a mythological way.  The daughter Jaina was the new light of the next generation—The Sword of the Jedi.

J.J. Abrams and Lawrence Kasdan essentially took the big themes of the novels and retold the story of Jacen’s fall to the dark side moving around the names of the characters and having him confront his sister—in an epic lightsaber battle.  Knowing all that felt cheap to me.  It took Star Wars from an epic pinnacle of the highest mythological order and dumbed it down to be simply another Avengers movie.  It was fun to look at, but the content was certainly watered down from the types of bold stories that were told in the novels.  I will probably see future Star Wars movies just to see what they do and how they look—like I would a superhero type of film—the many times the Batman story has been told, or Spiderman—even Superman.  But with Star Wars, Disney had a unique opportunity to build on a massive story arc, and they screwed it up—rehashing the old by putting their own stamp on it in a way that did a disservice to the fans who helped carry the franchise for so long with their loyal support.  Clearly the emphasis by Disney and Kathleen Kennedy was to weaken the original characters from the bold embodiments of their youth into guilt driven losers in the future—which might make them relatable to a larger audience who feels the same anxieties.  Of course they had to plant the seeds of an interracial romance—which felt forced—and was distracting.  Han returned to his days as a smuggler instead of the reliable family man that he was in the books.  Luke was in hiding feeling guilt for creating Kylo Ren though his failure in teaching future Jedi—which in the books Luke had built an entirely new Jedi Order.  In the books all the lead characters were strong and determined personalities who had suffered through unimaginable sorrows, but were still people a reader could lean on and trust to do the right thing in the end.  In The Force Awakens it is obvious that the all the old characters were flawed, especially Han Solo.  This was obviously a conscious choice to make him more relatable to the modern viewing audience instead of just trusting the story the way it had evolved over the years with great success.

There has been an effort from The Alliance to Save the Star Wars Legends Expanded Universe shown at the link below to save the storyline of these movie from just this kind of misery.  But, Disney didn’t listen and they’ll pay for that.  The Force Awakens will make a lot of money, but it won’t be as much as they could have made.  They just handed the next generation a bunch of loser characters not quite sure of themselves putting an emphasis on progressive values instead of American traditional ones.  The Force Awakens is about sacrifice and the greater good whereas a theme which always ran through the original trilogy was individualism and following a personal bliss.  Han Solo as the individual always had the answers to save the Luke and Leias of the galaxy from their altruistic tendencies.  In The Force Awakens it is Han Solo that needs saving from his guilt over failing their son in ways that aren’t yet shown.  Essentially the decision to turn Han Solo from an Ayn Rand type of character into a Shakespearian tragedy was meant to erase his lineage of strength into something modern audiences could identify with.

https://www.facebook.com/AlliancetoSavetheStarWarsLegendsExpandedUniverse

http://twibbon.com/support/star-wars-legends-never-die

The result for me, and I’m sure many others, is that I completely reject these new stories by Disney.   I just came out of seeing a premier showing before it opened officially on December 18th 2015 and my sorted emotions tell me that this story in The Force Awakens is not real.  I can’t accept it as cannon.  It’s actually pretty stupid.  It represents another case of activist filmmakers trying to plant progressive Huffington Post values into a very traditional American story for the sake of unifying the world around common values.  To do that they dumbed down the American influences of individuality, and created a much more “inclusive” universe that was the obvious intent they had in making the film.  People like Arianna Huffington will love this new Star Wars.  John Wayne would have hated it.

I can deal with the death of my favorite character.  What I have a problem with is weakening their presence out of a desire to appeal to a weakened society—where movies are made by committee rather than by strong individuals.  The Force Awakens obviously understands that few people have intact families these days and that people can’t relate to the type of strength that Han Solo projected which has carried the franchise quite frankly for forty years.  They made a conscious decision to weaken Solo—hand over the Millennium Falcon to a “girl” (his daughter) and reflect the values of the present global community instead of the values of the story itself.  They cheapened Star Wars in ways that will be very costly in the years to come.  So while the movie was beautiful to look at and had many elements that are respectable on the surface, the underlining message was feeble and a tremendous disservice to the fans who have stuck with the story religiously all these years.  Star Wars had a chance to be above modern politics, but the filmmakers failed to carry it to those lofty heights.  Instead, they surrendered to the currents of modernism—and the movie shows it desperately.  The movie felt to me like a fake and something to reject—which is not what Disney wanted, I’m sure.  Forever for me, and many like me, there will always be the Expanded Universe where Han didn’t leave his wife and fail his children with some “force bending” scheme of time to save his daughter from the wrath of her brother, Han’s failed son—and the Jedi master Luke who lost his pupil to the dark side.  I’m sure there is a story of redemption in the next episodes, but by then—who cares.  Disney already screwed up the story with renamed characters and repeated themes which were already told in the novels years ago.  And in that respect, The Force Awakens fails in every way that it never intended.

The prequels were a LOT better.

Rich “Cliffhanger” Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

http://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

The Elusive Nature of Leadership: Understanding the need for an entirely different approach

I know I write a lot about the failure of our education system, and need for Donald Trump as president.  While those subjects may become laborious to the everyday reader, there are so many angles to discuss that only voluminous examination from every trajectory of consideration is appropriate to the difficulties of our day.  Sometimes I run across a video clip that really exhibits the reason, and such an example came to me while I was watching a Donald Trump interview with Chris Cuomo on CNN.  I was so astonished by some of the things Chris said that it took me several days to get my thoughts right about it.  Watch the video below.  The specific part of the interview that I found so astonishing was the part that Cuomo uttered in question form, “how do you know you’re right if so many people disagree with you. “  Boy did he say a mouthful right there.

Leadership is the most elusive element of modern culture.  Even with all our science and physiological understanding of thought processes—academics do not understand it.  Very few people understand real leadership.  I actually deal with this kind of stupidity all the time.  I understand leadership extremely well; it’s always been a very natural thing for me.  When I read books like Trump’s Art of the Deal, and Sun Tzu’s Art of War, I understand the author’s point of view instinctively as opposed to the novice student hearing some of the elements of those books for the first time.  A lot of that comes from my education background and life experiences which looked to people on the outside to be extremely reckless.  I have always known the right thing to do even when nobody else could see it, in every aspect of my life—so it’s easy for me to look at Chris Cuomo and wonder if he’s from some other planet.  I’ve heard that baffling contemplation so many times that it doesn’t surprise me.  But for the sake of dramatic writing, I’ll fester along the line of thought to make the point more interesting.  Leadership does not come from focus groups or consensus of any kind.  It comes from raw individualized leadership only—meaning other voices are pointless.  It is good to utilize other people’s opinions for the sake of “team building.”  But a “team” approach is not the same as “leadership.”  It’s just a means of getting large numbers of people to do what you want them to do.  A team approach is fine so long as that team listens to their head coach.  Without a strong leader, a “team” will be ineffective.

When I talk about things like that to people who think they are the smartest people in the room, I get hokey references to all my mysterious books as if somewhere in them was a famous recipe for leadership that they can figure out if they just put together the right mix of a “team” working toward consensus.   As I write this the new Star Wars films are getting ready to release and there is a lot of excitement about them.  There really may never be such an event on planet earth again, where the entire world is so ripe with anticipation.  While I think the movies might be pretty good, I have serious doubts that they will be as good as the movies George Lucas made when he ran Lucasfilm from a leadership position as a sole proprietor.   The new films are certainly made by “committee” and I think that will show up in what comes across in the movie theater.  The message of the old movies was individualism versus the state because that was something that George Lucas believed in during that part of his life.  The new movies are about decentralized authority and consensus building.  For kids going to the movies today, the films will be the best thing they’ll have seen, but in the long lens of history, these new movies will lack the punch of the originals because of the method for which they were made—just like any company that tries to make a product after a strong leader has either left them, or they’ve tried a more inclusive approach—a rule by committee.   That is exactly the problem the Apple Company is suffering through right now.  They still make a good product, but they lack the innovation and spirit they had when Steve Jobs was in charge.   They can hold their own for a while, but are slipping a bit each year under weak leadership.

Trump would be a good president because of what Cuomo asked him.  Trump instinctively knows what’s right to do.  A good leader can make a decision even if nobody else understands the nature of the problem yet. The reason why is because of Robert Pirsig’s Metaphysics of Quality.  CLICK HERE FOR REVIEW.  Leaders are simply at the front of the metaphorical train instead of the back.  It doesn’t matter if you are talking about Jim Harbaugh leaving the San Francisco 49ers  to become coach of the Michigan Wolverines in college or George Patton, strong leadership is immediately noticed the moment its gone.   Good leadership is noticed on a restaurant drive through—good leadership keeps the food moving, bad leadership drives down the food quality and window times.  The moment that Jim Harbaugh left San Francisco for Michigan, that professional football team went into decline but the college team was on the uptake.  Good leaders never listen to the world around them except for intelligence gathering.  Good leaders always act from the inner voice that only they understand at the front of the train of thought—on the cutting edge of decision-making.  It’s not a mystery to those who naturally possess the trait.

However, our education system teaches kids like Chris Cuomo that answers to life come from collective consensus, and is a very unfortunate misunderstanding.  I won’t say that it’s a deliberate lie, just an improper understanding of where to put specific emphasis on personal value.  The schools have lied to these poor kids and taught them all the wrong things for all the wrong social reasons.  Everyone can’t be a leader, because most of the time they lack the courage to be.  It takes a lot of strength and courage to be a leader, and some people just don’t have it in them.  It can be taught to some extent, but only in small degrees.  It actually makes me sad to visit a hospital and see people having babies because most children have indications of the leadership trait available to them as infants–after all they had just survived nine months inside a womb and overcame the immense psychological trauma of child-birth.  If treated correctly, many of those children could be nurtured into the kind of mind that producers good leaders, and if America really wanted to solve some problems, it would focus on strengthening its children right out of the womb, not through some government confiscation program but by empowering the parents to promote self-reliance in infants as soon as possible, learning to walk, learning to play by themselves—not with other children—and developing a strong imagination with stimulation of many aspects of thought as soon as the neurons in their brains have connected to allow such thinking.  But what happens to most of those children is they are coddled too long next to their mothers, and their fathers take orders from society at large falling in behind some authority figure that is probably incompetent by default.  Children directly mimic everything they see from their parents so if the parents are social messes, the children will struggle with those aspects for the rest of their lives.  For many children their limits in life are pressed into them before they are even six months old, and it just saddens me every time I see it.

What’s unique about Trump is that he’s always been way in front of the cutting edge—his whole life.  He’d be a great president because he wouldn’t listen to the opinions of other people—that’s the point!  He doesn’t need consultants, he doesn’t need focus groups.  He needs information, but he doesn’t need anybody to tell him what to do with it.  It would be my hope that under a Trump presidency that he’d cause a renaissance in American leadership just because his methods would be on full display around the world and people would want to copy him.  That might bring out a few more babies per year who have the potential to be strong leaders in the future.  Trump often compares himself to George Patton, and it’s not because of the militaristic nature of both of them, it’s because they both possess similar beliefs in themselves—even when the rest of the world thinks they are crazy—they can see clearly what to do and when to do it.  To those without that skill, they are baffled as to how Trump and Patton could possible know what to do without some support from their peers.  But leadership is a lonely enterprise.  Leaders are alone in the troubles of their minds and they are alone in the successes—they are alone most of the time, even when they are with people who love them.  Being a strong leader is much about being alone—even in a crowd, because nobody understands.   American culture needs to at least embrace its leaders and if such a thing became fashionable through major changes in our education system and a populist president who would make bold front page news every day of his time in office, then maybe some of those children born under freedom might develop in them the natural inclination of leadership.  But before that can happen someone like Trump would need to be able to sell it to the masses.  Only then would the qualities of leadership become more widely acceptable—and understood.  But it will take a generation to get there.  There is nothing easy about leadership.  It is the most important element of a free republic.  Consensus building is absolutely the wrong approach.  It doesn’t work, and it never will.  It can produce moderate results, but spectacular ambitions will always reside among the few who embrace the cutting edge and by their very nature—who always see most clearly and act most decisively.  Trump is one of those rare few who do it so fluidly so this is a rare opportunity for the United States, and I’m excited about it.

Rich “Cliffhanger” Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

http://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

What Ann Becker and Donald Trump Have in Common: Why Republicans lose to inferior Democrats

Even though this is a local issue, it has significance on the larger GOP philosophy, so it’s worth a vigorous discussion.  My friend Ann Becker was harassed at a recent GOP meeting in Butler County for really the same reasons that Donald Trump has been on the national stage.  Not because she declared that Muslims should be rejected from American borders out of safety from terrorism, but because she, like him, is a political outsider—and they truly run the GOP like a mason’s lodge instead of a political representation of the conservative electorate.  I’m very sympathetic to her because I know it feels.  I’m probably the most conservative person in Butler County.  I would hardly say that I’m a radical right-winger by any means.  My type of thinking would be very much at home in John Wayne’s America.  But certainly not the type of GOP supporter the Bush family has helped create—center right leaning people who are in politics to protect their business interests only.  They are not for the philosophy of conservatism as a primary concern.  I personally like Todd Hall, who currently runs the Butler County GOP—which is arguably one of the most conservative areas in the nation.  But I learned much more than I cared to about the party and the politics of it in 2011 when area Republicans were pandering to the Tea Party types hoping to choke them off at the pass after the 2012 election.  Before getting into details of this behavior, read what happened to Ann Becker by Todd Hall at a recent meeting, which was extremely childish on behalf of the GOP.

http://www.annbecker.com/trouble-at-butler-county-gop-endorsement-vote/

I was at an event not that long ago with all the powerful local politicians and Governor John Kasich.  After a big speech we gathered outside where drinks were flowing freely and everyone was trying to convince the other about how worldly they were—essentially impressing nobody.  The words were empty and rooted in sand.  One small gust of political wind always uproots them into tumbleweeds of indecision—even at John Kasich’s level.  I was very unimpressed with these titans of Ohio politics.  Meeting him in person changed my impression of him forever.  He was weak; you could see it in his eyes and body language.  I don’t brag about it too much but I can usually tell everything I need to know about someone in about three minutes—I can completely disseminate their personality, their hopes, their fears and their strategic aims just by listing to their emphasis on words, the way they shake hands, and the way they communicate through body language.  There is nothing that anybody can hide from my analysis.  I take note of everything possible and arrive at conclusions based on those observations which are always correct, even when someone tries to throw me off the scent.  I was always good at these kinds of things, but over the last ten years, it has become so second nature to me that it’s like breathing.  Meeting Kasich in person and his immediate supporters and the donor base only caused me to lose complete confidence in their competency.  I try not to let people know what my conclusions are, because after all, those people have to live in the skin of their bodies—and most of the time it’s too late for them—so why make them feel worse.  It doesn’t accomplish anything.  But trusting them with something is off the table.

I gave them the benefit of the doubt until I was on WLW radio doing a live bit to hundreds of thousands of people and I was in a gotcha press moment. (CLICK TO REVIEW)  I was in one of those media sensation moments and was playing my part of it.  I worried that my Republican friends would bail on me under the heat of controversy—after all I was fighting on their behalf.  And they did exactly what I feared of them—while I was on the air they sent a press release to the station distancing themselves from me like a bunch of cowards.  I was of course prepared for their actions, but it still was something I hoped to be wrong about.  I wasn’t wrong.  I have not communicated with many of those people except on business since.  I’m not a let bygones be bygones type of person—I hold grudges for decades—maybe even lifetimes.  I have learned to get along with people for the sake of business, but I don’t get cozy with them—ever after they betray me in some fashion.  So it is for that reason that I don’t offer my leadership to the area GOP, even though they need it.

I don’t play in my life by bi-laws, like Todd Hall brought up to Ann Becker keeping her from videoing the event, and confiscating her personal cell phone from recording what was going on.  That’s not acceptable behavior.  The GOP is not a secret society, and there shouldn’t be any strategic secrets.   The Democrats are an open book when it comes to community organizing and they destroy Republicans at the effort because of the childish intentions of area GOP leaders.  It’s not just Todd Hall, it’s a nationwide problem.  You can hear the frustration in establishment leaders like Jeb Bush and John Kasich when they talk about Trump.  They really believe they can lean on the many thousands of Todd Halls across the country to prevent delegates from casting votes for Trump at the GOP convention at the end of the 2016 summer making him the official nominee.  They do so with the same stupid arrogance and need for power that Todd Hall confiscated Ann’s phone.  How stupid is that?

There is a lot that I could offer the GOP and Todd knows me, and what I could do for them.  The moment they tried to fight a tax increase without my help out front, they lost—for obvious reasons.  But I’m not submitting to anybody’s authority.  I am always respectful of other people’s rights, and when someone comes after me, man, woman, or whatever—I fight them hard—really hard.  I share with Trump a desire to completely destroy whoever attacks me—so those kinds of games only let “yes men” near GOP leaders instead of truly the best and brightest that each community has to offer.  The smart thing for Todd to do even if he doesn’t like Ann is to use her natural enthusiasm to carry the party forward with marketing efforts.  Ann is on 55 KRC every Monday morning with Brian Thomas and she’s great with the newspapers.  She’s a wonderful asset.  Ann and I have many differences, she was a Lakota levy supporter in 2005, she doesn’t like guns, and she’s much more libertarian than I am in regard to drug use.  But I still consider her a very good friend.  Whenever she’s convinced me to have a night out with her, I always enjoy it, and we get a lot done.  She’s good at what she does and I respect her.  That doesn’t mean she has to line up 100% with everything I believe.  Todd could have that kind of relationship with her, if he was willing, but he’s not.  Instead, he sees her as part of an opposition that is trying to take the GOP toward a more libertarian type of party—and for him; he likes the GOP to be the party of the builders and developers.  Ironically, he has a lot in common with Donald Trump, but if the party bosses say not to endorse the New York billionaire, Todd will strong-arm the party away from supporting the current front-runner.  They’ll abandon him like they did with me on WLW radio in front of hundreds of thousands of people because they essentially lack the courage to stand by a belief in anything.  That’s why they are so easy to beat.  Yes they have a Republican majority in the House and Senate and several state governors across the nation, but what are they doing with all that power?  They allow themselves to be pulled further and further left—because they won’t stand for anything.  So they lose in the big picture time and time again to left-winged radicals and name calling dissidents.

Even though I’m sure Ann was probably a little defensive while trying to set up her camera knowing that Todd would come over and condemn her for it, ultimately she is trying to make the party better.  And everyone should know that.  Every day I get emails from Democrats telling me to take action on some presidential proposal, or liberal talking point—both large and small.  They have a blogging network that the left gets behind along with a wide range of pundits that work the press actively every day.  I get emails from them because I’m politically active and my name is everywhere and on everything.  I get only a fraction of those emails from Republicans.  They are not nearly as good as Democrats at marketing their position, largely because when they do get someone who is good at that kind of stuff, they don’t stand behind them.  Liberals always stand behind their people, right, or wrong.  Republicans never do, they seek to distance themselves from controversy at every turn and collect cell phones from their most ambitious supporters only to put a cap of secrecy on everything they do, hoping the “enemy” Democrats don’t find out about it.  The cause of this behavior is that most establishment Republicans who have something to lose whereas the Democrats are largely government employees or recipients of government hand-outs in some fashion—so both sides vote with their wallets.  But people like Ann, and I—we are all about the philosophy of conservatism.  And there is no room in the Republican Party for us.  But there should be.

There are many good people out there not working with their area Republicans who are far more talented than the usual party stiffs to work the media. There’s nothing wrong with being a stiff—there’s value in it. But to market Republican values, dynamic personalities are needed.  I’m not particularly keen on dropping names to show who I know and to what extent but I recently spoke to David Kern, who just stepped down as Liberty Township trustee and was essentially removed from office as he used to run the GOP before Todd Hall took over.  I’ve known the Kern family for many, many years and have always liked them.  David Kern was a Tea Party type before there was ever such an organization, but he often walked the very fine line between establishment and maverick seamlessly.  He was very good and he will be missed because it wasn’t easy.  He’s an old man now, but he was like that for several decades and Butler County politics was better off because of it.  The party needed resistance just like a good football team needs to practice against a tough defense—to make them better.  Ideas are good.  But the establishment types made a move against Kern after they were done using him to win Tea Party support during the 2010 and 2012 elections—which ultimately helped take over the House and Senate by 2014.  The stage is always set for these things a half a decade before we ever see the results.  Anyway, Dave and his wife Katy told me the whole story as we ate at a dinner together—and it was incredibly disrespectful to him as a long time Republican.  I thanked him for his work on the Liberty Center project and he essentially rode off into the sunset.  I felt sorry for him—he gave so much to the Republican Party and was kicked aside like an old shoe—because he was one of those “free thinking undesirables” who thought the bi-laws were stupid and the party was too heavily in favor of one type of Republican—instead of the entire conservative base.

Ann Becker, David Kern, and Donald Trump all share some things in common, the GOP establishment like the one on full display at a GOP event in Butler County, want to push them out of the party.  They are all too free thinking to care about Todd Hall’s ban on cell phones and the childish games of a political party that wants to be an exclusive country club instead of a dynamic representation of southern Ohio conservatives.  If you want to be in a country club, join Four Bridges, Wetherington, or even my favorite, The Elks.  But don’t bring that crap to a political party that should be at war with liberals.  Democrats are winning because of it.  Instead of harassing Ann Becker, Todd would have been wise to listen to her, and bring her into his tent for what she could do for him.

But he didn’t and they won’t.  Donald Trump is right in front of their faces and they don’t like him because they can’t control him, which is why they continue to fail.  Ann Becker is also right in front of their faces and instead of befriending her; they harass her over her video camera and cell phone.  They are more about control than winning and that is the reason so many people are flocking to Trump.  Everybody on the outside of that GOP club has had enough.

Rich “Cliffhanger” Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

http://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

The Brilliance of Donald Trump: Why being a little wild is a good thing

Amazingly, Donald Trump’s recent position of monitoring and restricting the movement of Muslim’s in and out of American borders is creating quite a stir—politically.  While most in the Beltway believe Trump is a madman, I would say that Trump is behaving like the brilliant tactician that he is.  No wonder the United States is losing around the world, because the people in mainstream politics are clueless about negotiation and strategy.  Trump’s comments are brilliant for several reasons.  First he’s playing the typical high low game needed in any negotiation.  He knows by taking an extreme position, he’ll force elected officials to at least consider some measures of security in relation to the Muslim religion.  The terrorist element is obviously hiding within that religion behind peaceful people, but there is no way to root the bad guys out if you don’t force the Islamic community to separate themselves from the radicals.  In the short run, radicals are forced into hiding until things calm down which obviously makes the world safer through the Christmas Holiday.  Additionally, all the idiots who are coming out against Trump, which is everyone pretty much in the Beltway—are demonstrating why they are unqualified to be president as Americans want somebody to make decisive decisions even if they are standing alone.  To understand the extent of the issue, watch this ABC Report on Trump with clips from a recent Barbra Walters interview.

Trump knows exactly what he’s doing.  Six months from now he’ll be able to say that he was the first Republican to identify the problem, which will prove to be quite extensive in its sleeper cell network, and he will show Republican delegates that he is willing to do anything and everything to beat Hillary Clinton ahead of the convention.  That is after all what they all share in common as a concern, beating Hillary Clinton in a head to head election.  No other Republican candidate has a chance because it will take extreme positions to outscore her in a media field that is clearly in her corner.  You can’t play nice with her and win.  You have to hit her lower than she is willing to go, which is lower than most anybody can fathom.

Trump has many business interests around the world, particularly in the UAE, so he’s showing Republican voters that he is willing to go against his own interests to do what he thinks is right—which dispels one of the concerns Republicans have with Trump.  The New York billionaire has had a friendly relationship with the Clintons in the past, so Trump has to prove that he will hit Hillary hard and not go soft as a candidate.  So this Muslim debate does several things that are needed for Trump and the nation and he has orchestrated it all very brilliantly.  It puts the issues of Muslim terrorist cells hiding behind the religion on the front burner for discussion which is needed.  Complacency will only lead to many more domestic attacks—particularly through the Christmas Season.  Trump has also thrown cold water on the millions of dollars of attack ads that Jeb Bush and John Kasich have taken out against him ahead of the primaries.  The money of those other Republican presidential candidates and their donors has been completely wasted, so of course they are mad at Trump.  Then of course there is the Obama administration that is quietly terrified of a Trump nominee, as there will be unfettered criticism and bombastic dissemination of Obama and his former employee Hillary Clinton in his last year as president, establishing his legacy forever as a complete failure. Of course they think Trump is unqualified to be president, because they have set the bar so low that Trump would be unable to live under that bar.  Trump is promising to make fools of all of them and that’s the real fear of the comments about Muslims.   They don’t care about those people of religion; they care about being exposed as political losers.

The way that ABC presented that report was interesting, it was essentially no different from school kids debating who the best band is, or what is fashionable or not fashionable.  If a kid in school distinguishes themselves as a stand-out from the crowd, they get picked on endlessly until they comply with the recommendations of mass association.  Peer pressure is what public schools are all about—fitting into a crowd and merging with the collective opinion on a matter.  But real leaders are those who stand against the tide, who are the first to see a problem and offer a solution—even if nobody else understands it.  I was always one of those kids; I never fit neatly into place and constantly pushed back against the masses.  I never did what was expected of me, and now many years later, I have been proven correct time and time again.  Eventually people in the masses follow a good leader—they do come around to the correct way of thinking by necessity of their own survival.

Trump more than anything has shown himself to be a leader.  As the world turns against him he has managed to put himself on the front page of every newspaper in the world with hundreds of millions of dollars of free advertising showing himself to be willing to be a decisive leader—which is the most sought after trait that voters are looking for in the 2016 election.  There is no issue more important than that one to normal people outside of the Beltway.  The Trump comments were controversial, but there is no downside.  What he has done is made an investment that will pay off greatly by the time summer comes around in the northern hemisphere, and there will be no stopping him.

To prove themselves competent, authorities will have to bust terrorist cells during the Holiday season to prove they are doing their jobs—and they’ll do it to prove to Trump that all Muslims are not terrorists.  Because of their anger at Trump they will be forced to actually do their jobs for a change—something they wouldn’t have been motivated to do before Trump’s comments.  Likely we will all be a lot safer for the short run as Muslims themselves seek to push their radicals out of the darkness into the light of day to avoid association which will only help our Homeland Security investigations. And the Obama administration for helping these terrorists gain strength will be forced to pick sides—which they obviously don’t want to do.

All this will play in favor of Trump going into the fall of 2016 where he’ll be poised to take credit for it all—because it was his actions that provoked all the behavior change which left unchecked would have led to many more San Bernardino shootings.  Of course the political establishment doesn’t understand all these techniques of strategy, which is why they are the ones not qualified to be president.  All this that Trump is doing is outlined in his very good book on business, The Art of the Deal.  There is no secret—he spells it out for all to see.  Anybody with half a brain would know what he’s doing—and fortunately, many Americans do have a brain when they are given the right things to think about.

This is the only way to break loose the issues that are destroying our nation—the bad guys have to be rooted out and exposed in this fashion.  I know a thing or two about these strategies and have used them myself many times.  They work in both small and large situations.  But in Trump’s case, they will strike fear into his enemies when he takes the desk of the Oval Office.  He will be in a wonderful negotiation position by then, because it does pay to be a little wild.  Often it pays very well.  But to sell that wildness you have to be willing to carry out an act when called upon.  And if you have to pick something to display it, you do it with the most strategic subject possible so that if you do have to pull the trigger you accomplish another objective with the wildness.  That’s why Trump is the best.  And that’s why he SHOULD certainly be president.  You don’t win by playing patty cake.  You win with being a little crazy when it counts most.  Christmas of 2015 after a terrorist attack that the current president is avoiding to name is a good place to start.  New York will be safer because of Trump’s wildness, and so will everyone else.

 

Rich “Cliffhanger” Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

http://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

 

Gun Smoke, Hoppe’s, and Leather: How Second Call Defense preserves a fundamental American right


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With all the calls for gun control peculating from recent terrorist attacks it has been good for me to spend much more time with my guns than I usually do, just to balance out the obvious intrusion that political leftists intend on our rights as American citizens. I have been practicing a lot in my home gun range the new skill of Cowboy Fast Draw. While I have a long way to go before I get where I want to be, it has been a lot of fun getting there. In my home shop I can now reload my ammunition and shoot it within a few feet from my work bench and that is something that I cherish as a right.

The reason I became a recruiter for Second Call Defense is because it is the biggest fight presently in politics. I have spent a lot of time on other issues leading up to this latest crusade, such as education, and economic matters—political philosophy and related items, but guns are at the center of our capitalist culture and they require a defense—an articulate defense. So for me to provide some of the needed help—the words needed to frame the argument properly, I need to step into that realm with both feet. If you are going to promote conceal and open carry as a solution to many of the modern problems we are facing, you have to also provide people with the protections they need if they take your advice. I don’t want to get a bunch of people in trouble for using a firearm in their constitutionally protected right to defend their property. I’d like to keep them out of trouble for listening to me. Second Call Defense gives me that ability; I can promote firearms for self-defense while offering a legal protection in case something happens. Until the emergence of Second Call Defense, there wasn’t any such protection—so it was hard for me to promote something that might disrupt the lives of the people who listen to me.image

But I’ll have to say that I’m having a good time with it. It’s difficult to get into shooting for sport if you can’t use your firearms, but at least locally where I live there is a new shooting range going in near Port Union—a classy facility that looks fantastic. I’ve watched the building go together over the last few months and have been impressed with its construction. The facility is called Premier Shooting & Training Center and is located in West Chester focusing on a February opening. It will be the place in town to shoot the firearms of choice. I have already been told that my .500 Magnum will be welcome there. Then of course there is the ability to shoot at your own home, which is a treasure in itself.

There really is no better smell in the world than Hoppe’s bore cleaning solvent, leather, and gun smoke. Those are the smells of freedom—it’s the smell of America. It is what gives us our freedom, the right to bear arms. It is unique in the world in that guns are intended to protect the property of mankind which for the first time in history has decided that acquisitions obtained through capitalist enterprise needs private protection. That is the purpose of guns, to keep malicious people from cheating at life and stealing the fruits of labor—the things acquired in the game of life. There is no better smell than those three items because they are the smell of freedom. As I shot in my little private work area on Sunday watching football games and enjoying the company of my many tools, it was that scent that made me want to take a moment to appreciate what it’s all for.image

By becoming a member of Second Call Defense you can rest easily in using your firearm in concealed carry conditions. If you do use that firearm, the terrifying legal issues that follow are much less menacing. Just call the number on your membership card and let the attorneys at Second Call handle the case from there. There are five categories of protection, entry-level, or Basic, Advocate, Defender, Protector, and Ultimate. From Defender through Ultimate Second Call Defense even offers a gun replacement or retrieval of a beloved firearm during or after a court proceeding. One thing that happens after a gun related shooting is that guns are confiscated for evidence and if you happen to have a lot of history with that firearm, it will have sentimental value. Second Call Defense will do what it can to get your gun back once the case is put to rest. If it is impossible, then they offer to replace the gun. That would come in handy if the gun is a valuable one, something in excess of $1000. Or perhaps the gun is one that you intend to pass down to a son or daughter, with Second Call Defense; you have the best chance there is of getting that gun back. And that’s a very good thing. Of course the price per month increases for the higher coverage, but after spending countless hours cleaning your guns with Hoppe’s in your home shop, you tend to bond with those friends, and until Second Call Defense came along, there wasn’t anything that could be done with law enforcement when they did confiscate guns.

I don’t have a very high impression of the police—I know they are needed, and many of them do good work, but I have had lots of bad experiences with them. Most of those experiences are that I’ve never trusted them to do what I can do myself, and they seem to know that about me. They tend to be contentious in personal interactions because I’m not the submissive type and I with them because I personally despise authority figures—in every form. When I was first gunsmithing many years ago, I had a FFA license to practice and all the credentials it took to operate a shop at my personal residence. So I had to talk to government people, and I didn’t like it. There were too many rules and they all had very stuffy approaches to their jobs. They seemed too eager to throw barriers in front of you so that they would have less work to do. My respect for them was much lower after I had to work with them for a while. About that time my wife who was young and extremely beautiful—a top tier model type who was working as a receptionist at her parent’s business had to deal with a few cops investigating a break-in where her dad had lost some valuables. They knew she was married, she told them what I did because they asked and they seemed to get cockier in their questioning. The entire purpose of their visit was to get information on the break-in. Instead an older cop and his younger partner were more interested in hitting on my wife trying to exert authority upon her to get her to tolerate their sexual advances. “I won’t cheat on my husband,” she eventually said to them. But then the old fat one said, “but will you lay still while I do?” Her dad was in the other room and heard the whole thing. The cops had no fear of ramifications from their actions because they were the embodiments of the law. They knew her dad wanted them to resolve his case and they knew I needed to maintain my FFA license, because they bragged about how they knew ATF agents in town hinting that they could make life rough on me—if they wanted.

I stewed over that incident for at least two years—actually it still makes me very angry when I think about it. But needless to say, I gave up gunsmithing and decided to hold jobs that avoided that kind of manipulation—where someone could exert that kind of authority over my life. But I always loved gunsmithing and the idea of it. While that incident might have shaped my feelings about government authority for life—I didn’t let my love of gunsmithing and guns in general erode away. I was only 19 at that time, but now I’m much older, and times have changed—as well as the politics. I have much more powerful weapons now than guns to use against incursions—I have the gift of the written word, which I have been able to use much better than the best snipers on the planet in accomplishing my intended goals. Guns are just tools in the scheme of things.

But that doesn’t rival the smell of freshly discharged gun powder and Hoppe’s solvent with a newly made leather holster hanging from your hip. Those are the kinds of smells that brought my interest toward guns in the first place and many years later have reinvigorated my interest. However, it is Second Call Defense that has made it all possible for me. Knowing that such a defense exists puts my mind at ease in promoting firearms once again. In those early days of gunsmithing, it was obvious that there were cops, like those two that hit on my wife that would sell confiscated firearms in an auction or on the black market without a second thought and there was no defense against that type of harassment. Gun owners had to put up or shut up, or face arrest, or legal harassment through permit compliance—or some other government means of control. Without such a defense, I just couldn’t recommend such a lifestyle to people without the possibility of intrusion—because there is nothing like losing a gun you care about to legal red tape. It’s not as rough as losing a family member, but it’s close—because when you work with guns and clean them, maintain them, they become characters in your life that you treasure. And law enforcement can confiscate them at will with a trumped-up charge—which happens more than it should. Second Call Defense offers a protection against that kind of thing for the first time. If Second Call Defense had been around 25 years ago, I would have continued being a gunsmith to this day. It is better late than never though, and at least now it’s an option. And knowing that makes that gun smoke and Hoppe’s smell a whole lot better.

Rich “Cliffhanger” Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

Why ISIS Terrorists Want to Kill Americans: What it means to eat from the Tree of Life

I have listened to countless hours of talk radio and watched many segments on television, read many articles from the mainstream press and all have missed the mark in identifying why San Bernardino assassins Syed Farok and his wife Tashfeen Malik dropped off their six month old child at a grandmother’s house telling the unsuspecting woman that they were going to the doctor, neglecting to give any hints that they would probably never return—no final goodbyes to their child or parents, no hint of what was to come. Then to get back in their car and go to the government office where Farok worked to kill 14 people and wound many others in what they knew would become an international incident of terror. But why–how could that possibly have been justified in their minds to give up so much and to bring so much hurt to others if they were such devoted Muslims who read from the Quran so intently—supposedly a book of peace?

The answer is a rather disturbing one, and it cannot be reasoned with by fancy appeasement speeches and psychological evaluations. But it does explain why Barack Obama sympathizes with terrorism and why the political left seems to take similar positions against America as the San Bernardino shooters did. Ironically the answer is within the 2014 movie Noah by Darren Aronofsky—in how progressive types interpret Biblical events and the type of maniacal behavior that can sometimes be associated with religion. I’m one who enjoyed Noah by Aronofsky. I like Aronofsky’s work, particularly Pi, Requiem for a Dream and The Wrestler, so I gave Noah a chance, and immediately recognized within it distinct elements not just from the book of Genesis, but the Book of Enoch—which is a kind of deleted scenes group of stories from the Bible. Aronofsky certainly intended to shake up the foundations of the viewing public by throwing The Book of Enoch into the traditional story of Genesis—and I thought it was a pretty good idea to combine action film elements with the classic story to form a unique mythology. The response from the religious community was brutal and Aronofsky was deeply criticized. The film did pretty well at the global box office and was an ambitious project which I enjoyed. But of course there is more to it—as there always is.

In Aronofsky’s Noah, the biblical character was a bit of a madman following the will of the Creator with a maniacal ambition that could have easily been interpreted as insane. There are many hints to a time before Noah through his grandfather who lives atop a mountain protected by the fallen angels known as The Watchers. This grandfather Methuselah was played by Anthony Hopkins quite brilliantly and obviously possessed a Merlin like quality directly inherited from Enoch. Methuselah lived the longest of the Noah family at 969 years which is interesting. I happen to believe quite emphatically that the Bible has many missing chapters and what has been presented to the public at large through the churches over time are only the pacifist passages, and not the whole work—only the parts that would placate the masses. So I enjoyed very much the back story elements of Genesis within the movie Noah. This is quite a study in itself, but lets not get off track, the purpose of this article is to understand the rationalization behind terrorism and how religion can provoke such extremism. It could be said that many of the characters in Noah were radicals in their own way, Noah for building an Ark based on a vision from the Creator leading his family to safety through the end times for a rebirth of civilization, and Noah’s Tubal-cain who had an almost Ayn Rand concept of mankind—which I actually agreed with. In Aronofsky’s version of Noah Russell Crow’s self sacrifice as the classic Biblical character was an environmental one that very neatly pressed in the modern Green Movement into the film’s message as Tubal-can played by Ray Winstone was a pro man type of capitalist. I enjoyed all the various perspectives even though I don’t agree with much of it. I noticed the obvious Hollywood politics quickly which of course spilled over into the Obama Climate Summit in Paris.

Leading up the San Bernardino shootings Obama and his friends were in Paris which is still recovering from acts of ISIS terrorism of their own and declared that global warming was the greatest menace facing our world. If you really get to the meat of what they believe, they are not unlike Noah in Aronofsky’s movie. They want to erase mankind from the earth and return the world back to nature—so from their perspective, global warming is the greatest threat—because they don’t like the achievements of mankind. To Obama and his progressive friends, they have radicalized their foundations of social communism and economic Marxism into a new religion centering on the environment, which ties directly to the movie Noah—who believed he was not being saved to keep mankind alive, but to save the animals of the earth from Tubal-cain’s vile superiority as a species of man. In typical Christian understanding the moral of Genesis was a combination of Tubal-cain and Noah, but in Aronofsky’s interpretation, it was directed at the environmentalists who have a great desire to start a new religion of earth worship making the whole planet a kind of eternal Garden of Eden. Keep that in mind.

As anyone who has read the Quran knows, it is essentially another version of the Biblical Old Testament–it shares many of the same characters as it’s Christian counterpart and I believe with that book as I do with the Bible that the chapters were put together by former emperors and religious leaders to control their populations with stories conducive with “service”—so there are missing elements that will likely never be recovered but through myth and legend. This is the book that many of these modern terrorists are gravitating to, and with a singular focus such as what Syed Farok obviously displayed—where peripheral concerns were ignored, much like the prophets from the Quran assumed that they were the hand of god doing the work of a higher purpose even if it meant an end to the human race. If taken literally, the characters from the Old Testament and the Quran were extremely self-sacrificial and functioning from their unique connection to their deities. To the outside world this appears quite insane, but to them, it is justified.

Now enter the communist spread from the Soviet Union that is behind the current environmental concerns and the Islamic caliphate which has adopted various degrees of Marxism as a means toward collectivism to assimilate more closely with Allah. The goal of such assimilation is to recognize that one’s spirit belongs to Allah and that whatever he wishes for us, we must perform. To them the villain of Islam is the kind of mentality that Tubal-cain exhibited. Of course Tubal-cain is the West, Israel, the United States, Europe and all places that have elements of capitalism within their cultures—because capitalism is the religion of “man,” not of the “Creator” whatever name is placed upon it.

Viewed in this context things make a lot more sense—politicians like Obama use global warming as a way to attack western ways and the Tubal-cain nature of mankind—the capitalism of the United States. Radical Islam uses the prophet heroes of the Quran to do the same, their motive is to show Allah that they are pure in spirit and not attached to the evils of capitalism—that their values of self-sacrifice are paramount and worthy of an eternal walk in the Garden of Eden—that they don’t identify with the paradox of knowledge of good and evil, but that they eat from the “Tree of Life.”

I’ve read all these books—many times actually, and am 100% sure that when Syed Farok and his wife Tashfeen Malik dropped off their six month old child at grandmother’s house forever that they weren’t emotional about the issue, and that they didn’t feel bad lying to family members about what they were about to do. I would go so far to suggest that they purposely kept their eye on the higher goal of appeasing Allah because they justified their lives as eating from the Tree of Life-not the Tubal-cain based capitalism that corrupts mankind from the perspective of the Marxist. And thus, you have the reason that Obama cannot condemn Islam, and why global warming is the greatest threat to civilization. It’s not mankind that they are protecting, but mother earth and they share with radical Islam the belief that the capitalist West is the shared villain of their religious doctrines and that all of them are willing to sacrifice their life in the here and now for the benefits of an eternal afterlife with the “father.” And if you are a president with daddy issues like Obama is, an everlasting father in the clouds of heaven is an appealing idea. What he shares with the terrorist Syed Farok is the desire to end capitalism and all the Tubal-cain’s of existence for the might of a savor only written about in books ultimately controlled by churches and politics reflecting a fragmented past not conducive with the ambitions of America.

The goal of the terrorist of course whether it is the literal attempts by radicals like Syed Farok or politicians like Obama who obviously sympathizes with terror acts as his friend Bill Ayers from Chicago shares much in ideology with Farok—they intend to strike fear into mankind to force them to give up individual freedoms in favor of collective enterprise. And to their rational, if people have to die to serve the greater good of their maniacal deities, then so be it. They do so with their eyes off this terrestrial existence toward a greater good defined by their religions, whether that religion is Islam, or the more modern Mother Earth worship. All those ideologies share a common past one that spans the centuries. More recently it is rooted in communism, but it spans back further toward the desire of ancient rulers to keep their subjects under submission through religion that all these beliefs were fostered. If taken correctly many of the lost books of the Bible and the Quran, there would likely be different values expressed, but we’ll never know. Aronofsky played with the idea a bit in Noah, but ultimately carried the message of his film toward the values of his dinner time friends around Hollywood—the religion of conservation—and the desire to reacquaint themselves with the Garden of Eden as agents of light. Syed Farok and his wife obviously felt so strongly in their actions against the villainous West that they were willing to sacrifice everything to terrorize that representation of Tubal-cain into submission to the collectivism of Allah—even if it meant never seeing their child again.

But they all have it wrong, Aronofsky, Farok, Obama, and all the church leaders who edited these religious texts for the purpose of social control. Man wasn’t meant to stay in a Garden of Eden built by a creator. Man is the creator, and it is the task of civilization to build a Garden of Eden for each and every one of us to live within. Because when we finally peel away all the mysteries of quantum mechanics we will find that the creator wasn’t out there somewhere, but always inside. As Jesus said, “the Kingdom of God is all around us but men do not see it.” That statement didn’t mean that men were to be graduated from only to reconcile through death with the creator of all things. It was intended to evolve mankind into a true understanding—and the reason that men do not see the Garden of Eden in their own lives is because they are listening to all the wrong sources. Go to Trump Tower in Manhattan and you will see the Garden of Eden, the Kingdom of God—the Tree of Life. You will see the gates of heaven built through capitalism and the morality of productivity for the first time in human history. And that is why Syed Farok is a villain of epic proportions rooted in a medieval religion that is outdated and manipulated through the ages toward collectivism by power-hungry rulers who wanted nothing else but to control the masses to their selfish desires for terrestrial concerns.

For those who want to know my source material for this article, consult the metaphorical Tree of Life. The rest of these idiots are still eating from the Tree of Knowledge and they weren’t supposed to.

Rich “Cliffhanger” Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

Proof That American Muslims Celebrated During 9/11: The selective amnesia of mainstream media

It is truly astonishing the level of collective hypnosis that is occurring on the topic of radicalized Muslims within the United States. Exchanges like the one below on the Morning Joe with Donald Trump continue, where they berate him for his assertion that there were cheering Muslims in New Jersey who were having block parties in celebration as the World Trade Center buildings came down on 9/11 2001. I saw it, my family saw it, and obviously Donald Trump saw it. I know it was a long time ago and YouTube had not been invented yet. I also understand that many of today’s reporters were probably just learning to read in grade school so they probably don’t remember. They think the world and its history started once YouTube came to life in 2005 where video was suddenly readily available anytime to anyone. However, I’m sure there is video of the occurrences, we know what some of those Islamic groups were called—so it shouldn’t be too hard to dig up the video proving correct what Donald Trump is now saying—because we all saw it that were alive and cognoscente back then. I think many people are just choosing to forget about it because the implication is so scary that people would rather not know of it. One of the groups cheering was an organization that became Revolution Islam. Before we get into that, have a look and listen to the extreme denial displayed on that Morning Joe program. It really is astonishing. There is evidence to the contrary of what they are saying in the very next video.

Revolution Islam was known as recently as 2009 to protest outside of mosques in New York City trying to recruit peaceful Muslims into their radical agenda. They openly celebrated 9/11, the Fort Hood shootings, and every act of terror catalogued by Islamic radicals anywhere in the world. As they say, the Quran commands them to terrorize non believers. They would gather in the streets of New York and shout down all passers-by right in the light of day. They made no attempt to hide their behavior and the media reported on it. CNN did as well as others. There may have been an attempt to re-edit history to favor a pro-Palestinian vantage point, or perhaps the oil barons threw money at news organizations to erase their past financing of terrorist activity, but something happened to hide the videos from 2001 showing groups like Revolution Islam cheering in the streets after 9/11. But you can bet on it, those videos are out there, the news organizations just need to dig them out. Revolution Islam is part of a fringe group within the United States of radical Islamic fundamentalists who want a global caliphate and they will stop at nothing to get it. They openly worshipped Osama Bin Laden with great love—even saying that they cared more about him than themselves. Don’t believe me; well watch the video below from Anderson Cooper’s show 360 on CNN. He’s a credible source and did a story on this group with a sit down interview in 2009. I have no question CNN could dig up in their files the video of the cheering Muslims as the 9/11 towers were falling down. I know what I saw. If they need help searching their data bases just look under this group’s name, Revolution Islam. Likely the FBI, CIA, and every other news organization have the same video. Even if they don’t, or have destroyed them, this video at least shows the remnants of their behavior before they went into hiding after the terrorist attacks. These radicals were still operating out in the open.

If you haven’t already, make sure to copy this video on a private file so that you’ll have it later. If you are reading this story a week or so after I have written it and the video is gone, it’s because it was pulled from YouTube. As of this writing over a million people have seen the video, but if it gets out in the open it will likely be removed. It’s hard to say where Google’s loyalties are in regard to this global desire to help radical Muslims establish a global caliphate rooted in Dark Ages mentality. I wouldn’t think that Google or other forward leaning organizations would support this kind of censorship, but you never know. I am surprised that the collective media is so adamant about creating a separation between Muslim behavior and radical Islamists because the proof has been quite evident for a number of years. CNN’s report shown above is all the proof you need to comprehend the scope of the problem.

There really are only two explanations—we are talking about an Alex Jones massive conspiracy theory involving globalists who are using Islamic fundamentalists to perpetuate war and anxiety so that Americans will give up their Constitutional rights in favor of a global government which they control—or Americans endured such a trauma on 9/11 that they have eliminated the facts from their minds to deal with the terrible tragedy. After all, we all know Muslim people and want to think of them as nice and peaceful. Nobody wants to think that the person they know could be one of these nut-case terrorists so perhaps we have blocked out the unpleasant thought in favor of a national dialogue that preserves our sanity. Such bad news isn’t good for television ratings, and maybe that is the reason for the mass elimination of video from that period. But one thing is very clear—there were American Muslims very happy about 9/11 and they were celebrating.

Living in New York Donald Trump surely saw the CNN story and reflected back to the 9/11 period eight years prior. As much as Donald Trump had been interviewed and pays attention to the news—I have no doubt that he saw such reports in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. I remember such things too. I certainly remember the celebrations overseas, and I remember having discussions with people about homegrown Muslims sympathizing with the World Trade Center attackers—that were generated by what we saw on TV. After 9/11 a lot of Muslims felt they had to go underground so they hid their religion for a time. There were lots of reports from the media who felt sorry for these people as the established order of things took on the Muslim cause almost as a civil rights issue. Much of the bad behavior that we feared about radical Islam was being ignored so that innocent people wouldn’t be caught in the crossfire. Without question that is why so many young reporters today are reluctant to criticism of Islam in any way—even if the evidence points right into the doors of a mosque.

Over time it became so unfashionable to criticize radical Islamic behavior that the media had decided to ignore it. They put them in the same class as other minorities in America propping them up as a civil rights issue and threw their support behind massive America collection programs like the NSA hoping that Homeland Security would protect them from further attacks. When those attacks did come the blame was placed everywhere but the obvious. Fort Hood became a situation of “workplace violence” while the Boston Marathon Bombing became a couple of misunderstood children—not focusing on their radical Islamic exposure as the cause of the violence. For the same reasons that many people can’t remember much of the events during a violent automobile accident—because the brain shuts down as a survival mechanism—Islamic terror is undergoing the same type of process across American society, and the media certainly has a huge case of that selective amnesia. Whatever the cause of it, whether conspiracy, or psychological—it is a factor that shows up glaringly in these Donald Trump interviews with the media. They chose not to remember, yet the presidential candidate does—just as many do and the evidence is there for everyone to see.

Even if there is never any evidence of video from 2001, it cannot be denied that there weren’t American Muslims who were just as crazy as the typical ISIS terrorist now. CNN interviewed them with a credible journalist who was mainstream—and gay. Anderson Cooper is as harmless toward advocating false conspiracies as it gets. He interviewed members of Revolution Islam to get the facts and they weren’t hard to get. Those people were standing in front of a mosque advertising to fellow Muslims why they should become radicalized. What Donald Trump is saying isn’t conspiracy, or even politically incorrect. It’s a fact, as clear as the daytime sun on a cloudless day. The only difference is Trump hasn’t decided to ignore the facts he’s observed through history—while the general public and the media have. Yet that doesn’t change the threat level, and that is something we all need to take very seriously. Not every Muslim is a radical. But it only takes one or two, and given the recent history of treacherous acts, terrorists aren’t coming out of Christianity, Buddhism, or Hinduism—they are coming out of the Islamic religion. All that anybody needs to do is pay attention to the obvious.

Sorry to say it to the people who don’t support Trump, but he’s right again. He has a good reason to double down on the issue. Because he’s not wrong.

Rich “Cliffhanger” Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

A Review of ‘Crippled America’: The bargain of Donald Trump, my dream presidential candidate

I started on Donald Trump’s new book, Crippled America during Thanksgiving morning 2015 about two hours before the Macy’s parade and ended about an hour and a half after, just before our lunchtime feast. It wasn’t a very big book and was an easy read. It was written so people with very basic reading skills would have no trouble with it. For the first 25 pages I couldn’t help but think that Trump probably dictated the whole book to somebody because it sounded an awful lot like his campaign speeches, of which I’ve listened to quite a lot of. I didn’t anticipate that I’d learn very much new about Trump that I didn’t already know. However, by the time I closed the book just before the turkey was placed on our table, I felt refreshed and happy that such a guy was running for presidential office. I have been a Trump supporter since his campaign speech in June at Trump Tower so I was already in his camp. Leading up to his announcement it has been my strong feeling for years, going all the way back to Ross Perot, that successful business people needed to be in government, not the unproven lawyers that we have now—so Trump as president makes sense to me. After reading Crippled America it was clear to me that Trump should be handing these books out at campaign events, because it turned out to be a pretty good book, especially the second half after he warmed up a bit. The first half was pretty typical to his campaign platform, but the second half delved more into the man himself, the character behind the drama, the hype, and the brand—to the person who just wants to restore the American nation from the dilapidated mess that it currently is.

As I closed the book I understood Donald Trump. He was still that 28-year-old developer taking on impossible projects that nobody else could touch and turning them into marvels the world would gawk at. Trump isn’t nearly the egoist that his persona projects, he’s a very passionate developer who just likes to make things. His run for president is not about power or prestige, he already has those things. What he wants to do is restore America like he has so many failed properties around the world. It’s a massive restoration project that has his natural inclinations salivating to see if he can pull it off in his final years of life—the perfect period to an American story that he has been gloriously successful at writing. Trump is not the kind of man who is happy just dining his way into the sunset with a beautiful family and wealth beyond measure. He wants to be in the trenches fighting, and at the stage of life that he’s in currently only the restoration project of President of the United States suits his polished tastes. He has everything a man could want—literally, except one thing—completion of the greatest challenge perhaps the world has ever seen. America is a crippled superpower heavily in debt, defeated in spirit because of over 20 years of gross government mismanagement, and a country that has lost its global respect. Trump intends quite sincerely to turn all that around within a few terms as president. He even says in the book that he plans to actually accomplish more in the first 90 days than Obama has in 7 years. And I believe him, especially after reading his book, because he does get into details on how to do it—complete with examples.

Politically it was the usual stuff, discussions about the economy, taxes, the state of the nation, infrastructure, foreign policy and what he thinks he can do that’s better than everyone else. In that way Trump’s book sounds like Ben Carson’s, and Hillary Clinton’s. But there’s more to it—another layer that was not so obviously camouflaged. There is a swagger to Trump that indicates he could actually pull it off. With every other political candidate and commenter alike who have written such books—from Glenn Beck to Rand Paul—and I’ve read them all—nobody but Trump stands a chance of accomplishing even a small portion of the promises—because the political system itself is set up to prevent any action—and to feed the shadow government of lobbyists and political donations which essentially fuel all the politics of the Beltway.

Trump has a plan for just about everything and he has the confidence based on his reputation to pull off 100% of what’s in his book. I was actually impressed by his swagger, which is saying something. I have personally hired hundreds of people so I’ve interviewed perhaps thousands over the last decade and I’ve developed quite a bullshit detector. I know when someone presents an inflated résumé to me, and I know when raw passion is displayed for the hiring. Trump is raw passion with an understated résumé of which Crippled America is essentially. Getting to know Trump becomes much more evident toward the last third of the book where he talks about all his building projects over the years and when you realize just how much he’s accomplished in just three decades, its pretty earth shattering. Just considering what he did from 1974 with the Commodore Hotel in New York City to the opening of Trump Tower in 1983 is mind-blowing as an individual measurement, with just a loan from his father to take on the world of real estate in New York City which is arguably on of the most complicated and expensive in the world. He is an impressive figure radiating with confidence which is obvious in every word of his book. Based on his résumé and how he communicated it, I’d have to hire him just to see if he could do it. Our last president was a community organizer and he ran the country with that strength in his wheel house. Obama gets excited about Ferguson riots, but could care less about $19 trillion in debt. Bush the younger ran the country as a rich daddy’s boy—which he was. His dad wished he had completed the mission in Iraq, but didn’t so the boy finished the job—to his own detriment. Following the orders of his daddy was in Bush’s wheel house so he did so in that fashion. Clinton during the 90s was a free partying womanizer associated with criminals, drug smuggling and murder as governor of Arkansas. So he ran the country as if it were the mob. And that’s pretty much what we got. There hasn’t been anybody like Trump—ever. He’s successful, accomplished, and at the top of his game—and he’s even more confident than I think most people can even register. Out of all the candidates in this century or the last, Trump is the most poised candidate ever to put his name on a ticket. We have to give him a chance or we are just stupid as a nation, because he is certainly the most qualified presidential candidate.

And that’s where Crippled America gets interesting. Trump knows why the media is against him, and why the political parties are terrified of him. He’s more aware of it than even he’ll let on in his speeches—it comes out in his writing. When he is given time and a free stump without opposition he can really string together a number of complicated thoughts about matters. He’s much smarter than he lets on—that much is very clear. If Trump becomes president the entire political system falls apart. He has been a powerful political contributor and they loved him then. But now he’s crossing over into their world and he knows where the bodies are buried—and they don’t like it. The political class has been “apathetic” to say the least in the United States. They have made good livings for themselves doing nothing. They know if Trump is elected than there will be other business types who follow and a chain reaction will start that will end their way of life. Business people will begin to enter public office from the local school board president to the governors of states. The term “politician” will take on an entirely new meaning. Trump plans to run the White House like he does his businesses and that scares K-Street immensely. They will be exposed and Trump will use that leverage to get the arm twisting he needs done accomplished.

As I closed the book and thought about all the things I’m grateful for—which is a lot—I think for the first time ever I had hope for our political future. I’ve voted for people before who I thought might shake things up a bit and accomplish a nice thing or two. But Trump is offering to revamp America as a restoration project from Social Security, private sector driven health care, to making concealed carry a statewide option—like getting a driver’s license. I think I’d vote for Donald Trump just because he wants to make concealed carry good in all 50 states. I’m surprised he doesn’t talk more about that issue—because it’s a big one. He wants to simplify the tax code and demand respect from our trade imbalances. He planes to renew our infrastructure and dramatically increase our economic growth. His presidency would be a trend setting endeavor that would change all elections in the future. So for me the turkey tasted just a bitter knowing that Trump is running for president. And given his polling numbers in spite of everything that’s been thrown at him he has a great chance of winning. The political establishment however is fighting for its very life and will do anything it can to keep Trump out of the White House. The difference between my hopes for change in the past and this one is that I think Trump is just getting started and he knows how to work through that minefield and still come out of the other side dancing through the fire. Any apprehension I had about Trump was erased with Crippled America. Using his book as a résumé there really is no other option. He is the most accomplished candidate in the field to do what he says, and he’s most poised to put a stop to the current political process of fundraising and K-Street shadow governments.   If he did just 1% of what he promised in Crippled America he’d go down as the greatest president in the history of the world. But as I cut the turkey on my plate I realized that he had the potential to accomplish all 100%. And that is really something to smile about.

Rich “Cliffhanger” Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

Rodizio at Liberty Center: Review after the first full month of opening — a vacation in our own back yards

To be completely honest, when I travel it is usually the restaurants that I remember most and what I look forward to experiencing before hand. Maybe it’s just the primal need for food and its connection to our daily life that does it, but restaurants reflect most about whatever culture I’m visiting. For instance, when traveling to my favorite amusement park, the Epcot Center in Florida it isn’t the rides that I think of most afterwards, it’s the chance to eat at all the various restaurants representing the different countries. It’s like traveling the world without the pain of all the border crossings and language barriers. Usually when I’m planning a trip, whether it’s to another country or another city within the United States, I scout ahead to the dinning options available and look forward to concluding whatever business I have in those places, so that I can enjoy a unique restaurant experience.

Given that little prequel it should be obvious then why I have taken such a liking to the Rodizio Grill at Liberty Center. It’s an exotic joy that is just as authentic, if not more so, than if I visited a steakhouse in Brazil, but it’s just down the road from me saving the plane fees to get there. After a hard day, or week I can visit the Rodizio at Liberty Center and feel like I took a vacation—which I consider invaluable to stress management—so I feel grateful to have one of these Rodizio restaurants so close now in southern Ohio. There are only two in all of Ohio, one in Columbus and now the one at Liberty Center. There are a few in Colorado, a few in Florida, one in Louisiana, one in Minnesota, Nebraska and New Jersey. So there are a respectable number of them in the United States—but for most of the country it is a journey to get to one of the locations. The Rodizio at Liberty Center is literally down the road for me so given that convenience and my love of a vacation experience even if it’s just for a few hours, it shouldn’t be a surprise that I have been there several times in just the first month of its opening. My wife and I were fortunate enough to be invited to a VIP opening on October 27 2015 and we enjoyed it so much that we took our daughter there for her 25th birthday exactly one month later.

I had been there other times in between, most of them professionally based, but this last time was different—it was my family, so out of all the nice places around the city of Cincinnati, I wanted my little girl to have the best opportunity. I have eaten at most places around the city of Cincinnati. I am very familiar with the various restaurants along the Fields Ertle exit just outside of nearby Mason. But there is nothing like this Brazilian steakhouse outside of downtown Cincinnati. However I prefer the suburbs to downtown mainly because of parking, so it was a no brainer on the decision. I wanted to take her to the Rodizio for a unique, “worldly” experience that I think she deserves—because she’s a good kid who deserves to be pampered on her birthday.

My measure of steakhouses is of course Jags in West Chester which I consider to be the best in the area. Jeff Ruby’s Steak House on Fountain Square is a close second. But these are very expensive establishments. The food is very good, of course, but it’s more a place to be seen, or to raise an impression with a client then the actual functionality of those places. I put the Rodizio at Liberty Center above those steakhouses for one simple reason. The food is on par with those upper crest establishments—but the atmosphere is much more ambitious at Rodizio, and the food supply is limitless. The full Rodizio experience is essentially an all you can eat buffet—an endless supply of fresh vegetables, fruits and salads with some of the best cuts of meat that you can find anywhere—such as the Maminha which is a tri-tip sirloin steak with a moderate marbled-to-lean cut presented medium to medium rare right at your table. The Gauchos bring the meats to your table and present a slice to your plate directly. They will keep coming until you turn your table indicator to red letting them know to either give you a break, or to bring your check. The Picanha is a slice of top sirloin that rivals the best of what any steakhouse anywhere can provide and it’s presented in whatever quantities you can hold as the customer. At the birthday lunch for my daughter they were circulating roughly 7 different types of meat and a standout was the Miolo Da Paleta and the Garlic Beef. Lunch is $19.95 for the full Rodizio experience which I think is an absolute bargain. At dinner the selections increase to well over 10 items including lamb. Dinner is just shy of $33 dollars per person. I’ve now been to Rodizio enough to begin knowing the various cuts of meat on sight which seemed very exotic upon my first visit. They still are, but now they are like familiar friends.

My concern after the VIP dinner was that the management at Rodizio was putting their best foot forward to win over community leaders, but that the food quality would subside after a few weeks of a hard open to the general public. As of this writing Rodizio at Liberty Center has been open for only a month, but their food quality is as good as it was on that first special night. Each time I have been to Rodizio since, which has been at least once a week, Captain Hook, the head chef has personally come to my table to make sure the food quality is up to par. He welcomes criticism because he is aiming at perfection—which impresses me in any endeavor. I continue to be impressed with Captain Hook and the management at Rodizio purely from a business standpoint. It is a real challenge to offer so much fresh food to an unpredictable public. Dinners at Rodizio are busy, so make sure to make reservations. Lunches are something that local residents haven’t yet discovered so the rushes have been sporadic. Yet Captain Hook prepares large quantities of food to accommodate without putting the restaurant in an obvious strain. The kitchen might feel the pressure, but it doesn’t show on the floor where the customers are. Pricing wise, and by function Rodizio is like a hot rod healthy version of the Golden Corral, or a Frisch’s breakfast bar. In those places the food is prepared in mass quantities and sits under hot plates for hours. The food can be good, but you know you’re at a smorgasbord so you don’t expect high quality food. Rodizio has the same challenges, but they’re competing with the best of the steakhouses in the city so the food quality challenge by Captain Hook and the management is to balance out need with supply. I’ve been to Rodizio on really busy nights and during sporadic lunches and the food quality under all those conditions has been very high. They maintain items ranging from Ovo de Codorna (marinated quail eggs) to Salada de Cogumelo (mushroom salad)—fairly complex arrangements all presented very fresh—and I have yet to see the food quality drop.

The 27th of November happened to be Black Friday at Liberty Center and it was good to see the place  bulging with business. People have discovered the place and at just after 6 PM, there wasn’t a parking space to be found except in the very back of the complex. After the first thirty days of opening my family has been there at least 20 times—so Liberty Center has become very important to our social life. We’ve now eaten in most of the establishments—both the premier restaurants of which Rodizio is but one, and the offerings around the food court, and we have had pretty much positive experiences at all of them. I prefer the Rodizio because it is the most unusual of the dining options—it is the one that most feels like something you’d have while on vacation as opposed to just a night out on the town. Rodizio reminds me of something I’d have at the Epcot Center instead of at a local eatery—so I love it. But it’s not just that place, but all of Liberty Center which contributes to that vacation destination feel. If I were from out-of-town, I’d look forward most to visiting Liberty Center and restaurants like the Rodizio as the takeaway of my traveling experience. It’s that kind of place. I can’t help but think of how lucky some of the people who are leasing apartments and office space in the yet to be opened buildings where work, living, and pleasure will be offered in a one stop experience. When those places do open restaurants like Rodizio will be wonderful options for them. You can eat healthy and affordably at the Rodizio, and load up your food for the day instead of leaving hungry. A group of eight like we had at Rodizio would have cost about $700 to feed at Jags. That same group at Rodizio was just shy of $200 and we didn’t hold back on anything—we spent very loosely, deserts, drinks, and tips. And we were stuffed. I didn’t need to eat the next day. The food was so good that you just don’t want to stop eating it. But at some point you are on the verge of busting so you put your table indicator on its side and they bring your check. If I were a young millennial living at one of the Liberty Center apartments, I’d eat at Rodizio every day for lunch at only $19.95 and get all the fruits and veggies a body needs. For business travelers staying at the Marriott at the other end of the complex, Rodizio will solve jet lag and replenish you after a long day of boring business meetings. It’s a bargain, and a luxury. As good as the other restaurants are—and so far they all are, it’s the all you can eat option at Rodizio mixed with the exotic style of the food that put it on top for me.

After our lunch we walked around Liberty Center and enjoyed the Holiday lights. It was a warm evening, so it was a pleasure to stroll around and people watch. Liberty Center is a special place and in just a very short time my family has used it for what it was intended. It’s a vacation destination that we have in our own backyards. As I write this we are making plans for a complex trip overseas to very exotic locations, but I can’t say that I am looking forward to any of them the way I do when going to Liberty Center and dinning at the Rodizio Grill. I appreciate what all the ambition that made Liberty Center possible was committed to so that places like Rodizio could be an entertainment option. But it’s still nice to see people enjoying it. If there was anything that really jumped out at me about the Thanksgiving Holiday for which we just experienced, it was that I’m thankful for the wonders of capitalism—because it’s on full display at Liberty Center. It shows what unlocked human potential can generate if provided with the opportunity. Among the best of these examples is the Rodizio Grill. It’s a real treasure in southern Ohio and a perfect getaway for a spirit needing to recover from the stresses of living—without the worry of spending yourself into oblivion to get there. It’s a vacation experience every time you go—and for me, that’s a cache worth more than money.

Rich “Cliffhanger” Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT