Tag: George Soros

The Washington Post Declares War Against America: Being the “Last Man Standing”

I knew we were going to arrive at this “pivot point” for several years now. It just wasn’t clear how we’d get here.  But even so, the results are astonishing–so far down the rabbit hole of liberal control America has been on as a country. Probably the most obvious shot across the stern of conservativism has been the removal of two major prime time shows for which perceived Trump supporters might enjoy, The O’Reilly Factor and the ABC comedy, Last Man Standing.  The obvious move by the heads of both networks was to unplug the Trump base from nurturing information in the form of entertainment for the exclusive objective of converting them to liberals—which isn’t going to happen.  I have until very recently never seen Last Man Standing but now that it’s been cancelled I’ve caught clips of it and was astonished that it was even on a Disney owned network.  However, the behavior of The New York Post and The New York Times regarding President Trump has been over the top.  Each day of this past week, since the firing of James Comey and the passage of the Obamacare repeal in the House has emerged stories from those two papers designed to tie up the cogs of government preventing Donald Trump from achieving anything more—and I thought it astonishing—even for these liberal radicals.  Because each of their stories involved really nothing of any substance, yet the wall to wall coverage didn’t fit the accusations.  Then there is this constant talk of impeachment.  Really?  After what we’ve become used to under the Obama White House these idiots in the liberal media actually think that type of thing will take root? If the media wants to talk about impeachment then they should look at their lack of action on the items discussed at this link then understand why nothing under Trump is going anywhere.  He hasn’t even been in office long enough to merit such discussion—yet this media thinks it can pick and choose law to support their political agenda and that makes them not just a nuisance, but dangerous.

http://www.wnd.com/2017/05/25-impeachable-obama-scandals-far-more-serious-than-comey-firing/

 

If liberals think that by removing Tim Allen and Bill O’Reilly from television is going to defang the conservative movement, they are grossly misinformed—and I suppose that is what is most shocking to me. I mean, listening to their very small issues for which The Washington Post is making so much rhetorical comment when they were completely silent in regards to actual known crimes committed by Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, the motivations behind their actions are obvious.  They are in insurgent mode seeking to destroy and reshape The United States into some third-rate country and they expect to do it in full view of people like me—and that’s just not going to happen.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the constant reports from that same media about the possibility of North Korea shutting down the American power grid for months or years with cyber-attacks—which I don’t think is possible, but you never know. If such a thing would happen who would survive in America, the Berkley kids protesting everything in favor of communism or the rugged American individualists that Tim Allen played on television—the demographic type for which the show reached out to?  Within a week of a major power outage food will become a problem and people will start killing each other over it, so what would happen to that leftist utopian society under those conditions?  Obviously, it would fail quickly and all these stylish moves made by our technological society would revert back to primate behavior nearly over night. All the female CEOs of media companies would soon find themselves having to reprioritize their entire existence where food acquisition would become their number one concern—not whether or not ABCs lineup involved immigrant sit-coms as opposed to white men over 40 who cling to traditional American values.  All the tenets of progressive society where women have replaced men and those women have babies then turn them over to the state for their upbringing and education would fly out the window in less than a month.  The people who would survive most would be the gun carrying farmers of the Midwest.  Cities would fall to depravity and cesspools of murder quickly.

A society cannot credit itself as being successful or advanced if one little thing such as power loss could throw it into an unstable condition so fast. Yet the people fighting to erase the Trump Presidency want and expect to do exactly that—even down to attacking the entertainment options that such people enjoy.  That dear reader is a declaration of war and I take it that way.  What I’ve seen from our mainstream media is nothing less than a complete government take-over.  The Deep State was always much deeper than anybody thought and they are making themselves seen really for the first time.  I wanted this to happen and it was always my intention that the Trump presidency would expose these villains, but the depth of their activity has truly been shocking, which was revealed in all its glory over this past week.

So here is a little message to the people who run The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, NBC, ABC—all these leftist’s organizations—your media groups did not invent “conservatism.”  Even the great westerns which Hollywood produced in its finest years did not make American society conservative.  The people of this country were already that way by nature of the Constitution for which we function.  The media outlets of entertainment and news back then simply provided the kind of content that those types of people wanted.  What is happening now is that those same outlets believe that they are the creators, which is a mistake.  “We”—the Tea Party types, the NRA members, the farmers, the steel workers, the coal miners, the cowboys and the monster truck drivers—we put Trump in office as a last chance to fix the country from the lefty insurrection.  By taking away conservative news, television shows, books and movies, you think that this utopian folly of liberalism is going to take root–you have a hard lesson coming to you.  Conservativism is a philosophy derived from the essential ingredients of society whereas liberalism is a utopian theory untested against reality.  It exists in places like college campuses and big cities like New York where reality is often pushed away from people’s minds—but it doesn’t hold up to feeding the basics of foundation societal thinking.  Liberalism is one power outage away from being extinct from all human thinking and that is the hard truth.  Yet people like me—and there are millions who think the way I do—are not going to let things get to that point.  Trump was our preferred answer, but we can take it to violence if that’s what leftists want.  I can say this, I’m not going to put up with liberalism any more.

For years conservatives have looked the other way and been very inclusive in regard to people who think differently than they do. Even when we knew that there were crimes committed by Hillary Clinton we were angry, but we didn’t try to shut down reality the way these Washington Post writers are doing.  They expect to sell themselves as respectable journalists while everyone can see that they are just conducting hack jobs.  You’d have to be a complete idiot to think otherwise.  Liberals may in fact be that stupid, but I certainly am not and neither are many of the conservatives I know.  Conservative ideas are forged from the fires of reality—not theory.  It’s one thing to be compassionate toward other people’s opinions—even if they are stupid opinions.  But it’s quite another to yield to evil and turn away from the truth feeding villains to destroy our society.  I’m not going to stand for that—and it doesn’t matter if Bill O’Reilly or Tim Allen are on TV to tell me so—if the Trump experiment doesn’t work—the next step is violence and the liberals won’t like that.  They won’t last in that fight.  Before Trump was elected I was very close to organizing my own group to restore America back to greatness any way possible—and likely the 2nd Amendment would have been needed.  Yielding to liberals is simply not on the table.

Then there’s Trump, I know enough about him to know this—in this current fight in Washington D.C., he will be the Last Man Standing, which is likely the real fear that liberals have in regard to the white wealthy males they seek to destroy in order to change America into their progressive utopia.  Execs at ABC blame themselves for creating Trump, and the voters who elected him with shows like the Tim Allen comedy, but they give themselves too much assumption of power.  They don’t make us, we make them.  We decide if a media company is successful or fails.  It used to be they didn’t always come out and say to half the nation that they hated them.  They wanted people to watch their networks and read their newspapers so they kept politics as light as possible.  But now, now they’ve went and done it.  They’ve declared their hatred for us, they’ve not treated our guy in the White House with the respect that we at least showed their people over the many years, and now the gloves are off.  And it’s an insult to those of us who really are tough, and forged from reality to be cast into a stew with these liberal idiots and have them expect that they should rule over us in any way.  Even if they could manage somehow to impeach Donald Trump—what do they think would happen?  That we wouldn’t take revenge for their assault?  No, I figure they are lucky that they have Donald Trump—because he protects them from us.  We have hope that Trump can fix things in the D.C. culture.  If he can’t, then we’ll have to do it ourselves, and liberals certainly won’t like that.

Rich Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

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Killing Bill O’Reilly: When attacked you always have to fight back–any way possible

He’s a little too New York liberal for me, but I like Bill O’Reilly quite a lot.  I watched him on Fox News for many years like a lot of other people and have enjoyed his books.  He’s a very smart guy and I think he’s the best that there is in the news business.  But sometimes he’s dead wrong and one of those times was when he advised Donald Trump to settle out of court to make the parade of women seeking an apology for sexually inappropriate behavior to go away so he could focus on winning the presidency. That is always the wrong move.  When these people come after you in every case you have to fight them.  It doesn’t matter if they are men or women—if they attack your reputation, you have to fight them.  In that regard Bill O’Reilly should have never settled the cases against him because the media used that as an admission of guilt and Fox News simply didn’t have the backbone to defend O’Reilly in public.   O’Reilly may have wanted to protect his family from long court cases where he’d eventually be proven “not guilty,” but having the money sitting in a bank account to make the problem go away, Bill did what he thought Trump should have done and that’s just pay the extortion to shut everyone up so he could do his work.  And that was the wrong move which was now obvious as Bill went on Glenn Beck’s radio show for the first time after being fired at Fox News to talk about the situation.

Bill O’Reilly being a nice old-fashioned guy is exactly the type of person that Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals was designed to freeze and pummel in the court of public opinion.   Not that O’Reilly is a conservative, but compared to the extreme liberals of today, Bill is a traditional guy from an older time who believed that taking the high road would eventually pay off.  And in O’Reilly’s life, he was enormously successful so why would he do anything different?  But when the unthinkable happened and Fox News went soft and wouldn’t defend Bill, suddenly he was exposed.  These strategies have worked against conservative people for years because Saul Alinsky knew that decent people would always yield to evil due to the Christian premise of always turning the other cheek.  Alinsky didn’t believe in God, so that gave him and his followers a tremendous advantage over people like Bill O’Reilly who believed that by taking the high road that they’d always come out on top.

I’ve personally seen this process up close and many people whom I know have gone through it.  But I’m part of a new generation who have decided that we’re going to take this whole Rules for Radicals strategy head on and throw it back in their smudgy liberal faces.  And the way to do that is to not turn the other cheek.  If they come after you—you go get in their face and you fight them.  You start off legally and use the tools there to the extent you can.  But if that doesn’t work, then you hang the bastards’ upside down over a bridge and you skin them alive and make a metaphorical flag out of their hide.  You have to have that attitude to beat people who follow Saul Alinsky’s teachings which at this point are most of the people on the political left—most popularly Hillary Clinton herself.  You can’t beat those people being nice to them and you certainly can’t beat them with an intellectual argument because they aren’t interested in facts, charts or honor.  You have to take it out of their hide and when Bill O’Reilly settled, he admitted guilt and gave them everything they wanted—true or not.

The gains that the big government types have made over the years in both parties is with their forceful instance on admitting guilt from innocent people.  Even if innocence was the truth teller those gains have incorrectly advanced liberal thought and destroyed many aspects of American culture.  Once they have from you a confession, even if they beat it out of you by using your family and friends as hostages, then they own you forever and that’s why they throw in the case of Republicans like Trump a parade of women who would likely give a blow job on a sidewalk for the right amount of cash—to put a powerful person on the defensive and make them admit something against their will under duress.  That clearly was happening to Donald Trump during the election.  Nobody but maybe me and a few others I think thought he was right to fight back the way he did–which I had done on a much smaller scale in the Cincinnati media a few years prior.  Trump was the first to do such a thing at the level of the presidency and that was a relief.  Thankfully Donald Trump didn’t listen to Bill O’Reilly because if he had, the same thing would have happened.  When someone attacks you and you are fighting on the side of conservatism, you have to fight back.  You can’t do this turn the other cheek thing and expect to win any of these arguments.  The other side doesn’t believe in God—they are emphatically evil, and they will do anything to destroy anybody or anything that is in their way.  So you can’t play nice with them and unfortunately Bill O’Reilly has had to learn the hard way.

Right after Bill O’Reilly was taken off the air at Fox News the same lunatics turned their guns toward Sean Hannity who did the right thing and gassed up his defense.  He had the money to put some lawyers on retainer and he put them to work at attacking even small media outlets for falsehoods against his name—and that’s what you have to do.  Glenn Beck hasn’t held up too well over the years, his Blaze news outlet isn’t nearly as successful as it needs to be.  I’ve done my little things to help Beck and so have many others but Beck shifted toward the political center under great pressure and this fight wore him out—and that’s what the political left does. They beat on you until you either give up or you just are destroyed beyond hope—and in a lot of ways they managed to Kill Bill.  Bill O’Reilly played respectable with them and that gave the political left a way into his fortress to destroy everything he built over his many years of broadcasting.  And the political left needed the victory because time is running out for them with the successes of the Donald Trump Executive Branch—so they had to make their move now rather than later.  O’Reilly additionally made the mistake of telegraphing his response to the sex allegations when he advised Trump on the air to settle.  Insurgents at the George Soros funded outlets knew exactly how to get at Bill, all they needed were some washed up, do anything for money types to say publicly that they felt threatened and that was the end of Bill O’Reilly.

I do hope that O’Reilly takes Beck up on his job offer.  I’m not the biggest Beck fan these days—but he does have a media company that could use someone like Bill O’Reilly.  And if things took off it would stick the more centrist Fox News in the eye and contribute greatly to their downfall, which at this point obviously needs to happen.  There needs to be consequences for actions and the people running Fox News, the Murdoch boys, need to learn a lesson starting with their pocket-book.  That’s how you have to think about war, and this is war.  Don’t make any mistake about it.  In war, you have to be willing to take a life for a threat, an arm for a finger, and a tongue for a whisper. While I admire people who take the high road and try hard to live by Christian honor—I say if someone attacks you in any way you utterly destroy them.  Trump gets it, and listening to Bill O’Reilly on his radio interview with Glenn Beck I wish he would have not been so naive, because this experience has obviously hurt him.  He’s too good of a guy to suffer through that.  I’d like to see him get back on the horse and charge into battle once again.  But this time—don’t pay off the bitches.  Because that’s all they were—they put themselves out there for fame, fortune, but more than anything—the fantasies of insurrection.  Don’t settle court cases ever again.  Fight them until there is nothing else and make sure they are utterly destroyed—because that’s really the only way you can make them stop and do justice to our nation.  These people are villains and nothing else—and they deserve complete conquest without an ounce of sympathy.  That’s how you beat them which we must do if we want to keep America–America.

Rich Hoffman

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Donald Trump at Liberty University: The Roads Less Traveled

There was so much news that one of the greatest Donald Trump speeches yet slid by pretty much unnoticed over the weekend.  But I didn’t miss it and as I listened on the radio from my garage during a wonderful spring day in southern Ohio, I heard something special.  As Donald Trump spoke at a commencement ceremony at Liberty University to a packed 50,000 plus crowd Trump essentially told the story of “the road less traveled.” I would have thought that just the crowd size alone might melt the faces of the liberalized press—but the contents of the speech was amazing for a sitting president.  I can’t think of a similar speech from anybody anywhere.  Usually these speeches are full of empty cheer leading but what Trump talked about as a successful person himself had a lot more meaning and contained within it the keys to why his Executive Branch is so effective evoking so much criticism from those I would term losers.

It surprised me even though I suppose these kinds of speeches are common at commencement ceremonies, but this one was different in that Trump specifically spoke on the details of “The Road Less Traveled” which is another of my favorite books by M. Scott Peck M.D.  It’s quite something to have a person as successful as Trump to speak as a president of the United States.  The story of Liberty University is much like that of Donald Trump—it’s a little school guided by the evangelist Jerry Fallwell Jr., that has went from a small campus with big dreams to one that is actually about to compete at the top-level of NCAA football.  It’s a good school that is doing what colleges are supposed to have always been doing—educating.

Trump actually hit on why people fail at things in life in an honest fashion that should have done anybody listening a lot of good.  People often fail because they are afraid of peer critics who often don’t have the same courage to achieve things outside the norm.  Stamina has a lot to do with success too; very few things in life are easy.  But most kids at most colleges this spring and from the past hear a bunch of flat talk about success without ever really getting to the meat and potatoes of how it’s achieved, and Trump did those kids a tremendous favor in addressing the keys to success which none of them should ever forget.

Throughout a work week my wife often sends me texts asking me how my day is going hoping that one time I’ll tell it that everything has been OK, because it never is.  This past week we had lunch together and it was a particularly terrible day full of so much stress that my teeth hurt.  I could taste blood in the back of my throat and the calcium on my teeth felt thin as a direct reaction to enormous amounts of stress.  It had been one of those days where 99.9% of the people doing work in a similar fashion would just say to hell with it—and they’d give up.  And who could blame them except for the measures of success for which everyone mutually wishes to achieve.  I mean, nobody sets out to fail, everyone wants success in things at life—in their professions, in their personal life—spouses, kids, friends, etc.  But most people lack the basic ingredients to achieve success and it’s often a very lonely road so sharing the thrill of conquering some difficult obstacle is often something you can’t relate to others. In that way success is very personal and you either do it for the right reasons, or you don’t.

The world is full of people who don’t succeed in life—and most of those people who seek public office or jobs in entertainment—and I’d consider mainstream media part of entertainment—are the type of people who fail on their own accord.  They need someone else to give them success and as second-handers they climb a ladder and hope someone at least puts one in front of them.  These people will cheat, sleep, and manipulate others any way they can to achieve success at the expense of what the true measure of achievement demands—that life isn’t easy and that overcoming your greatest fears is really the only way to win.  And on those days where you look around and all you see is pain and misery from failure after failure to the point where you can taste the blood in your own mouth—you thrive because that’s the way you get there—and you learn to love it.

During that aforementioned lunch I quietly looked out the window thinking of my response.  We’ve almost been married for 30 years so these aren’t new discussions but every so often something remarkable gets discussed—and this issue about having a good day was one of them.  I can’t say that if I woke up in the morning where everything worked the way I intended it to, that I’d really be happy.  I love the battlefield and I love overcoming adversity.  I like beating the odds and I like being the only person in the room who thinks something is possible.  In fact, you might say I live to beat the odds—I like signing up for things that should be impossible and making them work.  I’ve been doing it all my life and it’s a consistent pattern that I embark on.  When someone says that you shouldn’t do this or that because there isn’t some metaphorical path taking you cleanly to some destination at the end—I always take that rough path because often that’s where treasures that everyone seeks usually hides.  Think about it, if you want something unique in life whether its happiness, riches, love, wisdom—why would you do things the way that people who are obviously unhappy with life do them—people who are unsuccessful—people who have to take drugs to avoid depression, or people who drink too much, eat too much, and can’t maintain relationships?  You can look at a man sitting in a park on a beautiful day on his third divorce chain-smoking cigarettes and know exactly why he’s in that condition.  If you talk to him he’ll blame the women.  But if you really peel back the onion, there are things wrong with him that cause the failures in his life—and it usually starts with the cigarettes—the reason he smokes.  I told my wife on that lunch day that I don’t think human beings should wake up wanting a good day, but that as thinking creatures we should seek to imprint our intelligence on the world against its wishes and take those days with all the twists and turns presented and straighten them out flat.  Problems were meant to be solved and you either tackle them aggressively, or you don’t.  And if you don’t tackle problems then likely you won’t have success in life unless a pile of gold just happens to fall in your lap.  But that is almost never the case.

Success is hard and it’s not something a peer can give you.  It’s just something you have to be willing to take with a fearlessness uncommon to our species.  That is after all why Trump is president and most people hate him. They hate him for what they aren’t.  They can cuss and spit at him talking about how unconventional he is, and how he does his own thing—but what they hate most about Trump is that he does have the fearlessness, the stamina, and the courage to strive for success in everything he does.  And that makes him different from them—and they hate the contrast because it makes them feel guilty.  So Trump’s Liberty University speech was certainly one of the greats for the history books.  It may have only spoken to the 1% out there who strive to think the way he does, and Liberty University seems committed to finding those types of people in the world—so the speech was appropriate.  But for many, the speech spoke at a key to life that many of them gave up on a long time ago and for them it was difficult to listen to.  When something sucks in your life and you are in midlife and miserable the answer is really easy—and you can see it clearly every morning when you look in the mirror.  That reality can be very painful, but such a person, which is in the majority of our so-called “democracy,” should not cripple intellectually the next generation.  That is why Trump gave not only a wonderful speech, but one that actually had true meaning.  What he did was a gift to the students of Liberty University—and to all those with the courage to hear it.  The key to success in life with all the pains and perils is, “The Road Less Traveled.”

Rich Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rich Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rich Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

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The Moon Rise of South Korea: Holding back socialists in Asia and the Democratic budget battle

It is a shame we don’t live in a more literate society.  It’s a shame so many school levies passed during the May elections where voter turnout was noticeably lower due to all the nice weather, and it’s a shame that more people don’t understand the strategy regarding the recent budget compromise on Capitol Hill.  Things that are complex in nature require a long view understanding and that is best achieved through literacy—because the process of reading develops in the mind the ability to comprehend layered strategies that exist beyond the immediate gratification most people are accustomed to dealing with.  And this was never more obvious than the situation with North and South Korea and the role that China is playing in a giant international chess game—for which Donald Trump is properly engaged.  Our shallow American media was shocked recently when Trump stated that he wanted South Korea to pick up the 1.2-billion-dollar price tag for the THAAD missile system placed there to protect them from a North Korean attack.  They didn’t report the rest of the story, so here it is.

Shortly South Korea is about to hold an election to replace their disgraced president recently outed over corruption charges and the leader of the pack is a socialist Democrat by the name of Moon Jae-in.  Moon wants to have good open relations with North Korea and China and in his campaign rhetoric is claiming that the “west” is interfering in the peace process of the Korean peninsula.  Of course Americans have forgotten why we fought the Korean War a half century ago, so they really don’t understand the politics.  Heck, most of them probably couldn’t find Korea on a map.  So they certainly can’t understand why America is interested in keeping South Korea protected from communist incursions to the north and to the west with China encouraging all the aggressions.

That is the role that North Korea plays in the region, they are there as communist antagonists to play the “bad cop” in the great negotiations game—while China plays the “good cop.”  Everyone understands that game reading this I hope.  South Korea is the only open market capitalist zone in that region except for Japan just to the east.  Losing Korea to a socialist in the upcoming election who is a global communist supporter would be bad for America as it would solidify the spread of communism. Most American’s think that communism died back in the 90s, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. China, North Korea and Vietnam to the south are all communist zones and are a serious burden on the freedoms enjoyed by capitalist nations like the United States.  Immigrants from those communist countries pour into the United States looking for opportunity while slowly changing the voting patterns from Republican to Democrat.  China understands all this and are currently in a waiting game hoping to crush capitalism in the west while using American markets to bolster their own economy.

When Xi Jinping visited Donald Trump at his Mar-a-Lago resort of course it was a nice meeting, Xi was playing the “good cop” and so was President Trump.  It was all strategy to set the stage for what was happening in the east Asian theater.  China wants South Korea under their flag, America wants to have a capitalist footprint in Asia essentially to protect Japan from further aggressions from their communist rivals across the Sea of Japan.  China supported North Korean aggressions, the United States sent in the THAAD system and several naval aircraft carriers.  Kim Jong-un to push back the Americans threatened nuclear war and resumed missile tests and each time they have done so recently the United States has blasted them out of the sky from space.  As the world beats the drums of war hoping to see hostilities escalate in the region—the media of course supported the communists, while capitalist nations hope America prevails—a silent stand-off has evolved.  North Korea has realized that they can’t launch any missiles anywhere due to American positions and therefore can’t threaten anybody on China’s behalf—which has exposed the communists in favor of Trump.

Now the hope of the entire region is that Moon Jae-in will win in South Korea in a few weeks and that will end the support of American involvement there and return the power of fear back to China while indirectly unifying all of Asia under communism.  They envision such a thing as when China took back Hong Kong from England at the turn of the 20th century and have used it as an “economic zone” under a communist flag.  They plan to do the same thing with South Korea and this Moon guy is receptive to that kind of thinking.

Trump knowing all this has offered to take the edge off by speaking well of China, and offering to talk to Kim Jung-un all the while charging South Korea for the THAAD system throwing bait in the water for Moon to stumble on during his last weeks of campaigning.  It’s really not that hard to understand—but due to the short attention spans of most Americans in the media, they just don’t understand how the pieces connect.  That’s why sites like this one exist, because I do understand and am happy to explain it to you dear reader.  That’s also why I’m not down on the way Trump handled the recent budget compromise with Democrats.  Like the situation in Korea, Trump has to expose the other side with “good cop” dialogue so that they will be the aggressors justifying action.  In the case of South Korea, the hostile action will be a trade war with the new liberal president Moon so that he can’t solidify people behind him toward socialist objectives, but to cut out the feet from under him before he can take roots—which is precisely what the global political left has been trying to do to Trump.  Only in the case of South Korea the leverage is completely in Trump’s hands.  He needed to bolster the military to take care of all the foreign policy issues immediately and without question he hoped to recruit some Democrats to get 60 votes in the senate to go against Schumer for upcoming legislation.  The most pressing issue of course was the military money so that Trump could hold back the villains in Asia, the Middle East and in regard to Russia—which then forced Putin to talk to Trump on the phone about peace plans yesterday.  Without that budget deal, Putin doesn’t participate because the military budget was the leverage he had been holding out for hoping Trump wouldn’t get it.

This is all very easy to understand if you understand The Art of War, the great literary classic on Asian warfare.  The American media certainly doesn’t get it, but some individuals who matter here and there do, and that’s all we really care about. Trump knows what he’s doing.  Results will take care of everything else.  I haven’t seen anything in his behavior that alarms me so long as the long view is taken into consideration.  This Moon guy in South Korea is a Obama type of liberal, so Trump would do well if he could cause the guy to stumble at the finish line of their elections. If not, then Samsung televisions and KIA cars will be facing some very hefty tariffs because the fight is still over the spread of communism and the Marxist ideologues of Asia need those fresh markets of Hong Kong and South Korea to justify themselves as second-handers.  Which is the only reason that Kim Jung-un has been allowed to exist.  But if Trump beats the South Korean socialist to the peace process in unifying the Korean Peninsula against the wishes of China—then all of them lose their leverage cards in future negotiations. But to do all this, Trump couldn’t have a budget battle with Democrats now—he needed the military money and the ability to show that he was willing to work with the Democrats.  He knew they’d reject him—but he had to try so that he’d have the high ground later.  And that is the difference between a good strategist and an idiot.  The media doesn’t know the difference but readers here do.

Rich Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rich Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

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The Unexpected Fun of Mario Kart 8: What a capitalist culture produces that’s good

If I sat and thought about it, there are a lot of things I deal with on a daily basis that I could claim drove me to depression or misery—where your expectations for things don’t match up with the real-world output. After all, that is the #1 cause of unhappiness.  Such things might be some distant family member that you care about. who got a new tattoo against your wishes, or some catastrophic expensive business disappointment—which happens all the time.  But I stay pretty happy all the time because of my personal means of management no matter what is going on—because I have a lot of hobbies that make me very happy.  One of those things I do is video gaming where I continue to be surprised at the technical achievements that are now coming almost quarterly from the industry—the latest great surprise being the Nintendo Switch counsel.  There have been 900,000 sold in the United States as of this writing and I consider myself lucky to have one of them.  It wasn’t easy to get—but once we did get one it has become a good friend to me.  I use it all the time and it has brought a lot of joy to my family after only a month.  The new Zelda game exclusively on Nintendo is for 2017 what Uncharted 4 was to last year’s game market for the PS4.  It is just a marvelous game on every front.  It’s like playing in a virtual Akira Kurasawa film—just something really special.

On Friday April 28th Mario Kart 8 was released and I didn’t realize how big of an event that was going to be.  My youngest grandson was about to have his 1st birthday party and a lot of family members were going to be there so I planned to bring along the Switch for everyone to play and of course Mario Kart is one of those great games for a crowd to play with. So I found myself at Target hoping to get a copy of the new Mario Kart 8 Deluxe that is simply a revamp of the 2014 game released on the Nintendo Wii.  I thought it would be a fun game and it was a priority for me because we did have a Switch, but I wasn’t prepared for the all-out display that Target had done for the new game on the new system.   Mario Kart 8 had its own display right at the cash register the way a hot new movie release might—which I thought was odd because likely very few people in the marketplace had a Nintendo Switch yet to justify such a roll-out.  But Target was absolutely committed to the new Nintendo game system and they were not shy about it.  I was impressed by that.

We had fun with the Mario Kart 8 game all weekend.  Another of my grandchildren stayed at our house and we played it until he went to bed and then again starting at 8 AM Sunday morning until about noon when his mother picked him up.  As we were saying good-bye to them I noticed she had McDonald’s Happy Meals in the front seat and on the boxes were advertisements for Mario Kart 8 on the Nintendo Switch.  Like Target, McDonald’s had jumped on the whole Mario Kart 8 release with great capitalist enthusiasm and it was fun.  I enjoyed with all the things going on in my life to have a delightful weekend playing with this fun new game system with my kids and grandkids sharing the enthusiasm that often comes from Nintendo products while being exposed to it everywhere I went.

Last week I went to great effort to convey why I liked the movie, The Founder so much.  McDonald’s is about more than food—on many occasions in the past they have infused themselves directly into our culture—as they did recently with the Mario Kart 8 game release for the Nintendo Switch.  As I say a lot, these video games are now part of our cultural heritage—they are updated story telling avenues that are in many cases replacing the effectiveness of movies and books—so I consider them significant.  And specifically, these efforts by Target, McDonald’s and all retail companies associated with Nintendo and the release of Mario Kart 8—a simple kids game that is just fun for anybody to play—are all creations of capitalism and convey the optimism that pours forth from creative enterprise that exists for the pleasure of past time indulgence.  That indulgence only happens in free societies led by capitalist monetary commitments.

I had to see a young lady at her office on the day that Mario Kart had been released and I was early for our meeting. So when I walked in on her she was looking sheepishly at her computer screen trying to hold back a laugh.  I knew she was hiding something so I walked behind her desk and saw that she was playing Mario Kart 8 on her Nintendo Switch and she was trying to hide it from people walking by her office window. I told her I understood and she proceeded to tell me that she went out for lunch to get the new game and she couldn’t wait to play it.  This was a grown woman with a pretty important job.  So Mario is for anyone and there isn’t any harm in blowing off a little steam with some fun—which is why this Switch game system is so powerful–culturally.

After my visit to Target I stopped by Gamestop to see if I could find an AC adaptor for taking the Switch on the run, so I could charge it up away from the docking station connected to my television.  While there the guy at the counter asked me if I had Mario Kart 8 yet—which of course I said I did because I had just bought it at Target from the big display they had there.  That’s when the sales clerk said “but do you have the steering wheels?’  I was a little shocked to see him present two Mario Kart steering wheels to use while playing the fun racing game and of course I couldn’t pass them up.  So It was a Mario weekend for me and I enjoyed it greatly in spite of having plenty to worry about in all other aspects of my life.  Being surrounded by the influence of one game for a game console few people had yet was enjoyable.  I spend a lot of time talking about cultures ancient and present—and Nintendo certainly has a place of honor in our modern myth making efforts as human beings.  I couldn’t help but be impressed because there really isn’t any downside to it.  It’s all a positive aspect of capitalism—you won’t find Mario Kart 8 bringing that kind of joy to places devoid of capitalism—places like Iran, Syria, Russia—Afghanistan and so on.  Only healthy countries functioning from good philosophy and positive money flow can enjoy these types of things and Nintendo was doing a good job of putting their product in the hands of the most people possible which was wonderful.  I’d love to see a world where kids in the middle of Africa could participate in the Mario Kart fun—but for them—they are lucky to find a stable meal because of the lack of capitalism in their countries.

Nintendo specifically is a good, clean company.  All their characters are wholesome and playful.  You don’t have to worry about illicit sex and mental depletion when it comes to Nintendo products.  In every instance I can think of they are child-like in their approach to gaming but revere intelligence in the actual game play. Mario Kart 8 is a smart little party game—and Zelda is very deep—but they all have in common that Nintendo fun of living life without the burdens of modern adulthood drowning in expectations.  Everything is optimistic—just like when we were all children—which is why many people are bringing these Nintendo Switches to work with them.  I don’t get mad when I see such things because I think it makes people more productive and that this video game element to our society is taking the place of more restrictive past times that used to be utilized during lunch hour.  It is a lot more productive to play Mario Kart 8 for an hour than going to BW3s and drinking a couple of beers.  The Mario Kart player will be ready to solve problems and tackle challenges after lunch while the beer drinker will struggle to stay awake and engaged for the rest of the day.  So I see no downside to all this capitalist excess because it helps our society in every phase, mental wellness, economic development, problem solving, enthusiasm endurance—when a simple game like Mario Kart can enhance the level of excitement when shopping at Target or buying Happy Meals at McDonald’s really—everyone wins.  There is no downside.

In that regard, the Nintendo Switch has turned out to be a little bit of a miracle. In just one month it sold over 2 million units worldwide which puts it up there with the PS4 and ahead of Xbox.  A few years ago Nintendo looked like it was falling off the map.  After watching the Superbowl commercial for the Nintendo Switch I was highly skeptical—but now I am a huge fan.  I love it.  It is a perfect marriage of incredible technology and innovative product development rolled up into one beautiful package that touches many aspects of our capitalist culture which advances human thought through entertainment and philosophy.  That to me is a big deal and is something to celebrate.  I certainly did.  After a weekend like I had with the Nintendo Switch, I felt privileged to be able to play a part in it.  Not only was it fun, but it was enhancing in ways I wouldn’t have thought possible even a few months ago.

Rich Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rich Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

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‘The Founder’, Movie Review: Why the battles of capitalism are worth all the blood they spill

I didn’t catch it when it was released in the theaters, but that didn’t stop me from buying the Blu-Ray at the first opportunity because I knew it would be a brilliant film—and it was.  The Founder starring Michael Keaton was just that—and it may well be the most important film you’ll see this year—or whenever you read this.  If you haven’t seen the film, do it now.  Don’t even finish reading this.  Just go see it.  I adored the film and personally I could relate to the type of character that Michael Keaton played as likely the most true to life rendition of Ray Kroc ever done—the founder of the McDonald’s franchise concept.  Readers here know I love McDonald’s; I make no secret of it.  I love a lot of things in life but I always have a special place for McDonald’s and the reason for my love was summed up extraordinarily well in the great movie directed by John Lee Hancock.

The Founder is all about innovation and American ingenuity.  It’s not always pretty, not always civil—but the engine that drives American capitalism specifically was captured so wonderfully well in this great movie that its worth watching and should be done in every American household.  Another favorite of my is the great Francis Ford Coppola classic, Tucker: The Man and his Dream—this movie might as well been the sequel to how innovative American enterprise was in the period from 1940 up until the 1960s.  The Founder is about nothing short than the invention of the fast food industry which has left the biggest mark on world culture that we’ve ever witnessed.

When I walk into a McDonald’s no matter where it is in the world I think of this creation story of Ray Kroc and his relationship to the fabulous McDonald brothers.  I simply love all those people even though as the story shows, Ray Kroc unethically outwitted them in the end to take possession of the company that featured their name—and that was likely a good thing for the invention of fast food.  In fact, I think the scene in The Founder where Kroc and two other people (one who would become his future wife) were discussing a new way to produce a milk shake.  It was one of the best scenes in film history because it captured so well the risk and innovation that was going on all the time during that post World War II period in America which we today all take for granted.  Imagine the skepticism that making a synthetic milkshake with powder was to the naiveté of the 1950s generation yet without people with the drive and charisma of Ray Kroc, we’d all still be eating a lot slower and living a lot less productively.  Anti-capitalists of course would love to go back to the days where it took 30 minutes to get a hamburger—instead of 30 seconds—but American society as we know it now was built on the extra productivity per capita that specifically came from the invention of fast food that started with McDonald’s.  To me that makes the company and this movie enormously relevant.

I’ve had McDonald’s in many countries around the world and to me it is always a piece of home.  Most dramatically my wife and I had a McDonald’s across the street from our hotel in Cancun which probably saved our lives.  We were both sick from our experience with a cenote inland on the Yucatan Peninsula where we were swimming on a very hot day.  The Mexicans use such places as their only relief from their terrible living conditions as most of them live in thatched huts.  I saw fish swimming around in the water so I figured it couldn’t be too bad, and it was clear water.   The local people were used to such bacterially infested water, we weren’t and the next day we were both terribly sick and massively dehydrated.  We lost trust in the local water supply even in such a popular resort town.  But we knew the quality control of the McDonald’s across the street was our best chance at a good meal—because many of the materials that made the material came from the United States.  So for the rest of our trip, we only ate at McDonald’s even though we had access to some of the best places to eat that the world offered.  We didn’t feel we could trust the water since our systems had been disrupted at the cenote.  Those Golden Arches were one of the best experiences I ever had eating.  I can say that my wife and I have had some fine dining in many of the best places in exotic cities and that McDonald’s meal for us was our best because we were so parched and in need of food familiar to our diet with tightly controlled filtered water.

Another time for me was in Japan.  I was so tired of eating seaweed and octopus.  I was trying to be respectful to their culture, but I woke up one morning really looking for some American food so I found a McDonald’s in the middle of the very nice city of Kobe.  Now consider I had just had authentic Kobe Beef the night before with some great wine and immaculate other dishes.  But at 7 AM in Japan after a hard week of work I wanted a Sausage and Egg McMuffin from McDonald’s with a nice big Coke.  When I found one I found a nice place to eat it off in the corner of the restaurant and it will always be one of the best meals I’ve ever had.  There is a lot to be said about the consistency of McDonald’s food because it is pretty much the same anywhere you go and someday when I visit the moon I plan to eat at McDonald’s because it will give a stable diet to my body in an unfamiliar environment—and sometimes that is better than the actual flavors of the food.  I find that when I’m doing hard things, whether they are exotic adventures or tough business engagements, or even intense competitions, McDonald’s provides stability in a diet that is consistent and that is often far more valuable.

A lot of those techniques that make McDonald’s food so constantly fast and reliable were developed by the McDonald’s brothers and marketed to the world by Ray Kroc and we are all better for it.  When I’m having a really rough week, it is not unusual for me to stop by and grab some McDonald’s breakfast on my way to do whatever I’m dreading, because it does bring me a lot of joy to have that food. So a story about how that remarkable place was born is a lot of fun to see, especially as honest of a movie as this is.  Essentially, the McDonald’s brothers developed a great idea and a means to make food fast.  But it was Ray Kroc who put them into every city and was able to take the chance to pound out the fast food concept as a chain of real estate transactions.  That was really the hinge point of the entire McDonald’s story, that the business concept of franchising wasn’t in the food itself, but in the real estate transactions involved, where McDonald’s owned the stores and franchise owners would lease the spots—which put the quality control firmly in the hands of the company—instead of the individual owners.  That was the key and it took someone like Ray Kroc to pound out the idea.  The McDonald brothers were simply too nice to make that next step plunge.

In the end the point of the movie was a clear definition of capitalism that was spelled out clearly.  When Kroc tells the McDonald brothers that his business was war and if he saw a competitor drowning—that he’d put a hose down their throat to finish them off.  Mac McDonald wouldn’t have done that and neither would his brother.  That essentially was why they failed to move beyond their initial concepts but no further.  To make projects work you need a Ray Kroc type of person or things just stall, and that is what makes capitalism such an elusive concept elsewhere in the world.  Every business needs their dreamers, and their concept people—but in the end they need someone who can bring persistence to whatever is being attempted.  Ray Kroc with all their faults was undaunted by the prospect of failure.  He had failed over and over through his entire life and in the end; he was speaking with Governor Reagan just before he was elected president as the most successful restaurateur in the world.

McDonald’s makes all of our lives more efficient.  My daughter often before she picks up her kids at our house brings them Happy Meals from McDonald’s to entice them to get into the car and go home.  It helps her to give them quick food while as a busy young parent time is often short.  The ability to get a Happy Meal frees her time up making her much more productive in other ways.  And the same story could be told for all of us, whether its breakfast on the go in the morning or a relief far from home while traveling on the other side of the world.  McDonald’s makes an essential thing we all must do in our lives—which is eat—faster making it so that we can do many other things in our 24 hour day possible.

This movie is just a champ—it captures the American Dream in ways I’m not sure even the filmmakers realized.  For instance, why was Ray Kroc so obsessed with the idea of franchising the McDonald’s concept when he had a nice wife, a nice house, and a membership into an exclusive country club with rich friends?  Isn’t that what people want in America?  And why did the McDonald brothers work so hard to find faster ways to make food more reliably?  The answer goes beyond the wealth that can be achieved by such endeavors.  It is in the hunt of doing them which makes this story different from any other.  Ray Kroc wasn’t about personal jets and boardrooms, even though those things did come to him over time—it was about the thrill of doing something impossible for the benefit of doing something that had never been done before.  That is what drove all the protagonists in this story and what’s wonderful about it is that it was a true story.  It is in that concept that American capitalism works so well and how when those battles are fought the benefits get sprinkled so wonderfully to the rest of the world.  The wars of capitalism are worth fighting because the byproduct of it makes all of society better.  Even though capitalism can be ruthless, the products that come about as a result advance civilization and it is people like Ray Kroc and the McDonald brothers who best exemplify the American Dream.  Not in their successes as much as in their eternal optimism to keep trying until they finally do win—or die trying.

Rich Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

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

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