Tag: George Soros

Welcome to the End of the World: Will it be laissez faire capitalism or socialism–don’t let the stupid decide

The only real solution to the health care debate is more competition.  Now, because of the oligopoly and mandatory requirements on insurance coverage, prices are now guaranteed to always go up.  The only way to change that guarantee is to introduce competition—sort of like what’s happened with oil prices where a few years ago we were told that they’d always go up.  But once the United States started fracking more heavily and other nations joined into the oil-producing fray, the Gulf States lowered their costs to squeeze down the margins making domestic oil investments less profitable—hoping to maintain their dominance on the market.  Currently in health care—due to hundreds of millions of dollars poured off K-Street into politics—there are only an oligopoly of insurance providers—which drives up all the costs ridiculously.  As I’ve covered here many times, a lot of this health care cost isn’t even necessary any more.  CLICK HERE TO FIND OUT WHY.  There are cures for cancer, there are technologies for regenerative growth—there really isn’t any reason to be sick or to even grow old.  The only reason we still do is to satisfy the market expectations of the pharmaceutical companies.  Things have to change dramatically and quickly.  Obamacare has to go away and the next president will have to tap into as much laissez-faire capitalism as possible—otherwise there’s no chance.

On the Democrats side of the political spectrum, they don’t really have a candidate for president.  Hillary Clinton is a criminal and I have serious doubts as of this writing that she will be able to beat the socialist Bernie Sanders for the nomination.  Then with that said, I really don’t think America is ready to elect an open socialist.  I don’t think in 2016 the nation is ready to accept socialism the way that France has, and many other European countries.  A large portion of America has been raised on socialism—especially victims of public school over the last two decades.  They have been taught in their educations that socialism is the way to go—especially college graduates.  It takes most young people at least a decade to start seeing the reality that they can only get once their parents cut them off from an allowance, and they pop out a couple of kids.  Hopefully by that time they aren’t sick with venereal diseases and can actually live moderately healthy lives for two or three decades without overloading the doctor’s office every time they get a sniffle—which is another large contributor to insurance increases—the preponderance of so many people living their life with risky lifestyles—reckless sexual attitudes, chemical abuse through narcotics and alcohol—and high fat diets.  What is remarkable however is how stupid most people are these days, and to exemplify it read the comments below from a recent CNN article about health care and the Bernie Sanders socialist approach.  We all know they are out there, but it’s another thing to hear them speak so foolishly.  Have a look and read the CNN article linked below.

DemandSider12 hours ago

@davidfour @sunny5280 

We have let capitalism run rampant, to the point that we borrow money from Communist China, to subsidize the human resource budget of our largest private employer, so that they can profitable import from Communist China. Do you think this is wise?

http://money.cnn.com/2016/01/16/news/economy/sanders-health-care-taxes/index.html?iid=hp-stack-dom

hardhatharry6 hours ago

I’m a Bernie fan but why even get people worked up about this, we all know Congress would never pass 99% of his ideas.  What it would cost is irrelevant, he is just getting people talking about it longterm. 

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medianone5 hours ago

@hardhatharry You never know….  Conservatives have done a great job of pushing their “anything but Obama” or “anything Obama does it bad, terrible, a failure” to the point that maybe people would consider something different that is not associated with Obama.  Maybe?

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QuestionCNN5 hours ago

@hardhatharry What this article refused to mention is that Hillary will do the same thing – increase taxes under the pre-tense of providing Universal Health care, then divert it to pay for her police-state Marxist Utopia. But CNN is in the Clinton camp and is helping her by providing free negative campaign attacks on the other Marxist – Bernie Sanders 

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DemandSider5 hours ago

@hardhatharry 

This election reminds me a lot of the 1932 election The inequality, the Republican leaning Congress, the economic collapse due to middle class destruction and speculation. With FDR’s election, both Houses switched to heavily Democratic. Sanders’ views are very similar to FDR’s. 

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RustyShackel1 hour ago

@DemandSider @hardhatharry Agreed, Bernie does seem like such a believer in the authority of government that he would take actions to throw Americans in imprisonment camps much like FDR did with innocent japanese-American citizens. I wonder who Bernie would target  – conservatives? The rich?

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DemandSider1 hour ago

@RustyShackel @DemandSider @hardhatharry 

No, you are confusing him with Chewbaca, The Confederate Republican nominee. He’ll probably just put another wing on in Cuba, call it Trumptanomo, and make a killing at tax payer expense, per usual with these “free market” parasites.

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DemandSider7 hours ago

sickforprofit.com/ceos

Stephen Hemsley, CEO, United Health Care, total value of unexercised stock options (Forbes):  $744 million

“Hemseley returns $190 million in stock options acquired as as result of practices found to be fraudulent by The SEC” -American Medical News

Edward Hanway, Cigna CEO, total value of unexercised stock options, $28.8 million,five year compensation, $120 million “The family of a 17 year old girl who died hours after Cigna reversed a decision to deny her liver transplant to sue” -Oakland Tribune

Michael McCallister, CEO, Humana, total value of unexercised stock options, $60.8 million, “Humana abandons seniors in Florida; returns after Republicans pass new Medicare law, upping HMO payments by 25%” – NY Times

Has this Bernie Sanders fella no sense of decency??!?  Who would hire these, ah, people?

  

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pulsecolo7 hours ago

@DemandSider Gosh, those salaries could be used to help pay to retrain and pay

all those insurance company employees mentioned earlier…. 

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JRCHICT6 hours ago

@DemandSider ” Bernie Sanders would LIKELY raise taxes,……”

“SOME experts say,…..”

Great journalism Tami

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medianone5 hours ago

@JRCHICT @DemandSider to be fair, or at least in cutting Tami some slack; we do live in a very litigious society.

Plus the article did say, “Sanders’ plan hasn’t been evaluated by the Congressional Budget Office or major think tanks…” which seems to be the standard for vetting candidate tax proposals.

But I agree with your thinking.

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DemandSider1 hour ago

@medianone @JRCHICT @DemandSider 

Yes, for a person to have their medical bills reimbursed, they often MUST be litigious. SIngle payer would ease the burden on our courts. 

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DemandSider12 hours ago

Insurance stocks rose with the passage of ACA. I don’t think they’ll rise with single payer. Manufacturers should rejoice, however, as their expenses will fall a lot.

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booboospal11 hours ago

Assuming a President Sanders could get his proposal through Congress, how would it affect (adversely?) the 50 million and increasing number of folks now getting Medicare benefits?

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CPR8 hours ago

@booboospal Well it would greatly impact the hundred thousand plus people that work in private insurance or in support of it. 

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booboospal8 hours ago

CPR: Do you know the answer to my question?

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pulsecolo7 hours ago

it would do nothing to adversely affect those folks, the only thing that would happen is that the advantage plans would go away.   But, there would no longer be a need for advantage plans as better coverage would prevail for all seniors as well as the rest of us with everyone in the pool.  Keep in mind, that the Silver  exchange plans under the ACA, that most Americans have with the subsidies,  have much higher deductibles and out of pocket costs than traditional Medicare does without any advantage plan at all.  The insurance industry successfully lobbied and sold America on the “snake oil need” for advantage plans.  Advantage plans have a daily deductible for in hospital stays, and do not cover long term care.   Plus, when seniors sign up for them, they may actually be paying more in the long run than had they banked the money they are spending for those plans.  

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booboospal6 hours ago

pulse:

Would there still be Part B premiums?

Would retiree pension and investment income be taxed more than now to pay insurance costs?

Would there still be a need for supplementary coverage?

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JRCHICT6 hours ago

@booboospal  all good questions.

I’m pretty sure though that we’ll have many who will expect to be perfect right out of the gate. Find any and all reasons to condemn it as we’ve done w/ ACA

Primarily use it as a political football.

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medianone6 hours ago

@booboospal Again, all good questions.  And shouldn’t debate on universal health care also include looking at other countries who’ve successfully implemented such systems?  Their costs, outcomes, sustainability, etc?

Seems like this debate has been ongoing for decades, at least since Hillary Care proposals.  And if other countries have been successfully operating single payer systems and covering 100% of their populations, it is a wonder our “top men” haven’t been able to track these successes and implement them here. 

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JRCHICT6 hours ago

@medianone @booboospal  I’m not sure our “top men” care more about taking the money from the lobbyists of the health and insurance corporations for same old same old, or they’re interested in doing what’s right for us.

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booboospal10 hours ago

My former employer pays a fixed monthly amount (adjusted each year) toward employee AND RETIREE and dependent health insurance. So far it has been enough $$ to cover a Blue Cross supplemental policy AND the basic tier Medicare Part B premium for both my wife and me. Of course both of us paid for Part A (hospitalization) Medicare coverage by payroll tax while we were employed.

How would the Sanders proposal affect us?

Anyone?

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CNN User8 hours ago

@DemandSider

Republicans: you blame non religions christians, atheists,Muslims, blacks,Hindus, Obama,gays etc. for US weak middle class,but the real problem is no healthcare,expensive college, no paid maternity leave etc. 
—- 
-evil socialist countries all rank higher in median wealth(or wealth of the middle class) 
Source: 
http://www.middleclasspoliticaleconomist.com/2013/06/us-median-wealth-only-28th-in-world.html 

(Before you republicans blame colored people, remember that UAE, Kuwait , Qatar, Singapore have a high percentage of colored folks but still have a richer middle class than us ) 

If you don’t believe my source just google “median wealth by country” and you will see similar results. 

We dont have paid maturity leave, free healthcare or free or reduced college. We are the only developed country to not have this. Thats why we rank so low.

Uninsured by state- 
http://www.gallup.com/poll/184514/uninsured-rates-continue-drop-states.aspx 

dem. states have a lower percentage of uninsured than republican states

Those are some really poorly educated theories shown above generated by a society raised on a terrible public school system which taught them all the wrong things.  The basic instruction was that mixed economies such as what Scandinavian socialism proposes is the answer to equal distribution of resources without considering what the source of the value of what’s distributed entailed.  For years the word on the street was that the United States would become more service oriented as other countries would become the producers.  Otherwise, China and the Gulf States would make most of our American stuff and we’d have more time to think about things and have service jobs to sustain those “intellectual” pursuits.  Well, that plan hasn’t worked out.  The “money” jobs are now overseas and socialists think that by raising McDonald’s jobs to $15 an hour that the “middle class” will be sustained.  Only idiot academics who live in a campus bubble could have concocted such a stupid notion.  Only laissez-faire capitalism will solve our problems.  Not crony capitalism which is what the pharmaceuticals and oil conglomerates have—I’m talking about open markets competing with each other to offer the most superior product for the lowest price.

All the countries mentioned above, places like UAE, Kuwait, Qatar, and Singapore are ultimately servicing the United States demand for products.  The United States creates the global demand with their $17 trillion a year in gross domestic product.  That GDP in order to survive by the way must increase by nearly double just for us to hope to survive as a country—and for the world in general to even have a chance.   Without the United States all those mentioned countries wither away and die.  So they are not examples of success or flowering epitaphs to managed economies.  Socialism is the tombstone that the epitaph needs to be inscribed upon, because it has not worked.  The United States is the only life support the world has.  It is sad that more people don’t understand that.

The next president cannot be a Democrat.  The House and Senate can’t just have Republicans; it has to have “conservative” Republicans the likes of Ted Cruz and Rand Paul.  Whoever is in the executive branch will have to be willing to fight the world and idiots like those in the comments above from their instructed commitments to socialism and convince them to embrace not just capitalism, but the most open form of it imaginable– laissez-faire.  We are no longer at a “theory” phase in this global economic struggle.  We are at the rubber hitting the road phase and it’s not the time for games.  If the situation doesn’t get fixed right here and now it will be over in the future.  Because there are just too many socialists who are having kids and are raising them to be just as stupid as they are—the evidence is right above you—they do exist.  Astonishingly they somehow manage to feed themselves, but they aren’t much good for anything else.  But they do vote.

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.

Where Quentin Tarantino is Getting it Wrong: The magnificent creativity of Ennio Morricone

I really want to like Quentin Tarantino.  I am actually thankful that he has resurrected some fresh music out of the great Italian musical genius of Ennio Morricone in his films Django Unchained and The Hateful Eight.  I really enjoyed Django Unchained, parts of it, but found the politics distracting.  His obvious hatred of the South was too much to fully enjoy his attempt at a western—and I have skipped The Hateful Eight at the box office because I know that Tarantino and his producers at the Weinstein Company are hopeless leftists.  Obviously, there are a lot of people who feel the same way as I do.  While watching The O’Reilly Factor recently I noticed that The Hateful Eight was under performing at the box office which surprised me.  I have been tempted to see it basically to witness that magnificent 70 mm lens Tarantino shot the film with along with an original score by Ennio Morricone.  But the politics of Tarantino is just too much to really enjoy his movies completely.  With everything that’s good, there are equally bad points politically motivated.  But, one thing I do have in common with him is a love of Sergio Leone spaghetti westerns.  I don’t take pleasure in watching The Hateful Eight fail at the box office.  I’d like to see it do well because Hollywood producers will blame the loses on the western genre and not on Tarantino himself, but it is clear that one of the most studied film directors in the world presently is just a second-hander from Knoxville, Tennessee named after the Burt Reynolds character in Gunsmoke.  He is not capable of creating from scratch the wildly imaginative stories that Ennio Morricone produced music for as seen below by the Spaghetti Western Orchestra.  I must warn you dear reader that some of this is very strange, but as a human achievement applied to the western genre, it was wildly innovative and distinct—and is the reason that a video store clerk like Tarantino wanted to get into film to begin with.  Unfortunately the young man missed most of the message and lost sight of the Cowboy Way as a key element to the story.  If The Good the Bad and the Ugly is Tarantino’s favorite film, he has grown as a filmmaker into making movies like it, but he obviously forgot to include the good in this plots.  And that is ultimately why The Hateful Eight is failing.

I have offered to help modern Hollywood with their problems several times.  But I have not been willing to compromise my essential conservatism to do so.  To me the Cowboy Way is a very real thing and I live it not just in writing and being in front of the camera—but off-camera as well.  I am quite certain that John Wayne would not be able to make films in modern Hollywood—and because of that—I stopped worrying about contributing to the industry to make it better.  Many fans of westerns think the many hundreds of Italian westerns called the “spaghetti western” were not a proper reflection of the American western because they often featured “anti-heroes.”  It is that aspect that Quentin Tarantino seems particularly obsessed with.  Spaghetti westerns often featured complex characters that didn’t always seem so bad or so good, but were sometimes blended together as a kind of gritty combo that made the viewer question the nature of morality.  However, I disagree.  I think Sergio Leone and his musical collaborator Ennio Morricone were reflections of Nietzsche’s “Übermensch” and that is the key to understanding the morality of the best spaghetti westerns.  They aren’t just revenge pictures, they are about the characters overcoming their human limitations to rise above their competition—such as Clint Eastwood surviving gun shots to the heart to beat his rival in the climax of A Fistful of Dollars, or Charles Bronson facing down death and all its possibilities to kill the man who tortured and hung his brother in Once Upon a Time in the West—a wonderful movie.   Tarantino understood the revenge, but he missed the “Übermensch” aspect of the characters.

At least at the end of Django Unchained the hero rode off into the sunset with his girl—and I thought that was good.  Unfortunately the character succeeded not because he was an Übermensch” but because his rivals were stupid Southern slave holders which of course cheapened the essence of the story.  That made Django Unchained a lot of fun and it was truly enjoyable to hear Ennio Morricone again in a western (or what looked like a western) but it lacked the punch of the classic Sergio Leone westerns which is sadly unfortunate, because obviously Tarantino was shooting for that.  If I thought he had made an inspired picture uniquely produced by Quentin Tarantino motivated by Sergio Leone I’d go see The Hateful Eight in a second.

I love the spaghetti westerns because of what they represented as an export of American value.  Italy was suffering a huge cultural emptiness after the failures of World War II, just as the Japanese had, and they turned to American cinema as a way to lift themselves out of the dust.  The Japanese made samurai films based on American westerns and the Italians made westerns for the same reason—so it makes me feel good that America was able to help those two fascist cultures re-invent themselves after their failed insurrections during a colossal world war.   Their interpretation of the American western involved a little bit of Nietzsche along with some very innovative music and to me that’s inspiring.  America and its values were able to help the world heal after a terrible tragedy and allow them to contribute aspects of their society applied to an American invention and I think that was a very healthy thing for their nations.  I love “spaghetti westerns” for that reason.  That is my idea of culture—where America exports an idea based on freedom and other societies use that art to lift themselves up to a higher level of thought.  The Good the Bad and the Ugly is one of those types of films, it yearns to define a confusing world where good guys and bad guys weren’t so obvious but in the end there was no question.  Clint Eastwood could have taken all the gold at the end, but he didn’t.  He left his partner with a fair share even though that partner had tried to betray him many times throughout the movie.  The “ugly” represented in that classic film could have easily been Italy itself after the war with the old guard of fascism being the “bad.”  The “good” was obviously the United States who won World War II and could have taken all the gold, but they didn’t.  They took their share of the spoils, but left plenty for everyone else, which is the metaphorical reason that the Sergio Leone movies have so much meaning even now.  The Ennio Morricone music simply captured that ambition with extremely creative endeavor that was very unique at the time induced from risk.

Quentin Tarantino missed a lot of these points and all the filmmakers studying him are also going to make the same failure.  Tarantino would argue against it, but a movie audience requires a moral tapestry to hang their belief system against—and if that audience has lost that system, they require the filmmaker to give it to them.  If neither the audience nor the filmmaker is offering that tapestry, then the project will fail.  American westerns helped pull Italy out of the fascism of Mussolini—which was wonderful for their culture.  The cinematic western was big enough to even allow other cultures to add their imprint, which Ennio Morricone and Sergio Leone was able to apply through art.  Tarantino as a filmmaker is missing the essence of his favorite films.  He makes movies that look and sound like his favorites, but they lack the punch of those classics because Quentin himself is still trying to figure out what they meant to him.  His foundation philosophy is in conflict.  He was raised by a guy who loved Burt Reynolds so much that the film director was named after the Gunsmoke character.  Now, as a big time Hollywood director surrounded by leftist filmmakers and knuckle dragging slobs— Quentin thinks he’s the standard of filmmaking regarding modern art.  Unfortunately, he’s not acquired the mentality of Sergio Leone or Akira Kurasawa yet—and based on his present trajectory, he won’t get there by age 60—and likely never will.  So I’ll wait for The Hateful Eight to come out on video and I’ll watch it on my nice television.  I may even buy it if Wal-Mart offers it in their $5 bargain bin.  But that’s all it means to me, and that fault is Tarantino’s.  I get the feeling it wouldn’t take much for Quentin Tarantino and I to be good friends—there is a lot that we both like in common.  But he is stuck creatively by the Hollywood priority to have him remain a second-hander to the past instead of doing as a human being what Ennio Morricone did so many years ago—and that’s take a wild chance on a uniquely individual artistic endeavor built by a lifetime of experience.

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 Cinebistro at Liberty Center: Better than a Broadway play, and more comfortable

I have to say something very positive about Cinebistro at Liberty Center, which is a luxury movie theater near my home.  I was at the soft opening for the James Bond film described below in the Channel 12 clip talking about the food selections available, and I have written about my experience with a positive review.  I have been to movie theaters all over the country over many years and I certainly know good from bad.  I also have been in several home theaters and know the benefits to them as well.  So it should carry some weight to know how much I think of the Cinebistro experience at Liberty Center which is the best way I think there is to see a movie.  I have been to that theater several times now and can report that after several months of operating, the theater is actually better now than when it first opened.  It is a grand palace of mythmaking endeavor and it is worthy of the best praise.

My wife and I went to see The Revenant there.  I had just jumped off the air at WAAM radio as I was guest hosting for my friend Matt Clark while he was on vacation.  We hadn’t had anything to eat yet and we had reservations to see the long-awaited movie at 3 PM.  I fully expected that in the middle of the afternoon between lunch and dinner that the Cinebistro wouldn’t be crowded, but was surprised that the theater was nearly sold out when I made my reservations online at 10 AM, before going on the air at 1600 WAAM.  The moment I signed off at the station we literally got into the car and went to Liberty Center because at Cinebistro if you have a movie start time of 3 PM you need to arrive at 2:30 to get seated and have your food order in.

Entry into the theater is just epic; I never get tired of it.  I was in the mood to be pampered; I had worked very hard all week.  I had done a lot of reading and writing that morning before doing an hour of live radio on a Saturday, so I was tired and ready to see a movie I hoped would be great—which it was.  That is what they do best at Cinebistro as opposed to a home theater or anywhere else, they understand people like me—hard working people who come to the movies for an intellectual experience as opposed to just entertainment.  Nothing for me is ever just fun.  Some people argue that’s not a good way to live, I’d argue the opposite.  Everything I do in my life I do well and I put a lot of effort into it.  I never just waste time.  No time in a 24 hour period is spent wasting time.  If I can’t squeeze multiple meanings out of every instance it’s just not worth doing.  So when I go to the movie theater, Cinebistro gets what I expect out of my investment.

Cinebistro does not skimp on their employees, they do not understaff.  There were a small army of people running the theater.  If you counted all the kitchen staff, which makes everything by scratch, and include the runners, servers and ushers, there are at least five times the amount of people who are typically employed by a theater system like Showcase, Rave, or Regal.  As I looked at all the employees through the lobby, at the bars, concessions, etc, it was quite an impressive operation and not every movie is promised to pack the theater house like The Revenant.  Most movies are typically 30% full, so it baffles me how Cinebistro does it.

The proximity to parking in the back lot and entering the Liberty Center complex through the access tunnel by The Funny Bone Comedy Club essentially meant that we parked, our car on a packed Saturday afternoon and were at the ticket counter within about five minutes where I picked up my reserved tickets and we were upstairs and in our seats at precisely 2:31 PM. My wife and I ordered a couple of hamburgers and some popcorn which lasted the entire two and a half hour movie, along with drink refills just like in a good restaurant.  There were a lot of “yes sirs” from the staff and everyone was very respectful—which is something I expect from other people.  I was able to step into the movie world on a pedestal and view the mythic essence of a good movie without distractions.  For the first time I was able to see what a full house at the Cinebistro looked like.  Even on the soft opening for Spectre it was my group and a few other key groups present, so I didn’t get to see how Cinebistro handled a crowd.  The answer was a very pleasant one.  Every seat was full yet I didn’t notice that anybody was around me. The seats are so big that the people nearest to me were a good distance, more than enough for me to stretch out and relax.

It’s not that I’m claustrophobic or can’t handle crowds; it’s just that I don’t enjoy myself in a crowd.  I don’t like the idea of breathing air that people around me immediately exhumed.  The carbon dioxide that comes out of the bodies of other people need time to mix with fresh oxygen molecules and nitrogen along with other elements to produce good quality air to breathe and that just can’t happen if during an entire two-hour movie someone is right next to you.  So space is important to me.  I typically go to movies when other people don’t for that reason.  At Cinebistro I don’t have to worry about them.  Their air circulation system in the ceiling is very good giving the air quality a feeling of constant replenishing.  With the food, service, spacing and air quality all in tip-top shape, I was able to enjoy my movie without any distractions, which I greatly appreciated-especially with something as mind-boggling epic as The Revenant.

Typically at the end of any film I watch if it was any good, I always stay until the end of the credits.  I read who did what, and where the filming locations were—and any other information that strikes my interest—like how many stuntmen did the film take, who were the visual effect companies, essentially how many jobs were created by the production of the film—because those types of things are also important to me.  I also just like to listen to the music and let the movie slowly roll through my mind.  So it really irritates me when other people sitting next to me want to get up as soon as the picture is done and head for their cars.  You always have to stand up a bit and let them pass in front of you and once they do you can just imagine that they are passing gas and that they likely have full bladders from sitting for so long and that they need to use the restroom.  I don’t enjoy knowing that those kinds of things are so close in proximity to my face, so until the theater empties, it stresses me out and is hard to enjoy the credits.  It’s even worse in regular theaters because teenagers are often present and they almost always stink—they smell like adolescents and cigarette smoke.  They just feel slimy when they bump into your leg.  Typically, you expect it when you go into a public place and I just endure it.  But at Cinebristo I never have to worry about it.  When the movie let out my wife and I could remain in our seats with our chairs reclined and our entire aisle was able to empty without a single person bumping into my feet. I didn’t have to move a muscle to let anybody get up and leave.

When the last of the credits finally ended I was a little surprised to see that the place looked like an entire restaurant had just got up at the same time and left.  It didn’t look bad, but it would take a lot of table clearing to remove all the plates and glasses that were on every table in the theater.  That’s another thing specific to Cinebisto.  Everything they do is restaurant quality including the utensils.  All the soft drinks are actual glasses and there are lots of wine glasses.  There are no paper cups and popcorn bags.  Everything is something that has to be washed in the kitchen.  They do not go cheap on anything, which they could easily justify at only $12 dollars per seat on films before 4 PM.  Night seats are only $14 dollars, not much more than a typical local theater chain.  I couldn’t help but think that nobody was doing any cleaning yet and that it was going to take a while to get the place ready for another showing.  Most of the people had long left and the last people had left several minutes before we did.  We were clearly the last ones out of our seats.  As we walked back out of the theater a manager was there with a little tray of mints which he offered to us with a smile and some polite banter.  I thought that was a nice touch and I told him I appreciated it.  Then we stepped out into the hall and saw about 15 employees ready to enter the theater to clean it.   The manager had made them stand in the hall and wait for us to leave.  I knew they had to be angry at us for staying so long, but the manager refused to let the employees enter to disrupt our movie experience.  That is the kind of place the Cinebistro is.  It’s not going out of its way to be snobby.  They just make a point to elevate the human experience of going to the movies.

So thank you Cinebistro for doing such a great job for one entire business quarter—I hope that everything continues as it has.  It was wonderful to leave that theater and have so many people tell me to have a good day as I passed them back into the large vaulted lobby of the Cobb Theater system. It was also nice to see that the sun had went down and the streets of Liberty Center were lit up nicely completing a nice day for my wife and me.  I was able to see a movie I really wanted to without having to compromise my comfort and standards, and for that I really appreciated it.  The whole experience was what you expect from a luxury theater system and it has lived up to those standards now over several visits which is a great compliment to the hard work obviously on display and in full commitment of the management of Cinebistro.  Going to the movies at Cinebistro has the feel of attending a play at the Aronoff Center or on Broadway—only without the tight seating and the crowded streets of a big city.  It is a unique experience and I’m proud to have one at Liberty Center.

Rich “Cliffhanger” Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

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Why the NRA Didn’t Attend the CNN Town Hall: The tricks progressives play to advance their strategic objectives

When President Barack Obama agreed to the CNN Town Hall debate on Gun Control in America on January 7th 2016 immediately after he signed executive orders against them, I couldn’t help but think of the typical consensus building exercises that public schools use when they want to bend communities over their knees for tax increases.  When my home district of Lakota conducted those types of meetings even though I was against the tax increases, I didn’t attend because I didn’t want to break bread with the enemy.  So I can understand why the NRA refused the CNN Town Hall.   There was little for them to accomplish having a public meeting with Barack Obama in a consensus building exercise unless you are willing to go to battle in front of everyone and embarrass the President.  That is the reason I didn’t attend the Lakota meetings—because I didn’t want to make friends and find common ground due to the foundation philosophies being too far off between us.  CLICK THE MANY LINKS TO REVIEW.  With that said, I think the NRA should have attended and engaged the president the way Taya Kyle did and several others—but I understand why they didn’t.

The problem with progressives, which the president certainly embodies that definition–is that they use compromise to advance their plans.  When you negotiate with them and give a little they always come back later to take a little more.  Compromising with them only opens the door for more impositions.  For instance, back on the public school debate, they always suggest that a little bit of tax today will save a generation of children tomorrow, so why not give a few dollars of your property value to the children who need it.  However, because of the progressive management of public school systems and the escalating costs associated with their style of management, every five years those schools continuously return to voters with the same argument because they never change their essential behavior.  The progressive oriented aggressors in this case always favor consensus building exercises because they know that no matter what concessions are achieved during a public meeting, that they will always come back to take a little more—and they continue forever until there is nothing left because the basic philosophy of a typical progressive is rooted in communism.  So in the case of a school system, every five years school board management typically changes a bit as well as the top-level teachers who take up the most payroll in a budget so the same people aren’t always asking for the new tax increase.  But, because the foundation philosophy of progressives is communism each new generation of progressives coming to consensus building meetings can trust that new concessions will be demanded and that the slow advancement toward a centrally controlled society will eventually be achieved once property taxes are too high to mandate private property ownership.

For instance, in my community, Liberty Township, Ohio, it is nearly impossible for a private owner to hold more than 10 acres of land because the taxes are so incredibly high.  Those taxes are high because of community mismanagement—local government making too many concessions over the years to the school system of Lakota and other public employees.  The only real decisions that large land holders have is to sell their old farms to developers who will turn plots of land to neighborhoods that put more kids in schools requiring more public employees to deal with the increase in children.  Essentially two decades of tax increases created the problem so now there is suburban overcrowding and the golf courses near my home are struggling to justify holding so much land at such a high rate of tax to benefit so few people.  This forces the land use to migrate from exclusivity among say country club affluence into more of a “community” centered use, which progressives have always been in support of.  For the people who loved the open farm land and large plots of land under private ownership progressives within the school system and local government have managed to convert the land use to large plots of that same land being managed by socialist oriented neighborhood homeowner associations that collectively decide whether or not you can have up a garage door or park an RV in your driveway.  As that same land used to be managed by a private family that might have had a target range in their backyard and a few cars being always worked on next to a barn, the land was converted into something entirely different and much more conducive toward the aims of progressives—which are aligned with the original communist goals of eradicating private property.

Nobody ever says it directly but if you get them to dinner away from a crowd’s ear people like Jeffery Stec who ran the Lakota “community conversations” have every intention of advancing progressive agenda concerns against all individual rights.  Even though Anderson Cooper at CNN did a great job with the debate at the Town Hall featuring Barack Obama just days after the president’s executive orders angered gun owners immensely, both Cooper and Obama as progressives were working to whittle away the resistance to their eventual aims of collective assimilation.  If you watch the debate carefully dear reader, you will see the tactics.  For instance, when Obama had to deal with the widow of Chris Kyle followed up by the rape victim—both who were strong supporters of the Second Amendment, Obama took the edge off their resistance with compliments to ease into his eventual position.  For either of the two women to attack Obama after he had provided such compliments would make them appear as the villains.  So Obama took away their aggression with compliments in a public setting.  The president yielded no ground, yet Taya and others had to, so to appear civil in the discourse.  CNN gave president Obama the high ground strategically, and once he had that, there was no way to create leverage against him in debate.  The public watching all this then assumed that Obama seemed reasonable.  CNN appeared to side at times with Taya Kyle and other Second Amendment supporters.  But in the long run, resistance to the gun control measures loosened allowing them to stand against scrutiny.  Then when the next tragedy occurs, more laws will be proposed.  Just like the land grabs of local public schools converting over time the use and philosophic position of the community toward such use progressives will gain and everyone else loses.

There is a way to attack such town hall effectiveness against the other side.  It is difficult, but possible.  In such a conflict, the NRA doesn’t stand to gain much—only to hold their ground.  The real test of Obama’s consensus building exercise would be to speak at an NRA event, on ground controlled by gun rights supporters.  CNN is certainly sympathetic toward Obama and all past and future progressives—so it was a safe zone for the president.  But a NASCAR event or a gun show would be a different story.  Obama wouldn’t give the same town hall in front of such an audience if he were invited because he would not be able to maintain the high ground in the debate.  Under such conditions, Obama would be equal at best, and that would not give him the strategic platform to execute the progressive objectives.  So it goes both ways.  The NRA did not attend the CNN Town Hall because by the nature of it, the president controlled the high ground in the debate, just as Jeffery Stec in my community controlled the community conversations.  All this is a variation of the Delphi Technique that I talked so much about over five years ago.  CLICK HERE TO REVIEW.  The intent of such games is not to find mutual understanding—it is to advance the cause of progressives—which always lead to further impositions against freedom—so the only way not to lose such an engagement is to not participate.  However, that only works so long.  Eventually, a conflict is mandated and for that reason, the NRA needs to think of ways to go on the offensive.  My suggestion would be to invite the president to the next NRA event and strip him of the security of dealing with the friendly studios of CNN.  In the battle over public opinion a new strategy is needed.  Yielding to progressives will not get the job done—as many homeowners who used to hold large plots of land now clearly understand.  You have to know what kind of game we are all playing before you can win it.

Rich “Cliffhanger” Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

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How the Government of Qatar Runs Hillary Clinton: Short of an armed revolution, Trump is the best answer

 

Did Hillary Clinton deserve what Trump did to her in Biloxi, MS on January 2, 2016?  Yes, absolutely!  As I reported yesterday, CLICK HERE FOR REVIEW, Hillary is guilty of working with the government of Qatar to advance ISIS.  ISIS is her creation along with Barack Obama, so she had some considerable gall blaming Trump for being the greatest advertisement for ISIS.   So be sure to watch this speech then read some information about the government of Qatar below to learn more about who Hillary Clinton associates with, and why.

The political system of Qatar is an absolute monarchy, with the Emir of Qatar as head of state and head of government. Under the 2003 constitutional referendum it should become a constitutional monarchy.[1] Sharia Law is the main source of Qatari legislation according to Qatar’s Constitution.[2][3]

Sharia law is the main source of Qatari legislation according to Qatar’s Constitution.[2][3] Sharia law is applied to laws pertaining to family law, inheritance, and several criminal acts (including adultery, robbery and murder). In some cases in Sharia-based family courts, a female’s testimony is worth half a man’s and in some cases a female witness is not accepted at all.[4] Codified family law was introduced in 2006. In practice, Qatar’s legal system is a mixture of civil law and Islamic law.[5][6]trump-warrior

Flogging is used in Qatar as a punishment for alcohol consumption or illicit sexual relations.[7] Article 88 of Qatar’s criminal code declares the punishment for adultery is 100 lashes.[8] Adultery is punishable by death when a Muslim woman and a non-Muslim man are involved.[8] In 2006, a Filipino woman was sentenced to 100 lashes for adultery.[8] In 2010, at least 18 people (mostly foreign nationals) were sentenced to flogging of between 40 and 100 lashes for offences related to “illicit sexual relations” or alcohol consumption.[9] In 2011, at least 21 people (mostly foreign nationals) were sentenced to floggings of between 30 and 100 lashes for offences related to “illicit sexual relations” or alcohol consumption.[10] In 2012, six expatriates were sentenced to floggings of either 40 or 100 lashes.[7] Only Muslims considered medically fit were liable to have such sentences carried out. It is unknown if the sentences were implemented.[11] More recently in April 2013, a Muslim expatriate was sentenced to 40 lashes for alcohol consumption.[12][13][14] In June 2014, a Muslim expatriate was sentenced to 40 lashes for consuming alcohol and driving under the influence.[15] Judicial corporal punishment is common in Qatar due to the Hanbali interpretation of Sharia Law.

Stoning is a legal punishment in Qatar.[16] Apostasy is a crime punishable by the death penalty in Qatar.[17] Blasphemy is punishable by up to seven years in prison and proselytizing can be punished by up to 10 years in prison.[17] Homosexuality is a crime punishable by the death penalty for Muslims.[18]

Alcohol consumption is partially legal in Qatar, some five-star luxury hotels are allowed to sell alcohol to their non-Muslim customers.[19][20] Muslims are not allowed to consume alcohol in Qatar and Muslims caught consuming alcohol are liable to flogging or deportation. Non-Muslim expatriates can obtain a permit to purchase alcohol for personal consumption. The Qatar Distribution Company (a subsidiary of Qatar Airways) is permitted to import alcohol and pork; it operates the one and only liquor store in the country, which also sells pork to holders of liquor licences.[21] Qatari officials have also indicated a willingness to allow alcohol in “fan zones” at the 2022 FIFA World Cup.[22]

Until recently, restaurants on the Pearl-Qatar (a man-made island near Doha) were allowed to serve alcoholic drinks.[19][20] In December 2011, however, restaurants on the Pearl were told to stop selling alcohol.[19][23] No explanation was given for the ban.[19][20] Speculation about the reason includes the government’s desire to project a more pious image in advance of the country’s first election of a royal advisory body and rumours of a financial dispute between the government and the resort’s developers.[23]

In 2014, Qatar launched a modesty campaign to remind tourists of the modest dress code.[24] Female tourists are advised not to wear leggings, miniskirts, sleeveless dresses and short or tight clothing in public. Men are advised against wearing only shorts and singlets.[25]

As of 2014, certain provisions of the Qatari Criminal Code allows punishments such as flogging and stoning to be imposed as criminal sanctions. The UN Committee Against Torture found that these practices constituted a breach of the obligations imposed by the UN Convention Against Torture.[26][27] Qatar retains the death penalty, mainly for threats against national security.

Under the provisions of Qatar’s sponsorship law, sponsors have the unilateral power to cancel workers’ residency permits, deny workers’ ability to change employers, report a worker as “absconded” to police authorities, and deny permission to leave the country.[28] As a result, sponsors may restrict workers’ movements and workers may be afraid to report abuses or claim their rights.[28] According to the ITUC, the visa sponsorship system allows the exaction of forced labour by making it difficult for a migrant worker to leave an abusive employer or travel overseas without permission.[29] Qatar also does not maintain wage standards for its immigrant labour. Qatar commissioned international law firm DLA Piper to produce a report investigating the immigrant labour system. In May 2014 DLA Piper released over 60 recommendations for reforming the kafala system including the abolition of exit visas and the introduction of a minimum wage which Qatar has pledged to implement.[30]

Cases of ill-treatment of immigrant labour have been observed. The Nepalese ambassador to Qatar, Maya Kumari Sharma, described the emirate as an “open jail”.[31] Qatar does not have national occupational health standards or guidelines, and workplace injuries are the third highest cause of accidental deaths.[32] In May 2012, Qatari officials declared their intention to allow the establishment of an independent trade union.[33] Qatar also announced it will scrap its sponsor system for foreign labour, which requires that all foreign workers be sponsored by local employers, who in some cases hold workers’ passports and can deny them permission to change jobs.[33]

On October 10, 2005, for the first time, Qatar was elected to a two-year term on the UN Security Council for 2006–2007.

According to BBC, in April 2006 Qatar announced that it will give US$50 million (£28 million) to the new Hamas-led Palestinian government. Hamas, an ally of Iran and Hezbollah, is considered by the US and the EU to be a terrorist organization.

In May 2006, Qatar pledged more than $100 million to Hurricane Katrina relief to colleges and universities in Louisiana affected by the hurricane. Some of this money was also distributed to families looking to repair damaged homes by Neighborhood Housing Services of New Orleans, Inc.

With the advent of the Arab Spring in 2011, Qatar has been seen as meddling in the affairs of other Arab countries, supporting insurgents, generally and increasingly radical Islamists and Salafists.[45] This policy has led to rebukes by neighboring Gulf states such as Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates.[45] Qatar joined NATO operations in Libya and reportedly armed Libyan opposition groups.[46] It is also became a major provider of money and support for rebel groups in the Syrian civil war.[47] With close ties to the Muslim Brotherhood the emirate’s funding for rebels strongly favored Islamic and Salafist forces in both Libya and Syria.[45]

The government of Qatar owns the Al Jazeera television network. The network has been accused of being biased and taking an active role in the affairs of other countries specifically during the Arab Spring in 2011.[48] Numerous countries have complained about biased reporting in support of Qatar policy.

Most of the developed countries (plus Brunei and Indonesia) are exempt from visa requirements. Citizens of exempted countries can also request a joint visa that allows them to travel to Oman as well.[49]

Qatar is member of ABEDA, AFESD, AL, AMF, ESCWA, FAO, G-77, GCC, IAEA, IBRD, ICAO, ICRM, IDB, IFAD, IFRCS, IHO (pending member), ILO, IMF, International Maritime Organization, Inmarsat, Intelsat,Interpol, IOC, ISO (correspondent), ITU, NAM, OAPEC, OIC, OPCW, OPEC, UN, UNCTAD, UNESCO, UNIDO, UPU, WCO, WHO, WIPO, WMO, and WTO.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_of_Qatar

The House of Thani (Arabic: آل ثاني Al Thani‎) is the ruling family of Qatar, whose origins can be traced back to the Ma’adid clan of the Banu Tamim tribal confederation.[1]

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Thani

When Trump said in his speech that the Iran deal was so bad that it was suspicious he’s talking about this history with Qatar and Hezbollah. The plan from Democrats like Obama and the Clintons have been to deplete American resources so that the Middle East can rise up and strengthen as an independent region with Palestinian leanings working closely with Iran.  To show the extent of Qatar’s activism into American politics consider the effort expensed by Al Jazeer America to expand its operations within the United States even with a zero share in the ratings.  The system is completely rigged against us and Trump is exposing it.

Al Jazeera America had been a disaster from the start. Its $500 million buy of Al Gore’s Current TV had been expensive but considered worth the price to get access to a huge number of cable households through Gore’s sweetheart deals with big cable companies. But the cable companies knew the difference between Al Gore and Al Jazeera and they wanted that oil money Qatar was throwing around.

So did Al Gore.

Gore had initially protected Al Jazeera by accusing cable companies who wanted to drop it of Islamophobia, but then turned around and sued Al Jazeera when it backstabbed him by using millions of dollars of his money in a slush fund to pay cable channels for airing its propaganda.

The House of Thani was forced to dig deeper to get Al Jazeera America into as many homes as possible, but it still wasn’t getting any actual viewers. Its average daily ratings of 13,000 viewers were less than half the already miniscule 31,000 viewers of Gore’s failed Current TV project.

Qatar had paid $25,000 per viewer and with some nights registering a zero in the demo, recouping that money through advertising was not a realistic business plan.

And then things got even worse.

Al Jazeera America’s biggest hit was “Real Money with Ali Velshi” with 54,000 viewers. Those were the kinds of ratings usually associated with cable hits like the deceased FOX Soccer Channel, but that was as good as it got for Qatar’s $500 million investment. And like all good things at Al Jazeera, it wouldn’t last.

http://www.aim.org/guest-column/the-fall-of-al-jazeera-america/

That is just the tip of the iceberg but it gives a good idea of why Hillary Clinton has been promoting Al Jazeera over domestic news organizations.  These are crooked people up to no good and the best weapon we have against them is Trump.  For all the reasons articulated in his Biloxi, MS speech, Hillary deserves everything she’s getting.  Clinton and her conspirators have been working with foreign governments against American interests and that idiot wants to be President.   The bottom line is that we can’t trust anybody else to do the job because they have allowed the Clintons to do everything they have up to this point.   And it’s time to end that—and only Trump is willing at that level to do the job.  And it’s about time.  The establishment is corrupt beyond belief and short of an armed revolution, Trump is the best answer in 2016.

Rich “Cliffhanger” Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

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Corporation of Disney Versus Sole Proprietorship of George Lucas: Why the new Star Wars is so terrible

With all the accolades given to the new Star Wars film The Force Awakens I take a bit of pride in being one of the very few to point out the obvious problems with it, and the gross neglect it represents on not only American culture, but international civilization.  Star Wars has a responsibility provided to it by its half century long quest to play that part with the human race, so when it takes that role for granted, it is the job of people like me to point it out.  Anybody can do such a thing after others have already jumped on the bandwagon.  Presently, The Force Awakens is the fastest movie to hit $1 billion in global sales and it’s still moving along at a respectable rate.  By every box-office measure, The Force Awakens is a glorious success.  Yet I’m saying that it’s not successful, which to some may appear baffling.  Here’s why, Star Wars surrendered what it was to become something that it isn’t and that deduction can be reduced to a very simple social understanding of how things work outside of a mother’s womb.  To get the gist of what’s wrong with The Force Awakens watch the very interesting reviews shown below. Watch them all, they tell the whole story.  I’ll go a step further in my explanation, but it’s a good place to begin.

One of the most difficult things a job creator can do is make decisions to eliminate the jobs of the people who count on you.  It is excessively hard—I think it’s one of the hardest things a human mind does in a capitalist society—because a means to a living is the sustenance used to survive from day-to-day.  George Lucas wanted to retire at 70 years old but he had all these employees that he felt responsible for, so he went looking for a way to keep them all busy so that he could retire in good conscience feeling he did what was right by them.  He sold his company to Disney hoping that it was the closest company to his own methods that would respect his former property and do well for an entirely new generation.   I was a supporter of it, until I saw the results. It would have done more people more good to just leave Star Wars alone and laid-off all the Lucasfilm employees.  Laying off 2000 Lucasfilm employees would have been painful, but the results have been worse.  Because in destroying Star Wars, it has taken away the good meaning it has possessed to literally hundreds of millions of people who now consider it something of a religion.

When the sale of Lucasfilm to Disney took place, many proclaimed that it was a sale to the dark side, but they said so without really understanding why.  Corporations have a tendency to be viewed as evil, while individuals are given great latitude for forgiveness.  This is the heart of the problem.  As a fan of unlimited capitalism, I should be very supportive of corporations—which I am in that they provide jobs and great products to a free marketplace.  But, they are often very socialist in their nature and their employees bring that mentality with them to the voting booth. For instance, a worker at P&G or GE works in an environment that does not promote personal growth and individuality—they work in very team oriented environments where the greater good of the company is often the focus.  This is a standard in most corporations—so when Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton expresses the values of socialism most voters are already receptive to it because they live that life within the corporate world.  Corporations are collective based organizations that are often top-heavy and loaded with too much management at the back of the train defined by the Metaphysics of Quality.  Not enough people at the front providing leadership, and too many in the back which slows down the train from true productivity.  To hide this problem, corporations hire lobbyists to work K-Street in Washington on their behalf to prevent competition, so that the corporation can stay alive longer at the expense of more capitalist invention.

I’m not a fan of corporations, but I am a fan of the people who lead them, individuals like George Lucas, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and the original Walt Disney—among many others.  To me, once those strong leaders leave their corporations, everyone who follows are second handers.  This is why I am a fan of people like Carl Icahn who is the original corporate raider—who defined the term, “hostile takeover” by purchasing the stock of failing corporations and inserting new management with real leadership to make a sizable profit.  The introduction of competition to the corporate world makes everyone better and more honest and is needed in a capitalist society.  Without that behavior, you only get degrees of socialism which is terrible because it forces people to behave as collective entities proving detrimental to individual integrity.

Star Wars was always about the power of the individual, Luke Skywalker being the only hope for the Force to overthrow the emperor, Han Solo to always be functioning just outside the organized systems of the rebellion long enough to save everyone, and Obi-Wan residing in a desert all alone as the last of his kind to preserve goodness for a new generation.  Even the robot Artoo Detoo functions as a rogue individualist often breaking protocol to do what he thinks is right as C3PO representing the corporate world of doing as programmed berates him for comic relief.  In The Empire Strikes Back when Luke senses that Han and Leia are being tortured on Cloud City Yoda tells the young Jedi that he must stay and not be lured into a trap if he honors what they fight for.  The designation is clear, the relief of collective pain is not more important than the value of an individual who alone has the power to save the galaxy.  That is powerful stuff and why I along with millions of others have been a fan of Star Wars for over three decades.

The Force Awakens is a corporate movie made by the second handers of George Lucas and Walt Disney.  They are corporate minds who think in terms of sacrifice and the greater good before individual integrity, just as any corporation resents the individualist–those who do what they want in the corner cubical, and does not socialize during lunch with others and doesn’t follow orders from their superiors.  Rey the strong female who is obviously Jaina Solo from the Expanded Universe miraculously knows how to do everything which is a problem that many people have with the film upon viewing.  Many are willing to suspend their disbelief because the female hero is such a strong and compelling character that viewers are willing to overlook the problem initially.  The dilemma is that the characters in The Force Awakens are just along for the ride.  The Force is the hero of this movie and all the characters are subservient to it.  Rey is the victim of the sword that finds her, not because she finds it—her role is a passive participation in the adventure which is a direct violation of the “Hero’s Journey” that all Star Wars movies embody to some degree.  The Force uses her to get through impossible situations like flying the Falcon and fighting Kylo Ren at the end of the film.  She doesn’t survive them because she is an active participant.   She’s just “going with the flow,” and yielding to a mysterious Force that is guiding her actions.  Those are aspects of Star Wars that have always been weak, easily overshadowed by the efforts of Han Solo.

In the original films The Force was something to be listened to, but according to Obi-Wan, it also obeyed your commands—as an individual.  In The Force Awakens The Force is doing all the heavy lifting which is a corporate view of what Obi-Wan said in the film A New Hope, “there is no such thing as luck.”  This indicates that all the heroics of Han Solo in the past movies were not because of his skill as an individual pilot, or a decision that was made at a key time, but was due to The Force working through him.  This cheapens Star Wars considerably into a religion instead of a myth building tool to encourage people to follow their personal bliss.  It is the difference between a company run by a strong individual, and a corporation ran by a board of directors and a CEO as their representative.  One is an individual enterprise; the other is a collective based entity.

In time, once the fun of a new Star Wars movie fades, the impact that the films had will fade considerably as they will lose their meaning due to this corporate interpretation of The Force as opposed to the one that George Lucas nurtured.  The corporation puts up memos on a bulletin board and expects everyone to be appeased and to serve the needs of the collective entity—no matter who it is.  A company ran by a strong individual personally speaks to everyone and gives them guidance in developing their own individuality for the good of the company. It is a slight distinction that makes all the difference in the world regarding the end result.  Clearly George Lucas understands that distinction, and Disney as an organization collectively based, does not.  That is why The Force Awakens is a failure even though on paper immediately it appears successful.  Its mythology has been tampered with and is now changed forever—for the worse.  The message is one now of collectivism as opposed to individuality and that makes it very dangerous—and vile.

Now you should understand dear reader why you felt that The Force Awakens was a bad movie, but didn’t quite know how or why. It looked like Star Wars, sounded like Star Wars, had the same characters as the original Star Wars—but it wasn’t Star Wars.  It turned the overall message away from the rebellion of freedom fighters fighting for an individualized galactic republic and put the emphasis on collectivism and the reach and authority of corporations and the eventual tenacity to grind away everything that stands in their way.  And there isn’t much anybody can do about it but wait for some unseen Force to tell us what to do.  To those broken by corporate socialism into waiting for permission to use the rest room or get their vacations approved by a superior, they love Rey in the film because it’s all they can hope for in their lives after being beaten by collectivism for many years into no other option but to hope that they’ll win the lottery or gain an inheritance to earn their freedom from the grind.  But for hard-core Star Wars fans, Han Solo was the self-determined individual who functioned heroically not due to special powers or hooky religions—but by his own actions.  And in The Force Awakens, they killed off that character—for the “greater good.”  The message couldn’t have been clearer from the corporation known as Disney.

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 Choice Between Good and Bad: Something special that nobody else these days will give you

Not to continue bashing the Disney Company every day, but because of their placement within the pantheon of cultural standards, they make themselves such a large target—by default.  Matt Clark and I in the video clip below had a rather powerful show for talk radio on WAAM in Ann Arbor, Michigan.  I like that station even though it’s a small market enterprise because it’s still a family business for them and they are real patriots who believe in traditional America as opposed to the giant conglomerates at Clear Channel which are failing by the business quarter.  It could be said that I am a professional at lots of things in life and one thing that is consistent across my résumé in all endeavors is that I specialize culture building.  I understand the signs of decline and I can read the upticks—and many of the reasons I have been positive in regard to Disney is because of its history in preserving traditional American values.  But, over the last two decades they have been increasingly a progressive organization and that makes them a prime concern for me regarding culture building not only within the United States but also in regard to the entire world.  That is the nature of the conversation that Matt Clark and I pondered during his radio show which will appear on 1600 WAAM during the weekend of January 2nd 2016 at 1 PM.  If you’d like to hear the entire two-hour segment CLICK HERE.

I don’t think there is another radio or television broadcast where such an in-depth analysis of the situation concerning our modern problems can be heard.  I was trained by Joseph Campbell to read and understand mythology—the same place that George Lucas learned it from, so I am uniquely positioned to provide commentary that nobody on cable, network, or radio news can provide regarding Star Wars, terrorism and the cultural responsibility of the Disney company to resist putting metal detectors at their entrance and banning toy guns from their properties.  What is wrong in Disney and of course throughout the world is not related to security, it is in cultural values, which is what Matt and I focused on.  Matt is in fact such a good radio guy that he knows how to set up the topics to extract it from me—which is why these conversations are so interesting.

The problem starts with culture and understanding what makes it, is it a reactive thing built from didactic desires, or is it a product of intellectual necessity?  I would propose the later while Disney is currently functioning from the former.  They believe that because they lack a strong CEO type who understands the complexity of culture building the way Walt Disney or George Lucas innately did.  As a company of second-handers they have had to mimic the behavior of their former leaders, like Lucas and Disney, they are clueless in understanding how the responsibility for building culture falls on their shoulders.  Similarly, they are clueless to understand when there is trouble how to deal with a crises.  Because they are second-handers, people who live through others for their sustenance, they assume that somebody understands a situation better than they do, leaving them prone to put too much trust into governments and other collective forces to guide their decisions.  That is why they prefer committees and boards of directors to make decisions instead of strong individualized leadership.

Disney made a huge mistake with The Force Awakens, every toy and commercial mostly featured the bad guy from the latest Star Wars movie to sell those products.  In a desire to recover their investment into the film franchise and to get their market projections, they rely on marketing the villains as a way to guarantee their financial expectations.  The net result is that the social impact on the population in general will be negative—kids are more interested in playing the bad guy when interacting with their peers than the good guys, which is a major problem.  Just a few decades ago kids used to fight over who was going to be the good guy when playing among each other.  Now nobody wants to be the good guy, and that is the fault of culture.  What makes up that culture is every progressive who has pushed for less heroic characters in movies giving good reviews to flawed heroes as opposed to the squeaky clean types who don’t drink, smoke, or have sex before marriage.  Our culture through music, movies, and television have put bad behavior on a pedestal and criticized good behavior.  So it shouldn’t be any surprise that young kids fight over being the bad guy when playing instead of being a good guy.   When there is nothing marketed for a new Star Wars movie but the bad guys, and the good guys are killed, or appear to be losing all the time, the behavior that children will mimic in their daily lives will reflect those priorities.

When Disney makes a film, or a television story of any kind, they must be careful not to allow the good guys to appear subservient to the bad guys in any way.  The progressive experimentation with the gray areas of life is not healthy.   It might make some Santa Monica bar slut feel better about her decisions in life for being a sperm receptacle during her twenties and early thirties, but it will not help young girls in the future not make similar mistakes.  Hollywood is full of these young women who work in the industry and party at the bars around Wilshire Blvd and they think they are the smartest people in the world because they manage to show their boobs to Quentin Tarantino at a party, who is essentially the same little boy growing up in Knoxville, Tennessee that he has always been. I like Tarantino, we share a taste for Sergio Leone movies and car chases, but he’s not very sophisticated as a filmmaker. Yet because his movies feature good guys who go bad, often, and bad guys who do good, there is mass appeal to the gutter sluts and social misfits of our culture. But Tarantino currently sets the standard on Wilshire and those slutty Santa Monica types who put on heels during the day and strip it off for anybody at night create market value based on their intellectual assumptions. Marketing executives assume that those Hollywood filmmakers and the agents who dangle from the industry know what they are doing, so they follow right along, and soon the entire industry is copying off each other because nobody has an original idea about anything because nobody dare go against the trends of the day which are often set in those Santa Monica, and New York City bars by skanks, whores, and insecure social climbers.

Meanwhile a kid at Wal-Mart wants a new Star Wars toy and they see Kylo Ryn on the cover who looks like he’s always beating the good guys—otherwise he wouldn’t be featured so prominently on the marketing material. After five or six years of playing the bad guy, when the kid hits adolescence and has to make decisions about, drugs, and individual integrity, they stand on the foundations created for them by the toys they played with and the lessons they learned in their youth. If the message is confusing, that bad guys sometimes aren’t so bad and that good guys are often just as bad as good guys, then that person will grow up to be a messed up adult. And before anybody says they disagree, just look around at the adults you know dear reader, the world is full of such people—and this is how they were made. The instruction for proper intellectual value and social relationships is directly built from the type of stories that we tell our kids. It’s OK to market those stories under a capitalist banner, but there is a responsibility in doing so.

Now, I know the next thing the curious reader here will say is, if I had the opportunity to make millions of dollars selling stories featuring bad guys over good guys I would as well. Well, I have a long history with this, a background that had personal instruction by Sol Stein, Linda Nagata, and even a little help from Skip Press in putting me directly in contact with Steven Spielberg’s agent for a project I was working on. I have looking back on it a lot of experience with Hollywood, so I know what I’m talking about and let me say this. When given the opportunity to have a lot of money by writing bad guys, or sticking with my good guys, I have never surrendered my position. It may not be what the market desires right now, but I refuse to participate in the perpetuation of evil by promoting bad guys over good—and by supporting the gray over black and white morality, it accomplishes just as bad of an end result. I have forgone personal wealth to do the right thing, so I expect others to do so as well—especially the Disney Company. I’ve known quite a lot of those skanks, and whores in Hollywood and believe me, they aren’t all women—and I turned them away several times—because it was the right thing to do. So for the same reasons, I don’t have a lot of sympathy for those who do sell-out for some quick money.

As talked about with Matt Clark, the cause of the problems in our culture will not be solved with metal detectors and gun restrictions—the source is in broken culture perpetuated irresponsibility by the weakest and worst that our society has produced. If we really want to be safe and to have a good and productive society then we must focus on separating the good guys from the bad and avoiding designations of gray and muddied fantasies of equality where the bad are placed at the same level as the virtuous. The root cause of most of our societal misery around the world is in this very simple concept. And the only way out of it is to be good. That is why during my next show on WAAM I will focus on just that type of concept and will offer society something they won’t get anywhere else. A path toward virtue in America once again—be sure to tune in, because I will promise this, you won’t get this kind of show anywhere in the world in any media format. It will be one of a kind. My path through life is very unique and I am offering those important lessons for those who are best positioned to utilize them. I wouldn’t ask anybody to do what I have not been willing to do myself, if I can make decisions based on ethics for the benefit of culture building, then so can Disney—and everyone in entertainment.

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.

Why Disney Destroyed Han Solo: Progressive activism and attacking “white, American, family men”

I knew there was trouble on June 3rd 2015 when Marvel comics announced that Han Solo had an ex-wife in its comic #6 issue.  I didn’t want to believe it, but after later seeing The Force Awakens, I am 100% sure that what I was watching Disney do was on the scale of the old medieval churches in Europe re-writing history with their printing of Bibles to control the mass population through religion.  Star Wars was becoming something of a religion around the world, and now that the Disney Corporation had paid 4 billion dollars for it they were taking great liberties with very important characters in an attempt to change their original meaning to the overall story.   They didn’t have to, because the property had already been developed by George Lucas over three decades into a positive household name with no signs of abating.  Even more alarming was that Han’s revisionist wife was a black woman named Sana Solo proving that Disney was more interested in establishing progressive values in their ownership of Star Wars instead of just continuing the story that so many loved.   Disney was deliberately smearing the market impression that Han Solo had on the Star Wars stories and they were doing it not to be more successful, but because they wanted to change the meaning and mythic impact of the overall story arc.  That is why if you were listening to WAAM today at 1 PM in the afternoon, you would have heard Matt Clark and I dismantling Disney’s ownership of the Star Wars franchise.  If you missed it, you can hear it again here and above this paragraph in two parts:

http://dorksideoftheforce.com/2015/06/03/meet-sana-solo-han-solos-wife-star-wars-6/

I am quite a believer that the Bible has been revised to such an extent by political forces over the years that it has lost much of its original meaning—so I don’t trust it.  One fine example is the missing Book of Enoch which would have been an important part of Genesis.  It is not considered by Jews and many other Christian groups to be part of the Biblical “canon” and knowing that one can only wonder what else has been left out, or added to the stories that have made three of the world’s religions, Jews, Christians and Muslims.  Like it or not, Star Wars has become something of a religion.  Another few hundred years and it will likely have more influence over mass populations than Christianity does today—and that all starts with these seemingly simple stories being shown in our lifetime.  So it concerned me greatly when Han Solo was introduced in Marvel #6 with a black wife—which I didn’t believe at the time.  My wife and I talked about it a bit, I was then involved in a large motorcycle accident which soaked up a lot of time and attention.  I was also involved in a massive international project that was taking a lot of time.  But my concern was so great that I stopped buying Star Wars merchandise at that moment.  I had been reading the books and comics to alleviate the daily pressure associated with my life.  But upon the release of Star Wars #6 under Marvel Comics, I stopped, immediately.

When Marvel took over the comics which were supposedly Pablo Hidalgo approved from the Star Wars story group six months earlier from Dark Horse I was curious that they didn’t show a desire to connect the story material between the two publishing conglomerates.  I didn’t let that bother me too much because comics I don’t consider to be as important as novels—especially the New York Times bestselling books that had taken over the Star Wars canon for two decades in a really positive way.  But under Disney’s ownership of Marvel they had introduced a black woman to be Han Solo’s wife in an effect to emphasize negative character traits of one of the most popular characters in Star Wars.  Solo was a white guy superman type of character, so I wondered if Disney’s direction was a political one.  Later when I saw The Force Awakens, it clarified it emphatically.   Disney had revised the Star Wars canon personally created by George Lucas to make the stories more progressive politically.  They were essentially destroying a major character for the sake of editing the impact the character had on established mythology.  This was equivalent to the way that progressives have attacked Thomas Jefferson as a real historic figure with the Sally Hemings allegations, or to attack Jesus and his relationship with Mary Magdalene, the prostitute in the Bible who traveled with Jesus and was there at his execution.  We have witnessed revised history taking place in our public schools and colleges for the purpose of erasing history and now it was happening in Star Wars—an entertainment property that was just supposed to be for fun.  Yet Disney was purposely destroying the character of Han Solo because of the impact he had on so many fans as being a very strong, and reliable character. My suspicions were confirmed at the beginning of September when a gay character was included in the new Star Wars novel Aftermath, which I reported a warning to Disney upon release.  CLICK HERE TO REVIEW. 

I’m not against black characters in Star Wars, or even alternative sexual types.  However, Star Wars has always been an updated western, a space opera intended to communicate mythic stories that propelled our society with foundation philosophies.  Until Star Wars comic #6, then the novel Aftermath followed by the confirmation of all my concerns with the movie The Force Awakens, I felt I could trust Lucasfilm with a story canon that was personally managed by George Lucas.   I could read a story in a book or comic and believe that it had meaning to the overall collection of stories that had been canon until the Disney acquisition of Lucasfilm from George Lucas.  Now in a very short time, Disney didn’t even try to cover their intentions with subtlety.   They disrespected the long-time fans so much that they counted on sheer numbers to justify their collective activism of taking a deeply traditional story like Star Wars and turning it into a progressive mess.  Disney was showing itself to be much more interested in selling the politics of the Obama White House than in just telling a story set in a galaxy far far away.   Disney was promoting gay sex and interracial marriages over protecting the value of what made Star Wars successful to begin with.  So for me, the only Star Wars canon is the one that took place before Disney took over.  The last official book in the Star Wars canon under the guidance of George Lucas was the very good book The Crucible.  It takes place 45 years after the Battle of Yavin in the film A New Hope.   After watching A Force Awakens, which takes place around 15 years earlier I had thought that there was some time travel going on that gave the Star Wars story group an out if things went wrong with their progressive activism, but I’m now convinced that it’s too late.  Disney executives have made progressive concepts their priority which has ruined Star Wars forever, they can’t go back now—they are too committed.  Here is how The Crucible went and is officially the way that Han Solo and the other characters of the George Lucas canon rode off into the sunset of storytelling. 

http://www.starwarstimeline.net/

When Han and Leia Solo arrive at Lando Calrissian’s Outer Rim mining operation to help him thwart a hostile takeover, their aim is just to even up the odds and lay down the law. Then monstrous aliens arrive with a message, and mere threats escalate into violent sabotage with mass fatalities. When the dust settles, what began as corporate warfare becomes a battle with much higher stakes–and far deadlier consequences.

Now Han, Leia, and Luke team up once again in a quest to defeat a dangerous adversary bent on galaxy-wide domination. Only this time, the Empire is not the enemy. It is a pair of ruthless geniuses with a lethal ally and a lifelong vendetta against Han Solo. And when the murderous duo gets the drop on Han, he finds himself outgunned in the fight of his life. To save him, and the galaxy, Luke and Leia must brave a gauntlet of treachery, terrorism, and the untold power of an enigmatic artifact capable of bending space, time, and even the Force itself into an apocalyptic nightmare.

I have praised George Lucas often because I think he’s a great filmmaker.   He is too liberal for me, but I respect him greatly.  He does have a black wife, which I don’t think is a big deal and he supports Obama.  I gave high praise for his film Red Tails because it was an important story that needed to be told.   When he sold Star Wars to Disney he did it because he was 70 and wanted to retire—but he had a massive company with over 2000 employees.  It would have been better for Star Wars if Lucas would have just maintained control of his property, but then he couldn’t just let his employees rot—at least in his mind.  So he sold Star Wars to a corporation he thought might preserve it, and washed his hands of the responsibility of being a major employer.  I can understand all that.  I thought it was a good move so long as Disney respected what George Lucas had built.

There is a lot more of George Lucas in Han Solo than in any other character I think.  I’m sure George would say that he’s Artoo Detoo, or Yoda and that Star Wars is all about Luke Skywalker.  But Han Solo is the old drag racer that Lucas used to be—and in many ways still is.  I have read hundreds of Star Wars novels, most of them have Han Solo in the stories so I know the character very well—and he’s what George Lucas wanted to be.  And let me say, Han Solo would have never had a wife during A New Hope.  He had a long time girlfriend who was a drug addict prior to meeting Princess Leia, but he was not a sleep around.  He wanted to be as far away from attachments as possible to protect himself from the obligation of maintaining those relationships and violating his opportunities for freedom.  He wanted nothing more to limit his loyalties to his Wookie friend Chewbacca and to travel the galaxy in his hot rod Millennium Falcon.  Much of his gruffness toward others was an act, just as he deliberately kept the Millennium Falcon looking like a wreck to disguise the power within it—the ship was the embodiment of Han Solo himself.  Solo would have never had a wife, and once he did, he would have never left her. Han Solo is not the kind of character who gets drunk on Nar Shaddaa and wakes up with a wife.  Han Solo was the embodiment of all the cowboys that George Lucas grew up loving as a kid, and he created a character that modern kids could look up to.  That’s why he was always my favorite character, so it was very easy for me to see the revisionist history that Disney was attempting to perform without getting caught.  Only, they got caught.  I know too much about all this stuff not to see it.  I know Star Wars not just from the surface but the structure of it—where it all started from the perspective of the Joseph Campbell Foundation.  I was a member way back when George Lucas was on the Board with Campbell’s wife Jean running things.  I’m not just a fan boy who didn’t want to see Han Solo killed in The Force Awakens.  I’ve studied history and I know the impact of mythology, and why politics seeks to capture stories to control mass populations.  That’s what Disney is doing with Han Solo, destroying him so that they can rebuild him in a progressive way to satisfy their political activism.

Star Wars fans really want to like The Force Awakens.  I’m one of them.  My opinions as of now are in the extreme minority.  Just like a religion, when people find out something is wrong with a mythic device that contains all their foundation thoughts, people tend to get defensive—and some of that could be heard on the broadcast I did with Matt Clark on WAAM radio.  But being in the minority does not make me wrong.  A million fools cannot erase a truth and what Disney is doing will bite them in the ass—because they are changing essential portions of the Star Wars mythology to satisfy current political concerns.  But those concerns will change over the next 60 years and these gay subplots will seem silly to future readers—especially when they seek out the original stories under George Lucas and compare the activism that occurred under Disney.  Disney could have made a lot of money and done something really good by just leaving Star Wars alone and letting the profits from the endeavor follow.  But they chose to be activists politically—for progressive reasons.  Executives at Lucasfilm and Disney looked at Han Solo and noticed that he was a strong, traditional white male, and they wanted to dirty him up.  So they gave him a wife that he was cheating on, and she was a woman of color to make her more of a victim.  Then they had Han leave Leia in A Force Awakens to return to smuggling as if that was all Han Solo was ever good for without his marriage to a woman of stature and prestige.  They purposely muddied up the character to make a point and create more social diversity because that is their value system.  And that is why the Star Wars stories for me ended with The Crucible, a New York Times bestseller that has as much value to me as the novel Lord of the Rings, or The Bridges of Madison County.  Disney by corporate design to elevate minorities, gays, and women in their stories to appear more diverse, politically, took the strongest character in the Star Wars mythology and erased his essence with a revised canon that makes him into a scumbag more relatable to modern audiences.  We are living in an age where a lot of children cannot relate to a Han Solo type, a man who stays with his wife and is loyal to a fault. So Disney tried to weaken the character to appeal to younger audiences—but all they did was cause trouble for themselves.  I’m not the only fan who will reject their product.  Many others over the years to come will follow and Disney will only have themselves to blame.

For me this whole exercise has provided proof of something I’ve long suspected, that mythologies over time are radically redesigned by politics in all cultures to justify the failures of social mismanagement.   The Bible has certainly been altered over the years to reflect the values of the Roman Empire, and the churches of Europe who wanted to use religion as a natural extension of that imperial control.  Modern progressives are trying constantly to re-write history from the vantage point of the conquered Indian to erase the merits of cowboy capitalism in the West.  And China prohibits proper archaeological study of their many pyramid-shaped mounds to suppress the real history of their ancient culture.  Those are just a few examples.  And right in front of our faces we have watched Disney revise something in our lifetimes in spite of the many witnesses.  I read just the other day a defense of the movie A Force Awakens straying from the original plots created in the Expanded Universe by declaring that Solo had a wife in the EU.  No, Solo did not have a wife under the EU.  That plot device was created six months before the release of the 2015 Disney film to justify why Solo left Princess Leia after Return of the Jedi to become a typical white, American male—a Homer Simpson loser who can’t keep his pants on, and is unreliable to family life.  In Disney’s desire to make Star Wars more accessible to women, and minorities, they have deliberately tampered with what made Han Solo one of the most popular characters in the saga—and they did it out of political activism, not intellectual necessity.

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.

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

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Donald Trump, the CNN Debate Winner: Beating Hillary until she can’t show her face in public

It was the last Republican debate of the year and all the candidates did pretty much what they needed to by their own playbook.  There were no real surprises for anyone, except for Trump.  The New York billionaire presented himself really for the first time as the leader of the Republican Party, which was completely by design.  I saw it coming, yet apparently many didn’t.  It continues to astound me how little people know about negotiations, whether they are buying a car or selling themselves as president—Trump has been working the wires of the entire political process for several months now—and has changed the landscape of perception entirely.   On the stage in Las Vegas at CNN’s last big live event of the year before the Holidays, Trump clearly dominated—and the rest of the members of the stage looked like clear inferiors.   Some of the other candidates might win a few states in the primaries but it is clear right now as of December 16th, 2015—unless Trump does something really crazy—that Donald will be the next President of the United States.

Now, beating Hillary, everyone seems to be so concerned about that—I’m not.  I don’t even think it will be close.  In a leverage game, Donald Trump holds all the cards—all the good ones anyway—while Hillary has only a hand of Jokers.   If Trump could focus his attention on one candidate, Hillary would never hold up.  If the Republicans want to win in 2016 and for many years to come, they’ll get behind Donald Trump while he tears Hillary, and her connections to Obama to shreds starting in the summer of 2016.  I believe the lashing will be so bad of her by Trump that she may struggle to win a single state in a head to head election—including California.

A Trump presidency will be even more dynamic.  He’ll use the same methods to get bills through congress, to balance budgets, and to bring nations to their knees without having to fire a shot.  His staff will be some of the most competent people to ever hold public office and things will happen daily that nobody has ever seen before—the rate that things get done will be astonishing.  Trump will use the same methods he used to destroy Hillary Clinton, won the Republicans over to his side and work the media like his own puppet show to bring nations to their knees.  He’ll work Russia against Syria—mark my words, he’ll put Putin in his back pocket and he’ll choke off the cash going to Assad and defeat Syria without a single boot on the ground.  Iran will be forced to open up all their secrets after daily media poundings by Trump, China will be forced to level the table in their currency evaluations and denounce North Korea leaving that ruthless dictator to rot alone and isolated.  Trump will promote capitalism to Europe to save it from itself and he’ll pull most of the global billionaires into pouring their efforts of charity into the poor regions of the planet, like Africa and Brazil to pull them into the 21st century instead of the Obama strategy of bringing everyone else down.  Trump will attack the premise of global warming putting the EPA on the defensive and opening up the oil fields of the United States into becoming the world’s greatest producer which leverages against the oligopoly of OPEC.  ISIS will be a thing of the past within months because they’ll run out of money and the shadow governments behind them will be forced into hiding by Trump’s mouth.

Trump will expand the Second Amendment promotion of concealed carry around America, and will dramatically cut down on gun free zones.  He’ll probably give his own press conferences each day and will work the job around the clock like nobody has since Calvin Coolidge.  Trump will solve many of the world’s problems with his very aggressive mouth—he’ll play the high, low game of negotiation until he gets what he wants—and his abilities are clearly unmatched.  It was quite evident in the CNN debate of December 15, 2015 that he was a master of communication and negotiation.   Trump is addicted to deal making like some might be addicted to eating or sex—Trump has a mind that is alive, successful, and untouched by drugs or alcohol—his whole life.  He essentially has the mind of a child before puberty—one that just wants to play and enjoy life, and for Trump that joy comes in making things through deals.  The best job in the world for him would be President of the United States where every single day of office would be an opportunity to make big deals like he did with Trump Tower, or the West Side rail yards in New York City.   I don’t believe there is a single downside to a Donald Trump presidency for anybody—Republicans or Democrats.  I believe Trump is at his prime and can do things that nobody has ever thought possible.  He’ll set the bar for the presidency incredibly high for at least the next century and that will make us all better.

Much of what Trump has been doing is clearly described in his book The Art of the Deal.  Every trick shown in the nomination process, and all the ways that he will destroy Hillary Clinton—Trump has a track record of being so ruthless in his desire to win that she may never be able to show her face in public again.  Trump may personally like the Clintons, but if they try to put themselves in front of something he wants—he will destroy them forever.  Mark it on your calendar.  I predicted much of everything that is happening now over six months ago, and six months in the future from this writing, I can see it as clearly as the words you are reading.

Republicans have to understand—you can’t just beat Hillary Clinton and pray for the day that Obama is out of the White House.  Obama is a young man and he will be more damaging as an ex-president than he was as president.  Obama will return to community organizing and will have charitable foundations that will rival the Clintons—and he will have an international stage to continue marketing socialism to everyone who will listen.  He could do much more damage than Al Gore did after he left office.   Republicans will have to fend off internal struggles within the party, natural international challenges to the White House that comes with the job, but additionally the periphery hen pecking that Obama will have the opportunity to exert as an ex-president.  The next President of the United States will have to soak up so much media that there won’t be time for anybody else, and Trump is the only one who could do that.  Trump would beat on those former activists—Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama so hard that they’d have to retreat into the sunset to avoid his combative presence.  I am 100% sure of it.

It didn’t take long for Trump to win me over.  Once I saw that he was serious, I put my chips on his card.  He is the person I’d hire for the job and I have a way of knowing things about people.  There isn’t a second choice.  He doesn’t do everything that I’d like socially, but he does share with me a personal policy of not being intoxicated, never abusing tobacco products, and he doesn’t gamble in spite of owning several casinos.   Trump is a predator who wants to win at any cost and what he leaves in his wake is truly beneficial to everyone—just walk around New York City.  Without Trump, I think New York might have gone bankrupt in the 1970s.  Instead, he amassed enough wealth to build Trump Tower and many other structures before he was in his mid-forties.  Dealing to him is the best game he likes to play, and you really can’t hinge too much on the things he says—because he’s all about leverage.  What you can bet on are the things he does.  Behind him, including his children—are many grand successes.  And for America, particularly the Republican Party—they’d be extremely wise to put that type of person to work on their behalf.  Trump owned the stage with a change of strategy that was very calculated during the CNN debate—which put several assailants on their heels with indecision.   But that’s just the beginning.  Trump has a lot more in the tank, and you can see it in his eyes that he’s ready to unleash it.  For the sake of our country—we need to turn him loose and let him do it.

It will be a lot of fun to watch what he does to Hillary Clinton over the next 6 months.  She won’t stand a chance.  She has too many secrets and entirely too much vulnerability—and Trump will expose them all with torturous detail—because he will do anything—and say anything to win, win—win.  And I—as a long time Republican—don’t just want to see Hillary lose.  I want to see her and her network completely destroyed.  And Trump is just the man to do it.

Rich “Cliffhanger” Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

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