Tag: Hollywood insight

Being a Big Fish in a Small Pond: Sheriff Richard K. Jones running for congress

It was spring of 2015 and I was at the Brazenhead in Mason, Ohio having a beer with some heavily connected conspirators fresh off the ear rings of Judy Shelton, the local Republican protector of John Boehner within the ranks of the Central Committee where I first learned that the Speaker of the House in Washington D.C. was planning to step down. It was also there that I learned that Sheriff Richard K. Jones was eyeing Boehner’s congressional seat which evoked some interesting thoughts which had been percolating for quite some time. At times I have liked Sheriff Jones. He once gave me a well done portrait sketch drawn in a way that made him look like a Wild West superstar—which I liked. But he lost me when he supported the union position against Governor Kasich’s Issue 2 in 2012, and the Lakota levy in 2013. As larger than life and John Wayne-like that Sheriff Jones wanted to be, he was a strictly local hometown celebrity who would be like a tropical goldfish cast into the frozen waters of the Artic Ocean if he were to go to Washington where much bigger fish than he experienced in Butler County, Ohio were there to eat him quickly—so I thought it odd that he’d even consider risking his reputation at his age to such a politically dangerous enterprise. After all, in Hamilton, he was a big fish in a small pond—but in Washington, where the GOP is changing rapidly under Tea Party influence—the game had changed in front of his face not in his favor.

I get the opportunity to work with lots of people from other parts of the country. In my work with bullwhips locally I was always well-known to be the best that anybody had ever seen. I grew up with that designation where literally everyone I met had never witnessed a person who could crack a cigarette out of the mouth of a willing participant with a bullwhip. For me it was not enough to be a big fish in a small pond, I had to know that I could be a big fish in a big ocean too—so I pushed myself to get better and compete against people from all over the world. Competition after all makes everyone better, even if you don’t like the results. I knew as a bullwhip artist that I could never truly consider myself one of the best in the world if I didn’t challenge myself against people who also considered themselves the best at the craft.

My journey took me to many competitive events; winning several trophies competing with the best that are out there. I even have had some stints in Hollywood dazzling celebrities with my whip work. I know what it feels like to stand in the middle of the road on Brand Blvd in Glendale California where television producers and movie stars were gathered around stopped traffic to watch me perform because they had never seen what I was doing before—and were fascinated. For me personally, it was then that I deserved to call myself a big fish in a big ocean. I had challenged myself and I had to. My life goal was to write stories about the pulp hero Cliffhanger and as the author; I had to know that I could have the swagger in real life of the character I had created. As a writer I had to know that I could do what I demanded my character to do. I never wanted to be one of those sickly writers who live through their art. Rather, my art had to reflect my reality—so I demanded of myself to be really good at the things I wrote about. Yet prior to the year 2000 few people knew about me outside of my hometown. I was a big fish then too, but the pond was small and easy to win in. Outside of my town the water was much larger and there is always the theory that there is somebody better than you. Until you test yourself against them, you don’t have a right to consider yourself the best—and if that’s your goal, you have to step out of the small pond and into the big one and compete.

Between 2005 and 2008 I had satisfied my goal. I had met and worked with some of the best bullwhip artists in the world. There were a few I didn’t get to meet, but at a high level, everyone is pretty even, so you get a good idea of where you stand among them. And it was very satisfying to realize that with all the hard work, that I could swim with the biggest fish in the biggest water possible and hold my own. I didn’t do such a thing to fulfill my personal ego, but to satisfy my literary needs for my own personal work of philosophy. After I achieved that goal I was ready to move on to the next thing and was quite secure in my place in the universe. Those who watched me and competed against me who worked hard to get better and better, I am happy for. I never felt a need to keep up with them or to outdo their efforts—because I know what they are trying to do—which was the same thing that I was—they need to know that they can swim with the biggest of fish. And I respect people who strive to do that. There is lots of room for big fish to swim in a big ocean. There are plenty of little fish to eat, so there is no reason not to cheer on other big fish to grow even larger—and impressive.

When Sheriff Jones first gave me the poster of himself I thought of him as a big fish. The day he gave it to me Fox News was going to have him on that night to talk about immigration issues on the border of Arizona. And during the Issue 2 union debates he and I were frequent guests on 700 WLW radio—so I thought of him initially as a big fish in a big ocean. But over time it was obvious that he was happy to be the big fish in the small pond, because the ocean out there was a bit too threatening. He’s a local boy who will always be the hometown hero, the public servant who marches in parades and made good by the area he grew up in. But going to Washington D.C.—that’s a big ocean that requires more than just tough talk—you have to actually be tough.

Jones showed what kind of person he was during the Issue 2 debates where he thought he was a conservative Republican who attended Tea Party events and was fighting to preserve American tradition. But his view of that tradition was much like John Boehner’s, a progressive touchy, feely, sentiment about conservatism that belonged more in a Sunday school class than in the halls of Congress. As the government in Washington started changing slowly under the Tea Party influences, Jones stood against that tide attempting to preserve the Republican standard nurtured by crony capitalists and pink middle-grounders just a few steps away from socialism on the scales of political philosophy. Issue 2 exposed him as a labor union supporter who refused to see the damage collective bargaining was doing to local budgets. He certainly lost my support, and many others like me who are looking for a purer version of a constitutional republic than we presently have.

When I heard that he wanted Boehner’s seat the first thought I had was that he’d be reluctant to test himself against the big fish of Washington. I remembered my first bullwhip competition against some really talented people—particularly Chris Camp who had won about everything there was to win in the bullwhip arts. He was a star in Vegas, had several world records and was the bench mark of a really good professional bullwhip artist. I worried for days before the competition about having a respectable showing against him. That was nearly 15 years ago, but I remember well how nervous I was about it. It was a bone chilling paralysis that sucked the life right out of you. The reason I was so nervous was that I thought I was pretty good with the bullwhip, but if I couldn’t hold a candle to Chris, I would know that I didn’t have what it took to be the best. Since the bullwhip was one of my signature attributes it was very important to me to be one of the best, so I pressed on. In 2005 after working very hard, I won every event there was against the best competition that the nation provided. I earned their respect and I earned the right to consider myself one of the big fish—and it was one of the proudest days of my life. In the scheme of things, it was a pretty minor deal—a competition at a regional festival. But, in the world of bullwhip work, it was a big deal to me because I had a lot to lose in the attempt.

In the world of politics becoming a congressman at the federal level is like winning that bullwhip contest against a really skilled group of guys. And Sheriff Jones I knew when I heard the story from the political insiders at Brazenhead that the local sheriff wouldn’t risk the disgrace. It’s not that he’d lose the race. I believe he would be elected if he ran for the seat. Butler County is the most populated area of Boehner’s district, which runs all the way up to Greenville, Ohio. Jones could run and win I think pretty easily. I share with him a passion for two big platform issues, his stance against drugs and illegal immigration. But on most other issues, he is as soft as Boehner was, and the now former Speaker of the House was just chewed up and spit out of Washington by a Tea Party wing of the Republican Party that is fast emerging to dominate the party. Those like the local apologist Judy Shelton who have fought so hard to keep Boehner in power all this time are well behind the political current of the times. Conservatives are demanding to move back to the right, they don’t like the left, or even centralist’s positions. And that is where the big fish swim these days. And in that pond, Sheriff Jones is a little fish who will have to scramble for his very life. That’s not a risk I think he is willing to make at this stage of his life. The time for him to test himself with such a feat would have been twenty years ago. The insurrection that is currently happening on Capital Hill for which Donald Trump and several other outsiders are a part are going to change politics from now on. Boehner saw that he was not equipped to handle the hard decisions that are ahead for a Speaker of the House, or even a congressman. So he jumped off the train singing songs. Sheriff Jones is of the same mind. If Sheriff Jones wants to be remembered as a big fish—he better stay in the small pond, because if he goes to Washington, he’ll be eaten rather quickly.

The talk went on that evening and I listened casually while looking at all the magnificent cannons decorating the Irish Pub. It was an appropriate setting for political intrigue and maniacal subterfuge among the socially manipulative. And that made the beer taste better. But I only half believed those sources when they said that Boehner was going to step down. So I have to also believe that Sheriff Jones is going to climb out on that limb and try to take Boehner’s seat. My advice to him would be to keep his image of a big fish alive for the sake of his grandchildren. An embarrassing experience in Washington would be hard to recover from unless he thinks he’s savvy enough to take on the candidates coming out of FreedomWorks. Because they are the future—the past is John Boehner and progressive radio hosts like Bill Cunningham. Sheriff Jones has more in common with them than the candidates nurtured along through FreedomWorks. Getting elected is only half the battle. Getting trampled as a RINO on the house floor is far more embarrassing.

Rich Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

Listen to The Blaze Radio Network by CLICKING HERE.

Boehner Crying over the Pope: Why there is supposed to be a separation between church and state

As many conservatives like Glenn Beck strive to bring God back into the political realm grounding the roots of patriotism, the Pope Francis visit to the United States should serve as a warning shot as to why in America we should keep a clear distinction between the separation of church and state. Obama and others like him who would love to empower the United Nations into being a ruling centralized authority throughout the world, is using the Pope to advance their progressive agenda—particularly the religion of global warming and immigration. I’m not Catholic; I don’t recognize the pope in any position of authority. If he were standing on the other side of a fence, I wouldn’t even take the time to gaze over at him. To me, he’s just another old man. I’m sure he’s a nice guy. I like that the church tries to help people with kindness—that’s a sweet thing to do as a human being. But I don’t need the pope addressing my congressional body of government from the vantage point of a religious figure from Italy who was born in Argentina and thinks socialism is more favorable than capitalism. Standing in front of my country’s government and lecturing us about the depravity of capitalism is like stepping into a hamburger restaurant and demanding that it become a Chinese buffet and should serve more items for vegans. It’s just disrespectful.

Even more disturbing is that John Boehner, my congressman in my district who happens to be Speaker of the House cried about meeting the pope. That is not very wise for a leader of Congress. Such behavior establishes that the Roman Catholic Church holds sway over the leadership of our republic, and that’s no crying matter. It’s embarrassing. No man should be crying over meeting another man—especially one like Francis. The celebrity of the pope is a completely made up thing, no different from Lady Gaga. There is nothing Holy about the guy other than an institutional organization decided to make him the leader of their church. The reaction that many have had toward the pope’s visit to the United States—summarized best by John Boehner is that philosophically, entirely too many people are wrong in their foundation beliefs and rely on the church to provide their spiritual essence—which is dangerous. It’s dangerous for individuals, it is dreadfully treacherous for an entire nation.

My article yesterday about the mysterious Serpent Mound was actually written to set up this point, CLICK HERE TO REVIEW. Religion is a poor philosophic foundation for anything intended to get to the facts. A proper philosophy is one established on proven observation, not one based on faith. If the pope can sell the idea of sacrifice in the here and now for the benefit of an afterlife, he can also convince people that global warming is real, and that poor productive lifestyles are not the cause of poverty. Otherwise rational men and women who conduct their lives in the world of the real put all that on hold on Sunday when they attend a Catholic service and give idolatry to this dude from Argentina that the Vatican in Italy calls a pope. A proper understanding of history reveals that religion is much older than the Roman Catholic Church and that because of the modern doctrines established only in the last 1800 years, a proper understanding of our real history is not possible. There is nothing to cheer about for a pope. If people will believe what he says there is no reason to not believe in some of the ancient alien contemplations about the start of the civilization—that earth was seeded by extraterrestrials, the planet was terraformed by an artificial moon, and interdimensial rulers from the far reaches of the universe are the true kings of our lives as ultraterrestrials. After all, if you’re going to believe in a burning bush, resurrection after death on the third day, and making the blind see—why not.

That is why it’s so upsetting to see grown men cry and pander to some guy walking around in an archaic costume from the Middle-Ages called a pope. I’ll be the first to say that I’d rather deal with people who have religious values than no values at all, but those most committed to faith have an extremely difficult time deciphering things through logic.  Once Pandor’s Box is opened and some blind faith is accepted to the human mind, there is no turning it off. If a person is willing to look at the pope and accept that he’s the embodiment of god on earth, then that person is no different from the countless societies from the past that have failed, from the ancient Egyptians to the Aztecs. The ability to worship a deity does not make a society great. The values often associated with religion sometimes do, such as the Judeo-Christian background that established America. But the Founding Fathers were wise enough to understand that there should be a separation of church and state so that an emphasis on logic could be established. Blind faith is no way to run a government, or make any decisions, so it is reprehensible that the symbol of blind faith would even fathom to lecture Congress about what types of things America should or should not value. Some of the Founding Fathers did attempt to put God in the government, such as the symbols that appear on American money—“In God We Trust.” It doesn’t say what god, it just references a deity. With hindsight being 20/20 it would have been best to never have muddied the water of confusing religion with the state and to stick with the original thought of separation. Because you can’t go down that road of belief and faith and still expect to make decisions based on rational evidence. The two things just aren’t compatible, as much as we’d like them to be.

That’s why if feels wrong to see John Boehner crying over the pope. He’s supposed to be the third most powerful person in the world—and he’s crying over the uttering of an old man because the figure represents the embodiment of godliness upon the earth. For a grown man in a leadership position to believe such a thing is a tragic display of faith instead of leadership. The human race has done a poor job of establishing a criterion for leadership largely because the values of its historic religions have idolized pacifists and sacrificial souls toward the fate of the universe, instead of relying on the miracle of thought.

For those who think human beings are insignificant in the universe consider that animals don’t think—not in the way that we associate thought to. Their activity is to maintain their life, they eat, drink, and reproduce maintaining a cycle of life that is specific to their species. Human children begin thinking very young when they begin playing with toys. With cats, dogs and other animals, they play with toys also, but the activity is largely connected to learning hunting techniques that will be valuable to them with muscle memory latter in their adult lives. Human children however play and daydream and play out fantasy events in their heads with an alternate reality that is very specific to human thought. Single cell organisms that might be found on some distant planet or at the bottom of the ocean don’t do that. They just live—they don’t do much thinking. Humans are remarkable because of their ability to think. Congress, the building that the pope spoke in, the President of the United States, and all the aspects of American culture that the pope saw on his trip are aspects of human thought—whereas in Cuba where the pope had visited the day before, the cost of not thinking was grotesquely obvious. God doesn’t help the people in Cuba with some miracle. America does with capitalism and the thoughts generated by the measurement of money have made society much better. The pope falsely associates the worship of money and a growing gulf between the rich and the poor based on Biblical text nurtured along by a crumbling Roman empire—so his premise and the assumption arrived at are wrong. Money is a measurement of productivity—of action. It’s not something given to people—it’s something that is created by value. When the political left tries to establish a life without values—and they fail, then seek to rob those values from a church that does have them—using the pope to justify every transsexual-homosexual act, abortion, and every chemical addiction known to man—they are trying to disguise their bankrupt philosophy. That’s why Obama made such a big deal about the pope’s visit as opposed to the Israeli prime minister who visited recently—that he gave the cold shoulder to completely during Netanyahu’s stay.

But to see John Boehner crying–it’s just sick. Even if the moment was an emotional one, he should be stoic enough as a world leader to hold it together. The pope has no authority in America and we certainly don’t want to go back to the inquisition of the Dark Ages. We don’t need the Crusades either. We don’t need global conquest under the flag of an old church that promotes Argentinean socialists into the white robes of piety. The pope should be asking America questions about how to live, not lecturing it. Because when it comes to moral positioning, America and its capitalism does more for more people than the church in the Vatican could ever hope to achieve. It all comes from human thought that is specific to the human race. The logic of nature and all the global warming that the pope advocated for before Congress is simply a demolition derby of primal chaos where millions of species of animals, plants and airborne bacteria are in a fight to survive from day-to-day. Of all them are human beings—the only species who can think. And when it comes to worshiping a pope, it’s a thoughtless enterprise more adapt to a primal animal, not a human being. The Speaker of the House should understand that America is a place for thought, and not a platform for lecture by a man and his church that just doesn’t understand its place in the universe—but by the definitions of a fallen empire and a Europe that still hopes to use the church to rule the world.

Before the pope could leave the United States after his trip Boehner so emotional over his visit quit Congress singing a famous melody from the Disney classic Song of the South.  The heat of the day proved to be too much for him, so he got out of the kitchen.   Many of us knew all along that he didn’t have what it took, that the position of Speaker required more than just pageantry.  And from his perspective realizing that when the pope left the podium as tears streamed down his face it was time to throw in the towel.  Because the fight coming to Congress is just getting started, and he obviously didn’t  have the heart for it.

Rich Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

Listen to The Blaze Radio Network by CLICKING HERE.

The Great Mystery of Adams County: Terror, death, and government conspiracy from beyond the fourth dimension

In a lot of ways the deeply mysterious is the key to understanding the profoundly obvious. To the lazy mind, such things are often regulated to the realm of conspiracy. But experience and a truly inquisitive mind points steadily to a deeply flowing current of activity that our mainstream thought refuses to acknowledge. In Ohio, near my home relatively speaking this was never truer than the effigy Serpent Mound in Adams County, Ohio where I go often just for the enjoyment of the experience. GE has a major engine testing facility in the rolling hills of Peebles which is just a few miles from the mound. My wife and I on several occasions visit the McDonald’s in Peebles for a Big Mac and an ice cream. The area fascinates me not only for the strange mound left by a forgotten people. Archaeologists claim the mound was built by the Adena, but more likely those hunters and gathering tribes of Indians were a secondary culture to the primary which had vacated the area. They built the Serpent Mound, along with the countless other effigies around Ohio by a mysterious culture obsessed with the events in the sky.

Most people don’t see the great mysteries of the earth and the hidden history of mankind because the religious lenses they view life with prevents such insight. Before they can admit the vast evidence of discrepancy to their minds, they must look beyond the text of their religious doctrine.   Since politics and science are often connected by grant money, those two fields often function as a religion, where belief takes prescience over fact. Among those facts is that the Vikings were a much more advanced culture than previously thought. Their knowledge of global sea lanes provoked them to expand well beyond their northern borders to conquer lands far away. They settled in America much earlier than Columbus which is generally accepted today and brought with them a mound building culture that was quite prolific in all the north regions of Ireland, England and of course Norway among many others. There were also giants in North America, probably along the lines of the biblical Goliath. When we say giants, we mean people who were comparable to today’s NBA players. They were in some cases eight feet or more in height, but they weren’t Jack and the Beanstalk large. But they were giants compared to the relatively small Adena Indian. There were also Chinese in the Americas well before Columbus, and should be given credit for discovering America—officially. The Native American Indians were a second-hand culture that played out the Vico Cycle as predicted and were part of a declining civilization—where their mythologies were all that was left of that previously advanced culture. Ohio was clearly settled by a combination of all these elements. The people of the mound building cultures were obviously trading and had influence with early Mesopotamian societies and applied that knowledge directly to the Ohio effigy mounds through mathematics seen in many of those pre-historic monuments.

Without question many effigy mounds in Ohio were destroyed during frontier expansion and farming. Many were destroyed to preserve religious belief. Others were destroyed to keep grant money flowing to dig sites as the government had a vested interest in preserving its view of history for the sake of its own justification. But Serpent Mound in Adams County is ground central to the strange and weird still. It is within regional proximity of the mysterious Mothman Prophecies as chronicled by the reporter John Keel and is close to the very strange things that always seem to happen in the eastern portion of the state. Many don’t know it, but Bigfoot sightings are quite common in Ohio, as well as crop circles. To avoid appearing kooky, the media doesn’t report them all, but they are quite common in Ohio. And its been known that crop circles appear across the street from Serpent Mound from time to time in a similar way that they appear at Stonehenge in England. What is most mysterious to me about the site is not necessarily who built it, or why. Even by today’s standards of transportation, it is a remote site. So why would anybody decide to build such a thing in that Adams County location? It’s not near a major waterway, or known animal hunting ground. It just doesn’t make sense. It’s a lot of effort for a randomly picked site.

Indians are upset that the dialogue is changing about their heritage in America. They are losing, quite by good reason, their “native” designation. Politicians are still stuck on the term, but the evidence is pointing toward them as a secondary culture built by a long gone primary in much the way that today’s poor inhabit the regions and homes of areas that once prospered. Enterprising people build things; secondary people live off the efforts of others—and clearly this was the case with the Indians who encountered Columbus and the European migrants. So they resent that UFO theories and Ancient Alien researchers are thinking of Serpent Mound as evidence of some extraterrestrial influence. They wish it to remain an archaeological site as part of their native heritage. But Serpent Mound is just too precise to be the work of a nomadic culture. It had a purpose in much the way that the Nework Mounds outside of Columbus did—very purposeful in astronomical significance and built by a culture with much more in common with ancient Sumerian than some African hunter tribe. Much of the evidence there has been destroyed by construction. But at Serpent Mound, there is purity to the place still evident by the lack of social noise. And the place is clearly the result of a high intelligence that does not show up in our history books. The primary culprit is not what is evident on the ground, but what’s underneath. The Serpent Mound location is located on a plateau with a unique cryptoexplosion structure that contains faulted and folded bedrock, usually produced either by a meteorite or a volcanic explosion. In 2003 geologists from Ohio State government and the University of Glasgow (Scotland) concluded that a meteorite strike was responsible for the formation. They had studied core samples collected at the site in the 1970s. Further analyses of the rock core samples indicated the meteorite impact occurred during the Permian Period, about 248 to 286 million years ago.[17]

This site is one of the few places in North America where such an occurrence can be seen. While some scholars speculate that prehistoric Native Americans may have placed the mound in relation to this geological anomaly, others think there was nothing visible at ground level that would have captured their attention. Yet, Serpent Mound was built right in the midst of this strange geological formation. Crop circles, strange cyrptoexplosions, and advanced knowledge of astronomy are what is typical at Serpent mound but why? Then this strange story a few years ago came about:

Ohioans were dazzled by a bright flash of blue light in the night sky on September 27, 2013, in southern Ohio around 11:30 p.m., Eastern Standard Time. Could it have been a meteorite or a satellite predicted to crash to earth on Friday?

A fireball reportedly hit near a home in northern Adams County, Ohio, a few miles outside the city of Peebles causing a house fire. Those reports are unconfirmed. The six alarm fire left fireman battling the blaze into the early hours of the morning. It is unknown at this time if the residents made it out safely.

A neighbor said the meteor crossed over the city and hit near the Locust Grove Cemetery just four miles from the Great Serpent Effigy Mound. In recent years, a crop circle appeared overnight in an adjacent field from the Serpent Mound grounds and thousands of years ago it was the sight of a major meteorite that caused a huge impact crater.

Update 1: As of the morning of September 28, 2013, a home outside of Peebles, Ohio, in the Locust Grove area of Adams County burned to the ground last night, the two residents of the home, an elderly couple, Jane and Lyle Lambert, as a result of smoke inhalation. The fire is believed to be caused from the meteor or pieces of the heated meteor that hit the home. The state fire marshal is investigating the fire.

Update 2: As of October 14, 2013, the cause of the fire that burnt down the home of Lyle and Jane Lambert is yet to be determined. Speaking to a neighbor of the couple who wishes to remain anonymous on October 10, 2013, says that NASA employees were to visit and inspect the location, however; due to the recent government shutdown that is not going to happen. There is no impact crater and impact of any fragments on the house cannot be confirmed or denied due to the house being a total loss.

http://www.examiner.com/article/was-it-a-meteor-that-lit-up-the-sky-last-night

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

The problem with human beings is that they assume that their four-dimensional world is all there is—length, width, height, and time. But there are more dimensional existences than those which our civilization is just beginning to grasp. Crop circles, ancient effigies, and astronomical alignments calibrated to equinoxes and other events in the sky appear more and more to be markers in time for reference. For instance, when you read a book, it is customary to place a marker between the pages for reference later when reading can resume—as it often takes time to read a book. While reading a book life is experienced in a very liner fashion, but if one wanted to they could scan ahead and read the end, or go back to the beginning for further reference. The strange things that happen around some places around the globe, like Serpent Mound appear to have a quality that serves a function close to a book mark in the context of time. Some locations have more relevance than others indicating that for inter-dimensional travel, quadrants about the earth have importance over others. Whatever it was that hit the house in 2013 lit up the sky even as far away as my location in Hamilton, Ohio yet nobody discussed it much the next day. I didn’t know until I did some looking around that a couple of people died as a result of the strike. But what was more mysterious was that out of all the places on earth that the event took place, it was at the Serpent Mound, where so much other activity has taken place.

Something is important about Serpent Mound, Ohio. It may not be obvious to our four-dimensional eyes, but the evidence sometimes left behind is quite obvious. A couple was killed in their home by a mysterious object hitting them in the middle of the night. 250 million years ago a strange object of some massive density punctured the earth’s crust from either within or without—or perhaps both at the same time. But it wasn’t a simple meteor strike. In linear time, 250 million years to the present is a long time, but to inter-dimensional time, it could be an instant. A crop circle may be just a thumb print in a book to hold one’s place—we really don’t know. But isn’t it convenient that NASA wasn’t available to investigate the impact site in 2013 where two people lost their lives to an object that apparently fell out of the sky near one of the greatest effigy monuments in the world? What was the excuse—a government shut-down—so the investigation was called off. There is never an official investigation of these types of things for many of the same reasons.

Government puts itself in charge of all things extraterrestrial, or even ultra-dimensional, yet they are proven time and again to be incompetent to perform the task. The rest of us are left to wonder based on the evidence what’s going on—because something is. So we’re all left grabbing at straws in the dark. But we do it because we know that the straw is there—somewhere. It’s just being hidden from us by our education systems and a government trying to maintain control of the real truth, which is getting harder and harder for them to maintain.

Rich Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

Listen to The Blaze Radio Network by CLICKING HERE.

GMC and a Wife Hard to Please: A financial warning triggered by low interest rates

For a long time my wife and I have missed our old Jeep Grand Cherokee. She lost it in 2005 to an accident where the airbags went off during a wreck actually induced by the Lakota school system’s cut of busing during a levy fight. There were too many people on the road at Lakota East and my wife was driving our children to school. It was wet out and there was an accident. The Jeep held up wonderfully. Hardly any physical damage to the vehicle—but the airbags did deploy and that put the cost of repair well over the price of the Jeep’s worth. So it was totaled and wasn’t worth covering the extra cost to repair ourselves. We had the Jeep for a long time, and it was time to get a new car anyway. We picked up a Chrysler Town and Country which was perfect for us, and our large family. We drove it everywhere for the last ten years. We tend to buy vehicles and keep them for a long time. We don’t lease throwaway cars. We buy to keep, and we take care of them when we get them. So it’s a big deal in our family to make a car purchase. But its time again for my wife to have a new car and she is really, really, really picky. Let me emphasize, she is very hard to please. She has very specific tastes that are hard to satisfy. Her standards are extremely high. Picking out a car with her is very difficult.

I had been looking at buying a GMC Yukon Denali myself with the extended back and showed them to her, but she wasn’t going for it. They are just too big for her. She wanted a Jeep, but now that they are owned by Fiat she wants nothing to do with them. Additionally we loved our Town and Country but after Fiat acquired Chrysler that was the end of having any possibility of buying a Chrysler or Jeep. My wife may be an old country club girl, but she is probably more patriotic than I am when it comes down to it, and she doesn’t want to pay good money for foreign cars. Her very first car was a BMW. We had a Toyota Camry once, back when she was in college, but she resented having an Asian car, so since then it’s always been American cars—which I personally think are too expensive due to the labor unions and short-cuts that are often made to compete with foreign markets. I didn’t want to look at any General Motors cars because of the bailout in 2009, and Ford wasn’t making anything all that great in my opinion. They weren’t dynamic enough for us. So shopping for a car was hard for us. She didn’t want to look at any of the Mercedes products, which I tried to bring up—because she didn’t want to support German manufacturers over American even though I think they have the edge in engineering presently. But my attitude softened as I started looking into the new Yukons. On that car GMC was starting to build a good reputation again, and I was impressed.

My wife refused to drive a Yukon so we gave up on the discussion as we were at an impasse. What I didn’t know was that she started to consider the smaller versions of the Yukon on the GMC line and found that she loved the Terrain quite a lot. I was aghast because I thought the car was too small, but knowing she had done a lot of homework, and how hard she was to please, I gave it a shot—reluctantly. After all, we weren’t buying for me, it was for her. We went down to Fiehrer Motors at Bridgewater Falls to let her sell me on the merits of the GMC Terrain and I walked away rather impressed. The only drawback for me was that the Terrain wasn’t a Yukon, which wasn’t fair to the Terrain. After driving them around and looking at all the options it was clear why she liked the vehicle, it reminded us of our old Jeep, and it was made by an American company trying to give birth to itself once again—and the front end of it was smashing cool. Inside there was a lot of room and it’s technically quite a leap forward in engineering development. I was impressed with the 6 speed transmission that actually has the ability to go manual if needed, so she sold me on it and we bought one.

But this article is not about buying a new car or reviewing the GMC Terrain. It’s about a revelation I had while going through finance and signing all the paperwork. Buying a car is a very important part of the American economy, so I pay attention to aspects of it that measure the greater aspect of national GDP. I enjoyed greatly my experience at Fiehrer Motors as they have been in business for three generations now—which is very unusual. They used to be on Route 4 for a long time across from the Hamilton Plaza, by the old Richard’s Pizza place. But my wife and I would never shop for a car in that type of location because it’s too busy there to think right, plus the area is surrounded by impoverished has-been homes. Not a good way to usher in an expensive car buying experience. When we have bought cars in the past, it has been at Kings Automall. We like it over there for all the reasons that we prefer that Costco over the one in Tri-County. There are fewer slack-jawed losers over on Fields Ertle, and it does matter. People who have purchasing power don’t want to hang out with people whose life goals are to buy a pack of cigarettes and win $10 on a scratch-off lottery ticket so they can buy a case of beer. It matters even if it’s not politically correct. If the new Fiehrer dealership at Bridgewater wasn’t so nice, my wife would have never convinced me to go car shopping in the first place. So we were there buying the new Terrain, the sun was out on a nice 68 degree day after a bit of rain. There was some college football on the big screen behind me in the lounge area which I enjoyed watching as we went over all the contract details. It was clean, everyone seemed professional, and it was a good productive atmosphere that was conducive to the proper exchange of money and product. The finance guy was finalizing the details and I had positioned myself so I could see his computer screen just enough to read. That’s when I asked him if he was a drug addict.

I’m not going to give away a lot of personal details especially on a purchase that costs half of a small house. I’m grateful for good terms when I can get them. I’m not complaining on an individual basis. But what I saw was alarming to me. Keep in mind that I used to do what this finance guy was doing, so I had some experience on the matter. That was over twenty years ago, and back then I even helped paint on the front window of our dealership a giant sign designed to entice people to come in and buy a car—“4% on all cars and trucks.” I remembered back then that almost nobody had credit good enough to qualify for the 4% interest rate. They usually walked out of finance at somewhere around 6% to 7% if they had really good credit. Only people with “gold” credit were able to actually get what was on the window. So here I was watching the Sooners stomp all over the Golden Hurricanes, my wife had found a car she liked, and we were getting Chick-fil-A for my grandson’s birthday on a nice fall afternoon once we were finished with buying the car. It doesn’t get any better than that—except for the interest rate that I saw on the computer screen of my finance guy. It was less than what I painted on the window of the dealership I worked at decades ago. I thought he had made a serious mistake and was trying to hide a drug addiction.

But he wasn’t on drugs, and it was a legitimate interest rate. While my wife and everyone else was happy, I wasn’t. Something was dreadfully wrong about that. Things were not alright, that interest rate should have been much higher. As we signed the paperwork, I thought about the Fed’s decision to keep interest rates where they were, which are artificially low. Sure its good for the economy, it’s good for people to spend money, but it essentially means that any investments made in bonds or other long-term holdings are not increasing encouraging investors to continue dumping money into risky stocks further flaming a volatile market. This meant that the economy was in far worse shape than anybody was willing to acknowledge, including the most conspiratorial talk show hosts on AM radio. Banks were giving away money at a very low profit to them just to get people to buy products—and that artificial stimulus was a direct correlation to the true state of our economy that is dangerously perilous.

Look people, America is about to hit $19 trillion dollars in debt, wages are stagnant, inflation is unbelievably high, and there isn’t enough GDP to stave off complete economic collapse. There is really only this next presidential election to get it right where both the House, Senate, and the Executive Branch can increase GDP, pay down the debt so the United States doesn’t choke on foreign interest rates itself, and put the country back on course again where buying cars is a routine exercise, along with many other factors of a national economy. Failure to solve this problem means there is no future. Interest rates can’t be lowered any more than they are, and if that’s not getting people out to the stores to move products, then nothing will do it. That is not a good situation.

I’m proud of GMC for getting their act together and producing a nice series of cars, particularly the Terrain. I am impressed, and it deserves a look by anybody in the car market. I am proud of Fiehrer Motors for relocating into a really nice store in a really nice area—because I otherwise wouldn’t have went car shopping—so it’s a factor in national GDP—nearly as much as interest rate shopping—for me anyway. Without their decision to move off Dixie Highway, I wouldn’t have visited them and they wouldn’t have had the opportunity to sell me a new car. I’m proud of the Sooners for playing a fun college football game that sold lots of beer and fast food options to hundreds of thousands of viewers. And I was proud to spend $100 at Chick-fil-A on food that day. These are all wonderful things for our economy. But, the bank shouldn’t have to feel like they have to give away money. They need a chance to make a profit and while some people will say that banks make enough money, profit is what they need to stay in business. And they deserve to make money on their services. Based on that interest rate, it was clear to me that they weren’t making enough. For my situation, I won’t complain. But the fact that they felt compelled to offer it makes me worry about their future. Good things aren’t always good things.

Overall, it was a fun day, but many of the things I write about became quite evident to me. I don’t always like being right, even though I am most of the time. Unfortunately, not enough people listen in time to help themselves. That is frustrating to me. For that reason my wife and I did get the subscription to XM radio. No matter what happens, we’ll have a good life and we’ll enjoy it. However, I want many others to have a taste of the good life too-which is why I put so much time into trying to teach people—if only they’d listen.

Rich Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

Listen to The Blaze Radio Network by CLICKING HERE.

2015 Lakota School Board Candidates: Options for management of tax payer resources

The people who run for school board, such as those at Lakota in Butler County, Ohio, should be people who truly want to save the system and make the best management decisions possible. So for this article, I’ll cover the election of 2015 for two potential school board seats in the fashion of neutrality. In my district there are four candidates, two who currently sit on the board, Julie Shaffer, whom I’ve had my share of spats with, Lynda O’Connor that I’ve supported, along with Ernest D.Gause and Tom Tran. They had a Meet the Candidates night down at my old high school building on Taylorsville Rd on the night of the big CNN debate—which was hosted by the valuable West Chester Tea Party. Refreshingly, quite a few people showed up to watch the event. However, not enough did, so a video of the candidates at that forum can be seen here:

There was some pressure on me to run for one of those spots, but as I explained to everyone who asked—I’m not a public servant type of person. I don’t really care to shake hands, when people call me who I don’t want to talk to, I like to ignore them and when I get mad at something, or someone, I like to be free to unleash my inner T-Rex on them. I don’t like being beholden to a community established set of values. Plus, I feel I’m too young to do anything like run for an office. But most of all, in regard to Lakota, I’m not a public education supporter. I think public schools should be profit based, the unions should be crushed and made illegal, and the government should be completely out of education starting with the DOE in Washington. I don’t want more money from the state to pay for higher collective bargaining agreements for the teacher’s union just so busy parents can have a free baby sitter for their children. If I ran for school board it would be to destroy the system, which isn’t necessarily the best thing for those who do support public education. I have enough respect for the republic system of government that we have to have a vigorous debate instead of imposing my personal views on the masses. So my belief is that people who want to work together to manage a good school system should run for office, and by my appraisal those are the kinds of people who are running in 2015 within the Lakota district.

This time around there aren’t a bunch of crazy lunatics, as there have been in the past running for office, so there really isn’t a downside to any of them. Julie and Lynda have I think done a good job of adapting to the tax opposition and try to avoid reckless tax increases. Listening to Julie, she has come a long way over the last four years. I don’t forget things, but I will put things aside to make a fair comment, and she is better now than the person who debated me on 700 WLW four years ago. That largely comes from experience. I personally liked the spunk of Tom Tran although I don’t think he can apply that gumption to reality on the board. He’d likely assimilate to the current culture uneventfully and be a standard vote. I did talk to Ernest Gause after the debate and was very impressed with his bright-eyed professionalism. He is a professional educator deeply committed to learning. He said some things that were obviously progressive to me and likely weren’t very conservative. But I could tell that he really cared about education. He probably deserves to be some new blood on the school board who could at least elevate some debate regarding the allocation of resources. My friend Ann Becker used to be a very pro levy, pro education type, and he reminded me of her which isn’t at all a bad thing. So there are some good choices for school board that voters have to pick from.

Due to the declining enrollment at Lakota even with the cuts in state funding, the increased tax revenue from commercial endeavors and diligent fiscal policy should prevent Lakota from seeking a tax increase from property owners for the rest of the decade. But, as I’ve said before, the current trajectory of spending and over priced government employees at well over 60K per year will put stress on logic and create the temptation to put another tax increase on the ballot by 2017. Out of all the candidates all of them sound like they’d be supportive of voting for that tax increase. The only way to avoid that is for three conservatives to make it on the board during the next election to out vote the current members. Otherwise, that fight is inevitable. For the sake of this Lakota forum, everyone was peaceful, because tax increases have not yet been put on the table. When the school board does move in that direction, then its time to take away the handshakes and glad tidings and go to war—which we will.

But it’s best to avoid war, and even better to provide good management so that unfortunate incidents in the future can be avoided in the present. And that’s what elections are all about. Of the choices, there are some promising ones, so take advantage of them, communicate with them, and let’s see where it takes us.

Rich Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

Listen to The Blaze Radio Network by CLICKING HERE.

Seattle Education Association: Caving to communism in a progressive utopia

When politicians use the word progressive, be clear that what they are talking about is essentially Bernie Sanders socialism. They intend to “progress” society toward collective salvation to nearly a religious fervor. That’s why they don’t have any hard opinions about North Korea, China, Iran, Mexico, Cuba, Brazil, Venezuela, Greece, France or even Russia for that matter, because socialism and communism are the modes those countries are functioning under, and they want the same for the United States. That is what politicians mean by “progressive” when they indicated that society needs to “lean forward” toward it.

Clearly one of the most progressive areas of the United States is Seattle, Washington. The massive union culture of the Boeing employees contribute largely to that, and the music culture that has evolved through their garage bands were undeniably socialist in orientation. They have an actual city council person who is a socialist. It is a highly liberalized part of the country and was one of the first places to attempt a $15 per hour minimum wage for fast food workers. So they have serious issues against capitalism and are certainly as a city leaning well toward pot smoking liberalism of the most severe version of progressive. With that said, it shouldn’t be a surprise that the teacher’s union in Seattle went on strike at the start of the school year holding the tax payers to the fire until city management—which is already on the same side as the progressive labor union—buckled just to get the teachers to go back to work again. Here’s what the school employees received in the deal followed by a short report from the Seattle Times.

 Highlights of tentative 3-year contract:

Raises: 3 percent in first year; 2 percent in second; 4.5 percent in third (state cost-of-living raise is additional). More in 2017-18 for some teachers for collaboration, and eight hours of “tech pay” for all school employees.

Discipline: Half day of training on reducing disproportionate discipline for all school employees. Equity committees launched in 30 schools.

Testing: New joint union-district committee to review and recommend testing and testing schedule.

Teacher evaluations: Test scores will no longer play any role.

School day: Will be longer, but not much for students, and teachers will be paid for the additional time.

Specialist caseloads: Sets limits, which union says is a first, for physical therapists, occupational therapists, psychologists and audiologists.

Source: Seattle Education Association

After four months of negotiations, a five-day strike and one final all-night talk, the Seattle teachers union and Seattle Public Schools reached a tentative contract agreement early Tuesday, and school is scheduled to start Thursday for the city’s 53,000 students.

The Seattle Education Association’s board of directors and its elected building representatives both voted Tuesday afternoon to suspend the strike, recommending the union’s membership approve the deal. The agreement will go to a full vote of the union’s 5,000 members at a Sunday meeting.

The building-representative vote came after hours of deliberation, where cheers and fervent discussion could be heard outside a packed room at the Machinists Hall in South Seattle.

Union bargaining chair Phyllis Campano, exhausted after one hour of sleep after the marathon negotiation session, declared victory.

“Let’s be clear,” she said. “We won the fight on this contract agreement.”

http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/education/seattle-teachers-and-district-reach-tentative-agreement/

What a bunch of communist idiots. That is exactly why education costs so much in America, and why our children are being liberalized during that institutional training. There are no rational conservatives in the process, and even if they did manage to get elected to a board seat, progressive politicians have skewed the table to always favor the labor unions. To properly negotiate a deal against labor unions you really have to be an ass, and enjoy it, because it’s tough. But with a 5 to 7 member school board, one will always be out-voted by the rest, as those who typically run for such offices are liberalized types themselves. I would argue that the best education the kids of Seattle could have had was a few more days at home as these progressive teachers went on strike for more money and power.

This strike was not about any kids. Kids were clearly used as extortion pieces to secure higher wages, lower testing expectations, and more secure livelihoods. To hell with the kids, which is what the Seattle Education Association declared when they went on strike—there’s no other way to frame the debate. It was about money at the expense of the kids for the progressive aims of further substantiation of a communist agenda spreading across the world.

However, this story is an old one. We’ve covered it many times before. We’ve covered it on radio broadcasts, many articles, public debates and anywhere that the issue has been raised. Yet in Seattle, the situation is clear, the politics are grossly progressive and the aims of the insurrection directly applicable to the region. The apparatus for political theater has a well-known cast and everyone benefited except for the kids, because a liberal education is not necessarily better than not having one at all. I would argue that children could learn far more from the popular Leap Frog devices so popular now at the local Target store than a K-12 education in a public school. Such educations are as dirty and disrespected as public libraries where everything is shared and stagnate. The value of such education is clearly deficient. As pollsters like to announce often during the presidential race of 2016, college graduates support Hillary Clinton whereas blue-collar non-college graduates generally support Donald Trump. The accusation is that highly educated types are more able to understand “higher concepts” of progressivism. But such a term is purely marketing and has no basis in reality. It could be just as argued that 16 years of liberalized education is detrimental to a conservative mind and they will leave college prepared to support progressive platform points such as gay rights, open borders, and socialist wealth redistribution. Whereas those who make their own way in life work hard from the ground up and go to bed tired each night, they don’t like to have their money stolen from them by progressives—so they vote with their wallets. The Seattle Education Association is clearly attacking the hard-working as opposed to the unionized slugs and the wealth redistribution that they most support in Seattle, so it’s no surprise that the government school union got what they wanted so quickly. There really wasn’t any opposition, just political theater that showed clearly that the children were not the priority to the teachers.

It’s a hard reality for many to realize, but the educations we all go through within the public education system is nearly worthless. It exists for these unionized teachers to mooch off of, as they provide very little of any worth for a young, inquiring mind, except a radicalized progressive education. Kids don’t learn about the value of cowboys and Indians in public school, but they sure learn how to stand in line, organize in a collective unit, and get voluminous exposure to the progressive religion of global warming. It’s hard work to unlearn all the crap we learn and for those who reject the experience, it’s easier for them. But for all, the reality couldn’t be clearer. If you support the teachers in Seattle you essentially support Bernie Sanders socialism. The people who won in that case were the socialists represented here by the Seattle Education Association. And they pulled it off because there is no free market competition for their services and it’s nearly illegal to avoid the reach of public schools. So they have a government backed monopoly on building future progressives with tax payer money and every year the price tag goes up. And nobody does anything to stop it because they are afraid of being called names for identifying the behavior what it really is—which is a diabolical socialist scheme that would make the communists of the world bulge with pride. And today in Seattle, they are.

Rich Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

Listen to The Blaze Radio Network by CLICKING HERE.

The Need for American Exceptionalism: How the political left has killed thousands and made life miserable for millions

Now you know dear reader why American Exceptionalism is so important. For all you peace lovers, only now do you understand that the wars in the Middle East that took place in recent years were not about oil. They were about stabilized government and the opportunity to live life for the indigenous people of those lands. The so-called American Imperialism that the political left is always talking about is very good for the world. American capitalism is also very good for the world. Wherever America has a military base or business influence, the cultures in those regions prosper. Where America does not have influence, there is war, death, and corruption. What should that tell the United Nations? And what would the United Nations be without the United States?   Nothing. So where does that leave us?

Worldwide presently there are 59.5 million people on the move as refugees within their home countries, victims of tyrannical regimes, poverty-stricken economies, abusive thugs, and environmental disaster. There have never been more people looking to leave where they were hoping to get refuge somewhere else. That is the cause of the problem on the American border with Mexico. Mexico is an impoverished nation collapsing economically under its 100 year commitment toward socialist oriented policies and now they are impoverished. The only real money they have is from American businesses fleeing the high taxation and union demands within the United States, and tourism. The political left is at fault for all those issues, the high taxes, the open border push, the drives toward socialism—yet they take no responsibility for any of it leaving the world a mismanaged mess that is killing many hundreds of thousands of people and leaving millions without hope and opportunity.

The latest crises in Syria has 4.1 million refugees registered fleeing the war-torn area of the Middle East destroyed by ISIS for destinations in Europe hoping for sanctuary somewhere that radicals won’t cut off their heads, rape their women, and corrupt their children. They leave for countries that will allow them to live on welfare—which is why so many are primarily fleeing to Germany. Greece doesn’t have any money to deal with even more people seeking social benefits from a socialist economic system. Obama blew the deal in Syria with Bashar al-Assad when he failed to enforce his “line in the sand” then refused to help that same dictator when indirectly America gave arms to his enemies which rose up to become ISIS—an even greater threat. The cause of that increase of aggression was the power vacuum left behind when America left Iraq, as telegraphed by Barack Obama—who ran for president on the platform of leaving the unpopular war.

As politicians like Rand Paul and his father Ron were technically and Constitutionally correct that America needs to take care of our own borders and not be the police of the entire world, the world actually needs the cowboy heroism of America to save them from mismanagement, religious zealots, and the ugly claws of communism that still seek to spread across the world with a vengeful effort at mass collectivism. So long as the world is rife with communism, socialism and religious fanatics, America is the only country responsible enough to provide peace and shelter to a world literally on fire. The global migrations happening right now are because America has pulled up its global influence and went home to drown in its 19 trillion-dollar deficit.

To any sane mind all these problems, again caused by the political left and their armies of progressives in virtually every field of endeavor. You could further trace much of this trouble back to billionaires like George Soros. His money goes into programs like open border societies, marijuana legalization, and extreme political left progressive candidates. What do all those things have in common? Well, drugs soften the minds of indigenous people while open borders destroy nationalism, creating new voting blocks with socialist foundations to elect progressives to manage the countries while people like hedge fund investors make money on the chaos. There’s no conspiracy there, it’s happening right in front of our faces and nobody is really denying it. Meanwhile, Republicans are more concerned with “playing nice” as millions of young people are killed in China and elsewhere under socialist, communist, and religious administrations. Planned Parenthood is a perfect example of this crises—abortion isn’t just about political and theological debate anymore. Practitioners under tax payer funding are deliberately killing children to sell their body parts. That is a crisis of epic proportions—and again the avocation of the evil is a strategy of the political left. So isn’t it explicitly clear what’s happening and why people are being made to suffer?

One of the terms used to disgrace American occupation of foreign lands is to refer to the act as “cowboy diplomacy” and the concept of the Wild, Wild, West where the naive concept of good guys shooting bad guys is considered reprehensible. America feeling guilt about that accusation stopped making westerns, stopped shipping its values abroad, and avoided the finger-pointing of American Imperialism that has so long loomed like a cloud over the freest capitalist nation on earth. Well, now we see the results of that avoidance. The world was so much better when it made westerns, and kids played cowboys and Indians as opposed to Miley Cyrus grinding on some teddy bears and passing around joints at a press conference. Miley was shaped by progressive politics whereas conservativism was shaped by American westerns and their values.   Turn a cowboy loose in the Middle East and there will be lot fewer refugees fleeing to Germany. I promise. Punish the bad guys so good people can live free. To a liberal that’s an overly simplified statement, because to their minds, evil has a seat at the table of debate. Liberals created all the problems, and the world is suffering under their mismanagement.

The question we have to solve now is what to do about all this. Just blindly taking in refugees and putting them on government assistance won’t solve the problem. They need real help in places like Syria, and Mexico. Those regions do need a return to cowboy diplomacy and a sense of honor typically associated with American westerns. They need capitalism and the opportunities that come with that economic system. The Greek isles depend nearly exclusively on tourism to sustain livelihoods for their inhabitants. They don’t make cars, or even brew beer there, not in any quantities to provide economical means toward social sustainability. They need tourists to visit to provide income to the families who live there. But tourists won’t come if dead bodies continue to wash up on the beach from failed attempts to cross the Mediterranean from Africa and the Middle East by families fleeing the terrorism of ISIS and the caliphate of Islamic extremism. Nobody wants to go on vacation only to see dead bodies on the beach. Yet the United Nations is in complete paralysis as to what to do about it all. They are totally clueless trying to deal with the problem, not the cause of the problem.

The cause of most of the world’s problems is a lack of capitalism and the American bravado to promote it. The reluctance to spread “cowboy diplomacy” throughout the world has been catastrophic. The world needs our help, and we have instead run like chickens—which progressives have told two generations now is a noble cause. Progressives would rather support abortion deaths; rainbow-colored transvestites, and legalized marijuana, than to allow America to feel good about its traditions and responsibility. Saving the world is the responsibility of those most able to do it. If a victim is in distress and a strong personality is nearby to do something about it, the responsibility for action is on those capable of solving the problem. America is the only nation capable of such a thing. And because we are not performing that job now, the world is suffering. The blame for that suffering is not only on the liberals who have caused the mess, but in those of us who have failed to act correctly in the face of danger and opposition. The world needs a little “cowboy justice” and it’s about time we stop apologizing and start giving it to them. Once the world learns to be more like Americans, then maybe the United States can be the way Rand Paul wishes. But not until then.

Rich Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

Listen to The Blaze Radio Network by CLICKING HERE.

The Iran Nuclear Deal: What you need to know

Without question the Iran nuclear deal that the Obama administration signed with that top sponsor of terrorism was detrimental not only to world security, but to American’s credibility as a nation. That’s why it was so refreshing to see Donald Trump, Ted Cruz and Glenn Beck, along with others gathered in front of the capital building in Washington D.C. to protest the ridiculous deal. For coverage of the speakers at the event, watch the clips below. To understand the basics of the deal, continue reading.

The Iran nuclear deal framework was a preliminary framework agreement reached between the Islamic Republic of Iran and a group of world powers: the P5+1 (the permanent members of the United Nations Security Council–the United States, the United Kingdom, Russia, France, and China plus Germany), plus the European Union.

Negotiations for a framework deal over the nuclear program of Iran took place between the foreign ministers of the countries at a series of meetings held from 26 March to 2 April 2015 in Lausanne, Switzerland. On 2 April the talks came to a conclusion and a press conference was held by Federica Mogherini, (High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs) and Mohammad Javad Zarif (Minister of Foreign Affairs of Iran) to announce that the eight nations had reached an agreement on a framework deal. The parties announced that “Today, we have taken a decisive step: we have reached solutions on key parameters of a Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action.”[1] with a goal of working out this final deal by 30 June 2015.[2][3][4] Announcing the framework, Foreign Minister Zarif stated: “No agreement has been reached so we do not have any obligation yet. Nobody has obligations now other than obligations that we already undertook under the Joint Plan of Action that we adopted in Geneva in November 2013.”[5]

The framework deal was embodied in a document published by the EU’s European External Action Service titled Joint Statement by EU High Representative Federica Mogherini and Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif Switzerland.[1] and in a document published by the U.S. Department of State titled Parameters for a Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action Regarding the Islamic Republic of Iran’s Nuclear Program.[6]

On 14 July 2015, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action between Iran and the P5+1 and EU, a comprehensive agreement based on the April 2015 framework, was announced.

According to the joint statement in Switzerland, the E3+3 countries and Iran agreed on a framework for a deal. According to this framework, Iran would redesign, convert, and reduce its nuclear facilities and accept the Additional Protocol (with provisional application) in order to lift all nuclear-related economic sanctions.[7] In addition to the joint statement, the United States and Iran issued fact sheets of their own.[8]

The joint statement outlines the following:[7]

Enrichment

  • Iran’s enrichment capacity, enrichment level and stockpile will be limited for specified durations.
  • There will be no enrichment facilities other than Natanz.
  • Iran is allowed to conduct research and development on centrifuges with an agreed scope and schedule.
  • Fordow, the underground enrichment center,[9] will be converted to a “nuclear, physics and technology centre”.

Reprocessing

  • The Heavy Water facility in Arak with help of international venture will be redesigned and modernized to “Heavy Water Research Reactor” with no weapon grade plutonium byproducts.
  • The spent fuel will be exported, there will be no reprocessing.

Monitoring

  • Implementation of the modified Code 3.1 and provisional application of the Additional Protocol.
  • Iran agreed IAEA procedure which enhanced access by modern technologies to clarify past and present issues.

Sanctions

When the IAEA verifies Iran’s implementation of its key nuclear commitments:

  • The EU will terminate all nuclear-related economic sanctions.
  • The United States will cease the application of all nuclear-related secondary economic and financial sanctions.
  • The UN Security Council will endorse this agreement with a resolution which terminates all previous nuclear-related resolutions and incorporate certain restrictive measures for a mutually agreed period of time.

In addition to the final statement, both the United States and Iran have made public more detailed descriptions of their agreement. Officials of both sides acknowledged that they have different narratives on this draft.[8] The U.S. government has published a fact sheet summarizing the main points of the deal.[10] Shortly after it was published, top Iranian officials, including the Iranian supreme leader and the Iranian minister of defense have disputed the document on key points which remain unresolved.[11][12][13]

According to details of the deal published by the US government, Iran has accepted to not build any new facilities for the aim of enrichment and reduce its current stockpile to 300 kg of 3.67 percent low-enriched uranium during 15 years and limit the enriched uranium to 3.67 percent for at least this duration, restrict to 6,104 installed centrifuges under the deal, with only 5,060 of these enriching uranium for 10 years.[14] This amount of enrichment – namely 3.67% – would be enough just for peaceful and civil use to power parts of country and therefore is not sufficient for building a nuclear bomb.[15]

According to press TV report based on Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), Iran’s extra centrifuges and the related infrastructure in the Natanz facility will be collected by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in order to be replaced by new machines consistent with the allowed standards. Iran will be allowed to allocate the current stockpile of enriched materials for the purpose of producing nuclear fuel or swapping it with uranium in the international markets. These comprehensive solutions permit Iran to continue its enrichment program inside its territory and also allowed to continue its production of nuclear fuel for running its nuclear power plants.[16]

According to the U.S. State Department fact sheet, Iran has agreed to convert its Fordow facility into a nuclear physics, technology research center, and to not conduct research and development associated with uranium enrichment at Fordow for 15 years.[14] According to the joint statement by Iran and the EU, the Fordow nuclear facility will be turned into a research center for nuclear science and physics and about half of the Fordow facility would be dedicated to advanced nuclear research and production of stable isotopes which have important applications in industry, agriculture and medicine. Iran would maintain more than 1,000 centrifuges for this purpose.[16]

According to Press TV, the implementation of JCPOA followed by lifting of all the UN Security Council sanctions as well as all economic and financial embargoes by the US and the European Union imposed on Iran’s banks, insurance, investment, and all other related services in different fields, including petrochemical, oil, gas and automobile industries will be immediately lifted all at once.[16] However, according to the fact sheet which is published by the US government, U.S. and E.U. nuclear-related sanctions will be suspended after the IAEA has verified the implementation of the key nuclear-related steps by Iran.[14]

Iran will be required to provide the International Atomic Energy Agency access to all of its declared facilities so that the agency can ensure about peaceful nuclear program.[15] According to published details of the deal which is published by the U.S. government, IAEA inspectors would have access to all of the nuclear facilities including enrichment facilities, the supply chain that supports the nuclear program and uranium mines as well as continuous surveillance at uranium mills, centrifuge rotors and bellows production and storage facilities. Iran will be required to grant access to the IAEA to investigate suspicious sites or allegations of a covert enrichment facility, conversion facility, centrifuge production facility, or yellowcake production facility anywhere in the country. Iran will implement an agreed set of measures to address the IAEA’s concerns regarding the Possible Military Dimensions (PMD) of its program.[14]

According to the Iranian fact sheet, Iran will implement the Additional Protocol temporarily and voluntarily in line with its confidence-building measures and after that the protocol will be ratified in a time frame by the Iranian government and parliament (Majlis).[16]

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

No deal of any kind is worth the paper it’s printed on if there isn’t respect for both parties making the deal. In regard to American’s view toward Iran, there is no trust except for the blind assumption by progressives that there can be foundationless trust between the two countries. Iran has sponsored terror and caused a lot of trouble. So trusting them is difficult under perfect conditions. Then of course there is Iran. What values do they stand to lose if they violate the deal? What implication against their honor would there be? What holds them to honor? Nothing. So for all the hoopla, the Iran nuclear deal negotiated by John Kerry is purely political theater that empowered an enemy of capitalism. That made it quite relevant, and historic that a few presidential candidates and some talk show pundits protested the farce on Capital Hill. And within that protest there was just a grain of hope that the world had not gone insane.

Rich Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

Listen to The Blaze Radio Network by CLICKING HERE.

Why America Should Abolish Labor Day: The Marxist roots of a national holiday

It was a disgusting Labor Day Holiday in 2015. I have never liked Labor Day because the premise of it speaks of unionized activity. And of course the premise of organized labor is a bad one, collective bargaining, collective adversarial relationships with management, and the greatest insult of all, the expectation that a job is an entitlement that should not be connected to performance. Entertainment unions aren’t as bad as manufacturing and government sector unions because there is still a bit of free market capitalism present in those fields. If a star football player or movie star doesn’t put butts in seats, their value goes way down. But in almost every case, labor unions do not connect productive work to their efforts at solidarity and their efforts are criminal viewed through the proper lens of capitalism.

Even more sickening are the number of times during Labor Day that employees were termed as “workers” in the mode used commonly in Karl Mark’s Communist Manifesto.   Such as the term at the end of the book, “workers of the world, unite.” Democrats and labor union leaders use the term “worker” in precisely the same fashion and every time I hear it I am reminded of just how much communism has penetrated the capitalist culture of America much to all of our detriment. When President Obama or VP Joe Biden say “worker” they are using communist terms to describe people. Their vantage point is clearly framed by Karl Marx—and that is the general spirit of Labor Day—to me it’s a communist recognition holiday—so I don’t like it.

Of course from a communist perspective the White House thought it appropriate to issue a new executive order on Labor Day—this one was one of the most disgusting that I can remember in recent history. Here’s how The Blaze reported the story:

WASHINGTON (AP) — Showing solidarity with workers on Labor Day, President Barack Obama will sign an executive order Monday requiring paid sick leave for employees of federal contractors, including 300,000 who currently receive none.

The White House wouldn’t specify the cost to federal contractors to implement the executive order, which Obama was to address at a major union rally and breakfast in Boston. The Labor Department said any costs would be offset by savings that contractors would see as a result of lower attrition rates and increased worker loyalty, but produced nothing to back that up.

Under the executive order, employees working on federal contracts gain the right to a minimum of one hour of paid leave for every 30 hours they work. Stretched out over 12 months, that’s up to seven days per year. The order will allow employees to use the leave to care for sick relatives as well, and will affect contracts starting in 2017 — just as Obama leaves office.

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2015/09/07/heres-how-obama-will-mark-labor-day/

Here’s the problem with this ridiculous executive order and the Labor Day that it was signed on—it celebrates “not working,” non productivity. It is a celebration of staying home and doing leisurely activities as opposed to actually working. The premise is a bad one rooted in laziness. When Marx says “workers of the world unit” in the Communist Manifesto and Barack Obama tells those workers to stay home more often, they are both building a sense of entitlement toward the endeavor of work that is unhealthy, and detrimental for a capitalist nation. Marx says to unite so that through collectivism they gain leveraging power to deprive an employer of their labor so that they can make ridiculous mandates as to the allocation of their effort toward productive enterprise.

Just before Labor Day a middle-aged male uttered happiness at their ability to have a four-day weekend. They had Friday off, but would also have Monday off due to the national holiday. They were quite happy to be free of work for four consecutive days. The statement to me was troubling because it indicated that the work the young man was doing was so far from what he’d rather be doing that he considered the opportunity for freedom from that expectation enough to proclaim joy. Now I’m sure a lot of people feel that way toward their jobs, but that doesn’t make it right. If you feel that way about something you work at, I feel sorry for you. Working is a joy. When I do it, it is part of my life in every way. I work while I’m at Disney World. I work at 4 am—I work all the time, even during holidays, weekends, all hours of the day because I see work as a creative endeavor and it feels good to make things. I enjoy making things. It is a joy to bring things to life that did not exist before. The thoughts of that middle-aged man were not something I could understand, or sympathize with. What would that person be doing besides working, playing video games, watching a movie, or just talking with friends? Those might be fun exercises, but they are often spectator sports. In the case of video games and other entertainment, the programmers did the work; the players just enjoy the productivity that brought the product to life. Enjoying entertainment is not in and of itself productive—its leisure. Productivity is when you bring something to life and the effort creates economic energy. Being productive is quite rewarding. You feel good after a hard day of work.

Yet the president is instigating a quandary that does not make sense. On one hand he is saying that workers are valuable, then on the other that they aren’t needed, because if they can afford to take off one hour of paid leave for every thirty hours they work, clearly they aren’t being paid for productive enterprise—but are relegated to the type of work typically associated with the government office worker—a butt in a seat that does very little but browse the internet all day while being paid extraordinary amounts of money for nothing. Obama clearly doesn’t understand the value of hard work and is clearly aligned with the referred middle-aged guy who was happy to have four days off for Labor Day. They don’t want to work; they simply want a job that pays them so they can do what they want in their leisure time. Obama has shown that his value in a job is not in productive output, but in time off work. That is an important distinction. It is a false assumption based on Karl Marx, not any capitalist philosopher. The failure is in the basic premise established on a college campus with Marxist pot smokers ignorant to the benefits of real productivity.

I would be alright with getting rid of the Labor Day Holiday completely. America doesn’t need to spend less time at work; it needs to work more, and harder. That may not be a popular sentiment, but you don’t get to be a great nation sitting around playing games all day. You have to do things that are productive, even if it’s fixing something around the house, or getting groceries. Productive output is the measure we have in life to gauge success. For those who couldn’t wait to have four days off, what did any of them achieve in those four days besides some extra sleep and more time to perform leisurely tasks? How productive was that long weekend, really? Not much, because the American government promotes that lazy, lackluster communist mentality that is so common around Washington D.C. They promote the entire nation to think the way they do—and to them Labor Day means spending time on their boats, eating out, or having more time to socialize with others—all acts that require the productivity of someone. To them they care not a bit—so long as it’s not them.

Rich Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

Listen to The Blaze Radio Network by CLICKING HERE.

‘High Plains Drifter’: A Clint Eastwood western that advanced American philosophy

I watched High Plains Drifter as one of the very first movies I saw when I was newly moved out of my parent’s house. I rented it because of the cover art on the VHS tape, Clint Eastwood holding a gun and a bullwhip. I had seen at that time most of Eastwood’s movies, so I wanted to see them all and this one was on the list. I didn’t expect much, but was very surprised to see that the film was a masterpiece—a sheer work of unapologetic authenticity. It may very well be my favorite western of all time and is the summation of a span of westerns by Clint Eastwood starting with A Fistful of Dollars and ending with Pale Rider that defined the genre forever. Eastwood’s westerns were Ayn Rand tales set on the frontier of America and were very much a part of my childhood. I loved westerns, all westerns, but Clint Eastwood westerns were uniquely special to me. I could identify with them immensely. At the time that I first saw High Plains Drifter I was living a very similar life and I didn’t feel a bit of guilt about it. The established order of things said that I should. Until I saw that director Clint Eastwood understood my vantage point in High Plains Drifter, I had nothing but gut instinct to tell me I was on the right path.

I will never forget the Friday before I saw High Plains Drifter. I drove my friends to Miami University for a bit of ruckus activity which ended up in a bar and a fight with the first stringers of the football team. The fight evolved into the back alley where I and one other friend literally took on the football team until the police came and arrested everyone—but me. The reason the police left me alone was strange. I was so mad at the time that I would have punched anybody who came near me, and they seemed to understand that. Instead of feeding their aggression, they backed off and arrested everyone else starting with the outside of the pile working inward. When it was just me and the rest of the police left with blood and pieces of clothing all over the place, I spoke calmly to them realizing and feeling quite satisfied that I had just done something that seemed impossible. My friends were arrested and carted off to jail and I had to find a way to get them out. But otherwise, I was the last one standing even though I was one of the first in the fray. It was a good feeling.

I managed to work things out with the police which ended up at the jail eventually and I had my friends released. I spoke to everyone in charge intelligently, which gained respect and leverage allowing me to get my friends out without a court appearance, which I didn’t think would be possible. My friends were baffled as to how I walked away from the incident without being arrested, and how I managed to get them out of jail. I didn’t know how to explain it myself. But on the next evening we decided to stay home and rent a movie, and that movie was High Plains Drifter. I had my answer at the start of the third act when a woman who Clint Eastwood had just slept with told him to be careful because he was a man who made other people afraid. From that Eastwood explained, “People are only afraid of what they know about themselves inside.” I knew somewhere in that exchange of dialogue was an answer that I would carry with me for the rest of my life. And the woman was right. Confident people—excessively confident people—scare the meager types like those who were in the fictional western town of Lago—from the film. And those meager types were easy to control once you looked them in the eye. That is what many of Eastwood’s westerns from that period were about—but specifically High Plains Drifter.

After watching that movie I felt like a much more focused person. I understood much more about myself—which might be troubling if not for the fact that Clint Eastwood was playing a ghost of some kind in the film—a vengeful spirit from Hell set to cast justice on the small mining town and all the guilty people within it. I thought Clint Eastwood was the greatest director on earth for capturing all the controversial topics he explored in that story with such effortless mastery. High Plains Drifter was a 1973 American supernatural western film produced by Robert Daley for Malpaso Company and Universal Studios, directed by and starring Clint Eastwood, and written by Ernest Tidyman (who also wrote the novelization). Eastwood plays an enigmatic wraith, who metes out justice in a corrupt frontier mining town, where he arrives as a stranger.[3] The film was influenced by the work of Eastwood’s two major collaborators, film directors Sergio Leone and Don Siegel.[4]

The film was shot on location on the shores of Mono Lake, California. Dee Barton wrote the eerie film score. The film was critically acclaimed at the time of its initial release and remains popular today, holding a score of 96% at the review aggregate website Rotten Tomatoes.

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

As I have been thinking about the significance of American gunfighters of late, this film keeps returning to me in a revelatory way. It is important, and specific to the American experience. I didn’t know it when I first watched it, but it is clearly in hindsight a masterpiece. It has within it an element that Ayn Rand brought out in her novels—an overman quality that is so needed. There was an evolution of human thinking that was occurring in that movie that as inescapable. There was honesty to the type of independence specific to American culture that Eastwood had tapped in to.

John Wayne was not a fan of High Plains Drifter. His westerns were about honor, sacrifice, loyalty and courage. While those are appealing attributes, High Plains Drifter was about something else. And I decided that I would commit my life to that something else. I had a taste of it at that campus fight. I had touched on it many times, but Clint Eastwood had fleshed it out and put it on the screen for all to see. His gunfighter character in the film was more than just a man—literally. But that made it even that much more appealing to me. High Plains Drifter is an American movie classic that is in a category all by itself. It is a western—the best of its kind. But it’s more than that, its philosophy—a thinking which is fresh and unique to the individual experience with an unequivocal desire for justice. Justice at every level possible, one that started with the gun, but ultimately enacted with a superior mind and unshakable confidence changed philosophic perspective for the better. It is good to keep the mind on the high plains of life and to face those tribulations alone. For that is the path toward something new, and specific to America. And freedom rides in its wake.

Rich Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

Listen to The Blaze Radio Network by CLICKING HERE.