Tag: Illegal Immigration

The End of Hollywood: Why the movie industry is dying

When I say that Hollywood is done my point of reference is from a business perspective and as a person who spent twenty years writing and pitching screenplays, attending film festivals, and sometimes working as a stunt coach.  Films were something I was very interested in—and still am, but the business of Hollywood motion pictures was something I used to spend a lot of time thinking about so I know it quite well.  Well enough to say that the time has finally come—Hollywood’s studio system movies are coming to an end and its right on time to what I said would happen over five years ago.  Hollywood’s current filmmakers do not represent most of America and like the national media companies, are much more interested in being a liberal propaganda machine.  Now that the costs of making a movie have intersected the declining box office receipts—such as in the case of Ghost in the Shell—the latest embarrassment with Scarlett Johansson—it’s just a matter of time now before the entire industry folds.

I suspect that Disney will always do something with film, as will Warner Bros. and a few other companies, but they will have to drastically change their habits.  After I watched the Blue Rey interviews for Rogue One—which I couldn’t wait to watch, it became very obvious—the filmmakers who are in the story group now replacing George Lucas have no idea why Star Wars movies work.  They only know to follow the basic formula that he created and that means they can get some semblance of a Star Wars movie—which is better than nothing, but not the whole experience.  I thought Rogue One was a fabulous movie, but it was missing the pop of a George Lucas production.  The San Francisco hippies who now work at Lucasfilm cited during the Rogue One interviews the fact that George Lucas had originally written that the “Force” was called “The Force of Others,” meaning mass collectivism and that kind of 60s communist philosophy.  Under tremendous pressure from Twentieth Century Fox Lucas had to whittle down his script and movie down to the bare necessities so he ended up following more of a Walt Disney approach to the themes of the movie which led to a great story rooted in Joseph Campbell myth interpretation.

But the “hero’s journey” is not a collective one.  Red State Americans do not think in collective terms and they cannot be made to.  We aren’t all better “together” and teams are not the supreme law of the land.  When North Carolina recently won the NCAA championship game over Gonzaga it wasn’t a “team effort” but actually the five to six guys who spent most of the time shooting the ball and the few individuals who shot clutch shots at just the right moment.  All the bench warmers sitting on the sidelines didn’t contribute equally—yet as members of the collective team they all celebrated as a single unit.  The cinematic story in telling such a movie would have been in the individuals—not the collective whole otherwise the mythic theme gets lost in the circumstances.  Luckily for the Rogue One people they killed everyone at the end so that washed out the ineffectiveness of the lack of individual performances.  By that I mean the mass collective sacrifice that all the members of Rogue One committed to save the Rebellion.  If the Star Wars story group continue to make those Lucasfilm projects with the progressive values of their San Francisco culture—they’ll see their Star Wars product losing its mythic effectiveness. It’s still a good product, but it’s certainly less effective as a storytelling device than it was under George Lucas’ care.  Just as the current collective decision makers at the Disney Company don’t understand what made Walt Disney work—they copy the formula and sometimes they get lucky.

Recently while I was in England for an extended period of time I noticed that there were a lot of westerns on television.  England was playing a lot of our old 50s era westerns because their society was fascinated by the individualism on display in American cinema.  They had committed themselves already to socialism for most of the 20th century and were looking for ways out of that mess—and American westerns were doing the trick.  They weren’t making much that was originally good as far as cinema in England, so they played old American westerns—and that seems to be a theme around the world.  And the best westerns are not about mass sacrifice for the greater good, but in individuals standing up against the masses in the name of suppressing collective evil—such as a band of cattle rustlers taking over a town and one gunman standing alone to face them down—or some bounty hunter like Clint Eastwood getting individually wealthy by killing all the bad guys and riding off into the sunset.  The best movies find some way to tell an individualized story about love, wealth, or power.  But movies lose their luster when they become instruments of statism.

Let me put it like this, when Wolfram Von Eschenbach wrote his King Arthur stories in the 12th century his subject was the individual casting off the limits of the collective.  The same kind of thing occurred with the Twin War Gods story of Navaho legend.  The society is in trouble and the individual must go out into the world to save everyone with their acts of heroics—alone.  When Hollywood adds all this “team” crap—and this “force of others” idiocy, the product on the screen gets watered down.  American audiences are by their nature individualists.  They don’t accept collectivist messaging in movies. They might endure them if there are cool action sequences or the leading lady takes her top off—but they won’t go out of their way to see the movie.  Now that China has bought up Legendary Pictures they are learning the hard way.  Their movie with Matt Damon about the Great Wall of China bombed in America big time.  And even the latest King Kong movie fell short—which I wanted to like badly.

I knew Kong: Skull Island was in trouble after the scene where the natives on the island were a bunch of utopian hippies who didn’t have any personal property or individualized desires.  They were autonomous robots who had learned to love serving King Kong as sacrificial elements.  As a result the movie only made 150 million in the domestic market but it did very well in communist China taking the film up and over the 500 million mark worldwide.  That paid the bills for the movie, but just barely considering that King Kong has almost 100 years of film history to build from.  It should have made a billion dollars—and could have if the filmmakers made a movie about individuals instead of collective salvation.  Audiences don’t attend movies as a collective.  They might share that experience with others—collectively, but they watch movies as individuals.

I watched with pain studio executives trying to explain why Scarlett Johansson couldn’t make Ghost in the Shell work.  With a production budget of 110 million it only had a domestic take of 26 million dollars.  The studio thought that Johansson did well in the Avenger movies so obviously she’d bring 100 million dollars to Ghost in the Shell?  No.  People don’t go to movies to see stars—you’d think that Hollywood would have learned this by now—they go to see stories about individuals.  At least that’s how it is in America—which then drives the world market.  And if Ghost in the Shell would have been cast by a Japanese woman—it would have done even worse—just for the record.  The content of the film is what hurt it—not that Scarlett Johansson was “white.”

Here’s the bad news, kids growing up today are interested in other things.  Their video games and phone apps are much cooler and individual based storytelling then modern movies and they just aren’t going to be there as adults giving Hollywood money.  The labor unions have driven up the cost of making movies to the point where small budgeted risky projects can’t be made.  For instance, you never see today movies like Days of Thunder or Top Gun being made where a Tom Cruise character who is over-the-top individually confident but loses his nerve after some tragedy, and the whole point of the character is in overcoming his individual fears and returning to the glory of being an arrogant son-of-a-bitch.  But that’s what American audiences want and Hollywood isn’t giving it to them so the movie industry is on life support held up by my generation who still goes to movies out of nostalgia.  The generation after mine will do something else because these movies don’t speak to them as individuals.  And those are the cold hard facts.

Rush Limbaugh Says We’re In A Civil War: He’s right, and what we need to do about it

I listen to Rush Limbaugh when I can, but not as often as I’d like. If I miss the show I try to catch the podcasts in my shop where I practice target shooting and doing gun repairs—which is soothing.  A long time ago when I worked at the “Mill” (Cincinnati Milacron in Oakley) Rush Limbaugh was on every day in every building on the shop floor.  You couldn’t go to the restroom without hearing Rush from 12 to 3 PM during the Clinton Years—so I have a point of reference to go on here.  But during yesterday’s broadcast Rush said something that I didn’t think he’d ever say.  I had said it about five years ago, but Rush finally said it and he was right.  Rush in my mind is mainstream.  Even though the radical loons from the left think Rush represents the “hard right” Limbaugh is in fact a moderate in my mind so for him to say that America was in another “civil war” was quite a statement.  Listen to the broadcast above specifically the second hour.  I consider that admission to be a turning point in this long war—because before you can fix something, you have to identify it.  Admitting that America is split into a civil war condition is the first step in solving the current national problem.  However, the next is in determining who wins—because obviously both sides are too far apart to ever come to agreements.   The philosophic positions are just too great and the political left isn’t interested—as they have demonstrated during the opening days of the Trump administration—at living peacefully together.

Rush asked a very hard question—how do you know who wins a civil war? Well, it comes down to one side recognizing the authority of the other and presently the political left is unwilling to do that—as Republicans have been so gracious in the past.  So there is no shame in pushing Democrats out of the political process because we gave them the table under the Obama presidency and they showed us what they were made of.  They abused their power and that caused Trump to be elected—to correct all those mistakes.  But Republicans can at least say they played by the rules.  Democrats have no such intention—and Limbaugh did a good job of pointing out the case as it stands.

That means that we have to not only beat Democrats in elections, but we have to beat them at their fundamental philosophy. To win this war we cannot have a “live and let live” attitude toward them in movies, music, and culture—we must challenge them at every phase of life and we must have a focus on “winning.”  Not just compromising, but beating those idiots into a pulp to the point where they must capitulate—or be utterly destroyed.  There is no reasoning with those people on the political left so we must beat them into submission intellectually until they either adopt our positions, or they are put to an end.  It’s as simple as that.

I’m not saying that we must impose physical violence on the political left, but when they start the fight, we must finish it. Otherwise, intellect is the weapon of today.  They cannot fight smart people, so it must be the smartest of the conservative base who must be the knights on this battlefield because it’s not cannons and arrows that will win—its superior strategic positioning and philosophic concept.  “The pen is truly mightier than the sword” as I’ve demonstrated repeatedly.  But that is only one weapon of war.  The use of the Second Amendment is one of the most powerful aspects of our position—because not even Hollywood can use the guilt game against conservatives—because without the gun, Hollywood would go bankrupt, which ironically is already happening.  Guns aren’t just for shooting, they are symbols of self-reliance and the political left hates that concept.  So just having a gun does a lot to undo the political left.  Using a gun as part of your recreational life does a lot more.  So one of the best ways to destroy the political left is to destroy their soft, snowflake sensibilities with “in your face” audacity.  They have certainly used that tactic on the abortion issue and many other leftist topics. Now is the time to turn that tide against them with conservative vantage points for a change—and the gun is the most effective weapon in that battle—not for shooting and killing—but for the self-reliance that they represent.

The political left does not represent America. They represent the stagnate old remains of Europe.  Recently while I was in Europe I saw clearly why progressives in America love Europe’s centralized control so much.  You could see it everywhere—Europeans are heavily encumbered by ridiculous rules intent to govern every part of their lives.  For instance, if you go to Burger King in London and you get a large drink with your meal—it’s like the size of a kids drink in America—because in England—and the rest of Europe there are many rules on serving sizes and ingredients designed to take the strain off their socialist health care systems.   Everything is small and served in reduced amounts—as opposed to America.  No wonder Michael Bloomberg thought he could limited the size of soft drinks in New York with similar rules that they have in the United Kingdom.  From his point of view Europe was already doing it and it really is all progressives want to do—is control other people’s lives.

From my little shop at my house I could make endless amounts of ammunition and maintain many firearms without the outside world having anything to do with any of it. I don’t need a store or a gun manufacturer to make guns.  A simple machine shop can make everything needed—and that is nice to know.  As I work out there I think about the political left and their stupidity in thinking that they can destroy the firearms market by taxing ammunition and putting tight restrictions on firearms manufacturers hoping to put them out of business—because that’s their intention.  That mentality doesn’t come from Americans it comes from European sympathizers who happen to have moved to America and been trained to think in a progressive fashion.  The best way to challenge them is to put it in their face and make them realize that there is nothing they can do to stop firearms in America—because the need for them arises from a philosophy that is specific to our culture.  It is not part of European culture, or even eastern culture—it is specific to America.

Just keep in mind that to win this war that you must do something. Letting the other side off the hook with silence won’t win the day. You must engage them with a shameless position toward your American philosophy and let them perish under its light like the devil might melt under Holy Water.  Whatever you do, don’t hide anymore.  Don’t give them the illusion that they are the only ones brave enough to be on the battlefield.  Join them there and outshine them.  Force them to retreat to their little liberal campus groups and pull out their hair in frustration.  Because Republicans—“conservatives” must now focus on winning this war.  It’s not enough to have Trump in the White House.  Now is the time to run liberals off the field of battle and force them into hiding for a change—and to bend to our will if we hope to save humanity.  That’s what’s at stake and what must be done.

Rich Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

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

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Alan Bean and Hip Hop: Why its likely migrations from Mars were a part of our past

The below article about a comment the astronaut Alan Bean gave, covered in The Huffington Post, bothered me intensely. Bean represents the current academic view point largely shaped by the National Geographic Society and the Smithsonian about the nature of life as we know it—and he’s dead wrong.  As I have said about the Cameo Night Club shooting in Cincinnati—and other things regarding politics in general, no society can sustain itself exhibiting the values we are today from different sectors of our global culture.  It just doesn’t work—the people who attend places like the Cameo Night Club are not productive people who can lead a civilization toward prosperity.  Rather they are something that seems to always arise in human beings that is programmed into us at the core of our very cells—a self-destructive predilection toward always starting over.  In the great novel Finnegan’s Wake we refer to this as the Vico Cycle.  Without question the hip hop culture and counter culture of socialism infused into America during the 1960s on up through today is an attack on the intellectual expansion that came from America during westward expansion and the Industrial Revolution.  The apogee of those human experienced peeked in the 1980s then began to recede back toward primal concerns—in spite of the invention of the Internet which became common in the 1990s.  The hip hop activity I illustrated in reaction to the Cameo Night Club shooting was something that has happened to the human race likely for many thousands of years—a cycle of theology, aristocracy, democracy, and then anarchy only to start over again and again.  My intention is to stop that cycle.  Human culture seems hell bent to repeat it with an eye on infinity—never breaking free.

That is why it’s important to read this Huffington Post article as I did for context. Please read the following very carefully:

When Bean retired from NASA in 1981, he became an excellent artist who paints the experiences of fellow astronaut-moonwalkers.

Astronaut Alan Bean holds a container of lunar soil collected during Apollo 12 extravehicular activity.

Bean’s spacefaring experiences have given him plenty of time to think about the question of whether earthlings are alone in the universe, and specifically, whether aliens have discovered us.

“I do not believe that anyone from outer space has ever visited the Earth,” Bean told the Australian news site news.com.au. “One of the reasons I don’t believe they have been here is that civilizations that are more advanced are more altruistic and friendly ― like Earth, which is better than it used to be ― so they would have landed and said, ‘We come in peace and we know from our studies you have cancer that kills people, we solved that problem 50 years ago, here’s the gadget we put on a person’s chest that will cure it, we will show you how to make it.’

“Just like someday, say, 1,000 years from now, when we can go to another star and see a planet, that’s what we would do, because we will know how to cure cancer, cure birth defects, so we would teach them.”

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/alan-bean-aliens_us_58dbe6d6e4b0cb23e65d9a12

I do believe that Alan Bean has taken up the very unhealthy habit of smoking Crack. Because no sane, rational mind could believe such things from a supposed educated position.  Bean believes, as many modern academics do, that human progress is linier so that once something like the wheel, or fire is discovered, mankind perpetually advances forward.  However, there is great evidence counter to that belief that is spewing out under every rock of modern archaeology, primarily that human kind rises from the ashes then advances to a certain point, then falls back to their beginnings over and over again.  And this process may very well have happened well before there was an Ice Age many times over.  For instance, consider that during the last Ice Age over 10,000 years ago ocean levels were 300 feet lower than they are today.  Forget about the mythical global warming theories perpetuated by modern politics to help with the Vico Cycle in taking mankind backwards intellectually—we’re talking about real science that has been proven.  That would mean that the entire English Channel would have been dry land—as well as many other places around the world.  Additionally, the land around Florida would be much larger meaning that much of the archaeology of that period would have been near the coast lines of that age.  That would put them underwater today.  Most of the archaeology that we study today from that time would have been deeply inland away from the vast water supplies and fish that being near the coast would have provided.  There are likely entire cities buried under that 300 feet of water now.  And this kind of thing could have happened many times over in the past.  After 10,000 years, a lot of the things that humans use and produce simply erode away into nothing.  Only something like stone can last the ages, but even then, the rate of erosion is very fast when compared to geologic time.

Due to the advanced arithmetic of the builders of Stonehenge and the various mound sites around the world, we are talking about people who learned these things from somewhere. They certainly didn’t learn them while hunting fish or catching game across the vast plains of grass during the last Ice Age.  There is some missing information that is likely buried under the oceans.  Just as New York City is built along an ocean front, mankind typically builds its largest metropolises on coastal regions, and during the last Ice Age, those coasts would have been very different from today.  The missing links to our modern understanding are likely located in those places.  Meanwhile, there are way too many reports about archaeology on the moon and Mars not to assume that there was life there at some point in time and likely they found their way to earth for either short periods of time, or for sustained stays.  Again, we won’t know until we visit these places for sure, but the evidence looks to be pretty convincing that we will find remnants of ancient civilizations on the moon and Mars when we set up settlements.  But like life on earth, they have went through their own Vico Cycles which we obviously have inherited in some yet to be discovered way.

If we look honestly into the past with an understanding of the Vico Cycle, we can see clearly what Alan Bean and many other intellectuals are missing. Just because a civilization is technical and masters certain aspects of interplanetary travel that doesn’t mean they can sustain themselves as a culture.  That doesn’t mean that people from an advanced culture once they are torn away from it won’t revert back to a primal state when forced to adapt to changing circumstances.  Take any of us in the present day of 2017.  Drop us off on a tropical island and we’d be forced to live as did our ancestors of Cro-Magnon from 10,000 BC.  We might have knowledge of our flat screen televisions, cars, flight and smart phones, but all those things would be useless to that reality of living on an island with no electricity or network signals to communicate with the outside world, and we’d revert back to primacy—quickly.

You can see that same primacy in modern cultures such as in Muslim groups, and in Hip Hop Clubs, even in motorcycle gangs—humans once they take their eye off greatness and forward achievement revert to an almost animal state and this always drives us backwards to the beginning of the Vico Cycle.

This seems much more logical than Alan Bean’s suggestion that an advanced society would be more altruistic and technically viable—and willing to help another culture along. Rather, the actual answer is that the Vico Cycle would send aliens to earth for help as a last refuge from whatever failure they endured elsewhere in the galaxy to start again.  If they were coming to earth they were likely fleeing for their lives—not brining cures for cancer.  Then they would mix and assimilate with whatever age of mankind they ran into—they’d mate and create new genetic pools assuming they were compatible through mitochondrial information and the Vico Cycle would start all over again. The assumption that mankind will always move forward is wrong.  A proper political philosophy must be in place before that can happen—it doesn’t occur in a natural state because if left alone—humans revert back to their origin state of animal behavior.  Just look at the conditions of any Hip Hop club and you will see the evidence.  That is not a society that will solve the problems of cancer or put people on Mars to live in a sustainable fashion. So just because Alan Bean walked on the moon that doesn’t make him an expert on all things historical.  It just makes him a guy who walked on the moon—just like we all will soon.  But before we can we must stop the trend to constantly reinvent ourselves through the Vico Cycle.  In that sense, I would say that America came the closest to breaking that Vico Cycle curse during westward expansion and the Hollywood westerns that followed.  That philosophic position of morality, exploration, and individual achievement was the closest that humans have ever come to breaking free of that perilous prison called the Vico Cycle.  When we stop that—mankind will advance and likely discover that out of the millions and millions of life forms floating around in the universe there is a very real possibility that we might be the first to break the code.  And that should not be an audacious thought for any of us.  But something expected.  In that regard, we should never listen to people like Alan Bean.  He just doesn’t get it.

Rich Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

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

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When Snowflakes Melt: The coming crises of tomorrow

I did manage to catch some of the Rush Limbaugh Show during lunch on 3-28-2017 and he was making some excellent points about the nature of our modern “snowflakes” as we are calling them now. It was a topic I have been talking about for more than twenty years—in fact longer.  Even when I was in my school years I was concerned about how different the people were in the 80s than they were from the westerns I watched as a kid where everyone was polite to everyone else, intelligence was celebrated and chivalry—especially toward women was considered a virtue.  I was concerned as a high school student that we had fallen too far from our core American values.  Kids liked to drink and do drugs too much—casual sex was destructively too common for the needed process of romance which then built families.  I dated a lot of girls back then but the relationships fell apart within two weeks as they craved more what they were used to from their parents and it was obvious that I was far too serious of a person for casual fun—or a boy toy.  Even back then I was much more interested in very deep topics as opposed to what musical bands were popular—or what my favorite beer was.  As an anthropology student in high school I was one of those kids who read USA Today every morning in my home room class before preparing for that class which was one of the few that I really enjoyed—I looked at my classmates and I was really concerned about the future of America because they just weren’t cutting the mustard.  I disliked them so much because of what they were that I have not communicated with any of them for over twenty years now.  I bump into someone here and there, but I don’t communicate with anybody—essentially because I am let down by what they have become.

 (Check out the 25 minute mark for the best examples)

But let me tell you something—compared to today, my generation which graduated in 1986 was a beacon of morality compared to the kids of today and as Rush said during his broadcast, one of our greatest shortages coming over the next few decades is in the intelligence of our youth. They have been deliberately destroyed by our public education system and we are facing a true crisis as a country.  The biggest fear we have is not of artificial intelligence taking over as it often does in science fiction movies—it’s in the inability of our society to meet the challenges of tomorrow—because as the snowflakes that they’ve become, they melt upon the slightest heat—and simply cannot endure the stresses of our times.

Probably the hardest personal thing for me was in raising two daughters in a time when I knew that the direction our society was moving was wrong. Again, it probably helped me greatly to have as one of my main hobbies a love for studying history and culture—because I could see it clearly and was able to teach my kids in ways that society wasn’t—and they turned out to be fantastic young people and continue to be.  But they were girls and that typically means they’ll want to date boys and as I looked around the boys in their age group sucked.  That wasn’t just because I was protective of my girls—of course I was as all dads should be, but because the boys they had out there as options to date did not share their value system which my kids gained from living under my roof.  So that was a problem and was probably the worst years of my life because you have to let them live, but you know they are encountering a tangled mess and they had to go through the pain of sorting it out as individuals which was really hard to watch.  I still have a really tough time with it.  When I deal with people in that generation I just assume I’m talking to a child that needs excessive patience—much more patience than I’m comfortable with providing.  I can do it, but I usually just steam under my hat because they just don’t have the basic foundations to understand much of anything I say to them.  One dumb boy who dated my youngest daughter actually argued with me about the value of Chick-fil-A over their position against gays.  First problem was that you don’t argue with me, especially in my house or treat me like some kind of equal to his sluggish ass.  Second was the kid was so incredibly lazy and unfocused.  I had to let my daughter go through the dating patterns and realize on her own the direction of things, so I tried to let her live her life.  But the kid was just so stupid—it made me miserable to look at him.  He grew up without a father and his mother coddled him to the point where he never thought he was wrong about anything so he truly didn’t know how to interact with an alpha male like me.  I took that into consideration for my daughter’s sake, but it was painful.  My concerns went far beyond the fact that no boy would be good enough for my girls—it was literally the fact that no boy was good enough for my girls because they had been taught incorrectly from infants on how to be good people as adults.  And the crippling of these young people was intentional by our education institutions.

My generation was wave one of the dumbed down society, my kids were wave two. The Department of Education was legalized as an institution while I was in grade school and from there public education went downhill fast.  I’ve watched a lot of the kids my children played with grow up and some of them are alright—but they all have suffered with dealing against a world that deliberately put low expectations on them only to drown a little bit each day by their inner desires for personal excellence—because the world was determined not to give it to them.  That has left a level of exasperation on their faces that is clear to me—a silent reservation of understanding that mediocrity is the ruler of our times for which the human race has never really accepted at our cores.  But these days instead of doing something about it in our lives we yearn for empowerment in our television, sports and movies.  But increasingly even in those formats the concept of nobility and valor are evaporating.  In movies and television shows dads are portrayed as dumbasses, women are overbearing tyrants hell-bent on forging their own professions away from the family unit, and children are always the smartest people in the room.   That was a long way from Gunsmoke and Bonanza which is what I grew up on where older people were there to help young people reason through complicated problems with good advice when needed most.  No, these days the primary concern of the day is change from a good country into a bad one by turning off the minds of our youth with drugs, sex, and liberal educations so that they will grow up to be drones to progressive thinking—which we are starting to see in abundance presently.  Even if we changed course right now and the Trump administration gets things fixed over the next eight years it will take at least twenty more years to see a turnaround in personal human philosophy within the family unit that would be productive on a macro scale.  We are truly in a crisis because that means two generations of people will not be functioning correctly in our American government and our businesses—because they are not intellectually equipped for the job.  Old people like me will have to work longer and harder to keep the train on the tracks and the very young will have to enter the workplace sooner so that they can save this current breed of snowflakes from their undeveloped minds.

I’ve talked about it for such a long time but yet in the back of my mind I hoped to be a little wrong—but I wasn’t. This generation of “snowflakes” have been brought up in day cares and their core value system was shaped in those terrible places of collectivism and stunted development.  There is no way to trick F**k the system.  You can’t take away a biological mother and replace it with a paid babysitter who is watching eight other children and expect those kids to grow up correctly because that’s just not how human beings are wired.  The liberal experiment of this Brave New World has been an utter failure and the ramifications of it are upon us—and it’s hard to look at.   I don’t blame the kids so much as I do the system they grew up in, but never-the-less, we have a major problem and there is no easy way out of it.  There will be no real retirement for my generation and things won’t be easy for the current generation that grows up under Trump as president because they’ll have to be rushed into the marketplace just to keep the ship floating—and we’ll be stuck with over 100 million louses who can’t think for themselves and melt under the slightest pressure as they are ruined for life and our compassion for them will force us to carry them along kicking and screaming at every inconvenience.  And that is the greatest crises of our coming tomorrow.

Rich Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

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

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A Case Against Islam: London terror, why spouses cheat on each other, and topless women in France

It was kind of weird to have been standing in the exact same spots as the terrorist attack victims had been when an Islamic lunatic hell-bent on Crusader revenge from the Middle Ages, ran his car into them in London, England near the Parliament building just a few feet from where Prime Minister Theresa Mays was speaking. After all, there were so many places in the world, and so many streets where something like that could have happened, yet it occurred on the exact walking path that my wife and I had just taken and the images where still fresh in our minds from our trip.  I found myself wishing that this had happened when I was there so I could have done something about it.  So close, yet so far away.  I did warn of this very thing as I was reporting what I saw in London, and Paris from that same trip and with all the Muslim people at all levels of activity within those two very liberal cities—the writing was on the wall.  You just can’t mix the religion of a Medieval origin with a forward-thinking civilization scratching at the ceiling of space and expect them to assimilate well together.  And that’s what’s happening.  There is a war between the east and the west and one side is going to win, and one side will lose as earth becomes one thing or another and those are the raw facts.  For many thousands of years, we’ve run from each other after one battle to another and now the world is just too small, and until we move into space, the fight between the two fundamentally different philosophies will battle it out in our city streets for supremacy.  We will never get along.

I of course am a white representative of western culture and my background is from the roots of that civilization—so obviously, I think its superior to all forms of eastern thinking. With that said, Christianity is an “eastern” concept.  It is not an idea born of western civilization as so wonderfully articulated by the 1150 AD art of Wolfram von Eschenbach and a few other writers who expressed the romance of the troubadours for about 100 years before the Catholic Church built their cathedrals all over England and ruled everything through the Church for the next thousand years.  We wouldn’t see another period like Eschenbach’s nobility, chivalry and romance in story form until the American western rose up for another 100-year period from about 1850 AD to 1950 AD for exactly the same reasons, to express the desires of the truly free, and western heart specific to the culture of Cro-Magnon man that evolved after the Ice Age in north western Europe—specifically.  The ideas forged in that region of the world were unique and very different from the rest of the world which has largely been shaped for all of human history by oriental thought.  So let that be a qualifier of my thinking and I have studied both in their various aspects and I see their values respectively—but clearly.

Also keep in mind that I respect people who need religion to hold together their otherwise unstable lives. It is too much to ask most people to live a good life without the fear of everlasting damnation motivating their private actions—so religions—especially for unstable people, is vastly important to maintaining a civil society which was the argument of the Church of England that was all too happy to abandon the romance of Arthurian legends in favor of the sacrament of Christ provided by the clergy.  In the modern era, progressives did the same only their church was that of government as the bureaucrat replaced the Church clergy for the same distribution of sacrament.

However, I am not going to abandon what I think are superior values—as expressed by the individualism of western culture for the “sacrament” of eastern religions—for which Islam and Christianity are but a few. And what is going on in London, Paris, and all over Europe is a clash of western ideas which are more underground these days, and superimposing them with a collision of the obvious surface eastern way of thinking collectively.   For instance, in France it is quite common to see a woman on the beach topless.  What she is doing in that situation is stating that she is an independent woman functioning from her passionate self-recognition.  But the religious background of the modern progressive will say that her nude state is a reflection of the collective essence for which we all are and her sexuality does not belong to one man, or lover—but to the world—that is the sacrificial aspect of it that came to the region from its long history with eastern infused religions—which essentially came from the Roman Empire trying to hold everything together in the last few hundred years of its existence.  The surface argument that many have about the topless women at French beaches is first of the morality of the nudity—which is fear of the Church—(Christianity and Islam).  But then there is that ancient troubadour history of western culture that inspires the woman to stand against those institutions proudly declaring to the world that she is a product of her own inclinations.  That’s why today we have all these kids looking like tattooed pin cushions declaring their individuality from the traditions of our past even through they are copying each other for the look—because they don’t know how to break down all these influences in their lives—because they are all stacked in dysfunctional ways.  That makes Islam’s simplicity appealing—which is a means of recruiting and why this problem is currently exploding.

In the confusion of our modern times western civilization has felt it had to apologize for the crimes of the Church during times of imperialist rule, through the Romans, then through the English and French Empires where Catholic missionaries did to the world what Islamic radicals are doing now—converting the world to their version of an eastern religion inherited from Zoroastrianism—and the cultures of the Indus Valley well before the times of the Greek. Christianity and Islam in fact are children of Zoroastrian religion, so they are not new to the human race but only the most recent embodiment of religion for the times of those large empires—which are outdated and useless to mankind in 2020 AD.  It was nice that Muslims preserved the work of Aristotle from the destruction of the Library in Alexandria by Roman radicals—but as far as original contributions, there is nothing innovative about Islamic culture that makes it more special to anybody else.  The same angel Gabriel as he did in the Bible was behind the shaping of Islam, so there isn’t anything really to fight over between Muslims and Christians that demand death.  Their rivalry is no different from that of a sport franchise between two teams within a 100 miles of each other.  They have a lot more in common than not.  If the religion produces zealots’ intent on murder, then the whole enterprise should be abandoned as a state religion.  No country should put their name on such a thing because it’s an outdated concept that has brought more harm to the human race than not.

My personal values which I share with many people in western civilization is that the original concepts of Wolfram von Eschenbach, of personal bliss and defying the authority of institutional barriers is a human concept that deserves its time in the sun. The eastern religions promise more of the same kind of trouble that has soaked mankind in blood from its inception.  Even though they preach peace often in Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, and Christianity and all the variants in between—the result is often war because each attaches itself to state sponsorship and politics—which then become something not so sanctimonious.  In the case of London, the terrorist who attacked so many people in the heart of that nice historic city wanted to use fear to convert people to his religion—and to impose the black flag of ISIS over the state symbols of the Christianized Europe that unleashed the Crusades on the Middle East centuries ago.  It’s time to stop, and to insist on that stoppage loudly.  No member of Islam has a right to murder other people in the name of God.  And for the liberals who have been running England and France, you cannot mix the religions of the east with the innate passions of the individualized west—because even in the most ardent liberal—the topless woman on a French beach—there is a little bit of the Arthurian romances in them—and they’ll never assimilate with the religions of the east.  Ever.  It’s not in their DNA.

There will be no conquest of western civilization as ISIS fantasizes about—especially through fear because they don’t understand what makes us tick as a species of “westerners.” The moment we were free of the Church of England in America we developed into the frontiersman and cowboys of cinema that is the innate condition of our people—our heritage.  And regarding that particular mentality, it is better to destroy 1 million collectivists than to break the heart of one individual who is trying to live authentically according to their bliss.  A marriage between two people in love by their choice is better than an arranged marriage to bring two tribes together under the premise of oriental philosophy—which has been the common practice of the Church for many years both in Islam and Christianity.  When it comes to values, individuals take the world forward.  Collectivists take it back—every time—it’s the classic Vico cycle—theocracy, aristocracy, democracy, anarchy—then back again to the beginning as Orientals have been doing for thousands of years.

When we talk about the “west” we are not talking about London as it is today. Radical terrorists aren’t attacking the concept of the west as they think they are when they kill innocent people outside of Parliament.  Because that old idea of the “west” is much deeper in our culture than any surface reaction to collectivist religions. And the centerpiece of that value system is that the individual is more valuable than a collective ideology.  More minds do not make something better—it makes it worse because it forces an inauthentic experience.  So when we look at trying to assimilate Islam with the “west” it will never work.  It can’t work.  A choice between the two has to be made and that choice was made on the battlefields—and Islam lost over and over again.  And it always will because collectivists do not beat individuals  They can only win in mass force—they cannot win in ideology and that is why Islam no longer works and should be tossed aside in favor of something else.  If that religion can’t be more constructive for the meager minds that adhere to it for their own personal faults—then the religion needs to be dropped from state sponsorship and pushed from the human experience—so we can deal with the real problems of the human race—and not this contrived religion from the Middle Ages.

Islam is at war with the west and they aren’t looking to make peace. They are on a mission to convert as many people to Islam through any means and they won’t stop until they are all killed or accomplish their task.  Catholic missionaries did this before, and it caused a lot of trouble around the world.  Now Islam is doing it and they will accomplish the same results.  Because people don’t want to be killed, they’ll tell the Islamic terrorists whatever they want to hear, but what’s in their hearts will be something else.  And just like people cheat on their spouses and do anything and everything out of rebellion from whatever religion they come from—life in the west has at its core a need for rebellion.  And that isn’t a new thing, it comes from our Cro-Magnon experience to always push whatever limits we are presented with—and that is what advances society.  Not that cheating on a spouse is a good thing, it’s not, but when the marriage becomes to the human mind an instrument of the state—the romance leaves the marriage, and rebellion in some way is the mode of western thinking.  The oriental religion of Islam won’t work for the west and it’s too late to go back.  So we either go to all-out war with Islam to preserve the west—or we go extinct.  There is no middle way as liberals like to think.  The two cultures just don’t assimilate because their evolutional trajectories are going in radically different directions.

Rich Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

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

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Rewriting the History Books: The giant prehistoric mound at Dover Castle

Some may think that I’m changing direction a bit too much for their liking as I move more away from the immediate topic of politics and local matters, and toward this global tapestry of a historical conspiracy as to the past and future of the human race—but fret not—there is a point to it all.  The written word is a very powerful thing, I’d argue more powerful than anything from a mind that can utilize it—because it has staying power—and I’ve had plenty of stay in cyberspace from the highest levels of our government to the media that covers it.  Currently, the machine of that power is set forth and doing what I want it to do so now for me it’s time to turn my attention to another issue I care quite a lot about, human migration patterns over time and to reshape the theories of diffusion that were molded under the umbrella of religions to gain a better understanding of where we’ve been so we can cast a good light on where we are really all going.

For years I have occasionally sprinkled in the occasional article about these matters, and even after nearly a decade of writing, they are the ones my readers come back to most.  And I am proud to have at least put some on the path to more discovery to hit the field and ask hard questions by showing for the first time something they didn’t know before—which is the main purpose for the voluminous writing that I do.  So with that in mind, this little article before you is kind of bench mark for me—a journey that started a long time ago and is now coming to a fine point—and it begins with a recent journey I had to Dover Castle in England.

I had always wanted to see the place which rests at the bottom of southeastern England looking across the choppy waters of the English Channel at France which was just over the horizon of the earth but close enough to feel.  Dover Castle is known militarily as the key to England and literally started its modern reign as a gate to that ancient land immediately after the Battle of Hastings by William the Conqueror in 1066 AD.  It was used in that capacity until 1958 and it served well the English people during World War II as a communications bunker hidden away under the vast castle complex.  It was a big place and it was built on a very tall mound which overlooked the Channel giving it excellent views across one of the narrowest points along the waterway between France and England.  But the Romans had already been there of course and that was my understanding before visiting—because they had an old lighthouse built there to show the way to their empire as they migrated north in and around 43 AD.  For people in the States all this history is all very old, but to my eyes, it’s all still recent history so I wasn’t that impressed other than to consider how much work those cultures had conducted to even build the place to begin with.   But as we parked the car and I started looking around things began to change for me starting with my introduction to the English Heritage people who saw my hat and my pockets filled with maps and notes and gave me a hard sale to join their group—which I did.  I didn’t know anything about them at the time but I quickly learned that these people were all over England and that they had done much for the field of archaeology over many years—and they had great literature to give out, and had published many really good books which were accelerating my discoveries in an organized fashion.  And that’s when the bomb hit me as I stood in line getting my membership pass to the English Heritage—which I now cherish—when I learned that the Romans had built their lighthouse on top of a massive earthwork which was reported to be Iron Age in its origins—which put it into the times well before Christ.  That meant that the mound we were standing on, that the Romans built upon and William the Conqueror had fortified—and Henry the II used as a political gateway to the rest of Europe before official visits to London by incoming royalty, had likely already been there for thousands of years prior by a long gone and mysterious people erased from history.  And that was the story I was most interested in.

Being at the site put everything in context for me—a lot can be accomplished by studying all the work that explorers and scientists embark on—and most of what I know comes from those kind of sources.  But I often need to physically stand someplace to get my bearings on what I read—once I do things open up for me rapidly and I can manage to sift through a lot of information quickly.  At Dover Castle I could physically see many of the layers of history all stacked on top of each other very neatly, from the early prehistoric people who likely were interacting with the builders of Stonehenge off to the west, to the Romans, Normans, and World War II periods.  People from an ancient period predating the Greeks had decided that this particular tactical spot was a good place for an early fort so the evidence that we were dealing with a prehistoric people with naval capability was quite obvious to me.

But the item of interest really was the need to build a castle there to begin with because the necessity hasn’t changed over the many years to the reasons we do things now—our political needs are built on the same essential philosophies as our English past gave us as a heritage—so the reasons Henry II used this castle are the same reasons we do things today—and that’s important to understand. Henry II was the same king who killed Thomas Beckett at the Canterbury Cathedral to the north.  He virtually had his French queen Eleanor imprisoned at Old Sarum to the west for over 16 years as he conducted business with foreign powers using the vast castle complex at Dover to impress upon visitors the power of England.  What was ironic to me was that the hill fort complex that had been there for several thousands of years before Norman occupation was nearly identical to Old Sarum.  The Normans recognized in their day the importance strategically of those old hillforts and they built their generation’s fortifications on them for obvious reasons.  But what was stunning was that some ancient people well before had identified those same necessities and had went to so much trouble to fortify themselves against invasion—which of course means that the ancient landscape was much more nibble around the world than we previously have given them credit for.  Nobody in their right mind goes to so much trouble to dig up so much earth with tools made of bones unless they had a good reason to do so and the amount of earth moved at Old Sarum and Dover Castle was extraordinary.

The castle itself was the obvious star of the show and it was well-preserved and interesting to look at.  For many that was the purpose of visiting Dover Castle.  The English Heritage people had done a fantastic job at the site making everything very user-friendly, there were nice restrooms—which was a luxury in England—plenty of gift shops and places to get food which is always important to tourist activities—which then help fund scientific research.  Again, I couldn’t help but think that we needed better organizations like the English Heritage in the States doing what they were doing in England.  I was very impressed with those guys and continue to be.  We have arguably better archaeological sites in the United States than they have in England, but they are not all protected for tourism and scientific discovery the way that the English Heritage people have done in England resulting in a lot of very valuable published information.  In the US we count on mavericks and other enthusiasts to do all the leg work, but it has put us dreadfully behind England in this regard. But I am happy that the English Heritage people are doing what they are, because obviously we have a culture on the English landscape that was clearly much more mature as a group of humans that was interacting with Europe, North America, and even the Middle East—perhaps even Asia at a time nobody thought possible.  In a lot of ways we’ll never know what’s under Dover Castle archaeologically because so much newer culture was built on top of it—and that is the same case at Old Sarum.  But the presence of all these mounds formed just like they are in my home state of Ohio told me everything I needed to know.

All this is important because in modern politics a lot is made about the “Native American” that is supposed to freeze us all in guilt for our westward expansion—and essentially the birth of the nation of America. We are supposed to believe that America was formed at the expense of the natives who lived in North America before Christopher Columbus arrived—and that now in 2017 we must pay retribution for those sins against those people halting our current economic development and turning America more toward European socialism as a penance.  That is the argument of the political left—the modern progressives.  And none of that is true.  The evidence is quite explosive.  Well before the tribes we ran into during the French and Indian Wars, the Revolution, then into westward expansion, there was an advanced group of people who predated the North American Indian who came from Europe and were active trading partners.  They had seafaring ability that nobody has considered possible until the crossing of the Atlantic by Columbus.  So we must look at the evidence and rethink all this because it has a bearing on our current politics to understand our real heritage and not some made up falsehood that was perpetuated to preserve the Christian heritage of the most modern travelers who wanted to make their mark and keep it that way for revisionists to utilize for their current objectives in the field of politics.  There is no such thing as a “Native American” unless you want to go back to the Neolithic people who were using advanced mathematics to plot out the positions of the sun and moon and were obviously part of a vast empire that extended from England, central Europe, the Mediterranean, to Central Mexico, South America and even Asia.  If we’re talking about “natives” we have to include them, but we currently don’t because it would force us to rewrite our history books—which they are open to in England at least.  But in America there is much more at stake.  An entire political movement has been built on the exploitation of Native American people and if they lose that security blanket of social leverage, they lose their entire political movement—which is why I have made this a priority for observation.  And under that definition dear reader my motivations might become a bit clearer and why I was so impressed to visit the site of Dover Castle and literally discover what resided beneath it.  What was there was far more impressive than the massive structure that stared out to the open English Channel.  And that is saying a lot.

Additionally, for those who run museums in America and consider ways of preserving our history best have a look at the website to Dover Castle by the English Heritage people and take some notes.  We should be doing things like this for Serpent Mound, Fort Ancient, Newark, Cahokia and many other places.  There is money to be made, and a whole lot of modern archaeological understanding waiting yet to be uncovered.  And a lot of history books that need to be completely rewritten.

http://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/places/dover-castle/

Rich Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rich Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

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

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The Real Problem with Illegal Immigration: Changing what people are running from in the first place

It was an interesting interview between Fox News host Tucker Carlson and Univision News anchor Jorge Ramos because it exhibited quite wonderfully the problem over illegal immigration. When Carlson asked—“do I not have a right to not like that the country does not look like the one I grew up in” he asked a very powerful question.  Of course Ramos exhibited the modern George Soros open border viewpoint that the United States is changing and that these are facts of life that we should all just accept.  But the real essence to the question is not whether or not America should look like a particular color of people—but that the idea of America be preserved no matter who the majority ethnic group might be—because the function of any people in moving to the United States over the last 400 years—likely much longer—was to get away from something to live better in North America.  However, open border advocates assume that when people come to America through illegal and legal immigration that those new people have a right to bring the culture they are running from with them—and that just isn’t the case.

If an immigrant is coming from Venezuela, Nepal, Vietnam, India, Columbia, Mexico—or anywhere that has had their economy destroyed by communism and socialism—they do not have a right to bring that garbage into America to change the nature of our country. The situation is not one of skin color, or even sex—it’s all about the values that make up a society.  America works as a capitalist nation and those coming to the United States for opportunity must respect that opportunity and they can’t bring the garbage they are running from with them.  That is the essence of the immigration argument.  People coming from someplace else have an obligation to assimilate to where they are going.  They don’t have a right to change the nature of the American idea.

I know far more immigrants than I do people from Appalachia America—or in other words I know many more people who are not of white skin color than I do those of my own skin color, and I like those people because often they have good families and strong personal values. But I’m clear with them that I will respect them so long as what they want in life is to work hard and live the American dream.  However, if they start voting for socialists in America and seek to turn our nation into some third world armpit of communism—then I have a problem with them.  It has nothing to do with the color of their skin or their country of origin.

Additionally, I was just able to travel through Europe and I have seen firsthand the trouble I have been reading about and watching on the news for years. Europe is under siege from the former communist block of east European countries and the communist insurgency injected into the Middle East during the 1970s—which is hiding behind the religion of Muslim faith to penetrate the “west” for revenge over Sykes Picot and the centuries long battle of the first Crusades.  Muslims are pouring into Paris and London at an alarming rate not to assimilate—but to change those great European cities from the inside out—and they have been attempting to do the same in America.

Unfortunately for open border advocates like Ramos there isn’t much Mexican history to go on to justify their society as a long-established entity. When there are claims that Texas was taken from Mexico or that there are open disputes along the border into Arizona and elsewhere the truth is that the Spanish conquered the Aztecs in 1519 and sacked the Mayan civilization around the same time—as well as the Incan Empire in South America.  The Spanish looted all the treasure of those cultures and hauled them back to Europe leaving the French and English to fight over what was left—leaving Mexico, Central America and South American depleted and destroyed.  The Spanish mixed with the beaten Aztec and Mayan people creating the people we see today and socialism replaced their former great economy under the Aztec Empire into one of a welfare state centered on Marxist ideas.  So what does Mexico, Central America or any country in South America have to bring to the United States but ideas that would collapse our economy because the people born of those regions were created under the flag of conquest?  We aren’t living in a world where everybody gets a trophy.  In North America, the Indians were beaten in the war over land.  So the rights go to the victor.  In Mexico, the people were beaten.  They don’t get rights to live equally in a world against a culture built on superior ideas.  And that is the problem for people like Ramos.  Admitting that the United States is a superior culture is something that nobody is willing to accept—yet there is a reason that people are willing to put themselves into danger to come to America in the first place—and those reasons need to be respected—and protected.  In order for those people to have opportunity in America the preservation of what makes America special must be preserved.

Mexico never had their act together—they were built from a culture of conquest and pillaging—and they never got their feet set as a country of ideas from the time the Aztecs were beaten to the present—over 500 years later. That’s not something to celebrate.  If anything, Mexico should be taking notes from America—not pouring into North America to bring socialism to our economy to turn it into the backwoods armpit that Mexico is presently.  Mexico could be great, but under the current conditions, it is terrible and I feel sorry for the people imprisoned there.  If they want to become United States citizens—I’m happy to welcoming them—but they aren’t allowed to destroy our culture in the process.

The North American Indian was not native to America—that falsehood was perpetuated by lazy science not willing to accept new discoveries made over the last 150 years that declare pre-Columbian archaeology had a much more advanced culture than what we typically associate with the nomads discovered by Columbus. And the same in Mexico, the Aztecs and whatever culture built the pyramids at Teotihuacan were far more advanced than the Spanish conquistadors who settled in the area and looted that culture into the despots we have now in that region.  If open border advocates wish to acknowledge those historical aspects, then they might get some historical agreement from people like me.  But they are defending conquered countries and insisting that the European translation of history serve as the backdrop of migration justification.  For instance, the slave trade in America was a European inheritance that was eventually eliminated as a result of our American Revolution—but Europe committed far worse atrocities when they looted Central and South America of its former wealth—yet that is never discussed.  But the evidence is still present in the people of today and they flee to America looking for hope and opportunity—but bring with them all the troubles they are trying to flee from.  That is not a sane option.

Understanding all that, Europe is falling apart, Russia doesn’t even have an economy that exceeds the one American company like Apple, China is a communist nation, and Japan is struggling with debt and limited resources—who in the world can save the rest of it from their long histories of bad decisions currently holding down many people from living good lives. Is the answer to let all the world into America as immigrants so to topple the last free and just place on earth—or should the rest of the world take notes from the United States and start forming their cultures around what works in our nation?  If open border supporters like Jorge Ramos really want to save their people in Mexico, Central America and into South America than how about proposing that those counties become more like America and embrace a capitalist form of economy abandoning what they have been doing which is causing so much misery.  We can’t let the world bring communism and socialism into America and expect it to remain a place of hopes and dreams—because those immigrants will just turn our cities into the slums they are running from by nature—because they haven’t changed their patterns of behavior.  Rather, those immigrants should in most cases stay put and adopt American ideas in the Middle East, in Mexico, in all of South America—India—Indonesia—Vietnam—everywhere so that opportunity could be found in their own backyard and not halfway around the world under illegal conditions.  The real issue is that these places that immigrants are fleeing from should change their ways so people aren’t so eager to leave.  That should be the concern of Jorge Ramos—because only when you fix that problem will everything else snap into place.

Rich Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rich Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

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

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Robert Cushman in the Westgate Tower: Where America was born–and the reason for separation of church and state

img_4159For my wife and I it was a bit of an overwhelming moment, only because we both love history and have a strong reverence for the Holiday of Thanksgiving in the United States. I had known that Robert Cushman who originally commissioned the Mayflower for the famous voyage to North America which of course unleashed the famous Thanksgiving Holiday that we celebrate each year unlocking the Christmas Season, but I didn’t think I’d ever get close to sitting in the cell where he was held imprisoned by the Church for spreading protestant pamphlets.  Yet, while touring the city streets of the ancient city of Canterbury, England at the Westgate Towers I found myself in a room exhibiting the shackles that were used for holding prisoners there and sure enough on the wall was the information talking about Cushman’s ordeal that led to the start of the Mayflower voyage in that very room.

img_4175A lot of people these days don’t really understand the necessity, and context of the argument between American separation of church and state because they have been free all their lives and have a shallow knowledge of history. But for Cushman who’s only ambition in life was to be a grocer on the streets of his childhood home in Kent he was a very passionate religious person who found himself in the crosshairs of the Church and their desire to be the primary vehicle through sacrament to Heaven.  Cushman naturally resented that control and wanted a more passionate relationship with God directly.  So the Church had him thrown in jail and as he sat in the cell at Westgate his young mind set him on a life course that would usher in the first pilgrims into the New World and start the concept of America.img_4161

In a lot of ways, the birth of the United States happened right in that spot in Westgate so it was a little overwhelming. The role that Canterbury played was phenomenal—it was a town that featured at least two major earthwork mounds that are credited to the pre-Roman period, but I personally think are even thousands of years older—likely the same type of people who inhabited the Stonehenge area over 100 miles to the west.  Both St Augustine’s Abby and a gigantic mound the size of the Miamisburg Mound in Ohio sit among the ruins of the great Roman city that set Canterbury on its start.  But then the Romans pulled out a few 400 years later and in came the Anglo Saxons from Germany and elsewhere.  But William the Conqueror from the lineage of the Viking Rollo invaded from France and dominated the countryside. When he came to Canterbury the people surrendered without a fight and thus the great Cathedrals began, first at St Augustine’s Abby, then the great Canterbury Cathedral and the region quickly became known as the Church of all England.  Fast forward another 500 years or so and Robert Cushman was wanting to apprentice as a grocer but as a young passionate man critical of the Church’s role in the issuing of the sacrament found himself locked away in that old Roman tower.img_4169

As many historians understand, the Church of England was always in a perilous relationship with the kings of England and some, especially Henry II and Henry VIII had especially contentious relationships with the power the Church held and pushed up against it. This often put the people of England in the crosshairs of politics whether they wanted to be or not just by their association with needing religion in their lives.   The church and the state were always at war with each other leaving people like Martin Luther and eventually Robert Cushman to make extreme personal sacrifices to be free of the mess.  As he sat cold in the Westgate Tower Robert Cushman made a decision that if and when he was released that he’d escape to someplace friendlier to his religious views.  When he was released, he fled to Holland to live for 9 years but had to leave again because a treaty with Spain was due to expire in 1619 which meant the Spanish Inquisition would soon legislate that little country—so Cushman had to flee again back to his homeland to find some other means of escaping the tyranny of the church and its battles with the state.  So he commissioned the Mayflower in Canterbury to take his small group of protestant followers to a New World where they’d be free to follow their passions which took them to the famous Plymouth Rock in Massachusetts.img_4215

When Satanists and radical Islamic lunatics want to claim that separation of church and state allows them to do whatever they want to whomever they like—they have an inaccurate view of the context of the statement. The separation of church and state was to prevent the situation that Robert Cushman and his pilgrim followers experienced on the ancient streets of Canterbury, England—where they couldn’t be thrown in the Westgate Tower just for having a different view of how the sacraments should be administered to the public.  The Church in its insecure position with the kings of England felt that Rome should continue to stand at the gateway to Heaven, and not those heredity selected masses of human flesh called kings—and if they lost that authority for just a decade of their existence, then the kings would push against the church for power over the people—so the poor people of England were caught in that vice between the state and the church.  People in America didn’t want to find themselves in that situation and they certainly didn’t want to be thrown in jail for having a different belief, as Cushman was.img_4160

For my wife and I it’s one thing to know these stories, it was quite another to stand in those spots and walk down the same corridors as Cushman did and to see what he did under similar conditions. If I had been Cushman, I would have been beyond pissed off and I don’t blame him a bit for organizing his pilgrimage to America to escape such nonsense.  It’s also important for those of us in America to honor the spirit of that first journey.   In many ways, this is the big debate surrounding the immigration debate to this day.  Refugees around the world are fleeing broken regions for the hope that America can shield them with freedom of persecution and economic mobility.  However, there are some who flee to America to destroy it from within from that same jealous Europe and all the fallen empires of the past for that first sinful act of defiance which Cushman fled from to begin with.  They do so not with military might, but with that paradox of squeezing society between the church and the state once again—such as what the radical Islamic terrorists have been advocating in their terrorist’s attempts.  The imposing religious beliefs of these modern terrorists are just a modern version of the medieval inquisitions being imposed on the here and now.  Yet the argument between church and state is the same as it was in Cushman’s time, only now we’ve run out of places to run.  So now we have to stay and fight because America is the last place on earth that is free of that type of tyranny.  And that is why we really celebrate Thanksgiving, and why for my family, it’s a very special Holiday.img_4174

Rich Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

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

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