Tag: overmanwarrior

Bullies of the Beltway: Standing with Trump and Arpaio to do the right thing

 

To further illustrate the level of the fight we are facing in 2016 have a look at this 2011 video of the White House Correspondence dinner.  The first video is of Barack Obama roasting Donald Trump and the second is of Seth Myers from Saturday Night Live doing the same.  The issue of tension was that Trump had been the one to push for Obama to release his birth certificate—which forced the White House to finally do it after stonewalling for over three years.  It was quite a mystery and gave rise to the “birther movement.”  Trump after a lot of persistence pushed, and pushed, and pushed until a document was produced leading to the victory lap in front of the media at the special 2011 engagement roasting Trump who was forced to sit stone faced in the middle of the action and take it.

But that wasn’t the end of the story.  Sheriff Arpaio from Arizona put together an independent group of people to analyze the released birth certificate and what they discovered was that the document Obama’s people released was a fake created recently, and not in the year of the president’s birth.   All of this was reported of course reported by me, CLICK HERE to review.  The rest of the media relegated the material as “conspiracy theory.”  For some reason, they didn’t want to know, as a collective entity—they wanted to believe that Obama was something that he wasn’t.  And when he was caught lying, only a few really held his feet to the fire making them easy targets like Trump was at that White House Correspondence dinner in 2011.  The purpose of that roasting was to show others what happens to people who dare to take on the Bullies of the Beltway.

All that seems like ancient history now—Obama won his election in 2012, and Trump decided not to run for president that year against him.  It seemed for a long time that only Trump and Arpaio were the only legitimate voices willing to yell against the tide that something was really wrong with President Obama.   Shortly after the 2012 election, we had the IRS scandal with Lois Lerner involving the White House, and then we had Hillary Clinton’s Benghazi hearings featuring her poor decisions leading to that disaster.  Then we had the destruction of Hillary’s emails on her private server so the scandals and stories mounted up to such a degree that everyone forgot about the birth certificate issue being a forgery.  The White House had produced a forged document and passed it off in a way that was more concerning than all the mysterious reasons that Obama refused to release it in the first place—which was always troubling.   I mean if you and I signed up for a new job, they will demand that you produce a driver’s license and/or a birth certificate to satisfy their screening criteria.  Becoming president of the United States is a pretty important job, so at least a birth certificate should have always been a high priority.  Yet it wasn’t and the president avoided it, and when pressed by Trump—day after day after day for several years, the White House finally managed to produce a document that could only have been created in the modern age—certainly not in the early 1960s when such technology wasn’t even invented yet to produce a computer generated layered document instead of a scanned replicate of an original.  If you and I were to scan our birth certificate into a computer program such as Adobe, you’d get a single flat layer of imagery.  There would be no way to separate the fields of what we scanned because the computer would have recognized only the image scanned from the source.  In short, if the document had been scanned into a computer like it was claimed, there would be no way to manipulate the various fields within the document presented by the White House.  The Obama birth certificate was a fake produced under great pressure by Trump.  In spite of all that evidence, Trump was laughed at by just about everyone.  Trump being a guy who saw a fight and the depth of that conflict knew what he had to do to clear his name—and that was to run for President in 2016 so that he could work from the top position to solve some of these diabolical problems.  And that brings us to the present where Trump is way ahead in the polls and poised to be the Republican nominee in 2016 to run directly against Hillary Clinton.  The people who presented that forged document among other scandalous cover-ups are terrified of Trump in the White House, because it’s obvious that he’ll expose everyone for everything to prove his point.

I took a lot of flak for supporting Trump for president so quickly in July of 2015—I do occasionally cover conspiracies and strange phenomena, but I’m not a conspiracy theorist.  When I say something it holds up—and a review of the many things I’ve covered will show that to be the case.  I know that something is very wrong with our political class—which extends over directly into our entertainment culture.  We have real criminals in very powerful positions and they need to be removed.  Yet congress showed no desire to take on the Obama birth certificate and most in the media completely ignored the issue.  Even people like Glenn Beck stayed away from the “birther” issue no matter how justified it was.  This left Trump and  Arpaio to hang out on a limb with all their hard-fought evidence as the media proclaimed, if a tree falls in the forest and nobody was there to hear it—it didn’t happen.  The media collectively refused to hear the tree fall on the Obama birth certificate leaving Obama to rake Trump over the coals at that 2011 correspondence dinner.  Trump fuming to do the right thing at his first opportunity.  I believe that Trump made his decision hell or high water to capture the White House after that roast.

Arpaio was sued by the Holder Justice Department soon after the birth certificate report and Trump stopped short of running for president so that he could solidify his position.  If he was going to do it he’d do so from a position of strength.  Trump spent the following three years doing just that.  Knowing all this, that’s why I was so quick to join Trump for his White House run.  He’s doing what I’d do myself if I were in such a position, and that is to treat the whole thing as a war that had to be won.  When Trump said he viewed running against Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton as a war for the White House, this is what he’s talking about—an establishment that seeks completely to control everything political with the banter of school yard bullies who determine the trends of the day with raw force and mass persuasion.  These people who have been occupying the White House for a number of years, people like the Bush family and the Clintons have the whole system rigged in their favor and the press eats out of their hands.  Obama is associated with that culture by default.  The same system that ignored his birth certificate problems allowed Lois Lerner to get by with IRS abuse and a massive cover-up of the top-secret emails destroyed and utilized on Hillary Clinton’s private server.  I know how Trump feels to be the only one speaking out for what’s right.

But here’s the secret dear reader, these are bullies who are running our country right now—it’s not Trump who is the bad guy—as much as they’d like to make him appear that way.  Just like in grade school when you stand up to them, they have nothing to throw back at you.  They can threaten to beat you up with IRS audits, they can harass you at work, through the media, and they can follow around your loved ones and harass them if it doesn’t work on you.  They can intimidate and harass you until you do as they are doing—comply with the orders of the collective.   Well, I’ve had everything mentioned above done to me and my family and I have done just what I did when I was in grade school, which is the basic mentality of most people working in government—they are still 15-year-old kids looking for a date to the homecoming dance.   The entire Beltway culture is made up of those types of intellects and they have only one game plan—harass individuals who flock away from the herd.   Well, when I was in grade school, there are plenty of stories of what I did to bullies and I never yielded to them.  As an adult, I dealt with bullies in the same fashion.  When they came after me—which they did for over 15 years—during my entire 20s up until I was about 35 and had essentially outlasted them—I fought them the way Arpaio and Trump did over the birther issue.  What’s right is right—not what the masses accept as right.  Right has to be the priority in every circumstance, especially when it’s obvious that there is a massive cover-up going on.  Somebody has to be willing to stand up to fight for what’s right, even at great personal risk—because the real bullies have to be stood up against.

I’ve been called a bully myself.  In fact I hear it more now than I ever did.  I have more expression in the English language and natural verbal ability to sidestep the bully accusation than many people who are similar in personality to me, but are functioning without as many tools in the intellectual tool box.  But what I want, I get, and Trump is made of the same stuff.  When he is called a bully, it’s because the real bullies have been denied the ability to beat people up without mercy, to impose on them the imposition of collective sentiment.  But that’s where serious crimes are hidden—behind the “Bullies of the Beltway.”  They only make fun of Trump because they have no other means to exact their will.  The secret to beating them is to be tougher, and rougher than they are.  Because they are liars, they are scum bags, and they are maniacal fools fit for defeat and only that.  They deserve to have their asses kicked.  They deserve to be pushed and to have the tables turned on them, because it’s the only way that we get our country back in the hands of the competent.  We have to start by getting the liars and Bullies of the Beltway out of our White House and into the gutters where they truly belong.

You can’t appease a bully.  You can only kick the shit out of them when they challenge you.  They might cry about it, but they put themselves in that position to begin with.  When they do come, that’s the only way.   That is why I support Trump.  He has a long history of doing the right thing even when it costs him to do it.  Because he’s learned how to deal with bullies-you do it directly and with great fanfare.  And you outlast them because in the end, they have to hide from the public and that is their true weakness.  When it comes to beating Hillary Clinton, the only way to capture the White House for Republicans is to expose Democrats one great weakness—their necessity to manipulate the public from their true intentions.  And in the fight for what’s right, that is what I look forward most in 2016.  For that reason, it is a Happy New Year.  The best thing we can do is support those who are willing to fight the Bullies of the Beltway because in that way, you are making a decision to not be pushed around any longer.  When Bush says that Trump is not a serious candidate, he is talking about playing the Beltway game of surrendering to extortion by those bullies in power.  But its time for a new game.   For the evidence, just watch the above videos completely, and you’ll understand the enormity of the problem before us and the very nature of the elections of 2016.  We won’t get a second chance any time soon.

Rich “Cliffhanger” Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rich “Cliffhanger” Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rich “Cliffhanger” Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

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

Hillary Clinton for Prison in 2016: Life can be a bitch, so don’t vote for one

Hey, this very nice young lady understands, Linda Lleshaj has found herself in the middle of some vigorous media attention after she was photographed at a Trump rally wearing one of the Alex Jones t-shirts promoting Hillary Clinton for Prison in 2016.  As 2015 closes and 2016 opens a new fashion trend is emerging against Hillary Clinton as millions of Americans have watched her on live television snake her way out of the email scandals, and a movie about government incompetency that she is responsible for is at the movie theaters still trying to deal with the Benghazi killings of innocent Americans in Libya.  We’ve watched the debt clock continue to tick upward, then we’ve watched the FBI and the White House fight over the definition of terrorism in San Bernardino as two ISIS sympathizers murdered innocent people just as Obama was trying to cover the tracks of his folly in Syria by letting refuges implant themselves in America to avoid violence there that he caused-making lives for all of us far more dangerous.   Obama was far more concerned about gun control than the possibility of more ISIS terrorists coming to America on converted UPS shipping planes under his authorization—and we are all just supposed to go back to sleep?   Some are asleep, but many more aren’t and that number is growing every day.  Some, like this very fine young lady know that we are at war and she’s doing something about it—and that’s good to see.  You can get a shirt like the one she’s wearing at the following links and join the fun.

http://www.infowars.com/video-women-defy-media-narrative-love-trump-at-packed-michigan-rally/

http://hillaryforprison.net/

https://www.facebook.com/HillaryForPrison16

http://store.infowars.com/Hillary-For-Prison-T-Shirt_p_1692.html

A radio guy got into a bit of a Twitter scuffle with me on Christmas Eve of 2015.  When he wanted out of the clash he said to me, “It’s Christmas Eve!  Go hug somebody who loves you.”  My reply was, that I had those bases covered and to remind him that he was the one who brought up the following subject, which apparently angered him:

Rich Hoffman ‏@overmanwarrior  10h10 hours ago

Rich Hoffman Retweeted Michael Graham

It will be impossible for Hillary to be POTUS against Trump. She’s a criminal and he won’t let anybody forget it.

Rich Hoffman added,

Michael Graham @IAMMGraham

Serious Q for Trump fans: If you knew with metaphysical certitude that voting for Trump would make Hillary POTUS, you’d still do it, right?

0 retweets0 likes

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Upon reading that I thought of George Washington crossing the Delaware on Christmas Eve to gain a surprise attack against British forces for a victory that was badly needed for the revolution.   You don’t win wars sitting around eating turkey and ham and praying at church—you take the fight to the enemy and you stay sharp at all hours of the day and night.  For perhaps the 80th time in the short week leading up to Christmas Day I actually had to remind people that we were at war in America.  That war is raging and that it was because our incompetent government has refused to acknowledge it that few know that we are in it.  I have been saying things like that for longer than Trump has been running for President, as proof of these articles will testify to.  I’ve been saying the same things that he’s saying now while he was still giving money to Democrats to help with zoning issues in New York and was focused on his hit show The Apprentice.  But, because of what he brings to the fight, I welcome him with open arms—because he’s a tremendous asset to the cause of winning this “civil” war.

A few years ago the kind of people I explained this war to would have thought that I was a tin-hatted conspiracy theorist looking for a fight that wasn’t there.  But this year at the Christmas parties and dinners celebrating the close of the fourth quarter of our economy rational people are now listening and I explained to them that they better be ready. The only way that there can be a peaceful conclusion to this war is that Trump gets elected president and takes this fight to the legislative process from the people’s house in the Executive Branch.  Otherwise, the streets in America will become active as a civil war of chaos and anxiety.  It’s not an organized fight the way the Civil War was in the 1860s over a few definitive issues.  This civil war is over fundamental ideologies, the sovereignty of the United States as a nation, and the types of people who have tried to internally weaken it to allow the global community to merge with it.

On Christmas Eve my mail lady, who is a government employee, but is individually a very nice person gave me very strange looks as she brought several packages to my garage.   It was a beautiful day so I had the door open to enjoy the weather.  She was a little shocked to find me at my work bench wearing one of my guns holstered from my practice and working on several others.  I had some time to clean and oil them, so I took advantage of the opportunity.  She normally drops packages on the front porch and we never talk, but it was Christmas Eve, and she felt a need to make direct contact because my garage was closer than my porch for her.  I thanked her, even though I could tell that she was anxious about the guns—which she shouldn’t have been.  The packages were not Christmas presents, but were orders from Brownells for the maintenance of my guns.  Specifically, I’m performing a trigger job on my Ruger Vaquero and the new springs were among the parts that were in the boxes she brought to me.  I have been dusting off my old gunsmithing skills lately.  I’m not doing it for money as of now because I don’t want to go through the trouble of obtaining a FFL, as I’ve had before.  When you get one of those you have to get fingerprinted and an ATF agent suddenly has access to your premises to check your records.  That’s one of the reasons I gave it up years ago.  As she walked back to her delivery van I could see by the way she walked that she was still uneasy about me.  If this were communist China—as the Obama administration clearly shows an inclination—she would report me to the enforcement police for reconditioning, one government employee reporting the activities of civilian activity to other government employees.  They are nice people when you get to know them, but in their role as employees to the kind of system that is allowing Hillary Clinton to flourish as a Democratic candidate, they are the type of people who could be dire enemies tomorrow.   I imagine there were some colorful conversations about me when she arrived back at the Post Office.

A few weeks ago I had an arrival from UPS that required hazmat approval, as the material was explosive in nature.  The delivery guy expressed concern about the contents.  As a fairly young man he had been trained through social conditioning that deliveries like that were “suspicious.”  The government considers people like me more dangerous than their Syrian Trojan horses.   I told the kid not to worry about it—“It’s not for a bomb,” I told him answering the question that I knew he wanted to ask.  “It’s primers for my reloads, nothing bad.”  But to young people trained to be nice government employees from their liberalized public schools and social conditioning, guns are bad—in anybody’s hands.  So I added, “don’t worry, my mouth is far more dangerous than anything I have around here.”  And that’s the truth.

I am aware that everything I do is being watched by the NSA, the FBI, and the CIA.  So they know I’m no danger to the United States—because I am the embodiment of what an American truly is, or should be.  But I’m not taking any crap from anybody, because I don’t have to.  I know what it feels like to be watched, followed, and even have contracts against you, and it’s not a big deal to me.  I’ve dealt with all that before, and apparently Trump has as well.  What I like about him is that he’s not afraid of anything—which makes him my kind of person-regardless of politics.  I like and respect fearless people. My mouth is the thing they fear the most—and when you understand that, you don’t have to use a gun for offense.  The guns are for defense—in case some idiot wants to cross that line.  Otherwise, my mouth does more work than an army of gun wielding patriots would—and I’m fine to keep it that way.  But if someone loses their mind and wants to impose themselves on me or my rights as a free-born human being—they will have big trouble.

But as for offense, my mouth works just fine, because it is that kind of war.  And in this kind of war, Donald Trump is as good as boots on the ground.  He fights the kind of war the government is imposing well which gives a platform for young people like Linda Lleshaj to function within.  That poor radio guy who wants a certain kind of Republican candidate is falsely assuming that we are not a nation at war, and that the 2016 election is just another cycle of idiots and fools who make promises that they never keep once they get into office.   We don’t have time for another Paul Ryan type in an important government office.  We have to literally capture the flag, because domestic enemies currently posses it under rules of war and only then can we talk about some sanity in politics.  Because I’m not changing my life for anybody-I don’t have to.  I play by the rules, I pay my taxes, and I work hard every single day.  I take care of my family without government help and I give a lot more to the world around me than I take.  I am not the problem and I see clearly the mismanagement of the people who have been responsible, so I wear my guns around the house just in case some desperate fool decides to short-cut sanity and take something that belongs to me.  Otherwise, I will be happy to fight the war on the terms of modern battle, and that is mostly with my mouth and through potential elected candidates like Trump.

The essence, and cause of that war is Hillary Clinton and her support organizations—the people who keep her as a viable candidate in spite of severe criminal misconduct.  I lived through the Clinton White House during the 90s and I’m not about to put up with that garbage again.  She belongs in jail, not in the White House, and it’s about time that more people start realizing it.  To her credit, Linda Lleshaj is part of a new generation who has to grapple with that reality.   And it is great to see that she is awake and is actively trying to get other young people to wake up as well.  Welcome to the battlefield Linda.  It’s a Christmas present to me to know you’re out there.  That is my idea of a good Christmas.   So let’s all cross the metaphorical Delaware together and surprise everyone.

Don’t believe we are at war, watch all the videos above, completely.  The evidence is quite clear.

Rich “Cliffhanger” Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

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‘The Art of the Deal’ versus ‘Rules for Radicals’: Trumping Democrats and their lock on the media

 

The answer is an easy one, as much of a killer as Russia’s Putin is accused to be, is he really guilty of crimes if nobody is around to bring forth the evidence.  It’s the old tree in the forest analogy, if it falls down in a forest and nobody is around to hear it—did it really happen?  When politicians destroy evidence revealing their guilt, did they really commit a crime?  That is precisely the accusation that George Stephanopoulos leveled at Donald Trump after the New York billionaire received unsolicited praise from the current leader and former KGB operative.  In the following interview, Trump did a fabulous job of turning the tables on Stephanopoulos who is the premier news man at ABC—owned by the Disney Corporation—who is a long time Democratic insider very close to Hillary Clinton.  It could be argued, successfully, that the Clintons are every bit the killers that Russia’s Putin is—yet they have been very successful in harassing witnesses, destroying evidence, and outright denying all accusations against them no matter how guilty they were—yet Stephanopoulos felt that the vague evidence against Putin was more than sufficient.  But when that same rational was leveled at his friend Hillary Clinton—by Trump, the same criteria was not honored.  Watch closely.

And that ladies and gentlemen is what we are up against.  In the past, Republican presidential candidates allowed themselves to be regulated into a media corner that the Democrats controlled.  No matter how strong their message was, it would never be heard correctly because Republicans simply didn’t market themselves in the hostile environment that is considered today’s media—largely controlled by people like George Stephanopoulos—flaming liberals who are activists against traditional America.  Republicans didn’t go on the late night comedy shows, they didn’t do media interviews on MSNBC, or CNN—they didn’t do Good Morning America—and they stayed away from George Stephanopoulos knowing that the table was tilted out of their favor.  That allowed scum bags like Hillary Clinton to cruise through political mine fields without harm knowing that the people conducting the interviews where her type of people.  It’s been a nice little game that Democrats have controlled completely for over twenty years now.

Trump completely changes that game in a way that nobody knows how to control.  Trump will go on any show at any time and argue with anybody. While he avoids fellow conservatives like Glenn Beck because the popular radio personality has been against Trump from the start and Trump knows there is nothing he can gain by granting Beck an interview because of the hit pieces that would follow—when it comes to Democrats in the media, Trump shows a willingness to engage them all in debate—and he’s successful.  For any Republican to hope to win the White House they must be able to enter the arena of the Democrats and be willing to do shows like The View, and Ellen and meet liberal arguments head on without surrender if they ever want to win a national election.  The Karl Rove methods are old, and have not been successful.  The Bush Family reign on politics is over—they did not do a good job, and now it’s time to push them off the stage for a new kind of Republican—one who is actually successful—personally.

After watching that interview between Stephanopoulos and Trump, it is clear that Hillary Clinton is in big trouble.  She cannot win this upcoming election crying about unfairness, or sexism.  Trump is far too smart to fall for that sentimentally.  I have been telling Republicans this for years, sometimes you have to call a latté sipping prostitute what they are and expose them.  It’s not hard, but a candidate has to be willing to face the ridicule which has protected the opposition for far too long.  In such a case the recipient has no choice but to call Trump a bully because they have no defense against what is being dished out against them.  Hillary Clinton has too many skeletons in her closet to win the White House and Trump is the only Republican in the current field who has the ability, and will to expose them.

No other Republican presidential candidate has the ability to meet Democrats on their controlled turf—they can’t go on George Stephanopoulos’s show and duel him in the manner that’s required-because they simply don’t have the self-confidence, or media persuasion to perform the task.  Ted Cruz does, but his voice just doesn’t command the presence required by television and radio to project strength, which isn’t his fault—but it just won’t do in the 2016 political climate.  Perhaps in the future when the rules have been changed, but presently, the media world is stacked against him in a way that prevents mainstream media platforms from working in his favor.  Trump takes away Hillary’s strength, and that is her ability to commit crimes and have the media hide those acts from the public.  In 2016, Trump has more media command than Hillary, and that is the most important aspect of the upcoming presidential race.  But what’s more important than that, Trump is more than willing to duel with people like Stephanopoulos over ANY issue.  Trump always believes he’s the smartest guy in the room and is never intimidated by degreed journalists or Rhoades scholars—so he never gives away the high ground in any kind of debate—and that is big trouble for people who have a lot to hide like Hillary Clinton.

Hillary Clinton cannot win an election against Trump without ruining her career.  Everything that she’s worked for during her entire adult life is in jeopardy with Trump—and you can see it in her face already—it is her worst nightmare to come to the end of 2015 with Donald Trump as the Republican front-runner.  She cannot survive the daily attacks on her character and her insider politics.  She is much more vulnerable than Jeb Bush was and once this presidential race moves from just Republican primaries to a general election, the numbers will dramatically favor Trump.  The only reason polling does not favor Trump versus Hillary in a head to head election presently is because Hillary has not been in the cross-hairs.  Trump has left her alone letting the email investigation percolate in the minds of the electorate for the opportune time to exploit.  Once he locks down the Republican nomination and there is only Hillary Clinton to worry about—Trump will expose everything making a complete fool of the Democratic presidential hopeful.  The usual stories about rich white men maintaining the office over the first woman president will not be enough to win in 2016.  Trump knows how to overcome things like that—because he can work the media in a way that nobody else can.

Looking back over Trump’s career he just loves to fight, and he has shown a tendency to take on giants.  Back in the 80s he was one of the most influential owners of the USFL professional football league.  They used to play in the spring while the NFL played in the fall.  Trump wasn’t happy taking a back stage to the NFL, so he convinced all the other USFL owners to take the NFL to court over anti-trust charges.  And they won their case against the NFL.  Eventually the USFL fell apart leaving the NFL to return to its monopoly status, but Trump led the charge and showed no fear during the entire endeavor.  Trump was at the time in command of players like Herschel Walker, Jim Kelly, and Doug Flutie—players that would later dominate in the NFL.  Even after the lawsuit victory which denied USFL owners financial awards as part of the settlement leaving a bad taste in everyone’s mouth, Trump was able to unload his contract with Walker to the Dallas Cowboys.  Jim Kelly went on to take the Buffalo Bills to three playoff appearances, and Doug Flutie became a superstar.  Trump has a long track record of dealing with very tough people—the smartest the world has to offer.  He also is personal friends with dominate athletes and hard nose franchise owners.  Taking on Hillary Clinton for Trump is like sneezing out a bacterial virus.  It’s no effort at all, but it will make a lot of noise and leave quite a mess.

Comparatively, Hillary has no track record of personal achievement.  She has been a manipulative second-hander her entire life.   She and her husband Bill have only had success because they’ve managed to cheat their way through trouble.  CLICK HERE FOR EVIDENCE.  Hillary cannot win a presidential run playing things straight, and Trump will force her to try.  That’s when he’ll have her and she knows it—and George Stephanopoulos knows it.  Trump is a different kind of person.  His book, The Art of the Deal is an innovation over the favorite book of Democratic strategy, Rules for Radicals.  It literally “trumps” the Saul Alinsky tactics that Hillary Clinton has used since she was in college.  Trump is her worst nightmare and there is nothing a single Democrat can do about it in the media.  They cannot strop Trump because it really comes down to the rock, paper, scissor relationship of strategy.  For Hillary, her Rules for Radicals are ineffective against Trump’s Art of the Deal.  And she cannot win.  By the time 2016 comes to a close, she’ll be lucky if she can ever show her face again.  That for Republicans is the best news we’ve had in several decades—and is truly something to look forward to going into a new year.

Rich “Cliffhanger” Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

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A Company Out of Ideas: The embarrassment of Disney and it’s second-hander employees

As this article blasted onto the World Wide Web Matt Clark and I were hosting a podcast giving the Disney Company and the makers of the new Star Wars a large dose of tough love.  And they deserve all the criticism and then some that we broadcast.  We are in a new day of media, unlike the days of old.  Disney does not control everything—they are in fact experiencing a contraction period as their media empire is feeling the effects of small media types like Matt Clark and I who are not bound by contracts or addictions to swag buying our loyalty at any price.   Quite the contrary, Matt and I have both been huge fans and supporters of all things Disney for many years now.  We offered our endorsements out of real passion, not purchased manipulation—so that relationship was built on trust.  People like Matt and I were the best assets a company like Disney could hope for.  Out of our own free will, we cheered on their behalf in small ways that often avalanched into big market impressions by sheer opportunity.  But, what they are doing with their theme parks—regarding toy guns, and what they have done with Star Wars is really inexcusable.  They are free to take any position they wish, but Matt and I as fans are also free to reject their product and to let people know why.  Disney counts on word of mouth to maintain their strength of their product marketing, but it can also work against them.  And because of their betrayal of key fans like Matt and I, they asked for it.

It was the first time in my life that a soundtrack to Star Wars arrived in my possession and I was not in a hurry to listen to it.  I bought the soundtrack because I love John Williams and have most of his music, so I bought The Force Awakens out of respect.  But I have yet to open it and the film has been out for over a week as of this writing.  I just have no appetite for anything regarding Star Wars presently, which is a big shift for me.  It was only a short time ago that was playing Star Wars: X Wing Miniatures and was sitting in a swing on my front porch waiting for new products to arrive in my mailbox.  I enjoyed immensely reading about all the different characters and playing in the galaxy that George Lucas created.  By the time that The Force Awakens ended, nearly everything I loved about Star Wars was destroyed like a Death Star blasting away the history and life of an entire species in just a moment.  It was one of the only real bright spots I saw on the horizon of our cultural mythology, and Disney had purposely destroyed it.

We’re not talking about stupid people who work at Disney, or Lucasfilm.  Kathy Kennedy had been around Spielberg and Lucas for decades and if anybody had learned to make a great movie by their apprenticeship, it should have been her.  J.J. Abrams is a great director.  Industrial Light and Magic—is the best special effects house on the planet.  Everything in their tool box was great to make a new Star Wars film.  It seemed impossible to screw it up.  Instead, what happened was that they proved emphatically what I have been saying about the metaphysics of quality over the years.  A committee of people do not surpass the singular vision of a strong individual leader.  As bad as many proclaim the George Lucas prequels to be, or his special additions, they were vastly better than what Disney came up with considering all their incredible resources.  There was no excuse, yet they failed miserably.

It was hard for me to admit how terrible The Force Awakens really was, so I know other Star Wars fans will dance around the issue for months.  But in the context of years, they’ll slowly realize just what a travesty this latest Star Wars film was to a franchise that many loved.  And it was all consciously done by Disney; they watched the screening of the film and thought they had a great product.  They sold it to the world as their best work and it clearly wasn’t.  It was essentially a fan film made by a second generation of spoiled brats, who had hitched a ride on the coat tails of greatness as perpetual second-handers. Yet nobody noticed within all of Disney’s organization—that is alarming.

It was difficult for me to accept the recent Mad Max film, because in the original, Max had a little boy who was killed by a gang of thugs. In the updated version it was a little girl.  I was willing to overlook that slight change because the film had the original director in George Miller and the film was a dramatic improvement over previous installments.  But it was distracting.  If the movie hadn’t been great, I would have felt toward it the way I do The Force Awakens.  Characters matter and once an artistic entity offers it to the public for consumption, they have an obligation to maintain those characters to their audience.  If they violate that trust, they risk alienating their audience to the characters they’ve created.  Star Wars over the years—Lucasfilm through their publishing arm—did a great job of nurturing their characters along with a sense of continuity.  For instance, a character in the novel Rogue Planet which took place well before the Prequel films appeared as a major character in Star by Star which took place many years later—like 50 years in Star Wars time, and that character had traces back to the Jedi, but lured Jacen Solo to the Sith through mental torture that lasted over many novels.  It was then no surprise that Jacen became a feared Sith Lord.  It was a set-up by Lucasfilm so that the mythology they created could be enjoyed by fans across multiple platforms—movies, books, comics and video games.  You could always trust that most of the Star Wars content was following some kind of ultimate timeline.  So when The Force Awakens borrowed all those elements but changed the names cheapening the stories told before, the whole mythology fell apart instantly.

Then it becomes even more shocking that given all the material the filmmakers had to use, that Disney couldn’t even create a single original thought worthy of a movie.  Everything in Force Awakens is borrowed, from the comparison of the Lord of the Rings plot driving the lightsaber quest to find Luke Skywalker hidden on a remote island—to a third Death Star (this time called Starkiller Base).  Every act of The Force Awakens is nearly copied from A New Hope—the movie comes across as a remake of Robocop—or Total Recall.  The big difference is that there aren’t any memorable moments of wisdom in the new movie to solidify the content. At least in Phantom Menace there are lines of Jedi wisdom—in A Force Awakens, there is nothing—astonishingly.  The filmmakers robbed the Expanded Universe of content and the original movies, and then passed it off as an original work of art disgracing all the good minds that did create new plot devices in past installments.

It wasn’t that long ago that I bragged about Star Wars having an essential conservative moral to their stories.  After all, in the novels, Han and Leia, as well as Luke lived somewhat happily ever after.   They did save the galaxy many times, but they had fun together doing it.  There was a lot of pain, but there were a lot of laughs and they all did it together, loyally.  In the later novels, right before the sale of Lucasfilm to Disney, a new Sith order had imbedded itself into the Galactic Senate of the New Republic and had begun to subterfuge politics into a New Sith Order—and they had the entire media under their thumb.  They were actually magnificent stories done on a huge scale, and Han, Leie, Luke and the Millennium Falcon and some of the children of the primary characters were rising up to become easy stars in their own way.  One of the greatest characters in Star Wars was Mara Jade who was an assassin who worked for the Emperor in the original trilogy and eventually became Luke’s wife.  They had a son named Ben who was a great character.   In Force Awakens, they named Ben after Han and Leia’s son who is the ultimate villain, Kylo Ren—essentially Darth Caedus from the Legends series.   I could literally go on and on.  If The Force Awakens had made a superior movie to the books, all could have been forgiven.  But they didn’t.  Instead the butchered the story in a very disrespectful way.  Han Solo, not in a million years would have walked out onto a bridge with no sides and confronted a bad guy—even if the bad guy was his son.  He NEVER would have done it.  He might have said, “hey kid, I’m going to blow this place up.  I love you—now get your ass out of here.”  But he never would have lowered his weapon and pleaded with him to come home like a guilty father trying to rescue a child from jail.  What Disney did was disgraceful.

I have a pretty good idea what’s at work here, so they deserve the ridicule.  Star Wars has been something I have valued, and these idiots just butchered it—so they get what they get.  Disney was more interested in making a progressive film than a good installment to the Star Wars saga.  They were intent to push out the conservative values of the founder, George Lucas—who these days is a flaming liberal.  But while he was building his companies, he was very conservative.  Disney as a company expected to rip-off and re-write the stories and outcomes away from conservative viewpoints to much more progressive perspectives.  This is why The Huffington Post and The White House love this new Star Wars and why people like Matt and I hate it.  Disney has declared war on conservative America and that has never been clearer than in their new Star Wars film.  I didn’t want to believe it was possible, but it is.  And just because I’m a fan doesn’t mean that I’ll give liberalism a free pass just because they put the name Star Wars on it.  If anything, that makes it more worthy of attack, which Matt and I are relishing in—and will continue for what Disney has done to something we both have valued for many years.

Rich “Cliffhanger” Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

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France is a Socialist Country: Understanding the intent of Four Horsmen and climate change arguments

I recommend that you watch this documentary called the Four Horsemen by Ross Aschcroft, who is an English director whose provocative film shown below evokes how the modern-day Four Horsemen continue to ride roughshod over the people who least can afford it.  It provokes a new kind of socialism that is supported by young Millennials like the group Anonymous and the Occupy Walls Street protestors.  It essentially is a repackaged hatred of capitalism that represents European socialism attempting to spread to every corner of the world, particularly in America.  It’s important to understand how the attacks on American enterprise come, how it’s being sold, and what the history of it is.  When Obama and French president François Hollande celebrated their climate change agreements in Paris recently the communist strategy behind their emphasis was not reported by the press and to those who don’t know any better.  Films like the Four Horsmen sound like reasonable suggestions—just like climate change might seem reasonable on the surface.  But it’s not reasonable, and many Americans don’t understand how deep the roots of socialism run in Europe—and how politicians in the United States have sought to mimic much of what they’ve seen there in American policy.

France is not a capitalist country that represents the values of the “west.”  It has a very long history with socialism and they are quite open about it.  Here is a bit of the history of France and its political system which was quite evident in the Four Horsmen film.  Of course the point in exhibiting this information is to show how France has influenced all of Europe, particularly Great Britain and liberal filmmakers like Ross Ashcroff.   The Socialist Party (French: Parti socialiste [paʁti sɔsjaˈlist], PS) is a social-democratic,[4] centrist political party in France, and the largest party of the French centre-left or center-right. The PS is one of the two major contemporary political parties in France, along with the Republicans. The Socialist Party replaced the earlier French Section of the Workers’ International (SFIO) in 1969, and is currently led by First Secretary Jean-Christophe Cambadélis. The PS is a member of the Party of European Socialists (PES), the Socialist International (SI) and the Progressive Alliance.

The PS first won power in 1981, when its candidate François Mitterrand was elected President of France in the 1981 presidential election. Under Mitterrand, the party achieved a governing majority in the National Assembly from 1981 to 1986 and again from 1988 to 1993. PS leader Lionel Jospin lost his bid to succeed Mitterrand as president in the 1995 presidential election against Rally for the Republic leader Jacques Chirac, but became prime minister in a cohabitation government after the 1997 parliamentary elections, a position Jospin held until 2002, when he was again defeated in the presidential election.

In 2007, the party’s candidate for the presidential election, Ségolène Royal, was defeated by conservative UMP candidate Nicolas Sarkozy. Then, the Socialist party won most of regional and local elections and it won control of the Senate in 2011 for the first time in more than fifty years.[5] On 6 May 2012, François Hollande, the First Secretary of the Socialist Party from 1997 to 2008, was elected President of France, and the next month, the party won the majority in the National Assembly.

The PS also formed several figures who acted at the international level: Jacques Delors, who was the eighth President of the European Commission from 1985 to 1994 and the first person to serve three terms in that office, was from the Socialist Party,[6] as well as Dominique Strauss-Kahn, who was the Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund from 2007 to 2011,[7] and Pascal Lamy, who was Director-General of the World Trade Organization from 2005 to 2013.[8]

In 2014, the party had 60,000 members.[1] In 2012 the party had claimed 173,486 members.[9]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialist_Party_(France)

 

François Maurice Adrien Marie Mitterrand (French: [fʁɑ̃swa mɔʁis mitɛʁɑ̃] ( listen); 26 October 1916 – 8 January 1996) was a French statesman, who served as the President of France from 1981 until 1995. He is the longest-serving President of France and, as leader of the Socialist Party, the first figure from the left elected President under the Fifth Republic.

Reflecting family influences, Mitterrand started political life on the Catholic nationalist right. He served under the Vichy Regime in its earlier years. Subsequently, however, he joined the Resistance, moved to the left, and held ministerial office repeatedly under the Fourth Republic. He opposed de Gaulle‘s establishment of the Fifth Republic. Although at times a politically isolated figure, Mitterrand outmaneuvered rivals to become the left’s standard-bearer in every presidential election from 1965 to 1988, except 1969. Elected President in the May 1981 presidential election, he was re-elected in 1988 and held office until 1995.

Mitterrand invited the Communist Party into his first government, a controversial move at the time. In the event, the Communists were boxed in as junior partners and, rather than taking advantage, saw their support erode. They left the cabinet in 1984. Early in his first term, Mitterrand followed a radical economic program, including nationalization of key firms, but after two years, with the economy in crisis, he reversed course. His foreign and defense policies built on those of his Gaullist predecessors. His partnership with German Chancellor Helmut Kohl advanced European integration via the Maastricht Treaty, but he accepted German reunification only reluctantly. During his time in office he was a strong promoter of culture and implemented a range of costly “Grands Projets“. He was twice forced by the loss of a parliamentary majority into “cohabitation governments” with conservative cabinets led, respectively, by Jacques Chirac (1986–88), and Édouard Balladur (1993–95). Less than eight months after leaving office, Mitterrand died from the prostate cancer he had successfully concealed for most of his presidency.

Beyond making the French left electable, Mitterrand presided over the rise of the Socialist Party to dominance of the left, and the decline of the once-mighty Communist Party (as a share of the popular vote in the first presidential round, the Communists shrank from a peak of 21.27% in 1969 to 8.66% in 1995, at the end of Mitterrand’s second term, and to 1.93% in the 2007 election).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fran%C3%A7ois_Mitterrand

To many left leaning political people capitalism is what America is, where corporations are the targets of crony deals between politics and free enterprise.   The bar of understanding has been set so low that capitalism has been defined as the mess that currently makes up the Washington beltway.   This is largely because we have allowed Europe—specifically the socialism of places like France to define capitalism as a definition allowing film and television producers in love with Paris and London to create the standard understanding of money’s measurement in our culture with films like Four Horsmen.  But socialism and communism did not go away during the McCarthy Hearings, or the fall of the Berlin Wall.  It is quite alive and well, and being taught in our local schools, in our media, and in our admiration for the Europeans by a class of people in America who really don’t understand capitalism—particularly pure capitalism without the crony aspect.

It is important to understand history and to know that as far back as most people alive today can remember, France has been a socialist county.  It must be understood that when there are climate change discussions in Paris that it’s not protecting the environment that they are after, it’s more of building sympathy for proposals like the ones expressed in Ross Ashcroff’s film Four Horsmen.  These are not people who want a free market economy, they quote Plato in the film, but ignore that it was Aristotle who built the philosophy of American politics and economy. And that for America to work correctly, Plato’s prehistoric socialism must be eradicated and replaced with competitive environments full of inventiveness and productive enterprise rooted in profit.  It is to understand that before a true indulgence of the market forces at work can be comprehended proper definitions for things must be clear.  And clearly the kid Ross Ashcroft missed the mark as do many.  That is because they were bred to believe that Europe is still relevant and that their long history with socialism is the standard of the day.  But for us in America, we need to sever that relationship until places like France get the clear message—that they are entirely on the wrong path and are destined for continued failure.  The only way they can hide that failure is by sabotaging through any means possible the economic power of the west, and the productivity of free enterprise.

Rich “Cliffhanger” Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

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

Winners Aren’t Losers: Donald Trump’s childrens book and primary presidential platform

Actually, I’m getting a little tired of people assuming that I’ll wake up at some point and realize what Donald Trump is—and will change my mind and vote for someone like Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio.  I listen to Glenn Beck nearly every day, and also Pat and Stu and have heard people like them bash Trump for the last six months—assuming that fans of Trump are somehow asleep and will one day wake up to find they voted for a monster.  I have watched Bill O’Reilly try his best to pin point Trump supporters with a simple explanation such as “they are angry voters who just want to bust up the establishment. “  I have put up with these types of people like I would the banter of children who don’t know any better.  But let’s make something very clear—extremely clear.  I know what Donald Trump is and what he might do.  I understand his motivations—clearly—emphatically.   And I’m certainly not stupid, naive, or in any way enamored with disillusion.  I know the good and bad of Trump—I have done a lot of research into him since I started supporting him and I want him as president now more than ever knowing what I do.  I want him specifically for the reasons shown below on the Jimmy Kimmel Show where a new children’s book was revealed about Trump called Winners Aren’t Losers.

Here’s the deal, we’ve had 16 years of really bad, and stupid presidents—people who clearly weren’t intellectually up for the job.  Republicans had the embarrassments of George W. Bush and communists had the academic politics of Barack Obama.   Before that we had 8 years of scandalous Bill Clinton and before that 4 years of a New World Order do gooder George Bush #41.  They were all terrible presidents and they have embarrassed America to the world.  Congressmen have lied, cheated, and enriched themselves incredibly over the last two decades to the point where people have lost faith in both parties.  Our government does not function—at all.  The people running it are terrible and have been well before Trump vocalized it.  I want a private sector candidate, someone who will sell capitalism to the entire world and can fight for it.  Socialism is the #1 problem in the world right now—it touches in some way or another every major problem we are facing presently in the world—everything from ISIS to college tuition prices.  The fix for most problems globally start with a moral justification for capitalism and advocates who won’t waiver from it.

The Constitution is not being followed now.  It should be, but a Constitutional purist like Ted Cruz or Rand Paul will not stand a chance against the K-Streeters—and that is the grim fact.  America needs someone who loves to fight those factions without fearing anything.  There isn’t a single politician ever to hit the scene who has no fear like Trump.  He’s not afraid of the mob, of killers from Mexico, of government surveillance, of terrorists threatening his family, of boycotts, protestors—of the media.  He’s not afraid of anything—he could care less about the Bilderberg parties, or the “illuminati.”  He doesn’t fear any money men—he doesn’t have to worry about some billionaire cutting his nuts off and denying his family an income.  He is above all that, and he loves to fight and argue and make deals.  He’s my kind of guy.  He doesn’t drink, he doesn’t smoke.  He’s a loner with great charisma who loves his family.  His kids are great.  And so were his parents.  Donald Trump is a great example of the American dream.

I don’t care about his bankruptcies.  I know why he did it, and he learned very important lessons from those experiences.  I also don’t care that he’s had three wives.  I know why he did what he did.  He pushed and pushed and pushed and the bankruptcies, the wives and the incredible controversies surrounding him through much of the 90s would have been enough to crush most people.  But Trump worked through it without jumping off a roof, without ever losing himself, and without ever surrendering.  He fought, and fought, and fought until all his enemies were pushed aside.  And on the back side of it he was even better because of it.  Now he’s a legitimate billionaire, not just one in debt buried in assets that could evaporate with a housing bubble.  He’s legitimately wealthy, and as self-made as a person can be in the mixed economy that we all inherited from years of socialism trying to poke itself into our lives from beyond our shores.   If Trump screwed people over, if he made mistakes in judgment such as he did with the tenants in Central Park South, he learned from them and is much better for it.  What he has learned is exactly what to say and when to say it.  In deal making you have to perform verbal faints to test your opponent to see what they have and when they’ll use it.  When you are fighting people who believe that the end justifies the means, you better have a response to whatever they throw at you.  You can’t fight them like some Red Coats from the Revolution—all lined up and orderly so that snipers can pick off everything headed their way.  You have to be unpredictable, you have to verbally joust, and you have to out maneuver them with sheer tenacity at times.   Ultimately you have to be willing to face every problem alone, and Trump flourishes at that.

An even more qualifying condition is that you must have somebody as president who knows how to surround himself with the right people, and that those people have to love to take junk and rebuild it.  Trump loves to fix old things and turn them to gold, and his friend Carl Icahn comes with the deal.  He’s worth $21 billion dollars largely because he’s a corporate raider-he turns around failed companies and makes them into winners.  The biggest loser on planet earth right now is the mismanagement going on in the Beltway which has people like Icahn liking his lips.  Even though Trump and Icahn are billionaires, they don’t really care about the money.  They only care about the score that the money represents.  Icahn doesn’t spend money on stupid stuff—he just likes to fight and to win.  He looks for fights so that he can win.

I’ve said it many times; the first priority is that we have to get management under control in America.  We have to solve our fiscal issues first.  Then we can make the Constitution a priority.  Without a solid winning national philosophy, the masses of a democracy will not support a freedom oriented Constitution—second-hander types will always look to rewrite the founding documents to allow them to legally loot others.  So the first priority is to put money in the pockets of a majority of the country so that they will support the American Constitution.  Otherwise, we are fighting a losing battle.  People will not follow a philosophy of freedom unless they are financially secure and can enjoy that freedom.

What Trump does best is make other people feel good about the things he does.  It doesn’t matter what he says, but why he says it.  America needs to hear how good it is, and that winning is our value system again.  And it needs someone to say it that won’t back down from a media that wants everyone to get a conciliation prize just for showing up.  America needs to focus on winning at everything.

I would think that Glenn Beck and his followers would understand the strategic necessity of putting these types of people in the White House.  Every generation has their specific challenges.  George Washington had his challenges, Lincoln had his, Reagan did as well, but there is no correct way of doing anything.   You take what you learn and apply it to all future problems.  The more a person has lived and the more they’ve seen—especially under pressure, they better they are to solve problems in the future.  And I know of nobody anywhere who has stood against the fires of life the way that Trump has.  America needs a deal maker and a cheerleader.  It doesn’t need another ideological failure who comes into public office with a lot of big ideas but falls short of accomplishing anything because they don’t know how to sell it to the public, and can’t work the media to their will.

There is zero chance that Trump loses to Hillary Clinton.  There is nothing in Trump’s history that indicates that he would do anything less than destroy her completely in a head to head election.  Only Trump could out talk and out maneuver Bill Clinton on the campaign trail.  You wouldn’t put Ted Cruz or somebody else up against ol’ Bubba, history shows that they’ll lose.  If they can’t do better against Trump in the primaries, they won’t do any better against Clinton.   So my decision to support Trump for president is not locked in illusion.  I’m not “asleep,” and need to be woke up.  It’s just that I see more clearly what others will eventually see.  And each week there are more people coming to the same conclusion, and it’s about time.  In this particular game, Trump is the best bet and we are lucky to have him.  It would be my strategic hope that he would pave the way for 20 years of a capitalist oriented society that would get back to our roots of Constitutional law—someone who will pick Supreme Court Justices like Clarence Thomas and stand for traditional America instead of the progressive crap that we have now.  Beck thinks of Trump as a progressive—and he’s wrong.  Trump has progressive beliefs because he’s a New York guy, but he ultimately is a deal maker who knows smart money from bad—and to see that—there has to be conservative roots to understand the value.   Of that, there is nobody better than Trump in this election or any election in history.  I’m voting for Donald Trump because I want America to win, and I do trust him to do that much.   Because winning is important—it’s much more important than most people acknowledge.  And Trump has a hunger for winning that I understand.   That is why I am voting for the New York billionaire.  I don’t care how someone plays the game—I care that they win.  Those idiots who say that winning is not the most important thing in the world don’t know what they are talking about.  It is because of those types of people that we have all the problems we do now.  So it’s time that we stop listening to them.

I expect to win at everything I do.  Winners are not losers.  The idiots running our government now do not represent me.   They lose too much and it’s time to change that.  Most of the idiots who believe that Trump is not suited to be president also believe that empathy is one of the most endearing human traits–like the born again Christian Glenn Beck–or the Beltway political addict Karl Rove–who hopes that everything he has ever studied and loved will remain intact through this election cycle.  That is the reason we get the same rejects over and over again in the presidential cycles.  Empathy is fine for church on Sundays or Holidays when loved ones gather for Christmas dinner, but winning is more of a priority–because without it, empathy is worthless.  Without winning, we all become like animals fighting over the same piece of meat.  With winning as a priority, even when people lose they win because competition drives a culture forward and allows the best of what they are to provide leadership by default.  In such a culture that leaves us all much less to have empathy about–and is a higher quality trait.  So it’s really stupid to value empathy over winning or to vote for anybody but Donald Trump for President of the United States.   If anybody really wants to win as a nation, you must have the best people on the job.  And the way to figure out who the best people are is to see who wins or wants to win the most.  Then you have your President.

Watch the videos above for more evidence and testimonials.  I even included a hit piece against Donald Trump.  I’m OK with everything he has done because his overall goal was to win, not to get style points for being empathetic.  Empathy will make a superpower into a muddled mess, like it is now.  Winning makes you more like Donald Trump.  Sure you have a lot of enemies, but life on a daily basis is so much better–and far more interesting for everyone–even those who lose.

Rich “Cliffhanger” Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

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

The Benefits of Second Call Defense: Information and Christmas wishes from the sheepdogs of the shooting industry

 

People seem surprised when they find out what a nice service Second Call Defense is, and the kind of reassurance that it offers to shooters as they conceal carry.  Several people of late have signed up for the service upon my recommendation and they are enjoying the benefits.  Second Call Defense is a very respectable organization affiliated with the NRA Business Alliance and they do the little details very well.  Sometimes I think readers think I’m just a blogger who puts out material in a scandalous fashion at times locked in my basement complaining daily about the state of the world.  Rather, this blog site is only about 1% of my life and in the rest of it, I am a very productive person, both in my relationships with other people, and in business efforts.  So when you use my name to sign up for Second Call Defense, good things do happen to you.  Yesterday on a website I sometimes visit to talk to like-minded people came a testimonial that reminded me how new customers of Second Call Defense are learning for the first time how using my name can provide something to them that they didn’t think was possible in a good way:.

Posted by  $  Technocracy 4 hours, 7 minutes ago

I can confirm that you get something back using Rich’s name on your application.

I chose an annual plan and just got my materials yesterday. In with everything else was a check refunding me a month’s worth of the plan cost. So thank you again Rich / Overmanwarrior.

Reply | Mark as read | Best of… | Hide | Flag | Ignore | Permalink

https://www.galtsgulchonline.com/posts/562d66c1/second-call-defense-protect-yourself-if-youre-going-to-carry

2016 will be an exciting time for Second Call Defense and its members.  Below is some information describing pertinent news updates, and providing information necessary for concealed carry holders.  Second Call Defense is a very informative group and a wonderful ally to have around.  My membership card is one of the most valuable things I carry in my wallet. I never leave home without it.  It has become something I consider more important than a driver’s license.   One thing that is important to know listed in the following information is how to take your gun with you while flying.  Be sure to follow the instructions so that you can do so without causing a lot of debate at the airport.

Exciting Changes Coming

Second Call Defense will be unveiling a new website in less than two weeks, right before the new year. The new site will be more informative for members and non members alike, and it will be designed to work well on mobile devices and be much easier to read.

In addition, they’ll be simplifying the membership options and adding great new benefits. If you’re a current member, nothing will change. Your membership dues will stay the same. And you’ll even pick up some new benefits.

Plus, we’ll have a member-only area where members will have access to exclusive content.

Make sure to visit our website the last week of December to see the upgrades.

TSA rules for flying with guns and ammo

Everyone knows how much trouble you can get into if you walk into an airport or try to board a plane with a firearm. But did you know that many gun owners routinely take their guns and ammo with them when they travel by air?

The trick is simply to follow the rules outlined by the Transportation Security Administration:

You may transport unloaded firearms in a locked hard-sided container as checked baggage only. Declare the firearm to the airline when checking your bag at the ticket counter. The container must completely secure the firearm from being accessed. Locked cases that can be easily opened will not be accepted. Be aware that cases that are supplied when purchasing a firearm may not be appropriate for securing the firearm when flying.

Firearms

  • Comply with regulations on carrying firearms where you are traveling from and to, as laws vary by local, state and international governments.
  • Declare all firearms, ammunition and parts to the airline during the check-in process. Ask about limitations or fees that may apply.
  • Firearms must be unloaded and locked in a hard-sided container and transported as checked baggage only. Firearm parts, including firearms frames and receivers, must also be placed in checked baggage and are prohibited in carry-on baggage.
  • Replica firearms may be transported in checked baggage only.
  • Rifle scopes are permitted in carry-on and checked bags.
  • All firearms, ammunition and firearm parts, including firearm frames, receivers, clips and magazines are prohibited in carry-on baggage.

United States Code, Title 18, Part 1, Chapter 44, firearm definitions includes: any weapon (including a starter gun) which will, or is designed to, or may readily be converted to expel a projectile by the action of an explosive; the frame or receiver of any such weapon; any firearm muffler or firearm silencer; and any destructive device. As defined by 49 CFR 1540.5 a loaded firearm has a live round of ammunition, or any component thereof, in the chamber or cylinder or in a magazine inserted in the firearm.

Ammunition

Firearm magazines and ammunition clips, whether loaded or empty, must be securely boxed or included within a hard-sided case containing an unloaded firearm.
Small arms ammunition, including ammunition not exceeding .75 caliber for rifle or pistol and shotgun shells of any gauge, may be carried in the same hard-sided case as the firearm, as described in the packing guidelines above.

Newsflash for unarmed Americans: We gun owners don’t carry for you

by Jeff Knox

This is an editorial dealing with the difficult issue of whether gun owners should intervene to stop a crime that does not directly involve personal self defense. While Second Call Defense believes this can only be decided on a case-by-case basis, we also think the point of view expressed in this article makes sense for most people with average firearm and self defense skills and training. We touched on this issue in a previous post titled Should you use your gun to stop a crime?

Like many Americans, I frequently carry a gun. I’ve done so for over 30 years without ever laying hand to it in need. Professor John Lott of the Crime Prevention Research Center reports that some 12.8 million people, over 5.2 percent of the adult U.S. population, are licensed to carry a concealed handgun. In addition to concealed carry license holders in all 50 states, seven states require no permit at all for concealed carry, and 40 states have few restrictions on carrying as long as the gun is visible.

On top of that, as I have reported recently, there appears to be a growing trend among people who routinely carry a firearm to also routinely ignore signs that tell them they can’t. It is a growing form of civil disobedience that puts no one at increased risk of death or injury. As the number of concealed carriers grows, violent crime continues to fall. This doesn’t prove that more guns equals less crime, but it irrefutably proves that more guns do not equate to more crime.

Unless you live in one of the extremely restrictive states like New York, New Jersey, or Massachusetts, any time you are on the street or anywhere that does not have controlled access, with metal detectors and bag searches, etc., there is a fairly high probability that someone nearby is legally carrying a gun. But they are not carrying that gun to protect you.

A popular essay from Lt. Col. Dave Grossman divided humans into three categories: “Sheep,” “Wolves,” and “Sheepdogs.” I would suggest that Lt. Col. Grossman left out an important fourth category: “Porcupines.”

My wife is neither “sheep” nor “sheepdog,” and she certainly is no “wolf.” She is a “porcupine,” harmless and docile if left alone, but ferocious and dangerous if threatened – even more so if her progeny are threatened. She would choose flight over fight every time, if flight is a viable option. But if flight is not an option, she has the tools, training and mindset to win the fight.

Our nation’s convoluted laws on self-defense and liability also force all but the most dedicated “sheepdogs” into the role of “porcupine” as well, making “porcupines” the most prevalent variety of armed citizen. We won’t passively stand by while the wolves have their way with us or our families, but neither can we take responsibility for protecting the “sheep” from the “wolves.”

Certainly, most people who carry would take action to help someone in need if there was an opportunity to do so and there was no obvious alternative – and while many of us would probably prefer to characterize ourselves as “sheepdogs” rather than “porcupines,” the reality is that protecting you, your spouse, and your children is your responsibility, not ours. You should also be aware that protection of you and your family is not the responsibility of the police, either. The courts have conclusively ruled that the police have a duty to protect only the public at large, not individuals.

Those of us who have a natural inclination toward being “sheepdogs” have some pretty significant disincentives to acting on those inclinations. Not only is it physically dangerous to intervene in a violent situation, it is a legal minefield that in most cases must be navigated in a matter of seconds. While laws and jurisprudence protect police from prosecution and civil liability, and while some protections exist for individuals acting in defense of themselves and their families, there are few shields for someone acting on behalf of a stranger. Armed citizens who intervene in situations where they or their families are not in imminent danger place themselves at significant risk of prosecution and civil penalties.

We also tend to be keenly aware of the fact that any error involving a firearm can be devastating and permanent. Violent encounters usually happen quickly, and they can be very confusing. It’s not always clear who is the “good guy” and who is the “bad guy.” Anyone who has ever been through a quality personal defense course has been cautioned to avoid deploying a firearm or engaging an aggressor unless there is no other alternative.

In any shooting situation, there are two key problems to deal with. Problem One is survival. Problem Two is dealing with the legal and emotional fallout from solving Problem One. Ending a life can be emotionally devastating, and the legal consequences can destroy bank accounts and quality of life as surely as being gravely wounded.

For most of us, there are no legal repercussions for running away. In the real world, this means flight is better than fight. Our training, and often the law, dictates that if we’re enjoying a movie when a homicidal lunatic starts shooting people on the other side of the theater, our first responsibility is to get out and away, especially if our family is with us. If we’re in a college class and we hear gunfire from the next building or a classroom down the hall, we, just like our unarmed classmates or students, should evacuate or “shelter in place,” not head toward the gunfire.

This approach is galling to many gun owners, especially those of us with a natural inclination toward being “sheepdogs.” We would rather fight than run. We would rather put ourselves at risk than allow evil to go unchecked. But regardless of the level of training and skill a person has, the multiple layers of risk that are inherent in any shooting situation stack the deck against playing the hero unless there is no other alternative.

Both sides of the debate over bearing arms have a tendency to relegate armed citizens to the role of “sheepdog,” but that is a role the law and prudence won’t let us accept, though some of us will try despite the obstacles. For the most part, we are “porcupines.” We are armed for defense of ourselves and our families, not for you and yours. In a worst-case scenario, one of us might be present and save your life in defending our own, but don’t count on it. We don’t carry for you.

©2015 The Firearms Coalition, all rights reserved. Reprinting, posting, and distributing permitted with inclusion of this copyright statement. www.FirearmsCoalition.org.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

From all of us at Second Call Defense, we wish you and your loved ones a blessed holiday season. Stay safe and remember, even during the holidays, day and night, we are standing by to help you the moment you call our Emergency Legal Hotline.

Rich “Cliffhanger” Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

https://www.facebook.com/AlliancetoSavetheStarWarsLegendsExpandedUniverse

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

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

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

The prequels were a LOT better.

Rich “Cliffhanger” Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

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