Tag: quantum mechanics

Yes, the Stock Market is Breaking Records because of Trump: A lesson on market forces

I continue to be amazed at the lack of knowledge that most people have. I mean most major malls have bookstores where people can buy and read books. The internet has voluminous amounts of information to sift through and we spend fortunes to send people through a public education system—yet still people are generally pretty stupid. It is baffling to me that they cannot make the direct correlation between the increase of the stock market gains and the Trump presidency—and that they don’t understand how 4 trillion dollars of extra investments into the American economy directly benefit every single person in our nation. Let me provide a little context of how much money that is—Russia, that country that supposedly has so much power over our elections has a GDP of 1.2 trillion dollars. Japan—one of the great economies of the world is only at 4.9 trillion. Canada has only 1.5 trillion in GDP and Germany is at 3.4 trillion dollars. When we talk about the gains in the stock market—specifically the Dow Jones average—since Donald Trump was elected we are seeing an infusion of wealth invested into our economy that exceeds most of the countries in the developed world. That is a significant achievement all by itself.

The next thing people wonder is whether or not Trump deserves any credit for it. Well, of course he does. Who else? If you do a little research into the history of stocks and investments you can clearly see a pattern for which the mob of buyers of stocks use to make their decisions. What investors love is optimism and deregulation and Trump has given them both right from the start of his election and that has caused investors to pour their money into opportunities created purely on sanguinity. It’s not very complicated and it certainly isn’t a mystery. Donald Trump gets the credit for the increases in the market based on his promise to get government out of the pockets of the movers and shakers and that has unleashed vast amounts of wealth that had been sitting around doing nothing. That’s how powerful optimism is and how limiting governments are on the happiness, and productivity of their citizens.

Venezuela is in trouble because they adopted socialism and the state runs everything leaving their markets overregulated and underperforming. They have great oil reserves that depended on artificially high prices to survive in a global economy. Once competition was once again opened up driving down the price of barrels of oil the socialist country couldn’t survive because they had provided no reason for any investors to bring money to their country. People with money are productive assets in a global economy because they have done things to earn that money. They aren’t villains as socialists and communists see them. Wealthy people are assets. Even politicians must admit as much because they need the money of wealthy people to run their campaigns. Without wealthy people any society is essentially an armpit of derelict behavior. The more wealthy people a society has—the higher quality that society will be. Venezuela made it so that wealthy people left and prevented more wealth from investing in their country leaving the people there struggling even to find a bar of soap to clean themselves with.

Wealth is created when something has a perceived value. For something to have such a value there must be a market demand for whatever that value represents—such as gold, cars, or old toys and cloths. EBay and Amazon.com can provide the proof of how joining market forces together can create wealth that wasn’t there before. Just by joining the consumer with a supplier those two companies have tremendously increased market value within America’s GDP. If there were some way in Zimbabwe to join together two villages which might otherwise be 30 miles apart so that they could sell rocks and animal bones to each other more easily, they would see an uptick in their economy as well. In places where individuals are freely able to exchange what they have to those who want it, you will see a more productive, and wealthy nation where the standard of living is much higher than places where personal freedoms are more tightly monitored.

This is why the communists of our present time have all put on the mask of the environmental movement because that way they could hide their hatred of production behind a well-intentioned cause—such as saving the planet. They have entirely made up the facts and figures. The government in the United States and around Europe who naturally always want more control use their power to issue grant money to scientific institutions who will make up phony global warming numbers to invoke their communist religion on the masses hoping ultimately to slow down production in develop countries so that undeveloped arm pit countries around the world can be propped up—the way Venezuela was. But all that value Venezuela had off oil money was artificially created by regulation—it wasn’t real—it was built off a lack of supply to meet a heavy demand.

Trump signed immediately legislation which put the Keystone Pipeline directly into use—at least the parts that could be. Trump immediately removed the federal restrictions so that local fights could hash out the details which had been the biggest barrier to implementing that very power delivery method of oil from Canada to the reserves along the Gulf of Mexico. Just that action alone sent the prices of oil down which was great for all market driven economies. While it might not have been great for Venezuela who depended on high prices to sustain their socialist government, oil is just one factor in a free economy. Cheap transportation can do much more to create many more aspects of wealth in any economy so it is far more important to a developing world to have access to cheap fuel and oil so that other markets can use transportation to develop new economic advances.

All Trump had to do to increase the stock market was promise optimism. The numbers are off lately from the record highs we had been seeing because of the obvious stand-off and war with North Korea. That creates market insecurity and makes people hang on to their money. If you really get to the gist of why so many senators have been coming out against Trump’s “optimism” its because they need the chaos of limitation to justify their do-nothing approach to everything productive. They, like Venezuela, need artificial regulations to justify their power. A free market means fewer people need government to redistribute wealth—and even Republicans have gotten used to that game. So long as people have no other options, their do-nothing game of pandering to lobbyists and getting rich off the results could continue. But Trump has not only deregulated the market and inspired great wealth which is reshaping our country as we speak—but he’s exposed those politicians with a value he has brought to politics that has redefined everything. So yes, they don’t like him. Just like Venezuela hates free and open markets. When people are allowed to do what they want and get what they need, all of society advances. But when they are limited and regulated society stagnates. All Trump did to increase the markets was show investors that he was willing to free them—and it is all just as simple as that. Just imagine what might happen if we really did have a free markets and politics were removed from the process altogether. Everyone could be unbelievably wealthy—everywhere in the world. If only……………………..

Rich Hoffman

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An Authentic Han Solo Costume: The miracle of Amazon.com amid changing industries–and people

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Everyone knows I’m a huge Star Wars fan—which I view differently from the geeky other types of entertainment exhibitions of public support.  When I see the name Star Wars and participate in its products in whatever form, it evokes in me an optimism that is very specific to it that I am very fond of.  That’s why my favorite character within Star Wars is Han Solo, because he is the most optimistic character perhaps ever created for film.  Nothing is impossible for Han Solo—he’ll try anything under any circumstances because his personality is such that he figures his confidence and sheer will can get him through anything.  He is the Donald Trump of science fiction and I’ve felt that way about that character for more than forty years now.  On more than a few occasions I’ve dressed up as Han Solo for Halloween events, or other science fiction endeavors, conventions, watch parties, literary events at book stores—just various festive gatherings that celebrate costuming and character reverence—but I’ve never had any kind of official Han Solo clothing. I would just piece together whatever I could find that sort of looked like the popular smuggler from the Star Wars series and go from there. But my five-year old grandson is about to have a big birthday party marking that invisible line of being a toddler to a genuine little boy fully aware of the world around him with the memories that now matter—and my daughters are fashioning it to Star Wars.  As I’ve reported before also, these parties my kids do for their kids are not just little events—they go all out in creating a very mythic experience that is almost a theme park occurrence and due to their passion for Star Wars they are going all out.  That meant that of course I had to dress up as Han Solo—but this time I wanted to do it for real—as real as possible because of the effort my kids were putting into this party and the eventual impact it would have on the youth in my family attending this thing.  So I turned to Amazon.com to see what was out there and was stunned by a world I discovered.

My mom made me a little vest like Han Solo’s when I was in the fifth grade and I sort of kept it all these years even though it was way too small for me.  But even a few years ago if you wanted something that looked like a Star Wars character and bought a costume from a place like Party City it always came out looking far from authentic.  If you wanted something that looked like the clothing in the movie you had to make it.  Back when my kids were little we went to a Star Wars Celebration in Indianapolis and my wife made Jedi robes for my girls and their friends so they could dress up at that convention which occurred right before the movie Revenge of the SIth.  The internet at that time had some support—you could get directions from people who built their own costumes but there weren’t suppliers carrying things like that on the shelf.  Even though Star Wars was popular there just wasn’t any money in it for costumers to make costumes of all those characters in the movies  for a public of all shapes and sizes.  The scope of that work was unrealistic. For Han Solo specifically his outfit looks pretty simple yet is really quite complex.  For instance, his vest from A New Hope has a series of very complicated pockets positioned just right—and there is nothing like that off the rack at Wal-Mart or Kholes.  Han Solo’s pants don’t have pockets and have a very specific pin stripe down the side of them which disappears into knee-high boots that are meant to put the swash in the buckle for the very dashing character. The shirt under the vest isn’t just a white button-up but has a very unique collar and v-nick style that has to fit just right through the shoulders to give the correct effect.  Then there is the gun belt which is a thing all its own.  So I went looking for these things and I started with the Star Wars Costume exhibit at the Cincinnati Museum Center—which has been running all summer and will end around the beginning of October before moving on to the next city.  It’s a good exhibit, most of which I’ve seen before at the Smithsonian, but for my quest it served its purpose.  I was able to get right up to the Han Solo costume and look at things up close so that I could duplicate it authentically.  If I couldn’t find the items online, my wife was willing to build them from scratch so we went and took lots of pictures.

To my shook as I started looking now, in 2017 for these very specific Han Solo costume pieces for this epic party my kids were having I discovered that I was able to buy everything at Amazon.com relatively inexpensively.  For instance the great Han Solo vest that I figured was the most important part of the costume was just under forty dollars from an outfit in China.  I skeptically ordered it expecting it to arrive in a very flawed condition.  I expected something that looked like a typical Party City costume that smelled like plastic and rubber.  But what came to my front door was an exact replica of the Han Solo vest from A New Hope made out of material that was like that of tactical gear for a SWAT team.   It was a very good garment that was legitimate and it fit well the moment I put it on.  I was stunned by the quality of it.  I then proceeded to order the official shirt, the pants, the boots and the gun belt which as of this writing hasn’t yet arrived, but everything else has and again I was stunned by the authenticity of each item.

At different points in my life I had looked for these things and nobody carried them—as I said, everything had to be made by hand.  What’s unique about now from then—and by then I mean like six months ago—is that due to all the COSPLAY that goes on at these Comic Con conventions and now that Disney World is building these amusement parks with Star Wars lands within them there is this big COSPLAY movement that has emerged—where people dress up as characters from their favorite movies to delve into the mythology of these various sci-fi events—and out of nowhere there are all these suppliers who are making these costumes to meet the growing demand.  It’s a whole industry of itself that has virtually arrived out of nowhere.  I am aware of some of it because I find Comic Cons interesting as well as Gen Cons and other conventions.  I also noticed that the plans for the new Star Wars resort coming to Disney World is seeking to tap into this emerging market with a Fantasy Island style of Star Wars experience where they encourage people to show up dressed for the part.   Obviously Disney knew all about this culture and were building their business plans around it.  I only discovered it because of my grandson’s birthday party—but this was big business!

As I had ordered everything from my home computer and each item arrived one by one to my doorstep without having to go anywhere to search for it I became more and more impressed.  Even more shocking was that everything fit nicely, I didn’t have to send anything back.  Just by reading some of the reviews I was able to size myself accordingly with no trouble at all.  I figured that the risk was low because if the stuff showed up and was junky I figured my five-year old grandson would forgive me.  He’d appreciate the effort and wouldn’t get hung up on the details—even though he is a very smart little kid.  He surprises me what he notices.  He’s already playing the video game Battlefront very well which is about two years before I thought he would.  He plays online against other people who are very good—and he’s effective.  He knows all the different types of weapons that can be used, how to outfit each character and how to manage the Star Cards which give unique abilities to tactical engagements.  So if something wasn’t right, he’d notice. But after getting the parts of my Han Solo costume together it was obvious that I had nothing to worry about.  As far as this party was concerned, except for my hairline, the outfit looks just like it would if it was on the actual movie set.  That’s pretty stunning for something that was so easily ordered on Amazon.com.

This is all just another example of how imagination is fueling an entirely new industry and due to the excessive and efficient reach of Amazon.com they were able to connect me to suppliers around the world where I could get a very specific items from a forty-year old movie to my doorstep within two weeks.  And the quality wasn’t junky but meant to impress even under the scrutiny of the most ardent film geek.   In some cases my outfit is better than the movie original on display at the Cincinnati Museum Center.  Those costumes were meant for just a few months of filming, these for purchase were meant to last much longer and under the judgment of live audiences.  Needless to say, which I have before, we are seeing something new and hopeful from these modern movie enthusiasts which starts with a mythology in the movie theater and extends into real life—what Disney is doing down at their theme parks is tapping into the public need to play out their fantasies and is an expansion of imagination that is very specific to our species as human beings.  The need to personify a fantasy experience has deep psychological roots that go far beyond primal necessity.   I think the end result is a very positive one that is headed toward an unknown climax.  I know I love to see the imaginations of so many people at work to make something like all this possible—but it surprised even me at the extent of it all. And the entity most responsible for the success of this new industry was Amazon.com.  They were the middle ground players that connected need with supply and allowed both to get what they wanted at the best price and quality.  If they can do that with a simple costume from Star Wars, just think what they can do with real necessities.  We are living in a whole new world.

Rich Hoffman

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A Warning to the Deep State: Through peace or war–the swamp is getting drained

In regard to the Bob Mueller investigation of the Trump family all in the name of trying to find some kind of dirt that might end the presidency, a few things need to be made aware.  I’m not speaking for everyone, but I’m sure everyone of any sane mind is pretty much thinking the same thing.  This is kind of a note to the swamp so that they can know the law of the land—because I really don’t think they understand.  My support of Donald Trump was a last-ditch effort at saving our American republic without having to resort to violence and bloodshed.  Prior to the election I was actually planning to put together a militia group to impose an actual rebellion—a civil war.  Lucky for the world, Donald Trump is doing a fantastic job and if everyone would just shut their mouths and enjoy life a little bit, we could all have a prosperous life.  But, there isn’t any going back to the way things were.  A prosecution of Donald Trump on some made-up charges just to sag down his presidency with distractions won’t preserve the looting that has been going on for 200 years in the swamp.  That reality is something that people on the other side need to realize.

Saying that people might wonder, “oh no, you can’t say such things—they’ll come after you too.”  Look, I know the NSA, the CIA, the FBI and many other organizations have their share of idiots in them who watch everything I do and have plugged everything I have ever said and written into a computer to get a tactical readout looking for some weaknesses to expose.  I have dealt with threats of every kind before, so I have a good idea of what to expect—and I’m not worried.  I’m a pretty smart guy who has some well-defined skills.  Let me rephrase that, I’m a very smart guy—not trying to sound pompous, but at this point in my life nobody or organization is going to out think me unless I purposely let them think so for some strategic objective—so there isn’t anything for me to worry about from the knuckle draggers in these government swamp positions.  They could come with force and I can deal with it.  They can come with passive-aggressive legal mumble jumbo—and I can deal with that too.  I know that, they know that through their analysis of data collection—so we are all waiting to see how things turn out here—and they are a lot more worried than I am about that potential prospect.

Violence is only necessary if we can prove that we are not a nation of laws. For instance, I was supportive of the idea of moving on from prosecuting Hillary Clinton and even Barack Obama until the ridiculous criteria was established in attacking Donald Trump.  Given that reality if the same rules were then applied to Democrats and the swamp of the Beltway, then there should be many prosecutions of the characters surrounding Clinton—but we know that’s not going to happen because we are dealing with a very archaic aristocracy of political culture that is using the power of government to break the law and preserve a dangerous power grab.  If the people of this nation are not protected by laws from such things then they must restore that justice with force.

I actually prepared for this possibility many years ago with written work, and with the voluminous work on this blog site to further reiterate my testimony.  If I were to be required to use my leadership skills and physical abilities to preserve the American republic from domestic enemies—and in the aftermath the courts would seek a prosecution of me—I have written two novels outlining my testimony for context.  My first novel, The Symposium of Justice was my way of displaying the need for action against tyranny—which our Beltway swamp in Washington D.C. is clearly obsessed with.  To fight back against them is one thing, but my novel the Symposium would be part of my testimony as a character witness to explain the needed actions to a potential jury.  Secondly, my novel The Tail of the Dragon further refines that point in defining justice between the needs of the individual and the needs of a collective mass.  With me there won’t be some nutty case like there was in Ruby Ridge, or in Waco—where government propaganda would be successful in making me out to be some lunatic.  Quite the contrary—I’ve laid out my case quite clearly and am convinced that a jury of my peers would be extremely sympathetic.  Those works are out there and would be a part of any case involving me in any way.  As I’ve said before, I’ve been to court so many times—I know how things work—and I’m prepared.

Since Trump has been elected the villains of the world have been beaten back and are on their heels.  Violence in inner cities is going down dramatically and the violent gangs associated with the drug culture are on their way in retreat.  That’s all very encouraging as I would hope that peace and prosperity could find everyone’s home in America so people could live and thrive under the laws of the land.  But clearly under people like Obama and Clinton the law was used to protect them as they committed crimes to preserve their political philosophy and a lot of people did get hurt, and killed.  Donald Trump was elected to put a stop to that kind of thing and so far it has been working.  I couldn’t be more proud to have a president like Trump in the White House.   He hasn’t been in office long enough to justify a grand jury investigation into anything in his life—and the fact that there is says everything about the hypocritical nature of this endeavor.

In the context of the grand jury investigation into Trump led by Robert Mueller and the Deep State swamp desperate to hold onto power with their constant information leaks which Jeff Sessions addressed as currently under investigation —I am as prepared today to lead a civil war against that Deep State as I was the day of the Election in 2016—which was historic.  I was relieved after that election that such a task might be avoided and many lives saved in the process, and I still am.  I don’t think this Deep State attack will amount to anything.  But I do want those idiots to know that if they would be successful, that things only get worse for them.  I will personally guarantee it.

I know I’m not alone in this, there are obviously millions of people who think the same way—as Trump’s West Virginia rally displayed quite clearly.  But I can only speak for myself.  The swamp is going to be beaten any way possible.  We are going to drain it and the insurgents that make it up are domestic enemies within America that must be defeated so to preserve our Constitution.   I have watched the flow of the law for years and witnessed how it has been used as a weapon of the Deep State to further their agenda—most specifically the way the IRS targets enemies of the State behind legal definitions while those same standards cannot be applied to the wrongdoers in the government—such as Lois Lerner and many other IRS employees.  We are not going back to that—and if I don’t have a president who can do such things legally through the election process, then there is no choice but to use force to take back our country from these malicious fools.  It’s as simple as that.   The arrogance that is driving the Mueller investigation is clearly corrupt and it’s not going to be accepted—certainly not by me—and I’m not the kind of person who makes threats loosely.

Rich Hoffman

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The Not So “Magnificent Seven”: Hollywood can’t make westerns anymore because everything is a Clinton campaign ad

If you ever wanted evidence of a declining culture and the severe impact that liberalism has had on Hollywood specifically, then just watch the newest remake of The Magnificent Seven.  The 2016 version was just God-awful, pathetically put together.  It was a disaster of a movie that shamefully called itself a western.  Clearly the writers, director and production staff had no idea what a western was when they cast Chris Pratt and Denzel Washington in the remake of the 1960s classic, because the film wasn’t even watchable.  I struggled through it because as a western I felt I needed to see it for cultural reasons but I will have to say that I was glad to see the end credits indicating that the movie was over because it was a disaster of a film.  The original film stared Yul Brenner and Steve McQueen along with several other popular actors from the period.  But that movie was a remake of the 1954 film The  Seven Samurai directed by the great Japanese director Akira Kurosawa.  Those classic films were good—not my favorite by any means because everyone pretty much dies during their big standoff with the villains at the end, but at least you could appreciate the valor. In this modern version all that valor is gone and all you end up with is an anti-capitalists message and a bunch of characters that are so unlikable that you are happy when they finally do die.  If you plot a line of Hollywood quality from The Magnificent Seven in 1960 to this modern update in 2016 counting the 1985 film Silverado by Lawrence Kasdan (another remake) you can clearly see a declining culture over time.  There’s no question about it.

One of the reasons Star Wars has held up over time is because of the influence of Akira Kurosawa in it.  The original Star Wars film was based on the Kurosawa film The Hidden Fortress. (1958)  In those old Kurosawa films character was a defining trait and the valor of combat was a feature of the underlining plot.  Several American filmmakers found influence with Kurosawa and essentially turned those plots from samurai sword culture to six guns.  In the case of Star Wars it was both, samurai swords became light sabers represented by Luke Skywalker and Han Solo represented the American western’s love of guns as the weapon of choice and so long as that style of filmmaking complete with human valor stayed as the centerpiece of the stories, they continue to endure.   All that is very well known, particularly among film makers and film school students—so I would have expected when the production for The Magnificent Seven started in 2014 and 2015 that the entire crew would have known how to make a movie—after all, they had access to all the best stuff from film hardware, budgets, to stunts.  They had much more to work with than old Akira Kurosawa did back in Japan when those old samurai films were first being filmed.

I knew the film was in trouble almost from the very beginning when the villain of the modern story went on an anti-capitalist—anti-God rant that was completely out of context with the kind of story westerns are known for.  It was a modern political speech that made it impossible to accept Denzel Washington as a suitable replacement for the old Yul Brenner character. There was a way to put a black actor in that role and still have a good movie—but these idiots missed the point completely focusing way too much on the racism and not nearly enough on the character itself.  Who cares if the guy was black because the character was so unlikable?  The filmmakers were entirely too focused on the progressive trends of our modern society and selling those trends to the public than in making a classic western filled with American values.  It simply went through the motions, put cowboy hats on people and called it a western with the type of story that might as well have been a campaign ad for Hillary Clinton.  And obviously, she lost the election that took place just a few months after the September release of the 2016 version of The Magnificent Seven. So the studio found itself on the losing side of philosophy—and the movie just fell flat.

I personally love westerns and it is a real tragedy that Hollywood no longer knows how to make them.  When Disney tried to make a remake of The Lone Ranger—which I thought was good, they even missed the main point—that westerns are about values—not the action.  Western gun fights mean nothing unless the characters in them exhibit a notable valor that justifies the conflict.  But modern filmmakers just don’t get it—and that is astonishing considering all the study of great films that go on to this day.  With the resources that film schools have to study this situation you’d think they’d get it, but they don’t.  That is essentially why Hollywood is failing.  You can’t attack the essential premise of American values and expect a western to work.  Westerns are not about the hats and the guns—but rather the values for which those things represent.

Needless to say I expected a lot more.  While The Magnificent Seven was filming Chris Pratt was in talks to be the next Indiana Jones so I figured that these filmmakers would utilize the star power of the young actor to make a really special western for modern audiences.  No.  All they could manage to do was create some progressive piece of crap that only people who supported Hillary Clinton for president could understand—those weird liberal types with that strange skin, downturned mouths and empty eyes who made up her supporters.   They are not like most people, the liberals who supported Hillary Clinton are physical manifestations of their rotten philosophy and it actually shows up in their molecular make-up.  There just aren’t enough of those people to support a modern western.  People who like westerns are not the kind of people who voted for Hillary Clinton so these film studios are missing the point.  I have no doubt that westerns have a place in modern cinema.  I’m sure Clint Eastwood could still make a good western because it takes a filmmaker who understands the genre.  But these skinny pants directors of this modern age have no idea what a western is.  They can watch them, and try to duplicate them, but they just don’t get it.

And that brings us to the new Han Solo film that just brought Ron Howard in with just three weeks of production left on the schedule.  From the very beginning Kathy Kennedy made it clear that this Star Wars film was to be inspired by Fredric Remington and the Phil Lord and Christopher Miller directors just weren’t getting it—due to their impulsive jokes for which they are known.  She had to go to Ron Howard who has roots on Happy Days and the Andy Griffin Show to get a director who could get their mind around this modern western set in space.  I hope it works out because honestly we are a culture desperately in need of westerns once again produced for modern audiences.  It doesn’t matter if its horses or space ships the values of westerns are about people and valor, not just stunts and guns.  Akira Kurosawa would have never done so well with his samurai films if he had just had sword fights.  It was his characters that carried his films and inspired many of the great westerns that came out during the 1950s and 1960s.  Hopefully Hollywood will learn from these mistakes—but obviously when it came to The Magnificent Seven, their efforts were not so magnificent—but rather pathetic.

Rich Hoffman

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The Loser John McCain: We need 11 seats in the Senate for 2018

John McCain has to go.  Obviously suffering from brain damage due to the tumor he’s carrying around in his head, the loser was the deciding no vote on defeating the still very liberal version of the skinny repeal of Obamacare.  He and the two RINO chicks, Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski showed themselves to essentially be Democrats.  There is not a Republican majority in the Senate as RINOs don’t count toward a strategic holding.  Those three people are just absolutely shameful in what they’ve done and the fate of what happens next will be the result of their error.

We used to have pretty good healthcare before these idiots stuck their noses in it and screwed it all up.  But with the costs of doing business today within the medical industry we have fewer doctors than ever-moving into the field giving us all fewer choices which ultimately result in skyrocketing costs down the road.  People like McCain have taken it for granted that the health care industry would always be there for us and they have grossly miscalculated the abuse that goes on in Medicaid—where the bottom percentages of healthy conditioned people overuse the system driving up the costs.  Those people tend to be poor, and most of the time they are poor for a reason.  They either smoke too much, drink too much or they are inherently lazy people who have in their minds that wealth is created by winning a lottery ticket from the local convenient store.  Rather than encouraging these people to do better and to pull up their boot straps to live better lives and maintain better health McCain and his liberal counterparts seek to weaken them further by pouring government looted service directly into their mouths making them perpetually reliant on the government liberals’ control.

McCain has been screwing up for many years.  The worst thing he’s done was lose an election to Barack Obama.  It is hard to believe that John McCain was the Republican nominee for president of the United States back in 2008.  I mean that was our choice!   We had McCain to pick from or Obama.  A liberal or a socialist.  It should then come as no surprise that within only eight years of that fate deciding election that ushered in the Obama regime which presented us with this Obamacare mess ,that we now have Trump in the White House.  But obviously, we need more reform in the House and Senate.  We need more conservatives.  McCain certainly isn’t one.

The two chicks who failed the Republicans aren’t off the hook. But they were never considered Republicans—and were from the beginning RINOs that we knew couldn’t be counted on.  But McCain actually ran for president of the Party.  On such a crucial vote it was expected of him to at least provide leadership.  Instead, he voted to essentially destroy the remaining options that we have in the medical industry.  Yes, it will implode, as it is well on a trajectory to do.  But it didn’t need to.  All this was unavoidable.

Trump’s reaction was the right one.  He cheered on a repeal of Obamacare to fulfill a campaign promise.  Many of us for a long time have sought freedom from the Obamacare imposition.  In Ohio we passed a Healthcare Freedom Amendment but Governor Kasich who is of the same kind of liberal mind as John McCain expanded Medicaid, went against the people who elected him and claimed that Jesus told him to do it.  A few years ago people like Kasich were considered stalwart Republicans but obviously due to their actions the definitions have changed dramatically.  Trump’s answer to the McCain mess was to just let Obamacare implode and out of the ashes we’ll rebuild—which is now what’s going to happen.

Healthcare is too expensive.  It costs too much to have because the options are so limited.  Government has stuck its nose into the lives of all of us under the banner of “helping the poor” with the subtle tactic of making more people spend most of their money not on expanding the economy with home purchases and new cars, but in paying doctors to keep them sick and in a dire state.  As healthcare is now, that’s what we have—and it’s absolutely pathetic.

We are still one of those families who have full cable as well as Netflix accounts and Amazon Prime.  We carry in our household all those options because I like having multiple opportunities to select my entertainment.  If I want to watch professional football, I can.  If I want to watch the news, I can.  If I want to watch CSPAN from my garage all weekend, I can.  But it costs a lot of money—especially for cable because there just aren’t enough entertainment providers.  The infrastructure for the cable system is usually maintained by one company, maybe two if you’re lucky and they can essentially charge what they want for service.  It basically costs me $200 dollars a month just for cable now where it used to cost around $45 dollars.  The costs went up as there were fewer and fewer options, just like healthcare.

I don’t go to the doctor, it costs too much money and it takes too much time.  I’d go if it were not so expensive and took less time—and if they weren’t trying to always pump you up with drugs.  Stupid people don’t know any better and they blindly take the advice of some doctor padding their pockets with all this government intrusion to refer patients to their local pharmacy where they get addicted to prescription medicine.  If you want to trace the opiate crises to a single villain look to the medical industry where they prescribed people on pain killers for every little ailment rather than actually treating the condition—and that’s how so many people became addicted which persists to this day.  That culture of being perpetually sick and dumping all our money into a terrible government-run health care system has destroyed so many lives and people like McCain beat on their chest claiming to be trying to help the poor.  They are making more people poor by supporting Obamacare—and they are supporting making more people sick to support the struggling industry so their pharmaceutical lobby can cover their margins—which is what all this is really about.

I mentioned the cable bill crises, where many people are cutting the cord to that industry which is sinking channels like ESPN and many others.  Most people have to make a choice between health care and their entertainment and if they are sick—obviously the quality of their life is in decline not only from poor health, but in loss of enjoyment of life. They have less money to pay for things like cable, vacations, or even new cloths and there just isn’t any reason to have these problems in America due to artificial inflation of the health care industry due to government tampering.  John McCain isn’t protecting the American people, or even the poor.  He’s protecting the pharmaceutical lobby—make no mistake about it—and due to that terrible decision, he is destroying an industry and keeping countless people sick, or robbing them of their expendable income just to stay alive.

So don’t forget who did this and make sure to get rid of them in the next election.  Obviously there is not a Republican majority in the Senate.  Until we get rid of people like John McCain and the two hippie chicks from Maine and Alaska we won’t be able to get much of anything done on Capitol Hill legislatively.  And it doesn’t stop with them.  Republicans need at least 11 seats in the Senate by good hard-core principled Republicans in 2018 so we might as well get started on finding those people.  As healthcare spirals down the drain John McCain and his liberal buddies need to go down with it.  Meanwhile the need for votes to pass proper legislation will not go away and that needs to be where the focus resides.  Americans should not have to pay so much for basic healthcare.  We need competition to drive down the costs so that we can spend our money on other things that improve our quality of living.  John McCain wants to take money from us and give it to the poor so that they can stay crippled and dependent and make his pharmaceutical friends wealthy off our misery.  And that has to stop starting with pushing the RINOs out of the Senate.

Rich Hoffman

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There Are a Lot of Dead Birds Today: The brilliance of Trump’s strategies

Who wants to be on the front lines of combat with some dude who wants to wear a dress? Or spends their time in R&R doing their nails?  This whole notion of putting sexual predilections into the military together to fight on the front lines has been pure insanity.  What foreign force will respect troops dressed like Bruce Jenner—prepared for a crazy night on Duval Street rather than ripping off the heads of the enemy and sticking it on a pike with a nice American flag sticking out of the forehead?  War is not a game and neither is the military and sexual preferences have no place in it.  You can’t mix men and women and not expect some monkey business and you certainly can’t include people who don’t know what sex they are and put them in a battlefield scenario—and expect success.  Trump was right to make things clear.  Trump is in charge of the military and he has the right and obligation to set things right, and he did.

Of course the progressives have always wanted to weaken the American military because their goal has always been to bring down our borders, to remove our sovereignty and diminish our global sales pitch for capitalism so that a central government led by the United Nations would then run all the countries of the world. One way they planned to execute this task was to get Americans involved in every war possible so that the world would push back and refuse the help of the United States—killing our people and using the negative public relations to further hamper our involvement in places rife with discontent—like Syria, the Middle East in general, all of South America, Mexico, Asia, Africa, all of Europe—virtually everywhere.  Progressives have sought global collapse created by chaos which they planted, then they wanted to be the ones to offer a solution of leadership.  It is essentially the exact same plan they had with our American healthcare system.  Load it with top-heavy costs, collapse it with impracticality, and then resurrect it with a single payer system.  It’s the progressive playbook and the whole nonsense of putting a bunch of he/she’s in the military was meant to destroy it as an institution.  It was never about equality, it was always about destroying the American military with even more bureaucracy and the essence of the fighting spirit it takes to maintain such a role.

When Trump said on the campaign trail that he would support the LGBTQRSTUV community he wasn’t talking about destroying things just to show fairness to specific groups. It’s one thing to protect people like Boy George from being beaten the hell out of on a public street for looking like a freak, it’s quite another to give him a machine gun and stick him on the front lines in North Korea to force them to the negotiating table of nuclear disarmament.  American forces need to be lean, mean, fighting machines meant to evoke fear and compliance—not to attend dance parties and smoke pot.  Sex should not be a part of military culture in any way.  When asking people to put their lives on the line we should not also ask them to be politically correct.  Those two things just are not compatible.

Then of course as there always is in good strategy multiple achievements to reap from such an action as Trump conducted.   The liberal people who have been hammering Trump for months with phony scandals and terrible press really care about this LBGTQ crap—and Trump took a punch at it likely on purpose.  Doing so not only builds the morale of the troops, but it really pissed off the liberals in the media and that’s what they get.  Trump tried to be a nice guy and be inclusive.  Since it didn’t work why not just do the right thing and piss everyone off?  The left pushed, and pushed and pushed and once all these investigations drug in Trump’s family into the mess he fired back starting with this LGBTQ issue.  Why try to work with the other side if they are just going to spit in your eye?  They did it to themselves and guess what, the media spent the next two days outraged over the issue and covered pretty much only that while the Senate worked on healthcare legislation and Jeff Sessions started the crackdown on leakers in our intelligence branches.  A good strategist knows how to kill many birds with one stone, and Donald Trump is a great strategist.  There are a lot of dead birds today.

I’d go so far to say that when Trump speaks he deliberately tries to get people to underestimate him.  The guy is very intelligent; you can tell that by reading his many best-selling books.  He has deep introspection on a situation and is magnificently observant.  I would go as far to say that everything he does is strategy and he’s great at it and many people are being played who don’t even know it yet—in the Republican Party, on the Democratic side of the political spectrum and in the media.  I think if the media had been nicer to Trump—he might have let the LGBTQ issue go for a while even though the military obviously hated the idea.  But why not make the military people happy and piss off Trump’s enemies at the same time—and get everyone talking about one thing while the other important things scoot by unmolested by stupid millennial fresh out of college who make up most of the new media these days fixated on a progressive idea they were taught in school which was so important—when its really not.

I am personally insulted that these LGBTQ people seek so adamantly to impose themselves on my life. I mean its one thing to be weird and have a mental illness and have compassion for people like that.  It’s quite another to bring down our entire society just to make those people feel OK about themselves.   I think The Rocky Horror Picture Show is one of the dumbest and vile works of art that has been produced in the 20th century and it is essentially that culture that is seeking to destroy the things that I personally value about American culture.  If those freaks want to dress up like girls and have sex with each other—have at it in the privacy of your own homes.  But if you flaunt it in my face which is built on the basic Christian model of America’s founders—then there are big problems.  When two lesbians are in line in front of me at an amusement park with their hands down each others pants kissing—it’s an assault on my basic premise for existence—and I take it personal.  I don’t behave that way in public with my wife because little kids might be watching and it’s not good for them to be thinking about sex at a young age.  They should be thinking about other things.  And these gay rights parades with all their rainbows are simply assaults on traditional America—a traditional America which I love.  We always hear what’s fair for those people, but what about what’s fair for me and people who think like me?  I’m not OK with a Rocky Horror Picture Show America and I sure as hell don’t want those people in my military representing my country in a life and death situation.

Trump achieved a lot of things by denying LGBTQRSTUVWXYZ people from the military but probably better than anything he solidified his base. It made people like me love him even more.  It’s about time someone does the right thing decisively and without a whole bunch of meetings and testimony and just made a decision.  The people who are mad about it I’m glad because those idiots have been shoving this shit down our throats for entirely too long.  We’ve had to take it and pay for it with our tax money pulling us into an essential evil for way too long and it’s nice to get a little revenge.  I wouldn’t feel that way if progressives had not been so aggressive in attempting to destroy a country I love to begin with—and a traditional value system that’s I represent and believe in.

I’ve known a lot of weird people and have been friends with quite a few of them. I do not advocate beating people up or harming them just because they are different.  But they are not allowed to destroy the values of our society so that they can operate without guilt among their peers.  If you show up at a convenient store all tattooed up and looking like a pin cushion with a hot pink spiked Mohawk, people are going to look at you strangely—because the appearance is something foreign to the value system of our Christian based culture in America.  Legislation to prevent people from looking at such people as weirdoes won’t stop the thought because dressing in such a way is weird.  So are desires for anal sex with a man or woman.  There is nothing good about it.  It’s a perversion on values that might be fun in the moment but leads to regrets latter—like tattoos.  And that’s what we are talking about with LGBTQ people—it’s a phase of their lives, a sexual decision and it’s meant for the bedroom.  It’s not meant for public policy.  In the military where soldiers forfeit their individuality there is no private space—so the institution has to have guidelines to keep everyone in the right frame of fighting spirit.  It doesn’t matter what other militaries do elsewhere in the world, because nobody is as good as the United States.  We are the pace setters.  And Trump made the right decision for that institution to do what it’s supposed to do—win fights wherever they occur.  The LGBTQ people can live their lives elsewhere, but they don’t have a right to destroy our values just to do their thing.  That is why we have to be careful who is in the military and keep our mind on the objective of maintaining a status as a successful country—and not get sidetracked with progressive attacks on our traditional values.

Rich Hoffman
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The Dream of Pratt’s PurePower GTF: What comes next is beyond robots and A.I.

Without getting into the details of it I have been very heavily involved in the jet engine displayed below which was a feature attraction at Made in America week on Capitol Hill where Donald Trump used the occasion to highlight the many great products that are still manufactured in North America.  For so long I had heard that manufacturing was done in America which I never believed.  In the late 80s when I first entered the manufacturing profession all the old timers were trying to tell me that it was a fools quest—that our politicians had sold us out to foreign interests and that it was only a matter of time before all our jobs would be shipped overseas and that everything we did would be service oriented.  Those same kinds of people are now saying that robots and A.I. will take over manufacturing around the world but let me tell them something—there isn’t any robot or A.I. program that could have reasoned through the decade long quest to bring this jet engine to market—the thousands of decision gates, the constant flow of engineering problems and the enormity of a very complicated supply chain complete with human minds to adjust to very fluid situations—and I don’t think there ever will be.   It took the vast imagination and practical application of science to bring this engine to life and the indomitable will to forge it from a jealous nature which seeks to forever hold the human race to the ground with apathy and laziness that ultimately seeps into every computer program which ultimately springs forth.  This engine is a miracle and I am very proud of my part in giving it life.

Manufacturing isn’t just something that happens.  It’s not like building a sex robot to service the biological lusts of the human race.  Building something is only a small part of its birth into a manufacturing existence.  Robots may be able to perform some basic work tasks but to gather up the elements of known physics and continue to refine them into some practical application it is the task of the vast imaginations of human beings that do most of the work.  Imagination is a different kind of intelligence and I don’t think with all the exciting forecasts that we are seeing that A.I. will be able to replace human beings, ever, until we can manufacture a human brain and delve into the regions of thinking which connect the soul to imaginative cognition which then produces reality.  Statically just thinking about something isn’t enough—a thought has to connect to multidimensional relationships which exist outside of terrestrial experience—which is where inspiration comes from.

I was speaking last week with some very smart people about the Pure Power engine from Pratt and how the last twenty years of development which gave birth to it was such a challenge.  But that chapter is now closed except for a few minor details which will be worked out over the coming months.  This engine is ready to fill the marketplace for the next two decades and will be the most sought after engine on planet earth over that period of time.  It will be made all over the world with a big part of it done here in Cincinnati—and it will provide many thousands of jobs and create vast amounts of wealth which brings to life economies in every corner of the world.  That is something that is very specific to human thought and will not be replaced by emerging technologies, the concept of producing wealth out of imagination and using science to drive manufacturing.  But even saying that it is quite something to consider that we are already looking at the next generation beyond the Pure Power engine that will carry us all out into space and across earth’s surface in ways nobody had ever considered before.

The technologies which will emerge from the Hyperloop for instance will be what replace the Pure Power once that next generation emerges in transportation.   Even though commercial air travel is the only way we can presently understand getting to vast places around the world several new developments will do a better job of getting us there.  Hyperloops will become the fastest way to get from city to city while Spaceports will take over as the airports of tomorrow.  Aviation is moving into space and that means new types of engines that will operate out of the atmosphere and into space routinely.  To fly from London to Tokyo we won’t do it at 50,000 ft like we do now over 10 hours, or New York to Beijing  in 14 hours—we’ll take off and fly out of the atmosphere for a reentry an hour or two later at our destination meaning we could travel to such places for a day trip essentially.  As we better utilize space travel this will be the natural byproduct—time and efficiency will be greatly improved.

If the Pure Power’s greatest attributes are its incredible fuel efficiency and noise reduction standards, the engines of tomorrow will only need to operate a fraction of the time and need to operate in very thin atmospheres—if any at all.  So we are looking at entirely new concepts in engine design that will be introduced by the time this Pure Power breakthrough is retired after two decades of service.  By then commercial air travel from airport to airport will be much reduced and will be considered archaic.  The long TSA lines and dirty chaos of a typical day at Heathrow will be replaced by the clean technology of a fast-moving spaceport where flights will leave more frequently and take a lot less time to conduct.   Part of what makes airports such rough places is the long flights stuck next to other frustrated people.  When I fly now I like to do it in first class, but for many years economy was the only way I could afford it, and it was like riding on a bus with people touching your knees and breathing your air over long periods of time—which is disgusting when you think about it—which I do often.  When you finally land after an oversea flight you are tired and it takes time to recover.  That will change in the years to come dramatically.

Spaceports won’t be located near cities so noise won’t be such a factor.  We’ll simply take a Hyperloop to a Spaceport located in a remote location and we’ll blast to our destinations from there.   The Kennedy Space Center will expand its role in the south.  I can see Florida having at least two more spaceports emerging to satisfy the Miami and panhandle regions.  But Kennedy Space Center will likely expand dramatically to incorporate all the tourism to Disney World.   Hyperloops will provide a 10 minute ride from the Cape to Orlando to the doorstep of whatever hotel travelers might be staying in at the resort of their choice.  A lot of the industry that currently provides taxi services to and from airports as well as other support oriented businesses will have to reconfigure their business models.  A traveler from Morocco who wants to visit Disney World will simply pull out their smart phone and order up a transportation pod—forget about Uber.    The pod will come and pick up the travelers at their doorstep.  It will take them in comfort to the local Hyperloop station.  From there they’ll travel to a spaceport.   They’ll catch their flight and they will arrive in comfort at a Disney World resort all in about 4 hours of travel.  They could literally leave at noon their time in Morocco and arrive as the parks are opening that same day.   It’s a totally different way of thinking about travel and looking back from that future time to this Pure Power demonstration in Washington D.C. will seem like a very archaic exercise.

As proud as I am of the Pure Power engine from Pratt, and as discouraging as it might be to already think of it as extinct, we still have to travel well over the next few decades as these emerging technologies move into our culture.  But I can say this for certain, A.I. won’t put us out of work.  Instead, we’ll have more productive opportunities than we’ve ever had before.  President Trump already has our present economy at about 4% unemployment so the robots and A.I. will supplement all this economic expansion while giving us all jobs to do that are specific to the human mind—like thinking.  While we should take the time to celebrate all the hard work it took to make the Pure Power GTF possible, it is important for us all to never look back but always forward to the next great thing and space is where is at.  And honestly, I can’t wait!

Rich Hoffman

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Thinking Big, and Practically: A Hyperloop between New York and Washington D.C.

It wasn’t that surprising to me, because I’ve been talking about it for a while.  Do you remember dear reader all the stuff I’ve been saying about the Hyperloop?  Well, it’s happening too and only because Elon Musk is continuing to be one of America’s greatest outside the box thinkers who has the financial resources to act on those thoughts.  But the fact that we can even talk about the Hyperloop as a reality has only one person to thank, Donald J. Trump.  Without Trump in the White House a lot of bureaucrats would be looking for a way for Musk to grease the skids.  Now, with the swamp draining as we speak we are on a cultural trajectory to have Hyperloops all over the United States starting with the link between New York City and Washington D.C.  Can you imagine traveling that distance in under 30 minutes?  A lot of people suddenly became very excited to hear that news, and most of them were not Trump supporters.  This is what you get when you have people like Musk in your country with a supportive White House.  Just read Donald Trump’s books, How to Think Like s Billionaire along with Think Big and Kick Ass, and it will be very easy to understand what, why, and how Elon Musk put up this Tweet much to the surprise of the mayors of several of the included cities.

The swamp creatures of bureaucracy want their take, but Trump and Musk are moving well beyond the speed of those people and as we speak Trump is beating them in the public relations battle.  By the time the Boring Company presents its proposals for digging underneath cities like New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore and of course Washington D.C. Trump’s team will have destroyed and replaced many of the figures who would otherwise stand against this project—so you can mark it on your calendar, this will get done.

People need to understand that all this controversy in the media about Trump/Russia, and polling numbers and legislative stalls are not a problem for Trump.  It sounds noisy now, but he has the situation under control.  The bureaucrats are not going to win against a Trump White House.  They may stall.  They may try to delay the inevitable, but Trump just has too many resources and works too hard to apply them for him to fail.  Having Trump in the White House puts him in a position to speak to people like Musk and to be essentially the most powerful lobbyist in Washington D.C. which is what Musk needed from the beginning.  Before, Musk would have had to lobby congress and the White House to get some pin head to even understand how the Hyperloop is different from a typical train.  But Trump gets it and knows what to do with good information when it comes his way.

For way too long we have allowed unproductive know-nothings to stand between us and the future and things have just stalled out technologically.  The following link is interesting in how it shows over time how deregulation of the phone industry and the introduction of the Internet allowed for smart phones to evolve to where they are today.  A lot of people forget that it was only ten years ago that the iPhone first came on the scene—but all that occurred because technology happened faster than politicians could crush innovation with their top heavy lumbering bureaucracy.  Regulators can be a good thing to make an industry safer, but often the kind of people who perform those jobs are cowardly people by nature and they love to have control over dreamers like Elon Musk.  So digging massive holes under all these cities and building a new transportation system that goes over 700 MPH is something they’d love to stop because it gives them power over  genius.  Those are the type of people who presently hate the Trump presidency and are doing anything they can to stop the changes that are happening literally right now.

https://www.bounceenergy.com/articles/texas-electricity/history-of-deregulation-telecommunication

Anthony Scaramucci is now taking over in Trump’s White House as the top communications official.  Trump met with Scaramucci recently and liked him so much that he put him immediately into the job.  Sean Spicer resigned to give Scaramucci a clean plate and just like that our new White House will be moving into phase 2 right at the 6 month mark.  The first phase of course was typical of any business dealing.  Trump enters the White House and softens up everyone with aggression.  Then when everyone is reeling he offers them an olive branch—which is what Scaramucci is—that is the “art of the deal.”

They are then happy and responsive to what the White House provides to the public.  So as Trump and Musk talked about the Hyperloop they were talking about things that would happen in step 4 as if those things already happened.  It’s just that the rest of the world isn’t there yet.  They will be and before they know it there will be a Hyperloop between New York and D.C.  It’s a good deal; Musk needs to get the Hyperloop rolling in America so he can convince California to put one between San Francisco and Los Angeles.  Trump needs to enhance America’s infrastructure with something that is more “Trumpian.’ It was in these kinds of things that provoked Trump to run for office in the first place—so he’s not going to let this die on the vine.

As much as the media hates Trump by watching these videos did you notice how quickly they suddenly became excited?  That’s how Trump will eventually leave office.  All these silly things talked about today will long be forgotten when people are getting daily news reports from places like the Moon and traveling across the country on Hyperloops at speeds over 700 MPH.  If left to the pin-heads in our bureaucratic culture something like the Hyperloop would take 50 years and cost trillions of dollars.  But if left to the private sector it will only take 5 years and only cost billions, which will be recovered by the technology of a new transportation industry and in the end that’s all people will really remember.

What’s different now than really at any point prior is that these characters are not ideologically political.  Musk obviously has many leftist leanings, but he is a capitalist by the nature of all his companies which are quite good and operate well.  Trump is a pretty hard lined conservative compared to Musk, but he’s good enough in business to be able to have relationships with people who are not like him ideologically.  Just as Scaramucci has more liberal leanings than a Midwest Republican he is an effective communicator and can sell a lot of the things that Trump wants to do so we are truly entering a new phase of American thinking and it’s very exciting.  Honestly I’m very happy about it.  I don’t care that people think the way I do about things as long as they are being productive and moving the ball of the human race forward—not with political philosophy, but in human achievement.  The political philosophy comes as an off-shoot of an emerging society.  We should not build an emerging society off a political philosophy then use regulation to preserve that philosophy.  Instead, what Musk and Trump are doing will shape our civilization with an optimism that can only come from a couple of dreamers who have the financial resources to think big and the political clout to make it happen.  And finally we have both in the White House and things will begin to happen rapidly—for a change!

Rich Hoffman

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‘The 15:17 to Paris’: Sully’s very American story

I was very excited to learn that the next movie Clint Eastwood is working on is the film version of the book by Spencer Stone, Anthony Salder and Alek Skarlatos, called The 15:17 to Paris. The book like the movie chronicles the heroics of those three young men as they stopped a terrorist attack on a train to Paris and became worldwide heroes before even turning 25 years of age.  The heroes are all boyhood friends and the story will display how their lives intersected to that key point in history, and honestly, I think only Clint Eastwood could make the movie version of that book.  Even more stunning to me was that Clint has cast the guys to play themselves in the film which is really unprecedented for a feature presentation.  Clint Eastwood is such a good director, and the three guys so naturally charismatic that they all felt only those people could tell this very unique story and I’m excited about it.  If anyone wondered what Clint Eastwood’s answer to American Sniper might be, this is certainly it.  This film will play well in the core of America and will resonate around the world deeply concerned about terrorism.

But the news about that film reminded me that I had not yet seen Sully, Eastwood’s last movie about the Miracle on the Hudson where Chesley Sullenberger lost both engines in his commercial flight A320 aircraft over New York City and had to land somewhere.  The trouble was that in New York at only a few thousand feet altitude there was no place to land without coming down on someone’s home or building.  People were going to die one way or another unless Sully—the 40+ year airman working for US Airways could think of something fast—which he did.  He landed the big plane on the Hudson River, literally the only place he could have and it was his unusually quick thinking that saved the lives of all 155 passengers on board.

Well, I knew the story and had read the book so I felt I knew what was going to happen so I waited for the film to come to home entertainment systems and was a little upset that it wasn’t available to rent on either the PlayStation network or Amazon Prime. A film that had done as well as it had should have had a decent rent value.  It did make $238 million worldwide so it was inconvenient to me that it wasn’t easy to watch—because I wanted to see it over the weekend after I had heard the announcement of The 15:17 to Paris. So we went to Wal-Mart, bought the Blue-rey, and watched the film over some carry-out from Chili’s—and it was just a wonderful movie.

It is a shame that Clint Eastwood is now 87 years old because I want to watch movies directed by him for the next hundred years. The guy is just sooooo good at what he does.  It’s the kind of thing that only a person with 60 years in the business could pull off.  Eastwood does these big, gigantic true stories full of top-tier actors and production talent and he presents them as small piano music scores underplayed just right   From a production stand-point Sully is a great movie.  It was nicely paced, wonderfully photographed and compelling—even though we thought we already knew the story.  But the NTSB needed someone to blame for the insurance claim made by US Airways and that was where the drama really kicked in and had me very interested.  Again, I think only Clint Eastwood could have told this story in this way.

I love the competency of pilots. They are one of America’s greatest contributions to the word.  They are by their very nature solid people who do not panic easily—otherwise they wouldn’t be pilots.  Watching the bonus footage on the Blue-rey I learned that Harrison Ford is really the person who got the story rolling by introducing Sully’s book to the producer Frank Marshall.  From there it found its way to Eastwood and production started right after American Sniper was making a lot of money at the box office for Warner Bros.  But this was a movie about pilots from pilots and Harrison Ford may be known for his roles in Star Wars and Indiana Jones, but in reality, what he really is, is a pilot.  We might recall the time he landed his vintage aircraft on a golf course shortly after having engine trouble out of Santa Monica.  His landing was very similar to Sully’s only he hit harder.  Sully at least had water to soften the hit.  So here were a couple of pilots bringing to light a story about pilots and securing a director who knew better than to get in the way of the story.  What ends up on-screen is really a wonderful depiction of the employees of US Airlines—not just Chesley Sullenberger.

Eastwood also cast some of the real people to play in this film, like the air traffic controller and the ferry driver who first arrived on scene to rescue people from the stranded aircraft. What all these people did in a moment of crises was very admirable and Sully turned out to be one of the most inspirational films I have seen in a long time.  I had a feeling it would be good which is why I went out of my way to see it, but it turned out to be one of those extraordinary movies that you just don’t forget.  Eastwood not only captured the heroics of the Miracle on the Hudson, but he captured well the spirit of New York in a crisis.  In the end, even though the National Transportation Safety Board had been looking for someone to blame they came around to seeing things Sully’s way and the story really became an interesting commentary on the nature of individualism standing up to the necessities of institutional collectivism without really making anybody look bad.  The members of the NTSB were after all just doing their jobs in the context of it—but the situation was so extraordinarily individualistic that no part of that institutional framework had even considered such a possibility—even in hindsight during simulation runs.

History will remember these late in life film contributions of Clint Eastwood as being a very accurate commentator on American life. Taken as a three-part trilogy, first with American Sniper then with Sully culminating with The 15:17 to Paris Eastwood is telling of the same type of lost America that he did in his Dirty Harry movies—only now with the all-encompassing view of an 87-year-old man who has literally seen it all and done it all.  And he’s telling these true stories in a way that will resonate for centuries.  Clint Eastwood is proud of the role that America plays in the world and he finds that joy in these little stories without being cheesy, or over-the-top.  Now that I’ve seen Sully and will likely watch it several more times, I am really excited for The 15:17 to Paris. That film may turn out to be the best of all and it will come out in a time where Trump is reshaping the concept of Americanism to fit Eastwood’s vision—and that has a lot of power—and it will happen at a perfect time.

Rich Hoffman

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The Beauty of a Long Goodbye: Institutional failure and a new kind of day

 

I think the best way to explain it is that we are now in a generation of people—mostly youth driven—who grew up entirely with The Simpsons, South Park, and The Daily Show.  Those people went to college, were fed large doses of Marxist influence, graduated from some form of journalism and are now working in the media and other culture shapers within our professional institutions.  Their cynicism and hatred of Donald Trump comes from some foreign place for sure.  For instance, we are now on over a week of the whole Russia, Donald Trump Jr. story—which is nothing yet the ferocity for which the media presents the information is truly amazing.  The subconscious message to the Trump family has been that they did not use the professional pundits, lawyers, and inside the box thinkers—and pay them accordingly during the presidential campaign, so they feel entitled to pounce on the Trumps for their inexperience.  But if a few controversies emerge from saving the kind of money Trump did during the election with just good ol’ fashion hard work, then why not.  That is the biggest difference between the parades of phonies that typically would act as a foreign representative to major events.  President Trump is doing a great job—and he’s doing it rather easily.  At the Bastille Day parade the newly elected French President Emmanuel Macron and his wife had a very sincere reaction to President Trump and Melania’s departure resulting in a long handshake that virtually everyone made fun of who presented it through the media.  I thought it was a beautiful thing—four people with very important jobs who are normally very fake with one another in similar circumstances were overflowing with positive emotion.  It showed me that Macron might be a guy who will actually do a decent job in socialist France—but to the media, they saw nothing but negativity and they pounced in a way that was clearly out-of-touch with the flow of modern observation.

When Trump was running for president and I was so vocally supportive it was fun to watch these establishment types squirm in dealing with Trump.  It is fascinating to me because it is a microcosm of a much more systemic problem and I always knew that if a sincere businessman as opposed to a person breed within the political institutions—a person from Harvard—the typical Skull and Bones initiate—a military guy, or a senator formed within the fraternity of Capital Hlll—or even a state governor who was at least a part of an association, ran for any politically powerful position that they would excel because business has a way of forcing people to deal with reality and they’d do a far more superior job.  So I knew Trump would be very effective and I wanted to see that change.  What is happening with the stock market having all the incredible gains it is producing and the global reaction to President Trump’s natural charisma was something I counted on.  Trump as a personality has always loved controversy and attention, but under it all he’s always been smart.  Just read a few of his books and its very obvious that Trump knows exactly what he’s doing, including the whole controversy of the Don Jr. story.  Trump isn’t the only one with these skills—most people who are good at business have similar abilities and they get them outside of the institutional systems that we have in America—but that was always the point.

Clearly Jeffery Zucker who is running things at CNN is deeply jealous of Donald Trump.  He wants to think that he made Trump through The Apprentice when he was head of NBC Universal.  Now he’s the president of CNN Worldwide and the evidence that it wasn’t him who was so successful, but was the talent around him has been a harsh reality.  He’s failing miserably because he has gone after Trump in a way to sink the President in a very personal way.  For a guy whom Trump spoke so highly of in the book Think like a Billionaire, Zucker hates Trump because the evidence within the circles of business is so obvious.   As they parted ways leaving Zucker to run CNN in 2013 and Trump to run for president in 2015 there was nobody for the former NBC head to hide behind.  Zucker fell from grace quickly as just another overpaid institutionalist while Trump no matter what anybody threw at him continued to succeed.  Nobody understood it at the time, but the situation was obvious.   People build the institutions, the institutions do not make people—that is a basic law that all successful people understand.  I knew that if someone who had always made things work behind the institutional façade that they’d be great in politics for a change—and that is what is going on with Trump.  He’s always been good at anything he does because he loves to work, he’s intellectually curious about the world around him, and he has a natural love of life that emerges from whatever he’s involved with.  Once people had a taste of that, they’d never go back to the old institutional model—but business people would from now on be the choice of every political office, from school board members to future presidents.  The mold has effectively been destroyed and now everyone involved can see that it was always people like Trump who made the Jeff Zucker’s in life, not the other way around.

Ayn Rand wrote about this phenomena many years ago, it was obvious to her how institutions fail and how it is individuals who constantly carry them as a value.  Without strong individuals institutions always fail.  They are only propped up by a kind of social ignorance which has always been used as a collective way to hide the truth from human beings.  Whether the institution was a church, a television network, or a political party their effectiveness is always a mask hiding the reality that there must always be a strong individual who is doing all the heavy lifting that makes the institutions successful.  It is never the collective whole that does it.  Trump will always be successful whether he’s working at NBC with Jeff Zucker or running the Republican Party as he his now—but Zucker cannot be successful on his own without someone to carry him.  Within just four years of running CNN Jeff Zucker has nearly destroyed that network.  It may not be so obvious now, but they’ll never recover from his terrible management where he went after a popular president in very personal ways just to prove that it was the institutions that made Trump, not the other way around.   The failure of The New York Times, CNN, and NBC to recognize the basic talents of Trump is proving to be their undoing—and these young people who grew up over the last twenty years watching The Simpsons and South Park have been taught to either trust institutions too much, or to make fun of them without offering solutions.   Virtually everyone has missed the point except for those who understand that individuals make institutions, institutions do not make individuals.  Pouring hundreds of thousands of dollars into any institution, whether it be a college, a network or even a religion cannot make success.  Only individuals who have mastered basic elements of life can do that and that reality is essentially what people are upset about in Trump.

It’s not always easy to see but the reaction that foreign leaders have in Trump whether it’s Russia, Saudi Arabia, China or the newly elected president of France, displays clearly the skills of a person at the top of his game in communication.   That’s because Donald Trump is a real person—a star of his own making.  The institutions tried to keep him at NBC working on a television show, but as a self-made person not really interested in millions of dollars for hosting a popular show, he wanted to apply his skills at the highest level and he walked away from the money.  Money is usually used to soften up individuals so that they never challenge the supremacy of the institutional controls that are used to mask the individual contributions of their talent.   Trump stepped away from one institution to another—one that had previously been forbidden.  He won and is now doing such a marvelous job and the institutions themselves have no other means of correcting the situation except for resorting to an infantile rejection of the behavior.  But the results can’t be ignored and the evidence was on full display between Macaron and Trump.  The French President didn’t want Trump to leave—that much was obvious.  Institutions can be scary because in them are a lot of little people like Jeffery Zucker who want to take credit for what good individuals do—but when someone like Trump comes along, things aren’t nearly so scary because it’s obvious that he’s the source of success and people want to be close to it, including the French president.   The truth has been revealed and all the institutions can do in defense of themselves is to use their young employees to verbally assault Trump hoping to protect themselves from further embarrassments.  But it’s too late.

Rich Hoffman

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