Tag: Rich Hoffman

The Network Boycott of Donald Trump: Life is going on without them

It was a little astonishing that the television networks of ABC, CBS, NBC, and CNN refused to play the political ad from the Trump campaign highlighting the first 100 days accomplishments by the new president.  After all, they didn’t have a problem highlighting every little thing that Barack Obama did.  But Trump isn’t Obama and the networks are seeing the difference already.  They are being exposed for what they always were; liberal outlets designed to promote progressivism and are now discovering that people are willing to turn away from them really for the first time in their history over political ideology.  As everyone now knows ESPN is a dying network owned by the Disney Company and they are losing their conservative viewers due to their extremely liberal on-air positions.  ESPN President John Skipper, a former employee at left-wing Rolling Stone magazine, insisted that the network had little intention of putting on the brakes of its liberalism even in the wake of their viewership exodus saying:

“It is accurate that the Walt Disney Company and ESPN are committed to diversity and inclusion,” Skipper said. “These are long-standing values that drive fundamental fairness while providing us with the widest possible pool of talent to create the smartest and most creative staff. We do not view this as a political stance but as a human stance. We do not think tolerance is the domain of a particular political philosophy.”

 

http://www.breitbart.com/sports/2017/05/05/survey-of-viewership-in-swing-state-market-shows-republicans-abandoning-espn-in-droves/

Then Ellen DeGeneres said just yesterday that Donald Trump wasn’t welcomed on her show—as if that were going to somehow hurt the feelings of the president—or change what’s happening.  Stephen Cobert—the former Comedy Central liberal who openly has a night show directed at pot smokers unleashed a potty mouthed rant that could only be justified through definitions of insanity—yet CBS allowed it to air anyway which should have provoked attention by the FCC.  If Cobert had been a conservative, he’d be out of a job, but since he’s a liberal like most of the people in entertainment—he gets a free pass.  What we are seeing is unprecedented—the political left is drawing a line in the sand and hoping that we all love them enough to keep watching their programs.  But the evidence is already in that conservatives are finding other alternatives.

What is really scary to the networks is that Trump is actually better at the job of communicating than they even understand in the industry.  George Will the conservative commentator actually quit the Republican Party because he thinks President Trump chews up the English language in an illiterate fashion.  He clearly has taken the side of the liberal networks in thinking that he knows more than Trump does about communicating.   Yet Trump has had great success in entertainment and obviously knows more about communication than even the most seasoned Hollywood actor.  Trump doesn’t just speak, he communicates with his entire body when he gives a speech and people understand him.  He may not articulate the English language in a scholarly fashion, but he communicates better than most anybody in the public eye today and he can do it without an army of advisors and Hollywood producers to help him along.  While Obama used to seek counsel from Steven Spielberg and Jeffery Katzenberg, Trump takes care of things himself and is able to produce a video illustrating his first 100 days without the entertainment industry’s involvement—and it drives them crazy.

It’s in Trump’s independence that has exposed the leftist tendencies of the major networks and now half the country is looking for alternatives.  They are used to making or breaking people and they can’t have an impact on Trump in any way and they don’t know what to do about it except make asses of themselves.  Now they are taking positions they can’t walk back and it will eventually destroy them.  I warned the Disney Company about this years ago, and they didn’t listen.  They insisted on putting little gay characters in their entertainment products and force-fed liberalism into their productions, and their bottom line is going to take a hit.  ABC is owned by Disney so like ESPN they are committed to leftist ideologies which run against the current of modern American politics and they are positioning themselves for extinction.  Trump actually did work on NBC with the hit show The Apprentice and even now after 14 seasons the executives cannot figure out for the life of them why Trump was so much better at that show than some Hollywood actor who gets paid to say what other people think.

What’s even funnier is that the political left thinks that they are going to find their own Hollywood star to run against Trump in 2020.  They are throwing around names like George Clooney, Dwyane Johnson and even Disney’s Bob Iger—but they really don’t understand that it takes more than “celebrity” to win as a president.  Trump didn’t win the presidency because of his celebrity—he won it because he worked harder than anybody else.  Hillary Clinton rolled out the celebrities in her final days and they didn’t help her at all.  The power that the networks and media companies had with their celebrates has evaporated before their eyes and they really don’t know what to do about it which is what I have been saying all along in regard to the value of Donald Trump being president.  There’s not just his skills as a businessman, or the self-reliance of his celebrity—but it’s the presence of a Republican who can simply rob the political left of their stronghold on the media all by himself.  The Democrats don’t have anybody like Trump and with all their resources in Hollywood there isn’t one person who can compete with Trump on the stage in 2020 and they all know it now.  They might have the celebrity, but they don’t have the work ethic or an understanding of all the modes of communication that Trump has naturally.

Trump wasn’t made into a celebrity by others the way that George Clooney was—or any other actor who gets paid to read off a script.  Trump made himself and that is a different kind of political candidate and the failure of the networks to work with this new administration will be their end.  They won’t survive the change in demographic posture combined with the economic burden of the modern cord cutters—the people who have decided that they don’t want or need cable television in their lives.  Ellen and Stephen Cobert can’t afford to cut off half their audience the way they have—yet they have done just that.  And that decision will prove detrimental to them all.  People will still see Trump’s ad about his first 100 days regardless of the participation of the networks in showing it because they don’t have a monopoly any longer on information.  They can’t stop Trump by cutting him off the networks because he can reach many more people through new media.  The only people getting hurt by the network boycott of Trump are the networks.  They can’t survive off only half the country watching their programs.  They can’t appeal only to liberals and hope to lure advertisers to their channels.  Look what happened to Curt Schilling at ESPN.  He represented the kind of man who many of their viewership were themselves, and when they took him down for being a conservative, ESPN lost viewers. I used to love watching ESPN, but since they fired Schilling, I haven’t watched them since—because they didn’t have talent on their programs that spoke and thought the way I do.  So I turned them off and moved on to something else.

There is a lot to feel good about Trump, the stock market is soaring, money is coming back to the American economy and the president is well on his way to becoming simply the best occupant of the White House ever to reside there.  History is already starting to overshadow the cries of the liberal left and that’s where the networks are making a major mistake in not aligning themselves with history.  Rather, they are sticking with their ideology which will be their undoing.  Trump works harder and is good at so many different things that his presidency will be a new defining marker in history.  The old guard is quickly finding themselves on the outside looking in and they know it. Right now they are protesting with defiance, but they are rapidly learning that nobody really cares about them.  Nobody cares about the opinions of The View girls, and nobody cares about Ellen.  Trump is going to be a good president with or without them.  And that is the hard lesson that the world is learning—but I’ve said it all along.  Maybe next time they’ll listen—for those who survive long enough to have a next time.

Rich Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

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

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In Trump We Must Trust: Now the senate has to do the right thing

Remember just a few days ago when the American media was contemplating the second failure of congress repealing Obamacare—and how devastating it would be for the Trump administration? Then as if out of nowhere, congress did the right thing and voted to repeal that legislative monstrosity and Trump had the Republicans firmly behind him at the White House announcing the victory of the first leg of that journey.  This is why we voted for Trump—because any other president would have let the issue go and would not have wrestled the challenges to the ground the way he did—and it is only because of him that the Republicans in congress were able to consolidate around something they could all get on board with—and the American media was awe-struck by the effectiveness of the deal it took to get the votes in such a short period of time.  The same kind of thing will take place in the senate. It’s still a long battle, but we are well on our way toward finally getting rid of Obamacare.

People can say what they want about Trump—that he’s not conservative enough, or that he’s not against a single payer system—but in regard to health care we are on a steep ledge with our insurance premiums for that industry. Dealing with health insurance providers every year I am amazed by how much they continue to rise—8 to 12% in a lot of cases with no sign of decreasing—and no politician has been willing to deal with it.  Obamacare made the situation much worse and was meant to collapse the system driving us all to a single payer mandate—which would essentially make health care a socialist right as they view it in Europe and Canada.  The health care in those places sucks so that is certainly not the model we should be following.  Changes have to be made toward making health care cheaper and more effective—not the opposite.  And if the ball didn’t get rolling in the first days of the Trump White House, it was never going to happen as the spiraling effect would destroy all hope of solving this problem with free market solutions.

Now with the debate in the senate, the president and the marketplace—there will be ideological differences. People like Rand Paul will want complete free market approaches, but to keep the health care providers we do have alive, they need help because of the last six years of government intrusions.  They can’t be cut off cold turkey—they’d fold otherwise.  So, it’s a complex problem made worse by the Obama White House.  To have a hope at a free market solution we have to put the problem in Trump’s hands and trust him to work the situation backwards over an 8-year period.  That is one of the biggest reasons to have a billionaire capitalist in the White House, to help make that deal a reality.  We can’t trust government to step out of the picture on their own.  We need a president to direct them out of it over the coming years while the health insurance industry grows its own legs again and can start to drive down premiums with options—like the phone industry did after deregulation.

The best hope we have of avoiding a single payer system is in trusting Trump—and Rand Paul is going to have to embrace that along with others in the senate who are economic puritans. Unfortunately, they are in the minority and this is a deal that will have to be walked back toward free market applications by a pro capitalists in the White House, congress, and senate letting the Democrats rot on their socialist stagnation.  The fear many have in repealing Obamacare is that this might empower Democrats to take back the house and senate during the next midterms, but that’s not going to happen if they stick close to Trump.  If anything, they’ll gain seats.  But they’re going to have to have courage and forge forward with boldness under the Trump flag otherwise the whole thing will come unraveled.  We are in uncharted territory and none of the news pundits know how to define things—so there is no guide on how to proceed.  So they will just have to trust in Trump.

That’s not to say that Trump is a dictator that should be followed blindly, but that he is a representation of free market associations and is but a guide toward that economic means of philosophic national understanding. In eight years Trump will not be president anymore, but his commitment toward capitalism should endure and that is essentially the same approach we all need to take regarding health care.  We need to trust the market, but we have to keep that market on life-support until it can leave the hospital so to speak—because Obamacare essentially shot it leaving it for dead in the streets.

Of course the socialist loving progressives were upset, and that was evident by the late night television people who dominate that European style thought process—and they are a growing infusion of failed policies that they intend to import against the individual based economic structure of our day. They didn’t think Trump would pull together everybody and they are now quite scared because socialized medicine is a big objective for them.  And how Trump did it scared them even worse, he caved on elements of the budget deal to keep everything running, and while the Democrats were celebrating, Trump was working out the health care issue in congress—and that was all a tactical decision coming from the White House.  Very clever, and masterly stuff from a strategic point of view. Given how everything occurred, you could hear real fear in the voices of the liberal leaning progressives after the fact—they know what this means and what’s at risk.

It is terribly hard to take away an entitlement which is why Democrats pushed through Obamacare in the first place—to get enough people addicted to it so that socialized medicine would become a mainstay in American politics. But, there is time to turn back the clock and Republicans have a very narrow window to do so—and it will take them all to see the vision clearly.  Trust the capitalist in the White House who has built a fortune building up brands and marketing goods for great profit.  He has to make health care a good free market enterprise for more insurers so that they can enter the market and compete to drive down those out of control costs.  That is the only way to really fix it—because doing nothing won’t get things done at this point, and socialized medicine will be even worse than those escalating premiums which increase because of the lack of insurers and the top-heavy need for coverage.  So there is a lot of work that has to be done, but I am very confident in Trump to do it.  It would be wise for the senate not to get caught up in ideological chest pounding, because this is a tight rope, and we must walk it now.  The sooner the better, because each day that passes, it gets more complicated and harder for a free market to be part of the future.  The public expectations for reality are too polluted and we have a young generation of socialists raised by our toxic public education system that will vote for the single payer route once they are over 30—and at that point free market options will not be on the table, coverage will be terrible, and the costs will be extraordinary.

Rich Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

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

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The Moon Rise of South Korea: Holding back socialists in Asia and the Democratic budget battle

It is a shame we don’t live in a more literate society.  It’s a shame so many school levies passed during the May elections where voter turnout was noticeably lower due to all the nice weather, and it’s a shame that more people don’t understand the strategy regarding the recent budget compromise on Capitol Hill.  Things that are complex in nature require a long view understanding and that is best achieved through literacy—because the process of reading develops in the mind the ability to comprehend layered strategies that exist beyond the immediate gratification most people are accustomed to dealing with.  And this was never more obvious than the situation with North and South Korea and the role that China is playing in a giant international chess game—for which Donald Trump is properly engaged.  Our shallow American media was shocked recently when Trump stated that he wanted South Korea to pick up the 1.2-billion-dollar price tag for the THAAD missile system placed there to protect them from a North Korean attack.  They didn’t report the rest of the story, so here it is.

Shortly South Korea is about to hold an election to replace their disgraced president recently outed over corruption charges and the leader of the pack is a socialist Democrat by the name of Moon Jae-in.  Moon wants to have good open relations with North Korea and China and in his campaign rhetoric is claiming that the “west” is interfering in the peace process of the Korean peninsula.  Of course Americans have forgotten why we fought the Korean War a half century ago, so they really don’t understand the politics.  Heck, most of them probably couldn’t find Korea on a map.  So they certainly can’t understand why America is interested in keeping South Korea protected from communist incursions to the north and to the west with China encouraging all the aggressions.

That is the role that North Korea plays in the region, they are there as communist antagonists to play the “bad cop” in the great negotiations game—while China plays the “good cop.”  Everyone understands that game reading this I hope.  South Korea is the only open market capitalist zone in that region except for Japan just to the east.  Losing Korea to a socialist in the upcoming election who is a global communist supporter would be bad for America as it would solidify the spread of communism. Most American’s think that communism died back in the 90s, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. China, North Korea and Vietnam to the south are all communist zones and are a serious burden on the freedoms enjoyed by capitalist nations like the United States.  Immigrants from those communist countries pour into the United States looking for opportunity while slowly changing the voting patterns from Republican to Democrat.  China understands all this and are currently in a waiting game hoping to crush capitalism in the west while using American markets to bolster their own economy.

When Xi Jinping visited Donald Trump at his Mar-a-Lago resort of course it was a nice meeting, Xi was playing the “good cop” and so was President Trump.  It was all strategy to set the stage for what was happening in the east Asian theater.  China wants South Korea under their flag, America wants to have a capitalist footprint in Asia essentially to protect Japan from further aggressions from their communist rivals across the Sea of Japan.  China supported North Korean aggressions, the United States sent in the THAAD system and several naval aircraft carriers.  Kim Jong-un to push back the Americans threatened nuclear war and resumed missile tests and each time they have done so recently the United States has blasted them out of the sky from space.  As the world beats the drums of war hoping to see hostilities escalate in the region—the media of course supported the communists, while capitalist nations hope America prevails—a silent stand-off has evolved.  North Korea has realized that they can’t launch any missiles anywhere due to American positions and therefore can’t threaten anybody on China’s behalf—which has exposed the communists in favor of Trump.

Now the hope of the entire region is that Moon Jae-in will win in South Korea in a few weeks and that will end the support of American involvement there and return the power of fear back to China while indirectly unifying all of Asia under communism.  They envision such a thing as when China took back Hong Kong from England at the turn of the 20th century and have used it as an “economic zone” under a communist flag.  They plan to do the same thing with South Korea and this Moon guy is receptive to that kind of thinking.

Trump knowing all this has offered to take the edge off by speaking well of China, and offering to talk to Kim Jung-un all the while charging South Korea for the THAAD system throwing bait in the water for Moon to stumble on during his last weeks of campaigning.  It’s really not that hard to understand—but due to the short attention spans of most Americans in the media, they just don’t understand how the pieces connect.  That’s why sites like this one exist, because I do understand and am happy to explain it to you dear reader.  That’s also why I’m not down on the way Trump handled the recent budget compromise with Democrats.  Like the situation in Korea, Trump has to expose the other side with “good cop” dialogue so that they will be the aggressors justifying action.  In the case of South Korea, the hostile action will be a trade war with the new liberal president Moon so that he can’t solidify people behind him toward socialist objectives, but to cut out the feet from under him before he can take roots—which is precisely what the global political left has been trying to do to Trump.  Only in the case of South Korea the leverage is completely in Trump’s hands.  He needed to bolster the military to take care of all the foreign policy issues immediately and without question he hoped to recruit some Democrats to get 60 votes in the senate to go against Schumer for upcoming legislation.  The most pressing issue of course was the military money so that Trump could hold back the villains in Asia, the Middle East and in regard to Russia—which then forced Putin to talk to Trump on the phone about peace plans yesterday.  Without that budget deal, Putin doesn’t participate because the military budget was the leverage he had been holding out for hoping Trump wouldn’t get it.

This is all very easy to understand if you understand The Art of War, the great literary classic on Asian warfare.  The American media certainly doesn’t get it, but some individuals who matter here and there do, and that’s all we really care about. Trump knows what he’s doing.  Results will take care of everything else.  I haven’t seen anything in his behavior that alarms me so long as the long view is taken into consideration.  This Moon guy in South Korea is a Obama type of liberal, so Trump would do well if he could cause the guy to stumble at the finish line of their elections. If not, then Samsung televisions and KIA cars will be facing some very hefty tariffs because the fight is still over the spread of communism and the Marxist ideologues of Asia need those fresh markets of Hong Kong and South Korea to justify themselves as second-handers.  Which is the only reason that Kim Jung-un has been allowed to exist.  But if Trump beats the South Korean socialist to the peace process in unifying the Korean Peninsula against the wishes of China—then all of them lose their leverage cards in future negotiations. But to do all this, Trump couldn’t have a budget battle with Democrats now—he needed the military money and the ability to show that he was willing to work with the Democrats.  He knew they’d reject him—but he had to try so that he’d have the high ground later.  And that is the difference between a good strategist and an idiot.  The media doesn’t know the difference but readers here do.

Rich Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

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

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The Disgraceful, Dishonest Press: Liberal losers in Hollywood and the media show how bad it really is

I deal with a lot of people and most of them don’t come as close to being the kind of conservative that I am. So the intolerance to other people’s opinions isn’t something that I understand.  Most of the time I am very disappointed in the people I meet, but I figure if they’ve gotten through 30 to 40 years of life and still have liberal leanings toward things—a five-minute conversation with me isn’t going to change much for them—so I don’t waste the time talking.  I deal with things as close to their level as I can allow myself and move on to the next topic without a thought.  If I didn’t do that I couldn’t speak to anybody—but that’s OK, because that type of thing doesn’t do much for me anyway.  But having an intolerance toward other points of view—if I functioned like that, I simply couldn’t live.  That’s why it is so disgusting to me to see how the White House Correspondents media behaved Saturday night as President Trump stiffed them by doing something else in a different city that night.  I don’t blame Trump at all—the media does cover him differently than say, President Obama.  In spite of all their talk about being a relevant part of “democracy” the press clearly didn’t hold Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and Eric Holder to the level of scrutiny that they do anybody in the Trump administration—so it is they who created this mess—and only they can clean it up.

I’ve told you dear reader before, the communist insurgents from the 1950s sought openly to take over Hollywood and the American media hoping to advance those collectivist ideas a half a century later and bring down the capitalist republic envied around the world so that a global order could rise from the ashes. Public schools have assisted in this enterprise and that is why on May first 2017 there were communist demonstrations in cities across America that we wouldn’t have seen ten or twenty years ago.  Those communist sympathizers are now in Hollywood and in our media and they have advanced that communist plot line.  Not that long ago there were a sizable number of conservatives in those fields.  There were always liberals in Hollywood and in the media, but they weren’t this obnoxious and insistent on shutting out conservative voices.  But these days conservatives are under attack which is most evident at Fox News where all the old timers are losing their jobs to more progressive liberals.  I felt sorry for Eric Bolling who had his new show debut at 5 PM on “May Day” and it was a disaster.  Why did he have on Mark Cuban?  He’s an idiot—I don’t want to hear from him.  In fact I didn’t want to hear from anybody but Eric on his show—more opinions don’t equate to better thinking.  But all Fox News could think to do in that time slot was another version of The Five.  I listen to liberals all day long—I don’t want to hear them on my news after working hard all day.  I’m open to other view points, but when it comes to my entertainment time—I’m going to choose people who are like-minded.  If Fox News doesn’t give me what I’m looking for I’ll find other alternatives—and that is the real reason for the misery displayed at the Correspondent’s Dinner Saturday

The country is moving back toward conservatism and the Hollywood types along with their partners in the media don’t like it. They are not open to people with other opinions and it shows in the way the covered Obama.  There were so many things they could have nailed him on, but because he was a black Democrat they literally gave him a free pass—but decided to put down the gauntlet for Trump and we all see it.  Who do they think they’re kidding?  They are the cause of all the divisiveness and when we don’t go along with their media plans—and just openly accept their stupid progressivism they think we are the ones who are intolerant.   Check out the riots just this year at Berkeley.  That will tell you everything you need to know.

For instance, I typically enjoy the Star Trek movies when they come out, so I watched the last one, Star Trek: Beyond.  It was horrendously stupid—overly progressive and ridiculously political.  They were more concerned with showing gay sex and multi-cultural civilization than in telling a good story—so the movie bombed.  It was rejected at the box office just like most projects are that are overly sexualized toward a progressive direction—because the United States as a market is not liberal.  When media companies start thinking their task is to make people into a certain thing by using art to take them there—they will likely fail if that art does not represent the demographic targeted by the art.  Star Trek: Beyond might represent the gay people at a Pride parade with all their rainbows and dudes dressed in drag—but it doesn’t register with some mechanic in Wichita, Kansas who is certainly not thinking of sticking any part of himself in the ass of some hairy assed man.  The media both in the press and in entertainment failed to understand their marketplace and thought they actually had the power to move culture instead of giving culture what it wants.

That is the big distinction, the liberals in the news media think they can shape the minds of their viewers and the hard reality tells them that people will leave and seek out other objectives. I seldom watched The Five on Fox because I didn’t want to hear from Jaun Williams or Bob Beckel.   It’s nothing personal, I just don’t want to hear their liberal voices—it’s a waste of my time.  It’s not that I’m intolerant, it’s that I don’t want to hear it—and that is what the media is missing now that we are in the age of Trump.  They are making themselves less relevant day by day and they still don’t know it.  By the way they behaved at the correspondent’s dinner—they really don’t understand America at all.  They only understand the progressive culture of New York, Washington D.C. and a few cities in California—but no place else who actually watch their programming—or not, depending on choices.

Since Fox New canned O’Reilly and really Roger Ailes over the summer, I only watch Lou Dobbs and Brett Baier at 6 pm on the Fox owned networks. I caught the Tucker Carlson segment shown above while I had breakfast because the headline caught my eye.  But I don’t have time to commit to a complete show if the people in it don’t represent what I want to see.  I don’t need a lecture from a bunch of artists and leftists who will take their clothes off for anybody and smoke dope every now and then—to “open” my mind to other points of view.  I know what works and what doesn’t and that’s pretty much it.  Maybe when I was in my twenties I had things to learn.  These days, nobody knows what I do because they don’t work as hard as I do for information—so there isn’t much for them to “teach” me.  I just want the news—not some 26-year-old kid crying about fairness.  I want to see reports on what’s going on in the world and if the press has to spin it at all, I want a conservative view-point.  I don’t want to listen to liberals cry about every little particle floating around the universe.

It was very disingenuous to listen to the press complain about Trump because honestly, I’m not sure they know where they live. All they really accomplished was that they confirmed they didn’t understand the average Trump voter who has loaded up government positions with conservatives at all levels.  It’s pretty bad that POLITICO released in its recent survey that no members of the press identify themselves as Republican—when the people they are covering most likely are—and the audience who wants their news.  When a majority of the press are openly Democrats it becomes a larger problem and we saw it during the Obama years and the Clinton election where they lost.  They didn’t understand what happened then, or why it was a problem, and they know even less now.  Yet for them the world will go on without them—because that’s how things work.  It’s just too bad their liberal college professors never taught them that so to save them from this present disgrace.

Rich Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

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

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The Unexpected Fun of Mario Kart 8: What a capitalist culture produces that’s good

If I sat and thought about it, there are a lot of things I deal with on a daily basis that I could claim drove me to depression or misery—where your expectations for things don’t match up with the real-world output. After all, that is the #1 cause of unhappiness.  Such things might be some distant family member that you care about. who got a new tattoo against your wishes, or some catastrophic expensive business disappointment—which happens all the time.  But I stay pretty happy all the time because of my personal means of management no matter what is going on—because I have a lot of hobbies that make me very happy.  One of those things I do is video gaming where I continue to be surprised at the technical achievements that are now coming almost quarterly from the industry—the latest great surprise being the Nintendo Switch counsel.  There have been 900,000 sold in the United States as of this writing and I consider myself lucky to have one of them.  It wasn’t easy to get—but once we did get one it has become a good friend to me.  I use it all the time and it has brought a lot of joy to my family after only a month.  The new Zelda game exclusively on Nintendo is for 2017 what Uncharted 4 was to last year’s game market for the PS4.  It is just a marvelous game on every front.  It’s like playing in a virtual Akira Kurasawa film—just something really special.

On Friday April 28th Mario Kart 8 was released and I didn’t realize how big of an event that was going to be.  My youngest grandson was about to have his 1st birthday party and a lot of family members were going to be there so I planned to bring along the Switch for everyone to play and of course Mario Kart is one of those great games for a crowd to play with. So I found myself at Target hoping to get a copy of the new Mario Kart 8 Deluxe that is simply a revamp of the 2014 game released on the Nintendo Wii.  I thought it would be a fun game and it was a priority for me because we did have a Switch, but I wasn’t prepared for the all-out display that Target had done for the new game on the new system.   Mario Kart 8 had its own display right at the cash register the way a hot new movie release might—which I thought was odd because likely very few people in the marketplace had a Nintendo Switch yet to justify such a roll-out.  But Target was absolutely committed to the new Nintendo game system and they were not shy about it.  I was impressed by that.

We had fun with the Mario Kart 8 game all weekend.  Another of my grandchildren stayed at our house and we played it until he went to bed and then again starting at 8 AM Sunday morning until about noon when his mother picked him up.  As we were saying good-bye to them I noticed she had McDonald’s Happy Meals in the front seat and on the boxes were advertisements for Mario Kart 8 on the Nintendo Switch.  Like Target, McDonald’s had jumped on the whole Mario Kart 8 release with great capitalist enthusiasm and it was fun.  I enjoyed with all the things going on in my life to have a delightful weekend playing with this fun new game system with my kids and grandkids sharing the enthusiasm that often comes from Nintendo products while being exposed to it everywhere I went.

Last week I went to great effort to convey why I liked the movie, The Founder so much.  McDonald’s is about more than food—on many occasions in the past they have infused themselves directly into our culture—as they did recently with the Mario Kart 8 game release for the Nintendo Switch.  As I say a lot, these video games are now part of our cultural heritage—they are updated story telling avenues that are in many cases replacing the effectiveness of movies and books—so I consider them significant.  And specifically, these efforts by Target, McDonald’s and all retail companies associated with Nintendo and the release of Mario Kart 8—a simple kids game that is just fun for anybody to play—are all creations of capitalism and convey the optimism that pours forth from creative enterprise that exists for the pleasure of past time indulgence.  That indulgence only happens in free societies led by capitalist monetary commitments.

I had to see a young lady at her office on the day that Mario Kart had been released and I was early for our meeting. So when I walked in on her she was looking sheepishly at her computer screen trying to hold back a laugh.  I knew she was hiding something so I walked behind her desk and saw that she was playing Mario Kart 8 on her Nintendo Switch and she was trying to hide it from people walking by her office window. I told her I understood and she proceeded to tell me that she went out for lunch to get the new game and she couldn’t wait to play it.  This was a grown woman with a pretty important job.  So Mario is for anyone and there isn’t any harm in blowing off a little steam with some fun—which is why this Switch game system is so powerful–culturally.

After my visit to Target I stopped by Gamestop to see if I could find an AC adaptor for taking the Switch on the run, so I could charge it up away from the docking station connected to my television.  While there the guy at the counter asked me if I had Mario Kart 8 yet—which of course I said I did because I had just bought it at Target from the big display they had there.  That’s when the sales clerk said “but do you have the steering wheels?’  I was a little shocked to see him present two Mario Kart steering wheels to use while playing the fun racing game and of course I couldn’t pass them up.  So It was a Mario weekend for me and I enjoyed it greatly in spite of having plenty to worry about in all other aspects of my life.  Being surrounded by the influence of one game for a game console few people had yet was enjoyable.  I spend a lot of time talking about cultures ancient and present—and Nintendo certainly has a place of honor in our modern myth making efforts as human beings.  I couldn’t help but be impressed because there really isn’t any downside to it.  It’s all a positive aspect of capitalism—you won’t find Mario Kart 8 bringing that kind of joy to places devoid of capitalism—places like Iran, Syria, Russia—Afghanistan and so on.  Only healthy countries functioning from good philosophy and positive money flow can enjoy these types of things and Nintendo was doing a good job of putting their product in the hands of the most people possible which was wonderful.  I’d love to see a world where kids in the middle of Africa could participate in the Mario Kart fun—but for them—they are lucky to find a stable meal because of the lack of capitalism in their countries.

Nintendo specifically is a good, clean company.  All their characters are wholesome and playful.  You don’t have to worry about illicit sex and mental depletion when it comes to Nintendo products.  In every instance I can think of they are child-like in their approach to gaming but revere intelligence in the actual game play. Mario Kart 8 is a smart little party game—and Zelda is very deep—but they all have in common that Nintendo fun of living life without the burdens of modern adulthood drowning in expectations.  Everything is optimistic—just like when we were all children—which is why many people are bringing these Nintendo Switches to work with them.  I don’t get mad when I see such things because I think it makes people more productive and that this video game element to our society is taking the place of more restrictive past times that used to be utilized during lunch hour.  It is a lot more productive to play Mario Kart 8 for an hour than going to BW3s and drinking a couple of beers.  The Mario Kart player will be ready to solve problems and tackle challenges after lunch while the beer drinker will struggle to stay awake and engaged for the rest of the day.  So I see no downside to all this capitalist excess because it helps our society in every phase, mental wellness, economic development, problem solving, enthusiasm endurance—when a simple game like Mario Kart can enhance the level of excitement when shopping at Target or buying Happy Meals at McDonald’s really—everyone wins.  There is no downside.

In that regard, the Nintendo Switch has turned out to be a little bit of a miracle. In just one month it sold over 2 million units worldwide which puts it up there with the PS4 and ahead of Xbox.  A few years ago Nintendo looked like it was falling off the map.  After watching the Superbowl commercial for the Nintendo Switch I was highly skeptical—but now I am a huge fan.  I love it.  It is a perfect marriage of incredible technology and innovative product development rolled up into one beautiful package that touches many aspects of our capitalist culture which advances human thought through entertainment and philosophy.  That to me is a big deal and is something to celebrate.  I certainly did.  After a weekend like I had with the Nintendo Switch, I felt privileged to be able to play a part in it.  Not only was it fun, but it was enhancing in ways I wouldn’t have thought possible even a few months ago.

Rich Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

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Trump’s 100 Days Speech: The media is completely lost as to where they are

It simply never has happened in my lifetime.  Usually presidents of the United States do everything they can to get the approval of the media and they end up giving the people of that profession the illusion that they are running the country. But not Donald Trump, as a man who doesn’t need to raise money constantly for his next campaign, he can afford to blow them off due to the way they conduct their business.  Instead of attending the White House Correspondents Dinner in Washington D.C. like everyone else has—Trump celebrated his first 100 days as president in Pennsylvania talking the same way he did during the campaign baffling everyone in the media who were forced to cover his event.  And guess what, Trump’s event was more popular, and much more interesting than a bunch of political insiders toasting the success of each other by using the president like a piñata.  At their event in Washington D.C. the media took their shots at Trump as expected even though nobody cared but themselves.  But this time Trump also took his shots at the media—and everyone noticed.  This was truly a different kind of president and business as usual is not on the menu.

I understand and support Donald Trump’s behavior toward the press completely.  Functioning just in Cincinnati, Ohio I have over thirty personal media contacts on my phone and have given many interviews over the years on television, radio and in the newspapers.  When I’m working on something that requires those relationships, I do a lot of media.  Over the last few years, the things I have been doing did not require media—but other skills.  And that’s good because in 2012 I had a pretty good blow up with one particular reporter from The Cincinnati Enquirer who took things I said in many different places and plucked them out of context for a hit article designed to help my political opponents purely for partisan reasons.  That guy was Michael Clark who was the education reporter for the Enquirer and what he did was flat-out manipulate the facts to support a liberal position—must like we have been seeing with Trump on a much higher platform.  I have firsthand experience and dealt my situation much the way Trump does now—only when I did it nobody had seen it before.  Even Trump was able to get good press back then because he was doing The Apprentice on NBC and the media needed Trump as much as Trump needed the media.  But when the time came to tear Trump down and keep him out of the White House, that’s when things got ugly as they usually do.

I was always nice to Michael Clark, when he needed a quote I always gave him one professionally no matter where I was in the world—to keep the ink flowing when he most needed it.  I gave him scoops and very articulate answers which helped him enormously because I gave him access to other stories just through association.  But when he played his part in one of those “mad mother” attack pieces—just like what happened to Trump on many occasions during the campaign, and recently happened to Bill O’Reilly, I cut him off after that.  He and I haven’t spoken since and we see each other sometimes around town—but in my book he’s done.  I won’t work with someone like that who is intellectually dishonest and he knows what he’s done. He thought what he did to me would finish me for life and he went for my jugular quite openly and nobody does that to me and gets away with it.  That’s a policy that I live by and it works and Clark apparently didn’t understand it.

Even back in 2012 people still read newspapers, but now many of the reporters I knew at that period are either out of business in 2017 or they are headed in that direction.  I used to read the Enquirer everyday early in the morning like a lot of people I know—but I can’t name a single reader now.  It’s not because of my incident—it’s just that the paper sucks and new media is taking over where the old media used to dominate.  Just covering my education issues back in 2012 there was a thing called the West Chester Buzz, and there was the Pulse Journal that was set up in the plaza owned by one of my old friends from No Lakota Levy at the Liberty Township Kroger Marketplace.  It’s an empty building now—because nobody reads that liberal crap in a conservative region any more.  I’m quite confident that more people read my blog site than those who read Michael Clark’s Enquirer articles because mine are a lot more interesting even if people don’t always agree.  And they can read my stuff anywhere, at home, on their phone, at work—anywhere.  But the Enquirer charges all kinds of fees and you can’t go back and archive information because they run out of server space—they are really pathetic and behind the times.

Donald Trump has experienced much more indignation than I have so his anger and means to strike back are on a much larger scale—so I can imagine what’s in his head and what he did in Pennsylvania will leave an impression.  I purposely went out of my way to let my reporter friends know I can write better than they can more often and with more varied content—just to drive the point home that they aren’t needed in the world.  And when they come after you, they are fair game.  Trump certainly drove that point home from his rally in Pennsylvania.  He addressed his political rivals who are largely in the media by overshadowing their little Washington D.C. event and it made them look pretty pathetic.  Trump knows what’s coming—in just a few years many of those Hollywood actors at that dinner will be out of a job, or just barely hanging on because the entertainment industry is changing just as newspapers were during my little 2012 incident.  ESPN just laid off over 100 personalities there and cable news is drying up.  Movies are largely losing propositions top-heavy with union labor costs meaning the talent they utilize makes more than they can produce in revenue.  Trump knows their business in entertainment and new reporting, but they don’t understand him.  In a few years, most of them will be out of work while Trump is ramping up for his second term and things will be much different then. So why eat out of their hands when he doesn’t need to?

If anybody doubted the effectiveness of Donald Trump those concerns should have been alleviated upon hearing that Pennsylvania speech.  Presidents of the United States just don’t do things like that—especially only 100 days in and given all the negative coverage Trump has had.  He was able to pack the house with an enthusiastic crowd who is turning away from the press.  From the perspective of the media who held a big elaborate annual event in our nation’s capital that should have had the world watching like the Academy Awards Trump sucked up all their hype denying them even that much.  But they deserved it, and I completely understand.  The media doesn’t run the country.  We elect people who do.  They like to think of themselves as protectors of the public from the corruption of the powerful—but all they really are is progressive insurgents trying to alter America’s capitalist system and most of us like our country—we don’t want to change.  I’ve seen it up close from personal experience and I understand why Trump needs to do what he’s doing.  And his strategy will be effective in advancing his needs leaving the current media scrambling to remain relevant.  For those who wonder if Trump will be a good president—that speech on his first 100 days says it all—and points to a time that will be even better which is all any of us can ask for.

Rich Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

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The Failure of Albert Einstein: Trump’s first 100 days as President

The most telling indicator of Trump’s first 100 days isn’t all the executive orders that he’s undone from the Obama era to take the chains away from American enterprise, or the unraveling around the world of the weak Obama foreign policy which the White House is facing down squarely on all fronts, but it’s in the fact that for the first time ever the Dow Jones spiked above 21,000 for a bit and is actually closing close to that mark. Money is flowing and optimism is high in such a brief period of time.  It has provided a clear window into what the future of America can look like. And for the first time that I’ve ever seen, the Democrats sound like old archaic socialists from some third world country that have no idea how economies work and that is largely due to the contrast they have with Donald Trump.

Wall Street is not a villainous enterprise. It should be remembered that when the World Trade Center was attacked—the goal was to bring down American capitalism because the rest of the world doesn’t have anything like it.  Enemies of America know that the way to beat us is to take away our financial means, and Democrats are the party intent to conduct that objective on behalf of the world.  I was surprised to learn some things new in the National Geographic series, Genius which was about the life of Albert Einstein because in it knowingly or unknowingly the Hollywood left and the progressive objectives of National Geographic revealed a lot about themselves in making Einstein their version of Jesus. In the beginning of the first episode Einstein is having sex with a woman with her back pressed against a chalkboard where he has some complicated equations written—which end up on her back.  After sex he casually wipes away the dust and rewrites them carefully while asking the girl to move in with him and his wife.  She refuses as she should where Einstein then gives a small lecture about monogamy not being natural.  Later, as the Nazis rise to power Einstein as a much younger man renounces his German citizenship to say that he is a man of the world and that Germany is full of temporary nationalists.  Even later his businessman father chastises the young, dreamy Einstein for not being focused on making a living where the two argue about the nature of capitalism for which Ron Howard clearly takes the side of the communist leaning Einstein.  The hopeful disguise is that the political left hopes through the lens of “genius” that viewers will be enchanted toward progressivism—after all, everyone knows that Albert Einstein was a “genius.”  Who could argue otherwise?

But after watching him more under the fine direction of Ron Howard was that Einstein was a bit of a little bitch complaining about everything and seeking for ways to daydream rather than do anything productive. Yes, the results of his daydreams was quite good and he advanced civilization—but he was quirky at best and hardly a fine example of human specimen.  Being smart doesn’t necessarily make a person good—it just makes them useful.  That was my takeaway from the National Geographic show about Albert Einstein—was that he was kind of a little bit of a bitch that you put up with because he did one thing really well—and that was articulate the realm of physics.  But he hardly had the keys to a constructive civilization or the understanding of transitory concerns for which we all live.  It’s not enough to only take the long view on things, but we must have both—the ability to see way over the horizon while we work in the here and now.  As Einstein’s wife said to him after his friend was assassinated by extremists of the rising Nazi party—“don’t hide in your work—you need to grieve.”  It doesn’t make a person great to hide in his genius and think about only big problems without doing the things in the here and now.  If that were the definition of greatness countless video game players who hide in their online activities would be considered “great” people instead of escapists unable to deal with reality.  But that is the problem of the political left, they worship people like Einstein without considering the faults of his compulsive desire to hide from the here and now by thinking about the infinite.  Just a few sentences prior Einstein’s wife addressed her husband’s infidelity for which he offered no apology—and she just accepted it the way most liberals do—as something that just happens.

These are the people who have been critical of Donald Trump—people who make movies about Albert Einstein on the very progressive National Geographic Channel and are functioning from a value system hiding out of reality—which is why they don’t understand money or the value of it. Money is a measure of morality in the value of something.  If something is worth a lot of money it’s because its value is desired by many.  Under that lens, the Wall Street stock markets are a measure of our economic horsepower which translates into many other good things which trickle off it.  Einstein might have figured out the theory of relativity, but the value of human achievement was clearly something that eluded him because he was fundamentally as a person detached from the value of such things.  He viewed such things as transitory—whereas they are mini miracles.  For instance—the planet Saturn never built a car.  The mechanisms of the universe may do many cool things across the mysteries of space and time—but with all the vast intelligence contained within it—the universe never invented an eraser to wipe away the chalk found on the back of Einstein’s sex partner.

A progressive would argue that an eraser only has value in the realm of human thought—but if you consider for a moment the value of that thought—isn’t it grander than the power of a black hole, or a quasar? Isn’t it a human mind who can figure out how to build a planet if they could gather up the proper resources as opposed to a bunch of forces that collide to form everything we see—would do so and perhaps even improve on the design of a “plant.”  How do we know that in the end of the quantum physics tunnel that it’s not a human mind that is steering everything—after all—we do typically associate our God figures as being recognizably human.

The New York Stock Exchange is a measure of human thought because the money that is produced by it through investments indicates the value of human concepts by way of invention and commerce. And under Trump that thought is expanding which is a miracle in itself and the greatest thing I’ve seen happen in Trump’s first 100 days as president of the United States.  Trump is beyond the nationalism that Hitler represented and Einstein feared so much—he is beyond even the universal accidents that seem to be happening all over the place in space—because Trump represents a step in human evolution that is directly seen emerging in the increased value of the American stock exchanges—the optimism of the pent-up potential of the human race.  That potential has eluded all societies for millions of years and under Trump it is emerging at a rapid pace—and expanding in ways that would have completely mystified Albert Einstein and his progressive subjects committed to a philosophy that died away with Immanuel Kant.  And Trump is doing it not because he himself is a great man—but because he knows enough to take away the limits to human potential and that along is a massive accomplishment of boundless value.  That concept all by itself is more important than any legislation that could have been created because laws do not make our society great.  Human invention through thought does.

Rich Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

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The Power of Positive Thinking: Persistance is the most important attribute of success

I have more to say about the recent Michael Keaton movie, The Founder than I did during a recent review (click here to read that).  The Founder was one of those unique movies that truly crosses many boundaries of intellectual thought and within it is a little hidden gem that I thought was remarkably well articulated.   Disguised as a simple movie The Founder captures in a bottle the essence of Norman Vincent Peale’s “Power of Positive Thinking” which is a very real thing.  I don’t know if I have it naturally because I grew up in many of the same places that Peale did and went to many of the same small churches in the Ohio region—specifically Cincinnati.  But it’s always been a part of my life this idea explored in the film—that persistence is the most valuable trait attributed to success that there is anywhere in the world and it is the magic ingredient that is unlocked through the philosophy of capitalism.

If Ray Kroc and Donald Trump turned to Norman Vincent Peale it was for me the 30-minute span of time in Raiders of the Lost Ark, where Indiana Jones was stuck in a tomb with snakes, to the point where he was about to be run over by a truck in the famous chase scene of that classic movie that did it for me.  I was always a positive person who never understood the word quit, but for me that movie set me on a life path of understanding of how important persistence was to the human condition.  When Indiana Jones a few scenes after the truck chase swam over to the Nazi submarine that for me was my version of Norman Vincent Peale.  But of course over time I have refined that type of thinking to make it my own.  But once you get it, it makes you a unique person for life however it comes to you, and it’s something very specific to American culture.

One thing I that really jumped out at me while staying in England for an extended period of time was the structured limitations they put on themselves as a country.  I love that they read, and that they speak well—but people who have a tenacious persistence toward objectives is lacking.  Their culture does not produce such people naturally.  They get their occasional Richard Branson, or their Gorden Ramsay but on the street level charismatic characters such as what makes people like Ray Kroc are missing.  I thought it was a very powerful moment while at a convention panel discussing the movie The Founder that Michael Keaton hit the nerve absolutely on the keys to American capitalism perfectly.  Keaton stated that people from other countries just didn’t get “it,” what made Ray Kroc more than an American villain—but a hero of capitalism.  People outside of America are often mystified by the tenacious quality of Americans which is born from culture, family and pre-kindergarten education.  Other countries are missing the element of personal freedom so the traits that breed persistence into people from the age of infants is missing. You could see the same comments from socialist oriented publications talking about The Founder—they all wanted to view Kroc as a villain when in fact he wasn’t.  His character was far more complicated than that.  In a socialist society the value of a human being might be interpreted by how much they sacrifice of themselves in service to others—whereas in the capitalist definition it is in how much war is won in the name of success which therefore translates directly to improving the lives of everyone.  In the film The Founder Kroc proposes to the McDonald brothers that if they didn’t want to franchise the McDonald’s brand for their own profit then they should do it for the good of America—which is precisely what ended up happening.  Kroc never took no for an answer and just kept coming at the McDonald brothers until they gave in—which is a trait of most successful enterprises.  Most success in life doesn’t come from lucky shots and instant millions in the bank account—it comes from decades of rejection where a person never gives up and preservers against all odds because they simply wear out the opposition.   That is a specifically American concept and it is so evident in people like the real Norman Vincent Peale and Donald Trump.  It’s also there in American culture in fictional characters like Indiana Jones—which is why those movies have such resonance in our culture many decades later.  Because it speaks to the hopeful child in all of us that if we just work harder and longer we will eventually punch through.   Most of the miserable people who Henry David Thoreau referred to when he said “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation, and go to the grave with the song still in them,” are your friends and neighbors who arrive at middle age sad, fat, and bored.  That is because what has died in them is that childlike persistence to attempt to walk, learn the alphabet, and learn to speak.   For people, lucky enough to preserve these traits in themselves into adulthood the world is a lot better off because of them.

Like they said in The Founder, which is what Michael Keaton was trying to frame within a global context during the aforementioned press conference, which many people just don’t understand—is that the most valuable trait to the pursuit of success is persistence.  You can have really smart people on a project, yet it won’t be successful if there is a lack of persistence present to drive things forward.  You can have strong people, beautiful people, or even conniving people, and a project won’t be successful unless there is someone there with vision fueled by persistence to accomplish a task.  (Robert Persig, Metaphysics of Quality)  For instance, Walt Disney is all about the story of persistence.  It’s not about talent, or even having a better idea than the next person.  Walt never quit trying hard for decades to get his ideas off the ground.  The same thing could be said of George Lucas and his Star Wars franchise.  He was “persistent” and if he hadn’t been there never would have been a Star Wars.  Persistence is the key to all endeavors.  If a person has persistence they are more valuable than people with great educations, great skills, and great beauty.   Persistence is the key to any successful enterprise and behind most stories of success, luck is not the driving factor, its persistence.  Luck sometimes happens, but persistence, the kind that Ray Kroc had in The Founder, is what defines success or failure.

People who have given up in life and turn to socialism for a means of feeding themselves without the shame of admitting what they’ve become hate people who are “persistent”  They may go watch an Indiana Jones movie and admire the persistence of the character and within the darkened theater, root for such people, but when they meet them in real life they hate them with a passion not because of the persistent people themselves, but because of what they’ve lost along the way that made them accept average results.  There are a lot of people in life who are like the McDonald brothers—successful people who figure out a better way to do simple things—but the world never hears from them because they stay in their little restaurants and live their little lives contently happy to remain there.  Then you have people like Ray Kroc who struggle most of their life to make it big from one idea to another always ready but never give up.  Because they never quit, and are persistent they are always in the game—much like the New England Patriots were in that great Super Bowl that wrapped up the 2016 season—never quitting, never yielding until they eventually ground out a win.  Or Donald Trump campaigning at 1 AM in the morning at Michigan the night before the massive American election in November of 2016.  Persistence equals wins—not every time, but the averages favor those who are always trying to win whether they are cleaning toilets or making multimillion dollar deals.

Persistance is not taught in our schools, but it is an aspect of American culture and explains why many people who are persistent are some of the greatest treasures to capitalism and our American economy that we have—and no school can lay claim to making them that way.  It’s created from deep inside during their infancy years.  I always had it, and I recognized it in Raiders of the Lost Ark when Indiana Jones just never stopped trying to get the Ark of the Covenant back from the Nazis.  In my life I purposely take on projects that would otherwise be impossible but for my endless persistence just to prove my thoughts true to all the people who have told me all my life that things are impossible.  My greatest thrill is in doing the impossible with sheer persistence.  I’ve done things in life that would have killed many people many times over from either suicide or public shame—and I have done them with an internal persistence that doesn’t come from any worldly reference.  It is beyond space and time even, and I consider it the greatest gift that a person can possess.  It should be the number one trait people list on a resume—but unfortunately most people don’t see it or understand it—otherwise they’d be better off.  But I can say that our American way of life makes more of them—and that alone makes the United States the most moral country on earth.  And that’s no small thing.

Rich Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

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‘The Founder’, Movie Review: Why the battles of capitalism are worth all the blood they spill

I didn’t catch it when it was released in the theaters, but that didn’t stop me from buying the Blu-Ray at the first opportunity because I knew it would be a brilliant film—and it was.  The Founder starring Michael Keaton was just that—and it may well be the most important film you’ll see this year—or whenever you read this.  If you haven’t seen the film, do it now.  Don’t even finish reading this.  Just go see it.  I adored the film and personally I could relate to the type of character that Michael Keaton played as likely the most true to life rendition of Ray Kroc ever done—the founder of the McDonald’s franchise concept.  Readers here know I love McDonald’s; I make no secret of it.  I love a lot of things in life but I always have a special place for McDonald’s and the reason for my love was summed up extraordinarily well in the great movie directed by John Lee Hancock.

The Founder is all about innovation and American ingenuity.  It’s not always pretty, not always civil—but the engine that drives American capitalism specifically was captured so wonderfully well in this great movie that its worth watching and should be done in every American household.  Another favorite of my is the great Francis Ford Coppola classic, Tucker: The Man and his Dream—this movie might as well been the sequel to how innovative American enterprise was in the period from 1940 up until the 1960s.  The Founder is about nothing short than the invention of the fast food industry which has left the biggest mark on world culture that we’ve ever witnessed.

When I walk into a McDonald’s no matter where it is in the world I think of this creation story of Ray Kroc and his relationship to the fabulous McDonald brothers.  I simply love all those people even though as the story shows, Ray Kroc unethically outwitted them in the end to take possession of the company that featured their name—and that was likely a good thing for the invention of fast food.  In fact, I think the scene in The Founder where Kroc and two other people (one who would become his future wife) were discussing a new way to produce a milk shake.  It was one of the best scenes in film history because it captured so well the risk and innovation that was going on all the time during that post World War II period in America which we today all take for granted.  Imagine the skepticism that making a synthetic milkshake with powder was to the naiveté of the 1950s generation yet without people with the drive and charisma of Ray Kroc, we’d all still be eating a lot slower and living a lot less productively.  Anti-capitalists of course would love to go back to the days where it took 30 minutes to get a hamburger—instead of 30 seconds—but American society as we know it now was built on the extra productivity per capita that specifically came from the invention of fast food that started with McDonald’s.  To me that makes the company and this movie enormously relevant.

I’ve had McDonald’s in many countries around the world and to me it is always a piece of home.  Most dramatically my wife and I had a McDonald’s across the street from our hotel in Cancun which probably saved our lives.  We were both sick from our experience with a cenote inland on the Yucatan Peninsula where we were swimming on a very hot day.  The Mexicans use such places as their only relief from their terrible living conditions as most of them live in thatched huts.  I saw fish swimming around in the water so I figured it couldn’t be too bad, and it was clear water.   The local people were used to such bacterially infested water, we weren’t and the next day we were both terribly sick and massively dehydrated.  We lost trust in the local water supply even in such a popular resort town.  But we knew the quality control of the McDonald’s across the street was our best chance at a good meal—because many of the materials that made the material came from the United States.  So for the rest of our trip, we only ate at McDonald’s even though we had access to some of the best places to eat that the world offered.  We didn’t feel we could trust the water since our systems had been disrupted at the cenote.  Those Golden Arches were one of the best experiences I ever had eating.  I can say that my wife and I have had some fine dining in many of the best places in exotic cities and that McDonald’s meal for us was our best because we were so parched and in need of food familiar to our diet with tightly controlled filtered water.

Another time for me was in Japan.  I was so tired of eating seaweed and octopus.  I was trying to be respectful to their culture, but I woke up one morning really looking for some American food so I found a McDonald’s in the middle of the very nice city of Kobe.  Now consider I had just had authentic Kobe Beef the night before with some great wine and immaculate other dishes.  But at 7 AM in Japan after a hard week of work I wanted a Sausage and Egg McMuffin from McDonald’s with a nice big Coke.  When I found one I found a nice place to eat it off in the corner of the restaurant and it will always be one of the best meals I’ve ever had.  There is a lot to be said about the consistency of McDonald’s food because it is pretty much the same anywhere you go and someday when I visit the moon I plan to eat at McDonald’s because it will give a stable diet to my body in an unfamiliar environment—and sometimes that is better than the actual flavors of the food.  I find that when I’m doing hard things, whether they are exotic adventures or tough business engagements, or even intense competitions, McDonald’s provides stability in a diet that is consistent and that is often far more valuable.

A lot of those techniques that make McDonald’s food so constantly fast and reliable were developed by the McDonald’s brothers and marketed to the world by Ray Kroc and we are all better for it.  When I’m having a really rough week, it is not unusual for me to stop by and grab some McDonald’s breakfast on my way to do whatever I’m dreading, because it does bring me a lot of joy to have that food. So a story about how that remarkable place was born is a lot of fun to see, especially as honest of a movie as this is.  Essentially, the McDonald’s brothers developed a great idea and a means to make food fast.  But it was Ray Kroc who put them into every city and was able to take the chance to pound out the fast food concept as a chain of real estate transactions.  That was really the hinge point of the entire McDonald’s story, that the business concept of franchising wasn’t in the food itself, but in the real estate transactions involved, where McDonald’s owned the stores and franchise owners would lease the spots—which put the quality control firmly in the hands of the company—instead of the individual owners.  That was the key and it took someone like Ray Kroc to pound out the idea.  The McDonald brothers were simply too nice to make that next step plunge.

In the end the point of the movie was a clear definition of capitalism that was spelled out clearly.  When Kroc tells the McDonald brothers that his business was war and if he saw a competitor drowning—that he’d put a hose down their throat to finish them off.  Mac McDonald wouldn’t have done that and neither would his brother.  That essentially was why they failed to move beyond their initial concepts but no further.  To make projects work you need a Ray Kroc type of person or things just stall, and that is what makes capitalism such an elusive concept elsewhere in the world.  Every business needs their dreamers, and their concept people—but in the end they need someone who can bring persistence to whatever is being attempted.  Ray Kroc with all their faults was undaunted by the prospect of failure.  He had failed over and over through his entire life and in the end; he was speaking with Governor Reagan just before he was elected president as the most successful restaurateur in the world.

McDonald’s makes all of our lives more efficient.  My daughter often before she picks up her kids at our house brings them Happy Meals from McDonald’s to entice them to get into the car and go home.  It helps her to give them quick food while as a busy young parent time is often short.  The ability to get a Happy Meal frees her time up making her much more productive in other ways.  And the same story could be told for all of us, whether its breakfast on the go in the morning or a relief far from home while traveling on the other side of the world.  McDonald’s makes an essential thing we all must do in our lives—which is eat—faster making it so that we can do many other things in our 24 hour day possible.

This movie is just a champ—it captures the American Dream in ways I’m not sure even the filmmakers realized.  For instance, why was Ray Kroc so obsessed with the idea of franchising the McDonald’s concept when he had a nice wife, a nice house, and a membership into an exclusive country club with rich friends?  Isn’t that what people want in America?  And why did the McDonald brothers work so hard to find faster ways to make food more reliably?  The answer goes beyond the wealth that can be achieved by such endeavors.  It is in the hunt of doing them which makes this story different from any other.  Ray Kroc wasn’t about personal jets and boardrooms, even though those things did come to him over time—it was about the thrill of doing something impossible for the benefit of doing something that had never been done before.  That is what drove all the protagonists in this story and what’s wonderful about it is that it was a true story.  It is in that concept that American capitalism works so well and how when those battles are fought the benefits get sprinkled so wonderfully to the rest of the world.  The wars of capitalism are worth fighting because the byproduct of it makes all of society better.  Even though capitalism can be ruthless, the products that come about as a result advance civilization and it is people like Ray Kroc and the McDonald brothers who best exemplify the American Dream.  Not in their successes as much as in their eternal optimism to keep trying until they finally do win—or die trying.

Rich Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

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Canadian Socialism: WLW’s poor choice in selective advertising and how America isn’t going back

This is one of those snarky media things that really irritates me—because there is a presumption that they know more than the rest of us.  But in my case at least—they don’t.  I’m usually polite toward other people who don’t work as hard at knowing things as I do, but when you run into one of these little smart asses it deserves a review in front of the class.  First WLW radio put out a little story on Twitter seen below, about Canadians disparaging Trump as if that were some kind of story.  Now, everyone here knows my history with WLW—I think they are too liberal since the exit of Darryl Parks and I stopped listening to them or doing little things for their various shows way back then.  AM radio is a dying medium so they are useless to me. When I saw them say something nasty about Trump, I responded accordingly.  I worked hard for the Trump campaign in Ohio, and I continue to do so when necessary.  The nature of my comment was that seldom does any media outlet acknowledge the dirty little secret that Canadians are socialist and the only way their society even begins to have any decent standard of living is that they have a very low population to support with their socialism, and they get all the economic spillover that comes with being the northern neighbor of the United States.  If that Justin Trudeau kid was running a country south of Mexico, Canada would be in just as bad of a situation as Venezuela is currently.  But because Canada shares so much trade with the United States, because we share rivers and lakes with them, they get to enjoy the change that falls out of our pockets as a rich nation.  There is nothing brilliant about the Canadian economy or their commitment to socialism.  Let’s get that clear from the start here.  I’m not a fan of Canada because of their left-winged politics.

But our American media and most of our left-winged entertainment culture love Canada for all those socialist reasons—and they are supposedly educated people.  Enter this Chad Selweski guy who responded to my Tweet to WLW Radio with the following smart assed answer from what he calls a “centrist viewpoint” as a media guy with some experience.  The only reason I point this out is because he represents largely what the mainstream media thinks about things and you quickly get an idea about why our media is so screwed up.

By his own words, Chad Selweski is a freelance writer and blogger with a centrist point of view from suburban Detroit, Macomb County (population 870,000), home of the “Reagan Democrats.” Selweski worked as the political reporter for The Macomb Daily for 30 years.

At The Macomb Daily, Selweski:

  • Earned 50 journalism awards for the newspaper from organizations such as the Associated Press, United Press International, Michigan Press Association, Detroit Chapter of SPJ, Detroit Press Club, Suburban Newspapers of America, and the State Bar of Michigan.
  • Was named by Politico.com in 2014 as one of the “Media Stars” in seven political battleground states.
  • Received in 1998 the highest honor ever granted to a Macomb Daily journalist, the SNA’s National Suburban Journalist of the Year award.
  • Covered the 2000 presidential election recount in Florida, from Tallahassee and Palm Beach County.
  • Interviewed numerous national figures, including President George H.W. Bush, Hillary Clinton, Mitt Romney, Colin Powell, Rudy Giuliani, Al Gore, Nancy Pelosi, Howard Dean, Dennis Hastert, Reince Priebus, Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, Carly Fiorina, Gen. Wesley Clark, Peter Jennings, George Will, Steve Forbes, Mike Dukakis, Richard Gephardt and Gen. Barry McCaffery.

https://www.politicscentral.org/about/

Socialism isn’t funny or cute—yet it’s being taught by a majority of our current education institutions in spite of the terrible track record it has around the world and its people like this Chad Selweski guy who help defend it even in the face of failure.  To more thoroughly answer his question about the beer company making fun of Trump, what they are doing is precisely what Canada always does—they are second-handers to American culture and in this case are using the Trump name to attempt to sell a few extra cans of beer to the largely socialist audience of their visitors and residents.  They aren’t being clever—they are just using the name of a successful person who happens to be picked on in the American media because he’s a capitalist.  That beer company was hoping that they’d get some free publicity from loser media groups like WLW radio to advertise for them subtle messages that go against Trump.  Not particularly clever free market advertising.  Just parasitic—like the overall culture of Canada.

These guys in the media—from WLW radio to this Chad Selweski cape rider want in American politics the type of people who screwed everything up—and Trump is a departure from the world they helped create—and they don’t like it.  I can understand that, but here’s the deal.  We’re not going back to the Peter Jennings world where George Will defined conservatism—or the equal value of Canadian politics on the North American continent.  Their economy only produces 1.7 trillion dollars so they are hardly masters of the universe when it comes to politics or philosophy.  Nobody should be taking any lessons on how to run a country from them.  I worked in the Tea Party movement for nearly a decade now and I have watched the political trajectory culminate into Donald Trump being in the White House and I’m here to tell all these “centrists” who eye socialism with compassion—America has a taste now of what a capitalist loving nation can do for them—and they aren’t turning away and returning to the world of moderation and mixed economies.

The best thing that Trump has done in his first 100 days since the media is so excited to report all the things he hasn’t been able to get done, like healthcare reform, or tax reform—and all the big-ticket items that small-minded people key on who don’t understand the big picture—was deregulation.  Trump has the Keystone Pipeline moving forward. He has cut back on the EPA.  He has an AG who is cutting down on illegal border crossings and he has encouraged trillions of dollars of investment to come back into the United States and that money is going to work in the American economy as I write this.  In just a few months Trump with just his name has put more money into our stock market than Canada produces annually over a three-year period of time.  And we’re just getting started.  By the time there’s another election the political landscape will be much different.  We’re not going backwards.

Trump isn’t the cause of the political shift, he’s the result.  The cause could be seen in the rallies way back in 2009 when people like this Chad Selweski guy were calling Tea Party people “Tea Baggers” hoping to shame people into holding that “centrists” line, where Canada, Mexico and the United States could all sit at a table as equals and contemplate the direction of the human race.  Two socialists and a capitalist do not all get equal consideration under the banner of philosophic contemplation—because results are what matter—not theoretical Marxist commitment when we all know what the end results are.  Trump can come and go, but the movement toward an unapologetic capitalist American society goes all the way back to the last days of George W. Bush when he gave up on the free market to put down the clamps which eventually caused the crash of 2008.  Many of us were ready to try something new back then and because of his skin color, Barack Obama got a chance and what he brought to America was European style socialism and that was like throwing gas on the bon fire.  Trump put his name in the ring and we voted for him—and in the future, it might be him or someone else—but we’re not going back.

The Canadians can make fun of America with their stupid beer cans, and our American media can disparage Trump yearning for those good ol’ days where they understood our political landscape and felt they could control it.  But the reality is what we are dealing with here—socialism doesn’t work, and America is about to pull ahead of the rest of the world economically showing everyone that they should have been more committed to capitalism than they were.  And people like Chad Selweski will find freelancing much more difficult because his “centrist position” just became the extreme radical leftist fringe again—the way it used to be in America.  People are now more open in their opinions and those old George Bush Republicans (pick either Bush president—it doesn’t really matter) are no longer going to be tolerated.

It’s now a numbers game—the old Tea Party types will fight it out for philosophic supremacy as the political left gets lost in the dust as the world changes under their feet.  That will happen because poor countries like Mexico, Canada and all of Europe are no longer equal players in global politics.  Because Trump has taken all the oxygen in the room—and that’s the way we want it in an “America First” world.  The Canadians can make fun of it—but it’s because they are the losers lost in the wake—not the superior economic contributor which WLW tried to pawn off on their audience of half-wits waiting for the next Cincinnati Reds baseball game to come on the air.  Personally, I care about as much about what the Canadians think of America as I do piss in a toilet.  A simple flush takes it all away.