Trains in West Chester: The magic and exuberance of a thriving economy

For the second time in my life I had the strange privilege to gain the viewpoint of foreign visitors and their intense interests in American trains.  In America, we take the length of our trains for granted as most of the rest of the world, particularly Europe and the East do not have they type of freight trains that we do in the United States.  But I remember the magic of when my future son-in-law visited over a decade ago how he thought the length of our trains were simply amazing which surprised me because I took them more as a nuisance that was in my way when I wanted to cross a road.  Then over this past week I had visitors from Japan and we were in a new office space that overlooked a very active railroad line that moved through West Chester, Ohio and they were simply amazed by the length and frequency of the trains.  We were working on some very important things, but I had the seating in such a way that they were able to look out the windows, so they had a prime seat for several hours of the day to see how many trains moved along that track in both a north and south direction.

I noticed that they seemed very interested in what was going on outside the window which made me wonder if I had the seating arrangements correct—and after a few days of this they simply asked me how long those trains were.  My reply was that most of them looked to be a mile long—or 1.6 kilometers as they understand it.  Some of the trains were longer clearly.  This information was simply stunning to these guys who spend a lot of time in places like Tokyo and London—even France. The length of American trains told them a lot about our culture and it was worth taking a moment to consider.

I’ve always loved trains—and like a lot of old men who have train sets in their basements, and like to visit the popular tourist destination in West Chester—Entertrainment Junction which features some of the largest model trains in the world—trains have an essence of optimism about them that largely goes unexplored.  We love them, but often don’t understand why.  After visiting Europe recently with this topic fresh on my mind I have some unique thoughts on the matter which might unlock better our understanding of this condition.  From my vantage point in both Japan and England I admired their train systems which was mostly regulated to passenger transportation.  People needed to get someplace fast so they took the train and it worked pretty well.  I was impressed with the complex way the trains ran in England particularly around London.  However, what was missing was the way that trains are used in the United States—you don’t often see the magic of an American train any place else even in places that are supposed to be the most popular and largest cities in the world.

Over the last year I had some very nice lunches in both Tokyo and London over looking their train systems and neither was as impressive as that display in this new office space where I had these Japanese guests.  After all, it was a fabulous spring day on this occasion where my guests were so enamored with the trains going by my window—so we brought in some good ol’ American pizza from Donatos and you’d think I took these people to a 5 star restaurant.  One of these guys had said that during this business trip they wanted to try some authentic American pizza—so you can image the elation that was experienced with a stack of five different pizzas with all different toppings sitting there being enjoyed while watching three, mile long trains all traveling south by our window while having lunch with a brilliant sun pouring in making us enjoy life that much more.  Just a bit beyond the train tracks was the endless energy of the American highway system which was unique also in the world.  Our big cars and trucks pouring endlessly by all day and night was another thing unique to American culture and we sat for about an hour eating our pizza and talking about trains and trucks in a way that impressed me with its philosophic content.

Japan for a small island economy produces about 4.4.trillion dollars a year which is impressive. To achieve that their people work very hard and intensely 365 days a year—you can feel the energy when you land there.  The people are vigorous, industrious, and extremely well-mannered and it shows in what they make.  And England where London is certainly one of the most important financial centers in the world produces somewhere between 2.2 to 3 trillion dollars if you count all the coins in your pockets on a rainy day—to be generous.  You can feel the energy there too—but in both cases, you can tell something is missing from an American perspective.  I knew what it was as I poured garlic sauce all over my nice juicy pizza watching the traffic under that morning spring sun in Ohio—and my guests were getting the gist of it too.  The American economy produces an astonishing 18.5 trillion dollars over a larger land mass, but the effect was clear by counting the trains and trucks up on I-75 going by then multiplying that over the land mass then dividing it by the hours of the day.  What we were looking at was a vibrant economy which was a product of mankind in all its glorious creativity emerging unencumbered by the powerful locomotives pulling freight from the north to destinations in the south.

The trains were a large part of that 18 trillion-dollar economy as some of the cars were double stacked and loaded with product headed toward distribution centers awaiting shipment.  China has a nominal GDP of 11.3 trillion although they have a PPP projection of over 23 trillion this year which equates out to $11-15,000 per pupil.  All that sounds impressive until you consider that they have over 1 billion people and in the United States our per pupil capita is roughly $53,000—quite a bit higher and that’s with 7 million people still unemployed as of this writing.  What we could see from our vantage point looking at trains and highway traffic was a very efficient and productive country making a lot of money and our big trains were a tremendous part of that.  Even the big tractor trailers cruising by down the highways couldn’t move the sheer volume of product that was chugging along by our train system.  And none of us said it at the time, but the American economy has been stagnant for a long time functioning at only a fraction of its potential due to the weaknesses of several decades of American presidents and destructive politics seeking to duplicate Europe instead of continue on with the polices that built America in the first place.

The trains didn’t just represent massive power by the large diesel engines which propelled them—they were aspects of a very powerful economy and contained within them many hopes and dreams which spill over into the enthusiasm that old men who build train sets in their basements share with their grandchildren. It was the length and frequency of those trains that caught the attention of my guests.  It’s one thing to read about the powerful American economy in a trade publication, or to watch a news story about it on television—it’s quite another to see it up close and personal and to see those trains going by our window was to confirm the majestic nature of American capitalism and the land of abundance that it produces.  That’s exactly why we love our trains and they continue to hold a special place in our hearts.  Trains are vital arteries of American capitalism and they continue to be impressive as the world watches jealously at how we took a relatively small country and made it into such an economy powerhouse.  Many can hope through colleges and other liberal institutions to hide just how powerful the American economy is—but when they see our trains—they can’t escape the reality of it.  Trains in America isn’t so much about taking people from one place to another—but in taking big things to large markets for income producing utilization and that is their specific purpose which is truly unique in the world.  And that is a truly majestic concept worthy of all the imagination ushered forth by our human race.

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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‘Star Wars’ Land Updates: Toy guns and realistic play contribute greatly to a healthy, and sane life

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I know there are a lot of big things going on in the world, but from my perspective, some of the most important are happening in Orlando, Florida with the Star Wars Celebration.  The reason is that one of my favorite topic is human cultures, their influences, and how they vary from region to region and I see Star Wars as one of the greatest positive contributors to the future of our human race, psychologically, philosophically, religiously, and scientifically.  It’s a fun topic but under it all I see the potential for tremendous opportunities in the future.  And as we celebrated Easter at my house and I went out to Target and bought up a bunch of Star Wars Nerf guns for the kids to play with on a really nice Sunday in Ohio I watched the footage of the Imagineers at Disney World conducting their Galaxy in the Making update on their two Star Wars themed worlds to be opened in Orlando and Anaheim during 2019.   Check out what they have in store.

I love guns—everything from my favorite .500 Smith & Wesson Magnum to the Star Wars Nerf guns.  My mom bought me for the fun of it a little Cassian Andor Nerf pistol which I wrote about during the Christmas of 2016 because I was deeply impressed with it.  When I was a kid, I loved the Star Wars guns, but they didn’t shoot anything.  That didn’t stop my brother and I from playing war all the time.  There were several years of my youth that playing war with the kids who lived near me was my favorite thing to do and if I had the guns that kids today can buy at Target and Wal-Mart I would literally have been in Heaven.  Star Wars for me was always about gunfights and being able to play some of those gunfights in real life which was just great.  Knowing all the kids were coming over for Easter I stopped by Target to buy their specific Cassian Andor sniper rifle which is just something special.  It has a clip that holds 12 shots which can be fired as fast as you can pull the trigger.  The trigger pull activates a cool little internal light that charges up your glow in the dark Nerf darts and they come out of the gun’s barrel looking like tracer fire.  The gun fires off compressed air generated by a fan which takes away some of the mechanical aspects that might complicate a real AR-15.  The gun operates much better than I would have guessed.  We had a lot of fun with that gun after our Easter Egg hunt.  I now have a nice collection of these Nerf guns and am a real fan.

But the guns and other toys available to kids these days are just part of the Star Wars experience.  The fun is in being able to play in real life what you mythologically experience through the movies.  And as I’ve said, these days the options are much better than what I had when I was a kid.  For instance, my favorite toy when I was a child was my Han Solo “Empire Strikes Back” version blaster which made a whine sound when you pulled the trigger.  The gun itself wasn’t very impressive because it just made a noise—and not a very good noise at that.  But we’re talking 1980 when I had that gun, yet what it symbolized to me was very special.  However, I just bought the Han Solo Nerf Blaster from the Force Awakens and it is very impressive.  These new Nerf guns not only make great blaster noises that sound like what they do in the movies, but they really shoot.  To get both functions to happen seamlessly is part of the magic of these new toys.  What they are talking about doing down in Orlando at Disney World is something that is certainly next step exciting.  If blasters and games from Star Wars are enhancing the kind of imaginative activities that take place at home—those big theme parks have to go well beyond what the movies can offer, and that’s what they are going to do with Star Wars at Hollywood Studios and Disneyland at Anaheim.

When I first started talking about these new Star Wars Lands at the Disney Parks I was very excited about this because as I said then, many new scientists and philosophers will have their imaginations explode in those places.  Yet, what they are doing with Star Wars Land is far beyond what even I imagined. They are going for a full experience here and that’s a game changer for all amusement parks.  The Disney and Lucasfilm employees in charge of this project are really bringing us the future in every category and the results will be jaw dropping.  We’re talking about full scale spaceships like the Millennium Falcon sitting around that people can see and touch. Imperial Walkers in full scale excitement—a new lightsaber technology that will be patented and developed for Disney World—this is very exciting.  Imagination is now merging with real science to tell stories which evoke leaps in further technological develop which we will eventually find in our daily lives.  Ideas are born in such places and that’s what makes them important for discussion.  The people attending the Star Wars Celebration in Orlando are movie geeks.  But the product of their enthusiasm eventually advances our culture because they spend a lot of money on Star Wars products and Disney reinvests that money in new ways to keep them coming back.  But in the process, they all unlock the human potential available to our species, and that is a beautiful thing.

I know a lot of people.  Some of them are big shots in the world—and some of them run comic book stores and spend all their time escaping in fantasy environments.  I’m not some dude living on a mountaintop in the Rocky Mountains who is out of touch with reality—quite the opposite, and honestly I am probably one of the sanest people alive in the world.  My mental health is excellent.  I can’t imagine anybody being healthier than me and I became that way playing with guns all of my life.  And my first experience with guns came from Star Wars.  Later it came from the great westerns of our movie culture—which eventually migrated into what Star Wars became.  Just like our first five years of life where all we do is play, adults do best when they continue playing well into their mature years—because that’s how we learn as people.  And what Disney is doing at their theme parks with Star Wars is a chance to make play a part of our lives in ways never done before.   And there is nothing wrong with that.

Sure Star Wars is about war, and guns, and people dying.  But it’s about ideas and optimism too and moving beyond the things that scare us.  Guns are the first step in that journey because once you learn to master them, you learn not to be afraid and new ideas can then come to your life.  So the toy guns, the light sabers and confronting villains is a part of our life within Star Wars and making it more real only makes the myth making that much more powerful.  The more playing we do in this realm of overcoming our fears—the better we all are and that is precisely what Disney is creating at its theme parks and I think it’s just riveting.  I am very much looking forward to the new Star Wars Land opening up.  But in the meantime, I think I’ll enjoy the Nerf guns and play Star Wars with my grandchildren as much as possible!

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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Beating the Drums of War: Time to take North Korea away from the stupid fat kid

Obviously I’m not a dope smoking libertarian who wants the United States to be a live and let live Constitutional Republic which allows for the legalization of pot and ignores threats around the world hoping everyone just behaves. While I like the Constitutional Republic part I am an expansionist—I think the world would be a lot happier if they’d just become another state in the United States.  They can keep their integrity and culture so long as the pledge allegiance to our flag.  The world is simply too small now to allow lunatics of theocracy like Iran, North Korea, and Syria to host tyrannical dictators.  I knew what I was getting with Donald Trump and he’s doing exactly what I wanted him to do—flexing the muscle of American military around the world fixing the numerous problems that 28 years of weak American presidents let brew out of control.  I understand that the only way to get to the kind of prosperity America enjoyed in the past is to be the top dog on the world stage—and we should be.  We are the best country with the best ideas and we are open to sharing those ideas with places not so fortunate.  But the bad guys need to be taken out-of-the-way.

I’ve written and written, and written about the effects of Socialist International around the world and how dominate it is really everywhere.  Russia has a former KGB agent from their communist days as their president and China is an all out communist nation.  Europe is all diseased with socialism and all the poor countries of Indochina are rotten with communism.  Stop by Cambodia sometime and walk the streets and 12-year-old girls will throw themselves at your feet offering sex because that’s the only way they can make enough money to eat.  The same in Kenya, Vietnam and the east European nations still trying to develop economies after the collapse of Russia—the world is unstable and many people are suffering for it.  So the grim reality is that nobody in the world is a reliable trading partner with the United States until these problems are solved.  The biggest difference with Trump is that he’s not in love with United Nations group hugs approach.  He’s fine to let NATO and the UN ride on America’s back as long as they shut up and do what he says.  The minute they don’t, they lose their United States funding and they’ll drown with the rest of Europe.  That is the Trump message to the world and as my representative, that’s what I sent him to Washington to do, along with about a 1000 other little things.

America can’t have peace so long as North Korea and many other countries empowered by the 20th Century failed experiments of social engineering remain alive—and that means cleaning up on all the unresolved issues started by past American presidents and getting back to polices that put North America the center of the world, not Brussels.  Since the Korean War ended in 1953 North Korea has been a pain in the neck and the excuse of many United States presidents to have reasons to have military spending as a cover story for their other failures.  And now there is this fat kid who runs the country like a spoiled brat teenager who was given a Lamborghini by his dying dad and he has nuclear warheads which can threaten United States partners in South Korea and Japan.  For the uneducated in the ways of geography, South Korea makes Samsung phones and televisions as well as Kia cars. So right now, they are a very important partner in the United States economy, so we do have a major interest in the area.  Then of course there is Japan who we fought in World War II, and beat.  We took away their weapons and now they are completely dependent on United States protection to produce one of the most powerful economies in the world—so we gave ourselves the responsibility to protect them from China and North Korea both of which have been making moves against that tiny little island in Pacific Ocean.  The American general Claire Lee Chennault warned what would happen if America left the region after World War II and our stupid government allowed communism to spread into China, the Korean peninsula and down into Indochina.  That pulled us into two major wars and essentially a half century stalemate which needs to be broken before there will ever be peace in the region.

This mess extends right in front of the Himalaya Mountains across the impoverished continent of India and into the chaos of Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iran which then borders Iraq and Syria. The average dope smoking American anti-war pacifist couldn’t find any of those countries on a map, so they have no idea what the dangers are in leaving those places free to produce dictators and theocratic nightmares.  There is a tremendous economic cost to the United States in addition to the moral cost of turning away and letting millions of people rot or rush American borders so they can try to escape.  Melania Trump happens to be one of those East Europeans who were lucky to have perfect super model features, like long legs, the proper height and facial features to be a top model in Paris.  If she had been two inches shorter she would have had to be a prostitute of some kind to escape the poverty of her native country in Slovenia.  People who don’t travel much and see the world for what it is who preach legalization of pot and think they can play video games through life leaving everyone alone, have no idea how bad things are out there beyond the borders of the United States.  And open border progressives love all this chaos because they want refugees of the wars they have caused to over burden our American capitalist system and to change it from the inside out.  Just listen to the average American college professor who preaches to our youth to hate those “rich white guys” so that the displaced refugees will flee to America and replace freedom with the only thing they’ve ever known, domination by dictators and failed economic opportunities.

So I say to hell with North Korea.  Let them send their “pre-emptive” strike. Because I’m tired of hearing about them—it’s time to call the bluff of that ruling family.  The solutions have always been there in these hostile countries—we just didn’t have the political will to do anything about it.  But now we do and the world needs to see what will happen to North Korea.  Let them try to fire a missile at the VP in South Korea or at any of the American Navy vessel parked in the waters off North Korea—and the THAAD system that is now in place will shoot them down and that fat kid running things will learn a hard lesson.  Trump can take that victory and negotiate all kinds of good stuff with China and Russia for the first time in over two hundred years of American foreign policy, which is exactly why I supported and voted for Donald Trump for president—to end these problems instead of just letting them simmer from one generation to another.

The best way to put America first is to defend American ideas around the world and to stand up to the bullies who want to end it everywhere.  The human race has to make a decision—will it be freedom or tyranny, because the world is too small to have both.  The world must pick—and they have to do it now.  Smoking another joint and listening to old Led Zepplin songs won’t solve the problem—instead, America must have peace through superior firepower and let bad guys know it when they step out of line.  That’s the way it has to be for a while until all those untied disputes are finally settled.  And based on Trump’s performance as Commander and Chief—it won’t take long.

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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Bomb the Towels Right off the ISIS Heads: The joy of getting a bag of chips out of a vending machine

It continues to be a topic of fascination how the world of politics deals with Donald Trump. They are just bewildered by him, one minute he’s for dismantling NATO.  The next he’s for it.  One minute he’s anti-China—the next he’s shaking hands—palm up with the communist leader and talking about trade.  Then there are the accusations of a “bromance” with Vladimir Putin—then the hammers of war being beaten in the direction of Russia. The people in politics and those who cover it are literally about to explode with frustration because they don’t understand what Donald Trump is doing.  But I do.

It’s a long story but today marked something of a personal milestone in achievement. I bought a bag of potato chips out of the new vending machines of a beautiful new manufacturing facility that I along with many other people breathed to life.  Whenever I do something like that I like to do little things like enjoy a bag of potato chips from there because it tastes very sweet due to all the effort it takes to get such a monumental task accomplished.  The road to get to where you actually put vending machines into such a place is a long one, and many pitfalls and challenges have to be navigated, so once you get the vending machines installed, you always achieve something tremendous.  But to get there you are constantly negotiating with other people, you are always employing some kind of strategy, you are always fighting something—because you have to remember that the world of government looks down on achievement—so you are always fighting various aspects of government corruption to do anything productive.  It could be zoning, unfriendly socialist trustees such as in the township where I bought the aforementioned potato chips.  There are three trustees there.  George Lang is a good one.  Mark Welch is another one.  But then they have a socialist who is always trying to build some sidewalk with tax payer funds, or yacking about his military record in the same breath as declaring himself a minority candidate.  He doesn’t understand business at all, so lucky for West Chester, there are two votes against that guy so business can happen.  But not every place is so lucky.  Many places around the world, especially in California, Seattle and other progressive areas, the good guys get outvoted by the bad guys (the anti-business people) most of the time.  So it is always a good feeling to get to a point where you can buy a bag of chips out of a vending machine because it’s nearly a miracle these days to get to that point.

But the administration part is only the beginning, there are deals that are constantly being made with other human beings to move a project along, and for someone like Donald Trump who has operated most of his life as a high-end developer, the chance to buy a bag of chips out of a vending machine is a very tall road to climb—indeed. The kind of person that does these types of things has to be unique because often it’s the thrill of accomplishment that drives such people—not necessarily the payday.  And for a person to master those skills means they can operate at many human levels of communication and are masters of negotiation, manipulation, and strategy.  Donald Trump is certainly all those things and I think he will be viewed by history as the unquestionably best president we’ve ever had in America because what he will produce during his time in office will be something that is rare.

You have to understand dear reader that for most of human history mankind didn’t have much of an economy that was driven off free market ideas. Always there was some king or emperor in the way skimming off the top of any national endeavor—and this effectively put the shackles on human production because people just don’t do much unless they are free.  They may work in the fields all day to pick rice, but they don’t think of better ways to pick that rice unless they can have the opportunity to get rich off it.  So without the free market system—innovation just doesn’t happen.  People don’t invent better ways to do things so some ruler can take their idea and live well off it.  If there isn’t some concept of reward, human beings keep their thoughts to themselves which is why socialist societies just don’t make it very long.

Now for complex economies where many people are pushing and shoving other people for a chance to win big, things get very complicated. In order to navigate any project where many such people are a part of your success you have to learn how to read everything about them to get some leverage that is mutually advantageous.  I say that because if you screw people over you may win once, but they won’t deal with you in the future.  So you must learn to read every non-verbal sign of body language, every variability of sentence structure, every hidden motive to learn how to move people to where you need them to be—where they also come out smelling wonderful.  And that is hard.  Very hard.

This is what we might call a “dynamic personality.” They tend to see things well ahead of other people, and are also personally courageous—perhaps to the point where they are thrill junkies who thrive off great risks.  Without them invention and economic expansion doesn’t happen.  Most people in the world are very static.  They learn the routines of their days starting with their very first experiences as human beings and once they level off in adulthood they are quite comfortable taking orders and falling in behind the leaders of society because it allows them to live within a framework of routine that is comfortable.  They don’t like risky behavior because it might make them late for dinner—that kind of thing.

Politics is built around static people—very predictable and having their roots back to aristocratic days when clear social levels could mandate what kind of home you lived in, what types of sexual encounters you might experience, and what the fate of your children might be. But when you introduce dynamic people suddenly the lives of the static people are always in jeopardy—because they don’t like change and dynamic people are all about change.  For many centuries, political people have prevented dynamic people from holding offices.  They allowed them to somewhat thrive in business so long as they could tax and control them through some legal means—but they didn’t allow them into politics. That makes Donald Trump the first of his kind to break through that invisible barrier for the long-span of the human race—and this dynamic has made the static order very uncomfortable.

That is why Trump’s negotiation skills are so frustrating to the static order of today’s politics—because the sheer dynamism of Trump threatens the future of the entire political system. As a businessman, Trump may want China to put an end to North Korea’s threats while closing the gap between the trading deficit.  So he does what he needs to in order to achieve that objective.  He may need to threaten war, or he may offer a bottle of wine—whatever is needed at that moment.  To the static political culture used to predictability—in fact their entire existence depends on it—this is a nightmare.  But for Americans in need of an American renaissance—its precisely what is required.  Just today Trump dropped a massive bomb on an ISIS hideout in Afghanistan.  Guess he wasn’t joking about ending ISIS—and the capital earned off that bombing will help with Russian deals, Chinese negotiations over territory and trade, and stop the butchering of innocent people in Syria.  In the end, everyone will get what they want because that’s what deal makers do.  And that really is the only way you can get to a bag of chips in a vending machine—you have to navigate very complicated engagements to arrive at such an opportunity. With that in mind, for the first time in the history of the world such a person is running things on the political levels, and the dynamism of that reality is shattering the static world of politics—likely forever.  And that is such a wonderful thing.

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.

Syrians Thank President Trump: Little birds, cockroaches and knives

Obviously now, in the days after the Syrian air bombing by the Trump administration, does everyone understand what the real game plan of the political left has been—which was actually articulated within the secret Skull and Bones Society for which both Bush presidents were a part of. War for many decades now has not been used as an objective by globalists to win territory or even gain cultural expansion—it has been used to displace people and force them like cattle into a slaughter-house of the global orthodoxy’s choosing.   The way that Trump conducted the bombing exposed the progressive trend to use displaced people from destabilized regions to change the cultures of their destinations—such as the United States where it would be assumed that those people would become Democrats holding their hand out to the government to care for under our welfare system. When Syrians came out in favor of Trump’s actions against Assad in Syria—the liberal press and politicians like Hillary Clinton and Elizabeth Warren had very little to say in defense other than to utter the playbook of their open border campaign contributors.

Syrians if given a choice don’t want to flee into the United States—they want to stay in their homeland which completely dismantles the leftist open border position. Now more people than the typical reader here can see that all along the wars in these third world locations from the Middle East down into Africa—South America and over into Indo-China—India and Indonesia were created to force tribes of people into other zones of population to drive the open border mentality and manipulate the gene pool toward nefarious leftist Utopian dreams of a one world culture all mixed together in a stew they control to serve to unknown dinner guests.

Trump’s bombing campaign took away everyone’s excuses which was the genius of it—from just about every side of the argument. But most effective of all were the thanks that came from the Syrian people toward America for aiding their existence.  I have spoken a lot lately about this Trump move and the strategic importance of it—but additionally I have gone so far to examine the nature of being that nosy neighbor who helps defeat evil when it’s obvious that they can’t help themselves.  The “law” isn’t very good at defining such things—but let me illustrate it this way.  When I see some little bug stuck in a situation I stop and help it out of my pool, or free it from being stuck between the glass of a house window if I can. Life is life and I try to do what I can to help the little things live just a few hours longer if possible.  Just over the weekend, I was mowing my grass and a little bird had got its feet wrapped around some string somewhere and had managed to get all that wrapped up into a little tree where the thing was beating itself into oblivion in a panic to get away.  It didn’t help that the bird was stuck low to the ground and was within my eye line, so the mower was terrifying the bird.  It was shitting itself dry just scared nearly to death.

Now……………I had several decisions to make. I could just leave the bird and let some cat or coyote come along and eat the creature.  After all, life lives off life and the coyote and cat need to eat too. However, as a human being I have a mind that allows me to think beyond animal necessities and as a result I am the top of the food chain.  So it is truly in my power to decide the fate of the little bird.  Under that consideration I took out my knife and cut the string wrapped around the bird about two feet back from its foot and freed it so that it could at least limp away and chew away the rest of the string back in the safety of its nest—if it’s leg wasn’t broken.  And that appears to be what happened when the bird fell to the ground disoriented and with a new lease on life.  Once it realized that escape was a possibility the bird took off for some hidden away security that only birds know about.  I went back to mowing my grass.

The Rand Paul philosophy would have left the bird and not intervened. I run into the same problem with spider webs.  If I see some bug not yet completely stuck, I help it out.  But, the spider did go to a lot of trouble to spin a web so that things would fly into it—so the spider could eat.  If you let the bugs fly free, you are denying the spider needed food so something is always bad for something else.  And if spiders didn’t eat so many insects the world would be overcome with them.  So the non-interventionalist stays out of it things and for good reason.  But I’m also a free market guy and I think that by helping littler birds and bugs out from time to time that I improve the hunters who must drive themselves just a bit further to eat.  Sure they might be pissed off at me for taking away their easy meal, but in the end they’ll make themselves better for it—or they’ll die trying.  However, liberals are the types of people along with their progressive counterparts in all global political parties who deliberately set traps for birds so that they can evoke in my empathy action that they caused.  For instance, they might put that decision gate in front of me to drive an answer from my actions that are favorable to them—such as getting the bird stuck to the tree with some string and when I drive by doing nothing they might photograph it and use the experience to move me in some position of guilt.  Or when I stop to help the bird they might hope that I accidentally kill it so that they can call me a murderer even though they were the ones responsible for the bird’s situation—hypothetically speaking of course.  But the political left probably isn’t prepared for me to be carrying a nice, big, sharp knife that easily cut away the bird so that I could resume my grass mowing and listening to the Reds baseball game on the radio over my headphones.  What Trump did was pull out a knife in the form of missiles to help out the “bird” (Syria) and free it from what was trapping it.

Whatever fox or cat that might have been counting on that easy meal had to work harder that day. I decided that—and I stand by my decision as head of the food chain.  I can be ruthless to the fox and compassionate toward the bird if I want to—and the same goes for spiders.  And that is the role of America in the world—as a capitalist country it is our decision to be compassionate or ruthless depending on the point of view of who we are dealing with.  And when it comes to children—100% of the time, we must help them when they are caught—because they don’t deserve to be someone’s easy meal.  More than anything when we do such things we can see who the real villains are by those angry that the sweet little birds of our lives fly free.  Likely that sweet little bird will give me many nice songs this summer and will bring joy to the world in many ways that a cat or a fox doesn’t.  So I’ll take the side of the bird.

But I must say that a few hours later I saw a cockroach in my house sitting on the ceiling. I have a rule for cockroaches—because they are dirty characters that multiply rapidly and once they get out of control, you could end up with a massive population of them where you sleep.  So I caught the thing and flushed it down the toilet.  I didn’t smash it quickly to put it out of its misery because I wanted it to scream as it drowned in ways that only cockroaches can hear because I want all his friends to learn an important lesson.   (They can live underwater for quite a while)  I did not act out of compassion with the cockroach because of its nasty nature that is not compatible with my existence and as head of the food chain—it’s my right to decide if it lives or dies.  So, I killed it.  And most Democrats that I know—they are just like cockroaches and the same fate is the only one for them (metaphorically).  You do it without thinking about it because the role they play in our society is a negative one—and little birds deserve to live a good life not caught in the strings of traps placed by global elites for an objective no honest person wants.

That’s why what Trump did was a good, moral thing. And it’s nice to see the world realizing what a blessing it is to be cut loose from those progressive traps out there which is all that Assad really is.  Nobody expected Trump to pull out the knife and free them—which is why he is the master of manipulation for the good of the human race—and that is a very good thing for all life—even the cockroaches.

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 Morality of Confronting Evil: Donald Trump’s Indiana Jones moment

I’ve listened to the critics of Donald Trump’s Syrian airstrike for several days now and it’s time to put some clarity to the matter.  While I’m an America first kind of guy, the solution to many of the world’s problems is not to live and let live the failed cultures of the globe, but to impose on them our values for the sake of our own preservation.  Many would say “who are we to do such a thing when those places are sovereign countries?”  But here’s the reality, when people want so badly to come to America to the point where it might threaten our own sovereignty, then we have an obligation to confront evil around the world so that it’s effects don’t spill over our borders into our country.  Put another way, when you are the best and everyone wants what you have—you must expand your territory not only for your own preservation, but for the assistance of those who would love to join the American team only from their own homelands.

I have many times gotten myself into a lot of trouble “getting involved” in other people’s business for the sake of confronting evil.  When I know something bad is going on around my house, like drug sales, abused women, neglected children—or just scum bags living as parasites against others—I do get involved.  I’m not going to say what I do obviously—because that would be stupid to put down in writing.  But in short—bad guys don’t do well near my home.  If I see some dude beating the crap out of a woman—I don’t care how interventionist it might be to stop him—I do it and have done that for as long as I’ve been alive.  It’s a morality situation that does not fit well under the written laws of our societies.  The need to do the right thing does not fit well under the umbrella of the law because such a thing requires context and context can vary depending on what culture we are talking about.  What’s good for one culture may not be so for another.

Yet, there is a morality to the human race that is well-known at our most biological instincts which is perceived rather than learned under institutions of law.  When I saw what Donald Trump had done in Syria I thought of a scene from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom where a little child was being whipped.  Jones sees what is going on and even though he could have served himself well by minding his own business and leaving with his treasure he instead threw a rock at the villain not thinking of what might happen next.  This is an instinctive element to heroism which we all have and the Indian Jones movie articulated it well at a primal level.  Obviously Donald Trump was having his Indiana Jones moment and he was doing what was obviously right without thinking about what the world might say about it.  Kids were harmed by the Syrian government.  Trump had a rock to throw to stop it—so he did it.  I would have done the same thing.

When you walk down the street and you see a couple being robbed, do you just keep walking to mind your business?  Of course not, you step in and beat the shit out of whoever is doing the robbing and you save the people from harm.  That’s what human beings should do for each other.  That doesn’t mean you become a busy body always poking into other people’s business, but when you are confronted with evil as it is defined within our biological essence—you must fight it wherever it appears.  If I’m in a position to help someone I do it 100% of the time.  If you live under a code of valor—which everyone should—you can’t just turn your back to evil just because our laws don’t have a good way to define the context of how evil moves from culture to culture under the umbrella of sovereignty.  If America is generally accepted as the most moral country on earth—not defined by religion, but by individual values—then we have an obligation to spread that influence to those not so lucky to live in North America—because honestly we can’t support the whole world.  But we can teach the world to support itself.  That means that tyrannically charged regimes that stand in the way of that freedom will have to be deposed so that good people can live freely.

So how do we go about determining who is good and who is bad?  Well, it’s really not that complicated.   In Assad’s case, under no circumstances should chemical weapons be dropped onto innocent children.  The kids didn’t do anything to deserve such a thing and there is no way to justify it.  I often get accused of being judgmental regarding other people’s families who obviously don’t put as much into life as I do—and I really don’t care if it pisses them off.  If adults are openly ruining the lives of their children by putting stupidity into their heads, then I make it known my disdain and if those kids want my help—I help them.  I’ve gotten into a lot of trouble over that kind of thing but I never regret helping.  It is my moral duty to help those who cannot help themselves if through my actions I can improve their “individual” state.  Ultimately, I want people to be able to thrive as individuals no matter where they come from, so I always help if the situation arises—even when it’s not convenient.

In Syria, if people are so desperate to leave because Assad is such a terror, then his problem becomes Europe’s problem and America’s problem because refugees will flood our borders trying to get away.  If you turn them away as we must because we can’t risk terrorists hiding in their midst’s then you must stop the evil they are trying to run from.  If you see a robbery, you have an obligation to stop it.  If you see a 14-year-old girl prostituting herself out on K-Street—you have an obligation to hunt down her pimp and end the threat to her.  If you know a drug dealer is ruining the minds of kids down the road from your house—you have an obligation to stop the behavior—by whatever means—preferably legally.  And if a country is killing its people for some collective cause—America is the only place on earth capable of making a moral judgment on the matter—and it must step in and act.

The Syrian situation was clear.  There was no reason children should have been attacked with nerve gas. Trump did what I expect him to do—he attacked the evil that perpetrated the villainous behavior.  Yes, Rand Paul is right; congress must give permission for war—“legally.”  But sometimes when you see evil being conducted and you have access to a rock and can stop it—even temporarily—you do it.  Because it’s the right thing to do.  Doing what’s right isn’t always “legal.”  But it is always right.  And helping kids have a potential for a good life is always right.  In those cases you have to live and let die because there is good and evil in the world, and you must stand for what’s good.  There is no middle way in such matters.

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 End of Hollywood: Why the movie industry is dying

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Zelda and the New Nintendo Switch: Something new, amazing, and just wonderful in every way

Storytelling is very important to our culture—it’s something that truly distinguishes us from any other living thing in the known universe—and we need it for feeding our minds as much as we need water and food to drive our bodies.  Stories may well be the most important thing to human culture.  Just consider that while Trump was talking to the press about what he thought about Syria gassing its people—he was playing the new Star Wars movie Rogue One in the background.  Trump seems to have a very healthy love of stories—especially movies and I’d go so far to say that it has made him an exceptionally good president—because he’s a thinker.  He may have the articulation skills of a typical Queens taxi driver—but he does think deeply about things from many angles—and stories certainly help develop that skill.

Among the kind of storytelling that we perform in modern times, video games are certainly at the top of the importance list because in a lot of ways they are the new dominate form—replacing books and movies as the cultural go-to method of telling them.  So when I run into a good video game, I typically talk about—and if it’s truly exceptional I’ll write about it. Some recent games that amazed me with their technical and storytelling achievements have been Uncharted 4 for Playstation 4 and Rush Blood for Playstation VR.  Not only are those great games, but they tell stories in completely new and literally uncharted ways that I have been amazed by.

Way back, twenty years ago, in the mid-90s while my two daughters were growing up and learning to read I had bought a Nintendo 64 and the latest Zelda title at the time called Ocarina in Time to play with them.  It was too complicated for them to play but they’d sit with me on the couch and watch me play because the story was so compelling and there was a lot of text to read—so in a lot of ways it helped them learn to read.  There are enough words to read in a Zelda game that essentially makes it a moving graphic novel.  The plots are thick—the philosophy unmistakably Japanese yet there is a little King Arthur in the storylines which makes the Zelda franchise highly sought after in western cultures.  Like Star Wars, there is a very healthy mixture of eastern and western philosophy reflected in the presented mythology which makes it an incredibly powerful storytelling device.  I often have said that I thought Ocarina in Time was the most intelligent video game I have ever played and it holds a special place in the hearts of my family because for about a 100 hours at a key time in my children’s life, we played Zelda each night before they went to bed and they have never forgotten the experience—even to this day.  I wasn’t allowed to play the game without them—so we did the whole thing together with them helping me make decisions that eventually won the game even though they were too little to play it themselves at the time.

Now they are all grown up obviously and Nintendo still has a place in my heart because of Zelda.  I typically buy whatever Nintendo creates out of loyalty to them because of their direct attachment to the Zelda franchise.  I famously tell the story often about the various elections that I’ve been a part of, especially the Lakota school levy events where I had something on the ballot that I was leading the charge for and the media always wants to know what kind of watch party you might be having so they can get reactions later that night from the winners and losers.  Well, my routine was not to rent out a bar to watch the results pouring in with my team nervously around a big screen television—but to play Nintendo Wii.  The game of choice for my wife and I was Wii Golf which allowed me to play as if I were on a real course somewhere, but from the convenience of my living room so I could monitor the results and answer questions from the media in an expeditious manner.  Nintendo has always been very good with driving the video game culture in creative ways to use the tools of game play in new ways—and their Wii system really opened the doors to interactive gaming where you could stand in your living room and interact with the big screen of your television in a virtual environment.

When word came out that Nintendo’s latest masterpiece was something called the Nintendo Switch, and that they had a new Zelda game for it called Breath of the Wild I had to get it.  It was simply an unquestioned reality.  The Switch featured new, unique game play options that were essentially unheard of in previous markets; you could play Nintendo Switch from your television in the traditional way.  But–if you had to catch a flight to a different city for a business trip, you could take the whole thing with you.  Plus, virtually every part of the game system including the controllers could be utilized in some unique aspect of game play making the Nintendo Switch incredibly versatile as a system.  I thought it was an astonishing breakthrough yet again for the good people at Nintendo.  So my wife and I made it a point to hunt one down because as of this writing they are extremely hard to get at the store.  Since their lunch at the start of March 2017 they sell as soon as they hit the shelves at Best Buy, Wal-Mart, Target, and Gamestop.  That’s typical for Nintendo products, as a company they often under produce so they can drive up demand with frustration—which increases their market value so they create positive word of mouth which drives up their price—a good healthy business model. But even for Nintendo, I don’t think they thought they’d have such an intense desire from the public for this new Switch because the sales seemed to be getting away from them.  We tried for a solid month to get a Switch all over Cincinnati and Dayton with no luck.  A few units would show up at a Target or Wal-Mart and we’d head to the store and they’d be sold out before we could get there.  People would watch the inventories of stores online and do like we would-drive in to buy the units the minute they showed up.  Outlets refused to hold anything because the demand was too high.

Just for context the Target in West Chester had a return of a Nintendo Switch—a used one returned to the store for whatever reason.  I had been watching the Target website all week and noticed that one Switch unit was put into stock and literally I was in the car within five minutes to make the ten minute drive to the store.  When I got back there another guy had just bought the unit and the cashier told me that all the units have been sold in this way.  People literally were standing in line as the supply trucks tried to restock the store and you just had to be lucky enough to be at the store when this happened.  Because as soon as the inventory clerks scanned the units into their systems and they showed up online, people were buying up everything within the hour.  I could tell the same story for just about every other store all over Cincinnati—not just Target, but everyone.  I was starting to wonder if I’d ever get my hands on a Switch.

Then it happened, my wife was at Wal-Mart at the Bridgewater location and ten Switches were put in stock just as she was heading there to check—as she was there to shop for other things.  Of that ten nine of them were gone instantly and she got her hands on the last one.  She sent me a text letting me know that our search was over and I rushed home to unbox it and play it for the first time.  And let me just say that playing Zelda: Breath of the Wild is an extraordinary experience.  I’ve been playing it for a week now and it is just an astonishing video game—it’s deep and very fun to play—and it brings out the best of what Nintendo’s Switch can do.

I have found that I like to play Zelda as the portable unit almost as much as the traditional TV based console.  It is very effective to be able to take the game everywhere with you, airports, the breakfast table, to play while watching the news—it is extremely versatile and well worth all the work it took to get my hands on one.  But the new Zelda is simply astonishing and well worth the money.  I continue to be extremely amazed and now that I’ve incorporated it into my lifestyle, I can see that I’ll get a lot of mileage out of that Nintendo Switch.  It’s one more technical marvel that is carrying mankind forward in ways that many never thought possible.  For me it is encouraging to see so much extraordinary quality on display from the mechanical features of the Switch hardware to the subtleties of programming featured in the Breath of the Wild video game.  The people who made Breath of the Wild are obviously very intelligent and it is refreshing to me to see so many young people calling it the best video game they’ve ever played.  But more than anything, it is great to see so much optimism emerging from a story telling market.  I can’t think of anything negative about it.  For instance, I had a really stressful week where many important decisions had to be made that might have an impact on millions and millions of investment dollars.  So how did I manage all that stress—I took my Nintendo Switch with me everywhere and played it at restaurants and in shopping malls to blow off the steam of anxiety that often comes with doing important things in life.  And you know what—it worked marvelously.  It is so wonderful to take a world like Zelda with you everywhere you go—and to give yourself a break when you really need it.  And for that, Nintendo as a company deserves a lot of admiration.

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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2 thoughts on ““Snitches get Stitches”: Why black on black crimes go unsolved”

  1. Well said. One baby momma said she had three babies at home. I would bet she is on full welfare. She had no business being in that cesspool. She should have been home taking care of her babies.

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    1. What a pathetic mess that whole story is. These idiots behave like this then wonder why we don’t want to associate with them. They call us racist just for having values. Just pathetic. Watch the videos of those people and you can see the cause of all their problems.

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The Art of a President: Donald Trump’s brilliance is the best gift I could ask for

Donald Trump must have known that it was my birthday because I couldn’t have received a better gift. After all, the world has been poking the fences since his election.

China has been advancing in the South China Sea against Taiwan and Japan.  North Korea is threatening to lunch missiles into America with their constant tests—Russia has continued to buzz American naval vessels in contentious waters.  Iran is sponsoring terrorism everywhere they can, Democrats are fighting everything Trump tries to do in the White House including trying to block the Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch.  Supposedly Steve Bannon and Jared Kushner are fighting it out in the Oval Office in front of Donald Trump and we’ve discovered that Susan Rice under Barack Obama’s direction had spied on the Trump transition team—illegally. The CIA, FBI, and all connecting intelligence agencies have been caught in a DEEP STATE scheme that has them all looking horrible and in the face of all that—Trump launched an airstrike against Syria while hosting the Communist Chinese President Xi Jinping at his Winter White House in South Florida.  After the press conference announcing the strike you could almost hear Trump say (nonverbally) “Xi, if you don’t straighten out North Korea—you’re next.  And by the way—I’m going to tax your exports.  Have a nice day.  Would you like some more wine?”  This was the art of the deal at its finest and I can say that this is my most satisfying birthday in my life—because I’ve been waiting to live in a country with this kind of winning record since the beginning.

PALM BEACH, Fla. — North Korea’s nuclear ambitions and the U.S-China trade imbalance as well as other points of tension between President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping are being overshadowed by the U.S. missile strikes on Syria.

Nonetheless, the two leaders are meeting for a second day at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate as planned Friday. Their first-night summit dinner wrapped up shortly before the U.S. announced the missile barrage on an air base in Syria in retaliation against Syrian President Bashar Assad for a chemical weapons attack against civilians caught up in his country’s long civil war.

  • The US military fired more than 50 tomahawk missiles at al-Shayrat military airfield at 8.45pm EDT Thursday
  • Moves comes just hours after Trump said ‘something should happen’ following Tuesday’s gas-attack atrocity
  • Trump took action after more than 80 were killed and many more were injured in the sarin poison gas attack
  • ‘Even beautiful babies were cruelly murdered in this very barbaric attack,’ he said after launching the strike
  • Russian President Vladimir Putin has issued a furious response calling airstrike an ‘illegal act of aggression’ 
  • US says airfield was used to store toxic weapons and was the base for the aircraft involved in the sarin attack
  • Claims that nine were killed, and more were injured, in the strike which has severely damaged the airbase 
  • US told Moscow it was launching an airstrike about 30 minutes in advance – but did not ask for permission

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4388834/America-launches-airstrikes-Syria.html

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/trump-xi-meet-again-in-shadow-of-missile-strikes-on-syria/ar-BBzvF6Q?li=BBnbcA1&ocid=iehp

I know Constitutional purists like Rand Paul are upset at the Syrian airstrike—but when America is the only country in the world capable of taking an authority position against bullies—there is an ethical obligation to act when we see poor little children suffering under the failures of politics—and that’s what happened in Syria. It was the right thing to do under any circumstance.  But, if Trump had to pick a target to pull the world in behind him and dispel the rumors of his alliance with the Russians—Syria was it.  Even as Gorsuch was nominated to the Supreme Court even Chuck Schumer was singing praises for Trump’s decisive move.  It was rather astonishing.

Trump has not suddenly become a globalist. He’s not about to become an interventionist.  But he needed to take a shot to set the stage for all the challenges going on around the world—especially with China and North Korea.  And he had to set up the relationship with Russia.  Nobody ever thought Trump was going to eat out of Russia’s hand—as I have been saying for a long time.  It will have to be the other way around—and this was the first step.  Trump had the moral high ground and he took it—and now the world is wondering how they didn’t see it all along.

This is how it is different having a real executive in the White House as opposed to a typical politician always sticking their hand out looking for campaign donations. Trump doesn’t care if Steve Bannon and Jared Kushner want to kill each other.  He’s more interested in the result of their conflict—he needs different points of view to flush out a truth.  That’s what good leaders do, they don’t necessarily want everyone to get along.  They want a competition of ideas and through conflict truth justice and reality are defined.  So the Trump White House thrives in conflict.  It doesn’t want everyone sitting around a campfire singing songs and giving each other reach-arounds.  It wants action, and when it comes time to make hard decisions, Trump can make them because he can see the truth through the combat of opinion.  He has a wife for the softer times in his life.  But at all other times, he loves the battlefield of conflict because that’s where life thrives and honesty, bravery, and valor emerge.

I’ve been waiting for this all of my life.  The closest I’ve seen to this kind of American decisiveness was when Ronald Reagan sent an airstrike against Libya—and I remember the effect that had on the world. Trump has had his moment and now he can negotiate with everyone from a position of strength.  It had to come sometime and now that he has done it there are many more opportunities for peace than there was before the attack.  Without this bombing the chances for violence by North Korea against South Korea is much greater.  The threat of China moving against Japan has much larger odds.  And Russia would continue to buzz American ships without wondering when or if Trump would react.  Now he has and even considering more aggression against America might provoke war.  So Trump has captured the high ground against every single one of his global rivals including his political ones with one swift stroke.  And it was just a brilliant time and place to do so.

I’m sure this won’t be the last time and I’m also sure that all this new power won’t go to Trump’s head.  Why—because he is used to being at the top of everything he does and he’s battle hardened to the perils of success.  Out of all the people in the world who could do this very difficult job as a modern American president with all the factions that are ankle biting out there, only Trump presently is qualified to perform the tasks.  This is precisely why I voted for Trump and I am very proud to see him doing such a very excellent job.  I feel very sorry for the kids involved in all the evils around the world who are suffering under bad people.  And this bombing in Syria won’t save them all.  But many more will be safe because of it—and like all good things in life—there are many more positives than negatives with the action.   For us in America—it’s good to see a president who finally knows how to juggle all these bananas—because it’s long overdue.

Being Fearless: What the Democrats are truly terrified of–people who don’t need them


I’ve already provided all the reasons that the Democrats are losing ground and how they are making themselves into an extinct political party. I have also covered how the Trump administration is innocent as to charges of collusion with Russia and how it is actually the Democrats who are guilty of that action as they were the party that was in power and had the relationships with Russia.  But at this point all of that is irrelevant because something much deeper is going on for which everyone is missing.  The great desperation of the Democratic Party that they are revealing presently—that last gasp of the dying donkey as I’ve described it, is the realization that their methods of incursion have forever been vanquished and as I look back on it—I’m very proud of the role I played in it.

I was a very “rambunctious” little boy in grade school. Don’t ask me how or where I got it from but I had a rebellious streak that was extremely mature, even at a very young age.  I’ve told some of these stories before, but I’ll put them together for context—in kindergarten I went toe to toe with my teacher in a way that was sometimes excessive.  I hated her and she set a pace for my entire public school experience—right out of the gate.  She threatened my mom to fail me from kindergarten after just a few months of attending Liberty Elementary School on Princeton Road way back in 1973 and all that started because I dressed up a bear for a class assignment in jeans when the pants were supposed to be corduroys.  She literally went insane over the issue and was institutionalized shortly after I moved on through her class.  In first grade I poked the class bully in the eye with my scissors because he threatened me.  He was a lot bigger than me and much stronger—so I did whatever I had to do to win that fight.  It was in class in front of everyone, including the teacher.  For the next four years I was constantly in trouble and getting “swats” from the principal’s office—but my behavior and love for fighting never changed.  In fourth grade a pack of kids tried to shove the drug “speed” down my mouth on the school bus and I spit it out of the window causing a massive fight on the bus.  I have always had a policy of no drugs in my life which holds to this day.  There were many fights after that as I had a reputation with the druggies and they wanted to conform me.  At this point I was good with the jocks because I was the fastest kid in school and I won the pull-up category in the winter Olympics in my fifth-grade year.  But in sixth grade I had many more problems with several more teachers and was in constant fights with 7th and 8th graders. One eighth grade kid who was a lot bigger than me by almost half jumped me at my locker and I literally shoved the kid through the principal’s office door and the fight ended up in his office.  Since the kid was again bigger than me and a lot stronger I had to find some leverage point, so I took the fight into the principal’s office literally with blood everywhere which was really the only way to win that one.  I gained a reputation for being crazy which suited me just fine.  My nickname back then was “Animal” from the Muppet’s character—because that’s how my peers saw me.  In high school is where I started to pull out ahead of my classmates in every category.  No longer were kids bigger and meaner than me and I had learned martial arts so I could block anything anybody threw.  I started winning everything I did and some people on the other side ended up dying through these actions and I went into my senior year pretty much invincible.  Nobody at Lakota challenged me to anything so the fights went over into other school systems at drive-ins, arcades, and just about anywhere I went.  My reputation was such that I was hired several times as a body-guard and a bouncer in places where I wasn’t even old enough to attend.  I was employed by the Chinese mob from Chicago and my next job after that was at a car dealership where I sometimes did repo work for the bank—and they sent me to all the ugly jobs—because I was the only one crazy enough to do them.  Luckily, I met my wife about this time and she gave me a reason to evolve into a different direction.  Most of the people I know from that time are dead or are in jail—so meeting my wife was a very positive experience for me.  Anyway, the sum of that little story is that I was never afraid of anything—and I’d fight anybody anywhere on any terms—and I’m still like that. Schools are places where they pound you into conformity.  The places were never about learning—they were about learning your place in society and I was one of those rare people who came out of it unbroken. If you add to all these experiences my expert use of bullwhips and a love of guns I really don’t worry about any threats to my person, or my loved ones.  I have a long history of keeping the bad guys at bay and looking back on it I’m a little shocked that I managed through it all from my earliest years completely pure as to my resistance to bullies.  I never liked them or bent over backwards to yield to them no matter where they were in our society—adults, mean kids, druggies—thugs, killers, dead beats—anybody.  And at almost 50 years old, I’m pretty proud of that—and I’m certainly not going to change now.

So when it has come time to make a stand for something I’ve always done it and in politics I knew what I was doing. Like for instance with the teacher’s union at Lakota when I put myself on the front pages of the Cincinnati newspapers over that issue way back in 2010.  My dad was very concerned when I went on WLW radio and called out the teacher’s union at Lakota for driving up the costs of running the school forcing property tax increases.  Like I told him—“what are they going to do to me?”  He knew what I was talking about but he thought I went overboard—because he had trouble with unions in the past even over unimportant things.  Unions like most liberal concepts always use the threat of force to sell their “altruistic” ideas.  My strategy on the Lakota issue from the very beginning was to take that threat away from my opposition—like I do in most things.  I mean I’m not a maniac who runs around threatening people all the time.  Generally, I’m pretty nice and can use many forms of communication to convey a thought.  I don’t have to threaten to kill people all the time to get my point across.  But I do have a reputation, and that gets around when people start checking you out.  And I knew that the union wouldn’t be able to do anything to me that I couldn’t easily swat away—so I got involved and my presence changed things.

I only tell that story because it takes a certain kind of person to break through the ice of fear that usually governors people in their daily lives because unfortunately they learn in their public schools to keep their mouths shut and not to stand for much of anything. You are taught what to think and when to think it and the peer groups form to be the enforcers—and those categories usually last a lifetime.   I’d say that Donald Trump likely could tell a similar story as I just did.  I’m not saying I should get an Eagle Scout award or be put on a pedestal of Christian orthodoxy—but if you want someone who will stand up to bullies solving problems, then a background like mine is probably the kind of person you want for the job.  As I did things I wrote down the why and how and other people started utilizing the same strategies.  Other people started sticking up for themselves and the liberal advocates out there were seeing for the first time that their Rules for Radicals book wasn’t working anymore on conservatives.  Really, for the first time since Al Capon’s mobsters in Chicago, Democrats were being challenged in ways they weren’t used to and panic began to set in.  All this opened the door to Donald Trump’s run for president in 2016.  I may have started the snowball rolling along with other people.  The net gains from the conservative movement that was no longer afraid that union leaders would show up to their houses and string up their family in the dead of night was beginning to embolden politicians to throw John Boehner out of the Speakership and to put a wide field of Republicans into the race for the White House starting in 2015.  Since conservatives were no longer afraid of the Democratic bully, they put their support behind Donald Trump as a way to finally strike back.

And that’s where we are. As people observed some of us early pioneers challenging the establishment and standing up to the threat of physical violence—it emboldened more people to fight back as well.  At Lakota when the union tried to impose fear against me—the results were not favorable.  It was laughable really.  Nobody is going to attack me to my face and get away with it.  And once people saw that on a mass level, more people realized that they too could fight back—and that the liberals weren’t so scary. Now, today, Trump is in the White House and he doesn’t put up with anything and Democrats literally don’t know what to do because their only playbook is the Rules from Radicals approach by Saul Alinsky.   The way to beat liberals is to take away their threat to violence.  Once you do that, they are lost.

I don’t go out of my way to be tough. I don’t work out obsessively or watch my diet to the point where I need to maintain a certain image.  I just do my thing and enjoy my life and I seldom think about fighting other people.  However, I internally know how to deal with anything that someone imposes on me and I have a long history of not taking any crap—and I’ve had it all my life.  I never remember a time when I didn’t behave this way so the best I know is that I was born this way.  That made me into an adult who was completely free of ever yielding to another human being under any condition.  I can honestly say that I’ve never been coerced to do something against my will at any point in my life and I’m sure Donald Trump is the same kind of person.  And now that those kinds of people are now involved in politics, it completely defangs the Democrats because they have nothing else in their arsenal but the use of fear to recruit members to their political philosophy.  When they don’t have the tool of fear, they are lost.  And that is what they really fear now that Trump is taking the White House—and America, to places they can’t follow.  That is the air behind their screams as their party dies, and to me, it is music to my ears.

Being free is not something any government can give you dear reader. You can only give it to yourself.  There is no law that can make you safe.   Only you can learn how to be essentially invincible protecting yourself from the intentions of others.  If you are the smartest person in the room, nobody can beat you.  You don’t have to be the biggest, the smartest by IQ, or even the best—you just have to have the skills to keep anybody else from getting at you—strategically.  And once you master that you can promise yourself success 100% of the time.  You can’t promise that you can win over others 100% of the time, but you can keep them from beating you 100% of the time.  For a liberal to be successful they must get at you and if you deny them of that—they are utterly powerless, which is exactly where the Democrats find themselves in 2017.  The best way to make yourself free is to make it so that in your life nobody can attack you—and once you’ve done that you can begin to taste a life without fear—and adversely, a life without Democrats.  With Trump, his polling numbers won’t drop below 35% and when all this first started—say back in 2010—it was much lower as to those who were willing to stand tall and live fearlessly in the voting booth.  And four years from now that 35% will be even higher and that is the indication which is terrifying those who live off the fear of good people everywhere.

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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2 thoughts on ““Snitches get Stitches”: Why black on black crimes go unsolved”

  1. Well said. One baby momma said she had three babies at home. I would bet she is on full welfare. She had no business being in that cesspool. She should have been home taking care of her babies.

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    1. What a pathetic mess that whole story is. These idiots behave like this then wonder why we don’t want to associate with them. They call us racist just for having values. Just pathetic. Watch the videos of those people and you can see the cause of all their problems.

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