Tag: Rich Hoffman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rich Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

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

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‘The Crystal Skull of Canterbury’: A new project born from a lot of passion

I have a new book in development called The Crystal Skull of Canterbury and am looking for a good team for its publication.  One thing I have learned after doing this a few times before is that even the best written pieces of work need a good team to get it to readers.  This book is a little different for me, I came up with the idea during a recent visit to the locations featured in the novel—it’s more of a Bridges of Madison County story except more contemporary and featuring an English countryside because honestly they like to read in that country so why not set the story there—for the target demographic.  I’m a business guy, so I think in those types of terms as a first consideration.  This is just a starting point and the story is as follows:

A NASA contractor whose specialty is in preparing mankind for the long-preserved evidence that will be discovered on Mars ahead of a 2030 mission that life much longer than earth’s existed on the Red Planet, is challenged by a former curator of the British Museum to defend claims made by the contractor regarding the authenticity of the popular Crystal Skull exhibit which attracts so many visitors each year. Dorrington Weingarten sees the opportunity as positive publicity for the museum in London, but on a deeper level resents NASA’s Ian Davenport’s theories on the origin of mankind and the revolutionary following that he has been brewing in the United States which stands in stark contrast to the scientific positions established by England’s heritage.

Ian accepts the challenge and during his travels to London and eventually into the ancient streets of Canterbury where a romance brews between he and the curator’s wife–he isn’t just an eccentrically brilliant scientist—he’s determined to crack old Dorrington for reasons that confound everyone whom he refers to as the Crystal Skull of Canterbury. He sees in Dorrington Weingarten the modern embodiment of the wounded Grail King from King Author’s legends and he has set in mind to solve a riddle that has nearly destroyed Dorrington’s wife now madly in love with Ian.  What results is a proposed answer to T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and Wofram Von Exchenbach’s Parzival contained within the elusive life of a man who did everything right his whole life—except for the things that really matter.  A man drowning by his own success, who had everything but lost it through the years without even knowing it.  But can he be saved, can the Crystal Skull of Canterbury be cracked?  It is a job that may be out of reach for the multitalented Ian Davenport who for the first time in his life may have found something he cannot do as an unconventional romance soon engulfs him as well with emotions new to him. For all his life Ian had avoided life in the Waste Land, but now a siren song beacons him from another man’s wife and the lure to surrender to it is strong—too strong. 

I’d like to keep the page count down although it’s a story with many twists and turns—and emotional complexity. I’m targeting women over 40 with this work first in England then in the United States.  It additionally attaches itself to the modern paradox of the many theories coming from the Ancient Aliens viewer base popularly shown on The History Channel and embraces new scientific concerns relevant to the next decade giving this story staying power as a mass market paperback.  The primary purpose for me was a promise I made to a nice old lady in Ashford, England who was kind enough to give me a very nice meal while my family was in route to Paris.  She asked me what I liked most about the English people, I told her it was that they still liked to read and bought lots of books.  I told her I planned to help show more Americans why they needed to become more literate.  She then pressed me on what I was planning to do specifically about it.  I thought for a moment because I assumed we were just making small talk, then I told her that I’d write a novel that was so good that people would want to read it, and bookstores would see an uptick in sales and therefore hopefully inspire others to do the same so that the industry as a whole could become stronger—in a business sense, and as a general philosophy.  She said OK, we sipped some tea, and  here I am doing it.  I always keep my promises.

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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Comey’s Disturbing Comments about Privacy: Security individually based as opposed to collectively sanctioned

I kept waiting for someone to do it, but only Sean Hannity that I know of even came close to covering the disturbing comments made by FBI Director James Comey at a Boston College speech on cyber security.  The media keyed in on a rather irrelevant issue that was said about the length of Comey’s remaining tenure as director—but missed the most important element he discussed rather bluntly—which was that no American had a “right” to privacy and that they could be compelled under court order to reveal anything at any time in the name of preservation of our national security.  He called this assumption a “bargain” made to live in a secure world.  I took the time to watch the whole thing because Comey’s most dangerous comments come at the 36 minute mark and context is important.  As presented, Comey sounds reasonable whereas if his comments on compelled information for national security sounded very dystopian if taken alone—so viewing the entire speech was important to this discussion which you should do now before going forth with this article.

I never made that bargain with the FBI or the federal government.  I am able to protect myself in most cases better than they can.  I don’t need the level of security they are assuming I need.  What has happened is that they have imposed themselves on us in reaction to the dangerous world we live in which has at its root, religious intolerance, economic depravity and the age old European tendency toward statism when challenged intellectually—so American intelligence gathering has filled the void of danger with the assumption that every single conversation in the world must be listened to and recorded so that any little bit of terrorist aggression can be stopped before it takes place.

Comey in that speech playing the good cop looking for recruitment into the “economically depraved” conditions of sacrifice for country probably believes what he’s saying while deliberately ignoring the facts of the matter. We know that the federal government cannot be trusted with our privacy.  For instance, just examine the situation with the Marines presently where men and women are placed together in the field only to have nude pictures placed online.  We warned that very situation would happen but the politics of the day said that we can’t discriminate between men and women and that women should be allowed to be in the same combat as men in service to their country.  Well, biology takes over when bullets aren’t flying and things happen when human beings are encouraged into primal circumstances.  The very same emotions that compel a person to run into a swarm of bullets and exploding projectiles are the same ones that procreate the human race.  So if a woman is in a muddy trench with a man, the two are going to want to get naked and explore each other—by their nature.  It should come as no surprise when abuses happen, yet politicians are and they really don’t know how to handle the situation leaving us with the present crises.

While traveling recently all over Europe I had to go through a lot of security—supposedly for the safety of everyone.  The rational was the same as what Comey said about private conversations and even thoughts—that nothing is private if the “state” has a need to know it for the security of everyone.  The assumption is that the “collective” is more valuable than the “individual” which is a false premise. If the individual is protected the natural byproduct is that everyone will be protected by default.  But because our intelligence and security organizations are filled with lazy minded louses most often than not—they default to seeing mankind in the plural rather than the singular because it makes their job easier.  Of course another aspect of modern progressive thought is that gay people can mix with straight people, and that bathrooms can be used by anybody exposing our private parts to the opposite sex without restraint.  This becomes a problem in these security lines.  For instance, at least once recently while going through TSA security I was singled out by a male officer for “extra security” just for the pat down.  I was with my family and wasn’t dressed in a way to provoke any suspicion and I was in line with hundreds of other people.  But the guy was obviously gay—stereotypically so—Beauty and the Beast gay as established by the live action character of LeFou and he wanted to feel my crotch to see if what was obvious was really there.  I suppose his justification was to see if I was smuggling something big in there, but the scanner would have shown that.  In fact they had a clear scanned image of my masculinity right there on the screen which women were able to see completely so I might as well have been nude walking through security.  Yet this security guy wanted to touch it and he used the law to exercise his personal sexual flavor and that was an abuse of power.  If I made a big deal about it, I would have missed my transfer flight and I still wouldn’t have been able to take it all back because that gay guy in the TSA had the might of Comey’s intelligence branch behind him protecting the TSA from individual protests—for the right of the collective.  But that TSA officer and the women watching the scanner were able to use that justification for their own personal pleasure while working on the job.  If an attractive person for their particular sexual tastes comes through the TSA line, and they are obviously always in a hurry to get to their flight—the TSA can indulge in that abuse all they want without fear of retaliation.  They try to give you pat downs of the same sex to preserve some semblance of sexual protection but if the person patting you down is gay, and you are a man—you might as well have given me a woman to do the job.  I never agreed to that bargain.  I can promise that I was able to protect the people on my flight better than those fat slobs working at the TSA—that’s for sure.

But the worst example of all is the recent presidential election of 2016 which James Comey’s FBI played such a large part.  We know that Hillary Clinton lied and that the Justice Department under Barack Obama was radicalized to abuse power for political preservation.  They did it before the election which was exposed by Wikileaks.  Hillary Clinton additionally destroyed evidence on her private server which she had to reduce the ability of government agents to see what crimes she was conducting through the Clinton Foundation.  When “compelled” by the FBI to tell the truth, the Clinton Campaign destroyed the evidence and refused to answer questions—so the whole notion that a judge can compel people to recall their memories falls apart under this examination.  Such an assumption bases itself on the Christian notion that a person will swear to tell the whole truth, nothing but the truth, so help them God. But if the person doing the swearing doesn’t believe in God, but rather is like John Podesta and invests his mind in “sprit cooking” rooted in old pagan rituals designed to conger up the spirits of the dead to help with living circumstances—lying under oath isn’t something they have a problem with.  So what compels a person to reveal their memories or even a conversation with a spouse?  Nothing.

There are some big problems with what James Comey said—the FBI’s position toward security of America is laced with half-baked assumptions designed to conceal their innate laziness as government employees—who are “underpaid” as Comey put it.  Give me a break—as I’ve reported often, government employees of all kinds make roughly 40% more than they would in the private sector, and that includes FBI agents.  I actually know a few and they aren’t hurting for money considering they structure their day around getting coffee every morning at the same time, then planning their lunches and afternoons in very predictable patterns.  They aren’t Eliot Ness types–that’s for sure.  And if they get tape of a couple having sex in their house—they do enjoy it—and they do share it among their other members.  They behave just as the Marines did in the recent sex scandal—when confronted with exclusive information, they often behave with their biological foundations—and they will abuse their power.

We’d like to believe that we can trust these people in our intelligence divisions, but we can’t.  While it’s true that we are better off having them as a layer of security between normal Americans and the bad guys—it doesn’t take much to make the intelligence officers of the FBI, CIA TSA and every other security division the villains—especially when sexes are mixed, gayness is promoted from within, and agents are encouraged to function from their primal instincts under duress.  So a blank check of authority is not the answer—Hillary Clinton proved it.  Wikileaks additionally has proven so by what they’ve released about the CIA.  These are not people we can trust.  They are currently using the power of government to attempt to destroy the Trump presidency—so what do you think they’d do to anybody else in America who challenges them?  The real answer is more private security individually based, not collectively sanctioned—and that requires a shift in basic national philosophy—which is hard for people like James Comey to do.  But that’s the direction we all need to be headed.

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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Journey into the Firelight: The life and death of Robert James Waller

I don’t typically acknowledge memorials because to me, you live, you die—it’s all transitory.  The spirit of someone is what matters and the body is just a vehicle they ride in.  So when a car stops working, I typically don’t attribute that to the end of a person.  However, in regards to what I think is one of America’s great authors, Robert James Waller who died quietly at his home in Texas yesterday at the age of 77, I’ll make an exception because it’s likely we won’t see any more of his very good literature.  Needless to say, I have been a fan of his since his breakthrough novel, The Bridges of Madison County.  I was quite ecstatic when Clint Eastwood took up the movie project at Warner Bros. to make that very interesting novel into a movie just two years after the novel was released as it was to me a modern Arthurian romance mythology about the nature of love—how duty destroys passion between couples and how to live authentically in the modern world.  Here was my favorite actor/director handling one of my favorite novels—so on the opening day of the film, I was the very first one in line—as if it were a Star Wars movie.  I loved the material and subsequently devoured each book that Waller wrote from then on as they were released.

That little collection is a uniquely western view of the world mixed with the type of mysticism associated with oriental cultures.  Waller captured perfectly the modern conflict of the esoteric and exoteric with out-of-the-box characters yearning like Ayn Rand’s characters always for more.  Waller’s characters were trapped against foundations of social convention and always seeking to flee into the firelight—as he put it often.  My favorite of his characters of course was Robert Kincaid who I always associated with—and was obviously autobiographical for Robert Waller himself.

The negative reviews of his work often confounded Waller, he really didn’t understand why the literary critics hated him so much, yet his novels did so well, especially The Bridges of Madison County.  It was a short book that many desperate women were screaming for as a voice beyond the veil of their social conventions cobbled up like a dry rotted sponge being tossed into an old bucket to wash away the dirt on a car that needed to be cleaned after a long winter on the first good spring day.  Pieces of that sponge of course fell off during the act and it showed culturally in the women and some men who read Bridges—and the critics hated it.  Waller’s Robert Kincaid is exactly the type of man who the literary critics were afraid of—he was too perfect, too powerful, too smart—and the idea that someone like him existed in pickup trucks all across the American landscape honestly terrified them.  For the weakened, defeated males of American culture it was also terrifying to them to consider that somebody like a Robert Kincaid could come along and steal their women by just asking for a cold drink on a hot day.  Waller was essentially writing about T.S. Elliot’s Wasteland in the context of small town America.  That wasteland is much more evident in the big cities, and it’s hard to put a finger on it in within the noise of a cityscape—because everyone is a little neurotic in those places—but to segregate the wasteland motif into the Iowa countryside was dangerous, and accurate.  And the literary gatekeepers let Waller know what they thought of him.

Lucky for us all, Warner Bros has some rebels that have worked there for many years in their film and book publishing divisions that have the imprint of the great Clint Eastwood on them to this day.  Eastwood made all his movies for the most part with Warner Bros. so he has had a large hand in shaping them as a company—culturally.  And to this day, especially in regard to the D.C. comic universe of the Batman, Superman, and Justice League movies, there are some rebel filmmakers who are obvious Ayn Rand fans—and that’s wonderful.  I’d attribute that same trait to the how and why The Bridges of Madison County was published and released with the backing of a major player in entertainment and the content took off brilliantly catapulting Robert James Waller into orbit as one of America’s great writers.  Critics don’t like much that comes out of Warner Bros. for many of the same reasons they don’t like Donald Trump.  It’s also why Warner Bros. still owns the rights to Ayn Rand’s Fountainhead and has Zach Snyder working on a treatment for a modern film about that topic, because Warner Bros. is still a studio that gets it—in the closed-door offices away from the entertainment media.  And Robert James Waller was one of their experiments—and a delightful one to emerge.

Waller was an economics professor and he understood business holding a PhD on the topic, but it was his art that he cherished most of all.  He had acute observations about things and had to get them out.  Unlike me, who lives in the days of the blog, Waller was one of the last writers to emerge before the computer generation exploded so getting access to his work required official publications of his written word.  But he wrote things for years fine tuning his thoughts which came to a very fine point in The Bridges of Madison County.  Robert Kincaid in that novel was essentially to an Iowa farmhouse lived in by the desperate love hungry wife of Francesca Johnson, what John Galt was to Dagny Taggart in the American classic Atlas Shrugged.

We are of course talking about “overman” characters here and that’s what critics didn’t like.  They wanted flawed people who were melting with guilt by their middle lives—and certainly not dripping with life passion as they moved beyond the age of 50.  Robert Kincaid was one of those characters and Waller managed to write about different variations of this uninhibited maleness in future novels, never to quite the same effect, but the characteristics were unmistakable.  But while Ayn Rand focused on the exoteric nature of things which eventually led to her creation of the Objectivist philosophy, Waller spent a lot of time with the esoteric, which women tend to reside in.  They love the idea of mystery and a connection to the unknown which is very oriental in its assumptions and the methods of Robert Kincaid were generally attributed to this esoteric nature.

Without question, Robert James Waller was one of the great American writers and I’ll miss the opportunity to read new work from him.  He lived a good life and his novels captured a bit of it in a way that was unique—and lasting.  So when it comes to the vehicle of Robert James Waller, I am sentimental about the many miles it drove and the quality for which it performed and as he dissolves into the esoteric nature of the universe I am glad that for a shining moment in the good ol’ firelight he was made terrestrial and formulated just enough exoteric language to share it with the world and give a voice to the wasteland which resides inside most people—if only for a fleeting moment.

Rich Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rich Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

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

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The Mistress Abu Dhabi: Unleashing the wealth of the world when temptations urge change

img_2471My wife was sentimental toward Harrod’s in London because of the long history that luxury department store had with the city that was respectable—so she wanted to do some shopping there which was quite an experience.  It was a very luxurious multilevel department store right on the edge of Hyde Park and was the anchor of all activity in that part of the city.

It was what Tiffany & Co. of New York or Sak’s Fifth Avenue were to the United States but Harrod’s had a little extra flair that I thought was quite glorious in its audacious embrace of capitalism in essentially a country that had embarked too long down the spiral of doom with socialism.  Harrod’s was all about luxury and excess declaring proudly that mankind had stepped beyond the limits of a hunting and gathering culture into the full light of an advanced society that produced more than it needed.  Harrod’s was a celebration of that and offered no apologies which surprised me in a good way.img_2451

As usual however I looked under the covers at the real situation.  I had noticed around London each time that I had been there over a two-week period that Muslim immigrants were in many service jobs at all levels of society and that for them it was a reversal of the Crusades period. Instead of the Christian world this time going into the Middle East to conquer the Muslims into conversion and acceptance of a Christian God—now it was the Muslim’s turn to handicap that originating country of the Crusades with social justice legislation through the EU then slowly convert the Christians which have been convinced to give up on the church into Islamic faithful—and they planned to do it peacefully without firing a shot.

This time there would be no attacking fortresses held by kings only to be slaughtered with superior technology.  There would be no Treaty of Versailles or the Sikes Pikot Treaty—this time the missionaries were coming from the Middle East under a banner of peace to integrate with English society then to convert their children into tolerant-open minded pacifists while the target of the next generation would be full acceptance of Sharia Law.  But that’s still about thirty years away by the attack plan well-known throughout the Muslim insurgents—for now they were peaceful and working in London—and they were shopping and working at Harrod’s.img_2459

You could see the power moves made particularly by Qatar Airlines and Turkish Airways in London to establish themselves as the new superior airline of the world marketing themselves as the next best thing.  And subtly, it was obvious at Harrod’s that they were no longer owned by the Charles Henry Harrod family but by Qatar Holdings.  This was particularly obvious when one of the many floors of that shopping complex was dedicating to promoting travel to Abu Dhabi as the next great metropolis city on earth.  And by the plans presented and so far implemented in that city which is as of now about the size of Cincinnati, Ohio by population density—it has all the benefits of a new city completely built on new wealth by the oil industry as  recently as 1971.  The Sharia Law country of Qatar is only 200 miles to the west of Abu Dhabi as Iran is right across the Persian Gulf 100 miles to 40 miles depending on where you measure from—the number one sponsor of terrorism.  Abu Dhabi is being set up as a fountainhead of capitalism thriving off the oil industry and convincing the West to turn its aggressions away out of a love for what they see there and using that wealth to bolster the terrorist countries which surround the region for their aims as a global caliphate.img_2453

Abu Dhabi is like a mistress to the civilized world—she doesn’t have the baggage of knowing her for 30 years and all the mistakes it takes to make a relationship—and showing that on her face as scars, sagging skin and menopausal hot flashes the way that Paris, London and New York are experiencing now.  Abu Dhabi is the fresh 18-year-old who loves the flash of gold and Rolex watches who would gladly trade sex with one gross looking middle-aged man to save herself from sex with many middle-aged men as an official prostitute in an economically deprived communist country such as China, Vietnam, Cambodia or even India.  She is clean and eager to please so long as she has access to the great wealth that the oil industry showers her with and this is what was on display at Harrod’s in London under the new ownership of Qatar Holdings.

Abu Dhabi was planning big things by the full-scale models of the city revealed at Harrod’s and they planned to be a big part of the international economy—which was a cover story for Islamic expansion to the far reaches of the world.  For instance, it’s not New York or Los Angeles who are looking to be the first to implement the new Hyperloop technology, it’s Abu Dhabi and India because that’s where the money is, and the freedom to build such a thing with loose regulation to allow for proper development of an emerging technology.  Within four years of this writing there will be a Hyperloop between Dubai and Abu Dhabi and an economic center of serious influence will challenge all the greatest cities of the world with new money influence.img_2460

While San Francisco, New York, London, Paris and Tokyo struggle under their welfare states built by old economic rules, the new money of Abu Dhabi, Dubai, and Qatar won’t have those burdens and it will force the world literally to eat out their hand.  However, things don’t have to be this way.  Sometimes all a woman needs is love and the new mistress isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.  I think it’s too late for Paris and London, but America is sitting on vast amounts of wealth—particularly oil of its own and could easily rival the wealth of Abu Dhabi  by unleashing it.  Commercial space travel is being developed in the United States as well as great work by the Apple Company—and of course the Hyperloop is American in its origin as well as countless medical breakthroughs which are seeing the light of day under the new Trump administration.  Between those things and a resurgence of old means of economics capped off by an activist EPA—America could produce extraordinary wealth that would stop this global incursion, which was on full display at Harrod’s in London.  And that’s exactly what is causing all the trouble between the Trump administration and the world powers that have set up this whole chess board.

Trump understands what I’ve said here and his election was a decision by the American people not to surrender tomorrow to the insurgents of today.  We could still have all that Abu Dhabi is offering in the United States if we could climb out from under our debts and embrace being the only country in the world that is truly free, and fiscally independent.  Because the 18-year-old mistress that likes gold and Rolex watches gets old too and within a few years will just be another has-been.  The best investment is to keep what you have nice, and fresh by treating her nice all along and loving her even when middle age provides a second wind.  For London to be saved from these mistakes America has to be there as an ally and for that to happen, we need our own versions of Abu Dhabi.

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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Whispers from the Catacombs of Canterbury: The great work of the Time Team and B.C. trade between America and England

img_4188One of the wonderful discoveries I made while in the United Kingdom recently was the great archaeology that had been done over a fifteen year period by the Time Team.  They had managed to host  television shows featuring very aggressive digs over three-day periods at various sites around England, and elsewhere and putting them on television in an entertaining way.  Working fast as they did, the Time Team has managed to do an enormous amount of research that has culminated in tremendous work in England in understanding their pre-history cultures, the Vikings, Anglo Saxons, Romans, Normand’s, and the relatively recent Victorian Age settlements to better assemble a history of England that nobody really understood prior.  Personally the most explosive example of the Time Team’s value to the United Kingdom was the work they did in Canterbury as seen below.

My son-in-law is from that region so it had been a goal of ours to visit his homeland and get to know the elements of that place which helped shape him into the fine young man that he is now.  When I first met him I was happy to learn that he was from Canterbury because Canterbury Tales was one of my favorite classic pieces of literature.  Along with James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake, Canterbury Tales was one of those really hard books I pushed myself to read while living on campus at the University of Cincinnati in what I would call my days of breaking free of society’s intellectual shackles.  Nobody was doing things like that when I was 25 freely reading those great works of literature while eating my breakfast, lunch and dinner almost every day in the Perkins at Coryville just to the east of the main campus of the University of Cincinnati.  Now people did read them because their literature professors gave them homework assignments to do so, but nobody did it for fun, like I did.  Even though I had a car in those days, most of my time was spent walking between the apartment I was staying at and that Perkins reading my books, such as Canterbury Tales.  So it was quite odd for me that my daughter had out of all places in the world meet a young man from Canterbury and was intent to marry him.

Fast forward 25 years into the future from the time that I was readying Canterbury Tales at that Perkin’s restaurant in a college campus environment to doing nearly the same thing in Canterbury itself this time not just reading classic literature in a studious setting, but seeing the places where Thomas Beckett was actually slaughtered and visiting the pubs and inns that were put on the map because of the pilgrimages to Canterbury Cathedral to visit the tomb of the slain archbishop who had fallen out of political favor with Henry II.  Because the intent of the visit to Canterbury was to visit my son-in-law’s family and see how he grew up, we were staying in a flat in the 4th most expensive city in all of England just one street over from the Canterbury West train station.  It was the closest thing I had come in over two decades to living the “college kid” lifestyle that I had when I first read Canterbury Tales—and it was strange.  We actually lived in Canterbury as opposed to staying at a hotel.  At our flat we lived like we would at home doing laundry, preparing meals, and conducting life in general outside the mode of being on vacation.  There is quite a difference.  Over the course of February my wife and I discovered our favorite shopping spots for getting food and we developed a nice relationship with the pizza place directly across from the Westgate Towers—because we ate a lot of pizza.  Canterbury became a second home for us.

However, for the part of me who would have loved to have been an archaeologist if I could put my other interests and career paths in some other order—Canterbury was like living in a dig site.  With their long history of prehistoric people who were conquered by the Romans, the Anglo Saxons, then the Normans—before being dominated by Catholicism, the history of this particular city was extraordinary and something that I soaked up like a sponge.  Not to mention that it was just a short walk from our flat where the pilgrims began their journey to America—so there was plenty of history to investigate and that’s what my wife and I spent most of our time doing around Canterbury.  After reading so much about the place for such a long period of time I was finally able to put my eyes on the real things and touch history as it was—which for me was very satisfying.

Canterbury is a microcosm of what I think has happened to the rest of the world.  In the macrocosm of modern history wars have defined our understanding of things and caused a very shallow recollection of our roots toward civilization.  But the world is just too big and our sciences are too slow to truly get to the roots of things.  For instance, the Time Team tried to do a similar show in America on PBS but they just couldn’t get it off the ground.  America is a different audience and things are spread out differently.  And in regard to our mound culture in the States everything is protected by the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA).  So archaeology has become nearly impossible in America for that very reason making it so that there isn’t any quick study over three days of the most ancient mysteries so obvious to American audiences, like Cahokia, the Newark Mound complex and Serpent Mound.  But the Time Team wasn’t so constrained in the United Kingdom and what they were able to unlock in a relatively short period of time was short of extraordinary.  That left a lot to explore for a guy like me in Canterbury and I relished it immensely.

There were in Canterbury several mounds that I could see on an ancient map of the city dating back to the Romans,  burial mounds all over the place just the same as were found in Stonehenge and in the United States at Fort Ancient and they all date back to the same periods.  I saw physical evidence of two large ones, one at the St. Augustine’s Abby and another right next to the old Roman walls that was as tall as the Miamisburg Mound.  Archaeologists in the area attributed that mound to the Romans who moved into the area, but because of my history with the mounds of Ohio, I would associate it as being before the Romans and for the same reasons.  I think the Romans put their imprint on the mounds they found in Canterbury, but I don’t think they initiated them.  But what was astonishing was that they were there—part of the history of Canterbury and its many microcosm layers of history were there for all to see focused on that one point in the world.  There are very few places anywhere that so much history could be observed in such a preserved way in a relatively confined space.  What made Canterbury unique was that it was the target for many civilizations to make their mark as opposed to building cities here and there within twenty miles of each other.  At Canterbury each big revolutionary period of human consciousness along the present Vico cycle was layered on top of each other for future archaeologists such as the Time Team to reveal to the world in a glorious television production which contributed immensely to our understanding of these periods.

The Time Team would go on to write several very important books on archaeology namely Fancis Pryor’s Britain BC and Tim Taylor’s Guide to the Archaeological Sites of Britain and Ireland.  I picked up Tim’s book at the St. Augustine’s Abby site and I found Pryor’s book at Stonehenge which both made my entire trip worth it alone.  These are books that you can find online, but not as easy as you might think in the States because the two cultures just don’t work well together intellectually.  What Pryor has been doing is similar to the very independent work of Fritz Zimmerman in America but schools of thought haven’t yet put two and two together.  But that’s part of the fun of discovery.  Zimmerman is dealing with a political culture in the States that is using laws the way the Catholic Church imposed its will on private citizens to control thought and history in Canterbury for at least five centuries strongly and another five modestly—but now the Time Team finds itself in a unique place where the politics in England is conducive to archaeology because of the various progressive elements that are trying to rot away the foundations of the Church to overthrow their current society.  So for the members of the Time Team, they went to work in a short period of time and are continuing to do fantastic work which has expanded the historic knowledge of Canterbury and the surrounding English countryside.

One thing I did notice at Stonehenge was that there were many archaeologists working on the site presently as they had their cars, campers and tents set up away from the tourist areas.  In America it is rare to see this kind of aggressive investigation simply because universities have not made it a priority and the politics of the times have not been friendly toward investigation.  We really need to fix that in America because we could use our own version of the Time Team.  But after visiting Canterbury and seeing many things up close that I have long been curious about, I am more convinced than ever that the cultures of prehistory Canterbury and southern, central and western England were actively working with cultures in North America through sea trade that was much more advanced than anyone has previously committed true scientific thought to as of yet.

I am grateful for the chance to have gone to Canterbury having all the great work that the Time Team and many others have contributed so that my time as a born again college kid living on the campus of that ancient city could wander around the streets with my notebooks, books, and camera validating in the microcosm something that interests me greatly on the macro.  The evidence was there for everyone to see and it was fixated on that spot because for the western world, it was the cradle of civilization.  Literature by Geoffrey Chaucer first drew my eye to Canterbury and my daughter’s marriage to one of its sons was the second, but before these events Canterbury was already ancient and laced with a deep history that was covered by time and only unearthed by human ambition through war and profit.  And that made eating pizza across from the Westgate Towers much more meaningful and mysterious as the echoes of the past came to me uniquely through the circumstances of authentic living for just a short time in an ancient place dying to tell its story on a global scale through whispers in the wind and ghosts from its catacombs.

Rich Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rich Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rich Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

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

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Old Sarum: Speaking to us from a time that earth forgot

img_4063Like Dover Castle, Old Sarum was fascinating because on top of previously built prehistoric mounds the Romans, the Normans, then several successions of English kings built magnificent castles providing many layers of study. While I was impressed with the amount of earth moved to make the mountain Dover Castle sits upon I was simply awestruck when I saw Old Sarum.  To think that human beings well before any mechanical earth moving machines made these tremendous mounds is literally jaw dropping.  In the case of Old Sarum, there is over 5000 years of history at the site which places it as part of the earthworks culture just 6 miles north at Stonehenge which I have previously written about.  CLICK HERE to review. That made the location a must see for me.  Additionally, just two more miles to the south from Old Sarum is the Salisbury Cathedral which holds one of the four original Magna Cartas under the spire which shoots up over 400 feet into the air declaring itself the highest point along the vast plain.  Of course the American Constitution was based on the Magna Carta so there is a lot going on in this very small region of the world, and I would argue that the preservation of all this history is due to the primary event by William the Conqueror when at Old Sarum he forced the land owners of England to come and commit themselves to his rule which was a dominating act in itself, but one that protected the region around Old Sarum for the next thousand years and preserved all these wonderful historical monuments.  Old Sarum was more than a fortress which would inspire thousands of fantasy films, Arthurian romances and provide the stereotypical backdrop for a medieval castle—it was literally a protector of a snapshot of human history saving the area much the way it would have appeared to William the Conqueror upon arriving for the first time.

There is no way photographs can capture the sheer scale of Old Sarum. It’s one of those places that only a human eye can rationalize upon being there.  When arriving from the north the fortress completely dominates the skyline and to fathom that it was being worked on at the same time as Stonehenge is something to behold.  I’ve been to the Cahokia mound site outside of St. Louis and this Old Sarum is much larger.  The ditches around the two-layered fortification are deep, and considering the amount of erosion that had occurred over the years, were still extremely steep.  To think human beings carried away all the dirt to make this complex is just inconceivable.  The castle and full cathedral which used to be on top of the earthworks are gone now, but just to think of the massive amount of human effort to build everything is astonishing.  I always felt that what Old Sarum suffered from is that archaeologically, it gets tossed into the medieval study group, so the people who work the digs put an emphasis on that period of time, from around 1070 AD until the time that the new cathedral was moved from Old Sarum down into Salisbury in 1227 AD.  The regional politics of the area were such that from the time that William the Conquer used the site to unite his kingdom and solidify his rule, to housing the Magna Carta in the new facilities, up to the present time, the entire region has been uniquely protected for modern study, which makes it extremely special around the world.

I would argue that it is because of the influence that the Romans had on the area, and the huge political effort excerpted by William the Conqueror then the personal care of Henry II all the way up the line that the 50-mile radius around Old Sarum has been spared from war, looting, and further religious defacements which protected sites like Stonehenge and Avebury to the far north. Farmers did move into the area, but other major cities never rose up around Old Sarum and no foreign attacker ever dared to come close to penetrating the English countryside from that angle of the island continent.  I think the evidence is quite conclusive that these mound building cultures were all over the world—these exact types were certainly in North America—but Russia, China and many other places have their share of these earthen reflections.  img_4108However, their borders have often changed many times over the centuries and hostile immigration often accompanied such movements and the thing to do was to deface the culture that was previously there.  For instance, the ISIS terrorists in the Middle East recently have been plundering the museums around Iraq and Syria and destroying great archaeological sites to preserve their Quran history of the region—so not to have any contradictory influences in their spreading of their religion into new borders—the way such things have been done for thousands of years to a greatly destructive effect.  The Quran text is a very new Muslim religion, written down for the first time in 632 AD so the cultures that built Stonehenge and Old Sarum are much older and would have been susceptible to a competing religion defacement if they had been located in a region of the world that was unstable.   But because of the might of England’s long reins of power extending into the modern world Old Sarum has been spared the spoils of war and its ominous influence protected it until the establishment of an imperial global presence.   This gives us the purest look in the world into our own history.img_4118

China has a number of unique earthworks, but study there is regulated to the communist government which censors everything. They are currently in the business of editing their own history so that their current communist regime won’t be challenged by their more than a billion residents. That kind of censorship has been going on in the United States for a long time as the political desire to show that the Indians were harmed during westward expansion has taken precedence of true archaeological study.  In North America, the mound builders have been associated as groups of Indians—in an effort to designate them as the oppressed people harmed by Christopher Columbus’s journey across the Atlantic and to blame Europe for discovering the New World in 1492 AD.  The problem for modern science is that the plot doesn’t fit the politics—obviously, the cultures that built Old Sarum, Stonehenge, and Avebury were able to bring gigantic 30 ton rocks down from Wales by sea and carry them up the shallow Avon River—but we are to believe that they weren’t sailing across the channel into France, Ireland, Greenland, and North America at a time many thousands of years before Christ was born.  This is because Christianity dominated Medieval thought all the way up through the Renaissance and now all the political boundaries of the world have been established based on those histories and nobody wants to change them now with all this new evidence—because of politics.img_4111

Old Sarum and the archaeology of the entire Salisbury plain say otherwise and reluctantly established science is beginning to change their minds off the assumptions of their grant funding from previous quickly deduced discoveries such as the characteristic that the Druids were the builders of Stonehenge which came from the Anglo-Saxons out of German shortly after the Romans left and the Normans invaded England. The people who worked and lived in the area of Stonehenge and Old Sarum were much older, and more organized than anybody has given them credit for previously—and how they came to know what they do about astronomy is just mind bending—for a supposed “primitive” people.  Those same people were in North America doing work like can be seen at Old Sarum and Stonehenge well before the Chinese began migrating into and settling the New World centuries before Columbus.  In fact, the North American “Indian” it is proving out was just a Hodge podge of global cultures abandoned by the Vico cycle only to begin again as hut dwellers who could barely thatch together a roof—let alone build massive structures that aligned with the stars, the sun and the moon on particular days of the year and had monuments on the ground visible from space to appease gods who were only passed down through oral tradition.img_4069

Old Sarum was to thank for the preservation of a culture that would otherwise be destroyed in other regions of the world and it is due to its massive political influence over a great period of time landing it in the present. Without Old Sarum I would say that Stonehenge never would have survived into modern times—it would have been looted over and over again and likely would have had someone’s church or mosque built upon it to hide what had been there before.  And so long as this is the way of the world, we can’t assume to know anything about our past or who did what when—because politics and religion have essentially erased most sites like Old Sarum from the maps of our understanding.  Even giant mounds like the one at Old Sarum have been built over and destroyed due to human migration that didn’t know the large hill they built their house upon, or a city was an ancient dwelling of any kind.  So it was quite a special to roll through the old English countryside to see the massive behemoth of Old Sarum perched high among the landscape defying convention.  The place was fascinating to me not for the Medieval archaeology it presented, but for the window into the past that it preserved, and for that I am very grateful.  What a fabulous site.  I am very happy to have seen it, in many ways it was more spectacular than Stonehenge, but more importantly, because of it, Stonehenge can still speak to us from a time that earth forgot.img_4112

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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