Tag: Rich Hoffman

The .500 Magnum: A story of strategy and understanding

I don’t talk about it much but one of my very first occupations, for which I spent two years of education gearing up for, was a professional gunsmith. I was newly married and my wife and I wanted to have a little gunsmith shop in the back of our home. I had a Federal Firearms License and had made several investments to build our life in that direction. However, I grew weary of some of the customers that came to my residence and having little children of mine running around decided that it probably wasn’t bestimage to do that kind of work with my family nearby. Some of the people who solicited my work were not the kind of people I considered upright, and I wasn’t willing to put up with them until my client list allowed me to be more selective. So I gave it up in favor of new horizons. But I never stopped enjoying the sport of shooting or following the new developments in the firearms field. To my mind a well machined firearm capable of controlled explosions sending a lead projectile into a small target many yards away is a fascinating achievement in human endeavor. With that said, I have always been a revolver guy as opposed to a semi-automatic gun user. There are less moving parts in a revolver making them more reliable. Of the recent developments in revolvers there has not been anything more spectacular than the Smith & Wesson X Frame models leading up to the .500 Magnum. I fell in love with the gun when it first came out in 2003. For the bachelor party of one of my daughters we skipped the strippers and instead rented out Target World firing off the .500 magnum they had until the small hours of the evening. But I never found justification to buy one—until now.

It’s an expensive gun to own and shoot. It costs over $3.00 per shot just to fire off the ammunition but what you get is a weapon that will penetrate about anything you aim it at. It’s really quite an achievement in raw power that you can hold in your hand. It is one of the most intimidating weapons on the market from both sides of the trigger. It’s not the most practical thing to use and takes some getting used to. I kept putting off buying one, until one day this past Saturday when I got off the live radio show with Matt Clark’s WAAM broadcast and decided that it was time to make the plunge. CLICK HERE TO REVIEW.

The topic of our show was why there was a left-leaning media bias and we flew through a lot of topics in the hour-long broadcast. But we did it in such a way that it put in perspective to me that our nation is in a lot of trouble. Not in trouble in the way where the government is going to show up and take all our guns, or involve themselves in vast conspiracies against the American people. We are in trouble due to the sheer mismanagement of our nation by really terrible people, like the Clintons, the Obamas, and the offshoots of the Clinton Foundation. There are real thugs in these groups associated with these people who have mismanaged our nation with an agenda based assumption that the American presidency is to be eclipsed in favor of a United Nations coalition not organized politically so much as it is through charitable organizations. The writing is clearly on the wall, the Clintons are selling influence, Obama is planning on being a multimillionaire community activist that will take the Clinton Foundation to the next level making whoever sits in the White House more of a token figure than they are now. Deals will be made outside of our political system by donors organized through charitable organizations, and nobody will say anything about it because the evil is being hidden behind altruistic purposes. Meanwhile the failures of progressivism is becoming rapidly evident. The Ferguson and Baltimore riots are just the tip of a powder keg intentionally set to explode in our current time. The poor have been deliberately fed socialism as a means to equality and they will riot to steal what they think they deserve from those who have things as the Obama and Clinton types stoke the fires from behind the scenes.   Additionally over the weekend Obama showed that he intends to prohibit the federal government from providing military-style equipment to local departments putting stricter controls on other weapons and gear distributed to law enforcement. Clearly that is a decision meant to embolden city protestors into continuing their riots and destruction—but in the long run is to fulfill the Obama desire to have a more Justice Department controlled police force at a national level. It is quite clear that these are errors in management of government resources that will become very problematic in the future. So it is up to each of us to decide how we want to deal with the ramifications of that mismanagement.

After I left the air with Matt my wife and I talked about it seriously—what to do at the family level with all these national faux pas. It can be debated as to whether those faux pas are motivated by progressive strategies, or whether they are driven by sheer stupidity—but the fact remains, that it will be up to the sane of us to put things right. We certainly won’t look for the fight, but the fight is certainly coming to our doors whether or not we like it—and this isn’t even considering the problems from foreign radicals flowing across an unguarded U.S. border. Idiots or insurgents are in charge of our nation and the ramifications of their behavior will have an impact on our lives. So, what are we supposed to do about it except use the tools available to us such as this blog, or radio shows like Matt’s to stop the encroachment of progressive politics and the results of its many failures? Well, I thought about my old days as a gunsmith and my three decades as a Wild West preservationist and realized that I needed to get more behind the Second Amendment not only as a plot device, but as a strategic counterpunch to the villainy that is sprouting up around us like dandelions on a spring day.

It was really my wife’s idea to buy the .500 Magnum. I was ready for it, I have been for years, but she needed to be ready for that. So we talked about it, and she clearly was. I have other guns, but nothing on the scale of that S&W .500 X Frame. It is the most powerful production handgun in the world and will remain so for many years in the future. The sheer power of that gun in anything bigger would likely shatter the wrist of a shooter. It is right at the top end of what a human body can legitimately handle. We decided we wanted the gun before the Memorial Day holiday so we pretty much got in the car and headed to the store. Our first stop was Right 2 Arms which is basically at the end of my street in Liberty Township. I like supporting area businesses so I wanted to give him the kind of business that would allow him to close early on a weekend. When I told the owner what I was looking for he laughed as if such a large gun on his shelves was something that just wasn’t feasible. But he offered to find me one within a few days. His price was less than the one I had been eyeing for several years at Bass Pro Shop also near my home, but I didn’t want to wait. We thanked him and went to Bass Pro to find the gun.

The .500 Magnum was where I expected it to be. It was an older model X Frame that had the standard compensator at the end of the barrel. It was the same exact style of gun that I had shot at Target World many years earlier, so we bought it on the spot. After thinking about the progressive intrusions on our lives so evident in the nightly news, I was happy that I had bought the gun nicknamed by all the workers as the “hand cannon” from the popular outdoor store because it was so refreshingly American—the way it was always intended. After completing a quick form for the background check, they gave me the gun, sold me the ammunition as my wife and I then went shopping for other items carrying the gun around with us as we grabbed some food. Nobody looked sideways at the big gun as I carried it around the store like a normal purchase. In the world of Bass Pro guns were not demonized, they were flying off the shelves at a rapid rate and the people selling them were helpful, and excited. It was a very positive experience.

Back in the old days when I first registered for my Federal Firearms License there was always a kind of regulation heavy taboo associated with guns that was wonderfully not present at Bass Pro. I understand Cabelas has the same general approach. I would expect openness at typical gun shops, but those types of stores have a higher profile and are geared more toward retail shopping. Walmart and Dicks offers ammunition, but more and more buying them feels socially like it’s some kind of pornography, which is completely wrong. That was not the experience at Bass Pro. I bought my .500 Magnum and all the staff was excessively helpful. It was exactly what I needed to feel when buying the long-awaited S&W X Frame—it restored my hope just a bit in America and the kind of people who are more and more living in the cracks running from the mismanagement of the cities and their left-leaning governments within whatever unfortunate county those cities reside in. The suburbs, where I live are filled with people shopping at Bass Pro Shops buying guns, ammunition, and fishing gear the way Americans always have. If they watch the news it’s usually Fox—if they listen to the radio, its likely talk radio like Rush Limbaugh—and they are under assault by the mismanaged resources of the federal government.

It occurred to me as I thought about buying that gun and the experience of purchasing it that if every American did something similar that the act alone would go a long way to defeating many of the progressive failures that are coming. It’s nice to have a military and a police department to sweep away bad guys without our direct involvement, but more often than not, they are getting their orders from knuckle-dragging slugs that have the intellect of a hard-boiled egg. They really are not qualified to protect our homes and our property. With that in mind it is fully my intention to dust off my old gunsmithing days and get involved in more promotional activity that will make other people want to go to Bass Pro Shops or Cabelas and buy themselves a new gun just for the pleasure of having it. Because if they do, that action goes a long way to eroding away the hopes and dreams of progressive insurgents who want to disarm America into a European type of colony firmly under the guidance of the United Nations. And the United Nations will largely be shaped by people like those involved in the Clinton Foundation crimes. That’s not acceptable to me, and my family isn’t going to suffer because of people like them. It’s not that shooting people is the solution either, but sometimes just having guns is enough to keep the bad guys in the bad areas when all hell breaks loose, which looks like an inevitable destination for our current culture. When hell does get loose it helps to unleash some hell of your own and for me that answer is the .500 Magnum—a wonderful treasure from Smith & Wesson. The best way to fight back against progressives is to buy a gun—and Bass Pro Shops makes it wonderfully easy. Better than it used to be in the early days of gunsmithing. Some things do get better with time.

Rich Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

Listen to The Blaze Radio Network by CLICKING HERE.

The Brilliance of Junkie XL: A review of ‘Fury Road’s’ soundtrack

I was just a bit stunned by the wonderful music I heard while watching the latest Mad Max film.  You can see a bit of why in the video clip below dedicated to the composer Junkie XL—who used to be a DJ in a previous life.  The music to me sounded remarkably like Hans Zimmer’s score on Man of Steel.  So I wondered if Zimmer knew that Junkie used some of his Man of Steel music in Fury Road.  After a quick check I discovered that the two composers have studios next to each other in Santa Monica and that they have become close friends.  So that explained why the music was so jaw dropping phenomenal.  The use of drums in Man of Steel for me was a major milestone in soundtrack design and I have been looking forward to other scores utilizing the same creative use.  Fury Road was that next film and the music is so heart pounding excellent that the moment the movie was over, my wife and I went on an incredible journey to find the soundtrack.

On May 15th I had long-planned to take the afternoon off my normal obligations and see Mad Max with my wife.  When we were dating I showed her all the Mad Max films along with Dirty Harry so we could see if we’d like each other enough to continue our relationship.  She of course loved them, so we got married.  For me, if a woman didn’t understand Mad Max and Dirty Harry, she wouldn’t be capable of sharing a life with me, so liking those films was a deal breaker.   For me it’s almost a religious experience to see a Mad Max film, so I blocked off the afternoon to see the move.  Before the film I was able to have lunch with my wife, one of my daughters and my grandson.  It put me in an exceptionally good mood for actually seeing the movie.  I knew I would like the film—I wasn’t sure how much—but it was overall leading up to the movie a very positive, long-planned experience.

After the movie my wife and I looked at each other knowing we had just watched a masterpiece for the first time and professed our love for the film until the last credit cleared the screen.  READ MY REVIEW BY CLICKING HERE.  But that soundtrack for Junkie XL was stuck in my head and I wanted the music.  I didn’t want to wait to receive it from Amazon.com.  I wanted it in the car for my ride home.  So we went on a journey all over Cincinnati to find it.  We checked Barnes and Nobel on Fields Ertle Road first—they didn’t have it.  Then we went to Target and Best Buy in that same area.  They didn’t have it.  We then hit the highway and headed to the Streets of West Chester to the Barnes and Nobel there.  They surprisingly didn’t have it either.  I was really getting frustrated.  So we were about to give up and go home.  But not wanting to surrender we hit one last spot, the Best Buy at Bridgewater Falls.

I love the Best Buy at that location because it’s full of new technology all the time.  It’s a big store relative to some of the others and always has a nice ambiance to it.  I’ve bought a lot of computer equipment, video games and appliances there, so I generally love my visits to the Best Buy at Bridgewater Falls.  After some frantic looking I found two copies of Fury Road stuck behind soundtracks to Pitch Perfect 2—and I beheld them as if they were treasures from the Sierra Madre.  We bought one of them and headed to our car where we spent the next hour listening to the music from our sound system.  It was a brilliant score well worth the purchase.  I didn’t stop the music over the whole duration of the following weekend.

The key to the success of the music is the inventiveness of the ambition behind the score that obviously is inspired by Hans Zimmer.  But Junkie XL brought a kind of rock and roll ambition to it that is strangely evocative of the dystopian world of George Miller.  Unlike the old Blade Runner soundtrack which is a favorite of mine, Fury Road is full of hope and energy.  I found it strangely compelling which is something I didn’t expect.

It didn’t take much time for me to get the soundtrack on my iPod where I proceeded to listen to it on a loop for several days.  By the time I wrote this little piece on it, I have heard it upwards of 25 complete times and I like it more each time I hear it.  It is another wonderful and often unappreciated journey into musical mayhem by some of the most creative people in the movie business.  I have included some videos on this article about Hans Zimmer and Junkie XL to provide some context as to why I love soundtracks so much—often more than the movies themselves.  As I’ve said before there isn’t one work of music on my iPod out of 8 gigs of storage ability that is not a soundtrack to some movie.  I love mythology, movies are modern mythology, and the music of movies is what holds those stories together.  Without a good soundtrack, a movie isn’t much.  But with a good soundtrack, a movie can tell its story on a scale that lasts.  For me one of those benchmarks was the Man of Steel soundtrack.  So it came to me as a surprise to learn that Hans Zimmer and his friend Junkie XL were working on the soundtrack to Dawn of Justice together, with Junkie handling the Batman tracks while Zimmer works the Superman needs.  Now that I’ve heard Junkie XL named more formally Tom Holkenborg, create such a masterpiece with Fury Road I am eagerly looking forward to the next Superman film by Zach Snyder.

Music is one of those things that stays with you long after the lights come up in a darkened theater.  If the story was a good one, the music of the movie can go with you anywhere you wish by the soundtrack of the film.  After Fury Road I couldn’t wait to keep my mind in that mythology because there were thoughts there that were pertinent to my observations—and the music helped usher those thoughts along.  So the journey was hard-fought and worth the effort, because the work that Junkie XL brought forth is indicative of a treasure that will continue giving for many years.  And for me, that means many more Friday afternoons with my wife and the treasures of cinema that come from blocked off mythology given to minds that love the stories they tell on the backs of really good music.

Rich Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

Listen to The Blaze Radio Network by CLICKING HERE.

Matt Clark and Rich Hoffman on WAAM: Understanding why the media is biased and the Clinton Foundation evil

You might have wondered what the cause of all the media bias is and how it came to be.  Well for answers to such questions there is one sure source, Matt Clark’s show on WAAM.  Over the weekend we covered an unusual number of topics in the broadcast that can be heard below.  It was also the first time that I was able to use the equipment that has essentially turned a room in my house into a radio studio.  The sound was clear which was just about as good as if I were in studio with Matt from several hundred miles south.  Obviously the equipment is primarily for when I stand in for Matt while he goes on his honeymoon for a few weekends in June.  But, it works so well, I’m sure we’ll conger up some other means for getting into some trouble with it. But that kind of trouble is different from the type that George Stephanopoulos is in as an undisclosed media donor to the Clinton Foundation.  Well, the Foundation reported the $75,000, but Stephanopoulos as a chief anchor didn’t—which is why he found himself in the specified hot water.

Even though we covered a lot of topics on that show—whether it be the conviction of the Boston Bomber, or the lunacy of Congressman Hank Johnson all the stories share in them the desire of one organization to rule over another using consensus to perform the task.  For instance, obviously with the Clinton Foundation the goal of the Clintons is to build relationships with people they can later use for some tactical advantage.  A fine example might be a sex party where everyone present is expected to get naked and do something embarrassing in front everyone else.  The immediate gratification might be interesting and enough to endure the apprehension, but the net result would end up being something you wouldn’t want to discuss at a fine dining occasion.  Then if one of the people—especially the host were at that fine dining opportunity with you, the trend would be to keep your opinions to yourself and to go along to get along because the other person is now in the power position over you.  They have dirt on you which prevent you from acting according to your own code of ethics.  Again, you might not agree with the host of the sex party on what they are trying to do, but they’ve seen you naked and compromised, so you don’t want to embarrass yourself by pissing them off.  So you go along with their plans even if they are maniacal and against your better judgment.

This is essentially why college fraternities have hazing rituals.  Groups want to see individuals assimilate themselves to the glob of the group by checking their values at the door and offering themselves uninhibited to the collective desires of the organization—even if that organization is just a handful of others.  Traveling road buddies want to know about that affair, or that over-night cheating opportunity.  They want to know you get intoxicated after four or five beers so that they can get emotional leverage on you’re at some future time.   They want you to be sure that you are not so high and mighty that you might think of stepping out on your own with your own line of thinking.  The group offers short-term rewards for long-term control.  With the Clintons it’s always about control whether it’s the sex orgies on Epsein’s private island of mischief or the donations given to the Clinton Foundation under the ruse of helping children. As a former president who has a wife next to the ear of the current president the Clintons used their name to sell influence.  A donation to them and their foundation under the auspices of goodness might feel good in the short run, but down the road the money is dirty and every contributor knows it.  They gave the money hoping to get a picture or an interview opportunity to build their own fame—but what they give up is the ability to hold the Clintons feet to the fire when they deserve to get burnt.

Even Fox News has given money to the Clinton Foundation and what the Clintons get out of the relationship is a dog with a soft bite because of the complicity. Fox News could rake the Clintons over the coals for any number of issues—especially the Epstein story.  But when the money you’ve given helps create an evil, it is far easier to put on the rose-colored glasses and go along to get along.  This is why the Clintons feel they only need to wait out the Benghazi storm, or the Epstein orgy island story—because most of the media is involved in the Clinton Foundation in some respect, and everyone knows that you have to pay to play.  If George Stephanopoulos is giving money at ABC News to maintain his relationship with his former pals, then he’ll get scoop interviews with the Clintons when a new book comes out, or get premier announcements of any political happenings as an exclusive.  But if other organizations like Fox News wants a shot at perhaps not an interview with the Clintons directly, but with at least James Carvel or John Podesta—then you better bring your donation to the next Clinton Foundation event.  If you don’t pay, you won’t be on the inside and thus won’t have the media credentials to cover any potential story. What would the mighty Fox News be without the ability to at least interview John Podesta from time to time?  Not very relevant when the other networks can get him on at will.  So everyone pays the money, commits some sin in front of everyone else to show that they can be trusted later and big stories get suppressed as a direct result.

I actually went through this on a smaller scale in my hometown of Liberty Township involving the Lakota levy, which I spoke about in brief during the radio discussion.  My guys in No Lakota Levy were largely developers who didn’t want to see their taxes go up on their investment properties, especially their holdings prior construction that weren’t making any money—but just sitting there waiting for a zoning hearing, or financing to line up.  They went to charity events usually hosted by school levy supporters so were largely handicapped into what they would say publicly about tax increases.  I always felt sorry for them because it was obvious their livelihood was in jeopardy based on their social connections within the community.  Without those connections, life would become much more difficult for them.  I was invited to these events, but I never went—because I didn’t want to break bread with the enemy—and those asking for higher taxes were the enemy.  The enemy was mystified as one by one they called in favors against my No Lakota Levy people starting with who they had primarily targeted, Mark Sennet who had been a previous public leader against tax increases and had a lot of properties to defend.  I never liked Mark even when we’d meet in person largely because of an animosity that occurred years ago when Trustee Bob Shelly was running things and rolled over to let Sennet scratch his belly over the United Dairy Farmers deal at the corner of Princeton and 747.  The last thing I was going to do was associate with him in a social setting.  It might affect my aim when it came time to make him a target—so I kept business in the proper categories until things got personal, which is when the relationship ended.  In this case the story came to a conclusion with the famous latté sipping prostitute utterance which formed the foundation of the Curse of Fort Seven Mile Cliffhanger stories.  I was able to keep things rolling longer than usual because I stayed out of the social circles involving the Chamber of Commerce, progressive tax increase professionals, and the business community all seeking a consensus on “helping the kids” by raising taxes on property values.  It was a scam.  The Clinton Foundation is the same, only on a global scale.

The goal of the Clinton Foundation is not to help children or impoverished nations lift their economies out of the gutter—it is to silence critics and to buy influence.  The best way to help poor areas of the world is to promote capitalism—but that’s not what this game is about.  It’s about control, not freedom and the Clintons are paving the way for all future ex-presidents.  Soon the President of the United States will no longer be the top job in the world; it will only be a stepping stone to United Nations influence by gigantic charity foundations like the Clinton Foundation.  If you give money to it, you get a picture with Bill, maybe Hillary and maybe a hug from their daughter.  If you don’t give money and you report negatively on them, they will call up your boss and shake you down for everything your worth.  You’ll lose your home, you’ll lose your mortgage, and you’ll lose any hope you have of a career within their social circles.  Once people like the Clintons make themselves the hub of the wheel, the direction of things will go where they decide—which we all know is toward the Scandinavian socialist model of northern Europe.

The same could be said for the other topics Matt and I discussed.  Even the Islamic story is functioning with the same overall strategy as the Clinton Foundation.  Play the game their way; you get to be on the inside.  Deviate from the path they establish and you will find yourself attacked, ridiculed and ostracized in negative ways.   To them the collective is much more important than individual rights.  That is what the Clinton Foundation and Islamic radicals have in common and why they are both dangerous.  They both are collective organizations, one political the other religious who desire to achieve the same objective, the conquest of individual will in support of collective assimilation.  The best way to achieve that is to get individuals to surrender their integrity in public which is equitable to a gag.  It is then that the secrets of the society from within are kept and why George Stephanopoulos paid $75,000 to his old friends to stay in their good graces.  As a head at ABC he does after all have a responsibility to the collective network to use his past influence to nab up all the hot interviews—after all, that’s why they hired him in the first place.  But to the Clintons, nobody is really their friend—unless you throw money at them to assist with the illusion of their charitable organization.  The real objective is global consensus as they seek to control their donors with all the mad zeal of the most tyrannical kings of historical memory.  And there’s nothing good about it.

Rich Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

Listen to The Blaze Radio Network by CLICKING HERE.

‘Fury Road’: Why the film is a work of George Miller genius

For all the reasons that Mad Max: Fury Road is a modern masterpiece on par with films like Citizen Kane, The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, and Ben Hur is to look at the film itself.  In 1981 if anyone would have predicted that the maker of the Road Warrior would 30 years in the future create such a scathing representation of human culture nobody would have believed it.  Yet our current society has devolved to such a degree that the evidence of such a future nightmare is fast upon us which brings a sort of exasperation at the end of the film.  Fury Road is many things all at the same time; it’s a modern morality western on wheels and can be enjoyed as popcorn entertainment.  This part of it was clear already in the previous Mad Max films.  But, there was always a hint at something deeper, which a younger director in George Miller probably wanted to utter, but didn’t yet have the whole package ready to wrap.  Fury Road dives deeper into the well of the human condition seamlessly like all great works of art.  It gives the viewer more of what they already know, and dares them to step beyond their comfort zone in a way that Picasso’s cubic paintings did.  But then again, Fury Road is deeper than even that—it jumps headlong into the vast depths of James Joyce’s literary masterpiece Finnegan’s Wake to play at Giambattista Vico’s four cycles of civilization.   When it is said that Fury Road is the work of genius, this would be the reason, it is modern art evoked in some of the most provocative ways ever put to film, and it is done so in a way that at the end viewers will wonder what the just saw.  Was the movie just another summer blockbuster in superhero clothing, or was it the genius of a new religion after mankind has fallen back to its beginnings as it has so many times before?

If George Miller was not a fan of Finnegan’s Wake, and had a firm understanding of the Vico cycle, I would be surprised—because that is clearly the theme of Fury Road.  Human beings have devolved from a race that once put satellites into the sky to a society clamoring over water.  Anarchy has given way to a new theocracy and at the end of the move, the last line shown on the screen before the end credits read like the first sentence in a new book of Genesis.  I can’t say that I have ever seen a critic rating of 98% on Rottentomatos.com for a movie, yet Fury Road had virtually everyone who had seen it eating out of its hand—something that certainly would not have been the case in 1982 when the Road Warrior came out.  Some radio movie reviewers on the Friday of the film’s release were actually giving the movie 5 out of 5 stars—which is something else I can’t ever recall happening.  Even great films typically get a 4 or a 4.5, but many critics were giving Fury Road a full unfettered five stars essentially calling it a perfect movie.  I don’t think Fury Road is a perfect movie.  It was on par to me to all the great western’s I have seen over the years—but it has the added dimension of hidden sophistication that all viewers sense which hangs in the air at the end of the movie.  It touches something very primal in us all and hints at long suppressed beliefs touched for the first time perhaps in some people’s lives.  Yes, the Vico cycle is well at hand.   In a time where nearly every movie is a retread from the past society has forgotten that all these retreads came from a period when our culture produced these kinds of stories every couple of months.  Just like the mixed up cars in Fury Road are representatives of a previous society which mass manufactured them, they are assembled on the screen hodgepodged together in bizarre and imaginative ways that still evoke a lesser society that inherited something great from the past yet didn’t quite know how to sustain them.  Fury Road is a metaphor of itself in a very tongue in cheek way.  There seems to be a very firm knowledge from George Miller of what he’s doing as he is clearly an artist at the top of his game.

Other progressive reviewers saw in Immortan Joe a greedy capitalist regulating vast resources to enslave people.  To their minds Immortan Joe was the Bilderberg bankers and Illuminati currency manipulators of the current times and the revolution of the people to overtake such a greedy bastard is communism so everyone can have equal share in the wonders of water stored in his magical pumps within his fortress Citadel.  Yet again, Fury Road is a deeper movie than that—it cuts to a primal rage contained within every human being—the desire to be free.  Immortan Joe might have been slain, and a new government might rule in his place—but the results would be the same.  So long as mankind follows the trends of the Vico cycle whoever is in power will always seek to suppress those under their control.  The reason the film has such high critical ratings is because of things like this, where the kinds of topics that are really important to people are expressed.  But like all great works of art, those people are limited by what they can see.  They may not have the ability to see too far, so they only see representations of feminism, or communism as factors for redemption—but there is clearly more going on.

I thought the most powerful part of the movie was a quiet scene where the characters named brilliantly, Toast the Knowing, Cheedo the Fragile, and the Capable were watching a star filled night sky as they saw a satellite flying across their view from horizon to horizon.  They contemplated the previous culture that actually made such things that could talk to people across the whole of the world.  They wondered who killed the world.  It’s not global warming which has done the destruction.  It was the Vico cycle—mankind’s innate desire to advance and regress along its formulated parameters.

As I bought my ticket for Fury Road the attendant whispered to himself, “Max, great choice.”  He locked knowing eyes with mine.  “I loved it.”  And that was the general feeling of everyone I bumped into who saw the movie.  They realized that they were seeing something that was strangely important, yet they didn’t really know why.  It is our present story played out in a way that they can easily see no matter what vantage point of political reality they approach the subject—because the road all leads to the same place.  It doesn’t matter if the vantage point is conservative, liberal, deeply socialist, fascist, or manically religious it all ends up in the same place, the cycle of Giambattista Vico, theocracy, aristocracy, democracy, followed by anarchy which has persisted in human lives for as long as we have had breath.  Most of us want to be Max or Furiosa, but know that they will always ever be at best like the old lady in Fury Road, the Keeper of the Seeds.  Worse yet, most people will spend their whole lives begging for water, or allowing themselves to be harvested for their bodies–their motherly milk, or their blind devotion to a male patriarchy more concerned with their place in a masculine peaking order than in inventing satellites to go to space.  Even though the world has gone mad Max at least has not surrendered himself to its cycle.  In the end he is the hero who carries those who want to back to a hope of advancing their cause instead of just retreating from it. It was a brilliant film by a brilliant director at the absolute top of his game.  The above and below line talent in the picture are all at the peak of film making genius and if there is any justice Fury Road will win many Oscars in 2016.  But that in and of itself will prove just how valid Fury Road truly is.  In a free culture capable of making all the stories it can deem possible, it is a retread from the past that is evoking so much of a response in a culture that subconsciously seems to realize it is slipping back into the abyss of anarchy and theocracy.   They don’t understand why or how—but know that it’s happening.  And the only way they can measure that slide is with a good ol’ Mad Max movie which shows them the map of how it’s happening, even if they are powerless to stop it.

Rich Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

Listen to The Blaze Radio Network by CLICKING HERE.

Why the Department of Education Should be Shut Down: Broadband for everyone!

This is why the Department of Education should be completely eliminated. It is grotesquely ineffective and agenda based politically. The aim of equality so boisterously proposed by government school advocates is only a thinly veiled attempt at state-run parenting. It’s an insult to have them in charge of education. For instance, I first saw the following article from Yahoo News, and found the source article after some checking. Essentially it’s a marketing ploy advocating in favor of two progressive agenda items—one Common Core, the other Net Neutrality and using children to advance both causes. I personally find it insulting that they actually think human beings are stupid enough to believe what they are saying. While many people may be, not everyone is, and while they strive for equality of stupidity for all people, I’m not going to comply, nor will the typical reader of this site. Here is how the article read:

Overall, 63 percent of public schools don’t have access to broadband speeds needed for digital learning. The problem is particularly acute in rural and low-income districts: Only 14 percent in those areas meet high-speed internet targets.

“It’s just very uneven all over the country,” Lan Neugent, executive director of the non-profit State Educational Technology Directors Association.

The Federal Communications Commission approved a $1.5 billion spending cap increase for school broadband and Wi-Fi last year that is expected to significantly boost connectivity. State grants linked to Common Core implementation and collaborations with tech and business leaders are also bridging the gap. But those initiatives could take a year or more to connect thousands of schools and testing started in 29 states and the District of Columbia for 12 million students this year.

In the meantime, they’re resorting to alternatives: Testing students in small groups, busing them to other schools and limiting all other internet access while exams are taken.

Ideally, technology can help eliminate achievement gaps between poor and rural students and their more affluent peers. The shift to online testing, however, reveals how wide the digital divide remains. Districts like Chicago Public Schools with large numbers of low-income students have raised questions about whether their students — who often don’t have access to a computer or the Internet at home — are at a disadvantage.

“The implementation of Common Core is bringing these issues more to the forefront,” said Brian Smith, executive director of the nonprofit Education Trust-West. “But this has been an issue that has plagued communities of color and low-income communities for years.”

 

http://www.usnews.com/news/technology/articles/2015/05/11/online-common-core-testing-lays-bare-tech-divide-in-schools

Problem number one, if technology is being used in public schools to the extent that they need WI-FI internet connections, then the institution itself is not needed. I already argue that modern technology as far as teaching is far superior to an actual union member public school teacher. Teachers may have some success in helping children who have bad parents, or limited financial opportunities, but for the masses of children, public school is ineffective as an institution—other than providing day care for children while parents work. Here is the Department of Education attempting to articulate that the internet is needed to provide education in a brick and mortar school—even to the extent that they are willing to spend money to bus students to locations with better WI-FI connections. People are supposed to actually sympathize with that nonsense. It’s an insult to assume that normal people are stupid enough to not see what is going on with that ridiculous assumption.

Secondly, the Department of Education ignores completely the Vico cycle of human devolution—which is historically as reliable as sunrises and sunsets. The reason that there are different portions of the country rural and urban as well as wealthy and poor is because different factions of people depending on their values progress along the Vico cycle at rates specific to them. For instance, those in poor neighborhoods are entering the anarchy phase while those in the suburbs may be at the aristocratic. Those phases are not compatible with one another—so there will be different types of people produced by them. CLICK HERE for a contemporary understanding of the Vico cycle. It would be thought that all the supposedly smart people at the Department of Education would understand the Vico cycle—but apparently not. Loses in internet connectivity has little to do with any other factor than whether or not an area is profitable. Internet providers are willing to incur the cost of service if there is money in it for them. They are not going to do it for the fun of it.   Ironically, Richard Branson with his Virgin Galactic company is planning to put satellites up that will bring internet coverage to even the most remote portions of Africa, so a day when such connectivity problems will still be an issue are on their way out—so long as government stays out-of-the-way. If Virgin Galactic is left alone, the problems of this entire article will evaporate like a puddle of water on a hot summer day. It won’t take long for there to be no trace of anything left behind.

Then of course is the not so subtle marketing of public education services by stating that technology can help erase the gaps between poor and affluent—as if government schools were the great equalizers of society. They aren’t. You could give a poor kid in South Chicago a brand new laptop and it would likely be destroyed within a few weeks, sold for drug money, or riddled with pornography because the parents of the poor child were terrible and instilled limited values on the unfortunate sapling. I’ve known lots of people from poor neighborhoods and tried to help them all. You can’t make bad people into good just by being nice to them, or giving them a fair shake. They have to change their values. A drunk has to value soberness to want to quit. The illiterate has to value reading to break their curse. A poor person has to want to be productive; otherwise they will continue to be poor. Until you work on the core values of a society, nothing can stop their progress on the Vico cycle. Nothing—no amount of money, no feel good public education experiment—no billions of dollars spent on the internet. The internet is useless without the desire to learn something from it. The internet doesn’t just magically make everyone equal with opportunity. Stupid people will use it for porn. Smart people will use it for knowledge. In order for everyone to be equal, everyone has to either want to be stupid or smart. Public education as indicated by the Department of Education has decided that the best way to make everyone equal is to make the smart into the stupid and then hope that government can manage the chaos of the Vico cycle that follows. But they can’t, and they will never learn to. Because the phase after anarchy is always theocracy, and when that happens the Department of Education will be eliminated anyway in favor of a new god to worship and the whole mess starts over again.

Well everyone isn’t stupid, or have plans on joining the ranks. For them, the Department of Education insulted their intelligence with such a stupid release of information flowed down to the orthodox media. It shows just how astonishingly ignorant those in charge at the Department of Education really are. I mean I don’t think much of them anyway, but to not understand the basic concepts of the Vico cycle—it’s just preposterous. Sad and ignorant that such people are employed by tax payer dollars. That—is the real insult.

Rich Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

Listen to The Blaze Radio Network by CLICKING HERE.

‘Fury Road’: Rebelling against Giambattista Vico

I have a general assumption about mankind that is quite opposite of typical academia. Civilizations rise on the backs of innovative individuals and flourishing capitalism. They decline with more centralized control and absorption of individual achievement into the fabric of a collective society. When an unworthy king or bureaucratic democracy takes over the direction of economic enterprise and invention, a society is in decline. It is due to the hard wiring of human beings trained from their infancy to follow the Giambattista Vico cycle always witnessing societies fall only to be born again in a much regimented pattern. This holds true no matter what the society, whether it be the Mayan people, the Inca, the Mongol, the Roman Empire—all societies so far have followed the Giambattista cycle. This is why anybody with any honesty looks at George Miller’s Mad Max films and declares him a genius. It’s also why it was more than symbolic that Mel Gibson showed up at the premier of Fury Road, the latest Mad Max film now staring Tom Hardy. Studios didn’t want Gibson in the film as the Vico cycle declares that what’s old must be recycled to make way for the young and new. But Gibson showed up to give the young Hardy a bit of support because any Mad Max fan knows that Mel Gibson will always be the iconic Road Warrior. It all started with this movie.

Our current world is not very far from the world of the first Mad Max movie. Police are now being openly murdered and Vico’s final phase of anarchy is fully at hand. What happens next is the rise of a theocratic society followed again by aristocratic, then democratic rule, followed by chaos once again. In the film Fury Road we find that in the period between the first Mad Max film society has devolved into the rise of theocratic civilization. No longer is society concerned with missions to Mars or inventing a new iWatch—now the primary concern as it has been in the past is to establish a new deity figure for the society at large.

I have always loved the Mad Max character because he maintains himself throughout the entire cycle as a constant reminder into the phase of the Gambattista cycle from which everything was taken from him, his wife, child, friend, career—everything he cherished from that time. Unlike the rest of the world he finds himself standing up against the tide of regression. He is a representation in these Mad Max films as Nietzsche’s ubermensch-otherwise translated as the overman. Nietzsche’s ubermensch is one who has graduated from mankind and stepped away from the Gambattista cycle all together—and has decided to advance their life based on individual creativity.   But this is a dangerous road, Hitler tried to take Nietzsche’s ubermensch and advance Germany, but failed in his interpretation and instead moved his country into a Karl Marx inspired socialist democracy—followed by war defined anarchy, then back to a theocratic/democratic existence where it currently finds itself in a European Union—otherwise a democracy that is once again plunging into anarchy now inspired by the failing economies of Greece.   Mad Max is the figure who refuses to submit to these tides of the world.

I have no doubt that George Miller would agree with this assessment. He knows all too well what he’s doing. He’s not just making a popcorn action thriller with great car stunts and bizarre characters. He’s making a rejection statement against Gambattista’s famed cycle. He may not have set out to be conscious about that statement but rather let his intellect drive those elements of the story along as evolution of the various aspects of the story evolved, but based on the presentation of Fury Road, it is clear he understands what he’s doing all too well. It’s also clear why so many people are excited to see such an apocalyptic story and why after all these years it’s so close to the hearts of so many people. This is not a typical summer blockbuster film.

So, how excited am I for the upcoming Fury Road? Well, let me tell you, I have dedicated this upcoming Friday to seeing it. I will certainly be one of the first, and I will likely see it several times. I love the action, I love Mad Max and all that he stands for, but more than anything I love seeing the Gambattista cycle challenged. The world may have went crazy in relation to the advanced days of invention when oil was being produced to propel cars from city to city, to instigate the growth of economies of various trade. All that can and will fall apart within just a few decades of human development—just like the Maya abandoned their cities apparently very fast—as if they just evaporated. It’s not that such people abandoned their cities because they left earth for alien destinations, the people of Ur did not suddenly become equivalent to the Neanderthal after building hanging gardens and massive temples—they regressed because they emerged into war then reinvented theocracy starting the Vico cycle fresh again losing all that they had gained before. Mad Max is that personality in these George Miller movies who in spite of everything that he has lost and continues to lose, refuses to give up on his heroic past and be the last representation of a time when mankind was truly great.

How many people do you know who would at the drop of a hat become one of the mindless followers of some future attempt at theocratic rule? The current Muslim obsession is but the latest. How many maniacs would kill the masses for a chance at everlasting life in the hereafter because some slug of a wanna’ be king dictated that such a thing would bring redemption to the soul? The answer is probably everyone that you know. Most of the people shopping at the grocery and working in a corner cubical would gladly trade in their suits and ties for a thong and Mohawk if some skull inspired death cult instructed them that through worship of his heavenly presence that someday they too might rise up to greatness if only they adhere to the tenets of collectivism.   Miller’s brilliance is that he was able to see such a clear vision from our present age. It’s not easy to see that overweight school levy supporter buying meat at the grocery as a future sex slave to a blood thirsty cult fighting over the worship of water—but Miller does, and with a grand design. It’s not easy to see that corrupt politician kissing babies and whatever else as the skull wearing Immortan Joe hunting down the wives who are desperate to leave him. But in Miller’s films, it is quickly recognizable that most people we know under similar conditions would find themselves as some character in that wasteland. It doesn’t take much to forgo everything we have ever been and throw it away in exchange for basic human necessities, like food, water, and sex.

I am excited for Fury Road, but for reasons that go well beyond the visual spectacle. I love it for the rebellion against Vico. On one hand the Vico cycle is shown in all its brutal honesty, but through the character of Max—using almost no dialogue—Miller beholds the ubermensch—a character that launched the career of Mel Gibson who in almost every movie refused to buckle under the pressure of Vico to decline—but always to advance. Whether it was Riggs from Lethal Weapon or William Wallace from Braveheart, Mel Gibson started as Mad Max, that hero from the past who punched through the Vico cycle with the throttle down and the skill of a Road Warrior as the rest of the world attempted to drag him back into the Stone Age. That’s why Fury Road is more important than a four-year degree in college studying history and the Vico cycle. Because Fury Road shows through art the results of that path—and how treacherously close we always are to falling off the edge of reality into an abyss controlled by maniacs like Immortan Joe—or the Toe Cutter.

Rich Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

Listen to The Blaze Radio Network by CLICKING HERE.

The Socialist Bernie Sanders: Why public schools want the Nordic Model

Many snickered when I stated emphatically that it was versions of communism and socialism that was being taught in public schools. They really didn’t want to deal with that reality. Others snickered when I said that Democrats like Obama and Clinton were functional socialists—that their political ideology was driven by Karl Marx and that liberalism in general had the goal of socialism. Well, the times are what they are—drug abusers want legalized pot, the lazy want great pay for little work, and two decades of children have been raised on liberal causes like global warming, Keynesian economics, and philosophies of collectivism. And now they are ready for socialism in America—openly. That is why Bernie Sanders feels that he now has a platform for a presidential run. Old Democrats like George Stephanopulous are used to hiding their love of socialism behind cocktail parties and racist issues so to deflect attention away from their intentions. But Sanders is one of the only open socialists in the U.S. government. To his credit, at least he’s honest about his intentions. His open embrace of socialism made Stephanopulous cringe a bit in the following interview. While watching, remember I have been saying this kind of stuff for a long time—longer than Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh or any other modern pundit. What follows is a bit of an article from a millennial website obviously proud of Sanders. This is what we are up against. These are not the Democrats of the 1990s. These are no longer ashamed of their socialism. These Democrats are openly advocating it—and because the youth has already been trained in socialism from their public schools, they are likely to vote in favor of it.

After raising more in 24 hours than each of the declared GOP candidates individually, Vermont senator and self-described democratic socialist Bernie Sanders went on ABC’s This Week to let America—and the D.C. pundit class that has already written him off—know he’s a real player in 2016.

 

“For 30 years I’ve been standing up for workers of this country and I think I’m the only candidate who is prepared to take on the billionaire class which now controls our economy and increasingly controls the political life in this country. We need a political revolution in this country.”

After a bit of half-snark from Stephanopulous over his embrace of the “S” word, Sanders went on to defend democratic socialism and explain, in detail, why America should be trying to emulate Northern European countries rather than belittle them. The ABC host and former Bill Clinton advisor tried to pin the Vermont senator down, musing aloud, “I can hear the Republican attack ad now: [Sanders] wants America to look like Scandinavia,” to which Sanders deadpanned in response, “That’s right. And what’s wrong with that?”

http://www.alternet.org/dont-underestimate-me-after-shocking-fundraising-totals-bernie-sanders-defends-european-style

The Nordic Model that Sanders likes so much is a joke; the GDP of those Nordic countries is like comparing a fly to an elephant. They may both be creatures of biological design, but that is the end of their similarities. The United States has a GDP of over $17 trillion per year, Sweden only has $570 billion, Denmark $340 billion, Finland $271 billion, and Norway $500,000. Most of that GDP is exports from companies Ikea, but other than that, there’s not much going on economically. Yet this is what socialists like Sanders are advocating for.

The Nordic Model – Embracing globalization and sharing risks” characterizes the system as follows:[15]

  • An elaborate social safety net in addition to public services such as free education and universal healthcare.[15]
  • Strong property rights, contract enforcement, and overall ease of doing business.[16]
  • Public pension plans.[15]
  • Low barriers to free trade.[17] This is combined with collective risk sharing (social programs, labour market institutions) which has provided a form of protection against the risks associated with economic openness.[15]
  • Little product market regulation. Nordic countries rank very high in product market freedom according to OECD rankings.[15]
  • Low levels of corruption.[15] In Transparency International’s 2014 Corruption Perceptions Index all five Nordic countries were ranked among the 12 least corrupt of 176 evaluated countries, and Denmark, Finland, Sweden and Norway all ranked within top 5.[18]
  • High percentage of workers belonging to a labour union. In 2010, labour union density was 69.9% in Finland, 68.3% in Sweden, and 54.8% in Norway. In comparison, labour union density was 12.9% in Mexico and 11.3% in the United States.[19] The lower union density in Norway is mainly explained by the absence of a Ghent system since 1938. In contrast, Denmark, Finland and Sweden all have union-run unemployment funds.[20]
  • A partnership between employers, trade unions and the government, whereby these social partners negotiate the terms to regulating the workplace among themselves, rather than the terms being imposed by law.[21] Sweden has decentralised wage co-ordination, while Finland is ranked the least flexible.[15] The changing economic conditions have given rise to fear among workers as well as resistance by trade unions in regards to reforms.[15] At the same time, reforms and favorable economic development seem to have reduced unemployment, which has traditionally been higher. Denmark’s Social Democrats managed to push through reforms in 1994 and 1996 (see flexicurity).
  • Sweden at 56.6% of GDP, Denmark at 51.7%, and Finland at 48.6% reflects very high public spending.[17] One key reason for public spending is the large number of public employees. These employees work in various fields including education, healthcare, and for the government itself. They often have lifelong job security and make up around a third of the workforce (more than 38% in Denmark). Public spending in social transfers such as unemployment benefits and early-retirement programs is high. In 2001, the wage-based unemployment benefits were around 90% of wage in Denmark and 80% in Sweden, compared to 75% in the Netherlands and 60% in Germany. The unemployed were also able to receive benefits several years before reductions, compared to quick benefit reduction in other countries.
  • Public expenditure for health and education is significantly higher in Denmark, Sweden, and Norway in comparison to the OECD average.[22]
  • Overall tax burdens (as a percentage of GDP) are among the world’s highest; Sweden (51.1%), Denmark (46% in 2011),[23] and Finland (43.3%), compared to non-Nordic countries like Germany (34.7%), Canada (33.5%), and Ireland (30.5%).
  • The United Nations World Happiness Report 2013 shows that the happiest nations are concentrated in Northern Europe, with Denmark topping the list. The Nordics ranked highest on the metrics of real GDP per capita, healthy life expectancy, having someone to count on, perceived freedom to make life choices, generosity and freedom from corruption.[24]
  • The Nordic countries received the highest ranking for protecting workers rights on the International Trade Union Confederation’s 2014 Global Rights Index, with Denmark being the only nation to receive a perfect score.[25]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nordic_model

Even though per capita income is high in these Nordic Model countries their average tax rates are hovering around 50%. So a $50,000 a year income is only $25,000 a year in useable income. Socialists like Sanders will tell supporters about the nice quiet life in Scandinavia, how happy people are, how long their vacations are—how all their educations were paid for—but what they don’t talk about is how they are not a people creating much of anything new, and that their economic power is largely dependent on their exports from markets that are rich because of capitalism. The Nordic Model is like socialism itself, a bunch of smoke and mirrors—and in the end all its really good for is some cheap meatballs at Ikea along with a table that breaks the first time a child falls into it.

Yet the point of this particular article isn’t to show what an embarrassment the Nordic Model is compared to the United States, or even a country of comparable landmass, such as Japan—it is to show that all along socialists were advocating these Democratic values intending always to advance socialism as a socially acceptable means of political and economic approach. Bernie Sanders in all his ignorance and naiveté is at war with billionaires because he assumes that they have an obligation to share their wealth—as if wealth is a finite resource that all people are born into. He does not know or understand that wealth is created, and that rich people make wealth because of the prospect of profit. When you take away the motivation to elevate oneself by giving them free education, free housing, long vacations and free health care, that you get a population of cattle that is happy to just graze in the field living off the efforts of others. Of course they’ll be happy to eat when someone puts food in their trough, and sleep in the provided shelter. But don’t ask them to invent anything new, or to advance the state of life in the world—because their minds are turned off—fat, dumb and happy. And that is what Democrats like Bernie Sanders always intended with their love of socialism.

It is that brand of socialism that our kids are learning in public schools at this very moment, and is also why Bernie Sanders thinks he can actually be president in this 2015 America. I’ve only been talking about it for around 30 years. They used to say it was crazy, but now Bernie has come clean with it, which for me is a justified poke in declaring that “I told you so.”

Rich Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

Listen to The Blaze Radio Network by CLICKING HERE.

The Truth Behind Pseudoscience: How the Forest Hills superintendent played a part in the destruction of scientific method

Pseudoscience is a growing trend which I cover quite a lot, mainly because it is evolving out of a lack of trust in the current intellectual institutions. As it turns out the imagination of mankind is more reliable than its ordained collectivism—the level of reality that the masses are willing to accept. For those masses, their level of intellectual aptitude is not very high, and they are happy to relegate their trust to those they consider authority figures. But that trust quickly evaporates when it is discovered that those authority figures are extremely corrupt individuals lacking basic leadership skills, which is certainly the case when the Forest Hills superintendent was caught trying to manipulate his child’s individual test scores—because obviously those types of things are important to his family. This is not an uncommon occurrence. In my dealings with public schools I was amazed at how simple their thinking was, and how easy to corrupt they were. My net result of observation was that they cannot be trusted with much of anything—especially the framework that science and education in general are bound by. Here is the story of the superintendent as reported by Channel 5.

ANDERSON TOWNSHIP, Ohio —Forest Hill School Board members have released the results of their investigation into allegations that Superintendent Dallas Jackson is accused of invalidating a first semester exam score, because his son did poorly on the test.

It could be a packed house at the Forest Hills School Board meeting Monday night after the district’s superintendent was accused of tossing out a test because of his son’s grade.

The board met in executive session for more than three hours Monday night.

According to an unnamed investigator, Superintendent Dr. Dallas Jackson attempted to interfere with grades on a pre-calculus honors mid-term exam, but the Turpin High School principal addressed the exam grades without influence from the superintendent.

Teachers first sent a letter to the school board questioning the ethics of the superintendent’s inquiries into the test his son took.

WLWT has been pushing the Forest Hills district for the documents for days. The station obtained a copy late Tuesday afternoon.

Jackson tried to step in after 44 percent of the honors students, including his son, failed an exam in December.

An independent investigation found Jackson sent a text to the principal saying he was not happy with the way she was handling the issue.

The district reported Jackson met twice with the principal at Turpin about the exam. Jackson told the principal the failure rate was due to either “a bad test or bad teaching.”

The principal approached the teachers in charge of the exam about averaging out the test grade, but they refused. Ultimately, the teachers, the Turpin principal and assistant principal agreed on a plan to give students a chance to raise their grades.

Jackson disagreed with the plan, but it was implemented anyway.

http://www.wlwt.com/news/forest-hills-school-board-ends-investigation-into-superintendents-conduct/32623884

In my experience at witnessing, writing, and researching many stories like the one above from Forest Hills, it is safe to say that I don’t trust much of anything that comes from institutions backed by government—especially if they have connections to international trade unions. There is just too much temptation to cover up bad human behavior, or interpretations of a strongly held static pattern—such as a religious preference—to alter and manipulate data intended to be involved in critical thought. As I say that I can’t help but think of a book a person I greatly admire wrote called The Demon Haunted World, by Carl Sagan. Sagan is not the type to jump into conspiracy theories and wanted very much to fight back the trend to take imaginations into pseudoscience. But the scientific data he often relies on to make proper decisions are known to be deliberately revised. Evidence cannot be considered if it is destroyed and proper assessment of data cannot be deduced if it is avoided to protect intellects from the challenges of new data that may be contrary to a static pattern of thinking.

The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark is a 1995 book by astrophysicist Carl Sagan.

In the book, Sagan aims to explain the scientific method to laypeople, and to encourage people to learn critical or skeptical thinking. He explains methods to help distinguish between ideas that are considered valid science, and ideas that can be considered pseudoscience. Sagan states that when new ideas are offered for consideration, they should be tested by means of skeptical thinking, and should stand up to rigorous questioning.

Science to Sagan is not just a body of knowledge, but a way of thinking. The scientific way of thinking is both imaginative and disciplined, bringing humans to an understanding of how the universe is, rather than how they wish to perceive it. Science works much better than any other system because it has a “built-in error-correcting machine”. Superstition and pseudoscience get in the way of many laypersons’ ability to appreciate the beauty and benefits of science. Skeptical thinking allows people to construct, understand, reason, and recognize valid and invalid arguments. Wherever possible, there must be independent validation of the concepts whose truth should be proved. He states that reason and logic would succeed once the truth is known. Conclusions emerge from premises, and the acceptability of the premises should not be discounted or accepted because of bias.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Demon-Haunted_World

Yet we live in a world where public schools have deliberately avoided critical thinking and reason—so that emotional decisions centering on collective endorsement can be utilized instead. The result of this action is an entire society that has lost the ability to think critically or to use reason to make determinations. When those types of people are in charge of an institution what you get is the kind of results seen in Forest Hills Superintendent Dallas Jackson. His son had a bad grade, he was a superintendent of an important public school, and he didn’t want the embarrassment of having his kid not performing at the top of his academic expectations………….what would the neighbors think? Worse yet, what about the rest of the family? So he used his power to abuse the system to his needs. This has happened within the IRS involving Lois Lerner. It happened in Benghazi. It happens every time a teacher decides they want to have sex with one of their students. It happens all the time and at all levels.

Its not unrealistic to imagine that some curators at The Smithsonian Institute, or The National Geographic Society who have poured their faith behind the Charles Darwin theories of evolution and built their careers around those assumptions would not stuff the bones of some giant discovered in a Ohio mound into some vault, or even destroy the evidence to preserve their scientific outlook. For instance, everyone knows that whatever wreckage was found in the Roswell incident was sent to Wright Patterson Air Force Base. Not long thereafter there were many UFO sightings around Southern Ohio probably related to new military technology either being developed at WPAB or the testing of alien technology found in the wreckage. Or perhaps somebody or something connected to the wreckage went looking for their stuff back. Supposedly the complex of this mysterious Air Force base was connected by tunnels to the Mound Nuclear complex nearby in Miamisburg. And in the middle of all this activity was the Masonic temple that looks down into downtown Dayton and the Great Miami River upstream from the nuclear site. Old buildings around Dayton all up and down the river in that area have lots of references to gargoyles and strange winged creatures that really don’t have a direct connection to the frontier development of those communities, so something really odd is going on behind the veil of the presented reality there. I probably wouldn’t think anything strange about any of this except that somebody decided to build the entire nuclear research facility right in the middle of a magnificent mound builder complex right in the middle of the site. At the Miamisburg Mound at least two skeletons of people over 8 feet tall were found, so any credible university it would be thought would seek to do some major excavations in Miamisburg to discover who and what they were. Instead, science and industry backed by politics built a nuclear research facility supposedly connected to the alien conspiracy theories of WPAB. If you take Carl Sagan’s scientific method at face value one has to ask—what proof is there of any paranormal, or pseudoscience behavior? Well, the mound itself there in Miamisburg is large, and the entire nuclear faculty was built around it for some reason—perhaps to give the illusion of having respect for Native American culture. Yet nobody has dared to do a proper excavation of the site in over 100 years. Why? The University of Dayton is literally just a few miles away—they have some anthropology courses that they offer. Nearby University of Cincinnati and Miami University both have respectable archaeology programs, yet nobody has pulled together the ability to do a suitable dig at the site—which would unquestionably produce many more skeletons—probably some of which were giants—relatively speaking. Science creates the pseudoscience speculation because of the various cover-ups which likely stem from a religious desire, or a European pride issue of maintaining that Christopher Columbus discovered America and that the cultures that were already in the New World were truly primitive hunters and gathers. The culture that built those mounds was more advanced than previously thought, and those in charge wanted to manipulate the facts to force reality to be shaped to their desire.

That’s why it’s a big deal when someone like Dallas Jackson abuses his authority to make his son look smarter to his peers. Jackson manipulated the science of critical thinking to create a desired outcome. When this happens in a local school system, you get mistrust and some chicken gawking toward righteousness. The teachers had a chance to push back against management and show what ethical people they are ahead of their next levy attempt, and the news outlets get a story to cover. But when the same thing happens on a national level with all the coordinating institutions protecting their version of realty—whether it is in preserving the illusion of European history and cultural superiority, religious orthodox, or even political alignments the only way to scratch at the truth is through the pseudoscience.

Public education institutions have lost their relevancy because they have shown themselves all too willing to behave as a filter to reality by programming the masses into illusions of understanding—so to preserve versions of reality they see as valuable. For Dallas Jackson it was more important to him to have his son look like a smart kid than in the actual fact of his son’s intelligence. So he sought ways to fudge the numbers in favor of his boy. This is how Carl Segan’s trust in the scientific method goes wrong because institutions and those in charge of any collective oriented enterprise are prone to doing just as Jackson did meaning that very little of what is produced and offered as truth can be taken as such without more evidence being sought out through speculation. Little things do add up to big things rather quickly and because of that pseudoscience is gaining ground where orthodox science is failing. And sometimes it all starts with a superintendent just trying to change the grade of his son to look better in a social setting. That is the damage that is done, and why it is so perilous a path to take.

Rich Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

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What’s Hidden Behind the Veil: Monsters of H.P. Lovecraft’s nightmares brought to reality

I grew up with a Christian background, which I still find useful.  Religion is for the most part good if it helps nurture along values that are positive.  But as a tool for historical reverence, religion is all about revising history to match whatever provided text is important to the cult in question—and over time, I have come to realize that much about history has been erased or distorted due to the rise and fall of Christianity.  Of particular complaint for me is the North American origins and actual history of the human race.  One of the most important books I have ever read was Forbidden Archaeology which chronicled the many relics of excavations that have been repressed from the historical record due to academic revision driven largely by government necessity and religious preservation.  To my mind the actions in the Bible are only lily pads of history with many more extending into the distant past, and there is archaeology to confirm it—so needless to say once you read Forbidden Archaeology it forces you to look at everything with a new lens toward reality.

And I’m far from alone.  A few years ago I was being criticized for my lack of involvement in a church of which I answered that I considered religion to be like a pair of shoes I wore when I was a child.  I’m happy to have had those shoes on my child-like feet.  But as an adult, my feet outgrew the shoes and I needed something that fits better—and currently no religion offers a shoe big enough to fit my very large feet.  I might keep my old shoes tucked away in a box thankful for the memories, but they would be of no use to me now as a fully grown adult.  To say that I’m an atheist would be completely inaccurate—it’s not even a category that applies.  Rather, I am part of a movement that is redefining religion and making new shoes for people to wear—intellectually and this is a movement that is picking up a lot of steam.

So it was much to my amazement that I ran across H.P. Lovecraft after falling in love with the board game Arkham Horror.  I never planned to like the game that much, but once I discovered that it was about monsters from other dimensional realities trying to come into the world of our own recollections and that it dealt with many different parallel worlds I started thinking more seriously of the writer H.P. Lovecraft who wrote pulp horror stories during the Roaring Twenties and was then considered a crack pot lunatic—a child of two parents who ended their lives in insane asylums.  Lovecraft was a young man haunted by terrible monsters in his dreams for his entire life, and he dealt with the beasts through literature.

Coming out of a heavily Christianized turn of the century with do-gooder progressives making their mark against the world of capitalism Lovecraft was way ahead of himself in his writing. He was essentially writing about the types of things that the modern David Icke is saying—that the monsters that haunt us are not of the type seen in Casper the Friendly Ghost.  They are ancient beings once considered gods that still haunt us through the mysteries of quantum mechanics.  They are like those in Poltergeist who bend dimensional reality to suit their needs, or like the Sumerian terrors in Ghostbusters who were able to come and pillage our planet in whatever form we feared the most.  Those films had fun with a subject matter that ultimately points back to the work of H.P. Lovecraft as he was clearly the start of a new way of looking at the things that terrify us from mysterious realms.  Most human beings seek to throw those gods into a religion hoping to appease to their sensibilities and give us luck at navigating their perilous objectives—but to those whose feet no longer fit in the confines of religion, something much deeper is needed.  For them, Lovecraft is becoming a literary giant a 100 years after his death.

Even before Forbidden Archaeology about a decade before that book was published I learned about the ancient city of Cahokia just outside of St. Louis.   I was stunned to learn about it being so large and having pyramids nearly the size of those in Mexico and Egypt and that they had such an advanced culture prior to the settling of America by Europeans. I wrote a screenplay about the place which won some awards, and no matter who ran across that story as I was shopping it around, nobody had ever heard of such a thing, yet the remains are right off the major highway that passes east to west straight into St Louis.  If science and politics were able to contain such information that was right out in the open, what were they really hiding, because experience said that they were hiding quite a lot?  When I was a kid, 10 to 15 years old I was a subscriber to Biblical Archaeology Review—so I knew quite a lot about various dig going on around the Holy Land.  But there was always a layer of haze over the reports that always bothered me.  Much of that cleared up as Forbidden Archaeology blew the doors off all the suppressed discoveries of the last century.  One of the great gods of worship at Cahokia was a thing called Bird Man.  I couldn’t help but wonder if Bird Man was the same thing that people in the town of Point Pleasant, West Virginia—several hundred miles up the Ohio River from Cahokia called the Mothman.  After the popular film drove me to read one of the scariest books I’ve ever read in The Mothman Prophesies I realized that something very dark and sinister was going on behind the thin veil of historical documentation. My family actually went on Mothman hunts as I was determined to catch one and discover what it was all about.  What I learned was that the Mothman likely was not a creature of four dimensional realities, but something else.  That something else is the kind of monster that David Icke has been talking about—and in fictional literature, H.P. Lovecraft.  CLICK TO REVIEW.

My wife and I this past week celebrated our 27th wedding anniversary and we enjoyed it by buying two new expansions of the Arkham Horror game and a giant New Annotated H.P. Lovecraft book by Leslie S. Klinger.  Yes we had dinner, but the best parts of our evening was in hunting new H.P. Lovecraft material.  As crazy as H.P. Lovecraft seemed during his time in the 20s, in hindsight he obviously understood what was going on as the popular show Ancient Aliens and other fresh explorations into our hidden human history are paving the way to validate work that Lovecraft did that seemed like fantastical fiction at the time—but today is perhaps a bit too real.  For a family like mine that has spent time chasing UFOs, hunting Mothmen and climbing around in some of the most haunted corridors of our reality—mostly finding nothing literally, but a lot peripherally—Lovecraft is our idea of a great date night.  But I can’t help but wonder if his musings were not more historical than fiction.  My current leanings say the latter more than the former—and it takes removing the confining shoes of religion to actually wade into those depths.

It isn’t surprising that Lovecraft is making a comeback.  I have been shocked by how many people now read his stuff when at the time of his death he was mocked by critics and was penniless at the age of 46.  Today, it’s a different story.  More and more people are realizing that they have been lied to by their government schools, their political structure, and their religions—and they are dusting off those old books to see what people were saying before the progressive purge of the Twentieth Century wiped everything out and revised history to the sentiments of the radicals vying for power. But that time has come and went now, and H.P. Lovecraft is emerging from the hidden depths of our own thought into history.  His musings reflect my own, that somewhere hidden in our mythologies are historical truths long suppressed by the orthodox shaped by modern religion.  And in those stories is a key to the gates of knowledge and it is there that humanity must go to discover our next step.  But For that next step, we will need new shoes—and that is my current obsession. For those new shoes I will need some of the leather processed by H.P. Lovecraft—and working that leather is proving to be an interesting endeavor to say the least.

Rich Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

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Don Quixote and the LEA Union: Laughably out-of-touch in Lakota

The Lakota Education Association (LEA) continue their strikingly ridiculous revolt against the suggested merit pay portion of a new contract with the blind stupidity of Don Quixote from the rhetorical knighthood epic attempting to revive chivalry against a skyline of windmills. The world had moved on against Don Quixote, just as it has from the LEA, yet both are stuck in the past painting themselves as comic caricatures against reality. In Don Quixote’s neurosis, at least his reverence was filled with a clamoring for honor, and justice. The LEA nutcases with their black t-shirts and school protests come across as just greedy and out-of-touch. Like Don Quixote they are poised in a fight against technology represented by an unyielding and unemotional windmill which they attack as the rest of the world goes about their business unconcerned.

I’ve already been quite public about my opinion. All the participating teachers in these demonstrations against merit pay should be terminated from the Lakota school district. What the school board is trying to do is apply some management to the outrageous wages and benefits that the current employees enjoy—which puts way too much imposition on tax payers as one of Butler County’s largest employers. If Lakota were a private business, a corporation, or any other creation of the world the rest of us live in, the school would be out of business. But, since they are government employees and part of a government employment union which is a terribly out-dated model of doing business fed entirely by tax payer extracted funds they sustain themselves with the furtherance of levies faking effectiveness. The collective bargaining that they are fighting so mindlessly for is also a concept that will soon be extinct—which has started in the United States in Wisconsin where Scott Walker has successfully implemented many of these new concepts in the heart of the most progressive state in the union. All other states will have to follow, including Ohio leaving these black clad LEA teachers looking foolishly irrelevant.

Perhaps more stunning was the comment president Sharon Mays made to her members and the flyer which emerged from one of the recent protests. Mays stated to the school newspaper, Today’s Pulse that “In no way are we at a standstill here. We are continuing to meet and collaborate to reach an agreement.” Then there was the flyer which stated, “It has become clear that Lakota needs a different perspective on our board of education. Please see Constant Contact for a notice about searching for supportive, positive community members who may be running as a candidate this November.” True to the flyer, there are two seats coming open on the school board this upcoming fall of 2015, but those seats are not currently held by bastions of conservatism. Julie Shafer has worked on behalf of the labor union about as aggressively as these LEA types could dream of.  What the union is talking about is a return to the good ol’ days in Lakota where union lapdogs were sitting on the school board behaving against the community to stuff the pockets of the union members with confiscated wealth from the district. Those days are over—forever. Lakota is too conservative of an area to put up with that kind of behavior leaving the type of current board members to adequately represent the most liberal aspects of the Lakota district. What the LEA has now is about as good as its going to get for them. And if that’s not good enough, they need to stop charging those windmills and hang it up.

Soon it will be summer and people will care even less about Lakota schools. And as the union pushes this whole thing into the fall, people will care even less as the new Liberty Center shopping complex will bring lots of nice stories to the district. Nobody is going to want to see a bunch of spoiled brat teachers dressed in black projecting unfairness when most people in the district are individually successful and know what it takes to make a dollar. Areas like Mt. Healthy or Over-the Rhine might have a more sympathetic public opinion for the LEA members, but they aren’t the ones who will vote for new school board members or future levies to pay for all these collective bargaining agreements. Those who do want to throw money at Lakota really just want to throw money at the school to take the burden of baby sitting their kids off their minds. These protests are reminders to them that their baby sitters aren’t so stable and might threaten to walk off the job at any time—which will only piss them off. Nobody with a sane mind thinks these Lakota teachers are “under compensated” or that they have a critical effect on their children’s future. Only idiots think that today. Everyone else understands that Lakota is just a baby sitting service.

To say it’s an insult to consider the highly degreed government employees at Lakota as mere baby sitters is to not be in touch with reality.  Only in public work these days are those degrees of any real use, because only there can any value be provided that is equitable to the perception of importance.  Schools like Lakota can only maintain that perception with looted wealth from property owners who do have value.  Just like the bad teachers will cry out for the best teachers to share with them the net value of their hard work through collective bargaining and a lack of merit pay to hide their lackluster effort—government schools do the same allowing organizations like this LEA to charge those windmills with the illusion that they are fighting monsters of great importance.  But they aren’t.  They are only fighting rotten wood in a vacant field as the rest of the world does their own work oblivious to the lunatics on horseback fighting illusions of a threat that doesn’t exist.

Public schools if they were effective would be producing lots of little Einsteins, but all they make are over sexed children bored with life and lacking the basic work ethics to conduct their lives in a successful fashion.  It is taking most public education graduates these days until age 35 to actually mature away from the nonsense they learned in government schools if they ever do.  That is not a success story worthy of black t-shirts and protests against merit pay.  My vote would be to shut down every public school and give every child in America a Leap Frog tablet replacing all these ungrateful teachers sending them to the unemployment line.  The kids would be much better off and get a far superior education.  So it’s quite humorous to watch them gallop about as if their work was somehow more important than it really is.  The LEA should feel lucky that they have a current school board who will actually talk to them. I’d simply let their contracts run out and begin hiring replacements.  Ohio will be a right-to-work state soon.  Lakota will then be able to hire teachers for a fraction of the current cost. So fire all the protesting teachers at Lakota and let reality finally catch up to them.

Rich Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

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