Month: April 2017

The Master Negotiator: What’s really going on at the Korean Peninsula

I completely support what Donald Trump is doing on the Korean Peninsula.  During an interview with Reuters Trump showed exactly why he is the most unusual American president in history by exhibiting excellent concepts of strategy as his reputation points to him being a master negotiator.  He certainly showed those skills this week in regard to North and South Korea.  First he politely dismissed North Korean tyrant Kim Jung-un stating that the kid inherited a regime and that he was only 27-years-old and that it was a difficult thing to be thrown in to.  And at the same time Trump stated that he intended to renegotiate the South Korea-U.S. Free Trade Agreement and that he wanted South Korea to pay for the billion dollar THAAD missile system that was put in place to protect them from North Korean aggressions.   All this came out as North Korea launched a missile that flew a few miles then fizzled out before it reached the Sea of Japan and Trump acknowledged that aggressive action with the communist country was appearing more likely.

No, we are not at war with South Korea, but as Trump said during the campaign, countries that use the United States for protection should pay for those services and he’s simply bringing South Korea to the table during a time of crises.  As a very smart engineer said to me this week when we were discussing these matters—“chaos is cash.” Trump is looking to do well for the United States and why shouldn’t he?  South Korea needs protection from its crazy northern neighbor who is a reckless kid who might cause some trouble, so they needed to renegotiate the deal between them—and pay a billion dollars for that THAAD system.  We have it–they don’t—so why not cover the costs?  All of that makes sense to me.  Trump is in the driver’s seat on all issues and nobody seems to understand how he got there—but that’s only because we’ve had political hacks in the past as presidents—not a guy who is actually good at this stuff.  Trump is doing an excessively good job.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again—North Korea isn’t going to be going to war with anybody.  That little communist country has been used by the many tyrants of the world as a cover story to hide their misdeeds behind the lunatics of the Korean Peninsula for a long time.  North Korea won’t be allowed to fire any more missiles into the waters off its borders beyond International waters.  They won’t be blowing up any American warships or sending any threats into South Korea—not while the United States is in the area.  While the world wants a fight like school kids egging on an after school brawl, North Korea is the skinny zit faced punk who picks on people and would get their ass kicked with one punch by the opponent who shows up and shuts everyone up in just a few seconds of engagement from someone who really knows how to fight.  Kim Jung-un and his deceased father were used by the world to harass others into making bad trade deals to begin with—and now their bluff has been called—in China, in Russia, in Iran and many other places.  Trump has them all stunned to silence with essentially one punch.

The news outlets who count on such fights for their ratings really don’t know what to do with all this information.  How can a president do two things at once?  Well, for the kids who are in the media who were trained at socialists training centers called “colleges” this is how things are done in the world—especially in business.  Those mysterious people on Wall Street do this kind of thing all the time and Trump is a master of that world—so what did they expect to see from his handling of the very volatile region of the orient?   American has demonstrated to both North and South Korea that they can stop acts of aggression.  Now the North has to come to the table and think about disarmament of their nuclear capabilities and the South has to pay for the protection—and the United States wins both ways.  That’s how it’s supposed to be.

In the old days with stupid presidents the United States would have been forced to protect everyone, eat the cost then end up spread out all over the world for endless decades of indecision because the problem was never dealt with—which is how we end up on the bad side of all these trade deals with economically inferior countries.  Their socialist natures figure that the United States was a rich nation that could afford to be the policemen of the world, so they should take care of that obligation because they had the means. Thus, American tax payers ended up taking care of all these messes when the creation of the mess was all part of a negotiation strategy to weaken the United States to begin with—just another wealth redistribution scheme by globalists like Obama, Clinton and the Bush boys to bring equality to the world.  Not anymore.

I’ll put myself on the record though, in spite of the rest of the world conducting their saber-rattling for that after school fight they hope happens for their ratings spikes on news broadcasts—there won’t be war with North Korea.  Trump gave the North Korean dictator a way out and showed a little compassion so that he didn’t have to knock his head off.  And the missile that was launched yesterday wasn’t going anywhere anyway.  North Korea is dealing with forces it can’t comprehend and Trump is standing over them smiling with a fist on top of the head of Kim Jung-un and another hand out to South Korea to pay up.   And China has suddenly had its covers ripped off in the middle of the night and now they are naked and afraid.  This is a new game for all of them and the United States is in a good position for a change—for the good of our capitalist country’s sovereignty.  I know that’s hard for a lot of people to see, but it’s quite clear if you know what you’re looking at. The American media in a lot of ways are like Kim Jung-un—they are all about the same age (27) and have a very limited view of the world.  It’s not always their fault that they just lack experience in the way things work.  They are about five minutes out of their parent’s womb and they think they know everything—and they are all learning painfully that they don’t.  But Trump is a seasoned veteran battle hardened by some of the smartest negotiators this world has to offer and now he’s in charge of things.  Yeah, North Korea isn’t going to war with anybody.  In the end, they’ll soon be eating out of our hand and there will be jaws that drop—and when they do, remember you read it here first.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rich Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

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

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Finally a Good Idea Coming out of Washington D.C.: Using El Chapo to pay for the border wall

There are a lot of scum bags out there, but to me one of the worst are those who peddle mind altering substances to people too stupid to know better. Drug gangs and Mexican cartels are in my book among the worst scum on planet earth and they deserve every bit of aggression given to them by any law enforcement organization.  They are essentially the cockroaches of our society—dirty, scummy insects that can survive anywhere and thrive in places left untended by care. I would even go so far to put bar tenders into that category even though alcohol is legal—to me it’s all the same thing.  But drug lords like El Chapo from Mexico who is now in jail awaiting trial in America after many years of eluding justice is the worst of the worst.  So it made me quite happy to hear that Ted Cruz had found a creative way to pay for Donald Trump’s border wall—and to make Mexico pay for it.  The following story is what government should be doing.  For a change, I like these people in Washington and the monuments of our nation’s capital seem more—prosperous—than they once did after eight years of Obama, eight years of Bush, eight years of Clinton, and four years of the elder Bush.   You have to go back a long way to get to a period where people could actually fell pride in their government and now that feeling is returning to me.

Texas Sen. Ted Cruz told Fox News’ “Tucker Carlson Tonight” that “there’s a justice” to his proposal that money seized from drug cartel capos be used to pay for President Trump’s promised border wall.

“These drug cartels are the ones crossing the border with impunity, smuggling drugs, smuggling narcotics, engaged in human trafficking,” the Republican told host Tucker Carlson. “They’re the ones violating our laws and it’s only fitting that their ill-gotten gains fund securing the border.”

Federal prosecutors are looking to seize $14 billion in drug profits from the Sinaloa Cartel leader, who is facing trial in the U.S. on a multitude of federal charges.

“Now, it so happens, coincidentally, that the estimated cost of the wall is between $14-20 billion,” Cruz said. “So, the legislation I filed yesterday was very simple.”

On Monday, Cruz introduced the Ensuring Lawful Collection of Hidden Assets to Provide Order (EL CHAPO) Act.

“It said any proceeds that are forfeited from El Chapo and from other drugs lords shall be spent building the wall and securing the border,” said Cruz, who also praised the Trump administration for their willingness to enforce immigration laws.

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2017/04/26/sen-ted-cruz-its-only-fitting-cartel-money-be-used-for-border-wall.html

I can’t think of any better way to prosecute El Chapo and all the terror he brought to the United States openly poisoning our youth with drugs than to crush his organization and use its vast wealth to fund the border wall between the United States and Mexico. Sure there are other drug dealers out there who have risen to the occasion in the wake of El Chapo, but why not use one drug lord to fund the destruction of all the others.  Sounds like a great plan to me!

The argument in favor of drugs by other scum bags is that the drug cartels are only fulfilling a market value—and that people will get it anywhere if they want to get stoned or otherwise mentally impaired. And to some extent that is true—you can’t legislate away stupidity.  But you don’t have to turn away from evil either.  Drug cartels operate as their own little country in Mexico and the exist largely beyond the law because so many people in the United States are seduced by the vile evil that comes from the drug trade. I have been against drugs of all kinds since I was a fetus so I have no compassion for the destruction of any industry that contributes to the destruction of the human mind—so I’m all about aggressive enforcement.  I don’t want my neighbors doing drugs next to my house.  I don’t want it in my neighborhoods and I have no problem taking action against people I know are doing such things.  Drug sellers and drug users are scum and worthless to the human race so we should as a nation take a strong position against the endless flow of drugs into our southern border.  Sure people will get “high” sniffing paint—but that’s another problem for a different article.  What we are talking about is the distribution of mind altering substances originating in an impoverished country where many abuses happen to innocent people to produce the ingredients.  And with that industry comes human trafficking and several declination behaviors toward the fulfillment of generational advancement.  The drug cartels are not about individual liberty in providing relief from the toils of life in the privacy of one’s home—they are selling poison to the stupid—weak, and evil—and it must be stopped as a practice in our country.

I can think of no better way to pay for Trump’s border wall than to take it out of the hide of the drug cartels. Put them out of business to pay for our American security against the severe mismanagement of the Mexican country as a whole, which is out of control.  Mexico needs to get their act together which they haven’t done since their socialist revolution at the turn of the last century and as a result they rely on the illegal drug trade as part of their shadow economy—as one of their major exports.  That is not a good way to make a living.  Even in the United States where there are many places to drink alcohol—which I don’t agree with—but they are there, our economy has great diversity so if you want to live outside of their influence you can.  But in Mexico they can’t.  If there is a drug cartel in the area—they become the law and ruling party—and you either do what they say, or you are killed.  If you happen to have an attractive daughter—she will be stolen as sure as you are reading this by these thugs and carted off to the sex trade.  Such girls if they are lucky end up in the sleaze palaces of sex in Cancun or Tajuana—and other resort towns.  But the worst are virtually sold into slavery to be consumed while they are young and to be destroyed by the age of 25 by vile people not fit for this earth.

So bravo to Ted Cruz for thinking correctly about how to pay for the border wall while sticking it to the Mexican drug cartels. Why not improve the life of American citizens off the looted wealth of the Mexican crime syndicate?  There isn’t a single reason not to. It’s a fabulous idea that should have been thought of and implemented long ago.  But with Donald Trump setting the stage and people like Ted Cruz putting on the show—we finally have a good idea out of Washington D.C. that encapsulates a sense of justice.   And it is long overdue!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rich Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

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 Fox News Magic Freak Show: How the Murdoch kids are screwing up and why Bill O’reilly will survive

I was doing some work so I loosely had on Tucker Carlson’s show in the old O’Reilly time slot on Fox News and it was terrible. I like Tucker, but the show just wasn’t working for me and when Bruce Jenner came on dressed in drag to show his wrinkled up old ass on my giant 4K television I turned it off and went into the garage to do some reloading of ammunition.  I have much better things to do with my life than watch that kind of crap.  If that’s what Fox News thinks is going to work now that the sons of Rupert Murdoch have pushed out Bill O’Reilly and Roger Ailes of Fox so that they can make their own way in the world.  I predict they will go out of business pretty fast.  The show The Five is just terrible—because Bob Beckel is like listening to a sick old man complaining about a toilet being clogged up, when he was the one who did all the clogging.  It was just an intolerable line-up and Fox News should be ashamed of themselves as an organization.  O’Reilly’s exit had nothing to do with women or sex—it was all about moving the station toward a more centrist position politically by the Murdoch kids and it was clearly not my taste.  I have a busy life and I don’t have time to waste on Bruce Jenner and a Fox News freak show.

I wasn’t planning to but I turned on O’Reilly’s podcast while I worked at my workbench pressing bullets into their casings and you know what—Bill’s little radio show was much better than anything I had seen on Fox News from 4 pm until that 8:30 pm moment where I turned it off at the site of Bruce Jenner’s wrinkled mug complete with a wig that looked like he snatched it from a Key West street whore from lower Duval. O’Reilly is after all the only connection our present society has to honest old-fashioned news the way the networks used to strive to deliver it.  Even PBS back in the day had a much better journalistic approach—I didn’t even know that Bill Moyers was a liberal until the late 90s.  O’Reilly knows how to deliver the news and that’s all I want.  I don’t want dudes dressed in drag and I don’t want to hear Bob Beckel’s anti-Trump rhetoric all the time. Honestly, I don’t care if the other political socialist loving liberal side of our society falls off the face of the earth—when I’m relaxing at home I don’t want to hear from them.  I see them enough around town and in daily business.  Roger Ailes understood that which is how Fox News became so popular to begin with.  The Murdoch kids—they haven’t got a clue.  They are typical second-handers who have no idea why their dad was successful.  They just know they are rich and that they can dump people like Bill O’Reilly and change him out with other people and everything will just work out.  Clearly, that was wrong after only one night.

I had my suspicions about the sex allegations against O’Reilly and Ailes, but when Sean Hannity’s name was tossed in the mix over this past weekend I knew the whole thing was a well-planned, and coordinated attack against the conservatives at Fox News. The Murdoch boys played along with the New York Times because they wanted to fulfil their dream of building their own legacy—but the attack was meant to destroy Fox News and indirectly the Trump administration. Hannity is about as clean of a Boy Scout as there is at a celebrity status—there is no way he was asking women to his hotel room.  I don’t think those words could ever come out of his mouth.  That’s just not in the realm of possibility and he can defend his position—so when the claim was made it was obvious what was happening.  I’ll listen to O’Reilly from my garage and won’t waste my time with Fox News.  That actually helps me with my shooting hobby so I have no complaints.  I’m just happy to see O’Reilly get back on the horse so quickly.

It has now been revealed that during the campaign of 2016 Hillary Clinton didn’t understand why she was losing to Bernie Sanders and ultimately why Donald Trump did so well. The world had changed and Hillary didn’t see it coming with all her liberal friends.  The old tricks were no longer working—suddenly she was the magician on stage pulling rabbits out of a hat only people could see all the hidden mechanisms designed to sell the illusion and people were laughing at her, not mystified by her acts of illusion.  People could see someone off stage handing her the rabbit under a table and she was exposed trying to sell the trick as majestic when it was at that point just a clown car scheme gone bad. Hillary played as much as anybody at exposing all the back-stage secrets of the magic show and now the American public was aware of everything and it wasn’t working.  Only really stupid people were willing to continue accepting the illusion.  But people with half a brain were laughing at her and moving on politically.

Getting rid of Fox News of course won’t put the skirt back around the table to hide the assistant hiding the rabbit for Hilary’s hat trick. As polling showed yesterday, if the election were held now—100 days into the Trump White House—Hillary would lose worse than she did in November.  And Elizabeth Warren will fair far worse when she is matched up against Trump in 2020.  Those people on that side of politics have no idea what country they are in or what Americans thank about things—they just have their ideology and hope that if they avoid looking too deeply at things that they can continue the illusion of the magic show to their base of stupid malcontents.  They think that Bruce Jenner dressed in drag will replace Bill O’Reilly because honestly they never really understood the simple brilliance of the Talking Points Memo and why nobody in news has been able to duplicate it’s success even after 20 years of trying.

The great American novel Atlas Shrugged dealt with this whole second-hander notion that is now destroying Fox News—a half a century ago.  It’s no mystery—just like any right-minded person knows that rabbits don’t just come out of an empty hat.  At some point you have to suspend your rationality to accept that magic tricks are actually more than just an illusion, and the political left are masters of tricking themselves into believing that everything they see is real. But the magic tricks have been exposed by the left and next generation second-handers like Murdoch’s spoiled brat children don’t understand how things really work—because they are afraid of the work involved in the process.  They are used to sitting in the audience, not working the stage—so they think they can put anything up—and people will be entertained.  But there is a huge difference between David Blaine and some street hustler just doing card tricks.  The news as it has evolved over time is all about selling the magic tricks of the political left and a lot of people—(half the country) are tired of it.  So they want a throwback to an old dinosaur that tells things with as little spin as possible—to just stand on the stage and tell us the news without the rabbit tricks and the empty hat on top of a table covered with a cloth designed to conceal the rabbit hidden underneath.  American society is more sophisticated now, and those old tricks just aren’t working.

And people want more than a freak show on Fox News.  They can get Bruce Jenner anywhere, MTV, E News, ABC, CBS, NBC—everywhere.  But people tune into Fox to step beyond the magic show.  And if they can’t get it there they’ll turn to the Bill O’Reilly podcast like I did and forget about Fox News all together. People aren’t as dumb as the Murdoch boys think and if they don’t know what they are doing—which they obviously don’t—they need to get back into the audience and let people who know what’s going on run the show again.  Because they are really screwing things up.  No skin off my back, but Fox News won’t just run itself.  If that network dies, something else will take its place.  But what their dad built will be lost forever—and I’m sure that’s not their intention.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rich Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

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

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

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

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

At The Macomb Daily, Selweski:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rich Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

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The Betrayal of Kirsten Powers: A grim reality surrounding all the women accusing Bill O’Reilly of sexual harassment

I always knew while watching The O’Reilly Factor that Kirsten Powers was bad news.  As a liberal political pundit from USA Today Bill O’Reilly put her on constantly and I often wondered if Bill put up with her because she was having occasional sex with him.  Otherwise, who would put up with that terrible mouth of hers, obviously not her husband whom she was only married to for a short time from 2010 to 2013.  Putting her on Fox News almost every night was dangerous in my opinion and given the way she piled on disrespectfully as Bill O’Reilly was pulled off the air at Fox during an Anderson Cooper interview—my instincts were certainly correct.  She sounded like a train wreck and her motives were clearly exposed.  What I saw speaking to Anderson Cooper was a spiteful woman who was in her middle years and not so cute any more that had pushed away everything good in her life—including Bill O’Reilly and she was resentful.  Ultimately that was the cost of trying to be fair and balanced on Fox—you put on spiteful, aging pundits who want to suddenly make a living without the aid of their youthful beauty—and they are scared.

And the same could be said of the several women who accused Bill O’Reilly and specifically Fox News for sexual harassment. Egged on by Media Matters behind the scenes and many liberal activists—the women took every opportunity to swipe at the older generation men who ran Fox News in an effort to make the place more progressive—and ultimately more like the other loser networks in competition—overly concerned with silly PC culture and modern nonsense that will be out of fashion with the very next generation.  What you find at the bottom of the complaints are a bunch of women who were fine to make good livings off their looks—but now that they are arriving at those middle ages where estrogen doesn’t come so naturally and skin wrinkles don’t look so good on 4K 70” televisions—a new generation of younger women doing just as they did twenty years ago is coming along and pushing them out of a job—and women like Kirsten call that “sexual harassment.”  I call it getting old.

If you peel the onion away that’s all that is really going on with the sexual harassment claims against Fox News. The women used their looks to get into the doors at Fox then they changed the rules of engagement mystifying the older men who came from a time when you could call women “blonds” even when they artificially dyed their hair to increase their supernormal sign stimuli to evoke the image.  The women’s complaints against O’Reilly and Fox News specifically are only defined by Obama era politics as harassment, when at any time prior or likely in the future will be considered normal human interaction.  The real hope of liberal ladies like Kirsten Powers is to stay relevant into her 50s so people will still want to listen to her without the visual quality behind someone who might lure men to sleep with them for attention.  Because lets face it, that was the only reason Bill put her on Fox News.  Whether or not he had occasional sex with any of these women it was important for the audience to wonder about such things because that’s what drove the ratings.  Nobody wanted to hear what Kirsten had to say from a fair and balanced point of view.  They wanted to think about what she looked like naked and in suggestive sexual positions.  Surely Kirsten understood that when she came on The O’Reilly Factor many times.

Women watch The View during the day, and other shows geared toward women—and that’s the only way that garbage heaps like Whoopi Goldberg and Joy Behar can make it in modern television—by bitching and squawking like a bunch of hungry baby birds that were knocked out of their nest during a heavy storm. People feel sorry for them, the might actually listen—but they aren’t going to change their behavior patterns—they’ll just watch.  Yet to the wider audience which might include men—there is no appeal.  Men and women are still and will always be—men and women.  Men biologically want to have sex with women and women will always look for ways to make their assets work to their advantage.  And that only works for them pre-menopausal.  After that, they become spectators in the games of life.  That may seem vicious, but take it up with God, because it’s the design of the universe.

Even knowing all this however it was shocking to hear Kirsten speak out so blatantly against Bill O’Reilly. I watched her so many times come on his show and eat out of his hand all the while I knew she was a nasty person waiting for a moment to strike like a snake. I used to tell my wife anytime she appeared that she reminded me of spit—because that’s just what she reminded me of.  The way she spoke, the way she made eye contact—her politics—virtually everything about her evoked something you’d want to spit out of your mouth—not put in it.  It actually made me trust O’Reilly less because he had her on so much.  I figured he was either having sex with her, or wanted to.  But so what?  Kirsten got exposure she never would have otherwise obtained—which she’ll never get again and she should be grateful.

In the demise of Fox News, these women accusers had some air time on all the major networks rejoicing that their rival had one of its major stars knocked off a prime time slot. But those same women have labeled themselves for life as a pain in the ass so we won’t see them again.  Kirsten is certainly done.  She might be praised now, but she’s still a woman approaching 50 who won’t be desired to be on television.  She may still write for USA Today for a while, but nobody is going to want to see her face or hear that terrible noise that comes out of her liberal mouth.  Because people tune into Fox not to see O’Reilly, or the hot chicks he had on as pundits—they are just visual icing for the cake.  They want conservative viewpoints on the news of the day.  Anybody else can come along and do the same job and if Fox moves into an even more progressive direction—some upstart will take over what they do now—because ultimately the audience is in charge—not the networks.  And nothing in the world can make people tune into a show they don’t want to watch to see a wrinkled up Kirsten Powers utter liberal nonsense.  They might put up with it to have her flirt with them as a youthful woman—but not as a serious political commentator.  There are plenty of ugly people who already do that work—one more used up old woman won’t change the conditions of the marketplace.

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 Decline of Fox News: Why not standing behind Bill O’Reilly makes them a bunch of pussies on their way out

It’s not Bill O’Reilly or Roger Ailes at Fox News who changed, it was the world run by these modern and very confused feminists. It’s those same people pleasuring themselves with a copy of Fifty Shades of Gray in one hand while gazing at their iPads and reading the headline to the New York Post this morning, “The No Job Zone,” enjoying the fact that Fox News cut ties with Bill O’Reilly over sexual harassment allegations.  The extreme progressives who made this new generation of neurotic feminist activists think that by taking down Fox News that they can stop the direction of the world when in fact they couldn’t be further from the truth.  Even though I’ve watched The O’Reilly Factor for roughly 20 years, I’ve often felt the show was entirely too moderate and that a dramatic shift to the traditional political right was badly in need.  Even though the O’Reilly Factor had great numbers in cable news, it was still only 4 million viewers a night.  And while it’s true that Bill O’Reilly has been a bestselling author at the top of the New York Times list for over a decade—his footprint of influence is limited to a relatively small national audience.  Getting rid of Bill O’Reilly won’t bring back the days of Obama simply because people like Alex Jones and Mark Levine seen below in a marvelous discussion on socialism in America have been rapidly gaining in popularity.  Bill O’Reilly wasn’t willing to go that far to the right and the world was starting to pass him up—and at 68 or 69—whatever he is, retirement or a complete job change was already in order just to stay relevant.  So losing The O’Reilly Factor on Fox News won’t change anything.  It won’t make Donald Trump lose his presidency, and it certainly won’t stop the slide that Democrats are finding in their political party.  It is simply chasing a ghost that when you grab for it suddenly isn’t there anymore.  When it comes to Rupert Murdoch, his kids aren’t as smart as he was, and he is an old man now—turning things over to idiots who are too much a part of New York progressive society—and still give The New York Times relevancy.

If you ever watch daytime television geared toward women, you can see clearly the problem. Several generations of women have been hard-boiled into European socialism, and feminism, yet their biological instincts are telling them something else and they are all over the map.  Not that long ago I was at a television studio with a couple of very attractive twenty something on-air personalities and when they were in the presence of an alpha male—the responded like school girls waiting to be asked to the prom, which was a purely biological response to the mating customs of human beings.  The more refined parts of our nature—the fact that I’m married, and that they were young professionals kept everything on the up and up—but clearly if we didn’t maintain a certain layer of civility our conversations would have quickly spiraled into something that Bill O’Reilly was accused of—such as calling one of his guests “hot chocolate.”  Such things might be appropriate if the subtext of the interaction had some power climbing flirting going on—but later depending on how things went—the definitions could be changed to garner a different approach to the desired outcome—which is usually the acquisition of power by using feminine charms.

Ugly women hate that attractive women have an advantage over them in this category. It drives them crazy that a perky little former model might get someone like Bill O’Reilly to slap her on the ass so she can get a top job somewhere within the organization—because it’s unlikely they will get the same opportunity.  So as feminists they desire to level the playing field so that they can have a top job in entertainment too.  But what they forget is that people don’t like to see ugly people on television, and whatever show they get on will likely tank.  It wouldn’t be Roger Ailes fault—it’s the fault of their ugliness.  Not that anybody can do anything about being ugly—but it is a factor in television.  As it is always in entertainment when you put attractive young people in a room with powerful producers—men or women—mating customs and business practices get crossed—just as it did with the Access Hollywood tape that was meant to bring down Trump.

The proper thing for Bill O’Reilly to have done in the case of Fox News was to just blow it off—maybe even say that he “wanted to tag that ass,” or something to that effect and move on. And Fox News should have stood by him understanding that if they caved on this issue, they’d be expected to cave on every issue henceforth.  The Fox News formula obviously has been to put attractive women into anchor spots, show a little cleavage, flirt with the camera while attractive alpha males in most cases did the hard news.  Of course, progressive stations like MSNBC and CNN were upset by it because they couldn’t compete.  Who wants to look at Racheal Maddow?  The hope they all have is that now Fox News will be forced to live by the same rules as the other progressive networks now that O’Reilly is gone—but that is not what’s going to happen.

This trend of hating everything that “white males” are a part of is getting old and is already swinging back the other way politically. So attacking traditional male roles in society by extreme feminists who really don’t know what they want to be in life won’t deliver our society to some wonderful Utopia.  Biologically, women love to be around powerful, strong men, and strong alpha men know how to read the signs of flirtation when it’s tossed in their face.  And you can bet that it can be very hard to tell the difference if you are one of those “powerful white males.”

Honestly, I take it as a personal assault when I see attacks against people like Bill O’Reilly and Donald Trump because I too am a white male with an inclination toward alpha maleness. I don’t go around rubbing it in, but I am most happy in a room where I’m the leader and everyone else does what I tell them too—as an aspect of my nature.  Women typically do what they’ve done for millions of years—they recognize that and they find a way to navigate.   If they challenge me directly they’ll get the same treatment that other males get—and often women are better at using other skills to avoid direct conflict with me.  And that’s how these things happen to the old timers like Bill O’Reilly, Donald Trump, and Roger Ailes.  A young hot woman might plop herself into their laps and make sexual advances through flirtation but turn off the advances at a strategic time hoping to use modern progressive definitions to keep them from getting dirty—but still using their bodies to advance their careers. (cough………Megan Kelly)  That likely happened on the set of the O’Reilly Factor all the time—young women looking for a break flirting with old man O’Reilly so they could get their book mentioned, or maybe even get a job at Fox News on a permanent biases.  Then to make matters worse, modern progressives—especially the drooling feminists—hope to erase the whole event by pushing “white men” out of “the business” hoping to hide what they did to get themselves into professional positions.  But they can’t hide it—because everyone knows and these modern progressives can’t hide the nature of biology.  There will always be alpha, “white” males, and there will always be “betas” who are willing to do anything to advance their careers—and those betas come in all sexes and colors.  They do not discriminate because flattery works at any level.

My life won’t change because Bill O’Reilly isn’t on the air anymore and likely I’ll watch Fox News a lot less. That is their problem.  But I’m not going to switch to CNN or NBC.  Likely, it will be more Alex Jones and Mark Levine—those types of people because they better represent my personality type.  Progressives had their eye on O’Reilly as a target but little did they know that he kept people from getting their news from harder political right sources—so Bill O’Reilly helped them—he didn’t hurt them.  O’Reilly’s audience won’t change to the left—they’ll drift more to the right and that’s not what these idiots had in mind when they went after Fox News with sexual harassment claims to sink the careers of Roger Ailes and Bill O’Reilly.  When they tried it with Trump—he was the only one who behaved properly.  “Yeah, I said what I said….so what.”  And as “white males” who are powerful because that’s what we’re inclined to do, we should learn a lesson from this Bill O’Reilly situation.  Next time don’t apologize—or change your behavior to appease the progressive mixed up modern feminists.  Because they don’t know what they are doing and are acting against their biological natures.  That is a truth no law in the land can avoid acknowledging.  Women still like to be told they are pretty and its often right to tell them so out of politeness.  If they come at you with a sexual harassment lawsuit, then in the future don’t hold the elevator open for them when they come asking for your autograph.  But never apologize for being true to your nature.  And if they fire you from your job, then move on and be successful elsewhere and let them choke on their bad decision—which is what will eventually happen to Fox News on the dying platform of cable programming.  It’s just a matter of time, and I won’t lose one moment of sleep over it.

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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