Month: May 2017

Dwayne Johnson Won’t Win as President in 2020: ‘Baywatch’ bombs big as Hollywood struggles with conservative audiences

I’m having a little fun with Hollywood these days because it is fun to say “I told you so,” especially in this case. There was a time where all I wanted to do was be a film director, and I took great strides in taking my life I that direction.  But my idea of what a film director was came from the Golden Age of movie history—of the Walt Disney days when John Huston was still making pictures.  Clint Eastwood as a film director was someone I always admired and I studied shot by shot each of his films and of course all this work put me on Hollywood’s doorstep more than once.  But each time I was in that position I found out that Hollywood had a different idea of what a film director was and essentially what we ended up with was a bunch of unionized radicals with left winged politics who were on treasure hunts to be gained through box office receipts.  Nobody wanted to make the next Citizen Kane like I did—instead they wanted to make safe little comedies that were there today and gone tomorrow—but everyone got paid.  That wasn’t my kind of thing so I never got a foothold that mattered in that industry because I just couldn’t do the collectivist thing like many of these modern directors do—where they view themselves as collaborators all equally contributing to the success of a film.  For instance, Jim Cameron was one of the greats.  I used to love him, especially his work on the Abyss, Terminator, and the magnificent piece of film making called Titanic.  No body but Jim Cameron could have made Titanic—and people who have studied the difficulties of that film know what I’m talking about.  That was always my idea of a film director.  So it is fun for me to see how right I was when I came into conflict with people, producers, financiers, and actors who thought they knew better than I did on how to make a great movie.  They were in the business, I was an outsider—and they assumed they were more qualified to make decisions on millions and millions of dollars of financial investment.  Turns out, they were so wrong and I’m rather enjoying it.

This is important because the same idiots who thought that making a movie out of Baywatch with Dwayne Johnson was a good idea are the same who think that The Rock—the same actor from Baywatch would be able to run for president against Trump in 2020. When Baywatch only made $27,605,514 over the Memorial Day weekend everyone seemed surprised even as the entire film industry went after the new Pirates of the Caribbean movie in a negative way but it made nearly $300,000 million worldwide over just four days.  Baywatch had such little worldwide appeal that it didn’t even show up on their global numbers—so what were the producers of Baywatch thinking at Paramount Studios?  I mean this is all these people do for a living and they made such a terrible decision.  They should all be fired.

I remember all the fuss about Jerry Bruckheimer’s relationship with Disney after the dismal failure of The Lone Ranger—which business wise at least recovered much of its initial investment. Baywatch won’t even come close. The Lone Ranger was a pretty good movie and was successful related to its budget.  It didn’t make a billion dollars which was what Disney was hoping for but it wasn’t a flop by any measure.   For all that, Jerry Bruckheimer and Disney parted ways except for this remaining Dead Men Tell Know Tales movie leaving the franchise in limbo.  Hollywood doesn’t like Bruckheimer essentially because he’s a conservative even though he has made them all al lot of money and kept them employed for a number of years. Baywatch is what will be considered a dismal failure at the box office not even coming close to its production budget after the first weekend with loads of competition slatted in front of it, namely Wonder Woman by Warner Bros.  It won’t last long and the drop off will be severe by the time Father’s Day rolls around. But the entertainment press won’t say much about this failure because they want Dwayne Johnson to run for president and they don’t want the fact that his name doesn’t put people’s butts in seats to get in the way of their illusion. People do not see Dwayne Johnson movies to see The Rock and all his muscles the way they used to see Bruce Willis and Harrison Ford.  People go to Dwayne Johnson movies only to see the action plots he’s in.  Put him in a regular movie and ask him to carry the interest of Midwest Americans and he can’t do it—especially now that he’s labeled himself as a liberal with the potential to run against Trump.

So yeah, I took a little pleasure in seeing all the idiots who put their bets behind Baywatch fail because it is endemic of the entire entertainment industry to make such mistakes.  I mean who in their right mind would think that a 20-year-old television show was going to translate well to the big screen?  I can’t think of too many that were successful in any capacity especially one that featured bikini clad women in a time before porn was commonplace online.  Who cares to pay big money to see Baywatch on the big screen when porn is accessible on any handheld device? Anybody who thought Baywatch was going to attract people willing to pay the high price of a movie ticket for a television remake was just out of their mind.

Another interesting thing to consider is how well Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales did in oversea markets—performing above expectations—especially in China, and Russia.  While Baywatch is a regional film about concerns people only in California might find funny, the new Pirates film was entertaining to a global audience even crossing language barriers.  The themes of Baywatch are those of first world worries whereas the concerns of Pirates are more primal—reconciliation with the father, superstitions, and the basics of romance, treasure hunting and immortality. Baywatch was concerned with getting laid, Pirates with getting wealthy and living a free pirate’s life at all costs. And I’d forgive Baywatch for forgoing all motivations of profit and forgetting about the audience who was going to see their movie if I thought there was any trace of such nobility—but clearly the producers of this major flop thought they were going to get rich off a used up old rag and it was insulting to see that they had so little regard for the movie going public that they didn’t put any more thought into it than they did.  It is because of people like that which is why I’m not in that business.  They are just idiots with money in their pockets and stupid ideas that should never be put to film which shows no respect for the money they are working with in budgets.

There are lots of ways to be successful in life and I certainly didn’t need the film industry to find my own way. But I always did have a genuine love for storytelling that would have been nice to have aligned with my propensity for profit.  It’s no skin off my back, but I do enjoy watching people I warned long ago—but didn’t listen, to see them struggling now.  Yes, I did tell them so, and they thought their industry was too big to fail.  As a whole, Hollywood is on life support.  Only a few movies carry the whole industry—and that’s not nearly enough to hold up over the coming years. Hollywood needs to reinvent itself from the ground up—and Baywatch is the proof of it.   Dwayne Johnson cannot pack a movie theater and he certainly won’t be able to carry the Democratic ticket for the presidency in 2020.   When a good movie does come out, I do write about it, and support it because film, like books, music and good television is a powerful way to expand our culture.  But movies like Baywatch are just rip-offs meant to make money off bored people—and I think it’s disgusting—especially when they are sold with a straight face and the potential of a presidential run.

Rich Hoffman

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

cropped-img_0202.jpg

Trump’s Budget Plan: Like Noah, we can all live over 950 years–new industries blooming under this White House

 

The only problem with Donald Trump’s budget which was recently presented to congress for consideration is that it is too big in scope for the limited people who are typically elected, and they just don’t get it.  In Trump’s book Think Big: Make it Happen in Business and in Life readers get some lessons from Trump on how to frame a thought to pursue as a target to take things from conception to reality.  Trump as a person has done this to a great degree and now as a politician he’s elaborating those expectations from the Executive Branch.  Loser types who think in such limited ways of course are angry with the budget, mainly because they can’t envision a growth plan of more than 2% GDP since they’ve been committed to wealth redistribution in America for a number of years where that growth was always supposed to happen in poor countries.  So 2% growth which is what this budget assumes as a foundation is devastating to the liberal cause of both political parties.  However, even if it didn’t go against their political strategy of stagnation, many right thinking Republicans doubt that such a feat is even possible.  Well, it is, and even more–which I’ll cover specifically in three key industries.  But first let’s examine the goals of this budget the way it was written as seen below:

Our moral commitment to replacing our current economic stagnation with faster economic growth rests on the following eight pillars of reform: Health Reform. We need to enable Americans to buy the healthcare they need at a price they can afford. To this end, we must repeal Obamacare and its burdensome regulations and mandates, and replace it with a framework that restores choice and competition. This will lower the cost of care so that more Americans can get the medical attention they need. Additionally, Medicaid, which inadequately serves enrollees and taxpayers, must be reformed to allow States to manage their own programs, with continued financial support from the Federal Government.

  1. Tax Reform and Simplification. We must reduce the tax burden on American workers and businesses, so that we can maximize incomes and economic growth. We must also simplify our tax system, so that individuals and businesses do not waste countless hours and resources simply paying their taxes.
  1. Immigration Reform. We must reform immigration policy so that it serves our national interest. We will adopt commonsense proposals that protect American workers, reduce burdens on taxpayers and public resources, and focus Federal funds on underserved and disadvantaged citizens.
  1. Reductions in Federal Spending. We must scrutinize every dollar the Federal Government spends. Just as families decide how to manage limited budgets, we must ensure the Federal Government spends precious taxpayer dollars only on our highest national priorities, and always in the most efficient, effective manner.
  1. Regulatory Rollback. We must eliminate every outdated, unnecessary, or ineffective Federal regulation, and move aggressively to build regulatory frameworks that stimulate—rather than stagnate job creation. Even for those regulations we must leave in place, we must strike every provision that is counterproductive, ineffective, or outdated.
  1. American Energy Development. We must increase development of America’s energy resources, strengthening our national security, lowering the price of electricity and transportation fuels, and driving down the cost of consumer goods so that every American individual and business has more money to save and invest. A consistent, long-term supply of lower-cost American energy brings with it a much larger economy, more jobs, and greater security for the American people.
  1. Welfare Reform. We must reform our welfare system so that it does not discourage able-bodied adults from working, which takes away scarce resources from those in real need. Work must be the center of our social policy. Education Reform. We need to return decisions regarding education back to the State and local levels, while advancing opportunities for parents and students to choose, from all available options, the school that best fits their needs to learn and succeed.

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2017/05/23/trump-budget-sees-big-cuts-big-deficits.html

https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/BUDGET-2018-BUD/pdf/BUDGET-2018-BUD.pdf

After reading the bill I think it’s rather conservative and Trump went well out of his way to not blow everyone out of the water with over aggressive thinking.  This bill should be passed as is, and Americans lingering on welfare programs needlessly should get off it and aim to become much more productive people.  As a nation we need to stop hating the rich, but aspire to become that way ourselves—even the lowly fast food worker who works hard but doesn’t get paid very much.  Work harder, read a lot of books and make yourself more valuable so that people will eventually want to pay you more money.  Everyone can do it if they want—stop wasting time playing on your phone or planning to get wasted on a night out with friends. Make every day count, and stop hating people who are productive—and rich.  Everyone will be much better off if they do those basic things.

During Trump’s terms in office the United States has the potential to have much greater economic expansion than what is projected in this budget.  Three key industries are seeing a complete re-invention of themselves and those expanded services will equate into magnificent opportunities for explosive economic growth.  After reading many of Trump’s books over the years I have no doubt what is on Trump’s mind.  It’s just a matter of time before others join him in thinking big and properly about these issues articulated in this budget plan.  The key to understanding all this is to see where the United States will be based on information provided now—not where it is now after 16 years of socialist infusion by the government types who have wrecked things over that span of time.

  1. Transportation is one of those industries that are changing as we speak. With the Hyperloop having its big completion again at Space X, California on August 25th through the 27th of 2017 that industry alone has the aptitude to revolutionize personal transportation and shipping instigating explosive economic growth.  Adding to that the explosive potential of the Skycar market which is now being formulated into realistic conception as the drone market has opened people up to the idea of personal flight transportation.  We’re talking about a complete overhaul of how we currently transport ourselves from one place to another being intermingled with our already booming personal transportation markets so there is the potential for explosive growth in this sector.
  1. As I’ve been saying for over a decade, the solution to Medicaid, Social Security and the current health care cost problem is in the regenerative growth fields. Science is now on the precipice of solving the age problem making the challenges primarily religious rather than technical.  People are now at a stage where they have to come to grips with human kind’s mortality and the ability to solve it for much longer lives—on a Biblical scale—where humans can live for a thousand years or even longer—like Noah did in Genesis.  Noah was 950 years old when he died; he lived for 350 years after the Great Flood, according to the story.  The way to solve health care is not to treat people who are getting sick, but to make people no longer sick.  Diabetes, cancer—old age are all diseases that can be cured through regenerative growth—essentially keeping the body turned on to the methods it uses as a young person to continue renewing body tissue. That technology is available now and is about to go mainstream.  When it does, there will be trillions of dollars in new economic development that will outgrow the current limits pressed upon us by the pharmaceutical companies.
  1. Space over the next decade will offer many more trillions of dollars of economic expansion not just from tourism, but the manufacturing industry. It will cost less to manufacture big things in space and there are opportunities for mining on the moon, Mars and several asteroids that will literally create new economies over night.  With the United States leading the charge, there will be the potential of yearly GDP growth of over 10% just from space industries alone.

The only reason we haven’t done some of these things yet is that our politicians have not thought as big as our entrepreneurs and they are slow to the objective—but even that is changing under Trump’s administration.  There’s a lot of kicking and screaming going on now, but all these things are happening quickly—month by month, and it won’t take long for even the most sluggish John McCain type of politician to catch up to these explosive opportunities in market expansion which will unleash such tremendous GDP growth.  So while this budget is realistic for 2017 what potentials come after it are even more epic so it’s a good plan and a realistic approach that can be done now as those industries mentioned prepare for full expansion in the 2020 time frame.  When that happens we will be looking at completely paying off the national debt and enriching the lives of every person on earth who doesn’t mind working.  Literally the sky is the limit in human achievement and it all starts by thinking, “Big.”  I’m just glad we finally have someone in the White House capable of thinking so big, because essentially that’s the only thing lacking.  Now, instead of dreaming about these kinds of things, we can now do them—which will result in explosive economic growth the likes that we’ve never seen in human history—ever.  And that is exciting!

Rich Hoffman

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

cropped-img_0202.jpg

‘Dead Men Tell No Tales’ was Great: Don’t listen to the critics, Disney needs to make a lot more Pirate movies

I think if you’ll look carefully dear reader you’ll notice two things about the newspaper reviewers who gave Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales, a bad review.  They are severe liberals who hate Donald Trump and they are suffering from “daddy issues,” meaning they have some predilection toward not wanting to think about their dads for whatever reason.  One thing that was extremely obvious about Dead Men Tell No Tales—which is a recurring theme in all the Disney Pirate movies, is that the famous Joseph Campbell Hero’s Journey of reconciliation with the father is used extensively.  If there is any fault in the film it’s in that the writers and producers are primitively stuck on that one theme—which for Disney is the formula.  To understand why, just read The Hero with a Thousand Faces, the classic Joseph Campbell work and you’ll understand why.  But other than that, Dead Men Tell No Tales is a great movie that was a lot of fun.  It’ll be a very successful movie and Disney should continue making a lot of them.  Hopefully they will.  The movie remarkably lacked any politics.  Disney wasn’t trying to slide any gay characters under the door and the romance themes were traditional and the whole thing was about adventure and discovery.  It’s one of those movies you leave the theater feeling good about much the way the ride in Disney World feels.  And Disney could continue making Pirate movies forever and people would still see them because they want to feel those things when coming out of the theater in their home towns since they can’t go to Disney World everyday.

But this hatred that reviewers had, particularly at The New York Times and at the ultra liberal Rolling Stone magazine was so pathetic for its desperation.  Their primary premise of hate was that the Pirate movies where the same old story lines—nobody had evolved.  Jack Sparrow’s story arch had no evolution to it—he was the same character that he was in the first movie. Basically, the reviewers have this idea that unless a movie deals with progressive causes like gay rights, feminism, wealth redistribution and plot points where the state takes care of everyone—then any movie is a bad one.  Of course Dead Men Tell No Tales isn’t about any of those things which is one of the reasons its good.  I mean I’ve been very hard on Disney for leaning toward progressivism when clearly their primary audience is Trump conservatives and they have been hurting their own market share by sticking in gay plot points and other acts of lunacy to appease the Democrats who now run Disney as a company.  But that mistake wasn’t made in this fifth Pirates film.  And it’s certainly not a conservative film by any means, but what movie is?  Conservatives are used to being ignored at the box office.  As the weekend numbers came in I found myself happy to see people went to see the movie in spite of the negative reviews showing the big newspapers how irrelevant they truly are in the 21st century.

All these industry people have already put their own nails into the coffins of Hollywood film making.  The grim reality for them is that only movies like Pirates from Disney can really be economically viable in this modern environment where they view the film making industry to be on the solitary mission of spreading liberal causes to the world.  Instead of making a movie that everyone can make money off of from the actors down to the promotional people, these industry idiots provide critics of movies as if the only reason people pay a lot of money to see them instead of waiting for the home market to show them from the comfort of our living rooms is to lectured to by Hillary Clinton supporters who would demand we all be more liberal.

There was nothing wrong with Jack Sparrow or Johnny Depp’s performance.  There’s nothing there to reflect the off-camera trouble of Johnny Depp’s rough divorce or his financial issues.  Anybody who writes anything otherwise is reaching—and trying to make something out of nothing.  If I were to give Disney any advice I would say make more Pirate movies and make them less as giant ensemble pieces and more about the adventures of Jack Sparrow.  All Pirates of the Caribbean movies don’t need to have huge casts like Dead Men Tell No Tales did and they all don’t have to be pinnacles to the survival of the human race to be good movies.  The character of Jack Sparrow is a lot like Bugs Bunny.  People would go see Pirate movies just to see how Johnny Depp’s character would get out of the latest mess.  Watching the execution scene in Dead Men Tell No Tales made this very apparent.  Jack Sparrow makes these movies fun and people would pay money just to see that character survive some new invention of malice, like at the opening of the movie where he wakes up inside a bank vault with the wife of the mayor trying to rob a bank but instead had passed out drunk and in need of escape.  Jack Sparrow could travel the world on such adventures and people wouldn’t mind a bit.  They’d still spend a billion dollars per picture at the box office and Disney could save some production costs.

On that note I think the Pirate films should be more like the new Star Wars movies—a new one should come out each year.  Bring the production costs down into the $150 million range and just let them do their thing.  There was nothing “lazy” about this Pirate movie as reviewers seemed obsessed in disclosing.  It’s not easy by any means to make a movie that looks as beautiful as Dead Men Tell No Tales from the special effects people, to the costume design to the wondrous score this time by Geoff Zanelli using themes created by Hans Zimmer.  This was movie making at its best and every new Pirate adventure doesn’t have to be on the scale of Dead Men Tell No Tales or At World’s End.  Like the classic Bugs Bunny cartoons, we knew and expected the animated rabbit to survive the aggressions of Yosemite Sam and the Martian, but what we wanted to see was how.  Disney has a nearly perfect character for that kind of thing in Sparrow and they should use him more.  Who cares what the industry thinks about milking the Pirate franchise for everything they can?  People in Hollywood want to work don’t they?  I would personally love to see a new Pirates film every year and if they only made $800 million each—so be it.  It would be good cash flow for a company that needs it—everyone needs it.  So why not do it?

Everyone should go see Dead Men Tell No Tales.  Don’t listen to the critics; they have no idea what they are talking about.  Movies are all about the feeling that this latest Pirates films provides—good fun that the whole family can enjoy together.  The correct formula for a motion picture really isn’t any more complicated than that.  I know when I’m having a bad day I put on one of the Pirate movie soundtracks and let the Jack Sparrow theme song cheer me up with his laissez-faire approach to life.  It works, in the same way that the character works in the movies.  I know that may be hard for the Disney Corporation to get their minds around, but all they really need to do is put Johnny Depp on-screen dressed as Jack Sparrow—pick some point on the map  and let the story tell itself.  Add the special effects in post production to fill in the gaps and just pump out as many Pirate moves as you can over the next decade and let movie fans have some fun without the politics.  Everyone would be better off.

Rich Hoffman

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

cropped-img_0202.jpg

Government Tendency Toward Necrophilia: The intellectual fantasy of Jack Sparrow

A thought occurred to me quite strongly while watching the latest Pirates of the Caribbean movie Dead Men Tell No Tales of what was specifically so appealing about the Johnny Depp character as well as Geoffrey Rush.   The movie was great by the way, and I found the opinion of many of the American critics to be completely wrong—and perhaps part of what I’m about to say is the reason they didn’t like it.  Jack Sparrow for all his irresponsible ramblings and drunken behavior is so laissez faire that his scandalous swagger was an asset not a failure.   What the Pirate’s story was essentially about was a love of life in the most un-evil exchange possible, yet the characters themelves were lawless thieves on the opposite side of what we might call legally good.  The villains were so dead in the case of this particular story that there was something very psychological going on.  It brought to my mind the problem of necrophilia—people who seek sexual interaction with the dead.  There are after all many forms of death, not just the physical kind.  People can be perfectly alive breathing with a beating heart, but still be intellectually dead—as so many people are.  What drives so many to that reality is usually some person in their life who has conquered them in some way—the way that we might break a horse or a dog.  It is possible to kill someone without physically harming a hair on their head by robbing them of self initiation.

The essential evil of government is that they inheritably seek to impose on their populations a lazy form of control because it is inconvenient to them to have people doing all kinds of different things that make it hard for governments to manage their people.  Put another way, we’ve all worked for some boss who was addicted to the power of their position where they seek to abuse their authority for the sake of control over others.  There is a desire among these types of people to make people so dependent on them that they mold their people into mindless automatons who no longer think for themselves but are always waiting for someone else to tell them how to think and what to do next.

We see this most notably in our American politics with the Democratic Party where they have a supporter base of welfare recipients, government employees, drug addicts, and sexual malcontents—they are typically the type of people who have been beaten in their life in some fashion and seek government to tell them what to do, how to think, and to define their existence.  Perhaps they come from parents who were too lazy to explain how a butterfly flies and were scolded away from thinking and asking questions because the authority figures didn’t want to be bothered with such things.  That parent might smack the child on the head to discourage further inquiry because the parent had on their mind the latest tabloid headline or some interfamily drama for which they enjoyed the misery of—because it deterred them of the realities of their own poor existence. Kids growing up with parents like that would tend to be Democrat inclined because they arrive as adults unarmed to think for themselves—and need others to think for them because they had their intellectual wings clipped at a critical stage of their lives—which I’d define as evil.

Studying the Bill Cosby case where he was a celebrity who could sleep with any woman he wanted essentially, but instead chose allegedly to drug many women into a condition where they lost consciousness.  At that point he’d have sex with them as a lifeless corpse where they couldn’t interact in return giving him complete power over their bodies—which is precisely what the necrophilia minded person would do by having sex with a dead body.  It’s usually all about having complete control over the other person.  The same could be said of people who seek out bondage such as the relationships in the popular book series 50 Shades of Grey.  A lot of times the people who want to be whipped, spanked and forcibly raped under controlled conditions are those who have very stressful jobs and they wish to surrender thought to a master who does all their thinking for them.  The sex act is painful but the surrendering of thought to a “master” is satisfying in a very dysfunctional way—because at some point in their life they learned to yield to a master.  It may have been as simple as a parent preventing a child from drinking milk before going to bed out of punishment for something else.  Once a mind is crippled from self-initiation it usually seeks to yield thought to some form of sexual abuse, drug escape, or some passive aggressive yearning for collectivist thinking. The man who wants to have sex with a woman at a bar might seek to get her drunk so that he can get her into bed—and the woman might want to get drunk so she can deny having control over her actions later.  She may want to be raped in some way but she doesn’t want the responsibility of making the decision so she gets drunk on a girls night out so she can surrender to the primal urge.  Society says she should be a bunch of things she doesn’t want to be, so to satisfy what’s been killed inside her—the tendency to be an automaton to collectivist thought, she turns off her mind and surrenders to a master in a game of abuse that started many years prior over something likely very trivial.

Back to the boss issue, when they are more concerned with the controlling aspects of the relationship—such as the dress code, the time clock, and the rules of company conduct but seem to be oblivious to the productive aspects of the job—the merit based stuff, you have someone who is functioning from a form of evil.  They do not seek to bring out the life of their employees but only to have lifeless automatons who do exactly as they are told and do not respond with any vitality of a life force.  This is the central premise of T.S. Elliot’s The Wasteland—people functioning from an inauthentic vantage point.  Necrophilia doesn’t have be only defined as sex with dead people—the same could be applied to the man who would rather look at pornography when he has a perfectly good wife in his bed.  But the wife might want to talk about curtains, cloths and kids for an hour and the guy might just want to have sex.  So rather than embark on a journey of listening to her for a while so that she might get everything off her mind so that she might then be ready for sex, he instead retreats to pornography where the images do exactly what he wants.  He is in control of what’s happening and what he sees and when he wants to see it.

Governments do not want to have a bunch of independent people running around doing whatever they want.  They don’t want thinking people to skunk up all their big government plans, they just want a lifeless body that pays its taxes and lays there waiting for some government pinhead to tell them what to do and what to think.  I would say that all governments have a bit of necrophilia in them—not in literal sexual conduct, but in intellectual attributes.

As I read the reviews of the new Disney Pirate’s film particularly of the fifth outing of Jack Sparrow it was obviously this necrophilia tendency in themselves that they didn’t like because the way Johnny Depp plays that character even as a drunken fool, his lively vitality is overwhelming—it’s no wonder that its one of the most popular characters in film history.  There was a wonderful scene in Dead Men Tell No Tales where Sparrow is about to be executed and he runs into Uncle Jack, played by Paul McCartney and they have a wonderful exchange that shows no fear of death whatsoever—a complete irreverence toward the danger they were all in.  There was nothing on earth that controlled the fate of Jack Sparrow and that’s why those Pirate films were so great.  Because they play out what we all feel, the curse of the walking dead, static controls of rigid governments, and the fantasy of living of one’s own accord under a pirate code that is rooted in 100% freedom-freedom to think and do anything you want and the empowerment that comes with it.

Most people are suffering under some form of necrophilia either as recipients or as the initiators—but in either case the psychosis is equally dangerous because it carries over into all aspects of our society from the kind of jobs we have to the relationship we have with spouses, children and neighbors.  The desire to control others or to be controlled is a very dangerous thing that in both cases seeks to fill something missing in our lives. The Pirates of the Caribbean movies can temporarily fill the fantasy that many have about living that self-initiated pirate’s life.  But in actuality they are like the dead characters in those films cursed by some mythic desire to control the masses through fear, pain, and eternal damnation. Maybe the cause was as children their parents spanked them for knocking over a lamp while trying to figure out how it worked or maybe some teacher squashed out their thinking in a classroom because the student wasn’t following all the proper instructions as the rest of the class.  But at some point most people get “broken” in and taught that someone else will do their thinking for them.  So they start yielding to authority.  But in the case of Jack Sparrow, the fantasy of so many people, he has no fear of anything—not of life and death—or even consequences.  He manages to stagger through life on his own accord and that is something to take note of.  People want to be free but like a cursed pirate from one of those movies they live either a half dead existence of their own, or they only want to deal with the half dead because of the predictable nature of the exchange.  They don’t want to be challenged with variety and thought.  But if they lived more like Jack Sparrow—not the drunkenness—but in the spontaneity for living—they’d be a lot better off as people.

Rich Hoffman

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

cropped-img_0202.jpg

Thank God Greg Gianforte Won: We need more politicians who body slam reporters

Yes, Greg Gianforte still won in the Montana special election for a valued Republican congressional seat after he body slammed a Napoleon Dynamite type Guardian reporter to the ground and broke his glasses.  I’m not going to tell you dear reader that you should never body slam reporters like Rush Limbaugh, Paul Ryan and most of the Fox New television personalities.  Rather, I’ll say that sometimes violence is part of life and when people disrespect your space, you have to take action.  It’s unfortunate that these things sometimes happen, and Gianforte apologized for losing his cool, but when these pin-headed millennial, skinny pants, metro sexual, progressive reporters try to hide their malice behind civility, sometimes the only remedy for them is a good ass kicking.

I would say I’m an excellent communicator and whenever violence happens it’s a complete breakdown in communicative options. But even then about two or three times a year I get into a scuffle with somebody over something and violence does take place occasionally.  Now I haven’t punched someone in the face in a long time—haven’t needed to recently.  But I can certainly see where Gianforte needed to hold his ground from an intrusive reporter trying to get his story at the expense of the congressional candidate’s sanity.  Gianforte was in the final stretch of an election he worked hard on and he didn’t feel like talking and this prick stuck a microphone into his personal zone—so what did that reporter think was going to happen?  You see, these stupid kids think they can be ass holes because they are protected by the law.  But in the good ol’ days when men were men, women were women, and dogs slept on the porch protecting the front door from bad guys—people had respect for each other because if things got out of line, a fight might break out—so civility took front stage in most discussions.

Liberals were aghast that Gianforte won the election and they attributed the victory to the “Age of Trump” where alpha males are making a comeback and are on a rampage—which I would say is the liberals own fault. They are the ones who pushed their luck and if liberals hadn’t abused people for such a long time with this tight-assed political correctness, people like Gianforte wouldn’t be gaining grounds in these elections.  But I can say I couldn’t be happier.  I wouldn’t have cared if Gianforte made a belt out of that Guardian reporter, I would have voted for him in less than a second.  Not that we need “men” in these positions over say “women” but we do need authentic people who will stand their ground when pressed even to the point where they are body slamming people when necessary—because sometimes it is necessary.

A lot of times when I find myself in such a situation it is due to all the methods of civility being exhausted and pricks like that reporter still keep pressing as they hide behind contemporary rules and sensibilities to pry at you when they think you won’t strike back. That is precisely when you have to grab them by the throat and smash them to the ground because they assume you won’t do it—because the rules of society currently favor them at the moment. But it wasn’t always that way—and I’d argue that we should return to such times for the sake of humanity.  It’s OK to press for a story and even to be aggressive.  But people have a right to have their minds and if they don’t feel like talking that doesn’t give a reporter the right to stick a microphone down their throats out of the illusion that the “public” has a right to know everything anytime.  The “Age of Trump” is clearly a trend in the direction of personal sanctity—which is starting to emerge in elections and will make America stronger for sure.

It is perfectly alright to occasionally kick the shit out of someone, especially if they deserve it. You may get into a lot of trouble for it—and I have—but it’s good for everyone to have that out there as an option.  It is not good for a society to assume that violence has been taught out of our society and that the state will sort out all conflicts between human beings as liberals think.  Most conflicts are better resolved in the moment and when I have had fights with people I find that afterwards healthy understandings develop that allow for a respectful relationship instead of the issue lingering in court for months and costing both sides thousands of dollars.  A good punch in the face can save everyone a lot of money and get to a respectful exchange much faster and more effectively and these stupid millennial kids who work as reporters these days as extensions of their liberal college educations need to learn some hard lessons.  If you press someone like Gianforte in disrespectful ways, he might body slam you to the ground.  You don’t get up from something like that and say, “you just body slammed me and broke my glasses.”  What a pussy.  You get back in his face if you think he did you wrong and you fight it out.  That weasel you see hoped to use the law ,or the threat of a law, to allow him to continue to attack Gianforte as a member of the protected press.  He assumed that the congressional candidate wouldn’t be able to fight back and would just stand there and take it.

We see the results in people like Bill O’Reilly who has lost his very good job to losers like this Guardian reporter.  I spent some time in Europe this year and watched for weeks on end little pricks like that body slammed reporter espouse hours of liberal rhetoric without fear of any kind that somebody might punch them in the face for being ass holes—because they live in a “civilized progressive society” in Europe and nobody takes action against anything.   They just sit around eating food and drinking wine as their nations drown in financial ruin.  But not so in America.  Thankfully we are turning away from that European pussyness and are starting to elect people like Trump and now Gianforte who will hold their ground when pressed—because that is more representative of the American people than the Napoleon Dynamite press corp.

Ten years ago Napoleon Dynamite was a favorite movie in my house.  We watched it many times and laughed openly upon those viewings—because there was a lot of truth in it.  But now those kids of that generation are now working in Washington as reporters and they are a bunch of pussies.  For many of them they have a good ass kicking coming—it may be the only way to straighten them out.  So while I understand why Gianforte apologized—rightfully, I am happy that he still won the election, that people stood behind him—because he was the right guy to win.  And if he needs to body slam someone in congress, I hope he won’t refrain from doing so, because sometimes that is the necessary thing to do—when law and order have been exhausted, and debate found useless—sometimes the right thing is just to pick somebody up and throw them to the ground beating the snot out of them, and breaking their God-damn glasses.   Because in doing so you might be doing them a favor that will help them not be ass holes to other people for the rest of their lives.  And without that threat, the human race is a weaker, and more evil species.  There is honesty in conflict which has a value all its own.

Congratulations Greg Gianforte!

Rich Hoffman

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

cropped-img_0202.jpg

Looking Forward to, Summer: Michelle Cline of Hickory Ridge High School is what’s wrong with public education

There is nothing wrong with women who have small breasts. And there really isn’t anything wrong with women who are smart—the smarter the better. But let’s face it, women—especially liberal women who claim to be all one voice speaking in unity the virtues of feminism, have an extreme dislike of women who are both voluptuously gifted, and smart, because they know that there are many options available to such women and the feminists are infinitely jealous. In fact, you could say that behind most butt ugly feminists who arrive at middle age—manless—or with those little wiener tag-alongs that often accompany such women to middle-aged dinners—it is their lack of access to good male genitalia that is often their problem and they hate other women who do have such access. They become feminists because misery loves company. And if I had to bet money on the motivations of the lunatic principal Michelle Cline of Hickory Ridge High School, North Carolina when she harassed and suspended a graduating student who was wearing the type of clothing Europeans typically love—it wasn’t a dress code she was concerned with. It was the dismay she had with the honor’s student named Summer who had both great intelligence and attractive physical features which set the unhappy 44-year-old women into a power-hungry fit.  Here is the story as reported:

A senior at Hickory Ridge High School in Harrisburg, North Carolina fears her future is in jeopardy, and it’s all because of a shirt.

According to an NBC affiliate in North Carolina, Summer wore a long sleeve green shirt that exposed her collarbone on Wednesday. During lunch period, she was approached by her principal who asked if she had a jacket.

In the suspension notice from Hickory Ridge High School, the principal told Summer to cover up with a jacket.  The report stated Summer responded with, “I think my shirt is fine.” The principal then told Summer that her lower back was also completely exposed, so she was not in compliance with dress code. Summer repeated again, “My shirt is fine.”

According to the report, a friend offered to loan her a jacket.

http://www.oxygen.com/blogs/honor-student-with-44-gpa-suspended-over-long-sleeve-shirt-cant-graduate-with-peers

http://www.cabarrus.k12.nc.us/hickoryridgehs

http://heavy.com/news/2017/05/michelle-cline-hickory-ridge-high-school-principal-summer-dress-code/

Biologically speaking we should all be proud of Summer.   As an attractive young woman, she could have simply decided to rely on her looks to carry her through life because what feminists fear most is that voluptuous breasts will still give women access to powerful men usually of the woman’s choosing.  Where some meat-head looking chick would have to go begging for a date, women like Summer have to be selective in who they spend their time with during the courting rituals that typically occupy the time of young women.  Summer as we can see will be as successful in life as she chooses to be because beauty does have a market value—and she as an individual is in command of it—which drives feminists nuts.  But Summer wasn’t happy with just her looks, because as all smart people know, looks last only so long.  By the time you’re thirty years of age people start to stop looking at attractive women and you better have something else going on in your head if you want to stay relevant.  Because by age 40 nobody wants to sleep with you except for other people’s rejects—and that’s not fun.  Being smart, building your life correctly from the start with as few mistakes as possible are the keys to living a good life—especially if you’re a woman.  Those who fail to do this become crazy feminists angry at life—and Summer obviously isn’t one of those young women.  She’s doing the right things so far.

But even worse than a young woman in a public school who is pretty, and is smart is a student who has a mom that loves her and in this case, Summer has that too. Crazy liberal teachers like Michelle Cline believe that the public school is the primary instructor of society—and that the parents are secondary.  Of course, they never admit this openly, but their actions confirm it.  Parents are meant to be ruled over.  So when Principal Cline who had worked her way up from a lowly teacher to run the Hickory Ridge High School targeted the young Summer as a potential threat to her own existence as a modern feminist—mom stepped in to remind the school that her parental role in her daughter’s life was more important than the public school.

I don’t know Michelle Cline personally. I’ve never spoken to her.  I’ve not met her.  But looking into her face—I know her.  I can see the way her goofy eyes look back at the camera what kind of person she is and I can say that I’m sure she plotted for a long time how to ruin the life of Summer in some way while she still could—before the young lady moved up and away from her grasp.  Michelle you see had to work so hard in her life just to have mediocre results and she really had to kiss some serious ass to become the principal—yet Summer would cruise through life with beautiful looks, a great work ethic, natural intelligence and a mother who loves her—and that just drove the homely Cline crazy with manipulative rage.

I could be wrong, and we could all be struck by lightning at the same time on a perfectly sunny day—concurrently. Anything can happen in life.  But I doubt I’m wrong—as I’m usually not.  In fact I can’t remember the last time I was wrong about something honestly.  As news reports jumped on this little story in North Carolina everyone sort of danced around the real issue.  We should never give someone like Michelle Cline authority over our children.  Anybody that insecure should not be in charge of anything.  If they want to teach kids things, then teach.  But getting drunk on power is something that should not be endorsed by anybody getting a salary from the tax payers—which Cline does.  This is the real problem with public education—it doesn’t exist to make kids better or smarter, otherwise the school would bend over backwards to accommodate people like Summer—good kids who just want to make a good life for themselves.  Instead, public schools are committed to ruining children and destroying their relationship with their parents in nasty liberal ways of undermining their natural authority. It wasn’t Principal Cline who was there helping the young Summer learn to walk, learn to read at home and engaged in hours and hours of mental development through conversation—it was Summer’s parents.  Principal Kline only existed to help put a little icing on the cake—yet she assumes to take all the credit by trying to undermine the young woman in one great jab—hoping to secretly to derail the enterprising honor student on last time before success might find her.

It is hatred that is at the heart of such people. On the outside they often speak of wanting to help all people through altruism, but often people like Michelle Cline hope that pretty girls end up as strippers, whores and otherwise physically destroyed by unwanted pregnancies so that those vibrant young looks will quickly be washed away by the guilt of abortions and countless cigarettes looking for love in all the wrong places.  Meanwhile the ugly, the stupid and the corrupt find safe passage under people like Cline because they are not a threat to her power—power long gained through climbing the liberal ladder and greasing the right skids only to get a little truffle in life—an overpaid principal job that means nothing to anybody outside of that little brick building called a school. Meanwhile, Summer, she’ll have opportunities that people like Cline will never have and it’s not just because she’s a beautiful young woman in full bloom, but because she’s smart.   Feminists don’t like smart women—because they know better than to subscribe to the hatred that feminists have for life.  And that I would bet is why Summer was suspended.  The dress code was just the excuse.

Summer’s future isn’t over just because she didn’t walk across that stage to get her diploma. It may feel like it now, but that silly ceremony doesn’t mean a thing in the context of life.  But what she did in defending herself is to be much commended.  Rather than just taking the issue she fought back in the media and has obviously won.  That is the best way to graduate that there is—and she’s doing it.  As I said before, there is nothing wrong with people who aren’t physically and intellectually gifted.  But there isn’t anything wrong with people who are either.  Summer is fortunate to have both—and that is something to be celebrated, not torment.

Rich Hoffman

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

cropped-img_0202.jpg

The Good Work of Sean Hannity: Why Buck Sexton is wrong about the Seth Rich murder

Sean Hannity has been doing good work at Fox News for a long time.   But I have noticed a huge difference in him over the last few years as he has become more involved in martial arts—his reporting naturally has been more fearless.  As a person he is functioning from a position where he’s just not afraid of the mass pain that the collectivist lefties use through peer pressure to manipulate things in their favor and that has put Sean Hannity out in front while some of the old big dogs like Bill O’Reilly have fallen to the ankle bitters.  I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, I wish for everyone to study some “martial art” so that you can make your life as fearless as possible.  Nobody should make decisions out of fear so by having some way to defend yourself against those who wish to use force to drive your opinions—you can be free of their intentions and do justice to the truth if you learn something in the martial art professions.

In my life I have not only had martial art experience as taught in the eastern philosophies, but I have been a bull whip expert for my entire adult life and I have used it often to keep villains away from my existence.  It has been very useful. And these days my Ruger Vaquero along with my fast draw rig is my very best friend in life.  I’m older now and can afford a hobby like fast draw shooting and I love it.  But in the back of my mind it is just another form of “martial art.”  It is nice to know that if someone has a gun pointed at me and my gun is still in a concealed position—that I can draw and fire before they can even react to my movement.  Those kinds of things allow people to be straight with each other and use honor to govern their interactions—and I think every human being alive everywhere in the world should experience such things.  By learning something that can defend you and your family from the force of others, you inspire the world to be more honest.  And that is what I see different in Sean Hannity as opposed to virtually everyone in the news business.  He has only gotten better over time and I think it’s because of his dedication to martial arts which then carry over into other aspects of his professional life.

As he is doing great work in defending President Trump, Julian Assange and the conservative movement in general, the political thugs out there are trying to knock him off the air the way they did Bill O’Reilly and Roger Ailes—by attacking the advertisers. Sean being keen on martial arts thought has learned how to block and while reporting on the explosive Seth Rich story, managed to get out in front of those efforts by reminding everyone what the left is up to behind the scenes which is great.  If I were running Fox News now that they have screwed up with what they did with Bill O’Reilly losing the 8 PM time slot to Racheal Maddow of all people—I’d put Hannity at 8 PM, Tucker at 9, then that Five show at 10.  The Five just doesn’t do it for me in that prime spot.  As I’ve said before, I don’t want to hear from the political left.  I get that during the Bret Baier news hour—I don’t want that during the prime-time hours.

I can say that now that O’Reilly is off at Fox I watch Lou Dobbs at 7 during dinner then go into my shop to work on reloads and shooting practice until Hannity comes on at 10.  I listen to Bill O’Reilly on his podcasts during this time so I’m not watching Fox—which is why they are now losing to the other networks.  I’m sure there are many others who feel the way I do.  I don’t want to listen to a bunch of lefties.  I have a special place for them in my day, but once that’s over—I’m done.  For entertainment purposes, I want to be around my own kind of people not hearing the wasted efforts of the progressive left who hate everything and have taken an alliance with the very nature of evil in this world.

Sean Hannity is really the last man standing and his coverage of Seth Rich has been phenomenal. The DNC has real trouble, they are down on fund-raising, they have no candidates who aren’t socialist losers and their future is bleak.  I think they know the only way they can stay relevant is to drive people like Sean from the airwaves so they can completely control the message and if any of their own step out of line, they kill them—which is what I think happened to Seth Rich.  They are a desperate party with a lost message that this new President Trump is going to outshine and they know it.  They are like mobsters and back when Seth Rich was killed, they thought they were going to win the election and maintain control—and that they’d get by with it the same way Hillary got by with her email crimes—or Donna Brazil got by with cheating during the debates.  Cheating and killing is what they do—and they do it so that when you are dealing with them that you fear for your own life and will yield to their demands if you want to continue living.  Let’s face it, that’s what the Democratic Party stands for.

I was doing some cowboy reloads for my .45 Vaquero after Bill O’Reilly was done and was listening to Buck Sexton whom I like well enough on The Blaze. He’s pretty good with Trump coverage so I catch him here and there but I couldn’t disagree with him more over the Seth Rich case where he doesn’t think there is any fire to the smoke.  I know Sexton has experience in “intelligence” but from my experience in actually knowing “hit men” I am sure that the DNC put out the request and that it was executed to the specificity of their desires.  In my teen years—a long time ago—but not enough to not be relevant to this discussion—I was friends with three hit men.  None of them were friends together but they all knew each other and me through a special relationship with a very respected judge in Southern Ohio.  They killed people and the judge knew about it and all the members of the various political parties knew what was going on.  The press knew it, the business owners knew about it and the old Cincinnati Bengal players that I hung out with knew it.  We all knew what these guys did and if your name came up on their request list, they’d come after you.

These hit men were really just normal guys except that they liked to kill people and they needed the law enforcement buy-in to do their work. As a 17-year-old I had several dinners at a big round table where one or two of these guys were there along with the judge and other important people and they all spoke on a first name bases knowing what their roles were.  The reason I was there was because they liked me and I had a personality where I liked to compete and they respected that.  I endeavored to have more nerve than those guys so they enjoyed teaching me things.  In many cases they had destroyed their personal families by living on the edge so their relationship with me made them feel like they had some value to their lives.  I married my wife two years later, which was good for me, and I don’t think that any of those guys lived five years beyond that.  Life in the fast lane usually ends much quicker, and I doubt they had any regrets.  But Buck Sexton’s premise that the DNC wouldn’t put out a hit for fear of going to jail—that was grossly naive.  I’ll give Buck a little credit, he’s probably a very nice person, but he’s certainly, obviously naive to evil—which surprises me given his previous profession. But let me say this, I have no doubt the DNC would want to kill anybody who was trying to wreck their plans of putting Hillary Clinton into the White House.  Their very existence depended on it—which we now can see clearly. And they had law enforcement on their side—look at the many crimes Eric Holder covered up—and Lorretta Lynch at the Justice Department.  The times that the “fifth” was invoked by Obama era bureaucrats—and executive privilege. I’ve seen such hits ordered and I was there when the strategies for implementation were created—with the help of lawyers and the justice system. So I 100% believe the DNC functioning at the highest levels of government would be using hit men to eliminate trouble.

But understand this, the use of force is meant to change behavior so whether we are talking about actual killings such as in the Seth Rich case, or the assassination of a talk show host on Fox News like Sean Hannity, the intention is the same—to use force to change behavior. With O’Reilly out of the way all guns are pointed at Sean Hannity—and in spite of that Sean is doing some of the best work I’ve ever seen out of him.  I attribute that not to any special skill that he’s newly developed except for the tendency to trust that he can defend himself against anything.  The key I think for Sean Hannity in this really tough time is that he knows he can defend himself against anything—which then disarms that political left and the villains who sit at big tables and order hits on people to shut them down.  One thing about those “hit men,” the truth of the matter was that they weren’t like the James Bond villains you see in the movies.  They weren’t very sophisticated.  They were just people who lacked a certain amount of natural fear and they would do things that most people wouldn’t even think of.  If you caught them off guard they could be beaten pretty easily.  The only real power that they had was in intimidation, but if you weren’t scared of them—they lost a remarkable amount of power quickly.  After all, anybody can shoot somebody in the back—it doesn’t take anything special.  And if you can take that option away from them, they really have nothing to work with.

Sean Hannity is a well defended person, he’s a concealed carry holder in New York City and now he’s rather proficient at martial arts. He knows how to take a punch and to deflect the energy into a good offense which is much more powerful than most people think.  And having that position, he’s prepared to do a great many things at Fox if they’ll stick with him.  We are fighting pure evil here and some of that evil is finding its way into the Fox management by way of fear, fear of the wrath of the murderous DNC—a dying American political party out of ideas—and bullets.   As we speak they are losing their friends at the justice department and in the courts and soon they won’t be able to have those round table discussions because the judges will be loyal to Trump, not Hillary.  Now that they are afraid for a change, we conservatives must to be willing to take the eye and the heart out of them forever—to step on their neck while we have them down and pop that head completely off.  And we must do it out of respect for justice.  Knowing the difference is the key to everything and you can learn it by knowing a proper martial art, whether it is traditional melee combat or gun fighting.  These days I prefer the gun fighting.  For most of my adult life it’s been the melee stuff.  But having something helps keep fear from your mind because you know you can handle anything they throw at you.  And that is the way to truly disarm evil.

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.

cropped-img_0202.jpg

Zelda: Breath of the Wild–The best video game ever

Mythology as people who know me best is my favorite topic.  I talk about politics because it has a direct impact on culture and mythology informs the philosophy which becomes politics.  But the foundations are always in mythology and to be entirely honest the latest Nintendo game Zelda: Breath of the Wild is one of the most powerful tools of mythology to ever hit human culture.  I’ve been playing it now for about six weeks with no end in sight and I have to say—it may well be the best video game ever made.  I’ve talked about some great video games before, but this latest Zelda game is just something special. It is unbelievably good.  It is worth buying a Nintendo Switch just to play this game. It is astonishing.

I have no idea how they did it, or even why, but what the makers of Zelda: Breath of the Wild did was make a video game that has at least 200 hours of potential game play, perhaps even a 1000.  The world of Hyrule as presented in this game has so much in it, and it’s so vast that I’m not sure a video game player could do and see everything.  The amount of programming and planning that had to have gone into this game is simply mind-blowing.  I continue to be impressed with it even after playing it for nearly two months now.  It has become our primary source of entertainment at my house and is enjoyed by all ages.  My wife and I would rather play Zelda together than watch anything on television.  Its compelling, it’s adventurous and it is full of optimism.  It has been and continues to be a real treat—one I never came close to expecting.

Before I was able to get a Nintendo Switch I was at a local Target department store and saw two moms and about four little girls sitting in the floor with a long check list buying up hundreds of dollars of Amiibos that were on display.  Amiibos are little Nintendo characters that can be scanned into their game systems to give bonus rewards.  I looked at them as a pure gimmick and as a rip-off until I did manage to get Zelda: Breath of the Wild.  After that, I completely understood.  Adding up the cost of the Switch and the new Zelda video game, my wife and I have put in nearly $1000 into playing it.  We’ve had to go to Ebay to find special Zelda Amiibos which are sold out everywhere thus making them extremely rare and expensive online, and the whole adventure has turned out to be quite a nice journey.  While it’s possible to play Zelda without all the accessories, my wife and I have enjoyed using those accessories to enhance our experience.  For instance I am not a guide-book kind of video game player, but there is just so much in this game that without a good map and some details on how to find all the hidden parts of the game—you really wouldn’t get your money’s worth.  So we have gone all out on Zelda: Breath of the Wild knowing that we were likely to be playing it five years from now still.  It’s that kind of experience.

We were playing the game with our grandson and he was so into it that he spread out a big map that I have from the guidebook of the entire realm of Hyrule and he was comparing things on the map to what was in the book.  He’s too young to know how to read yet, but it was wonderful to see him take to getting the book on his own and pretend to read it the way I do in trying to unlock as many of the game’s secrets as possible.  For him this is his first big experience where an entertainment option extends over into other parts of his life which is what a great adventure should do—whether in real life, or just in a video game.  The mind really doesn’t know the different.  Some of the puzzles are monstrously hard but once you figure them out you feel great and want to tackle more of them.  Just guessing but I’d say there are at least 500 puzzles if you count all the shrines, the Korok seeds hunts, hidden treasures, and the normal plot parts of the game for which some are extremely complex.  Every new place on the map is a new discovery and every time we turn the game on we are doing something else.

I’ve talked about before how my wife and I played Star Wars: The Old Republic for at least two years every day back in 2013.  It was something we could do together and we had a blast.  She’s played World of Warcraft with my adult children before so we have some reference on MMO games so it says a lot when I say I think Zelda: Breath of the Wild is the best video game made to date.  What makes a game like this good is the open world game play where you feel you can do anything and go everywhere.  Usually there are parts of a video game experience where you run up against a programming blocks—even on the massive MMO games where you can’t go certain places because the video game designers were too lazy or not motivated to fill every possible place on a map with an opportunity for adventure, but not in Breath of the Wild.  You can literally go everywhere and do anything making it a nearly infinite experience.  I’ve never seen anything like it.  I mean there are a lot of great games out there, and I tend to talk about them when I run into them, but this Zelda game is in its own category.  It’s a true technical achievement that never sacrifices itself.  It clicks on all cylinders in what will surely become an industry setting standard that will change the video game industry.

While Breath of the Wild isn’t the biggest game ever created it makes the most of what it has.  The map of the new Zelda game is 23.5 square miles—about the same as Manhattan Island New York, but in literally every section of that map has something to do.  You could spend countless hours looking for things hidden in Breath of the Wild making this such a wonderful little treasure hunt that can frustrate you at times only to leave you elated with each accomplishment and coming back for more to recover the sensation. Never was that more real for me than in the section of the map called The Korok Forest.  Not only was that area playfully optimistic, it was extremely spooky at the same time and the puzzles were at times really difficult.  I can just imagine a team of people coming up with the various stories and puzzles just in that forest as the design lay out was just magnificent.  But that is such a small part of the whole game that it almost gets lost in the reviews—because there’s just too much to cover.  There is nothing small about Zelda: Breath of the Wild but as I said this isn’t the biggest video game world ever created—it clearly has the best level design that I’ve ever seen.  I have no idea how the Zelda creation team managed to get all the ideas for this game down on paper to a bunch of programmers to implement into a working reality.  There are so many options, so many outfits, good combinations, objectives that there is no way one player’s experience will be exactly the same as another yet the game works.  You don’t come along and find many glitches which allow you to buy into that world and the characters.

Then there is that other issue for which I am more than just a little obsessed, the idea of ancient technology being superior and the cycle of life coming around and around again,–the Vico cycle. There is a huge amount of that topic in this game, so it has been a wonderful experience—and I’m far from done with it.  But when I finally do finish it, I have no doubt that this will be one of the greatest games ever made—yet another benchmark for the industry but even more than that, an exceptional entry in perfection.  It’s easy to consider video games as silly things for a new generation to keep themselves busy with—but Zelda: Breath of the Wild is certainly something bigger than that.  It is the first massive game of its kind that can go with you while traveling due to the nature of the Switch game console.  It essentially is the first game of its kind to actually weave itself into all aspects of our reality with an optimistic story of honor and fearless pursuit of vanquishing evil all while enjoying the little things in life.  The only thing that I wish was that every video game was as good as this one—because this is one of those things you only see a few times in a century—creatively as an art form.  It’s that good.

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.

cropped-img_0202.jpg

Saving the Middle East: See the smoke, the DNC has the matches

Long before Donald Trump was running for president I had read his books, because why not—he was enormously successful personally and I wanted to know his thoughts on business. He did have for most of the last decade one of the top-rated television shows about project management and general business practices that there was on The Apprentice—so reading Trump’s books was a logical thing to do.  He thinks big and correctly on most things business related and he really knows how to prioritize concepts for actual implementation.   Given that, I thought it was laughable that a bunch of pin-head establishment types actually questioned his foreign policy experience when Trump had been traveling around the world for years networking and building some of the best real estate that is out there—anywhere.  Politicians argued that the experience gained from the private sector would be of little use to Trump.  I thought otherwise of course and cast my vote along with intellectual support appropriately.  Through the first 100 days of Trump’s presidency it was obvious he was going to have good foreign policy.  But it was when he left for his first foreign visits starting with Saudi Arabia, then Israel, then the Vatican and onward that it became clear just how good Trump was going to be.

Knowing Trump through his books and watching him over the years, I feel I know what he’s doing in the Middle East and it’s working. By the reception of him in Saudi Arabia it was clear that they wanted to send him a message that they wanted to be in the United States corner—in a big way.  No other American president in history could have commanded that kind of respect and it comes due to the fact that Trump was successful as a person long before he was ever a politician and all those guys know him.  So with the power of the United States at Trump’s back—they literally rolled out the red carpet with a massive ceremony.  The trip to Israel was followed with similar enthusiasm.  Anybody who thought Trump was going to be a bumbling mess unprepared for foreign engagement was sadly mistaken and you could tell by the dead silence from the political left that the president’s foreign trip was a glittering success.  You’d have to be dead not to see the light of it.

What Trump’s foreign policy visit demolishes is this old aristocratic notion that elected office holders without any merit to their name were somehow superior to hard-working people who arrived at the top the old-fashioned way. That notion has been shattered forever as it will take years for those reluctant lefties to admit just how good Trump has been on foreign policy.  Reading a lot of history I can say that the ramifications of this trip will resonate through the centuries to come.  Teddy Roosevelt had a similar moment during his second term as president when he painted battleships white and paraded them around the world to show that America had arrived on the global stage.  Big speeches from Martin Luther King and John Kennedy came to my mind as Trump spoke about evil and the soul in the heart of Islam.  I could almost see the future exhibits at Disney World’s Epcot Center where Trump’s words would speak to the future generations quoting that speech as the moment that peace in the Middle East started.  Of course there is years of work yet to be done between Israel and the Palestinians, but history will look back to this point in time when it started.  Trump and the show surrounding him was simply amazing.

Meanwhile the small-minded press was stuck all Monday morning trying to push a silly narrative that the Russians helped Trump get elected president—and it wasn’t sticking. The Seth Rich story is picking up steam because there is fire behind the smoke and it leads to a DNC holding the matches.  The Russian story is going nowhere and once the fuel of that narrative runs out, Trump is going to have all these successful endeavors to show for his body of work and the political left is going to really have a bad day then because they will have by that time alienated themselves from the victories of the “American” team.  And all these methods of doing things were always there in Trump’s books if people would have just read them.  He’s doing exactly what I elected him to do—in precisely the correct way.

When you’ve been at the top of the game for as long as Trump has events like this foreign visit are a piece of cake. In Trump’s case the risk is all political which at his age he could care less.  It’s not like he’s trying to set up a nice job after he gets out of office.  Unlike doing deals when his own money and reputation were at stake, this stuff is easy for him and it shows.  Politicians who have never achieved anything in life in the past always relied on the unspoken code of lost aristocracy in such occasions—which is why nothing ever happened but talk.  Trump as a man of action expects results and the people he is dealing with know it, and respect it—which is the largest difference in this case.  People in life respect results driven people and that is why there is a real opportunity to finally have tangible results in foreign policy from this current White House.

The political hate for which so many subscribe is driven largely not in jealously toward Trump but in the fear that what Trump does will inspire more merit based results in the future—which is going to happen regardless of their made-up rebellion about Russia manipulating the American election. Democrats lost the 2016 election because they sucked and their media outlets in bed with them did not have the minds of America as strongly as they thought they did.   And with just a few more months of behavior against President Trump as they have so far engaged, where 93% of all news stories about the new president have been negative—they are losing credibility by the day, yet they can’t stop themselves from making the situation worse.  They just can’t get it through their heads that politics has changed in America from one of subscription to a long dead aristocracy to one driven by merit.  People respect people for what they do in life, not what name they have or what society they belong to.  Trump is the embodiment of merit.

Trump is playing chess several games ahead of everyone else while the world is playing checkers. Or put another way, the world is playing Tick Tack, Toe while Trump is playing high stakes Poker.  In Poker holding the right cards and bluffing when needed is part of the game and people playing the simpler games in the media must understand that Trump is playing this game for goodness well beyond the most intricate manipulations seen in some television show like House of Cards.  Part of Trump’s brilliance is that he doesn’t speak like a master of the English language—he speaks common speak—but he thinks on a scale that defies his ability to communicate it except in non-verbal communication—the way he walks, shakes hands, and stares at the camera.  For instance, Trump’s visit to the Western Wall which inflamed both sides in the Israeli/Palestinian negotiations was purely tactical.  Trump can do something like that where nobody else would even dare it.  After all, from a business perspective, if you always do what you’ve always done……………..you know the rest.  Trump made himself the first U.S. President to visit the site—ever.  Yet he can do it without overthinking the situation because it evokes an improvement in the situation.  It forces everyone to put their cards on the table and show what they have—which a professional negotiator at any basic level should be able to do.

Politicians and aristocratic loving media who wish to report on the pomp of the presidential office don’t like Trump because for a change the job is getting done the way the Founding Fathers always intended. We were never supposed to have a bunch of peacocks working from the Executive Branch trying to appease people instead of driving them to perform.  To perform a person must understand through merit what they are asking and in regard to politicians, they just don’t have it.  But Trump does and that was on full display in the Middle East. History has been made in a big way and the world will certainly never be the same—for the better.

Rich Hoffman

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

cropped-img_0202.jpg

The Trump Speech in Saudi Arabia: “Drive them from the earth”

After Trump’s fabulous speech in Saudi Arabia I watched the news and even those who don’t like the president, and wish him ill will at every turn, have to admit that everything that happened over the weekend of 5/20 2017 was history making.  I was incredibly impressed with the Trump visit to Saudi Arabia, in many ways the speech he gave sounded like something I’d write.  His focus on the word “evil” was appropriate and he used proper metaphors regarding the human soul in the correct context while setting the stage for negotiations between Israel and Palestine.  I’ve been waiting all of my life for an American president to do what Trump did in the heart of Islam.  If you didn’t see the speech, watch it here.  Then send it to a friend.  It was historically an incredibly relevant declaration of authority.  “Drive them out!  Drive them from the earth!”  That is big stuff.

Rich Hoffman

 

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

cropped-img_0202.jpg