Month: June 2017

Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg Have Lost Their Minds: The flawed Facebook data and advocacy of Universal Basic Income

I personally like Elon Musk so I’ll forgive him for his ridiculous support of this re-packaged communist proposal that lefties are so excited about, the idea of Universal Basic Income distribution.   Musk is doing good things with his billions of dollars so I can forgive dumb ideas based on his baseline left-leaning philosophies identifying that he has become slightly out-of-touch with reality due to his various projects which happen to be populated by Earth-first wackos.  Musk makes a great car and his SpaceX company is way out in front on driving the frontier of space in the direction that mankind needs to go.  But that stupid kid Mark Zuckerberg from Facebook I have no sympathy for.  He’s an idiot who made his money collecting vast amounts of data from the world population and selling it to intelligence agencies for their covert work.  He’s essentially a sell-out who came into a lot of money because he had no predilection for privacy invasion and he has been fed vast sums of money to keep doing what he’s doing—because the end game is just another modern version of communism disguised as something else for the tech age.

Universal Basic Income is a global idea being floated around that essentially gives everyone a no strings attached paycheck to live life. The big problem is—who pays?  Who pays for the entire world to have a paycheck without having to earn it?  Of course Zuckerberg will tell you that it is the “states” that will have to pay as we all must become one global government working toward the same goals.  Through his Facebook analysis he knows that a majority of the world is lazy and would rather not work a job toward productivity so he’s using this trend to launch this push toward Universal Basic Income.  After all, he’s a billionaire kid who clearly doesn’t understand the value of working at McDonald’s for the summer to buy a new car or earn a down payment on an apartment. Such a proposal as Universal Basic Income will never touch him and his vast wealth—so what does he care.   But he knows that a huge part of the population currently under 30 would rather stay home and play video games and talk on Facebook all day instead of being productive people toward goals of GDP.  Zuckerberg isn’t so smart—he’s not a great visionary.  He’s just a kid who won the lottery doing what other people wouldn’t because their conscious wouldn’t allow them to.  So what Zuckerberg and his other tech buddies are suggesting is an all out assault on our basic sovereignty and it should be challenged boldly.

I’ve made my feelings about Facebook clear. I think it’s vile, and evil.  I want nothing to do with it because it’s essentially a data collection operation designed to study personal habits and associates for sale to intelligence agencies and commercial enterprises.  Facebook wants to know what you know, who you know, how you interact with those people—how important some of those people are compared to other people and essentially what your daily habits are.  Facebook knows that humans are essentially social creatures so it uses a lot of code to exploit that need for the gains of the state.  So I don’t participate.  Facebook is different from other online activity opportunities because it’s a one stop shop of data collection.  Twitter isn’t nearly as invasive, and most other web activity forces data collection to cooperate with each other to build a profile—which is much harder than most people would think.  Facebook puts it all into one place for sale and distribution to those who want to use that information for their own needs.  Facebook isn’t revolutionary it’s just a big spider web designed to capture intellectual property from its users for others to consume at their leisure.

To assume that these advocates for Universal Basic Income are smart because they are part of the tech sector is a folly. As Zuckerberg and Musk both said recently, they think artificial intelligence and robotics are going to replace the human workforce so that gives justification toward Universal Basic Income because as they say, people will still need money in that changing economy.  All this is, is a dressed up new fear created by nothing to back it, to force people into a kind of communist thinking—that we will all be replaced by robots that these tech people are building—so we should listen to them because they have “hidden knowledge” we don’t have.  So we should all be grateful to them for sharing that information—and listen to their proposal.

I don’t mean to come across arrogantly, but I seriously doubt there is anybody in Silicone Valley who can see over the horizon better than I can—into the distant future.  I’d argue that even the best futurists couldn’t outthink me on the matter.  They may be as good, but better would be a statement based on lunacy.  I don’t typically beat people over the head with it—but in cases like this, I can see clearly elements to this puzzle that Zuckerberg and Musk don’t.  In Musk’s case, I think he’s enchanted a bit too much with the power he’s helping to create—but there is a diminishing return on all that he hasn’t yet factored in.  With Zuckerberg, I just think he’s a modern communist hiding his intentions behind modern terms and technology—and he doesn’t care.  What is being ignored which is represented directly by the GDP of a nation is the effect money has on the human soul and the necessity of productivity to extract it for the benefit of spiritual growth.  Humans need to be productive and in capitalist countries that necessity is obvious—and the culture expands at a rate that is very healthy for further development.  Thus, what is missing from these so-called “genius” billionaires is the basic reality that money by itself is worthless without productivity to back it up.  If you just give someone a paycheck—the value of it might buy them groceries, cars and lodging, but it denies them the merit of productive enterprise—or the incentive to be more productive so they could participate in more of life’s fabulous treasures acquired through financial surplus.

I heard a nice challenge to Mark Zuckerberg—if he believes in his Universal Basic Income plan than why don’t he put $1 billion of his so-called $60 billion in total net worth into a little village in Africa and watch what happens.  Give those people a pay check so they can live a basic life and put no demands on it.  Let automated electric cars donated by Elon Musk drive them everywhere they need to go and introduce the best of automation to run their fast food restaurants and their basic needs for manufacturing and measure what happens.  Within a few years the total sum of all that money would be gone and the region would be sucking for more investment but GDP would not contribute to any surplus leaving more investment needed and the rate of invention would decrease because there would be no real incentive to do so except for the back yard mechanics naturally inclined to tinker with things to make them work.  They’d regress as a mini society even from the point where the billion dollars was initially given.  Within a few years there’d be no trace of that billion dollar investment and the village would go back to its status of hut dwellings and chieftain hierarchy.  But why?

Out of all the data Facebook collects it is missing one important element. Facebook can track your associations with other people, your mood at various times of day, your career choices, what you like to eat, the type of music and movies you enjoy—just about everything except for what’s most important in your life—how productive are you.  Productive people don’t tend to spend much time playing on Facebook—but lazy worthless people do—so the data that Mark Zuckerberg is looking at and selling is tainted—it cannot predict the next great revolution in thought, economic, and practice.  And before humans are ever replaced by robots and artificial intelligence, they’ll find a way to excel in other fields where imagination and human input is needed—because at the core of the human experience is the need to be productive.

Now, not everyone feels this way. There are many sick human beings out there who are psychiatrically broken and laziness is part of the symptom of living these shattered lives as a bi-product.  I would go as far to say that likely 90% of our society at all levels is psychiatrically broken to some degree—and those idiots are on Facebook giving a lot of people bad, distorted data based on a whole host of mental illness—such as needing too much correspondence with other human beings to cover deeply personal problems that lay hidden.  That’s not to say those people are not valuable or beyond hope—but as far as functioning in a democracy they are unreliable because they will always seek socialism and other forms of mass collectivism to hide their dysfunctions not only from themselves, but from society as a whole.

It is productivity that is the best way to draw out mental health issues and to become a proper human being and the human race will never surrender productivity to robots, artificial intelligence and other emerging systems of technology just so they can sit around all day and play Call of Duty.  It’s just not going to happen.  There may be a lot of people who will desire such things so they can hide in the shadows and get a free paycheck so they don’t have to deal with real life issues—but giving everyone a free pay check without attaching to it some expected productive output will only lead to a mass psychosis in human activity and we will discover too late—(a hundred years from now) that machines couldn’t do half of what we thought they could because the mysterious human soul is still needed for imagination—and imagination is the first step in all productive output.

I am so certain about these things that you can mark it on your calendar and remember that I told you first—because I just did. Mark Zuckerberg has performed a con by over-sampling human deficiencies while ignoring what matters most to human beings—which is why he and people like Elon Musk are so terrified of artificial intelligence and robots.  Most liberals don’t understand the things I’ve presented here and I would go as far to say that everyone one of them on the liberal side of thinking is operating in some rendition of mental illness.  Even though they are part of shaping tomorrow technologically, they are still liberals who don’t understand the nature of productivity properly—thus they have nothing to contribute on the really big philosophical issues of our time.  And believe me, Universal Basic Income is not a part of any human future that thrives.  It would only contribute to the Vico cycle and destroy our present course because missing from its introduction is the crucial ingredient of productive enterprise that is at the core of all human development.

Rich Hoffman

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The Ridiculous World of CNN’s Jim Acosta: Why we are lucky Eric Trump is so fast to defend his dad

A lot of people forget what the Trump family sacrificed to have Donald Trump president of the United Sates. They have great properties all over the world to manage and they have quite a fortune built the old-fashioned way—and they could have been happily neutral New York progressives for the rest of their lives and nobody would have blamed them. But when Trump decided to do something about the way the world was shaping up to be, and understood that he was in a unique position to do something—he had to pick sides and that isn’t generally good for the family business.  It used to be people thought Trump was an arrogant billionaire but he was on another place and so long as he stayed there, people would see the Trump products and think of exceptionally high quality. Now that he’s president essentially half the world hates him, while the other half obviously loves him—and as a businessman that’s not a great place to be.  I think with Trump he has the long view in mind so history will be very forgiving to the Trump name.  But in the meantime, it’s going to be tough on the family.  So it is very unique to have a guy like him in a powerful elected office and it is ever rarer that his kids are so supportive—such as Eric Trump over how the CNN reporter Jim Acosta has treated his father in the White House.

I found the Tweet by Acosta particularly interesting and I loved Eric’s response to it. This is what new media can do, it can create real-time discussions that are much quicker and less filtered than liberal editors at traditional outlets like CNN would typically permit—and its driving them crazy—the MSM.  Because these new media applications have their strength in exchanged ideas it seriously puts poor philosophies at a disadvantage because they can’t hold up against competition driven by reality. When Jim Acosta says something that in the 90s might have been profound and emotionally driven our new world can scrutinize his position and comment on it often to their disadvantage.  That has put CNN in a bad place leaving them to attempt their liberal activism in the White House briefing room for which Sean Spicer had, had enough.  Due to the constant grandstanding by Acosta to look good for television the White House now makes reporters turn off their cameras while asking questions so that they can’t become “YouTube” stars at the expense of the current administration.

Typically, in the private sector where money is made and GDP is measured from—which is really all that matters—government is a burden to that number so the larger the government the less efficient a nation—nonsense like Jim Acosta showed a predilection to participate in was grossly ignorant. A “democracy” as all these leftist losers keep yakking about is not a good thing—a rule by the majority is just stupid because most of the majority is not very smart.  That is why we have a republic which allows for a partial majority rule process but the effort requires participants at least smart enough to vote and even then regionally. For instance, a crack dealer in San Francisco who likes anal sex with other guys should not be able to vote to send a member to congress who is supposed to also represent a book-worm from Ohio who works 90 hours a week, loves his family, has straight sex with his wife and is mostly friends with farmers from the country.  The two value systems just aren’t compatible—so we have a republic of representative government and we let them fight it out instead of us fighting among ourselves.  But the “public” doesn’t have a right to know everything by merit of ownership.  When Obama and Clinton were in the White House people like me were effectively shut out of the democratic process and the “People’s House” was not representing me—and they made that quite clear.  So now I happen to have someone who does represent me in the White House and the shoe is on the other foot—and people like Jim Acosta can be mad about it—but who cares.  Too bad.  Tough F**king luck dude.  I don’t give a rat’s ass whether or not his little feelings are hurt or not.  Speaking for myself I want proper management of our government starting at the White House and I don’t want a bunch of noise like Acosta spews out there trying to screw it up.  In the private sector, we don’t allow that kind of grandstanding.  Typically, such a person would just be fired.  Obviously, Jim Acosta doesn’t understand the rules.  He thinks we’re a democracy—which we are not.  And he thinks that the White House owes him something—which again—it doesn’t.  All the White House owes anybody is that they do what was promised to the people who voted for their administration.  That’s it.

Part of what makes this White House so different, and so much better is that it is filled with people who actually have experience in the world—not a bunch of political hacks and that is why we are lucky the Trump family as a whole was willing to take all this on. Eric Trump doesn’t need to get involved in a scuffle with Jim Acosta. Yes, it might cause a decline in memberships to their various golf resorts—but they are willing to absorb that hit to do what’s right and that is so rare in the world.  People like Jim Acosta don’t understand those motivations.  Eric Trump confronted Acosta because it was the right thing to do and by the moment it is causing leftists to disintegrate.  The clash of philosophies is just too great.  Acosta all his life along with his contemporaries, thought they were safe behind the veil of contemporary progressivism and now all that protection has been stripped away like a scared young child hiding under the covers.  There is Jim Acosta ranting and raving like a spoiled brat kid citing rules that never existed articulating a fairness that only resonated in the wildest imagination of the very destitute.

So yes, we are lucky that we have these people in the White House and that they are changing things for the better just by bringing proper management to the swamp of Washington D.C. smoking out losers like Jim Acosta who always wanted America to be something it wasn’t—a democracy ran by fools, losers and drug addicts. In the Republic for which we are, we have representational government—not a rule by the mob and for a change there is someone qualified to manage our White House with private sector experience. That means no-nonsense management that pushes loud mouths like Jim Acosta to the back of the line so that clear voices can resonate with important information for those critical management decisions.  If the Trump family had not been willing to do this important work, we’d all be worse off right now.  So if there is anything to be thankful for it’s that they are in position to do great things and the cost to them in spite of what people think is very high.

Rich Hoffman

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Time to put the Democrats in Jail: Illinois is bankrupt and the cause was that liberal political party of criminals

Doesn’t anybody find it odd that most of the people involved in the 2016 Election are under some kind of criminal investigation except for Donald Trump. It is quite clear now that the only reason Trump’s administration has had a host of investigations leveled against it were to take the attention away from the real crimes being committed.  Now we have learned that even Bernie Sanders and his wife were part of the mismanagement and financial ruin of a little upstart college.  Likely all they are really guilty of is being stupid socialists who don’t understand money or how to manage it—but like their other members of the Democratic Party—they have shown a desire to run our lives even though they have proven they can’t run their own.  Specifically, I’m talking about the immense problems in Illinois which I articulated several years ago announcing the bankruptcy the state is facing largely because of the mismanagement of money in the city of Chicago.  All these problems are coming from the Democratic Party and they use crime to hide their stupidity over and over again essentially until Trump’s presidency took away that excuse and started fighting back.  Now they have been opened up and exposed for the criminals they always were and the payday is upon them.

That is why as Republicans, no person who calls themselves such should turn away from this vast evil revealed to us by Democrats during that same 2016 Election.  As soon as they thought appropriate they went after the Trump administration with all the teeth and claws they had—and really for the first time our Republican representative in a sitting office did not back down—which exposed them.  Now we see that it was Loretta Lynch who obstructed justice during that same campaign.  We also know that Eric Holder committed many crimes as head of the Justice Department under the direction of Barack Obama.   We know Obama spied on the Trump transition team and that we had an activist FBI director who was leaking sensitive information to news outlets—particularly The New York Times.  We have already established the many crimes of the Clinton family, but when you add to that the DNC collusion to keep Bernie Sanders out of the primary, and then the sad actions of Bernie Sanders himself what we end up with is a serious bunch of misfits who shouldn’t be anywhere near an elected position.  Most of them should be in jail.  These aren’t just bad people, they are criminals and they deserve to have the full weight of justice leveled at them.

Failure to punish these people is to invite further debate and a lot of wasted time lost fighting with them over the critical issues of our day.  If left alone to roam about freely, they will insist to bankrupt our nation into the poor state that Illinois currently finds itself in.  There are really only two ways to deal with the bankruptcy of Illinois—you have to have explosive economic growth to pay down all the debts, or you have to go bankrupt.  There isn’t any middle ground because the interest payments alone will destroy the state with fiscal liability.  And there aren’t any Democrats out there who are legitimately offering to solve the problem with a proper economic philosophy.  They are the “socialism or bust” Party, and reality has determined that they—bust.

The most tenacious of the Democrats out there who refuse the reality of their broken philosophy have taken up the plight of crime to profit from their political careers—because unlike Democrats from the past who gave away money to various unions and mismanaged their cities like Santa Claus on Christmas—the payments are coming due in our current time and someone has to pay.  That has pushed the Democratic leadership toward crime just to survive and now they have all been caught.  There isn’t a one of them alive today from Chuck Schumer to Nancy Pelosi who doesn’t know the true situation and all they have is schemes of deceit to inflict their propaganda.  But they are exposed and as Republicans the time to act is now.  Nobody should hesitate to utterly destroy the Democratic Party because if left to their peace, they will try to destroy ours.  There is no reasoning with them and we cannot all co-exist.  What they want for America is economic collapse and unification with a world government.  And Republicans want fiscal responsibility and sovereignty.  Those ideas are not compatible with one another  So one must lose and one other will continue on to become the governing philosophy of our nation.

It is important to observe the trajectory of events to arrive at the proper strategic conclusion, Trump has only been in the White House for six months as of this writing and because the Democrats came after him so hard, the same rules if applied to them which is what has them in so much trouble now threatens to destroy their Party.  Another six months of this activity will seal the deal and Republicans must do their part to make it so.  Don’t extend out a helping hand at the last moment, and don’t offer them a reassuring assimilation.  Have the heart to destroy them so that we can get onto the proper management of our country with a unified general philosophy.  Obviously from there another two-party system will emerge but the party of insurgency—which the Democrats became do not have a place in the discussion of American ideas so long as their basic definition is change from a traditional nation to a more European progressive one.

The way to win all the needed regional seats, the state seats and of course the critical seats at the federal level is to take the crimes the Democrats have been caught in and pound them into the ground until there is nothing left.  Forget the debate, just go for the metaphorical jugular.  Trump has demonstrated this effectiveness, so now it’s time to do the same at every level of our governing population.  There isn’t any reason that Republicans should fight each other so long as there are Democrats to destroy. Get rid of them then have the subtle debates about how to go about governing business within the framework of the Constitution.

A failure to do this will only result in more states like Illinois and cities like Chicago to go bankrupt over promised pension obligations and further liberal policies which destroy economic growth.  The situation is critical presently and the only way out is either radical cutting of budgets or absolutely explosive economic growth.  We can’t have it both ways as insurgent Democrats propose.  Their aim was never to fix problems in America, but to use problems to change our nation into something more like Europe and this just is not an acceptable reality.  When it didn’t work policy wise, they turned to crime and now several at the top of the Democratic Party food chain have been caught and it’s time to make them pay.  Hillary Clinton should be in jail.  Loretta Lynch should also be in jail.  The proof is extremely convincing and that’s before we do any digging.  Eric Holder as well—Barack Obama—they all deserve to be raked over the coals much worse than Donald Trump has—Democrats set the criteria and now they must live with it.  Bernie Sanders—the communist—he needs to be given the letter of the law and put in his place for everything he has done to speak out of both sides of his mouth and create a climate of insurgency that he has fostered over the last few years.  These people have done it to themselves and now it’s time to go after their jugular for all that’s right and moral.  Do them in and don’t look back or feel the least bit sorry for them.  They have been bad people and their deserve what’s coming.

Rich Hoffman

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‘Baby Driver’: Reflections where facts are more dramatic than fiction

Even through the new film Baby Driver isn’t quite out yet I think it’s safe to say that my own car chase story Tail of the Dragon is still the most intense action packed of its kind ever put to paper by a human mind to date.  But I’ll have to say, when I wrote that story, I was thinking about movies done in the style of this soon to be Edger Wright classic.  There is room in our culture for a lot more of these types of stories and this one has hit me hard with anticipation for many personal reasons. First of all, since I first heard the song “Radar Love” by the Dutch Band Golden Earring in 1973 I have wanted to see it used as a backdrop for a car chase of some kind and it looks like Edger Wright has done it.  Second of all, by the previews shown so far, the main character of Baby played by Ansel Elgort looks remarkably biographical to my real life between my 17th and 19th years of life.  After all it was those experiences which provoked me to write Tail of the Dragon to begin with—to get all that out on paper.  So it makes me very happy to see movies like Baby Driver getting made and that several of the Fast and Furious movies have continued to push great box office numbers in theaters.  I hope the same for this one—I am very excited for it.

I’ve alluded to it before but after watching these trailers it may be time to get a little more specific because the Baby character just in these previews speaks to me with quite a bit of reflection.  I understand his dilemma.  It was only a month or so ago where a political enemy of mine had looked me up on one of those online searches trying to get dirt on me, and they were stunned at what came back to them.  It showed over 17 hostile interactions with law enforcement and this person sent me that information hoping to get some leverage on me because I’m now living the life of a respectable citizen and they thought I wanted to hide that past.  What they didn’t know is that I consider my actions back then—at that critical juncture between youth and adulthood–to be very respectable—even though it might have been on the wrong side of the law. All I ever wanted was freedom—real freedom—and I wanted to be a millionaire quickly and just step over the nonsense of fighting it out the way I saw was making other people miserable.  I did live heavily in the fast lane and I was willing to use those skills to acquire all the money I could to launch a family and when I found the right girl for me—those people didn’t want to let me out of that lifestyle—and many conflicts ensued.

If I were ever have been said to have an addiction it was probably speed, the kind you get from driving a car extremely fast.  Like I said, as a youth when I first heard the song “Radar Love,” I was thinking of it playing to excessive speed in very fast cars.  The very first person I remember admiring as a young man was Evel Knievel so even at ages 5, 6, and 7 moving fast and recklessly was pretty much all I thought about—so when I was finally able to turn 16 and buy my own car I was ready and I quickly made a reputation for myself. My very first traffic ticket for excessive speed was on the Wednesday night before Thanksgiving in 1984 where I was in a race with a Trans Am that clearly out powered my car at the time.  So the only way to win was to have more nerve than he did—so I flew through a swarm of cops parked at the Tri-County Mall in Cincinnati on the wrong side of the road at well over a 100 MPH—against the traffic.  When the police got the radar gun on me they caught my speed at 85 MPH in a 35 zone.  They would have taken me to jail for reckless operation but one call to the Sharonville police station told them to just issue me the ticket.  I was under the protection of the senior judge in that district and literally had a get out of jail free pass given to me by him—because I did work on the side for him which was related to a mob outfit in Chicago—and they wanted me free to do it.

The way that Kevin Spacey’s character is portrayed in Baby Driver reminds me precisely of one of my first “bosses.”  This guy ran a car dealership that I worked for and from that I had to do more than just sell new and used cars.  I did repo work and they liked me because I had no reservations about danger—as people obviously didn’t like having their cars taken back when they failed to make payments. I was always very eager to sneak up to someone’s house and take their car without being shot, and people did shoot at me while doing this kind of thing.  It was very exciting and I thoroughly enjoyed it.  These days repo guys aren’t allowed to do some of the things we did to get our cars back so for me it was a unique opportunity to live very dangerously and get away with it legally—and make great money doing it.  But then again, the car dealership was a front at the time for cocaine dealing—as a way to launder the money and all these repo jobs were ways that this Kevin Spacey style “boss” could check to make sure I wouldn’t be a rat—because they needed a driver to help deliver regionally.

I had my limits of course.  I didn’t mind the danger or the drama of court appearances and the continuous threat of jail—but I did not like drugs.  So when the dealership sent me with another senior car salesman down to Over-the-Rhine to deliver cocaine to a distributer operating across from Union Terminal it was in my precious car which had survived many high-speed encounters and for which I was particularly attached to.  Of course they didn’t tell me what we were doing—they let me believe that the whole operation was going to be a unique repo job, so I didn’t ask what was in the suitcase in my back seat. But I did think it was strange that we didn’t take a company car on this effort—as we typically did.  This was my car and the salesman smoked—and because we were not in a company car I had a little sign on my dashboard telling passengers that there was no smoking allowed. In fact, people who knew me also knew my very strict policy against drug use. So this forty something drug dealer who was very rich I might add, was very upset with  my rules and promised that I’d have a hard time when we got back to the office.  So things weren’t getting off to a good start. When we arrived to the destination he left the suitcase in my back seat and told me he’d be right back as he went to the door of the townhouse where the target lived. While he was in there I took a peek at what was in the suitcase and I saw that it was cocaine.

Over the years up to that point I had a reputation of not flinching at anything.  I knew some of these people I was working with were serious criminals and some were very powerful politicians and sports stars.  I was with them as a body-guard at times even though I was very young, and as an assurance that no matter what happened I was their ticket out of it.  They had never asked me to directly commit a crime—but rather used me as a lifeline back to freedom—and I was very dependable.  But, I had just met my future wife and I was thinking of living a normal life that we could build a family with—and once you’ve been invited to those types of circles—they don’t want you out flapping your mouth about every little thing you’ve seen.  They’d prefer you to be dead or with them—there really isn’t any middle ground.  So with drugs in my backseat I left that guy down there and headed back to the sales office where the mission started and reported back to my Kevin Spacey looking boss that his partner at the dealership was selling drugs.  He looked at me exasperated.  “You left him there?”  Of course I had to tell him yes and there was about a half hour of excessive panic because this Over-the-Rhine distributer had a ruthless reputation and now he had to call in for help while he was in hostile territory.  I was commanded to go back and get him for which I refused.  They had to send someone else.

Maybe I’ll write about the details sometime about what happened next but needless to say the Baby Driver plot reminds me of the two weeks that followed. I can really sympathize with the Baby character especially at that time in my life.  I wanted to be married to this wonderful new girl and I wanted away from those types of people—and it wasn’t easy.  A lot of people got into a lot of trouble and I had to drive very fast a lot to stay out of both jail and this side of the dirt—because these people did play for keeps. It seemed like a long time then, because at only 19 years of age, time moves more slowly, but in reality it was all over in just a few months.  Things worked out for me the way I needed them to.  It was a tough adjustment to live without the level of money I was used to.  Just out of high school I made twice as much money as my dad did at the prime of his career, but my country club wife assured me that she wanted to do everything clean and that holds true to this very day.  It took a while, but eventually I was able to climb out of that hole in my lifestyle—and it was all worth it—especially being able to live and tell about it.

It doesn’t happen often but just watching the previews for this new Baby Driver movie set to “Radar Love” took my mind instantly to this very turbulent time and I won’t even pretend that it was all bad. I loved living like that. It was fun to live beyond the rules and to be so good at things that people would literally do anything to make it so you could keep doing it.  For the first seven years of my marriage I didn’t have a driver’s license because once I stepped away from that life the courts crashed down on me and it wasn’t easy—the penalties were severe.  That past kept clawing away at me trying to either pull me back in, or destroy me in the process—it took about an entire decade to finally outpace that lifestyle I had before my marriage.  People had to die off and the fast life caught up to many of them who did manage to live for the next decade.  They either destroyed themselves or they ended up in jail.  There wasn’t really any middle ground.

Needless to say, I feel a connection to Baby Driver and I really hope it does good business during its run.  Speaking from experience I think what’s worse than a life of crime is a life not lived.  The spontaneity of life is a magical thing and you often don’t really see it until you are pushed well beyond your comfort levels.  And even though he is villainous in this movie Kevy Spacey’s character is right—people do love a good heist—they do need something to talk about over their “lattés” Thinking of “Radar Love” and the way the scenes played out for the preview of Baby Driver, I feel quite a lot of satisfaction knowing that I gave plenty of stories that have been talked about over a great many lattés.  And in the great theater of living, that’s not a bad thing.  I can’t wait to see Baby Driver.

Rich Hoffman

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The 2017 Dayton Airshow: Short but sweet–with Trump now president aviation has a new lease on life

IMG_4724.JPGAs usual, The Chairman’s Club hosts at the Dayton Air Show did a great job; the food was particularly good during this 2017 event.  It usually is, but this time it was even better and still proves to be the best way to see the great exhibition of American airpower.  It was a rough weekend for the long running air show at the birthplace of aviation.  On Friday the Thunderbirds had an accident during a reconnaissance flight which essentially ended them for the weekend—a big blow to the schedule.  Then by Sunday the weather was just fantastic except for the very windy conditions.  Several acts were cut making the show which should have been over four and a half hours to a whittled down three hours long.  But the best part of the day was when the great B-25s paid tribute to the Doolittle Raid with a massive wall of fire right in front of my seat.

I normally take more pictures at these types of events but for a change I just enjoyed the day and watched in awe how wonderful the F/A-18 Super Hornet performed as well as the F-35.  I tried to record some of the afterburner action but the sound was so overwhelming that it was difficult to capture the immensity of it.  So for the day, mostly, I just enjoyed the show.  It was a privilege to be there and to witness such a raw exhibition of American horsepower and I think I felt that way because Trump was in the White House now as opposed to years past when Obama was in charge of the military.  I’ve been to the Dayton Air Show a lot of times but I don’t always feel compelled to write about it, because there always seemed to be a cloud over the military in the past prior to the election of Donald Trump.

This year the food did taste better, the sun was brighter and the engines sounded more eager to race out into the heavens to protect the idea of America from the insurgents of anti-capitalist sentiment.  So even though the show was much shorter than normal, the festivities had more teeth to them with an optimism exhumed from a changing administration.  Everyone involved with the show seemed to be functioning from a little less desperation and the multiple American flags displayed around the show seemed to be more proud than usual.  In the past it seemed that people revered the flag almost like a dying loved one.  They respected it but there was always the concern that it might not be there tomorrow.  Nobody wanted to talk about it, but everyone seemed to feel that way.  This year it was like a new lease on life, and the American flag didn’t feel like an ancient piece of nostalgia.

As I sat there in those nice seats and enjoyed the great food I couldn’t help but think about my various trips to different countries over the past year.  Those countries don’t have planes like we do, the good work of Boeing, Lockheed Martin and many others are unique to the United States.  It is planes like that F/A-18 Super Hornet that have really extended the reach of American politics into regions desperately in need of capitalism—and it has kept the bad guys away from American borders for many generations.  The power that was on display has a lot to do with our freedoms—it truly is the birthplace of aviation in Dayton where it all started and essentially made America great to begin with.  Aviation is critical to our global success and air shows like the one in Dayton are monstrously critical to advancements in that field.

They had a Wright Brothers Flyer replica which was the plane they built there in Dayton first flown down in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.  I’ve seen the plane before, or versions of it, but this time there was a guy who was there operating the controls and showing how the Wright Brothers actually steered the plane by twisting the wings ever so slightly.  It was remarkably like a bicycle which made sense because the Wright Brothers were bicycle mechanics.  They applied those general mechanics to invent the concept of flight and it was a minor miracle that they managed to pull it off.  Essentially all the great planes on display at the Dayton Air Show were just further advancements of those basic concepts created by that Wright flyer.

It is a privilege to have so much aviation activity in Ohio and it is a testament to Dayton that everything started there.  Each year when the Dayton Air Show takes place at the international airport it is a special event because it was there and only there where everything started and it reminds me of how important and to what extent aviation plays in the promise of freedom around the world.  It is certainly something to be proud of for those of us who reside in such an aviation rich area.  It is always good to see such a celebration displayed without any pretense of apology for being so good.  There was just so much there that was good that it was overwhelming.

But what stood out for me was the simulation of the Doolittle Raid—where Americans volunteered to bomb Tokyo and show the Japanese that they weren’t safe within their homeland.  The attack had the needed effect psychologically on the Japanese people and it wasn’t long thereafter when they lost the war.  Because of Doolittle’s B-25 raid of Tokyo, Japan had to push out their carriers further from their homeland and it changed the way they conducted the war—which allowed for the tide to turn against them.  Aviation is the key to changing battlefield tactics and the politics which causes conflict—so it’s excessively important.   Similarly the F/A-18 Super Hornet has changed the fight against ISIS–the very threat of them operating in the Middle East forces the bad guys to operate in a clandestine way preventing them from bringing their evil out in open—which is wonderful.  Knowing all that, it is always special to see them up close and operating in all their glory—I never tire of their exhibition of raw power.

I mentioned the Chairman’s Club because it is in my opinion the best way to see the Dayton Air Show.  In that section are many of the people who are on the cutting edge of advancing aviation in our modern age and it’s good to spend time around them.  It is in that continuous march toward innovation in aviation that freedom continues to breath.  Without that natural growth America would lose its edge eventually to a country that invented the next great thing.  But when it comes to aviation, America has always been and will continue to be the absolute best.  Yes, Obama tried to kill our aviation industry with budget cuts while trying to destroy our economy with Obamacare and many other socialist concepts—but now we have a new lease on life.  Trump is president and the afterburners on the F-35 sounded just a bit louder this time—because the cloud of insurrection had been removed and suddenly the world of limitless aviation invention seemed boundless—and that was very nice to see.

Rich Hoffman

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Ron Howard Directing the New Han Solo Film: Why hating Donald Trump is toxic for people in the entertainment industry

There is no way I couldn’t do it because it was only the biggest news story of the week—bigger than Donald Trump’s latest speech, bigger than the latest terrorist threat in Europe—it was so big that it actually led the headlines for three solid days worldwide.  The new Han Solo Star Wars movie production fired its two directors—whom I liked—Phil Lord and Christopher Miller with just three weeks left on the schedule and a summer of re-shoots still needing completion.  Obviously, I have designated myself as a Star Wars fan and out of all the characters in that fantasy sci-fi series Han Solo is my absolutely favorite character.  So even though there are thousands of other topics I might otherwise discuss—I must cover this issue by default of its cultural importance—because as I’ve said many times, Star Wars is not just a movie.  For many people it is a nearly religious event with tremendous cultural ramifications.  And yes, this was big news to a lot of people—and to the film industry as a whole.  My first inclination was optimism for reasons that I’ll describe because it tells me that Kathy Kennedy has her arms around these Star Wars movies—she understands what needs to be done and she isn’t afraid to do it—and I respect that.  Her pick for the next director couldn’t have been better—Ron Howard fresh off the Genius National Geographic drama about Albert Einstein.

I understand now that it was the kid playing the young Han Solo who actually started the process, Alden Ehrenreich.  He apparently was concerned that the directors known for their comedy in films like 21 Jump Street were not taking the picture to a place it needed to go and he spoke to people about it.  His instincts were correct, Han Solo is serious business even though there is comedy that surrounds a character like that—it’s a very fine line.  After Ehrenreich stated his concerns the word got back to Kathy Kennedy who took a look at the dailies and the film just wasn’t working.  It’s not necessarily the fault of Lord and Miller, but if they weren’t getting that fine line—then they needed to be fired.

Additionally, and this is something I don’t think any of them would admit, I noticed that both Miller and Lord were openly protesting Donald Trump and were members of this new Hollywood “resistance” which happens to be the same name of the group that works against the Empire in the new Star Wars films—and this was making Disney and Kathy Kennedy nervous.  The Han Solo film went into production in February of this year and I just happened to be in London at the same time so I was seeing news that wasn’t so available in the United States and I was very concerned that these new Star Wars directors were so openly against Trump and were fully supporting demonstrations in the streets of London.  There is no question that some of that radicalism was finding its way into the new Star Wars movie—where it clearly didn’t belong.  By pissing off half the country in America with political activism in a Star Wars film it would certainly take a hit at the box office and the franchise led by Kennedy these days can’t afford something like that, directly or indirectly.  It was so bad that I actually Tweeted the kids to knock it off—they needed to keep their eyes on the big picture.

Just this week Johnny Depp effectively ended his career when he stated that he thought that a modern actor should assassinate Donald Trump—he was speaking to a group in England where that kind of talk is quite popular these days and he forgot really how far his statements might go—and once it hit the American media it was too late for him.  Depp’s latest Pirates of the Caribbean film had done decent business and if he had kept his mouth shut, he might have recovered as an actor.  His recent divorce and difficulties on the set of Dead Men Tell No Tales have flagged him as a has been that can’t deliver at the box office.  His money was over extended and he really needed to just ride the wave of Pirates and actually hope for another one to pull him out of this slump. But now—he’s toxic. Like it or not, Trump is president and many people are having a positive experience because of it—and they don’t want to hear a bunch of spoiled brat actors and directors taking shots at their president in movies they pay to see. It’s just not good business.  I think Johnny Depp—as much as I like him as an actor—just killed his career forever.  He’ll never recover. He literally just went from riches to rags—because with his financial problems he needed to stay on top to get large pay checks and he just killed that opportunity.

Although I was critical of the Genius show on the National Geographic Channel, Ron Howard did a great job as he always does directing it.  He is one of the top filmmakers in the world clearly functioning from a different place—and when it was announced that Lucasfilm had hired him to replace Lord and Miller I was very happy about it.  Ron Howard knew how to keep the modern politics out of his projects just like many older directors could. For instance, I never knew whether or not George Lucas or Steven Spielberg were conservatives or liberals in the 80s.  When Ronald Reagan invited them to the White House they went and took pictures and they certainly didn’t protest in politics.  If Return of the Jedi had references to the Vietnam War in it sympathetic to the Vietnamese—I couldn’t tell by watching the product.

I was quite shocked to find in the 90s that Spielberg and Lucas gave money to the Clintons and were becoming more active within the Democratic Party—and as much as I liked them—I thought differently about them since then.  No longer did I rush out and see their movies because they had shown themselves to be against conservative positions—and honestly they never recovered their former positions culturally because of it.  However, Ron Howard has never lost that and is the closest thing we have in Hollywood to a good traditional director and actor who established his roots on the Andy Griffin Show.  He knows how to walk that fine line so that people can enjoy a project of his without thinking about the modern politics of the moment—because ten to twenty years from now—you still want the film to be relevant.

For this Han Solo movie to have the kind of appeal that Disney needs out of it they really need to pull off something special and it’s a credit to Kathy Kennedy that she took action before it was too late.  Ron Howard will know what to do and I’m relieved for it.  The world is changing and that radicalism that Hollywood has embraced cannot find its way into something that needs to stay relevant well into the future.  By the time this Han Solo movie is released in May of 2018 we will be living in a different world–largely shaped by Donald Trump’s presidency—and a lot of people will be supportive of him.  They don’t want to see a movie made by people who openly hate him and have filled their Twitter pages with disparaging Trump remarks.  They’ll want to go to the darkened theater and enjoy a new Star Wars movie without politics trying to shape their opinions—and Ron Howard knows how to do that.  After all, it wasn’t Howard’s fault that I liked Albert Einstein less after his Genius series.  It was to Howard’s credit that I was able to get to know Einstein much better than ever before.  As an artist he just presented the facts—he didn’t tell me how to feel—and that is the difference between a great director and people who are just average.  That is why hiring Howard to direct the Han Solo movie will prove to be so brilliant—and I’m glad the production had the courage to do it—before it was too late.

Rich Hoffman

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Donald Trump Making Looney Toons out of Everyone Else: Being poor is a choice in America

At this point it’s obvious, the Democrats are like the Looney Toons characters of Yosemite Sam and Wile E. Coyote compared to Donald Trump who is to them a combination of Bugs Bunny and Road Runner all rolled up into one terrifyingly president of the United States. Nobody out-thinks the “Trump” I suppose is the way the situation should be phrased.  Trump is playing chess while everyone else is playing some child’s game in the media and within the Beltway. Trump has totally turned upside down even the most terrifying Deep State insurgents and made them look stupid just five months into his presidency—and I’m so glad to see it.  I hoped this would happen, but Trump is even more successful than even my wildest imagination could articulate and I’m loving it.  Yet when Trump made a small remark about the kind of people he had in his administration who were handling the economy—for which the political left has been critical because Trump’s people are very wealthy—Trump said to an Iowa rally audience that he wanted rich people instead of poor people managing economic affairs and this was somehow controversial.  When I heard it I didn’t think anything about it until I saw the reaction of the media the next day, and I have to say I was shocked that they were so shocked.

In covering this episode of leftist babble Sean Hannity made a good point, he said on his Fox News show that out of all the jobs he had ever done in his life from busboy to radio station on air talent—he never worked for a poor person. As I thought about that it was obviously a correct statement.  I reflected on my own colorful past of work experience and it was true, I never did work for a poor person.  I can think of one guy who did struggle to pay for his monthly bills but that wasn’t because he didn’t have access to financial resources—it was because he was reckless with his money.  After all he had just spent $23,0000 dollars on a stripper in Newport, Kentucky—so that did soak up some of his expendable cash during that time period.  But nobody was ever poor who signed a pay check to me—and there’s a reason for that.  Job creators are those who have financial resources beyond what they can handle themselves to manage—they have access to productivity which places them in a category of understanding that is beyond the concepts of a poor person.

As the poor are described Biblically, as people with limited resources who were not part of the political structure of their times, I can understand the nobility of being free and clear spiritually to live life simply and close to God. But the term is no longer relevant today with the invention of the United States of America.  In America, you can be religious and wealthy and there is nothing wrong with it.  It’s not like you have to live in sin to appease the Roman Empire or the Pharisees to hold wealth.  America made it so that any person who wanted to work hard regardless of their social stature could become wealthy and that is essentially what is wrong with liberals today—they don’t understand that.  They still want to apply merit to the poor because like most churches, it holds people’s minds to socialism and communism.  Poor people to the socialist is a badge of honor.  To an American conservative who loves their guns and their Bible—they are just lazy pot smoking losers.

There is no reason to be poor in America. There is always a job that needs to be done in a productive society and if you want to hold three or four jobs to climb out of a financial hole, you can do that.  I know I have.  I also know that Sean Hannity has.  The main reason I enjoy listening to Sean Hannity is because he has a similar background experience as I do.  I have nothing in common with news commentators who get up and go to work around 9 am and are pretty much done for the day by 3 pm.  I get up at 5 am every day and I go to bet around 11:30 pm and I work pretty much all day on and off.  Even in my leisure I’m still working on something—and that’s how it’s been for me for four decades now.  Sean Hannity always worked hard, and so does Donald Trump—even now.  The primary reason he’s running circles around everyone is that he’s used to this pace, and the swamp in Washington isn’t—and they look like fools trying to compete with him—because they aren’t prepared.  People who are poor in America are that way because they made a choice to limit their income to only 40 hours a week—or less.  There are 168 hours in a week and people who are poor likely are only being productive a quarter of that time.  For those under that ratio—they are even worse off—and that is by their own inclination.

To dig out of a financial hole I once worked 96 hours a week at a regular job then on weekends I had a paper route and I worked for a tree trimming business. Essentially, I worked seven days a week on a primary job, then in weekend slots I trimmed trees all over Cincinnati and my wife and I shared several paper routes and that was the time we spent together.  I was in my late 20s and 30s when I was doing all this.  And I still found time to spend with my kids.  We still went to see movies together.  We still went out to eat and took nice vacations.  We had Kings Island season passes and went often—we made it work.  I never felt like I wasn’t getting enough sleep.  I read at least a book a week still and I felt I lived a very good and productive life—and we weren’t poor—that’s for sure.  We didn’t have unlimited money to throw at things and had to manage it, but we had to do that with every hour of our work day.  When my kids need braces or musical instruments we bought them.  Whatever they needed, we took care of it and we never used any form of welfare or government assistance to get through life—even though we could have.  If we needed more money—I just took on another job.

In that context, I have no sympathy for the poor or those who complain about not having enough money. Being poor in America is a choice and there isn’t merit to it when you drag all your loved ones through a depressed lifestyle just because you are too lazy to work.  The Bible for such people is often used as a mask—they might say something stupid like, “well you can’t take ‘it’ with you,” meaning material possessions and other justifications to explain away their inherit lazy nature—but it’s only an excuse for laziness.  I don’t admire the mountain man or the monk who decides to quit life and retreat to their thoughts on top of a mountain and devote themselves to poverty and lack of possession.  But I do admire the person who works 18 hours per day and employees over a 100 people—because they are the keys to being a productive society.  Those are the type of people who should be in charge of the economy.  Not some driveling idiot who hates money, wealth, and production. And in that context, we should all thank God that Donald Trump is finally in charge so we can talk about these things properly instead of with a bunch of emotional flap designed to hide a lack of personal ambition.

It’s not against the law to be lazy, or poor. If that is what people want to do, then let them have it.  But, they don’t have a right to skunk up the works of a perfectly successful, and wonderful capitalist economy where the natural spillover of productivity makes even the poorest people in America far better off than some of the richest in the godforsaken third world countries of the world—where political connections and aristocracy still rule the who has from the wish they dids. In America, it’s a choice and that is what makes America such a beautiful and moral country.  The best of the best are the job creators—because they bring opportunity to those who enjoy working hard.  By their very nature, they are not poor.  Rich people give jobs because they have produced an excess in their lives—poor people do not.  So to Trump’s point it’s quite clear he understands the difference—and for that we should celebrate with the flare of a Bugs Bunny as the stupidity of Yosemite Sam blows up his carefully laid plans in his face yet again as America cruises one more day toward a prosperity that was attempted to be robbed from future generations—but in a nick of time—wasn’t.

.Rich Hoffman

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The Truth About Stonehenge: Comments about the absurdity of summer solstice rituals

Visiting Stonehenge for me recently was one of the most important things I’ve ever done. It wasn’t just a bucket list item that I wanted to see at least once in my life—it was crucial. I have read so many books starting at a very young age where Stonehenge was contemplated that I needed to see the place in person. But to get to it you have to make a trip to England—and to do that you have to see a lot of other things and London usually has some part to play in such an expedition—so enough time in a schedule is necessary to accommodate such a task. However, this year I was able to get there and it was everything I expected and more. More than anything I was extremely impressed by the position the Neolithic complex held on the high plains of western England and the relation that all the mounds in the surrounding countryside had with the ancient stone ritual center. I think Stonehenge is remarkable in many different ways and its history is quite vast—much deeper than what the type of people who showed up at the summer solstice events which happen every year where druid loving people watch the sun rise on the longest day of the year.

I watched the events that these types of people participate in and it actually makes me pretty mad. The druids were not in any way involved with building Stonehenge. Their Celtic heritage is just another rendition of the modern nature worshipping hippie—the earth first losers who plague our modern politics with wishy-washy sentiment rooted in a new religion—making Mother Earth the new Yahweh or Shiva. For them and their followers of the modern age—Stonehenge is an earth worshipping symbol that a bunch of second handers from the region of Germany adopted to have sex parties and conduct themselves foolishly while under the ground dating back over 10,000 years were the relics of civilizations’ origins waiting still to be discovered. The reasons for Stonehenge’s alignments to the sun and other celestial bodies go far beyond the natural worshipping druids.

Yet like the American Indian the true meaning of the people who built Stonehenge goes undetected because intellectual curiosity cannot get past the necessity for spiritual redemption. Even the people studying Stonehenge cannot help but be pulled into the earth worship distortion that people like these druid lovers bring to the site during real archaeological study. When I was there the obvious layers of observation was distinctly obvious. On the surface, you have all these conclusions that are wrapped up in the methods of druid mythology which has always been associated with the site—unjustifiably. The druids came along many centuries after the final stages of construction at Stonehenge in 2500 BC. But to look properly at Stonehenge you have to be willing to look at Old Sarum to the south and Avebury to the north—as well as many hundreds of earthworks over the 50 miles of regional coverage. There was a lot going on in that region of England dating from the end of the last Ice Age to the relative present of 4000 years ago. For many millenniums—much longer than our present age—the Stonehenge region was very important and it goes well beyond the need to worship the earth.

Dating back 10,000 years—at least, are the skeletons of many sacrificed animals. What we know of Stonehenge and its modern rocks were built on the sacrificial site of these animal bones. Even in recent years—the last stages of Stonehenge after final construction, human sacrifices where happening with frequency—many of them quite brutal. I’m inclined to think that the stone alignments with the various solstices had less to do with celestial worship and more to do with keeping track of their progress throughout the year—likely to mark the points in time where interactions with important events occurred—such as when it became known how to calculate complicated mathematical concepts among a bunch of supposed nomads hunting and gathering for their entire lives and doing nothing else. Somewhere along the line of this 10,000-year span something happened that made people do remarkable things in that rather unremarkable landscape.

Then there is the problem of understanding that the builders of Stonehenge were not a regional phenomenon, but a global one. I am quite convinced after visiting Stonehenge and seeing things with my own eyes that the same people who built that place were also in North America building the many similar structures still seen all over the Americas. We are likely looking at a society that was much more advanced than we give it credit for, and was likely part of the culture that existed all over the world prior to the time the Book of Genesis was written. Many calculate that the Great Deluge took place around 2348 BCE which is just a few hundred years after the final touches of Stonehenge so we are dealing with more than just mythology and Earth worshiping killers. We’re dealing with a particularly potent hidden history that is right in front of our faces—yet we hide the truth behind our recent religious inventions—and that is compelling.

Evidence of life—even giant stones like what we see at Stonehenge do not last very long. Once you apply 20 or 30,000 years of wear to anything it often becomes unrecognizable and that to me is the most compelling aspect of the Neolithic monuments surrounding the Stonehenge area. Without question to me the same culture that built Stonehenge ended up in some way in North America and likely China. Without question, there were global sea trade routes moving all around the world at a time when we think of the people of Stonehenge as being separate and rising independently. The evidence simply doesn’t support that if you look at everything instead of just the Stonehenge complex. And then there is the case of the American Indian—they are obviously from the China region and settled in North America as a separate transaction of migration and they were interacting with these Stonehenge people—whoever they were—well before the druids walked out of Germany. All this is very revolutionary and certainly changes what we know about our own history. That’s why I so badly wanted to visit the site in person as opposed to reading about it as I have so much. It is clear that even lifelong researchers into Stonehenge are trying to fit it into what we know about science, instead of letting history properly tell its story with us being a willing audience. We’ve tried too hard to shape the narrative to fit our comfort level.

The biggest question about Stonehenge is—why there, and likely that answer is due to events that occurred before the Ice Age even happened. The uneventful plain of land in western England did not suddenly just pop up all these really remarkable monuments—something inspired people to do these things at a great cost to themselves—and that is where we need answers—and we’re not going to get it by watching a bunch of hippies worship the sun. I think the reason the sun was so important to all these ancient people clearly marks their need to demonstrate to the political masses a way to tell time. The sacrificial elements that often come out of collapsing societies tend to be what we study but the initial cause is where the focus should be. Why, and why there?

The mathematics involved alone extend well beyond the achievements of Greek study—it is time to accept that Greek and Roman empires were only ages and that all this had come before in times long forgotten. I think Stonehenge says to us that society wasn’t so primitive—at least aspects of it. People may have come from the surrounding countryside to become part of something bigger, and wiser at Stonehenge, and Avebury, but the people who built all these things were far less nomadic than we want to admit. They were rather advanced and that is something we need to deal with. They were a global society, not a regional one. It may take us 100 to 200 more years to find enough evidence to support some of the things I’ve said here, but the evidence is stacking up, and much of this is obvious. We just need more evidence before re-writing history books. But mark what I’m saying here, these druid rituals are just a bunch of left leaning hippies who are trying to use history to justify their religion of Mother Earth worship. They are as loony as the fools who sacrificed other human beings at Stonehenge trying to make it rain. They are not the builders of Stonehenge, or the causes for why it’s there to begin with. They are just more of a second-hand civilization riding the coattails of greatness and hoping that they can loot the credit for it over the lens of history. So far it has worked for them, but the evidence emerging is telling us the truth, and they are certainly blind to it.

Rich Hoffman
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Megyn Kelly’s Career Killing Interview with Alex Jones: Karen Handel and many other Republicans win easily

It was even worse than I thought, the Megyn Kelly interview with Alex Jones for her new NBC Sunday night show—which is not performing as expected. In a lot of ways, you could tell the results of the special elections held on June 20th 2017 based on the NBC broadcast by Megyn Kelly. It wasn’t even close in the 6th District Georgia race where Karen Handel easily beat the Democrat Hollywood money, and over in South Carolina Ralph Norman took his seat for the Republicans making it a 4-0 run in these special elections since Donald Trump took over at the White House. And if you listened carefully, the NBC execs behind Megyn Kelly’s new show were screaming in frustration at this strange new mysterious world where they had very little control over the mass population—and that people have instead put their efforts behind people like Alex Jones instead of traditional figures like Tom Brokaw and the new-comer Megyn Kelly. They are lost and simply don’t understand what’s going on.

Megyn Kelly’s Jones interview was technically a ratings disaster and resonated with the many Hollywood productions that are losing money this year because they don’t represent the masses in the fly over states. As the election results came in for the 6th District in Georgia I received the information that the two directors of the new Han Solo movie have left the production over “creative differences.” I liked those guys but they started filming in London on that picture in February, the same time that I was there and they were very enamored with all the anti-Trump rhetoric coming out of all the liberal precincts—and in London that gives the impression of a majority in the world. I thought then as I do now that they were too close to all that anti-Trump radicalism and surely those elements would end up in the Han Solo movie—which wouldn’t be good. Without question Disney has been watching all these events and while it’s too early to tell, I would bet money that those boys decided they couldn’t deal with changing up elements of the Han Solo film to reflect the political realities of the world as of now. It’s a much different place than it was last year when the script was written and if Disney wants a good picture in the spring of 2018, then they better get with the program. Everybody better—because all these witch hunts against Trump are going to amount to nothing—in the end he’s going to be one of the greatest presidents we’ve ever had in the United States—Republicans are going to increase their House and Senate seats and like it or not, more people can relate to Alex Jones than they do Megyn Kelly.

Megyn’s mission was to make Alex Jones look stupid, and he knew that—so he scooped her and beat NBC to the punch by secretly recording her then releasing the tapes over the weekend ahead of the big Father’s Day show. And after listening to her promise Jones that she wasn’t doing a hit piece, then watching how NBC cut up the interview—it was clearly everything she promised it wouldn’t be and Jones came out looking even better. NBC hates that there is competition out there like Alex Jones. Megyn tried to take shots at the Infowars method of reporting—which was essentially a bunch of internet reports that come out of cyberspace and is talked about on Infowars in a very laissez-faire manner—as opposed to the way it’s done at NBC and the other networks where an editor—(usually someone who gives a lot of money to Democratic political causes) validates a story given by a reporter and shapes it to the network’s position—calling it truth. Alex Jones at Infowars wants everything fast and loose and thus can cover a lot more ground than some giant bureaucratic organization like NBC who uses sex to essentially sell their Democratic ideas then uses traditional anchors like Tom Brokaw to reflect back to a time when nobody questioned their news reporting to validate their authority.

The frustration and even exasperation of NBC for this new kind of news which Alex Jones represents with millions of fans gathered up from the internet doesn’t begin to come close to understanding what happened. Essentially, thirty years ago the primary networks of NBC, ABC, and CBS had a stronghold on the media and they controlled the narrative. Back then the conservatives had Reagan in the White House and most of their movie stars like Tom Selleck and Mel Gibson were openly conservative, Bruce Willis, Clint Eastwood, and many other male actors were open members of the Republican Party so everyone lived in a kind of careful balance with everyone else. But the leftists plotted and schemed behind our backs and we ended up with the Clintons in the White House in the 90s. Our movie stars become noticeably less conservative. Television began to push an openly progressive agenda—such as when Ellen was kissed on network television by Laura Dern—and Madonna was showing us that reckless sex was something we should all be thinking about. In reaction to all these leftist incursions, talk radio rose to prominence and eventually as the internet increased in usability the conservative message went to cyberspace—since it was shoved out of Hollywood and New York media productions.

Alex Jones was one of those upstarts and now just twenty years later he has millions of daily viewers and his monthly hits on his website far exceed that of NBC. That has left all these media organizations exasperated with plots to stop the bleeding by shaming people into changing their behavior. But it hasn’t worked and instead more people have went the other way. They have tried every trick available to them, including fixing the polling numbers as they did in Georgia and with Trump—yet Republicans keep winning. That is because as a media group they arrogantly thought that if they controlled the mainstream outlets like Hollywood and New York broadcasting—that they’d control the message—but instead people have found other ways to get their message—with or without the traditional media. If the question were truly what comes first the chicken or the egg—clearly it was the egg—the roots of conservative values in America. You could still cut the head off the chicken—(the media) but the egg still came first. The media was there to reflect American culture—not to shape it. The media forgot their role and life moved on without them. They tried to take away the conservative influences and what they ended up with were declining ratings and people they had far less control of. With Mel Gibson and Clint Eastwood—at least those guys lived a little hard and fast which the Democrats could understand. People like Alex Jones they can’t understand at all. Alex is like that crazy canoe tour operator in the mountains of Tennessee who is all country, all guns, and all red-blooded testosterone driven maleness—and because the media overplayed their hand—one of those guys ended up with an audience of millions putting out stories by the hour where NBC spends days reviewing stories suitable for the political spin approved by the Bilderberg meetings—just to make sure that Mr. Soros isn’t upset by the slant because those network chiefs want to sit by him at the next charity event and they want his advertising money—indirectly of course. By the time all that happens Alex Jones will have produced 10 headline stories and discussed them for hours on end. That is why NBC has been losing.

It’s not Alex Jones’ fault that he has such high ratings and it’s not the human races’ fault because people don’t like the kind of news that NBC wants to produce. It’s not Donald Trump’s fault that he’s a ratings magnet—because people want to hear what he has to say and how he says it. It has always been NBC and the other mainstream networks who have decided that they wanted to work against the current of American lifestyles to change it into something they thought was more to their liking. And just like they thought they could spin the Georgia election into a close race, and that they could somehow shame Alex Jones into stopping what he’s been doing at Infowars—all it really comes down to is a bunch of losers complaining that the world does not like what they are offering and their feelings are hurt. Everything from the obstruction of justice investigations into Trump’s White House down to his Tweets, people like Megyn Kelly who have played the game to become a part of that losing world now have to face it that the reason Donald Trump listens to Alex Jones and now he’s the president—and Jones has so many millions of followers, is that there is a market need for these people—because they more accurately reflect the America that we are all living in. And that is a reality all these people on the other side have to face. They can trick themselves into believing falls polls, and emotional stories like Sandy Hook—but in reality, a majority of the American people like what they like. And they like Alex Jones, and they like Donald Trump. They don’t necessarily like Megyn Kelly which is obvious by the ratings. And more and more, they don’t like Democrats. They are losing everywhere and the longer Trump is president, the harder time Democrats will have to win anything. Trump is much more popular than the phony polls will indicate. These are the facts and so long as the MSM refuses to see those facts and look toward people like Alex Jones and declare them the problem—they’ll never learn the lessons they need to improve themselves.

I think that was the dagger that will kill Megyn Kelly’s career. After the interview, there were rumors she was in negotiations to return to Fox, but she’s burnt too many bridges there and she has upped her profile to such a level that she will have a hard time just being a correspondent. She had positioned herself to be the next Barbra Walters—but clearly, that is not her skill set. She might have pulled it off if not for this Alex Jones interview—she hoped that a little sex appeal and flirting would entice enough to do a hit piece on Jones—take him down and make all her NBC bosses happy—but instead she exposed herself embarrassingly on tape which was played by Jones who knew what was going on, and now that’s all anybody will remember about her. But the fault really isn’t hers, it was NBC who set the stage to begin with, and let her believe that these tactics would work in the modern competitive news market. We are living in the days of the Drudge Report—where the narrative is set dynamically leaving the crusty old news sources to crawl crippled along an unknown landscape. Even if they did manage to take Alex Jones out, there are plenty of people who would take his place—because the demand is there. And that is a reality that NBC better learn fast. Maybe Disney is finally learning it—but not fast enough. The entire old world of the media should have known better—but they didn’t.

Rich Hoffman

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 Book of Henry’: More than a film review–but an articulation of the very nature of evil

I was stunned by the movie reviews for The Book of Henry—they were illustriously bad.  In fact, they were so bad that there was often hatred in the utterances of the reviews.  Some people just hated this movie.  Yet, I have been very excited about it and did go and see it on the opening weekend—and I thought it was an absolutely brilliant film.  It wasn’t just a little good—it was great and in any other time, it would win many awards.  So how could all the critics be so wrong—well, to get to that let’s study the reaction to just the trailer that Grace Randolph from Beyond the Trailer provided when she reviewed the preview back in March.  I’m not picking on Grace, I usually lover her opinions even when I don’t agree—but this reaction is one of those raw–primal hatreds that certainly influenced all the negative reviews and that is why this is such a brilliant film.  Watch closely.

I think it said a lot about Colin Trevorrow that he wanted to even make this movie between the blockbusters of Jurassic World and the ninth Star Wars film upcoming.  He could have made any movie he wanted yet he picked The Book of Henry, which features a boy genius, 11 years of age who knows that there is great evil in the world and he spends much of his time contemplating how to stop it.  Trevorrow brought in some great talent, wonderful editing, great composer, great actors, great cinematography—great film business people from top to bottom and gave a project like The Book of Henry a top notch indie film treatment.  It’s a movie with a lot of heart but it has a judgment and that is what has people so outrageously upset with the movie and seek to punish it with their own needs to deflect their own guilt for the theme for which the movie is about.

The little girl next door to where Henry lives with his single mom and his little brother is being sexually abused by her step father who happens to be the police commissioner. So let’s answer Grace’s question from above, because her reaction was pretty innocent but some of the people in the film review business, from Variety to Rolling Stone are no doubt like the Sarah Silverman character—whom I don’t like as a political activist.  But she played a wonderful normal person in this movie—a person that likely 90 percent of our population could identify with.  She’s a loser, a hard-core drinker who misses work too much and has an ugly tattoo on her breast which she shows off most of the movie—she is the best friend of Naomi Watts who plays Henry’s mom.  And what a poor creature she is—she represents another large segment of the population who have lost her way in life.  She’s not a bad person, but she’s afraid to make her mark on the world and she drinks and plays too many video games to hide from that inclination—and she is totally dependent on her oldest son Henry who is an impeccable genius.

Most of the reviewers have commented that Henry seems otherworldly and un-relatable. After all, there just aren’t 11-year-olds out there who are as mature and wise as Henry.  But movies are supposed to take us to places we can’t go in normal life and meet people worth the hard work that usually goes into making movies.  And lucky for me, I completely understand Henry.  I knew people like him and there are parts of him that I can directly understand.  There is a scene in the movie that I thought was particularly powerful, it’s where Henry, his brother and his mom are at the grocery and they see a guy beating his girlfriend as they are having an argument. Nobody does anything to help the woman, but Henry is inclined to get involved and his mom stops him telling him its none of their business.  “Don’t get involved.”   Later that night Henry and his mom are in bed talking (innocently because the mother still reads books to her boys even though they are probably too old) and Henry tries to explain how disappointed he was in his mother for not wanting to get involved in the argument between the couple at the grocery store.  Of course his mother uses the excuse that she didn’t want to become embroiled in a violent episode.  Then Henry explains to her that violence isn’t always the worst thing.  Curious, his mother asked the young man what is the worst thing in the world.  Henry pauses for a second and answers, “apathy.”

When Grace Randolph was so outraged that The Book of Henry relied so heavily on a child genius to tell a rather ordinary story about revenge, redemption and family assimilation she made the mistake to assume that these things are normally very obvious to people—and they are in the third person.  After all, we are used to watching other people in the god-like position of viewer, with television and movies where we often have more information about what’s going on than the characters on the screen do and the drama we experience is in hoping that people we care about learn what we do in time to save themselves.  But in real life where stories are not broken down into typical three act plays, introduction, articulation of the conflict, then wrapped up nicely and on que to climax—events do not hold to that structure and because we have trained our minds in such a fashion—we often do not see evil sitting right in front of us.  Evil comes at us in subtle ways through loved ones, our jobs, our politics—even the kid who wants to mow our grass, install our cable, or check out our food at Wal-Mart.  We as human beings trust our structures and our institutions.  But most of the things that happen in the world happens outside of those organized elements and in the case of The Book of Henry, we see a society stuck in its structures and trust in institutional figures—such as the police chief next door who complains that the leaves of his single parent mother neighbor keep blowing into his yard giving him psychological leverage over her to hide his real crime—that he is sexually molesting his step daughter and using the institutions of government to keep inquiries away from him.  It takes someone free of those institutions—someone bigger than what human kind has to offer at that moment to see the evil—and that is why it was necessary to have Henry in this film be a brilliant kid.  Without that genius, nobody would have the courage to step beyond the veil of adulthood with all its trickery and diversion tactics meant to deceive themselves into believing they were living good lives—to see the truth.  That the police commissioner was destroying this poor little girl for extremely selfish reasons he deserved a style of justice that has nearly been outlawed in America. The Book of Henry nails all this and more making it a remarkable work of art.  That it has pissed off so many reviewers say more about them than the movie—for they are like the institutionalists in the film who failed the little girl while only Henry thought to act and took action to start the process. There are a lot of little girls—and little boys in the world who need someone to see how much trouble they are in but unfortunately their plight is invisible to most of our adult population.

The Book of Henry is a rare film that like all great art shows us what is difficult to see and in this case the plot device is genius to show it to an audience stuck in life much like the Naomi Watts character—not a bad person, but a person stuck in hundreds of bad decisions holding her down in life.  Her son Henry is pure and free of such things and it is through him that she comes to see the world for what it really is—and is compelled to act accordingly.  Even with some of the truly tragic story lines in this film it is an uplifting tale of optimism and genuine love of life. It is a truly remarkable work and something everyone should see at least once.  The reviews don’t like the film because it’s a bad movie—but because it makes them look at things they are partially guilty of creating—so that should not be a reason to avoid the picture.  Rather, The Book of Henry should be watched with open hearts and open minds and an honest assessment to what role the viewer might play on the side of villainy so that they can correct the situation for the good of everyone. The Book of Henry nails it and is certainly one of the great films of history and should still be remembered many years from now.

Rich Hoffman

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

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