Rich Hoffman's Blog, page 335

The Guilt of Sean Payton: Murder, bounties, and the NFL hiding behind gun control

I don’t like Sean Payton, the head coach of the New Orleans Saints football team, mostly because I’m a Tampa Bay Buccaneer fan. I think he runs a dirty organization as was the evidence of his one year suspension a few seasons ago, and I think he leads a team of thugs.  That could be said of many NFL teams, but when a coach like Payton exploits that thug culture to squeeze out a few more wins for his own personal advancement I think he opens himself up to an extra level of scrutiny when something goes wrong.  And when an ex-star player of his, Will Smith was gunned down in the street on April 9th 2016 Payton didn’t blame the football players involved for their very bad behavior leading up to the tragedy—he blamed guns and took a progressive position socially to camouflage the failure of a culture which he has helped create—and that makes him a scum bag.

Former Saints DE Will Smith and his wife were out for a night dining with friends.  One of those friends just happened to be a cop who was involved in a shooting of the father of Smith’s future murderer—later that evening—ironically.    Smith had friends in law enforcement and he was a star football player and Super Bowl champion—so he had a sense of entitlement based on his behavior.  He was doing good things with his life and looked to be a good family man.  He had celebrity friends and was the star of whatever event he attended.  All was well until he started driving home and accidentally bumped into the very expensive Hummer driven by Cardell Hayes.

After Cardell Hayes lost his father to a police shooting the city of New Orleans paid the minor league football player a hefty sum of money for which he purchased a bright red Hummer.  It didn’t sit well with the football player to be rear ended on a late night Saturday while stopped in the road.  Hayes moved toward the sidewalk to get out of the way of traffic and settle the matter with the driver who hit him.  But instead of pulling up behind to exchange insurance information, like what was supposed to happen by law, and call the police to file a report, the car driven by Smith ran off invoking a hit and run incident.  Well, being a young football player who has had to scrap for everything on every play to get what he needs in life, watching that car run from the scene of the accident was apparently too much for Hayes who gunned off in pursuit of the fleeing vehicle.  It was unlikely known at the time that it was the famous Will Smith who had hit him and whom Hayes was chasing.  All Hayes knew was that someone had committed a crime against him and he was going to get the guy.  What Hayes should have done was write down the license plate number.  He would have had his justice and everyone would still be alive.  But instead Hayes torpedoed his car into Smith at a traffic light several blocks up the road and the two drivers met on the street for an angry brawl. One thing led to another and before anybody realized how serious the situation was, Hayes shot Smith in the chest six times killing the New Orleans football star.

Hayes stayed on the scene and admitted what he had done to police and everything was cleaned up and looked to be a pretty straight forward case of road rage. But it was in the aftermath that Sean Payton obviously missing his friend and speaking with a heart rooted in tragedy said that he hated guns, and that New Orleans was like the wild, wild, west.  Payton used the death of his friend to advance a progressive anti-gun stance without addressing the behavior that actually caused the violence in the first place, and that was disgraceful.  It made Payton an even worse person than I already thought he was and he appeared to think as Smith did that his level of celebrity could free him of the burden of judgment.  For instance, if Smith was as smart as news reports obviously wanted to portray him in this tragedy, why did he participate in a hit and run?  Was he counting on making a call to his friends on the police force to resolve the issue and to ensure that he was above justice because of his celebrity?  It certainly looked that way.  Payton seems to think that he can make reckless progressive statements because the people of Louisiana want another Super Bowl win so he calculated that they would just put up with his banter without question.

Most of the people I know in my neighborhood have guns and they often carry them.  Yet we never shoot each other—even when we get into traffic accidents.  It was only a few months ago that a lady hit me on my motorcycle nearly injuring me badly.  I was literally a half-inch away from losing my right leg.  We were both armed with guys, yet even in such a crises it never occurred to either one of us to shoot each other.  I simply yelled at her, and then once I saw how sorry she was, we quickly went to the business of settling the accident.  It was a very civil way to settle a tragedy.  It certainly didn’t devolve into the kind of violence that killed Will Smith.  That is because the problem isn’t guns, its behavioral science.  The football culture that Will Smith and Cardell Hayes lived within is built on primal valor and coaches like Sean Payton exploit that pent-up energy to win football games. For young people like Smith and Hayes—who often grow up fatherless, but find social redemption in popular gladiator sports the ethics on a football field often depend on an eye for an eye mentality.  There is a lot that goes on during a football game psychologically that never shows up on a television screen for which Smith and Hayes have made their livings and it’s not easy to turn all that off for civilian life.  Many football players have a hard time with that adjustment.  Will Smith was apparently attempting to do that and he was mostly successful.  But when you play a game where the alpha male rules the field and that an entire team depends on your ability to assert that dominance over other alpha males—the nature of the game doesn’t just leave the mind on the football field.  It sometimes carries over into the streets of whatever communities they live in.

Will Smith abused his rights as a private citizen when he attempted to roll away from the accident.  When he was challenged by another alpha male for attempting to flee likely they said things to each other that required in their minds an ultimate statement on who was the alpha male.  Hayes not having any other intellectual resources to guide his actions went for his gun and the rest his history.  But it wasn’t the gun that was the problem or that people carry them.  It is that we have a society that doesn’t understand how important alpha males are and how hungry young people are to either become them, or yield to them.  And for coaches like Payton who build alpha males for the benefit of football victories so that the people of New Orleans can feel good about themselves on a Sunday afternoon—he should have known better than to say the stupid things he did about guns.  In a lot of ways Payton was just as guilty of what happened in that murder as the gun was.  He breed and exploited the circumstances for which the violence was provoked in a road rage incident and like a coward—he deflected the blame to an inanimate object—instead of the behavior of the participants.  For a coach that paid players on his defensive teams, which Smith was a part from 2009 to 2011—to physically harm other players to take them out of a game, the morality of gun violence doesn’t hold much water when Payton helped create a culture that inspired violence against others.   

How guilty was Payton, well, for the NFL they came down on him hard—a $500,000 fine and a year suspension.  Considering the problems the NFL has had and how much they’ve let go over the years—Payton must have been pretty guilty.  If Payton had been a better coach and mentor, it is highly unlikely that Will Smith would have run away from a hit and run accident, or ran his mouth when cornered down the road by the victim.  We are all products of our environment and in the world of professional football; the head coach is the judge, jury and executioner of environmental influence.  Will Smith was a product of Sean Payton’s professional football teams and that product showed itself most when he crashed into Cardell Hayes then left the accident scene expecting to be relieved of the guilt.  Why shouldn’t Smith have expected to not be punished when he watched so many of his friends and fans forgive his head coach and push behind justice just so they could witness one more win in New Orleans on any given Sunday? The answer is, Smith didn’t know better and that was the fault of a culture who made him that way—and the guilt for most of what shaped that culture for Will Smith led right into the office of Sean Payton.

http://content.usatoday.com/communities/thehuddle/post/2012/03/sean-peyton-suspended-saints-fined-for-bounty-program/1#.Vw-3Wo-cHIU

 

http://www.msn.com/en-us/sports/nfl/new-details-from-police-help-shed-light-on-smiths-shooting/ar-BBrHtMU?ocid=ansmsnsports11

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.

I Hated ‘The Hateful 8’: A terrible movie by a failing Hollywood industry

There was a lot not to like about Quentin Tarantino’s latest film The Hateful Eight. I personally didn’t see it when it came out in theaters around Christmas of 2015 because of Tarantino’s political activism against police, but I put it on the checklist.  It was sold as a western shot in 70mm traditional wide—just as Ben Hur was many years ago—so I figured it would be worth watching.  My chance came once it was released to the home theater market and I was a little excited about it. But after two hours of movie realizing that the whole thing was going nowhere, I was very concerned that if Tarantino was the best that Hollywood had to offer—that they consider him a “modern” Shakespeare–that there is no wonder their movie industry was in trouble.  At that point there was still about 45 minutes of movie left to show and I was ready to turn it off—but didn’t because I already had too much time invested.

This is what happens when someone becomes so full of themselves—and have been told by hundreds of aspiring actors and progressive movie producers that they are the greatest thing to arrive since fire.  They forget that people actually will see their movies and that those people think very differently about the world than those tucked up against the mountains of California and the Pacific Ocean. The only good characters in The Hateful Eight was the Kurt Russell character.  Samuel Jackson wasn’t the greatest and once he revealed an oral sex scene with another guy—I decided I didn’t like him and didn’t want to invest any more time into learning about him.  Most of the movie took place inside a cabin getting to know all these characters who were telegraphed very early to being all completely killed off.  There was no point to their stories or the interaction between them because it all led to one place—death.

The Hateful Eight is like a person being walked to an execution getting to know all the people spitting on him along the way.  It just doesn’t make any sense because that person was going to be dead soon—so why waste the time?  It was just horrendously stupid.  Beautifully photographed, good soundtrack—most of the time—but just a stupid story—I can’t believe anybody read that script and thought it the work of a genius—and I can’t believe anybody gave Tarantino money to make that movie.

Coming from a guy who shares with me a love for the great movie, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, Tarantino obviously isn’t at the same level of Sergio Leone, and I went into The Hateful Eight hoping sincerely that he was.  Not even close—not even close to the sincerity of a spaghetti western, which I thought was the point of The Hateful Eight. It ended up being just another sign of a broken and declining culture that doesn’t make anything original anymore—even though all the tools were provided.  To suggest that The Hateful Eight is anything close to the masterpiece Hamlet, just because everyone ended up dead in the end is ridiculous.  There weren’t any sympathetic characters for which to hang a morality on in Tarantino’s movie.  All the characters were villains and none of them were people I’d want to get to know if they sat down next to me at a bar.

Even using the barroom metaphor with The Hateful Eight seems underwhelming.  Typically when a man wants to pick up a girl in a bar he engages in small talk to get her to reveal bits about herself.  Once she decides to talk about herself the conversation evolves into more personal matters.  Then as a climax and some trust won, the girl decides whether or not she wants to sleep with the guy.  It’s a little mating game that our species plays to make the experience not seem so cheap.  The Hateful Eight is like walking up to that girl and just flatly saying, “Let’s have sex.”  Then spending three hours talking about all the things you should have talked about before blurting out the obvious.  It was just despicable as a story—pathetic at every level.

I have liked other Tarantino movies—I thought Pulp Fiction was clever, and I enjoyed his work in other things—but I wouldn’t say he’s a master of anything.  He’s only smart compared to the very stupid people who now make up the Hollywood industry which these days are just a few rungs above raw porn in its creative impulse. I am really glad that I did not go to see this Tarantino western at the theater because I would have been angry at wasting the money. The Hateful Eight wasn’t a western; it was a monstrosity of undeveloped ideas from a director who obviously has personal problems holding back his artistic ability.

As an example of how all westerns should be presented these days, The Revenant is still the featured example.  If you are going to make a western, at least put in the work.  So what if someone stole the script to The Hateful Eight and that’s why Tarantino made it into a feature film.  The material wasn’t so good that an eight year old child couldn’t have written it—so whatever provoked big money donors to give Tarantino money for that piece of crap sadly overrated the ability of the troubled, progressive filmmaker.  The movie wasn’t just bad enough to write a poor review about, it was bad enough that I personally feel like I was robbed just by watching it, because I can’t get back my time.  It would have been a much better movie if Samuel Jackson hadn’t forced a naked man to perform oral sex on him, because in the last dying moments he was the only one left and I couldn’t help but think that he was the last person I wanted to see on the screen in the end.  Given that, he was the best character in the movie after Kurt Russell’s character died of poisoning.  The Hateful Eight was horrendous filmmaking and storytelling at its absolute lowest.  Sadly, it represents a new generation that thinks it’s the work of genius—because people are now so stupid and have such a low opinion of themselves that they don’t know any better.  People now can actually relate to these despicable characters.  And that’s the real problem with The Hateful Eight and the filmmakers who put that trash on the screen.

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.

The #NEVERTRUMP Geeks: A Party of Republicans who forgot why they exist

You can tell when I’m really angry about something because I usually prefer to talk about entertainment events– that topic is usually good non-emotional neutral territory discussion.  As probably was noted, I have spent the last three days talking about various entertainment observations as opposed to the hottest topic of the day, the betrayal of the GOP and their voters.  I do the same thing in one on one discussions, when people who know me observe that I start talking about entertainment—it is because I either find the politics of the person I’m talking to revolting and I’m looking for common ground to keep from wanting to snap their neck like a twig, or I have blown them off as irrelevant losers not worthy of any intellectual input other than entertainment appeasement.  And appalling is the word of the day for what has been happening.  (For the record, notice how I predicted this too, CLICK HERE TO REVIEW.)  Now several weeks later, many others are coming to exactly the same place that I have been—willing to quite the Republican Party after a lifetime commitment because of the evident corruption that has been exposed as a direct result of the Trump candidacy.  I have been feeling precisely like this old Colorado voter who burned up his registration for the Republican Party after a betraying visit to Colorado Springs.

Trump was wrong when he declared that the process which robbed him of all the Colorado’s delegates without a single vote cast was not very democratic.  He’s right about the democratic process, but America has never been a democracy—which is just a stepping stone toward open socialism.  America is a constitutional republic which should be better but in this case isn’t.  The voting process which was intended to select those representatives were sold to the public as being acquired through a democratic process—but in this case it was cut short and was sabotaged by the Republican Party.  That revelation has only served to substantiate the intense level of anger that has intensified during the primary campaign season.  Yes, the system is rigged, it always has been, and we all knew it.  But we didn’t know what the cost was to us because we had never seen another viable alternative that had gotten so far in the process other than Ross Perot many years ago.  Trump by his popular successes has forced the party leaders to outwardly show their protections for the first time to people who are learning about this whole process as it develops in front of them.  We should have learned all this in our public schools, but instead kids learned to riot and vote for socialism—so people are shocked by what they are seeing.

Among the #NEVERTRUMP clan, there is a feel of superiority over Trump and his supporters because those constitutional geeks work really hard to understand the Constitution and are legitimate nerds in a lot of ways.  They are like Star Wars fans who argue over little specifics of the movies because they know everything while the common viewer only see a fraction of what they do in casual viewings.  The #NEVERTRUMPs like the rules of the system because they worked really hard to learn that system—it gives them a feeling of superiority over everyone else—they are specialists on that topic and they secretly want to protect that specialty.  I know several of them personally.  So it gives them quite a charge to see that Trump is furious at losing delegates to Trump.  They would argue that if Trump wanted to play the game, then he should have learned the rules.  But, what those #NEVERTRUMP geeks have forgotten is that Trump’s candidacy represents a large faction of the American population that have no desire to learn the rules of the game—because they hate the game—and the Republican Party has just solidified that sentiment epically.  They want a change in the rules, they want to play a different game, and they sure don’t have any desire to learn the old rules.

This notion that the Republican Party can do whatever it wants—that they can nominate anybody they care to is preposterous.  Sure they have their little club and they seem obsessed with controlling who is in it with them and where they stand in the peaking order in relation to others.  No question many of the party leaders want to be king makers deciding who county commissioners are, governors, and presidents—but that’s not the way it was supposed to be.  What they want to control is ultimately representatives of “the people” who elect them into a representative republic.  The Republican Party for instance isn’t bigger to me than myself, or my family, or my community.  It’s just a group of people who I either agree with or don’t.  I am not beholden to a sacrificial relationship with them in any way. So if they show themselves as philosophically deficient—as they are clearly in the run for presidency in 2016—they I have a right, and obligation to reject them.  The “Party” does not have authority over “me” and is not empowered to provide “me” with a representative vetted by them for their own purposes.  Clearly the Republican Party interprets their role as such—but I along with many others completely reject that premise.  I will not vote for Paul Ryan for anything.  He screwed up in 2012 and he won’t get another chance by me.  I will not vote for John Kasich.  He is the governor of my state, and he has let me down—he’s turned out to be an idiot.  I will not vote for Mitt Romney—he has been a failure.  I will not vote for Ted Cruz—he’s just another attorney running for office.  I don’t want any more legal geeks messing with laws any more. I’m tired of the same old mess offered by the Republican Party and they either want to represent my philosophic conservatism, or they don’t.  If they don’t, I am not beholden to them to take whatever piece of crap they offer.

The Republican Party arrogantly believes that it is the end all of American politics—as if the matter has been settled long ago after the Civil War turned out in their favor.  They’d be incorrect, each age has its own challenges and the party leaders are either aligned with those challenges, or they will fail to lead their party to a position where it can be beneficial to the constitutional republic for which we are all a part.  That republic was always founded on the merits of individualism, not collective assimilation—and that is precisely where the Republican Party is going wrong—in assuming that the “party” is too big for any one individual.

Trump represents a public need to establish a return to individual association.  He is the ultimate pronoun “I” and that is what the people who vote for him want to see emerge in this year’s election cycle and obviously the Republican Party has a problem with that declaration.  That leaves Trump and his supporters without a party—which of course will give rise to a competing party to rival the Republicans and Democrats.  If 30% of the voting public doesn’t have a political party which represents them—or seeks to—then what are they to do?  Surrendering their beliefs to one of the two other options isn’t viable as individuals.  Yet the Republican Party seems inclined to insist on such a thing.  As Ted Cruz gloated about his legalese victories around the west, particularly Colorado—and the use of the party machine in Wisconsin to goad Donald Trump into throwing a fit because people weren’t voting for him—he is assuming that the masses are on his side.  Show me one time that Ted Cruz can fill a stadium with supporters like Trump does.  All Cruz has on his side are the political geeks, not the average people who make up our Republic.  They aren’t–wait until Cruz gets to New York, and Pennsylvania.  The masses are speaking, and they haven’t been picking Ted Cruz.  Cruz has been playing the legal game, but not winning the hearts of the masses.  When Kasich says that it’s the delegates that matter, he’s right from his perspective within the game of politics—but the party for which he belongs is supposed to serve the conservative interests of the republic and instead they serve a collective notion of consensus building which I would argue is un-American.  Want to see a national consensus established by the will of the people where they generally agree—go to a Trump rally.  Trump voters, me included, reject that collectivist philosophic position and the party should be listening, instead of working to hold society to a set of rules designed to protect a system they have learned to profit off of as public servants.

When the smoke clears, Trump will have won many more votes in the primary effort—yet the political party seeking to maintain their control of that system will attempt to ignore that fact and offer up the same old garbage as they have before.  And now that many of us have had a taste of what could be, we aren’t going to swallow that pill again—because it leads nowhere and we’ve learned.  It is not the voting public that has to learn a lesson here—it’s the Republicans.  They either get with the program, or they will be replaced.  It is they who are in the weakened position—the public holds all the cards because ultimately the “party” either serves the interests of the public—the conservative public—or they don’t.  And given their behavior against the popular front-runner Trump—it is obvious where all this is going.  When it gets there I’ll be joining that old man from Colorado.  I’m not going to hold my nose and vote for another Republican loser.  They either start winning—or I’m done too with them. And victories are measured by the popular vote in this primary race, not the legal gymnastics of lawyers and political geeks.

http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2016/04/colorado-gop-leader-disgruntled/

I’m at a point where I don’t think I could support Republicans even if they did get behind Trump all of a sudden. I think the process is so broken and the philosophies so displaced that there is no mending it.  As the link above describes the Colorado situation from the point of the of the GOP, the issue remains that the party leaders have made a system that ultimately they control, because it is rule heavy and requires a full-time staff to learn all those rules.  It puts the power of candidacy in pin-heads and political addicts instead of the best and most viable candidates and is the root cause for why the Republican Party has been so grossly ineffective for such a long time.

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.

 

‘Star Wars: Rogue One’: Hope and perhaps a second chance

I was not a fan of The Force Awakens.  I still think it was a rip-off fan film and it wasn’t very good.  It’s obvious to me that Star Wars saw its best days under the control of George Lucas and that it will forever be in a declined state.  I was a tremendous fan of Star Wars because under Lucas they had established a nice storyline that embodied several video games, novels, comics and of course the movies themselves into on giant mythology—and that mythology had a conservative lean to it—rooted in Ayn Rand oriented individualism.  Now it is clear that when Lucasfilm under Kathy Kennedy released The Star Wars comic series about two years before the release of The Force Awakens that they were telegraphing what they were going to do with the many novels that had been written after The Return of the Jedi in 1983—they were going to rip them off and retell many of the stories because they thought they needed to be more Huffington Post oriented progressive stories instead of Ayn Ran.   In that comic series Lucasfilm took George Lucas’ original screenplay and turned into a comic to show how rough the story had been compared to what ended up on screen—as a ploy to justify what they were about to do to the Extended Universe.  Well, that’s all water under the bridge and Star Wars is forever ruined for me—because I had stayed with them through many years—and they let me down.  Now that I know that, I can at least appreciate what telling some of those old stories from the books to cinematic vision can do for a new generation desperate for some positive mythology and after seeing the trailer for the new Rogue One film by Garth Edwards, I am encouraged.  Lucasfilm might earn back a little respect with it because it looks nicely done.

The sad thing about that movie and premise is that it is essentially a retelling of the story of the video game Dark Forces and the name of the female lead is essentially a take on Kyle Katarn’s trusted ship captain.  Dark Forces was the first video game I ever played with my oldest daughter and it was a special story for us, and now Lucasfilm is going to screw that up too—but I think Edwards will do the story justice.  I suppose the sad thing for me is that there won’t be any new ideas coming out of Star Wars.  But the value of what has been told is important and to a new generation that is seeing some of this stuff for the first time—these movies are good for them.  This is consistent with the Disney Company that has taken stories told over time and put a modern take to them for their movies.  There is value in retelling a story, so to that extent I’m glad to see Star Wars doing what it’s doing.

It gives me hope that the future stand alone films featuring Han Solo and Boba Fett will be very good and dramatic—even though the topics have been covered in the novels of the past.  It is still fun to see these things put into a movie even if the story is better in the original novelizations.  Let’s face it, not many people read any more, so at least these stories will get told.   Rogue One, I would say will arguably in that case will be better than the original story of Dark Forces.  So if that’s what Disney is going to do, I suppose it’s better than nothing.  I see Star Wars as just another remake the way that Godzilla was recently retold with an updated spin on a classic story.  I am looking forward to Rogue One because it tips the hat toward the spirit of the original trilogy and I trust that director to do a good job.  It will be fun to visit that universe again by someone who obviously loved the original film as much as I did—if not more.

Still, I can’t help but think how special Star Wars could have been if they had stuck to the carefully planned books.  But Hollywood in general has lost its creative impulse—very few filmmakers these days have any imagination and those that do can’t get funded for their projects because backers are caught in a static pattern that is dangerous to their own industry.  All of Hollywood is stuck in this creative vacuum of copying off old books and comics to update stories for a more visual format.  I had the benefit of seeing Star Wars when everything was truly new and original and I wanted that freshness for this new generation.  But it can still be good.  Just not as good.

Since The Force Awakens I have been pretty staunchly anti-Star Wars.  My brother and kids have been a little sad that I can’t share my enthusiasm for it as I once did.  To me the death of Han Solo was essentially the death of Star Wars.  It will never mean the same to me, especially with the progressive direction that they are going.  I don’t care about the minority roles or the strong female characters—but the collectivism push is something I just can’t get into—stories where the individuals take a backseat for the collective benefit of everyone.  With Han Solo, everything was better, his selfishness epitomized Ayn Rand’s objectivist philosophy wonderfully.  It may have been unintentional by George Lucas, but it was very pro capitalist leaving A New Hope and Empire Strikes Back the best two movies likely to ever be made for the Star Wars saga.  It was exciting to see images of costumes, ships, sounds, and other elements of those two movies in the Rogue One preview—so I’m sure it will be enjoyable.  I may not enjoy it as much as I otherwise would, but Lucasfilm has a chance to win me back just a little.

To put things in perspective, since I was like 10 years old I bought every single video game that was ever released for Star Wars the first week it came out.  I loved every one of them, particularly the Dark Forces games, Force Unleashed, and Rebel Assault.  That lasted until essentially The Force Awakens.  I dropped Star Wars like a rock and pushed it out of my mind completely.  It was so bad that when we finally bought a Playstation 4, I had the option of buying one with the Star Wars: Battlefront option, or with the Call of Duty bundle—I picked Call of Duty.  I don’t want to play that game because I don’t want to play as a bad guy—because they force you to if you want to play online.  And I refuse to play any game that makes me shoot at the Millennium Falcon or Han Solo flying it.  So Battlefront is the first Star Wars video game that I haven’t bought.  I’ve even bought game systems to play specific Star Wars games.  I would love to play Battlefront as the rebellion.  But I have absolutely no interest in playing as the Empire.  To my mind, George Lucas was treading on shaking ground when he attempted to humanize the bad guys in his prequels.  But I thought there were good points to make, and I personally liked Obi-Wan enough to hang with Lucas through those stories.  But without a good guy to hang morality onto, Star Wars falls apart and becomes just another average story.

Fortunately, it looks like Garth Edwards understands what makes Star Wars good, so I am encouraged, and will likely see the new Star Wars film when it comes out in December.  I’ll give it a second chance to win my respect.  I think it was pathetic that The Force Awakens only made a bit over 2 billion dollars—it could have made more.  I’m sure Disney executives are happy, but they are obviously unaware of their short-sightedness.  So we’ll see.  We were so serious about Star Wars that my family had been planning to go to London this upcoming summer to attend the Star Wars Celebration there in 2016.  Those plans changed after Force Awakens quickly.  We’re not going.   It remains to be seen how good Rogue One turns out to be.  If it is respectful to Dark Forces, then I might be able to like it.  If it craps all over it, then that will likely be it for me.  My opinion is pending successful implementation.

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.

The rediculous ‘House of Cards’ Gay Agenda: Being a lion among sheep

Do you remember several weeks ago when I stated that my wife and I were done with watching the Netflix series, House of Cards because of the gratuitous sex—particularly the three-way at the end of season two which featured some gay sex by Frank Underwood and his secret service agent shared by his wife?  Well, we decided to give it a second chance because I was interested in the politics part of it and was relieved to find that season three seemed to put less emphasis on the sex.   After all, Frank Underwood had become the President of the United States and there wasn’t much time for power climbing and the sex that is often used to serve as rungs on that ladder.  However, there had been, and continued throughout all of season three a gay subplot to the new President—a soft side that craved the love of men.  This utterly made me sick because it was so misplaced as a human emotion that it left me feeling like the whole point of the House of Cards series wasn’t to convey politics, but to serve as a Trojan Horse of gay advocacy by presenting those types of plot points to a confused society hoping to advance the rainbow sentiments of guys who like to stick parts of themselves into a dirty ass.  By the end of season three, Frank Underwood was having a touching moment with his biographer and the two were holding hands like a couple of girls and my wife and I burst out laughing because of house stupid the scene was. The gay agenda was clear and House of Cards was attempting to normalize it—and it wasn’t working with us.

I’ve been saying it for a long time, when a motion picture company thinks that it will make one of its heroes gay, or Disney thinks that it will put out some musical featuring a gay couple that will make the kind of box office money that Frozen did—those executives should be fired for putting their companies at risk—because those movies will bomb in a theater.  Regarding House of Cards, it’s free—so it’s not much skin off my back to turn the show off.  It’s part of my subscription fee and I’m free to watch anything on Netflix—so I can literally vote in favor of the many other decisions.  But to drop good money on a movie or song that features gay sex as the driver—it’s just not going to happen no matter how much artists like Bruce Springsteen attempt to normalize it.  Gay sex isn’t normal—particularly with men.  I can see women having non sexual touchy relationships with other women, but desiring intercourse just doesn’t make biological sense and has to be evolved along the lines of some abnormality rooted in psychosis.  I can even understand when good friends have close relationships where sex isn’t even a factor of their relationship and they prefer each other’s company.  But the premise that closeness to another human being leads directly to sex is just a preposterous thing—and it’s simply not true.

Now we know emphatically why public schools and other social networks have been attempting to emasculate men for several decades now.  Now we know why men have been told that it’s OK to cry, and to share their emotions—because society established by an aristocratic political class of global micromanagers had fantasies of population control using gay rights as a means to manipulate the masses to stay focused on very primal instincts so that populations would be easier to control.  By changing the role of the sexes, progressives could then take the women out of the home and away from their children allowing the “state” to raise the following generations gradually.  It has always been the long plan of communism brewing for over a century in America to make everyone equal and in the House of Cards sexually, everyone is.  Frank Underwood was introduced as an open marriage womanizer which was fine with his wife so long as there was some tactical objective to the sex.  But then there was some affair that Frank had while attending the Citadel in South Carolina—where he had a gay lover—LOL.  This gay lover is in the background and the series kind of danced around the issue until it came back up again with full hand holding and finger caressing by the end of season three with Frank’s biographer.  There was no kissing in that scene but it was still radically foreign to me and was uncomfortable—it totally ruined the premise of the entire series.  My wife felt the same way.  It wasn’t “homophobia” that was driving that discomfort, it was fact that neither one of us has ever had any gay urges and the whole thing seemed comical to us.  I can honestly say that I’ve never seen some other male and thought, hmmmm, I’d like to “touch” that person to be closer to them.  It’s just not part of our human experience and it was strange.

Sex exists for one reason—biologically, and that is to procreate and continue the human race.  The point of all the emotions and the elements that the different sexes like in each other point toward that ultimate goal.  Sex is not necessarily a byproduct of a decent and healthy relationship.  You can have a close friend if you are mentally healthy and not want to have intercourse with them—which is something that House of Cards completely ignores—which is why the gay agenda is so ridiculous.  Gay sex is a primal behavior that requires a lack of sophistication to endure.  Intellectuals tend not to waste much time on sex because the very act itself—the whole mating game just takes too much time—and smart people tend not to waste time.  This whole notion of equality among the sexes is just a part of their communist agenda to put in people’s minds an eventuality of “state” control where sexual fulfillment is not rooted in procreation—because population control of such a “state-run” society is highly desired for resource management.  But it’s not natural, gay sex requires some mental deficiency to be successful.  That mental deficiency might be deep insecurities placed upon a mind at a young age, or abuse from a trusted family member—or it could be that a child was intellectually born broken—by no fault of its own.  But it’s not “normal.”  That doesn’t mean we treat them badly—but that doesn’t mean that we normalize our entire society for them either.

There is an old Joseph Campbell story that he used to tell in his lectures about “the lion and the sheep” that covered this difficult topic very nicely.  A young lion was abandoned by his family at birth and left alone in the wildness to survive on its own.  It comes along to a pack of sheep that it sees grazing and conjugating near a watering hole so it joins them.  The sheep of course are scared at first because lions eat sheep as carnivorous biological entities.  But when they realize that the lion is only a baby, they quickly warm up to the threat—because they are stupid sheep—collective masses of grazers.  Well, the little lion grows up among the sheep and thinks of itself as one of them.  It grazes like they do and drinks from the same watering hole and behaves like them.  Well, one day a magnificent lion—a strong male with a full mane of hair attacks the herd to hunt and in so doing spots the fellow lion.  He goes up to the creature and asks him what he’s doing.  Of course the young lion now grown up and living among the sheep can only reply, BaaaAAAaaaaaaAAAaa.  It doesn’t know any other term because it’s been raised by sheep and the little thing had been having a hard time because obviously it has a body that craves carnivorous substance to survive, so it’s become a sickly creature.  The old lion says to the young one, “Hey, you aren’t one of them; you should be hunting with me.  Look in the watering hole at your reflection and you’ll see it for yourself.  So the young lion does so and realizes that it was true, he wasn’t like the sheep, and that he was in fact a lion.  Of course the old lion slaughtered a few sheep and brought some meat to the confused young lion and said, “eat this, you’ll feel better.”  The young lion did and as soon as his system had meat in its body it began to make a difference, he immediately felt better, stronger, and less inclined to follow the others around in a herd.  Before long the young lion was able to let out a nice roar and to begin hunting like other lions and to take his rightful place as king of the pecking order within the food chain.

Young males in our society currently are like that little lion, they have been told by their school teachers, their media culture, and even their governments that gay sex is perfectly alright.  They were lied to.  Like the lion growing up among the sheep the reason society told them that was to make it easier to lead them to the slaughter-house eventually and control those free spirits by behaving in a herd.  Once males embarrass themselves with something, they are much easier to control socially by those who desire such things.  But gayness isn’t natural, it’s a learned behavior designed to manipulate mankind into a kind of herd animal that is far easier to manage than a bunch of roaming testosterone driven ego maniacs.  But I’m here to tell you people, look in the water, realize what you are, and turn your life back toward your biological impulses.  Don’t act like a sheep if you are a human being, be a lion.  If you are a man, be a man—don’t sit around crying or hugging other guys.  If you are a woman—be a woman—play the role and enjoy it.  Be what you are and don’t let political philosophies manipulate you into being a herd animal for their benefit.

House of Cards is ridiculous.  The kind of sex they portray in the show is not normal.  It’s an invented creation designed to advance a collectivist oriented social agenda.  But men, real men, do not behave like Frank Underwood.  They don’t seek to hold the hand of other men and they don’t do all that gay singing either.  Only broken people who were taught from an early age to be sheep—we can have sympathy for such people, but we can’t destroy our species to relieve them of guilt either—seem inclined to gayness.  We are not all in this together—all for one, and one for all.  We are in this game to win, and to be the top of the food chain—and to be human.  In the game of life we even can eat the lions because we are smart enough to invent tools to kill them if we so desire.  So we should be smart enough to think above sexual impulses and to behave as our sexes dictate—and those established biological rules dictate that men just don’t show emotion to other men in a way that weakens other aspects of their relationships with one another.  If you are a man and you want to show another man that you like them, punch them in the arm.  But don’t stroke their finger like Frank Underwood did in House of Cards at the end of season three.  That was just stupid—forced—and biologically improbable.

Rich Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

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Dueling Needs to Make a Comeback: The American tiger in a cage being poked by “social justice warriors”

Anyone can see what the root cause of the problem witnessed in the following Alex Jones video was.  In it there was a group of people that we might call, “social justice warriors” who have grown up in a society deliberately softened to allow for their rise by a political class hell-bent on staying in power—no matter what.  These kids, and the adults that they will grow into, have been empowered by essentially removing the ramifications of their lunacy—the consequences of their personal assault against individual liberty.  The blame clearly falls on our global education system and the forces which gathered to perpetuate their stated curriculum. It has made me realize that a practice long forgotten for its perceived barbarity needs to be dusted off and inserted back into our American culture—the gentlemanly practice of dueling.  As radical as that may sound, we must find some version of it to emerge in this modern century otherwise we won’t make it into more advanced stages. To see why, watch this video then all of the following for substantiation.

A version of dueling still existed in the Old West as towns erupted across the vast frontier of North America guided by flimsy laws enforced by even flimsier sheriffs.  I practice that type of dueling nearly every day with a group I’m involved in called the Cowboy Fast Draw Association.  A friend of mine made a comment that I was thinking of while shooting that day and it was, “if dueling made a comeback, people these days would be a whole lot less offended.”  That’s when I thought of those snot-nosed, liberalized socialist losers in that Alex Jones video.  What was missing from their lives was the respect that comes from asserting an insult at individual integrity.  What those kids have been taught in that video—and anywhere these days that “socialist justice warriors” gather under storm clouds of collective effort—is ramifications for their individual mistakes.

The duel as it was inherited from Europe was widely practiced within the United States for quite a number of years by our early presidents and was a declaration of individual honor.  In that society from which our Constitution was written, an individual’s honor was required to have a civil society.  If some rogue threatened that sanctity then ramifications just outside the grip of the law were required to keep the peace and maintain an orderly society.  We all know about the famous Alexander Hamilton duel with Aaron Burr—which I think about quite a lot.  I was born in the Ohio city directly named after Hamilton who lost his duel with Burr and died.  I also think of President Jackson a lot when I think about duels and the kind of attitude which formed the country of America.  Dueling and honor went hand-in-hand which provided a foundation for our laws.

When I was growing up the Department of Education had just been enacted, so they didn’t have time to drive this trend out of our culture.  Even one hundred years after the Wild West, dueling was still a common practice among kids in my school of Lakota in Liberty Township, Ohio which was essentially settled by war heroes of the Revolutionary War.  When something which insulted individual honor fell outside the established law of the school or the society outside which controlled it, boys would settle the issue with a fight after school—which I found myself in a lot.  Failure to show up to one of these fights would lead to extreme scorn and a loss of respect up the pecking order of male influence among both sexes.  If you were challenged to one of these fights, you didn’t fail to show up.  I always did, and most of the time, just as it was when the dueling action was pistols—handshakes and respect were given out and sometimes friendships were forged.  People respect courage and when two people faced down each other over a dispute that couldn’t be legally worked out by putting a hand on the Bible and letting God sort through the details—individualized respect was the only real option which bound our society together.

Think about it, when you are in the grocery check-out, what keeps you from belting the person in front of you in the head and taking their place in line—is it fear of the law—of being arrested for assault?  Perhaps for most, that is their first reaction—but these days people have a lot less respect for the law as police officers and their methods of control have come into question.  So what is the next layer of defense which prevents you from acting—you look the person over and decide that you could physically overpower them and take their place in line.  What keeps you from doing it?  Essentially, fear…………….fear of what that person might do if you challenged them in some way.  If you push them they might turn around and clobber you, or they might have a gun and shoot you.  That threat forces you to respect their individual boundaries at a primal level which then paves the way for respect at the legal level.  Without a foundation of respect for individual integrity, no laws in any land can have real influence.

And that is the primary issue, public schools are in the business now of teaching collective rights, not individual ones.  As seen in that video, the Donald Trump supporters represented individual values whereas the social justice warriors represented collective values—and our society has put its priorities on the collective effort over the individual ones and that’s how we find ourselves in this current mess.  Those social justice warriors have no fear of individual retribution so they are free to attack anything, anywhere over anything.  They have grown up lacking respect for individual property or sanctity and are acting on behalf of collective efforts for achievements which extend beyond their personal gains.  The way to fix that whole problem is by empowering the individuals to defend their positions with actual respect–and unfortunately that means with all human beings—an imminent fear of being removed from the face of the earth so that a proper dialogue between two parties can emerge.

Years ago I was with a group that was buying a mechanical bull for a nightclub I was involved with and we were at one of those honkytonks to see it in action.  I had on my customary cowboy hat as I have since I was a little kid and I was standing in front of a couple of guys at the bar who were obviously drunk and looking for a quick ego boost to their reputations.  As I watched people ride the bull in question I felt something rub against the brim of my hat from behind, so I turned quickly and saw the hand of some sappy looking bastard removing his hand quickly hoping that he wouldn’t be caught.  Of course I confronted him angrily and I told him that if he did it again I’d beat the rat piss out of him.  He and his friend were two tobacco chewing rednecks who thought they were more authentic than me, and they didn’t need to wear hats to country bars—which essentially was what they told me.  My response was to take them outside and show them that they weren’t “shit,” both of them.  Of course they headed for the door to protect their honor as they were with women who were both at the bar urging them not to fight.  When we got outside they saw the anger on my face and realized that the fight was not going to go well for either of them.  A bouncer stood on the porch and watched, letting things play out respectfully.  Suddenly the two guys apologized for touching my hat and they were quick to want to make friends.  I accepted and we returned inside where they bought me a beer and were nice to me for the rest of the evening.  Their dates were grateful and everyone had a pretty good time the rest of the night.  When I left they even went out of their way to say goodbye and shake my hand.

Protests are getting out of control in our country as socialists, communists, and various anarchists raised in our public education system to not respect private property, personal integrity, or any level of valor have no fear of the law or the individual integrity for which laws were written to protect—and honestly, they need their asses kicked.  They are the result of what happens when you don’t retaliate for someone touching your hat, or insulting your personal name in a newspaper.  Without that basic respect for other human beings, there is no society to build from and everything plunges into chaos, which is exactly the goal of liberalized social justice warriors.  They aren’t warriors at all, only instigators who don’t expect to be punched back in the mouth once they’ve leveled their insults.  We live in a society now where they can touch my hat yet don’t expect to be punched in the mouth for it.  Once you do, they want to retreat to the law to settle their honor—which is essentially what has been happening at Trump rallies.  The society which created these losers doesn’t want to acknowledge that individual liberty is the key to holding all of society together.  They want to believe that it is the acceptance that the tapestry of a global society brings that will garner respect for each other—and they are miserably failing in their psychological assessment.  Just because they have de-clawed a tiger and removed its teeth, and even castrated it of its aggression, a tiger is still a tiger.  You can’t put a bunch of snot-nosed communists into a cage with it and let them poke it with a stick and not expect the tiger to attack those idiots.  At some point the individual temper of the tiger will break through the social constraints placed upon it.  And in many ways, there are a lot of people in this country who have been treated as such, castrated intellectually, and tied up individually to make the collective masses feel equal.  This has given rise to a period in our history where just about everyone is offended at something that somebody else says and that is leading us to a disaster—legally.  But, if the practice of dueling were to make an official comeback, and even become legalized again as it once was—then people these days would be a whole lot less offended, so easily.  And then, we might just find a way to work together toward achievements that require teamwork. First however, a respect for other individuals must be established, and that only occurs when acknowledgement of those other people is based on a foundation of integrity.  That is what the old duels established and that necessity is every bit as strong today as it was 300 years ago.  Only now we see what happens when we outlaw the mechanisms for achieving that respect—we have a mad, runaway society full of losers, imbeciles, and malcontents.

Rich Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

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Thank You Merle Haggard: Saving lives with the wisdom of lyrics learned from hard living

I have a lot to thank Merle Haggard for and I’ve been thinking about them all since his death on April 6th 2016.  He had a lot of great songs, but for me the most important and my personal favorite was ‘Misery and Gin.’  I was 12 years old when I saw the movie Bronco Billy by Clint Eastwood for the first time.  It was and still is one of my favorite movies.  It hit me at just the right time in my life.  Like the Clint Eastwood character in that movie, I was socially awkward up to that point, so I could easily relate to his quirkiness.  But the tenacity for which the Bronco Billy’s character stuck to his beliefs even in spite of a changing world held a lot of appeal to me—so I watched it often.  One particular time was as a late teenager, I had just been in a serious car accident running around with friends.  The driver crashed in a manner that should have killed everyone.  I had blood running down every part of my body, and every bone hurt.  It was probably the most fun I had ever had watching a movie was that particular time.  I had taped Bronco Billy on a new VHS tape off television and enjoyed watching it when I needed a lift—and as I  breathed a sigh of relief at still being alive, the Bronco Billy message resonated intensely with me at that particular time.  And of all the good songs in that movie it was ‘Misery and Gin’ which had taught me the most about life.  Clint Eastwood wisely allowed Merle Haggard to have an extended section of the movie to sing his new song and rolled it nicely into the events of the movie—and I never forgot it.

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/music/la-et-ms-merle-haggard-appreciation-20160407-story.html

‘Misery and Gin’ was everything that I didn’t want to be in life. It was a parody of itself, a country song that espoused all the misery that drinking, picking up loose women, and bars filled with cigarette smoke entailed.   It was an extremely honest song and was one that I decided very early on that I wanted nothing to do with relating to lifestyle choices.  It reminded me of several uncles I had who lived that life, and I thought they were losers.  It gave me more conviction to turn away from that kind of life well before I was deep into puberty—and I am thankful for it.  Regarding the night of the car accident, I was with a friend in a hot rod car after a Christmas party for the place we worked.  That friend and I had a rival relationship; we would continually outdo each other on daring deeds.  We took outlandish risks to satisfy the inner daredevil in us—such as playing high-speed chicken with cop cars, fighting the biggest bullies in whatever number they presented themselves and performing any risk of physical manner that opportunity allowed like jumping across high-rise roof tops.  We did some really crazy things that should have killed us several hundred times over—and neither of us ever backed down from anything.  But you can only push things so far.  We both had a knack for coming out on top no matter how deep in trouble we got ourselves.  I think I was around 17 at the time.

One thing I had on this friend is that he had difficulty with talking to girls and women.  I was never afraid to talk to any girl anywhere about anything.  It was very easy for me, but for him it was extremely difficult.  He could never find the right words for the right girl.  So I’d hang that over his head whenever I could.  He’d respond by showing off more to compensate for his inequity.  I had arranged for three very attractive girls to race us back to his house after this Christmas party so he was showing off in his hot rod car to do his part in impressing them.  He let them get on the highway in front of us by nearly a mile and his plan was to blow by them at over 150 MPH—to show them how fearless and how powerful his car was—because we all know that girls like that kind of thing—the naughty side of them anyway.  That’s when his angle was wrong and there was too much traffic on the road and his Chevy, Nova had too short of a wheel base to maneuver quickly in any kind of evasive action so he fishtailed wildly into a retaining wall after blowing by the girls and the car spun endlessly through the heavy traffic before going airborne then flipping end over end down the highway.  Of course we didn’t wear seat belts in those days.

Miraculously we landed with the car pinned up against a retaining wall, nose down and pieces of the car strewn all over the highway.  We were both alive and hadn’t hit any other cars somehow.  But we were all sliced up from broken glass and the violence of the impacts.  The police came and arrested my friend for reckless operation, endangerment and a whole host of other violations.  I was free to go to the hospital.  Instead, the three girls took me home and helped me get all patched up.  I put duck tape on the deep cuts to hold the skin together and applied maple syrup to clot up the blood that was still dripping everywhere.  After all that was over, I watched Bronco Billy after popping some popcorn and having a nice cold Coke.  That is when I realized that life didn’t get any better than that.  A good movie, a nice drink, and the thrill of being alive—all I needed was a nice woman to share that kind of thing with. I met my wife about 9 months later—and obviously now I live a lot like Bronco Billy did in that movie—by choice largely because I decided to after that night.  It was a little more complicated than that, but looking back, it’s pretty easy to see.

Of that movie it was actually Merle Haggard’s song ‘Misery and Gin’ which communicated strongest to me.  I decided I wanted no part of living anything like that life.  While most everyone I have known before and since find appeal to that lifestyle—it doesn’t have to be a country honky-tonk, it could be a BW3s or a nightclub—drinking and hanging out with women who have made bad decisions in their lives and living a life of perpetual misery just wasn’t something I was going to do—and I never have.  Even that night in the car, it was my love of life which was the secret ingredient that the girls liked so much and why it was so easy to get them to come along and do whatever I wanted—including patching me up.  Of course nobody understood that—but I knew it was the promise of getting away from the misery and gin lifestyle that the girls had been trained which was their ultimate fate by a society stuck to that fate by their own bad decisions.  I offered a release from that, something of a lottery ticket.  It was very appealing to both the opposite sex, and the guy friends I had who clearly wanted to be a part of it whenever possible.

I used Bronco Billy to bond with my wife.  We watched it several times a month during our early marriage and she came to understand the words of Merle Haggard very well.  Without Bronco Billy, it might have been too difficult to convey to her what kind of life I intended to live.  She wouldn’t have understood.   But the mood of the entire movie was captured so nicely in that old Merle Haggard song and I have to thank him for it.  It put my life in a positive direction very early.  Without it, I probably would have still found a way, but it might have taken me a decade or two more to figure it all out.  Because of his song, I was able to accelerate the process and apply it much more quickly than if it hadn’t of ever been made.  So I’ll miss Merle Haggard. He made my life better in a lot of ways. He was certainly one of the greats and I’ll always be thankful.  Listen to the words and maybe it will help you too.

Rich Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

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Ending the Republican Party: The “stuffed” elephant in the room

The answer to the elephant in the room is that it is dead—and has been so for some time.  It is time to acknowledge it and move on to something else.  The Republican Party, which was created to end slavery, for which Abraham Lincoln was its best spokesman—died a long time ago—and is no longer effective.  If you put Karl Rove, John Kasich, Mitt Romney and me in a room together all three of them added up would not even come close to me as far as conservatism—so they do not represent me as a political party.  They have lost their war with the left and become too much like the enemy—the political left in America.  They are useless to me in a representative republic.  I have voted for them over and over again for several decades, but they have always been ineffective and the reason was that we were voting for a taxidermy version of an elephant, instead of a real creature full of vigor.

That nagging prospect has been on my mind for quite a long time, but it was never clearer than on the night Ted Cruz won the Wisconsin primary.  Cruz has no shot of winning the nomination, yet the party, the media, and all the #NEVERTRUMP fans worshiping the dead and deceased Republican Party behaved as though a New Year had dawned on them and life had been returned to their caricature.  Only Donald Trump has a mathematical path of achieving the Republican nomination at the Convention in July.  Nobody else does—yet the party is willing to use anybody and anything to delay Trump so that they could hold onto their grip of party control and what they believe are conservative values. Yet studying the voting patterns of Wisconsin, it was only in the heavily populated areas—particularly those most affected by the major talk radio stations which espoused the #NEVERTRUMP mantra loudest that Cruz won.  All of the surrounding, rural counties went for Trump.  It was almost a carbon copy of the type of voting pattern seen when Democrats compete against Republicans.  Country people were having their voices drowned out by the more heavily populated urban areas—and they were not happy about it.  The Republican Party wanting any good news that it could get was willing to accept any information that stopped Trump from becoming head of the party—even to the point of self-destruction.  The short-sightedness was grossly obvious.

But the glee that emerged from their mouths was rather pathetic.  It signified a political party at the Alamo not acting heroically in one last stand, but of a bunch of soldiers out of bullets knowing that the end was coming then seeing that the encroaching army was short on ammunition themselves and was awaiting supplies—they were able to live for five more minutes and were happy about it—even boastful.  They were so happy that they denied Trump of roughly 40 little delegates that they missed the point of what the supporters of the GOP frontrunner were espousing.  They were just happy that they had a better chance of getting the nomination process to a convention so that they could insert somebody they were more comfortable with—as if the public would put up with it.  It was a pretty disgusting display.

My first thoughts and those which stayed with me after considerable contemplation were that the Republican Party just needed to be put to rest.  A new party needed to be created, one that better represented conservatives and rural voters much more accurately.  I think Trump should make a point and win his remaining primary victories, but that he should then just start his own party—likely a continuation of the Reform Party for which he, Pat Buchannan and Ross Perot were a part of in the past.  Even Rob Portman was a part of the Reform Party when he ran for the congressional seat he took over in 1993—I know that because he was going to the same meetings I was—I knew him back then.  It’s time for a fresh start and a completely new political philosophy not rooted in the failures of the past.  A return to the Party of Reagan is not enough for me. I want something better than what Abraham Lincoln was the head of.

Regardless of how many delegates Trump has, the #NEVERTRUMP people have shown that they will not behave themselves and unite behind him—which they should do.  So they need to be destroyed as a movement.  We need to have a head to head election with Hillary, Paul Ryan, and Donald Trump.  Trump as everyone knows by now has a solid 30% support base no matter what.  In a three-way race, that almost gets him an assured victory.  I don’t believe Hillary will be able to get 50% of a vote in any election—especially with the troubles she has, and there is no way Ryan beats Trump.  I think it’s obvious that given a choice in a three-way race it’s not Republicans that will be split.  Kasich as it stands now is similar to Hillary in politics, Cruz with Ryan, and then there is Trump who is about 7 to 8% ahead of everyone else routinely.  That is the number nobody is talking about, and it would give Trump a victory in a three-way race without question.  So why not?  If we don’t have this showdown now—voters will continue to be tricked into voting for the stuffed caricature of an elephant—and that’s just not fair to them.

The only advantage for Trump to win the nomination from the Republican Party is to tap into the funds to run a national campaign.  However, Bernie Sanders has shown what people are willing to do to fund a campaign, and Trump has more access to funds from his fans than any political candidate has in the history of politics.  I wouldn’t fault Trump for taking $10 million dollar donations from his friends—like Carl Icahn and others to win a general election.  I think he has a better chance of winning as a third-party candidate than as head of the Republican Party with all the inner back stabbing that will take place even if he wins the nomination outright.  So he should just leave and let them flail on the vine rudderless.   The Republican Party doesn’t deserve Trump and they certainly don’t deserve me and the many voters who are sick and tired of the establishment passivity toward Democrats.

To all the #NEVERTRUMPS, I don’t want to be in a political party with you people. I want nothing to do with your stupidity.  I’m happy to have it out in a general election in a three-way race and see what happens after the smoke clears.  What has to happen is a major philosophic shift in political philosophy—the standard mode of operation just won’t be acceptable.  I have always supported the Reform Party, I did when Ross Perot ran in 1992 and in 1996, and I supported Trump and Buchannan when they toyed with the idea in 1999.  The reason that the election between Bush and Gore was so close in 2000 was literally that people had to pick between one piece of shit and another.  Which one was better—nobody knew and the country was split right down the middle.  Bush was not a good president, and then the GOP thought to offer us John McCain, and Mitt Romney. 

They are just stupid—rooting for the GOP is like cheering on the Cincinnati Bengals to win a Super Bowl.  They just don’t have the ability to get to the big game—let alone win.  So let’s just drop them once and for all.  Even if Trump secures the nomination with a win in California—he should still go third-party so that the Republicans can be put in a museum with all the other stuffed animals.  They are guaranteed losers who will continue down that path until they are taken out of the game.  And the time to do that is now-before they do any more damage.  Basically, either the GOP brings in fresh blood, or we dump the party, change the name, and have something else to represent conservative values.  Not “progressive” conservative values like many of these #NEVERTRUMPs believe (Paul Ryan, Mitt Romney, John McCain, ETC.)  But something all together different and more representative of the rural inhabitants of this country—I’m at the point in 2016 of its either Trump for president or nothing for me.  Hillary is not even a factor.  She can’t even beat an old communist lover.  She is not as formidable as the media wants you to believe.

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.

When the Train Horn Blows: Heroin addiction in Butler County, Ohio–NO NEW TAXES!

We live near a railroad and deep in the night, trains let out their horns announcing that it is approaching a place where it intersects with the road.  The road I live on is rural compared to most in Butler County and it’s a dead-end within a heavily wooded area.  My wife is a housewife so she’s home most of the time and has studied this behavior for years so she knows with some certainty that when the train lets out it’s whistle—not always—but often enough—that the signal has been given to pick up the packages that were thrown off the train near that particular intersection—day and night.  Within those packages are smuggled drugs and other villainous items carried over vast distances by small time traffickers who don’t want to risk the larger shipments through the highway system by tractor-trailer.

My wife and I have some experience with this stuff—we got ourselves into a lot of trouble in Mason, Ohio several years back when we exposed a drug network of marijuana distribution for which the police department was involved in.  Of course the media didn’t want to cover the story because they viewed us as nosy busy bodies poking into other people’s business.  Even the mayor at the time was involved—I sent him video of the drug transactions when the police failed to act—and it just caused us more trouble, not less.  You can’t do much when the law is working with organized crime to sell drugs to a suburbanite neighborhood.  If the law refuses to help good people, the actions at that point are very limited.  Now 16 years later the social trend is even worse, and more libertarian.  Drug tolerance has established, first in our education system, then through our media outlets—movies, video games, and music—then political acceptance of it and the obvious side money that can be made by turning eyes away from the crimes, a landscape of drug use that has made Butler County, Ohio one of the most ravaged drug infested areas of our country—more people die of heroin overdoses than of anything else.  It’s the biggest killer that nobody wants to talk about—because so many people are associated with a little bit of guilt in letting it happen.

As I sit on my porch and watch pick-up trucks drive by my house after retrieving the shipments down by the railroad tracks I get more than a little frustrated.  The law protects those punks from people like me, but the law doesn’t protect me from them.  They are free to bring the vile influence of drugs into my community because nobody wants to stop them.  The police only care when they want to make headlines with a drug bust.  The politicians don’t want to admit that there is a problem, and society loves to get “high” off narcotics—everything from alcohol to heroine—with marijuana use making up the muddy middle.  If there were any justice in the world we’d have a legal system where I could be deputized to just go round-up all these bastards and stop the flow from external outlets—since the police won’t or can’t do it.  I’d do it gladly.   Then if we would defund any public school that takes a soft stance on drug consumption—we might start to turn the tide on the user end.  If a teacher gets caught promoting drugs in any way—they should be fired and the school they worked for penalized with reduced funding.  And anybody caught promoting drugs in a social context should be ridiculed to the ends of the earth.   Here’s why according to the Journal News of Butler County.

The MHARS board has determined it needs about $3.5 million more a year to deal with addictions. Taxpayers already agreed to fund more mental health services by approving a five-year, 1-mill mental health levy on March 15, but dealing with the county’s opiate epidemic will require more funds, officials said.

“We looked at practically addressing the opiate epidemic,” said Scott Rasmus, executive director of the MHARS board. “… It was around $3.5 million as we developed this business plan to address the opiate epidemic in a practical way in Butler County.”

More people died in Butler County from heroin-related overdoses in 2015 than suicides, traffic crashes, other accidents, homicides and undetermined causes combined, according to the Butler County Coroner’s Office.

http://www.journal-news.com/news/news/butler-county-taxpayers-could-be-paying-for-addict/nqxBn/

http://www.journal-news.com/news/news/local/butler-county-coroner-we-have-a-rampant-killer-in-/nqtFP/

http://www.journal-news.com/news/news/how-mexican-drug-cartels-move-heroin-to-butler-cou/nmmtM/

Here’s my position on this whole drug problem.  It’s fine for people to have that stupid libertarian outlook on life—that “live and let live” nonsense about if people want to smoke dope, drink themselves into oblivion, or even smoke cigarettes its their right to live as free people and do as they please—even though I can smell a cigarette from a mile away—and it does bother me.  But the moment someone asks me for money in the form of taxes, then the community has made it my business.  I didn’t vote in favor of the 1 mill mental health levy—but it passed.  And now two weeks later the MHARS board is testing the waters with this 3.5 mill levy to deal with the aftermath of this irresponsible drug use which has been promoted by just about everyone from law enforcement to our entertainment culture.  Public schools instead of tackling this issue the way they used to with slogans and marketing against drug behavior has taken a more progressive approach which has exploded the use—so they caused the problem and the only way to fix it is to reverse the trend–not to fund the net result—which is drug addiction.  Giving money to addicts isn’t compassionate, it’s equitable to flushing money right down the toilet—because next year there will be more people dying of addiction—and the year after, even more.  It will continue until our society stops promoting drug use and weak mental behavior.

The answer to the problem isn’t more money to deal with the back of the problem; we have to deal with the front.  When the train blows its whistle, a cop should be there to bust the exchange, not sit up on RT 4 browsing the internet and talking to people on their phone waiting to bust somebody for speeding.   The Sheriff’s department should do a bust of the entire county and scoop up everyone known as a drug dealer.  Of course they’ll say that there isn’t room in their jails for all those people—which is why they’d say that they haven’t done the job up to now.  From their perspective the 3.5 mill levy that the MHARS board is requesting is a small cost compared to the cost of incarceration.  But, right is right—I’d be more prone to support increases in a police budget if they could actually arrest people and put them in jail. If people commit crimes—and drug dealing is a crime—then they should be in jail.

I have no sympathy for drug use or their dealings—I hate both the supplier and the customers.  I see no benefit to drugs, and I am certainly not a libertarian on this issue.  I don’t even like the look of people who might do drugs.  I may be the most conservative person in America on this issue and I understand that my views alone do not rule the world.  I watch the pick-up trucks with disdain as they hull their goods up from the railroad tracks secretly hoping that they will make some move against me that would allow me to confront them on a public road.  But so long as they keep their eyes forward and mind their own business, they can escape that wrath—and they do every week.  I know I am very outnumbered on this issue—and I respect the decisions of the people within my community.  We have a representative republic and decisions have been made at the ballot box to allow for our present circumstances, so I bite my tongue for the benefit of everyone.  But let me tell you this dear reader—DON’T ASK ME FOR ANY DAMN MONEY TO PAY FOR THIS SHIT!  If you want to fix the trouble—FIX IT. If the Sheriff’s department wants my help in solving the problem—I will volunteer in a heartbeat.  But don’t fund more of the problem—fix it at its source.  That is the only way forward.  And if you want to know where to start, listen for the train whistles around the countryside of Butler County and watch which cars leave those areas about 15 minutes later.  That’s when you will have an easy drug bust.  Prosecuting them and putting them in a crowded jail is another matter.  But at least the paper trail of bad behavior can be established to begin to solve the massive problem that drugs in Butler County truly is.

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.

The Three Things This Year: How guns can save the lives of children

Three things happened within a year of each other which really sent me philosophically into a direction which requires a change of focus.  Five to six years ago I had identified that socialists were running our education system in America and that private sector influence needed to be introduced to root them out from dominating the minds of our children.  It took half a decade but now those discussions are becoming mainstream—they are discussed openly when prior they were considered conspiracy.  We are now on a path within 15 years to correcting the behavior.  It won’t be fast enough to help all the poor children raised currently, but it may be to help the next generation.  Nothing happens fast when so many people are involved, but first you have to properly identify the problem. That is what I do; I identify problems then use dynamic resources to repair static patterns.  CLICK TO REVIEW.  I have done that all of my adult life—so I am always on the lookout for the next needed priority. I found it actually while traveling around Japan on business. 

For a culture that had been plucked clean of the right to defend themselves first through a dominating emperor than under occupied presence—the Japanese were still very much in love with their ancient samurai culture and it made me ask myself why America had allowed itself to step away from its own cowboy culture so willingly—because I see cowboys and samurai as being symbolically similar to our respective cultures.  Japan was conducting its society very well with some basic foundations of philosophy established during the feudal period of their history rooted in Shinto Buddhism.  The other thing that happened to me was that my two daughters were both pregnant within a few months of each other and I have this nagging feeling that the world needs to be fixed so that those grandchildren can have a shot at a good life—and I’m not going to let them down.  It is my mission in life—from a position of philosophy. Then I saw this old Mattel commercial for a cap gun that the toy maker made for our society supplied to me by some friends within a group that I adore and belong to, the Cowboy Fast Draw Association.  This little commercial really says everything.

Boys who grew up in the period when they could actually buy that toy gun and use it, didn’t grow up killing their friends and neighbors.  They are now our senior citizens and they are some of the best people on planet earth. They are mildly affluent, respectful, hard-working, and they vote most often–participating in our Constitutional Republic.  The culture that made them who they were has been attacked by progressives from every level of life with quite a lot of ferocity.  Progressives have attacked our American love of guns and our Christian roots that based our society into foundations centering on the Ten Commandments—which to me are similar to the “9 Ways of the Samurai” established in The Book of Five Rings.  What we used to be before progressive instigation made good responsible people and one of the greatest countries on earth, into a thing of scorn.  What we have allowed ourselves to become is something of a nightmare.  CLICK HERE to read about a recent trip to Wal-Mart as just one example. 

I didn’t worry about it too much when I was raising my daughters.  My wife and I grew up under the optimism of Ronald Reagan and had our children at the end of his presidency and as George Bush took over in 1988.  The world was in pretty good shape, communism had fallen in the Soviet Union, and Clint Eastwood was the top box office star in Hollywood.  Then Bill Clinton became president and we watched our country fall to all the socialist hippies left over from the 1960s protests.  By then it was too late.  In our family we stayed very traditional as the world around us fell to progressivism and by the time our two children were married, I had committed myself to healing my nation through philosophy with this blog site—volumes of writing that I provide for free not for any hope of financial gain, but to actually help our country stay solvent by bringing up topics for discussion that nobody wants to talk about.  It is a commitment to a survivable human philosophy for living in an emerging century where we either survive, or destroy ourselves following the Vico cycle. 

Watching that little video about the Mattel .45 cap gun reinforced in me that an important ingredient to our American philosophy has been purposely destroyed by progressive propaganda and that we must renew it in our culture—perhaps for the first time.  I’m not suggesting that America return to a time when women and people of color couldn’t vote—but that the chivalry that was introduced through mythology within the American western needs to be a staple that holds our society together.  In Japan, the samurai culture goes a long way to assisting them in just about every aspect of their society.  Our counterpart is the American Cowboy and I intend to make it my mission in life to restore it to its rightful place—with gradual infusion of my brand of philosophy. The first time through I don’t think we understood the magic that made America exceptional.  But now we have a much clearer idea through the benefit of hindsight.  We have seen what the progressives in our society intended for us—and that is the enemy of capitalism.  As much as I liked the Teddy Roosevelt “Rough Rider” presidential persona, he was a progressive that established the anti-trust elements of an over-extended government and the roots of that failure need to be reversed all the way back to the period of 1870 to 1890, legally and morally.

It was in those years—after the Civil War was out-of-the-way and mankind was free for the first time in its long history—that giant steps toward human endeavor took place.  No nation on earth was superior to America and finally the philosophy of the American Way had taken root to free the slaves.  Not everyone was on board yet, but the laws of the land dictated the social evolution.  There was still war among the collectivist cultures of the Indian against the frontiersmen—and that victory went to the individually based cowboys who settled westward expansion with great emphasis on personal freedom. While some may look to what the Indian lost and their reverence toward nature as tragedies what a nation gained was the type of society that could be built under capitalism—and it was in those years when railroads connected the nation and cities rose on the wealth created under Adam Smith’s capitalism that the most opportunities known to humankind showed itself for the first time truly.

Progressives have put an emphasis on the destruction of the Indians—(which they call Native Americans) because the nomads living in North America at the time of Columbus’s arrival reflected many of the mystical elements of a progressive culture—a Kantian philosophy rooted in blind trust in spirits, nature, and the individual’s insignificance among the heavens.  While the Navaho sand paintings of the North American southwest were nearly identical to the practices of Tibetan monks in eastern China it never seemed to raise an eyebrow—whereas it should have—the many hours of delicate work that went into making such paintings were routinely and ceremoniously destroyed to reflect the point of the art in the first place.  Once created into beautiful and complex pictures they were then mixed up into a collective powder to return to the earth as “one” element.  The ritual is of course to emphasize that we are all just grains of sand that make up a beautiful life together but a reminder that at the end of our days we return to the earth to become part of the greater cosmos.  It’s the old question, are we the light bulb or the light—from which do we associate?  Does light come from the light bulb or does it come from the energy that flows through it?  The collectivist says it’s the energy that flows through the bulb.  The individualist says that without the bulb, there is no way for the energy to emerge into this world as a captured element.  This is the philosophy of the modern progressive  who hates the light but loves the light that comes from it and is why they love gay sex, abortion, orgies, broken families, dysfunctional relationships and other diabolical practices—because they don’t associate themselves as individuals (light bulbs), but as part of the “greater” universe.

Western expansion put these two philosophies at war with each other and the Indians lost.  The Indian way of life pushed westward until they ran out of ocean, and only compassion preserved their culture for the sake of memory.  It was the great war between individualism and collectivism and it finally happened in North America from 1800 essentially to 1900.  The Indians even though they were credited with being the native people of North America were not, they only arrived a bit before white Europeans fleeing the kings of the Bible thumping inquisitions—and adopted the settlements of a long forgotten sophisticated race of people who settled and traded around North America.  Evidence points clearly to the fact that more archaeological and anthropological study needs to occur before any species of Native American population can be properly identified—if at all.  CLICK TO REVIEW.  So for the sake of this discussion, we shall now and forever call them Indians. The Indians as nice and noble as they were lost the fight and the individual frontiersmen and their guns won the West articulated through the mythology of the silver screen western.

Young boys who grew up on those westerns and the women who fell in love with them, married and had children, found that within the values established by the American western the foundation concepts of a thriving nation.  When a young boy could wear one of those Mattel six shooting cap guns on their hip and play at being a western hero like they saw in the movies and on television they grew up to be good husbands, hard workers, and generally good neighbors.  There were imperfections of course, but the basics were foundations which helped create the strongest economy in the world with the greatest GDP of any nation.  Ronald Reagan essentially restored some love for the American western during his presidency and Clint Eastwood made a lot of money producing and directing them, mainly the great Pale Rider and Unforgiven.

Pale Rider has always haunted me; it is about two ways of looking the same problem.  There isn’t an Indian in the entire story—it’s all about land rights and who has a claim to them—which is a rather strong premise for a typical western—the protection of private property.  The film is about the argument of two aspects of capitalism—settlers looking for gold so they can get rich and live a fresh life on the frontier.  The villains are crony capitalists who have industrialized the gold mining process with strip mining and the heroes are the little village of gold miners working the creeks panning for gold in a very traditional and non evasive way.  Of course the industrialists are trying to force the underdogs off their land so they can mine it in the stripping process they are utilizing upstream.  Clint Eastwood as a hired gun is brought on to protect the underdogs from the vicious strip miners.  Both villains and heroes in the story are capitalists—certainly not collectivists.  It was the perfect western to see at the end of the Reagan presidency which gave rise to people like Donald Trump.  The movie was essentially about “responsible” laissez-faire capitalism and that brand of economic method is only possible with a culture that can defend itself from the natural greed that sometimes overtakes the overly ambitious.

The Indians and other mystics of the “East” have decided that material acquisition in this life is not important—which is essentially what their sand paintings were all about—the futility of achievement.  What they were able to do was beautiful, but that nobody should fall in love with the products of their imagination—that at some point we all return to the dust and become of the earth.   Progressives to this day still believe such things and their philosophy have virtually destroyed our human species.  That needs to stop and the only way is to return to a period before their incursion of faulty philosophy.

That Mattel commercial spoke of a time when young boys walked a bit taller, strived to be a bit better, and desired to be a good guy with a gun fighting bad guys who use force and collective might to incite tyranny upon the world.  The cowboy and their six guns spoke of justice that anybody who practiced with it could utilize to keep peace and order in the universe.  It was a philosophy that evolved under the guidance of American Old West mythology but instilled more than just history into inquiring minds.  The six-gun brought value to our society and kids couldn’t wait to use them so they could learn to grow up and be the kind of man who people wanted to hire, and the type of man women wanted to marry—and the type of man who their children wanted to grow up to become.  Progressives have attacked that premise, and it’s time to reverse the damage.

So that will be the focus of this new stage, which I’ve said before will put a light on the aspects of our culture known as the American Gunfighter.  If it takes five years to start changing minds toward guns and the American West, my new little granddaughter will just be entering her first year of kindergarten.  15 years after that, she’ll likely be starting to look to start a family of her own—and when she arrives at that time I want her to have a lot better options than she has right now.  She doesn’t need to deal with “he/she girly men, lazy losers, and drug addicts.  She deserves a real man, and obviously in our culture that starts with establishing respect for a gun and the people who properly teach young minds how to use them.  The tradition of passing down a gun from father to son or cinematic hero to a hungry audience is important.  And the use of the gun to protect capitalism from collective enterprise is a key to understanding America.  For that reason, we were a better country in 1870 than we are in 2016—and to return to that level of awareness; we need to make the gun, especially the single action six-gun, more a part of our national mythology. 

It is in that very simple symbol a major key to solving many of our contemporary problems, and it is time to express it in a way that makes philosophic sense to a society that has been flamboyantly lied to by progressives.  To me, the heart of America is in that Mattel commercial.  And it’s time that we properly defend it from enemies foreign and domestic.  Japan has been through a whole lot more than we have as a country and they have held to their traditions.  We have a lot more to be proud of, and there is no reason we shouldn’t hold our traditions dear to our hearts.  That was the question and answer I had while leaving Tokyo recently, and the samurai culture that I had observed.  I learned all about the West by traveling the East—and the clarity for me couldn’t be more profound.

Rich Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

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

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