Rich Hoffman's Blog, page 374

The Hilarious Hillary: A trip down memory lane–body bags, scandals, and lies

We knew it was coming, so the news was sort of flat, but Hillary Clinton is running for president which is evidence of just how terrible the Democratic Party really is. Hillary with all her scandals and baggage is the best candidate for President of the United States that the Democrats can put forth. Think about just how pathetic that is for a moment���������������������������������..

On the Doc Thompson Show heard on The Blaze Radio Network they had some fun with the topic which I found funny. They compared Hillary Clinton to the 80s rock group Poison that used to be all the rage. Poison used to fill stadiums with screaming fans, but now thirty years later they are still together but playing in much smaller venues. It was some funny radio and held within its criticism of Hillary a grain of truth that is true for the entire Democratic Party. Their message is tired and worn out. Her message only has appeal to people looking for government freebies���which was quite clear by her really slow and overly dramatic launch video. She has no message except the same tired old communist banter of playing the poor against the rich and suggesting that government cover the balance through wealth-redistribution.

The worst of Hillary Clinton is that she is completely incompetent. She has accomplished nothing in all her years of public service except leave in her wake controversy and betrayal. Even if it is true that she and her husband played a part in all the dead bodies surrounding their lives���it is beyond refute that she has personally known and associated with some of the worst people in the known world���and has been very arrogant about it. When she has held positions of direct responsibility, such as her fairly recent stint as Secretary of State, she fumbled epically on a grand stage and thought she could smile her way through it. Her time as Secretary of State was so bad that she had to have her own email server to hide her faults and give her control to delete all her correspondences showing evidence of her vast debacles particularly the Benghazi incident.

And here is a woman who has been an enabler of one of the most sexist womanizers ever to hit the public stage who wants to be the first female president just because she happens to have the physiology of it. She wants to represent the freedom of women, and to epitomize the women���s movement���which all she has really accomplished is to show the world what a truly dysfunctional household looks like. Hillary Clinton is a joke as a mother, a joke as a grandmother, a joke as a wife, a joke as a politician, a joke as a person, and yet she wants to be president with no credentials or competency shown just because she���s a female.

Well one thing is for sure, it will be an interesting race. I have serious doubts that Hillary will be able to pack an arena just as the rock band Poison would struggle now. Their messages are more of nostalgia than of substance. Hillary will have to appear relevant with a lot of smoke and mirrors, and a lot of help from the media that wants desperately to see a progressive return to the White House. But in live events, Hillary won���t drive much passion which is why she is doing this cross-country tour trying to appear like she is one of the ���people��� posing for photos that will help her market herself as a ���common folk.��� Her life is a lie and people see that. People won���t line up to see a lie, or a has-been. And for the Democrats they are truly in trouble. If Hillary is the best that they have, they might as well be extinct. Because with her at the helm once again���they will be.

Rich Hoffman

��CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

Listen to The Blaze Radio Network by CLICKING HERE.

Why Individualism is not Selfish: Refuting critics of Ayn Rand with the work of Joseph Campbell

Watching the below segment of The Daily Show��featuring a question intended to be sarcastic regarding Ayn Rand it came to my mind that its time to make a legitimate argument against the general sentiment of today���s average political centralist, and Democrat. The segment attacked Ayn Rand���s philosophy in favor of self-interest over altruism by placing candidates running for president currently in alignment with the work of the controversial writer as a way to indirectly associate them as representatives of meanness. Politics in 2015 have been moved so far to the political left after over 100 years in argument in favor of altruism and collectivism, that today���s centralist would have been considered a radical left-winger in yesterday���s world���the world where America produced the Greatest Generation. So it is clearly time to re-evaluate the situation as Ayn Rand���s work was created on the heels of the greatest generation as the radical communists and extreme leftists were making themselves known���which today is the new standard. People are so confused as to what the proper behavior is for their society, that they no longer know what is up, down, left or right. They only react to the feelings and temperament of contemporary society shaped by years of chaos and wrecked philosophy.

The biggest attack against Ayn Rand is her philosophy which features a priority on self-interest. For generations of people raised within strict religious leanings featuring altruism as a sign of goodness, and a political system built on wealth-redistribution backing their inner mentality shaped by those same religious motivations the question has failed to be asked or answered as to whether or not we should help the poor and destitute. The comment was simply made that we should because it���s good���but good was never properly defined���so a valueless assumption was required to accept the proclamation which then constitutes the typical Democratic voting behavior. There should have been a sought after proven answer framing the cause of what makes people poor to begin with. But there wasn���t, only a kind of primitive belief similar to the tribes of yesteryear who believed that a rain dance would bring rain to their dried up crops. What factors make an individual poor? That is a question that deserves an answer such as why won���t my car start? Well, for the car, it might be a low battery, a bad starter, the car may be out of gas���those types of things. But in essence it makes logical sense���there is a cause and an effect. However, for the poor person, there is no attempt to designate a cause because the assumption is based on faith that some mythical gods have granted advantages to some while denying opportunity to others. While this was true in Medieval Europe, America was an invention to out-grow those limitations driven by philosophy which challenged the previous vantage point of victim hood.

The rest of the world largely driven by philosophies of collectivism, as they had been for millennia the last several thousand years worshipping kings and gods putting the sanctity of their nationality before their individual rights have set the stage for our current dilemmas in politics. America formed with an emphasis on individuality and rights as opposed to sacrifice. The economical means��of this nation was capitalism���driven by individual need and desire. In America money was created not dispatched to the population through a top down hierarchy from kings and a ruling class. The rest of planet earth functioned from classic collectivism whereas America was experimenting with a practice specific to individual value using money as a measurement of productive enterprise. In Europe, Russia, Africa and the rest of Asia the general philosophy of those regions is that things happen to you due to an ancient belief that some god was in charge and that people were just along for the ride through life. In America, even though it was formed by religious men, they sought to run their nation by rational decisions conducted by men for the higher moral purpose of goodness���and that goodness eventually benefited God. The economical means to measure that goodness was money���because it was the only way to guarantee that good products purchased by individual self-interest would bring to the surface the best and brightest of our society. Capitalism couldn���t prevent people from wanting to cheat and take short cuts to wealth, but generally, a free society is able to reject the services of an organization they deem unworthy���and could vote with their dollars.

Trickle down economics such as what works best in America takes into account that not all people work hard, or are creative, but those who do and are���create opportunities for everyone. Those who take the most risk and have the most skin in the game generally make the most money as opposed to those most highly connected to the political structure of a ruling class. Over time, Washington D.C. has elected themselves the type of power that the ruling classes of Europe still enjoy���and have always benefited from. But those politicians do not represent the essence of America���or the philosophy which emerged from the rapid benefits which exploded from capitalism���s American experiment. That is the reason for the current issues of political corruption and the cries of the people for European style socialism, and communism. Under this corruption, communism has been as attractive to young people as it has been in Europe where peasants have no other means of stepping out of poverty and living equally to the richest of their nation. America has been and continues to be a place where anybody who works hard can brush shoulders with the very rich and powerful. In America classes are not divided as they are in Europe as upper, middle, and lower���they are divided by those who work hard and those who don���t���at least traditionally. Slowly over time as the nation has moved so far to the radical left, more European influence has won the day as opposed to the righteousness of the American experiment.

After witnessing all these elements several writers emerged to chronicle the pros and cons of what had occurred during the first two hundred years of American experience. One of course was Ayn Rand who has run up against the classic opposition such as what was seen in the Daily Show episode���where her announcement that self-interest is what actually leads to morality was considered preposterous viewed through the lens of the classic European progressive model. But another writer whom I think is much more important than Ayn Rand did at the same time much broader work which arrived at essentially the same conclusions by comparing all the mythologies and religions of the world and came up with the now popular term, ���Follow your bliss.���

As Ayn Rand was writing The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, Joseph Campbell was writing The Hero with a Thousand Faces. These books were uniquely American and have turned the literary world upside down challenging thousands and thousands of years of human thought. Campbell unlike Rand is much more inclusive in his comparative studies. He has a reverence for many progressive leaders uttering insight from the early 20th century, like Nietzsche, Jung, Joyce, Mann, Steinbeck and many others whom he read incessantly then compared them to his vast encyclopedia of knowledge of the world���s religions. His conclusions were that every individual on the face of planet earth needed to ���follow their bliss��� meaning their own internal call to living. They had to listen with an individual���s ear to the calls of their own life���s adventures. This was really revolutionary work done by Campbell as he was conducting it during the Red Decade in the presence of extreme left-winged radicals and open communists. Yet he took a path to scholarship that was unique to him and let the facts come in as he analyzed them���and his report was what is likely the most important book of the previous century and so far of the 21st. The Hero with a Thousand Faces explains why Atlas Shrugged is so powerful to so many people.

The Hero of a Thousand Faces would not have been written by a lettered academic at Oxford or any other major institution. Joseph Campbell led a life of unique individuality and his scholarship is a direct product of a very unusual life remarkably free of social strings conducting his thoughts and conclusions. His life���s work essentially became the Star Wars saga which is currently unleashing upon the world brand new updated religions and philosophies. George Lucas himself will declare that he could not have made Star Wars without the influence of Joseph Campbell. In Campbell���s work the individual has much more value over the collective���as described in the Navaho legend of the Twin War Gods who were on a quest to meet their father the Sun. They had to leave their village on a grand adventure as their people were being attacked by monsters. Everyone had tried just about everything and nobody had a solution, so the Twin War Gods had to travel in a direction nobody else had yet tried and endured a number of trial and tribulations to bring the boon of their discovery to their people.

There is no politics in Campbell���s work. His admires include radical leftists like Jerry Garcia from the Grateful Dead to Bill Moyers from the very left leaning PBS network. Campbell just let the facts speak about the nature of reality, and he was uniquely qualified to surmise the details through stories of this own. It is the clear distinction that Campbell makes through a lifetime of scholarship that it is the individual that moves the world and not the sacrifice of individuals to the collective good. Although sacrifice has been the mode of behavior that has driven most of society, it is the individual following their own unique bliss that brings the boons to society. Society does not bring boons to the individual. It is a fantasy that a collectivist hierarchy can bring joy and wonder to people of differing needs. The best way for people to serve each other is to allow their own lives to live to their own potential for the aims of their individual achievements. By doing that they create things that the rest of the world needs. Joseph Campbell���s outlook is uniquely American, just as Ayn Rand was. Both were authors of works that shook the foundations of thought, and their conclusions are here to stay leaving in their wake the destruction of the old modes of operation. Collectivism and religions of sacrifice are a way of the past that is in quick decline. The Daily Show in their presentation against Rand knows it. That much is evident by the type of people running for president in 2016. On one hand you have the collectivist Hillary Clinton representing the socialists and Democrats, then on the other, at least two candidates directly formed by the freedom loving Tea Party���the type of people who openly love the work of Ayn Rand.

As much as many from the old European world would like to see a continuation of their brand of collectivism, it is writers like Ayn Rand and Joseph Campbell who are shaping the world of tomorrow���and that is why their popularity is increasing while the desire for extremists like Karl Marx is declining. The weak and lazy still look to Marx, but there is no ���Following your Bliss��� in communism. You do what you are told, and that is not the way to lifetime fulfillment���just stifled misery and suffering due to unlived��lives encumbered by sacrifice to speculative assumptions. Capitalism allows individuals to ���Follow their Bliss��� which is a long storied concept that started for Campbell in the radical troubadours of the High Middle Ages, (1100-1350AD��) from France. They were some of the first to challenge the collectivism of arranged marriages and sacrifice of the self to the many. America inherited from them the concept of courtly love and chivalry which eventually found their way into our western mythology. Before the troubadours marriages were all arranged for the benefits of a collective need and the individual was looked upon as something to be despised, and vanquished out of preservation for the many. But it never worked and never will work because whenever the collective is served values are what is sacrificed, because value is an individual assessment���not a collective one. Once values are sacrificed, a society crumbles into nothing to create the four-part��cycle of Giambattista��Vico–the age of gods, the age of heroes, the age of man and the age of chaos���more expressively described as theocracy, aristocracy, democracy and anarchy. Joseph Campbell and Ayn Rand proposed to Americans the notion that civilization should get off the circular highway going nowhere in between the aristocracy and democracy portions of that cycle and to emerge independent of collective influence toward an unknown horizon. By action out of each and every person���s ���bliss��� individuals would then do the job they were created for in the first place���and this is what gives the old world the anger toward Rand that they have���that management of those individual lives does not come from the church, or the political order���but the very essence of the soul encapsulated within every living thing. To grapple with such a thing means that society at large need to understand what a soul is, and how it functions within them. And to find that out, one cannot be told by a parent, a grandparent, a teacher or a lover what it is���you have to find it out for yourself. For the timid and weak, this is a scary prospect. For the brave and valiant���it is the essence of adventure. For society���it is through adventurers that new things come to sustain all life. It is in the timid that all things decay. The timid should not be cast aside, but should follow in the path of the brave toward a destiny their lack of courage would have never allowed them to behold otherwise. And the brave should allow those in their wake to follow their example without robbing them of the treasures of discovery���taken on an individual basis. Not everyone can slay a dragon, or race a car through danger, but everyone can find discoveries under a common rock and a path paved by their own intentions in their own way.

The answer to what makes wealth is found in the adventurer and the cure to the poor is to spark in them the essence of life���and for them to follow their own bliss instead of becoming dependent off a collective society. Once they find themselves dependent on others, they find themselves either poor, or like the classic European peasant���begging for bread and water by the political elites. And among them, there will always be other weaklings like Hillary Clinton who desires the old way of Europe so that meaning to their meaningless lives can have some measure of fulfillment. The way to make the poor into the rich is to get them to follow their bliss���and that is what Ayn Rand���s novels were all about. It is always why collectivists of all sizes and shapes hate her���because they can see within her work the end of their line of thought. But as to the science of why Ayn Rand works, all one need to do is look toward Joseph Campbell���s The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Heroes are not collectivists, and they don���t sacrifice themselves aimlessly for the needs of the many unless they discover that it is part of their bliss to do so���a bliss arrived at through their own individuality.

Rich Hoffman

��CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

Listen to The Blaze Radio Network by CLICKING HERE.

Jurassic World: A new step in science and philosophy

I���m not kidding, I am ecstatic about the opening of the new Jurassic Park franchise film Jurassic World. I may actually be more excited than that���but needless to say, I can���t wait. I love those movies deeply because they embody questions very relevant to our times regarding philosophy, science, morality, and economy that are not explored more effectively than in any other venue. It was Jurassic Park that really introduced over twenty years ago the concept of DNA replication to bring to life extinct species. A lot of science has been unraveled since then really demanding this latest edition���where scientists needing a ratings boost in park attendance make a hybrid dinosaur that gets loose and destroys the fully realized Jurassic World���the dreamy creation of the former John Hammond whose dream of a fully realized dinosaur park is finally made into a reality.

I loved the Michael Crichton books when they first came out, Jurassic Park and then The Lost World. When the movie hit in 1993 I made a big deal about it and took my little girls at the time to see it on opening night. They still remember that movie as their first theater experience. For this last Christmas my youngest daughter gave me a Jurassic Park t-shirt as a present because it is something that is specifically our thing. To this day she loves biology, botany, and paleontology because of her childhood spawned from the first Jurassic Park movie. A few years later when The Lost World came out I drug my wife���s side of the family, something like 25 people who had been gathering at a lake house on Nolan Lake to Elizabethtown, Kentucky to see the opening night in the only theater within fifty miles of the remote residence. The family often gathered at that lake for Memorial Day. In that group of people are a lot of science lovers, particularly my father-in-law who held multiple degrees in geology and was a school teacher���so they all wanted to see it. We packed up in several cars and made a pilgrimage into town to watch The Lost World. My kids were older at the time and had an absolute blast with their cousins.���� I don���t think they ever forgot the experience.

When Dr. Grant returned to Jurassic Park III��my kids were in high school and I let them take a day off to go see the movie on opening day. Dr. Grant was always my favorite character so I was excited and my kids were excited because I was. It was a marvelous experience. The movies declined in quality a bit from the first one, especially as Steven Spielberg moved away from direct involvement with the franchise as the director, but they are still good regardless. Each movie is like the approach to a theme park at the beginning of the day when the sun is out, the air is cool, and eagerness fills the mind. There is nothing quite like the morning approach to a Orlando park whether it be Universal Studios, Disney, Sea World, a day at the local zoo, a thrill park, there is magic in the air that is unique to the human experience emerging from such a creation. Each Jurassic Park film embodies that same type of optimism where act one is filled with that type of energy. Act two in the movies becomes something of a Hitchcock type mystery where problems of clashing philosophies set up act three. In that third act all the optimism from act one gets tossed out the window and the films become a haunted house experience where a new thrill is around every turn that is wrapped up nicely at the end with heroics and fanfare. They are fun in the least, but at their best they ask deep questions very relevant to modern science���and they drive advancements in technology.

In my family we all loved playing Jurassic Park Builder on XBox and later on our cell phones. My kids play those types of simulators often and that love started with seeing the movies and dreaming of what it would really be like to see a fully realized Jurassic Park. So it will be wonderful to see what a Jurassic World will look like in the movie, where the whole island originally conceived in the very first film has finally been built into a fully functioning amusement park. I overlook the obvious attacks on capitalism which always spawn in the second act as a simple plot device to ask ���what if.��� If not for capitalism there wouldn���t be anything relevant about Jurassic Park so without it, there wouldn���t be any dinosaurs or topic to contemplate. Rather the theme of the movies is what happens when undisciplined use of capitalism leads people astray, which is what happens in Jurassic World.

As cool as all the dinosaurs are, the cost of running such a large theme park is excessive so they need increased attendance just to cover their costs. So they invent a new dinosaur which is wrong in so many different ways. But what is to stop human kind from doing such a thing. Very soon genetic research which was in its infancy in the first Jurassic Park movie, will allow people to alter themselves into whatever they want to be. All you have to do is manipulate your DNA code and we can all be taller, faster, and prettier���whatever we wish. The same topic of conversation is emerging in the discussions of giving birth once again to extinct species of animals. What is to stop zoos from making a wholly mammoth when they can change it into something that has never before existed. What are the limits in playing God?���� Religions will say that nobody should play God, but science dictates that we should���so where is the happy medium? Those types of questions are what the Jurassic Park movies explore and leave movie goers talking about those very topics on the way home after the movie. That is why these movies are important, because they put hard science into the spotlight of what we should and should not do as a species with very advanced tools in our possession.

Needless to say, I am excited and will continue to be the closer the movie gets to a release date. There are a lot of great movies lined up for the summer, but none of them are as exciting to me as Jurassic World. Will it be as good as the first one? Probably not. Likely it will be somewhere between the second and third film���it probably won���t make as much money at the box office as Universal hopes it will, but it will still be enjoyable, and relevant. I hope it does well enough to justify another movie in the franchise, because I could watch them forever. It is always fun no matter how many times we go, to pull up to Disney World for a fresh adventure. There is always optimism in the morning before attending an amusement park. And those are the same type of emotions experienced before seeing a Jurassic Park��movie. It is one of the few films of its kind that really captures that optimism fully. That is the reason I simply can���t wait for the movie to open. When it does, I will be one of the first in line!

Rich Hoffman

��CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

Listen to The Blaze Radio Network by CLICKING HERE.

Secrets of the Moon: We are not alone, and never have been

The great danger of having the government in control of so much, particularly education, is that it makes it easy for them to conceal information that they do not wish to emerge. And this has never been more evident than in the issue over mankind���s actual origins or its relationship to the heavens. For instance, NASA recently had a press conference announcing that it would be likely that mankind would discover alien life within the next decade as seen in the video below. This was a remarkable statement by a government organization that has traditionally tried to debunk some of the wild UFO theories that have emerged throughout the years. Yet innately we all seem to understand that there is something not quite right about the stories we were given as children, and we look to the heavens as if yearning for home. We hide those yearnings behind religion and trust in government because the implications are just too terrifying to us in discovering, (or rather re-discovering) the truth. But the truth is headed in our direction quicker than mankind can deal with it and is on a collision course with destiny that none of us are ready for. Government has some idea, although it���s unlikely any one person in government has the whole story. For instance, NASA is planning on getting a manned mission to Mars by 2035 and they already have a pretty good idea what we���ll find once we get there. Just recently it was discovered that there was a vast ocean that covered the Northern Hemisphere of Mars and at a time, the red planet was very earth like. If there was water, it is likely that some form of life was in it. It is even possible that a whole life cycle of intelligent life rose and fell well before humans were even mating with (angels) in the time before the Deluge.

The most suspicious giveaway of this massive cover-up is the fact that mankind has not returned to the moon since the 1970s. Our journeys to the moon came to a sudden stop never to return or even send a probe. When the Apollo missions were over, everything just came to an end. NASA moved into a phase of launching shuttles and building an ���International Space Station��� content to float above the earth, but never to venture out too far from our home planet. The moon was strangely off limits suddenly.

The moon is pretty easy to see and amateur astronomers have been looking at it for many years. No matter where we are on earth, we all see the same side of it, never seeing anything on the back side as the same face always gazes at us���yet human beings have been more curious than their governments have been comfortable with. They have seen strange events happening on the moon and speculate as to why or how. But the real evidence that gives away the mystery is that nobody has returned, and if they have, it was a secret not disclosed to the public. When mankind does return to these other planets we���ll confirm the long-held suspicion that we are not alone. We were never alone, in fact, our galaxy is teeming with life���most of it very primitive, some of it advanced, but we will share with that advanced life an origin story that will be difficult for all of us. It will shatter our religious convictions and a perceptual understanding of reality���so for now our governments protect our fragile emotions with the thin veil of concealment like children still wanting to believe in Santa Clause. We want to believe in the Leaky theories of evolution, in the hand of God shaping us into our present form. But what we���ll discover very soon is that God was not some deity in the heavens but only part of the story of a race of people who came to earth from someplace else and made the world into the image of their homeland. Likely some of these relics will be found on Mars which will finally put all the speculation to rest. And before Mars was settled, there are other home worlds some of which still host life and have with them the origin stories what will shatter our current perceptual knowledge and leave mankind reeling with panic. The government isn���t all sinister, just filled with human frailty and an understanding that such revelations will shake the very foundations of society to its very core���and they have an innate desire to stay in charge and protect their ���flock��� from such trauma. But, it���s too late. It���s coming whether or not we want it to.

It is common in government schools for children to ridicule other children for believing in UFOs even though the evidence in support of alien life far surpasses the official press releases provided by government. The government has shown that it will lie collectively about small things, like Benghazi, or the true nature of a deal with Cuba and lifting sanctions with Iran���so it is quite a mystery why anybody would be so willing to believe the government in regard to alien life. But in public schools the government helps shape the consensus of learning. Children are encouraged to keep up with all the latest trends in pop culture and social concerns filling their brains with irrelevant material doomed to revision once government gets caught concealing the truth. That time is coming quick especially with independent private sector companies moving into the space race. Government will have to come clean or put a stop to free will because they can���t prevent the curious from uncovering the origins of mankind any longer. There are just too many tools available to the modern adventurer. Kids still make fun of other kids in school who dare to ask questions that have their answers outside of the latest happenings of a boy band singing the latest greatest hits. Many young minds are happy for a time to turn off their thoughts so they can feel the boobies of some girl during their adolescent years, but eventually their curiosity will catch up to them. And the evidence won���t be concealed any longer.

It wasn���t that long ago scientists���(individuals functioning under government grants) doubted that there was life anywhere but earth and that water was unusual to our planet. Now we know that Mars had an ocean���a big one and given the nature of our personal mythologies and early ���pagan��� religions, that in our background on earth there is evidence of life that was quite vast and intricate. Before there were governments in the form that we have them today, there were kingdoms and religion was used to control the minds of those within those kingdoms to serving their kings as a link to the heavens. Government has expanded this role, it is no longer just one or two monarchs sitting on a throne, but a whole class of people we are supposed to trust to manage our affairs as we work to pay our taxes to them and pick one of the few religions provided to us to focus our eye toward some version of immortality after the death of our bodies on earth. We are taught in our public schools to cattle prod our classmates into staying in the lines and not believing the strange reports of UFOs that flood in from the curious. But later, when the school days are done and government doesn���t provide answers to the strange things we see around us but to tell us to look somewhere else and keep our minds focused on some religion to answer our questions, all we have to do is look up and see ancient relics looking back at us. ��The moon is right there���yet human kind does not see it for what it really is..

The moon itself is an ancient artifact and this will be confirmed once we finally return and stay on its surface. There won���t be concealment of the truth any longer and NASA can see the day within the next few decades when this reality will occur. So they are slowly floating out to the public what is expected to be discovered, so that mankind has a chance to grapple with the implications. And those implications will shatter the religions of the world too stringent to accept the reality that we have never been alone but were only a colony on earth from a vast species that still roams the universe. And from there is the real origin story that will bring with it many new religions and a destiny not rooted in such sure footing. The strongest evidence to the fact is in what NASA or the government in general has avoided doing. The moon is so close, yet so far away. It is right there in the sky and on it is the truth���a truth we ran away from after the Apollo program. But a truth that is catching up to us faster than government can conceal the information.

Rich Hoffman

��CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

Listen to The Blaze Radio Network by CLICKING HERE.

Solar Panels at the Cincinnati Zoo: Great innovations that should be more heavily utilized

Many think that because I���m to the political right of Ted Cruz, that I don���t enjoy green technology. Contrary to the belief, I enjoy innovative technology regardless of the political sensibilities. I���m certainly not against green technology when it makes sense and is not uttered with religious-like fervor through belief in speculative science which indirectly attempts to undercut capitalist endeavors. With that said I was in for several surprises at the Cincinnati Zoo which greatly impressed me when I went there for the first time in several years in early April 2015 just as the flowers were blooming after a day of heavy rain.

I was loosely keeping track of events at my hometown zoo which I have always been proud of. My wife and I had been there so many times and never really saw any improvements so we took a break for a bit. I haven���t even driven down that particular stretch of Vine Street in at least six years, so I had no idea about the wonderful solar panels built in the new Vine Street parking lot. My wife and I have often given out season passes to the zoo during Christmas because we like to support the zoo, but we personally hadn���t gone in a while.���� My kids are all in their twenties now and our grandchildren have been too young. We have one grandson who is at the prime age, so we went with him for the first time and I was astonished by what we��had discovered at the Cincinnati Zoo.

When I was a kid I loved going to the zoo. The Cincinnati Zoo is the second oldest zoo in America and has always been considered one of the top destinations in the country. At 16 years old I went to the San Diego Zoo, which was considered the best in America in the mid 1980s but I always thought it wasn���t by much. The zoo in Cincinnati has always been something I was proud of in my home town so I was eager to share it with my grandson and now grown daughter. So I was in for a surprise when I tried to enter the parking lot that I always did when I was a child���the old one. I found I had to drive all the way around the block and park at the Vine Street entrance. I remembered that they were building a new Vine Street entrance when we came down for the Festival of Lights a half a decade ago, so I knew about the parking lot, but I had never seen the bridge that went over Vine Street or the new buildings consisting of the new heavily renovated entrance which turned out to be spectacular. That���s when we pulled in and I was astonished to see all the solar panels covering the parking lot.

I���m not a very big fan of solar panels because they take up so much space for what you get in energy feed back. However, the way that the Cincinnati Zoo utilized them was absolutely perfect; they essentially spent something around $11 million dollars to cover the parking lot for their guests dramatically cooling down the surrounding air during their intense summer season. The whole parking lot was basically a large car port which would really help visitors keep their cars cool while they enjoyed the zoo avoiding that terrible heat that often happens when a car has sat in the sun all day when visiting amusement parks as the sun beats on those cars for hours. The Cincinnati Zoo led by Mark Fisher had done something that I thought was incredibly smart with solar panel technology and found the perfect dual use. They gave their millions of yearly visitors a car port to park under while generating approximately 20% of their power needs at the zoo. Solar panels are expensive and spending $11 million to save a bit on the electric bill by itself doesn���t make much immediate sense. But improving the customer experience while doing so does, and I was extremely impressed by what the zoo had done with just the parking lot. Then we went inside.

The Cincinnati Zoo and Botanical Garden is as I said the second oldest zoo in America, just 14 months younger than the Philadelphia Zoo. On Vine Street in Avondale when the neighborhood was the premier suburb of Cincinnati in 1874 visitors entered off that classic street which extends from there to the south through the University of Cincinnati to downtown. The first thing visitors would see off that original entrance was the Reptile House which is the oldest zoo building in the United States built in��1875. So we are talking about some legitimate history here. The architect building the new entrance did a noticeably fabulous job of constructing a skyline from the vantage point of the parking lot that was consistent with the homes built around Vine Street. If I didn���t know where the zoo was, I would have thought that the new entrance was simply part of the community, and not the entrance to a major amusement park, which the Cincinnati Zoo is. It was an ascetic decision that greatly impressed me. But not as much as what the zoo had done to the original old parking lot which I noticed instantly after we had visited the new giraffe area.

Starting in 2010 through 2014 were four phases of a long-planned exhibit called Africa, which sat on 8-acres of former parking lot. A fifth phase was still under construction which would feature Nile hippos opening in 2016, but the four opened phases simply stunned me with their innovation.���� New to the zoo were these magnificent glass barriers which put little kids right up to the lions and gave the feeling of an open African savannah teeming with Africa���s most spectacular animals, like zebras, gazelles, impalas, ostriches, storks, cranes, and of course lions. It was very Jurassic Park inspired and was a massive improvement over my previous visits.

Yet even more impressive was the new Base Camp Caf�� which is rumored to be the ���greenest��� restaurant in America, which was so effective I didn���t even think about it. It sat on a bit of a hill overlooking the four phases of the African exhibit with the kind of charm and utilization found in Disney theme parks. The dining area outside of the Base Camp was vast and well suited to allow diners to watch the animals while they ate. As we ordered our food gone were the employees at the zoo from old where they were sometimes a little grumpy and acted as if they were doing you a favor by talking to you. Here were very energetic employees who knew they were in competition with other tourism dollars and they wanted our money. They were polite, helpful, and fast with an eye on quality. They had an expediter at the counter to keep food moving from a very well-staffed kitchen working hard. That was good to see. Upon getting our food and sitting down to eat it outside I kept thinking that vacationers to Disney World or the actual African Serengeti were not so lucky to have such a view. The food was of a high enough quality to be considered good, but the view was simply spectacular. There really wasn���t a bad seat in the house and the whole Base Camp restaurant was stationed at such an angle that all the exhibits blended together into one giant plain. The animals were of course separated by different elevations of pooled water, which kept the lions from eating the gazelles, but from the point of view of the restaurant you really couldn���t tell. That was another brilliant move by the architect���who clearly knew what they were doing.

Throughout the rest of the park were small little improvements that showed a major investment of energy in updating the historic zoo to the level of competition influenced by the Disney Parks and offerings of Kings Island just up the road. Everything was just top-notch and improving. To make matters even better were all the flowers that had been planted and were blooming in the early April sun. The colors were just stunning. I love spring anyway, but the zoo took everything I love about spring and accentuated it dramatically with a visual display that rivals their winter time Festival of Lights.

Needless to say, I had a nice visit to the zoo with my family. It made me happy my daughter had kids just because it gave me an opportunity to return to a zoo I had gone to all my life, but had grown used to. If not for my little grandson, I might not have gone to the zoo so soon, because I thought I had seen and done everything that they could offer at such a city zoo location. But the Cincinnati Zoo showed that they were not happy just being one of the oldest zoos in the country with a respectable reputation for innovation over the years. They were still growing and wanting to get better. Their work with the parking lot and the African exhibit showed me that they were willing to compete directly with Disney World and Sea World for tourism dollars because they are offering a comparable experience. I had no problem spending a good deal of money at the zoo as if we were traveling to some exotic location to see the animals. I would go to the zoo again just to have lunch at the Base Camp.

I was surprised to learn that only the Cincinnati Zoo had utilized the solar panel parking lot concept. Conceived in 2011 it is still the only one of its kind anywhere���which again surprised me. I mean the sun shines regardless of whether someone captures some of it���s energy���so why not grab some of it for lights and to run a few of the water pumps that filter the water at theme parks like Disney World and Kings Island? I can only imagine what the impact would be at those two destinations if they did with their parking lot what the zoo had done. I have been to Disney World in the heat of mid summer and have returned to a car so hot that it took the whole ride back to the hotel to cool off with the windows down and air blowing. If they did what the Cincinnati Zoo had done, the cars would have all been shielded by the sun and the parks would have received some power to help with their energy costs. For a park like Disney World it would likely cost $200 million dollars which is a third of the cost of a whole new park. But it would enhance the customer experience while cutting down energy costs with their electric bill. The Cincinnati Zoo should be the showcase of how and why we should use solar panels, and if more businesses did the same type of thing, the cost might actually come down.

The solar panels at the zoo set up on just 6,400 solar arrays take about six acres and could power 200 homes of average size for a year. It really exhibits how roofing material made of solar arrays could capture energy to soften the blow of escalating electric bills. It���s a smart idea that should be gaining traction, but nobody but the zoo has yet to take that step. Granted, it���s a radical departure from tradition, and it is science that steps beyond politics. I���m sure Duke Energy would lobby the Ohio senate such as what is behind Ohio Senate Bill 310 to freeze state renewable energy standards for 2015 and 2016. The zoo was able to pay for the solar array with a multitude of options like tax credits, accelerated depreciation, and some debt financing, but it all paid off in what they were able to create. In my opinion, there should be a lot more of these solar panels anywhere that the sun beats down on a car in the hot summer sun, from shopping malls, to Cedar Point, and sports stadiums. It was a remarkably innovative idea that should be copied by everyone. And it made me proud to see that my favorite zoo, The Cincinnati Zoo, was the first to use them in a way that made sense and paved the way for what our future should hold. The Cincinnati Zoo is an organization that has always pushed the limit with innovation, and that is a tradition that looks to continue into the future. And what a treat it is to see that innovation at work. It made my trip to the zoo a wonder which I hadn���t expected. It reminded me of what a special place the Cincinnati Zoo is, and made me proud of all those season passes we passed out over the years even though we hadn���t gone ourselves. It was a pleasant surprise to say the least.

Rich Hoffman

��CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

Listen to The Blaze Radio Network by CLICKING HERE.

Vote No on the Midpointe Library System: Philosophy and the changing way of expanding knowledge

I am against the MidPointe��Library System in Butler County, Ohio for all the same reasons I am against school levies. Even though I tend to love people who strive for knowledge and desire to feed minds with information, the quality of those efforts can cast people adrift all of their lives ruining them, and a library in many subtle��ways contribute to that personal destruction. Before detailing why and how, here is the case that the MidPointe Library System makes for itself looking for more money from voters during the upcoming May 5th 2015 election.���� Essentially to make a long story short, they make the same arguments that public schools make, helping the children, offerings to the community, and all that kind of nonsense.

The MidPointe��Library System will have a renewal levy on the ballot on Tuesday, May 5.�� Please find information regarding this levy, as well as why the Library is asking for continued community support below:

Something for Everyone in the Community

With current funding levels, the MidPointe Library System is able to provide many resources, materials, services, and programming to the residents of eastern Butler County.��

MidPointe��offers a collection of over a half million items, and partnership in the SearchOhio��lending consortium gives patrons access to over 16 million items from across the state. In 2014 over 2 million items were checked out. Additionally, MidPointe provides internet access and public computers to assist people in finding jobs, accessing data and doing school work.

In 2014, MidPointe��offered over 2000 programs.�� These are as diverse as yoga class and technology instruction for adults, to storytime and early literacy book clubs for children. ��The Library’s Summer Reading Program, which promotes literacy for all ages, reached record involvement last year, with nearly 10,000 patrons participating.��

MidPointe’s��influence expands well beyond the buildings. Librarians visit schools and community centers to engage young people in the joy of reading. Educators are able to stock their classrooms with books as a result of MidPointe’s��“Teacher Collections.” The MidPointe Outreach Services Department delivers materials to over 200 patrons who are unable to physically visit the Library.

Library Budgeting

For the past two decades, Libraries in the state of Ohio have faced reduced funding.�� In 2008, the most drastic of these cuts occurred and as a result, the Library had to dramatically reduce hours, services and staffing.���� For the first time, the Library approached the public with the possibility of a .75 mill levy to supplement operations.�� The voters of our Library district passed the levy, which represents almost 40% of the MidPointe budget. Overdue fines and fees only represent 3.25% of the Library’s overall budget.

The overwhelming majority of the Library’s expenses are devoted to collection development and public service and programs. Administrative costs represent only 12.5% of overall expenses and the MidPointe��Library System has continually been recognized as one of the most cost-effective in the state.��

Levy Details

The levy on the May 5 ballot is a renewal.��This is not a new tax.
Levy funds make up 40% of MidPointe’s budget.
Levy Millage:�� .75 mill
Length of Levy:�� 5 years
Cost: The cost of this levy to the owner of a $100,000 home is approximately $22.97 a year(less than the cost of one hardback book).

Levy funds will:

Maintain services and materials at all MidPointe locations.
Continue to provide current technological resources to the public.
Allow for sensible expansion in our growing community.
Sustain programs for children, teens and adults.

��

��

http://www.midpointelibrary.org/news/renewal-levy-information/

Essentially they simply want more money to continue a practice that is rooted in socialism. I have never liked libraries because I have never liked sharing my books. I like buying them, and owning them���collecting them like treasures to be guarded by me as part of a life���s journey. It has always seemed wrong to ���borrow��� a library book from the library where they maintain ���collective��� ownership. The concept of a shared resource is disgusting. Library books are routinely abused because nobody owns them and are reflective of the type of society that is not centered on personal responsibility and individual ownership.

I have not been to a library for years. In my community within my little network of a neighborhood I have one of the best libraries in the entire country, the West Chester��Library, yet I never, ever use it. I would not borrow a book or movie from them, because I don���t want to use someone else���s stuff. However, I go to one of two Barnes and Nobles book stores about two times a week. The children sections in both of those book stores are tremendous services to children and show how much better private investment is in constructing the mind of young people. The book store in Newport, Kentucky is just fabulous and is still one of my favorites anywhere���which is pictured within this article. It is a temple of knowledge and I love it���yet it is struggling to stay afloat in the changing climate of online offerings. Unlike the MidPointe Library System, Barnes and Noble cannot ask for a tax increase to stay afloat in a changing economy. So they have to adapt���where libraries are doing the same things they always have���and they lose a lot of money because of it. They are essentially money pits and their offerings to the community are not beneficial as they pretend.

The job of teaching children to read falls on the parents or less directly, the extended family members of a child���aunts, uncles, grandparents and so on. Not a socialist librarian or volunteer who has a subtle agenda of encouraging sharing as opposed to ownership. The world of a capitalist society like the United States is rooted in ownership���not sharing. When something of value maintains its worth because someone owned it and cared for it, it is then valuable to someone who might want to purchase it for their own. Libraries encourage sharing and while that might sound good on the surface���the mentality created from this exchange of ideas often leads to various acceptances of degrees of socialism���like public education, public housing, public assistance and so on.

From the book shelves at Barnes and Noble in Newport, Kentucky in my favorite section���the philosophy section���the two primary competing ideas regarding philosophy are on full display���because that is what people are buying. Amazon.com can provide obscure books within a few days and at a great price. Barnes and Noble put on their shelves titles that sell. All the other sections in the book store, politics, fiction, and cooking, current events���etc, all stem from the philosophy section. People think the way they do and are attracted to some things rather than other things based on their personal philosophy, so I see it as the most important section. In the various schools of thought in Western philosophy everything is basically built off two individuals, Plato and Aristotle. In the east it is Confucius, which leans toward Western Platonic thought. What that translates to through a long line of philosophic thought is essentially Karl Marx and Ayn Rand. I certainly lean toward Ayn Rand���yet I think her Objectivism��is limited to Einstein���s Theory of Relativity and that there will be new schools of thought stemming from her Objectivism that will have to encapsulate the bizarre behavior of quantum mechanics now being discovered. But Karl Marx has been a failure and is a dying philosophy that will either be extinct within the next two hundred years, or it will destroy our civilization. I have no use for Karl Marx in any fashion. Libraries are part of a Karl Marx mentality.

I love libraries for their historical significance���especially the library in Alexandria. At the time the cost of printing books was prohibitive and everyone couldn���t own a book. So the borrowing of books at a library was the best way to achieve an exchange of knowledge. But that time has passed. Now there are so many books printed that the market is saturated with knowledge. It is easier, and more efficient for people to upload books onto their devices, or just buy them at Amazon.com. Stores like Barnes and Nobel fill the traditional role��of a library being a center of learning���especially for kids. But as for motivation into intellectual endeavors, libraries are not a substitute for a good parent or mentor. The reason I don���t go to the West Chester library is because it feels like a socialist utopia to me. But Barnes and Nobel feels like the intellectual center of a capitalist country and I could essentially move into every one of them and be very happy. It is for that reason that I will vote no��for the MidPointe levy on May 5th. I feel sorry for them, but they are a dying enterprise that will evaporate under the changing times���and it would be better for them to see that happen now than prolonging the agony. Community isn���t very valuable unless the members of that community believe in an Aristotelian logic as opposed to a Platonic sentiment. A community of socialists is a destructive force, and that will be the unintended consequence of a continuation of the library system in America. It is time for a replacement and it begins with a withdrawal of funds from the black hole of tax increases for which libraries currently represent.

Rich Hoffman

��CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

Listen to The Blaze Radio Network by CLICKING HERE.

The Art of Playing: Celebrating life and happiness

It was my 47th��birthday today and I spent it in an unusual fashion compared to some, but quite the standard within my family. During it I was reminded of a conversation I had recently with some pretty important and powerful people about the nature of living and how I manage to do so many things at several layers of severity and risk,����but still manage to lay my head down on my pillow each night for sleep without wanting to jump off a roof. It���s a secret that I feel compelled to teach the world, just so that I might remove just a bit of their suffering and change the direction of their life���s focus. It���s a method that everyone would benefit from if they embraced it more and would drop the broken stereotypes of the past���because they don���t work. As a brief intro to the concept please understand that my wife could have given me just about anything for my birthday���a new Apple Watch, an expensive vacation, a dinner at Cincinnati���s exclusive restaurants, even a new car���but what she did give me was infinitely more interesting and fun. She gave me a Zoomer Dinosaur. She has been watching my grandson and he knew what she had bought me, and at just over 2 years old, he couldn���t wait to tell me. So he guided me to where she was hiding it and we opened it up. She didn���t care because he was so excited to see it move. After opening it, we put the little dinosaur on the ground and began playing with it���which set the tone for the entire birthday celebration.

My mother taught her kids how to play, even late in life. Growing up we played a lot and had very diverse interests. My grandmother also played at life a lot and made growing up very fun. Every trip to the grocery store was fun because they made it that way, and as a result I carry that into my own life-even in tragic situations. I try to have fun every day of my life���no matter what is going on. That is a pattern started in my childhood by my mom. My brother and sister have a similar love of playing and as a result as grown adults, they don���t have any mental problems or issues with social interaction. They are not drug abusers of even a slight nature and have no real insecurities of any mention. Now with kids of their own, they are bringing that element of play to their own offspring with very positive results. But out of all the members of my family, I learned to play more than the others and I am more obvious in my dedication to it.

One of my best memories as a kid was when I had to go to soccer practice one evening when I really didn���t want to. I always loved sports, but only the games themselves. I didn���t like all the team work crap���ever, or the social infusion with the community. When my team would win the parents were always excited for some mysterious reason and used the word ���we��� a lot. Yet they never did anything to help win the game except yell like a bunch of idiots on the sideline. It never made sense to me, and as the years moved on, I stepped away from sports because of the heavy emphasis on team building and derision on individual achievement. If I had different teachers and social influences as a young kid I might have moved into professional sports of my choosing, but because the wrong influences were around me focused on the wrong things, I abandon sports at my first opportunity���as a freshman in high school. But of that wonderful memory, I was at soccer practice, miserable because honestly I had a huge set-up in the basement of my home dedicated to Star Wars��and I wanted to be there playing with all my toys rather than running around at soccer practice. It was spring time, my dad was out-of-town on business, and I was hoping to be home so I could have some play time before bed. It was the middle of the week and I had school the next day, so my time to play at the things was short. My mom picked me up from practice and we headed home. Only this was different, my brother and sister were in the car dressed like we were going somewhere, and there was the smell of popcorn from the trunk. I didn���t think much about it until we took a different route home and ended up on roads I wasn���t familiar with. Those roads eventually took us to a drive-in theater in Hamilton that was playing the very first Star Wars movie as a re-release. My mom took us all to see it for what I think was the 7th time at that point. It was wonderful and I cherished deeply every frame of film. During the scene where Han Solo and Luke were rescuing the princess, which is the high point of the film for me, I was sitting in a lawn chair with my soccer cloths still on listening to the echo of all the portable speakers around the drive-in playing the sound of the movie with a slight delay during that specific scene���the clouds were high in the sky and slightly blotting out a big bright moon on a spring night���and I thought about how wonderful life was. It really didn���t get any better than that.

But every day I try to make the day better than that day at the drive-in, and most days I come close. I am always looking for a way to have fun with a situation, and most of the time I do. I avoid people who don���t know how to have fun. If they are depressed people trapped in emotions constructed around neurosis, I usually paint them out of my life for my own preservation. If they can���t keep up, I leave them behind without looking back. I like to have fun, I love to play, and I hate people who don���t know how. I���m happy to teach ���happiness��� to them, but if they don���t show much of an effort, I drop them quickly. I understand and sympathize that they didn���t have a mom like mine who showed them how to play, even as adults, so I take the time to teach them. But I won���t sacrifice myself to their misery. If they want to be miserable, I leave them to it. I might write an article like this to help show them the way, but I won���t take their burden on myself if they wish to be stubborn about it.

I have known many adults who give Rolexes to their spouses and new cars for birthdays���but most of the time those gifts are laced with a desire for social approval more than developing happiness in the recipient. Behind such gifts is the desire to brag to someone else about the value of the gift, and thus, the amount of social pull that person has in the world of mixed economies. So it means quite a lot that my wife out of all the things she could have given me picked the cute little dinosaur which I think is quite a leap in scientific development. The little sensors in it for a kids play toy are very advanced, and the gyroscope system which balances it on two wheels is quite extraordinary. I could play with it all day and night if left to my own devices. It is intriguing, and intellectually stimulating. I love it!

But of course there was a gathering with my family like we usually do later in the day during my birthday. This year we went to Dave and Busters so that we could���������������play���������������.as a family. Specifically there is a new video game called Star Wars Battle Pod which is a kind of flight simulator for Star Wars. It is the newest, and greatest of what technology has to offer, complete with a breeze simulator to replicate actual environmental conditions. It has a wrap around screen that totally engulfs your vision allowing you to invest your intellect into the experience without distraction. The food was great, as it usually is at Dave and Busters, but playing Battle Pod was for me the best thing I���ve done for a birthday in years. In my family, most of us are intense Star Wars fans so we loved taking time to play it together. It was a stunning game to play, and fly. I had to reflect back to that drive-in surprise where my mom played like she was just picking me up from soccer practice on a school night, but instead took us all to see Star Wars one more time on a big screen, before it was gone forever���or so we thought at the time. Now, because of Battle Pod, people can play in the Star Wars universe in a way that was only a remote fantasy for someone like me years ago.

At Hollywood Studios my favorite restaurant is the Sci-Fi Dine-In Theater. It tries to simulate the drive-in movie experience I had in my youth, with my best memory being that Star Wars outing. There are still drive-ins, but they don���t carry the same impact as they did when I was a kid. Now they are viewed as a cheap alternative to the cinema experience as opposed to a first-rate experience. But when I go to Hollywood Studios, I have to stop by the Dine-In Theater and have a hamburger. It reminds me of that Star Wars presentation after the soccer game, and reminds me of the importance of playing at life instead of taking things too serious.

In reference to the important people I was talking about the best of us realize hopefully before they arrive at 60 years of age that career climbing and ass-kissing doesn���t get anybody anywhere. People are most effective and ultimately better when they retrain, or relearn the art of playing���as they did when they were kids. Typically, I don���t get along very well with people in my own age group, because most of them suffer from socially created illnesses. The people I most get along with are kids and old people because generally they aren���t worried about the ridiculous social rules which construct our network of associations. They would do far better for themselves to spend their time playing with other members of their families than in chasing the tail of someone higher in the peaking order hoping to schmooze their way to the top instead of letting their actions speak for themselves. One of the people I was talking to is a guy I enjoy quite a lot. He has a PHD in an advanced field of endeavor, but has not lost his love of playing. He���s is the grandpa of some lucky grandkids and the father to some fortunate children. Yet he solves problems like they don���t even exist, the kind of problems that might hang up regular people in the related field of endeavor. The difference is that this smart guy never forgot how to play at life, and therefore solves problems the way a child does, with resiliency and creativity. We teach our children to stop doing these things, and that is our first mistake. Instead, we should be teaching them to develop it further and to do so through their infantile 20s and 30s. But until everyone else gets on that page and recognizes that this is the way to conduct their lives���with playing at life for their entire lives���then I will continue to recharge myself the way I have. And for that, the little dinosaur my wife gave me along with Star Wars at Dave and Busters was a wonderful experience that gives me more than anything money can buy–a chance to play.

Rich Hoffman

��CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

Listen to The Blaze Radio Network by CLICKING HERE.

Duke Wins NCAA Championship: College athletes rising to greatness in spite of institutional failure

United States Senator Claire McCaskill, of Missouri, illustrated without really thinking too much about it a great crisis for many when she tweeted after the 2015 NCAA Championship between Duke and Wisconsin:

“Congrats to Duke, but I was rooting for team who had stars that are actually going to college & not just doing semester tryout for NBA.”

http://www.msn.com/en-us/sports/ncaabk/missouri-sen-claire-mccaskill-takes-shot-at-duke-after-title-win/ar-AAawu1y?ocid=LENDHP

Saturday Night Live��just prior to the big game made similar jokes in the same spirit, assuming that college athletes had an unspoken duty to their institutional education as opposed to the financial opportunity of leaving college after one or two years to join the NBA as young millionaires. These points of view are lost to ideology rooted in a hatred for capitalism where the old-fashioned belief was that citizens were supposed to learn a vocation which served society and that was the purpose of the college experience. Instead the perception and accusation is that student athletes were selfishly serving the all mighty dollar and colleges were letting them do it for the big money generated by the popular basketball tournament. The common villain in the whole exchange was money.

This is where the old progressives have failed to understand where they are, and what young people are supposed to learn in college. The NCAA Tournament is all about production, sixty-eight��college teams fighting it out for the number one spot. The heroes get drafted into the NBA, thousands of sports bars cash in on a spike in business���beer is sold, chicken wings etc. Advertisers get exposure for their products and schools get an increase in their profile with national exposure���meaning likely increased enrollment in their colleges which then pay the salaries of their staff. There is very little wrong with the NCAA basketball tournament known as March Madness. I���m not even a big basketball fan, yet I find myself enchanted by the festivities every spring.

College as it was conceived is a failure. The thought of shaping young minds into soft-minded government employees is currently failing. Going to college is not the path to a vibrant economy. Fresh, unimpeded ideas are. Too much government restricts the economy so the college experiment failed right out of the gate. Instead of giving their children a better life than they had, lifestyles regressed just two generations after the implementation of a global acceptance of widespread college education. Kids today have been spoiled rotten by parents guilty over their own life decisions and those students are entering the workforce with house payments thrown at colleges��� indebting them for their entire working years. They are arriving at jobs that pay half of what they expected and not having expendable income to help float the economy leaving epic stagnation. Since most of what the colleges taught was progressive values, nobody learned how to do anything but show social sensitivity, because nobody knows anything anymore about anything. That is the fault of modern colleges instituting misplaced values.

One of the only things kids can look forward to is that their college sports team might do well and give them some sense of pride in their alma mater���for all the money they���ve spent on their educations. Lucky kids can use their college years to get a job interview, but it doesn���t do much to prepare those former students for the marketplace of ideas. College was sold as a way to buy success for children���but all it really bought were kids flat lined economically and socially neurotic. They have been molded into dismal human beings.

That is the system that Senator Claire McCaskill and Saturday Night Live defended through their various parodies. It reminded me of my fourth grade teacher who took my class on a field trip to the Cincinnati Music Hall to listen to the symphony play a concert dedicated to Star Wars which had just come out and was grotesquely popular. During the concert slides from the movie were shown on a big screen and kids cheered with the display of their favorite characters. It was a very energetic and positive experience���until we arrived back to our class. Our fourth grade teacher who was just shy of 30 years old at the time chastised our entire class for enjoying the concert. I sat there completely dumbfounded as her reaction was completely opposite to what I was feeling. I had a great time, and so did the rest of my class. I didn���t understand. My teacher went on to say that cheering for the characters on the slides would hurt the feelings of the members in the symphony and that Star Wars was all about making money and success���so it should be shoved aside in favor of ���high art.��� The same arguments are constantly thrown at the Disney Company, and even Nickelodeon for exploiting children for the all mighty dollar, as if making money was somehow evil. Yet if not for Star Wars would any of those kids have sat through a musical concert featuring a symphony? No.

Colleges would be more successful in capitalist America if they stopped copy-catting��off the socialist Europeans and started teaching kids that making money is the most important thing they could learn from college. And under that criteria what is wrong with a freshman basketball player from Duke University leaving school for the NBA the very next year because they are so good that team owners want to make 20-year-old kids millionaires? Even better, college sports often highlight minority children������.there is nothing wrong with the situation. Notice how none of the sports bars around America had angry white men protesting black basketball players covered in tattoos. Nobody cared, everyone picked a team and rooted for somebody giving kids the opportunity to be a star no matter what their background or appearance���and receiving a chance to make more money before they are thirty than the lifetime incomes of everyone watching the games in a BW3s. Colleges, as institutions and the products coming from them have missed the point of the NCAA Tournament completely because they refuse to acknowledge the real truth of what the offering of higher education was supposed to be. People want upward mobility���not just a chance to receive a government check and a pension after age 55, but real, substantive wealth���the kind of wealth that could purchase their own island in the Caribbean.���� Until colleges face that music, they will continue to lose in the marketplace of ideas, and will struggle to keep their public image as high as it currently is. If not for college sports, how many Americans would still support college as an option? That is an answer that United States Senator Claire McCaskill doesn���t want to know.

Rich Hoffman

��CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

Listen to The Blaze Radio Network by CLICKING HERE.

Ayn Rand and Social Security: Confiscated money that is owed eventually

As far as Ayn Rand and her modern footprint into politics and philosophy many on the left have attempted to discredit her based on the notion that she drew from Social Security late in her life. As a small government advocate deeply suspicious of America���s steps toward socialism���which she had fled from, and lost her family to, many progressives have identified her as a danger to their Kant driven philosophy doing whatever they could to discredit her writings using the Social Security issue to lead the charge against the logic she presented. Recently my friend Mark Etterling��ran across just such a person on his email musings with the far left and radical nut cases��hoping to shut off the world to wisdom, so to disguise their treacherous attempts against righteousness���specifically a strong economy driven by capitalism. Mark presented a strong case in favor of Ayn Rand which I thought was effective enough to repeat below. Many assume that Social Security is a government entitlement when in fact as Mark presents; it���s supposed to be an investment. The distinction is important as Etterling explains in greater detail:

From: ��Mark Etterling��Date: April 5, 2015 at 1:31:22 PM EDT Subject: Moron, expose theyself��Reply-To: Mark Etterling

 

Recently I read a Facebook post from a liberal that was meant to be a ���gotcha��� moment against conservatives and in this case the now deceased author Ayn Rand in particular. Upon reading the post I actually found myself laughing out loud. Not only was this a hilariously bad attempt at painting the right as hypocrites, but was so moronic that the poster had no idea who he was actually insulting.

The post was a story about how the vaunted die-hard capitalist Ayn Rand had actually dared to collect on Social Security in her old age in defiance of her own writings demonizing big government. This is the same tired assault that liberals have tried for years by claiming conservatives are hypocrites for railing against intrusive government up until such time as it���s their own turn to stand in line for some government goodies.

So for the umpteenth time allow me to explain what the half-wits on left just simply can���t seem to grasp. SOCIAL SECURITY ISN���T A GOVERNMENT HANDOUT! Let me put this in simple terms. If you loan someone $100 today and then later return to collect on your loan that doesn���t make you greedy, a thief, a handout recipient, a hypocrite, or any other such non-sense. It simply means that you are collecting a return of what was rightfully yours all along. The fact that the government forcibly confiscates that money from you (and the matching funds from your employer) throughout your working life on the promise of returning it to you later (if you���re fortunate enough to live that long) doesn���t constitute even the remotest concept to anyone above the IQ of a horsefly that it somehow magically becomes a handout.

To prove my point all you need to do is look at your pay stub. You have separate line item deductions for Social Security and Medicare because those moneys are SUPPOSED to be placed in a separate government trust fund so that people won���t foolishly waste all their money before they reach retirement age. The reason I capitalized the word supposedly��above is because under this scenario the ugly truth is that it���s been the government all along who has foolishly wasted your money instead as they have basically borrowed and spent against all that money until the actual trust fund is pretty much an empty vault of IOU���s. Personally, as an intelligent adult I would have preferred it if big brother government would have simply butted out of my life so that I could have invested that total of 15% annual matching funds on my own instead of through a glorified government sanctioned Ponzi scheme. However, now that they have it, you can bet your @ss I want it back!

It blows my mind every time I hear some idiot from the left proclaiming that the elderly are better off because of Social Security. In saying that they are not only stating by proxy that all Americans are too stupid to be trusted with something like their own retirement (same thing for healthcare), but completely forget that had the government not interfered the money that was confiscated would have been the people���s money all along (plus interest) anyway. It���s like a thief robbing you and then expecting a big old ���thank you��� for returning the things they should have never stolen at government gun point in the first place. Here���s another way to think of it for when they ignorantly try to insult conservatives for trying to collect what is rightfully theirs. Is it right that someone should be forced to pay for a meal in advance and then demonized simply because they would now like a chance to eat it before it���s all gone? Honestly, I wish I could think of a stronger word than ���moron��� in situations like this.

Morons are morons and nothing will ever change that. However, in posting what he posted this particular moron doesn���t even realize that who he has basically insulted isn���t just conservatives, but every American who has worked all their life and is now old enough that they are simply trying to retrieve what was rightfully theirs all along. The checks they are now receiving aren���t government handouts. They���re long overdue reimbursements. Personally, I hope he reposts his article over and over. In doing so he���ll be accomplishing far more to expose his own true self-insulting ignorance than any rebuttal I could ever hope to write.

P.S. As a side note please remember that it was DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman-Shultz who recently proposed the idiotic idea of having the government confiscate everyone���s IRA���s and 401K���s and using that money to shore up the missing funds from Social Security. As you can see, these people aren���t just simple morons. They���re morons that are hell-bent on ruining all our lives.

Social Security was a stupid idea, and it never should have been enacted. It is an insult to stick the government in between Americans and their so-called retirements. I resent every deduction taken from my paycheck as a theft stolen from me, because the government will never be in a position to pay me back all the money I have ���invested��� under coercion. I have personal friends who hate Social Security so badly they have essentially given up their citizenship over the issue. One of those friends had began plotting his deferral from the Social Security system in the 5th grade���no kidding. He was a very smart kid and while the other kids were talking about the rock band KISS and the new show on television called The Dukes of Hazzard, he was planning on how to legally refuse his obligations toward Social Security. As an adult, he gave up his citizenship after years of legal entanglement���but���he doesn���t pay into the system, because as he was always right, Social Security is stolen money not granted by an infant when they are issued a card after being registered by their parents. His argument was that his parents didn���t have a right to commit him to a life obligation into such a contract with the government.

The rest of the world isn���t willing to take such extremes, so we just pay into it knowing that its wrong���because we don���t want the hassle of fighting the government���and they know that. My friend had a lifelong crusade against Social Security which continues to this very day���but I have always found it easier to just outwork the money grabbing hands of the government. I have infinite energy which they don���t posses. With me it���s a delicate balance; government knows they need me to be productive to pay their salaries, so they generally leave me alone. But, I have to accept that they will steal a portion of my money every week because they made laws enabling them to do so. I have the same deal with insects in my house. I know they are there in the cracks, but if they come out in the open, they are disposed of. I don���t want to see them even though they are likely hidden in every crevice available. The government takes my money before I even get to see it each week. They get first dibs on my earnings���which is why more Americans aren���t angered by the stolen money because they figure they never had it in the first place. But when it comes time to get that money back���everyone expects it���just like we expect tax returns at the end of each year for the overpayments interest free we make to the government through the same withdrawal system. The idiots who came before us who voted in favor of this kind of thing made a major mistake, and it should be rectified. But until then, like Mark Etterling��said in his article���I want my money back at the first opportunity I can get it. And I won���t apologize for wanting it either. It was stolen from me without my permission, and I want every dime back before it’s all said and done. When Ayn Rand needed the money she put into the system, I don���t fault her for getting it. She paid into it, so she deserved to get it back. But, she would have been the first to argue, if the government had stayed out of the exchange in the first place that same money may have made her rich, instead of needing Social Security in the first place. She was more qualified to handle her own money than the government was, and that is the tragedy we all face���at some point in time.

Rich Hoffman

��CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

Listen to The Blaze Radio Network by CLICKING HERE.

The Science of a Resurrection: Understanding the essence of a human soul

��In lieu of the recent discussions that always follow Easter Sunday and the resurrection of Jesus, the topics of concern from a religious point of view center on the nature of life and death. Older people tend to look at death as an end; young people do what they can to avoid thinking about the end, because they are just at the beginning. As Easter came and went I was editing the latest installments of my Cliffhanger series from The Curse of Fort Seven Mile stories which have been building up to a discussion about this very topic. I can successfully state that I no longer acknowledge death as an end to anything, but the vehicle which beholds consciousness���otherwise termed as the soul. We are living in an age where computer power will allow us to upload everything contained within the memories of a brain into an artificial intelligence. But we will likely miss the opportunity to replicate what we call the soul of a person���because it exists in a quantum level and can exist anywhere and everywhere in the universe, or multi verse simultaneously without any concern for time and space. In the context of my Cliffhanger stories, this means that villains killed or deceased are still a threat to the fabric of mankind. Just because a life on earth has ended does not mean that the desires they held in life are not still being utilized in some fashion because their soul is still roaming about looking to create havoc just as they did in life. A human body is but a vehicle that the soul rides within and uses to navigate through a terrain of space and time. Once that vehicle is removed, the soul is free to move about under the rules of quantum mechanics instead of in the Theory of Relativity.

When you look at a dead body, it is quickly obvious that there is nothing there. They look strangely vacant even though the facial features and other aspects of their living life can be seen. Even if the contents of memory and brain capacity are fully uploaded into a computer program that can replicate human behavior what will still be lacking is the information at the quantum level which contains our immortal elements. The big challenge for human beings of the 21st��century and on is to divorce themselves of this notion that a human body is the beginning and end of a life. To know yourself, and others you care about, you have to see who they really are and look beyond the scope of bodily limitations. To grasp a bit of this concept here is an article about the work of Stuart Hameroff and Roger Penrose and their work toward understanding the quantum aptitude of the human soul.

��

Soul quanta

So, there is abundance of places or other universes where our soul could migrate after death, according to the theory of neo-biocentrism. But does the soul exist?

Professor Stuart Hameroff from the University of Arizona has no doubts about the existence of eternal soul. Last year, he announced that he has found evidence that consciousness does not perish after death.

According to Hameroff, the human brain is the perfect quantum computer, and the soul, or consciousness, is simply information stored at the quantum level. It can be transferred, following the death of the body; quantum information carried by consciousness merges with our universe and exists infinitely. In his turn, (Robert) Lanza proves that the soul migrates to another universe. That is the main difference his theory has from the similar ones.

Sir Roger Penrose, a well-known British physicist and expert in mathematics from Oxford, supports this theory and claims to have found traces of contact with other universes. Together, the scientists are developing a quantum theory to explain the phenomenon of consciousness. They believe that they have found carriers of consciousness, the elements that accumulate information during life and ���drain��� consciousness somewhere else after death. These elements are located inside protein-based microtubules (neuronal microtubules), which previously have been attributed a simple role of reinforcement and transport channeling inside a living cell. Based on their structure, microtubules are best suited to function as carriers of quantum properties inside the brain. That is mainly because they are able to retain quantum states for a long time, meaning they can function as elements of a quantum computer.

��

http://www.learning-mind.com/quantum-theory-proves-that-consciousness-moves-to-another-universe-after-death/

In my Curse of Fort Seven Mile series, the introduction to villains still desiring mayhem even after their death is introduced based on the science of quantum mechanics and the understanding of 5th��dimensional branes. From this vantage point, souls without bodies can still enact strategies against humanity for the same purposes they did in traditional life���only they do it without the limits of a human body. Even though this may seem like science fiction, I would say that it is more fact than fiction. I stopped believing in death years ago which then pokes holes in all aspects of religious mythology and forces new definitions to deal with that emerging reality. If beings whether they be in the form of humans, honey bees, or even trees live on in a form of their innate soul only using the vehicles of existence as a temporary carrier of their true essence, than what can we attribute life to if not the birth of a living thing and the death of it? I would even propose that a human body has the potential to live as long as we can repair it, just like a car. After all a body is simply a series of mechanical parts biologically assembled. There is no reason a human being couldn���t live for thousands of years only dying in cases where the body is destroyed by tragedy. Old age is a sickness that is curable and is only not utilized because of a silly belief that the body and soul are connected in ways that are more revered than they really are pulling our thoughts into a timeline consisting of a beginning, middle, and end. But this is unnecessary.

Yes I believe in resurrection—but to be more accurate, I don���t believe in death, so resurrection is a relative term confined to the bodies of 4 dimensional existences. What makes living dangerous is that the evil of minds like the mass murderers of history are like Jesus, still living���only in a different form and if they wish to, they can still terrorize targets of their desire for needs unknown to the living unaware of the motivations and desires contained within the quantum world. But one thing is clear in such an understanding, if life doesn���t end in death���than what happens when evil people are punished or removed from their bodies by killing them? Are they not free to roam the universe causing terror and mayhem for eternity, and how could such creatures be combated if death is no longer a threat to them. That ladies and gentlemen, is the topic of the next century and the answer will change the way we view everything���most notably death itself. But before we can begin to comprehend such a thing, we have to change the way we view life and death and divorce it from the bodies which carry our souls through existence.

Hell is a concept invented by humans to separate the good from the bad in human behavior. What humans have failed to do is define the necessity of judgment against evil and given the responsibility to a deity of worship���such as we say when declaring that ���Jesus will come again to judge the living and the dead.��� This will no longer work knowing now what we do about the nature of life and death. The old mythology of birth, death, and resurrection will no longer function now that we know where the soul resides and the reality of uploading ourselves into another body, or even a machine becomes a more plausible in the very near future. We must force ourselves to define evil once and for all, not as an act that kills, maims and destroys culture ending the lives of innocents���but in something else much more literal. For that is a task of our age, and it will have ramifications that will span the universe.

Rich Hoffman

��CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

Listen to The Blaze Radio Network by CLICKING HERE.