Rich Hoffman's Blog, page 379

Why FCC Chairman Wheeler Wants Net Neutrality: Sign the petition today against it

Below is a good video that demonstrates exactly what Net Neutrality is and it should be watched. It���s a very confusing issue because the advocates of Net Neutrality are actually taking the position of the opposition in saying they are defending the freedom of the Internet. However, it is a ruse. The FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler is a Obama guy, as will be shown below and is a former lobbyist for the cable companies. The Net Neutrality supporters are trying to make it sound as if it is the cable companies who are pouring millions of dollars into defeating Net Neutrality, but it is the opposite that is really happening. It is the status quo technology that wants Net Neutrality and it is all the upstarts that are against it���because the FCC chairman under Obama���s direction is seeking to make the Internet a public utility���so they can control it���tax it, and unionize it. Just four days before the FCC historic vote, over 200,000 signatures have signed the below letter to the FCC, which can be accessed for yourself at the following link.

https://www.protectinternetfreedom.com/

Dear Chairman Wheeler,

Internet use and online communication is the scourge of autocratic governments that deny basic freedoms to their people. Internet information has proven to be a spark that creates the fire of freedom in the most oppressive corners of the world.

The Internet is one of the most positive forces for improving the human condition the world has ever known. It is the hub of innovation for the economy in America and the world. It’s a source of progress, democratic distribution of information, societal change, personal empowerment and technological innovation.

The attempt by the Obama Administration to control the Internet as a public utility takes power away from consumers, website developers and small business owners and puts it in the hands of Government. This will drive up costs, slow down innovation, and put unelected political appointees in charge of picking winners and losers.

And it will take away America’s moral authority to argue that autocratic regimes have no right to assert control of the Internet in their own countries.

Mr. Wheeler, I am signing my name here today, asking that you and your colleagues vote NO on bringing the Internet under Federal Government control.

Sincerely,

Now watch this video–they are all on the same team. ��The protestors, and Wheeler.

It is the right thing to do to sign the letter and send it to the FCC, but be warned, the Chairman already has his marching orders by the president, so the letter won���t have any levity to his decision-making process. All that signing the letter will accomplish is in letting the government know how many people actually stand against them in a fashion to actually put their name to it. By traditional White House analysis, 200,000 signatures is a large number. It���s a small number of the population, but it represents a fairly scary opposition that they will try to minimize, but to a less successful effect. To understand why, study the history and background of the FCC chairman.

Thomas Edgar Wheeler (born April 5, 1946; Redlands, California)[1][2] is the current Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission.

He was appointed by President Obama and confirmed by the U.S. Senate in November 2013.[1] Prior to working at the FCC, Wheeler worked as a venture capitalist and lobbyist for the cable and wireless industry, with positions including President of the National Cable & Telecommunications Association (NCTA) and CEO of the Cellular Telecommunications & Internet Association (CTIA).

Originally considered a frontrunner for the position,[7] Wheeler was confirmed as the new Federal Communications Commission chief in November 2013.[8] Despite a letter written by several prominent former Obama administration officials endorsing Wheeler for the position, many people expressed concern over the consideration of Wheeler for the position due to his history of lobbying for industry.[7]

In recognition of his work in promoting the wireless industry, Wheeler was inducted into the Wireless Hall of Fame in 2003, and in 2009, as a result of his work in promoting the growth and prosperity of the cable television industry and its stakeholders, was inducted into the Cable Television Hall of Fame.[5][9][10] He is the only member of both halls of fame.[6] Cablevision magazine named Wheeler one of the 20 most influential individuals in its history during cable’s 20th anniversary in 1995.[5]

During Barack Obama’s presidential campaign Wheeler spent six weeks in Iowa aiding his campaign efforts and went on to raise over US $500,000 for Obama’s campaigns.[7][11]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Wheeler

On the current path, large cable companies are becoming extinct, the government cannot get their control around information because of the free and open Internet that exists now, and they want the FCC to begin getting things back under control from Google, Microsoft, and Amazon to actually protect the companies they are claiming to be against like Comcast, AT&T and other traditional communication companies. They are playing the same tricks they did with Obamacare, Benghazi, and open border immigration to overwhelm the system, hamper the minds of the masses with too much data-and to shove through new controls and regulations that nobody will stand against until it���s too late.

Wheeler is going to vote in favor of Net Neutrality because he���s been told to by his boss in the White House to do so. This is a power grab by the FCC for more control, not less. The government position is actually that they want to protect start-ups and porn providers with a free and open Internet by defeating a pay to play system���but what they don���t tell anybody is that they are seeking to control and limit that freedom for everyone, not just the big companies. In that respect the Internet will be ���equal,��� it s just that everyone will be equally limited and taxed.

So fill out the form, send it in so that guys like me will have ammunition to slam the FCC with later when we can expose the crimes about to be committed. The more people who fill out that form, the better the case will be later to prove that we told you so���so that by the time there are new elections in 2016, congress, the senate and hopefully a new president will pull the FCC back in and defund them into oblivion. That is the best way to strike a blow at this encroaching insurrection. So, make sure to fill out the form today, so that when we fight tomorrow���there will be some statistical information to use in proving what a gross violation the FCC actually imposed on the freest place on earth, the Internet. And they did it all in the name of control, taxation, and much more limited options for a tomorrow they dread to see coming.

Rich Hoffman

CLIIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

 

The Value of Good Employees: Chick-fil-A showing the best of private sector employment

The biggest difference between workers in the private sector and those in the public is the monopolization of effort that is typically associated with a lack of options. In the private sector there is a lot of competition whereas the public has virtually none. Scientists, teachers, IRS service representatives from the top to bottom get a check whether or not they perform so they are not motivated to do a good job. In the private sector there are other options and a check only comes if the product or service rendered is one that people actually want. Private sector work actually demands performance and those who excel do so because the product they offer is superior to other attempts of a similar value.

I thought I was in for a tough time the other day when I visited the Chick-fil-A��at Bridgewater Falls near my Ohio home. My wife and I waited until about 2 PM to visit so that the lunch crowd would die down a bit, but the parking lot was still full. Parking next to us was a couple of ���wigger boys��� with their pants pulled down to look like rap artists complete with neck tats and a girlfriend belonging to one of them���maybe both. I typically go to nicer places just to avoid those types of people. But this particular Chick-fil-A��is near the Hamilton/Fairfield border and there are a lot of these types of people coming from the government subsidized homes in that area���so you tend to bump in to them at the Bridgewater location. But I wanted a chicken sandwich so my wife and I went in any way.

The scank��boys and their trashy girlfriend complete with a baby tucked into something that looked like a purse took one look at the crowded dinning room and said, ���fu** this��� and turned around to walk out. I gladly held the door open for them to leave happy to see them go. As they walked by they smelled like cigarettes, pot, and spit. I watched them walk like penguins across the parking lot back to their car to make sure they didn���t open their door into my own car out of disrespect. Once they were gone, my wife and I resumed our visit to Chick-fil-A.

I had just been thinking about those ���wigger boys��� trying to emulate a government subsidized African-American��existence that has fed the rap culture with so much negativity when a young man of color stood at the counter to take our order. He was excessively polite, well-spoken and very clean-cut. His voice sounded like it belonged on the radio with a deep resonance that held behind each word an articulation of confidence that came from nowhere else but from within a complete personality. He said ���sir,��� to me about ten times in 2 minutes and was extremely professional. He even wiped the overflow off our drinks as he prepared them. Everything he did the attendant did with professional flair and an appreciation for the quality of his work. He was marvelous.

Chick-fil-A��typically has better employees than other similar fast food restaurants which is clearly a by-product of their recruiting practices. But this guy was excessively good even compared to Chick-fil-A��employees. I continued to be impressed as we were given our food and I turned to find a table I had been looking at recently vacated, and still dirty. I had been thinking of cleaning off that table so we could sit down���because it was rather messy. But before I could perform the task a woman in her middle years was already there wiping it down clean. She even got on the floor and hand-picked bits of food that had fallen there so that it wouldn���t be messy around our feet. That further impressed me. We sat down and I watched the woman who promptly went behind the counter to wash her hands. For a fleeting second I had the feeling that mankind wasn���t falling off the edge of the earth into an abyss that it will never recover from. I was delighted.

The articulate attendant continued to take orders from the line that continued to be nearly out the door. With each customer he showed the same interest in perfection and left his customers with a fulfillment well above the standard for a fast food experience. As I thought about him, and Chick-fil-A��in general I had to contemplate what drew us to the restaurant as opposed to the Chilis just across the pond from our location, or the Wendy���s down the road mixed with an Arbys, Frisch���s, Subway, Pizza Hut and even an Applebee���s all located nearby. At that hour even the Chilis restaurant had a nearly empty��parking lot���but Chick-fil-A��was full. And the employees seemed excited about working there. The food after all was pretty average. I mean its good, fresh and there���s a decent variety, but the Chick-fil-A experience is different and that seemed to be more of what was drawing people in than anything.

A large part of that experience which sets apart Chick-fil-A��is the quality of their employees���which directly carries over into their food and overall environment. It is obvious that Chick-fil-A��puts an emphasis on quality employees and this gives them a market advantage over everyone else. It also helps that they stay so busy that quality people tend to be drawn to the place to avoid the scum bags and skanks��that are found everywhere else. In the case of my experience, the disenchanted social misfits decided they didn���t want to brave the crowd, but as I looked around most of the people in the dining room were pretty clean-cut types who looked like they might attend church often���and likely took an interest in the lives of their families. It probably had more to do with why those ���wigger boys��� and their ���hoe bag��� decided to leave because they felt uncomfortable with the environment. They would be more at home at a Taco Bell, or a White Castle where half the workers behind the counter looked the same as they did.

I���ve worked on the other side of the food counter for a long time and I know what goes on. When I buy food if I see someone working in the kitchen covered in tattoos and looking like they belong in a rap video I am likely to be careful what I order and I will watch them prepare it. It���s not practical to expect a low quality person to prepare food for your own sustenance. Garbage in tends to make garbage���so I am usually careful about stuff like that. I have an extreme reluctance of going through drive thru windows for that very reason.���� I like to see what I���m buying and I don���t trust people I can���t see to do the right thing. We are dealing with an entire generation raised on movies like Jack Ass and shows like Beavis and Butthead��and they think it���s funny to spit in food and rub their body parts on what we put in our mouths. At Chick-fil-A��I have much more trust in the food making process than I do someplace else���especially Taco Bell. McDonald���s I trust more just because they have been the best at taking the human element out of the food making process. There are many fewer opportunities for food tampering at McDonald���s than there is at Burger King or Wendy���s. But Chick-fil-A is the best of them all and they still do a lot of traditional food prep.

A Chick-fil-A��would never occur with government workers at the helm. If the restaurant were��unionized it would also not have the same level of service. It would at that point be just another chicken place���it would lose its special appeal���its value. Government workers and those coming from union mentality households tend to believe that jobs were created so that employees can buy flat screen televisions and play video games all day���that a job is just something that gives them a check at the end of the week instead of a privilege for earning a living based on their individual merit. It is because Chick-fil-A understands how to recruit and keep good employees that they have such a market edge over a very competitive marketplace.

Whenever I go to Disney World��with my family one of the things I most look forward to is the treatment of the customer anywhere within the vast complex in Orlando, Florida. The employees are always very professional��and enthusiastic about their jobs, which allow customers to buy into the fantasy setting they try to create. Negative people are a deterrent from positive thought processes, and at Disney World��negativity would destroy the fun world created by the theme parks. So I actually look forward more to the positive environment by the workers than of the rides and attractions themselves. But at Chick-fil-A��I get the same without the extraordinary expense. And that is what is so magical about the fast food giant. And I have to thank that young man who made my experience so much better recently���who was so much better than the average Chick-fil-A employee���which is saying a lot. He created such a positive environment that he elevated the personal work ethic of all those around him and that is the most marvelous gift of all. It was why that restaurant was still packed even as the other restaurants in the area were preparing for their dinner rush. Chick-fil-A at Bridgewater Falls hadn���t yet stopped being busy from lunch, and the way things looked, they weren���t going to get a break. But the employees stayed positive anyway, which is what makes them so much more special.

Rich Hoffman

CLIIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

 

‘The Delivery’ Graphic Novel: Rob Gunnerson’s dream made into a reality

The creative process is fun and I remember when I first met Rob Gunnerson��at a film festival, it was the start of a lot of fun that has slowly trickled in over the years. I was performing a firewhip demonstration for the World Stunt Association and he and Twilight��actor Peter Facinelli��were watching. A few years later they invited me to Los Angeles to help make a pitch trailer for an interesting story Gunnerson��had been thinking about since he was a little kid. We were all kind of the same age, so we had grown up with a love of certain types of movies. We had a lot of fun putting Rob���s vision into a short two-minute trailer introducing the main objectives of the story. Peter was producing and using his considerable fame to draw studios to the project with Real D 3D as a partner.��In the back ground was Dave Stewart from the Eurythmics��supporting the project so it was exciting. We captured some wonderful images and had a lot of fun. But as I���m mentioned before, it is hard to get things off the ground in today���s Hollywood, even for seasoned veterans and popular pop culture personalities with millions of Facebook contacts. To get the money men to line up to fund projects now requires more than even Peter was able to assemble leaving Gunnerson to turn toward a new direction to get his project the attention that producers now require to put up the kind of money it takes nowadays to make a motion picture. CLICK HERE TO REVIEW. The three primaries on the project, Rob, Peter, and Dave Stewart turned toward a graphic novel version of their story which comes out in April of 2015 to tell their complicated, dynamic story about Angels, Demons and The Last Hour before both try to destroy Mankind. Listen to them talk about the project below.

I fell in love with Gunnerson���s vision because of the actions of his protagonist Brother U who was an Angel who uses a firewhip��to perform combat. Facinelli��played that character in the short and is the basis for the character in the upcoming graphic novel. I was brought in to do the firewhip work and act as a stand-in for Peter. It was a project that I have always had a lot of hope for, and still do. But it is very telling how difficult it has been for these talented guys to get their project off the ground. Needless to say, I am really looking forward to their graphic novel. Rob told me a good part of the story in my time with him, but I am really looking forward to the visual conception released in an actual printed edition. It has taken nearly 10 years since Rob and I first met at the film festival stunt show to get to this point which he talks about in the below interviews a little bit���and for the director some pieces of his puzzle fell into play during my performance which makes me happy, so I am looking forward to seeing his vision put onto a printed page finally.

The art for the graphic novel looks fantastic. We captured some really cool scenes during the trailer shoot which I���m sure Gunnerson has looked at over and over again, so there are wonderful visuals to provide a template for the artist to pull from. I have always viewed Rob���s story as a kind of modern Highlander��project. If Gunnerson had been a director in Hollywood during the 1980s, The Delivery would have been made for about 10 million dollars by a major studio and would likely be a cult classic to this very day. But, in the Hollywood of today where studio executives are much more timid and the cost of a movie is much, much greater���you have to prove there���s a market for something like this before anybody will drop 50 million to 100 million into such a project for a studio release.

The journey is often an adventure in and of itself. Between shoots on the set, the producers and I had fun on Brand Blvd cracking bullwhips��on the sidewalk in a part of town that was filming television shows on nearly every city block. My hotel was on the main strip down the road from the Americana shopping complex and a lot of those people had never seen a whip act in real life. Under the encouragement of the small entourage that accompanied me, I pulled out some of the big whips and cracked cigarettes out of the mouths of just casual passers-by, and curious spectators adding to the nightlife that was vibrant. Needless to say it left an impression. When I flew out of Los Angeles that time, I had the feeling I would be returning within a few months to shoot the actual movie. But the project sat around and soon months because years with still no movement. Finally, after quite a lot of time passed, Gunnerson��turned toward the tools available these days���such as Kickstarter to produce the story into a graphic novel that would at least get the concept into some art that people could look at, and slowly build up a cult audience, which for something like this���is the best way to go.

I admire Rob for not giving up on his dream of bringing this story to life. He���s an accomplished director and has access to celebrity personalities, but even so, it���s a hard sell in modern Tinseltown and this idea could have died easily on the vine. But, these guys have stuck with it and are still fighting to bring this concept to an audience. If not through a movie, then through a graphic novel, which I personally will enjoy more���I love artwork like the type shown in this upcoming graphic novel and I hope it is successful for them. If they desired to step away from Hollywood there are options out there for them. But it is a tough decision. The business model of the movie business is changing before our eyes, so it���s a difficult moving target to hit. But making The Delivery into a graphic novel to bring this story to an audience more poised to enjoy it���is clearly the smart thing to do.

I am happy to have been a part of the creative process in showing in reality the kind of things that were in Rob���s mind before our meeting. Its one thing to think of something, it���s another to see it come to life. Seeing a firewhip��in action obviously helped take Rob���s thought process to the next level. Now, with some footage shot to work from, artists were able to convey that over into a graphic novel with some fabulous artwork. It is the kind of artwork that I tend to treasure and know that I will enjoy immensely. It will always remind me of the time that we brought bullwhips��to the streets of Hollywood and kept Burbank awake at night with fireballs and explosions that bounced off the Verdugo Mountains with the ease of unfettered sonic booms at 3 AM.

I���m looking forward to the graphic novel of The Delivery. Read more at the following link.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/172403788/the-delivery-issue-1

Rich Hoffman

CLIIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

A Rudolph Giuliani Defense: Why all the effort

As I���ve said before, there is a very good reason I write all these articles, and they are never intended for the masses. I offer them to everyone, but due to their length, and content, the masses will tend to reject them as too difficult. Purposely I present most of my articles at over 1000 words���because people of poor intellect will avoid the contents���leaving a target audience of approximately 1% to read them. That 1% tends to be the social elite, the news makers and shakers of society who aren���t so easily scared off by such lengthy presentations. They require such explanations as they cannot find in typical 400 word pieces because modern problems require more information for their inquiring minds. The Drudge Report has its niche, which is to present many links to several pertinent articles on a daily basis from one location. Other news sites do a good job of reporting daily events, but they only go surface deep not giving the proper depth of an argument that might typically fill a 12 to 22 minute television or radio segment. Being a person with a background in doing a lot of live radio and television I have a pretty good idea what is needed for a typical interview so I present my articles in a way that will settle the mind of the type of people who find themselves in a position to do important things���by means of shaping the social dialogue.

The general rule is that it takes approximately five years for the typical 1% of the target audience to fully embrace the topics of my articles. This is due to the train metaphor discussed in a recent article I did on leadership which can be reviewed by (CLICKING HERE.) It takes about that long for my target audience to properly embrace the things they read and for the events I report to begin being seen to their eyes. So my task for quite some time is to report the conditions and circumstances as early as possible so that 1% of the target audience can contemplate those observations for a number of years while balancing out their own information obtained through experience.

Going through Overmanwarrior���s Wisdom��articles a number of them especially from 3 to 4 years ago are routinely at the top of many Google searches because minds seeking that information start inquiring about the topics about a year and a half before they feel comfortable talking about these controversial issues at a social occasion or even more daring���in front of a camera. I am not the only one providing this service, but I do make sure that I provide each topic in a way that would be able to be discussed credibly during a news segment���because I have the unique experience of performing that task myself. One of my most popular articles is the one about Barrack Obama���s mother revealed through nude photographs taken likely by Frank Marshell Davis���the communist and mentor to the current president which at the time seemed very controversial, but presents enough evidence to declare that there is something really wrong with the mind of the man currently sitting in the White House.

When that article was first written I had taken an article from The Blaze discussing the new book The Communist��written by Paul Kengor and provided a means for framing the argument by logical, articulate minds. Anyone who has done live interviews knows that before you can articulate fully a statement during a debate, that you have to know the who, what, why, when and where backwards and forwards otherwise you will stumble through the interview sounding foolish. It���s not enough to provide the observation that Obama was trained as a communist���and these are the facts���you have to paint the story in a way that makes sense to the 1% of the population that actually considers things, and tend to be leaders in their own right.

So it gave me great pleasure to watch former New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani defend American exceptionalism and lay out essentially the primary topics presented in my article on Obama mentioning specifically the Frank Marshelle Davis connection on the popular Fox News show The Kelly File. It was an explosive interview by a guy who traditionally speaks his mind and hits hard in his positions. But, five years ago, he would not have dared to say any of the things he did on The Kelly File because of the scrutiny it would have provided him as a spokesman for the Republican Party. Back then, Obama���s presidency was still new, and people like me were being viewed as extreme. Now, the facts are in, and those at the back of the train of thought���not always their fault���are seeking answers. In Obama���s case the foundations of his beliefs point back to a childhood developed by socialist leaning grandparents and a number of father figures scooped up by his sexually carefree mother over many years. These men were Islamic and Hindu in their faith and in some cases were communist radicals shaping the mind of the young confused little Barrack Obama in a way that ruined his mind.

I started out my article on the Frank Marshell��Davis character with a sensational headline that typically grabs a reader���s attention, but once they see the lengthy contents they turn away. However, there are plenty of who, what, why, when and wheres��presented and by the time those readers finish one of my articles, they are well equipped to seek out support information. I even put the link to the very good book by Kengor at the end for people to read for themselves.���� After they���ve done a bit of personal investigation they can then ask the question how we allowed such a Trojan Horse like Obama into the White House to begin with. That appears to be the path that Giuliani has taken-and it was good to hear him double down on The Kelly File when he was being offered a platform to apologize from.���� I���ve been in that situation a time or two myself, so I understand and sympathize with what it means, and when Giuliani held his ground, he put himself in a position to lead many others in the proper direction of actually questioning Obama���s intentions in a way that the political left has successfully deterred for six years.

Just because a person is President of the United States it does not mean they love the nation. Glenn Beck actually did a good radio piece about Obama in the wake of the Giuliani comments about love for a country specifically and was spot on in his analysis. Obama does not love America the way we might love America. He was raised away from the mainland in a third world developing country by a sleep-around mother who brought many men to the young man���s life leaving a very confused little boy who��communist radicals later befriended to send the fair-skinned community organizer behind the scenes to dismantle the ���imperialist��� monster. They saw America as something to ���transform��� not to protect so they went about their business of hiding their insurgent behind the protection of racist accusations. Influential Republicans who often tour the talk show circuits held their tongues because of the volatility of bringing up anything negative about Obama���s past giving him a chance to show what he was really about. When they saw his actions over the last six years, they sought out answers to provide some context to their observations leading them to articles like mine that have been out there a while, but are only just now being accepted as a viable examination into the insurgent mind of America���s current president.

Obama is an American president that we���ve never seen before���and there is a reason. He was raised and developed to be a radical within the White House. He was elected through guilt���accusations of an ancient past that involved slavery cast against the political party that actually freed the slaves. Through their timidity Republican leaders stayed away from the controversy and gave Obama a chance. Now, they are seeing what people like me have been saying all along as the facts have caught up to their positions at the back of the train and they can���t hide from the facts any longer. Of those Giuliani is among the first of the top 1% of party leaders and people of means to speak about these matters in front of a camera instead of at social gatherings under hushed voices and for that he deserves credit for his courage. Now that he���s shown the way, others will follow, and it is at that time that a proper exploration into the real motives of President Obama can be understood.

It takes a while for the contents of these articles to do their job, but it���s the nature of the human mind. If I wanted to appeal to the masses, I would write much smaller, less controversial and far leaning articles. But I���m not. I want people like Giuliani to read these articles from his iPhone in a New York caf�� and consider���what if. I want him to think about it for some time with the reassurance of talk radio, books like Kengor���s and to want to add up the evidence and finally do something about it when they get the opportunity. Because guys like Giuliani get in front of the camera often, they get a chance to really break open a story���even if the information is old. The Frank Marshell Davis story is old at this point, but it never really hit the American consciousness, because it is too complicated and deceitful to consider among a busy public. But that was always the plan to place an insurgent communist type thinker into the White House of the freest country on earth to dismantle its power and influence the world over. It���s one thing to present the evidence, it���s another to stake a reputation on it. And for a man of Giuliani���s reputation, it means a lot that he���s finally willing to make such statements. It���s a sign that the type of people who typically find themselves in a leadership role, are finally able to articulate an argument against the Obama presidency that steps beyond the pageantry of the office itself. And that is the first step in solving the problem. The masses of democracy that Obama appeals to have enabled the insurgent to hide his true colors behind a political office meant to be above scrutiny. It takes that unique 1% to take action against such maniacal schemes. And it is for them that I do all this work.

Rich Hoffman

CLIIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

 

A Philosophy for the 22nd Century: iPhone 6 and Glenn Beck’s American Dream Labs

My wife and I have been getting acclimated to the new iPhone 6 for a few days now and the thoughts I���ve had while going through all the subtle new technology and the emerging business model so obvious, have only convinced me that the 21st century will be full of such extraordinary breakthroughs that by the time mankind gets to the 22nd��century the world will be much different. As I write this Apple is not only in the market for making fabulous personal devices like iPhones and personal computing systems���but are developing a new car with their nearly 1 trillion dollars in market value. It costs roughly a billion dollars to perform the R&D for a new car, and Apple is at the front of that cutting edge by 2020 because they have the cash to do the job. The terrorist group ISIS is using some of that technology to broadcast to the world their level of Islamic theocracy in a negative way, and the American government is trying to create Net Neutrality through the FCC to get control of the run-away-technology so to slow it down and put it back in federal control. But more than that, my T-Mobile plan informed me that they offer free data streaming for music���such as iHeart��Radio. That means twenty-four hours a day seven days a week no matter where I am, I can listen to The Blaze without any interruption in service. I don���t have to worry about consuming too much data from one place to another where free Wi Fi isn���t available which for my lifestyle of motorcycles and other unconventional travel means I can have 100% access to the new radio station for the first time since its creation without any worry. No wonder the FCC wants so much control.

The iPhone 6 is about the size of my iPod but it does so much more as the technology has shrunk to fit into such a small device. Even now if I am rappelling in the middle of Red River Gorge or backpacking to the top of Mt LeConte��I can still listen to The Blaze Radio Network the entire time���which for me is relaxing. I don���t always want to hear the birds and the babbling brooks of nature. I like to hear the ideas of mankind and find out what the disputes are against modern philosophy, and The Blaze gives me that kind of information. More than anyone else in broadcasting on such a large-scale with a large and well-respected retinue of current politicians offering their insights Glenn Beck���s The Blaze is positioned in much the same way as Apple is to bring broadcasting, news, and entertainment to the next century while traditional companies shrink away and go extinct because they couldn���t keep up with the technology. Beck through his American Dream Labs is about to unleash several feature films and is unveiling several new innovations on April 4th of this year���just a few days before my birthday���which I am very excited about. There is a lot going on in the world that is truly scary, but there is a lot to be excited about as well. Glenn Beck���s innovations are among them and I will use my new iPhone equipped with a wonderful T-Mobile deal to stay plugged in along the way.

A few friends of mine from a secret Atlas Shrugged type of real life Galt���s Gulch just yesterday were contemplating the implication of the new iPhone also coming in April. I am certain that I will be getting one at some point in time, but just the sheer opportunity that such a device holds in such a small package is a stunning display of technological ability. If you mathematically apply the types of innovations being unleashed just in the last couple of years to the youthful generation that is taking them for granted in their replication of advancement every 18 months or so���that same generation will expect that type of progress in everything from televisions to automobiles. The self-driving cars from Minority Report will happen regardless of political road blocks because these young people will demand it. They want to play Xbox and text their friends while driving and Apple along with Google looks to be among the first companies poised to provide such a thing. I joked to our T-Mobile rep as he was displaying all the unique features of the iPhone 6 that in two years the phone would be outdated and he laughed, because he knew it was true. Things are moving that fast���yet government isn���t moving with it���because they are functioning from the failed philosophies of the past.

During the week my wife managed to convince me to go to Costco with her, which I seldom ever like doing���not because I dislike shopping or Costco���but because time is often short. I have a very busy and packed life���so grabbing a hot dog at Costco and shopping for necessities is last on the list of things to do. But she managed to convince me, and upon arriving I had to marvel at the prices on their 80��� flat screen televisions and their new curved screens which were reasonably priced at under $5000. The prices are coming down to the point where every room in a home could have one of those large televisions without any trouble at all. The technology in them is simply incredible. The next challenge is going to fall on production companies to provide content that people actually want because the technology is there. Again, that���s where I think Glenn Beck will have an advantage over even the most deep pocketed traditional studio. The old way of producing video is long gone. The iPhone 6 has a mini camera in it far superior to what even a $10,000 camera cost in the 1990s so everyone with an iPhone is holding in their hands a television studio if they desire to utilize it. Of course that is another reason the FCC wants to create a Department of the Internet���because that notion scares them intensely.

My two-year old grandson is already speaking in complete sentences. Much of that I would attribute to the various learning devices he has available to him such as the television program on Nickelodeon called Blaze and the Monster Machines���which is a cartoon designed to teach kids about language, science, and physics. It is not as clunky as Sesame Street was���nor as agenda driven. It���s just about learning and having fun while doing it. Consider on top of that he has a Leap Frog tablet and other similar devices that allow his imagination to just soak up all this vast information so quickly the education model is obvious. Everything I have said negative about public education just became much, much, much more relevant. I am convinced that kids could learn everything they would typically learn by age 22 in college by age 10 because of the education options available now, that simply weren���t there 5 years ago, let alone 10.

So given all this rapid acceleration in technology, there is nothing in the adult world that is preparing for this onslaught in thought. Fox News is talking every night about the 2016 election where Republicans will likely put up another boring candidate based on the old machine politics of tradition and Democrats will put up Hillary Clinton, another old hippie progressive out of touch and expecting feminist nut cases to carry her into the White House. Neither political party is poised to deal with the typical iPhone user. Just as the car companies are lecturing Apple about how hard it is to get into the car market. But Apple will expect to do in two years what it takes General Motors a decade to perform, and they have the available R&D cash to pull it off. Just this past week Amazon.Com was upset that the FAA created regulations against their proposed drone delivery system, and they also have the cash to challenge the government���s attempt to preserve the old-fashioned way of delivery by UPS, FedEx, and the United States Postal Service. From the government its business as usual reacting to lobby money poured into their offices���but the marketplace represented by Amazon wants their products delivered within hours not days���and the collision will impact the government more than it will the marketplace because the next generation will expect fast delivery-because technology has always provided them with quick and immediate gratification on anything they have wanted.���� They will expect the same out of their politics. Politicians standing in the way of that desire will be chewed up and spit out. Trust me. It���s coming fast and furious.

That is why it���s important to now focus on a philosophy for the 22nd century because it will take that long for the dust to settle. It has taken a 100 years to arrive at this current juncture, and it will take that long for the intellect of mankind to catch up to the philosophy needed by their recent inventions. Politicians like the Hillary Clinton types who expect to show up and walk on stage uttering a few lines of dialogue to pretend they are in the most powerful position in the world aren���t going to be able to deal with the advantages given to the typical person through all these new inventions. The explosion of invention coming available requires a new philosophy to deal with it all, and one of the first things that will have to go is the old adherence to the political machines of the past. The tools given to mankind currently allow for such a philosophy to develop. The old systems will be swept away in the current���car companies will go out of business as new ones emerge, power generation will change dramatically as more and more people learn of the options kept from them through unnecessary regulation, and stonewalling politicians will be crushed by a coming generation deeply impatient and empowered with knowledge at their fingertips. There���s no way to stop it now. What is needed to help the transition is a new way of thinking���a philosophy for the 22nd century so that when the dust clears, the mind of mankind will be aligned with the products of its innovation.

Rich Hoffman

CLIIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

 

Understanding Leadership: The difference between success and failure

Compared to most everyone else I have some bizarre ideals about leadership that certainly don���t travel well with the currents of civilization. Yet I am so certain of them that I no longer entertain opinions to the contrary because I recognize it as a special gift that is of great benefit not only to myself, but everyone I happen to know. Of course this leads to many matters of conflict which part of me strategically avoids while at the same time seeking it out. Leadership is one of the least understood attributes to modern society even though it should be easily plotted through history. Our best modern attempts is to believe that somehow West Point makes leaders through the military and that somehow the armed services through the concept of sacrifice makes great people. The other belief is that somehow in the classrooms of our colleges a teacher touches the life of a student and magic happens and a leader is born. So the mystical belief is that if society wants leaders, they need more procedures and rules to create an environment for a leader to evolve into the role of a savior willing to sacrifice themselves for a common good���so most schools of thought travel down that path. Yet, that grasp is likely the most ardent enemy of leadership that there is, and ends up crushing such opportunities for such people to emerge leaving in the wake chaos and process driven bureaucracy where everything just grinds to a halt with inaction.

Many times while dealing with a political system from local government to a business of some kind, what is found there is a process driven commitment to a rigid line of thought mystically protecting them from the scandal of inefficiency. The belief is actually as stupid as a group of head hunters from a South Pacific island refusing to allow their picture to be taken because they believe that their soul will be captured in the process. The belief in processes and procedures comes directly from a lack of leadership���it doesn���t act as a substitute. Where it gets really confusing is that some sense of order is needed for mankind to act with one another but to have real leadership it often requires visionaries to break those rules so that leadership can occur.

Readers here know of my thoughts on the work of Robert Pirsig who developed the Metaphysics of Quality and specifically captured the essence of leadership in his contemplations on philosophy. I often refer to his train motif to explain leadership���who is always the character at the front of a long train spotting things at the cutting edge of travel along the tracks. Process driven analysis is usually at the back of the train���away from the leader���as far as possible in most organizations. They are never in a position to make decisions at the cutting edge because by the time the problem gets to their part of the train at the back, decisions are long passed the point of no return. The only way that decisions can be made at the back of a train is for the train to go very slow or to stop all together���so that communication from the front can get to the back of the train in time for decision makers to consider the information and then project it back up to where the engineer is, and the train can turn, stop, or go faster depending on what is needed. It takes courage to be at the front of the train, and when decisions are made there, they can be immediately applied allowing for more swiftness in movement. Most modern organizations, the American military included, function from the back of a train of thought.

The back of the train is safe. It covers up the great mystery as to why some people are naturally better than others at the task of leadership. In fact, it avoids the entire question when process driven analysis can just keep everyone busy giving the illusion of productivity. But frustration often emerges that the train just doesn���t move fast enough���and that is because there isn���t anybody competent at the front of the train because everyone is stuck in the back. Those most able to be great leaders get bored and just step off in frustration leaving an organization even more befuddled than they were before. This is essentially why Apple fired Steve Jobs the first time���before hiring him again to save their company. Steve Jobs was always at the front of the train���and was happy no place else. Most great companies with the most innovation coming out of them have a leader at the front of the train who is most comfortable being there. There are of course people in the back who collect data to analyze, but the train is not driven from there. It is given to the leader to create a history to learn from so that decisions can most fluidly be made at the very front of the train as the future progresses.

I would never make it in todays military. Even while watching American Sniper I kept thinking how stifling the military is on a human mind, and that is for a good reason. When you become a soldier, you become part of a system and surrender your individuality to process driven goals. I could never do that, and I never have been able to. Yet great individuals in the military like Chris Kyle, Chuck Yeager, General Claire Lee Chennault, and General Patton all had a strong streak of individuality in them that sometimes defied orders and acted on their own merit from the front of whatever train they were on. All those characters found life at the back of the train boring and stifling desiring instead to be at the cutting edge of action. For those characters, the orders were less process driven because they were literally on the front lines of combat. However, especially in Chennault���s case when General Stillwell became U.S. Army commander in China during World War II Chennault was much less effective as a leader because the jealous Stillwell insisted on running the war from the back of the train, instead of the front where Chennault resided. This caused constant feuding between the two generals and cost the lives of many soldiers as the end result. Patton was much the same kind of man, and if reading the book Killing Patton��is studied, it was likely that someone killed the general because nobody wanted to deal with him in peace time.���� Likely it was Stalin who ordered the assassination, and at the time they were supposedly allies with the United States-but Stalin just didn���t want to deal with Patton in a future war���so they killed him���likely. And many in the U.S.���including the White House���secretly breathed a sigh of relief. But why? Because, Patton insisted not only at being at the front of the train, he wanted to be on the sweep at the front���the closest to the tracks as he could get. He was a real, natural-born leader and he often defied orders to do what he thought was best. If not for Patton, it is likely that the Germans would have beat America to the bomb���and the Allies would have lost.

So given all this historical data���why are organizations still insistent on back of the train analysis designed to stifle leadership? Well, it is the same vile human emotion that desires communism over capitalism���the jealous refusal to accept that some people have leadership, and some people don���t. Those that don���t desire process driven rules and regulations to protect them from their own inadequacies���and that pretty much sums it up. They hover like ghosts behind a leader in the back of the train and look for ways to take the credit for decisions made at the front once they think the situation is safe for them to do so. In Patton���s case they of course waited for a few days after the war ended to kill Patton. Authorities did something similar in China with Chennault sending him quickly to pasture once the conflict ended trying quickly to silence the petulant general. Instead Chennault wrote a great book The Way of the Fighter��which revealed all his contentious exchanges between FDR, General Stillwell, and Truman up until the publication of the book in 1949. Chennault was irate with frustration saying that the conflict in China was not against the Japanese, but with the encroaching communists from the North. The authorities at the back of the train laughed it off and pulled out the United States surrendering all the hard-fought��gains to the communists to become our future enemy. If Truman had listened to Chennault instead of Stillwell, there wouldn���t have been a Korean War, and there wouldn���t have been a Vietnam. And China would to this day be a capitalist country and friend to the United States instead of the holder of its debts and leveraging itself for a fiscal take-over of the American economy. And for a modern context, Chris Kyle would have likely had many less killings if he had always done what he was told. It���s part of the American way to think on ones feet and to make judgment calls from the front of the train. But first someone has to have the courage to reside there���and that is what���s short in most organizations. If they can find someone who wants to be at the front of the train, they are lucky. Those types of leaders are rare, but they are the key to making an endeavor successful or a failure. In classrooms look at the kids in the back of the class as opposed to those who voluntarily sit in the front���and you will see the difference between potential leaders and slugs who want to hide in the masses.

The failure to recognize such people is the problem, and they are often concealed behind jealousy, inflated egos, and overly educated process driven knuckle-draggers. Even the best leaders were hated even when they were loved. People love the results, but they hate that they can���t emulate a leader through processes, graphs, and structural definitions. There isn���t a class at West Point that can properly teach leadership and there isn���t a single course anywhere that can teach the proper behavior. It comes to some people naturally who love to stand in the fire at the front of the train. Leadership takes a natural courage that is vacant from most people, and if a society wants more leaders���it has to create an environment that produces more of them. But more often than when potential leaders are discovered within government schools they are beat into submission before they get out of the fifth grade and destroyed like baby seals surrounded by sharks that just want a meal. Most leaders are destroyed before they ever make it to adulthood. Today���s real leaders are taught early and often to stand at the back of the train and to shut up. So, not knowing any better, they do���and live desperate lives unfulfilled quietly screaming in silence to words that can���t be articulated.

For more on this topic read my article ���Making Omelets: The essence of leadership��� which features several videos of Gordon Ramsay the popular chef and television personality who is famous for fixing failed restaurants. There are millions upon millions of people who can cook, and there are hundreds of others who have made successful television careers out of cooking. But Ramsay is different. It���s because he makes decisions at the front of the train instead of the back���and that skill is one of the most unusual��in the world���the culinary world is much, much better off.���� Whether its food, war, or just aspects of manufacturing, real leaders are hard to come by, but when they are found, they are more precious than a treasure trove of wealth discovered.���� They have the ability to see and guide others through dangers not yet seen and can create what���s needed before anybody even understands why. But before one can be a leader they must have courage���because the front of the train is scary. And that is why organizations without good leadership languish in bureaucracy. Because they have to go slow enough for the cowards in the back to make a decision���and that is a promise of inevitable failure���because the competition out there will likely happen across a leader���and they won���t be moving slowly���they���ll travel fast because they have a leader at the front of the train. It���s not the size of an organization that makes it successful; it���s about the quality of their leadership. And to understand that, quality has to be understood���which is the topic of a whole new article.

Rich Hoffman

CLIIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

 

Net Neutrality and Castro: Both lied to achieve their political objectives

Anyone claiming that Net Neutrality is a good thing is a political insurgent within the United States and they are lying. They are up to the same kind of lies that history has seen before, and they are after control of information and the taxation of the Internet with the creation of yet another government department. They are following a pattern very similar to one that was seen in Cuba when Fidel Castro overthrew Fulgencio Bastista to bring communism to the small island occupied largely by American businesses. The very same people who currently support Net Neutrality watched and supported Castro���s use of communism as a weapon and are still seeking to apply the same methods to capitalism wherever it flourishes. In 21st century America, there is no place that capitalism is more alive than on the Internet���so those who advocate that the FCC take control of the Internet are using nearly the same strategies as Castro did to win the hearts and minds of supporters to execute the task at hand���the spread of socialism. To illustrate my point watch the clip below where Castro promised during a speech that he was not bringing communism to Cuba. Of course in hindsight we now know better–just as it will be with Net Neutrality. Castro lied openly that he and his party were not communists. He also lied that he did not want power for himself. He���s still in charge in Cuba some 60 years later���and people are still dirt poor and crumbling away into dust because of socialism.

Castro became a communist during his jail term from Bastista after the failed attack on the Moncada��Baracks. It was in prison that he formed a revolutionary group with Che Guevara and his brother Rual Castro���who just worked out the deal with Obama to reopen Cuba to Americans. American intelligentsia particularly on college campuses openly supported Castro as a hero of Marxism and thought of him as a rock star. Castro was treated with the kind of fanfare that might only be seen today from a Hollywood celebrity. Yet all during this period Castro denied being a communist, until he was in charge. It was then that he made the subtle announcement shift and began to lace his speeches with references toward socialism. Please take the time to watch the next video, which is a pretty good documentary about Castro and the whole Cuban situation on the world stage. After watching it will become clear what the strategic desires for communism were and what a thin line America really walked on���and still does. For instance, when Castro created the ���boat people��� as a way to infect the political leanings within America with socialist trained insurgents trying to reach their families already in America the move was a tactical one���just as the push for open boarders is today. The third world countries to the south of the United States are poor because of the open utilization of socialism, yet they are being encouraged to move into the United States to infect the political process with socialist voters. It is the desire of most on the political left in America to see communism spread globally, and to eliminate capitalism everywhere. Go ahead; the history is clear in the following video.

Net Neutrality advocates are performing the exact same strategy and are openly lying to the American people so the FCC can create a Department of the Internet. Their intentions are first to put on the breaks to the open capitalism currently so prevalent there. They then intend to tax the Internet so that they can increase the amount of revenue to the Federal government. Then, most importantly of all, they want to control information. For those on the left who have captured our education institutions, the media and even the values of the American nation with sentiment, they are still a party that looks like its going to be extinct within a few years, just because they are mathematically a minority party. Just look at their upcoming field of candidates for the 2016 elections. They really only have Hillary Clinton as a viable progressive. There are no other challengers���whereas the Republicans have a dozen or so. There is a lot of competition in the Republican Party, but hardly any within the Democrats and most of them are within the groups mentioned. Mainstream America still leans toward the right and toward capitalism. The only way the progressive left can win elections is through voter fraud, or by encouraging right thinking people to just stay home and not vote���because it���s a pointless exercise, which then cuts into the voting numbers.

 

The desire by the left to allow amnesty to illegal aliens is the same strategy that Fidel Castro imposed on the United States when he used his own people to infect the Florida political system with socialist Cubans so to slowly rot America from within. It was a strategy that even modern communist loving progressives still want to continue���because it���s working. It���s a way that Democrats can turn red states into purple states and continue to do the work that Castro started in the Western Hemisphere���the end of capitalism and the spread of communism.

Communists can���t have an open exchange of ideas on the Internet. China regulates what people can see, and there is a desire for the same in America. After all, the political left has control of the current media���including Fox News. Fox would be a lot harder hitting if they didn���t want to play fair and so not to threaten their White House press pass. And anybody who has worked for media knows that editors and program directors trained in liberal institutions lean to the left as opposed to the right. Those on the right often find themselves clamped with FCC regulations that target the removal of such characters with surgical precision���which is how the left managed to take over the media in the first place.

They wish to do the same with the Internet. Because the left controls the media citizen journalists have risen to challenge traditional broadcasts-and information is getting out that the government clearly is embarrassed by. For instance, take this article for example. No broadcaster on the air today would dare make such comparisons to Fidel Castro and Net Neutrality���even though the strategies are clearly the same. Castro to achieve power lied about his support of communism until it was too late. In the same manner the producers of the below commercial are doing precisely that���denying the real intention of Net Neutrality by attempting to capture the position of their opposition���which progressives do all the time. It was Republicans that ended slavery in America.���� Yet to this day, it is thought that Democrats are for all people of color. During the Iraq War, the left pounded President Bush for American involvement. Now, under Obama, they are calling for war to attack a group of radicals they helped empower in Egypt, Libya and the entire Middle East. Now suddenly the left-leaning media is pounding the drums of war. When people like me point out the hypocrisy, the political left is embarrassed, so they seek to remove the observer so they can continue to hide in the shadows behind lies. If they can regulate me out of existence, they can continue to rule politics as a minority party. That is what Net Neutrality is all about���control.

This is typical among communists; they are second-handers who live through other people. They falsely expect others to do the work while they benefit and in Cuba once Castro took possession of all the American businesses there, their economy died and they essentially currently live in the stone age, until fellow socialists in America desired to come to Cuba���s rescue with an insurgence of American investment hoping to further spread the message of communism to the heartland of the United States through vacations and interaction with the landmass south of Florida.

Net Neutrality is about destroying capitalism and the advocates in favor want control���just as Castro wanted control of Cuba. The political left has already destroyed an entire generation through public education and sappy entertainment options from a Hollywood no longer supporting capitalism. This has given rise to the value of the Internet and created a desperate need by liberals to capture and control the Internet for their own survival. The only way they can perform the task is through a Trojan Horse insurrection, just as Castro did in Cuba-by openly lying about their intentions until it was too late. For the Internet that time will come when the FCC creates a Department of the Internet and seeks taxation and permits right out of the gate to destroy their philosophic rivals���just because they can���t compete. Because that���s the real secret between those who support socialism and communism, and those who support capitalism���the capitalists aren���t afraid of competition because they are always striving to get better. But the socialists are already of the weak type and just want to be told what to do because they are too lazy to think. Those are the type of people buying into Net Neutrality���and due to the lies being spread���historically the perpetrators know that the results will likely reside in their favor.

Rich Hoffman

CLIIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

 

Ideas are Scary: The important task of being a place that lets them grow

By far my favorite commercial of 2014/2015 is the one below from GE about how ideas can sometimes be scary featuring a little alien looking ET creature being born and ridiculed until GE opened its doors to the innovative prospects of the fledgling creature. It���s a very honest commercial for such a huge corporate giant and it tells me that at least in practice GE hasn���t lost its way in understanding where it came from and what role it plays in America���s future. Growing up in Cincinnati it is impossible to not have GE a major part of my life and whenever I have to travel downtown and drive by the Evendale plant there is a little happy place that keys off in the back of my mind knowing to what a great extent GE has advanced technology and really lived up to the aspects of the commercial on innovation.

Being a corporate giant isn���t easy, and I am often distrustful of them to stay nimble in the field of innovation simply because there comes too much pageantry and fluff just to keep rules and regulations off their back to maintain the kind of forward thinking that made them great in the first place. Jeffrey Immelt��after Barrack Obama was elected was put into a very difficult position. Here was a president openly hostile to corporations and business that would see GE as a massive target for socialist implementation. As a CEO it is first the job of such a person to guide their corporation through the potential threats that exist so that those gates of innovation can stay open for such fledging ideas shown in the commercial. So Immelt did what he thought was best, he made a partner out of Obama running the president���s Jobs Council for a few years. In so doing he was able to exploit the lack of financial understanding of the barely concealed socialist by enacting 54 of the 60 recommendations made by the Council���such as fast tracking key infrastructure projects and selling more leases for both oil and gas production. But in the end, only 4 of those recommendations were completed as is typical of government which loses focus quickly as life in the Belt Way quickly kills off ideas like an African hunter on the Serengeti. Under the auspices of government ideas quickly become extinct���and Jeffrey Immelt���s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness was one of the first things that Obama hung on his trophy wall. Obama tried to use GE to stimulate his economy, and largely took Immelt���s advice without knowing anything else to do���but failed to nurture those ideas into fruition

http://blogs.wsj.com/corporate-intelligence/2013/01/31/the-one-job-jeff-immelt-might-be-happy-to-lose/

For the last 20 years the GE90��engines from GE have been a game changer in commercial aviation. It is largely because of this engine that oversea travel has been on the increase just because now airlines can perform such a task with such a powerful engine without massive fuel consumption. That engine is exactly what the metaphorical commercial about GE innovation was all about. It was one of the great leaps of innovation from American culture that could have only come from such a large corporation that embraces such invention. And to make the GE90 work, it took a lot of the best minds at the time in the field of aerospace to pull it off.

There is a new generation of engines coming to serve for the next two decades, so the GE90��today is something of a Payton Manning in aviation. It���s still a great engine, but it has set the bar very high and newer, younger players are entering the market to break those previous records���but it took the pace setter first to show everyone what the innovation looked like. While some may look at the GE commercial in respect to Immelt���s work with President Obama and cry foul, I have a tremendous amount of respect for those open doors which allow scary little creatures like new ideas a place to go. I wish there were a thousand GEs in America���and I believe there is plenty of room for all of them���but unfortunately for most, they end up in the trophy case of some politician���s game wall���hunted, killed, and stuffed for memory.

I don���t watch much television so I didn���t see the GE commercial until I was watching the start of NASCAR last weekend. I love NASCAR because of the innovations���the new MAC tools, the tires, the corporate sponsors. I love seeing a pit crew in action trying to troubleshoot a problem in record time to get their driver back on the track as quickly as possible. There are a lot of ideas born on those tracks which end up in the cars we drive, so I love to just watch NASCAR for a glimpse into the future. It was in looking for innovations that I actually saw the GE commercial.

Recently I had one of the worst days of my life where everything that could go wrong did and there was just a mess of activity that had to be cleaned up from more of those idea killing vermin. So to brighten my day, my wife went to McDonald���s and picked up a couple of Big Mac meals so I could watch the news while enjoying that wonderful idea from McDonald���s ancient past���which I still think is one of the greatest inventions ever created. Big Macs would be an impossibility to the typical hunter and gatherer in New Guinea or Africa���yet out of the mind of Ray Kroc came a company called McDonald���s that made quality fast food easy and affordable on the go���the Big Mac was created. When I have a really bad day-one of those days where it���s difficult to breathe from one moment to the next, I typically get a Big Mac and just like that���I���m good to go. My worries and concerns evaporate. It���s not just the taste of the burger��that drives my interest, it���s the story of McDonald���s itself that does. It reminds me of what innovation is supposed to look like. As rapidly as McDonald���s makes Big Macs it is astonishing that they always come out well, cooked perfectly, possessing just the right amount of lettuce, onions and sauce, and can be done so quickly. To this very day if I buy a Big Mac in Florida, it will be made nearly to the same specifications as one that I might buy in Wisconsin. They are little miracles���now taken for granted like the GE90 jet engine���but they have changed the way the world interacts with each other���and each one of those ideas is beautiful.

So I have a major soft spot for the GE commercial with the little alien idea being born to the voice over about ideas being scary. Ideas are the natural-born��enemy of the way things are. They are ridiculed and mocked, and are often hunted by members of the political class for sport. When Immelt joined Obama���s Job���s Council, the move to me was to protect all the ideas brewing at GE from the hunters of the political class who want to destroy those wonderful creatures before they can bloom into beautiful creatures. That���s what a CEO should do, and if that sometimes means drawing fire away from those they are trying to protect���then so be it. Because as the commercial says, ���under the proper care, [ideas] become something beautiful. They do.

The task of a massive corporation like GE is to create an environment where ideas can grow. Not everyone within that culture embodies such a spirit, of course, but in general, the philosophy of the company must seek to strive for such creation. If it does, then it will bring into the world ideas that would otherwise be destroyed by humanity always speculative, and short-sighted. It was a bold commercial from a company that really didn���t need to push the limits of perception���yet they did. They didn���t have to ruffle any feathers, yet they did���and for that I deeply appreciate the commercial. It is good to see that GE is not playing it so safe in the public relations market���and that they are remembering who and what they are���and how they got where they are today. Ideas are beautiful���even when they look scary to the un-enterprising and clandestine political hunters. It is good to be the natural-born enemy to the way things are. That is the spirit of innovation���and the direct benefit is humanity and its offspring.

Rich Hoffman

CLIIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

 

Why I’d Vote For Scott Walker: The worthlessness of a college education

Out of all the potential candidates for the upcoming presidential election in 2016, it is Scott Walker who most personifies my expectations for such a high administrative position. He is certainly the most qualified, and vetted of any potential candidate except for maybe President Obama himself. Walker has been through a remarkable amount of tribulation���and has come out on top each and every time. He has the even temperament to take on anything and still come out as someone who can build bridges with those he disagrees with. From my vantage point, he���s the perfect candidate including the fact that he did not graduate from college. Recently when progressives have witnessed the polling numbers of Walker and realized that he could have a legitimate chance at running for President of the United States, they have been clamoring for anything and everything negative about Walker that they could���which has been a very short list. Even when they looked for skeletons in his closet they found it surprisingly empty. All they could muster was an attack on his intelligence because he did not complete college���which again to me is one of his greatest strengths.

The college myth was created by the progressive class to perpetuate the complete lie that college would allow kids to purchase their way into merit for income earning potential. It has only worked in regard to government workers who don���t have any real expectation of performance anyway. In the private sector college experience has not replaced the traditional ground up mentorship���s which used to be so common���where a hard enterprising worker learned everything there was to know about a business and worked their way up the ranks through tribulation and experience. Progressives in their desperate task of creating a society of collectivists decided that the best way to accomplish the task was through public education and colleges���which they have done. There is a good reason that most educators throughout the United States are known liberals. It is to teach students liberalism and to implant in their young minds the concept of selflessness. For instance, when my wife attended college she was told to read the Koran. When she asked the question about why the Bible wasn���t offered she was instantly told that she wasn���t there to ask questions but to do as she was told���which came as a surprise to both of us. The college had an agenda for their students and that was to spread the theocracy of Islam while charging students huge amounts of money for the indoctrination. The results can be easily seen around us to this day.

In college I was primarily interested in economics and philosophy���and my professors were wrong on both. In philosophy on the very first day the topic of conversation and first reading assignment was I Ching, which I thought was stupid. I explained the book to the class and professor as a ridiculous expression of oriental mystics that had very little to do with American economic power. Of course the professor attacked American domination through economics around the world and cited that the oriental people had it right as a best approach through a happy life toward our deaths. Even more shocking to me was the fact that out of a class room of 50 students I was the only one who had read I Ching so I was the only one who knew what I was talking about���except for the professor who was clearly a huge bleeding heart liberal. I Ching��essentially preached the ideals of Confucianism which was really a back door approach to preparing the mind to accept communism as a state-run option���because the orient is essentially a collectivist based society and their philosophies reflect a lack of focus on individuality. I had read the book on my own the year before and already knew what I was going to get out of it, yet the philosophy professor was planning to spend four weeks on the book���which to me was just ridiculous.

There was a similar story which involved my economics studies. When I discovered that the professor in that class was essentially preaching the merits of Keynesian economics I completely rejected the class and was ready to withdrawal. Again, I had already read enough prior to the class to know what the professor was teaching and to stay in his class meant I would have to turn off my mind���not turn it on to a greater degree. Clearly, the experience my wife and I had in college was evidence that the college experience was not about teaching students to be productive people in society���it was to indoctrinate them with as much liberalism as they could cram into a four-year degree hoping that students would take with them that idiocy into the real world to implement progressive political strategies.

I lived on the campus of the University of Cincinnati for one full year and part of another without the desire to party at the fraternities, or to hang out at the bars and nightclubs. I went to a few of those events just to see what all the fuss was, and I didn���t like them. So I spent my time reading books in restaurants that were open all night and maintaining my emotional distance so I���d have clear observation. I was able to watch the college students���who were my age, with the gained insight of uncommitted logic and I drew my conclusions���which turned out to be extremely right. College for most people is a really bad idea. It���s good for learning something in the medical industry and other sciences, but for practical application into the manufacturing sector, or in sales, invention, and even engineering���college does a terrible job in producing intelligent, hard-working masterpieces. College is the dream of progressives to ruin the minds of the young with collectivist crap with the promise that success in life can be purchased. All you have to do is sit through the liberalized classes like a time share victim and hope that you come away from the experience with a free vacation from life.

College teaches people to think within a system���but often the answers to the hardest problems are outside of any organized structure. This is why major progressives like Howard Dean were threatened by Scott Walker as seen in the video above. This is also why Walker has been so successful in Wisconsin where other governors throughout the country have faltered. Walker is functioning from personal experience instead of direction from a system of collective thought. College graduates make nice little party leaders who will think for the good of the political orthodox, but if a problem falls outside of those parameters, they are often lost as to what to do���because collectively their party has not yet answered those types of questions. That happens to Barack Obama all the time. He is the epitome of a college graduate ill prepared for the world outside of liberal institutional thought.���� He cannot think on his feet.

College success is a myth created by progressives and largely the baby boomers bought into the lie completely surrendering logic to pure speculation. Boomers wanted to believe that they could purchase a better life for their children with a college ticket���but all their kids really received was a trip into the ���Brave New World.��� College often ruins minds and destroys opportunity���and most kids are better off not going. There is no replacement for good old-fashioned��hard work���and that is the kind of person that Scott Walker is. A quick study, and one of my most popular articles seen on the sidebar to the right indicates that most successful people avoid the damage that college does to their minds. I saw little of nothing in my college days that was helpful to a human being who desires to think. What I saw happen to women in particular I thought was devastating to their integrity forever. What I gained most out of college was found at a local Burger King that I sat in and read my many books���which I could have done without going to college. It was the most positive aspect of my experience. I ate a lot of Whoppers.

The panic of a Walker candidacy from both Republicans and Democrats is in finally convincing America of the worthlessness of a college education. If Walker wins, it will be a major blow to the progressive myth���and that has all those who love their institutions deeply concerned. But that issue needs to be addressed, sooner rather than later, because America needs the innovation that comes from those who normally get frustrated with college and drop out all together as opposed to those looking to purchase their way through life by turning off their minds just so they can get a piece of paper. From my personal experience there are a lot of potential Bill Gates types out there along with his nemesis Steve Jobs���both who didn���t have a college education. College destroys minds, it doesn���t help them grow and develop new ideas���not at the normal pace of human need. College limits people far more than it helps them, and that is what a Scott Walker President would illustrate to the 21st Century masses. The college scam is already falling apart and people will discover it by default, but Scott Walker could accelerate the process, and might actually save some of what���s left of America. So if I get the opportunity, I will vote for Scott Walker.

Rich Hoffman

CLIIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

 

Ayn Rand’s 1961 Capitalist and Communist Warning: Why Apple is successful and everyone else copies

The Ayn Rand Institute recently posted the below video from 1961 by��Ayn Rand herself about capitalism and communism. At the time there was a lot of debate about which was better for society. The political class and intelligentsia decided they liked communism whereas the American people still in love with their John Wayne westerns and old-fashioned ideas of westward expansion loved their capitalism. Democrats and labor unions in a partnership with each other decided that they would avoid the name of communism in much the same way that Fidel Castro did during the period that he was trying to convince Cuba to turn toward Marxism by denying that his proposed dictatorship was a party of communists. Of course we know by history that it was a complete lie, just as history will show that in America public schools, colleges, and the federal government itself has fully embraced communism all along���and sought to teach children those ���communal��� concepts from before even kindergarten. Visit any daycare facility and you will see communism being taught to 3 and 4 year olds in great abundance. In 1961 Ayn Rand was despondent as to how the great America could even conceive of making the mistakes she had just escaped from in her mother Russia. So she made the below recording to the Presidents Club of the American Management Association to contemplate why.

Speaking of management associations and the innovations available to America it is an aspect to my life that I know first hand. I came to know Ayn Rand and the ARI work because I share with them very similar ideals about how business should be conducted and why capitalism is such a vastly superior mechanism in any global marketplace. I never read Ayn Rand until just a few years ago, yet I lived my life nearly in parallel with her character Howard Roark from the great novel The Fountainhead. When I finally did read it I wondered how I had traveled through life for over 40 years without running across it���and once I did I understood completely the intentions of the novel.

For me the most powerful part of the book was when Roark refused to be a member of the architectural board for the World���s Fair exhibit because of his strict personal revulsion toward collectivism. I too have been invited and had to decline many such associations and it has cost me likely millions in so doing. For thirty years I have been given many, many, many opportunities to do just as what was offered to Roark in The Fountainhead and I declined for the same reasons so to keep my own integrity intact. I had never heard of anybody doing the things I had been doing and taking the social positions I had until I read The Fountainhead, which was really the first time I had a measure that I was actually right in my instincts���and it was good to hear Ayn Rand from beyond the grave tell me she understood.

I had for years been struggling with the communism so present in American business���everything from Six Sigma concepts to Jack Welch management methods. I was sent to many classes over a great deal of time and on day one I lost interest because essentially what they were teaching was classic communism���not capitalism. It was no wonder that companies struggled with profits and innovation and I had no desire to learn such a stupid thing. I often refer to my years at Cincinnati Milacron��as one of those pinnacle moments of understanding. I was sent to a Lean Manufacturing seminar as a hand-picked bright spot in their future only to discover that the company was dying on the first day of class. I lost interest in that company once I realized that they were has-beens and would soon go out of business more or less���which of course they did. My views at the time I couldn���t articulate against the current because everyone essentially thought I was nuts���since I was the lone voice against ���consensus��� and other focus group derivatives. I knew from experience that I wanted to maintain my individuality because it was within that element that true innovation in thought was brought forth.

I still run into the same opposition���actually every day. But I now have a track record to beat over people���s heads which quiets them. When I was in my 20s and 30s everyone just thought I���d grow out of such thoughts of independence���but instead I just got worse over time the more I saw that my methods worked as opposed to other studies. During the 90s I likely read every management book there was in Barnes and Nobel over a ten-year��period, and most of them were so wrong, that they might as well be the equivalent to the latest ���quick diet��� fad because the methods were built around the same mysticism. Most corporations, and most businesses function like a communist dictatorship which quickly saps the strength of an organization of its most valuable resource���the individuals who actually work for the institution. It isn���t long that a company dies on the vine once a few decades of communist dictatorship ruins them for life. Cincinnati Milacron died in this fashion���as did General Motors. The later was only saved by government bail-outs.

Banking institutions, corporations, political structures���everywhere that there is a hierarchy of a few nameplate administrators who have power over others just by title, communism is found to be at the core philosophy of the leaders within the institution. Many of those tuning in to listen to Ayn Ran only cared about what she had to say about profit���not about the means of obtaining it. Most American businesses in 1961 were already infiltrated with communist ideals through their education institutions. They were already thinking in the wrong manner and were mapping out their own personal destructions even as the leaders built their careers and retirement pensions. Those same individuals might have been paid good money for their leadership���but what they often left in their wake was a declining business, not a flourishing one. I simply refused to play along���and over time it has benefited me and many others because when fresh ideals are needed, they are available because I have not destroyed the means of obtaining them.

As Ayn Rand said, it wasn���t communism that proved to be superior to capitalism. It was that in America capitalism committed suicide because businessmen and women discovered that to be good at capitalism they actually had to be good people to the very core of their being and could not have their egos uselessly massaged by corporate structure. The ability to dictate the lives of others because they held power over their employees��� financial purse strings proved too tempting and they fell in love with the power of communism���the ability to be the center of control of all things distributed to others according to their need. For men, the best way to test this morality is in placing a beautiful young secretary outside of their offices. If they contemplate using their power and influence to bed her���they are not moral enough men for capitalism. For women, if they use their power and position to decorate themselves with excessive sign stimuli and tales of oversea travel not out of necessity���but grandeur for the sake of it���as if to exemplify that they hold a higher title than others and therefore hold the fate of so many in their hands���then they are not moral enough for capitalism and will become seduced by the profiteer communism eventually. Once they do, you can hear the term, ���team��� uttered from their mouths more and more often as they are always on the search for ���communal��� exercises intended to achieve consensus. A typical episode of The Office is a good place to start to see this withering, pathetic diatribe of failure manifested through comic relief.

As I write this article my wife and I just bought iPhone 6 mobile devices���which to me is one of the most innovative items on planet earth presently. The company itself is nearly at a $1 trillion market cap valuation, and they���ve done it their way. They are very much as a company the way Howard Roarke��conducted his business���vastly independent of other companies. They make the market come to them instead of forming themselves to the market. Many analysts college trained to think like nice little communists wonder why the market evaluation of Apple isn���t already over $1.26 trillion���after all it could be. But Apple does things their way for their own reasons and they are driving the market according to their creative input as a company driven by individuals. Steve Jobs after all was a very informal businessman who didn���t have a college degree, and was actually fired from the company he created. But in the end it was Jobs who made Apple what it is and paved the way for creative minds through an excessive commitment to a capitalism loving culture that made Apple such a successful company. Jobs was one of the first to introduce casual wear to the business place just to break down the top down communist culture of rigid dress codes and oppressive company reminders that the employees served the institution���not the other way around. What Jobs did at Apple he was able to perform because he wasn���t taught in college to hate it capitalism���but to use it to be a creative human being. He was essentially a modern real-life Howard Roarke.

Apple isn���t the only company out there who understands that communism has no place in American business. There are others, but they are definitely on the fringe. I am one of those proud fringe people and I know of several others because like-minded��people tend to know each other. But what Ayn Rand said in her lecture to the Presidents Club of the American Management Association was completely accurate. It���s not that communism is superior, or had even won. Communism has seeped into our culture as a profiteer while those who were supposed to protect capitalism were too busy thinking about how powerful they are over their employees, or in banging their secretaries. Instead of conducting themselves in a moral way, they have instead turned toward Apple and tried to copy everything about the company hoping that they will strike gold in the same manner. But they can dress in jeans and follow other similar attributes of Apple, but if they don���t develop a creative���capitalist environment for their employees to prosper in���they will fail leaving the default mode of operation to the mindless communists who will sweep in to save the day with bail-outs, focus groups and the constant reminder that institutions are all about ���consensus��� building. But they were, and will always be wrong. Successful companies are built by individuals for the sake of creative enterprise and it is there that capitalism shines best and brightest���and for the most people���s benefit. It is what���s missing from our present culture and why everything taught��counter to that basic ideal is a waste of time. ��American business knows how to get there, but they are not willing to act morally to achieve it���which is why Ayn Rand in 1961 was so baffled by the American approach to the long-standing debate. There just weren���t enough defenders of capitalism out there because too many executives were staring at the boobies of their secretaries���instead of on the next great idea and how to free the minds of mankind to unleash the power of capitalism and the ideals that spring forth from such a culture.

Rich Hoffman

CLIIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT