Rich Hoffman's Blog, page 382

Fairfield Township Tax Increase: The signs of a declining community

No matter where you are in the world articles like this one are something you should pay attention to. Even though the story is a local one, gradually its contents will find you in whatever corner of the world you happen to reside. When I was a kid, Fairfield Township was one of the booming areas around the City of Cincinnati. With Jungle Jims��bringing international attention to the area as one of the most unusual grocery stores in America, General Motors operating a parts plant off RT 4 and a number of other developments, Fairfield Township was the rising star of Ohio. I lived in neighboring Liberty Township and used to think the people who lived in Fairfield were rich and very lucky. Well, years of mismanagement and sheer stupidity have brought to the Township a promise of bankruptcy by 2018 unless the trustees put a 4.9 mill levy up to pay for their fire and police protection on the May 2015 ballot. Here are the numbers provided by the Journal News:

The problem stems from the fact that since 2012, the township has transferred more than $1.7 million from the general fund to the police and fire departments to cover budget shortfalls. Expenses have been outpacing revenues in both departments since 2011, Geis��said. (Ken Geis,is the township���s interim administrator.)

Police expenses, including salaries and equipment, were just short of $3 million in 2013, while revenues were about $2.2 million. The fire department had similar figures in 2013, Geis said. The township transferred about $350,000 from the general fund in 2012 for the fire department, $1.1 million in 2013 for fire and police combined and about $300,000 so far this year for the police department.

The township���s finances are strong now, with a Aa2 bond rating from Moody���s, the second highest rating possible and an indicator of good credit risk, and a projected balance of nearly $4 million this year after expenses. However, that���s down from the 2011 balance of $6 million. Projected balances show the general fund gradually diminishing until it dips near or below $1 million in 2018.

http://www.journal-news.com/news/news/local/township-may-consider-levy-to-avoid-insolvency/nhWC6/

The smart thing to do would be to restructure the contracts and staffing levels of the police and fire departments to reflect the declining community that Fairfield is. Let���s face it; Fairfield Township is not the best place to live anymore. It is mired with the same types of challenges that most big cities face with a demographic population overly dependent on government services as the more self-reliant types have picked up and moved on to places where people think more the way they do. It was easy to keep adding fire departments as part of a gigantic international labor union and expect massive wages for mostly sitting around all day doing nothing while Fairfield Township was experiencing its economic boom that lasted for several decades during the 60s through the 80s. It���s not like the roughly 18,000 residents around Fairfield Township were having houses burn down every day. There is the occasional arson case, the occasional pot bust, and domestic violence calls that come when you put stupid young people with no money and addictions to alcohol in conflict together near a bowling alley���but other than those issues, Fairfield Township is grossly overstaffed��with police and fire department employees���and the trustees know that the fight to reduce those positions will likely be more unpopular than filing bankruptcy���which is just fine with the labor unions behind the police and fire departments. For instance, the Township in the fourth quarter of 2014 hired Lawrence Barbiere��to replace Jack Grove as the township law director. Guess what, Grove was charging the township for his services–$315 per hour. Barbiere only charges $150 per hour. If the trustees look at their fire department and police payrolls they will see a lot of officers pushing over $100,000 per year with their overtime roll-overs. Those employees should be cut���or put on a RIF so that newer���cheaper employees could be implemented so not to force residents to vote for a tax increase. You can still have your police and fire departments sitting on the side of the road playing on the internet all day���but at least they���ll be there if some delusional drug addict has a bad drug bust or ends up burning down their home to collect insurance money so to pay off their gambling debts.

But of course the fire department will inflate their numeric needs because it must always be remembered; they are an international labor union first���servants of the local citizens second. Chief Matt Fruchey��said this of the trustees decision for a tax increase in May������I am very pleased that the trustees have aligned with our assessment of current and future needs of the township.��� What that means is that Fruchey believes staffing levels need to be increased to some magic number consistent with the number of people living in the area. Increasingly Fairfield Township is filled with people like Barbara Holland who said to the Today���s Pulse newspaper that she���s not worried about her taxes, as her property is not of a great monetary value. ���They���re (trustees) going to really have to get out there and push this���.it���s the people with these big houses that are going to fight it.��� So essentially what Barbara said is that she wants the services of the police and fire without paying for it, and wants wealth redistribution from those ���big houses��� to give her community resources that she isn���t equally contributing to.

It is that kind of mentality that tells the money to leave Fairfield Township because the trustees failed to protect them from people like Barbara Holland and Chief Matt Fruchey. Fruchey knows that his guys need a few more players in their Call of Duty network down at the firehouse, so he���s protecting their interests by exploiting the stupid in Fairfield Township. So guess what happens, the people in those big houses get up and leave Fairfield Township and move next door to Liberty and West Chester where personal wealth and property value is still appreciated somewhat leaving the community who just passed the high tax rates filled with people like Barbara, and without people in those big houses. Guess what happens to the revenue stream of a community when value leaves and poor value stays? The community dies.

Yet in a different newspaper Barbara Holland spoke a different note about the upcoming levy when the trustees split the vote on a May ballot or a November vote during a special Friday meeting on January 23rd. Suddenly Holland stated to the Enquirer that ���I think you need to have another town meeting roundtable. Tonight was not informative. I���m going to be cutting something out if this goes through.��� So in one paper Holland doesn���t care about the tax, the next she���s undecided. What is going on is that the trustees know they have to come up with more money to pay for the police and fire services and they don���t want the pain of lawsuits if they force staff reductions to balance the books. Wishy washy residents like Holland they need to speak out in favor of the levy to put peer pressure into the community to support the next levy���they just can���t decide when the best numbers will be that will work toward their advantage. These are the decisions of a declining community���because no matter what the trustees do, failure will follow. If they pass a tax increase more money will leave the township for friendlier districts. If they don���t pass the tax increase the international unions connected to the fire and police departments will put the screws down on the trustees in ways they aren���t equipped to deal with financially or emotionally. So either way, Fairfield Township loses and will further go down in value. There will become more residents like Barbara Holland demanding more taxes on properties of little value and less in those ���big houses��� who will pay a lot more just because people like Holland ended up voting for the increase.

The same struggles are coming to your front door dear reader. It���s just a matter of time.

Rich Hoffman

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Labor Unions in Decline: Knuckle-dragging losers, Obama and King Jayavarman II

���To give working families a fair shot, we���ll still need more employers to see beyond next quarter���s earnings and recognize that investing in their workforce is in their company���s long-term interest. We still need laws that strengthen rather than weaken unions, and give American workers a voice.������� That is the advice of a knuckle dragging idiot whose entire world view was shaped by marijuana cigarettes, Marxists college professors and a parade of communists who wanted to screw his promiscuous white mother. ��Well, that idiot has been president of the United States now for a few years and even with the hard lessons about how socialism does not work, and managed economies by government infusion of their bureaucratic tendrils stifles creative enterprise instead of feeding it���Barack Obama still says really stupid things like that about labor unions.

Union membership in the United States fell to an all-time low in 2014, according to a government report released just days after President Barack Obama called for new laws to strengthen unions during his State of the Union speech. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the union membership rate was 11.1 percent last year, down 0.2 percent from the rate seen in 2012 and 2013. This trend is part of a growing realization about unions in America and the kind of rhetoric uttered by major left leaning progressives like Obama and his personal friend Richard Trumka���that the concept of a labor union is right out of the pages of Karl Marx. Labor unions are essentially anti-American, anti-capitalism, and immoral toward positive growth toward productive enterprise.

The BLS report reveals that union membership is increasingly a thing of the past for most Americans, and is a status mostly relegated to government workers���which needs to be made illegal. The union membership rate for the public sector was 35.7 percent, and was just 6.6 percent in the private sector. As of last year, there were 14.6 million people working in unions.

Labor Secretary Tom Perez picked up on this point, and noted that the BLS report showed that weekly wages for union workers were significantly higher than wages for non-union workers. Union workers saw a median weekly wage of $970 in 2014, while the median wage for non-union workers was $763.

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2015/01/23/u-s-union-membership-falls-to-record-low-in-2014/

Well������������������.Tom, Barry, and Richard T and all the other slack-jawed��old hippies and social parasites who utter such ridiculous nonsense with the wit of a cockroach���the reason labor unions are failing is because that $10,000 dollars per year difference in pay that union workers typically make above non-union workers is sapped directly out of the profit formula that most businesses need to exist. While the communist in people like Barak Obama, and Tom Perez point to the CEOs of various corporations and declare that they should give back their high salaries and bonus checks to ���the people��� of the ���middle class��� they forget that it takes leaders to drive companies and the workers toward profitability in the first place. Under the philosophy of Karl Marx the ���workers��� typically left to their own devices are often uninspired toward productive enterprise and are easily out produced by the rest of the world. Yet they command salaries that are higher for less work. That doesn���t make any sense and is the direct cause of why union membership is down.

If labor unions attached to government positions were made illegal that would go a long way toward solving many budget problems in the United States. The private sector has had to learn the hard way���yet the government sector workers have no reason to change their behavior from their point of view. They can now vote themselves raises as labor unions protect them from reality leaving the only option to eliminating their corrosive influence is to cut the positions all together. As Obama lectures that CEOs should distribute their bonus checks to the ���middle class��� he runs off to a golf outing on the tax payer funded Air Force One to live as if he were the king Jayavarman II of the Khmer Empire presiding over the majestic Angkor monuments. The drunkenness of power upon Obama���s mind is purely funded by tax payer looting provided to him through an army of union driven thugs at his feet providing support so long as they get that marginal pay increase just for belonging to a federal labor union. Labor unions attached to government work of any kind invites corruption of the highest order and are the root cause of the inflated tax payer funded budgets demanding reforms that never come.

Most of the time workers are not worth that $10,000 difference in pay that Tom Perez is talking about because the laws of a free market economy were ignored. The value is artificial and focused on the worker instead of the net result of the product produced by the endeavor demanded���which is a fatal flaw in thinking. Only government workers who get paid for showing up at a desk without the expectation of doing any real work, like Obama and Perez, could conclude such a ridiculous proposal���that companies function as ignorantly as they, and pay employees for unproductive work at values that are unreasonably high. In government when they need more money, they just raise taxes. So they assume in the private sector that the cost of goods and services can do the same to cover their margins. But it doesn���t work that way. When the world is competing with a global economy where many workers in those far away lands are doing work for $1 to $2 per day, its hard for the worker in the middle of Tennessee to justify their existence toward productivity when they expect to make over 100 times that amount for the same work.

This blind support for labor unions comes from people who have no idea how the world really works. They have been bred in a government backed vacuum to believe that jobs are created with tax payer money and that results are never to be expected. In many ways Obama is very much like the king Jayavarman II who started an empire in the region of Cambodia around 802 AD by declaring himself king of the world sticking a penis shaped rock in a slotted stone and asking the gods to give him immortal power. To prove he and his subsequent rulers were truly divinely led, they built all the monuments popular to the region���such as Angkor Wat. But guess what, they weren���t immortal or divinely influenced. They were just men who rose and fell within a few centuries of their climb to power. And so it will be for all government workers and their inflated wages they demand. Their large houses, boats, and lavish vacations paid for by the tax payers will be consumed and cast back to ruin the moment their lives are snuffed out by fate���and nobody will remember their efforts. Only through productivity does the work of ones enterprise live on in some fashion of immortality. No matter how much people like Obama take and give away���the value of what is looted is what suffers. What is taken is productivity and without it an entity dies one hundred percent of the time. That is why union membership is down. Soon, it will only be government workers who will be in them and the next great crises will be when people not in a union are asked to pay for more taxes to justify those in government still in unproductive unions. But the sympathy won���t be there. It���s already fading fast���especially after the scandals within the IRS over the last few years.

It���s only a matter of time before those union memberships decline as well. Because there is no longer sympathy for the unionized slug who expects to get paid for sitting around all day doing very little. The reason is not so much because of the money���it���s because of the effort. America as a nation was a productive place driven by capitalism. Without that productive edge against the rest of the world, Americans feel ���average��� and nobody likes that. The only way to be a winner is to out-produce your rivals around the globe, and the only way to do that is to do better. A union slug won���t be motivated to do better because they get paid regardless of the work performed. So it will be that aspect to their complacency which will eventually do them in. More union workers is a guarantee to have less work done at a higher cost���and that is not a recipe for success. People, no matter where they come from expect success���yet the labor unions work against that desire in ways that are happily putting them out of business.

Rich Hoffman

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A Case in Favor of the Kroger Marketplace: Sometimes the way to save something old is with something new

I was very much against the proposed Kroger Marketplace at the corner of 747 and Taylorsville Road in West Chester, Ohio. The opposition was because the people around the community didn���t want it and the developer didn���t seem to want to construct the buffer zone that was needed to appease the community according to news reports. The Kroger store was supposed to be a service to the community in a positive way, but the people who had moved in and around the area obviously didn���t want anything to do with it. So the trustees listened to the voters instead of laying down flat for the developers and the project halted, which I applauded. Now a different developer wants to build a Marketplace literally at the end of my street, and I am quite happy about it. So what���s the difference?

For several decades now the RT 4 corridor that runs a short way through Liberty Township, Ohio has been an optimal area for commercial and business development. When I arrive home after a long trip I cherish my hometown intersection of RT 4 and Liberty Fairfield Road which includes a traditional Kroger store that has been swelling over the years to a breaking point. Often my wife and I go to the strip mall where the Kroger currently exists and eat Chinese food at the little place there which I think is some of the finest in the country. On a Saturday, traffic is terrible because that Kroger is so swelled making further quests into the surrounding businesses unattractive.

The prospect of a 133,868 square foot Kroger Marketplace being built just up the road and diagonally across from the Elk Run golf course to replace the current one is very attractive just because the business at the old one is so robust that it demands an expansion. I purposely don���t like going to Kroger because it���s just too cramped. We typically get our Chinese food and go home because driving through and around the Kroger parking lot is just too cramped that it���s not worth it. One of the benefits of that particular intersection and the developments there is that everything is so spread out, so traffic is typically handled well. I���m happy to see a new Waffle House being erected next to the Taco Bell and LaRosa���s which is across from the McDonald���s and Skyline Chili. There are so many dining options at that intersection that it looks deceptively rural. But, I can get just about everything I need there. I can get my car repaired. I can purchase advanced firearms. I can get all my household maintenance needs between Tractor Supply and Ace Hardware. My wife and I frequently eat at the Frisch���s. Our banking is there, there���s a Hallmark. A Beverage Barn is run by a wonderful Indian family and were among the first in the area to special order Mello Yello for me directly, before the Coke Company resumed distribution back to the Cincinnati area a few years ago. There are so many positive developments that allow my family to do virtually everything we need to do within two miles of our home and I love it.���� But the grocery experience is just too inconvenient.

http://www.journal-news.com/news/news/public-hearing-for-new-butler-county-kroger-resche/njmb4/

The wealth of the area is conducive to the type of grocery experience that a Kroger Marketplace offers. I like the options offered in the other Liberty Township Kroger store which is a Marketplace���but it���s too far away to be considered convenient. So for me the Kroger Marketplace offers a fix to my present dilemma and the zoning for years has wanted to move in that direction at that particular location, the corner of Kyles Station and RT. 4. There are of course people who enjoy the view of an empty field, including myself. I still enjoy the sight of the occasional farming that takes place on that high hill which looks down into Trenton within the valley of the Great Miami River. But for business development, that particular location is one of the best in the area and is needed due to the value of the developments surrounding it.

There are homes around my property that are in the half million dollar range. The Elk Run Golf course I think is one of the nicest in the city���as it is very picturesque and classy. It���s a bit dated, but is due for an update which will only come if people continue to see the value in it. In a lot of ways the new Kroger will do a lot to bring the proper demographic of financial value to the area directly across from the golf course to appreciate what Elk Run offers as an asset of Liberty Township. Of that new demographic is the residents of the new Carriage Hill development which featured Homarama two consecutive years with homes upward of a million dollars in value. People who have homes like that don���t want to be cramped into a box full of dated architecture and limited shelf space. They want options, high-end cooking ingredients, and a shopping experience that is professional, and free of neurosis. The proposed Kroger Marketplace in Liberty Township is poised to provide all those options and more because the location, view, and proximity to so many family dwellings is just phenomenal.

The West Chester location was nothing like the Liberty Township location as far as placement and overall community impact. The West Chester location needed a developer that understood what the community was weary of. That particular intersection along 747 is very busy already as the Lakota school down the road really mounts up the traffic in the morning and afternoons. The homes in the immediate area already have to contend with a great deal of traffic on crowded roads. But in Liberty Township along RT 4, the road infrastructure is already built; it just needs the construction to begin.

As for the complaints, local residents won���t want to trade their view of a grassy field for a parking lot full of cars. I will be impacted as my wife and I enjoy evenings in our hot tub looking at the stars. The lights from the new Kroger will add to the light pollution which will dilute out more stars from our view.���� But it���s a small price to pay for the types of high-end food offerings that are typical of a Kroger Marketplace. I will gladly welcome the new development as it will greatly enhance my life and does what new creations are supposed to���it will improve life in the community. It will bring a fresh new awareness not just to the area, but to the legacy items currently already there and in a state of decline.

To this day the Western Row golf course is an empty field. The course died years ago before the spur of development along Mason-Montgomery Rd occurred and there are no takers to develop such a large plot of highly expensive real-estate now that the prices are through the roof. The property is too expensive for a golf course, and too large for more restaurants and small stores. ��So it sits in limbo. I would like to not see the same thing happen to Elk Run. I love the Elk Run property. I love the golf course. But because taxes are so high, it would be too expensive to privately own if the golf course fails in the future. And it���s too big to fill with business. It has taken twenty years to fill what has been built along that span of RT 4���so it���s not logical to expect Elk Run to fill with anything but more homes at some point. So for those who love green space and the scenery on top of the big hill in Liberty Township the best way to preserve it is to fully support the new Kroger Marketplace in Liberty Township. What���s wrong with a round of golf before a grocery shopping trip? Nothing at all. At the proposed location I would hope that the Elk Run golf course would enjoy new life from a new demographic support system instead of fading away into the sunset as an older generation moves on to greener pastures and a new generation perpetually looks for something new. Sometimes it takes something new to keep the old alive���and in this case, the new Kroger Marketplace will do just the trick.

Rich Hoffman

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‘American Sniper’ Review: A target only Clint Eastwood could hit

It���s been a few days and I���ve let American Sniper wash over me slowly. If I had written this review the day I watched the movie it would have likely have been one continuous glowing epitaph. It will go down as one of my finest moments in a darkened theater. I simply loved the movie. The acting by Bradley Cooper and Sienna Miller��were particularly good as the leads of the real life Chris and Taya Kyle���as the rest of the cast was just fabulous. It was very easy to forget that the characters on the screen were actually in a movie. It was also easy to forget that the director Clint Eastwood shot most of the picture around California���given that most of the move took place in sets dressed up to look like Iraq. American Sniper takes you away into a bold story of masculinity, love, drama, and geopolitical circumstances on a scale that seemed as simple as a jazz piece, yet as infinitely complex at every level as the most involved, and beloved classic novel. It is truly a wonder of filmmaking exposition.

As much as I love Steven Spielberg as a director and still consider his Schindler���s List to be the pinnacle achievement in film���I think American Sniper just surpassed it as for very complex subject matter conveyed through raw brutality, hope, and cleaver strong characters toward a resolution not so cleanly wrapped up by the climax. During development for American Sniper Spielberg became hung up on the story inflating the script to over 160 pages. Due to budget constraints at Warner Brothers, Spielberg had to bow out with his hands up in frustration when the studio wouldn���t budge. Warner Brother knowing they had a big problem called up old reliable���Clint Eastwood���the ultimate minimalist director at the top of his game and asked him to take the helm���which he did. The result is likely the best movie in Clint Eastwood���s career���which has spanned over five decades now.

On August 5, 2013, Spielberg dropped out of directing the picture. By August 21, 2013 Eastwood signed on. Upon arriving at the script by Jason Hall, Eastwood immediately went into action. By March 14, 2014, Sienna Miller joined the cast. Principal photography began on March 31, 2014 in Los Angeles. In just six short months Eastwood had delivered a movie ready for production and whipped through the shooting schedule quickly so that by June the company was doing its pickup shots. The film was ready to present to the AFI Fest��on November 11, 2014 just six months later. Eastwood had masterfully taken control of a very complex subject matter complete with grieving families, a high-profile lawsuit by Jesse Ventura, a murder trial, and a Hollywood community split in half politically by the subject matter to fly through the production in a way that lesser directors would have been terrified of���to deliver a sheer masterpiece to the movie screen. The only real knock to the movie is that the babies in the film looked like dolls, instead of real infants. Considering the liability of using real babies on a set���I can���t blame Eastwood for the decision. Other than that���the movie was stellar in every way.

I remember when Chris Kyle was murdered and was very aware of the book American Sniper because of the Ventura lawsuit. I had respected Jesse Ventura until I saw what he was doing to the widow Taya and I had my doubts about who said what against who during a bar fight between Kyle and Ventura. So I was turned off to the book waiting to see the evidence as time passed. When Ventura was awarded over a million dollars against the Chris Kyle estate my heart dropped because I wanted to believe that the person Glenn Beck spoke so highly of was everything he said he was. America needed a hero, and it looked like Kyle was just another inflated, propped up celebrity backed by cardboard supports. But, I trust Clint Eastwood. I know how he works. I knew how the Warner Brothers deal evolved���I knew how Eastwood came on board while reading American Sniper so I figured if there was a fraud in the story, Eastwood would sniff it out. So I watched carefully all of Eastwood���s interviews as he did promotional work for Jersey Boys over the summer of 2014 and was intrigued by his beard growth and even in how his stature had changed a bit to reflect the actor I had come to know two decades before. The American Sniper project was having a wonderful effect on Clint Eastwood. Here���s what I think happened.

In October 2013 Dina Eastwood filed for divorce which finally was granted on December 24th 2014 ending 18 years of marriage. Eastwood did what most men do under those types of emotional escapades, he turned to masculine camaraderie to heal any misgivings he might have had at the time and buried himself into his work. Much like the subject matter in his films, Heartbreak Ridge, Kelly���s Heroes and even Where Eagles Dare, Eastwood found the subject matter of American Sniper soothing���and redeeming. His wife had run off with another man���an old high school buddy. Eastwood handled the situation calmly and in a manner very similar to how Chris Kyle dealt with his cheating girlfriend at the beginning of American Sniper.���� There was a subtle pain to the scene that was classic Clint Eastwood���and something only he is able to put on-screen.

Throughout the rest of American Sniper��there were many similar scenes where the relationship between Taya and her husband Chris were strained. One scene was before the birth of their first son. Chris feeling like he should have been in Iraq shooting bad guys wondered why he was going to the shopping mall with his wife. The moment was broke up by the sudden birth of their son. It was a scene filled with pain, hope, and an earnest attempt to capture the essence of living daily life and all the obligations that tug on our souls. It was again only a scene that Clint Eastwood could have directed in an obvious male bonding experience he was having with Bradley Cooper who was a co-producer on the movie. American Sniper��was more than a movie for all the people involved, Eastwood, the real wife Taya, Bradley Cooper–a role of a lifetime for him���and even the memory of Chris Kyle. They were all using the movie to heal themselves and thus their product is healing a nation who is watching this movie and instantly connecting to it.

There is a scene in Magnum Force where Clint Eastwood is on the shooting range for a competitive duel with his police force rival when his buddy ���fatso��� tells him he���s ���never been smoother.��� Eastwood���s Dirty Harry character in the movie was dealing with some really intense emotions about friendship, betrayal, trust in law enforcement and an egotistical boss seeded with corruption. Under hard emotional circumstances, Dirty Harry hit the shooting range like a well oiled machine. Eastwood understands that kind of thing and has put it in many of his movies. But in American Sniper his mastery of that well oiled machine has never been more evident.

Steven Spielberg would not have been able to make American Sniper. It would have been good, and likely would have come out like Munich. It would have been a decent movie, but not great. American Sniper took a person like Clint Eastwood to guide the complicated subject matter through a mine field off and on the screen to deliver a product to Warner Brothers quickly, cheaply, and efficiently.���� American Sniper from the onset was a real life expert shot that only a few people in the world could make leading to an ending that was much more metaphorical than it otherwise would have been.

Eastwood rarely uses slow motion in his movies. Yet when the shot was taken at the end of the film from Chris Kyle toward his ultimate rival���Eastwood slowed the bullet down so everyone could see it flying across the Fallujah cityscape. It was a shot that meant more than just a flying projectile intended for an assassin’s head. It was the story of American Sniper itself and in the end the bullet hit its target and a nation could finally breathe a sigh of relief. It���s not too much to say that American Sniper is the result of a long career by Clint Eastwood who was born to make this movie and perhaps this movie only. Eastwood had made a lot of great films���but American Sniper is the result of a new gear that no modern director possesses���and only he could wield. Warner Brothers is lucky Steven Spielberg backed off the project. They made the movie for a fraction of the budget but more importantly, it will go down as one of the best movies to come out of their studio in their long and storied history.

Long after the Academy Awards ceremony in the spring of 2015 takes place American Sniper will be a favorite movie���particularly among men. It speaks to a man���s warrior bound heart honestly. Over Christmas I was speaking to my father-in-law who had been hiding in his basement at his personal movie theater watching Mark Walberg���s movie Shooter���which is a story about a sniper who has to fight for his own survival against forces that have turned on him. He was down there as the rest of the family socialized for Christmas. But for him, the movie spoke to him much more powerfully than all the good tidings of joy centering on Holiday festivities. Shooter is a good movie particularly for gun enthusiasts���and he loves it. There is an honesty to it that cuts through all the B.S. normally associated with disjointed groups of people from all different backgrounds trying to mesh themselves into a cohesive family unit for the sake of photographs and memory. In the future, American Sniper will be the pinnacle achievement of such movies and will be many people���s favorite to view when they want to touch the face of America and the heart of a real warrior. For my father-in-law, it will be the movie he tucks away into his private theater to watch so to see the purity of what America was always intended to be. He���ll forget about Shooter. We���re not talking about a slack-jawed��hippie when we talk about my father-in-law, but a former school teacher and multi-degreed academic who has late in life become quite a gun enthusiast.

American Sniper��is a must see movie. Once it is seen, it will quickly become many people���s favorite war movie. It took the heroics of Chris Kyle to get it started followed closely by his tenacious wife. Then it was Bradley Cooper who produced it, gained all the weight to look like Chris and to get so close to the project that he knew the character inside and out and back again. But ultimately it took a heavy-hearted Clint Eastwood who took 84 years of life experience and a recent divorce to make a movie about men and the hard decisions they often have to make when life presses down hard. And in the end when regrets are demanded, they are refused the way testicular fortitude expects���with firmness that punches through death itself to the heart of honor we all crave to carry. American Sniper is more than a movie. It���s a philosophy that is uniquely American and it is one that will make future Fourth of Julys much more reminiscent of what the Founding Father���s always intended���and give reverence to the wonderful freedoms provided by the Second Amendment.

Rich Hoffman

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Another Kind of American Hero: Taya Kyle and how love can manifest resurrection

One of the reasons that I am most happy about the astounding support and box office numbers for the new Clint Eastwood movie, American Sniper��is because of the redemption it is bringing to the widow of the slain military hero Chris Kyle���the most deadly sniper in US history. In the span of two years Taya Kyle has had to deal with the death of her husband, a defamation lawsuit by Jessie Ventura, and the ongoing circumstances of the trial of her husband���s murderer Eddie Ray Routh. It has been a painful period for her���the pressure would have crushed lesser people. But she held up and stood strong, and finally through Eastwood���s movie her husband���s memory has been given proper context and a bit of closure has finally become possible. It was commendable that she held it together when attorneys told her to let things die down before making too many public statements because of the upcoming murder trial. The movie was planned before Chris Kyle���s death, so it took a lot of emotional stability for her to continue with the project���which few are talking about. It had to be difficult. And when she was told to put a lid on her comments���she did what she felt was right to preserve her family���s memory���which is one of the most heroic aspects of American Sniper.

On Feb. 11, Eddie Ray Routh is scheduled to stand trial for killing Chris Kyle, the former Navy SEAL played by Bradley Cooper in the film. Prosecutors are seeking the death penalty for Routh, who confessed to shooting the deadliest sniper in American history and Kyle’s friend Chad Littlefield two years ago at a rifle range southwest of Dallas. Routh, a former Marine, plans to introduce evidence that he was experiencing post-traumatic stress disorder and mount an insanity defense, but the enormous profile of Kyle in the wake of American Sniper‘s success could present some complications.

The Warner Bros. film “is going to be an issue,” J. Warren St. John, Routh’s attorney, tells The Hollywood Reporter in an interview. “Can there be a fair trial?”

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr-esq/how-american-sniper-could-complicate-764712

Then there was the Jessie Ventura case where the former wrestler, governor, and conspiracy theorists went after Taya��just because her husband had damaged his ego in a best-selling book.

The Minneapolis Star Tribune explains…

In a section of his book called ���Punching Out Scruff Face,��� Kyle describes a confrontation with a ���celebrity��� at a 2006 wake for a Navy SEAL. He claimed ���Scruff Face��� made disparaging remarks about the war, the United States and President George W. Bush, provoking Kyle to punch him in the face.

Kyle later identified “Scruff Face” as Ventura.

In a federal trial last summer, Ventura won a $1.8 million verdict from the Kyle estate after convincing a jury that Chris Kyle had defamed him by writing that he decked Ventura in a bar after he made disparaging remarks about SEALs. Taya Kyle is the executor of the estate.

http://www.startribune.com/entertainment/movies/289097651.html

For Ventura it is obvious it was always about the money because he has done far more to damage his own reputation than the bragging rights of two military veterans in a bar arguing over the Iraq war. The differences between the two men are essentially the differences between Glenn Beck and Alex Jones. Taya is personal friends with Glenn Beck because their values about things are essentially aligned. Jessie Ventura is friends with Alex Jones because their values are aligned. Both are considered radical right-wingers, but they are ideologically as different as the sun and the moon. They only thing they really have in common is that they are both located in space.

Ventura made an absolute fool of himself during the trial. If the debate was with Chris Kyle, Ventura should have let it go upon his death. But to go over a grieving widow was below respectable, and he will always be known for such a gross embarrassment. And now that American Sniper��is succeeding, Ventura is considering more lawsuits. It is simply unbelievable that a man would stoop so low���yet Ventura did. I think Ventura���s actions were unfathomable. No reputation is worth putting a widow through what he did. If Taya had emotionally collapsed after such an example of human vileness after the trial went against her���nobody would have blamed her.

But then came the murder trail of her husband and the concern that the killer was planning to plea guilty by reason of insanity. With all the popularity surrounding her husband it looked like Eddie Ray Routh wouldn���t be able to get a fair trial. So there was risk of messing up the trial if she continued to promote the film. But to her credit, knowing that there are serious flaws in the court process anyway���which lean in favor of Eddie Ray Routh by default���she would only get one chance to pay proper respect to her husband and that was through the Clint Eastwood film.

It really is an amazing story both on-screen��and off. Through it all Taya Kyle has emerged as a hero in her own right. Her children are extremely lucky to have two parents who have provided them with such magnificent guidance. They have a hero to look up to in their father immortalized forever in the movie American Sniper���and they have a mother who has stood up to some very ominous opposition and tribulations to punch through to the kind of redemption American Sniper��has given to her family. According to her husband���s killer she lost her husband to a man who simply wanted Kyle���s F-250 pick-up truck. Such a stupid loss of life over something so trivial would impact Taya��forever. Fast forward to the present where pinheaded attorneys are telling her not to jeopardize the murder case by promoting American Sniper. Fortunately she has enough experience after getting burned over the Ventura case to know that she will likely not get justice in the Eddie Ray Routh case either. The best thing she could do for her husband was to get behind American Sniper���and let the legal world choke on itself.

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/sniper-killer-traded-soul-victims-new-truck-article-1.1255561

Taya���s story is only one of the many circling the American Sniper movie. Her heroics in the face of much misery is defiantly fuel behind the quality of the movie. Eastwood has obviously captured her spirit in his film���and it makes the movie much better. It is just one example of the kind of extraordinary feats surpassed to bring American Sniper to the big screen and why it is such a triumph to see the movie getting so much support from the public. Any other director but Eastwood would have been caught up in all the emotional drama and the film could have languished for years in development���because of all the legal cases pending. But because of Eastwood, filming started, concluded, and was distributed before the lawyers could find ways to stumble the project���which is another miracle in itself. Legal fights, grieving family members and a left-leaning Hollywood society violently against the end result. Only Clint Eastwood could have made the picture.

Like all parasites who want to suddenly hook their wagon to the star of the deceased Chris Kyle, Ventura is at it again claiming that because of his defamation suit against Taya American Sniper had a tremendous boost in sales���so he wants some of that money too. The link to the story is below. Ventura���s friend Alex Jones claims that Eastwood���s American Sniper��is a giant hoax where the U.S. government is using its soldiers as propaganda pieces only to discard them when they cease to be useful. Jones utters that the whole project is designed to brainwash the American people��that��war is good for our society. But it is Taya who will laugh last as America has her back by supporting American Sniper at the box office. Living well is the best revenge, and because of her heroic stand against so many bullies after her husband���s death, she will get that redemption. And she deserves it.

http://controversialtimes.com/news/another-lawsuit-jesse-ventura-back-in-court-against-chris-kyle-american-sniper/

http://www.infowars.com/american-sniper-exposed-as-giant-hoax/

For every ticket sold in favor of watching American Sniper,��a bad guy somewhere weeps. So for God���s sake, see the movie as many times as you can possibly can.���� Taya��Kyle deserves the wind in her sails that will come from it. Yeah, Chris Kyle was and is an American hero. But, his wife in many different ways was just as heroic. And that is a truly magnificent story worthy of a sequel to American Sniper.

Rich Hoffman

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Finding the Gold Within: What women who desire ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’ and young black youth have in common

One of the reasons that I am most proud of the extremely good work that the Joseph Campbell Foundation has done over the years is in their continued innovations by members to open up the world properly to future generations. I was extremely pleased to learn from them that Karina Epperlein has produced and directed a new film showing the wonderful work being done at the Alchemy, Inc academy in Akron, Ohio which seeks to specifically help young black males with a treacherous crises facing virtually every young man in the world presently���that enormous gulf required to step from childhood into manhood. Karina���s film is titled, Finding the Gold Within��and focuses on six young men as they enter their first year of college. Each has personal circumstances to overcome as he works to escape the straightjacket of contemporary stereotypes, and each has participated from sixth grade on in Alchemy, a myth-centered mentoring program that fosters refection, critical thinking, and living an authentic life.

The biggest crises of our modern-day is not in politics, it is not in economics, religion, scientific development or any other nightly crises espoused on the various news broadcasts, it comes from an emerging menace which seeks to wipe out mankind altogether���the destruction of the male. The social experiments have concluded and a 100 years of results are now pouring in.���� Some of those results are women climbing over themselves with soiled panties to see the upcoming Fifty Shades of Grey movie largely because the men in their lives have been feminized and defanged to the point where females biologically, and intellectually just aren���t interested in them. This is bad because all young children crave the structure that a good solid father brings to a family as a pillar of reliability and strength. Kids who don���t have that fortunate situation in their lives suffer greatly until they find a replacement, or come to terms emotionally with their condition.

Of the worst of the social experiments were the various black communities where government tampering with the motivations of productive enterprise has most crippled enthusiasm for economic mobility. It has been more profitable for black households to produce children without fathers in the home, which has had a devastating effect on old and young males in minority neighborhoods. As the government has become the father figure in such homes���particularly under poor conditions, the real fathers and men of the community have turned to the bottle and drugs to compensate their failed family endeavors. There is a reason that a majority of state liquor licenses are issued to poor communities where a bar is open to wash away the broken dreams of the males while the women breed more fatherless children to qualify for more household government income. The intention was originally good, the by-product has been terrible. Black children as a result of this terrible social failure now are left with serious holes in their life which then gets filled with gangster behavior, drugs, illicit women, and years and years of alcohol. I have in the past tried to befriend these types of males and they all end up in the same place in spite of my optimistic attempts. Once they get to a certain point, there is no way to fix them. Alcohol and drugs literally destroy them, and they become hooked on those substances because of the mountains of guilt which follows them from their criminal past is impossible to escape.

The trick in the whole escapade is that young black males���all males for that matter���but particularly the ones in minority neighborhoods are looking desperately for that mysterious bridge from childhood, where they nurse close to their mother���s breast, into that void of master hunter and gatherer among their male peers. When young black kids do not have men in their lives to show them the path, they turn to gangs because males have a serious need to fill the role of a provider of some kind. Once they fall into the narco life, the money they make goes to cars, jewelry, and tattoos which indicate to females that they are a male worth mating with. But when the women aren���t interested in a family and the male has no goal to work toward because the females just want a sperm donor toward their next welfare check���the males by the time they hit their twenties flame out and end up as future alcoholics and drug addicts. If they live into their forties they are unlucky miserable specimens too far gone to properly help. The only answer that really works is to fix those young men before they become old broken heaps of social experimentation gone wrong at the local neighborhood bar going nowhere fast.

This is where Alchemy, Inc comes in. The use of myth has always functioned as a sociological and pedagogical tool with the goal of teaching people how to live in this world together while simultaneously providing examples of how to realize the personal gifts each individual brings to the stage play of life. Today this method closely resembles what is known as Social and Emotional Learning (SEL). The roles that we are all born with are meant to be fulfilled, not altered in some way that is not authentic to our individuality. To attempt otherwise is to declare that on the great stage play of life that we don���t want to play the role we are given���so we lobby for some other position. The transvestite community is good at this kind of second-guessing. They might have the role of the bold and gallant warrior in the great play of life, but decide that they actually want to play the princess. So they protest, yell and scream about the injustice of life, only to show up for the play in a dress. You can see why this causes a problem if the play was written by the god of your choice with the intention to see it play out on stage. Young males are brought into the world to become men and women will expect men in their beds, at their dinner tables, and helping to raise their children. But when young men don���t even get a chance out of the gate because nobody showed them the way, they fail. Alchemy, Inc is a group dedicated to teaching those young males how to find that path in their individual lives. Alchemy, Inc. according to their website shown below, provides a healthy masculine model and strategies that set youth on the right course to stay in school and become successful, responsible family men and professionals rather than being sidetracked by the false appeal of apathy, anger, drugs, violence and victimhood. Their program is embraced by young men because of its authenticity and realness. Young males who are alienated, disengaged, and cynical towards life are drawn to the program because Alchemy, Inc offers a way to answer their “call to manhood.” They are a program that does not question or criticize youthful masculinity but repositions its positive aspects to show the way from boyhood to manhood. The course values are steeped in the character traits of “The Hero.” The model of The Hero inspires youth to persevere, learn to make the necessary sacrifices, overcome obstacles, and serve their community. Alchemy, Inc is more about cultivating wisdom than teaching knowledge.

Alchemy, Inc. offers a safe group environment for youth to focus on topics directly related to their stage of development. Youth who have engaged our program:

Increased their Social and Emotional Learning (SEL)
Increased their school attendance
Increased their high Grade Point Averages
Increased high school graduation rates
Increased their college acceptance rates
Developed the character traits necessary to succeed in life

http://alchemyinc.net/

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Alchemy-Inc/231344416972351

The beauty of Alchemy, Inc is that they do not seek to preach a particular set of values to young people; they instead turn to mythology to bring the kids to their own individual adventures with authenticity. The focus is on learning to think instead of being told what to think. The kids are shown the way to become the heroes of their own lives, so that they can aspire to become the hero of a family at some future time.

Alchemy, Inc is one of the best mentoring programs I have seen for young people, particularly minority kids. All young boys need atonement with their fathers and if they don���t have it, or get it, they are marked for life as lacking. They can overcome that drawback, but it is more difficult for them than it is with kids who have a stable father figure. The kids in the Alchemy program don���t have the advantage of fathers in their life. So they have myths to replace the emptiness, which is such a powerful tool. When there isn���t a father around to teach young boys how to be men, the job doesn���t get done. Myth is a worthy substitute. When it���s applied it does the same thing as a man who speaks to his sons about the mysteries of the universe and their role in it as men when they graduate to such a level. Mythology encourages young men to be heroes not villains in their own story, which a future family will need for their nurturing.

Before feminists declare that they don���t need men, think about what you���re saying. In just a few weeks from this writing Fifty Shades of Grey is about to hit theaters and women are salivating over it. Not all women but a large enough demographic sector to provide a scientific sampling. They are as excited for the movie as teenage males might be for Star Wars, or Avengers. But why? For the adolescent male Star Wars��and comic book heroes are myths that instruct what our internal values are���authentically represented by the characters. The heroes in those stories are the men we all want to become���whether we do or not is up to our personal decisions and values. If we are given the myths to live by, we will likely follow the example into our own heroic story. But because too many men give up on their heroes, they do not arrive into their adulthoods properly equipped to take care of the needs of their women. So the women are left with a void to be filled by romance novels and the occasional movie like Fifty Shades of Grey. Men are scratching their heads wondering what all the fuss is just as most women wonder why Marvel comic films are so impressive to males. The story of Fifty Shades of Grey��is all about a powerful man who is redeemed through a hero journey through love into an awakening of a higher truth. The sadomasochism is reflective of all the repressed and social pressure for authority that is imposed on most people, so in mythology it is revealed through sexual fantasy. Just as most women are suffering from the condition of not having men in their lives that are strong enough to fill their yearnings; the children of minority neighborhoods do not have proper males to lead the young to their adulthoods. What���s missing in both cases are strong male characters. And in the absence of proper instruction from one generation into another, it is mythology that provides the path. For that, I am very proud and happy to see what they are doing at Alchemy, Inc.

If you happen to have the chance to see Karina Epperlein���s new movie, you should do so. More on it can be found at the following link:

http://www.karinafilms.us/index.html

Rich Hoffman

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‘American Sniper': Breaking $105 Million on opening weekend and being a sheepdog

Is American Sniper��the best Clint Eastwood film he���s ever done? Probably. Look, I���m a huge fan of Clint Eastwood so it would be hard for him to do wrong in my eyes. I knew he���d do a great job with the Chris Kyle story of the deadliest sniper in US history. I had the entire movie laid out in my mind before I even saw it, and knew it would be great. I know Eastwood���s directorial style so well that nothing really surprised me except that he���s currently 84 years old and can still make such vigorous movies of immense complexity appear so simple. He���s a jazz musician and a very wise old man who still has the heart of a 35-year-old��lumberjack which was one of his odd jobs way back in the day before his acting career took off. He���s a man���s man and most women would succumb to his seductions even in his advanced years���and he knows it. He knows that hunger from women for real men and most of his movies embody that spirit in some regard���which is why women also like his movies. He appreciates that masculine quality in other men and knows precisely how to capture it on-screen. He did it marvelously in Heartbreak Ridge, Grand Torino, White Hunter Black Heart, even in Million Dollar Baby where the protagonist was a female. Eastwood has a way of getting to the primal raw nature of what it means to be a living human being from a free country. ��I probably have watched Eastwood over the years as closely as Bradley Cooper watched actual footage of Chris Kyle to portray him in this fantastic movie so accurately. Yet even so there were parts of the movie where you just forget to breathe because it was so spectacularly good. I think Clint Eastwood and only he could have made this movie. It was essentially an update of the very first Dirty Harry movie played out against the Iraq war���at least in how Eastwood approached the subject. It was raw, primal, honest, sentimental, and gloriously American in spirit.

American Sniper made $105 million dollars over the Martin Luther King Day holiday which far exceeded the box office predictions���by like $60 million. It broke every box office record there was for a January movie release, and even some in every other release month���even the Mel Gibson epic, The Passion, which seemed outrageously high at $83 million. I wasn���t going to see the picture until the buzz died off a bit���because I knew what to expect. But, when I read the box office take in USA Today Sunday morning that the film was trucking quickly by the $90 million dollar mark and not slowing down I knew something phenomenal was happening. Clint Eastwood had been tapping on the glass of a uniquely American concept for a movie for nearly five decades and he had finally struck gold with American Sniper. Eastwood didn���t star in the film at all, but unquestionably, he was there in the stellar performance behind Bradley Cooper and Chris Kyle himself. As Kyle whizzed in and out of bullets on the screen and paraded down Iraqi streets with his ���Punishers��� bearing the emblem of the popular character from graphic novel fame���Eastwood had hit the tap-root of American consciousness and had placed it on the screen for one of the first times in cinematic history. He captured and answered on the silver screen the debate of our day���should America have been in Iraq, what makes Americans free, and what does it mean to be a good person, father, husband, brother, friend and patriot? American Sniper��was a movie that a majority of the people in the United States wanted to see, and needed to see through many years of guilt and embarrassment by politicians who have squandered away the pride of our nation. Eastwood captured that spirit in a bottle through the honesty of Chris Kyle, and unleashed it like a cyclone across American movie screens with the pent-up energy of a Tasmanian Devil.

It had been a long time since I had seen a movie sell out at the theater. The last time that I can recall was the 1997 film Titanic. So my wife and I planned to see the American Sniper during the playoff games late on Sunday January 18, 2015 figuring that it would be easier to get seats in our Cincinnati movie theater during that time frame. But just to be safe we arrived three hours early and discovered that the 3:30 shows were almost sold out upon our arrival. So we snagged our tickets, did some shopping to fill the hours from then until the movie began, and braced for an onslaught of movie goers lining up as early as 2:30 to be let in to see the film which showed an hour later. It only took about 20 minutes once they started seating to fill up the giant Showcase Cinema Theater from back to front with no spaces in between. I had not seen such a thing in years. American Sniper was having its ���Chick-fil-A��� moment���middle America was voting against Hollywood with a ticket for the Eastwood product���and they were doing it to a consensus of stunned industry insiders who were bewildered by the epic show of support for an R-rated war movie filled with profanity and drama. This wasn���t The Avengers or Transformers where children helped make up the audience. This was a strictly adult crowd showing up stone faced to support a rare piece of Americana placed before them by a legendary director depicting a real-life American hero.

http://www.thecelebritycafe.com/feature/2015/01/clint-eastwood-bradley-coopers-american-sniper-stuns-box-office-passes-90-million

I will likely give a more formal review after thinking about it for a few days���because there is a lot to cover. But for this examination, understanding the massive show of support for American Sniper��is the key subject. What was it about the film that had people showing up in such an unpredictably profound way? Well, during the movie I thought a lot about what Liam Neeson said after his release of last week���s hit movie, Taken 3, where he stated after the terrorist killings in Paris:

���First off, my thoughts and prayers and my heart are with the deceased, and certainly with all of France, yesterday. I���ve got a lot of dear friends in Paris. There’s too many fucking guns out there. Especially in America. I think the population is like, 320 million? There’s over 300 million guns. Privately owned, in America. I think it’s a fucking disgrace. Every week now we’re picking up a newspaper and seeing, ‘Yet another few kids have been killed in schools.'”

��http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/01/14/liam-neeson-america-guns_n_6472266.html

Then I watched Chris Kyle and the background he came from navigating house to house searches in Iraq and dealing which what was termed as sheer evil in the movie, and comparing the conditions of Iraq to those in America. Then it became quite clear why so many people showed up to support American Sniper. What made those barbarians in Iraq evil was that they allowed dictators to breed in their culture who then sought to spread that desire to the distant shores of America. Kyle said it in the movie, ���You don���t want these people in San Diego do you?��� Evil had to be fought on their soil and only there so that through passivity they didn���t end up in our back yard���as they have been doing more often under President Obama���s presidency. Terrorist cells were emboldened to attack New York under the lackadaisical watch of President Clinton, another Obama type liberal. It was eight years of 90s liberalism that gave those terrorists courage as President Bush was in his first year of office when 9/11 occurred. So a failure to bring in the kind of people who Chris Kyle represented to meet that evil far away from home to keep the fight away from the shopping malls, businesses, and industry flourishing under capitalism did not happen as it should have in the late 90s. Leaving the Iraqi people alone didn���t make them less evil. What made them evil was that they wished to impose their view of the world and understanding upon others through force which is the best definition of evil that there is. America wasn���t trying to impose its world view���it tries to free people from their oppressors. Liberals thought the war in Iraq was about oil, but it wasn���t. America has its own oil and the threat of using it is what is currently driving the prices down for our transportation costs. Iraq was always about confronting evil which America helped put in power���and had to rectify morally. For a society, an individual, or a political party to be evil, it must trample on the rights of individual thought and action to achieve its goal. People like Chris Kyle were raised to know the difference between good and evil���so he couldn���t turn away from it when he saw it. He felt compelled to kick evil���s ass wherever it was out of a natural inclination given to him by his upbringing. There are many people just like him being born and raised right now who think the same. Chris Kyle is a uniquely American type of man. You wouldn���t find him in Ukraine, or France, or anywhere in China because those cultures do not make people like him. He was born and made in America to recognize evil for what it is���and to eliminate it.

America is the freest place on earth. There is evil trying to embed itself in virtually every institution���but with free speech, and the right to bear arms, it is impossible for institutions to gain the kind of traction seen in Iraq, Iran, or China over their populations. The people in America simply won���t put up with it. Currently Americans put up with a lot, they put up with a terrible president in Obama, they put up with the entire leftist political platform points, and they put up with mismanagement of government from our schools all the way up to the highest levels of congress. But they have a breaking point and to ease their minds they have their gun cabinets in their homes to remind them if all hell breaks loose, that they are still in control. It is within that 300 million gun culture that families make heroic people like Chris Kyle. It wasn���t the military that made the man great. They simply refined the kind of man who Kyle already was. It was a father who told him there were three types of people in the world – the sheep, the wolves who prey on them, and the sheepdogs who protect the herd. His father further said, ���and we aren���t raising any sheep, and we aren���t raising any wolves. Do you understand boy?���

America is the sheepdog to the rest of the world struggling to climb from under centuries of oppression. In American Sniper there isn���t one apology to the fact, which was so refreshing for the first time in a modern war movie. In the great war films of the past like the Deer Hunter, Apocalypse Now, Full Metal Jacket, and Saving Private Ryan there is always a bit of guilt associated with the actions of American troops���a questioning of whether or not they had a right to be involved in a far away land or not. In American Sniper��there is no such guilt���there is only a resounding YES! Kyle as portrayed in the film signs up for four tours in Iraq against the wishes of his family because he felt it was his job to kill Mustafa, the Olympic sharp shooter working with the Al Qaeda forces. Al Qaeda had put an $180,000 bounty on Kyle���s head which Mustafa��intended to collect. The entire film was essentially a cat and mouse game between those two rivals. Kyle felt he could not leave the battlefield with someone as dangerous as Mustafa on it killing American troops. It was impossible for his wife to understand at the time, but it was something Kyle as a man had to do, just as Dirty Harry Callahan had to hunt down and kill Scorpio in the 1971 cop drama. It was the same masculine necessity that uniquely only Americans seem to understand. And the reason they understand it is because they too have vaults of guns in their bedrooms, and can taste the kind of freedom that gives such ideas places to grow. People certainly don���t think that way in Ireland, England, France, or even Spain. They certainly don���t think that way in China, Russia, or anywhere in Malaysia, India, or even Australia. They only think that way in America because the gun culture gives liberty a place to sink roots and contemplate the effects of evil.

Most of the world suffers from indecision and political derision because they don���t have the ability to defend themselves from evil. They, like the Iraqi people, are left to always barter with evil to keep their loved ones from being killed or maimed. They don���t have the luxury to fight back against evil if the circumstances mandate it. For people like Chris Kyle, he learned how to spot evil, and stop it in its tracks from his family heritage driven in America by a gun culture. That is the reason that Chris Kyle was in Iraq, and why his ���Punishers��� were there to inflict justice upon evil as defined by common sense.

Eastwood with his big shoulders and typical brashness knew exactly what he was doing when he shot American Sniper. He knew the faces of most of the Hollywood elite would melt off when he showed the Iraqi people as savages who deserved to have their asses kicked if they were aligned with Al Qaeda. He knew that the progressive usurpers currently within American culture from the academic high towers of snobby scrutiny would decry him and his film to the end of the earth. But Eastwood like Chris Kyle was willing to weave through the bullets to ���punish evil��� as it is not only in Iraq, but in our own missteps stateside. Eastwood is shooting again not as the Dirty Harry character, but as one of the finest directors in cinema history and this time his targets are soothsayers like Seth Rogan, Michael Moore, and all the rest of the progressive despots who want to pave the flyover states with six feet of asphalt to bury the gun culture of America forever and the freedoms that come with it. To support Eastwood in this quest America showed up and surprised everyone with a show of force that has evil quivering in its boots right now from Hollywood mansion to mansion wondering what on earth they are going to do about the 84-year-old man who can out shoot them, out-wit them, and out-work them in every phase. Not even blockbuster film directors like James Cameron will be able to criticize the fabulous work of Eastwood or his newly found box office prowess. Because American Sniper is a statement from Eastwood to the future of his country���his movie will go down as one of the greatest war movies of all time. But more than that, it will be the defining film that articulates to the present and future generations what it means to be an American. We are the sheepdogs of the world. The sheep may not appreciate it all the time and the wolves certainly hate us, but we are what we are, and we have the guns to do the job because of capitalism. Pure and simple. American Sniper is made for the sheepdogs and by the box office numbers there are a lot of them hidden in the woodworks���and have always been there. They were just ignored by Hollywood as it was hell-bent on social change and reform. American Sniper has exposed those home-grown insurgents for the intentions they have always had.

American Sniper is like a nice shower after several days of riding in the hard desert. It felt good and clean to see such wonderful articulation of values which are uniquely American���without an ounce of apology. If you���ve seen it, go see it again. If you haven���t yet, what���s stopping you!

Rich Hoffman

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James Holmes and ‘The Suffocator of Sins': The fuel of conspiracy theory

Checking on the Holmes case in Aurora, Colorado, especially after the recent terrorist escapades in Cincinnati during the opening weeks of 2015, a status was needed as to when the so-called ���Joker��� theater gunman would actually go to trial. I said initially that the James Holmes case had all the signs of a false flag incident. That���s more than the typical Alex Jones conspiracy theory; it���s rooted in the behavior of the federal government in their prosecution process. The reason that there are all these conspiracies about the Illuminati, alien abductions, and government cover-ups extending from JFK to the present is because of the behavior of the authorities when pressed for answers is not satisfactory. That same sloppy manner was seen during the recent Cincinnati arrests and it is what isn���t mentioned that provokes the imagination to fill in the blanks leading to conspiracy. With the Holmes case it was obvious from the start���yet there wasn���t any real desire to do any hard reporting by the mainstream media. Likely, they feared that the attention span of the typical American wouldn���t want to pull back the 7, 8, or 9 layers of the story that held the actual truth. The rest is that they didn���t want retaliation against them either���as for the forces capable of making a Manchurian Candidate type assassin might turn their anger in the direction of any proper investigation. So that has left proper research to be left to the amateurs and proprietors of new media���such as in the video below. The following documentary by Mark Howitt��is good���it���s a bit rough and it bounces around to seemingly disconnected theories���but the collection of news reports and information is worth its weight in gold. Howitt is certainly on to something important. I think there is several more layers to the story���but this documentary presents the essence for critical analysis. To understand the James Holmes shooter and the forces really at work against us, this video needs to be watched, so do yourself a favor and do that now.

In that video it was stunning to see clips of James Holmes as the honor student that he was, very connected to other people and well on his way into the fast track of success. It has a very stunning parallel to the Christopher Cornell case in Ohio where the supposed attacker was planning to join ISIS and turn his anger toward the government into violence and mayhem. The strangest problem regarding Cornell is that the typical ISIS sympathizer isn���t angry at the collectivism of government employment; it is toward the degradation of the West as seen from the perspective of the Middle East and the Sykes-Picot agreement after World War I. Cornell���s motivations seem���contrived���forced into an all too easy package complete with a ribbon on top. It is possible, as anything is in the realm of physical reality, but highly unlikely. Likely, Cornell has more in common with James Holmes than with the lunatics in Syria who are executing homosexuals, westerners, women, and anybody else who stands in their way without any fear of reprisal.

Holmes was a very intelligent, and integrated young man. Real interviews paint a picture of a very different kind of young person than the lone gunman obsessed with Batman movies. Specifically the infatuation Holmes had with the MTV personality Diggity Dave���s movie The Suffocator of Sins. That was a rather interesting tidbit to the story of a struggling future assassin trying to work things out in his head prior to becoming one of the biggest mass murderers in history. In The Suffocator of Sins a would-be hero finds Batman killed so he takes his mask and identity to become a resurrected Dark Knight. This is a very important attribute to the trial of James Holmes because it points directly to the kind of behavioral conditions that took place prior to the murders. However, since Holmes has not within two years even made it to trial yet���these psychological profiles have not been professionally examined for public consumption leaving only conjecture at this point. But it clearly shows the kid was struggling with something intense���which likely has a direct connection to the advanced neural studies he was involved in at college.

The point of the matter is that there are other elements to the story which have not been properly explored, and likely ever will. The source of the conspiracy is the question, why? For instance why hasn���t more been discussed about these conversations that Holmes had with Diggity��Dave other than blowing them off as a publicity stunt for a poorly made, cheap movie by a Batman enthusiast, because the motives are highly relevant? Yet very few media outlets covered that story with any real seriousness. They were all too quick to wrap up the story with the booby-trapped apartment and the easy arrest of an incoherent James Holmes sitting in his car.

Then there is all this trouble about a second shooter. The Kennedy assassination has been mired in conspiracy for over five decades over essentially the same kind of thing. Do these gunmen act alone, or did they get help? There is still compelling speculation that there were others involved in the Kennedy shooting and until the report which has been sealed away since that time is revealed finally, that speculation will continue. In that regard the CIA is still insisting that a majority of the sealed documents about the Kennedy case remained sealed���which is odd behavior unless there is something there that they are embarrassed about? The speculation is that deceased agent George Joannides is a large reason for the continued sealing���as there are embarrassing aspects to the CIA involvement that will be revealed. All the people alive at the time will have to die off, and the CIA will have to change hands and be named something else before those records are unsealed���because the agency is protecting itself. Wouldn���t it be nice if you could do that dear reader if you were caught in some illegal action? When you control the law, you can control the punishment for poor decisions. So we don���t know if there was a second shooter, or if Lee Harvey Oswald was a Kremlin controlled assassin, or an agent of Cuba, or a false flag to cover up other issues where Kennedy wasn���t getting along all that well with the powers that wanted his seat. It���s all very murky to say the least. And here again, at the Holmes murder scene many years later are witnesses who talk about two gunman���one of them with a goatee. Well, Holmes didn���t have a goatee. The revelation of a second gunman was uttered on the spot quickly, but not mentioned much in the following days and law enforcement was very quick to mop up any reference. They found their guy in his car calmly, and it helped them wrap up the story quickly. Yet for nearly ten minutes there was plenty of time to escape, but Holmes didn���t even try. He then warned officers of the booby traps in his apartment. So why did he set them up if he didn���t have the heart to set them off���after all, he did just walk into a movie theater and shoot everyone he could dead. So why the sudden change of heart?

There are so many things that don���t add up, and the case is still lingering as if the state is dragging its feet on purpose���because they also know that there are things that just don���t add up, and the media does still ask questions they can���t answer. Because of where the case is now, the prosecution needs a nice clean case where Holmes admits to the killing but under mental ailments so that the evidence can be presented against that aspect only. But if the trial goes in another direction and all these open windows get explored, and testimony by Diggity��Dave gets added to the mess, and the people at the scene who stated that there was a second shooter���well, then the case against Holmes isn���t so clean and the prosecution has some serious trouble in proving guilt���which is why it’s still in limbo.

These conspiracy problems seem to be increasing, not decreasing. The old tricks used by authorities to cap a case just aren���t working anymore because citizen journalism is doing all the work that the media should be doing and is uncovering the deep layers instead of just the surface stuff. That journalism may not be the most accurate, but at least the questions are being asked���which then require evidence that likely doesn���t exist because of the cover-up aspects of the case. Really smart people just don���t fold up and become mass murders without some kind of provocation���so the question remains���where did that provocation come from? Was it culturally, or was it because of something Holmes got into during his research? Was there a second gunman���who booby trapped the Holmes apartment not with the mind to maim officers���but to destroy evidence in the explosions set off by authorities���computer hard drives, paper reference to known accomplices, and other truths which needed concealment, because the same illusive behavior is being shown in regard to Christopher Cornell in Ohio? I smell a rat���don���t you too?

All this could be cleared up with just simple transparency on behalf of agencies like the CIA, the FBI even the ATF. But we have witnessed what happens in those government agencies when they are caught. The IRS recently destroyed their hard drive evidence implying their guilt during the Lois Lerner debacle, and the ATF actually had an informant that testified against the agency���who suffered much ridicule over the ���Fast and Furious��� scandal. The CIA is still covering up the Kennedy assassination���God only knows what else they are covering up that is much more recent���and relevant. Because they are hiding something���they are all guilty by association. The court of law may not be able to prosecute them for their crimes, but the public has and will continue. And the conspiracy theories will perpetually boil until the real facts of these matters is revealed without the cloak and dagger escapades of empire building federal employees up to no good for reasons unknown to convention.

Rich Hoffman

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A Christopher Cornell False Flag: The possiblities of entrapment for political objectives

There is something very fishy about the Christopher Cornell case in Harrison, Ohio where a twenty year old kid supposedly was planning to attack government officials in Washington D.C. Cornell wearing a very ISIS terrorist looking beard was arrested at a popular gun store in the suburb of Cincinnati by ���government employees��� and sent to a facility run by more government employees to be tried by more government employees. So it will be very interesting to see how much evidence comes out of the trial and of the relationship the kid had with the FBI between the weapon purchases recently made and the date where Cornell showed up at a 9/11 rally as a ���truther��� revealing his beliefs that the New York terrorist attack was an inside job. The mode of operation of this terrorist attack seems awfully close to motivations of the IRS in attacking conservative groups. After all, here is an angry white male���an anti government type who is converting to radical Islam and wants to kill government workers buying weapons at a gun store in the heart of America. And the kid���s father is another small government type who immediately stated that the government set up his kid. So it is obvious where young Cornell got his distrust of government. The whole story is wrapped up a little too neatly for the government case against the certain demographic types that are currently putting pressure on them to reform themselves. So the FBI���and the government for that matter���suddenly had a story that made them look proactive against homegrown terrorists, and at the same time shuts up the sector of society known as the ���hard right��� from fear of themselves being targeted as terrorists.

It is very easy to manipulate young people, especially between the age of 15 to 21. Kids are still kids at that age���especially these days, and not very wise to the ways of the world. If a kid in that age group starts hanging around with ���wigger��� kids, he���s likely to start walking about with his pants down and listening to Eminem. If a kid hangs with a gang of ���narco��� types, they���ll likely spend a lot of time listening to gangsta rap and planning petty crimes. If a kid hangs around nice kids who spend their weekends learning to milk cows, they will likely attend church on Sunday and praise the Lord at the dinner table. Behavior for most young people is largely governed by environmental conditions. And environmental conditions are established by peer review and pressure.

For a kid like Cornell, who it appears didn���t have many close friends, it would be very easy for a FBI��agent to indirectly contact the boy after the 9/11 truther protest and provoke him into a direction of choosing since it was clear that there was an origin of discontent. It might begin with a simple positive comment on a Twitter post of something that Cornell had said, then over the course of a few months, the agent could plant ideas in the mind of the target and begin to steer his thoughts in the direction of choosing. To put it another way, think of the relationship to a first date where a man wants to have sex with a woman. The woman may be interested in sex otherwise she likely wouldn���t be on the date, but she doesn���t want to come across as cheap, so she plays hard to get. Maybe she plans to wait a date or two before she allows for the possibility of sex. But, the man needs to tell his friends about the date so that he can look like a big man with great sexual prowess.���� Men need to report to their peers about how they bag and tag the women with their powers of persuasion. So the man leads the girl along with a nice dinner, perhaps a gift at a store to make her feel obligated later, then when it comes time to close out the evening, he pulls out the guilt to get the sex. The woman gives him what he wants because internally she���s insecure that she might lose such a sugar daddy, so she accelerates the process along hoping to get a date number two, and three���and perhaps even marry the guy. So she gives up her sex hoping to hook the guy to her loins.

Fast forward to Christopher Cornell playing video games in his room all day long doing very little productive in the world who is still very close to his mother. The boy never really broke away from his mother���s breast to become a man of his own���so he���s still very prone to the peer pressure of society as a direct result. This is always a typical trait of such males who are too close to their mothers. They are very socially conscious as their foundation thinking still comes from the women���s circles within family structure. Yet to assimilate with the father and behold atonement which is another major concern among most young males, Cornell adopted the notion that 9/11 was an inside job. (Of course this is all hypothetical at this time, and could be confirmed by court documents during the trial if allowed to be seen by the public) So Christopher goes to a rally with his famous sign and catches the attention of the FBI who decide to make an example of him. An agent contacts the lonely kid looking for his way in the world and tells him he agrees with him on 9/11 and earns the trust of Cornell. Then the agent starts planting seeds, just as the man who wants to have sex with a woman does���to provoke reaction and stimulate an outcome. A person craving acceptance���any acceptance will do extraordinary things to get it���and perhaps Cornell wanted to impress his FBI friend so much that he was willing to kill and maim targets of the friend���s definition so to earn that respect. In the end there was only one man who walked into the Harrison gun store to buy weapons for a planned terrorist attack. So Cornell is guilty of that. But would the kid have grown the beard, and changed his name to the ISIS wanna��� be���Raheel Mahnus Ubaydah just a few years out of high school where he was a wrestler and planned a terrorist attack against government workers and the U.S. capital? Likely not. If the FBI had not befriended the kid, it is likely Cornell would still be in his room playing Assassin���s Creed and texting his mother about his needs.

The target likely wasn���t Christopher Cornell himself, but the father because of his political beliefs. The FBI needed to make some kind of arrest somewhere to show that they were getting out ahead of these potential home grown��terrorists before something happened���especially after the Paris attacks. America needs to know that its safe and the Cornells��as a family were easy targets. By pushing their buttons to send them over the edge the government gets the sniffing dogs off their backs with the IRS corruption, the Benghazi murders, Fast and Furious, the communist insurgency coming out of Cuba, Russia���and China. The push toward socialism in Europe, carbon credits, oil prices to destroy American fracking, and the desire to see Islam and other religions besides Christianity spread through public education to young people with a new civil rights movement–a modern crusade. The message behind the Cornell arrest is two-fold, that the FBI was doing their job of protecting America and that even angry white tea party types are prone to the teachings of Islam���so there is no place to hide.

This could of course all be fiction on behalf of my prose. The court documents would of course provide the context of the story in greater detail. But if I had to bet money���I���d say what I stated is closer to the truth than what is being told to us on the news. There are very good reasons not to trust the government. Just yesterday John Kasich, the governor of Ohio stated people against Common Core were suffering from an inaccurate ���hysteria��� when the reality is that local school boards still have the final say. What he didn���t say was that his support of Common Core, and why local school boards will go along to get along is because there is federal money attached to it, and like a common prostitute he wants the money for his budget balancing, just as a crack whore wants to fund her habit. So they will justify the means to satisfy the evil. Then of course there is the local politician John Boehner��who stated that someone needed to go to jail over the IRS scandal. Yet now the targeting of conservative groups is known, and even people close to Boehner suffered yet he isn���t motivated to do anything about it now that he knows it���s connected to the White House because of the 2014 congressional hearings. At every turn federal workers at most levels are showing that they are more prone to corruption and vile acts because they are protected by labor unions���such as the IRS workers were, police are, and just about every public service. So what we get is bad work from employees who take their jobs for granted. And they are only motivated to act when public pressure is applied.

When it comes to the Christopher Cornell case it solves two problems for the federal worker���it shows that there is extremism within the small government types of demographic population, and it shows that Islam is spreading to the lonely recesses of Harrison Avenue in Ohio. The hope is that people like the Cornell family will just shut up and do what they���re told to do. At least that���s��� how it looks. The trial, if it���s open and well covered by the media will either confirm or deny these accusations. But what will likely happen is the trial will be put off until the case cools, then it will happen lightening fast and without much fanfare. Christopher will be tucked away for a while to be further broken down and his parents will have to shut their mouths if they ever want to see their kid again. And once it is realized that the FBI actually entrapped the kid into saying everything he did, the public opinion will already be set and they���ll be on to the next crises.

Meanwhile the government will pardon themselves from any guilt in the debacle and will be looking for a tax increase to pay for their pension plans and summer vacations. Angry white guys and small government types especially in Ohio will watch their tongues so that they are not accused of guilt by association. And the Cornells��will grieve each night knowing that their son is beyond their help. Fear makes monsters out of even sane minds, and it does much more neurotic destruction to societies in general. And the FBI was well aware of that when they contacted Christopher Cornell needing an arrest of a certain demographic type to satisfy their bosses in the Capital. After all, the budgets are being made by a new congress, and there is nothing like a high-profile��arrest at a key time to ensure that budget cuts don���t strike the FBI as it has the now unpopular IRS. In the end, it always comes down to money by the looters who don���t make it���but spend it like drunken sailers in a whore house. And in my opinion that���s the way government employees treat the money we send them.

Let���s see how much info comes out in the trial. But to confirm my thoughts does anybody remember the James Holmes case? He was supposed to go to trial on December 6th. It will likely be with the Cornell case as well. Oh, they���ll cover it locally, but it won���t go very far. The Holmes case is still in jury selection just as a reference. These cases deliberately go on forever because the public losses interest even when deaths occur as it was with Holmes. With Cornell where it was just potential threats showing intent, the public will be even less motivated���and therefore no matter how guilty the FBI is, they know the public will never catch them on their imposition. So it will continue to the next victim.

Rich Hoffman

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ISIS Terror, Assasination Attempts and Opinions from Transexual: Bizarre stories from Cincinnati and the root of conspiracy

There is an element of lunacy that is persistent just beyond the haze of most layered group associations. Once the veil of proper conduct and mannered conversation is pulled back elements of mild psychosis among the patrons are ever-present and those participants are not difficult to shove over the edge with just a little provocation from directions not directly connected. In my fiction I have dealt with this literally as a story device���such as in The Symposium of Justice where a water tower in the town of Fort Seven Mile broadcast a signal designed to stimulate the pituitary gland of innocent people so that they might drop from the edge of sanity on queue and conduct evil that could then be capitalized by those desiring control through legislation over all human kind. A wonderful purpose of fiction is to explore these possibilities from the safety of thought. However real life is often more treacherous���and complicated���as it was in Cincinnati recently as a number of major national stories struck the bastion of conservative value in a manner that seems a bit too organized to be incidental.

Even several weeks after the story broke in Kings Mills, Ohio a United Kingdom newspaper did the following story centering on a little ol��� suburb of Cincinnati:

A close friend of Leelah��Alcorn, the 17-year-old who took her own life after her parents refused her demand to live as a woman, was allegedly prevented from attending the teenager���s funeral.

The mother of Abby Jones, Ms Alcorn���s friend and the person who posted photographs of her after took her life, said the youngster had wanted to attend the funeral but was banned from doing so by Ms Alcorn���s parents.

���Her mom called and blamed Abby for everything that got posted online, even though Leelah���s page was public,��� Ms Jones��� mother,�� Danielle Pieper-Jones, told the Daily Mail.

���My daughter just wanted to say goodbye to her best friend. They did not allow her to go to the funeral��� had no right to call and harass my daughter.���

Ms Alcorn, who lived near Cincinnati, Ohio, took her life last month by stepping in front of a truck. Before doing so she posted a message on her Tumblr account. In it she explained that her parents, who are devout Christians, would not allow her to live as a woman.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/leelah-alcorn-suicide-parents-stopped-best-friend-from-attending-transgender-teenagers-funeral-9980986.html

Then there was the terrorist attempt���or one that was being planned by a 20-year-old kid named Christopher Lee Cornell as reported in the following story:

Tom Willingham didn’t know what to think when the FBI approached him about helping them arrest someone they suspected of wanting to commit a terrorist act on U.S. soil.

“Nobody knew enough to be scared,” said Willingham, president and CEO of Point Blank Range & Gun Shop. “We knew everyone (law enforcement) was in place.”

Willingham’s��employees sold two semi-automatic rifles at about 11 a.m. Wednesday to Christopher Lee Cornell, also known as Raheel��Mahrus��Ubaydah, at the Colerain Township location.

“We did not know (Cornell). He came in for a purchase,” Willingham said.

After the gun store employees ran Cornell’s name through the national background check system to ensure he had no criminal record and was eligible to buy guns ��� “Not anyone can come in and buy a gun and walk out,” Willingham��said ��� Cornell was sold what Willingham called “sporting rifles.” In addition to the M-15 rifles, Cornell also bought 600 rounds of ammunition.

When Cornell left the store and walked to the parking lot of the business in the 7200 block of Harrison Avenue, he was arrested by the Joint Terrorism Task Force.

Cornell, 20, of Green Township, is accused of using cyberspace to plot to assassinate Congressional employees and attack the U.S. Capitol for his personal jihad. He was charged with attempted killing of U.S. government officers and possession of firearms in furtherance of an attempted crime of violence.

He’s being held in the Butler County Jail without bail.

http://www.cincinnati.com/story/news/crime/crime-and-courts/2015/01/14/fbi-cincinnati-man-plotting-us-capitol-attack-arrested/21770815/

But that wasn���t the end of the news day in Cincinnati. Apparently even closer to the heart of GOP politics was Michael Hoyt who went crazy and planned a bizarre assassination against speaker Boehner��at the Wetherington��Country Club in West Chester. Hoyt told on himself with a 911 call and was the only reason he was even caught. The story went like this as reported by the Cincinnati Enquirer.

Michael Hoyt, 44, who worked at Wetherington��Golf & Country Club in West Chester, Ohio, was charged after admitting that he considered��poisoning Speaker Boehner���s drinks in a loosely-planned assassination plot.

Hoyt said that voices in his head told him that Boehner��was ���evil��� and that the Speaker was responsible for last year���s Ebola outbreak. He also felt that Boehner had mistreated him during visits to the club.

The crazy plot was discovered after Hoyt himself called authorities on October 29 saying that he was ���Jesus Christ��� and needed to kill the Speaker.

http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/01/14/boehners-bartender-admits-to-assassination-plot/

Those are some extraordinary stories all of which show some sort of neurosis stemming from a mental ailment. Whether it���s a boy who wants to be a girl, a young kid who wants to rename himself after a jihad against America and go on a terrorist rampage, or a charismatic bartender for one of the most exclusive country clubs in Ohio thinking that the devil wants him to kill John Boehner–it is safe to say that all those incidents are related to broken thinking patterns. Yet as inflated as the stories became they really weren���t that treacherous. After all, the FBI picked up the kid who wanted to commit jihad even if they did encourage the behavior so that they could make an arrest and show that the federal government was capable of doing something right in the wake of the Paris attacks. The country club bartender actually told on himself doing all the work of authorities for them. Perhaps it was the last bits of sanity of Michael Hoyt creeping out from beyond the void to do the right thing one last time while he still had his mind. And Josh Alcorn was just another suicide in the scheme of things as a young man found it beyond his skills of negotiation to deal with what society told him to do, and what his parents taught him to live by. Suicides happen every day���sadly, yet this one was made into a major issue���as were the other two stories percolating in the opening weeks of 2015 in Cincinnati, Ohio. Something is amiss.

Conspiracy theory might speculate but there is no way of knowing how any of these stories might be connected, because the roots are deeply entangled in the static patters of our learned living. After all, most literature classes in college require a reading of the Koran, not the Holy Bible so to encourage students to ���open up��� to other religious influences. Public schools are intensely secular in regards to Christmas, or any other Biblical heritage, but go well out of their way if a student is a Muslim, a Hindu, or a Buddhist. And kids are taught that there is no fault so long as everyone arrives at a consensus. So long as a majority of people believe something, then a reality is born���at least that is what���s taught. So is it any bit of trivia that there are so many people on the precipice of emotional collapse. The answer is no. Put garbage into a mind, you get garbage out.

But further, what about those strange voices that haunt the wooly loner stuck in a man���s body, or struggling not to kill a powerful politician, or a copy cat who wants to do something meaningful with their life after the Paris attacks made heroes of other young boys looking for redemption against feminism under the battle flag of Allah. Do you believe in ghosts��� dear reader? I do, and they do work in strange ways. Sometimes they seem aligned to help the enemies against goodness in the most remote ways. I have put my own contemplations into some of my speculative fiction just for the sake of argument. After all science is always there for rational discussion���and there is an explanation for everything if all the facts are revealed. But in the case of these sudden Cincinnati stories���the heart bed of conservativism���it looks as if we don���t have all the facts. We have the results, but not the immediate causes. Isn���t it just a bit strange that so many people are going crazy in the same region all at once when history otherwise indicates? What���s different about this situation?

The answer is one that no one dare ask in the light of day for fear that they may follow Michael Hoyt into the mental ward. But science points toward that revelation. Cincinnati is becoming the symbol of the old Quit Riot song, ���We���re All Crazy Now.��� So what is making everyone crazy, and why? Perhaps it is the same root that wishes to wipe away the good traditional work of one of the last places on earth that is truly conservative. Maybe the target is the area that still has a large enough demographic footprint to push smaller communities over the edge. History may have something to say so to point us in the right direction. After all, wasn���t the whole IRS scandal against conservative groups started in Cincinnati? What type of weapons are available to the modern NSA data banks and the politicians collecting that data? We don���t know���..do we? But the facts do point in a direction, and the origin is not in Cincinnati. It���s in the whispers of change that come from groups hell-bent on imposing their vision on the innocent and conservative for aims that are not easily detected. Yet their imprint can be seen not by what they show, but by what they don���t.

Maybe we���re not all so crazy after all. We���ve just been told we are by the truly guilty parties. Something to contemplate.

Rich Hoffman

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