Month: September 2017

The Reality of ‘Game of Thrones’: How Hillary Clinton is all too similar to Cersei Lannister

It has taken several years but my youngest daughter has finally talked my wife and I into watching the Game of Thrones, the popular HBO series based on the books by George R.R. Martin.  My first impression was forged when my daughter was watching an episode from Season Two many years ago where two women were essentially involved in pornography and each time I looked up from my work while she watched these episodes someone was naked.  So I didn’t have a very high impression of the show but for an excuse to get people naked and make it a medieval setting.  I thought it was just another tacky enterprise and I wasn’t impressed.   But it has done well over the years and people obviously like it for some reason, so my wife and I gave it another chance recently and started watching it from the beginning, and much to our surprise, we both actually like it.  For me, I find myself living in the Game of Thrones literally as I have those experiences in most of the people I know in politics, business, and family quite literally.  I find the characters created by George R.R. Martin to be very realistic in their motivations and how they apply those needs to the world around them.

I can’t help but draw parallels to the Game of Thrones and real life, specifically in the case of Hillary Clinton.  The character of Cersei Lannister comes to mind—the queen who will literally do anything to stay in power and close proximity to the throne for which her son sat for most of the first seasons once her husband had died.  House of Cards involves much of the same kind of power grabbing soap opera style narrative and when I was watching that series drew unmistakable parallels to the Clinton White House.  Now that Hillary Clinton has been caught and the DNC exposed the United States is having its moment or discovery where we learn how vile all these characters in this real story actually have been.   When we voted for Donald Trump many of us only suspected it, but now in the aftermath, we understand all too clearly what Hillary and her minions have been up to and the plots are not unlike the Game of Thrones stories, and for the same reasons that exist in the realms of that fiction.

My mom and my grandmother used to get very involved in their day time soap operas.  When I was a kid and went to the store with them on their daughter mother days I’d often make fun of how they’d cackle after the various narratives of whom was sleeping with whom and for what reason.  I never understood their fascination with such boring stories of love, lust, betrayal and scandal—it seemed small-minded to me even at a very young age.   However I do like fantasy stories, such as Star Wars, and Lord of the Rings, and clearly these are very similar styles of stories with a soap opera quality to them when you start getting into the private motivations of the human condition.  A fantasy backdrop seems to work well for our society in observing things that might otherwise be all too real for us.  And this appears to be the big secret of Game of Thrones.

I think this is why the actions of Hillary Clinton and many politicians just like her go by people generally unknown.  People may suspect many of these things but their only real acceptance to these motivations are best presented through fantasy stories which seem removed so far from our reality that the villains often get away with hiding from us in plain sight, and once we discover their villainy, we don’t know what to do with them because our only experience with understanding these types of characters is from the voyeuristic comfort of our television screens.

It wasn’t ironic to me that as I was watching Game of Thrones for the first time seriously and I heard the dialogue by the character Cersei Lannister that Hillary Clinton was doing media for her new book, What Happened.  What was revealed was a character right off the pages of George R.R. Martin.   Hillary was so insulted by the Donald Trump election that she couldn’t stop herself from showing the world just how arrogantly she believed she had a right to the throne of the American White House.  For her it was a rightful claim passed down to her from some progressive assumption that American politics was the same as European politics, or those throughout the world functioning from the same kind of social illness as we see on display in fantasy stories like Game of Thrones.  We rebelled in America to get away from this kind of thing, not to advance it.  We don’t look, for kings to worship in America, at least we aren’t supposed to.  Literally, the American White House is not supposed to be just another episode of the Game of Thrones or House of Cards.

In many ways I think this is the problem people have with Donald Trump—he is truly something different.  I know that’s why I voted for him.  Trump has virtually the perfect wife, he has perfect kids—Trump himself is a pretty perfect person—he’s not sick, he never sleeps; he doesn’t have little insecurities that he’s trying to hide behind public office.  He’s just a guy who loves to solve problems and be in the heat of the kitchen—and this doesn’t fit the narrative of the typical American politician that we have come to think of as corrupt.  Hillary Clinton does, but Trump requires us to accept all new motivations which have not yet been explored in a contextual way articulated through our fantasy stories.  I would go so far to say that only a novel by Ayn Rand begins to cover the Donald Trump presidency while most of us experience the range of human emotions driving modern politics through fantasy works like Game of Thrones, or even Harry Potter.

Deep inside us all is still that European fascination with names and titles—the very things we rebelled against as Americans.  We may not like people like Hillary Clinton, but we trust that dysfunction because it’s what we understand at a primal level.  In Game of Thrones I haven’t yet found a character I can relate to except for some of the Stark kids—but even then the idea of duty to a family name and the promise of a reign on some Iron Throne doesn’t make much sense to me.  But most people watching can find something they can relate to in the characters of the very sprawling epic that has become Game of Thrones.  And to my experience it works because it’s not so much fantasy, but is actually quite real.  The fantasy settings of dragon stories and magic allow us to create some emotional distance to the subject, but honestly the psychological explorations of the characters themselves is all too real.  What is shocking about Hillary Clinton is that she is every bit as vile as the most dastardly villain from Game of Thrones, but we have been exposed to her without the trappings of a fantasy story set a long time ago in a time long forgotten—but she’s standing right in front of us on full display.  Our modern society may not be as simplified as a medieval setting so to examine all the plotting and scheming that goes on in the human mind for the advancement of infantile ideas about control and human achievement, but the essence of those motivations are all too real—and not so much a fantasy.

Rich Hoffman

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St. Louis Protesters Vandalize the Mayor’s Home: Lyda Krewson should have gunned down the people on her lawn

The St. Louis protests over the shooting of an alleged drug dealer during a police arrest migrated into radicals upset with the lack of prosecution by the legal system to go over to Mayor Lyda Krewson’s home and vandalize it by throwing rocks through the windows and blasting it with red paint.  In the process nine St. Louis police officers were injured, two of them seriously, one with a broken jaw, the other with a dislocated shoulder—and in my opinion the protestors crossed the line from something possibly protected under the umbrella of free speech and migrated into something where an armed defense of the mayor’s home was justified.  Lyda appears to be a nice lady who did everything she could to deescalate the situation with non-violence, but I would argue that in so doing she actually perpetuated the situation.  It would have been better to put bullets into those attackers when they came to her home and to send them to the hospital, or to the morgue at that point in time instead of taking the passive position that she did—because she only empowered them further.

I have some experience with this kind of thing and my general policy is to engage violence with more violence than the attackers can handle.  If they come to your house to throw eggs, then you should burn their cars so they can’t escape and cripple them so there is no retreat-until the police can come to make an arrest.  Playing nice with people who are willing to vandalize private property doesn’t make things better.  As the mayor said, nobody was hurt and that she can fix what was vandalized—but in all actuality people were hurt, police were hurt seriously and getting hit in the face with bricks could have easily have killed those police officers, which to me opens up the options of what should be done to those attackers to deescalate the situation in the future.

Private property is what we’re talking about here.  While Mayor Krewson’s position is the one that current law and order adheres to—it has the assumption that material things can be replaced but lives cannot-it is technically wrong.  The reason for the police, the Second Amendment and the trappings of a legal system are to protect the private property of America’s citizens.  By going to the mayor’s home and attempting to influence her where she lives the mob was purposely attempting to use fear and the destruction of private property to influence the nature of law and order.  That is not acceptable.   When those lines are crossed and a mob of insurgents arrives to your place of residence to influence your behavior in the realm of law and order, then violence in return is the only option.

Obviously the actions of Black Lives Matter and ANTIFA are open about their strategies of violence against those they disagree with, so that opens the play book to violence which can then be conducted against them.  And the battleground which gives merit to the action is in the defense of private property.  I would say to the reporters who had to endure having water bottles being thrown at them, or violence inflicted on them in any way that your personal space then becomes private property and should be defended with any means necessary.  If the attackers lose their life in the process–then so be it—they had it coming.  This is the right way to think about these matters.

I’m writing this now as a kind of qualifying statement for future behavior.  Speaking for myself, I get by most days without having to inflict violence on other people.  If it happens it’s never because I started the conflict.  I have had to be violent with people before on occasion and while doing so have in my mind the complete destruction of those people.  Most of the time things work out alright and everyone lives to see another day.  But when it comes to private property and the defense of it, we have a right as individual American citizens to defend it.  Our politics does not give those rights over to enemy insurgents to do with whatever they want.  If I were the mayor of St. Louis I would have had to engage those people after the first broken window with violence that likely would have ended their existence—because it would have been the right thing to do.  All that stands between such things is law and order and once the mob failed to be contained by law enforcement, then the next tier of defense is personal protection.  For me, I have lots of options, but firearms are part of that defense.

I always try to use other methods before reaching for the gun in this present so-called civilized world.  Someone trained in various combat methods should have various degrees of defensive persuasion to apply against villains.  But for Mayor Krewson who obviously is a nice lady who doesn’t think much about such things, machine gunning down the protesters on her lawn would have been acceptable.  Those protestors made it very clear that they were willing to fight and possibly kill the law enforcement personnel on the streets—so that means that all the rules are off the table and anything goes—essentially.  It is quite obvious that appeasing these radicals is not the best method and that our legal system does not know how to handle these matters.  The path of Mayor Krewson has only made the situation worse.  Turning your back on these types of aggressive people empowers them to do more vile acts, it doesn’t deter them.  So we must draw the line somewhere and a personal residence where your family sleeps and your possessions are kept is where that thin line of justice resides.  If anybody is willing to cross that line, then they are said to be willing to surrender their life to your protection of it.  Because you really have no way of knowing what their intentions are.  Are they there to simply scare you, or under the pressure from the mob and the politics of our times, will they simply revert to the animal nature of rape, pillaging, and death?  We must assume the worst and hope for the best, but if they cross that line, they’ve made that decision for us.

A legal system that cannot protect our private property and our pursuit of happiness is ineffective and they don’t have a right to then prosecute us, the law abiding, with the use of firearms or other things to protect our personal sovereignty—and our bodies are part of that sanctity.  People do not have a right to get in our faces, vandalize our cars, or threaten our homes in any way shape or form.  If politicians cannot get this situation under control and use the rules of law to produce a society filled with justice, then we have no other choice.  In my opinion the mayor should have gunned down those protesters and left the lifeless bodies hanging from the trees of her front yard—because that’s the only language that people corrupted with primal instincts understand.  And in the realm of value assessment private property cannot always be replaced.  It represents more than material possession—it is a token of our personal sovereignty, and if we don’t have that in American society—then we have nothing of law and order.

Rich Hoffman

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The Piracy of St. Louis Protesters: It’s a behavior problem, not one of law and order

It’s important to understand what is going on at the St. Louis riots over the weekend of 9/15 2017.  We’re not talking about a free speech case where protesters were just upset over the ruling from a court case where a police officer shot a man of color during an attempted arrest—we are dealing with communist trained radicals who fundamentally want to change the nature of American life.  After the acquittal of the police officer due to a lack of evidence, the Black Lives Matter people along with ANTIFA took to the streets to vandalize the mayor’s home and commit violence against police officers and journalists hiding the action behind free speech—when in fact all it truly was could only be considered open insurrection.  It’s time that we properly define things so that we can deal with them.  People who are working against the American way of life don’t get to tear down the institutional judgment of protections under the 1st Amendment and even the 2nd Amendment, then hide behind them to commit violence, loot stores, break people’s bones and generally become a menace against society.  We don’t have a system of law and order which allows for mob justice-such as what these communist oriented protestors are advocating—that if you don’t like a court ruling, you get to destroy things built by a capitalist society.  That behavior just isn’t acceptable and deserves to be met with violence of its own.

The suspected drug dealer who was shot in this case by a panicky police officer is an old story and it won’t be the last time.  If you are a thug who shows no respect for the law you are giving an open invitation to the police to shoot you.  If I acted the way that guy did when the officers tried to arrest him, using a car as a possible projectile to run the officers over, they’d shoot at me also.  It has nothing to do with being black—but everything to do with having law and order on the side of the police who are commissioned to walk a fine line between justice and anarchy.  Without police, people like these protestors would turn our society into some rotten destination of human degradation—and when they get the police on their heels paralyzing them from action, which is precisely what happens they change the nature of our society into a much greater negative.  Of course that is part of the strategy behind the anti-capitalist groups that sponsor these race riots such as what we saw in St. Louis and many other places recently.  But it’s important to remember that it isn’t a race situation at all, it’s a behavior problem.  The police will shoot at a white person under the same conditions as they will a black person.  The difference is that the black person has been taught from their youth in many cases to function in a victimized state and that the law doesn’t apply to them whereas the typical white criminal shows much more restraint when dealing with the police—so they get shot a lot less often.

Additionally, it’s the location of these shootings, usually in inner city dwellings and city streets where crimes are statistically higher because of the demographic circumstances.  The Democratic failures of applying people of low value into concentrated dwellings has produced a society of crime where the only way to advance their lives is through criminal conduct.  If you take young black men and give them mentors, and raise them in the suburbs where there are good neighbors, things to do, and reading isn’t considered a negative—they tend to grow up somewhat successful and they don’t get shot by cops because they aren’t in trouble to find themselves in that situation.  It’s not a color problem it’s a behavior problem.   The way to fix it is to change the way that people live in cities and under what conditions.  Throwing money at them isn’t enough; you have to change their behavior from the ground up.  The people participating in the St. Louis riots this past weekend are not interested in law and order; they are conducting themselves as communist insurgents looking to rule society through mob influence.  If they don’t get what they want they are looking to the violence of a mob to change the conditions of the world around them—and that is an essentially anti-American activity.  We can define that by characterizing the nature of the rule of law toward individual behavior as opposed to mob justice-which is a distinctly different thing.  Mob practices are associated with communist and socialist countries, not American culture, so to apply it to this case complete with flag burning voids the warranty so to speak of constitutional protection.

As a society we cannot allow ourselves to be paralyzed by people who have no intention on living within the parameters of a capitalist nation.  You can’t have a nation of communists within a nation of capitalists and expect everything to work out OK.  That’s just not possible.  Just like you can’t have a bunch of people protesting the values of the United States flag by not standing for the National Anthem or burning the American Flag then claiming that the activity is protected by that same flag under the Bill of Rights.  It’s just preposterous.  When we stand for the flag or put it up our flag pole, we are saying to one another that we adhere to the values for which that flag represents.  You can’t protest those values then when trouble breaks out run to the protection of that flag, even as you burn it in the city streets of St. Louis.  You also don’t have a right to protest that flag if you are currently taking money from the government for which that flag has been instituted—and most everyone participating in those St. Louis riots have their hand in the government cookie jar—so we need to look at this situation with the correct lenses.

Vile groups who hate America are using these protestors and the issue of race to fundamentally change the nature of American culture.   Back in the glory days of the pirates off American coasts where looting nations were hauling gold back to Europe from the conquered Central and South American regions, it was customary to fly the flag of whatever ship you wanted to raid.  As you got closer, as a pirate and earned their trust so they would not fire on you prematurely, pirates would then run up the Jolly Roger flag to let the victim know that they were about to be attacked and by then it was too late to flee or prepare the cannons.  That’s how pirates took over vessels to loot them of their worth without being blown from the water.  Communist groups are doing the same thing in St. Louis; they are using black people, poor people, stupid people and out-right criminals to get close enough to the law of our times to take over institutions under a condition of social paralysis.  It’s not a case of free speech; it’s an act of piracy.  The only way to quell that violence is with violence because reason has left the battlefield.  It’s a behavior problem which causes these situations, but its insurgent activity which fuels the violence afterwards with an aim of changing our nation from a capitalist society to a communist one.  That is what these rioters are really after, so we should treat them accordingly—and stop treating these insurgents as if they have a right to do what they are doing.

Rich Hoffman

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Eliyahu M. Goldratt’s ‘The Goal’: Kathy Kennedy is doing a great job with ‘Star Wars’, and how we can prove it with proper business measurements

Before anyone says, “Oh no, he’s writing another Star Wars article,” stay with me for a bit here. What I’m about to say has some very important things in it that are very “holistic.”  They span very much into our greater lives as a human species, so put on your thinking caps and follow along.  Specifically Star Wars and in general Lucasfilm under the leadership of Kathleen Kennedy have come under great attack lately for firing four directors and twelve writers as she looks for just the right combination of people to make the new Star Wars movies just right.  The most recent news was that J.J. Abrams was coming back to direct Episode 9 which caused quite a stir and finally unleashed a major backlash from the entertainment community that was surprising, because it has revealed some extremely Marxist elements that we all know are there, but these Star Wars firings are exposing it in a measurable way.   So as a guide post to keep us all from getting lost I’d like to introduce to everyone the very good, and very popular book on business, The Goal, written in 1984.  The Goal is such a powerful book that Amazon makes its executives read it and apply the basic philosophy to their industry, which obviously works.  I also happen to know that Boeing has had their industry flow professionals read the book to improve their business climate as well, so we aren’t talking about some fringe infusion of ideas here.  The Goal is very mainstream in American business—extremely well known.   In short The Goal is to make money and to use that as the identifier of all business measurements.  If you are in business the only thing you should be concerned about is making money, it’s not to provide jobs, it’s not to just make products, and it’s certainly not to fuel a political philosophy that is not aligned with the realities of the world.   Now let’s introduce the great director John Landis whom I am a tremendous fan of but has obviously lost his mind late in life.  Read the linked article for the details, but in essence Landis has forgotten that the reason for a movie studio to exist is to make money.  Disney exists to make money.  The director’s specific job is to make money for the studio, not to sacrifice themselves for some social cause, or to have artistic, and creative freedom to let their “inner voice” speak to a mass audience. The director in the case of a movie or most anything else is there to make a product that the studio can make money off of.  It’s the only thing that matters.

http://movieweb.com/john-landis-criticizes-star-wars-lucasfilm-directors/

Now obviously to do that the product needs to be desired by the public and in the case of Star Wars it brings a lot of joy to people who go to the movies, buy the toys and video games and in general it is those movies that keep the theater experience going so that directors can work on movies that are not Star Wars and may only appeal to 5% of the population.  Movie theater owners need to make money too just to have a place to show Hollywood products.  The industry is there for them to work because enough money was made with something like Star Wars to allow for other viewpoints in other films to be presented to mass audiences around the world.   If I had to value stream map this situation for studio executives I’d of course designate the consumer at the movie theater as the customer that the value of the product design must appeal to in order to successfully implement the strategic objectives.  These people fired from the various Star Wars projects, like Colin Trevorrow and Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, just over the last couple of months were obviously not getting the holistic reason for the Star Wars films getting made.  And what people like John Landis are now criticizing Kathy Kennedy for doing is essentially the labor union point of view from the various entertainment guilds—and that is putting money before art.

I can tell you that growing up all I wanted to be in life was a film maker and an adventurer, something between a Josh Gates and Steven Spielberg.  But when I had the opportunity to work on a few movie sets and talk to people behind the scenes I realized that most of them were Marxists openly pushing for socialism in American society.  So I had to turn away from that industry—sadly.  In the old days these liberals, like John Landis, and Ron Howard had to put up with their stars such as Mel Gibson, Bruce Willis and Clint Eastwood who were all conservative A-listers and Hollywood at least had a nice balance of product to present to the public.  However over the last few decades Hollywood producers looking to appeal to the Clintons and the Obamas in office tried to create a new generation of Marxists to replace the conservative leading men.  They tried to bring progressive ideas to their stories and they figured that if producers gave big explosions and loud music to a movie feature to help the Marxism go down easier, that audiences would stay with them, but that hasn’t happened.   People have just found other things to do.  It should say a lot that Netfllx productions like Stranger Things which is an obvious throwback to the 1980s and the HBO show Game of Thrones which is all about politics set in a kind of Medieval time where all the primal human instincts are explored, lust for power, sex, dominion over others are presented without a lot of subtle global warming messages, and the plight of the poor–the trend toward a customer experience is well-known..  The labor unions in the entertainment industry are looking at their situation and they are blaming Disney for not sticking to their Marxist goals of social reform but instead keeping their focus on “making money.”  Disney currently makes a lot of money off Star Wars and their Marvel projects.  They are giving audiences what they want and in return we give them money.  That’s the name of the game.

Disney to appease the creative labor unions does take up social causes-but it doesn’t help them at all toward The Goal.  They have nearly destroyed the ESPN network with progressive garbage nobody wants to hear tied to sports.  And Kathy Kennedy has messed with Star Wars in ways that could easily destroy it, by putting more of an emphasis on female characters. I don’t have a problem with it, but its a gamble to try to expand the market reach of Star Wars with females at the possible expense of the males. So far so good, but it is a risk worth noting.  Kathy Kennedy is not a Midwestern conservative, she is a social progressive and it shows in her projects.  But at least she understands The Goal which was written by Eliyahu M. Goldratt—and that is to make money.  To make money with Star Wars you must have merchandising—the experience must continue long after customers have left the movie theater.  That means that filmmakers have precisely two hours to create a product that will unleash countless books, comics, toys, t-shirts, bed sheets—you name it.  There isn’t room for some director to “put their own take on things,” they must follow The Goal—and that is to make money for Disney and its shareholders.  That is a very capitalist concept which pisses off the Marxists—but tough luck.  The product does not exist to make a point—it exists to make money because with that money many good things happen.

I went out on Force Friday a few weeks ago to buy a few items.  One of the things I had to get was a Rathtar from The Force Awakens movie, which was released on Force Friday specifically this year ahead of all the new The Last Jedi toys.  Even though I was very hard on The Force Awakens when it came out largely because Kathy Kennedy allowed the franchise to movie away from the line of stories I had been reading for thirty years in the novels and allowed J.J. Abrams to have the creative freedom to write a completely fresh Star Wars story changing the direction of the original novels dramatically, I have respect for the good work done on that movie.  My favorite scene from any movie in recent memory and certainly one of my top ten moments of all time is that scene from The Force Awakens when the Rathtars are introduced.  That was a lot of fun and whenever it’s on television when my grandkids are watching it, I usually stop what I’m doing to see it again.  At Force Friday there were a lot of happy people spending countless thousands of dollars on new merchandise because The Goal of the product which is Star Wars was aligned with their consumer needs.  Disney received a lot of money, which was The Goal, and the consumer got a quality product that spoke to them mythologically in ways they needed—for whatever reason.  The end result was good for all parties in that transaction.  It is not up to some Marxist Hollywood type to question The Goal.  The Goal is market driven, it is up to those in the entertainment business to figure out what the consumer wants—not to change the consumer into something the artists wants—do you get what I’m saying—because this relates to virtually everything in our culture.

I have been extremely excited about the new Han Solo movie now directed by Ron Howard.  I think he’s exactly the right guy to make that movie which he had to take over from Phil Lord and Christopher Miller.  Obviously Larry Kasden who has made some of my favorite movies in the past understands The Goal of Star Wars as a screenwriter.  He may not philosophically like The Goal, but he’s hired to do the job of achieving it—and that’s the difference between professionalism and being a Marxist douche bag.  He’s the writer on this new Han Solo movie along with his son so when the young directors known for The Lego Movie were fired because they didn’t get what Larry was trying to put up on the screen, Ron Howard was brought in to fix things.  I was happy about it because it told me that Lucasfilm understood what The Goal was, and they were committed to it.  I have no doubt that the professionalism of Ron Howard will keep The Goal of the new Han Solo movie in focus and deliver a product that Lucasfilm needs and Disney can continue to use to make a lot of money—which is a wonderful thing.  But I did have to send Ron Howard a Tweet the other day reminding him that all his Donald Trump bashing he has been doing may very well draw a line between him and his audience—half of which like the job Donald Trump is doing.  By politicizing Star Wars, you risk deviating from The Goal, and that is dangerous to everyone involved.  Howard is a smart guy and a fabulous director, but it’s not his job to define The Goal. It’s his job to implement it as the director, and that’s what he was hired for.  All the below Tweets shown below are on Ron Howard’s main page.

The new Star Wars movies may be corporate productions that lack the heart of the solitary vision of George Lucas—but they do understand The Goal and that’s why they are special.  The three measurements in The Goal are throughput, inventory, and operational expense—everything for a successful implementation of a flourishing business model is contained within those three measurements.   Throughput in the case of Star Wars is the delivery of a movie on time from conception to the release date.  Inventory is the resources it takes to make the movie, like directors, writers, studio rentals, building props—all that stuff.  And of course operational expenses are the overall costs of keeping the movie franchise alive as a social mythology, the new theme park attractions, the marketing of merchandise and all the other big picture items.  There is a lot more to a movie than just paying honor to the creative instincts of the film’s directors or the writers.  There is much more to The Goal than just the vision of an artist.  Star Wars is successful because traditionally Lucasfilm understood The Goal.  The Marxist friends of George Lucas may have given him grief over it, but if George had listened, we wouldn’t have Star Wars.  And in that respect, what has John Landis done lately except complain.  He made that famous “Thriller” video like a million years ago.  And The Blues Brothers was made in the 70s.  I would say that Landis like his friend Spielberg has forgotten what The Goal was and instead have adopted that radical Marxism that they all share through their director’s guild.  And lucky for us, who are Star Wars fans, Kathy Kennedy has kept her eye on The Goal and not the socialist sentiments of her entertainment industry friends.   Sure she made the lead actors in most of these new movies a “girl” and she made a black stormtrooper, and put a Hispanic guy in as the lead hot-shot new pilot, which I’m sure made her liberal friends give her less grief over heading a giant capitalist movie studio—but at least she hasn’t forgotten The Goal.  And for that I must commend her.  If she has to fire 200 Star Wars directors she should, because it tells me she is committed to my customer satisfaction and not the social ranting of just another Hollywood Marxist, like John Landis.

Rich Hoffman

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Why Hillary Clinton is Technically Insane: The dangers of people who are functionally crazy who seek office–like Joan Powell

I wouldn’t keep talking about it but it’s such a fascinating example of mass psychosis that we’d be doing the human race an injustice not to examine the situation. Of course I’m talking about Hillary Clinton’s book tour for her new excuse called What Happened. While doing press for the book she has said some of the most bizarre things I think I’ve ever heard as a collection of thoughts from one person in serious denial. Its equivalent to a psychiatrist conducting theory on a wife-beating alcoholic drooling from being freshly drunk with his spouse sitting next to him with blood dripping from her lips from a fresh beating and bruises all over her face and arms and for the drunk blaming the lawn mower for all the miseries in his life. Mark Dice did a pretty good video seen below on this subject, but honestly, the collection of many clips displaying the sheer insanity of Hillary Clinton is overwhelming—even for people like Dice. It is difficult for any sane mind to even grapple with the insanity it takes to pull off the Hillary Clinton case. As it turns out, she is even worse than her most vicious detractors have theorized. Hillary represents just how crazy progressives typically are and how delusional they are about the nature of the world around them. Naturally a person who cannot deal with reality in the forms for which it is presented is clinically insane and must be treated with cautiously.

Locally in my home town politicians like Joan Powell who is running for a trustee seat displays similar insanity as Hillary Clinton—because the situation isn’t specific to Clinton—it is rather indicative to a mass psychosis that emerged as a result of progressive philosophy being injected into a traditional Christian culture in America and assuming that it had a right to do so. Those who subscribed to it have had to actually ignore elements of reality to pull off the ruse—in themselves, and that process has destroyed their grip on truth as defined by the relativity of human society. I have often looked at these local politicians and their supporters—like in the case of Joan Powell and observed their craziness. But the situation is obviously even deeper than that. With Hillary Clinton representing kind of a spokeswoman for insanity, many people suffering from this condition follow her blindly and its fascinating to observe. They typically say and do the same kind of things as Hillary is exhibiting—and we might not have this observational window into their crazy minds if not for the hurt feelings of the former presidential candidate who assumed that she would win an election just because she was a woman.

I never took Hillary Clinton serious as a candidate. I thought Trump would win a full year ahead of the election and I said so much on these very pages. When it was clear that Hillary would be the Democratic nominee and not someone like Joe Biden, I knew the party had picked the wrong person and that they would be defeated. I even predicted this current situation for Democrats live on the radio just a few weeks before the election of 2016. It was clear to me what was going on not because I’m a white male with an affluent background—but because I’m dealing with reality and the rules of nature to make decisions. Hillary Clinton and her supporters are not—they deal in a kind of voodoo cult of belief, suspicion, assumptions and superstitions indicative of the early hominids of our species. For people who call themselves “progressives” they have not evolved passed observing a lunar calendar and having a party when there is a summer solstice or doing a rain dance trying to usher in water for their dried-up crops. It’s not against the law to be stupid—largely it’s a choice—and people are free to be stupid if they want. But they are not free to be stupid and rule over others—and that was exactly what Hillary Clinton and all her doppelgangers running for various offices around the United States are attempting to do. Knowing something about human nature, I never thought she had a chance even though she was sold as reality by those in the media who think they are the progenerates of truth.

It’s one thing to believe something even if it’s not there, it’s quite another to go into public and blast it from every avenue defending it which clearly indicates insanity when the values of the message do not align with reality in any way, shape or form. That is what Hillary Clinton is doing on this book tour. Anybody with a thinking mind can hear her talk and know that she is not a person people like. She is a person most people would not enjoy having a beer with unless they themselves were suffering from the same condition. The trouble with Hillary is that people just don’t like her and they never have. She’s always been Bill Clinton’s punching bag and that earned her sympathy from sadomasochists and drug addicts, but normal people found her repulsive—and she should have known that going into this whole effort. But to go to the extent to break the law like she did before the campaign ever got started was in itself a kind of mass psychosis. Only really dumb people were buying into her candidacy and her polling numbers should have shown her that—and they likely did, only she didn’t pay attention to it because she was living in her own brand of reality. But to put herself out there as a presidential candidate with the media fully at her back, the crony capitalists, the progressives, the global elites, and the entire Beltway culture trying to get her elected and still get destroyed in the Electoral College is something quite spectacular. It wasn’t racism, sexism or fear of any kind that kept her from getting elected. It all came down to the fact that she was a terrible candidate and a not very likable person.

Then to watch her go around assuming that reality is something else and to write it all down for all to study for many centuries in the future is pretty crazy. If she had even a thread of sanity she would have just retired and let people think what they wanted—but to go out into society and say the things she is shows an insanity that is actually quite troubling. There are a lot of people out there in the world who aren’t very smart who use power gained through peer pressure to cover their illness—and Hillary gives them validation and hope. What should happen in the case of people like the local politician I mentioned such as Joan Powell is that they should get medical attention. But instead, because of Hillary these insane people are kind of cosplaying at life, dressing up as normal people but playing the role of a social lunatic. And that might be fine for their domesticated lives, but when they seek the levers of power for other people, that’s when they become dangerous.

Rich Hoffman

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Now Lynda O’Conner wants to be a West Chester Trustee: Old Lakota tax and spenders ride the cape of Mark Welsh

 

Unfortunately none of the smart people who I know are running for the various school board seats at Lakota this fall as the old board members are now in a race to become the next West Chester trustees.  Since Lee Wong failed to get enough support to move into another seat he’ll likely be back in West Chester as a trustee just because of his name recognition as an incumbent.  Mark Welsh is defending his seat from an onslaught of unionized radicals—like the former Lakota school board president—Joan” the Hutt” Powell.  And now that George Lang is moving into a congressional seat in Ohio, more people have decided to run for West Chester trustee, specifically Lynda O’Conner.  There are also other candidates, but Lynda jumped out to me because she has been by far the most conservative school board member at Lakota—which leaves open that spot for more unionized representatives.  This situation is maturing into a not very good scenario.

I know Lynda pretty well and to be honest her being on the school board at Lakota has helped me take my own fangs out of it.  She has made it a better place—a functioning body of government, especially after Joan Powell left. However she has supported tax increases at Lakota which makes her a bad fit for the West Chester trustee positions.  I consider those trustee seats to be much more important than the Lakota school system positions.  All public schools are liberal institutions, so having a tax and spender there that even pays a little bit of lip service to an actual budget is pretty remarkable.  But that doesn’t mean they translate well over into the general business community that makes all the money for which a region functions.  Lynda in her role at Lakota has been caught many times playing all sides.   As a trustee of West Chester, she might as well be as liberal as Joan Powell and Lee Wong.

This won’t be the first or last fight we’ll have with those types of tag along politicians—who come into a seat thinking that they’ll be as good as their predecessors.  But it is unfortunate, the two guys running West Chester for the last four years have done a very good job and it would have been great to see that continue. But the odds of Mark Welsh becoming a minority vote are looming now into a much more hostile government body toward the merits of logic.  To people like Lynda and Joan Powell the hard work of managing West Chester are in place and they think it will be easy.  But since the only experiences they have are running big liberal government schools, they’ll only have those experiences to stand on while essentially running a city of 100,000 people.  The difference between running a large industrious township and a silly school is that it’s not the radical neurotic moms who you have to please who feel guilt over how little time they spend with their children—it’s the business community who view the school as just another unnecessary expense hooking into their pockets that they have to appease with a tribute otherwise they’ll find themselves splashed on the cover of a newspaper by Joan Powell’s reporter friends and Chamber Alliance stooges.  There’s a big difference between being pleasant to people for the sake of friendly tolerance and having a true relationship with them—and that’s what those former school board members will learn should they get one of these trustee seats.  There is a lot of hostility toward them deservedly so for their support of higher taxes in the past, then bringing that to a currently well-managed West Chester Township that has staved off the temptation to expand government while staying small and nimble to attract business to the area will nurture resentment quickly.

A lot of people forget that Joan Powell was an advocate of committing West Chester into a city status—which of course would have added a city council, a mayor and many other big government expansion  positions that go along with the liberal philosophy her type of people have.  West Chester currently functions very well with just three trustees—actually only two—Lee Wong doesn’t count.  Union contracts have been worked out, taxes are low, zoning is fluid and functional—things have been going well and it shows.  I had guests this past week flying in from overseas to see me.  It was a late trip by necessity—not one planned out months in advance—so when they tried to book a place to stay overnight, they could not get a room in West Chester.  Every room was filled in the middle of a week in September with nothing really special going on.  Over the past few years West Chester has added a lot of nice hotels to the community—at least 10 that I can think of off the top of my head.  My out-of-town guys couldn’t find a single room in any of them—they had to stay in Blue Ash to find a room two weeks ahead of their impromptu flight.  Now why were all those hotels booked?  It certainly wasn’t for IKEA—not in the middle of the week.  And it wasn’t for Top Golf—although some of it was.  It was because there are literally thousands and thousands of people doing business and West Chester has become the hub of Cincinnati for business conduct.  Low taxes, lots of things to do, highway access, and a small government that isn’t sticking its nose into the complex world of commerce with a sidewalk every five minutes so some homeless person can feed some ducks like you find in a lot of other places.  Or a sidewalk so Lee Wong can sneak in the back door of Sushi Monk from his house and beg for free food.  Out of all the names announcing themselves as an option for West Chester trustee it looks like now Mark will be the only conservative.  The rest are all tax and spend liberals as proven by their track record, certainly Lee Wong, ostentatiously, Joan Powell, and of course Lynda O’Conner who has always supported the tax increases at Lakota.   West Chester is headed for trouble.

The question begs to be answered why more conservative names don’t rise to the top and run for some of these seats.  Well, it’s because most of the smart people out there make a lot more money for their productive week and they don’t have the time unless they are retired to waste on these government seats.  But that’s a shame, because a failure to put the right people in the school board seats and trustee seats ends up costing a lot of us a lot of money.  While these liberals play house managing these school boards and trustee positions they always cave into the demands of other government departments seeking perpetual pay increases.  Until George Lang and Mark Welsh brought their business experience to the West Chester trustee seats and started saying no to the hand outs and government expansion that Lee Wong and Cathy Stoker wanted to implement, such management from a government position was unheard of.  It was a good ride and an example that proper management of government resources could take place.  But there just aren’t enough people like those guys out there to keep it rolling—and that’s too bad.  I know I don’t have the time to give to it at this point in my life and I know many other people in the business community are in the same boat.  That leaves those who don’t have anything else to do to run for those office seats and they’ll likely get that second critical vote over Mark because of it.  That means for everyone doing business with West Chester the potential for higher taxes is on the horizon–because they did it at Lakota.  And they’ll do it again on a larger platform for sure—because it’s the easiest thing to do, and when pressed, they’ll give in within a New York minute.

Rich Hoffman

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Why the Senate Can’t Afford to Go “Slow”: Grim realities of politicians who shamefully made too much money in the public sector

Traditionally its true, the Senate is supposed to slow down legislation so that hot-headed ideas don’t mire our American industry with too many regulations and debt. However, you might recall an article I did many years ago featuring my ol’ buddy Darryl Parks who used to run 700 WLW radio in Cincinnati. He did a broadcast showing how much money many of our congressman and senators made while on the job—where they started their tenure as government employees nearly broke but were multimillionaires a short time later. Obviously, there was corruption where these government employees—people like Mitch McConnell tipped the scales of power in favor of themselves becoming greatly enriched by the proceeds of what we call today—The Swamp.

So the rules are off the table now as our country is on the fast track to decline and these senators and congressman have dramatically let us down. Voters saw what was happening so they put a charismatic businessman in charge of the Executive Branch so that economic growth could be created to outpace the devastating debt these looters of congress have embedded into our culture. At $20 trillion in national debt, America doesn’t have time for the Senate to drag-ass and protect their schemes for which have made them rich. We can’t afford to have a Senate that uses “slowness” to protect themselves from Americans by using that “tradition” to shield needed reform.

The way to start the debt clock backwards instead of toward that monstrous cliff of $24 trillion for which there is likely no recovery from bankruptcy is through very optimistic growth—over 3% economic upticks quarterly. And obviously there isn’t anybody else in Washington D.C. who understands how to get there but Donald J. Trump. It’s his task to mash down anybody who stands in the way—because any other method should be considered detrimental to the stability of our nation. Trump knows what he’s doing—look the Dow Jones closed over 22,000 with two major hurricanes striking the US mainland causing billions and billions of dollars of damage. For most presidents, these disasters would have sunk our economy for perhaps years. For Trump it’s just a blip, because he knows how to cheerlead from a top position to keep optimism flowing, and therefore the cash needed for our economy to thrive.

It would be advisable for Mitch and the gang to take their money and run—and get out-of-the-way, or to play ball and reform themselves, cutting ties to the lobbyists who have filled their pockets and to act properly from their positions. Again, this is why Trump was so attractive. The guy already made his money, there isn’t enough money to loot from the system that he couldn’t make himself off the interest of his valued assets. So he is lobbyist proof, Trump doesn’t owe anybody anything so he can be honest about how to fix things, whereas McConnell clearly can’t. Mitch has been purchased just like a prostitute for nearly the same reason—and he can’t act against what made him wealthy—so he should do the right thing and step aside and retire. We have a need and if he loves our country even a little bit, he should at least get out-of-the-way.
For the Senate to function as a restrictor plate to progress, the nation needs to be running properly, taxes need to be low, debt needs to be nonexistent and GDP needs to be between 3% TO 6%. Anybody who doesn’t understand that needs to be out of government office. They are not there for personal enrichment. They are there for proper management of our government’s resources. People who get elected I would expect to have already made their mark in the world and like Trump—be immune to the temptations of power. Anything short of that type of person I would argue cannot effectively do anything on Capitol Hill because they don’t have the correct mindset.

This idea that the Senate or Congress would even entertain the option to prohibit corrective action toward the needs of this country is reprehensible, and it means what many of us have said all along. It doesn’t matter if it’s a Democrat or a Republican, they are—or at least they have been—all the same. Nancy Pelosi isn’t any different from Mitch McConnell and Chuck Schumer is no different from Paul Ryan. For instance, when Ryan was running on the ticket with Mit Romney there was all this talk about him being an Ayn Rand fan, and the hope that he would be a fiscal conservative. But the moment it was in the press that he liked Ayn Rand he ran from it and hid pandering to the media. That little bit of emotional leverage right there has prevented him from being an effective Speaker of the House. Once you dip your feet in the honey well of temptation and either run from a conviction or taste the nectar of social acceptance, you lose the opportunity to lead when such criteria of conviction is required. Trump has that criteria because he has at least lived honestly. He may have been reckless in his living, but he’s honest about it and this keeps the hooks of guilt from his mind when conviction is needed to make hard decisions. Ryan can’t do that likely for a lot of reasons, but from my observations it started when he ran from the American author Ayn Rand.

Everyone knows that with economic expansion explosive growth is possible. It’s no longer an Adam Smith theoretical concept—it’s a proven fact. Lowering taxes is the way to pay down the debt and to make America Great Again. I would go so far to say that Trump’s 15% corporate tax rate would be key to achieving 5% to 6% GDP growth which would pay down the debt really fast. Liberals don’t understand economics—no liberal—and people like Mitch McConnell have already been paid off to keep the swamp full so that crony capitalism can continue to thrive. Crony capitalism is not the same as the kind of open market capitalism that Trump is advocating. But the socialism that establishment types in the Beltway advocate for will actually destroy our nation with crippling debt for which there is no recovery.

Why so fast Mitch McConnell and the rest of the drag-assers in congress who have become very wealthy selling themselves to lobbyists? Well, we are racing a generational shift in mentality here. The young people—those under age 35—have been taught out-right socialism. They get it in their media, they certainly have it in their educations, and they function as young radicals looking for a free ride—for the most part, that socialism is the way to go. If the national debt does not get under control by 2020 we are done in America—fiscally. Every smart person knows it, and the Democrats also understand it. They would love to see America collapse as a superpower and have to eat out of the hand of communism—essentially China. Just today the socialist Bernie Sanders introduced a bill for their beloved single payer option in health care in the senate which was always the goal. Because of John McCain the Republican repeal of Obamacare went nowhere setting up Democrats for this socialist single payer vote. McCain, is reported to be worth $21 million dollars as a do-nothing senator from Arizona who has never had a real job outside of military service. How did he get so much money? Not all from his wife—that’s for sure. That’s why congress must act quickly, we are running out of time and we don’t have the time to allow for these money hungry politicians to satisfy the people who have paid them off. We need action now—while we have a once in a lifetime chance. Because it won’t come again.

http://www.therichest.com/celebnetworth/politician/republican/john-mccain-net-worth/

Rich Hoffman

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A Note to NFL Players: Understand your role, social causes are not one of them

Let’s get something straight, this is football.

This is not:

I thought it was rather stunning that the CBS Sports staff on the Sunday pregame show for the opening of the NFL season at noon spent at least 15 minutes talking about a player who isn’t even on an NFL team, Colin Kaepernick. It is truly an awesome display of ignorance that the studio heads of the major networks would look at the NFL ratings and not draw a parallel to the amount of players who have followed Kaepernick into kneeling during the National Anthem ceremonies before games. People who pay over $200 per seat by the time you total up the whole NFL experience don’t want to have some 20 something kid lecture them about social injustice. They want a break from the world which is why they show up to spend so much money on a simple game. But for people connected to the NFL media to openly endorse anti-American behavior is a reckless enterprise that shows they have no idea who their audience is, or how much that audience will put up with to spend money on their game.

I look forward to the NFL season each year—I enjoy the game as a capitalist enterprise that makes a lot of people happy. The NFL experience is a good one, especially on an October Sunday where the air is cool, the humidity is down and all of downtown is thriving at 10 AM in the morning with festivities awaiting the big game at 1 PM. I’ve been to several NFL games around the country and have more than once spent large amounts of money on experiences in the club section and I always enjoy it—more on a macro level as opposed to the intimacy of a local team. I think football is good for America and is an appropriate metaphor for the capitalist system of economics that makes our country the most successful on planet earth. Its good in that regard to indulge in the spectacle of football.

But then you have a player’s union rooted in Marxism that seeks to work against capitalism by its very nature—you have a lot of kids who grew up in impoverished socialist cities who only found in football a way out of their self-imposed misery—who really don’t understand the greater world outside of the rules of the game who are thrust onto the front pages of magazines and television cameras for a short five or six years of their young lives. Then when the game is done with them they are thrown back into society to do something—usually to fail. You have the various progressive groups who want to rename teams into things less “offensive” or to make the game “safer” by making movies attacking the concussion protocol, and other issues. Like CNN did with Sea World, many in the entertainment business see the NFL as a capitalist icon that should be brought down and they use social welfare causes to attack the institution of football, which is having an effect. Then you have some kid like Kaepernick who takes all the fun out of the game by not honoring the National Anthem and forcing people to deal with a social cause everyone wants to forget about for the three-hour span of a game. Most people watching football want to drink and knock the edge off the stresses in their life, and they want to watch violence as their team marches toward a meaningless victory that will be forgotten 24 hours later in the middle of a Monday. When Kaepernick started these protests during the 2016 season and other players followed him, the NFL ratings plummeted. And that is carrying over into the 2017 season which should concern everyone involved. But mysteriously, people close to the game, like television game hosts are sticking with the protest narrative as if Kaepernick has some kind of right to be anti-American while the team he is on is supposed to honor the American system for which football is a game of proper metaphors.

It really shouldn’t even be a debate. The NFL owners understand what the intention is—it’s to make money. Without money the players don’t get paid, their cities don’t get the needed revenue they need to support stadiums in their downtowns, and many of the bars and restaurants that are satellite businesses to the NFL lose huge portions of their revenue. I hate to say it but if you are an NFL player, you are an employee of something much larger—and you need to shut your mouth and play your role in the entertainment for which you have been commissioned. You are not some God on the field of dreams, you are an instrument to be played to the liking of the mob—and you better get used to it. You sacrifice your personal sovereignty the way a soldier does for the US military—you are to follow orders and do what they tell you to—and to like it. When you are done playing the game, you get your life back—and that’s what players sign up for in exchange for the massive paychecks. They are to sacrifice their bodies and their lives while they are playing to the needs of football.

When I was younger every coach wanted me to play on their team, but I never did because I knew as a younger person that football was a means to losing my individual sovereignty and I didn’t want to do that. I wasn’t willing to give that up for the fame, the girls, the power of local celebrity—but some people were. They had pretty positive experiences until they were injured or found they could no longer play the game. I think it’s a reasonable trade-off, and for those who choose to play, they need to understand the rules. They don’t get to change them the way that Kaepernick has tried to do—by assuming that football is so big, and that he was so good that his social messages would have to be listened to by a public half drunk and miserable in their daily lives. He obviously was wrong.

It was really amazing how many social causes attach themselves to the game of football these days, from cancer treatments to hurricane relief—football—especially in the NFL has become more about social causes than about smashing the other guy into oblivion and winning a game for the pride of your local city. But on a Sunday where two hurricanes had just hit the US mainland and one of those hurricanes shut down the opening of two NFL teams in Florida there were a lot more important stories pertinent to the game of NFL football than Colin Kaepernick who is without a team because he’s so toxic and whether or not he should be playing due to his social justice crusade. People don’t care, nor do they want to be reminded of such a thing when they are spending over $1000 on beer, nachos, and hot dogs hoping their team will give them in return a victory they can enjoy for the afternoon and forget all the troubles on their plate at that moment.

Rich Hoffman

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Steve Bannon said what I have for Years: How Republicans need to win elections to control more seats

The 60 Minute interview with Steve Bannon was a remarkable thing to watch.  For anybody who wonders if the Tea Party movement was effective just wonder if there would have ever been such a thing shown on national television 5 years ago.  Of course the answer would be no.  Such things just weren’t talked about in the mass media markets.  So it’s a pretty big deal to even see this interview with Bannon newly released by the White House back into the private sector.  As Bannon explained it, his reason for leaving the White House wasn’t because Trump asked him to go; he left so that he would be free as a private citizen to fight the federal government—which he couldn’t do as an employee of the system.  I concur with Bannon, that’s the precise reason I have never sought a public office—and why I tend to protect politicians that I think are on the right track.  Bannon is more effective from the outside, and it’s important to have people like him doing the street fighting—because that has to be part of the strategy going forward.  Five years from now even more unbelievable things will occur in politics that establishment types won’t like, so there will be many, many more battles that will be fought and we need all the street fighters we can get.

I think Bannon hit something very important during this interview that I have said before.  Some people listened to me and they have done well, politically.  But now that Bannon has said it coming right out of the White House who helped Trump beat two political dynasties, the Bush family and the Clinton family—not to mention the Obama family—I would say that in this next phase potential politicians looking for good advice should listen more carefully.  Its one thing to hesitate when there is an unproven track record, but now there is a lot that is known that wasn’t.  I’m talking about the advice Bannon said he gave Trump on Billy Bush Weekend during the October portion of the 2016 presidential election.   Established politicians told Trump that he should resign or face the most embarrassing defeat in election history.  Bannon told Trump to ignore the whole thing because the American people didn’t care.  Guess who ended up being correct?

I’m mainly thinking of some local election races this year where people I am rooting for can either hold their seats or advance themselves.  I can’t reiterate it enough; listen to what Steve Bannon is saying.  Don’t run or hide from anything, always be confrontational in the debates even in local elections.  Be a street fighter—don’t allow yourselves to be pulled into a mundane effort by playing nice.  Politics is not nice, its war, so treat it that way.  Let people like me defend you and help flash a light where it needs to be to sort the noise from the true path of necessity, but don’t hold back when it comes to vanquishing your enemies.   Playing nice won’t get you anything—but beaten.

I would go so far to say that voters in America would rather see a fight than a handshake, especially in politics.  You might remember dear reader an article I did last year stating that Trump’s membership into the WWE was the single most qualifying element of his campaign—because he knew how to put on a show that featured aggressive fighting which is a primal understanding that all people can relate to.  It’s an effective communication tool to be combative—people respect it naturally.  Playing nice the way the Bush family did, or John McCain did during his presidential run simply plays into the strengths of Democrats.  Mit Romney is a good example of how not to win an election—be nice, don’t attack your opponent and pretend like you’re always in church.  That’s how you lose.

Don’t let Democratic opponents find something you are ashamed of, like a perjury trail, a sexual harassment accusation, or the size of your personal wealth.  Always be proud of what you do and don’t give them a hook into your guilt, because they will attempt to freeze you with it.  However what you should do is to take the advice of Donald Trump and Steve Bannon.  They just pulled off the most amazing election victory in the history of the world.  Not to mention I was saying things just as Bannon said them more than five years ago—so believe in this strategy.  Crush your opponents and don’t hesitate.  Take the high ground if you want, but don’t be afraid to spit down on the faces of your enemies.  If they challenge you in politics, don’t hesitate to destroy them from the face of the earth.  That is the way Republicans should approach all elections, even those against the RINOs who are in the party who want to hold it to the limits of the institutional past.

You can see how Charlie Rose tried to pin Bannon down but what was unique was that it didn’t work.  Instead Bannon knew his facts and stuck to them whenever the CBS News staff tried to shape the conversation toward classic progressive assumptions which have nothing to do with the masses of the American people who vote in elections.  Truth be told, when people are alone in the voting booth they will always vote for courage.  Most people lack personal courage so they greatly admire people with conviction even if they disagree with them.  This method doesn’t work for Democrats because they are all essentially con artists looking for implementing socialism and wealth re-distribution—so they can’t be honest about anything.  They need Republicans to be pacifists—like John McCain and Mit Romney to beat.  In a street fight, Democrats can’t win because they can’t defend themselves.

If they call you a sexist, call them worse.  If they come after you for some court case where you were innocent, then dig up every bit of dirt you can find on them and get it out to the public.  The newspapers won’t publish it because they are in bed often with the Democrats—but I will.  And other people like Steve Bannon will as well.  Success in every venture favors the bold—so don’t feel like you need to play nice just because that’s what Republicans used to do.  Trump has proven what people like me have theorized about, so take that information and expand on it.  There are too many races out there that we need win, so win them, and don’t look back—or feel like you need to shake the hand of an enemy.  Forget about all that “good will” stuff.  Democrats want to destroy our country—so fight them with that in mind.

This war is fought with the little battles, the little local races, the state races, and of course the federal seats.  To win those battles you can’t play patty cake with the enemy.  It’s one thing to be morally and intellectually correct—but you have to also take the next step.  You have to defend those things with a sometimes vicious personality.  Being nice won’t be enough.  You can be nice until they go negative and once they do, unleash hell on them until they are so miserable they don’t want to get up in the morning.  That is the way to win, and now that we have a playbook that shows it’s the way to success—I suggest everyone use it to full effect.

Rich Hoffman

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Why the Star Wars Movies Keep Losing Directors: The Pizza Hutt delivery driver

It was my oldest grandson’s birthday party and it was a Star Wars themed event so my youngest daughter who is the mother of the young man put heart and soul into giving him the party of a lifetime.  She personally decorated the house for this party with creations she mostly made from scratch and it was quite spectacular.  To match her efforts she wanted all of us to dress up so the first time that I can ever remember I put together a costume of my favorite Star Wars character—Han Solo, and had a lot of fun doing it. In the process I learned some things that are worth sharing.  One thing that became obvious to me as I acquired all the Han Solo costume pieces needed to get everything together for this party was how similar it was to the kind of equipment needed for Cowboy Fast Draw and that while wearing it, I felt more like a western character than a science fiction icon—which Han Solo has always been.IMG_5166.JPG

Naturally through small talk I have been asked why I like Star Wars so much and my reply is usually because it’s the best western that movie makers can produce these days.  As much as George Lucas wanted   tell a story about a hippie idea of eastern religion defeating western greed through the “force of others” his creation of Han Solo really is the key to the entire Star Wars universe.  The character so wonderfully played by Harrison Ford is an Ayn Rand kind of superstar who advances the story wonderfully, and gives everything resonance.  George Lucas always intended Luke Skywalker to be the hero of the movies, but it was Han Solo that really took over the story as the central and most popular character.  I knew all this before I put together as authentic of a costume as I could, but wearing it complete with the gun belt instantly knew where I was.  The gun belt was the key, it felt as good as my rig for Cowboy Fast Draw and remanded me that it’s not lightsabers and talk about The Force, but Star Wars is more about “having a good blaster at your side” than anything.  Lucas may have intended for Han Solo to be redeemed by the end of A New Hope into the kind of unselfish character that hippies were wanting to portray in 1970’s San Francisco—but the love that the director had of fast cars and Saturday Morning Republic serials featuring cowboys won the day and it was those influences that turned Star Wars into a simple science fiction drama and placed it into the realm of something truly special.  Star Wars is the best western movie made in the modern era—and by that I mean the last 40 years.IMG_5259

I don’t think George Lucas meant to make Han Solo such a powerful character but as the story evolved it was the old smuggler and that capitalist sector of characters from bounty hunters down to crime lords who took over as the featured plot lines that most captured the imaginations of fans.  People didn’t want to grow up so much to become Jedi in the temple fighting the Sith—they wanted to be the smuggler and hot-shot pilot flying the Millennium Falcon and solely saving the galaxy.  In his best moments Han Solo is not a team player but is someone always used to being in charge and finds a way to be successful even when the odds were terribly stacked against him.  When they tried to water Han Solo down into a group think character, he loses much of his power and I think this was something that mystified George Lucas a lot over the evolution of that character.  George Lucas the hippie who knew mostly dope smokers and San Francisco radicals found it an unintended consequence.  But the little boy who grew up watching serialized westerns and swashbuckling action adventure movies found in Han Solo a trusted voice from the past—and wisely Lucas went with it out of the needs of his new company Lucasfilm to pay all the bills of his various projects—even though it bothered him that Luke wasn’t the star of the movie as it was always intended.

I bought 21 pizzas from Pizza Hut for this party to be served on a table in front of Jabba the Hutt. It was a cute idea that my daughter had to tie the two things together so when the pizza delivery guy arrived he found himself pulled into the Star Wars universe by default, and he was having a good time.  While I was paying the guy and walking him back to his truck we talked about Star Wars and why the new Han Solo movie and now Episode 9 had lost their directors.  In fact, since Lucasfilm announced their slate of 6 new Star Wars movies four directors for those projects have bitten the dust and either been fired, or have quit.  The trade media for Hollywood really hasn’t understood why but this is where the rebel George Lucas always shinned brightest.   In spite of his liberal tendencies, Lucas at heart was a small business guy whose father owned a stationery store in Modesto, California.  Naturally, Lucas hated the studio system because of their static approach to filmmaking.  And it was that part of him who shinned through Han Solo—the do whatever he wants, guy—which made Star Wars so special and Ayn Randish.  These modern kids raised in the studio system may have loved Star Wars growing up, but that doesn’t mean they “get it” when it comes to putting what they love up on-screen.  Kathy Kennedy who runs Lucasfilm now apprenticed under George Lucas for most of her adult life and she has an understanding of what makes Star Wars work even if it’s difficult to put into words.  She knew instinctively why her new film directors weren’t having success in developing their Star Wars stories—for instance reports from the new Han Solo movie set which is coming out in May of 2018 were that the directors were turning the story more into an Ace Ventura comedy instead of a western set in space.  So Kathy brought in Ron Howard who has been around long enough to know at least how to mimic what George Lucas had stumbled upon so many years before.   The pizza guy agreed with me, Star Wars to work had to pay tribute to its western-like background—without it the storylines flounder and fail—much like many people felt the prequel films did.  I personally liked them because I like politics, but without the swashbuckling element of the matinee idols of the 1950s, Star Wars is pretty boring.  I know that, obviously Kathy Kennedy understands that much—but more importantly, the Pizza Hutt delivery guy understood it.

The exchange of values has always been something I could share with my kids through Star Wars and obviously that is getting passed on down to a new generation.  As the kids dressed up there were a lot of Kylo Ren costumes, and even some of the adults wore Kylo Ren t-shirts.  Little do they know that by the time we get to Episode 9 that Han Solo’s now infamous son will turn back to good and help Rey restore goodness to the imaginative galaxy set a long time ago, far, far away.  Kylo Ren will turn out to be a good guy—which I think is a very good thing.  Again, it goes back to Han Solo again, without him and his redemptive qualities, Star Wars falls apart as something special in our human culture.  For me its fun to be able to share these values on a platform that allows for at least the discussion and Star Wars does that better than anything else out there presently.  That wasn’t always the case, back when George Lucas was growing up, there were a lot of things like Star Wars out there that communicated value effectively and our culture reflected it.  These days, not the case—values have been cast aside by movie directors trying to make movies about socialism, which people don’t like, instead of capitalist westerns which people do, and they are often mystified as to why people like the Pizza Hutt delivery guy don’t like their product.  (Hey, I gave the pizza delivery guy a huge tip for his capitalist appreciations and enthusiasm.  He understood.)  Wearing the authentic Han Solo costume for me told the whole story—it took what I had only thought of before and applied it to reality.  Han Solo was a gunfighter and that is a concept specifically unique to American culture and was the heart of every good western.  That is what makes Star Wars work, and why it is such a good device to teach morality stories about good versus evil.  It is those values which I’m glad I can share with these new generations which was on full display at my grandson’s birthday party. It was a lot of fun to be a part of.

Rich Hoffman

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