Category: Black Spire Outpost

When Jerusalem Was a Space Command Center: Why there are wars, to keep power in the hands who have seized it and use ignorance to suppress rivals

Examining the mysterious site of Ishi-no-Hoden in Japan

I find that science fiction and fantasy often contain more truths than what mainstream sources would ever admit to, such as television shows like Battlestar Galactica, where the concept of human seeding on earth was explored, or Lord of the Rings, where the nature of evil in some far ancient past, or future, is the dominating topic, or the Robert Jordan series, The Wheel of Time that was a very good book series that dealt with essentially the Vico Cycle that I talk about so much. And, of course, Star Wars has been a favorite of mine that was set a long time ago in a far-distant galaxy. Not even our own. Examining abstract concepts in science fiction certainly does help us deal with reality much more effectively and provokes the questions we should be asking. And when you start to do that, you can see truths lost to others, such as why there are so many global wars. Well, especially in the hot zone of the Old Silk Road, many of the conflicts we have these days, such as the war in Israel, and then of Ukraine and the whole Russian puzzle with China and other places that don’t have massive economies, but are perpetually in conflict for some mysterious reason. And I would offer that the best evidence indicates that these regions have very ancient pasts, far extending into what we today consider old. We think of a few thousand years as a lot, but the evidence from many sources, not the same idiots who tried to tell us not to take Ivermectin to deal with the lab-created virus, COVID-19, and that there was no election fraud in 2020, have tried to tell us about true history. But the result of decentralized media that is finally talking about real, substantive issues indicates that the wars of our modern times are purely created to conceal a deep and ancient past, allowing a corrupt global network to remain in power over the human race through sheer deceit.

The Millennium Falcon at the Black Spire Outpost

And that’s what I was thinking about when my family recently visited a very favorite place I have, the Star Wars land at Disney World, Galaxy’s Edge. I’ve always loved that particular science fiction story, and specifically the spaceship, the Millennium Falcon so to see a land where all these things were built and you can walk around and interact with them, was magnificent. So, I found that I was able to get my family to Disney World and to that specific place and we had one of the most marvelous days of our lives, together. But there had been something bothering me over these last few years since I had last visited what they call The Black Spire Outpost that I resolved while there with my family. I had a lot of time to think about it, and it all came together for me during this recent visit. The place reminds me of what Ancient Jerusalem would have looked like in a period of largely unrecorded history, around 8,000 BC, when that region of the world was said to have been a space command center for a landing corridor that was very important in the near east area, where many of our most significant religions were born, Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hindu, Buddhism, and Zoroastrianism. And the haunting passage from the Bible that I couldn’t get out of my head was that from Genesis 22:2, “and he said, take now thy son, thine only son Isaac, whom thou lovest, and get thee into the land of Moriah; and offer him there for a burnt offering upon one of the mountains which I will tell thee of.” This action was in around the 2070s BC, long after any settlement of a spaceport in Jerusalem would have been located there. All Abraham would have seen of Mt. Moriah, where King Solomon, over a thousand years later, would build the great temple and place the Ark of the Covenant, the Ten Commandments, upon that exact spot where Isaac was to be sacrificed, in that precise spot. In 3000 to 5000 years, most stone structures erode away into nothing, so anything that would have been in that region at that time would have long eroded from 8000 BC.

My kids

I’m a fan of Zecharia Sitchin’s books. Many people, especially mainstream scientists, have said that his books are purely science fiction and not based on accurate science. Even Graham Hancock has said such things. But I think those are not fair assessments, and I think time has proven that Zecharia Sitchin was very authentic. He has since died, but his work lives on in his students, who have done some exciting work on the activity on earth that may have occurred based on stories passed down through various cultures that are just as scientific as anything else over a roughly 450,000 year period, which paves the way not only for our current world religions but also the notion we have of kingships and even burial practices. After all the lies that the world’s governments have told us, more people are looking at things that used to be considered wild conspiracy theories and reexamining them with fresh eyes. When looked at with this updated perspective, it becomes evident that the power structures on Earth who desperately want to hold on to what they consider royal bloodlines given to them through heredity wish to maintain their right to rule Earth by controlling what we know of the past, so that is the real cause of all these ridiculous wars. If there are wars, actual science can’t do any research because those regions are too dangerous for that kind of activity. I’m also a fan and dedicated member of the Biblical Archaeology Review Society, and I understand and sympathize with their task of digging and gathering evidence in such a hostile part of the world, politically.

How things likely looked, a long time ago. But not so far away.

For me, uniquely, I had just stepped off a plane from Japan while I was with my family at the Black Spire Outpost and had visited the very ancient site of Ishi-no-Hoden and studied how the modern city of Osaka was built around the Kufan tombs that were built in the shape of keyholes, very mysterious.  Going to the Black Spire Outpost reminded me of what an ancient Jerusalem would have looked like well before there was Abraham, Isaac, or the Jewish people.  A mixture of high technology that could navigate the known galaxy, perhaps even the universe that has long since come and gone interlaced with primitive structures and building methods erected quickly to facilitate the need from a growing economy not rooted to travel on earth.  But what was left behind was some remote memory of these actions lost only to telling stories and an understanding of that truth within our subconscious brains, which most of us share.   And those memories are most effectively communicated through science fiction.  Yet, at the Black Spire Outpost, you can walk around and touch something that may well have been part of our far ancient past only manifested through storytelling.  But it is as accurate as anything else—perhaps more.  The wars in the world that dominate much of our political discussion these days are meant to hide the truth from us, which is why I am talking about them more than ever.  Because we have been lied to, we must have a culture that deals with the past to have an honest future.  The reason that Jerusalem is such a hot zone even to this day is that power is sought in concealing the truth and giving people controlled narratives through religion that keeps them in power and prevents people from learning their true history, which is buried under the streets of Jerusalem well past the typical periods that we have always thought of as ancient, but in reality, are just scratching the surface.

Rich Hoffman

My Defense of the ‘Star Wars’ Hotel: If it brings joy to people, which is does, its worth doing

I think it’s a huge story, even if it only concerns a small part of the overall population. After all, the topic of the day is shareholder capitalism that is attempting to be destroyed by the Desacrators of Davos strategy of stakeholder capitalism. And few companies are a bigger target for them than Disney Entertainment in the United States. Progressives have jumped all over the Disney Company. And now the Star Wars property they purchased from George Lucas in 2012 reflects the attack accurately from the Desecrators of Davos, the progressive incursion into all our lives not through the front door of politics, but through the backdoor of finance and business. Star Wars is an excellent meter to measure this kind of thing. It started out from the mind of George Lucas as a warning to 8 to 12-year-old boys how not to grow up to become evil. And today, it is the very definition of state control and authority to the compliance of the nanny state; everything Star Wars wasn’t. Naturally, fans are very upset about it and are letting Disney know. And now, after working on it for a decade and spending over a billion dollars developing their live Star Wars experiences at Disney World and Disneyland, the much talked about Star Wars hotel called, The Galactic Starcruiser is open for business, and all eyes have been on it. Many Star Wars fans are hating it and have been speaking out against it. So I have been watching it closely, and I have thoughts on it that are very much relevant to all our corporate problems in America. The challenge of wrestling away from the Desecrators of Davos insurgents our American concepts of capitalism from the imposition of state-controlled stakeholder capitalism is the challenge. Ironically, this Star Wars hotel finds itself right in the middle as a form of art displayed for all the world to see.

Star Wars is all about fighting back against institutionalized systems. But under Disney, they are all about yielding to that institutionalization. That was the critical error Bob Iger, and Kathy Kennedy made with Star Wars under the ownership of Disney. They should have followed the George Lucas plan. Instead, they ended up with a massive mess that will never be fixed. That is sad, but it’s why fans are so angry at Disney. However, I see some good in it all, and I think personally, Galaxy’s Edge in Disney World is one of the most fantastic things I’ve ever experienced. I will never forget my vacation there in 2019 with my wife. We had about two or three days of the best time I’ve ever had visiting the Star Wars park there at Hollywood Studios and other attractions. It was the first time she and I had been kid-free in about two decades, and we were able to enjoy all that just as a couple. So I am still grateful for that experience, and I can see why people would want to go to the Galactic Starcruiser, which is essentially a Star Wars cruise in space. It’s very ambitious; it costs around 4 to 6 thousand per person to do and is essentially a Fantasy Island experience.   For three days and two nights, you enter the world of Star Wars all immersively and practically live a live Star Wars novel, which I think is pretty cool. Now I’m a gun at my hip kind of Star Wars fan. Not a sit around and play games kind of guy, and eat food and listen to music. If I don’t get to wear a DL-44 on my hip and go laser tagging, it’s not a lot of fun for me. It would cost me about $100K to take my clan. I checked it out, thought about it, and decided they’d like it, but not for that price. But, I know quite a few employees at Disney, many at the executive level, and I understand what they’ve done. They did their best. I also follow quite a few influencers on YouTube who work in the Orlando region, and they love the Starcruiser. They are much more social butterflies than I am, and I think it’s great in the world we are living in today that there is something like the Starcruiser for them. And in that context, I hope the Starcruiser is successful for Disney. Because I’d like to see, it remain an option. 

While at the Cincinnati Comic-Con this past September, I had a chance to talk to Timothy Zahn about this modern Star Wars stuff, and he’s pretty much where I am. He’s the guy responsible for all the great novels that came from Star Wars, going all the way back to the 90s when he started the trend. My wife and I have read well over 200 Star Wars novels. We are not fans of the new stuff since Disney bought Lucasfilm and turned radically more progressive. But at that Comic-Con, as Zahn signed a few books for me because I do love his books, we talked about the joy of those comic cons. There are people there who have had bad childhoods, society has let them down, religion has let them down, and they find refuge in Star Wars. They like to dress up and escape the world’s disappointments with some form of art, and Star Wars gives them that refuge. And I remember how it was in Hollywood Studios in the early days before Disney bought Lucasfilm. There were Star Wars weekends in May that were actual celebrations. I can’t blame Disney for wanting to give those fans what they dreamed of, a Star Wars land all their own, and even a hotel experience that allowed people to cosplay for three full days eating, thinking, and living Star Wars in a much better way than they would a comic con. That’s one of the reasons I read so many Star Wars books. In my crazy, very stressful life, those books were great places to relax and think about big concepts. I love them or have loved them. The Star Wars hotel was a chance to throw away the disappointments of politics, life itself, and live a fantasy. And that I think is a very useful thing. 

Even with all the politics, I might still do it with my family at some point. Seeing what Disney has done, they have tried hard to thread the needle and give everyone what they want, which usually means everyone is a little disappointed. But, knowing what we do about the world, I think we should all feel proud that we have a culture that can actually pull off something like this for this amount of money and commit resources to even attempting to do it. The Galactic Starcruiser is enormously ambitious, and if it survives, it could evolve over time in a positive direction. My grandchildren would get quite a kick out of it because the experience is essentially an escape room, a broadway play, and a novel all wrapped up into one experience. I can think of people who are very sick and dying of cancer, who are kids who would love for this to be the very last thing they did in life. They would die happy. They want to escape their problems, and art does that for human beings at its highest form. It’s not so much hiding from the pains of life as much as it gives the mind emotional distance from massive disappointments. And if this Starcruiser experience can do that for people, at any cost, then I think that’s a wonderful thing. And I hope that Disney can keep it going because there sure was a lot of love that went into it for all the right reasons. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

The Iniquitous Intent at Disney: When it comes to ‘The Book of Boba Fett,’ it’s all about a “Return to the Primitive”

It may seem iniquitous, but when you know a subject very well, it’s easy to see the changes over time and trace those changes to particular injunctions that contributed to a demise. And that is precisely what I saw as I looked at an earnings report for Disney stock and noticed how many shares BlackRock owned recently, then saw episode 7 of the new Book of Boba Fett on the Disney+ streaming service. The imprint of Larry Fink and his fellow board members of the World Economic Forum was unmistakable. Additionally, I used to write screenplays, and I have a good understanding of the politics of movie-making. When I was a young guy, I had several projects that won screenwriting awards at film festivals and made the circulation around Wilshire Blvd selling them, so I’ve been told more than once by the people of finance, “he who owns the gold rules.” So, I sympathize with what Dave Filoni, Jon Favreau, and even the original creator, George Lucas, went through to make this new show. They tried to do with The Book of Boba Fett, an original character from the old movies, bold and ambitious things. But at the end of the series, Star Wars fans were left feeling shortchanged. That’s the standard review of the show now that it’s completed, and a year of waiting left fans flat and looking for much more. It had some good stuff in it, but the overall message was filled with wokeness, and to my eyes, it points back to the owner of BlackRock owning too much stock in Disney and dictating creatively what ends up on the screen. I’ve seen it before in much smaller ways, and that is certainly the case with what is going on at Disney these days.

My review of The Book of Boba Fett is that its space meets Dances with Wolves. Clearly, the current makers of Star Wars projects, specifically Filoni and Favreau, used to enjoy playing with Star Wars figures, as I did. We are all kind of the same age, and when it comes to Star Wars, we just want to put what we wanted to see as kids on screen. Most people who watch these Disney+ shows and go to the modern movies feel that way; it’s more about childhood nostalgia than what is actually good about it. So it was strange to see the gunslinging bounty hunter from the classic film The Empire Strikes Back, running around in half the show dancing with Tusken Raiders around a campfire, acting like some hunter and gatherer. The purpose of the entire show became quite clear by episode 7, where Boba Fett and another bounty hunter called Cad Bane had a gunfight duel to the death, which was the ultimate climax and apparent purpose for putting the whole thing together. But this is where things get iniquitous, and the influence of BlackRock and other forces come into play. The show’s creators wanted to put on film what they thought about as kids, a gunfight with Boba Fett and some ultimate gunslinger. Woke Disney, essentially not run by Bob Chapek but by the owners of the most stock options, such as Vanguard and BlackRock, changed the story’s nature to reflect real-world tactical goals for global domination. That is clear by what Larry Fink puts in his ultra-liberal letters to CEOs showing the woke parameters for which the show must be done. 

When people ask, “what’s wrong with Star Wars,” well, I would point to the loss of ownership of George Lucas, who over time have listened to people like Larry Fink more in his old age than he would have like a 20 to 30-year-old. Star Wars was about standing up to people like Larry Fink, not being told what to do by them. So now that extreme characters of progressive causes are calling the shots on the finance end and sticking their nose into the creative process of the much more woke Disney than it ever has been before, Star Wars comes out as if Darth Vader made the movies instead of Luke Skywalker. I could recite the production meetings as if I had been there when the pitch for The Book of Boba Fett was made to Disney executives who had an eye toward stock prices and the massive control BlackRock has on it. “You want to make a Disney+ show about a villain from the original movies to win over the fans from all the mistakes that Kathy Kennedy has so far made? Well, you’ll have to make the bad guy into a good guy and to do that, we must make him identifiable with indigenous people, which parallels the gunfighter against the Indian in American history.” So from there, the show’s writers had to figure out a way to get their big gunfight with Boba Fett and Cad Bane done in a way that made the show sympathetic to Disney’s woke needs to stabilize their stock price. Ultimately, they had to make Larry Fink happy, and to do that; Boba Fett had to Return to the Primitive.

Fans feel shortchanged because the whole thing was out of character for Boba Fett. When he finally had his gunfight with Cad Bane, the bad guy beat Boba Fett to the draw not just once but twice. That meant that Boba Fett had to rely on the new skills he learned from the Tusken Raiders to defeat Bane with a Gaffi Stick in the end. It was like a gun duel with an Indian (native American), and the Indian winning with a bow and arrow. Undoubtedly, a hidden message implied that primitive traditions are superior to technology and that, ultimately, the West will fall to tribal unity. Again, I know this subject very well; I just wrote a book called The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business because I run into people like Larry Fink all over the world. They have been trying to promote China, indigenous people of all kinds constantly over the technology of the West for years. Such an assumption is at the center of Lean Manufacturing. And of course, Disney couldn’t have given me a better example of why I felt the differences between the West and the East needed to be pointed out in business transactions. The message behind The Book of Boba Fett was that in the end, to be the good guy and to beat the bad guy, the classic Star Wars villain had to learn to embrace the primitive tribes of Tatooine, the scary Tuskin Raiders. But in the original movies from 1977, the Tuskin Raiders were thought of as villains. That basic flip of the script is why people are so upset with the Disney-owned Star Wars productions instead of what George Lucas produced on his own originally. Once you start worrying about stock prices, woke politics, and the letters to the CEOs from Larry Fink, what you end up with is a bunch of garbage nobody wants. But suppose Disney wants to keep their stock price up. In that case, they have to do what The World Economic Forum tells them to do, and that is to bring down the West and to sell those asset bubbles to China, where their new world order will emerge under a communist flag and a foot on western civilization that is meant to choke it off, forever. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

The Failures of Institutionalism: Disney’s New Star Wars Hotel Rejected by the Fans

Corporate Failure

To understand why and how liberalism is failing currently and will continue to fail, a great example of what’s to come was displayed when Disney released a preview video for their new Star Wars Hotel experience.  Fans had been waiting for over eight years for the opening of this more than a billion-dollar investment, and what Disney showed the public instantly went from ambitious hope to fandom scorn for the immense wokeness contained in the project.  I certainly wanted to give the project a chance. I would have liked to take my grandchildren and children to this hotel if it looked any good.   After all, I raised my family on Star Wars and the various stories of good and evil in such a modern storybook fashion.  But what Disney did with Star Wars and the hotel experience was full of contemporary liberalism in every way that we can see it failing, from the Biden administration to the global greenie weenies at the United Nations.  These people at Disney, who had infinite resources to spend on this hotel experience and Star Wars itself, didn’t understand what they had bought from George Lucas. They presented the ultimate failure of liberalism, which I found very interesting and relevant to our modern observations.  After a very long wait, the hotel is supposed to open in a few months, March of 2022.  The video itself looks like a child made it, and for what Star Wars means to people, everyone expected from Disney a lot more. 

Part of that billion-dollar investment went into making the Galaxy’s Edge experience at the two Disney parks in Florida and California.  My wife and I went to the one in Florida once it opened, and I thought it was magnificent for the price of a $100 admission ticket.  To see some full-scale props from the movies was worth the money.  I enjoyed myself and thought it was a great experience.  But this hotel experience was poised to be something like a “West World” experience, or Fantasy Island from the old television show where you came to Disney to realize a fantasy of living in Star Wars for a two-day affair.  And for that experience, it would cost around $6,000 to $10,000.  So naturally, what they were selling was very ambitious, and people were excited about it.  The point of releasing a preview video, which they did in mid-December 2021, was to book reservations for the rest of 2022 and into 2023.  But the video turned out to be so bad that the opposite happened.  People started canceling their reservations as soon as they saw the video because it looked and felt nothing like Star Wars.  I covered this problem years ago on a radio show with a guy who is now a Disney employee.  Way back in 2013, when this Disney Hotel was just announced, we contemplated the problem Disney would have with its anti-gun politics when Star Wars was all about guns.  How do you have fun with Star Wars without promoting “war?” When fans attended the hotel experience but couldn’t wear around their blasters, it wouldn’t feel like Star Wars, and that is precisely what the first problem was with the video promo. 

It looked like the people who developed the concept for the hotel were more in love with the movie, The Fifth Element rather than Star Wars.  The cantina singer as the feature in the video was a clear sign that the Disney creators thought Star Wars was all about funny colored aliens, space, and orchestral music.  They didn’t understand the heart and soul of what made the films so beloved in the first place. It’s the kind of corporate failure I see all the time and talk about extensively in my book The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business.  I wasn’t upset by the video, but it certainly solidified my plans for 2022.  There was no way I would spend $20-30,000 in 2022 to take my family to this Star Wars experience.  To understand their target audience at this hotel, the Disney planners would have done well to study the current video games, Battlefront, Call of Duty, and Fortnite.  With the amount of money Disney wants for the hotel, they should know that, at a minimum, they should be offering some kind of competitive laser tag experience, something that simulates pulse-pounding action with real consequences to the story.  People were not going to spend that kind of money to watch people sing and eat food.  But to be fair, the Disney philosophy had no chance out of the gate; as a woke company going after what they think is the emerging middle class of China, they are not prepared to tell Star Wars stories.  They believe that as a media company, they set society’s values instead of offering the products that society wants. It’s a fine line that they have lost, but it’s more a condition of modern liberalism in general and institutional failure on a massive scale.  Institutions are not powerful if they don’t embody what the public wants as a consumer class.  And Disney has lost its way the more corporate they have become and moved away from the foundations of Uncle Walt Disney himself.  That is the same thing that has happened to Star Wars the more they have moved away from George Lucas, who created the franchise. 

The mistake was that the modern corporate Star Wars approach had all the tools for success right in their breadbasket, but they approached it all with the wrong philosophy, which carries over to the more significant message here.  If all the values of institutionalism were as they assumed, the Star Wars Hotel would have been a slam dunk for Disney.  They had the money.  They had the best and brightest of modern college graduates.  They had a proven brand that spanned decades as a money maker.  What could go wrong?  Well, wokeism, for one.  But deeper than that, it’s the corporate approach that fails in all companies to some degree or another, whether it’s McDonald’s, Wal-Mart, or Nike.  Once a product becomes affiliated with a political movement, such as globalism, it loses its use as art. It becomes simply a tool of a detached class of people stuck in their own versions of quicksand in life.  Star Wars was always about rebellion against tyranny.

Here were the Disney people all too happy to be a compliance culture trying to make a Star Wars experience for people, complete with masks indoors in a state-run by Ron DeSantis, who has been the best against such idiocy.  Because of their political intentions toward liberalism, Disney masks their employees and guests on purpose.  They didn’t have to, but they wanted to be part of that “woke” culture they think the world will be driven by.  In the video, they put out there were no signs of masculinity, which is essential because Star Wars was always designed for boys 8-12 years of age.  Trying to create an “expanded market” with outreach to girls and people of color has only destroyed the original base of the franchise.  So now Disney has made something that nobody wants.  Their target audience for this hotel experience would have been the Comic-Con types who would spend thousands of dollars on a Star Wars experience.  But now, they have all those types of people against them as they are insulted by Disney’s approach.  And after watching all this, it looked like our nightly news and the perplexity that many global institutionalists are having when they wonder why people don’t want Build Back Better, the CDC, or to be controlled by the United Nations.  When institutionalism and the necessities of individuals are not aligned, we can see these kinds of failures everywhere.  But what’s essential about the Disney case is that it proves that no amount of money can solve the problem and make people think something they don’t.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

The Black Spire Outpost–the roots of genius

Most of my readers are over 50, but I do have quite a few that are under that number and they are likely as excited as I am about the opening of the Black Spire Outpost in Disneyland, which happens next week. That is of course the new Star Wars Land called Galaxy’s Edge which is finally opening after Disney bought Lucasfilm in 2012 and now six years later is about to be opened. I had a lot to say on the matter back then and just as I hoped, it will prove to be not only a technical marvel, but an important contributor to human mythology. Additionally, it centerpieces an enthusiasm for the imagination which I think is critical to the production of genius in our culture. A free roaming imagination has many safe places in the Star Wars stories, so being able to actually visit such a place with all the authentic detail that fans and just park goers can share with this new Disney contribution to the live action myth building that they are so well known for is a really exciting enterprise. So for the sake of people thinking of visiting it in the weeks to come, or over the course of this upcoming year the video below is a good place to start just to get the basics of a successful visit.

As many also know I have a small obsession with the concept of genius and growing older to me can be a blessing if the elements of childhood have not been lost in the process. However, I view most human beings as being at their peek around the ages of 6 to 10. After that, most of us slowly decline over time. We may gain more responsibilities and wisdom, but usually it’s at the sacrifice of thoughtful imagination and wonder. Being older of course has more fiscal opportunities, but I sort of drew the line at 50 because at that age people become much more reflective and my readers come here to think about the things in their life that they neglected before getting to an age where its too late to change anything quickly. Most of my fans don’t want to leave the world worse off for their children and grand children so they start thinking of politics and what they can do to help.

Unfortunately, everyone under 50 is mostly concerned with social statuses and where they fit on the pecking order of existence where it is generally accepted that elected offices are something that most people don’t want to think about. Rather than talking about politics they reside to the safe topics of sports and grilling hamburgers or steaks in their back yards. It continues to amaze me how much conversation is generated among people in this age group, between 30 and 50 years of age about grilling out in the back yard. And these same people detest any talk of politics, because they fear it will harm their climb up whatever social ladder of influence they are concerned with navigating. Then of course there are the people of the previous twenty years, from the ages of 10 to about 30 that are nearly obsessed with their newly turned on sexual attributes. The race to find a mate to have children with, or to just use sex as a tool of manipulation and control becomes their dominate thinking. Watching all this from my perspective is disgusting and I never accepted any of those social gates. Instead my mind has always been more on books and other mythic entertainments because those were the values of my youth and I never let go of them. And I see quite clearly that the path to genius is through retaining that child-like “Peter Pan” element of perpetual curiosity.

Star Wars is a great vehicle for refining that genius. Some of the smartest people I know are comic book geeks and pimple faced readers of Star Wars books. Most of these people are extremely overweight and don’t get out in the sun much, but they don’t care. They have made decisions to not care about their places in the pecking order of our civilization and they get made fun of for not participating. But most of these people are extremely intelligent and rather childlike. It’s a shame that they are so stigmatized in society because they could bring to the world great things if only, they cared to participate. But the world to them is often a disappointment and nowhere near as exciting as the Star Wars stories they read about and enjoy in the movies. But that trend has been changing and places like this Black Spire Outpost is the latest effort to allow people to revisit their childhood hopes and to actually put their hands on what used to be only a fantasy, and I think that is a very good thing.

Star Wars was and has always been very political. After all, if there is a war, there must be something to fight over and those stories often reflect the politics of our day. As much as people think of George Lucas, the creator as a hippie of his generation concerned over Watergate and the Vietnam War, I see in him a pretty conservative hot rodder who came to age through racing cars and learning to work on them who also had an active, very childlike imagination, which is why Star Wars turned out to be so special. And so the seeds for the Black Spire Outpost were born from the burnout smoke of his race cars and a keen interest in anthropology. Unlike many filmmakers these days who are obsessed with film trivia George Lucas made Star Wars from a perspective of genius by carrying with him into adulthood the hope that most young people have, that they may have the opportunity to change the world as an individual.

Of course, genius doesn’t stay with people. It can be lost in a puff of instant smoke. Once the values of genius are lost, people usually revert back to some biological timeline of age ward progression. But it doesn’t have to be that way and every time a big amusement park land like the Black Spire Outpost comes on the scene it reveals some of the best elements of our culture. And that excites me greatly as I enjoy the enthusiasm that comes with such ambitions. This particular creation at Disenyland is a huge cultural element that when I was a kid wasn’t even thought possible. I remember going to Universal Studios in Hollywood and looking forward for months beforehand to see the full-sized star fighters from the television show Battlestar Galactica—the Colonial Vipers. I think it was one of the most exciting things I had seen as a young person and I never really forgot it, even though the thing was just a prop from the television show’s set. To be able to see the Millennium Falcon sitting in a free state and to be able to actually ride it in an active way is extremely exciting and we can only imagine what impact that will have on future generations . One way or the other, the opening of the Black Spire Outpost is a very significant cultural event that will likely have long standing consequences for the better. So for those planning to visit, enjoy it! It is truly something special!

Rich Hoffman

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