Category: Policial Science

The Famous Trump Tower Press Conference: Protecting value from those desperate to steal it

As if Donald Trump didn’t already have my support as President of the United States he certainly solidified it on August 15, 2017 during that now famous press conference at Trump Tower.  After seven years of writing on this blog almost every day over that entire time publishing millions and millions of words—for free—because I passionately want to see problems fixed—FINALLY we have someone in the White House who gets it.  Trump understands the situation clearly and he can articulate it.  He has no problem taking on any one any time any where taking on entire ominous institutions in the process.  I’ve had a taste of walking in Trump’s shoes and I can relate to how tough it is to be him and face reporters who are hostile agenda driven maniacs that own the media and the public perception of you.  I know how hard it is to convince other people in your political party to stand up for what’s right and not to bite on the Saul Alinsky tactics and for many, many decades I have frustratingly preached and waited for other people to get it—and finally I can see that Trump does.  After the hounding he took from the media for two solid days after his comments about Charlottesville he arrived out of the elevator of the luxury building he created and pretty much flattened the media that greeted him there with an impromptu press conference that was just magnificent.  If there was a bunch of garbage clogging the drain to the swamp Donald J. Trump yanked it out with this press conference so the muck could flow again.

I couldn’t have said any of that better myself. Trump hit all the high notes—the value of preserving historical monuments, the agenda of the press, a defense of his timeline, condemnation for all the sides involved because they were all out for no good.  Trump did defend the moderates who weren’t parts of the white supremacists and the Black Lives Matter crowd.  He praised the grieving mother of the young lady who was killed.  He even promoted his winery that is in Charlottesville all in the same string of sentences.  It was truly magnificent!  Nobody could write a novel or a movie to capture this spiritual awakening that we are all undergoing through the Trump presidency.  The exasperated looks on the faces of the news commentators and print media was priceless.  Then to top all that off Trump put out a Tweet targeted at Jeff Bezos dodging taxes with his online store Amazon.com.  The reason was because Bezos owns The Washington Post which has been a personal blog for the rival billionaire.  Talk about hitting back ten times harder, Trump did it and I couldn’t be prouder of him.  Not as a president of my country but as a fellow human being who is 70 years old and doing the right things for the entire human race.

Personally I like Amazon and Jeff Bezos, but I can understand where Trump is going. If I had to pick teams I’d pick Trump over Bezos any day but I always cheer for productive people.  And Bezos is abusing The Washington Post to instill a progressive agenda that suits him in a global way that I’m not interested in.  The battle that is currently taking place is like a plot from all my favorite stories all rolled up into one.  It is Atlas Shrugged, The Fountainhead and War and Peace spread out on a grand scale that is much more interesting.  As Trump gave his press conference news came that North Korea was backing down from their nuclear escalation threats which was yet again another victory for Trump—and for us all.  When was the last time a president told some maniacal country like North Korea that they were going to get their ass kicked and they actually listened?  Trump made it look easy—because in the hands of a competent person—it was relatively speaking.

The reason this was such a spectacularly relevant activity is because much of what Trump articulated is part of an unspecified menace that I have been covering for most of my adult life. I’ve always seen it clearly, but most people don’t, yet they suffer from it immeasurably.  As I’ve referred, I have had my own experience with this kind of thing and have witnessed very powerful people buckle under this name calling pressure that the terrorist types on the political left have always used to advance their cause.  Even though I know the tactics and have been personally unaffected by them the people around me have all too often fallen victim—and it always amazes me.  In my situation I witnessed the movers and shakers of my community, and the leaders of the Republican Party be completely frozen by this exact technique that is being used now against Trump.  In my case it was in calling me a sexist because a reporter strung together a bunch of things I had said in different places to paint a picture that provided a feeding frenzy to my political opponents.  I had no problem with the massive social pressure that was unleashed on me, but what did surprise me was how quickly my partners distanced themselves from me like a bunch of wimps.  I showed that I was willing to stand and fight doing whatever had to be done to win—in many cases on their behalf and they didn’t even have the courage to stand behind me.  They only wanted to cave in and ask for peace because they thought that was the way for them to achieve a protection of their bottom line—in a business sense.  I was truly shocked how cowardly they were in the face of just name-calling by those on the political left.

I said many times up to that point and many times since that the way to beat these crazy leftists is by hitting them harder than they hit you and letting them know that words and name-calling isn’t enough. Much to my surprise again, the masses just didn’t get it—those who were either business leaders or political leaders—or both.  They felt they had too much to lose to fight such a fight so their tendency was always to surrender to the radicals in their communities.  The reason was that they had something to lose while those seeking to destroy them had nothing to lose.  I told a bunch of them at dinner one night this cause and effect in a way I felt they could understand what was happening to them.  It was a nice dinner and I had a captive audience, so I said, “say you are a responsible husband and you work hard to provide for your family and are busy late into the night everyday during your income building years.  Your wife gets a little bored and wants attention and along comes some devil-may-care rock n roller who travels from town to town and meets your wife at the grocery where she thinks—this would be an exciting adventure.  So she starts seeing this guy while you’re off kicking ass making money.  You are busy building a life and you have a lot to lose.  But this little punk, the rock n roller, he has nothing to lose, only things to gain.  So in the relationship with your wife—he has the natural advantage leaving you vulnerable to her.  Now you could divorce her, but then she’s going to get half of everything you’ve worked so hard for—and everything you’ve put into her will be lost also making the relationship a terrible waste of time.  So what do you do?  The tempting thing to do would be to ask the guy to leave you and your wife alone and hope that he respects you enough to comply.  But if he doesn’t then it might pay to actually find a way to appease him so you can have your life back.  That is what the political left do to Republicans.  That is how they continue to beat conservatives time and time again.  They have nothing to lose and we always have all the assets because we work hard and save our money, living our lives in a way that is always vulnerable to insurgents who might want to steal off our efforts.”

They liked the story. We were all at Jags having a nice steak and the waitress was filling our glasses next to the fireplace as the snow fell outside, so I continued, “I’ve learned in my life, very early on, that the best way to get rid of guys like that is to—well–get rid of guy like that.  Make sure there is no way to trace him back to you when you do get rid of him.  Don’t give him what he wants.  Just erase him from the earth—and remember, he asked for it—right?  After all, you didn’t ask the little bastard to come into your life and threaten your well-being.  He did on his own accord in spite of the warnings, so you have to take care of that situation swiftly, and boldly.  That’s always how I function.  You can’t play patty cake with those types of people.  And if you give in to them they’ll be back next week asking for not only your wife, but your daughter—your car, and your guns.  You can’t take a pacifist stance on those types of people and those are who make up the political left—hippies, rock and rollers, drug addicts, college professors, anarchists, race baiters, moochers of every kind—just degenerate personalities who have nothing to lose and only to gain by taking something from you because you work hard and have things of value.  They are degenerates who function from a vast evil of collectivist philosophy and there is no reasoning with them.  The conservative philosophy that I function by and that is emerging with Trump as president expects to win.  We don’t do white flags of surrender like John Kasich, Rob Portman and Mitch McConnell.

Trump did well to stand against the tide and not to back down. He knows at least that people like me are out there supporting him and I know I’m not the only one.  Trump doesn’t get to see those people very often so much of what he’s doing he is doing it without the benefit of light to help him.  That makes all this that much better.  And I couldn’t be more proud.  Trump is doing what he is, things are changing forever.  We will always look back on these times and say that this is where things changed.  We went from a liberal society controlled by these terrorists through name-calling to a society that began to stick up for itself following the example of Trump—and it’s about time.  I am more proud than ever to call Trump my American president.  It takes a lot of guts to do what he’s doing and even more not to complain about it.  For that I am very grateful.  I’d be happy to do it if someone like him didn’t come along—but I’m very happy he did.  It gives me faith that the human race might not be so bad after all.

Rich Hoffman

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The Demons of Charlottesville: Screams from the evil trying to seduce us all to sleep

It took me a couple of days to get my mind around the extreme hypocrisy on full display in the wake of the Charlottesville racism issue in Virginia. I thought Donald Trump did a great job of addressing the nation just a few hours after violence broke out between the usual Black Live Matter communists and the Nazi socialists fighting over the removal a Robert E. Lee statue in that extremely liberal town.   At the time that Trump spoke he kept his statements general because after lunch on a Saturday afternoon it wasn’t yet known who ran over whom.   Was it the same ol’ radicals from Ferguson and Baltimore—or was it the skin heads, and Nazi fascists?  Trump couldn’t have been sure until much later and it was at that point that even Republicans were criticizing the president for not specifically identifying the white nationalists—as if he were associated with them.  It truly was an amazing display of evil—not in the violence at Charlottesville which was despicable in and of itself—but in the mass volume of the media propensity to advance a false plot against Trump that was truly vile.  Wasn’t it just a few weeks ago where a Bernie Sanders supporter shot up a bunch of Republicans at a baseball game, and a few months ago where Kathy Griffin held up the bloody severed head of a fake Donald Trump—and Snoop Dogg put out a video showing the mock assassination of our new president?  What we all witnessed in the wake of Charlottesville was a new kind of evil which was much more sinister than the kid who ran into a mob of communist radicals in a clash of leftist maniacs gone wild.

Again I was very proud of Donald Trump—he did all the right things at all the right times during the crises and the people who came out in criticism against him are the people who are protecting the swamp we are all trying to drain.  If you wanted to root out the Never Trump types who are holding up legislation in congress to prevent the President’s agenda from being implemented then just listen to those who criticized Trump so quickly.  They had an agenda against Trump and they used the death and injury of people at this tragic protest as a way to advance their selfish agenda.

There were many times in just the past eight years that Barack Obama took many days to respond to a tragedy on the scale of Charlottesville and when he did he often didn’t come close to providing an adequate statement.  The media, even the conservative media, never went this crazy over anything any previous president has said on a national stage.  This attitude against Trump is a whole new category of hate revealed through a swarm of aggression born from sheer evil.  It was a truly magnificent display of pure malevolence.

Trump revised his statement on Monday, August 14th to include all the white supremacy groups that the media had been criticizing him for not specifying.  I didn’t think he should have done so—he should have just let his Saturday statement stand.  After all, he addressed the real issue correctly the first time and nothing he could or would say would matter.  These parasites were going to use anything he said as a way to attempt to paint him into a corner.  The media and many of the Never Trumpers who lost to Trump during the 2016 campaign wanted to pin the president to white supremacy as their last-ditch effort to stop the movement which elected him.

The “alt-right” movement is not what makes up the Trump campaign.  White supremacists, Nazis, and the KKK radicals are all leftovers of southern Democrats and it is true that Hitler took notes from these people to advance his purge of Europe of people he didn’t want in his pure German society.  The people gathered in Charlottesville were all aspects of liberalism, the Black Lives Matters people were the hard-core communists while the Nazis were the socialists and the media framed them in their coverage as the extreme right and extreme left as if we all lived somewhere in between.  In that way they attempt to put us all into some crazy fringe of leftist radicalism and by default we must then defend our innocence from being too close to either of those fringe groups.  But, in reality, most of us are nowhere even near thinking like those two sides of the same idiotic coin.

Trump showed leadership early in the crises and it was a positive effort—in a sane world.  But we are not living in a sane world.  We are dealing with an evil that hides behind the pain and suffering of others to an extremity that is baffling to normal people.   It baffled me to see that evil so alive and desperate as they thought they had Trump pinned up against the ropes over doing what was expected of him during a crises. Trump didn’t say anything wrong. The skin heads, the communists, the people who wanted to take down the Robert E. Lee statue, the Mayor of Charlottesville, the Nazi lovers all the leftist losers who were in those city streets ready to fight for varying degrees of leftist philosophy were present to do damage and hurt others.  Trump had to be general in his statements given the level of evil present in Charlottesville.  Trump did the right thing—the media showed their real game plan perhaps too audaciously.

I’ve referred to it before but there is a wonderful scene from a great Akira Kurosawa film called Dreams where there are three mountain climbers caught in a snow storm high in the Himalayas.  They’ve lost their base camp in the storm and were dying in the extreme cold.  The leader found himself seduced by a beautiful ghost who came to his side to ease him into death.  She sings him to sleep gently and seductively pushing him into death.  But, being the leader that he was, he decides to fight back and once the ghost realizes that she’s not going to get her way, she turns into a skeleton and screams angrily at the leader then vanishes into oblivion.  Once gone, the storm clears and the leader is able to wake up his friends saving them from death as well.  As the sun came back out they realized that their base camp was always only about 20 feet away the whole time.  While they had only moments before been ready to die out of desperation, now they saw clearly that they were always so close to safety—but couldn’t see it for the chaos.  That is what we see happening, the demons of our lives are hiding in this chaos and now they have been exposed and are screaming out pain that they cannot get us to follow them to our death.  And in the aftermath of Charlottesville we will also see all along our base camp has always been right next to us.  When we do, as it’s being revealed right now, we will learn that it was never in between the communists and socialists but in the warm bed of conservatism which exists well to the right of the skin heads and Nazis.  That is where America lives and that is what Trump represents in our great republic, for which we stand.

Rich Hoffman

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The World is not Enough: Thank, God for Hasbro, Sphero, and Nerf

Every now and then I like to cover lighter topics that shed some hope for the human condition.  Occasionally I have written about my observations regarding the new cosplay phenomena and some of the very unique toys being made for kids from really great companies like Hasbro, Nerf and Sphero.  I have no problem admitting that when my wife drags me to the store for whatever reason—usually because she wants my company–that the place I always like to go first is the toy section to see what’s new there.  I have always enjoyed the inventiveness that comes with play and I think the world would be far better off if kids played more and for a longer period of time instead of rushing into puberty too quickly.  They should develop their minds longer than they do and after several discussions with my daughters who are now in their mid twenties I do have some hope that some of the inventiveness that is coming out in the toy markets and cosplay endeavors are the millennial’s generational self correction.

Any analysis into my love of Star Wars as a grown man would conclude that I find the people in those stories more interesting than real people.  The mythology of Star Wars as a whole has in it people I enjoy more than actual interactions.  Now some people might say that my view is unhealthy—that I shouldn’t set my bar for human interaction so high.  I would argue that society doesn’t set its bar for achievement high enough.  As a young person I always measured myself against the unrealistic expectations of the silver screen—not off the terrestrial limits of the real people in my life who I always felt were striving to be, “only human.”  They didn’t think big enough for me—the world they were offering was not enough.  And to a large degree millennials have grown up in broken homes with divorced insecure parents.  Their educations have been a joke and generally the world around them has been a tremendous let-down.  I mean who wants to grow up to be like John McCain? Anybody?  Or Maxine Waters?  How about a news anchor on any network?  Anybody want to be Chris Wallace?  If you have half a brain dear reader, you get my point.  So for their own survival millennials are doing to a larger degree what I always did, they turn to mythology where heroes and villains are larger than life and they base their standards for living off them instead of real people-because they innately recognize that they must do something to overcome the low expectations given to them by the lost generations which came before.

So that is the who and why all these fantastic toys and cosplay devices have emerged and specific to my interest is the Star Wars items from Nerf, Hasbro, and Sphero.   With Force Friday II coming up on September 1st 2017 where all the new Star Wars toys hit the shelves at Wal-Mart, Target and Toys R Us inventories that have been out there for a while since last year’s Rogue One movie is now at a very reduced price so my wife and I have been buying up things we’ve long been watching.  Specifically for me is the Hasbro At-ACT which came out last year for Rogue One but was over $300.  Hard for me to justify spending that kind of money on a toy, but lately it was marked down to $150 so we picked it up.  Another big thing we were able to pick up was the Sphero BB-8 robot which is driven off your smart phone.  In fact that’s what the AT-ACT and BB-8 have in common—both can move around on their own controlled off programming inputted into your iPhone which I think is just phenomenal.   The BB-8 robot from Sphero I think is a remarkable device and after finding it at Wal-Mart for half of its original $150 price tag I thought was a bargain.

For us, even though I enjoy the creativity on display in these new age toys if we didn’t have our grandkids over so much I wouldn’t have much of a desire to get them.  But, the kids are over a lot and I enjoy them immensely so when they are at my house we have all these very epic and expensive things to play with.  I remember how it was as a parent where luxuries were hard to come by and having all these expensive things to play with for the kids was difficult.  But as a grandparent we can afford to give the kids access to those kinds of things so we do, and I enjoy playing with the kids as they build up their brains with positive things I know will last a lifetime.  When kids play they don’t play to be a worthless bureaucrat or an average loser—they play to be a hero that saves the entire galaxy, that is the fantasy and it sets up in their minds the objective to reach for that high bar—even if it’s unrealistic.  It’s better to aim high than to not aim at all.  I also remember what it was like being a kid and I was a unique one.   I built models in the basement of our house very late into my teens and I had a large Star Wars toy collection that I played with until past the 8th grade.  I had a younger brother who had friends come over on Friday nights and we’d have massive Star Wars battles and honestly I found that a lot more fun than what was going on in real life.  I didn’t have any desire to drink, do drugs, use cuss words or play with girls.  The world I had in the basement of our house was far more interesting.  One of those younger kids who came over had a sister my age who was trying to fix me up with one of the prettiest girls in the 8th grade. She wanted me to go to the big homecoming dance with her after the football game.  This girl liked me a lot and had let me know that if I went to the dance with her that she’d let me do anything I wanted to her.  She was two years older than me and could drive.  Guess what I picked?  I chose playing Star Wars with the younger kids rather than messing around with that girl.  I never went to a single school dance until I was in my senior year and that was only to get a picture for my mom to put on her wall.   Many of my parents’ friends thought I was a weird kid so she wanted something to show that I wasn’t so strange.  In reality the toys were more interesting and I still love them to this day.   I can understand fully what cool toys and the freedom from guilt in playing with them can do for children.  I would say that now as an adult I am extremely well-adjusted and a very good problem solver.  I attribute a lot of that to developing my brain with a lot of play as a kid without the hassle of social pressure—like girls in the 8th grade and dances after football games.  Now as an adult with financial means, I do spoil my grandchildren for specifically those reasons—so they can feel the boundless joy of being a kid and discovering so many new things for the first time before life starts clamping down.  When life does clamp down, I want them to intellectually be ready.

And that’s why these toys are so much better than the toys from my youth, because Hasbro and Sphero aren’t just making them for kids.  They are making them for the many adults who now get past their 20s and aren’t interested in what the world has to offer.  As I think about this interesting aspect of our culture I can’t help but think of the James Bond movie The World is not Enough by the musical group Garbage.  That song captures this issue very well, the world is not enough because it doesn’t offer a big enough tapestry to project our hopes and dreams against—so many people find a relief from those limits by fulfilling their imaginations with these very sophisticated toys and these very creative companies understand and are rushing to fill that market need with some really spectacular offerings.  I always loved that song.  Needless to say I am impressed and continue to look forward to the next great thing to come from Hasbro and Sphero. That AT-ACT and the BB-8 droid are just fabulous and will bring a lot of joy to my house.  And I continue to look forward to what they come up with this year for Force Friday. I waited for some of these items for a few years so that the price would come down, but given the great utilization on display, maybe I won’t wait so long next time.

Rich Hoffman

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Sea World Needs Your Support: Don’t let CNN, PETA, and other radical organizations destroy it

It is a shame that the same forces who are attacking this present Trump administration and the positive outlook he has for a thriving America are the exact same attacking the Sea World Entertainment.  The attendance in the many parks they have around the nation, especially Orlando are down and have not recovered from the CNN hit job created by the PETA film Blackfish which has played on Netflix for several years now and has taken a major toll on park optimism.  In the case of Orlando specifically, as the competition from Universal Studios, Disney World and many other attractions in central Florida where people have to shell out $100 a ticket and spend over $1000 on a vacation experience they have steered away from Sea World because of all the negative press.  People don’t go to amusement parks, which Sea World is to feel bad about things.  They want optimism if they are going to spend that kind of money and the PETA crowd and their liberal sympathizers in the media have taken optimism away from the Sea World experience and put the very good company that does so much good for marine research on their heels foolishly.

http://www.baynews9.com/content/news/baynews9/on-the-town/article.html/content/news/articles/cfn/2017/8/8/seaworld_revenue_attendance_down.html

We all know what PETA is, it’s the crazy chicks that take off their clothes in public and put on ridiculous displays of extreme foolishness to make their point of saving wildlife from the terrors of mankind.  They are usually kids right out of high school or old pot smoking hippies who are part of that “Earth First” crowd that wonder why Al Gore’s new movie An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power bombed at the box office.  That movie was so bad that it only made $1,495,661 during its opening two-week period starting on July 28th. It was a piece of crap propaganda film meant to evoke the heart-strings of the radical capitalist hating progressives.  The movie bombed because it sucked and was essentially a movie of progressive evangelicalism making nature a god to be worshiped with the same kind of flimsy justification of scholarship that those same people make fun of in Bible thumpers.

Sea World however doesn’t suck—it’s a really good company that does great things for the preservation and understanding of marine habitats.  They do a good job of balancing the needs of scientific understanding using capitalism to drive research—which is how things are supposed to work in America.  I’ve been to many of the Sea World parks and have always loved them.  Their presence in Orlando enhances that city tremendously.   I love visiting the Orlando airport where all the amusement parks scream for attention.  I cannot imagine a Orlando without their buses and signs painted up with the images of killer whales.   With all the fantasy offered by Universal Studios and Disney, Sea World offers a nice blend of entertainment and science which heightens the intellectual experience of the entire Orlando area.  Unfortunately times have been tough in Orlando.  People are still spending money and visiting the parks there but Universal Studios has been literally killing it with their Harry Potter attraction and other very good offerings such as Kong: Skull Island which is simply a phenomenal experience worthy of a trip to Florida all by itself. Then of course Disney has their Avatar Land which just opened this year and the promise of Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge is coming rapidly.  Those parks have done a great job of staying fresh as the entertainment market for amusement parks has shifted dramatically in recent years to these “experiences.”  Meanwhile Sea World has had to fend off these crazy attacks essentially by CNN who has went on mission to literally torpedo the company to appease their PETA base of supporters at the left leaning cable company.   Instead of fighting CNN, Sea World should have been doing their own versions of those experiences and they are late to the party.  Finally they will have a Sesame Street Land in 2022 which will help, but that’s just too far off for them at this point.  They needed to be opening something like that in 2018 to maintain their market viability.  This attack on them really has not been fair to the good work they have always done in bringing marine life to millions of children over many decades.

To understand this “experience” trend in amusement parks and how big it is for market share it was obvious to me at my local park of Kings Island in Mason, Ohio.  Their newest attraction is a wooden roller coaster called Mystic Timbers which has a kind of Indiana Jones meets the Blair Witch theme to the experience and it’s very effective.  Kings Island has done a good job of keeping itself fresh over the years and has really blossomed under the care of Cedar Fair Amusements which runs Cedar Point up in northern Ohio.  The benefit that Cedar Fair has is that their business is purely thrill rides whereas Sea World is actually about education.  Sea World has some great thrill rides such as the Kraken which reopened just this year with a major overhaul featuring a VR ride that is quite spectacular.  But the essence of their market is education based which is a tough sell these days with all the glitter offered to consumers with extremely short attention spans and not much money in their pockets from wage stagnation.

Sea World used to be a destination vacation experience.  When I was a kid we went to the one in Aurora, Ohio well before it was closed down and I looked forward to it all summer.   It was a big deal to me and I loved the Orca shows and learned a lot about marine life that is still my foundation for that topic to this day.  Now that I have grand children I want to be able to take them to the park in Orlando and give them a similar experience.  However, Sea World is falling behind in the competitive battle to stay relevant in a capitalist society because of these attacks against it which is a shame.  Clearly we are not all one America and so long as these radical losers exist in our society who would even think to attack such a good company then there will continue to be strife over every little thing between us—just as there is under the Trump presidency.  All this started when that other side felt empowered under the Obama White House.  Sea World had an accident that was truly difficult for them and is part of the danger of their business.  But instead of providing support the radicals attacked and sought to put the company out of business and that is just despicable.

I would say that if you are thinking of taking a vacation and are going to the Orlando area dear reader, or any of the other locations that Sea World has around the country, you should make a point to visit them and put some money in their pockets.  Sea World could use the help.  The work they do is too valuable to ignore and it costs a lot of money to run an operation of live sea creatures the way they do.  Disney World at the end of the day turns off their rides and powers down their attractions. Sea World has to feed all those animals so their expenses are much different from other thrill park attractions yet that is the market they must compete in.  I’ve never been to Sea World where I didn’t have a good time and learn something fresh—or felt that the cost of admission wasn’t worth it.  So if you love optimism, science and capitalism—then you should support Sea World.  They are the Donald Trump’s of the theme park world and are being attacked essentially for being good.  And we shouldn’t allow that to happen to them.

Rich Hoffman

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The Cause of the Violence in Charlottesville: ‘The Big Lie’ by Dinesh D’Souza explains it all

This would be a good time to tell everyone to go out and read Dinesh D’Souza’s book The Big Lie—because it explains the terrible tragedy that has taken place in Charlottesville, Virginia quite well.  Before I explain why, think about what’s happening.  Liberals in that college town want to take down the long-standing statue of Robert E. Lee provoking a radical group of white supremacists to arrive with torches to defend it.  The next day the progressive advocates and communists behind the Black Lives Matter movement clashed with the socialist nationalists into a violent exchanged that killed several peopleand injured many others.  Shocked reporters on the scene described the engagement as a clash between the extreme left wingers and right wingers of our country and that is where they’d be wrong.  They just don’t know their history and misreported the situation in an embarrassing way.  But one has to ask, what did these leftist think was going to happen—they have been attacking white culture for a long time now and these people who still cling to the Civil War to articulate their social philosophy are tired of getting pushed around—so a fight ensued.  However I’d argue that the fight was caused by ignorance because they are all wrong about the state of history and if they knew better could have avoided a conflict all together.  When a fight gets this bad it’s because intelligence has left the arena and emotion is all that is left to govern.

https://twitter.com/overmanwarrior/status/896669144875249664

Calling white supremacists “right wingers” is an incorrect term because I am a serious conservative and their values don’t even come close to my viewpoints.  They are all to the political left of me and it is the very good research conducted by Dinesh D’Souza which explains it to people who do not know their history very well.  Apparently the reporters on the scene in Charlottesville need an education and they should read Dinesh’s books.  Last summer during the presidential campaign D’Souza released the film Hillary’s America which explored the Democratic Party’s foundation of the KKK which over time became the white supremacist movement.  All of the hard-core Confederates during the Civil War were Democrats and racism  in America was fully endorsed by the Democratic Party.  Remember, it was Abraham Lincoln who stopped slavery—he was a Republican.  The Democrats played that game until the 1960s where they attempted to rid themselves of that history and pass it off like a hot potato to the nice Christian Republicans who were too nice to give it back.  Following the example of Christ Republicans took that burden of slave guilt on themselves in a hope to heal the nation even though they had never been guilty of that kind of behavior.

Meanwhile when Hitler wanted to unite Germany with his own supremacist movement  he looked to the American Democrats as his model for how to go about it.  It wasn’t Republicans who Hitler copied; it was Democrats who helped Hitler build the socialist party of Germany.  So talking about the Trump presidency as if it represented the hard right is to completely misunderstand history.  The idiots protesting in Charlottesville are all variations of the American left who founded the Nazi regime prior to World War II and who essentially cased the Civil War.  When you put all those people on the streets of a liberal college town what did anybody think was going to happen?  Nothing I saw surprised me.

The problem is that both sides of those various socialist philosophies have no connection to the average Trump voter in today’s politics which is why nobody in the so-called mainstream media understand what’s going on.  The MSM is functioning from the wrong definitions for our modern events because they assume that the political “right” is these socialist losers who call themselves white supremacists.  I don’t know anybody on the conservative side of things who think anything close to what the radicals in Charlottesville did to the extent where they were willing to kill people who wanted to take down a statue of Robert E. Lee.

Then there are the communist Black Lives Matters activists who continue to push the limits of assaulting police officers and imposing their aggressive tactics against “white America.”  They have enjoyed openly pushing the tempers of parts of society that they think are against them wanting their own civil rights crusade—and they pushed things too fast and too aggressively in Charlottesville.  Just as gay rights advocates love to push against social norms insulting Christian thinking people with great colorful audacity they asked for someone to smack them in the mouth by pushing emotional buttons of the other side.  They were as much at fault in Charlottesville as the idiots who called themselves white supremacists.

Always in the wake of these tragedies people wonder what it will take to become all one country.  I might say again, but I don’t think we’ve ever been “one country.”  We may end up that way under a Trump presidency, but I can’t say that at any point in history we were “one country.”  So what would it take to get there—well Democrats need to get their act together.  All through their history they have been a disaster of criminal minded people who are always associated with socialists, communists and drug addicts with addictive personalities.  They are a psychologically broken people who have inspired all the worst things we’ve seen in our country—from Nazi support to slavery.  It was Democrats who wrote the playbook for violence connected to red flagged communism, black flag anarchy and swastika flagged Nazi supremacy. Traditional Republicans were not in Charlottesville, only radical groups connected to the Democratic Party where there to conduct the violence witnessed on August 12, 2017.

If you want respect you have to give it and going around the south expecting to take down Confederate monuments to prove a point isn’t going to lead to peace and civility.  Stupid people don’t have much to believe in and when you take away everything they trust without replacing it with something positive you will push them to the brink quickly and that drove the neo-Nazi white nationalists from their hiding places and into a battle mode.  Taking down General Lee’s statue to the people around the city of Charlottesville was a hostile act and the Black Lives Matters people knew it—so a fight broke out and people unfortunately died.  But they weren’t from the radical right—both groups were aspects of the political left.  They were in facts brothers of the same mother of a Democratic Party who gave birth to all the violence, only with different fathers.  What we saw in Charlottesville was a bunch of Democrats doing what they always do—cause trouble due to their faulty political philosophy.  And if anybody knew anything about history they’d understand it, and we could all take strides to solving the problem.  The people who have the answers were not there—they are in the Republican Party and they typically go to church on Sunday.  They tend to be employed, and raise nice families.  Those were not the people who were at Charlottesville protesting.  Yet it is they who have the answer how to further prevent the violence we saw.  Somebody ought to be asking them—not the idiots who caused the trouble in the first place.

Rich Hoffman

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Thank You, Mr. President: Being bigger than life and the stories about it

It really is for me a dream come true. One of my favorite movies of all time is Sudden Impact the Clint Eastwood film about Dirty Harry confronting the evils of progressivism in San Francisco during the 70s and 80s.  In that film the character of the veteran homicide detective well into his 50s was at the top of his game and had no shortage of disrespect for the corruption that was taking over his city and he confronted it with a single-minded audacity.  That movie was and has always been a breath of fresh air for me.  I always hoped that such a real character would exist—but the Dirty Harry films are a fiction designed to appease our desires.  They might reflect reality in need, but certainly not action.  That was until Donald Trump stepped into the White House to give us something of a sequel to that classic cop drama.  But even better, every day in the life of Donald Trump is like a movie in and of itself and he has quickly eclipsed the plot of Sudden Impact just in social impact.  Every day is something new and exciting with this president and I simply love it. For all the reasons why just have a look at Trump’s very elegant public comments quick on his feet during the day of August 10th 2017.  They are better than any movie—and its all real.

Trump was not only juggling a potential war with North Korea but he was taking on the Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell for his ineffectiveness during the last session, answering legal inquiries into the Russian scandal that for most people would completely destroy them all by itself. Trump also declared the opioid crises a national emergency and addressed several more large-scale topics as if he were swatting at flies.  Historically speaking, Trump was magnificent and each day he is in office things are changing around the world dramatically.

The change that I’m referring to for once is a good thing—its change back to in some cases of the motivations that we like most about the human experience—the strong masculine presence of self-determination that have often been granted to mythical creatures in the form of gods like Zeus, Shiva, and Hanuman. But what’s different in the way of change is that for once we are not looking to worship such people but are seeking to unlock that potential in other people for the first time in all known written history.  Trump isn’t seeking to be a dictator.  He simply wants to inspire other people to be more like him—or even better.  He is such a breath of fresh air into politics and world affairs that the effect will be permanent before he’s done.

I remember reading the great book Theodore Rex which was a biographical account of Theodore Roosevelt and thinking how great it would be if we had a president of the United States once again who had that much personal passion for life.  I didn’t agree with everything Roosevelt did—in many ways he was a flawed man running from his sickly childhood seeking refuge in machismo to fight back the many illnesses that were trying to gain control of his body all his life.  But generally, he was good, well-intentioned and passionate.  In his case the path to hell is paved with good intentions and what he ended up doing was create progressivism with a firm platform into American politics which still drags down our style of government to this very day.  That is the effect that such an ambitious and passionate person in the White House can have on history.  Donald Trump is likely at least four times more passionate and macho than Theodor Roosevelt and that will have an impact on American politics for centuries whether or not people like it.  It’s already cemented into our nation right now—less than a year into office.

Any one of those topics discussed during that very impromptu press conference would have destroyed any previous president from FDR to Barack Obama—just this Korean problem would have done it. But Trump slapped it away like an irritation from an insect moving quickly from topic to topic all of them taken separately could have been the plot of a new James Bond thriller.  Donald Trump moves so fast and with so much decisiveness that he made it look easy baffling the traveling reporters with him and the media struggling to analyze all the information.  In truth it was all beyond the scoop of their ability to cover the news.  It will take them weeks to digest it all.  The problem is tomorrow holds a whole new slew of topics coming at them far faster than they can manage it all.  That might frustrate them, but that’s not Trump’s problem and he is fully aware of it.

This is a government that I can finally get behind and root for. The way Trump is governing is what I have always expected out of our elected representatives and I wouldn’t care if we had 10 to 20 more like Trump moving into the House and Senate—and eventually into the media because I’m inclined to say that what is happening under Trump is the new mainstream.  It is the kind of America that the hard workers and passionate people unlocked by the freedoms of our nation produce and finally we have someone in the White House worthy of our trust.  To that effect I have to say thank you Mr. President and that is something I don’t do often to any public official.  You have done a great job so far and I look forward to each day that you are in the White House because boundless possibilities wait to be unlocked by your passion and vigor.

Rich Hoffman
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Yes, the Stock Market is Breaking Records because of Trump: A lesson on market forces

I continue to be amazed at the lack of knowledge that most people have. I mean most major malls have bookstores where people can buy and read books. The internet has voluminous amounts of information to sift through and we spend fortunes to send people through a public education system—yet still people are generally pretty stupid. It is baffling to me that they cannot make the direct correlation between the increase of the stock market gains and the Trump presidency—and that they don’t understand how 4 trillion dollars of extra investments into the American economy directly benefit every single person in our nation. Let me provide a little context of how much money that is—Russia, that country that supposedly has so much power over our elections has a GDP of 1.2 trillion dollars. Japan—one of the great economies of the world is only at 4.9 trillion. Canada has only 1.5 trillion in GDP and Germany is at 3.4 trillion dollars. When we talk about the gains in the stock market—specifically the Dow Jones average—since Donald Trump was elected we are seeing an infusion of wealth invested into our economy that exceeds most of the countries in the developed world. That is a significant achievement all by itself.

The next thing people wonder is whether or not Trump deserves any credit for it. Well, of course he does. Who else? If you do a little research into the history of stocks and investments you can clearly see a pattern for which the mob of buyers of stocks use to make their decisions. What investors love is optimism and deregulation and Trump has given them both right from the start of his election and that has caused investors to pour their money into opportunities created purely on sanguinity. It’s not very complicated and it certainly isn’t a mystery. Donald Trump gets the credit for the increases in the market based on his promise to get government out of the pockets of the movers and shakers and that has unleashed vast amounts of wealth that had been sitting around doing nothing. That’s how powerful optimism is and how limiting governments are on the happiness, and productivity of their citizens.

Venezuela is in trouble because they adopted socialism and the state runs everything leaving their markets overregulated and underperforming. They have great oil reserves that depended on artificially high prices to survive in a global economy. Once competition was once again opened up driving down the price of barrels of oil the socialist country couldn’t survive because they had provided no reason for any investors to bring money to their country. People with money are productive assets in a global economy because they have done things to earn that money. They aren’t villains as socialists and communists see them. Wealthy people are assets. Even politicians must admit as much because they need the money of wealthy people to run their campaigns. Without wealthy people any society is essentially an armpit of derelict behavior. The more wealthy people a society has—the higher quality that society will be. Venezuela made it so that wealthy people left and prevented more wealth from investing in their country leaving the people there struggling even to find a bar of soap to clean themselves with.

Wealth is created when something has a perceived value. For something to have such a value there must be a market demand for whatever that value represents—such as gold, cars, or old toys and cloths. EBay and Amazon.com can provide the proof of how joining market forces together can create wealth that wasn’t there before. Just by joining the consumer with a supplier those two companies have tremendously increased market value within America’s GDP. If there were some way in Zimbabwe to join together two villages which might otherwise be 30 miles apart so that they could sell rocks and animal bones to each other more easily, they would see an uptick in their economy as well. In places where individuals are freely able to exchange what they have to those who want it, you will see a more productive, and wealthy nation where the standard of living is much higher than places where personal freedoms are more tightly monitored.

This is why the communists of our present time have all put on the mask of the environmental movement because that way they could hide their hatred of production behind a well-intentioned cause—such as saving the planet. They have entirely made up the facts and figures. The government in the United States and around Europe who naturally always want more control use their power to issue grant money to scientific institutions who will make up phony global warming numbers to invoke their communist religion on the masses hoping ultimately to slow down production in develop countries so that undeveloped arm pit countries around the world can be propped up—the way Venezuela was. But all that value Venezuela had off oil money was artificially created by regulation—it wasn’t real—it was built off a lack of supply to meet a heavy demand.

Trump signed immediately legislation which put the Keystone Pipeline directly into use—at least the parts that could be. Trump immediately removed the federal restrictions so that local fights could hash out the details which had been the biggest barrier to implementing that very power delivery method of oil from Canada to the reserves along the Gulf of Mexico. Just that action alone sent the prices of oil down which was great for all market driven economies. While it might not have been great for Venezuela who depended on high prices to sustain their socialist government, oil is just one factor in a free economy. Cheap transportation can do much more to create many more aspects of wealth in any economy so it is far more important to a developing world to have access to cheap fuel and oil so that other markets can use transportation to develop new economic advances.

All Trump had to do to increase the stock market was promise optimism. The numbers are off lately from the record highs we had been seeing because of the obvious stand-off and war with North Korea. That creates market insecurity and makes people hang on to their money. If you really get to the gist of why so many senators have been coming out against Trump’s “optimism” its because they need the chaos of limitation to justify their do-nothing approach to everything productive. They, like Venezuela, need artificial regulations to justify their power. A free market means fewer people need government to redistribute wealth—and even Republicans have gotten used to that game. So long as people have no other options, their do-nothing game of pandering to lobbyists and getting rich off the results could continue. But Trump has not only deregulated the market and inspired great wealth which is reshaping our country as we speak—but he’s exposed those politicians with a value he has brought to politics that has redefined everything. So yes, they don’t like him. Just like Venezuela hates free and open markets. When people are allowed to do what they want and get what they need, all of society advances. But when they are limited and regulated society stagnates. All Trump did to increase the markets was show investors that he was willing to free them—and it is all just as simple as that. Just imagine what might happen if we really did have a free markets and politics were removed from the process altogether. Everyone could be unbelievably wealthy—everywhere in the world. If only……………………..

Rich Hoffman

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Mitch McConnell the Underperformer: How the exceptional make the weak feel terrible

Mitch McConnell made a fool out of himself when he returned to his district in Kentucky to essentially throw Donald Trump under the bus for what the senator was not able to do in the Senate. As he said, Trump had unrealistic ideas about the way legislation works and had set ridiculous expectations of achievement—and that it was Trump’s inexperience that was at fault—not him. As he said that Trump was speaking to North Korea in a way that no American president never has where real threats are being made against our sovereign nation. I still don’t think North Korea has the means to attack America—but they showed the intent and that deserves an ass kicking all by itself—so Trump has some things to do. While congress went on vacation the President is still working and solving complicated problems around the world essentially spelling out the entire problem for all to see. Congress is essentially lazy and have grown accustom to doing very little but talk a lot and here was a new President that actually expected to accomplish things—and that was too much for ol’ Mitch—who has been in the Senate too long.

I understand this pushback because I get it all the time—in fact it was just this week where I had to explain to people who thought what I was asking them to do was impossible that it was they who were the problem. Speed and accuracy are equally important in all endeavors. I don’t just practice these things with my bullwhips and fast draw hobbies for fun—there is a deep philosophical necessity in mastering some aspect of speed and accuracy in people’s lives so that they can apply those techniques to a real problem in some regard. Any idiot can stand in front of a target and hit it with a gun, or a whip when time is not applied to create extra pressure. When we do our bullwhip competitions people who are very good technically have a hard time hitting their targets because time is a factor and the pressure often makes them miss. People who are good at managing their speed and accuracy obviously are the people who win the most while those not so good look terrible and incompetent. They may be very accurate and can put out a candle with a bullwhip if they have all the time in the world but they struggle mightily under the pressure of time.

That is why I love cowboy fast draw. My schedule has been too busy to attend a lot of the shooting events this year because most of them take most of a weekend to do, and I don’t have that kind of time to give in 2017—but I practice most every day and I’m currently shooting consistently in the .500s—which is pretty good. The really fast guys are shooting in the .300s which is just over a quarter second. I’m shooting in the half second range which consists in shooting at a 24” target from 21 feet away with a gun in a holster with a single action firearm. To perform the shot a lot of things have to go extremely right and it is quite an exercise to start thinking in fractions of a second.

Most people think in a way that a second is their idea of fast—so when they speak of things in matters of speed their point of reference is in seconds. But when faster than a second is needed to refer to speed, those people do not have the proper vocabulary, or context to comprehend the need. The same can be said of congress. Their unit of measure to articulate their accomplishments have not been based on performance, but purely on bluster. Donald Trump was elected to change the definitions and the people who are struggling with the new definitions are obviously uncomfortable. But they don’t have a right to refuse to act.

In our bullwhip speed and accuracy contests not only is speed a consideration by accuracy is equally important. For instance, for each cup missed on the target line there is a five second deduction. Also there is a line six feet away from the targets and you can’t put your toe on that line otherwise you could incur another 5 second penalty. Even if you ran through the 10 targets in 11 seconds, but you stepped on the line twice and missed two cups, your real-time would be up over 30 seconds which isn’t going to win shit. You have to be fast, and smooth and make little or no mistakes taking nothing for granted. It is possible if you are competent in that kind of endeavor. If you are not, or have drifted through life without being tested—then you can see why some people are very jealous of those with those who can do things accurately—fast.

Mitch McConnell’s “excessive expectations” comment about Trump is just that—a frustrated old legislator who has been exposed as a phone because he isn’t good at anything—especially his field of endeavor which is as a Senator. The only thing McConnel has been good at is deceiving people and getting himself elected year after year on empty promises. For all the time he has been in the Senate Mitch has never been able to find money for the I-75 bridge from Ohio into Kentucky even when the powerful Speaker of the House position was in his friend’s hands John Boehner in the House. Those two couldn’t have completed a shadow on the sidewalk under a hard summer sun at 5 PM on a cloudless day. They were simply lobbyists in waiting or facilitating the needs of lobbyists who fund their campaigns each term. They never planned to do anything but talk as elected representatives. Trump asking them to do anything is an “excessive expectation.”

People like Mitch McConnell are the type of people who always say, “slow down” so that we don’t make mistakes. They want all day to stand in front of a target so that they can hit it. They are the type of people who support a progressive society void of competition because they can’t compete. I always love it when the best bull whip artists come to our competitions. Some of them are the best in the world and have several world records and you bet it feels good to beat them on some of these competitions. We all win our share of things just being good at that sport, so we never get very serious about it. But I know people who hate it when I come to competitions because they fear they won’t have a chance to win. Instead of rising to the challenge they cuss about how it might rob them of a win just by being there. That is what Mitch McConnell is doing with Donald Trump. He wishes that the new president had never been elected because it makes him look bad in comparison and the game as Senator that he has been playing and making a lot of money off of has been exposed. Now he’s supposed to act, and he isn’t prepared. The drag assing hasn’t been working because Trump doesn’t understand the game—that everyone knows congress isn’t supposed to actually accomplish anything. They are supposed to pretend while the shadow government runs everything. Everyone makes their money and the public has been none the wiser. Only we have been wise to it for a long time—and we’re sick of it. That is why we elected Donald Trump. And we expect things to actually be accomplished.

Rich Hoffman
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The City of Losers: Chicago’s demise into oblivion

Chicago is a disaster; by 2025 it will have fewer residents than it does now making any tax hike to pay for its staggering debt even less of an option.  They cannot tax their way out of the trouble they are in and even worse is the state that Chicago is in—Illinois, which is 15 billion dollars in the hole.  15 BILLION—that’s like the GDP of an entire country in some places in the world.  And now that bankrupt city is about to lose 3.2 million dollars in federal Byrne Justice Assistance Grants because Chicago has declared itself a sanctuary city providing protection for illegal immigration.  What a bunch of lunatics.

http://www.mychinews.com/news/chicago-financial-crisis

http://money.cnn.com/2017/06/29/investing/illinois-budget-crisis-downgrade/index.html

http://rightwingnews.com/illegal-immigration-2/sanctuary-city-chicago-sue-doj-threat-losing-federal-money-sanctuary-city/

Granted, the budget in Chicago is a staggering  $9.8 billion—so losing a silly little 3.2 million dollars shouldn’t be a big deal, but the money has been slated to pay for new police cars for their beleaguered law enforcement officers—and when you are that far in debt, everything matters.  Chicago is the poster child for how a bunch of Democrats mismanage everything they do.  Chicago is so bad they couldn’t even make a deal with George Lucas to open the Star Wars museum on the lakefront even as Lucas tried to lay it in Chicago’s lap.  But the loser hippies and distrustful progressives fought the museum—which would have brought some much-needed new money to the city—and Lucas set the project up in Los Angeles instead.  There is no hope for them now and they honestly can’t afford to lose that grant money over being a sanctuary city.

But think about what Chicago is doing.  They are demanding money for breaking the law as their people virtually shoot themselves to death on a daily basis.  As of this writing there are 428 homicides in Chicago just in 2017, which can be seen below for an update.  You can’t tax people to pay for your debt if they kill themselves and scare away people from moving into their neighborhoods.  Aside for the immediate downtown area by the lake—more specifically the Trump Hotel area by the river—Chicago is extremely dangerous.  If you’ve ever flown into O’Hara flying over the downtown area once you get a mile or two west the place looks like a socialist capital from Europe with row houses and beat-up square street blocks  extending for as far as the eye can see.   And the people who live in those homes are largely welfare babies raised in single parent homes, drugs, and depravity.  The sun does not rise and set there as it does other places in the country.  The place is a dump and the crime in the area is indicative of any place maintained by low quality people—low quality because they have no appreciation for intellectual aptitude or human achievement–it has nothing to do with skin color–but attitudes.

http://heyjackass.com/

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/ct-man-61-found-shot-dead-in-garage-in-south-lawndale-20170222-story.html

So along comes Trump and the Department of Justice under Jeff Sessions who seek to clean up Chicago of their gangs and drugs imported through smuggling channels that lead straight to Mexico and are hidden behind illegal immigration.  If you were in the leadership of Chicago such an effort by the feds would really help, because it just might make Chicago more attractive to new investments and residents. After all, what right-minded tax payer wants to live in such high crime areas but slugs, deadbeats and whores?  Bizarrely Rahm Emanuel is resistant insisting to protect those same gang members under the guise that they represent a group of well-intentioned immigrants.  Now why would little man Rahm do something like that?

Obviously the Mayor of Chicago has no intention to fix his budget problem and is following the entire state on a death spiral of economic viability that will not last into the future.  Literally for Rahm Emanuel is the sobering reality that Trump is president and the world isn’t going to come to the rescue of Chicago the way that progressives always planned.  The money just isn’t there, nor is the will.  Chicago has lost its place as a special place in the heart of America because people are sick of hearing about the excessive murder rate and hypocritical nature of its politicians.  Chicago used to be one of America’s great cities, but now it’s just a dying shell of old buildings and lost people.  Take a walk through the airport sometime and you’ll understand what I’m talking about.

Chicago filed a lawsuit against the DOJ to extract the money they think they are owed and people are watching.  Through the process of this public relations stunt by Emanuel even more people will become turned off by Chicago—as if the murder rate wasn’t embarrassing enough.  By taking on a big national campaign against the DOJ Chicago is insistent to scare away any potential new money that might flow into their economy—which is the worst thing they could do at this point.  It’s not about the 3.2 million in grants, it’s the big dollar new business that might be out there and want to set up shop in Chicago.  After all, that’s the only way they could ever hope to solve their fiscal crises.  Instead of nurturing more wealth to return to Chicago they are instead hedging their entire future on illegal aliens who flock to that sanctuary city from socialist and communist countries around the world in search of running water.  Those people do not, nor will they ever have money to pay for the massive debts Chicago has—so Chicago by their own actions is as good as over.  Only they don’t yet realize it.

Years ago the movie Ferris Bueller’s Day Off was filmed in Chicago and that was only in 1986.  Back then Chicago was pretty nice, the South Side was pretty rough but when people thought of murder in that city they thought of Al Capone.  In just thirty years Chicago has destroyed itself with massive debt, terrible public policy shaped by progressive politics and has attached their star to the a sinking ship pension system.  Chicago abused their beautiful city and its placement on the great lakes of the Midwest and they loaded it with a progressive philosophy which has not only destroyed the city, but have destroyed the lives of the people they proclaim to protect.  Wherever you go in the world you can see the depleted results of what progressive philosophy does—whether it’s in Venezuela, Africa, China, or Paris and everywhere you see slugs living off the state and barely living lives of any worth.  Chicago is certainly on that trajectory.  Today they are nothing like that nice city seen in that popular 1986 film.  The only place you can still have a good experience is downtown—and that is shrinking at a remarkable rate—essentially because they are broke.  Chicago killed itself way back in 1995 when they failed to get their legacy costs under control and kicked the can down the road until they ran out of road. Now they have no other recourse but to kill themselves.

Rahm Emanuel is building his case to save Chicago by actually breaking the law and turning away people who might save it in favor of the people who will guarantee its destruction.  As hard as it might be to take a hard stance against illegal immigration if you are looking to preserve something you can’t overload it with destructive elements and Chicago needs value not more depleted people.  It’s nice to have a city like Chicago have so much surpluses that poor people might have a good standard of living but you can’t have a majority of the people be poor and expect the budget to work out to support such a large population.  You can’t pay your teachers $85K per year, or your cops over six figures with unlimited overtime, and you can’t get upside down with pensions as your population decreases.  And by raising taxes more people will leave making the budget even worse. And thus we have a city run by Democrats under a progressive philosophy not rooted in reality—and the only thing they now have in their favor is that they can call themselves a sanctuary city—a place to hide from the law.  And that makes them all terribly pathetic.

Rich Hoffman

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An Authentic Han Solo Costume: The miracle of Amazon.com amid changing industries–and people

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Everyone knows I’m a huge Star Wars fan—which I view differently from the geeky other types of entertainment exhibitions of public support.  When I see the name Star Wars and participate in its products in whatever form, it evokes in me an optimism that is very specific to it that I am very fond of.  That’s why my favorite character within Star Wars is Han Solo, because he is the most optimistic character perhaps ever created for film.  Nothing is impossible for Han Solo—he’ll try anything under any circumstances because his personality is such that he figures his confidence and sheer will can get him through anything.  He is the Donald Trump of science fiction and I’ve felt that way about that character for more than forty years now.  On more than a few occasions I’ve dressed up as Han Solo for Halloween events, or other science fiction endeavors, conventions, watch parties, literary events at book stores—just various festive gatherings that celebrate costuming and character reverence—but I’ve never had any kind of official Han Solo clothing. I would just piece together whatever I could find that sort of looked like the popular smuggler from the Star Wars series and go from there. But my five-year old grandson is about to have a big birthday party marking that invisible line of being a toddler to a genuine little boy fully aware of the world around him with the memories that now matter—and my daughters are fashioning it to Star Wars.  As I’ve reported before also, these parties my kids do for their kids are not just little events—they go all out in creating a very mythic experience that is almost a theme park occurrence and due to their passion for Star Wars they are going all out.  That meant that of course I had to dress up as Han Solo—but this time I wanted to do it for real—as real as possible because of the effort my kids were putting into this party and the eventual impact it would have on the youth in my family attending this thing.  So I turned to Amazon.com to see what was out there and was stunned by a world I discovered.

My mom made me a little vest like Han Solo’s when I was in the fifth grade and I sort of kept it all these years even though it was way too small for me.  But even a few years ago if you wanted something that looked like a Star Wars character and bought a costume from a place like Party City it always came out looking far from authentic.  If you wanted something that looked like the clothing in the movie you had to make it.  Back when my kids were little we went to a Star Wars Celebration in Indianapolis and my wife made Jedi robes for my girls and their friends so they could dress up at that convention which occurred right before the movie Revenge of the SIth.  The internet at that time had some support—you could get directions from people who built their own costumes but there weren’t suppliers carrying things like that on the shelf.  Even though Star Wars was popular there just wasn’t any money in it for costumers to make costumes of all those characters in the movies  for a public of all shapes and sizes.  The scope of that work was unrealistic. For Han Solo specifically his outfit looks pretty simple yet is really quite complex.  For instance, his vest from A New Hope has a series of very complicated pockets positioned just right—and there is nothing like that off the rack at Wal-Mart or Kholes.  Han Solo’s pants don’t have pockets and have a very specific pin stripe down the side of them which disappears into knee-high boots that are meant to put the swash in the buckle for the very dashing character. The shirt under the vest isn’t just a white button-up but has a very unique collar and v-nick style that has to fit just right through the shoulders to give the correct effect.  Then there is the gun belt which is a thing all its own.  So I went looking for these things and I started with the Star Wars Costume exhibit at the Cincinnati Museum Center—which has been running all summer and will end around the beginning of October before moving on to the next city.  It’s a good exhibit, most of which I’ve seen before at the Smithsonian, but for my quest it served its purpose.  I was able to get right up to the Han Solo costume and look at things up close so that I could duplicate it authentically.  If I couldn’t find the items online, my wife was willing to build them from scratch so we went and took lots of pictures.

To my shook as I started looking now, in 2017 for these very specific Han Solo costume pieces for this epic party my kids were having I discovered that I was able to buy everything at Amazon.com relatively inexpensively.  For instance the great Han Solo vest that I figured was the most important part of the costume was just under forty dollars from an outfit in China.  I skeptically ordered it expecting it to arrive in a very flawed condition.  I expected something that looked like a typical Party City costume that smelled like plastic and rubber.  But what came to my front door was an exact replica of the Han Solo vest from A New Hope made out of material that was like that of tactical gear for a SWAT team.   It was a very good garment that was legitimate and it fit well the moment I put it on.  I was stunned by the quality of it.  I then proceeded to order the official shirt, the pants, the boots and the gun belt which as of this writing hasn’t yet arrived, but everything else has and again I was stunned by the authenticity of each item.

At different points in my life I had looked for these things and nobody carried them—as I said, everything had to be made by hand.  What’s unique about now from then—and by then I mean like six months ago—is that due to all the COSPLAY that goes on at these Comic Con conventions and now that Disney World is building these amusement parks with Star Wars lands within them there is this big COSPLAY movement that has emerged—where people dress up as characters from their favorite movies to delve into the mythology of these various sci-fi events—and out of nowhere there are all these suppliers who are making these costumes to meet the growing demand.  It’s a whole industry of itself that has virtually arrived out of nowhere.  I am aware of some of it because I find Comic Cons interesting as well as Gen Cons and other conventions.  I also noticed that the plans for the new Star Wars resort coming to Disney World is seeking to tap into this emerging market with a Fantasy Island style of Star Wars experience where they encourage people to show up dressed for the part.   Obviously Disney knew all about this culture and were building their business plans around it.  I only discovered it because of my grandson’s birthday party—but this was big business!

As I had ordered everything from my home computer and each item arrived one by one to my doorstep without having to go anywhere to search for it I became more and more impressed.  Even more shocking was that everything fit nicely, I didn’t have to send anything back.  Just by reading some of the reviews I was able to size myself accordingly with no trouble at all.  I figured that the risk was low because if the stuff showed up and was junky I figured my five-year old grandson would forgive me.  He’d appreciate the effort and wouldn’t get hung up on the details—even though he is a very smart little kid.  He surprises me what he notices.  He’s already playing the video game Battlefront very well which is about two years before I thought he would.  He plays online against other people who are very good—and he’s effective.  He knows all the different types of weapons that can be used, how to outfit each character and how to manage the Star Cards which give unique abilities to tactical engagements.  So if something wasn’t right, he’d notice. But after getting the parts of my Han Solo costume together it was obvious that I had nothing to worry about.  As far as this party was concerned, except for my hairline, the outfit looks just like it would if it was on the actual movie set.  That’s pretty stunning for something that was so easily ordered on Amazon.com.

This is all just another example of how imagination is fueling an entirely new industry and due to the excessive and efficient reach of Amazon.com they were able to connect me to suppliers around the world where I could get a very specific items from a forty-year old movie to my doorstep within two weeks.  And the quality wasn’t junky but meant to impress even under the scrutiny of the most ardent film geek.   In some cases my outfit is better than the movie original on display at the Cincinnati Museum Center.  Those costumes were meant for just a few months of filming, these for purchase were meant to last much longer and under the judgment of live audiences.  Needless to say, which I have before, we are seeing something new and hopeful from these modern movie enthusiasts which starts with a mythology in the movie theater and extends into real life—what Disney is doing down at their theme parks is tapping into the public need to play out their fantasies and is an expansion of imagination that is very specific to our species as human beings.  The need to personify a fantasy experience has deep psychological roots that go far beyond primal necessity.   I think the end result is a very positive one that is headed toward an unknown climax.  I know I love to see the imaginations of so many people at work to make something like all this possible—but it surprised even me at the extent of it all. And the entity most responsible for the success of this new industry was Amazon.com.  They were the middle ground players that connected need with supply and allowed both to get what they wanted at the best price and quality.  If they can do that with a simple costume from Star Wars, just think what they can do with real necessities.  We are living in a whole new world.

Rich Hoffman

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