Tag: Amazon

An Amazon.com Pricebreak: A guidebook to capitalism to step out of the darkest period of American history

There is no shame in being good at what you do

I have had many of these over the last five years: super-secret meetings with people in the back of some restaurant or shooting range where people want to talk. Only this one was 30 or so people who were fans of my book, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and they wanted a little private class on the subject matter. I get the secrecy; I think of it as enslaved people learning to read during the Underground Railroad Period. People want to learn how to improve themselves in a world that doesn’t want them to accomplish such a task. These people were Chamber of Commerce types and were concerned about other people knowing they were meeting with me because it was a social taboo. But I was happy to attend the event and give a talk, which everyone enjoyed. But during the Q&A section at the end I learned something from the class, that my book was being offered on Amazon.com for $4.59, which is practically giving it away. Normally, most of the sales that I see come from the publisher’s website, is $16.99. When I get the sales report, it usually has a long list with all kinds of prices shown, and some of the lower numbers I had thought were likely Kindle downloads. So, I didn’t pay much attention to them. But at this little seminar, a fan told me about it, and sure enough, the book was listed by Amazon at that very low price, so low that it’s likely cheaper than what it cost to make the book. Yet I wasn’t surprised upon hearing this; it didn’t make me angry. I think it was meant to make me angry, to be very insulting to me. But my reaction is one that I’ll share here: if you can get the book for a cheaper price, then I’m happy to let you know about it.

A pretty good price

I personally like Amazon; I get a lot of books through them. I also am a frequent visitor to bookstores all over southern Ohio, going as far north as Dayton and Columbus regularly to get books that I don’t want to wait for to arrive in the mail. I read three or four per week on average, so it’s a major priority for me to have access to new books. For books that I must have that afternoon, I go and get them at an actual bookstore, the old-fashioned way. And I prefer hard copies of books because I don’t like the bad guys out there to know what I’m reading or looking at on the internet, because I am watched by just about everyone who wastes time watching people. And the algorithms set against me are outrageously difficult, for getting visibility. I frequently get offers from IT people wanting to “fix” my foundation links because my Google score is so low that people searching for me don’t find me on the top picks because of all the blacklisting I am listed under. I typically say no to all those offers because most of them are likely the same people doing the damage, and they’d love for me to make it easier for them to rob the stagecoach. Amazon does not like me politically, and they’d love to make me feel that I’m at the bottom of a well nobody could hear me from. That is a common strategy for them, so I never expected a fair shake from Amazon. They offer the book because they are a prominent bookseller and want to say they offer such books. Even if they hate that people want to read from someone like me. So I put them out of my mind and never really took the time to see what they were selling my book for, or to check reviews because they set algorithms on their server against me that obviously were not encouraging. So, I put my mind elsewhere. The sales listings tell a different story, so much so that I didn’t even notice the Amazon pricing.

There will be a major shift in the economy over the next decade

The book has been out for a few years now, so I don’t read it every day. When I wrote it, I had been thinking about the contents for a while, but after Biden was put in the White House and Trump wasn’t there anymore, admittingly, I needed to take a break from the world for a few weeks. My wife and I took our RV out into the desert of New Mexico to escape Biden and the COVID protocols that were such a dark period in American history. I knew the economy would take a hit and that corporations had been seduced by this World Economic Forum view of the world and would need a guidebook out of their wokeness. So I wrote The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, applying my favorite sport, fast draw, with a genuine love of history. I enjoyed touring all the John Chism and Billy the Kid sites in Lincoln County during the winter of 2021, which had a lot of snow on the ground, even in that part of the world. It was a very revelatory experience for me, and it shows up in the book, which, looking back on it after a few years, is very good. Like I said, I read a lot. I have just finished a few books by Johan Norberg which I think are great, but they aren’t as good in my mind as my own book. Not just because it’s my book but because the contents are revolutionary compared to the large amounts of Marxism that have taken hold in all corporations around the world. I wrote the Gunfighter’s Guide to give people a weapon to fight against that trend, which turned out great.

A large worldview helps see things more clearly

The book as I thought it would be, has been a slow burn. It’s not one of those books that makes a splash and then fizzles out. When I wrote it, I was thinking of a book I love called The Machine That Changed the World, which is about Lean Manufacturing and is filled with many assumptions about a Marxist world without ever naming the beast. I wanted to write an antithesis to that which businesses could use to improve their situations without destroying their essential character. I have read many hundreds of business books, and most of them make it a point to declare their hatred and unfairness of capitalism, which is quite obvious in the Lean Manufacturing movement, which seeks to centralize power to the people and is antagonistic toward management, which is consistent with the labor union view of the world, which is always socialist in origin. In 2020, with Trump out of the office and the world on lockdowns, corporations thought the best strategy was to play along to get along. But after three years of the Biden economy now, people are looking for answers, and many of those answers only come from a source like mine, who has made it a point to declare the answers in spite of the social poison that wants all such voices to hide for their lives under a rock somewhere. My point was never to hide but to engage the enemy as they present themselves, like a gunfighter. Fight the villains in a dusty street and gun them down metaphorically for their intentional destruction of the world. And to be proud of it in the process. As I gave my presentation to that audience, I couldn’t help but reflect on how good the book was. I’m very proud of it; it has helped people who have read it and applied it. I don’t just reflect on the times of the gunfighters during American expansion but also look to the future with AI and improved technology. It’s more of an attitude than a reverence. But the world for the next few decades is going to move much more toward capitalism and away from socialism, and already many corporate leaders see the writing on the wall. And they were looking for a translation, so we were all meeting secretly, not for my sake, but for theirs. But if I learn of a price break everyone can take advantage of to get the book, I’m happy to share it. It doesn’t hurt my feelings in the least. I like seeing people getting it, finding inspiration, and achieving success. That is, after all, the best compliment I can get and why I wrote the book in the first place, for people to enjoy and be helped by. So the more people who have it, the better it is in my mind. And at that price, it makes it very easy for people. I can’t promise that the price will stay that way, but when I hear of a price break, I certainly will pass it along.

Diversity, equity and inclusion was always going to fail in business because it’s not rooted in real social value

Rich Hoffman

America’s Book on Strategy: Amazon is practically giving away ‘The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business,’ and that’s fine with me

One type of book I really enjoy is strategy books by different cultures to see how they view warfare. That is particularly the case with Unrestrictive Warfare written by the original People’s Liberation Army Documents. These days, around the world, because everyone wants to understand how China fights battles, that is the book everyone is paying attention to. But what continues to happen is that the United States is underrepresented in books about strategy, which has always disappointed me. Because America has had the best economy. We have had the best culture. We have the best military. We have had the best, best, and the best at everything, and because of the woke ways of the world, especially coming out of the jealous Desecrators of Davos types, we aren’t supposed to flaunt that trait. So, there hasn’t been much representation on the stage of strategy books representing American ideas instead of other cultures worldwide. I wasn’t happy with that. Because I read many books, I found that nobody was writing the type of book that America needed these days. They will read Unrestrictive Warfare, which the Chinese wrote in the late 1990s, and find it interesting but not very substantive. But it looked purposeful that America wasn’t publishing strategy guides on beating down the kind of forces we see attempting to destroy America today. There are plenty of self-help books out there and lots of books on business that are intended to help people become better at their jobs and better in their lives. But they all have a yielding to the current order of things as their primary theme. Yet, America deserves better, so I wrote The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business for that exact reason. It’s different, it works, and I am very happy that I did write it when I did because many people, especially influencers, have used it to make their lives better. And that has been good, especially with the timing of things that have come undone in the world since I wrote the book.

Amazon is selling the book currently for $7.60, and I don’t mind telling everyone that. I’m all for it if you can get the book for a much lower price. I didn’t write the book to make a lot of money, just as I don’t write for profit on this blog site. I do these things because they are the right things to do in the world, and I want people to be successful for personal reasons. I am quite aware that Amazon is not crazy about carrying The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business. Many people have picked up the book, yet no reviews are shown. And they have continued to drive the pricing down to cover their costs but to deny my publisher a piece of the pie. The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business was originally $16.93 when it first came out in August of 2021, so the pricing strategy from a very progressive publisher is obviously intended to discourage the publication of these kinds of books. But like most things we see these days, progressive politics has sought to control us through financial motivations. That’s how they control us in our jobs, that is how they are trying to trick the world into accepting progressive politics in our investments, and it’s how they control us from yard to yard in our homes. People seldom ever do things for the right reasons because they are always concerned about taking care of their financial necessities. So in that way, many of the attackers, including Amazon, try to steer us all through finance to get us to walk through the mouse maze to get the cheese they have hidden, to control what we do and think from a fundamental position of staying alive. It’s a malicious game, but I live my life in a way that affords me to think bigger than that. So I am encouraging people to take the price reduction just to get the book. If people continue to buy the book, as many people have and enjoy it, I’m happy. 

The profit for me isn’t my take from an Amazon sale, which isn’t anything at all at the prices they are selling it. I want America to survive and for many of our companies to make it through this obvious mode of attack that is much clearer in 2022 than it was even in 2019 when businesspeople who knew I was writing The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business were apocalyptic about my motivations. The woke culture was already taking hold of most company leadership at that time, and my thoughts on how to deal with it were certainly not conducive to the Klaus Schwabs of the world and what they wanted to do. My goal was to destroy woke culture without destroying the companies they were taking over by isolating the true value of our lives and the work we do in the framework of American Exceptionalism and daring those who might argue the fact to take their shots and be shot down in a dusty street metaphorically in the process. I couldn’t at that time count on all my fingers and toes how many times some enemy in the business world had tried to cancel culture me out of existence. I have spent over 30 years in business dealing with every kind of betrayal that human beings can do to each other. Over time, it is evident that most of that was a strategy being used against the United States to destroy it from within. So when I wrote The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, I had read all the excellent strategy guides that there were in the world. Still, I wanted to write one for Americans who were being attacked by jealous globalists trying to trojan horse our culture for the looting of their intentions in the light of day and hoping to get away with it. Many of those critics who expressed their disdain for what I was doing in 2019 understand in 2022 why I wrote the book. Hindsight has certainly provided them with more rational vision; let’s just put it that way.

Ideas are the best kinds of weapons, especially in war, and without question, America has been at war for many centuries now. It’s a war that hasn’t been well defined and was concealed with politeness. But as I saw all the time, we must always judge people based on what they do, not what they say. The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business will help any reader understand how to see behind that politeness to the true intentions of the many villains who are trying to destroy America through our businesses these days, under the progressive attacks of the Biden administration and a world running him who still want revenge for the Revolutionary War. If we’re going to save ourselves and our excellent economy, we need a strategy that sees the enemy and calls to name them when the rest of the culture tries to hide the name so that people don’t see what they are up to. It has been very rewarding to write The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and help the people it has already helped, primarily influencers who are in positions to do great things on the battlefield of ideas. In that way, I have accomplished my goals. But there’s more to do, and for those interested, Amazon is practically giving the book away. They might think in their progressive minds, just like Twitter, that denying profit on the book is the goal and that it might discourage me from doing these kinds of activities.

But contrary to their progressive logic, I want the book to be in as many hands as possible. And if I could give them away on a street corner for free, I certainly would. More people with knowledge of fighting this modern war is far better than a big check. Saving our country and our way of life is far more critical, and for me, that has always been the case.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Where to Get ‘The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business’: The Book Depository offers it at 10% off if anybody wants to flood Hong Kong’s streets with it to overthrow communism

Where to Get The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

So far, my new book, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, is doing what I wanted it to do; it has opened up a new kind of dialogue with my usual blog audience and expanded the message in ways that promote growth and hope. I’ve spent over a decade writing just about every day literally.  At this site, there are many thousands of articles that I have written for free that are good and relevant to the problems of our day.  But there is nothing like a book you can hold in your hand.  Many authors have published works about the opposition to our American Republic, such as Saul Alinsky, The Weather Underground, Antifa, and many others openly hostile to American life. People have read them as a recruiting mechanism toward the mess we see today.  Traditional Americans, I hesitate even to say conservatives, have not met the challenge for many reasons.  They looked at the insurrection possibilities more as a nuisance than anything, yet here we are.  These evil people have been vile, and now many of them are running our government.  And like a good sheriff from the days of the Wild West, we have to clean up our town, our country, and our very lives in ways we never thought we’d have to.  I wrote The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business as a purposeful strategy guide for undoing unprofitable enterprises in our political lives and our places of business.  At the foundations of productivity to preserve goodness and justice for all.  I will likely always write daily articles as I have, and I’ll do it because many people need to hear words of encouragement and some sense in a confusing and aggressive world.  But a book is different; when people buy it, they invest.  It has added value to them.  Then in reading it, there is the investment of time.  In the end, a book has a complete set of thoughts, from the beginning to the end.  A book projects a comprehensive view to behold and can direct the reader to a resolution, which is needed. The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business has been created as an option toward conceptual understanding.

The book doesn’t come out until August 28th of 2021. Still, just the initial links to booksellers such as Target, Barnes & Nobel, and The Book Depository have been encouraging. I’ve made many new friends from hopeful people looking for something just like The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business.   As I have been saying, this is a book I wanted to read.  At this point, I have read over 1000 books in my life.  And am well on my way toward the next thousand.  Yet, I have not seen a book like this one on strategy ever written.  I meant for it to be Western Civilization’s answer to Sun Tzu’s The Art of War which we haven’t seen in 2500 years.  So when the question is asked, why me and why this book?  It’s because I got tired of waiting for someone else to write a book like this, and nobody has.  And there are no plans to do so by anybody.

Many conservative writers are doing good work, but there appears to be none who are audacious enough to presume that they have the authority even to attempt such a book.  We would assume that such a book would come from some great war general or even a country’s president.  Yet, in truth, most of the best things in life come from those who reach for the stars and get burned along the way and are outside observers of any historical trajectory.  It has become clear that institutional assumptions and the products of their effort will never produce such an unusual perspective to defend Western Civilization’s capitalism properly and audaciously as needed.  It would have to come from a unique perspective to answer popular classics such as The Art of War and Japan’s Book of Five Rings.   It’s not in following the rules of publishing either that any such book could come to be; it takes in some cases breaking those rules because the rules have been limiting the thinking in the first place.

The publisher of The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business has been great to work with Liberty Hill, a division of Salem Publishing.  I went with them after the whole incident with Parler, where Amazon shut them off their server.  I had been considering publishing with Amazon because of their vast resources and reach, but what Parler taught us was that if we fall out of political alignment with a host of our work, we could find ourselves canceled out of existence.  So I changed course after that event and found the very conservative Liberty Hill publishers, which were terrific.  However, they have listed me as to booksellers as a conservative author. That’s true; I am a very conservative author.  But I have already seen a stigma directed at me on search engines and product placement.  For instance, because Amazon is a bookseller, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business is listed for sale.  Yet the Kindle version, which is available now, is listed on a different page than the print edition, out on August 28th.   Usually, all editions of a book are listed on the same page.  Little things like that will impact the buying experience where a purchaser may have to decide between a digital version and a print edition.  But the way Amazon listed it, they may not know they have a choice.   The book is available anywhere books are sold, so I’m not going to get hung up on little things like that. Still, it is an indication that wherever the marketplace can be manipulated against a conservative author, you can bet that some activists working for these companies will certainly do so.  It shouldn’t be a surprise, but rather, it should be expected. 

So far, the best price for the print edition has been coming from The Book Depository, which is offering it at a 10% discount off the usual price.  The Book Depository is selling The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business at $15.21 for the print edition.  There are also Nook versions of the book as well as offerings at iBook in a digital format.  We may do an audible version at some point, but the book itself should be different from what we do on the blog site.  The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business is meant to hold in your hands.  It’s also meant to be divorced from the internet, meaning that the relationship for big brother is removed from reading it. It’s a book that some mass investor may want to buy and dump into the streets of Hong Kong or Cuba to teach them how to overthrow their communist regimes, much the way communists have flooded colleges and regions of activism with The Coming Insurrection and Rules for Radicals. It would be good about now to flip that script.  There is nothing like a book you can hold in your hand or stick in your pocket to read at the small hours of the morning over coffee and pancakes somewhere to refer to when the strength of the day has worn away, and a freedom fighter needs some encouragement.  Honk Kong could use a lot of that, so that’s my thinking on the hard print editions at this point.  If someone wanted to do such a thing as an investment, it wouldn’t hurt my feelings.  If we can get them a 10% discount, I’m all for it. 

As I said, I have spoken to many good people over this past week who were very energized to get The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business to satisfy their strategic goals. It’s a scary world right now, and things do appear hopeless.  But I would argue that it is all entirely on purpose.  It’s like when a robber tells us to stick up our hands and people comply because they hope that by going along to get along, the villains will let them live and not just shoot them dead.  And that’s what we have going on a lot these days, especially when it comes to mandatory vaccination talk and the wearing of masks to submit to a tyrannical authority.  The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business is all about how to eliminate that robber before they get a chance to hold us up.  And that is a very proactive sentiment that people are finding attractive.  All hope is not lost.  I would argue that we are just beginning to win absolute freedom for ourselves in these dark times.  For many, it just takes a slightly different way of thinking to make it happen, and from what I hear so far, we are well on our way. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Blue Origin’s Spaceflight: The unfortunate cost of being one of the world’s most hated men

What Should Have Been

I wanted to enjoy the rocket launch of Blue Origin as it occurred in July of 2021.  But, hey, it’s Jeff Bezos. I’ve written many good articles on Bezos in the pre-Trump days, but he’s come out as so anti-Trump, that it’s impossible to like the guy.  But as a big fan of commercialized space and the steps Bezos had played in making it more of a reality, I did my best to put all that aside to support what he did when he went to space with three other people to prove that traveling into space could be so easy that anybody could do it.  And it was, the space flight itself was great.  The Blue Origin rocket itself was brilliant.  It took off effortlessly with minimal infrastructure and flew out into space without any sign of struggle.  The booster rocket returned to earth and landed like a special effect from some excellent science fiction movie.  It was so good that it didn’t look real.  Then, the capsule containing the passengers came back to earth and landed almost where they had all taken off.  Nobody emerged from the vehicle looking chaotic or stressed out. It was smooth as silk and quite an achievement for commercial spaceflight.  Jeff Bezos even wore a cowboy hat before and after to understand the kind of mentality it will take to commercialize space. That space flight itself did not have to involve pressure suits and other inconveniences.  In all those ways, the flight was enormously successful. However, spaceflight was never going to be the problem.  The problem was Bezos himself.  As one of the world’s wealthiest people, that, of course, makes him a target of every bootlicker there is.  Add to that the awkward nature of Bezos himself, where he always comes out sounding like a Bond villain, even at a birthday party, and the PR for the spaceflight was just terrible. 

After what Amazon did to Parler after the Trump election of 2020, it was the final straw for me.  Amazon is a great place to buy books and just about anything else you might want, but now they had made themselves political activists, and that was the beginning of their eventual doom.  Their branding would be harmed forever.  Now that won’t matter, but it will slowly rot Amazon in the years to come because they essentially alienated 80 million Trump-voting Americans, which will be a real problem in the future.  I responded by moving my book, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, from Amazon’s Bookbaby and moved it to a more conservative publisher, which took some effort.  Amazon is the largest bookseller globally, so my current publisher lists books there, but I was not about to publish my book with Amazon, even though they have tremendous resources.  It comes down to Jeff Bezos and his activism that is the problem.  I often forgive, to some extent, rich people and how they have to appease the mobs of progressivism. Still, Bezos has gone too far in trying to control the corrosive elements of progressivism by becoming one of its spokesmen.  And that is what ruined his spaceflight.  After the historic flight, Bezos gave $100 million as a donation to liberal causes to the communist Van Jones, which was simply unforgivable. 

I get it; Bezos didn’t have any blacks on the space flight, so he had to do something for the black community to justify his picks for space.  But that didn’t stop the onslaught of hatred that emerged after the flight, everything from the rocket looking like a penis to Bezos’s cowboy hat during the journey.  People don’t like Bezos because he presents himself as a progressive hack.  Like many other modern people of great wealth, they think the future is in globalism, so they have worked against American tradition to favor a change state government that liberals will run.  And that dream is falling apart in their hands, running like water between their fingers, and Bezos seems to have an understanding of that.  After all, Amazon knows that conservative books are outselling liberal books by a lot so that the trend won’t be going in the direction of Van Jones.  Bezos has gone all-in on betting that liberalism would win anyway, and that has created a level of tension that is ever-present with anything attached to Blue Origin.  Of course, Bezos shares that problem with the Walt Disney Company who has also gone all-in on a progressive world of tomorrow.  But like Virgin Galactic’s journey to space, they made the mistake of miscategorizing space travel as an extension of preserving the earth rather than escaping from it.  Bezos made comments about looking back on the earth from space and appreciating that we are all in it together or something stupid like that; it came out sounding terrible.  Not something people could feel proud of. 

That’s the sad part of the story; what should have been a great day came out as a bla.  A perfect feat of engineering that involved many thousands of people turned out to be all about the odd personality of Jeff Bezos.  Nobody cared about his mom, his brother, or the other passengers because the entire event came out as a pr appeasement of progressive erosion to give a rich person a ride into space.  The scope of the effort was lost in the hatred toward Jeff Bezos by a public that decided it just doesn’t like him.  And if he were the kind of person who could care less, it would at least be honest.  But he tries to pull the shades over everyone’s eyes, including Van Jones.  To cover that ground of oddness, he just tossed $100 million to a devout global communist from CNN, giving more power to an enemy of Americana all the while trying to appeal to the cowboys and Trump voters by wearing the cowboy hat.  What he ended up doing was making everyone mad.  The story of space was lost in the drama, which is saying a lot.  With such an outstanding achievement into the vastness of space, all people saw was a way to poke fun at Bezos, one of the world’s most hated people.  But people don’t tell him they hate him because they want a chance to maybe get some money from him at some point.  Yet as I say all the time, you can tell a lot more about people by what they do, not necessarily what they say.  And that is what came in the aftermath of the Blue Origin space flight; people could only find fault in an otherwise faultless flight.  A journey to space without error, as predictable as the hands on a clock, but as hated as a pile of cow dung.  The public would have instead had anybody else go to space aside from Jeff Bezos. That’s what’s sad about the effort; rather than advance space travel, it had the feeling of setting it back by decades.  Giving that big check to a communist as payment for letting the socialists and the communists of the world let Bezos go to space came out as an ominous message of appeasement rather than freedom.   It said to the world that we are slaves to it and the communist greenie weenies who inhabit its service like a virus of thought that seeks to chain humans to earth forever and never let go. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

The Compliance Parasites Come After Amazon: One of the biggest shakedowns known these days creates a climate of political activism

I’m not the biggest Amazon.com fan these days.  So much so that after what they did to Parler, I removed my upcoming book from their Bookbaby Publishing business and went somewhere else.  They are using their power to try to steer political theater into a direction favorable to them.  But they are a business, and they do an excellent job at what they do, so it burns me up that there are accident reports that are starting to come out against them recently announcing that their workplace injuries have doubled.  I explain the details in the video above, but the essence of this story is a large part of how government turns allies toward them through threats of activism by their compliance culture is one of the biggest problems of our modern time.  Government makes activists out of companies like Amazon with a gun to their head to work against us, and we all must deal with this problem eventually. 

Cliffhanger the Overmanwarrior


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The Good Gardener: Understanding the importance of the Amazonian wildfires and nature in general

It is really interesting to gauge how liberals view events like the current Amazonian wildfires as a catastrophe when in all reality they are quite a common occurrence on planet earth. Fires start all the time, especially by lightening, however these in the Amazon that are raging currently were largely set by farmers trying to clear their land and have gotten out of control. It has even gotten to the point where the new Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro is claiming that is political enemies are setting the fires on purpose to make him look bad as he is more to the conservative side of political thinking that Brazil typically has avoided, to their own detriment. So far in 2019 there have been 74,000 wildfires along the Amazon valley which is up from previous years and the blame is going to farming, and logging companies. So called “experts” which is the same as saying that people who have read the progressive National Geographic since they were kids and grew up to be college institute liberal activists, are warning that these actions “could” cause a stop to the world’s oxygen supply and begin to emit carbon and speed up climate change further. “OH NO!”

Well, all of that is garbage, there is an actual psychology to this pathological nonsense that needs to be understood before we have any real intelligent discussions on the matter. Of course by now we all can at least agree that liberals by their nature have attached climate science to their long established goals for communism and socialism using something everyone can agree on, such as climate conditions as a vehicle to launch their political ideology with urgency for action, to vote for them in office. And most of the time they believe their own arguments turning their plight into something that might make the plotline for a new Avatar movie where they are the heroes and all things capitalist are the villains.

That is after all what liberals are protesting in all wildfires is that imprint of human thought and action, farmers trying to grow crops, or industrialists wanting to turn trees into lumber to build homes and more businesses, are bad. Liberals want a world where nature rules, but the quandary to their effort is a scandal all its own, because what they are arguing for is to allow the world to remain sick when it is taken over by disease. Imagine a human body that accepted every little disease or cancer attempt where the immune system just accepted the intrusion and allowed the bodily parasites to take over and kill the whole body. That is what liberals are advocating, because in a lot of ways they see themselves as the parasites which want to thrive off all healthy activity and consume it into chaos, like the underbrush of a rainforest.

Trees are a renewable resource; they grow quite fast. Like all plant life they consume what we dispelled and what they give off, we consume. We have a wonderful symbiotic relationship with plant life as humans. And the more humans and human activity, the better it is for plant life. And following Adam Smith’s economic philosophies, forests are wonderful examples of the invisible hand and survival of the fittest. The best and most healthy plants grow and flourish where the weak and sickly perish into underbrush. It is that underbrush that occasionally needs to be burnt away from the good living life forms through forest fires. Naturally, liberals have an affinity for the underbrush because in the world of human life and functions that is what they are, and the thought of tragedy coming along to burn them all away is a constant fear for them. Every time there is a mass shooting, or an earthquake the first thing that is consumed is liberal ideas. Bravery, self-reliance, and proper philosophies for survival become the most urgent thoughts. Just as in mass forest fires, where the best rooted and strongest trees survive in some form while everything else is consumed.

Take the liberal gardener who lets plants grow everywhere and doesn’t tend to them properly. They always look like a mess. Compare that to the astute and meticulous gardener who plants certain kinds of plants here and there and trims back the dead limbs and shapes the growth of their garden with care and precision. The effort of the human influence to shape the garden makes it either esthetically pleasing or not, based on the interpretive mind of the human being. The gardener makes a choice to rid the world of undesirables like weeds and dead limbs and carves out beauty as a form of art, which is to say a way of thinking. A philosophy of thought, a value system that says some plants are beneficial to the garden, while others are detriments is critical to a good garden, or a good society. What makes a weed a weed? The value system that places it at a lower value than say a well-trimmed Japanese maple tree. A good gardener hopes that all plants do well, but once the garden grows, we must make decisions on what works and what doesn’t and change the behavior into something more conducive to a good garden.

Rainforests are messy, and hot. Life is growing everywhere, and it is unmanaged. Nature’s management is that occasional catastrophes like fires come along and clean up the mess. But ideally, mankind was born to think and make decisions to carve out nature for the best benefit, whether the need is for farming, or industry, the human mind is just another force of nature, and its disciplines are meant to create esthetic harmony by bringing nature under control for the use of higher needs, instead of some random nonsense of a bunch of animals living and dying in trees and underbrush that only are born, eat, reproduce and die. The human mind brings a higher meaning to all life and it is a force of nature in and of itself.

The typical liberal cannot see themselves in that higher plan because they know that in the great gardens of the world that they are the weeds, the underbrush, the diseases infecting a healthy body and that they must be eradicated in order for healthy conduct at life to occur. They may want to have a roll in the scheme of things but since they are parasitic in nature, their philosophies mandate that they must be destroyed in order for better things to live. That is why they cry so much when there are forest fires and try to threaten us all with a terminal life on planet earth, so to protect them from termination within the philosophy of politics and world conduct. They are the weeds and cancers fighting for their right to survive, but we know good health cannot support everything. As humans we must choose, just as our immune systems must choose healthy cells over diseased ones. To live and be healthy we must choose life sometimes over other life. A nice tree over a weed. A healthy body over a diseased one. And not to discriminate, but to discourage people from becoming weeds, from becoming liberals and help them in life find their way toward good thought and conduct. That is the most humane way to deal with political gardening. And the way to do it in the world such as along the Amazon is to burn away the garbage so the people of Brazil can use the land for something more than just decay and nonsense. Clear the land for farmland. Log for more lumber and develop the resources of that country so that people who are barely living in huts and on city streets can live better and longer for the purpose of existence which is not up for debate. Give them a better life in our world garden. The trees will grow back. But the weeds and underbrush need to go.

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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