Tag: Ayn Rand

Rise of Skywalker hits the Billion Dollar Club: Star Wars in the age of Trump

The final verdict for me on the new Star Wars movie the Rise of Skywalker is that I’m happy it crossed over the billion-dollar mark for the weekend. Disney needed that number to justify everything they had put into the effort, and that means more for the future, which is a good thing. I could rip the movie apart technically, and continue to be upset that Lucasfilm under Disney’s guidance veered away from the source material that was there for them for the plunder. We will never get the Jaina Solo that the series deserved and who lived dear to many people’s hearts before The Force Awakens ever appeared. But with all the mistakes made, I felt Disney turned the corner with Solo: A Star Wars Story and reached out to the fans who didn’t reach back. So Disney redoubled their efforts to win back fans with this latest movie with obvious hat in hand. That was enough for me. The most important thing to come out of this latest film is that it is one of the most positive movies I’ve seen in a very long time, everything is above the line and positive, which ultimately is what Star Wars is always about. And why people love to see the movies. We all understand reality and the nature of it. What we want to see in movies is hope, and optimism, and that is what Rise of Skywalker is all about.

The critical reception of the film I have said, and continue to, is solidified in the politics of our times and can be seen in the election of Donald Trump. For all the reasons that some people hate Trump they hate Star Wars. Some people don’t like optimism, they want artistic interpretations for the problems of their lives, not a “can do” spirit to take on anything and to win with perseverance. I think demographically, many fans of Star Wars are also Trump supporters even though Vanity Fair wants to believe that these movies are all about the resistance to Trump. The comparisons to modern politics and the way people vote with their money at the box office is synonymous. Where the rubber hits the road people pay to see hope and to walk away from a movie theater feeling good. And that is what Disney gave audiences finally after messing with the formula with experimental film makers several times in previous attempts. If Disney had just listened to George Lucas at the start of this journey, they’d be a lot better off, but at least they were able to make a recovery with these latest two films, Solo and Rise of Skywalker. Thankfully for them and the rest of us, they weren’t pig headed about it.

Even more importantly, the new ride at Disney World, The Rise of the Resistance continues to show enthusiastic support from a hungry audience. After going to Disney World the week after the ride opened at Hollywood Studios to ride it, my concern was that the movie would come out and people wouldn’t like it making the billion dollar investment that Disney made in the new Star Wars land not worth the effort. I was concerned that it was too little too late and that the brand damage to the property was too far gone. But still, well past the holidays people are showing up in the mornings to ride the most technical ride in the world and its selling out within an hour of the park opening still, meaning that the enthusiasm for Star Wars is still very high.

The most important part of the movie, Rise of Skywalker I think is at the end when Rey goes to the old farm of Luke to bury the lightsabers there for future generations. When Rey rides down the little sand dune as she did in the first movie it showed that J.J. Abrams and other writers for this latest movie understand that Star Wars isn’t about change, its about surviving and living to have a better day tomorrow. With all the events of the films in this recent trilogy Rey had shown that she was still that hopeful girl from the first movie unchanged by the tragedies she had endured. Even though Rey should have been Jaina Solo, and The Force Awakens shouldn’t have ruined the main characters from the original by dumbing them down into stumbling fathers or failed Jedi masters, or women who put their careers before their families only to breed the next generation of galaxy killers, acts like the one with Rey at the end are what Star Wars has always been about, and its great to see it get back on course.

My interest in all this is of course cultural. I don’t get much from a movie like Star Wars that inspires new thoughts in my mind. The movies are meant for children. I want the movies to do well for kids to have something to grab on to for a future where expansion into space and taking values with them for goodness late into their lives is key to establishing a wonderful future. Star Wars is key to that future, so I am very interested in how Disney uses the brand to shape goodness, and optimism in our society. But after The Last Jedi, which I liked because it had some interesting things in it, I wasn’t sure Disney would ever figure out what to do with the George Lucas creation.

But after visiting Galaxy’s Edge in Disney World and seeing The Rise of Skywalker several times at the movie theater, I can say that I am happy with the results and the mythic imprint it has on our society. There are a lot of very positive messages that are spawning off these efforts that will shape the intent of this next century so its all very exciting. It would have been a very sad story to see the brand disintegrate due to all the progressive political experimentation that has been going on, all the #METOO gestures in an attempt to win over the girls away from the boys in the audience. Star Wars is still a movie for boys ages 8 to 13. Girls can come, but its made for boy problems and no matter how much Disney wanted to change that, it was never meant to be. So at least The Rise of Skywalker returned to those roots as best they could, and the box office rewarded them with another billion-dollar money maker which they needed desperately.

Corporate filmmaking is a very different thing from a young George Lucas going to the bank to get the money to make Empire Strikes Back with all his hopes and dreams on the line, which showed in the final cut of the film. We may never see ambitions like that again in Star Wars due to the need of the films to make so much money to cover the corporate expenses. But there was a lot at stake with Rise of Skywalker even though Disney certainly has plenty of money to work with on a budget and advertising. It was good to see that a big company like Disney can gamble in a big way and come up winners when so many people need the win. Disney continues to show they don’t always understand what a winner looks like, as most big companies don’t, but they are always on the lookout for them, and they win more than they lose. And this time, its good that they won, because Star Wars will have new life, which I think is great for our future in many ways that are still undefined mythologically.

Rich Hoffman

Sushi and Kroger’s New Marketplace: Works of art often come from modifying nature

It’s true, I have a thing for sushi. I appreciate the warrior’s way that food can be created in a raw form to defy necessity and turn the experience into art. The way the food is prepared with the fine work of a knife and is placed into a composition of edible delight is something I never get tired of eating or observing. And so it has been often at my house, a nice football game has been on through the Holidays and I have wanted sushi, only the Kroger Marketplace that was supposed to be built at the end of my street has been stalled out for a few years leaving me without a proper outlet. Much to my relief, a good friend of mine sent me the article after a lot of asking on my part, letting me know that construction had resumed, and that the wonderful 133,868 square foot store was moving along once again. The reason that is such important news is that Kroger Marketplaces always have great sushi outlets. I use the one in West Chester several times a week for a sushi run. But that is a little far for me for those spur of the moment trips, so this news has been great.

I understand some of my neighbors are not crazy about the idea of the new Kroger. They have had views along RT 4 for many decades of empty farm fields in that location that look out for many miles in every direction. The Kroger location is a fine piece of land and my wife wasn’t crazy about the idea of a new Kroger being built there. After all, just down the road just over one mile was a 57,000 square foot facility that supplied everything you could want. Only for me, for decades, it was just too small of a store. I avoid going there because its just too cramped, I need some elbow room when I want to get some sushi. So learning that a new Kroger Marketplace was going to be built even closer to me and that I could run there to get sushi during a halftime intermission without missing any of a game was an absolute delight to learn.

I love nature and obviously Japanese culture is very heavily steeped in it, which sushi reflects. But I do like how the Japanese look to incorporate nature into their everyday life. That is evident when you visit their country, they are very creative people and have found ways to join nature to construction in ways that are very satisfying to their society. For them its not an “either or” scenario, its just a necessity. They don’t view preserving nature as a defiance to capitalism, quite the opposite. But we have allowed ourselves in America to have the definition of preservation established as a resistance to construction. The suggestion that an empty field has more value to nature than a booming metropolis of 133,000 square feet of food options of all kinds has been the established norm, which is a notion I reject.

Also near my home just a bit to the west of the wonderful Elk Run Golf Course is a new Kentucky Friend Chicken that I also welcomed, along with a brand new Burger King. I see all such places built as acts of creation and I love them every time they open. I love wide open spaces too, and nature. I live where I do because I get both in a kind of sushi like existence. There are great parks, great open vistas, and there are great capitalist enterprises everywhere. I can literally get a bucket of chicken to eat, any hardware I need to repair my house, and even get a new heavy-duty hitch for a truck within a half a mile of each other. Then spend a day playing golf across the street. I often said before President Trump was elected that we would know the strength of the national economy by whether or not Kentucky Fried Chicken would build a free-standing outlet near my home, because its sort of in between other locations. Obviously with the Dow hitting 29,000 in just three years of the Trump presidency the Kentucky Fried Chicken opened just before the New Year and it was right on target. A good economy is an opportunity for many creative people to do things and that is what I see every time a new enterprise is erected, and I never get tired of watching new businesses open. I like the entertainment options, but more than that, I like seeing an economy come alive as a new living thing.

The centerpiece of a great economy is the luxury of having so many options, such as being able to get fresh sushi cut nearly in front of you while a football halftime show is commencing. Only the vast resources of a Kroger Marketplace can cut through the opposition of nature to tame it to the degree that such a thing is even possible. And that is why I am excited for this new retail development. Developers are not blights on the surface of the earth, rather like the Japanese who compose nature into a beautiful symphony of food with sushi, every new enterprise built by some mind using capitalism to advance their cause is taking raw material and making a work of art out of it that expands our economy and that is one of the most beautiful things in the world.

Its true, a wide-open field is beautiful too, to see food being grown on it from a fresh spring planting is wonderful. But it’s not an either-or thing for me. I typically wouldn’t eat a fresh fish right out of a lake caught that morning, but when it is put together with the context of sushi, then I will. There are many states of nature and to me building something new is one of them. Taking something like land in its raw form and turning it into a place that has multiple beers, chips, meats and of course sushi is an amazing achievement. And to give shoppers the kind of elbow room that makes them comfortable while they are there is even better. I personally can’t wait for the opening of this new Kroger Marketplace. I will go there a lot.

While some of the neighbors in the area are still sore that they are losing their view of an empty field from their windows to be replaced by a parking lot full of cars, I think they are only seeing part of the story and need to open their eyes to the nature of the achievement. The nature is still there but like sushi, humans have taken it and carved it into what they truly desire. Construction is a work of art and creation, not a blight on nature. Its an extension of it. A parking lot is still that open field, only now people have something to do except just look at it and think of the worms, ground hogs and mosquitos that otherwise would inhabit it in a raw form. They are still there, but now there is sushi and people who are good at making it. And that is a miracle of human achievement all by itself.

Rich Hoffman

The Obscurities of Exsistance: Understanding differences between results people and process driven bureaucrats

I am pretty happy these days, we are having what I think is a very healthy growth period for the human race. That was quite evident while listening to Rush Limbaugh’s January 9, 2020 show which can be watched below in its entirety. I would suggest to all to take a little time to watch it this weekend for the content which in a lot of ways is revolutionary. Rush Limbaugh always does good shows whether or not the listener happens to be a conservative. There are few places anywhere on planet earth where these kinds of topics are discussed and analyzed that have such far reaching consequences. I am of course talking about the aftermath of the Iran situation and the killing of their top general, and how Trump did everything so decisively leaving lots of sloppy minds in his wake. Congress reacted by attempting to limit his powers, but what they are really saying is that they just want to slow him down because he’s such a fast and decisive thinker that it makes them look bad. While Trump was saying as much he had guests in the White House behind him in a speech and they were laughing to themselves at the situation as many do these days all across the country, and that is because of this issue that Rush spoke about, the big difference between people of action, and people of process.

I have always been a fast driver; I enjoy best a road with nobody in front of me. I hate most traffic. I am not a patient driver when on a highway only going 15 mph. I prefer to go 100 mph or more with no cars in front of me and I don’t look back at whoever is behind. There is nothing more arrogant than some loser who pulls out in front of you if you are cruising down a street at 50 or so and they get in front of you and only go 35 or worse. They may stick ride to the speed limit and stay there in front of you almost smiling to themselves that they are slowing you down and that its for your own good, because they think speed kills or something ridiculous. This is the mentality of our regulatory class of people who are process driven and are the direct products of our current education system which is obviously deficient.

I heard recently that Boeing employees were mocking the FAA on approval of the 737 Max with little new training for pilots. It was the New York Times reporting it as process driven social malcontents because in their world, regulations and process is what protects them from a world that demands results. They of course sympathize with the government workers at the FAA because they are those slow minded losers who pull out in front of us on the highways and hold up traffic to the speed limit or less. Speed limits as I say all the time, I hate them so passionately that I wrote an entire book on the subject called Tail of the Dragon, are for the weakest links of our society, not the best. Not the fastest. Certainly not the most competent.

I’m not saying we live in a lawless world, or a world that doesn’t need FAA regulators, or even people who drive the speed limit. We do need those people for things. But we should not like them. There is nothing wrong with mocking them just as the people behind Trump snickered at how stupid the rest of the world was while Trump was talking. People get it, they know the process drivers of life are slow, dim-wits who should not be in charge. We can use them to test our skills and advance our civilization. But we should not let them limit us creatively in the realm of business. Trump has shown why it was always important to have a business guy in elected office instead of process drivers who are overly educated in process, but not in results.

Businesspeople are used to results where as Rush pointed out, government types are used to processes. They hide their lack of courage and personal timidity behind processes and so long as the world stays under the speed limits that they set; they can feel like they are important to the growth of the world. But they aren’t, usually what happens is that they are those slow losers who pull out in front of us and ruin our drive by slowing us down ridiculously and they are smug about it because it forces us to live within their limits instead of them reaching up to ours.

Trump by the nature of his existence is forcing this discussion in ways that just weren’t possible a decade ago. Rush was right, if you really take the reason that people don’t like Trump in Washington its because he’s a results driver as most good executives are in business. He’s exposing the compliance and process class of people who have been running things for many decades for what they are, slow people who never expect to accomplish anything and to get paid well for no results. They go home at the end of everyday whether or not the work was done, they meet friends for drinks even if the world is on fire, and they could care less. They are safe in the processes that we have created for ourselves, and so long as they stay under those speed limits, they feel safe. But for the rest of us, we feel fury at the lack of results that are produced, and at the cost of such bad results.

My happiness comes from having this discussion finally after many years of observing this trend and my own personal feelings about this matter. I’ve always had a thing for speed limits and compared them to our processes in a social context. These processes greatly limit the human imagination and it makes me sick to see. I enjoy most to see free minds thinking and striving at whatever pace they can handle. I don’t want to see them running over others and killing them, but I want to see what people can do if they push themselves and processes prevent that kind of thinking and place everyone into the same box of performance based on some arbitrary speed limit that a bureaucrat conceives is “safe.”

As I tell people all the time, processes and speed limits can be used to make you better, so they aren’t all bad. We do need FAA regulators to check our quality and to maintain standards. But they should never be allowed to be the pace setters for society. If they pull in front of you on the road, you should pass them. And in the Trump presidency, he does just that and the workers behind Trump gave their knowing smiles because they understand that. So did all the people later that night in Toledo, Ohio who lined up to watch him speak in a stuffed venue in the middle of the work week. None of the Democrat candidates could draw a crowd like that even if they paid people. The process people just don’t understand because things are happening faster than they think and are willing to function. Leaving them in the dust, permanently. And for the rest of us who have felt unnecessarily restricted by these process driven lunatics for many years, finally we can see changes happening much to our relief.

Rich Hoffman

As Iran Fired Missiles, I Slept Very Well: Having a very good president in the White House

It was over before it even started as I announced in earlier articles. Trump had destroyed Iran’s “queen” in the great chess game and the war was over even as Fox News broke into its coverage to show missiles in the air headed for American occupied bases in Iraq. Every station had in fact started covering the revenge from Iran on live television and the situation looked ominous. I laughed to myself and went to bed. I was not at all surprised to wake up the next morning with a text from President Trump saying all was well, no American lives were lost. As a matter of fact, as the day evolved, we learned that the Iranians had been telling us that they were firing missiles essentially to appease their political base, but they weren’t aimed at any Americans. And they told us when they were done. They really didn’t want any action from America, that was obvious. They just wanted to show some missiles in the air flying around to show on State television to save some face after the embarrassing end to one of their top military minds. It’s not that I didn’t care about the results, but I can do math. Iran as I have said over and over again cannot fight a war. They do not have the resources for anything beyond regional terrorism. So, they weren’t going to sign their own death warrant. I slept well even as the missiles where in the air flying around in the desert.

The media was caught red handed on this one because the fuel of the entire exercise was their coverage, made up as they went along. Like many of us have been saying for decades, the media has ran many of these wars covering movements, reporting them on air, then forcing presidents and generals to adapt to the broadcasts as if it were a sporting event. This has been going on since television became a common thing. And now that we have a president who understands the game, he doesn’t get played by it, but he certainly plays the players. The drums of war were being beaten by the media for an event that couldn’t even take place if the Iranians even wanted it to. They simply don’t have the resources, which left all the broadcasters reeling to justify their panic driven coverage in the aftermath.

If you are a reporter, or a network executive, you should at least be a little intellectually curious as to the nature of war and strategy, and to know that Iran only has about 200 to 300 Scud missiles and about 100 Shahab-3 medium range ballistic missiles. Their entire strategy is to use terrorism as a leverage point to show power, because they don’t actually have any power. They have an unstable government hanging on to an old communist idea that has eroded away into Islamic ideology leaving them with very little in financial options. And without finances they can’t even buy new weapons or think about building nuclear ones. They have nothing to work with, so no possibility of a war with anybody. The energy and cost to fire off those few missiles they did in revenge of their slain leader cost them a fortune that they didn’t have, and they have no appetite to do it anymore. We aren’t talking about kids firing off Nerf guns in their back yard, it costs a lot to fire off any kind of missile and Iran just doesn’t have the financial resources to conduct a war of any kind. That is why I went to bed, because what the news was broadcasting was pure nonsense. It was a ruse from the start and any news organization should have known that. What they were broadcasting was a fiction, and they likely knew it. If they didn’t know it, they were incompetent and shouldn’t even be on the air.

I slept well because for the first time in my life I knew there was a guy in the White House who could see through the illusions and to not allow a bunch of panicky generals and advisors to poke him into war with an enemy that was about as harmful as a common house fly. Now a house fly can land in some shit and then land on your food and cause trouble, but in all reality, their intent is pretty iniquitous but not very dangerous. And Trump’s speech to the country was along those lines. Be careful with flies landing in shit and crawling on you, but for now, we will leave them alone by keeping the door shut. Trump’s speech addressing the issue was the best that I can remember. He shut down the drums for war quickly and addressed the truly minimalist situation for what it was properly, giving people an honest assessment for what was one of the few in history. Most of these kinds of things are draped in drama meant to add a fearful narrative that has a big government subtext to it, letting people know that government will keep them safe. Not in Trump’s speech. He essentially said, nothing to worry about. Its cool. Go enjoy your families. Only with him, it wasn’t a lie meant to lull people back to sleep, but to get them back to living good productive lives without the worry of some flies landing on their food with feet dripping in shit.

This is what competency looks like, it doesn’t need to fear the actions of losers. Losers do not rule the world, as the media would like you to believe. To properly reflect this new age of living, the media is going to have to adjust, they’ll have to get better. They’ll need to figure out how to cover a 24-hour news cycle without talking about war, impeachment, or some FBI scandal against our president. Eventually they’ll have to come up with fresh content all on their own that doesn’t rely on scaring everyone to death to stay relevant. I would say that time has passed, but there is no time like the present. For myself, it was the first time I went to bed when some national incident was occurring, because I have learned the falseness of it all well and could see the signs from the very first moments. And the next day, most of the country had to admit the same, even CNN. As we all learn to be more competent, and focus our efforts on productive things, the news will have to grow with us and that will be a real challenge for them. The same old tricks will not work in the future as they have since the advent of televisions into our living rooms. They could all learn some lessons from Trump himself who is the Master of Media. He was before he became president, he won because of his knowledge. And now as a president, he only has sharpened that mastery. I trust him more than I trust television executives, so I went to bed until I heard from Trump. I didn’t want to hear from all the lesser people covering things they didn’t know just trying to frighten people into staying tuned. And that not just for me, but for many people, is a very new thing.

Rich Hoffman

A Review on the Fantastic HBO Miniseries Chernobyl: Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi was never better illustrated

As I watched the fantastic HBO miniseries on Chernobyl I couldn’t help but think of someone I admire quite a lot, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the author of the great pinnacle work on human psychology called ‘Flow.’ I finally was able to watch the five part series after many people kept recommending it to me and I have to say at every level of that experience, from the writer by Craig Mazin to the direction of Johan Renck—and everyone in between from the great acting to the executives who put the deal together ‘Chernobyl’ was a bold undertaking on an epic scale. These are not the filmmakers of the 80s and 90s where The Hollywood Reporter measured success by the size of their pay checks, and overall box office, but this trend we have now of streaming projects on the scale of Chernobyl are bringing forth creative filmmakers who are functioning from Csikszentmihalyi’s ‘Flow’ on several projects that are giving the world so many new entertainment options, from projects like Stranger Things to The Mandalorian. But this Chernobyl effort was on a scale of Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List, which is one of my all time favorite films. But there won’t be big Academy Awards for this labor of love, or big Hollywood contracts. I don’t know what the makers of Chernobyl made as far as a paycheck, but its obvious they made this series out of pure love of the content, and the hard truths that come from it.

I don’t think Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi meant to reveal why communism doesn’t work in his own studies, but he did and that footprint of human effort was stamped all over Chernobyl. The film series brilliantly walked the line between the heroics of every day “working” people as Karl Marx fantasized to represent and cast a very bright light into every aspect and social level of Soviet society. The apartments were small and dingy, even the offices of the chief coordinators were skanky and shrill. No wonder everyone was so willing to lie about the status of things because nobody wanted to jeopardize a promotion into something improved. Conditions were so terrible for everyday people in Russia during this period of Chernobyl, which for those who don’t know was the site of the worst nuclear accident in the history of the world and continues to be a blight on Ukrainian politics. Even to this day, Ukraine is in the news and is at the center of an impeachment attempt by modern Democrats in America. For everyday people around the world who don’t know history or geography, the kind of corruption that these old Soviet regions bred is unfathomable.

Comparing lifestyles from the same period such as in the film Wall Street it becomes quite clear that the Soviet Union was so terrified of their people learning about the great gifts that the West might inspire into their society that they put all their efforts into publicity of the state for the purposes of the state robbing people of their natural free will so what the entire country ended up with was a massive economy filled with the Parkinson’s Law. Not the disease but the trend in human beings to fill schedule targets with procrastination when loose parameters to fulfillment are allowed and lazy ambitions fill the void. Where Chernobyl told the stories of many brave people it was only when the tragedy of the moment was able to tap into people’s natural Flow as Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi often discussed. When left to their own devices into service to the “state” people took their sweet time, did only what they had to in order not to be shot by the KGB, and the result was a society of peeling paint, small apartments, boxy cars that all looked a like and very little retail options to speak of. Because the entire society was only doing what it had to because their Flow and love of life itself was so micromanaged.

The Chernobyl story could be told in any communist or socialist country and it is ironic that the American left is so enchanted with these efforts and want that for our own society. It is an unfathomably stupid idea unless people just don’t understand the concepts behind the work of very serious modern phycologists such as Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Modern China is suffering through exactly the same trials and tribulations as the Soviet Union was during this period of Chernobyl. It is the perception of power that they have and only that. That is the reason the state must control information flow so vigorously. The same in modern day Iran. Any society where people live in sloppy conditions and there are economic struggles we will find the elements of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s observations, once you take away the flow of ambition from people and force them to serve institutionalism, you get from them a natural Parkinson’s Law. I use that term to abbreviate Csikszentmihalyi’s teachings, which of course does the trick. This was precisely why the test at the Chernobyl plant was done in spite of the need to shut down for 12 hours to meet the output quotas for the end of the month needs. That Soviet society needed to push quotas on people in such a way says everything about their society, people weren’t naturally inclined to produce, or even motivated to “over produce” as we might see in Western cultures, but they had to be coaxed a gunpoint to do so and there is all the problem with Chernobyl or any communist society.

What was remarkable about the HBO miniseries on Chernobyl is it was done by very creative people functioning from Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow ideas reporting on why communism was a massive failure because it robbed Russian society of their Flow. Whether or not this was intentional we may never know. It could just be a happy accident as events provided these filmmakers with the opportunity of a lifetime. But one thing is for sure, they seized on it and created one of the most magnificent narratives about a global tragedy that anybody has ever seen. And the work left in their wake is worth serious scientific study. Terms like Parkinson’s Law have not been around until fairly recently, certainly not as long as the peasant ambitions of Karl Marx over a hundred and fifty years ago. There are still a lot of discoveries that we need to make as a society as to what works and what doesn’t. For now we know that Western ideas do better economically, where these notions of collectivism tend to create Parkinson’s Law when Flow is robbed from individual people. We see it in manufacturing all the time no matter where in the world we are conducting it. Tight, micromanaged establishments tend to get a lot of Parkinson’s Law whereas free flowing creative efforts like at Pixar or Apple generate massive intellectual output. The results are unmistakable.

Chernobyl is the kind of program that every human being should watch once. That something like that is available to HBO subscribers or those with Amazon Prime accounts to me is a modern miracle. Such a great history lesson is available from the comfort of our living rooms any time of day in any length of time that you may wish to view it. We live in a modern world that has always craved Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow. He didn’t invent the desire, he simply observed it and noted conditions when Flow was restricted in people. But seldom is there ever a film series that shows not only what caused a tragedy on an epic scale because of Flow problems created by a government that is more relevant today than even when the event occurred. That’s what we have with Chernobyl. A massive undertaking created by wonderful Flow by the filmmakers about a society that had terrible Flow and ultimately why it’s important without being preachy. Chernobyl is ultimately about the gifts that come from a free society, the ability to look at ourselves and improve to get the desired results, something we all take for granted way too often. And we do so because of Parkinson’s Law, because we always fill the work to fill the comforts of a schedule, we see no horizon on, and think we have all the time in the world to fix it. But we don’t.

Rich Hoffman

Keith Kinnunen and Liberals: There are a lot more mentally depraved people in the world which requires us all to be armed to defend ourselves from

Not that it’s a surprise, but we now know that the shooter of the West Freeway Church of Christ in White Settlement, Texas was Keith Kinnunen—a loser who had managed his life poorly who targeted that church because they had given him food instead of money. This instance reminds me of many of my personal run-ins with homeless people. Once at the Kenwood Mall a homeless person was on the side of the highway exit looking for food, but what he really wanted was money. My wife and I went to the food court and bought him a bag of Arby’s for which he immediately threw to the ground. I’ve tried to help people like that since, but often with the same result. It doesn’t surprise me when people who find they can’t live in the world due to their lack of mental development (which is almost 100% of the time their own fault) or because they have drug addictions, that this loser Keith Kinnunen was upset that the church only gave him food instead of money, and sought to take his rage out on them due to his own radical ideas of self-indulgence.
When Kinnunen pulled out a 12-gauge shotgun to kill parishioners at that church, he managed to kill a few people before Jack Wilson pulled out his own gun and shot the assailant dead in seconds, as concealed carry holders are supposed to do. Its always sad to see anybody lose their life, but this case had a happy ending, a lot more people were able to return home to their families due to a good guy with a gun shooting a bad guy with a gun. The problem with the case is that liberals put their own two cents into this case by suggesting that instead of focusing on the success of Wilson’s actions that we should be looking at eliminating the need for gun violence in the first place, which is an astonishing statement considering that it is the liberal view of the world that caused the conditions.

Kinnunen was a troubled person his entire 44-year life, as a guy who had been married two times with ex-wives available to tell plenty of stories of his crazed anger and drug abuse, the guy was so irresponsible that he was just another homeless person. Many have pointed out that he wasn’t mentally healthy which is obvious. The burning question in this case and all of them for that matter is what the cause of mental illness is, which I often say the entire Democrat party could be guilty of. Trying to decide what is mental illness and what isn’t is where liberals have a hard time because their entire lives could be said to function out of some mental depravity not that unlike the killer in this Texas church case. They support drug abuse, do not believe in family structure and have a sense of entitlement which suggests that the world owes them something. They are not much different at face value than Kinnunen getting angry with the church because they gave him food instead of money.

This is entirely why most all liberals are opposed to open carrying of firearms because they see themselves in killers like Kinnunen. They want to believe that they are mentally healthy people, but when the facts come out on the kind of people who perform these mass killings in nearly every case, its not just a case of mental illness, but are the products of liberalism in our society—drug abuse, lack of personal responsibility for actions, and a sense of entitlement. Whether that entitlement comes in the form of federal workers demanding higher taxes to cover their inflated pensions, or whether its some loser like this Kinnunen guy who expects people to feel sorry for his bad decisions in life and to give him money for drugs so he can forget about his problems—that he himself created. Liberals sympathize with these killers because they see themselves in the mirrors of their existence—and they certainly wouldn’t want to have an armed society that could protect themselves from liberal incursions, which are frequent if left unchecked.

There are tens of thousands of liberals who are not much healthier than Keith Kinnunen functioning right now in our schools, our BMVs, even at the post office. The only reason they have not become homeless people running around food kitchens looking for free money is because we overpay them to be government leeches. Most of them are about one paycheck away from becoming assassins like Keith Kinnunen. Not that they would go out and shoot someone tomorrow, but they think about it. Believe me they do. It took Keith Kinnunen 44 years to get to that point, so its not like people become killers that fast, but the thought is in their heads and they want desperately to hide it from the rest of us. That is why they are against an armed society. Its not what they fear in people like Jack Wilson, its in a loss of a safety net to catch them if they should fail in life like Kinnunen did. Because they have more in common with the killer than they do a church going do-gooder.

Without question we could have put a suit and tie on Keith Kinnunen and stuck him on MSNBC and called him a political pundit and if he talked about global warming instead of cash from church food giveaways, we’d accept his positions as rational. But its all extremism and rooted in beliefs that need others to fill them for sustenance. Kinnunen was self-righteously religious and likely took Bible verses rooted in socialist sentiment too far and believed that people owed him a living, whereas the global warming crowd requires others to believe in a complete fiction to validate their point of view. Both ideas are rooted in collectivism requiring many sane minds to drop away their logic to accept the premise of lunacy.

We accept logically that liberals can use the IRS to steal our money for their own government theft, and that the power of government can be used to overthrow elections such as the impeachment case against Trump, but that there is some invisible line that separates the actions of Keith Kinnunen from demanding money at a church instead of food, and when a shootout breaks out over the issue liberals want to prosecute the gun owners. When in truth it was a failure of liberalized society that allowed a guy like Keith Kinnunen to live outside of jail, on and off the streets as a drug addict and a violent person to more than one spouse. We all knew Kinnunen was dangerous, but our society failed to recognize that threat because honestly, he was too close in behavior to most Democrats. So, he continued in paralysis until he eventually pulled out a gun to kill people of his own sense of entitlement. His insanity is really the responsibility of a society that did not set him right at an early age and allowed him to become a menace as a grown adult. That is why our future will require more people to carry guns in more places, because this guy isn’t the end by far. There are many just like him ready to snap and they are listening to the liberal dog whistles to fetch them on society as a menace. And it is then that we must defend ourselves.

Rich Hoffman

Dealing with the Leftist Frankenstein Monsters of Evil: The Texas Church shooting and why more guns are needed

If it was the sexual antics toward a government takeover of our 2016 election from Lisa Page that ended our thoughts of 2019 it should be the armed parishioners who took out a domestic terrorist at a Texas church that should launch our ambitions in 2020. Because there were trained participants of a security team armed at the church led by the guy who killed the suspect in the conflict, Jack Wilson—the attacker was subdued in about 6 seconds. Without voluntary armed protectors at the church ready for such action many more people would have been killed. This was a perfect case of what we have been talking about for many years. And this was another high-profile example of how such a system could work thanks to a recently passed state law that permitted concealed firearms inside places of worship. If not for that this tragic case of two people being shot would have been much more egregious, and unnecessary as we must all admit that evil is alive and well in the world, and when it shows bad intentions, it must be dealt with. Of course, the challenge to that assumption is that one person’s evil can be another person’s heaven, so there are additional complications into defining evil. But everyone can agree that when aggression is taken toward others in a life and death matter, that evil is amiss, and it must be eliminated quickly, not a 911 call later.

I always think about these things, but fortunately I live in an area where our local sheriff gets it, he understands the purpose of the Second Amendment. Yet even for me, I was a lot troubled while watching the film Richard Jewell, the day before this shooting, where in a scene where the FBI came to Jewell’s house they confiscated all his guns that had been laid out on his bed. It troubled me to see that just because the FBI accused Jewell of a crime that those agents could come into his house and just confiscate all his property, and given the reaction of the people in my movie theater, they seemed to be OK with it, accustomed to such a tyranny disguised as “safety” for the public at large. That is a very dangerous notion, and one that troubled me tremendously. It was the direct result of a culture that has been sold to us to think of guns as dangerous, or even as part of some counterculture. In that same film Jewell’s lawyer asked if the bombing suspect was a member of any fringe organizations, like the NRA and Jewell had to ask, “is the NRA a ‘fringe’ organization?”

It is that attitude actually that makes our world all that much more dangerous. Guns have always been a part of my life, since I was a very little kid to the present. And I’ve never really had a reason to use a gun on anybody, even though lots of times I could have been more than justified in doing so. It just wasn’t my go-to option when danger was amiss. But its always good to know that the option was there. I think guns should be carried everywhere, to restaurants, shopping complexes, to and from work, everywhere—because you never know when evil will show itself. This is especially true in public schools where everyone knows that they are typically gun free zones—making them obvious soft targets for bad guys looking to invoke terrorism on the innocent. Guns should be in reach of every human being on planet earth. If they were, a lot less evil would be taking place. That is for sure.

When bad guys show themselves, as this one at the Texas church in White Settlement did, the threat should always be eradicated in seconds, not minutes. It is always sad to see anybody die in these kinds of conflicts, especially if they are innocent, but the need to end that threat quickly cannot be understated. And when evil is unleashed, it needs to be quelled as fast as possible. If not faster. This is why also every shooter in America should practice speed and accuracy with their firearms so that when a threat is presented, ending it happens almost second nature with instinct. Taking a kill shot such as Jack Wilson performed is critical, there is no time for talking and pleading. This is why every state should also have a stand your ground law instead of a duty to retreat. When aggression appears, the shooting defender should not think for a second about some silly legal obligation created to retreat when showing a villain a passive attitude could end up getting a lot more people killed. A shooting defender should put a bullet in the head of evil before a countdown of 1 enters the mind. The threat should be over before anybody even realizes it started. That is why having an armed society is the best way to deal with the realities of evil.

There is no reason to contemplate the nature of a villain when they show they are willing to harm innocent people just minding their business. Laws should be clear on the side of gun owners willing to be that stop against threats at a moment’s notice. We want more Jack Wilson’s carrying guns. Whatever we might say about experiments in modern life where we have taught too many people to be parasitic in nature, that stealing, and bad behavior are forms of valor, such as what was suggested in the recent film “Joker’ we shouldn’t be surprised when hopeless losers in life are attracted to the antics of evil and consider using fear as leverage in the games of life. When we make it so that a clear definition of good and evil is blurred with addictions to pornography, drug abuse, and a social state where government takes the place of good parents, we should expect some to go too far and to fall off the edge and become dangerous. And to that warning, we should know that this one shooter at the Texas church is only the tip of the iceberg. That there are many tens of thousands just like him thinking of doing the same, only the next time it may be a school, a shopping mall, or a place of business. And when they make that mistake, someone needs to be there to stop them with a gun and a quick bullet to the head to end the thought and intention of evil that always follows.

It’s time to stop playing patty cake with anti-gun activists who sympathize with evil then want to disarm us to defend ourselves from their Frankenstein monsters. Those on the left who experiment with these false political philosophies build these monsters which we must defend ourselves from and it’s time to stop giving them a seat at the table as equal partners and to call things as they always have been. Guns are part of the solution especially when they are in the hands of skilled users. A person comfortable with a gun is one of the safest people in the world to be around, not the other way. Guns aren’t the danger; it’s trusting a system that is intent to build social monsters that is. And protesting gun use on their creations isn’t “fringe,” it’s actually the most patriotic thing you can do. And we should be doing a lot more of it in 2020.

Rich Hoffman

The Real Lisa Page: What the world looks like outside the bubble

It was sort of lost to the events of the moment, but I think it was the biggest story of 2019 and should be the last thing we think about before we usher in the new year. Impeachment after all is a very tactical decision for a Democrat party that has no other choice really. They are a loser political group looking for supporters as each day they fall further behind the trends of the times. But for all honesty the noise of the year especially from Democrats was to cover the terrible FBI scandal that sought to put an end to the Trump presidency by manipulating the law to their advantage at the expense of the rest of us. So, it isn’t surprising that on December 17th when Lisa Page went on Rachel Maddow’s show on MSNBC to give her first live interview, the story was washed out before it even hit the airwaves. Impeachment was all anybody was talking about, and the new Star Wars movie was hitting theaters giving people a much-needed distraction from the perils of reality. And of course, there was Christmas and the need to get last minute presents. All the big names in the media were going on vacation, so Rachel put on a fellow Democrat to try to clear her name and repair her own brand by “fighting back” as she calls it. The results were fascinating, and worth a last look before we enter 2020.

What Lisa Page showed of herself by opening up a public exchange on Twitter and by doing this interview was a woman lost in a bubble that collapsed right on her face as she got caught not only messing around on her husband, Joe Burrow, the aspiring opera singer and current educator with a power hungry Georgetown University FBI agent married to a woman who has seen better days in the mirror—but they were both caught attempting to stage a coup against a sitting president and overthrowing an election. Now to be fair, they were not alone, but they were certainly attempting to shape history and abuse their access to power, for which Lisa Page obviously regrets. We’ve heard her lover’s response in public in front of Congress when Peter Strzok showed what an out of touch loser he really was as a registered Democrat that thought the rest of the world was the way he and his circle of friends were, institutionalists who could name all the current popular wines, and books that they are talking about at Martha’s Vineyard on a Sunday afternoon, but not a single reason of understanding why anybody would have even wanted to vote for President Trump.

Even on her best behavior on the Maddow show, Lisa Page showed outside the academic halls of a law school, or in a opera hall where her husband might sing away the day, as she and her friends sip wine in the foyer and contemplate the universe from the perspective of Georgetown society she reflected precisely the sentiments of their director of the FBI at the time, James Comey who thought of the presidency as an extension of some “higher order” for which the FBI was protecting. Some relationship with a pagan god and the heathens of a desired monarchy, for which America had rejected long ago, yet the memos never made it to the academia of Washington which lived joyously in that bubble of social construct for which they were the architects. These FBI agents are defending an American way of life that doesn’t exist, but is rather an extension of Europe and all the dirty cobblestone streets that still haven’t been repaired from the Middle Ages.

Yet Lisa Page is tired of being a caricature of the “right” as she stated it, and she is going to start fighting back because she thinks the rest of the world is with her. Apparently her husband understands the affair with Peter Strzok, perhaps he even sang a song about it as she sipped on a vintage wine of immaculate dating and sent text messages to the Strzoks inviting them over for dinner and a book review of a mutual friend recently found on the New York Times Bestseller list, pinky out. Perhaps James Comey was available too as they could all discuss what a disgusting reprobate the American people were for voting for Trump into the White House. Affairs, what are those? What’s wrong with sharing good times with friends, until that friend falls in love with you as Peter Strzok did with Page. But to their minds it was all just a little fun, it didn’t show any bad judgement regarding their character.

And so it went during the Maddow interview that Lisa Page continued to be bewildered as to why people have made a caricature out of her, and she tried to explain her text message statements with a context that presented her case in a more beleaguered way. Watching her speak to what Lisa Page thought of as a friendly audience was a window into how all these people think when they are alone with their own kind. They are wanna’ be royalty trying to impose a standard of living that America rejected long ago, only they never got the memo. And they missed the memo because they hang around the wrong places and learn from those equally tarnished. Affairs in France are normal, and the people in Georgetown and around the greater Washington D.C. area strive to be more like dirty Europe and its topless beaches and free-thinking lack of physical possession marital commitments. What was missing from Page’s interview was any kind of understanding that the whole purpose of throwing off English rule was to get away from the very kind of people she was and desires to be. And to answer the question, Trump was elected to undo their influence over the rest of us, not to strengthen it.

Unfortunately, I know a lot of people like Lisa Page, James Comey and Peter Strzok. I live in Liberty Township, Ohio where it was founded as a direct spawn of the American Revolution but these days these leftists spawn like Gremlins that have eaten after midnight and had water spilled on them breeding like popcorn. They are everywhere, but that doesn’t make them right. It makes them simply as a form of insanity born in a bubble where natural predators have been staved off to allow them to grow. And to see Lisa Page’s face in that interview, it is the face of a young lady who has used her sex to attempt to shape the world in an image she understands instead of trying to live in the world that is. Instead she sought to use her sexuality to control the mind of the investigating FBI agent on the case of Hillary Clinton to free her candidate to control the course of the nation to her whims. Opera is all about just those types of powerplays and from her point of view, it was all very normal, and exciting. But she got caught and now she is on the front page of everything and it bothers her to know that she is not the mainstream. Her version of fighting back is to try to rebrand herself as a victim of abuse, but people see through her to the truth, she is just another slut using sex to control events in the world. And there is no way to spin that rugged truth, even on the very liberal Rachel Maddow Show.

Rich Hoffman

Richard Jewell, the Movie Review: To understand what’s happening now everyone should watch this great film by Clint Eastwood

The movie, Richard Jewell is certainly one of those that every Trump supporter should see, and those considering becoming one. No wonder it has not done well at the box office, the last time I saw such an antagonistic hatred of a movie was the Atlas Shrugged films for many of the same reasons. Critics hated the movie, it essentially comes down to institutionalism against individual rights when movies take the side of individuals, the college trained movie critics become synonymous with anger at those who challenge their understanding of the world, which was forged in such places as Harvard, Yale, Oxford and Princeton, or some of their copy cats teaching those who didn’t do so well on their ACT tests. When people want to know why the media and our government rally to each other’s needs so often, and so quickly, well, they were all taught in the same places to march to whims of the institutions while those who didn’t enjoy the experience become everybody else. But the best products of our modern education systems, our unionized government schools or our best colleges essentially become guys like the featured FBI agent played by Jon Hamm’s Tom Shaw or the newspaper reporter hot to get any story and generally bored with life, Olivia Wilde’s Kathy Scruggs. And it was those two who were playing around with each other sexually who came up with the whole story against Richard Jewell, because they needed somebody to be the face of terrorism, even if the guy was completely innocent.

There is a Kathy Scruggs in every newsroom from all sides of the sexes. There are guy versions, but this one played by Olivia Wilde was fantastic, and very close to many of the people I have known in the media. 89-year-old Clint Eastwood, who directed this picture with the experience of a man who has been around and seen everything is likely the only person who could have directed Olivia Wilde with such realism. She reminded me of a not so disgusting scum bag as Eastwood showed in his Dirty Harry film Sudden Impact, the bar whore who was the central figure behind the rapes of the two leading girls. For these characters wreaking other people’s lives is a kind of game that they love playing. It fills a void in their lives that they work very hard to hide from other people and they are dangerous. But make no mistake about it, there is a Kathy Scruggs in every newsroom to some extent or another. She is not an exceptionally evil person, she is as common as a raindrop in the world of the media, and it takes a director like Clint Eastwood to pull that kind of performance out of an actress who might otherwise not feel comfortable going to such a dark place.

We all know the story, but as I was watching this movie, I was thinking that this is exactly what has been happening to the Trump administration. Kathy Scruggs might as well have been Lisa Page in the middle of the FBI investigation against President Trump. Sexual manipulation is not a new thing for women to play against horny, stupid men, and Peter Strzok was no exception. Not all people are as flamboyant about their behavior as Scruggs was, they hide their actions better. But these kinds of things are happening all the time at every level of our society, and if you get in the way of their actions, another Richard Jewell is born. We only know of Richard Jewell because the profile of the case was a big one. There are Richard Jewell types losing their jobs every day, or being denied promotions for all the same reasons. What Trump captured of the FBI and the media in Richard Jewell was an examination into the kinds of people who are really part of these classes of people, and it wasn’t pretty.

What happened to Richard Jewell, with the attempted entrapments by the FBI was exactly what happened to Roger Stone in the early morning raid of his home at 5 AM with the CNN reporter tipped off and waiting to capture the images of an arrested Trump confidant to splash on the television at the earliest moment. Or what about pinning down Michael Flynn without a lawyer while attempting to get him to give false testimony by pretending to be his friend in the early days of the White House transition? You can’t lie to an FBI agent, it’s against the law—but they sure can lie to you, or control the evidence in such a way to make you look bad if it makes them look good in the process. This movie Richard Jewell showed how those things happen in a very legally valid way. We should all question ourselves in why we have given the government so much power over us. Well, I’d say it’s because there’s a bit of Richard Jewell in all of us, a do gooder who just wants to live a good life and we don’t want to think that people are so dishonest as Tom Shaw or Kathy Scruggs.

The problem with institutionalists like the villains in the movie Richard Jewell is that the villains see value for themselves in supporting the institutions at all cost, even at the price of humanity. And to the rest of us, we can’t even comprehend such evil, yet we face it every day. Occasionally we get fighters who know the system better than the bad guys like the attorney in the film played by Sam Rockwell, Watson Bryant. President Trump comes to mind as a person who has made so much money in life and seen every trick in the book that he can sidestep the institutionalists easily. But those not so experienced around Trump were not so difficult to pluck into the trash bins of trouble. One little misstatement at that level and you are going to jail, while gang members, thugs, and illegal aliens roam our streets unimpeded. If you lie to an FBI agent when they set up the deceit themselves to trap you in it, and you are going to jail to show their power. It’s a bad, nasty game that many fear almost more than death, and it’s sad that we have allowed it to take such a hold of all our lives.

The problem though isn’t that we are stupid, its that we have been short to admit to ourselves that people are as bad as Kathy Scruggs and Tom Shaw. We find it astonishing that they would take it for granted that we’d just naturally believe them and that we’d put up with their evil ways because we all want to believe in the good in people. But some people just don’t have it in them. They adhere so well to the institutions because as people they are broken likely from birth, and there is nothing to hold them together but the rigid rules for which they control. Whether it’s the FBI or the media, the rules are built to serve the institutions and when they need some diversion, they can always pick on the latest Richard Jewell—the good guy who is so well intentioned that he can’t see the evil that is at work right in front of his face. Yet we all see it, and its not just in the Jewell case, but it’s happening right now to our president by that same FBI. Only that story is a much bigger one that many just aren’t ready to admit has been happening. But to see it for all its possibilities, everyone should see Richard Jewell. Its one of those types of movies for our times.

Rich Hoffman

Nobody Should Care About China’s Box Office: Reaching a market of over a billion people can’t justify surrendering to communism

What I have always loved about Star Wars, aside from the obvious creativity that it takes to make the movies, is that they are in and of themselves positive stories that don’t get hung up on negativity. Yet the theme of our day is negativity, because if people are in a state of discontent they may be open to the offerings of some political class. It was probably always this way to some extent, but its really bad now, where negativity is insisted upon by certain sectors of the world, as a culture. Yet, its not always easy to see, but when something like a new Star Wars film comes out, the pop culture reaction to it is an obvious measure that we can all see and touch. And it was never clearer as to what the intentions for our society is than in reporting on the new Star Wars film, which was probably the most positive film I’ve seen by anybody in a long time, and one that certainly stands for goodness. Clearly the intent of the characters in the movie were to make clear choices about good and bad behavior. So of course the focus on the reviews was that this latest movie, The Rise of Skywalker is that it is the most poorly reviewed film since The Phantom Menace, and that it has bombed in China at that box office, see the Variety article below:

https://variety.com/2019/film/news/star-wars-the-rise-of-skywalker-flops-debut-china-1203449672/’

This is why I write so much about Star Wars, the movies are very positive and defined about what good and evil should be—as any kid’s fairy tale would. That makes them as a work of art a wonderful measure about social values and the motivations of our cultural forces. Further, I would offer that communism has been the functioning plan for many years, especially those college trained as all media people are to some extent, certainly in the case of writers of these types of articles like Patrick Frater a defense of China and its communism is baked into their view of the world, and by attacking films that are distinctly American points of view, China continues on with the mission they’ve had all along and is constantly assisted by universities and their products to advocate for and against certain types of cultures. The effort becomes grossly obvious when entertainment trades make it so obvious such as trying to slam a movie as successful as The Rise of Skywalker which made over $177 million domestically over its opening weekend and will continue to do well at the box office over the long Christmas week. Especially when the news around the world that in just a few days it made $376 million globally. That is hardly anything to sneeze at, or to ignore, culturally.

The problem is one that I have pointed out often, especially coming out of Hollywood for more than a couple decades now, where Chinese companies have been buying up interests in film studios and even trade magazines. They have been trying to do to American markets what they do internally in China as communists, and that is to control everything at every level. I mean give me a break, Star Wars was beat at the box office in China by Ip Man 4: The Finale, and that is very fishy. Instead of making the story about the Chinese box office being a failure of Star Wars to reach an audience, the story is really about how China as a government controls such box office numbers so that they can protest against western ideas influencing their country, especially when the protests in Hong Kong are fueled by those same western ideas. The box office numbers themselves do not tell the story, but our media which has been heavily influenced by the Chinese even from such a far reach uses the known measurements that China controls to attempt to shape the kind of stories that are told in our culture—which the rest of the world obviously loves as they were.

I admired Disney, which is a big global company that wants to please everyone, because they allowed the filmmakers of Star Wars to get back to what made the films popular with fans and The Rise of Skywalker is a love letter back to them full of very positive storylines that don’t get hung up on negativity. The previous installment The Last Jedi was taking a turn to the dark side in all aspects and critics loved it. But the fans didn’t. As I said at the start of this article, one way to control people is to take away from them hope, disconnect them from options so that they will be forced to embrace a way of life that the controller wishes to impose. When Star Wars looked to be taking a negative “realistic” tone with this modern trilogy, critics loved the film, but when the box office diminishing returns started showing that fans were leaving, Disney had to make some decisions and listen to the fans, and return to the kind of storytelling that Star Wars has always been for people—which is not the trend of the world full of communists in China that still have global plans.

I doubt that Patrick Frater from Variety is an open communist, but I would bet that he’s likely an anti-Trump political personality and that the whispers of his college days speak to him in copious amounts, and that the roots of those whispers were sympathetic to the type of society that China has been trying to export for decades. Star Wars obviously stands against that sentiment. While in the states, Variety has been very supportive of Star Wars so long as they could view the Resistance as being anti-Trump and liberal. However, the reality is that Star Wars has always been a small government love letter and few stories in the history of storytelling has ever shown how a government can be great one day, and on the next turn into a mass manufacturer of dystopia and scandal. The enemies of American ideas I would offer are those who have also been giving bad reviews to The Rise of Skywalker. While Disney has tried to make everyone happy, especially with the ridiculous lesbian kiss at the end of the movie as if to throw a bone to the dogs, ultimately there is no way to shut out the negativity that comes from the press because the goal is to attempt to keep people from being enchanted by the positive messages of Star Wars, since it is control over mankind that is at stake.

This movie is just one more example of why China is ultimately irrelevant. Nobody can make movies culturally that China and America will enjoy together. If a film studio tries to make movies that China will like, American audiences will push it away. And if the story is too “western” then China will shut it down in their markets. This is the nature of this entire battle yet I don’t see any evidence from the trades in dealing with the issue properly. That is because they are part of the problem and when they can, such as in this Variety article, they must take down any challenges to China as a communist culture. To save Star Wars, Disney had to choose, and they went with traditional western storytelling as they should. Nobody cares about China’s stupid contributions. Its worth dropping a $100 million at the box office, which is likely what it cost. But that money will be made up many times over in the other markets before its all said and done, and Disney will be rewarded for their choice, even if the trades like Variety are rooting against it for all the reasons stated.

Rich Hoffman