Tag: corruption

Observational Realities: What the premier of ‘Solo’ in Los Angeles tells us about the future

I am the type of person who could write a novel about the reason that a person might change the way they hold a fork. Observational changes in nonverbal communication are an obsession with me and are a constant companion. I would have to say that nothing happens that I don’t notice. I am always on the lookout for why someone might have changes to their eye movement, or the tip of a head as it’s positioned on the shoulders, does it drop more than usual, or is it cantered off to the left or right more than typical. Is there an unusual emphasis on words when somebody is speaking and if there is, what does it mean—those types of things. So I enjoy big pop culture events because of all the mass information available to the way I think. I love going to baseball games where there are lots of people, because it tells me so much about the temperature of our culture, and I love big entertainment movie premiers—especially for projects that I am excited about like this new Star Wars movie, Solo: A Star Wars Story because there are always important things that can be learned about the nature of our society. And the thing that I thought was most compelling at the Solo premier in Hollywood this past Thursday wasn’t the usual fanfare that comes from most Disney productions that they know going in will turn in big box office numbers—it was that Bob Iger wasn’t there. I would encourage you dear reader to watch the whole red-carpet coverage. It was quite impressive.

Going even further was the lack of VIP formality at the event, even after the premier. The after party mixed cosplayers and celebrity actors together in ways that were very unusual for Hollywood which is kind of a theme with this new Solo movie. Freedom from social pretension is the underlying message of this new Star Wars movie and the absence of authority figures in our lives is the goal of Han Solo, and Disney wisely embraced that during this premier. This Star Wars movie is quite different from any other in the past, and it reaches back to recapture that feeling so many people had in 1977 when the first film came out where a much younger George Lucas put out a very unusual movie he had made with his wife in what were some very happy days for the fledgling filmmaker. Not happy on the business side, or the marital side, but from the ideological position where observations made were translated into unique characters placed into the Star Wars movies, like Han Solo—maybe one of the most independent characters ever put into film. That revulsion for authority figures was actually quietly part of the Disney movie premier. There were no special speeches by anybody from Disney or Lucasfilm before the three theaters started playing Solo: A Star Wars Story—all that happened were that the lights dimmed, the movie started, people had a good time, and afterwards everyone mingled together no matter what their social standing was. If you were at the premier, you were someone and therefore welcome to interact with anybody, anywhere within the scope of the premier. It was all very unusual. The richest person in the world was at the premier, but nobody made much mention of it. At the after party mixing with fans dressed in their favorite Star Wars outfits was a bald guy introducing himself as, “HI, I’m Jeff.” No pretension what-so-ever.

What these movies about Han Solo do for the Disney franchise of what is coming in 2020 and thereafter is that they use the main character to open up the entire galaxy to new stories. Solo is the thread that is connecting the massive mythology that is being planned by Lucasfilm and that is important in many ways. Lately I have been talking a lot about the scientific changes that are coming to us in real society, like the Uber Elevate sky cars, the missions to Mars by NASA and Elon Musk’s Space X, and just yesterday The Boring Company finished digging a tunnel under Los Angeles meant to carry traffic under the busy city with car pods and Hyperloops. Currently there is a video from Boston Dynamics that is freaking people out displaying a robot running across a park and jumping over a log in much the way a human does, so we are seeing a competitive species of a living thing that humans have invented moving into our world and it is causing some anxiety. There are a lot of things changing and what I see in pop culture are ways to intellectually deal with them that are emerging in our art, like in these Star Wars movies. For many people they need science fiction and fantasy to open their minds to the explosion of new ideas that are coming to the human race in a very rapid fashion and companies like Disney are trying to embrace their role in the whole thing in a proactive way.

Humans need conceptual tools to help them navigate ideas—in much the way that Star Wars needs Han Solo to open up the context of future stories, the elements of the films—the space travel between planets, the way that space travel is conducted, the type of people who will do it, and even the tools that humans use while doing all these things—like robots, religion, and even the type of “can do” spirit that everything takes are part of movies like Solo: A Star Wars Story. The movie exists to make money for Disney and all the merchandise retailers, but of course there is a deeper meaning that people like Bob Iger may not be consciously aware of, but the greater purpose is certainly part of the overall strategy. I watched very carefully the interview with the two Kasdens who wrote this new Solo movie and just like Larry was when he wrote the great film Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Empire Strikes Back, he knew what he was doing with his son on this latest film. It is just the kind of movie that people are looking for at this particular time in our lives where technology once again, as it was in 1977—is taking over and we are wondering what our place is in all of it. The original Star Wars movies told us it was OK to embrace the future and what we ended up with was the fabulous 1980s. I think the Donald Trump presidency had a lot to do with why the original Solo movie directors were fired, because Disney had planned a certain kind of Guardians of the Galaxy Star Wars film featuring Han Solo, but that wasn’t going to work in a post Donald Trump world and Kathy Kennedy wisely made the change to more of a traditional western as opposed to a color popping change that might have been a much more progressive film. I noticed that Disney has been very careful not to put Woody Harrelson on the red-carpet interviews, because he is a major pot supporter. He’s done a few interviews, but not much—he’s not even featured in the Denny’s cards from the promotional tour—and that says something.

Everything means something and there is a lot going on with Solo: A Star Wars Story. Disney is giving fans what they want in a Star Wars movie even if they don’t personally like the direction the franchise is going, because they have their eye on the bigger prize—the furtherment of human civilization as a whole, and the part they play in it as artists. While the company of Disney may not want to do a modern cowboy movie with hot rod spaceships, the fans want it, and that’s what drives merchandise sales and brings people into the parks where the real magic happens for Disney. That’s also where new technology gets its cutting-edge tests for public consumption, and directly leads to the world we are all stepping into. We are all going to space and our daily lives are changing with all this new technology. As humans we are looking for ways to process all this information into the context of stories, which is what we have always done when processing new observational realities. And it’s all very exciting!

Rich Hoffman

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Uber Elevate in West Chester, Ohio: Getting ready for the future, because its on our doorstep–all we have to do is open the door

Sign me up, Uber doesn’t even have to sell me on it. I have been all about skycars for over two decades now and understand that this form of transportation was always the key to our future as human beings—everywhere in the world. It is time for that great technical leap and I am prepared to do whatever needs to be done to bring a skyport to my town of West Chester, Ohio. Let me provide a situational necessity for why Uber Elevate is needed not just in my home city of Cincinnati, but in every city. Here is a problem I run in to several times a year, I have business guests from out-of-town. At the conclusion of our business day they go back to their hotel, usually a few miles down the road in the heart of West Chester, Ohio. Before they leave, I offer to take them to a Reds game, which they almost always accept, especially in the Diamond seats for the full Mercedes-Benz sponsored luxury experience. The game starts at 7:10 PM, but to take advantage of the dinner option, we need to arrive an hour early. Our business day ended at 5:30 PM but the relatively short drive from West Chester to downtown Cincinnati just to the south takes an hour due to the traffic congestion. That doesn’t leave my guests any time to change cloths and get ready, and still have time to get to the game without missing something. What I need in those situations is to go to a Uber Skyport over by the Top Golf complex with my three guests and fly down to the stadium landing at the Uber Skyport at the Banks. From there we would simply walk into the stadium and enjoy our game without any delays or traffic anxiety. And a successful day of business would be concluded in the most optimal way possible. After the game I would dial-up a Uber Elevate vehicle from my phone app which would be waiting on us at the skyport pad to take us all home. The reality of that experience is about five years away with a realistic projection date of 2023.

I watched the Uber Elevate presentation that they did this past week with great enthusiasm. When I saw that NASA was affiliated with their project I was even more impressed, finally after many years there was a viable plan to take transportation into the air where it belonged with a viable business model. Most of the technical problems have been worked out ironically with the toy drones that we can all get at Target or Wal-Mart. But these drones are just bigger and can hold passengers. The variable speed engines to provide the lift and computer-controlled adjustments that had to be made to deal with wind shears and other weather anomalies were present and it was now time to finally have an intelligent discussion about personal transportation by way of sky transport.

The Uber Elevate concept would need to be in high population areas to work well and my town of West Chester is just the perfect location for one of the opening cities. Already Uber Elevate is set to start operations in 2023 in the Dallas area and in Los Angeles. But quickly they will spread to other cities once public trust can be built with the new technology. With most of the current skycar designs there really isn’t any way that the vehicles will fall out of the sky. There are too many propellers on them to allow a vehicle to fall, the resistance of the air passing through the blades would have a kind of paper airplane effect in case of irreparable power failure. But that is a worse case scenario. In so many ways the Uber Elevate vehicles would be many times safer than a conventional car because it has upward mobility to keep it out of the trajectory of other vehicles. Riding in a Uber Elevate vehicle would be very comfortable and not violent in any way. It would be smooth and transitional from takeoff to destination landing. It would be no scarier than riding an elevator in a sky scrapper and looking out the windows once at the top levels.

Like it or not this is where transportation is going—its where it must go. There will always be a need for cars and large trucks will always be in demand to deliver goods and services. But for personal transportation from city to city or even across a large metropolis, the Uber Elevate is the best option there is. Getting from one end of Manhattan to the other is best achieved by flying over everything, not with an expensive taxi ride stuck in traffic every block of that big city. With Uber Elevate you would just walk to a building near Central Park and take the elevator up to the top floor where a Uber Elevate Skyport would be located and grab a transport to the financial district with a short five-minute flight over blocks and blocks of traffic. There is no infrastructure investment either at the ground level or underneath the city, everything would be vertical, which is the whole purpose of cities.

Even though part of the Uber Elevate presentation makes the assumption that cities will continue to grow vertically, such as in Mexico City, I can say that I don’t think people will be moving into cities—cities tend to expand outward as the tax problems of urban development pushes away wealth into the suburbs. That means that for people who work in the cities but live out in the suburbs the highway system just can’t deal with all the commerce, which is why it takes in Cincinnati an hour to drive down I-75 a mere 12 miles during rush hour. Getting to a Cincinnati Reds game from where I live is very difficult and in West Chester that is where so much business is done these days in the Cincinnati area. It’s not done downtown because it’s too difficult to get in and out of the city. But with Uber Elevate, much of that problem is solved. I can think of at least one downtown Cincinnati parking garage near City Hall just south of the Convention Center that would make a perfect Uber Elevate Skyport—and it would do big business in that location.

That means what is left to do to make all this happen is we need to get some money people together for the initial investment and we need to solve the political problems and all the regulations that currently stand in the way of making such a thing happen. The prototypes are already there and will be ready for flight by 2020. That only gives us three years to build the skyports and work out the navigational routes—for instance in the example I provided, buying the land and building skyports in both West Chester, Ohio and on the Banks in Cincinnati. Eventually of course within the subsequent years there would be hubs of skyports all around the I-275 loop, just as there would be in every big city that could transport people in and out of their cities easily and to all points around their metropolitan areas. Once that network was established then there would be city to city travel, such as from Cincinnati to Indianapolis, or Chicago to Detroit, Los Angeles to Las Vegas and so on. That is the way of the future and I am happy that we are now on the doorstep to it. Now all we have to do is open the door. I’m ready—are you?

Rich Hoffman

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Iran is Finished: Those with money always determine the rules–and the outcome

How wonderful it is that Donald Trump as President of the United States pulled America out of that treacherous scam of a deal with Iran. With all the talk about how dangerous it was I have not heard a single media outlet tell the truth about Iran and why the Democrats under Obama were so willing to give so much to them without anything coming back in return. The answer which is key to the entire situation is that it was Marxist revolutionaries that moved in and took over the Iranian government in the late 1970s and they still rule to this day. Hidden behind the radical Islamic practices of showing anger toward the Sykes-Picot agreement of 1916 is the not so subtle push to spread Marxism to the entire planet, and to use force wherever necessary to do so. Most everything done in the Middle East including the support of Saddam Hussein of Iraq was to deal with the mess created by Sykes-Picot and the spread of Marxism that was generated in anger over that World War I negotiation. In the stalemate of a century of policy failures in that region it was always Marxism and a strong desire to spread socialism and communism to despot countries around the world, like Cuba, El Salvador, all of Africa, North Korea, Vietnam, Russia—virtually everywhere—which drove the politics of the Middle East. And the deal Obama’s administration made was meant to provide money to the struggling economy of Iran to keep them active in that original aim of spreading Marxism to every corner of the world through terrorism. Isn’t it something that nobody is talking about any of that?

The truth of the matter is that Iran isn’t much different from what happened to Venezuela in South America. Sitting on major oil reserves the world was willing to put up with the socialism and Marxism that was destroying the governments of those two countries—because of their oil. Socialism had already infected Europe, so they had no real reference point to judge the evils of the behavior in Iran—since they weren’t far from being in the same boat. Obama’s deal negotiated by John Kerry was designed to tie Europe, the United States and Iran together in an effort to keep the economy of the failing Iran together so they could perform their role in the great scheme of Marxist expansion.

Any college professor in America could tell you what I just did dear reader, which is why they support Iran mysteriously even though currently the country is the number one sponsor of terrorism. That is because most liberals support that Marxist spread of influence, and they are rooting for Iran to do their damage for the acquisition of socialist triumphs globally. But for everything to work the United States had to be involved because it is only from that capitalist country that there is any real value for Iran to loot and continue to exist. What Trump did was cut off that support. The deal Iran has with everyone else suddenly became worthless—Europe doesn’t have anything of any value to add. With the United States out of the deal, Iran has no cover and no way to prop themselves up on the world stage to hide their acts of terrorism, or to fund it.

Put another way that might be easier for people to understand, many years ago I had a group of family members who wanted me out of their way. They didn’t want me in the family and they wanted control of my wife. When I wasn’t intimidated by their outright aggressiveness toward me they regrouped and decided to play nice to my face in order to bring about financial ruin behind my back. The trouble was, my wife and I had great love for their children so if we wanted to see those children have a good life, we had to deal with these people in a civil fashion. These family members calculated they could put us in a dangerous position to bring about financial ruin to my family achieving their objectives of destroying me to get me out of it, because if I had no money, the thinking was, my wife would divorce me and they’d all live happily ever after—from their point of view. They didn’t care about my own children, or even my wife, they just wanted me out-of-the-way any way possible. So when frontal aggression failed to scare me off, they decided to make a “deal” and they used their children as the bargaining chips knowing we wouldn’t do anything to risk their wellbeing.

Once the father of these kids realized that I would do anything to make sure his kids were well off he became lazier and much less motivated to work. He spent most of his time lying around the house feeling sorry for himself and complaining that he wasn’t wealthy. Eventually the whole family ended up moving into my house because they had no place to go. I had to put up with it because the fear was that great harm would come to the children if we kicked them out. They had in many ways made themselves addicted to my every effort.

For many months on and off over several years the entire family loafed around and mooched off my efforts. My wife was a housewife, as she stayed home with our children. I was already carrying my whole family the way men have always been expected to. But now there was an entire family of five living in my house composing of nine people and essentially only one adult working. My situation was a perilous one, it was a situation that directly affected my wife.  I thought having a knock down drag out fight might be needed which is how I prefer to do things, but then that would have damaged the children and the larger aspects of the family, so what was I to do? Things are almost never literal enough for a good fight, strategy is often the most important combatant, and winning without physical confrontation. Well, I worked three jobs, two of them full-time and one part-time on the weekends and I made enough money to cover everything. In doing so I accomplished two things, I gained leverage of the situation over the lazy parents who found themselves addicted to my efforts, and because of that, it gave me power over the situation to protect the children, for the sake of everyone involved. But for the husband of that ridiculous couple, I showed him that he wasn’t man enough to keep pace with me and he gradually withered away in guilt. It took a few years, but the experience destroyed him as a person, as he deserved it. I did all that work and I still made time to play with all the kids and help them anyway I could, and it had a major impact on them. They grew up moderately intact. Not the way they would have if my wife and I had raised them, but better than they would have been without us in their lives. The couple ended up divorced once the kids were grown, and in exactly the condition we predicted they would at the time. Looking back, I am proud of how we handled a very delicate situation. The key was that by having all the money in the situation it gave us the moral authority to do what needed to be done in the long run. Instead of giving them what they wanted, which was to crush me out of existence, I simply showed that I was so much of a man who I could hold up the entire world and then some—and still smile and have fun with life.  Gaining the high ground is important in every major conflict if you can get it.  Money in all civilized society decides who has the high ground and holding the high ground in an effortless fashion, meaning you do not give your enemy the impression that you are exhausted is the most demoralizing thing you can do to win over such opponents.  And when they have ill intentions for your life–who the hell cares how much you hurt them.

Essentially this is what Trump has done with the Iran deal, only he has cut it off at the time when everyone was most addicted to America’s money. Like my situation, he had to wait for the kids to grow up, when they could no longer be harmed by any action on our part. For the United States that time came when North Korea decided it would rather have season tickets to NBA games from the West rather than carry on the failed policies of Kim Jung-Un’s communist father and grandfather. Once Iran was isolated, the time to choke off their income was there, and because they had grown dependent on the efforts of the United States, they are now unable to survive without the money from the most successful capitalist country on earth. Iran has no money to carry on their nuclear program, just as North Korea didn’t. And the Iranian people are tired of a Marxist regime limiting their opportunities for the future, so they are ripe for their own revolution back into a capitalist country. But they won’t act until the current Marxist regime is broke of money—so Trump made a move that Iran can’t survive. They will be crushed without anybody having to fire a single shot. Europe will be fine, and perfectly safe, because everything always depended on the United States, because it was they who had all the money. And when you have the money, you get to rule the circumstances.

Much like my personal story, the Iranian deal centers on financial power. Rather than sitting around feeling sorry for ourselves, we always had the power to solve the problem by using our money to control the situation. Trump held his cards long enough to squeeze out North Korea so now is the time to make the move against an only slightly stronger Iran. But Iran unlike North Korea already has internal rebellious elements hungry to seize power back into the people’s control. Marxism has failed in Iran, and everywhere else it has been tried. Their plan was to loot off the United States until there was nothing left, just like the family I described who wanted to get rid of me tried to work me into my own death—literally. But once that failed and all the financial leverage was on my side of things, they found themselves crushed by the guilt and their own lack of resources and the rest is now history. Iran has suppressed their own people and they will no longer be able to bring death to the West by looting America until there was nothing left. Now all the wealth is in our court and they need it to survive—so they’ll have no choice but to submit. Mark it down on your calendars. Iran is as good as gone.

Rich Hoffman

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Melania Trump’s “Be Best” Initiative: The secret to success is within us all–if only we think right about it

Even if she looked like an elephant’s ass, I would still think that Melania Trump is one of the most beautiful people on planet earth. Fortunately, she looks as wonderful as she acts from the inside out making her a striking personality and upon seeing her in person, I can report that the cameras don’t lie. In fact, they don’t do her justice. She is a truly beautiful person and the United States is excessively lucky to have her as a First Lady. I think she will go down in history as THE best with no close second, which says a lot, because there have been many great ones over the many years of our country’s existence. So I wouldn’t have expected anything less from her when she announced on May 7th 2018 her latest White House Initiative: “Be Best.”

I love the name for her initiative, “Be Best” which is rather all incumbent toward what is needed in our modern age. Everyone should wake up each day trying to be the best that they can be at whatever it is they are doing, especially children because the trajectory of their lives will follow the path of whatever it is they are thinking about, so they’ll always do themselves a huge favor by thinking the best of everything, no matter what it is. The program as Melania Trump has outlined it consists of three basic elements listed below:

https://www.whitehouse.gov/bebest/

WELL-BEING

By promoting values such as healthy living, encouragement, kindness, and respect, parents, teachers, and other adults can help prepare children for their futures. With those values as a solid foundation, children will be able to better deal with the evils of the opioid crisis and avoid negative social media interaction.

SOCIAL MEDIA

When children learn positive online behaviors early-on, social media can be used in productive ways and can affect positive change. Mrs. Trump believes that children should be both seen and heard, and it is our responsibility as adults to educate and reinforce to them that when they are using their voices—whether verbally or online—they must choose their words wisely and speak with respect and compassion.

OPIOID ABUSE

Opioid dependence, addiction, and abuse are an epidemic in this country. BE BEST will support the families and children affected by this crisis, bring attention to neonatal abstinence syndrome, and help educate parents on the importance of healthy pregnancies.

It was pretty disgusting given the positive nature of this presentation for many in the media to criticize Melania Trump for her accent and let’s not beat around the topic—because she is a gorgeous human being. In a world where we are not supposed to discriminate against other people for how they look or what sex they happen to be, we should never berate another person just because they are beautiful. Melania was mocked because the media believes that her husband President Trump is the ultimate cyber bully, but what they miss is that it was never he who initiated the fights. The real bullies are those on the political left who use all forms of media, especially social media, to bully people through threats and intimidation into following in behind their social constraints. What those who criticized this very beautiful First Lady for, this “Be Best” initiative, were really trying to do was force Melanie into hiding so she can’t do things like this from the platform of the White House. The political left doesn’t want anybody to “Be Best” they want mediocrity so that people always turn to government for their needs, which is their essential philosophical premise in everything they do. Donald Trump is not a bully, he is one who fights back, and his wife Melania is much the same, only she uses different tools to do so.

All three of the items she listed as part of her “Be Best” initiative are symptoms of poor left-leaning political philosophy, the bullying on social media coming straight from the peer pressure tactics children learn from their public educations. If people are off doing what they want, the public schools teach children to gang up on other children to push the rogues into a peer groups formed by the government school. That is the root cause of most bullying on any media format. Even the idea of well-being is a derivative of left leaning failure because that is something that everyone must work out for themselves, and if they are following an inauthentic existence not conducive to their personal initiatives they will not be well off emotionally. Those problems often lead to the opioid abuse problem that we currently have in America. When people desire to turn off their minds to the numbness provided by drugs there are intellectual failures going on that the body is seeking relief from. So while the three topics sound distinctly different, they are very interconnected problems given off as by-products of left-leaning political ideologies.

In many ways I think this “Be Best” initiative is more powerful than Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No” campaign—because Melania is dealing with the basic essence of most of the problems young people face today. No kid wants to grow up to be “middle class,” or “poor.” They don’t want to think of themselves as blacks, whites, males or females, they just want to have a shot at the wildest dreams they can come up with as a result of their childhoods of playing. I make mention often of how the lights of children gradually go out the older they get. Before five years of age, most kids still have on those lights in their eyes that they can be anything they want in life so long as they can dream it. This is a very optimistic period in their lives. But due to our social failures in government education and our general failures as adults to adhere to a successful philosophy that leads by example healthy, and wealthy lives in America, children begin to lose hope with each year they come toward adulthood. To deal with that loss of hope they turn to peer groups and drugs to mitigate the losses they see coming at them faster than they are prepared to deal with such a crisis. The genius behind Melania’s proposal is that by taking the mind to the place of being the best at something, it puts the acquisition of dreams on a much higher priority list and even if young people fall short of their wildest fantasies, they often find that their lives are much better off as a result of their high objectives. When we have a society with such expectations, the net result is often a much-improved overall society.

It’s not enough to just say “No” to drugs. You must stop why people desire to do drugs in the first place, or that temptation to gang up on another child from within a peer group to push individuals into breaking down to the force of a mob and adhere to the values of a foreign entity just to survive the threats of physical and mental harm will continue to persist. What Trump has been doing is bullying the bullies, he has not been the villain. And Melania coming from a communist country as a little girl to end up in the White House gaining a platform to actually help people has done the most with her position in a positive way—and her efforts are beyond criticism. Nobody in their right mind could say anything negative about Melania Trump or her efforts at improving the world—unless they are part of the problem. And for those who stand against the “Be Best” initiative, they reveal themselves as the true villains of our national politics and have always been part of the problem for which we must now correct.

Rich Hoffman
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The Republicans of Star Wars: Expanding the base with new voters inspired to action by fantasy meeting reality

It was good to see that two Republican politicians that are notable in Ohio politics took a moment on May 4th 2018 to honor the now official Star Wars holiday which takes place every year on that date. Jim Renacci who is running for the Senate seat in Ohio to challenge Sharrod Brown put out the press release displayed below, and Sheriff Jones put out a Tweet that was well received by Star Wars fans. It would be easy for either politician to ignore the Star Wars holiday as both men are over 60 and could plead ignorance to the cultural changes that are taking place artistically by the Disney franchise but they wisely embraced the holiday which was very smart–politically.

Good afternoon,

Today is Friday, May 4th a normal day for many, but die-hard fans of the Rebel Alliance will tell you: it’s Star Wars Day.

The first Star Wars movie to hit theaters (eventually subtitled Episode IV: A New Hope) was released in 1977, 41 years ago. Though this blockbuster franchise has existed for over four decades, career politician Sherrod Brown has worked in politics even longer, first being sworn into office in 1975.

“While Brown has lived in a political bubble for the last 44 years—never bothering to develop real-world experience—Jim Renacci has worked as an entrepreneur for the last three decades, creating more than 1,500 jobs and employing over 3,000 Ohioans.”

— Brittany Martinez, Renacci for Senate Communications Director

I’ve been writing a lot about Star Wars lately for a lot of reasons. Not only am I excited for the new Han Solo movie that is about to come out, but I can’t help but notice a number of things that are happening where politics and entertainment are coalescing together in new and unusual ways. I personally think that the new film Solo: A Star Wars Story will be one of those special movies similar to what happened when Raiders of the Lost Ark came out in 1981 and was one of those movies that everyone went to see and was a kind of unifying factor in our society culturally. Most movies that come out don’t have the potential to touch just about everyone who watches them the way that I think this Solo Star Wars film will. When Raiders came out it was a year and a half into the Reagan White House and looking back at how politics and entertainment came together to create a positive decade for America, I can’t help but notice the similarities happening now in 2018. Only I think the potential now is much greater than it was back then. So that prospect has given me great excitement. We are facing a new decade that will not only see mankind visit Mars, but there will be economic expansion that will touch literally every country in the world and their point of entry into those new opportunities will come ironically from Star Wars. People in China and India don’t watch Fox News but they will see Star Wars and be touched by it likely in some way and that will shape their politics in ways that aren’t explored under normal circumstances. But these are not normal days of political development.

I recently wrote of the nature of the Star Wars stories as being best when they are anti-authoritarian, because that was the original vision George Lucas brought to the film series. When Star Wars works best, they are anti-authoritarian art. When Star Wars fails, they are saturated with progressive politics reflective of the creative people who work in the film business. The new people running Lucasfilm and Disney these days are starting to understand that relationship through trial and error, and I think we will see those results in the new Solo: A Star Wars Story movie. Star Wars is not a form of liberal art, it’s a conservative endeavor by its very nature. Even though George Lucas meant it as a reflective form of art from the counter-culture, it was his love of old westerns and 1950s science fiction that set Star Wars apart from everything else that was being produced by Hollywood.

It is hard for liberals to look at themselves and admit that it is the Democratic Party that is all about tyranny and attempting to control people’s lives. They sold the Democratic Party to themselves as the part of civil rights and empowerment, but it was always the Republicans who truly stood for all the things that gave power to individuals and philosophically relied on smaller government to advance a country’s needs. That is why Republicans tend to love Star Wars. Even though the creative people behind Star Wars self-identify as Democrats they philosophically have been making Republican movies because the stories have always been rooted in the traditions of mid-20th Century America. The rejection by fans of elements of Star Wars since the Disney acquisition have been those Democratic elements that just don’t fit with the traditions of the old Saturday morning matinees that inspired George Lucas. Just as Disney would never have been such a massive company if it started out as a liberal enterprise, the origins of both film franchises was rooted in traditional America which Republicans represent.

This is important because if you look at the pod cast shown below where a big show was recorded in a Denny’s to celebrate the upcoming Solo: A Star Wars Story which the restaurant chain is promoting, there is a represented fan base there which I would bet are all potential Republicans, yet they don’t currently vote. If you listen to them speak, they sound like Republicans, they are certainly not collectivists, but the political party structure as it currently is does not inspire them to participate. Getting to know elements about the Star Wars movies are much more interesting to them. And I can say that there are many millions of these people out there, they are politically disconnected from the real world, but the politics of Star Wars as a functional mythology philosophically grounded in the traditions of America and being shown all over the world culturally are aligned with them. It would not take much to convince these people to vote Republican, because in so many ways they are already there.

Until Donald Trump came along Republicans allowed themselves to have their messaging controlled by the Democrats who tend to be better at marketing themselves even if they steal all the good stuff from Republicans—like civil rights, women’s rights, and small government ideas. What I see happening is now with a year and a half of Donald Trump and Star Wars really dominating the entertainment landscape, those two things are coming together in a way that should expand party affiliations in favor of the Republicans. Smart Republicans like Jim Renacci and Sheriff Jones already understand that the way to expand their party base is to reach out to Star Wars fans and get them out voting for Republicans in elections.

Even through Bob Iger at Disney is a Democrat, and Ron Howard who directed Solo: A Star Wars Story is not a Donald Trump lover, they have both done a really good job for their responsibilities in the movie business. If they behaved like liberals in their jobs, they obviously would not have done such a good job so it doesn’t take much to win them over too. The new Republican Party under the Donald Trump White House is actually something that social liberals but business conservatives could sign up to be a part of and that would truly be a unifying factor nationally. I think that’s where everything is headed in 2018 so it would be wise to make strategic alignments that would allow for some really special things to happen at this year’s midterms. There are a lot of new voters out there, and in many cases people who have never even thought about voting who could be recruited once they had the doors opened to them by a party who understands them. Republicans are the party for Star Wars fans and any candidate who wants to expand their base should do so with that understanding. While Star Wars is for kids, it has an epistemology that is rooted in American tradition for which the Republican Party best articulates, and that means that special things can happen politically if everything were aligned properly. So it made me very proud to see that Sheriff Jones and Jim Renacci are some of the first party heads to understand that real potential that exists just beyond our fingertips. We are truly in a new age and those who survive best use all the tools in the tool box, not just the ones that used to be cool—but the ones that are cool now.

Rich Hoffman

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Elections are the Alternative to Violance: Two more FBI agents quit ahead of mounting legal problems at the agency

The big speech that Donald Trump performed at the NRA meeting in Dallas, Texas culminated one of the most incredible weeks we’ve ever had in the United States. Virtually as Trump spoke two of the FBI agents close to former Director Comey left the agency, the much-maligned Lisa Page and James Baker. Of course, we were told that them leaving was unrelated to the Trump case, but in Baker’s situation he is leaving the FBI as one of its top lawyers and is now going to the Brookings Institute to write a blog on National Security Law. Give me a break, I write a blog every day—it’s not a full-time job. I can promise that Baker won’t be writing more than I do, nor will his content be as thought-provoking, or detailed. So his position at Brookings is simply a place to hide as the FBI hopes that all this mess that James Comey has gotten them into will boil over and they might all return to a normal life. Lisa Page of course was the person having the affair with another FBI lead investigator who muddled up the Hillary Clinton email case quite on purpose for political purposes then wrote all those text messages which are now unraveling the law enforcement agency more day by day as more is learned. Then there was the condemnation from the federal Judge T.S. Elilis III in Virginia Friday May 4th who slapped away the intentions of the Mueller special investigation quite publicly as a political witch hunt of the Donald Trump presidency. Taken individually, all these stories were extraordinary, but put together into the reality for which they represent and we see clearly what was behind the curtain of law and order all along, and it is pretty scary.

We should all hope that we never need our guns to take back our government from people like James Comey, Robert Mueller and useless bureaucrats like Lisa Page and James Baker. I’m sure that Lisa Page is a nice lady to have lunch with, but in her institutional role, she was serving as a vile tyrant using the law to pick and choose political players—along with her lover and companions outlined in those damning text messages found on her phone. It is for this reason, where parts of our government might go ideologically off the radar to take over rule away from the electorate that we have the Second Amendment. It should always be our hopes that we can correct these types of problems through elections, as we have with President Trump. When he goes to the NRA meeting in Dallas and indicates that he is enjoying these big legal fights, it is refreshing, because that’s what it takes. It keeps the rest of us cleaning our guns instead of having to use them to take control of our government again from people like James Comey who were obviously abusing their authority under institutional context.

I think I speak for most Americans when I say that I don’t recognize anybody on planet earth as my “better.” I don’t have a “better,” someone who is intellectually, physically, and morally superior to me in any way. I am a free person born that way and I intend to keep it that way doing whatever needs to be done to see that basic assumption through. I’m willing to be a law-abiding person so long as the law is trustworthy. But if it isn’t I will not submit to the authority of our legal system. To my way of thinking what does it matter if someone is under oath if they don’t believe in God, and the evidence is quite clear that many of these villains revealed by the current FBI are not believers of God—so what do they care if they lie to the public. What is there for them to fear if they don’t fear eternal damnation, because after all isn’t that the basic premise of being under oath? How can someone swear to the truth and nothing but the truth so help them God if they don’t really believe in God, Heaven, Hell and the concept of damnation? Yet many of these characters in modern government don’t believe in such things, instead they believe that government has replaced God which is the basic assumption of progressive society and that is an epistemological failure that defies the nature of our country. Without that basic agreement, there is no law and order which leaves us with two options. Elections which can reset the epistemological premise philosophically so that the United States is functioning on an agreed legal assumption, or violence, to literally destroy the criminals who are trying to take over our government and replace them by force. The Trump presidency has allowed for us to delay the violence in the hopes that elections might still work. But obviously, the Mueller investigation is all about undoing that election, so the situation is tenuous.

I’ve known for a long time that the legal system was rotten in America and like many people have played along to get along because we were not willing to surrender everything to chaos and anarchy. We always had hope that an election here and there would take care of the issue. That is how Trump was born, as a last resort to solve the corrupt nature of our legal and political system starting in Washington D.C. then cascading down through the rest of society through the states and local municipalities. Nobody cares if he had sex with some porn star or even a thousand porn stars. Donald Trump was a playboy who lived in the fast lane most of his adult life. Everyone knew that when they elected him, and they did so because they wanted someone in the Executive Branch who had been there and done it all and wouldn’t be seduced by the power of the office or become hypnotized by the décor of aristocracy. More than all that, he was used to legal threats and he knew how to deal with them when needed. Trump has experience with mob bosses and lawyers, mayors and regulations used to control a process so he was the perfect guy at this point in time to retake the White House for the electorate, and because of that election, it has kept our guns on our shelves. And that has been a good thing.

Yet that is how far we have all come. We are literally on that precipice of civil war where real people will get hurt instead of just a bunch of words being cast at each other. Both ideologies cannot live in the same country, one that wants a big centralized state that progressively controls everything and everyone, and a country run by the Constitution that assumes everyone believes in some concept of God and that the rule of law is rooted in a lack of desire to spend eternity in Hellish damnation. Intellectuals may laugh at the naiveté of our Christian nation to place such trust in oaths of office and moral indignation toward evil, but it’s a pretty good starting point when you have to keep rogue FBI agents from attempting to start their own country behind the mask of a corrupt legal system. They should all consider themselves lucky that there is such a system, because it has prevented a lot of violence. If those basic rights are not respected, that of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, then the only next step is to take those guns off the shelves and retake the government by force. Compliance as progressives would assume based on the behavior of their rank and file, is not an option. It is better to see everyone fired at the FBI than to accept the vile conduct that their agents have conducted against the American people by allowing themselves to become weaponized and serve a political party that is specifically strong in the Washington D.C. area, but not around the rest of the country where Republicanism is still quite strong.

Rich Hoffman

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The Revealing Statement Made by James Comey: Beating the law at their own game

One of the greatest fears that people have is of the law. They think that because our legal system is written in such a way that it defies the type of education that we get in school, and that only specialized lawyers can interpret it for us, that the law is something they cannot defend against. We can protect our homes and families with guns, but when it comes to the law we are at the mercy of specialists and the court system which we all innately know can be leveled against us to serve the interests of our enemies. We know and understand that if our enemies want to come after us that we might have to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees just to keep what we had before the legal incursion—so when the law comes after you, it means to destroy you and can be quite vicious. The law is never about individuals, it’s essentially about the institution of normality which has been established through collective case-law, to impose the order of the masses against individualized effort. That made James Comey’s comments recently particularly powerful when he spoke about his wishes that Hillary Clinton were president and what impact that might have had on his future. To me this one comment encapsulates the entire case against Donald Trump from the Mueller investigation, the Rod Rosenstein rebellion and the general behavior of the FBI over the last three years toward presidential politics:

“I think I would still be the FBI director…Secretary Clinton is someone deeply enmeshed in the rule of law, respect for institutions, a lawyer,” Comey said in response to a question about what he thought would have happened to him if Clinton had won the election.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/comey-id-still-have-a-job-if-hillary-clinton-won/ar-AAwAQcN?ffid=gz

Then consider what Rosenstein said about the mounting pressure to submit documents to House Republicans, that the Justice Department was not going to be extorted—obviously he forgets who he works for. Yet in the context of what James Comey has said, now with everyone under great pressure, pressure that the FBI, CIA, and all the career bureaucrats within the Department of Justice have never had to contend with in their entire lives—they are starting to say what they really think and we are learning a great deal about the values of our legal institutions which were always at the cores of our fears. Confirmations of our worst nightmares has surfaced, in a constructive way.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/justice-dept-won’t-be-extorted-rosenstein-warns-republicans/ar-AAwBVNM?OCID=ansmsnnews11

You should never have to fear the law unless you are up to bad things, but that’s not what we are talking about in this case. The people who are having their lives destroyed because they are somehow affiliated with Donald Trump’s acquisition of the Executive Branch wouldn’t find themselves in the trouble they are in now if they had not fallen on the wrong side of politics and that is the danger. We don’t elect people like Rob Rosenstein to office, we elect presidents who do fill those positions, so everyone in the Justice Department works for the President and should be more respectful. Comey should have been more respectful before he decided to leak information to his friend to inspire the special investigation that Robert Mueller is now conducting on his witch hunt, which is all it is at this point. The institutions of government as formed by ideological moderates in both the Republican and Democratic parties are using this investigation to keep an aggressive president from changing their good life as politicians being enriched by a corrupt process. They have been using for years the institution of law and order to preserve their racket, and its very disgusting. In the past when there have been challenges to the institutional system, those people were destroyed by James Comey and Rod Rosenstein—and people lost their net worth’s and even went to jail fighting the law which was protecting a corrupt band of Washington politicians.

People like James Comey have sold the purity of their institutional roles to themselves by not looking at the corruption which created the laws, but on the laws themselves as law enforcement officers. In a similar way that a cop collecting traffic citations to raise money for the local municipality will tell their victims, “I’m only enforcing the law” they rid themselves of the responsibility for the imposition by not paying attention to how that money is spent. They surrender their judgment to the greater aspect of the institutions they serve. Maybe city council members swipe money out of the coffers to pay for strippers in Las Vegas, or perhaps to fund a new government project that helps them get elected at the next election cycle, the money and how its used is of no mind to the law enforcement officer—they are only there to enforce the law. In the same way, Comey has surrendered his thoughts to the merits of law enforcement choosing not to deal with the corruption of the laws in the first place, and why they were created. In Comey’s world and that obviously of Rob Rosenstein, lying to the public isn’t hard because they are protecting the merits of the institutions that they serve, and in their world that is task they are bound to by duty. They don’t see anything wrong with doing such a thing because they are protecting the institution for which they are a part. When Comey said of Clinton that she had respect for institutions, what he meant is that like him, Hillary Clinton put individual value behind the need of institutions to function. He is blind to someone like her who functions beyond the scope of institutions because she has always been one of the law makers which formed the institutions in the first place. That’s why his statement is so interesting and revealing.

Many people in life associate their value by the role they serve in the greater world of their occupations. A lawyer will introduce themselves at a dinner party as such—an engineer will as well. A FBI Director likely will think of themselves completely by the role they play in society—not necessarily as a dad, a husband, or perhaps a collector of coins, Legos or baseball cards. What they do for a living is what they are to the world at large—they base their value on their status within the institutions they serve. However, thinking in such a way can make such people weapons against the innocent because those who control those institutions might be malicious and up to no good and if law and order can’t be counted on to protect the innocent, then who can? The answer is nobody. Comey, Rosenstein, Mueller and many others are functioning from this assumption that they were the top of the food chain of institutional value, and that their jobs were bigger than the Executive Branch. This occurred because previous presidents yielded to the awesome power we’ve given to our institutions of law and order, because of that basic fear we all have of the law, that we think we aren’t smart enough to translate laws for ourselves and need lawyers to protect us from that scary foreign language.

The case against Trump by the federal government is exposing this massive weakness in institutional judgment. The law is clearly on the wrong side of history and now they are finding themselves caught in the quandary of their own failed philosophies. It’s not enough to say to the world that they “serve” the institutions of law and order when we can see clearly that those institutions have been used against us for years, and now that we have a president in the Executive Branch we are seeing things we always suspected clearly for the first time, and we—the electorate—don’t like it.

We should not have to fear our own system of law and order. The institutions of the FBI and other government agencies should never seek to impose themselves on the public with fancy terminology that can only be interpreted by an overpaid specialist or the judges they play golf with on the weekends. If the law doesn’t serve the people of our Republic, then it’s no good. And Donald Trump was elected by us to represent our needs, and if the institution is picking a war with him, they are essentially picking a fight with all of us. And I can say this as a guy who has fought the law many, many, many times—sometimes even representing myself as legal counsel—I’m not going to take it. That’s for sure. While its true, I do have a lot of guns to protect myself from thugs, better than that I have a mind that isn’t afraid of any lawyer or judge. And neither should you dear reader. If you want our Republic to work properly, you need to stop fearing our own legal system, and to take command of it. Voting for a good person in the Executive Branch isn’t enough, obviously.

It’s time to change the title to this song–because they “ain’t” going to win this time.

Rich Hoffman

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Trump’s Nobel Peace Prize–For Iran: Predicting the future after North Korea

A lot of people these days are saying that they never saw peace in North Korea happening and that nobody could have predicted it. Well, I did predict it, and anybody can go back through these pages and see that I went into explicit detail on how North Korea would come begging to the negotiating table, if only we had a president who knew how to negotiate. Two of the biggest contributors to Kim Jong Un’s wavering on continuing communism in North Korea to fulfill his father and grandfather’s wishes was that the kid liked American NBA basketball. That by itself was a foot into the door of capitalism and most of his anger toward the West was that he was on the wrong side of an issue he desired to be on from the start. The other is that they didn’t have any money in North Korea and once the sanctions started to kick in, Kim Jong Un realized quickly that his bluff had been called and that he had no real choice but to walk back his global position and try a different approach. Most of the weapons and military displayed by the North Korean dictator are dummies, meaning they falsely represent the real firepower that the communist country has. The way to make peace with North Korea was to box the kid in and isolate him from the rest of the world then let him have a path out of the corner he created for himself into enjoying aspects of the West that he liked, like NBA basketball. He gets to stay in the palace and run the country and be the great negotiator for his people ushering in an age of prosperity for which they have never known, and everyone lives happily ever after—for the most part. Yes, I predicted it well before anybody else did in the world—apparently.

So I’m not shy about making these new predictions about Iran. Trump needs to pull out of the deal and to choke off the country financially—isolating them just as what happened in North Korea. Using North Korea as an example of what could happen in Iran will be Trump’s greatest negotiating chip, and he’ll use it once the DMZ meeting happens. Iran supplies most of the disruptive presence in the Middle East. They keep the Taliban alive in Afghanistan, they keep things stirred up in Syria, and they are the backbone of Palestine. If Iran falls as an instigative force there isn’t much to keep disruptions alive in the Middle East and peace will soon become the theme of that land—and for the first time in all known history the world will be united in ways that nobody ever thought possible. The timeline for the Iran situation is 2020, it won’t take long. Without that Iran deal with the United States, Iran doesn’t have much money to work with and there really isn’t any state sponsorship anywhere else, including Russia and China who can’t fund Iran behind the scenes without getting caught—and they won’t risk that.

Iran’s oil is worth much less now that the United States has their own energy that they are exporting—so like Venezuela there just aren’t many economic options for Iran to keep their people submitting themselves to the current Ayatollah regime. The desire for revolution is already there in Iran, the people are not happy with the Marxism that has been a part of their country since the 1970s and they want to have a chance to shop at Bed Bath and Beyond, like everyone else in the world can, so they are not patient for Iran to get itself fixed economically. Without the deal with the United States, Iran is in serious financial jeopardy and their sponsorship of global terrorism suddenly won’t fit on their credit card, and the country will have no choice but to join the rest of the world in peace.

Shortly thereafter Israel will make peace with Palestine because without Iran there to stir the pot, there isn’t any will to continue fighting and we will then find that the Middle East will be on the path to peace. And it’s as simple as that. However, no politician could do these things, only people from private business who understand how things work in the real world, which is why Donald Trump is having all this success, and will likely receive the Nobel Peace Prize before his next term in office. To the political establishments and global intelligence all this seems so improbable, yet it’s happening and will continue to happen because they never knew what they were talking about.

One of the ways to live best in this world is to not just learn one specific occupation, but to know many things about many occupations, and if you have a creative mind, you can piece everything together from the evidence that had been gathered. Private sector people who are used to creating business transactions are much better positioned to deal with these big global matters, and Trump certainly represents that assumption. Anybody with half a brain could tell that Kim Jong Un’s demonstrations with his missiles and troops were to fluff their feathers but always underneath was just a bird that could have its neck broken with the simple twist of the hand. The same with Iran and all the other terrorist actors around the world. If they were smart and had resources to work with, they wouldn’t need to fluff their feathers and play to the world’s fears of being the plot line of the next James Bond film. In reality the villains of the world are not masterminds like James Bond’s Spectre, they are more like that crazy chick at the White House Correspondents Dinner in 2018. Only people who have mastered dealing with such people would know the difference, but politicians who are in it for the aristocratic perks of the job have no idea—and they take everything at face value—which is why they lose all the time.

You can tell by the way that Ali Khamenei is thrashing about at Donald Trump that he’s about to fold, because that is what people who have nothing left in the tank do when faced with someone they know they can’t beat. Iran has no resources—they only have an economy that produces $1.5 trillion and if they are cut off from the world, starting with their lopsided deal with the United States, then their people will overthrow the Khamenei regime quickly—because they are close to doing so now. Life isn’t good in Iran and it hasn’t been since Marxism entered the area so many decades ago. In modern-day Iran socialism is the ruler on the political right and left. Their most strict observance of political ideology representing conservatism would look more like something Bernie Sanders would come up with as opposed to even some squishy Republican like Marco Rubio would—and those concepts are foreign to us in America. We can’t imagine that anybody would be so stupid, yet they are. So for those who know about these things, the path to beating such minds is easy, and Donald Trump is doing it.

So mark it on your calendars, there will be peace in the Middle East and the first step of that process comes from the unification of North Korea into the rest of the world. Once Trump meets with Kim Jong Un at the DMZ and the world catches their breath, Iran is next—and they know it. Iran of course does have a larger economy than North Korea did, so it is a little bit trickier, but the concepts are all the same. With North Korea off the map of contentious behavior, Iran is stuck all by themselves for the world to watch. If Trump doesn’t get the Nobel Peace Prize for North Korea, he will for what he’s about to do to Iran.

Rich Hoffman

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The Millennium Falcon Experience was SOLD OUT: What everything tells us about what type of society we want to be

In case you hadn’t noticed dear reader, there is a lot going on out there in the world. Even as the White House Correspondents Dinner over the weekend of April 28th showed truly how much we are living in a society well declined, a large number of really big Supreme Court cases are about to have decisions made that will shape American society for the next century. Primary elections are happening in May that will have a major impact on the midterms this upcoming fall, and the Korean peninsula is uniting for the first time in over 70 years. I’ve been writing on this blog site for around a decade now and things are happening so fast that they have defied intellectual saturation, but I have noticed one thing lately that simply amazed me and the start of it came as we were having Millennium Falcon waffles at my house before leaving to visit again the Millennium Falcon Experience at NKU. The new Avengers movie called Infinity War made over $250,000 domestically breaking all kinds of box office records and that was important for a number of reasons in relation to the grand scheme of things. If Jim Cameron was hoping that superhero movies were about to fizzle out, this news would upset him greatly, and many who have tried to use the film industry as a propaganda arm of the liberal left.

The plan was always to take the larger part of my family down to see the Millennium Falcon Experience on Sunday morning at 9 AM—which is why we scouted the event on Friday to figure out how we could take a large group through it. My family was very excited to go see the reproduction of parts of the Millennium Falcon and get some good pictures. One of my daughters is a professional photographer so we wanted to get some great pictures at the Millennium Falcon Experience since we are all Star Wars fans—its seemed like a good opportunity for us. Plus, the character of Han Solo has always been my favorite and without him in a movie, Star Wars has never really been Star Wars. I have been very critical of the new Star Wars movies, except for Rogue One, so I have been nervous about what Lucasfilm and Disney would do to my favorite Star Wars character. Han Solo certainly isn’t a liberal character by any measure, so my concern was that Disney would push to water him down to make it part of their overall liberal agenda at the company these days. However, indications are that the exact opposite will be happening. It appears that Lucasfilm has been listening to their fans since the Force Awakens problems in killing off the character, and the direction they had taken him. This new movie Solo: A Star Wars Story looks like they understand what the character is supposed to be and to what impact that will have on our society as a whole.

Like I always say, my favorite topic isn’t politics, funding challenges, or even scientific endeavor, although I do talk about those things a lot—my favorite topic is mythology. I am mildly obsessed with the way cultures form and what mythologies are used to bring people together, what themes work and which ones don’t. Han Solo is the most popular character in the Star Wars series for a reason, he is a very traditional alpha male who is reckless and in pursuit of his own independence often at whatever cost. I’m sure the progressives within the Disney Company and at Lucasfilm have discussed Solo at great length, and I think much of the reason that Ron Howard was brought in to take over the directing duties was because Donald Trump was elected and wisely Lucasfilm knew they needed to change a few things that were becoming obvious about the world after President Trump moved into the White House.

I was in London while Solo: A Star Wars Story was shooting at Pinewood and I was watching the protests against Donald Trump in those opening months and I listened carefully to the two original Solo movie directors show great support for the movement against Trump. While I don’t think that Kathy Kennedy is a conservative by any measure, the tide of movies that were going to make money certainly had to accept that Trump voters were going to decide if a film succeeded or failed at the box office. So they made some adjustments on the Solo set and brought in Ron Howard who understood that this movie about Han Solo was more about American Graffiti meets A Fistful of Dollars than a space version of 21 Jump Street. Han Solo actually means something to a lot of people, not just me, and Lucasfilm recognized that and decided to make the movie that needed to be made to pay respect to Han Solo, not the movie they wanted to make about Han Solo as a bunch of social progressives, and that is a very important distinction.

This Millennium Falcon Experience was meant to tour city to city with three sections of set reproductions from the Solo movie to generate interest in the film. My wife and I along with two of our grandchildren went to the opening of the event on Friday April 27th and I was impressed with the crowd. I saw what was going on pretty fast, on the public relations side, the event had printed a limited number of tickets that they gave out for free and when they were gone, they were gone which would get people talking about the whole thing on social media, sharing pictures, and generating interest in the new Han Solo movie that would come out on May 25th. The Millennium Falcon Experience would start in Northern Kentucky at NKU, then travel the following weekend to Atlanta, then to Denver before settling in Los Angeles ahead of the premier for the movie. My scouting report, which is seldom ever wrong, which I conveyed to my two daughters was that the big Star Wars geeks would hit this event on Friday and the thing would fizzle out by Sunday after a weekend of being open. After all, there were only so many Star Wars fans out there. Our plan was to show up at 9 AM on Sunday morning when the tickets would be issued, and we’d walk onto the exhibit, get our pictures, then go somewhere nice for breakfast. That’s not what happened.

We arrived at precisely 9:07 AM and found out that all the tickets were gone. People had started lining up at 4:30 AM that morning and the line had wrapped around the building of the BB&T Arena and the whole day sold out well before the event even started. The crew hosting the event wasn’t prepared for such a large crowd, so they issued the tickets so that people could get their tour times and leave, since there were no bathroom facilities. The event was open from 9 to 5 PM and tickets were given at intervals that would allow for about ten minutes of personal touring for each ticket which was good for five people. So doing the math, a lot of people didn’t get a ticket who wanted one. If we hadn’t gone down to the exhibit on Friday, we wouldn’t have been able to see it at all, which just mesmerized me. The opposite of what I thought was going to happen, happened. The Millennium Falcon Experience had more interest in it by day 3 than it did on day one, which I thought was remarkable given the fact that it was a free exhibit for a movie about Han Solo that didn’t come out for another month. There are many in the industry who think that people are going to get Star Wars saturation given that this is the second Star Wars movie within a year, the first was The Last Jedi. But like the Avengers Infinity War, audiences were hungrier than ever for mythological products like these movies—and that said something very important.

Both films talked about here are products of the Disney Company and while the overall movie industry is declining, Disney at least has kept their ear to the ground to give audiences what they need in the characters produced in these movies. There is a theme which all these movie characters represent that speaks to the yearning people have for individualized freedom. Han Solo is certainly all about that restless lust for personal freedom and that Millennium Falcon Experience spoke to that yearning directly. People weren’t just watching it in a movie, they were able to put their hands on it and that hunger surprised even me. I pay really close attention to these kinds of things and this went well beyond the passion I thought was out there. With that in mind I think that by the time this Solo movie hits at the end of May, after Infinity War had been out for over a month, there will be some cultural influences from these movies that will percolate into our society as a whole, in the fields of science, fashion, art and entertainment—in everything, and those things will be happening at a time when the Supreme Court will make decisions on some big cases that will affect us all. I think we are in a world that is changing dramatically, and not for the worst. I think we have been there already and are on the way out of it. But more than that, I think the movies reflect more about what we want to change into than what we just want to participate in as escapist fantasy. And that is a very interesting occurrence for our modern-day experience.

Rich Hoffman

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An Amazing Amount of Information: The turning point

It was bewildering to listen to the so-called pundits try to analyze whether or not Donald Trump played a “role” in the sudden North Korea group hug that is taking place across the globe. From a tyrannical regime just a few months ago threatening nuclear war to a world stage icon, the threat of North Korea has been melted away by the new American president and all the institutional addicts are perplexed as to how and why. Most interesting was the comments from the despot of Iran Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who said that Trump was not qualified to be a world leader and negotiate in any way because he was a builder of buildings and only a businessman—as if a politician were some kind of godly position. And within that statement and the presumptions of the entire political class around the world I think the Ayatollah hit the sweet spot on why everyone is so upset with Trump who have made livings for years scaring normal people into believing that their politicians were gods incarnate and meant to rule without question.

It was absolutely fascinating to watch the Trump supporters Diamond and Silk (Ms. Hardaway and her sister Ms. Richardson) voice their concerns in front of congress about social media platforms attacking conservative groups. I can’t imagine anything like that happening prior to just two years ago, yet they did it and it was quite interesting—and exemplifies the difference between the static order of old, and this new light on their feet brand of conservatism that is emerging so spectacularly. We are learning now what Trump conservatives are, and they are not like the Reagan conservatives at all. People like the black entertainment artist Kenya West are a part of it ironically and the old rules that have been dividing our society up over many thousands of years are coming apart right in front of our faces, and its very interesting to watch.

As the White House Correspondents Dinner was happening in Washington D.C. President Trump came to Michigan to host a rally against the establishment—fresh off a diplomatic week of massive productivity, state visits from France and Germany as well as constant negotiations with North Korea to set up the official end of the Korean War. And instead of giving those media personalities the illusion that they were a part of a shadow government, Trump cut them off and left them hanging wet on the cloths line—and he should have. They are part of that old Ayatollah mentality which believes that aristocratic politicians are superior to individuals of business and opinion. Yet everywhere we look these days the old guard is fumbling with this new attitude best exemplified by Trump and people like Diamond and Silk.

With all the weapons they have had at their disposal, such as has been revealed by James Comey trying so hard to pretend that the intelligence agencies of the United States have not been weaponized—they are failing and there is a very gentle panic beginning to emerge in them. James Comey and Ali Khamenei ironically have the same opinion of Donald Trump and the same belief in the old order which propped them up to be leaders of their respective societies. They can’t accept that a businessman like Trump is a superior caliber person to the old-style rulers of the old world—the aristocratic societies of yesteryear, of which the United States was always rebelling away from. That was the point from the inception of America, to rebel away from Europe. We were never meant to copy those aristocrats. Washington D.C. was never supposed to be a swamp in the way it has become. The swamp formed because good people were too busy settling out west and forming their own companies and families independent of king’s courts and political associations. The politician in America was always supposed to be a servant, not a “better.”

The more James Comey spoke on his book tour culminating with the Fox News interview he did with Bret Baier the more obvious it was that he was genuinely hurt that the world he understood was melting away and was being replaced by this new world full of rules he knew he wouldn’t be good at. I would suggest that this world of Trump and activists like Diamond and Silk were always supposed to be part of the American experience—so its his fault that Comey thinks the things he does. It was his fault that he failed like so many others in our social tapestry have, to recognize the obvious. Human beings do not like institutionalized concepts. They may have used them to bridge over from the Neolithic periods of early mankind, but the destination was never going to be more authority figures in our lives running everything that we know and love. It was destined to be less.

While James Comey and his wife were part of that Beltway society that thought they understood the rules and toasted each other with expensive wines in Georgetown backyards, the rest of the world yearned to be free of such aristocrats. In truth the social media platforms like Facebook that have worked so closely with American intelligence agencies to collect data on people without warrants and complicated legal procedures have helped accelerate this issue of necessity for freedom. I have no doubt that Facebook wanted to shut down the popularity of Diamond and Silk’s page, just as they would have loved to have stopped the Donald Trump presidency. But the nature of social media is freedom to communicate with people within their circle of influence with more ease and that has created in the mind of people a yearning for more of what they already want—freedom from overseers.

People generally want a society that is productive and filled with justice. But if left to their own devices, they despise authority. There are a percentage of people out there in the world that have an intense desire to rule over other people for various reasons, so they turn to institutions to provide them that ability, whether they end up as teachers in a public school, or the head of some military branch—the desire to rule over other people has always been at the center of war in human societies, from the beginning. But most people don’t have such yearnings, they just want to be free of such people and to live their lives on their own terms and they are the clear majority of people functioning out there across the planet. America was born because of that intense desire and now social media has caused that longing to become much more defined.

Where it goes from here is truly an unexplored territory, but its exciting. Trump’s achievements are the result of a person functioning outside of institutionalism, that has been developed by the merits of capitalism to solve much more complicated problems than the aristocrats of the old world could manage. That is how America became such a great country to begin with, when private enterprise was able to work around the political class to truly achieve objectives that people yearned for. And that is precisely why Iran is an armpit of a country currently because it is still run the way countries have been run for thousands of years—and that top down model just isn’t valid any longer. North Korea had to see the writing on the wall when Trump didn’t back down the way politicians in the past did, and he decided for his own good to join the world. Iran will have no choice either, and that truly scares those types of people who try to use institutionalism to bring meaning to their lives by giving them authority over others based purely on the rules of artificial parameters of human politics.

Rich Hoffman
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