North and South Korea Hug at the 38th Parallel: What educations should be and why the NKU Millennium Falcon Expereince was the most important thing

I had a lot of thoughts while waiting in line at the BB&T Arena at NKU University just across the river from downtown Cincinnati to witness the promotional exhibit for Solo: A Star Wars Story which comes out on May 25th. Among those thoughts were how nice and well-educated all the fans were who showed up early to get a ticket to essentially sit in the cockpit of the Millennium Falcon, which was in so many ways very, very cool. From my perspective as a super fan of not only Star Wars, but of the functions of world mythology in the greater sense I noticed some very special things going on that were worth a deeper analysis. Because of my conservative political positions, my stance against large salary requirements for teachers and college professors, it is often asked of me what I want in public education offerings that are reasonable, and to be quite honest, I want our education system to produce the type of people who were in line for that Solo exhibit—and the type of people who have used the Star Wars mythology to bring meaning to their lives where the regular social offerings have failed our entire civilization.

What made this NKU exhibit from Lucasfilm and Disney unique was that it was free, and there was no merchandising on hand to clutter up the motivations of people. All they wanted to do was see the props of the Millennium Falcon from the movies up close and satisfy some longing for that reality to become their reality. Because reality as we have all come to know it is something very disappointing. Star Wars for many people offers an alternative to that boring reality and that was quite clear to the thousands who showed up to see the Millennium Falcon Experience at NKU over the first weekend of a four-city tour which will take place all through the rest of May 2018. I’ve traveled the world, eaten in the very best restaurants in places like Japan and London, I associate with people at the very top of the food chain both politically and economically. If I’m not a mover and shaker in the world, I don’t know who would be—so I’m hardly a couch potato geek who is hiding from reality behind the fantasy characters of a space movie. Yet I’ll say that one of the most thrilling things that I have ever done in my half of a century of life was to sit in that cockpit of the Millennium Falcon with my grandson, wife, and granddaughter and play with the buttons, handle the flight yoke and just sit there for many minutes in private to consider how everything could work in real life—how to make that delicate transition from fantasy into reality—which is where everything is headed.

Even better than all that though was the people in line with me, who from what I could tell were some of the smartest people I’ve seen in one place in many years. If I had been waiting in line for tickets to a Miley Cyrus concert, the collection of intellect presented would have been much less. Most of the children present were reading books while in line, mostly Star Wars books. Most of the adults had already read them and were certainly higher than the average intelligence that is functioning in the world and I would attribute that to the fact that Star Wars has given people something positive to think about, so even though what they were thinking about was a fantasy entertainment offering, the process of thinking about something had better prepared them for functioning in the world than the average person experienced, who didn’t have such advantages. The exhibit itself took a long time to get through because of all the thousands of people in line, only five people at a time could go through that Falcon cockpit, so people were very motivated to wait their turn which I thought was astonishing. Nobody in line was angry with the people ahead of them making them wait, it was one of the most remarkable things I had witnessed in a long time from a large collection of people. Given that the campus of NKU was in the background I couldn’t help but think that every college in America should aim to have this type of experience for everything they try to instill in an educational format to the participants of their classrooms. The goal of all education should be to turn on minds, not to turn them off, and often that is what we are doing at all levels of our education. The people who have become Star Wars fans over the years have rejected that premise. When their schools have told them to turn off their minds and to stop daydreaming, to put their hyperactive kids on Ritalin, the people at the Millennium Falcon Experience who were there with me on that first day, the people who Channel 19 called “super fans” with just a bit of contempt to make sure the viewer didn’t associate her with them—the Star Wars fans rebelled and turned inward rejecting social norms and invested their intellects to the fantasy world of a galaxy of a long time ago far, far way.

Millennium Falcon coming to a galaxy not very far away at NKU https://t.co/cfC3dmNgao

— Rich Hoffman (@overmanwarrior) April 28, 2018

While all this was going on I was checking on the latest NFL picks from the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, watching Kenya West get criticized by the liberal entertainment guild for defending President Trump, and North Korea and South Korea were hugging at the 38th parallel, an astonishing feat all by itself, and contemporary society mistakenly thought that those events were more important than this Millennium Falcon Experience—but I don’t think so. In many ways it is those events that are the fiction and it is the mythology of Star Wars that has more truth in it than anything else going on outside of that NKU campus that day. Specifically, the Kenya West situation where just because he’s a black rapper married to Kim Kardashian he’s supposed to fit some liberal presentation of what a “black person thinks”—which was taught to all of us in our public-school experience. Those same public-school personalities don’t teach kids that Republicans ended slavery, and that Fredrick Douglas the great black crusader was a Republican. The emphasis on what we learn in our K-12 educations is not to read and perform math, its to fit into a segment of society for which our political philosophies at the administrative level can deal with when everyone grows up. The purpose of public education is to create demographic groups, not individualized thought and Kenya West was pushing back against that system which had all the proponents of that reality very upset. Many of the Star Wars fans at NKU to see the Millennium Falcon Experience had gone through the same type of rigor and had made very conscious decisions to reject those offered demographic categories created by the politically driven public-school systems, and they were looking for things to think about elsewhere.

Education is supposed to ignite the thinking process, not to turn it off, and for most of our civilization that is exactly what is happening in our government sponsored schools. They destroy minds, not meaning to, but that is what ends up happening. Later that day after the Millennium Falcon Experience I watched the coverage of the NFL Draft on Fox and I’ll have to say that it wasn’t nearly as rooted in reality as Star Wars was. The people drinking too much beer and spending most of their free time thinking about the statistics of the various players offered were participating in a fantasy much less real than seeing the Millennium Falcon up close. Star Wars fans have evolved as a rebellious rejection of that static public education offerings. The NFL draft was just a big reality television show that promoted the schools the athletes came from advertising those universities for millions of young people who might be inspired to spend $100K on an education to get a decent job at the places that produced these gladiators of the NFL. But honestly, the Millennium Falcon as presented at NKU to promote a new movie coming out soon was a lot more real, and much more positive for the intellects of the participants—and that should say a lot about the world we are living in.

We’ve made a tremendous mistake as a human civilization in establishing to people through their educations that they should give up the ideas of youth and to accept the limited offerings established by our governments through their education systems. We have tried it so many different ways and they all end in failures—in most cases middle class earners who makes six figures in household income who drink too much on NFL draft night over a grill cooking hamburgers in the back yard and think that is the definition of success. Star Wars and other pop culture entertainments have simply done a better job in creating foundation mythologies that the human intellect truly craves for the unending yearning for adventure and exploration. Those adventurous desires are what fuel all invention and take it from me, I just received a patent that I had led a team to realize just last week, so I understand what I’m saying in scope of human endeavor. It all starts with imagination and adventure which is specific to human minds and it is in our fantasies that we do a better job than our official educations in harnessing those powers. But it shouldn’t be that way. I bought three things over the past two weeks that made me very happy, one was a new gun that cost well over $2000. Then I bought a little Hot Wheels Millennium Falcon and a new Han Solo landspeeder for about $5 each—and they equally made me very happy. One is notably a very “adult” thing to buy, the other two are associated with the desires of children. But I can say that I enjoyed those purchases equally, and I think that is an essential need that any active intellect has—it wants to be fed stimuli—not junk food, or alcohol, but intellectual stimulation that provokes thought. Regarding education moving into the rest of this century and into the next, all over the world, we need to end this nonsense about “growing up.” What public education means when they encourage people to “grow up,” is that they intend to turn off minds, not to turn them on. And until that happens, I will be against our government endorsed education systems, both K-12 and the college experience, because they are not adequate in their objectives into preparing human beings for the kind of world we all want. Fortunately, and unfortunately, the Millennium Falcon Experience did a much better job.

Rich Hoffman
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Lakota’s School Board Approves a Reckless LEA Contract: The new average teacher salary will be $73,000!

It’s a very hard thing to do, to sit in front of a person, or a group of people when you are an employer and tell someone they are not worth as much money in employment as they think they are. I would say it is one of the hardest things in the world, and most managers aren’t good at it. Yet in the private sector managers must do it every day to keep books balanced in relation to the income they are dealing with. But in government seldom if ever does an elected manager push themselves to endure the ridicule of such a situation and that’s what happened at Lakota schools on Monday April 23rd 2018. A radical teacher’s union sat in front of the school board hoping for an approval of their LEA contract which provided raises of 3.5% for the first year, 3.25 for year two and 3.25 for year three—this after they had received a 1.9% cost of living increase plus bonuses. Surely the recent teacher uprisings in Kentucky were on the minds of the board and they had no stomach for a strike—which should never happen when children are involved, yet the threat had been made by the Lakota teachers under the whispers of insurrection. Lakota had been operating with a nice budget surplus, and they are actively looking for ways to compete with other districts for a limited number of teaching positions—no doubt all that played out when the deciding vote from the conservative Todd Parnell cast in favor of the contract. Yet the massive irresponsibility that transpired could be applied to every government position in America, what was happening at Lakota was happening in every city and county and is a trend that must be stopped, otherwise everything will come to a terrible end soon.

At first glance the conditions of this Lakota teacher’s contract seem reasonable. After all, roughly 3% in raises is on par for most cost of living projections. The problem is a little deeper than that when we find out 3% of what? 3.5% of $45,000 a year would be reasonable for a public-school teacher which is essentially a glorified babysitter these days. It could easily be argued, and it should, that teachers in the modern age are doing more damage to children with liberalized educations than they help because children will have to undo all that mess at some point in their adulthoods. But for the babysitting service for busy parents, $45,000 per year to hold 26 children in a classroom environment may be worth the cost. But that’s not what we are talking about in the case of Lakota. Currently the average cost of teachers within the Lakota district is $70,000 per year. While some teachers may be worth that much money the number is likely under 5%. The other 95% of all employees at Lakota are likely worth a figure under $50,000 per year based on the value of the teaching profession to the world at large. Market value considerations should be applied, but because we are talking about government schools, no such value is ever applied. Instead, teacher unions collectively bargain to rack up huge cost impositions against property tax payers of those schools in the district of their residence and as a result, these parasitic labor unions destroy any sense of reality when it comes to labor negotiations. The only negotiating they do is demand more money as teachers, or they walk off the job leaving kids to fend for themselves while those busy parents seek some way to have someone watch their children while the teachers are demanding more money. Not a good system by any measure.

The net result of the Todd Parnell vote is that the average wage for Lakota teachers went up from $70,000 per year to $73,000 by the end of the contract and that is just reprehensible. As I have said, probably only 5% of the teachers are worth that much money. An even fewer percentage are probably worth more, but a vast majority likely aren’t even worth $50,000 and they only make that because of the radicalized collective bargaining negotiations that take place due to the government unions that have infested all these government schools. Parnell should have voted against the contract but as he looked out at all those teachers in the audience, it is hard to stand against such a tide. After all those employees don’t really care about the students because they threaten at every turn to walk off a job if they don’t get their collective bargaining. At best such tactics by the unions are terrorism and obviously Parnell as a school board member didn’t want to be responsible for setting off a labor incident at Lakota. I’ll have to give credit to Lynda O’Connor, she did hold strong on the school board, but she was the only one.

Obviously to pay for those raises Lakota is eyeing a tax levy because once you give union employees something they never go backwards and will continue to ask for more and more until the entire system is bankrupt. When Lakota does ask for the next levy I will use this incident to explain why the government school doesn’t deserve it. Very few voters can sympathize with a bunch of government employees upset about a levy passage when they make over $73,000 per year on average. That is a ridiculously high wage rate for job positions that are simply glorified babysitters. In the past when school board members like Julie Shafer have attacked me for standing against school levies what they really are mad at are the bad decisions they made in the past that required levy passage to sustain a budget—because they want to throw money at teachers and be the good guys with their peers instead of doing the hard work of management and telling those employees that they aren’t worth the money. Let those unhappy teachers go to some other district and lower the payroll of the Lakota budget. Hire fresh teachers right out of college who only make $45K per year. If they want to make more, leave and let Lakota hire some new fresh faces. That is what you do in management. But if you don’t know what you are doing with people and employees, you think that experience is worth the money. Often it isn’t. Youth and vigor are often what children need to learn new things, not some old over paid coffee sipping teacher just milking the system because the union protects their lack of ambition behind collective bargaining. I would bet that most of the teachers in the Lakota school system fall in this mediocre category, and it is the responsibility of the school board to do the hard job when they can to keep those costs down by pushing those old budget busters away.

The problem of budget busting happens when nobody wants to be the bad guy and tell employees that they aren’t worth what they think they are. Schools need to operate more like the private sector does because after all that is what we are supposed to be preparing kids for. The goal isn’t to prepare kids for some socialist indoctrination center called college any more. That scam has been fully revealed to be extremely destructive to the education process. Most kids would be better off not going to college so to keep their minds intact—and reluctantly voters are starting to admit that to themselves—as hard has it is to come to terms with. Many parents save for a long time to send their children to college with life savings that would be better spent elsewhere—so it is hard to acknowledge that colleges are only indoctrination centers and the prep work happens in public schools paid for through a socialist practice of taxing private property. Even knowing all that nobody wants the public school to fail in their community because the schools attach themselves to businesses and homes in an unhealthy way, and until that changes school board members like Todd Parnell will find themselves split. Parents don’t want to lose that free baby-sitting service while they are out in the world doing what they think is important stuff—to pay for their kids to go to college. That whole problem is far too philosophically challenging for them. But I know this, in Lakota there are a lot more residents with kids out of the schools than in them, so if Lakota wants an embarrassing bloodbath at the ballot box, I suppose that’s what they’ll get due to their poor management of tax payer resources.

Rich Hoffman
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Wayne LaPierre gets it Right Again: The trend of returning to the state of the primitive

I continue to be impressed with Wayne LaPierre’s columns in American Rifleman, one of the official magazines of the NRA. In his latest, “We Won’t Waver Despite Media Attacks” LaPierre identifies correctly the vast influence of socialism in American culture and how it has seeped into our education system and created a media environment that is predictably anti-American, and more specifically, anti-gun. This of course didn’t happen overnight—it has occurred essentially from the 1930s and has now culminated into a culture that is clashing with traditional American values which is in essence the cause of this modern civil war. The media are overwhelmingly liberal because those are the types of people who survive the vetting process, the years of college and pre-interviews which get young people into media careers. If they aren’t detectably liberal, they won’t get work in the publishing and television industry. Liberalism is one of the key ingredients that prospective employers look for in new media applicants and this has been going on for decades, so it should come as no surprise that we find a liberalized media establishment that is now coming after NRA members, and conservatism in general. The difference is that now we are starting to talk about it.

https://www.americas1stfreedom.org/articles/2018/4/23/standing-guard-nra-will-not-waver-despite-media-attacks/

The first thing I thought when the troubled 29-year-old Travis Reinking shot up four people at a Waffle House in Nashville was that someone should have shot the kid on the spot so police wouldn’t have had to waste two days looking for him. There was a good Samaritan on the scene who challenged Reinking but there wasn’t anybody there to put the kid down saving countless manhours of investigation. As it turned out Reinking was a troubled kid who found his guns confiscated for being in a danger zone recently at the White House, so the signs were there well in advance that Reinking was going to snap at some point and do something stupid which he did late on a Saturday night at a Waffle House. There are probably thousands of people like Rainking running around out there in the world and when they show up to terrorize us, we need to have the ability to defend ourselves.

That liberalized media baulks at those types of proclamations. They’ll say that this isn’t the Wild Wild West and that we are a more civilized society now and shouldn’t need guns. They say this as the current crop of youth springing from the public-school system is desiring to return to primitive exhibitions of adulthood that were practiced in Neolithic times, body piercings and tattoos to show that they have left childhood and should now be considered adults. Those type of rituals are innate and part of human biological intellect. I know several very young women in their 20s who are extremely well-educated. At first glance they look like typical young ladies fresh out of college who have access to the best fashion of our day and they have the money to buy them. They live upper middle class lifestyles with their peers. Yet upon a closer look they have tattoos behind their ears and all over their backs and chests. They have the common tramp stamps on their lower backs as well which are intended to show people they are intimate with that they are a little wild and crazy which is part of their ritualistic sex practices. They demonstrate orthodox behavior professionally, but raw savagery privately. This is a relatively new phenomenon and that I have asked them about which of course they answer like I’m 2000 years old out of touch with laughs. But they are young people still fresh from their liberalized educations, and it was there that they learned this type of behavior.

The tattoo story is important because young ladies like that just a few decades ago wouldn’t behave in that fashion. They’d be concerned that once they found a husband and started having babies that they might not be able to explain such wildness to their future families. Those instincts have been taught out of them resulting in the product of youth that we see today. The same tragedy could be said to have occurred in young men—especially young men with poor intellect and rotten family histories. For instance, it could be easily established that if a young woman has a good relationship with her father, she probably isn’t going to be easy to sleep with by a predatory male looking for a quick trip to the bed. That is because she will likely have traditional self-confidence and won’t be prone to whimsical seductions by young men looking to paint themselves on her blank sheet of paper. Young girls who don’t have good relationships with their fathers tend to be sleep arounds and dress wildly because they are seeking the attention they didn’t get from a father figure. In a similar way young men like Travis Reinking act out in a similar way when they don’t get the proper male attention in their lives from an elderly figure—and this can make them very dangerous. The primitive instinct of young males is to prove themselves in battle even to the point of killing another human being—so as our liberal society craves more primitive foundation values, young males are becoming more and more dangerous socially. Travis Reinking is just the latest, there are many more like him out there looking for something to latch onto so to prove they are great warriors—whether it be ISIS, the Neo Nazis, the latest ANTIFA socialist protests, or even a college football game—young people more than ever are struggling to show their adulthood, and for a certain percentage they are turning to violence to earn their respect as grown-ups. Most of the gang violence that we are dealing with in America can be reduced to that very simple human need.

It will take years after admitting that this is the fundamental problem in America to solve it—likely five or six decades. Liberalism has destroyed the lives of many young people, in many cases irreversibly—yet our society must still continue to function. That means that the only way to contain the violence that is coming at us so rapidly these days, is with personal firearm protection and quick resolutions when some stupid kid like Travis Reinking does go into future Waffle Houses and shoot up the place, that we can end the attempt there on the spot within seconds. The institutions of liberalism have created this problem and once again it is up to regular traditional Americans to fix it, which is why the NRA is such a valuable organization. They stand pretty much alone these days to offering real solutions to these classic problems. In this case, liberalism has taken young people back to the needs of a more primitive time and it is the philosophic value behind personal firearms which stands as leverage against that social incursion.

Without the NRA the process of transforming America into just another European colony would have taken place. Because of the NRA the liberalized media has not shaped American society into something unrecognizable to our traditional values. And because of personal firearms there aren’t those thousands of Travis Reinkings out there shooting everyone up ever five seconds. Even without a firearm, killers like Reinking could still drive a rented van into groups of people to conduct their primitive need for public malice. But because of the way American society is, there are more often than not heroes lurking in every Waffle House, in every shopping mall and camped outside every church ready to take action, because they have the personal protection of firearms, which has been the game changer on the world stage in America. And it’s about time we appreciate it more for what it has always

Rich Hoffman

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Han Solo’s New Landspeeder: The reason young men have for racing, risking their lives, and proving themselves

That’s a wrap on post production! #Solo @HanSoloStory #SkywalkerRanch Wow. What a movie-making adventure it’s been! Thanks to a terrific cast & extraordinary folks behind the camera as well. You’ve worked so hard to fully realize this cool story. Hope fans have a blast! #May25 pic.twitter.com/SeSSXZirBZ

— Ron Howard (@RealRonHoward) April 22, 2018

Institutionalism has been on my mind a lot lately. It has always bees something I was concerned with—it’s a huge part of culture building and there is need for some of it to keep an orderly society organized and effective. But all too often it is a destructive device that robs individuality from the human race which limits the output of potential available to mankind. Obviously the Comey situation with the current FBI is the most clear-cut case of institutional failure at so many levels and that is exactly what was on my mind as I went to Target as a 50-year-old man and bought the new Han Solo Landspeeder toy from Hasbro that I have been looking forward to being released. As I write often my favorite Star Wars character is Han Solo and I continue to think that the entire franchise under Disney ownership will depend on the quality of this new Solo: A Star Wars Story movie coming up on May 25th. For the movie to work, it has to tell the story of a young man who is so rebellious against institutionalism that he drives that inner need for the audience to yearn for individual freedom. It’s a tough game for Disney because they are an institution all on their own, and it has been a real challenge for the filmmakers to capture that proper “Han Solo” spirit produced by such an institutionalized production company. But they have worked hard at it and I think the selection of Ron Howard to be the final director was crucial to making this upcoming film positioned to be the best product possible. To get Han Solo right, the filmmakers must understand that he is a person fighting the mundane clutches of institutionalism which is the key to understanding what makes Star Wars different from other science fiction, and additionally makes it one of the most valuable elements for shaping modern society. It’s a very delicate balance and I couldn’t wait to get my hands on that toy car so I could get up and close to it to get some questions answered.

Much to my delight it exceeded my expectations. Most young men—not girls—but boys, desire to obtain a car, customize it to some degree to represent their personalities and to apply that effort to the world so that they might come out on top. Girls typically think of wedding dresses, getting invited to prom and play with toys that lead them to domestic lives as young married women. No matter how much we tamper with that basic human yearning, those fundamental differences between boys and girls are obvious. Boys have that pressure to rebel from what they’ve known so that they can launch themselves into a position to acquire a wife, build a family, and live life on their own terms for that family—and a car is that first big step. So in a movie that deals with a younger version of Han Solo, a guy who has to acquire all the things that led him to a marriage to Princess Leia, The Millennium Falcon, his DL-44 gun, his years of experience at getting out of dangerous situations, what would his very first car look like? Getting that right would go a long way to telling me that these modern filmmakers understood the character of Han Solo well enough to not screw up the movie.

Ever since I saw the footage from the filming of the Solo movie I have been curious about this car. It’s square in design and looks pretty junkie for what you might expect from Han Solo. But then the Millennium Falcon was pretty beat up by the time the original movies were made—so this is a theme for Han Solo. He is a character not limited to the designs of the original manufacturer of his vehicles, some institutional engineer who works for a big company and rigidly gets all their drawings approved for production. Han Solo as a young man would acquire a speeder like this vehicle probably used because that’s all he could afford and he’d make it into something of his own design—to imprint his character on it. He would then use that vehicle to make a name for himself out in the world. This is very important to young men—really important. So getting Han Solo’s car right in a design tells me that they would also get it right in the movie and that this thing was going to be good.

When I was a young guy, 16 to 20 years of age I raced everyone everywhere. I seldom ever drove at speeds less than 100 MPH and I was in trouble with the police most of the time. I think it is safe to say that I was the fastest driver in the city of Cincinnati during that time frame who lived to talk about it. I know a lot of people I knew back then who died in car wrecks or ended up in jail for the rest of their lives so I can understand the background of a young Han Solo who was addicted to speed and competition. Young men must have some way to prove themselves because only the best have access to the best females. The way we all work biologically is that the most attractive females usually like the guys who are the most daring and ambitious acquiring the most wealth. Of course, the reason is so that a young female can build a family using the guy to give her children and financial resources. Having young men run around racing each other for the opportunity to make a lot of money so they can have access to the best females is a very primal sentiment. It’s not the way political progressives want things to be, and Disney has become a very progressive company so that makes the stakes of this Solo Star Wars film very high. Progressives would like to erase masculinity from the face of the earth yet Han Solo is a very masculine figure which makes him very popular among young males looking to make their mark in the world. I’ve been very skeptical especially the way The Last Jedi embraced so many progressive values. I didn’t think it hurt the value of Star Wars culturally, but it was noticeable. The same kind of anti-male sentiment won’t work in a movie starring Han Solo. I am happy to say from what I have seen by reading the latest Han Solo book Last Shot and going through some of the toy releases, I think they have nailed Han Solo in this new film. We’ll have to see how it is, but so far, the hot rod speeders are there, the souped-up star ships, the guns and the attitude are all there, so I am excited, more so than I was even a month ago.

I was in England for a good part of the Han Solo filming at Pinewood and I read all the news I could from the set as it was happening. It was exciting for me to be that close to the movie. One of my methods of stress management is to play a lot, whether it is video games, toys with my grandkids, or just roaming around at the store looking at new toys coming out. I particularly like the Star Wars section and the Lego sections of toy stores. Playing with ideas and massaging my imagination helps me solve complicated problems in real life, so there is a method I use to make those experiences productive in the real world. The Han Solo Landspeeder was very exciting for me personally because it has a lot of design in it that reflects the Han Solo character in all the ways that I enjoy. While everyone doesn’t get as excited about toys and Star Wars that as I do, the people who do are often those who advance human civilization in positive ways, engineers, creative people, and authors. Star Wars is such a major contributor to modern literature and the sciences that I get excited with each new film because of the cultural impacts that naturally spawn off them. Solo: A Star Wars Story however has more pressure on it than any movie yet has. How this one goes will determine the future of Star Wars forever, so there is a lot on the table. From what I have seen so far, I don’t think anybody will be disappointed.

Rich Hoffman
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The Wonderful World of Winning: Eating at Chuy’s and the Democrats suing Trump, WikiLeaks, and the Russians

I had a wonderful lunch the other day at Chuy’s in West Chester, Ohio. It wasn’t my first visit to the popular Tex Mex dinning establishment but this one was better than other times I had been there. It was a business lunch and the subject of discussion was two of my favorite books of strategy, The Art of War by Sun Tzu and The Book of Five Rings by Miyamoto Musashi. Whenever I get a chance to talk about those books people are usually put on their heels a bit with my enthusiasm which is difficult to turn off once things start flowing. But this day was more unique on the subject of those two books simply because the discussion point was in how you can determine who on the other side of an objective is about to fail—which is clearly one of the primary ingredients needed in understanding proper strategy on anything. As I was talking about how you can know who is about to fail and when to pounce on their positions, I received the news that the Democratic Party had filed a lawsuit against President Trump for a conspiracy between the Russian government and WikiLeaks to rob Democrats of the 2016 presidential election. It was pretty stunning stuff, because it essentially announced to the world who knew how to read the tea leaves that the Democratic Party had just announced its end.

http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-pol-democrats-lawsuit-russia-20180420-story.html

The Democrats have lost the news story of Russian collusion and many of their ranks are about to be pulled into the insane story about James Comey as that former FBI director continues to make an absolute ass of himself on his incriminating book tour. The Mueller investigation for Democrats has sputtered into a big nothing going further nowhere leaving a lot of money spent with nothing to show for it. Trump is having personal success in spite of all the mechanisms of power that have been thrown at him from FBI lying and spying to the entire entertainment industry coming after him. He is still bringing peace to North Korea, something that hasn’t happened in nearly seven decades by lots of supposedly smart people. Trump has accomplished the task in just a matter of months and that’s not all. He has been successful in Syria against Russia and continues to have success in the Middle East. The economy is doing well and the culture in America is changing for the better, and people are starting to feel it.

Fundraising is down for the Democrats and as they come to the primaries and the midterms that come after there just aren’t a lot of “blue” candidates who can win “red” seats in spite of all the Republicans who are retiring from Trump’s control over the GOP. The Democratic Party knows it has no other hope to win anything other than in scoring some major publicity victory which at this point isn’t going to happen. They have just announced that they are suing one of the most sued people in American history—in Donald Trump. If anybody knows how to handle the rigors of court drama its Trump. Trump’s legal team can now counter a lawsuit and depose evidence that the Democrats have long sought to hide, like the DNC server, because you can’t prove anything was hacked without presenting the evidence—and that evidence for the Democrats is very damning and is what got all of them into trouble in the first place.

The entire case that the Democrats are presenting is based on an early 2016 press conference that Trump had where he jokingly asked the Russians to produce Hillary Clinton’s delated emails that she had destroyed obviously to hide crimes she had committed as Secretary of State when she set up her private server to conduct her electronic communications. As a public servant she wasn’t allowed to do that. She ignored the rules and thought she was going to get away with running for another public office when she obviously disregarded the rules of conduct prior to that attempt. It has been amazing to listen to James Comey talk during his book tour because as the head of the FBI it would seem that he’d have better knowledge of how the rest of the country thinks, but what we’ve learned is that he is just a beltway liberal who has very activist objectives. He’s a lot like Hillary Clinton in that he thinks he’s entitled to things, just as she thought she was entitled to the presidency—her lifelong goal as a meal ticket of womanhood. When reality didn’t match up to their expectations they flubbed up—Comey in trying to hide his activism as the head of the FBI, and Clinton in operating her campaign in illegal ways trusting that people like James Comey would run cover for her, and that nobody would challenge them. Trump simply threw the issue on the table joking about Russians which exposed the Clinton campaign and really put pressure on the FBI investigation into her activity as a candidate. Trump had forced both the FBI and the Clinton campaign into a series of mistakes that culminated into an early July 2016 blunder by the FBI once Loretta Lynch had met with former President Clinton to work out a deal to keep Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign alive even though there was a “there” there.

One thing I really like about Chuy’s, as a restaurant experience is that it looks crazy as a fusion mix of Texas enormity and Mexican chaos. Mexican culture is a mash up of Aztecan heritage, Spanish Catholicism and the mixing of two radical cultures into one impoverished Marxist enterprise—color pallets that don’t go together, hubcaps on the ceiling, exotic tropical resorts which give the country some forms of legitimate business to front for all their illegal drug activity. Yet the food underneath all the colorful forms of chaos is all very fresh and you can trust that everything you are eating is nearly right off the farm quality. There’s a lot going on at Chuy’s which I find very stimulating. Not because I like crazy, but that it is metaphorically pleasing to me to immerse myself in those types of environments because they are emblematic toward the many layers of life that is in our present society. On the surface the things we see clash and meet in ways that seem disconnected, but under all those layers is high quality and competency.

Once you understand the chaos on a story like the Hillary Clinton case, you can enjoy the quality that is behind an endeavor, and that was the reason I knew that the Democrats were in serious trouble, which I had been predicting for a long time. As I was eating at Chey’s with some business friends talking about the long history of samurai warfare and the ability to understand victory long before anybody else could—it was obvious that President Trump had punched through into a new good place for the country. And the Democrats had sealed their own fate with that announced lawsuit. For the Democrats, their much-coveted Mueller investigation was imploding and the waters of the swamp had dropped several feet unmasking lots of slimy creatures who had been hiding just under the surface. As I ate my tortillas on a fine spring day in April, I could smell victory for the Republicans in the air and the wonderful understanding what winning for America feels like once again. And it was a grand sensation.

Rich Hoffman

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Support Allegiant Airlines: Don’t let panic driven people ruin everything for the rest of us

Let me just say in defense of Allegiant Airlines that I would have no problem flying on them with my entire family anywhere they are going, be it Las Vegas, Orlando, or anyplace else. As a discount carrier I think they do a fantastic job and provide a wonderful service. Being able to fly to far away destinations for under $100 per seat—in many times much less than that—helps bring down the prices in an industry obsessed with attempting higher and higher costs on the consumer. I was personally disgusted with the hit job 60 Minutes conducted against Allegiant this past week and how it set off a subsequent parade of negative aviation stories—especially after Southwest Airlines actually had a CFM-56 engine blow up at 30,000 feet killing a passenger. Let me tell everyone something, the FFA does not need more regulations for god’s sake, accidents happen, especially in an aging fleet of planes that have been flying for a while. What happened with Southwest Airlines is an extreme rarity, the containment case should have captured that shrapnel from the exploding engine. It certainly doesn’t mean that every exploding engine will produce the same effect as the panicky people on the 60 Minutes episode by Steve Kroft articulated based on their experiences with Allegiant.

https://www.bizjournals.com/tampabay/news/2018/04/17/how-allegiants-woes-could-hit-tourism-in-pinellas.html

What I see happening in general toward Allegiant is a similar hit that CNN did against Sea World—an attempt to bring down a company using the media by competitors. In this case Allegiant puts a lot of pressure to bring down costs in the airline industry, which is desperately needed. The unions and other airlines all have an intense desire to use every excuse to drive up prices, so the safety record of Allegiant is attacked so that it forces them to comply with industry regulations designed to appease the labor unions. It’s no different from when panicky moms and school teachers use “children” as an excuse to raise taxes in a local school district, because it presents an indefensible position that is emotionally driven. Allegiant Airlines is providing a low-cost service using planes that have seen a few miles without all the luxury that other flights might offer to get customers to faraway places without breaking their bank accounts, and I think its wonderful. I don’t care if the planes shake, rattle and roll a bit in flight, they are safe enough to fly reliably. The only thing they are doing wrong in relation to the industry as a whole, is that they are forcing other airlines to lower their own prices.

Listening to those losers on the 60 Minutes segment was utterly disgusting. Flying is supposed to be something of an adventure. The way flight was invented in the United States always had with it a bit of living on the edge where the pioneers of flight endured the many unknown dangers associated with flying with valor and a confidence that anything could be overcome. Passengers had the same type of spirit. A rickety craft over the South Pacific or the jungles of the Amazon carrying some business to faraway lands was a positive experience in every way. The lives of the passengers were never in much danger at the hands of a competent pilot and the ambition that kept aircraft going into the sky by ground crews inventing everything as they went with duct tape and glue.

The larger problem of today isn’t the fault of the airlines, it’s the type of people they are dealing with. There are always a percentage of the population that have been raised on panic television, who watched the Jerry Springer Show entirely too much that are looking for every available lawsuit, and those people ruin life for the rest of us. It is their fault that there are too many regulations, too many stop signs, ridiculously low-speed limits—because they bitch and complain about everything which forces companies to waste money trying to appease them. It made me sick to see that big girl interviewed by Steve Kroft talk about how she feared she wouldn’t see her children again when the engine blew on that Allegiant flight. Let me say that if I had been on that flight I wouldn’t have even stopped reading my book. It is disgusting that such panicky people are out there complaining about every little thing and are so terrified about basic things in life. Just because somebody cries about their fears about something doesn’t mean the entire industry should change what it’s doing for everyone else.

Airlines like Allegiant allow big girls like that 60 Minutes complainer to fly to Vegas and have access to all those bottomless pit buffets because they offer cheap flights. Without those cheap flights most, people wouldn’t be able to afford going to places like Vegas for the weekend. People like that lady want Allegiant to go out and invest in a new fleet of aircraft that aren’t so worn and rickety but they don’t expect to have to pay the higher ticket prices associated with new aircraft investment. It’s just like that idiot Jessie Jackson coming to Cincinnati to protest Kroger for not keeping failing stores open in poor neighborhoods because they were losing their ass due to theft, vandalism, and poor-quality clientele. The expectation is that companies have an altruistic obligation to society to give all their profits to the poor and needy. Well, people who think like that are completely wrong. Go see how that mentality has been working in Cuba, North Korea and Iran. Go visit Africa and tell me how that “profit sharing” is going. The truth is, profit drives ambition, which drives industry. Vegas thrives off cheap flights and buffets. It could be argued that Vegas is a sinful place that brings no good to the moral condition of society. I would say that Vegas is a lot of bad things but it’s also a lot of good—they have great shows in Vegas and great food. We have a better society because there are places like Vegas in the United States and Allegiant does a great job of getting people there who otherwise wouldn’t be able to afford to go.

Sea World is still reeling from the hit job CNN did to them way back in 2014. That same hit job media is in full court press attack mode against President Trump. And now it’s after Allegiant for all the same reasons. The competition doesn’t like change or a society that has options, so they use the media to exploit the fears of stupid, panicky people to give them a competitive advantage over a rival. Essentially when something is good these days some parasitic cape rider will seek to jump on for a free ride and use the anxious sentiments of federal regulators to attempt to slow down the best to the cumbersome exploits of the weak—and its utterly disgusting to see. The TSA has been much better under President Trump, but they are still a laborious unionized organization of make work efforts designed to appease a panicky public. Every time someone complains about something like exploding engines—which are facts of life in aviation—or terrorists, or smelly buffet participants fresh from a trip to Vegas, someone writes a new law that slows down the entire industry and that is much more destructive than some occasional mechanical failures. It costs a lot of money to run an airline and people are lucky that there are companies like Allegiant out there. Without them the ticket prices would be so high that few could afford to travel—which wouldn’t be good for anybody. I would encourage everyone to book a ticket on Allegiant and take a weekend vacation to some exotic destination, and to support them in this time of bad publicity. They deserve the support.

Rich Hoffman

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Thoughts on the Nature and Value of Geeks: The last hope of a rare few who have not given up on intellect

There are plenty of negative news stories out there but what they all have in common is that most of the participants of those stories, both on the end of generation, and on the receipt, all share crippled minds created for them by institutional restrictions socially mandated on previous historical context. Most of the problems of our society can be traced back to this essential problem. With that in mind I have been exploring over these last couple of weeks the incidents of society where positives are emerging, and I identified the Star Wars franchise as one of those things that create new, imaginative context to a new way at looking at old problems. While I agree that most of our human species is mired in dank, miserable thinking, I would say that roughly 5% are not. I meet a few here and there who are operating outside of the modern limits, who don’t care about baseball statistics and the NBA playoffs, or what’s going on in modern politics. They are seeking to fill their active minds any way possible. Most of the time their net results are that of social misfits whom nobody will ever listen to, and they will have no impact on the social circumstances around them, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t any merit in trying, which they appear to be doing.

I was at the Barnes & Noble in West Chester at 9 AM sharp the day that James Comey’s tell nothing book came out. Actually, it told a lot—it said that in the Comey household James does what his wife tells him to do, and she was a Hillary Clinton supporter. So he broke the law to make her happy—its pretty much as simple as that. But I was there to get another book as well, the new Star Wars book Last Shot that was all about Han Solo, which I had been very eager to read. While I was in line at the checkout there were three other people there with me and they all had the Last Shot book in their hands—but none of them had the James Comey book. That told me a lot about the state of the world. I’m sure Comey’s book will sell, but the real interest was in fantasy alternatives to the present reality, and for people daring enough to ask, Star Wars was offering something to think about. All the people holding that book looked to be under 35, two of them were male, one was a female and they reminded me that there are people out there in the cracks of life who haven’t given up on a potential future—and I found that encouraging.

For my birthday last week my kids gave me a little Millennium Falcon Lego set to build with my grandson. While he was over during the weekend we took the time to build it and once we completed it he was very impressed with our work. He wanted to display it prominently on a book cabinet that I have which has a lot of models and trophies on top of it, because to him it meant a lot. As I’ve said before, the Lego Company has been doing some great work for years—both in video games and in toys. Every time I do a model kit of theirs I am always impressed with they way they engineer their products. This particular Millennium Falcon is a simple ten-dollar toy kit that you can get at Target, but I found it remarkably sophisticated in how it went together. After seeing my grandson’s reaction, I immediately considered getting the new Ultimate Collector Series Millennium Falcon set. It has 7500 pieces and costs about $1,200. He probably needs a few years before working on that one, but it did spark my imagination on how productive such an experience could be. That’s when I found this video from the Tested guys, who are part of the Myth Busters television series.

All of the adults in that Tested group reminded me of the kind of people who were with me at Barnes & Nobel at 9 AM sharp to buy the latest Han Solo book. Society from the outside looks at people like these people and thinks they are wasting their time on fantasy, but what I see and have experienced with them is that they are in acts of rebellion against the status quo—they are standing against the tide of lackluster thinking that is so prevalent in modern society. Yes they are geeks, but that is to say that they are people who have not yet surrendered their minds to the apathy of modern society. They can’t find what they need in society to fill their minds, so they have turned to fantasy to satisfy their hungry intellects. It makes me very happy to see all those grown adults sit down and tackle that Millennium Falcon Lego build with such unbridled enthusiasm. I would say that there are more people like that in the world now than there were 30 years ago, or even 60, which is important to note.

People don’t spend $1,200 on a Millennium Falcon 1500-piece puzzle essentially because they don’t like to think. As I mentioned earlier this week about the opioid crises, the main cause of drug abuse is an intellect in conflict with their environment. I would dare say that those people in the Tested group probably don’t go out and get drunk very much, and they probably don’t do drugs because their minds are in harmony with their existence. It’s a shame that they had to turn to fantasy to get that harmony, but at least it’s a mechanism they have discovered which allows for such a positive relationship with themselves. And when you visit the toy aisle at Wal-Mart and Target, they have entire sections dedicated to Lego and puzzle games because they obviously are selling. Just as people don’t show up at 9 AM to buy the latest Han Solo book because they want to go out and smoke crack—to turn off their minds. Reading, no matter what it is turns on a mind and is a very positive experience.

Most of what drives our world to evil is the vacancy left when people have surrendered thought to the lazy whims of groupthink. Sports in many ways is a groupthink activity and is very popular with modern civilization. But more and more I am seeing the influence of fantasy elements like Star Wars creating in people a desire to sit down and build Millennium Falcon models and read books about that ship in stories that mean something to those who participate in the task of discovery. I saw in those three-other people in the bookstore line with me that day hope in their eyes. The world around them was letting them down in many ways and they were thoughtful enough to contemplate the issues. But their minds were hungry, and society wasn’t feeding them, so they turned out with me at 9 AM to buy a book they couldn’t wait to get their hands on. And I’m noticing more of these people year by year, and that gives me a lot of hope for tomorrow. They are still in the extreme minority, but maybe, just maybe, they will become the majority in a few hundred years—and that would be a great thing for the human race!

Last Shot was the first Star Wars book that I have read since 2013/14 and I admit I only did it because it featured Han Solo as the primary character. I wanted to see how they were going to deal with Solo ahead of the movie coming out on May 25th. I have said many nice things over the past years about how important I think Star Wars books are to the next generation for all the reasons outlined in this article. But I have been very skeptical about the direction the Disney ownership has taken their acquired Star Wars franchise from a person I greatly admire in George Lucas. I am not happy about the more progressive direction that Star Wars has taken, but I am very happy that it is fueling the imaginations of people like those great Tested guys. I can say that after reading Last Shot I enjoyed it enormously and I will probably go and read the long list of new books that have been published since 2012. There is plenty of good value in those stories that justify the investment and all the fun that a grandpa can have with his grandkids for the next thirty years. And that all by itself is a wonderful attribute. It was a good book, and it made me very happy to have the opportunity to read it—which I did voraciously!

Rich Hoffman

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Comey’s Crime is in Being a “Yes Dear”: The reason for the political divide in America

I had more than a few friends tell me this week that they just can’t take the political divisions in their country anymore, and that they were going to seek more positive things to do with their lives. As they said, the rhetoric is just too divisive to have proper discourse between people, and they were checking out. These are media people who work in the business and it is ironic that we heard pretty much the same thing when James Comey gave his interview with George Stephanopoulos on ABC’s 20/20 Sunday night. As book stores opened today, the day of this writing, I picked up Comey’s book and read it just to make sure my thoughts about the guy were correct—and of course they were. Essentially James Comey is like a lot of my friends in the media who were proclaiming that the world had shifted in a direction they didn’t understand, and they were refusing to participate. Comey after all had thought of himself as a reasonable person even though his wife and kids were rather radical leftists. If it had been Jeb Bush who was running against Hillary Clinton the only division in the Comey household would be whether or not a woman would become president, because institutionally, the two candidates were the same. But since it was Trump, there was nothing in James Comey’s background to prepare him intellectually for what that meant. And many people find themselves in the same quandary at this point of time and they are distressed by it.

James Comey protecting the way things were took it upon himself to alter the political landscape of the 2016 election. He meddled far more than any Russians, or fat slob hacker in the middle of Kansas—as Director of the FBI he tried to walk a fine line of keeping Hillary Clinton in the candidacy for president even though she essentially disqualified himself with the email scandal. Thinking in hindsight, Comey should have suggested prosecution of Hillary Clinton and let the DOJ refuse it. At least the DNC could have put up another candidate before the convention process. That would have been the right thing to do, but then Comey would have been blamed for eliminating the first woman potentially for president, which is what got him into trouble. That pressure likely came mostly from within his own home. Reading what he has said about the matter I am completely convinced that he did all that to make his wife and kids happy. To them, the first female president was far more important than the law, so Comey put himself in a bad spot based on family pressure. But it didn’t help that he was surrounded at the FBI by the same kind of Washington Beltway types who were ideologically far to the political left from the average American. They all thought the game they were playing was a different one from which produced Donald Trump as the head of the Republican Party and James Comey had no way to navigate that reality. That is clear in his book which is devastating for him personally. If these were normal circumstances, he’d be put in jail just for his testimony given in his book. But there is a long line of people who are in that line with him and I don’t know that there are enough jails for all of them, so who knows what will happen.

Comey obviously hated Donald Trump, but not for the reasons he has managed to articulate. After reading Comey’s book it is obvious from a psychological point of view that he resented Trump for not being as pussy whipped as he was, where his wife controlled him too much. Comey views his role in his marriage as a sacrificial sanctuary that takes precedence over his personal desires and here was a Donald Trump who did what he wanted, when he wanted to, who doesn’t appear to answer to anybody—even his wife, and to Comey this was something he just couldn’t get his mind around. So he developed a disdain for Donald Trump from the outset. Of course Trump’s hands were smaller than Comey’s. Comey is around 6’ 8.” But to Comey he had to build up his lack of inferiority to Trump any way he could justify so to preserve his own relationship with his long-time wife. Using his marriage to show moral superiority to Trump was the only way he could protect himself from the reality of Trump’s election and justify his radical behavior to attempt to impeach him. For Comey, that was the only way he could protect the world he understood it to be—even though that is obviously not the reality.

I can say that the palatable anger that my media friends are talking about come from a realization that many have not yet come to terms with—just as James Comey hasn’t. For at least 32 years, through all of Bill Clinton’s presidency, then George Bush, then 8 years of Barack Obama normal Americans quietly sat by and let the system work to the best of its ability. We didn’t protest every little thing. We didn’t seek the impeachment of the president every five seconds. I did take a case for the impeachment of Barack Obama down to John Boehner’s office where his people laughed at it—like it was such an impossibility that it wasn’t worth the paper it was printed on. So we worked really hard to put a change candidate for conservatism into the White House—after waiting all that time, and once the deed was done we did not receive the same respect for our guy. Now we see the political left pushing so hard against our choice with a constant barrage of disrespectful aggression that we are angry about it. And some Republicans that we thought we could trust have joined the left to preserve the institutions that we have come to hate due to our sudden mistrust.

Facebook is on fire with discontent, Twitter is rhetorically divisive, the comments sections of online newspapers are being shut down everywhere because the discourse is so volatile, and the reason is a good one. Normal Americans, for which I am one, have been lied to, manipulated, and used by people like James Comey for most of our lives and we aren’t happy about it. Jeb Bush and his brother were never our kind of Republican. James Comey was entirely too liberal for us, but we put up with him out of polite discourse and now that we have someone who truly does represent our part of the nation the same respect is not provided to our decision as we gave to the other side for three decades.

I announced on these pages many years ago that America was in a new civil war so none of this is a surprise to me. I think the hatred that is on display toward the political left these days is better than armed insurrection. It took a reality television star to really break down the ultimate reality television show—that which was driving our society politically at every level. Through Trump we have seen behind the scenes all the ugliness that was always there and we don’t like it. We always knew it was there, but we couldn’t be certain until Trump was elected. Then and only then did he metaphorically pull down the curtains, so we could all see the characters hiding there who were running everything we loved essentially into the ground. James Comey was one of the villains—a Boy Scout like figure who used his image to hide his political radicalism—which was largely formed by his “yes dear” relationship with his liberal wife. The same could have been said about the entire Hollywood industry, our favorite stores, and our music industry. Our country was being drug in a direction we didn’t like and when we put a stop to it we really saw the fangs of the other side and now instead of polite discourse, we have a fight. What did anybody really think was going to happen? Were we expected to stand down forever? We believed in the election process and now that appears to be in jeopardy, what are we to do—be happy about it and say, “yes dear?” No, that’s not how things work, especially in my world.

All that’s happening now is that my side is fighting back, they aren’t taking it any more the acceptance that the other side from Comey all the way over to the most radical leftist of the Communist Party USA have been very disrespectful to our part in the great Republic of America. Comey didn’t respect our “democracy” he tried to use his position as head of the FBI to pick his new boss—even if she grossly broke the law. He expected us to be civil about it? If you can’t trust the FBI, who can you trust? As we’ve seen the FBI has been weaponized against normal Americans, just as the IRS has been. Then to make matters worse, we elected our kind of guy into the most powerful position in the world and the FBI was audacious enough to break into the lawyer’s office of the President and steal information, so they could leak it to the press to instigate an impeachment case and we are supposed to be alright with that? If they’ll do it to the president, what would they do to the rest of us? So yes, we are mad, and no, we’re not going to take it anymore. And to those in charge within the media and in politics, you should all be extremely happy that its words and not bullets that we’ve chosen as our vehicles of justice. That could change in an instant if the political left continues to push it—which it seems obvious to me they are intent to attempt. That is their fault, they chose to disrespect us. Respect goes both ways; one side can’t give it all while the other pisses all over it. So they should expect to get everything they are getting and worse, because it’s what the political left chose. Yes, the situation has plenty of room to escalate. The lefties, for which Comey is a part, better decide if they really want to play at this bloodsport. Politeness should have never been identified as weakness. We simply waited for our turn and now that we have it, we aren’t going to put up with getting pushed around and lied to.

Rich Hoffman

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How to End the Opioid Crises: Why people desire to do “drugs” and pursue “intoxication”

Very moving visit today – "Prescribed to Death" Opioid Memorial on the Ellipse is a worthwhile partnership between @WhiteHouse, @Interior & @NatlParkServuce. #StopEveryDayKillers pic.twitter.com/ciJ0W5PBnN

— Melania Trump (@FLOTUS) April 16, 2018

Everyone seems so concerned suddenly about the opioid crises that has been destroying American civilization for many years now—because the effects of such a society are just now becoming irreversibly evident. To date the best explanation, I have ran across understanding this crises came from Ayn Rand in her 1970 essay called “The Comprachicos.” Of course now that was 50 years ago so the damage is much worse than it was then, but it does go a long way into explaining how evident even in the early stages the devastating effects of opioid abuse truly was. One particular paragraph in that essay I think says it all, “drugs are not an escape from economic or political problems, they are not an escape from society, but from oneself. They are an escape from the unendurable state of a living being whose consciousness has been crippled, deformed, mutilated, but not eliminated, so that its mangled remnants are screaming that he cannot go on without it.” To my experience this is 100% true and should be the main thing taught in all institutions of learning.

You have to peel back the layers of life quite a lot to get to the notion that ruling humans desire to become Comprachicos over all others, and they have every intention of starting the process as early in childhood as possible. If you speak diligently to the busy soccer mom and school levy activists with a van full of kids at a Burger King on a Saturday afternoon after the morning games you would think by her conviction that everything she is doing is for her kids and their friends. She truly believes that she is sacrificing all her time and energy into doing what’s best for her children. That same type of person will work very hard with her husband of the moment to put away tens of thousands of hard-earned dollars to help pay for their children’s college tuition—so that their kids can have a shot at a good life. Most people, especially parents believe in these basic foundations of child raising, so they have no understanding of considering that the original intent of all of it was to cripple those young minds from the outset so that they would grow up and become adults living under the whims of a select number of rulers.

Yet if you have the right kind of mind—one that has learned to think from birth until a well-balanced adulthood, you can clearly see that the intention of public education, and the college experience from the outset was to cripple the minds of children instead of filling them with knowledge and the desire to think. A mind’s ability to process information is what makes the human being different from all other life in the universe, as best we can tell. Even when we do discover some form of bacteria on some moon in our Solar System that form of life is nothing compared to a thinking human being. A human being’s ability to think is quite extraordinary and I have no faith that A.I. will overcome the human brain’s complexities. Calculating information is one thing, conceptualizing it is quite another and that is what humans do best. Every living human being desires to think—it is evident as infants. The pain for most people is that the older they get, and the further away they get from those pure moments of youth where they were able to think without artificial restrictions placed upon their conceptual thinking, the unhappier they become. To anybody still left with the ability to think it is quite obvious that the purpose of all education as it has been developed in first world countries is to cripple the minds of young people into existing within the barriers placed there institutionally. A mind is crippled into thinking within the box of conceptual thought, not outside of it as humans were always designed to do.

The older a child becomes, and the more adult they strive to be, the more they must seek to numb themselves from the dueling realities at war in their minds. Inside their biological bodies is a mind that wants to think but functioning in the world that the body finds that the rules of existence require the mind to be numb to endure the stagnation of thought that confronts it. Sadly, kids with each year of their life gradually give up on their thoughts and fall back on the basic memorization of society’s rules of conduct to operate, and this pressure squeezes them until there is nothing left. By the time the kids hit the college years and go through their various initiations into adulthood, mostly involving alcohol and “partying” the minds of such people are lost usually for the rest of their lives—and the education system then can claim success in their original objective. Such people pick their political party affiliation—which those in charge rule covertly behind the curtain so that the illusion of “democracy” can be maintained—people believe they are contributing factors in the process of their lives. They pick their occupation which is often controlled by the same forces as their chosen politics. They pick their sexual mates—who are often molded to be gate keepers to this hidden world of compliance—to ensure that as people buy their homes, their cars, and mow their lawns, that the illusion of self-expression stays within the confines of social acceptability—molded by the same sexual mates which deliver a new crop of brainless youth to the next generation.

Yet deep down inside is that will to think which was there at birth, and the now grown adult must shut down those thoughts with drunkenness, and other forms of intoxication. If they can manage to convince their doctor to give them some “meds” for their achy back, or their stiff knee, or their kid who has a “hyperactive” disorder, they’ll take those drugs in a second and they’ll numb their brains on a Saturday afternoon blindly watching a college football game without a thought in the world except what is required to make a living so they can make their house and car payments.

Before we can do anything about the opioid crises, we must tackle the cause of it. Attacking the supply side isn’t enough because the desire is still there to shut down the mind so that it’s thinking isn’t in conflict with the rules of society. People desire to be thinking creatures—biologically, but our method of human development currently requires us to turn off our thoughts and to conform to a static system of rules where we endeavor to send our kids to pre-school, enroll them into sports running around all weekend to satisfy those requirements, and to send them off to college without considering that all those elements are meant to destroy the minds of our children instead of fulfilling them. That same levy fighting soccer mom can only find relief when she can get her lips on a glass of wine or some other intoxicant, and she craves it like a person in the desert dying of thirst craves water—for much the same reason. Her husband does the same with his beer and his mixed drinks. At another time in their lives or even occasionally with friends they might smoke a little pot to take the edge off. And what are their kids to think of their defeated parents? They can do only what they are taught, so they follow in their footsteps and before we can all blink, all these people are abusing every drug legal and illegal that was ever created to turn off their minds so that they can live without the conflict of their true desires at war with the socially imposed rules of conduct.

To solve the opioid crises, we must reinvent ourselves as human beings, and that is no small task. But it’s the only one that will do the job. The true problem with drug abuse is that the intellect of the human mind is not conducive to the institutional parameters of historical thinking. All human institutions were formed from previous notions of science and religion—and they are obviously not relevant in a healthy way to modern life. So our minds are locked in conflict and the best answer our social norms have come up with is to bend our minds to institutional thinking rather than what our vast imaginations are informing us is the real needs of the human race. And that is where we must focus.

Rich Hoffman
Sign up for Second Call Defense here: http://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707 Use my name to get added benefits.

Don’t Worry About War with Russia, Syria, Iran, or China: Cheaters on a test have no ground to stand on

.@Uncle_Jimbo: “President Trump did the right thing, he answered… Assad, Putin and the Iranians in their disregard of his previous warning.” pic.twitter.com/GfRynODJaO

— Fox News (@FoxNews) April 14, 2018

Let me say regarding the Trump action in Syria that on many levels it is justified. There are people who think the president should not have been pulled into the conflict, and there are those who are terrified of war with Russia. Neither concern is warranted. Essentially, there will never be peace in the Middle East so long as Iran and Russia are propping up dictatorships in Syria. We can’t run from evil. It’s that simple. Like it or not for there to be peace in the world, the world is going to have to become more American. There will never be a world of differing opinions that just mesh together seamlessly. There must be an epistemological starting point for peace and that must come from at least basic shared ideas. Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran are all hostile communist nations—Russia still is in many ways, and until they truly join the world as free market capitalists their values will never match those of America or even Europe, and conflict will always be a threat. So there is no way for America to turn away from the gassing of the Syrian people and allow the Middle East to fall under the rule of ISIS terrorists and Russian manipulation.

There will be no war with Russia, like I’ve said about China and North Korea, none of these countries have the money for it. They are bullies who must act with force to get what they want—and so long as they are functioning in the world this way, there will be senseless death and destruction attached to random terrorism. Russia certainly doesn’t have the means to go to war with the United States. They are broke now let alone after any kind of military engagement with the United States. For years, especially during the Trump administration Russians have been provoking American troops whenever possible and over the last few weeks a lot of comments have been made. Trump has been standing up to the bullies of the region even though he’d rather think about something else. And when they crossed the line, he had to take action because when you tell a bully you are going to punch them in the nose, you had better do it if they don’t yield. Russia continued to back Syrian aggression so Trump had to send in the targeted military strikes.

But do not worry about provoking Russia. This is all part of draining the swamp. The Deep State has always used the threat of hostile nations to scare the American people into paralysis in believing that we all need those extra security offerings provided by the FBI, CIA, and Homeland security. To sell that threat they need people like Putin to be thriving in the world, so they go to great effort when our eyes are turned away to provoke hostile actors around the world to believe they have a seat at the table. But guess what, they don’t. I’d refer to Plato’s shadow man theory from his great book The Republic. The Deep State creates these shadows on the wall to keep our attentions on the scary practitioners of existence to essentially keep that Deep State in power. The Deep State even controls what we call political ideology, what the ideology of the political left and right are by manipulating over a long period of time the differences between the epistemologies of political theory in the United States. But the truth is to peek behind the curtain and eliminate the real threats, to take down the puppets and drain the swamp water where everyone in the Deep State is hiding.

Only when all the enemies of the world are conquered, which is very near a reality after just over a year of a Donald Trump presidency, will people come to know that the Deep State has been always the real threat. Without the Deep State there is no Putin, there is no China, and there is no trouble in the Middle East. And when I say “Deep State” I’m not talking about a bunch of black masked Bilderbergers of wealthy elite—they are just people like anybody else. I’m talking about the ancient yearning of people to desire to rule others as either kings, religious leaders, or military generals who truly desire to take mankind back to the days of the primitive—intellectually, so that they can rule the way they understand—through fear. They need deficits, they need villains, and they need a big strong police state to keep people from looking at anything too closely. In truth however, and this is what people are learning, all those threatening countries are not very strong unless the Americans prop them up to look meaner than they actually are. By Americans I’m talking about the CIA, and the FBI—the American media, and the other agencies who make their livings off protecting “us” from those same villains.

For over two years now we were led to believe that Russia’s President Putin hacked our election system and deposed the incompetent Hillary Clinton putting instead Trump in place. Well, Putin had nothing to do with me—it was people like me who voted for Trump and I’m no fan of Putin. If Putin wanted anybody to win the American election of 2016 it would have been the pushover loser, Hillary Clinton whom Russian had already smacked around plenty when she was Secretary of State. They certainly didn’t want a businessman in the White House who understands money, because it is money that truly does decide who the winners and losers are in the world. By defeating the remaining tyrants in the world through exposure and turning the formerly hostile countries into capitalist zones to truly compete with the United States in trade, that is the only real path to peace which would then allow America to turn back toward itself and not get stretched across the earth putting out every little fire that every bad actor known to mankind can ignite.

I think its great that American is bombing targets in Syria and is calling the bluff of Russia. I told everyone who reads here that there wouldn’t be a trade war with China, look how fast Xi caved on his tough talk. Do you know why dear reader? Because they need American imports much more than we need them. All communist countries have one fundamental problem, their societies do not produce citizens with imaginations, so they have serious intellectual property problems. That means they have to steal it from those who do, and that is how China has been making their living for a long time. Russia is in much the same boat, without the West to copy off of, they are left to their own devices. They are like that kid in school who didn’t study for a test and have to cheat off the person next to them for the answers. Well the person who did study and has all the answers has the leverage in that situation. Halfway through the test if they decide to put their hand over their paper, the cheater is stuck with no resources to complete the test. That is essentially what Trump is doing in China, what he has done in North Korea, and what he is about to do with Russia and Iran. When you have the power position you use it, especially if it creates an opportunity for peace. Which is precisely what is happening presently in Syria.

Rich Hoffman

Sign up for Second Call Defense here: http://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707 Use my name to get added benefits.

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