Tag: drug cartels

How to Have a Happy Life: The nature of love and meaning of Pavarotti’s ‘Nessun Dorma’

I ran across this unique article linked below which of course inspired comment. So many people in life are drowning in misery and self-doubt which is a real tragedy because it’s all avoidable. It’s one thing to have little regrets in life which start when we are all very young, but if not dealt with properly they become monstrosities as we age, and it really destroys people. The burden of regret is a tremendous liability on most people as this little article explores in Best Life. Things get even more complicated philosophically for people as we instruct them that a sense of “self” is selfish and that they should always put others before themselves 100% of the time. Such a position in life is not conducive to a successful existence, so for the sake of inspiring people to live just a little bit better not just in the short-term, but the long-term as well, perhaps a few encouraging words are appropriate.

https://bestlifeonline.com/this-is-biggest-regret-in-life-most-people-have/

From my earliest memory I have always had a strong sense of self and I’ve protected that concept vigorously for over 50 years now. I’m not a believer in reincarnation, but my inner compass has always pointed toward the need to protect my individuality. For that reason, I have never struggled with peer pressure attempting to take me away from my personal goals which later led to regret. I can honestly say that at age 50 that I have no regrets in life. Not a single one. That is true of both good and bad memories. Of course, not everything is always rosy, but when I’ve needed to I’ve certainly defended my sense of self with arguments and fist fights—and even though some people did get very hurt, for me those events didn’t lead to regrets because I was defending my sense of self. I think a lot of people go wrong in their lives because they feel like they should say this or that when other people impose themselves, yet the target of those negative emotions never say anything, they just internalize the emotions leaving them to reflect later in life back to a regret, which then destroys them in thousands of negative ways always from the inside out. Speaking personally, when I felt I needed to do something to defend my sense of self, I have always done it, sometimes recklessly and against the advice of everyone. At the time such things seemed crazy, but it has led me to a life without any regrets and that is a huge benefit to me now.

We are all taught that there is something bigger than ourselves, which is really stupid. The person that people fall in love with and want to be near and to learn from is what we are, not what we sacrifice to others. If you are the type of person who is always giving of yourself and your time you should not be surprised that the people you attract in your life are all people drowning from their bad decisions in life, and that they migrate to you to take whatever you can give them. So unhealthy relationships persist under such conditions. On the other hand, you can’t be psycho about your sense of self either going to the extreme opposite, never letting anyone near you because you feel you are so weak that you can’t let people tow in your wake. I find that the definition that we all have for “love” is wrong. Love isn’t about “falling” for other people, a spouse, a child, or a friend, it’s about taking the substance of one’s existence and allowing people to share in the fruits born from the pronoun “I.” If a person does not have a strong sense of self, than what is there for anybody to “love” about you.

What people love is not what you can give them, but what they can “love” about you—that strong sense of self. For instance, children might love their father but if the guy is just sitting around on the porch of his house thinking about all the things he regrets about his life, the times he should have made more money, or the times he stepped away from a fight with a neighbor over grass clippings, or even gave up his seat in the employee cafeteria to avoid some kind of conflict, there isn’t much for the children to love about such a person except for the sacrifice they provided to their own existence. Compare that to the father who builds a model train set in his basement which the grand kids play with whenever they come over. The material representation of the train set is a reflection of the sense of self of the grandfather which provides some hook for which others in his life can love about him, and the relationship is much more beneficial for everyone. The self-interest of the father to pursue a train set is much more value to a family than a regretful shell of a man rocking in a chair at the end of his life handing out twenty-dollar bills to his children who appreciate the gesture but are craving a sense of love for their father.

I had a tremendously bad day the other day at the start of it and as I am known to do on such days things got a little hairy. One of my daughters was coming over for dinner that night and as the sun was starting to set they asked me what I wanted for dinner and were putting their toes into the water to check my mood. By the time we had the conversation I had solved many of my problems and my response to them was that I had taken a lot of curvy roads through the mountains that day and turned them straight through a desert terrain. Upon further inquiry they asked for details so I sent them by text this video of Luciano Pavarotti singing the famous opera of Nessun Dorma. It is a favorite of mine not because it has inspired me to great things, but because it often matches my mood and approach to things in my life. When I hear Pavarotti sing this opera it reflects my sense of self for which provides many people in my life with something to love about me. I had two choices in such an interaction, I could say that “oh, my day was so bad, I just don’t know what to do” which for me would be uncharacteristic, because I always know what to do. Or I could send them an uplifting message for which they could invest their love—which they could trust because they understand my need to turn curvy roads into nice straight roads and solve problems—no, to “conquer” problems.

It is far better to live a life with bumps and bruises and occasional broken legs than to learn to live with regrets. Similarly, on that bad day I described I gave a little class to some of my employees who needed to hear It about the road less traveled which I’ll share here for context. Do not expect in life to take the safe paved roads that are provided for you and expect to find rare treasures just laying along the side of them. All you ever find is pocket change that people who came before you accidentally drop. The way to really find treasures in life is off those paved roads in the places in the forest where no trail exists. That is where snakes will bite you, thorn bushes puncture your skin and you can even break a leg stepping on the uneven surfaces. But it is also there where treasures are more likely to be found and they don’t all come from actual gold, but in other valuable forms that are otherwise left unmolested due to the difficulty in retrieving them. Yes the road is safe, but the sense of self that we have for which people fall in love doesn’t like safety—because it leads to regret. Not asking that girl for a date, or not taking the time to read that book, or driving that car, or taking that vacation to Hawaii because it’s too expensive leads to a life filled with regret. Life can be difficult and it often can be punishing just to breathe in it, but for me I expect to end each of my days with that feeling you get from Pavarotti singing Nessum Dorma “I will win.” Win what and why, that is defined by our sense of self, and you must have that to know what winning means and how being a winner brings more love to the people in your life who care about you than just being a loser that stays on the safe roads of life and does what everyone tells you to do, leading to an obvious life of misery and regret that isn’t good for anybody.

Rich Hoffman

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

A Note to the Political Left: You want to fight, I’m more than ready

https://twitter.com/overmanwarrior/status/1012131397878865920

31% of people polled in a recent Rasmussen poll believe that we are headed to a second civil war in America.  I am one of them and when and if it happens, I offer myself to help win it on behalf of traditional America.  Just let me know.  It would be fun, and is greatly needed.

http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/general_politics/june_2018/31_think_u_s_civil_war_likely_soon

I am an excellent communicator with a great vocabulary. I’ve done radio broadcasts, television, given public speeches, written a few books and conduct myself at a high professional manner in business. Additionally, I have a martial art background, am a professional bullwhip artist and am one of the fastest gun owners on the draw from a holster to target that there is in the United States. No matter what kind of confrontation I find myself in, I can deal with it easily. I can debate any topic with any person at any time and any place in any format, and I know that 99.9999999999999% of the time that will be enough. For that rare time that physical violence does erupt, which the older you get and the smarter you get is much less often—that I can take care of the situation. The reason I bring this up is that I know how to avoid conflict and prefer debate over violence any time. But I also know where the limits for debate are and when physical violence is unavoidable—and I am quite certain that the situation the political left is in currently, a year and a half into the Trump presidency, that likely violence is the only thing that will work against the threats that are being made against conservatives. Liberals cannot and will not listen to reason about the things that are going on in the world because their entire political platform is about avoiding reason and functioning from pure emotion—how they would like the world to be, not how it actually is, so no matter what format they choose to fight on, they are going to lose leaving them to retreat to the most primal of threats—physical violence.

I have said often what the purpose of public education is. I know a lot of school board members both current and former, and many of them want to believe that they can have some positive impact on public education, but they really can’t. The way public education was designed from its inception as a government instruction tool it’s primary concerns were not to make children literate or to learn math. It was to shape them into peer groups for which they would be controlled for their entire lives. The children were always meant to confront bullies in school and to learn later in life that when a neighbor, a homeowner’s association, a boss, an IRS official, a FBI agent or a mob of leftist protestors confront them that they were to yield to that bully. The reason there are bullies in public schools is because the system is designed to bring them forth and to confront the masses to teach them conformity to the system as a whole—not to nurture individualized feelings.

In addition to the things I mentioned above I had a very unusual period in grade school, from kindergarten to my senior year in high school—I never once in all that time yielded to a single bully so naturally I stepped into adulthood unbroken completely—which is an unusual vantage point. I learned these lessons very early in life when getting a paddling from the teacher and being sent to the principal’s office were supposed to be the scariest things a kid would have to endure. I’ve told this story before but it’s very relevant to this situation, in the first grade there was a really scary bully that everyone was terrified of and the teachers avoided because he was impossible to deal with. He had terrible parents and they knew there was nothing they could do with the kid. Yet he was learning in a classroom environment with all the other kids. He was twice the size of all of us and he was just mean. He was smoking cigarettes in school in the first grade! So he was hopeless and everyone knew it. But the suggestion was that we would all have to learn to live with him and learn to like it. We were supposed to go out of our way to appease the kid so that we wouldn’t get beat up. Well, not me, he happened to sit in front of me and I didn’t like the way he smelled or spoke, so we never got along. And one day he turned around to punch me in the face for smarting off to him and to defend myself I poked him in the eye with my scissors, as a raw reaction to his aggression. I got into a lot of trouble, and essentially the rest of my school years I was in and out of the principal’s office not because I was a bully, but because I refused to yield to them. The bullies never got into any real trouble, but I sure did. I was the good kid that was supposed to be molded into a productive citizen that would learn his place under the rule of the bullies. I did learn to be a productive person, but I never learned to yield to any bully. That has given me clarity to speak from regarding this present problem.

The political left is largely untested radicals who were nurtured from their youth to be bullies in their adulthood, not individually of course, but as pack hunters. Their greatest weapon is the kind of mass force that was experimented with during the Berkley Riots of 1965—where the students were used to drive social issues in a left leaning direction by essentially using mobs as a bully to instigate fear into the voting public. They were created in our public schools and deep in their subconscious have key words programmed into their minds which are activated by media buzz words for which they act like robots upon hearing them. And just like that they are trying to kick out Sarah Sanders from The Red Hen, or confronting Mitch McConnell outside his Georgetown condo and are roaming the country under the hoods of ANTIFA threatening to rape, destroy and vandalize any Trump supporter because they have the sense that the mood of the country has finally turned away from them and they may very well lose the next election cycle to even more Republicans.

Violence is all the political left has, they don’t have ideas, they don’t have a strategy, and they don’t have a future. All they have and all they ever had was fear driven by emotions. If they fail to evoke fear in their audiences, they have no impact legislatively, and as we all know, all rules in society should be made by reason, not emotional fears. The strategy of the old conservatives who hold a Bible in one hand and tell us to have compassion for our fellow people on the other side of politics are wrong. You cannot appease a bully when they are programmed to do nothing else but destroy. Like that bully I mentioned and many that came after him, there was no talking to or reasoning with the guy. He had to be destroyed, because that’s all he understood. And that is what we are dealing with now, people who will destroy you if you give them the chance. They are not ever going to listen to reason, they will never seek peace from thuggish aggression—because they don’t know anything else. We have to deal with them the only way that anybody can, with the offer of debate, but the moment that doesn’t work, violence. I certainly know the difference between the two, debate and violence. Debate is always preferred, but this fight before us isn’t a rational one. All the political left has in their arsenal is fear. And without that they have nothing. So when an opponent is intent to use the only weapon they have left, you have to meet them with at least an equal force. That means the time for talking is over, they will have to be beaten into oblivion in order for peace to ever have a chance. You must take away the only weapon they have before anything can change, and that takes courage, and the self-confidence to do so.

I can only speak for myself in this matter but when I hear the political left threatening violence against Trump supporters it makes me want to confront them and actually beat them into submission. As I mentioned in the first paragraph, I have all the tools to engage them with methods other than with violence, but if they think we are going to yield to them out of fear, they have a lot to learn. I would say, again, speaking for myself, it is impossible for them to beat me. I’ve been threatened in every way possible in the past and been through more than enough to know what happens during physical confrontations and there is nothing that worries me about anything they have to offer either as individuals or as mass groups. If you know how to defeat such people it doesn’t matter if the threat is one or a million, they can all be beaten—easily. Nobody is going to hurt me under any conditions. And nobody is going to hurt my family, friends or associates. There is no way for them to make a person like me comply to their brute force tactics and peer pressure. Being very Kantian philosophically they are inclined to believe that if a tree falls in the forest and nobody was around to hear it, that the event didn’t happen, because for the event to happen, they as a collective would have to accept that the event occurred. But reality says that if a tree falls in the forest it doesn’t matter if anybody heard it or not. It fell, and it happened regardless whether everyone agreed that the event occurred. That is the game that political leftists are trying to play with the Trump presidency. They are in denial that it happened, and they are willing to use whatever force necessary to deny its existence, not just from us, but from themselves. So for the good of mankind and of reality, we must take away their weapons and meet them with force equal to or superior to what they offer. And they must be destroyed, utterly, and completely as a philosophic species and be reborn as children of reason. That is the only option there is in 2018.

Rich Hoffman

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

Case of The Red Hen: Stephanie Wilkinson showed us why breaking the law on gun legislation is perfectly justifiable–if the “left” wants to fight, let’s go

Sarah Sanders, the White House Press Secretary for President Trump was with her family 200 miles into the Virginia countryside when they stopped by the little town of Lexington for some food at The Red Hen. From outside, it looked like an arty little place, badly painted and small—with only 26 seats, yet it had been a rough week and a little cultural experience seemed like just the thing, so they stepped inside to have a family meal, hopefully without the media paying much attention so they could relax. Yet the staff recognized her and wanted to make a political issue of the visit. Lexington was a liberal town centered in a conservative county, so they are already at odds with the Trump supporters of the rural countryside surrounding the town.

Not sure what to do they called up the cousin of Meryl Streep herself who was the restaurant owner and also the Director of Main Street Lexington which was a group designated to inspire a friendly business atmosphere in the downtown area. Stephanie Wilkinson as a liberal activist who had hired a lot of radicals to her staff had to take their side so she came in during the appetizer portion of the meal that was being served to Sanders and pulled her aside to ask her to leave. Sarah respected the restaurant owners right to serve whoever they wanted, so she and her family left. More specifics about this case can be seen at The American Thinker article below as well as this very interesting video featuring an interview with Stephanie Wilkinson herself. So much for her efforts at trying to help downtown Lexington—she just put a black eye on that poor town with her liberal activism, and everyone will have to pay for it, not just the little dump they call The Red Hen.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/06/red_hen_bigotry_or_moral_conviction.html

The hypocrisy couldn’t be clearer, when pressed by reporters in the wake of the aftermath, Wilkinson said she would do it again, and that she felt morally compelled to make the decision citing that the restaurant had certain standards that they had to uphold and that she had to uphold those standards by asking a member of the President’s staff to leave. Obviously, this is a problem because it calls to mind the rantings of the political left over the refusal of bakery owners to serve to gay people, or the Kentucky case of the clerk of courts to certify a marriage certificate because it was a gay couple, the notion of “standards” is quite an open issue, because those standards could be defined differently by different people in different regions. As much as the political left made of the issue you’d think they wouldn’t be so stupid to attempt such a refusal to serve, but obviously as the Supreme Court recently upheld, such places do have the right to discriminate if they so choose.

The case of the week which Sarah Sanders had to deal with by members of a very ignorant and immature press corps, was the breaking up of children from their parents at the border who had to be detained for trying to illegally cross the American border from the south. The political left was involved in attempting to spread the notion that illegal immigrants should ignore the law so to change the nature of the American population more to their favor. The political left at just about every issue they care about feel quite comfortable ignoring laws they don’t agree with and using mass force in the form of protests to legislate by overwhelming the courts. The same approach could be said to be in play over the marijuana controversy, where states are supposed to say, “oh well, people are going to smoke it anyway, so let’s just make it legal.” They are trying to do the same thing over border security, “look at all these poor children without their parents, let’s just let everyone out of jail and open up the borders.” The children are used as pawns, the media plays long with the narrative and law breaking is advocated as a viable option to the current state of things.

Yet mysteriously, those same liberals assume that if they lobbied for gun control for example, that the other half of the country who are not liberals would just magically obey the law if it were liberals who were in charge. Does that make any sense? What good would more gun rules be if all the people who like guns, like me, ignored those laws, overwhelmed the courts with cases they couldn’t possibly deal with, and filled the jails to the point that they couldn’t afford to send anybody else to jail. There are probably around 1.20 guns per American citizen, which comes out to well over 360 million and counting. Who in the right mind thinks that those gun owners would ever comply with the gun confiscations that the political left are always advocating for? The sheer numbers make it impossible, because if pushed, those of us with guns would just refuse to comply, the same way that liberals do on issues like border security, drug legalization, and even common decency such as restaurant service. I mean two can play at this game and I look at the case of Stephanie Wlkinson as a perfect example of how the political left has shown us their cards opening the refusal of any future liberal administrations to outright rebellion against any rules they might come up with. Lawlessness, and physical violence such as we’ve seen by the liberal group of anarchists called ANTIFA that have opened the door toward that type of reasoning. Do they think that conservatives won’t fight back, or that we won’t push back against incursions of our value judgments? Just because we tend to settle disputes with legal recourse and polite debate, that doesn’t mean that we will accept lawless administrations dictating terms to our lives.

Sarah Sanders did the right thing, if she had stayed, the radical lefts in the kitchen probably would have just spit in her food and sabotaged their experience passive aggressively. So they did her a favor to ask her to leave. She likely had a much safer meal elsewhere. What’s more dangerous than people like Stephanie Wilkinson openly protesting conservatives they don’t agree with are the saboteurs who just piss in your food from the kitchen, and believe me, that does happen. It’s good to know their minds, to watch how they probe the fences and how they react when they are not in charge, because when and if they ever are again, we have just as much right to break the law as they do, especially over the issue of gun control. The political left has shown us what they are willing to do when they aren’t the ones making the rules, and they have opened the door to outright lawlessness. So when they beg the police to come and confiscate our guns, they shouldn’t be surprised when we say no.

Liberals like Stephanie Wilkinson and her crappy Red Hen restaurant is a small player in the world economy. It is likely that people from outside of downtown Lexington, Virginia are not flocking to her restaurant of gay servers on a Friday and Saturday night for a “cultural meal.” Now if there were a Chick-fil-A in town, that place would be swamped, but not the Red Hen. Wilkinson probably thought that this whole deal with Sarah Sanders would be a good publicity stunt and fellow liberals would flock to Lexington to fill up their empty storefronts with like-minded liberal losers. But the opposite is happening to her, the Trump supporters from the countryside are just a little pissed off now, and the ramifications of that can be pretty scary. And like her cousin Meryl Streep learned, because Hollywood isn’t doing so well these days in the aftermath of their Trump protests, Stephanie Wilkinson poked the wrong bear. And that serves as a greater metaphor for all future legislation. If liberals are going to break laws and ignore conduct of proper decency in restaurants, than why should the rest of us respect them? Oh, didn’t think that far, did they?

If these liberal losers want to fight, I’m game.  If I were them, I wouldn’t bet on winning that fight.  After all, we ain’t playing patty cake.  The “left” better watch what they wish for.

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

The First Day of Summer at Premier Shooting: A nice way to celebrate what America is all about

I can’t say enough about Premier Shooting and Training Center which is in West Chester, Ohio. Every time I go there I feel renewed it is one of those places that has a spirit about it that is extremely positive. It’s a unique creation of American philosophy that does not shy away from their positive impact into the local community. They make West Chester so much better in what they do which is train people not only in proper firearms conduct, but general self-defense with various martial art forms. They are a really neat operation. Of course I’ve been to a lot of gun ranges over the years, but Premier is absolutely the best.

I was taking a VIP there the other day and it just happened to be the first day of summer and Premier was giving out free water bottles with the Premier logo on them and hot dogs. In addition to a really nice gun range that is wonderfully well ventilated and training classrooms that are equal to any college campus, they have a cafeteria overlooking their fishing lake which is very well stocked. So after doing a little shooting, they welcomed us to some hot dogs as a way to celebrate the arrival of summer which I thought was a very nice touch. Me and this VIP might have otherwise have gone to Jags for lunch, but the hot dogs were good enough given the atmosphere.

I’ve been to Premier before but recently since acquiring a gun that I had been thinking about for a very long time I have been going regularly to shoot it. Most of my shooting these days has been in my private range in my home where I shoot Cowboy Fast Draw. While that is fun, and still constitutes most of my shooting activity, the bullets are wax and not the same kind of experience as shooting my .50 AE Desert Eagle. To shoot that, you really need a range like they have at Premier. On this particular day I brought along my .500 Magnum, so we were shooting some very big ammunition for which the Premier ventilation system really showed its use. There was no lingering smoke from those big guns hanging around, it was all scooped up leaving a very pleasant environment to shoot in which is what they do best at Premier.

When I shoot in my garage with Cowboy Fast Draw, my wife loves the smell. The gunsmoke is part of the appeal for her. I leave the garage door closed when I shoot there so that the sounds don’t wake up the neighborhood. It’s not uncommon for me to shoot really early in the morning or late at night. But as good as the smoke smells it’s not good to breathe. When I’m done I usually open the garage door to let the smoke out and get the ventilation moving again. But with that type of shooting the only real explosive element is the 209 shotgun primers which are used as the propellent for the wax bullets. We’re only talking about a 7 grain bullet with about 600 FPS velocity at the barrel. You always need to use proper gun safety but these are not the types of bullets that are killing anyone. They can sting, but are perfectly safe to use in a sport like Cowboy Fast Draw. They are effective up to about 15 feet, although we compete with them up to 21 feet. But firing the .50 AE is a different matter, it typically has a 300 grain bullet with muzzle velocity of 1475 FPS and a whopping 1449 ft/lbs of muzzle energy. It really is a remarkable cartridge and what I consider an engineering marvel, to be able to contain all that power into a relatively small gun. The Desert Eagle is not a small gun by any means, but for the power output that it is utilizing, it is a real engineering feat to have such a thing work so well under such violent conditions. The smoke that is left behind if you are shooting indoors can be a lot, but at Premier, you don’t even notice it. Their ventilation system picks it all right up, it’s very impressive all its own.

Shooting for me is a daily occurrence so it’s very disingenuous to listen to people who don’t understand the sport of shooting to cry out against the 2nd Amendment. It really gets on my nerves because guns in America are not a brutal thing, they are a deeply philosophical element to the freest country on earth. Because without all the guns that we have, and places like Premier which helps take the gun from a thought to a practice, the Constitution would have been eroded away a long time ago. The only thing that keeps the three branches of government working properly, in that one doesn’t try to take over the others is the very defined understanding that the people of the nation can at anytime take back their country from the grips of corruption, should they choose to. That gives weight behind our police to do their jobs in defending our laws because if that doesn’t work, an armed society is there is a backstop. I view gun ownership as an essential American right that every household should participate in. But that right comes with responsibility and places like Premier Shooting do a fantastic job of defining that balance. The atmosphere of the place is very family oriented and patriotic. It’s the kind of place that certainly charges me up whenever I step into their doors and by the time I leave I’m good for a few days. My new Desert Eagle gives me a reason to go there more now than I did in the past and that has greatly enhanced my life.

Smaller caliber guns really don’t excite me, because I do so much shooting with the wax bullets. Working on my accuracy just on paper targets wasn’t a big attraction for me prior to the Desert Eagle. My big .500 Smith & Wesson Magnum was just too expensive, ammunition is over $3 a shot, so shooting it regularly isn’t practical. It wasn’t until this Desert Eagle for me that the slightly over $1 per shot made visits to Premier Shooting a viable option for my personal lifestyle. If I’m going to shoot a gun, I like it to be a big one because that’s kind of the point. The ballistic power so self-contained is amazing to me and is part of the joy. But to enjoy it I need a good range and that is where Premier comes in. They are the best certainly in Cincinnati and compared to most places in the country. Specifically, to West Chester, they are a great asset to a community that already had it all. I’m glad they are there. When I want to have such an experience with a VIP and we don’t feel like spending a whole half of a day playing golf or some similar activity, a half hour on a shooting lane at Premier is just the right thing. We were in and out and back to our professional tasks within the hour, and that included enjoying a hot dog by the fishing lake—and that is what makes shooting in America such a special thing, and Premier does it better than anybody.

Rich Hoffman

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

There Will Be No Trade War With China: They can’t afford the bullets

I really haven’t heard too many people cover the real ambitions of President Trump’s trade talks, that he wants to essentially get away from trade tariffs all together. Rather Trump wants to move to an international system of free trade in a way we’ve never seen before, where real value is exchanged evenly between countries based on the real needs of the products. Who wouldn’t like that unless the whole goal of tariffs were always intended to redistribute wealth around the world using the United States as the foundation for the theft? The whole issue has left many countries vulnerable who have been doing just that, robbing America of goods and services by making a lot of money off the imbalance, it has all been just another way of subsidizing socialism at the expense of capitalism and Trump has put the issue front and center, where it should have always have been. Given that, it’s a mystery how this would cause anxiety in the markets, other than it destabilizes the old way of doing things. It’s a mystery, because it actually is a chance for a lot of investors to make a lot of money. But it does expose many of these socialist and communist governments who have been hiding their terrible efficiencies behind trade tariffs displaying for the first time in the modern age the true value of goods and services.

I have found it fascinating over the last few days to watch Elon Musk’s Twitter account where he has been arguing with socialists and anarchists with some rather bizarre new definitions of what it means to be a socialist. For those who don’t know many people under forty these days socialism is the new trend, and we should have expected this, because that is what young people learn in their public educations. I would attach the press corps into that category, they are mostly young people who were born during the 1990s when the Clinton’s were in the White House and they only really have ever known a Clinton, a Bush, or a Obama in the White House so they only understand extreme government tampering with markets as a reality of basic economics. But Trump as a true capitalist is suggesting a global trade policy that terrifies many of those nations who are filled with the kind of youth who were quite perplexed over Elon Musk’s ostentatious definitions of socialism.

The reason that China is particularly vulnerable to the debate of the theft of intellectual property essentially comes down to their communist closed society. Such countries where people are not free typically do not have the ability to generate new and creative products, so they must obtain those creative endeavors from outside their country. Up until the time of Trump American presidents, especially Obama have sort of allowed China to cheat off our paper in class because it helped them advance on the global stage—because Obama had a soft spot with communism and wanted to see it work. So trade deals were worked out in a way that China could openly loot American markets in a way that fed intellectual property into the communist country that was suffering from creative infusion by their people.

 

 

As things have been China has artificially been propped up as a superpower, they were given vast amounts of wealth as an emerging economy due to their cheap labor and closed society as a state-run government. That has allowed them to pour a lot of money into destabilized regions of the world knowing that they wouldn’t get back their money but could trade those debts for control of those investments. That ironically has been the plan behind Chinese investments into the United States, to eventually call in those loans and to gain control instead of money. The fuel behind that opportunity has been trade imbalances and intellectual theft China has been able to exploit with a lot of help from governments around the world who want to see the communist formula work.

However, what makes them particularly vulnerable in China is their very nature as a closed society. Without the protections of tariffs that allow China to play big boy ball on the global stage, they are extremely vulnerable to foreign competition, such as American agriculture. The typical American farmer can outproduce anyone in China and Russia simply do to the type of society that America is, a free nation that has functioned from minimal government tampering, so they tend to be highly efficient due to the fact that most of the personal investment of the farmer goes back into their trade. That is not the case in communist countries where private ownership into their trade is micro managed by the state. That makes it extremely difficult for Chinese farmers to compete with American farmers for the trade of food. Even though China outnumbers the United States with population density, America is able to do much more with much less because of the incentive of their workers to own and produce their own goods.

Trump’s trade policies are not isolationist as many economists would like to believe. Simply Trump’s trade position is to recognize the obvious, the strength of the American markets is the high ground for which the rest of the world must rise up to in order to compete toe to toe, and to do that those origin countries will have to give up on the restrictions of communism and socialism to do so. For a world that has been taught that socialism is the way to go, of course they are disjointed to see how Trump is advocated free trade for everyone. Trump’s high/low game with China is to eventually get them to accept open trade, which he knows they cannot afford to do. But they’ll also never admit it as a communist country—so Trump is very quietly doing back to China what they have been doing to the United States since Clinton was president, he is calling their bluff which is a capital investment of its own and letting them hit the rocks where America will be there to pick them up off the ground with a huge demand for American products. It won’t be other world markets that suffer under a Chinese collapse, it will simply put value where it belongs, into countries who have allowed capitalism to thrive and can meet the true needs of global production against the theft and corruption that occurs in closed markets.

Without discussing the different economic philosophies of these trading nations, it has allowed the communists to hide their vast evil behind tariffs artificially propping up the authoritarian regimes at the expense of those functioning from freedom. We have been led to believe that China is doing something special and that we all need to bow down to it, but in reality, the opposite is true. America doesn’t need China, China needs America. From the perspective of Trump how can the United States stop the threat of China into the South China Sea at the expense of Japan—don’t threaten them militarily, expose them financially. Keep them from making such moves because they simply don’t have the funding to invest in such projects. Up until now the fuel that has allowed the Chinese government to threaten to become superpower status has been in these trade imbalances. By Trump forcing a value to value trade of equal measure it will force all these communist and socialist countries to produce on an equal footing with America, which they will not be able to do because of the nature of freedom over totalitarian control. People are far more efficient when they get to keep the wealth they produce as opposed to countries who siphon off that wealth through corruption to enrich themselves off the effort. That happens in China in extraordinarily evil ways, and Trump is exposing it. There won’t be a trade war, because China can’t afford the bullets.

That is the brilliance of Donald Trump’s trade plans with everyone. Those most hurt are those who have been allowed to hide their true value behind poor economic philosophies. When Trump says the United States isn’t going to continue to be the world’s piggy bank are those same socialists arguing with Elon Musk who don’t understand, because they haven’t been taught, what the real difference between capitalist governments and socialist ones really are. The fairest thing to do would be for all markets everywhere to be fair and open, trade value for value. But governments that are used to lots of government tampering and use state ownership of resources to attempt to compete with free people in the United States know they have to be subsidized through tariffs if they even want to participate in the big global game. And by forcing markets to compete with each other evenly, Trump is exposing the tyranny of communist regimes who have big problems going toe to toe with freedom. Trump isn’t an isolationist, he’s simply calling a big global bluff that has been allowed to simmer but was always a house of cards about to fold. China is a propped-up superpower and investors were always going to find that out eventually. Forcing fair trade only brings that to a reality faster, which is good for everyone really, because it saves America so that the United States can continue to help the world the way it has. But the wealth redistribution that has been going on is coming to an end so that everyone involved can measure value for value the way it should have always been. And that is a good change that will bring great peace to the world in just a few years without having to fire a single shot from our military.

Rich Hoffman

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Pulling Away the Masks: The brillance of Donald Trump’s Singapore Summit revealed

So many interesting things to talk about. It is all so very astonishing. Probably the most remarkable part of President Trump meeting with Kim Jong Un was the very powerful Return of the Jedi metaphor of pulling away the mask of Darth Vader only to find a nice kid under the layers of hyperbolae. The ironic thing is that it took a person from outside the established order to take away the masks that same order uses to drive public emotion, and that effect has many people reeling from the sudden exposure to the outside world. Kim Jong Un really is just another 20 something kid who wants to watch NBA basketball. He loves the West and wants to be a part of the fun, and Trump offered it to him in a way that nobody had ever done before. I watched very carefully the CNN interview with Dennis Rodman where he became very emotional over the Summit in Singapore between both of his friends Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un that it became very obvious what had always been going on. The old aristocracy that has always wanted to rule the world needed people to be afraid of something, so they put a mask on Kim Jong Un for us all to look at while they attempted to manipulate us with global ideals and the theft of American wealth for the rest of the world committed to socialism to enjoy. Using that same fear to drive people out of their native countries and into the United States the intent was always to change America from the inside out, but now that is changing. Trump’s foreign policy that many people think doesn’t exists isn’t to welcome the oppressed to our doors at the border, its to teach their home countries how to be more like the United States—and that has many in a panic.

Yes, the Bush presidents could have made peace with Kim’s family many years ago, Bill Clinton could have, and if you watched the Dennis Rodman interview, Barack Obama could have as well. As crazy as Rodman is in his public appearance, any president of the United States should have been interested in what went on in the interactions of an American who just returned from North Korea with a personal message from Kim Jong Un with any hint at a peace-offering. The really sad answer was that none of those presidents really wanted peace, and neither did the rest of the world at the aristocratic level. They needed a Darth Vader character to scare the world into their arms of leadership, so they ignored the cries for attention that came out of North Korea making the world a much more dangerous place, on purpose.

It took a very self-confident man in Trump to see past the illusions and to simply take the mask off Kim Jong Un so that peace could be discussed and more than that, to introduce western capitalism to the country that has been left so far into the dark. As it turns out it wasn’t North Korea who wanted to repress their people into the darkness of communism all this time, it was people like the Bushes, the Clintons, and Obama who did. Trump wants to build a condo on the beaches of North Korea and give their people opportunities to eat at McDonald’s, like everyone else in a developed country can. But that old order needed a bad guy to scare everyone into following their leadership and what has now happened is that we are all free of that fear, for the first time.

I would expect the Democrats to be upset with Trump’s successful Singapore Summit, because they really have nothing to offer as a party and by making North Korea a friend instead of a foe, Trump has more than earned a second term, and destroyed any fantasy they had of a blue wave in November. Trump has done something in record time that many proposed was impossible. A less confident person would have listened to the pundits, to the political hacks, to the lawyers cautioning him to listen to the “experts” instead of simply walking over and taking off that Darth Vader mask to reveal a smiling young guy underneath who just wants to have what any other millennial would like to have, a cool car, a big fast airplane and a good place to get a hamburger. The Democrats have nothing to do but complain that Trump should have done this, and that he should have done that. Even Republicans in congress who have drag assed for years can only now try to associate themselves with the peace process by attaching themselves to Trump’s deal for their review. But we all know that nothing would have happened if Trump had not been willing to simply pull off the mask and help the kid from North Korea join the world with an invitation that was only issued from a White House backed by a voting sector tired of the games that aristocrats play.

What is so surprising to many people is just how manipulative so many people at the top have turned out to be, how much they have lied to all our faces about what constitutes a threat and what doesn’t. Trump really did make the whole thing with North Korea look easy and as he said in his press conference, he reminded the world that China’s economy is less than America’s and that Iran was next, which I believe my readers will recall I have been saying for some time. Capitalism and communism are not equals on the world stage. Many of the people who wanted to make Kim Jong Un into Darth Vader, which the kid played along with because his father and grandfather had put him into that role—and that role was globally accepted for what it did—even if people did die—wanted to support the managed economy world view of a lesser communism driven by the necessity to join together against a common enemy—so they made up their world enemies to provide justifications for their own existences. The miracle of what Trump is doing is what the United States should have always been doing. There was never a reason to make deals through the CIA with dictators around the globe to make peace, the way to beat them all was through economic strength, and the way to do that was to pull away the restraints of capitalism and open up free markets in a way that had never been done before.

Understanding the power of financial leverage, which Donald Trump obviously does, as well as any decent business person, it isn’t hard to bring peace to the world. A country like Iran is easy to destroy if you attack their ability to hide their Marxism behind a scary mask of radical Islam. By pulling away the mask, often we find just simple people who want all the things that the rest of us want—opportunity. When opportunities are limited the small minds will fight over table scraps, which is what the global aristocrats have been doing for many decades to us all. Trump didn’t just put an end to that practice in North Korea, he set the motion going into the other direction the entire motivation behind the immigration problem. People flee to America always to get away from some terrible place on earth. But why not make where they are coming from not so terrible? Why does North Korea have to be such a bad place—or Honduras, El Salvador or even Syria? Because the social order in favor of global communism has always wanted to use fear to drive people from one place to another, and in that transaction, voting patterns changed those destination countries to their tactical favor. But now, Trump with the simple meeting with Kim Jong Un, has just reversed that everywhere in the world, and that is a major miracle that won’t have the full ramifications of its impact measured until many future decades finally realize the significance. And when they do, the history books will all have to be completely rewritten.

Rich Hoffman

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The Summit in Singapore: I’m so proud of President Trump

The last time I stayed up all night to watch a political event was the election of Donald Trump in November of 2016. But last night I stayed up to watch all the fanfare of the Singapore Summit by a master deal maker. I am so proud of Donald Trump. I’m proud to have stuck with him through the hard times, I was proud to be one of the very first to support him, and I was proud to have seen through all the haze to get to this point in time to watch him take charge of that Summit and literally bring the world to a stop. A complete stop. The Singapore Summit was literally the most epic thing many of us may ever see—it was on par to the ending of World War 2. In a lot of ways, I think this deal with North Korea is larger than the collapse of Russia because of what it means and under the conditions for which it was achieved. Trump went from near all out war with North Korea to shaking hands with a path to peace in just 7 months—and he got a lot more done as a result. At five PM that evening with no sleep in 25 hours Trump held this amazing press conference.

In subsequent articles I will break down all the elements that led to this Trump success. I’m sure there are a lot of jaws that will have to be picked up off the floor, and people are going to reassess their lives after this, and they will be hungry for information. I understand it, but I also understand that a lot of people don’t remember that all along I have predicted everything that happened and I was able to make those statements because of that understanding. What it comes down to is that most people just have not been taught how to think correctly about things in their life. I’ve read all of Donald Trump’s books, written works that he produced before he was ever president. So nothing here is a surprise including the wonderful press conference that went on for well over an hour. Trump is very honest about everything he does, and he has been for many years, and it takes that type of person to be successful in big events. Typically, in the past, his type of personality has not been in politics or in a position to help with things like this, so what transpired was truly a unique event.

Trump just put himself on a completely different scale of American leadership and it was quite good to see. He has elevated the bar for the future, there will never be another presidential candidate who won’t be expected to perform at the level of President Trump and in that fashion we all win. Trump has literally changed the world overnight from one of skepticism and fear to one of hopes and dreams. People like me have always been there, but now that people have seen it, now there is a model in Trump to live up to and that is the most beautiful aspect of this Summit.

The key to the whole event however is the hard work of the 72-year-old Trump, a tireless person who is willing to work around the clock to achieve anything. It really comes down to unshakable self confidence and the desire to out work everyone. As an older person Trump is never asking to have a nap, or to delay a meeting like this so that he could recover from the negotiations at the G7 Summit. Trump simply does what has to be done, and he doesn’t complain. Without question, by the time Trump was back on Air Force One he was on the phone with China to talk about how well the meeting went and to discuss what comes next. That tireless, childlike energy is what many critics of Trump really don’t like because deep down inside them all is the fear that Trump raises the bar of expectations for everyone. Trump could use all the same excuses that other people use, he could blame his age, his weight, his lack of political experience—but he never does. He always expects to win whatever he does and he’s willing to do whatever it takes to obtain a victory, even at the expense of his personal comfort, and that is the key to this whole experience. It’s not so much that Trump is smarter than everyone else, it’s just that he’s willing to win and do whatever it takes to have victory. He’s like that if its just a golf game, or in international dealings. The guy likes to win in a way that young people do, and that is why this was a successful exchange.

A few days ago, I was in a pretty good fight with some colleagues over the pace of a project I am working on. For their part of it they were drag assing, and it was getting on my nerves, so we had a rather explosive “discussion.” My problem with them is that they are just going through the motions of their jobs and do not exhibit any real passion for their tasks, and that makes me sick, because I have passion for everything I do. They call my enthusiasm child-like exuberance, I would say that it is an unconquered virtue. My passion for things is only child-like in that children do not yet know what the sting of defeat is, so they approach everything with a level of play that carries them enthusiastically through every task they get involved with. For them life is an open book full of possibilities, and I can say that at my age now of over 50, I still very much have that same attitude. When I run into conquered people who do not find passion in the things they do from their work to their leisure activities, I have a very short wick with people like that. It doesn’t take long for a conflict to ensue between me and them because they literally make me sick by slowing down the process of whatever I’m doing. If their laziness robs me of the fun I get in being productive, then I consider it a personal attack. In watching President Trump work, and meeting him a few times now, I can say that he is very much of a similar mind. The guy just loves to work, and he finds people who look for excuses not to do things very frustrating, and he is confrontational to preserve his own playful spirit from the lackluster dealings of people craving to be very average in life.

The Summit in Singapore was one of those situations where nobody of an average mind, of someone who plans for lunch the moment they awake in the morning after 8 to 10 hours of sleep could have achieved. Perhaps a hard-working president like Calvin Coolidge might have matched Trump in these North Korean efforts, but not even he could have had the boyish charisma to cheer on capitalism the way Trump did, even walking Kim Jong Un over to his car to show off what capitalism could buy the young man. North Korea could very well be one of the next great economic centers of the world and Trump had the playfulness in his approach to bring that level of optimism to the negotiating table, and nobody in political theater of the world is functioning at such a level. There are a few business leaders here and there, a few film producers—some scientists—mavericks that come to mind—but nobody like that ever makes it into high level politics, yet there Trump is for the first time in history—and history has been boldly made. It is truly a significant day in so many ways. The ramifications of this day are incalculable not just historically, but philosophically. As a person who shares many of Trump’s passions as a human being—a person who just likes to be productive and has fun being that way, I am so proud of him. And I’m proud of the human race for giving a guy like that a shot at the big stage. Trump is doing great things there and guess what—-he’s far from finished. This is only year number two.

Rich Hoffman

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Yes, North Korea Still Wants to Meet with Trump: The art of emptiness and fullness

I continue to be astounded how stupid some people are about the ways of the world. The so-called “experts” actually thought that what President Trump did on Thursday of this past week was reckless and even irrational. While those same people thought that all the ways we got there was just as reckless and irrational, but once there were willing to make their careers around riding the coattails of history and suddenly Trump was ruining it for them. Hey, like I told everyone, the North Korea deal was never in jeopardy. That’s why I felt I could take a few days and enjoy the new Han Solo movie, because the summit on June 12th was never in danger. The events of Donald Trump’s negotiations do not surprise me—I expect these kinds of things to go on, and honestly, I think everyone at every level of government should do the same. When a school board is negotiating with a hostile teacher’s union, this is how it should look. I was at a Sam’s Club the other day looking at their book section, and guess what? They had a copy of The Art of War that anybody could purchase—right next to the macaroni and cheese, and hot dogs. Anybody who reads that book would know exactly what was going on this past week between Kim Jong Un and President Trump. It certainly isn’t rocket science. Yet few people did understand and that is pretty sad.

Our experts taught all that institutional nonsense over the years have turned out to be pretty worthless. I mean, I understood from the beginning how dumb they were, but it is still shocking to see how poorly they are performing under the pressure of President Trump. All these top jobs in government from the experts on foreign policy to the bumbling idiots at the highest level of our intelligence agencies are just as comically stupid as any cartoon caricature could imagine. For people who are paid all these six figure salaries it would appear that most of them are completely worthless. I think I have heard more stupidity over the last week than I’ve ever heard in my life in regard to bad analysis. At first pundits were upset that Trump had been so reckless with Kim Jong Un, but after the Trump administration had brought North Korea to the table suddenly everyone thought Trump was an idiot in how he handled every juncture of the situation. They mistakenly thought that Trump was going into the negotiations ready to cave so he could get a Nobel Peace Prize. Everyone’s world seemed to fall apart on Thursday of this past week when Trump said he was withdrawing the United States from the deal with North Korea. I wasn’t surprised, and I had no fears that North Korea wouldn’t be coming to the negotiating table. So why did everyone else?

Here is how you can know the winner and loser in every situation. The book, The Art of War is a strategy guide from the East, but it follows some very basic common sense about human beings and understanding those basics you can usually tell who will win and lose just about every situation. Everything is about emptiness and fullness. Those who are empty are always going to lose to those who are full. Troops not fed well, who are on the low ground will not be able to beat troops not hungry who loom over them on the high ground if all other things are equal—numbers of troops, cultural heritage, and intelligence levels. Winning in the arts of war mean that those skilled in such battles know how to empty others and fill themselves.

Communism and socialism have not worked, the philosophies of Karl Marx are complete failures in every corner of the world. I was not surprised that the Venezuelan government let go of Joshua Holt yesterday. The young kid only 26 years of age went to that impoverished country in the summer of 2016 to marry a woman there and was thrown in jail under false pretenses hoping to use the American as leverage against the Obama administration. Now that the bus driver Maduro has won re-election through serious voter tampering, he’s looking to cut a similar deal as Kim Jong Un is getting ready to make with Trump—financial assistance, American investment into the economy of their regimes—they are desperate for money in Venezuela so they let go of Holt hoping to open negotiations because they are at wit’s end in that country due to the socialism that has ruined their country there. The economies of North Korea and Venezuela are poor because of their commitment to Karl Marx, so when dealing with the real world, they have nothing to barter with except threats. When threats are made against a much stronger adversary, physical violence has no effect, so these tyrants running these countries have no place to go but to the negotiating table to ask forgiveness to those more powerful than them. Power as it is defined in human culture is not in the weapons one has, but in the amount of money. Those without money are always going to lose against those who have it.

The goal of the Obama administration was to loot the wealth of America and give it away to socialist countries so that the world would be equalized. Finally, socialism was going to work in the world once all the super powers had been destroyed. Only what they neglected to consider as “experts” were the philosophic premise of a place like North America which has been and continues to function from the foundation of capitalism. The American people would see all this going on and change it. As we were being robbed by our government we made a change in our elections and started voting for people who would stand up for the kind of economy that was the backbone of our nation. We didn’t look for a “moral character” the way that experts thought the game of elections in America worked, we voted for someone who understood the power of emptiness and fullness so that they’d represent us on the world stage with those basic skills to protect our nation from ruthless overlords around the world who were all empty but trying to appear frighteningly full. It’s been a few years now and the word is out in every country, America is no longer being led by a ruling class of college professors and socialist sympathizers disguising their intentions of spreading Marxism by weakening America, but is instead being run by a business guy who understands how to play the game of emptiness and fullness.

Because America is essentially the only nation left on earth that is a capitalist country beating these other countries is easy—because none of them have anything of any value due to their commitments to socialism and communism—and I include China in that assessment. China is not the powerhouse that they’ve been made out to be, they are largely an economy dependent on American purchases. Without the strength of the American dollar and the markets from that capitalist land, the Chinese are in trouble financially. Don’t let anybody fool you dear reader. While they have been helpful in bringing North Korea to the table, it wasn’t out of the goodness of their hearts. Trump knows how to play the emptiness and fullness game, which is why we hired him in the last election to go out into the world and play to win for America for a change. Everyone should understand at least the basics of the game, and none of what is happening now should come as a surprise. Yet it does, which is astonishing. Either those “experts” are really pretty stupid, or, they are playing dumb because they really always wanted America to fail to these hostile agents—and if that is the case, then there is some ass kicking that is coming deservedly to them for what they’ve tried to do to harm us all. Hopefully for their sakes, they were just stupid.

Rich Hoffman
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‘Solo’ Gets a Standing Ovation at Cannes: Mythology and culture are on expanding in a very positive way

I can’t emphasize enough what Star Wars means to our current society—and specifically how important this next film, Solo: A Star Wars Story is to the continuation of the great mythology that is now set to take on a life well beyond anything planet earth has ever seen. As I say often the most important topic to me out of all the things that I discuss is the realm of mythology and how it captures the minds of mankind and propels it forward at each juncture of history. I am specifically thinking right now about the great legends of King Arthur, or the early works of the Iliad where Odysseus propelled modern society to its current form to the point where our civilization has outgrown those great stories. Our modern society is very complex, and we know so much about so many things that were not known at the time that the great classics were written, and we are and have been in desperate need for stories that can take us all into the future—because that’s how human beings work. They need conceptual devices in story form to put into context their observed reality—and even though Star Wars is intended for kids, it works on so many levels to get the imaginations of the human race moving that I think it’s currently the most important thing in the world happening right now, and I understand very well what is happening from North Korea to the taxation of Amazon in Seattle—to the teacher union strikes, to the corruption of our own FBI becoming weaponized against us all. Even in that context I think this new Star Wars movie is a tremendous opportunity for mythmaking to expand dramatically into the lives of all thinking beings on planet earth for the better, and it would all come down to the presentation of the film at the Cannes Film Festival in France. It’s not just because I love the character of Han Solo, but it’s why the movie was made in the first place that I think it’s so important and I was very happy to see a standing ovation for the film after its screening. This is going to be a big one.

I read the critics opinions of the film and most of them were positive, many very positive with about 23% less than enthusiastic. What those lukewarm reviews had in common was that they missed the epic scale of life and death situations that have been present in Star Wars up to this point—the save the whole galaxy or else type of storylines. If Star Wars is going to work in future, they need to become much more individualized, personal stories which we all know culminate into the three trilogies of nine films we have mostly been familiar with. And once Lucasfilm accomplished that, mythology by way of the vehicle of Star Wars will be unleased in a very dramatic way and I don’t think those people trained into their institutional professions, and are making good livings in those comfortable places, are open to these big changes. Their comments about nobody asking for a movie about Han Solo and that the movie is just capitalizing off the Star Wars name and is an entirely different kind of film altogether are missing the point. This movie was always intended to expand the Star Wars mythology in ways that I would argue it always needed to go—since the Empire Strikes Back way back in 1980 and I think everyone watching this movie is going to be in for a surprise.

I know enough about this movie to be happy with the decisions that Kathy Kennedy has made over the last two years. A lot of people do not understand how hard it is to make a movie, and to negotiate contracts with expensive actors and to hold those contacts over many films. I continue to be amazed how the Marvel team does it with all their big-name actors now and how they can put them all in a film like Infinity War. That would be an astonishing payroll to put all those stars into one movie, but Marvel has figured it out and that Disney polish is now coming to Star Wars with these Han Solo movies serving as a test bed of creative entanglement. I will be the first to say I was not happy with the Lucasfilm abandonment of the original books which they now call legends, and I was not at all happy with The Force Awakens when they killed Han Solo in that movie. Long time readers here know very well how angry I was at the way they dealt with Han Solo’s character in that film and I did several radio shows discussing the issue in detail. However, and I know I wasn’t the only one, I think Lucasfilm to a reasonable extent has listened to the fans—and they have made some adjustments with this Solo movie which is why it needed to stay on schedule even after the previous directors were fired and Ron Howard was brought on to fix things. It’s also why I believe that the last movie of the modern trilogy, Episode 9 now directed by J.J. Abrams was pushed out into 2019—because Lucasflim needed to see how audiences reacted to new story elements in this new Solo movie.

I don’t think Kathy Kennedy or Bob Iger are all that happy with the direction of Solo: A Star Wars Story, I think they’d love to have a much more progressive film with less male characters acting so strongly. That’s a very educated guess on my part, but business is business. If you are running a movie company that makes Star Wars movies and you intend for them to transcend modern politics, then they need to be timeless stories, and this new Han Solo movie needed to be more of a classic western than a modern progressive version of Guardians of the Galaxy. I watched Kathy Kennedy at the Cannes press events and I think she is breathing a bit better now—she really needs to pull in at least a billion dollars off this Han Solo movie to justify everything they’ve done with Star Wars since Disney bought it in 2012. She made serious mistakes putting top-heavy female characters into Star Wars and making really stupid comments like she did to the New York Times where she said she didn’t care about male Stars Wars fans—which traditionally have been the primary support of the franchise for over four decades now. There was always room for women in Star Wars, but they couldn’t just take everything over and get away with it. The backlash against Kathy Kennedy in general has been harsh. And Bob Iger is an anti-gun liberal, so it’s probably tough for him to see all these posters of Han Solo pointing a gun out into the horizon, but that’s the character and that’s what people want to see in movies, and putting politics aside, Lucasfilm and Disney have given fans what they want—which is a very good thing.

I will likely give a very long and detailed review on the 24th of May which will articulate many, many things that I think are superb about this new kid’s movie which I think will capture the hearts of so many people in a very positive way. It’s not just the movie that I’m happy about, but what will come out of it creatively. Mythology has always been the center of any advanced culture and when a story works—it advances everything from arts and sciences, to politics and philosophy. And after watching that standing ovation at the Cannes Film Festival, I am quite sure that we are all about to see something very special.

Rich Hoffman
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Donald Glover’s Brilliant Childish Gambino “This is America”: But it’s not the America the rest of us know

I couldn’t be happier for Donald Glover’s wonderful song and music video by his musical personality of Childish Gambino’s “This is America.” It is one of the most successful videos of all time pulling in nearly 120,000,000 million views on YouTube in just a week and I have to say that I think its one of the most interesting that I’ve ever seen. The music and the video are the work of a truly talented young person in Donald Glover who is playing Lando Calrissian in the new Star Wars movie Solo: A Star Wars Story. I am personally very impressed with young Donald Glover, he’s a smart person, genuinely very talented, and obviously has some things to say about the world around him and can express them both artistically and commercially, which is extremely rare. For his part, I hope the new Solo movie is a huge hit because it will continue to expose him to a larger audience and culturally, I think that’s great for our civilization. However, I disagree with the assumptions he has made in his music video. His America isn’t my America and that void is truly at the center of all our modern politics.

The video done with such fantastic choreography and pacing is obviously an anti-gun message that assumes that from the point of view of African descendants living in America that the deck is stacked against them by whites who are easily distracted and put gun rights over the rights of life. From the point of view of young people, especially people making a living in Los Angeles, this is a swallow well of thought that is common in liberal regions around the country. Even though the video is well done, and the music itself is excellent, the message is flawed because it doesn’t see the bigger picture of human existence as a context, but rather progressive politics as it exists in the mind of young people not yet in their 30s. They haven’t begun to live lives yet, in many cases they haven’t started raising families and living life, yet they think like all young people do that they know it all and can lecture the rest of us how things “ought” to be based on what they feel.

Value for life goes much deeper than just saying you want to let people live—the true value of human existence that sets us apart from all other living things is our ability to think. Obviously, the kind of culture that is displayed in Childish Gambino’s “America” is a black culture with beliefs and yearnings straight from their African continent—the manner of dance and values are clearly different from what might be considered from the aggressive white Wall Street crowd in the United States. It is one thing to believe that money is the root of all evil but it is quite another to complain that everyone in the black community is poor because they have either sacrificed themselves to a new plantation of Democratic politics, or they have chosen to bring the kind of Marxism that is common in the African continent to their voting patterns in America. In either case, it should not be surprising to anybody that people who do not embrace the capitalism of western civilization will be at a loss to live within those cultures without being left behind economically. It’s not that white America has left behind black America and suppressed them into the slums of inner cities—its that blacks generally as a race of people have been slow to accept capitalism in their lives and have philosophically at the most epistemological level adopted the wrong outlook toward life and have made themselves victims.

In the video Donald Glover appears to be smoking a joint, (a marijuana cigarette) as he dances on a bunch of older American cars. These are interesting images taken together—and marijuana is a particularly popular drug in black neighborhoods which I would argue are poison for their minds. Likely more dangerous for the black community than guns is the numbing of their minds by drugs, alcohol and poor educations. Even worse has been their acceptance of big daddy government to allow fathers to leave the home and government to raise the many children born to broken families. Gun violence is a symptom of the broken homes of many black families who are struggling to accept the rules of conduct that were always supposed to be part of the American experience and instead the young people have joined gangs for social acceptance and taken to mental destruction as a way to push away the reality of their many mistakes.

I thought the handling of the guns in the video was particularly powerful. Its true, America does handle the guns with great care because firearms represent an intellectual aptitude that they are meant to protect. Just because elements of our society fall short of the values that were always supposed to be part of the American experience, the guns are not the villains. To be lectured by a bunch of liberals who abort babies at a rate that would embarrass even the most ruthless mass murders in world history that guns are killing their young people is hypocrisy at its most telling. I don’t blame Donald Glover for his lack of seeing the big picture. I have had dinner with many people in the LA night scene over the years and I can report that they have a very limited understanding of life in the big picture. They are pinned into that little valley between the Pacific Ocean and the mountains and think that everyone around the country thinks the way they do about things, and they couldn’t be more wrong. The pace of our modern world driven by capitalism is fast-moving, it is driven by money, because money represents a form of value and is a good thing, not a bad thing. And guns are the centerpiece of American freedom, without guns politicians like John McCain would have turned America into Europe a long time ago—so the guns are an intellectual protection of the founding principles of our nation—and they are to be treated with great care—unfortunately only by the conservative parts of America at this moment.

The real dangers facing the black communities are in their ignorance—their desire to march in a mob together with Marxist philosophies which have imprisoned them to Democratic politics. Donald Glover’s caricatures of Jim Crow I thought were very interesting, but the suggestions of racism are misplaced in the context of history. America was founded by religious white people from Europe who had been thinking about freedom and self-governing ideas for many centuries—largely due to the failures of the church in places like England and France. A big part of that philosophical contemplation is what freed the slaves in America and gave opportunity to blacks that they certainly didn’t have in Africa, and for some they embraced these opportunities—Fredrick Douglas comes to my mind who was a very prominent Republican at the middle 19th century period. However, many whites were skeptical of people from black culture—their dancing and music were unusual, and they had ideas from a totally different region of the world that were unfamiliar—and it took some time to bring those two races together—and nothing else should have been expected. There are few places elsewhere in the world where people of totally different background have tried to unite in peace like they have in the United States. Rather than complaining about everything, black Americans should be happy that they can find an audience of acceptance in the United States. I can’t think of anybody I know who will refuse to see Solo: A Star Wars Story because Donald Glover is a black man—and I certainly don’t know anybody who loves sports who refuses to attend a professional team because the players are mostly black. The only people who really notice blacks and whites are those who profit off the divisions, like Democratic politicians who need to victimize black cultures to keep their vote counts high. That is the real victimization that is going on—and that kind of thing certainly wasn’t in Donald Glover’s video.

But take as a work of art from a young man who still has a lot to learn about life, I thought “This is America” was a brilliant piece of work. I may look at it and clap the way I would encourage a kid in the third grade to keep trying because someday they may get it—due to their raw talent. At my age these days a third grader and a 30-year-old are not that far apart in intellectual development, so I kind of see them the same way. Unquestionably, Donald Glover is a rare modern talent and I am excited to see more from him. It’s not wrong to have opinions, or to express them. But he’s not presenting the next monumental breakthrough in thought. He’s still a young kid trying to impress his LA cultural peers with his understanding of their politics—no matter how false that politics may be compared to the sentiment of the rest of the country. And that is the real trick, not just in making interesting art that a particular sector of political order enjoys as a reality, but that speaks to everyone. In that regard, “This is America” misses the mark as it only speaks truly to the self-oppressed, the ignorant, and the inexperienced.

The big misunderstanding that persists to this day is that merit and respect are given out in American society the way a village chief might have enjoyed in some other region of the world, and under capitalism, that isn’t the case. Respect is earned by those who work hard and pull themselves up. While it was true that white Americans were weary of black Americans because they feared that the newly freed slaves would not work to incorporate themselves into the Christian based society that was so newly created from European statism. But Donald Glover certainly has made good use of American opportunity, and many other black Americans have too, and that is where skin color truly does disappear. Americans like successful people, or people trying to be successful. They tend to look down their nose at lazy people no matter what their skin color is, or people who lack intellectual aptitude. Racism isn’t the biggest problem facing America—its stupidity—from all races and sexes, and that is what needs to be addressed if we are ever to truly solve the problems of our age. America is not the problem and never has been, the burden has always been and continues to be that not all people understand what it takes to live and be successful in America. As a person, Donald Glover gets it, but as the culture he is representing in his new music video, they don’t. All they can do is discuss the symptoms of the problems instead of the causes—and for that they must look at themselves.

Rich Hoffman
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