Tag: George Lucas

The Benefits of Julian Assanage: How the dynamic intellectualism of pirates save the world

I was very happy to hear that Sweden had given up on its rape allegations against Julian Assange taking one burden away from the international fugitive. As everyone here knows I am a law and order guy who has a very black and white view of justice.  In the great parody of pairs of earthly opposites, I always side with the good, the pure, and the blind efforts at justice, fairness, and honorable civility.  But I’m also the first to recognize when the other side isn’t playing by the same rules and in such cases I’m willing to do whatever it takes to pummel them into oblivion.  And from what I’ve seen, I do not trust the United States government in its current form and I certainly don’t have any love for the Deep State—the American intelligence community dedicated to the Skull and Bones creed of global governance through constant panic and war.  Further, it is my strong conviction that without Julian Assange’s “WikiLeaks” organization, America would have fallen deeper into despair than it already has been.  WikiLeaks has done us a tremendous favor.  I’m happy that Pamela Anderson is taking care of Julian Assange—but honestly, the guy should be working for our American intelligence department—not being a fugitive from it.  Save Pamela some airfare and constant harassment through the TSA by letting her visit Julian in Washington D.C. or perhaps even at Langley.  Free Assange and put him to work for the good of everyone.

I’m sure it was more than just a fleeting sensation—I do get to travel around and see things, but by far the most exciting place I can remember seeing in this decade was the Ecuadorian Embassy in London just down the street from the great Harrod’s department store. I normally don’t pose for pictures but on that day I did, and it was one of my best days in London to date—because behind those windows just above my shoulders Julian Assange was captive under diplomatic conditions.  And Assange and his WikiLeaks was doing the job of holding off giant international governments without troops, or even the bureaucracy of a country to challenge everyone to stay honest. While we were there my family was a little mystified at my intense desire to see the place and after I explained it after they sort of “got it.”  I am convinced that if not for WikiLeaks our American media would clearly be gone.  There are few if any reporters who are willing to do any hard investigating without a bias, but through WikiLeaks we at least get raw information for that same media to chew on.

People who know me best also understand that I have a natural love for pirates—which confuses them, because I am a law and order guy. Pirates by their very nature break the rules and make new ones up as they go.  I see that process as healthy because under the terms of dynamic intellectualism we need dynamic forces to challenge static forces in order to institute healthy societal growth.  Put another way, the best way to not have too many mice contaminating your food supply is to get a cat that hunts down and kills the mice.  We want to have a certain level of mice as a species, just not enough to destroy our society with disease.  So cats even though they can be uncaring, selfish little bastards that spray smelly piss everywhere are necessary to keep down the varmint population. The Introduction of cats is a dynamic to the static population and behavior of mice.  The same holds true with our media, without competition, or intellectual challenges such as what we see with one party clearly dominating the kind of thinking that the press articulates, we have a very static situation.  So to keep them honest, and controlled we need a dynamic force.  Piracy in this case has a moral element that might be brutal to watch but the results are beneficial.  Julian Assange is a kind of pirate in many ways that Henry Morgan was during the golden age of pirates.  We don’t want the lawless behavior but what poured forth from the Morgan pirates was the freest country on earth—the United States roughly 100 years later after many thoughtful people took note of the kind of society Morgan created in Jamaica spawned the idea for America.  The United States wasn’t formed from law and order, it was created from a lawless leap for freedom—a dynamic force challenging the worldly “static” orthodox.

Under normal conditions in life, law and order is fine, but when you get too many mice—otherwise—too many disease infested varmints that roam through life unchallenged, you get an unhealthy stagnation that is detrimental to our existence. Pirates even though they live as lawless bandits serve as a challenge to static institutions that are about to fail under their own weight for lack of external competition.  The original Pirates of the Caribbean led by Henry Morgan under direct supervision of the King of England at the time invented something new.  It was rough and a lot wild, but ultimately it was healthy and we celebrate it today with romanticized movies and books on the subject.  But when it comes to international intelligence gathering for which the United States is the biggest player and has become over time—“too big to fail” and see themselves as “bigger” than the elected presidents of our republic—then a dynamic challenge is certainly in order.

Being a modern pirate doesn’t mean you have to wear a crazy hat or rape women during pillaging missions. It doesn’t mean you have to kill anyone or even be a villain dressed all in black.  But it does mean you are a dynamic force challenging the static patterns of our society and for that we all owe Julian Assange some thanks. That is precisely why I was excited to see the Ecuadorian Embassy in London out of all the cool things there is to do there—because behind that glass just over my shoulders was one of the greatest dynamic forces of any lifetime functioning for the first time in human history without any major troop network with minimal resources that was openly challenging the static corrosion that has infected all of our institutions around the world.

Many will say that Julian Assange is a criminal, that he’s “unpatriotic,” and that he’s a villain. I say he is a pure human being looking for honesty among a bunch of plague infested rats and he is the cat that has determined himself to catch and kill them for our benefit. It takes guts to challenge the world the way he has.  With his talent, reputation, and resources he would serve everyone better if he were sanctioned and not kept a fugitive.  Who cares what the media thinks about the issue.  They are part of that static problem—and they need to either be challenged and cured through competition, or they need to be utterly destroyed.  I mean if there wasn’t a Juilain Assange just think how terrible newspapers like The New York Times and The Washington Post would be left unchecked.  We’ve witnessed how Comey’s F.B.I ran as a partisan machine for the Democratic Party.  In many ways things are far worse than anybody imagined, but we only know that because WikiLeaks is there as a threat to expose the truth when these guys get caught.  And if they weren’t there, what cat out there would be around to catch these mice?  The answer of course is that there wouldn’t be.

Rich Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

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

cropped-img_0202.jpg

Bill Maher and Stephen Colbert Can’t Make it in the Real World: Understanding the nature of American culture and Donald Trump

This tendency of media personalities to think that by ankle biting at a president that they are protected behind some invisible barrier of orthodox is truly baffling. I didn’t think that when Obama called out people who got on his nerves like Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity in the past that it was wrong, and I certainly don’t think it’s wrong for Trump to call out losers like Stephen Colbert.  What makes Trump unique is that he is a president that does not desire to function behind some veil of formality.  To him the presidency is just a job—it doesn’t make him as a person.  Yet many like Colbert and his audience and the type of people who voted for Barack Obama in the past, want the presidency to be royalty in America and that’s just not the way we intended the position to be.  I like the idea of a Thomas Jefferson who would answer the front door to the White House in his bath robe personally, or a Teddy Roosevelt who would swim nude in the Potomac.  I’m not at all enchanted by the luxury of the White House so I don’t see that the presidency is above the ankle biters out there like Stephen Colbert who nightly rip on the new administration hoping to return American back toward the direction of progressivism.   I like a president who is willing to fight anybody at any time under any circumstances—so I love that Trump takes on losers like Colbert the way he does.

Few people really know it, but some of these late-night comedians who are most against Trump, such as Bill Maher and Jon Stewart, are little guys. TV makes them look bigger but in real life walking around the great American Midwest these guys would easily get their asses kicked by average sized pick-up truck driving, tobacco chewers who make up most of the green space between America’s cities—and it scares them. Bill Maher knows that he can’t walk into a Waffle House at 4 AM in Tennessee and run his mouth without becoming a hood ornament.  I mean the guy is only like 5’8” and Jon Stewart is even shorter than that.  So these guys are truly afraid of those bulky white males who still dominate American politics.  They have kiss assed their way onto television and now take pot shots at the American way of life for laughs from behind the protection of celebrity—and many of us are sick of it.  They are partly why someone like Trump was elected—because we—the people who have lived in and made America what it has been—which we like—we are tired of these puny little punks, communists, lunatic feminists and many others of having a foothold under the banner of “fairness” only to have them ankle bite at us and not expect to be punched back.

We get tired of being called “white trash” or “rich white males of privilege” and all that crazy European talk about class structure which has been specific to life in the aristocratic age. That is not the way of life in America.  In this country, we like a guy who was born in Queens who gambled big with some loan his father gave him and worked hard as hell to become a billionaire—and along the way took no shit from anybody and is even in the WWE Hall of Fame—as well as eventually becoming president.  We like a guy or girl who can be born anywhere with any family name and become rich if they are willing to work hard enough.  We know that not everyone makes it but we like having that dream of opportunity to aspire to each day.  That is what America is and what people like that shrimp Bill Maher fail to understand.  Stephen Colbert—a satire guy from Comedy Central who made his living making fun of Bill O’Reilly isn’t what people who eat at Lee’s Chicken in Trenton, Ohio aspire to become.  But Trump is.  So we love it when someone we like slams some puny punk like Colbert on television.  Trump is right, it helps his base tremendously. What Colbert and Maher are doing is just mean-spirited propaganda which is very unlike what the conservative critics of Obama were doing.

Sean Hannity has put the screws to liberals for years and before him it was Rush Limbaugh both of which have been viciously attacked over just because they offer an intellectual argument against liberalism. Barack Obama naturally didn’t like it and as president he abused his power on many occasions to put an end to them if he could.  Obama actually used the White House to try and crush them through regulation, media pressure, and advertiser boycotts—not directly of course, but indirectly—through other people, donors, and media types.  And even if you are one of the stupid people who did vote for Obama, anybody with half a brain would have to admit the guy was very shady.  Scandal followed him everywhere and that wasn’t the fault of Republicans who were always there to point it out.  The scandals were so intense that he essentially destroyed the Democratic Party because congressman lost their seats, senators were voted out of office and Republicans replaced Democrats as governors all over the country.  And of course there was the 2016 election where Republicans retook the White House.  Trump ran a good campaign, but it was essentially that Democrats who had nobody competitive to put up as a sequel to Obama who lost the election, and they knew it.   Out of all the talent they supposedly had on the liberal side of the ball from George Clooney the actor to Warren Buffett, they only managed to put up a beat up old woman in Hillary Clinton chained to countless crimes and they lost the election because of that decision.  Their failure was complete with the rise of Trump.

They continue to lose because they got caught trying to take America away from the population that built it. There is nothing wrong with having an inclusive culture where people of all different nationalities and sexes can succeed together, but Democrats are out to destroy “white males” and that is something many take very personally.  I know I do.  When these various liberal groups come out openly for my destruction—yeah, I get a little angry about it.  So when Trump pushes back on my behalf, he certainly wins my support.  If people like Colbert and Maher had kept their mouths shut, it might not have been so bad.  But they pressed and pressed and pressed until people had enough, and Trump was the result—and they better get used to it.

The next step of course is that if we don’t have Trump as a recourse, then things might have to get nasty. They can only stand on the stage for so long hidden behind television security before people start giving it back to them worse than they have.  I think in many ways they should be thankful that they live in a nation where we have elections instead of armed insurrections because little midgets like those guys wouldn’t last long.  It’s easy to talk tough on a stage in front of a friendly audience in New York and L.A.  But it’s quite another to sit next to truck drivers, strippers, and hard luck old farmers at Waffle House at 4 AM and tell them you have big plans for their lives that were formulated by the United Nations two decades ago.  Because those people will beat the shit out of you and feed you to the dog.  That is the real America and I love it!

Rich Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

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

cropped-img_0202.jpg

The Disgraceful, Dishonest Press: Liberal losers in Hollywood and the media show how bad it really is

I deal with a lot of people and most of them don’t come as close to being the kind of conservative that I am. So the intolerance to other people’s opinions isn’t something that I understand.  Most of the time I am very disappointed in the people I meet, but I figure if they’ve gotten through 30 to 40 years of life and still have liberal leanings toward things—a five-minute conversation with me isn’t going to change much for them—so I don’t waste the time talking.  I deal with things as close to their level as I can allow myself and move on to the next topic without a thought.  If I didn’t do that I couldn’t speak to anybody—but that’s OK, because that type of thing doesn’t do much for me anyway.  But having an intolerance toward other points of view—if I functioned like that, I simply couldn’t live.  That’s why it is so disgusting to me to see how the White House Correspondents media behaved Saturday night as President Trump stiffed them by doing something else in a different city that night.  I don’t blame Trump at all—the media does cover him differently than say, President Obama.  In spite of all their talk about being a relevant part of “democracy” the press clearly didn’t hold Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and Eric Holder to the level of scrutiny that they do anybody in the Trump administration—so it is they who created this mess—and only they can clean it up.

I’ve told you dear reader before, the communist insurgents from the 1950s sought openly to take over Hollywood and the American media hoping to advance those collectivist ideas a half a century later and bring down the capitalist republic envied around the world so that a global order could rise from the ashes. Public schools have assisted in this enterprise and that is why on May first 2017 there were communist demonstrations in cities across America that we wouldn’t have seen ten or twenty years ago.  Those communist sympathizers are now in Hollywood and in our media and they have advanced that communist plot line.  Not that long ago there were a sizable number of conservatives in those fields.  There were always liberals in Hollywood and in the media, but they weren’t this obnoxious and insistent on shutting out conservative voices.  But these days conservatives are under attack which is most evident at Fox News where all the old timers are losing their jobs to more progressive liberals.  I felt sorry for Eric Bolling who had his new show debut at 5 PM on “May Day” and it was a disaster.  Why did he have on Mark Cuban?  He’s an idiot—I don’t want to hear from him.  In fact I didn’t want to hear from anybody but Eric on his show—more opinions don’t equate to better thinking.  But all Fox News could think to do in that time slot was another version of The Five.  I listen to liberals all day long—I don’t want to hear them on my news after working hard all day.  I’m open to other view points, but when it comes to my entertainment time—I’m going to choose people who are like-minded.  If Fox News doesn’t give me what I’m looking for I’ll find other alternatives—and that is the real reason for the misery displayed at the Correspondent’s Dinner Saturday

The country is moving back toward conservatism and the Hollywood types along with their partners in the media don’t like it. They are not open to people with other opinions and it shows in the way the covered Obama.  There were so many things they could have nailed him on, but because he was a black Democrat they literally gave him a free pass—but decided to put down the gauntlet for Trump and we all see it.  Who do they think they’re kidding?  They are the cause of all the divisiveness and when we don’t go along with their media plans—and just openly accept their stupid progressivism they think we are the ones who are intolerant.   Check out the riots just this year at Berkeley.  That will tell you everything you need to know.

For instance, I typically enjoy the Star Trek movies when they come out, so I watched the last one, Star Trek: Beyond.  It was horrendously stupid—overly progressive and ridiculously political.  They were more concerned with showing gay sex and multi-cultural civilization than in telling a good story—so the movie bombed.  It was rejected at the box office just like most projects are that are overly sexualized toward a progressive direction—because the United States as a market is not liberal.  When media companies start thinking their task is to make people into a certain thing by using art to take them there—they will likely fail if that art does not represent the demographic targeted by the art.  Star Trek: Beyond might represent the gay people at a Pride parade with all their rainbows and dudes dressed in drag—but it doesn’t register with some mechanic in Wichita, Kansas who is certainly not thinking of sticking any part of himself in the ass of some hairy assed man.  The media both in the press and in entertainment failed to understand their marketplace and thought they actually had the power to move culture instead of giving culture what it wants.

That is the big distinction, the liberals in the news media think they can shape the minds of their viewers and the hard reality tells them that people will leave and seek out other objectives. I seldom watched The Five on Fox because I didn’t want to hear from Jaun Williams or Bob Beckel.   It’s nothing personal, I just don’t want to hear their liberal voices—it’s a waste of my time.  It’s not that I’m intolerant, it’s that I don’t want to hear it—and that is what the media is missing now that we are in the age of Trump.  They are making themselves less relevant day by day and they still don’t know it.  By the way they behaved at the correspondent’s dinner—they really don’t understand America at all.  They only understand the progressive culture of New York, Washington D.C. and a few cities in California—but no place else who actually watch their programming—or not, depending on choices.

Since Fox New canned O’Reilly and really Roger Ailes over the summer, I only watch Lou Dobbs and Brett Baier at 6 pm on the Fox owned networks. I caught the Tucker Carlson segment shown above while I had breakfast because the headline caught my eye.  But I don’t have time to commit to a complete show if the people in it don’t represent what I want to see.  I don’t need a lecture from a bunch of artists and leftists who will take their clothes off for anybody and smoke dope every now and then—to “open” my mind to other points of view.  I know what works and what doesn’t and that’s pretty much it.  Maybe when I was in my twenties I had things to learn.  These days, nobody knows what I do because they don’t work as hard as I do for information—so there isn’t much for them to “teach” me.  I just want the news—not some 26-year-old kid crying about fairness.  I want to see reports on what’s going on in the world and if the press has to spin it at all, I want a conservative view-point.  I don’t want to listen to liberals cry about every little particle floating around the universe.

It was very disingenuous to listen to the press complain about Trump because honestly, I’m not sure they know where they live. All they really accomplished was that they confirmed they didn’t understand the average Trump voter who has loaded up government positions with conservatives at all levels.  It’s pretty bad that POLITICO released in its recent survey that no members of the press identify themselves as Republican—when the people they are covering most likely are—and the audience who wants their news.  When a majority of the press are openly Democrats it becomes a larger problem and we saw it during the Obama years and the Clinton election where they lost.  They didn’t understand what happened then, or why it was a problem, and they know even less now.  Yet for them the world will go on without them—because that’s how things work.  It’s just too bad their liberal college professors never taught them that so to save them from this present disgrace.

Rich Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

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

cropped-img_0202.jpg

The New Rebel Fashion: Joy Villa wears Donald Trump dress to the 2017 Grammy ceremony

It took a lot of guts for Joy Villa to show up at the Grammy’s dressed in this fabulous evening wear.  Talk about fashion.  I’m sure the faces of the liberal left of Hollywood melted off.  But hey, for years those American insurgents showed up at these award shows in Che shirts and celebrated Mao openly.  And at parties before the drugs and the orgies, they toasted to Fidel Castro.  So they have it coming—Donald Trump is the new rebel fashion and they have to face the fact that their sun has set and Trump is the new fashion for the rebellious creative types.  And they better get used to it.

Rich Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

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

cropped-img_0202.jpg

America is at War with Terrorism: The countries under executive order are those connected to the hostile organizations–don’t forget that

The key to understanding Trump’s immigration executive order was to listen to Kellyanne Conway’s appearance on Fox New with Chris Wallace.  The last part of the interview she really lit up and the villains of America’s restoration toward sanity were wonderfully illustrated.  The “extreme vetting” at this particular time wasn’t just to fix the loose polices of the past—it is to protect us from military activity that is ongoing at this very moment in those mentioned countries and keeping retaliation from sneaking in as a method of revenge.  It’s a proactive measure on the road to eliminating ISIS.  As to the resistance of mainstream politicians, I’ll have a lot more to say about that later.  They are beginning to gas out in Trump’s wake and starting to drag ass.  But what’s important here is what the immigration order means and to understand its timing.

Rich Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

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

cropped-img_0202.jpg

The ‘Rogue One’ Review: A New Hope, not only for Star Wars, but the entire movie industry

For me it was an entirely magical experience.  I’ve always loved Star Wars, even though over the last few weeks I had been troubled with the makers at Lucasfilm who obviously were in despair that Donald Trump was the new President of the United States.  After a few weeks of “banter” it became obvious to me that the root of their problem was a regional one.  Lucasfilm is located in San Francisco at the old  Presido so their points of emphasis on all things political lean-to the left.  But prior to Rogue One being released on December 16th 2016 as the first standalone film to be presented in the Star Wars storyline I personally wished Chris Weitz and others at Lucasfilm luck with the opening because I felt that the direction of the series was growing up and going where George Lucas always intended—to be bigger than terrestrial politics and that this new film deserved fresh judgment.  Gareth Edwards as everyone who reads here knows, I think is a wonderful director—as assessed by the 2014 Godzilla film—so I was very eager to see Rogue One on opening night and once I had was met with a number of Star Wars characters in the lobby of my local theater just days before Christmas.  Outside of the Cobb Luxury Theater at Liberty Center, Ohio were brilliant Christmas lights lining the streets as Star Wars music blared from the park across the street in the harsh 20 degree cold.  A little Jawa and Imperial Trooper were outside adding to the excitement as seen in my Twitter update below from that moment.

Rogue One was a bold movie—certainly created by hard-core Star Wars fans and by committee which hurts it a little bit—but the love for the film by all those who made it was really a jaw dropping experience.  It was a fabulous film done with a classic Saturday morning serial style.  The title screen was very distracting at first because it was the first Star Wars film done without the crawl.  We’ve had seven Star Wars films with a grand opening followed by a crawl of text telling us where we were in the story and what was going on and with Rogue One, that was noticeably gone—on purpose.  It felt to me like this Star Wars movie was actually rebelling against our expectations to be its own thing even though by the ending it literally took us to the beginning of Episode IV the very first Star Wars movie from 1977.

I always wondered as a kid what that first major victory of the Rebellion was as mentioned in that text crawl and Rogue One nearly reflected my imagination remarkably well.  After all, A New Hope plunged us all into the middle of the story and we could only guess at the history of the situation based on what the characters told us about it.  The heroes of the Skywalker family and specifically Han Solo were larger than life manifestations of heroism propelled by unnerving optimism and that carried the saga into realms of mythology which has formed our society around philosophic concepts unparalleled in the history of storytelling.  Rogue One and the rebellion before those heroes entered the metaphorical stage noticeably is about average people daring to do extraordinary things under the collective assembly of a rebellion against the empire.  This was evident in the directorial approach of Rogue One which might have been tempted to retell a modern story with epic heroes which would continue on for generations—but instead they stuck to the mode of the story and the Michael Giacchino musical score never tried to outstrip the original John Williams score—even though I think he could compete with Williams if he wanted to.

One thing I know quite a lot about is John Williams music—I think I know every note from every film he’s ever done for every scene put to film.  I listen to John Williams music in my office almost every morning—it is my breakfast for starting a day and the music from A New Hope is so full and rich.  The themes for each character are so fleshed out and defined—it is an unquestioned masterpiece so it is quite a task to ask Michael Giacchino to step in with only about a month of time to score Rogue One which is a film designed to essentially be the first moments of A New Hope.  And the music has that rushed feel not in a bad way, but in the way of Rogue One itself—a band of incomplete and flawed people joining together in rebellion against a tyrannical empire also full of jaded and incomplete people not quite fleshed out as life forms to do battle on the epic planet of Scarif in a kind of grand crescendo.  I have listened very carefully to Michael Giacchino’s score and I think many of his tones are underplayed on purpose to be deliberately fleshed out in A New Hope as Luke Skywalker eventually enters the picture and finds his own guardian angel in the veritable Han Solo at the cantina in Mos Eisley space port.  That’s where the rebellion finally finds its true heroes which they can clip their star onto and finally overtake the empire in the movies we all know so well by now.  By the end of Rogue One the music coalesces into themes that sound nearly right out of the New Hope soundtrack.  Maybe that was on purpose, maybe it just took Giacchino time to find his Star Wars legs—but I think the small amount of time given to him was to evoke that kind of unorganized chaos that often happens with battle only to be brought to a finer point in movies we’ve already seen and that was quite brilliant.  In that way these standalone movies never have to be as good as George Lucas made the originals, or the John Williams music which accompanied our memories.  But the stories of how those events came to be are infinitely fascinating and in that regard Rogue One is a masterpiece of cinema.

Even bolder was the inclusion of old Star Wars characters who are either long passed from life on this earth or too old to ever possibly be seen again as a 19-year-old princess.  The decision to make lifelike full onscreen CGI characters in this day and age of 4K televisions was monstrously bold because every little flaw would be easy to detect.  But these makers of Rogue One had full scenes of the late Peter Cushing speaking to members of the empire under hard light and in close-up—which was bewildering.  Give the movie a standing ovation for not playing it safe.  And it works.  When Princess Leia speaks finally at the end for a brief second accompanied by the strings of Giacchino’s bold soundtrack I looked around me in the theater and there were tears streaming down the faces of the full crowd.  The audience looked as if they had Christmas lights on their faces which glittered in the reflection of the white interior of the Tantive IV—the ship which we first see at the start of A New Hope.  Then suddenly the film cut to credits not letting anybody linger in contemplation which gave the effect of wanting to see it again immediately.  This wasn’t just a movie, or a tip of the hat to a cinematic masterpiece—this was a bold rebellion of conventional cinema history declaring its independence to throw off convention and serve a timeless story with new installments to bridge mankind into the everlasting.

So dear reader, you might understand now the feeling I had when I shot that short video for the Twitter upload.  Until you’ve seen the movie, you won’t understand—it just sounds like music with some people dressed up in front of a movie theater.  But the unconscious connection that those characters had to our mood was very similar to that experience when you’re coming out of church after a particularly inspiring sermon to greet someone you otherwise wouldn’t talk to because you shared a common experience.  They understood how magical the movie was from behind their costumes and they could see the joy on our faces and they played right along.  Rogue One is a great movie without all those secondary considerations, but there is a magic to seeing one of these Star Wars movies on opening night as they now have such a hook into our human culture.  To make it better for me, my wife and I saw Rogue One at the Cinebistro and had a very nice dinner at the theater which I never get tired of.  So it was very nice that the theater management went to the extra step to bring in costumed Star Wars characters to patrol the lobby and had the foresight to set up a booth at the park pavilion at Liberty Center to blare Star Wars music down the street to mix with the Christmas festivities of Holiday shoppers vibrant on a cold December Friday evening.   Yes it was very magical.

I think those tears on the faces of the audience were of pure joy even though it was quite sad to see each member of the Rogue One team get picked apart by the ominous strength of imperial might.  The movie reminded me of The Magnificent Seven—the original starring Yul Brynner who were gunned down at the end trying to save the town.  But the film didn’t end there.  Getting those plans to Princess Leia was like a last-minute play in American football where the losing team had almost no chance of scoring an impossible needed touchdown as a superior opponent set up a tenacious defense.  It didn’t so much matter how many poor rebels were killed so long as before one died they handed the plans to the next so that they might just get the objective to the Tantive IV before Darth Vader killed them all.  The desperation was so evident and the end of the film felt the same as when a team goes into overtime in a football game—and at the end we’re not dealing with an outmatched opponent as we might have thought at the beginning, but two even teams about to do battle to the death in A New Hope (overtime).

I loved Rogue One, I’ll probably go see it many more times while at the theater and I will buy it on the first day its available on Blue-rey.  The film is a gift to the next generation.  My grandchildren will love these new Star Wars movies and I can clearly see the benefit of taking this series well into the future.  My wife and I did some Christmas shopping after the movie and sort of walked around sorting out our feelings about Rogue One.  One of my daughters called me to get my verdict of the film, as she and her husband had seen it already with an advance screening—and she was anxious about my opinions and wanted desperately to share her enthusiasm for the film.  She had to contain her feelings for our sake not to give anything away, and when she called, I was still in stoic mode.  I don’t get emotional about anything unless its extreme joy or anger—except for when I write.  So I mechanically went through the events of the movie with her that I liked, but didn’t come close to articulating the full impact of it until after I had slept on it.  That’s what kind of movie this is.  It’s a no brainer—everyone should see Rogue One.  It’s a special film for a special time and it not only leads to a classic story called A New Hope but it is in and of itself “a new hope” for the entire movie industry.  It’s a feat in and of itself that not only unites people of different political beliefs, world cultures, and young and old alike, but with our primordial past and the hope we all have to live free of tyranny against the natural inclinations by those whose faulty personal identifications seek to imprison us much like Galen Erso was.  That is after all the point of the movie.  Even under duress for his natural brilliance Galen Erso “rebelled” in the only way that he could and hoped that freedom would follow.  And in those tears in that audience I think that most people understood the situation that Galen was in—because in their lives—they are stuck in much the same scenario—thus the brilliance of cinema to reach our hearts in ways that no other mode can.  Rogue One does.  It wasn’t the best movie I’ve ever seen, but I’m a 50-year-old man.  For a lot of young people ages 4 through 15 though—this will be and it will become the standard they measure everything off of in the future.  And that is a very, very, very good thing.

Rich Hoffman

 

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

DSC01839

10 Seconds of Sheer Bliss: ‘Star Wars’ transcending politics and the #dumpstarwars movement

Obviously, many of the makers of the new Star Wars film, Rogue One regionally identify with San Francisco politics, because after all, that is where George Lucas moved his Lucasfilm company just prior to selling his empire to Disney in 2012.  They are not Donald Trump fans and have foolishly engaged in a progressive campaign against the president-elect adopting the same slant as Saturday Night Live has—lampooning Trump and the supporters of the new rebellion in America which they’ve associated as racists, bigots, and homophobes.

Where they’ve gone wrong is in assuming—including Mark Hamill, (Luke Skywalker himself) is that the meaning of Star Wars was always about diversity and togetherness in a collective kind of ooze, as opposed to what the masses actually cleave to making it one of the most popular modern stories of all time.  They obviously don’t understand why Star Wars is successful, and they don’t necessarily need to so long as they stick to the formula that George Lucas started so many years ago.   Rogue One is a war movie inspired from the World War II era, and that involved European politics from a time when nations came together to combat the evil of Hitler—and that is a universal theme everyone can get behind.  I personally like Garth Edwards as a director—he did a great job on the recent Godzilla film, and now that I’ve heard the Michael Giacchino soundtrack for Rogue One, particularly the section shown below at the 1:40 mark, I am getting very excited for the new film.  I wish I could have an hour-long soundtrack of just that kind of music because it reflects how I personally think.  If you could put music to my way of thinking 24 hours a day seven days a week—it would sound like that—that’s it!

I’ve went to the trouble of warning these modern Star Wars makers, like the Rogue One writer, Chris Weitz to story group leader at Lucasfilm Pablo Hidalgo and the director of Episode 8 Rian Johnson through Twitter that they needed to can their opinions because they don’t understand Star Wars in an ethical way so far as it relates to the world outside of Lucasfilm—by way of its art.  I think they are too young and as natural second-handers to George Lucas, they don’t get the appeal because they live in a filmmaking bubble.  Even George Lucas didn’t understand it for most of his life—if he ever did.  In fact, Lucas may have only understood Star Wars after he survived the car crash that nearly killed him and ever since—he has been losing that understanding year by year.  As an artist, he tapped into something by accident and that became something that changed the world philosophically and when film industry employees seek to bring modern political meaning to Star Wars, they cheapen it.  For instance, as Chris Weitz stated about Trump supporters—foolishly—the empire from the Star Wars movies were racists white supremacists and that the villains from Rogue One were much like those who put the New York billionaire into the White House over the corrupt Hillary Clinton—whom many at Lucasfilm were openly supporting.  I reminded all those mentioned above that Finn was a black guy and that Captain Phasma was a woman and as my friend Matt Clark pointed out recently, all of the Clone Troopers were copied from the DNA of Jango Fett—who certainly wasn’t a “white guy.”  So I told Chris that if he thought that’s what made Rogue One tick as a movie—as the writer—then the film would likely suck.

http://www.businessinsider.com/trump-supporters-star-wars-rogue-one-boycott-2016-12

What those Lucasfilm employees obviously don’t understand is that most of the people I know who ran the Trump campaign on the ground level all loved Star Wars and that from their perspective the evil empire was the Democratic Party and the villains were clearly the Clintons.  The destruction of the second Death Star was election day 2016 and we celebrated by pulling down the statue of the evil empress Clinton in the city square of a metaphorical Coruscant.  So we are clearly at odds with each other and our definitions of things are defined by regional relationships—Lucasfilm by the progressive views of the coastal cities of New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles—and the Trump rebellion from the flyover states like Ohio, Georgia, Texas, Indiana and Michigan.  One thing that Star Wars taught me as a young person, which the modern Lucasfilm employees have not yet mastered is that the space opera is best defined on wings of art—the kind James Joyce participated in—which tapped into ancient roots of human experience and that it is there that the keys to understanding the power and success of Star Wars is best applied.

It was only because of Star Wars that I was inspired as a young twenty-something to read the great European classics like The Canterbury Tales and Finnegan’s Wake.  One of those is actually medieval literature while the other is an attempt at preservation of life before the Catholic takeover of Europe specifically in the British Isles.  Star Wars is all about that kind of thing mixed with oriental cultures.   Lucas properly took all of the world’s mythologies and placed them on an infinite tapestry of galactic magnitude and benefited it even more by setting the story long before our modern human history.  The genius of that was to remove the audience from the here and now and place it comfortably in the past so that reflection was possible without the immediacy of modern troubles.  So I literally have spent the last thirty years reading classic literature from around the world because I was inspired by Star Wars as a kid to do so—and I am far better off for it now.  With these new Star Wars films I am hopeful that the same thing happens to millions of other people over the coming decades because there is a real hope that I have that this art of Star Wars will carry mankind to a new level of understanding even in spite of Kathy Kennedy’s immediate desires to find female directors and stick progressive causes into Star Wars which rips the mind away from the transcendental nature which evokes the magic in the first place.  She and Lucasfilm in general understand I think enough to get by.

For instance, Rogue One is really a classic spin on an old World War II movie.  The upcoming Han Solo film which goes into production at the turn of the year 2017 has the art department looking at old Frederic Remington paintings to get the look of that movie to reflect a classic western, so these guys get it, and I look forward to seeing what they get up on the screen.  I understand that we will see a newer Millennium Falcon with some cool paint schemes on it, which will be wonderful as Han Solo is my favorite character.  He’s a very Ayn Rand type of hero.  I am so excited about that project that I’m planning to visit the studio where they are filming while they are there in the first quarter of 2017—because it’s wonderful as a work of art to see those types of elements being put together in something that will inspire the world.  I’m not saying anything more about the Millennium Falcon because it’s all kind of a secret and I respect that.  We’ll all see it soon enough.

The success of the new Han Solo movie will largely depend on how well Rogue One does, so I am rooting for the film to do well.  I won’t be boycotting Star Wars just because the filmmakers at Lucasfilm don’t understand the presidency or modern necessity of Donald Trump.  They’ll get it in hindsight, but if they don’t see it now—I won’t fault them for it.  They have an important job to do in my mind and they need to stick to it.  I will say that I am encouraged by what I’ve seen so far, like that Michael Giacchino film score, and the recent update to the video game Battlefront where there is a DLC featuring Rogue One events which came out this week.  I’ve been playing it and let me just say—it’s quite astonishing.  Additionally, this past week the new VR Mission for X-Wing came out on Playstation and it was jaw dropping cool.  The neatest video game experience I’ve ever had.  There isn’t even a close second and all this is a result of Star Wars newest film Rogue One which has resurrected the science and ambition those films evoked in the 1980s.  I never thought in my wildest imaginings that I’d be able to sit in the cockpit of an X-Wing Fighter and perform dogfighting with other ships around a massive Star Destroyer on the edge of an asteroid field in the most perfect 3D imagery I’ve ever seen.  I say that from the perspective of working with the RealD 3D guys back in 2008 when they were perfecting their cameras for the revolution we see now in movie theaters.  I can only imagine what kind of technical breakthroughs we will see over the next few years as Star Wars continues to inspire science and art to push human understanding and the Trump presidency opens up the purse strings of capitalism to make those ideas happen.  If everyone can’t yet see the big picture—I can deal with that.  But lack of vision doesn’t make people correct in their assumptions.  Chris would do his project and Lucasfilm a tremendous service if he’d just keep his mouth shut and do his job within that context.

Meanwhile I will be one of the first to see Rogue One.  I ordered the soundtrack from Michael Giacchino based exclusively on that clip.  I will now go listen to those few seconds of music at the 1:40 mark for the rest of the day because it’s that kind of thing which feeds my brain—which is my favorite part of my body—and it likes to eat.  Matt Clark and I are planning a Star Wars special on 1600 WAAM on New Year’s Eve and we’ll review the new Rogue One movie and elaborate on all these topics more, once we have had the benefit of seeing the movie and comparing it to the history of the franchise which are shaped in translation by the politics of our time.  So we’ll see.  I’m hopeful, but will reserve my judgment on the product presented.  And as of now, I’m enjoying the possibilities that come with Star Wars and the hope for the human race that often trails in its wake.  I will say this, thank you Michael for that 10 seconds of music shown in the Rogue One scoring session.  Because I love it!

Rich Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

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

IMG_0303

How Trump can Win the Next Debate: War gaming hard questions with Chris Wallace

trump4Obviously with the polls giving Trump a boost after the presidential debate on October 9th 2016 and the failure of inflammatory controversy to prevent the results—Hillary Clinton supporters are in a full panic.  One more poor performance of Hillary Clinton on a stage where Chris Wallace is the moderator is enough to terrify them because as Wikileaks has shown of John Podesta’s emails—they don’t trust Hillary without her handlers guiding her like a puppet through anything resembling opposition.  What is even more terrifying for them is that Trump thinks fast on his feet and can dominate those debates—like he did at the last one.  One more good debate performance would be a torpedo hit to the Clinton campaign that it likely won’t recover from which is why all these attempted sex stories from Democratic operatives are now at a fevered pitch.   With three weeks to go until the election, there is full panic in the corners of Hillary Clinton’s candidacy.  The political left is doing everything they can, cooking the polling with high Democratic samplings, false media stories, and every dirty trick in the playbook of politics to stop Trump–but it’s not working and there is real fear in the voice of Hillary Clinton and the future of the global progressive movement as they stare down the coming weeks and contemplate losing it all.

Trump is quite capable, but we are all good at different types of things and as a strategist—a good one that I am—I noticed a few things that he could afford to clean up ahead of this next debate with Wallace.  Chris Wallace is one of the few traditional reporters left out there—he’s still an old school journalist who was in the field doing good work while a lot of the current press was still being brain washed at their liberal colleges learning to work in the modern media environment.  So he will ask tough questions of both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.  He knows which kind of questions will stump them both because he has interviewed them over the years many times and has no real influence of celebrity to taint his conduct.  I expect out of him a good debate format that could work dramatically to Trump’s favor, so for the sake of the campaign as a whole, I am offering this information to help fill the natural inclinations of Donald Trump who is good at thinking on his feet—especially when he has a hook into something useful to use in whatever situation is in front of him.  In this case, avoiding the pitfalls Chris Wallace will throw at him so he can let the events of the debate run their natural course in showing how terrible Hillary is without her helpers which would then solidify the case against her in front of 100 million people just a few weeks from the election—fair and square.

If I were Trump—and I can say that knowing that I understand the way he thinks—I would exploit the weaknesses that will come up during the debate for which Hillary will falter.  She will not be able to answer the questions about Wikileaks, Podesta, or her deleted emails.   Additionally, when the subject of congressional perjury comes up, she was clearly guilty and that will leave her stumbling on the stage because essentially, she lied, she knows she lied and her body language reveals all the truth against her efforts at hiding it.  The Clinton Foundation is another aspect of her campaign that she can’t defend.  The sexual exploits of her husband Bill were the subject of the last debate and need to be left off the table this time in favor of setting up these narratives for the last two weeks.  If I were Trump every question would be pivoted back to one of those topics which would leave her a writhing mess on stage.

But Wallace isn’t going to want to look like he just picked on Clinton—because he truly wants to be fair and balanced.  He will go for the jugular on Trump too and let the public decide who handled the pressure best.  So let’s war game this a bit with Trump’s answers to help solve that problem.  Obviously I’m not writing this for the general public—but for the Trump campaign.  Like Trump I think fast on my feet.  I don’t like to take notes and when I speak in public I like to be spontaneous and rely on my wits.  But I have the benefit of emotional distance and can think objectively about this issue so as Trump is playing things out in his head so that he can be spontaneous on stage, it helps to let some online app read an article like this while doing debate prep so that when you’re in the moment you’ve heard this stuff before and can act without hesitation on the questions posed.  I know Trump has very good people around him who know a lot of this—but again—when you’re in the heat of the battle, sometimes you can’t see the forest for the trees.  So let me describe the trees so that the campaign can cut down the right ones and build something nice for the country to benefit from.  What follows is a mock debate from the point of view of Wallace and Trump as I imagine it will be after watching Chris for years.  These will be the manner for which he will ask questions designed to stump Trump.

Wallace: Mr. Trump, over the last week additional women have come out against you as a response to the Access Hollywood tape and claimed unwanted sexual advances.  How do you respond to calls that your actions of sexual misconduct disqualify you to be in the most powerful office in the world?

Trump: Well, Chris, as I’ve said of the tapes mentioned, it was locker room talk, banter that guys do sometimes just to have fun.  You know—we’re all human beings.  Guys say things to each other for fun, and so do women.  There is an entire bachelorette party industry that counts on people having fun in such a fashion that many wouldn’t want to have revealed during serious moments of their lives.  For a long time I lived my life building a powerful business and to feed that drive, I lived a bit of that life as a rogue when it came to relationships.  For a long time, and it was probably all me because I was so focused on building my businesses, but the idea of a woman who I could pour myself into and share a life with seemed like a fantasy to me—until I met Melania.  I don’t say it much, but I’ll say it now—why the hell not—but I appreciate her incredibly.  Her patience and constant love have actually encouraged me to grow to be the man that is standing before you now, ready to take all my years of experience—in every phase of life—and help make America Great Again not just fiscally, patriotically, or even legislatively—but in a way that might open others to the kind of love I have for Melania—which she nurtured along over many years patiently.  I’m not going to say that I’m a perfect person, but I do strive for perfection every day and in regard to a partner in life, Melania is the closest thing to perfection that I’ve ever had the pleasure to know.  And it has changed me for the better, into the man standing before you now, who is offering to be your voice to the world for a day yet to come where we can all be better off.

(APPLAUSE)

Wallace:  Mr. Trump, your opponent has produced her tax returns and has called on you to do the same.  Your refusal to do so has gone against years of precedence where every presidential candidate has provided them.   As the IRS has said, you are free to release your tax returns even under an audit and many legal minds agree—you are not prevented from doing so.  So why haven’t you released them?  Is there something you are trying to hide form the American people?

Trump:  Chris, as you’ve reported on Fox News a lot, the IRS has targeted conservative groups heavily for their political affiliations—so I wouldn’t trust what the IRS tells you—because they don’t have a good track record at honesty—let me tell you that.  But as I’ve said, I’m under a routine audit.  Since I’ve been involved on the front lines of many conservative causes over the last eight to ten years increasingly, those audits have become much more routine—so I can provide many examples of IRS targeting.  So while I’m under audit—and because of the way a tax report shows only the kinds of things politicians value—like the amount of wealth they can confiscate from you so they can give it away like candy in exchange for votes to keep them in power—I’m not going to take any chances.  Obviously, we’ve all seen that the system is rigged and the IRS is part of that.  I pay millions and millions of dollars in federal, state, and every kind of tax that politicians like Hillary has come up with so my tax forms are a lot more complicated than hers.  She gives a few speeches to Goldman Sacks and earns millions of dollars to do their bidding and that income is easy to show.  She didn’t create any jobs or build anything taxable—unlike me—so she only has to put down a dollar value.  I’ve actually built things and those things are taxable assets and those types of reportings get complicated.  My papers that I filed at the start of the campaign do a much better job of showing the dynamic of my vast assets and burdens.  Additionally, I must say, given the lazy status of our media culture, the way they print anything Hillary wants, it is clear they wouldn’t do the investigative work to even begin to understand what my tax returns tell about anything.  Because essentially, they don’t understand money, wealth, or amassed value.  They only know to do hit pieces to elevate more crooked politicians like her and seek to keep me out of politics so they can protect the corrupt organizations they’ve built.

(CROWD SHIFTS IN THEIR SEATS AS WALLACE CAN’T HELP BUT SMILE)

Wallace:  Mr. Trump, you’ve said time and again that you know more than the generals in solving foreign policy issues.  Yet if you are commander in chief, you will have to work with many generals in dealing with the great challenges the United States is dealing with around the world.  Given your statements how are you going to accomplish that task?

Trump:  Chris, look, I’ve been doing this stuff for a long time.  Not only am I a successful businessman, but I’ve written several bestselling books, and I wrote The Art of the Deal.  I’ve sat across the table from many people who don’t like me and I’ve found a way to work with them toward objectives that are usually mutually beneficial—that’s what making deals is all about.  And I want to make deals that are good for America for a change.  So when it comes to generals and even people from the other side of the political aisle in congress and the senate—I’m going to be able to work with them.   As sure as you’re sitting there it will be easy because these guys are on the government dime, they get paid one way or another and they are going to take the path of least resistance—let me tell you that.  And they will agree with me more than disagree because “they’ll take the path of least resistance.”  I’ll listen to the generals.  Some I will value and we’ll act on their good advice.  Some will be idiots and I throw them out of the people’s office.  That’s the way it’s going to be, Chris.  And Washington better get ready because we’re going to be doing things differently than we have in the past and for a change, we’re going to win.

Of course these are only three questions, but they are the big ones that Trump has not answered with the kind of depth that a candidate at this phase of an election needs to, so it’s time to put these issues to rest.  This is only advice; I certainly wouldn’t expect Trump to recite these paragraphs word for word.  I think I know his mind well enough to put together these sentences in the style that he thinks.  It’s just not always easy to turn practical thought into political speech at the cutting edge, and with Trump, he is certainly at the cutting edge.  Hopefully this helps, because this last debate could sink Hillary Clinton by adding to the great debate performance of October 9th.   I know this is an unconventional form of communication to a presidential candidate—but what the hell.  I’ve invested so much into this campaign that this is the least I can do.  Hopefully this helps.

Rich Hoffman

Liberty Twp, Ohio and will be in the VIP section of the US Bank Arena Rally on 10/13/2016.

Just win…………..

Star Wars Battlefront: A mythic jump into the future of the human race that is just jaw-dropping cool

It took my radio buddy Matt Clark from WAAM in Ann Arbor, Michigan a good part of 2016 to talk me into getting Star Wars: Battlefront for my PS4.  But after a lot of coaxing, by him, I finally did about six weeks ago.  The result after just that short duration of time—and granted I have very responsible social obligations so I can’t sit around playing games all day every day—but presently I’m well over 2 million points of online play and I just hit level 52 by Force Friday on September 30th which still gives me reasonable happiness and hope for the future of what has become one of the most important mythologies to our society in the history of the human race.  There is nothing like Star Wars really and now that I’ve played Battlefront a lot on PS4 and witnessed the new Deathstar expansion I have a few things to say that are extremely positive.  The game is simply jaw dropping in its scope, ambition, and graphic ambiance.  Even though I deal with a lot of very usual serious subject matters on this site, I often say that I vacation in the Star Wars universe as a stress management tool, and with Battlefront that has certainly been the case—so it’s OK to take a break to think about something fun.

As I’ve said before, I am a fan of the Star Wars miniatures game.  I wish I had more time to play it, but I think it is superior to Chess as a strategy game and is a real window into what can happen when the human imagination is unleashed through a powerful mythology like Star Wars.  For the last couple of weeks, billionaires on the cutting edge of tomorrow—like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk—have been discussing the opportunities for expanding the human race into our solar system, which I have been talking about for quite some time.  Where those two individuals are not aligned with a person like me politically, we do agree on human expansion into space, the development of new technologies, and expanding the reaches of our imaginations during the next century—and largely Star Wars has helped frame the thought in our generation to make possible the real science we are just beginning to see.  In fact, I was in a business meeting just yesterday—Force Friday—where the new Star Wars toys for the upcoming film Rogue One were released at Target—and the old timers in that meeting were astonished with the very real business results they had witnessed from my performance over the last two business quarters.  While I would never cheapen those efforts with a simple rationality by saying Star Wars was responsible—it did help shape my young mind into thinking big about things and conceiving of ideas that would later develop into quite beautiful ways of thinking—which Bezos and Musk are also utilizing.  When we were all kids, we played with the same toys and I can see the effect in a positive way that it’s had on our culture and the stuff that’s out now for kids is many times better—so I can only imagine what impact that will have on tomorrow’s children who will take what Musk and Bezos are saying today and make it happen tomorrow.  From that vantage point Star Wars can make you better, it can make you think better, act better, and provide mythic direction important to subconscious yearnings key to behaving as a functional adult.  By the high standards set by the orchestral Star Wars music in these movies and video games to the advent of various propulsion systems to make the ships fly, to the artificial intelligence represented in the various robots shown in the Star Wars mythology there is a lot of room to provoke thought in that science fiction, fantasy epic that I see dramatically expanding the consciousness of the human race.  Given that, I’ve told the story of how my wife and I took a few years and played Star Wars: The Old Republic online for nearly two full years—and had a lot of fun doing it.  So when I sat down and finally let myself play Battlefront by a joint partnership between the video game companies DICE and Electronic Arts I was more than a little astonished by the result.

The negatives for me in getting into it in the first place were that I didn’t want to play as an Imperial player—because I never play bad guys—in anything.  I don’t even let my mind go there and in the multiplayer mode of Battlefront they often queue you into both Imperial and Rebel players randomly.  During one game you play as a Rebel and in the next you’ll be an Imperial.  I had to find a way around that just to play Battlefront—and it’s a little bit of a pain in the ass—but the results have more than been worth it.  The other drawback for me was that there was not story mode in Battlefront.  It’s what they call a “sandbox” game where you just show up and play like you would on a playground—only this is quite literally set in the worlds of Star Wars.  I didn’t think that would be enough for me, but as it has turned out, I actually love the format.  Here’s why.

Back in the 90s—and I’ve told this story before a little bit—my favorite game was a space simulator called X-Wing based on the Star Wars missions from the original film.  It was a DOS based game and I played it religiously.  I simply loved it—still do actually.  I loved it so much that it has essentially become the measure of every game thereafter for me—because it did so many things well.  At that time my kids were babies and they learned about video games by watching me play that one, and I had a nephew I was very close with who was a little kid then and played it with me all night some nights, and we never forgot the experience.  It was certainly a very special game for a very special time and the contents of the experience would evoke great discussions between us that greatly enriched our lives even to this day many decades later.  So a great video game done right can have a wonderful impact on people—much greater than what a classic novel once had on our society—because the experience can be shared with other people.  There were a few more editions of that X-Wing game that came out in the late 90s as the Internet became more of a factor in computer use—which seems like an odd thing to say today—but back then the Internet was expensive and clunky, and wasn’t much good beyond communication through email and web browsing.  It couldn’t stream the amount of data that it takes now to play massive battles in high-definition between 60 players at a time like we can now see in Battlefront.  I remember being extremely impressed by the third X-Wing game, X–Wing vs Tie Fighter that allowed for online play against real life opponents which I was very interested in.  Because I wanted to test myself against other pilots around the world—I’ve always played combat simulations on computers—everything from Microsoft’s Flight Simulators which are very realistic to the old Dynamix World War II aerial combat sims, and X-Wing took the realistic stalls out of the mix common to old propeller driven planes but kept the classic dog fighting elements which was a marriage of two styles of fighter combat that was very enjoyable.  X-Wing fighters were like the old World War II warbirds—such as the P-40 and the P-51, but they had technology that was ahead of our time such as shielding and hyperspace travel which puts your mind onto ideas which force it to lean into the future just to bring all those elements together—which is the correct function of a proper mythology.  Over time a few games have come and gone that I was impressed with—most recently the Old Republic version of its starfighter gameplay where online matches were something I did religiously for about a year—but none of them really got to the meat of what I liked about the original X-Wing where you had to take on massive squads of Tie Fighters, take down Star Destroyers and really challenge yourself to fulfill the mission parameters.  Some of those missions were quite challenging—tactically.  Of course I’m a huge believer that once you work out things in your mind—even on a simulator—then you can achieve it in reality because honestly the mind doesn’t know the difference.  Reason can tell the difference, but the process of thought works whether what you’re doing is real or fantasy.  So I think video game play can be very healthy for producing positive thought.

With that context explained I finally purchased Battlefront after Matt Clark sent me a series of texts over the course of about six months coaxing me into playing online with him.  I was busy at the time and playing the Uncharted series, so I didn’t have time for one more thing.  But when I had an open window to do it, I did and I was amazed at what I had been missing.  My favorite mode in the Battlefront sandbox is Fighter Squadron which is essentially a modern update to the old X-Wing game and once I realized that, I was off to the races.  Quickly I was able to hold my own against even the most experienced players averaging 20 to 40 kills per match—which is pretty high.  The graphics are incredible, the frame rates astonishing—the scope of the battles simply unfathomable even to my most fantastic imaginings of two decades ago.  If that was all there was—I would have been happy.  But that’s only the tip of the ice berg.  There are in fact too many things to talk about in how cool Battlefront is, but really the most telling essence of the game is probably the Walker Assault mode which to me is a really fancy version of the old Atari 2600 game Empire Strikes Back where Imperial Walkers threaten to get to your power generator and you have to fly around and shoot each one of them 48 times to kill them before they reach their objective.  As a thirteen year old kid, I was good at that game—which was a take on the classic Defender video game I played a lot in the old arcades.  But on Battlefront the game mechanics are photo realistic, especially on the Endor modes where the Imperial Walker trounces down a creek bed through a dense forest and you have to bring it down before it gets to your troop transport.  The leaves on the trees are extremely detailed.  There are clouds of mist in the forest as well as insects—the amount of programming to pull off all those elements is insane and I often find myself just staring at the screen wondering if it’s all real or not.  It is crazy ambitious and cool beyond lunacy.  Simply jaw dropping to a guy like me who has watched all these video games evolve over the years into what I am seeing now with Battlefront is inspiring.

It was only a few years ago that I was so excited about the video game Battlepod which came out as a Dave & Busters exclusive from Lucasfilm.  That year my family celebrated my birthday there so we could all play it together.  I thought the graphics on that were spectacular.  But now, after playing Battlefront a lot, I recently went to the Main Event in West Chester where my oldest grandson is now discovering Star Wars for his first time.  He had been watching me play Battlefront for countless hours so he saw the Battlepod game so we played it.  He loved it, but to me it looked clunky and old because my eyes had adjusted to the realities of Battlefront and a few years ago I didn’t think that would be possible.

As I’ve said, I’ve been busy so I kept my experiences with Battlefront to myself for the most part.  There are after all a lot of things going on in the world, and I’m playing my part in a lot of them.  But then Battlefront released its Deathstar update a week ago with the promise to release a Rogue One expansion by the end of the year and suddenly I found myself overwhelmed with the sheer coolness of the Battlefront game.  Finally in real-time you can do battle with live players all over the world around Star Destroyer capital ships, and bring them down fulfilling tactical objectives and really do things that the original movies could only dream of as far as graphics and coverage and I have found my enthusiasm bulging ready to explode with excitement.  Star Wars: Battlefront is a really cool game in every respect.  It is simply astonishing.  In a lot of ways it has healed my hatred of Star Wars that I felt after watching The Force Awakens because through the games I see a bigger picture coming into frame—one that is carrying a new kind of mythology directly to the minds of so many millions of people and connecting them in ways that were only fantasy a short time ago in a galaxy that now seems far away—only it wasn’t.

I have to thank Matt Clark for his persistence.  If not for him I probably wouldn’t have even picked up the title and I would be missing out.  But because of him, I have a front seat onto something truly special that a lot of people who grew up recently don’t have a proper context into just how amazing it really is.  For the first time in a long time I have hope in what this very important mythological tool will unlock regarding the future of the human race and our eventual expansion into space—and beyond.  It all starts with a thought and Star Wars: Battlefront makes thinking beyond our terrestrial limits commonplace in a world brought to us by movies, but made real through virtual reality.  And more than anything I shudder at the day where I think of Battlefront with the same disappointment that I know look at Battlepod because the new edition is so much better.  Because for me it is hard to imagine how a game could be any better than what Battlefront really is—yet I am excited to see how they will be.

Rich Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

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

Hillary Loses her Mind Again, and her Shoe: Is the presidential candidate looking for a doctor’s note to get out of the debates?

By now dear reader you’ve probably heard, Hillary Clinton nearly passed out at a 9/11 ceremony even losing her shoe as her entourage ushered her into her motorcade before the cameras could capture her despair.  By all appearances Hillary Clinton looks ill—like she’s a very sick person.  And factually, that’s all we have to go on.  But beware of the scheming Hillary Clinton—the criminal—who will stop at nothing to cover her trail and do what she has to do to survive another day.  Consider that just before the Benghazi hearings, it was this same Hillary Clinton who supposedly had a concussion and couldn’t attend the congressional hearings for quite some time delaying the efforts.

Many—such as yours truly—believed she was faking the injury to delay justice—until public sentiment had worn out on the topic blunting the effect on her professional life—which worked to some extent.  I believe this is the same kind of “injury.”  Hillary does not want to debate Donald Trump.  I believe she is looking for a doctor’s note getting her out of the upcoming events and that she is trusting the element of sympathy and a friendly media to carry her over the finish line.

She knows that she has better chances at the presidency if she avoids the debates than if she will if she gets pounded on her emails during them.  The only way she can hope to endure the ridicule of the Wikileaks email releases and the public embarrassments Trump will unleash on her are to avoid the debates all together.  And to get away from that—she needs a doctor’s note and a whole lot of progressive sympathy.  Be very careful of the wounded animal that whimpers until you get close enough for it to swipe at you one last time.  Hillary is a criminal, and nothing she does can be trusted at face value.

Rich Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

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