Tag: Hollywood insight

Las Vegas wasn’t a Terrorist Act, it’s a Battlefield: What’s missing determins the guilt of the Deep State

 

My view of the Las Vegas massacre is not one of terrorism or even derangement syndrome from Stephen Paddock—the millionaire who shot at people from a hotel window into a crowd of country music concert participants. It’s that of a battlefield in this ideological civil war that our country is now locked in. We are clearly not one country of one people focused on a future we can all share together, but a divided country of left and right-thinking philosophies which are not cohesive. One side will win and one side will lose and will be forced to retreat. The calls for peace for which the political left is so well-known for are only to disarm us all for their social incursions. They do not intend to live in peace with conservative Americans, and mean to destroy us, and it is there for which we must begin this discussion. The Las Vegas massacre is a battlefield, not a murder. It is obviously about destroying part of an ideology not in just randomly killing people for a personal objective and this is the reason authorities have not been so forthright about the killer’s motives.
I think the most telling evidence of this assumption is that we actually pause when the FBI says that this was not a terrorist incident, yet we are inclined to believe the ISIS claims that it was responsible—even though this guy was white, older, and affluent. Stephen Paddock doesn’t fit any of our assumptions about terrorism, yet he just committed the largest shooting incident in American history and he went to great effort to buy himself enough time to kill as many people as possible. His hotel suit was strategically selected. He had advanced cameras stationed to give him warning of incoming officers—the whole effort looked more like the ending of the movie Fight Club than anything else. There was an ideological story present that was not being revealed early in the investigation. In a time of massive media footprints from Facebook to Twitter—there is surprisingly nothing known at this point about Stephen Paddock except that he was a retired accountant who was a high rolling gambler that had an Asian girlfriend.

So what we have to go on is to examine what has been erased to draw our conclusions. The attack was against supposed Trump supporters. The gun grabbers were quick to exploit the tragedy and some members of the media actually showed hostility toward the victims because they were believed to be Trump voters. We have seen the Deep State react very violently toward the Trump presidency and even if conspiracy theories are not entertained, we must look at what President Trump has had to endure over the last 9 months and wonder how many of the most farfetched thoughts really are. Some people believe that there are means to control the weather with advanced scientific mechanisms. Three major hurricanes in just a few weeks when we’ve never seen anything like that before have hit the United States. Unprecedented investigations into the affairs of the Trump family when the Obamas and Clintons have been given a free pass—even in the face of great evidence. War being stoked by all the villains of the world, close calls with Russia, North Korea, Syria, Iran and constant pressure from every regime to lash out at the United States at the slightest provocation. Trump has had to terminate more employees than any previous administration at a faster rate than at any point in history due to the constant leaks to the press—some of which have come from the ex-FBI director himself. And now on Trump’s watch is the deadliest shooting ever when the President ran on a pro-gun platform. If only one of those things could be tied to the Deep State control of our government and the shadow instigators who hide there, we have an obvious problem. These are not random occurrences, they are deliberately solicited to evoke social change—at least some of them. They are being unleashed to overload this president and the sentiment of his voters into not making such bold assertions in the future. They have declared war against America—these Deep State activists and I don’t think I’m going out on a limb here in saying it, but I bet this investigation into Stephen Paddock leads straight to the door of the Deep State itself. The bread crumbs have been deliberately picked up too obviously. It’s what we don’t see that tells us most about what’s really there. Nobody goes to that much trouble to kill so many people unless there is an ideological purpose, and that ideology was obviously against Trump and his supporters, and that to me means war.

No, this is not the time to consider gun restrictions—not by any means. The first reason would be that we can’t trust our centralized authorities. If the Deep State has so much power that they can so openly harass a rightfully elected president, then they can harass the rest of us at will. They don’t care about laws, they certainly don’t care about respect and obviously collateral damage is something they are willing to utilize to keep their grip on power. The only thing that stands between their complete takeover of American life is our rights to own guns—to stop such a thing from happening. If they were successful in making America a gun free zone then there would be nothing to stop them from running the country. All they need is to make people shake their heads yes to obvious evil such as this Las Vegas shooting to start the ball rolling. They don’t care how many people they must kill to get us to say yes—and that tells us everything we need to know.

Was Stephen Paddock insane—maybe. Maybe he did it for the girlfriend. But he had enough thought in his mind to prepare the battlefield for a game changing moment and we must understand why he would spend so much time, money and even give his life to such a thing. Those reasons don’t point to insanity, they point to warfare and ideological activism that obviously leads to the Deep State. How do we know, well, the evidence has been erased leading there, because the floor is too clean to the door of that Deep State. And that means we need more guns, not less. You don’t give your weapons over to the enemy, and yes, that is how we must view these insurgents.

After Trump was elected many people thought that they didn’t need to buy as many guns, and that they might let their support of the NRA drift in neglect—but trust me dear reader, the time for that support has never been stronger. We need guns now more than ever and we need the NRA. We are not living in a civil society. We are in a time of civil war and in moments like those in Las Vegas the bullets became real more than just ideological. The fuel that cast them into the bodies of so many people was not the guns themselves, but the thoughts behind them. And there is no law for addressing a broken ideology which seeks to destroy people to make a point. Until that war is won by us in the conservative movement, then we must have plenty of guns and the desire to use them to defend ourselves from the villains of our society. And that includes the members of the Deep State—because it’s obvious that they are in a killing mood—and the only way to rectify that is with force of our own—which is sadly the only language they understand.

Rich Hoffman

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Everyone Has a Plan Until they Get Hit in the Mouth: Why Donald Trump and Jim Renacci are the future of politics

 

You can really tell how sick something is when you apply some basic measurements that work perfectly well in one known environment then apply those same rules to a lesser understood situation.   That is certainly the case in regard to President Trump’s business experience compared to the falsehoods of political theater.  With Trump expectations of completed tasks have rocked Washington D.C. culture with something they’ve apparently never seen in the modern era—firings.  And they’ve also never seen somebody work as hard as Donald Trump does. That combination of things has really put the pressure on the political establishment to show how bad and ineffective they’ve always been leaving only to point to the president and declare that he works too fast on too many things and that the turn-over at his White House has been too extreme.  With the resignation of Tom Price Trump has gone through more employees than any previous administration has and that is likely to continue.  What did people think was going to happen from a president who became known on television for firing people?   But honestly, this is the way it typically is, when you do any endeavor some people will adhere to the philosophy of whoever is running things, and some won’t make it.  Those that don’t will find themselves on the outside looking in and that’s how things work in the real world.

It is astonishing how limited most people live their lives.  When they assume that Trump for instance cannot deal with three major hurricanes, a war with North Korea, a health care reform package, a tax cut and a hostile media and still not have time to Tweet about the NFL’s disgrace of our flag then still take time to conduct social occasions at the White House are people who clearly don’t understand what multitasking is all about.   When I campaigned for Trump this is exactly the kind of president I wanted, someone who would work on all the major issues of the day and do so seven days a week 24 hours a day.  For those who don’t understand the difference between Trump and Obama playing golf, Obama played golf to show that he was one of the big guys who had made it in life.  Trump does it to make deals—which is why it’s the game of business transaction.  It also helps that he owns golf courses and can go there to work and get away from Beltway politics.  But with Trump, he works day and night no matter where he is and this is simply something Washington D.C. has never seen before and they really don’t know how to interpret any of it.

The firings and resignations at the White House under Trump’s administration do not surprise me at all.  I have personally hired hundreds of people and whenever I start a new project I have enthusiasm for each and every one of them.  But often you can tell within a month or a year who will be around for the future and who won’t.  Everything looks great on paper, but when reality hits you quickly find out who was talking a good game during an interview and who can actually live up to what they sold of themselves.  With Trump the people he hired for his administration all seemed competent relative to the way things were before he took office.  Well, just a few months into the years of Trump things have changed and everyone is feeling the pressure, and this is no surprise to me.  I had a feeling this was exactly what would happen and I never had any expectations that Trump’s cabinet would stay intact.  Over the pressure of expectations some would last and some would not.  I will go as far to say that there will be many more firings and resignations over the next eight years because the daily grind will mandate performance and it is Trump who sets the standard—and few people will find that they can live up to that standard.

Part of the problem is that people have previously viewed government work as a kind of lifetime appointment and expectations were never really associated with the work. That attracted the worst of our civilization to public office because there they could hide their incompetency from the world but still demand the highest wages available in those fields of endeavor as administrators.   By bringing in private business people into government however naturally this age-old sentiment is being challenged and the results are predictably good.  In my hometown of Cincinnati, Ohio the affluent community of West Chester has been run by a couple of pro business politicians who have private industry backgrounds and things have really taken off.  This has been part of a national trend that really has been emerging since 2009 when the Tea Party movement started taking shape and affluent people stopped looking to give their money to politicians and instead started getting involved themselves—in many ways like the Founding Fathers of our nation did in the beginning.  Why give some useless politician your money when you can just do the work yourself?  So we are seeing all across the country these politicians with actual business experience running for offices and winning—and they are actually fixing things for the first time that we’ve ever been able to see in American politics.

That’s certainly the case with Jim Renacci in Ohio who is running to replace Governor Kasich next year.  Jim is my kind of guy, he’s self made, he’s became rich doing good hard work and running several businesses and now he’s looking for kind of a retirement job to give something back to the state he has worked in for so long.  Being personally successful in many endeavors from  a financial consultant to running Harley Davidson dealerships in the Columbus area he is the Donald Trump of Ohio pouring $4 million dollars of his own money into his campaign for governor.  Anybody but Jim would be a status quo vote and the same old people who served the governor’s administration would still be around long after the next few elections because that’s how it typically is in government.  They create jobs for themselves and they take in money from lobbyists and financial backers who work against the will of the voters.  Someone like Jim Renacci and Donald Trump are already wealthy so they aren’t looking to get rich off schmoozing in politics.  Management is in their blood and they are attracted to these governor and president jobs because they are the ultimate management challenges and these guys like to be in the heat of the battle. That’s what sets them apart from the typical politician.

That trend is going to continue and most of the Beltway media just hasn’t been able to wrap their mind around these changes.  The changes came because performance was expected and the lies of the past just won’t work going into the future.  I’m getting exactly what I expected out of Trump and I would expect nothing short of the same from Jim Renacci in Ohio.  I want these types of people as local trustees.  I want them on my school board. I want them as county commissioners.  I’ve told the story of my dealings with Hamilton County commissioner Todd Portune before—people like him are abundant for pennies on the dollar-they are what we have had to accept as the political class.  It used to be that business guys would give people like Portune money for their elections, and would hope that rules could be made to help the business community, but those politicians often cost businesses in other ways with higher taxes, or they just fiscally run their communities into the ground.  So people like Trump and Renacci instead of taking their lifetime of earnings and retiring to luxury in Florida—as they may have in the past are finding in politics a nice retirement gig.  They’ve already made their money and solidified their reputations.  But if they still want to smell the flames of battle regarding management of resources as they did in their businesses from years past, they are running for office—and I think that is a wonderful thing.  That’s how it was always supposed to be.  The best and brightest among us should seek political office and bring that vast experience that made them successful into the management of our country’s affairs.  And if people get fired, so what.  The goal of government isn’t to create jobs that people sit in over their lifetimes.  It’s to do the work of the people who elect representatives into government to take care of business.  And it should be people good at business who sits in those seats.

Everyone has a plan until you get hit in the face.  Mike Tyson said that years ago when he was the defending world champion of boxing and its very true.  Politicians are good at making plans but nobody until recently ever expected them to implement those plans.  Once life hit them in the face they sort of went back to their offices and planned their lunch break—and they’ve been doing that for years.  What we expect now is that once a plan goes south, and we get hit in the face, that we have people in office that hit back and make whatever adjustments need to be made so that success can become the norm.  That means often people who are hired for a job will fall short of what’s expected of them and they will need to be replaced.  When those circumstances arise, we don’t want politicians who don’t have experience in hiring and firing people to be in charge—we want people who do have such experience.  And that is what Donald Trump is doing and he’s doing a fantastic job of it.  My only wish is that we didn’t have him ten years ago—but I’m glad we have him now.

Rich Hoffman

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We Need More Guns: What the Las Vegas mass shooting has taught us about the failures of progressive society

The only way to stop the mass shooting that took place in Las Vegas by the 64-year-old Stephen Paddock was to have other armed people nearby who could have shot him dead. Ideally, personally armed people could have killed him from the balcony from which he rained down terror well before he took the lives of over 50 innocent people and more than 500 concert goers. There is no law or any centralized planning that could have stopped this crime. And if it hadn’t been a gun a person like Stephen Paddock could have used a vehicle. There is always danger when people are so tightly packed together anywhere under any circumstances. The best safety for all involved is to have other people there with weapons to stop the crime before the authorities arrived. As it stands Paddock was able to shoot unmolested for over 20 minutes—and that is simply too long to take action.

LAS VEGAS, Oct 2 (Reuters) – A 64-year-old man armed with more than 10 rifles rained down gunfire on a Las Vegas country music festival on Sunday, slaughtering at least 50 people in the largest mass shooting in U.S. history before killing himself.

The barrage from a 32nd-floor window in the Mandalay Bay hotel into a crowd of 22,000 people lasted several minutes, causing panic. Some fleeing fans trampled each other as police scrambled to find the gunman. More than 400 people were injured.

Police identified the gunman as Stephen Paddock, who lived in a retirement community in Mesquite, Nevada, and said they had no sense of what prompted his attack. The Islamic State militant group claimed responsibility for the massacre, but U.S. officials expressed skepticism of that claim.

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/breakingnews/gunman-mows-down-at-least-50-people-in-las-vegas-concert-attack/ar-AAsLPFk?ocid=spartanntp

What we know now is that this guy, Paddock was a mild-mannered fellow prior to this event and I’m sure there will be a lot of talk about his background and speculation into why he would do such a thing. Could it be some kind of false flag deal to harass the Trump administration with just one more thing? Conspiracies are relevant to the fact-finding of an issue no matter how far fetched they might seem. Given what we know about our own government, who knows what they might do to turn public sentiment onto a topic of their design. What matters is that somehow this guy managed to get a lot of automatic weapons and a lot of very expensive ammunition to commit this heinous act which is very suspicious. Trump said it best when he said that it was an evil act—because no matter how you slice it—it was evil.

And that places this issue at a very philosophical place—can we trust centralized authority to protect us or do we fully utilize the Second Amendment to make every citizen a first responder in a violent world where people like Paddock could bring death to us in any moment? Can authorities stop the Paddocks of the world? I would say no. The only solution would be to have everyone in that concert armed, to have people in that hotel armed and to have people always ready to stop evil when it appears. There isn’t any other solution. Progressives have an ultimate failure that they are specifically responsible for, they have tried to centralize our society to the point where people don’t think for themselves anymore and the solution to a mass murder like this Vegas shooting is to decentralize the means to stop it.

Progressives like to talk about the kind of laissez-faire gun control that I propose as living in the Wild West—as if that were a bad thing. What they fail to understand is that there is a natural morality associated with personal firearm protection that actually elevates our society into mutual respect. There is nothing in the world that makes people more equal than a gun. A weak woman is as strong as the stoutest man if she has a gun. Guns make the races, and people of age all on equal footing and it forces people to be respectful of one another. In a society where guns are on every hip, Stephen Paddock would have been killed within a minute instead of many more—and many fewer people would be dead and hurt. Progressives are the ones who regulated everything and centralized the safety of our world, and when it fails, the blood is on their hands. In Las Vegas the failures of progressive society failed miserably.

At gun events I never worry about anybody shooting guns at other people because a mutual respect is established between everyone else since everyone is equally armed. Guns are only scary when other people have them and you don’t. Because of the progressive educations we have all experienced where guns were demonized people of our time have been made to fear guns when instead they should look to them as equalizers in a dangerous world—that by having them guarantees respect from those who might have evil intentions. Guns make the world safer, not more dangerous. It is only when guns are in the hands of bad guys, or people who lose their mind for whatever reason that the balance of equality shifts toward evil and the innocent become the bottom of the food chain. One more law or 200,000 cannot stop evil from committing crime when respect is vacant from our society. Guns create respect where it isn’t naturally applicable.

In a free society the best way to achieve equality and respect is with a gun. The more guns the better and in as many places as possible. A centralized state may have good intentions but they were powerless to stop someone like Paddock. And there are no metal detectors and security checkpoints in the world that can stop evil when it decides to act. God forbid we turn Vegas into another airport terminal of neurotic security to overreact to this tragedy when the real answer is to arm more people, not less of them. I’m not a big fan of Las Vegas but it is one of the most laissez-faire places in the world and it would be a shame to allow clueless government bureaucrats to overact by instituting more security when all they really need to do is to make it easier for good people to carry guns openly so that people like Paddock couldn’t kill so many so easily.

One of the most attractive aspects of the Wild Wild West for me is that it was a time before progressives came to existence to latch to our governments and ruin our world with overly centralized planning. The period of westward expansion was a time of great human enterprise and philosophic contemplation. Slavery was ended and most of America’s wealth was created in those years and much of who we are was established in that period. Progressives wanted to “progress” beyond that thinking, and they have the ruin of lives in their wake to demonstrate their lack of virtue. And that has never been more obvious than in the debate over guns, where in Vegas they got what they wanted—a society of people standing around listening to a concert generally unarmed and enjoying an evening in “Sin City.” But all it took was one person to shoot guns into a packed crowd to change their lives forever. And Paddock didn’t have a right to do that. If it hadn’t been for progressive influence, there would have been someone there to shoot that old man. And if they had, many more people would have lived.

Rich Hoffman

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The Church Shooting in Tennesse: Guns are the only thing that makes us all equal

If the gunman were not a black foreign immigrant who invaded a Tennessee church shooting and maiming innocent people within the congregation—the story would have appeared everywhere for days. But as it stands the story has been lightly covered because it turns out to be a very good one for those who advocate the necessity of the Second Amendment. For whatever his motivations the Sudanese shooter, Emanuel K. Samson brought his troubled recollections to the innocent lives of the masses, and people needed to defend themselves. If not for the actions of another young man, Robert Engle, Samson would have massacred many more people. Here is how The Washington Post reported the story—which is hardly a conservative publication. The facts speak for themselves:

Authorities have not said what motivated the gunman to execute the shooting. Emanuel K. Samson, who used to attend the church, has been charged with murder.

The shooting has shaken this relatively diverse pocket of Nashville, a community now fearful that Samson’s attack on a predominately white church could disturb a sense of racial harmony here.

Samson, 25, is a native of Sudan but resettled in the United States in 1996. Nashville police and federal investigators haven’t publicly identified a motive for the attack, but the U.S. attorney’s office in Nashville has launched a civil rights investigation and federal authorities have opened a hate-crime investigation.

“Everyone is saying don’t jump to conclusions and he was a nice guy but I think it was planned,” Goad said. “He knew what he was doing and picked out a place he knew where everybody was elderly, and didn’t expect to encounter anyone who was armed.”

After Samson shot Spann and the other parishioners, another man inside the church, Robert Caleb Engle, confronted him. As the two men struggled, police said, Samson’s gun went off, hitting him in the chest, and he fell to the floor. Engle then retrieved his own handgun and stood over Samson until police arrived.

 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/wounded-minister-in-tennessee-church-shooting-describes-chaos/2017/09/26/6aa229b0-a305-11e7-b14f-f41773cd5a14_story.html?utm_term=.7cdc39822148

No matter how much progressive thinking people believe that cultural assimilation is a productive thing to do, their thoughts are deeply flawed. We are not living in the times when kingdoms were united by a simple marriage. In those days people had to swear fealty to a king, so the responsibility for their thoughts and actions were not their own, meaning people of different value systems could be united out of fear of punishment by a centralized figure. But that’s not the way it works in America. People are free here and we do not bend our beliefs to a centralized figure, or even an institution. That puts the burden of social order on the strength of our values and when a group of people are suddenly thrust into a group of another people who have different value systems, then the first primal reaction to it is to inflict violence upon the other so that a challenge of their value systems is not so obvious. That is technically why we have ever had every war the human race has seen.

Now that progressive society has mixed up so many people of different values and put them all in each other’s faces—to force conflict in many cases—now they have to deal with the ramifications of that bad decision. As it stands the strong values of American tradition will prevail simply because they have worked in the past and those challenging those values come from failed states of thought where the roots of belief are very shallow—meaning their foundations are easily eroded away. That would certainly be the case of the Muslim faith and those who reside in poor communities where reading and wealth are not priorities. Their value systems are nurtured due largely to laziness—where other people work out the details and they simply grab on as the trend of the day—which is obviously the case of these young people looking for their way in the world and discovering that there are challenges to their emotional testaments. Without knowing the details of Emanuel K. Samson we can look at the situation and conclude that he was a young man who was finding the challenges of living in America difficult and he had developed enough rage to lash out in a murderous way toward those whose value systems were much different than his. So he grabbed a gun to inflict terror on those different from him. That’s an easy thing to do when the assumption is that the victims will be unarmed.

This kind of thing will of course continue—and will likely get worse as the failed experiments of progressivism fizzle out over the next fifty years. Americans are rediscovering themselves and there are many people like the young Engle who will need to wrestle bandits to the ground under gunfire in the future. Concealed carry holders will be more important than ever before. Personal firearm protection is an increasing need, not a diminishing one. The way to maintain a civil society is not to put the burden on an already overburdened “state” but to allow individuals to help the state by being the first responder to violence—then shielding those individuals from the burdens of legal activism in the wake. As many young men like Samson will discover in a world where capitalism forces values to be well defined—their foundations of belief from wherever they came from may come into conflict with the world around them. Their default reaction will be to inflict violence—so we need to be a well-armed society to protect ourselves from the psychological breakdown of these personal catastrophes, where immigrants finding the beliefs they had were failing to take root among free people—and them not knowing what to do about it other than kill those who are different from them.

To all those who preach equality, nothing makes people equal better than a gun. Personal firearm protection is something that needs to be the wave of the future for all those who wish to live in a free and equal society. Putting more trust in the state certainly hasn’t worked, nor will it ever work. The only thing that does is to have people personally armed so that when people like Samson pull out their guns, we can pull out ours and shoot them dead. Banning guns doesn’t work because Samson would have then just went to a knife or some other raw weapon of malice. Uninventing the gun won’t work either. We have to deal with the values of our people everywhere—and that is something the progressives ignored from the start of their movement. They never thought this thing through, this mixing of people in the ways we are seeing where value systems collide without an answer to heal it, and now we are seeing the ramifications. The only solution is to have personal firearms to deter the violence, and when it does occur, those threats can be quickly removed. Ignoring the situation will not fix it.

I would suggest everyone reading this to obtain a concealed carry permit and to carry a firearm everywhere you legally can. Hopefully you never have to use it. But if you do, you can be ready to blast people like this Samson kid into oblivion. He gave up all his individual rights when he walked into a Tennessee church and put bullets into innocent people. At that point he couldn’t be shot and decommissioned soon enough. Forget about the trails, forget about his human rights. Forget about the social ramifications. Once he made that decision to take the lives of other people—for whatever reason—he gave up his rights to live on planet earth. And only the gun can serve as judge, jury, and executioner in a society of clashing values. Only the gun makes them all equal.

Rich Hoffman

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Donald Trump’s ‘Atlas Shrugged’ Moment: Venezuela’s epic failure due to their commitment to socialism

 

I know, I write about Donald Trump a lot these days.  Yes there are many other things going on in the world—especially local issues,  but as I see it we are witnessing the greatest political trend change that the history of the world has ever seen—and I can’t think of anything more important.  It dosen’t do any good to chase the tail of something as long and elusive as our current social trends which are like a very long snake.  What Trump does today will have a tremendous effect on tomorrow, so it is important to capture those little moments as they occur.  Specifically it was the great United Nations speech that Donald Trump gave which illustrated so many positive things for American culture, but none as great as when the topic of Venezuelan socialism was brought forth and put on the world stage for all to see.

I was surprised years ago when so many people were upset that the great American novel Atlas Shrugged was being made into a movie.  I knew the filmmakers, and was a friend of the crew throughout the production and for them it was a love project.  They had a small budget in order to tell a gigantic story—an epic on the scale of Game of Thrones.  Yet Hollywood wouldn’t touch the project through a legitimate studio with A-list actors essentially because the media companies were so deeply contaminated with socialist and communist supporters that such a pro-capitalist story like Atlas Shrugged was never going to get “green-lit.”

Hollywood has always been a little left but it has only been recently that they were so overtly advocated out-right socialist—as a general philosophy.  Their A-list actors, even people like Harrison Ford, have stepped out of reality and onto the socialist band wagon because it is the social trend of Santa Monica valley these days.  If you go into a bar there by the pier talking about the merits of capitalism those weak-kneed she-males and braless bitches will be ready for a fight—they believe in socialism that much.  So when the independent filmmakers of the new Atlas Distribution Company wanted to make a movie out of one of the great American novels for which Atlas Shrugged is and has always been, all the studios laughed at them.  Many years before the studios laughed at Star Wars too, but that’s another story.  I only say that because “group think” does not understand how to make good movies, or how to detect social trends.  Individuals do.  Remember that.

I thought the movie attempt at Atlas Shrugged was ambitious and they managed to do a pretty good job getting the high points down in a visual form.  I would like to see a big budget Netflix series done for Atlas Shrugged that spans for 10 one hour episodes, because I think that’s what it would take to properly tell the story—but it was a bold attempt even as the entertainment unions pushed back hard on anybody associated with the project.  The production could not keep actors from one film to the next as the movies were divided out into three parts.  The actors were beat on so much by the rest of the Hollywood community that all three movies had a different cast and the only ones who signed up were actors looking for something to do.  It was a real challenge and showed me how bad Hollywood really had become.  All the friendly meetings I had with various people over the years flew right out the window as their true intentions were revealed during the production of Atlas Shrugged.

For those who have read the book you know what I’m talking about.  The modern situation in Venezuela is essentially the plot of the book.  A successful country (the United States in the story) is pushed into socialism by their government and the world plunges into darkness.  Once the government establishes things like price controls and root themselves into a severe crony capitalist market, the world falls apart and it is the point of Atlas Shrugged to identify why.  Essentially the “engines” of the world go on strike and that leaves everyone else starving—literally.  The beauty of Atlas Shrugged is that it does something that Karl Marx never achieved—it identified why some people make everything happen while others destroy the world around them—so if the makers of the world fail to participate, economies fail and countries wither away into dust.   The political Left has never come to grips with this phenomenon and this is the aspect of our civilization that is most important to our continuation into the future.  Marxism and all the fruits that fell from it like socialism, communism and fascism all turned out to be rotten short-lived fantasies first breathed by Sir Thomas More in his classic book Utopia—that were destroyed during westward expansion in the United States.   While Marx and his followers were pushing for labor unions to take over the world by controlling the means of production the railroads, the gold rush and the promise of private property in America used capitalism to fill the sky lines of the worlds next great cities like New York, Chicago and Los Angeles which until that period was just a border town–until the gold rush then the movie industry gave people a reason to live there.

Venezuela had been a pretty good place to live; it was a thriving country living off its oil reserves until Hugo Chavez brought socialism to their economy.   Once Chavez died a member of his inner circle Nicolás Maduro, a former bus driver (seriously) rose to power as a union leader and became the next president.  If you want to see what happens when labor unions get their way by controlling the “means” of production, just look what happened to Venezuela in just a few short years. As the state took over more and more of its industry, they became much less productive and their economy essentially died right in front of the world.  Now the people of Venezuela are starving—literally, and nobody seems to understand why, at least those who have advocated for socialism. Yet it is the nearly seventy year old book Atlas Shrugged that provided an almost page by page analysis for all to read—but the world watched and let it happen to Venezuela anyway.

What was remarkable about Donald Trump’s speech was that most of the people in that general assembly at the United Nations have emotional connections to socialism.  They are either members of Socialist International or they have been thinking about it.  Only the United States has maintained a defense of capitalism and our economy shows it.  The way for more countries around the world to prevent more people from being poor or from having terrible GDP numbers is to unleash capitalism and reject communism.  China’s communism only works if it attaches itself to a capitalist country and can keep the other nations around them poor so that they can maintain some form of price controls.  But if a country to the south like Vietnam were to adopt capitalism, or Cambodia, India or even North Korea—Russia and those types of places—China’s economy would sink because of their communist system.  What happened to Venezuela was that the price of oil went down and they couldn’t compete. That is all the unsaid story before, and no American president would strongly defend capitalism allowing everyone to shrug their shoulders as if they had nothing to do with anything happening to countries like Venezuela.  But when Donald Trump said what he did it put the issue on the front burner in a way nobody was prepared for, and it properly articulated the problem—boldly, people had to listen.  And that was a significant moment in the history of the world that will be remembered for many centuries.  I thought it was tremendous and it will prove to be bigger than anything that happens on the local level because that culture change will flow into the rest of the country rather rapidly.  And I love it!

Rich Hoffman

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The Reality of ‘Game of Thrones’: How Hillary Clinton is all too similar to Cersei Lannister

It has taken several years but my youngest daughter has finally talked my wife and I into watching the Game of Thrones, the popular HBO series based on the books by George R.R. Martin.  My first impression was forged when my daughter was watching an episode from Season Two many years ago where two women were essentially involved in pornography and each time I looked up from my work while she watched these episodes someone was naked.  So I didn’t have a very high impression of the show but for an excuse to get people naked and make it a medieval setting.  I thought it was just another tacky enterprise and I wasn’t impressed.   But it has done well over the years and people obviously like it for some reason, so my wife and I gave it another chance recently and started watching it from the beginning, and much to our surprise, we both actually like it.  For me, I find myself living in the Game of Thrones literally as I have those experiences in most of the people I know in politics, business, and family quite literally.  I find the characters created by George R.R. Martin to be very realistic in their motivations and how they apply those needs to the world around them.

I can’t help but draw parallels to the Game of Thrones and real life, specifically in the case of Hillary Clinton.  The character of Cersei Lannister comes to mind—the queen who will literally do anything to stay in power and close proximity to the throne for which her son sat for most of the first seasons once her husband had died.  House of Cards involves much of the same kind of power grabbing soap opera style narrative and when I was watching that series drew unmistakable parallels to the Clinton White House.  Now that Hillary Clinton has been caught and the DNC exposed the United States is having its moment or discovery where we learn how vile all these characters in this real story actually have been.   When we voted for Donald Trump many of us only suspected it, but now in the aftermath, we understand all too clearly what Hillary and her minions have been up to and the plots are not unlike the Game of Thrones stories, and for the same reasons that exist in the realms of that fiction.

My mom and my grandmother used to get very involved in their day time soap operas.  When I was a kid and went to the store with them on their daughter mother days I’d often make fun of how they’d cackle after the various narratives of whom was sleeping with whom and for what reason.  I never understood their fascination with such boring stories of love, lust, betrayal and scandal—it seemed small-minded to me even at a very young age.   However I do like fantasy stories, such as Star Wars, and Lord of the Rings, and clearly these are very similar styles of stories with a soap opera quality to them when you start getting into the private motivations of the human condition.  A fantasy backdrop seems to work well for our society in observing things that might otherwise be all too real for us.  And this appears to be the big secret of Game of Thrones.

I think this is why the actions of Hillary Clinton and many politicians just like her go by people generally unknown.  People may suspect many of these things but their only real acceptance to these motivations are best presented through fantasy stories which seem removed so far from our reality that the villains often get away with hiding from us in plain sight, and once we discover their villainy, we don’t know what to do with them because our only experience with understanding these types of characters is from the voyeuristic comfort of our television screens.

It wasn’t ironic to me that as I was watching Game of Thrones for the first time seriously and I heard the dialogue by the character Cersei Lannister that Hillary Clinton was doing media for her new book, What Happened.  What was revealed was a character right off the pages of George R.R. Martin.   Hillary was so insulted by the Donald Trump election that she couldn’t stop herself from showing the world just how arrogantly she believed she had a right to the throne of the American White House.  For her it was a rightful claim passed down to her from some progressive assumption that American politics was the same as European politics, or those throughout the world functioning from the same kind of social illness as we see on display in fantasy stories like Game of Thrones.  We rebelled in America to get away from this kind of thing, not to advance it.  We don’t look, for kings to worship in America, at least we aren’t supposed to.  Literally, the American White House is not supposed to be just another episode of the Game of Thrones or House of Cards.

In many ways I think this is the problem people have with Donald Trump—he is truly something different.  I know that’s why I voted for him.  Trump has virtually the perfect wife, he has perfect kids—Trump himself is a pretty perfect person—he’s not sick, he never sleeps; he doesn’t have little insecurities that he’s trying to hide behind public office.  He’s just a guy who loves to solve problems and be in the heat of the kitchen—and this doesn’t fit the narrative of the typical American politician that we have come to think of as corrupt.  Hillary Clinton does, but Trump requires us to accept all new motivations which have not yet been explored in a contextual way articulated through our fantasy stories.  I would go so far to say that only a novel by Ayn Rand begins to cover the Donald Trump presidency while most of us experience the range of human emotions driving modern politics through fantasy works like Game of Thrones, or even Harry Potter.

Deep inside us all is still that European fascination with names and titles—the very things we rebelled against as Americans.  We may not like people like Hillary Clinton, but we trust that dysfunction because it’s what we understand at a primal level.  In Game of Thrones I haven’t yet found a character I can relate to except for some of the Stark kids—but even then the idea of duty to a family name and the promise of a reign on some Iron Throne doesn’t make much sense to me.  But most people watching can find something they can relate to in the characters of the very sprawling epic that has become Game of Thrones.  And to my experience it works because it’s not so much fantasy, but is actually quite real.  The fantasy settings of dragon stories and magic allow us to create some emotional distance to the subject, but honestly the psychological explorations of the characters themselves is all too real.  What is shocking about Hillary Clinton is that she is every bit as vile as the most dastardly villain from Game of Thrones, but we have been exposed to her without the trappings of a fantasy story set a long time ago in a time long forgotten—but she’s standing right in front of us on full display.  Our modern society may not be as simplified as a medieval setting so to examine all the plotting and scheming that goes on in the human mind for the advancement of infantile ideas about control and human achievement, but the essence of those motivations are all too real—and not so much a fantasy.

Rich Hoffman

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Eliyahu M. Goldratt’s ‘The Goal’: Kathy Kennedy is doing a great job with ‘Star Wars’, and how we can prove it with proper business measurements

Before anyone says, “Oh no, he’s writing another Star Wars article,” stay with me for a bit here. What I’m about to say has some very important things in it that are very “holistic.”  They span very much into our greater lives as a human species, so put on your thinking caps and follow along.  Specifically Star Wars and in general Lucasfilm under the leadership of Kathleen Kennedy have come under great attack lately for firing four directors and twelve writers as she looks for just the right combination of people to make the new Star Wars movies just right.  The most recent news was that J.J. Abrams was coming back to direct Episode 9 which caused quite a stir and finally unleashed a major backlash from the entertainment community that was surprising, because it has revealed some extremely Marxist elements that we all know are there, but these Star Wars firings are exposing it in a measurable way.   So as a guide post to keep us all from getting lost I’d like to introduce to everyone the very good, and very popular book on business, The Goal, written in 1984.  The Goal is such a powerful book that Amazon makes its executives read it and apply the basic philosophy to their industry, which obviously works.  I also happen to know that Boeing has had their industry flow professionals read the book to improve their business climate as well, so we aren’t talking about some fringe infusion of ideas here.  The Goal is very mainstream in American business—extremely well known.   In short The Goal is to make money and to use that as the identifier of all business measurements.  If you are in business the only thing you should be concerned about is making money, it’s not to provide jobs, it’s not to just make products, and it’s certainly not to fuel a political philosophy that is not aligned with the realities of the world.   Now let’s introduce the great director John Landis whom I am a tremendous fan of but has obviously lost his mind late in life.  Read the linked article for the details, but in essence Landis has forgotten that the reason for a movie studio to exist is to make money.  Disney exists to make money.  The director’s specific job is to make money for the studio, not to sacrifice themselves for some social cause, or to have artistic, and creative freedom to let their “inner voice” speak to a mass audience. The director in the case of a movie or most anything else is there to make a product that the studio can make money off of.  It’s the only thing that matters.

http://movieweb.com/john-landis-criticizes-star-wars-lucasfilm-directors/

Now obviously to do that the product needs to be desired by the public and in the case of Star Wars it brings a lot of joy to people who go to the movies, buy the toys and video games and in general it is those movies that keep the theater experience going so that directors can work on movies that are not Star Wars and may only appeal to 5% of the population.  Movie theater owners need to make money too just to have a place to show Hollywood products.  The industry is there for them to work because enough money was made with something like Star Wars to allow for other viewpoints in other films to be presented to mass audiences around the world.   If I had to value stream map this situation for studio executives I’d of course designate the consumer at the movie theater as the customer that the value of the product design must appeal to in order to successfully implement the strategic objectives.  These people fired from the various Star Wars projects, like Colin Trevorrow and Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, just over the last couple of months were obviously not getting the holistic reason for the Star Wars films getting made.  And what people like John Landis are now criticizing Kathy Kennedy for doing is essentially the labor union point of view from the various entertainment guilds—and that is putting money before art.

I can tell you that growing up all I wanted to be in life was a film maker and an adventurer, something between a Josh Gates and Steven Spielberg.  But when I had the opportunity to work on a few movie sets and talk to people behind the scenes I realized that most of them were Marxists openly pushing for socialism in American society.  So I had to turn away from that industry—sadly.  In the old days these liberals, like John Landis, and Ron Howard had to put up with their stars such as Mel Gibson, Bruce Willis and Clint Eastwood who were all conservative A-listers and Hollywood at least had a nice balance of product to present to the public.  However over the last few decades Hollywood producers looking to appeal to the Clintons and the Obamas in office tried to create a new generation of Marxists to replace the conservative leading men.  They tried to bring progressive ideas to their stories and they figured that if producers gave big explosions and loud music to a movie feature to help the Marxism go down easier, that audiences would stay with them, but that hasn’t happened.   People have just found other things to do.  It should say a lot that Netfllx productions like Stranger Things which is an obvious throwback to the 1980s and the HBO show Game of Thrones which is all about politics set in a kind of Medieval time where all the primal human instincts are explored, lust for power, sex, dominion over others are presented without a lot of subtle global warming messages, and the plight of the poor–the trend toward a customer experience is well-known..  The labor unions in the entertainment industry are looking at their situation and they are blaming Disney for not sticking to their Marxist goals of social reform but instead keeping their focus on “making money.”  Disney currently makes a lot of money off Star Wars and their Marvel projects.  They are giving audiences what they want and in return we give them money.  That’s the name of the game.

Disney to appease the creative labor unions does take up social causes-but it doesn’t help them at all toward The Goal.  They have nearly destroyed the ESPN network with progressive garbage nobody wants to hear tied to sports.  And Kathy Kennedy has messed with Star Wars in ways that could easily destroy it, by putting more of an emphasis on female characters. I don’t have a problem with it, but its a gamble to try to expand the market reach of Star Wars with females at the possible expense of the males. So far so good, but it is a risk worth noting.  Kathy Kennedy is not a Midwestern conservative, she is a social progressive and it shows in her projects.  But at least she understands The Goal which was written by Eliyahu M. Goldratt—and that is to make money.  To make money with Star Wars you must have merchandising—the experience must continue long after customers have left the movie theater.  That means that filmmakers have precisely two hours to create a product that will unleash countless books, comics, toys, t-shirts, bed sheets—you name it.  There isn’t room for some director to “put their own take on things,” they must follow The Goal—and that is to make money for Disney and its shareholders.  That is a very capitalist concept which pisses off the Marxists—but tough luck.  The product does not exist to make a point—it exists to make money because with that money many good things happen.

I went out on Force Friday a few weeks ago to buy a few items.  One of the things I had to get was a Rathtar from The Force Awakens movie, which was released on Force Friday specifically this year ahead of all the new The Last Jedi toys.  Even though I was very hard on The Force Awakens when it came out largely because Kathy Kennedy allowed the franchise to movie away from the line of stories I had been reading for thirty years in the novels and allowed J.J. Abrams to have the creative freedom to write a completely fresh Star Wars story changing the direction of the original novels dramatically, I have respect for the good work done on that movie.  My favorite scene from any movie in recent memory and certainly one of my top ten moments of all time is that scene from The Force Awakens when the Rathtars are introduced.  That was a lot of fun and whenever it’s on television when my grandkids are watching it, I usually stop what I’m doing to see it again.  At Force Friday there were a lot of happy people spending countless thousands of dollars on new merchandise because The Goal of the product which is Star Wars was aligned with their consumer needs.  Disney received a lot of money, which was The Goal, and the consumer got a quality product that spoke to them mythologically in ways they needed—for whatever reason.  The end result was good for all parties in that transaction.  It is not up to some Marxist Hollywood type to question The Goal.  The Goal is market driven, it is up to those in the entertainment business to figure out what the consumer wants—not to change the consumer into something the artists wants—do you get what I’m saying—because this relates to virtually everything in our culture.

I have been extremely excited about the new Han Solo movie now directed by Ron Howard.  I think he’s exactly the right guy to make that movie which he had to take over from Phil Lord and Christopher Miller.  Obviously Larry Kasden who has made some of my favorite movies in the past understands The Goal of Star Wars as a screenwriter.  He may not philosophically like The Goal, but he’s hired to do the job of achieving it—and that’s the difference between professionalism and being a Marxist douche bag.  He’s the writer on this new Han Solo movie along with his son so when the young directors known for The Lego Movie were fired because they didn’t get what Larry was trying to put up on the screen, Ron Howard was brought in to fix things.  I was happy about it because it told me that Lucasfilm understood what The Goal was, and they were committed to it.  I have no doubt that the professionalism of Ron Howard will keep The Goal of the new Han Solo movie in focus and deliver a product that Lucasfilm needs and Disney can continue to use to make a lot of money—which is a wonderful thing.  But I did have to send Ron Howard a Tweet the other day reminding him that all his Donald Trump bashing he has been doing may very well draw a line between him and his audience—half of which like the job Donald Trump is doing.  By politicizing Star Wars, you risk deviating from The Goal, and that is dangerous to everyone involved.  Howard is a smart guy and a fabulous director, but it’s not his job to define The Goal. It’s his job to implement it as the director, and that’s what he was hired for.  All the below Tweets shown below are on Ron Howard’s main page.

The new Star Wars movies may be corporate productions that lack the heart of the solitary vision of George Lucas—but they do understand The Goal and that’s why they are special.  The three measurements in The Goal are throughput, inventory, and operational expense—everything for a successful implementation of a flourishing business model is contained within those three measurements.   Throughput in the case of Star Wars is the delivery of a movie on time from conception to the release date.  Inventory is the resources it takes to make the movie, like directors, writers, studio rentals, building props—all that stuff.  And of course operational expenses are the overall costs of keeping the movie franchise alive as a social mythology, the new theme park attractions, the marketing of merchandise and all the other big picture items.  There is a lot more to a movie than just paying honor to the creative instincts of the film’s directors or the writers.  There is much more to The Goal than just the vision of an artist.  Star Wars is successful because traditionally Lucasfilm understood The Goal.  The Marxist friends of George Lucas may have given him grief over it, but if George had listened, we wouldn’t have Star Wars.  And in that respect, what has John Landis done lately except complain.  He made that famous “Thriller” video like a million years ago.  And The Blues Brothers was made in the 70s.  I would say that Landis like his friend Spielberg has forgotten what The Goal was and instead have adopted that radical Marxism that they all share through their director’s guild.  And lucky for us, who are Star Wars fans, Kathy Kennedy has kept her eye on The Goal and not the socialist sentiments of her entertainment industry friends.   Sure she made the lead actors in most of these new movies a “girl” and she made a black stormtrooper, and put a Hispanic guy in as the lead hot-shot new pilot, which I’m sure made her liberal friends give her less grief over heading a giant capitalist movie studio—but at least she hasn’t forgotten The Goal.  And for that I must commend her.  If she has to fire 200 Star Wars directors she should, because it tells me she is committed to my customer satisfaction and not the social ranting of just another Hollywood Marxist, like John Landis.

Rich Hoffman

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Why the Senate Can’t Afford to Go “Slow”: Grim realities of politicians who shamefully made too much money in the public sector

Traditionally its true, the Senate is supposed to slow down legislation so that hot-headed ideas don’t mire our American industry with too many regulations and debt. However, you might recall an article I did many years ago featuring my ol’ buddy Darryl Parks who used to run 700 WLW radio in Cincinnati. He did a broadcast showing how much money many of our congressman and senators made while on the job—where they started their tenure as government employees nearly broke but were multimillionaires a short time later. Obviously, there was corruption where these government employees—people like Mitch McConnell tipped the scales of power in favor of themselves becoming greatly enriched by the proceeds of what we call today—The Swamp.

So the rules are off the table now as our country is on the fast track to decline and these senators and congressman have dramatically let us down. Voters saw what was happening so they put a charismatic businessman in charge of the Executive Branch so that economic growth could be created to outpace the devastating debt these looters of congress have embedded into our culture. At $20 trillion in national debt, America doesn’t have time for the Senate to drag-ass and protect their schemes for which have made them rich. We can’t afford to have a Senate that uses “slowness” to protect themselves from Americans by using that “tradition” to shield needed reform.

The way to start the debt clock backwards instead of toward that monstrous cliff of $24 trillion for which there is likely no recovery from bankruptcy is through very optimistic growth—over 3% economic upticks quarterly. And obviously there isn’t anybody else in Washington D.C. who understands how to get there but Donald J. Trump. It’s his task to mash down anybody who stands in the way—because any other method should be considered detrimental to the stability of our nation. Trump knows what he’s doing—look the Dow Jones closed over 22,000 with two major hurricanes striking the US mainland causing billions and billions of dollars of damage. For most presidents, these disasters would have sunk our economy for perhaps years. For Trump it’s just a blip, because he knows how to cheerlead from a top position to keep optimism flowing, and therefore the cash needed for our economy to thrive.

It would be advisable for Mitch and the gang to take their money and run—and get out-of-the-way, or to play ball and reform themselves, cutting ties to the lobbyists who have filled their pockets and to act properly from their positions. Again, this is why Trump was so attractive. The guy already made his money, there isn’t enough money to loot from the system that he couldn’t make himself off the interest of his valued assets. So he is lobbyist proof, Trump doesn’t owe anybody anything so he can be honest about how to fix things, whereas McConnell clearly can’t. Mitch has been purchased just like a prostitute for nearly the same reason—and he can’t act against what made him wealthy—so he should do the right thing and step aside and retire. We have a need and if he loves our country even a little bit, he should at least get out-of-the-way.
For the Senate to function as a restrictor plate to progress, the nation needs to be running properly, taxes need to be low, debt needs to be nonexistent and GDP needs to be between 3% TO 6%. Anybody who doesn’t understand that needs to be out of government office. They are not there for personal enrichment. They are there for proper management of our government’s resources. People who get elected I would expect to have already made their mark in the world and like Trump—be immune to the temptations of power. Anything short of that type of person I would argue cannot effectively do anything on Capitol Hill because they don’t have the correct mindset.

This idea that the Senate or Congress would even entertain the option to prohibit corrective action toward the needs of this country is reprehensible, and it means what many of us have said all along. It doesn’t matter if it’s a Democrat or a Republican, they are—or at least they have been—all the same. Nancy Pelosi isn’t any different from Mitch McConnell and Chuck Schumer is no different from Paul Ryan. For instance, when Ryan was running on the ticket with Mit Romney there was all this talk about him being an Ayn Rand fan, and the hope that he would be a fiscal conservative. But the moment it was in the press that he liked Ayn Rand he ran from it and hid pandering to the media. That little bit of emotional leverage right there has prevented him from being an effective Speaker of the House. Once you dip your feet in the honey well of temptation and either run from a conviction or taste the nectar of social acceptance, you lose the opportunity to lead when such criteria of conviction is required. Trump has that criteria because he has at least lived honestly. He may have been reckless in his living, but he’s honest about it and this keeps the hooks of guilt from his mind when conviction is needed to make hard decisions. Ryan can’t do that likely for a lot of reasons, but from my observations it started when he ran from the American author Ayn Rand.

Everyone knows that with economic expansion explosive growth is possible. It’s no longer an Adam Smith theoretical concept—it’s a proven fact. Lowering taxes is the way to pay down the debt and to make America Great Again. I would go so far to say that Trump’s 15% corporate tax rate would be key to achieving 5% to 6% GDP growth which would pay down the debt really fast. Liberals don’t understand economics—no liberal—and people like Mitch McConnell have already been paid off to keep the swamp full so that crony capitalism can continue to thrive. Crony capitalism is not the same as the kind of open market capitalism that Trump is advocating. But the socialism that establishment types in the Beltway advocate for will actually destroy our nation with crippling debt for which there is no recovery.

Why so fast Mitch McConnell and the rest of the drag-assers in congress who have become very wealthy selling themselves to lobbyists? Well, we are racing a generational shift in mentality here. The young people—those under age 35—have been taught out-right socialism. They get it in their media, they certainly have it in their educations, and they function as young radicals looking for a free ride—for the most part, that socialism is the way to go. If the national debt does not get under control by 2020 we are done in America—fiscally. Every smart person knows it, and the Democrats also understand it. They would love to see America collapse as a superpower and have to eat out of the hand of communism—essentially China. Just today the socialist Bernie Sanders introduced a bill for their beloved single payer option in health care in the senate which was always the goal. Because of John McCain the Republican repeal of Obamacare went nowhere setting up Democrats for this socialist single payer vote. McCain, is reported to be worth $21 million dollars as a do-nothing senator from Arizona who has never had a real job outside of military service. How did he get so much money? Not all from his wife—that’s for sure. That’s why congress must act quickly, we are running out of time and we don’t have the time to allow for these money hungry politicians to satisfy the people who have paid them off. We need action now—while we have a once in a lifetime chance. Because it won’t come again.

http://www.therichest.com/celebnetworth/politician/republican/john-mccain-net-worth/

Rich Hoffman

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Why the Star Wars Movies Keep Losing Directors: The Pizza Hutt delivery driver

It was my oldest grandson’s birthday party and it was a Star Wars themed event so my youngest daughter who is the mother of the young man put heart and soul into giving him the party of a lifetime.  She personally decorated the house for this party with creations she mostly made from scratch and it was quite spectacular.  To match her efforts she wanted all of us to dress up so the first time that I can ever remember I put together a costume of my favorite Star Wars character—Han Solo, and had a lot of fun doing it. In the process I learned some things that are worth sharing.  One thing that became obvious to me as I acquired all the Han Solo costume pieces needed to get everything together for this party was how similar it was to the kind of equipment needed for Cowboy Fast Draw and that while wearing it, I felt more like a western character than a science fiction icon—which Han Solo has always been.IMG_5166.JPG

Naturally through small talk I have been asked why I like Star Wars so much and my reply is usually because it’s the best western that movie makers can produce these days.  As much as George Lucas wanted   tell a story about a hippie idea of eastern religion defeating western greed through the “force of others” his creation of Han Solo really is the key to the entire Star Wars universe.  The character so wonderfully played by Harrison Ford is an Ayn Rand kind of superstar who advances the story wonderfully, and gives everything resonance.  George Lucas always intended Luke Skywalker to be the hero of the movies, but it was Han Solo that really took over the story as the central and most popular character.  I knew all this before I put together as authentic of a costume as I could, but wearing it complete with the gun belt instantly knew where I was.  The gun belt was the key, it felt as good as my rig for Cowboy Fast Draw and remanded me that it’s not lightsabers and talk about The Force, but Star Wars is more about “having a good blaster at your side” than anything.  Lucas may have intended for Han Solo to be redeemed by the end of A New Hope into the kind of unselfish character that hippies were wanting to portray in 1970’s San Francisco—but the love that the director had of fast cars and Saturday Morning Republic serials featuring cowboys won the day and it was those influences that turned Star Wars into a simple science fiction drama and placed it into the realm of something truly special.  Star Wars is the best western movie made in the modern era—and by that I mean the last 40 years.IMG_5259

I don’t think George Lucas meant to make Han Solo such a powerful character but as the story evolved it was the old smuggler and that capitalist sector of characters from bounty hunters down to crime lords who took over as the featured plot lines that most captured the imaginations of fans.  People didn’t want to grow up so much to become Jedi in the temple fighting the Sith—they wanted to be the smuggler and hot-shot pilot flying the Millennium Falcon and solely saving the galaxy.  In his best moments Han Solo is not a team player but is someone always used to being in charge and finds a way to be successful even when the odds were terribly stacked against him.  When they tried to water Han Solo down into a group think character, he loses much of his power and I think this was something that mystified George Lucas a lot over the evolution of that character.  George Lucas the hippie who knew mostly dope smokers and San Francisco radicals found it an unintended consequence.  But the little boy who grew up watching serialized westerns and swashbuckling action adventure movies found in Han Solo a trusted voice from the past—and wisely Lucas went with it out of the needs of his new company Lucasfilm to pay all the bills of his various projects—even though it bothered him that Luke wasn’t the star of the movie as it was always intended.

I bought 21 pizzas from Pizza Hut for this party to be served on a table in front of Jabba the Hutt. It was a cute idea that my daughter had to tie the two things together so when the pizza delivery guy arrived he found himself pulled into the Star Wars universe by default, and he was having a good time.  While I was paying the guy and walking him back to his truck we talked about Star Wars and why the new Han Solo movie and now Episode 9 had lost their directors.  In fact, since Lucasfilm announced their slate of 6 new Star Wars movies four directors for those projects have bitten the dust and either been fired, or have quit.  The trade media for Hollywood really hasn’t understood why but this is where the rebel George Lucas always shinned brightest.   In spite of his liberal tendencies, Lucas at heart was a small business guy whose father owned a stationery store in Modesto, California.  Naturally, Lucas hated the studio system because of their static approach to filmmaking.  And it was that part of him who shinned through Han Solo—the do whatever he wants, guy—which made Star Wars so special and Ayn Randish.  These modern kids raised in the studio system may have loved Star Wars growing up, but that doesn’t mean they “get it” when it comes to putting what they love up on-screen.  Kathy Kennedy who runs Lucasfilm now apprenticed under George Lucas for most of her adult life and she has an understanding of what makes Star Wars work even if it’s difficult to put into words.  She knew instinctively why her new film directors weren’t having success in developing their Star Wars stories—for instance reports from the new Han Solo movie set which is coming out in May of 2018 were that the directors were turning the story more into an Ace Ventura comedy instead of a western set in space.  So Kathy brought in Ron Howard who has been around long enough to know at least how to mimic what George Lucas had stumbled upon so many years before.   The pizza guy agreed with me, Star Wars to work had to pay tribute to its western-like background—without it the storylines flounder and fail—much like many people felt the prequel films did.  I personally liked them because I like politics, but without the swashbuckling element of the matinee idols of the 1950s, Star Wars is pretty boring.  I know that, obviously Kathy Kennedy understands that much—but more importantly, the Pizza Hutt delivery guy understood it.

The exchange of values has always been something I could share with my kids through Star Wars and obviously that is getting passed on down to a new generation.  As the kids dressed up there were a lot of Kylo Ren costumes, and even some of the adults wore Kylo Ren t-shirts.  Little do they know that by the time we get to Episode 9 that Han Solo’s now infamous son will turn back to good and help Rey restore goodness to the imaginative galaxy set a long time ago, far, far away.  Kylo Ren will turn out to be a good guy—which I think is a very good thing.  Again, it goes back to Han Solo again, without him and his redemptive qualities, Star Wars falls apart as something special in our human culture.  For me its fun to be able to share these values on a platform that allows for at least the discussion and Star Wars does that better than anything else out there presently.  That wasn’t always the case, back when George Lucas was growing up, there were a lot of things like Star Wars out there that communicated value effectively and our culture reflected it.  These days, not the case—values have been cast aside by movie directors trying to make movies about socialism, which people don’t like, instead of capitalist westerns which people do, and they are often mystified as to why people like the Pizza Hutt delivery guy don’t like their product.  (Hey, I gave the pizza delivery guy a huge tip for his capitalist appreciations and enthusiasm.  He understood.)  Wearing the authentic Han Solo costume for me told the whole story—it took what I had only thought of before and applied it to reality.  Han Solo was a gunfighter and that is a concept specifically unique to American culture and was the heart of every good western.  That is what makes Star Wars work, and why it is such a good device to teach morality stories about good versus evil.  It is those values which I’m glad I can share with these new generations which was on full display at my grandson’s birthday party. It was a lot of fun to be a part of.

Rich Hoffman

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The “Train Song” by Federale: Devil’s Tower and the legend of 19,000 foot trees

As I’ve been reporting, my son-in-law is on the final leg of a massive motorcycle ride across the United States that he started weeks ago.  Now he’s in South Dakota after snapping the picture of Devil’s Tower in Wyoming shown here which had my mind racing.  Devil’s Tower, some are saying these days is actually a giant petrified tree, a tree that used to be 19,000 feet tall.  While that might sound outstanding, and even outlandish, given what we are learning about our own hidden history its worth considering.  After all, we are talking about an area that Paul Bunyan’s legends started.  Who knows, but what we do know is that it’s a cool place and I’m very happy my son-in-law is finally in this part of the country.  It is the heart of the Old West and is an exciting place on earth full of legends, mystery and the culmination of human achievement unleashed for the first time.

Thank God for Pandora because I spend a lot of time in my garage these days shooting my Ruger Vaquero and practicing Cowboy Fast Draw, and my workout music is typically Ennio Morricone who is best known for his spaghetti western tracks conducted in the 60s. I have several reasons for getting involved with Cowboy Fast Draw—which has been quite a challenge for me because it has required a psychological shift.  The skills needed for it are much different from those for which I am known for, which is bullwhip artistry.  There are very few people in the world that can put out a candle with a bullwhip and I’m one of them, so it would have been easy to just sit on that skill and use it as a novelty item into larger opportunities.  But I was never quite satisfied with that.  I always wanted to become very fast and proficient with a classic Old West six-gun without really having a strong sense of why.  I’ve thought about it a lot and the articulation is pretty complex, and seeing my son-in-law’s photos from the Devil Tower region hit on something I have been thinking hard about for about 25 years.  Then I heard one of the most beautiful songs I’ve ever heard on Pandora while I was reloading my Vaquero in my garage shooting range between practice sessions.  It was the “Train Song” by the rock group Federale.  Obviously they were very inspired by Ennio Morricone and it was refreshing to hear new, fresh music done in that style.  But that had been at the core of my thinking for a long time—why was that music so special to me and what was it about that South Dakota and Wyoming region of the world that has always meant so much to me?  If I had to be honest with myself I had joined the CFDA to go out west and shoot with other fast draw artists because I didn’t want to just visit the west from time to time—I wanted to become part of its mythology—and that is why I joined the CFDA.  And if I were to have a theme song for my journey it would be that “Train Song.”

Here’s where things get confusing since we are in the age of Donald Trump where the word fascism gets thrown around a lot.  Well, Trump isn’t a fascist and it certainly wasn’t a bunch of fascist white people who took over the west in the Dakota Territory and pushed the Indians off their land for evil intentions.  The people who inhabited that region of the world were fleeing the tyranny of the Vico cycle inherited from Europe and they wanted freedom from essentially the four-part cycle of theocracy, aristocracy, democracy and ultimately anarchy which had painted all known history. That battle was a clash between eastern and western ideas on the plains of America and became the legends of the Old West.  The Indians represented the eastern philosophy of collectivism whereas the cowboys and gunslingers of western legend represented mankind’s struggle for freedom.   Facism in Italian is a word meaning “groupism” or collectivism and it was precisely that which the “white people” were running from in westward expansion colliding with the Indian culture that had at that time inhabited the area.  Now I don’t consider Indians or whatever you want to call them Native Americans because they were essentially no different from the gunslingers of the Old West, they too were seeking freedom in another land from their ancestral heritage of South America, China, Russia and the Mediterranean region.    Perhaps even further back to a time when people were much larger and trees were a lot taller—more Pandora -like.  When I listen to Ennio Morricone’s spaghetti western tracks from the Sergio Leone westerns I hear people who were using their hope in American inspired imaginations to shake off their role in the fascism of Mussolini.   The music is very individualistic and in many ways Sergio and Ennio captured America’s westerns better than American filmmakers did because they had the baggage of fascism to shake off their culture and they used westerns to make their case.   The desire to not be associated with fascism I think is what makes Morricone’s music on those spaghetti westerns so special.

So I’m listening to Pandora in my garage and a Morricone song drifted off and I was ready to hit the advance button to get to the next one but I was putting shells into my Vaquero so my hands weren’t readily available to make the move when I heard the start of the “Train Song“ by Federale and I was captivated.  What a marvelous piece of music, nothing like it had been done since Ennio Morricone had done it for a movie soundtrack half a century earlier yet the song seemed more at home today than it would have back then.  The reason of course is the politics of our day and the human desire for an authentic experience.  It was the reason my son-in-law was on his massive motorcycle journey and why I had joined the Cowboy Fast Draw Association—the hunt for an authentic life.  Ultimately that is what came to war in the Dakota Territory where east met west and the west won.  The difference maker was two things, the equality that the gun gave to people for the first time in human history.

Anyone could shoot a gun so being a big man or a fast man didn’t have much to do with success in the west.  You just needed to know how to shoot straight, the gun did all the work.  Learning to appreciate that has been my difficulty in switching from a bullwhip to a six-gun as my preferred western arts point of focus. I enjoyed the exclusivity of working with bullwhips because not many people could use them the way I did.  And that was the mistake the Indians made; they relied on over specialization of their warrior class to keep the migrating frontiersman out of their land.  But it didn’t work, the frontiersman had guns, the Indians didn’t.  What they managed to steal from the white people they had to keep loaded with ammunition so they were always at a loss to the encroaching “whites.”  But is that the fault of the “whites” who settled the Old West.  No.

Having firearms to protect themselves and advance their position white settlers were free to mine for gold which gave America a much-needed jump in the world economy with the Gold Rush period.  The combination of guns and gold unleashed the human potential of the human race for the better and those two things were never better rendered than in the Ennio Morricone music of the 1960s.  Because of the Italian history with fascism he saw probably clearer than any other artist in the world what was going on in America and he captured all the hopes, dreams and pitfalls with his very crafty notes which have stood alone in our imaginations for half a century.  That is until finally a modern rock group decided to make new music in the same type of spirit, and they were actually successful.

On the surface westerns look incredibly simple, just like the landscape of Wyoming and South Dakota.  That is until you start thinking that perhaps Devil’s Tower wasn’t formed by high pressure magma from under the earth’s crust, but may have been a 19,000 foot tree at some point in the distant past.  Listening to old Indian legends such things take on new meaning if you really listen to what the world is telling us.   But for millions of years life on earth struggled to find its own footing without become tyrannies in and of themselves and long before the “whites” came to the West Indians fought among themselves.  Life was not in harmony before frontiersman settled the western territories of a young America.   The “whites” brought peace behind their war, and their guns and now in modern times my son-in-law can ride safely across that vast landscape without much worry.  That is because our American culture tamed the land to the will of human kind and the hopes and dreams that came with it.  Those lofty goals are what Ennio Morricone’s music has always been about and now the group Federale has captured that same spirit, refreshingly.  I know the “Train Song” is my new favorite and I will listen to it often—especially while I’m practicing Cowboy Fast Draw in my garage preparing for competitions all across America.  I can’t think of any song that better tells such a story and lends its weight to the philosophy of western expansion rising above the mess of conflict to the idea of a better day for all humanity.

Rich Hoffman

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