Tag: overmanwarrior

Why Lean Manufacturing is Dead: The Trump tax cuts change everything

Before moving on to more positive topics there need to be some additional information as to why Lean manufacturing is dead, and why it is more cult than fact.  Every company I’ve been associated with for the last twenty years has bought into the nonsense James Womack articulated in The Machine that Changed the World—which is an incredibly negative book about western manufacturing techniques.  While there is a lot to Lean manufacturing that is very worthwhile and should be looked at as the next generation of improved thought over mass production roots imitated in America—it certainly isn’t a silver bullet in solving everything as it was sold to American management.  It really comes down to a battle between two cultures where the obvious favoritism goes toward the Japanese market.

Nearly every fifth page of The Machine that Changed the World Womack and his pals criticize as inferior Western methods with an obvious academic lens of hatred.  The real purpose for the book wasn’t to make American business more profitable on an individual bases—but to make them more global—as the authors played their part in the grand scheme of wealth redistribution that was so common at the time. And for their part, they were very successful, large companies like Boeing, GE, Ford and so many others looked at their competition, the Japanese, and sought to beat them—but honestly it was too late.  I knew that when I worked at Cincinnati Milacron as one of their crack staff of Lean advisors.  They took me to their South Lebanon facility late in 1999 to study these methods by Womack and the gang so to save them from closure.  But before I had a chance to read all the materials they had dumped in my lap, the Oakley plant had almost completely closed down and they refocused their business to just delivery of CNC units as opposed to actually building machining centers. The South Lebanon facility closed in the early 2000s just a few years later. When our crack team of Lean manufacturing surgeons were gathered to save Milacron it was already too late—like the Titanic had already hit the iceberg.  Only it hadn’t sunk yet but those of us smart enough to look at the damage below decks knew it was going down.  A wound like that couldn’t be repaired at sea just as the culture at Milacron couldn’t be fixed by reading a few books too late in the process.

I currently work with a very smart engineer from Wichita, Kansas who could nearly tell the same story of the Boeing plant that closed down there.  While they were sinking they made him a Six Sigma Black Belt hoping to save their own fate from such a tragic end, but it didn’t work.  The employees just couldn’t make the change, they weren’t Japanese—the cultures were just too radically different.  And to Womack’s credit he is correct about most of his observations regarding Western approaches—we all saw what happened to General Motors.  The writing was on the wall way back in 1990 when The Machine that Changed the World was first published.  One of my daughters was born that year and it shocks me that she isn’t yet thirty years old, yet this Lean manufacturing stuff has been sold to the manufacturing world as some voodoo remedy that could stop all these plant closures when in reality it was just one culture dominating another.  I watched before my eyes the economy of southern Ohio cities like Norwood and Hamilton, Ohio evaporate.  The shopping mall I visited most as a child, the Middletown Mall turned into a ghost town within a few years and nearly every major industry died except for AK Steel which still operated as a traditional mass producer with heavily leveraged unionized labor holding it back from being better than it was.  Middletown, Ohio died and so did the people who lived within it. To the west all Trenton had going for it was the Miller Brewery plant which made the safe product of beer.  The tradeoff was again high cost employees protected by a union.  Many companies adopted Lean manufacturing to help get their labor unions under control but the bottom line was that American workers expected too much money for their productive output while Japanese based employees were willing to work for less in exchange for job security for a lifetime.

When you visit a Japanese plant you find that everyone dresses the same, in most cases.  When Westerners visit in their suits and ties they are given hats to wear to show all the other employees that these visitors are equal to the people on the shop floor.  They refer to their upper management as seniors because literally they are the people who have been at the company the longest.  The floor workers in Japan know that if they stay with the company, they will move up the latter so they are content with this reality.  While this solves problems that unions typically are concerned with, the security and income trajectory of their workforce makes a stable investment understandable, while in the West literally labor costs can fluctuate all over the place depending on the type of people who are running those organizations at any given time.  It is possible in America for instance for a sharp tack in the box to become a high level manager in their mid thirties if they worked hard and climbed the ladder at a fortunate company—while this would be very unlikely in Japan.  There, due to Lean manufacturing, that employee would have started on the shop floor as an assembler and might still be working their way into a management job due to their years of service and experience garnered.  This is the primary reason American companies have failed in their Lean offerings—they go through the motions, but they aren’t willing to go all the way and become like the Japanese.  There is more to Lean manufacturing than just a bunch of charts and Japanese words for things—it’s a philosophical approach to manufacturing that is part of the workplace culture.

Obviously in The Machine that Changed the World Womach and his buddies Jones and Roos were a bunch of statistical academics who bought into this global economy garbage and they thought the Japanese were going to dominate that push—which isn’t what happened.  While the Asian work ethic is something that is to be admired compared to the beaten down lethargicism that we find in the West these days—even the Japanese had their problems with just in time delivery when they became the global leaders at the front of the train.  They’ve had their own troubles leading from the top so as the smoke cleared it was obvious that the biggest difference between East and Western practices in manufacturing was cultural and that assumption was that if America wanted to play ball, they needed to become like the rest of the world.  Well, that too is a shifting dynamic that will change as early as 2018.

To act as a companion to The Machine that Changed the World coming straight out of academic circles and into politics was the notion of wealth redistribution.  America raised its corporate tax rate to up over 30% which pushed many American companies into foreign markets.  To the lesser educated minds the work of Womach appear to be genius.  We were led to believe that these companies were leaving because America was so inefficient when in reality it was really due to high taxes.  Politicians were selling globalism to Americans while they skimmed off excess for the IRS to fund all their progressive causes in the process of destroying American manufacturing.  President Trump knew all too well what was going on and before the close of the year in 2017 had the tax rates changed for corporations down to 21% and now we will see the truth that was there all along.  Jobs were mostly inventions of America and the high costs associated with them were due to American labor being higher than in places around the rest of the world.  But the reason for their leaving the United States was artificial due to high taxation.  Where Womach was pushing for a new global economy lead by the Japanese Lean manufacturing system that kept prices down and expectations for employee advancement low—and manageable—everything changed in December of 2017 when Trump signed the tax reform package which lowered corporate rates.

The nationalism Womach criticized so heavily in The Machine that Changed the World is now the economical method of our time.  With the tax rates lowered we find that Lean manufacturing was really just a scam designed to move wealth from one place to another using common sense improvements of traditional mass production utilizing a very competitive workforce by people who think differently than Americans.  Part of the American lifestyle is the assumption that everyone can have a piece of the dream, a house, a yard—a few cars and money in the bank where in other places they hope to have a bed to sleep in and a job to go to—because the rest of their lives aren’t very good.  There is a lifestyle expectation in America that is part of the consideration factor for which Womach completely ignores.  Even the Japanese who transplant to America formulate their lives around it so new methods of manufacturing improvement are due to be revolutionized to meet these market demands.  And Lean isn’t it.

For so many years we’ve all been told that the Decline in the West is inevitable and that it was they who had to change—but nothing could be further from the truth.  The decline of the west was manipulated by people like Womach to sell globalism to everyone as capitalism was the hidden driver of invention within The United States that made the jobs and created the markets to begin with—a little fact ignored by nearly everyone in every sector of academia—from anthropologists to the most astute economists.  America made the necessity for jobs and the markets for income flow—and the spillover effect is why they even have cell phones in places like Vietnam.  Without America nobody would have anything and that is the key to the next generation of manufacturing thinking.  It’s not to elsewhere that the keys reside—it is right in the homeland of America that we must look—and it is there where the great next movements of manufacturing will emerge.

Rich Hoffman

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The Death of Lean Manufacturing: Self confidence and experience can’t be tracked on a graph–but they make everything possible

I normally don’t cross the streams of my projects but I had an experience recently that was worth sharing, and well heck, it’s Christmas and if I can help a few people today—then why not.  For professional reasons I had to re-read The Machine that Changed the World which was written by three college academics, Don Jones, Dan Ross, and Jim Womack.  I never liked the book even though there are some very good things about business within it.  Instinctively I hated the message of Lean manufacturing—to me it was like a cult—but being in manufacturing in a leadership capacity I obviously had to know as much about Lean manufacturing techniques as possible to talk the language with everyone else.  I needed to re-read the aforementioned book because the project I’m working on requires it heavily so I had to pull the baby out of it while disposing of the bathwater you might say.  To me the elements of that book that are good are guided largely by Mr. Womack and are things I learned instinctively by working really hard for a very long time.  I didn’t need Womack to tell me to decentralize my processes, or to have horizontal management systems.  Or to build as much of a product as close to the same room as every other process to maximize efficiency—or countless other similar things.  I’ve understood those concepts since before that book was written for a 1990s audience.  Rather I am quite certain that Womack and his friends sought to use academia to become part of the manufacturing world for their own self relevance in the late 1980s and that they’ve scammed many businesses into buying in to this Lean concept which was essentially to use common sense techniques sharpened after several decades of mass production methods as a base point, and to unite the world and its governments under a common manufacturing technique which would unleash globalism to the masses.  However, Womack and his academic buddies were wrong—and I’m here to declare that Lean manufacturing is dead—if it were ever alive really in the first place other than selling itself as a Frankenstein monster of copied techniques not really understood for why they worked, but only that they did.  The next method of global manufacturing technique is likely somewhere along the lines of what I presented to my manufacturing team as a Christmas present witnessed below.  It’s a radical idea which I think was always the essence of Lean manufacturing but will be further drawn out by necessity in the future—the role the individual plays in utilizing minimal force for maximum results as a cascading effect of influence which comes from The Power of Positive Thinking. It’s a major metaphysical shift in thought which takes the globalism out of manufacturing and instead recognizes the immense power that an individual plays in the utterances of productive output.  I provided a demonstration using my bullwhip as a metaphor for daily action.

Once I cleared childhood and the natural fears that come from being little in a big world—like loud noises, water, falling and speaking in front of people, I have been fear free most of my conscious life.  I have never been a person who functioned from fear; I never feared authority figures, bullies, or circumstances beyond the horizon of the living world.  And no matter how harsh the world was, I never backed down from it.  In spite of living a very aggressive life I’ve never had a moment of crises where I gave up and turned away.  I’ve certainly wanted to, but I never have had that experience of defeat in the face of a challenge.  I never thought to because nowhere in my mind was anything ever supposed to be easy. I never had that contamination of thought.  Even as I read more books than any contemporary I know, I also understood that such a practice was quite common in the year’s past.  As a young man not yet out of my twenties I took my family to Thomas Jefferson’s home in Monticello because I thought it was important for them to have that experience in life.  Privately when our guide explained to me that Jefferson’s library started the Library of Congress, and that the former president had read voraciously over 1000 books—I silently endeavored to outdo him.  It was a goal I set for myself, and a lofty one.  In that regard my formal education has never stopped as I now read books like Womack’s for lunch.  I am currently re-reading Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations just because I am sure the message of 2018 will be all about capitalism as the Trump presidency turns it loose once again—and my role in all this is to explain it to people.   I enjoy my role and I love my books—but most of what I know came from the unique circumstances for which I learned to live in the world—and the many hard jobs I have had while being completely fearless about the actions that would come at me from day to day.  Over a twenty year period of my life I did every kind of job imaginable, from cleaning toilets to being a great sales closer.  I worked in every kind of assembly environment and at every level.  And while I was doing all that I became a very respectable bullwhip artist—and in my head all those things do go together.

Having no fear means that I approach things without restrictions of thought.  For instance, the little presentation I did professionally was unique because most in my position would never risk the credibility to their reputation to start with.  What if I had missed that candle, or not delivered my speech correctly?  I could have done more damage than good.  But the most important element to my life that makes me unique and good at what I do is my self confidence.  I never worry about not achieving something because I have enough personal love for what I do and know to trust it.  I have been tested in every way that a human being can be, and fear has tried to work its way into my life for decades, but it has never found an unlocked door for which to color my thoughts with even a single self doubt.  Part of my presentation to those very nice people was to show them that part of what makes people good is that practice and confidence which can deliver them to the promise land of prosperity.  And that it doesn’t always take force, it just takes focus.

What made the Toyota method work in Womack’s analysis which launched the Lean approach to most things business these days, was that the Japanese had a samurai culture which bred this kind of self-confidence, but additionally as people from Asia naturally worked well together in a team setting.  After World War II they were an occupied country dominated by their former enemy, the United States.  So with the same vigor that they kamikazed American ships at sea with a never say die attitude toward conflict, they sought to exploit the weaknesses of American manufacturing’s mass production techniques and applied their own spin built from their ancient warrior codes.  Using the American Deming as a foundation they invented Lean manufacturing as a way to put themselves back on top of the world and recover their losses after the war—and college academics like Womack and his friends saw a vehicle toward globalism for which they could hang their star.  But they all missed the point.   Europe as well never quite understood Lean manufacturing.  They certainly understood the team concept of brothers before stars and all that—but they could not get the idea introduced by the Japanese of lifelong employment starting at the bottom and working your way to the very top—always staying at the same company to preserve the assets in training for which each individual brings to the table.

The next wave of manufacturing philosophy will embody some formal core element for which I shared with my business partners above—and which I share with you today.  It doesn’t matter to me whether or not I am talking to only 150 employees or 30,000, the message of concentrated individual effort is the same—and the trust in themselves to do whatever task is needed.  For my demonstration, putting out the candle in front of a crowd when I have everything to lose and very little to gain was more than a stunt for some Holiday cheer, it was a demonstration in self-confidence that I wished to share for a more profitable 2018.  Nobody who works for me is the type of people I want to be scared when I walk into a room.  I wish for every human being on planet earth the same reality I have—a no fear approach to everything, and if I can get them there with some instruction, I’ll do it every time there is an opportunity. However, the keys to good business is not from formalized education or in methods of team building that ignore that there is no I in team, but there is in win—but that victories large and small come from the individual focused on what they are doing and sprinkle into their productivity a self assuredness that was always in the underbelly of Lean manufacturing.  That confidence never came from a European style chain of command, but from living and being confident in what you do in a microcosm so that the macrocosm was better off for it—and that is the real trick.

Just as I explained that to put a candle out with a bullwhip requires placing the small sonic boom right in front of the flame—a good productive life is just as delicate.  In putting out candles to do it successfully requires many thousands of possible trajectories of movement to get that sonic boom to occur in just the right place. My experience and practice allow me to find that spot quickly and within a few attempts.  When I did my demonstration the way to assure more accuracy would have been to mark on the floor the exact distance from the candle.  But I didn’t do that, nor did I use a targeting fixture for which I was accustomed.  While those things might have given more closer to 100% accuracy, they would have been meaningless for my demonstration.  I simply went down to IKEA for lunch and picked up whatever candle arrangement they had for the Holiday season.  Everything was very spontaneous which forced me to react to those changing circumstances and illicit to my audience the self-confidence it takes to pull off something like that.  Once they had seen me do it, then in their own minds it unlocked the possibilities they likely all thought about—and it was my hope that it didn’t just make them better employees for me, but in every aspect of their lives.  And in that statement is the key to the next generation of manufacturing and all things related to production.

Rich Hoffman

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Realities of Sex Trafficking: Somalia, Ukraine and Thailand–American feminists are part of the problem

I really don’t want to hear from some American feminist how abused they think they are being treated every time a man looks at them in an elevator, or accidentally brushes up against their ass in a hallway until they get behind the effort of saving truly abused women around the world involved in sex trafficking. I would start by telling them this truly sad story about a young Christian girl who survived her experience with the terror group Al Shabaab in Kenya along the trade route from Somalia described below.  The region being discussed is a remote and impoverished area with very few options for women or men. Many of the men who are in Al Shabaab are there to be militant Muslims due to their limited economic options—so the root of the evil is poor economic conditions—for which adherence to open capitalism would solve.  For instance, if a lot of these militants could work at a local Dollar Store—or Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant, they would gladly.  But if all there is to do is to be a militant to make money—then that’s what they do.  And sex trafficking isn’t limited to this type of remote African region. When people wonder why Donald Trump’s administration is now selling weapons to Ukraine, to free that country from its heavily Russian past, again there sex trafficking is the core issue.  Ukraine is now considered the Thailand of Europe where the unethical predators seeking illicit sex with young boys and girls occur openly.  No matter where the region limited employment conditions attract people to sell themselves to others for sex and that is a tremendous problem that requires diligence.  When American feminists attempt to villainize normal sexual behavior between men and women as a political power grab within the industrialized world, all they are really doing is exacerbating the global trend toward sex trafficking—and until they do address the illicit trade—what they say and do means nothing.

“Sex Slave Survivor of Christian-Killing Group Al-Shabaab Describes Gang Rapes, Forced Abortions,” by Stoyan Zaimov, Christian Post, December 12, 2017 (thanks to The Religion of Peace):

A woman who was held captive and repeatedly raped by members of Al Shabaab is sharing the horrific details of daily sexual abuse and forced abortions endured by those who are kidnapped by the the radical Islamic terror group.

Kenya’s The Standard reported on Sunday the story of one of the women who survived the ordeal at Boni Forest camp, identified as Fatuma, who said that she and others were raped by as many as six men at a time for five years.

“The women in the camp had to cook, wash clothes for the militants and undertake other household duties. The fighters frequently physically and sexually abused us. Some militants would beat us if they did not like something we cooked, which was often for me as I was not familiar with cooking Somali injera (bread) that was preferred by the militants,” Fatuma, who managed to escape the jihadists a year ago, explained.

She said the militants forced the women to use contraceptives and undergo abortions when they got pregnant.

The abuse reportedly worsened when Al-Shabaab fighters battled the African Union Mission in Somalia or Somalia National Army troops.

“They would drink and take drugs all day and night, whether celebrating the killing of Somalia National Army or AMISOM soldiers or mourning their own, and that’s when the gang rapes would happen,” she recalled.

Fatuma said that only the female captives who were married off to commanders were allowed to have children, and said that there were about 15 children at the camp.

The woman, who admitted that she was looking for work with Al-Shabaab before finding out what the group is really about, said that captives were also often forced to use drugs and were treated as prisoners.

“If you were lucky, a commander would take you as a wife and that would stop other militants from raping you. But those who were made wives were only native Somalis,” she said….

https://pamelageller.com/2017/12/sex-slave-shabaab.html/

It’s one thing when men and women decide to enter the sex trade as free people—the way they do in Las Vegas, or at Times Square in New York.  They could choose to work in the sex trade or become a cashier at Macy’s—they have a choice.  There are many options in America that the rest of the world doesn’t have.  But consider the kid in Thailand who is trying to support all his brothers and sisters in that impoverished country who works the sex trade in red light districts serving up sex to dirty old men who come there from around the world just to have under aged sex.  There are no options but to engage in the sex—and that is a vast evil all its own.  The correct thing to do is to bring options to those people so they could have a choice in the matter.

Showing the impoverished countries how to function as capitalist zones is the first step in correcting the behavior.   Bringing economic choices to such young people addresses the problem on the supply side.  And it also attacks the demand—which is vastly a larger problem than the poor kids getting lured into these shameful existences.  Much like the drug industry in America where demand is high so supply always finds a way to meet the market need, we must use the morality of capitalism to use financial options to alter the behavior.  For instance, there’s a reason American women don’t feel that they have to sell themselves on the street to pay for a bus ticket to see their mothers—that’s because they can work at a local McDonald’s, or the shopping mall to make the money they need.  Dirty old men are forced to go elsewhere looking for illicit sex.  It does happen in every town across America, but it tends to be a problem hidden largely from our first looks.  But in places like Ukraine, or in Thailand, the sex trade is as common on the street as someone selling refrigerator magnates to tourists are.

Frustrated men from around the world who don’t know what the rules are for sex any more in their “civilized” societies back home, flood these sex trafficking markets on business travel and sex vacations which has only increased the demand.  That behavioral problem is the next thing to tackle once economic mobility is introduced to even the smallest village in Africa or southeast Asia.  It is stunning how many women on any street in Europe will take off her clothes and have sex with anybody with a little cash—because cash is not easy to get.  Even in cities like London and Paris, economic options are very limited leaving women to be all too tempted to use their bodies to pay their high rent each week.  Rent in London is extraordinarily expensive making it very tempting for women to sell their young bodies in any way possible to cover the high costs of living in that town.  They may not do such things every day, but once or twice a year is too much.  They may pass off such encounters as casual sex with strangers in exchange for a little financial security.  They don’t work the streets directly but go to just about any dance club and the sex trafficking issue is fully at play.  The next morning they can blame it on the drink to save their reputations to some extent, but they shouldn’t have to make such a choice.  In America, finding women to sell sex is much harder, because they have so many other economic options.  The key to fighting this evil is economic mobility—not handouts from the government, but an adhesion to capitalist concepts.

Thus the cause of this very evil business is limited economic options, so that is where we must focus.  Feminists who complain that Harvey Weinstein grabbed their boobies so they could have a role in a Hollywood movie are just describing the high-end of this very world-wide problem.  Those girls have options, they could let a sleaze bag like Weinstein grope them, or they could work an office job for some respectable position—for less money mind you, but they have that option.  A poor girl in Kenya has no choice when she is captured by Al Shabaab and forced to be gang raped daily by 5 to 6 men for many years. She is in that situation because of limited economic mobility.  Even though Ukraine is part of the civilized world, Russia wants it back as a territory and has been trying to choke it off militarily to fall back under the mother country with impoverished conditions as the rest of Europe has been happy to have chaos rule.  Why you might ask, because the powerful men and women who could solve the problems in Ukraine go there for the sex, to satisfy those deep dark demons that lurk in their repressed imaginations.  That leaves Ukraine with very few options economically except to yield to the sex addicted tourists who have full pockets and are seeking the bodies of the young to spend it on.  That is a topic that liberal feminists in America won’t touch with a pole of any length—because they are as guilty as anybody for the perpetuation of such an evil—which makes them all pathetic hypocrites—and part of the problem as well.

Rich Hoffman

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The ‘Star Wars’ Backlash: Disney’s choice to make progressive films has hurt their product sustainability for the future

Disney could have avoided the whole issue.  They will make their money regardless, but all the controversy surrounding their new Star Wars film The Last Jedi was completely unnecessary.  The movie will do good business in spite of a sharp drop off in the weeks after its release—but like The Force Awakens that came before it; it could have done much better.   Many will argue that these movies didn’t need to do anything—they are making more money than any other film in the history of planet earth.  But there are problems with sustainability here that are clear—especially in The Last Jedi.  These filmmakers decided to make a noticeably progressive film complete with an emphasis on girl power, the fair treatment of animals, interracial romance, and even trying to throw a bone toward the gay community by hiring Laura Dern—the girl who helped Ellen come out of the closet.  The white guys are the bad guys and everyone else is trying to climb out from under their wrath—which is the essential part of the story—so of course the critics loved it.  But the audience score is noticeably hovering at only 50% which was a stunner for many analysts in the week leading up to Christmas.  It really shouldn’t be—my thoughts about the film nearly reflect the review by Ben Shapiro below—which is sometimes very funny—because it’s true.

The original movies were conservative movies whether or not George Lucas intended them that way or not.  They were warnings of big government imposing its will on people. They were also warnings about how a group of leftists such as the Nazis could emerge in a society with “thunderous applause.”  So conservatives like myself and young Ben Shapiro tend to be drawn to Star Wars and the core message.  And yes, the Nazis were socialist radicals of a left leaning philosophy which they borrowed from the Democrats in America. That is all historically accurate, yet the modern progressive left is trying to suppress that history and attribute them all to the political right.  That mess of thought is what ends up in a movie like The Last Jedi—where all the major plot points only work because of nostalgia but all the actions of the characters seem goofy and foreign—which is forgivable in a kids film.  But these are not the kinds of stories that will be beloved for decades like the originals were.  The modern political left doesn’t know what it is or what it believes because everything they love is built on lies.  That trait is quite clear in most Hollywood productions now because the entire industry is functioning from the same neurosis.

As I said with The Force Awakens, Disney could have avoided all this by just sticking to the stories of George Lucas and the canon established by the Extended Universe.  It was all there for them—hard core fans would have embraced a new trilogy set 40 years after Return of the Jedi with Jaina Solo leading the way as the new protagonist—but Disney and Lucasfilm wanted to tell a more progressive story.  In the EU Luke had built a wonderful Jedi school that was defending the galaxy against threats even from outside the galaxy.  Han Solo was the every reliable dad who always knew best—and was a respectable grandfather.  And Princess Leia was learning to be a Jedi master.  Hard core fans would have been satisfied, and casual fans would have still enjoyed the stories for the reasons they like these new ones.  Instead Lucasfilm led by Kathy Kennedy and Bob Iger decided that gender was more important, that showing common people from anywhere could do anything was more important and that progressive concerns were the driving force of these new movies where traditionalists were the villains.  In the Kathy Kennedy movies Han Solo was a deadbeat dad who failed his son and ran away from his wife. Luke is a loser who tried to kill his student and when he failed he retreated to an island to hide from the responsibilities of the galaxy making everything that happened in the original trilogy pointless—in every regard.  So of course only half the audience coming out of the theaters like the new movie.  Critics only like the progressive elements, but the people who have been fans and kept the film franchise at the top for so long were certainly ignored—and they aren’t happy about it.

I gave up on loving these movies.  I enjoy them because my grandkids like them, and they aren’t so bad that they don’t do what good mythology is supposed to do, and that is inform young people about right and wrong.  For me just getting a new John Williams soundtrack is enough.  The music from The Last Jedi is absolutely stunning.  But I can’t help but think that The Last Jedi was the last real Star Wars movie because the modern filmmakers just don’t have it in the tank to know what made Star Wars great to begin with.  They are too liberal and really don’t understand history the way that George Lucas did and it shows in the writing.  The entire plot of Rose and Finn in The Last Jedi was a liberal diatribe on the evils of capitalism and the correct treatment of animals.  The climax of the whole exchange was to show that a chubby Asian girl could kiss a black guy after saving him from a pointless suicide mission.  All that might be fine for some show on Netflix but in Star Wars—don’t expect everyone to love the movie when that kind of obvious political garbage is being shoved down the audiences’ throat.  Sure it did what Disney wanted, and pulled great reviews out of the critics—but that only front loaded the anticipation.  When audiences got into the theater and saw all that crap, they were obviously let down—and that isn’t good for the future of Star Wars.

I won’t lose any sleep over any of it.  I’m an EU guy.  I’m trying to give these new movies a chance mainly because they are the movies of my grandchildren’s generation and I want to share these stories with them.  But they are really screwing it up for the future at Lucasfilm—and it was all so unnecessary.  I still think that Rey in the movie is the daughter of Han and Leia Solo—and at this point it’s the only thing that can really save the franchise.  I think that will be the big reveal in Episode 9.  If not that, Han and Leia Solo were the worst parents in the galaxy and all the events of the original trilogy were meaningless.  Disney could have had all the good stuff right out of the gate and gone much further if they had just stayed away from doing their own thing and ignoring the EU.  They chose to make some upfront money while sacrificing the whole thing down the road—they destroyed the sustainability of it.  And that is why there is a very real Star Wars backlash showing up in the audience scoring.  Those scores mean many millions of lost dollars and that is trouble down the road for everyone connected to these movies. They should have listened up front and not been so audacious to think they could change things and still get away with a beloved series.

Rich Hoffman

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Trump Makes Idiots out of the United Nations: Gold always rules, not bureaucrats

Boy we’ve come a long way in such a short time. You know dear reader what I’ve said for many years—that the purpose of public education is for people to assimilate into their peer groups and for the pressure of those groups to enforce behavior patterns for which centralized societies can more easily control. Public education was never intended to teach children how to read, and conduct math. There are other ways to achieve those same objectives. But schools use those necessities as a cover story for their real intention—to teach people to follow the direction of their peer groups. That is the entire purpose, and is the primary cause of most modern forms of neurosis. But it was only five years ago where smart meters and other Agenda 21 United Nations initiatives were causing so much consternation among sovereign Americans. Now under Trump the United Nations has received a death-blow of its own by a President Trump who shrugged them off as worthless one day after revolutionary tax cuts cleared a House vote. The U.N. foolishly tried to apply peer pressure on the Trump administration with a 128-9 vote against the American measure to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.

http://www.latimes.com/nation/sns-bc-un–united-nations-us-jerusalem-20171221-story.html

The United Nations budget is around $7.8 billion dollars and the United States contributes around 28% of that—or $2.8 billion. I learned a long time ago from a business deal I had with the head of Servatii Bakery in Cincinnati that “he who has the gold rules.” It was a hard lesson for me, I was only 25 years old and my proposal which involved the head of the popular Cincinnati bakery involved many millions of potential dollars and a lot of private upfront investment. Essentially, I was working with no cash but a lot of effort I had done in partnership with a small team of people the leg work in showing this business leader how to get a change of use plan approved through the Cincinnati Building Commission. Once he had that information he changed the deal on me—which cost me a lot. When he flew back in from Las Vegas to a have sit down meeting with me for what I thought would be good news—he dropped the bomb that for him it made more sense to take what he learned from me and apply that knowledge to a partner who had deep pockets on another deal which had much less personal risk for him. Of course, I felt betrayed and that’s when he told me that line—which I’ve never forgotten. The same applies to the United Nations—they don’t have any gold, they have a lot of utopian ideas, but no cash to work with—so they are at the mercy of those who do have the gold—and that is the facts of life. Like it or not, that’s the way the ball bounces in life.

If you want to lead and make decisions for yourself and others who may want to follow you, you have to get your hands on some gold. You have to be willing to do the work, to have the proper philosophy in your life to allow you to have gold, you have to compete with the world to get it. In the case of the United Nations, they are running most of their countries on socialist economies, so they have very little gold. America is a fabulous capitalist economy—so it has a lot of wealth to work with. Yet it makes no sense at all to fund 28% of the United nations budget—for what? What do we get out of it? Agenda 21 threats—smart meters, washing machines that spy on how much water we use? The United Nations can mind their own business—and I don’t want to give those idiots any of my money—I can tell you that. However, for years no politician listened to us—instead they caved into the pressure of the United Nations as if it were an equal partnership. It was never equal. If it wasn’t for the United States there wouldn’t even be a United Nations. So why would any of our past presidents bow to anyone within the United Nations?

It took me nearly a decade to recover from that deal with the head of Servatii, but I eventually did. For many years I hated that guy and if I had caught him in the street after that initial shock wore off, there would have been trouble. But he was at the top of the pyramid and had cash to burn. He came to America as a German immigrant and worked his way to the top. I had a few opportunities to go to lunch with him and a few other multimillionaires and learned how those people thought—which ultimately was much more valuable to me than if the business deal had actually concluded. They certainly weren’t what the political left thinks of them—people like the Scrooge, or the Grinch—interpretations of wealth by socialist minded artists. They were smart guys who liked to compete and make money, and they were good people. That’s why it was so shocking to me to feel that sting of betrayal. At one dinner I was at with these guys I saw that the check came back at $13,000 which was all the money in the world to me at the time. When they saw my reaction, the laughed and told me that was a normal lunch cost—they did that everyday. And they were serious. I never forgot that either. So many people depended on those guys to spend their money on things–they had gold, they were the ones who ruled what happened and what didn’t. After my deal went sour it took me ten years and many jobs, sometimes three at a time to make ends meet and recover. For a long time, my wife and I only had one car which I left for her in case the kids needed to get somewhere. I rode a bicycle everywhere—all over the city of Cincinnati to whatever job I was doing, and I did that for many years. For a solid four-year period, I held two full-time jobs—both of them demanding overtime minimums at times of at least 10 hours each—a lot of times demanding Saturdays as well. All that time I read books on my break times and always strived to get back on my feet. I worked harder than anybody I ever met, and eventually I pulled back out on top and those expensive meals are something I experience again. This is what the United Nations is about to go through, they have now been cut off from the gold and they don’t have a means on their own of obtaining it. Will they work hard to solve their problem like I did on the microcosm? Probably not—and the result is that they will be destroyed.

The United Nations assumption that they had some ruling power over the United States was simply preposterous. They learned a hard lesson with Trump that gold truly does rule the world, not bureaucrats—the aristocratic societies of the past are officially dead—and it was Trump that killed them all with just a simple strategy of letting them defund themselves. You see, Trump always meant to defund the United Nations—that is after all why people like me voted for him as president. If he did it on his own he would have been a villain, just like that Servatii bakery guy needed me to figure out how to solve his permit problem so that his real objective could be fulfilled. Trump knew the United Nations would scrutinize his decision to move the embassy to Jerusalem. So when they made idiots of themselves by voting against the measure at the U.N. they gave Trump a free pass to withdraw the huge amounts of money that the United States pours into it. And who will win in the end—who do you think? He who has the gold always rules—and it is they who define fairness in the morality of value exchange. And that’s life.

http://www.politifact.com/global-news/statements/2017/feb/01/rob-portman/us-contribution-un-22-percent/

Rich Hoffman

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Finally, I’m Proud of my Government: And Trump University was never a fraud

For the first time in my life when I look at the White House, I’m proud. That actually goes back to the days of Ronald Reagan—everything in Washington D.C. seemed dirty and corrupt to me, but now—now everything is different. The Trump White House has given me faith in an American government not as some ominous thing to be feared, but a partner in the great American experiment yearning for a better tomorrow. After passing the tax cuts through the House and Senate by midweek 2017 in a December looking toward Christmas, I witnessed something I thought would never be possible. I hoped it would honestly, but I had doubts it could—and that is to see business objectives applied to politics for the sake of changing the way the whole game will be played forever more. Donald Trump has brought an honesty to the White House and therefore all of Washington D.C. culture that has altered the course of the human race I think forever. This little evolutionary step we’ve seen in the year of 2017 will always be viewed as a special time that the world will reflect on and be thankful for.

I have to think back to the very dishonorable thing Mit Romney did when he came out against Trump in the primaries as the establishment GOP threw everything including the kitchen sink at Trump to stop his nomination process. Probably the hardest hitting criticism Romney leveled at Trump was about Trump University being a fraud. As I’ve said before, I’ve read all of Trump’s books over the years—as everyone should. If you really want to know who Donald Trump is, read the books he’s written—he is a very open person. Well before he was president of the United States he had a deep concern to help motivate people to greatness. Basically, he’s a high energy guy who loves to work, so he gets involved in lots of things in his life, and he loves to talk about them. He sets high standards for himself and always seeks to meet those standards. For instance, when he plays golf with other professional golfers, he doesn’t see himself as inferior to them. Instead he plays with them to get better himself, but he doesn’t consider himself an inferior talent, the way most people would. Whatever Trump has ever done he justifies that if he puts the time and effort into being good at it, that he can be as good if not better than everyone else.

Trump’s pursuit of greatness has given him a good life, and he’s been very open to sharing that good life always. Like a lot of us he looked around once his Celebrity Apprentice show took off at NBC and figured that lots of people wanted to learn from him—so he started Trump University. There are a lot of schools out there that are actual frauds, such as Yale, Harvard, Oxford, Princeton and many others—because what they sell is not what you are getting. In the established schools their intent isn’t to teach you about the world and how to live in it—they are there to program children into becoming liberals and adjusting student’s lives to socialism. They sell their services as helping people get good jobs, but what they are really after is programing children into liberalism. There are other schools like Liberty University that try to teach conservative studies, but they are typically looked at by the political left as institutions of fraudulent activity—because they aren’t part of the orthodox. That’s when Trump entered the fray with a university of his own located in one of his developments along the Hudson—and his intention was basically to share his experience with hungry minds wherever they came from.

As Mit Romney did his public comments against Trump criticizing Trump University specifically I was holding in my hand my copy of a book called Trump 101: The Way to Success—which was published by Trump University. How could Mit Romney say that Trump University was a fraud as I was holding one of the books produced by that endeavor that was clearly written to improve the lives of people in business—and in life? The answer was that he couldn’t. Trump University may not have taken off the way Trump wanted—but he certainly tried. Once Obama was elected in office and it was obvious to the rest of us that we had a real criminal enterprise moving into Washington D.C. Trump moved his efforts more to the Tea Party movement—like many of us right thinking people did—in 2009. After Obama personally called out Trump at the correspondent’s dinner in 2012 Trump had decided that he’d try for a presidential run and give the Tea Party movement the thrust it had been lacking. I think for him based on the books he had written, it was the ultimate challenge to some of his lifelong philosophies—and if he pulled it off, he would have a chance to actually save the nation.

I knew Trump was never a fraud and I was a supporter of his essentially from the time he announced he was running. I based my support on his books because I knew that if a guy who thought the way he did were ever to become president, then he’d be the greatest that we had ever had—that includes Lincoln, and George Washington himself. Trump has never been a bad guy who functioned from his flaws—he’s always sought to be better each day that he woke up. He was a little crazy with women for a while as he lived a genuine playboy life—which in his day was the way success was defined. But he obviously outgrew that over time and has arrived into his modern age better prepared than anybody to do the hard job of being President of the United States.

His first-year successes are straight off the pages of his books and I’m happy to say he hasn’t disappointed me in any way this entire time. Most people don’t think of him as an author, but he’s quite expressive and very inspiring—naturally, and I think his written works are some of his best attributes. I really look forward to reading the books about his presidency in the future—because there are some really wonderful things happening every day in his administration. For people who clearly wanted America to fail—of course they hate him. They hate all of us and have decided that they don’t want to live in a country with our values—they made that decision, not us. But until Trump came along to flip the tables, they had control of the narrative within the media. They don’t have it any longer, and it only took a year. Because of Trump and his successes, they are forced to reveal themselves—really for the first time, and people can see the maliciousness of their actions in the light of day. Trump has brought honor to the White House that will have a lasting effect—and I’m very proud of what his administration has been able to do in such a short time. Based on his books, I know this is all just the tip of the iceberg, there will be many more great things to come and soon people will forget about all the ugly stuff. And that will be the greatest thing of all—something that we will all carry deep into the future for all time.

Rich Hoffman
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‘The 15:17 to Paris’: A Clint Eastwood movie coming at just the right time

Since the heroics of Spencer Stone, Anthony Sadler and Alek Skarlatos on that fateful train to Paris where they stopped a terrorist attack, I have to admit that I have been hoping to have the same encounter whenever I travel.  It must have been a very gratifying experience to be able to beat the shit out of a terrorist.  That’s why I think the movie version of that famous event will do extraordinary business, because in America I think my feelings are quite common when it comes to terrorism, whether it was the neighbor to a church in Texas who stopped the shooter that unleashed a barrage of bullets into the innocent with a gun of his own, or the countless episodes in just the last few months where law enforcement and private citizens have done the same the moment they heard that, crack, pop, crack of .223 bullets splitting the air toward dreadful intentions.  Leave it to Clint Eastwood to capture that American gusto in his newest film The 15:17 to Paris, which is set to release on February 8th 2018.

I’ve ridden on trains through France, just as that trailer set up the story, and I experienced very much the same emotions—especially in regard to the European baby Cokes.  Eastwood is a master of the movie making craft at his mid-80s maturation and nobody does the little things better these days than him.  I said it at the time that when Eastwood decided to make a movie of the book written by the three heroes that he’d do great things with the project—and he did by casting the three guys to play themselves in the movie.  That took extraordinary confidence on his part and I think the result that ends up on-screen will be incredible.  America needs a story like this right now and especially under a Trump White House, the cultural phenomena that it has a chance to become are ripe for the exemplary.

It’s obvious that Eastwood is going to explore the how and why these three ordinary kids become the heroes they did—and I’m quite certain that the answer will reside in the philosophy of Americanism.  I remember when the guys were being praised after the event around the world for their heroism and thinking—why them?  There were over 500 people on that train that day, and why was it three Americans who stopped the terrorist?  Well, I know the answer, but the world has been banging its head against the rails trying to come to grips with it.  The reason of course is that we make Americans from the time they are little kids into their adulthoods with a sense of self-purpose—with an assumption that they can do and be whatever they want in life.  In Europe they are raised quite differently, because they have a history of bloodlines and aristocracy that keeps them from assuming that their destinies are largely in their own hands.

The idea that an individual can make a difference and do anything is an American concept.  Not everyone in America gets it obviously, but the concept is there for anyone to answer and in the case of Spencer Stone, Anthony Sadler and Alek Skarlatos, they certainly did and Eastwood’s direction for the film will no doubt explore that.  People inclined to fate might otherwise just sit there and let the events of terrorism do what they will do—and people will live or die accordingly.  But changing that fate is something that you can see in the eyes of Spencer Stone in that preview—which is what Eastwood was obviously after when he decided to cast them in a movie about themselves.  He wanted to show audiences what that looks like—to believe to their very core that if they wanted to change the fate of something, then individual action was the key to doing so.  Some wimpy actor can try to mimic that behavior, which is how Eastwood pulled off the great work he did for American Sniper.  But with something like this, in the age of terrorism—how best to combat terrorism but to teach people not to be so damn afraid of every little thing.  So bullets are coming at you.  Maybe some hit you.  So what?  But for a chance to beat the crap out of a terrorist and stop the death of hundreds of people who might otherwise have international consequences—who wouldn’t want the opportunity to do what these three guys did?  I’d love the chance.

Clint Eastwood as I’ve said before is my favorite movie director—he has been for a while and he’s only become better over time.  So I’d go see this movie regardless of what it was about and who was in it.  Every film he does could be his last, so he appears to be putting a lot of love into each one of them while he still can—which is very admirable.  But even for him the timing of this movie and the way it will be presented I don’t think could come under better circumstances.  America has had a year of Trump.  The economy is booming, tax cuts are coming, the Deep State is being exposed and cleansed of its activists—the world is respecting us again and terrorists are on their heels.  All that has largely happened because normal every day Americans have had the courage to do their part in Making America Great Again and Clint Eastwood has captured that in this film.

Warner Bros. will have a massive hit on their hands when they release this, because we are all feeling it, and we want this story.  Once we see this story it will only accelerate the process which explores what makes Americans different in a positive way—what makes them run toward danger when others cower and pray for mercy?  That’s what The 15:17 to Paris is all about.  As I said, I’ve been on a train across the French countryside, so I can relate to those opening shots.  And in Paris which many consider to be one of the greatest cities in the world—I can say that Americans are very easy to spot.  We think different, and not in a bad way.  We like our Cokes bigger, we enjoy more food—we tend to be bigger and stronger as a result—but more than anything we like what we like when we want it, because we come from a culture that feeds that nature in us.  We don’t like long lines—we don’t like public transportation—because we want to be in charge of our own destinies whenever possible—and we don’t like to be pushed around.  When someone points a gun in our face, we have more than a few of us who will charge that attacker for the glory and pride of doing so no matter what might happen afterwards because we were born free and recognize quickly around the world where tyrants look to oppress—and we naturally don’t like it.

I will be one of the first in line to see The 15:17 to Paris.  I can’t wait!

Rich Hoffman

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Trump the Destroyer and Beyond Pairs of Opposites: ‘The Last Jedi’s’ message to the 21st Century

There is nothing I enjoy more than a good discussion about very heady topics.  It really is the only thing that interests me so my mind is often open to these elements when I see them.  And before everyone complains that I’m writing another Star Wars article, it would be worth the time to follow through on this one, because we’re going to talk about some important stuff.  After the dust settled on The Last Jedi—once I had seen it and considered what Disney’s role in the whole thing was, and compared all that to these really massive investigations into the FBI and Donald Trump’s institution cleansing presidency—I have a few thoughts to share to those with a mind to listen.  So here it goes.

Taken up close, there is a lot to be angry about.  There’s a lot to fix, and most of us do not understand our role in the grand scheme of things.  We can call that grand scheme God if you’d like, but I’d prefer the term Grand Fortissimo—A term I acquired after reading the Joseph Campbell masterpieces The Masks of God many years ago for which that term was applied to the steady march and consideration  of the human race—from its inception to the present.  Art after all is the yearnings and toils of the mind and the imagination which fosters it—and Star Wars was always a work of modern art presented as myth to a hungry public needing more than what other forms of entertainment typically give us.  I’m not particularly happy with the direction Disney has taken the Star Wars stories—because taken at the ground level—these new films are very progressive in their values which makes them political in a negative way.  But………what separates Star Wars from the pack is that they are rooted in very ancient mythologies which have been always trying to answer the big meaning of life questions we all seek and to get there it is the orchestral music of John Williams which takes what might otherwise be average television plot lines and elevates them into the realm of modern myth.

As I was thinking about all this I listened to the new Last Jedi soundtrack by 85-year-old John Williams and if there was ever a person on earth that has the powers of God working through him, it is that guy.  Listening to the music with no images attached, just a good symphonic score pulled from the movie is just amazing.  What he put down on paper is something that would rival Mozart or Bach or Tchaikovsky any day.  That Ahch-To them from The Last Jedi which was introduced at the end of The Force Awakens I think represents the direction of the human race in the 21st century and John Williams is quite well aware of it.  It’s fully majestic and deeply philosophical and touches on all the classic myths of our imaginations and shines a light to where we are going.  For Williams to capture all that in just a few notes is nothing short of genius.  As I was listening to that little piece in my car with the windows up and the sound turned up as loud as I could get it to go I received a notification from my oldest daughter that NASA was sending up a copy of The Last Jedi for everyone to watch up on the International Space Station.  On another notification I received the Friday box office results which was tracking The Last Jedi to break over 200 million domestically by Sunday night—which is extraordinary.  Even though I thought the surface plot of The Last Jedi was pretty mediocre—almost descending into the plot of the latest stupid Star Trek movie, Into Darkness—the deeper elements of it are actually quite sophisticated, which is a serious nod of the hat to Rian Johnson, the director.  He chose to essentially make this Episode 8 movie a modern rendition of the classic Twin War Gods Navaho legend and it is quite effective.

Meanwhile Donald Trump is shaking up the entire world of the establishment.  Liberals might see Trump as Snoke from The Last Jedi and they are guarding themselves from the First Order of his creation.  Conservatives see Trump as the Rebellion fighting against an evil faceless Empire where the Deep State has all the power and might we see in the Star Wars movies as being something worth fighting.  The main them of The Last Jedi is the motif of most mythologies that we know of, and that is to move beyond the pairs of opposites—the yen and yang life.  The cultures of our past which built pyramids understood this all too well, you pick your side and work your way intellectually up to the point where you will have to meld with all the other sides of the pyramid.  Life forces you to pick sides, but once the roles we play in the conflict of living are concluded, all sides blend at the point.  At the end of The Last Jedi what Rian Johnson has done was essentially kill all the villains to merge the characters into this concept which was pretty bold stuff.  I am pretty sure that Donald Trump is a Star Wars fan, and I’d dare say he understands what I’m talking about and he knows his role in all this is a Shiva role—a destroyer of evil and a transformer upon our culture.  I remember when the Rogue One Blue-ray came out in April of this year Trump was playing it on Air Force One while reporters where talking to him.  Trump gets it—I’m quite sure of it.  His job is to clear away all the institutional hesitation for which Star Wars is conceptually introducing to the human race a tomorrow for which we presently aren’t prepared for.  That is clearly the intention of The Last Jedi—to bring mankind to the top of the pyramids and to now move beyond—which no culture in the history of the world has done so far—that we know of.  If they have in the past, they left earth long ago.

It was just this week that Trump announced the next steps for NASA which are going to once again use the space race to spur our economy along into uncharted waters.  Within a few decades we will all have to make a conscious decision as to whether or not we want to die—because we’ll be able to download ourselves into some form of A.I.  We’ll also be able to biologically heal ourselves—so there’s that as well. We are moving toward a time where dying for the honor of our flags, or our loved ones is really going to be robbed of its merit—and what are we going to do then?  How do we live beyond the pairs of opposites—once we’ve had reconciliation with the “father” whether it’s the God of the Christian Bible or the Sun from the Navaho legend?  We must have Shiva destroy the old world and to clear away all the smoke so that we can see the top of the pyramid, then we will complete that climb and move into that next age.  Star Wars is providing a road map of thought to help us through art and subconsciously we seem to understand. Donald Trump for the world right now is Shiva—and I say that in the most positive manner.  He is working beyond the villains of Star Wars for that moment on Ahch-To when Luke vanished at the end of The Last Jedi to join Yoda in the realm of the dead—which aren’t so dead—but willing participants in the theater of life.  Very interesting.

Donald Trump and Disney without really planning it in any way are serving as the two greatest influences that are shaping our culture of tomorrow in ways that many of us today still can’t fathom.  I saw a lot of people at my screening of The Last Jedi who are full-grown adults dressed up for the movie.  This stuff is a religion to them now, and that is taking us all to places that are uncharted in the human experience.  While our political assumptions are being destroyed—rightfully so, our art is providing us with a road map to renewed self-discovery.  Star Wars is not just a movie experience; it is amid all the sex scandals and the obvious destruction of Hollywood the best and only safe place that we can still trust.  It’s all around us at Target, Wal-Mart and even in our cars.  It’s fueling the imagination of NASA which has been given wings again under Trump and where we are all heading for is that grand fortissimo I was talking about.  It may take thirty or forty more years, but we’re going to be going somewhere we’ve never been before and I think that is absolutely wonderful.

Rich Hoffman

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Embodiments of Good Culture: ‘The Last Jedi’ review as seen at the Liberty Township Cinebistro

Regarding the new Star Wars film, The Last Jedi0DC280AC-2650-4978-AF7B-AD3BA74C3987—I enjoyed it. It is the best movie of its kind made these days. To me it’s a long way off from George Lucas’ original vision and is much more progressive. When I say that I’m not knocking it for its various species and races working together for a common cause—its just the value system is very collective based—much more than it used to be and that makes the film step on itself often. But for kids 15 and under, Star Wars is magical stuff, and for everyone else—it’s the best pop culture eye candy that you can get anywhere with a stirring new John Williams score to go with it. So there is a lot to love and I did. Disney did a good job as far as movies made by committee go—and I thought Rian Johnson did a good job navigating all the needs of those committees quite well to even pull off something that did sometimes reflect the classic Star Wars film The Empire Strikes Back. Honestly, I wish there were more films like The Last Jedi because when it comes to the movie going experience my sentiments go to the theater owners who often get screwed by Hollywood for putting out a bunch of liberal crap that nobody wants to see. At least films like The Last Jedi give theater owners a chance to make some money—which they desperately need these days in the age of changing entertainment options.

Since I’m a Star Wars guy I was going to see it at the soonest opportunity and that came on a Thursday night before the film’s official release. Thursdays are rough for me because I usually have an oversea call with people on the opposite side of the world, so their 8 AM on a Friday is for me 6 PM Thursday. And of course my first responsibility was to the call. So at the conclusion my wife and I had plans to meet at the Cinebistro in Liberty Township to see Star Wars: The Last Jedi at 8 PM. It was on these kinds of evenings that excited me originally when I learned a Cinebistro was coming to my hometown—and since its arrival it’s really been the only movie theater we’ve gone to. I love every visit to that theater. But Star Wars is a special event and everything is elevated during those kinds of movie releases—so I was very grateful to leave my call meeting and arrive at the bar in Cinebistro with a nice overlook down into the square at the Liberty Center shopping complex and have a Ohio brewed Star Wars beer with my wife while we waited for our assigned seats to be called.D29EA4ED-8F8E-4BE7-A989-1C50576967D2

I was hungry, as we hadn’t eaten anything that day so it was quite a delight to be seated with all the politeness you expect at a nice restaurant by the staff at Cinebistro. Our waitress was a veteran who had been working at the Cinebistro since it opened and she was sharp as a tack which to my tired presence was very welcome. My wife and I ordered our food and within a few minutes our order started coming back at us and it was one of the best burgers I’ve had in a while made more so by how hungry I was. The movie hadn’t even started and it was already one of the best nights out to a movie that I could remember having in several years. Then the lights went down and The Last Jedi started and it was just a fun movie to sit there dead tired after 14 straight hours of working and enjoy.

My honest impression of the film was that it painted itself in a corner. There isn’t much reason to have an Episode 9 as most of the big climaxes that you would expect in a Star Wars film happened in The Last Jedi. There was a big standoff with Luke at the end as he faced down the might of the First Order stoically that was particularly powerful and made the worth of the entire movie valid in that one moment. But there were a lot of good moments that made this an above average film about science fiction. There were many times that I felt the filmmakers were secretly trying to make an anti-Trump film where they turned the Rebellion symbol into a calling sign to liberalism—and that bothered me. Hey guys, I was a Rebel before anyone else was who are making these movies now. Just for the record, and I’m certainly not a liberal. I have no sympathy for Kylo Ren or Darth Vader. I have never liked the bad guys in these films so I’m not sure the filmmakers really understand their modern audiences the way that George Lucas did. Instead, Lucasfilm and Disney are happy to just pick every demographic that’s out there and plop them into the plot and make all the white males the villains and hope that nobody gets pissed off and refuses to see their movie. I tried not to notice, but it was very distracting.DA1609EC-8629-457B-93C3-C7172250F5B8

Way back in the first Star Wars movie Han Solo says to Princess Leia—“now if we can avoid any female advice, we might be able to get outta here,” or something to that effect. Well, the members of the Resistance would have been wise to listen to that—because in this new film there is no Han Solo to keep all these crazy overly emotional women in check—and they’ve pretty much ruined the Resistance. The Poe Dameron character tries to fill in the shows of Han Solo’s pragmatism, but the women end up shooting him and incapacitating him into a feeble position several times demoting him and harassing him as if he were an imbecile—when really, he’s the best that they have. Han Solo always was the older guy and had a father knows best quality in regard to Luke and Leia. Now they are the ones in charge and Leia has ruined the Resistance and Luke is hiding on an island ready to die—to quit the world. Without thinking about things too much, the movie is still fun—but with a little analysis it doesn’t take much to sympathize with Ben Solo who essentially rebelled against all this stupidity and became seduced by Snoke to essentially run the First Order.

The First Order seems to have unlimited money and resources when the Resistance is supposed to be fighting for the Republic which is the current governing power. So the question I had for the whole movie is that if the First Order were so bad, how did they get such great wealth? There was an attempt to explain that a casino planet where many of the galaxies rich and famous resided was how the First Order obtained all its power—but honestly the point failed to be made. All I heard was some chubby Asian chick yack on about how evil money and wealth was while she and Finn tried to figure out how to save the Resistance for which her sister had given her life. I wanted to pull her aside and say—“hey little lady—try making a little money so that you can fund your rebellion and stop resting on ideas of hope and sympathy to get your point across. You might have more luck.”

That’s what makes these movies made by liberal San Francisco young people different from George Lucas who came from a small business background and made the Star Wars movies with great personal risk and cost to himself. Even though George was a political liberal he was a fiscal conservative when it came to making movies and the industry was better for it—and so were his characters. That is missing from the prequel films and these made by the next generation. These filmmakers have all the budgets and resources they need whereas Lucas didn’t and that certainly shows up in the final product. The special effects company Industrial Light & Magic got it reputation from the first Star Wars movies. Now everyone expects excellence, so there’s that element as well. It’s a lot harder to WOW an audience now than it used to be so the emphasis is obviously spent on doing that for fans. I see that it hurts the story, but that is an older guy speaking. Kids will love these movies and they should—they are the best morality tales available to young people, so the benefits are obvious.

The Last Jedi ended in a way that I thought probably should end all Star Wars movies, because there will never be a way to top that last scene with Luke. It was pretty magnificent. And I left the theater thinking about big lofty ideas about whether or not the dead and vanished would even care what goes on in the world of the living. In Star Wars they do, and it’s a fascinating concept that more than made up for some of the obvious liberalism. But even better than the movie was the experience of seeing it at the Cinebistro. They certainly did a good job there, and around the theater with all the Christmas decorations. For me that night was probably the climax of the entire Holiday season and I couldn’t have expected more. A good movie to watch in a top-class movie theater at a top-class entertainment district within my home town. It’s the way these kinds of experiences are supposed to be, and thankfully for one night everything was perfect and I’m very thankful for that.

Rich Hoffman

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The Emails of Peter Strzok and his adulterous lover Lisa Page: When the FBI becomes the enemy

The real issue is not who won the Alabama Senate seat, which should have easily have gone to Roy Moore, but was surrendered to the Democrat—the main issue is how deep the Deep State truly is. After all, in the case of Roy Moore, establishment Republicans were openly hoping for the Democrat to win, because they essentially wanted to give up their majority so that they can passive aggressively stop the Trump agenda. The best way for them to do that is to surrender their majority and take the light of responsibility off themselves. They used some nonsense 40-year-old story to pull their support of Moore so that they could do everything they could as Never Trumpers to halt the reforms taking place under the new administration. In that regard the much bigger story yesterday and going forward was the extent that the FBI played in tampering with the election—forget the Russians—it was our own intelligence agencies who were trying to stop Trump to protect establishment politics. The proof is in the very explicit text messages that are now out between lead investigator Peter Strzok and his adulterous lover Lisa Page. As reported by Fox News below, it was obvious that these two had serious opinions about Trump’s nomination to the head of the Republican Party. That wouldn’t have been an issue except that they sought to use the wheels of government to manipulate the situation against the American voter. Have a look for yourself:

Text messages between FBI officials Peter Strzok and Lisa Page in 2016 that were obtained by Fox News on Tuesday refer to then-candidate Donald Trump as a “loathsome human” and “an idiot.”

More than 10,000 texts between Strzok and Page were being reviewed by the Justice Department after Strzok was removed from Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia probe after it was revealed that some of them contained anti-Trump content.

The messages were sent during the 2016 campaign and contain discussions about various candidates. On March 2, Strzok texted Page that someone “asked me who I’d vote for, guessed [Ohio Gov. John] Kasich.”

“Seriously?! Would you not [vote] D[emocrat]?” Page responded.

“I don’t know,” Strzok answered. “I suppose Hillary [Clinton].”

“I would [vote] D,” Page affirmed.

Two days later, Page texted Strzok, “God, Trump is a loathsome human.”

“Yet he many[sic] win,” Strzok responded. “Good for Hillary.”

Later the same day, Strzok texted Page, “Omg [Trump’s] an idiot.”
“He’s awful,” Page answered.

“America will get what the voting public deserves,” said Strzok, to which Page responded. “That’s what I’m afraid of.”

Later that same day, Strzok texted Page, “Ok I may vote for Trump.”

“What?” answered Page. “Poor Kasich. He’s the only sensible man up there.”

“He was pretty much calling for death for [NSA leaker] Edward Snowden,” Strzok said. “I’m a single-issue voter. 😉 Espionage Machine Party.”

Strzok later told Page, “Exacty [sic] re Kasich. And he has ZERO appeal.”

Twelve days later, after Trump took a commanding lead in the Republican delegate race with victories in key “Super Tuesday” primaries, Page texted Strzok, “I can not believe Donald Trump is likely to be an actual, serious candidate for president.”

Four months later, Strzok and Page exchanged messages mocking Trump and his family at the Republican National Convention.

“Oooh, TURN IT ON, TURN IT ON!!! THE DO*CHEBAGS ARE ABOUT TO COME OUT,” Strzok texted Page on July 19. “You can tell by the excitable clapping.”

Later, Strzok reached out to Page again, saying, “Omg. You listening to npr? Apparently Melania’s speech had passages lifted from Michelle Obama’s…Unbelievable.”

“NO WAY!” Page answered, adding “God, it’s just a two-bit organization. I do so hope his disorganization comes to bite him hard in November.”

On Aug. 6, Page texted Strzok a New York Times article about Muslim lawyer Khzir Khan, who became embroiled in a war of words with Trump after Khan spoke at the Democratic National Convention.

“Jesus. You should read this. And Trump should go f himself,” Page wrote in a message attached to the article.

“God that’s a great article,” Strzok answered. “Thanks for sharing. And F TRUMP.”

Strzok, who was an FBI counterintelligence agent, was reassigned to the FBI’s human resources division after the discovery of the exchanges with Page, with whom he was having an affair. Page was briefly on Mueller’s team, but has since returned to the FBI.

House Intelligence Committee investigators have long regarded Strzok as a key figure in the chain of events that began when the bureau, in 2016, received the infamous anti-Trump “dossier” and launched a counterintelligence investigation into Russian meddling in the election that ultimately came to encompass FISA surveillance of a Trump campaign associate.

Strzok briefed the committee on Dec. 5, 2016, sources said. But within months of that session House Intelligence Committee investigators were contacted by an informant suggesting that there was “documentary evidence” that Strzok was purportedly obstructing the House probe into the dossier.

Strzok also oversaw the bureau’s interviews with ousted National Security Adviser Michael Flynn – who pleaded guilty to lying to FBI investigators in the Russia probe.

He also was present during the FBI’s July 2016 interview with Hillary Clinton at the close of the email investigation, shortly before then-FBI director James Comey called her actions “extremely careless” without recommending criminal charges.

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2017/12/12/texts-between-ex-mueller-team-members-emerge-calling-trump-loathsome-human-idiot.html

https://twitter.com/overmanwarrior/status/941114109394812934

No wonder the FBI didn’t want to turn over these records to a House committee on the matter. This is very serious, even more serious than our media outlets are giving credence too. If you add this to the totality of the whole Deep State story we are dealing with major corruption of government resources for the entire purpose of picking and choosing the heads of states. No wonder Obama was so arrogantly free of confiding his actions to the rules contained within our Constitution. Seeing all this, nobody could have someone like Strzok gathering evidence against the Trump administration or working with Hillary Clinton during the campaign in any capacity. This only confirms the wildest conspiracy theories that were out there about the motivations of the FBI. Now we have the proof and we are required to act on it—which is a responsibility we can’t turn away from.

Trump’s election exposed all this, as we’ve discussed before. When a solution was presented as to why nothing ever gets done—which is why we elected Trump—known for his ability to achieve things, that is when the excuses were taken away from the establishment types and the Deep State which protected the aristocracy of Belt Way politics took action—which exposed them as insurgents. As it turns out, everyone was in on the game. Those people are so happy that Roy Moore didn’t win in the Alabama election because to their mind that was one less person they must contend with in maintaining a government that is more progressive and to their liking. They still plan to push Trump out of office by any means necessary, so from their point of view, things are easier with Moore not in a senate seat. They don’t consider that the other side—the people who did put Trump in office might have something to say about it if they are robbed of their election choice, and that arrogance is obvious in the actions of FBI agent Peter Strzok and his lover Lisa Page.

Rich Hoffman

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