How to Stop Gun Violance in American Schools: The answer is in the roots of our basic philosophy

It was never a mystery as to why all these school shootings are occurring. It’s two things really, one is that they are government places which are gun free zones, and the second is that they are essentially liberal places filled with liberal people who think liberal things. The shooter in this case was Dimitrios Pagourtzis who killed 10 and wounded at least 10 more at Santa Fe High School who admittingly shot up people he didn’t like, based on his own statements. The kid wore a trench coat with leftist Soviet era propaganda on it and apparently, he wore it often, even when it was 90 degrees outside. It’s not a mystery that these kids are snapping as reality outside of these government schools are clashing with the leftist learning they get in those places. Dimitrios intended to kill himself after he used a shotgun and a revolver he stole from his dad and attacked people he didn’t like in an art class at that small high school around 7 AM Friday morning of May 18th, 2018.

https://www.westernjournal.com/ct/school-shooter-anti-trump-icon/

Yet it was perplexing as many news reporters covered the story and continued to ask—why are these school shootings happening and what can we do about it. Well, first you must arm the teachers and make those schools gun zones to discourage the kind of carnage that kids like this Dimitrios Pagourtzis was—troubled youth that have had their minds filled with leftist ideology that is not conducive to the world outside of their schools. If those kids don’t have strong peer groups, girlfriends, or goals in life that might otherwise keep their thoughts in check, then they will be prone to violence and will have to be destroyed once they initiate an attack. I would guess that there are hundreds of thousands of kids out there in America just like this Dimitrios kid and they aren’t going to go away soon. Even if we put together again all the broken homes, started teaching kids the correct things in those government schools, and managed to convince the entertainment industry to stop publishing such angry music, movies, television shows, and video games—it would take 50 years to begin to solve the problem. Gun violence and murderous kids are going to be a part of American schools for the foreseeable future. Why you might ask—well, it’s because those schools made those kids the way they are. Its their own fault, a fault of liberal sentiment aligned with improper philosophy that is collapsing against the merits of reality. It’s pretty simple.

Of course the political left is going to blame guns, because they can’t blame themselves. They can’t admit it is their failed policies and beliefs that are causing all these kids to become mass murderers. This actually is a global problem and is rooted in philosophy itself, the epistemological beliefs of society itself. Most places in the world are to the political left of even the liberals in America. While its true that we don’t hear much about mass murder violence in schools in France, or in China, the kind of trouble that Dimitrios Pagoutizis exhibited manifests in other ways, either in sexual depravity, body piercings and tattoos, and generally a somber existence that is quite typical of most Europeans and members of the Asian corridor. But because in the United States there is a Constitution that is rooted in a very independent philosophy of self-governance, the emphasis has always been on the individual with expectations that each would do their part to conduct themselves properly in context with the greater society. The right to own and use guns for self-defense were always intended to protect that individual sanctity from the kind of group think that is so persistent elsewhere in the world and has been failing for many centuries.

Yet the political left in the America which would be considered the far right in almost every other country in the world has brought these clashing ideas into North America and made them the basic platform of the tax payer funded schools that kids are learning in. Yet those ideas are not conducive to the capitalist society that those same kids find themselves in once their school days have concluded, leaving many to face a very fearful future filled with anxieties that their parents are becoming increasingly ill prepared to help them with. That is largely also the fault of the government schools which actively has sought to replace parents in the home with a parental authority figure within the school. That is an experiment that has not worked. It hasn’t worked in Europe, it certainly hasn’t worked in Mexico and all through South America and Canada—it doesn’t work in Australia, and New Zealand—it doesn’t work anywhere. It appears to work in communist countries like China because they hide all their domestic statistics from the world—the misery factor is obscured with state-controlled polling data that is not representative of the individualized lives of their citizens—because communist countries in Asia do not care about individuals. They are concerned with the affairs of the state as a whole—so analysis from those places cannot be trusted. Obviously, the American model should be studied by all people of the world since it is within North America that the most successful economies anywhere are found, and the quality of living for each person are extremely high. Even our poorest of the poor in America would be considered to live a great life if compared to the average villager in Africa or India. So in the context of who should learn from whom, it’s quite clear that America does enough things correctly to merit a philosophy shift that is conducive for success in other countries. Yet American schools do not respect or teach those values, so it’s really not practical to expect other countries to do what’s right for their people and make the necessary changes. Instead the political left has declared a civil war against the American right and they purposely have used our own youth against us as weapons. It is the American leftists who built the mind of Dimitrios Pagourtzis. You don’t see kids with strong mothers and fathers in the home that take their kids fishing every Saturday running around in black trench coats covered in Soviet propaganda trying to kill other kids. You certainly don’t see kids growing up in homes of NRA members entering adulthood with lots of crazy anxieties that prove to be self-destructive—where other people get hurt as a result. There is a reason that families that put God and guns at the front of their epistemological beliefs do better than families who turn to mother government for their basic necessities. Those two groups can’t be put together and expect everything to just work out.

The answer is easy in how we can stop this violence in our government schools—stop letting those places be run by liberals who teach liberal ideas to kids who don’t know any better and make them gun zones. Put guns on the teachers so they can do more than pull fire alarms and can engage a threat at the point of attack and end the misery quickly, before 10 people are slaughtered for no reason. This is not a problem that can be solved by politics or any legislation. Politics is born of philosophy, so if a philosophy is wrong, obviously the politics will fail as well. Gun ownership is not a political problem, it is part of a philosophy of self-reliance—and education comes out of that branch of thought. So to solve the problem you have to fix the philosophy that feeds the politics, and in this case left leaning philosophies are proven failures everywhere in the world they are utilized. That means that if we really want to fix these government schools, we must use American ideas to solve them, not the same old European failures and until that happens, there are many more Dimitrios Pagourtizis types waiting to snap and make a name for themselves at the expense of others before they kill themselves. And those are facts we all must deal with.

Rich Hoffman

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Why I’m So Excited for Han Solo’s Movie: A brief history of cinema and the progressive attempts to control the messaging of American values

If you study any ancient society—or any society at all for that matter, scientists and historians always find a way to rationalize their successes or failures on a few key elements. They will proclaim a civilization may have been successful because of their proximity to water, or key trade routes. Or fertile soil, access to natural resources, abundance of food—those types of things. The truly great societies are often judged by the artists they produced and the literature they performed. In a lot of ways entire societies are judged based on the written works produced by their cultures, such as in England with William Shakespeare, or Ireland’s James Joyce. But we don’t really have enough history yet to properly understand how our modern age of great art and entertainment will recoil through the ages, because most of it is so new. American movies for instance are underplayed in their importance to how they shape world culture—because they essentially have only been around for a century, so the effects on people as a whole are still being determined. But I have a pretty good idea how those results will be determined as judged by time and it is for that reason that I am so excited when a new film comes out that I know will be a game changer in the way that art shapes society. That is why I am so excited for this new Solo: A Star Wars Story as it is being produced by Disney. Something very different is going on with this one and if it turns out the way I’m thinking, there will be shock waves percolating through the industry as a whole that will favor the political trajectory of the modern Donald Trump age—and that’s a really good thing. To get a good idea of what I’m talking about read this fine movie review about Solo: A Star Wars Story in Forbes. I don’t think I could have written a better one.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/markhughes/2018/05/18/review-solo-a-star-wars-story/#48a5365b7dd8

Over that same century that movies came to be as a form of new art and entertainment liberals under the umbrella of progressivism made their move to spread tyrannical socialism to every corner of the world. Movies didn’t always reflect this socialism because the cultures they were speaking to had emerged before the progressive move to take over the world essentially. Westerns specifically were a group of movies that told stories of Americans yearning for freedom at any cost and the values that could be inflicted on large tracts of unpopulated land with the barrel of a gun pointed at a bad guy, and on the backs of that concept, Hollywood was essentially born. It was westerns that propelled the film industry into being such an important artistic endeavor that became the envy of the world. Not only had America created this interesting artistic machine known as Hollywood that mass-produced art and entertainment in such an excessive capitalist fashion. But it could do so in seemingly infinite quantities quickly spreading the culture of a free North America to every part of the world that had electricity.

Progressives saw this power and sought to take it over starting before World War II but really beginning to succeed in the late 1960s. But some of the best films of that time still came from filmmakers who made movies in the traditional way of Hollywood before the liberal invasion and it was those films that carried Hollywood into the modern age financially. Star Wars is a great example of the type of America that used to show up in the movies of its culture—B movies made quickly and cheaply for Saturday Morning Matinee entertainment. George Lucas was often derided by his peers in the film industry for wanting to make such old-fashioned throwbacks to the old westerns and science fiction films of his own youth—yet the Hollywood liberals built and industry around the commercial success of those movies and the history of all that is well-known.

Fast forward to my excitement in 2012 when I found out that there were going to be more Star Wars movies because Disney had bought the franchise from George Lucas for $4 billion dollars and I had high hopes. I also had my concerns which I expressed to everyone who would listen, including the key people at Lucasfilm. I did not like The Force Awakens not just because they had killed the character of Han Solo, but because they had cheapened that very popular fan favorite into a much weaker progressive character as was reflective of the attempt by Hollywood to follow a more progressive political agenda for which they sought to take over the entertainment industry in the first place. But I kept my mind open because I knew they were planning to make a Han Solo movie in the future so I stayed on the ship awaiting the results of that to figure out if I would continue to support the artistic efforts of Star Wars in the future—or relegate that it had died with the Disney acquisition. Thankfully I am quite happy to say, the financial viability of Star Wars as a business has won out and the filmmakers at Lucasfilm and Disney have come to terms with what works and what doesn’t in that particular universe of storytelling—which is essentially the values of the traditional westerns in America, and they have unleashed all that into this new Han Solo movie.

That’s important because Solo: A Star Wars Story is not about social justice, or the mysticism of religions—its not about altruism and all that garbage—its much more of an Ayn Rand type of story which is what I have always said was the core value system of Star Wars. Han Solo has always been and will always be best when he reflects more a character that would be written by Ayn Rand in The Fountainhead or Atlas Shrugged than from Les Misérables. Star Wars fails when it tries to be reflective of European literature more than American bravado and that lesson has been reluctantly unleashed in Solo: A Star Wars Story, which is all about guns, getting rich and taking care of the character’s self-interests.

Of course, the liberal aspects of Hollywood are hoping that this Solo: A Star Wars Story will fail at the box office, and for that to happen the industry will pounce on any numbers that don’t reach a billion dollars globally, or under $600 million domestically. Anything short of that and this Solo movie will be destroyed in the press much the way Donald Trump’s presidency is under constant attack because it threatens the status quo. But as I have been saying for many, many years—Star Wars is best when it is about all the things I described this upcoming movie to be as opposed to the self-sacrifice and general altruism of the Jedi and the Skywalker portions of the saga. Without Han Solo, I’d say there is no Star Wars. So to their credit, they listened at Lucasfilm and Disney has not been shy with the money and has thrown their full weight behind this movie knowing that it goes against the general strategies of the progressive community. And they had to do it because economic necessity dictated that they protect the property of Star Wars from the politics of the modern age. The last time I saw Disney market this hard for something like a western was The Lone Ranger in 2013, which was financially successful, but was considered a big bomb at the box office. If I had to bet, I’d say that is why Bob Iger has been nowhere near the early previews of Solo: A Star Wars Story. He is keeping one foot in the world of deniability. But I don’t think he’ll have to throw anybody under the bus. I think this new Star Wars movie will make everyone happy at Disney, even if it does give them a political paradox to deal with.

Progressives would love to assume that they can shape culture—which is why they wanted to take over the movie business. Films were to reflect the cultures they came from and the values expressed which is what other nations wanted to see in American movies. People get excited to see things they can’t get at home or yearn to become themselves, so they enjoyed the lofty characters of the American westerns who shot first and asked questions later, who did whatever they had to do to get rich so they could live free of the rest of the tyrannical world. Thinking of the great Sergio Leone movies from the late 1960s, The Good the Bad and the Ugly, and For A Few Dollars More, the filmmakers were from Italy making westerns as they interpreted them, as a way out of the fascism that their country had just emerged from and the character emphasis wasn’t on saving the world or even a damsel in distress, it was in using a gun to get rich and live happily ever after alone and disconnected from the rules of society. That was always the allure of the Disney Pirates of the Caribbean movies, that is why the Fast and Furious movies make so much money, and that is the commitment behind Solo: A Star Wars Story.

With this being the fourth Star Wars story produced by Kathy Kennedy as the new head of Lucasfilm economic necessity has dictated a more traditional approach to their films. That is a great thing because it informs what the true values of our culture are which addresses at the most epistemological level values that are conducive to a successful modern culture reflective in movies, and not where Hollywood shapes culture. The values of people are inherit and they need to form their lives around those values—that is self-interest, acceptance of capitalism as the primary driver for success and improved lives. What could be a better message in Star Wars than a black character called Lando Calrissian who loves wealth and the fine things in life and became an extraordinarily successful businessman? Solo: A Star Wars Story may be the first movie in several decades that doesn’t demonize the acquisition of wealth. I doubt the movie will do well in China for that very reason, but that’s OK. Lucasfilm made this movie and hopefully people support it the way I’ve always said they would. I can say this, I am excited for it—for all these reasons and more. I think it’s a game changer that could very well alter the way Hollywood produces films, and that is not good for the progressive elements which have taken over. Like the presidency of Donald Trump, Star Wars is rooted in old-fashioned values, and that was something that Hollywood has wanted to destroy but find that they must reconcile with if they want to live into the future. I never honestly thought I’d ever see a Hollywood product like this movie, where guns are as much of the plot as the pursuit of personal wealth and freedom. But here it is, and my hope is that people show up and support it, because it took a lot of guts to make it—and for Lucasfilm and Disney—it’s a tremendous gamble that could pay off big for them—and the rest of us.

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

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

Fun night. Warm reception. Thanks to those who attended last night #Cannes #HanSolo Cast a blast https://t.co/lpI6H1Xvfn

— Ron Howard (@RealRonHoward) May 16, 2018

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

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

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

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

Fun from our post premiere party #Cannes #HanSolo #May25 pic.twitter.com/zmgwj72K7w

— Ron Howard (@RealRonHoward) May 17, 2018

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

The Socialists of Seattle: Jeff Bezos tried to feed red meat to the wolves, and they bit him

Way back in 2013 I told you dear reader about Kshama Sawant, the socialist who was recently elected to city council in Seattle. Remember that? Well, she and the rest of her socialist brethren have proven me more than 100% correct with their anti-American brand of socialism that is going after the rich at every turn these days. The budget of Seattle is a disaster and these idiots are seeking measures to pay homeless shelters and taxing their big businesses to cover the costs—which has already pushed Boeing to remove a lot of jobs from the city to avoid the high taxes. Now the Seattle City Council has voted a new “head tax on their large businesses with an 8 to 1 vote on any company that earns $20 million or more in annual sales, 14 cents per employee hour, in an effort to raise $50 million per year toward outreach efforts for the homeless, including affordable housing and emergency shelters. This is what happens when people who have no idea what the value of businesses are truly for their communities or lack the understanding of what makes people homeless in the first place. Throwing money at the problem by stealing it from valuable companies is not the way to solve the problem. But when people follow the failed philosophy of Karl Marx, this is what you get in human intellect—deficient people too stupid to help themselves.

It’s a little funny that the big time liberal Jeff Bezos tried to appease these socialists in Seattle with his war on Trump by using The Washington Post as his personal blog to create an impeachment of his billionaire rival. Bezos is now the richest man in the world and he gambled wrong in thinking that the socialists of Seattle would stay away from him because of their mutual hatred of Trump. Obviously, Bezos is a smart guy who runs a great business in Amazon. But like many in his position he got caught trying to feed the wolves red meat hoping they would go away. Instead they only became hungrier.

The thing with socialists is that they always are looking for people of value that they can steal money from in an effort to call it “social justice,” “equality for all” and one for all and all for one, and all that garbage. Socialists mask their parasitic tendencies behind altruistic intentions, but what they really are reveals itself in decisions like their Seattle Head Tax—theft granted by government for the sake of those who work and produce and those who simply are too lazy to exist on their own. Socialists are those who want to live off the efforts of others, its that simple. There isn’t anything morally just about their actions, they are thieves—pure and simple.

If Jeff Bezos didn’t build Amazon up bit by bit over the last several decades what would it be? Would Kshama Sawant create Amazon, would the city council? Would the homeless people they want to help make Amazon the great company that it is today? If Jeff Bezos didn’t have all those sleepless nights in the 1990s when he was building his empire of e-commerce with distribution warehouses all over the nation for a business that was on the cutting edge at best—where were the socialists of Seattle back then—playing video games, reading books about Karl Marx, protesting the breeding patters of fruit flies cut off from a thousand-year old hole in the ground where someone wanted to build a housing development? They certainly weren’t trying to create jobs like Jeff Bezos was.

In a capitalist society—in ANY society a job creator is one of the most important aspects of civilization. Without job creators there is no economic expansion. Government doesn’t create jobs unless you count useless bureaucratic positions equivalent to slow ass workers at the BMV or a Clerk of Courts. People like Jeff Bezos and Donald Trump have far more value than a socialist looter trying to use the power of government to steal the hard work of those who take the big chances in business to create jobs from nothing. Yet where Bezos went wrong is that he tried to appease those progressive minded by tossing money at them hoping they’d go away—only they didn’t. Once they realized where the money was—after all Bezos is now known as the world’s richest man—and he lives in the neighborhood so to speak of people like Kshama Sawant—their target went to him. For a socialist it’s like a nice pile of shit for a fly to swoop on to take away all they could get while the gettin’ was good. Such lessons have come hard and now Amazon doesn’t have much choice in the matter, they’ll have to move their operations out of the Seattle area. Starbucks is in the same situation—Seattle is now notoriously unfriendly to business, and the word is out. Businesses will have to leave Seattle.

I was in Paris, France recently and the effects of their open socialism is grotesquely obvious. There are no big chain restaurants, no big factories—not like there should be for such a large city with so much history. The socialism of France has pushed away so much business investment because it’s a pain in the ass to do anything. It’s hard to even use the restroom in Paris, even near the tourist attractions the restrooms were dirty, and they charge you money to use them. I was stunned to see a toll turn style at the bathroom at Notre Dame with some Pakistani guy smoking a cigarette and collecting $2 a piss. I told him I’d just piss on the sidewalk outside which is what I dd. And so were about five other guys. No wonder Paris these days smells like piss everywhere you go. The city to deal with the exodus of their most productive turned to immigration to refill their empty apartments which has created their current crises—of mixing Muslims from the Middle East with the Christian Crusaders of old to extract revenge for the long conflict between religions that are left over from the Dark Ages. Instead of thinking of building new vehicles for space and colonizing Mars, the people of Paris are trying to keep piss off the sidewalks and nobody in their right mind is opening up a McDonald’s with free bathrooms across from the Eiffel Tower. Socialism has destroyed the opportunities for private investment to make a deal.

I’ve seen plenty of homeless people, I got to know them quite well in Canterbury, England where I’ve spent some time living in the city. Because of the social justice policies of that town ran by first the church, then by a much more socialist government in England after World War II homeless people have been incentivized into sleeping on the sidewalks. They are actually well fed and people befriend them letting them know that there is a safety net in case they fall from life. Knowing that, the weakest among us tend to throw in the towel too soon and retreat to a sleeping bag on the sidewalk rather than to shake a drug addiction, a family problem or whatever crises has come at them and destroyed their ambitions. When you give people free shelter, food and companionship—what reason do they have to keep fighting in life? Nothing, which is why when you start giving such people resources you get more of them, not less.

So Seattle has quite a problem now and there is no end in sight. I think it’s a good thing that the people of America can watch Kshama Sawant and her city council destroy their city, because it’s a good warning shot to the rest of the nation—socialism is dangerous, and it doesn’t work. And this is also a good lesson for people like Jeff Bezos. He should have never have tried to appease the socialists in the way that head hunters tried to appease their gods with human sacrifice, because it just makes the blood thirsty even thirstier. The only way out of all these messes is more capitalism and a defining stance against socialism before everyone can advance. Anybody who wants to help the homeless truly will learn these lessons quickly, the best way to keep people off the streets is to give them a job and let them earn their way through life. Giving things away for free while stealing from those who work hard and truly are people of value destroys opportunity for everyone. And that is something I think we can all agree is not what we want to see happening.

Rich Hoffman
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Uber Elevate in West Chester, Ohio: Getting ready for the future, because its on our doorstep–all we have to do is open the door

Sign me up, Uber doesn’t even have to sell me on it. I have been all about skycars for over two decades now and understand that this form of transportation was always the key to our future as human beings—everywhere in the world. It is time for that great technical leap and I am prepared to do whatever needs to be done to bring a skyport to my town of West Chester, Ohio. Let me provide a situational necessity for why Uber Elevate is needed not just in my home city of Cincinnati, but in every city. Here is a problem I run in to several times a year, I have business guests from out-of-town. At the conclusion of our business day they go back to their hotel, usually a few miles down the road in the heart of West Chester, Ohio. Before they leave, I offer to take them to a Reds game, which they almost always accept, especially in the Diamond seats for the full Mercedes-Benz sponsored luxury experience. The game starts at 7:10 PM, but to take advantage of the dinner option, we need to arrive an hour early. Our business day ended at 5:30 PM but the relatively short drive from West Chester to downtown Cincinnati just to the south takes an hour due to the traffic congestion. That doesn’t leave my guests any time to change cloths and get ready, and still have time to get to the game without missing something. What I need in those situations is to go to a Uber Skyport over by the Top Golf complex with my three guests and fly down to the stadium landing at the Uber Skyport at the Banks. From there we would simply walk into the stadium and enjoy our game without any delays or traffic anxiety. And a successful day of business would be concluded in the most optimal way possible. After the game I would dial-up a Uber Elevate vehicle from my phone app which would be waiting on us at the skyport pad to take us all home. The reality of that experience is about five years away with a realistic projection date of 2023.

I watched the Uber Elevate presentation that they did this past week with great enthusiasm. When I saw that NASA was affiliated with their project I was even more impressed, finally after many years there was a viable plan to take transportation into the air where it belonged with a viable business model. Most of the technical problems have been worked out ironically with the toy drones that we can all get at Target or Wal-Mart. But these drones are just bigger and can hold passengers. The variable speed engines to provide the lift and computer-controlled adjustments that had to be made to deal with wind shears and other weather anomalies were present and it was now time to finally have an intelligent discussion about personal transportation by way of sky transport.

The Uber Elevate concept would need to be in high population areas to work well and my town of West Chester is just the perfect location for one of the opening cities. Already Uber Elevate is set to start operations in 2023 in the Dallas area and in Los Angeles. But quickly they will spread to other cities once public trust can be built with the new technology. With most of the current skycar designs there really isn’t any way that the vehicles will fall out of the sky. There are too many propellers on them to allow a vehicle to fall, the resistance of the air passing through the blades would have a kind of paper airplane effect in case of irreparable power failure. But that is a worse case scenario. In so many ways the Uber Elevate vehicles would be many times safer than a conventional car because it has upward mobility to keep it out of the trajectory of other vehicles. Riding in a Uber Elevate vehicle would be very comfortable and not violent in any way. It would be smooth and transitional from takeoff to destination landing. It would be no scarier than riding an elevator in a sky scrapper and looking out the windows once at the top levels.

Like it or not this is where transportation is going—its where it must go. There will always be a need for cars and large trucks will always be in demand to deliver goods and services. But for personal transportation from city to city or even across a large metropolis, the Uber Elevate is the best option there is. Getting from one end of Manhattan to the other is best achieved by flying over everything, not with an expensive taxi ride stuck in traffic every block of that big city. With Uber Elevate you would just walk to a building near Central Park and take the elevator up to the top floor where a Uber Elevate Skyport would be located and grab a transport to the financial district with a short five-minute flight over blocks and blocks of traffic. There is no infrastructure investment either at the ground level or underneath the city, everything would be vertical, which is the whole purpose of cities.

Even though part of the Uber Elevate presentation makes the assumption that cities will continue to grow vertically, such as in Mexico City, I can say that I don’t think people will be moving into cities—cities tend to expand outward as the tax problems of urban development pushes away wealth into the suburbs. That means that for people who work in the cities but live out in the suburbs the highway system just can’t deal with all the commerce, which is why it takes in Cincinnati an hour to drive down I-75 a mere 12 miles during rush hour. Getting to a Cincinnati Reds game from where I live is very difficult and in West Chester that is where so much business is done these days in the Cincinnati area. It’s not done downtown because it’s too difficult to get in and out of the city. But with Uber Elevate, much of that problem is solved. I can think of at least one downtown Cincinnati parking garage near City Hall just south of the Convention Center that would make a perfect Uber Elevate Skyport—and it would do big business in that location.

That means what is left to do to make all this happen is we need to get some money people together for the initial investment and we need to solve the political problems and all the regulations that currently stand in the way of making such a thing happen. The prototypes are already there and will be ready for flight by 2020. That only gives us three years to build the skyports and work out the navigational routes—for instance in the example I provided, buying the land and building skyports in both West Chester, Ohio and on the Banks in Cincinnati. Eventually of course within the subsequent years there would be hubs of skyports all around the I-275 loop, just as there would be in every big city that could transport people in and out of their cities easily and to all points around their metropolitan areas. Once that network was established then there would be city to city travel, such as from Cincinnati to Indianapolis, or Chicago to Detroit, Los Angeles to Las Vegas and so on. That is the way of the future and I am happy that we are now on the doorstep to it. Now all we have to do is open the door. I’m ready—are you?

Rich Hoffman

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A Rapidly Changing World: The freedom of new media is making all the difference

I had a few unique thoughts as I watched at 3 AM in the morning President Trump greet the three prisoners recently released from North Korea. My ol’ friend Gery Deer published his last article titled “Deer in the Headlines” in the Jamestown Comet, a newspaper he has written for over the last ten years largely due to it had become a negative influence in his life. He did a spot-on Channel 2 in Dayton featuring his reasons which I thought were interesting, and very reflective—and actually indicative of the kind of world we were becoming as North Korea came to the table and decided to play nice for a change. The reasons that caused that change were not the ones that created them in the first place and in lots of ways traditional media had been to blame. It took a president and a whole lot of new thinking people to break down the barriers created by the old ways of doing things—like the local newspapers that controlled the sentiment of each community. People involved in that old way are having a hard time figuring out what kind of world we are living in. To them everything is upside down—which I think is a wonderful thing. But it is not lost to me how people are feeling pain in the transition.

From @livingdaytontv talks about #change and how it can affect you as we say goodbye to #DeerInHeadlines. #motivatable #changeisgood #life https://t.co/YxYZLTFH7Q

— Gery L. Deer (@gerydeer) May 7, 2018

About ten years ago I knew all the media in my town of Cincinnati. I regularly corresponded with newspaper reporters and reporters from the main television news networks. Back then community comment sections were the hottest part of a newspaper that people read, and I was a frequent contributor. I also wrote for other publications as my work was published in Forbes and American Thinker. I had written a few books and done what authors did, learned to autograph them and attend conventions and film festivals promoting my work the way everything was traditionally done. As many know I have a lot of experience with talk radio and have even hosted a few shows from time to time appearing on big national shows and some local powerhouse stations in Cincinnati, and even doing work for one of my favorites WAAM in Ann Arbor, Michigan. I also did some work out in Hollywood and had several projects bouncing around Wilshire Blvd during the 1990s working with agents to get things done—so I had some point of reference when I started my blog Overmanwarrior’s Wisdom in 2010 to essentially drive elements of the growing Tea Party movement in a positive direction, because I could see that traditional media wasn’t enough. Newspaper editors didn’t give enough words per page to flush out complete thoughts, and television only provided 3 to 4-minute segments. Talk radio wasn’t much better, they only gave you about 12 minutes per segment, and many of the things that were coming on the horizon politically, and philosophically required much deeper thinking. Not even the publishing industry was fast enough to deal with all the changes. By the time someone wrote a book on a subject, the information was outdated, so what was needed was something that was vast, articulate, and could string a storyline of ideas over years in a very dynamic fashion. That was the reasoning for my decision to pretty much give up on all that traditional media and put my extra efforts into what has become Overmanwarrior’s Wisdom.

Of course, nobody in traditional media wants to acknowledge that a blog has any real power. They refer to them as personal rant pages as if they were just the opinions of some loser Facebook poster. I don’t see them that way at all, rather I see a blog as a replacement for the opinion pages of newspapers, which is precisely what has happened. My blog is very popular, it gets many thousands of impressions each week and it has had great staying power. People from all over the world are still reading things I have written over five to eight years ago, where most newspapers scrap their content after a few years or charge subscriptions that people would be crazy to pay for information they can get free elsewhere. A major advantage that a blog has over other forms of media are that there really isn’t any advertising. I do a little on my site for issues that I care about, but not like a newspaper that has pages of ads that nobody wants to see just to get a little bit of news.

A blog also doesn’t have a lot of unnecessary bureaucracy. Editors are notoriously liberal, so even if you tend to be a conservative columnist, there is a bunch of rules that typically must be followed to get your work through the editor. I found that even in the most conservative publications that I had worked with in the past, that most of my best ideas would be scrutinized beyond recognition by the time it made it through the editing process—and I decided I didn’t want that kind of thing in my life. The trade-off is one of quality control, its good to have good clean editing to clean up written articles, but on the other hand, its likely better to get raw opinions from the writer to truly flush out opinions. I have decided that the raw expansive thoughts were better for my readers than a tightly controlled publication that was overly concerned with the structural aspects of writing. The rules weren’t as important as the content if you had to pick, and these days you do with the speed for which things happen. The news is happening so fast that all that extra scrutiny was getting in the way of an audience that wanted information and opinions faster than traditional media could produce that content.

Each day I write about 5000 to 6000 words, about 1500 on my blog site in articulate articles about a variety of topics and the remainder in a professional capacity, meaning I get paid. The blog to me is an even exchange, I flush out thoughts that people want to know more about. I’m not interested in squeezing out money from every little thing I do because I am more interested in helping to shape the world of tomorrow in a way that I can live with, so the words I produce I have no reason to get a monetary value for. And from experience I can say that my word content is very unusual—there are few people anywhere in the world who can produce that much material every day, seven days a week, yet I do and my readers have learned to trust that little light in the darkness. Working with traditional media, I often was frustrated that I could not get everything out that I wanted to say about something due to the limits provided. The thought process by traditional media was that if you couldn’t say what you needed to in five to ten minutes or in under 500 words, that you were rambling. But as I have learned over time, that was part of the problem, that approach, because many topics are very complicated, and they require extensive explanations to flush out the root causes of whatever we were talking about. As a writer I enjoy the freedom of not having slow minded editors and publication owners putting caps on my thoughts, so the blog is a much more powerful way to get a message out. And when you have a readership like I do, where some of the top minds in the country are reading everyday instead of reading the traditional newspapers, the effectiveness of communicating an opinion is much more powerful. My goal has always been to get people thinking—they don’t have to think just like I do, I just want people to think. I also don’t care about appeasing the masses in a popular way, I am more interested in the smart people who shape the world—truly. I really don’t care what some pot smoking lottery ticket buying loser thinks about what I say. But I do care about the billionaire, or the top-level politician and executive who makes decisions and needs to have context to think with.

And that brings us to North Korea and Donald Trump. If it were up to traditional media, those prisoners would have never been released and North Korea would still be acting like a country of tyrants. Donald Trump probably wouldn’t have been president either. A lot of the reason that traditional media hates Donald Trump is that he has proven them irrelevant, which hurts, but it’s the way of life these days. They have resisted the changes that were happening and stuck with what they knew rather than doing as I did, and that was to adapt. If you really enjoy writing, then write. If you want to get paid, then work for someone. I have a very successful career and I am personally very well sustained. I don’t need to sell my writing to validate my existence and there is a freedom in that. Yet it is within that freedom of new media that a passion for Donald Trump was able to take hold and elect someone out of the box, and it is because of his presidency that those North Korean prisoners were released. If we were still living in the days of printed media and half hour nighttime news broadcasts, the world would still be a much more dangerous place. Thankfully we aren’t, and I am very proud of the part that I play in all this. It has been certainly worth it and has been a very positive experience. Thinking is good, and anyway that we can get people to think is worth a lot more than a place card in traditional media. The respect obtained from media personalities is nothing compared to what comes from a job well done when people who need to hear important things at just the right time can take those words and save the world from itself.

Rich Hoffman

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Iran is Finished: Those with money always determine the rules–and the outcome

U.S. pres.'s shallow & ludicrous behavior wasn't unexpected. The same behavior existed in previous US presidents. Yet, Iranian nation is persistent while former U.S. presidents passed away & IRI is still standing. This man's corpse will also be worm food while IRI stands strong.

— Khamenei.ir (@khamenei_ir) May 9, 2018

How wonderful it is that Donald Trump as President of the United States pulled America out of that treacherous scam of a deal with Iran. With all the talk about how dangerous it was I have not heard a single media outlet tell the truth about Iran and why the Democrats under Obama were so willing to give so much to them without anything coming back in return. The answer which is key to the entire situation is that it was Marxist revolutionaries that moved in and took over the Iranian government in the late 1970s and they still rule to this day. Hidden behind the radical Islamic practices of showing anger toward the Sykes-Picot agreement of 1916 is the not so subtle push to spread Marxism to the entire planet, and to use force wherever necessary to do so. Most everything done in the Middle East including the support of Saddam Hussein of Iraq was to deal with the mess created by Sykes-Picot and the spread of Marxism that was generated in anger over that World War I negotiation. In the stalemate of a century of policy failures in that region it was always Marxism and a strong desire to spread socialism and communism to despot countries around the world, like Cuba, El Salvador, all of Africa, North Korea, Vietnam, Russia—virtually everywhere—which drove the politics of the Middle East. And the deal Obama’s administration made was meant to provide money to the struggling economy of Iran to keep them active in that original aim of spreading Marxism to every corner of the world through terrorism. Isn’t it something that nobody is talking about any of that?

The truth of the matter is that Iran isn’t much different from what happened to Venezuela in South America. Sitting on major oil reserves the world was willing to put up with the socialism and Marxism that was destroying the governments of those two countries—because of their oil. Socialism had already infected Europe, so they had no real reference point to judge the evils of the behavior in Iran—since they weren’t far from being in the same boat. Obama’s deal negotiated by John Kerry was designed to tie Europe, the United States and Iran together in an effort to keep the economy of the failing Iran together so they could perform their role in the great scheme of Marxist expansion.

Any college professor in America could tell you what I just did dear reader, which is why they support Iran mysteriously even though currently the country is the number one sponsor of terrorism. That is because most liberals support that Marxist spread of influence, and they are rooting for Iran to do their damage for the acquisition of socialist triumphs globally. But for everything to work the United States had to be involved because it is only from that capitalist country that there is any real value for Iran to loot and continue to exist. What Trump did was cut off that support. The deal Iran has with everyone else suddenly became worthless—Europe doesn’t have anything of any value to add. With the United States out of the deal, Iran has no cover and no way to prop themselves up on the world stage to hide their acts of terrorism, or to fund it.

Put another way that might be easier for people to understand, many years ago I had a group of family members who wanted me out of their way. They didn’t want me in the family and they wanted control of my wife. When I wasn’t intimidated by their outright aggressiveness toward me they regrouped and decided to play nice to my face in order to bring about financial ruin behind my back. The trouble was, my wife and I had great love for their children so if we wanted to see those children have a good life, we had to deal with these people in a civil fashion. These family members calculated they could put us in a dangerous position to bring about financial ruin to my family achieving their objectives of destroying me to get me out of it, because if I had no money, the thinking was, my wife would divorce me and they’d all live happily ever after—from their point of view. They didn’t care about my own children, or even my wife, they just wanted me out-of-the-way any way possible. So when frontal aggression failed to scare me off, they decided to make a “deal” and they used their children as the bargaining chips knowing we wouldn’t do anything to risk their wellbeing.

Once the father of these kids realized that I would do anything to make sure his kids were well off he became lazier and much less motivated to work. He spent most of his time lying around the house feeling sorry for himself and complaining that he wasn’t wealthy. Eventually the whole family ended up moving into my house because they had no place to go. I had to put up with it because the fear was that great harm would come to the children if we kicked them out. They had in many ways made themselves addicted to my every effort.

For many months on and off over several years the entire family loafed around and mooched off my efforts. My wife was a housewife, as she stayed home with our children. I was already carrying my whole family the way men have always been expected to. But now there was an entire family of five living in my house composing of nine people and essentially only one adult working. My situation was a perilous one, it was a situation that directly affected my wife. I thought having a knock down drag out fight might be needed which is how I prefer to do things, but then that would have damaged the children and the larger aspects of the family, so what was I to do? Things are almost never literal enough for a good fight, strategy is often the most important combatant, and winning without physical confrontation. Well, I worked three jobs, two of them full-time and one part-time on the weekends and I made enough money to cover everything. In doing so I accomplished two things, I gained leverage of the situation over the lazy parents who found themselves addicted to my efforts, and because of that, it gave me power over the situation to protect the children, for the sake of everyone involved. But for the husband of that ridiculous couple, I showed him that he wasn’t man enough to keep pace with me and he gradually withered away in guilt. It took a few years, but the experience destroyed him as a person, as he deserved it. I did all that work and I still made time to play with all the kids and help them anyway I could, and it had a major impact on them. They grew up moderately intact. Not the way they would have if my wife and I had raised them, but better than they would have been without us in their lives. The couple ended up divorced once the kids were grown, and in exactly the condition we predicted they would at the time. Looking back, I am proud of how we handled a very delicate situation. The key was that by having all the money in the situation it gave us the moral authority to do what needed to be done in the long run. Instead of giving them what they wanted, which was to crush me out of existence, I simply showed that I was so much of a man who I could hold up the entire world and then some—and still smile and have fun with life. Gaining the high ground is important in every major conflict if you can get it. Money in all civilized society decides who has the high ground and holding the high ground in an effortless fashion, meaning you do not give your enemy the impression that you are exhausted is the most demoralizing thing you can do to win over such opponents. And when they have ill intentions for your life–who the hell cares how much you hurt them.

Essentially this is what Trump has done with the Iran deal, only he has cut it off at the time when everyone was most addicted to America’s money. Like my situation, he had to wait for the kids to grow up, when they could no longer be harmed by any action on our part. For the United States that time came when North Korea decided it would rather have season tickets to NBA games from the West rather than carry on the failed policies of Kim Jung-Un’s communist father and grandfather. Once Iran was isolated, the time to choke off their income was there, and because they had grown dependent on the efforts of the United States, they are now unable to survive without the money from the most successful capitalist country on earth. Iran has no money to carry on their nuclear program, just as North Korea didn’t. And the Iranian people are tired of a Marxist regime limiting their opportunities for the future, so they are ripe for their own revolution back into a capitalist country. But they won’t act until the current Marxist regime is broke of money—so Trump made a move that Iran can’t survive. They will be crushed without anybody having to fire a single shot. Europe will be fine, and perfectly safe, because everything always depended on the United States, because it was they who had all the money. And when you have the money, you get to rule the circumstances.

Much like my personal story, the Iranian deal centers on financial power. Rather than sitting around feeling sorry for ourselves, we always had the power to solve the problem by using our money to control the situation. Trump held his cards long enough to squeeze out North Korea so now is the time to make the move against an only slightly stronger Iran. But Iran unlike North Korea already has internal rebellious elements hungry to seize power back into the people’s control. Marxism has failed in Iran, and everywhere else it has been tried. Their plan was to loot off the United States until there was nothing left, just like the family I described who wanted to get rid of me tried to work me into my own death—literally. But once that failed and all the financial leverage was on my side of things, they found themselves crushed by the guilt and their own lack of resources and the rest is now history. Iran has suppressed their own people and they will no longer be able to bring death to the West by looting America until there was nothing left. Now all the wealth is in our court and they need it to survive—so they’ll have no choice but to submit. Mark it down on your calendars. Iran is as good as gone.

Iranian MPs Burn U.S. Flag in Parliament, Chant "Death to America," following Trump's Withdrawal from Nuclear Deal pic.twitter.com/3zCiFSLblz

— MEMRI (@MEMRIReports) May 9, 2018

Rich Hoffman

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It’s all about Resisting Authoritarianism: Star Wars, George Lucas, Donald Trump and what we all see in the mirrior each day

Of course, it’s an official Star Wars Holiday, May the 4th, 2018 and at the precise moment that tickets went up for sale on Fandango I bought mine for Solo: A Star Wars Story. I am more excited for this movie than any one that I have thought about for over two decades now, so it made me very happy to get my tickets. Financial projections for the movie were released yesterday and they are predicting that Solo: A Star Wars Story will make in the $150 million-dollar range on its opening weekend. I honestly think it will be higher and will surprise a lot of people and here’s the reason why. Within this interview shown below that George Lucas and James Cameron did together for an AMC series is everything that is needed to be known as to why I love Star Wars so much and why it’s so successful. I know quite a lot about George Lucas and share with him some very basic foundation ideas about life. But ironically, both he and Cameron have evolved into Hollywood liberals over time and it is there where they depart from the rest of American society and have lost touch. All that is revealed in this short 3-minute clip, it is quite fascinating to watch.

Like George Lucas for me Star Wars is the most anti-authoritarian art that I can think of displayed on a mass scale—and that is what I love about it. That’s why even as a grown man, I still get excited about new Star Wars stories. Star Wars at its best is a warning against authoritarianism. And within Star Wars there’s no character more anti-authoritarian than Han Solo—he’s a free spirit to an almost extreme and most represents that young George Lucas who used to race cars and fight movie studios to make his movies. Deep in their hearts, most people yearn to be like Han Solo—even though they won’t always admit it, they don’t like authority figures, especially now in the United States with all the trouble we are discovering with our FBI and Deep State revelations. This new Han Solo movie comes at a particularly powerful time for movie audiences and I think its going to do some big business and may set Star Wars right again after starting off the new generation in a rough way under Kathy Kennedy. All the progressive messages that Disney and Lucasfilm stationed in San Francisco have not resonated with movie fans because it steps away from the formula of what makes Star Wars so great, something that I think George Lucas himself began to forget as he got older. So did James Cameron, I don’t think his new Avatar films will do quite so well as they did back in 2009 because he is a much less anti-authoritarian director than he used to be.

Where liberals like Cameron and Lucas go wrong is in their assumption that Democrats are the anti-authoritarians and that progressive society is the vessel to hold their message into the future. It actually is quite the opposite and I find it astonishing that being smart people, that they don’t see it. I would attribute their blindness to the fact that by working in the entertainment industry they are regionally surrounded by liberal types of people so they have lost touch with the origins of their anti-authoritarian roots and mistakenly associate all Republican ideas on the Nixon administration, which was the era for which they came of age. As creative people, they can see the need for anti-authoritarian ideas, but they can’t apply them to the world around them which is why neither filmmaker has made a hit in around a decade now.

Lucas made in Han Solo that young 1950s rebel that we know from race car tracks all across the country, the main character in Grease that John Travolta played, and the character from Happy Days that was played by Henry Winkler, the Fonz. When Ron Howard was brought in to direct this Solo: A Star Wars Story I knew immediately what was happening, and I am very excited to see those results not just because it goes back to a time in cinema that I grew up watching, but because all these very unique elements were coming together to give audiences something they just weren’t getting anywhere else in any other media format. There is a tremendous need for anti-authoritarian drama, maybe more now than ever, and while many of the modern filmmakers have forgotten what it was that made them great in the first place, Ron Howard is one of those pure directors who has liberal sentiments, but at his core he understands all this anti-authoritarian stuff better than anybody.

Like George Lucas Star Wars for me was always about pushing back against authoritarian influences and hod rod space ships. I enjoy greatly the imagination that comes from Star Wars productions, but nothing more than in their various vehicle designs. I’m a huge fan of their Incredible Cross Section books published for the Star Wars movies by DK and have spent many hours looking at them and thinking about how those vehicles could be made in real life. Hot rods and anti-authority sentiments go hand in hand in American society and are very much part of our own love of car culture. We love our cars, our ability to go where we want, when we want to, and still maintain our personal space. In the 1950s up to the 1970s cruising in our fixed-up cars was very important to Americans, especially young people. I would attribute this deep love to the success of the Fast and Furious movies, which also make a lot of money even though the plots aren’t that good. They touch on that deep love of cars and how they give individuals space against the authority figures in their lives.

However, as political reality would have it, there isn’t a more authoritarian political party than what the Democrats have turned out to be. Their authority has become the influence of mob rule where they shout down anybody who doesn’t fall in line and that is where the George Lucas and James Cameron political ideology falls apart and why they struggle with films in the modern age because the world has moved in a very different direction. All these filmmakers are anti-Trump when in reality it is the new president who like the Fonz has stepped onto the world stage and spit in the face of all authority figures. Donald Trump has a lot more in common with Han Solo than George Lucas or Stephen Colbert, yet at some deep level they understand it enough to put it down on paper in script form, but they can’t apply it to the political world around them due to their regional influences. It’s quite fascinating to watch.

But I couldn’t be happier with the result—I think for this movie Solo: A Star Wars Story that all the right creative pieces came together to really make something special that audiences are deeply craving. I think this movie is going to take a lot of people by surprise and is going to really reignite what Star Wars movies mean to people, and what sets these off from other forms of science fiction. Especially in the age of Trump where all the authority which has been built by political progressives—people who used to think they were part of the counter-culture, the old hippies from the youth of George Lucas and James Cameron, the new flower children, the environmental radicalism and the green is the new red movement people who gave birth to people like James Comey, Clapper and Mueller, I think Solo: A Star Wars Story will be best served as a mirror for us all to look at and realize how far many have drifted from the original idea of what we all truly desire to be—free people able to do what we want when we want to do it and that the real tyrants in our lives sometimes are those people who look back at us in the mirror every day.

Rich Hoffman

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The Revealing Statement Made by James Comey: Beating the law at their own game

One of the greatest fears that people have is of the law. They think that because our legal system is written in such a way that it defies the type of education that we get in school, and that only specialized lawyers can interpret it for us, that the law is something they cannot defend against. We can protect our homes and families with guns, but when it comes to the law we are at the mercy of specialists and the court system which we all innately know can be leveled against us to serve the interests of our enemies. We know and understand that if our enemies want to come after us that we might have to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees just to keep what we had before the legal incursion—so when the law comes after you, it means to destroy you and can be quite vicious. The law is never about individuals, it’s essentially about the institution of normality which has been established through collective case-law, to impose the order of the masses against individualized effort. That made James Comey’s comments recently particularly powerful when he spoke about his wishes that Hillary Clinton were president and what impact that might have had on his future. To me this one comment encapsulates the entire case against Donald Trump from the Mueller investigation, the Rod Rosenstein rebellion and the general behavior of the FBI over the last three years toward presidential politics:

“I think I would still be the FBI director…Secretary Clinton is someone deeply enmeshed in the rule of law, respect for institutions, a lawyer,” Comey said in response to a question about what he thought would have happened to him if Clinton had won the election.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/comey-id-still-have-a-job-if-hillary-clinton-won/ar-AAwAQcN?ffid=gz

Then consider what Rosenstein said about the mounting pressure to submit documents to House Republicans, that the Justice Department was not going to be extorted—obviously he forgets who he works for. Yet in the context of what James Comey has said, now with everyone under great pressure, pressure that the FBI, CIA, and all the career bureaucrats within the Department of Justice have never had to contend with in their entire lives—they are starting to say what they really think and we are learning a great deal about the values of our legal institutions which were always at the cores of our fears. Confirmations of our worst nightmares has surfaced, in a constructive way.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/justice-dept-won’t-be-extorted-rosenstein-warns-republicans/ar-AAwBVNM?OCID=ansmsnnews11

Mr. Cohen, an attorney, received a monthly retainer, not from the campaign and having nothing to do with the campaign, from which he entered into, through reimbursement, a private contract between two parties, known as a non-disclosure agreement, or NDA. These agreements are…..

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 3, 2018

…very common among celebrities and people of wealth. In this case it is in full force and effect and will be used in Arbitration for damages against Ms. Clifford (Daniels). The agreement was used to stop the false and extortionist accusations made by her about an affair,……

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 3, 2018

…despite already having signed a detailed letter admitting that there was no affair. Prior to its violation by Ms. Clifford and her attorney, this was a private agreement. Money from the campaign, or campaign contributions, played no roll in this transaction.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 3, 2018

You should never have to fear the law unless you are up to bad things, but that’s not what we are talking about in this case. The people who are having their lives destroyed because they are somehow affiliated with Donald Trump’s acquisition of the Executive Branch wouldn’t find themselves in the trouble they are in now if they had not fallen on the wrong side of politics and that is the danger. We don’t elect people like Rob Rosenstein to office, we elect presidents who do fill those positions, so everyone in the Justice Department works for the President and should be more respectful. Comey should have been more respectful before he decided to leak information to his friend to inspire the special investigation that Robert Mueller is now conducting on his witch hunt, which is all it is at this point. The institutions of government as formed by ideological moderates in both the Republican and Democratic parties are using this investigation to keep an aggressive president from changing their good life as politicians being enriched by a corrupt process. They have been using for years the institution of law and order to preserve their racket, and its very disgusting. In the past when there have been challenges to the institutional system, those people were destroyed by James Comey and Rod Rosenstein—and people lost their net worth’s and even went to jail fighting the law which was protecting a corrupt band of Washington politicians.

People like James Comey have sold the purity of their institutional roles to themselves by not looking at the corruption which created the laws, but on the laws themselves as law enforcement officers. In a similar way that a cop collecting traffic citations to raise money for the local municipality will tell their victims, “I’m only enforcing the law” they rid themselves of the responsibility for the imposition by not paying attention to how that money is spent. They surrender their judgment to the greater aspect of the institutions they serve. Maybe city council members swipe money out of the coffers to pay for strippers in Las Vegas, or perhaps to fund a new government project that helps them get elected at the next election cycle, the money and how its used is of no mind to the law enforcement officer—they are only there to enforce the law. In the same way, Comey has surrendered his thoughts to the merits of law enforcement choosing not to deal with the corruption of the laws in the first place, and why they were created. In Comey’s world and that obviously of Rob Rosenstein, lying to the public isn’t hard because they are protecting the merits of the institutions that they serve, and in their world that is task they are bound to by duty. They don’t see anything wrong with doing such a thing because they are protecting the institution for which they are a part. When Comey said of Clinton that she had respect for institutions, what he meant is that like him, Hillary Clinton put individual value behind the need of institutions to function. He is blind to someone like her who functions beyond the scope of institutions because she has always been one of the law makers which formed the institutions in the first place. That’s why his statement is so interesting and revealing.

Many people in life associate their value by the role they serve in the greater world of their occupations. A lawyer will introduce themselves at a dinner party as such—an engineer will as well. A FBI Director likely will think of themselves completely by the role they play in society—not necessarily as a dad, a husband, or perhaps a collector of coins, Legos or baseball cards. What they do for a living is what they are to the world at large—they base their value on their status within the institutions they serve. However, thinking in such a way can make such people weapons against the innocent because those who control those institutions might be malicious and up to no good and if law and order can’t be counted on to protect the innocent, then who can? The answer is nobody. Comey, Rosenstein, Mueller and many others are functioning from this assumption that they were the top of the food chain of institutional value, and that their jobs were bigger than the Executive Branch. This occurred because previous presidents yielded to the awesome power we’ve given to our institutions of law and order, because of that basic fear we all have of the law, that we think we aren’t smart enough to translate laws for ourselves and need lawyers to protect us from that scary foreign language.

The case against Trump by the federal government is exposing this massive weakness in institutional judgment. The law is clearly on the wrong side of history and now they are finding themselves caught in the quandary of their own failed philosophies. It’s not enough to say to the world that they “serve” the institutions of law and order when we can see clearly that those institutions have been used against us for years, and now that we have a president in the Executive Branch we are seeing things we always suspected clearly for the first time, and we—the electorate—don’t like it.

We should not have to fear our own system of law and order. The institutions of the FBI and other government agencies should never seek to impose themselves on the public with fancy terminology that can only be interpreted by an overpaid specialist or the judges they play golf with on the weekends. If the law doesn’t serve the people of our Republic, then it’s no good. And Donald Trump was elected by us to represent our needs, and if the institution is picking a war with him, they are essentially picking a fight with all of us. And I can say this as a guy who has fought the law many, many, many times—sometimes even representing myself as legal counsel—I’m not going to take it. That’s for sure. While its true, I do have a lot of guns to protect myself from thugs, better than that I have a mind that isn’t afraid of any lawyer or judge. And neither should you dear reader. If you want our Republic to work properly, you need to stop fearing our own legal system, and to take command of it. Voting for a good person in the Executive Branch isn’t enough, obviously.

It’s time to change the title to this song–because they “ain’t” going to win this time.

Rich Hoffman

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Rich Hoffman (@overmanwarrior) April 28, 2018

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

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

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

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

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