Tag: Rich Hoffman

The Power of Reading: If you want to succeed in life, books are the key

IMG_5095It happens to me at least twice a week where some claim jumper tries to leap onto something I’ve worked very hard for, and they think that if they impose themselves at the finish line that somehow success will find them.  It is the human nature of lazy people to desire to mooch off the efforts of others so rather than do the work themselves they spend that energy looking for some easy way to get ahead in life.  I usually don’t get too upset about those types of things because I know what will happen next.  Once I notice such a thing I immediately give them the wheel to the ship so that they can see how difficult things are once I remove myself from the process—and they crash nearly immediately because they lack the skills to conduct themselves.  When you work hard to dig for the gold and haul it out of a metaphorical canyon up a muddy, slippery trail and at the top some claim jumper wants to then help you carry it to the market with a 50/50 split and call it “team work” I always call bullshit because of the effort is not rooted in equality, or even fairness—but in looting.  When people are willing to work as hard as I do at anything, they then might have the right to some equal portion of the credit.  And in that regard I find this little Twitter statement below to be enormously valuable to people who routinely ask me—how do you do what you do?

For well over forty years now I have read a lot, but once I was married at age 19 I have averaged at least a book a week over that entire time which puts me now at well over a 1000.  I say only a 1000 because some books take me three weeks sometimes, or a month to get through because they are big books or difficult—or both.  But on average it comes out to well over that number because some books can be read in hours or days like Donald Trump’s Think like a Champion or Marx’s Communist Manifesto.  Stupid people like those Karl Marx easy books and that is why they are attracted largely to communist ideas.   I read all types of books, business, fiction, philosophy, history, motivational, conspiracy—there are very few topics that I don’t read.  My favorites have been books by Joseph Campbell and my least favorite are by liberals.  I did just read a book that I picked up in England called The Red Dean of Canterbury by John Butler which I struggled with but learned a lot from.   I struggled with it because I didn’t enjoy the real life character of Hewlett Johnson who was the Dean of Canterbury Cathedral during the World War years.  I was at a book store in Canterbury and they offered the book free to me because I had spent over $200 dollars.  Never one to turn down a book, I took it and I read it mostly while my wife shopped in various English towns.  I always try to make good use of my time which is something else I have little tolerance for.  I’m never bored—I am always doing something and thinking.  Anyway, that book was about how the Dean of Canterbury was a communist who could not separate the philosophy of collectivism from the Christian idea of God’s Kingdom on Earth.  But he was right, there is a lot of similarities between communism and all churches which was not a pleasant read for me—but it was worth struggling through for the thought process of working out difficult concepts.  I don’t just read stuff I enjoy, I read things that often challenge me like James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake which is one of my most treasured accomplishments.  Very few people on earth have worked through that one because of the enormous difficulty in reading it.  It’s essentially written in a dead language where each word has multiple meanings spanning the history of the human race from a European perspective—so you have to know something of European history to even attempt the book.  But it felt good to get through it.

When people ask me how I can write so much, or when they wonder how I can talk for hours and hours about just anything without notes or reference pictures the secret for me is that I have read so many books that I have a massive archive of information to always draw from to apply to any experience.   When somebody asks me something I always have an answer—because after reading over a 1000 books somewhere at some point I encountered someone who had been through it before.  And the process of reading is a superior way of developing information in the brain.  You could read cereal boxes and the process of reading would still benefit you because of the way the eyes have to work with cognitive imagination to paint a picture in the mind to be retained by short and long-term memory.  Reading is simply the best way to learn something and it’s a very individualized experience—which is specific to the human condition.  So yes, I can write over 1000 words a day on this blog because I have millions of words of acquired knowledge bouncing around in my head all the time and formulating those thoughts into these little articles help put context to them for me.  The process of writing therefore puts those thoughts to work and strengthens the neurons in my brain for easy recitation later—when I may need it.  Having all that stored knowledge helps develop that needed gut instinct that is so critical in thinking on your feet under pressure.   That’s essentially how I’m able to extract gold that is valuable to so many people—it certainly isn’t luck.  It’s hard work from my very intensive personal development.

The picture provided is of what is next to my leisure chair in my home.  Often I watch television, review documents on my computer and I read books all at the same time.  I have learned to read while many other things are going on so that multitasking can squeeze in the most activity in any given day and I have found that this gives me a distinct competitive advantage over most everyone I may need to professionally deal with.  I don’t say that to rub it in, but as hopefully some inspiration to those reading this.  When you do something so many times you can get pretty good at it and I can now read a voluminous amount of material—even boring legal stuff without any trouble and still live a fun life—such as watching a football game or a movie with my family.  It is a good skill to develop—high reading comprehension of voluminous material.   However, some of the best days of my life were days where I was able to turn off everything in life and just read a treasured book without interruptions for an entire day or weekend.  That doesn’t happen very often—but when it does, I am a very happy person.

So to me it is quite an insult for anybody to think that they can do what I can without putting in all the hard work.  When people assume they are equal to me without doing the work—it honestly pisses me off.  As I told several people this past week who were obvious claim jumpers and they utilized that famous “team” designation, I explained to them that teams are not made of equal parts of a whole.  Teams are dictatorships where a leader implements something and the rest of the team shuts up and listens—and does what the leader says.   The crap people are learning in college these days where group think rules and everyone gets a trophy is completely wrong.  It’s the person who knows the most and can utilize that knowledge through leadership that matters most.  Teams are the pawns on the chess board that shut up and do what they are told—they are not equal contributors to success.  If you don’t want to be a pawn in the great chess games of life—read more so that you can become a leader.

I started reading to acquire an offensive weapon over my enemies.  When I was a kid—11 to 19 years of age I had already learned martial arts for hand to hand combat and I was a bull whip master—meaning I could put out a candle with a bull whip and pretty much hit any target I wanted using it as a melee weapon.  I felt I could handle any situation presented to me.   For instance, when my wife and I were dating and she was a hot to trot model at 17 years old I had her downtown in Cincinnati in the rough part of town before going to a play at the Taft Theater.  Three big guys on Liberty Street wanted to know why I thought I had the guts to come out of suburbia with such a hot little women and think I could get away with it unimpeded in their neighborhood.   Well, I showed them and we made it to the Taft Theater on time and with only blood stains on my cloths—not from me.  I loved doing that kind of thing and still do.  But it was obvious that the real world wasn’t so literal as those three thugs.  Not everyone fought you face to face, most people do it behind your back.  So to beat them I knew I needed to be smarter and faster minded than them—so I started reading as an intellectual martial art.  Now I do it because I like it, but I started it as an offensive weapon against my many enemies and it worked great.  “Knowledge is power” is more than a cliché, it is quite true.   At this point, it would be hard for anybody to catch up to me so I know going in to any situation that the people I’m dealing with are handicapped and will be easy to intellectually beat.  I don’t rub it in, but I do sleep very well at night knowing that most of the things I do, only I can do.  So a little lesson to those who wonder how and why just remember—you have to do the work.  If people aren’t willing to do that work jumping a claim at the end of a process won’t yield positive results. It will just give me something to laugh at as they struggle under the assumption that we are all equal.  Sorry, we are not.  Some of us work hard.  Some of us work DAMN hard.  And those that do know how to work fly while those who don’t crash quickly and predictably.  You can’t cheat your way through life when knowledge is literally capital.  The best way to get knowledge is to read. It is in my opinion the greatest skill anyone could give themselves and for those who do read a lot—it almost always guarantees success in any venture you might want to embark on.  Which is why the best CEOs out there read an average of 60 books a year—it quite literally is the difference between success and failure.

Rich Hoffman

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Cool Kids and the Geeks: Why Republicans are wimps who grovel at the feet of the media

I remember when I went to John Boehner’s office to inspire him to impeach Barack Obama for some bad behavior the president had conducted under a congressional recess, which was a valid issue. It certainly deserved a rebuke from the Speaker of the House who happened to be my congressional representative at the time. Of course, Boehner did nothing and ignored my suggestions so to maintain order in the swamp letting Obama off the hook completely. He let Democrats know that they could do anything to Republicans and there would be no retaliation. Yet when the shoe was on the other foot and we had a Republican in office and the Democrats were looking for any little thing to impeach him Rep. Steven Cohen put forth a formal proceeding to impeach Trump over quite valid comments made in the wake of Charlottesville. Where the Republicans tried to play it above the fray with Obama, Democrats have no trouble throwing out the impeach word and that is the essential difference in why those liberal losers think they even stand a chance in this new civil war in America.

What? You didn’t know we were in a civil war dear reader? Well the signs have always been there and now they are extremely obvious. No, it’s not between the alt-left and the alt-right—those are made up terms by the media to attempt to put us all consciously into those two book ends for which both are a means to socialism. They’d have us all believe that we are all somewhere between those two leftist groups. But we aren’t, the real civil war is between those who had their educations before the liberalized media took completely over and those who have grown up under its far-reaching umbrella. It wasn’t that long ago that radio personality Matt Clark and I did several radio shows on how communists took over the media industry starting in the 60s and by the 2000s had infiltrated nearly every aspect of it. Now with financiers like George Soros gathering up his anti-American friends for the purpose of using the media as a hammer that thrusts by his funding the leftist influence of both the Nazi and the Russian communists are basking in the theater of debate as if they were a majority. But they aren’t—otherwise Donald Trump wouldn’t have won the presidency.

When polling comes out against Trump the samplings are usually all the members of the CNN phone banks for which the criteria is established. The same with CBS and ABC, especially NBC who are still angry that Trump left The Celebrity Apprentice tanking their leading show so that he could become president. They aren’t calling me, or my wife, or my neighbors out in Southwestern Ohio for polling—where the buckle on the Bible belt is large enough to deflect a speeding bullet. No politician could go to an arena anywhere in the country like Trump can and fill it up with enthusiastic people. And no media personality could either—as Arnold Schwarzenegger learned when he tried to step in and run the boardroom on the show Trump left. That’s what terrifies them. They know their polling is wrong. Trump has more than 50% of the country and they dare not let that information get out—so they are doubling down doing anything and everything they can to attempt to seduce us all away from the truth.

I was awakened in the middle of the night by an urgent report from my iPhone. The Hollywood Reporter was telling me that Tina Fey and Seth Meyers was going to return to Saturday Night Live’s “Weekend Update” and that they were going to “slam” Trump. The 20-something reporter writing for that trendy publication couldn’t hide her hope that her progressive media celebrities might change the course of history with some crafty insults which might end a presidency. But to our sane eyes her enthusiasm was equivalent to a child thinking that they could pluck the moon out of the sky without understanding anything of the science of why it hangs there in the night. That same Tina Fey first really exposed this extreme liberal bias when she made outrageous fun of Sarah Palin only for being the first woman to run for vice president on the John McCain ticket. The former governor of Alaska was panned by every liberal activist in the media for a solid five years and the effect did take its toll on Palin’s family. Some of the meanest things I’ve ever heard from anybody came in her direction from people like Tina Fey who was protecting NBC’s social activism position on ever-expanding audiences through global communism. The same broadcasting company that ate out of the hand of Trump for his hit television show used people like Tina Fey to politically assassinate anyone who dared to stick their neck out against the trend. If Tina were to come out as a Republican the same knives would come after her as well. But so long as she was one of the “cool kids” as established by the group mentality of the orthodox media mechanisms—she will have success in life. So long as she does what NBC and the other MSM types desire—to destroy Republican no matter who they are, she gets to be a celebrity with all the frills that come with public acceptance. It doesn’t matter if they are women. It doesn’t matter if they are former stars of their network. If they stand against the tide of progressive liberalism—then they must be destroyed and it is the job of people like Fey to advance her network on their strategic advancement of social change.

This behavior reminded me of the root cause of all this evil. Our public education system after all is guilty of paving the way to all this insanity. People like Tina Fey and the Saturday Night Live comedians represent the popular kids in every school. They set the trends that all public-school cultures must adhere to—as part of the MSM for which The Hollywood Reporter, Rolling Stone, MTV and all of network television function driving the cultural trends of our society harnessed and communicated to the masses through group assimilation taught to us in our public government-run schools. I remember how it was to get on the school bus. Every kid there would have on a KISS shirt, or Def Leopard or some rock group that was popular at the time and they were invited to be part of the warm blanket of the group. I would step on the bus wearing my Han Solo shirt from Star Wars and I was made fun of incessantly. Unlike most people, I liked to fight and antagonize people especially in group behavior patterns so I did more of what caused all the ruckus. I’d make fun of them back and when they turned to violence to make me conform, I beat the shit out of them-literally, especially by the time I was in high school. But usually people cave to the pressure and that is how such things are communicated into our culture and that is clearly what is at play with the Trump presidency. Lucky for us, Trump likes to fight too—because that’s the only way to beat these evil collectivist slugs.

The impeachment suggestion is s sign of their extreme frustration on the political left, because the cool kids can’t use peer pressure for compliance of the individual to group assimilation. Obviously, all this is over the heads of most Republicans. John Boehner and his team thought I was out of my mind for suggesting that Obama be impeached. Most of our orthodox Republicans were in some way or another the cool kids in school—or they wanted to be and they are now paralyzed as adults to act against the MSM because what they want more desperately than anything in the world is to be considered one of them. And that’s how good individuals sacrifice their very lives to be marginalized into group behavior losing forever their personal ethics for the sweet delight of other people’s approval. But little do the political elites and the MSM know that the trend is changing and has been for a long time. It’s now cool to wear Star Wars shirts to school and to geek out at Gen Cons. The cool kids aren’t so cool anymore and personal individuality is more cherished than ever before which is showing up in that polling that everyone is trying to hide from the public. But Trump is the proof of it no matter what anybody tries to say. The results speak clearly for themselves.

Rich Hoffman

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ProgressOhio and Other Radical Leftists Copy the Tea Party: Why liberals will always lose–they lack intelligence

To understand the situation that we see today you’d have to go back nearly a decade to when I was fighting school levies and the evils of public education on radio stations and television to a great effect. Now my warnings have come to fruition, many of those kids who were in grade school back then getting openly socialist propaganda in their K-8 classes are now in their twenties ripping down historic monuments and joining forces with communists across the world to continue the efforts of Karl Marx.  It was in fact really the third decade of that kind of public education crises when I was sounding off the alarm bells—but each year has gotten worse leaving our next generation children to be mush minded losers largely due to the broken home situation that they have had outside of the school and open socialist indoctrination at the government institutions of learning.  They really had no chance.  And now that Trump is president they are attempting to overthrow his administration with all the tactics learned in that little, easy to read book, The Communist Manifestro.   Check out these links to see what kind of activity is brewing in my home state of Ohio.  You can bet that the same kind of behavior is going on across the nation and were fully in place ahead of the Charlottesville catastrophe—which was induced on all sides by radical leftists.  The “alt-right” were leftists well to the side of socialism and not even on the scale of American conservatism.  Then of course were the open socialists and communists of the Black Lives Matter group and the group called ANTIFA which was just another rendition of the “Occupy” anarchists who are about as far left on the social spectrum as you can get.  These are the people organizing future upheavals in my state as they seek to end the Trump presidency.  You can read their strategies at these sites.

https://www.indivisibleguide.com/guide/grassroots-advocacy/

http://www.indivisible513.org/

http://www.indivisible513.org/resources

http://progressohio.org/actioncalendar/

https://indivisiblenkydistrict4.org/

http://www.cincinnati.com/story/news/politics/2017/07/26/local-resistance-groups-rise-field-guide/494902001/

http://kyd4.org/2017/08/14/inkyd4-statement-on-charlottesville.html

I thought it was funny to see my old rivals at ProgressOhio reveal their intentions so openly, and desperate.  I haven’t heard from them in a while and had been wondering what they were up to.  Their vision of the Tea Party movement is pretty funny and based completely on ignorance.  I was a very active member of various Tea Party movements in the Cincinnati area from 2009 to 2014.  I kept myself on the edges which is how I normally deal with group behavior—but I was certainly very intimate as a functioning leader in the freedom movement for quite a long time.  I know how the Tea Party won and changed politics pushing out people like John Boehner and John Kasich from power and replacing them with people like Trump.  Once it looked like people such as Donald Trump, Scott Walker and Ted Cruz were going to run for president in 2015 most of us in the Tea Party movement picked our guy and we broke off to help whoever it was which is why my activity declined in 2014.  I picked Trump and went hard to work for his campaign.  And now I am quite happy that he is president.  I worked very hard to get him there, just as he worked very hard to get elected and the concerns I wanted to see addressed he is currently dealing with.  However, if any of these Progress Ohio, ANTIFA losers think that I’m going to let them destroy a presidency I worked hard to help put in place—they have another thing coming.

Here’s the deal as I see it—which should have considerable weight considering my history—the biggest difference between the Tea Party movement and these various personifications of ANTIFA is that our efforts were based on education. The socialist radicals are based on threats and intimidation behind group assimilation.  If you check their strategy on those above links they think that the Tea Party was successful because of their mass organizations—which were actually few and far between.   The real work happened at Tea Party meetings where good people offered classes on the Constitution and on the Founding Fathers so that those people would be better voters who could see through the media circus and elect proper people in the Republican Party and wrestle away the progressive influences from what was.  It took a few years but the trajectory of success was obvious and it was all based on educating people to be more informed voters.  We weren’t threatening to rip down statues.  We never tried to assassinate president Obama or even alluded to it. When the IRS came after us—and I was personally targeted by this because of my relationship with the Liberty Township Tea Party—we didn’t storm Washington or stand outside vandalizing Lois Lerner’s house—we fought them in court and at the ballot boxes.   We had a heck of a fight in the 2016 primaries.  My guy Trump won, and eventually most everyone got behind him and here we are—doing what we planned a decade ago—and doing so quite effectively.

What’s missing from the plans of ProgressOhio and all the other Ohio based progressive activist groups is education.  Sure they are trying to study now how the Tea Party was so successful and they’ll try to copy it—but they won’t be able to because all they have is the threat of violence to advocate their position and people aren’t going to put up with that any more.  Let me tell you that much.   These liberal groups cannot compete on the battlefield of ideas.  They cannot do three hours of radio in the middle of the day and attract 15 million listeners because their political philosophy is old and crusty—and un-American.  It might fly in Europe but that’s not saying much because Europe is crumbling away with economic rot.  No sane mind in America is going to sign up for that socialist garbage except for kids coming out of high school with a communist education who don’t yet know any better.  Socialism is boring and is a philosophy for the lazy which makes it really difficult for people in Progress Ohio to recruit anything but idiots to their cause because the smart people are either working or put their efforts behind the Tea Party. Lazy people don’t have the energy to perform the kind of education it takes to change people’s minds at the voting booth like the Tea Party did.

And that’s the real problem that all the leftist groups have. The people in their organizations are stupid, lazy and impatient.  They don’t have a sense of history or of personal values which is why if a group like ProgressOhio tried to educate voters the way the Tea Party did their members would likely become conservatives by default once they had knowledge.  The political left relies on emotion and stupidity to survive where the Tea Party was about knowledge and thoughtfulness.   Before each meeting there was a prayer and always the meetings were geared toward knowledge—not telling people how to think but in letting them learn on their own.  It was that knowledge that led to the 3 to 4% swing in voting patterns within the GOP which has evoked so much change—not just in electing Republicans, but in determining the kind of Republicans which get elected.

The political left which is the foundation of ANTIFA and Black Lives Matter are progressives looking for socialism and in order for that to work people need to be stupid. Pubic education has been successful in turning off the minds of our youth.  Most of them are complete idiots by the time they are adults.  But when they learn—if they learn—they become Republicans which is why they will never succeed.  For Progress Ohio to work their supporters need to use rioting to scare people into submission because they can’t win an intellectual debate.  And if they can’t win a debate, they can’t get elected.  Nobody is going to vote for a bunch of thugs—which is their strategy.  It worked for years under the umbrella of union membership but that mask has been pulled off now.  They are exposed for all their ugliness and this will hurt them on serious matters.  Sure, there will always be two or three hundred stupid degenerates who will stand outside of a congressional office and call Republicans “Nazis” but what are they offering by way of knowledge to help voters see their side of the story—except—“we’re going to burn down your house, rape your wives and key your car until you see things our way?”  That is the difference between the Tea Party and ANTIFA.  The Tea Party read books, they taught each other things and pursued an intellectual approach that changed the dynamics of politics.   All ANTIFA has are drug addicts, losers, video gamers who want socialism so they can sit on their fat assess all day playing Xbox, and mentally challenged fools vacant of intellectual curiosity.  That is not a winning formula and they will lose miserably in the months to come.

Rich Hoffman

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The Famous Trump Tower Press Conference: Protecting value from those desperate to steal it

As if Donald Trump didn’t already have my support as President of the United States he certainly solidified it on August 15, 2017 during that now famous press conference at Trump Tower.  After seven years of writing on this blog almost every day over that entire time publishing millions and millions of words—for free—because I passionately want to see problems fixed—FINALLY we have someone in the White House who gets it.  Trump understands the situation clearly and he can articulate it.  He has no problem taking on any one any time any where taking on entire ominous institutions in the process.  I’ve had a taste of walking in Trump’s shoes and I can relate to how tough it is to be him and face reporters who are hostile agenda driven maniacs that own the media and the public perception of you.  I know how hard it is to convince other people in your political party to stand up for what’s right and not to bite on the Saul Alinsky tactics and for many, many decades I have frustratingly preached and waited for other people to get it—and finally I can see that Trump does.  After the hounding he took from the media for two solid days after his comments about Charlottesville he arrived out of the elevator of the luxury building he created and pretty much flattened the media that greeted him there with an impromptu press conference that was just magnificent.  If there was a bunch of garbage clogging the drain to the swamp Donald J. Trump yanked it out with this press conference so the muck could flow again.

I couldn’t have said any of that better myself. Trump hit all the high notes—the value of preserving historical monuments, the agenda of the press, a defense of his timeline, condemnation for all the sides involved because they were all out for no good.  Trump did defend the moderates who weren’t parts of the white supremacists and the Black Lives Matter crowd.  He praised the grieving mother of the young lady who was killed.  He even promoted his winery that is in Charlottesville all in the same string of sentences.  It was truly magnificent!  Nobody could write a novel or a movie to capture this spiritual awakening that we are all undergoing through the Trump presidency.  The exasperated looks on the faces of the news commentators and print media was priceless.  Then to top all that off Trump put out a Tweet targeted at Jeff Bezos dodging taxes with his online store Amazon.com.  The reason was because Bezos owns The Washington Post which has been a personal blog for the rival billionaire.  Talk about hitting back ten times harder, Trump did it and I couldn’t be prouder of him.  Not as a president of my country but as a fellow human being who is 70 years old and doing the right things for the entire human race.

Personally I like Amazon and Jeff Bezos, but I can understand where Trump is going. If I had to pick teams I’d pick Trump over Bezos any day but I always cheer for productive people.  And Bezos is abusing The Washington Post to instill a progressive agenda that suits him in a global way that I’m not interested in.  The battle that is currently taking place is like a plot from all my favorite stories all rolled up into one.  It is Atlas Shrugged, The Fountainhead and War and Peace spread out on a grand scale that is much more interesting.  As Trump gave his press conference news came that North Korea was backing down from their nuclear escalation threats which was yet again another victory for Trump—and for us all.  When was the last time a president told some maniacal country like North Korea that they were going to get their ass kicked and they actually listened?  Trump made it look easy—because in the hands of a competent person—it was relatively speaking.

The reason this was such a spectacularly relevant activity is because much of what Trump articulated is part of an unspecified menace that I have been covering for most of my adult life. I’ve always seen it clearly, but most people don’t, yet they suffer from it immeasurably.  As I’ve referred, I have had my own experience with this kind of thing and have witnessed very powerful people buckle under this name calling pressure that the terrorist types on the political left have always used to advance their cause.  Even though I know the tactics and have been personally unaffected by them the people around me have all too often fallen victim—and it always amazes me.  In my situation I witnessed the movers and shakers of my community, and the leaders of the Republican Party be completely frozen by this exact technique that is being used now against Trump.  In my case it was in calling me a sexist because a reporter strung together a bunch of things I had said in different places to paint a picture that provided a feeding frenzy to my political opponents.  I had no problem with the massive social pressure that was unleashed on me, but what did surprise me was how quickly my partners distanced themselves from me like a bunch of wimps.  I showed that I was willing to stand and fight doing whatever had to be done to win—in many cases on their behalf and they didn’t even have the courage to stand behind me.  They only wanted to cave in and ask for peace because they thought that was the way for them to achieve a protection of their bottom line—in a business sense.  I was truly shocked how cowardly they were in the face of just name-calling by those on the political left.

I said many times up to that point and many times since that the way to beat these crazy leftists is by hitting them harder than they hit you and letting them know that words and name-calling isn’t enough. Much to my surprise again, the masses just didn’t get it—those who were either business leaders or political leaders—or both.  They felt they had too much to lose to fight such a fight so their tendency was always to surrender to the radicals in their communities.  The reason was that they had something to lose while those seeking to destroy them had nothing to lose.  I told a bunch of them at dinner one night this cause and effect in a way I felt they could understand what was happening to them.  It was a nice dinner and I had a captive audience, so I said, “say you are a responsible husband and you work hard to provide for your family and are busy late into the night everyday during your income building years.  Your wife gets a little bored and wants attention and along comes some devil-may-care rock n roller who travels from town to town and meets your wife at the grocery where she thinks—this would be an exciting adventure.  So she starts seeing this guy while you’re off kicking ass making money.  You are busy building a life and you have a lot to lose.  But this little punk, the rock n roller, he has nothing to lose, only things to gain.  So in the relationship with your wife—he has the natural advantage leaving you vulnerable to her.  Now you could divorce her, but then she’s going to get half of everything you’ve worked so hard for—and everything you’ve put into her will be lost also making the relationship a terrible waste of time.  So what do you do?  The tempting thing to do would be to ask the guy to leave you and your wife alone and hope that he respects you enough to comply.  But if he doesn’t then it might pay to actually find a way to appease him so you can have your life back.  That is what the political left do to Republicans.  That is how they continue to beat conservatives time and time again.  They have nothing to lose and we always have all the assets because we work hard and save our money, living our lives in a way that is always vulnerable to insurgents who might want to steal off our efforts.”

They liked the story. We were all at Jags having a nice steak and the waitress was filling our glasses next to the fireplace as the snow fell outside, so I continued, “I’ve learned in my life, very early on, that the best way to get rid of guys like that is to—well–get rid of guy like that.  Make sure there is no way to trace him back to you when you do get rid of him.  Don’t give him what he wants.  Just erase him from the earth—and remember, he asked for it—right?  After all, you didn’t ask the little bastard to come into your life and threaten your well-being.  He did on his own accord in spite of the warnings, so you have to take care of that situation swiftly, and boldly.  That’s always how I function.  You can’t play patty cake with those types of people.  And if you give in to them they’ll be back next week asking for not only your wife, but your daughter—your car, and your guns.  You can’t take a pacifist stance on those types of people and those are who make up the political left—hippies, rock and rollers, drug addicts, college professors, anarchists, race baiters, moochers of every kind—just degenerate personalities who have nothing to lose and only to gain by taking something from you because you work hard and have things of value.  They are degenerates who function from a vast evil of collectivist philosophy and there is no reasoning with them.  The conservative philosophy that I function by and that is emerging with Trump as president expects to win.  We don’t do white flags of surrender like John Kasich, Rob Portman and Mitch McConnell.

Trump did well to stand against the tide and not to back down. He knows at least that people like me are out there supporting him and I know I’m not the only one.  Trump doesn’t get to see those people very often so much of what he’s doing he is doing it without the benefit of light to help him.  That makes all this that much better.  And I couldn’t be more proud.  Trump is doing what he is, things are changing forever.  We will always look back on these times and say that this is where things changed.  We went from a liberal society controlled by these terrorists through name-calling to a society that began to stick up for itself following the example of Trump—and it’s about time.  I am more proud than ever to call Trump my American president.  It takes a lot of guts to do what he’s doing and even more not to complain about it.  For that I am very grateful.  I’d be happy to do it if someone like him didn’t come along—but I’m very happy he did.  It gives me faith that the human race might not be so bad after all.

Rich Hoffman

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The Demons of Charlottesville: Screams from the evil trying to seduce us all to sleep

It took me a couple of days to get my mind around the extreme hypocrisy on full display in the wake of the Charlottesville racism issue in Virginia. I thought Donald Trump did a great job of addressing the nation just a few hours after violence broke out between the usual Black Live Matter communists and the Nazi socialists fighting over the removal a Robert E. Lee statue in that extremely liberal town.   At the time that Trump spoke he kept his statements general because after lunch on a Saturday afternoon it wasn’t yet known who ran over whom.   Was it the same ol’ radicals from Ferguson and Baltimore—or was it the skin heads, and Nazi fascists?  Trump couldn’t have been sure until much later and it was at that point that even Republicans were criticizing the president for not specifically identifying the white nationalists—as if he were associated with them.  It truly was an amazing display of evil—not in the violence at Charlottesville which was despicable in and of itself—but in the mass volume of the media propensity to advance a false plot against Trump that was truly vile.  Wasn’t it just a few weeks ago where a Bernie Sanders supporter shot up a bunch of Republicans at a baseball game, and a few months ago where Kathy Griffin held up the bloody severed head of a fake Donald Trump—and Snoop Dogg put out a video showing the mock assassination of our new president?  What we all witnessed in the wake of Charlottesville was a new kind of evil which was much more sinister than the kid who ran into a mob of communist radicals in a clash of leftist maniacs gone wild.

Again I was very proud of Donald Trump—he did all the right things at all the right times during the crises and the people who came out in criticism against him are the people who are protecting the swamp we are all trying to drain.  If you wanted to root out the Never Trump types who are holding up legislation in congress to prevent the President’s agenda from being implemented then just listen to those who criticized Trump so quickly.  They had an agenda against Trump and they used the death and injury of people at this tragic protest as a way to advance their selfish agenda.

There were many times in just the past eight years that Barack Obama took many days to respond to a tragedy on the scale of Charlottesville and when he did he often didn’t come close to providing an adequate statement.  The media, even the conservative media, never went this crazy over anything any previous president has said on a national stage.  This attitude against Trump is a whole new category of hate revealed through a swarm of aggression born from sheer evil.  It was a truly magnificent display of pure malevolence.

Trump revised his statement on Monday, August 14th to include all the white supremacy groups that the media had been criticizing him for not specifying.  I didn’t think he should have done so—he should have just let his Saturday statement stand.  After all, he addressed the real issue correctly the first time and nothing he could or would say would matter.  These parasites were going to use anything he said as a way to attempt to paint him into a corner.  The media and many of the Never Trumpers who lost to Trump during the 2016 campaign wanted to pin the president to white supremacy as their last-ditch effort to stop the movement which elected him.

The “alt-right” movement is not what makes up the Trump campaign.  White supremacists, Nazis, and the KKK radicals are all leftovers of southern Democrats and it is true that Hitler took notes from these people to advance his purge of Europe of people he didn’t want in his pure German society.  The people gathered in Charlottesville were all aspects of liberalism, the Black Lives Matters people were the hard-core communists while the Nazis were the socialists and the media framed them in their coverage as the extreme right and extreme left as if we all lived somewhere in between.  In that way they attempt to put us all into some crazy fringe of leftist radicalism and by default we must then defend our innocence from being too close to either of those fringe groups.  But, in reality, most of us are nowhere even near thinking like those two sides of the same idiotic coin.

Trump showed leadership early in the crises and it was a positive effort—in a sane world.  But we are not living in a sane world.  We are dealing with an evil that hides behind the pain and suffering of others to an extremity that is baffling to normal people.   It baffled me to see that evil so alive and desperate as they thought they had Trump pinned up against the ropes over doing what was expected of him during a crises. Trump didn’t say anything wrong. The skin heads, the communists, the people who wanted to take down the Robert E. Lee statue, the Mayor of Charlottesville, the Nazi lovers all the leftist losers who were in those city streets ready to fight for varying degrees of leftist philosophy were present to do damage and hurt others.  Trump had to be general in his statements given the level of evil present in Charlottesville.  Trump did the right thing—the media showed their real game plan perhaps too audaciously.

I’ve referred to it before but there is a wonderful scene from a great Akira Kurosawa film called Dreams where there are three mountain climbers caught in a snow storm high in the Himalayas.  They’ve lost their base camp in the storm and were dying in the extreme cold.  The leader found himself seduced by a beautiful ghost who came to his side to ease him into death.  She sings him to sleep gently and seductively pushing him into death.  But, being the leader that he was, he decides to fight back and once the ghost realizes that she’s not going to get her way, she turns into a skeleton and screams angrily at the leader then vanishes into oblivion.  Once gone, the storm clears and the leader is able to wake up his friends saving them from death as well.  As the sun came back out they realized that their base camp was always only about 20 feet away the whole time.  While they had only moments before been ready to die out of desperation, now they saw clearly that they were always so close to safety—but couldn’t see it for the chaos.  That is what we see happening, the demons of our lives are hiding in this chaos and now they have been exposed and are screaming out pain that they cannot get us to follow them to our death.  And in the aftermath of Charlottesville we will also see all along our base camp has always been right next to us.  When we do, as it’s being revealed right now, we will learn that it was never in between the communists and socialists but in the warm bed of conservatism which exists well to the right of the skin heads and Nazis.  That is where America lives and that is what Trump represents in our great republic, for which we stand.

Rich Hoffman

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The World is not Enough: Thank, God for Hasbro, Sphero, and Nerf

Every now and then I like to cover lighter topics that shed some hope for the human condition.  Occasionally I have written about my observations regarding the new cosplay phenomena and some of the very unique toys being made for kids from really great companies like Hasbro, Nerf and Sphero.  I have no problem admitting that when my wife drags me to the store for whatever reason—usually because she wants my company–that the place I always like to go first is the toy section to see what’s new there.  I have always enjoyed the inventiveness that comes with play and I think the world would be far better off if kids played more and for a longer period of time instead of rushing into puberty too quickly.  They should develop their minds longer than they do and after several discussions with my daughters who are now in their mid twenties I do have some hope that some of the inventiveness that is coming out in the toy markets and cosplay endeavors are the millennial’s generational self correction.

Any analysis into my love of Star Wars as a grown man would conclude that I find the people in those stories more interesting than real people.  The mythology of Star Wars as a whole has in it people I enjoy more than actual interactions.  Now some people might say that my view is unhealthy—that I shouldn’t set my bar for human interaction so high.  I would argue that society doesn’t set its bar for achievement high enough.  As a young person I always measured myself against the unrealistic expectations of the silver screen—not off the terrestrial limits of the real people in my life who I always felt were striving to be, “only human.”  They didn’t think big enough for me—the world they were offering was not enough.  And to a large degree millennials have grown up in broken homes with divorced insecure parents.  Their educations have been a joke and generally the world around them has been a tremendous let-down.  I mean who wants to grow up to be like John McCain? Anybody?  Or Maxine Waters?  How about a news anchor on any network?  Anybody want to be Chris Wallace?  If you have half a brain dear reader, you get my point.  So for their own survival millennials are doing to a larger degree what I always did, they turn to mythology where heroes and villains are larger than life and they base their standards for living off them instead of real people-because they innately recognize that they must do something to overcome the low expectations given to them by the lost generations which came before.

So that is the who and why all these fantastic toys and cosplay devices have emerged and specific to my interest is the Star Wars items from Nerf, Hasbro, and Sphero.   With Force Friday II coming up on September 1st 2017 where all the new Star Wars toys hit the shelves at Wal-Mart, Target and Toys R Us inventories that have been out there for a while since last year’s Rogue One movie is now at a very reduced price so my wife and I have been buying up things we’ve long been watching.  Specifically for me is the Hasbro At-ACT which came out last year for Rogue One but was over $300.  Hard for me to justify spending that kind of money on a toy, but lately it was marked down to $150 so we picked it up.  Another big thing we were able to pick up was the Sphero BB-8 robot which is driven off your smart phone.  In fact that’s what the AT-ACT and BB-8 have in common—both can move around on their own controlled off programming inputted into your iPhone which I think is just phenomenal.   The BB-8 robot from Sphero I think is a remarkable device and after finding it at Wal-Mart for half of its original $150 price tag I thought was a bargain.

For us, even though I enjoy the creativity on display in these new age toys if we didn’t have our grandkids over so much I wouldn’t have much of a desire to get them.  But, the kids are over a lot and I enjoy them immensely so when they are at my house we have all these very epic and expensive things to play with.  I remember how it was as a parent where luxuries were hard to come by and having all these expensive things to play with for the kids was difficult.  But as a grandparent we can afford to give the kids access to those kinds of things so we do, and I enjoy playing with the kids as they build up their brains with positive things I know will last a lifetime.  When kids play they don’t play to be a worthless bureaucrat or an average loser—they play to be a hero that saves the entire galaxy, that is the fantasy and it sets up in their minds the objective to reach for that high bar—even if it’s unrealistic.  It’s better to aim high than to not aim at all.  I also remember what it was like being a kid and I was a unique one.   I built models in the basement of our house very late into my teens and I had a large Star Wars toy collection that I played with until past the 8th grade.  I had a younger brother who had friends come over on Friday nights and we’d have massive Star Wars battles and honestly I found that a lot more fun than what was going on in real life.  I didn’t have any desire to drink, do drugs, use cuss words or play with girls.  The world I had in the basement of our house was far more interesting.  One of those younger kids who came over had a sister my age who was trying to fix me up with one of the prettiest girls in the 8th grade. She wanted me to go to the big homecoming dance with her after the football game.  This girl liked me a lot and had let me know that if I went to the dance with her that she’d let me do anything I wanted to her.  She was two years older than me and could drive.  Guess what I picked?  I chose playing Star Wars with the younger kids rather than messing around with that girl.  I never went to a single school dance until I was in my senior year and that was only to get a picture for my mom to put on her wall.   Many of my parents’ friends thought I was a weird kid so she wanted something to show that I wasn’t so strange.  In reality the toys were more interesting and I still love them to this day.   I can understand fully what cool toys and the freedom from guilt in playing with them can do for children.  I would say that now as an adult I am extremely well-adjusted and a very good problem solver.  I attribute a lot of that to developing my brain with a lot of play as a kid without the hassle of social pressure—like girls in the 8th grade and dances after football games.  Now as an adult with financial means, I do spoil my grandchildren for specifically those reasons—so they can feel the boundless joy of being a kid and discovering so many new things for the first time before life starts clamping down.  When life does clamp down, I want them to intellectually be ready.

And that’s why these toys are so much better than the toys from my youth, because Hasbro and Sphero aren’t just making them for kids.  They are making them for the many adults who now get past their 20s and aren’t interested in what the world has to offer.  As I think about this interesting aspect of our culture I can’t help but think of the James Bond movie The World is not Enough by the musical group Garbage.  That song captures this issue very well, the world is not enough because it doesn’t offer a big enough tapestry to project our hopes and dreams against—so many people find a relief from those limits by fulfilling their imaginations with these very sophisticated toys and these very creative companies understand and are rushing to fill that market need with some really spectacular offerings.  I always loved that song.  Needless to say I am impressed and continue to look forward to the next great thing to come from Hasbro and Sphero. That AT-ACT and the BB-8 droid are just fabulous and will bring a lot of joy to my house.  And I continue to look forward to what they come up with this year for Force Friday. I waited for some of these items for a few years so that the price would come down, but given the great utilization on display, maybe I won’t wait so long next time.

Rich Hoffman

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Sea World Needs Your Support: Don’t let CNN, PETA, and other radical organizations destroy it

It is a shame that the same forces who are attacking this present Trump administration and the positive outlook he has for a thriving America are the exact same attacking the Sea World Entertainment.  The attendance in the many parks they have around the nation, especially Orlando are down and have not recovered from the CNN hit job created by the PETA film Blackfish which has played on Netflix for several years now and has taken a major toll on park optimism.  In the case of Orlando specifically, as the competition from Universal Studios, Disney World and many other attractions in central Florida where people have to shell out $100 a ticket and spend over $1000 on a vacation experience they have steered away from Sea World because of all the negative press.  People don’t go to amusement parks, which Sea World is to feel bad about things.  They want optimism if they are going to spend that kind of money and the PETA crowd and their liberal sympathizers in the media have taken optimism away from the Sea World experience and put the very good company that does so much good for marine research on their heels foolishly.

http://www.baynews9.com/content/news/baynews9/on-the-town/article.html/content/news/articles/cfn/2017/8/8/seaworld_revenue_attendance_down.html

We all know what PETA is, it’s the crazy chicks that take off their clothes in public and put on ridiculous displays of extreme foolishness to make their point of saving wildlife from the terrors of mankind.  They are usually kids right out of high school or old pot smoking hippies who are part of that “Earth First” crowd that wonder why Al Gore’s new movie An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power bombed at the box office.  That movie was so bad that it only made $1,495,661 during its opening two-week period starting on July 28th. It was a piece of crap propaganda film meant to evoke the heart-strings of the radical capitalist hating progressives.  The movie bombed because it sucked and was essentially a movie of progressive evangelicalism making nature a god to be worshiped with the same kind of flimsy justification of scholarship that those same people make fun of in Bible thumpers.

Sea World however doesn’t suck—it’s a really good company that does great things for the preservation and understanding of marine habitats.  They do a good job of balancing the needs of scientific understanding using capitalism to drive research—which is how things are supposed to work in America.  I’ve been to many of the Sea World parks and have always loved them.  Their presence in Orlando enhances that city tremendously.   I love visiting the Orlando airport where all the amusement parks scream for attention.  I cannot imagine a Orlando without their buses and signs painted up with the images of killer whales.   With all the fantasy offered by Universal Studios and Disney, Sea World offers a nice blend of entertainment and science which heightens the intellectual experience of the entire Orlando area.  Unfortunately times have been tough in Orlando.  People are still spending money and visiting the parks there but Universal Studios has been literally killing it with their Harry Potter attraction and other very good offerings such as Kong: Skull Island which is simply a phenomenal experience worthy of a trip to Florida all by itself. Then of course Disney has their Avatar Land which just opened this year and the promise of Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge is coming rapidly.  Those parks have done a great job of staying fresh as the entertainment market for amusement parks has shifted dramatically in recent years to these “experiences.”  Meanwhile Sea World has had to fend off these crazy attacks essentially by CNN who has went on mission to literally torpedo the company to appease their PETA base of supporters at the left leaning cable company.   Instead of fighting CNN, Sea World should have been doing their own versions of those experiences and they are late to the party.  Finally they will have a Sesame Street Land in 2022 which will help, but that’s just too far off for them at this point.  They needed to be opening something like that in 2018 to maintain their market viability.  This attack on them really has not been fair to the good work they have always done in bringing marine life to millions of children over many decades.

To understand this “experience” trend in amusement parks and how big it is for market share it was obvious to me at my local park of Kings Island in Mason, Ohio.  Their newest attraction is a wooden roller coaster called Mystic Timbers which has a kind of Indiana Jones meets the Blair Witch theme to the experience and it’s very effective.  Kings Island has done a good job of keeping itself fresh over the years and has really blossomed under the care of Cedar Fair Amusements which runs Cedar Point up in northern Ohio.  The benefit that Cedar Fair has is that their business is purely thrill rides whereas Sea World is actually about education.  Sea World has some great thrill rides such as the Kraken which reopened just this year with a major overhaul featuring a VR ride that is quite spectacular.  But the essence of their market is education based which is a tough sell these days with all the glitter offered to consumers with extremely short attention spans and not much money in their pockets from wage stagnation.

Sea World used to be a destination vacation experience.  When I was a kid we went to the one in Aurora, Ohio well before it was closed down and I looked forward to it all summer.   It was a big deal to me and I loved the Orca shows and learned a lot about marine life that is still my foundation for that topic to this day.  Now that I have grand children I want to be able to take them to the park in Orlando and give them a similar experience.  However, Sea World is falling behind in the competitive battle to stay relevant in a capitalist society because of these attacks against it which is a shame.  Clearly we are not all one America and so long as these radical losers exist in our society who would even think to attack such a good company then there will continue to be strife over every little thing between us—just as there is under the Trump presidency.  All this started when that other side felt empowered under the Obama White House.  Sea World had an accident that was truly difficult for them and is part of the danger of their business.  But instead of providing support the radicals attacked and sought to put the company out of business and that is just despicable.

I would say that if you are thinking of taking a vacation and are going to the Orlando area dear reader, or any of the other locations that Sea World has around the country, you should make a point to visit them and put some money in their pockets.  Sea World could use the help.  The work they do is too valuable to ignore and it costs a lot of money to run an operation of live sea creatures the way they do.  Disney World at the end of the day turns off their rides and powers down their attractions. Sea World has to feed all those animals so their expenses are much different from other thrill park attractions yet that is the market they must compete in.  I’ve never been to Sea World where I didn’t have a good time and learn something fresh—or felt that the cost of admission wasn’t worth it.  So if you love optimism, science and capitalism—then you should support Sea World.  They are the Donald Trump’s of the theme park world and are being attacked essentially for being good.  And we shouldn’t allow that to happen to them.

Rich Hoffman

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The Cause of the Violence in Charlottesville: ‘The Big Lie’ by Dinesh D’Souza explains it all

This would be a good time to tell everyone to go out and read Dinesh D’Souza’s book The Big Lie—because it explains the terrible tragedy that has taken place in Charlottesville, Virginia quite well.  Before I explain why, think about what’s happening.  Liberals in that college town want to take down the long-standing statue of Robert E. Lee provoking a radical group of white supremacists to arrive with torches to defend it.  The next day the progressive advocates and communists behind the Black Lives Matter movement clashed with the socialist nationalists into a violent exchanged that killed several peopleand injured many others.  Shocked reporters on the scene described the engagement as a clash between the extreme left wingers and right wingers of our country and that is where they’d be wrong.  They just don’t know their history and misreported the situation in an embarrassing way.  But one has to ask, what did these leftist think was going to happen—they have been attacking white culture for a long time now and these people who still cling to the Civil War to articulate their social philosophy are tired of getting pushed around—so a fight ensued.  However I’d argue that the fight was caused by ignorance because they are all wrong about the state of history and if they knew better could have avoided a conflict all together.  When a fight gets this bad it’s because intelligence has left the arena and emotion is all that is left to govern.

https://twitter.com/overmanwarrior/status/896669144875249664

Calling white supremacists “right wingers” is an incorrect term because I am a serious conservative and their values don’t even come close to my viewpoints.  They are all to the political left of me and it is the very good research conducted by Dinesh D’Souza which explains it to people who do not know their history very well.  Apparently the reporters on the scene in Charlottesville need an education and they should read Dinesh’s books.  Last summer during the presidential campaign D’Souza released the film Hillary’s America which explored the Democratic Party’s foundation of the KKK which over time became the white supremacist movement.  All of the hard-core Confederates during the Civil War were Democrats and racism  in America was fully endorsed by the Democratic Party.  Remember, it was Abraham Lincoln who stopped slavery—he was a Republican.  The Democrats played that game until the 1960s where they attempted to rid themselves of that history and pass it off like a hot potato to the nice Christian Republicans who were too nice to give it back.  Following the example of Christ Republicans took that burden of slave guilt on themselves in a hope to heal the nation even though they had never been guilty of that kind of behavior.

Meanwhile when Hitler wanted to unite Germany with his own supremacist movement  he looked to the American Democrats as his model for how to go about it.  It wasn’t Republicans who Hitler copied; it was Democrats who helped Hitler build the socialist party of Germany.  So talking about the Trump presidency as if it represented the hard right is to completely misunderstand history.  The idiots protesting in Charlottesville are all variations of the American left who founded the Nazi regime prior to World War II and who essentially cased the Civil War.  When you put all those people on the streets of a liberal college town what did anybody think was going to happen?  Nothing I saw surprised me.

The problem is that both sides of those various socialist philosophies have no connection to the average Trump voter in today’s politics which is why nobody in the so-called mainstream media understand what’s going on.  The MSM is functioning from the wrong definitions for our modern events because they assume that the political “right” is these socialist losers who call themselves white supremacists.  I don’t know anybody on the conservative side of things who think anything close to what the radicals in Charlottesville did to the extent where they were willing to kill people who wanted to take down a statue of Robert E. Lee.

Then there are the communist Black Lives Matters activists who continue to push the limits of assaulting police officers and imposing their aggressive tactics against “white America.”  They have enjoyed openly pushing the tempers of parts of society that they think are against them wanting their own civil rights crusade—and they pushed things too fast and too aggressively in Charlottesville.  Just as gay rights advocates love to push against social norms insulting Christian thinking people with great colorful audacity they asked for someone to smack them in the mouth by pushing emotional buttons of the other side.  They were as much at fault in Charlottesville as the idiots who called themselves white supremacists.

Always in the wake of these tragedies people wonder what it will take to become all one country.  I might say again, but I don’t think we’ve ever been “one country.”  We may end up that way under a Trump presidency, but I can’t say that at any point in history we were “one country.”  So what would it take to get there—well Democrats need to get their act together.  All through their history they have been a disaster of criminal minded people who are always associated with socialists, communists and drug addicts with addictive personalities.  They are a psychologically broken people who have inspired all the worst things we’ve seen in our country—from Nazi support to slavery.  It was Democrats who wrote the playbook for violence connected to red flagged communism, black flag anarchy and swastika flagged Nazi supremacy. Traditional Republicans were not in Charlottesville, only radical groups connected to the Democratic Party where there to conduct the violence witnessed on August 12, 2017.

If you want respect you have to give it and going around the south expecting to take down Confederate monuments to prove a point isn’t going to lead to peace and civility.  Stupid people don’t have much to believe in and when you take away everything they trust without replacing it with something positive you will push them to the brink quickly and that drove the neo-Nazi white nationalists from their hiding places and into a battle mode.  Taking down General Lee’s statue to the people around the city of Charlottesville was a hostile act and the Black Lives Matters people knew it—so a fight broke out and people unfortunately died.  But they weren’t from the radical right—both groups were aspects of the political left.  They were in facts brothers of the same mother of a Democratic Party who gave birth to all the violence, only with different fathers.  What we saw in Charlottesville was a bunch of Democrats doing what they always do—cause trouble due to their faulty political philosophy.  And if anybody knew anything about history they’d understand it, and we could all take strides to solving the problem.  The people who have the answers were not there—they are in the Republican Party and they typically go to church on Sunday.  They tend to be employed, and raise nice families.  Those were not the people who were at Charlottesville protesting.  Yet it is they who have the answer how to further prevent the violence we saw.  Somebody ought to be asking them—not the idiots who caused the trouble in the first place.

Rich Hoffman

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An Authentic Han Solo Costume: The miracle of Amazon.com amid changing industries–and people

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Everyone knows I’m a huge Star Wars fan—which I view differently from the geeky other types of entertainment exhibitions of public support.  When I see the name Star Wars and participate in its products in whatever form, it evokes in me an optimism that is very specific to it that I am very fond of.  That’s why my favorite character within Star Wars is Han Solo, because he is the most optimistic character perhaps ever created for film.  Nothing is impossible for Han Solo—he’ll try anything under any circumstances because his personality is such that he figures his confidence and sheer will can get him through anything.  He is the Donald Trump of science fiction and I’ve felt that way about that character for more than forty years now.  On more than a few occasions I’ve dressed up as Han Solo for Halloween events, or other science fiction endeavors, conventions, watch parties, literary events at book stores—just various festive gatherings that celebrate costuming and character reverence—but I’ve never had any kind of official Han Solo clothing. I would just piece together whatever I could find that sort of looked like the popular smuggler from the Star Wars series and go from there. But my five-year old grandson is about to have a big birthday party marking that invisible line of being a toddler to a genuine little boy fully aware of the world around him with the memories that now matter—and my daughters are fashioning it to Star Wars.  As I’ve reported before also, these parties my kids do for their kids are not just little events—they go all out in creating a very mythic experience that is almost a theme park occurrence and due to their passion for Star Wars they are going all out.  That meant that of course I had to dress up as Han Solo—but this time I wanted to do it for real—as real as possible because of the effort my kids were putting into this party and the eventual impact it would have on the youth in my family attending this thing.  So I turned to Amazon.com to see what was out there and was stunned by a world I discovered.

My mom made me a little vest like Han Solo’s when I was in the fifth grade and I sort of kept it all these years even though it was way too small for me.  But even a few years ago if you wanted something that looked like a Star Wars character and bought a costume from a place like Party City it always came out looking far from authentic.  If you wanted something that looked like the clothing in the movie you had to make it.  Back when my kids were little we went to a Star Wars Celebration in Indianapolis and my wife made Jedi robes for my girls and their friends so they could dress up at that convention which occurred right before the movie Revenge of the SIth.  The internet at that time had some support—you could get directions from people who built their own costumes but there weren’t suppliers carrying things like that on the shelf.  Even though Star Wars was popular there just wasn’t any money in it for costumers to make costumes of all those characters in the movies  for a public of all shapes and sizes.  The scope of that work was unrealistic. For Han Solo specifically his outfit looks pretty simple yet is really quite complex.  For instance, his vest from A New Hope has a series of very complicated pockets positioned just right—and there is nothing like that off the rack at Wal-Mart or Kholes.  Han Solo’s pants don’t have pockets and have a very specific pin stripe down the side of them which disappears into knee-high boots that are meant to put the swash in the buckle for the very dashing character. The shirt under the vest isn’t just a white button-up but has a very unique collar and v-nick style that has to fit just right through the shoulders to give the correct effect.  Then there is the gun belt which is a thing all its own.  So I went looking for these things and I started with the Star Wars Costume exhibit at the Cincinnati Museum Center—which has been running all summer and will end around the beginning of October before moving on to the next city.  It’s a good exhibit, most of which I’ve seen before at the Smithsonian, but for my quest it served its purpose.  I was able to get right up to the Han Solo costume and look at things up close so that I could duplicate it authentically.  If I couldn’t find the items online, my wife was willing to build them from scratch so we went and took lots of pictures.

To my shook as I started looking now, in 2017 for these very specific Han Solo costume pieces for this epic party my kids were having I discovered that I was able to buy everything at Amazon.com relatively inexpensively.  For instance the great Han Solo vest that I figured was the most important part of the costume was just under forty dollars from an outfit in China.  I skeptically ordered it expecting it to arrive in a very flawed condition.  I expected something that looked like a typical Party City costume that smelled like plastic and rubber.  But what came to my front door was an exact replica of the Han Solo vest from A New Hope made out of material that was like that of tactical gear for a SWAT team.   It was a very good garment that was legitimate and it fit well the moment I put it on.  I was stunned by the quality of it.  I then proceeded to order the official shirt, the pants, the boots and the gun belt which as of this writing hasn’t yet arrived, but everything else has and again I was stunned by the authenticity of each item.

At different points in my life I had looked for these things and nobody carried them—as I said, everything had to be made by hand.  What’s unique about now from then—and by then I mean like six months ago—is that due to all the COSPLAY that goes on at these Comic Con conventions and now that Disney World is building these amusement parks with Star Wars lands within them there is this big COSPLAY movement that has emerged—where people dress up as characters from their favorite movies to delve into the mythology of these various sci-fi events—and out of nowhere there are all these suppliers who are making these costumes to meet the growing demand.  It’s a whole industry of itself that has virtually arrived out of nowhere.  I am aware of some of it because I find Comic Cons interesting as well as Gen Cons and other conventions.  I also noticed that the plans for the new Star Wars resort coming to Disney World is seeking to tap into this emerging market with a Fantasy Island style of Star Wars experience where they encourage people to show up dressed for the part.   Obviously Disney knew all about this culture and were building their business plans around it.  I only discovered it because of my grandson’s birthday party—but this was big business!

As I had ordered everything from my home computer and each item arrived one by one to my doorstep without having to go anywhere to search for it I became more and more impressed.  Even more shocking was that everything fit nicely, I didn’t have to send anything back.  Just by reading some of the reviews I was able to size myself accordingly with no trouble at all.  I figured that the risk was low because if the stuff showed up and was junky I figured my five-year old grandson would forgive me.  He’d appreciate the effort and wouldn’t get hung up on the details—even though he is a very smart little kid.  He surprises me what he notices.  He’s already playing the video game Battlefront very well which is about two years before I thought he would.  He plays online against other people who are very good—and he’s effective.  He knows all the different types of weapons that can be used, how to outfit each character and how to manage the Star Cards which give unique abilities to tactical engagements.  So if something wasn’t right, he’d notice. But after getting the parts of my Han Solo costume together it was obvious that I had nothing to worry about.  As far as this party was concerned, except for my hairline, the outfit looks just like it would if it was on the actual movie set.  That’s pretty stunning for something that was so easily ordered on Amazon.com.

This is all just another example of how imagination is fueling an entirely new industry and due to the excessive and efficient reach of Amazon.com they were able to connect me to suppliers around the world where I could get a very specific items from a forty-year old movie to my doorstep within two weeks.  And the quality wasn’t junky but meant to impress even under the scrutiny of the most ardent film geek.   In some cases my outfit is better than the movie original on display at the Cincinnati Museum Center.  Those costumes were meant for just a few months of filming, these for purchase were meant to last much longer and under the judgment of live audiences.  Needless to say, which I have before, we are seeing something new and hopeful from these modern movie enthusiasts which starts with a mythology in the movie theater and extends into real life—what Disney is doing down at their theme parks is tapping into the public need to play out their fantasies and is an expansion of imagination that is very specific to our species as human beings.  The need to personify a fantasy experience has deep psychological roots that go far beyond primal necessity.   I think the end result is a very positive one that is headed toward an unknown climax.  I know I love to see the imaginations of so many people at work to make something like all this possible—but it surprised even me at the extent of it all. And the entity most responsible for the success of this new industry was Amazon.com.  They were the middle ground players that connected need with supply and allowed both to get what they wanted at the best price and quality.  If they can do that with a simple costume from Star Wars, just think what they can do with real necessities.  We are living in a whole new world.

Rich Hoffman

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A Front Row Seat to History: Trump’s West Virginia speech and the implications

I know I write about Donald Trump nearly every day and there are so many topics in the world, but can you name one other thing dear reader, which is as exciting and game changing?  That’s why Donald Trump is the topic of the century.  Watching the President’s speech in West Virginia on August 3rd 2017 the same day that Robert Mueller announced a grand jury investigation into Russian tampering in the 2016 election—and two leaked transcripts of phone calls with foreign leaders emerged in an embarrassing way—that the event was a testament of fortitude.  It’s something nobody has ever seen in human history before, the most powerful person on earth because of the power of the American presidency stepping out of the Washington drama and into small town USA to be with the real people who are really behind the country—to bypass the soothsayers, the lawyers and the phony lobbyists—the self congratulatory world leaders, the socialist media and the institutional swamp of the Beltway culture to speak to the nation while everyone else was literally going on summer recess.

That’s not all, so far in his presidency Trump has very quietly surpassed the amount of money Barack Obama raised for the Democrats during his first term and poured it into the Republican Party.  The Trump team is very good about sending out emails for donations to their supporters.  I get about two or three a day, which is what I’ve always been saying that Republicans should be doing, because the Democrats sure have done it.  And what’s the rule basically in business and in life—he who has the gold rules.  As rival Republicans and Beltway insiders plot and scheme the destruction of Donald Trump, the new president has amassed quite a lot of wealth for the Party which comes from his charisma and determination.  When the vacationing Republicans come back to Washington after Labor Day, Trump will even further embed himself as the leader of the Republican money and controller of the purse strings and that will certainly help his legislative agenda—especially as many of those House and Senate members start thinking about running for office again in 2018.  Trump is an amazingly positive force in American politics, no matter which side you may be on dear reader.  What’s happening now is the stuff of historic legends.

I realize that most people have no idea what’s going on.  They see his West Virginia speech and they make fun of the participants—but think about the theme of that speech.  Trump specifically said, “We didn’t win because of the Russians, we won because of you.” The crowd went nuts.  The silent Trump supporters aren’t so silent and have been unlocked and activated in ways that no demographic population ever has—in the history of the world.  We’re not talking about the desperate fanaticism of Hitler in 1935 Germany where depravity ushered in an era of evil, or a Roman emperor who conquered the northern realms of Europe to expand civilization into the distant corners of pagan monstrosities—we’re talking about a free people who have gathered behind an indomitable force—by choice.

I remember well when Trump came to the US Bank Arena just a few weeks before the big election and the event was a lot like that August 2017 crowd in West Virginia. Trump filled that place up and the crowd was extremely engaged.  It was for me an obvious turning point especially after all the controversies that had been released trying to derail his presidency.  I remember thinking at the time, “boy, if this guy actually becomes president, this will be a game changer just because of his positive attitude that is so contagious.” While Trump was in West Virginia at that exact moment my oldest daughter was at the Hans Zimmer concert at that same US Bank Arena.  Hans Zimmer is a major Hollywood star and one of the greatest musicians of our time.  What was strange to me was that as my daughter was sending me pictures of the concert on my phone, I couldn’t help but notice that the crowd was far less than when Trump had been there.  Zimmer was far from sold out which reminded me how amazing it was that people would actually show up for these Trump events to just listen to a guy talk.  What Trump does and how he goes about it is an amazing exchange of human emotion aimed at positive resolutions—and it’s simply remarkable.

Most people would have folded under the amount of pressure that Trump is currently under.  Heck, most people wouldn’t have made it out of 2015 during the campaign with the amount of trouble that was thrown at Trump.  As I’ve said often, I feel I understand Trump in a personal way.  Before he ever ran for president he was a very accomplished author and I’ve read many of his books several times.  I can’t say that I learned much because my personality type is very similar to the kind of people Trump is trying to teach people to be in those bestselling books.   For me they were positive reassurance that someone out there thought the same way as me.  One of my favorite Trump books is Think Big and Kick Ass which was published in 2007 after several seasons of The Apprentice had made him into a major celebrity.   In that book Trump covers an entire chapter dedicated to handling pressure.  All great people must learn to handle enormous amounts of crushing pressure—and that is something that essentially separates achievers from the rest of society.  Lots of people are smart.  Lots of people have good educations.  But not a lot of people can handle pressure.  Trump is someone who actually performs better under pressure and that is what makes him so much different from any other person to ever enter the political class.  And that’s why every day he is in office is a game changer for the direction of the country.  People know it too—and they are willing to defend Trump because they understand how unique this opportunity is.

The Beltway culture is essentially like a big high school where peer pressure has been used for centuries now to control the most ambitious and individualistic presidents to house themselves in the White House.  If anybody got too far out of line, peer pressure from their rivals would hold them to the mold of institutionalism and keep them prisoner so that they couldn’t do much damage to the mechanisms of aristocratic deception.   That has left the rest of us scratching our heads as to why we always had such weak presidents who seemed more concerned with being one of the cool kids than in being a figure that might one day be put up on Mt. Rushmore.  I mean if you are going to be president of the United States, why not shoot for a big memorable role?  The sad answer is that most people care only about fitting in with their peers, and that relationship holds them back in life so terribly much.  But Trump doesn’t care about his peers.  He expects to be the top dog—the trend setter who follows nobody and that is what is changing that Beltway culture day by day.  The media is aware of this and they are actually terrified that Trump might be successful.  Nothing they have been able to do has put a dent in Trump’s ambitions because the new president actually thrives under pressure—he doesn’t run from it.  That is a first in American history in a political position.  Most of those types of people have always stayed in the private sector only to die quietly on some mountaintop after the conclusion of their lives.   So this is completely uncharted territory and it’s very exciting to see where it takes us each day.  All I can say is that I’m enjoying each day of this president and am very glad that I voted for, and supported with more than effort, Donald Trump.  History is being made and I love having a front row seat.

Rich Hoffman

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