Tag: Stupid in America

The Political Left has Ignored Our Laws on Illegal Immigration: Why would we obey their laws on gun control?

Democrats are all about compelling us to do things, which is the real reason they are so supportive of gun control and there is currently an assault weapons ban floating around the House. Take the bartender turned congresswoman and socialist activist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her opinions on the media company Barstool Sports where the owner Tweeted that he’d fire any of his employees on the spot who tried to unionize. Of course, we know now that unions, all unions, are concepts of Karl Marx and have their foundations firmly in socialist ideas, and they assume that company ownership should always be shared with the workers. That is part of their philosophy on the whole socialism versus capitalism argument, that common everyday workers who don’t work very hard at life can run a company through democratic consensus instead of hard work and risk taking.

When the owners of Barstool Sports made his declaration against a unionized workforce, he was of course appalled that such a concept would seek to take away the ownership of his company and place its management among the workers, which is a real slap in the face. And to make matters worse Cortez stated that he was likely breaking the law for which the Department of Labor rigorously defends. Government unions especially can defend the poor performance of their members such as they did with the two prison guards who let Jeffery Epstein die in jail under their care, but if a business owner says that they don’t want their company unionized, watch out! They’ll come for you in balls and chains and even some terrible words to destroy your public image in the press. Democrats love laws and they pass them any time they can so they can use the government to compel people to do things they don’t want to do through force and violence.

And just as Cortez was quick to remind Barstool Sports that they have an obligation by the Department of Labor to allow people to unionize, that is the real intent behind the assault weapons ban that is picking up steam in the Democratic controlled Congress. After two recent mass shootings, both conducted by radicals from their own party, Democrats are pushing for another assault weapons ban, and one that goes further than the ridiculous 1994 law that was created by the Clinton administration, between visits to Epstein’s Orgy Island where sex with underaged girls was always on the menu. There are currently 198 co-sponsors which is just 20 shy of the votes needed to push the bill through the lower chamber and into consideration. Given the nature of their gun grab Democrats have no interest in what actually caused the mass shootings, but only in what laws they can pass to further control all of our lives.

That brings up an interesting question, why do Democrats think they can ignore the laws that conservatives support, like marijuana illegalization, and illegal immigration, but that any of us would give a damn about their assault weapons bans and attempts to control unionization of businesses? If they are going to ignore laws to push a political position, which is what they have done and it led directly to the mass shooting in El Paso, Texas due to the push to shove immigrants into Texas from Mexico to turn it into a purple state of Democrat voters, then why would anybody think that we would change our behavior over gun control?

The thing about laws in general, especially in a society with too many laws that were hastily passed to gain political points rather than really solve problems in society is that it pushes activity underground, and that is exactly what will happen to guns if they are overly regulated. As it stands now if police want to know what kind of guns are in a household there is a data base with serial numbers that will tell them what to expect if they knock on a door to make an inquiry. I think that’s too much, but many lawmakers should consider themselves lucky to get that much. But the moment that congress starts making this and that illegal guns won’t stop existing; they will just move to an underground market that nobody in government will have any control over and things will be worse as far as gun control. The attempted ban of high capacity magazines and AR style platforms will only push them underground to a point that the police couldn’t even begin to get their arms around. And the foppish FBI can’t even stop mass shootings now, what are they going to do when all the gun related behavior goes underground? They’ll be even less effective than they are now.

For all the reasons that moonshine was pushed underground, people never stopped making it. These days you can walk down the street of Gatlinburg, Tennessee and buy all you want. The laws didn’t stop the behavior. Just as pot laws never stopped the behavior. And it is illegal to have sanctuary cities for illegal aliens, and Democrats have ignored those laws openly, and without consequence. So why would an assault weapons ban even be considered a viable option? Because Democrats want to send the clear message that they are in control and want to regulate your life in every way they can, that’s what they are about and all they really desire. They don’t care if people do break the law so long as they can pick and choose their targets to regulate vigorously, such as Cortez did in pushing Barstool Sports into shame over their anti-union sentiment.

Ultimately this is why we have the Second Amendment, because the power of politicians does go to their heads and they will try to control our lives every chance they get. And in response to their desires for gun control we are in the maker era, where we can make our own guns in our garages with technology like the Ghost Gunner from Defense Distributed. I can make an AR-15 in my garage in an afternoon. I don’t need to go to the store to buy one. Just like I could make moonshine or some other substance that might be against the law. The law is just a piece of paper that politicians pick and choose which to enforce. They want more laws so they can pick and choose from more when they think its to their political benefit. Meanwhile, the rest of us are just trying to live life, and clearly Democrats don’t want that. They want to control the flow of that life and that is the real problem.

More laws, there will obviously be more people ignoring them. More laws will not make society safer, or march any of us toward prosperity. It will only create an environment where Democrats can shoot fish in a barrel any time they want to push and pull control for some social cause that enhances their power, like relying on the Department of Labor to enforce laws against Barstool Sports just for desiring to maintain control of their business. To the socialist advocate, they are on a war path to take over industry for the “people” which in essence means the worker not invested in risks and rewards that built the business to begin with. By taking over companies the Democrats spread their philosophy of socialism to every sector of an economy and that is why they like rules, because it gives them that assault without bloodshed in the streets. But history says otherwise, and since they ignored our laws, we might as well get used to ignoring theirs’.

 

Rich Hoffman

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Democrat Policies Have Caused Mass Shootings: If we have Red Flag laws are we going to arrest all of them as potential terrorists?

Ahead of President Trump’s visit to Dayton, Ohio the Democrat mayor of Dayton was very disingenuous toward his intentions and toward guns in general. Rather than talk about the victims and the circumstances leading up to the recent mass shooting she made an open pitch for gun control which would have done nothing to stop the problem. Rather, the shooter was from her own political party and actually was an advocate for gun control. The shooter didn’t really care to live, and he knew that if he did conduct a mass shooting that the debate on gun control would rage, largely by his own making. So it was rather astonishing that Governor DeWine surrendered so quickly to appease gun control advocates when it was really political radicalism antagonistic toward President Trump’s successes that caused the violence. Yet nobody covered that issue. A few reporters tried to get the Dayton mayor to say something about the political motivations of the shooter, but she ignored the questions and deferred. Meanwhile, most establishment Republicans did exactly what Democrats wanted them to do really without any reason whatsoever.

Now rather than talking about the cause of the violence, everyone is talking about “red flag laws” which is a very dangerous platform. In the future, no matter what they say now, once we accept that red flags brought up by friends, neighbors or family are a means for preventing crimes then we have essentially entered the realm of the “Minority Report.” It will be the next level of social control which Google and Facebook are already performing for the government with censorship and is a direct attack not just on the First Amendment, the Second Amendment, but the Fourth and Fifth. Red flag laws are an absolute abomination of American law and serve only one purpose, by giving government more control for which they don’t deserve.

There were plenty of red flags surrounding the life of Conner Betts, but our government didn’t act on any of them. There were plenty of people including many mainstream reporters who were interacting with his extreme liberalism on social media, and he had a history going well back to high school that showed a propensity toward violence. Yet there he was running around in the world planning a mass killing. The solution to him was to have more concealed carry holders there on the spot to kill him within the opening shots instead of waiting for the 30 seconds that it actually took for the police on the scene to engage him. Because it was a nightlife district, there were plenty of police there with guns, so the carnage could have been much greater. But it could have been reduced even more if the engagement was within 5 to 10 seconds. I have a few guns that I carry that would have stopped that guy with or without body armor, and to be honest, in a society like the one we have now where moral conduct has lost its grip, that is the only solution for the short term, until we can restore some structure to our society once again. But we are a long way from that. Until we deal with the real problems, more concealed carry holders are going to be needed in traditional gun free zones so that we can cut down the reaction time from when a shooter reveals themselves, to when they are stopped. If politicians, especially on the liberal side of things don’t want Wild West shootouts in our streets, then they should have managed their cities better.

The Dayton mayor really made me sick over these last several days of news coverage. We have been talking about how Democrats are ruining cities and Cincinnati and Dayton are certainly no exception. I like both of those cities, but the evidence of Democrat leadership is grossly obvious. Yet the mayor only wanted to talk about laws like red flag and how to keep CCW holders from expanding into day cares. As she spoke it took everything I had to keep from leaping into the TV to explain to her that if we truly did what she wanted the entire Democrat party would have to be red flagged, because their rhetoric and activism against the flow of the nation makes them all a menace. Are we really going to arrest them all and throw them in jail because they “might” do something illegal and against the safety of society in general?

All liberals want out of these mass shootings are more laws that they can use later to get more control over all of us. Red flag laws once started will then be used to attack political opposition just as Google and Facebook use them now to attempt to control the First Amendment. Democrats are seeking to attack the entire Bill of Rights and they aren’t shy about it. And for most of us, we should see that as an open assault. Democrats in general don’t care about the people who died in these tragic shootings, they only want to see how they can advance their cause on the backs of them.

In Chicago, which is an important story, over 1500 people have been shot so far in 2019 to the date of this article. Most of those shootings have occurred in the south and west sides, which is filled with years and years of socialist government experimentation. The results have been a completely failed society that is obvious from the air when landing at O’Hara. There were 59 people shot the weekend of the so-called mass shootings. 7 people actually died which is just as bad as the Dayton mass killings, but nobody is talking about that with equal vigor. That is because the cause of the shootings are the results of Democrat policies and social tampering. Guns are already illegal in Chicago yet they have no control as a police force of how to stop those killings which are happening every day. More laws won’t do anything to stop the problem because the causes are in education, social safety nets and their effects, low moral conduct—no dads in the homes, drugs, and poor economic outlooks. Neighborhoods that are poor have generally adopted socialist policies over the years pushing capitalism to the suburbs which cause bad options for jobs and micro economies. High taxes, high government tampering into investments, and government run housing that nobody wants to live in are all contributing factors. To fix all those things we have to admit that it is liberal policies that have failed. No new law can mask that.

It is good that at least President Trump gets it and he showed as much on his visits to El Paso and Dayton. The political class under him are still functioning from unearned guilt, but maybe they will follow his lead and stand up for themselves. Red flag laws are already in place, but what are you going to do when we have an FBI and CIA who see and monitor this activity but fail to act. Yet Alex Jones and many other conservatives are de-platformed off social media for uttering nothing even close to the kind of rhetoric that Connor Betts participated in leading up to the shooting. The lack of attention to his activity almost look as if authorities wanted him to commit a mass shooting so that more anti-gun legislation could be enacted. That isn’t the kind of thing many of us would utter in the light of day, but we all think it within the confines of our minds. And it isn’t Democrats that are changing their tune, they are demanding that Republicans change. That is outlandish because it is Republicans who are offering and have been offering solutions. Democrats have been making them, and their lack of responsibility in the matter is truly astonishing.

Rich Hoffman

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The Cause of the Mass Shootings in El Paso, Texas, California, and Dayton, Ohio

It is pot and our culture of marijuana use that we need to be looking at in relation to the two shootings that have occurred within hours of each other, one in El Paso at a Walmart that killed 20 people and wounded 26. The other in downtown Dayton that killed at least ten and injured 16. In the Texas case the shooter was captured, he was a 21-year-old kid filled with spewing hate and apparently left a manifesto behind very conveniently tying the case together for authorities. In Dayton, the shooter was shot and killed by police eliminating the threat. There are still a lot of unknowns about the cases that will come out in the coming days and weeks, but in essence what we do know is that young people are largely involved in perpetrating these shootings and that as I’ve said before, the likely culprits are the sudden use of marijuana now openly consumed, that is causing this spike in violence among our youth. Gun control of any kind will not stop the carnage, and neither will avoiding the radical shoving of people into typically conservative areas by immigrants from communist and socialist countries just so Democrats can get their voting numbers up.

Under no circumstances should anybody cowardly shoot other people in such a violent way, there are no reasons for it whatsoever. None. Yet in places like El Paso where illegal immigration is literally invading their city and trying to turn their red state purple, people are very angry about the push by Democrats to overflow the border with liberal voters who are trying to change their country. It has nothing to do with skin color, but in the values of the people. The illegal immigrants just want a chance in life and where they came from typically are very oppressive socialist governments. So any freedoms they can get in the United States are many times greater than where they came from so they have nothing to lose. But for Americans, they see an invasion which is actually what it is. The immigration is being driven by failed government policies that are actually supported by Democrats to inspire them to flood the border. The evils that drive that push are promoted, not stopped, so that immigration will actually happen. So let’s get all that into context right out of the gate.

Then to make matters worse, and to actually drive up the body counts when these terrible shootings occure, we still have gun free zones such as inside shopping complexes and in bar districts like the situation in Dayton where we have taught people to duck and run waiting for authorities to arrive minutes later when seconds are needed to eliminate the threat. If we had a policy of stand and fight, guns would be friendly to a positive resolution as opposed to aggressor. In both recent shooting situations, a good guy with a gun present could have killed the aggressors quickly and with much less carnage. Our political system will say that we can’t have shootouts in our public places, yet the case remains that police can’t get to these shootings fast enough to lower the body counts. The solution is more gun coverage and much more use of the CCW in public places than we have now, not less.

But it is the cause of these shootings that we should all be concerned about because what we have is a massive failure of Democrat policy that is removing hope from young people and causing them to turn to violence to get their point across, and as a culture we have failed them. That was certainly the case with the 21-year-old kid Santino Legan who killed three at the Gilroy Garlic Festival in California. In spite of security at the event, Legan cut a slit in the security fence and stepped through to release carnage making reference to getting “high” left behind on his social media posts. In other shootings leading up to this event especially among young people they all had history of marijuana use, and we have to draw conclusions that Patrick Crusius who was also 21 years old and arrested near the shooting scene in El Paso also had some history with drugs and medication. The bars in Dayton certainly have with them an element of intoxication that is the root to most bad judgment. The cause of these evens is not the gun culture that is America, it is why there is a gun culture to begin with, as the desire for violence is ever present in the hearts of people.

Video games and movies are certainly contributing factors. I would say that it opens the mind up to such a violent situation even though most people don’t resort to violence to solve their problems. All it takes is a small percentage that will. Add to that the effects that depression drugs and actual psychedelic effects that something like marijuana can inspire in some people and we have a ripe condition for these mass shootings. Poor parental structures for young people to grow up in, liberalized educations, a bar toward adulthood that keeps getting pushed longer down the road to where age 21 isn’t considered old anymore. We keep these kids in a state of dependence for far too long and by the time they arrive into their 20s they have been treated as children too long. These are all very serious contributing circumstances that can’t be ignored considering that most of these mass shooters are all young people.

I have so little trust in our government that gun control isn’t on the table at all for me. It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that there were agents of our own government sympathetic to the Democrat cause who worked chat rooms and other Facebook methods to push some of these disturbed kids toward violence to set the stage for upcoming elections and to try to throw a wet blanket on President Trump’s success at pulling the nation together toward America first goals. Yes, I think the agents of George Soros are that dirty and would do much like Charlie Manson did with his Helter Skelter murders. It wasn’t him who did the killings, he inspired others to do them instead. Obviously, these kids doing these mass shootings didn’t wake up one day and decide to throw their lives away with mass carnage. There were events that led up to such a radical decision and we simply can’t trust authorities to tell us what kind of internet activity led to the violence or if such evidence would ever make its way into court. The same bad Democrat radicalism that is pushing people from other countries to flood the American border for refuge is the same likely that is pushing these kids to act on their impulse to commit these violent acts. So let’s not get hung up on the poor people innocently shot. As tragic as that may be, there is a lot more violence and evil going on all over the world that is behind the push for the border, many rapes and economic conditions that are literally killing many thousands of people who will never have their names released on ABC News.

If people don’t want to see Wild West shootouts in front of bars in Dayton, or at festivals in California, or even shopping at Walmart in El Paso, Texas, then they should stop tampering with people’s lives to inspire political movement in their favor. They should outlaw intoxicants and promote strong family values and guidance. They should also make kids more responsible earlier, like at age 18 instead of forcing kids to be kids until they are 21 so they don’t get used to having adult bodies with the minds of children playing violent video games at all hours of the day with no consequences to their thoughts and actions. As I said before, with the condition of the youth what it is today, I would expect many more of these mass shootings. They are a failure of our society at the level of its foundation and the guilt for that falls squarely on Democrat policies that have created them. And until that is understood the only method for solving this problem is to have more people with more guns on the streets to protect innocent people when these things do happen. Because the number won’t go down. We are just getting started with this new generation and they are very disturbed and dangerous as a demographic group and its time we start dealing with that fact instead of avoiding it with cries for more gun control. Gun control only puts more power into the idiots who have caused this problem in the first place, and that would be a terrible injustice.

Rich Hoffman

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Why Nobody Can Beat President Trump: The great rally in Cincinnati

It was strange to watch the Trump rally in Cincinnati because it was the first one I haven’t been to once he has come to my hometown. But honestly, even with a VIP ticket, seeing him is an all-day event and I just couldn’t block out that kind of time. So what does that say about him and his presidency? When did anybody ever wait all day to see a president and fill a 20,000-person arena along the Ohio River an hour before the scheduled speaking time of 7 PM? At 6 PM in fact all the seats all the way up to the luxury suites were full except for a those who had left into the concourse to get food. The floor in front of the speaker’s stage was filled and there were still lines wrapped around the arena outside.

I was at that same rally when Trump last came to US Bank just a few weeks after the infamous Access Hollywood tapes that would have sunk any other candidate. But even then, when the media had wrote him off with a torpedo hit and as we have learned, many other sabotages, some by our own government, Trump still filled that arena even as Hillary Clinton couldn’t fill up a park just a few hundred yards down river. I thought then that Trump was going to win but at that time I was one of the few. Yet he packed that place and people were very happy to be there. It was a great experience that I have never forgotten, and it was amazing to see it duplicated just a few years later under much better circumstances. This time he was the president and suddenly everyone wanted to speak ahead of him. Even one of the best Supreme Court Justices in the country, Sharon Kennedy of Ohio spoke a few hours from Trump’s ostentatious patriotism on full display once he arrived.

So why, what is the reason that Trump can do this while nobody else can? Why are the Democrats still pushing an impeachment narrative even after all the premise for such a thing had legally been tossed out the window? Why? Well, the answer is celebrity and not just the kind that Hollywood produces. What Trump has built over the years is the real kind of celebrity that actually built Hollywood at a distant part of their history, which they have lost. Celebrity is when a person, an actor, or a representative comes to embody the unspoken thoughts and words of a significant number of the population. That is why Trump had crowds in October of 2016 when Hillary Clinton could barely fill a spot 10 times smaller. Hillary Clinton in her final push tried to bring in celebrities to push her over the top yet couldn’t. Trump won the election anyway even though the forces against him were phenomenal. And at this present rally in the summer of 2019 people saw in Trump parts of themselves that they didn’t have a voice in any other way. So, they lined up to see him making an entire day of the event and they were happy to do it. They are an untouched market in America that no professional consultants had spent time trying to understand. They still don’t get it, but US Bank was the measure of their failure. It filled when the media thought there weren’t any supporters left and not only did Trump fill it easily, he did so hours before the show even started.

Think about what people were waiting to see, a 70 something year old man, a politician, talk for an hour or so. There was no music to accompany the show, the whole thing was just Trump talking about current events and world affairs. There is no conventional wisdom that could explain it, so unconventional study is needed to even begin to comprehend it. There isn’t any Democrat in the United States or in the world who could do what Trump did in Cincinnati or anywhere, even telling basically the same speech over and over again over the years. To be a celebrity who can generate that much excitement, who in their right mind thinks that anybody is going to beat him in 2020? I said in in 2016, nobody. And I’ll say it again now, there isn’t anybody who is going to beat Trump for a return to the White House in 2020. It is astonishing that an arena that big could be filled by anybody. Carrie Underwood sold out that arena, but that is for a full concert. What Trump has done is simply incredible.

Celebrity is a vote all its own. Even with the cheating that Democrats are known for throughout history, whether it is stuffing ballots, getting dead people to vote, or trying to qualify illegal aliens and prisoners to tip the scales in their favor, they have nobody like Trump. Not a single celebrity in Hollywood. No athlete, no musical artist. Nobody. People showed up to see Trump speak for over an hour and they spent the day doing it because they wanted to. And in a country where votes still matter, even when cheating does go on, people are speaking with sheer numbers of support even as the media and establishment culture tries to suppress that information from them. When Trump speaks to people directly people reward him with support, because that’s the only voice they really have—the celebrity that they gave to Trump because he represents their true values.

Deservedly, those who work against Trump should be concerned. Those who have taken their shots to end the Trump presidency made the whole story about him as a person, but what they failed to understand was that Trump is the representative of the people who elected him. People don’t follow Trump as some dictator they follow him because he represents who they are and without him they have no other voice. Enemies of Trump don’t want to just stop him because they disagree with him, but they want to silence the voices that back him. They don’t care what those voices really want out of their government, they want to pretend that they are in charge and can lead them toward some progressive objectives.

Those against the Trump presidency are in denial of what really makes Trump tick. In a representative government has there ever really been anybody who really was more authentic and representative than President Trump? Who thinks that people stand all that time to see an old man talk about current events? Its not so much him, but that he is their vehicle to bring forth their own voices, and for that they will wait all day for just a short shot in the spotlight. I have seen those events before, but this latest rally in Cincinnati was different, it was even bigger and more spectacular, and more of a statement about the real state of the nation. It wasn’t a racist event, it wasn’t a dictator, it was just a celebrity who represented the real people of the nation and no representative from the other political side can go toe to toe with him. And for that, it was an event to celebrate and be grateful for.

Rich Hoffman

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The Democrats Hate Profit: Working against the American Flag for change none of us want

When people ask me why I am writing a book about business, specifically about the necessity of executive culture in all places of employment, called The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, well, the debates by the Democrats that have taken place over two days during this past week tell the whole story. There are many aspects of American culture that have been pulled into this anti-profit path that was very obvious during the debates, and for those who do get it, they have forgotten why profit is important to our culture and really don’t know how to defend it from criticism. So, I feel compelled to help settle the matter any way I can. Although I have been talking about the socialist slide of Democrats for many years, and how our schools and most government interactions support the Marx theories, even I was surprised how open the Democrat candidates were to reveal themselves as socialists, perhaps even communists. Times have certainly changed and I’m not at all happy to have been proven right on the matter.

Profit is not a dirty word; it is a method of payment. Profit is how a company gets paid for services rendered, after they’ve covered all their other expenses. There needs to be something to benefit their time and energy on whatever it is they are making. If they are rich, then that means that lots of different people, or companies want to give them profit for the offerings they provide. Yet at the core of the Democrat platform that protests against the notion of profit is that very value system that points out good work from bad conduct. Bad conduct isn’t very profitable, so that value system is something that Democrats wish to get rid of, so they can continue to build a dependent class of people who will always vote them into power and if you think about it the whole notion of such a thing is disgusting.

Getting back to President Trump’s assertion that people who protest the American flag and the motives of American life should go back to wherever they came from, whether they are first generation immigrants or third, if you are not honoring the American flag and what it stands for, then probably you should go to a country that endorses your political theory. Because as American citizens we all have an obligation to at least agree on the basic foundations of American life and what they are. And what they are is that we are a for profit country that is always looking to expand as an economy. If we can’t agree on that basic thing, then we can’t be said to all love America. I don’t think people who protest the idea of profit could be said to love their country, not if all they want to do is to change it into something else.

I don’t think Democrats were always this way, I grew up around a lot of farmers and many of them were what we might call Kennedy Democrats. They were certainly flag waving Americans, they understood market prices for their crops and the needs to save up money to buy a new tractor or some chickens so they could have eggs because a fox got into the chicken coup. There may have been some of these Marxist type Democrats out there in the world, apparently in our universities and larger education system, but we didn’t see them at parades on the 4th of July and at Memorial Day festivities. This hatred for American profit is a new thing that I would say comes directly out of our education system and has been a massive failure based on how much tax money we have wasted trying to educate our next generation youth. If the result of all that money is what was on stage this week with Democrat presidential candidates, then the whole experiment has been a massive waste of time.

The debates were supposed to be a kind of job interview for an executive seat in our government to manage the country. It’s a CEO job in official function and the candidates should have treated it that way. But if you are all about anti-profit, then you really aren’t wanting to do the job as an American CEO of a high government title. You can’t have a political philosophy that wants to undo everything then turn around and declare that they deserve an equal seat at the table of consideration if what they are proposing seeks to destroy the country we all love. And that’s essentially what the Democrats want to do. Why would you want to change something that has worked so well for so many people? Their argument is that it doesn’t work for all people. Well, show me some other place in the world that does do better for all people, where so many diverse people can come together as they do in the United States and accomplish anything, let alone the most powerful economy on the planet. And the reason for all that goodness is that America is a country that supports profit, the work done by people well and are rewarded for that work in such a fashion.

Secretly what Democrats want is for the government to decide winners and losers for the power of the vote, not for the effort of hard work and good conduct. When they protest profit, they are protesting a reward system that promotes good behavior instead of a centralized authority. When the government is big and has the power to give out wages whether earned or not, we have fundamentally changed the nature of America into something else and that is a grounds for conditional action on behalf of those who love our flag as it is today.

I associate with lots of different people every day. Some of them come from all over the world and have lots of different ideas about how things should be. I talk to liberals even though they have values that seem like they belong on another world. And I know lots of people who call themselves conservatives at all places along the degrees of value. But what they all have in common which makes them so I can at least speak to them is that they understand profit and loss. None of the people on the debate stage for the Democrat representative for the Executive Branch of our government did, they were completely unrelatable and it makes you wonder if they are even aware of it. You would think they would be. But maybe they are so out of touch that they just don’t get it. And these are the best that Democrats have to offer?

It is further astonishing that this same group of people have made it so that we can’t even talk and that people like me are considered radical by their crazy definitions for things. Again, it is the education system that has paved the way for this mentality but when it comes down to real people working and living in the real world, the support doesn’t go too far for these radical ideas. So why do they have them? Because they just don’t get it? Or that they are so radical and polluted in their educations that they can’t see the forest for the trees? Or perhaps, and this is what I think, they simply hate America and want to destroy it for us all. That is the question of this election and our tolerance for it will be decided on election day.

Rich Hoffman
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What Comes Around Goes Around on the Wild, Wild Frontiers of Thought and Culture

It’s always a good day for me to attend the Annie Oakley Festival in Greenville, Ohio where I rejoin old friends and meet some new ones at that annual event always set during the last weekend of July. In many ways I am happiest during that period because the world is as I’d like it to be and I get to dress the way I’d like for the event. This year was a little different however because its one of those transition periods for me. I’m in the middle of writing my new book, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and have been working on several themes that were born right there in Greenville over the last several decades. As a lover of Ohio history and of frontier life in general I find great solace in the small towns up and down Rt 127, from Hamilton, Ohio all the way up Celina on the Grand Lake St. Mary. Lebanon, and Eaton come to mind as well, and of course Greenville itself nestled there in God’s country with the smell of corn dogs and ice-cold Coke offered from the various venders. But more than anything I enjoy competing with those old and new friends and pushing myself in ways that I don’t get to do in regular life, and the results are always rewarding, such as in this very close example shown below of our Bullwhip Fast Draw competition during the finals.

Yes, it’s fast. I have been practicing Cowboy Fast Draw for quite a long time now and have a pretty good feel for how fast is fast. The events shown in our Bullwhip Fast Draw are around .600 of a second down to about .450, almost as fast as the pistol shooters who were also there at the event. I spent quite a lot of time with them as well. Yet it amazes me how fast the Bullwhip Fast Draw competition has become, and how fast we have become in conducting all the various steps literally in the blink of an eye. For a lot of people, the blink of an eye is about .015 of a second. So, we are moving very fast these days in performing a task that really should be nearly impossible. But you never really know until you start pushing yourself with competition which is one of the big themes in my new book.

I am an optimist, really an unshakable one. I’ve seen more than my share of tragedy and heartbreak, but my optimism has always been intact no matter what’s going on. Over the years this Annie Oakley event has been that reset period for me that no matter what has been occurring, it gave me an opportunity to be around people who aren’t losers and activists of malice and just enjoy good people in a good flag waving country. Many years ago, I broke away from the entertainment aspects of my relationship with the western arts and went to apply my skills to real life problems, that were very controversial. It was quite a thing to do before Donald Trump was president, but now isn’t considered so radical, because the country is snapping back into shape, thankfully. The evidence is everywhere. This year at our Western Showcase event a really good Lone Ranger impersonator stopped by and did a show which I enjoyed quite a lot. As I listened to the Lone Ranger creed from him, I couldn’t help but think of myself and some of the decisions I had made along the way leading up to that moment.

In 2004 I released the book The Symposium of Justice which featured a bullwhip cracking vigilante that was at war with the corruption of his hometown. But in the years thereafter I found that many of my themes were quite real and that as an author, I couldn’t just write about them, I wanted to be the real-life character of my stories. So, I turned my skills to the real-life problems of my community and many reading here know the rest of the story. Up until Donald Trump emerged from the Tea Party to become President of the United States, I felt I needed to be the real-life characters I had written about. But that has changed due to the sudden shifting of the winds. The western arts no longer feel like a dying thing as it used to, but something that is reemerging and becoming new again. That makes me very happy. Not only does the world need it, but it confirms many of the things about people that I have long suspected and those are the clear contents of my new book that will likely come out next year.

It has been sad that so many people who still believe in things like the Lone Ranger’s Creed have stayed out of the fight that has needed to be fought. I couldn’t just sit around and think about it. I wanted to do something about it and I am proud that I have. But hearing the Lone Ranger impersonator go through the creed this year in front of our audience was for me very refreshing. Some of my favorite quotes are “That all men are created equal and that everyone has within himself the power to make this a better world.” And “in being prepared physically, mentally, and morally to fight when necessary for that which is right.” Or, “That God put the firewood there, but that every man must gather it and light it himself. Those are all good quotes and who could argue them? Well, Democrats for one, and many of today’s youth who get their morality from Grand Theft Auto rather than the Masked Man as they used to.

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Another good day in my favorite clothes. #life #family

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That is why I love the Annie Oakley event so much. It is a break from the disappointments of today’s culture and the youth being born from it, from the primitive cravings of body piercings, tattoos and shaky morality. Of loose sexual standards and a proclivity toward drugs and intoxication. From lazy losers who want socialism over capitalism and champions of expanding government who will issue them mailbox paychecks for just sitting around and letting mother government drop food in their mouths without doing anything to deserve it. For one day a year I get a break from all that and I cherish it tremendously. If I could have every day like the days I get in the middle of God’s country every year in Darke County I would take it eagerly. Unfortunately, that is not our reality, but it should be. Most of the people who go and participate in those events there don’t have the same kind of reflections that I do. They just go and enjoy the festivities without giving it much thought. But not me, I see the potential and reflect on what we used to do well and how we could do it again. And perhaps a new day is emerging. Whatever comes I at least feel good about what I’ve done to make the world better, which I will always do. But I get the feeling that the world is getting more favorable to those grand old traditions and that the thugs and losers of life aren’t winning any more, they are being swept away into the garbage heaps of history, where they belong and that makes me the happiest of all. For the first time in many years I think that tomorrow will be better than yesterday, and that is very encouraging.

Rich Hoffman

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House Bill 6 in Ohio is a Good Thing–if you want free markets, then provide them

There has been a lot of criticism about the passage of House Bill 6 which is the “Ohio Clean Air Program” because both sides of the political spectrum are missing the point. The bill essentially is a government bail out of the Akron-based First Energy Solutions nuclear power plants. The hippie liberal communist environmentalists don’t like that the bill strips away cash credits for “renewable energy,” such as wind power and solar while raising $200 million per year to cover the costs of the plants as a government heavy highly regulated industry that continues to lose money to the point where they won’t survive past the year 2021.

On the other hand there are the free market capitalists who don’t like that the utility company has donated over $1 million to Republicans to keep fossil fuel energy production alive, where the Obama era administrators sought to kill the industry in 2008 with more government mandates. Given the climate of government intrusion to begin with, and the need for good, reliable energy in Ohio, H.B, 6 further allows for local townships to vote by referendum any wind or solar powered take over of land and other assets to launch their “renewable energy” proposals, meaning the government can’t just decide to put up wind power plants by force. People in local areas would have the right to vote on them, which has the radicals infuriated. But equally infuriated are the capitalist who think that the whole deal is just another example of crony politics, where politicians will do anything for the donor base.

Here’s the deal, and I have been talking about this for a very long time, our utilities companies are monopolies that are directly attached to government management. And they shouldn’t be. If they weren’t “public” utilities then the management burden wouldn’t fall on government to have to solve, and Republicans in Columbus wouldn’t be tasks to bail them out or otherwise watch them fail down the tubes. And if the companies fail, what’s that do to our ability to produce nuclear power? Letting them fail at this point simply isn’t an option. And putting regulatory barriers on that industry just to facilitate hippie energy isn’t going to solve the problem either. What is truly needed in the long term are true free market solutions, which I suggested in Thorium, where every single home could generate their own power off a government regulated grid, kind of like how each home has their own air conditioning units. The technology is there, but government needs to get out of standing in the way of it, and when it does problems like what First Energy Solutions is going through would then become a private problem instead of a government problem. That is where the real issues reside.

The current state reality of energy creation is that it isn’t privatized, which by no coincidence is precisely why the health care industry is going through the same problem. If health care were privatized competition would bring down the expensive medications that are on the market. Government intrusion raises those cost and puts all the power in lobbyists. Until health care is privatized, costs will continue to be high and no easy solution for providing health care to people will be conducive to reality. Energy is hampered by the same restrictions. Power companies are government mandated monopolies, made that way through the incredibly high barriers of entry into the market. Regulator considerations destroy anything but the deepest pocket investors who then look to government to protect their investment. It’s much like the railroad situation at the turn of the 19th to 20th century. Someone had to build all those railroads, then someone had to manage the trains themselves and the people getting on them. Public utilities do great work, but they are expensive, and they are vulnerable to mass outages which hampers so many people because they must maintain and old grid of power supply that is in this present time old and obsolete.

But until we invent a better means of power generation, such as personal Thorium power plants the size of an air conditioning unit on a home for every home in the nation, government is stuck keeping the old dinosaur alive, which is what H.B. 6 in Ohio essentially is. The future of power generation isn’t the government mandates for solar and wind power plants passed down from the communist oriented Obama administration, its in private investment and personal maintenance, such as moving public transportation from the train to a car.

I love camping and always enjoy the sites of an RV park. Sure, while they are stationed in these weekend warrior hideaways, they are plugged in usually into the campground system of power and water maintenance. But in looking at all those great RVs within most of them are generators and tanks that allow them to function independently while traveling along the vast highways of our nation. It is from them that we should be learning how to push technology into each of our homes and businesses with more independent power generation and to get there we need to allow competition into the public utilities, which of course they don’t want, but that is the ultimate solution. We have allowed government to stand in the way of that energy independence so we really shouldn’t complain when they are called on to manage the trouble.

In that regard I completely support the Republican position on H.B. 6 and the Governor DeWine’s reasoning on the matter. They are dealing with dinosaur technology to supply the energy needs for a sustainable Ohio. The goal thankfully isn’t to pander to the flimsy hopes of the environmental terrorists, or the communist desires to destroy capitalism in the United States through heavy regulations tied to the backs of “Green Energy” but to deal with the two nuclear power plants that we do have, which have already cost a lot of money and do employ a lot of people. We need to use the energy we do have to bridge us into a 21st century solution. Likely the utility companies won’t like that solution but that is a bridge to cross when we get there. But we do need to get there.

Independent energy has to be the answer for the future, and free market competition to bring down the costs. Government needs to be out of all these economic transactions so that real free market solutions can come about, just like it did when the telephone utilities were deregulated. That is how the cell phone came about. Imagine what would happen if utilities were deregulated to allow for new methods of power generation to emerge. It amazes me how good some of the RV power generation innovations are these days. Imagine what it would look like if every home in the nation had their own source of power. Think of the lack of destructive impact to any economy that happens during every major storm where power grids get knocked out and hundreds of thousands of people are out of power for days, putting many people at risk. The option could be that every home treated their power supply like they do their air conditioners or heating services. A few downed trees wouldn’t kill the power for several neighborhoods. Instead one or two homes might be affected who could solve their problem with a simple service call from a competitive repair person. If we really want free market conditions, then let’s get government out of the utilities market and put them in the hands of the private sector.

Rich Hoffman

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The Great Trump Poker Game

In case you haven’t heard, there are even more text messages between Lisa Page and Peter Strzok that show directly that the Clinton campaign was involved in the FBI cover-up of DNC tampering into the 2016 election which Donald Trump won anyway. But now the skin is off the cat and its quite serious. It doesn’t seem that way to the mainstream media outlets because largely they refuse to cover it, but people like James Comey Clapper, Brennan and many, many others involved directly with the Obama White House are in deep trouble, and they deserve to be. It’s getting worse for them week by week and is why they came out against President Trump from day one, because they feared this day, where they no longer controlled the flow of information in government and could be tied to many crimes they knew they had committed to stay in office against the wishes of an official election. Meanwhile the state visit of the Trumps to Buckingham Palace in London was something even the most cynical person against Trump should have been very proud of. For those who have always supported Trump, it just made us prouder of his presidency.

What makes the Trump’s so good at these oversee visits with rulers, kings and queens of the world is that they’ve been there before. Long before Trump became president, he had become the very definition of the rich and famous, so looking comfortable among the most elite of the world is nothing new to him. And Melania is just such a great first lady, always looking and acting like the best that America has to offer. I can’t think of a single Democrat or Republican who could pull off one of these visits with the Queen of England so well, as if it was second nature to Trump. Which of course it is. I mean before the White House he and Melania actually lived in a tower of gold named after him. That lifestyle has certainly put him at ease in events like this one in London and I am personally glad. His approach certainly represents the way I think America should sell itself to others. Not just as an equal partner, but as a respected leader of the world and something others should feel a need to live up to.

But that is also why there was so much opposition against Trump to begin with. For many decades the plan was to diminish America’s role in the world and to cheapen our leadership in every way possible. So when we elected Trump to the Presidency the powers that had been engaged in all this diminished activity were inflamed to protect what they had been destroying. They certainly didn’t want Trump to repair our status around the world, which is precisely what has happened. Do you want to know how you can tell that Trump is unbeatable in 2020? Just look at how he has been playing the game. If his presidency were a poker game, which I’d say it is, he held great cards from the beginning, and now that the River has been revealed he has a 100% chance of winning the hand and the massive pot in the middle. The reason is that the Democrats went all in with what they thought were great cards, even cards they stuffed up their sleeve. But Trump had the aces and during the flop two more aces were revealed along with a King a Queen and a Jack. The King was the Mueller investigation, the Queen was the Strzok and Page FBI text messages, and the Jack was the phony Russian dossier paid for by the Never Trump establishment helped along by the Republican John McCain. And the other two Aces were the tax cuts and the great economic numbers that came from Trump’s policies. The two Aces Trump had all along were his great ability to lead people and generate excitement wherever he went, and his ability to be independent of the stuffy establishment with his own personal wealth.

Trump always had a great hand but once the Mueller Report was finished and the economy was continuing to truck along boldly, there wasn’t much anybody playing the game against Trump could muster. They had nothing and what’s unusual about politics played at this stage is that Trump knew how to play the game all along without all the advisors who whisper in the ears of leaders and usually guide everything in the direction they desire—who are completely controlled by establishment objectives. That made Trump a very unusual political figure, and one who couldn’t be beaten playing the game conventionally. And Democrats don’t have a candidate on the horizon who can match him.

That seemed to be the understanding of the English who finally did this state visit and put forth all the pomp that would be expected by such an occasion. When Trump was first elected, I was in London and saw how the local news had been covering him. I was at Big Ben and saw the massive protests around it trying to steer English politicians away from embracing the new American president. So, no doubt, the Queen waited to see how things went, so no immediate plans for a state visit were entertained. Now, two years later, as all the gas has gone out of the opposition forces, Trump is going to be around for a while, so the English might as well embrace it, so that had even a bit more sauce for this fine meal. Capitalism was making a comeback and any world leaders who didn’t want to be left behind understood that they needed to make friends with this American president, which is why the smartest of us elected him. We were tired of the bowing and apologizing that had been going on and decided to take matters into our own hands, and Trump was a great hire.

Personally, I was very proud of the Trumps at Buckingham Palace and the performance of the whole family on that very important trip. Even while the theater of pomp was in full bloom, the Russians called Trump up to indicate they were withdrawing their support from Venezuela. Mexico was reeling from the proposal of new tariffs, which will cripple their already deficient economy, and China is being bent over backwards from the tariffs that are now in place and is really bringing much needed pain to their economy. Its good to have an American president who understands the Chinese book on strategy, The Art of War. Finally! It’s not hard to beat them at their own game, we just need people in leadership positions who get it, and Trump does. There is just so much to be proud of even the biggest Never Trumpers that there are realizing that their efforts are futile. Trump has all the good cards in this game and he knows how to use them, and the best thing that everyone could do is to fold, before they lose everything. The Queen of England knows the story and she was very gracious in receiving the Trumps. They may not be her cup of tea, literally. But she is a smart woman and she knows how to play the game too, and for her and everyone, that means giving Trump credit for getting this far and still having Aces. Most of the chips on the table are on Trump’s side of it and as an American, that’s what I expect to always see.

Rich Hoffman

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Politics and the Banned Books of the Bible

I think the most interesting thing in the world is not how we all evolved out of some single celled creature swimming in the sea, or were molded literally out of dirt by a god and cattle prodded into existence while mating with our brothers and sisters, but in why mankind has a perpetual need to regress. And that is the trend if you look back over the many years to the beginnings of things. For instance, even while we may marvel as I have at the antics at Stonehenge and Avebury in England the Egyptians and Sumerians were conducting life not so different from our modern day needs and desires in America. Then visiting those same places today, the Middle East has not progressed from accomplishment to accomplishment always building higher, but is now considerably less sophisticated and much less economically viable. Places around the world do not evolve at the same rate, while one part of it may be on the cutting edge of technology the other parts of it has clans of rock throwers and superstitious psychotics sacrificing their first born daughters to some gods hoping to make it rain so they don’t all starve to death.

Then there is the problem as to why we desire to hide that reality from ourselves behind veils of culture, religion, economics, even history. One thing that has always really bothered me about the Bible in the Christian tradition is that the book was essentially conceived around 100 AD, a century after Christ had died. A few hundred years after that the Roman emperor Constantine wanted to unite his empire using Christianity as the glue so the first Bibles were organized and over the next several hundred years scriptural scholars decided what books to put in the Bible and which ones to leave out. For instance in the days of Jesus he was known to have been well versed with scripture, but what scripture are we talking about if the nature of the Christian religion in the New Testament is all about him. The Old Testament had been picked through by so many “authorities” that it really doesn’t hold any historical reference any longer. The scripture that Jesus had studied is obviously long, long gone. There is a long section of Biblical history that is just ignored, especially if you go back and read the banned books of the Bible, the Book of Jasher, the Book of Enoch, and the Book of Jubilees.

For all we know the ancient books of the Bible were passed down for millenniums and mankind had been coming and going for all that time scratching at the surface of civilization while continued pockets of failures went back to being spear chuckers and forgetting about the massive ziggurats they had built with great effort to satisfy somebody somewhere. That span of time could have been three of four thousand years to tens of thousands of years. Yet if you go to the National Geographic Museum in Washington D.C. they will insist that all over the world we all developed as hunters, then planters, then city builders to where we are today. But then using modern science to peer back under the veil of history we see that all over the world, especially in regions today that we might call “third world” we see the evidence for massive lost civilizations that just don’t follow that assumption. All along the Amazon River we see evidence of major cities buried under the jungle canopy waiting to tell us their stories that occurred long before the Inca were even thinking of building their empire in South America.

We are learning that the Maya were much older and much bigger than we ever thought they were. What we know about all these cultures is really only captured in stone and stories. How much truth is there in the myths of all world cultures and how much of it is made up fantasy to represent metaphorically a need that minds had, like the modern myth of Star Wars. There are deep human needs in most mythologies that are revealed in those stories, but how much of them are truth and how much based on desire? All we really have are guesses and deduction from looking at some pottery and making assumptions based on our modern life. How many Göbekli Tepe temples are there buried under a hill in Turkey out there all through the Middle East and extending into Asia, even North America? The date for that location is well accepted now by mainstream science to extend back to the 10th millennium BCE which would indicate that life there was an advanced culture in the area of the Biblical regions well before the Temple of Solomon was built, or the City of David had laid its first stone. We tend to walk the streets of Jerusalem and think of the Old City as…..old. But when you consider the evidence of Göbekli Tepe as being five to perhaps even ten thousand years older it makes you wonder how many other places around the world might view Göbekli Tepeas the newcomer.

I grew up with Bible study, my family attended church often and I enjoyed learning about religion in the Christian context but as I grew older I started studying comparative religion and wondering about how so many different versions of the same stories percolated out into our nation building. Then I couldn’t help but wonder how much of our myths and legends were actually true, how much of the tall tails were in all actuality laced with fact. And by just a casual observance you learn really quick that most of the governments of the world do not want to know the truth. And they will actually use violence to keep anybody from discovering our true historical context to the distant past. Every culture wants to think they are the first to arrive at some grand conclusion and are therefor the authority to follow. But in reality, they are just the latest, many have tried before and that will continue well into the future. My question is and remains, how do we stop the cycle?

I have some pretty good ideas on the matter, and I have my thoughts on the past and the future that I have discussed in some detail. My interest in politics and economics have spawned off this basic question as to why societies rise and fall so often and unlearn everything they worked so hard to develop. Is this the first time for instance that a world culture has developed the means to leave the planet and head to space? I don’t think so. In the politics of Democrats for instance I hear in them a deep yearning to crawl back into the cave and to paint images of a deer hunt onto the dark walls of Lascaux. Even among most Republicans is the desire to use capitalism to advance mankind into a hopeful future of discovery and triumph, but while hanging on to parts of Biblical history that insist they were the first and only attempts at civilization and that we not deviate from the pages of a book built by the Roman Empire to control their territories. To my study nobody really wants to “get it” and that is the biggest mystery of all, and something that deserves some consideration. Because in that answer is a treasure trove of understanding that holds a key we all could benefit from. And it only takes a little courage to unlock.

Rich Hoffman

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The Hope of Comics

Even though it’s not why I do it, because in the beginning I considered this blog to be a fun extension of my life and my many interests, it has become something bigger and much more literate. And with that come judgments from people who just aren’t very intellectual presently, or perhaps never will be which I consider worthless. The difference between me writing these many articles for myself, which I have for many, many years and sharing them in the form of a blog is that in the back of my mind I hope to help people realize that there is more to life than what they are presently living. I think by any measure I am a very well-balanced person and an excellent thinker. True, I could be another Alex Jones, I certainly have interests in that direction, but I could also be a sports star, or any number of things. But what I am is a lot of things and I like it that way. And I share those things with my audience purely for the sake of their own uses, certainly not mine. What I do for myself is know that I am trying to help people live better and more authentically, and when the refusal of that offer is openly rejected I do get mad about it. I don’t force people to do anything and they certainly shouldn’t expect such a thing from me. The things I do object to in life however is anything that leads to below the line thinking and when I see such a thing I do get pretty vocal about a need to rebel against it erupts. But sometimes even for me the disappointments about how people choose to live and paint themselves into a corner gets to be too much and on those moments I give myself a breath by going to my local comic book store.

As I’ve said before, I like every sport there is. The reason I didn’t enter professional sports as a young person was that while I liked the objectives of winning, I didn’t like the compliance of building a team. I always related more to the coaches than the players and the elements of leadership so sports took up too much time and there were too many social stigmas about what success or failure meant and I had other things I wanted to spend time on. But I’m certainly not one who is an either or person, either the life of a jock or the life of the geek who hangs out in comic book stores avoiding life while others chase balls around and get headlines in the newspapers because of it. Those divisions were always absurd to me and still are. I enjoy reading all types of things, including comic books. They are usually full of ambition and the artwork is usually very energetic.

So it was with that zeal that my oldest daughter, my youngest grandson and my wife went to two comic book stores on Saturday which was a combination of Star Wars day and free comic book day. What I really wanted was the new comic about the new Star Wars land at their theme parks called Galaxy’s Edge. I’ve always been a Han Solo guy so I am quite excited that the plot of the new land was featuring him and that it was highlighted in the new comic, and I wanted to get it. I can’t recall the last time a theme park decided to tie modern mythology in this way and I found it very interesting. So for the history of it I wanted to collect it for reflection 50 or 60 years from now in the future. I was also curious how Disney would attempt to tie all these media platforms together into a big unified story.

Much to my surprise they were sold out of the Galaxy’s Edge comic that I wanted at the first comic store, but otherwise it was a very bustling place. I didn’t see any kids there, but a lot of adults and they were all talking quite vibrantly about various comics, the recent Game of Thrones episode, the Avengers climax with Endgame and the upcoming Cincinnati Comic Con which my other daughter is planning to attend as an exhibitor. I couldn’t help but wonder if Socrates ever thought for a second that any culture on earth would have so much mythology produced and that people would gather in a comic book store to talk about them with such passion. I am encouraged by such places, they often restore my thoughts that people are worth saving when I read comics and see the bold desires there that are unfurled by obscure artists revealing their hopes and dreams through fantastic characters that are translated onto colorful pages full of art. There was more art produced just in that one comic book store than the entire Renaissance period of Europe, which I think is every bit as good.

We ultimately had to go to a comic book store in Mason to get my Galaxy’s Edge comic. I picked up far more than I had planned to and I enjoyed reading them later while I watched the Reds game on television and for me, all was right with the world. But more than anything I enjoyed the people. There were a lot more people participating in the free comic book day events than I would have thought which led to a lot of contemplation for me. My daughter and I discussed it over lunch. Her generation has grown up in a lot of hapless situations. The political system has let them down, their educations were a joke, their parental structure often broken. It was in their last hopes for participating in mankind that they go to the comic book store looking for heroes to believe in. Some people would say they were escaping from reality, but what I saw was that it was for their own good. Their love of comics was a survival mechanism to the disappointments of life and I saw in all those people a desire to not just accept a “bla” existence, but to at least learn through the mythology of fantasy characters that there was more to the human experience than just accepting defeat then eventually death.

To say I’m excited about Disney’s new Galaxy’s Edge would be a severe understatement. I read the comic pretty much in the car on the way home because I couldn’t wait to see how everything would be tied together and I was happy with the ambition of it all. I personally needed the break in thought myself. For me it’s never about going backwards. When I get disappointed in the ambitions of the human species, I too look for reasons to feel good about it all again and comic book stores do it for me. They are filled with hope not just in the artists who produce the content, but in the participants. In all their geekdom, they are essentially out for the same thing that the baseball player is, or the golf enthusiast, or Fantasy Football player, everyone wants a win. And if there are things that comics are typically selling, its victories of the human soul overcoming adversity. And unfortunately for most, such concepts are a fantasy. But at least they haven’t lost sight of the need for such a thing.

Rich Hoffman

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