Rich Hoffman's Blog, page 268

The Republicans of Star Wars: Expanding the base with new voters inspired to action by fantasy meeting reality

It was good to see that two Republican politicians that are notable in Ohio politics took a moment on May 4th 2018 to honor the now official Star Wars holiday which takes place every year on that date. Jim Renacci who is running for the Senate seat in Ohio to challenge Sharrod Brown put out the press release displayed below, and Sheriff Jones put out a Tweet that was well received by Star Wars fans. It would be easy for either politician to ignore the Star Wars holiday as both men are over 60 and could plead ignorance to the cultural changes that are taking place artistically by the Disney franchise but they wisely embraced the holiday which was very smart–politically.

pic.twitter.com/3c7IeBDrRL

— Richard K. Jones (@butlersheriff) May 4, 2018

Good afternoon,

Today is Friday, May 4th a normal day for many, but die-hard fans of the Rebel Alliance will tell you: it’s Star Wars Day.

The first Star Wars movie to hit theaters (eventually subtitled Episode IV: A New Hope) was released in 1977, 41 years ago. Though this blockbuster franchise has existed for over four decades, career politician Sherrod Brown has worked in politics even longer, first being sworn into office in 1975.

“While Brown has lived in a political bubble for the last 44 years—never bothering to develop real-world experience—Jim Renacci has worked as an entrepreneur for the last three decades, creating more than 1,500 jobs and employing over 3,000 Ohioans.”

— Brittany Martinez, Renacci for Senate Communications Director

I’ve been writing a lot about Star Wars lately for a lot of reasons. Not only am I excited for the new Han Solo movie that is about to come out, but I can’t help but notice a number of things that are happening where politics and entertainment are coalescing together in new and unusual ways. I personally think that the new film Solo: A Star Wars Story will be one of those special movies similar to what happened when Raiders of the Lost Ark came out in 1981 and was one of those movies that everyone went to see and was a kind of unifying factor in our society culturally. Most movies that come out don’t have the potential to touch just about everyone who watches them the way that I think this Solo Star Wars film will. When Raiders came out it was a year and a half into the Reagan White House and looking back at how politics and entertainment came together to create a positive decade for America, I can’t help but notice the similarities happening now in 2018. Only I think the potential now is much greater than it was back then. So that prospect has given me great excitement. We are facing a new decade that will not only see mankind visit Mars, but there will be economic expansion that will touch literally every country in the world and their point of entry into those new opportunities will come ironically from Star Wars. People in China and India don’t watch Fox News but they will see Star Wars and be touched by it likely in some way and that will shape their politics in ways that aren’t explored under normal circumstances. But these are not normal days of political development.

I recently wrote of the nature of the Star Wars stories as being best when they are anti-authoritarian, because that was the original vision George Lucas brought to the film series. When Star Wars works best, they are anti-authoritarian art. When Star Wars fails, they are saturated with progressive politics reflective of the creative people who work in the film business. The new people running Lucasfilm and Disney these days are starting to understand that relationship through trial and error, and I think we will see those results in the new Solo: A Star Wars Story movie. Star Wars is not a form of liberal art, it’s a conservative endeavor by its very nature. Even though George Lucas meant it as a reflective form of art from the counter-culture, it was his love of old westerns and 1950s science fiction that set Star Wars apart from everything else that was being produced by Hollywood.

It is hard for liberals to look at themselves and admit that it is the Democratic Party that is all about tyranny and attempting to control people’s lives. They sold the Democratic Party to themselves as the part of civil rights and empowerment, but it was always the Republicans who truly stood for all the things that gave power to individuals and philosophically relied on smaller government to advance a country’s needs. That is why Republicans tend to love Star Wars. Even though the creative people behind Star Wars self-identify as Democrats they philosophically have been making Republican movies because the stories have always been rooted in the traditions of mid-20th Century America. The rejection by fans of elements of Star Wars since the Disney acquisition have been those Democratic elements that just don’t fit with the traditions of the old Saturday morning matinees that inspired George Lucas. Just as Disney would never have been such a massive company if it started out as a liberal enterprise, the origins of both film franchises was rooted in traditional America which Republicans represent.

This is important because if you look at the pod cast shown below where a big show was recorded in a Denny’s to celebrate the upcoming Solo: A Star Wars Story which the restaurant chain is promoting, there is a represented fan base there which I would bet are all potential Republicans, yet they don’t currently vote. If you listen to them speak, they sound like Republicans, they are certainly not collectivists, but the political party structure as it currently is does not inspire them to participate. Getting to know elements about the Star Wars movies are much more interesting to them. And I can say that there are many millions of these people out there, they are politically disconnected from the real world, but the politics of Star Wars as a functional mythology philosophically grounded in the traditions of America and being shown all over the world culturally are aligned with them. It would not take much to convince these people to vote Republican, because in so many ways they are already there.

Until Donald Trump came along Republicans allowed themselves to have their messaging controlled by the Democrats who tend to be better at marketing themselves even if they steal all the good stuff from Republicans—like civil rights, women’s rights, and small government ideas. What I see happening is now with a year and a half of Donald Trump and Star Wars really dominating the entertainment landscape, those two things are coming together in a way that should expand party affiliations in favor of the Republicans. Smart Republicans like Jim Renacci and Sheriff Jones already understand that the way to expand their party base is to reach out to Star Wars fans and get them out voting for Republicans in elections.

Even through Bob Iger at Disney is a Democrat, and Ron Howard who directed Solo: A Star Wars Story is not a Donald Trump lover, they have both done a really good job for their responsibilities in the movie business. If they behaved like liberals in their jobs, they obviously would not have done such a good job so it doesn’t take much to win them over too. The new Republican Party under the Donald Trump White House is actually something that social liberals but business conservatives could sign up to be a part of and that would truly be a unifying factor nationally. I think that’s where everything is headed in 2018 so it would be wise to make strategic alignments that would allow for some really special things to happen at this year’s midterms. There are a lot of new voters out there, and in many cases people who have never even thought about voting who could be recruited once they had the doors opened to them by a party who understands them. Republicans are the party for Star Wars fans and any candidate who wants to expand their base should do so with that understanding. While Star Wars is for kids, it has an epistemology that is rooted in American tradition for which the Republican Party best articulates, and that means that special things can happen politically if everything were aligned properly. So it made me very proud to see that Sheriff Jones and Jim Renacci are some of the first party heads to understand that real potential that exists just beyond our fingertips. We are truly in a new age and those who survive best use all the tools in the tool box, not just the ones that used to be cool—but the ones that are cool now.

Rich Hoffman

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Elections are the Alternative to Violance: Two more FBI agents quit ahead of mounting legal problems at the agency

The big speech that Donald Trump performed at the NRA meeting in Dallas, Texas culminated one of the most incredible weeks we’ve ever had in the United States. Virtually as Trump spoke two of the FBI agents close to former Director Comey left the agency, the much-maligned Lisa Page and James Baker. Of course, we were told that them leaving was unrelated to the Trump case, but in Baker’s situation he is leaving the FBI as one of its top lawyers and is now going to the Brookings Institute to write a blog on National Security Law. Give me a break, I write a blog every day—it’s not a full-time job. I can promise that Baker won’t be writing more than I do, nor will his content be as thought-provoking, or detailed. So his position at Brookings is simply a place to hide as the FBI hopes that all this mess that James Comey has gotten them into will boil over and they might all return to a normal life. Lisa Page of course was the person having the affair with another FBI lead investigator who muddled up the Hillary Clinton email case quite on purpose for political purposes then wrote all those text messages which are now unraveling the law enforcement agency more day by day as more is learned. Then there was the condemnation from the federal Judge T.S. Elilis III in Virginia Friday May 4th who slapped away the intentions of the Mueller special investigation quite publicly as a political witch hunt of the Donald Trump presidency. Taken individually, all these stories were extraordinary, but put together into the reality for which they represent and we see clearly what was behind the curtain of law and order all along, and it is pretty scary.

We should all hope that we never need our guns to take back our government from people like James Comey, Robert Mueller and useless bureaucrats like Lisa Page and James Baker. I’m sure that Lisa Page is a nice lady to have lunch with, but in her institutional role, she was serving as a vile tyrant using the law to pick and choose political players—along with her lover and companions outlined in those damning text messages found on her phone. It is for this reason, where parts of our government might go ideologically off the radar to take over rule away from the electorate that we have the Second Amendment. It should always be our hopes that we can correct these types of problems through elections, as we have with President Trump. When he goes to the NRA meeting in Dallas and indicates that he is enjoying these big legal fights, it is refreshing, because that’s what it takes. It keeps the rest of us cleaning our guns instead of having to use them to take control of our government again from people like James Comey who were obviously abusing their authority under institutional context.

I think I speak for most Americans when I say that I don’t recognize anybody on planet earth as my “better.” I don’t have a “better,” someone who is intellectually, physically, and morally superior to me in any way. I am a free person born that way and I intend to keep it that way doing whatever needs to be done to see that basic assumption through. I’m willing to be a law-abiding person so long as the law is trustworthy. But if it isn’t I will not submit to the authority of our legal system. To my way of thinking what does it matter if someone is under oath if they don’t believe in God, and the evidence is quite clear that many of these villains revealed by the current FBI are not believers of God—so what do they care if they lie to the public. What is there for them to fear if they don’t fear eternal damnation, because after all isn’t that the basic premise of being under oath? How can someone swear to the truth and nothing but the truth so help them God if they don’t really believe in God, Heaven, Hell and the concept of damnation? Yet many of these characters in modern government don’t believe in such things, instead they believe that government has replaced God which is the basic assumption of progressive society and that is an epistemological failure that defies the nature of our country. Without that basic agreement, there is no law and order which leaves us with two options. Elections which can reset the epistemological premise philosophically so that the United States is functioning on an agreed legal assumption, or violence, to literally destroy the criminals who are trying to take over our government and replace them by force. The Trump presidency has allowed for us to delay the violence in the hopes that elections might still work. But obviously, the Mueller investigation is all about undoing that election, so the situation is tenuous.

I’ve known for a long time that the legal system was rotten in America and like many people have played along to get along because we were not willing to surrender everything to chaos and anarchy. We always had hope that an election here and there would take care of the issue. That is how Trump was born, as a last resort to solve the corrupt nature of our legal and political system starting in Washington D.C. then cascading down through the rest of society through the states and local municipalities. Nobody cares if he had sex with some porn star or even a thousand porn stars. Donald Trump was a playboy who lived in the fast lane most of his adult life. Everyone knew that when they elected him, and they did so because they wanted someone in the Executive Branch who had been there and done it all and wouldn’t be seduced by the power of the office or become hypnotized by the décor of aristocracy. More than all that, he was used to legal threats and he knew how to deal with them when needed. Trump has experience with mob bosses and lawyers, mayors and regulations used to control a process so he was the perfect guy at this point in time to retake the White House for the electorate, and because of that election, it has kept our guns on our shelves. And that has been a good thing.

Yet that is how far we have all come. We are literally on that precipice of civil war where real people will get hurt instead of just a bunch of words being cast at each other. Both ideologies cannot live in the same country, one that wants a big centralized state that progressively controls everything and everyone, and a country run by the Constitution that assumes everyone believes in some concept of God and that the rule of law is rooted in a lack of desire to spend eternity in Hellish damnation. Intellectuals may laugh at the naiveté of our Christian nation to place such trust in oaths of office and moral indignation toward evil, but it’s a pretty good starting point when you have to keep rogue FBI agents from attempting to start their own country behind the mask of a corrupt legal system. They should all consider themselves lucky that there is such a system, because it has prevented a lot of violence. If those basic rights are not respected, that of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, then the only next step is to take those guns off the shelves and retake the government by force. Compliance as progressives would assume based on the behavior of their rank and file, is not an option. It is better to see everyone fired at the FBI than to accept the vile conduct that their agents have conducted against the American people by allowing themselves to become weaponized and serve a political party that is specifically strong in the Washington D.C. area, but not around the rest of the country where Republicanism is still quite strong.

Rich Hoffman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rich Hoffman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rich Hoffman

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Vote for Jim Renacci: Trump endorses the Ohio candidate to take on Sharrod Brown’s Senate seat in 2018

The primary election is now under a week away and in Ohio I will be voting very enthusiastically for Jim Renacci for the U.S. Senate. For me there isn’t even a close second. Renacci is the guy who should be the Republican nominee to go after the Sherrod Brown seat this fall, and is best poised to represent the new Trump agenda. So its important that when May 8th comes around that you don’t just sit home and skip the primary vote. Go vote and cast a vote for Jim Renacci, because you can’t take anything for granted these days. We are living in a time of great change, for the better I might add, but to keep that momentum going, you must participate even if in small ways. A vote on May 8th is a small thing, but it all adds up to big things. Even with all that’s going on in the world for which President Trump is a part of he took time recently to officially endorse Jim Renacci:[image error]

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE May 1, 2018

Wadsworth, Ohio—Today, U.S. Senate candidate Jim Renacci, received the endorsement of the the Trump Campaign which comes on the heels of President Trump’s personal endorsement last week.

“I am humbled to have received the Trump campaign’s endorsement for U.S. Senate, in addition to President Trump’s recent personal endorsement for my candidacy. I am proud of my record as a strong advocate for the President’s America First agenda and l look forward to continuing to advance that cause in the United States Senate,” said Jim Renacci.

I enjoyed watching the West Virginia Senate debate on Fox News where there is a similar battle going on there as in Ohio. A Republican is looking to knock off a long-held Democratic Senate seat to put the numbers more in Trump’s favor. It’s a strategy that the mainstream media is ignoring in hopes that people won’t notice, but the GOP is very active in this regard in 2018, led largely by the Trump White House. My pick by the way in West Virginia for which I have many readers is of course Don Blankenship. He’s a business guy and he was prosecuted and sent to jail for many of the same reasons Sheriff Joe Arpaio was prosecuted in Arizona. I think it takes a lot of guts to step right out of jail and run for a Senate seat at the federal level taking on an entrenched incumbent. A few years ago such a thing would be unheard of, but in 2018, why the hell not. We’re looking for people in these seats who want America to win and will fight to make it so—even when they have had to face down personal adversity to such extremes. The Blankenship case is one of those types of political stories where the Obama administration was at war with the coal industry and was seeking to weaken it. Blankenship was the CEO of a number of large coal mines all over West Virginia and when an accident happened that killed several people, the Obama Department of Justice used the power it controlled to put a CEO in jail. It was Obama’s way of showing the world that socialism was the new trend in America and that CEOs weren’t safe under the new socialist oriented president.

Jim Renacci in Ohio isn’t nearly as controversial as Blankenship but he could tell similar stories about how the federal government abused him as a private businessman. Jim as an entrepreneur has been very successful and one of his big enterprises was a General Motors Dealership that he ran around the time that GM went bankrupt. Due to a long story of government tampering and a congressman in his district who happened to be a Democrat, Jim reached out to try to save his dealership from the GM collapse. When the Democratic congressman lied to Renacci leading to a series of events where Jim lost his dealership anyway, Jim did the most noble thing he could do at the time, and that was run against that Democrat and beat him to take his senate seat away from him.

Jim Renacci is a fighter, but not in a crazy way, in the careful and precise way that top business executives are—which is the trend for where the Trump controlled Republican Party is moving—thankfully. And that is why President Trump sought Jim out of the crowd to run for the Sharrod Brown seat. Trump needs more senators on Capital Hill and he wants Jim to be one of them. But he also needs someone who can beat an entrenched Democrat to take that seat away, which is how we have arrived at this place in time under these specific circumstances.

The politics of yesterday where fizzled out lawyers and old lobbyists try to get elected to one of the two parties for a chance to become American aristocrats enhancing their social lives greatly in destructive ways without ever being expected to do anything meaningful while in office is over. Now that Trump has won the Executive Branch and is doing a very good job, former business executives like Jim Renacci are getting serious looks where they hadn’t before, and for the first time we are looking at staffing a government not with political hacks, but actual people of real world accomplishment. Who couldn’t like the reasons that Jim Renacci got into politics and his record thus far as a true conservative? Jim is just the kind of person I think every elected position should have in it, if only there were enough good people out there like Jim Renacci.

I’ve had the opportunity to meet Jim Renacci a few times now, one time was when he was traveling on Air Force One with President Trump to visit a local manufacturing plant in southern Ohio. He’s as solid of a person I’ve ever meet as a politician, he’s the real deal, and Trump knows it. Being handpicked by Donald Trump, when it comes to the upcoming fall, the President will come to Ohio several times to help push Jim over Sharrod Brown, and that would be good for everyone. But Trump won’t do the same for those he hasn’t handpicked, because he knows how to tell who the losers are and who the winners will be, and his time is too valuable for losers. Given that qualifier, Trump has already put a considerable amount of time into Jim Renacci, and very early in the process. So if you are a Trump supporter, it is very important to help that overall effort out by voting this upcoming Tuesday, May 8th in the primary.

I think the primary elections in May are every bit as important as the fall elections in November, but often only a fraction of the potential electorate shows up to participate. Don’t be one of those people who stay home that day. Jim Renacci needs your vote, and so does Donald Trump. To keep this conservative reform going that we are currently undergoing, we need fresh troops on the line and Jim Renacci is one of those new, fresh faces that are so badly needed in the Senate. So vote for him and help us turn the corner to the next great battle—the Sharrod Brown Senate Seat!

Rich Hoffman

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Trump’s Nobel Peace Prize–For Iran: Predicting the future after North Korea

A lot of people these days are saying that they never saw peace in North Korea happening and that nobody could have predicted it. Well, I did predict it, and anybody can go back through these pages and see that I went into explicit detail on how North Korea would come begging to the negotiating table, if only we had a president who knew how to negotiate. Two of the biggest contributors to Kim Jong Un’s wavering on continuing communism in North Korea to fulfill his father and grandfather’s wishes was that the kid liked American NBA basketball. That by itself was a foot into the door of capitalism and most of his anger toward the West was that he was on the wrong side of an issue he desired to be on from the start. The other is that they didn’t have any money in North Korea and once the sanctions started to kick in, Kim Jong Un realized quickly that his bluff had been called and that he had no real choice but to walk back his global position and try a different approach. Most of the weapons and military displayed by the North Korean dictator are dummies, meaning they falsely represent the real firepower that the communist country has. The way to make peace with North Korea was to box the kid in and isolate him from the rest of the world then let him have a path out of the corner he created for himself into enjoying aspects of the West that he liked, like NBA basketball. He gets to stay in the palace and run the country and be the great negotiator for his people ushering in an age of prosperity for which they have never known, and everyone lives happily ever after—for the most part. Yes, I predicted it well before anybody else did in the world—apparently.

So I’m not shy about making these new predictions about Iran. Trump needs to pull out of the deal and to choke off the country financially—isolating them just as what happened in North Korea. Using North Korea as an example of what could happen in Iran will be Trump’s greatest negotiating chip, and he’ll use it once the DMZ meeting happens. Iran supplies most of the disruptive presence in the Middle East. They keep the Taliban alive in Afghanistan, they keep things stirred up in Syria, and they are the backbone of Palestine. If Iran falls as an instigative force there isn’t much to keep disruptions alive in the Middle East and peace will soon become the theme of that land—and for the first time in all known history the world will be united in ways that nobody ever thought possible. The timeline for the Iran situation is 2020, it won’t take long. Without that Iran deal with the United States, Iran doesn’t have much money to work with and there really isn’t any state sponsorship anywhere else, including Russia and China who can’t fund Iran behind the scenes without getting caught—and they won’t risk that.

Iran’s oil is worth much less now that the United States has their own energy that they are exporting—so like Venezuela there just aren’t many economic options for Iran to keep their people submitting themselves to the current Ayatollah regime. The desire for revolution is already there in Iran, the people are not happy with the Marxism that has been a part of their country since the 1970s and they want to have a chance to shop at Bed Bath and Beyond, like everyone else in the world can, so they are not patient for Iran to get itself fixed economically. Without the deal with the United States, Iran is in serious financial jeopardy and their sponsorship of global terrorism suddenly won’t fit on their credit card, and the country will have no choice but to join the rest of the world in peace.

Shortly thereafter Israel will make peace with Palestine because without Iran there to stir the pot, there isn’t any will to continue fighting and we will then find that the Middle East will be on the path to peace. And it’s as simple as that. However, no politician could do these things, only people from private business who understand how things work in the real world, which is why Donald Trump is having all this success, and will likely receive the Nobel Peace Prize before his next term in office. To the political establishments and global intelligence all this seems so improbable, yet it’s happening and will continue to happen because they never knew what they were talking about.

One of the ways to live best in this world is to not just learn one specific occupation, but to know many things about many occupations, and if you have a creative mind, you can piece everything together from the evidence that had been gathered. Private sector people who are used to creating business transactions are much better positioned to deal with these big global matters, and Trump certainly represents that assumption. Anybody with half a brain could tell that Kim Jong Un’s demonstrations with his missiles and troops were to fluff their feathers but always underneath was just a bird that could have its neck broken with the simple twist of the hand. The same with Iran and all the other terrorist actors around the world. If they were smart and had resources to work with, they wouldn’t need to fluff their feathers and play to the world’s fears of being the plot line of the next James Bond film. In reality the villains of the world are not masterminds like James Bond’s Spectre, they are more like that crazy chick at the White House Correspondents Dinner in 2018. Only people who have mastered dealing with such people would know the difference, but politicians who are in it for the aristocratic perks of the job have no idea—and they take everything at face value—which is why they lose all the time.

You can tell by the way that Ali Khamenei is thrashing about at Donald Trump that he’s about to fold, because that is what people who have nothing left in the tank do when faced with someone they know they can’t beat. Iran has no resources—they only have an economy that produces $1.5 trillion and if they are cut off from the world, starting with their lopsided deal with the United States, then their people will overthrow the Khamenei regime quickly—because they are close to doing so now. Life isn’t good in Iran and it hasn’t been since Marxism entered the area so many decades ago. In modern-day Iran socialism is the ruler on the political right and left. Their most strict observance of political ideology representing conservatism would look more like something Bernie Sanders would come up with as opposed to even some squishy Republican like Marco Rubio would—and those concepts are foreign to us in America. We can’t imagine that anybody would be so stupid, yet they are. So for those who know about these things, the path to beating such minds is easy, and Donald Trump is doing it.

So mark it on your calendars, there will be peace in the Middle East and the first step of that process comes from the unification of North Korea into the rest of the world. Once Trump meets with Kim Jong Un at the DMZ and the world catches their breath, Iran is next—and they know it. Iran of course does have a larger economy than North Korea did, so it is a little bit trickier, but the concepts are all the same. With North Korea off the map of contentious behavior, Iran is stuck all by themselves for the world to watch. If Trump doesn’t get the Nobel Peace Prize for North Korea, he will for what he’s about to do to Iran.

Rich Hoffman

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The Millennium Falcon Experience was SOLD OUT: What everything tells us about what type of society we want to be

[image error]In case you hadn’t noticed dear reader, there is a lot going on out there in the world. Even as the White House Correspondents Dinner over the weekend of April 28th showed truly how much we are living in a society well declined, a large number of really big Supreme Court cases are about to have decisions made that will shape American society for the next century. Primary elections are happening in May that will have a major impact on the midterms this upcoming fall, and the Korean peninsula is uniting for the first time in over 70 years. I’ve been writing on this blog site for around a decade now and things are happening so fast that they have defied intellectual saturation, but I have noticed one thing lately that simply amazed me and the start of it came as we were having Millennium Falcon waffles at my house before leaving to visit again the Millennium Falcon Experience at NKU. The new Avengers movie called Infinity War made over $250,000 domestically breaking all kinds of box office records and that was important for a number of reasons in relation to the grand scheme of things. If Jim Cameron was hoping that superhero movies were about to fizzle out, this news would upset him greatly, and many who have tried to use the film industry as a propaganda arm of the liberal left.

The plan was always to take the larger part of my family down to see the Millennium Falcon Experience on Sunday morning at 9 AM—which is why we scouted the event on Friday to figure out how we could take a large group through it. My family was very excited to go see the reproduction of parts of the Millennium Falcon and get some good pictures. One of my daughters is a professional photographer so we wanted to get some great pictures at the Millennium Falcon Experience since we are all Star Wars fans—its seemed like a good opportunity for us. Plus, the character of Han Solo has always been my favorite and without him in a movie, Star Wars has never really been Star Wars. I have been very critical of the new Star Wars movies, except for Rogue One, so I have been nervous about what Lucasfilm and Disney would do to my favorite Star Wars character. Han Solo certainly isn’t a liberal character by any measure, so my concern was that Disney would push to water him down to make it part of their overall liberal agenda at the company these days. However, indications are that the exact opposite will be happening. It appears that Lucasfilm has been listening to their fans since the Force Awakens problems in killing off the character, and the direction they had taken him. This new movie Solo: A Star Wars Story looks like they understand what the character is supposed to be and to what impact that will have on our society as a whole.[image error]

Like I always say, my favorite topic isn’t politics, funding challenges, or even scientific endeavor, although I do talk about those things a lot—my favorite topic is mythology. I am mildly obsessed with the way cultures form and what mythologies are used to bring people together, what themes work and which ones don’t. Han Solo is the most popular character in the Star Wars series for a reason, he is a very traditional alpha male who is reckless and in pursuit of his own independence often at whatever cost. I’m sure the progressives within the Disney Company and at Lucasfilm have discussed Solo at great length, and I think much of the reason that Ron Howard was brought in to take over the directing duties was because Donald Trump was elected and wisely Lucasfilm knew they needed to change a few things that were becoming obvious about the world after President Trump moved into the White House.[image error]

I was in London while Solo: A Star Wars Story was shooting at Pinewood and I was watching the protests against Donald Trump in those opening months and I listened carefully to the two original Solo movie directors show great support for the movement against Trump. While I don’t think that Kathy Kennedy is a conservative by any measure, the tide of movies that were going to make money certainly had to accept that Trump voters were going to decide if a film succeeded or failed at the box office. So they made some adjustments on the Solo set and brought in Ron Howard who understood that this movie about Han Solo was more about American Graffiti meets A Fistful of Dollars than a space version of 21 Jump Street. Han Solo actually means something to a lot of people, not just me, and Lucasfilm recognized that and decided to make the movie that needed to be made to pay respect to Han Solo, not the movie they wanted to make about Han Solo as a bunch of social progressives, and that is a very important distinction.[image error]

This Millennium Falcon Experience was meant to tour city to city with three sections of set reproductions from the Solo movie to generate interest in the film. My wife and I along with two of our grandchildren went to the opening of the event on Friday April 27th and I was impressed with the crowd. I saw what was going on pretty fast, on the public relations side, the event had printed a limited number of tickets that they gave out for free and when they were gone, they were gone which would get people talking about the whole thing on social media, sharing pictures, and generating interest in the new Han Solo movie that would come out on May 25th. The Millennium Falcon Experience would start in Northern Kentucky at NKU, then travel the following weekend to Atlanta, then to Denver before settling in Los Angeles ahead of the premier for the movie. My scouting report, which is seldom ever wrong, which I conveyed to my two daughters was that the big Star Wars geeks would hit this event on Friday and the thing would fizzle out by Sunday after a weekend of being open. After all, there were only so many Star Wars fans out there. Our plan was to show up at 9 AM on Sunday morning when the tickets would be issued, and we’d walk onto the exhibit, get our pictures, then go somewhere nice for breakfast. That’s not what happened.

We arrived at precisely 9:07 AM and found out that all the tickets were gone. People had started lining up at 4:30 AM that morning and the line had wrapped around the building of the BB&T Arena and the whole day sold out well before the event even started. The crew hosting the event wasn’t prepared for such a large crowd, so they issued the tickets so that people could get their tour times and leave, since there were no bathroom facilities. The event was open from 9 to 5 PM and tickets were given at intervals that would allow for about ten minutes of personal touring for each ticket which was good for five people. So doing the math, a lot of people didn’t get a ticket who wanted one. If we hadn’t gone down to the exhibit on Friday, we wouldn’t have been able to see it at all, which just mesmerized me. The opposite of what I thought was going to happen, happened. The Millennium Falcon Experience had more interest in it by day 3 than it did on day one, which I thought was remarkable given the fact that it was a free exhibit for a movie about Han Solo that didn’t come out for another month. There are many in the industry who think that people are going to get Star Wars saturation given that this is the second Star Wars movie within a year, the first was The Last Jedi. But like the Avengers Infinity War, audiences were hungrier than ever for mythological products like these movies—and that said something very important.

Both films talked about here are products of the Disney Company and while the overall movie industry is declining, Disney at least has kept their ear to the ground to give audiences what they need in the characters produced in these movies. There is a theme which all these movie characters represent that speaks to the yearning people have for individualized freedom. Han Solo is certainly all about that restless lust for personal freedom and that Millennium Falcon Experience spoke to that yearning directly. People weren’t just watching it in a movie, they were able to put their hands on it and that hunger surprised even me. I pay really close attention to these kinds of things and this went well beyond the passion I thought was out there. With that in mind I think that by the time this Solo movie hits at the end of May, after Infinity War had been out for over a month, there will be some cultural influences from these movies that will percolate into our society as a whole, in the fields of science, fashion, art and entertainment—in everything, and those things will be happening at a time when the Supreme Court will make decisions on some big cases that will affect us all. I think we are in a world that is changing dramatically, and not for the worst. I think we have been there already and are on the way out of it. But more than that, I think the movies reflect more about what we want to change into than what we just want to participate in as escapist fantasy. And that is a very interesting occurrence for our modern-day experience.[image error]

Rich Hoffman

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An Amazing Amount of Information: The turning point

It was bewildering to listen to the so-called pundits try to analyze whether or not Donald Trump played a “role” in the sudden North Korea group hug that is taking place across the globe. From a tyrannical regime just a few months ago threatening nuclear war to a world stage icon, the threat of North Korea has been melted away by the new American president and all the institutional addicts are perplexed as to how and why. Most interesting was the comments from the despot of Iran Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who said that Trump was not qualified to be a world leader and negotiate in any way because he was a builder of buildings and only a businessman—as if a politician were some kind of godly position. And within that statement and the presumptions of the entire political class around the world I think the Ayatollah hit the sweet spot on why everyone is so upset with Trump who have made livings for years scaring normal people into believing that their politicians were gods incarnate and meant to rule without question.

It was absolutely fascinating to watch the Trump supporters Diamond and Silk (Ms. Hardaway and her sister Ms. Richardson) voice their concerns in front of congress about social media platforms attacking conservative groups. I can’t imagine anything like that happening prior to just two years ago, yet they did it and it was quite interesting—and exemplifies the difference between the static order of old, and this new light on their feet brand of conservatism that is emerging so spectacularly. We are learning now what Trump conservatives are, and they are not like the Reagan conservatives at all. People like the black entertainment artist Kenya West are a part of it ironically and the old rules that have been dividing our society up over many thousands of years are coming apart right in front of our faces, and its very interesting to watch.

As the White House Correspondents Dinner was happening in Washington D.C. President Trump came to Michigan to host a rally against the establishment—fresh off a diplomatic week of massive productivity, state visits from France and Germany as well as constant negotiations with North Korea to set up the official end of the Korean War. And instead of giving those media personalities the illusion that they were a part of a shadow government, Trump cut them off and left them hanging wet on the cloths line—and he should have. They are part of that old Ayatollah mentality which believes that aristocratic politicians are superior to individuals of business and opinion. Yet everywhere we look these days the old guard is fumbling with this new attitude best exemplified by Trump and people like Diamond and Silk.

With all the weapons they have had at their disposal, such as has been revealed by James Comey trying so hard to pretend that the intelligence agencies of the United States have not been weaponized—they are failing and there is a very gentle panic beginning to emerge in them. James Comey and Ali Khamenei ironically have the same opinion of Donald Trump and the same belief in the old order which propped them up to be leaders of their respective societies. They can’t accept that a businessman like Trump is a superior caliber person to the old-style rulers of the old world—the aristocratic societies of yesteryear, of which the United States was always rebelling away from. That was the point from the inception of America, to rebel away from Europe. We were never meant to copy those aristocrats. Washington D.C. was never supposed to be a swamp in the way it has become. The swamp formed because good people were too busy settling out west and forming their own companies and families independent of king’s courts and political associations. The politician in America was always supposed to be a servant, not a “better.”

The more James Comey spoke on his book tour culminating with the Fox News interview he did with Bret Baier the more obvious it was that he was genuinely hurt that the world he understood was melting away and was being replaced by this new world full of rules he knew he wouldn’t be good at. I would suggest that this world of Trump and activists like Diamond and Silk were always supposed to be part of the American experience—so its his fault that Comey thinks the things he does. It was his fault that he failed like so many others in our social tapestry have, to recognize the obvious. Human beings do not like institutionalized concepts. They may have used them to bridge over from the Neolithic periods of early mankind, but the destination was never going to be more authority figures in our lives running everything that we know and love. It was destined to be less.

While James Comey and his wife were part of that Beltway society that thought they understood the rules and toasted each other with expensive wines in Georgetown backyards, the rest of the world yearned to be free of such aristocrats. In truth the social media platforms like Facebook that have worked so closely with American intelligence agencies to collect data on people without warrants and complicated legal procedures have helped accelerate this issue of necessity for freedom. I have no doubt that Facebook wanted to shut down the popularity of Diamond and Silk’s page, just as they would have loved to have stopped the Donald Trump presidency. But the nature of social media is freedom to communicate with people within their circle of influence with more ease and that has created in the mind of people a yearning for more of what they already want—freedom from overseers.

People generally want a society that is productive and filled with justice. But if left to their own devices, they despise authority. There are a percentage of people out there in the world that have an intense desire to rule over other people for various reasons, so they turn to institutions to provide them that ability, whether they end up as teachers in a public school, or the head of some military branch—the desire to rule over other people has always been at the center of war in human societies, from the beginning. But most people don’t have such yearnings, they just want to be free of such people and to live their lives on their own terms and they are the clear majority of people functioning out there across the planet. America was born because of that intense desire and now social media has caused that longing to become much more defined.

Where it goes from here is truly an unexplored territory, but its exciting. Trump’s achievements are the result of a person functioning outside of institutionalism, that has been developed by the merits of capitalism to solve much more complicated problems than the aristocrats of the old world could manage. That is how America became such a great country to begin with, when private enterprise was able to work around the political class to truly achieve objectives that people yearned for. And that is precisely why Iran is an armpit of a country currently because it is still run the way countries have been run for thousands of years—and that top down model just isn’t valid any longer. North Korea had to see the writing on the wall when Trump didn’t back down the way politicians in the past did, and he decided for his own good to join the world. Iran will have no choice either, and that truly scares those types of people who try to use institutionalism to bring meaning to their lives by giving them authority over others based purely on the rules of artificial parameters of human politics.

Rich Hoffman

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

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

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

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

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

— Rich Hoffman (@overmanwarrior) April 28, 2018

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

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

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

Rich Hoffman

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The Millennium Falcon at NKU in Cincinnati: A look into penetrating the frontier of space

[image error]The first thought I had while touring The Millennium Falcon Experience at the Northern Kentucky University campus was that this fictional ship from the Star Wars stories would be the best way to travel from Earth to Mars, or the moon and some more distant destination within our solar system. I thought of Jules Verne’s great book From the Earth to the Moon where he conceived of the rocket design that would be used 100 years later when NASA would eventually launch people into space and land on the moon. Star Wars was much more than just geek fandom. While I had personally thought about sitting in the cockpit of the Millennium Falcon from the movies most of my life, and never thought I’d ever get a chance to actually do so, when the time did come I couldn’t help but think of real space travel using the actual design of the Millennium Falcon to serve as a foundation for a fleet of ships that would take commercial space travel to the next level.

I have been enjoying all this Han Solo media ahead of the new movie coming out on May 25th. Han Solo and his Millennium Falcon are some of my favorite fictional things in entertainment so I have been looking forward to a movie dedicated just to him and his famous starship. When I was a kid and was watching these movies for the first time I’d spend a lot of hours thinking of how to build the Millennium Falcon and trying to figure out the engineering of it. Obviously, I wasn’t alone, millions of people have been so enamored. It is a wonderful thing to see imaginations sparked to life by what they see in a movie. Over the years there have been attempts to build elements of the Millennium Falcon by the legions of fans that follow the Star Wars movies and I have enjoyed their attempts. Most notably I have been very excited to learn that a full-sized Millennium Falcon will appear at the new Disney Parks called Galaxy’s Edge. I can’t help but think that the human race is on a similar trajectory as it was with the Jules Verne novels and how NASA emerged.[image error]

I was one of the first in line to see the exhibit at NKU on Friday at 11 AM. I’m a very busy person but not too busy to see the interior of the actual Millennium Falcon as it goes on a five-city tour promoting the new Solo: A Star Wars Story all through the month of May. The Millennium Falcon is after all my favorite ship in science fiction and this whole tour started in my home town, so I had to take a moment to go see it, and it was quite impressive. It was really cool to visit the cockpit that was only seen in the movies from a few points of view, which have become iconic over the years. But it didn’t take long for the nostalgia to wear off for me and to look at the display put on by Lucasfilm as a film promotion to begin to take it all very seriously.[image error]

What’s really unique about this new film set before the events of the original movies is that the Millennium Falcon is presented not as a hunk of junk, but as the best and most exquisite of ships from its era. The Millennium Falcon becomes a junkie star ship because of the rough lifestyle of Han Solo, but this new movie goes to the start of all that, before a time when the popular Star Wars character owned the ship. As presented the Millennium Falcon was well made and bright white looking like an icon of luxury. It looked like the ship I remembered from my childhood only it looked much better. When I think of the Millennium Falcon I think of a dirty interior of a couple of friends living without women flying from one end of the galaxy to the other and not carrying to clean up after themselves. But presented the way it was for this promotional tour, the Millennium Falcon looked like a realistic offering for our own modern space travel.[image error]

It is a little ironic to me that it was the year of 2018 that Disney’s acquisition of the Star Wars franchise seems to start paying off. I think this new Solo movie will be one of the most popular and will ignite a fresh start for the popular films. It’s the first time that there have ever been two Star Wars films within one year of each other and the impact that has had on merchandising has been remarkable. It’s hard to go to Wal-Mart or Target these days without seeing something regarding Star Wars. And all this is happening as commercial space endeavors are literally starting to take off. Later this year Virgin Galactic will begin their commercial flights for space tourism and Space X is preparing to send people around the moon. All this is happening while a Trump presidency has thrown its weight behind a reinvigorated NASA space program and a hot economy that is redefining employment statistics. The iWatch has essentially turned us all into Dick Tracy speaking on the phone to others from our wrists, things are moving very quickly these days.

I find it all very exciting. It won’t be long before Elon Musk has a colony on Mars and commercial industry begins to move into space. The next 50 years will explode along the frontier of space much like it did in America once humans began westward expansion free of European kings for the first time in known history. Space will bring much of the same ambition for adventure and profit. But people won’t want to fly in the kind of cramped quarters that we see with ship designs so far offered. Likely we’ll resort to what we know from films and literature, and the Millennium Falcon looks to me to have solved many of those long-distance space traveling problems.

You can make a starship in really any design you want, what you’ll need for long distance space travel is something that humans are comfortable in, that can use its external surfaces to generate power and have lots of surface area for controllable thrust. The design of the Millennium Falcon presents a lot of options for hauling freight to and from places like Mars over 18-month visits one way. Sitting in the cockpit and forgetting about the hyperspace jumps we see in the movies it wasn’t hard for me to consider spinning the Falcon to produce gravity until it arrives at its destination around Mars. Hooking up to whatever cargo it needs to bring back to earth then resuming that spinning effect all the way back with the crew living in relative luxury inside the whole time. Because of Star Wars we have a whole generation of people who are intellectually ready to accept such a deep space reality.

The Millennium Falcon’s interior as it was presented at NKU was certainly something I could live in for the long back and forth journeys to Mars that are about to become quite a reality. The Millennium Falcon already has practical docking clamps as part of its design. Solar panels could easily be incorporated into the outer shell to provide power and the interior is large enough to not go crazy in over such a long voyage. It’s round and interesting taking away the boxy designs that are offered in the International Space Station which is not conducive for long periods in space where people want to gather in a common room, but also want to be able to have their personal space as well. People need to get away from each other as well as communicate in common ways. The Falcon’s interior design goes a long way to solving lots of deep space traveling problems for a functional freighter.

Looking at that exhibit at NKU I could easily see some eccentric future billionaire building a fleet of Millennium Falcon style ships to essentially become like tractor trailers hauling rare minerals from the moon and Mars to enrich life on earth then use that wealth creation to catapult mankind even deeper into space. I could live on the Millennium Falcon with the amenities that were presented in the exhibit for many months, even years on end. Normally when we see designs for space, the environment has a military look to everything which makes it so that only the most disciplined space travelers could endure the experience. But that will have to change, and it is in our science fiction designs. [image error]To me the most impressive thing about the Millennium Falcon Experience was that after only 50 years of film history fans of the movies have finally figured out how to make the ships that were shown in Star Wars, and now artists and craftsmen are able to actually recreate what we see in the movies in real life. The next steps become rather obvious at that point and that is truly exciting. The Millennium Falcon Experience at NKU advertising a new Han Solo movie was something I personally never thought I’d see. But after seeing it, and touching it, and soaking it all in—I have a feeling that we will all be seeing a lot more of it in the years to come. As I left that exhibit I had the strange feeling that I may just own my own Millennium Falcon in a few years that can fly to Mars and back many times over as routinely as we can now drive to Florida now in a car. And I think I would like that world very much!

This was the line for the Millennium Falcon Experience today at NKU. It was a fantastic exhibit if you are thinking of going. @starwars @RealRonHoward pic.twitter.com/1L7gxRpjm7

— Rich Hoffman (@overmanwarrior) April 27, 2018

Rich Hoffman

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