Tag: education funding

The Death of Globalism: Climate activists and their great hoax are losing as Paris clearly shows

If you went to a baseball game to get to know a “globalist” better, especially a wealthy activist like George Soros, Barack Obama, or even George W. Bush what you would discover is that they are only people doing what they think is right. They wouldn’t come across as the vile, evil people that they really are because they think they are doing the right things as a collective society focused on collective attributes. They think that the way to end all wars is to take away all the things that people fight for, national borders, wealth acquisition, and innovation. They don’t care about all the good things that come from conflict which has advanced civilization, like aviation, radar technology and even medical practices because as progressives they are actually regressive who wish to step back in time and worship the collective deity of mother nature because in their youths they listened to old Beatles songs about coming together and that India had all the spiritual answers so our tasks in life were to divorce ourselves of our individuality and accept that we are all the light not the bulb. So we should endeavor to remove personal identities, possessions such as wives and families and private properties with fences around them and become citizens of the world and when we die, to assimilate into the great unknown where we become united with the same collective consciousness that moves the streams on earth and fills them with fish, or makes an eagle fly from tree to tree because we are all part of each other, and we need to learn to accept it. Yet, they are all wrong, and always have been.

Those globalist minded activists that have been running things for a long time, because they sold themselves in sheep’s clothing trying to hide the wolf within, are losing their influence. In 2016 things changed dramatically for them when a majority of the nation ignored all the traditional factors of election winning and voted to put Donald Trump in the White House. The guy was smart, self-made and wealthy so he could fight the fight that it would take because most of us have jobs and have to go along to get along to pay our bills, our mortgages and interact with people we have to make livings with who don’t always share our values. And with Donald Trump, he was an old man at the end of his life and had nothing to lose, so he could literally afford to piss off all the right people to do some great things for the country he loves while he still could. The globalists had manipulated the election process over the years to prevent just those types of circumstances from occurring all in one person, yet like a single sperm penetrating the egg of a human female against all odds of birth, a new movement was conceived, global populism and a reverence for the nationalism of their domestic countries. And now the world has evolved under great turmoil to a truly terrifying place for the average progressive.

People in Paris should have known that if they allowed their socialist country of France to adopt open socialism—or any socialism for that matter that the money would run out. For the last two weeks thousands of protestors have taken to the streets in the tourist part of town over high gas prices for which President Macron has promised to enforce to support the efforts of the mythical climate change that the globalists keep talking about. Everyone knows that the way to unite any opposition is to find some common flag that everyone can rally behind so globalists have been trying to use this climate change issue as that flag which was meant to transcend the concern of nations and their borders, and put people’s minds onto the fictional premise of deity worship in regards to mother earth. But now people have seen in President Trump that populism of a conservative nature is working and in sectors all across Europe there are challenges to the old order and even in the poor and broken hell hole of Tijuana, Mexico the mayor there is trying to become his own version of Donald Trump. People have seen that they have options to what the globalists have been offering and they are turning away from them first in spirit but now in elections.

But what about the 1,656 page climate change report by over 13 federal agencies called the National Climate Assessment report issued every four years by congress and is blaming every forest fire, flood and hurricane on climate change assuming that the earth never had these things happening until humans developed technology? What are we supposed to do with reports like that from supposedly respected institutions? After all, it is reports like that which has encouraged President Macron to raise taxes on French fuel costs artificially to pay for all their socialism. People are supposed to care about killing their planet and change their behavior domestically, not to hit the streets vandalizing popular tourist centers.

It is easy to become convinced that these globalists are winning because even in the United States socialism has now openly taken over the Democrat Party and they promise to make life hell for President Trump with countless congressional investigations underlined with a genuine hatred for all aspects of American capitalism except when they want to sip a latté at Starbucks. People like George Soros and even the Koch Brothers thought they had this whole globalism thing in the bag and the world was on an irreversible path, but Trump has beat them and taken away the fuel of their movement, and coming in 2019 the new sentiment of nationalism is destroying the cultural attempt at globalism. China is losing in the trade war in a major way against the United States. Russia isn’t even a consideration, notice how they have had to quit down in Ukraine and other places around the world? Korea is uniting and talking. Iran has been decimated and can barely feed themselves let alone sponsor terror around the Middle East. Mexico is actually defending the American border because they are terrified that Trump will close that border and destroy their tourist industry wrecking any aspects of a legitimate economy that they have left.

All through the Holiday season the global minded who run all the big networks these days, are trying to focus on the bad stock market numbers as a blame game on the Trump administration. But it is the uneasiness around the world that is causing that, the Democrats running the House of Representatives and destabilizing the markets, the tech stocks being caught data collecting for the ominous purpose of government conspiracy and losing the confidence of their consumers and a Federal Reserve that has been looking to play their part in the conspiracy by raising interest rates too early to slow down the steam and give globalists a few more tries at the plate before everything really takes off. But the writing is already on the wall. It’s too late. Now that people have tasted the freedom of Trump’s populism and seen the renewed benefits of nationalism, the trajectory of success is self-evident. And in truth, the world is turning to Trump for their answers, which is a great thing. And the globalists have lost in a big way, and for those who stand against them, thankfully so. It’s about time.

Rich Hoffman

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As The Wagons Circle: Trump’s real plan is revealed as Mexico is finally preparing to pay for the wall

Remember when Trump said he was going to build a wall on the southern border and Mexico was going to pay for it, well now the how is revealing itself. Now that the caravans have arrived and Tijuana is struggling to pay for all the new immigrants from Central America who were literally pushed into making the journey to the border looking for asylum American forces have been authorized to use force to prevent them from going any further, but it is Mexico who has been tasked with dealing with the issue or else—Trump is threatening to close the border. To those who haven’t been to Mexico lately that is a devastating proposition, because the entire country relies so heavily on American tourism that such a threat seriously jeopardizes the few legitimate businesses that Mexico produces, within the tourist industry. Without American tourism, and any Mexican will admit when asked, Mexico’s legitimate economy falls apart. So when Trump told Mexico to do something about the caravan, the leverage is clearly in the court of America and the beginnings of the Mexican payoff is emerging through all the political smoke.

With the Democrats coming into control of the House in January clearly the military budget is about to be reduced and the pressure to have continued open borders especially along the southern United States will increase. Drug dealers from south of the border without question are not happy that the American military is at the southern border stopping illegal crossings which have been coaxed along by these caravans of immigrants and the byproduct of that is a look at the world after Trump’s wall where drug smuggling suddenly got a lot harder. Democrats being the party of illegal activity and drug abuse are going to look keenly at resolving the immediate conflict so that the drug dealers can get back to work which all puts Trump in a commanding position with all the leverage.

The panic is full-blown as most people haven’t been paying attention to the news over the last several days, due to the American Holiday season. But Mathew Whitaker the acting Attorney General has come under serious attack by Democrats over supposed “Hatch Act” violations which occurred during a previous run for Senate. They obviously don’t want anybody but a lap dog to keep their Mueller conspiracy theory story going by a federal investigation initiated by the liberal activist James Comey. Jerome Corsi is being pushed into a plea deal to essentially root out any Wikileaks connections to the 2016 campaign, which is yet another attempt to fight many things on several fronts. There is currently a global motion to remove Wikileaks from any future campaigns and to kick Julian Assange out of the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. Talk about a lack of freedom of the press. The whole effort is about complete control of the press under the ruse of “justice.” And a lawsuit against the Trump Foundation has been allowed to proceed by a Manhattan judge essentially to mire the President in legal battles on so many fronts that he won’t have any options available to him but to yield in mercy. That is the strategy. Isn’t it interesting how Democrats are so interested in justice when they have something they want done, but if the same effort is applied to them, it’s all a conspiracy theory. If the kind of evidence existed against Republicans, which it doesn’t, that occurred with the DNC, Hillary Clinton, the former Attorney General Loretta Lynch, former President Obama Republicans should be having sit ins and protests for justice every day. But most Republicans don’t have the will to fight all the time so Democrats get away with things, but when they think they can use the law as a weapon they never hesitate.

But there is an Achilles heel to all this excitement, the border wall. The reason that Democrats want to remove Trump from office so viciously is in what he has the power to do, which is defend the nation from enemies. That is a right the Executive Branch has that fall outside the powers of the congress. Trump can also get nominations through the senate and can still appoint a new Attorney General with his Senate majority which also falls outside of the authority of congress. So the increase in panic from Democrats is due to the control Trump has on the southern border and there isn’t anything they can do about it. The stand-off there in Tijuana is the lead story in every circumstance because it has brought a halt to illegal immigration there, since the military is on the border, and drug dealing has trickled to a fraction of what it has been costing cartels millions and millions of dollars in adjustments to ship their poison through other means to their target buyers.

There are a lot of bad people at work and it all centers around the border wall which Trump has all the high ground to enforce. So no matter what side stories emerge, Trump’s border wall, or one that is currently being covered with military forces, is the key to the whole chess game. And in that game Mexico is going to end up paying for the wall because their tourism industry is under serious jeopardy. At this point they would do anything to get tourist activity back to some semblance of normalcy. All this controversy is not good for business, especially when tourism is all that they really have.

In the past when the United States had Presidents who needed advisors just to walk down the hall, having a business guy in office who understands the power of money and leverage has made a tremendous difference. Even with all the weapons that Democrats are throwing at Trump legally, the President has all the cards that matter, financial leverage on all fronts, and he knows how to play those cards and when. When Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador won the election to be the next Mexican president Trump was nice to him even though the politician was an extreme leftist. Trump didn’t care, he reached out a hand with offers to make future deals anyway, just as he has done with Nancy Pelosi in the congress. That is another benefit of having a business guy in the White House. A typical politician wouldn’t know what to do or how to wear the many different masks that are required to deal with such people. But also, as any business person understands, what you show isn’t always what you play, and now that the friendly relationship between Trump and Obrador has been in place, the burden to stop those caravans resides on Mexico, not America. Otherwise Trump can really hurt Mexico where they are most vulnerable—tourism.

It only took a few years to get to this point, but in the world of strategy, everything is happening right on time, and in spite of all the dirty tricks the Democrats are throwing at the situation. The open borders people are not happy, the poison they want to destroy America with is having major gaps in delivery. The future Democrat voters that they always hope to extract out of the immigrant community are stuck in Tijuana. Even the mayor of Tijuana is a kind of Trump supporter who is trying to bring the kind of populism seen in North America to that city of sin and intrigue, which is a new development on the world stage and all this is happening as we speak. As the wagons of court proceedings circle around Trump and his associates thinking that they have him trapped in a circular firing squad, Trump’s ultimate objective is at the border wall where nobody can touch him. And that will lead to a very exciting start to the new year!

Rich Hoffman

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Who Made Who: Trump made them, not the other way around

Since the election there has been quite a subtle shift, even from Fox News which many think is fueling the Trump presidency. There has certainly been a lot of anger leveled in the Fox News direction. But those thoughts come from people who really don’t know what is going on, they are clinging to ancient truths that no longer matter, and ways of thinking that are simply outdated, such as reverence for the military, concern about ancient Gods—in this case global warming, and a non-business first approach to virtually everything. Before Donald Trump won the presidency, the business class were only supposed to contribute money to political campaigns, they weren’t supposed to be making any of the real decisions, but that has changed, and likely forever and the resentments from those in the old world who were quite something to talk about back then, are suddenly finding themselves useless and passed over. As I said, even Fox News has been very critical of President Trump over military funeral visits, the dealing of Saudi Arabia and their assassinations, and every dip in the stock market. In truth Fox News doesn’t command the ratings of nearly the kind of audience that talk radio does, or the monthly publications of the NRA, so who really cares if Fox News goes even more liberal as the new CEO there seems to want to take it. It won’t make President Trump weaker, it will just inspire people to switch to new methods of getting the news they want, like Alex Jones online. People are going to get what they want one way or another and President Trump is a creation of that desire and the old guard just hasn’t come to terms with that notion yet. That much was very obvious on Saturday Night Live the weekend before Thanksgiving 2018. The following video makes their hatred of Trump abundantly obvious.

Petty is the word for their approach to President Trump but it really shows what kind of people are running things at NBC. The world is changing under their feet and one of their old superstars is now in the Executive Branch looking like he will easily win a second term. In a few years many in the modern media won’t be around any longer, the world has literally changed right under their feet and they were too busy bitching and trying to change the nature of human beings to notice it. As progressives attempting to play down all the attributes that make human beings great, such as thinking, a desire to change their environment, and a strong desire to change the direction of history in every generation, liberals have put themselves on a rope hanging from the edge of a vast metaphorical cliff which is coming untethered by the moment. And it can certainly be understood why they are anxious, and even angry. But that still doesn’t excuse them for their ignorance.

Speaking for myself, but as a representative of a Trump supporter it’s not important to me that Trump visits the military on Thanksgiving. I could care less, we aren’t at war in the world. The Afghanistan situation is a mess only because politicians made it that way. The way Trump has leveraged to win conflicts around the world is through economics. If the United States has all the money, and the wealth generated as the world’s largest oil producer, who cares what despots are doing around the world who are literally begging for a piece of that wealth. In Trump’s view we shouldn’t even have troops overseas, his goal is to get them home. This comparison to what President Bush did or Obama for that matter is just ridiculous. While Trump was making himself into a billionaire George W. Bush was abusing alcohol and cocaine living off the wealth of his family’s business. While many say that Trump benefited from his own father’s business there is a great difference, Bush chose to mooch off that wealth doing very little in his life to advance it while Trump was driven to the point of obsession with making his own mark in the world. Bush and Obama were not leaders, only in title. Trump is a true pace setter. He doesn’t have to live under the terms of presidents from the past who were essential failures.

There have also been many comparisons from those who don’t know much about history that Trump is a lot like Teddy Roosevelt in that he is an unconventional president who is facing many opportunities to bust up monopolies. With Roosevelt there was always a kind of hatred of those who had wealth as he was a lot like George W. Bush and was born with a silver spoon in his mouth never really learning how money was made. Trump did learn. Roosevelt went to war with the railroad and oil tycoons of the early 20th Century but Trump isn’t so inclined to ruin the billionaires who are working against him in the tech sector. Saturday Night Live was almost coaxing Trump into a fight with Jeff Bezos who has become the political left’s new champion because he is currently the richest man in the world. But what they don’t know is that Jeff Bezos could spend every last dollar of that wealth on the presidency and he couldn’t win it. You know why dear reader? Because he couldn’t win over people like you and I. I personally like Bezos as the head of Amazon and his ventures into space, but he’s kind of a weird guy. He couldn’t walk into an arena like Trump does and command so much energy. Trump built his wealth the old-fashioned way, through real estate in a tough market. Wealth by itself isn’t an automatic ability to do everything in life. Trump is smart enough to know that business deals with Saudi Arabia are good for America. Who cares if they assassinate a reporter from Jeff Bezos Washington Post? You see, there are other ways to skin a cat—direct conflicts are often not the way to go.

The drop in the tech stocks is for two reasons, the uncertainty of a potential Nancy Pelosi House of Representatives and unstable news from oversea markets. Once the smoke clears those tech stocks will be bought back up and will shoot back up to over 26,000. People who buy at the lower rate will become rich in just a few months, so buy up. The dip isn’t caused by tangible value, only by emotional reaction to a changing world. Regarding the House, as I said before the election, Republicans had to guard against massive cheating by Democrats and that looks to be just the case, not just in Florida, but in most of the counties where Democrats picked up seats. Early voting ballot tampering and massive I.D. fraud look to have given Democrats a few thousand votes here and there where they needed them. Trump seems to be OK with the Democrats taking over the House and the cheating that got them there because it paints a contrast that only helps him in the upcoming 2020 election. But the markets are nervous with all these socialists getting news time because Democrats are clearly anti market and that obviously has investors nervous and in a selloff mood.

The desperation is obvious by the other side and Saturday Night Live represents that vantage point. Their view of the world is so petty and ridiculous, yet that view has ruled for many thousands of years so we can’t blame them for their anxiety. And too many still think that if only they can capture Fox News into full liberalism that the Republican march toward a much more productive and optimistic 21st Century could be stopped. In truth, people will find alternatives, it’s not the news that makes people, its people who make the news and the networks are learning those hard lessons right now. Even at the core of NBC right now is the belief that they made Donald Trump, that they made him a star who could then win the presidency, and that they have the power to take that away. In truth it was the other way around, it was Trump that made NBC a star and opened the door for reality television, and that same influence is at work in the White House. And there isn’t anybody on the political left, or the right who can do it was well as Trump. And they hate the reality of that truth.  Remember the old song by ACDC called “Who Made Who?”  Trump and creators like him made the world, the media and many others are just living in it and it drives them crazy.

Rich Hoffman

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The Ballad of Buster Sgruggs: A review and an observation on the nature of existance

I have always loved westerns, they are uniquely American inventions born of our culture and the world watches them with great curiosity. If you are in a hotel in London or even Paris and Madrid, and flipping through the channels in the middle of the night, you will see lots of old westerns playing because to them there is great optimism in old American westerns. Westerns specifically show values easily in a stripped away fashion of what American values truly are, what a capitalist society truly thinks about itself and others. Hollywood essentially built itself on the strength of the western but leftist radicals’ intent on destroying America have launched a not so secret crusade against all westerns essentially, most obvious in big Disney productions like The Lone Ranger and the Star Wars film Solo: A Star Wars Story. Even in the disguise of science fiction such as Solo was, modern critics and the entertainment press in general want nothing to do with them, and they make it known as they try to torpedo those films at the box office leaving a clear message to filmmakers to stay away from the genre or else. Those who do so dare usually end up turning the American western into a Shakespearian tragedy which is certainly the case of the new one from the Coen Brothers called The Ballad of Buster Sgruggs, just released to Netflix and the video game by Rockstar Games called Red Dead Redemption 2. However, in the case of both references, Red Dead and Buster Sgruggs the old traditions of the American western are there and represented strongly and in the age of the Trump presidency, are quite necessary.

It wasn’t planned this way because Rockstar Games has been making Red Dead Redemption 2 for the last eight years, and the Coen Brothers, Joel and Ethan have been writing The Ballad of Buster Sgruggs for the last 15 years so neither could have known what would happened in 2016 when Donald Trump would be elected president and the world would be shifting toward nationalism as opposed to a one world government. But with those events westerns such as these suddenly have much more appeal to the longing individualists struggling to make sense of our modern times. And let me tell you something dear reader, it is a real treat to get something as good as The Ballad of Buster Sgruggs delivered to the comfort of your own living room through Netflix as opposed to having to go to the theater to watch it. The film was released to limited theatrical presentations, but on a project like this very inventive western, it is a must watch for those with Netflix accounts.

However, I would not call The Ballad of Buster Sgruggs a traditional western such as Bonanza or Gunsmoke where the protagonists defeat the antagonists with great moral clarity by the end of the story set to uplifting music. Buster Sgruggs is a tragedy, but in all other aspects, it is a very epic achievement of art set against the canvas of America and is very much worth watching. The movie is divided up into six primary stories and is presented in a format much like the great film by Akira Kurosawa called Dreams. The six stories are very compelling but one in particular I felt a great affinity with, it was the story of an old gold digger panning for gold in some unlisted wilderness environment. I think that story said so much about the pros and cons of capitalism in a very simple setting that it was brilliant in its execution. That portion of the story was well worth watching all by itself.

I have a real love of old western towns and Buster Sgruggs had plenty of well-designed sets that were wonderfully built of old frontier towns. The reason I love those towns so much is that they say a lot about us as human beings, suddenly free from the aristocrats of politics and provided with great resources, what is it that humans desire to build. Modern cities have lots of added levels to them and the benefit of modern construction methods, but when you look at an old frontier town and consider the amount of human capital it took to build them, everything from downing the trees, to plaining the wood for construction to building every last thing by hand, to see a town build in a remote corner of the world for the purpose of a new economy freshly discovered in just a few years is quite a remarkable undertaking. And in a lot of ways The Ballad of Buster Sgruggs captured that dim hope that the human race placed in such projects without being overly preachy about it. Everything was wonderfully shot and was generally ambitious in the way that those old towns were constructed. The filmmakers seemed to have understood that yearning and applied the same effort to their craft to obvious effect.

Another particularly sad but very effective story was the segment involving Liam Neeson as he traveled the country with a quadriplegic orator. Not to give anything away, but it was quite a commentary on the human condition and why people do things that they do. The results were ultimately very depressing, but all too honest and I thought it was a wonderful display of high art. Way too sad, but honest and it really is a good format to tell a story like that in the context of a western where people for the first time in their lives were free to roam about on their own, without the protections of group affiliations or government reach.

Another such tragedy that I didn’t see the end coming was the segment about the Oregon Trail, wonderfully photographed in Nebraska with a real caravan of covered wagons. You can’t help but love the characters, they are very likable and you want to cheer them on to success. The love story that evolves is one that anybody would want to see flourish, but how it all ends was just sobering. Often human beings cut the rug out from under themselves all with good intentions, but we often write our own tragic ends in life before the story ever starts. And that was the case of that story, sad, tragic but worth living. It was a mesmerizing tail not so much of good and evil, but in stupidity and hope, blind faith, and the harsh realities of existence.

If you get a chance, I’d highly recommend The Ballad of Buster Sgruggs and to watch it with an open mind, without the pretense of previous westerns. I would not so much call this a tragedy set in the west because there are moments of great optimism in it. I for one had several favorite characters, my favorite probably being Buster Sgruggs himself and the banker who is tasked with fending off a bank robbery. I can really relate to that guy. But ultimately, I think my favorite character was the old man panning for gold. His shock and awe intertwined with endless hope and persistence is something that anybody could admire. And his story alone makes The Ballad of Buster Sgruggs worth watching. But lucky for us there is so much more to enjoy and it is a real achievement in these changing days of entertainment where something of that quality can be streamed at home rather than a theatrical experience which is yet another benchmark in our march into the future.

Rich Hoffman

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Donald Trump’s Interview with Chris Wallace in 2018: One trying to preserve the politcal order from thousands of years, the other a CEO born out of capitalism

A few interesting observations about the Chris Wallace interview with President Trump on Fox News, now two years in office, it is quite clear that even the most politically astute, and experienced, still don’t understand why the Trump White House is so magical. For so many centuries, really for several thousand years all aspects of the human race have been built around ideas of democracy and society as established by the Greek and Romans. But those are limiting factors, under the banners of capitalism new kinds of leaders have advanced and they are now in direct competition with the assumptions of the old, and that is what is going on with this very interesting interview. Chris Wallace is trying to hold Trump to an ancient standard of political leadership whereas the president is behaving as any culture building leader would, and the clash is rather obvious.

What is missing from the politics of old is that charismatic salesman who looks at everything as half full and leads their team of industrialists through every kind of terror with a smile on their face. It’s not that we haven’t seen characters like Donald Trump before in history, but never have they been at the top of government running countries until this specific moment in time. Not a single Roman emperor, or Greek philosopher was ever in a position across the world as President Trump is presently. Not a single king or queen of England, France or Spain had such a glass half full personality driving their population. So when Chris Wallace asked President Trump questions about his administration, his relationship with the press, controversies from political insurgents and the like, Trump’s answers are literally new to the world.

Yet in just about every business across the nation Trump’s leadership style is somewhat recognizable. Under the most powerful economy of the world a certain kind of personality must emerge and logically speaking it was only a matter of time before one of them ended up in the White House. What has the globalist seekers trying to unite the world under one flag for which they control so terrified, which was only exacerbated by the Fox News Wallace interview was that after everything that has been thrown at Trump, he is still an optimistic salesman selling nationalism across the world. Nationalism is spreading all over Europe, and even into the Middle East and Asia. Trump as a natural Chief Executive Officer knows how to set up a sale and through the mechanisms of political order has established a norm that globalists just cannot compete with, and everyone knows it. Trump unphased and loose on his feet with probably the best news man in America that is left in Chris Wallace had delivered the world into a completely new age of thinking.

Determinations of leadership used to be considered not on merit, but by birthright or conquest. Never has such leaders of economic dominance been in a position to lead nations, they have always had to grovel for appeasement to leaders who were unworthy of real leadership. That checks, and balance system has dominated since the dawn of mankind, so this Trump phenomenon is a very new thing. Chris Wallace was asking his questions based on the way things were as Trump was answering them based on how things would be from now on. After only two years in office he has turned the entire system on its head. After another six, the world will be changed forever. That is what was obvious from that Fox News interview.

What was even more interesting was the grand picture of the situation which I thought of specifically as I watched the interview. Chris Wallace is a Democrat, but he’s a good reporter who is about as fair and balanced as they get. Many people consider Fox News to be a conservative bastion of reporting, but that clearly isn’t the case. Since the days of Bill O’Reilly, Roger Ailes and the waning influence of Rupert Murdoch the news station is becoming more and more liberal moving dramatically to the center. I would never have considered Bill O’Reilly a bastion of conservative thought either, he was a centrist in my book to a large degree, so it’s not like Fox News represents the standard of conservatism. They are just more so than other stations which is why conservatives watch them more than other outlets. But that could change quickly and likely will over the coming years. Fox News for me is nearly unwatchable during the day and on weekends. I would not say that Fox News is friendly to the President. They certainly weren’t on the Chris Wallace interview, yet Trump continues to give Fox News exclusive access to him which has helped them dominate in the ratings war over the ever-changing media landscape. But one thing that has become quite clear, news like most other things is becoming more and more decentralized. Social media is now taking over where Fox News and others have dominated and by the time that Trump does leave office, it will be a completely different story.

One thing that continues to come up regarding the president which was talked about in great detail during the Wallace interview was the Russian conspiracy and whether the new AG should recuse himself. Any CEO of a company could easily root this problem out and see it for what it is, a kind of employee uprising meant to wrestle control of the company away from its leadership, an insurrection. Most politicians would have no idea how to handle the optics of that problem but for Trump, it’s no big deal. He’s not going to allow the Mueller investigation to run the culture of the country and give Democrats the power they hope it will. Now that the election is over and they have seats in the House, enough to make fools of themselves with, Trump is going to let them hang. Any good CEO would see this as a clear strategic option. Emperors and kings from the past would look to appease the mob, but leaders created under the banner of capitalism are functioning from extra values that most people around the world don’t yet understand, so the results and methods of getting those results are yet uncharted in political life. But Trump knows what to do and just how to do it.

For centuries we have allowed liberal artists to write anti-capitalist books and movies portraying the American industrialist as a villain. But in reality, most of them are brilliant tactical thinkers. I would say that even the manager of a typical American fast food restaurant has more leadership skill than the typical dictator or emperor of a destitute third world country and that is the miracle of American capitalism, the ability to produce such minds and put them to work in the world. And the current hatred of President Trump is to maintain that illusion. But time is running out and reality is telling a different story and as Chris Wallace tried to hold the White House to the standards of old, Trump is just too optimistic for that world. He easily skipped across Wallace’s tough questions and left the interview as still a glass half full guy, which is what makes this presidency so much different from those of the past. And very exciting to be a part of.

Rich Hoffman

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How the Kardasian’s Saved Their $20 Million Mansion from the Wildfires: Decentralization of all services is the trend of the future

I don’t know much about Kim Kardashian and Kanye West. Celebrity gossip and trivial nonsense is a massive waste of time and I contribute nothing to that enterprise. I did recently learn that I liked Kanye West because he has emerged over the last few years as a Trump supporter. Other than that, I know they are celebrities and they make their mark in the world on social media. They are of course rich because they serve a role in society of making regular people occupied with foolish behavior so they won’t truly look at the world as Democrats attempt to steal even more counties in California for the House of Representatives, flipping those previously conservative seats. While crimes occurred people marvel at the Kardashian sisters and their beauty and controversy and forget about the low bar nature of their personal lives, which seems to be the only goal of magazines like “People” and other tabloid acts. But I did hear something interesting involving Kim Kardashian and her husband, that they avoided having their $20 million dollar mansion destroyed by the California wildfires in Hidden Valley by employing and maintaining their own fire department. Honestly, I had never heard of this but learned that out of all fire departments in existence a small single digit percentage of them are privately employed. But any would be something I’d consider an extraordinary revelation.

I have been a tremendous critic of public employee tax payer funded centralized organizations culminating with the Senate Bill 5 that Sharon Jones and John Kasich tried to get passed back in 2012. I went all in even though it was dangerous supposedly to piss off your local fire department, police and teachers who were all targeted in that bill to break up the collective bargaining agreements they have as public employees to suck off all our tax money in extraordinary ways without any real management to control the out of control costs. When their obvious banter came back to me that only they had the courage to run into a fire or toward danger while I slept well at night my response was to call bullshit. If I see danger I run to it every time. I love danger, actually I’m obsessed with danger—I go looking for it ever waking hour of my life, so what they were saying to me just didn’t stick. They were doing what they always do as public employees, they tried to use sentiment and a natural fear of danger to asset that we should pay them infinite amounts of money for their public service. Then we are supposed to worship them in every parade and memorial ceremony. And if you feel differently they really develop a bad relationship with you, almost like they’d love to teach you a lesson for daring to challenge their role in society.

I’ve had the same fallout with teachers. When I questioned their ridiculous budgets at my home district of Lakota I had some of those union activists approach me and declare that I couldn’t teach their classes because the effort was too hard. My response to them was that I’d be happy to take them up on that challenge. In fact, I took it even higher, I volunteered to teach four classes all by myself to prove my point, which nobody took me up on. I was quite serious about my proposal. I’m not one of those people who will say, teaching kids in a class is too hard, or that charging a gunman as a police officer is either. And in fighting fires, I think it would be fun to save people and put out fires. I wouldn’t think of it as work, more as a human obligation. So I’m not one who thinks there is great value in those occupations. I think there is value in the tasks, but as large labor unions attached to tax payer money, I think there are better ways to do it.

I’ve often said about teachers that the decentralization of information these days has made them pretty irrelevant. Once children learn to read, write and do math, the public education system pretty much just drags out their baby-sitting service for the next ten years mostly ruining the ambitions of young minds in the process. And police have their role, but more guns in the hands of responsible people is the real answer to crime and punishment. But I never really considered fire fighting as an option to decentralization. I can say that when I’ve been in situations to put out a fire, I’ve always done it myself. And some of them were quite big. I’m not a call the fire department and stand outside and wait kind of guy. I never have been and I never will be. But they do have good equipment and expertise in basic medical care that saves lives, so I have sympathy for their efforts as first responders. They fix a lot of cut up people and people who suffer heart attacks and that can be a tough job to show up at a site and have people always in a state between life and death. But do these people have to work for an international labor union and do they have to be centralized in a community?

So we’ve heard so much about the California wildfires, and how they are destroying so much property. We’ve heard they were caused by global warming and other gods of disaster by liberals who still think that rain dancing and wearing the severed head of an animal as a mask is a viable option to solving problems of drought. And we watch on the news as constrained resources fight these massive fires that just spawn out of control. But then we learn that the Kardasians had their own fire department who built a fire break around their property and kept the fires from destroying their home. Why does a constrained resource have to be so, why can’t such services be decentralized so that quick action can be taken when danger arises? If you can afford it, why limit yourself to a constrained, publicly funded service? Seems kind of dumb to me and obviously most of the wealthy people who lost their homes in places like Malibu could have done the same. Instead, like a bunch of idiots they evacuated and let the professionals do the work of letting everything burn down because they were trying to fight fires everywhere at once and doing very little to actually solve the problem.

This Kardashian example is just another glimpse into the correct future, where public utilities are decentralized, where every home generates its own power, where every home can get anywhere in the world from their driveway, where even food is brought to your door without the added complexity of having to waste time going out and getting it. Already information has been decentralized in our relatively new phones which are essentially not just communication devices with anybody in the world any time of day, but are vast libraries of information and surveillance right in the palm of your hand. I often think of my iPhone as being as powerful as a typical television station was as I grew up. That is also the trend for all these public services. If you have the money, why not have your own fire fighting department to protect your property? It makes sense to me.

But that of course isn’t the message liberals want people to hear. They want more centralized authority and they use these positions, police, fire departments and teachers to make their arguments for more government that they control. But if they were so effective, California wouldn’t burn to the ground the way it has. Most of that damage was quite avoidable and the Kardasians proved it. While the fires were hard to put out, their path can be diverted out and away from valuable property. But because their efforts were too centralized, places like Malibu just burnt to the ground leaving a bunch of celebrities to stand crying in the streets and reminding America why more centralized authority was needed in all fields of endeavor. That is until the Kardasians showed that the whole thing really has been a ruse to sell more socialism from the beginning and that is a very important observation to consider.

Rich Hoffman

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Red Dead Redemption 2: Defining the meaning of an American

There are so many things to talk about, but I consider the new video game Red Dead Redemption 2 on the big console home game systems to be one of the most paramount issues of our day. Not just because I love westerns and video games, but because the story itself is really at the core of our modern world and the confusing philosophies that we contend with every day—is big government better or small. I’ve always loved the “Red” games as the producer Rockstar has published them over vast amounts of time. The first Red Dead Redemption came out in 2010, and its sequel just this recent year of 2018, so a lot of time, money and effort goes into these things and they are truly epic for any scope of entertainment venue. But as I was playing Red Dead Redemption 2 I couldn’t help but think a thought I had been thinking for a long time, that the game was essentially Game of Thrones only set in a western instead of some unidentified middle ages of Europe. The essence of the game is to ask the question, “what does it mean to be an American.” The conflict of the game is when many different sectors of society unleash their understanding compared with the natural human tendency toward greed and violence. The result is a very compelling story that could easily fill up several seasons of a Netflix drama.

You can tell that the game is upsetting the progressive elements of our present society, they have lots of problems with some of the themes of the game. Red Dead Redemption 2 is set in 1899 just as the progressive movement is getting underway. In the game there are random characters that you meet many whom are part of the suffragette movement. As a player you can choose to help those people or harass them and many players are picking up these screaming feminists and putting them on railroad tracks to be run over by an oncoming train. And the game is providing awards for those actions, so the real progressives in our entertainment culture have serious problems with that. Additionally, the character you play in the game, Author Morgan is in a gang as kind of the heavy. The leader of the game is a guy named Dutch who is essentially a socialist philosopher. I don’t like the guy but it is a very interesting experiment in the fallacies of socialism that his vision is being destroyed moment by moment in the game driving him to lunacy because he can’t get socialism to work without being a criminal element in the larger context of society.

I thought Rockstar Games went out of their way not to insult progressives as many of the storylines within the game treated them fairly. But as the player you decided how relevant they were or weren’t, and that is what has progressives so angry. By the end of Author Morgan’s story in Red Dead Redemption 2 I had my good meter tapping out as high as it could go. That is a meter you get for doing good deeds for people, and mine was as good as it could get. And it was rewarding to do good as opposed to doing bad things which many players might be tempted to do. The whole thing is a very interesting experiment in human behavior that I thought went well beyond any previous entertainment exploration, whether it be a novel, a movie or a television show. This form of story telling I thought was very revolutionary, and powerful. I wouldn’t go so far to say that it is the literary equivalent to a Dicken’s novel, but Rockstar Games put a lot of effort into the whole presentation that there really has never been anything quite like it anywhere yet. I think of it as I often do with these massive video games, like its taking a resort vacation to an exotic place. On my 70” 4K television with a Bose sound system, its easy for me to forget that I’m just in my living room. The world is vast and well rendered in Red Dead Redemption 2, almost to the point of ridiculousness. That makes investing yourself into the stories that much more compelling, and powerful.

And again, by the end of Author Morgan’s storyline anyway, with the good meter at the highest point, because the character and those he interacts with changes depending on that meter, Author came to the point of what being an American really was. The game sifted through all the various elements of turn of the century North America and found the real heart and soul of American life quite wonderfully. It was a shame that his realization came all too late, but the point of the game is the tapestry that everything is set in more than the lives of the characters. I found the whole thing extremely refreshing. Its one of those things that everyone who can find the time should endeavor to experience.

I have always been around guns, but the first time I played Red Dead Redemption back in 2010 I had not yet purchased or became involved in Cowboy Fast Draw. But at the end of that game I decided that when things called down for me in life that I would. A few years later when an open window came I took 2K and had a custom fast draw holster made for myself and I bought my Ruger Vaquero. Since then I have been practicing Cowboy Fast Draw almost every day and I have become proficient. That is important because I see the gun, especially the way it was presented in American westerns to be even more symbolic to the life of free people as the samurai sword is to Japanese society—which is saying a lot. I usually dig a lot deeper into things than most people do so the first Red Dead game was something that built on thoughts I had been having for a long time. By the time this new game came out, I had a very good understanding of what Cowboy Fast Draw was all about so it was even more meaningful to me to be able to go around that vast world and gun fight other characters. I think any player would find the experience meaningful but for me and the kind of things I do in real life, it was even more so. It’s a world you simply don’t ever want to end.

That is why I think there is real opportunity here. We keep hearing about all these socialists that have been trained in our public-school system and are now making moves into larger official government positions. And that is in a class with the Trump economy and there is a lot of consternation about what will happen as a result. But the social experiment has already been simulated in Red Dead Redemption 2. And the socialists, like Dutch in the game, have no choice really when confronted with reality. Now, not to give too much away because Red Dead 2 is actually a prequel to the first Red Dead, but Dutch eventually has to jump off a cliff to kill himself because his views of the world just don’t match the reality of a new American idea. People followed Dutch because he was intelligent and well read, but that couldn’t solve his basic problem with his corrupted philosophy. And in a very complex story about many, many people, somehow Rockstar Games hit the nail right on the head, and it is truly a remarkable achievement in art and entertainment. And one that carries directly over into the politics of our modern times, in haunting ways that were quite intentional. There were moments in the game that were like the climax of every movie I’ve ever seen, only in the context of this game, they were better.

Rich Hoffman

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The Media and Me: Why all the hate?

I generally am not a vindictive person, I let people do what they want and think what they will so long as they don’t try to impede on my life. Generally. And this is certainly true of the media. About ten years ago I was friendly with most of the media in both Cincinnati and Dayton and I did a lot of radio on WLW and was on television quite often. Back then also I was going to film festivals and doing some work in Hollywood because at the time I still thought I might end up doing work in the entertainment industry. I was always a conservative and everyone knew it, but there wasn’t a need to be contentious and fight about everything. After all, these were the days of a soft George Bush presidency and the early years of Obama, so the political left largely propped up and controlled by our media culture felt comfortable, and even entitled. So a guy like me wasn’t a threat to them. Newspapers would quote me often, television news outlets would seek my opinion and I’d write occasional pieces for national magazines and everyone was happy—except for me. One thing I never liked about that system was that I had a lot more to say about everything and editors and producers would never give me enough time to put together a complete story on a given topic. So in 2010 I decided to become my own publisher so to speak and start this blog, Overmanwarrior’s Wisdom. I never meant for it to become an endeavor of consternation, but what I have found out over the eight years since is that all media outlets hate it, and therefore don’t like me as a result.

I especially heard about how much the media doesn’t like me during this 2018 election. I’d get reports from people who associate with the press and elements close to the press who actively want to discredit everything I do, as if they were the gatekeepers of knowledge. But in reality, I write about so many things in so much detail that essentially nobody can keep up and that is the root of their anxiety. Media types are like any other worker out there, they are held to very confined standards and are certainly not free to write what they want. In the beginning I never thought of this as being a problem, but after talking to a Cincinnati Enquire reporter way back in 2011 just a year into it I realized just how jealous they were over my blog. It didn’t make much sense to me because anybody could start a blog, even them. Blog sites were free, anybody in the world could do one, so I didn’t consider what I was doing to be a threat to anybody. Just supplemental material. People would read what I’d say in newspapers and on the radio and they’d come to the blog to get more information. Since in media they don’t give you unlimited time to make your point, but just skim the highlights of any given topic.

And that is where the problems started and ended, the media never wants to solve a problem, they are perpetually the old Don Henley song “Dirty Laundry” where they need chaos, panic, and mayhem to generate the ratings they feel they need to survive, and my blog offered more than that to readers. As a writer I don’t think anybody in the United States or Europe can touch me for content and volume. I can write about more topics in quantities that often rival published books than anybody else, and that makes Overmanwarrior’s Wisdom very unique in any published venue. I didn’t set out to do that on purpose, I just let my natural inclinations take me where I felt things needed to go and I turned loose the ideas. If I want to publish articles about a reptile civilization that controls global politics and to deal with the pros and cons of that conspiracy theory, I do it and people enjoy the material. Or if we want to get into the weeds of actual political occurrences, we can do that too. Information and ideas are never bad, yet the media culture that we have had only want the headlines, never the substance. They never want a solution, only to ask the questions to provoke emotional results.

It is for that reason that I stepped gradually away from most of my media contacts. This blog did it for me. All I ever wanted to do was communicate ideas that were interesting to people who might enjoy exploring those concepts. Whether one person likes the topic or thousands really doesn’t make a difference to me. But that is also why reporters generally do not like my blog site, because it contains in it a freedom they simply don’t have. I love to read and write and I contribute to my blog in the old-fashioned way that any writer would, out of love and passion for the topics. But I would say that my efforts are similar to personalities from the past like Benjamin Franklin who did lots of things in his life, including being a publisher. I do other things in my life for money, so I have no reason to sell my published works. And that makes what I do vastly different from what all other media do and there resides the rub.

It was bound to happen sooner or later; the old modes of media would have to give way to the new. And within the new, if some publisher such as myself might come along and provide vast amounts of content out of the passion of doing it as opposed to prostituting it out like most media personalities must, then so be it. I have written millions and millions of words on a vast array of subjects but to me they all connect in very precise ways. Yet to the traditional media that can’t keep up with someone like me jealousy is their dominate emotion and that kind of thing came out dramatically on several fronts after the election of 2018. Feedback I received was nothing short of hate—that publishers like me are “ruining” the world. Well, I would ask, “from whom.” The world as we have all known it is going away, and I’m happy to see it leave. I never liked it to begin with. The age of Trump has been propelled by many people like me, but in the sheer effort of content offerings even though I am heavily restricted by Facebook, Google and Twitter, and have been for many years, the work still gets out to the people I intend for it to. If not a mass audience, a very targeted audience of people who are thinking people who are very smart. Popular mass media just have no control over this new age and they hate it. Information has been decentralized and that is a reality for the future. They could have embraced it, but they didn’t. Instead the have decided they hate me, which is their prerogative. But in the end it’s no skin off my back. I don’t need them, but they do need people like me and it was they who alienated themselves. The world will march on without them in it, and that is purely their choice to make.

Rich Hoffman

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How Republicans Should Address Health Care: Dealing with the future to have a real plan

Warning, this may be the most important thing you read and see in your life, proceed with that understanding:

Now that the election is over its time for Republicans to announce to the world what their health care plan is, which of course in the short-term will have to be a more competitive free market option. But everyone knows that the old days of drug induced medicine are over, just as stage coaches were replaced by automobiles. We are at a point where the medical industry is under a complete overhaul, as provided in the example in the video below by the Japanese proposal of using AI to produce new healthy cells to replace damaged or diseased tissue within a body. The solution to all medical problems is in cell repairs, not surgeries or chemical medicines. So, any health care plan must look at where human civilization is headed, not where it’s been before anything can be seriously considered, so the Republican plan needs to incorporate that reality. If you want to make the heads of Democrats explode, tell them that you want to solve health care as a detrimental condition instead of just throwing drugs at people. Tell people who you can actually fix them instead of just numbing their pain and the leverage of the whole health care issue changes.

The trouble with regenerative medicine is purely in human psychology and this is why politicians have not yet touched the issue, but they ultimately will have to. President Trump is just the kind of president who could do it, but what must be overcome by the public is the desire of approximately 85%, maybe more, of the population to believe in the cycle of life and death which has been with us since the beginning of all recorded history. I would argue that like the Vico cycle, the themes of life and death were always meant for human minds to solve which is why specifically it is our species with their vast imaginations that have been born and have evolved to solve these types of complicated problems. Death and disease are literally solvable problems and they are at our doorstep in this current time to carry mankind well into the future. Yet because most people don’t know any better, they are resistant to change. Like most dysfunctional sentiments, they would rather die than change their minds about things, because they have literally been programmed from their birth to always look for an end to it all at some point.

I would not call myself a transhumanist, but as people who know me understand, the name of this site is “Overmanwarrior’s Wisdom.” There has never been a part in my life where just being human was acceptable. Even in my earliest memories I have always wanted to be superhuman. I never have said, I am too tired to work, too tired to think, care for my family or anything. I often stay up all night working and reading and all day working without any sleep at all and I love every day of my life. If I lived for the next ten thousand years, I can say that I would never be bored for one minute of that entire time and I would be very happy to do and learn and live for even longer than that. If the Vico cycle politically states that humans have always went through various cycles of theocracy, aristocracy, democracy then anarchy, all elements that we see today around the world at various stages always in combat with each other, then all our lives and the religions we have invented to deal with the problems of life and death are essentially the same. There isn’t any mythology or philosophy that properly deals with the possibility of a life stimulated by regenerative medicine. Humans just didn’t see the possibilities of regenerative medicine coming and the artists and philosophers that still construct our social context are still rooted in ancient ways of viewing death.

I was reminded of my twenties lately while watching an episode of Josh Gates’ Expedition Unknown where he took a vision quest with some shaman in Peru using ayahuasca to induce the hallucinogenic journey of what they call the journey of life and death. I was very hungry to learn more about these shaman trips while I was reading Primitive Mythology by Joseph Campbell in Waffle Houses at 4 am in the morning when I was around 23 years old. I was always impressed with how shaman were able to step into the mind of the sick and help them recover from whatever it was that had a grip on their souls, so I think there is some merit to these techniques. But what Josh Gates went through is a supercharge on his brain and all the experiences and thoughts he had experienced over his lifetime. The shaman were able to journey with him on a kind of quantum realm that they had learned to tap in to. But the nature of a soul and life itself does not need to be defined by life and death, only by existence and the amount of contribution that it makes to higher dimensional realities, whether on the very small-scale such as those that shaman likely tap into by using the artificial stimulant ayahuasca or on the scale of the huge, where entire universes are as common as cells in our body, and the one we live in is just one. All those realities intersect with each other in ways we still don’t understand and I think the key to grasping them is that humans need to step away from the cycle of life and death to help in some way the reasons for our birth. Obviously there is a reason for intelligent life, for beings like us who can think and conceptualize and to solve the riddles of the universe and all the quantum realms that connect it we must step away from the cycle of life and death that requires each generation to learn just a little from the previous one, but only gives professional observers about 50 years to crack a code, which isn’t enough time.

What is coming out of Japan and the Mayo Clinic in America are options for a completely new way of living and understanding our role in the universe. While ayahuasca may stimulate a brain in hyper charged ways typical shaman and other religious leaders view the results in the context of their religions which are formed around observations of birth and death. While the observations are interesting, the context is the variable, and that is essentially the case behind the health care debate. If we are talking about keeping a system in place that supports pharmaceutical companies and the economy they have built on delaying death as long as possible that’s one thing and is at the heart of the Democrat desire for a single payer socialist system. As we know from history, politicians whether they be church leaders or village shaman use their connection to the afterlife to control populations. And Democrats are attempting to control people’s fear of death and the pain that leads to it as a way to control their voter base. And like most people, many people are willing to die if at some point in their life they can hold great power over others. That is why health care is the number one election issue. But think of what Republicans could do in the future if they could change the view of healthcare without the conservative base getting too freaked out about it? It’s only a matter of time before politics, art and science catch up to the ambitions of the imaginations of the human race. The question is, who will do it, and what benefits will come their way as they redefine the entire game? If anyone can do it, Trump can and these new Republicans coming together under his leadership. Truly, the future is what we make it and that reality is happening much sooner than most people realize.

If these concepts are new to you, feel free to watch all the videos contained here in their entirety.  This is the future, we might as well align ourselves with it now rather than later.

Rich Hoffman

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Red Dead Redemption 2: Playing in the future by exploring the great westerns of the past

When Red Dead Redemption came out many years ago, I said that it was one of the best westerns ever produced. As a video game by Rockstar, the company that made the title, it was an awe-inspiring effort that still holds up as one of the greatest games ever made eight years later. Other games that were benchmarks of open world simulation gaming have been titles that I’ve referred to such as Uncharted 4 for the PlayStation 4 console, and Zelda: Breath of the Wild for Nintendo Switch. I wish I had time to play everything because I really enjoy video games, but I only have time for a few that I consider to be exceptional and game changers. So when those types of games come out, I usually take some time to spend with them. And that was certainly the case when it came to the sequel to Red Dead Redemption called appropriately enough, Red Dead Redemption 2. The game has been on the radar for release for a long time, many years now but finally on October 26th of 2018 the game made release so I targeted time to spend with it for my own reasons. The game itself is a prequel to the previous story and is set this time in 1899, a period I am very interested in regarding American history. The result was just astonishing. It really is the closest thing to a real-life West World experience that anybody could hope to get. It is not a perfect simulated reality but as a player you can easily forget about the real world and find yourself living and breathing in that massive computer world complete to every detail including tree bark, flowers and insects. The world of Red Dead Redemption 2 is fully alive with people and places set in the Old West and is just an amazing technical achievement not to mention some of the best writing for a western that I’ve ever experienced. It is truly an amazing achievement that is worth talking about.

But first there needs to be some context as to how powerful and popular video game sales are, especially for something like this. As a person I am well over the age of the average player so when my wife and I picked up our pre-ordered copy of Red Dead Redemption 2 at GameStop at Bridgewater Falls in Ohio at 9 P.M. on October 25, just hours before the official release at midnight I was met with a very large line that snaked out the door, down the sidewalk and down into the parking lot. I had just come off an important oversea call with some business partners and worked some political angles that were important for the upcoming election. On the very next night I would be at the Jim Renacci debate with Sherrod Brown at Miami University and mingling with the crowd there. During those conversations the talk wasn’t about the upcoming election for anybody under the age of 30, it was about playing Red Dead Redemption 2. But I didn’t get any weird looks for being too old to be at GameStop even though I can’t say that I had ever been to a video game release quite like this. One of my daughters used to manage a GameStop store and she’d tell me about these hot releases, such as happen with each new Madden game or Call of Duty. But this game, Red Dead Redemption 2 had been promoted for a long time as the game missed several previous release dates so people were very excited to see the result. My wife somehow managed to get us into group one on the pre-release so literally the moment we arrived we were called to the front of the line to pick up our copy and within a few minutes we were back home to start the 3 hour download of over 100gigs of information just to start playing the game. The game sold over 17 million copies during that opening weekend which accounted for nearly $800 million in sales. Compared to the average Hollywood movie, these video games are just destroying the traditional movie experience. These entertainment platforms are far more popular with young people than any movie and for good reason. I left that GameStop amazed.

It’s no secret that I love gunfighters and the basic morality of the Wild West period. I have always felt that there was something extremely optimistic about Wild West towns, that really beautiful moment in world history where individual liberty was free to dream and yearn for a better life as it matched up against the harsh realities of nature. The great things about westerns and the American historic period about gunfighters is that it was the culmination of a lot of philosophic thought crashing into an Asian culture in the American Indian that puts many of our modern problems into a correct context. And Rockstar Games has done something quite remarkable with Red Dead Redemption 2, they have paid honest homage to great classic westerns like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Magnificent Seven and High Plains Drifter and literally put video game players in those worlds not with a two-hour story but one that goes on for hundreds of hours. I have been taking my time with the game and am at over 100 hours and I still have a lot more story to get through as of this writing. I have been doing all the side quest which include taking up bounty hunting jobs, fishing, hunting, crafting various equipment improvements and generally exploring a massive western themed world from the high snow-capped mountains in the north to the plains and deserts of the lowlands. There is even a fictional town called Saint Denis which is a kind of New Orleans city complete with early versions of electricity that is fully realized and populated with people. For instance, just for fun I went into town on my horse and spent the entire night in a high stakes poker game, and I won a lot of money. The game play was just jaw dropping cool, and realistic. It was as close to an experience of actually sitting down at a table in Las Vegas is, yet the whole thing was set in an Old West environment as the sun set and rose again outside the windows. There are many little side activities in Red Dead Redemption 2 that a player could literally get lost in forever, if there was ever enough time in that sentiment.

The game is quite honest and eager to explore the clash of progressivism with the rugged concept of the American individualist and the amount of dialogue that was written and acted in this story by many random events is just staggering. There really isn’t any way to experience everything and to talk to everyone in just one playthrough of the game. Decisions made have consequences in the overall world so not everyone will be available to players based on what they do or say to other people. But the basic plot of the game guides you through a kind of participatory novel. Red Dead Redemption 2 is a story telling experience that is unlike anything ever produced, novel, motion picture or Broadway play. There are some very probing questions asked in the story that is explored with great depth that no western ever had time to fully contemplate. The attention to every little detail is just staggering and how they all randomly interact with each other only conjured in my mind that Red Dead Redemption was simply an early version of the HBO series West World. You really do forget that you are playing a game as a player, you are pulled into that world and living it.

At this point I still have a lot more to play, I probably won’t have it wrapped up as a story until after the Thanksgiving Holiday. Maybe even Christmas. If I put 14 hours a weekend into the game it will probably take another 6 weeks to finish, that is how big it is as a conceptional element. Players could blast through the story if they wanted probably in 60 hours or so, but for me, I want to live in that world of Red Dead Redemption. I personally love the time period and the optimism of the American frontier and this is the best way to experience it. Even in their worst elements, I consider the drunks, thieves and whores of the Old West to be much better people than our modern counterparts because there is an honesty in human endeavor that is evident in that time period that is lacking in modern life, so I am spending as much time there as I can. And if you are like me and like to play video games but don’t have time for all of them, if you had to pick, Red Dead Redemption 2 is the one to play. It is better than any Netflix series, any movie made, or long-standing network television program. It is modern entertainment in its best form yet and it is something to see. If this is how entertainment in the future will be, then we all have a lot to look forward to. One thing that is obvious about the makers of Read Dead Redemption 2 is that they love American westerns and they have somehow managed to put every one of them into the story of this new video game from the ugliness of criminal outlaws, such as the movie the Wild Bunch explored down to the innocence and honesty of Little House on the Prairie. It’s all there in raw and spectacular fashion and is an experience everyone should have at least once, no matter how old you may be.

Rich Hoffman

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