Tag: philosophy

The Real Killers of Jamal Khashoggi: The context of honesty regarding Trump’s defense of Saudi Arabia–never forget Seth Rich

Now we are seeing the evidence of how things became so screwed up before the Donald Trump presidency. As Black Friday dawned across the American continent and gas prices were down on average by .25 cents per gallon the issue of morality came up regarding public relations between our White House and the Saudi Crown Prince Mohamed bin Salman’s direct relationship with the Washington Post reporter Jamal Khashoggi. For some reason we were all supposed to be worried that the Prince put the hit out on the reporter and cut up his body in an embassy in Istanbul. The reporter himself was a friend of Osama Bin Laden saying of him, “I collapsed crying a while ago, heartbroken for you Abu Abdullah”, using Bin Laden’s nickname. “You were beautiful and brave in those beautiful days in Afghanistan, before you surrendered to hatred and passion. Khashoggi to put it simply in a very complex story was a liberal progressive on the world stage and had the sympathetic ear of all liberals trying to advance the world in a direction it didn’t want to go. Like most liberals they tried to use peer pressure applied through the media to destroy the lives of people whereas the Crown Prince still used old world tactics like death and torture to maintain power. So in such a world of vast immorality, How can any value be determined? Essentially in the power of the United States economy. That is where morality resides.

The reports are that it took seven minutes to die as assassins had injected the reporter with a numbing agent to alleviate the pain and stop the screaming. The hit squad listened to music on their head phones as they started cutting up the body, while still alive. They removed the body parts piece by piece and destroyed the evidence, just as Democrats had with their email evidence was well as our own F.B.I. in their attempts to have a coup against the incoming President Trump before he took power., and once the killing occurred, everyone went about their business. Turkey was outraged that the United States wouldn’t take action against Saudi Arabia who tried to dredge up the memory that it was Saudi Arabia who had backed the attacks of 9/11. But what they failed to mention was that it was the Jamal Khashoggi faction that supported the terrorism as he was a supporter of The Muslim Brotherhood. You might remember those guys who had personal invites to visit President Obama in the White House often from 2008 to 2015. It’s not a conspiracy theory or a “whisper campaign” to discredit the radical Khashoggi, but rather a fact. Ultimately in the war of power alignments in the Middle East with Israel in the middle of it all and Saudi Arabia to stand in direct conflict with Iran and Syria the urgings of the progressives are that all that should come to an end just because one of their own was killed in the conflict.

But there are other ways of destroying people, not just in cutting them up into little pieces and getting rid of the body so nobody will ever really no the gruesome details. Liberals in America literally did everything they could to destroy the life of Brett Kavanaugh prior to being confirmed on the Supreme Court. Liberals try desperately to destroy the careers of anybody who stands against them in the press, such an example would be the best-selling author Bill O’Reilly, formally on Fox News. They had no problem trying to use a phony sex scandal to destroy everything O’Reilly stood for, the media was so vicious that they didn’t care if he ever showed his face in public again. Did they physically kill O’Reilly, no, but that’s not how people destroy other people in civilized nations. In the Middle East, they still kill people literally. In the West, enemies of others try to kill the social footprint a person has in the world using democratic peer pressure to do the messy part of the work. We are talking about a double standard such as how the media did not hold Sherrod Brown from Ohio who had a history of domestic violence but ignored it so that the senator could defend his seat from the challenger Jim Renacci. Liberals don’t care about Khashoggi or moral clarity, they only care that they lost a voice in their attempts at global progressive crusades. They care about how they can change the world and gain power using ever manipulative tactics to do so. But nothing more.

And the people from the so-called conservative branch of things within the GOP such as Bob Corker and Bill Kristol, all Never-Trumpers who are raw displays of who various factions of the political right and left are still enemies of the President and the people who elected him, much the way the conflict between the Crown Prince and Khashoggi were. In Saudi Arabia they kill each other, in America we fight it out in the press. Is that better than killing a person, arguably it’s still aggression and conflict. Kristol isn’t going to be killed by Trump but the conflict is just as real between them. Enemies of the President would love to trap him into making enemies with Saudi Arabia so that by 2020 the American economy would be a wreck and people would blame Trump for the high gas prices and further instability in the Middle East. Why should Trump change all that over some progressive reporter who was against him too? Where is the incentive?

And Senator Menendez who just won reelection in New Jersey, by a little bit, is crying for morality over the Khashoggi murder too. Menendez the federal corruption charges guy who had all kinds of trouble in 2018 after a judge declared a mistrial barely saving him from serious jail time is on the lecture trail promoting action against Saudi Arabia. This is the same person who has an “F” with the NRA and anywhere else in the country besides liberal New Jersey wouldn’t be able to be elected on a one-person ticket suddenly has international credibility because he has come out against Trump’s support of Saudi Arabia. These are the kind of people who are standing against President Trump—these people aren’t any different from the assassins who chopped up Jamal Khashoggi. The only real difference is that they aren’t as literal in their villainy. But the are all villains attempting to change the world to their own version of it.

The only real morality of all these scandalous characters, and Trump clearly understands it, is the American economy. By siding with the Saudis in the world it gives him negotiating leverage for all future deals but more than anything it keeps gas prices down through the critical Holiday season. One bad move with the economy and all that positive GDP growth that the United States is experiencing could turn negative, and that is really what the liberal press and RINO conservatives like Corker and Kristol are after. Nobody ever cared about Jamal Khashoggi being cut up into little pieces, only that they in the media didn’t want the same thing to happen to them. But they will use anything to attempt to bring down President Trump, even if they can trap him into making an error in moral judgment that would destroy the American economy. And that military equipment that the United States is selling to Saudi Arabia, that is worth so much money, it means more than just jobs to Americans who make it, it’s all about having a friend in the Middle East that can stand against Iran and protect Israel. That is really what the liberal press is after, they want America out of the complicated Middle East so that progressivism can be ushered in on the backs of Islamic radicalism. And for that they will kill anybody literally or metaphorically. The American economy is the bright light that saves so many lives around the world, and without that light many more people die and are plundered out of existence by radical progressives and even members of America’s own intelligence agencies who still hope and pray for a one world order. The assassins cutting up Khashoggi were probably much more morally fit than the typical liberal operative, like James Comey, Hillary Clinton or even Peter Strzok. At least the assassins were conscious enough to listen to something pleasant while they did the dirty work. American liberals in many cases are much, much, much more brutal and uncaring. They can do the deed and lie to our faces without having to listen to any music, and that makes them very dangerous.

Just remember something, Seth Rich……………………………………The New York Times certainly didn’t do a big investigation on that murder directly attached to the DNC.  Hmm, and I don’t recall Saudi Arabia forcing a resolution on that murder.  So why Jamal Khashoggi?  Well, watch all these videos and use the questions that come from them be your guide to reality.  And when the question comes up about law enforcement covering up evidence to help create a political story, never forget what the F.B.I. did for Hillary Clinton.

Ultimately, this is why I support Julian Assange at Wikileaks.  I’ve been to the embassy there and I think the Trump administrating should stand with him as the world closes in to remove his journalism from the reporting of global news.  I personally don’t trust the media and their ties to governments.  This is just one case that shows the dangers.  I stand with Julian Assange!  That’s me in the picture at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London where Assange lives.  I consider it one of the few places in the world where real freedom of the press exists. 

Rich Hoffman

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Thankfully No Jokesters at the White House Correspondence Dinner in 2019: Respect and Leadership do not owe comedy “equality”

Honestly, I think the pick to put Ron Chernow as the headliner of this year’s White House Correspondence Dinner is a good one. His book on Grant was fabulous as he is a great historian and to me that should be the purpose of the dinner. This tradition of laughing at ourselves as a country is a pretty dumb one. How it got started in the first place is something that we should have revisited a long time ago. I understand the need for comedy, but there is psychologically something much more sinister going on at roasts of celebrities and people who have achieved great importance, and when it comes to President Trump, he has one clear message for his years as the leader of the Executive Branch, respect is a theme he has always wished to cultivate on projects he works on. This trend to make fun of everything so not to show that we as a culture and as a people don’t take ourselves too seriously has major flaws that should have ended after Johnny Carson and Bob Hope’s era closed. After them, the trend went out of control and has turned into a joke and that doesn’t help America be great, which for many in the typical White House Correspondence Dinner audience always wanted anyway.

I share with Trump a distaste for personal aggrandizement. I just never have participated in it and I don’t do it to other people. Part of the gift of thinking positive about everything is that it has to start with yourself and if you are making fun of some imperfection that you have to show the world that you aren’t any better than they are, well then you are a captor to their limitations for themselves. When you work hard to be the best person that you can be, why on earth would you sit around and let people find flaws in what you have done? Especially when the people making fun of you haven’t made any efforts themselves at greatness.

We all have grown up with this notion that its good not to take yourself very serious and it was always a false one. After all, if you don’t take yourself seriously, who else will, and in many cases—especially when it comes to children we raise, people we lead in industry or just friends and neighbors, they need someone to believe in. So if we allow our value to be cheapened by silly jokes about ourselves and allow our image to be brought down to earth where all the lazy and unambitious are sitting around as losers smoking pot, drinking too much and generally showing no yearning to live life to the fullest, then we have cheapened everything we individually stand for, and that has always been the point.

When people who do great things allow themselves to be chided and ridiculed with a display of humility it is a silent endorsement that the masses and all their lackluster effort are the standard and the efforts of the great are meant to be absorbed in the murky depths of social stagnation. There was always an unsaid truth between the person who makes fun of other people and those who allow it that states a lack of superiority in the target and if left unchecked the bar that we should all aspire to falls short. In my own personal life even as a very little kid people would tell me, especially adults, that you can’t go through life as if your shit doesn’t stink. You can’t go around acting like you are better than everyone else and expect to be a successful person, because they won’t let you into the gates of life if you don’t make peace with them. Well, I never listened and all those things they said were untrue. Reality states that if you are the best at things no matter what controversies are going on in your life, the world will beat a path to your door and line up to seek your attention, because they will need what you have to offer. So why would anybody who works harder than the average person ever give jokesters a seat at the table of equality by allowing puns to go unchecked.

People who want to elevate themselves by castigating the successful and harder working will call their targets “thin skinned” if they don’t silently endorse the efforts at equality by allowing it to continue. But why did it ever become necessary to “take a joke” especially if one doesn’t dish it out? I can tell you dear reader that the source of that trend comes from the same European concepts that invented Marxism and it never should have been allowed to set foot in American culture. Personally, I am a very positive person by nature. I think greatly of myself obviously and I see absolutely nothing wrong with that. I love myself and everything I do and I live every single day and every single second of that day trying to be the best that I can be. And when I deal with other people, I always look for the positives in them. I always try to extract out of them goodness and a positive self-image. People who fail to respond or persist to continue their lives as a joke and find jokes in others are really just too lazy to try to accomplish anything in life, so their attempts at jokes are meant to keep the bars of life low for everyone. I see this as detrimental to any productive culture and have never participated. I don’t let people make fun of me and I don’t make fun of them. If they do make fun of me, I will tear up whoever it is that is doing the banter because I see it as an attack not just on me as a person, but on what the efforts of goodness should stand for. Do I take myself seriously, yes? Of course! And for damn good reason. Everyone should, and I am happy to help them look in the mirror and like the person that looks back at them. But fault-finding is a very negative thing and has huge implications on the quality of any society, and I personally don’t allow it.

I have never thought it appropriate to have a White House Correspondence Dinner that centered around telling jokes and making fun of our own culture. People around the world watch the video clips and it doesn’t set a good standard for a country that leads the world to make. Why would anybody follow a culture that finds so much fault with itself? The answer is they wouldn’t. Yet that has always been the secret ambition of the jokesters, to keep others from following the great people of high ambition and taste, and to celebrate the weak losers of lazy aptitude. We are talking about the kind of society that celebrates the star football player in any school at the same level of the class clown to the point where the star plays right along to endorse the behavior because they think it’s the popular thing to do—and that if they don’t, they may lose their star status. That is the great ruse of our modern times, that jokesters are just as important as the stars that build the society.

I understand Trump’s reservations about the way the White House Correspondence Dinner has been conducted. After all it has the word “White House” in it so that is a brand that President Trump has a great interest in protecting. Why would he want to cheapen it with the jokes of the stupid and lazy, to lower its image on the world stage just so that he could appear “cool.” That’s what we say to people we want to lower their guard to us, “be cool.” Don’t get upset, just drop your standards and opinions and join us in the collective mud of civility where we are all equally bad, stupid and imperfect creatures of God. No thanks. I like striving for perfection every day and working as hard as I can to get there. The last thing I want to hear is some joke about my hair, or the way I talk, or other little nitpick. And Trump is of the same mind, and I don’t blame him for it one bit! One way to make America great again is to believe that its great to start with, and that requires looking at the greatness and celebrating it, not making fun of it and trying to demean it so that other people won’t feel the pressure to be better. They need to try to be better and not use jokes as a way to insulate themselves from the expectations of the ambitious.

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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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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House Bill 228: No more singing in the rain for bad guys

I am extremely proud of the current congress in Ohio as the gavel dropped in the affirmative on House Bill 228. I wasn’t too excited at first as several people were quick to let me know that the vote had been taken and passed as it happened. My response to them all was that we still had a liberal governor in Kasich so he’d veto it. The bill would arrive dead essentially. But over the last couple of days many from Columbus told me much better news, that they fully expected Kasich to veto Ohio’s new Stand Your Ground law, but that they had the votes to override the veto. Now that became an entirely different matter all together and the fact that the Ohio congress acted so boldly at the end of the session spoke a lot about what’s to come for the positive. Stand Your Ground laws are needed everywhere and they reinforce the Second Amendment in ways the Bill of Rights was always philosophically designed. I consider The Anti Federalist Papers and the Federalist Papers to be some of the most joyous reading I’ve ever done in my life and there can be no understanding of American Constitutional law without accepting that the paramount epoxy of a proper structured society is the decentralization of law enforcement using the gun as the symbol of order. And for Ohio to take that proper step in making Stand Your Ground legislation the law of the land the state takes that critical step forward in raising the bar for a state that was being tempted to go purple to turning a nice bright red.

With a vote of 64 to 26 House Bill 228 passed comfortably showing great conviction. I know the House has had to sit on their attempts for a long time knowing that Kasich would prevent its advancement. But what was a surprise was that the House proved they could get the three fifths of the total vote count needed to override a veto, which in this case is 60 votes out of 99. With the 64 House of Representatives members who voted in favor o House Bill 228 they are already there. Then of course it will take 20 of 33 Senators to get passage of the bill without the governor’s signature. “Isn’t this exciting!” I learned from a good source that the senate was on board as well which was a stunning revelation. Of course, this boldness comes after the election before the newly elected congress takes over but its more than symbolic in nature. Kasich has prevented many of these conservative advancements and because many members of the House and Senate were up for election, they couldn’t afford to have Kasich pulling resources away from their re-elections. But it is refreshing to see that the moment they could, this congress acted and they did so boldly on legislation that is far from the type of change agent progressivism that has taken over Columbus in recent years like a vast sickness.

Stand Your Ground in Ohio is a big deal. The “duty to retreat” laws that have been in place were always dangerous and a real impediment to continued growth in both a population sense and in relation to business. With a “duty to retreat” it has added an unnecessary layer of burden to gun users when faced with hostile adversity. If something is going on that is hostile in nature a person acting in good faith should never have to worry about hesitating when faced with eminent threats. I can say I’ve been in those situations more than once and have not elected to use a gun because I did not want to go through the legal mess that always comes after. I have the fortune to have other tools to stay out of trouble and I use them more than I’d care to admit. But I do worry often about those tools not working and having to resort to a gun, and with Stand Your Ground, one less layer of concern has now been removed. House Bill 228 doesn’t allow people to have shoot outs in a Wal-Mart parking lot over parking spaces. But it does give gun defenders the ability to use deadly force to resolve a situation at the point of a threat. Under the “duty to retreat” obligation not only was a gun owner under a burden to diffuse a threat before using deadly force, but they had the burden on them to prove it. When some criminal loser is acting aggressively they don’t care often what happens next. They only live in the moment whereas their targets are at a tactical disadvantage of having to be put in a circumstance to think of the future while facing the possibility of everything coming to an end right then and there. If you do survive those moments, you might lose everything you own in law suit after lawsuit and many years in jail. “Duty to Retreat” favored a progressive vision of society where dissemination of activity, high taxes and massive government welfare has spawned sharp increases in criminal activity putting good people at a burden to deal with the conduct.

The way things have been reminded me of the book and movie, A Clockwork Orange, where young criminal gangs terrorize innocent people because they know that people who have built value of themselves in society are always at a disadvantage. A person who has nothing to lose always has leverage against people who have everything to lose. And progressive legislation, (regressive in human nature) favors the down and out of society, the criminally inclined and inherently lazy. Their premise is that all people are equal, and that property should be redistributed to all, so the criminal element helps them achieve this goal through open crime and theft. Obviously, they don’t want people of value to be able to defend themselves from people of little value with a gun so that is why there has been legislation in Ohio that favored “duty to retreat.” If a criminal wants what you have, then you have a duty to retreat to save the lives of everyone involved. These are the same kind of people who wanted to lower the criminalization standards in Ohio with Issue 1 over the last election. Their goals are to grow criminal conduct that redistributes property to those who need it—the down and out, and the poor—essentially the Robin Hood effect. Clockwork Orange was an interesting observation of the trend of these redistributive thoughts and in how they unleashed the worst elements of society. For the anarchist the criminal is a saint, to the builder of a republic, the criminal is a detriment, a cancer that must be eliminated.  The singing in the rain scene from that film shown above is specifically what I’m thinking about.  While the scene is a dramatized version of rape violence the behavior of the criminal mind I think is captured all too well in that Stanley Kubrick classic.  So the essence behind all such legislation is what kind of society we really want to have, a republic or a anarchists paradise that puts power in the hands of the criminal and ties the hands of the law binding and hard-working behind their backs while their assets are stolen from them. Before Ohio voted for this Stand Your Ground law, that was the philosophic premise of the previous progressive legislation.

The trend of our society in every American state is moving in the direction of the gun owners. Gun ownership is part of American life—its at the core of our philosophy. While pockets of our society are still functioning from European progressivism and the noise they leave behind sounds bigger than it really is on the nightly news, the real trend is toward more individual liberty and the protection of that liberty with a gun. If you plot out legislation history not just in the Ohio statehouse but also in Washington D.C. the trajectory of what guns mean philosophically to our society is headed away from confiscation and more gun control and toward more freedom, and many more of them in the hands of hard-working people who have something to defend. And that is great news for the good, and terrible news for the bad. While progressives hate judgements of people into such categories the gun then becomes the judge. If a bad person seeks to inflict harm on a good person who is just minding their business, now the gun can rectify that conduct. The burden is not on the good to prove that they didn’t suddenly become bad the moment they pulled the trigger. And that is historic in how humans deal with each other. Because good people don’t go around creating gun violence, but bad people do. And now we have a situational judgment that can root out the unnatural paradox. Which is a wonderful thing to behold. Nice job in the Ohio House! That is truly something to be proud of.

Rich Hoffman

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Those Murdering Wagners from Pike County, Ohio: The reason guns make society safer

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As it turned out, I know people who know people who know people who knew the Wagner’s, the four family members who slaughtered the marijuana producing Rhoden family in Pike County, Ohio a few years ago. It didn’t surprise me to learn that the heavily tattooed George Wagner III and his wife Angela along with their two sons George the Vth and Edward were responsible for the execution style killings of eight people. Pike County is rural, everyone knows everyone, and almost every house has someone’s ex-wife in it and when it comes to child custody which is always a problem of high turnover divorce situations, or loose sexual ethics, tempers flare. It doesn’t matter what courts decide, particularly among people who have the IQ of a potato, when raw, primitive instincts are unleashed, things like this grisly murder happen.

When people were slow to back Mike DeWine for governor, now they get to see why many of us supported him. DeWine may not be flashy, but he certainly didn’t back down from this horrible case as Ohio’s Attorney General and thank goodness he didn’t. There was plenty of wrong to go around when the bodies of Christopher Rhoden Sr., 40; his ex-wife Dana Manley Rhoden, 37; their three children, Hanna May Rhoden, 19; Christopher Rhoden Jr., 16; and Clarence “Frankie” Rhoden, 20. Frankie Rhoden’s fiancée, Hannah “Hazel Gilley,” 20, were found badly beaten, butchered, and killed execution style, along with the brother and cousin of Christopher Rhoden Sr., Kenneth Rhoden, 44, and Gary Rhoden, 38. The nation has been shocked not just once due to the nature of the murders, but in seeing the pictures of the Wagner family. The shock that such normal people, “so to speak” could do such a thing has captured the terror that resides in most everyone, in wondering who among the people they know might be capable of something similar.

What always shocks me about cases like this is how the family could have lived since then. The Wagners obviously were a close family who talked to each other and had at least great passion for the kid that was at the center of the killings, but what did they think would happen after they killed the Rhoden family? Imagine the dinner conversations after they killed eight people in a Ohio county where if someone sneezes, every house knows about it. Feeling the pressure the Wagners moved to Alaska where they actually had conversations with their landlord about coming back to Ohio and clearing their name, so they were professing innocence. Imagine living with the knowledge that you had been involved in such a terrible crime then trying to tell people you knew about it and declaring innocence. You would either have to be terribly stupid or just manically evil. Regardless, it was great work by Mike DeWine’s office and law enforcement to put all the pieces together and make the arrests of the Wagner family this past week. And watching them appear in court I just have to shake my head in wonder what they were thinking and what life for them must have been like over the past two years. I mean did they sit down as a family and stream movies off Netflix and live like normal people? How didn’t the crushing weight of what they had done destroy their happiness in their every day life? Then looking at them and watching their courtroom conduct, I think they were just too stupid to know that what they did was wrong and they were likely too thoughtless to quell their emotions in the first place which is how these killings happened originally.

There will always be George Wagners in the world, dumb people acting on animal instincts who tattoo themselves up to look like a menace to society to earn respect that they can never get due to their limited intellectual abilities. And when their ruse doesn’t work, they will seek to enforce their emotions through physical dominance, these problems are as old as the human race itself. We can create laws to stop it, but marijuana is against the law yet the Rhoden family had a major growth operation, they weren’t completely innocent in all this. This is precisely what happens when we have a lawless society filled with people who have not pushed themselves intellectually interacting with each other. What you end up with is a society obsessed with sex and death and in that context, the Wagners were functioning at the level of the average animal, and nothing more.

We like to think that we have a civilization where public education and a structured society might avoid making people like the Wagners and the Rhodens. But I can tell you that through massive parts of rural America and well within the inner cities, a lot of people aren’t very far off from these primitive emotions. They are all one power outage away from becoming mass murderers themselves. All it would take is a lack of access to bread and water for a few days and they could easily become serial killers. There is only one thing that keeps these people in check, just like why animals don’t go near campfires or the sound of a gun shot can scare off predators, and that is their own fear of death. For the very stupid and unsophisticated, most people, even the Wagners as dumb as they appeared to be, have a basic instinct for self-preservation. That’s why after they committed the crimes, they fled to Alaska to hopefully outlast Mike DeWine’s investigation. Some states with less tenacious attorney generals might have given up after a few years of investigation, so the Wagners came back to Ohio expecting that to be the case, but obviously that wasn’t what happened.

This is why I say often, more and more these days, that gun ownership is an intellectual pursuit, because it provides protection from the lawless and stupid that structured society fails to provide. A structured, respectful society only exists when people like these Wagners are diffused from action out of their own preservation. But if they think the target of their anger or anxiety is unarmed, they will all too often function from raw emotion. They have no respect for the law as life in Pike County tends to be. There are a lot of marijuana growers there who live too far away from the city to have a steady job. Once the premise for law breaking is established then more advanced law breaking becomes more and more of an option. Murder is against the law but so is running through a stop sign, or speeding, or selling drugs. Once you rationalize one thing, the door to everything else is opened and chaos erupts. In such a world, which no law can prevent, the gun is the only thing that normal people can use to keep the villains of the world safely away.

This is why I propose that more guns not less are the essential element to a more civilized society. Gun possession and the will to use them against assailants triggers in people like the Wagners at least a measure of self-preservation that may well prevent senseless murders over raw passions such as in the Rhoden case. I’m sure the Rhoden’s had guns, but they likely weren’t readily available. I think guns should be worn or be near their owners most times of the day. At any point in my 24-hour day I am never very far from mine ever. It’s not that I plan to shoot anybody, but when your enemies know you have them, it causes them to take an extra measure of planning before they try to kill you. Often that is a variable that they are too lazy to sift through, and when those enemies are as dumb and unsophisticated as the Wagners, they are likely to turn on the television and forget about their flared tempers when given the option of a possible death among themselves. And that is the only real way to have a peaceful society.

When you carry a gun, even around your house you aren’t conducting your life-like some gun crazed lunatic, the way gun control advocates would like to portray such people. You are saving lives by detouring many attempts that would otherwise occur. That is exactly why gun free zones are so dangerous and why many of our gun free cities have the highest crime rates. Guns are the fabric of a structured society and they keep losers like the Wagner family from showing up on your doorstep wanting to kill you because you looked at their “ol’ lady,” or that you took their parking space at a Dollar Store. By having the gun with you at all times in your life, you keep those types of losers from becoming murderers and you keep crime from happening and that is the only method of real law enforcement that works.

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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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

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

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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The Shooting in Thousand Oaks, California: Why can’t we all just get along–because liberals don’t want to, they have declared war

In the wake of another mass shooting, this time in Thousand Oaks, California by what people are saying was a mentally deranged 26-year-old Afghanistan war vet leaving over a dozen dead, gun control and civility were cited as the things that people wanted, not just from the people present at the press conference, but across the nation. Why can’t we have gun control? Why can’t we all just come together and get along and heal this divided country? While they were saying it they might as well have asked why monkeys can’t fly like they do in The Wizard of Oz or why blue can’t be red, or green viewed as purple and why couldn’t Elvis still be alive making music—or Michael Jackson for that matter? Why can’t reality be suspended to fulfil our fantasies is essentially what came from the press conference in Thousand Oaks, in the aftermath of the tragedy was a desire to find civility and peace in all these mass shootings so that a solution could be brought forth that allowed people to just dance at a nightclub on a Wednesday night to some country music. Oddly enough, some of the people there were survivors of the country music concert in nearby Las Vegas where another gunman opened fire into a crowd there—of course the motive of the killer was never determined or released. On this shooting the motive was released much quicker, it was mental illness, PTSD and ABC News almost seemed to be reading off a script as they announced it. But not so fast.

As all this was happening Democrats were looking to literally steal the election in Florida from Rick Scott for the senate seat he won there with votes that are appearing out of nowhere. The lady in Georgia is trying to do the same—apparently Oprah wasn’t enough. Tucker Carlson from Fox News had his house attacked by ANTIFA and threats to his life were made. Of course, there have not yet been any arrests even though the protestors were going well beyond free speech. They were violent and implicating a promise of violence. Nancy Pelosi in the newly won Democrat majorities in the House are promising endless investigations of President Trump who has done nothing to be impeached but beat them in an election, which continues to happen. Democrats won the House for only one reason, because many never-Trumpers wanted out of their jobs because they didn’t like the way things were shaping up in the Republican Party, so they retired in most cases, around 38 Republicans and 17 Democrats leaving a lot of open seats coming up in this particular election giving Democrats a slight edge in filling those vacancies. It says more about the Republican Party coming together under Trump than anything the Democrats did. In Atlanta hoping to intimidate voters in voting for the eventual loser Stacy Abrams was members of the New Black Panther Party posing for pictures on social media dressed in military gear and holding guns as if to say, vote for our person or die. And when Donald Trump finally fired Jeff Sessions the day after the election there were protests and endless streams of anxiety from the political left over that, which is well within his right to do.

There is no prospect for peace in America. There are domestic enemies who wish to toss away the Constitution and to change the way that we conduct ourselves in American culture. They do not want to get along, they wish to be agents of change to alter the behavior of American life and so long as that is occurring there will be violence and conflict. The reason that so many people are willing to support Donald Trump in the presidency and why there were gains in the Senate, and very minimal losses in the House due to the Republican retirements specifically, is because people are aware of the new civil war that we are currently under. Big money from those domestic enemies have financed that war effort on a media front and so long as those agitators are functioning and challenging American society there will not be peace, so don’t even indulge in the illusion.

The cries for gun control after the Thousand Oaks shooting are just to disarm good Americans so that the bad ones can run free to do as ANTIFA did at Tucker Carlson’s house, threaten and dominate those standing in opposition to the point of death. It will be interesting to learn more about the shooter, the former Marine who did spend extended time in Afghanistan exposed to Islamic culture. PTSD sounds like an excuse to me, there are surely deeper issues not so neatly summed up. But the bottom line is that occupants of that night club should have been armed. The bouncers in the very least should have been carrying guns. So should the security outside the venue. If people inside had guns, they could have shot back instead of hiding under pool tables and having to jump out of windows just to survive. As it always is, more guns are the answer, not less. And eliminating gun free zones is the way to stop these mass shootings. The shooter was a frequent customer to that establishment and he knew where the guns wouldn’t be, making the entire area a soft target.

Gun control and civility are not even on the radar so long as insurgents are trying to change American culture through dirty tricks and outright threats of violence. When the question is asked, when can we return to more bi-partisanship, when can we all just get along, well the answer is in those who are imposing themselves upon the rest of us with threats of violence, impeachment and law breaking. The threats to peace come from these insurgent Democrats who want single payer health care, illegal aliens, and gun control to change America from a prosperous first world country into some armpit of Europe. It is not an act of violence to stand up for yourself, it’s a right. If there had been people at that nightclub armed in a way to stand up for themselves and not having to wait the short, but deadly time that it took for police to arrive, then the situation would be different.

The change agents looking to turn America from one thing to another have already had quite an impact and most of that started before I was even born fifty years ago. While guns where shown in westerns on television and movies during the golden age of cinema all through the 30s, 40s, and 50s Americans didn’t run around killing each other because we all at least had some shared values about what American society was, and gun ownership protected those values-more as a symbol than a tool. But now carrying a gun and the gun itself has been made out to be a monster by the same radical leftists that want to impeach Donald Trump for nothing more than winning an election. They expect us, “gun supporters” to sit down and shut up while they steal the elections in Florida and Georgia with made up votes pulled out of a few counties known for cheating. And we’re supposed to just shut up and like it. That is the source of the problem, and until that is gone, there will be no peace in America. Because we are at a time of war and it wasn’t Republicans that started it.

Rich Hoffman

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