Tag: Pirates

Rebels, Rogues, and Outlaws: Without a piratical effort, corruption would have won in 2024

I’ve been telling conservatives since before even the Tea Party movement that they needed a piratical effort to fight conventional politics.  The reason they kept losing to an inferior socialist global plot was that they did not fight back.  They might have had good ideas, but they couldn’t defend them from radicalism, and Saul Alinsky understood that and used that knowledge to build the Democrat Party on very loose sand on a beach.  But they survived because they essentially turned off the water of ideas, so there was never a high tide of ideas to wash away the sand castles of assumptions that they had built.  So they could appear strong and superior because they controlled the water, not the ideas that propelled society, keeping their dumb ideas from washing away.  But the first thought I had when Mika Brzensnski and Joe Scarborough flew to Mar-a-Lago to have a meeting with President Trump, after all the trouble they have caused him over the last 8 years, I put the credit more toward the WarRoom audience of podcasters who had formed to create alternative MAGA media, more than the valiant efforts of President Trump.  Not to take anything away from Trump, he needed to be tough and drive through all the opposition to win this massive election of 2024.  In this second American Revolution, he will go down in history as the modern George Washington, and nobody can take it away from him the day he was shot in the head, and his first instinct was to stand up and pump his fist in the air yelling fight, fight, fight, to a roaring crowd.  Nobody worked harder than Trump, but he couldn’t have done it alone. Instead, what had been missing from these rebellious enterprises is the pirate element of the modern versions of John Paul Jones, which is precisely how Steve Bannon sees himself, and the work of the WarRoom podcast over the last four years that has become a powerhouse in media.

Steve Bannon and Peter Navarro spent the summer in jail for defying a corrupt January 6th Congressional Committee that was attempting to hide election fraud and the crimes of Covid behind some government insurrection they created to have a coup against President Trump and to send a warning across the bow of all Trump supporters the Department of Justice prosecuted many of the people shown in the new book by WarRoom Books, Rebels, Rogues, and Outlaws released right around the election to commemorate all the great work done by the people who set up and became the voices of the WarRoom posse, as they like to call themselves.  I rushed out to get the book because, like the Trump coffee table books, this is a big book that is mostly pictures but one that captures this period of history extremely well.  The people celebrated in the book are some of the people who, if they didn’t do what they did, there wouldn’t have been a successful MAGA media to challenge the mainstream media and their capture of everything people saw and heard.  Like John Paul Jones harassed under the guidance of Ben Franklin, the most powerful navy in the world during the First Revolution, the equivalent these days was the global mainstream media, and what was done by the WarRoom during this Second American Revolution was on the same scale.  We needed a place in the media where the rebels and outlaws could help the American cause of preserving the Constitution and selling it to the world.  That is precisely what was captured in this new book: the efforts of many people who did not do the safe thing and sat on the sidelines.  They worked the behind-the-scenes stuff to a massive effect.  One of the reasons that election fraud was managed better in this 2024 election, and we did learn that Trump won during the prime time hours and that cheating didn’t go on to keep him out of office in the days after that, was because of the pressure of the WarRoom. 

I’ve seen this pirate effect work up close and have been doing it myself for a long time.  So, I have been telling thousands of people how to do it.  And Steve Bannon was just the kind of guy to do it, as he had done over at Breitbart after Andrew died suddenly.  Steve carried that alternative media to significant levels and was recruited by the Trump team during the first term as a key strategist.  However, the pressure mounted by the traditional forces and Steve left the White House and essentially started the WarRoom podcast, which reported news twice daily and even on Saturdays, far better than anything the mainstream media was doing.  What the WarRoom was able to do was essentially replace The Drudge Report with alternative news and The Rush Limbaugh Show for the conservative audience once he died shortly after Biden took office in 2021.  Those were some very dark days.  I continued doing my own pirate efforts, and they worked very well.  But there weren’t many places to go for news until the upstart Real America’s Voice provided a place for people who were sick beyond sick with the betrayal of Fox News.  And the WarRoom started partnering with them to provide what many have since called MAGA media. 

Good, it will save us from firing them

But this isn’t just about a successful media enterprise. Many of the people pictured in that book were openly harassed by an established order of criminal-level government that grotesquely abused their power. This is one of the reasons that Trump has indicated that he has no other pick for Attorney General other than Matt Gaetz, who is also featured in the book.  Many names, like Mike Lindell, who had very successful companies, were personally sought after to be destroyed because they supported President Trump and were the kind of people who stuck with it every day and fought back with everything they had.  Alex Jones is in the book, and we all saw what they tried to do to him.  So is Rudy Guiliani, who, as of yesterday, had lost everything he had but a good cigar and openly laughed at the forces of evil that were trying to destroy him with bankruptcy utterly.  No, Trump is going to support those who fought hard in the background to put him back in office, and to a large extent, that is why the Morning Joe crew at MSNBC had to bend the knee to Trump, as is most of the media.  Oh, don’t get any fancy ideas of reconciliation.  These people are out of gas and are in that condition mainly because of the WarRoom as a media outlet.  Charlie Kirk is one of the brightest political minds of modern times, and he is featured in that book.  And I love the book because history will look very kindly on all the people in it and many who didn’t make it.  I think people like Grace Chong should undoubtedly be in it, but probably isn’t because she doesn’t like to draw attention to herself.  There are many more who aren’t in the book, but those who are are examples of how to do these things in the future, and we need to remember who they are and what they did to help save America.  And the effort that actually requires people to fight back and not just take what an established order gives you.  And without these outlaws of a criminal government, we would not have had the election win of 2024 that we did have.  This is why the book Rebels, Rogues, and Outlaws is such an important book to remember of these very dark times. 

Rich Hoffman

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Disney Stock is Down 31% to the Year: And its never coming back

I warned everyone years ago, Disney stock is never coming back. Currently, as of this writing, it’s down 31% of its value for the year, and this was before the big battle with Ron DeSantis in Florida occurred, where the tax status and self-governing control is in jeopardy. The writing was on the wall a long time ago. Being a Star Wars fan, I was encouraged when Disney bought Lucasfilm, which makes Star Wars products. I have wanted it to work. My wife and I had one of the best vacations of our 34-year marriage in 2019 when we went to Disney World and enjoyed all their creations to celebrate the opening of the Star Wars ride, Rise of the Resistance. No company but Disney could have made a ride like that or built a Star Wars land like what they had in Florida at Hollywood Studios. So I don’t report this news about Disney happily. I’m a fan and have wanted it to succeed. But reality is headed in an entirely different direction.

I’m the guy who used to go to Target in September when the Holiday toys would come out for Star Wars and buy up the cool stuff before anybody else did at midnight. The toy aisle at Target and Walmart used to be filled with Star Wars figures just from the movies that were made in the 80s and 2000s. But after Disney bought the brand, and the company headed in the direction indicated by the Desecrators of Davos globalists, like Klaus Schwab, the brand of Star Wars has died. Gone are the toys or the demand for them. Kids have moved on to their favorite YouTubers, and when you see what Disney has done to a really solid brand, like Star Wars, you can see what they are doing to everything else that Walt Disney built. Disney as a brand is damaged, and it will never recover, and those are the facts. Get your money while you still can.

The truth is that in a free culture like America, the Davos plan for our complete economic destruction by hijacking our brands and destroying them from within with ESG scores will fail. If Disney isn’t going to provide a family-friendly place, then someone else will come along and do what Walt Disney did. America will not be deprived of what we want. We made it in the first place, and we can make it again. Disney World was built when I was a real little kid; I was there when they started digging out the big lake in front of Magic Kingdom. I remember it. It hasn’t been that long. If the family value dollars aren’t going to Disney, they will go to its eventual replacement, whatever that may be. But American brands won’t just go away, as has been the plan by those who hate America, and which to desecrate all the corporate branding directed through finance to a global change state to a one-world government managed by the Desecrators of Davos. The playbook is out, and people can now see what has been going on for a very long time. Being close to Star Wars, I watched how fast Disney destroyed the brand in just a few short years, and now we can see that brand damage everywhere.

Even the great Pirate films with Johnny Depp are going through a wake rethinking with his court trial, destroying his personal brand attached to the Pirate films. Not having anything really coming to rebuild the Disney brand, no new Johnny Depp Pirate films, no great string of Marvel movies like they had with the Avenger films, Star Wars damaged the way it is with woke politics, there is nothing on the horizon that will help Disney recover the damage that has been done to it. There are Avatar movies coming, and next year there is an Indiana Jones film. Those might be entertaining, but we are in a different world now with entertainment where streaming services are driving entertainment value, and the days of the billion-dollar blockbusters worldwide are becoming less reliable. Covid interrupted that cash flow for Disney. They played along with the woke politics of it, and now they are going full ESG, and that is not a replacement of value for investors or fans. That has left Disney in a tough spot that they put themselves in. They incorrectly played the wrong side of politics by fully embracing Rocky Horror Picture Show politics from the radical communist left. In truth, their real fan base is Trump conservatives. 

Disney has always been about family-friendly content and a safe space for boys and girls of all ages. But now that they have come out against the very popular governor Ron DeSantis in Florida, Disney has essentially cut off half of their audience. Some of the squishy Republicans who have booked their Disney vacation a year ahead of time don’t want to take a moral stand at this time. Still, as the trend continues, which it will, they will stop booking those vacations because the nostalgia of doing it is going away. And Disney can’t survive with its top-heavy costs. They are essentially where General Motors was before 2008. They are only floating along with inflated value perceived by theme park attendance. Their Disney+ service is struggling. The current show that is so hot there, Moon Night, which I think is fantastic, isn’t enough to justify its existence.

Disney can’t produce enough content to keep young people interested. YouTube is by far the preferred path for young people because daily content is new and refreshed daily. Production value isn’t a concern for young people of the Minecraft video game generation. They only care that what they see is new. Disney has lost that next generation, leaving them to desperately cling to these left-winged communist radicals because they bet all their chips that America would essentially become China. In 2022, that is clearly not going to happen. Trump is going to be back in the White House in 2024. Ron DeSantis is establishing the new rules for being a state governor, and the political pendulum is swinging back to the kind of America that Walt Disney provided entertainment to. The future of America may well be the most conservative in the history of the world once the smoke clears from all this, and Disney is nowhere close to appealing to those types of people. They are now positioned among the radical types, the anti-family movement. That doesn’t mean that good, family-friendly entertainment is gone forever. It just means that Disney won’t be the provider of that entertainment. They are not agile enough to react to these changing markets, and instead, they are digging in. So those stock prices are gone forever. Their value in 2019 and early 2020 was their high-water mark of real value. Inflation may make things appear to be better than they are, but the public sentiment toward Disney has been destroyed. And unfortunately, it has been destroyed forever. Yet, someone will come along and replace Disney. America will be what America is. The attackers of our culture want to destroy our companies and us like Disney. Like Star Wars. Marvel. But it’s not the company itself that makes the content or buys the product. They just provide the transaction, and anybody can do that. And they will. Disney can die, but the need for what they offered will live on, which will be the next great investment. 

Rich Hoffman

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The Honor of Dueling: We had a better and more honest society when fighting to the death was important

I often talk about the books I keep right next to my reading chair. The Federalist Papers and The Anti-Federalist Papers are a few that I look at often as I think about Constitutional applications to modern society and the vast history of human achievement that brought us all to this point in history. Because of my study of those books, I think of the American Constitution as the most outstanding philosophy for a mass society ever put to paper. It could have only occurred under the unusual circumstances of America’s creation and early evolution. But with those books, I have another one that I glaze through several times a week just for the pleasure of it. Of course, I’ve read it many times, but the frequent visits to its contents have a nobility to them that I get nowhere else. John Lyde Wilson’s little guidebook for dueling was written in 1838 called The Code of Honor. Wilson had been governor of South Carolina and felt a guidebook for dueling needed to be put to paper because so many people had gunfights to solve personal matters. Wilson, like President Jackson, would eventually feel dueling to the death to be an unfortunate thing to do. But, they also understood the premise of the personal possession of the concept of the words “I” and “My.” In their time, “my reputation” had meaning, significant meaning, and it was worth fighting to the death to defend it. Understanding this little nuance of intellectual philosophy helps to understand the premise of the American Constitution as it was written at the time to reflect this necessity of protecting personal virtue. 

As I have pointed out in Ayn Rand’s work, specifically her dystopian novel, Anthem, the word “I” was pushed entirely out of their culture and replaced strictly with “we,” and society devolved along the known Vico Cycle to the point where they had to discover the light bulb once again, literally. In that future society, The Council of Candle Makers ran everything. The nature of that collective-based society was to do everything for the greater good as interpreted by those in charge of that interpretation. All personal needs and values are surrendered to the mass of culture in general, which means that the direction of the entire society gets dumbed down to the weakest links of social discourse instead of the best and brightest. That is why those societies always fail, as they are in our present time. Ayn Rand provided significant warnings about these collective philosophies because she came from the Soviet Union as a young woman and saw up close and personal the results. As the last century evolved, we watched communism spread through most of the Asian world coming out of Russia, and it is to this day, the influence is seeking to conquer the West. China is not shy about their statements, and they have bought off many of our political class with stolen wealth to do precisely as Ayn Rand warned about in her book Anthem. That is why there is more of an emphasis on “teams” and “teambuilding” over individual development. Such emphasis is a process in erasing individual effort for the good of the whole, and it is the biggest challenge of our present time.

Clearly, to achieve their goals, the foreign and domestic forces that are the enemies of our Constitutional law desire to “progress” beyond such a concept into a world of global governance ruled by the United Nations. Study history, as I often do. You can see the apparent path of achievement by the international governing class that has been trying to undermine the American Constitution since it was written. English nobility was never crazy about the Magna Carta in their society. They indeed found it preposterous that the American colonies Declared Independence from them during the Revolution and that a new country was formed in the wake. Among the aristocracies of Europe, they never understood the concept of “I” and “My” to the level that it developed in the vacuum of power, when people were far from their overly controlling governments, how people tended to evolve into personal virtue instead of concern for collective based reasoning. And it was in such a breakaway environment some of the best forms of government have ever been created by mankind, starting with the democracy that was invented in pirate societies in the Caribbean then evolving into the Republic of America. In both cases, pirates helped topple the powers of Europe, first with John Paul Jones during the Revolution, then when England tried to take New Orleans during the War of 1812, it was Jean Lafitte who joined with Andrew Jackson to defeat the British forces, who were much more superior. The unregimented individualism of America, with all its variety and creativity, continued to win out over the old forces of collectivism from Europe eventually Asia, time and time again. And that attitude then went on to create the greatest economy the world has ever seen, and it still outpaces all the ruthless mechanisms to bring it under the control of Europe and Asia to this present day. 

Much of that magic came from discovering and protecting the self that the American Constitution afforded people everywhere, including the European concept of slavery. Free people simply outperformed those under the team concept of collective-based societies. Dying for the Queen or an emperor did not match the efforts of gunfighting for the right to a good life and all that could be built with it under the premise of the self. And when the honor of that self was questioned, it meant more to the people who wrote the Constitution to defend their honor to the death than to surrender that concept over to mass society and the bureaucracy of an administrative state which we find ourselves in now. Clearly, we were a better society of law, order, and economy when we fought to the death to preserve our individual honor than when we punt that honor to lawyers and governments to fight on our behalf. We have found that corruption tends to seep into such a society at a maddening pace because there is no individual honor to check it at the door. Without any fear of individual judgment and death by dishonor, there is nothing to keep a criminal class from rising out of chaos and forming right under our noses since honor and personal satisfaction of all concepts of the word “I” have been abandoned in favor of collective rule. When the criminals seek to hide their actions behind the “team” concept, there is no mechanism to identify the evil as individual achievement. Therefore, nobody is ever punished for committing the crime. The crimes then become collective-based because individual judgment can’t be applied to mass culture. That is how criminals are flourishing and why they see to it their best strategy of getting rid of the American Constitutional altogether and thinking of it as archaic. Yet looking back over history, it is clear that we were a better society when individuals could call on each other to have a duel to the death if the value of “I” and “My” needed to be defended. History shows us that protecting “we” has no meaning if the value of personal responsibility is surrendered in the process. And with that in mind, perhaps we should bring back dueling in America and worldwide. I think we would find the behavior of the criminal class that seeks to hide their malice behind rules and regulations under the protections of inefficient mass governments suddenly at a severe disadvantage. 

Rich Hoffman

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Rick Santorum was Correct: Indians deserved to lose in the context of history

America was correct to fight and beat the Indians

I have nothing at all against Indians.  There are many admirable traits that they have that speak well of them as a culture.  Yet my thoughts about them in the scheme of Westward Expansion is that they lost the war.  And they deserved to.  I can’t agree with the modern interpretation of these events.  Like 9.999999% out of ten, most people do not know history enough to have an opinion, and that includes the professionals who teach at our universities.  I have a unique relationship with history, and I can say that Rick Santorum was right about his comments in April of 2021 when he said that “there isn’t much Native American culture in American culture.” He has since walked back those comments due to intense pressure by the progressive elements of our society. They have made Native American worship just another political strategy to undo America as a country. Like their attempts to paint slavery as an excuse, North America should have never gone independent and, for unwarranted reasons, sought to destroy our Western culture with great effort using Indians as an excuse.  Yet some profound things happened that fully justify Westward Expansion and America’s founding as the correct and moral necessity that it was. The world of politics is entirely wrong in its approach.  For instance, if not for the real Pirates of the Caribbean, slaves today would have never been freed.  It took the pirates of the time to invent the concept of freedom in the world, and as pirates raided merchant vessels from England, France, and Spain, they freed black men being stolen from Africa whenever they could.  A democratic process was then created for the first time in human history that was directly learned by our Founding Fathers a century later.  That effort then translated to America’s Westward Expansion, which destroyed the culture of the Indians.  For the name of freedom, they deserved to lose. It should be celebrated, not regretted, for all the same reasons that it was Republicans who freed men and women of color upon studying the pirate movement.  The quest for humans to free themselves from an ominous past of king worship and imposition of radical religious movements which hindered the human mind for thousands of years was necessary.

You must know who did what to whom regarding slavery or the conquest of “Native Americans.” The desire for freedom from cultures of oppression, which England, France, and Spain were in the world of that time, before them, it was the Chinese coming straight out of the Ming Dynasty where they roamed the earth in their giant treasure ships procreating with cultures everywhere. At the same time, they spread the wealth of China liberally.  You likely didn’t hear about all this because they certainly don’t teach any about it in school. Still, there was trade going on globally between various cultures going back before Christ. As Spain was building little ships to send Christopher Columbus across the ocean to look for new trade routes to India, the Chinese for many centuries prior had floating cities bigger than anything previously seen on earth.  Their goal was to promote the might of China.  What we know about the modern Indian was directly attached to this effort.  Many Indian tribes were created globally and were hardly native to the continent from its inception.  The idea of diffusion from hunters and gathers coming down from the Bering Strait and settling the North American mainland first is preposterous.  Before known history, even a few thousand years before Christ in the Middle East, Phoenicians show evidence of trading in North America looking for vast copper mines in the Great Lakes region.  

I say all this for context because people upset with Santorum’s comments about Indians have pointed out the great societies of the Aztec and the people of Cahokia.  The massive pyramids just outside of St. Louis are just off the highway there as millions of people drive by every day and do not notice them at all.  Yet that is evidence of the extraordinary sophistication of global cultures trading all over the world.  That is the same kind of story as the Mound Builders of the Ohio and Mississippi Valleys.  We know now that these people were very large, some as big as 8 feet and 9 feet tall.  We call them giants now who came from the culture that built Stonehenge and were mixed with red-haired Vikings and migrants from Germany and perhaps even Egypt again well before Christ was born in a manger.  Lazy scientists who work in the Marxist university system over the very young fields of archaeology and anthropology are just beginning to scratch the surface of any global natural history.  There is so much that isn’t known. It has been way too soon to judge any culture anywhere regarding slavery, native status, and the like.  There is yet so much to learn.  They typically associate mound-building cultures as Adena and Hopewell Indians, but nobody knows.  With all the research that we have done, nobody knows anything about the Cahokia people who built those massive pyramids right in the middle of North America. It was all along a known trade route of the Mississippi River to the rest of the world, the pre-Mayan people, people in South America, and Africa, and beyond.  It is agreed that Cahokia supported a cityscape larger than London at the time. 

The Lakota, the Sioux, the Shawnee were not ancient cultures who built all these North American relics but were primitive offshoots of sophisticated societies that fell apart under the standard Vico Cycle.  I always talk about the Vico Cycle and people who turn back to the primitive under a necessity for the ambitious to rule over the lazy who are glad to follow.  So they became warring factions of hunter and gatherer tribes which is what met the first Americans.  The Five Nations of the Iroquois were not ever going to form a great government and shape the nature of human civilization. They had a chance, and they blew it long before Americans ever arrived to create a great republic.  Interpreters of history have it all wrong and did from the beginning turning the entire analysis into a political weapon instead of fact.  And when the two cultures met, the Indians were beaten as they should have been.  Their deep past was relatively shallow, and they felt the human need to be free of rule over tribal leaders and bloodthirsty kings.  Of course, the pirates were made out to be terrible.  Look at who interpreted history, the English, the Spanish, and the French, who were destroying the cultures at the time in South, Central, and North America for gold.  But Americans evolved and fought them all off, and freed the slaves, and stopped the long history of tyranny in the world for the first time. The Indians as we knew them were run over by the process, but that had been going on for many centuries, and if it hadn’t been Westward Expansion, it would have been themselves.  They would have destroyed each other as they were known to do.  Indians weren’t peace-loving victims. They indeed weren’t the ideal utopia of Sir Thomas More and other liberal contemplators of the human condition.  They were savages and muts from the world after tens of thousands of years of migration and global trade set to fail as all cultures typically do.  And in that regard, Rick Santorum should have never walked back his comments—because he was and remains correct.

Cliffhanger the Overmanwarrior


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Uncharted 4: A Thieve’s End, the greatest adventure story ever told

The Nathan Drake adventures on the Playstation game systems have reminded me often of my experiences from 1983 through 1988.  I love the games and the character of Nathan Drake.  Up until recently I thought Uncharted 2: Among Thieves was one of the greatest video games ever made.  The video game company Naughty Dog actually did something unthinkable, they are challenging great movie characters like Indiana Jones for the right to be king of the storytelling venue, and up until Uncharted 4: A Thieves End—which just came out in May of 2016 I thought they were scratching the surface.  However, I have given myself some time recently to play the 4th game, with great anticipation on my part.  Even though in my life I have shelved many of the traits about Nathan Drake’s life which remind me so much of my early years I deeply wanted to see how Naughty Dog would end the story of that very likable character—as this is slated to be the end of the series as we know it.  After playing Uncharted 4 let me report that it is jaw dropping great.  I had high expectations but even so, it far exceeded those in every way.  By the time the credits concluded I had a very similar feeling as I did the very first time I saw Raiders of the Lost Ark, only this was better, because the game was much longer and had time to jump into the lives of the characters in a storytelling fashion that I think was Academy Award winning.  The acting and pacing was so good that it rivals the best films Hollywood has ever produced—like Citizen Kane for set design and drama, or James Bond for sheer action and scope of circumstance.  As just an example of how good the game is, how it looks and how magnificent it is the video below is actual game play.  It looks like a movie but I can confirm that everything you see is a playable element.  It is quite astonishing.

If you have not yet played the game you may want to return to this article once you have as spoilers will follow.  I thought there were a number of elements about Uncharted 4 that were quite extraordinary story wise, and those items will be discussed—so if you don’t want to know, stop here.

Was I happy with the ending?  Actually, I was amazed by the ending.  It was so refreshing, that an entertainment company actually produced a story that featured strong characters with healthy relationships.  It was good to see that Nate and his wife actually lived happily ever after—that the events of the previous games were really about Nathan Drake coming to terms with his past and living a healthy future.  And it was nice to see that they gave birth to a daughter who was living a successful life with them.  Nathan Drake managed to also maintain positive relationships with his brother and his father figure mentor Sully as the years after Uncharted 4 progressed.  It was the happiest ending I’ve seen since the conclusion of the very first Back to the Future movie—it was satisfying in every way.  My wife and I kind of looked at each other after the story concluded because honestly it was like Naughty Dog had been spying on our own lives together over the years even down to the characters of the new daughters.  I was certainly able to relate to the ending—to say the least.  I was so pleased that millions of video game players were able to experience these Nathan Drake adventures which featured such positive role models and outcomes.  No wonder the game is so popular—the ending showed me that video games have become the dominate form of storytelling in our modern culture surpassing movies and novels finally.  In a lot of ways Uncharted 4 is the greatest story ever told—it is certainly the greatest treasure hunt surpassing Raiders of the Lost Ark or even Humphrey Bogart’s Treasure of Sierra Madre.  The people at Naughty Dog knew what they were doing and they pulled it off with sheer audacity.  Such a good ending to the story of Nathan Drake—especially for those who have spent the last ten years enjoying the Uncharted franchise.  Hollywood would have never dared to give fans such a positive ending.

What started as a rip off of the Tomb Raider franchise—which was a female rip-off of Indiana Jones, Uncharted had evolved into its own thing by the third video game.  Even the makers of the Tomb Raider games had realized that Uncharted was literally going someplace nobody had thought previously possible.  So by the time Naughty Dog set out to do Uncharted 4, they were truly in “uncharted” territory for any storytelling medium.  The game designers appeared to be aware that they were laying foundations that every video game and movie company in the future would have to live up to and they were enjoying it.  There were times where they were actually showing off their technical abilities just because they could.

For me the moment of ecstasy occurred when Nathan Drake arrived for the first time in Libertalia, the mythical pirate colony established by Henry Avery.  As it may be noted I have a particular love for pirate lore.  Uncharted 4 would have been the greatest video game I ever played taking away the pirate subplot, but adding it for me was just a wonderful bonus.  I have always wondered about the Avery colony which is a kind of Atlantis legend that I first ran across in the old book A General History of Pyrates by Danial Defoe (Captain Johnson).  Ironically, that book is one of my personal favorites so it was paradoxical that it was the centerpiece to the entire Uncharted 4 storyline—it was a slice of heaven for my mind.  It was the story I most wanted somebody out there in the world to tell because it is certainly worth of the attempt.  Libertalia in Uncharted 4 was realistically realized in much the fashion it would have been given Avery’s incredible wealth at the time and the tendency of the world’s nations to want to hunt down those pirates for the looting of all their vast treasures–$400 million dollars worth.

Libertalia was very interesting in that it actually fits politically into the discussion of our times—really the philosophic difference between libertarians, and the Tea Party movement.  What a lot of people don’t know is that the American Revolution was ignited by the actions of these very pirates central to the Uncharted 4 story so I consider the narrative an important one which shaped the actual Libertalia which become America. But for the founders of Libertalia, what a concept, a utopian paradise founded by renegades from all the world governments and all the possible problems that might arise from it.  I found the entire concept extremely compelling.  Then to walk around that environment in a 3D world was really something to behold.  The sense of scale was truly incredible.  These Uncharted makers obviously have experience with real world adventures as their physics through caves, with rappelling and climbing and geography was spot on—nearly real world in their feel.  If not for some of the over-the-top gun battles, and climbing, Uncharted 4 could be a simulation of real life.

It’s really hard to pick a favorite part of the game for me, because after I was finished, it seemed like a really long journey.  I took my time getting through the game—spending about three weekends completing it.  Ironically, I think the chapter where Nathan and his brother break into the old mansion to get back their mother’s personal possessions was the most compelling, which I didn’t expect.  Nathan’s mother supposedly committed suicide when he was very young forcing him to grow up in an orphanage run by nuns.  Uncharted 4 opens with Drake and his brother in a Panamanian jail and it is very gritty.  Through the series Drake is in many jails yet he’s highly intelligent walking a very fine line between ghetto thug and world-class traveler.  So it was interesting and realistic to learn that Nathan’s mother was a genius scholar who had obviously brushed elbows with powerful people and something bad happened to her.  Her absence in the lives of her children obviously sent them down a dark path leaving them with relationship troubles later in their lives as they had been a relatively happy family.  As young children that happiness was ripped from them and they spent the rest of their days trying to get it back which culminated around the secret treasure of Henry Avery—a character of obsession for their mother.  I thought that the Naughty Dog team went so much further than Spielberg could in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade in taking such an interesting globetrotting adventurer and grounding him into something internally driven by overbearing parents and childhood disappointments.  Even in the Panamanian jail, Drake and his brother seem too smart for their circumstances, but psychologically damaged by their upbringing.  Apparently they got just enough from their mother to be smart and inquisitive young people, but not enough to stay out of trouble.  The story was to me, deeply intelligent.

And that is the triumph of Uncharted 4, not just as a Playstation only video game, but as a mechanism for storytelling.  It is a shame that such a magnificent story doesn’t have the ability to reach everyone, but it certainly does justify the expense of buying a PS4 just so that people can play this video game.  It is worth every penny the cost of not only the game at $60 dollars, but the $300 cost of a PS4.  I haven’t played many of these types of games over the last five or six years.  Previous favorites were Red Dead Redemption and of course Star Wars: The Old Republic.  But this Uncharted game is just another step in creating virtual realities and telling stories in those realms.  Recently after buying a Samsung 4K 70” television the first thing I wanted to do was get an updated gaming system so I could catch up on some of the new titles that have been produced in the video game world.  The highest on my list was Uncharted 4 which was coming up at the time.  With that said, the game was gorgeous blown up big and in 4K—nearly flawless.  It really was a game that hit every mark on a high note and was something truly to behold and enjoy.  If you get the chance, take the adventure.  It’s not the only reason I spent 5K on an entertainment system, but I would do it again just to play Uncharted 4 once.   It will last in your mind for a lifetime.  It is my new favorite video game, and one of my most beloved adventure stories.  It has the depth of an adventure novel, the action of a summer blockbuster, and the romance of an Academy Award winning motion picture.  I really don’t think Douglas Fairbanks or Errol Flynn could have ever imagined the type of storytelling exhibited in Uncharted 4.  It is a new gold standard that will certainly stand the test of time and is one of the greatest adventure stories EVER told.  What a great experience Naughty Dog!  Thanks!

Do yourself a favor and watch the videos included above.  The effort put into Uncharted 4 is just incredible, and it certainly shows—an A+ in every single category.

Rich Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

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Pirates, Freedom, and Key West: What’s more important, order or happiness?

A week ago I shared a private family secret, our love of pirate ships, the constructible strategy game. Everyone that knows me well knows that I love pirates. It’s not the lawlessness nature of them that I like, but it’s the romantic idea of freedom that they represent.

I’m not normally a fan of liquor commercials, but I think I may have just seen the best one ever produced in this Captain Morgan advertisement. The makers of this commercial got it right. It may as well been ripped straight out of my mind. I LOVE IT!


The only thing I would have done different is the French vessel would have been sunk, the treasure looted, then Morgan’s crew would enjoy the drink. But, close enough.

Needless to say, I immensely enjoy the marketing strategy of Captain Morgan Rum. The key is to be honest with the sign stimuli that moves your heart to beat, and for me, this kind of stuff does it.

Pirates are one of the reasons that I ride motorcycles everywhere I go, its part of the attitude and culture of motorcycle riding that you can’t get when you just drive a car around. Here is that same woman from the Captain Morgan sword fight commercial doing the next natural thing, doing a motorcycle shoot for Harley Davidson.

That’s why I’ve said it more than once, progressives can attempt to ruin America through the schools, through legislation, through television and other social media, but deep within the human heart is a desire to be free. Motorcyclists today have a taste of that freedom, like the original pirates of the Caribbean did or the open range cowboy or frontier fighter. So in the end, progressives, socialists, communists, Marxists, and every group that wishes social control, will fail, and the reason they will fail is for the same reason the Captain Morgan ads work as visual eye candy, for the same reason that a man, or woman will spend all their extra money to buy a motorcycle, and will flock to a large motorcycle rally like Sturgis or Daytona.

The real Henry Morgan is one of my favorite historical characters. Now this might seem like an odd selection to people who read my work and think I’m a moralist. Morality to me is being authentic. Hiding one’s desires behind a drunken splendor does not take courage. To say that I did what I did because I was drunk is weak. To say I did what I did and I don’t care what you think about and I did it with full knowledge that you would not like it is more the proper attitude.

This is why I like modern-day Key West so much, because it is the closest thing on earth to Port Royal in Jamaica during Henry Morgan’s time. Here is a great documentary on Morgan and Port Royal. Again, I don’t enjoy debauchery, drunken acts, or illicit sex, but I do enjoy honesty, and there is a lack of politics in Key West and an honesty that comes with it that I enjoy. And Port Royal is what it was because it was free of politics and represents what people truly want and desire for themselves without government engineering.

We are at the point, as of this writing, just a week away from the release of the 4th Pirates of the Caribbean film, which of course my wife and I will be seeing on the opening day. Pirates of the Caribbean as a concept of course started as a ride at Disney Land and the interesting thing about the ride Pirates of the Caribbean, Walt Disney was making children films, yet he was obsessed with pirates. Why do you think that is? Listen to Walt Disney talk about his concept for the ride, where he talks about the crimes pirates committed in heroic ways. Nobody these days could get by with talking about this kind of stuff. Progressives have made everything so “touchy—feely” that creative types can’t even discuss the violence committed by a group of people like pirates, or frontiersman in any context by in feeling compassion for the victim of the violence. This is why the closest thing we have today to Walt Disney is George Lucas. Our society today would sue Disney for trying to corrupt children with this broadcast.

The key to Walt Disney is he understood that for imagination to work in the human mind, which is what he hoped to inspire in young people, is that they can’t get too hung up on rules. But young people needed to have their own set of values that they’d build with the mythology Disney gave them with foundation stories.

Modern business executives or politicians don’t understand how Disney thought. In fact, nobody does, because people get so hung up on the rules of living instead of the joy of it. Heck, even people in his family, friends and company don’t understand. We all understand the situation on a subconscious level, but people are unable to reach that understanding under conscious thought.

Oh, by the way, Walt Disney didn’t go to college. He didn’t even finish high school, only had one year. Maybe that’s the key to success. Tests do show that kids seem to become less innovative and imaginative with each year of public school. We seem to teach imagination out of kids.

So when Johnny Depp puts on this costume to play Jack Sparrow again, people will flock to see it, even though many of the people who work at Disney don’t really understand why. They are still milking Walt Disney’s ideas that are over 40 years old now without creating anything new, because the key to success is in the essence behind the myth.

If you follow progressive ideas, and a lot of young people do because it’s taught to them in their public schools and colleges, they hide the lie of their movement behind emotional truths, which then disguises the essence of any given thought. They seek to re-engineer what it means to be human by eradicating the desire for freedom. That desire for freedom to my relief is still able to reach young people. In fact, the new Lego Pirates of the Caribbean is something my wife and I are looking forward to playing with our young nieces and nephews where even those under the age of 10 can get that small taste for freedom manifested in the enjoyment of a game.

It is unlikely that any of the people working on the Pirates film including Johnny Depp understands what Walt Disney understood clearly when he came up with the idea for a Pirates ride in his children’s themed amusement park. Here at the premier, all the participants appear able to feel the energy evoked by the film, but aren’t sure how it translates to the art of living life. To them, the movie realm is a separate fantasy to be lived only with the price of a ticket and viewed in a darkened theater. To me, the movie realm is a reflection of human consciousness and represents the true desires of mankind.

That art is all about freedom, and not waking up in the morning worried about a government telling you what to do, what to eat, what to learn, or how you’ll make your money. It’s a genuine love of freedom, the right to succeed or fail to live or die in the pursuit of it. That’s the magic!

And it was nice to see that the director of the Captain Morgan commercial understood that freedom which he captured so wonderfully in that new clip. It’s one thing to copy off something you like and admire. It’s a whole other thing to understand it, and that commercial does.

These are my kind of people!

Rich Hoffman

https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2010/12/04/ten-rules-to-live-by/
http://twitter.com/#!/overmanwarrior
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The Magic of Pirates: Spending Mother’s Day at the Hoffman House

In my family naval battleships from the 1600’s through the 1800’s have a special place in our hearts. I’ve always been a fan of pirates, and that love has trickled down to my wife and kids over the years. Why do I like pirates so much? Well, Tenochtitlan which was the capital city of the Aztecs that sat in the middle of a lake which resided where modern-day Mexico City is started my love of pirates. It was a monstrously large city at the time of over 200,000 people divided into nobles and commoner groups. In Aztec culture, much like the modern Progressive, they lacked an inherit understanding of science so they relied on sacrifice to the gods hoping that magically the spirit realm would shine on their society and grant them life. They were such a foolish culture that over a four-day mass sacrifice in 1487 the Aztec king Ahuitzotl butchered 80,400 prisoners by shifts of priests working four at a time at convex killing tables who kicked the lifeless bodies of victims down the sides of their temple pyramids. (to see what this looked like click here) This established a killing rate of 14 victims a minuet over a ninety-six hour bloodbath. The Spanish encountered this group of Aztecs, saw that they were rich with gold, but lacked science, so Cortez took the city using superior technology and wiped out the Aztecs completely. So much for the gods saving Aztec culture, even with all the sacrifice.

Spain having wiped out the Mayan culture and now the Aztecs suddenly was very rich with gold, which scared the crap out of England and France. Those two countries hired “privateers” to intercept the Spanish vessels returning to the home country with the gold, so they could also have a share of the “new wealth.” This is a version of “redistributing the wealth” 1660’s style. Today we call them tax collectors.

Once much of the gold had been looted from Central America the three countries decided to be at peace with each other so they put a stop to their privateering efforts against one another and banned the practice with new laws. The only problem was those privateers were making good livings intercepting Spanish vessels from Central America. These were now sailors committed to living away from the “mother countries” so they had no real psychological commitment to a king or queen, so they decided to thumb their nose at their kings and become pirates. This was the start of the golden age of piracy.
It would be pirates who laid the foundations for America in breaking away from Europe. And it was on a pirate ship that democracy was first implemented, and concepts such as insurance were invented. In fact the very first law suit in the history of the world involved one of my personal mentors; Henry Morgan in a libel suit against Alexander Exquemelin who had written a book called The Buccaneers of America, based on Exquemelin’s adventures with Morgan, which exploited Captain Morgan as a ruthless cutthroat.

But Morgan had the king’s ear, and had made the man very rich in his spoils from Spain, and serving the king as a correspondence of sorts between Morgan, who had a base in Jamaica, and the king in England was none less than the philosopher John Locke, who Thomas Jefferson would base the Declaration of Independence off of Locke’s written work just a century later. There is without a doubt that the founding fathers held the book, The Buccaneers of America in very high esteem as a way to envision what freedom would look like. Many of the revolutionaries in the times of the founding fathers were sons of former pirates since New York had been a pirate haven once piracy was outlawed and those out of work privateers merged into legitimate fields of endeavor.

So anyone that knows me well knows that I love pirates, and the art of the swashbuckler. Here is video of the real pirate ship The Black Pearl firing its cannons.


A few years ago a game came out from Wiz Kids that combined model building, which I like, with military strategy, which I like a lot, with history, which I love almost as much as the air I breath, and touched on the fantasy of high adventure and pirate exploits on the high seas complete with treasure hunting, monsters, and supernatural events, all draped over actual historical context. So I introduced my family to the game and it became a family favorite.

The first release of the game was called The Spanish Main. Here is the original promotion video from that release.

Then Wiz Kids came out with a second series, with approximately a 150 new ships all themed around the period of the Revolutionary War.

The game combines the fun of model building with the historical facts that more mature players enjoy, and allows young players and older players to join together in a battlefield that everyone can enjoy together. It has not been uncommon from my son-in-law, my daughters and father-in-law and my wife to play a game at a big table for hours at a time, during an entire Saturday afternoon. My father-in-law who is a geology teacher for high-school students and lover of history in his own way enjoys telling my kids historic facts while they get the chance to blow up his ships and steal his gold. It doesn’t get any better than that for a young person. Here is what a pack of cards looks like when you buy them from the store and begin the process of building the ships.

The game has some simple rules, but the strategy is rather complex, involving thousands of decisions and possible variables. Here’s how the game is played.


There have been many releases over the years and literally thousands of ships to collect and build. These are just a few of the types of ships available.

So with this little introduction to put things in context my wife and I were out shopping yesterday for Mother’s Day. I wanted her to pick out a gift for herself, to treat herself to anything. My wife is the only person I know that can buy items from Victoria Secret, (She is really picky about this stuff, and Victoria’s Secret is the only quality she really enjoys as far as under garments.) then turn around and go over to another one of our favorite stores, Sci Fi City! It was her option to pick up a new bathing suit for the summer or to buy something from Sci Fi City, and she picked Sci Fi City. This is what she wanted The Pirates Constructible Strategy Game Expansion from Wiz Kids.

This is a role-playing expansion to the game we’ve played for years and opens things up a lot. Seeing how excited she got over this book made me proud to have her for a wife, because her priorities are clear. The pictures above are how we spent Mothers Day, enjoying her new book with the people she cares about most.

My daughter asked me yesterday, “What should we get mom?” I told her to come over, and bring your pirate ships for a day of adventure and probably some LaRosa’s Pizza. Nothing more is needed.

A few years ago Wiz Kids came out with an online version of the game which allowed people to play other players online using the same rules of engagement. This video will give an idea of how the game is played and how it looks in the minds of the players. The thing I don’t like about the online game is that you buy ships like you do in real life, but they only exist online. It is quite fun to build an actual ship and hold it in your hand and do battle. My family has spent many Saturday afternoons in comic book stores, book stories, gaming gatherings, looking for new decks of cards. The fun of these afternoon adventures is you never know what you’re going to get in a pack. I’ve bought hundreds and hundreds of ships, and I haven’t run into the problem of getting very many doubles of the same ship, so that gives some idea just how many ships were built for the game. Among my family, all of whom have hundreds of ships themselves, most of us have ships completely different from each other. The ships are broke down by color code, red (common), silver (uncommon), yellow (rare) and black (super rare. I have managed to get a fair number of rare ships and even a couple of super rare boats. Some of the most fun days we’ve all spent as a family together have been days were we’d find a fresh shipment at a comic store, a whole box, and we’d buy everything they had, and we’d go home and spend the rest of the day building ships, then the rest of the night playing.
Here’s what the action looks like online.


For people who are unfamiliar with the world of strategy gaming it’s very popular in an underground sort of way. When I was at Sci Fi City with my wife yesterday they have a gaming area in the back that was packed with about 30 people of all age brackets and demographic groups playing these games. I saw a mother and her daughter playing Magic the Gathering and the mother was well into her 60’s. Here’s video of Origins from the summer of 2010 in Columbus, Ohio. Origins is a big gaming convention done each year in Ohio. Some will make fun of these people, but let me provide a disclaimer. I’ve sat in front of some of the most powerful people in the country, or people who think they’re powerful anyway. I know the mind of people who wield great political power. And I know the power of people like this. I’ll pick them any day over the people who run the country currently.For all the reasons articulated in the book Atlas Shrugged, the people who play these games are much more intelligent, and able to construct a reasonable strategy than many of the people currently working in the White House and Pentagon. The difference between these people and those political types is that the people at Origins don’t wish to have limits placed upon their minds. So in strategy gaming their minds are free and not confined to “politics.” That’s why I’d pick these people as my friends any day of the week. The quality of their minds is superior to those who chose status quo complacency. I treasure knowing these types of people.

Here’s my family playing the game. This video was done by my son-in-law. We went as far to build actual three-dimensional islands replicas with great detail.

It’s a game that inspires imagination and to me that is the most important attribute to any form of entertainment.

So when we travel and visit a ship yard whether it’s in this country or another one, and one of these old ships fire their cannons there is a special place that I hold for them in my heart. Not only in the context of history, but in the memories of many battles fought with my family, where the mind does not know the difference between real or fiction because in this type of gaming, it is the minds process of thinking that is important. The Wiz Kids Constructible Strategy Game does all that at many levels, and it is a treasure to anyone that plays the game. For lesser minds, such as your typical politician, where they are always out for the end result, the better mind, the one of the strategy gamer, is out for the opportunity to think freely, without limit for the sheer process of doing so. The end result is secondary. That’s why it is not important to those gamers if people laugh at them for walking down the hall of a hotel dressed as a pirate or a dragon slayer, because they have freed their minds to engage in limitless possibilities, where the rest of the world is stuck on the rules and the achievement of victory. So when I see a sight like this:

I swell with pride in knowing that such minds exist out there in the world and it was such minds that conceived of the ships and the warfare they were intended for in the first place, that were given birth in the realm of imagination, where all great things humans truly enjoy emerge into the world either to be shared by many, or the sole gamer on a quest to solve the puzzles of their mind with limitless possibilities.

Rich Hoffman

https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2010/12/04/ten-rules-to-live-by/
http://twitter.com/#!/overmanwarrior
www.overmanwarrior.com