Rich Riel

11/27/2025

Somewhere in San Diego, a short time after the apocalypse, Mark Twain, Socrates, and Richinspirit are smoking ma*****na, and contemplating the vicissitudes of life in this new world. The men sit in the sun-soaked ruin of the once-grand San Diego Library, now repurposed as a communal health center. The trio prepare for the first Thanksgiving since the Second Coming.

Socrates:

My friends, the joy of heaven is upon us. By the grace of God, we have another day in paradise. How are we on this grand and glorious day?

Twain:
If this is paradise, is this all there is? The coffee’s weak, the politicians are loud, and my boots still leak. But I suppose any day above ground is better than the day before.

Richinspirit:
Who could complain what good would it do?
Socrates:

Indeed. In hardship, the soul is laid bare, and so too the souls of those who claim to care. The flatterer flees; the virtuous remain.
Twain:
You’re too kind. I say the flatterer flees, and the virtuous ask if you’ve got anything left to pawn. Friendship’s a fine thing, until it’s asked to carry a mattress up three flights of stairs.
Socrates:
So you believe friendship is tested by labor?
Twain:
Labor, poverty, or the request for a loan. That trifecta will sort out your friends faster than ICE agents in a catholic church.
Richinspirit:
It is only when you are need of help, that you know who your true friends are. When you have no money, are destitute of fortune, addicted to truth, your only friends are those who have the same enemies as you have.
Socrates:
Yet, is it not noble to stand beside a man when he has nothing?
Twain:
Noble, yes. Common? No. Most folks prefer their friends well-fed and mildly amusing. Misery makes poor company unless it’s your own.
Richinspirit:
"Misery may make poor company, but it makes honest company. When the money is spent, the feast is gone and the music fades, the ones who stay, those are your friends.
Socrates:
Then let us agree: adversity is the crucible in which true friendship is forged.
Twain:
A crucible, yes. Though most men prefer their metals unmolten and their friendships untested." But I’d still rather be rich and suspicious than broke and enlightened.
Richinspirit:
You'd rather be rich and suspicious? Mark, you'd just be suspicious about different things. The rich man worries his friends love his wallet more than him. The poor man knows his friends love nothing but him, because there's nothing else left to love.
Socrates:
How does the poor man truly know this, or does he merely believe it? For how can one be certain that friendship born in shared suffering is not merely an alliance of convenience. Friendship is a ship big enough to carry two in fair weather, but only one in foul.
Twain:
Friendship is a ship, sure enough, but it's not the weather that sinks it, it's the captain's pride and the first mate's envy. I've seen more friendships founder on borrowed money than borrowed boats.
Richinspirit:
Maybe so, but I've seen men share their last can of beans when they didn't know where the next one was coming from. The apocalypse has a way of clarifying things. All that noise, the status, the posturing, the keeping up with the Jones’s, it's gone. What's left is: Will you share? Will you stand? Will you stay?
Socrates:
Then perhaps we must distinguish between friendship of utility, friendship of pleasure, and friendship of virtue, as Aristotle would have us do. In these ruins, which do we practice?
Twain:
We practice the friendship of "what the hell else are we going to do anyway?" Which, I submit, is the most honest kind there is.
Richinspirit:
That's just virtue with its Sunday clothes off, Twain. We stay because we choose to. God didn't put guns to our heads.
Socrates:
In this choosing, do we not prove that man, even after the world has ended, still seeks communion over solitude? That the examined life is still best lived in dialogue?
Twain:
The examined life, or the life with someone to complain to about the examined life?
Socrates:
Tell me then, as we approach this Thanksgiving, what shall we give thanks for? The world we lost, or the friends we kept?
Richinspirit:
We give thanks for the friends we kept, because the world we lost was never ours to keep. It was borrowed time, borrowed comfort, borrowed illusion. But friendship? That’s earned. That’s forged in the furnace of empty pockets and sleepless nights.
The world taught us to count blessings in things, titles, trophies, square footage. But the end of the world taught us to count differently. In hands that reached back when we fell. In voices that stayed when the silence got loud. In laughter that survived the sirens.
So I say this: give thanks not for what you had, but for who stood with you when you had nothing. That’s the only wealth that can’t be looted, taxed, or burned.
Twain:
To the ones who stayed. And to the beans they didn’t eat without you.
Socrates:
To the examined life and the unexamined loyalty that makes it bearable.

The sounds of their thoughts echo softly through the broken rafters of the old library as their words hang in the smoke-filled air of the lobby. Like dust on forgotten books, the sun sets on a world reborn not in riches, but in remembrance.

11/16/2025

The irony of the quintessential “plutocrat” facing off against the prototype “philosopher king” here in California is delicious.

In 2008 and 2010, my fellow Californians led by Governor Gavin Newsom rose above partisan politics and passed Propositions 11 and 20, stripping the Legislature of its power to draw electoral maps and handing that authority to a Citizens Redistricting Commission. The commission was designed to be transparent, impartial, and immune to backroom deals. California became a national model, cited by reformers from coast to coast. The largest and most diverse state in the union had shown that determined citizens could change the way we conduct the public’s business.

Then came 2025.

Faced with aggressive gerrymandering by Republican-led states with Trump’s backing, California still led by Newsom, decided that a return to the politics of gerrymandering was the only acceptable response.

Here is where the irony begins.

In the early days of California’s redistricting revolution, Newsom stood with the reformers. He praised the Citizens Redistricting Commission as a triumph of voter-driven democracy, “Let the people draw the lines,” he said in 2010, echoing the spirit of Propositions 11 and 20. With this radical change from politicians making deals to citizens making choices, California had become a beacon of reform.

But in 2025, driven by presidential ambition, Newsom reversed course.

Confronted with Republican redistricting in Texas and beyond, he crafted proposition 50, a constitutional amendment that suspended the commission’s authority over congressional maps and returned that power to the Legislature. His justification? “If Trump can do it in Texas, I can do it in California.”

Newsom campaigned for Prop 50 and celebrated its passage with defiant bravado. “You lose,” he told the Trump administration on election night.

The irony is staggering. Fifteen years ago, Newsom defended the commission as a safeguard against abuse. Now, he defends its suspension as a stepping stone toward the presidency. Californians fought for redistricting reform to protect democracy, not to see it discarded for blind ambition.

Prop 50 may yield short-term partisan gains, but it erodes the long-term trust that reform was built on. It tells voters that principles are expendable, that even the most celebrated reforms can be undone when the payoff is higher office. It replaces the commission’s deliberative process with legislative expediency. And it sends a chilling message to future reformers: even the best ideas are vulnerable when power is on the line.

The gauntlet has been thrown down by Newsom. The challenge has been accepted by Trump.

In the courtroom battle over Prop 50, Newsom defends the measure as a strategic counter strike.

U.S. Attorney General Pamela Bondi frames it as a constitutional betrayal.

“Two can play the Texas game,” Newsom declared, calling Prop 50 a “resurgence of energy” and a “defensive realignment.” He insists this is not a retreat from reform, but a response to a changing political environment.

Bondi calls Prop 50 “a brazen power grab that tramples on civil rights and mocks the democratic process.” Her legal team argues that California’s new maps violate the Equal Protection Clause by using race as a proxy to engineer partisan outcomes. “Race cannot be used as a proxy to advance political interests,” she insists, invoking Supreme Court precedent on racial gerrymandering.

The irony is thick. Newsom, once the champion of California’s redistricting commission, now undermines it. Bondi, a Trump loyalist, now positions herself as its defender.

Newsom’s dilemma is a classic case of a plutocrat tacking with the political winds to steer his career toward the presidency. In 2015, he appeared to Californians as a principled leader leading a legacy of reform. The reality of today reveals a man willing to trade that legacy for his own self-aggrandisement.

05/16/2025

Socrates and Me, are we AI?

10/30/2024

The following is written by Jared Kline, my classmate from “The Citadel, Military College of South Carolina” about President Theodore Roosevelt’s extraordinary life. Being President of the United States was just one of his many accomplishments.

Jared Kline, October 26th, 2024

Has it really been 166 years already?

Tomorrow would have been President Theodore Roosevelt's 166th birthday. He was born in New York City on 27 October 1858. What a life he had. It is impossible for me to briefly summarize it without leaving an awful lot out, so I apologize up front for not being able to do a better job with this today.

Roosevelt was born a sickly child with a pretty bad asthma, but he was tougher than the asthma was and overcame his physical problems by means of his answer to any personal problem, which was strenuous exercise. He was terribly nearsighted, but that only made him more determined to become a crack rifle and pistol shot, thick glasses and all. All his life he had a terrific energy about everything he did.

He was "home schooled”, learned to speak French and German, studied history, natural science, and obtained a scholarship to Harvard University. One story about him as a university student involves a professor telling him, “See here, Roosevelt, I am the one teaching this class!"

He wrote a great number of books, including "The Naval War of 1812" (1882), which established him as a learned historian and even a popular writer. He went into New York politics, which was rough on the political establishment, beginning with his start as the leader of the "reform faction" of Republicans in New York's state legislature. I should mention that he was the youngest person to ever become a state representative for New York when he was elected at age 23, which record I understand he still holds.

President McKinley made Theodore Roosevelt the Assistant Secretary of the Navy in 1897. When (they said) the Spanish sunk the USS Maine off the coast of Cuba while his boss was on vacation, Assistant Secretary of the Navy Roosevelt, on his own assumed authority, sent Commadore George Dewey to the Philippines to take out the Spanish Navy. Roosevelt then declared a state of War with Spain, despite the fact the he had absolutely no authority to do so. Acting on Roosevelt's orders, Dewey then sunk the entire Spanish fleet at Manila in about four hours. Commadore Dewey later said that the early orders from Roosevelt were key to his success at the Battle of Manila.

President McKinley and Congress caught up on the required paperwork to officially declare war on Spain in due course.

At this point, Theodore Roosevelt resigned his post as Assistant Secretary of the Navy and raised a volunteer regiment, the 1st United States Volunteer Cavalry Regiment, popularly remembered by their nickname "the Rough Riders". He took anybody who wanted to join, regardless of race or creed, and headed out to Cuba to defeat the enemy. At the Battle of San Juan Hill, the decisive battle that sealed the American victory in Cuba, Lieutenant Colonel Roosevelt won the Congressional Medal of Honor (due to paperwork latency, it would be 2001 before President Clinton finally signed off on it) for "conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity”, and was promoted to full Colonel.

After the war, Colonel Roosevelt decided to run for Governor of New York. He won, and as soon as the New York political establishment realized that Roosevelt was going to clean out all the corruption in state and local administration, there was strong political support to nominate him as a candidate for Vice President of the United States, a post where he presumably wouldn't have any power to do anything.

The McKinley-Roosevelt ticket won, and as we know President McKinley was assassinated. Theodore Roosevelt became President on 14 September 1901. He was 42 years old, and still holds the record as the youngest US President in history. He is remembered for his "Square Deal" domestic policies, promising fairness in government and commerce for the "average citizen”, breaking of trusts, and government regulation of railroads.

As industrial agriculture and processed food became more prevalent as the country (and the world) grew more densely populated, while at the same time medicine was also becoming an industrial interest, he involved the government in the regulation of food and drugs with his "Food and Drug Administration".

He was a historian who knew where urbanization and pressure of population were leading, and he made conservation a top priority; establishing many new national parks, forests, and monuments intended to preserve the country's natural resources and environment.

His main foreign policy focus was on Central America, where he began the construction of the Panama Canal. He significantly expanded the US Navy and sent the famous "Great White Fleet" on a world tour to project the United States' naval power around the globe.

He was re-elected in 1904 to a full term, during which President Roosevelt continued to promote the policies he considered important and necessary, notwithstanding the circumstance that many of his efforts and much of his legislative agenda were eventually blocked by the political establishment in Congress. President Roosevelt successfully prepared his close friend, William Howard Taft, to take over after he was done, and Taft won the 1908 presidential election.

I should mention that President Theodore Roosevelt won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1906 for negotiating the end to the Russo-Japanese War. How many people in history ever won both the Nobel Peace Prize and the Congressional Medal of Honor? I only know one.

There are a number of other things that President Theodore Roosevelt was the first US President ever to do. Here is a partial list:
Theodore Roosevelt was the first US President to:
- fly in an airplane
- own an automobile
- invite an African-American (Booker T. Washington) to the White House
- dive in a submarine
- have a telephone in his home
- ride in an automobile
- travel outside the US while in office
- receive the first electoral vote cast by a woman delegate (Helen B. Scott in 1912)
- advocate a Jewish homeland in Palestine (1917)
- advocate the establishment of a League of Nations (1915)
- host the Olympics (St. Louis, Missouri, 1904)

I should also mention that, during President Roosevelt's second year in office, it was discovered there was corruption at work in the federal bureaucracy; specifically found in the Indian Service, the Land Office, and the Post Office Department, whose corrupt officials soon wished that somebody else was President.

President Roosevelt understood, better than any 21st Century political figure I can name, that the moral is to the physical as three to one, so he vigorously investigated and prosecuted corrupt Indian agents who had cheated the Creeks and various tribes out of land parcels.

He also uncovered land fraud and "speculation” involving federal timberlands in Oregon. In November 1902, President Roosevelt forced Binger Hermann, the General Land Office Commissioner, to resign his office, and on 6 November 1903 he appointed Francis J. Heney as a special prosecutor for this big action to clean up the Executive Branch. There were 146 federal criminal indictments for one Oregon Land Office bribery ring alone. US Senator John H. Mitchell was indicted for bribery to expedite illegal land patents, found guilty in July 1905, and sentenced to six months in prison.

President Roosevelt discovered still more corruption in the Postal Department, which led to indictments for an additional 44 government employees on charges of bribery and fraud. During President Roosevelt's regime, personnel assigned within the Executive Branch were expected to be diligent and honest, or else.

It was 1902; it was not 2024. The federal bureaucracy was afraid of the President; the President was not afraid of the federal bureaucracy. Anyway, he completed his mission as President in 1908, leaving the Ship of State to President Taft.

President Taft disappointed his old friend and, frustrated with President Taft's relatively modest conservatism in facing the political establishment, Theodore Roosevelt tried (arguably a little too late) to win the 1912 Republican nomination. Failing that, he refused to give up and founded a third party, the Progressive Party, known by its nickname (he liked nicknames) the “Bull Moose Party", which aimed to carry on with his program of reforms for the government, which still needed a vigorous cleaning with an iron brush, from his point of view.

On 14 October 1912, while campaigning in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Theodore Roosevelt was shot by an assassin named John Flammang Schrank, who was a New York saloonkeeper who had immigrated to New York from Bavaria when he was nine years old. He said that he wanted to help Taft win the election. As soon as he shot President Roosevelt, he was seized and disarmed, and Roosevelt said to him, "You poor creature."

Anyway, the bullet went through his steel eyeglass case as well as his 50-page speech that he had folded double and had in his coat pocket. President Roosevelt pulled out a white handkerchief and coughed into it. Seeing no blood, he concluded that the bullet had not nicked a lung, and so he could continue. He declined some rather urgent suggestions to go to the hospital immediately, and went on to deliver his 90-minute speech, right on schedule. He opened his speech by asking people to keep their voices down so as better to hear him:

“Friends, I shall ask you to be as quiet as possible. I don't know whether you fully understand that I have just been shot; but it takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose. But fortunately, I had my manuscript, so you see I was going to make a long speech, and there is a bullet – there is where the bullet went through – and it probably saved me from it going into my heart. The bullet is in me now, so that I cannot make a very long speech, but I will try my best. “

After his speech he went to the hospital, where probes and an x-ray disclosed to the doctors (who were very impressed with his physical condition) that the bullet had lodged in Roosevelt's chest muscle, but did not pe*****te the pleura. The doctors concluded that it would be less dangerous to leave it in place than to try to remove it, so President Roosevelt carried the bullet with him for the rest of his life.

The operational effect of President Roosevelt's intervention with his "Bull Moose Party" in 1912 was to split the Republican vote, and the Democrat candidate Woodrow Wilson won the election.

After losing the election, President Roosevelt led a two-year long expedition to the Amazon, where he nearly died of some kind of tropical disease.

During the First World War, he criticized President Woodrow Wilson for keeping the country out of the war with Germany, and he even offered to raise another regiment of American volunteers to go to France, but this was prevented as it was seen as a kind of private foreign policy.

Though he had considered running for president again in 1920, President Roosevelt's health continued to deteriorate (it wasn't the years, it was the mileage --- long service, bullets, and third world diseases will do that to you), and he died in his sleep on 5 January 1919 at the age of 60 years. A blood clot had detached from a vein and traveled to his lungs, and that is what killed him.

President Wilson's Vice President Thomas R. Marshall, said, "Death had to take Roosevelt sleeping, for if he had been awake, there would have been a fight."

Anyway, 27 October 2024 would have been President Theodore Roosevelt’s 166th birthday. I have to think of him today.

10/27/2024

God has performed two miracles in my life. The first one was when he defeated the first woman running for President as a candidate representing the democrats.

The second miracle is allowing Trump to survive the assassination attempt just before the Republican nomination convention.

The third miracle will be his victory on Nov. 5th.

God loves America.

10/27/2024

The Washington Post, bastion of liberal journalism, with an unbroken record of endorsing liberal candidates refused to Harris for President.

For the first time in 36 years, The Washington Post will not endorse a presidential candidate. Publisher and CEO William Lewis explained, "We are returning to our roots of not endorsing presidential candidates.” It comes after The Los Angeles Times publisher blocked a planned endorsement of Vice President Harris.

10/27/2024

Science and philosophy have this in common an absolute or a truth never changes. Just as the speed of light is constant so is this truth.

The following is true.

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10/26/2024

Yesterday afternoon, Israel launched an unopposed air attack on Iran. The IDF owns the air space over Iran because Iran does not have any combat airplanes or pilots. Iran’s theocratic government lost all their pilots and planes to young men who defected to the west.

The next air operation over Iran will be to remove Iran’s nuclear threat by surgical air strikes on all nuclear production and development sites.

WWIII will end next two years with regime changes in Iran, Russia, N. Korea and China.

10/26/2024

Israel has launched a retaliatory strike against Iran, with several explosions heard near the capital of Tehran, according to multiple reports.

The strikes come after Iran launched nearly 200 missiles across the Jewish state's borders earlier this month.

Four Hours ago ..."In response to months of continuous attacks from the regime in Iran against the State of Israel – right now the Israel Defense Forces is conducting precise strikes on military targets in Iran," Israel said via its Telegram account. "The regime in Iran and its proxies in the region have been relentlessly attacking Israel since October 7th – on seven fronts – including direct attacks from Iranian soil."

"Like every other sovereign country in the world, the State of Israel has the right and the duty to respond. Our defensive and offensive capabilities are fully mobilized. We will do whatever necessary to defend the State of Israel and the people of Israel," the statement added.

10/25/2024

Mr. Saul and many of his readers are guilty of having the mind set of self-fulfilling prophecy reporting. I don’t want to believe it is true so it must not be true.

I am a computer expert, I started in computers when programming was done on punch cards.

The Dominion voting results are meaningless.

The Dominion fraud is the vote is certified not verified. We can find out that we voted (certification) but we can't find out if our vote was counted the way we intended (verification.)

There is no way to verify that our vote was counted the way we voted. Court challenges that focus on attacking the fraud by the fact the results can't be verified, should ask the court to require that verification be done by calling random voters to certify and verify the results.

Without verification there is no way to determine if there was fraud. Arguing about results of an election are pointless because the voter does not know if his vote was counted the way he intended. From the early days of computer programming the basic logic has always been without verification the results are meaningless.

Computers that are designed to certify but not verify with the source, can report anything they want without detection. Dominion voting machines are rigged. The only way to verify if they are rigged or not is a random sampling of voters after the elections to not only certify the vote but verify it.

OAN owner Herring Networks instead of arguing that the elections are rigged, should have argued the results cannot be verified and are therefore are meaningless.

The good news is that Blockchain technology will provide America with the means to verify the vote without having to count it by a third party like the registrar or Dominion voting machines.

The elections of the future will eliminate fraud by instituting a two-party relationship between the government and the voter. The voter will be able to verify his vote was reported correctly and the government will have the results instantaneously and no one else can interfere in the process.

The Blockchain encryption will guarantee free and fair elections just as they guarantee who owns bitcoins.

New examples are already popping up ahead of Election Day.

10/24/2024

I did not get a ballot in the mail so I went down and voted for Larry Turner today in person at the San dioego County Register of voters located at 5600 Overland Ave, San Diego, CA 92123. The link below is the reason I voted for Larry.

Instead of focusing only on temporary shelters, my plan emphasizes wrap-around and transitional services crucial for long-term success.

10/23/2024

independent.

This is a democrat forum rigged in favor of Harris. The spin here is that Trump is “exhausted.” Trump and Kenndy planned in advance for RFK to attend the rigged forums while Trump continued to campaign.

In any forum with Harris and RFK, Kennedy will expose Harris as weak and ineffective. Kennedy will take votes away from people in her own party that dislike her.

In America Kennedy is well like. The reason the independent voters are on the rise, is Kennedy and many former democrats are disgusted by what democrats have become under Biden/Harris. California and other states where Kennedy are still on the ballot will vote for Kennedy because they can’t vote for Trump and they have an alternative to not voting or voting for Harris.

He pulls out of health-themed town hall with RFK Jr., Tulsi Gabbard, in yet another cancellation