Category: Creative Writing

Dreams of a Giant: The Skeleton Key to Finnegan’s Wake

There are plenty of modern things to write about—however, most of them have been covered here and are predictions previously submitted simply manifesting before our eyes. Every day feels like an “I told you so moment” so I no longer feel inclined to provide warnings—because they are before us. Personally, I am about to embark on the most intense, and difficult year so far in my life, and for those who know me—there have been some really difficult years leading up to this one. Also for those who know me, they by now know that I deal with difficulties through intellectual expansion. In much the way that a fighter trains for a big match, so to must the intellectual who will have to move mountains of passive aggressive opposition hell-bent on mediocrity to punch through to the other side. So for that I seek lots of literature to help push my mind to the point where it can deal with anything. In the past, I have found that novels like Finnegan’s Wake does that for me. I have read it before, I have it even on a book to tape that I have listened to many times. It is likely the most difficult book of literature ever created. I love the book and I love the primordial giant at the start of the book named Finnegan who dies and is buried by his wife Annie (Anna Livia Plurabelle) who puts out his body for the mourners to eat. But before they can feast on his body, he vanishes only to rise again by the end of the first chapter bawling for whiskey. His mourners put him back to rest convincing him that death is better and so he dreams through death that he awakens into the modern family man and pub owner H.C.E. H.C.E. stands for “Here Comes Everyone” meaning all of mankind. So in essence the giant Finnegan in Finnegan’s Wake dies and is born again as all of mankind and the content of the book is primarily a dream that takes place in the wake of his life.

There aren’t many sentences in Finnegan’s Wake that sound even remotely like the normal dialogue of a novel. The book is written in reference to over 60 different languages and none of them seem to string together in a coherent way—yet they do. They are meant to transport the reader beyond the conscious mind into the primordial ooze of a dreamlike existence and to actually peer into the possibly of life beyond death as mankind is but a resurrection of thought—exclusively.

For years many have pondered over the meaning of the novel. It is one of the great puzzles of literature.   Personally I came to the work by the lectures of Joseph Campbell and read the novel knowing that Campbell was obsessed with it. My teacher was so obsessed with Finnegan’s Wake that he spent over four years attempting to translate line by line the entire 600 page novel with another novelist by the name of Henry Morton Robinson. The result of that collaboration became A Skeleton Key to Finnegan’s Wake. It was a book that promised to unlock the mysteries of James Joyce’s masterpiece Finnegan’s Wake.

However, since Finnegan’s Wake is such difficult literature to read, there isn’t much of a market for it even among the most serious intellectuals. Some people spend their entire lives contemplating Finnegan’s Wake—so it is intimidating to even start the book, let alone trying to figure out what it all means. As I’ve said before I am a big fan of the Joseph Campbell Foundation and all the great work they do there. I have virtually everything Joseph Campbell ever wrote—except one thing—his Skeleton Key. The infamous book first went to print in 1944 then again in 1961 but died on the vine for many, many years until the JCF picked up the copyright in 2005. The book was finally republished by the Foundation at the New World Library in March of 2013. Well, at the time I was enormously busy with politics and business—which I still am—and couldn’t find the time to jump back into Finnegan’s Wake through the Skeleton Key. But standing here at the end of 2014 looking into a very, very difficult 2015 the time is now to capture Campbell’s classic wonder about the very elusive Wake before it goes out of print once again. So for Christmas this year I gave myself the book and the time to read it so that I could use the expanded intellectual muscle to deal with an ominous set of obstacles lined up to defend complacency with raised swords and curses from another world.

It is one thing to struggle through Finnegan’s Wake it’s another to seek out its meanings line by line—which is what Campbell was the first to do not long after the first printing in 1939. James Joyce spent nearly twenty years writing the Wake—exclusively. It was a work of obsession to say the least and is a revolutionary masterpiece that more or less killed the author with exhaustion. But thank God he did the work, and even more so, thankfully Joseph Campbell was the first to attempt to unlock its secrets.

My personal obsession with the Wake is that it taps into the ancient mythology of the Hill of Tara in Meath Ireland—the ancient high seat of the Ardri, the High Kings of Erin. The Hill itself is an item of archaeological concern as it is said to have ties to the Lost Tribes of Israel and the ancient Ark of the Covenant. The thoughts of some are that the Tribe then took the Ark to America and settled into the Midwest to establish the mound building cultures found there. It is also thought that among these lost tribes were the Biblical Nephillim whose gigantic stature has been found in the mounds of Ohio, Indiana, and the entire Mississippi Valley. This certainly lends credence to the possibility of how the mound building cultures in Ohio had such advanced mathematics and science. The Hill of Tara is a massive mound structure along the lines of those in Newark, Ohio so there is a connection to the two styles—and intentions.

Joyce essentially wrote Finnegan’s Wake to recreate the illegal Dark Tongue for the Teamhur Feis which took place on the Hill of Tara which had been made illegal after the victory and Christian conquest there by Saint Patrick. So obviously, there is much, much more to the Finnegan’s Wake than just an unintelligible book meant to frustrate readers. It is a coded connection to the illegal language of Dark Tongue. Finnegan’s Wake holds a key literally to understanding the long, deep past of humanity which was deliberately erased by Christian crusaders during 433 AD directly leading into the Dark Ages of Europe.

As if all that wasn’t enough, the main character in my novel The Symposium of Justice and all the subsequent stories coming out starting in 2015 involving the trails and tribulations of Fletcher Finnegan is a direct tip of the hat—literally—to the giant leader from the Teamhur Feis rituals which took place at the Hill of Tara. Fletcher Finnegan for me is the resurrection of that giant who steps into the world of mankind and carries it beyond the limits of the tavern owner H.C.E.

Understandably, many books have been written after Joseph Campbell’s Skeleton Key. But for me, his work is the best because he was the first and many after him were able to take his work and extrapolate further—and deeper than he was able to do with just a few years of puzzling through Joyce’s bizarre work just prior to World War II. When the topic is the resurrection of an ancient language connected to the Druids—made illegal by Christian orthodoxy that wanted Ireland to unite behind English rule—under careful regulation by the church—Joyce wrote in code to preserve an aspect of human life that has long since descended into the recesses of morality. And to truly understand who we are, and where we really come from—the truth is locked up in works of art like those of Joyce. Campbell was the first to offer a key. So for Christmas this year—I finally put my hands on the book so that I can use what I find there to solve the many riddles coming quick and under ominous intent. Like an encroaching army it takes more than muscle to defeat the swarms’ amassing to keep history erased and protect their grip on revision. It takes great intellect and the best way to give intellect a boost is with the mysterious work of Finnegan’s Wake. For me, my Finnegan—Fletcher Finnegan is what begins again after the sentence “A way a lone a last a loved a long the riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and the Environs.”

In Finnegan’s Wake it begins with the end of the last sentence of the book, the one described in the previous paragraph. All the events that occur between the beginning and end of that sentence which folds over on itself by the end is reflective of all humanity which is always beginning again after perpetual death. It is in this immortality that the eye must focus—and the keys to most everything reside. And it is in that realm that Fletcher Finnegan lives. And to all those who I’m about to piss off in a grand and epic way—you have it coming for being content to sit in the pub of H.C.E. and sip at the contents of mortality when in all reality you are but the dreams of a giant.

Rich Hoffman

Visit Cliffhanger Research and Development

Star Wars: X-Wing Miniatures Game: Pizza, Coca Cola, and Strategy, the cornerstones of a happy life

At Mos Eisley Radio these guys not only talk news concerning the most recent Star Wars Game X-Wing Miniatures, which I am crazy about, but a lot more.  Have a listen to them for  in-depth looks at classes, guilds, lore, and everything else fans care about in the galaxy far, far away.  But related to this article, they go into great detail about the strength of ships and strategy of the game for those who are prompted to get more involved by the conclusion of this article.   Have a listen while reading the below text!

star-wars-x-wing-miniatures-game-milennium-falcon

While it’s true that many of the people I know are locked into the very real and immediate danger of a real-life rebellion, which is covered at this site extensively, the way I endure the stress of such a thing is to fill my life with interesting hobbies, that also help build up my strategic ability.  I share some of those hobbies from time to time in hopes that others might become inspired and do the same for themselves, not by copying my suggestions so much as in finding something that works for them to give themselves a break so to endure the rigors of life just a bit more efficiently.  I have shared glowingly my love of the strategy game Pirates, the Constructible Strategy game by Wiz Kids.  My family has spent many hours buying, building, and playing that game till the very small hours of the morning.  I can remember one very fun Holiday week after Christmas where my kids and I with a small army of other kids bought every single pack of WizKids pirate ships on a cold December afternoon at Cincinnati Sci Fi in West Chester, Ohio.  The delighted store clerk even brought out a new shipment of those ships which had just arrived that was in the back while we were in the store, of which we bought every single one.  So needless to say, we love those types of role-playing games as a family, and as individuals.

Recently while on vacation in Florida my nephews along with my kids, my wife and I played a very cool Dungeons and Dragons type of role-playing game called Heroscape over pizza from the best place in Central Florida till the late hours of night with the condo door open to the ocean outside.  We had turned our large dinning room table into a war zone and found ourselves intensely engaged in mortal combat with dragons and warriors.  Like the referred to pirate game, I enjoy those types of games that allow you to play with several live players around a dinner table.  It is a great way to bond with other family members and actually speak to each other, while exercising the brain. 22_Top I find those types of games to be stimulating in a similar way to reading a novel, or playing a great video game.   The difference is that you have to work with other people in a way that is only possible with this type of strategic gaming.  For many years these role-playing strategy games have increased in popularity from a sub-culture of Dungeon and Dragon players, to what is now considered mainstream geekdom at major conventions all over the country.  The transition came officially from the popular game, Magic the Gathering.  The gaming industry in that market has never been the same, which is wonderful for the human race.  A short history of this type of gaming can be seen at the link below.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dungeons_%26_Dragons

However, for me, I always loved that Pirate game from Wiz Kids the best of any that I have played in the last twenty years.  My entire family was deeply into it and our playing time together represent some of the most fun we’ve had together, which is quite a statement.  So I have missed it as Wiz Kids stopped making the game in the format we enjoyed, and time and distance has moved us away from the contents.  However, I recently received news from Lucasfilm about their latest version of a Star Wars Role Playing game by Fantasy Flight Games which I thought at first would be gimmicky, but upon investigation quickly found that it was a quite in-depth game that actually combined the type of game play that I enjoyed so much in  Pirates, the Constructible Strategy game by Wiz Kids and the Heroscape.  The new game is called Star Wars: X-Wing Miniatures Game.

Star Wars: X-Wing Miniatures Game is a tactical ship-to-ship combat game in which players take control of powerful Rebel X-wings and nimble Imperial TIE fighters, facing them against each other in fast-paced space combat. Featuring stunningly detailed and painted miniatures, the X-Wing Miniatures Game recreates exciting Star Wars space combat throughout its several included scenarios.

Whatever the chosen vessel, the rules of X-Wing facilitate fast and visceral gameplay that puts you in the middle of Star Wars fiercest firefights. Each ship type has its own unique piloting dial, which is used to secretly select a speed and maneuver each turn. After planning maneuvers, each ship’s dial is revealed and executed (starting with the lowest skilled pilot). So whether you rush headlong toward your enemy showering his forward deflectors in laser fire, or dance away from him as you attempt to acquire a targeting lock, you’ll be in total control throughout all the tense dogfighting action.

Star Wars: X-Wing features (three) unique missions and each has its own set of victory conditions and special rules; with such a broad selection of missions, only clever and versatile pilots employing a range of tactics will emerge victorious. What’s more, no mission will ever play the same way twice, thanks to a range of customization options, varied maneuvers, and possible combat outcomes. Damage, for example, is determined through dice and applied in the form of a shuffled Damage Deck.1XW For some hits your fighter sustains, you’ll draw a card that assigns a special handicap. Was your targeting computer damaged, affecting your ability to acquire a lock on the enemy? Perhaps an ill-timed weapon malfunction will limit your offensive capabilities. Or worse yet, your pilot could be injured, compromising his ability to focus on the life-and-death struggle in which he is engaged…

The Star Wars: X-Wing starter set includes everything you need to begin your battles, such as scenarios, cards, and fully assembled and painted ships. What’s more, Star Wars: X-Wing’s quick-to-learn ruleset establishes the foundation for a system that can be expanded with your favorite ships and characters from the Star Wars universe.

More can be learned at these links:

http://www.fantasyflightgames.com/edge_minisite.asp?eidm=174

http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/103885/star-wars-x-wing-miniatures-game

The hook for me was when I saw the game’s version of The Millennium Falcon which is for me one of my favorite fictional symbols in film history of rebellion.  CLICK HERE FOR MORE.  I remember vividly when I toured the Smithsonian Museum in Washington D.C. to see the actual model of the Falcon in a traveling display that was set up there.  I traveled to Washington that weekend just to see the Falcon.  I spent nearly two hours looking at it, photographing it and memorizing every pipe, dent, and burn mark on a ship I had watched so many times in the feature films.  It was for me one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen in my life.  When I saw the level of detail that Fantasy Flight Games had poured into the Millennium Falcon game piece for the X-Wing Miniatures role-playing game it called to my mind memory of that original model in sheer detail and I instantly fell in love.  I immediately bought a starter set of the X-Wing game and launched my family onto a new generation of game play that is sure to engulf for many years. In the game players can fly the legendary Millennium Falcon into fast-paced battles for the fate of the galaxy! The Millennium Falcon™ Expansion Pack for the X-Wing™ Miniatures Game allows players to blast through hyperspace with Han, Chewie, Lando, and more. The Millennium Falcon comes with four pilot cards, thirteen upgrades, and all requisite tokens. New rules expand the X-Wing galaxy to include large ships and modifications. With its pilots, upgrades, and lovingly detailed miniature, the Millennium Falcon Expansion Pack is a beautiful addition to the X-Wing game!  It may be the coolest thing I have seen in years regarding this kind of thing.  It is a marvel to look at and unbelievable to have as a game play option.  I consider it stunning.

If the Millennium Falcon didn’t close the deal for me on the new X-Wing game the promise of the next ship did.  It doesn’t come out until the end of August, but when it does, I will buy it immediately.  It is the HWK-290 designed by Corellian Engineering Corporation to resemble a bird in flight, the “hawk” series excels in its role as a personal transport. The HWK-290 Expansion Pack comes with one detailed miniature at 1/270 scale, a maneuver dial, all necessary tokens, six upgrades, and four pilots, including the renowned Kyle Katarn. Each HWK-290 provides a wide range of support options for your squad and can be outfitted with both a turret weapon and crew member.  The reason this ship is significant for me is because it was the featured spacecraft of the main character in the video game Dark Forces.  pic1394907_lgIt never appeared in a Star Wars film, but was the home craft of the video game character Kyle Katarn, who would later become a Jedi Master in the novels years later.  One of the very first video games that my oldest daughter ever played was Dark Forces.  It was a first person shooter that came out in 1995.  My daughter was only 6 years old at the time and helped me play it by pressing the space bar on the key board when I told her to which caused my character to jump.  She was too young for the complex shooting and strategy it took to win the game, but she knew how to hit the space bar when I told her to and it was that game that launched her into a lifelong love of video games.  She and I will always share that unique father/daughter experience, and I will always think of her when I think of the HWK-290.  I was dazzled to learn that Fantasy Flight Games was actually inserting that ship into the game mythology before other types of ships, which let me know that the game designers were very serious about expanding the Star Wars experience of role-playing gaming in a format that hasn’t seen such a level of attention since our beloved Pirate Constructible Strategy Game.

Now that I’m going to be playing, it won’t take long before other members of my family will also and soon we will be ordering LaRosas pizza late at night and lining up 2-liters of Coke along our kitchen counter playing Star Wars: X-Wing Miniatures Game well into the night.  It doesn’t matter that everyone playing will be well over 20 years old and in my case their 40s.  I still get a thrill about purchasing new strategic game pieces that can be used under battlefield conditions that have infinite possibilities.  I do not feel this kind of passion for other types of games.  The reason is that the role-playing games allow for complete independent freedom of strategy, unlike board games where the path is set and random chance puts players often into a position to win the game.  With games like X-Wing Miniatures all the conditions of battle are set and designed by the player, and that is why I love these experiences so intensely.  For me the game is only part of the fun.  I enjoy often reading the stats of the cards and infinitely considering various strategies before hand.  The game only proves a theory good or bad. 

 

I have played these games with people who are really good.  They are very quick with their mind and spend a lot more time playing the games than I ever will.  It is fun to watch these kinds of players at tournaments and conventions.  I will never put the kind of time into these games that they do, but I admire their efforts.  Too many adults in our modern age believe falsely that games are for kids and that such things should be put away as adulthood consumes our lives.  Games are not for kids, they are for minds.  Games like the Star Wars: X-Wing Miniatures Game feeds the mind with more than entertainment, it provides mental exercises that are invaluable to real life.  I can’t say how many times I have been locked in epic political struggles and other situations where I resorted on the practices used in these strategy games to apply some skill I tried and won with in theory, against real opponents in real scenarios. 

 

So as I sometimes take breaks from the rebellions of the real world to embark on these flights of fantasy, even in my leisure, strategy is an important part of my life.  It is far safer to make errors in judgment among friends and family over pizza and Coca Coke than when it really counts in real life. 

And with that said, I am ecstatic to see this new Star Wars: X-Wing Miniatures Game available at what might only be termed, an essentially important period in my life.  The timing couldn’t have been more perfect and I am so glad that the good people at Lucasfilm put the short playing clip of the example with Wil Wheaten and Seth Green up so I could see the Millennium Falcon playing piece for the first time and become enticed enough to investigate further.  That investigation will yield tremendous benefits that can only be found when adults play the games of young people and further develop their minds against the antagonists who have lost such abilities to their own detriment.  Sometimes being good at strategy isn’t about being better at the game itself, but is due to working against un-armed opponents.  Those who don’t play these kinds of games find their minds unable to think strategically enough to compete when it really matters, and every time a new game like Star Wars: X-Wing Miniatures Game comes out, I am deeply thankful for the opportunity to feed my mind with the contents that have benefits which extend beyond convention.  When a vacation is needed, it’s not just the body that needs rest, the mind does also.  But the mind enjoys stimulation, not stagnation, and often a game like this can provide the crucial ingredient that the mind seeks with abundance in all the best scenarios.

 

To get the gist of what I’m talking about read this review from Boardgamegeek.com.  It reveals why this game is so much better than most other games, and why it will become one of the most enduring games of its type in this generation. 

 

 

 Harrowing dogfights, family drama, shootouts, a tender moment, amazing monsters, humor.

There’s a tempo to Star Wars. We all remember Luke screaming NOOOOOOO at Vader. For different reasons, we remember Anakin turned Vader screaming NOOOOOO. But we also remember Leia offering a little cracker to an ewok. We remember first seeing Darth Maul’s double lightsaber. And we remember Han saying “I know.”

It is NOT all pew-pew-pew. It is NOT all Vrusssshhhhhhhzwwwmzwwwmmm. It’s a cycle of teasing action and drama.

Even though the X-Wing Minis game plays out some incredible dogfight sequences, the play of the game is NOT a straight forward flow.

I’ve got dozens of rounds under my belt now, and I’ve been wanting to write a review, and it finally came to me what it is that makes this game such rip roaring fun.

It’s not the astoundingly detailed minis. And anyone complaining about scale needs to take a close look at the movies, where the scale of the ships to each other changes from shot to shot due to the compositing techniques used at the time.

The minis are awesome. I’m somewhat surprised that different ships use different plastics, but I understand why. That denser stuff used on the X-Wing would collapse a Falcon into itself.

The prepaint jobs are incredible. The cards gorgeous, the components just off the scale. Even with the bit more they must pay in royalties to Uncle George, the massive appeal of this game allows them to make a ton of copies and the price, while at first glance seems daunting, isn’t a lot for what you get.

What makes the game work is the pendulum swing. The rhythm.

First, the setup. The agonizing squad building. Is it worth 2 points to raise this pilot’s skill, not knowing what the enemy force contains? It could easily be two points that have ZERO effect on the game. Terribly tough gambles. Now that wave 2 is out and you could just as easily face a hulking mothership like a decked out Slave I or a swarm of the world’s most annoying TIE fighters, you really have to prepare for a wide contingency of opponents.

This setup is tense. You want flexible. But strong. Synergistic support between squad members, but not so much that the loss of a key ship means defeat. And you ALWAYS want about 3 more points for that perfect build. No matter how many points you choose to fight, you will kill for another 3.

So it’s got that whole squad building aspect down great. Especially now that there’s a ton of options. Who knows what your opponent will bring?

But the flow of a turn is brilliant.

Everybody chooses their maneuvers. No downtime. But here in the game is where you are playing cat and mouse. Maybe psychologically toying with the opponent, making them think your plan is A when it is actually B.

Hidden agendas and secret moves. That’s the next game that plays out after the squad building math.

Then the wonderful move system. Everyone slowly reveals their moves, in what might be the games most questioned rule. The lowest skilled dudes go first, and eventually the better skilled dudes, which mean they have a fairly good chance of accidentally hitting and losing their action, where the lower skill guy might pull it off.

But it works in the long run, because it keeps higher skills in tailing positions.

Bit in this phase of the game, again, very, very little downtime, as the nefarious plans and maneuvers are revealed.

Squeals of glee and grunts of horror abound as unexpected collisions happen and skillful turns are executed.

But then comes the start of your devastating on the spot decision making. While plotting your squadrons moves, you had an overall plan. Now, each ship must choose it’s precious action.

Evade? How many guys might end up firing on you? Target? Are you clear to get the shot this or next turn? Focus – the all purpose “Egads, I need help” token. Or maybe that barrel roll or super freakin cool new Boost – move a bit maybe out of a firing arc or -surprise – snap someone into your arc. Maybe you execute some trick of your specific pilot.

Here is where you are tempering your odds. Things that will alter the upcoming luck sequence. carefully guiding the gods of luck to your favor.

The tokens build up on the board as actions get selected. At first, this is a pile of confusing cardboard. In a few games, the counters become invisible, simply reminding you of who plans what.

Whew. So, strategic planning in the squad build, then the secrecy of move plotting, then the agonizing action choices. What more does this game need?

Raw luck.

Bring out the dice. Or the iPad app, if you prefer.

Its Star WARS and the dice bring on the war. Now MORE decisions that hurt. Do I spend my focus token to get that extra damage possibly in, or hold on to it to help me avoid possible damage? What if I hold it and no one fires? What a waste… Two hits coming in… Do I evade? Or hold on to the evade since a crit might come next?

Hopefully, you’ve pile bonus upon bonus on your fighters. Distance, skill, weapon, focus… Or maybe all you’ve got is a shot in the dark.

Fire away.

Even defenders are active, choosing focus and evade moments.

Again, very little downtime. Lots of whining and cheering. Little downtime.

Start the cycle again. Hidden choices, movement reveals and actions, combat.

I think THIS is why X-Wing is such a stunningly successful design. It bobs and weaves each turn. No phase is long enough to overstay its welcome. And you must juggle and balance each phase to support the others.

An excellently designed system that overcomes any of it’s perceived problems due to the overall strength of play.

http://boardgamegeek.com/thread/942443/why-it-works-review-after-wave-2

Listen to Star Wars gaming news at Mos Eisley Radio broadcasting straight from the Outer Rim!

http://moseisleyradio.com/category/mos-eisley-radio/

Rich Hoffman

 www.OVERMANWARRIOR.com

Give yourself the gift of ADVENTURE.  CLICK HERE!  

The Wonderful ‘T-Rex Cafe’: Refusing to honor “Mother Earth” with one more mass extinction

T-Rex1I enjoy fine dining and have rather high expectations in regard to food.  In my home town of West Chester when I want a nice dining experience, my wife and I go to Jags.  For power dinners it is the Montgomery Inn Boat House downtown along the river that most suits my taste.  So with those qualifiers I must report that I had one of the finest dinners I can ever recall at the T-Rex Café in Orlando, Florida.  This was unexpected as I thought the restaurant featuring animatronic dinosaurs that howl at you while eating would be just another gimmicky eatery that would fall short of anticipated hope.  My family was with me at Downtown Disney recently so I had the opportunity to treat them to a nice dinner in a unique place, so we headed to the T-Rex Café which is only one of two in the entire country.  T-Rex5The other establishment is located in Kansas City.  As expected the interior of the restaurant was fabulous looking resembling more a dynamic museum than a place to eat.  The hostess seated us in a corner table next to the fire pit cooking area directly underneath a pterodactyl dinosaur and flaming licks that emerged from a volcano.  Our large booth was situated inside a geode that looked out into the dining room as a meteor shower flew by violently overhead.  Across the room was the ice cave complete with fossils embedded in the walls.  Everywhere around the large dining room which held over 600 people were spectacles of science and ancient biological history.  But better than that, the food was as good as the environment.  The appetizers were seasoned wonderfully, the service was top-notch, and the feature plates were excellently prepared, and delivered.  For the climax of the dinner we had a Chocolate Extinction which was delivered as a flame spewing volcano that was absolutely fabulous.

As I ate my dinner and spoke with my family I had a persistent thought–the restaurant was just another miracle of capitalism.   Only capitalism could produce such a place, and even though the cost of the meal was certainly on the high side, it was well worth the price as the environment cost an enormous sum to maintain daily.  Only an economic system of capitalism could hope to produce the resources to make such a place possible.  Yet in our current time, capitalism’s greatest predator is socialism, and the current incantation of political socialism is the “green movement” that attempts to take mankind back to the roots of earth worship and primitive rituals in an effort to preserve the world for eternity.T-Rex4

As I looked around the room at the T-Rex Café I thought of a conversation I had with one of my nephews the day before—a small argument that we had in a swimming pool over the merits of personal Thorium reactors for sustainable, cheap power at each home in the world.  His position was one of concern for the radioactive waste generated by nuclear fission taught to him by the six digit debt he incurred in college that had steered his thinking.  I tried to sympathize with his view-point as he spent a lot of money on his education and wanted to believe that the things he learned were valid.  But in the scheme of things he was taught by left-leaning college professors the mystical trend of primitive sacrifice to the goddess Earth and were wrong.  The entire environmental movement is built on mysticism and a primitive need to sacrifice to the gods that are now representative in New Age doctrine as a love for the great Goddess Earth.  The mentality is the same as the Mayans sacrificing human beings to Kukulkan, or a bunch of Native Americans (displaced Chinese people) doing a rain dance to bring water to their crops.  The idea of sacrifice to a deity is a primitive concept that is rooted in ignorance which is wonderfully portrayed in one of my favorite books, The Golden Bough by James Frazer.  Human beings have evolved for the most part beyond that ridiculous mentality rooted in ignorance with the advances found in the philosophy of capitalism.  The T-Rex Café was a direct product of capitalism and was a celebration of life forms on earth that had become extinct for natural reasons.  Because of capitalism, children can share with their parents a celebration of a world long gone so that hopefully they can all learn something from the process while enjoying the roots of our own evolution.T-Rex2

Yet there are thousands of young people like my nephew who have been taught that preserving the earth is more important than the products of the human mind which is in essence a dedication to the primitive nature of human beings before the invention of capitalism.  Those human beings who hate capitalism tend to support socialist tendencies either directly or indirectly and it is they who have perpetuated the myths about global warming, and the sacrifice of human advancement to the benefit of the earth—which is just ridiculous.

As I watched the meteor showers strike each other across the ceiling of the T-Rex Café restaurant I thought of the future of the earth as we know it now.  Part of the ongoing supercontinent cycle, plate tectonics will probably result in a supercontinent in 250–350 million years. Some time in the next 1.5–4.5 billion years, the axial tilt of the Earth may begin to undergo chaotic variations, with changes in the axial tilt of up to 90°.

During the next four billion years, the luminosity of the Sun will steadily increase, resulting in a rise in the solar radiation reaching the Earth. This will cause a higher rate of weathering of silicate minerals, which will cause a decrease in the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. In about 600 million years, the level of CO
2 will fall below the level needed to sustain C3 carbon fixation photosynthesis used by trees. Some plants use the C4 carbon fixation method, allowing them to persist at CO
2 concentrations as low as 10 parts per million. However, the long-term trend is for plant life to die off altogether. The die off of plants will be the demise of almost all animal life, since plants are the base of the food chain on Earth.T-Rex7

In about 1.1 billion years, the solar luminosity will be 10% higher than at present. This will cause the atmosphere to become a “moist greenhouse”, resulting in a runaway evaporation of the oceans. As a likely consequence, plate tectonics will come to an end.[11] Following this event, the planet’s magnetic dynamo may come to an end, causing the magnetosphere to decay and leading to an accelerated loss of volatiles from the outer atmosphere. Four billion years from now, the increase in the Earth’s surface temperature will cause a runaway greenhouse effect. By that point, most if not all the life on the surface will be extinct.[12][13] The most probable fate of the planet is absorption by the Sun in about 7.5 billion years, after the star has entered the red giant phase and expanded to cross the planet’s current orbit

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_of_the_Earth

And at any time during this cycle of destruction, a meteor, an alien race, or even the collision of the Milky Way galaxy with another galaxy may occur destroying not just the earth, but all the millions of planets in the galaxy.  The idea of not installing a Thorium reactor on every home, every car, and every need for power that the human race desires seems insanely stupid when it is realized that the sacrifice of technical achievement to short-sighted preservation of the earth is currently occurring.  Humans would be wise to blast the radioactive waste of such nuclear fission into space to dump among the stars, but such things are of secondary concern to the efforts that are produced by the human mind.  Whether the earth ends in 100 years or in 7.5 billion years, the earth will end, and the human race will need to evolve into a type 3 civilization by that time, or it will go out like a light in the universe that has been turned off by its own short-sightedness.  When the earth ends, human beings need to be elsewhere.T-Rex3

To avoid extinction, human beings not only must develop an ability to move from one galaxy to another, but from one universe to another, because the universe is not exactly stable.  Mankind through capitalism has the ability to solve these problems but the trend of the current environmentalist is a dedication to the failures of mankind’s past, the sacrifice of humans to the gods of speculation—to the mystic desire to shun personal responsibility for ones own life to a deity of convenience and hide their lack of courage behind group behavior.

The T-Rex Café is an excellent example of capitalism at its absolute best.  The food is great, the environment, the service, the location was absolutely spectacular.   But more importantly were the thoughts that the place was able to invoke in the imagination.  Dining with my family at a big comfortable table with good food to ease the tensions of the day allowed for the possibility of thoughts that were stimulated by the dynamic environment.  For me, the conversation I had with my nephew at the pool came rushing to my mind as the meteor shower overhead violently erupted.  Everything on earth was created from violence and force.  Every mountain is the result of earth’s crust violently being shoved upward.  Every river is the result of massive rain fall.  Every drop of ocean water is the result of crashed comets millions of years ago.  The dinosaurs of which the T-Rex Café was dedicated to had lived and died over a much longer span of time than human beings have even been a thought on earth, and in all that time no dinosaur ever invented a way to draw energy from a Thorium reactor, yet the audaciousness of the modern-day environmentally conscious religious zealot is to assume that the earth will always stay just as it is now in the year 2013 and never become hotter or colder, or violently upset by a planetary collision of any kind.  They assume that humans are equal in value to all other life forms on the planet, and that’s not true—only humans have developed complicated thoughts that enable them to leave earth, extend their own life spans, and create their own future.  For the greenie weenie environmentalist the small mindedness of their short-life spans is unfathomably foolish and insecure.  They hope to revert mankind back to a cave man building fires and barking at a bolt of lightning streaking across the sky as some mystery delivered from the gods, instead of understanding the science of static electricity and using that power to carry them off earth for good, to destinations not yet discovered.T-Rex6

A good meal not only fills the belly, but the mind, and I left the T-Rex Café full in both regards.  It was worth the money of a 5 star restaurant because the combination of food and environment was so extremely magnificent.  I won’t soon forget the place because long after the food was enjoyed the experience continued to give me fresh ideas that are invaluable to proper perspective.  It was clearly one of my favorite dining experiences to date anywhere in the world, in part because of the restaurant itself, but mostly in the recreation of a time long-lost to history that was recreated as an honor, and a warning to mankind’s own doomed fate if it fails to embrace the proper philosophy of reaching for the stars instead of the jealous confines of mother earth and her selfish desire to doom all humans to the same fate she will surely suffer.

Rich Hoffman

“Justice Comes with the Crack of a Whip’!”

www.tailofthedragonbook.com

How to Save the American Economy: John Galt and Thorium Reactors

Two things I noticed immediately from the film critics of Dark Knight Rises, and now of the upcoming Atlas Shrugged Part II, is that the media in general is belittling the kind of super energy power supply that is featured in those films. CLICK HERE FOR AN EXAMPLE. In Dark Knight Rises Bruce Wayne has funded essentially a thorium reactor that will power Gotham City with the cleanest and most powerful energy yet devised on earth. In Atlas Shrugged Part II John Galt has built a special engine that is capable of running off static electricity, literally pulling electrons out of the air much the way lightning forms in nature. Both technologies are based on scientific fact yet are presented in superhero films as a solution to the world’s energy, financial, and environmental impact issues surrounding sustainable power. There is a good reason for that belittlement–because anything that is not coal, solar, wind, oil, or any other established technology, is a threat to the financial roots those technologies have established in human culture.

Even the liberal press who leans in the direction of environmental concerns find the kind of energy supply shown in Dark Knight Rises and Atlas Shrugged as science fiction regulated to childhood fantasies. What they fail to disclose is that their opinions are formulated around the millions of dollars traditional power supply companies have spent on congressman, senators and lawyers through lobbyists to protect their monopolies. The media are victims of a protection racket propelled by the political establishment to cover for the money that lobbyists spent on legislators to shape public opinion. All the parties involved in the racket are committed to their own doomed futures with a foolish pursuit of the kind of power that is produced by traditional sources in order to protect the jobs, the flow of money, and the long-term contracts that have been set up by the emergence of electricity.

But, the concepts shown in Dark Knight Rises and Atlas Shrugged are not science fiction, but rather are science fact. Thorium in fact is a source of nuclear power that was developed as far back as the middle of the Twentieth Century and President Nixon was firmly committed to developing it as a way to inject a lot of life into the American economy. But politics got in the way and threw roadblocks up at every attempt. When Three Mile Island happened in America, and most recently Fukushima in Japan the media and political scallywags seized upon those tragedies to frighten a timid public away from nuclear energy—so to preserve the public need of dirty energy by which many millions of current jobs rely. No politician in their right mind would dare act against the job losses and union jobs of those working in the energy sectors of the American economy which would be threatened by the kind of change thorium reactors would bring to the energy industry. It would be equivalent to introducing email to the United States Post Office service. The result to traditional mail is that it’s going bankrupt because it simply can’t compete with email. Thus the same would be said of thorium reactors compared to coal-burning power plants or solar energy.

Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor technology is truly a revolution in clean energy production. Thorium is such a dense energy supply that a lifetime of energy use can be held in the palm of a hand. LFTR reactors are small and can consume nearly 100% of its fuel while current reactors only consume about 2% before the fuel becomes waste. LFTR’s process heat can turn coal and natural gas to methanol, and can be used to harvest shale oil. It can turn trash into synthetic gasoline and diesel fuel. LFTR’s can help cure cancer, provide true national energy independence, desalinate salt water and create countless jobs and national prosperity. The only thing that is preventing LFTR energy in America is over regulation of the nuclear industry created by the government in response to a panic addicted media all in the preservation of existing power sources protected by lobbyists.

Imagine being able to build a LFTR power plant in North Africa along the coast of the Mediterranean Sea. Not only could it produce enough power to take care of most of the northern countries, it could also turn sea water into drinkable service bringing irrigation canals to draught infested regions saving millions of lives and improving the lives of millions more. Because of LFTR technology no place on earth would have to go without water and no human being would have to die of thirst. It would enrich the lives of every human being on the planet.

There are many people in politics who do not wish to see American dependence on foreign oil go away, because they profit a great deal from that arrangement. They also do not wish to turn deserts green and feed the world, because then there would be no altruism from which they could act as middlemen of kindness. They do not wish to eliminate nuclear waste as LFTR does because then opposition to nuclear power by the public would be removed. They do not wish to turn trash into fuel, because then there would be no environmental danger to protest against, giving their fruitless lives less meaning. These types of people do not wish the world to be truly better. They wish to keep energy dependence alive and well because a dependent population tends to look toward a leader, and they fantasies to provide that leadership, even at the expense of other people’s freedom.

If America could rid itself of its fearful lobbyists and the politicians that eat from their hands stepping forward and embracing LFTR technology, the entire economy of The United States would change for the better. Such a decision would affect each and every citizen of America with new energy that is found in North America in great abundance that is clean, powerful, and clearly the next step for the human race. What is holding back our society from the millions of new jobs LFTR would create is a corrupt political system and a toothless media more committed to progressive politics than the kind of future LFTR could bring not just to America, but the world.

The misery of a failed economy, of world hunger, of people dying of cancer, of dirty energy and environmental hazards are self-inflicted because the potential of LFTR technology is available right now and has been for a number of years. But it has been concealed in order to protect the old way of doing business from the new way. What has happened is equivalent to the car companies at the turn of the century being prevented from emerging as a business because the makers of horse carriages lobbied congress to create laws to prevent the car companies from buying tires. The power of the energy lobby has been to protect how money was made yesterday, not in developing how it will be made tomorrow.
When film critics attempt to belittle an emerging technology it is not because they find it offensive, or silly. It is because it threatens the system they serve as a member of the accepted collective. They are acting as agents of attack against any threat to their primitive knowledge, because they wish to preserve the static intellectualism that they have built their lives around. When critics come out against the new Atlas Shrugged film it is not that the movie is bad, or the film narrative is poor. It is because they represent in real life what the fictional character of John Galt is attempting to warn the world about.

In the book Atlas Shrugged John Galt creates a society for those brave enough, and smart enough to comprehend it deep in the mountains of Colorado. He calls it Galt’s Gulch—otherwise known as Atlantis. It is a paradise on earth where he his friends flee the parasites of The United States resisting the inventions of the truly brilliant and creative. That society is made possible by John Galt’s miracle power generator, very similar to the LFTR technology discussed in this article. I have reported here at Overmanwarrior’s Wisdom many technological achievements that are being held up by an overly regulated nation such as cures for cancer, flying cars, and extraordinary botanical growth methods which point to a world of tomorrow what we could have today if not for the degrees of collectivism invented by Karl Marx which is behind almost every modern political action. It is because of Marxist subscription to social collectivism that wonderful technologies like Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor’s have been placed on the shelf to protect the infrastructure of yesterday and the jobs created by that faded dream. The pain and suffering our society is anguishing through now, the mindless war for absolutely no reason but to keep politicians in power and crony capitalism thriving through lobbyists is completely avoidable and senseless. It’s a self-imposed pain created by the masochists in love with Marxism—with huge government bureaucracy, and a political class drunk on tax payer funded power.

Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor technology is not being discussed in the mainstream news because it threatens the monopolies of the past. Even though every politician wishes to get elected on promises they make to fix the problems of our day, deep in their hearts they never want the problems to actually be solved. They crave environmental issues, unstable conditions in the Middle East, nuclear melt downs with radiation that kills thousands because it leaves society scrambling for a leader to save the day, which never comes. So long as there are problems in the world, the politician has a job to do, and Washington—along with every parasite who lives off the money flowing down K-Street strives to keep that system intact. LFTR technology actually solves many modern problems, and that is why it is being shoved under the carpet, and kept from the public’s eyes.

So when the movie Atlas Shrugged Part II comes out understand that the plot of some brilliant man who invents a new form of energy which could save the world and give rise to a new day for the human race, but instead retreats to the mountains of Colorado to selfishly keep it for a small group of capitalists, that it’s more science fact than science fiction. Technology like what John Galt fictionally invented in Atlas Shrugged is actually quite real, and the methods which prevent that technology from benefiting mankind is just as real as the fictional tale claims. The critics who will pan the movie as ludicrous and immature—even selfish are the thieves who are keeping the world prisoner to their Marxist philosophy of collectivism in service to the political elite at the expense of innovation and human prosperity. The by-product of this philosophy is misery by the truck loads and mountains of broken dreams stamping out forever the light behind the eyes of every child with the courage to question their surroundings and crush the spirit of all the children who didn’t leaving an adult population of mindless drones and school levy supporters.

Rich Hoffman

If you like my work at this site then check out my new book Tail of the Dragon along with quotes, interviews, reviews, and ways to find one at:

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‘No Lakota Levy’ Hosts a “Community Conversation”: Results from Jefferey Stec

Who wants to tell me I’m being an “extremist” for calling teachers of public education socialists, which I have been doing for years now?  The video below shows the teachers from the Chicago Teachers Union celebrating their money grabbing victory after their recent strike.  Watch carefully.  These are the kinds of employees who are asking for a tax increase off of property values in our communities.  The time has come to ask if we really want socialist public workers teaching our children at all, let alone at the expensive sum of money they are demanding to do it.

 

A week ago some of the members of No Lakota Levy hosted a “Community Conversation” which is the $40,000 program pushed by Lakota Superintendent Karen Mantia and conducted by the progressive Cincinnati activist Jeffery Stec. Below are the results of that meeting so it can be seen what Jeffery is trying to do and how the meetings are to be conducted. I thought it was odd that they put the name of the host on their mass mailings to the entire district. I would think it would discourage people from volunteering in the future. So for the sake of this article I took the homeowner’s name off the letterhead out of courtesy. To see my comments about the “community conversation” program CLICK HERE.

Below is the outcome of the meeting as Jeffery sent it out to the residents of the Lakota School District. For my readers here I have hot linked each item with an article I have written in the past regarding Lakota and their failures to balance their budget. So feel free to click on each item to see what I’ve said leading up to this meeting.  As to what’s wrong with public education the Chicago Teacher’s Union tells the whole story.  Any public school that has a union like the one shown in the video below should be replaced with a competitive alternative. 

Defining a Good School District
A Community Conversation 9-13-2012

1. Non-curricular goals
a. Kids have transportation to school (differing opinions about bus transit)
b. Buildings look nice, well maintained
2. Outcomes
a. Kids can compete globally
b. Kids are motivated
3. Taught values
a. Honor
b. Integrity
c. Kids speak well of teachers
d. Kids have a good social culture with peers
4. Taught skills
a. Technology
5. Educational process
a. Much one-on-one time between teachers and children
i. Address specific needs of individual kids
ii. Maximize potential of each child at their pace
iii. Get optimum classroom size
b. Kids are engaged
i. With the educational material
ii. With other kids socially
iii. They compete for grades
c. Teachers
i. Are proud of their jobs and the district
ii. They have integrity
iii. Care for students
iv. Involved in community outside of teaching
v. Willing to do more
vi. Creative
vii. Honorable, professional, integrity
viii. Fulfilled
6. Administration
a. Proactive to address issues before problems arise
b. District listens to community needs—it’s a two-way, respectful conversation
c. Fight for right answer, not what is easy (e.g. giving in to union)
d. Financial issues
i. Be efficient, disciplined, and creative with finances
1. But “to a point”—don’t overly compromise effective teaching
ii. Be a resourceful district—find a way to make it work
iii. Balanced budget—live within its means
iv. Community needs have priority over union demands
1. Fight the union
2. Lower teacher costs by 5%
v. District tightens belt as community does
vi. Don’t use cuts to scare parents into supporting levy
e. Employees
i. Competent employees
ii. Frugal employees
iii. Accountable employees—they care about district outcomes and resources
f. Kids not involved in levy debate

Rich Hoffman

If you like my work at this site then check out my new book Tail of the Dragon along with quotes, interviews, reviews, and ways to find one at:

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15995766-tail-of-the-dragon

Visit me at Goodreads!  Check out my list of top 50 favorite books.

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Meet Harmon Kaslow: Producer of ‘Atlas Shrugged Part II’–a preview of the review.

Harmon Kaslow is one of the most passionate movie producers I have ever worked around. That was the only conclusion I could make after we parted ways in front of the Hyatt Regency in downtown Cincinnati where he finally went back to his room after a very long day. Kaslow was at the Duke Energy Center promoting Atlas Shrugged Part II speaking with Glenn Beck, Matt Kibbe and a long list of freedom fighters who spoke during FreePac to a very large crowd that packed the floor with thousands upon thousands of people hungry to see what they could do to make The United States a better country to live in. In the video below Kaslow personally greeted hundreds of attendees after his dramatic presentation on stage, as I along with a team of helpers worked the Atlas Shrugged booth passing out over 5000 t-shirts announcing the release date of Atlas Shrugged Part II.

I was there to help promote the next movie edition of Atlas Shrugged in a similar fashion that I did with Part I only there were not huge forums like FreePac two years ago when that first real film translation of Ayn Rand’s epic novel was released to theaters. CLICK HERE FOR A REVIEW. Things were harder then; John Aglialoro had the rights to the famous Ayn Rand masterpiece that happened to be the most influential novel in America and he wanted to make a film version of the massive book dividing it into three parts, just as they were presented by Ayn Rand. The material is extraordinarily difficult to put into a film version because much of the content is cerebral, so the difficulty in translating such heady material into a visual format proved elusive for the mainstream Hollywood community. The closest thing I have seen to Atlas Shrugged in a feature film is the recent Batman films by Christopher Nolan. But unlike Bruce Wayne from the Nolan trilogy, Atlas Shrugged does not have the benefit a superhuman powers, or cleaver gadgets to fight crime in the city of Gotham. The heroes of Atlas Shrugged are human beings who acknowledge their ability to be unique producers who support the entire world with their creative minds. The primary protagonist that was listed on the t-shirts we were handing out is John Galt, a man of such extraordinary brilliance that he is able to earn the respect of the worlds primary movers to go on strike against the looters of government who pretend to be at the center of everything—but are clearly lacking.

Atlas Shrugged does not have any literary problems. It is a standard unto itself. It may very well be the perfect novel. It is every bit as grand as any novel by Victor Hugo and is as stunning from a literary character development stand point as any novel ever written by any writer. But the deep social divide that comes out when the book or film is mentioned is that the villains of Atlas Shrugged are a bit too real. Members of modern governments and the general media recognize quickly that they cannot relate with John Galt, or Dagney Taggart, Henry Rearden, Hugh Akston, Francisco d’ Anconia, or my favorite character out of all of them Ragnar Danneskjöld—the pirate! Ragnar was a philosopher who became a privateer in the book. Alone he defied the might of the United States Navy and of all the People’s Navies of the world to be, as he famously said, “the friend of the friendless.” Atlas Shrugged does not dress it’s villains up in costumes like Darth Vader in Star Wars, or the Joker in Batman to allow the reader or movie viewer the courtesy of psychological distance. The villains are a too real for many guilty of similar real life acts to fathom, so they of course reject the material of Ayn Rand. Much of the negative criticism that comes from critics, beltway politicians and social looters emerges in defense of their own tendencies to be parasites upon society. These elements make Atlas Shrugged a divisive story that does not spare punches. Written over 50 years ago it features a president that is just like the modern version of Barack Obama. Atlas Shrugged came well before Barack Obama was even born, so the film can never be said to be taking shots at his presidency, or the kind of government he supports. But never-the-less, the policies of the Obama White House are remarkably similar to the policies of the villains in Atlas Shrugged, and the media who supports the President for all the wrong reasons.

All day long at FreePac as I personally handed out thousands of t-shirts people stood slack-jawed at the concept that we were giving them away for free. Many people wanted to give me money for them seeking to trade value for value in their minds with actual currency. If I wanted to I could have pocketed several thousand dollars because people wanted to give me twenty-dollar bills per shirt but I told each of them—“keep your money today, but spend it on an extra ticket for the movie, because the media who is currently functioning does not want you to see this movie. Barack Obama does not want you to see this movie. Mayor Bloomburg in New York does not want you to see this movie. No Democrat, many Republicans, and no head of any network want you to see this movie because they know they are the villains in it, and they don’t want that reality for themselves and they don’t want you to see them in the context presented in Atlas Shrugged, which is terribly realistic. They wish to continue to believe they are saving the world, when it is actually they who are destroying it. So take your twenty dollars and spend it at the box office on Atlas Shrugged Part II because it will need your support, because it won’t get it from the press.” I can think of seven times during my work in the Atlas Shrugged booth where tears streamed down the faces of people who gathered the impact of what I told them and they could only respond through broken gasps—“thank you.”

I warned everyone who took a t-shirt that the reviews for Atlas Shrugged Part II would not be favorable even though nobody has yet seen the movie. The reason for this trend was also covered by Ayn Rand not in Atlas Shrugged but by the juggernaut of novel which happens to be my favorite called The Fountainhead published in 1943. In that book it explains how members of the media align themselves with the politics of the day to help “shape” culture. I recently wrote an article about how this was attempted against the newest Batman film once the media realized that the Nolan brothers had written a story about anti-collectivism and not a troubling thriller featured around Heath Ledger’s Joker character. Dark Knight Rises in spite of the tragedy in Colorado upon its opening had gone on to do over $1 billion dollars in world-wide business so it has the support of the public in spite of how the press turned on it in midstream. The New Yorker led the way coming out against the film in an attempt to steer business away from the anti-collectivist message of Dark Knight Rises in the exact same way that characters from Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead attempted to do the same in that fictional tale. CLICK HERE TO REVIEW. The same thing will without question happen to Atlas Shrugged Part II. I told the people I handed shirts to that we needed them to wear the shirts around to their grocery stores, to their shopping complexes, to work whenever possible, to act as a walking billboard because the media machine will not do the film justice. By taking a t-shirt and wearing it proudly they could help make Atlas Shrugged Part II a success without the help of any media, any politician, or mainstream acceptance. I know very well the material of Atlas Shrugged and can report that it is much more powerful than Dark Knight Rises on a cerebral level, which is not intended to take anything away from that fantastic movie. But if Atlas Shrugged II could afford the media backing that Dark Knight Rises had where Warner Brothers put the film on over 3000 screens domestically and on additional screens all over the world, Atlas Shrugged Part II would do similar business. The problem is there is not a major studio behind Atlas Shrugged. It’s John Aglialoro, a few other financial backers, and Harmon Kaslow. To make Atlas Shrugged Part II it required a great deal of personal passion on the scale of the heroes in the novel Atlas Shrugged knowing every part of the process would be an uphill battle. For people like John Aglialoro and Harmon Kaslow making this film is equivalent to the scene that takes place in the actual movie of Part II when Henry Reardon is taken to court by the government for being “too good.” Those types of things do happen in real life and they happen often. So it is a miracle that this film actually got made.

Once Harmon finished his speech talking about Atlas Shrugged II and Glenn Beck finished up his speech, Kaslow came back out to the booth and helped us pass out the rest of the shirts as seen in the video above. After a long hard day he was still full of energy and boundless enthusiasm for his movie. He and I talked about the questions people had been asking me all day, primarily why the cast from the original film was not in this update. Many people discovered Ayn Rand for the first time though Part One which is available right now on Netflix, so naturally they are in love with the characters they came to know in that first installment. As Harmon explained, they had the opportunity to beef up their production value so they had to take the leap. He explained that the decision was hard but that Spiderman, Batman and many other superhero films had relied on the strength of the material instead of the character of the actors playing the part, so as a production they made the decision to take steps forward as they learned what worked best from their first film and expand on it. In essence Atlas Shrugged is a superhero story, and is every bit as fun and powerful as The Avengers, not on a physical level, but cerebrally. That is why the Atlas Shrugged booth all day long resembled more of an active booth at Comic Con than a political convention. The geeks in this case are not the kind of fans of The Incredible Hulk arguing over the Edward Norton version from past films or the new Mark Ruffalo version in The Avengers. These Atlas Shrugged geeks are fans of capitalism and the minds that drive it. They do tend to be smarter because they work to make themselves that way, and to see the emotion on their faces just to shake the hand of someone associated with the Atlas Shrugged production was wonderfully encouraging. Most of the day at FreePac I represented the face of the Atlas Production, and it was refreshing to see so much joy at getting a t-shirt advertising the movie and answering questions about the book and Ayn Rand in particular. I enjoyed watching people line up to have their picture taken next to Kaslow—just to be near a man who helped make Atlas Shrugged into a movie.

You know a man is authentic when the crowds are gone and the cameras are turned off, and they still espouse the same principles. As Harmon and I crossed Elm Street in Cincinnati he and I continued to talk without any pretense of selling the movie to a hungry public. We were just a couple of guys talking and I told him I admired him for taking such a shot with his movie. His efforts were tireless as he is about to go on a media rampage speaking on virtually every radio interview possible, TV spots also, and will shake tens of thousands of hands over the next two weeks. But like the characters from Atlas Shrugged I could see why John Aglialoro put so much of his own money on the production of the next Atlas film. It was the energy–the springy enthusiasm that Harmon Kaslow brought to the production that was making Atlas Shrugged possible. In a large part the thousands of new readers of Ayn Rand’s work were getting exposure to her novels because these movies Part One and now Part Two–because of the guy walking next to me along 5th Street about to leap into the Hyatt to rest from a hard day of marketing.

Two days prior to FreePac my wife and I spent 4 hours buying our stock of books for the week at Books-A-Million and Half Priced Books. I was happy to find a copy of Frazer’s The Golden Bough which I purchased along with a host of other choices and my wife had a stack up to her chin, as usual. But during our time in those two book stores I watched the staff set up a new display promoting all of Ayn Rand’s books in a special stand prominently featuring them with proud reverence—and people were buying them by the bucket. I personally watched that stand lose 50% of its stock in just a two-hour period and I knew it was because of the anticipation of Atlas Shrugged II about to hit more than 500 movie theaters. To find out if one is near you, or how to get one, CLICK HERE. The movie is a celebration of Ayn Rand’s work. If people want the full effect, they MUST read the book. But the movie will bring millions of new fans to the great and highly intelligent work of Atlas Shrugged. And to a large extent it is the tireless energy of Harmon Kaslow, the man shaking my hand for the 100th time in 2000 feet of walking that is the force able to take the movie from financing, to casting, to production, to wrap, and now to delivery standing up in front of thousands upon thousands of people to promote Atlas Shrugged. Like the character of John Galt, Dagney Taggart and Hank Reardon from Atlas Shrugged  I thought of all three of them as Harmon gave me one last wave before the sliding glass door to the Hyatt opened as if to move hastily out of his way so not to be crushed by his boundless energy.  Before he entered the doors to his hotel he proclaimed to me in a loud voice not caring who around us was listening, “I’m the luckiest guy in America, to be able to work on a picture like this!”  Seeing him standing in the doorway of the Hyatt with his arms stretched out fearlessly reminded me of the ending of Shawshank Redemption.  No question about it, completing Part II for him was redemption of a different nature, and most likely just as difficult.   I continued to walk through the streets of Cincinnati thinking about that wave as minds half asleep with social evasion gathered in front of a closed Macy’s looking for something to do. It takes people like Harmon Kaslow to move the mountains of the world so that the sleepy minds of the ordinary can even have the opportunity to touch greatness for brief moments in their lives. And when Atlas Shrugged Part II opens, it is because of real life people like Kaslow and Aglialoro who haven’t quite given up on the world and retreated to their own versions of Atlantis that make it happen. They are still out fighting in the city streets of Cincinnati and residing in the Hyatt with a cell phone to their ear and an iPod in their hands answering email, setting up interviews, and plotting the next day’s activities in an effort to save the world by getting the people in it………to think.

CLICK HERE to see what Ayn Rand, Walt Disney and Ronald Reagan attempted to do to save Hollywood from the real life villains of Atlas Shrugged in the 1950’s. This is the real document as written by Ayn Rand to all the major studios in a fight that Harmon Kaslow and John Aglialoro are respectfully continuing to this very day with Atlas Shrugged Part II.

Rich Hoffman

If you like my work at this site then check out my new book Tail of the Dragon along with quotes, interviews, reviews, and ways to find one at:

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15995766-tail-of-the-dragon

Visit me at Goodreads!  Check out my list of top 50 favorite books.

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“Shoot Extreme” : The fine dining of target shooting in all of America

One of the true delights in life is to have a gun in your hand. Guns are the great equalizers that are among the greatest human inventions, because due to guns, tyranny has a hard time digging its claws into the individual lives of citizens. This has paved the way for a productive society not afraid to invent and to look down their nose at the political class with comfortable disdain. Because of the gun, the political class in America cannot believe that they are superior in any way to the average person. Because of the gun, freedom exists. Because of the gun, diversity of business can thrive in abundance. And because of the gun one of the most interesting businesses I have yet come across has started in West Chester, Ohio, the unusual concept called Shoot Extreme.

As I prepared to enter the Shoot Extreme facility at the corner of Tylersville and Cincinnati-Dayton Road I noticed that The Cone ice cream store was almost right across the street and I felt pride to live in a community that could sell ice cream in a unique specialized shop less than 200 yards from a shooting range that is indoor and set up to practice tactical target shooting with real guns. The concept of Shoot Extreme is a great one–move through a haunted house like maze with live ammunition and shoot at zombies that jump out at you from every direction. It’s a unique way to practice strategic skill, blow off some steam, and target shoot under pressure.

Shooting at fixed targets is one thing, and Target World in Sharonville is a wonderful venue for that. But shooting under pressure, where the shooter only has three seconds in a low light environment to identify a “friend or foe” target is a wonderful benefit to the civilian community of West Chester. It’s a wonderful option to live in a community that allows a person to get a fine steak diner at Jags, then to cap off the evening with a run through the tactical course at Shoot Extreme and take out the frustrations of the day by blasting the hordes of zombies set up throughout the maze. After the shooting is done, all the shooter has to do is turn the guns back in at the counter and Shoot Extreme takes care of cleaning and maintenance. The shooter can then have desert over at The Cone without further worry.

Needless to say, I am deeply impressed with the staff and concept at Shoot Extreme. For a gun loving community like West Chester, Mason and Liberty Twp, I would expect a place like this wonderful shooting range to be packed all the time. It is highly recommended that reservations are made online ahead of time to reserve a spot, and to fill out the release form on the website www.shootextreme.com before arrival because it speeds up the process of getting guns and ammunition just a bit quicker, because that is the goal of shooting at Shoot Extreme, to shoot zombies and to sharpen your senses.

This is a wonderful idea since some of the most popular videos games currently on the market are Undead 4, and Call of Duty. Shoot Extreme allows average people without access to military training and hardware to get a taste of tactical training in real life, beyond a video game environment where the smell of gunpowder and the urgency of the moment are elements of additional danger. For the cost of a night at the movies, a shooter can run the gauntlet of zombies and increase their combat skill level combining entertainment and practicality into a wonderful symphony.

More timid spectators might wonder why such things are important—why people would desire to shoot guns, let alone to do it in such a fantasy environment. The answer is because guns are cool, and are an important part of American culture. For those who don’t like guns, I would suggest that they do not understand what being an American is. Guns are the foundation of freedom, and it is healthy to become competent with them. I would say that shooting guns is as important as eating ice cream at The Cone, or buying new cloths at a department store. Shooting guns is the essence of freedom in America and there is simply no better way to celebrate it than with a trip to Shoot Extreme.

If you want fine dining, in West Chester, Mitchells Fish Market or Jags are the places to go. If you want to shop, then Voice of America shopping complex is where it’s all at. But if you want the fine dining equivalent of target shooting, then it is Shoot Extreme that becomes a must. This is simply the best indoor shooting experience of its kind anywhere, and it’s found in West Chester, Ohio.

The public perception of guns is that they are somehow a taboo subject, and that they should be feared. The timid types who still believe these ridiculous notions are in for a harsh reality as the new shooting range Shoot Extreme is just the tip of the iceberg for what’s coming. America has a youth that has been brought up on films and video games that heavily involve shooting, and as they come into age, thoughts about guns will loosen up considerably. I foresee a day in the not too distant future where guns will be openly carried by civilians like jewelry is displayed today. They will be just as common, and will not raise alarm when seen. And in the near future gun ranges like Extreme Shooting will be more common than unique as this range in West Chester is now.

The creation of Shoot Extreme is out of a desire for an indoor facility that gives to the public the same type of training only the military had access to before. The fun addition of zombies being the targets instead of actual terrorist insurgents only adds a layer of commercial appeal to a functionally sound tactical course that makes it just more than average entertainment. The desire of the timid to remove guns from society with rules and regulations is to suppress a fundamental American right that is never better present than at Shoot Extreme and the eradication of zombies in a mock apocalypse that can befall anyone with the price of a ticket. And the ticket is well worth it!   Part 2 of this posting will go up tomorrow and will dig deeper into the actual merit behind tactical training and the weapons involved at Shoot Extreme.  I am very proud to be a card-carrying member!

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Click Here to see what people are saying about my new book–Tail of the Dragon 

Visit the NEW Tail of the Dragon WEBSITE!  CLICK HERE and help spread the word! TELL SEVEN PEOPLE TO TELL SEVEN PEOPLE!

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

“Ayn Rand still lives through the work of Rich Hoffman”: Galt/Stephens 2016!

“Wow, I just finished reading ‘Tail of The Dragon’ and I physically feel like I just got off a roller coaster without the benefit of a safety harness.

If you believe that progressive policies pushed by collectivist politicians can rob a vibrant free and independent country of its spirit, how excited you will be to see one man, desperate for freedom – powerful enough and devoid of chains, who refuses to capitulate, take on a government without a soul and bring it to its knees!

The spirit of Ayn Rand is still alive and is being lived and written about by Rich Hoffman…Galt/Stephens 2016!

I was impressed how this skillful author can tell this story that involves sleazy politics without using profanity.

Hoffman got it right.”

–George Lang West Chester Twp Trustee

Out of all the reviews for my new novel Tail of the Dragon, this is one of them that mean the most. When I started writing this novel I had not yet read Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand, which is certainly the case back in 2004 when I wrote The Symposium of Justice. I have heard similar comparisons with the John Galt character from Atlas Shrugged with my Fletcher Finnegan character in The Symposium as shown in the Galt/Stevens 2016 reference.  I read Atlas Shrugged prior to the first movie coming out in spring of 2011 while preparing for a Glendale Tea Party Rally with Doc Thompson. Between Doc and me we put forth a bit of effort on 700 WLW to convince AMC Theaters in Newport to book that film so people could see it, and during the process I felt I should at least read the book of the movie I was advocating.

My draft for Tail of the Dragon had already been turned in to American Publishing and they were considering a contract. I didn’t get the offer for publication from them until the end of May in 2011 so while I was in that in-between zone, I was reading Atlas, and of course found I understood the character of John Galt all too well. Like Ayn Rand I have an idea of what a man ought to be, and my characters reflect that belief. This review given by Lang is not the first time parallels have been drawn between my work and Rand’s that stand out in the mind of my readers.

Most notably in The Symposium of Justice the primary protagonist worked as a grill cook at the restaurant Republics which is a fast foot joint popular in the town of Fort Seven-Mile. In Atlas Shrugged I had a de ja vu moment when Ayn Rand placed Dr. Hugh Akston, who was the college professor of Francisco d’ Anconia, John Galt, and Ragnar Danneskjold, into a similar roll hiding out in the open from the looters of society as a cook at a Colorado diner. The theme in Atlas Shrugged was nearly precisely one that I was trying to capture in The Symposium of Justice and I had found that path by taking the path least trotted upon in the forest where the trees were thickest. These characters found that by working out in the open but in professions that society deemed worthless, they could operate aggressively at reforming the world and the bad guys would not see it, because their minds had become “overly specialized.” In that manner I found that without knowing it, I was very interested in the same types of themes as Ayn Rand and my novels were about those topics.

In Tail of the Dragon even though Rick Stevens is a person who wanted to be a race car driver, he had arrived at a stage in his life relatively socially unmolested, giving him a clear idea of what he wanted from the world, and what was in the way of him getting it. As a man he does not have insecurities about himself, his upbringing, whether or not his wife loves him, whether or not he raised his child correctly, whether or not he could make more money than his neighbors because his focus is on his passion, which I believe should be the focus for all human beings. Rick Stevens is the kind of character who does not believe in yielding to others, he does not believe in compromising himself to politics or social fashion. I had been thinking after I read Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead that he was the closest kind of character in literature to emerge since John Galt in 1957 and Howard Roark in 1943 – which is my personal favorite now that I have finally gotten around to reading them. Rick Stevens is certainly cut from the same cloth, but at the time I had no way of knowing. What I did know was I wanted to write about a character as I thought men and women should aspire to be, not what they might otherwise compromise themselves into living in reality. The point of an epic story is not to capture reality as it is, but as it should be so that like a sign post on a desolate highway, the wondering reader might find their way to a life they only suspected was possible.

I know George Lang as my business sometimes bumps into his business, and out of all the politicians that I know personally, he is close to my own age and has seen the very ugly side of politics in a unique way. So I asked him to read an advance copy of Tail of the Dragon and confirm that the vile politics in the book were not so over-the-top that it was unbelievable. In my novel, the story is based on real politics so I wanted to paint the picture with the correct colors, and George had some unique insight to that seedy world and could tell me if I was on the right course.

When George finished the book and sent me the above review, I was a bit taken by it, because over the last year and a half I had become an Ayn Rand fan since she was trying to do in the 1930’s and 1940’s what I am trying to do in the first decade of a new century, and that is elevate the perception of what a man is, define why the world needs them to think this way, and what it takes to get there. The fact that George drew parallels to one of the greatest figures in literary history with Rick Stevens is the ultimate compliment.

Like John Galt and Howard Roark from The Fountainhead, Rick Stevens is an uncompromising man in a world that expects compromises at every turn. Stevens is a man that pays no political system honorable worship. He does not stand in salute to any legal judge. He treats the U.S. President like a bell boy in an expensive hotel—a servant, nothing more or less. Stevens is clearly his own man and the conflict of the story is how he navigates through an intricate story of politics and social engineering while trying to maintain his value system.

I am glad that George Lang noticed what I was trying to do. I am sad that there have not been more attempts in literature from the years of Ayn Rand to the beginning of my novels to explore the same type of characters, because I think the world desires them. The world needs them. I discovered them in my own way through years of trying to make sense of humanity and determine how to fix it. Having the ability to fix problems led me to develop my own modern characters that are examples of man the way they should strive to live. When I fix a car I do not change the tires if I discover it will not start. And in life, we don’t worry about education funding, racism, or illegal immigration when the national debt is about to topple over 16 trillion dollars upon this writing. The problem is something besides all those side issues, and must be dealt with before we tackle the kinds of problems tires may give us. All those other things may be concerns, but they are not the keys to solving the key problems before us. Rick Stevens in Tail of the Dragon like John Galt in Atlas Shrugged was meant to be a mirror that the reader can look into and discover something about themselves so they can utilize their part in fixing big international issues. Those things do not get fixed from the far away land of Washington, or the U.N. of Europe, they are fixed in the daily lives of mankind, and a yearning to be more than what is offered on the precipice of our own destruction.

It means a lot to me to have my name included with Ayn Rand by a reviewer who has been in the political trenches up close and personal. The only sadness I feel is that it took more than 60 years to provide literature with another type of character that can show what a man should be in a world that is much like our own. In Tail of the Dragon, it is a heck of a lot of fun reading about Rick doing what nobody in their socially conditioned minds would dare do–take on the entire legal system with the intention of bringing it down to its very knees—by the simple efforts of refusing compromise and yielding to forces that believe they are greater than the effort of an individual.

Being a trustee of West Chester, Ohio is no small task. Even though I disagree often with much of what the trustees do, George Lang has been instrumental in helping to make West Chester fall in at #97 in America’s top 100 places to live. That is no small feat. In the world of local politics, it is in the quest for the exceptional that helps make rankings like that possible, so his opinion of Tail of the Dragon carries great weight with me.

Thank you,

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Click Here to see what people are saying about my new book–Tail of the Dragon 

Visit the NEW Tail of the Dragon WEBSITE!  CLICK HERE and help spread the word! TELL SEVEN PEOPLE TO TELL SEVEN PEOPLE!

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

Rise of the Citizen Press: The Enquirer puts one more step in the grave–part 1.

It was wonderful to see Peter Bronson, the former award-winning Cincinnati Enquirer editorial columnist, speak at a recent event because he represents a day when the newspaper was a trusted friend in a confusing twisted world. I used to love Peter’s editorial columns as thousands of others did, and upon his exit from The Enquirer the paper has taken a noticeable downward turn as his influence has faded and a new regime of political boot lickers and levy whores have taken his place, bringing down the quality of the paper to a slow dying entity.

The Enquirer as it is today is like looking at a patient in a hospice center. Everyone knows death is immanent; it is just a matter of time. A newspaper that used to set the pace and trend of Cincinnati now is being replaced by citizen journalists, and twitter gossip, because the reporters at the paper, and the management did not adjust to the changing world and embrace new forms of media.

As Peter explained, newspapers used to receive over 1/3 of their total revenue from classified ads and in this modern environment, many of those ads are now on Grieg’s List, Career Builder, and Monster.com. By the time an ad appears in the paper in this fast-moving world, the event is already over, and that is the way of the future. The result to newspapers like The Enquirer has been that they have to replace those classified ads with auto dealer ads which have given the paper a cheapened appearance. And to make matters worse for them, The Enquirer has pushed reporters like Bronson out the door because of his conservative views, and replaced him with liberal, “touchy,” “feely,” emotional types who are attempting to report the news with a liberal slant to a conservative town. That is not a recipe for success.

My experience with The Cincinnati Enquirer extends back into the days when Bronson was still working there, up until March of this year where my relationship with them disintegrated with the debacle article Michael Clark put out on me which was technically an “assassination article.” CLICK HERE TO REVIEW. Listening to Bronson speak I became more sympathetic of Michael Clark, a reporter I had a good relationship with for a long time, but it ended upon publication of a very provocative article about me that was designed to cause me a lot of trouble. I sympathize that times are not good at The Enquirer, and that it must be terrible always looking over your shoulder wondering when the ax is going to fall on your job, and being an education reporter for a paper that is looking to cut jobs in every possible place, education is a tough topic to cover for schools that are cutting busing, cutting jobs, and trying to keep their dirty laundry out of the public light.

Clark and I had a growing tenuous relationship through the last Lakota levy in 2011 because of a scoop to a story I tried to give him, but he refused citing that I had posted it on my blog here at Overmanwarrior’s Wisdom first. In my mind I didn’t consider citizen journalism equal to professional journalism, so I considered the story a scoop for legitimate media. Clark let me know that my blog was very much competition to him, which I was surprised to hear him say. I promised him that the next big story I had to release would come to him before I posted it on my site, giving him pure exclusivity.

I always thought Michael Clark gave fair treatment to my side of the story even though he did the typical liberal slant which was to only mention my portion of an interview in the body of each article while the pro levy people seemed to always get the first and last word. I didn’t mind, because my comments were so strong, that no matter what the other side said, they couldn’t answer my three interview lines with eight of their own. So I made good on my promise to Michael even though many of my friends in the anti-levy circles were warning me that Clark was a snake that would stick me in the back eventually. I figured that if Clark did that to me, then I’d find a way to make it work to my advantage, but in the back of my mind, I didn’t think I’d ever see it happen.

With the No Lakota Levy group the plan for a long time was to get more aggressive if the school attempted a fourth attempt and when Lakota showed signs of doing just that, we turned up the heat, as promised. We decided to create a foundation called Yes to Lakota Kids to help with the sports fees that were extremely excessive with a $10,000 donation for the districts’ neediest kids. For my friends in No Lakota Levy they genuinely wanted to help heal the community after three contentious levy failures at Lakota. For me personally, I thought it was like dropping a spoon full of water in the ocean. Hundreds of kids were still being ripped off in the sports scam at Lakota charging over $550 per sport per child, so I wasn’t happy.

I told Michael what we were doing and he and I planned an exclusive that was mutually beneficial. I wanted the coverage to show that No Lakota Levy was not a group that hurt children, but wanted to help them, and Michael wanted a story that The Enquirer could exhibit on the front page. Some of the No Lakota Levy people who were close to people working for Lakota arranged that I would present a $10,000 check to a member of the athletic department at Lakota so I set up a press conference and all the media in town was invited. Channel 5 came out, Channel 19, and of course The Enquirer. The Pulse Journal was contacted but didn’t make the press conference, but did cover it in the following Thursday edition. I did coverage on 700 WLW, so it was a pretty big deal. However, Lakota did not send over an athletic director for me to give the check to, so we basically just let the media take a picture of the $10,000 check with no school representatives present.

I can only speculate on what the school was thinking, but based on their violent reaction to my press conference, it looked as though we hit them too close to where they live. They needed to be able to extort the children to the public otherwise they could never consider passing another levy, and now we were offering a solution to the school they didn’t want to see fixed. So they pulled off the gloves and somewhere in that process they managed to win Michael Clark over to writing a very harsh article about me to get me out of the levy fight. Lakota had enough, now they were fighting for their very survival.

A few weeks prior to this event I received reports from friends of No Lakota Levy that levy supporters had gathered outside of the Lakota East Kroger store and were conducting a survey designed to belittle me in public. CLICK TO REVIEW.  So I did a blog posting about how angry it made me where I called them latté sipping prostitutes with some very descriptive language that school board member Julie Shaffer put on her Facebook and contacted some of our mutual friends at WLW and of course Michael Clark to get him to write his “assassination article.”

I wondered why Michael had done it for the last 6 months–why he betrayed our relationship for the small price of being on the good side of the Lakota School System, for the easy sports stories and covering every time an administration official moves to a new job? My whip targets in my back yard have featured the name of Michael Clark on each of them and I have cut thousands since that day. Why had he turned against me so spectacularly? So blatantly?

Well the answer is that Michael was trying to save his drowning job, and he needed a spectacular, sensational story, and he used my blog to get it. Up until the Clark article I figured that legitimate media required one kind of discussion, and online activity, comments, blogs, Facebook postings were another. But the Cincinnati Enquirer legitimized my blog as an authentic source of news, which was part of my worst case scenario plan, but even so I found the level of human betrayal to be quite extraordinary.  CLICK HERE FOR REVIEW.

Predictably Clark did me a favor he didn’t intend; he made me much more popular and killed the next Lakota Levy till at least 2013 because people saw through the media driven antics, and they smelled a rat. In the process he killed the good relationship we had which was a good source of school oriented stories for the short-term gain of a sensational story that he and his fellow reporters no doubt were high-fiving in the press room by the overwhelming negative reaction that spread across the city of Cincinnati on March 15th 2012 emitting from every radio in town my salacious blog comments about levy supporters. My numbers at Overmanwarrior’s Wisdom jumped up from 400 to 500 daily hits to 500 to 800 since then, which is what I needed to get my message out to people. Since I couldn’t trust the legitimate media to cover the education issue in the detail it required, my blog site was the best chance at combating trouble in the future, so the sensational story brought more people to the truth. The attention The Enquire gave me helped spread my blog to the rest of the state to districts who were suffering under heavy taxation in degrees similar to Lakota. And Clark is now left to scamper for silly stories that will probably end up costing him his job as mundane rhetoric settles in the wake of the controversy.

Sad, because it didn’t have to be that way, but it is what it is. Such is the competitive world of news and the changing landscape of who delivers it. In this new world it is not those who play it safe, because the real risk is in collusive protection. Sometimes to find the truth you have to pull aggressively in all the wrong directions to discover the possibilities you never thought possible. And The Enquirer played it safe, and is suffering for it.

To be continued in the next posting.

____________________________________________

Click Here to see what people are saying about my new book–Tail of the Dragon 

Visit the NEW Tail of the Dragon WEBSITE!  CLICK HERE and help spread the word! TELL SEVEN PEOPLE TO TELL SEVEN PEOPLE!

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

Obama and his Monkey God Lord Hanuman: Cleaning the ‘excrement’ out of The White House

The 2012 election measuring the follies of President Obama and his economic catastrophes are not of simple job performance. For those who are working on behalf of the Romney/Ryan ticket pounding on doors trying to get the message out to voters to eject the communist ways of Obama back to the abyss from which he came, traditional election procedures will not be enough. The reason is that the undefeated demon fighting monkey-god Lord Hanuman from Hindu faith has blessed the Obama administration with his protection as he seeks to pummel conservative America with its traditional Christian faith into the realm of demons so Obama can continue to reside on his shape shifting throne. Yes, Hanuman it seems protects President Obama from a figurine that has resided in the President’s pocket. Check out the video.

In case that didn’t convince you here is a BBC article on the matter. I’d say the BBC is an exceptionally competent news organization with no skin in the game, and they tend to cover international issues much, much better than the American media does.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/7468662.stm

To learn more about Lord Hanuman check out the Wikipedia link below:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanuman

So what we know about President Obama is that he was personally mentored by the notorious communist Frank Marshell Davis as a young man. Davis was a very sexually kinky guy who appears to have taken several nude pictures of Obama’s mama, which has to be troubling. Obama’s grandparents in Hawaii were open socialists. Obama’s real father was a Kenyan anti colonialist revolutionary who left Obama as a little boy and was married to another woman while he was married to Obama’s white mother. Obama’s step father took him and his mother to Indonesia where Obama attended his most impressionable years in public school, and it is there that Obama discovered the Hindu god Lord Hanuman whom he reverse so intensely that he carries around a small figure of the god in his pocket———–and this isn’t alarming to anybody? Not to mention that Obama started his political life in the living room of a known radical terrorist, and had many other criminal thugs and provokers in his past that appear to guide the President’s hand in matters of economic devastation. To what aim?

Well, if you know anything about foreign Hindu gods and their intentions for the world, Hanuman would like to see the world bow to his feet. According to Obama he was introduced to Lord Hanuman by his step father Lolo as stated in his autobiography, “There standing astride the road was a towering giant at least ten stories tall with the body of a man and the face of an ape. That’s Hanuman, Lolo said as we circled the statue, the monkey-god. I turned around in my seat, mesmerized by the solitary figure, so dark against the sun, poised to leap into the sky as puny traffic swirled around its feet. He’s a great warrior,” Lolo said firmly, “strong as a hundred men. When he fights the demons, he’s never defeated.”

Well, this is a revelation that I did not know, and I’m sure many Americans didn’t know it either as many expect their president to be much more up to date on all things American, and not groveling at the feet of an undefeated monkey-god from Hindu faith. I can’t even conceive of carrying around such a thing in my pocket as Obama does. Such a thing for me might be carrying around a tiny Incredible Hulk  figure for good luck. Yet this information provides much-needed insight, especially in hindsight, into how the President thinks and why he does the strange things he does, and how he gets away with it. You can hear Glenn Beck and his team exploring this further in the video below from a recent radio show.

http://www.glennbeck.com/2012/08/17/hanuman-the-undefeated-demon-fighting-monkey-god/

Obama’s reverence to Hanuman may very well explain why the President has been able to deceive so many people right out in the open. An argument could be made that by praying to Lord Hanuman Obama has gained the Hindu god’s ability to shape shift, which the monkey-god was known to do in order to defeat his enemies.

In the Ramayana Hanuman changes shape several times. For example, while he searches for the kidnapped Sita in Ravana’s palaces on Lanka, he contracts himself to the size of a cat, so that he will not be detected by the enemy. Later on, he takes on the size of a mountain, blazing with radiance, to show his true power to Sita.

Also he enlarges & immediately afterwards contracts his body to out-wit Sirsa, the she-demon, who blocked his path while crossing the sea to reach Lanka. Again, he turns his body microscopically small to enter Lanka before killing Lankini, the she-demon guarding the gates of Lanka.

He achieved this shape-shifting by the powers of two siddhis; Anima and Garima bestowed upon him in his childhood by Sun-God, Surya. Based on this information Obama has been given the power by Hanuman of Anima and Garima to shape shift at will, to seduce to sleep the media and millions of Americans into believing that Obama is not responsible for the economic depression the country is in, he is not responsible for the 16 trillion-dollar debt, he is not responsible for taking America to the doorsteps of tyranny with the signing of the NDAA Act on New Year’s Eve, he is not an open communist with Muslim/Hindu ties, but is a Christian and a free market, capitalist—even though he hates rich people—even though he is himself, rich. The power of Anima and Garima are at work indeed!

Imagine little Obama growing up watching a program like the video below as opposed to Thundercats, or Spiderman on TV. The guy on the ground rubbing the king’s leg is Lord Hanuman.  Can anybody imagine Jesus rubbing the leg of King Herod Antipas?  Progressives for many years have looked to India as having all the answers to their life goals, but few understand what extreme collectivists the people of India are, and to what devotion they sacrifice the self to achieve “enlightenment.” This little production tells the story pretty well. This could be a scene from Obama’s childhood, and speaks loudly of his world view.

People not under the spell of Lord Hanuman can see that Obama is everything but a good president and we can see that he takes on many forms, just like the shape shifting god he reveres so highly in the undefeated monkey-god warrior Lord Hanuman. But to those under the spell of the shape shifting Lord Hanuman, they see a smiling man of honor who can sing them to their deaths without them being any wiser. Such powers are granted by the gods like Lord Hanuman, the ability to appear as one thing, while actually being something else.

So we’re not just fighting a Democratic presidential nominee, a covert Communist Party U.S.A infiltration member hiding behind his race to achieve the highest office in the land on a sea of lies dressed up to look appealing, but we are fighting the undefeated demon fighting monkey-god Lord Hanuman from Hindu faith who sees Americans as the great demon, and Obama as his personal soldier for glory who hides his real intentions behind a shape shifting ability that allows Hanuman to conquer America as the great warrior that Obama’s step dad proclaimed the monkey-god to be.

Obama is not a flag waving patriot who has a deep history and respect for The United States. Whether or not he was born as an American citizen is pointless even though it is incredibly relevant by Constitutional standards.  It only matters if there is respect for the Constitution, which there isn’t.  Obama spent his childhood oversees idolizing a father he never knew who was Kenyan, being raised by a kinky anthropologists student who traveled the world and married a dude from Indonesia who thought Hanuman was a great warrior. Years later Obama would carry around a small statue of Hanuman along with a tiny Madonna for good measure. But what Obama is—is not what he sells as the shape shifting president operating under seemingly divine influence of mysterious forces. It is not only Obama who must be defeated in November, but his undefeated demon fighting monkey-god Lord Hanuman. Because The White House is Americas house, and not a palace for Lord Hanuman, and after four years of occupancy, it’s time to clean all the monkey shit out of the house and stop the stank that hovers over Washington before it spreads to the rest of the country.

In America we have freedom of religion for the purpose of keeping it out of creating policy decisions which drive the country. People are free to honor whatever religion they chose. If a court-house wants to have the Ten Commandments to reflect their Christian heritage, they are free to do it. Or if President Obama wants to worship the monkey-god Hanuman with a little figure in his pocket, he’s also free to do it. But what is important is that the people know what they are electing. Politicians should be prevented from selling themselves one way, while actually being something totally different. In the case of Hanuman, the Hindu version of the story Obama was exposed to as a child is one of extreme collectivism, and this explains his thoughts about social welfare in more complicated terms than simply proving him a communist. Hanuman is honored for being able to rip open his chest to show his devotion to the king Ram and his queen imprinted upon his heart. Hindus the world over cherish this tendency has honorable. But in America we don’t have a tradition that honors such blind devotion, yet many feel that Obama believes himself a king, and that Americans should rip open their chests like Hanuman and have pictures of Barack and Michelle imprinted on their hearts, and that is not how Americans roll.

Contrary to what worldwide collectivist think of The United States, it is not that we are godless heathens that are demons to be defeated by the monkey-god Hanuman, but a free people who find more reverence in a Marvel Comics action figure than in a 85 foot tall statue of Lord Hanuman. The reason is we have a diverse and free culture that has evolved under that umbrella of non collectivist thought, and we have advanced, while many in India are still bathing in the filthy Ganges river and riding bicycles down dirt roads hoping that their revered god Hanuman might step off his pedestal and show the world his devotion to his king Ram. Here in America, we don’t honor kings, queens, princes, or princesses, and we certainly don’t worship presidents as sacred. We honor private property and our right to have it, and such psychological investments has made America a superior culture that is the envy of collectivists all over the world, because they have been left behind, and can only hope that infiltrators on behalf of Hanuman can deceive America into reverting back to huts and dirt roads by the shape shifting abilities of President Obama taking orders from the monkey-god that resides in his pocket to destroy any culture that is not collectivists by nature.

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Rich Hoffman
https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2010/12/04/ten-rules-to-live-by/
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