A Case in Favor of the Kroger Marketplace: Sometimes the way to save something old is with something new

I was very much against the proposed Kroger Marketplace at the corner of 747 and Taylorsville Road in West Chester, Ohio. The opposition was because the people around the community didn’t want it and the developer didn’t seem to want to construct the buffer zone that was needed to appease the community according to news reports. The Kroger store was supposed to be a service to the community in a positive way, but the people who had moved in and around the area obviously didn’t want anything to do with it. So the trustees listened to the voters instead of laying down flat for the developers and the project halted, which I applauded. Now a different developer wants to build a Marketplace literally at the end of my street, and I am quite happy about it. So what’s the difference?

For several decades now the RT 4 corridor that runs a short way through Liberty Township, Ohio has been an optimal area for commercial and business development. When I arrive home after a long trip I cherish my hometown intersection of RT 4 and Liberty Fairfield Road which includes a traditional Kroger store that has been swelling over the years to a breaking point. Often my wife and I go to the strip mall where the Kroger currently exists and eat Chinese food at the little place there which I think is some of the finest in the country. On a Saturday, traffic is terrible because that Kroger is so swelled making further quests into the surrounding businesses unattractive.

The prospect of a 133,868 square foot Kroger Marketplace being built just up the road and diagonally across from the Elk Run golf course to replace the current one is very attractive just because the business at the old one is so robust that it demands an expansion. I purposely don’t like going to Kroger because it’s just too cramped. We typically get our Chinese food and go home because driving through and around the Kroger parking lot is just too cramped that it’s not worth it. One of the benefits of that particular intersection and the developments there is that everything is so spread out, so traffic is typically handled well. I’m happy to see a new Waffle House being erected next to the Taco Bell and LaRosa’s which is across from the McDonald’s and Skyline Chili. There are so many dining options at that intersection that it looks deceptively rural. But, I can get just about everything I need there. I can get my car repaired. I can purchase advanced firearms. I can get all my household maintenance needs between Tractor Supply and Ace Hardware. My wife and I frequently eat at the Frisch’s. Our banking is there, there’s a Hallmark. A Beverage Barn is run by a wonderful Indian family and were among the first in the area to special order Mello Yello for me directly, before the Coke Company resumed distribution back to the Cincinnati area a few years ago. There are so many positive developments that allow my family to do virtually everything we need to do within two miles of our home and I love it. But the grocery experience is just too inconvenient.

http://www.journal-news.com/news/news/public-hearing-for-new-butler-county-kroger-resche/njmb4/

The wealth of the area is conducive to the type of grocery experience that a Kroger Marketplace offers. I like the options offered in the other Liberty Township Kroger store which is a Marketplace—but it’s too far away to be considered convenient. So for me the Kroger Marketplace offers a fix to my present dilemma and the zoning for years has wanted to move in that direction at that particular location, the corner of Kyles Station and RT. 4. There are of course people who enjoy the view of an empty field, including myself. I still enjoy the sight of the occasional farming that takes place on that high hill which looks down into Trenton within the valley of the Great Miami River. But for business development, that particular location is one of the best in the area and is needed due to the value of the developments surrounding it.

There are homes around my property that are in the half million dollar range. The Elk Run Golf course I think is one of the nicest in the city—as it is very picturesque and classy. It’s a bit dated, but is due for an update which will only come if people continue to see the value in it. In a lot of ways the new Kroger will do a lot to bring the proper demographic of financial value to the area directly across from the golf course to appreciate what Elk Run offers as an asset of Liberty Township. Of that new demographic is the residents of the new Carriage Hill development which featured Homarama two consecutive years with homes upward of a million dollars in value. People who have homes like that don’t want to be cramped into a box full of dated architecture and limited shelf space. They want options, high-end cooking ingredients, and a shopping experience that is professional, and free of neurosis. The proposed Kroger Marketplace in Liberty Township is poised to provide all those options and more because the location, view, and proximity to so many family dwellings is just phenomenal.

The West Chester location was nothing like the Liberty Township location as far as placement and overall community impact. The West Chester location needed a developer that understood what the community was weary of. That particular intersection along 747 is very busy already as the Lakota school down the road really mounts up the traffic in the morning and afternoons. The homes in the immediate area already have to contend with a great deal of traffic on crowded roads. But in Liberty Township along RT 4, the road infrastructure is already built; it just needs the construction to begin.

As for the complaints, local residents won’t want to trade their view of a grassy field for a parking lot full of cars. I will be impacted as my wife and I enjoy evenings in our hot tub looking at the stars. The lights from the new Kroger will add to the light pollution which will dilute out more stars from our view. But it’s a small price to pay for the types of high-end food offerings that are typical of a Kroger Marketplace. I will gladly welcome the new development as it will greatly enhance my life and does what new creations are supposed to—it will improve life in the community. It will bring a fresh new awareness not just to the area, but to the legacy items currently already there and in a state of decline.

To this day the Western Row golf course is an empty field. The course died years ago before the spur of development along Mason-Montgomery Rd occurred and there are no takers to develop such a large plot of highly expensive real-estate now that the prices are through the roof. The property is too expensive for a golf course, and too large for more restaurants and small stores. So it sits in limbo. I would like to not see the same thing happen to Elk Run. I love the Elk Run property. I love the golf course. But because taxes are so high, it would be too expensive to privately own if the golf course fails in the future. And it’s too big to fill with business. It has taken twenty years to fill what has been built along that span of RT 4—so it’s not logical to expect Elk Run to fill with anything but more homes at some point. So for those who love green space and the scenery on top of the big hill in Liberty Township the best way to preserve it is to fully support the new Kroger Marketplace in Liberty Township. What’s wrong with a round of golf before a grocery shopping trip? Nothing at all. At the proposed location I would hope that the Elk Run golf course would enjoy new life from a new demographic support system instead of fading away into the sunset as an older generation moves on to greener pastures and a new generation perpetually looks for something new. Sometimes it takes something new to keep the old alive—and in this case, the new Kroger Marketplace will do just the trick.

Rich Hoffman

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‘American Sniper’ Review: A target only Clint Eastwood could hit

It’s been a few days and I’ve let American Sniper wash over me slowly. If I had written this review the day I watched the movie it would have likely have been one continuous glowing epitaph. It will go down as one of my finest moments in a darkened theater. I simply loved the movie. The acting by Bradley Cooper and Sienna Miller were particularly good as the leads of the real life Chris and Taya Kyle—as the rest of the cast was just fabulous. It was very easy to forget that the characters on the screen were actually in a movie. It was also easy to forget that the director Clint Eastwood shot most of the picture around California—given that most of the move took place in sets dressed up to look like Iraq. American Sniper takes you away into a bold story of masculinity, love, drama, and geopolitical circumstances on a scale that seemed as simple as a jazz piece, yet as infinitely complex at every level as the most involved, and beloved classic novel. It is truly a wonder of filmmaking exposition.

As much as I love Steven Spielberg as a director and still consider his Schindler’s List to be the pinnacle achievement in film—I think American Sniper just surpassed it as for very complex subject matter conveyed through raw brutality, hope, and cleaver strong characters toward a resolution not so cleanly wrapped up by the climax. During development for American Sniper Spielberg became hung up on the story inflating the script to over 160 pages. Due to budget constraints at Warner Brothers, Spielberg had to bow out with his hands up in frustration when the studio wouldn’t budge. Warner Brother knowing they had a big problem called up old reliable—Clint Eastwood—the ultimate minimalist director at the top of his game and asked him to take the helm—which he did. The result is likely the best movie in Clint Eastwood’s career—which has spanned over five decades now.

On August 5, 2013, Spielberg dropped out of directing the picture. By August 21, 2013 Eastwood signed on. Upon arriving at the script by Jason Hall, Eastwood immediately went into action. By March 14, 2014, Sienna Miller joined the cast. Principal photography began on March 31, 2014 in Los Angeles. In just six short months Eastwood had delivered a movie ready for production and whipped through the shooting schedule quickly so that by June the company was doing its pickup shots. The film was ready to present to the AFI Fest on November 11, 2014 just six months later. Eastwood had masterfully taken control of a very complex subject matter complete with grieving families, a high-profile lawsuit by Jesse Ventura, a murder trial, and a Hollywood community split in half politically by the subject matter to fly through the production in a way that lesser directors would have been terrified of—to deliver a sheer masterpiece to the movie screen. The only real knock to the movie is that the babies in the film looked like dolls, instead of real infants. Considering the liability of using real babies on a set—I can’t blame Eastwood for the decision. Other than that—the movie was stellar in every way.

I remember when Chris Kyle was murdered and was very aware of the book American Sniper because of the Ventura lawsuit. I had respected Jesse Ventura until I saw what he was doing to the widow Taya and I had my doubts about who said what against who during a bar fight between Kyle and Ventura. So I was turned off to the book waiting to see the evidence as time passed. When Ventura was awarded over a million dollars against the Chris Kyle estate my heart dropped because I wanted to believe that the person Glenn Beck spoke so highly of was everything he said he was. America needed a hero, and it looked like Kyle was just another inflated, propped up celebrity backed by cardboard supports. But, I trust Clint Eastwood. I know how he works. I knew how the Warner Brothers deal evolved—I knew how Eastwood came on board while reading American Sniper so I figured if there was a fraud in the story, Eastwood would sniff it out. So I watched carefully all of Eastwood’s interviews as he did promotional work for Jersey Boys over the summer of 2014 and was intrigued by his beard growth and even in how his stature had changed a bit to reflect the actor I had come to know two decades before. The American Sniper project was having a wonderful effect on Clint Eastwood. Here’s what I think happened.

In October 2013 Dina Eastwood filed for divorce which finally was granted on December 24^th 2014 ending 18 years of marriage. Eastwood did what most men do under those types of emotional escapades, he turned to masculine camaraderie to heal any misgivings he might have had at the time and buried himself into his work. Much like the subject matter in his films, Heartbreak Ridge, Kelly’s Heroes and even Where Eagles Dare, Eastwood found the subject matter of American Sniper soothing—and redeeming. His wife had run off with another man—an old high school buddy. Eastwood handled the situation calmly and in a manner very similar to how Chris Kyle dealt with his cheating girlfriend at the beginning of American Sniper. There was a subtle pain to the scene that was classic Clint Eastwood—and something only he is able to put on-screen.

Throughout the rest of American Sniper there were many similar scenes where the relationship between Taya and her husband Chris were strained. One scene was before the birth of their first son. Chris feeling like he should have been in Iraq shooting bad guys wondered why he was going to the shopping mall with his wife. The moment was broke up by the sudden birth of their son. It was a scene filled with pain, hope, and an earnest attempt to capture the essence of living daily life and all the obligations that tug on our souls. It was again only a scene that Clint Eastwood could have directed in an obvious male bonding experience he was having with Bradley Cooper who was a co-producer on the movie. American Sniper was more than a movie for all the people involved, Eastwood, the real wife Taya, Bradley Cooper–a role of a lifetime for him—and even the memory of Chris Kyle. They were all using the movie to heal themselves and thus their product is healing a nation who is watching this movie and instantly connecting to it.

There is a scene in Magnum Force where Clint Eastwood is on the shooting range for a competitive duel with his police force rival when his buddy “fatso” tells him he’s “never been smoother.” Eastwood’s Dirty Harry character in the movie was dealing with some really intense emotions about friendship, betrayal, trust in law enforcement and an egotistical boss seeded with corruption. Under hard emotional circumstances, Dirty Harry hit the shooting range like a well oiled machine. Eastwood understands that kind of thing and has put it in many of his movies. But in American Sniper his mastery of that well oiled machine has never been more evident.

Steven Spielberg would not have been able to make American Sniper. It would have been good, and likely would have come out like Munich. It would have been a decent movie, but not great. American Sniper took a person like Clint Eastwood to guide the complicated subject matter through a mine field off and on the screen to deliver a product to Warner Brothers quickly, cheaply, and efficiently. American Sniper from the onset was a real life expert shot that only a few people in the world could make leading to an ending that was much more metaphorical than it otherwise would have been.

Eastwood rarely uses slow motion in his movies. Yet when the shot was taken at the end of the film from Chris Kyle toward his ultimate rival—Eastwood slowed the bullet down so everyone could see it flying across the Fallujah cityscape. It was a shot that meant more than just a flying projectile intended for an assassin’s head. It was the story of American Sniper itself and in the end the bullet hit its target and a nation could finally breathe a sigh of relief. It’s not too much to say that American Sniper is the result of a long career by Clint Eastwood who was born to make this movie and perhaps this movie only. Eastwood had made a lot of great films—but American Sniper is the result of a new gear that no modern director possesses—and only he could wield. Warner Brothers is lucky Steven Spielberg backed off the project. They made the movie for a fraction of the budget but more importantly, it will go down as one of the best movies to come out of their studio in their long and storied history.

Long after the Academy Awards ceremony in the spring of 2015 takes place American Sniper will be a favorite movie—particularly among men. It speaks to a man’s warrior bound heart honestly. Over Christmas I was speaking to my father-in-law who had been hiding in his basement at his personal movie theater watching Mark Walberg’s movie Shooter—which is a story about a sniper who has to fight for his own survival against forces that have turned on him. He was down there as the rest of the family socialized for Christmas. But for him, the movie spoke to him much more powerfully than all the good tidings of joy centering on Holiday festivities. Shooter is a good movie particularly for gun enthusiasts—and he loves it. There is an honesty to it that cuts through all the B.S. normally associated with disjointed groups of people from all different backgrounds trying to mesh themselves into a cohesive family unit for the sake of photographs and memory. In the future, American Sniper will be the pinnacle achievement of such movies and will be many people’s favorite to view when they want to touch the face of America and the heart of a real warrior. For my father-in-law, it will be the movie he tucks away into his private theater to watch so to see the purity of what America was always intended to be. He’ll forget about Shooter. We’re not talking about a slack-jawed hippie when we talk about my father-in-law, but a former school teacher and multi-degreed academic who has late in life become quite a gun enthusiast.

American Sniper is a must see movie. Once it is seen, it will quickly become many people’s favorite war movie. It took the heroics of Chris Kyle to get it started followed closely by his tenacious wife. Then it was Bradley Cooper who produced it, gained all the weight to look like Chris and to get so close to the project that he knew the character inside and out and back again. But ultimately it took a heavy-hearted Clint Eastwood who took 84 years of life experience and a recent divorce to make a movie about men and the hard decisions they often have to make when life presses down hard. And in the end when regrets are demanded, they are refused the way testicular fortitude expects—with firmness that punches through death itself to the heart of honor we all crave to carry. American Sniper is more than a movie. It’s a philosophy that is uniquely American and it is one that will make future Fourth of Julys much more reminiscent of what the Founding Father’s always intended—and give reverence to the wonderful freedoms provided by the Second Amendment.

Rich Hoffman

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Another Kind of American Hero: Taya Kyle and how love can manifest resurrection

One of the reasons that I am most happy about the astounding support and box office numbers for the new Clint Eastwood movie, American Sniper is because of the redemption it is bringing to the widow of the slain military hero Chris Kyle—the most deadly sniper in US history. In the span of two years Taya Kyle has had to deal with the death of her husband, a defamation lawsuit by Jessie Ventura, and the ongoing circumstances of the trial of her husband’s murderer Eddie Ray Routh. It has been a painful period for her—the pressure would have crushed lesser people. But she held up and stood strong, and finally through Eastwood’s movie her husband’s memory has been given proper context and a bit of closure has finally become possible. It was commendable that she held it together when attorneys told her to let things die down before making too many public statements because of the upcoming murder trial. The movie was planned before Chris Kyle’s death, so it took a lot of emotional stability for her to continue with the project—which few are talking about. It had to be difficult. And when she was told to put a lid on her comments—she did what she felt was right to preserve her family’s memory—which is one of the most heroic aspects of American Sniper.

On Feb. 11, Eddie Ray Routh is scheduled to stand trial for killing Chris Kyle, the former Navy SEAL played by Bradley Cooper in the film. Prosecutors are seeking the death penalty for Routh, who confessed to shooting the deadliest sniper in American history and Kyle’s friend Chad Littlefield two years ago at a rifle range southwest of Dallas. Routh, a former Marine, plans to introduce evidence that he was experiencing post-traumatic stress disorder and mount an insanity defense, but the enormous profile of Kyle in the wake of American Sniper‘s success could present some complications.

The Warner Bros. film “is going to be an issue,” J. Warren St. John, Routh’s attorney, tells The Hollywood Reporter in an interview. “Can there be a fair trial?”

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr-esq/how-american-sniper-could-complicate-764712

Then there was the Jessie Ventura case where the former wrestler, governor, and conspiracy theorists went after Taya just because her husband had damaged his ego in a best-selling book.

The Minneapolis Star Tribune explains…

In a section of his book called “Punching Out Scruff Face,” Kyle describes a confrontation with a “celebrity” at a 2006 wake for a Navy SEAL. He claimed “Scruff Face” made disparaging remarks about the war, the United States and President George W. Bush, provoking Kyle to punch him in the face.

Kyle later identified “Scruff Face” as Ventura.

In a federal trial last summer, Ventura won a $1.8 million verdict from the Kyle estate after convincing a jury that Chris Kyle had defamed him by writing that he decked Ventura in a bar after he made disparaging remarks about SEALs. Taya Kyle is the executor of the estate.

http://www.startribune.com/entertainment/movies/289097651.html

For Ventura it is obvious it was always about the money because he has done far more to damage his own reputation than the bragging rights of two military veterans in a bar arguing over the Iraq war. The differences between the two men are essentially the differences between Glenn Beck and Alex Jones. Taya is personal friends with Glenn Beck because their values about things are essentially aligned. Jessie Ventura is friends with Alex Jones because their values are aligned. Both are considered radical right-wingers, but they are ideologically as different as the sun and the moon. They only thing they really have in common is that they are both located in space.

Ventura made an absolute fool of himself during the trial. If the debate was with Chris Kyle, Ventura should have let it go upon his death. But to go over a grieving widow was below respectable, and he will always be known for such a gross embarrassment. And now that American Sniper is succeeding, Ventura is considering more lawsuits. It is simply unbelievable that a man would stoop so low—yet Ventura did. I think Ventura’s actions were unfathomable. No reputation is worth putting a widow through what he did. If Taya had emotionally collapsed after such an example of human vileness after the trial went against her—nobody would have blamed her.

But then came the murder trail of her husband and the concern that the killer was planning to plea guilty by reason of insanity. With all the popularity surrounding her husband it looked like Eddie Ray Routh wouldn’t be able to get a fair trial. So there was risk of messing up the trial if she continued to promote the film. But to her credit, knowing that there are serious flaws in the court process anyway—which lean in favor of Eddie Ray Routh by default—she would only get one chance to pay proper respect to her husband and that was through the Clint Eastwood film.

It really is an amazing story both on-screen and off. Through it all Taya Kyle has emerged as a hero in her own right. Her children are extremely lucky to have two parents who have provided them with such magnificent guidance. They have a hero to look up to in their father immortalized forever in the movie American Sniper—and they have a mother who has stood up to some very ominous opposition and tribulations to punch through to the kind of redemption American Sniper has given to her family. According to her husband’s killer she lost her husband to a man who simply wanted Kyle’s F-250 pick-up truck. Such a stupid loss of life over something so trivial would impact Taya forever. Fast forward to the present where pinheaded attorneys are telling her not to jeopardize the murder case by promoting American Sniper. Fortunately she has enough experience after getting burned over the Ventura case to know that she will likely not get justice in the Eddie Ray Routh case either. The best thing she could do for her husband was to get behind American Sniper—and let the legal world choke on itself.

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/sniper-killer-traded-soul-victims-new-truck-article-1.1255561

Taya’s story is only one of the many circling the American Sniper movie. Her heroics in the face of much misery is defiantly fuel behind the quality of the movie. Eastwood has obviously captured her spirit in his film—and it makes the movie much better. It is just one example of the kind of extraordinary feats surpassed to bring American Sniper to the big screen and why it is such a triumph to see the movie getting so much support from the public. Any other director but Eastwood would have been caught up in all the emotional drama and the film could have languished for years in development—because of all the legal cases pending. But because of Eastwood, filming started, concluded, and was distributed before the lawyers could find ways to stumble the project—which is another miracle in itself. Legal fights, grieving family members and a left-leaning Hollywood society violently against the end result. Only Clint Eastwood could have made the picture.

Like all parasites who want to suddenly hook their wagon to the star of the deceased Chris Kyle, Ventura is at it again claiming that because of his defamation suit against Taya American Sniper had a tremendous boost in sales—so he wants some of that money too. The link to the story is below. Ventura’s friend Alex Jones claims that Eastwood’s American Sniper is a giant hoax where the U.S. government is using its soldiers as propaganda pieces only to discard them when they cease to be useful. Jones utters that the whole project is designed to brainwash the American people that war is good for our society. But it is Taya who will laugh last as America has her back by supporting American Sniper at the box office. Living well is the best revenge, and because of her heroic stand against so many bullies after her husband’s death, she will get that redemption. And she deserves it.

http://controversialtimes.com/news/another-lawsuit-jesse-ventura-back-in-court-against-chris-kyle-american-sniper/

http://www.infowars.com/american-sniper-exposed-as-giant-hoax/

For every ticket sold in favor of watching American Sniper, a bad guy somewhere weeps. So for God’s sake, see the movie as many times as you can possibly can. Taya Kyle deserves the wind in her sails that will come from it. Yeah, Chris Kyle was and is an American hero. But, his wife in many different ways was just as heroic. And that is a truly magnificent story worthy of a sequel to American Sniper.

Rich Hoffman

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Finding the Gold Within: What women who desire ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’ and young black youth have in common

One of the reasons that I am most proud of the extremely good work that the Joseph Campbell Foundation has done over the years is in their continued innovations by members to open up the world properly to future generations. I was extremely pleased to learn from them that Karina Epperlein has produced and directed a new film showing the wonderful work being done at the Alchemy, Inc academy in Akron, Ohio which seeks to specifically help young black males with a treacherous crises facing virtually every young man in the world presently—that enormous gulf required to step from childhood into manhood. Karina’s film is titled, Finding the Gold Within and focuses on six young men as they enter their first year of college. Each has personal circumstances to overcome as he works to escape the straightjacket of contemporary stereotypes, and each has participated from sixth grade on in Alchemy, a myth-centered mentoring program that fosters refection, critical thinking, and living an authentic life.

The biggest crises of our modern-day is not in politics, it is not in economics, religion, scientific development or any other nightly crises espoused on the various news broadcasts, it comes from an emerging menace which seeks to wipe out mankind altogether—the destruction of the male. The social experiments have concluded and a 100 years of results are now pouring in. Some of those results are women climbing over themselves with soiled panties to see the upcoming Fifty Shades of Grey movie largely because the men in their lives have been feminized and defanged to the point where females biologically, and intellectually just aren’t interested in them. This is bad because all young children crave the structure that a good solid father brings to a family as a pillar of reliability and strength. Kids who don’t have that fortunate situation in their lives suffer greatly until they find a replacement, or come to terms emotionally with their condition.

Of the worst of the social experiments were the various black communities where government tampering with the motivations of productive enterprise has most crippled enthusiasm for economic mobility. It has been more profitable for black households to produce children without fathers in the home, which has had a devastating effect on old and young males in minority neighborhoods. As the government has become the father figure in such homes—particularly under poor conditions, the real fathers and men of the community have turned to the bottle and drugs to compensate their failed family endeavors. There is a reason that a majority of state liquor licenses are issued to poor communities where a bar is open to wash away the broken dreams of the males while the women breed more fatherless children to qualify for more household government income. The intention was originally good, the by-product has been terrible. Black children as a result of this terrible social failure now are left with serious holes in their life which then gets filled with gangster behavior, drugs, illicit women, and years and years of alcohol. I have in the past tried to befriend these types of males and they all end up in the same place in spite of my optimistic attempts. Once they get to a certain point, there is no way to fix them. Alcohol and drugs literally destroy them, and they become hooked on those substances because of the mountains of guilt which follows them from their criminal past is impossible to escape.

The trick in the whole escapade is that young black males—all males for that matter—but particularly the ones in minority neighborhoods are looking desperately for that mysterious bridge from childhood, where they nurse close to their mother’s breast, into that void of master hunter and gatherer among their male peers. When young black kids do not have men in their lives to show them the path, they turn to gangs because males have a serious need to fill the role of a provider of some kind. Once they fall into the narco life, the money they make goes to cars, jewelry, and tattoos which indicate to females that they are a male worth mating with. But when the women aren’t interested in a family and the male has no goal to work toward because the females just want a sperm donor toward their next welfare check—the males by the time they hit their twenties flame out and end up as future alcoholics and drug addicts. If they live into their forties they are unlucky miserable specimens too far gone to properly help. The only answer that really works is to fix those young men before they become old broken heaps of social experimentation gone wrong at the local neighborhood bar going nowhere fast.

This is where Alchemy, Inc comes in. The use of myth has always functioned as a sociological and pedagogical tool with the goal of teaching people how to live in this world together while simultaneously providing examples of how to realize the personal gifts each individual brings to the stage play of life. Today this method closely resembles what is known as Social and Emotional Learning (SEL). The roles that we are all born with are meant to be fulfilled, not altered in some way that is not authentic to our individuality. To attempt otherwise is to declare that on the great stage play of life that we don’t want to play the role we are given—so we lobby for some other position. The transvestite community is good at this kind of second-guessing. They might have the role of the bold and gallant warrior in the great play of life, but decide that they actually want to play the princess. So they protest, yell and scream about the injustice of life, only to show up for the play in a dress. You can see why this causes a problem if the play was written by the god of your choice with the intention to see it play out on stage. Young males are brought into the world to become men and women will expect men in their beds, at their dinner tables, and helping to raise their children. But when young men don’t even get a chance out of the gate because nobody showed them the way, they fail. Alchemy, Inc is a group dedicated to teaching those young males how to find that path in their individual lives. Alchemy, Inc. according to their website shown below, provides a healthy masculine model and strategies that set youth on the right course to stay in school and become successful, responsible family men and professionals rather than being sidetracked by the false appeal of apathy, anger, drugs, violence and victimhood. Their program is embraced by young men because of its authenticity and realness. Young males who are alienated, disengaged, and cynical towards life are drawn to the program because Alchemy, Inc offers a way to answer their “call to manhood.” They are a program that does not question or criticize youthful masculinity but repositions its positive aspects to show the way from boyhood to manhood. The course values are steeped in the character traits of “The Hero.” The model of The Hero inspires youth to persevere, learn to make the necessary sacrifices, overcome obstacles, and serve their community. Alchemy, Inc is more about cultivating wisdom than teaching knowledge.

Alchemy, Inc. offers a safe group environment for youth to focus on topics directly related to their stage of development. Youth who have engaged our program:

Increased their Social and Emotional Learning (SEL)
Increased their school attendance
Increased their high Grade Point Averages
Increased high school graduation rates
Increased their college acceptance rates
Developed the character traits necessary to succeed in life

http://alchemyinc.net/

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Alchemy-Inc/231344416972351

The beauty of Alchemy, Inc is that they do not seek to preach a particular set of values to young people; they instead turn to mythology to bring the kids to their own individual adventures with authenticity. The focus is on learning to think instead of being told what to think. The kids are shown the way to become the heroes of their own lives, so that they can aspire to become the hero of a family at some future time.

Alchemy, Inc is one of the best mentoring programs I have seen for young people, particularly minority kids. All young boys need atonement with their fathers and if they don’t have it, or get it, they are marked for life as lacking. They can overcome that drawback, but it is more difficult for them than it is with kids who have a stable father figure. The kids in the Alchemy program don’t have the advantage of fathers in their life. So they have myths to replace the emptiness, which is such a powerful tool. When there isn’t a father around to teach young boys how to be men, the job doesn’t get done. Myth is a worthy substitute. When it’s applied it does the same thing as a man who speaks to his sons about the mysteries of the universe and their role in it as men when they graduate to such a level. Mythology encourages young men to be heroes not villains in their own story, which a future family will need for their nurturing.

Before feminists declare that they don’t need men, think about what you’re saying. In just a few weeks from this writing Fifty Shades of Grey is about to hit theaters and women are salivating over it. Not all women but a large enough demographic sector to provide a scientific sampling. They are as excited for the movie as teenage males might be for Star Wars, or Avengers. But why? For the adolescent male Star Wars and comic book heroes are myths that instruct what our internal values are—authentically represented by the characters. The heroes in those stories are the men we all want to become—whether we do or not is up to our personal decisions and values. If we are given the myths to live by, we will likely follow the example into our own heroic story. But because too many men give up on their heroes, they do not arrive into their adulthoods properly equipped to take care of the needs of their women. So the women are left with a void to be filled by romance novels and the occasional movie like Fifty Shades of Grey. Men are scratching their heads wondering what all the fuss is just as most women wonder why Marvel comic films are so impressive to males.

The story of Fifty Shades of Grey is all about a powerful man who is redeemed through a hero journey through love into an awakening of a higher truth. The sadomasochism is reflective of all the repressed and social pressure for authority that is imposed on most people, so in mythology it is revealed through sexual fantasy. Just as most women are suffering from the condition of not having men in their lives that are strong enough to fill their yearnings; the children of minority neighborhoods do not have proper males to lead the young to their adulthoods. What’s missing in both cases are strong male characters. And in the absence of proper instruction from one generation into another, it is mythology that provides the path. For that, I am very proud and happy to see what they are doing at Alchemy, Inc.

If you happen to have the chance to see Karina Epperlein’s new movie, you should do so. More on it can be found at the following link:

http://www.karinafilms.us/index.html

Rich Hoffman

Visit Cliffhanger Research and Development

James Holmes and ‘The Suffocator of Sins’: The fuel of conspiracy theory

Checking on the Holmes case in Aurora, Colorado, especially after the recent terrorist escapades in Cincinnati during the opening weeks of 2015, a status was needed as to when the so-called “Joker” theater gunman would actually go to trial. I said initially that the James Holmes case had all the signs of a false flag incident. That’s more than the typical Alex Jones conspiracy theory; it’s rooted in the behavior of the federal government in their prosecution process. The reason that there are all these conspiracies about the Illuminati, alien abductions, and government cover-ups extending from JFK to the present is because of the behavior of the authorities when pressed for answers is not satisfactory. That same sloppy manner was seen during the recent Cincinnati arrests and it is what isn’t mentioned that provokes the imagination to fill in the blanks leading to conspiracy. With the Holmes case it was obvious from the start—yet there wasn’t any real desire to do any hard reporting by the mainstream media. Likely, they feared that the attention span of the typical American wouldn’t want to pull back the 7, 8, or 9 layers of the story that held the actual truth. The rest is that they didn’t want retaliation against them either—as for the forces capable of making a Manchurian Candidate type assassin might turn their anger in the direction of any proper investigation. So that has left proper research to be left to the amateurs and proprietors of new media—such as in the video below. The following documentary by Mark Howitt is good—it’s a bit rough and it bounces around to seemingly disconnected theories—but the collection of news reports and information is worth its weight in gold. Howitt is certainly on to something important. I think there is several more layers to the story—but this documentary presents the essence for critical analysis. To understand the James Holmes shooter and the forces really at work against us, this video needs to be watched, so do yourself a favor and do that now.

In that video it was stunning to see clips of James Holmes as the honor student that he was, very connected to other people and well on his way into the fast track of success. It has a very stunning parallel to the Christopher Cornell case in Ohio where the supposed attacker was planning to join ISIS and turn his anger toward the government into violence and mayhem. The strangest problem regarding Cornell is that the typical ISIS sympathizer isn’t angry at the collectivism of government employment; it is toward the degradation of the West as seen from the perspective of the Middle East and the Sykes-Picot agreement after World War I. Cornell’s motivations seem—contrived—forced into an all too easy package complete with a ribbon on top. It is possible, as anything is in the realm of physical reality, but highly unlikely. Likely, Cornell has more in common with James Holmes than with the lunatics in Syria who are executing homosexuals, westerners, women, and anybody else who stands in their way without any fear of reprisal.

Holmes was a very intelligent, and integrated young man. Real interviews paint a picture of a very different kind of young person than the lone gunman obsessed with Batman movies. Specifically the infatuation Holmes had with the MTV personality Diggity Dave’s movie The Suffocator of Sins. That was a rather interesting tidbit to the story of a struggling future assassin trying to work things out in his head prior to becoming one of the biggest mass murderers in history. In The Suffocator of Sins a would-be hero finds Batman killed so he takes his mask and identity to become a resurrected Dark Knight. This is a very important attribute to the trial of James Holmes because it points directly to the kind of behavioral conditions that took place prior to the murders. However, since Holmes has not within two years even made it to trial yet—these psychological profiles have not been professionally examined for public consumption leaving only conjecture at this point. But it clearly shows the kid was struggling with something intense—which likely has a direct connection to the advanced neural studies he was involved in at college.

The point of the matter is that there are other elements to the story which have not been properly explored, and likely ever will. The source of the conspiracy is the question, why? For instance why hasn’t more been discussed about these conversations that Holmes had with Diggity Dave other than blowing them off as a publicity stunt for a poorly made, cheap movie by a Batman enthusiast, because the motives are highly relevant? Yet very few media outlets covered that story with any real seriousness. They were all too quick to wrap up the story with the booby-trapped apartment and the easy arrest of an incoherent James Holmes sitting in his car.

Then there is all this trouble about a second shooter. The Kennedy assassination has been mired in conspiracy for over five decades over essentially the same kind of thing. Do these gunmen act alone, or did they get help? There is still compelling speculation that there were others involved in the Kennedy shooting and until the report which has been sealed away since that time is revealed finally, that speculation will continue. In that regard the CIA is still insisting that a majority of the sealed documents about the Kennedy case remained sealed—which is odd behavior unless there is something there that they are embarrassed about? The speculation is that deceased agent George Joannides is a large reason for the continued sealing—as there are embarrassing aspects to the CIA involvement that will be revealed. All the people alive at the time will have to die off, and the CIA will have to change hands and be named something else before those records are unsealed—because the agency is protecting itself. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could do that dear reader if you were caught in some illegal action? When you control the law, you can control the punishment for poor decisions. So we don’t know if there was a second shooter, or if Lee Harvey Oswald was a Kremlin controlled assassin, or an agent of Cuba, or a false flag to cover up other issues where Kennedy wasn’t getting along all that well with the powers that wanted his seat. It’s all very murky to say the least. And here again, at the Holmes murder scene many years later are witnesses who talk about two gunman—one of them with a goatee. Well, Holmes didn’t have a goatee. The revelation of a second gunman was uttered on the spot quickly, but not mentioned much in the following days and law enforcement was very quick to mop up any reference. They found their guy in his car calmly, and it helped them wrap up the story quickly. Yet for nearly ten minutes there was plenty of time to escape, but Holmes didn’t even try. He then warned officers of the booby traps in his apartment. So why did he set them up if he didn’t have the heart to set them off—after all, he did just walk into a movie theater and shoot everyone he could dead. So why the sudden change of heart?

There are so many things that don’t add up, and the case is still lingering as if the state is dragging its feet on purpose—because they also know that there are things that just don’t add up, and the media does still ask questions they can’t answer. Because of where the case is now, the prosecution needs a nice clean case where Holmes admits to the killing but under mental ailments so that the evidence can be presented against that aspect only. But if the trial goes in another direction and all these open windows get explored, and testimony by Diggity Dave gets added to the mess, and the people at the scene who stated that there was a second shooter—well, then the case against Holmes isn’t so clean and the prosecution has some serious trouble in proving guilt—which is why it’s still in limbo.

These conspiracy problems seem to be increasing, not decreasing. The old tricks used by authorities to cap a case just aren’t working anymore because citizen journalism is doing all the work that the media should be doing and is uncovering the deep layers instead of just the surface stuff. That journalism may not be the most accurate, but at least the questions are being asked—which then require evidence that likely doesn’t exist because of the cover-up aspects of the case. Really smart people just don’t fold up and become mass murders without some kind of provocation—so the question remains—where did that provocation come from? Was it culturally, or was it because of something Holmes got into during his research? Was there a second gunman—who booby trapped the Holmes apartment not with the mind to maim officers—but to destroy evidence in the explosions set off by authorities—computer hard drives, paper reference to known accomplices, and other truths which needed concealment, because the same illusive behavior is being shown in regard to Christopher Cornell in Ohio? I smell a rat—don’t you too?

All this could be cleared up with just simple transparency on behalf of agencies like the CIA, the FBI even the ATF. But we have witnessed what happens in those government agencies when they are caught. The IRS recently destroyed their hard drive evidence implying their guilt during the Lois Lerner debacle, and the ATF actually had an informant that testified against the agency—who suffered much ridicule over the “Fast and Furious” scandal. The CIA is still covering up the Kennedy assassination—God only knows what else they are covering up that is much more recent—and relevant. Because they are hiding something—they are all guilty by association. The court of law may not be able to prosecute them for their crimes, but the public has and will continue. And the conspiracy theories will perpetually boil until the real facts of these matters is revealed without the cloak and dagger escapades of empire building federal employees up to no good for reasons unknown to convention.

Rich Hoffman

Visit Cliffhanger Research and Development

ISIS Terror, Assasination Attempts and Opinions from Transexual: Bizarre stories from Cincinnati and the root of conspiracy

There is an element of lunacy that is persistent just beyond the haze of most layered group associations. Once the veil of proper conduct and mannered conversation is pulled back elements of mild psychosis among the patrons are ever-present and those participants are not difficult to shove over the edge with just a little provocation from directions not directly connected. In my fiction I have dealt with this literally as a story device—such as in The Symposium of Justice where a water tower in the town of Fort Seven Mile broadcast a signal designed to stimulate the pituitary gland of innocent people so that they might drop from the edge of sanity on queue and conduct evil that could then be capitalized by those desiring control through legislation over all human kind. A wonderful purpose of fiction is to explore these possibilities from the safety of thought. However real life is often more treacherous—and complicated—as it was in Cincinnati recently as a number of major national stories struck the bastion of conservative value in a manner that seems a bit too organized to be incidental.

First was the story of Josh Alcorn, which I covered previously. CLICK HERE TO REVIEW. Even several weeks after the story broke in Kings Mills, Ohio a United Kingdom newspaper did the following story centering on a little ol’ suburb of Cincinnati:

A close friend of Leelah Alcorn, the 17-year-old who took her own life after her parents refused her demand to live as a woman, was allegedly prevented from attending the teenager’s funeral.

The mother of Abby Jones, Ms Alcorn’s friend and the person who posted photographs of her after took her life, said the youngster had wanted to attend the funeral but was banned from doing so by Ms Alcorn’s parents.

“Her mom called and blamed Abby for everything that got posted online, even though Leelah’s page was public,” Ms Jones’ mother, Danielle Pieper-Jones, told the Daily Mail.

“My daughter just wanted to say goodbye to her best friend. They did not allow her to go to the funeral… had no right to call and harass my daughter.”

Ms Alcorn, who lived near Cincinnati, Ohio, took her life last month by stepping in front of a truck. Before doing so she posted a message on her Tumblr account. In it she explained that her parents, who are devout Christians, would not allow her to live as a woman.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/leelah-alcorn-suicide-parents-stopped-best-friend-from-attending-transgender-teenagers-funeral-9980986.html

Then there was the terrorist attempt—or one that was being planned by a 20-year-old kid named Christopher Lee Cornell as reported in the following story:

Tom Willingham didn’t know what to think when the FBI approached him about helping them arrest someone they suspected of wanting to commit a terrorist act on U.S. soil.

“Nobody knew enough to be scared,” said Willingham, president and CEO of Point Blank Range & Gun Shop. “We knew everyone (law enforcement) was in place.”

Willingham’s employees sold two semi-automatic rifles at about 11 a.m. Wednesday to Christopher Lee Cornell, also known as Raheel Mahrus Ubaydah, at the Colerain Township location.

“We did not know (Cornell). He came in for a purchase,” Willingham said.

After the gun store employees ran Cornell’s name through the national background check system to ensure he had no criminal record and was eligible to buy guns – “Not anyone can come in and buy a gun and walk out,” Willingham said – Cornell was sold what Willingham called “sporting rifles.” In addition to the M-15 rifles, Cornell also bought 600 rounds of ammunition.

When Cornell left the store and walked to the parking lot of the business in the 7200 block of Harrison Avenue, he was arrested by the Joint Terrorism Task Force.

Cornell, 20, of Green Township, is accused of using cyberspace to plot to assassinate Congressional employees and attack the U.S. Capitol for his personal jihad. He was charged with attempted killing of U.S. government officers and possession of firearms in furtherance of an attempted crime of violence.

He’s being held in the Butler County Jail without bail.

http://www.cincinnati.com/story/news/crime/crime-and-courts/2015/01/14/fbi-cincinnati-man-plotting-us-capitol-attack-arrested/21770815/

But that wasn’t the end of the news day in Cincinnati. Apparently even closer to the heart of GOP politics was Michael Hoyt who went crazy and planned a bizarre assassination against speaker Boehner at the Wetherington Country Club in West Chester. Hoyt told on himself with a 911 call and was the only reason he was even caught. The story went like this as reported by the Cincinnati Enquirer.

Michael Hoyt, 44, who worked at Wetherington Golf & Country Club in West Chester, Ohio, was charged after admitting that he considered poisoning Speaker Boehner’s drinks in a loosely-planned assassination plot.

Hoyt said that voices in his head told him that Boehner was “evil” and that the Speaker was responsible for last year’s Ebola outbreak. He also felt that Boehner had mistreated him during visits to the club.

The crazy plot was discovered after Hoyt himself called authorities on October 29 saying that he was “Jesus Christ” and needed to kill the Speaker.

http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/01/14/boehners-bartender-admits-to-assassination-plot/

Those are some extraordinary stories all of which show some sort of neurosis stemming from a mental ailment. Whether it’s a boy who wants to be a girl, a young kid who wants to rename himself after a jihad against America and go on a terrorist rampage, or a charismatic bartender for one of the most exclusive country clubs in Ohio thinking that the devil wants him to kill John Boehner–it is safe to say that all those incidents are related to broken thinking patterns. Yet as inflated as the stories became they really weren’t that treacherous. After all, the FBI picked up the kid who wanted to commit jihad even if they did encourage the behavior so that they could make an arrest and show that the federal government was capable of doing something right in the wake of the Paris attacks. The country club bartender actually told on himself doing all the work of authorities for them. Perhaps it was the last bits of sanity of Michael Hoyt creeping out from beyond the void to do the right thing one last time while he still had his mind. And Josh Alcorn was just another suicide in the scheme of things as a young man found it beyond his skills of negotiation to deal with what society told him to do, and what his parents taught him to live by. Suicides happen every day—sadly, yet this one was made into a major issue—as were the other two stories percolating in the opening weeks of 2015 in Cincinnati, Ohio. Something is amiss.

Conspiracy theory might speculate but there is no way of knowing how any of these stories might be connected, because the roots are deeply entangled in the static patters of our learned living. After all, most literature classes in college require a reading of the Koran, not the Holy Bible so to encourage students to “open up” to other religious influences. Public schools are intensely secular in regards to Christmas, or any other Biblical heritage, but go well out of their way if a student is a Muslim, a Hindu, or a Buddhist. And kids are taught that there is no fault so long as everyone arrives at a consensus. So long as a majority of people believe something, then a reality is born—at least that is what’s taught. So is it any bit of trivia that there are so many people on the precipice of emotional collapse. The answer is no. Put garbage into a mind, you get garbage out.

But further, what about those strange voices that haunt the wooly loner stuck in a man’s body, or struggling not to kill a powerful politician, or a copy cat who wants to do something meaningful with their life after the Paris attacks made heroes of other young boys looking for redemption against feminism under the battle flag of Allah. Do you believe in ghosts’ dear reader? I do, and they do work in strange ways. Sometimes they seem aligned to help the enemies against goodness in the most remote ways. I have put my own contemplations into some of my speculative fiction just for the sake of argument. After all science is always there for rational discussion—and there is an explanation for everything if all the facts are revealed. But in the case of these sudden Cincinnati stories—the heart bed of conservativism—it looks as if we don’t have all the facts. We have the results, but not the immediate causes. Isn’t it just a bit strange that so many people are going crazy in the same region all at once when history otherwise indicates? What’s different about this situation?

The answer is one that no one dare ask in the light of day for fear that they may follow Michael Hoyt into the mental ward. But science points toward that revelation. Cincinnati is becoming the symbol of the old Quit Riot song, “We’re All Crazy Now.” So what is making everyone crazy, and why? Perhaps it is the same root that wishes to wipe away the good traditional work of one of the last places on earth that is truly conservative. Maybe the target is the area that still has a large enough demographic footprint to push smaller communities over the edge. History may have something to say so to point us in the right direction. After all, wasn’t the whole IRS scandal against conservative groups started in Cincinnati? What type of weapons are available to the modern NSA data banks and the politicians collecting that data? We don’t know…..do we? But the facts do point in a direction, and the origin is not in Cincinnati. It’s in the whispers of change that come from groups hell-bent on imposing their vision on the innocent and conservative for aims that are not easily detected. Yet their imprint can be seen not by what they show, but by what they don’t.

Maybe we’re not all so crazy after all. We’ve just been told we are by the truly guilty parties. Something to contemplate.

Rich Hoffman

Visit Cliffhanger Research and Development

The Science of Defying Odds: Cliffhanger’s return to extrodinary endeavors

There is a science to defying the odds. I’ve spent a good part of my life unraveling it. I first came to know a bit about that science when I was six years old and stabbed the class bully in the eye at school with a pair of scissors because he kept threatening to beat up everyone. It was considered impossible to stand up to such a large, mean kid, yet I did. Then after many thousands of culminating instances 40 years later just a few days ago, when I was caught in an ice storm with my motorcycle going down a hill so steep I couldn’t stop, steer, or even stick my foot upon the pavement to hold it up because of all the black ice. I made it to where I was going in spite of those oppositions, as I always do. There is a secret to surviving and advancing in spite of the odds and I have unlocked it after much study. It could be said that I have done all this for a literary character I have thought about since imagination first took root, who is the hero of my newly released book, The Curse of Fort Seven Mile. The description of that long contemplated work goes as follows:

Evil is amok through the police departments, school houses, and every political crevice of Fort Seven Mile. Labor unions, secret societies, and drug cartels are revealing their deep plans constructed by a global menace, “The System” to unleash complete control over the human race. An era of chaos seems poised to unleash hopelessness into every home throughout the world, except for the emergence of a curse that refuses to submit.

From the shadows comes a solitary savior who seems unstoppable and is threatening to shine light everywhere that darkness rules. In the wake of the masked avenger known as Cliffhanger the town of Fort Seven Mile is uniting around the heroic obscurity. However the greatest mystery of all is the origin of this gallant madman who defies all odds at every turn and a race is on by the forces who wish to maintain control of mankind’s minds. A lone reporter is uncovering a carefully concealed secret which has been suppressed since the emergence of ancient civilization. The Curse of Fort Seven Mile is loose and the world will never be the same again.

To me, evil is a very real thing and all the nightmares of humanity that manifest it. Personally it is the greatest odds to defy and has been a constant obsession for me for as long as I can remember breathing, which has led to living the kind of life I have. So obviously Cliffhanger is the result of my conscious mind. I won’t even attempt to say otherwise because it would be less than genuine to declare.

I started constructing the character of Cliffhanger as a kind of modern Zorro, or a Jedi Knight set in the modern here-and-now world. But for my interests Cliffhanger needed to be so much more—he needed to be the beginning of everything that it means to be human and to do that he needed to defy every kind of evil known to mankind so that a mirror could be held up to flash the image back to society in a way that few have ever attempted.

My literary motivations have largely been shaped by writers like Johnston McCulley, James Joyce, and Ernest Hemmingway, only my frustrations with their characters were that they were entirely too weak—and human. Human in that those characters were still vulnerable to the odds that evil dishes out to the struggling protagonist. In Joyce’s case, his characters were always deeply flawed and part of the resurrection process indicative of Vito’s cycle of birth, death, and resurrection. Cliffhanger is poised in this Curse of Fort Seven Mile to question that entire process with a new way of thinking. Even though it is a worked categorized as an action adventure story, to me it is a work of philosophy constructed through art.

In essence The Curse of Fort Seven Mile is about what occurs when various collective associations strategically seek to stack political favor through cronyism at the expense of other groups. What they all miss, and why they tend to be associated with evil is that their sole purpose in associating with one another is in taking what someone else made for their personal gain. In this first chapter it is evident that the takers are the local police department in Fort Seven Mile as they are looking for an increase in their budget so that raises can be allocated on schedule. That is the source of a remote and little talked about evil which of course carries over into other aspects of life. Even though the police sell themselves to the public as a force for good, their relationship to collectivism through collective bargaining is fundamentally evil. When they are challenged they have no choice but to attack the sanctity of the individual—who in this case happens to be the mayor of Fort Seven Mile. Because the mayor is popular she is earning respect from sectors of society in and around Fort Seven Mile which threaten the political grip the police have through their F.O.P. union. So the leader of this particular union has no other recourse but force to make the mayor comply with his needs. The result of this confrontation is a job for Cliffhanger.

Future chapters will be released each month throughout the year and will drive the story to a very dramatic conclusion that is very satisfying, and unique. For instance the next chapter deals with the influence of teacher unions. The one after that the role drug cartels play on local politics and so on–so that by the end of this particular book many different ways of analyzing collectivism in all its evil forms has been examined through the prism of an action adventure story. It has to be entertaining, and it is—but to satisfy me, it has to examine some aspect of society that is not being dealt with, the origin of evil and why it spreads so easily from person to person.

The pleasure in writing this Curse of Fort Seven Mile novel published as a traditional serial much the way H.P. Lovecraft and Charles Dickens did a century ago is that the gatekeepers have been eliminated completely. When I pitched the first Cliffhanger book The Symposium of Justice I even received grief for the content by self-publishers. The uphill battle just to put it in print was enormous and I have always felt that it affected the quality of the end product. But what did get accomplished from that first work was the structure which would lead to this new story—which will evolve into a very detailed and expansive work before all is said and done. It is no longer necessary to plead to a publisher and bend a work to their whim. Now it is possible to publish without any corrosive elements but the original vision of the author. This can of course cause quality problems for any work, but it also creates a freedom that has never before existed for an author with something important to say. For me, The Curse of Fort Seven Mile has a lot to say, important, entertaining, and just whimsical—but it is certain that only a few years ago—when I in fact started the blog, Overmanwarrior’s Wisdom, it would not have been possible to publish such a story as this new novel. This first chapter would have been drastically cut by any publisher—I know first hand. My second novel Tail of the Dragon—a separate story aside from the Cliffhanger tales and also coming soon as a re-launch—was heavily scrutinized particularly the scenes involving police violence. The prison scene itself was heavily edited to fit a more PG-13 market instead of the R rating that is sometimes needed. Yet, even though sometimes very violent and expressing sometimes suggestive sexual images, The Curse of Fort Seven Mile will contain not a single curse word—and is in essence a morality tale for good. The evil that often oppresses the good is vile, and to properly convey it, language is needed to paint the picture correctly and there is a lot of colorful language in this new Cliffhanger story. For those who know my free work on blog sites like this one, you should assume that if I am selling something—that there is value behind it worth the cost.

So it’s an exciting time to release a new Cliffhanger story. The gatekeepers are bypassed and the likes of this type of modern mythology can actually be told and delivered as a direct download to the world’s digital devices. There is no purer publishing method anywhere or at anytime than from my mind to your iPad, iPhone, NOOK, Kindle, or other device. By releasing each chapter at a time, it will give readers something new to look forward to each month specific to their outlets. The work isn’t so long that it makes reading tiresome, but just long enough to carry the reader deeper down into the mysterious well of mankind’s secrets—the intention behind all chance. The ultimate questions–does a human being hold free will over themselves, or are our stories written for us by beings we’ve never met directly but only provide a voice to our ear. And is the source of that voice a benefit of wonder and divine intervention or the origin of a nightmare? When a bullet passes by our ear in a shoot-out is it luck that saves us—or is it our own free will to write our own destinies and to that end what role does it place in religion, law, and daily living where evil attempts to erode every sharp opinion into a decayed mess.

As I’ve said, I have spent over forty years working out the mystery of defying the odds. I have a lot of experience in doing so and I practice at it every chance I get. By defying the odds we’re not talking about scientifically implausible things like jumping from one mountain to another—but in things that are physically possible, like navigating a motorcycle down a wintery road covered with black ice when logic says that you should crash. It is in The Curse of Fort Seven Mile that we begin to unravel that ambiguity of chance to reveal a deeply guarded secret that it takes a lot of pain, and terror to discover. But for the reader curled up in their favorite seat with their electronic device bringing them the world with the touch of a button—that secret is available through the heroics of Cliffhanger. That journey begins at this link:

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00S7AXFMA

Enjoy!

Rich Hoffman

Visit Cliffhanger Research and Development

Leelah Alcorn Who–His Name Was Josh: The world gone mad in Kings Mills, Ohio

There was never a Leelah Alcorn from Kings Mills, Ohio who died on December 28^th 2014. There was a kid who killed himself by the name of Josh, but there was never a “Leelah. Yet at the 2015 Grammy Awards ceremony the name was mentioned as if it were a reality. Candlelight vigils across the world broke out to mourn the boy who wanted to be a girl and the parents of the deceased were attacked because they refused to acknowledge the name of their son as a female. The world has gone literally mad as virtually every news outlet in every demographic market cited the name of Leelah as if it were a reality instead of the actual name of Josh just because the troubled kid mentioned it

in a suicide note saying:

“I have decided I’ve had enough. I’m never going to transition successfully, even when I move out. I’m never going to be happy with the way I look or sound. I’m never going to have enough friends to satisfy me. I’m never going to have enough love to satisfy me. I’m never going to find a man who loves me. I’m never going to be happy. Either I live the rest of my life as a lonely man
who wishes he were a woman or I live my life as a lonelier woman who hates herself. There’s no winning. There’s no way out. I’m sad enough already, I don’t need my life to get any worse. People say “it gets better” but that isn’t true in my case. It gets worse. Each day I get worse. That’s the gist of it, that’s why I
feel like killing myself. Sorry if that’s not a good enough reason for you, it’s good enough for me.”

Well, the kid killed himself and the news reports were astonishing in the aftermath. They went something like this:

In life, Leelah Alcorn felt alone. Born male, she feared she would never be the woman she felt like inside.

In death, the transgender 17-year-old – born Josh Alcorn – wanted to make sure others never felt the way she did.

“The only way I will rest in peace is if one day transgender people aren’t treated the way I was, they’re treated like humans, with valid feelings and human rights,” Alcorn wrote in a post on the social media blog site Tumblr.

“My death needs to mean something,” she wrote in the post, which she scheduled to appear the day after her death.

That plea marked her final public words.

On Sunday, just before 2:30 a.m., Alcorn walked 4 miles from her middle-class Kings Mills neighborhood with its views of Kings Island to Interstate 71. There, she was struck and killed by a tractor-trailer. The highway was closed for more than a hour.

By Tuesday evening, Leelah’s story had become a worldwide story – one of how transgender teens often feel alone and afraid. The hashtag #LeelahAlcorn was topping Twitter; news sites worldwide had picked up the story; and someone had even created a Wikipedia page for Alcorn.

Alcorn’s mother, Carla Wood Alcorn, wrote on Facebook Sunday, “My sweet 16-year-old son, Joshua Ryan Alcorn, went home to Heaven this morning. He was out for an early morning walk and was hit by a truck. Thank you for the messages and kindness and concern you have sent our way. Please continue to keep us in your prayers.”

According to the school statement, Alcorn attended Kings schools and was most recently enrolled as an 11th grader at the Ohio Virtual Academy, an online school.

Before her death, Alcorn scheduled her note to post on her Tumblr blog at 5:30 p.m. the day of her death. A note titled “Sorry” came later. In it she told her younger brother and sisters she loved them. She thanked her friend Abby Jones for “dealing with my pathetic problems.” And she told her mom and dad, “You just can’t control other people like that.

In 2010, the National Center for Transgender Equality and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force reported 41 percent of 7,000 transgender people surveyed had attempted suicide.

An analysis of the survey responses by the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention and UCLA Law School’s Williams Institute last January showed transgenders who experienced rejection by family and friends, discrimination, victimization or violence have a higher risk of attempting suicide.

Leelah Alcorn, who was born Josh Alcorn. Cincinnati City Councilman Chris Seelbach, the city’s first openly gay councilman, has taken on Alcorn’s cause. In a post on Facebook – shared more than 4,700 times – Seelbach said Alcorn’s death shows just how hard it is to be a transgender today in the U.S.

“By reading her letter, Leelah makes it clear she wants her death to, in some ways, help ‘trans civil rights movements,'” he wrote.

[Abby] Jones met Alcorn last spring when Alcorn, a talented artist, applied to work as a caricaturist at Kings Island.

Alcorn’s work was the best of any new employee. They drew caricatures of each other and a friendship took root.

“She was super bubbly and upbeat, with a really brash sense of humor; she could make anyone laugh,” said Jones, 17, of Milford.

Freshman year of high school, Alcorn came out as gay as a way to transition. Her friends were kind. She wrote her family “wanted me to be their perfect little straight Christian boy, and that’s obviously not what I wanted.”

She had never really understood what she was feeling. At 14, she finally understood. But, she said, her family didn’t understand.

“She would get really down, there was just no talking her out of it,” Jones said. “She always said, ‘Nothing is going to get better, I am never going to transition successfully, I am never going to be the pretty girl I want to be.’ “

The following links show to what extent the various progressive advocates advanced the situation out of proportion trying to profit off the sad kid’s death:

http://www.cincinnati.com/story/news/2014/12/30/transgender-teen-death-needs-mean-something/21044407/

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2015/01/12/its-time-for-conservative-christians-to-take-responsibility-for-transphobia/

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mary-j-moss/apology-letter-to-leelah-_b_6451606.html

http://www.advocate.com/commentary/2015/01/12/op-ed-when-parents-are-enemy

http://www.slate.com/blogs/outward/2015/01/02/leelah_alcorn_suicide_prosecuting_her_parents_won_t_help_other_trans_kids.html

http://sdgln.com/news/2015/01/06/tragic-death-leelah-alcorn-how-her-mother-my-mother

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

http://www.inquisitr.com/1717434/transgender-teen-leelah-alcorn-commits-suicide-says-f-k-you-to-parents-in-suicide-note/

http://www.thehollywoodgossip.com/2015/01/leelah-alcorn-suicide-mother-still-wont-acknowledge-teen-was-tra/

http://www.daytondailynews.com/news/news/crime-law/transgender-teen-killed-on-i-71-left-suicide-note/njdWs/

http://www.thenewcivilrightsmovement.com/davidbadash/mother_on_leelah_alcorn_being_transgender_we_don_t_support_that_religiously

Clearly, there is more at work here than just a kid who committed suicide. Those types of things happen, but in this case it looks as if Josh being a bit on the soft side was nurtured through popular culture to believe that he was a woman and the public school system along with the progressive culture in general supported the child in this belief. Believing that Josh was a child of the “community” and not of his parents—society took it upon itself to supersede the Christian teaching the parents were trying to give their troubled boy—and this only fed the problem more because it put a light on his plight from friends plugged into MTV and Lady Gaga music driving a wedge between his parents and the rest of the world—which was wrong.

Yet it wasn’t the child who was attacked for committing suicide in such a premeditated way that he actually left a post dated blog post of the incident—it was the parents for taking the child out of public school to try to reclaim their child before it was too late. They were raising him in a conservative area with a religious influence for a reason—because it is an area which supported their family values. Likely, as a family, they avoided places like Key West during Fantasy Fest so that their children wouldn’t be corrupted by what they saw there, so they lived in a nice conservative community, went to church often, and did their best to give Josh what they thought he needed. The parents were qualified to do that because Josh was “their” son. But, the LGBT community feels it is their mission in life to destroy such people and through popular culture, they got their fangs of poison into young Josh, and the parents had a right to be upset about it. From nearly every corner of the world nutcases who believe the Rocky Horror Picture Show was actually a good movie uttered that if society didn’t accept their ridiculous notion of sexual perversion—there was a lack of moral justice contained in the hypocrisy. In other words if people didn’t accept that some men wanted to wear high heels and dress as a woman—that there was something wrong with those who condemned the behavior—instead of the owner of a hairy ass hanging out of a pair of thongs under fishnet stockings.

It was clear what that old movie and later the stage play Rocky Horror Picture Show was up to when it told the story of the newly engaged couple Brad Majors and Janet Weiss who found themselves lost and with a flat tire on a cold and rainy late November evening. Seeking a telephone, the couple walked to a nearby castle where they discovered a group of strange and outlandish people who were holding an Annual Transylvanian Convention. They are soon swept into the world of Dr. Frank N. Furter, a self-proclaimed “sweet transvestite from Transsexual, Transylvania”. The ensemble of convention attendees also included servants Riff Raff, his sister Magenta, and a groupie named Columbia. They all discovered the wonders of sexual perversion during the story and everyone had a marvelous time—according to the movie. It was a story designed to break down the moral boundaries of Christian society as a direct assault.

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

With this Josh Alcorn case we see how far into the logic of society that the Jim Sharman directed movie has manifested into normalcy. After all, for over two decades many college campuses have shown midnight showings still of the old movie which attract hoards of young ideological, and rebellious fans looking to be different from their parents with the escape velocity of youth. Literally, the lunacy of that Rocky Horror Picture Show story has grown from a mere seed planted long ago in American culture to reveal a harvest of decadence plaguing our land—and it was an attractive rebellion to young Josh Alcorn who was obviously pushing back against his church going parents like most young people do. Only in his case he had a support network which interfered with the family believing the kid to be a child of society which supersedes his parents. Such beliefs are clear in the support links above. That is the real cause of the death of Josh Alcorn. Realizing that he had gone too far to come back after Christmas ceremonies—he stepped out of life hoping to be made into a martyr, which of course the whispers in his ear had told him would happen. Upon his death, they made good on the promise calling him Leelah instead of Josh—the ultimate insult to the Christian family who gave birth to him and raised him from a baby. To declare otherwise is to insult all the long nights of caring for the child as an infant, all the diaper changes, all the countless hours of teaching him to talk, read, write, and move around in the world—a decade long endeavor that required a lot of time. The LGBT community actually arrogantly believed that it had a right to sweep in and corrupt the youth with just a few years of pop culture investment—and that they have a right to the soul of a potential collectivist for their hive of homosexuals, transvestites, and lesbians all serving the animal instincts of sex—raw sex and unpolished emotion.

Yet those Rocky Horror Picture Show nutcases and transsexual perverts demand tolerance from the conservative right—but they certainly don’t give it in return. They are violent, and intrusive. From the moment of Josh’s suicide they have hounded Josh’s parents who simply wanted to grieve for the loss of their beloved child. For the parents, the kid had just entered puberty a few years before and everything happened so fast that they didn’t even know what hit them. They pulled the child out of public school too late—and they likely regret it now—so their loss is even that much more magnified. The LGBT community expects respect and understanding—yet they don’t give it. Instead, they are all about being in our faces about it flaunting flamboyantly their decadence with great fanfare—then expect sympathy when something goes wrong.

They are in essence trying to conduct upon the world the same plot given to Brad and Janet when they came across the transsexuals in the castle—they were a nice, pure, couple who were gradually corrupted throughout the story until at the end they are bisexual experimenters ready to assimilate into the rest of culture without any judgment as to gay, transsexual, ugly, pretty, good or bad—they are just there for the consumption of pleasure—social pleasure and nothing more.

Josh’s parents had a right to not let their boy wear a dress. He was a boy and so long as he lived under their roof, that’s the rules of the universe as far as a family is concerned. It was not “societies” responsibility to rescue the child from oppression—and religion. Society interfered, and they caused the death of a young man shortly after Christmas in 2014. But to make matters worse, they attacked the parents too for trying to instill values in the young lad, then showed quite a lot of ridicule when open acceptance of their LGBT ways was looked upon with scorn from normal Americans. Yet the media in just about every regard picked up the story and ran with it—a young girl named Leelah Alcorn threw herself in front of a truck on a lonely stretch of I-71 because nobody accepted who she was. Because she didn’t think her parents would ever let her wear a dress in their presence. The media lied; there was never a Leelah, only the ranting of an unhappy kid caught between social pressure and religious conviction who invented the name on their way toward suicide. And the media picked up the story and made up the rest to fill the LGBT progressive agenda. What is most obvious in this story is that if the media was so willing to accept a complete falsehood—what more do you think they are willing to make up and lie about? You already know the answer dear reader. If it fits the progressive agenda—anything is fair game—and that is what we learned in the wake of young Josh Alcorn from Kings Mills, Ohio. I feel terrible for the parents. They tried to help the child, but society snagged him away like child molesters in the night—and they destroyed the Alcorn child. Lady Gaga types and all the seeds planted by Jim Sharman are all just a bit guilty of the creation which ended up on the highway late at night in the cold of judgment and social pressure lost to time and opportunity. The fault rests on their shoulders for creating an opposing force to the sanctity of the Alcorn family—and the responsibility is one they more than share.

Rich Hoffman

Visit Cliffhanger Research and Development

Jeffrey Epstein’s Orgy Palace: Bill and Hillary Clinton’s progressive roots

When you deal with legislators and corruption in politics—and the declination of morality among social institutions it is not enough to analyze the results—but the cause. There is a very good reason that I have been pointing out the sad plight of underage girls who are on the fast track to destruction, as I pointed out in last night’s article. CLICK HERE TO REVIEW. I happen to know one right now. I have known them in the past and I’ll know them in the future and always the end is the same. You’d like to help them, but if they don’t listen—you just can’t do anything for them once they go down that dark path. So to really understand that dark path and the cause and effects, I turn toward complicated literature—like James Joyce. Because there is a dark underbelly to everything in our modern culture that religion can no longer reach. And millions of young women are prone to this danger because of pedophiles like Bill Clinton and his old friend Jeffrey Epstein. The story goes that Epstein as a billionaire financer luring support always in front of losers like Bill Clinton brought in major politicians and the social pace-setters to massive orgies with underage girls at his private island resort in the Caribbean. The cause of the desire for old sex hounds like Bill Clinton to catch a plane to Epstein’s house and live that evil life is important because it proves that his behavior in the White House, and as a prior governor of Arkansas were not isolated to just the power of a governing seat. They are part of his internal needs—which I described in the river Liffey metaphor—which is as close as anyone is going to get to properly indentifying the problem. James Joyce nailed it years ago—and it is still a major problem among men feeding off the sacrifices of young girls to inflate their egos and cancerous prostrates.

This is a concern of mine always, but particularly when a family member—even a remote one is involved. You want to help these girls understand how the world works and not to become just another trophy on the wall of Bill Clinton’s sex chest. It is obvious that people like Clinton are nothing like Middle America. He certainly, morally, ethically, or even by the standards of a man does not represent anything close to what my beliefs are—so his global aims through the United Nations is a major red flag to me. He was a terrible president in my book because he had tremendous moral issues. He and Hillary obviously have an open marriage and his ability to fly down to Epstein’s island sex palace is something she had to know about—and was fine with. This is very relevant because she wants to be the next president in 2016. This story may very well derail that attempt, but the issue is not that Bill Clinton was caught again with his pants down—it is a behavior pattern that is dangerous and is actually endorsed by Hillary. Hillary has a lot of female supporters because many see her as a victim, and they sympathize because they too are married to Bill Clinton types of males, and many men if given the opportunity to do what Clinton did with Epstein would in a New York minute. So there is no moral conviction against the behavior and flawed people like the Clintons continue to get national respect and press—even though they should be in jail for sexual abuse, drug trafficking, and murder either directly or indirectly. The body count in both sex victims and the actual dead is just too great for the Clintons to be completely innocent. In this case where there is smoke, there is fire—lots of it. And that fire roared in the Caribbean with Bill in full participation. But what’s most sad of all is that there are other people who set up those sex orgies by scooping up disenfranchised children—young girls 14 to 15 years of age who can satisfy the sexual appetites of these horrible men—men like Bill Clinton. It starts with casual drug use and once addicted, the young girls will do anything to get their fix. They leave behind their families, their support mechanisms and they run to the orgies of horrible people like Epstein to become sexual conquests of scum bags like Bill Clinton.

And the activity continues because politicians like Clinton want access to such girls. Much of the Clinton support of the LGBT community comes from his personal knowledge of these indiscretions and instead of dealing with the sexual sickness of their behavior; they further perpetuate it with their charisma. When they are done with the girls they toss them aside like dirty toilet paper and ruined lives then preach to the rest of the country that America needs to treat women with more respect. It is a sick practice that is highly dysfunctional—and evil. It rips at my heart to see any girl go through this process—especially one that I’ve known since she was a baby. Such a young girl is totally vulnerable to their parents and the parents were terrible leaving her to be open to such behavior as we are discussing with young girls finding their way into the mansions of people like Epstein and Bill Clinton. If it isn’t those types of scum, it is others—the various strip houses across the country, the escort services, or any number of prostitution outfits thinly disguised as massage services or dating opportunities. It all starts with drugs and some youthful skin—and the scum bags of all existence line up to take advantage. In case you dear reader are not familiar with the Clinton/Epstein case in the Caribbean here is a basic breakdown with a support link for more information:

A new lawsuit has revealed the extent of former President Clinton’s friendship with a fundraiser who was later jailed for having sex with an underage prostitute.

Bill Clinton’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, who served time in 2008 for his illegal sexual partners, included multiple trips to the onetime billionaire’s private island in the Caribbean where underage girls were allegedly kept as sex slaves.

Tales of orgies and young girls being shipped to the island, called Little St. James, have been revealed as part of an ongoing lawsuit between Epstein and his former lawyers Scott Rothstein and Bradley Edwards.

It is unclear what the basis of the suit is, but they go on to call witness testimony from some of the frequent guests at Epstein’s island to talk about the wild parties that were held there in the early 2000s.

Flight logs pinpoint Clinton’s trips on Epstein’s jet between the years 2002 and 2005, while he was working on his philanthropic post-presidential career and while his wife Hillary was a Senator for their adopted state of New York.

‘I remember asking Jeffrey what’s Bill Clinton doing here kind of thing, and he laughed it off and said well he owes me a favor,’ one unidentified woman said in the lawsuit, which was filed in Palm Beach Circuit Court.

The woman went on to say how orgies were a regular occurrence and she recalled two young girls from New York who were always seen around the five-house compound but their personal backstories were never revealed.

At least one woman on the compound was there unwillingly, as the suit identifies a woman as Jane Doe 102.

She ‘was forced to live as one of Epstein’s underage sex slaves for years and was forced to have sex with… politicians, businessmen, royalty, academicians, etc,’ the lawsuit says according to The Enquirer.

Epstein’s sexual exploits have been documented since 2005, when a woman in Palm Beach contacted police saying that her 14-year-old daughter had been paid $300 to massage him and then have sex.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2584309/Bill-Clinton-identified-lawsuit-against-former-friend-pedophile-Jeffrey-Epstein-regular-orgies-Caribbean-compound-former-president-visited-multiple-times.html

These bad people have used their positions of power and wealth to normalize their internal weakness for youthful girls. The reasons they do so I explored in the river Liffey metaphor and it is the best way to truly explore the reasons. But these are not isolated issues. A “majority” of males contemplate such fantasies and that is a huge problem for all of society everywhere in the world. And anybody who is prone to such weaknesses is not fit to govern a child across the street let alone an entire state, a nation, or the world through the Clinton Foundation.

It is arrogant beyond measure to even suggest that there is a broker who was a family friend of the Clintons who was actually invited to the wedding of their daughter and collected naked pictures of young girls who might make for good sex slaves at Epstien’s orgy palace. This broker was herself a woman and was given some level of social respect just because she knew the Clintons and a rich eccentric billionaire who happened to like sex with underage kids. These same people are telling us what kind of education we should provide for our children, how the world should get along with each other, how economies should be structured—yet in the back of their mind—if you are a female, and a young one at that—they are undressing you and looking for every way possible to exploit your innocence. Their regard for your life and sanctity is equivalent to a condom they might pick up at a drug store and discard just as quick. They don’t care at all for the life of young women, or their future lives and the children they may later have. In their progressive utopia everyone owns everyone else anyway so they might as well start young and train them to be government dependents broken before they ever get out of the gate. But the basis of their political philosophy is not out of care for the poor, or a yearning for equal rights, or even the plight of women—it is to weaken people so that they can have their way with the targets of their desire. For Hillary, no question, she wants power—her love of progressivism is purely ideological as it was defined by the communist insurgents of the sixties. But those progressive philosophies were constructed by people like her husband for reasons exhibited at Epstein’s sex plantation in the Caribbean. And these are people who will lie, kill, and destroy anybody who stands in the way of what they want. Then—they will lecture all of us as to what the interpretation of law is or what it should be as they trash the Constitution, deface our Christian heritage and integrate our economy with a mass wealth redistribution scheme because deep down inside they want to hide their sexual dysfunctions behind a thin veil of chaos. So long as the world is in chaos, and integrated with low values, people like Clinton and Epistein can take their pick of humanity’s litter and staff their sexual orgies with the cream of the crop as they see it. And the mothers of those poor girls won’t have a leg to stand on because like drug addicts—most of them are addicted to the government breast and would do nothing to violate that relationship even if it means saving their own children from a fate they themselves suffered from.

Evil is upon us. Where do you stand dear reader? It doesn’t come quickly, but slowly—so much so that the encroachment must be measured in decades instead of days. But the path to that evil is paved by the innocence of young girls and their short bursts of purity which scum bags like Epistein and Clinton seek to devour like sluts and bar whores along the river Liffey. It is the very foundation of progressivism and the vile instruction that comes from that despicable political philosophy designed to destroy lives by looking like its helping them.

Rich Hoffman

Visit Cliffhanger Research and Development

The River Liffey: A message of warning to all women–especially young ones

One of the many metaphors of the great book Finnegan’s Wake is the role of Anna Livia Plurabelle within it who is often compared quite dramatically as the epitome of the river Liffey as it flows through Dublin, Ireland. I have in mind one specific young girl in this article, but this should be helpful to all young girls and old girls alike so that they might know their place in the universe not as a law constructed by politicians, ideological college radicals, and bra burning feminists—but rather the rules of life itself governed by a rapidly expanding universe and the forces from without which drag that momentum. Women are what they are just as men are—and for our bearings we must refer to our arts to measure the honesty of our analysis.

This is for every girl who shows up at 16 years of age to a family event in tight jeans, knee-high boots, a few body piercings to be sexy and sheik by contemporary standards and makes sure that her shirt is just short enough so that when she raises her arms, her belly button shows—these days pierced and occasionally tattooed—and believes that she is the first of her kind to arrive as a seductress of mankind and has the power of all existence between her legs. Such girls are often reckless and smoke cigarettes thinking that their fine skin will not wither away into dried leather any time soon, and abuse themselves with drugs and alcohol thinking that it aligns their minds to the impulses of animal instincts without any recourse. There is only one way that such stories end—and for women—all women, it is a box canyon of options that defies escape once they’ve moved into it. It is the hardest thing in the world to watch young girls you care about enter this void to know what will become of them on the other side. So to chart the course we must turn our gaze at Anna Livia Plurabelle.

Anna was the wife of HCE in Finnegan’s Wake and was forced to come to his defense when her husband fell from grace. Like all women who have the gift of giving life through their sexual exploits, Anna is seen in the novel as the river Liffy itself which runs in from the countryside to the west to enter the suburbs just outside of Phoenix Park. It then widens and moves into the harder—seedier elements of Dublin where the prostitutes discard often of their waste as well as the various pubs and the ruckuses which proceed after many ales of Guinness have passed through the mouths of many humans, through their digestive centers and out onto the streets of Dublin at the small hours of the morning to be washed with rainwater down the city streets and dumped into the river Liffey day in day out for all eternity.

The river then widens more and carries all of the garbage of the city into Dublin Bay to wash out into the sea only to be evaporated by the sun and predisposed back across Ireland in the form of rain to begin again at the foot of the River Liffey far to the west where the great body of water starts as a thin little attractive stream of purity and sanctified newness. The water that runs down this river is considered beautiful and fresh when it is in the upper part of the river and is thin enough and shallow to walk across with ease. But toward the middle and end of its lifespan, prior to mixing with the sea, it becomes a vision of filth which carries away the contents of mankind’s waste—its indiscretions.

The best way to see the River Liffey is not to visit Ireland and sit upon its shores to watch the water roll by, but to visit a typical funeral. There are a lot of River Liffey’s which cry after their deceased friends and families–the girth of their asses barely fitting their pew seats. They cry not just because they will miss their deceased icons, but because they know that they too are carrying with them all the garbage of mankind’s existence with them into the sea to be integrated and evaporated into rainwater only to be sprinkled once again across the land. Another way to see the River Liffy is to visit the Pepper Pod in Newport, Kentucky at 4 AM. That is where the strippers from the Brass Ass and the Playpen come after their shift is completed to catch a bite to eat. They cover up their c-section scars and put on street cloths looking like young ladies trying to pay the rent. Under their cloths they are in need of a shower, but the food is the first order of business as they stave off the last of the night’s drunks still hoping for a hook-up. Some of the older ones—in their late 20s and early 30s are starting to wrinkle up from a decade of smoking and abusive living. They have been pissed on and covered in enough reproductive juices over the years to pave a highway from Cincinnati to Florida—but at 4 in the morning, they just want an Iced Tea. They are the river Liffey before it passes by Phoenix Park in Dublin—still nice to look at, but starting to fill with trash. To see the river further downstream you have to go to a Waffle House during the same hour and the waitresses there have their lives filled with all the garbage of mismanaged lives, all their bad marriages, the abusive drinking, the ungrateful children, the failing health, the general degradation of any city anywhere in the world washing away its waste into the rivers which flow through them. Women are the rivers who carry away the waste of their families whose lives are filled with embarrassments as they near the bay.

But rivers never start that way, there is always hope that a river will maintain its beauty and grace well into it long journey into the sea. But it never works that way. Men craving the scenic structure of a young river that is still thin enough to cross from one side to another—that hasn’t had the world’s trash dumped into it yet—seek the vibrant waters of a shallow stream. They like young girls because nobody has yet tainted them with their glutton behavior. So upon seeing such a creation of beauty seek to be the first to dirty the waters with their waste so to declare to the burgeoning city downstream which will ultimately dump its cargo into the much wider river that they were there. For the perverted man of middle years it is like graffiti indicating that their lives were once important and that they existed as they too are facing death’s door with hesitation and drunkenness. But unlike the women, they are not flowing anywhere. They do not bring forth life, they only deposit themselves into the rivers they encounter and so are free to walk from river to river dirtying up all that they can along the way. The woman has no choice. She is the summation of what gets dumped into her as she flows through life. Fair or not, that is her fate because women—unlike men are the givers of life and the primary target of life’s garbage—which has to go somewhere.

Feminists have tried to rectify this situation by making men clean up the table at the end of a family meal, but to a large degree this will never take. Men might be willing to clean up a dinner table so that their women will give them sex later—otherwise they will just desire to return to the living room to watch football while the women carry away the waste of the meal. But they are not inclined to do it unless there is something to be gained for them in doing so. Unlike women, they do not feel inclined to carry away the family’s waste. They do not feel the responsibility to do so. They only feel inclined to make a mess. They are like the drunks who dirty up the streets of Dublin which the river Liffey carries away daily. The cycle never ends even though the characters might change.

Most young girls at 16 think that their lives will always be as they are at that point in their lives, thin, shallow, and a little bumpy from rocks that are visible in their clear waters. They don’t think of the consequences of a little dirt here and there because their waters are rapidly running and pure with sparkling radiance. But anybody with a brain knows what’s downstream and once there, that young 16-year-old will begin to fill up with trash. They’ll widen proportionally, their depths will deepen and they will no longer be able to see the bottom. They will quickly become dirty and contaminated—and much slower moving. The cries of the rivers at funerals are not so much that their end is near, but that they are no longer sure who they are as they are so filled with everyone else’s junk, that they have lost that slim body of water from the start which they understood so clearly. At the end of their lives they are like the river Liffy before it hits the harbor, wide, dirty, and so deep that the bottom can hide the bodies of the past without detection. The 300 pound Waffle House waitress missing most of her teeth and wearing the face of a cigarette ash try is just such a river before it hits the bay. The same could be said of the Mississippi River south of New Orleans, or the St Lawrence before hitting the Atlantic, or the Nile before hitting the Mediterranean Sea. There is no escape for such women. It is the fate of their nature, and the destination for every young river still shallow and clear.

So, while you can it is good to keep away those who seek to muddy you up. When they come near, push them away. And slow yourself down as much as possible because what is downstream will contaminate your waters and the faster you get there, the quicker you become the river Liffey prior to its dispersal into the bay. There is no cuteness, no tattoo, no skin-tight jeans that will steer your life away from such a fate. Instead, they accelerate your decent into such a deep and muddy river. The more lucrative the sight of your countryside beauty, the more inclined the men will be to imprint you with their marks of defacing graffiti.

If this is a little obscure, then so be it. The warning has been cast. Fate will do the rest. The only escape from that fate is to slow down the water’s flow of a river and avoid the contamination of a city if possible. And seek not the lure of the impure to carry their filth to your fresh waters to be the first to mark purity with waste. The path of such a river is clear; they will within a few short years of their rebellious rapids from the “west” become those whores of the Pepper Pod so sick and tired of love juice that they just want a freshly made cup of tea and coffee. As I said, this message is intended toward a specific person who is on the last gasp of a young river about to flow into the red light district of Dublin. But it is useful to any young women trying to find their direction in life.

Rich Hoffman

Visit Cliffhanger Research and Development

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