Tag: overmanwarrior

The Decline of Hueston Woods: Capitalism versus statism sponsored conservation

It had been a while since I had been to the Oxford area; the last time was to give an on campus speech last year, so it had been some time since I had made my way into Hueston Woods State Park.  However, for likely the 60th to 70th time in my life red lights were filling my rear view mirror and a patrol officer  was at my window telling me I was driving too fast—as determined by some cry baby, wimpy, leather faced, cheating whore of a politician afraid of riding the Merry-Go-Round at a summer fair.  I was being pulled over for going 40 in a 25 MPH zone.  My answer to the State Officer when asked if I knew how fast I was going was that I had no idea the speed limit was so slow.  For me, it was impossibly slow.  I can ride a bicycle faster than 25 MPH.  That is simply too slow for a long series of roads.  What are they protecting at the park with such a slow speed limit, turtles, rabbits and squirrels?  Worse yet, where I was pulled over was right at the entrance where fisherman and boaters were pulling in for some early morning access to Action Lake which is currently undergoing a $15 million dollar face lift at the damn.  The lake receives roughly 1.8 million visitors per year so Huston Woods still gets a lot of activity after many years but during my recent visit, it was easy to see that there was a lot more that they could do if they only had the right attitude.

I grew up with Hueston Woods so I know its history very well and am in a position to offer some criticisms that are needed if it wants to sustain itself into the future.  As a kid I spent many summers at camp there between Boy Scout groups, my church and in my teen years I was actually part of the chain gang that had to walk the entire park and pick up trash around the entire loop.  That is a long story but the short of it was that I was loaded onto a van from the Hamilton jail and driven with all the other juvenile convicts to the lake to spend the day performing “community service.”  I learned to hate the pompous over-weight delinquency officers who rode behind us in the van playing music as we picked up trash around the lake for everyone to gawk at.  I took the point position and walked faster than everyone else on purpose just to drive things along and put pressure on the people behind me.  I was yelled at a lot that day, and I noticed that the state employees seemed very comfortable at the park.  Our chain gang launched from the left side of the lodge and it didn’t take long to realize that one of the two guys in the van was having an affair with a woman who worked in the gift shop who was married.  So I had an opportunity to see the underpinnings of the park at a young age where the seeds of apathy had clearly been placed—which was reflected 30 years later in the visit I had with my family in the middle of a summer week.

I always loved the lodge and wanted to marry my wife there, but her parents talked me out of it in favor of the Becket Ridge Country Club, of which they were members.  For most of my youth up until that event with the chain gang I loved the lodge and used it as a base station for many adventures.  So it was a good pick for a wedding to my wife.  This time returning I was with my grown family and was introducing my grandson to the place—visiting the game room it literally hadn’t changed much since I had been a teenager.  In fact, it looks like the Ms. Pac Man machine was still in the same place.  Instead of the reunion with the lodge being something of reverence, it saddened me to see the place going downhill quick.  It was still nice, but had the tired look of a place uncared for.

Elsewhere in the park the marina looked wore out and the wildlife exhibit was in disrepair.  They still had a nice mountain lion on display and some large birds including an eagle, but the passion had obviously left the management of the area.  Hueston Woods has plenty of opportunity for revenue not directly related to tax payers; they of course have the lodge traffic year round which attracts many lodging dollars for people taking in-state vacations.  There are also cabin rentals, horseback riding opportunities, boat rentals on the lake and other similar activity—so the park should not look like it did—run down and tired.

Granted, since I was a kid my worldly vision had dramatically opened.  The lake used to look really big to me and it seemed impossibly large to walk the entire route around it as a member of the chain gang.  Now it looked small, I have walked a lot further for a lot less reason, and have seen places much, much nicer than the lodge in far away locations around the world.  As I played many video games from that lodge I used to wonder what kind of adventures I’d experience in life, but none of them seemed to have the capability to surpass Hueston Woods. But within a few years of my chain gang experience I quickly learned that just about everywhere was nicer which was sad, because there were opportunities in Hueston Woods that other State Parks simply didn’t have—particularly the proximity of Miami University nearby.  Students use the Hueston Woods beach as a natural sun bathing destination and place to play volleyball and study away from their congested dorm rooms.

So you’d think that the State Officer pulling me over would understand that sitting on the side of the road pulling people over for going 40 MPH under the guise of safety would understand how negative his presence was to financial investment into the area—which it badly needed.  The guy literally had nothing better to do than to sit in his squad car and pull people over all day so that their speeding cars might not run over some ducks.  In fact, elsewhere around the park are the typical greenie weenie messages that come straight out of the Al Gore handbook of progressive political discourse such as having people clean seeds off their shows before walking into a forest to minimize the transference of hostile plants that crowd out the sunlight to more delicate vegetation.  I took my grandson and daughter to the fishing pier which was a long walk for his little feet, but was perplexed by the message on the trail signs.  If state officials could make such statements about plant life then why couldn’t they make the same judgments about human beings—there are certain groups of human beings who behave just as aggressively as the plants they were talking about at the ODNR advisory board?  The same mentality could be declared in neighborhoods where welfare recipients’ crowd out private investment because they tend to present themselves as unkempt and destructive pushing out people who wash their cars, care for their lawns and generally try to improve their surroundings.  And as that thought crossed my mind it appeared that those same types of people were at Hueston Woods.  The lady in front of us at the nature walk was with a group of kids who looked like they climbed out of the trunk of a car covered in garage sale items.  She was a beat up woman who had a cheap shoulder-blade tattoo of some kind of flower and a bleeding heart.  It was hard to tell because she was about my age and the ink had smeared over time all running together.  As I looked around there were a lot of people like her there and a lot fewer of the type of people I remembered as a kid who had boats at the marina who would come to the park to go sailing on the weekends.  It appeared that the parasitic humans were crowding out the contributing humans and the park was suffering.  Yet the park rangers could make that distinction with plant life, but not with their human visitors—very interesting and much to their own detriment.

As I waited for the State Officer to return with my driver’s license and insurance card I couldn’t help but think of all the lost opportunities at Hueston Woods compared to a place like Disney World.  Both parks are roughly the same age but one looks as new as the day it was built and the other looks like it is a few years away from decaying away into nothing.  The difference really is the people, at Disney World the employees look happy to have a job and be working.  At Hueston Woods the employees give off the impression that they’d rather be watching afternoon tabloid television or sitting in a patrol car giving tickets so they could save some tree frog that might jump into the road—just because they have nothing better to do.  At Disney World there is plenty of wildlife and they reproduce robustly, and there are not unfriendly park rangers running around trying to issue tickets every five feet—because they want visitors in Disney World.  But at Hueston Woods the general impression is that humans are intruding on a natural habitat and that they aren’t welcome unless they follow certain parameters of rules.

High quality people look to have left the park or have gotten old and died off leaving behind the dregs.  The dregs were part of the Hueston Woods experience of my youth but with them were people who had new cars, boats, and were business professionals in their private life who enjoyed the recreation at the lake.  So both types of people were there, but these days, it appears that one type of person is coming far less than the other which is driving down the quality of the park.

Growing up I saw both types of people on a regular basis.  The criminals that I had to do community service with likely all grew up to be the dregs of society now.  It was easy to see them then, and now they were like that girl with a thirty year old tattoo on her shoulder which had sagged and become distorted with age.  And I went to Hueston Woods with my church groups and Boy Scout organizations where suburbanite parents at least attempted to care about the value of things.  Clearly one group was missing and the other had multiplied over the years—and Hueston Woods was suffering for it.  Making it worse was the patrol car discouraging me from bringing my family to Hueston Woods for the day because they guy had nothing else to do but sit in the grassy area off the side of the road by the mountain bike parking lot and pull people over.

My reaction to the State Officer was that I wanted out of the park as quickly as possible.  When we were done with each other I took the nearest road out and left.  Our day at Hueston Woods had concluded and it’s likely that I won’t return for another dozen or more years.  25 MPH is simply too slow for a car of any kind, and is not friendly to visitors.  The park and its employees gave off the impression that visitors were lucky to be there and that is simply the wrong attitude.  In response quality people are not visiting the park in the kind of numbers that can sustain it as the dregs are continuing to come because they have access to a free beach.  That problem is one of management where the effort into saving trees from hostile plants failed to take the same measures to preserve their internal economy leaving the place to devolve into a sad state of disrepair only to be devoured by the dregs of society and their parasitic nature.

Rich Hoffman

www.OVERMANWARRIOR.com

 

Sane in a Crazy World: The importance of mental health during times of war

A number of readers here are naturally on the fringe of sanity because of the strategies being used against them to perpetuate evil—evil in this case is using the definition of collectivism versus individual value recognition.  Lately I have received email feedback from consistent readers who believe that the times mandate complete attention to the task at hand and that they expect to see my usual hard-hitting opinions and observations about current events and nothing else.  Yet it should be noted that at least once or twice a week for over four years now I have taken the time to write about things that appear completely irrelevant and a bit fun.  I will explain the reason here today.  The article most in question was one recently about the board game Arkham Horror which can be seen by CLICKING HERE.  The belief that came back to me by more than one reader was general bewilderment—that currently World War III was happening right under our feet, the IRS is corrupt and an abusive arm of a vile government, and the forces of doom are lining up now to march all of us to concentration camps to have our lives eradicated in a similar way that the Germans did to the Jews during the Holocaust.  There is a persistent belief that the bankers of Europe are going to call in their loans and the only payment people will have as currency will be their lives and a massive purge will take place across the entire planet.

Those who know me best would do well to remember that in my life I have seen the worst that human beings can do to each other.  Generally I have lived my entire life prepared to meet each day on my own terms.  I am generally polite to strangers, sympathetic to the stupid, and respectful of wisdom—particularly the elderly.  But I have never been afraid of force either institutional force or individual.  I have resisted the designs that others have attempted to impose on me and this has caused much bizarrely placed animosity toward me that has unleashed the absolutely worst behavior that human beings can conger up in their minds.  I have had a lifetime of enemies not from my provocation but from their desire to rule me in some fashion or another and I have not let them.  When I was younger this seemed unfair and I did not have definitions to explain it, but at the stage of life I’m at now I understand all too well the motivations of why people and institutions do the things they do and my desire here at Overmanwarrior’s Wisdom is to share those with others of similar mind so that a kind of road map out of the wilderness can be provided so that future allies in these wars of living can be utilized.

The strategy of the modern passive-aggressive personalities so common as a result of the education institutions that constructed their thought processes desire to drive their enemies insane with insult and overwhelming force so to break the will of resistance to their policies.  Enemies of humanity no longer show up on our doorsteps with swords of force to execute a strategy; they hide behind institutional policy and faceless provocateurs to let the dirty work of peer pressure do most of their bidding.  When those things don’t work, they call upon supernatural assistance.  Now before I say what I’m going to next consider what the primary tension between the Jews and Muslims are in the Middle East—particularly the Dome of the Rock issue in Jerusalem where religious differences between God’s pact with Abraham has resulted in conflict and tension emerging around every form of politics essentially centering on the location of the Holy of Holies as well as the sacrificial site of Abraham offering up his son Isaac—where in the last moment God offered up a ram instead.  People believe a lot of really dumb things for a lot of dumb reasons.  With that said when enemies cannot beat you with strategy, skill, or any form of merit, they turn to what they think are gods and pray against you.  More than once I have had enemies consult Ouija boards to ask for black help from beyond the grave, conducted seances against my name, sought voodoo priests to cast spells against me and my family, and locked themselves in upstairs bedrooms chanting incantations against my health and well-being.  People believe these things, so they are something that must be dealt with.  Whether or not the sought after spiritual aid can be considered Biblical or even demonic is not the purpose of pointing it out at this point.  Science is still mapping out the effect of multi-dimensional realities and the concept of a multiverse so at this point spirit aid likely comes from some life form living in those realities.  It doesn’t make them magical any more than a modern human can use an airplane to fly.  They are just beings that can use tools human beings can’t to utilize attributes which might help the one who summons those forces.  I wouldn’t bring it up if it wasn’t something I’ve had to deal with.  The motivating factor is as simple as a football player wishing for a bit of luck to get a touchdown in the closing seconds of a game, or one country praying to god for a victory over another—the desire to summons supernatural aid is a factor even if the nature of that aid is still in question.  My name has been frequently abused in this fashion—“please help me get Rich Hoffman out of the way—I’ll sacrifice a goat, a lamb, or my eternal soul if only I can have success today in the land of the living.”  Whether the supernatural aid played a part, science will have to explain it to me, because dark forces have entered my life from every direction many, many times and tried to undermine everything I have stood for.  More than once I have literally lost everything in my life on a Biblical scale and know very well what it means to wake up with nothing in the world but what could not be taken within one’s own mind.  And each time I have overcome whatever obstacles were placed in my path.  The threats were not always supernatural, but more often translated out into human intention—and I have seen the vilest of those intentions.  The result is that after 20 straight years of that really every day, if you survive you learn an art form of living that is unique and a strategy of implementation that is far superior to what an adversary can claim.  I take that experience and share it with others so that they may learn to do the same.

There is a point where all the points connect and make sense and you realize that any ill intentions that paper warriors heading banking clans are actually powerless if their ability to rupture their enemy’s sanity through fear is taken from their arsenal.  The reality of sinister motivations is that intention is one thing, but even evil spirits fail—they fall from grace like everything else and they become easily frustrated when immediate satisfaction is not provided to them. Whether the enemy is conjured from religious assistance or a financial payoff, they falter due to competency levels and only have fear as a weapon.  In this way The Synagogue of Satan and all the Zionist conspiracy theories are a strategy not of true threat, but of an illusion meant through passive aggressive institutional force to overwhelm the sanity of their adversaries.  The merit of their claims is as stupid as the dumb rock they believe Abraham wanted to kill his son Isaac upon—but instead killed a lamb—which is why Muslims around the beginning of October will practice Eid al-Abha to appease Allah.  The killing of an animal which takes place over the three-day celebration is a reminder that sacrifice is important if one wishes to stay on the right path in life.  But people who think like this are not a threat—millions of them are no match for a single mind who thinks outside of collectivism.  Sure they have physical power, but that power erodes away quickly under the hands of incompetency.  Their next move 100% of the time, before the world realizes their charade is just smoke and mirrors, is to call upon spiritual aid which sometimes comes as a shadowy figure that enters the side of your vision, or haunts a dream, or even a loved one’s dream.  One might find a complete re-occurrence of bad luck inundating them for days, or weeks—perhaps years for no other reason than unseen forces seem hell-bent on destroying their lives.  But in the end whether the thugs are spiritual or material, they are still collectivists who have very little power but to walk around and look menacing.  The paper they put their laws upon mean nothing because the philosophy they are built upon crumbles as soon as people see the truth of their merit.  So their only hope to maintain their charade is to drive good minds insane with worry, or too much information.

Over the years I have been able to bounce back to report these observations to the level I am now exclusively from sanity maintenance.  When I brought up the Arkham Horror game there is a good reason—when I was playing it with my family there was one card in it that struck me with a realization that had been perceived, but not completely understood.  In the game sanity points are issued against the characters you play to reflect the abuses of a battered mind.  From what I have described, I understand what the strategy of a battered mind can do to a person.  I have seen people lose their minds and there were times where the pressure was so great upon me where I thought my mind might pop from the weight.   People can take, or threaten to take everything you have at any time.  The Zionists may want to control the world through finance and the Muslims may want to convert the entire world to a tribal society that wants to sacrifice lambs at the beginning of October because Abraham did it four thousand years ago on a spot that David would build his eventual temple, and his son Soloman would place the Ark of the Covenant on a site called the Holy of Holies which no person except those deemed fit by God may enter—but in the end all they really have is a belief system that will crumble about them the moment they are forced to deal with contrary ideals.  To avoid those ideals they will ask for spirit aid, or hire hit men to kill and destroy the evidence of their own heresy—but they can never be right—and they know it.

There were many times where it would have been easier to just jump off a bridge to escape the pain of living—where the forces amassed seemed too overwhelming.  In those times I took the only possessions I had which were a few books and sat in Waffle House until 5 AM reading with the rest of society’s rejects to learn that as the world slept so too does the forces of evil who wish to rule the world through fear.  Once that is taken from them, those enemies can be obliterated easily no matter how many in number they present themselves as.  And it is under that realization that I function from and seek to teach others how to destroy their enemies.

The enemy out there means to drive their targets toward insanity with that constant pressure of always looking over their shoulder for that bullet chambered in the barrel of a sniper hidden carefully in the woods, or across a field.  Or to send you to church on Sunday praying to God for protection that only you can really only give yourself.  They mean to take your mind from that lucky rabbit’s foot on your key chain that you carry hoping for some spiritual aid when that bullet is shot or that co-worker wishes to harm you at your job, or those terrible spirits enter your dreams delivering nightmares.  It is possible to be in complete control of these things and those forces once you understand their motivations.  For me, that information was hard won—and I share it openly with my readers so that maybe they might use a fraction of the boon for their own needs.

Equally important to knowing all the bad things that are out there in the world is learning how to comprehend the overwhelming evidence without it crushing your mind.  That card I referred to from Arkham Horror came into play during the game when my character uncovered the source of mankind’s origin and went insane with the overwhelming knowledge. He lost his way and had to go to the Asylum to get his mental health back.  This reminded me of the old Quiet Riot song, “Mama We’re All Crazy Now” which seemed like an appropriate metaphor for our modern existence.  It could be argued that it is crazy to sacrifice a lamb to appease Allah, or to fight over a dirty rock in the Middle East just so that a temple can be rebuilt when much grander structures have been built in Las Vegas and elsewhere by the minds of modern man, or that grown men would lock themselves in their bedrooms chanting against a rival co-worker who is showing them up by being a better person and thus preventing the invocation summons advocate from getting that needed raise.    The world’s antagonists—which are voluminous have only one way that they can rule a superior mind—it’s not by force, it’s not by intellect, it’s by diminishing that mind.   If that ability is taken from them, they fall under the pressure which they are seeking constant escape.

There was a reason that I have lived the way I have, with the loud music, particularly from Quiet Riot’s “Bang Your Head” screaming from my car speakers, and there is a reason that I play games and talk about other things besides the war at hand.  The goal of war is the suppression of the enemy—and for our enemies, they require a destruction of our minds and they expect those minds to go crazy with frustration by coming up against a wall of apathy which never provides justice.  Our enemy in this modern war cannot win with bank notes, or pieces of paper in a vault in England—they have to destroy our minds and sense of right and wrong.  This must be deprived from them—otherwise sanity does come into question no matter what the source of provocation may be.  The goal is a loss of sanity and therefore an opponent to their schemes.  The best rebellion I know of is the one I learned to conduct—which is a flagrant display of sanity in the face of irrational collectivism designed essentially to sacrifice lives upon an altar of superstition for the religious beliefs of a people who are as privy to the secrets of the universe as a bird landing in a tree looking for a worm to eat.  And it is good to flaunt logic in their face and turn the tables against their strategy letting them know with audacity that good minds cannot be broken no matter what the enterprise.  World War III is not about weapons and territory.  Boundaries are only marks on a map—this war is for the mind of mankind—and in that war, we must protect those minds with nurturing—and respect—and pride.

Sometimes, not all the time, it is good to drive 120 MPH down the road with the Quiet Riot song “Bang Your Head” playing as loud as the speakers will take the music.  It is good to play Arkham Horror for 8 hours on a Friday night and it is good to thumb your nose at authority in general—because sometimes that’s what it takes to preserve your sanity when the forces of the world wish to take it.  The counter to their force is audacity on behalf of mental health and the preservation of sanity so that the victors of World War III are those who still have sanity over those who lost it long ago and are still sacrificing sheep and worshiping rocks with their lips perked against the dirt hoping that rival ideals will perish by supernatural aid before the stupidity of their beliefs is revealed as crazy as it really always has been.  This requires big, sane minds to deal with big difficult problems.  To  perform that task it requires a mind in top form and full of love for life–which means care must be given to it even if the means is sometimes outside of social importance.   Many minds are wasted chanting for supernatural aid when the answer was always in front of it, but insanity prevented the revelation.   And it is insane  to pray to a wall and the history there when most of history is still before us.

Rich Hoffman www.OVERMANWARRIOR.com

 

What Are The Chances: An IRS cover-up and a 3.3% raise for federal employees

Remy from Reason TV certainly has it right in his new video about the IRS titled, “What are the Chances.”  It is beyond refute that the IRS has not only committed crimes, but is currently committing them and our legal enforcers absolutely have no stomach to address the rampant problem.  I have said that Lois Lerner does not only need to go to jail, and be publicly tarred and feathered—but there are many, many others as well who are equally guilty in need of punishment.  What we are dealing with is a criminal culture at the IRS that looks to extend into virtually every government office cubical in some form or another by the basic practice of evasive responsibility.  The unionized workers at the IRS do not have their service directed toward any form of individual justice—but toward collective preservation of the system they serve—and this is how they can justify the destruction of the multiple hard drives containing Lois Lerner’s guilt.  The workers who are underlings to the fiasco are equally complicit because they have not stepped forward to stop the corruption but instead play along to preserve their order.  Have a look at Remy’s take in this song.

http://personalliberty.com/irs-reveals-crashed-computers-least-one-thing-common-lois-lerner/

There are better chances that there is life on the Moon right now than there is regarding the innocence of the IRS in evidence destruction for their targeting of conservative groups.  And as for there not being a “smidgen of corruption” as indicated by President Obama—he is also being revealed as a liar.  An operation as large as the IRS does not go unnoticed by even a President who is deliberately operating with a mandate to maintain his deniability.  The evidence is pointing straight into his White House through the union president Colleen Kelly.  The NTEU, (National Treasury Employees Union) was in fact at the White House on March 31st 2010 but of course they deny any direct contact with Obama on the day before the IRS began targeting conservative groups.  “What are the Chances?”

Ironically Colleen in March of 2014 was on Federal News Radio 1500 AM (Yes there is such a thing—and it is dreadfully boring) bragging about a congressional bill introduced by Representative Gerry Connolly and Jim Moran that would provide federal employees with a 3.3. percent across-the-board pay raise in fiscal year 2015.  The mode of operation has been by the NTEU to throw out statements and ignore the implication then operate as normal, which is the same thing the President in the White House is doing, and it’s what has been going on at the IRS with the multiple destruction of hard drives in a direct desire to destroy evidence.  Then Colleen Kelly had the gall to testify that federal workers should get a 3.3% raise for all their good hard work?  It is beyond sickening.

There is no respect for congress to enforce anything upon anybody because like the members of the NTEU they are also part of the fraternity of government workers and when push comes to shove, will not go against their comrades in the Belt Way.  The Justice Department is corrupt and in direct control of the same White House who is connected through Colleen Kelly to all the members of the NTEU who then behave like ants protecting the queen when their nest is under assault.    Ultimately President Obama has the power of pardon so long as he is president and all the guilty parties involved know that they can just deny, deny, and deny protecting the president so that they can have access to his pardon power should they need it later.  This is how the corruption in the federal government is allowed to boil to such a level without being regulated back into reason.

There is no respect for the tax payers, no care for how the bills get paid, and no desire to seek the truth of any corruption—because all the people involved can’t afford to know.  To maintain their illusion of worth for some ridiculous 3.3% raise for their services in fiscal year 2015—they have to destroy evidence and look the other way when the evidence is practically dropped in their lap.  And those media insiders operating as correspondence within the Beltway are more in love with the culture of Washington D.C. than they are of unraveling the truth, so they sit on their hands and do little to no investigating.  Most of the hard-hitting reporting coming out on this IRS story has been from new media journalism—not the traditional types who make their weekend rounds to Beltway parties and rub elbows with those they perceive to be the mighty and powerful of Washington politicians.

The entire culture of Washington D.C. is dreadfully corrupt and the IRS is the embodiment of that characterization.  The belief is that the federal workers in D.C. have one purpose in life and that is to roll out of bed—and get paid for their existence.  In trade they put up, shut up, and look the other way when crimes are committed making each and every one of them guilty of not only this recent IRS crime, but all the others which have been hidden over the years.  Remy’s song, “What are the Chances” is a much-needed satirical look into the ridiculousness of the premise that the IRS is actually functioning from a position of merit but what we are seeing is the degeneration of mankind on an epic level more reminiscent of a fire and brimstone catastrophe when so many people are functioning so improperly and think nothing of the enterprise.  All we can do is laugh because the audaciousness of their social position of innocence is absolutely intolerably insulting—because the chances are that the coincidence is impossible.  Remy’s song hits the issue square on the head, there is no chance that the IRS is not guilty of document destruction and an epic cover-up larger than any scandal in our modern lifetimes—and the expectation is that we should all just walk away and keep quite.  If we do that there is a promise of a 3.3% raise out there just to keep everyone’s mouth shut—and those employees will, because they won’t get money like that anywhere else for doing absolutely nothing—and they know it.

Rich Hoffman

www.OVERMANWARRIOR.com

 

A New X-Wing: Capitalism helps a ‘Force for Change’ benefit the world

Charity is only a bad thing when the altruism involved masks other behavior designed to win social favor instead of genuinely using productive excess to help those suffering from stifled freedom.  The Star Wars: Force for Change initiative, linked below, is one of the good ones.  The intent is to bring the benefits of capitalism to the far reaches of planet earth, and that is wonderful.  There are many children suffering under countries with poor political philosophies or economic systems that do not capture the natural innovation of their inhabitants—but instead stifles them needlessly.  Force for Change is intended to use the excess of capitalism created by the mythology of Star Wars into actually making people’s lives better which is something everyone should emphatically support.  And as usual, J.J. Abrams has provided a teaser of the new movie, Episode VII in a final week push to drive up the numbers.

 

http://forceforchange.starwars.com/

The new ship looks like a classic Z-95 Headhunter from the pre-years of the X-Wing fighter seen in the original trilogy.  But the claims are that it is a new kind of updated X-Wing—whatever the case it looks fantastic and is proof that the crew working on the new Star Wars film is going to extraordinary measures to produce something wonderful.   The clever presentation of the Force for Change material during the production of Star Wars hints at the level of creativity emerging from the endeavor and is truly something to be excited about.

It will be hard to avoid this new Star Wars movie once it is released—so news from it is important to everyone, even those who are not dedicated fans of the series.  Star Wars is a direct creation of capitalism and without it there would not be a Force for Change initiative and a number of other charities which trickle off the mythology that takes place “a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.”  Certainly under no socialist government could Star Wars have been made, and it is particularly under socialist style governments that many of the children the Force for Change is attempting to help.  England is hardly a bastion of capitalism, but they are also directly benefiting from the production of Star Wars being shot in their country—in England over a billion pounds of wealth was created by production companies filming in and around London—Star Wars among the most notable and Abu Dhabi has seen an increase by 19% in hotel reservations from fans all over the world traveling to the left behind film sites to visit the location of the Episode VII props.  Without a story nothing would be shot in London or Abu Dhabi and without that story meaning anything to anybody, there would be no desire to pay money to buy plane tickets to fly to such places just to take pictures of what was left behind during the creation process.

And that is what J.J. Abrams is doing in his Force for Change videos; he is using the props created for the film—which will be seen by hundreds of millions of people the world over.  The film may generate $1 billion in global revenue just in the first two weeks—which is astonishing.  It will likely go on to make several billion more dollars dwarfing anything previously done by any film anywhere, because the buildup is so intense.  But on top of that Walmart, Target, and anywhere Star Wars toys are sold will see sharp increases in profit.  Fast-food tie-ins will dramatically increase their sales with promotional campaigns.  And the Disney Parks will also see spikes in attendance and interest in their new property from t-shirts to DVD sales.  J.J. Abrams knowing all this is using the props from the film already used to tell the story as a way to help some kids suffering from the lack of creativity their economies have imprisoned them to—and that is a wonderful thing.

Star Wars is capitalism at its best and is something worthy of support not just of the product itself—but the spillover it has which helps feed and clothe many millions who otherwise would not have the opportunity.  Because of Star Wars, there is a Force for Change—and the nature of that change is one of depravity to fulfillment through investment driven by passion for the subject matter.  And in that regard it is very exciting to see a new ship from a future Star Wars film.  I’m sure Fantasy Flight Games is already making plans to have it in their miniatures game which is so much fun.

Rich Hoffman

www.OVERMANWARRIOR.com

 

Arkham Horror: How to play the game and why!

Dear reader, it should be by now well documented that the things I write about here seldom have anything less than monumental significance to the stage play of life.  For my regular readers you will find the expected observed truths about the rest of the world laced within this article so it should not be expected that this is purely for entertainment or instruction on how to play a difficult, rules heavy role-playing game called Arkham Horror.  The things that excite me are often categorized this way.  Even the things I consider leisure fall into this summation.  When I get a sense that something has some sort of metaphorical significance I become obsessed with plunging into its depths—and this holds true if the target is the literary works of James Joyce or some phantom relic from the past lost to time and space.  CLICK HERE to review.  In that regard I have made my affection for Fantasy Flight Games well known—it is a gaming company that was brought to my life through family members bridging my love of mythology with a need for adventure—and I have found with them a wealth of creativity and new ways of modern storytelling.  One game in particular is of the type that I have to thank the owner of Nostalgic Ink and my grandson for putting before me.  It was just the kind of thing I was searching for and has brought to my life a joy in discovery that nurtures my imagination and for that I am extremely grateful.  Also of note I am placing throughout this article the instructional videos of Ricky Royal from the YouTube channel Box of Delights who poured an extreme amount of love into the creation of the following “how to” videos.  By watching these videos he explains many of the rules and way to play Arkham Horror.image  I used these videos to get started and to make the decision to purchase the game.  They are long, but very complete and well worth watching.  The result is that my wife and I bought Arkham Horror on a Friday afternoon and did not stop playing it until midnight on the following Sunday.   We were one turn away from closing the final gate when one of the characters I was playing was plunged into Time and Space letting the monster Azathoth loose to destroy the world.  I was so frustrated that I wanted to put my fist through our kitchen table because we had worked very hard to position the game for a victory.  But circumstances being what they were—time ran out—as it often does even when the best of hopes are the fuel behind endeavor.

We had played several games over the weekend and most of them ended with losses—the game is far from easy.  In fact, it could be said to reflect life all too accurately even though the subject matter is about monsters and attacks upon mankind from other dimensions.  I find the subject matter to be more accurate than a daily read of USA Today and ultimately more rewarding for the soul even in disappointing losses where all the best layed plans fall apart in the end. For a game it reminds me of Jumanji the old game from the Robin Williams movie—Arkham Horror not only takes place in the streets of the classic horror writer H.P. Lovecraft, it carries players into other dimensional planes of reality such as the City of the Great Race, the Great Hall of Celeano, R’lyeh, the Plateau of Leng and Yuggoth.  It is often there that terrible things happen if players forget to adjust their lore or luck rating to deal with the type of things that typically happen during the “Other World Encounters” phase.  Sometimes even if players do adjust their settings terrible things will happen anyway—just as they often do in real life so it is the task of the players to adjust and recover attempting to suppress obstacles with tenacity even when the situation feels hopeless.

The terror of the game comes not so much from the monsters which flood the game constantly throughout from each round as the Doom Track edges ever closer to the end where the Mythos Monsters present themselves from centuries of slumber to destroy the world and everyone in it, it comes from the lack of certainty that one has about what happens next—the constant feeling that the floor could drop out from under everyone at any moment.  imageIn this way Arkham Horror is like walking through a commercial haunted house that is dark and smoke-filled not knowing what might happen around the next corner.  Visitors know that the monsters cannot harm them—but the terror comes from not knowing what’s coming next.  In Arkham Horror the game designers obviously took great pleasure in making every stack of cards and every move a potential failure with very little rewards given to players.

The rules of the game are vast.  On its surface all things about Arkham Horror look simple, the game board looks not so much different from a Monopoly board, but this is very misleading.  The game is layered with meaning and small printed text that takes the level of game play very detailed destinations.  There is no way to just pick up the rule book and begin playing even for experienced Dungeon and Dragon players.  The mechanics are very similar, but the depth must be understood before proper game play is even possible.  For instance, particularly helpful items that will help win the game are Elder Signs which can be purchased from the Curiositie Shoppe as a “unique item.”  Those cards are the most powerful in the game because they not only seal gates without having to spend clue tokens, but they take their seal off the Doom Track for the Ancient One holding off its arrival as a destroyer of the world.  Other very helpful tips are alleys which can be recruited down at the boarding house, blessings which can be found at the church and Magick spells which can be purchased at Ye Olde Magick Shoppe that can hold off terrible Mythos cards revealing rituals.  Combat weapons are purchased at the General Store as common items.  It helps to have a couple of pistols to increase combat points up over +6 to +7 with buffed applications above and beyond the amount of fight on the character sheets.  The reason is that each time a player encounters a monster—which is unavoidable—a horror check must be performed with “will” and will is connected directly to “fight.”  So in order to have a high will typically it will cost fight and to beat a monster, both are needed. So the fight needs to come from weapons, not the skill bar as much as possible.

I think for me the most compelling, and terrifying aspect of the game is the “sanity” cost of certain tasks whether it be losing a horror check, casting spells—which often cost sanity—or random things that happen to characters that scare them into losing their mind.  I am used to health points, and Arkham Horror has a standard health measure which is called “stamina” but balancing that out with the general mental health of the players is something unique.  When the mind gets too beat up during the game sanity can be restored at the asylum—two dollars will completely restore mental capacity or a swig of a whiskey bottle will give a +1 boost.  But the game takes place during prohibition so there are times that the police come and arrest anybody caught with whiskey in their possession—so it is dangerous to have such things.

Hearing all this it might be wondered why anybody would want to play the game at all.  That is where things get interesting in a very satisfying way.  In spite of the horror nature of the game, it is actually an adventure game nicely mixing genres in a way that Poltergeist the movie did.  As I was going through the characters I was very pleased to find a card named Monterey Jack who happens to be an archaeologist and has the fixed possessions of a bull whip and a .38 revolver—identical to Indiana Jones the film character.  The game makers at Fantasy Flight know what makes a good adventure story and no matter how great Indiana Jones was, he still ended up tied to a pole during the opening of the Lost Ark, he was cursed by poisoned blood, burnt, tortured, and had spells of voodoo cast against him.  He was captured many times and jailed and designated for execution by the Nazis and all this happened in just three classic movies. image Arkham Horror is the kind of terror that was found in an Indiana Jones film and the best way to play the game is to roll with the punches and just keep getting back up and trying to win.  Some of the best moments in Arkham Horror come from the characters running into clues from ancient secrets or stealing treasure away from terrible creatures deep in a slumber from some dimensional rift.  Needless to say, my favorite character is Monterey Jack, the bull whip gives a plus one to a combat check but if you miss, you can use the whip to role again.   So of course I have to play that character!  It seems Monterey Jack was made by Fantasy Flight Games just for me.

The Indiana Jones films were inspired by old Saturday morning serials from the 30s, and 40s and those serials were inspired by the kind of publications that H.P. Lovecraft wrote for—the pulp magazines so popular in the 1920s and 30s.  Indiana Jones was not original in the sense that he sprang from the mind of George Lucas but was rather a tribute to the kind of movies and stories he enjoyed as a kid. So it is only fitting that the makers of Arkham Horror paid tribute to Indiana Jones who was a product of the original H.P. Lovecraft stories.  The game we see today started in the 80s as a different version of role-playing game similar to Dungeons and Dragons designed by Richard Launius called Call of Cthulhu.  By 2005 Fantasy Flight Games purchased the rights and brought the game up to a level seen presently.  There is a lot of love poured into the presentation that would have taken many hundreds of hours of game development and input by people who simply love all these genres, Indiana Jones, the literary works of H.P. Lovecraft and movies like Poltergeist.  Arkham Horror is a very story driven game that looks like players lose more than they win.  What is most intriguing is that you do not play against other players so much as you play against the Ancient One’s reemergence with the world from an awakened slumber.  Players work together to fight the Ancient One and all its minions—and up to eight players can participate.  The best way to perform this task is to trade items that other players might need like spells, or weapons in the streets of Arkham.  To do this, items can be passed to other players as long as both players are in a street location and they are not in a combat phase with a monster.

About the Ancient One, there isn’t just one, but many.  Of course the primary is Cthulhu but others include the Nyarlathotep, the Yig, Hastur and the Yog-Sothoth.  To make matters even worse each mythos monster has its own worshippers among the land of the living.  For instance, the Yog-Sothoth worshippers have powerful magical abilities giving cultists a combat rating of -1.  Or the Sub-Niggurath worshippers have babies that roam the game board and all are given the “Endless” ability when fighting in combat.  This means that players who kill these creatures cannot collect their hides to sell for money or items as a trophy—but are returned to the monster pool only to be drawn again when a gate opens.  Reading through some of the text reminded me of the many real life attempts by Alistair Crowley and the Masonic rituals particularly on display at the Denver International Airport to appease unseen spirits to invoke supernatural benefit to their attempts at success in life.  Many people are willing to trade their souls for successful help by spiritual aid and in Arkham Horror this is reflected in the sanity meter.  There are many in the real world that clearly do trade away their sanity for a chance at victory even if it calls for the invocation of unseen forces.   Arkham Horror deals with these types of things making it all too reflective or a reality we all know too much about—making this game even scarier because it dares to name an avoided truth.

It has been a long time since my wife and I played a board game all weekend long, but with Arkham Horror the depth was such that it was not hard.  Before we knew it, 14 hours flew by on a Saturday and the sun had set.  We resumed on a Sunday only to see the day fly by as well and midnight was indicated by the hands on a clock.  Arkham Horror is like reading a great novel that you share with other people.  Afterwards win or lose there is a feeling of an adventure that had just been embarked upon.  Other players have complained that Arkham Horror feels too much like a hopeless enterprise because it is difficult to win and like the H.P. Lovecraft stories, bad things happen to the characters and no matter how smart or good you are at playing the game—there is a sense of fate that must fall in your favor to even have a chance at victory.  But that too is reflective of life—all you can really do is position yourself for success and if bad things happen, you have to get up and try again even if you are cursed or find yourself driven insane or even lost between planes of reality.  The adventure of life must trudge on or the world will be consumed by the evil, vile, intentions of an Ancient One striving to claim its hold on all of existence and everyone in it.

Arkham Horror is a fabulous game that is not just mere entertainment meant to pass time away, it is an experience that gives back much just by playing.   It is well designed and certainly does what it set out to do—which is provoke thought.  The random mechanics are not so overpowering that victory is impossible, it is just treacherously difficult like climbing a tall mountain, or running in a marathon.  Playing Arkham Horror will never be the same game twice, but it will always be something that requires attention and care to detail.  It is something that I’d call remarkable for what it does just like the game itself—working on many different levels.image  I am very pleased that my buddy at Nostalgic Ink pointed me to the game.  I have spoken on more than one occasion about these gaming stores and how they are palaces of mythology with only one purpose in mind—feeding the mind of the curious.  Stupid people do not wonder into stores like Nostalgic Ink to buy games like Arkham Horror.  Lazy people would avoid the place like a plague. But in that store are treasures of really previously unimagined consequences, and they are popular enough to have a store of their own now instead of being an underground fad like Call of Cthulhu was for so many years previously.  I have often looked at wonder at the games on the shelf in places like Nostalgic Ink and Yottaquest in Mt. Healthy, Ohio and wondered how or why those games are so popular with this newer generation.  Granted, Arkham Horror even among hard-core gamers is a difficult game—but after playing it, I clearly see the appeal and am a fan.

Rich Hoffman www.OVERMANWARRIOR.com

 

Kingdom of the Cthulhu: The Lovecraftian horror of an ultraterrestrial universe built on sacrifice

Horror to be relevant as an art form must have some hook of reality to it before it can be considered effective.  The best horror writers avoid topics that are so fantastic that they extend beyond belief.  Among the best of the horror writers was a creation that John Keel would later term more scientifically as “ultraterrestrials” and that would be H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu.  This is a dominating creature that lives outside of human time and space pushing against a cosmicism of projected reality driven by limited human senses to manipulate the actions of the technically defined living being.  In theory those who attempt to reach beyond their senses into that world of Cthulhu run the extremely high possibility of insanity as minds often fold over on themselves once they leave the boundaries of four dimensions.  Cthulhu was a fictional creation by a writer who lost both of his parents to an insane asylum and had himself suffered tormenting dreams by strange creatures from a very young child.  But like all great horror writers, Lovecraft’s Cthulhu has its roots into a reality we all understand—but fear to comprehend for many reasons.  The mythology of Cthulhu allows human beings to explore those strange possibilities from the safety of their senses without plummeting over the edge of sanity into a realm they clearly are not ready for.  It is in that realm however that my own eyes have always looked as the cause of much misery and defaults in living as the primary source of superstition and religion—and a barrier to the truth.

When talking about such things I prefer the term ultraterrestrial to reference the type of creatures that Lovecraft wrote about in his Cthulhu mythos which has taken on a life of its own since his death in 1937.  The stories Lovecraft wrote were well ahead of their time as it has only recently been proven that there are more than 10 dimensional realities known to mathematics—and probably more.  Lovecraft’s stories explored the possibilities of beings from those other dimensions visiting from their realms in ways humans could not—which was a terrifying prospect.  It still is, and is why even nearly a century after his death there is a cult following of H.P. Lovecraft.  The reporter John Keel seemed particularly obsessed with this type of reality and reported about it in The Mothman Prophesies.  In that book Keel was very level-headed and factually based even though the subject matter was extraordinary—UFOs interacting with people, strange monsters appearing out of nowhere, Men in Black walking about dressed as government agents not quite appearing human—being slightly off to those who spoke to them.  Keel in that book was knocking on the door to Lovecraft’s Cthulhu and it could be said that the Mothman of Point Pleasant, West Virginia, or the “Bird Man” of ancient Cahokia or the many thousands of gargoyles poised from the buildings of gothic structures—particularly the Budweiser brewery in St Louis—were there to appease the demons who come into our world to terrorize and manipulate our reality.  Keel’s other books, Strange Creatures From Time and Space, Our Haunted Planet, Operation Trojan Horse, The Eighth Tower, The Cosmic Question, and Disneyland of the Gods are all works obsessed with this realm of Lovecraft’s Cthulhu.  Keel had been opened to the possibilities before his investigations into the strange creature in Point Pleasant during 1967 and once there had everything confirmed as though it was tailor-made for him by what he would later call ultraterrestrials—or tricksters.  Because of their power and influence he would spend much of the rest of his life all the way to age 79 when he died in 2009 avoiding any kind of electronic device such as computers, phones, televisions etc., because Keel believed that the “tricksters” used those devices to control and manipulate the world of human beings with impunity to counteraction.

As time went on Keel’s books became more and more paranoid, and his subjectivity diminished for a time as he appeared to have gone too far down the rabbit hole of sanity for a time.  Perhaps not as far as Lovecraft’s parents did—but the rope to reality which Keel held on to was slipping.  Toward the end of his life he regained some of his grip on reality.  The 2002 film adaptation of his book The Mothman Prophecies appears to have helped him and he spent the rest of his days giving lectures as the film brought his ultraterrestrials with the help of Richard Gere into the mainstream.

I have personally noticed this manipulation of these ultraterrestrials by Keel’s definition for a long time.  The lazy relegate their definition of ultraterrestrials as angels and demons but that has never suited me.  I have never been comfortable handing over my fate to beings that just flash in and out of my life with some advice—or appear in a dream to leave an imprint of instruction for me to execute.  If I had been Noah and God appeared to me in a dream telling me to build an Ark, I would have woke up the next morning and told him—“dude, I don’t have the time to build you a stupid boat.” And I would have ignored the command.  When the floods came, I would have survived somehow regardless of the advice.  My opinion is that unless the motives of such individuals from other worlds is known, there is no way to attribute value to them leaving you to play the part of a pawn.  Without knowing those beings personally there is no way to validate if the sources are good or evil.  My assumption is that they are almost always evil posing as good.  So to properly serve the good in the context of universal merit, those beings should be ignored.  In this way for years I have poked and prodded into their world without the usual fear of insanity because I simply don’t trust any of them even though they have constantly tried to throw me off the trail.

One night on New Year’s Eve my family was playing a late night game of Pirates the Constructable Strategy Game.  We were between rounds so as everyone got up and stretched I resumed to my living room chair to read another quick chapter of The Mothman Prophecies which I had taken an interest in after seeing the movie.  In the book there was a surprising amount of coverage of UFO lore and as I was reading it I couldn’t help but wonder if Steven Spielberg had read this very same book to inspire him to write Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Poltergeist because this was the subject matter by the very fact based reporting of John Keel.  I found the book terrifying refreshing and a key piece into a lifetime puzzle I had been assembling most of my life which attempted to define the world of Lovecraft’s Cthulhu.  As I had conceived that very thought outside my front window clearly over the golf course was a UFO floating freely over the tree line.  My first rational thought was that it was a helicopter picking up a crash victim, or maybe even some kind of pyrotechnic display celebrating the New Year.  But it was just floating there enticing me like a seductive siren attempting to lure me into the hidden rocks in the choppy waters of the ocean.  My children were in the kitchen so I calmly grabbed their attention and directed their sight asking them to identity what was there.  They went through the same process I did, helicopter, fireworks—UFO.  Once we realized that the strobe displays on the vessel did not look like anything Wright Patterson Air Force Base nearby could have put out—it was too large for a drone—and too lit up to be stealthy we put on our shoes to rush out and meet it. We piled into our car and raced down the road to intercept it as it was now moving slowly.  We turned left onto a road about a hundred yards north of our home and saw the vessel floating over a home valued near a million dollars and the strobe lights flashed down upon it.  I blinked to make sure my vision was not faulty and when I opened my eyes it was gone.  I stopped the car, got out and looked to the north.  The entire sky was filled with a blacked out vessel roaming northeast.  The moonlight had been showing the outlines of clouds, but this vessel concealed them all.  My kids saw it too and we watched as it was there moving toward downtown Trenton one moment covering the entire sky from our home, over the Miller Brewery all the way to Trenton.  It appeared to be about 7 or 8 miles wide.  Then within the blink of an eye, it too was gone.  If my kids hadn’t seen it with me, I would have thought it to be an illusion, but it was actually much more sophisticated as other minds witnessed it simultaneously.  Within 30 seconds of the encounter we were left wondering if we actually saw what we saw.  I got out of the car and walked up to the house where the vessel had loomed over and they had lost power.  Nobody appeared to be home at the time, but their internal lights had flicked back on and a computer in the living room that had been on was in a reboot phase.   So something material had been there and it caused the power to drop then come back on.

We had seen our first UFO as a family and it was exciting—it certainly wasn’t our imagination.  However, I was skeptical and not so sure that little green men came down from E.T.’s home planet to pick some flowers.  Rather, I was thinking of Keel’s ultraterrestrials—or even more cynically something like Lovecraft’s Cthulhu.  It was more than a coincidence that I was studying The Mothman Prophecies and reading about those exact occurrences at that particular moment.  And out of all the years I had been alive I had never seen a UFO until that moment.  I didn’t even have to leave my home to see it, the thing practically landed in my front yard to get my attention. But as soon as we could chase it down for confirmation and get our cameras turned on and toward the object—it was gone.  My intentions as it was happening was to find a way to get on the vessel and pull one of the pilots off and capture it so I could conduct a proper investigation.  I doubt that was the intention by the perpetrators—but that’s what was going to happen.

I did the same thing as I spent some time hunting for a Mothman one summer in the regions where sightings had occurred.  I was determined to capture the creature and put it in a zoo dispelling any folklore about it with scientific fact.   But the more I looked, the more obvious it was that I was not going to find it—it would have to find me because those things only appear in our dimensional plane of reality when they want to.  Over time I concluded that the UFO at our home, like the Mothman hunting, was a creation by ultraterrestrials to bait me into insanity by feeding my curiosity and thus directing my thoughts on the matter into a direction they desired.  The circumstances were just too perfect to be real in the context presented.  After that event I had a lot more respect for John Keel—he was certainly on to something.  And without question H.P. Lovecraft was as well.  The reason his Cthulhu mythos is so terrifying and is still very much alive after a century of development is that deep down inside we know there is some truth to it.  The fictional creation of Cthulhu is an attempt to put into mythology a reality that is difficult to otherwise deal with.

To a writer like Lovecraft who had been tormented by ultraterrestrial monsters in his dreams from a child to an adult constantly and lost both parents to insanity his philosophy of cosmicism is understandable.  The philosophy of cosmicism states that there is no recognizable divine presence, such as a god, in the universe, and that humans are particularly insignificant in the larger scheme of intergalactic existence, and perhaps are just a small species projecting their own mental idolatries onto the vast cosmos, ever susceptible to being wiped from existence at any moment. This also suggested that the majority of undiscerning humanity are creatures with the same significance as insects and plants, who, in their small, visionless and unimportant nature, do not recognize a much greater struggle between greater forces.

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

John Keel had come to many of the same conclusions as Lovecraft when he said at the end of his book The Complete Guide to Mysterious Beings, “there are entities on this planet, and around it, that are far beyond all efforts to translate them into understandable cellular creatures.  They are not real in the sense that we are animals motivated by sex and emotions.  They are part of the energies that were scattered into space billions of years ago.  Their intelligence is so vast and so ruthlessly inhuman there is no way for us to comprehend it or communicate with it as we talk to dolphins.”  Keel would then propose twice in that same book, “Someone within two hundred miles of your home, no matter where you live on this earth, has had a direct, often terrifying, personal confrontation with a shape-shifting, unbelievable. (ultraterrestrial)  Our world has always been occupied by these things.  We are just passing through.  Belief or disbelief will come onto you from another direction.”  What Keel was talking about was essentially Lovecraft’s Cthulhu.

Charles Fort said in his 1931 book Lo! during the time of Lovecraft, “There may be occult things, beings and events, and there may be something of the nature of an occult police force, which operates to divert human suspicions, and to supply explanations that are good enough, for whatever (minds) human beings have—or that, if there be occult mishiefmakers and occult ravagers, they may be of a world also of other beings that are acting to check them, and to explain them not benevolently, but to divert suspicion from themselves because they, too, may be exploiting life upon this earth, but in ways more subtle, and orderly or organized fashion.  In “The Call of Cthulhu”, H. P. Lovecraft describes the fictional Cthulhu as “A monster of vaguely anthropoid outline, but with an octopus-like head whose face was a mass of feelers, a scaly, rubbery-looking body, prodigious claws on hind and fore feet, and long, narrow wings behind.”[5] Cthulhu has been described as a mix between a giant human, an octopus, and a dragon, and is depicted as being hundreds of meters tall, with human-looking arms and legs and a pair of rudimentary wings on its back.[5]Cthulhu’s head is depicted as similar to the entirety of a giant octopus, with an unknown number of tentacles surrounding its supposed mouth. Cthulhu is described as being able to change the shape of its body at will, extending and retracting limbs and tentacles as it sees fit.”  This description is remarkably like the Mothman and is a creature of imagination brought to life through the reality of some ultraterrestrial shape shifter which is a trick as old as time.

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

Many of the cultures of times past as in the present which call for sacrifice to bring about something desired must point their superstitions toward these creatures.  Not surprising those who attempt to map out that realm of the ultraterrestricals even in a fictional sense—such as the Cthulhu end up dead.  Lovecraft died by the age of 46 and many who go down a similar path end up in the same state.  Looking into that other world brings upon the cells of the human body an undoing which prevents living.  I too have seen this as most notably reflected in my personal UFO story.  There have been many times when shape shifting entities made their entrance onto the stages of existence and did just as Charles Fort stated—“policed” the explanations of reality to suit their desires.  But if an inquiry into the other realms goes too deeply, then death is soon to follow.  Sometimes it’s not even by deliberate attempt.  Every year, roughly 15,000 people vanish under the most incredible circumstances, again according to John Keel’s studies into the matter.  “A family man steps into his backyard to mow the lawn. He is never seen again.  A waitress steps out of a restaurant to put a dime in the parking meter and disappears forever.  A family of five in a suburb melt into nothingness, leaving behind all their cloths, bank accounts, the family car.  We have dozens of puzzling cases in our files.” (Keel’s files)   These Cthulhu stories by Lovecraft are terrifying—because they are grounded in a reality we are aware of but dare not probe.

Most people are happy to carry a lucky rabbit’s foot, avoid unlucky associations, or pray to a deity to navigate through the minefield of the ultraterrestrial traps.  I have seen the attempt firsthand to divert my own attention obviously when doing an investigation by having those same beings throw me a bone as a UFO flew outside my front window to take me in a direction of inquiry they approved of—a classic case of misdirection.  Entire societies have adopted the notion of sacrifice in substitution for productivity to essentially satisfy their unconscious appeasement of these metaphorical Cthulhu’s which loom like gargoyles over charity events and suck off the vanity of opulent socialites and the perfume bathed on to cover the smell of their decaying flesh.  From the darkness of other dimensional realities our world is observed and manipulated to suit the needs of the ultraterrestrial, not our own as the strings of many living marionettes are tied to the fingers of an actual Cthulhu.

But unlike Keel and Lovecraft I do not believe the human race is destined to be meager insects in comparison to the cosmos.   I believe in the thin veil of cosmicism but do not believe that the Cthulhu type creatures residing there are superior to the human being.  If they were, there would not be all these elaborate tricks, like UFO’s landing in our front yards, or strange stories to captivate the tabloid lover in all of us—to keep us distracted and thus sacrificing to these gods of the unseen.  Their tricks only have power of the one way mirror for if they enter our reality with us, they discover they have no real strength—only the ability to scheme for their own ends as a competing organism.  And that goes for any entity in the universe—if they were so bold and audacious, they would not avoid direct contact and hide behind curtains of dimensional reality.  So there is nothing really to fear from them once it is understood that they gain all their power and terror from dwelling in the unknown.  But science is taking human beings into their realm whether they like it or not—and once we are there—there won’t be anywhere for them to hide any longer.  They are not to be feared, but to be conquered and the way to beat them is to remove the concept of sacrifice from the human landscape.  They obtain their sustenance off the emotional energy of the human race by a means not yet discovered and require misery, fear, and death to fuel their own existence.

Good horror touches these known truths—these deep suspicions we all have that just walking out to the mailbox may be the last time our bodies inhabit the earth.  We all know someone who has suffered from paranormal experiences yet nobody discusses it because we feel the breath of the Cthulhu on the back of our necks.  We try to counsel ourselves that the breath we feel is God and we seek to appease him with more sacrifice at churches, or financial donations and our prayers, but deep down inside we suspect that God is really a Lovecraftian monster ready to yank our lives from our bodies and consume it like a snack on Superbowl Sunday.  So we don’t name the evil for fear that it has power over us, we don’t talk about it with others for fear that we might be discovered betraying our overlords.  But those beasts have no real power—only the ability to operate from concealment.  Cellular attacks can be countered, diseases overcome, and mental breakdowns—alleviated by a strong—well-read mind.  If one is playing the Arkham Horror game which is a Lovecraftian journey I said weeks ago that I would take because of the nature of it, the characters of Harvey Walters and Sister Mary who both have a sanity of 7 would be the type of examples I’m refereeing to.  I like Harvey and would like to teach everyone to be more like him so that they could have a proper defense against the Cthulhu terrorists of inter-dimensional sacrifice.  But man’s fate is not destined to yield to these creatures, rather the other way around—which is the big secret they don’t want you to know about dear reader.  The human mind has the power to create these Cthulhu monsters—but it can also destroy them.  The reality of the horror of the Cthulhu is that they cannot match the productive enterprise of human imagination and effort.  With those efforts the driving force of humanity, the Cthulhu has no defense leaving the ultraterrestrial empire without armament in a war that is as old as time.  It would be my position to teach people how to make those Cthulhu into pets instead of Gods and the horror of their imprint into a children’s story.

Rich Hoffman

 

 

www.OVERMANWARRIOR.com

 

“The Serpent Mound Disturbance”: A giant hole opens in Siberia–again

For those living near Cincinnati, Ohio they would likely know of the strange archaeological remains of Serpent Mound off to the east—a mound built by an ancient people several thousand years ago clearly displaying a serpent design visible to the air which has astronomical calculations built into certain points of the large site. The people who built it went to incredible trouble for reasons that are even more mysterious. Thickening the plot the site sits on a significant portion of a crypto explosion which took place over 300 million years ago. There was no way that the ancient people could have at the time known of the explosion as erosion had removed most of the sight references visible without advanced scientific equipment.   Yet out of all the locations that Serpent Mound could have been built—it was on the edge of this gigantic 4 mile wide crater that looks to have come from inside the earth as opposed to a traditional meteor impact from space. The reason this is significant is that modern scientists are mystified–a helicopter spotted a large mysterious hole in Siberia Tuesday July 15th, 2014—and it has left scientists largely perplexed thus far. The first explanation rationed was that gas from deep in the earth exploded due to the mystical global warming phenomena perpetuated by paper-thin intellectuals—a falsehood designed to disguise their ignorance.

The massive hole, about 260 feet wide, is located in the Yamal peninsula and can easily fit several helicopters inside the entrance, according to the U.K.’s Independent. It is believed to be about two years old, RT.com reported.

The area’s name, Yamal, translates to “end of the world” and is home to some of Russia’s largest gas reserves.

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2014/07/18/a-giant-mysterious-hole-has-opened-up-at-the-end-of-the-world-in-siberia-and-its-left-scientists-baffled/

Yet this wasn’t the first such hole to appear in Siberia.

On June 30,1908, a giant fireball exploded in Siberia’s remote Tunguska region, leveling trees for more than 20 miles around and causing atmospheric shock waves that were detected round the world. At the time, scientists thought that a giant meteorite had crashed into the earth. Later, when they failed to find a major crater or clearly identifiable meteorite fragments at the site, they began to question their earlier theory.

Many scientists have since attributed the phenomenon to a comet head that exploded in the air before hitting the earth. Others suggest that a stray clump of antimatter from elsewhere in the universe was the cause through some dimensional portal—a fold of space and time which is concealing the evidence.

http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,908001,00.html

971521_574480222593899_774166430_nBack at Serpent Mound just outside of Cincinnati, hardly a location at the “end of the world” the same type of thing occurred long ago. The valley beneath the effigy is really the western rim of a mysterious, four-mile-wide, circular crater – the eroded remains of a huge, catastrophic event geologists call “The Serpent Mound Disturbance.” About 300 million years ago, either an asteroid collision or an underground explosion blew apart more than seven cubic miles of rock. The central area was uplifted more than 1000 feet, while an outer rim dropped more than 400 feet.

What we see today results from eons of erosion, although the shattered fragments of the “Central Uplift” remain among the hills above Serpent Mound. The distant ridge tops, visible from the overlooks, stand high today because they are the much harder Ordovician bedrock that was offset by the event.

The strange geology of this spot was first noticed in modern times by Dr. John Locke of Cincinnati, who named it “Sunken Mountain” in 1838. Yet, it’s not hard to imagine that the ancient effigy builders could have recognized the unusual land forms. The serpent looks out from the edge of the Central Uplift zone.

http://mobile.ancientohiotrail.org/sp-5.html

This little recent hole in Siberia is much smaller than the four mile wide one that occurred at Serpent Mound but one thing is for sure about the Serpent Mound crater—it wasn’t caused by global warming and much stronger forces were at work.   At this time the two craters may have been caused by entirely different forces but what is clear is that even with all of our modern equipment and satellite analysis the hole in Siberia wasn’t even noticed for two years.   This confirms that there is very little that modern science really knows about anything as our study into nature is still infantile. The cause and effects of forces known and yet to be discovered are not complete, so static conclusions are impossible at this time.

But what is most mysterious of all is that a so-called primitive people knew enough about the geology of the Ohio area which had filled back in after hundreds of millions of years of erosion to build a tribute to it as if they knew that their monument in the shape of a serpent might appease the forces that created the impact.

Many societies could have risen and fallen over several hundred million years and not all of them may have been terrestrial. Yet by some word of mouth or written documentation which is no longer seen, the ancient people who constructed Serpent Mound likely knew about the strange ancient events that took place on that site. And in our modern times similar holes are opening up right under our feet and we have no explanation for them but to blame the occurrences on our own development and science. That only goes to prove how feeble our modern grasp on reality truly is. The mysteries of the earth are alive and well, and mankind looks upon them with fear of the unknown for which they lack the courage to probe with honesty to an origin that does not reside on this planet—but out into the Milky Way toward one of NASA’s recent proclamations—that within 25 years life will be discovered afar and the answers to some of these mysteries will then become known—and we may not like the answer as it will disturb our religions, mythologies and basic concept of existence.   If history is to be followed when matched up against a superior intellect and culture—it is likely that we might want to build a monument to appease them in the same way that a weak-willed politician licks the boots of those they perceive to be their superiors. In that future time the real answer to the mysterious crypto explosions on earth will then be provided by documents that left long ago only to return by the minds responsible.

The term cryptoexplosion structure (or cryptovolcanic structure) means an explosion of unknown cause. The term is now largely obsolete. It was once commonly used to describe sites where there was geological evidence of a large-scale explosion within the Earth’s crust, but no definitive evidence for the cause such as normal volcanic rocks. These sites are usually circular with signs of anomalous rock deformation contrasting with the surrounding region, and often showing evidence that crustal material had been uplifted and/or blown outwards. The assumption was that some unusual form of volcanism, or a gas explosion originating within the crust, was the cause. The use of the term went away with the rise of the science of impact crater recognition in the late 20th Century. Most structures described as cryptoexplosions turned out to be eroded impact craters, caused by the impact of meteorites. Today geologists discount former cryptoexplosion theories.[1]

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

Yet, geologists have yet to explain what caused “The Serpent Mound Disturbance” and have relegated their investigation to the back of their desk drawers and left investigations to theorists who must resurrect the term, “cryptoexplosion” once again to properly term the classification.  And such explosions are not regulated to the distant past, but still occur right under the nose of science who believed that just because they stopped using a term, that the need would cease to call attention to itself.  By the evidence of the new hole that has opened in Russia–“cryptoexplosion” would appear to be much more appropriate as a term than “global warming.”

http://magnetic.me/Serpent/crater.htm

Rich Hoffman

www.OVERMANWARRIOR.com

 

Declaration of Independance: Poor minds not qualified to care for such a wonderful document

I do not believe that there is a single lawyer, politician or lobbyist who could write the Declaration of Independence today in 2014. When modern progressives, socialists, and domestic terrorists declare that they believe the founding documents of America are “living documents” they are wrong—because the quality of the minds that could contribute in the ways they propose would only diminish the meaning. It is possible that John Adams, Ben Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson were among the greatest collected minds in human history when they gathered to write the Declaration. They were as proficient philosophically as Socrates, Plato and Aristotle only all existing at the same time and without the murder of one by a society protecting itself from their intellectual advancement. When those three gathered and Jefferson wrote the founding document, a new era of philosophic endeavor had begun in the wake of war. A unique window had opened and the three of them stepped in bringing the rest of the new country with them. The results were the Declaration of Independence that was presented and edited by the Continental Congress in the following days leading up to July 4th 1776.

Congress ordered that the draft “lie on the table“.[66] For two days Congress methodically edited Jefferson’s primary document, shortening it by a fourth, removing unnecessary wording, and improving sentence structure.[67] Congress removed Jefferson’s assertion that Britain had forced slavery on the colonies, in order to moderate the document and appease persons in Britain who supported the Revolution. Although Jefferson wrote that Congress had “mangled” his draft version, the Declaration that was finally produced, according to his biographer John Ferling, was “the majestic document that inspired both contemporaries and posterity.”[67]

On Monday, July 1, having tabled the draft of the declaration, Congress resolved itself into a committee of the whole, with Benjamin Harrison of Virginia presiding, and resumed debate on Lee’s resolution of independence.[68] John Dickinson made one last effort to delay the decision, arguing that Congress should not declare independence without first securing a foreign alliance and finalizing the Articles of Confederation.[69] John Adams gave a speech in reply to Dickinson, restating the case for an immediate declaration.

After a long day of speeches, a vote was taken. As always, each colony cast a single vote; the delegation for each colony—numbering two to seven members—voted amongst themselves to determine the colony’s vote. Pennsylvania and South Carolina voted against declaring independence. The New York delegation, lacking permission to vote for independence, abstained. Delaware cast no vote because the delegation was split between Thomas McKean (who voted yes) and George Read (who voted no). The remaining nine delegations voted in favor of independence, which meant that the resolution had been approved by the committee of the whole. The next step was for the resolution to be voted upon by the Congress itself. Edward Rutledge of South Carolina, who was opposed to Lee’s resolution but desirous of unanimity, moved that the vote be postponed until the following day.[70]

Here is the text as it appeared after those edits:

Introduction Asserts as a matter of Natural Law the ability of a people to assume political independence; acknowledges that the grounds for such independence must be reasonable, and therefore explicable, and ought to be explained. In CONGRESS, July 4, 1776. The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen United States of America,When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
Preamble Outlines a general philosophy of government that justifies revolution when government harms natural rights.[77] We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.
Indictment A bill of particulars documenting the king’s “repeated injuries and usurpations” of the Americans’ rights and liberties.[77] Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.

He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their Public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.

He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness of his invasions on the rights of the people.

He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected, whereby the Legislative Powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.

He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.

He has obstructed the Administration of Justice by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary Powers.

He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.

He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people and eat out their substance.

He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.

He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil Power.

He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:

For quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:

For protecting them, by a mock Trial from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:

For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:

For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:

For depriving us in many cases, of the benefit of Trial by Jury:

For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences:

For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these states

For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:

For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.

He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.

He has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.

He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation, and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & Perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.

He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their Country, to become the executioners of their friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands.

He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.

In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.Denunciation This section essentially finished the case for independence. The conditions that justified revolution have been shown.[77]Nor have We been wanting in attentions to our British brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which, would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our Separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.Conclusion The signers assert that there exist conditions under which people must change their government, that the British have produced such conditions, and by necessity the colonies must throw off political ties with the British Crown and become independent states. The conclusion contains, at its core, the Lee Resolution that had been passed on July 2.We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these united Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.Signatures The first and most famous signature on the engrossed copy was that of John Hancock, President of the Continental Congress. Two future presidents, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, and a father and great-grandfather of two other presidents, Benjamin Harrison, were among the signatories. Edward Rutledge (age 26), was the youngest signer, and Benjamin Franklin (age 70) was the oldest signer. The fifty-six signers of the Declaration represented the new states as follows (from north to south):[78]

 

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

It is unlikely that there is a single mind in all of Washington D.C. who could write those sentences presently let alone put them into a contextual sentence.   Clearly those same minds are not capable of participating in a “living document” which evolves over time to accommodate changing circumstances. This is the actual sad part of our history is that the intention was that each generation would produce men and women like Adams, Franklin, and Jefferson, but this has not been the case. Instead, American society has regressed into the worship of stupidity and patted themselves on the back for passing gas in the form of a “fart.”

It would be my wish that I could associate with people like these Founding Fathers, instead of the weakened people of the modern age—people unable to understand the above document let alone produce another one of equal value. What is to be respected from this period in America is that intelligence was honored and valor was a part of daily existence and it is these traits that carried America to become the greatest country on earth. It was not the “come lately” types who spent years of their academic lives getting drunk, pursuing sex, and passing gas yet expecting to build their minds into understanding the need for the Declaration of Independence. Worse yet, to even entertain the belief that they were equal to men like the authors.

The sad state of our modern times is that intelligence is attacked and stupidity is worshipped, and it is for this reason alone that no modern man should even conceive of changing a single word of the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution—because they simply are not qualified—intellectually. No modern Supreme Court Justice, no lawyer—anywhere, and no current resident of the White House are able to meet the task of intellectual aptitude required to care for the founding documents let alone amend them. They are only capable of winning elections and moving money from one pocket to another—but they are not stewards of America equal to the founders—and authors of The Declaration of Independence.

Rich Hoffman www.OVERMANWARRIOR.com

 

The $2,474,520 Home of Lois Lerner: Life as a parasitic government employee

It’s not a problem for a person to have a home valued at $2,474,520 like Lois Lerner does—if they have earned it productively. However, Lerner and her husband have achieved much of their wealth as government parasites—meaning they live off the efforts of government specifically perpetuating the complexity of IRS law so that only they can translate the information to those willing to pay for the service.   Both Lerner and her husband are attorneys who haven’t been discussed in great detail after Lerner was forced to step down from her IRS position in the wake of serious scandal for which she has been caught. As a family of attorneys Lerner understands how to manipulate the system because it was her type who helped shape that same system. For those types of government parasites which Lerner and her husband are but a small part—times are good—so good that they can afford a multi million dollar home essentially living as second-handers. But before understanding why they are such prescribed leeches it is important to study a bit of their background.

Lerner is a member of the Massachusetts bar, having earned her juris doctorate degree from Western New England College School of Law, graduating cum laude. She completed her undergraduate studies cum laude at Northeastern University.

Lerner began her career in government as a staff attorney in the Honors Program at the United States Department of Justice. She served as a Special Assistant in the U.S. Attorney’s Office where she was lead counsel handling felony and misdemeanor prosecutions. In 1981, Lerner moved to the Federal Election Commission, serving as the Assistant General Counsel for Enforcement, and ultimately as the Acting General Counsel.[1]

Lerner is a past president of the Council on Governmental Ethics Laws (COGEL) and an active member of the Humane Society of the United States where her efforts in performing pet rescues necessitated by the 2005 Gulf Coast hurricanes were widely acknowledged.

Lerner began her IRS service in 2001 as Director Rulings and Agreements in the Exempt Organizations function of TEGE. [2] In January 2006, she was selected as Director Exempt Organizations. In this capacity, Lerner led an organization of 900 employees responsible for a broad range of compliance activities, including examining the operational and financial activities of exempt organizations, processing applications for tax exemption, providing direction through private letter rulings and technical guidance and providing customer education and outreach to the exempt community.[3]

On May 23rd, 2013 Lerner was placed on administrative leave. Acting IRS Commissioner Daniel Werfel selected Ken Corbin as the acting director of the exempt organizations division. Corbin was the deputy director of the submission processing, wage, and investment division.

In 2014, Lerner was held in Contempt of Congress in connection with the 2013 IRS controversy.[4][5] The resolution, H.Res. 574, was introduced into the United States House of Representatives on May 7, 2014 by Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA).[6] The bill was considered on May 7, 2014, and passed in Roll Call Vote 203 with a vote of 231-187.[6] All of the Republicans voted in favor of the bill, along with six Democrats.[7] The resolution holds Lois Lerner in contempt of Congress for refusing to testify at a congressional hearing.[8] Rep. Steve Stockman filed a motion on July 10, 2014 that, if enacted by the House, would direct congressional police to arrest Lois Lerner for contempt of Congress.[9][10]

Lerner is married to Michael R. Miles, Esq., Partner, Sutherland Asbill & Brennan LLP.

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

Michael Miles provides insurance companies with creative solutions and tax planning strategies for their corporate, insurance, and reinsurance transactions, including cross-border transactions and corporate restructurings. Michael also advises on consolidated return issues, the general taxation of corporations and shareholders, the taxation of regulated investment companies, and the application of withholding rules (including FATCA). He has substantial experience in advising clients on the tax consequences of proposed mergers and other reorganizations, reinsurance transactions, stock and asset acquisitions, and dispositions, distributions, and redemptions.

Before joining Sutherland, Michael served as an attorney in the Office of the Chief Counsel of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). He has more than 30 years of experience in handling federal tax controversies, first for the IRS and now for the firm’s corporate and individual clients, as well as substantial experience in obtaining rulings for clients on corporate tax and other matters and in practicing before the IRS.

http://www.sutherland.com/People/Michael-R-Miles

Knowing these things about Lerner and her husband it becomes clear that their combined incomes exist primarily from second-hand sources—living off the efforts of others. They do not build things, or behave in a productive manner—one was an IRS insider while the other provided tax strategies to a complex code. Like many in the Washington D.C. beltway they are a professional couple making vast sums of money as second-handers. They directly benefit from the efforts of others then redistribute those efforts directly into their pockets. This is how they came to own such a nice home in Montgomery County outside of Washington.  It wasn’t earned by productive enterprise—but rather parasitic leverage—(insider knowledge gained by political connections.)

Montgomery County Home:

Owner: MICHAEL R MILES & LERNER G LOIS Total land value: $747,870 Total value for property: $2,474,520 Total assessed value for property: $2,474,520 Base area of building: 6,500 square feet

Read more: http://www.city-data.com/montgomery-county/F/Fernwood-Court-1.html#ixzz37ZfF3700

Lerner only became a household name when she was caught in the current IRS scandal and set up to take the fall so that the rest of the IRS could skate away unharmed as her lawyer husband and past legal experience handled things behind the scenes. Politicians on the Hill benefit from the same second-hander strategies so when the cameras are turned off, there is little will to actually throw Lerner in jail or punish her in any way. The essential reason why is that they are all guilty of the same type of behavior.   All around Lerner’s $2,474,520 home are similar properties owned and operated by carbon copies of Lois and her husband, Michael—professional parasites that live off the efforts of others. Once they extort all they can from those sources they move on to new clients to extract all they can from them—until that too is gone, and this process continues until they either run out of clients, or find themselves in legal trouble and having to flee behind the curtain of protected BAR associations and their congressional friends who reside there with them.

When it is wondered what is wrong with Washington D.C. all one need to do is look at Lois Lerner and her husband to know what it is. They represent a deep fault in the current American political system overrun by lawyers, con artists and general second-handers avoiding any productive enterprise aside from the theft of other people’s money.   Lois Lerner is not unusual—she is common in her neighborhood—there are carbon copies of her on nearly every street.   The only reason that anybody knows about her is that she was the one who got caught. Many of the others are still unseen because their efforts are not so easily detected.   But they all have nice homes like the one that Lerner has because they achieve the wealth to buy them from other people’s money as service to government has paid them a healthy ransom and allowed them to live a pirate’s life only with a suit and tie to hide their true identities.

Rich Hoffman www.OVERMANWARRIOR.com

 

Saving a Cincinnati ‘Ghost Ship’: History and methods of resurrecting the ‘Sachem’

This is part two of a story previously articulated. CLICK HERE TO SEE PART ONE.

At first a visit I took to the “Ghost Ship” of Cincinnati was just to confirm that it was there and provide my daughter with an interesting subject to photograph, as she is a professional photographer. But after doing a little research it became quickly evident that there was more to the story of this ancient vessel rusting away in a tributary of the Ohio River across from Lawrenceburg, Indiana. The story of the ship was a compelling one describing a century of exotic adventures. It was certainly an oddity that such a historic vessel would end up beached in a completely foreign setting from the Caribbean Sea where it one time roamed. Upon seeing the ship after doing the research of its history it was easy to conclude that the Sachem had a tenacity which commanded respect and was in the fight for its life surrounded by a hostile forest environment that is trying desperately to denigrate it from rust to soil once again. So the trip my daughter and I took became more than a photographic voyage into the wooded areas of Northern Kentucky, it became an investigation into the viability of actually rescuing once again the ship that D’Andrea LaRosa is trying to raise money to save through her Lawrenceburg Art Foundation seen at the link below. The current owner Robert Miller out of money for many years now is in Mexico and had saved the ship once before but appears to not have the resources to do it again, leaving us to contemplate the condition of the ship during July when the water level was low and the ship could be seen from all angles feasibly. The walk about that ship can be seen in the video below with a visual commentary on what we were seeing.

http://www.dandrealarosaartfoundation.org/SachemCampaign.html

Looking into the life more of Robert Miller to discover if there was any way of helping the guy finish the restoration project of the Sachem which he so boldly attempted, I ran across the article below describing the conditions of the first rescue from the scrap yard as far back as 1985—which went into great detail of how the ship ended up from New York to Lawrenceburg on the Ohio River. Since the article is so old I am including it in its entirety for preservation purposes but link the original article following the text. It is quite a story describing a vessel that was much closer to being destroyed a long time ago than had been previously reported.

PROUD ‘LADY’ RESCUED FROM HUDSON SLUDGE

Frances Ingraham Staff writer

Section: LIVING TODAY,  Page: G1

Date: Sunday, September 14, 1986

The Sachem, a privately owned 187- foot yacht, built in 1902, once was an elegant lady of the sea. But time played its role, fortunes tossed it around, and by the time she was barely 50 years old, she was given up for dead.

However, that’s not to be. Not since Robert “Butch” Miller of Cincinnati surfaced and is determined to bring it back to life. “I’d been looking around probably eight or nine years for a steam yacht,” he said. “Not necessarily this one, and not with any intentions of purchase, because I figured it would be out of range financially for me. But I hadn’t seen any in a museum, any restored, any sunk on the bottom.. There just weren’t any around.”

However, stuck there in the sludge, where the Hudson twists into New Jersey, was the once-noble Sachem.

Seated in his cramped and cluttered living quarters on the ship that has now been raised, and docked at the Riverview Marina in Catskill, Cincinnati businessman Miller recalled how the forgotten ship became his.

He first saw it advertised for sale in Boats and Harbors magazine, but when he arrived at the site – in West, New York, N.J. – he discovered it was an endless hulk of rust bogged in the Hudson.

“The (seller) was selling his property,” he recalled, “and this was the last thing that was left. Everybody was afraid of it. They had tried to move it out a couple of times and it didn’t move. They tried to move it with bulldozers,” without success. Miller had no idea he would find it in this condition.

All the ad mentioned was that the vessel was a steel hull, it had an engine that wasn’t in running condition, and the size and the year the vessel was built.

“I thought, ‘Wow! That could be about the size of one of those old steam yachts!'” he recalled.

Miller decided to buy and restore the vessel, no matter what it took. So he paid the $7,500, called in the bulldozers and tugs and eventually prodded it in the Hudson, in the spring of ’85.

The upper deck was a shambles, leaving him the choice of sleeping outside or in the bathroom – which he didn’t recognize until he took a couple of inches of mud off it. The hull was sloshing with rain water. Parts of it leaked.

Miller wasn’t discouraged.

With his mother handling the family business of manufacturing auger bits and wire-stringing devices in Cincinnati, 35-year-old Miller has been living on, and patiently restoring, his “dream boat” ever since. Occasionally, he returns to be with his wife Deborah, a court stenographer in Cincinnati, and their five-year-old son.

One of these days, Miller says he hopes to sail the Sachem home – a 2,600-mile voyage through the Erie Canal, the Great Lakes and down the Mississippi to the Ohio River.

Just in case he should break down on his way, Miller has also bought a 12- foot, 1881 tug with a powerful engine for $1,250. Another reason he bought the tug was to save the $200 an hour it would have taken him to have the Sachem professionally tugged from Brooklyn to New Jersey before he could get his vessel going.

But why all the fuss? Why all the toil, the time away from home? Why has Miller already spent close to $50,000 to get the old tub going, and expects to spend close to $1 million before his dream boat no longer is a nightmare?

Because the Sachem isn’t just any boat, he reasoned.

The Sachem, a steel-hulled steam yacht, first named the Celt, was built by Pusey & Jones, Wilmington, Del., for a Manhattan entrepreneur J. Rogers Maxwell and launched in April 1902.

When he died, Maxwell’s widow sold it to a Matt B. Metcalf of New York City who continued to use it as a pleasure craft until 1917.

With World War I under way, the U.S. Navy requisitioned it. They thoroughly refitted the boat – removing the masts, sealed the ornate brass- fringed portholes with steel, raised the sides to make it ocean-worthy, added military navigational equipment…

By the time they were through with it, the yacht resembled a battleship.

She was pressed into service as a harbor patrol craft but was better known, at that time, as a floating laboratory for inventer Thomas A. Edison.

On board, Edison worked on and perfected more than 30 military aids, including underwater detection devices, the fog bomb, efficient nautical steering devices, underwater searchlights, airplane detectors, ship-to-ship telephonic communication.

After the war, in 1919, the Navy returned the Sachem to Metcalf who sold it to a Jake Martin. After using it for a years as a fishing charter boat out of Sheepshead Bay, L.I., the Sachem became the flagship of the Circle Line sightseeing service in Manhattan.

The vessel – close to 24 feet wide and sitting about 13 feet in the water – originally contained two deck houses, forward and aft, of solid mahogany with teak sills and brass handrails.

The furnished and accessorized state rooms, which were also finished in mahogany had adjoining bathrooms with mosaic-tiled floors, porcelain or vitreous walls that were five feet deep. It was equipped with modern plumbing and electric power throughout. The vessel was designed as a schooner, its stout masts made of Oregon pine. The engine was a four-cylinder powerhouse in an open engine room.

Miller added: “Norman Brauer, the curator of the South Street Seaport Museum (in New York City) said that there are only three of these steam engines left in the world.”

The past year “hasn’t been all unique experiences and fun for me,” said Miller. “You can’t just pull up to any ol’ dock and tie this boat up. You need a commercial-size dock and security for insurance and personal reasons.”

When he first rescued the ship, Miller he towed it to a lumber yard in Brooklyn and tied up to the loading docks.

With the engine in need of repairs, he said he would spend that time with interior renovations, then sail it to Cincinnati for further work.

It hasn’t quite worked out that way, though.

A gang of vandals applied an axe to the mahagony panels in the cabin, went to work with cans of spray paint, made off with the 2,000-pound anchor, most of Miller’s tools, a steam cleaner, band saws, paint remover, engine parts – even the garbage.

Late last September, it happened again: Vandals pitched the 900-pound engine heads overboard.

Miller tried to flee the damned area, but chronic engine problems had him grounded at the expensive Bay Street landing on Staten Island.

“It was kinda fun and scary,” Miller recalled. “I’d watch the Columbian freighters come in and vans from nowhere would pull up and park in the lot. The FBI kept an eye on me before the President’s arrival (for the Fourth of July Statue of Liberty celebrations). There was no protection or fences. Anybody, who wanted to come up on the boat, could.”

On the lighter side, while docked there, rock queen Madonna taped a fleeting moment of her new video “Papa Don’t Preach”in front of the boat’s bow.

During the past few months, Miller has shared his boat with an aging Afgahn hound. He said he has existed on a steady diet of canned goods, peanut butter, jelly, fruit and any produce he can buy.

One day soon, Miller hopes to be home with his “dream.”

“I’ve been interested in boats since I was 10 years old,” he said. “I always wanted to keep on going and not go back home at the end of the day. I thought that was the only way to go. My dad always had boats. I’ve never seen a boat or ship I didn’t want to have. I almost bought a 350-foot passenger cargo vessel once, and a P-T boat.”

Now that he’s skipper of his historic boat, Miller said: “I’m not going to make a disco, a floating shushi bar or sightseeing boat out of it. It’s just strictly my yacht; for me to be able to go whenever and wherever. Heck, I can use my 46-footer as the dingy for this boat!”

Miller always had the burning spirit of an adventurer in him, he said slowly, looking down in his cup of coffee. “Maybe now I qualify.”

http://alb.merlinone.net/mweb/wmsql.wm.request?oneimage&imageid=5453530

Surely enough Miller brought the ship across the country and boldly took it up a tributary with some idea of dry docking it for repairs. But at that point, as they often do, the adventure ran out, and reality caught up to the endeavor. The resources to repair the ship even back then would have been in the millions of dollars and now in the state it currently is, likely millions more, and there just aren’t many people out there who want to pour money into that kind of project just to preserve something. It wouldn’t make much economic sense—which has generated a very lukewarm reception of D’Andrea LaRosa’s fundraising campaign—even with the prestige of her family’s pizza empire at her back. This has left the Sachem in limbo—a kind of in between world squeezed by business finance, good intentions, historical value, and practicality. Yet as I looked at it beached in Northern Kentucky with the lush deciduous forest barking bird calls reminiscent of a rain forest in Peru I could think of many other instances where much more audacious efforts had been made for far less reason. What came to my mind were the many people who read Overmanwarrior’s Wisdom that contribute vast sums of wealth into political campaigns and if the same effort were given to the Sachem, the ship could be saved.image

As I was looking at the Sachem it appeared to be stable enough to sustain lifting it out of the creek bed with a large construction crane supported at multiple points under the hull. There is a large field directly to the south which could lean over the tree line and down into the creek. Access to the field appears to be reasonable with a large truck to carry all the equipment to the proper location. The ship could then be lifted out and placed on a barge or large flatbed tractor-trailer and taken out of the area for repairs. Given the cost of making the ship sea worthy, it is likely prohibitive, but might be better suited as a dry docked museum, restaurant, or both. It would be a wonderful exhibit at Newport on the Levy, the Cincinnati Banks project, the Museum Center in Cincinnati, or even the Edison Museum in Michigan. The top of the ship could be rebuilt with wood to look like it did leaving all the plumbing and engines out of the restoration equation to save cost.

To receive the investment dollars, unconventional explorations should be utilized, such as informing location scouts for motion pictures who have a need for a location like the one where the Sachem is. As I was looking at the vessel, it looked marvelous in the woods and would fit nicely as a ship wreck for a movie that needed that type of setting. It would cost a lot to build such a location and the land around the ship would easily accommodate a film crew. Again the land to the south is flat and relatively open allowing for trailers, tents, and equipment storage for location shooting.   An example of the location and how it could be filmed dramatically can be seen in the sample video my daughter and I put together during our visit seen at the start of this article. After collecting the footage we went over to McDonald’s in Lawrenceburg and cut it together as we had lunch. It was only about a 7 to 10 minute drive across the bridge from the ship to the McDonald’s so a film crew would have no trouble finding nice hotel accommodations that are very comfortable. The land around the Sachem was actually magnificent visually allowing film crews to shoot other scenes not directly related to a ship wreck and fees collected from the use could help fund the restoration of the Sachem. Film studios are usually sympathetic to these kinds of causes and might be entirely supportive. The key would be to let scouts know about the location so it could be used in this fashion. Hollywood is constantly looking for locations that offer tax incentives, which is why the new Avenger films are being shot in Ohio. Kentucky and Indiana have wonderful locations that could utilize the same resources. It is in this fashion that resurrecting the Sachem makes the most sense.image

Yes it is possible, and worthy—and would require a lot of people to do it for all the right reasons putting aside their need for private wealth, prestige, or other vanities and sincerely work to give new life to the Sachem—the Cincinnati Ghost Ship. An even better project would be to produce a series on the History Channel chronicling the life of the Sachem as a 7 or 8 part series and using the proceeds generated to actually save the ship. These are the only ways that I see a project of this scope happening—it certainly will take more than D’Andrea LaRosa’s kind efforts, or the other enthusiasts who have taken up the Sachem as a personal crusade. The money for the effort has to come from somewhere and it would be up to the parties involved to make it easy for that money to take up the cause—otherwise the ship will rot away on the banks of the Ohio River.

I certainly understand Robert Miller running out of gas on the project. He worked hard to get the ship saved from a New Jersey scrap yard, and his resources ran out once he got it to that creek and he hasn’t had the ability since then to continue. But he did his job as far as I’m concerned. Apparently the person he is now and the one described in the article is the result of many hard years and disappointments. But all hope is not lost. All that’s needed is a direction change and an emphasis on new methods to generate the funds required to save this remarkable ship filled with nautical history. It will take more than Robert Miller to save the Sachem this time—and it will take more than luck. But it is possible, and quite worth the effort.

Rich Hoffman

www.OVERMANWARRIOR.com