Tag: Rich Hoffman

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

 

A Temple of Hope: The Ghost Ship photographic journey

My family had a good laugh when the lunatic feminists in my home school district addicted to tax money accused me of being sexist.  The terminology clearly didn’t fit.   I raised two daughters and never gave them the indication of submission to anybody for any reason under any circumstances.  They are more technically liberated women than even the most rabid progressive feminist and it is quite a joy to watch them grow up and flower into everything that they feel inclined to develop about themselves.   However, it was very rewarding to see how one of them who is a professional photographer viewed a day we recently spent together.  She is pictured below on the bow of the Cincinnati Ghost Ship and can read her point of view at the following link.

http://adventuringphotographer.wordpress.com/2014/07/16/the-cincinnati-ghost-ship/img_7006

She has been an adult for long enough now to display her skills many times over and I haven’t been disappointed.  She is first and foremost an artist that wishes to embody all the elements I introduced to her as a child and it is wonderful to see all those elements come together into the person she is.  As I was raising her I never directly tried to shape her personality into something I would approve of, but simply removed the social shackles that often prevent the development of a mind properly.  My interest has never been social roles as society defined them, but as an individual does—so my parenting style was always focused on allowing my children to be exactly who they uniquely are—even in spite of my wishes—which I always made sure to contain.  When someone decides to become an artist of some type they leave themselves vulnerable to interpretation as their efforts are impossible to disguise.  What an artist produces becomes the culmination of their internal philosophy, which in my daughter’s case can be seen in the video below.

 

 

The day was not intended to be so monumental.  She and I have done that kind of thing many times.  As a little girl she trudged through many denser places, caves, trees, lakes and even confronted sometimes hostile inhabitants.  The standard equipment has always been a part of our life, satchels, loose clothing for easy climbing, hats to keep spiders and small rodents out of our hair, and my whips for climbing and diverting away hostile encounters.  Oddly enough on this trip to the Cincinnati Ghost Ship as an artist her natural focus was on most of those things which I take for granted as just part of everyday life.  As a photographer she brought them to the surface in a way that told me much of how she sees me—which is more beneficial to me than her.

Videography is a new skill she is adding to her arsenal.  She has been to film festivals with me several times and has met professionals who make movies—and has seen many artistic efforts from behind a lens.  So she has seen all the tricks and knows that there isn’t any way to hide her soul.  The way a camera operator and video director lights their subject, the focal point, the movement of the camera, and the way a piece is edited together ultimately reveals everything that there is to know about the artist behind the effort.  So her shot selection and ability to tell a story with moving pictures was very revealing regarding the kind of young woman she has become, and was a real treasure.  I didn’t know that at the beginning of our little adventure that I would come away with more than she did.img_6972

As the video was shot, we typically did not stop and pose for pictures.  We just did our thing and turned on the camera to capture footage as we were doing it.  The adventure always comes first; the attempt to document it is second which makes the job of a filmmaker more difficult.  Some things that show up in the video that were actually not filmed was the nice lunch she and I had at McDonald’s just prior to visiting the Ghost Ship.  Usually when she and I get together the rest of the family is with us, so she has been deprived of craved personal time with me.  Upon hitting the exit that would take us to the Ghost Ship off the highway the fuel light came on indicating that we were about to run out of gas.  So I turned around and got some gas down in Lawrenceburg before getting back into the hills of Northern Kentucky on an empty tank.   We were in the right area so I felt confident that time was on our side.  Getting gas was a little bit of an adventure so we decided to go ahead and grab a bite to eat before getting back into the woods.  The two of us had a Sausage McMuffin with Egg each—which the last time she had breakfast at McDonald’s with me was during a trip back from Florida the previous year so that breakfast tasted much better on the cusp of such an adventure.

As we sat and ate, and caught up on all the things we typically talk about, we looked over topographical maps of the area and contemplated strategies for getting there.  It turned out to be much easier than I anticipated which was nice considering that we had some really expensive camera equipment.  We were dressed to wade into the water and board the vessel if need be.  I typically carry with me a 12’ bull whip for those types of occasions.  I also typically have my rope bag that has 150’ of rope along with climbing gear, but that wouldn’t be needed for this.  The whip will get a person up small climbs most effectively.  I always have on my hip a whip holster that my friend Gery Deer designed especially for me.  I use it each year in the bull whip fast draw competition and when I walk around the house practicing.  It is designed for smaller whips but the 12’ whip can fit in it.  So that is what appeared in the video.  I didn’t know my daughter focused some of her shots on things like my whip and satchel, but they were nice bits of context from the adventure that surprised me.

When she was old enough to sit still I raised her on Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and each night when she went to sleep, she played the Raiders of the Lost Ark soundtrack and let it go on repeat throughout the night.  She had a healthy childhood filled with the yearning for adventure, likely due to the kind of material she had from her first conscious moments.  Our interest didn’t stop there; we actually expected to live that life to a certain degree and she has so far her entire life.  So our outing to the Ghost Ship was simply a reflection of who we were.  But watching her video of it, it was clear that there was some Indiana Jones in there—which makes sense.  Indiana Jones to me is one of the most wonderful characters ever created for film.  He can get dirty with the best of them then turn around and be among the most scholarly.  He reads, he’s smart, and he’s fearless—but better yet, he’s tenacious.  I knew what I wanted to be as a man when I saw Indiana Jones swing into the Temple of Doom and steal the Shankara Stones from the skull on the sacrificial altar.  To a large degree I do live that life as a man.  The film was a fun movie filled with comic book antics, but the substance of the story is something that both my daughter and I have carried with us every day of my life and hers.img_6977

After we explored the vessel, dripping with sweet, I was pulling bugs off my hat and we decided to go back to McDonald’s for lunch to cool off.  We looked at our footage and talked about what we saw and as we were sitting there I thought about the many times that I had shown her the Temple of Doom movie and realized that we were living that life.  One moment we were knee-deep in adventure, the next integrating the boon of our discoveries with the civilized world—sitting in the corner with my cut up cloths and sweat soaked shirt, with cobwebs still hanging from my hat.  More than a few people looked my way wondering what we had been doing.  Most of them had no idea that just across the river was a treasure that had been there for many years right under their noses yet they were blissfully ignorant.  The only trace of anything out of the ordinary was my daughter and I who had just stepped out of some story book adventure sitting in the corner eating ice cream.  But that was part of the fun for us.

It was those little moments from the adventure that filled her mind which ended up in her cut of the video and framed the way she photographed the day’s events.  It made me very happy and confirmed why I raised her the way I did—it was to nurture that spark of hopeful optimism that can always be present—even when the circumstances are quite scary.  There is a hope in the way my daughter photographs that is a liberating pleasure unmatched by anything else for me.  As an artist, the mind of the creator cannot hide so cynicism shows behind every attempt if it is present.  Adventure isn’t always about things “out there” but what’s really inside–the adventure of a Ghost Ship in our back yard, or a simple trip to McDonald’s, or running out of gas at a highway interchange with no stations in sight.  Adventure starts in the heart, not in the extraordinary and the best of those events happen  when a parent and their child get together for the fun of it—and joy, and lack of pretense just to live life and capture what comes as future memories.   A temple is a place of worship and our lives come together driven by mutual interest.  It is not the Temple of Doom that we share as a lifelong focus–but a Temple of Hope captured by photos for time to benefit.img_7024

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

 

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

 

“I WAS ONLY DOING MY JOB”: Why Lois Lerner should be tarred and feathered

When John Adams defended the shooters of the Boston Massacre the essence of the defense was that the soldier, who fell under pressure from a raging mob—largely led by John Adams cousin Sam, accidentally fired into the crowd launching a barrage of shots from the other English troops killing several in the crowd. The defense was that the soldier was simply doing his job as a servant to the Crown and the uniform. Later of course John Adams would take up the patriot cause more and more until he would be an eventual President of The United States. However, the foundations of his argument hastens back to the many evils often perpetrated by individuals in service to a system created by collectivism and uttered by the simple words—“I was only doing my job.”

The term is used daily all across the world when phrased as an explanation for something that goes wrong. The presumption is that the individual is somehow disassociated from an act because of service to a system and the requirements of surrendering thought to collective action. When somebody does something bad against someone else they often look for the escape—“I was only doing my job” to alleviate responsibility for their actions.

For instance, when a cop gives an expensive ticket to a housewife on her way to the grocery store and she declares that the only reason she was getting a ticket is because she’s driving a nice car, lives in a nice area, and has a nice life and can therefore pay the ticket without further trouble for the court—the cop says—“I am only doing my job.” With those simple words the officer shrugs off any personal responsibility for decisions and surrenders his actions to the benefit of the collective whole even though he did target the housewife instead of the Cheech and Chong look-a-likes who might have been in the next car. The housewife was an easy target, low confrontation type who typically pays the fee without any trouble. The other types might not even have the money for the fee creating defaults in court, time in jail, and all kinds of further work for the officer, so he picked the housewife for a ticket and blamed the system he served.

When a White House spokesman lies to the public to defend a president guilty of many crimes—the spokesman claims that “I was only doing my job.” When a lawyer defends a murderer whom he knows is guilty but provides a defense anyway doing whatever may be done to get the client off the punishments for the accused crime the lawyer says—“it is my job.”   The term itself refers to the notion that crimes can be committed so long as they are for a collective causes within an institutional system—but if that same act is committed between individuals, then punishment is expected.

This term, “I was only doing my job” is an old archaic notion left over from our primitive past as nomads and hunters and gathers where a village chief pointed the society they led to the higher cause of collective salvation. Modern society is only a few hundred years removed from this type of remnant behavior, so the type of individuality represented by American philosophy has not yet been biologically accepted as a new static pattern socially. People are still socially, mindless creatures trying to figure out where they stand in the grand scheme of things and their personal focus is still centered on service to a system over their own impulses to think. This is what is meant when someone declares, “I am only doing my job.”

Responsibility is not lost to the phrase, just the acknowledgment of an imposition. It is impossible to blame a system blob like presence like the “federal government, or a corporation over the individual behavior of the participants. When the police declare that they are just doing their job to kick in doors and arrest people for charges more politically motivated than attempts at justice—they are allowing the institution and their service to it to guide their thought instead of contemplating the value of an order given by a “superior.” When something goes wrong, they declare—“I was just following orders.” In this fashion the current IRS scandals was thought to be avoided as the participants taken individually are likely good people who shop at the same stores as everyone else, raise kids, see movies and eat at restaurants. But when they were asked by Lois Lerner to perform illegal actions of activism they said to all who questioned them, “I am only doing my job.” In this way many crimes were committed by the IRS because the leader at the time was a political activist using the arm of the IRS for personal conquest of opponents to a big government philosophy.

When Commissioner of Customs John Malcolm was accused of telling on tea smugglers in Boston in 1773 he was stripped, tarred and feathered and paraded around the city as a victory against tyranny. Before the lynching the man attempted to declare—“I’m just doing my job” hoping that it would relieve him of judgment by the angry mob who was sick of taxation without representation and the monopoly power of the tea supply company to levy taxes. The mob, led again by Sam Adams and witnessed by his cousin John held the Commissioner responsible for his individual actions not as a member of the East India Company or a favored member of the Crown in England—but as an individual who made a conscious decision to participate in a system perpetrating tyranny against the colonies. The difference between then and now is that the Sons of Liberty involved in the Boston Tea Party were holding individuals accountable for their evils instead of allowing the responsibility of a “system” to suck blame like a black hole—and this forced change.

By those who resent America the Boston Tea Party is often thought of as a terrorist act comparable to something like the World Trade Center attack, or the Boston Marathon Bombing. But there is a distinct difference that must be brought to light. The radicals of Islam, and other related tribal mentality terrorism is utilized to attack the collective mass through fear to have an impact on the institutions represented. For instance, the World Trade Center attack was designed to strike at the American economy as an institution by attacking a collective symbol—the sky scrapers of economic activity. The essence of the Tea Party attack in 1773 Boston was to remove the mask of individual responsibility to collective evil—by negating the term—“I was only doing my job.”

The crises that John Adams felt—America’s second president—was that he had defended that institutional position when defending the Red Coats during the Boston Massacre. Because of his fair and civil defense of the Crown’s army, Adams was offered into the elite circles of the King’s personal advisors as a reward. Yet Adams turned away from this being appalled by the actions leading up to the Boston Tea Party ultimately he made the decision as a very good lawyer to stand behind individual merit instead of collective sacrifice. By the time he was nominated to attend the First Continental Congress, he had evolved as a person who could argue in defense of men guilty of crime by declaring that “they were only doing their jobs” and begin holding people accountable for their individual actions in spite of their role in the institutional representation.

Much evil is conducted behind the façade of goodness to an institutional cause. But this does not get people off the hook of judgment. They are still required to be good people and to make decisions based on what’s right as an individual–opposed to an entity functioning as a tyranny because of institutional commitment to non-thinking collectivism. The Boston Tea Party was an act of accountability—in not allowing individuals to hide behind institutional evils.   The 9/11 terror attacks were collectivist attacks upon an institution thought of as American imperialism. In that circumstance the terrorists were individuals serving a collective desire—whether that desire was world bankers advancing their investments, or crazed lunatics committed to Islam it does not matter. One was an act of aggression for the good and one was for the bad. The difference between good and bad in this case is the commitment to individual value or collective based institutional assessment. America was formed upon individual value and it is there that the great differences reside. It is why John Adams came to realize that his cousin Sam was actually not such a provocateur and was actually standing for something unique on the world stage—a commitment to justice as judged by individuals as opposed to institutional preservation. In this case the term, “doing my job” has roots in the value of the individual instead of institutional concerns and does not allow vile acts to be performed behind a curtain of indecision, such as what has been happening at the IRS which dictates another type of Boston Tea Party where the individuals helping conceal the crimes should be tarred and feathered in pursuit of justice that has value where it is otherwise vacant. And this should be the fate of Lois Lerner so to send the message that institutional preservation is not going to hide behind the evils, lies and deliberate crimes of IRS leaders and their political activism paving the way for attacks against value. She was not “doing her job,” she was allowing tyranny to spread through institutional corruption and that deserves punishment.

 

Rich Hoffman

www.OVERMANWARRIOR.com

 

Practitioners of Drunkenness: Why ‘Gladiator’ was such a great movie

The aspect of the second-hander is the only one that makes sense when many of the world’s problems are analyzed.  My hatred of the intoxication culture stems from this division between second-handers and producers—which was elaborated upon as a kind of identifiable introduction in a previous article.  One of the primary reasons that I have enjoyed the movie Gladiator so intensely is because it deals squarely with this problem of producers and second-handers—as the Emperor’s son was a second hander, and Maximus was a producer.  When that same son—Commodus inherited the throne through treachery—and attempted to completely destroy Maximus by killing his family, robbing him of all his social connections, and leaving him for dead in a forest the producer lead Maximus rose up through the ranks of the gladiators to challenge the entire Empire not through any other effort but sheer tenacity.  Commodus could not understand how his old rival had managed to regain such respect and stature because as a second hander, he had to be given his value through others.  The new Emperor believed that because he stole away the life of Maximus that he destroyed the man.  But Maximus was a producer and therefore a great leader—it didn’t matter if it was among the best fighters in the world at the time of Roman legionnaires or the dregs of society as gladiators fighting for their life in the arena.  Maximus thrived because he didn’t know how to do anything else but generate success—as a producer which eventually destroyed the emperor.  Gladiator was a great movie primarily for this reason.

Producer types make their own way, and enjoy thinking.  They typically don’t pray to the gods for success, they don’t seek to live off the inheritance of their ancestors, and they don’t gamble or purchase lottery tickets hoping to be filled by chance of a draw so that they can wake up one morning filled by the efforts of others.  Everything they do is geared toward productive enterprise even when they are performing in leisurely endeavors.  That said producers would typically not be comfortable in social settings like bars where intoxication is the objective.  Producers do not wish to lose their mental faculties.  Second handers however do wish to lose their ability to think—as mentioned in the previous article about people who prefer electric shock over thinking.  The practitioners of drunkenness are second handers because they are surrendering thought to chance as relief from the responsibility of action.

Intoxication is one of the vilest activities that could be perpetrated against an active mind.  Yet second handers routinely abuse their thinking because they cannot allow the impulse of their own inner producer developed as children to reemerge to the life of choice competing with their adult decisions to remain a passive second hander waiting for others to fill them with thoughts and action.  When it is said that someone is “drunk with power” this is something to which they speak—taking the example of Commodus once again, the new Emperor killed the old one believing that his actions would settle the issue of who would lead next the Roman Empire after the conquest of the Germanic people of the north.  But Maximus interfered with this equation with a new set of rules—that of a producer who did not care for politics—because he did not need politicians or social connections to give him authority—he simply generated it.  Maximus didn’t need a god to give him authority or validation to be great—because he already knew that he was.  And Maximus didn’t need favors granted by those in a bloodline of leadership because he knew he was a natural leader functioning well as a producer.  So Commodus tried to have Maximus killed to preserve his illusion of power and right by blood to lead an entire region of people as if he had a right to the throne by grace of the gods.

The drunk does the same thing in essence; they drink to lose their minds from the observations of contrary reality which conflicts with their path of parasitic social behavior—that of the second hander who needs the approval of others.  A room full of drunks as a bar is a palace of second handers evading their destiny as thinking producers.  Instead they have surrendered their fates to being filled by others for their sustenance.  Getting drunk helps them not feel the conflict of thought which is always seeking to emerge.

A constant companion of dialogue in these modern times is the term “depression” which is thrown about so flamboyantly by second handers to explain their affliction—much of which is prescribed drugs to alleviate the pain.  The cause of depression is the desire for something which does not come to second handers by luck—such as love, money, respect, or general value.  When those things fail to come to a second hander by the grace of invisible rulers—people find themselves depressed and seek alcohol or other drugs to relieve them of that pain.    As alcohol is a depressant it often makes depression worse—but what is really sought is the numbness of thinking—not the affliction of depression which usually becomes more pronounced.  A producer generally does not feel depression because their thoughts are not out of alignment from their actions.  Producers are not let down because their IRS refund check did not come in the mail, or some perfect job fell upon them by social connections.  They make these things for themselves and are generally a happy lot of people because they are living authentically to their nature—as producers.

If you walk into any environment where large amounts of alcohol are being consumed you are seeing a temple of second handers seeking to suppress thought and responsibility for productivity.  As second handers they try to crush their inner Maximus so that their Commodus can speak to them.  And what Commodus says to them often exacerbates the tendency toward depression they feel, but without thought to measure against—they are free of the pain so long as they drink.  This is why second handers tend to drink to get intoxicated and producers do not.  Producers value their thoughts as second handers are running away.  This means that if anything is ever to be fixed in the world about us, it has to start with this tendency toward second hander behavior.  The world cannot be run and built by second handers—because they are incapable and are not equal in value to the producers of the world.  The issue is not one of race, sex, or even fate—it is one of decisions and mental faculties by way of focus.

Rich Hoffman

www.OVERMANWARRIOR.com

 

Kevin Smith’s Report from the Episode 7 Set: Finding the Peter Pan in all of us

There was a lot of Star Wars news this past week as the world revs up for the most recent reports from that line of mythology originating during the 1970s. As I received news from Lucasfilm about their schedule at Comic Con, San Diego, a fan from Germany did a brilliant YouTube video showing vehicles from the Empire being unloaded at a foreign airport. It was a remarkable short film and showed how easy it is for anybody these days to make wonderful visual effects—putting story telling within reach of the entire world. Even more remarkable was that the creator was not an American, but was German—meaning that the very American Star Wars mythology was important enough to him to create such a video which would have taken a considerable amount of thought and time.

But most remarkable of all was the report from Kevin Smith—the filmmaker from the Clerks movies and Red State who was given permission to visit the Star Wars Episode 7 set by invitation of J.J. Abrams. Smith is personal friends with Ben Affleck and a number of notably progressive Hollywood types, but he is also a very pop culture lover of comic books and heroic endeavor. If he and I had a dinner conversation together it is likely we would agree on nothing related to politics, but everything regarding comic books and Star Wars which is the magic of that particular mythology.

I was not a fan of Smith’s movie Red State—which felt to me like a Hollywood shot at life in the Midwest. Most of the antagonists in the film were perverted versions of the type of characters Hollywood views as “Bible Thumpers” so I nearly ignored the report that Kevin Smith gave after his visit to the Star Wars set. However, under the recommendation from some of the filmmakers from the Atlas Shrugged set I gave it a chance and was glad I did. Smith gave a remarkably honest breakdown not only of what he saw there—but in how it made him feel which reaches to the heart and soul of the entire Star Wars movement.

Star Wars is a movement, philosophical, political, and religious—it is a culture building exercise that extends far beyond simple entertainment. Cultures throughout the world have spent decades now having values removed from them leaving them empty. The causes have been varied—but the results are massive cases of emptiness leaving people desperately hungry to fill themselves with something of value. Star Wars created by George Lucas was intended for children to provide value and this hunger for all things Star Wars is most reflected in the excitement level of grown adults who are rediscovering their inner—long lost child through new movies and products.

I promised my children and wife when we all saw the movie Hook together by Steven Spielberg that I would never become lost like the Robin Williams character and lose my inner Peter Pan. And I have never broken that promise to them—I understand all too well the character of Peter Pan. I live the life of Pan with every breath that I take. With that said, the bedroom of my wife and I looks like a Star Wars toy section at Target. Looming over our bed is a large Millennium Falcon and located around our bedroom are several different versions of that same ship in various sizes. I know what Star Wars means to me because I have never left that part of my life behind—instead I incorporate it seamlessly into my mature life in the way that Peter Pan had to reconcile at the end of Hook.

I’m sure that J.J. Abrams invited Kevin Smith to the Star Wars set to generate positive publicity ahead of Comic Con in San Diego and to put some of the negative rumors about Harrison Ford’s broken leg—which is healing, to rest. Ford is doing what he has always done—he’s fighting back to health so he can complete the film. (Harrison Ford suffered an ACL tear during the making of Raiders of the Lost Ark, and ruptured a disk in his back during the filming of Temple of Doom. In both cases he hit the weight room and recovered and finished his film as the star. He is doing the same thing as a 71-year-old man for Episode 7. That is what makes him great and a man’s man.) Smith came to the set and reported in a video what he saw which was captivating, but what impressed me most was his sense of understanding of what happened to him when he stepped to the top of The Millennium Falcon ramp.

It was an interesting admission that Kevin Smith made when he declared that everything he had been—as an adult—was a corrupt caricature essentially shaped by the times of society’s impression upon him. He was very honest about stating that when he visited the Star Wars set he returned back to his childhood which for him was a treasure—as it is for most people. His intense revelation about crying at the top of The Millennium Falcon ramp says a lot about our culture. It is that lost Peter Pan persona that most of us seek to regain.

So the question must be asked—why do we give up that treasure in our teenage years? Some of the most courageous among us regain that persona later in life once we become grandparents—and too old to care what people think of us. Once we lose our sex appeal, our hair, our nice skin, and the ability to impress others with our appearance there is once again a chance to become childlike with the wisdom of years of learning to support ourselves. Kids don’t care what they look like, they just like to play and have fun, and this is a trait that we should not give up on as adults.

I never have—I promised my family I never would, and I never will under any conditions. Every day in my life is like the end of the Robin Williams version of Peter Pan in Hook. I skipped right over the crises period and just went from childhood to adulthood with the same enthusiasm. What Kevin Smith, Seth McFarlane, and I all have in common is that even though we differ dramatically in our politics—we share emphatically a love of Star Wars for the same reasons—as the mythology is a direct link to the energy of childhood which should never be lost to any adult anywhere.

Kevin Smith obviously would have been a happier person if he didn’t start swearing, doing drugs, and adopting progressive causes. This is why our politics is different essentially. He would have been happier if he had kept that inner child all through his life and dropped the cynicism of adulthood. He shouldn’t have had to cry when he stepped to the top of The Millennium Falcon ramp. But, his friend J.J. Abrams probably did Smith a huge favor on a personal level by bringing him to the set to see the Star Wars shoot in person.   It is good that Kevin Smith had that experience and reported it so honestly—because this is part of the healing qualities that I have spoken about so often regarding Star Wars. The culture that will come from all this will leave us all much better off than we are today—because the stories are about values that the inner child in all of us crave so deeply. The cynical adult in us has yielded to the pressures of existence which imposed compromises of those values leaving us shells of ourselves to live as caricatures of our former dreams—which is the essential story of Hook.

Disney will surely give the rest of the world the same opportunity Smith had when they build a full scale Millennium Falcon in Orlando, Florida for visitors to their theme parks. It will be a common sight to see grown adults weeping at the top of the ramp in the same way that Kevin Smith did because the long suppressed magic of childhood will come rushing back to them in that instant. It’s not immature to feel such things–it is actually rational to reacquaint an adult life with the foundations of their belief systems formed during childhood. For many people, Star Wars is the clearest representation of value that they have and is why so many fans go to such elaborate measures to touch that mythology any way they can, even if it is in a short film remarkably done like the one at the German airport. There have been few people who have put their finger on the pulse of the Star Wars movement better than Kevin Smith did when he so honestly reported his visit to the Episode 7 set.

There is no shame in rediscovering the Peter Pan in all of us—the eternal youth forever thoughtful of the hopes and dreams of discovery and imagination. When those things are lost, we are robbed of much—and it is always good to revisit these traits which we are born with. It has only been recently when there was a mythology like Star Wars providing the mechanism through simple sight of a movie prop that could make a grown man cry like a baby at the purity of the emotion—the long lost hopefulness of childhood and the values of the uncompromising dreams of youth.

Rich Hoffman

www.OVERMANWARRIOR.com

 

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