Tag: Rich Hoffman

Dol Guldur: Spitting in the eye of evil

As some may be mystified when I make a lot to do about certain types of movies and I rate them exquisitely high, and then seemingly trail off into a different more contemporary direction for the next series of writings, there is a good reason for it.  My wife and I have a number of hobbies we share together, she does a lot of personal crafts–and reads a lot, I read, write, and practice bullwhips—but one thing that we share intensely is a study of evil and the various forms it takes in society.  We have intense discussions about parallel universes, and the numbers for infinity contemplating how evil manifests between dimensional planes and grabs lives into this little four-dimensional space we all share on earth.  We make a point to see how evil burrows its way between the lines of reality like the roots of weeds and finds its way around a sidewalk brick and goes around solid objects rather than through them.  I have often compared our waking world to a 24 frame per second movie—what we view we accept as our reality—however we are really witnessing 24 independent pictures per second which our mind paints together into a functioning comprehension.  What exists between frames 18 to 19 or 20 and 21 is a black empty bar separating the pictures from one another which our minds ignore so that we can accept the reality presented in the framed pictures.  Often evil lives and comes into our lives in those black spaces, it comes into our minds because we cannot behold two separate realities presented on the same metaphorical film strip at the same time—so we often accept the pleasant pictures of existence rather than try to understand what isn’t so pleasant.  It is in that understanding that my wife and I share an intense passion and also gives insight into a world that is acting upon us—but is otherwise invisible.

Religion for me limits this exploration.  I enjoy the magnitude of Biblical study and other religious examination into the roots of evil—primarily through mythology, folklore, and philosophy.  But mankind’s explorations into evil did not stop in the Dark Ages when many of the religious texts of the world were surmised.  They continue—even more so today than ever before in the realm of fiction.  It is highly likely that in the distant future once the dust settles on the ages a bit that literary classics like J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit, Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion will become religions onto themselves—perhaps 2000 to 3000 years in the future.  It should be noted that Tolkien considered himself a Christian, but had a deep need to understand the nature of evil as he witnessed it during two World Wars—so he invented a mythology that could explore evil in a way that the old mythology of Satan from The Bible did not go far enough.  The desire of any modern society to focus the minds of mankind on ancient traditions and mythologies is so that emotional distance can be maintained between one age now gone and harmless and the new one where much is at stake and power is to be had.  So long as the functioning myths of a society are on events 2000 years ago people generally do not see what is happening to them in the world of today as their focus is adrift.  But in modern stories like the contemporary Hobbit, writers like Tolkien have tackled that problem directly with the type of story that can be directly applied from Middle-earth, to modern existence.

In the film The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, Gandalf discovers Black Speech graffiti imprinted on an old ruin, coinciding with a telepathic message from Galadriel imploring him to investigate the tombs of the Nazgul.  When Peter Jackson went off on this subplot as the film’s director it has drawn a critical response from Tolkien purists who don’t feel that the work of The Simarillion should be included in the film adaption of The Hobbit.  But Jackson did it anyway and I’m very happy that he did because it turned out for me to be one of the most intensely enjoyable parts of the film.  Once the three Hobbit films are complete Jackson will have correctly connected the Lord of the Rings trilogy together with The Hobbit in a way that Tolkien didn’t live long enough to do, and that will bring the work to a new audience, which is of utmost importance.  Once at the tomb Gandalf discovers that the Nazgûl have been revived by their one true master.  This prompts Gandalf to visit the ruins of Dol Guldur which he discovers appears to be dilapidated beyond refute.  But this is only an illusion as a spell has been cast over the place to keep its true form from being noticed by the outside world as a mounting army led by the ancient evil form of Sauron—who in this film is a Necromancer—a disembodied spirit organizing events in the world for his triumphant return as the one world ruler.  The spell is meant to disguise these efforts so that they cannot be stopped while the rising evil is still vulnerable.  The Necromancer confronts the solitary Gandalf and tells him that there is no light in the world that can stop darkness, which then provokes an epic battle of which Gandalf is not quite prepared to deal with.

 The cosmological myth prefixed to The Silmarillion explains how the supreme being Eru initiated his creation by bringing into being innumerable spirits, “the offspring of his thought,” who were with him before anything else had been made. The being later known as Sauron thus originated as an “immortal (angelic) spirit.”[5] In his origin, Sauron therefore perceived the Creator directly. As Tolkien noted: “Sauron could not, of course, be a ‘sincere’ atheist. Though one of the minor spirits created before the world, he knew Eru, according to his measure.”[6]

In the terminology of Tolkien’s invented language of Quenya, these angelic spirits were called Ainur. Those who entered the physical world were called Valar, especially the most powerful ones. The lesser beings who entered the world, of whom Sauron was one, were called Maiar.  In Tolkien’s letters, the author noted that Sauron “was of course a ‘divine‘ person (in the terms of this mythology; a lesser member of the race of Valar).”[7] Though less mighty than the chief Valar, he was more powerful than many of his fellow Maiar; Tolkien noted that he was of a “far higher order” than the Maiar who later came to Middle-earth as the Wizards Gandalf and Saruman.[8] As created by Eru, the Ainur were all good and uncorrupt, as Elrond stated in The Lord of the Rings: “Nothing is evil in the beginning. Even Sauron was not so.”[9]

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

The Nazgûl (from Black Speech nazg, “ring”, and gûl, “wraith, spirit” (presumably related togul, “sorcery”); also called Ringwraiths, Ring-wraiths, Black Riders, Dark Riders, theNine Riders, or simply the Nine are fictional characters in J. R. R. Tolkien‘s Middle-earthlegendarium. They were nine Men who succumbed to Sauron‘s power and attained near-immortality as wraiths, servants bound to the power of the One Ring. They are first mentioned in The Lord of the Rings, originally published in 1954–1955. The book calls the Nazgûl Sauron’s “most terrible servants”.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazg%C3%BBl

After the success of The Hobbit, and prior to the publication of The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien’s publisher requested a sequel to The Hobbit, and Tolkien sent them an early draft of The Silmarillion. But through a misunderstanding, the publisher rejected the draft without fully reading it, with the result that Tolkien began work on “A Long Expected Party”, the first chapter of what he described at the time as “a new story about Hobbits“, which became The Lord of the Rings.[2]

The Silmarillion comprises five parts. The first part, Ainulindalë, tells of the creation of Eä, the “world that is“. Valaquenta, the second part, gives a description of the Valar and Maiar, the supernatural powers in Eä. The next section, Quenta Silmarillion, which forms the bulk of the collection, chronicles the history of the events before and during the First Age, including the wars over the Silmarils which gave the book its title. The fourth part, Akallabêth, relates the history of the Downfall of Númenor and its people, which takes place in the Second Age. The final part, Of the Rings of Power and the Third Age, is a brief account of the circumstances which led to and were presented in The Lord of the Rings.

According to Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, the Nazgûl arose as Sauron’s most powerful servants in the Second Age of Middle-earth. They were once mortal Men, three being “great lords” of Númenor. Sauron gave each of them one of nine Rings of Power. Ultimately, however, they were bound to the One Ring, and succumbed completely to its power and its seduction:

Those who used the Nine Rings became mighty in their day, kings, sorcerers, and warriors of old. They obtained glory and great wealth, yet it turned to their undoing. They had, as it seemed, unending life, yet life became unendurable to them. They could walk, if they would, unseen by all eyes in this world beneath the sun, and they could see things in worlds invisible to mortal men; but too often they beheld only the phantoms and delusions of Sauron. And one by one, sooner or later, according to their native strength and to the good or evil of their wills in the beginning, they fell under the thraldom of the ring that they bore and of the domination of the One which was Sauron’s. And they became forever invisible save to him that wore the Ruling Ring, and they entered into the realm of shadows. The Nazgûl were they, the Ringwraiths, the Úlairi, the Enemy’s most terrible servants; darkness went with them, and they cried with the voices of death. — The Silmarillion, “Of the Rings of Power and the Third Age”, 346

The corrupting effect of the rings extended the bearers’ earthly lives far beyond their normal lifespans. Some passages in the novel suggest that the Nazgûl wore their rings, while others suggest that Sauron actually held them.

In a letter from circa 1963 Tolkien says explicitly that Sauron held the rings:

They would have obeyed . . . any minor command of his that did not interfere with their errand — laid upon them by Sauron, who still through their nine rings (which he held) had primary control of their wills . . . — The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, Letter 246

They were by far the most powerful of his servants, and the most suitable for such a mission, since they were entirely enslaved to their Nine Rings, which he now himself held . . . — Unfinished Tales, p. 338

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazg%C3%BBl

Tolkien’s world as it was portrayed in these massive volumes of work refers to a time on earth that has either long passed, or is in the distant future.  It is hard to know in geologic time when these events have transpired.  Robert Jordan in his Wheel of Time series took the work that Tolkien did several steps further and wrote 14 massive books, most of them the size of Lord of the Rings.  In those books he actually wrote about a period of human history where man were once again regulated to horses and magic—but this was thousands of years after skyscrapers and flying cars, a society hundreds of years ahead of our present time.  Society had risen and fallen and went through a rebirth phase—and this appears to be a possibility with the Tolkien work.

In our contemporary time we consider ourselves so sophisticated with our history, our educations, our iPhones, the internet, and modern weaponry, but we are infants looking at just a few frames of film and reality is much more than that.  It isn’t hard to see contemporary evidence of the events discussed above happening in the real world around us every single day.  However, in order to see them we need a kind of translation of what is happening between those frames of film in our lives—a way to understand them.  Tolkien has offered that, and Peter Jackson has provided a proper interpretation in a visual medium that is very powerful, and reaches a lot of people.  But evil is very real.  We see it and deal with it every day, and it is not enough to pray for help to an interpretation of a God understood thousands of years ago and shaped by centuries of power-hungry churches and empires demanding compliant citizens broken easily by force and faith.  Evil must be confronted directly, and we must piss in its eye and eradicate it from our lives the best we can—and before we do that—we must be able to see it, feel it, and touch it.  Like Sauron’s stronghold Dol Guldur, the “Hill of Sorcery” the real nature of evil is hidden from our eyes.  Study the reason for any public relations firm, and the practical function of them.  They are primarily designed to deceive our eyes and minds away from the facts and to direct our attention away from the vile tasks that often accompany their clients.  Study how this effect works in public schools and it will be easy to identify that there is a Dol Guldur in each of our communities spreading evil right under our noses, blinding our eyes to a truth that we cannot completely see.  CLICK HERE FOR REAL WORLD PROOF OF THIS PHENOMENON.

As I left the movie with my family after the second Hobbit film ended I listened to the people leaving and later read some of the reviews.  The assumption was that Peter Jackson was working purely for profit as Warner Brother execs wanted three billion dollar films out of the relatively small novel, The Hobbit—and Jackson was stretching things.  Without question that was Warner Brother’s hope, and who could blame them.  But Jackson saw a chance to make The Hobbit into what Tolkien likely would have wanted to do in 1937, but had not flushed it all out yet.  Jackson simply combined the life work of Tolkien’s study on the nature of evil and put it into three massive three-hour films, two of which are completed at this time.  Evil is more studied today than at any point in human history—the book stores are filled with the confrontation between good and evil—it is the central theme of our age.  Yet, we are told by modern society that value judgments against evil should not be made—that we should accept those different from us—and when I hear such things—I see the shroud which protected Dol Guldur from the prying eyes of the outside world.  And like Gandalf I poke and pry at those barriers because I suspect that evil is hiding behind such facades—and 9.999999999 times out of 10, I am right.  It is not because of magic that I’m often right about these things, it is because my wife and I have a habit hobby of defining evil and spotting it from afar the way some people watch birds, or weather patterns.  We enjoy it, and are always looking for where it conceals itself.  And part of the way we fulfill that enterprise is by studying the various forms that fiction writers of modern myth have used to discover the metaphorical Dol Guldur’s of our lives—those frames around the film that we cannot register, but know are there.

When I witness an honest attempt to confront these problems I tend to get very excited not because what is seen, but what is not.  The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug taken by itself as an action/fantasy film is decent fun. The effects are sometimes over-the-top, and silly, but the story is not about those things.  The ultimate theme of the stories of Tolkien was an exploration of evil and the proper way to meet it with a happy productive life untouched by such forces.  It is in this achievement that The Desolation of Smaug is an epic masterpiece that is heads and shoulders above everything else done like it—and the reason it will endure not just for years—but millenniums.

Unlike the fantasy world of Tolkien and his modern version of The Devil in Sauron, it is highly unlikely that only one such creature would evolve into such a state of evil over such a vast span of time, but many.  For the context of a story only one such evil can exist otherwise there would be no real narrative flow.  As my wife and I believe, there are thousands of Sauron’s in the real world every one of them just as bad as all the others.  They may not have magic and sorcery in their arsenal of tools the way these fictional characters do, but they have other tools, and they use them.  It is against those that we have a continued and enduring fight, and like Gandalf’s fight against the Necromancer at Dol Guldur it often feels like a tiny light surrounded by constant darkness.  Gandalf’s response and valiant fight is why someone like he should be President of the United States and take such thrones of power away from the many who function from evil and desire with every sign of life in the smallest cells of their bodies to touch the One Power of Sauron.  They desire such power for all the reasons that evil has ever spread over the lives of man—to be admired, and to shape one’s own destiny.  Evil often hides itself behind illusions the same as the one that shrouded Dol Guldur—and only films like The Desolation of Smaug attempt to portray such a thing.  So when a film does such a thing successfully, I give it an ambitious review not so much for the content and quality of the film, but for looking evil in the eye and giving it a form that people can relate to—so that they can confront it, and defeat it.  And before evil can even be confronted, a firm understanding or right and wrong, good and bad, light and dark and the vileness of evil must be understood clearly.   The living world is all about pairs of opposites, death is about unification.  In the living world choices must be made—light or darkness—good or evil—one team against the other.  There is no other way.

Rich Hoffman

 www.OVERMANWARRIOR.com

 

‘The Desolation of Smaug’: A gift that only mythology could give–a film of GREAT importance

Until I saw the new Hobbit film The Desolation of Smaug my favorite dragon film was the old 1981 flick, Dragonslayer.  CLICK HERE TO REVIEW.  I have been waiting for this Part II of The Hobbit series for a long time—so much so that I have avoided talking about it to keep my excitement level in check.  The reason is that the attribute of human society that I most value is mythology, and there is no better exhibition of modern mythology than the Star Wars films and the Tolkien films by the great unpretentious filmmaker Peter Jackson.  Mythology in films and novels can communicate complicated aspects of human culture that cannot be communicated any other way and are the hinge pins of modern philosophy—which is directly created by a society’s mythology.  I don’t see The Desolation of Smaug as just another fantasy movie—I see it as a functioning mythology that says a lot about the state of our modern existence.  A great storyteller like Jackson can pour so much value into a film like this that years of a similar education under an orthodox system of instruction will fail after many years of trying.

There are two basic kinds of dragons in classic mythology, the oriental dragon which is largely a symbol of rebirth, and the European dragon.  I spoke about the oriental one the other day when discussing the upcoming film Godzilla.  Godzilla is very much an oriental dragon in a modern context.  Then there is the European version of dragon, the classic villain of so many movies from Sleeping Beauty to Fantasia, dragons in a European context represent human greed, arrogance, and corruption.  If one wanted to understand the major differences between Eastern and Western cultures, their basic interpretations of dragons in mythology would be the place to begin.  In the classic 1937 novel, The Hobbit, the dragon villain Smaug is a classic European dragon, and in this updated movie version, he is the king of all dragons ever filmed and put on a screen.

I would say that seeing The Desolation of Smaug is the most important commentary on modern politics that is available to anybody on planet earth presently.  A student of politics, philosophy, and social organization could watch MSNBC, Fox News, Politically Incorrect on HBO and achieve a doctorate in psychology, history, and political science—read all the books by Glenn Beck, Bill O’Reilly, and Charles Krauthammer—listen to talk radio for the next 10 years, and there would not be a more accurate summation of the state of our world than in this Hobbit film.  The simple line of dialogue between two of the elf characters in the film upon deciding if they should fight on behalf of light or let the world fall to darkness was uttered by, “when did we let evil become stronger than us.”  That is what almost every human being is facing on the very day that you are reading this—what are the consequences of living our lives away from the light?  How does evil spread?  And what do we do about it when we are confronted with it?

The Desolation of Smaug is not just a simple morality tale speaking in generalizations about an ideal existence wrapped in fantasy.  It is a commentary—a mythology of the problems experienced in our modern times.  The setting has been changed to provide context in a similar way that Star Wars removed time and history with the opening, A Long Time Ago in a Galaxy Far, Far Away.  The Hobbit is dealing with the very nature of evil, greed, and faulty living that is at the heart of every human being.  It is literature on film, and is marvelous to behold. 

Smaug as the centerpiece of this latest story is the embodiment of the kind of individual who has taken the world’s wealth by force and sits upon it guarding it religiously.  He is the kind of bourgeois that added fuel to the fire of the communist movement where the common man wished to wrestle power back away from such dragons so that they could have their riches away from such greedy bastards.  That is why Smaug is a European dragon that sits in this movie upon a pile of gold taken from the Dwarves and their mines.  He loves it so much that he has buried himself within it so that he can worship it like a rodent burrows itself into the ground.  Many real life wealthy people like Bill Gates, George Soros, Michael Bloomberg, and Warren Buffet give so much money to philanthropy advancing progressive causes because they feel guilt over their wealth.  They wish to prove to the world that they are not dragons like Smaug even though in their wealth building years they behaved just like Smaug—rolling their bodies into their confiscated wealth.  In the case of Gates, he made his money the correct way with a superior product—but discovered that the world saw him as a Smaug, just as the Dwarves in The Hobbit saw Smaug as a villain who took their wealth.  Gates wished to prove that he was not such a Smaug so he began to give mast amounts of money to the public education system in America feeding the teacher unions.  In many ways Gates became like the treacherous politicians in Laketown—living in constant fear of Smaug—scheming around the beast to carve their own way to power and wealth.  For Gates and his idealism, he became a major supporter of Common Core which seeks to centralize the education process for society.  A good intention with a sinister reality which allows corrupt teacher unions to control the kind of curriculum being taught to children—which opens the door for despots to shape the minds of society for the worst.  In the film, once the dragon was no longer a threat, the kingdoms of the world now without the fear of Smaug immediately launched themselves into a power play for control of Middle-earth.  Smaug as cruel as he was made out to be when confronted by Bilbo in The Lonely Mountain was caught between his own genius and ability to inflict cruelty, and his ability to keep the vast evil that the occupants of Middle-earth possess in check.  Only a proper and effective mythology could communicate such a complicated concept. 

Peter Jackson is such a great filmmaker.  He knows instinctively much of what I write about here because his understanding of mythology allows him to think of things in the large view.  He can make a film like the Hobbit movies with an ease that is unfathomable to most Hollywood directors—especially on the scale that this Desolation of Smaug is.  Jackson gets it—and people sense that something important is going on in the movie which is why it has made over $500 million world-wide dollars in just two weeks at this point.  When he completes the trilogy, of The Hobbit, along with the Lord of the Rings films, Jackson will have completed one of the greatest explorations into the nature of evil ever done by anybody anywhere.  Of course Tolkien started the process with his great books, but Jackson has taken the baton and ran with it in a way that few people could ever hope to do, and he does it with a lack of pretension that is simply wonderful.

People who love fantasy stories like this generally are aware that the real world does not have much to offer them.  Most of the time, they see too much, and can’t lie to themselves about the nature of reality.  So they bury themselves in fantasy where they can relate to the characters that stand for justice, righteousness, and a fight against evil.  Doing such things in the real world is considered unrealistic, naive, and foolhardy.  So they turn to fantasy and lose themselves to the efforts of gaming, movies, books, and any other attribute a story can bring to a mind hungry for understanding.  We all know a Smaug in our life—whether it is a rich uncle, an employer, or even a political power.  Most of us think that such dragons must be killed and slayed so that the wealth of the world can return to us.  But often—which is an ideal that the writer Ayn Rand was exploring around the same time that Tolkien was exploring Middle-earth—there is a need for such dragons as they prove to be more capable than the greed of the Dwarves, or residents of Laketown.  The masses may not like the dragon, but often the dragon is more capable than the masses in dealing with the overwhelming pressure of greed—thus the line at the end of this film by Bilbo—“What have we done?”  Bilbo means, we killed the dragon, but we seem to have slayed ourselves in the process.

The Desolation of Smaug is such an important film as it deals with a massive social commentary that is pertinent to our present time in such critical ways.  Smaug is one of Ayn Rand’s characters who have failed at life.  He is not an overman able to support the world without corruption who creates wealth with creative effort.  Smaug took the created wealth of the dwarves with force, not creative effort—and spent the rest of his life guarding that gold because he was unable to create more of it.  To Smaug, the wealth was finite, created by others and if he wanted to keep it, he had to hold it greedily with terror which of course everyone in Middle-earth resented.  But without Smaug, the people of Middle-earth would be at war with one another constantly.  Smaug focused their hate into a direction that only a fire-breathing massive dragon could carry.  Bilbo because of his ability as a thief was able to spot a weakness in Smaug and let the people of Laketown know about it.    Once that weakness was exploited, and Smaug was removed as a threat, the real work of Sauron, originally known as Malron the Admirable, could begin.  Mariron was turned to evil by the Dark Lord Morgoth in the early days of the world, and ever after remained a foe of the Valar and the Free peoples of Middle Earth.   We all know people like Sauron too.  In fantasy fun is made of combating such figures with magic and battles with fantastic monsters, but the content of such people can be found on a local school board, or machine politics at any level and on both sides.  The reason people flock to see these films is not an escape from reality, but to actually see reality as it is masked to us in the light of day. 

The second Hobbit film, The Desolation of Smaug is a movie that everyone should see; its great cinema, wonderful story telling, and a visual art of the highest order.  Nobody makes films better than these films, except for possibly the upcoming Star Wars films which deal with the same basic content, only in a future/past kind of way.  On a scale of 1-5 I give this Hobbit film a 100.  It is that good—but only if viewers enjoy exploring the hidden aspects of a society that is not so far away in Middle-earth, but right in front of us all—only not seen because of our educations, and prejudices–a world that can only be revealed to us through mythology.

To understand more fully how powerful mythologies are to all societies, CLICK HERE.  

To read more about what I’ve said about The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, CLICK HERE. 

Rich Hoffman

 www.OVERMANWARRIOR.com

 

The Box of Christmas Past, Present, and Future: Important gifts from important people

Christmas gifts always mean more than the actual material value of an item.  They often represent how people see you and whether or not they value you or not.  I was proud to see that so many different people went well out of their way to give me gifts that held tremendous symbolic meaning.  The effort placed into each of them goes recognized by me—unfortunately it would be nearly impossible to include them all here one by one in a way that would not bore everyone reading.  However, two gifts jumped out at me as being exceptionally good and deserve some recognition.

The first gift was not given by any particular person, but was just a gift of life itself.  My wife and I were in our outside hot tub on Christmas Eve, the temperature was right around 15 degrees Fahrenheit with a bit of a chill to the air.  The clouds were moving quickly in the noon day sky and the sun was brilliantly bright.  We had a particularly quiet morning, which was a gift in itself and had no place particularly special to go that entire day—so I was very relaxed.  The mist was coming up off the water with an intense fog because the water inside the hot tub was 102 degrees Fahrenheit.  The zone of air about two feet from the surface of the water was well below freezing while a small bubble of warm air mixed around our heads like a miniature climate indicative of the Earth’s atmosphere.  I popped open a Mello Yello for breakfast which had been refrigerated at approximately 32 degrees Fahrenheit and a spew of cloud-like moisture erupted from the can.  It was a neat geyser effect that would have only occurred in those specific climatic conditions and was something to marvel at.  Watching the mist dance in the air I could only conclude that “life was good.”

The other thing was that my parents gave me an iPad Mini for Christmas.  That was a very nice gift but was not the climax of the entire ceremony.  My mom wanting to build up the anticipation for the gift had wrapped it with incrementally larger boxes so that the origin box was a rather large thing, kind of a matryoshka doll concept.  It was this first box that actually turned out to be the best gift.  When I was a kid in the 6th grade that box had a special Star Wars gift in it that was particularly significant.  It was just a normal box, but my mom had wrapped it in a special Star Wars wrapping paper that was common in 1979-1980.  After I had opened that gift my mom had kept the box.  She had wrapped it in a way that the paper was attached to the box.  Way back then she made a comment that someday when you’re old I’ll give you another gift in it.  When I was at such an age a time like that seemed so remote and beyond thought that I forgot about it.  Well, this Christmas my mom had done just that using that old box with the 40-year-old wrapping paper still on it looking like it did when it was new.  The paper itself would be the envy of anyone who goes to events like Comic Con, or Gen Con.  It was a rare item that was like a piece of archeology from another time and place—and it was. After seeing the box again after so many years I really didn’t want to open all the incrementally smaller presents inside—I was fixated on the box.  However, after some time, I did finally unwrap my way to the iPad after about six boxes of barrierimage

I immediately downloaded Star Wars Pinball onto the iPad with Star Wars Angry Birds and had the time of my life the rest of Christmas playing those games.  During the age of the original date of the Star Wars wrapping paper the biggest gifts under a Christmas Tree during those years were small little hand-held football games that were basically little digital sticks that could move across the screen with the rapid push of a button.  Now games much more graphically interesting and complicated can be downloaded like nothing for .99 cents onto an iPad and played with almost no moving parts to fail after so many button depressions like those old games were subjected to often.  Star Wars Pinball is phenomenally fun, and would be worth $2000 dollars to me just for the sheer delight.  It seems unfathomable that such a thing could be downloaded onto an iPad for almost nothing.  I knew that in 40 more years some future children would look at my iPad and wonder how on earth I could ever enjoy such a thing—but that box with the Star Wars wrapping paper would still be around to bring a smile to someone’s face—I’d make sure of it.  The iPad as cool as it was would have long-lost its value, but the box would be priceless to people who appreciate such things well into the future.

For me it’s those kinds of extra efforts put into gifts that I appreciate.  Readers here sent me CDs with special songs on them to remind me that they thought of me during the Christmas Season, and other people went well out of their way to throw me similar curve balls of thought picking out presents for me.  And of course my mom fulfilled a promise she made nearly 40 years ago and gave me the box with the Star Wars wrapping paper once again.  Getting an iPad is a wonderful gift, and cost a lot of money.  But the real value comes when such ceremonies are placed on the ritual to give it the added meaning—and that extra thought is what makes Christmas such a delight.

For those reasons and more I watched another Christmas drift off into the cold January tundra of snow, cold, and gray skies with short days and sidewalks covered in ice with a bit of reminiscent contemplation about a Mello Yello can that spews forth magical mist and a box from my distant past that has brought forth yet again a tool of value for my present age.

Christmas is a wonderful time—and this one of 2013 was one of the best for me.

Rich Hoffman

 www.OVERMANWARRIOR.com

 

The Joan Powell Legacy: Big spending, high taxes, manipulation, and cover-ups.

I always thought it was strange when I gave an interview once to Michael Clark at the Cincinnati Enquirer how the reporter asked me so many questions about Joan Powell—and what I thought she should do differently to help repair the image at Lakota schools.  He came across as having a “man crush” on her, which didn’t seem possible—but to each their own.  Later it became obvious that Clark and Powell where intellectual adulterers—cut from the same cloth philosophically.  So it should come as no surprise that Clark was salivating over Powell upon her exit from Lakota schools at the end of fiscal year 2013. CLICK THE LINK BELOW TO SEE CLARK’S PARTING TRIBUTE TO POWELL.

http://westchesterbuzz.com/2013/12/17/powell-leaves-lakota-board-leaves-legacy-of-leadership/

For everyone else, Powell was a menace—a power hungry despot that played a lot of political games and used her position at the school to assist her real estate career.   I summed up Powell’s career more appropriately than Clark on 700 WLW where Doc Thompson and I poked fun at the kind of things that the Lakota school board wanted to cover up—like the infighting that was going on.  Watch the video below to reminisce over those events.

For the collective good of Lakota Linda and Powell put their differences aside and pulled everyone together for another levy attempt at the end of 2011 going into 2012.  Powell being an old veteran on school boards run by radical left wingers like Jamie Green and Sandra Wheatley clearly sided with the labor union advocate groups against tax payers, and instead of listing to the voters in the previous three elections decided to go on a public relations campaign against me specifically working very hard behind the scenes to eliminate opposition to her will and unite the community in the same way that she pulled the board together.  The situation backfired leaving Lakota to not attempt another levy for 2 more years in spite of having the media, politics, and many latté sipping prostitutes in her back pocket for support.  Instead Powell would sanction the spending of many, many thousands of dollars carrying over into the deep six figures hiring specialists that would improve Lakota’s public relations and hopefully win a levy not based on merit, but on pity.

Lakota simply threw looted money at their problems, and then asked for a tax increase to cover the costs.  It was a situation of pro public education radicalism at its worst.  Powell never portrayed herself as a radical, but her behavior certainly represented such views.  This is the legacy of Joan Powell at Lakota—a big spender who used the school to sell homes to panicky young parents who needed a day time babysitter for their children—and Lakota schools through taxation was cheaper than their other options.

Reporters at all the major television stations and of course the papers never felt comfortable covering these follies because of the perception of public education as being the centerpiece of a community. To admit such things as being faulty would be to admit that there are serious social issues afoot that are contextually destructive.  So rather than analyze the pro tax radicalism of Joan Powell and past Lakota school boards—they only measured the success rate of levy passage as an indicator of a successful school district.  For instance, this is how Clark from the Cincinnati Enquirer framed one of the successful hurdles overcome by Joan Powell during her reign, “The longest operating tax levy losing streak in Lakota history. From 2004 to this fall, voters rejected six of seven school tax hikes. But in November voters narrowly approved a new school operating tax.”  The assumption in that comment is that it is taxes that make a successful school, and if every few years taxes are passed—then the school will be considered productive.  There is never the question asked as to how long such taxes could be extorted from the public before the whole house of cards comes crashing down—or how many homeowners were forced to leave their homes because of the high taxes.  Or, how many businesses folded because of taxes, or how many didn’t sign a lease because the tax rates were too high.  The opportunity cost assessment of tax increases were never analyzed by the mainstream media.  The only measure of success was whether or not taxes were obtained so that school boards like the one that Powell was president over could throw money at labor union collective bargaining contracts and buy a few more years of peace from that radical progressive element.

For all those reasons the best Christmas present the Lakota school district could have received is the retirement of Joan Powell from the school board.  The remaining board members have issues—and lean way too far to the political left—but are not relics from the old corrupt days at Lakota the way Powell was.  The challenges to the board from No Lakota Levy have made them function better as a leadership body.  People like Powell and the current superintendent Karen Mantia resist that improvement—but the tide is slowly sweeping their type out to sea.  That is not to say that all is well at Lakota—but the old guard progressive types like Powell are fading off into nightmarish memory.  She is the last of the heavy radicals who occupied the board at Lakota and paved the way for the ridiculously high teacher salaries, the misspending, and the many cover-ups.

The way Powell did it was reporters like Clark ate from her hand like a tamed dog sitting by her side waiting for table scraps of information carefully arranged by Lakota’s public relations people.  Without that cooperation Lakota might have actually lived within its means, not dumbed down so many children, and ruined the lives of so many people caught in cover-ups.  The path to hell is always paved with good intentions—and I believe that Powell was full of good intentions.  The remaining question is—good for who?  The answer will come in time.  With Powell gone from the board one of the most divisive and manipulative public figures in Butler County is no longer able to do such corrosive damage directly.  For me, the best Christmas present I received in 2013 came from the ending of her time as school board member and president. A Lakota without Joan Powell is one that has hope—unless your perspective is a giant state-run school teaching progressive instruction taking society into a Brave New World.  In that case, Joan was a Madonna and symbol of radical advancement of left-leaning policies designed to shape the entire world.  In that regard, Joan was successful—for those kinds of people.

I will always enjoy knowing that Joan spent several hundred thousand tax payer dollars and two years worth of effort to move voters 4% points only to extort more money from the local residents.  Now that is a legacy!

Rich Hoffman

 www.OVERMANWARRIOR.com

 

The ‘Duck Dynasty’ Controversy: Things that stink and things that don’t

I have never seen an episode of Duck Dynasty.  I have only seen interviews of the main characters on television interviews—so I have no way of knowing anything about the actual show they conduct.  My primary exposure to them comes from a table full of material they have at my local bookstore that I can’t help but notice during my weekly visit to purchase my supply of books.  From what I know about them, they appear to be like most of the people I know—so there is no drive for me to see how they live.  I’m already where they are—so there is nothing special going on.  If I had to put my finger onto why they have the top rated show on cable television it would be due to the fact that through progressive educations, everyone else is rediscovering their value system which has been socially suppressed through the Duck Dynasty.

A good friend of mine who sometimes opines here grew a long beard like the Duck Dynasty guys during an age when it was really unpopular.  He was only 25 years old at the time so he looked oddly out-of-place everywhere he went—which was fine with me.  I enjoyed his brand of rebellion, so the odd looks suited my entertainment.  We’d go out to eat at a Wendy’s or McDonald’s, I’d have my hat on, he’d have his long flowing beard and people thought we stepped out of the Appalachian mountains while other people our age were dressing in the latest campus fashions.  During the 90s nobody who lived near a city grew beards like that—only motorcycle riders, and mountain men.  That guy was a genius level personality who wanted desperately to be a mountain man—but too many social entanglements prevented it at the time.  So he grew a beard that would have made ZZ Top jealous.  But after a while, he moved through that phase and decided to shave it off and go clean shaven—so he cut the thing off and hung it on a wall in his bathroom, fully intact.  It was all woven together like someone had knitted it, and hung it in a mask like form on the wall next to his sink.  My daughters were scared of using the restroom at his home because of that beard.  They didn’t want to be in the same room with it.

So I have a little history with the type of people who are in the Duck Dynasty show.  There are quite a few of them who live from Appalachia to Utah.  They are quite common around Bristol, Tennessee, and can often be seen living in trailers in the middle of Idaho—living debt free and seeking no human entanglements.  If a person were to go to the Sturgis motorcycle rally in South Dakota, a lot of those beards would be seen.  They are as common as air in a place like that.  But in New York and Los Angeles they are an anomaly.  In those progressive cities, the European sensibilities have taken root from across both ponds, and people just don’t do those kinds of things.  Rugged individualism is a concept of wonder that they cannot grasp, which is why a progressive cable channel like A&E put the Robertson family on television to begin with—as a kind of eccentric fascination that the folks on Brand, and Wilshire Blvd could gawk at and feel good about themselves.  They had no idea they were tapping into a reservoir of unrepresented frustration experienced throughout the rest of the country. So I can see how they would be upset when A&E had to run up against the comments of Phil Robertson’s GQ interview about homosexual behavior—which represents most of the country’s opinion.  The LGBT (lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and transvestites) community represents around 3% of the total American population, but as a lobby force—since they have made themselves the squeaky wheels—they have captured the interests of major corporations terrified of activism lawsuits, if discrimination is shown toward gay oriented people.  So to prove corporations are open to all forms of living—so to avoid parasitic social shaping lawsuits, most corporations have come out in open acceptance of gay behavior—which was the reason for the aggressive action by the LGBT community regarding Phi Robertson.

Most corporate types lack any personal convictions—so they see no problem yielding to the LGBT community.  It is good business to show acceptance to all lifestyles.  Unfortunately for them, they are not very good at predicting content that the American people want—so they often happen across success by accident—which clearly was the case with the Duck Dynasty people.  They are used to celebrities who have found fame and fortune bending to their will to keep the money train humming along—and that includes yielding to special interest advocates like the LGBT community.  They are not used to celebrities like Phil Robertson who are functioning from an authenticity that is not for sale.  People like Phil Robertson are who they are whether or not they are being paid millions of dollars for it—and at the heart of the recent controversy where Phil Robertson made his feelings about gay sex quite clear—is the collision of progressive politics, and authenticity—the kind of honesty that has made the popular A&E television show so fashionable among a very hungry public.

I know a bit about what Phil is going through.  I know what’s it’s like to come across a progressive perception of things, and when told by the establishment to “apologize” and you don’t—but stick by your guns—which I will sum up at the end of this article.  The reason Robertson is in trouble is because of the kind of beliefs he has expressed below.  All of these issues are common observations from people in the flyover states, on the farms, the factories, and barber shops all across Middle America.  It is for that reason that they tune in to watch Duck Dynasty, because to them somebody finally put on a show that speaks to them—instead of some coastal crap about hippie free love, reckless religious conviction, and overly emotional despots.  The progressive establishment has worked hard to change the beliefs of people with an opposite message, which Phil Robertson exposed on episodes of their television show well before the recent gay remarks.

The below comments are excerpts from one of those insulted progressive types.  Check them out:

  • Robertson thinks black Americans were treated just fine in the Jim Crow-era South, and that they were happy there. “I never, with my eyes, saw the mistreatment of any black person. Not once. Where we lived was all farmers. The blacks worked for the farmers. I hoed cotton with them. I’m with the blacks, because we’re white trash. We’re going across the field…. They’re singing and happy. I never heard one of them, one black person, say, ‘I tell you what: These doggone white people’—not a word!… Pre-entitlement, pre-welfare, you say: Were they happy? They were godly; they were happy; no one was singing the blues.”

 

  • Robertson thinks the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor because they didn’t believe in Jesus. “All you have to do is look at any society where there is no Jesus. I’ll give you four: Nazis, no Jesus. Look at their record. Uh, Shintos? They started this thing in Pearl Harbor. Any Jesus among them? None. Communists? None. Islamists? Zero. That’s eighty years of ideologies that have popped up where no Jesus was allowed among those four groups. Just look at the records as far as murder goes among those four groups.”

 

But more specifically, based on the GQ article, Phil said:

“It seems like, to me, a vagina — as a man — would be more desirable than a man’s anus,” he said. “That’s just me. I’m just thinking: There’s more there! She’s got more to offer. I mean, come on, dudes! You know what I’m saying?

http://radaronline.com/exclusives/2013/12/duck-dynasty-gay-gq-phil-robertson-homophobe-homosexual/

What’s wrong with that?  It’s an opinion based on years of experience?  Yet the LGBT community believes this kind of opinion should be attacked because it goes against their social agenda which is the erosion of traditional values.  However, for a guy like me—that is an insult—when they attack traditional relationships with traditional sexual practices they are attacking me.  Yet I don’t protest Madonna who was a major advocate of the LGBT community, or Hillary Clinton who does the same—even though they only represent a very small portion of the population.  When Phil Robertson speaks, he’s stating what a guy like me is already thinking.

When the film Broke Back Mountain came out and those two mainstream actors had anal sex in a tent far away from their wives, then fell in love with each other,  I tried to watch and accept the story because it was so critically appraised.  But the unrealistic nature of the whole thing was inescapable.  I’ve been on many camping trips and on those kinds of endeavors with other guys—those kinds of activities are not desirable.  My wife and I never pass gas in front of each other, there is no belching at the Hoffman dinner table, and there are never, and I mean never, “toot jokes” in my home, or around me.  Human gas is a part of the digestion process, but it is also disgusting.  It belongs with the rest of human feces, somewhere out of site so that intellectual pursuits can be established.  The sex engaged in during Broke Back Mountain is unrealistic.  That would have made such a mess that the filth afterwards would have made their back country trip unbearably uncomfortable.  Without a shower immediately afterwards the smell would be disgusting.  When Phil Robertson was talking about a vagina over an anus he’s talking about this kind of thing.  With a woman, you can make love on a beach, in the woods, on top of your house, and when you’re done you don’t have to take a shower or even change the sheets.  You can just go to sleep.  With anal sex, absolutely no way—somebody will be taking a shower as feces would be everywhere.  For a gay couple to do such a thing then  go to sleep afterwards it would be like having a dog that rolled in feces out in the yard jump in your bed in the middle of the night and leave behind all the yard waste into the sheets of slumber.  It would not be a good thing.  Human beings have perverted the sex act and used such an orifice with the assistance of modern lubricants that are very unnatural.  Without access to such things, anal sex would be impossible unlike with a woman where once the engine is running, it takes care of itself.

I don’t even like to use the restroom on camping trips because it makes me feel dirty.  Fecal matter is not an attractive attribute of human existence.  The appeal of it is contrived, not natural—and for more people to experiment with it, the LGBT community needs people to participate in such sex out of rebellion against the establishment.  What Phil Robertson did was expose what everyone else is already thinking—and when they heard it; it got them off the hook of guilt that the gay community tries to invoke in order to promote their life style.  Many years ago I worked with a sexual deviant who shared a story with the same friend whom I referred to who grew the beard.  We were salesman at a dealership and between sales there was a lot of time to talk.  This guy and his wife were very adventurous sexually, and he’d tell us all about his latest escapades.  (My friend will remember the guy—his name was Perry.)  One thing he had done the previous night was have is wife defecate onto a sheet of glass that he put over his face so he could watch it drop out and plop against the barrier between him and his wife.  I told him he was insanely disgusting and he’d laugh and say, “To each, his own.”  He had a twisted sense of erotic behavior.  For me the smell alone would have been it, let alone watching such a thing.  For a gay couple, they would have to accept that kind of odor, and the byproducts of engagement.  A small percentage of the population likely has their wires crossed like that guy and his wife—where like dogs, they like fecal matter.  They have a right to like what they want, but I don’t want to know about it.  It is their dysfunctional behavior, not mine—and that is my general feeling about the whole LGBT population.

The gay pride people are afraid of people coming to these logical conclusions because it will end their spread of the social relationships between a man and a woman in a traditional family which they seek to destroy.  They have the same level of deceit that public schools have over their funding issues, or government has over its spending.  Being typical Kant trained Keynesian economic theorists they believe that as long as they do not speak of evil, hear any evil, or participate in any evil through their own lack of recognition of any value judgment, that there is no evil.   The LGBT community has the same approach, they want vagina sex to be equal to anal sex—and they aren’t, one stinks, and one doesn’t.  But in order to propel that belief, they need society to remain suppressed, and stupid acting out of rebellion, instead of logic.  Logic says that the dudes in Broke Back Mountain would have had to clean off their dip sticks somewhere after the act.  They wouldn’t just be able to get on their horses and do a day’s worth of hard riding.   Only a gay writer from Santa Monica could even think this was possible as he has countless gels and lotions next to his bed to disguise the odor.  But in Broke Back Mountain, such things were not around, only human spittle—nothing else—and that is just gross.

The reason for the beard and the popularity of the Duck Dynasty is that the characters are speaking the language of a part of society that has been suppressed deeply.  The explosion of popularity seen by the A&E show is the untapped potential that Hollywood has been trying to avoid so to propel a progressive agenda.  Duck Dynasty is about authenticity, and little else.  And that traditional authentic behavior is something that America is very hungry for.  What happened after Phil Robertson made his comments was that the LGBT community saw a sleeping giant come to Phil’s defense, and that scares them.  A&E thought a token suspension until everything cooled off would suffice, but it didn’t.  The LGBT community tried to force the issue, Phil Robertson didn’t back down, and lines in the sand were drawn.  Forty years of public relations work likely went out the window in the period of one week as a majority of America found themselves supporting Robertson, and rejecting the arguments of the LGBT community.  What will be one of the most common Christmas presents in 2013?  Likely, Duck Dynasty material.  What will be the number one topic around Christmas dinner tables—likely the stand Phil Robertson took against the LGBT community.  Without question, many people who try that whole back-door approach with their spouses find the whole thing a lot less appealing than the vagina.  The LGBT community has sold the whole thing in such a way that it makes people want to try it—but the reality is disgusting.  Phil Robertson just gave people who feel that way a pass to not try it—and that is what the LGBT community is terrified of.  Their peer pressure has folded because the Duck Dynasty guys refused to back off their position against anal sex.  Like the act itself, the concept has more appeal than the reality.  In the end, everything comes out smelling bad—just like the movement by the LGBT community.  And Americans don’t like things that stink.

Rich Hoffman

 www.OVERMANWARRIOR.com

 

Christine Metacic’s Tax Increase for a Commisioner’s Seat: The Liberty Township Police Levy of 2014

 

Having police around can be a good thing for the occasional Lakota East student who wants to kill their parents by burning down their home, the drug busts from marijuana growers, or the stupid kids who wrap themselves around telephone polls with their cars traveling at excessive speed.  Police are also needed to arrest parents who drop off their adopted children like a sweater they don’t like at Wal-Mart, expecting to be done with the contract because the job is too hard.  Police during the times indicated above all of which happened in the otherwise quiet community of Liberty Township over the last year, requires police to step away from the United Dairy Farmers milk shake counter and do some work—and a few times a year, we’re glad they are there.  There is a certain monetary value of having someone take care of that kind of nasty business—but how much is it worth?  To me, not much, if I run into security trouble at my home, I will only call the police to take a report.  I’ll handle dealing with the threat myself.  That’s what the second amendment is for after all, and in Liberty Township, a lot of people feel the way I do about such things.  So having police around is more of a pain in the ass for those who behave responsibly, because more often than not—when there aren’t the four or five tragedies per year that happen in Liberty Township, which requires police, the cops sit on the side of the road and threaten drivers with speeding tickets. 

 

For a woman who wants to be a Butler County Commissioner, Liberty Township Trustee Christine Matacic is starting her campaign off poorly already advocating a tax increase in 2014 against the people she is supposed to represent.  Liberty Township staff members are beginning to look at equipment and law enforcement staffing needs for the next few years, before making a recommendation on what to put on the ballot in 2014 which could include a new levy, a replacement levy, or renewal of the 3-mill levy.

“I’d rather look at it now to give us the option of do we go in May or in November,’’ said Trustee Christine Matacic.  “With (the levy) expiring and being at the point we are with economic development, I don’t want to see us jeopardize the safety of our residents.” Oh, isn’t that nice of Christine to use the safety buzz word as a way to justify continued, or increases in taxes.  Rather than look at the amount of use the police have contributed, and assess the value based on those facts, Christine is already showing what kind of Commissioner she wants to be—a tax and spend type with eyes bigger than her belly. 

The new levy would supposedly pay for equipment, the township’s contract with the Butler County Sheriff’s Office to provide police service, but here is the new justification which proves that the whole ordeal is a scam–one of the reasons proposed for entertaining a tax increase is the township’s share of the cost of a school resource officer at Lakota East High School.  During the Lakota levy of 2013 when even Sheriff Jones, a leader in the Butler County Republican Party, a labor union supporter, and Liberty Township resident—advocated his support of the Lakota levy on the premise that some of that tax increase money was going to go to security at the school.  Now, it appears that Christine made some kind of deal that was not reported by the Pulse Journal, the Enquirer or any of the news stations covering the Lakota levy organized by Randy Oppenheimer—the tax payer public relations guy at Lakota working for Superintendent Mantia.  The little detail that yet another tax would be needed from Liberty Township and presumably West Chester to cover a portion of the cost of putting police in the schools as a direct reaction to the Sandy Hook Massacre was not discussed.  Lakota schools used this marketing ploy as a justification for their higher tax, and now Christine is using the same mantra of “safety” to cover her taxation desires.  The police fund is projected to begin 2014 with a $2.6 million carryover from 2013. Spending is estimated at $2.4 million and the ending balance at the end of 2014 is estimated at $2.6 million.

http://westchesterbuzz.com/2013/12/12/liberty-township-voters-likely-to-decide-on-police-levy-in-2014/

As I’ve said before Christine Matacic lives in the house my grandmother grew up in.  It looks a bit different today than it did when she lived there nearly a hundred years ago.  Today it has a nice luxurious in ground pool, an extravagant garage and other modern comforts, but it is essentially the same home.  But that doesn’t give her a pass to pretend to be a conservative Republican, then turn around and advocate tax increases and double taxation hiding behind safety to accomplish the crime.  It is a crime because in advocating of a tax she is endorsing essentially the legalized theft of money taken by force from the residents of Liberty Township, and if Matacic becomes a commissioner, for all of Butler County.

 

It is easy to say that Liberty Township will have more economic growth and will thus need more police.  It is easy to say that more police equals safety.  It is easy to hide certain facts about deals made with the Lakota school system which the media in bed with all the characters involved assisted with to get a tax increase passed, then tried to use the same argument to support a police levy when a tax for the same issues under the same argument has already been approved by the tax payers.  What is hard is in deciding how useful the police really are per hour, per day, per week.  Instead Christine Matacic does what every other politician does—she looks at the few incidents per year where something really bad happens, then decides that more government workers in the form of police officers should be thrown at the situation to minimize her liability as a public official.  Her approach is lazy. 

 

It doesn’t take much to bow at the feet of Steiner—the developer of the Liberty Center development—which I support.  It does not take much to lick the toes of the Terrys, my childhood friends and developers of Carriage Hill, the Homarama of 2013 and upcoming 2014.  It doesn’t take much to pander to Lakota schools and the emotional arguments that always come on the backs of children from adults too busy to really pay attention to what is going on.  Matacic is just another Republican looter—which is better than a scum bag socialist Democrat, but not by much.  She rides on the backs of other people’s success, and then tries to sell herself as a fiscal hawk.  But she is just another politician who writes checks paid for by other people’s money and she wants to come out favorably in the upcoming commissioner race by sucking up to Sheriff Jones so that she will get the police endorsement in that election. 

 

The cost of all this activity, and deal making is that residents of Liberty Township will get a continued tax rate that is unneeded—because of lazy and exploitive politics.  The police need that Matacic is talking about is a blanket cost that is largely unmanaged.  The real intent for her statement, and support at this point in time is to gain approval of the police union to support her run for Butler County Commissioner—so she is using tax money as a mechanism to achieve access to an elected office—in a round about way.

 

For those with buyer’s remorse over the Lakota levy—who barely approved that levy thinking they were buying police protection for the kids who attend there—they should vote down Matacic’s levy so that they can recover the money they are losing to Lakota.  They could gain a portion of that money in savings when this police levy expires.  Let Matacic and the other Liberty Township Trustees figure out how to pay for police protection out of other money—but don’t give Metacic a free pass into a commissioner seat on the back of another tax increase using security at Lakota schools for a second straight year as the excuse when the first year’s money was supposed to cover the entire issue.  Supporting this upcoming police levy means that tax payers are approving yet another tax that really isn’t needed for reasons that are purely emotional and exploited by Christine Matacic for her political goals of an office beyond Liberty Township Trustee. 

Rich Hoffman

 www.OVERMANWARRIOR.com

 

Liberalism is a Mental Illness: Why the media is so quiet about Karl Pierson–the “Socialist School Shooter”

If liberalism were classified as a mental disorder, we might have stopped many mass shootings; at least that was the reasoning Ann Coulter espoused during a recent episode with Sean Hannity.  That comment may sound inflammatory—but in all reality—there is more truth to it than rhetoric.  The proof is in the recent school shooting at Araphoe High School outside of Denver, Colorado which occurred on Friday December the 13th 2013 and was a dead story more or less by Monday, December 16th. On Friday the news coverage on CNN, MSNBC, Fox News and everywhere else was wall to wall—as usual.  But by Saturday morning, less than 12 hours after the shooting the coverage dried up.  By Monday on the Special Report by Brett Baier there wasn’t a single mention of the shooting during the entire program—a news station thought highly to be a conservative leaning network.  Oddly missing from the many news stations were the Hollywood elite with constant calls for gun control, the prayer vigils, the sorrow of the poor kids shot by the made gunman Karl Pierson foolishly, maliciously, and for no reason at all struck down.  It seemed as if the media in general wanted to move on to another story and forget about this school shooting even as the anniversary of the Sandy Hook Massacre had just occurred prompting schools all over the country to begin staffing armed patrol officers to stop such things from happening—Araphoe being one of them.  The reason…………..well, Pierson unlike the other mass shooters of recent memory who were rumored to be politically left, but not clearly—the Araphoe shooter was clearly, unequivocally—and boldly was a socialist.  Socialism is the political philosophy that most of the media had accepted in small doses, a concept that is taught in public schools—not by name of course, but by practice, and is the current philosophy of the current President of The United States—again, not by name, but in practice.

Karl Pierson’s attack at Arapahoe High School lasted just 80 seconds.  He rushed into the school Friday with a bandolier of ammunition strapped to his chest carrying a machete, three Molotov cocktails and the pump-action shotgun that authorities said he bought days before to avenge a grudge he had against his debate coach for kicking him off the team.  Pierson was such a radical socialist—such a maniacal collectivist, that when even his teacher tried to reel him in, he thought like most left-winged tyrants do—that he had a right and obligation to force others into his way of thinking—by force if necessary.

The teen apparently harbored a grudge against his debate couch Murphy after being disciplined by him in September. The discipline came after Pierson made a verbal threat against Murphy to a group of students. Law enforcement was made aware of that threat, and the response to it remained under investigation.

Pierson’s Facebook page, before it was taken down, was a window into the mind of the accused shooter. He wrote a lot about economics and politics, calling himself a “Keynesian” and jesting that neoclassic economic theory would not fix the economy.

He also used his Facebook to routinely mock Republicans as seen below:

The Republican Party: Health Care: Let ’em Die, Climate Change: Let ’em Die, Gun Violence: Let ’em Die, Women’s Rights: Let ’em Die, More War: Let ’em Die. Is this really the side you want to be on?

One classmate described him as harmless but said he could get verbally aggressive and very heated when debating and discussing politics with teachers and students.  It is obvious that the left-winged radical was not harmless.  Pierson cared enough about socialism and Keynesian economics to go home, buy a gun, and kill his teacher for not being allowed to continue debating on the team—to have a platform to spread his message of collective endeavor through socialism.

Here are several articles covering the story as it unfolded:

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/12/15/dad-says-daughter-critically-wounded-during-arapahoe-high-school-shooting-is-not-doing-well/

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/12/13/sheriff-at-least-two-people-injured-in-colorado-shooting/

http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_24724553/arapahoe-high-school-shooting-sheriffs-office-interview-hundreds

http://www.heavy.com/news/2013/12/karl-pierson-arapahoe-high-school-shooter-colorado/

When progressive types run into any issue such as gun violence, their very first reaction is more regulation, more government intervention, less personal freedom, and stronger public school presence, yet these things keep happening in schools where many perceive such places to be safe—even though it is far more likely that their children would be involved in a school shooting than to be involved in an airplane accident.  There is still a fear of flying where there is not a fear of public schools.  Liberals often proclaim that these school shooters are mentally ill, and must be detected by the government schools and treated before they ever bring harm to anyone.  Yet it is never considered what made the shooters ill to begin with—it is never considered that the illness came from institutional failure and no other contributing factor—and that more government intervention will indirectly lead to more mass shootings, and more people who think the way Karl Pierson did.

Does anybody think that Pierson learned to be a socialist from his home environment?  Likely, he learned it from school.  Most children learn about liberalism in public schools by their teachers and college professors.  They vote for Democrats for the first 15 years of their adult lives, then once they maintain jobs for a while have kids of their own, purchase property and live responsibly—they grow out of liberalism and slowly become conservative.  By the time they reach their 50s and 60s they become those stuffy Republicans they used to rant about.  It’s a bit of a cycle of life that we needlessly endure because we allow the government to teach our kids with left-leaning methods that are destructive to their minds.  For people like Pierson—who was probably a bit different from most children from the start—after his debate teachers told him to watch shows like MSNBC and CNN’s Pierce Morgan—and other “recommended” viewing, so that the kid could become a better debater—his young mind became tainted as he observed the socialism of his school, the socialism of his President, the socialism of the news—and he put his finger to the wind and decided that he would become a liberal because he saw that the masses endorsed those views—from his perspective at the public school.  The teachers ripped on Republicans—so if he wanted good grades—he could do the same and get better grades—and maybe even become the next Michael Moore.  After playing at this game for a while, he began to believe that Keynesian economics was the salvation of the world—instead of its destroyer, and that socialism was a benefit to equality—instead of the great slayer of it.

The silence from the news came in the wake of the shooting because most of the people covering the story realized that they had contributed just a small bit to the violence because of their endorsements of soft socialism hidden behind mixed economies so prevalent in The United States.  Karl Pierson was a product of public education—and like most Frankenstein experiments—he became a monster that nobody wanted to acknowledge.  The political theory, the economic theory, and social justice that Karl Pierson learned in his public school became a monster that went on to bring great harm to the other collective occupants of Araphoe High School.  Pierson took what he learned further than the school intended and they tried to pull him out of it too late—they had let his mind go too far to the left—so much so that Pierson become dangerous.  Instead of growing up to become the next Al Gore, or Nancy Pelosi, or even Barack Obama, they had created a Frankenstein monster that got loose and wanted to destroy its maker—his teacher.

Liberalism by default of the frequent actions by many mass killers should be designated a mental illness—so that future people like Karl Pierson can be avoided.  But to admit that would require most people in the mainstream media, and political structure to admit that they are also suffering from the mental illness of liberalism—just not to the same degree Pierson was.  The great fear is that it might not take much for them to become as crazy as Karl Pierson—because they too support concepts of Keynesian economics, they too support socialism, and believe that liberalism is a benefit to society—instead of a detriment.  If anybody were really serious about stopping school shootings, they would not look to laws, guns, or more pansy teachings in public school, but would eliminate liberalism from the American consciousness.  By eliminating liberal instruction, education would not feed the mental illness that tends to occur in mass collectivists who believe that socialism should be the spine of all national economies.  In Karl Pierson’s case, he believed in liberalism so intently that he was willing to kill for it.  There really isn’t any other way to stop such a person once they get loose from a teacher’s control, and that is what scares so many media outlets.  Because they have helped put in motion large doses of the liberalism mental illness—and there will be more Karl Pierson types created by them for the destruction of mankind.  When they show themselves, the responsibility for their actions will fall on the shoulders of those most silent—the national media.

Rich Hoffman

 www.OVERMANWARRIOR.com

 

Galactic Starfighter Strategies: New ways of dealing with old problems on the liberty front

A lot of the things I am usually concerned with politically and professionally are current disappointments.  Just this past week I learned that conservative groups could not agree on a candidate to challenge John Boehner’s seat confirming that many people talk tough until it really counts—but in the end they wimp out—and will get the government they deserve as a result.  There appears to be a challenger to John Kasich’s seat, but that will be an uphill battle with major opposition rolling large stones down to stop the progress, so that is hardly a success story at this point.  President Obama is proving to be a crook more and more as the follies of Obamacare are setting up 2014 to be a disastrous year for many financially.  And my public school of Lakota got their tax money with a levy approval.  I am personally making arrangements in financing to ensure that I don’t pay the extra $36 dollars in taxes per month—but the monopoly hold the institution has on the press, the political structure and the  young minds of America’s youth remains strong—at least on the surface.  Professionally, I am busier than I have ever been in my life.  There is no shortage of need for problem solvers in spite of my attempt to be ostentatious to lower the line down to only those most serious–so free time is short—and at a severe premium.  It is in times like these that one must have good constructive hobbies—and I do.  I have shared with my readers here my long history and love of strategy games—particularly combat oriented war games where I can apply methods learned in The Art of War and The Book of Five Rings to theoretical situations—which I then apply to my real life needs by washing out strategic theories against real life opponents. Currently my two favorite games of this type are X Wing Miniatures, CLICK HERE FOR REVIEW, and the squeaky new online computer game Galactic Starfighter—which is my topic of discussion today.

Galactic Starfighter has been a very pleasant surprise.  As a space flight simulator featuring aerial combat that I have been looking forward to for a long time—it has delivered spectacularly.  I have a favorite video game called X-Wing from way back in the early 90s that I used to love—the graphics were not what they are today, but the game play was infinitely interesting.  The enemies were NPCs (Non Playable Characters) and would require tight combat engagements with a variety of craft to fly and fight against.  Huge capital ships would come into the scenario and would often hyper jump into a hot zone and start dispatching enemy fighters leaving a player frantic to shoot down as many as they could in a short time and attempt to take out the large vessels by knocking out their shields then destroying their bridge where the command structure was usually housed.  I played that game with a nephew of mine for many hours—and he still talks about it 20 years later as if it were one of the most fun times of his life.  Galactic Starfighter came out only as recently as December 3, 2013 and it didn’t take me long to discover what the design team at LucasArts, BioWare, and Electronic Arts were up to.  They essentially made a game with the basic concept of the old X-Wing game and dusted it off with a slick new paint job which modern programming allows.  The flight mechanics, the ability to shove power to shields, or engines depending on need is there, directional shields, targeting reticules, telemetry data streams—it’s all there.  Only Galactic Starfighter is better.

The old X-Wing game had NPCs programmed to go after a target along fixed parameters.  Once a pilot learned the basics of these standards, the NPCs could be dominated—so the learning curve was not terribly steep once the basics of concept and flight control were mastered.  With Galactic Starfighter the entire game is PVP (player versus player) meaning the people you fly against are all live pilots.  It reminds me of a very slick version of the old X-Box game Crimson Skies and how that game played on X-Box Live.  I have now played hundreds of matches, earned over a million credits, countless ACE awards, medals, and ship requisition allowing me to purchase upgrades for my small fleet of ships—and I’m nowhere near finished with it. If anything I am more eager to play it with each match queued up.  It is that good.

But what’s even better is that my wife—who is not a typical dog fighting advocate has found she can play it with me at the same time as we have very large specially built computers designed to exclusively play Star Wars: The Old Republic which Galactic Starfighter is a part.  That is a new development for me to have a combat simulator this powerful and dynamic which can link up to another player in real-time to fly coordinated maneuvers toward separate targets.  My wife does not love speed the way I do.  It is not something she enjoys.  I love to zip in and around obstacles forcing my opponents into a mistake running themselves into a fix object with close quarter fighting.  My wife is more of a defender type who takes her time and is good at holding down the fort after I’ve taken it—which is ironically the object of the game in Galactic Starfighter—which is essentially a fancy capture the flag game.

My wife uses a gunship—which is slow, but heavily armored to hold areas that I capture with my strike fighter, and she has gotten so good at using her 15,000mm rail gun to strike down approaching enemies from a comfortable distance while I engage them up close and personal—that it has led to a devastating series of losses for the other players on the opposite team.  And she is having a blast with it.  I don’t have to coax her into playing; she is the one wanting to continue playing new rounds.  Last night it was a quarter till one in the morning and we were both trying to find a good reason to play one more match—because it is so fun—and addicting.  It has all the mechanics from X-Wing which were best I’ve ever seen even after playing Crimson Skies, all the Microsoft Flight Simulators, and even Star Wars: Battlefront—yet Galactic Starfighter goes to a new level that is unprecedented. It has a Wing Commander feel to it and is simply a combination of all the great war games beloved for years wrapped up into one very cool package.

Using that rail gun, my wife may actually have more kills than I do which should say a lot to new players not confident with their piloting skills.  In Galactic Starfighter the gunships are slow—but powerful and very deadly.  The strike fighters and scout ships are the ones that have to fly all over the battlezone engaging in dogfights with other players.  The gunships sit back like snipers and zap their enemies from a comfortable distance—and using my wife and my strategy, I engage the enemy to keep them busy while she zaps away from a distance.  So long as they are engaged with me, they don’t notice her, which then makes all the kills.  Good stuff.

I get most of my creative strategic ideas for things in the real world by playing games like the ones mentioned.  On the liberty front, there are some valiant efforts, but not enough horsepower to pull things across the finish line—and it basically comes down to a lack of will power.  People talk a good game, but when they find themselves in the cross-hairs—just as they do in Galactic Starfighter, they panic and run into something killing themselves.  If I had a quarter for each time I applied a missile lock onto an enemy and when they hear their sensor alarms go off in their ship warning them of my approaching missile, they panic and run into the side of a mountain, or a floating asteroid, I’d be able to solve world hunger by making millionaires out of each of them.  The same thing has been happening in real life—people behave as they do when they play games like this—even worse because in real life they take even less chances because it matters there.  There is no reset button in the real world.  In a game like Galactic Starfighter at least if a mistake is made, the player can start over—and hopefully learn from their error.  Because of the value of such games it is a privilege to live in a time where they can be played relatively effortlessly.  My wife and I have a very expensive set-up basically just to play this game.  We have thousands of dollars invested.  But for a casual player, they could probably get by with only a laptop.  However, when she and I are both playing vigorously, our computers with their big processors put out enough heat to warm up a good-sized room on a very cold night.  We have six cool down fans on each of our computers to keep them cool during intense graphic interfaces enduring millions of calculations per second which makes playing Galactic Starfigher even possible.  Our set-up is unusual, and it is unlikely that many of the thousands of players on the game with us at any given time have such system capability—yet they can still play and enjoy it.  Since these kinds of things are so important to us, and we do so much of it, we take the extra measures to ensure a positive experience.

New strategies are needed when the old ones are not producing the results desired.  The first step in such a process is to recognize the issue, and correct it.  The way I do that is by playing these kinds of games.  Not falling in love with a set of engagement rules is the key to discovering the best way to take out an opponent, and in the real life world of politics, business, and human relationships—there are many enemies that must be taken down—simply because their intentions dictate such a position.  For me, the best way to do that is through strategy games—and currently the X-Wing Miniatures game is at the very top of my list—but this Galactic Starfighter is right there with it.  I’m telling you all this dear reader because during the Holiday Season, there are often moments of downtime—and abilities to play these kinds of games present themselves often.  Take advantage of the opportunity, because in 2014, a lot of tough topics are on the table—and fresh minds will be required to tackle them.  One way to obtain that freshness is in the new game Galactic Starfighter.  For you people out there who have a problem with me but the law won’t let us settle things properly in a parking lot somewhere, or in a duel of some kind—look me up on Galactic Starfighter.  I’m on the Jedi Covenant server flying by the name of Cliff-hanger.  You can’t miss me, I’m the one sending craft out of the sky in exploding heaps—and I’ll be happy to add your name to the list.

Rich Hoffman

 www.OVERMANWARRIOR.com

 

The New Sons of Liberty: Doc Thompson and the gang make a Tea Party Documentary

Doc Thompson and his radio partner Skip LeCombe stopped by Matt Clark’s WAAM broadcast in Ann Arbor, Michigan while filming a nationwide documentary on the Tea Party movement as it stands in 2013.  I am scheduled to appear in that documentary so it is always fun when all these different elements combine in a rare broadcast interview with so many people who I work with at different levels.  Doc reported to Matt about his preliminary findings as his film crew has scoured the country working for The Blaze under the guidance of Glenn Beck—and his feeling has been a good one.  He is encouraged by the passion he is seeing from crowds of people everywhere he goes—and how upset they are at the state of the current government.  The documentary is set for release around the second quarter of 2014, but you can listen to that interview below.

Doc works fast and loose these days—allowing his spontaneity to shine, which Glenn Beck is obviously tapping in to.  Doc has been given under his employment at The Blaze free rein to fight on the liberty front not only on the radio, but in cross-country tours with public speaking engagements which are unprecedented.  The Blaze has not held back in their support of Doc Thompson and Skip LeCombe—and the results are showing dramatically.  It was out of this experience that the documentary about the Tea Party movement was born.

Most of the time during the first Revolution—the one in 1776, the patriots were always behind the much more powerful, and well-funded British.  In this new Revolution—the one against progressivism and the tyranny of collectivist cultures parasitic in nature—the same holds true.  The Tea Party patriots of 2013 are learning of the levels of deception they have been exposed to for a long time—and they have a bit of sticker shock.  As each day moves past us, they are learning of more aspects of that sticker shock—so they are not yet acclimated to what needs to be done.  But they are attending the many gatherings Doc has been conducting all over the nation.  Since The Blaze hired Doc and Skip a year ago, I doubt there are more people with more frequent flyer miles than those two guys applied directly to the cause of liberty anywhere in the world.

Doc pointed out in his broadcast with Matt he had recently learned that during the Boston Tea Party of 1773 the patriots there did not sneak onto the British vessels in the secret of night covered by silence—the shores were littered with people watching—knowing full well what was going on.  The people of Boston knew a Revolution was afoot and they were watching it unfold.  Many people weren’t sure that success was even a possibility so they stood on the shore and watched others do the first work of the liberty movement which launched our country.  Much the same thing is happening now, people are coming to Doc’s public speeches and they are watching from the shores of their own inner comfort level—not yet willing to cross the line and join the rebels—but they are thinking about it.

As bad as things appear today, at least the spirit of what traditional America has always been is slowly coming to the surface.  A few years ago Doc Thompson was on the mainstream radio station 700 WLW and I was his frequent guest.  I was living the kind of life where I could pick up the phone and speak to entertainment producers and mainstream press personal.  Once it became known that Doc and I were not going to take the squishy middle position—and had convictions that we were willing to stand behind—even at the cost of personal career gain—we were both quickly blacklisted and exiled in much the same way that Glenn Beck was cast out of Fox News and Judge Napolitano was removed from his show on the Fox Business Channel.  The same thing occurred during the first Revolution.  Many of the people at the Boston Tea Party knew they would not be invited to any more British social engagements.  They knew they would not be quoted in the British newspapers, and certainly would not be given safe passage to travel back to London for any visits.  They knew they would be cast aside from the established society which was behaving in a tyrannical fashion.  The people watching from the shore had not yet decided that they could handle being blacklisted from the English.  They wanted to sell cloths to the British troops, wood for British ships, food to British soldiers, and needed to appear neutral in the conflicts so they could make a living for their families—yet they showed up in silence to watch the Boston Tea Party—their closed mouths their endorsement of the activity.

Doc and I knew what we were getting into.  Doc was in fact married to the mainstream media.  His wife Yuna Lee was the popular news anchor from Richmond, Virginia that many WashingtonD.C. employees comfortable from their suburban homes watched every night—and enjoyed.  She fell in love with Doc and his rebellion and left behind her comfortable job to follow him to Cincinnati to take a job at Channel 2 in Dayton.  This was prior to Doc’s blacklisting from Clear Channel where he was exiled blatantly in favor of radio personalities who were more “middle of the road.”  Yuna is still very much a part of the establishment, but she is not one of the silent types standing on the edge of the shore during the Boston Tea Party.  Rather, she is the wife who supports her husband and his travels all over the country in her own way—which gives him wind beneath his wings—doing the difficult job of being a front man for the liberty movement—where everyone you meet knows your sensibilities forcing them to make a hard decision.  If they speak to you, or are caught doing so, they risk being blacklisted in their own businesses, churches, and social groups—and most people can’t handle that type of exile.

These are the silent costs of liberty—and the pursuit that brings it about.  The same type of pressures existed in colonial times from the British Empire—and people behaved pretty much the same way.  They supported the push for liberty—but feared letting their opinions become known because it might mean they could not make a living for their families—or might even be thrown in jail for dissention.  Doc Thompson struggled for over a year to get a job after being tossed off the ship at 700 WLW and his career was at risk more than once—and his wife’s career who stood by her husband resiliently.  So Doc has every reason in the world to be bitter—but he’s not—he’s hopeful.  That is a very good indication of the state of the world.  Doc stated on Matt’s show more or less that he knows he’s a member of the modern Tea Party, and he’s throwing over the barrels of tea into the metaphorical harbor.  But he also sees the people on the shores watching curiously, and the numbers are much larger than the elements of statism would care to admit.

Without question it will be these elements which will make up the documentary that Doc and Skip are producing.  The results will likely show the view of the Tea Party that nobody in the mainstream establishment cares to acknowledge.  They blacklisted all the reminders in their social circles so that they wouldn’t have to see the reality of their actions—yet the inevitable course of their lives is about to intersect with that undeniable reality.  The two ideologies, the one of statism, and the one of freedom are about to collide—it is inevitable—and it will be violent.  It may not come to literal bloodshed, but lives will be destroyed as a result and the people who have been blacklisted—and made the decision to pursue that consequence ahead of time—have much less to lose.  Those who are protecting their established order have everything to lose, which leaves them watching the Tea Party from the edges of the harbor—wanting to participate, but unwilling to make the commitment to become fugitives in doing so.  But silently, they support the Tea Party—but fear saying so out loud because they aren’t willing to end their lives of comfort within the establishment—even though they root against it in the quite of their distance fantasies.

As much as many wish the Tea Party movement has fizzled out—they are sadly mistaken.  All that has happened is that the most vocal voices, those like Doc’s, mine, Glenn Beck, Matt Clark and many others—have been blacklisted out of the mainstream in hopes that if the establishment does not see the problem—that it does not exist.  But it does.  It is this existence from which Doc and Skip’s new documentary will be focused, a new Liberty Tree where people gather to push for a new type of Boston Tea Party—one not so literal—but more allegorical.  The new Liberty Tree is not an actual thing that the British can cut down this time to remove the symbol of freedom that it once represented—it is in the voice of people like Doc Thompson, Matt Clark, Skip LeCombe and their resilient efforts at freedom while the rest of the world watches quietly from the shores and secretly hopes that they will be successful.

Click here to learn more about the Liberty Tree, and how I see the current movement.  If you want to meet the new Son’s of Liberty, listen to Doc Thompson on The Blaze Radio Network, and Matt Clark on the Clarkcast.com.  These are the John Adams, Samuel Adams, and Thomas Paine’s of our day—and we are lucky to have them.  When it is wondered what the Tea Party means, for me it is summed up perfectly in the old Disney film Johnny Tremain.  If that is threatening or malicious to anyone—then the premise of that accusation needs to be checked—and the real threat to human existence will quickly be revealed.

Rich Hoffman

 www.OVERMANWARRIOR.com

 

Beer, French Fries, Obamacare and the Kingdom of Heaven: Jesus Christ from the Gospel according to Thomas

I was flying recently over Sandusky, Ohio from an altitude of approximately 28,000 feet.  A patch of cloud had opened revealing the small point of land I knew to be the Cedar Point Amusement Park extending well out into Lake Erie—looking perilously vulnerable.  I remembered upon this vision how high the roller costar, Top Thrill Dragster seemed at the peak of its 400 foot plus vantage point—barely even a blip across the surface of the earth from such a high perspective.  Invisible from such a high point of view are all the thrill rides of that famous park, the countless little restaurants, the hotels, the many street venders which give the place a sense of vibrant life.  From my airplane, they could not be seen—yet I knew they were there—and during this Christmas Season which is a celebration of Jesus Christ—and the anxiety that I know many feel because of Obamacare—the time is correct to cover some issues of great concern focused on the Kingdom of Heaven and the parallels to it with the amusement park of Cedar Point as viewed from such a high place.

Most of us live our entire lives from such a high vantage point.  We are busy with our lives, and when someone we care about becomes sick, or cannot become helped with medicine—which will become a much more frequent occurrence with the upcoming health care destruction by President Obama—we pray to God to help us.  Yet from where God is residing, the power to hear every individual prayer can be achieved just as Google Earth or a powerful set of binoculars can zoom in on those roller coaster peaks from such a great height, but often people will die, prayers will not be answered, and tragic disappointment will ensue when God fails to acknowledge the qualms of the living lost in the perspective of distance.  The sheer numbers of people suffering is just too great and in the scheme of the universe, there are more important things to be concern with other than the prayers of a college football player hoping to make his mother proud of them by scoring a touchdown during a bowl game on national television.  The black hole at the center of the Milky Way is sucking in and destroying billions of tons of matter every second and spewing it out into some other dimensional plane of reality for some purpose only understood perhaps on a multi-verse plane of reality—so the prayers of the football player, or the cancer patient being kicked off their insurance plan because of the tampering of government will likely be lost to the eyes of God’s kingdom.

But to understand why, the concept of The Kingdom of Heaven must be understood and for that I have often turned to the Gospel according to Thomas.  There are some really wonderful quotes by Jesus which Thomas recorded for posterity.  Upon hearing them I have to conclude that Jesus had learned Indian Buddhism at some point in his post teenage years, and likely the work of Aristotle which was preserved by the Muslims at the time.  Jesus must have also studied heavily the concepts or Zoroastrianism.  This is not to say that he was not the “son of God” the way people hope to believe, but that he needed to develop the language to convey what he felt coming from his mind and mouth to the people of the world.   This took Jesus down the path he was looking for, and he brought his own interpretation to these concepts to form his foundations for teaching the beginnings of Christianity—which most people fail to grasp.  As the statism through the Roman Empire sought to use Christianity to unite their crumbling empire, they of course altered, manipulated, and even extorted from the learned masses opinions which focused on the altruistic nature of Christianity—and moving mankind away from the core message of Jesus which focused heavily on the “Kingdom of the Father.”

Anyone who says a prayer is hoping to penetrate this Kingdom that Jesus was always talking about—and he even went so far to tell people where it was. It was because of his revelation about the Kingdom of God ultimately that he was killed, because the Pharisees could not put up with Jesus having the masses reach such a place without the gate keepers and tax collectors standing in the way.  So to this very day, most people spend their entire lives separated from the Kingdom of God needlessly—and suffer for no reason other than the control of politics desiring to sacrifice the masses to the blob of archaic gods like Zeus, Yahweh,  Ahura Mazda, or Kulcucan.  Most politicians and establishment types are just as stupid today as they were in the times of Jesus, and they wish to kill, destroy, and render helpless the minds of humanity with the same vigor that Obamacare hopes to stop scientific development which currently is destined to carry philosophic understanding into an intersection with quantum mechanics.  The goal of politics whether through democracies, or religions is to separate the Kingdom of God from the people who want to go there by putting height, distance, and layers of clouds between the two so they cannot find one another in the chaos of existence.  Just like the Cedar Point Amusement Park, it is there, but because of the great height of my airplane, man cannot see it.  According to the Apostle Thomas—this is what Jesus had to say on the matter.  The first one is my favorite quote from this Gospel.

The Gospel
According to Thomas

  1. His disciples said to him, “When will the kingdom come?”  Jesus said, “It will not come by waiting for it. It will not be a matter of saying ‘here it is’ or ‘there it is.’ Rather, the kingdom of the father is spread out upon the earth, and men do not see it.

  2. Jesus said, “Whoever finds the world and becomes rich, let him renounce the world.” Jesus said, “The heavens and the earth will be rolled up in your presence.  And the one who lives from the living one will not see death.” Does not Jesus say, “Whoever finds himself is superior to the world?”

  3. Jesus said, “The kingdom is like a man who had a hidden treasure in his field without knowing it. And after he died, he left it to his son. The son did not know (about the treasure). He inherited the field and sold it. And the one who bought it went plowing and found the treasure. He began to lend money at interest to whomever he wished.”

  4. Jesus said, “The kingdom of the father is like a merchant who had a consignment of merchandise and who discovered a pearl. That merchant was shrewd. He sold the merchandise and bought the pearl alone for himself. You too, seek his unfailing and enduring treasure where no moth comes near to devour and no worm destroys.”

  5. Jesus said, “The kingdom of the father is like a man who had good seed. His enemy came by night and sowed weeds among the good seed. The man did not allow them to pull up the weeds; he said to them, ‘I am afraid that you will go intending to pull up the weeds and pull up the wheat along with them.’ For on the day of the harvest the weeds will be plainly visible, and they will be pulled up and burned.”

  6. Jesus said, “Whoever has come to understand the world has found (only) a corpse, and whoever has found a corpse is superior to the world.”

  7. His disciples said, “When will you become revealed to us and when shall we see you?”   Jesus said, “When you disrobe without being ashamed and take up your garments and place them under your feet like little children and tread on them, then will you see the son of the living one, and you will not be afraid”

  8. Jesus saw infants being suckled. He said to his disciples, “These infants being suckled are like those who enter the kingdom.” They said to him, “Shall we then, as children, enter the kingdom?”  Jesus said to them, “When you make the two one, and when you make the inside like the outside and the outside like the inside, and the above like the below, and when you make the male and the female one and the same, so that the male not be male nor the female female; and when you fashion eyes in the place of an eye, and a hand in place of a hand, and a foot in place of a foot, and a likeness in place of a likeness; then will you enter the kingdom.”

http://gnosis.org/naghamm/gthlamb.html

I believe based on a study of philosophy, comparative religion, observed fact, many years of bible study, and my own creative judgment that the Kingdom of God is within us all, and we reach it when we die to the flesh (pairs of opposites—male and female, good and bad, right and wrong, and all transitory perspective which places our vision high up in the clouds of institutionalism and away from the metaphorical Cedar Point—the Kingdom of Heaven.  It is always right there below us, around us, within us—but we do not see it because of the tools we are using to observe the world.

If one had to think of Heaven as an actual place that could be located with some sort of mapping system, instead of Heaven being out there someplace reachable by space ship or airplane, it is beyond our current focus—as it exists in the very small—instead of the very big according to some of the bizarre rules of quantum mechanics—perhaps as my elderly father-in-law has postulated–Heaven exists in the 12th dimension—where mankind has only yet discovered 11 of them.  The myths of many cultures use the number 12 as a kind of unified theory, and that perhaps the innate understanding of this end game has always been known to imagination even as far back as the centuries before Jesus’ birth.  Heaven is likely so small that in order to arrive at its gates to reside, we would have to strip away the smallest atom of our lives so that the cells of our bodies were like universes dotted across a multi-verse body of mammoth composure.  Heaven may well be like a Cedar Point currently viewed not from 28,000 feet, but from 2,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, miles away looking at the same point in space.  It will only be reached when all pairs of opposites are gone from perspective, and all reference to material flesh preventing the energy of a human body from entering such a place are removed.

So don’t be surprised when prayers go unanswered dear reader—or seem that way anyway.  It is nearly as hard to see a plane in the sky at such a height from the perspective of Cedar Point at ground level as it is to see details from up there into the courtyard of Chick-fil-A lost under the trees next to the big log flume ride.  God is getting the whole symphony of human existence in one giant played note, and there are many notes yet to be played on the backs of the many that have already reached Heaven’s Gates.   But as far as Obamacare, we are on our own—we are part of the musical piece which penetrates all dimensional plans of reality from the very large, to the very small—and it requires our participation, and understanding of what Jesus was really talking about regarding the Kingdom of Heaven.

As my plane landed I thought about the change in perspective as the craft descended out of the clouds to reveal all the details of the world that had been seen beneath, only at a great distance.  Once I was in the gate concourse I found an airport bar/restaurant to jot down my thoughts as Obamacare discussion was on every television visible—the anxiety over the matter noticeable among everyone around me.  The anxiety is in the misplaced trust that government can manage this situation—which they cannot.  The tragedy of Obamacare requires an understanding of the Kingdom of Heaven and the nature of the afterlife so that fear cannot be allowed to manipulate the masses with the major assault on their personal sanctity by promising them shortened lives, poor health care choices, and total control of their existence with a power grab disguised through altruism to end the free thought and action of every human being.

As I wrote this, the beer tasted good, the hamburger was delicious, and the knowledge that all that I could see around me was invisible to the naked eye from 40,000 feet—yet it was all here all along.  And as I finished my hamburger, beer, French fries, and captured my thoughts waiting for the next flight, I had a very good understanding of what Jesus was talking about all along.

Rich Hoffman

 www.OVERMANWARRIOR.com