Rich Hoffman's Blog, page 404
June 23, 2014
FROM THE PAGES OF AYN RAND: Clint Eastwood, Harrison Ford, Angelina Jolie and the great Sergio Leone
The first time I was on television was on a commercial for the restaurant I worked for when I was only 16 years old. I was a part of the filming and of setting up some of the shots and it gave me the opportunity to work with a crew from Channel 19. The commercial just happened to air that week during “Tough Guy Week” where nightly they played movies from the toughest characters in Hollywood, people like Steve McQueen, Chuck Norris, Bruce Lee and best of all, Clint Eastwood. I had been familiar with Eastwood’s spaghetti westerns before, but on the night that my commercial aired it was the same night that For A Few Dollars More played on television, so I ended up watching the entire film so that I could see how the commercial turned out.
The “Man With No Name” character in the Sergio Leone westerns—the trilogy A Fist Full of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, and The Good, Bad, and the Ugly starring Clint Eastwood was a benchmark in tough guy films. There had never been another character like the one that Eastwood played in those westerns in all of human history—including stage plays from the Renaissance. Eastwood’s character was a brand new concept that few understood at the time—but loved. That love continues 50 years later and has had an impact on cinema that has only escalated.
Eastwood would continue to work this personification of a male Übermensch conceived by Leone for several more films—particularly High Plains Drifter, Pale Rider, The Outlaw Josey Wales and Sudden Impact. To a smaller degree Eastwood played the same role in the contemporary comedy Every Which Way But Loose as a bare knuckle fighter. Eastwood’s characters were so popular that they spilled over into other films like Star Wars where the characters of Han Solo and Boba Fett were direct embodiments of the Leone westerns that were only 10 years old at the time. Kevin Costner would take on a similar Übermensch role in The Bodyguard which was the romance drama of 1992 that women swooned over. Arnold Schwarzenegger would adopt Eastwood’s screen presence in films like The Terminator, Commando, and Conan the Barbarian, and following Eastwood’s movie production pattern at Warner Brothers did a comedy with Danny DeVitto called Twins—where his Übermensch character could be played off the hapless antics of a much smaller man.
Progressives in Hollywood of course hated all this attention on these tough guy films and the actors who played them. In 1989 Tim Burton tried to make a common everyday guy into a tough guy with his Micheal Keaton Batman film which attempted to stop the trend of these superhuman character films that were out of reach for the common man. Progressives did not want these Übermensch types to steer the American public away from their social messages of interconnected reliance on each other, feminist causes, and sexual experimentation in gender roles–so they tried to get the situation under control. The most obvious attempt was in the Batman films by Warner Brothers. While the first film was visually stimulating, the sequel fell apart leading Val Kilmer to play in the 1995 version of a Batman reboot. The movie was good, but Kilmer wanted nothing further to do with the role—likely from internal pressure within the Hollywood community to stop making Übermensch films. The next Batman film was with the progressive George Clooney playing the caped crusader, which bombed and was a terrible film filmed with progressive slanted messages—which the public rejected. This would cause Hollywood to return grudgingly back to the Übermensch concept by plucking the older material directly from comic books. There was some experimentation with Spiderman to take the Übermensch concept and make him more altruistic which fell apart after Spiderman 3 in 2007 completely imploded on itself as Hollywood had lost the formula. Christopher Nolan would dig deep into the roots of the Übermensch and get it right which has launched the current superhero parade of films from Ironman, The Avengers, The Hulk, Superman and all the good stuff that’s coming.
Meanwhile James Bond went from an obvious Übermensch in the late seventies and early eighties to a much more “progressive” and less secure secret agent in the 90s which nearly destroyed the character when Timothy Dalton took control after Roger Moore and showed that Bond wasn’t always so sure of himself—which audiences didn’t like. The Bond franchise is still struggling to find itself as fans still love the old Roger Moore, Sean Connery version of James Bond over the newer—less sure of themselves—James Bonds. Personally I find the new Bond films by Daniel Craig to be nearly unwatchable. I enjoy them for the stunts, but the Übermensch Bond is not there. Progressives love the new Bond and promote it actively—but it just doesn’t take to the American consciousness.
Then there is Quentin Tarantino who loved the old Leone films as much as I did and resurrected the Übermensch concept with a new spin to appease his producer Harvey Weinstein—he cast the lead as a woman and gave the origin for the special mystical power of the Übermensch to the East as a tribute to martial art films from the past. The result was a fun romp through a bloody series of films where the heroine Uma Thurman was essentially playing Eastwood’s “Man With No Name” character from the Leone films. It doesn’t matter in the least that Thurman’s character was a woman—what matters is that she was an Übermensch. Angelina Jolie would take the Übermensch type of character into her portrayal of Tomb Raider where she played the video game character Lara Croft. To this day even though critics panned the film as not very good, Jolie is known as Lara Croft even though she has made dozens of very good films. It was her confidence—and Übermensch character in Tomb Raider that fans will always remember about her.
So what is the point of this little history of films produced by Hollywood? Well, most of these stories lean back on the Leone films which were real breakthroughs at the time and indicated that mankind changed forever. Human beings want their Übermensch in spite of what political or social forces wish to acknowledge. And the first filmmaker to really get it right was Sergio Leone. Without him, it is unlikely that any of the above would have happened—and Hollywood would be just another industry failing in America under progressive leadership. Instead, Disney now has control of the Star Wars franchise and the world just spent a week wondering if Harrison Ford’s broken leg from the new Episode VII set would hinder his ability to resurrect his Übermensch Han Solo once again. Disney is rumored to be planning a Boba Fett film which will essentially be a science fiction spaghetti western inspired directly from Sergio Leone—and it will make a ton of money—and progressives will be left scratching their heads wondering why.
So let me give you the secret dear reader. Let me explain to you the reason why this trend has emerged and given birth to a comic book culture that is taking over today’s youth steering them away from the pacifism of progressivism. When Ayn Rand spent approximately twenty years writing two books—one, The Fountainhead and two, Atlas Shrugged, she took Nietzsche’s concept of the Übermensch and completed the work that the German philosopher was unable to due to madness. In The Fountainhead was the first real attempt to provide an Übermensch to ever occur as a fully functioning character. The novel published in 1943 was part of a growing trend for human beings to grapple with the Übermensch concept. In just 1938 the first Superman comic was produced based on a 1933 fanzine trying to take the overman idea as proposed by the socialist George Bernard Shaw and Nietzsche’s direct influence of Hitler’s National Socialism and complete the destructive nature of the incomplete philosophic principle. The Superman comic was a direct reaction to the type of sentiment which led to Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal ideals in America and had a bit of a liberal spin on it. Ayn Rand further flushed out the Übermensch concept and put them on the pages of her novel, The Fountainhead—which to me is one of the greatest novels of all time. Rand would then further perfect the concept into Atlas Shrugged which 60 years later is still selling like French Fries at McDonald’s. It was in these two books that the Übermensch found the right philosophic balance and emerged as a new way of thinking. It was this concept which found itself into the Sergio Leone films thus inspiring modern Hollywood in ways that would be inconceivable otherwise. If not for Ayn Rand, her early work as a screenwriter for Cecil B. Deville, her casual associations with Walt Disney, and John Wayne and her deep work in philosophy with the fresh eyes of an immigrant who had seen the worst that communism had to offer—the movie For A Few Dollars More would have never happened, and likely Clint Eastwood would have remained an obscure actor doing bit parts on television shows.
Without Ayn Rand’s fleshing out the concept of the Übermensch there would not have been a Star Wars, there would not have been an Arnold Schwarzenegger in film, and Kill Bill would have never even gained the ability to be made. Without question there would be attempts, but they would have failed. When direction was given on how Han Solo should get up out of his chair after killing Greedo in the cantina, or how Boba Fett was supposed to walk down a hall, reference was pointed back to Clint Eastwood—“do it like the characters in the Leone films.” And it was Ayn Rand who invented the type of Übermensch who appeared for the first time in The Fountainhead so that Clint Eastwood could have some sort of reference on how such a character should behave—since one had never been seen before in the history of the world. Ayn Rand took the speculative theory of what an Übermensch was supposed to be and fleshed it out in her novels. Filmmakers like Sergio Leone and Clint Eastwood then brought that Übermensch concept to Hollywood which has changed the world.
There is no going back now. It is only a matter of time that society acknowledges their intense desire for the Übermensch. The evidence is obvious from the intense interest in comic book films, space odysseys, and an 84-year-old Clint Eastwood who is still tougher than men a fraction of his age. It’s not the muscle which produce the toughness, it’s in the mind—the beholding of the Übermensch concept—something that became very real to me the first time I really came to understand it watching my first television commercial on Channel 19 during “Tough Guy Week.” The world has been forever changed for the better in a tug-of-war between the Übermensch and the progressives who despise having to even hold a rope against the strength of such characters. They have no choice. Their years of progressive philosophy inspired by Immanuel Kant and Karl Marx are coming to an end in failure. What is coming are the philosophies of the Übermensch brought to man’s mind through films inspired directly from the pages of Ayn Rand.
Rich Hoffman
June 22, 2014
The Arrogance of John Koskinen: Sonasoft backed up IRS emails–the evidence is available
It took me a few days of extreme anger to calm down enough to even write about the congressional testimony given by IRS commissioner John Koskinen. As I watched the man speak to congress, I saw arrogance at its most audacious exhibition, and a disrespect that unionized government employees have toward their employers, the tax payers. I spend a lot of time talking about this issue and am quite certain about the validity of my arguments. Yet when you see such an obvious case of misconduct happening right in front of our faces—the IRS being caught red-handed with the metaphorical blood dripping from their fingers—and they still declare their innocence–it convinced me that no government employee under any unionized representation can be believed about anything under any circumstance—and that is quite a vote of no confidence. We see school teachers lie routinely about their poor conduct and often the sharpness of their rebuke is hidden behind the lives of children taking away the blunt edges of criticism. But in the case of the IRS—here is a long time government employee in John Koskinen who fully expects the world to believe that a hard drive crash destroyed all the evidence of their targeting conservative groups in an IRS scandal that is the biggest crime to come out of government since Watergate. And the John Koskinen found he could sit in front of the world and declare innocence when the evidence of malpractice is painted all over his organization. The only reasonable thing the guy could have done was admit to the mishaps, promise to make it better, and cooperate. Instead, he dug in deeper destroying evidence and smugly declaring the innocence of the IRS without even knowing what is possible in the world or data collection and the destruction of evidence.
As criminals, the IRS should know that the only way to really lose data on a hard drive is to burn the disk and destroy it completely. Data may not be totally recoverable, but partial information is quite possible even on a malfunctioning hard that has crashed. But even worse, the information was backed up elsewhere with a company called Sonasoft as reported by Breitbart.com and The Blaze over the weekend. That creates a very specific problem for the IRS. They are not in control of the backed up data:
As IRS commissioner John Koskinen sat on Capitol Hill belatedly informing a Congressional committee of the “disappearance” of years of email communications from a host of IRS employees under investigation–including Lois Lerner–it was discovered that the IRS had hired an email backup company to prevent just such a loss of data.
After the commissioner’s testimony, a Twitter user went hunting for info on the IRS and discovered that as far back as 2005 a company named Sonasoft had announced that it had been awarded a data backup contract from the IRS. Even as late as 2009, the company had tweeted about its association with the taxing agency.
So, how is it that commissioner Koskinen was so sure during his testimony before the House Ways and Means Committee that all the emails of the very IRS operatives under investigation just happened to have disappeared forever?
The answer is as plain as a gold nugget on top of a pile of shit. It is unequivocally evident—the IRS has attempted to cover up their crime by destroying evidence with the arrogance of government employees who are obviously not very tech savvy. They are caught, busted, and guilty as hell and everyone knows it. As I watched the hearing during Paul Ryan’s portion, I nearly threw my television through the front window, across the yard and into the street. My anger was intense not just because the IRS has confirm everything that people like me have said about them and is turning out to be true—but because they actually are so rotten and corrupt that they are willing to dig in even further to deny, deny, and deny destroying as much evidence as possible to avoid a clear assessment of their crimes. As an organization obsessed with legal terminology they know that as long as there is never any direct evidence, that they cannot be prosecuted. People may not trust them—but at least they won’t be directly guilty. They know that the evidence they are trying to hide from the American people is so damning to them they will do anything to keep it out of everybody’s eyes, even if they must lie to continue the charade.
The so-called lost emails are certainly available for public consumption. No matter what sort of hard drive crash occurred on a localized server, the emails of Lois Lerner will be retrieved and read to the world and all these guilty parties will have much more serious problems to contend with. This is no longer even about politics—this is a crime—a gross abuse of power and it has major implications for the future of the IRS. Over time, it will all come out, and there will be a lot of broken pieces. The trust in that agency is gone forever. The real impact just hasn’t sunk in yet. But it will.
The IRS is an arrogant organization which needs to be dismantled. It was bad before this revelation, and now it doesn’t even have righteousness on its side any longer. John Koskinen should know that the NSA has a record of every email created at the IRS, and likely, so do other agencies. There is nothing private about email. It is like speaking in a shopping mall, or city street. It is a form of communication—but nothing that happens in email should be considered private. Yet these government employees are so arrogant that they actually think they can suppress evidence and went in front of congress and lied about their actions. That is absolutely amazing—astonishingly arrogant, and stupid. These are the people we pay so much! They aren’t even smart enough to understand when the eyes of the world are upon them—and a lot of very smart people analyzing their every word—that they can’t delete a bunch of emails hiding evidence and blame it on an IT failure. That just doesn’t cut it.
John Koskinen said, “I don’t think an apology is owed.” He doesn’t think that the errors of the IRS constitute accountability. Then a Democratic Congressman alluded that the whole scandal was a concocted conspiracy theory not concerned at all by the behavior of the IRS. What we are seeing is a major conspiracy that involves many people—and in this case half of the people on Capitol Hill appear to be guilty. They are using every trick in the book to throw all investigations off their trail, but to no avail. The emails are recovered and have been backed up. All it takes is guts to put them out to the public, who will likely be ready to lynch the IRS once the contents are discovered. When that happens, major heads will roll in Washington D.C. and that is what has everybody scared.
It is in that realization that I nearly destroyed my television and had to spend two full days calming down. I don’t like being lied to, and the IRS has lied to my face and expects me to just go away quietly. Worse yet, it wasn’t directed at me—but at all Americans, and for that—they deserve the wrath that is coming their way. If the Republicans screw this up, they have no hope. The Democrats have placed themselves on a tee and are daring the Republicans to hit them out of the park. If the Republicans really wanted to win in 2014 and 2016, they’d hit the IRS issue hard and without remorse. This is not a conspiracy equivalent to Area 51 and Bigfoot—this is evidence of such things that normally might be regulated to conspiracy theory. In this case, the IRS has done everything everyone who fears it has claimed and the proof is on those backed up emails at Sonasoft.
Rich Hoffman
June 21, 2014
Giant Megaliths On Mount Shoria, Russia: The importance of Archaeology and deficiency of modern education
According to a site called The Truth Wins:
An incredible discovery that was recently made in Russia threatens to shatter conventional theories about the history of the planet. On Mount Shoria in southern Siberia, researchers have found an absolutely massive wall of granite stones. Some of these gigantic granite stones are estimated to weigh more than 3,000 tons, and as you will see below, many of them were cut “with flat surfaces, right angles, and sharp corners”. Nothing of this magnitude has ever been discovered before. The largest stone found at the megalithic ruins at Baalbek, Lebanon is less than 1,500 tons. So how in the world did someone cut 3,000 ton granite stones with extreme precision, transport them up the side of a mountain and stack them 40 meters high? According to the commonly accepted version of history, it would be impossible for ancient humans with very limited technology to accomplish such a thing. Could it be possible that there is much more to the history of this planet than we are being taught?
Well, I’ll answer that question, proposed by The Truth Wins; it is factually evident that there is a lot more to the history of the earth that is just now becoming obvious after only 100 years of archaeology, geology, paleontology, and anthropology. Any thought about mankind and its history that has so far been taught in schools has been grossly premature. The taught knowledge of history is comparable in scope to the knowledge of a kindergarten student fresh from their mother’s arms compared to a triple doctorial post-graduate of three major universities. Unfortunately, those same universities in competition for academic respect have published too much theory too fast as fact and attempted to ignore the vast amount of evidence which continued to pour in from scientists in the field. The result has been a catastrophe in understanding human history which is turning out to be nothing like what was taught in public schools and colleges for several decades now.
The greatest hindrance to proper archeological understanding of our planet comes from two primary sources, politics—such as in Iraq where so many ancient cities reside but are impossible to properly excavate due to the political volatility that is ever-present. What caused such poor contributions from Russia during their heavy communist years under Stalin was a political system that suppressed information to the outside world. Because the country was closed off to the West, university archaeologists were not able to do any excavating in Russia, so a vast span of that part of the world has been ignored scientifically. Siberia for years has been ripe for a raw look into mankind’s past, because it is so remote from civilization and provides an accurate looking-glass into our past. This recent discovery of the megaliths in Russia is just the tip of a culture which easily evolved around the Pacific Rim and has been building megalithic structures well before documented history.
Archaeologist John Jensen was quoted in the article from The Truth Wins, and is primarily concerned with ancient canal builders chronicling the many harbors built all around the North American continent well over 7000 years ago which defies any notion about earth’s history previously entertained. His comment about the Russian megaliths state:
Anyone with a brain and eye can see that these megaliths are man-made. They are everywhere even under water. The truth is, we don’t know how they did it but my guess is HUGE PEOPLE built it. Let’s just stop listening to people paid by the Smithsonian Institute and use our heads to search out the real truths. From Fiji.
John Jensen April 21, 2014 at 7:39 PM
I tend to agree in general terms. We have substantive proof in the geological column that super giants lived on the earth at some time (at least several Epochs) ago. They ranged in size between 26′ and 35′ tall, or at least that is as large as we have hard evidence for. (A 5′ footprint in a granite stone in South Africa)
More can be learned about John Jensen at the following link:
http://www.ancientcanalbuilders.com/
The other major hindrance to proper archaeological study is religion. For instance, there is not a proper study of the current Temple of Solomon because of the perpetual anxiety between Christians, Jews, and Muslims over the Temple Mount location. In spite of the evidence that both Muslims and Jews and Christians have Zoroastrianism as their origins, and even further a reverence for the philosophy of Aristotle. Presently, the religions do not get along and are fighting over whose version of Biblical history is correct. Zoroastrianism arose in the eastern region of the ancient Persian Empire, when the religious philosopher Zoroaster simplified the pantheon of early Iranian gods[3] into two opposing forces: Spenta Mainyu (Progressive mentality) and Angra Mainyu (Destructive Mentality) under the one God, Ahura Mazda (Illuminating Wisdom). Zoroaster’s ideas led to a formal religion bearing his name by about the 6th century BCE and have influenced other later religions including Judaism, Gnosticism, Christianity and Islam.[6]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoroastrianism
Because of these religious conflicts proper archaeological investigation does not happen. Even worse, because many wish to believe the text of the Holy Bible and Koran as sacred—and historical, they ignore any evidence which is contrary to their religions doctrines. The result has been that many different races of people have existed on earth over time, some of them likely were giants 10’ to 20’ feet tall, some even larger and have given rise to the many mythologies which speak to us presently from the past. There is more truth to many of the ancient stories than fictional fantasy—which is confirmed by archaeological evidence. Yet that evidence is ignored because the information requires an adoption of religious viewpoints to accept—and because many people function from a primal, infantile grip on the reality of life and death—they cling to these religions like people caught in the middle of an ocean hanging on to a life raft lacking the ability to swim. It is not inconceivable that giants walked and worked the planet earth before the species of Neanderthals rose to form what we think of as humans, two-legged creatures between 5’ to 7’ tall.
Biblical history tells the story of a group of descendents emerging from Noah who formed a tribe of Jews that rose to prominence in Jerusalem. In the context of history, these events only took place a few thousand years ago. Yet the stone structures discovered in Siberia are far, far older and could not have been built by any known method from any period prior to the present. It would be difficult to build them today with all the power equipment available—let alone in a time when ropes and rocks were the only reasonable tools known. The builders at the site in Siberia had very advanced technology indicative to the many megalithic structures common around the earth untold years ago and they were audacious enough to build them in the largest fashion recorded throughout the world.
Based on my observations, sometimes in person, but collected from readings projected from every corner of the world, specifically now from Siberia is that mankind has moved through several cycles of rising and falling such as what happened with the Roman Empire. There was a glorious period of human thought and technological development in Rome, which fell eventually to the barbarian hoards. Immediately thereafter was a period called the Dark Ages of Europe where society regressed backwards to tribal villages and small-minded kingdoms leading to the kind of plot lines that Shakespeare wrote about in his stage plays. China went through a similar cycle around 1410 AD to 1430 AD, then declined in power living off their grand breakthroughs around the cited period. The United States is currently going through this decline period and if left unchecked, cities like New York could wither away into empty shells within a few hundred years, and erode away into nothing within 10,000 years leaving no memory of their creation except for some very obscure archaeology. The human race has over time risen and fallen and was not always of the same height or species. The Neolithic cultures all around the world including the new Siberia site had in common either extreme size and strength completely foreign to modern human beings—or they were extremely advanced technologically and that technology has been lost to time. What we do know is that the large stone structures seen in Siberia and elsewhere the world over were made by thinking hands and are a mystery that will endure so long as religion, academic stagnation, and regional politics hold back thoughtful inquiry into their origins. It cannot be argued that they were made by something similar to a human being and were not random acts of nature. There was a period on earth where a mysterious race of people from every corner of it built large structures of stone and they did it with precision—and that time period does not fit into our known—or acknowledged history.
This evidence is a warning that with all the bells and whistles modern society believes it possesses, such as the iPhone, the Internet, and McDonald’s restaurants—it can all be wiped away if the education establishments get into the practice of protecting their theories instead of letting knowledge carry society perpetually forward. Once the human being accepts such practices, that society will begin a decline into ruin and will be forgotten within a century or two. Many believe that Siberia is a no mans land of nothing—but it was not always such. There was a period where Siberia had a thriving culture that cared enough about their presence on earth to build something out of stone that could not be easily forgotten or decayed away with the pages of their previous history. Even in modern times, CDs, books, all the creations of mankind can decay away into nothing within 10,000 or 100,000 years lost forever. The Neolithic cultures may have understood this, and decided to build their structures out of one of the slowest decaying substance on earth—stone. It is entirely possible that they were more advanced then than we are now and their culture had its time in the sun and died away for whatever reason. It is that reason which should concern us presently. If we conduct our lives in the same fashion as they did, and allow politics and religion to steer the evidence to places we feel comfortable, then a similar fate will befall the modern human race. At that time 200,000 to 1 million years from now—which is nothing in geologic time, visitors whoever they may be might arrive on the east coast of North America and see large mounds covered with grass and mistake them as hills. With a little archeology they may dig into those hills and discover the remnants of Washington D.C., New York City, and Atlantic City and wonder if there was ever a society as intelligent as they are. Their inventors for the first time might learn how to build a car out of combustible materials, and how to heat homes with energy oared from the earth. Their conspiracy theorists may think of us as giants, or as aliens, but their academic institutions and churches will proclaim that such things are heresy and will steer society away from such theories, and within a few thousand years they too will become extinct—again and again until the earth is consumed by its sun and destroyed forever.
The human race has had its chances and failed each time—we are currently in a time of one of those periods and it will be how we handle the information discovered that will decide our perpetuation, or our doom. Because it is without question that the untouched archaeology of Siberia is about to unload upon the world knowledge that it is likely not prepared to handle—intellectually. Consider what we know about the dinosaurs which have been deduced based on the study of discovered fossils. We assume that we know all there is to know about dinosaurs based on 5 or 6 T-Rex skeletons partially constructed and hundreds of other prehistoric species found through the fossilization process. However, fossilization is a unique process, complete decomposition is more the norm and there is no way to know what type of species of living creatures inhabited the earth—so there is no way to say that such a large structure in Russia was constructed by any living beings other than giants, or a technically superior civilization long forgotten from any written record. Their evidence is filling the archaeological achieves in the back rooms of museums and universities with academia not sure how to deal with the introduction of new information. But one thing is clear—quite clear—our present education system is useless because they feed the faults which prevent proper understanding instead of dispelling the long-held grip into religious mythologies and political territories suppressed from proper investigation because of constant turmoil from failing governments, like Russia, Iraq, Iran, Cambodia, China, and the entire Middle East. When the evidence is difficult to uncover in a free country with great wealth to spend on excavations, it is nearly impossible to perform the work in war-torn countries where science is frowned upon due to fear that it might shatter their religious outlook. This is how the world’s mysteries remain hidden and entire people disconnected from their real past in the long drama directed by the human race.
Watch the videos included with this article for more information and further contemplation. And be sure to educate a friend by passing this along. Also, read the link below to learn more about Russian archaeology and some of the mysteries coming out of Siberia that are far less published in the West:
Rich Hoffman
June 20, 2014
28 Years of Bad American Presidents: The cause of a nation’s fall from grace
Let’s make something clear since Jay Carney brought it up on his last day as the White House spokesman—the Bush administration was not a good 8 years for America. And certainly, Obama has been bad for American just in even worse incompetence. There isn’t a competition between the Republican loser in office and the Democrat—they both were terrible. At the end of Obama’s second term, America will have seen 16 years of terrible presidents and America has suffered terribly for it. America will be well over $18 trillion dollars in debt and will have virtually everything that has been taken for granted–good jobs, a flourishing economy, food, power, and medical help in question as Obama leaves the White House. However, the folly doesn’t start there—Clinton was a terrible president, and Bush the senior wasn’t a cup of tea either. It is then no wonder that America is a shell of its former self as the political leadership has reflected a society on the decline. The people who have elected these losers are of less quality than previous generations and the result has been horrible leadership in the White House that has had a detrimental effect on America’s quality in every category.
Nobody will argue that Dick Cheney was far from the best vice president—just as Joe Biden appears to be a complete buffoon in the same position. Jay Carney’s reference to the poor Bush presidency as a defense of the Obama presidency is like saying that thunder is better than lightning in a rain storm—as they accompany each other in the grand scheme of things. It is best to not have a storm at all if no damage is desired—and in politics, it is best to avoid terrible presidents—so to avoid damage once they leave.
Yet is it clear now why America went to war in Iraq? It was to prevent the spread of terrorism, not because of “oil.” It was to keep wealth and resources out of the hands of diabolical terrorists. Does everybody now understand why there must be a border between Mexico and The United States that is secure—because all the impoverished countries from the south in Central America are flocking to the border hoping for relief from their circumstances? The cause of those circumstances is the socialist and tyrannical policies of their corrupt governments giving America the obligation to protect itself by imposing freedom on those places. When such strength is not present—there is no reason for tyrants to oppress their people with no option but to flee those lands of terror in pursuit of opportunities for freedom.
America never should have to concern itself with the affairs of other countries, but when it is the only good place in the world beholding freedom—and immigrants flood our boarders looking for freedom from oppression, America has a right to defend itself by helping those countries have freedom on their own. But if those countries do not have a philosophy that allows for freedom, then it won’t last, like what has happened in Iraq. It is not enough to give a country a set of laws and turn them loose in pursuit of democracy. If most people in the country are corrupt by bad, collectivist thinking, they will not be able to maintain freedom under any circumstances.
For over twenty years now bad presidents have led America on a chase mimicking these bad global governments instead of standing for what was right in defense of freedom. At least Ronald Reagan as an actor/president understood that America had an obligation to help oppressed people so that freedom would spread around the world instead of tyranny—his presidency was a strong one that left the entire world a better place. There were presidents before Reagan who were also pretty good at defending that basic premise from both political parties—but as for the last twenty years, representation for freedom from the White House to the world has been terrible.
Many of the problems experienced presently in the American nation are due to weak leadership and foreign policy vision. Bush and Obama have very little understanding of economics and abandoned capitalism under their terms. Clinton was simply a socialist who defended his corruption with his legal skills as a diabolical lawyer. Without question, he is likely enjoying these current problems as they fit his open border philosophy where the value of America is diminished in favor of a new global government.
The premise that every time Obama is criticized for being a complete idiot, which he is, a defense for his stupidity is not to point at George W. Bush and say “he did it too.” They were both idiots, and they have both left America worse as a nation than it was when they took over as president. But for context, the Pentagon moved the Aircraft carrier George W. Bush off the coast of Iraq to show the terrorist insurgents that America is nearby. That brought forth the thought that it is now unimaginable that a future aircraft carrier would be named, the “Barack Obama.” Such a carrier would be a laughing-stock, and certainly would not incite fear into the opposition. It is in that reality that the quality of the presidents can best be determined. For as bad as Bush was for the free market, he at least understood how to project strength in the military—even if it was at times overreaching. It is better to reach too far in foreign policy than to not reach at all—like Obama has. Lack of American projection of strength to the world leads every cockroach to come forth as a potential tyrant and ruthless dictator—which is what is happening from Russia to the Middle East. And in the end, that is why Barack Obama will forever be known as the worst president in the history of America, and make the top ten list of worst leaders of all time the world over. Obama will own that designation on his own and no deflection to George W. Bush will cover his ignorance from the responsibility of that title.
It is not enough to simply defeat a dictator or to send military support—or to throw money at countries who are functioning from poor philosophic beliefs and collectively based cultures. When that sense of collectivism carries over into religion these countries become even more dangerous to themselves and others. What all poor countries have in common is collective based economies based on Karl Marx and Keynesian thought, and religions based on sacrifice and worship through collective yielding to higher powers. Those failures of thought are what cause hopeful immigrants to pour into the U.S. border and terrorists to believe they have a right to impose religious law against non-believers through force and terror. The failure of the American presidents of the last 20 years is that they failed to identify this root cause—and have instead let them fester unchecked until presently the world is in disarray. Money cannot be thrown at the problem of poor philosophy, and neither can lip service. People have to think differently. They have to “think” like Americans instead of just running to America hoping to be put on welfare and cared for by the tax payer in The United States for the rest of their lives. They have to adopt new philosophies that allow them to have flourishing economies and religions that don’t require the eradication of those who don’t believe the same things under the premise of social collectivism. If traceability between these two differences in thought could be made it is the difference between Immanuel Kant, and Adam Smith—or the difference between Aristotle and Plato. The root cause of evil is in philosophy, and it is the philosophy of poor nations which leave people looking to escape into The United States, or to flee tyrants on their way into Bagdad that causes the trouble. The only way to really help the people of the world is to change the way those people think—and Obama, Bush, Clinton as well as many other presidents have put American value into reactive defense instead of assertive projection of philosophies born on American soil—which would do far more good than all the tanks, planes and missiles in world history of stopping tyrants in their tracks. Recent American presidents have failed to show pride in that American philosophy born of Adam Smith, John Locke, Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin and Ayn Rand—and that is why they are embarrassments in the context of history—all of them.
Rich Hoffman
June 19, 2014
The Ultimate Latté Sipping Prostitute: Michelle Obama too ignorant to feed her children
It was an astonishing revelation when Michelle Obama admitted that she was a bad parent prior to gaining access to the White House and receiving the vast resources available to government workers who become president. She stated:
“Before coming to the White House, I struggled, as a working parent with a traveling, busy husband, to figure out how to feed my kids healthy, and I didn’t get it right,” she explained, sharing a story about her children’s doctor who pulled her aside to talk about her family diet.
“I thought to myself, if a Princeton and Harvard-educated professional woman doesn’t know how to adequately feed her kids, then what are other parents going through who don’t have access to the information I have?”
That explains a lot and sounds like most of the levy supporters in my neighborhood—the kind of people I’ve termed as “latté-sipping prostitutes”—as they lack common sense, are overly dependent on government services, and spend much of their spare time sipping lattes and complaining about their spouses. These are a new breed of people invented by the big government socialist policies born of the Great Depression—and the result is these parents unwise about child rearing and deeply insecure about their roles as parents. Government services have made them lazy and dependent not feeling qualified to even make decisions about what their children should eat—let along much more complex social issues. These are not the days of Leave it to Beaver where the parents were wise and had all the answers a child could possibly need to ask. These are the days of Oprah where parents were taught to ask a professional and surrender their children’s sovereignty to the care of public schools. Michelle Obama represents this new age parent who can’t even answer simple questions without professional assistance in whatever topic is in question.
So it comes as no wonder that Michelle Obama thinks that the rest of America is as dim-witted as she has been, and needs vast government services to support their lives, and robust cabooses. I often term these types of people as latte sipping prostitutes because they tend to be drastically out-of-touch regarding world affairs primarily getting their news, and ultimately their philosophy from day time television. There is nothing against places like Starbuck’s, but often their dinning rooms are filled with these types of people, the kind of people who Michelle Obama is—social climbing neurotic, dependent personalities. When I refer to them as prostitutes it is because often these types of parents put their careers before their children and somehow expect everything to come out wonderfully in their families. Prostitutes often are willing to do anything for money. They most of the time sell various degrees of sexual interaction with male clients, but usually their obligation is not sexually related at all—only on the surface. Men who use the services of prostitutes are often looking for company—someone to spend time with. So the prostitute must be ready to sell her body for sex, or just for company—which isn’t any different from most jobs in most careers where time is sold in exchange for money. The only real difference is that time is sold instead of a physical body.
Michelle Obama complained that she was in a relationship with a man who traveled a lot, and she was an attorney with a Harvard law degree who made a decision to serve others by selling her time instead of giving that time to her children. Thus, it was her conclusion that she needed help feeding her children correctly—because she didn’t have time or knowledge to perform the task. But it was her decisions in life that prevented her from obtaining that knowledge—she chose instead to whore herself out to a legal profession full of radical social advocates—such as Bernadine Dorn from the Weather Underground and similar reformers instead of pouring that same energy into learning what foods are good for her children, or what they should be doing and thinking about. Typical school levy supporters are of the same type—they whore themselves to occupations with the sole intention of making money—and wonder why their children are faulty—lacking parental input. It’s not always the case, but generally you can easily tell children who have a full-time parent in the home and children who are raised through baby sitters, public schools, and empty homes owned by parents too busy with careers to care for them. The parents are doing essentially the same thing that prostitutes are doing—selling their time for money and what gets deprived are the children who need that sold away time.
This is the heart of why Michelle Obama was lost on how to feed her children. She was raised to be a prostitute. Instead of selling her body, she has sold her time to a law firm and legal career. Her mind was not on raising children; it was on the concerns of the Weather Underground as she worked at the same Chicago law firm that the former American terrorist worked at. Before her husband became a big time public looter, she worked the streets sipping lattés at lunch while looking over legal briefs for judges interpreting the law of corrupt politicians whose only productive enterprise was creating more paperwork. And she felt sophisticated, and accomplished as most progressives established value. Michelle Obama by her own admission was so deficient as a parent that she didn’t even know how or what to feed her children without professional input. That was because she was too busy whoring herself to society that she didn’t have anything left for her children—that is why she is a latté sipping prostitute.
When I called the levy supporters in my home district of Lakota schools latté sipping prostitutes, they wanted to assume that the statement was derogatory toward women—again as progressives have defined the value. But it wasn’t meant toward women—but at their neglectful behavior as parents who were too busy raising future attention starved children instead of productive members of society—which becomes my business when they become hapless adults like Michelle Obama—unable to even know how to feed themselves without professional help. They expect to cover up their mistakes with increased tax money to wave a magic wand and “puff” make their children scholars and successful adults—and that wand is waved in public education classrooms. But the results are often as accurate as newspaper horoscopes and just as factually based. They are a destructive species who are pretentious and corrosive to the human race—and it starts in lunch time cafes among cackling, unhappy parents who attempt to justify the guilt they feel in selling their time for money while others do the jobs of raising their children. That is why they are latté sipping prostitutes.
Occasionally, these whores strike it rich. They marry someone who could sell the pants off a priest, lying their way from one social circle to another until they are in the White House. When they arrive at such a place, they are still unequipped to be parents, because their background as whores has not prepared them for such things—but they can now command vast resources supplied by the tax payers to attempt to cover their deficiencies. In this way, Michelle Obama is no different from a typical school levy supporter. But the fault is not common to everyone, only to people like the Obama family—who have sold themselves for years to everyone in trade for power, money, and political power. Yet, that power can’t even help them feed their children on their own—they still have to hire help to cover their ignorance. And that is the fault and fate of every latté sipping prostitute in existence—which means that their children will tragically suffer under their care.
Rich Hoffman www.OVERMANWARRIOR.com
June 18, 2014
A U.S. Wings Special Treasure: Indiana Jones closing at Hollywood Studios
PIt was bitter-sweet news for me to learn that the Indiana Jones Epic Stunt Spectacular show at Hollywood Studios, Florida is closing at the end of fiscal year 2014 to make way for a new Star Wars land in the popular park. While I can’t wait to take my grandkids, and children to the new Star Wars land, since in our family, those films have so much reverence—I have a long history with the Indiana Jones show that I will always cherish. I wrote about my latest visit to the park in an article complete with footage from the show. Years ago, I nearly moved my family to Florida to be a stuntman in the show which was only supposed to run for 3 – 5 years according to casting agents 20 years ago. But, the show has been so popular that it has endured all this time. On the same day as I received this news, my friends at U.S. Wings let me know that they had a new Indy jacket limited edition that they were releasing based on the original measurements from Raiders of the Lost Ark made of kangaroo hide. Kangaroo hide is a favorite of mine as many of my whips are made from the common Australian hide and is very tough stuff. The jacket will cost $849 which is well worth the price giving more meaning to fans of the popular show in Florida. Once the show closes, it will mark the end of an era with Indiana Jones that the world will never see again. If fans of the films wanted to buy a special jacket to remember this time—now would be the time to do it.
Closing the Indiana Jones show along with the American Idol exhibit will free up a lot of space in the already packed park. Star Wars is the future of Disney—so it is only fitting that they make good use of the area. As much as I love the Indiana Jones show, it is dated and can only really be enjoyed in a nostalgic way. Star Wars will fill that space far better than the same space is used now—so it’s a great decision. But for me, Indiana Jones will always have a special place that can’t be matched any other way. I am happy I was able to take my first grandson to the show at least once. Crowds for the show from now until the end of 2014 will be intense and in high demand as fans from all over the country will flock to see it one more time. For those people I suggest remembering this year with an official jacket from U.S. Wings which is the closest thing to the jacket shown in the show that anyone will ever get anywhere. Here is the press release from U.S. Wings:
Limited Edition – Back By Popular Demand! We last manufactured a kangaroo Indy-style jacket more than 10 years ago, but we’re once again offering one in this outstanding leather! We’ve chosen to offer our authentic Indy-style “Legend” Jacket (which is based on the specs of one of the original movie jackets from three decades ago) in this ultra-durable material. Besides being a rather rare and unique jacket material, Kangaroo-hide is outstanding for its practicality: it’s perhaps the most rugged leather available while still being light in weight.
Features include two front cargo pockets with original-style pocket flaps, side-entry handwarmer pockets, pleated action back for freedom of movement (with correctly-sized small side gaps), small yoke on back panel, original-length side adjustment straps with rectangular sliders, an interior pocket, satin nylon lining, brass zipper, and plain cuffs & bottom. Also features a shorter overall length and a trimmer, more tailored fit in the body & sleeves. Our Kangaroo jackets have that desirable “rugged look” right from the start, because the hides come from wild Kangaroos, not farm-raised. The hides will display naturally occurring scratches, scuffs, and other range marks which adds character to the jacket. This will be a limited production run, so get this unique jacket while you can. A U.S. Wings exclusive. Made from hides imported from Australia.
Limited production run: once these jackets are gone, they will no longer be available.
Availability: These jackets will be available late Summer 2014.
http://www.uswings.com/product/kangaroo-indy-style-legend-jacket/
As I’ve said in previous articles I have a U.S. Wings leather jacket of a similar style and I wear it every day. They don’t just look good, but are actually functional—which is basically why Indiana Jones wears that type of clothing no matter if the time period is the 1930s, the late 1950s—or the current time. There isn’t a better style jacket for a person who conducts their life with actual adventure. I have an A-2 variation of the same jacket that U.S. Wings is offering made of Kangaroo hide and let me declare how tough and stylish it is.
Just the other day I had people from outside the country visiting and we were meeting in downtown Cincinnati for dinner. It was a hot day and I had to high tail it to the city from about 30 miles out in 20 minutes, so I was speeding down I-75 during rush hour in heavy traffic with bugs and grit from cement trucks bouncing off my U.S. Wings leather jacket. Without the jacket, the ride down a busy highway at those speeds would be nearly impossible. At times I had to use the emergency lane which was filled with gravel to avoid crashing into cars coming to sudden stops in the wall to wall procession of cars heading south. I was late to dinner and parking downtown anymore on a motorcycle is a nightmare as the parking garages no longer allow them, so I was pressed. After a series of adventures parking in a safe lot about eight blocks from Fountain Square, I climbed over walls, up ladders, across rooftops and then back through heavy traffic in a full sprint dripping with sweat dressed in a suit. Protecting the suit was my U.S. Wings jacket which was covered with bugs that I was brushing off as I approached the restaurant and directed the hostess to take me to my table where the guests were already waiting with expensive wine and appetizers. I was stylishly late, but better yet, the jacket was dressy enough to match the surroundings, but tough enough to get me there without screwing up everything that was underneath. That is the gift of a U.S. Wings jacket.
This is why the actors of the Indiana Jones show in Florida have used jackets like these A-2 types for years. Indiana Jones wore them to allow the stunt men to do all the dangerous stunts with an added layer of protection that still looks good on film. In the Indiana Jones Epic Stunt Spectacular, the actors use those jackets show after show, after show giving that added protection in the hot Florida sun as the stuntmen fall from the ceiling and rappel into the stage area five times a day for twenty years. The leather jacket doesn’t just to look good; they protect the people who wear them.
So in the year that the Indiana Jones Epic Stunt Spectacular is closing for those who are willing to drop a couple thousand dollars to watch the show one last time before it closes, do yourself a favor—buy the new Indy-style “Legend” Jacket from U.S. Wings at the link provided. Don’t even waste your time thinking about it—because it is a real treasure that you can give yourself. I like the jacket so much I may even buy another one. The jacket U.S. Wings is offering is thinner than the one I use everyday, and would have its uses on hot summer nights in remote locations far from home—which is of interest to me.
I’m sure Disney will do something with Indiana Jones that will appease fans—but it won’t be the same as the era that we have all just moved through. That era of live shows at Disney World and Harrison Ford films will end in 2014 and for that a treasure is deserved—and I can think of nothing better than a new U.S. Wings jacket from their “Legends” collection to hang in a closet and remind the owner of a period in their life where Indiana Jones was new, fresh—and original.
Rich Hoffman www.OVERMANWARRIOR.com
June 17, 2014
The Idiotic Presidency of Obama: A fool in sole possession of his place in history
For those who thought I was unfair toward President Obama when his campaign opened an office in Mason, Ohio—history has proven me right once again. As usual, those types of people who lean in that particular political direction as Obama supporters have shown why they are so incompetent and living evidence as to why democracies will always fail. The mob cannot rule—because collectively they are too stupid to. I said so much about the Obama supporters who showed up to open the Mason office and many thought I was too harsh. Well, what does anybody think now?
Obama is the worst president in American history and may go down as one of the worst leaders in the history of the world, which is saying a lot considering Europe had some terrible kings, and the Roman Empire had a large percentage of fools serving as Emperor. Obama has proven as President of the United States that he is either a diabolical terrorist sent to undermine America as a world power, or he is a complete idiot incompetent to manage anything or anyone. I have often said that Obama was not qualified to manage even a McDonald’s restaurant—and this statement has more than proven to be true. Granted, managing a McDonald’s is not an easy task on a good day, but one would think that it should be within the management capacity of the world’s most powerful so-called leader. Obama could not even do such a thing—he is completely and utterly incompetent.
The list of scandals is growing under Obama’s care, and if there were a defining moment when Obama lost control of his foreign policy, it was Syria when he did not make good on his promise to defend a metaphorical line in the sand. This opened up the opportunity for Russia to push the U.S. in Ukraine, this antagonized aggression in Iran, Iraq and embolden terrorists in Afghanistan—as well as throughout the Middle-East. The wheels are now completely off, and are rapidly deteriorating. The world knows Obama is a fool, and they no longer respect American involvement in anything—which is the fault of the President and his administration.
Obama has in his Justice Department a common thug in Eric Holder involved in scandal after scandal from the IRS, gun dealing, open border debacles, and NSA surveillance. Obama has screwed up virtually everything he has touched in every category that he has touched it. If he has done anything right, it is in his con artist presentation—his ability to get elected and make promises—but he has not been able to make good on anything. I have often referred to him as a used car salesman—who will do and say anything to sell a car—but once you get the car—you realize it’s a lemon. What Obama gives isn’t even a lemon—it’s rather a picture of a lemon printed on garbage.
Obama’s ultimate failure is his socialism that he brought to the American economy. If Bush ran America into debt fighting terrorism, and attacking the free market with micromanagement—Obama put a dagger square in the back of capitalism placing the American economy into the hands of complete idiots—much like himself. Whether it is the Veterans Affairs scandals of mismanagement which actually killed innocent people—it is Obamacare which is destroying the greatest healthcare system in the world. Obama has propped up unionized businesses foolishly and squandered away billions of dollars on green energy hippie concerns. He has further strangled the U.S. economy by going to war with coal, and using the EPA to halt virtually every business development in the nation with over-regulation and government enforced corruption. Before Obama it was difficult to do business with the federal government—now it is nearly impossible. Mindless bureaucrats are in charge of creativity and productive enterprise—which has nearly stopped manufacturing and new job growth. All Obama can do to solve the problem is mindlessly create more government jobs like firefighters, cops, and teachers—or even worse, IRS agents, healthcare workers, or EPA staff which are simply flow over members of the Sierra Club and PETA. He has given activists power over the productive and the productive have simply thrown up their hands and said to hell with it. It’s not worth the headache, the law suits and the pain in the ass to start a new business. Even if a company could launch a new product, their profits are confiscated by the federal government and distributed to the poor, the lazy, and the idiot—the typical Obama supporter. Productivity under Obama has stopped. Existing companies have held their own, but new growth has been embarrassingly stagnating in future development and implementation through capital assets. That is the fault of Obama and his policies of federal terrorism of capitalism.
Obama spent the first four years blaming the previous administration on the state of the world. Now, six years into his presidency, he owns the parade of follies shown daily on the nightly news. All his bad management has caught up to him and he can no longer escape it. What will turn out to be his greatest failure will be that he did win a second term—because history will remember his faults instead of giving him the benefit of doubt of the four years he would have been in office left unproven. Now, he is proven. He’s a proven fool and is simply embarrassing as a human being—let alone a manager of anything.
Obama is way over his head and is proof of what happens when you put a radical community organizer into a responsible position. America and all the trouble currently plaguing the freest country on earth is the result of putting an idiot—and domestic terrorist like Obama into a governing position. Whether Obama is a terrorist by deliberate deceit or under just being a fool is the only question left to answer. Obama will always be known as the worst president in American history and a major step backward in human development. The results of his life and times as an American politician are now beyond refute and are solely in his possession. America would have done much better if it had simply plucked a stressed out fast food manager out of a nearby restaurant and put them in The White House. The results would have been much more productive.
Rich Hoffman www.OVERMANWARRIOR.com
June 16, 2014
Life Down The Rabbit Hole: The meaning of ‘Alice of Wonderland’ and the perilous plots of Ultraterrestrials
The other intent of this blog, which again was addressed from the very beginning, was that it promised to take readers down the “rabbit hole” of knowledge so to unlock the reasons for many of the events occurring in the world. Of course the reference is to the novel Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll brought to immortal life by the Walt Disney film of the same name. I knew that those reading here would find themselves at some point in a world they never knew existed, but perilously aware that the mechanisms emitting from deep down the Rabbit Hole would explain the type of insanity seen in the nightly news. Such a tragedy is similar to a child watching a puppet show and believing that what they see on stage is real, only to discover as their eyes become more sophisticated that there are strings on the marionettes which extend off stage somewhere. So the inquiring mind gets out of their seat and climbs onto the stage to follow the strings up above the stage where it is discovered that the real manipulators of movement reside. In this way, the “rabbit hole” is anything and everything which helps support the puppet show away from the stage. The stage where the puppets act is the reality witnessed, but anything away from the stage would be considered Rabbit Hole material.
But the rabbit hole of our real life can be much more tragic than a child realizing that the puppets in a show are not real, and are manipulated by talented actors off stage. The realization that from deep down the Rabbit Hole of existence are the mechanisms which affect our daily life from news stories like the ISIS invading Iraq to the countless scandals involving President Obama, the IRS claiming to have lost two years of emails, or the real intentions of the legalization of drugs in America. On this site I also deal with the origin of the human race pointing to religion often as simply a puppet show to mask that true reality—but there is danger in going down such Rabbit Holes. I often give hints to games I endorse, or literary achievements which can help preserve the mind not from the fantasy of escapism, but the linking of a mind back to the accepted reality of the true dream world. Sports are a good mutual bonding agent between life in the Rabbit Hole and the world the rest of the society lives in. I often reference these types of things to keep sanity a close ally when the images of the Rabbit Hole threaten to shatter consciousness. For some people, it is too much to know what is really happening off the stages of life and they do fall into insanity. My goal with this blog is to show people what happens in the Rabbit Hole without destroying the minds of the inquiring minds who want to know more. So not only do I help lead people down the Rabbit Hole, I also provide mechanisms for dealing with the crisis of learning the truth once there.
To me the Rabbit Hole is a way of understanding the world of quantum mechanics and the world of macro and nano technology which is evolving at a rapid rate. From this realm it might be denoted that a ultraterrestrial species lives in conjunction with the human race and injects its influence upon us—and certainly stirs the pot so to speak. So dealing with this species is a conflict which goes well beyond the world of commerce, politics, or acknowledged philosophy—and can really only be discovered through advanced mathematics. Ironically, the author of Alice in Wonderland was a mathematician, and seemed over a century ago—well before anyone at the time had an inclination—whether through tragedy, sexual crises, or just a mind folding over on itself with the realization that all was not what it seemed and lacking a philosophy to deal with it—Lewis Carroll wrote a novel from inside the Rabbit Hole. So for those who thought they understood Alice in Wonderland as a beloved children’s story and classic Disney animated cartoon with images inescapable at Disney World, it is time to reveal what many of the metaphors mean. To make that the easiest transition as possible, I have shown the Cliff Notes below, along with video explaining the meanings of the classic novel. A link to the Cliff Notes origin article is provided below after a rather robust gathering of explanations on Alice in Wonderland and the life of Lewis Carroll are provided.
The novel is composed of twelve brief chapters; it can be read in an afternoon. Each of the brief chapters, furthermore, is divided into small, individual, almost isolated episodes. And the story begins with Alice and her sister sitting on the bank of a river reading a book which has no pictures or dialogue in it. ” . . . and what is the use of a book,” thought Alice, “without pictures or conversations?” Thus, we find many pictures and read much dialogue (although very little of it makes sense) in this novel.
After introducing us to one of the creatures in Wonderland, the Gryphon, for instance, the narrator tells us, “If you don’t know what a Gryphon is, look at the picture.” As noted earlier, Wonderland is filled with strange animals, and Alice’s encounters with these creatures, all of whom engage her in conversations, confuse her even more whenever she meets yet another inhabitant of this strange country.
Slowly losing interest in her sister’s book, Alice catches sight of a white rabbit. However, he is not merely a rabbit; he will be the “White Rabbit,” a major character in the novel. In this first paragraph, then, we learn about the protagonist, Alice, her age, her temperament, and the setting and the mood of the story. In a dream, Alice has escaped from the dull and boring and prosaic world of adulthood — a world of dull prose and pictureless experiences; she has entered what seems to be a confusing, but perpetual springtime of physical, if often terrifying, immediacy.
The White Rabbit wears a waistcoat, walks upright, speaks English, and is worrying over the time on his pocket watch. Alice follows him simply because she is very curious about him. And very soon she finds herself falling down a deep tunnel. For a few minutes, she is frightened; the experience of falling disorients her. Soon, however, she realizes that she is not falling fast; instead, she is falling in a slow, almost floating descent. As she falls, she notices that the tunnel walls are lined with cupboards, bookshelves, maps, and paintings. She takes a jar of orange marmalade off a shelf. But finding the jar empty, she replaces it on a lower shelf, as though she were trying to maintain a sense of some propriety — especially in this situation of absolute uncertainty. As she reflects on the marmalade jar, she says that had she dropped the jar, she might have killed someone below. Alice is clearly a self-reflective young girl — and she’s also relatively calm; her thinking reveals a curiously mature mind at times. But like an ordinary little girl, she feels homesick for her cat, Dinah. In that respect, she is in sharp contrast with conventional child heroines of the time. Although Alice may be curious and sometimes bewildered, she is never too nice or too naughty. But she is always aware of her class-status as a “lady.” At one point, she even fears that some of Wonderland’s creatures have confused her for a servant, as when the White Rabbit thinks that she is his housekeeper, Mary Ann, and orders Alice to fetch his gloves and fan.
Thus, in Chapter I, Carroll prepares us for Alice’s first major confrontation with absolute chaos. And note that Alice’s literal-minded reaction to the impossible is always considered absurd here in Wonderland; it is laughable, yet it is her only way of coping. As she falls through the rabbit-hole, for instance, she wonders what latitude or longitude she has arrived at. This is humorous and ridiculous because such measurements — if one stops to think about it — are meaningless words to a seven-year-old girl, and they are certainly meaningless measurements of anything underground.
In Chapter II, Alice finds herself still in the long passageway, and the White Rabbit appears and goes off into a long, low hall full of locked doors. Behind one very small door, Alice remembers that there is “the loveliest garden you ever saw” (remember, she saw this in Chapter I), but now she has drunk a liquid that has made her too large to squeeze even her head through the doorway of the garden. She wishes that she could fold herself up like a telescope and enter. This wish becomes possible when she finds a shrinking potion and a key to the door. The potion reduces her to ten inches high, but she forgets to take the key with her (!) before shrinking, and now the table is too high for her to reach the key. To any young child, this is silly and something to be laughed at, but on another level, there’s an element of fear; for children, the predictable proportions of things are important matters of survival. Yet here in Wonderland, things change — for no known reason — thus, logic has lost all its validity.
Then Alice eats a cake that she finds, and her neck shoots up until it resembles a giraffe’s. Suddenly, she is a distorted nine feet tall! Clearly, her ability to change size has been a mixed blessing. In despair, she asks, “Who in the world am I?” This is a key question.
Meanwhile, the rapid, haphazard nature of Alice’s physical and emotional changes has created a dangerous pool of tears that almost causes her to drown when she shrinks again. Why has she shrunk? She realizes that she has been holding the White Rabbit’s lost white gloves and fan — therefore, it must be the magic of the fan that is causing her to shrink to almost nothingness. She saves herself by instantly dropping the fan. But now she is desperate; in vain, she searches her mind for something to make sense out of all this illogical chaos, something like arithmetic and geography, subjects that are solid, lasting, and rational. But even they seem to be confused because no matter how much she recites their rules, nothing helps. At the close of this chapter, she is swimming desperately in a pool of her own tears, alongside a mouse and other chattering creatures that have suddenly, somehow, appeared.
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is full of parody and satire. And in Chapter III, Victorian history is Carroll’s target. The mouse offers to dry the other creatures and Alice by telling them a very dry history of England. Then, Carroll attacks politics: the Dodo organizes a Caucus-race, a special race in which every participant wins a prize. Alice then learns the mouse’s sad tale as Carroll’s editor narrates it on the page in the shape of a mouse’s very narrow, S-shaped tail. The assembled, unearthly creatures cannot accept ordinary language, and so Alice experiences, again, absolute bafflement; this is linguistic and semantic disaster. Indeed, much of the humor of this chapter is based on Alice’s reactions to the collapse of three above-ground assumptions: predictable growth, an absolute distinction between animals and humans, and an identity that remains constant. We might also add to the concept of a constancy of identity a conformity of word usage. But in Wonderland, Alice’s previous identity and the very concept of a permanent identity has repeatedly been destroyed, just as the principles of above-ground are contradicted everywhere; here in Wonderland, such things as space, size, and even arithmetic are shown to have no consistent laws.
In Chapter IV, the confusion of identity continues. The White Rabbit insists that Alice fetch him his gloves and his fan. Somehow, he thinks that Alice is his servant, and Alice, instead of objecting to his confusion, passively accepts her new role, just as she would obey an adult ordering her about above-ground. On this day when everything has gone wrong, she feels absolutely defeated.
In the rabbit’s house, Alice finds and drinks another growth potion. This time, however, she becomes so enormous that she fills up the room so entirely that she can’t get out. These continuing changes in size illustrate her confused, rapid identity crisis and her continuous perplexity. After repulsing the rabbit’s manservant, young Bill, a Lizard (who is trying to evict her), Alice notices that pebbles that are being thrown at her through a window are turning into cakes. Upon eating one of them, she shrinks until she is small enough to escape the rabbit’s house and hide in a thick wood.
In Chapter V, “Advice From a Caterpillar,” Alice meets a rude Caterpillar; pompously and dogmatically, he states that she must keep her temper — which is even more confusing to her for she is a little irritable because she simply cannot make any sense in this world of Wonderland. Alice then becomes more polite, but the Caterpillar only sharpens his already very short, brusque replies. In Wonderland, there are obviously no conventional rules of etiquette. Thus, Alice’s attempt at politeness and the observance of social niceties are still frustrated attempts of hers to react as well as she can to very unconventional behavior—at least, it’s certainly unconventional according to the rules that she learned above-ground.
Later, Alice suffers another bout of “giraffe’s neck” from nibbling one side of the mushroom that the Caterpillar was sitting on. The effect of this spurt upward causes her to be mistaken for an egg-eating serpent by an angry, vicious pigeon.
In Chapters VI and VII, Alice meets the foul-tempered Duchess, a baby that slowly changes into a pig, the famous, grinning Cheshire-Cat, the March Hare, the Mad Hatter, and the very, very sleepy Dormouse. The latter three are literally trapped (although they don’t know it) in a time-warp — trapped in a perpetualtime when tea is being forever served. Life is one long tea-party, and this episode is Carroll’s assault on the notion of time. At the tea-party, it is always teatime; the Mad Hatter’s watch tells the day of the year, but not the time since it is always six o’clock. At this point, it is important that you notice a key aspect of Wonderland; here, all these creatures treat Alice (and her reactions) as though she is insane — and as though they are sane! In addition, when they are not condescending to her or severely criticizing her, the creatures continually contradict her. And Alice passively presumes the fault to be hers — in almost every case — because all of the creatures act as though their madness is normal and not at all unusual. It is the logical Alice who is the queer one. The chapter ends with Alice at last entering the garden by eating more of the mushroom that the Caterpillar was sitting on. Alice is now about a foot tall.
Chapters VIII to X introduce Alice to the most grimly evil and most irrational people (and actions) in the novel. Alice meets the sovereigns of Wonderland, who display a perversely hilarious rudeness not matched by anyone except possibly by the old screaming Duchess. The garden is inhabited by playing cards (with arms and legs and heads),who are ruled over by the barbarous Queen of Hearts. The Queen’s constant refrain and response to seemingly all situations is: “Off with their heads!” This beautiful garden, Alice discovers, is the Queen’s private croquet ground, and the Queen matter-of-factly orders Alice to play croquet. Alice’s confusion now turns to fear. Then she meets the ugly Duchess again, as well as the White Rabbit, the Cheshire-Cat, and a Gryphon introduces her to a Mock Turtle, who sings her a sad tale of his mock (empty) education; then the Mock Turtle teaches her and the Gryphon a dance called the ‘Lobster-Quadrille.” Chapters XI and XII concern the trial of the Knave of Hearts. Here, Alice plays a heroic role at the trial, and she emerges from Wonderland and awakens to reality. The last two chapters represent the overthrow of Wonderland and Alice’s triumphant rebellion against the mayhem and madness that she experienced while she was lost, for a while, in the strange world of Wonderland.
This story is characterized, first of all, by Alice’s unthinking, irrational, and heedless jumping down the rabbit-hole, an act which is at once superhuman and beyond human experience — but Alice does it. And once we accept this premise, we are ready for the rest of the absurdities of Wonderland and Alice’s attempts to understand it and, finally, to escape from it. Confusion begins almost immediately because Alice tries to use her world of knowledge from the adult world above-ground in order to understand this new world. Wonderland, however, is a lawless world of deepest, bizarre dream unconsciousness, and Alice’s journey through it is a metaphorical search for experience. What she discovers in her dream, though, is a more meaningful and terrifying world than most conscious acts of intelligence would ever lead her to. Hence, “Who in the world am I?” is Alice’s constant, confused refrain, one which people “above-ground” ask themselves many, many times throughout their lifetimes.
Throughout the story, Alice is confronted with the problem of shifting identity, as well as being confronted with the anarchy and by the cruelty of Wonderland. When Alice physically shrinks in size, she is never really small enough to hide from the disagreeable creatures that she meets; yet when she grows to adult or to even larger size, she is still not large enough to command authority. “There are things in Alice,” writes critic William Empson, “that would give Freud the creeps.” Often we find poor Alice (and she is often described as being either “poor” or “curious”) in tears over something that the adult reader finds comic. And “poor Alice” is on the verge of tears most of the time. When she rarely prepares to laugh, she is usually checked by the morbid, humorless types of creatures whom she encounters in Wonderland. Not even the smiling Cheshire-Cat is kind to her. Such a hostile breakdown of the ordinary world is never funny to the child, however comic it might appear to adults. But then Wonderland would not be so amusing to us except in terms of its sheer, unabated madness.
One of the central concerns of Alice is the subject of growing up — the anxieties and the mysteries of personal identity as one matures. When Alice finds her neck elongated, everything, in her words, becomes “queer”; again, she is uncertain who she is. As is the case with most children, Alice’s identity depends upon her control of her body. Until now, Alice’s life has been very structured; now her life shifts; it becomes fragmented until it ends with a nightmarish awakening. Throughout the novel, Alice is filled with unconscious feelings of morbidity, physical disgrace, unfairness, and bizarre feelings about bodily functions. Everywhere there is the absurd, unexplainable notion of death and the absolute meaninglessness of death and life.
Alice’s final triumph occurs when she outgrows nonsense. In response to the Queen’s cry at the Knave’s trial: “sentence first — verdict afterward,” Alice responds: “Stuff and nonsense! Who cares for you? You’re nothing but a pack of cards!” At last, Alice takes control of her life and her growth toward maturity by shattering and scattering the absurdity of the playing cards and the silly little creatures who are less rational than she is. In waking from her nightmare, she realizes that reason can oppose nonsense, and that it can — and did — win. And now that the dream of chaos is over, she can say, from her distance above-ground, “It was a curious dream,” but then she skips off thinking that — for a strange moment — what a wonderful dream it was.
Of all Lewis Carroll’s major works, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland has a unique standing in the category of whimsical, nonsense literature. Much has been written about how this novel contrasts with the vast amount of strict, extremely moralistic children’s literature. This is true; Alice is quite different from all other Victorian children’s literature. Yet, as odd as this story appears in relation to the other Victorian children’s stories, this short novel is odder still because it was written by an extremely upright, ultra-conservative man — in short, a quintessential Victorian gentleman.
Lewis Carroll was born Charles Lutwidge Dodgson on January 27, 1832, in the parsonage of Daresbury, Cheshire, England, the third child and eldest son of eleven children of Reverend Charles Dodgson and his wife, Francis Jane Lutwidge. The parents were descended from two ancient and distinguished North Country families. From the Dodgsons, the son inherited a very old tradition of service to the Church and a tradition that he belonged to one of the most respected lineages in England — for example, family legend has it that King James I actually “knighted” either a loin of beef or mutton at the table of Sir Richard Houghton, one of Carroll’s ancestors. This incident has been thought by some critics to have inspired the introductory lines in Through the Looking Glass, the sequel to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, when the Red Queen introduces the leg of mutton to Alice: “Alice — Mutton: Mutton — Alice.”
For the sake of those who are curious about pen names and how authors choose one over another, “Lewis Carroll” is an interesting example. While teaching at Christ Church, Oxford, Charles Dodgson (Carroll) wrote comic literature and parodies for a humorous paper, The Train. The first of the several pieces submitted to The Train was signed “B. B.” It was so popular that the editor asked Dodgson to use a proper nom de plume; at first, Dodgson proposed “Dares,” after his birthplace, Daresbury. The editor thought that the name was too journalistic, so after struggling over a number of choices, Dodgson wrote to his editor and suggested a number of variations and anagrams, based on the letters of his actual name. “Lewis Carroll” was finally decided on, derived from a rearrangement of most of the letters in the name “Charles Lutwidge Dodgson.” Clearly, Carroll was fascinated with anagrams, and he will use them throughout Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland; his interest in anagrams also explains much about the writings in his later life, and his mathematical works. Concerning Carroll, one cannot safely exclude any influence, least of all hereditary ones, but a good case can be made for the formative effect of Carroll’s father on him. Those who knew Reverend Dodgson said that he was a pious and gloomy man, almost devoid of any sense of humor. Yet from his letters to his son, there is recorded evidence of a remarkablesense of fun. For example, in one letter to his son, he speaks of screaming in the middle of a street:
Iron-mongers-Iron-mongers — Six hundred men will rush out of their shops in a moment — fly, fly, in all screwdriver, & a ring, & if they are not brought directly, in forty seconds I will leave nothing but one small cat alive in the whole town of Leeds, & I shall only leave that because I shall not have time to kill it.
To a boy of eight, such correspondence from his father must have greatly heightened his later love for literary exaggeration; indeed, such fanciful letters may have been the genesis for Carroll’s so-called nonsense books.
As we noted, Reverend Dodgson was said to be an austere, puritanical, and authoritarian Victorian man; Lewis Carroll’s mother, however, was the essence of the Victorian “gentlewoman.” As described by her son, she was “one of the sweetest and gentlest women that had ever lived, whom to know was to love.” The childhood of Lewis Carroll was relatively pleasant, full of ideas and hobbies that contributed to his future creative works. His life at Daresbury was secluded, though, and his playmates were mostly his brothers and sisters. Class distinctions did not permit much socializing between children of the parsonage and the “lesser” parish children. Curiously, a number of the Dodgson children, including Carroll, stammered severely. More than one author has suggested that, at least in Carroll’s case, his stammer may have arisen from his parents’ attempts to correct his left-handedness. Isa Bowman, a childhood friend of Carroll’s, has said that whenever adults approached them on their walks, Carroll’s speech became extremely difficult to understand. Apparently, he panicked; his shyness and stammering always seemed worse when he was in the world of adults. This stammering made him into a bit of a “loner” and explains, somewhat, Carroll’s longtime fascination with puzzles and anagrams, solitary games to amuse himself. It was as though the long suppressed, left-handed self endured in the fanciful, literary adult Carroll — in contrast to the very stern adult librarian, mathematics lecturer, deacon, dormitory master, and curator of the dining hall. Carroll was, seemingly, the archetype of the left-handed man in a right-handed world, like his own White Knight in Through the Looking Glass (the sequel to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland).
And now if ever by chance I put My fingers into glue Or madly squeeze a right-hand foot Into a left-hand shoe . . .
Carroll’s fondness for games, language puzzles, and the world of the bizarre is further demonstrated in his flair for amusing his brothers and sisters — especially his sisters, which explains, perhaps, his lifelong attraction for little girls. In fact, a great deal of Carroll’s childhood was spent taking care of his little sisters. At home, it was he who was in charge of these seven sisters, and his imagination was constantly being exercised in order to entertain them. In one of his fanciful story games that he invented, he imagined a sort of “railway game,” and as one of the rules of the game, at least three trains had to run over the passengers in order for the passengers to be attended to by physicians. Fortunately, though, rarely were Carroll’s amusements cruel, and when the family moved to the Croft Rectory, Yorkshire, where Carroll’s father assumed the Archdeaconry, Carroll wrote, directed, and performed light, gay plays, and he also manipulated puppets and marionettes for his family and friends.
In addition to the plays that Carroll wrote and the scripts that he composed for his puppet theater, he also wrote poems, stories, and humorous sketches for his own “magazines.” In his “Useful and Instructive Poetry” magazine, for example, a volume that was composed for a younger brother and a sister, he satirized a copybook of stern, dogmatic maxims (a typical Victorian children’s book), and in this poem, he alluded to his own handicap:
Learn well your grammar And never stammer.
Eat bread with butter; Once more, don’t stutter.
Other poems in the volume focus on the theme of fairy tales, an interest which played a large part in the creation of Alice. An early poem of Carroll’s, for instance, “My Fairy,” suggests the contrariness of the creatures that Alice will meet in Wonderland:
I have a fairy by my side Which cried; it said, “You must not weep. “If, full of mirth, I smile and grin, It says, “You must not laugh.” When once I wished to drink some gin, It said, “You must not quaff.”
Similarly, in another early poem, “A Tale of a Tail,” there is a drawing of a dog’s very long tail, suggestive of the very slender, increasingly smaller mouse’s tail in Alice, which coils across a single page in a sort of S-shape. Also, an early poem about someone falling off a wall anticipates Humpty Dumpty in Through the Looking Glass, and a “Morals” essay reminds one of the ridiculous conversations between the ugly Duchess and the evil Queen in Alice. It is difficult to ignore the writings of Carroll as a child in any analysis of his works, for in his childhood productions, we find conclusive evidence of early imitations, hints, allusions, suggestions, and actual elements of imaginary creatures, dreams, and visions that will appear in his later works.
Education
All his life, Carroll was a scholar; when he was not a student, he was a teacher, and until two years before his death, he was firmly imbedded in the life of Oxford University. Quite honestly, though, nothing very exciting ever happened in Carroll’s life, apart from a trip to the Continent, including Russia. His vacations were all local ones, to his sister’s home in Guildford, his aunt’s home in Hastings, and to Eastbourne, the Lake Country, and Wales. He did not begin his formal schooling until the age of twelve, when he enrolled in Richmond Grammar School, ten miles from the Croft Rectory, but he had already received a thorough background in literature from the family library. Yet it was mathematics — and not English literature — that interested Carroll most. When he was very young, for example, Carroll implored his father to explain logarithms to him, presumably because he had already mastered arithmetic, algebra, and even most of Euclidian geometry.
Carroll entered Rugby in 1846, but the sensitive young child found the all-boys environment highly unpleasant; the bullying abuse, the flogging, and the caning was a daily part of school life. Nonetheless, Carroll was, despite his three years of unhappiness there, an exceedingly studious boy, and he won many prizes for academic excellence.
Carroll matriculated at Christ Church, Oxford, in 1851, and remained there for forty-seven years. But, two days after entering Oxford, he received word of his mother’s death, something which deeply distressed him and seemed to have worsened his stammering. By all accounts, Carroll was not an outgoing student; with little money, and because of his stammer, his circle of friends always remained small. Yet in his academic work, he applied himself with the same energy and devotion that characterized his career at Rugby. He won scholarship prizes, honors in Classical exams, and also won a First Prize in Mathematics. His scholastic efforts were rewarded by a lifetime fellowship and a residency at Christ Church, so long as he remained unmarried and proceeded to take Holy Orders.
In 1854, the year Carroll took his B.A. degree, he began publishing poetry in the student magazines and in The Whitby Gazette. Carroll’s writings had already established him as both a superb raconteur and humorist at Oxford, and in 1854, he began to seriously teach himself how to express his thoughts in proper literary form; it was at that time that his writings began to show some of the whimsy and fantasy that are contained in the Alice books.
In 1857, Carroll took his M.A. degree and was made “Master of the House.” During those years, he immersed himself in literature, mathematics, and also in the London theater. He produced freelance humorous prose pieces and verses for various periodicals, explored theories of dual identities, wrote satires, published mathematical and symbolic logic texts, invented word games and puzzles, and took up photography, a hobby that would make him famous as one of the best Victorian photographers. In short, Carroll became a sort of lesser English equivalent of Leonardo da Vinci. He invented the Nyctograph, a device for writing in the dark, and he also invented a method of remote control self-photography. Helmut Gernshein, the author of Lewis Carroll: Photographer, calls Carroll’s photographic achievements “astonishing”; in his estimation, Carroll “must not only rank as a pioneer of British amateur photography, but I would also unhesitatingly acclaim him as the most outstanding photographer of children in the nineteenth century.”
Carroll’s Interest in Little Girls
In every study of Carroll’s life, one finds that Carroll had only the most formal encounters with mature women. There was seemingly no romantic interest in adult women. Some biographers have attributed this asexual interest to Carroll’s stammering and his self-conscious shyness about it. On the other hand, Carroll’s diaries and contemporary accounts about him are full of his encounters with children, nearly always with little girls. He obviously delighted in the company of little girls twelve years old and younger, and his diary records in great detail the aesthetic pleasure that he took in viewing “nice little children.” Carroll’s attractions for little girls were honorable and above reproach — at least we have, almost a century later, absolutely no evidence to the contrary.
Carroll’s interest in discovering new little girls for his photographic studio seems to have amounted to his discovering hundreds, perhaps thousands, of girls in his lifetime. And in nearly every recorded case, Carroll produced a masterpiece of character study. His photographs are filled with unusually sensitive and candid “personalities” of the subjects. They caught the essence of human beings; they were not merely stiff, embalmed-like “objects.” Occasionally, there is an extraordinary sense of straightforward eroticism — but it is straightforward; it is not murky or perverted. And in nearly every recorded case, Carroll had the full approbation of the child’s parents, and invariably his work was chaperoned, at least indirectly. Had there been any intimacies between Carroll and his young female subjects, it would long ago have been ferreted out by the multitude of Freudian-oriented literary critics.
Today, we can understand why, occasionally, certain people thought Carroll’s photographs to be erotic. Most people now, however, wouldn’t consider them to be. His photographs are alluring; they look as if they almost could speak. They all have a provocative quality about them. But, they are “safe,” and as we view them, they help us to understand Carroll’s interest in seeing children as his own personal, private, peculiar escape from mature sex.
Alice Liddell
In 1846, Carroll met Alice Liddell, the four-year-old daughter of Dean Henry George Liddell of Christ Church. Carroll had already established himself as a close friend of Alice’s elder sister and cousin. But it is Alice who figures most prominently in Carroll’s most famous creation, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
On July 4, 1852, Carroll and a friend, Rev. Robinson Duckworth, took the Liddell children, Lorina (13), Alice (10), and Edith (8) on a boat ride (a row boat) up the Isis River (the local name for the Thames River). As they made their way upstream, Carroll began telling a story about the underground adventures of a little girl named Alice. According to Duckworth, the story “was actually composed and spoken over my shoulder for the benefit of Alice Liddell, who was acting as ‘cox’ of our gig. I remember turning around and saying, ‘Dodgson, is this an extempore romance of yours?’ And he replied, ‘Yes, I’m inventing as we go along.’”
Upon disembarking, Alice asked Carroll to write out Alice’s adventures for her, and Carroll promised to do so by the following Christmas, but the work was not completed until February 10, 1863. By that time, Alice was eleven, and Carroll was no longer seeing her with the regularity that he used to. Now he had made a new friend, the famous ingénue Ellen Terry, who was nearly seventeen. His interest in Ellen Terry is the closest relationship that Carroll had with an adult woman, apart from his family, of course.
From an initial length of 18,000 words, Carroll’s manuscript expanded to 35,000 words, and the famous English illustrator John Tenniel read it and consented to draw illustrations for it. As Carroll searched for a publisher, he gave anxious thoughts to a perfect title. Various ones came to him: Alice’s Golden Hour, Alice’s Hour in Elf-land, Alice Among the Elves, Alice’s Doings in Elf-land, and Alice’s Adventures Under Ground. Finally, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was chosen, and Macmillan, the publishers for Oxford University, agreed to publish the book on a commission basis.
Alice was an immediate critical success when it appeared in 1865. The Reader magazine called it “a glorious artistic treasure . . . a book to put on one’s shelf as an antidote to a fit of the blues.” The Pall Mall Gazette wrote that “this delightful little book is a children’s feast and a triumph of nonsense.” About 180,000 copies of Alice in various editions were sold in England during Carroll’s lifetime; by 1911, there were almost 700,000 copies in print. Since then, with the expiration of the original copyright in 1907, the book has been translated into every major language, and now it has become a perennial bestseller, ranking with the works of Shakespeare and the Bible in popular demand. In the words of the critic Derek Hudson: “The most remarkable thing about Alice is that, though it springs from the very heart of the Victorian period, it is timeless in its appeal. This is a characteristic that it shares with other classics — a small band — that have similarly conquered the world.”
http://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/a/alices-adventures-in-wonderland/book-summary
I consider Alice in Wonderland to be a real treasure of literature—and relevant in a metaphorical way to Finnegan’s Wake by James Joyce, which is a favorite of mine—just for the puzzles and allusion to another dream-like existence. Finnegan’s Wake is far more complicated than Alice in Wonderland nearly to the point of being completely useless to the average person. Disney saved Alice in Wonderland by making it relevant as a cartoon—which would have been the only way to preserve such a story as the age of media has cheapened the mind of man by providing information so easily that few wish to think deeply about things any longer—being less prone to exploring the Rabbit Holes of existence—rather than the other way around. The question of the day—philosophically, which reality is the dream in our lives and which is the true reality—and this is my primary concern with this blog.
Most people accept that the words they hear coming from President Obama at a press conference, or a school board announcement for more tax money, or the tragedies on the nightly news reflect the reality of the living world—but I contend that it is far from the case. What we see are only marionettes to a stage play without a title anybody understands, and to learn the plot, title, and actual cast members you have to follow the strings down the Rabbit Hole to where reality actually exists. In this way most of society is already Alice—they are in the land of the Mad Hatter, the Queen of Hearts, or the Cheshire-Cat and the way to understand the bizarre behavior of Wonderland—the stage play we are all witnessing in “reality,” is to go down the Rabbit Hole to where quantum mechanics will reveal who holds the strings and ultimately the fate of mankind hidden behind the deceptions of reality.
But beware while traveling down that hole—it is a superhuman journey that requires courage, and a sane mind. While it may seem easy to get up out of your chair while watching a puppet show and gaze up at the puppeteers above the stage with their hands on the strings of the stage actors—it is not. It is one thing to notice that the strings extend beyond the reality of a stage play—it is another to confront those puppeteers on their terms and deal with them directly. For that—it will require every bit of cleverness, and intellectual aptitude that can be gathered—and for that—I have prepared a road map to guide the weary traveler inclined through the curiosity of Alice, to jump down the Rabbit Hole to the truth and to meet the horrors found there squarely, and with valor.
When traveling down this Rabbit Hole, be sure to stay sane, stay grounded, and maintain a relationship to those still stuck in the dream so not to get lost along the way—otherwise—you will never be able to help them down the Rabbit Hole when they are ready to travel. Because it’s only a matter of time before they will. Talk to them about sports, movies, books and other nonsensical trivia because all those things are part of the dream. And most of all beware of ultraterrestrials, they are devious creatures who are more a part of your life than you might wish to acknowledge. To learn more about them, read the Mothman Prophesies by John Keel. The strings of the puppet show extend into their hands—and they are not friends—but rival foes in a fight for the same resources in the long drama known as the human race. Ultraterrestrials have formed religions to serve their needs in a plot they wish to sell to their four-dimensional rivals—us—and they are withholding much of the truth to serve their own ends.
See you in the Rabbit Hole………………………………
Rich Hoffman www.OVERMANWARRIOR.com
June 15, 2014
Fantasy Flight Games Does It Again: Wave 5 release to include a YT-2400!
In the context of my lifelong interest in global mythology and comparative religion, I see all the news coming out about Star Wars as infinitely good in so many ways. When Harrison Ford was injured recently filming the new Star Wars Episode 7 movie, the world stopped as he was airlifted to the hospital in England. With all the news going on globally, terrorists taking over Iraq, Obama’s parade of scandals, election impact of new blood in the Republican Party, it was Harrison Ford’s injury which captured the headlines of virtually every news source. Some of that is deliberate misdirection, but a lot of it is genuine interest, and concern for a mythology which touches the heart of so many people. On the same day as this terrible news about Harrison Ford, who will bounce back from such things as he always does—came the latest news from Fantasy Flight Games popular X-Wing Miniatures game. For Father’s Day my wife hosted a big party for our family, which was wonderful. But much of the best parts of it were the weekend of playing X-Wing Miniatures with the people who came.
Every time I turn around starting about a year ago, Fantasy Flight Games has been improving their product line. What they are doing with X-Wing Miniatures is cutting edge stuff that is launching tabletop gaming into a whole new dimension. I’ve never seen anything like it. There have been for years great games like Warhammer, Dungeons and Dragons, and Magic the Gathering, but this effort with X-Wing Miniatures is game changing. As the new films hit the marketplace and return to the mind of society in general as part of their daily dialogue—which is already happening, this Fantasy Flight Games production of X-Wing Miniatures is about to explode. Mythologically speaking, I think FFG’s relatively new game is the best vehicle to express and maintain new mythological trends that exist. It is more powerful than novels, more relevant than the films themselves, and more participatory than video games. Playing the game does essentially what some of the highest minds in the world do at Esalan at the Mythological Roundtable sponsored by the Joseph Campbell Foundation. X-Wing Miniatures recreates myth and allows players to directly participate actively, as opposed to passively. They take control of their own mythology, which is what I think is the key to the success of the Fantasy Flight Games venture.
http://www.jcf.org/new/index.php
During Father’s Day my family played the game extensively, and as we played we talked heavily about the new ships coming out in Wave 4, in just a few weeks, and we discussed the very exciting news about Wave 5 set to hit the marketplace later this year—2014. The most exciting news of that announcement is the YT-2400 from the old video game Shadows of the Empire from Nintendo 64. That particular ship will go well with my Millennium Falcon to cause all kinds of trouble in a game that has become a mild obsession. Here is the press release from Fantasy Flight Games published as news poured out to the world the Harrison Ford would quickly recover from his injury.
Fantasy Flight Games is proud to announce the upcoming release of two new starships for X-Wing™!
In this, the game’s fifth wave, two large starships arrive ready for the heat of battle: the Rebellion’s YT-2400 and the Imperial’s VT-49 Decimator.
In addition to their starships, each of which is sculpted faithfully at the game’s standard 1/270 scale, the YT-2400 Freighter Expansion Pack and VT-49 Decimator Expansion Pack introduce a host of new upgrades and terrain pieces that allow you to explore a wide range of new tactics in your space battles.
You’ll also find a large cast of characters drawn from the expanded Star Wars universe, the first Imperial turret weapon, and upgrade cards designed by the game’s first two World Champions.
YT-2400 Freighter Expansion Pack
A fast and resilient light freighter, the YT-2400 features no fewer than thirteen weapon emplacement points, making it an attractive vessel for smugglers, mercenaries, and other individuals looking for a heavily armed “transport.” Although a stock YT-2400 light freighter has plenty of space for cargo, much of that space is often annexed to support modified weapon systems and oversized engines.
The YT-2400 Freighter Expansion Pack brings this formidable light freighter to your table as a Rebel starship with two attack, two agility, five hull, and five shields.
The highlight of the YT-2400 Freighter Expansion Pack is its detailed miniature starship, which is enhanced by one new mission, three debris cloud tokens, a maneuver dial, all requisite tokens, and four ship cards, including one for the famed smuggler Dash Rendar.
VT-49 Decimator Expansion Pack
To be granted command of a VT-49 Decimator is seen as a significant promotion for a middling officer of the Imperial Navy. A heavily armed transport, the VT-49 Decimator is one of the Empire’s most feared warships, often used to provide long-range reconnaissance or to deploy raiding parties past enemy forces.
The VT-49 Decimator Expansion Pack brings this intimidating Imperial gunboat to X-Wing as the game’s largest ship yet designed for Standard Play. Even at the game’s signature 1/270 scale, the expansion pack’s detailed miniature towers over its base and smaller starfighters.
In addition to its imposing, pre-painted miniature, the VT-49 Decimator Expansion Pack introduces four ship cards, three debris cloud tokens, a new mission, a maneuver dial, and all the tokens you need to fly your Decimator into the thick of combat. Finally, you’ll find thirteen upgrade cards, which introduce a variety of crew members like Mara Jade and Fleet Officer designed to help you fill out the Decimator’s three crew member slots.
http://www.fantasyflightgames.com/edge_news.asp?eidn=4869
X-Wing Miniatures as it stands today is one of the coolest games on the market. I have never seen something like it which has united my family the way it has—from young to old and all economic groups. Everyone who plays the game loves the game—even if they aren’t very good at it. I would say that is because of the strength of the mythological nature of it—it pulls players into a story which they control, and that is what separates it away from novels, movies, and video games. In those forums, participants simply unlock what someone else created, but with X-Wing Miniatures, Fantasy Flight Games simply provides the tool box–the players use the tools for their own stories.
In my personal story arc, I’m a YT guy in every way possible—and to get my hands on a YT-2400 that barrel rolls and has a turret that can equip a secondary weapon is extremely powerful. This will be the build that replaces the twin Falcons and with the meta game moving away from TIE swarms and toward the devastating aspects of Whisper who flies the upcoming Phantom Wave 4 ship shooting with 4 dice. The game is getting faster and more maneuverable. Rebel ships can’t just sit around with no agility waiting to get picked off. They will also have to be able to shoot every turn just to survive the weapons the Imperial players are throwing at them—and that is where the fun begins. Figuring out those types of problems and letting the mythology play out based on the thought of the players.
I think this game X-Wing Miniatures will replace Monopoly as the newest, hottest selling game that brings families to the kitchen table to play—because as the new films hit the market over the next 6 years, and the new Rebels television show on Disney XD gains in popularity, the innovation created by Fantasy Flight Games will have hit critical mass and the general population will find themselves every bit as addicted to the sheer joy that the game brings—only for them the learning curve will be steep. What started as a simple game with just a few ships has turned into a very complex web of tactical entertainment with a seemingly infinite combination of strategic options which can keep a mind occupied for years. But beyond that—there is a story to this game which has more power than Chess, all the ambition of a novel, and more edge of the seat excitement than a year’s worth of video games—and the new additions never stop coming—the most exciting for me yet is the YT-2400.
Rich Hoffman www.OVERMANWARRIOR.com
June 14, 2014
“Our Universe Explained by the God Rich Hoffman”: The anger of those grounded by stupidity and arrogance
When I first started this blog, it was just prior to a planned visit to a popular radio station where it was intended for me to release the salaries of the local school administration pay rates causing a tax levy increase request. I knew the type of people working in education, and understood the people who ran the labor unions controlling those “educators” anticipating clearly that I would be a target of their antagonism. So I started this blog as a way to attack those pretentious people and to educate those kept in ignorance by tyrannical antics. For an example of this behavior click here see a bit of what I am referring to. What many didn’t know was that I knew exactly what I was getting in to, and that by criticizing a local school wanting to raise taxes I was putting a target on my back which would extend right into the White House—so I had to be willing to take on virtually anyone and everyone all at the same time who attempted to use democratic intelligentsia to intimidate critical thinking of their diabolical schemes—because up until this blog in 2010—people outside of the education industry, and progressive politics behaved as though they lacked the intelligence to question these con artists of public education.
I have a long history of dealing with people who believe that they are the smartest people in the room—people who work very hard to be masters of a specific field of endeavor—no matter what it is. I have dealt with some of the worst people imaginable—from actual killers of men hired for the task so to suppress competition—and those who just believe that they are smarter than everyone else hiding their true intentions behind a veil of confident mastery over specific fields of endeavor. However, I have always had since the age of a very small child the unique ability to see through any level of bullshit into the soul of the perpetrator and know exactly what they are up to and why. Some might call it a gift from God—my unique skill which sets me aside from virtually everyone. Some people can run fast, some can calculate complicated mathematics without a calculator, some can read pages and pages of legal documentation and actually retain the knowledge—etc, but almost nobody who I’ve ever met had the ability to see into, and through people the way I do. Some might think it a curse—but I wouldn’t trade that ability for all the gold in the world and a life of ease and immortality on a paradise island with only pleasure in the forecast—I enjoy my ability that much.
So I started this blog as a way to address the crimes that I was seeing and challenge the premise that those same crimes were committed under—specifically by a class of people who sincerely believed they could get away with harming intellectually others while hiding their maliciousness behind a superior intellect. They can’t. To demonstrate my effectiveness, I have now written millions of words in this blog, virtually every article is over 1200 words each, and I’ve done it every day since 2010. It has changed the lives of many people for the better and shattered the once confident hiding places of those most vile in our society—who hope to perpetrate their ill will toward mankind in obscurity. They have tried every trick imaginable—but have failed utterly to shake me off their scent—which to me was never in question.
The good thing about the blog is that with all those words and the public forum of it—where anybody can answer my comments and pick holes in my theories, to date they have not been able to do so. They can certainly insult—but they cannot answer or refute my claims and they’ll never be able to—and they hate it. The proof is in the vast swath of articles I have produced in such a short time—relatively speaking. At this point in this blog’s history I could take all the books of Ayn Rand and Leo Tolstoy and combine them—and I have written more than they have specifically targeting the crimes of our modern age. I will certainly not proclaim that these works are as well edited—most of the articles are raw, and from the heart, the way a writer’s notes would be when formulating an idea for refinement—but that doesn’t take away the results which are enormous, and likely only rivaled over the entire Internet by a few outlets.
I mostly deal with excessively smart people who universally believe they are the smartest people around at any given time. It is my task to show them that they are not—so that their efforts do not become a detriment to an enterprise—but a contributor and this often causes resentment. This has been my task for four decades now, so I knew that by taking on the established thinking especially in regard to politics and education, what I was getting into. That is the history of this blog to this point. It has evolved away from the more specific task of identifying education industry crime—and has evolved more into a philosophic analysis of mythology and how it impacts the static patterns of the human race. Because it is within that phrase that my special gift shines most brightly—when I go into long tirades about Star Wars, or some new game, literary work, or musical effort, it is because I see the impact of those achievements well before the rest of society does. What I say today, will become the standard of thought approximately 15 years from now. I am so confident in my assertions that I write these things audaciously for free on the Internet for future testimony without revisionist deflection. People may not always understand why or what I’m doing, but if they did—they’d be the ones writing about them instead of me—but they aren’t, and they can’t.
Because they can’t, this leaves critics bitterly resentful, and constantly plotting and scheming so that they can return to the safety of their cloaked behavior within society. Most people from the perpetrators of injustice currently sitting in The White House to the local labor union leaders within the education industry spend large amounts of their time trying to stay hidden—and they despise anyone who can see what they are really about—so they plot, scheme, and manipulate any way possible to return to that status. But in regards to this blog, it makes it impossible for them. Readers here have taken my words and used them as tools to change behavior and flush out the pretentious thugs of their localities in much the same way and embolden their efforts at justice—which is all I want. But those motives still elude the most dastardly terrorists of the mind and within their circles of self-imposed exile have begun spreading reference to me in the following fashion:
“Our universe explained by the god Rich Hoffman”
On my blog I can see the site stats hour by hour of the kind of terms people use to find it online—and that phrase has been coming up more often by different origin IP addresses lately. This is an indication of the temperament of the critics out there and how they view this blog. It is unfathomable to them that any individual would attempt to declare that they unshakably know facts, and can see into their hearts unless those individuals were supernatural. So this is their new derogatory term used to confront the light which shines into their lives grudgingly preventing them from hiding in plain sight. We live in a time where information is easier to get than ever before in human history—yet people are expected to be dumber than at virtually any point since the dawn of man. People are expected to remain stupid so to prevent inquiry into the nature of crimes that those who think they are smarter than everyone else, wish to commit upon the innocent—and genuinely good-hearted.
Referring to me as a “god” in their context is not a compliment—but I take it that way—because it shows me more about them than they wish for me to see. At the start of this blog I knew I was challenging people who thought they were the smartest people in existence, and the shattering impact that they were not has often proven too much for them to handle—which serves them right. It is ultimately best for them to learn that they cannot use their intelligence for evil—but should utilize it for good, productive ends—and they’ll only do that if they are not allowed to hide behind an industry that does not question their merit for what it is.
A “God” is universally accepted as one who can see everything at all times—they are omnipotent. Does that accurately describe me? That is for me to know, and nobody else. But my enemies do see me that way—and that is because they have been unable to match my assertions which leaves them metaphorically stripped naked for all to witness—and the sight is not a pleasant one. But it is one that makes society and all endeavor better—which makes me sleep better at night knowing that I did the work that was required—and if some see that as the work of a “god” well—so be it. I may be a lot of things to a lot of people depending on the context—but one thing I am not is humble. Humbleness is a waste of time when the only goal of it is to make others feel better about their life decisions and ultimate fall from grace. And that is not a business I want to be a part of.
Rich Hoffman
