Category: Aviation

Shooting From the Hip: The cost of socialism in any society

Don’t Learn to Stay in Your Lane

While I was working on the themes for my book The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, one of my most important stops was the British Museum and sitting in the places where Karl Marx had written his books that literally changed the world.  While in London for this investigation, I took my family to the best restaurants and spent some time investigating the areas around parliament to understand the radical swings of their class structure and how anybody could even think that what Marx put down in his books was good.  After sitting in Marx’s same seats in the museum, I confirmed what I already knew; Marx was lazy and worked his ass off to prove it.  Yes, that is a paradox of terms, but that was what the guy was suffering from.  While his family sat at home, broke and hungry, Marx and Engles at the British museum tried to show the world why the capitalists were evil.  And many in British society who enjoyed the nice things in life felt guilty because they either acquired a lot of power from socializing or other methods, and it rotted their minds with unearned doubt.  So they formed political parties like the Labor Party in England and the Democrat Party in America.  Other places around the world, too, adopted Marx not because they thought it would make a better world but because it gave more centralized power to governments. Hence, the idiocy of Karl Marx spread like wildfire in a dry forest, and rage of destruction swept over the world.  But to my thinking, fires are good, and it benefits people to see things for themselves. That’s why what I wrote in my book was necessary.  Without the stupidity of Karl Marx to highlight the benefits of capitalism with a defense of it in my Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, people may never have seen the differences between the two. 

Learning to Get Better

That’s what has happened with Marxism mixed in with capitalism; people didn’t notice the little things slowing us all down and constraining productivity.  Marxism has embedded itself in almost everything we do, but people did not see it as it was happening because as long as they could buy their cars, get milk at the grocery, and send their kids to school, they didn’t pay much attention.  But I did notice that it has been a source of constant frustration for me during my entire professional life, which started when I was still a teenager.  One thing about me that has always been criticized was that I “shot from the hip” too much.  People would say that I didn’t take careful aim in my life and take my time when shooting at targets.  That, of course, was a metaphor for my thought processes in how I manage things.  To others, I have always been the reckless cowboy who was too impulsive to be trusted.  Yet mysteriously, everything I have always touched succeeded.  I understood it on a conceptual level, but years later, when I would finally write a book about it, I had to understand it.  Like Marx, many people in the world are too lazy to become truly good at anything.  They grow up, they grow lazy, and they are content to be average.  So they bring this attitude to their businesses, and for their lazy minds, Marx was a kindred spirit.  While they wanted to make money in life, they didn’t want to work too hard to get it, so they adopted little bits of socialism along the way to make it so that they wouldn’t have to work too hard.  This point became very obvious to me once I started the sport of professional gunfighting for competitions.  I watched for years how real gunfighters could draw and shoot a gun by drawing from the hip in under a second.  It seemed impossible to me, but I wanted to learn to do it, so I began the learning process, and once I figured it out, all these other elements became very obvious.  Obvious enough to write a book about what I learned.

Shooting from the Hip is Good

One of the premises of communism is equality, which we hear about all the time now that Biden has been inserted in the White House to preserve these gains Marxists have made around the world.  But for equality to indeed happen, we must cripple those who are the best and fastest in life at certain things.  I often compare this metaphor to a hay bail truck full of farm animals traveling down the road at 45 miles per hour.  Up behind them, storming down the highway at 120 miles per hour, is a fancy sports car that can take curves on a dime and run all day long at 200 mph.  Socialist society says that the fancy car has to stay behind the truck because that is the constraint, that is the average, and to be fair, everyone needs to build their life off the average.  The speedy car is supposed to slow down to 45 mph and not pass.  Socialist society creates rules like double yellow lines to keep everyone staying in their lane so that socialism and communism can occur.  However, in America, the rules have always been in reverse.  The fast car was encouraged to pass or have a speed lane to travel in to go as fast as possible.  Speed limits aren’t made for the best and most competent; they are made for the average, the slow, and the lazy-minded.  Those who can’t or won’t think too fast to avoid an accident.  Therefore, the speedy car is penalized and encouraged to be less than it is in a democracy where the majority of the people decide what the average behavior should be.  This is how our businesses have been crippled and how the government has enforced converting America from capitalism to socialism over time.  Through rules and regulations intended to force people to stay in their lanes, not shoot from the hip, and ignite Karl Marx while suppressing Adam Smith.

I’ve always been that guy who shot from the hip, and I’m very proud of it.  Even now that I’m later in my life than when many of these things have been said about me, learning to shoot in Cowboy Fast Draw activities has shown me the essence of becoming better each day.  What seems impossible today may be quite possible tomorrow if only you put a little work into it.  That is what America did best in the past and still is better than anyplace else in the world mired in socialism and communism.  This is also how many of our corporations had become so woke, just as the politicians of England did when scrappy old Karl Marx worked himself to death trying to create a philosophy of government that justified his laziness.  I didn’t feel I could say that based on just my opinions of reading his books.  But I could say it after I sat in his seats and saw the world from all of their perspectives.  Marxism and its birthplace there in London intended to be in the world that hey bail truck going 45 miles per hour.  They created rules in life to protect the feelings of the slow and lazy from the speedy and competent.  And when they called me names like “cowboy” and a person who “shoots from the hip” too much, they might as well have been calling me the most derogatory names humans could call each other, hoping to peer pressure me into accepting average behavior.  But I never will.  Instead, I’ll explain the differences to people with a mind to hear it, and I’m not about to ever accept getting stuck behind slow traffic on the highway.  The goal of all of us should always be to get faster, wiser, and better.  Not to accept the lazy and dim-witted who want to rule the world but are too lazy to do it. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Progressives Think Destroying Anglo Saxons will Save the World: They are of course wrong, dumb, and out of their minds

Anglo Saxons are Not The Answer

I suppose the positive thing about the chaos of 2021 where an extended planned communist plot infiltrated into the American government, unleashed all their schemes in an all-out revolution against capitalism is that we can now discuss the matter without a banner of conspiracy theory.  Being able to talk openly about these things is incredibly liberating.  I always have, but now the fundamental definitions for something are more evident to others who previously weren’t inclined.  And I can say this with certainty: the communists’ plan for America will fail because they don’t understand what they are doing or why they are doing it.  Academia is simply using the playbook of several communist insurgents from the past. Still, they never dealt with the root cause of communism and capitalism or understood why people did what they did with them.  Instead, historically, communism was created to break up the class system of Europe, which had been mired in royalty and church politics for centuries.  Communism was meant to bring those institutions down from the poor and lazy mind of Karl Marx.  Meanwhile, while Marx was selling his communist ideas to the sorry lots of people in Europe who never in their lives had ever tasted a hint of freedom from government and religion, in America, the gunfighters were paving the way West in an expansion effort that gave birth to a new nation.  And it was there that capitalism showed its true potential away from the jealous minds of the tyrannical dictators of the world’s economies. 

The fatal flaw of all communists and socialists, which was revealed in a 2015 Joe Biden discussion about open border policies which he is now pushing as planned, is that the world intends to drown out the Anglo Saxon in the world, especially in America because it is believed that capitalism is their creation and that by destroying the Anglo, that capitalism will die.  So the purpose of open borders wherever they occur is to shift people from communist countries and socialist places into areas controlled by traditional Anglo Saxons and smother capitalism wherever it was born and practiced.  And that, in essence, is what all the progressive insurgents think they are doing in America with open borders.  What is amazing about this belief is that highly educated people with double Masters’ and even Doctorates will swear by this strategy.  I mean, who could blame them, they were taught all their lives that these are the value systems of society, so of course, that was the key to the future.   Well, I’m here to say that everyone who thinks such things, which is millions and millions and millions of people, are all wrong.  The Anglo Saxon is just a consumer of capitalism.  Capitalism exists whether or not Anglo Saxons exist.  In truth, if there were no “white” people in America, America would still live, and capitalism would still be the dominant means of building economies.  Communism will never last or flourish, even if they achieve their goal of only having communism as a choice. Here’s why.

In my book The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, I tell the story of freedom starting with Egypt and the Indus Valley in India and evolving to the plains of the Wild West, where shootouts with bad guys led to the greatest nation the world has ever known.  And along that story comes a critical juncture where the real Pirates of the Caribbean created the first democracies ever made.  On a pirate ship, English people fought with freed slaves and Spanish adventurers.  They had Frenchmen on their vessels, they empowered women, they all worked together for the first time toward the common goal of robbing shipping vessels of institutional countries, and it was there that a government of freedom was born.  Without pirates, there never would have been a Revolution for America, nor would America have ever become a country.  Being Anglo Saxon had nothing to do with it; instead, it took rebels from Anglo Saxon culture to recognize the world’s problems and offer their solution, empowering all individuals of all colors and sexes. 

I know this topic well; I associate with many hundreds of people every week from all over the world.  And you know what, many of them are more American than the people I know from Appalachian culture.  Every time I hear a liberal yacking on about racism, and white power, they indicate that they have no idea what makes America Great or what fuels capitalism in general.  They are simply reciting what they were taught in their liberal colleges and never question whether or not those things were correct.  Well, I can say that every bit of what they learned was wrong, and they often spend the rest of their lives trying to justify their ignorance by ignoring the facts.  People will not go back into the authoritarian bottle that we all escaped from in Europe and Asia.  People fled to America to get away from where they were, and for a reason.  And I would propose that the great conflict of ideas that we see today is that collision happening simply because the world has shrunk to the point where the inevitable conflict was bound to occur.  From my experience, I would say that many immigrants coming from other places to America want what America has. If they must adopt capitalism to get there, they’ll assume it in a second.  Capitalism was invented to allow individuals, not governments or races of people, to thrive.  That may have been Karl Marx’s belief that capitalism in Europe only separated class structure.  But in America, the class was not a consideration.  If you could make money, you could have anything, and that freedom fueled the power of the greatest country ever to evolve out of a human mind. 

That is why the communists and socialists will lose this current fight because everything they are doing is rooted in ignorance from a failed philosophy rooted in Old World politics.  What made pirates invent democracy on their ships was a trajectory of human invention that was bound to discover eventually.  Power grabbers, just as the Blue State governors in America did over Covid, held tight their reigns of power for centuries in Egypt, Rome, England, the Roman Catholic Church, the Dynasties of China, everywhere because they feared that people might figure out that they didn’t need them.  The modern liberal wants more than anything to return to those times, but that is not the mind of humanity.  Humanity wants to be left alone and to make a life for themselves without such intrusions.  And it is that which the progressive insurgents are fighting.  They aren’t fighting some ancient concept of race relations, but the inclination of all humankind, the need to be free to live, love, and be productive for their desires.  Not the wishes of a centralized government.  Now that the Biden administration has shown its intentions, people will rebel.  Many were willing to give him an honest chance even though people like me were warning against it.  But now they can see for themselves, and they won’t be fooled again.  The old tactics are not effective ultimately because the driver of capitalism is not genetics. It’s a desire from everyone from everywhere to live free of a boss and enjoy existence for all the opportunities it can provide.   

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Meeting Timothy Zahn: How Comic-Cons predict the future of politics

Predicting the Future by Going to Comic Cons

It’s no different from predicting the weather or an upcoming earthquake.  Some measurements are quite scientific that can be used to measure cultural ability and political sentiment.  For me, those measurements don’t come from the nightly news cycles or the hours of daily talk radio and podcasts, but I learn a lot from places like comic book stores and Comic Cons, such as the one they recently had in Cincinnati during September of 2021.  My daughter is a well-respected artist, and she was at that show and invited me to come on her opening day to help out, which I love to do.  It exposes me to different kinds of people where my age group is not well represented.  Most of the Cincinnati Comic-Con of 2021 were in the 20 to 30-year range.  Last year the event was canceled due to Covid, so I wasn’t sure what we would see.  Happily, the event was a great success, well attended, and there were lots of great costumes elaborately displayed, which I think is wonderful to see.  Mythology at work, where ideas work in people’s minds driving to manifest some form of reality.  From the mind of fantasy to the existence of at least a costume.  When I see that, it tells me that the participants recognize something in these fantasy stories that are attractive to them and care enough about those things to make them into reality.  As I think about the world and the problems that we have in it presently, many of the people in a comic con are at least doing the first step in solving those problems, recognizing that there is one.  Now their recognition may not be rooted in a realistic solution, but the first step in situation solving of any kind is in seeking alternatives to the present reality.  If the world is messed up and these people find comfort in fantasy, well, that says something to me, and I discovered that the Cincinnati Comic Con environment is full of great young minds looking for something positive in their lives.

I have written extensively about Star Wars in the past and how the future progressive problems for the political class currently at work in the world would fall apart.  The latest trilogy of films that have upset Star Wars fans is a perfect barometer for how progressive woke policies are destined to be destroyed in the coming years, especially in the United States.  The America First movement will only pick up steam. The Disney strategy of seeking market expansion in places like China and other places in the world was already showing signs of falling apart before Covid hitting in 2020, paving the way for the United Nations Great Reset.  People, the kind of people who go to Comic Cons, see through a lot of the nonsense.  They don’t care if Disney sells its products to China or some other communist country.  But if they screw around with characters and make them political, well, then there will be trouble.  When Disney and Kathy Kennedy at Lucasfilm decided to kill off Han Solo in the first movie of the new trilogy, they wanted to kill off toxic masculinity and put in his place a girl.  That didn’t go over too well, to replace the gunslinger of space and replace him with a person who had no idea who her parents were and what her job was.  The mistake of Disney to erase the Star Wars past and replace it with some woke, warless future wasn’t going over well with fans.  And they rejected Star Wars sending the studios into a frenzy trying to repair the damage.  Because ultimately, that’s what it always comes down to.  That will undoubtedly be the case in the world regarding electric cars, windmills, health care, and taxes.  Progressive intentions might sound good in an academic setting, but people ultimately decide what they want when it comes to reality. 

A few booths down from where my daughter was, I could see the great Star Wars author Timothy Zahn signing books, all of which I’ve read.  He had his latest book, which I hadn’t yet, book II of the Thrawn Ascendency series, so I went down there to speak with him and talk to him a bit.  It was a rare opportunity, and I couldn’t pass it up.  Now Timothy Zahn is a great guy and a great ambassador for the Star Wars brand with Lucasfilm and Disney, so I’m not going to reveal the contents of our discussion. He’s the creator of the expanded universe.  He started the novel-writing after the movie Return of the Jedi, so I had to ask him how he felt about Disney coming in and screwing it all up by changing the entire story with their dumb movie The Force Awakens.  But I’ve read his Thrawn books since then, and I know where he’s going with this recent series, and after talking to him at the Cincinnati Comic-Con, I am just glad that he’s out there. He’s a great dude, and he and some others now at Lucasfilm with Kathy Kennedy, now pushed into the background, are going to fix up Star Wars and win back their fans.  Listening to him talk only confirmed what I had said about everything 5 or 6 years ago.  And here it was, all happening, just as I said it would.  Zahn held his nose like a lot of people do when they work for big corporations.  I know many people who work at Disney; some are very dear friends who have done the same.  But what I know and have known, which these people suspected also, is that they’d wait out the storm until the corporations learned their lesson and had to adjust to the market conditions. 

Globally, the political hacks think they are in charge and utilize various methods of communism and socialism to regulate all existence.  But when I go to events like these comic cons, it just reminds me that the mind of humankind is still in charge.  The kinds of things people decide to spend their money on and the type of stories they find attractive still indicate what the rest of the world will do.  For instance, even with all their woke corporate policies and insults to Uncle Walt and his frontier America, Disney bent the companies back to facilitate communist China.  But when Disney tried to release their new Marvel movie Shang-Chi to China, the communist country turned them down.  Disney has gone way out of its way to appease China, even sticking Asian characters into Star Wars not because they needed to be but because Disney was sucking up to China.  Well, China sees the wave of the world, and they know that they are in trouble for their part in manufacturing the Covid crises and election fraud, and they are lashing out.  And Disney is the one getting slapped.  Was it worth nearly ruining Star Wars to get a communist government to play nice?  Well, Disney learned too late.  Their actual audience is in America, and they need to cater to that audience.  As I was talking to Timothy Zahn, I saw many Star Wars characters coming up to him looking for an autograph.  I even saw Mara Jade.  But you know what I didn’t see.  Nobody was dressing up as Rose, the Asian girl from The Last Jedi.  The movie that Star Wars fans hate.   What is evident at these kinds of events is that the rest of the world will follow politically.  And the direction will not be toward more totalitarianism.  But to freedom, justice, and the American way. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Anna Perez Understands: Overcoming America’s inferiority complex and becoming your own shepherd

Overcoming America’s Inferiority Complex

As I was promoting my new book, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business,I discovered the show on Real America’s Voice, The Water Cooler, with David Brody.  I contacted the producer Anna Perez about coming on and talking about the book’s contents because it seemed that they would be interested.  This is the same network that produces The Warroom and Dr. Gina, so they have some good things going on there that people are just discovering.  I certainly fit in that category.  Here I was promoting a book, but my personal feelings limited my reach to an audience with clear parameters regarding the massive amounts of injustice that we see play out politically.  So Fox News was out.  Newsmax was too wishy-washy.  They wanted to be a Fox replacement, but they were shying away from the real sources of the problem.  One American News was stuck in what we’ll talk about here, a kind of inferiority complex common among conservatives for all the reasons we’ll discuss.  So what I found in Real America’s Voice was something different.  They were confident, hungry, and asking all the hard questions.  I had a person the other day asking me on Gettr what a replacement for Fox was during a discussion and when I said Real America’s Voice, they shunned it away as if it was a radical right-winged network of religious freaks.  To that, I could only say, the crazy lunatics who are the current problem in the United States would say that anything to the right of Vladimir Lenin is a “radical right-winger.” The entire political scale has been moved and measured so that I would reject the whole premise.  Real America’s Voice represents most American beliefs, and I have found I enjoy them very much.  And I have become quite a fan of Anna Perez’s produced show The Water Cooler.  It’s more fun than The O’Reilly Factor, which made Fox News what it became, and it indeed points to the future of what our country will become once we sort out all this current mess and get Trump, DeSantis, or Kristi Noem in the White House again. 

Anna Perez has done several shows over the last several weeks when she has hosted The Water Cooler as David Brody has been out, that deals with the lack of masculinity in our culture.  Of course, we all know why, especially now.  Our society was primed for a global takeover, and the attackers wanted an easy way. So they watered down the necessity of men with all kinds of sexual viewpoints that would underline toxic masculinity in our culture and replace it with this kind of “beta” male that most women don’t want.  The rest of the world doesn’t identify with masculinity these days, and they certainly understood that to conquer the United States, men needed to be neutralized.  So of all the news reporting going on, Anna has been contemplating why we have allowed ourselves to fall for this concept of toxic masculinity in a busy news cycle.  It’s at the source of everything bad that has been happening to us as a country.  When attacked, the men are running away; they are not standing and fighting.  This goes back to every time society told us that it was OK to cry; we should all hug and express our feelings.  When public schools started promoting this kind of behavior twenty years ago, more people should have seen the intent.  But here we are, and Anna Perez is one of the only ones out there these days asking the question correctly and often.

I essentially wrote my book The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business as an answer to this problem.  It is a guidebook to solving many of these contemporary issues.  But to sum it up concisely to answer the question, I discovered the answer at the Buffalo Bill Center of the West in Cody, Wyoming, as my book was going through the last parts of the editing process with the publisher.  I had long been thinking the same things as Anna has been, where are the men, why are they so ashamed, and how could we wake them up?  Well, oddly, the answer is one that essentially answers the old Saul Alinsky question about Christians and how the left can permanently paralyze conservatives into defensive positions when attacked.  The leftist attackers exploit a part of the conservative brain that puts them perpetually on the defensive, and now with the lack of manhood to defend such actions, there was no defense mechanism.  This was further obvious to me while at a funeral recently where the church was decorated with images of the shepherd guarding the flock of sheep, meaning Jesus playing the role of shepherd and the congregation being the sheep. That’s an excellent idea in church, but when some crazy leftists step in and take out the shepherd, they gain control of the sheep, and that’s what we find has happened to us.  The sheep might be upset about it, but they still follow whoever the shepherd is.  So for the world’s malcontents and evildoers, they understand that the way to beat conservative America is to fight to become their shepherd.  Replace their god with government, and most of the battle is already over.

I propose in my book for the reader to become their own shepherd and look back to the great gunfighters of American culture as the reference.  Take away the willingness to cooperate as a group of sheep and be your own shepherd.  It will help your business, your community, but most of all, your family.  But there is an additional problem that must be solved, which I discovered at the Buffalo Bill Center of the West. It’s the inferiority complex that most Americans have about how young our country is and how we assume that Europe and other places are wiser than we are because of the depth of their history in arts and sciences.  While Buffalo Bill was touring his Wild West show around Europe, even he became enchanted with the Europeans honoring him as a great representative of American culture. That endorsement filled a need that he and most Americans had to be respected by the mother country.  Even now, most Americans still view Europe as the big brother or parent to impress.  There are many great things about America, but our weakness is that we don’t have a vast history of showing that our culture works instead of the other cultures around the world who do have deep histories.  That inferiority complex has prevented us from fully embracing an America First platform.  Sure, there are 30% of all people who get it.  But there is still another 20% who are too insecure about assuming that they are equal or even better off than European or Asian culture.  Then there are the below-the-line thinkers beaten in life who become liberals and want to be sheep all their lives. 

I talk about all this in the clip above; it’s a topic that could use much discussion.  But Anna Perez is tapping into the issue by identifying the toxic masculinity problem.  We can see the shadows of the conspiracy, which is undoubtedly a global trend.  I remember reading the Fifty Shades books a few years ago to understand why women were so hungry for those books, which were essentially about sadomasochism.  I found the lead character repulsive and excessively weak.  From a female perspective, there were all kinds of things going on. The politics of our times have sought to remove men from society to expose that need in women.  The goal has been to replace men as the family’s shepherd and replace them with the government.  It was essentially a coup of every American home.  I wrote my book as a guide to get out of that cycle and to think not just like a man again, but as a culture of shepherds, not sheep.  And what makes us that way, and why are Americans different than other places in the world?  Well, it starts with the invention and cultivation of the gun in our culture.  Not as a weapon of death and destruction.  But in becoming shepherds of our destiny and leaders of business, industry, and family.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Why We Are a Society of Guns: When government gets out of control, as Biden has, there is no other way to check their power

The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

I’ve said it for years, and I’m saying it now to remind everyone once and for all.  Thank God that we have the Second Amendment. If we didn’t have it, that monstrosity of an executive order mandating vaccines that Joe Biden issued on September 9th would have been something else.  When a government goes wrong, and the Biden administration and all those connected to it have put themselves in all kinds of trouble, really too numerous to mention here, they need some mechanism to save themselves from the ramifications of bad decisions.  All governments, from their point of view, think they are doing the right thing. I’m sure Joe Biden and those around them think they are doing the right things.  Progressives and communists worldwide believe that a social utopia is a way to everlasting peace and joy.  But unfortunately, people get things wrong all the time, and there are no multiple correct answers.  If a political philosophy is wrong for life, for the world, then it can’t be made right through power grabs and executive orders.  And a political regime cannot be made to hide their failures through force, attacking people who might point out to them the obvious.  Once a political entity of any kind realizes that they have been a failure and seek to cover it up by threats and intimidation, then you get a hostile actor of political consequence that you’ll have to deal with.  Then knowing that you can thank the Second Amendment for being the only thing that is genuinely protecting us from this real tragedy of a Biden administration and a House and Senate controlled by the Democrats.

Now, this is way beyond partisan politics at this point.  This is a matter of life and death, not just our lives but also our country.  People who supported Trump warned everyone about this very kind of thing with the Biden administration, that they weren’t in control, and that other forces were at work that wanted to undermine our country.  Well, now you can see it, just as we said it would be.  Biden is as wrong as even the most extreme warnings attempted to caution.  But when things do go wrong, and you end up with a power-hungry administration that refuses to play by the rules, and attempts to subvert the checks and balances of our legal government become common and makes up rules from the bench, essentially taking all power away from the judiciary to check laws made by the legislature, the only measure you have to keep a law and order society in balance is the threat of violence.  Guns and having a society with more guns than people are the only thing keeping the Biden administration from all-out tyranny, as we have seen in Australia.  Because most homes in America have some firearm, it makes the power of government pretty useless when they decide to turn to authoritarianism to mask their many mistakes from the judgment of a public they quickly come to resent when they are caught.  Because of guns, Joe Biden could only issue an illegal executive order and show mass government overreach when what he wanted was to go full lockdown and keep the eyes of the public from the affairs of their many debacles.

Most people would find an armed defense of their country against an out-of-control government to be seriously debilitating.  It would be hard for them, but I see that people are thinking about it now where they weren’t before. I’ve spoken recently to very well-respected House and Senate members who genuinely believe an armed insurrection to take back our country is the only way out.  I personally would look forward to that kind of world.  With the kind of clear sense of justice that I operate with, it would be satisfying to have such a conflict with a clear winner and loser to strengthen our republic to a level it has needed to be since the Jackson administration or James Polk.  Not everyone agreed back then either, but at least the republic’s needs were more understood as the goal of government.  The means of getting there had differences, of course, but at least all political sides were mostly honoring our nation’s flag and not trying to destroy it the way Democrats do today.  We can’t work with people who at least won’t say the Pledge of Allegiance and will work every day to destroy our country from underneath us, then mask that failure, attempt to suppress us under unruly executive orders. 

The ultimate backstop and the only thing keeping the Biden administration and the global cabal behind his phony presidency is gun rights, the ability to have weapons, not just peashooters, but total military-style armaments.  The ability to form a militia when the good guys in our military become the bad guys with the simple signing of an executive order by a lunatic president who has gone full Nero, or Henry the 8th.  The Second Amendment was created because, in history, many powerful emperors and kings gained unreasonable power and used it to mask their insanity.  So to stabilize things in America from just that kind of trouble, we have gun rights.  We have votes which are meant to replace armed insurrection during administration changes.  The Republicans have pretty much followed the rules.  Democrats have attempted to break those rules with every election, most spectacularly with the 2016 election of Donald Trump. The riots in the streets, the FBI activism, the funding by the DNC of the Russian Dossier, and many other things opened the door for all to see just how corrupt the process was.  Then with the election fraud of 2020, nobody was hearing it anymore.  It was preposterous to suggest that there wasn’t election fraud.  Like we’re supposed to believe the denial of election officials at their word when it was they who allowed election fraud to happen?  But once election fraud happens or doesn’t happen, once people believe that it did happen and lose trust in the election process, what means do they have left to maintain a proper government?  Guns and the threat and will to use them to maintain law and order is the centerpiece of a proper, legal society. 

Democrats should never have implied that they wanted to cheat in elections by playing around with the voting window, mail-in ballots, and not maintaining voter rolls.  Once people lose trust in the election process, there is nothing to stop them from turning to violence to install a proper government.  We saw a slight hint of that on January 6th, which Democrats have attempted to use as a way to divert attention from their criminal actions.  But let me say, January 6th could have been a lot worse.  I thought it was a healthy protest and a reasonable warning to authorities.  It was a mild case of violence from a government that had done so much wrong.  People didn’t carry guns into the Capitol and didn’t go there intending violence.  Imagine what it would be like if we had mass action like we’ve seen recently in France and Brazil?  Yes, things could be a lot worse, and government should be scared.  If that’s the only way they will respect the people they are supposed to represent, well, then so be it.  But make no mistake about it, if America was not a country of guns, we’d already be taken over now.  This administration has shown its teeth and its frustrations.  It wants full authoritarian, communist power.  And because they don’t have it, they are lashing out.  But silly crappy things written on a piece of paper are not as harmful as bullets in guns.  And the only reason we haven’t seen death and carnage yet in this effort is that we have so many guns.  Never, ever forget that.     

Rich Hoffman

The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business
Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

The LEA Union at Lakota Goes Too Far: Trying to screen school board candidates to protect their stranglehold on the district

Labor Unions think they are Management, they aren’t

It’s safe to say it now; it’s no longer a conspiracy theory, as it used to be when I first started talking about it years ago.  Teacher unions formed under the John Dewey public education system have been communist recruitment centers meant to re-shape the minds of our children into diabolical menaces against American values, life, liberty, and capitalism.  In my school district of Lakota, the LEA labor union has been a treacherous disaster for decades, imposing on the community, which tends to be conservative, a lot of liberal ideology that people aren’t comfortable with.  Many of the kids who have been through the Lakota school system and are now adults can easily see the damage.  Parents tell me all the time the sad stories of their precious little kids who were so sweet and wonderful, who turned into delectable losers through their high school and college years.   By the time the kids get into their 20s and 30s, they end up as unrecognizable communists of anti-American sentiment.  And where did it all start?  Well, in Lakota, there is a group of mad moms led by Sandy Wheatley, an old name to me but likely new to unsuspecting parents new to the school district.  She used to lead the local teacher’s union at Lakota and still has been one of the “sweat bees” always aggravating Lakota school business in the ways you can see in this article.  All the trouble starts with people like her.  In truth, all labor unions were born out of the push for communism during the mid-1800s when Marx published his destructive concepts that have stifled the world in many ways we see today.  But it’s one thing to look at it happening and have feelings about it, but quite another for it to happen in our backyards and not be expected to do anything about it.  I’ve never felt compelled not to do something about it.  I think we should fight these losers everywhere they show themselves because now many can see what I’ve been saying for years.  Teacher unions have not just been bad for our public education system, wasting millions of our taxpayer dollars over the years as an actual imposition. They are additionally harmful to our flag and country and must once and for all be considered domestic terrorists and threats to our children’s very lives.  Because they are.

Recently I have told many stories about a group of school board challengers endorsed by the Republican Party of Butler County, Ohio, running this year to replace three seats on the Lakota school board.  They are great candidates functioning on their own for good reasons which they have determined for themselves.  But I’ve been around for a while and understand the impediments that get in the way of good people intending to do a good job where good jobs are needed, and old labor union presidents like Sandy Wheatley don’t want to see a good job done in public schools.  They function from a different idea of what “good” is.  You and I, dear reader, might call “good” a well-balanced kid who can read, write, think, and grow up to get married, have good kids, a job, run a good household, and come over to a happy family gathering on Christmas for some quality exchanges.  For the communist labor union types, “good” is to turn the kids into servants of the state, do drugs, experiment sexually, collect unemployment, and vote Democrat.  And when it comes time for Christmas dinner, to send those children into those nice American homes filled with nice American families and to torpedo them all from the inside out with disappointment, anxiety, and malice.  Yet many people have always thought that my statements about the teacher’s union were overstated and purely political.  Because I have been more involved in these school board candidates this time around, I have seen how the labor union at Lakota behaves from a different point of view, and that view has been ugly.

One of these school board challengers asked me the other day about the questionnaire shown in this article, along with correspondence showing some Facebook postings from old Sandy Wheatley herself disparaging members of the current school board and the challengers in ways meant to impact the vote the way labor unions all over America intend.  These documents show the intent of the LEA teacher’s union at Lakota in a very honest way that voters should know about.  I found the questionnaire sent to this particular school board challenger to be reprehensible.  As I explained to them, they want to do a nice job for the district, and all this labor union radicalism can be a bit scary, that as a member of the school board, they are the management.  The labor does not get to interview the management. The other way around is the first problem with managing all public schools, especially at Lakota.  These labor union types felt it was appropriate to gather information on incoming school board members at Lakota.  Just read the questions for yourself.  What is being proposed by this questionnaire is that the labor union wants to know how progressive the candidates are.  Will they support the current progressive political agenda such as gay rights in the schools or uncontrollable spending with perpetual tax increases on private property through school levies.  How the candidates’ answer will determine the level of activism the union will perform against those candidates.  The LEA wants people like what they have molded on the current school board, lapdogs of union appeasement from Julie Shaffer, Kelly Casper, Michael Pearl, and the Brad Lovell replacement, Douglas Horton.  As you can see from Sandy’s direct comments on Facebook, they hate Lynda O’Conner because Lynda has tried to do the job a school board is always supposed to do, represent the community who elected her into place.  While the rest want to get along with the communist teacher’s union so bad things won’t be said about them.

People never wanted to face the facts of the origin of the labor movement, especially when it came to their kids.  Parents wanted to like their teachers; many of them started with good intentions.  Everyone always does, including Sandy Wheatley and the union thugs sucking the life out of the Lakota school system.  Even in the human body, viruses want to live.  Cancer wants to live by being a parasite of the host.  Everyone from their perspective wants to live.  But good is determined by logic, and that is why we elect school board members to insert reason into the management of children in a school and the millions of dollars it takes to teach them with free education.  But the quality of that education has always been under attack by teacher unions who want far more than just a job in a school district.  They want to act as parasites to our children and the property we own and maintain to fund their menace.  Attacking private property is one of the communist goals as they were adopted directly from Karl Marx and John Dewey was quite aware of it from the beginning.  It was a mountain of corruption from the start, and it shows in the products of public education, most of us, our children, and the state of our nation now.  And based on these documents shown here, you can see what is going on in your local teacher’s union.  These aren’t unique to Lakota.  But they do require action from voters who have a mind to fix the situation.  In Lakota, during 2021, voters will finally have a chance to do something about all this nonsense.  But really, this is a nationwide problem, and it needs to be addressed in America once and for all.  Otherwise, we won’t have a country, making all teacher union members very, very happy.

Rich Hoffman

The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business
Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Biden Threatens Businesses With Covid: When anti-science becomes a weapon of cover-ups

Remember the FEMA Camps?

I’ve told everyone before what Covid was, why it was made, and what the world’s governments plan to do with it.  Just as a reminder, this push to impose vaccines on businesses and the Biden administration’s mask mandates are strict because they have no legal authority to do so.  So hoping that peer pressure will do all their work that the law forbids, they are implying to businesses that if they don’t enact stricter than the CDC policies for managing Covid, then they might create a perceptual unsafe work environment for their employees, forcing them out of fear of litigation to adopt the Biden tactics. That’s all it is.  Like China, the Biden Democrats and many foreign agents of mass corruption connected to this administration are in deep trouble with many things they have been caught in.  Such as the election fraud of 2020, which is presently unraveling, the debacle of Afghanistan, which will make Iran look silly in comparison.  The economy is tanking, and the Biden people need something to blame since their policies are stifling growth.  Oh, and also, Larry Elder is about to win as governor in California punishing Gavin Newsom for his lockdowns there harming one of the world’s biggest economies. They need a story to take people’s eyes off the southern border, which is a mess.  So many terrible things have been unleashed in the opening months of a corrupt Biden administration that these losers hope that Covid will save them once again.  Notice how Dr. Fauci has lost his mind over this Delta variant just as Rand Paul pressed him on his connection to the Wuhan lab in China and the funding by NIH of Covid.  We now know Covid was made in the lab there for what the Chinese imply is a bio-weapon.  Yeah, Covid is all those things, meant to hide these crimes and more.  The masks and vaccines are not about health maintenance at all.  And the push for vaccines has to have a majority of people near 100% to hide what the vaccine will do to people.  Suppose statistical sampling is 100%, and we all of a sudden have mysterious deaths, sterilization, and other ailments creeping into society within a few years. In that case, nobody will see that healthy people who did not take the vaccine are not suffering the same conditions.  If everyone gets the jab, nobody will know the difference.  This is what you get when malicious, bad people take over a government and get caught doing ill will on people and still hope to cover up their debacles.

I’ve heard these stories for years, and now it’s pretty clear where the old fears of FEMA camps came from.   I think the area I’m in outside of Cincinnati was designated Sector 5.  Troubled people were to be taken to the railyards just south of Indianapolis to be quarantined.  It was never quite clear who would go there, would it be sick people somehow made that way by the government or holdouts against some government mandate like resistance to the vaccination.  But given the conditions of our times, the forces at play have hit the panic button, perhaps too soon, and now we see what we see.  But it’s not a surprise to me at all.  Those FEMA camp rumors look to be more fact than fiction, and those were ten years ago.  I remember the pictures of the plastic coffins stored on the side of railroad tracks for what purpose nobody could imagine.  The world was simpler back then; nobody could imagine a day where the government would stop the economy and force all of us to stay in our homes under force.  Now it’s not so scandalous. 

I always took those kinds of things in stride.  I think the people who run these government agencies are idiots, and they can be easily beaten.  If they decide to intrude on our lives, then we are free to fight them.  I generally leave them alone as long as they leave me alone.  I don’t want such people in charge of my health or safety.  No doubt, they have been talking about this for a long time; the rumors made it out onto the Alex Jones show, well before YouTube made that show one of its first targets of censorship.  Now we know why, and we know that Big Tech was in on this game from the start.  Like I said in the video above, this is all anti-science. It’s been covered in Ayn Rand’s book Anthem, where people far in the future are dazzled to discover the light bulb again.  Their tyrannical society had traded science for submission.

I don’t think all of the government is in on the gig, but many federal employee types find complete authority attractive.  The Big Tech companies like Google, Twitter, and Facebook played their part as government censors immediately with Covid.  They were in on the game plan from the start, and that would be the first place to go to prosecute for the attack on our country.  They denied medical help to people sick with Covid by censoring references to hydroxychloroquine and Regeneron cocktails to manage the virus.  We were meant to have the virus manage us, not science containing the virus.  That was always the plan from the very beginning, and many people knew it.  The conspiracy theories may not have been as sinister as we thought regarding the FEMA camps, but there was more truth to it than fiction, and we are in that nightmare now. 

But what caused the nightmare?  It was the cover-up of the crimes, and I don’t think what we see now was how things were supposed to go.  The Donald Trump presidency was not supposed to happen, and it pulled the scab off the wound created by the SWAMP too early.  The Democrats and their puppet masters had to push the panic button to lay ground cover for the many crimes they were caught in, which we see now.  They are caught in this election scandal, and people are unwilling to hide behind a curtain of wokeness to conceal the truth.  They might have in 2020 when this Covid game was first played on us.  But not now.

We know too much.  Everyone knows that the best measure to fighting off viruses is a person’s immune system.  Vaccination is a means to managing a virus in a society with weakened immune systems and wouldn’t be wrong if that were the case.  Yet, that’s not what we are talking about here.  I would never undermine my own immune system with medicine unless it were necessary.  And it’s not necessary.  This virus was created as an attack, not as some occurring natural threat, so the solution to it is not in vaccinations, but in politics, where the virus was really created.  And for the government, mandates are about as tough as wet paper holding up a paint can.  They have no legal grounds at all.  They have no power.  All they have are implied threats which are designed to scare a workforce into acting against employers.  That then forces employers to adopt the government policy to protect themselves from potential litigation.  And that’s all the government can do, is scare people into compliance because the actual science is weak and full of corruption.  As human beings, we should know better, and they think that fear will rule over logic.  But then again, these are the same idiots who have entangled themselves in all these cover-ups.  With their track record, why would anybody think that something they do would work now?  Think things through, dear reader. Don’t be a buffalo watching all the other buffalos being killed around you and just standing there grazing.  Because they think you will, stand there and take it.

Rich Hoffman

The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business
Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

We Don’t Have the Right Politics for Space Travel: We’ll have to change that before settling Mars

To move into Space, we need Capitalism as the driver of our politics

I am by far not an Elon Musk fanboy.  I like a lot about Elon Musk and the great work he does with Tesla and SpaceX.  But I’m not crazy at all about his talk about universal incomes and climate change.  I view a lot of what he says as a guy throwing up ideas, much the way he runs his companies, and if someone can shoot holes in his thoughts, he welcomes that chance.  He sees it as making things better.  I could talk and argue with Elon Musk all day and year, and I would have fun doing it.  And I think he would too.  But I found an extraordinary moment from him recently on Part III of the exclusive Everyday Astronaut interview where Elon walked them around the Starbase facility ahead of a Superheavy launch attempt. I’ll put those interviews up here for you to watch, but I found them remarkable.  Space X is how most companies should be run. It reminded me of the eventual aim of my recent book, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, which is to learn not to be afraid of those who intend to impose fear on you.  To learn not to fall in love with rigid rules and to reunite yourself to risk because that’s how the human race advances.  During Part III, Elon paused and referred to just that very concept.  But he knows he can’t say such things.  He has all kinds of people who follow him, liberals, conservatives, people who have no idea what they are.  He currently has to work with the Biden administration if he wants to send ships into space.  He must also work with other countries, like China, because we are all tangled together in unhealthy ways.  So, I get why he couldn’t say what he wanted to say.  But I am under no such restriction. 

I don’t typically think of the “degrowth movement” as an accurate word. Still, the way Mark Levin talked about it in his recent book, American Marxism, seems more appropriate when talking about the sciences than just saying “socialism” or “communism.” Many young people think of these things not as a recent threat but as an ancient menace that expired well before their time.  But they understand growth, and for this topic, it’s certainly the correct way to term what the political left has been doing.  Elon Musk has played around with left-leaning ideas, such as the universal income, electric infrastructure ran by solar, and even smoking pot on a podcast to show how cool and hip he was.  Those are all things that have made me ignore what Elon Musk has been doing.  That is until he does something magnificent like developing the Falcon rockets for reusable landings and building the Starships in Texas.  Slowly over time, I’ve watched Elon as he has tried to do “growth” things in a world run increasingly by “degrowth” personalities; he has been getting frustrated.  For instance, he moved to Texas, leaving California behind after the ridiculous Covid policies shut down the state economically.  And recently, when environmentalists threw protests toward his desire to build a Starship factory at the Starport facility because of water concerns, he sounded more like a Trump supporter than a centralist libertarian. 

Musk is trying to do all pro-growth in a world being drug into a no-growth period by the participants of the Vico Cycle, which I explain in detail in my Gunfighter’s Guide to Business.  These cycles are not new to the human race, they have occurred many times in the past, and we end up constantly re-inventing ourselves.  And that is what Elon Musk sees he is up against, and he let it out a bit during that Part III interview.  That was the primary reason I wrote my book, to help people not repeat the past, but to punch through into this new space age not with restriction and fear, which the communists of the world want, but with unrestricted adventure fueled by the power of capitalism.  When it comes down to the various philosophies, we cannot all have different ideas about the direction of the human race.  We either want to grow or retreat into the huts of history and return to yelling at lightning bolts and attributing gods to their origins to make sense out of a storm.  Or, we want to fly about those mysteries into the worlds beyond and fulfill our quests for adventure, both large and small, on a vast playing field of unlimited possibilities.  The two views of the world will not live together forever.  The inflection point is upon us.

And that’s when Elon Musk realized that everything done at SpaceX would disappear in an instant without him.  It is he alone that is doing all these outstanding achievements.  Sure, he has lots of brilliant employees who do the heavy lifting, but he provides the vision, and without vision, nothing happens.  If human beings are going to be a space-oriented society, then a new type of government will have to be embraced.  The one we have now, which fought hard to keep Donald Trump from being president and wanted to get rid of him when he was, will not allow the efforts of Elon Musk either to carry humans into space.  We have to solve one problem at the philosophical level if we are ever to put 1 million people onto Mars like Elon Musk wants to do.  We have to have a growing economy with an increasing workforce to accommodate it all.  To have hundreds of thousands of people on the moon, Mars, and wherever else in the next couple of decades, Elon can do the math that was in his words during the interview.  The illogical politics of our current moment, driven by communism and Marxism, are just wrong for the adventure of space. 

Going even further, we have never solved these problems even in our science fiction, except perhaps in Star Wars.  People need to be free, adventurous, experimental, and free to fail for space to work.  A micromanaging government will always be in the way of what Elon Musk wants to do.  He can only smoke joints so much, enough to keep the parasites off his heels.  He can only spout off so much greenie weenie appeasement to keep the environmental protestors from standing in the way of a new Starship manufacturing plant in the middle of the desert.  And that is the point of my book, not to crawl back into the Old West and sleep in hot unairconditioned cabins using the restroom outside.  And getting water with a bucket every time you wanted a drink.  Modern conveniences are good to have.  But what we may not want to leave behind is the courage and adventure of discovery and wealth building.  I would say that those are far more essential things than climate preservation or the appeasement of soft-natured Marxists looking for a big daddy government to care for them the way their parents failed.  Once we solve those problems, we can then move to space.  Elon Musk has figured out how millions of people are excited about it and follow his every move.  They don’t know that the politics they wish to ignore are just the very thing that will keep their feet on the ground and their starships from flying.  We must solve the politics before we can solve the space. 

Rich Hoffman

The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business
Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

There is Nothing Worse than Saying Something Cannot be Done: Managing unknowns for victory

Sometimes the Answers are Where Nobody Looks

For perspective, I feel like I say it 1000 times in a week; limits are meant to be overcome, not yielded to.  When I hear someone say, I can’t do this because of this, or I can’t do that, I immediately hear laziness in the terminology. It’s a lazy approach to life because skills are often needed to be developed to achieve a task.  And when people tell you that something can’t be done, it’s because they are too lazy to do it, plain and simple.  I understand limits, but as I talk about constantly in my new book, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, perceptions of what is achievable today will be shattered tomorrow with lots of practice.  That is certainly the case with various fast draw competitions that go on all over the country that are less known to most of the world because they exist in pockets of Americana.  We seem to understand these kinds of things in sports, where rookies improve with experience, and that few people expect a newly drafted football player to go straight to the NFL and be a superstar.   It takes time and development to become great.  And that is true too in how we make all our livings.  When I hear someone tell me that it takes this much time to do this kind of thing, that is never a fixed value.  But is only a point of reference that should always be pushed for and achieved.  That is why I suggest that all business people stop thinking in controlled statistical ways and always look for innovation opportunities to explore what can be done, not what lazy people tell you can be.

Bullwhip Speed and Accuracy

Every year that I do the Annie Oakley Wild West Show in Darke County during the last weekend of July each year, I go through this process.  It’s always one of the fun weekends that I give myself to keep the world in focus.  I love Darke County, Ohio.  It reminds me of many towns out west and brings the heart of America close, so it’s easy to see.  And this year was no different.  We have the bullwhip competitions that I always participate in, where many of these ideas about business have matured over the years and eventually evolved into the themes of this book.  Now that I am one of the elderly participants, the competitions have become a period of self-reflection for me rather than a nervous do-or-die thing with legacy performers from years past.  As I also talk about in The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, young people need more than anything a reputation to launch them into life.  Well, I have my reputation well intact, and nobody can ever take that from me, even if the thing we are doing is relatively tiny in the scheme of things.  The bullwhip competitions of Annie Oakley for me were always a big deal because the people who do them are unique.  The activity is out of the box, and you develop a genuine respect for the people who share that space with you.  And the competition pushes you always to get better.  And once you push yourself to get better and have success, you realize that the same holds with just about everything in life, including decisions that cost millions of dollars either way if success or failure is utilized.  That may be the life I’m in now, but over the years, my grounding in these cowboy arts always kept things authentic to me and gave me perspectives that nobody else was considering, even though they probably should have. 

The two videos I’ve included in this article are from two bullwhip competitions from this latest 2021 Annie Oakley show.  I always do pretty well in those, but the value in winning has diminished a lot over time.  What matters most to me, what has become an obsession of sorts, is managing all the competition variables in these kinds of things.   In both competitions, the goal is to cut as many cups off the target stands at the fastest rate that you can.  One competition, the Speed Switch, requires you to do so with both hands.  The other, Speed and Accuracy, is all one hand and in sequence.  If you miss a cup, it’s a 5-second penalty.  You get two attempts at each cup.  You have to stand six feet from the target and not cross the line with your feet.  The time starts on your first crack.  Those are the rules.  That is the way participants interact with the competition.  Like in all things in life, that is how we plan to achieve success, cutting as many targets as possible in the fastest time you can.  What fascinates me is all the variables that come up in pressured events that can wreck those plans.  The people who usually win at these things, whether they are in bullwhip competitions or big business deals, can manage those variables. 

Bullwhip Speed Switch

Many talented people are good at the exhibitions in the bullwhip world, but not so good at the competitions.  Without the pressure of time, where they can show off the skills that they’ve practiced for hundreds of hours, they are magnificent world record holders, and it looks great for an audience.  But when they apply the same methods to a timed competition, things go bad and don’t look so good.  It has always fascinated me how the difference between the two is so applicable to life in general.  People who study and practice a lot in life can put on a great show.  But when the pressure is on, they usually choke.  That choke is what people tell me thousands of times a week and expect me to accept because that has become fashionable in the world, to accept failure. Instead, my thing is to get comfortable with pressure and danger and learn to manage the variables.  Not to yield to them.

I have done those contests for many decades now every year at the Annie Oakley event, and not a single one has ever been the same.  Sometimes the popper blasts off the end of my whip.  Sometimes the whip gets caught on the target stand, as happened this year.  Sometimes we perform on grass, sometimes on smoothed concrete where the whip slowly slides all over the place. Sometimes the wind kicks up and throws off your aim.  Sometimes, a speedy guy will have luck catching most of the targets on their first run, forcing you to go faster than you are comfortable with.  All those variables are what make the good from the bad.  It’s not the skill; everyone who competes has talent.  But it’s in how you manage the variables that matter most.  

Its all in fun, but is it……………………..?

Ultimately, that is one of the big takeaways from The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business. I’ve been a professional in the industry for more than three decades, and I work with people who also have a lot of experience.  Everyone has lots of experience; they go to college, get trained and try to do the best they can.  My point is that little things like these extra little competitions I do, such as bullwhip competitions force you to adapt to all the things they don’t teach you in an orthodox society.  How can you use your skills to accommodate all the things that happen that you don’t control?  Can you still win then?  Well, of course, you can.  But what makes me madder than a hornet that some kid has stuck a stick into its nest is when someone tells me something can’t be done because they have not learned themselves how to manage variables in their life.  That they accept that anything outside of their skill level is a mystery that they automatically yield to.  To me, that is just the kind of thing they should all be training for, in having the skill to do the job, but in honing those skills so that they can adapt to the variables that come up along the way.  That they can successfully manage the situation when it’s never optimal and still succeed. 

Rich Hoffman

The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business
Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Vote For Mark Welch: Shooting guns, solving problems and making the world a better place

Vote for Mark Welch

If West Chester wasn’t one of the best places in the world which demonstrates what small government looks like and how much prosperity can occur when proper management at the level of government is applied, I can’t imagine what it would be.  West Chester, Ohio, has the population density to make it a city, but over the years, it has stayed small, where just Trustees run the community’s needs, and it has flourished.  What started as a kind of Tea Party dream, with two members getting elected to the Board of Trustees and applying fiscal responsibility and limited government concepts to the day-to-day business, George Lang and Mark Welch, West Chester has been proof of what good government looks like.  Even during the government-induced pandemic over coronavirus.  Even as many businesses struggled to stay open all across the country or find employees to fill their vacancies, West Chester has managed to see astonishing growth in some ways.  Much of that points back at the policy set by the conservative trustees who have been running things in West Chester for over a decade.  Lowering the cost of doing business, reducing bureaucracy so that things can happen, West Chester would be, for me, the example of what good governments everywhere in the world should look like.  When we debate about government so much, we could always offer West Chester an example of where the government goes right.   

A lot of that credit goes to Mark Welch, who has been with the trustees in West Chester for a while now, a few terms. He’s been that critical second vote when George Lang set the stage for much of West Chester’s success.  Then as George moved on to a position in the Senate, Mark carried the torch for the next generation and continued the policies that made West Chester wonderful.  Mark has been great at the significant and minor issues, so much so that often you never even hear about the things he is doing.  I often say, especially in management positions, that if you are good people won’t even know you are there doing a good job.  Its when managers in government make themselves part of the story that things start going wrong.  Then, the more people you add to a process, the worse it gets.  And thus, that’s how you get a bad government.  The federal government that we are always talking about is just such an example.  It’s big, nobody takes responsibility for anything, and they always make themselves part of the story on everything.  Their goals are usually to make themselves known by looting off the efforts of others, while Mark has always been a facilitator of other people’s dreams and needs.  He doesn’t get in the way of some big project that wants to come into West Chester.  Instead, he finds a way to get rid of the obstacles so that something new could be born.  Whether the project is a significant new company or a hot new entertainment venue, West Chester has thrived because Mark and other conservatives have created an environment where productive output wasn’t penalized but rather encouraged. I’ve been all over the United States, and you’d be hard-pressed anywhere to see four highway exits that are better than the ones in West Chester with a diversity of options, per capita income, and future opportunities.

Shooting with Mark Welch

Mark Welch is up for re-election this year, which he should have no problem with.  But for many of the new residents of West Chester who don’t hear much drama from their trustees, especially with a community with such a high population density, they wouldn’t know about it because the government isn’t in their face about every little thing.  Yet I think it would only be wise to pull back the curtain a bit and share with everyone what I know of Mark Welch, a guy who goes shooting with me often at Premier in West Chester, a great gun range at Port Union off RT 747.  Included here are a few video clips of our last trip just to let people be a bit of a fly on the wall.  I go to Premier often to shoot various guns and to blow off some steam.  I enjoy almost everything in West Chester, from the steaks at Jags to the fine dining and shopping options at Voice of America.  And I love Voice of America Park, another great story that we could write books about.  But commercially, I spend most of my time at Premier, and often Mark is there too where we manage stress at the gun range and often contemplate the origin of the universe.  The other day, it occurred to me that people don’t get to see that side of Mark, and they should because it’s what makes him unique in government. 

When Premier Shooting first opened, Mark and I were there for the grand tour, which was very special.  To have a classy gun range in such an elegant town with so many business and residential options was such a treat, and we’ve enjoyed it now for several years.  They have added a nice walking trail around the big fishing lake and turned the whole property into a country club setting that is great for escaping from business during a lunch break. That’s how I use Premier Shooting as a place of stress management.  And now, primarily because of the policies Mark has nurtured and a small government approach, Harley Davidson is building a new superstore next to Premier.  Adding this business to the rest of the options in that area is an incredible achievement. It is just another example of what can be done when the government doesn’t make itself the story but gets out of the way.  Mark likes to see new things being built as much as I do, but he’s as far away from the type of intrusive politician who always wants to stick their nose in everyone’s business.  That is precisely why Harley Davidson is building such a large store that will be a great gift to the community. 

Shooting the Colt .45

Talking to Mark the other day while we were up at Premier shooting the guns in the videos shown here, we talked about the new Harley Davidson store as we watched an excavation team work machinery leveling the site for a foundation.  Mark was like a kid brimming with excitement at what such a place would mean, and I sort of thought for a moment how unusual it was for a politician to have that kind of attitude. I’ve been around many politicians over the years who would look at a situation like that and find some way to insert themselves into the story and try to take credit for all Harley Davidson’s efforts.  But not Mark.  In an actual small government, conservative fashion, he likes seeing things happen.  If he can help them along, he’s happy to do it.  Yet, it never crosses his mind to loot off the efforts of others.  He wants to help make things happen, which is one of the premier ways in which West Chester has remained one of the best places to live in the world, even as economic downturns have hurt communities elsewhere.  West Chester is lucky to have Mark Welch.  But to Mark’s mind, he truly wants what is best for West Chester in the ways good management always does, by getting out of the way of those who make things happen in the world.

Rich Hoffman

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