Category: Organized Labor

We Have to Stand Up to our Bullies: Mean Tweets were what kept peace in the world

We Have to Stand Up to Bullies

I know it from years of professionalism, and most people with common sense understand it, too; you don’t sacrifice effectiveness for niceness.  Now in a leadership role, I think the most effective communication is with honey rather than vinegar.  People are more willing to do things in their life of their own free will if given a chance.  However, they often need leadership to help them figure out what that is.  And they often need a kick in the pants to reside beyond their sense of laziness to aim for higher things in life.  It is up to leadership to define the goals of an organization.  How people get on board with that strategy is up to them.  But complacency and drag assing are not options.  Often there will be resistance to the goals established by a leader, and sometimes, they will have to employ methods of motivation that might be boisterous or otherwise.  This is not the same as being a bully.  Our culture understands this subtle nature well; we’ve seen it in movies like Back to the Future.  We all have our Biffs in life and could cheer on George McFly when he punched the bully in the face at the end of the movie to win his future wife and start a good life for himself.  We see it every year in The Christmas Story where Ralphie gets tired of getting picked on by a group of bullies coming home from school, and he beats the crap out of one of them, which solved that problem forever.  In my own life, I poked a big-time bully in the eye with a pair of scissors when I was in the first grade.  I had to, and yes, I got into a lot of trouble.  But you can bet that it was worth it; it changed many things for me for the better.  There are many bullies in the world, and the focus of our academia has been to avoid conflict, which has only empowered them.  And it was the wrong approach.  From his years of experience, Trump understood what leadership was supposed to look like, and we saw it daily in what was called “mean Tweets.” But look what happened in the world when he could no longer provide those mean Tweets; when Twitter took down his account and through election fraud, he was removed from office.  How is the world doing now?

Even George McFly Learned His Lesson

We all had our stories of bullies when we were young, and we either dealt with it or looked for some protection in group behavior to hide from them.  And yes, it’s that simple in the world.  Those who never learned to fight back against their bullies joined groups such as political parties to do their dirty work for them.  It is clear to all that the Democrat Party has offered a chance to be a bully on their behalf with collective salvation.  We see it in our businesses when consensus-building exercises stifle any attempts to impose work standards by a strong leader.  People who want to hide their timidity usually do so by hiding in groups, and from there, much evil is launched.  Humans trying to avoid this reality have built every part of their civilization around the idea of a democracy for just this very reason, to hide their lack of courage, leadership, and zeal for day-to-day life.  With a democracy, pack hunting, they believe they can hide their soft souls from the world and do OK, just as long as they are not exposed as phonies.  They go to school to get pieces of paper that tell the world that they have proven their worth academically.  They join clubs so that others will say they are notable within the context of the group.  They do anything and everything to hide the fact that when they had a chance to punch their version of a bully in the face, they didn’t, and they grow up bowing to every kind of corruption that there is because they essentially are terrified of conflict.

But most people understand the value of leadership, so we put President Trump in office because he had a reputation of standing up to bullies and fighting back.  We saw it on television and read about it in the media for several decades, so we gave him a chance, and it worked out great.   America First was a plan people could rally behind.  The world was not acting aggressively toward the United States in any way.  Trump had brought peace to the world one mean Tweet at a time and survived what aggressions were thrown his way by an endless stream of media and activist groups.  It didn’t matter, Trump was successful every day he was in office, and the world was better off for it.  Many who didn’t like him felt the way they did because they were averse to conflict, not that Trump did anything wrong.  People felt that Trump should have been more “presidential,” which is just short of saying, “we want to steal your lunch money, so let us do it.” It said more about the state of other people’s minds than it did of Trump.  People showed by electing him twice that they wanted leadership in the world, not the collective shield of group-oriented behavior.  People in America wanted to win at life, and to do that, leadership needs to be present to set the objectives.  And once those objectives were set, people also needed to be pushed to achieve those goals.  We had that type of President over the last four years, and America was winning.  Look what happened in just seven months after it was taken away.  The world is literally on fire from every quarter of it. 

Ralphie Gets Its!

We could talk all day about the malcontents around the world who want a weak American president.  Without leadership, the bullies from every quarter of existence emerged to push people around, and a kind of tribalism that is entirely destructive occurs.  It is the most understudied aspect of liberalism that there has ever been, the need for individuals to stand up to bullies not to join groups to seek protection from them points to the ultimate failure of their plight.  The world and everything in it needs leadership that pushes individuals toward greatness.  Not where groups provide refuge only to become bullies themselves spreading evil upon the earth.  There is nothing good or just about a Democrat Party who protects the weak and meek by allowing them to join the masses to become the bullies themselves.  And there is nothing good about a Republican Party who lets them do it the way George McFly did in Back to the Future.   Allowing evil to grow is just as bad as perpetrating it yourself.  With that said, I do not doubt that we are learning our lesson right now.  Even if they weren’t Trump supporters before, many people are craving the mean Tweets of the Trump administration.  It was better to win in the world than cower in the corner and hope that something terrible didn’t happen.  We have to stand up to the bullies of the world, and we can’t become bullies ourselves along the way.  Being a leader is not the same as being a bully.  Our academic system needs to learn that for future prosperity.  But in the meantime, mean Tweets or whatever their replacement becomes will do just fine.

Rich Hoffman

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

The Alliance Between Big Pharma and Government: Covid is all about using you to promise market saturation

Government Creating Market Stabilization for Big Pharma

With Covid, you can smell the rat easily.  Sure, some people like to be scared; they want to go to haunted houses, ride roller coasters at amusement parks to get a thrill and watch scary movies.  And the nightly news produces almost exclusively scary stories because that causes people to tune in, partly for the thrill and partly for the comfort that bad things are happening to other people and not themselves.  In all of that is how we were scammed with Covid and the ridiculous protocols from the CDC.  Some people don’t want to see it because of their human desire to be scared.  But also, they don’t want to deal with it because they are too lazy to think.  However, if you’re going to see a big government scam, all you have to do is follow the money.  Ultimately, we can say that Covid has been a lot of conspiracies, and I’d say there is truth in most of them. It’s a form of control by the government over mass populations to see if they can get away with it. It’s been a chance to shape politics by steering mass society into virtual pens of control in experimental ways.  It’s been a way to commit voter fraud, which most of the Democrat party plans to use always to stay in power.  Just consider why they want open borders with illegal immigration. So they can overload votes with new voters who might be dumb enough to vote for Democrats who play Santa Claus every day, giving away things that aren’t theirs to give.  But mostly, what Covid has been, is a guaranteed market for the pharmaceutical companies to land their products. Politicians have had to pave the way for them because of their constant need for campaign donations.  By doing big pharma a massive favor by guaranteeing market saturation for big pharma products, the government plays the role through the legislative process as market mall cop in ensuring that everyone does exactly what big pharma needs them to do.

Sure, it’s happened many times before, so many times that many of us have just come to expect it.  The auto insurance industry essentially did the same thing when I was younger.  These days we all accept it as logical, but when I learned to drive a car, insurance while driving was an option.  If you had a wreck while going and it was your fault, then you had considerable trouble.  But you had a choice.  That led big auto insurance companies to lobby the politics of their state to offer relief from the many lawsuits that were not being collected from those who could never pay for the damages they committed while driving cars.  So, states like Ohio passed laws where every driver on the road would have to maintain insurance and show proof of it when called upon.  It was never a question of if a driver had insurance; it was just showing it when a cop pulled you over.  There are many other examples of this kind of thing where the government wrote laws that ultimately helped various businesses. Still, the insurance industry is one of the most obvious.  When politicians and insurance companies saw how the American people accepted these impositions against their freedoms so quickly, they were inspired to do it on other things.  Pretty soon, seat belts were made legal.

You had to click it or get a ticket.  Of course, insurance companies pushed this because they wanted to close up their payout margins.  They were given by the government a stable slice of the pie. The insurance industry didn’t have to drop their prices to earn a customer; the government handed it to them on a silver platter.  Now the insurance carrier wanted to make sure that their payouts were less, not more.  It was better for them to have a driver live in car accidents because dying was too expensive.  It is better to keep the driver alive, even if permanently maimed for life, rather than to lose that driver to a death payout if it could be avoided.  Seat Belts were the kind of law that paved the way for what is currently being debated, vaccine passports.  People accepted the logic, and the government made laws that benefited the insurance companies, and everyone was somewhat happy. 

But that’s not what happens; is that everyone stays happy.  Instead, once the government and the insurance industry saw how easily people would give up their freedoms for so-called “good reasons,” such as “safety,” who doesn’t want to live in a “safe” world, then, of course, they wanted to do the same kind of thing with every industry. That’s where the idea of insurance being a socialist right came about.  People accepted that mandatory insurance to drive a car was acceptable, so why not mandate that everyone have health insurance?  And then, of course, the government would maintain that insurance, which is the concept behind Obamacare.  Once Obamacare got involved, and the government stuck its nose into the 5th largest market in the American economy, trouble arrived for growth.  We heard less about stem cells and regenerative growth as medical innovations moved from new ideas to ensure insurance companies got paid.  And of course, competition in the medical industry stagnated as health providers could essentially charge whatever they wanted, including the big pharma companies.  Now they had guaranteed customers given to them by the government.  All they had to do was give some donations to critical politicians in their states, and they’d be on easy street.  It worked, people put up with it, and that’s the mess we find ourselves in today. 

Now you can see why the government mandates for vaccinations come into play over Covid.  For the first time, we have allowed the government to interfere with the natural immune system of human beings and have put the government in charge of maintaining health.  In all other times, people would get sick with the common cold or with some variation of SARS, Covid, or whatever.  People would take a few days off work to get better or not contaminate their co-workers, and life would go on.  But with Covid, something that turned out for most people to be a common cold with mild symptoms, the government got involved in managing the virus ultimately.  From social distancing, altering economic activity in very destructive ways, and the voodoo science of wearing a mask instead of using actual science, such as Regeneron cocktails and Hydroxychloroquine to fight the virus off.  This time, the government, with its partners in crime, Google, Facebook, and Twitter, moved to control information to create demand for a vaccine where they wanted every single person in the world to get it, no matter what the effect was.  For the first time in history, the world’s governments working together wanted to provide a guaranteed market for the big pharma vaccines for all kinds of mysterious reasons, many that we will learn about in the years to come.  We know that the government is attempting to tamper with markets for the advantage of the pharmaceutical companies.  Essentially for the promise that campaign donations will flow their way and everyone will be happy, just as they were when auto insurance was made mandatory.  We have all shown these dangerous liaisons that we will gladly put up with being pushed around, so why would they think otherwise? That is how innovation is killed when we allow politics to distribute money without merit to undeserving markets.  That is precisely what is going on with Covid, the masks, and the offered solutions to a made-up problem, vaccine mandates for all.   It’s not to save lives.  It’s all about control and making it easier for pharmaceuticals to maintain their markets for products without the worry of competition.  They suddenly don’t have to earn your dollars; the government is giving it to them unearned. 

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

Lakota Votes for Mask Mandates: The squeaky wheel gets the grease

The Lakota School Board trying to vote on Mask Mandates

As it is everywhere, the health directors, national and local, want their power back. Still, the governors in many states don’t want to return to the kind of authoritarian rule that gave health departments so much power during the first year of Covid.  In Butler County, Ohio, where I live, the health director and bureaucratic officials have been working wherever they can to intimidate businesses and government establishments into CDC compliance for the sheer desire of wanting to boss someone around.  So, of course, they are putting pressure on several local school boards in Butler County to implement mask mandates.  In the satire above, which isn’t far from the truth, the Lakota school board is trying to figure out how to deal with the health director ahead of the meeting on August 23rd, 2021.  The Lakota school system is being pressured by outrageous compliance to CDC guidelines or self-imposed mask mandates. It’s a rock and a hard place for Lakota. They either deal with the wrath of the Butler County Health officials, or they deal with the anger of the furious parents.  And for this school board, at Lakota, it is way beyond their ability to deal with leaving them to pander to the squeaky wheel.  So if you as a parent don’t want masks on your kids while in school, you better get to that meeting and be that squeaky wheel.  Otherwise, the underhanded tactics of the health department are going to play their games of tyranny to establish authoritarian rule. 

Of course, no matter what you think about Covid, there is zero to less proof that masks do anything but make the situation worse.  That stupidity is for adults to sort out, but children should never be victimized to wear masks based on such flimsy science.  If people want to wear them, have at it.  Just as a casual observation, I’ve seen cultures wearing masks in Asian countries for years, and it’s always more about compliance than health.  This attempt to mask the American population is just more of that imposition of eastern cultures on western cultures, just as the Beatles have been trying to do for years and many thousands of other sources attempting to tell us in the west that yielding to authority is the way to solve problems.  No, it’s not.  I had my family at the zoo recently, and they were trying to push the latest from the CDC, encouraging people to wear masks.  Only a few dumb fools were doing so.  My wife and I went to Costco to get a hot dog and a drink for our date night, and they were encouraging people to wear masks, forcing their employees to do so to put that peer pressure on people.  But guess what, most people were not wearing the stupid masks, and I felt sorry for the dumb fools who fell for it.  Yet all the trouble starts with these crazy lunatics in the local health departments who are hungry for their mall cop powers to be restored to them by governors who have lost their ability.

Andy Beshear, the governor of Kentucky, has been a disaster.  He wants to force children to wear masks in school, but the supreme court now challenges him after William Bertelsman granted a restraining order on Beshear.  These kinds of fights are happening all over the country, especially in Florida.  The trend is against the tyrants, the health officials.  Now that people have seen the game, there is no public appetite for the mask mandates.  The federal government has not made its case for why masks should be used.  They are hot, they smell bad and are gross, and they display a kind of anti-science that some backwater countries would implement as a means to solving problems.  And people are sick of them.  Even people who might be liberal are not wearing the masks if they can get away with it.  But all those places mentioned, Costco, the zoo, amusement parks, and the like, are feeling pressure from the compliance cultures to implement that stupidity, which is how the schools feel pressure to comply.  But the attack against our children is reprehensible, and it deserves to be fought with everything we have to fight with.  These school boards will cave if the parents don’t get involved.  Edgewood schools in Butler County have struggled with this issue for weeks, and the parents have spoken up.  Monroe is also going through tribulations.  If Lakota falls, the rest of them will follow.  And that’s the game the health directors want.  They want to rule in silence, from their offices using a phantom menace to scare everyone into some ridiculous authority rule.  So the voices have to be heard at the school board meetings. Otherwise, the school boards will yield to the pressure. 

Watching people wear these masks the second time around, who are in the extreme minority in public, you can almost see the deadness in their eyes.  That desire to comply with authority because they are too lazy to think is a public health crisis.  They are more dangerous to society than any virus because their willingness to comply encourages these bureaucratic tyrants to grab power as they are now.  Covid did not come out and kill everyone like it was told to us.  There are some heartbreaking stories here and there, but fewer people are dying of Covid than are getting killed in car accidents, and people don’t stop driving cars over every crash.  For most Americans, Covid is an acceptable risk.  They might stay home from work for a few days and get over it if they get it.  They want alternatives like a Regeneron Covid Cocktail or a dose of Hydroxychloroquine.  They may use ultraviolet light to kill the virus, a legitimate method of managing viruses, especially UVC light.  Science is great, and there are methods we all know about now.  But this dumb method of wearing a mask is as unscientific and barbaric as anything government sciences have ever come up with.  If public schools are ineffective, why would anybody expect Dr. Fauci and government science to get it right with Covid?  They are either treacherous lunatic terrorists for a new global order, or they are dumb as hell.  Or perhaps, a mixture of both.  But putting masks on kids and ruining their lives with the bad decisions of power-hungry health officials would make bad parents out of all of us.  Kids don’t deserve this stupidity.  It’s up to all of us as adults to at least protect kids from government absurdity, starting in our schools.  And for Lakota, while you still can, you better let the school board know how you feel.  Because if left to their own devices, they will yield to the Butler County health officials and their power grabs from the CDC to put the government in charge of our health, which they have proven entirely incompetent to handle.  They weren’t effective the first time around, and now that we’ve had time to reflect on the mistakes of 2020, why would anybody fall for it a second time?  What we are up against is sheer stupidity and nothing less.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Ohio is Number One in Corruption: Jim Renacci wants to be the Ron DeSantis of the state to fix that

Wind Turbans in Ohio, part of the progressive push to change the state into Green Energy

It’s not murky for me at all.  Mike DeWine screwed up as governor of Ohio. He must go. He needs to be primaried, and the Republican brand in Ohio restored to honor before a general election where a Democrat will have to be defeated at the ballot box for control over our state.  The behavior of Democrats in the House and Senate indicates that they have a plan.  That plan is to exploit Ohio as the number one state in the category of corruption and to use that to implement their changes toward even more progressive agenda desires, which ironically has caused most of the problems so far.  DeWine has been hiding his vast incompetence behind the Covid crises, like many in government have, and now it’s gotten Ohio Republicans in trouble, and that situation needs a fast solution.  And one of the first Republicans to offer that solution and throw his hat in the ring has been Jim Renacci.  I was happy to have a chance to talk to Jim Renacci a bit this past week one on one. It’s the first time I’ve had that chance since his run for Senate against Sherrod Brown a few years prior.  Renacci has an exciting story which I touch on in the video above, and I had thought for a while, well before he announced that he would officially run for governor, that Jim would be suitable for it.  His pitch is essentially to be the Ron DeSantis of Ohio, open up markets and opportunities, and bring to the state good management that is no-nonsense and productive.  But more than anything, he wants to clean up the corruption and repair the Republican brand tainted by Mike DeWine and John Kasich, both progressives who opened the door to all this corruption, to begin with. 

I thought Jim was joking when he told me that Ohio was the number one state out of all 50 states in corruption.  That didn’t seem possible to me, but sure enough, I went home and looked it up, and that is the case as of 2021.  When DeWine was running for governor, many Tea Party groups were already saying that DeWine would be a corrupt governor, but people were willing to give him a chance.  As it turned out, they were right, and DeWine has essentially run as a Democrat most of the years that he’s been in office.  To hide his many missteps, he has turned to Covid to rescue him as many blue-state governors have, and that was, of course, to conceal the underlying corruption.  That is the obvious problem when a governor who is supposed to drive on the right side ends up on the left.  A collision with oncoming traffic is inevitable, and that’s what happened with the FirstEnergy debacle in Ohio that Mike DeWine has his hands all over.  The net result is that Democrats are currently planning to exploit these collisions and take seats in the House and Senate because of the corruption and capture the governor race with a damaged DeWine.  So Democrats currently aren’t willing to make any deals with Republicans as they wait out the next election because they can smell the blood in the water. 

I’ve said it before, House Speaker Larry Householder and other Republicans did wrong when they allowed FirstEnergy to pour a lot of money into the Republican Party.  That allowed the FBI to make a bribery case out of the tragedy involving a few nuclear power plants being pushed to shut down.  But things are not always the way they seem.  FirstEnergy was fighting for its life as the Obama administration targeted traditional forms of energy such as coal and nuclear in favor of solar and wind.  I found a few of those ridiculous wind power turbans in Greenville, Ohio, in the video above.  I had seen them all over the United States this year, and it was insulting to see them in Ohio.   A more significant push is going on that is far more corrupt than FirstEnergy trying to buy off politicians like Larry Householder for their survival.  Jim Renacci understands that kind of corruption because he’s been a victim of it himself.  He got into politics as a businessman who had lost his Chevy dealership by that same administration who tampered with the markets to create a change state at GM.  The collapse of General Motors into bankruptcy meant that the government could help restructure them into producing eco-friendly cars, which is what they are presently doing.  The bailout they received from the government was just as corrupt as anything FirstEnergy was involved in.  The difference was that the Obama administration controlled the DOJ.  And when Trump was president, the same radicals were still running the DOJ because he refused to act in such a corrupt way and call them out on their activism.   So now the FBI, run by those prominent government activists, wants to destroy companies like FirstEnergy unless they embrace these new wind and solar Obama initiatives.  They are picking winners and losers, which led to the corruption that eventually involved the many Republicans caught taking money from FirstEnergy so that they could keep their nuclear power plants open. 

I would say that this kind of corruption is going on in all states, and all their legislators are involved in some way or another.  But in Ohio, it’s a Trump state, and it has a target on its back for progressives that go way beyond reasonability.  That means we have to take a stand with this governor race and clean things before the general election vote for governor takes place.  Republicans have to take that step with a governor prospect that can rebuild the party behind an anti-corruption platform, and for me, Jim Renacci is just the right kind of guy for the job.  President Trump likes Jim quite a lot, and a Jim Renacci ticket that is pro-business, anti-corruption, and knows how to stand up to progressive tricks is just the ticket for the current challenges. I’m against corruption of any kind.  I don’t want my state tarnished with any corruption, let alone being number one in the entire country.  That is just embarrassing.  Not acceptable.  So when Jim Renacci sat across the table from me and looked me straight in the eye and told me what he wanted to do with being the Ron DeSantis of Ohio, I was just a little encouraged.  Ron DeSantis is the new gold standard for which all Republican governors should aspire, and if Renacci has that kind of scope for the governor job in mind, well, then that’s something I can get excited about.  So far, other candidates haven’t announced themselves for the governor race, but I don’t think this is something we need to fool around with.  Republicans need to understand the battle plan.  We need to retake the House at the Federal level, and we need a leader to do that.  We need to unite behind that cause and the people who can make that happen.  And we have to repair the corruption problem left in DeWine’s wake.  That will take someone like Renacci, who is dedicated to the cause, can get Trump behind the effort, and is willing to do the job in two steps, repairing the Republican Party, then defeating the Democrat challenger.   It helps when you can talk to someone like Jim to see if they are up for such a big job, and based on my experience, he is. 

Rich Hoffman

The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business
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Screw Our Freedoms: ‘The Brothers Karamazov’ would have been different if written in Deadwood

Screw Our Freedoms, no, I don’t think so

It was pretty amazing to see the massive panic coming out of the Biden administration over the vaccine push and mask mandates.  Stunning really, from celebrities to Dr. Fauci himself, last week leading into this one has been a test of sorts for this global push for a central government to take over all day-to-day activity.  But for that to happen, they had to scare us into imprisoning ourselves into the cage they intended for us.  Instead, what happened was that they found most of us refused to enter and are running about doing our own thing regardless of their taunts.  That left Arnold Schwarzenegger to tell us on CNN to “screw your freedoms.” Dr. Fauci said pretty much the same, something in direct reference to Kristi Noem, the governor of South Dakota, as over a million people descended on the Sturgis Bike Rally, an annual event I talk about a lot.   Despite the Covid warnings of the new “Delta variant,” people went anyway and didn’t wear masks.  People were getting tired of the government crying wolf every day, and they were finally starting to ignore them.  I would argue that people should have stopped listening to the government months ago, but ultimately, people were getting it, and the government has been in a bit of a panic.  So much so that Biden avoided talking about the evacuation of Afghanistan but instead deflected comment to the booster shot to the vaccine that would be available soon.  Covid is their cover story to hide all the crimes that have been committed, even when the world was on fire and all they wanted to talk about was a glass of water. 

This is Where We Are

God bless Kristi Noem, who went to Sturgis herself after a week of the press following Dr. Fauci and trying to put tremendous peer pressure on her to cave to the gods of Covid.  She rode her horse onto the stage at Outlaw Square in Deadwood carrying an American flag in front of a large crowd and gave an excellent speech on freedom.  The optics were tremendous, and you could tell by what the media didn’t show.  Hardly anybody covered a prominent American governor riding her horse carrying an American flag while wearing a cowboy hat down the streets of Deadwood, South Dakota, at all.  But for Kristi Noem, it was her answer to the criticism.   It was a kind of Braveheart moment in this new American story, and it infuriated the government.  Wait, Kristi Noem is the government.  So was Donald Trump. Let’s say instead, these insurgents connected to international Marxism have infected Washington D.C. and other academic circles with the intent to overthrow our American Constitution.  How about that?  We don’t want to overthrow the government.  We want our government to resume administrative power and take away the leverage that the spooks, kooks, and losers of international Marxism have over us presently.  We let them have that leverage after all out of niceness, and they misread that niceness as weakness.  But that niceness has expired.   

This is what Leadership looks like

While all this was going on, I read Vivek Ramasamy’s new book Woke, Inc. a few times, which I liked a lot.  But, there was a lot I didn’t like at all, which I attribute to him being on the inside of corporate America for a long time—even being tempted by the fruits of globalism.  I loved his book because I loved his perspective.  But as I closed the book for the third time in a 70 some hour period, I concluded that Vivek is still learning. He’s a brilliant guy who has made a lot of money, but he’s still the kid in India who grew up with a caste system spoiled by American capitalism.  He thinks the modern Woke problem can be solved like the story he recites in the book The Brothers Karamazov, where the Grand Inquisitor committed Christ to death because the Church no longer had a use for Jesus.  Jesus Christ had served his purpose, and now it was time to die and let the Church handle things.  Well, we can’t help where we are born, and I’m perfectly open to people fleeing from where they came from to come to America for a chance. I’m even more for America spreading its influence to many of those places so that they can get western civilization in their back yards, which makes what’s happening in Afghanistan that much more of a tragedy.  But in America, when we get tired of being poked in the eye by some bad guys, we won’t be kissing them on the cheek and leaving quietly as Jesus did in that story.  The Brothers Karamazov is a very European story. That’s not how things are done in America, or at least they haven’t been.  And that planned assumption that Americans would passively sit around and be bossed around was a bad one from the start.  Yes, there are plenty of bootlickers in America who will.  There are more who won’t, and that is what’s going on with the masks and the vaccines. 

Liberty or Death……..but where are the deaths?

I only bring up Vivek because he wrote a reasonably significant book that the mainstreamers have fully embraced.  He represents many people who hatched this Covid plan, and clearly, they don’t understand Americans.  I was enormously proud of Kristi Noem when she hoisted that flag on stage atop her horse in Deadwood.  I had just returned from that exact spot a few weeks ago.  Deadwood and South Dakota, in many ways, are vestiges of freedom that people growing up in India or Russia can’t even imagine until they see it for themselves.  And even then, the culture change is dramatic. It’s not an accident that Mike Lindell held his Symposium in South Dakota. That’s where the heart of America is, and you can certainly feel it when you visit. It’s a long way from Wall Street and the hacks of investment that Vivek knows.  People who ride horses, shoot guns, and love their American flag aren’t putting up with what they are seeing, and the current government is just now getting a feel for it.  These kinds of Americans aren’t going to be controlled by Facebook or Google. They’ll just come up with their alternative.  They aren’t wearing masks or have the government tell them to take the medicine they don’t want.  And if the government gets too pushy, they’ll get shoved back.  When people wonder why Afghanistan is the “graveyard of empires,” as Biden calls it, they haven’t seen anything yet when they try to go door to door in Ohio or South Dakota to confiscate guns and force people to take a vaccine.  Instead, they will see something far different from what Vivek Ramaswamy proposed with his example of Christ versus The Grand Inquisitor.  If The Grand Inquisitor tried some of that stuff that he tried to pull on Jesus Christ in the city of Deadwood, or Sturgis………well, I would promise that he would have been shot dead before he ever had a chance to sentence Christ to death.  Fyodor Dostoevsky’s great book would have been a short story instead of a great literary classic if written in Deadwood.  And the bad guy would have died quickly and spectacularly under a hail of gunfire.   The American way to fight these things ultimately isn’t with a kiss on the cheek, but a hand on our guns and the willingness to defend ourselves when pressed by an authoritarian government that does not have our best interests in mind.  And it’s good to see people finally sticking up for themselves because that is ultimately the way to peace where such a tragedy could be avoided.  Do like Nancy Reagan used to say, “Just Say No.”

 

Rich Hoffman

The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business
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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

Kings Island Goes Cashless: Communist China is leading the world in controlling financial transactions

Communist China is Leading Kings Island into going Cashless

I understand why Kings Island, as a company, would want to go cashless.  Forget about the conspiracy theories for a minute of a global cashless system run by a communist regime.  They have many people under 22 years old that they employ, and cash is messy.  Everywhere there is something to buy at Kings Island, at the beginning of the day and the end of the day, Kings Island must act as a major bank and carry a lot of cash on hand to operate.  It is a tricky problem to put all that money in and out of a safe.  Then there are all the mistakes that the employees make during a typical business day, and they lose a lot of money at each station where goods are purchased.  Then, of course, money is dirty, all kinds of people touch it, it never gets washed, and it becomes a cesspool in the pocket of someone’s dirty, sweaty pants.  For the convenience of Kings Island, one of the biggest amusement parks in America located in Northern Cincinnati, getting away from cash and moving to credit cards makes their job a lot easier.  That is part of the big global plan to push for a cashless system.  Companies like Kings Island have tremendous overhead just in dealing with employees who handle cash on any particular business day, and it’s a real pain, especially if there are options.  I understand why Kings Island wants to be cashless.  I know why global communists wish to be cashless, which we’ll talk about in a minute.  But what nobody was asking is, what do the customers want?”

Well, I can tell you my thoughts, I was infuriated when I was stuck in the Festhaus of Kings Island with all my grandchildren, and my wife couldn’t buy any food because we just had found out while paying for that food in line that they were only taking credit cards.  No cash allowed.  We were all hungry and tired.  We had been swimming, so we didn’t bring anything that might be easy to lose into the park.  We put a hundred bucks in our pockets for food but otherwise kept all our valuables in the car.  Now we couldn’t use that money to pay for food, and we were highly inconvenienced.  The guy at the checkout apologized and explained that Kings Island had made the switch due to Covid restrictions, which infuriated me.  Because I knew it wasn’t Governor DeWine who was pushing a cashless system.  It was Cedar Fair Amusements who were using Covid as an excuse to go cashless.  An advantage to them that I explained above. That’s when we left the park to get food somewhere else, which became a nightmare all its own for similar reasons.  But needless to say, that was the end of our day at Kings Island, and it will likely be my last time going for a while.  Going cashless for me is a breaking point, a take it or leave it a moment, and I’d just soon leave it. 

The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

The push for a cashless society comes from communist China.  They are already doing much of what Kings Island is working to do, so why not do it.  Why are they doing it? Well, it gives them control over their people.  It allows for the concept of a social score to accept or deny financial transactions.  For instance, if you speak out against the communist government in China on social media or some other traceable way, they can lower your social score, which might prevent you from riding a bus or going to see a movie.  Just think of the censorship of Twitter and YouTube but apply it to things you need to do in life, like go to the grocery store.  If you have a terrible social score, you may not be able to buy food.  That is how China plans to control its population of over a billion people, and it’s why many American corporations are leaning toward a cashless society.  Having that kind of consumer control is very attractive to some of the variability in any financial transaction.  I have seen this cashless thing attempted at several tradeshows and other venues around the country, and so far, it hasn’t been working very well.  There are still many people who still want to use cash, so vendors have to make accommodations.  What it always comes down to is whether or not someone wants a customer.  The consumer desire drives the behavior, not the other way around.  It is for that reason that cash will always be king in America.  Cash is freedom.

I give an example in the video above about me wanting to buy a beer at Kings Island.  Typically, I enjoy going there to look around and think.  If I pay ten bucks for a beer, I pull the money out of my pocket and pay whoever is selling the beer.  The transaction is between the seller and me.  No bank in New York even knows about it.  They might understand that Kings Island sold a beer, but to whom and for how long someone like me took to drink it, nobody knows.  And I like it that way.  So do a lot of other Americans.  Part of drinking the beer is a minor rebellion in it that is specific to American culture.  Just drinking a beer to be drinking one is pretty dull.  Also, using anything but cash means you must trust the system and all the employees who handle the transaction.  While traveling around, it’s happened to me that my wife might go to buy something, and she gets to the counter to pay with a credit card, and the company has shut down the card.  That happened to us while I was traveling in Japan, I had made a suspicious purchase, a tiny one, and the credit card company thought it was a stolen card testing it out on something less risky before making a more significant purchase.  My wife in the states was the one who got stuck without a way of paying until we could resolve the issue with several phone calls and a lot of embarrassment.  Carrying around cash as a secondary or primary way of paying is an obvious solution.  But if we have a cashless society, you must trust the entire system to get everything right, and we all have stories we could tell.  The burden shifts to the consumer while the corporations and governments of the world get the ease of control they so much desire. 

I expected a lot more out of Kings Island, and for them to blame the decision on Covid was just too low of a blow to accept.  I generally love Kings Island and Cedar Fair Amusements.  All I could think of was when they announced that they were not leading in the world but was only copying what the communists in China have already been doing. It diminished them significantly to my mind.  It felt like a betrayal.  My family was out of that park within 10 minutes of that attempted food exchange.  They do have cash conversion machines that can put a value on a card, but then your cash becomes like a gift card, and you must start figuring out how much money you put on it for all your transactions, and the whole thing becomes a significant pain in the neck.  Not that a few hot dogs and a hamburger cost $40, but they were making people stand around and use all these cashless systems was too much.  So, we left, and I can’t say I’ll be going back any time soon.  I go to Kings Island to enjoy myself, not to go to communist China.  Because that’s essentially what it has become—too many rules, too much control, and way too rigid.  And lazy.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Covid is the New Excuse for Laziness: Turning America into socialist Europe

Covid is the New Excuse to Hide Laziness

I told the whole story in the video above, but I’ll have to say, it’s been a long time since I was that angry.  After a long, hot day and a constant stream of Covid related excuses in service, a car full of kids who refused to eat anything but chicken nuggets and waiting in line for 45 minutes to get them from a Wendy’s in Kings Mills, Ohio, I was about to lose control and go on a rampage.  Both Wendy’s and McDonald’s had their dining rooms closed due to what they were saying was Covid concerns, but I knew better. It was apparent when we finally made it to the drive-thru window to find two lone workers busting their butts on a Saturday night dinner rush from Kings Island doing their best to fulfill all the orders coming in much faster than they could deal with them.  What made it worse for me was that I knew exactly how those kids felt.  Many years ago, when I was an up-and-comer, I worked at that Wendy’s, only it used to be across the highway.  This new one was recently built to deal with the large amount of traffic that came from being so close to one of the largest amusement parks in the United States.  Back then, I was known as one of the fastest grill people in all of Cincinnati.  Those were the words of Wendy’s management, not from me.  I frequently ran both meat grills, the dining room, and the drive-through, all by myself.  I also ran the fry station and handled all the chicken, and I never got burnt.  Working fast food was one of my many second jobs as I raised my kids, and to make it even more compelling, my wife and I didn’t have a second car.  We couldn’t afford one, so I rode a bicycle 12 miles one way every day in addition to my primary job at Cincinnati Milacron, which was just down the hill near South Lebanon. I’ve been in situations like that many times, and I know what good is supposed to look like. 

Only back then, there was no Covid.  People got colds, and they came to work anyway, and nobody ever died.  If they did, we never heard about it.  I never called off work for anything.   If I had a broken arm, a broken leg, and open lacerations, I’d come to work anyway.  If the pain was too great, I’d take a few aspirins and plug through the night.  I never killed anybody with my work ethic or viral loads.  The world was much better off when people behaved that way than it was now, that was for sure.  And here I was at a fast-food restaurant that I had worked at before, watching a new generation of kids struggling to do a quarter of what I used to do all the time.  I worked for McDonald’s too one hard summer where the world was crashing down around me in every way you could imagine.  The pressure was so great that it would have killed a lot of people.  But I came to work every day without a car and worked my ass off, literally.  So, when I see both restaurants with drive-thru lines wrapped around their buildings with 45 minutes to one hour wait times, I was more than a little furious to be stuck in that situation.  I would only do it for my grandchildren; let me say that. 

The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Even today, and I can’t officially tell anybody to do this due to all the socialist rules and regulations of the government class, I often repaired my own serious injuries, including a time where my knucklebone came right through the skin.  I wrapped it up and finished my shift.  Then went home and fixed it up. Still, if I get a severe cut or those around me who think the way I do, we superglue the wound and get back to work.  In cases where 8 or 9 stitches would be needed, I have frequently just pulled out a tube of superglue and glued the skin back together, only losing about 15 minutes of work.  These days, such an idea is not even conceivable to anybody.  Everything is a lost-time incident.  Everything!  But what made this particular night bad was that both McDonald’s and Wendy’s had closed their dining rooms and expected to blame it on Covid regulations.  The expectation by management was that Mike DeWine would go on lockdown mode again, so without a fight of any kind, management wanted to show health officials that they were going to be proactive and get in front of the protocols.  But, as I also said in the video above, I knew Mike DeWine wasn’t going to dare do anything about Covid.  He had already used his political points last year, and he came up a loser.  He couldn’t afford to fall for the Covid crap again.  And if I knew that, why didn’t the executives at Wendy’s and McDonald’s?  Well, of course, the answer is a dumb and disappointing one.  Do you know what it is?

Most of what made that particular Saturday miserable, even at Kings Island itself, was staff shortages.  The government now empowered companies with lousy management to blame their terrible recruiting methods and high turnover on Covid instead of their internal problems.  Covid had given everyone these days a free doctor’s excuse to get out of work, sit home on their lazy butts, and cry every time it rained outside.  And that was the real problem.  It had nothing to do with Covid being an actual danger.  It was all about the government sticking its inefficient nose into the lives of businesses and ruining initiative and gumption, further eroding the work ethic of an already soft generation.  Granted, the stories I told about my own experiences were extreme even back then, but they are unfathomable now.  Nobody does those kinds of things because our work ethic has been virtually destroyed by a heavy government culture that has tampered too much with human initiative. And that is why I was furious getting those chicken nuggets at Wendy’s on a hot Saturday night in Kings Mills.  Even as I was about to blow my stack on the employees, I could only see in their eyes as they handed me the kid’s meals, defeated faces who were about to throw in the towel.  There were no managers there that night that we could see.  Nobody was being called in to help.  There was no pressure from corporate to get their act straight and to do better.  You know why, because now everyone could blame Covid for their problems.  The government had given the lazy a new excuse that gave them a free pass, Covid.  Anytime something wrong happened, everybody had to say “Covid,” and everyone was supposed to understand.  Expectations were supposed to be tossed away, and we were all supposed to expect much less from our consumer experience. 

Well, let me say this, I worked way too hard in my life to arrive at a point in time where I will ever accept the kind of lackluster effort I see these days.  And Covid will never be an excuse.  The government screwed up by injecting itself into our health and wellness for all kinds of duplicitous reasons.  But if I can’t get my grandkids their chicken nuggets in a fast and productive way, then it’s war! 

Rich Hoffman

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