Tag: management

The CIA Funds Itself Through Illegal Drugs: Without civilian oversight, corruption always occurs

The first problem I had with the world after the first Trump White House administration was that so many characters, including many domestic conspirators, were not at all concerned about breaking the laws of our Constitution.  And our legal system, led by our three letter agencies, was working against it, as clearly, the FBI did in its work to perform a coup against a sitting American president.  Then, there was the CIA, which was actively involved in many controversies.  But what sealed it all for me was when I had a chance to talk to Mike Pompeo, who ran the CIA under Trump, and I had him alone for a moment to ask him what he thought about the 51 intelligence officers who had come out and dismissed the Biden laptop and called it Russian disinformation.  He was careful with his answer.  I think he did an excellent job as the CIA Director.  I was a kid who used to have a CIA ball cap that I wore everywhere.  I love law and order and the idea of a protective agency that is out there in the world fighting the bad guys.  But the more I learned about the CIA and the rest of the intelligence agencies, the more obvious it was that they “were” the bad guys.  They weren’t patriotic Americans fighting to do what’s right.  With all these elements in my mind, I allowed myself to ask the question about their integrity because it was a long process; the evidence had to take me to the answer because I wasn’t looking for it to be so sinister.  I wanted to think that reform of the CIA was possible and that if only we had the right kind of leadership, they could be salvageable. 

Then, I heard the root cause of the problem from a prosecutor while serving on a grand jury.  We were talking about the Constitution and the typical visits they make in Butler County to the local jail to see how criminals live and are processed because many of the decisions we had to make would impact that system.  It was one of those let your hair down kind of discussions, and he let it slip that we did that with grand juries in Butler County, Ohio because we were still old-fashioned regarding the law and wanted to pay tribute to the concept of civilian oversight.  That hit me because, to my mind, that was the whole point of what we were doing on the grand jury.  But then I looked over the weeks of cases we had been judging, and many were not the significant, serious crimes out there.  Many of those were left unresolved because the Feds were usually involved in those and took over once the borders of our community were imposed upon by outside elements, which, when it comes to significant crimes, is just about everywhere when it comes to drug cartels.  My experience on the grand jury was frustrating regarding drugs because I have a profound hatred of all mind-numbing intoxicants, even those prescribed by doctors.  To say I don’t like drugs is not severe enough to describe how I feel about them.  Hate isn’t a strong enough word.  But a pattern was emerging that was at the root cause of all this bad behavior, and I did a lot of research to uncover what I had been learning about the process of law and order from the perspective of prosecutors and why these drug cases weren’t being punished enough, and why the big dealers were never messed with. 

The problem with the CIA is that they do not have civilian oversight.  And they have been working against voter-picked White House occupants for many decades now and have involved themselves domestically in election fraud, just as they do around the world when they set up governments to topple countries considered enemies of America.  At least, that’s what we’ve been told.  Instead, what has happened is that they have formed their fourth branch of government that does not have any elected representative oversight.  They do not report to Congress, where the American people have their representatives overseeing their government.  And if they do a terrible job, we can elect new representatives.  Just as the Butler County prosecutor let it slip that they have to pay reverence to the concept of the American Constitution and the idea that the whole point of a grand jury was to have the community oversee the behavior of law enforcement to make sure they weren’t getting too big for their britches.  Because most of the world doesn’t respect America anymore due to the open border movement, they certainly don’t respect our legal system domestically and have no problem breaking laws with immunity.  In addition to all the experiences with various people that I mentioned, in my youth, I had experience with mob crime families, and I always wondered why the police and FBI never seemed to bust them.   I knew where they were and who they were.  But unless it was a rival crime element, the feds and police never seemed to arrest them.  Why were all these things happening?

The answer for me was a long one, but an excellent package of the truth can be found in the book by Paul Williams called Operation Gladio, which gives a history of the creation of the CIA after World War II and how it interacts with the sovereign government of the Vatican and the Italian crime families.  It’s much more complicated than all that. It involves banking families with their hands in all kinds of global activity, but it all points to one essential problem.  There is a tendency toward corruption in any organization that does not have to be accountable to the people it is supposed to serve.  That was the key ingredient to the American Constitution; that was the purpose of our grand jury and jury system.  But even our prosecutors see that our legal society has been washed away into globalism concepts without respect for American policy.  They don’t even respect our borders, let alone our laws.  Prosecutors know all this and only go after the kind of crimes they are allowed to prosecute, allowed by the presumption of global politics, not domestic management.  The reason that the CIA has always been rumored and confirmed to allow the drug trade to flourish was that it has funded its budgets, which keeps them from getting money from Congress and avoiding that need for civilian oversight, with illegal activity in the drug trade.  And that was a mistake, assuming they could operate in secrecy and not lose themselves to corruption.  And, of course, they would not allow a President elected by vote to diminish their power even if they had to kill to do it, which they have been willing to do, as the Kennedy assassination displays with history in hindsight.  We have a government agency that operates on its own and is funded by illegal activity, a global drug trade that started in China during World War II but has migrated into a worldwide enterprise connected directly to international mobs and religious organizations that ran a cover story, for which the entire purpose was to have all the power of a government without any oversight.  The point of all the crime was to fund their activities without having to beg Congress for funding and report to them the value of their work.  When pressed, they would point to nuclear threats and declare any oversight could result in World War III.  Or that aliens might come down and kill all of us, so we had to support the secrecy of the CIA and FBI for our own good.  Otherwise, we might all die if we ask too many questions.  And sadly, that’s why we have to get rid of them. They don’t have civilian oversight and are willing to fight to maintain that status, which makes them very dangerous and is the greatest threat America faces as a nation.  It’s not other countries that we have to worry about.  Without any civilian oversight that controls its government agencies the process is doomed to fail from the start and that is the story of the CIA.  They are guilty of working against the Constitutional parameters set up to prevent them from becoming just what they are today: a fourth branch of unaccountable and dangerous government that has turned to illegal activities for their sustenance and intentions for a global government that is corrupt beyond measure and a menace to us all. And they can’t be allowed to continue as they have been.  They kill, they steal, and they corrupt in ways that are dangerous to the human race and we can’t ignore their destructive behavior any longer.

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

Time Management and Friendships: Being productive is fun but not very socially accomidating

To answer the question all at once, because many people have been reaching out for friendship, and I give them quick one-sentence texts and very short emails, it’s not personal. I have many friendships, and I like that I do. But I don’t traditionally maintain them. In my life, there isn’t a lot of time to ask about how the dogs and cats are doing, and I certainly am not one who spends time standing around the grill in the backyard with friends sipping beer and talking about lawnmowers. There is nothing wrong with that; many people enjoy that kind of thing. I might if I didn’t otherwise have the type of life I enjoy. But it’s certainly not a rejection of friendship that I express to all those who have reached out, and it’s been happening so frequently that I do want to put things in context a bit. If I can avoid some hurt feelings, I care enough to at least do that. I try to answer all the emails I get from people. For instance, my Gmail account is so out of control that if anybody sends me an email there, it’s highly likely that I will not see it. There are over 500,000 emails there that I will never have time to open, so I have other email accounts that are much more manageable that I use for the needed correspondence. It’s an interesting problem to use technology to reach as many people as possible and not lose touch with the personal relationships that can quickly saturate life with too much interaction. As I came to think about it recently, it really is an astonishing number of correspondence, and managing them all might otherwise make each of them feel disenfranchised, which certainly isn’t the intention. 

Professionally, I apply about 70 hours per week toward those objectives, which by itself is a lot. Then beyond that, I put in about 30 hours a week, usually between the hours of 2 AM and 6 AM, toward political endeavors, which I view not as a networking opportunity but purely as community maintenance. I want to live in a good world, so I spend that kind of time each week to do so. Some people actually move into elected office, and many have asked me about doing so in many positions. But the truth is, I can do the most with the time I have available in the way that I do because I am interested in so many community functions. Even though I talk about it a lot in specific formats, education issues are less than 1% of what I spend my time on. There are actually many more topics that I am much more passionate about, but public education is a predecessor to them. So, you must do one thing before you can do the other thing kind of thing. So, if you are doing math, you can quickly see that there are only about 68 hours of sleep left for the week, which would be about 9 hours per day. But then there is spending time with family, which I do a lot. And I have a lot of interests and read many books. I read an average of 3 books per week. I manage that by utilizing reading time during meals. I answer emails usually while walking from one place to another. And there certainly isn’t much time to talk about lawnmowers and smoking meat in the backyard. 

The truth is, I love the pace of my life and all the things I do in it. It’s a hyperactive life, and I wouldn’t want it any other way. Many people believe that we are supposed to sit around meditating all the time, centering ourselves with quiet. To take time and find peace in our lives. I think that is a bunch of garbage. Life is meant to be productive. Quiet time is boring. I would go as far as to say that it’s lazy. And people who say such things are just trying to justify their own lack of ambition. If I had more hours in the day, I would quickly fill them with every possible opportunity to do something productive. They would not be filled with more sleep. I think only a few hours per night in the form of power naps is needed, and I’ve been doing this kind of pace for several decades, and it’s enjoyable. Not a burden the way many might think of it. There are occasions when hostile perpetrators came to my house at 2 AM hoping to find me asleep, only to be caught by me as I was walking around my yard at that hour with books in both hands and me reading them with a flashlight. Needless to say, they were quite surprised and frustrated by that reality. Being busy has its benefits, you might say it that way, depending on what a person values in life. And for me, it’s productivity. The more productive I am, the happier I am. But I do expect to accomplish things quickly. I don’t have much time for traffic or to get to things. I drive fast. I avoid crowds that might slow me down. And I expect to be doing multiple things all at the same time. My wife thinks it’s funny; we recently went to the grocery to get my mom some Mother’s Day flowers; I expected to be in and out in under 7 minutes. She wanted to look at the various breads and snacks, so she slowed us down and laughed at how fast I moved. She’s used to it, but she always manages to draw a joke when she has to experience my pace, which is so different from her. 

Usually, especially regarding family things, she coordinates where everything happens. I show up where she says and do what needs to be done. I love family stuff, but like the grocery visit, I usually have an hourglass I’m looking at before the next thing needs to happen. So, without a relationship with my wife, it’s pretty hard to get me to be somewhere unless she arranges it. I appreciate when frineds send me texts telling me about something important, even if I don’t answer right away. Those reminders keep me plugged in where I might otherwise miss it. Reminders of big events are very useful as news stories. I don’t waste much time on gossiping in the newspapers or the nightly news. But I do appreciate it when people point things out that are useful. From trusted friends, it helps me manage chaos better and still get to the essence of a problem. But taking time for small talk and smelling the roses that are just not for me. And I don’t intend for people who would like to spend more time to get frustrated with the lack of effort on my part. It’s certainly not intentional. It’s just clock management. You get just so much time per day, and I literally work to make every second of every minute of every hour matter to the most efficient utilization. And it’s fun. But certainly not normal. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Kids Who Learn to Shoot Guns Grow Up Into Better Adults: Managing stress and dealing with problems under parental care works better than government tampering

It’s come up a lot lately, especially on social media, where there are criticisms of parents who start training their kids to use firearms under ten years old. There have been some cases of kids just over five years old on social media actually drawing pistols from their holsters and shooting, then reloading with a clip that has the more timid-minded of our society exasperated with horror at such a sight. Which, of course, demands some ground rule understanding. I have known a lot of kids, especially growing up in southern Ohio, who worked on farms and started using firearms at a very young age, and they have grown up to be some of the best people in society. And when I see videos of these kids who have liberals so horrified, I see children who will grow up and become very useful as adults. They’ll become good spouses; they’ll be good parents themselves. They’ll be good members of their community. They’ll make great workers. They likely won’t grow up with many dumb problems that many people these days are experiencing through stress management and depression. Learning to use firearms and to manage danger as early as possible is great for young people, and the earlier they learn, the better off generally for them later in life. Out of all the people I know and have known who handle firearms and did so as kids, I’d have to think hard if any of them grew up into some kind of psychological disaster. I can’t think of any. Instead, they usually hold doors open for women; they are polite to adults when speaking to them. And they likely will attend church willingly at some point in their life and have some fundamental beliefs that make them trustworthy people to their friends and neighbors. And their exposure to firearms made them better people, not worse. 

I saw an advertisement for anxiety medicine the other day, and it reminded me of how often I hear about that problem in young people these days. When my kids were growing up, it was Hyper Active Disorder which was why medical firms prescribed Retaline to kids if they were identified as being too hyper in school. I always saw all hyperactive disorders as the latest scam of the medical field, where experts, just as they did with Covid, stuck their noses into people’s businesses in ways they had no right to do. What we have seen coming out of medical professionals with their alignments with the government and Big Pharma has been an experiment that has failed miserably. As the government tried to use public schools to remove parents from children’s lives, the expert class hoped that the drug industry could replace wisdom, experience, and love with some kind of chemical substitute. Of course, that has been a devastating failure. We have watched a steady decline in people generally over the last few generations; the more good parenting was replaced with substitutes. And the substitutes have turned out to be no substitute at all. Rather, they made known problems worse and created problems in people who would be expected not to have them otherwise. The failures of experts extend well beyond the damage they did with a massive global power move regarding Covid in 2020, which has been steadily rejected by many populations ever since, but those failures had been going on for many decades prior, as governments turned to the drug industry to satisfy the psychological void of an overly managed society with too much central planning, and a lack of fundamental love coming from family interactions. 

I think I’ve said it twenty times this past week where some kid, someone younger than 40 as far as I’m concerned, has been said to have some kind of mental disorder, such as anxiety. My response has been that people have always had problems, but recently we turned to drugs to treat them. For anxiety and stress management, the primary cause is that there aren’t enough fathers teaching their kids to shoot guns and build fires anymore. If a kid did learn things at ages 5 through 10 like building fires and shooting guns, we would find that there would be a lot more adults arriving to maturity who could handle problems much better than what we are seeing now, where people are just collapsing over small things. We have had an overly coddled society where the government and media have insinuated that danger could be managed out of existence, which then has left entire groups of people unable to manage the stress that danger poses. Most of those problems could have been solved if an adult had given a kid aged six a pocketknife and taught them how not to cut themselves. I knew many years ago when the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts were coming under attack by leftist radicals, that we were going to have this problem where people were going to grow up under liberal guidelines, tossing out the teaching of managing danger to just turning to government to eliminate the danger. Now because so many people have listened to them and so many children have grown up under their influence, we have a mass society of drug users and victims of a panic attack every time lightning streaks across the sky. And that problem happened when the government told lazy people that everything would be taken care of. If you don’t have enough money, just get on welfare; the government will pay you not to work, and if you are stressed about anything, just take some drugs. With that position, it’s no wonder why the government has been pushing to legalize pot—more drugs and more dead minds, which make people easier to control for an out-of-control government. 

Whenever I see young people working with firearms, I don’t see abuse but self-reliance. Teaching children to handle danger at a young age, and to manage it properly, with poise and persistence, is the key to a successful adulthood, and those who criticize such methods are part of the problem. Listening to those types of people who think guns are too dangerous for children to handle at all has led our society to the problems it has now, which is an unmitigated disaster. I would rather have a 6-year-old learning to shoot guns with their parents and showing proficiency around them even in their maintenance than some crazy adult flipped out with hypertension because they never learned how to manage stress and do things for themselves. The secret fear that all these anxiety victims have is the loss of a safety net where the safety blanket of an all-powerful government won’t be there to relieve them of stress, that the drugs might stop working, or that the money might suddenly disappear. People who learn to live without that security are much better able to do for themselves, so when tough times come, they don’t panic; they just solve the problem. And that’s what’s missing these days. There aren’t enough young people being taught how to handle guns, and they are growing up to be liberal disasters of panic and anxiety. And as a result, everything that is stressful comes out as anxiety as if that were an excuse for not performing. And that’s why we have the problems these days that we do. Government and Pharma tampered with something that worked great before they came along and messed with the basics of human needs with their own misaligned philosophy that has been so destructive and ruined so many lives. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Remember When Lakota Paid $175,000 to an Employee over Ethical Violations: The cost of mismanagement of public employees is extraordinarily high

For the quick answer that is being talked about because of the Lakota superintendent’s lawsuit threat letters, the response to them would, of course, be frivolous litigation aggressively pursued based on The New York Times v. Sullivan case of 1964. In that well-known case, criticism of public officials protected by the 1st and 14th Amendments ensures that legal recourse is off limits for pursuing damages. The price for a life in public office and the comforts that come with living off public funds is that criticism is healthy for an honest exchange of information. No matter how crazy the information may be, which hasn’t been the case with this Lakota superintendent case, it is protected under the American Constitution. There is consistent case law that resolves the issue to the extent that any challenge to it would perfectly justify a knowingly frivolous abuse of litigation and the time of the courts themselves. And with that known, the aggressive attack on the public by sending out threatening letters to around ten community members just because they expressed themselves about the kind of private conduct that Matt Miller has utilized in his life has only caused a lot more anger. Because of this aggressive act, and what has been learned about what the school board knew and when, now there have been explorations of class action litigation against Lakota schools themselves for the reckless spending of taxpayer funds that have gone on not just in the actions of protecting their superintendent from public judgment, but in several other instances as well. Currently, a group of people are adding up all the costs and instances so that a coherent story can be pieced together by the evidence, and further action is pending in those assemblies. 

Yet, along the way, it has been noticed that a lawsuit filed by former teacher union leadership member Emily Osterling won her $175,000 in 2019 for wrongful termination back in 2017. At that time, Matt Miller put forth an 11-page resolution that listed a series of allegations, none of them criminal, pertaining to Osterling’s dealings with students and their parents. The resolution illustrated behavior that was willful and persistent violations of board policy pertaining to staff ethics as well as Ohio’s code of professional conduct for educators. And federal laws govern how she educates and serves the students. Well, that got some people’s attention since we had all just been told that any of the Lakota superintendent’s actions revealed from his very explicit divorce records that his conduct wasn’t illegal. And that morality wasn’t a consideration of employment. Upon learning about all this behavior, many people in the Lakota district were shocked that Lakota didn’t have a “morality clause” in the superintendent’s contract like other schools do. And in that oversight, they have allowed a very aggressive, a very progressive activist and an unwelcomed figure into our community at a high cost, with no way to get rid of him. And that has brought up the excessive cost of keeping that employee with indirect costs that go far beyond his actual salary and benefits. By the time his cost to Lakota is added up due to lawyer fees, public relations firms, and other burdens connected to other instances of similar mismanagement, it looks to be in the many thousands of dollars. Even millions if we go back to all the circumstances since his hiring in 2017 when that Emily Osterling case occurred. Now I’m not suddenly a supporter of teacher union members. But the point of this matter is how Emily Osterling could be held to some standard of values and even terminated from her job when Matt Miller was not held to the same standard as a superintendent for essentially doing much worse. 

Matt Miller was always nice in my presence, so I was shocked to learn that several school board members thought Matt would sue the district over his contract for a lot of money if he were terminated over the revelation of his divorce revelations in 2020. I had my doubts about this until I saw how he behaved toward the community who learned about his private life and expressed themselves as to why they didn’t like it. The letter I received was very aggressive, and my policy on that kind of thing was to hit back many times harder. That’s when discussion about a class action case started to take root in gathering up all the facts and the timeline. And after reading that letter, it was obvious that the school board’s worries were justified. However, to understand the law, it would have been better to settle the issue in court than to dig deeper into the trouble with attempts to cover it all up with PR firms and lawyers. Understanding the constitutional limits of legal recourse, it would have been perfectly justified to counter any such attack with frivolous litigation given the context of his contract concerning community reputation, which was his burden to maintain healthily. 

With the standard set by the Emily Osterling case, it’s evident that a community precedent had been established in removing her as an employee. It didn’t hold up in court, and they ended up paying her out a lot of money. Add her case to the many others out there and we have a serious case of mismanagement at the school board level over a long period of time. The job has been too big for them to handle since they give everything to some professional class to take care of, which ends up costing a lot of money. Of course, there will be justifiable legal costs, with legal firms and PR outlets, but what we are seeing is a massive amount of waste, waste we wouldn’t have noticed unless Lakota’s superintendent decided to attack members of the community in these bizarre ways as if he were entitled to employment, no matter what his personal conduct revealed. Much of this he has done to himself through his own mismanagement of his own life. Then Lakota, as a district, has had to spend a lot of money to protect him from his own actions. Then when you add up all those costs to all other similar disputes with other employees and public relations problems, you get quite a large number. And that large number results from massive mismanagement by a public-school culture that is out of control and not aligned with the community that pays for it.

And in many cases, the only correction we have for such bad behavior on a massive scale is the constitutional protections of The New York Times v. Sullivan, 1964. No wonder progressives everywhere want to shut down free speech. But all the law of our country is built around constitutional law, not the protection of public employees by a judgmental public. Without those judgments, there is literally nothing to keep public employees honest. And what is such an insult with this case at Lakota, despite learning that the very things that are happening now and being justified as correct were the same things that same superintendent did to get rid of other employees, for ethical standards. And to keep people from talking about it, he sent out nasty threats to people hoping to crush criticism which in his case, the criticisms are more than well justified. The best advice anybody could give him would be that he shouldn’t be making news if he doesn’t want to be in the news. And threatening the community for their anger at his actions is making news, not the kind Lakota would like to have. But it’s just the latest in a long history of mistakes that have cost a fortune and have nothing to do with funding education for children. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Fast Draw at the Annie Oakley Event: What the world looks like out in God’s country

For me, the western arts is a religion of sorts, it’s something I think about every day, and I work with some aspect of it several times a day in just about everything I do. And for context, the white hat I wear so much came from my favorite hat shop in Jackson, Wyoming, on an extraordinary pilgrimage I made there with my entire family. I’ve traveled worldwide and seen many of the world’s best things up close and personal. And I’ve been to rodeos they have out West, specifically the one at Cody, Wyoming, which is fantastic and about as good as it gets. A rodeo experience out to Cody, Wyoming, is in itself worth a vacation just to do that. But I will say that the Annie Oakley Festival they have every year in Darke County, Ohio, in the town of Greenville, is one of the best displays of Americana on planet earth, and I never get tired of attending. I look forward to it every time they have it, and when they do, I usually am involved in some aspect or another in the shows they put on. This year I was in the bullwhip competitions, as I usually am. But additionally, I was able to be in the Ohio Fast Draw Association’s competition, a two-day event that I have always thought brought the Annie Oakley Festival into the realm of uniqueness that establishes it as a vacation destination all its own. For people looking to get in touch with America again, I would recommend everyone to mark the last weekend of July on their calendars and make the trip to the Annie Oakley Festival when it’s happening in Greenville and to put the noise of life aside for a few days and experience the festival in all its glory.

I’ve been participating in the Annie Oakley Festival for a few decades. During that entire time, I worked with my friend Gery Deer at the Western Showcase to put on Saturday bullwhip competitions that are always crowd pleasers. I started working with whips on my grandparents’ farms when I was very young, so they have always been a part of my life. When I learned that my great grandfather could crack a fly off the wall with a bullwhip, I decided that was something I was going to do, and over the years, it has become my own version of a martial art. In my recent book, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, I take many of the concepts I have been thinking about over the years from the Annie Oakley Festival and apply them to the ways of the world that have influences from everywhere. I have thought of the Annie Oakley Festival as a kind of unique American philosophy that shows what all people, no matter where they come from, gravitate to when they have the freedom to be away from government and go to God’s country without a lot of United Nations influence. And from the showman side, I have watched the audiences and come to some very definitive understandings that are unique to the Annie Oakley Festival. The Buffalo Bill Wild West show has always been a definitive presentation of what America uniquely is. Without Annie Oakley, it would never have become the global phenomenon it was. And I find that Greenville festival every year to be the embodiment of that definition, more so than in places like Cody, Wyoming, which is the authentic real deal cowboy life, right in the middle of a desert in the traditional way people think; of the “West.” But it’s the swagger that came from the Buffalo Bill show that Annie Oakley specifically brought to the whole exhibition that I have always loved so much. It’s why that event is a yearly reset period for me, where I clear my thoughts and push the noise aside for a few days and just soak up the American flags and the smell of gunsmoke.

After the bullwhip competitions, I always used to go over and watch the fast draw guys. But I couldn’t make fast draw part of my life for a long time. Getting the equipment to participate was a bit expensive, but more than anything was the time. Many of the shoots last entire weekends and are all over the place. You can’t just show up at Annie Oakley once a year to commit to the sport and compete. It has only been over the last few years that I finally have had the time to commit to it, so it’s something pretty new for me. But it was always their shoot at the Annie Oakley Festival that I looked forward to watching. So, it was really enjoyable to be able to attend as a competitor, and I made the most of it. This was the first year I did both events, the Ohio Fast Draw Association shoot and the Western Arts Showcase, so it was a very busy weekend for me. So busy that I didn’t even have time to look at my phone and answer the many text messages that were adding up due to the news of the world. I was able to get caught up after the festival, but the time off was well worth it. I have provided several pictures and videos of the event to capture a bit of the atmosphere, which I never get tired of.

That’s what makes my Gunfighter’s Guide to Business such a unique book on business and life in America in general. The Annie Oakley Festival has always given me a unique opportunity to see America for what it is and get to know people as spectators wanting to get a piece of that old Buffalo Bill Wild West show that so clearly defined our young country to a world perplexed by it. That challenge is still very true and even hostile at times. But when you are there, you can clearly see what people want and how much of that noisy world they are willing to take. Practicing the combat arts, the fast draw, the bullwhips, and the cowboy-mounted shooting are all exhibitions of the kind of skills that make America, America. And there is no need for apologies regarding the Second Amendment there. No hint to it. People generally agree on how the world is, understand right and wrong, and treat each other well and respectfully. The world does not look so screwed up when you escape the coastal media influences of Los Angeles, New York, and Washington D.C. It’s always good to see people for what they are. Many from the liberal coasts would be horrified by the stoic tenacity of the people from the flyover states, especially those who attend by the thousands the Annie Oakley Festival. But what’s clear when you attend something like that festival in Greenville, Ohio, is that there are a lot more of those people than there are from liberal politics. You just don’t hear from them on the nightly news. They are out working in the fields, and living life as the coastal types fly over, high above in comfortable jets going from one big city to another, maintaining their bubbles that allow liberalism to grow as a concept. That is until they stop by some place like Cody, Wyoming, and see what people really think of them. Or, they drive into the heart of Ohio, way out in God’s country, and see the many yard signs dedicated to Trump, and get a sense that Annie Oakley never really died, and neither did the Buffalo Bill Wild West show. It lives on in Darke County, Ohio, and recharges me yearly. I spend my days between Annie Oakley events thinking about it. It’s never far from my mind. And given the way the world is now, they would do well to learn their own lessons from the Annie Oakley Festival. It’s a vacation destination all its own and well worth the time to do so. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

How Crimes Are Committed in the Modern Age by Governments: The Boggle Threshold and the advantage it gives the criminal class

Everyone is wondering how so many crimes committed by government, such as Covid and the vaccine mandates, the theft of wealth through inflation, and the sell-out of America through privileged political hacks like Hunter Biden, can go unpunished. They see the crimes committed but nothing being done about it. Well, the political left has already provided the answer; the classic Cloward–Piven strategy is meant to overwhelm systems, then collapse them into a change state favorable to the attacker. Then there is John Kotter from the Harvard Business School, who will tell leaders to create a crisis, even if there isn’t one, so you can unify efforts to your direction. It’s a standard trick, and by now, especially among the college-educated, they have seen it done to them over and over through many years, and now as adults of their own, they unconsciously do the same thing to people they are supposed to lead. It’s the classic lie a parent tells a child, don’t go outside during a storm because you’ll be struck by lightning, with the intent to keep children safe in the house and under control by fear of what might happen to them. Many grow up and become terrified of several irrational fears because of such methods employed on them over a long period. And believe it, the governments of the world, the global criminals know this, and many of the crimes we are seeing now are happening because of their understanding of this modern problem of interconnectivity across political influence. They continuously seek to exploit the conditions to their advantage. 

Yet, the strategies mentioned, whether it’s Cloward-Piven or Kotter’s Eight Stage Process of Creating Major Change, have a more technical term for the conditions those strategies expose, and that’s the Boggle Threshold. When we talk about something “boggleing the mind,” we are talking about people reaching their Boggle Threshold, which is the saturation point where a mind rejects new information upon receiving it. The information might be perfectly valid, but the mind witnessing the information might be too consumed with other information to accommodate it into a change state reality. The Boggle Threshold is typically associated with paranormal phenomena, so it doesn’t generally get used to express political matters and everyday concerns. When the question comes up about ghosts, UFOs, or Big Foot, ordinary people are worried about gas prices, love lives, and whether their neighbor cut the lawn and don’t have room in their minds for contemplation about information outside their everyday experience. The criminal class, which was first most successfully used under the mob in Chicago and later captured by the favorite book of the left, Rules for Radicals, knew this about people and often hid their crimes behind it. They might murder people in the streets of Chicago. Yet, with all the other crimes going on and the rebellious nature of Prohibition in general, Al Capone knew he could exploit the Boggle Threshold in people to hide the mob’s many crimes behind his magnetic personality. People could relate to his charisma. But they couldn’t see the monster behind his façade because their Boggle Threshold just couldn’t contemplate such things. That’s why he was never convicted of the actual crimes he committed but was only found guilty of tax evasion because it was there that a conceptual idea of a crime could be conceived within the rules of tax policy—rules that everyone can generally understand within their Boggle Threshold. 

An example of the Boggle Threshold would be if you were walking along and found a dead body, then next to that body, there was a bloody knife; any rational person would conclude that that murder weapon had killed the deceased person. But, if the person who discovered the body was encumbered past their saturation point within their Boggle Threshold, then they might not see the crime scene so clearly. Perhaps they were in a fight with their spouse over who was going to drive which car to work that day, or maybe they were trying to find the money for the mortgage. Perhaps they were worried about something with their kids or some other series of details on their minds before discovering the dead body. How many people who witness a crash on the side of the road would stop to help, and how many would just drive on because they had a million other things to do and couldn’t afford the chaos of something out of their routine? When people are at their Boggle Threshold, they don’t have room for new information, such as election fraud, the origins of Covid, or that the President’s son is on hours and hours of video recordings of himself naked smoking crack out of a pipe. All those things are happening outside of people’s Boggle Threshold. People might observe those conditions but are paralyzed to pass judgment because they are past their saturation point for new information to influence their behavior. 

Just like Al Capone, but on a vast scale these days, and across the entire world, crimes are committed knowing that in democracies, most people won’t have the intellectual capacity to maintain a Boggle Threshold that can actually see the crimes being committed. This Boggle Threshold is hard-wired into our media culture and our public education, where one sets where that threshold is for everyday people. The other works to saturate people’s minds with so much useless information that they never have room for new information that may be much more important, such as the Wisconsin Supreme Court making a decision that none of Joe Biden’s votes counted from drop boxes were legal, and must be subtracted from the overall number, which would mean that President Trump actually won the state. People are worried about a recession, gas prices, and increases at the grocery store. My family ordered a pizza the other day, and the driver reported to us that the delivery charge was $4 now instead of just $2 because of gas prices. When you can’t even order a pizza these days without it breaking the bank, nobody has room to contemplate global election fraud that has put in place radical communists who want to take over the world. It might be accurate, but it’s beyond the Boggle Threshold of most, so the crimes go unnoticed and unpunished. A Boggle Threshold can be increased through intellect, but if people don’t know they should be expanding their personal limits, they aren’t going to make the conscious effort to do so. And knowing that, the criminals of our society are perpetuating their crimes with the understanding that ordinary people don’t have the time or mental capacity to deal with the ramifications of their crimes committed, so long as the crimes are hidden by a barrage of nonsense that fills up people’s minds and saturates their Boggle Threshold. However, the weakness of this strategy can always be uncovered by “intent,” the intent to commit a crime, which is evident to all, even those stressed out by the events of our day. Once you simplify matters into observing intent, then the Boggle Threshold gives way a bit, and people can understand the circumstantial evidence. But taken at face value, until “intent” is obvious, the crimes continue to be committed without the fear of prosecution or a society that will take a stand against them. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Why You Must Always Be Ready: The biggest secret in the world

In the video above, I answer a question that I get asked a lot, “what’s in the backpack?” Well, I carry that backpack with me everywhere. When I’m not at my house, it’s always nearby. And of course, watching the video, you will quickly see what’s in it, my .500 magnum, which is one of my conceal carry guns. And additionally, that backpack is heavily armored. If someone shoots at me from behind, or even from another direction, I can have a way to absorb the bullet harmlessly and take away the danger. It’s a big pack for that reason; it covers a lot more body area. Then hearing that the next question is, “why do you feel you have to be so well-armed and to defend yourself so heavily?”

Most people would be happy with some little Glock tucked in their pants. But not me. I want to be ready for a small war, and there is a good reason for it. I put those thoughts into my Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, which has become highly relevant in the early years of 2020. When I was writing that book, I knew that it would stir up trouble, and it has. To my mind, it’s the good kind. But one thing is for sure; you don’t have to go out into the world looking for trouble. Trouble will come to find you, and for all kinds of reasons. The main reason is that the world’s bureaucracies were all built to conceal a dark truth about human nature. They were built to conceal laziness and the unambitious, which is in the majority. Everyone wants a trophy for success, but not everyone wants to do the work to become the best at something. And when people discover they can’t loot off you for their own efforts to make them their own, then they seek to get rid of you in any way possible to erase your memory from their minds. And that is why it’s important to be well-armed and always ready for trouble when it comes looking for you.

While I was writing The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business a few years ago, I had a confrontation with a consultant from a very expensive and powerful firm that teaches Lean Techniques worldwide to the biggest corporations that there are. When he found out that I had my own theories on process improvement and that I took exception to his constant beratement of “shooting from the hip,” as if it was a reckless assertion toward productivity, he became irate when he discovered I was writing that book. “what are you going to say that hasn’t been already said, the field is crowded with opinions on process improvement. Pick your poison and get with the program.” My response was, “well, I want to create a system that doesn’t involve poison, something that is more reflective of what is really going on in the world.” That’s when he lost it and pretty much swore himself to be my enemy, which didn’t work out very well for him. There was no provocation to try to make the guy mad. He went there on his own. It was the realization that a kind of scam was being exposed that he secretly feared was the real issue. And ultimately, this secret is a big problem out there in the world. I knew it was, but watching some of the violent reactions that played out, knowing that the secret would be put into a book I was writing, was just too much for him, and many, many others. 

The truth of the matter is what I said in the video when people find out they can’t steal from your efforts to hide their own lazy and unproductive natures; they actively seek to eliminate you from the discussion, whether it’s cancel culture, outright violence, social ostracization—whatever means they can come up with. And we are seeing that play out on a mass scale these days in business, politics, media, and even neighborhood soccer games. It’s everywhere. But what’s worse for them is when you don’t care, and you don’t need what they offer, which is kinship in a team environment. At that point, everything they have ever been taught turns out to be a lie, and they can’t handle that knowledge. There is a great yearning in the world for nobility and individualized respect. While traveling all over the world, I have found that when people see those elements in you, they often pay reverence instantly. People crave the kind of individualization that evolved in American culture and, ultimately, American business. But there have been many who have shaped this European collectivist mindset into global affairs and have evolved a kind of socialism during international trade that has found its way into every aspect of business. And the big secret was to hide the incompetency of the many from the eyes of the few. So when people often criticized me for “shooting from the hip,” they meant that I should always sit down and consult with others to figure out the best next step. Even if my idea ended up being the way to go, the bureaucrats wanted to believe that they had some hand in the process and wanted to share credit for the endeavor. But to a person like me, that all takes too long, so I cut them out and take my shots without them, which denies them of the theft, which makes people angry, very angry, for being exposed. That’s why I carry the backpack, and it has come in handy often. 

After dealing with that guy, and many others like him over the years, I felt it would be good to address the process improvement problems that all businesses have, especially these days with all the woke problems that are entering our places of employment. There are many great techniques for process improvement out there, but most of them never address the real elephant in the room. What makes people corrupt, and why do they intentionally sabotage process flow in a business? I often point to the time clock, even the salary people, and say, “look how quickly they leave for the day.” Their minds were never on their work; they just collect their paychecks and associated with other people waiting for someone else to do something. They are too lazy to do things independently and often leave all the heavy work for the few with a mind to do it. And there is no fancy consultant class that can address that issue. To deal with that, we must deal with the real problem that sits at the heart of all process improvement needs, the lack of human capital and raw individualized leadership. That is why I wrote The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, to empower the types of people who really do all the work and to prevent those who get in the way from doing so. And also to explain that consensus building and teamwork are only distractions away from productivity. In the world we have today, it is the few who make everything happen and the many who try to hide behind those exploits and take credit for them as their own. If you let them take that credit, they will love you. But if you don’t, they will do everything in their power to get rid of you, even if it means killing you any way they can. Sometimes they become so jealous that their minds lose all reason, and their thoughts become a Shakespeare play. And the only way to have real peace is to carry a backpack like the one I do and make sure that their intentions do not become your reality.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business