Month: July 2019

What Comes Around Goes Around on the Wild, Wild Frontiers of Thought and Culture

It’s always a good day for me to attend the Annie Oakley Festival in Greenville, Ohio where I rejoin old friends and meet some new ones at that annual event always set during the last weekend of July. In many ways I am happiest during that period because the world is as I’d like it to be and I get to dress the way I’d like for the event. This year was a little different however because its one of those transition periods for me. I’m in the middle of writing my new book, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and have been working on several themes that were born right there in Greenville over the last several decades. As a lover of Ohio history and of frontier life in general I find great solace in the small towns up and down Rt 127, from Hamilton, Ohio all the way up Celina on the Grand Lake St. Mary. Lebanon, and Eaton come to mind as well, and of course Greenville itself nestled there in God’s country with the smell of corn dogs and ice-cold Coke offered from the various venders. But more than anything I enjoy competing with those old and new friends and pushing myself in ways that I don’t get to do in regular life, and the results are always rewarding, such as in this very close example shown below of our Bullwhip Fast Draw competition during the finals.

Yes, it’s fast. I have been practicing Cowboy Fast Draw for quite a long time now and have a pretty good feel for how fast is fast. The events shown in our Bullwhip Fast Draw are around .600 of a second down to about .450, almost as fast as the pistol shooters who were also there at the event. I spent quite a lot of time with them as well. Yet it amazes me how fast the Bullwhip Fast Draw competition has become, and how fast we have become in conducting all the various steps literally in the blink of an eye. For a lot of people, the blink of an eye is about .015 of a second. So, we are moving very fast these days in performing a task that really should be nearly impossible. But you never really know until you start pushing yourself with competition which is one of the big themes in my new book.

I am an optimist, really an unshakable one. I’ve seen more than my share of tragedy and heartbreak, but my optimism has always been intact no matter what’s going on. Over the years this Annie Oakley event has been that reset period for me that no matter what has been occurring, it gave me an opportunity to be around people who aren’t losers and activists of malice and just enjoy good people in a good flag waving country. Many years ago, I broke away from the entertainment aspects of my relationship with the western arts and went to apply my skills to real life problems, that were very controversial. It was quite a thing to do before Donald Trump was president, but now isn’t considered so radical, because the country is snapping back into shape, thankfully. The evidence is everywhere. This year at our Western Showcase event a really good Lone Ranger impersonator stopped by and did a show which I enjoyed quite a lot. As I listened to the Lone Ranger creed from him, I couldn’t help but think of myself and some of the decisions I had made along the way leading up to that moment.

In 2004 I released the book The Symposium of Justice which featured a bullwhip cracking vigilante that was at war with the corruption of his hometown. But in the years thereafter I found that many of my themes were quite real and that as an author, I couldn’t just write about them, I wanted to be the real-life character of my stories. So, I turned my skills to the real-life problems of my community and many reading here know the rest of the story. Up until Donald Trump emerged from the Tea Party to become President of the United States, I felt I needed to be the real-life characters I had written about. But that has changed due to the sudden shifting of the winds. The western arts no longer feel like a dying thing as it used to, but something that is reemerging and becoming new again. That makes me very happy. Not only does the world need it, but it confirms many of the things about people that I have long suspected and those are the clear contents of my new book that will likely come out next year.

It has been sad that so many people who still believe in things like the Lone Ranger’s Creed have stayed out of the fight that has needed to be fought. I couldn’t just sit around and think about it. I wanted to do something about it and I am proud that I have. But hearing the Lone Ranger impersonator go through the creed this year in front of our audience was for me very refreshing. Some of my favorite quotes are “That all men are created equal and that everyone has within himself the power to make this a better world.” And “in being prepared physically, mentally, and morally to fight when necessary for that which is right.” Or, “That God put the firewood there, but that every man must gather it and light it himself. Those are all good quotes and who could argue them? Well, Democrats for one, and many of today’s youth who get their morality from Grand Theft Auto rather than the Masked Man as they used to.

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Another good day in my favorite clothes. #life #family

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That is why I love the Annie Oakley event so much. It is a break from the disappointments of today’s culture and the youth being born from it, from the primitive cravings of body piercings, tattoos and shaky morality. Of loose sexual standards and a proclivity toward drugs and intoxication. From lazy losers who want socialism over capitalism and champions of expanding government who will issue them mailbox paychecks for just sitting around and letting mother government drop food in their mouths without doing anything to deserve it. For one day a year I get a break from all that and I cherish it tremendously. If I could have every day like the days I get in the middle of God’s country every year in Darke County I would take it eagerly. Unfortunately, that is not our reality, but it should be. Most of the people who go and participate in those events there don’t have the same kind of reflections that I do. They just go and enjoy the festivities without giving it much thought. But not me, I see the potential and reflect on what we used to do well and how we could do it again. And perhaps a new day is emerging. Whatever comes I at least feel good about what I’ve done to make the world better, which I will always do. But I get the feeling that the world is getting more favorable to those grand old traditions and that the thugs and losers of life aren’t winning any more, they are being swept away into the garbage heaps of history, where they belong and that makes me the happiest of all. For the first time in many years I think that tomorrow will be better than yesterday, and that is very encouraging.

Rich Hoffman

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You Can’t Hide Bad Behavior Behind Imaginary Racism

One of the changes I’ll be making on this site is the perspective that it speaks from. For instance, most of the time that I have written on this blog site it has been from an underdog perspective, as a member of the real “Resistance” where our country was literally being taken away from us. Normally, on a day to day basis I only associate with really smart people who are plugged in to what is going on in the world. However, and we all go through these things, I have had a family member in the hospital for an extended period and I have been pulled out of my natural state routines. So I have had to speak to people who really don’t care what’s going on in the world or they weren’t part of any “resistance” which is how I think of the Tea Party movement. Even in the entertainment community for which I have several very good friends, the trend is to not talk about politics because nobody wants to be divisive. Yet I continue to spend a lot of my time on what is actually going on and would consider myself well above an elevated state of pop culture knowledge of world events. And from my perspective a truth that everyone can relate to has emerged from the Trump administration and a new kind of politics is emerging. People can say that they don’t like Donald Trump, but history will remember his presidency as a great victory in global politics and the way we do business as a republic. So it is from that perspective that I will have future articles here and elsewhere. I am quite confident that history will catch up.

The biggest element to have fallen in politics recently is this whole notion that everything is racist which has any kind of measure to gauge success against. The Elijah Cummings issue of the 7th District in Maryland is a great example as President Trump has pointed out with his tweets so far this week describing the mess that Baltimore specifically is in. Like most big cities, Baltimore has not seen the benefit of the vast amounts of money that has been poured into its budgets. When a problem like gun violence or homelessness is targeted as an objective to go after, Democrats, all of them, just don’t have a management approach that solves any problems. Their philosophy makes more of the detrimental behavior we see not less of it, and in the case of Elijah Cummings he is a great example of it. While he runs a lot of the investigations that have been going on in Congress for a number of years, he hasn’t been able to solve the hard problems of his district with any amount of money that have been tossed into it. Just like my argument about school levies, anywhere where progressive politics is the theme of management effort, failure is attached.

To hide this obvious evidence from the public progressive politicians have decided that they would use “racism” as a shield against their failed approach. Watching Chris Wallace on Fox Sunday this week was quite a shocking bit of reporting from what I think is one of the best in the business. Wallace couldn’t get it through his thick skull that Trump’s comments about Cummings district were quite valid, just as the situation was for what we call “The Squad,” the four congresswomen who are progressive activists who have also been the target of President Trump’s outrage. Trump is a guy who made his living building elegant buildings and golf courses. To him roads with pot holes make them dumps, so from his measurement, which is the same as most people, places where homicides are up, respect for the police are down, per capita income that does not rid an area of homelessness and drug addiction are dumps, and I think we can all agree. The only thing that progressives have to defend themselves from such a striking judgement is to proclaim that it is racist to have an opinion, which is of course ridiculous.

What was outrageous about what Wallace did as what I think of as a great reporter is that he played straight into the race narrative which I found in my recent interactions with “normal people” (people who are more concerned with the kind of grill they have in their back yard than what is going on in politics) is that race was accepted as a measurement of value, which its clearly not. People have accepted this notion that people of color should not be criticized in any way about anything and if you really get down to it, that is why a lot of these inner cities are failing and people are dying in filth and poor living conditions under addicted circumstances, is because nobody—especially white people—feel they can have an opinion on the matter. Now it has become obvious that Fox News is not a bastion of conservative value. Quite the contrary, Wallace himself is listed as a Democrat and the network as a whole has moved far to the political left now that Rupert Murdoch has taken a back seat to the new CEO Suzanne Scott. One of the big decisions under Scott was in hiring Donna Brazile who was fired from the DNC for rigging the election in favor of Hillary Clinton. So Fox News is not headed in a good direction. They are still more conservative than the rest of the media outlets that are mainstream but that’s not saying much.

As I said, I know a lot of people in entertainment and talk about a double standard. Many of them are afraid to have conservative opinions because they won’t get work, even though most of the audiences for modern media content lean toward a conservative nature. Yet Joss Whedon who is a big time Disney film director, responsible for the Marvel movies and even co-wrote Toy Story thought that he could send out an anti-Trump tweet saying “We have a racist, fascist president who’s using armed thugs in law enforcement & illegal militias to keep us cowed & hopeless & he’ll take the 2020 election by armed force & blatant, treasonous criminality & that’s us now, we’re the country with concentration camps so happy 4th.” For that Whedon wasn’t dropped from any film projects, Disney hasn’t distanced themselves from him, they just let it go. But as conservatives, if any of us said just a fraction of that one time, we’d be raked through the coals and tortured in the court of public opinion.

Of course, it’s ridiculous, but what’s important to understand is that the real anger that is coming from Whedon and Wallace along with many others is that they have come to realize that they do not have their finger on the pulse of America. They have an ideology that has been built on ideas of failure over time and they used the quiet nature of America who live and let live to justify their phony belief system. Meanwhile, bad ideas weren’t challenged which impoverished places like Baltimore in the wake of nobody thinking of criticizing the place wanted to be called names for pointing out the obvious. But that is changing and President Trump knows it. Not only that, but for the first time that I can think of a person running for a second term of office isn’t afraid to point it out because there isn’t any real competition for Trump in the 2020 election and all these Democrats know it. All they have for a defense is to cry racism even though it was they who put women and minorities into these political roles then expected nobody to criticize their bad behavior just because of skin color and sex. The stupid assumption was on their original strategy, not in the reality of the situation. The world is conservative and getting more so. The covers have been ripped away and not even Fox News is safe. And that is a trait that they will all have to get used to because the country and the world is moving away from their sentiments, not toward them.

Rich Hoffman
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Steampunk and the Future of Technology

My readers here might have noticed my new mask which is kind of Steampunkish and likely wondered what the deal with it was. Well, I was shopping with my family in the famous Charleston City Market which has been around since 1804. One of the booths had kind of a Steampunk theme which my kids are into. I haven’t paid much attention to the movement because to me it represented a time that never occurred and was rooted in “what ifs” instead of factual observation and an understanding of history. Steampunk however has turned out to be very aligned with what I want to do with my new book, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business so through buying this mask it gave me several good ideas to build off of, so I started using it on my social media platforms because I think its pretty cool.

Death and life have very much been a part of my thinking lately, I’ve had some sick family, my own aging process and all this constant news about artificial intelligence taking over the human race–becoming actually a terminator type of conflict that seems much more possible today than it did when that popular movie first came out—has been on my mind. The mask to me is a clear indication that we can enhance our own flesh now, and the future looks to be even more of a case for it. So even when our flesh dies of natural causes we can continue to live on through various mechanical means, and this new mask of mind makes me think of those potentials and consequences, so I was very excited to get it. And in talking with my kids about Steampunk as an art movement that’s when it became clear that my argument for going back into the Wild West period to look at our value systems, which is key to my own efforts, was the same in bridging those values with the technology of the future.

As kind of a prerequisite to buying that mask my wife and I spent some time in Gatlinburg, Tennessee looking at grandfather clocks, which have always been on my radar. There is a very nice store on the main strip there that we have always gone in and contemplated. Even though these days a digital display clock is often better and far, far cheaper, there has always been a charm for me in the craftsmanship that goes into a grandfather clock that I crave. And at the height of the Victorian era for which the Wild West period was a part of that is why the stylized outfits and fonts looked the way they did. It was a very exciting time where guns became very reliable and could be used to shape a culture as the Victorian designs immigrated from Europe and moved with the expanding train system into the wild frontier of western expansion. These days many of our smartest people, people who enjoy thinking, are finding that they enjoy the values of that period and would like to see a return to those values. But we are all on the technological frontier of so many other positive elements that we must find a way to bridge these values, which is how Steampunk came to be as an art form.

Its not at all a mainstream thing yet, or if it ever will be. But one thing is quite clear, it was mainstream enough to have that mask I bought displayed at the very popular Charleston City Market and people walking by all stopped to look at the crafts displayed at that booth, so there is some very obvious curiosity by most people about this type of art, whether they understand it consciously or not. I suspect that subconsciously most people are thinking the same thing, they don’t want to lose themselves as individuals in the technology of the future, and they very much want to be in command of that relationship. We don’t want to lose our lives to technology, but rather want to see humans continue to set the agenda—but one way or the other, tech is here, and we must find our way with it. So suddenly, I’m quite a fan of Steampunk.

This mask is appropriate for me because honestly, I have no intentions of every dying. Now the nature of life may change, but my essence I suspect will live on in various forms forever, and as I get older, I am quite open into whatever enhancements I need to utilize to continue enjoying life. After all think about it, I have written so much that it will float around in cyberspace or whatever form of that space exists well into the future, that it will likely go on forever as defined by universal life spans. Even if all that is left is a skull, I will get all I can out of life because that is how I approach these kinds of things. While I do advocate for the values of the past, of the Victorian era Wild West values of pure capitalism and frontier justice, I think very much that those values not only work here on earth, but will work as we colonize space whether it is the moon, Mars or the moons of Jupiter. If I could live 20,000 years to see all those advancements happen or to help them along, I’ll do it whether the form is a living entity, legacy memories, or as a variation of that mask, a biological entity more machine than traditional life that exists without losing the basics of humanity.

Coming back from Charleston I had been listening to Rush Limbaugh while staying in the very nice Mt. Pleasant area and looking at all the sites and thinking about how Google was being thought of as evil, and that Facebook was capturing so much of us to build an artificial intelligence that it was forcing tough political and economic decisions for the future. For me the solution was in Steampunk, or at least the first doors to solving those complex problems and that mask gave me a reference point. But when it came time to come back home and I punched in my address to my Google Map app on my phone it stated at 5:30 AM in the morning that I would arrive back at my home in 10 hrs. and 16 minutes. Thinking about Rush Limbaugh’s radio shows and some by Alex Jones that I had been listening to online when everyone else had gone to bed I wanted to try an experiment knowing that Google had a profile of my habits that it had been collecting about me for many years. I decided to leave my phone plugged in so that I wouldn’t reset my destination forcing Google to recalculate my destination time.

On the way home I traveled with one of my daughters, her kids and my wife so there were lots of variables. We didn’t leave at 5:30 but the time really didn’t change from when we actually did so the Google Maps had figured out all our stops, our pace of driving and the traffic conditions from Mt Pleasant to our home address and all the surprises that can happen along the way. Outside of Columbia, South Carolina we stopped at a Cracker Barrel for breakfast. At the North Carolina line we switched around some drivers. Just outside of Ashville we stopped to let the kids use the restroom. In the heart of the mountains near the tunnels just before the Tennessee border we stopped to get some more food. In Knoxville we stopped to get more gas. Ahead of Jellico Mountain we stopped by McDonalds just to stretch and get a snack. On the other side of the mountain from Jellico to London, KY we had lots of single lane traffic and some serious traffic delays. We pulled off the highway to use the restroom yet again and we fiddled around for an additional 15 minutes because we were all tired of driving and didn’t want to rush only to sit in traffic again. We stopped just north of Lexington just to stretch because we were tired and wanted to get home but were getting impatient. Then we hit traffic in Florence that lasted all the way through the city of Cincinnati. By the time we got to our driveway the time on the trip back was 10 hrs. and 17 minutes. One minute longer than Google Maps had predicted originally, which I thought was astonishing.

Technology can be our friends or our enemies, what it becomes will largely be up to the values we bring to it. I for one plan to embrace it with an eye toward longevity and accomplishing more in a lifetime than typical biological existence would otherwise allow. And even the sad stories of family sicknesses prove that technology is on the cusp of solving many of those problems. But then what? Well, that is up to us to figure out, and that is my focus in helping to shape. And for me, that is a very exciting prospect and what I think about when I see that new mask found at the Charleston City Market. To me its not a scary thing, but something that will help us live beyond the terminal existence of yesteryear, but if we hold the values from the past that worked best and combined them with the future, we wouldn’t just get Steampunk art, but perhaps a new reality that matches what Jesus said when he walked the earth, “heaven is all around us, only men do not see it.” Well, maybe its time that we start looking at it.

Rich Hoffman

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We Have an Obligation to Attack Enemies, both Foreign and Domestic

I have planned to take a vacation from politics and this forum so that I could write my new book, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, which is coming along nicely. However, this recent debate between the Trump administration and the four progressive insurgents Cortez, Omar, Pressley, and Tlaib bring up an important point that Democrats are going to have to get used to. Watching and listening to their comments, and those of the other liberal presidential candidates that have come in in their defense after President Trump lacerated them at a North Carolina rally, we need to talk about a few things. Trump didn’t just act correctly in calling out the anti-American rhetoric that has been frequently discharged by the four women, and many others for that matter, but we are all expected to do as Trump has done, and in doing so, we would be by no means acting as racists, or bigots, but as people of value who love our country and are justifiably pissed off by those who show their open hostility toward the values most of us embrace as “Americans.”

It is ridiculous to suggest that we are supposed to allow people, who happen to be women, or people of color, whether or not they are American citizens or not, to trash talk our country without some retaliation. It’s just not in the realm of considerations. In no way should any of these women, or Democrats expect to get a free pass to do and say whatever they want without people getting angry about it. After all, isn’t that what they were trying to do all along? Omar, and Cortez particularly have been very bold in attempting to make as many people angry at America as possible, what did they think was going to happen, that they’d be allowed to hide behind their femininity and their race without anybody answering their challenge? When the crowd broke out chanting during the Trump rally in North Carolina to “send her back” meaning Omar, they were perfectly correct to express their opinion, just as the four progressive Democrats had. They don’t get a free pass to act because they are minorities. Why would they even think such a thing?

I have a son-in-law who came to America and gained citizenship to marry one of my daughters and I admired the work he did to go through everything. I was particularly touched during the swearing in which all politicians must go through at some point, and many others, where an oath to protect the notion of our Constitution is made. I’ve heard it a million times but during his swearing in it had hit me particularly hard, when the lines, “I will support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic.” The word “domestic” rang a bell because we were seeing increased terrorist activity coming to our nation at that time, in the years before the Trump administration entered the White House and it was very obvious that some of those terrorist cells, particularly those finding refuge in ISIS were American citizens who had gone astray. Just having an American citizenship wasn’t enough to make you an American. You had to also support the way of life that being an American required. That meant capitalism. The Constitution along with all the Bills of Rights. It meant at least respecting the flag that brought all of us from all over the globe together to make America great. The freedom of speech didn’t mean you could just march around our neighborhoods burning the American flag and preaching on about Communism without someone kicking your ass. Those are the rules and we are all mandated to do so, by the Constitution when we see that domestic enemies are attacking our way of life.

I have known many media personalities over the years, and honestly, they are not the most inquisitive bunch. You won’t find them reading books about history in a Waffle House at 4 AM in the morning, the way I was when I was there age. They are more excited about talking to their friends on Facebook and finding out where the next music festival is, or some drunken orgy. Unfortunately, these are the people who interpret these events for us most of the time, so we have not been looking at people who speak against America as “domestic enemies” but they are. Nike made themselves into a domestic enemy when they picked Kaepernick’s position over the shoes of Betsy Ross. That soccer star for the women’s team completely overshadowed their great victory by using her fame to debase America life as anti-gay and racist when it was our great nation that gave her the ability to use her skills to their best effect on a world stage. Megan Rapinoe could at least have said “thank you.” Instead, she made herself into a “domestic enemy.” Her choice, but the choice was clear putting the burden on what to do about it on us all.

I just traveled the Carolinas and spent some time in Gatlinburg, Tennessee for a couple of days and even for me, I was quite taken by the patriotism displayed there. I couldn’t help but notice that no Democrats are having rallies at the convention center in Gatlinburg. But if Trump went there maybe hundreds of thousands of people would show up and pack the streets. I saw lots of Trump bumper stickers and lots of flag waving, and it was the kind of thing I have not seen represented in the news for over twenty years. I don’t know what the Democrats are thinking these days, but that span of the South from Charleston to Lexington Kentucky, and I would add, on up into Ohio and Indiana, is as pro Trump as it gets. And its not Trump himself I don’t think, but because Trump represents them Constitutionally. Rather than them having to take up arms to fight off domestic enemies who the media fails to identify for them, they are happy to support Trump to prevent the unneeded bloodshed. But yes, the situation is that serious, who would think otherwise?

Honestly, these progressive attackers, Bernie Sanders included are getting off lucky. Thankfully we have a system of government that does a pretty good job of preventing violence from happening when domestic enemies present themselves. Free speech usually defeats them when it is allowed to work. But Google, Facebook and all the media companies have involved themselves into censorship to allow a false platform to exist for these anti-American progressive ideas, because for some dumb reason, they think they can trick the system into buying into their dumb ideas. But all those actions have been anti-America because they are attacking the very foundations of American life that we are all supposed to agree on, justice for all, economic activity for all, and common decency to everyone. However, among those values are that the winner takes all because that is how the best and brightest among us elevate our entire society. An attack on that system is an attack on our way of life and we are obligated to defend it from domestic enemies when those events occur. And for their own benefit, those domestic enemies of America, they are lucky that it is only Trump calling them out during election debate. It could be much, much worse, because the people who put Trump in power are very much in the majority, and they are pretty pissed off with the attacks against their rights to guns, against their churches, their energy consumption, their basic values. And it wouldn’t take much to turn them into very angry soldiers in the streets toward justice.

Rich Hoffman

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What I Like about George Lang: He’s the perfect compliment to the Trump administration at the state level, and takes the Dirt out of Politics

One aspect of this modern Republican Party that has evolved over the last decade in Butler County is that it is very effective and surprisingly unified. I had been thinking about it for a while, but the matter became quite clear for me at the launch event for George Lang’s run for senate in Ohio. While there I found myself associating in a friendly way with many people, I would have called rivals years ago. Suddenly they were friends largely because the party had united so well behind the Trump administration. Ten years ago, we called more liberal Republicans RINOs while I ran more with the Tea Party Crowd. Then during the primaries, everyone had their various picks. Some liked Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, or his dad Ron. Others liked the way the Bush family ran things. I was from the very beginning a Trump supporter, so there were obvious disagreements when Republicans came together for something like a public announcement by a great politician like George Lang. But at this most recent event I couldn’t help but notice how unified everyone was and it was good to see.

After George made his announcement and many politicians came forth to give their endorsement and tell stories of why they supported George through testimonials, seen in the video above, Sherriff Jones and I reminisced a bit about the last ten years while walking through the parking lot of Miami University’s Hamilton campus. As we talked it became obvious to me that the Trump presidency, which has deep roots into Butler County, had gone a long way to uniting Republicans in a way I could have only dreamed of. And it was only natural that a person like George Lang could build bridges in a positive way with all the different types of people that were in the Republican Party and get so many people to come forward to say such nice things. The Trump administration in all its genius had united Republicans in ways that just weren’t possible prior to 2016 and I was very happy to see it.

During all this contemplation I was thinking about why I liked George Lang so much and had for such a long time. I was very happy to hear that he was running for a senate seat, but I wasn’t sure why until after his announcement event. It wasn’t just that I liked him as a person, it was for another reason, a more important one. I have been involved in politics at many different levels for several decades, and it has been my choice to stay on the outside as much as possible to avoid too much corrosive contact. But I have never felt that way about George, whom I have now known for well over a decade. Even in the hardest of times George has always been a solid person and loyal to free market ideas, especially when they weren’t all that popular. Yet to my eyes he has always been constantly a good person, and that was rare in politics.

A lot of my reason for staying on the outside looking in, even when the door was wide open to step inside, was that I have always viewed politics as a dirty business and honestly, I don’t like the dirt. I’m happy to sling mud when challenged, but personally, I’d rather think about big things and find ways to bring about larger concepts to people. So politics just wasn’t conducive to that kind of thing. However, over time, George has pounded away his own kind of honesty in politics and it has shown to be a different way of doing business as a politician. George can still go out and raise the money it takes to run big campaigns, and associate with people all along the very fine edge of the political spectrum without becoming so disagreeable that relationships are no longer possible. George had found a way to work within the political spectrum of Republican politics at the local and state level without losing himself along the way and to me that is enormously encouraging.

Political enemies of George might want to roll their eyes at my assessment, but I have been with George through some perilous times and I know the guy well. I know his family and a dishonest person just can’t cut it with those kinds of relationships. George is an honest person who stands by the people close to him through thick and thin and oozes sincerity. Sure, there is always someone out there who wants him to do something that he doesn’t want to do, or that he disagrees with, but he never seeks to make an enemy out of them. Yet he has a tendency to stand resolute and that does make enemies. But that’s part of the territory. You can know a person by the way they are when the cameras are not around and nobody else is looking. And in those conditions, George Lang is the same good person. That ultimately is why I like George Lang so much; he takes the dirt out of politics.

George was going to be successful in politics whether or not President Trump ever entered the White House, but due to the current political circumstances, a politician and businessman like George Lang is poised to do much greater things than ever before. Under the Trump administration good people like Lang have far more clout than the back-room dealers of yesteryear and that was as much of a relief to the other Republicans giving testimony about George’s qualifications for higher office as it was me. Truly we are experiencing a new day in politics, something that none of us had ever seen. Trump’s presidency had like a vacuum sucked up all the disjointed disagreements and plotting for power that used to go on for the sake of obtaining any elected office and replaced it with a sincere effort to be a part of a greatness in keeping America great now that it has been built that way once again.

There is tremendous room in the years to come to make Ohio one of the great economic powerhouses of the world and George Lang sees it, he has always seen it. I remember a very dark time when he and I stood in the parking lot of a restaurant and contemplated the universe and how unfair it seemed at the time. Neither of us thought we’d be able to do much to help it. But George has always been the same person, from that hard time to the opulent present, he’s had the kind of integrity that is contagious to other people and a real desire to help people reach their full potential in life. And for George, that is as a senator doing great work now that the Trump administration has set the pace for allowing such audacious dreams to happen.

You can tell a lot about a person by the type of people who will actually come forward and provide an endorsement, and on that day a wide range of people who have been in public office for a long time came forward and said nice things about George, and the event was a great unifier. If one little event can show that kind of solidarity toward purpose, just think what a senate term in the Ohio Statehouse could provide. The prospect is very exciting and is something we can all look forward to with George Lang as the 4th District Senator in Ohio.

Rich Hoffman

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I Fully endorse George Lang for the Senate District 4 seat in Ohio

I was quite excited to learn that George Lang was running for the Senate seat that Bill Coley had been occupying in Ohio for several years. The seat itself was terming out and George let me know that on Monday at noon he was going to announce his run for it, and it brought a lot of joy to me. I first learned of his candidacy while on vacation with my family in Charleston, South Carolina touring sites that many were reviewing as the best in the world. I kept hearing while on my weeklong stay in Charleston that this neighborhood, this beach, this restaurant, this shipping lane, this and that were the best anywhere. I had to admit that everything was very nice. Property values were certainly great, and shipping vessels seemed to come into the harbor every 30 minutes loaded to their max. Even at 3 in the morning from our Mt Pleasant home I could hear the cranes working and I found all that economic activity very exciting. Yet the town of Mt Pleasant across the harbor from downtown Charleston was quiet and very chic at that time of night, just as it was all other hours of the day. The people there were prosperous and happy, no crime was in sight. Prosperity tends to do that to a community. So I was a little sad to leave and come home, but then for comparison as my family hit Cincinnati starting at Florence then going up I-71 to avoid the traffic on I-75 it was a startling comparison which culminated into our last moments of the journey travelling down Butler County Regional Highway where for as far as the eye could see, there was prosperity, especially in West Chester. After coming from an extremely wealthy area full of vibrant economic activity, it was obvious that my hometown of Butler County, Ohio was even greater and that is something the rest of the nation hasn’t been talking about. And for the last twenty years, it was my friend George Lang who has had a tremendous hand in that success, which was why I was elated that he was running for that Ohio Senate seat.

It goes without saying then that I endorse George Lang for the Senate District 4 seat in Ohio, fully. I could tell stories all day about why he’s qualified, but the best part of his resume is in this opening paragraph. I had spent a week in one of America’s most prosperous communities and coming directly home to West Chester, where I work, and Liberty Township where I live it becomes obvious that we have it better than most anywhere else in the country and that is due to the very pro-business environment that Lang has championed for many years starting as a trustee in West Chester. Even when Lang was outvoted 2 to 1 on most issues in West Chester by the much more liberal trustees who were there at the time, Lee Wong being one of them, George managed to be a change agent for the betterment of business and the results are obvious today, and the spill over has poured over into neighboring Liberty Township and other regions connected directly to West Chester very positively.

I remember well when George benefited from Mark Welch getting elected into that second trustee seat knocking out a longtime incumbent so that a second vote could be obtained, and real growth could occur for business. For a few years George Lang and Mark Welch opened West Chester to a very positive pro-business culture that is now carrying over into our current conditions which rival any of the best in the entire country and now George wants to bring that culture to all of Ohio. When George was elected into the 52nd House of Representative seat, this was his ultimate goal which he has been working toward. However, as a Senator, he will have much greater leverage to make that pro-business platform more prominent and to take it above the noise of all the other political matters that permeate the state.

George really doesn’t have any competition for this spot, his rivals during the upcoming primary are Candice Keller out of Middletown, who I think is a wonderful person. But when it comes to experience, George has many of the same positions as her on conservative ideas, but his understanding of business and his pro-business platform just puts him on a higher level. Then as I’ve said about Lee Wong, he’s the kind of guy who is a liberal in a conservative area. He has no choice but to run as a Republican. His policy decisions are very much that of a Democrat. If he were running for office in Hamilton County or even Dayton, he’d be a Democrat without question. It was Lee who stood in the way of many of the growth ideas that George wanted to implement in West Chester. I seem to remember Wong’s campaign slogan was that you “Couldn’t go wrong with Wong.” Well, yes you can, in a big way. He’s a nice guy but he’s not on the level of Lang, in any category. In many ways Lee stood in the way of growth, it was George and Mark who broke through his resistance to give West Chester the great prosperity that it sees today.

So, if there is a theme to all this, management does matter and who we elect into these positions has a major impact on all our lives. Obviously in Charleston South Carolina they have a lot of good things going on. Essentially there they have a deep and rich history to draw from which has put politics on the efforts of preserving that history, and not getting in the way of businesses wanting to capitalize off that deep history. In West Chester, Ohio the situation was harder, while Butler County does have a great history going back to before the Revolution, just as Charleston does, we had to be good the old-fashioned way, in the middle of the country with great highway access. We needed our politicians to make the most of those advantages with low cost compliance and protections on upfront investment for businesses. In West Chester, George Lang alone for a long time, then later with a good support staff from a very good Republican Party presence, have created an economic boom that plugs straight into the Trump administration. There is a reason that President Trump enjoys coming to the southern Ohio area so much, and George Lang is more a part of that success than just about anybody. Not in what he has done, but in what he hasn’t.

Most politicians measure their success by what bills they sponsor and ultimately by how much they grow government. In George’s case, it’s the opposite, he measures his success by how much he can get government out of the way of business, allowing them to spend their time and energy on being profitable, which then allows a high quality of living for everyone. For people who have lived in the Butler County area for many years, its easy to take for granted just how good it is. But if you have traveled, the benefits are obvious in comparison. I am very excited to see George Lang do for Ohio as a Senator what he has done for West Chester. I personally think Ohio has an opportunity to become one of the great economic powerhouses of the world and it will take people like George to make it happen. So he has my endorsement and then some. I simply can’t wait to get him in that seat so he can start the work, for which we will all benefit.

 

Rich Hoffman

 

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The Merits of Dueling

The Merits of Dueling:

As I have said, I have been working on a new book called the Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and I’m about halfway through it.  For my readers of a long time here who have been sending me a lot of emails missing the daily articles, they will return.  But I offer this little sample of this “gunfighter” project to give a taste of what is to come.

The concept of getting “satisfaction” from a personal insult went a long way to establishing honor and proper conduct among business transactions, in the time before modern rules as we know them today. As we have seen often where various religions and their value are not unified, and therefore cannot be expected to hold up in a court of law, there needs to be a mechanism that brings about honor and to hold it into the context of moral conduct where villainy will quickly grow like a weed in a garden of dreams. Dueling in the classic sense, especially in the New World during the time of the American Revolution was an answer to this problem. And if there is an argument against the American Constitution for changes, it was in the original rules of the nation that mechanisms of honor were already established before the courts were needed.

In doing business in the orient, particularly in Japan where honor is still a respected trait, business transactions are accelerated because the interactions mean something with one another. This is obvious at the airports around Tokyo among men and women as respect is a universal language that makes interactions between people start on common ground. In the West we have allowed our own culture of respect to drift away into the more centralized regulation of the state which outlawed the practice of dueling essentially so that lawyers could profit off the instillation of justice. The cost was that individual satisfaction for an insult did not get the respect it deserved while the emphasis was on protecting society from itself by settling matters in a court of law. This has led our culture to adapt into a more passive aggressive society where trust isn’t always easy to find in other people. It could be argued that we were all better off when we tried to openly kill each other to protect a slight against our individual names.

Dueling was so common at the start of America that the governor of South Carolina wrote a book on it to make sure everyone did it right called The Code of Honor: Or Rules for the Government of Principals and Second in the Art of Dueling in 1834 by John Lyde Wilson. Dueling in the time of the Revolutionary War was quite common. While it was slowly going out of style at the start of the invention of a republic form of federal government once George Washington took office, in the South, particularly in Charleston, South Carolina where so many important battles occurred in defining freedom during the start of the new nation, dueling was so common that the governor felt compelled to create some legal means of settling disputes, which sounds barbaric compared to our modern legal system, but in hindsight seemed to generate more responsible people on an individual level. This certainly helped in business commerce, because if a business deal went bad, the parties may find themselves in the streets fighting to the death to obtain their satisfaction.

The important aspect of satisfaction is that the emphasis was on the individual reputations of the participants. It wasn’t some third party “state” that decided justice, it was the people at the heart of the conflict, and in many ways, society was more honorable. People had to treat each other individually better as a result. The more the states intruded on management of the affairs of people the more passive aggressive disputes have become leaving business conduct to suffer greatly. After the Civil War it was particularly immigrants from the South who moved West in search of gold and other opportunities, and they took with them the concept of dueling that had been very much a part of early American life. Dueling with fast draw had with it a way of bringing honor where there wasn’t yet law and it forced people to treat each other better and more honorably which is why there is still reverence for it.

At the state level we can all see today that the concept of taking honor and responsibility for good conduct away from individuals has been a mistake. While dueling was a violent concept the amount of people who died from it were arguably much less frequent than the kind of violence we see in modern times. That is why thinking in the way of the gunfighter is better than in the modern context of leaving disputes to be settled by those not directly responsible for the conduct, such as lawyers and the state as a legal entity. These days instead of getting satisfaction for an honor tainted we say “see you in court” instead of settling the matter right then and there. Then of course those who can pay for the best lawyer become the winners in most cases and the state enjoys the revenue and job opportunities that come from settling disputes. But what is lost is the individual responsibility for the actions taken and the merit of an honorable exchange. Taking the example of the famous duel between General Gladsten and General Howe in 1778, both Generals in the Revolution and were in a dispute over troop possession. They took to the streets of Charleston, South Carolina where many such duels were taking place at the time and when the time came stared each other down waiting for the other to make a move. After taunting each other for a good bit of time finally General Howe fired his pistol and clipped the ear of Gladsten. Gladsten in response, who was thought to be the John Adams of the south and inventor of the famous “Don’t Tread on Me” flag deliberately fired his shot into the ground inviting Howe to try again. Eventually the two men shook hands and that settled their dispute with only a minor injury occurring to Gladsten’s ear. Otherwise, the business between two major Revolutionary War figures was settled respectfully, something that certainly wouldn’t have occurred if the two had fought it out in court with lawyers acting as their pistols and fancy words spoken in legal jargon as bullets.

The point of the matter is not that dueling is a desired trait, or even that we should bring it back in the form that it was. Killing another person isn’t a desirable outcome for any dispute, but the finality of it tended to put in the participant’s minds the seriousness of an issue and this mindset certainly set the West and its expansion ablaze with activity that couldn’t have been regulated by any legal system at the rate that human ambition was expanding at the time. Honor was preserved by the potential for dueling and this threat allowed for proper respect when a nation needed it most. We could learn a lot from this period today where honor among business transactions is desperately lacking, particularly within the American borders. Other countries have their honor driven rituals and it is noticeable during business transactions. In the United States however, we have allowed our laws to be governed by lawyers and judges who take away the responsibility for personal conduct and place it in the hands of the state, and many of our businesses have followed. The impact has been a loss in honor among business interactions that has not been desirable. Yet honor could be restored if only we stepped back into hindsight and dusted off the values that did emerge from dueling and upgraded that sentiment for our modern needs which starts in thinking like a gunfighter.

Rich Hoffman

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