Meet the Paladin Staff: Donna H.

Donna H. is everyone’s favorite at Paladin: as the company accountant, she’s the one who writes all the checks.

Donna is a free spirit who brings her own style to Paladin. Before starting at Paladin in 2005, she ran two businesses that had absolutely nothing to with her current bookkeeping “skills.” The first was a business called DNAJ (Donna’s Nifty Ass Jeans), which provided custom-designed jeans to the Native American entertainment community and private individuals from the festival circuit. The second business was professional beadwork, which also was geared to Native American entertainers and groups, as well as to Midwestern trading posts and private collectors.

Donna participates in the Annie Oakleys, a group of women who meet monthly for target practice at the Boulder Rifle Club. Given her artistic background, her interests, not surprisingly, are museums, galleries, live theater, ballet, and most live performances of any kind. A proud member of the Longmont Senior Center, Donna calls herself a “pretty good” amateur photographer. She’s also quite modest about her talents.

Train with the Ultimate Snipers

If you have seen Ultimate Sniper III: The Video, you know who Steve Reichert, Jim Gilliland and Rob Furlong are. Reichert is credited with the longest confirmed kill in Operation Iraqi Freedom. Furlong held the longest confirmed kill shot in history with a .50 caliber at 2,430 meters in Afghanistan, and Gilliland is credited with the record single-shot engagement with a 7.62 rifle in Iraq.

Watching these three world-record long-distance snipers in action in John Plaster’s latest video is awesome, but how would you like to shoot with them in person? Well, now you can train with Reichert, Gilliland, and Furlong for five days. Click here for more details about this once-in-a-lifetime shooting opportunity. (Paladin is not hosting this event.)

Ineptocracy

Earlier this month, Peder Lund (aka The Boss) walked into the office of Paladin's graphic designer, Jason Stowell, and asked him to make a poster from that definition.


After doing so, Jason emailed me to say, “Have I said how much I like working for this man?”

I hear ya, Jason.

Until that moment, I'd never heard the word ineptocracy. Near as I can tell, it’s been around the ’Net for about 10 years, origins unknown. But only last fall did it acquire that detailed definition and start making the online dictionaries.

Perhaps that’s because, right then, so many people discovered that Obama isn’t just a bad (e.g., overreaching, arrogant, lying, constitution-voiding, bought-and-paid-for) president, but a clumsy, weak one to boot. Who would ever have imagined that, given the well-organized and masterful campaign he ran to get where he is?

Ah well.

But let’s not make this about Obama. He’s just continuing in the grand tradition of George W. Bush, a man who felt entitled to be president — even though he couldn’t even bother to learn English properly — and who then proceeded to destroy our freedom in order to save it and (by his own admission) abandon the free market in order to save that.

But let’s not blame GWB either. Ineptocracy may be a new word, but it’s a long-standing form of U.S. government. Google “stupid government tricks” and you’ll get no shortage of examples. Why, the FAA and TSA alone provide enough ineptitude to keep bloggers entertained for years. And that's without even mentioning the BATFE!

Amazingly, ineptocracy marches on, decade after decade, despite every promise of reform.

When Richard Nixon was president, he asked his advisors to find the stupidest organization in the entire federal government so he could campaign against it as an absurd example of waste. They came up with the Board of Tea Experts (founded 1897) and their official tea-taster. This silly board (whose work was already covered by U.S. tea importers) was tossed before the media, where it was duly and loudly ridiculed.

Yet, 30 years later taxpayers were still paying a federal official to taste their tea. The Board of Tea Experts was finally done in by the Clinton-Gore “reinventing government” project.

It takes more than three decades to get rid of an agency that everybody agrees is completely idiotic. But, then, nobody really cared about federal tea-tasters once they quit laughing at them.

So let’s look at another example: It takes more than 20 years to get rid of something Americans universally and truly loathed: the National Maximum Speed Law.

Ineptocracy in action, truly.

The “reinventing government” project, by the way, was designed to make the federal government “work better and cost less.” Noticed anything like that happening lately? Or ever?

And how about the bipartisan 1990s triumph to “end welfare as we know it”? How”s that working out for ya?

You see, that’s the thing about ineptocracy. And that’s why the word (though I hope it catches on) is a little misleading. Although it’s true that everybody from the voters to the candidates to the bureaucrats to the president himself appears increasingly inept, the system itself is a model of super-efficiency. The system of government is amazingly, entirely, super-competently successful in meeting its goals.

Because what is the inevitable answer to every botch, every stumble, every outrage, every abuse of power? MORE! Higher taxes. More government borrowing. More laws. More regulations. More enforcers. More bailouts. More handouts. More crackdowns. More agencies. More centralized power. More nannying. More, more, more!

In practice, we think we’re experiencing ineptocracy. In reality, what we have is a giant, parasitic organism — the federal government — that uses ineptitude with Darwinian skill to serve its own health and ensure its own survival.

Claire Wolfe is the author of the Paladin books The Bad Attitude Guide to Good Citizenship, Freedom Outlaw’s Handbook, and I Am Not a Number, and a contributor to The Paladin Book of Dangerously Fun Stuff and Tough Times Survival Guide, Vol. 2.

COMING SOON: Street Krav Maga II—Stick Threat Survival Tactics

For a sneak preview of the final volume of Branimir Tudjan’s new Street Krav Maga II series, click below. Stick Threat Survival Tactics, which is coming soon from Paladin Press, will show you the best tactics for surviving an attacker armed with a stick.

New Kelly McCann DVD Now Available

Kelly McCann’s new Brass Tacks Kem-’ba-tivz DVD is now available from Paladin Press. Click on the video link below for a look at the first volume in the new five-volume Crucible All-Access Training series, which takes up where the two previous Crucible High-Risk Environment Training series left off.

In Brass Tacks Kem-’ba-tivz, Kelly McCann combines the hard-hitting unarmed tactics of his combatives system with simple, nasty, go-to techniques for the street. The goal is to show you how simple, everyday movements can be adapted for combative self-defense.

The working titles and approximate release dates for the remaining All-Access Training volumes are as follows:

Volume 2: Horizontal Shooting and Tactics with John Buchanan (Spring 2012)

Volume 3: Combative Conditioning 3 with John Garman (Spring 2012)

Volume 4: Mission-Essential Off-Road Driving 2 with Ty Washington (Summer 2012)

Volume 5: Tactical Combat Casualty Care with John Duncan (Summer 2012)

Keep an eye on the Paladin website for actual release dates.

State of Mind

by Dave Spaulding

One common theme that should be readily apparent to anyone who follows the Paladin Press website is the emphasis on self-reliance. It doesn’t matter if the subject is firearms, combatives, wilderness survival, or military action, Paladin Press is certainly behind what I like to think of as my mantra: we must all be active participants in our own rescue!

There is no other state of mind that offers greater peace of mind than knowing your are ready and willing to take whatever it takes to prevail in whatever trial or tribulation life sends your way. If I were to make state of mind look like a mathematical equation, it would look like this:

Awareness + Willingness = Prevail

They are a team with neither one more important than the others. Awareness means knowing what is going on around you at all times, being in a state of relaxed preparedness so you are not caught off guard. The best way to handle danger is to either avoid or evade it, and neither one is possible if you do not see the threat before it is thrust upon you. That said, the harsh reality of life is such that not all threats can be avoided; there will be times when fighting is your only option. For those who serve in the military or law enforcement, engagement is an inevitability. Cops and members of the military seek out those who would do us harm, so combat is par for the course. If one is not willing to engage in combat, failure is almost ensured.

The best explanation I have ever heard regarding willingness came from the 1976 movie The Shootist starring on John Wayne. Wayne’s character takes a teenaged stable boy out to shoot and when the young man out shoots the legendary gunfighter, the veteran of many gunfights explains the key component of prevailing in armed conflict:

“It’s not being fast or even accurate that counts, it’s being willing! I found out early that most men regardless of cause or need aren’t willing . . . they’ll blink an eye or draw a breath before they pull the trigger, and I won’t!”

This quote is almost verbatim from the book of the same name, and it encapsulates the state of mind necessary to win in the direst of circumstances, but it is not new. Those who have faced death in combat have long known that it is the more ruthless of the two combatants who will likely prevail, the one who has no hesitation about killing. While this may sound harsh, it is reality. If you want to know more about proper state of mind, I strongly suggest you read The Deadliest Men and More of the Deadliest Men Who Ever Lived by Paul Kirchner. Both books are full of men and women who understood the proper state of mind.



Dave Spaulding is a retired lieutenant from the Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office in Dayton, Ohio, where he worked in all facets of law enforcement, including SWAT, training, crime-scene investigation, undercover operations, and violent crime investigations. He is a graduate of most of the better-known shooting schools and the author of more than 1,000 articles in firearm and law enforcement publications. He is the author of the two best-selling books Defensive Living and Handgun Combatives, and has been featured in Ruger’s Tactical Tips at www.ruger.com.