Random Thoughts

Random Thoughts for November, 2016. By Robert A. Hall

Feel free to post or forward.

We were in Maryland visiting my 87-year-old father-in-law, a Marine vet, who has not been doing well. Got back the day before the election, so held the random thoughts until today to seethe results.

I owe my friend Andy, a brother Marine, a dollar. He bet me Trump would win. I would have bet more. I was wrong. I was wrong when I thought Trump wouldn't put his ego on the line by running. I was wrong when I thought he wouldn't win the primaries or nomination. I was wrong when I thought last spring that Clinton would crush him. I was wrong the day before the election, when, reading the polls, I still thought Clinton would win by about 3%. Last night I said a prayer that I'm also wrong about what I think a Trump presidency means.

People will now lump pollsters with lawyers and used car salesmen as untrustworthy.

The person most responsible for Trump's stunning victory is Barack Obama. Voters took a long look at a jobless recovery, the rewarding of green cronies with tax dollars, a sound-the-retreat foreign policy, putting a radical green agenda ahead of working families, a military crippled by PC and social engineering, declining labor force participation, the lies of Obamacare, and the exploiting of racial division and identity politics for partisan advantage and decided that with all his manifest flaws and ignorance, Trump was a better risk that four more years of progressive non-performance.

While I have had a deep-seated loathing for Donald Trump for decades, I have had an equal loathing for Hillary and Bill Clinton, so her defeat is gratifying. She will now become an object of vilification among progressives--the candidate who lost to Donald Trump. Foreign donations, and a lot of domestic ones, to the Clinton Foundation will dry up. Clinton Cronies who were given sinecures at the Foundation to keep them ready for the campaign will have to seek gainful employment in an economy that will not value the word "Clinton" on a resume. Charity watchdogs will dig deeper into it. Investigations into her conduct will no longer be protected by politics. Even liberals will think she gets what's coming. Though I think it would be a mistake for President Trump to be seen to go after her.

Meanwhile, Trump's business empire will flourish. People will want to do business with power as they did with the Clintons. That represents a trap and a danger to him. If there are compromised financial dealings, the media will not give him the pass they gave the Clintons.

I can't help having a frisson of Schadenfreude imaging Obama's anguish over his legacy and fundamental transformation being dismantled.

The Trump campaign always claimed there were lots of voters who were not telling the pollsters they supported Trump. They were right.

Trump proved he could take campaign advice during the last couple of months, which made a lot of voters more comfortable with him. I hope he will be able to take advice from economists like Dr. Thomas Sowell, advice from his military leaders and advice from foreign policy experts. Not progressive ones. We shall see.

Donald Trump owes part of his rise to white identity politics, in the form of the Alt.Right, white supremacists and other groups. But they have gained prominence and supporters as a reaction to several decades of progressives cynically seeking power by playing black identity polices. They long ago abandoned the dream of a color blind society, and every action has a reaction. They helped create Trumpism.

"Peace: noun. in International affairs, a period of cheating between two periods of fighting." --Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary.

After the collapse, there will be a great die-off. Or maybe kill-off is more accurate.

Everyone is living on borrowed time. As a doctor told me, despite all the advances of modern medicine, the death rate remains unchanged. One per person.

Conservatives help the poor through personal giving. Liberals help the poor by taking from productive people and giving it to bureaucrats, who one hopes help the poor after taking their administrative cut. But the war on poverty indicates it doesn't work.

Coincidence is the camouflage of premeditation.

"Social Justice" is a progressive dog whistle for "Hands up, give me the loot!"

We should change the name from "conservatives" to "rationalists," people opposed to the progressive pie-in-the-sky principles on practical grounds.

Those who espouse a "living constitution" actually want the constitution and its protection of freedom dead.

I think Obama issued all those executive orders because he was jealous of the Supreme Court's power to legislate.

Most "home cooked" food is not cooked in a home.

Stupidity is often a fatal disease.

The cascading problems with BOCare were entirely predictable. And were predicted, though those predicting them were smeared for their trouble.

Matthew 18:17: "If they still refuse to listen, tell it to the church; and if they refuse to listen even to the church, treat them as you would a pagan or a tax collector."

"Let your credo be this: Let the lie come into the world, let it even triumph. But not through me." --Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Note to BLM: "I do not believe in collective guilt nor in collective responsibility. Only the killers are guilty." --Ellie Weisel.

People who are willing to sacrifice constitution rights such as Freedom of Speech to some issue they view as more important (global warming, "hate" speech) will soon find they have no rights, as every right has people who would abrogate it for something they think more important.

Just because you can use your smart phone to call people or get text messages anywhere doesn't mean you should.

The first of November and we barely have 60% of our Christmas shopping done. Where does the time go?

Wish as hard as you want, wishing never trumps reality. Ignoring the coming fiscal crisis or trying to wish it away will not delay it by a minute.

I believe that Obama, like so many black leaders, is anti-Semitic. Given liberal Jewish support for Democrats, he keeps it mostly under wraps, but his policy of undermining Israel, which will lead to the slaughter of the Jewish people there, can have little other basis. It is well hidden compared to his pal Jesse Jackson's crude reference to "Hymietown." Plus Israel, the only democracy in the middle east, the only country there offering pluralism, multiple parties, freedom of speech, religion and the press, plus equality for women, enrages liberals. How dare those damn Jews! I also believe he has a bias against the British, based on their having been the colonial power in his father's home of Kenya. This is revealed by his cleansing of the White House of the bust of the greatest man of the 20th century, Churchill, without whom Hitler, the exterminator of the Jews would likely have won the war. I strongly suspect he has at least a mild racial animus towards whites in general, unless they have accepted the sacrament of the Great Progressive Church and adopted Obamaism as their creed.

I would like to join the Illuminati. Can anyone direct me to their membership application on line?

The new rule for politicians: Assume that every email you send will be read and conversation recorded by people who wish you ill.

Why is it that the most ignorant people are the ones who think they know everything?

If Saddam Hussein had only waited to invade Kuwait until Obama was president, he could have had it for the price of reading a sharply-worded diplomatic note.

When I want a break from reading history, politics or economics, I often pick up a novel. One "escapist" author I really like (if reading about the war with terrorists can be considered escapism) is Brad Thor. I recommend his books. I'm just one of his novels, Full Black, from 2011. Thor gets what is going on. I just pray there are really characters like his good guys taking the fight to the enemy we are at war with. In the novel, one of the very bad guys is a multi-billionaire, James Standing, who has turned on the system that made him rich (maybe based on George Soros?) and wants to destroy capitalism, thus is funding and directing terrorists. A journalist, Julia from a business paper is interviewing him:

Standing: "You have given me the usual shallow, shopworn defense of capitalism, but you haven't given me one concrete reason why my ideas are so unreasonable."

Julia: One concrete reason? ... I can actually give you four. First, it is morally wrong to take anything that doesn't belong to you and having the state do the taking doesn't magically make it okay or right. Second, socialism has been tried repeatedly and has never worked anywhere. Yet each new crop of elites thinks they can enact socialism and this time it will be different. They stick the socialist fork back in the electrical outlet expecting a totally different outcome, but it always ends up the same. Third, when people become reliant on the state, that reliance erodes their self-respect, their sense of self-worth, their work ethic and their independence. Finally, socialism promotes class envy and class warfare. The makers resent the takers for draining their resources and the takers resent the makers because no matter how much the takers take, they always want more. They erroneously believe that the makers have an abundant supply from which they should be continuously compelled to give. But as Margaret Thatcher so aptly put it, the problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money."

The older I get the more I like small towns. They and small businesses and the dedicated (non-careerist members of our military may be the only fingers in the dyke against the coming deluge.

The more rights progressives discover, the fewer responsibilities they recognize.

Professional sports are a leading world cause of stupidity.

You cannot say that the Obama foreign policy was a failure. It's object was to humble America and promote the "International Community" - never mind that the international community is a fiction and bodies like the UN are dominated by barbarians seeking power - as the arbiter of good and evil, and the source of correction. In all this it has succeed so well that your grandchildren will likely live to be slaves.

I have hearing aides from the VA, due to loud noises in my misspent youth. They don't help much, but I wear them for the fashion statement.

Progressives live under the delusion that if they can just make the state powerful enough, the laws all encompassing and the regulations tight enough they will create the longed-for utopia that has always escaped them.

Black Lives Matter chanting "Pigs in a blanket, fry them like bacon" and "What do we want? Dead cops! When do we want them? Now!" are almost as precious in the progressive pantheon as their Jew-hating, gay-hanging, women-stoning, child-abusing, apostate-executing Islamist brethren, because, after all, they are multiculturalists and all cultures are equal valid. Except, of course, rural, law-abiding Christian culture in the United States, which must be destroyed.

If liberals really believed that "global warming" was the threat they shrilly proclaim, they would be protesting to demand an immediate expansion of nuclear power and Al Gore, Barack Obama, the Clintons and the wealthy Hollywood fluff-brains would have lowered their carbon footprints to say, only four times mine. Until they do, I'm not on board.

The people who have annoyed me the most lately are the folks saying Jesus would vote for this candidate or would support that policy. I'm sure he has all he can do to keep his Dad from wiping us all out and starting over.

"We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor, and are shocked to find traitors in our midst." —C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man.

People tell me I live in the past. I tell them it's nicer there.

It's amusing how liberals who cannot understand how conservatives, Christians, rednecks or gun owners think believe that Muslims think they same way they do and want the same things like peace, tolerance and multiculturalism.

Liberals think anyone with a gun is a monster. Conservatives think that anyone without a gun is monster chow.

If there is only one way to heaven, it's going to be a lot less populated than Wyoming.

American ambassador Wm. Dodd in Berlin, Oct. 1933: "One may safely say that it would be no sin if statesmen learned enough of history to realize that NO system which implies control of society by privilege seekers has ever ended in any other way than collapse." 

Colonialism is often blamed for a country being poor and backward. Which is why, I suppose, the United States, being cobbled together of former English, Dutch and Spanish colonies, has always lagged other nations economically and technologically.

We laugh at China's "One-child" program. But we seem to have a "one parent" program.

Progressive economics might be called Lutheran Economics. Prosperity comes not from good works--making better widgets with better service--but from the grace of the all-powerful one they serve--the State. See Solyndra.

Social Justice warriors don't believe in the Tenth Commandment.

Shouldn't abortions be included in the Infant Mortality Rate?

The Jihadists practice cruelty and call it compassion, slaughter and call it Justice, and barbarism and call it divinely will.

The time is coming when hope and tears will not suffice, only deeds. And there will be no safe spaces.

If a Christian murdered 40 people because of their religion, Progressives would accuse him of cultural appropriation.  

History that serves a political agenda is not history, but propaganda. 

I suggest developing a new holocaust museum in Washington to memorialize the decades long holocaust in Islamic countries against Christians, Jews, Yazidis, non-conforming Muslim sects and others, aided and abetted by western "multiculturalists" who believe that even a culture that engages in oppression and murder must be honored and protected from critics.

 If a Jihadist walks into your church and starts shooting people, and you tackle him to stop it, you will be labeled an anti-Muslim extremist by the media, the left and the administration.

It may be time for Late Rites for Constitutional Rites. Neither party's candidate gave more than weak lip service to the Constitution.

Happened to click on a sports program where they said, "This is a moment in history." Aren't all moments, "moments in history"?

We have raised a generation that can't take a hit. And very hard hits are coming indeed.

They say geese mate for life. People used to. Now they mate until something that looks better comes along.

You haven't really made a large mark in life unless people have died cursing your name.

Don't talk to me about the NFL players who dishonor the flag. Friends of mine died for that flag. I suspect your friends spit on it.

Get the collection! My “Random Thoughts” from 2008 through July, 2013 are collected in this book: The Old Jarhead's Journal: Random Thoughts on Life, Liberty, and Leadership by Robert A. Hall

http://www.amazon.com/Old-Jarheads-Journal-Thoughts-Leadership/dp/1490500162/ref=sr_1_1?s=booksandie=UTF8andqid=1373907206andsr=1-1andkeywords=Old+Jarhead%27s+Journal

The Old Jarhead’s Journal is a collection of Random Thoughts on politics and life and Conservative Political Essays, mostly published on the author’s blog, including the essay “I’m Tired” which went viral on the Internet in 2009, “The Hall Platform,” “This I Believe,” and “Why I’m a Republican.” While they will be of interest to conservative thinkers, they are collected here in book form as a service to readers who wish to give a copy to favorite liberals and watch their heads explode. All royalties are donated to the Injured Marine Semper Fi Fund.

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Robert A. Hall is a Marine Vietnam Veteran who served five terms in the Massachusetts State Senate. He is the author of The Coming Collapse of the American Republic. http://www.amazon.com/Coming-Collapse-American-Republic-prevent/dp/1461122538/ref=sr_1_5?s=booksandie=UTF8andqid=1304815980andsr=1-5 For a free PDF of Collapse, e-mail him at tartanmarine(at)gmail.com. Hall’s eleven books are listed here: http://tartanmarine.blogspot.com/2010/07/new-book-published.html. His blog of political news and conservative comment is www.tartanmarine.blogspot.com.