Saturday, December 31, 2016

Happy New Year from the Religion of Peace.

Happy New Year: 35 killed and 40 wounded in New Year's attack on Istanbul night club
Excerpt: An armed assailant who is believed to have been dressed in a Santa Claus costume opened fire at a nightclub in Istanbul during New Year's celebrations, killing at least 35 people and wounding 40 others, according to Istanbul's governor and Turkey's state-run news agency. (ISIS or Kurds. Happy New Year from the Religion of Peace. ~Bob)

Happy New Year


Random Thoughts for January

Random Thoughts for January, 2017. By Robert A. Hall
Feel free to post or forward.


I dedicate this month's posting to Thomas Sowell, PhD, 86, the brilliant economist and writer who has just retired from writing columns. I consider him to be one of the five or ten smartest people in the country. His numerous books are all worth reading, as he has a terrific ability to translate the complex into clear understanding for average minds (like mine, alas). I highly recommend Basic Economics, which has been translated into six languages and used as an economic text all over the world. I learned more from it than any other book I have ever read. I also highly recommend his books Race and Culture: A World View, Applied Economics and Black Rednecks and White Liberals. There are many more. He will pursue his hobby of photography, learned as a photographer in the Marines. His voice will be missed, but I wish him a happy, peaceful and enjoyable retirement and long life. My monthly Random Thoughts were inspired by his far better Random Thoughts on the Passing Scene columns. Look up his work.
Farewell by Thomas Sowell

*****
I hate those "End of Year Wrap-up" stories. Wasn't the news bad enough without rehashing it?

Democrats: The party of folly, favoritism and fantasy.

We get those shopper coupon magazines. Some of the restaurant "deals" are so low I suspect that only existing customers use them. I won't drive to the other side of town to try someplace new for $2 off.

How to be instantly vilified as a racist: Tell the same jokes about Obama that the left is telling about Trump.

Few things make for needless work like laziness and procrastination.

Apparently, the hard part about writing political news stories is coming up with a semi-believable plot or narrative.

The Eight Stages of a Political Campaign
1. Enthusiasm
2. Concern
3. Panic
4. Election or defeat
5. Disillusionment
6. Search for the guilty
7. Punishment of the innocent
8. Praise and honors for the non-participant

I was thinking of demanding a Wisconsin recount on behalf of my candidate, Evan McMullen, but I was a tad short of the $3.5M cost. And I thought it might not change the outcome.

Want to look smart? Proof your emails and texts to make them as error free as a business letter.

As blog readers know, I didn't vote for Donald Trump, writing in Evan McMullen instead. But you'd have to have a heart of stone not to laugh at the distress, anguish and wailing of progressives over Trump's election.

Trump saved jobs at Carrier with tax dollars. Then he saves tax dollars and kills jobs at Boeing by cancelling the new AF1. Government picking winners and losers in the economy, same old story.

I expect that Keith Ellison as DNC chair will be an even bigger asset to the party than Debbie Wasserman Schultz was. The Republican Party that is.

Socialism leads inevitably to Gulags, Guillotines, and Graveyards.

A Congressman from northern Wisconsin is getting grief for calling Madison a city of communists. I think crypto-communists would better describe them.

Progressives won't let up on water-boarding until we kill all the Americans whose lives were saved by information from the three terrorists water-boarded. Maybe we should ask them if they had rather they were turned into red much by one of Obama's drone strikes, along with anyone near them.

For eight years the Obots called any criticism of the president hateful or racist. Now it's the Donaldcrats turn to demonize criticism.

Page views of my blog over the week of December 4 to 11. Go figure.

Russia
13401
France
4953
United States
4437
Norway
1365
Germany
311
Poland
236
South Korea
57
Portugal
57
Ukraine
48
Canada
29

Note to Millennials: Work Wins When Wishing or Whining Won't.

I think the donkey became the Democrats symbol because it is as stubborn as a mule, but half as smart.

To media flaks, political hacks. and partisan pundits, everything their hero-candidate does is wonderful, brilliant or at the worst, excusable. To the same sorry collection on the other side, everything that hero-candidate does is reprehensible, corrupt or stupid. Doesn't matter if they are Obama or Trump true believers. And anyone who tries to be objective is battered in turn by both sides.

Not standing for the National Anthem or burning the American flag may be free speech, but it is also hate speech against America and tens of millions of veterans. Far more so that flying the Confederate battle flag.

I wonder how I learned some things. When I was a kid did some adult say, "Here, taste this. That's what bitter tastes like"?

In the future, no doubt we will see football games between the Raging Rantallions of Offend U. vs. the Stuttering Snowflakes of No Hate Speech State. There will be no blocking or tackling and the refs will ensure a tie so everyone gets a trophy.

I don't watch much TV, but when it's on I note that two big commercial categories are for miracle weight loss equipment and miracle non-stick frying pans.

There is nothing so ridiculous that progressives won't believe it if it is promulgated by the high priests of the Great Progressive Church.

The myth that savage and brutal cultures are somehow better than your own civilized one is not a recent progressive invention to traduce the West. It likely started with Montaigne's essay "On Cannibals" c. 1580.

The people screaming about fake news should know. They've faked enough news over the years: Dar Rather, Brian Williams, Benghazi was caused by a video, Hands up don't shoot, Hillary dodged snipe fire, Hillary was named for Sir Edmond Hillary

Found another smart phone, an Apple, in the men's rooms at Sam's. Turned it in at the desk. Guess finding two smart phones pays back for the cops finding my flip phone.

Program on TV was talking about how hard it is to convince people Heroin Addiction is a disease. Yes--maybe because it's a disease that people inflict on themselves because they think they are so special they can feel good and not end in the gutter like everyone else who uses Heroin. Or in the morgue. The program complained that in the US a heroin addict dies every 19 minutes. Takes idiots out of the gene pool in my view. I feel worse about the addicts who live and go on robbing innocent people, often their parents, or selling sex and spreading disease, or getting other kids hooked so they can make money to feed their habit. Would that I could I push a button and kill every drug dealer in the world.

As I have said, I pretty much accept all friend requests and allow all posts on Facebook. My newest friend is a woman in a pink hijab and robe whose name is Ramlet Mohammad. Be interested in her comments on my posts.

Civil Service was designed to protect government employees from politics. What it actually does is protect bureaucrats while they carry out their own political agenda regardless of what the elected officials or the people want.

People release fanaticism for calculated political reasons and are always surprised when they can't control it.

Honor is a demanding master. But it is the only earthly one worth serving.

2016 was the year that leftist's favorite president was rebuked at the polls, leftists most-worshiped candidate lost to Donald Trump (of all people), and leftist's favorite brutal dictator died. so it wasn't all bad.

Progressives can stop looking for someone to blame for Trump becoming president. Two people more than any others were responsible. Obama, whose "fundamental transformation" was abhorred by a large number of Americans, and Hillary, who was the worst candidate since Michael Dukakis.

The "Obama can do no wrong" people and the "Trump can do no wrong" people are mirror images of each other. If you point this out to them, they will become barking mad and likely froth at the mouth.

If a politician promised to repeal the law of gravity, rabid partisans on his side of the aisle would believe it as an article of faith and watch for things to start floating. "Put not your trust in princes."

The economy doesn't offer participation trophies to the non-performer.

Supremacism is a existential threat to liberty and life, whether it is the white supremacism of the Alt-Right, the black supremacism of BLM and the NBP, the Hispanic supremacism of La Raza or the Islamic supremacism of the jihadists.

Want to see college tuition drop sharply? Do away with student loans.

Remember if you are on campus, saying "pull your own weight" or "take responsibility for your actions" is hate speech and you need to give a trigger warning. And probably pay for the snowflakes' counseling.

When the Muslims exterminate the last Jew in Israel, you will finally see Obama's legacy.

The saddest thing about the Berlin Truck massacre was that so many of us--but not Merkle--could see it coming.

I returned from watching the latest Star Wars movie Rogue One, in which a look-alike Princess Leia from the first movie makes a cameo at the end, to the news that Carrie Fisher, 60, the real Princess Leia had died of a heart attack. Talk about feeling old fast.

John Kerry came home from Vietnam on the side of tyrants and murderers and has remained on their side ever since.

Pettiness for political reasons never plays well. The nasty pettiness of the left is driving people to Trump.

Looking forward to the Freedom from Religion Foundation protesting Muslim prayer rooms in public buildings.

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
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.

*****


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.

Migrants

Islamic State top dog from Kosovo returns to Europe with 400 jihadis

Security

Muslim migrants were employed as security guards in Cologne on New Year’s Eve

Military Obesity


Killing Trade

A Measure of How Destructive Trump’s Tariffs Would Be. By Erick Erickson
Excerpt:  The New York Times has a fascinating in depth piece on the iPhone factory in China. My guess is that this piece has a lot to do with building the case against Trump’s tariffs. If not, it should. Because it shows just how economically devastating Trump’s tariffs and the subsequent trade war would be.
Tariff disaster offers a lesson on the folly of protectionism. By Thomas Sowell

Excerpt: The Hawley-Smoot bill raised U.S. tariffs to record-high levels in an attempt to protect existing jobs and in hopes of helping the unemployed find work producing things that the United States had previously been importing from other countries. Many businesses were in favor of the new tariffs, hoping to retain or expand their markets, and farmers were especially big supporters of Hawley-Smoot. Most of the leading economists in the country were opposed. A front-page headline in The New York Times of May 5, 1930, read: "1,028 Economists Ask Hoover to Veto Pending Tariff Bill." Those signing this public appeal against the new tariffs included many of the top economists of the day - 25 professors of economics at Harvard, 26 at the University of Chicago and 28 at Columbia.

The Electoral College

The Democratic Party’s 2016 Death March Presages GOP Suicide

Excerpt ...the one enduring function of the Electoral College is to ensure that presidents can't be chosen solely to represent the interests of the larger states and big population centers.... Let's put this in terms that might be easier for today's left-leaning young people to understand. In the popular Hunger Games books and films—a future dystopia written by a modern "liberal"—the nation is divided into rural districts that are subservient to a big, densely populated Capitol. That is precisely the result the Electoral College is designed to avoid. It is intended to give the outlying rural districts a political weight that makes them impossible for the urban elites to ignore.  (This article makes some really good and valid points. I’m a bit more doubtful of his conclusions. Time will tell. Ron P.)

Friday, December 30, 2016

Women in Islam

Nigeria: Muslim leader says bill proposing equality of women and men is un-Islamic

the Muslim War on Women

Boko Haram Teaching Child Soldiers to Rape. Senior Boko Haram militants are now ‘providing specific instructions’ to younger boys for raping women and girls at gunpoint.

Muslim Sex Slave

UK Muslim held teen girl as sex slave for 13 years, sold her four children

Germany made their bed

Rampaging Syrian migrants KICK BABY on bus, then attack paramedics trying to treat child

Brexit & Migrants

BREXIT WARNING: 12 MILLION more migrants to arrive in UK in 25 years without hard Brexit

White House and Israel

White House On Defense After Being Exposed as Architect of Anti-Israel U.N. Action

The Brits on Kerry

British Government Smacks Down John Kerry Over His Israel Speech
Excerpt: A spokesman for Prime Minister Theresa May said it was inappropriate of Mr Kerry, America’s top diplomat, to attack the make-up of the democratically-elected Israeli government – a key ally of both the US and Britain. Downing Street also rebuked Mr Kerry for focusing on the single issue of Israeli settlements and not the whole conflict. Intervening in the increasingly hostile international dispute today, a spokesman for the British Prime Minister said: ‘We do not… believe that the way to negotiate peace is by focusing on only one issue, in this case the construction of settlements, when clearly the conflict between the Israelis and Palestinians is so deeply complex. ‘And we do not believe that it is appropriate to attack the composition of the democratically-elected government of an ally.’

Hanoi John

John Kerry’s Indefensible Swipe at Israel

Deported

Mali sends back migrants deported by France

Hard Times


Got your back


Pettiness of the Left

So they ask the young singer, Jackie Evanko, to sing the national anthem at the inauguration. She happily agrees. She instantly comes under all kinds of vicious personal attacks, a prediction of her career ending, and a move to boycott her albums and performances. She stays firm in her commitment to sing our national anthem at our national ceremony. Her album sales quadruple. Maybe there's a lesson there, that there are more moderate and conservative Americans than idiot whiners and super sore losers. Maybe more of us admire willingness to sing our anthem anywhere for anyone than those who think they can oppress people from acting their free will. And what this does is just more of betraying the stupidity and downright meanness of those on the Left, who haven't figured out that acting out like this just demonstrates how unfit they are to make decisions for the rest of us. If they keep this up- and it seems they will- they may yet damage the Democrat Party for a very long time to come. --Del
More than Obama already has? Pettiness for political reasons never plays well. The nasty pettiness of the left is driving people to Trump. ~Bob

Shootout

6 Time Felon Killed In Shootout By 13 Year Old During Home Invasion

http://freedomdaily.com/6-time-felon-killed-in-shootout/
Excerpt: A 13-year-old South Carolina boy fatally shot one burglary suspect and scared off a second with his mother’s gun, police said. The unidentified teenager told the Charleston County Sheriff’s Office that he was alone on Tuesday afternoon in his family’s home, north of North Charleston, when someone tried to break in, according to NBC affiliate WCBD.

Thursday, December 29, 2016

Kerry Secret Meeting

Egyptian Daily Close To Egyptian Intelligence Reveals Minutes Of Secret Palestinian Authority Meeting With John Kerry, Susan Rice; U.S.-Palestinian Coordination On UNSC 2334; Rice Says Trump Administration's Policy Will Be 'Dangerous'
Obama-Kerry certainly colluded with the "Palestinians" at the expense of Israel. Kerry made sure by getting New Zealand to make the betrayal look clean. I'll bet Senegal was somehow paid off. Yours truly, Larry Greenberg

Heretic?

Let’s Be Blunt and Honest
Excerpt:
Many of you will think it is no big deal that Donald Trump is inviting an open heretic who rejects the eternality of Jesus Christ and the trinity itself to represent Christians by praying at the Presidential Inauguration. You think I’m overreacting, a sore loser, or some such. And you know damn well that if Jeremiah Wright had said a prayer at Barack Obama’s inauguration you’d be publicly outraged and calling for Obama to reconsider the invitation. Jeremiah Wright’s black liberation theology and Paula White’s prosperity gospel are two sides of the same heretical coin. By being outraged about one and not the other, and admit it that you would be and you were upset by Barack Obama attending Wright’s church, you have reduced Jesus Christ to partisan team sport.

Kerry

John Kerry’s Fitting Ending. By Jim Geraghty
Excerpt: Thus, it’s fitting that John Kerry’s last major act as secretary of state is a speech that offers up hot nonsense, a bitterly hostile address that called Israel’s government “the most right-wing in Israeli history, with an agenda driven by its most extreme elements.” (Mind you, the opposing side in this conflict elected Hamas, an actual terrorist group, to govern the Gaza Strip.) The cement hardens on the Obama-Kerry foreign-policy legacy: They were toothless and hapless against ISIS, Bashar al-Assad, North Korea, Iran, Russia, China, and the world’s worst and most ruthless regimes. But as for Bibi Netanyahu, they came down on him like a ton of bricks.

Wednesday, December 28, 2016

Free Woman


Afghanistan Women

Afghanistan: Muslims behead woman for visiting city alone without her husband

Women

Saudi Arabia: Man jailed, fined $8,000 for calling for an end to male control over women

American Jihadist

American convert to Islam is now key Islamic State leader

Cowards

The Moral Cowardice of Barack Obama and John Kerry
Excerpt: For eight years, Barack Obama has given lip service to our special relationship with Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East and our long time ally. During that time, the United States has opposed anti-Israel efforts in the United Nations, standing shoulder to shoulder with Israel. But with less than four weeks before he leaves office, Barack Obama finally worked with Israel’s enemies to pass a United Nations resolution hostile to Israel. This is an act of moral cowardice and immaturity the likes of which Barack Obama thinks only Donald Trump is capable of.

Translation




Peace


The War on Women

The War on Women: Nigeria's Sultan of Sokoto rejects gender equality bill

Syria

Syria conflict: Turkey and Russia 'agree ceasefire plan'
Without hep from Obama and Kerry who have made themselves distrusted. ~Bob

Thank you, Professor Sowell

Thank You, Professor Sowell. By Michael Malkin
Excerpt: I first read Thomas Sowell in college — no thanks to my college. At the majority of America’s institutions of “higher learning,” reading Thomas Sowell was a subversive act in the early 1990s when I was a student. It remains so today. Why? Because the prolific libertarian economist’s vast body of work is a clarion rejection of all that the liberal intelligentsia hold dear. Among the Left’s most corrosive ideas is the concept of perpetual and permanent racial victimhood, which social engineers pretend to rectify through federally mandated, taxpayer-subsidized preferential policies. Sowell’s groundbreaking academic analyses of these programs in the U.S. and around the world exposed how elites profit mightily at the expense of the alleged beneficiaries of government-coerced affirmative action.

Obama's legacy with jews

Phone Call From Biden Said to Precipitate Ukraine’s UN ‘Yes’ Vote
Excerpt: A wealth of evidence is now emerging that, far from simply abstaining from a UN vote, which is how the Administration and its press circle at first sought to characterize its actions, the anti-Israel resolution was actively vetted at the highest levels of the U.S. Administration, which then led a pressure campaign—both directly and through Great Britain—to convince other countries to vote in favor of it. Tablet has confirmed that one tangible consequence of the high-level U.S. campaign was a phone call from Vice President Joseph Biden to Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, which succeeded in changing Ukraine’s vote from an expected abstention to a “yes.” According to one U.S. national security source, the Obama Administration needed a 14-0 vote to justify what the source called “the optics” of its own abstention. (Jesse Obama sticks it to Heimieland. ~Bob)

Deal?


Tuesday, December 27, 2016

Dr. Thomas Sowell is retiring



Thomas Sowell, PhD, 86, the brilliant economist and writer is retiring from writing columns. I consider him to be one of the five or ten smartest people in the country. His numerous books are all worth reading, as he has a terrific ability to translate the complex into clear understanding for average minds (like mine, alas). I highly recommend Basic Economics, which has been translated into six languages and used as an economic text all over the world. I learned more from it than any other book I have ever read. I also highly recommend his books Race and Culture: A World View, Applied Economics and Black Rednecks and White Liberals. There are many more. He will pursue his hobby of photography, learned as a photographer in the Marines. His voice will be missed, but I wish him a happy, peaceful and enjoyable retirement and long life. My monthly Random Thoughts were inspired by his far better Random Thoughts on the Passing Scene columns. Look up his work. ~Bob

Farewell by Thomas Sowell
Excerpt: Even the best things come to an end. After enjoying a quarter of a century of writing this column for Creators Syndicate, I have decided to stop. Age 86 is well past the usual retirement age, so the question is not why I am quitting, but why I kept at it so long. It was very fulfilling to be able to share my thoughts on the events unfolding around us, and to receive feedback from readers across the country — even if it was impossible to answer them all. Being old-fashioned, I liked to know what the facts were before writing. That required not only a lot of research, it also required keeping up with what was being said in the media.

Excerpt: Any honest man, looking back on a very long life, must admit — even if only to himself — being a relic of a bygone era. Having lived long enough to have seen both “the greatest generation” that fought World War II and the gratingest generation that we see all around us today makes being a relic of the past more of a boast than an admission. Not everything in the past was admirable. Poet W. H. Auden called the 1930s “a low dishonest decade.” So were the 1960s, which launched many of the trends we are experiencing so painfully today. Some of the fashionable notions of the 1930s reappeared in the 1960s, often using the very same discredited words and producing the same disastrous consequences.

Refreshing/ Why I'm boycotting the NFL

New NC Governor’s top advisor: Kaepernick is “refreshing,” we shouldn’t “honor warriors”

Dems for Trump


Important?


Merry Christmas from Chicago, where Black Lives don't matter

Merry Christmas from Democrat stronghold Chicago, where Black Lives surely don't matter: A violent Christmas in a violent year for Chicago: 11 killed, 50 wounded
Excerpt: Two girls, 13 and 14, were shot on the South Side as a violent Christmas weekend came to a close during one of the most violent years in Chicago in decades. A total of 61 people were shot in the city during the holiday weekend and 11 of them died of their wounds, according to data kept by the Tribune. Seven people were killed on Christmas Day alone, more than on the holiday the past three years combined. Three people were killed in 2015, one in 2014, and two in 2013. (BLM can say "Mission Accomplished" as the cops have clearly backed off in black neighborhoods. ~Bob)

Don't Listen, Democrats

Worth Reading: The Democrats' destructive politics of righteousness
Excerpt: If Trump pursued the politics of resentment in courting white, working-class voters and their rural cousins, Democrats succumbed to what I call "the politics of righteousness" in overlooking their concerns and underestimating their power. By righteousness I mean the tendency of the Democratic Party to assume ownership of the moral high ground whenever cultural values and social norms are at issue in American politics — and to presume that those who disagree are, as Hillary Clinton put it, "a basket of deplorables." (From the Chicago Tribune, usually a reliable Democrat paper. This is a surprisingly well thought out article. I don’t think I’ve run across this author before, but I’ll be watching for his work from now on. --Ron P.)

Monday, December 26, 2016

Christmas at the Hall's

Hope yours was as happy.










Frightening

UW-Madison students to carry sex toys to protest gun bill

ISIS

This is How You Re-Create the Fascists, Nazis, and Other Demagogues

BO Care

Healthcare.gov Approves Fake Applicants in Undercover Investigation, Again
Excerpt: Yes, as hard as it is to believe that the monster bureaucracy can make mistakes, so far they're batting only 250, and this is not the first time they've been checked. I'm not one of those people who demands perfection, but 9 out of 12 false applications getting approved is a really impressive record.... on the bad side. Regular insurance companies do much better, but they have a certain motivation, when they make mistakes it hits their bottom line, when a federal agency makes mistakes, it's the rest of us who pay for it. --Del

Climate Change

Congress: Obama Admin Fired Top Scientist to Advance Climate Change Plans
Isn't this neat? An actual case of a federal employee scientist of high rank getting terminated for giving Congress actual answers to questions! Well, we certainly can't allow that kind of thing to go on, can we? Why, it undercuts Mr. Obama's divine mandate to do whatever he wishes on whatever subject. I hope this woman has been found, now that she's been vindicated, and she gets her job back, with back pay, and will be part of the new day under the new Administration. Where maybe telling the truth will be the normal practice. --Del

Satire

Satire: ISIS plans to use brutal Department of Veterans Affairs tactics to combat US military
Funny, but I have to say the Madison VA saved my life. ~Bob