Random Thoughts for May,
2018.
By Robert A. Hall
Feel free to post or forward.
Dear Al Gore: Never mind global warming, what did you do
with Spring? (Update. Spring finally arrived on April 20. The first 20 days of
April were the coldest on record in Wisconsin.)
Our high schools and colleges have created a generation of
historical, political and economic imbeciles, who will rend the social contract
of our society. The price will be heavy on everyone, but especially on that
generation, who, without a clue as to why things fell apart, will wonder who’s
to blame.
I saw the first robin of spring on April 14. He was dead of
hypothermia.
Al Gore was reportedly worth $2M when he left the Vice
Presidency and is now worth over $300 million. I wonder if he switched to
sounding the alarm about Global Cooling (the settled science of the 1970s) he’d
rake in another $300 million. He is one of the liberal prophets, who’s every
word is, well, gospel.
Americans insulting each other with the term Nazi, Fascist,
or Communist have no notion of the horrors of living under these bloody
totalitarian systems. Nazism and Fascism are, excerpt for a handful of neo-Nazi,
alt-right and skinhead nuts, pretty much a dead letter, but communism continues
to have a seductive appeal for the airheaded who know little history, because
it sounds nice in theory. (Though Obama’s economic policy was more fascist than
communists. Private ownership of companies, but they do the bidding of the
state and get favors. Think Solendra.) So, they may yet get their chance to
find out what it’s like. Welcome to the Gulag, Comrade!
No matter what you thought at 20, love without reciprocity
is unsustainable. This is a good thing.
I may not look like much to you, but my cat thinks I’m a
god.
A common failing of people when judging others is to put
more emphasis on family, tribe, race, ethnic heritage, religion or nationality
than on character and past behavior.
When I left for Marine boot camp, my dad wrote me a letter.
He said, “I won’t tell you to act in a way that will make me proud, that would
be selfish. But always act in a way that makes you proud of yourself.” Good
advice in 1964, good advice now.
Looking at the world around us, living in the past has a
great attraction.
You look at some people and say, “He must have taken a stool
softener and it went to his head.”
I’m of the age when if I get up in the morning and something
doesn’t hurt, I think I’m dead.
Every time I lose a couple of pounds, my body thinks the
famine has come and starts storing fat.
“If we are here to
help others, I often wonder what the others are here for.” –Sir Thomas
Robert Dewar, of the Scotch Whisky family.
I often go over old wounds in my head to make sure they
don’t heal.
Food? Better to waste it than to waist it.
Don’t you love talking to a computer on your phone, so the
company can waste your time jumping through electronic hoops without using any
employee time?
I managed professional associations for 31 years and was a
state senator for ten before that. In all those 41 years, if you called my
office during business hours, a live person answered the phone. I thought that
was a minimum for good customer service.
Vietnam Veterans take note. In 50 years, the children and
grandchildren of those tearing down Confederate memorials will tear down the
Vietnam Memorial Wall, because the people on it died fighting progressive principles
and the agrarian reformers under Uncle Ho. They will put up a statute to him. Vietnam
Vets will be considered then as dead Confederate are now.
Most people don’t seem to understand the difference between
coincidence, correlation and causation.
On TV they are always telling you to ask your doctors about
some drug they are pushing. Then after they tell you the possible side effects,
you don’t want to even think about it, let alone bother your doctor.
My plan for today: live through it.
Someday, old folks will be saying, “Remember when gas was
only ten bucks a gallon? Those were the days.”
The only remedy for what’s wrong with some people is
shooting.
Dear Democrats. The air strikes in Syria were just enforcing
Obama’s Red Line.
I believe in not letting the perfect be the enemy of the
good. But some people don’t let the good be the enemy of the mediocre.
Stuff is expandable to cover any flat surface. Exhibit A: Our
dining room table and kitchen counters.
If I had it to do over, I’d be a trust fund baby. You know,
rich like the Kennedys, but without the tendency to abuse women.
I’ve finally achieved a work-life balance. I work three days
and have four off to do all the life-maintenance things.
I watch little TV, but I notice when my bride has it on,
that there seems to be three times as much air time devoted to commercials as
when I was a kid. In 30 years, they will be saying, “Your programing will
resume next week after these messages from our sponsors.”
I think that inevitably disruptive technology will put the
cable companies out of business. I just hope I live to see it.
It is the tragedy of life that what we want to do is so
often at variance with what we should do. There are those who usually do what
they want rather than the tasks they should do (like work, study, the laundry,
etc.). You can spot them because they are usually poor and always miserable.
I sometimes make future commitments that I regret when the
day comes.
If you do someone a favor, they will often convince
themselves that it wasn’t a favor at all, because you owed it to them.
A weak, vacillating and unreliable ally (or friend) is more
dangerous than an enemy.
I’m thinking of starting a Go-Fund-Me account because I want
money. Bet it would work.
I expect a TV host to ask a person fired by Trump, “The
president said you weren’t loyal. Is that true?” And the guy to answer, “More
loyal than he’s been to Melania.”
Congress ate the seed corn long ago. They are now stripping
the bark from the fruit trees.
I’m so old, I remember when the GOP was for free trade,
limited government and fiscal responsibility.
You are more likely to hurt yourself working with a dull
knife than with a sharp one. The same is true of working with dull people
versus sharp people.
Those kids crying for communism should consider North and
South Korea. North Korea is a communist dictatorship. (communism requires a
dictatorship to force people to do what they don’t want to do. If it were a
democracy, the victims/citizens would vote them out of office.) It is allied
with its friend communist China. South Korea is a capitalist democracy, allied
with its friend, the capitalist, democratic United States. In which Korea are
the people freer? In which one do the people live better?
Trump’s major problem, like Bill Clinton, is that he wants
to control other people but he can’t control himself.
Gratitude vanishes like snowflakes falling into a camp fire.
Tariffs are a tax on consumers, who have to pay more for
goods.
Wanting a sports team, any sports team, to win a
championship isn’t in my top 10,000 wishes.
Maybe we should mandate that the president and all members
of congress must get their medical care from the VA, even if they are not
veterans.
Some time ago, the car companies figured out that if they
replaced real bumpers with expensive, flimsy plastic bumpers, they get to make
a lot of money selling replacements after “crashes” under 5 mph.
Ronald Reagan famously said that freedom is always only one
generation from extinction. I think the millennials may be that generation.
I never buy fair trade coffee. Nothing makes that morning
cup of joe taste better than knowing the beans were picked by over-worked, sweaty,
under-paid peasants.
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
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.
He currently works part-time as a writer-editor in the My Life, My Story
program as the Madison VA hospital, interviewing vets and writing up their life
histories.
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