Random Thoughts for April,
2014
Robert A. Hall
March 31st was the
Obamacare "firm deadline." Ha! Obamacare has no firm deadlines
anymore than any of Obama's promises are firm. All subject to polls and
political whims.
Republicans won a special election for Congress in Florida while I was in
the VA Hospital for ten days early in March for three follow-up debridement surgeries
on my new lung. It produced gloating from our side, spin from both, but that is
standard now. I tend to agree that it didn't mean much. I think special elections
rarely do. Turnout is always different, as are many factors. But I'll tell you
who though it was a big deal--much of the main stream media, which was almost
totally silent on the outcome, just as they were silent on a former high IRS
official, Lois Learner, taking the fifth before Congress for the second time.
They still have Obama's back--but it's getting harder. Ask yourself, if the
Democrat had won the special election, or a Republican official had taken the
fifth, would they have mentioned it? Probably it would have been splashed on
Page One or at the top of the news hour.
I am amazed to discover there are lung or heart transplant
patients through the VA who don't follow directions, go to PT rehab or do as
medical staff instructs. I received the gift of a new lung. They are in short
supply. I have a moral and ethical responsibility to the VA/UW Hospital Medical
Team, to my family, to the donor family and to the person who would have
received that lung if I hadn't been next in line with a higher LAS to do
everything I can to make it work. It may not--these things go bad beyond
anyone's control. But it won't be because my healthcare team didn't do all that
is humanly possible. And it won't be because I didn't do all I can. I will be
fighting all the way.
Anyone who heard the vacuous emptiness of candidate Barack
Obama saying "We are the ones we've been waiting for," which is
totally devoid of meaning, and didn't know the guy was hopelessly out of touch
with reality, has the cognitive ability of fungi. (Of course, Obama and company
were the ones that Ambassador Stevens and the SEALs were waiting for in Benghazi --they waited in
vain.)
Our friend Danny says she is a "Commercial
Cleaner." When a commercial comes on TV, she gets up and cleans house a
bit.
When I was a boy, ADHD was known as "Boyhood."
Sure, I'd like to live someplace warmer, especially after this
winter. But we are tied to Madison ,
WI
Women use health insurance 33% more than men, according to
the CDC. Women get paid less than men with more education, more experience, and
who work more hours on average. But for them to pay more for insurance they use
more of or to get paid less than men who work more is an outrageous inequality
that liberals must fix! Men pay more for car insurance, because they have more
accidents and drive more. They pay more for life insurance, because they die
younger. Liberals see no need to fix this inequality by mandating equal
rates--life is unfair! Stop the liberal war on men!
When something goes wrong, good people often feel bad though
it was not their fault. But too often, the people whose fault it was accept no
responsibility, but begin a search for excuses or scapegoats.
There may be no stupid questions, as they say, but there are
sure a lot of stupid questioners.
Costco reports a big drop in profits. Liberals love Costco
for giving better wages and benefits to employees, but the laws of economics
are terribly unforgiving (as the country is finding out). If you can’t compete,
and the liberals who love you still shop SAMS Club for better prices, those Costco
employees will eventually have no wages or benefits.
For ROI, the best investment is raising a person’s stature
in the eyes of family, friends, colleges and/or that person. It costs nothing
and is very kind. But be sure that the compliment you give or share is sincere
and deserved. Fulsome flattery just turns people off because it is so
transparent. One of my nurses at the VA (who was terrific herself) said that if
she was sick, she'd pick Nurse Cathy to care for her. I thought that was
well-deserved, and made sure to pass it on to Cathy.
People keep selling health food—low fat, low sugar, low
salt, no gluten—for high prices. I think there might be a market for “Low Life
Expectancy” food, that has all these bad things, tastes good, and is cheaper.
There was a time—in my life time—when people saw black
professionals (doctors, lawyers, accountants) and thought they must be very
good to have overcome racism and often other obstacles like poverty and poor
schools. Now many folks wonder if they achieved their success from the liberal
view that blacks cannot compete with whites or Asian (who certainly suffered
equally bad racial discrimination), and therefore must be given lower college
admission standards, grade standards, hiring standards, and promotion standards
to achieve diversity, to overcome past racism or the effects of slavery, or, in
my view, to buy votes from a large black population they have instilled with a
victimized, we can’t compete, mentality that would have outraged earlier
generations of blacks with higher employment rates than whites. As one group of
former slaves petitioned the Freedman’s Bureau, “We are a working class of
people.” Successful professionals like Thomas Sowell, PhD and Walter Williams,
PhD, who grew up poor and black, and became nationally prominent economists
without “affirmative action," are incensed, as they reject this
condescending (and in my view, racist) view of black people .
If you believe with progressives that “all cultures are
equally valid,” including those that execute gay people, mutilate the genitals
of young girls, stone teenage rape victims to death for “adultery,” oppress
women, believe slavery is sanctioned by God, and discriminate (or murder)
people of differing religions, including variations of their own religion, then
you have no values worth holding. Period.
Now that Bitcoin seems to be on the rocks, I feel vindicated
in my conservative belief that I’d invest in memories and 12-year-old Single
Malt first. I mean, the guy who created it was anonymous and went dark after it
was up and running. Wasn’t that a red flag to folks pouring a lot of money into
what looks increasingly like a high-tech, Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme?
The only difference between Rod Blagojevich and other
convicted Illinois
politicians, and most of the rest of them, is that so far, the un-convicted
have been better at covering their tracks and staying off the skyline.
I think you could make money with a new app that made Word
10 work as easy as Word 03.
As far as I know, being annoying is not a sin. But it’s
still annoying.
As far as I’m concerned, a druggie arrested for a crime
could go cold turkey in the cell, no methadone or anything. It might be an
instructive deterrent. Yeah, I’m a monster, who doesn’t care enough about
druggie criminals. But the folks who do care about them would rather you or
your kids get robbed, raped or murdered so they can feel good about caring. So
who is the monster?
Obama mocked Romney for saying Russia was our greatest
enemy, saying, “The 1980s called—they want their foreign policy back.” That
would be Reagan’s foreign policy. After Russia
destroyed Obama’s Syrian “Assad Must Go” policy by letting him make a deal on
chemical weapons, and is now invading the Ukraine , Obama should be on the
phone to the 80s, begging to borrow it again.
It’s hard to be pretentious when you once thought of a
C-ration can of Meatballs and Beans as a delicacy because the guy next to you
drew Ham and Limas.
No one knows everything about anything. The most important
part of knowledge is knowing what you don’t know, because not knowing that is
very likely to come bite you.
The problem with Obamacare failing, as it seems to be, is
that Progressives will come up with something worse to “help people” (read “buy
votes”), which will speed up the deterioration of our healthcare system into a
single-payer disaster like the UK or Canada, where people die faster from
cancer or inattention, and waiting lists are terrible to get tertiary care. But
cost is no object—they will borrow or print the money, hastening the coming
fiscal collapse. Future generations will loath them, at least the survivors of
the chaos will.
I wish I had the money to buy billboards all over the
country supporting Progressive Policies:
• SUPPORT PLANNED PARENTHOOD: ABORTION KEEPS THE BLACK
WELFARE POPULATION DOWN
• SUPPORT WELFARE: IT KEEPS BLACKS OUT OF THE WORKFORCE,
UMARRIED AND DEPENDENT ON THE GOVERNMENT
• SUPPORT MINIMUM WAGES HIKES: THEY KEEP BLACKS FROM
COMPETING WITH WHITES BY TAKING LOWER WAGES.
• REPEAL “STAND-YOUR-GROUND” LAWS: TOO MANY BLACKS ARE USING
THEM TO GET AWAY WITH MURDER.
• CUT THE MILITARY: IT’S CHEAPER TO LET AMERICANS BE
MURDERED BY TERRORISTS.
• SUPPORT BIGGER GOVERNMENT: BETTER THEY SHOULD BE
BUREAUCRATS PAID BY THE GOVERNMENT FOR A LITTLE WORK THAN WELFARE RECIPIENTS
PAID FOR NONE.
• SUPPORT OBAMACARE: THE GOVERNMENT CAN ALWAYS PRINT MORE
MONEY.
I read that a high school student in Texas accidently took a can of beer in his
lunch, thinking it was a soda. You know it was an accident, as when he realized
it he went to a teacher and turned it in. The school suspended him for two
months and he must go to an alternative school. Message to students: If you
make a mistake, and are honest about it and try to correct it, we will punish
you. But if you hide it, you will likely get away with it. And they wonder why
average Americans think the education establishment is full of feeble-minded
idiots with no ability to think.
People who say that Obama is Hitler are silly. Putin is
Hitler. Obama is Mussolini. Except he can’t make Obamacare run on time, as
Mussolini did the trains. And he isn’t even a junior ally of Putin.
There are two ways to get improve student grades in college:
Raise student standards and effort or lower the institution’s standards. But
increasing the students’ effort and standards is unfair, euro-centered and, if
the students are black, racist. So institutional standards decline, knowledge
and critical thinking decline and "A" averages proliferate. And
“educators” congratulate themselves, institute more courses in things ending in
“studies” for kids who can hardly write or read at a 1960s 8th grade level, and
hire more specialists in things like diversity and aroma therapy, and
administrators. The "graduates" then live in Daddy’s basement, Occupy Wall Street ,
get Obamacare and talk to each other on Obamaphones about how unfair life is.
My PJ ensemble in the hospital was a yellow top, purple
bottoms, green socks and red & rose striped bathrobe, all of several sizes
except mine. I assume this is so if you slip out, the Fashion Police arrest you
and bring you back.
Obama to Putin: “If you like the Crimea, you can keep the Crimea . Period.” Putin to Obama: “If you liked the USSR , you are going to get the USSR back.
Period.”
Little girls are wine. Little boys are whisky. Different
tastes. Of course, there are good wines and whiskies—and not so good one.
I think every government employee, federal and state, should
be required to pick a Silver Health Care Plan from Obamacare, the government
pays for it, and if they want gold, or outside coverage, they have to pay the
extra out-of-pocket. Won’t happen—the backlash on Democrats would force repeal
in a month. Obamacare is for you, not them.
I see that bureaucrat-required paperwork on doctors, nurses,
teachers, business people and other professionals increases every year. You
could graph out to the year when they spend 100% of their tine doing paperwork,
and do no real work. But I think that date will be well after the collapse.
You think a collapse from spending and big government can’t
happen here? That’s what the Russians thought in 1988,
Obamacare is getting worse. One of my friends saw a picture
of his health care plan on a milk carton at breakfast.
It does no good to be a “country of laws,” if the government
can refuse to enforce or change the laws at the whim of the guys in charge. If
Holder doesn't have to enforce laws he doesn't like, why do I have to obey laws
I don't like?
Young people voted for Obama because he was going to spread
the wealth around. They didn't realize it was their wealth to pay for
healthcare for old people.
If you need a permit to exercise your Second Amendment right
to bear arms, why not a permit to speak, to publish a newspaper or to go to
church under the First Amendment?
Liberal Economics in four steps. 1. Major in an area where
the universities (fat on student loans they
don't have to pay back) are creating far more graduates than the economy is
creating jobs, like social work, education or anything ending in
"studies." 2. Work part time in burger delivery, live in parents'
basement. 3. Blame it all on Wall Street and the Free Market. 4. Demand the
government take money from people who earned it in more economically-viable fields
to help victims of capitalism like you.
People who don't read books are the voluntarily illiterate--and
often woefully ignorant. It doesn't seem to hurt their standing with the media
boobs, though. Dr. Thomas Sowell points out, "Adlai
Stevenson was certainly regarded as an intellectual by intellectuals in the
1950s. But, half a century later, facts paint a very different picture.
Historian Michael Beschloss, among others, has noted that Stevenson 'could go
quite happily for months or years without picking up a book.' But Stevenson had
the airs of an intellectual — the form, rather than the substance. ... As for
reading the classics, President Harry Truman, whom no one thought of as an
intellectual, was a voracious reader of heavyweight stuff like Thucydides and
read Cicero
The person who does just enough
to get by rarely gets by in the long run.
People who cheat others lack
integrity. People who cheat themselves lack intelligence. But there are many of
both kinds and not a few folks who do both.
I have a wonderful wife. She
isn't perfect, but there's a vicious rumor that I'm not either...
I majored in "Peace
Studies" at the University
of Parris Island
Had to laugh at the Weather
Channel. They said the computer models differed on what tomorrow's weather
would be. But of course, the models of the climate 50 years from now are
settled science. Which is why Al Gore was able to confidently predict a few
years ago that the Arctic would be ice free in
the summer of 2013. Saying Global Warming is "settled science" is
like saying Obamacare is "settled law." That is, the "settled" part is
subject to change at any moment to fit the shifting political narrative.
In the Third
World , the election winners usually file corruption charges
against the losers. And they are usually justified, regardless of which side
won.
Barack Obama: The Ramblin'
Mouth from Chicago
If you think KGB Agent Putin can be deterred, you probably
know nothing about the famine the Russian communists created in the Ukraine in
the 1930s, to suppress potential rebellion in the area, at a cost of an
estimated 14M lives (compared to the 6M Jews murdered by the Nazis in the
Holocaust). Leftwing progressives denied it happened until the truth came out
after the collapse of the USSR--since then they just ignore it, meaning that
everyone knows about the Holocaust, though it is denied by Muslims and Neo-Nazis,
but few know about the Ukraine Famine.
http://www.unitedhumanrights.org/genocide/ukraine_famine.htm
http://www.faminegenocide.com/resources/ukraine_famine.html
I tend to be organized and
orderly. I also tend to be competent and efficient. Both thanks to Sgt. Owens,
Sgt. Martin and Sgt. Harris. But they can conflict--sometimes being neat and
orderly militates against efficiency. My wife, on the other hand, is committed
to neat and orderly--on my part. She much prefers that I put the medical stuff
I use twice a day, like my Neti Pot, away in a cabinet in the morning and then
drag it out at night, whereas I find it efficient to have it and other items in
plastic bins on counter or table, then put them away if company is coming. On
the other hand, she can leave ad flyers or junk mail on the dining room table
or other flat filing cabinet for months, happily ignoring it, while I dare not
chuck it in case it falls into the 2% of paper she really wants to save. Sigh.
The situation in the Crimea
is very troubling for liberals, who are desperately looking for a way to blame
it on Israel
Don't tell the liberals, but
most of the babies aborted by Planned Parenthood would grow up to be Democrats
if they lived.
Democrats are bragging that
6M people have signed up for Obamacare. How many of them were previously
uninsured? The most transparent administration in history won't say. How many
had insurance and lost it due to Obamacare? The most transparent administration
in history won't say. How many have actually paid? The most transparent
administration in history won't say. How many went on Medicaid as opposed to
buying insurance? The most transparent administration in history won't say.
Get the collection! My
“Random Thoughts” from 2008 through July, 2013 are now 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://tiny.cc/g02s4 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