Random Thoughts for the Holidays
Robert A. Hall
This is the January Collection, posted early to fill gaps in posts created by the Christmas holidays. I wish you a Merry Christmas, and, for friends of other traditions, a happy and safe holiday season and a free and prosperous New Year. Unto us a child is born…
What do you call people who read The Old Jarhead blog? Well informed.
“Tis the season for the old songs, like, “It’s beginning to look a lot like chaos, everywhere I…..”
The real “Hockey Stick Graph” that threatens the world is the federal deficit graph since Democrats took over the Congress in 2006 and the White House in 2008.
For the political battle in Wisconsin, I think they should issue bumper stickers that say, “Recall Walker, Raise Property Taxes”
Or: “Remember when Wisconsin had a huge deficit and was headed down the drain? No, I don’t recall…”
If you don’t have to show an ID to vote, why should you have to show one to buy a gun? Or Booze?
I think Occupy Wall Street types should show their sincerity by refusing to buy or accept handouts of any product, including food, sold by a capitalist corporation. Problem solved.
In November, we took our grand daughter to see the Dancing Horses show, located on Rt. 50 in Delavan, WI. Terrific show, as was the talking parrot show afterwards. Well worth the $25 adult/$19 kids ticket price, should you be in South WI, North IL area with kids.
It should go without saying, but in this era of celebs paid to tweet endorsements, needs to be said. If I recommend anything in my blog, from a book to a show, and I have a financial or personal interest, I will tell you. That, so far, would be two of my five books where the royalties go to me instead of charity, though I’m still behind on them.
They asked one of the parrots if he was ready for Thanksgiving. “Don’t cook the bird! Don’t cook the bird!” he said. Too funny.
I was recently shopping in Goodwill (I was “green” before it was cool) in liberal Madison, Wisconsin. I was delighted to see a copy of Obama’s Audacity of Hope languishing on the bookshelf, no takers at $1.29. Three books away was Best Gay Erotica 2009. I put them side by side for potential buyer’s convenience. Really.
I signed up for Twitter to get links to items for the blog, but haven’t time to log on and read 95% of the tweets from those I (supposedly) “follow.” I especially avoid Sundays, when even political folks I like seem to think I’m interested in their reactions to touchdowns and fumbles. Not to mention that I can’t get by without knowing where they are having lunch on a given day.
Not that I go to many sporting events, but when I do, I never boo my team, no matter how badly they play. I only boo the opposing team if they do something dirty, or the refs for a bad call, not for just showing up to play. Most booing displays the booers lack of class.
Much of what passes for “class” in America today is just “elites” making a snobbish display of what they have agreed is in good taste, to show off their status or wealth. Recently, a young woman in a wheelchair maneuvered through a door, then stopped to hold it for me as I pulled my oxygen tank through. She had class. Class is not owning a big home, wearing expensive clothes or dining at a fine restaurant.
That’s probably why my wife and I prefer family-run local cafes to expensive restaurants or chains.
I’m connected to a whole bunch of people on Linked-In. So far, the only thing I’ve found Linked-In valuable for was connecting to people who ask me to connect.
I was going to send my liberal friends a Christmas Card that read, “A donation has been made in your name to the US Nazi Party to help them support of Occupy Wall Street.” But my wife doesn’t always approve of my sense of irony.
If you don’t say, “This %&^$#$ computer” at least once a day, you don’t work on one a lot.
Seems to me too many environmental measures are designed to stick it to the poor and middleclass good and hard, so the wealthy liberal elites, to whom the cost of energy is meaningless, can feel all green and fuzzy, like bad meat in the fridge.
Here’s a thought to balance the budget. You get to go to a US Air Base, and fly your own drone. $5k for flying, $10k for each terrorist you get to kill. Not sure how much to charge for donkeys, camels, goats and stray civilians, but they could work out a scale.
RINO, n. Any candidate who doesn’t agree with me 100% of the time. Now or at any time in the past.
I don’t know why people retire. I think it will be more cost effective to stop working, but keep drawing my salary until they fire me. Then maybe I can sue for age or disability discrimination. Law Suits—the New American Dream.
I’m Thinking Outside The Box and Reaching Out to people to stop over-using clichés.
Thanks to the deteriorating value system, I fear in 20 years the American Dream will be, “Meat for Dinner Today (Don’t ask from what animal).”
Funny how things change. Once you develop a lung disease like pulmonary fibrosis, SOB means “Short of Breath.” Still a negative connotation.
A real scandal, IMHO, that no one talks about is the wide inequality of research funds spent fighting various diseases, based on dollars per death. Breast cancer gets something like eight times as many research dollars per death as lung cancer. Probably twenty times as much as the dollars per death spent on pulmonary fibrosis, which kills as many, probably more, every year. Medicine and research, like every thing else, are political. Or some lives are more valuable than others.
From my Marine Buddy Bill R.: I love Christmas lights. They remind me of the people who voted for Obama. They all hang together; half don't work, and the ones that do, aren't that bright.
Recent Internet joke: If it looks like socialism, and it smells like fascism, it’s BO.
Dieting is not hard. I went on four diets just yesterday, and still managed to get everything else done before having a big dinner.
Funny how the politicians who are so concerned about sending jobs overseas are all for open borders to bring people here to take jobs.
I don’t have a “smart phone.” It’s bad enough that my cats and my granddaughter are smarter than I am, without my phone getting in on the act. When I was a kid, the phone was black, connected to the wall, and several families in our rural area shared the same party line. We didn’t seem to be suffering.
Islam is a great Religion of Peace, which has been hijacked by a small group of radical, violent extremists. Starting, I fear, with one named Mohammad. ("I have been made victorious through terror" --Bukhari 4.52.220 --Mohammad.)
While lots of things to fix the country are hard and complicated, some are easy and simple. Example: Never vote for a trial lawyer for any office, for any reason.
Needed Bumper Sticker: We can’t wait! For the Keystone Pipeline Jobs.
I ran for public office—the Massachusetts Senate—five times and won all five. But it would have taken the pressure off if I’d known I could blame a loss on my “handlers.” I thought I was my handler.
I think there is a chance that things will be so bad by next November that Obama will lose 40 states to whoever is nominated by the GOP. Unfortunately, that means that things will be so bad, it will hardly matter who wins.
To the delight of Obamatrons, it’s now pretty certain that the Republican nominee will be despised and derided by a large percentage of the Republican activists and contributors. Regardless of who wins.
The must-have electronic gizmo for American taxpayers in 2012, the new iBroke.
Every day I get alarmist e-mails from folks whose hair is on fire over small, symbolic issues, that in a month will be forgotten, as the next “crisis” arises. Few affect the future of the Republic the was the big issues do.
When Obama says he “needs another term to finish the job,” he means “to finish off your job.”
The airlines regularly make me get an updated note from my doc that I need portable oxygen to travel. I guess they think I might have had a miracle cure for my pulmonary fibrosis and want to sneak an oxygen machine I don’t need on the flight to look cool.
We continue to hear about the evils of slavery. Let us all agree that slavery, which was practiced in all cultures until Western civilization turned on it, was a terrible thing, and that America would be far better off if not one slave had ever been brought here in chains.
The other day we were behind a car with the vanity plate SOFI. My wife thought that must be the driver’s name. I figured she was just Sick Of Frickin Illinois.
It’s disgusting that Mitt Romney offered Rick Perry a $10k bet. That much money could have paid for something really important, like another two hours of vacation for the First Family, or another 3-4 minutes of operations for Solyndra, or even 6 or 8 more assault weapons for Mexican drug cartels. He needs to get his priorities right.
Bi-partisan compromise is good. Think of the trouble that would have been avoided if we had only negotiated a deal that would have allowed, in the spirit of compromise, Hitler to control half of Europe and kill only half the Jews.
Donald Trump is not going to run as an independent, any more than he ran as a Republican, or as a Democrat a few years ago when he talked about it. Talking about running gratifies his huge ego. Running involves actual hard work, and likely defeat, and other costs he will not pay. You read it here first.
If Ron Paul is the GOP nominee, I’m going to write in God, because only He could help us then.
Maybe we could get the job-creating Keystone pipeline passed by telling BO it pipes in sunlight, wind and biofuels. Or illegal colonists.
If a Republican wins the 2012 presidential election, I think there is better than a 90% chance that the country will collapse in the next ten years. If Obama wins, I think there is a 99% chance. Take your pick, voters.
If we beat Obama with a candidate who doesn’t have the backbone to make very painful, hard decisions, it doesn’t matter.
New term for things like Solyndra, Jet-fuel gate, etc. Crony environmentalism.
A friend told me that inflation had driven bird seed up $7 a bag in the last year, so the birds were going to lose out. I told her to keep feeding them, because it would make them easier to catch when she needs to eat them in a year or two.
If you baby those around you, you will soon be surrounded by babies.
From Larry, a Marine buddy from Vietnam: “I haven't decided who I support, but I've narrowed the field. Ron Paul, who I've always thought was insane, proved he is dangerously insane. Rick Perry? Arrogant and stupid...and you can't fix stupid. Jon Huntsman is a confused liberal who should probably move to the democrat party where he would be more comfortable. Rick Santorum is a good guy, but seems a little too desperate. So, I'm left with Romney, Gingrich, and Bachmann. Bachmann is the only conservative running, but she probably isn't electable. So, it's going to come down to the two global warming cultists - Romney and Gingrich.”
I’d say that I fear an Obama reelection would put us in a new Dark Ages. But some liberal blogger would find something racist in “dark.”
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Robert A. Hall is the author of The Coming Collapse of the American Republic.
For a free PDF of the book, e-mail him at tartanmarine(at)gmail.com
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Robert A. Hall
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