BREAKING:
Governor Katie Hobbs Confused!
School Vouchers:
Read below
“Truth is beheld by the intellect which is appeased by the most satisfying relations of the intelligible...”
- James Joyce
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Updated, Most Read (>10,000 Reads):
Hate in the “Next Europe”
Merry Christmas and Pass the Ammo: Guns in Arizona
Einstein’s Wristwatch: Relativity and Religion Reconciled
What’s Really Wrong with the US Economy
Quixotic Fiction: Don Rey Hombre de Arizona
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June 5, 2023
Latest Issue of The Independent Daily:
(At the bottom of each page is a link to the next most recent series of articles)
Sherlock Holmes’s Body Not Yet Found!
Hundreds crowd local venue to remember America’s greatest Black Detective!
Although his body has yet to be recovered, three months after tragedy at Toccoa Falls, all of Savannah mourns his passing!
Howard University plans several events to honor most noted graduate!
Doctor Watson announces Memoir!
Doctor Watson and I feel a deep sense of loss and powerlessness against all the tomorrows wondering how we shall ever reconcile continued existence in his absence.
- Missus Hudson
by Doctor John H. Watson, MD
Special to
http://TheIndependentDaily.com
Hello, friends: As many of you know, I am a medical doctor by profession, but career criminologist by design. With all modesty I may say that I was, and will always remain one of Sherlock Holmes’s oldest and dearest friends, the self-same Holmes who changed my life in immeasurable ways.
In his memory I have recently completed a chronicle of our many cases together under the title of Holmes and Watson, LLC: Goodnight, My Love, copyright 2023.
Although the manuscript has been completed in a first-person narrative, it appears under the nom de plume, Joseph Richard Warren, after the great American Revolutionary War hero, Doctor Joseph Richard Warren, an historic personage of immense importance to me, being one of the very few White men at that time in our history who sought out the empathy and the cooperation of slave and freeman alike in the battle for this country, treating all with unfailing equity and respect.
After arguing with Holmes for more than a score of years regarding the necessity to secure a web presence, I was always shunned. Now, as a memorial to my dearest friend, we have debuted our site in an effort to perpetuate remembrance of his life, and to find a publisher bold enough to commit this very unique, completed and edited 92,000-word manuscript to printed form.
In honor of his memory, please visit our newly launched site at http://WatsonandHolmes.com to learn more. Both Missus Hudson and I have decided that fitting tributes would be posted to the site, as well. And, as we review the many wonderful letters expressing grief at his loss, updates will be made. If you have anything you’d like to share - your thoughts or expressions regarding this terrible tragedy - please visit our site and use the email link provided, or simply clock here: Mr.Warren@WatsonandHolmes.com
Sincerely,
s/John H. Watson MD
School Vouchers:
A Very Quick Look at Arizona’s Confused Governor Katie Hobbs
by Joseph Warren, Editor
http://TheIndependentDaily.com
Legislative Republicans need to explain why they are forcing this runaway spending on Arizona taxpayers and making working families foot the bill for private school tuitions, the governor said. We need to bring an end to the wasteful school voucher spending that threatens to decimate our state’s finances.
- Governor Katie Hobbs
Yes, there will be funding redirected from state-run (Public) schools. That’s the point. Arizona’s parents (and many states elsewhere) have been footing the bill for the last many years while our schools have become mired in the bog of Inclusionary Society, allowing their focus to drift to non-academic subjects rather than teaching what is important to an evolving society. Appreciating sexual inclinations, as an example, is not.
Those parents who seek another educational outlet for their children don’t want or care that their children be made aware that Transvestites or Transsexuals or Gays or Lesbians or any of the other myriad variations at the bottom layer of Maslow’s pyramid comprising sexual functions, defecation, or a place to sleep, need to be acknowledged. It’s their choice to embrace that lifestyle, and to pursue “enlightening” all others on its essence is disingenuous, plainly wrong, and a waste of educational resources. It isn’t racist or discriminatory: it just isn’t what ought to be the foundation for a well-grounded education.
Yet, all taxpayers have been contributing a great deal of financial support to their efforts misdirecting our public educational system from real, actual, intellectually-stimulating curricula. They’re tired of it. They want their children to receive a good education without indoctrination.
Lastly, Governor Hobbs did not find herself in office because of some great public outcry for homosexual or racial justice, but because she competed against Kari Lake whose ill-conceived rhetoric and political affiliation soured the majority of Arizona’s electorate, swinging the Independent vote in her favor. It’s the same for Biden, really. Hobbs is our Biden – he, like Hobbs, was a rejection of the alternative, not an endorsement. We’ve discussed this in detail earlier herein.
FDA Changes Pfizer Covid Vaccine Publication and Data
by Joseph Warren, Editor
http://TheIndependentDaily.com
Suspicious? Why would I be suspicious?
It had been a number of months since I made a detailed review of readership of TheIndependentDaily.com, and several months have passed since I checked specifically on traffic to our articles regarding Covid vaccine efficacy, available in the tab above under the heading of “Vaccine.” I made a quick review and clicked on the links contained therein, particularly that for efficacy and mortality for those vaccinated, versus those who have not been vaccinated.
Imagine my surprise when I found that the FDA had changed out the report on efficacy and morbidity for vaccinated vs. unvaccinated.
As I mentioned in this article, published about the time of the big vaccine push, we downloaded and saved to our local drive the original report. In our article we said:
“Open the document and “turn” to page 18. There you will find Table 6: Vaccine Efficacy…
- In Table 6 you will see that of the 20,540 participants who received the COMIRNATY vaccine, 7 days after the second dose there was one confirmed case of Covid.
- Of the Placebo group – people who received an injection of Saline – 21 of 20,629 developed Covid in the same timeframe.
- The delta (difference) is 20 additional Covid cases without the Pfizer vaccine out of more than 20,000 people. That is to say that, according to Pfizer’s own research, the incidence of Covid infection in an unvaccinated society is .0969% or less than one-tenth of one percent. Compare this level of incidence to the flu, detailed below.”
In the replacement document, this table no longer exists.
Given the FDA’s actions, we’ve uploaded our saved FDA document in whole. This is the document they took off the site. This is the document, they found, apparently, unsettling. This is very duplicitous. You may access it and now make the comparison, wherein you will find that empirically, the Pfizer vaccine is useless. It was useless. It will likely be useless. But, the very good news is, we have given Pfizer and our Health Care industry trillions of dollars which, at this very moment, we are trying to confront in Washington DC. (Rooster coming home to roost, et cetera.) This was on the very heels of Pfizer’s being held accountable for today’s Opioid Epidemic, in part, wherein they were required to compensate “America” for its use and deleterious effects thereof.
Suspicious? Why would I be suspicious?
Mass Shootings:
Achieving Population Reduction, or a Terrible Waste of Good Ammunition?
by Joseph Warren, Editor
http://TheIndependentDaily.com
It’s certainly a very painful way to go about it, but let’s take a moment and recall what Jesus said, “Wherever four or more of you gather in my name, there is a likelihood of a mass shooting.”
The Guardian reported recently that the US is currently on-track to set a new record for mass killings estimating a number of events equalling sixty for the year 2023. That’s plainly not good enough. With a worldwide population of more than eight billion quickly dissipating natural resources, continuing food shortages, ignorance and illiteracy on the rise to levels not-seen in our country for many decades, failed educational systems, a pandemic of debilitating social media, pervasive greed, malignant hate, and cancerous ennui regarding our shared state of being, we need to focus on reducing the number of people sharing our crowded little dirt-ball Earth.
Piecemeal, onesie-twosie assassinations won’t achieve the needed reduction. As an example, setting aside mass killings, we – the United States – are only able to exterminate about 22,000 additional citizens per year by good ol’ fashioned murder, which would only negligibly impact the population of either Los Angeles, New York, or any other larger city. So, what other tools do we have available?
Traffic deaths add another 43,000 fatalities per year to the number. That’s not bad, and given the increasing number of our addled and affected youth hitting the streets without regard to safety, there’s a promise of greater losses ahead. Then, there’a always driving while intoxicated.
Drug abuse chips in, too, for annually about 100,000 US deaths.
And, if these numbers give you reason to celebrate, consider consuming alcohol while doing so: every year about 150,000 people die from alcohol-related diseases. Not bad…
But, wait! It gets better: annually more than 200,000 people die by accidental means: As it turns out, falling off a ladder is no longer a conclusionary act by such literary characters as Doctor Juvenal Urbino, and my Uncle Bob back in ‘42. Here, in Arizona, people have been felled by tall and heavy saguaros after having emptied their shotguns in the otherwise peaceful succulent, but their numbers are not great.
Overall, a little less than 3,500,000 people die every year here in the United States, while our intellectually withering population continues to pump out a little more than 3,500,000 new humans through the magic of fornication. So we are, for all purposes, a “wash” as they say, and that will not keep our various religions and the “Walmarts” of our country in sufficient solvency if something goes awry. They, as does nearly every industry, depend on the kindness of fornicators: The More fornicators, the More money.
You: “Do you mean like Covid caused the loss of so many of citizens?”
No. Covid did nothing except juggle deaths from one category to the other. Nearly the same number of people died just as they did the years before from the same causes. During Covid, though, the Pharmaceutical and Health Care industries overall benefitted by trillions of dollars in direct and indirect payments. So did you. So did I. And, as a matter of fact, the dirt lot next door to our Historic Cohenour House is now nicely paved thanks to what I call, Covid Bucks. Other benefits were realized around town, too, as they were in your town, if you’re a US reader. If you’re one of the thousands every month from some other third world country, like Germany, as an example, you probably didn’t reap the windfall we did, and you probably don’t have a thirty-two trillion dollar debt.
In Washington DC today they’re talking about eliminating the debt ceiling so that we don’t keep bumping up against this nuisance fiscal practice of accountability. This is tantamount to throwing away your credit card bills as they arrive, and I applaud that practice as sound and fiscally responsible. Greta doesn’t, but I do, which is why I don’t handle our accounting here. Perhaps there’s a lesson there too for the US Government.
Below, this little chart appeared next to a relatively innocuous article in the Los Angeles Times, early May 2023. It was issued by the Los Angeles County Public Health and covers the period of the Great Pandemic! As you can see, if you know how to interpret a very simple chart, during the reign of Covid people stopped dying from Heart Disease, Alzheimer’s (a misnomer given that one doesn’t die from Alzheimer’s, but associated organ failures, etc.), Stroke, Diabetes, Cancer, and COPD. It was a glorious time to have an incurable disease. Now, though, it’s all gone terribly awry, and people are once again dying from Heart disease, as an example, falling face first in their soup all across Los Angeles County, as I write these words. Perhaps a few trillions of dollars will help?
For more opinion regarding the fallacy of Covid’s severity, click on the tab, “Vaccine” way at the top, under which we grouped a collection of articles regarding this financial fiasco.
Clearly, eight-billion people is too many to feed, clothe, educate, and protect from their own stupidity, and given the unlikelihood of either Messrs. Putin, Xi, and/or Un, and assorted other superpowers leveling missiles at us, our only hope is that we knock one another off in increasing numbers through gun violence creating greater attrition and giving the Earth a break from the weight of so many, doing so little, for so few, as Churchill might say today. Until something happens to unburden us of this monstrous population problem, let’s keep buying guns and using them to their fullest extent.
The Holocaust: Shoah Survivors
Greta Warren-Hill’s Latest Work
by Joseph Warren, Editor
http://TheIndependentDaily.com
“We old people are completely desolate,” (Rabbi Richard Feder) wrote in Jewish Tragedy: The Last Act, 1947. “We have lost our brothers and sisters, children, grandchildren — everything that was dear to us, everything that made life beautiful.... There is no balm that could heal these wounds.”
- Leah Goldstein, writing in Yad Vashem’s Martyrdom & Resistance, 2021, quoting Rabbi Feder.
When writing about the Holocaust most scholars and authors tend to presume that we – all of us – see those who survived the agony of the Shoah as relatively youthful, albeit aged beyond their chronology and expected physical state, given their experiences at the hands of their depraved and abusive captors whose depredations are so well documented and kept lucid and vital in the archives of Yad Vashem and other centers of study in the world today. I have never thought this.
Survivors came (and still do today) from those who are clever, quiet, obedient, evasive, or paramountly intelligent enough to evade, avoid, circumvent, or even bedevil the exigencies of their surroundings. Perhaps, if anything, I expect the lucid elder to survive more frequently than the youthful, if for no other reason than having learned from the experience of life: having an accumulated knowledge base far greater than their younger counterparts on which to devise how best to make it to tomorrow, and to defer worrying about the next day until it presents itself. Both subjects in the image avoided deportation. There were reasons, but they are unknown.
Sometimes too, not surviving was the result of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, as is so often the case in our world today.
Greta Warren-Hill’s latest work, Shoah Survivors, is based on the image that came to her very circuitously: A woman friend, of comparable years, had worked in photography – 4X5 format – many years ago and had visited with a retired official US government photographer who had chronicled post-war Europe, including the activities of the occupying US Army and various camp emancipations. His photographs were displayed in his home and this woman, this friend, before she became a friend, asked if she might make copies of them in large format (4X5 negative). It’s called an internegative in the trade: a negative from a photographic positive.
He gave her permission to do so and she made several exposures (internegatives) of some of the most stunning images of that era, of that place, but this one stood out for the story it told and still does today. (Now the images are in various public archives.)
The photograph though, lacked the depth of the characters, and the detail of their faces was lost in the lack of dimensionality and flatness of the fairly early field-based emulsion era. Their faces, their reflective expressions, their intensity, their absorption on the removal of the Nazi-befouled symbol of King David, the Magen David, as it is nearly finally removed from the man’s coat, and although nothing else was significant to the photograph’s impact, it was all there, and annoyingly so.
This painting is oil on aluminum. It measures about 40cm by 50cm. The custom frame’s absolute blackness highlights the image it spatially defines.
The scissors sheen with a metal finish from the “un-painting” process we’ve described before in a few of her other works where Greta creates starkness by exposing the aluminum beneath the brooding base coat of paint. After, she creates the corresponding images in shades of grey, white, black, and in this case, yellow.
It’s time to identify who the two men were who figure so prominently, yet obscurely in the aftershock of the Holocaust, painted in this work:
Simon Trampetter is the man cutting the Magen David (Mogen David, Shield of David, or Star of David) from his long-time, dear friend’s suit coat, Joseph Keller. Trampetter was 83 when this picture was taken in 1945. Keller was 84 years of age. Their shared focus and sense of awe as to the event’s monumental importance cannot be overstated.
What I love most about this example of Greta’s work, is that she has removed all extraneous, superficial matter from the scene leaving only the two men sharing this far more important moment, perhaps – no, surely – pondering the fates of the many who did not emerge from the blackness of the immediate past. It is nearly the culminating moment just before their tontine is reconciled.
That blackness is apparent in Greta’s work where she cancelled out all background, everything that was not absolutely key to the viewer’s focus, first to the faces, then to the hands, then to the only element of color she chose for us to see – the yellow of the Star of David, draws us inward and fixed on that point, perhaps pondering the salvation of a few and the deaths of millions.
While difficult to completely see in the photographic images of her work here, her marks are highly expressive and masterful, and add a depthfulness that lifts the image off its base. Together, they express details that are typically not found in any experience other than what we call “real life.” Skin, hair, stubble, moustache, fingernails, scissors, knotted tie, coat fabrics, eyebrows, and other facial features are defined so clearly and cleverly, yet recede in importance as one of the last threads are cut, releasing Mr. Keller and Mr. Trampetter from their human bondage.
Thank you! Amazing artist. Very happy with my purchase. Talent beyond words…
(Acquired, "Shattered Hope" Pashtun girl observing life by Greta Warren-Hill. Painting now resides in Florida, USA)
A little more than forty years ago I was standing at a deli counter somewhere on Fairfax in Los Angeles ordering a something-or-other on a Kaiser roll with mustard, to go, so it must have been brisket and it must have been at Canter’s on Fairfax, and noticed the man next to me, many years my senior. I was drawn to the numbers tattooed on his forearm.
I said something to him and he said something in return and that was, as they say, that. I don’t remember what I said, but I remember what I felt: it was the true meaning and significance of the title of a very well known film chronicling the Holocaust, The Sorrow and the Pity. If you haven’t seen this film, you should, particularly if you think, Life is just so hard today…
It had been maybe 35 years since that man’s liberation. Other than through books and films, I had no idea what he had seen, heard, said, nor did I know how close he was to death every day of his life, and how many of those he loved he had to watch die: his wife, his son, daughter, cousins, his father, maybe his mother? I don’t know if he regretted anything he may have done to save his life and not the life of another. I don’t know if his night’s dreams were filled with symbols and images of horror, or blessed with relief and a sense of righteousness. I hoped (and hope) for the latter.
When you look at this incredible image Greta has brought forward in time, remember that under their jackets, shielded as David would have it, was a string of numbers that meant who lived and who died as definitively as any random number generator today, but with a finality that only He may manifest, for whatever reasons and to whatever end.
This ought never to happen again; yet everyday somewhere in the world some variation of the greatest loss of all is played out to the gratification of some timeless, universal Golem.
Very happy. Love the painting.
(Acquired, "Sombra de Amor, (Shadow of Love) Guitarrista" by Greta Warren-Hill. Painting now resides in England, UK)
This painting, entitled, Shoah Survivors, is available through any of our sites, including this one, our TheIndependentDaily.com for 5,218.18 (USD) or approximately the same in Euro, exclusive of shipping and any sales VAT taxes imposed by your country or state of residence, if asked to assess and report. It is an original work of art. No reproductions will be offered, as is always the case with Greta’s work.
It’s time to identify the artist, Greta Warren-Hill.
She has been painting for many years creating works that have found their way to collectors all over the world: Japan, England, Scotland, and all over the USA. In nearly every painting, the eyes of her subjects are the most pronounced leading the viewer to contemplate what truths may lie within. Interestingly, they are absent in Shoah Survivors.
Who is TheIndependentDaily.com?
We are an electronic publication that strives to bring answer to today’s issues by using that which we already know – in Literature, History, the Arts. At one time we had several contributing writers but several years ago we shifted the essence of the publication from raw rhetoric to a more deliberate use of what we believe: the power of thought and logic based on experience. Greta is our publisher.
Thank you,
Joseph Warren, Editor & Writer
The Plug-In EV Charging Station:
Killing Fields of Tomorrow?
WaterWorld of Today?
Dawn of a New War?
(You get the idea...)
What a piece of work is man...
- Shakespeare (Shakspere), Hamlet
by Joseph Warren, Editor
http://TheIndependentDaily.com
The behavioral problems of our society are not negated by the introduction of alternative fuel vehicles, notwithstanding how Peace-Loving they may appear. (You can almost see the little Peace signs and sticky flower decals pasted on the sides, along with a Deadhead sticker in the back window, à la 1968 can’t you?)
No amount of Peace and Love though can negate the fact that people have always behaved badly when driving; when parking; when fueling; when doing anything remotely related to cars – fossil fuel or electric or a hybrid combination. As the necessary popularity of EVs and commensurate charging grows to complete one’s tasks, we can safely expect violence to ensue. It’s already happening.
Freud famously said, All humans are assholes when not being video-taped, but he was wrong (see below), and what will happen tomorrow when the competition for EV Charging really heats up as some percentage of the more than five or ten-million EVs then to be on the road compete for charging at an estimated 300,000 individual charging stations, sometimes obstructed or occupied by conventional car owners who simply want to make the EV owner pay an added emotional tariff for owning a Tesla (or other perceived expensive or exotic electric car)?
Every Tesla owner knows what happens when they drive their Tesla, occasionally confronted by irritated non-EV people who see the Tesla owner as a threatening example of arrogance and affluence. To many they’re like a vehicular Mark Zuckerberg: There’s something about him that just makes you want to punch him really hard in that stupid little face, for no really good reason other than that he is an existential annoyance. In a real world, he (and EVs) are something that should not be, in the ontological sense of the word. They are in opposition to the nature of the universe. Nietzsche wouldn’t be caught dead in a Tesla or with a Facebook account in the MetaVerse, or whatever these dweebs are calling it.
“Charging at home overnight makes charging while underway for daily, mostly local tasks unnecessary!” you say?
According to AAA Public Relations Manager Andrew Gross, the organization responded to precisely 194,317 out-of-gas calls from January to April 2022. This does not include other roadside help resources: other insurance companies, a friend easily imposed upon, or your Mother.
Your Mother: Happy that you made it home safely, “Baruch HaShem!”
As to an EV, your Mother cannot deliver a bottle of electrons, and neither can AAA although they do have limited mobile charging services, which means EVs will require a much higher level of discipline than currently apparent in our society. That said, emergency roadside charging is being expanded in preparation to take on the many who live like Cosmo Kramer thrilling to the challenge of squeezing out the last mile from their local dealership demo car:
Companies like SETEC Power, currently operating in China, are starting up to provide roadside recovery charging, including the venerable and reliable AAA, and developing business models for economically feasible where-you-end-up assistance, and when you get a gander at the rig required to deliver roadside charging, you’ll sense correctly that a pizza will not be sufficient payment.
194,317 out-of-gas calls from January to April 2022
In just four months time, that is how many people ignored their gas gauges (or the equivalent of the Charge Level gauge in an EV) and called AAA for assistance: just AAA. Consider that unlike EV Charging, Gas Stations are everywhere. They are as ubiquitous as hookers on Market Street in San Francisco, or so I’ve been told regarding the hookers. It’s hard to miss a Gas Station and they far, far outweigh EV stations of comparable purpose. So do the hookers, for that matter, but neither Sonni nor Tempest can blow up your battery, although if you need a ride, they’re available.
Then, combine the time it takes to recharge an EV to an acceptable extent – enough to get you another 50, 100 or more miles down the road, compared to that of a fossil fuel conventional automobile, and the real problem becomes clear.
EV charging time varies from about 15 minutes, at the very least at a superfast Tesla charger, to as much as several hours at home. (Filling up with gasoline is about a five minute process except for the most addled fidgeting with their supermarket discount cards or trying to decide if they need a car wash.) Some non-Tesla fast chargers can do the job in an hour or more, but that is a very long time to sit at a charging station while the line behind your EV continues to grow, particularly if you – the driver – don’t appear busy tending to the charging process even though the least sentient person ought to know that there is nothing you can do to speed the process along, short of shouting encouraging words to the little electrons as they move down the wire and into your battery. “C’mon little guys… You can do it!”
What will happen tomorrow when the competition for EV Charging really heats up? This is what will happen:
It’s our version of today’s human condition. It’s deplorable. It’s insipid. It’s hateful and violent, and it is who we are, generally. Already the numbers on the tote board are spinning as more and more of us find our way into EVs during this last spate of exotically-priced petrol continues into the foreseeable future.
When 50% of us drive EVs will gun violence increase proportionately? Or will the lessened consumption of hydrocarbon fuels yield greater placidity veiling us with a diaphanous cloak of true peace and love? My money’s on the former. And, lastly, if you drive an EV, this may be your future:
The race to build more and better charging stations is on as recognition of the immediate and future needs of EV owners becomes more apparent. And in their recklessness, municipalities and up are hell-bent, in some cases, on mandating charging predicated on square footage of the facility or as a percentage of parking overall, placing the cost of developing charging stations on the Small Business person whose goal is to realize an American dream: preferably one that is fueled by petrol, and not at $5,000 or more out of her pocket per charging station. The math doesn’t work...
Note: Neither Warren nor Hill drive an EV. At 3,000 miles per year, it doesn’t pencil out, and you can only have my Jaguar XK8 after you pry my cold, dead fingers from the steering wheel.
Our Uncle Sam Buys a House
by Joseph Warren, Editor
http://TheIndependentDaily.com
Uncle Sam is at his desk in the dark, cavernous reaches of his office in Washington, District of Columbia, his face aflood in light from his iMac’s 27-inch computer screen driven by the simultaneously-opened windows of Zillow, Trulia (one-in-the-same, but he is unaware), Coldwell, and Craigslist, too, for safe measure and not to miss the likelihood of an FSBO opportunity, while stirring a large red-white-blue mug of coffee perched precariously next to his keyboard tipped awkwardly by a pencil caught between cup bottom and desktop: he is oblivious though to this pending consumer disaster, shocked as he is by the continued drive to higher prices in areas of his country which should have by now, owing to the untiring efforts of the Fed to drive down inflation, and other phenomena, dropped far more than they have.
Although Uncle Sam is vastly in debt, as we know from the uncomfortable credit interview during his last car purchase (see below, TheIndependentDaily.com), and notwithstanding mortgage rates that have exceeded the wildest expectations of the average consumer of today, hovering around 7-1/2 percent, and although his savings passbook rate remains at far less than 1 percent, he, because he is Uncle Sam, after all, remains optimistic about America’s future.
And, since being unceremoniously thrown out of his basement digs with Kamala Harris at her Naval Observatory residence, he’s been sleeping in the back seat of the car he bought on time in Kingman, Arizona, being rousted every night by Capitol Police for vagrancy and misdemeanors. (Being ejected from Harris’ home was not all bad since he was tiring from the constant blast of James Brown and Drifters’ music droning through the ancient floorboards until three in the morning and waking to find the lawn riddled with broken, empty Thunderbird wine bottles and the front windows shot-out.)
“I got to get the Hell out of here!” he thinks as he peruses the Zillow map for DC. A short time later, seated in his car with a full tank of gas, half-a-pack of Camels and a 20-ounce latte, he hits the highway instead heading for the absolute heartland of his country, Georgia. First stop, Savannah (historically revered as the place where Pulaski was shot in the ass and died shortly thereafter).
En route, Uncle Sam contacted an agent, a Mrs. Bellfinger employed by Re-Century 18 in Georgia with an expertise in all homes of an Historic nature, even featuring some of her represented properties on her YouTube channel, This Amazingly Overpriced Home.
Uncle Sam parked at the curb, shut-off the ignition and listened to the engine ticking while he surveyed the elevation of the historic 1885 home dressed in lavender and “old lace.” He was a tad early for the appointment so he fired up another Camel and finished off the dregs of his latte. He needed to pee but, other than the curbside shrubbery, there was no other apparent place of relief, so, after taking off the lid to his cup, he carefully situated it on the edge of the seat, tilted slightly back and, after making the necessary sartorial adjustments, released. Just at that point (wouldn’t you know it!) Mrs. Bellfinger parked directly in front of Uncle Sam, and in his dismay he ejected urine on the front of his red and white striped pants leaving an obvious darker area growing around his crotch, to which he added the loss of the elongated ash of his cigarette. (As a fellow-American I was not proud of his appearance at that moment in time.)
Mrs. Bellfinger recognized him immediately from his many Internet postings by adoring Fans and Terrorists alike. Stepping from her car, she waved; he waved through the windshield and held up his index finger to signal, “Just one moment.” She nodded. He searched the car for an old newspaper to shield his crotch and found two dated copies of the New York Post and The Nation, one of each. Quickly he chose the Post (given his locality) and eased himself out of the car keeping the newspaper in front of him until the stain dissipated. Putting his hand to his face he noted the smell of urine.
Mrs. Bellfinger extended a hand in greeting. Uncle Sam shrugged a bit and said, “I think I may have picked up a bit of a cold and I don’t want to give it to you, but it sure is nice to meet you and thanks for taking the time to show me the place.” He gave a little salute from the brim of his tall hat and caught the faint lingering odor of urine wafting from his hand.
“Now as I remember you’re a single man, isn’t that right, Uncle Sam?”
“Yes, single.”
“You understand this is a very big house. It’s more than seven thousand square feet, in fact. That’s a lot of room to roll around in… and to Hoover by yourself without some domestic help: I presume you’ll hire staff to help out with cooking and cleaning…lots of rooms for the hired help,” she offered cheerfully.
“I guess I hadn’t really thought about that. I hate to push a vacuum around and I usually eat out. Many good restaurants around?”
Mrs. Bellfinger smiled and swished her large frame around gesturing to the streets adjoining on all sides. “No. Just about only residential. Finding help isn’t too difficult, though. We’ve got lots of Colored people always looking for work.”
Uncle Sam let that pass. Then, “It is a big house, but people expect that of me. They anticipate that I’ll live in a large house – a grand place. That’s why I wanted to see this home, specifically. It looks big. You got a lot of ‘em here in Savannah!” As an aside, “The color though is a little… I don’t know. Maybe a bit strange for me. I don’t wear anything lavender. Just straight old red, white and blue, you know.”
“Well let’s take a look then inside. Everything behind that lovely entry door just screams Stately. I’ve called the owner and it’s ready to see so we might as well go in and poke around. You’ll absolutely love the inside.” Adding quickly, “It’s furnished period-correct, 1880 or so. You’ll feel right at home.”
“Gosh. I was only a little more than one hundred years of age then. Remember it like it was yesterday.” Uncle Sam drops the paper in a nearby trashcan at the curb forgetting about his urine-soaked front. He gestures to the house. Mrs. Bellfinger drops her gaze and focuses on his crotch.
“We should go in and you can use the bathroom on the first floor reception.” Mrs. Bellfinger strides ahead to open the door and to avoid further embarrassment to Uncle Sam. “There you are Uncle Sam. The bathroom’s just off to the right. I’ll tell the owners we’re here.”
Thinking this would be an excellent time to wash his hands, Uncle Sam exits.
Mrs. Bellfinger is speaking to one of the owners as Uncle Sam approaches, wiping his hands on the front of his pants hoping to cover the still-wet urine. The owner smiles and turns to leave, “Well I’ll let you two get to it, ma’am. See you.” He leaves out the back door.
Speaking to Uncle Sam, “The owner says that he’s had a lot of interest in the home, so you may want to make up your mind after we see the place today, and make him an offer. Frankly, I couldn’t agree more.”
“Okay. That’s a fair suggestion.” Looking around he points at an oil portrait, circa 1800s, hanging in the front parlor-reception. “Say! I think I dated her. What’s her name? Do you know? She was a lot of fun.” He scratches his chin reflectively. “I’m sure of it. She looks pretty innocent there, but believe me, she had a way of dunking for apples, if you know what I mean!”
Mrs. Bellfinger issues a nervous laugh. “I’m sure I have no idea what you mean, Uncle Sam.” She fans her face lightly with her folder, unconsciously emulating a character in an overwrought and turgid Oscar Wilde play. Recovering, she continued, “You understand that this house has eleven bedrooms and as many bathrooms? As well, there is a full kitchen, study, and various other rooms all requiring day-to-day maintenance?”
“O, sure, I get that. I’ll probably just close off a few rooms most of the time and just live mainly on the ground floor. Everything I need is here.” He sweeps his hand around the grand entrance and staircase, then lifts his tall hat and scratches his head. “You know, though, the thing I do not get is that Georgia’s population has been dropping off over the last several years by a fairly large percent…”
“Yes, and?”
“And yet this house sold for just a quarter of your asking price – just about somethin’ like one million and change only seven years ago. Now you want pretty near four million for it. You know, four times as much.”
“Well that’s just inflation.” She dismisses his comment and points to the staircase. “Look at how grand this staircase is! Can you imagine bringing home the president of some country to this? How proud we’d all be! Truly, truly proud!” Hands together as in prayer telegraphing utter sincerity, she thinks.
Uncle Sam scuffs his boot on the rug a moment, gathering his thoughts. “But, Georgia’s population has dropped by nearly two million since 1988 – more than thirty percent. Who’s going to buy these houses at these prices? I mean, really, who? Population’s down more than thirty percent and the home price is up about two-hundred and fifty percent from just seven years ago. How can you justify that?”
Indignant now, “Well I’m not the one who sets the prices, Uncle Sam. Let me remind you that it’s based on the seller’s opinion and market forces. Not mine. I have nothing to do with it. And there are just a whole bunch more homes for more money right here in this neighborhood. You know, comparatively, it’s a pretty cheap buy.”
“O, bullshit, Mrs. Bellfinger, if you’ll excuse me for saying so. A lot of my people want to live somewhere in a house of their own and they can’t. They really want a home of their own, but that’s a no-go anymore in our country for a large number of folks because of just plain old greed. You and I both know that. These old homes – and the newer too – are bought up by greedy people and corporations with money who just want to make more money without working, and you people, the agents and everyone else involved in this silliness, make it happen for them.”
Uncle Sam casts around in his mind, “At seven-and-a-half percent and a ridiculous asking price, who the hell can buy a house like this, other than someone like me who prints his own money?”
“Well some people have sold their homes and have much of the sales price at hand…”
“Californians, New Yorkers: You’re right. I forgot to include the less intelligent of my people. Besides, even though I’ve got more money than Jesus, doesn’t mean I want spend it on a house this big that I have to clean, fix, heat and cool – don’t forget cooling here in Savannah!”
Bellfinger turns to leave, “Well I never!”
“Sure you have. I can see that in your eyes, but I need a place more in keeping with my heritage of austerity and common sense. Obviously Savannah doesn’t work.” He turns to leave, “Want a Camel?” holding out the pack.
“Unfiltered?”
“Of course.”
“Yeah…” (dejected). “Say! I’ve got a two bedroom Condo for half-a-million: Interested?” Uncle Sam shakes his head.
The Greatest Pandemic of All Is Here!
Washington DC is Apoplectic by Startling Revelation!
CDC Discloses: Every Day Thousands of People Around the World Die of This Disease!
President Biden Proposes Another Trillion-Dollar Payout for Vaccine to (Again) Pfizer!
Hospitals Plead for Trillions of Dollars in Assistance: “Our emergency rooms are full! We’re overwhelmed! I’m so tired I can barely stuff this cupcake in my face!”
by Joseph Warren, Editor
http://TheIndependentDaily.com
Who Was Patient Zero:
Her Royal Highness, Queen Elizabeth Succumbs to Death by Something Termed, Old Age!
“I’ve never seen so many old people who are dying like this here!” said Rebecca Phatarse, a Healthcare professional in Macon Georgia. “They’re dropping like pants at a bachelor party, which I used to work before becoming a licensed clinician, you understand.”
And so they were. By one account in Macon alone, several thousand people are expected to die in the next few years as a result of Old Age and, sadly, there is nothing we can do about it until the Pharmaceuticals industry develops a vaccine, which they must before it is too late!
In San Francisco, in New York, in Paris, Rome, Berlin, Kingman, and even in Boise, great numbers of our fellow citizens are succumbing to this “Mega-Killer” as the CDC’s Chief of Hyperbole has termed it, Dr. Maximillian Juberg.
And he ought to know: “In my earliest years of practice at Our Lady of Irrational Phobias (a Rosicrucian hospital in Miami at which he served his residency) I saw maybe one or two cases of Old Age death every year. That was it! For the last two years before the death of Queen Elizabeth everyone just died of Covid, and I mean everyone! It was great for us: It brought in a lot of money. Sure, they were mostly fat people who freaked out and others who drank themselves silly, but this…this is different! This is frightening. We should all be chilled by the likely outcome of this newly-discovered disease.”
TheIndependentDaily.com (TID): How? How is this different Dr. Juberg?
“Both fat people and skinny people are all dying now sometime after experiencing the early signs of the illness, and we have no explanation. They just seem to expire, you know, like the way Joe Biden will be talking along and suddenly his eyes seem to cross, and like that! (Dr. Juberg snaps his fingers.) He’s gone for a moment or two. But, in this case, although the expired person may look very much like Joe Biden, the effects are somewhat longer lasting.”
TID: How much longer does it last? Like a month or so?
“Maybe a month. Maybe two. But you’ve got to remember that all brain functions completely stop, so you could wake-up a year down the road brain-dead, or, you know, as a Trump supporter. In that time – the time you were dead, you would have missed a lot of important stuff on Facebook and television.”
TID: That’s chilling!
“It is. And your Pool Guy will probably be boning your wife, and your car will be repossessed, and, if things continue the way they have, your IRA will be down to about thirty-eight cents. So, really, you’re better off if you stay dead.”
TID: Do you consider this a virus, then?
“Yes. It’s definitely a virus. How else could we get the federal government to hand over vast sums of America’s wealth and pass it off to Healthcare “Professionals” and, of course, Joe Biden’s principle funding source, Pfizer?
TID: I notice you said “Professionals” in quotes. Why was that?
“Did I? You’re the one running the keyboard. Just stop inserting quotes.”
TID: So what are you going to call this virus?
“What else: the Omega Virus!”
TID: A very clever biblical reference, Dr. Juberg. And I want to thank you for your time, which I know is limited because as I understand it you have tested positive for the Omega Virus yourself have you not?
“Yes. And I’d ask that everyone immediately get tested for the Omega Virus at your local hospital. It costs only about fifty-dollars per test and diagnosis. That’s a lot of peace of mind for not much money. You owe it to your loved ones… You owe it to Pfizer.”
TID: Thank you, Dr. Juberg. Is there anything you’d like to add?
“You forgot the close-quote about seven paragraphs above after the word Pfizer and before the question mark.”
TID: Thank you.
The Centers for Disease Control recommends that you immediately wear a mask, latex gloves, a condom, hospital gown with no underwear beneath, and keep a thermometer inserted in your rectum at all times. It is best to stay away from everyone including those you do not know, and avoid touching of any kind, including of another person’s private areas, and “that includes the breasts,” per Dr. Juberg.
The Omega Virus is not something to be taken lightly:
It’s the only way to divert our attention from how poorly the country is being managed.
Our Uncle Sam Buys a Used Car on Time
But Finds that Our (National) Debt makes it Difficult.
by Joseph Warren, Editor
http://TheIndependentDaily.com
Our Uncle Sam is looking over a few cars in the auto sales lot of one of the “Auto Row” dealerships clustered along Stockton Hill Road here in Kingman, Arizona. He’s not certain which car he wants but is drawn to a sexy, older-model V8 dating from the 1990s before we began to worry excessively about Climate Change sometime 30 years from now in the middle of this century when it’s far too late to do anything about it.
The salesman approaches. “That’s a beauty, ain’t it?”
Uncle Sam casts a nervous glance. “Yes. I guess. I mean, it depends on the price.”
“O, don’t fret that none.” He studies Uncle Sam for a moment. “Say, that is some hat you’ve got there!”
“Thanks.” Uncle Sam fiddles with the hat brim a moment then steadies his gaze at the salesman. “Whadayamean don’t worry about the price?”
The carefully dressed yet strangely wet man extends a warm handshake in answer. “My name’s Bob. I handle car sales and I’m the finance guy, too. I could put you into any car we’ve got on the lot here, if I had a mind to.” His arm extends to encompass the full dimensions of the sales lot glimmering in the all too bright sunlit day. (Subtly, Uncle Sam wipes his returned hand on his red-white striped trousers to remove the sweat.) “Yup! Any car. Want to take this baby out for a test drive? You might have to take off your hat… since it ain’t a convertible.”
“Why not! You sure you can make it affordable for me?” Remembering his manners, “By the way, I’m Uncle Sam.”
“’Uncle Sam’ you say? My wife has an Uncle Sam, too.” Bob looks benevolently at what he assesses to be a centuries-old punim (Yiddish for “face”). “So, don’t worry about the financing, if I can’t get you into this beaut, no one can. Get in: keys are in the ignition.”
After a few minutes of fidgeting and getting comfortable, Uncle Sam and Bob leave the lot and disappear in the direction of Starbuck’s or Dutch Brother’s or Golden Corral or Home Depot or… any of the other chain joints that line the street sending their profits to some other state or country. Or, maybe just Walmart, the benign cancer of America before Amazon stepped in.
From the backseat we can see Uncle Sam having a great time driving along the boulevard. Shifting gears and giving it a little gas – glancing askance at Bob to make certain he won’t be reprimanded for a little Old Guy Hot Rodding, only to detect a faint, telling smile cross Bob’s lips knowing he has Sam hooked.
“You look good behind the wheel there, Uncle Sam. Maybe knocks a few decades off of you. Hell, looking at you, you don’t look a day over 120!”
“I’ll be 247 years old next birthday. Don’t feel it, though.”
“You don’t say!”
“I do say! Believe it or not.”
Bob twists his view back to the road, “Pull back in the driveway and let’s go into my office and talk turkey. I want to see you drive this car home today!”
(Inside seated at a desk: Bob on one side and Uncle Sam on the other. Bob’s scratching his head and screwing up his face as he looks at a computer generated report in his hand.)
“I’ve got your credit report here, Uncle Sam…”
“My what?”
“Your credit report. It assigns a score for credit worthiness and yours is three-hunnert out of about eight-hunnert, fifty. Doesn’t go any lower than that. Hell, dead guy has a credit score of three hunnert.”
“That so?”
“That’s a fact. Doesn’t mean anything to me, though, Let’s see what we can do here. The report lists all of your debts and other personal information.” Bob points at a line on the report for his own reference. “Says here that you have a family of three hunnert, twenny-nine million, five hunnert thousand people. That sound about right?”
“Yes, sir. It does. Give or take, depending on what’s happenin’ on the border.”
“Okay. Says your total debt right now is a little less than thirty-one trillion dollars? That’s just a whole heap of money, by golly.”
“Covid…”
“Boy, don’t I know! Let’s take a look at the other side of your financial situation for a minute. Now, you owe thirty-one trillion dollars but you make around four-and-a-half trillion a year. That’s pretty good money, Uncle Sam.”
“Yeah, but as you said, I got debt coming out my ol’ ying-yang.”
“That’s a fact, you do. But it says here on this third page that you can print your own money.”
“That’s pretty good, isn’t it? That ought to count for something in my favor.”
Bob sits back and scratches his head. Drums the eraser on his pencil against the desktop and scans the walls of his office. The wetness has not left his face. Uncle Sam sits idly waiting for Bob to complete his ruminations. Finally, Bob speaks, “Would you happen to know somebody who could co-sign for this loan? Somebody who could guarantee that it would be repaid should you not… you know, should you fail to make payments on it?”
“You mean make someone else pay for it instead of me?”
“Yeah, that’s what it is, you know, basically.”
“I guess Mexico could co-sign for me. They’d pay for it, I’m sure of that.”
“Okay. That’s one possibility. How ‘bout China? Says here that every year you rack up about a half-a-trillion in trade deficit with them. Maybe they’d think kindly about co-signing this note?”
“No…” Sam dismisses China with a gesture. “I don’t talk to them anymore. We don’t get along. I couldn’t… I wouldn’t know how to ask them.”
A heavy silence pervades the small office. Finally, Bob lifts a pencil and scribbles a note on Uncle Sam’s credit application. “I’ll tell you what, Uncle Sam. I’m going to make this loan and guarantee it myself. Because I got to tell you, I know a lot people who lend money and I can’t, for the life of me, think of anyone who’d trust you. We just got to keep it right here in the family and hope nobody gets wind of how much trouble you’re really in.”
“Trouble?”
“Sam, I’ll be honest…”
“Like Abe? I liked him.”
“Me, too. Yeah, like Abe.” Bob looks hesitant. “Really, Sam, you’re bankrupt. But, thank God we got each other to lie to.” Bob reaches over and grabs the keys to the 1990 Fordolet and tosses them across the desk. Sam picks them up and smiles.
Thrusting a finger at Bob he says, “I want you! To keep this to yourself.”
“Mums the word… Uncle Sam. Mum’s the word. Nobody’d believe it if I told ‘em.”
Sam stands and extends a hand to Bob, “To tell you the truth, Bob, nobody seems to care…”
We Must Accept Who We Are
by Joseph Warren, Editor
http://TheIndependentDaily.com
…a fragmented society, a mountain of conflicting interests, a nation which appeared to share nothing save poverty and the hatred of each against each…
From The Literary World review of Rudolf Ditzen’s (ndp, Hans Fallada) Little Man, What Now? (Kleiner Mann, Was Nun?)
Reproduced in the book’s Afterword commenting on Nazi Germany
If the words above sound like an adequate description of our world today, here, in the USA, and you too have asked, What Now? as I have many times in the past 20 years, then you will have discovered the timelessness of Ditzen’s book.
- Editor
Ditzen’s writing was simple and to-the-point. It flowed gloriously, in my opinion, although he had his detractors way back when the art of writing was something seen as tantamount to creating master-stroke marks with oil on a canvas: as important, as creative. In Little Man, What Now? we have an opportunity to follow the lives of a young couple in Germany during the last years of the Weimar Republic before its descent into hell.
Versailles, and the many missteps by Germany’s then-leadership took the once-great country into the depths of economic destruction, not unlike what we are experiencing today owing to our own corrupted economic practices and befogged societal constructs, only without the extrinsic influences that brought Germany’s society to its knees. Yet.
Throughout the novel, Ditzen describes the effects of a failing economy on the lives of the young married Pinnebergs, through repeated moves owing to straitened circumstances, child birth, job losses, and vast societal upheaval. But it’s nothing that many young people haven’t experienced here today and certainly will in the future.
It’s not a “Sad” book. It is reality from time-to-time in our world: Periodically, as our individual lives adjust to varied circumstances and conditions impacting our planned futures, we too have to ask, What Now?
“Sad” is Ditzen’s Every Man Dies Alone, sometimes entitled (owing to translation), We All Die Alone, and is, for me, one of those far too powerful books, the storyline of which I sometimes internalize so thoroughly, alluding myself into a character’s being, that I must set the book aside for a while. This book is a powerful account of a true story of a couple who had suffered the loss of a loved one in battle. The facts have been structured differently to fit Fallada’s narrative, but the consequences remain virtually unchanged: a sentence of death by guillotine in Plotzensee prison, much like the Harnacks and tens-of-thousands of other Resistors: people who gave their lives to defeat evil.
They all died alone. We all must. But there is hope. There always must be, or there would be no point.
Today
If I were dictator of a country on the precipice of civil unrest, such as Xi Jinping, as an example, I might be inclined to control the populace to forestall further disintegration of order, so long as I had adequate enforcement resources – police, military, militia – by contriving to prevent the spread of a marginally lethal virus, such as Covid-19 which has been shown to successfully cull some portion of the population experiencing other coincidental forms of morbidity, by lockdown.
It is a facile approach to eliminating dissent, unrest, violence and the likely eventual eruption of far more serious events to and through overthrow of the political systems over which I held ultimate sway. An easy solution: vilifying some unseen, unknown, nebulous golem who lurks thirstily and silently awaiting its prey.
Various dictators throughout history have imposed curfews and lockdowns for sundry reasons in order to stop the escalation of dissent. It works, as Xi Jinping knows too well.
I believe that Joe Biden knows this too. So did Donald Trump. Following the November 2020 elections, our country was being ripped apart by conflict resulting from the election of Joe Biden over Donald Trump, and the resulting unrest spread like sewer gas throughout much of the country in a miasma of political distrust and a complete breakdown of faith in our shared heritage (all of us: Black, White and otherwise) and historic political beliefs.
We are far too divided today to carry on much longer. We hate without respite. We envy and mistrust. Greed has usurped religion. Violence has overcome resolution. Bigotry trumps understanding. It’s a terrible state we’re in, and one that may only be resolved by those who can set aside strong personal feelings, and instead look to intelligent and rational thought. In other words, pushing ourselves aside for the good of all, and subordinating the nuances of our needs to the greater needs of the United States of America.
We must develop a view of tomorrow that accepts our society as it is, and for what it is, such as it is, and plan a strategy for overwhelming the nearly insufferable hate pervasive in our country today, and supplanting it with tolerance and respect. We need to set aside some small portion of our opinions and do as our fathers, mothers, grandmothers and grandfathers largely did: Understand that total control and influence may not be achieved even by dictatorial fiat. Only the sum of the efforts of every one of us can bring about resolve. Until then, we are weak and factionalized and unfocused and hell-bent on destruction.
Those who do not like us in this world know who we are today. They know our weaknesses and that we are desperately short on resolve as a nation. Putin knows this. Xi knows this. Other international leaders know this as well.
While not just 80 years ago we were still seen as a welcome interloper prepared to impute our resources and commitment into any struggle anywhere to insure the triumph of humanity, today we are viewed, and in fact are, impotent and self-destructive.
Everything in nature renders itself into another form, a different state. The Cosmos itself is constantly evolving into a future state of perhaps nothing more than a precise point, only to replicate what has been so that future life forms have the opportunity to do it all again… perhaps more successfully than we who reside on Earth.
The simple process of entropy guarantees that any gaseous substance will molecularly “disintegrate” and lose its seeming cohesion, and, really, our society is nothing more than millions of molecules confined within our borders struggling to move outward and away from the vastness of fellow Americans. But we can’t: we’re constricted and the resulting Brownian jostling and shoving only stirs discontent further.
We’ve run out of desirable habitable space. Whether rightly or wrongly, Hitler perceived the same condition in Germany and devised a plan to expand space and opportunities for Germans through Lebensraum: Living Room, based on an idea he goniffed from earlier German thinkers. (Of course, his program also entailed the elimination of those who currently occupied the intended territory.) But we are not capable of rational thought to evaluate our path forward. We are confused and challenged by the cacophony of the diverse masses.
Our country today is clearly psychotic. A part of our society believes that abortions ought not be allowed, seeing all lives as worthy of preservation, but not enough to ban one of the few tools we have to substantially reduce population through, unfortunately, the most painful manner available: firearms. Yet through this population control device, only a few tens-of-thousands of lives per year are eliminated: hardly enough to meet the needs of a burgeoning world population of 8 billion.
Another facet of America believes that the lives of those who express themselves in their unique ways through what was once perceived, as an example, aberrant sexual practices ought to be protected, yet they demand the right to terminate any life before gestation results in birth without knowing if the unborn is homosexual or not.
In today’s America, Black Lives (may) Matter but not to the extent that Blacks will stop killing other Blacks. Blacks perpetrate about 90% of homicides of Blacks. This is unacceptable. It is also inexplicable. It is illogical and contrary to rational thought.
In a recent poll, more than 90% of Democrats said that they would vote for Joe Biden again in 2024 if Donald Trump opposed him in that election, although given another person, most would not vote for Biden. Yet there are nearly 260 million adults living in America, and, as a result of a failed two-party system, no other more meritorious adult may find their way to lead this once-great country.
Americans keep getting fatter and the World keeps getting hotter. India and China contribute 3/8ths of our world population burden as a result of living in an age of the ignorant past. Putin grabs a few pages from Hitler’s playbook and begins his own Blitzkrieg. Vast swaths of rainforest are burned to clear for the production of food. Rivers everywhere run dry. People whose minds are muddled continue to be elected to leadership positions by those whose minds are muddled.
Jenny Williams in her biography of Hans Fallada, More Lives Than One, (a very well-written, interesting account of Dietzen-Fallada’s conflicted life) includes a quote by Peter Suhrkamp, a noted German writer and publisher, from the 1940s regarding the writer’s job in Nazi Germany:
To give people courage, the courage to face life, is probably the best gift a writer can bestow…
I wish I had something to say to give us all the courage we need to resolve toward the future, but I’m at a loss. All I can ask is, Kleiner Mann, What Now?
Pandemic Puppies
by Joseph Warren, Editor
http://TheIndependentDaily.com
The Antiseptic Baby and the Prophylactic Pup
Were playing in the garden when the Bunny gambolled up;
They looked upon the creature with a loathing undisguised;
It wasn’t disinfected and it wasn’t sterilised.
- From the poem Strictly Germ-Proof, by Arthur Guiterman.
(Recited by our publisher, Greta Warren-Hill, 1965, Second Grade, at Four Corners Elementary School, Salem, Oregon, before a live audience.)
Immersed in a plethora of advertisements for guns and drugs, Craigslist, Facebook, and all other social media, is staggering from the weight of ads posted by those who during the Covid Pandemic elected to supplement their income by encouraging animal fornication in the jejune belief wealth would follow.
Many were (and are) asking extravagant sums for designer dogs following breed lines hitherto unknown, mating the most unlikely together to conjure what they assumed would be exotic and desirable objects of affection to the multitude of shut-ins and otherwise lonely-hearted who just needed a more organic “Like” than what might be achieved in the festering fetid swamp of popular online forums. New breeds emerging: Puginese, Schweenie, Pithuahua and countless other neologistic approaches to saying the same thing. (Mongrels.)
Perhaps we should try the same approach to human reproduction and introduce new breeds as well, such as the Jewipino, Germench, Italish, Scotinese, Raniard, Chipanese, and for me, Anglitian. (Mongrels.) Inventing a cute hybrid name does not change the fact that the breed is an amalgam of various mutations accounting for no particular superior attribution once blended, and the end result for dogs (and for us) is the same.
We – all of us – are buried under a pile of dog poop that accumulates yearly to an amount in excess of 26 billion pounds, in the USA alone. That’s the total waste – feces (or faeces to the rest of the world) of how much dog poop is generated each year by American Dogs. That’s 13 Million Tons. Another way of looking at it: That is the equivalent of 260 Million cubic feet of poop.
260 Million cubic feet of feces is enough to cover Manhattan, completely, in about ½ foot, up, down and side to side, from the East River to the Hudson to the Harlem: Shit, shit, shit. And, I know: that’s not a bad idea, but how would we get it all there?
Naturally, generating that much waste requires a great deal of food: Every year we feed our dogs about 38 Billion pounds of dog food, to varying degrees depending on quality and your dog’s eating habits and fitness. Since fat owners are likely to perpetuate fat dogs, and since about 80% of our country is overweight, we might safely assume that overfeeding is a likely eventuality. Here, in our country, cooking and eating a dog is considered bad form (for now…) so all this energy is being siphoned off from our very limited resources in order to sustain the lives of fairly useless, albeit mostly friendly creatures over whom we may be protective and nurturing. Given our global overpopulation, I’d prefer those of child-breeding inclination seek out a four-legged substitute, but our churches, retailers, manufacturers, governments, and the myriad other beneficiaries of our run-away procreative proclivities, won’t permit it.
Is there an environmental cost associated with this process of sustaining the lives of millions upon millions of dogs? According to Gregory Okin (whose detailed research on the subject was abstracted in 2017), dog food production alone constituted about a 25% or more equivalency to production of human food in our country. Energy, packaging, transportation: all the many costs associated with getting the equivalent of “your Cheerios” to the bowl on the floor of your kitchen or porch. Seems extravagant for something that doesn’t provide us with any physical nourishment.
At least 25% diesel fuel usage…
At a time when our supply chain is so broken even baby formula, as an example, must be imported from foreign countries at a cost underwritten by us all.
When the price of gasoline to propel us to our worksites threatens, as it did in 2007, to make getting to work something far more onerous and tenuous than the mere act of driving.
When in our country critical human food items are not available to insure adequate nourishment for our human population.
Makes no sense, whatsoever.
They said it was microbic and a hotbed of disease;
They steamed it in a vapor of a thousand-odd degrees;
They froze it in a freezer that was cold as banished hope
And washed it in permanganate with carbolated soap.
- Ibid
Dead Dog Walking
More than 3500 public animal shelters take in stray and unwanted animals in the USA – Dogs and Cats and whatever else may find their way through the door.
Of those delivered to the perceived arms of salvation, about 400,000 Dogs are euthanized or killed every year, with the trend increasing owing to vast overcrowding resulting to a large extent from the imbeciles who breed dogs for cash, as mentioned above. These people have a complete disregard for the lives of their Dogs and see them as a means to an end, probably much as their parents had seen their births as nothing too exceptional, for truly they were not. (As an aside, every year more than 500,000 Cats are euthanized as well, but Cats see us as nothing more than an emergency food supply: O, well, nobody’s perfect.)
These new ad hoc dog breeders are only a small part of the staggeringly ignorant lumpen of Americans whose perceptions are warped. They are greed driven and they want what’s coming to them, regardless of the consequences, even to the point of bringing our country to bankruptcy.
Many of these same humans are generating other dispassionate humans of similar deficient mental capabilities.
Maybe, while we’re legislating protections to keep those who ought not own a firearm from buying one, we should do the same for breeding: We did so many years ago. Read, What Hitler (and California) Got Right and Wrong: Eugenics and Euthanasia, below.
...And each imbibes his rations from a hygienic cup —
The Bunny and The Baby and The Prophylactic Pup.
“Thank you, Greta. That was very nice. You may take your seat.”
- Mrs. Brooks, Second Grade teacher, Four Corners Elementary School
*
“Not much going on... How ‘bout you?”
Since 2011 Consumer debt has spiked from about 11 Trillion to nearly 16 Trillion dollars
by Joseph Warren, Editor
http://TheIndependentDaily.com
Let me get this straight:
Our “unprecedented” drought has taken our lakes and rivers (that quite literally feed the Southwest’s population) to unheard of shallowness and flow threatening a painful decline in Power, Water, Food Production, and even recreation leading to perhaps a point of societal collapse, but we do nothing of any consequence.
The Anasazi, who occupied a good bit of the Southwest in the early 1200s, vanished from historic records following a documented 50-year drought that left them without adequate water to sustain their lives. Anthropologists speculate that the Anasazi merged with other local tribes following their abandonment of their homelands. Yet, we think that 20 years is a substantial enough period for a drought to last and maybe next year we’ll have to do something (reactive) proactive, like get people to stop filling their swimming pools, watering lawns, and washing their fossil fuel burning cars. Then, the Anasazi were a few (at best) thousand. The number of Desert Southwest inhabitants today exceeds 20 million, excluding many tens-of-millions more in California.
Global Warming, allegedly responsible for our changing climate can be mitigated by reduced emissions, yet through 2021 87% of all cars sold in our country were powered by (fossil-fuel) internal combustion engines.
Since 1950 our world population has grown from 2 billion to 8 billion people: that is to say, during my lifetime. At the same time obesity and excess weight has skyrocketed to more than 80% of our population. In an earlier article we extrapolated that this extra fat of our citizens increases our population from a little more than 330 million to nearly 400 million. You cannot maintain fat by not consuming a commensurate level of food – junk and otherwise.
We throw away much of what is made for our consumption – of all things – from a Time perspective, anywhere from as soon as it is purchased to a few weeks or months following generating vast mountains of waste.
Per the Heritage Foundation, 71% of our young men and women are either too fat, too stupid or too criminal to join any of our armed forces, leaving us, in the event of an existential struggle, unable to defend our country from an aggressor, such as Russia or North Korea or China.
All of these fat and stupid people are breeding at unprecedented rates for many reasons, some of which include:
* It’s one thing they know how to do.
* We are told that every life is a precious commodity although many of us know that many are not.
* The people who have become very rich by selling us crap cannot continue to be rich if our population declines.
* Churches thrive on procreation and the continuing development of the like-minded and, particularly, the Catholic Church and those of similar mass-breeding ilk would suffer greatly in perpetuating their alleged Kingdom Here on Earth if their followers did not screw like rabbits.
* We are about to take away a fundamental tool (albeit least-desirable) of birth control by revoking legal abortion.
* We have no propagation guidelines for the continuance of the species, and, like owning a gun, it’s everyone’s right to copulate and bring about an issue or two or three or many more.
Owing to a lack of intelligence and/or education, History’s various and profound lessons are lost to those in power and subservient and, thus, some of us continue, in the face of all we know as fact, to repeat the same idiotic acts.
Although most people know that the data they post publicly on platforms such as Facebook, will be sold, exchanged and used to someone else’s benefit for their gain or influence at the cost of those who post, they continue to expose themselves to the tyranny of the hacker, predator, criminal, greedy. And, interestingly, those who pay for this information (leading to the vast wealth of a few), continue to believe that they are benefitting by their payments, being demonstrated by a series of manipulated statistical reports, when, in reality, if they did nothing, they’d do as well.
Greed has become a cancer on the housing market: Everyone wants to be a millionaire. They’ve seen YouTube episodes where a “fortune” was made through the simple act of buying a home and waiting until prices escalate somewhat. Then, dumping it on someone else without making any sort of improvement to the realty. In truth, though, while Barnum said, “There’s a sucker born every minute...” he couldn’t have anticipated the sheer increase in morons who now own multiple properties listed for sale at ridiculous prices, and who, soon enough, will find their “dreams” listed under Foreclosed. It keeps happening. It’s what we call, History. History says that all of the marginal loans made to speculators, that lacked a sound financial basis, will soon be abandoned leaving those families who struggled to find their way into a home in the last 14 years, with greatly diminished equity as speculator homes lie dormant and unsold. Gasoline prices, as they did in 2003 then in 2008, will help derail the market as the heads of our American households struggle to set priorities for payment of their debts: Do I buy gasoline or groceries? Clothing for the kids or their monthly iPhone subscriptions? Do I have a Starbuck’s coffee for seven dollars or put it with a few more dollars and get the oil changed on the car?
These are the hard choices before us, again. They’re not unique: they happen continually in a Capitalist world. Rest assured that they are not decisions to be made by Zuckerberg or Musk or Buffet or Trump or Biden or many others who have set you up to take the fall.
Lastly, The upcoming 2024 election will, unless some great and mysterious power intervenes, pit one nitwit against another as one succeeds in defeating the opposing “Klep…Kleptoc…Klep…you know…” O, for Christ’s sake, Biden: Kleptocracy!
(No literary references this column: Just a simple appraisal of our present condition. I know there are more, perhaps to you, pressing issues. Our readers have never been hesitant to remind me of such.)
Iris Chang, Volodymyr Zelensky
and
Mao Zedong
Chang Kai-Shek
Adolf Hitler
Vladimir Putin
George W. Bush
by Joseph Warren, Editor
http://TheIndependentDaily.com
The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
- (The first four lines of Wordsworth’s remarkable poem, The World is Too Much with Us.)
When the curtain lifts revealing all that remains of Ukraine’s children, women, men, houses, schools, hospitals, roadways, bridges, theaters, the dead have been counted, the cruelties uncovered, the rapes tallied, the disemboweled accounted for, the children without either a mother or a father gathered together and fed and clothed and taken into the arms of those who are willing, after the last fire has been extinguished and the final rock removed, when the smoke finally clears removing the diaphanous veil to what truly remains of Ukraine; how long until it becomes a footnote to our flaccid memories and is repeated, tirelessly, again and again and again and again?
That is the point of Hell, is it not? Nowhere in Scripture, Bible, Quran, Torah, or fable is Hell a singularity. Events such as these are repeated for the benefit of those newly arrived. Welcome to Hell wherein the Seven Deadly Sins perpetuate unremittingly and without opportunity for respite, to rest, to gather one’s thoughts, to decide on the correct course to a righteous life.
Iris Chang chronicled the Nanking invasion by the Japanese in and around 1938. It became known shortly after the War as the Rape of Nanking. Rape, though, was the least offensive of criminal actions perpetrated on the Chinese population of Nanking at that time. The viscera flowed as though the Qinhuai had flooded with blood washing all of Nanking - bathing everyone in its sanguineous horror. Aberrance and criminality, of every form was inflicted on Nanking’s children, women, and, of course, men. Nothing and no one was beyond the reach of the invading Japanese. Iris was haunted by what she had learned.
The other night I picked up Jonathon Fenby’s, Chang Kai-Shek. (This was to mark my second reading of this epic in contemporary Chinese history, with a focus on the events leading to the Second Sino-Japanese War.) I had forgotten that midway through the book Fenby describes in formidable detail those events that Iris had taken to heart: too much to heart and mind and soul.
Iris Chang committed suicide in 2004, aching, irrevocably, from the images she had conjured in her mind of what had happened to the people of Nanking, her mother’s parents among them, having miraculously escaped death. To her, Nanking was more than an academic study of an historical event: it was personal, private, familial. It was painful.
Midway through the many pages of Fenby’s very detailed account of Nanking I stopped reading. I covered my eyes and wept for a moment. Not for the lives lost in Nanking so many years ago, but for Iris Chang; for the millions who died in China at the hands of Kai-Shek and Mao Zedong; for those who met death in Krakow and throughout Europe in the late 1930s; in Vietnam and South East Asia in the 1960s and beyond; in Iraq beginning in 2003; and, sadly, as though we are non-sentient, in Ukraine today, and I remembered Wordsworth.
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon,
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers,
For this, for everything, we are out of tune…
(Ibid)
Iris Chang, Sleeping Flower, help us in this hour of need to overcome apathy, and to understand that the pain of one is the pain of all, and so it shall be forever and ever. O, man! Will it ever end?
As I did last time, I set aside Fenby’s powerful account and began reading something else: anything else. (I will finish re-reading Kai-Shek later, as I did before.)
How to Install and Use a Toilet Seat Bidet
(and Eugenics!)
Listen to this!
Click the image for an audio file.
Listen to This! is an occasional feature on TheIndependentDaily.com
by Joseph Warren, Editor
http://TheIndependentDaily.com
…in the merciless struggle for survival the unfit were doomed anyway and the fit destined to prevail.
Daniel Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics, on Karl Pearson
One year before the current COVID-19 pandemic began, very fortuitously we decided on a bidet toilet seat from Home Depot: it was the cheaper and easier way to approach a higher standard of hygiene and consequent evolution compared to the many space and plumbing challenges associated with a separate bidet commode, and far more commodious since it did not involve moving one’s tuchus from one pot to another. (Tuches, Tochas, and in the plural, Tuchii, are all transliterations, so don’t bother writing and criticizing my spelling.)
Our decision was made in November, 2019. It was the less expensive model without water heater: winter temperatures are frigid in northern Arizona at that time of year. The bidet seat’s instructions read something like, “T” the seat water line into your toilet’s cold water pipe, which I did.
Our water temperature averages about 40 to 45 degrees (Fahrenheit) during winter. At 8AM having your sphincter blasted by near freezing water is an eye-opening experience surpassing anything Starbuck’s can offer in stimulants. After the first morning I had cursed myself for being such a cheap bastard and not buying the heater version. (As an aside, one of the appealing design features of the Kohler bidet is the motorcycle throttle that controls the flow of water on the handlebar to the right of the seat, and I’ll often make, Vrooom-Vrooom sounds while washing, being an old motorcycle enthusiast. If you have explosive gas, it also gives you something to hold on to prevent cracking your head against the ceiling. Overall the bidet seat adds water volume to the toilet bowl facilitating the flushing of “waste” or, if your Donald Trump, classified documents.)
Back at my desk and sphincter constrained, I sat warmingly and researched an automatic mixing valve. I found, at Home Depot as well, a thermostatic mixing valve with Shark Bite on all three points, which is exactly the type of plumbing connectors I used to re-plumb the house a few years prior. I ordered it.
…in the merciless struggle for survival the unfit were doomed… That is, until the intervention of progressive government some few years ago. Now, our President Biden has informed us that we will defeat Cancer “soon” thus allowing our population to continue to spiral out of control, losing the one sure-fire disease for population control, second only to Hate. Read, What Hitler (and California) Got Right and Wrong: Eugenics and Euthanasia below. In that article we mention that (in my lifetime, from 1950 to today) our world population has increased from 2 billion to 8 billion – a 400% increase.
That’s why our planet’s environment is crumbling: at the very least a 400% increase in fossil fuel usage, industrialized food production, durable and non-durable goods manufacture, housing, household energy use, and all other costs to sustain the extravagances of our world today, far beyond the per capita of 72 years ago.
And, as we mention in the above referenced article, in the United States 78% (ipso facto, only 22% will appreciate the words that follow…) of us are overweight and a growing number (at this writing more than 44%) are obese adding another more than 40% equivalent to our population: fat people eat more to sustain their fatness; it requires more fossil fuels to pull their fat asses along the highways (and roadways to the nearest McDonald’s); more material to clothe them; more energy to cool them; more… more everything.
Our local hospital, Kingman Regional Medical Center (KRMC), spends a great deal of money counseling those who smoke on the dangers of smoking, yet to walk through the halls is an exercise in fleet-of-footedness while dodging the vast majority of the obese on staff: it’s not a good look for Health Care professionals, yet it is increasingly more acceptable today as the multitude of Americans trod the pathway toward Fatville. (Interestingly, directly across the small roadway from KRMC is an In-n-Out burger joint: heavily populated with scrub-wearing folks at meal times.)
Likewise, KRMC was overwhelmed during each Covid-19 outbreak. The irony is that in several findings, Covid susceptibility was firmly linked to body fat, allowing the virus an “incubator” to eventually overwhelm our immune systems, while those who smoke were proportionately under-represented. During the fat-involved process apparently your body releases massive amounts of cytokines that destroy tissues and organs. The resulting organ damage - lungs it appears most often, as reported - are not destroyed by the Covid virus directly but by your body’s response. Here’s an interesting article for you to consider “fascinatingly” entitled, COVID-19 Severity in Obesity: Leptin and Inflammatory Cytokine Interplay in the Link Between High Morbidity and Mortality. Can’t wait to read that, eh?
In the article referenced above regarding Eugenics and Hitler, which you will find below (and that covers at least one dimension thoroughly) I used Cohen’s book, Imbeciles as the basis for developing the need to better control our burgeoning population. It’s not just those who are fat of body, but an increasing number who are fat of head, too. In Kevles’ Eugenics, he cites Francis Galton’s axiom that, …if they were left to reproduce without constraint, (they) would ultimately regress toward the mean of the initial population.
In other words, we, today, appear to be irrevocably doomed: the mean of the initial population is not an advanced state. (Consider “Initial” in context of population.) As a society we are failing to select out those who skew the mean to a lower level, and conversely, select in those who elevate the mean, leaving us moving unalterably toward the center of an Evolutionary Black Hole, evidenced daily in the news.
I plumbed in a red Pex line into one side of the T in the thermostatic fitting, having T’d into the hot water line in the basement bringing it through the floor to the left of the toilet, and a blue pipe into the other, T’d from the water fill line already projected through the floor to the right of the toilet. The third, or to be blended line, yielded a mix of hot and cold water which can be adjusted under the cap of the T mixer. The line out fits into the feed of the bidet toilet seat and, voilà, as Voltaire probably said a few times in his life, a far more pleasant mix of water is rendered unto your hiney resulting in an equally pleasant cleaning sensation, especially so if you fearlessly grab a bar of nearby soap and render your keister kompletely klean and kommodius to those nearby your person, and, thus, know that you are following a path toward enlightenment and evolutionary progress.
A well-plumbed bidet
Ian Deary said, Some people are cleverer than others. I think it would be a good thing if more biologists began with that observation… I think it would be a good thing if those who legislate our laws regarding abortion and birth control embraced that supposition, too.
And, following along with the above, when the next Pandemic hits, you too can say, What toilet paper shortage? Do I care about a toilet paper shortage? I don’t even need toilet paper (if you don’t mind potentially sullying your blow dryer).
The failure to re-implement a standard for Eugenics practice today falls on Adolf Hitler. Without his rise to power and subsequent actions, Eugenics laws and practices probably would have remained intact, as they had before his rise to power and bastardization of the ideal. Today, people like Arthur Dyck illustrate the evils of Eugenics by placing them on all fours with Hitler’s nasty approach. Dyck, Harvard Divinity, is another victim of the maudlin sentimentality that continues to plague resurrection of the only remedy we have today to circumvent what lies ahead. Our world is filled with confused people with an agenda that is without logic and strives to defeat what Nature had intended.
Read, Adam Cohen’s Imbeciles for a robust look at the history and evolution of Eugenics.
Don’t bother to read Kevles’ In the Name of Eugenics, unless you wish to completely immerse yourself in the minutia of the practice and theory: it’s painful, and like Jesus, I have suffered for you so you may not.
Get, a toilet seat bidet and plumb it as above, and you will do much to expand your universe of influence and sociability. And if your neighbors dog tries to smell your butt, a look of grave disappointment and confusion will encompass his countenance.
What Hitler (and California) Got Right and Wrong:
Eugenics and Euthanasia
by Joseph Warren, Editor
http://TheIndependentDaily.com
Reading is not an end to itself, but a means to an end.
Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf
(We’re quoting Hitler? Well, even a stopped clock...)
If more than 47% of white army enlistees were feebleminded that would make the United States, as one critic observed, ‘a nation of morons.’
Adam Cohen, Imbeciles:
Maybe so, or at least seemingly quickly becoming so. The former formal progression was Idiot, Imbecile, Moron – through to an IQ of about 80 (and less) under the Stanford-Binet test. Above that threshold – 80 – one is considered leaning toward “average” and only slightly impaired. People of average intelligence ranged (and range) from 90 to 110. We often meet people of the Moron persuasion, functioning within society to varying extents and performing tasks (currently) critical to our economy. We thank them for their help, smile, and walk away mumbling, “Jesus, what a moron.” Now, empirically, you may better understand the subtext of your comment.
The problem we have, though, is that with increasing rapidity the jobs currently fulfilled by these people are going away: disappearing into the abyss of technological advancement. Combine that with out-of-control population growth and the future looks, at the very least, bleak.
I elected to re-read Mein Kampf, this time in full, after reading Cohen’s Imbeciles. Imbeciles speaks to America’s early Eugenics program whereby we applied varying standards across our many states, sterilizing those who did not fit our definition of those who should be generating our future citizens: a jump start on natural selection, much as Hitler initiated in Germany some years later. I recalled in many other books references to Tiergartenstraße No. 4, such as in Erik Larson’s In the Garden of the Beasts (commented on in an earlier piece – see far below on this site). It was arguably at this location that Hitler began his sterilization program, then advancing the Nazi effort to the eradication of those deemed un-German, interpreted to mean through precise definition, anyone but those who were relatively pure Aryan. This left a lot of people who thought they were German, such as Albert Einstein, confused, and to befuddle Einstein was no easy task.
So, to begin this article, let me summarize Mein Kampf:
Hitler reflected what I might call traditional Calvinistic, American values with regard to child raising and obedience to law, little of which applies to our society as it has emerged in the last few decades. He was firmly committed to the German ideal of adhering to society’s statutory and normative behavior standards, vis-à-vis: “You must follow zee rules!”
We were a lot like that when I was born a long time ago. I was one of the many people who derailed that normative train, along with millions of others of my (and subsequent) generations along with the help of Social Media (for the last 20 years), television, and a popular disdain for History. In today’s parlance, We f***ed it up. Too late now.
Mein Kampf, quite honestly, is filled with many tracts one might confuse, if lifted from context and anonymized, to those of modern day Christian conservative America (except for the Jew thing, in some cases). The book begins with an alternative universe version of Abraham Lincoln’s biography in a roughly equivalent parallel Austrian setting of a log cabin; raised in modest conditions; intellectual curiosity; an unquenchable thirst for reading; a forceful desire to create (in Hitler’s case, Art); and an emerging social consciousness.
Well, you know, I love to read. Actually, I’m looking at a book, I’m reading a book, I’m trying to get started.
Donald Trump on Reading to Tucker Carlson
Hitler suffered from all the typical symptoms of an autodidact. He was driven, self-possessed to an extent, he believed firmly in the responsibility of the individual to improve his or her life continuously in a never ending process of reading and thinking about what he had read, and how it may apply to the German republic at that point in time, dismal as it was. Zee Germans have a word for this life process – one I embrace in my life – Bildung. Thomas Mann popularized this concept in many of his writings, as did others like Goethe, as an example.
If you read Mein Kampf, you will likely find that you share much in common with the more youthful Hitler, if you are worth your salt as a human. If you are not, you’re not reading this anyway (does that sound judgmental?). However, if you share much in common with the older Hitler, there are many diverse governments globally who would welcome you to their kith. Ironically, I might suggest Israel.
It was this sense of the younger Hitler that first inspired ire in me when I heard people compare Donald Trump to Hitler. I found myself feeling angry that someone would so slight young Hitler’s posthumous reputation as to compare him to that numbnut then in office. This is called, dissonance: major dissonance. This realization was very disturbing: My God! Am I really insulted on behalf of Hitler for what I suppose to be an egregiously defaming comparison? Yes, I was: comparing a man who committed his early life to the acquisition of knowledge to that of one who is uncertain which way is up in a book, is patently truncated logic. I dismissed the thought.
From the first part of the first book – there are essentially two volumes to the book – Hitler summarizes what’s wrong with Germany at that point in time, winning many friends along the way speaking to the travesty of the Treaty of Versailles, which facilitated his emergence as a formidable political leader. He speaks also to that little thing that happened in Sarajevo, and all that followed. Austrians, Hungarians, Russians, Italians… no one is left out.
Following this recitative he moves on in a flurry of invectives regarding Jews, Jewish, Jew things, Jewishness, and finishes with a flourish: World-Jew-Domination. In Germany then, if your toilet backed up, there was a Jew at the root cause. The same held true for flatulence, impotence, schnitzel shortages, devaluation of the Mark, and that nebulous feeling of nausea (regardless of Sartre): Jew. Jews caused this and Jews caused that. It was very much like in America, 2001, thanks to Bush, Cheney, and the rest of those rascals who successfully schemed to incite war against those who controlled the vast reserves of Oil for their personal gratification and enrichment, and for those with whom they associated, resulting in the deaths of, perhaps, millions of Iraqi civilians. Only the culprit then was Muslim. Off-and-on, although they would largely hesitate to agree for obvious reasons, they are the Jews of today to many.
Overall in the book, Teutonic superiority weaves its way through world domination, anti-Communism, anti-Homosexuality, anti-Anything-Other-Than-Pure Germans in the missionary position, and the book ends with the words, “A State which, in an epoch of racial adulteration, devotes itself to the duty of preserving the best elements of its racial stock must one day become ruler of the Earth.” (Insert evil, villainous laugh here.)
Two thoughts emerge. One: Hitler’s rhetoric and associated beliefs were not going to garner world support for his regime, except with Henry Ford, Thomas Edison and other very wealthy American anti-Semites of the day. (Read, Who Financed Hitler, by James and Suzanne Pool.) The not-wealthy of America, just didn’t care. Jews in America were just people (admittedly for some, about whom one could tell a clever joke typically authored by a Jew, since they tended (and still do) to save the sharpest knife for themselves). Two: had he not effectively evicted or killed a large segment of Europe’s Jews, he would have conserved the abundant scientific and otherwise creative minds present in Germany at that time, and Germany may very well have won the war, ignoring other factors significant to events, and the last sentence of this paragraph would read, und unsere landessprache wäre Deutsch. Of course, Hate was integral to his thought processes, necessitating an object for his mania, stoked passionately by Goebbels.
In truth, I’ve struggled over this brief article for months after reading Adam Cohen’s enthralling analysis of the case of Carrie Buck, or what came to be known as Buck v. Bell, after the legal issue of forced sterilization of the feeble minded meandered its way through the American judicial system, ultimately to Justice O. W. Holmes, Jr., and thus foundationally influencing our earliest position regarding forced sterilization, and oddly enough, serving as the platform by which Germany’s Third Reich based its laws regarding “practical” Eugenics.
Only, initially the Nazis were far less committed to the Eugenic ideal than the State of California, foremost, and others, secondarily. California’s statutory practices basically served as the Nazi guidelines by which the German Hereditary Health Court decided who was, and who was not, required to submit to mandatory sterilization. The Nazis thought California’s laws were too broadly encompassing, and chose to mitigate the more far-reaching California standard. Not really news today, but worth repeating: it’s like quite pleasurably sticking a finger in self-righteous California’s eye.
At that time in America, we, and Germany, and many other countries were dealing with the unconstrained propagation of the human specifies and thus generating masses of people, somewhat less than half of whom were unable to fully participate in government, society, and to contribute to the economic stability and growth of their country: rather, they served as a drain on the progression of their respective society, both from an enlightenment and economic perspective, very much like today here and elsewhere in the world as we seek as a majority, apparently, to preserve the life of every nitwit, criminal, and incompetent. (You know it’s true, but you won’t say it. And, if you don’t know it, perhaps you’re one of the legions of those described at the beginning of this article.)
Much people is killed of course. Velly cruel. But we have lots more, yes? Ha, ha, ha, ha!
Christopher Isherwood, Journey to a War, quoting Mayor of Canton
Eugenics is a logical heuristic response, but one we in the USA and many other countries choose not to pursue, instead indulging the “Maudlin Sentimentalism” of those who lead and control our various churches, social welfare programs – both government and NGO, Penal systems, Police, Judiciary, Health Care, Rehabilitation and a myriad of other institutions, both public and private, who would find themselves substantially out of work if it weren’t for the steady, increasing population of those who are mentally and/or physically defective or inherently aberrant.
You have been taught that it is wrong. Moses, Jesus, Mohammed (pbuh), and a plethora of other spiritual and civic leaders have cautioned us that kindness and understanding towards our “brethren” is central to the advancement of world civilization. (Logically, nothing can be more contradictory.)
And here’s fifty for you, fatso.
Groucho Marx, You Bet Your Life, to an obese contestant
Not any more: We cannot afford the luxury of pandering to the masses, like it or not. Take the obese, as an example:
When I was born total world population was about two billion. Within my lifespan it has increased 400% where today, we now have eight billion people to feed and clothe and employ and house and…
Multiply the world’s out-of-control population by 40% to account for the plethora of fat people, and you’ll see what’s wrong with our current population models.
And we are failing miserably. Our climate, as a result of this incredible population boom has been destroyed. Natural resources are greatly diminished. Our ability to grow food and get it to the tables of those in need is failing. Yet, in America, 40% of the adult population is more than 40 pounds overweight. That is to say, in America there is a total of about 5.4 billion pounds of excess fat. This is equivalent to nearly 40 million additional people of healthy weight. And, 40 million is far more than the number of US citizens who are experiencing what is called “Food Insecurity.”
To counter this phenomenon, Social Media and the other dwindling popular media have taken to condemning Fat Shaming, to assuage the emotions of the many millions – billions worldwide – of fat people. And here’s fifty for you, fatso.
And the fuel: The EPA registers a 2% savings in fuel economy for every 60 pounds of weight removed from a car.
Then too, more than 10 million US citizens are receiving Social Security Disability, some/many of whom are disabled for obesity-related illness, others causally linked to alcohol, drugs, laziness, intellectual simplemindedness, or a lack of education.
Stupid is as stupid does.
Forrest Gump, from the eponymously entitled movie
While reading Imbeciles I made a note on the frontispiece. It was a fleeting thought, but one I did not erase after considering the veracity of my conclusion:
Everything derisive, factionalizing, destabilizing that occurs in America today can be construed as a result of a lack of a national Eugenics policy.
I believe that. The difference between that conclusion and Hitler’s Eugenics policy, as it evolved, is that our country’s early Eugenics practices, and my conclusion above, are devoid of any racial or religious considerations. Black, white, red, Jewish, Christian, Muslim, and the many and myriad other prejudices each of us carries and sometimes lets out for a brief period of exercise, are not part of the criteria, nor should they ever be: this is called naïve optimism on my part, I know. Euthanasia is not part of the process, only sterilization, and I know several parents who retrospectively wished they had been forcibly sterilized. But, who can predict the future?
Genetics make up who we are, to some extent and to varying opinions, and so do environmental and nutritional factors. It’s the old Margaret Mead, Nature-Nurture argument. We may predict with some accuracy who will reproduce a Moron, but it’s not a certainty. Smart children have issued from stupid parents. Conversely, the smart have bred the stupid.
Today, we are so many that unless something dramatic happens to bring about a massive loss of population, we are doomed to some nebulous and probably catastrophic conclusion, adrift in a sea of idiots, imbeciles, and morons – elected and otherwise.
To quote the mayor of Canton in 1938, Much people is killed of course. Velly cruel. But we have lots more, yes? Ha, ha, ha, ha!
On Reading Marquez and Saroyan
by Joseph Warren, Editor
Editor@TheIndependentDaily.com
Earlier this month my copy of Saroyan’s The Gay and Melancholy Flux (on the recommendation of a writer-friend, Bruce Janigian, read, Persona Non Grata: End of the Great Game) arrived post from the United Kingdom. I was able to read through about the first two-thirds of it before becoming miserably mired in the profundity of Saroyan’s many commentaries on humanity then (circa 1930s), as now. I see it all around us everyday; I see the reflections of Saroyan’s words in our society as we lope along unforgiving and lost in the madness of what has become a parody of itself in a world stampeded by souls unable to inhale and yet always hoping for a continued life among the living.
“…you can’t be born again until you die, and you are afraid to die, you are afraid to live…to look and talk and speak and move…who are you anyway?” (From the story, The Drunkard.)
It made me think of the solemnity of Marquez in Love in the Time of Cholera, a book I had read twice before, but hadn’t in a number of years, so I withdrew it from the shelf and took a break from Saroyan. I have it in Spanish as well and have stumbled through a third of the book laboring over definitions and trying to grasp the complexity and depth of the word Marquez chose for that one word and why he chose it, but I admit defeat. It must be what it’s like for the partially literate to try to read a “Literary” novel, in English, in our country: like a stuttering of the mind and frustrating as hell.
So, for the third time I read again, during my Saroyan-inspired hegira to escape the certain nausea associated with mortality, Edith Grossman’s translation of Marquez’s epic work on love, death, life, failure, success and the significance of none. (Why do I mention the translator, Grossman? There are many translators of Marquez’s work: none evoke the essence of what I believe Marquez intended, to the level of Grossman: she is a great writer unto herself. Comparing all other translators to her is to compare the act of telling to that of describing with images, song, and poetry.)
The concluding pages of Marquez’s book happen on the Magdalena River at a time in Columbia’s history when the country remained plagued by cholera and the aftermath of revolution in a mired confluence of unblending cultures and conflicted society. Yet above it all Love persevered.
Although wonderfully described – beautifully told – I felt a yearning to better understand the river from the point of its original telling during the earliest passages of the book through to its conclusion. I found what I wanted in a collection of early photographs that, from my perspective, capture the Magdalena as it must have been to Marquez’s Florentino Ariza in his youth.
So rather than immersing yourself in “…things you cannot change…” as the addicts admonish, read Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera (El Amor en los Tiempos de Cólera, if you’re a better man than I) and keep the images below for reference while reading the various passages taking place on the River Magdalena. Then, find a copy of The Gay and Melancholy Flux by Saroyan and come to understand that none of what is happening today is important in the least, and that is why we have changed the format of this journal.
Images of the Magdalena and associated with the river:
The town of Honda and the rapids on approach
Perico Station: Terminus of the route
A wayside wood fueling station for the riverboats
A Magdalena wharf-side image
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J Warren, Publisher and Editor; GL Hill, Publisher and Contributing Writer; Warren-Hill Productions. WarrenHillProductions@gmail.com