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@WarrenHillFilms
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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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March 1, 2023
Latest Issue of The Independent Daily:
(At the bottom of each page is a link to the next most recent series of articles)


Our Uncle Sam Buys a House


by Joseph Warren, Editor
http://TheIndependentDaily.com
@WarrenHillFilms

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.

On The Kennedy Assassination

Historians and researchers said they were just beginning to comb through the 13,173 documents containing newly released information, hoping they might shed further light on one of the most closely scrutinized murders in recent history and on the government’s actions before and after it.
- NYTimes

by Joseph Warren, Editor
http://TheIndependentDaily.com
@WarrenHillFilms

Our government, the United States of America, is withholding an additional approximate 3,000 documents from release, perhaps indefinitely, owing to the threat of Identifiable Harm, two words freighted with intense meaning. “Identifiable Harm” to my mind means that a person, people, branch of government, or even an American ideal faces critical and likely imminent danger (resulting from the information’s release).

On November 22, 1963, at 13 years of age, I was with my parents in a restaurant waiting for a table in the lobby. A television was mounted on the wall of the waiting area, black & white as I recall although that may be a muddled recollection owing to my youth and current age.

Walter Cronkite interrupted the then-currently broadcasted program and delivered the news: The President has been shot. Many people still alive today recall that day and moment with vivid clarity.

For those of you not so close to death as most of us who had lived through that apocalyptic episode in our history, let me recount what it meant to many of us so that when the obstacles preventing the release of the balance of documents are removed, and the truth finally will out, you will be as angry as I am regarding the lies and deceit proffered by this corrupted, decaying, violent, manipulative, and malevolent government.

Over the many decades since his death and throughout my reading, I often bumped into the idealized Kennedy, where untempered by personal knowledge he would have appeared to be a great candidate for beatification and by now many good Catholics would offer their evening vespers to him as his miniature likeness flickered in the glow of a candle flame. Knowing Catholics as well as I do, I am sure some do anyway, notwithstanding his unofficial status.

But (and this is a very important point) his death marked the concurrent demise of a hopeful, passionate, tolerant, America that was rising like a full moon above the darkness and dread of our landscape. An America that saw a belief in our country as paramount to all personal considerations. An America that saw (or proposed to see) racial tolerance as the center of an advancing society. He gave us hope. He gave us a reason to commit to a sometimes otherwise very diaphanous belief in a country that been battered by war and bigotry and racism and economic unbalance.

Most Americans alive at the time of his death recall the war, the depression, the riots, the corruption, and Kennedy gave us a “tomorrow” that did not exist before he assumed office. And that is what the CIA, Russia, Johnson, the Mafia, or whoever is known to have orchestrated the assassination in concert with a minion of others took from us. Took from me and left me highly skeptical and downright disbelieving of any proposal, plan, promise, military action, since. And, as it happens, I (and many others) was correct in my conclusion, and that is why we are who we are today.

When the truth is told, be angry for all of us long since passed.

Attention Arizona Republicans and Democrats!
If you had dug up Barry Goldwater I would have voted for him before either Lake or Hobbs

So, this is Tuesday and nearly everyone is below average...
- Heather Tesch, The Weather Channel

by Joseph Warren, Editor
http://TheIndependentDaily.com
@WarrenHillFilms

An Independent’s Perspective:

Who made the mid-term elections? Democrats? Republicans? Both are minority influences in today’s politics. Neither represents the majority perspective in Arizona, and increasingly, in the United States.

Once again, it was the Independents who changed the tide in our mid-term elections a few days ago.

In Arizona and elsewhere in our country the Republicans are a minority, holding, simply, far less than one-half the vote, as are the Democrats to about the same extent; and as they each become more entrenched in their warped perspectives of what America wants and needs more voters fall away from partisan membership.

This is a very important statistic: In this most recent election, registered Republicans numbered 34.67%, Democrats 30.66%, and Independents (33.89%) (plus Libertarians (0.78%) for a total of 34.67%).

We’ve written many times before about the growing trend toward the abandonment of partisan affiliations yet I continue to be amazed that both Democrats and Republicans fail to heed the very clear and distinct message, which unfortunately leaves all of us disadvantaged.

Many independents believe foremost: Immigration control is important. Inflation control is critical. Fiscal responsibility is essential. Preserving many of our traditional values is an imperative. Maintaining our international footing in an increasingly volatile world is critical. Educating our young is an absolute imperative. Supporting those who guard us while we sleep is fundamental, from a Maslovian perspective, to fulfilling our life goals.

Conversely, to some of us, Black Lives Somewhat Matter; Gay men and women deserve a fair shake, although we would prefer they keep it to themselves as in the past when what you did for sexual release was not something to be publicly declared (no “specialness” is associated with this base-level behavior); those who have fallen on hard times ought to be assisted, but not at the expense of leaving job openings unfilled; panhandling should be allowed by those who are not fat; student loans are not forgivable unless the borrower gives back what he or she has learned, including related documentation; and, amongst many others, winning an election amongst the dysfunction that is our government today is not a mandate to ignore all opposing views in favor of special interests Left or Right.

Until such time as one party or the other realizes the depth of the Independent voter’s influence in the critical decisions facing our country in the near future, the tumult is likely to continue and the exodus from partisan affiliation will only increase.

Now you know why I voted for Hobbs for governor of Arizona: Filling in the little bubble on my ballot I kept thinking, Where is Barry Goldwater? Where is Jack Kennedy? Where are all the other men and women who made America what it used to be before the Clintons, Obamas, Bushes, Bidens and Trumps made America Stupid?

(The Weather Channel comments had to do with temperatures, but seemed spot-on to today’s political climate.)

No Matter How the November Election Turns Out, Nobody’s Going to War!

Put Away Your Assault Rifle:
Why There Will Likely Never Be Another American Revolution
(At least for the moment…)

Where a government has come into power through some form of popular vote (…) the guerrilla outbreak cannot be promoted…
- Ernesto Guevara de la Serna (Che Guevara), Guerrilla Warfare

by Joseph Warren, Editor
http://TheIndependentDaily.com
@WarrenHillFilms

Imagine that in the November 2020 election Donald Trump would have been the indisputable winner in both popular and electoral votes, leaving no “rational” doubt as to the election’s outcome and validity, and yet, somehow, the events that occurred around January 6, 2021 remained, holding Joe Biden as the election winner and successor to our highest leadership position.

Following that, maybe, possibly, but still not likely, a popular revolutionary movement might have been mounted by those whose voices were the loudest in the aftermath of the chaos that followed, perhaps resulting in an outcome reversing our Legislative branch’s decision regarding electoral vote intent.

In Che’s Guerrilla Warfare and in his Bolivian Diaries, although immensely interesting reading capturing his ideologies and methodologies surrounding his actions, the impetus behind the decision to “invade” Bolivia he made in clear defiance of his own guidelines on what constitutes a successful revolution. In Guerrilla Warfare he held that he should not have been successful in his attempt to seed revolution in Bolivia because the Bolivians perceived their government to be as equitable as one might expect, notwithstanding how the country’s leadership came into office. Generally nobody gave a rat’s ass: they were just mired in the day-to-day “struggle” of living, much like our country today. It was no surprise, therefore, that he failed for the very reasons he listed as those opposing the basis for a successful revolution.

Generally, save for a handful of the more raucous citizens, mostly Communists, Bolivians were pretty content with their government and society, and Bolivia did not have the multitude of social programs and benefits serving the Poor, Middle Class, and Rich as we do.

We are all married into the American way of life, notwithstanding how miserable from time-to-time it seems, particularly in today’s endless stream of vitriol – or, more appropriately, the out-gassing of frustrations by particular interest groups.

It mattered little if one was mute; people did not understand one another anyway.
- Jerzy Kosinski, The Painted Bird

Here’s our country today:

In no other time in history have Minorities been more thoroughly looked after and protected, whether citizen or not.

In no other point in history have the rights of homosexuals been safeguarded by any government to the extent they are here, while in many other countries their acts remain outside the law.

From the earliest epoch, there has never been a time when the Wealthy and the Poor have been granted access to the national treasury through tax cuts and out-right payment of benefits and cash to all “qualifying” groups of varying economic strata, supporting them in either acquiring the means to a stable life or adding to their (sometimes already vast) wealth.

At no other time have criminals been treated with such a perverse equity and their acts tolerated repeatedly to the detriment of society.

Everybody’s being paid-off

Everybody’s enlisted in the American lifestyle: we’re all part of it. We’re all part of the grand conspiracy to rip-off future Americans – people who have yet to be born – as evidenced by the increasing National Debt, today hovering somewhere around 31 Trillion US Dollars, or about $93,000 for every single person: from adult to the teeniest, tiny baby who has yet to learn not to crap his diaper. Ninety-three thousand dollars.

In the United States we have (what passes for) Health care (or certainly the availability of Pharmaceuticals), and (for the most part) food when we’re hungry. We have roads that only sometimes collapse. We’re largely protected from violence (think of Mexico today). There is no scarcity in things we may consume to take the edge off of the angst of living (once illegal and now legal or tolerated), or to completely eliminate the torment of living, if we so choose.

We have a multitude of cheap, disposable things to occupy our minds, such as they are. We have recreational activities we may freely pursue at little to no cost. We are at absolute liberty to say the most vile and hateful things online and (increasingly) in person. We have the freedom to shoot people with whom we do not agree, or who intrude into our lane on the highway without obeisance.

Our “elected “ representatives (even those here in Arizona) basically do the people’s business while seemingly trying to wedge us apart by offering conspiracy after conspiracy as though the vast majority of us actually care. Many of them probably think they’re doing our bidding, although for most of us, they are not. We’re interested in, as Vonnegut said, Just getting through this thing, whatever it is, referring to life, itself.

So who wouldn’t be happy in this Best of all possible worlds, per Voltaire?

Varied Nihilists populating our country’s landscape, who would probably self-identify as Nihilists if they knew what the word meant and had read a little Hegel along the way. They don’t know what they want, but they know this isn’t it.

Take the two down-home boys in Michigan who had conspired to abduct Michigan’s governor: Barry Croft Jr. and Adam Fox. They are part of a militia of some number of others (probably numbering not more than 20 at the most, which makes them slightly outnumbered by the US Army) who very much want to be seen as patriots. They’ve read (or probably just heard online – not the same as reading) enough History to know that our country was founded on revolution, but they really don’t know why. Yet, ironically, they are the very reason we have a Representative government.

Back then, some 250 years ago, too few of us at that point in time were capable of thinking our way through to the future. Most of us couldn’t read to any higher level, if at all. Back then, like some of us today (including Croft and Fox), we were basically unread and/or uneducated. Most of us at that time in our earliest pre-revolutionary years, knew nothing of what came before, other than localized, familial history and practices, and generalized repetition of rumors of vague importance. Only the very rare – the schooled, mostly elite of our Colonial society understood the nuances of government and economies.

Mostly, just some portion of our population understood that some of us were discontented with British hegemony, and thus repeated slogans they had heard from others that fueled the revolutionary spirit.

Today, we’re not the ignorant rabble we were then: We are a new breed of ignorant rabble educated in a little binary schoolhouse where anything goes, and it often does. But, save for a few complete nitwits who fail to see the United States for what it is, and how we are all just jostling for the bigger tit, side-by-side, revolution of any scale is just not likely. We’re all too connected, too busy Bleeding the Beast, as the Fundamentalist Mormons used to call it.

So unload your rifle, Dewayne: The revolution has been postponed.

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
@WarrenHillFilms

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
@WarrenHillFilms

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…”

The Holocaust: Shoah Survivors

Greta Warren-Hill’s Latest Work
by Joseph Warren, Editor
http://TheIndependentDaily.com
@WarrenHillFilms

“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
@WarrenHillFilms

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.

We Must Accept Who We Are
by Joseph Warren, Editor
http://TheIndependentDaily.com
@WarrenHillFilms

…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.

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?

This House was Built in 1911
by Joseph Warren, Editor
http://TheIndependentDaily.com

To her, Goethe’s darling was still alive and still young, things that long since had become historic and legendary to us were still reality to her. I always felt a ghostlike atmosphere in her presence.

Stefan Zweig on Mrs. Demelius’ recollections of her childhood friend, Goethe’s granddaughter. The World of Yesterday (Die Welt von Gestern)



2022: The Historic Cohenour House, entitled, “1911” by Greta Warren-Hill (Publisher, TheIndependentDaily.com) showing both the builder, Mary Eleanor Cohenour (left) and Mae McMullen depicted on the front porch: Although 50 years separates the two, Mary Eleanor is more than 110 years distant from Greta. The painting will be on exhibit at the Kingman Center for the Arts (4th and Beale Streets) later this year.

“Don’t be put-off by the age…” was the beginning of a narrative of a home for sale on Zillow, not in Old Town Kingman, but some short distance away (less than a league off). That home was built in 1972, and as a semi-autodidact in Asian, American and European history, and one who lives in a reasonably new home built in 1911, I thought that was a strange bit of salesmanship.

Our home was built by Mary Eleanor Cohenour (in 1911 by Tarr, McComb & Ware) and is now known eponymously as the Cohenour House: it is constructed of Rusticated Concrete Block (RCB, which was cast on-site then to look like quarried stone blocks) on a perimeter and basement foundation. The windows are complex with multi-lite upper sashes, and to this day much of the original glass remains - seedy and wavy. The interior and exterior doors are very close-grained Douglas fir and were “preserved” in many, many coats of early enamel then latex paint, containing enough lead to build a life-sized replica of the Brooklyn Bridge and still have enough left over to drop the average IQ at the Princeton Institute by at least three full points.

Each door took three to five days to strip and finish, and each window at least that amount of time to restore to pre-abandoned-maintenance condition. Each is now covered with a storm window, frames for which we cut from cedar, beveled, glazed with double-strength panes, hung on period correct screen hangers, and painted a matching burgundy, of the three-color scheme we had landed on seven years ago, not to protect against storm surge in Arizona, but to keep the wood from deteriorating and undoing what we had done.

Mary Eleanor Cohenour was a very successful businesswoman, and had this house built after her husband, Jacob Neff, left her for another “Mary” soon to be Cohenour, in 1906. Will wonders never cease? (And I thought my generation originated that proclivity.)

“Our” Mary acquired, subdivided, and developed the many smaller streets that sit behind our house, and in earlier times the buildings were dubbed, the Cohenour Cottages: not a pejorative but to denote their diminutive character. She was very active in local theater often being cast as a matronly figure who held familial sway, dominating those around her: all of local history confirms this as type cast, as I am sure Jacob would confirm if he were still with us.

She held many events here: soirees and parties for friends, neighbors (few at that time), and officials. The house was frequently in the news, many times for her gardening prowess: corn, grapes, almonds.

When this home was built, China’s Qing dynasty had just fallen: the last of thousands of years of dynastic rule, if we exclude China’s current leader, Xi Jinping, who has assumed the legacy of the Dowager Empress (even to the point of faintly resembling her). Until 1911 China had resisted more than two hundred years of violent incursion by Portuguese, British, US, Russian, French, Japanese (and other) imperialist usurpation of resources; including, and most egregiously, serving as a dumping ground for US and British Opium intended to spread the disease of drug use, addiction, and pacification throughout China’s vast population to the ultimate benefit of Drug Lord families here, such as that from which our American hero, John Kerry came, and other American notables as well.

The Opium Wars continued off-and-on for decades from the early 1800s resulting in the loss of Chinese lives in the hundreds-of-thousands (perhaps millions, although no official “body counts” were made) at the swords and cannons of American and British forces.

The fan kuei (collectively, us) sold a great deal more than they bought (in tea and silk); every year more and more silver dollars…left the Gulf of Canton…Now the emperor faced a deepening money crisis as well. By the middle 1830s the relentless outflow of silver…had driven his principal civil servants to distraction, and to a man they blamed the crisis on opium…(and) for brigandage, for corrupting the army and civil service, for ruining increasing numbers of Chinese.

The Opium War
Peter Ward Fay

Homes and families, on a vast, nearly incomprehensible scale were viciously destroyed by us and our distribution of opium. Today, we believe that dumping Smartphones and other Chinese-made goods through Walmart and a host of other online and brick-and-mortar co-conspirator retailers serves to the detriment of the American worker, and worthy of sanctions, and the threat of international conflagration. Irony abounds in history.

And then there was the Boxer Rebellion in 1900, (on the heels of the Spanish-American War in 1898).

Many Westerners recalled the direst of Chinese maledictions, “May you live in interesting times.”

The Spirit Soldiers (Boxer Rebellion)
Richard O’Connor

Stemming from our persistent need to take from others (non-Protestant, non-White, or non-Wealthy) believing them to be subhuman and unworthy of sovereignty or respect, our greed and wantonness had reached a climax in the minds and lives of many Chinese eclipsing their relative docility, the end result of which was a massive uprising against resident foreign powers. The “Boxers” were so-called because of their style of fighting, which from a Westerner perspective seemed pugilistic, recalling that this event pre-dated both Jackie Chan, in various films, and David Carradine in Kung Fu.

Fortunately, by murdering many tens-of-thousands of Chinese men, women and children, we eventually treated with them to a reconciliation that gave us territories and access, from which we were better able to launch further future depredations. Hong Kong came to the White man in this way and today is the focus of attention by world powers as those who have an historic claim to the small, once worthless pile of rocks, bid to bring it back into their waiting arms, much to the dismay of Hong Kong’s current residents... predominantly.

After the many wars had ended and the last of the dynasties was about to topple after thousands of years of dynastic rule…
…this house was built.

China then fell into the hands of warlords and tyrants, many of whom found strengthened regional authority, wielding corruption and death broadly and without mercy, virtually enslaving a region’s populace, much like every Post-Apocalyptic America movie we’ve ever seen, and just as violent. In fact, very much like Afghanistan and Iraq until not many months ago: thanks to our efforts, as well.

From 1911, China began a nearly forty year struggle to emerge in 1949 under Chairman Mao, while the exiled Chiang Kai-Shek moved off to “succeed” to Taiwan, but that was another story and much later: and we’re still at 1911 when this house was built. (Read, Chiang Kai-Shek, Jonathon Fenby, for an illuminating history of this controversial and mercurial leader of China’s republic (for a relatively short time). It, too is a very informative look at an important international leader and strangely beguiling spouse, as well as an account of our intense US involvement once again working to manipulate China’s future.)

Elsewhere in the world, in 1915 the Lusitania was sunk off the coast of Ireland by U20, a German submarine under the command of a strong-hearted patriot of the German navy. 105 years hence, and the cause of this tragedy is still pondered. Following my reading of Erik Larson’s Dead Wake, I am more than certain that Churchill, then First Lord of the Seas or some such really great job title, manipulated circumstances that placed the Lusitania in the gunsite of U20 to stimulate American intercession in the failing British effort to defend against the aggressing German (and other Central Powers) forces. “Rule Britannia” was, from that day forward, no more, unless one counts the (Islas Malvinas) Falklands War, which to Argentines was just insulting.

It took far more than the Lusitania disaster to shake Wilson out of his eros-induced torpor, while British, French, Russian (and numerous other Entente members) “lives lost” numbered into the millions - military and civilian. But eventually we joined in... Over There.

And probably from this house, and from the many houses across and up and down the then-gravel streets of what we now call Old Town, departed those who would wage war in a place so remotely different from Kingman Arizona. Some of them would come back when it was “over, over there.” Some wouldn’t, and like many towns in America we have a war memorial in Railroad Park, which used to be Kingman’s professional Baseball field. The Cubs, Pirates, and others used the field for off-season training and exhibition games…

…while this house looked on a few yards away.

Stefan Zweig (ibid) rightly discoursed furiously about the destruction of Beethoven’s House in 1903 on Schwarzspanierstraße, Vienna. Here in Kingman, while never the official home of any noted composer, or for that matter anyone who could hum a tune for all we know, our City’s leadership does not let history obstruct the advancement of new, cheap, architecturally depraved homes and other buildings, either. They are driven by pay-offs and other considerations that always put me in mind of Mel Brooks’ line in Blazing Saddles, where, as the small-town mayor he justifies his actions exclaiming, We’ve got to save our chickenshit jobs!

And so they do at the cost of local history.

Between “Big” wars, this house changed hands twice and served, having reconfigured the old Carriage House on the opposite side of the block, as a commercial laundry facility for central Kingman. Streets were paved covering over the old dirt motorways and in the depth of our Great Depression, the WPA, our Works Progress Administration who “employed” millions of out-of-work, destitute Americans in Public Works projects, laid in sidewalks in the 1930s much of which remains today – intact, unbroken, level, and clearly stamped. They are as new – 90 years hence. Here, if you walk through Old Town you can walk on history, even as the City labors desperately to remove our past to make way for crappy chain restaurants and stores and car dealerships and monolithic government building atrocities.

The 1932 Bonus Army Riots made our recent January 6 episode look like a re-run of Dancing with the Stars

Also between the Wars, Washington DC was crushed under the anger and revolt of 17,000 of America’s World War (One) veterans seeking payment of their promised Bonus following the war, finding themselves in the depths of the Great Depression unemployed and, to a large extent, unemployable given the absence of available jobs as American opportunities vanished under the weight of economic collapse and Climate Change, buried, literally and metaphorically, under millions of square miles of stripped and desiccated topsoil. Unexperienced heat and drought from the Continental Divide eastward left the country sweltering and debilitated in a time long before air conditioning.

So while the WPA was improving Kingman, Japan and China mixed it up in the vilest way possible, and in Germany there began the rise to prominence of an otherwise very unremarkable former German army corporal who really, really just wanted to paint for a living. In retrospect, any number of us would have supported his enrollment in the French Academy. We didn’t, but he did manage to paint out the lives of more than 11 million people, many of whom were guilty of practicing a different form of prayer, much like our actions in Iraq and Afghanistan, only the Jews didn’t control vast oil fields as the Iraqis did in Majnoon and West Qurna, raffled off to industry giants like Shell and Exxon-Mobil: Father Timothy announcing the winner of the church raffle, “Well, will wonders never cease? The new Cadillac has been won by our own Monsignor O’Reilly.”

Many more millions of dead later: this house still stood.

In 1946 this house was acquired by Mae McMullen, known by various surnames owing to changing life circumstances, marking the thread of ownership that lasted for nearly 60 years. By all accounts, she was a remarkable woman: Chief Surgical Nurse at Mohave County Hospital, which stood until a little more than a decade ago not more than one Li away, she worked with the famous and infamous in Kingman medicine, including one of our most recognizable doctors who from the 1930s onward practiced his surgical craft while completely toasted on alcohol: still, his patients were loyal and believing. He was fairly short, kindly (probably owing to his condition), and while there were several other qualified physicians in Kingman, he is fondly recalled by some long-time residents, and by various long-ago lovers now gone to ash.

Mae was tall, strong, intelligent and raised her children in this house, none of whom were infants here. Thus, Mae’s grandchildren occasionally find their way to us through email, phone or visit. We learn so much about the house that way. They are older Americans today.

World War Two brought significant, albeit transient, changes to Kingman with the development of the US Army Air Corps airfield from which practice sorties were launched. Zealous and far-too-young men served as gunners aboard bombers and fighters in our overseas theaters of war after first blasting live .50 caliber rounds from automatic weapons into our countryside. For sport, the guns were occasionally trained on cattle peacefully grazing below, usually owned by John Neal and other prominent ranchers. They were many times admonished to not shoot the cows: that the cows were not Nazis, and probably held no political affiliation, although they did hold clandestine meetings wherein the membership espoused a united commitment to a shared Vegan philosophy. Many of our young men and women never returned, and they too hold a place on our memorials close by this house. But the cows do not.

In 1950, the year I came about, on the Korean peninsula the first of our Asian US proxy wars began, eventually drawing us into a civil war that was supported on the opposing side by China and the Soviet Union. Arguably, it remained a proxy war for them during the duration of the conflict. Our total war dead numbered about 36,000, with tens-of-thousands of walking dead bringing up the rearguard. And young men from this house and others in Old Town as before and once again went off to war. Some never returned.

The US was booming, though, as only the US may from time-to-time, with only minor setbacks we called recessions (like today, deny it or not), mostly effecting smaller swaths of specialized industry, like in Defense, such as for my father. But we lived in Highland Park just on the outskirts of Los Angeles in a neighborhood not unlike where this house abides in Kingman. I believe that’s one of the reasons we love this house so.

(As an aside, today I imagine Joe Biden as Captain Rudolph Sharp, the master of the Lancastria, whose 1940 sinking took maybe as many as 6,000 lives (or more) to the bottom of the sea off St. Nazaire during the evacuation of British and other troops from the south of France, following the mostly failed Dunkirk exodus. Standing on the wing bridge I can almost hear Captain Biden excoriating, There is nothing to fear! Return to your posts! Denying a recession, does not make it so.) Read, Fenby’s The Sinking of the Lancastria for the complete story.

During our second year of caretaking this house, since that is all that we are, for all purposes, I finally got around to looking more closely at the concrete basement wall on the east side. I had already ripped out four iterations of plumbing going back to the original well pipes that supplied the house from the still-working well, although we draw our house water from City supply for clarity sake. I replaced everything with Pex and SharkBite fittings: I will never sweat copper again!

In the basement wall I noticed several deep scars from which some of the concrete was sloughing off. Fearing the worst, I welded up a bracing for that span of flooring above, treated and patched the concrete.

“Dad (referring to Mae’s teenage son, the woman’s father with whom we were speaking) used to go into the basement with my uncle while grandma (Mae) was at work and fire grandma’s .45 caliber into the concrete wall…”

The next day, “Ooooooh! I get it.” I stuck my finger in the hole, “This is a bullet hole! And so is this…and this…and this…”

During this chance to learn more about Mae, we were told that the “boys” often climbed into the attic and fired live rounds from the latticework hip roof opening on the front of the house covering the arched concrete porch. I suppose this was better than shooting apart the house foundation unless one happened to be walking by at the wrong moment, but this is not Chicago.

Time in this house passed virtually undisturbed and the “boys” have all gone to Glory (just as we all must) after having lived an acceptable lifespan. And, as of this writing, not even Jeff Bezos can do anything about that.

What’s happened since the Korean War? Not much…

We’ve fought so many wars and killed so many people; famine and disease have taken millions; the ebb and flood of economic collapse and resurgence has left a lasting and often overlooked legacy of what to expect from life, most of which most of us choose to ignore; people have come into the world, and people have left; the universe is getting smaller, and perhaps multiplied; we know that this world is not of continuous matter but insist on viewing it as such, because in our restricted consciousness, it’s the only game in town; we continue to view our fellow human beings as we did in the 1600s; and, most importantly, globally we’ve grown from about two to eight billion people during my lifespan, most of whom own Smartphones, and in an effort to further humanity, post images and videos of themselves having sex, alone or otherwise: we are not advancing as a society. In fact, we are on the retrograde.

So, let me ask you something Realtor representing the 1972 home I first mentioned at the beginning of this piece: Why on earth would I be “put-off” by a home built so recently as 1972? So many homes in America pre-date our little home by a few centuries and chronicle events beginning with the Spanish invasion of North America. Like you, probably, I’ve slept in homes abroad built in the time of Shakespeare or before.

Old Homes have essence, spirit, and are quantum vessels that I believe still hold the remainders of those who came before. Old homes can evoke love, peace, or a sense of belonging that cannot be realized in a new home, no matter how the builder may sloganize variations on “Come home to Larchmont” or wherever. You will not be home there: you will just inhabit space. Perhaps, fifty years hence one who lives there will be “home” if, and this is very important given the quality of construction, it remains standing.

If you’re now thinking, Jesus! I gotta buy an old house and get me some of that peace and tranquility shit! Recall that there will likely be some work to be done. But through that work the house becomes your home. Of course one can always search out something completely renovated, but that can be a very pricey proposition in today’s real estate market: maybe not next year. Who knows? We didn’t learn from the last “Great Recession” just a few years ago.

Here’s Rule One: Don’t Home Depot an historic home. Doing so ought to be a Capital Offense. It’s the same with classic cars: If one puts a 350 Chevy in a 1939 Plymouth, it’s no longer a 1939 Plymouth. It’s something else, and it is not preservation.

What’s rewarding is to know that what we’ve done to this house will remain for decades, even centuries to come. Perhaps subsequent owners will become curious and research the subject; maybe they will come to know us, and through this effort, carry us forward in time. Kurt Gödel would be proud.

Southern Border War
(Maybe...)
by Joseph Warren, Editor
http://TheIndependentDaily.com
@WarrenHillFilms

We Must Pay Greater Attention to History: Putin Does

Germany’s Arthur Zimmerman, Foreign Secretary to Kaiser Wilhelm, sent a coded message to Mexico’s President Carranza, proposing a jointly conducted Latin American effort against the United States, reward for which would be restoration of much of Mexican lands currently held by the United States under the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.
- Editor

Make war together, Zimmerman proposed. Make peace together. In return, Germany would take measures to help Mexico seize previously held lands…
- Eric Larson, Dead Wake
-
As the Barack Obama administration increasingly pressured Russia regarding its activities in the Ukraine, Russia was equally capable of reasserting its presence and challenging the United States in Latin America, the region once considered the “U.S. backyard.”

- The New Russian Engagement with Latin America…
U.S. Army War College, Strategic Studies Institute, June 2015

Vladimir Putin may be many things, but ignorant of history he is not. He believes himself to be, in a fashion, a modern-day, more affable version of Adolf Hitler seeking greater Lebensraum for Russia (along with appurtenant diminishing natural resources), and intends to add that extra geography at the expense of his neighbors who are otherwise engaged with their own governments and ideals mostly not consistent with Putin’s.

He is not prone to Hitler’s many strategic mistakes, being well read in the matter of history. Unlike many of our global leaders today, including Joe Biden, Putin understands the fundamental ease by which events of the past may be re-introduced into any given geo-political situation at any time far after the historical event is all but forgotten. Make no mistake about it: Putin’s goal is to resurrect the former Soviet Union (and then some) under a state-controlled, Capitalist autocratic banner, in the same manner and form as both the current Russian and Chinese economies successfully function today.

They are basically interchangeable governments: Both are despotic, seeking advice from only selected resources within the government’s hierarchy; inexorably intolerant of dissent; focused on the perpetuation of the central government, and with negligible concern for the vast majority of citizenry except as necessary to sustain the economic machine: a form of economic slavery not much different than the United States, as a matter of fact, except that China and Russia lack the basic elements of freedom - free speech, habeas corpus, and other protections - while we feign, to a large extent, benevolence.

Popular Media is not telling you everything you need to know

Mr. Putin also understands the United States today: by his own words and through his various lingering and vestigial apparatchiks, Putin has declared that we – the United States – are an impotent mass of fools unable to defend ourselves against aggression. Unfortunately, he is right to a large extent: Far more than 70% of our military age youth are, as we’ve written before, citing this recent Heritage Foundation summary, too fat, too stupid, or too criminal to be useful as anything other than cannon fodder in any traditional conflict.

Sadly, we are predominantly a country of imbeciles and morons, and we bear no resemblance to those who were our parents and grandparents. Putin knows this, and this knowledge, along with his understanding of history has invigorated him to challenge us on a global scale through various proxy wars, currently and to come, knowing that we must risk global nuclear conflagration in order to defeat an enemy like Russia, and that is why he’s arming Mexico.

The line-up of visiting heads of state and government in attendance was thinned down to 21 after Biden excluded Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua, prompting Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador and several other leaders to stay away in protest.
- Reuters

Mr. Putin would very much like to re-write history to his vision. First, though, he must insure that the United States is deeply mired in conflict. I suggest that it is no accident that Mexico’s president (and other Latin American country leadership) were absent from Joe Biden’s Summit earlier this month (June, 2022).

To an intended end we may safely conjecture, Russia has supplied Mexico with a vast supply of offensive weapons of sufficient range and capability to present a formidable threat to our southern border and deep within, virtually assuring him that our attentions would be fully engaged on a potential two-front conflict – an unwinnable scenario as evidenced by Nazi Germany’s fall - should Putin elect to strike. He knows and understands history, while we seem to ignore it, or someone would have heeded earlier advice proffered by many and put a bullet in his head by now.

“The Mexican side is currently considering concrete proposals from Rosoboronexport, including the supply of (additional attack) helicopters,” (Sergei) Lavrov said.
- Reuters

This is in addition to numerous longer-range missiles and other offensive weapons and supplies. Given that Mexico has a very stable and mutually-beneficial relationship with China, at a substantial geographic distance, who else might Mexico have in mind as a target of engagement? Certainly not Venezuela or Columbia.

Will, once again, maudlin sentimentally overrule our heuristic understanding of what the world has come to? Look, we live in very dangerous times, and at no time has it been more important to elect leadership capable of understanding what the near future portends. Remember what awaits us when you cast your vote later this year and in 2024.

Pay attention to what matters: Your Nationality, your Sexual Inclination, your Skin Color, your Social Media presence, are of no importance in a world bent on destruction. Those are frivolities better suited to better times, if then, but that’s just my opinion. As an aside, it’s probably not a good time to buy a home in Bisbee, Tucson, or any of our other close-to-the-border communities.

Of course, it all could be just a coincidence.

(As an aside, I can think of no better way to bring our world population back into balance with our planet than blowing a few billion of us into smithereens: It’s quick and, I would imagine, relatively painless, but I understand that this may cause some of you some distress. If you’re one of those people, find an alternative.)

Read, The New Russian Engagement with Latin America, U.S. Army War College.
Read Erik Larson’s Dead Wake. A complete account and riveting book on the sinking of the Lusitania.

Pandemic Puppies
by Joseph Warren, Editor
http://TheIndependentDaily.com
@WarrenHillFilms

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
@WarrenHillFilms

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
@WarrenHillFilms


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.)

The Involuntarily Celibate (Incels):
Young White Men Who Hate Women
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
@WarrenHillFilms


Anybody can get laid: That’s the easy part. Hell, it‘s as easy as stepping in dogshit at a Bark-Park.
- Editor

People fucked back then just as much as they do now. We just didn't talk about it as much.
(Somewhere in the quote above was Miller’s signature, Don’t ya know…)
- Henry Miller

I don’t remember exactly in what film I caught the interview where Henry Miller utters these erudite words, but it was a long time ago: a great line from one of the early 20th Century’s (arguably) greatest writers – I remember it as vaguely being the Dick Cavett show, but I wouldn’t guarantee it. If you don’t recall who Dick Cavett is, then Henry Miller is likely equally as lost in time for you. That’s fine since they have little to do with this article.

(In the world of literature, please note, when seeking suitable reading for your teen children follow this bit of advice: don’t confuse Arthur Miller with Henry Miller.)

Point is that I must have fallen asleep to the world around me sometime in the last 15 years or so since the birth of the Incel movement, a group of like-minded nitwits numbering in the tens-of-thousands in America who have adopted the label of Involuntary Celibate, or Incel for short, (which may be one of the involuntary contributory factors). Their formal and informal numbers have grown to such an extent, and their actions more and more aberrant, that the National Threat Assessment Center (NTAC) of our Secret Service has developed a substantial database on Incels owing to their likelihood and history of criminal acts against women, and collaterally, men. So, while I could never have imagined some years back a group of young men getting together to self-identify themselves as “too ugly of mind or face to fuck” I suppose it’s a Cowardly New World, as Aldous Huxley probably wrote (or will write) in some multiverse at some “time” in the past-future.

Interestingly, the Incel movement (if I may call it that) began about the same time as the rest of the turds who floated to the internet surface beginning many years ago, coinciding with the Kardashians, West, and a host of others of whom I know nothing other than to scroll past their images as quickly as possible online. (We have not had television wired to our house for more than 17 years now, leaving us blank-faced when someone we know begins a sentence with the words, Did you see (blah, blah) on television… only unlike the sex thing for Incels, we don’t miss television.)

Foremost, Incels hate women: the stress of existence – the angst of life – has overridden the Incel’s ability to comprehend that finding someone with whom to share a momentary sexual experience, as I recall from many years ago, is about as easy as stepping in dogshit at a Bark-Park.

Incels are basically a modern, dark and violent rendition of Spanky’s, He-Man Woman Haters Club of Our Gang comedy fame decades ago. Only when Darla moons at Alfalfa, he has Buckwheat hold her down on the treehouse floor while he beats and rapes her.

Instead, on something apparently called the Manosphere (I really do not get this world today), which is a collection of websites and forums for the like-minded, these imbeciles rail against women and mourn the non-loss of their virginity, celebrating being Incels by discussing who to hate and how to do harm to the female of our species. Harm being defined as harm, in the very real sense of the word, through to and including kidnapping, rape, and murder. Incels believe that women today are primarily feminists and see the rise of women in government and business as threatening their ultimate masculine position in society as the Hunter and usurping the ultimate power associated with that role.

Incels in the news has become fairly common with relational threads tying various violent events to either or both the philosophy, if I may use that term loosely, and those known to have committed acts against women, under the banner of Incel. For the last 15 years, here’s a partial summary...

Robert Long: Sometime ago you will perhaps remember the young man who in March 2021 allegedly decided to murder several women who worked at an Atlanta spa – a massage parlor – apparently favoring their customers with a Happy Ending. Robert Long was charged with eight counts of murder in that event.

George Sodini allegedly killed three women and injured many more in Pennsylvania.

Elliot Rogers is accused of killing six people and injuring 14 more in California.

Chris Mercer apparently killed nine and injured eight others in Oregon.

Sheldon Bentley allegedly killed a man because he was frustrated owing to his Incel-esque existence. Obviously, there was something else going on with Mr. Bentley, having selected a male victim.

And, William Atchison allegedly killed two people in New Mexico. The list goes on… all within the last very few years.

Probably the most interesting tale of Incel misadventures involves Mr. Carini of Virginia who, while building a bomb to supposedly commit some act of mayhem directed toward those about whom he posted demeaning and hateful speech, experienced premature detonation (which can happen when you’re young) leading to the loss of fingers on one hand, and the complete loss of the other hand. Now, if you’re a young man having difficulty experiencing a sexual relationship with a woman, losing one of your hands and fingers off the other has got to be a kick in the nuts, which is about all the sexual experience he has left.

Read, Black Spring, Sexus, Nexus, Plexus, and the most renowned book of my very early years of pre-sex, Tropic of Cancer. Also, there is more smut to be had in Tropic of Capricorn and other lesser works by Miller, and a very nice and strangely genuine sentimentality in Insomnia along with several works of Miller’s art representative of the book’s many meanderings: I read it well more than 40 years ago, but I remember something about a piano bar, too, which are non-existent today. There were piano bars everywhere in San Francisco and Los Angeles back then. (Boy! I sure miss piano bars… and my youth.)

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
@WarrenHillFilms


…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.

Cancel Culture
Restructuring History: The Elimination of Teddy Roosevelt
by Joseph Warren, Editor
http://TheIndependentDaily.com


I am an American; free born and free bred, where I acknowledge no man as my superior, except for his own worth, or as my inferior, except for his own demerit
Theodore Roosevelt

You are over the line, America: NPR.org published an article January 20, 2022 reporting on the withdrawal of a Teddy Roosevelt (on horseback) statue from the American Museum of Natural History in (where else…) New York.

It would seem that today Roosevelt’s image sits in metaphorical juxtaposition to that of George Floyd, a criminal and street thug who was killed some months ago, an event we are unable to put behind us owing to the invocation of his name in all matters of responsive police violence in the apprehension of criminals.

The apparent difficulty with the Roosevelt statue (one of my most highly regarded presidents) was that he is flanked by both an American Indian on one side, and an African on the other, and owing to his elevated physical position the statue is regarded as symbolically Racist. (That would seem to be an issue to take up with the artist, long since having passed into glory, rather than the heritage of Theodore Roosevelt, who to my knowledge was never seen astride a horse flanked by an Indian and a Negro, to use the vernacular of the day whence this statue was created.)

Roosevelt and Friends
(Black guy is to the right.)

In all fairness, the bronze statue is not to be melted into a puddle of so much slag, but moved to Mount Rushmore (at some point) in closer proximity to his likeness chiseled relatively irrevocably into the mountain side: I presume next to Donald Trump.

We’ve gone too far in our quest to absolve ourselves of past wrongs. Forgiveness for who we were is not something to be gained by eliminating any past references to those who fashioned our early society in an effort to manifest a greater goodness for those who brought Whiteness to this land. There is nothing we can do about it. It’s done, and replacing Roosevelt, et al. with busts of punks and thugs as we have with George Floyd is a futile and a meaningless gesture unprofitable to those who truly do strive to bring about greater goodness and righteousness into our part of the world - White, Black and Otherwise.

Roosevelt’s character, per those in charge today, apparently has been tainted by his support of Eugenics, a controversial subject in today’s world having allowed genetics to run rampant in our society, and as a result we are now suffering the consequences of our misguided maudlin sentimentality binding us to the false belief that every nitwit and miscreant walking the streets is part of the “sacredness” of life. In the world of all other animals, that is not the case: it’s a recent contrivance not endorsed by any other species, nor was it of ours until as of late, and it is still not wholly inwardly endorsed by many, including this author. It violates a basic premise of life.

Read: What Hitler (and California) Got Right and Wrong: Eugenics and Euthanasia, to understand why Eugenics was abandoned and how it became a tool of Hate in Europe. But, while you’re at it, consider these images of just some of those allegedly involved in the Smash-N-Grab robberies last Christmas:





Here are more images from recent news reports online without regard to subjectivity on my part (they’re just a daily occurrence and I could easily fill the digital pages of this publication with only a month’s worth of reportage):

Victims, then Murderers:








Murderer, then Victim:

Countless examples of violence by those who share George Floyd’s heritage on those who did not, meaning Whites, Hispanics, Asians: all of us, and, occasionally the converse. It would accomplish nothing. This is our reality today though: there are those who remind us that it is George Floyd who ought to be seen as a victim and mourned. That’s hard to do for many or most of us, and likely to lead to a bitter end: The more one side opposes the other, the greater the consequences as the stress from compression builds, erupting eventually like a Tonganese volcano. It won’t be a pretty sight… perhaps that’s why nearly every day there are articles in mainstream publications (like NPR, see below) forewarning of a coming American Revolution. Let’s hope not, yet it may be the only way to change the dismal retrograde path we’re on today.

The Coming of the Nationstate of Deseret
(encompassing a portion of the region known formerly as the Southwest United States.)
by Joseph Warren, Editor
http://TheIndependentDaily.com


Not long ago, the idea of another American Civil War seemed outlandish...
Ron Elving, National Public Radio (NPR.org, January 10,2022)

Contrary to what Mr. Elving describes in his article appearing January 10, 2022 online at NPR.org, the idea of a contemporary American Revolution, not waged at the voting booths and by ensuing litigation, but in the streets, is not a new idea, nor is it perceived as outlandish by some or many of us living in relatively “normal” America today. In 2006, prior to the first publication of this site 10 years ago today, we wrote an essay entitled, the Coming of Deseret, a hypothetical, newly-formed nationstate comprised largely of the geography of today’s Utah, Arizona, and portions of other neighboring states, thrust into being following the chaos of an American Civil War stemming from deeply factionalized ideals regarding race, government control, globalization of industry, diminution of individual rights, state sovereignty, broad entitlement, and a myriad of other factors, the growing disparity of which metastasized in our country, becoming more exaggerated every day. Like today. Right now in America.

Here is a brief synopsis of the storyline, then I’ll provide you with a link to read it in totality:

The international border with Mexico has essentially collapsed; Mexican government forces (largely powered by drug cartels) are over-running US border towns and leading assaults on US military facilities in southern Arizona. California has devolved into chaos and anarchy in its larger cities and threatens the peace and well-being of other regions within the state’s borders whose perspectives run contrary to the collective opinion of most of those within the larger metropolitan areas.

Utah, managed efficiently under the continued influence of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (or Mormon or LDS, most commonly in the Gentile community, where “Gentile” refers to those who are not members of the LDS faith) musters the Mormon Militia, much as Joseph Smith and (later) Brigham Young did in preparation of the impending war with the United States government just 160 years ago.

The Arizona 158th Infantry Regiment, a very capable (albeit far understaffed military unit augmented by civilian volunteer-soldiers), joins the diminished US Marines in defense of the bases and the border, and together with the Mormon Militia defeat the intruding forces bringing about relative stability, but not until after the balance of the former United States of America (FUSA) evolves into more homogenous political and coinciding geographic entities more reflective of the needs of each region’s citizens. The “South” is, in fact, born again, which doesn’t bode too well for its more radical population, which is not too subtle code for “Blacks” many of whom found their way to a new nationstate, Liberty, not surprisingly encompassing much of what is (much) greater Detroit, Michigan today. Our Native American (Indian) population establishes the long ago proposed nationstate of Sequoyah somewhere around and comprising a good deal of Oklahoma, much as it had been described in 1905. And so it goes until there are - if I remember correctly - seven nationstates newly formed from what we are at the moment. Anyone in touch with America today may easily sort out how our one-time, relatively agreeable little country devolves (or evolves, depending on your perspective), in our story into an array of divergent but far more homogenous entities. (You probably know who goes where as well as the next guy, right? Most of us just don’t want to talk about it.)

Obviously, this painful re-structuring leaves many people either dead, or in the wrong place. That can happen. It’s happening everyday throughout our world. One society is significantly restructured leaving an irrevocable selvage left on the border, perhaps figuratively and otherwise.

Look: America was never meant to be this big. It was never meant to be this corrupted. America is an ideal country for a relatively homogeneous culture and cannot address the many diverse perspectives in existence today without financial and social collapse. A government - any government - cannot legislate human nature. A government cannot legislate tolerance. Most of us are not particularly concerned with the plight of America’s Black urbanite, or the rights of Gay or Transgender people, or any of the myriad causes bankrupting social media to make their voices heard: If we say we are, we are motivated by other dynamics, pressures, constraints. Plainly, we’re lying, but it’s a nice lie, not intended to harm but more to identify with a higher goodness and a fantasy: a world far more ideal than that in which we exist; an ideal we will never achieve in this world of material illusion.

(Coincidentally, in the story political unrest erupted in Canada as more of the world’s population collectively decided that their situations were as imbalanced as ours: Quebec, as an example, revolts to bring about a sovereign nation separate from British influence, so that they may better pretend to be French. Although why one would want to do that, I don’t know.)

A concluding thought: We, here, are not Mormons. We would be if they permitted cigarettes and coffee. Frankly, I don’t think that either serve to one’s spiritual detriment, as evidenced by countless societies, the members of which drank stimulants and smoked tobacco (and do today). And, although we are not Mormons we hold many Mormon principles near, as many non-Mormons do, particularly in the Southwest, foremost of which is the time-tested axiom, Be Prepared.

Find the complete story of Deseret here in pdf format. Click the link and scroll to page 77 for the beginning. It’s a short 26,000 words. Many have found it interesting to read. Probably more so will tomorrow...

If you find yourself depressed after reading Deseret, do what I do: read something by David Sedaris, like, Me Talk Pretty One Day. You’ll likely laugh so hard you’ll fart.

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!

Avogadro’s Constant, the Election Audit and
Societal Entropy in Arizona:
It’s the Heat
by Joseph Warren, Editor
http://TheIndependentDaily.com

Vastly underpaid warehouse employee encounters Bezos in hallway while mucking out his champagne powered bidet
Mr. Bezos, may I have a few dollars extra so that my infant child may have the second head with which he was born, removed?
Bezos:
“Neither a borrower nor a lender be.” So said Mr. William Shakespeare.
Vastly underpaid warehouse employee:
“Fuck you.” So said Tennessee Williams, albeit often misattributed to David Mamet by New York pseudo-intellectuals. Also, I restocked the toilet paper with the random images of poor people you prefer to use.

From The First Chakra, by Jack Kerouac, in an entirely different universe, sometime in that future

*

We Arizonans are not all as delusional, dimwitted, and misguided as you may think observing the continued reporting on Arizona’s Election Audit in-process in Phoenix, as we speak, and as we will likely continue to do for many months to come while the Internet Buccaneers (Cyber Pirates? Cyber Ninjas? or whatever they’re called) continue to bill for their machinations intended either to validate or invalidate the 2020 election results. Many of those following and supporting the audit effort believe that Donald Trump will be restored to office sometime in August, presumably of this year (the alt-universe wherein Kerouac wrote the above exchange between Bezos and employee).

Why do they believe that? It’s the Arizona heat: it is a dry heat, but it is getting hotter and dryer every year, and right now it has been more than 100 degrees (way more) here in NW Arizona – Kingman, and nearing the point of spontaneous combustion in Phoenix 200 miles south – for several days running, and frankly I’m getting very tired of being relentlessly air conditioned like week-old bratwurst lolling about in a plastic sandwich bag on a shelf in the refrigerator and living in night-to-night fear of awakening to a malfunctioning central air system: hopefully I’ll emerge from slumber in a cold sweat: “...if my air conditioning system should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.”

“Five of the Deadly Sins.”

Could be worse: I could be sitting in rush-hour traffic on the 405 (not Interstate 405 as anyone anywhere other than California would call it) in the San Fernando Valley in the very same 100+ degree heat while trying to move out of the way of a ten-car police pursuit as a police chopper and six news copters hover ten feet above, breathing in vast quantities of pollutants, forced to listen to the car next door’s bass thump to lyrics that encompass at least five of the Deadly Sins, and the guy on the other side is giving me the finger after temporarily abandoning masturbating to convey his hostility. So, life’s a lot better…

The heat makes us do strange things. It can make us act erratically. We lose reason. We become intolerant of others. We act out violently. We smell bad. And, if we happen to be small-minded or small-town politicians, or just some random Trump janissary, like those fueling both the audit and the desperately craved sensationalism seemingly not shared by the majority of Arizonans (or Americans), we try frantically to hold on to the coattails of the Prom King’s tuxedo, long after the ball is over, no matter how silly the Prom King looks and is.

“Tell me about the wabbits, Vladimir.”

Yes, J'biden won the popular vote in Arizona, but as many have said before, it wasn’t because he was our first choice: we voted for him because a majority of us here are rational enough, in spite of the heat, to know that four more years of Donald Trump was just not tolerable, under any circumstances, notwithstanding how appealing a few of his policies were to our more atavistic, combative, xenophobic, or protectionist inclinations. So we closed our eyes and voted for the other “apparent” moron; the other barely sentient old guy; the person less likely to earn us international scorn; the one not a fundamental tool of some Russian oligarchy; someone not seemingly auditioning for the role of Lennie in some other-world version of Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men (Tell me about the wabbits, Vladimir). (You know Putin has videos of Trump nancying around a hotel room full of hookers, wrapped in a towel with a gold laurel around his pate. He must.) Anyway: that’s why we voted as we did - many or some of us.

“So, if I am a Millennial can I spread Avogadro on toast for breakfast?” No, that’s avocado.

“Well, if I can’t eat an Avogadro, why did you mention it in the title?”

If you’re like me and your mind is tangled up in associations, when I think of entropy I think of Avogadro, and conversely, when I think of things going off in various misguided and conflicting directions, I think of our country. Avogadro’s number (something like 6.02 X 1023 (sorry: superscript not working) which is a very large number) tells us how many constituent particles of basically the same thing are in a container or space, a Mole as an example, or like perfume in a bottle to some extent. Entropy says that when you pull the stopper, the smell begins to escape going off in very different directions and no longer concentrated, no longer sharing the same container and conditions and behavior. Only with us, it’s more like lighting a stink bomb: the stink just keeps spreading. Once released, and as the molecules bubble off on their random ways, there is no putting them back, and the chances of them regrouping in the bottle (or the stink bomb) on their own accord through infinite, random, bumping and grinding are infinitesimally small.

Right now, and despite God’s recent best efforts, there are nearly 8 billion people in the world today of which something like 340 million are our fellow Americans. Many years past, someone pulled the stopper out of the American bottle resulting in a plethora of individuals today of every (at the moment, with more variation to come) conceivable inclination and mentality all striving to impute their views on society and government, whereas previously we were a country dominated by heterosexual white men, corked tightly, and sharing the same space and relative motion.

Today we are a diaspora of inclinations and conditions: the immensely wealthy and very poor (stratified as never before in our country like the cotton ends on a Q-Tip after you penetrate deep into your ear canal accumulating abundant ear detritus and lost household items); people of varied color and nationalities; diverse sexual attitudes and practices; eagerness to succeed at all costs whatsoever, and a genuine willingness to fail; and becoming increasingly intolerant as we move decades beyond the bottle’s neck.

And, that is why we all go to sleep at night hoping that the air conditioning is still functioning in the morning, because, it’s just going to get hotter.

This is why we shoot our fellow Americans:
American Coolies - 71 Years of War

by Joseph Warren, Editor
http://TheIndependentDaily.com

“This” they said, “is a coolies’ war.”
Christopher Isherwood, Journey to a War

What has our government taught us?
It has taught us, irrevocably, that the way to resolve conflict is through killing.
- Editor

71 years: back to 1950…

Since then - since that year - we’ve not seen a moment - a nanosecond - of peace, and have been actively involved in armed conflict, slaying the “guilty” along with many, many mothers and children, through those who predominantly fight our wars – the young, the societally marginalized, the poor, the black, the brown, the uneducated, the unskilled, those temporarily politically incited by the legerdemain of the media - manipulated by the government’s ministers of propaganda, and by those who truly see viable threat where others do not: collectively they are the people we have made the Coolies of America.

“...useful timber dies prematurely by the axe and only useless timber enjoys good fortune.”
Gao Xingjian (quoting Zhuangzi), Soul Mountain

And for the last 71 years we have lived under the darkness of impending world nuclear destruction in a continuous yet-fought war (other than through proxy-conflict with Russia, and today as then, China, and to an added extent, the vast sea of foreign terrorists by whose real or imagined threat our civil liberties have been largely torn apart by our own government).

Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of our own mind...
Emerson, Self-Reliance

Now, in this year, we face the added threat of not only “…enemies foreign…” but enemies domestic, too, as the vast Ideological American Fault Line gives way to an abyss predicated on those fallacious and archaic ideals of both the extreme Left and Right. We are no longer, “…one Nation, under God, indivisible…” We have been torn asunder, as they say. Like opposing ice shelves breaking away from Antarctica: it, too, is irreconcilable, I fear.

Since 1950, we - the United States – have been embroiled in continuous war without respite. Korea and Vietnam: by proxy China and Russia (the former Soviet Union); the civil war in Laos, Lebanon, Cuba, everywhere in Africa, Thailand, back to Korea, Dominican Republic, Cambodia, Grenada, Libya, Panama, Persian Gulf, Kuwait, Iraq, Syria, Iraq again, Afghanistan, Somalia, Bangladesh, Bosnia, Kosovo, and the list goes on: much, much beyond. Millions – tens of millions – have died.

I know what you’re thinking: Yes, yes, yes. But where’s the fourteen hundred dollars J’biden promised me? It’s on the way…rest assured, and soon a substantial number of you will be able to pay for your iPhone and have a few extra six-dollar coffees at Starbuck’s. (It’s difficult to think about what America has done (and is about to do) while encumbered by worry: not being able to access Social Media, as an example, no matter how rationally absurd Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, and the many others.)

But, while you’re waiting for your money (What’ll you have, anyway? Venti Mocha? Frappuccino?) from the government, money forward-funded by many generations of US citizens yet-to-be-born, ask yourself, Who led us into these deadly conflicts? Who perpetuated the death and destruction?

Well, we did. We allowed it to happen, mostly because our attention was consistently diverted by survival – at home – because of one contrived scenario after another, each greater than the one before in complexity and threat.

But, who was at the helm? Republicans and Democrats, alike.

Each lied to us – sometimes gravely so. Each constructed a scenario of certain destruction. When I was 16 years of age in 1966, the war in “Viet Nam” – which was then two words, but today has been substantially condensed for ease of spelling by the American consumer – was about defeating Communism: the evil force opposing our American Way of Life, Liberty, and so on. The Vietnamese (2020 US Trade Deficit, $70 billion), along with their Chinese (2020 US Trade Deficit, $320 billion) backers, were Communists and that was certain to be the ruination of Capitalism, (strike that), Democracy... Yeah, that’s the ticket. In our world today, China is the leading force and as we speak (as I type) J’biden is meeting with those who have become know as the Quad: Australia, Japan, India, and the United States, as a consort we plan to stop China from expanding her reach.

Feed your head, not your wallet
- Grace Slick

Those making up the membership of the Quad are a part of the same group who had previously, over the last two centuries or more, attempted to change China’s path toward her ultimate destiny – whatever that may be. I have a list of very well written books I may offer you, should you decide to feed your head, and use it. They include Isherwood’s Journey to a War, Fenby’s Chiang Kai-Shek, Gao Xingjian’s Soul Mountain, O’Connor’s The Spirit Soldiers, and Fay’s The Opium War, amongst others.

Obviously, J’biden (like Trump before him, like Obama, like Bush, etc.) either knows nothing about history or chooses, notwithstanding George Santayana’s admonition, to ignore History as nothing more than a series of singular unrelated events.

Reality is much different, and our approach to China is very much the same as what it has been for nearly two hundred years back to when John Kerry’s relatives (our envoy for the environment and former presidential hopeful) were dumping vast quantities of opium on China’s population to the benefit of the Forbes family wealth. But today, the outcome will not be the same as it was in the Opium Wars: it will be far, far worse for us all. Listen to this: China is no longer a frail dowager empress huddled in her royal city while warlords control vast tracts of land and people, unaligned with the Empress’ vision. China is becoming the Dragon.

Of course, the Quad could just ask their respective populations to quit supporting China’s manufacturing through their spending habits and the problem would be mitigated, except for Japan whose history and reasons behind aligning with the Quad are far more Machiavellian.
- Editor

Of all the lies I’ve heard in the last 71 years, though, none stands out more strikingly than that told by the Bush-Cheney duo...

(Please take a moment and recall J’biden’s recent comments regarding holding the highest level of Saudi government responsible for the very brutal murder of the journalist, Jamal Khashoggi. J’biden, quoting Monty Python said, Let's not bicker and argue about who killed who… In point of fact, we do when it is fittingly appropriate, as when there are vast reserves of Oil, and that’s how we found ourselves in Iraq.)

That war – just that war in Iraq, the war that continues today and will for many years to come fought there and here – at 2011 cost more than 5,000 US lives, tens of thousands of US veterans disabled mentally and/or physically, and probably in excess of one million Iraqi lives lost, with many more added to the toll through today. Many of those who fought in this war did so believing the wholesale bullshit pedaled by mainstream media. Today, of course, all the way up the line to the dizzy and addled Nancy Pelosi, if they speak of it, they claim ignorance and provide some form of subjectively-validated plausible denial predicated on a misguided media, who in-turn blame George W. Bush, who in-turn has taken up painting and has, thus, avoided being sentenced to death by the International Criminal Court (ICC) because he was at least smart enough to not sign the international ICC agreement, knowing full well his intent when first taking office.

Had GWB read Ahmed Rashid’s Taliban, or any other history book ever published concerning the Middle East, even remotely, he may have reconsidered before unloading on Iraq and Afghanistan, although probably not given the forces behind his decision.

Why does this keep happening?

“The last man at the end of history knows better than to risk his life for a cause, because he recognizes that history was full of pointless battles in which men fought over whether they should be Christian or Muslim, Protestant or Catholic, German or French…”
Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man, citing Nietzsche

Either we are plainly ignorant and unthinking, or, as I’ve speculated privately and publicly, this…this existence we call Life, is actually Afterlife and we are all in our assigned Dantean circles of Purgatory or Hell: that’s why. That and we’ve given up learning. We don’t read - most of us. The vast majority choose to throw up what they’ve read online at some Hash House of social media. Of course, even the “regular” media are highly suspect today - none of them read, either, except each other’s books in order to make certain that their wallets are adequately padded.

What has all this killing taught us?

It has taught us, irrevocably, that the way to resolve conflict is through killing. We’ve learned that from our government. Our children have learned that, too. We all have that vestigial predilection. And, thanks to the efforts of popular media – Social and Mainstream – and to the commitment of those who saturate your televisions and streaming content with violence to fill their wallets, including the US government, we have little to no reason to holdback any longer. Are there justifiable reasons to kill? Of course: even the Daoists understand this. Anger, Greed, Hate, Prejudice are not among them...

Arizona has its own peculiar way of dealing with things.
- Editor

In the mean time, and as an interesting aside, in the aftermath of the last election Republicans in my home state, and the one from which this journal is published, have found new and exciting ways to deal with all those fussy and picky minorities by imposing stricter conditions under which one may cast his or her vote in our elections.

Arizona’s New Polling Place Sign Indicating Minimum Height and Hue (HH) Requirement to Vote:

In addition to the above Height and Hue requirements (or HH as it is abbreviated on Facebook) certain precincts will selectively permit “Drive Through” voting. For those passing by Window One of their polls in a Jaguar, Mercedes, BMW and a few others, their votes will be automatically tallied. At Window Two they receive their complimentary Thank You For Voting cocktail. Those arriving at the polling place via public bus – particularly those relegated to the last few rows – will have to enter through a second-floor building window, prostrate themselves before the poll official, pay the assigned Poll Tax of from 50 to 100 Swiss Francs, provide incontrovertible proof that they had been to France in the last ten years on holiday, document a substantial investment portfolio, then sign their names in Sanskrit.

In the interim, of course, while our Republicans plan their next party-wide meeting at Nürnberg, our Arizona Democrats are planning on a public Read-a-Thon of the English translation of Das Kapital, as soon as they can find a few people who can actually read non-emoji based American English: that’ll take awhile.

How bad is it in America today? Read Xenophon’s Anabasis: things could be a lot worse. At least here in Arizona, in some strange, very dysfunctional way, we are still family.

Arizona’s Independent Voter Mantra:
“Clowns (id est, extreme left leaning Democrats) to the left of me, Jokers (nitwit fanatical right wing Republicans) to the right;
Here I am stuck in the middle with (at least 31.67% of) you.”
(from Stealers Wheel)
by Joseph Warren, Editor
http://TheIndependentDaily.com

If you don’t recall the Stealers Wheel epic, here’s an embedded link:

Arizona isn’t turning Blue. We aren’t turning Red: many of us are plainly repulsed by the mephitic gas being excreted by some of our statewide (and national) elected officials. This wasn’t the way it was, and it isn’t the way it should be. We intuited that, and we responded to it in this last election, but our choices were, at best, feeble.

From both primary parties - either of which is a minority party in today’s America - the respective choice was either one dotard or another: unread, unwise, in one case, reacting to the greed and ignorance embedded in the hearts and minds of (a minority of) America’s (Arizona’s) mentally confused, marginally sentient population who see threats and danger lurking on every street corner. From the other party, another feeble-minded ne’er-do-well who longed desperately to achieve that last rung in the long climb upward prior to his demise. Both strove to overcome the other: one with a smile, and one with a smirk, all at the cost of America’s future: one economically, one socially. And here I am, stuck in the middle with most Arizonans.

Yet, we - the Independents, unaffiliated, unorganized, and ignored - made the last election what it was. The Democrats did nothing to perpetuate reasonableness and temperance of thought. While the Republicans only inflamed the Left and those of us repelled by the rhetoric and ignorance of their diatribes. It seemed as though the most vocal in Arizona were, and are, the most ignorant of both primary parties: the xenophobes, the racists, the apologists, those who hold all lives sacrosanct in the face of overwhelming evidence and experience to the contrary. And, like many Arizonans I was appalled at the epithets and oratory hyperbole - the slings and arrows - directed at one minority party or the other.

America today is too big and too complex to view from the isolated vantage point of Flatland (read, Edwin Abbott’s Flatland): it is a large, cumbersome machine teetering precariously on either the right leg or the left trying desperately to maintain an upright position while a host of Lilliputians push and shove to topple him over. The last great American I can think of who saw Partisan dysfunctionality for what it is, was Theodore Roosevelt. In frustration he abandoned the partisanship and moved on with his vision for our country. Today, both primary parties are so far removed from where they were 100 years ago (so far to the extremes) Roosevelt’s reaction would be like many of us here in Arizona: complete disgust at the polarization both parties have wrought.

Independents are fluidly minded. We have the ability to see our society for what it is. We retain many of the values that made America a very great country with acknowledged faults. On the road to our modern era, we did several things wrong, but we understand that we cannot change what was and may only strive to not repeat those episodes from our past. We know that the financial integrity of our country is critically important - not for us, but - for the generations to come. We know enough about economics to understand that one cannot continue to borrow from the future to finance the present without consequences. We know that societies greater than ours have fallen before us, as they will in the future. We know that Hate buys nothing but the reciprocal. We know that insanity is not reserved for the individual, but can manifest aberrance on the masses, as well. We know that the world has grown beyond its capability to sustain itself by a population that has grown beyond reasonable limits. We know that Nature is working desperately to constrain and reduce our impact, but wring our hands in frustration, because more than anything we want to believe that all lives matter, but we know better.

We are not organized, though, because to do so would be tantamount to trying to organize a church service for Atheists. It is counterintuitive. It is the dichotomy of heuristic thought. Thus, at the moment we Independents are without hats or t-shirts, and haven’t come up with a suitable bumper sticker, nor are we likely to. We’ll just continue to be the agents of change in a world more and more mired in ignorant actions and counteractions.

Here are the numbers: Arizona’s last election registration roll shows Arizona’s electorate is 35.24% Republican; 32.20% Democrat; 0.90% Libertarian; and 31.67% Independent. We here at TheIndependentDaily.com represent that last group – the Independently-minded who subscribe, sometimes embracingly so, to Einstein’s Theory of Partisan Stupidity, and in the lead-up to the November elections I heard from several of my fellow Arizonans all of whom voiced the same frustration, best summarized by the Stealers Wheel song above: Clowns and Jokers wearing the costumes of the Partisans. (Frankly, I don’t know who the old guys are in that video: the Stealers Wheel I remember were all much, much younger.)

The Republican and Democratic parties in Arizona (and America) have lost traction: they are becoming more and more facile and impotent; and that is why they are losing membership. And in their leadership, including statewide, many of whom might be likened to nitwits, are those most grievously still protesting the election – four months after the fact, while...

No one is tending to matters that are most imperative to us today, and long into tomorrow. As an example:

Our National Debt is closing in on $24,000,000,000,000.

That’s 24 Trillion US Dollars of Debt. Our President (whether the Republicans like it or not) as a result of extreme Left leaning pressure is going to add trillions of dollars more debt to the Trillions of dollars created by our former president in his four years in office. Most of Trump’s debt increase (about $19 Trillion to more than $26 Trillion) went to the wealthy and Corporate interests in the form of tax credits and the like, leaving the US Treasury otherwise bankrupt had it not been for our dubious ability and willingness to print more money, just as the Chinese did during the years of Chang Kai-shek and the rise of Mao, or the Italians and Germans in the 1930s, none of which worked out especially well for them as any C-graded student of World History can tell you.

Some time back when National Debt first exceeded GDP, a few responsible journalists sounded a reasonable alarm, and forewarned us of the consequences. What’s particularly important is that today our GDP is comprised of nearly one-fifth Health Care – 17.7%, to be exact. That ought to be alarming to everyone, most of all to anyone with children who will likely have children who will be citizens of a then-insolvent country: an economy does not grow by providing Health Care to it citizens within its borders, strictly speaking.

So, while the horned and cow-robed lunatic Republican mascot becomes the signature of the Republican party leading Trump’s collection of Soggy Bottom Boys through the preeminent lair of Democracy, and the Socialistic Left is carried carefully and caringly onward, borne on the caressing mittens of Bernie “Show Me the Money” Sanders, we who are stuck in the middle can only continue to tip the scales and provide paradigm disrupting influence on an otherwise highly corrupted system:

Quit Partisan Politics.
Register Independent* and begin thinking, before it’s too late.

* No dues, no meetings.

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 Saroyan break. 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 from 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 @WarrrenHillFilms

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