The curse of inheritance

Posted on January 27, 2018 by | 8 comments

feral hog
Hi readers. Thanks for coming by for a read.

Those of you who have read this blog awhile probably know I’m inclined to think we’ve got to quit rewarding people for being born to wealthy, powerful parents. The practice has been around so long it’s almost impossible to force our minds to examine the issue. But when we are able to do it a lot of facets emerge that would argue to the unbiased observer it’s not the way to operate a society.

We all grew up on rags to riches stories and the generations before us had their Horatio Algers, Joseph Kennedys and other self-made millionaires. This country spawned thousands of them during the 19th and 20th Centuries.

But what we rarely consider is that the progeny of those millionaires and billionaires end up being the driving forces in the running of the country. An aristocracy based as thoroughly on inheritance as any European lords and nobles the people who founded this country did their best to assure would never rule here.

In the same way we know about self-made wealth and the men who have it, most of us also know about their offspring. The powerful insanity of the heirs to the DuPont fortune. Teddy Kennedy. Paris Hilton. And the list goes on and on. There’s no evidence at all that being born to conspicuous wealth lends itself to breeding better, more productive people. The opposite is more likely true.

So what, the next obvious question asks itself, should ‘we’ do with billionaire estates after it’s all been confiscated besides, say, a million dollars each to the heirs?

Well, how about this? Use it to finance those damned wars nobody has asked anyone but wealthy people whether they want?

Or use it to build that damned wall most sane people don’t want, but are being threatened with having to pay for.

Or sum it all up each year and divide it into equal parts as a sort of ‘tax refund’ for all the other citizens of the country who don’t have a million bucks?

And every one of these suggestions is certain to infuriate a huge piece of the public. The wealthy and powerful, of course. And those who think they might inherit sometime, somehow. And those who believe they’re clever enough to be a self-made millionaire and that this will keep them from creating a dynasty.

But the really strange ones are those down in the trailer parks, of out there in suburbia who toil for their survival and work hard for everything they get in this life. They are as protective of our power elite aristocracy as their masters who did inherit their fortunes.

There’s no understanding the human mind.

Old Jules

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Posted in 2018, America, Human Behavior

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Higamus Hogamus

Posted on January 27, 2018 by | Leave a comment

There’s been a lot of water under the bridge since Dorothy Parker wrote that poem. And there’s been a lot even since I posted it on this blog the first time. But that just goes to prove Parker captured a universal truth. And was never recognized, acknowledged or acclaimed. Never canonized as a saint of the literati.

So Far From Heaven

All this feral swine talk reminded me of one of the most succinct, philosophical, psychological, sociological, sexy and romantic poems I’ve ever read.  Dorothy Parker authored it sometime back in the ’50s, I think:

Hogamus higamus men are polygamous.
Higamus hogamus, women monogamous.

Inspiring, thought-provoking and titillating.  It doesn’t get much better than that.

Old Jules

 

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Posted in 1950's, Human Behavior, Poetry

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Remembering the Fallen from All Eras who died for our property rights.

Posted on January 26, 2018 by | 23 comments

 

Kansas City VA Medical Center, Kansas City, MO.

Hi readers.    Thanks for coming by for a smile.

I was sitting in the Silver clinic waiting area at the KCVA Medical Center today and got some really good news!   Keep in mind that I was just a few dozen yards from the Hall of Heroes and fairly close to Valor Elevator.   So this guy doing all the talking really seemed appropriate.

He was a severely overweight old fellow with a lot of bends in the wrong places, hair coming out in patches.   Had the man next to me pinned to his chair as he went on bludgeoning the people of this country for not supporting the president more, for all the ‘snowflakes’ and cowards nowadays, and for the fact nobody is honoring our soldiers dying in these presidential wars.

Guy next to me, “I voted for Trump.   I don’t regret it yet.”

“They complain about him going to Florida!    Heck, Florida, at least, has a park where they honor the dead from all wars!”    He named the park, and I went back to trying to read my book.

But then I got to thinking.    All wars?   Wow!

Anyway, I looked it up.   He was right!

Field Of Honor Recognizes The Fallen From All Eras , Hillsborough Veterans Memorial Park.

By golly I think it’s about time someone honored all those fallen soldiers at Little Big Horn who got themselves killed trying to attack a lot more Sioux and Cheyenne than they thought were there.    And all those twenty-five soldiers killed when they massacred all those people at Wounded Knee.

Heck, when you  think about it, all those Indian wars have all sorts of fallen GIs who got themselves offed trying to kill Indians…… Apache, Navajo, Sioux, Cheyenne, Yuma, Ute, Comanche, Kiowa, Seminole.  I’ve never heard one solitary soul stand up in front of a podium and pronounce how those men died for our freedoms.   But without them we wouldn’t have farms and ranches scattered all over the Dakotas, Wyoming, Montana and Idaho.   And condos and resorts all over Florida.  Those men died for our property rights.

And what about all the heroes who fell in the Mexican War when we were taking California, Arizona, New Mexico, Utah and Nevada away from the Mexicans?   Nobody ever stands over their graves, stares at the flag, gulps, and talks about how they fought for our Constitution, our freedom of speech, our property rights.

Then there was the Spanish American War, where we took Puerto Rico, Cuba, and all her other possessions away from Spain …… and the heroes who died in that war for our property rights.

There’s just no getting around it.    We’re falling down on the job honoring our fallen from all eras.   Good thing someone is at least remembering the guys who died for our freedoms in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq one and two, and various other places in the Balkans, the Middle East, Korea, and Africa.

In fact, probably having someone stand in front of a podium and explain how all those guys were protecting our freedom would be a good place to begin.   I’m inclined to think General Custer came about as close to protecting our freedom as anyone who died in a war after 1950.

Yeah, all those fallen heroes  killed by Geronimo and Cochise won’t rest until someone honors them by explaining how they died for our freedom.

Old Jules

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Posted in 2018, America, Military, Native American, Native Americans, patriotism, Politics, US Army, VA campus, Veterans

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Amber waves of marijuana and shale oil deposits – Protecting the Mexicans from people like us

Posted on January 26, 2018 by | 2 comments

Re-blogged from September 18, 2013

Hi readers.  Thanks for coming by.

Those damned Mexicans.  They refuse to protect themselves.  This time 150 years ago they had a damned Austrian monarch running the country and French soldiers keeping him in power.  A little before that the US Army had to go down there and whip the bejesus out of them because they wouldn’t give us New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, Nevada and California.

Heck, a century ago they refused to protect themselves again and we had to send General Blackjack Pershing to beat some sense into their heads.  Bastards had the cheek to kill 19 US Navy men when a US ship drove into Vera Cruz and started shelling the town.

Now they’ve got all that marijuana growing down there nobody can make any money from until it gets across the border.  Nobody making a penny off it except Mexicans until it gets up here where someone can use it.  Bad enough, you say?  Well, I agree.  But it isn’t all.

The shale oil deposits Old Sol gave us because we’re his Chosen People don’t necessarily stop at the Rio Grande.  There’s a better-than-even chance some of it’s down there where nobody can make any money off it except Mexicans.

We’ve been patient and we’ve tried hard, but those shiftless, indolent people down there keep having stuff we need to be making money from and they refuse to protect themselves from us.   There doesn’t seem to be any way we’re going to be able to avoid having to invade them to protect them from us.

People like that don’t have any respect for human life the way we do and it gets downright boring and tiresome forever having to invade them.  Time to put a stop to it.

Time to make them Chosen People with us, annex them.  Time to make Mexico a US territory so we can protect them.

Old Jules

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Posted in 2018, America, Current Issues, Government, Human Behavior, humor, patriotism, Politics

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All these free kids flooding into the country and they want to send them BACK?

Posted on January 26, 2018 by | 2 comments

Re-blogged from July 12, 2014

Sheeze readers, can you believe this?  Hundreds, maybe thousands of kids at loose-ends coming across our border.  Nobody for us to answer to, no matter what we do to them.  And whatever it is beats starving to death in some pesthole where they don’t even speak English.

Heck, we could send them to butler and house-keeper schools so’s when they grow up they’d have rent-free jobs they can’t quit in the homes of rich people.  Make slaves of them.  Hell nobody would notice or care.  Auction them off to Oriental pedophiles to pay the National Debt.

These kids are the future and we’re squandering it, haggling over how long it should take to send them back.  Sending them back is crazy.  Nobody has ever been more helpless than them.  We can do anything to them that makes us feel good.  Put them to work doing phone sales, teach them martial arts and how to shoot and give them to important people for a lifetime of free bodyguarding.

Hang signs over their shoulders advertising pizza joints or wearing statue of liberty suits waving people into tax joints.  Free.  Everyone could have one to wash the laundry, cook and do the dishes.  Curl up under the kitchen table when the work was all done.

Mostly these days a lot of people can afford to hire someone for menial tasks, but they still have to get up to get beers or change the batteries on the TV remotes.  Still have to carry out the trash.  Life still sucks for them.

And as always, God heard their pleas.  Sent all those starving, displaced kids up from Godawful places south of Mexico.

God has always taken a favorable view to slavery.  Time was He demanded His Chosen People of the time make slaves of all the neighbors they couldn’t kill.  And now we are his Chosen People.  He’s offering a free gift of thousands of slaves for us to do anything with we want to.  And they can’t do anything back.

Hell, they’d probably thank us.

Send them back?  What the hell is wrong with those people in Washington?  Right now they’re having to PAY illegal aliens to mow the grass.  If they relax they can have one for a slave and use him/her for a sex toy when all the work’s done.

And they’re helpless to keep it from happening.  Perfecto!  If we’re going to be God’s Chosen People we’re going to have to start acting the way God’s Chosen People acted when they were still getting their instructions.  And the way the ones who think they are, but aren’t anymore, are still behaving, though they’ve toned it down some.

But they don’t have any starving, helpless kids flooding across the border begging to be exploited seven ways from Sunday upside down and backward.  God’s pretty much cut them off for the last couple of thousand years.

Old Jules

In case you missed how we became God’s Chosen People and posts in that vein:

 

 

 

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Posted in 2018, America, Current Issues, Government, Human Behavior, humor, Politics

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The four civilized countries in the world

Posted on January 25, 2018 by | 2 comments

Re-blogged from September 9, 2013

Hi readers. Thanks for coming by for a read.

When I confided to you a while back that Old Sol told me the people of the US are his 21st Century Chosen People I knew some of you would be skeptical. So I held back part of what he said to give you an opportunity to digest it a piece at a time.

If you look at the maps you’ll immediately see Australia is just the 48 contiguous states of the US turned upsidedown and placed in the southern hemisphere. This is no coincidence. It’s proof of Old Sol’s intentions.

Old Sol wants the four civilized countries in the world, the US, Australia, New Zealand and Canada to all be his own Chosen People. To accomplish this He wants those four countries to form a confederation which, once accomplished, will make them all Old Sol’s Chosen People!

Isn’t that exciting?

Naturally Old Sol wants the Promised Land to have secure borders easily defended. So He points out, as He used to do in ancient times with his former Chosen People, that a few pieces of real estate currently occupied by Non-Chosen People will have to be absorbed. Namely everything from Texas to the Panama Canal. Which shouldn’t be a problem.

In fact, Old Sol even suggests offering to move Israel to the new Promised Land and establishing them from the north shore of the Panama Canal north to Guatemala! Give them Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador and northern Panama. Maybe even Guatemala if they behave themselves. That way they’ll be able to once again be Chosen People, same as the Jews in the four civilized countries already are.

Isn’t that exciting?

But what’s equally exciting is that Old Sol wants the southern hemisphere Promised Land to be occupied by left-handed Chosen People. Right handed Chosen People will be moved to the northern hemisphere Promised Lands.

There’s a lot more, but I’m going to allow you time to digest this before I pass it on to you.

Old Jules

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Posted in 2013, 2018, America, Current Issues, Ethnic Supremacy, humor, patriotism

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2018 Influenza epidemic seems somehow appropriate

Posted on January 25, 2018 by | 5 comments

1918 influenza pandemic

Over coffee this morning Johnny, across the hall, described the 2018 flue that is evidently stalking around scaring innocent people.   Johnny tells me it’s killing people like flies.   He said 1200 people died of it somewhere he couldn’t remember, either in a day or a week.   Or during the passage of some other length of time.

But the downside of not being able to believe anything the news media tells you is that you can’t believe anything the news media tells you.    And by extension, even though Johnny is my main source of news, he gets it off the television.   So I can’t trust the news he gives me.

But he did tell me some horror stories about entire families showing up at hospitals with this stuff and croaking right there under the noses of whole tribes of medicos.  Which, if true, might mean we actually are going to experience something more in tune with the 1918 pandemic than most of the later scares.   Cemeteries all over the US have lines of graves of people who were offed by that bull goose 1918 flu.

If you’re like me, you aren’t all that interested in coming down with the damned stuff.   Whether it’s just a little bitty pissant flu, or a great big Alpha-Male gorilla flu that expresses itself more forcefully.

Johnny also said they were telling people to avoid gatherings of people and think twice before sitting around a waiting room in a hospital or doctors office.

Well gee whiz.    I have appointments at the KC VA tomorrow over at Kansas City, MO.   I’ll bet there won’t be any people over there blowing flu virus around all over the rest of us, though.   I’ll bet everyone going over to that vet hospital will be suffering from broken legs and poor vision is the only reason they’re hanging around.

Yeah.     Bound to be no flu sneezers and coughers  over there in the halls, or in the cafeteria, or waiting rooms.

medical masks

Usually I don’t bother with those mask dispensers by the entryways and scattered here and there by the elevators and halls at VA medical centers.    But I’m thinking tomorrow I’ll just snag one of those as I come through the door, and step back outside to put it on.

Or better yet I’ll just trip over to the Leavenworth Emergency room a couple of blocks from here, snag a mask or two, and have it in my pocket tomorrow morning when I arrive.

Not that those things are going to filter out an influenza virus.    They won’t.   But they might confuse it enough so’s it goes and finds someone else to hex.

I’ve donealready had the required minimum of flu for this lifetime.

Thanks for the read.

Old Jules

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Posted in 2018, America, Human Behavior, ks, Leavenworth, VA campus, Veterans

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Why Napoleon’s troops shooting the nose off the Sphinx with artillery in 1799 was a good thing

Posted on January 25, 2018 by | 2 comments

I’ve been doing a lot of reading about the British Empire the past few months, and considering the implications of its almost spontaneous collapse during the decades after WWII. This was written November, 2013, but I find it’s still worth a chuckle today. Old Jules

This reblog is only a portion of the original piece.   If you want to read the entire blog entry you can read it here: Why shooting the nose off the Sphinx was a good thing

So Far From Heaven

Hi readers.

A lot of you probably think the world would have been just as good a place if Napoleon’s troops hadn’t shot the nose off the Sphinx practicing with artillery in 1799.  You might even think if they’d just stayed home in France and shot the noses off every Frenchman they could catch the world would be better off?

In the interest of science, Napoleon's troops couldn't know what would happen up there without shooting some artillery at it to find out. Same as Hiroshima and Nagasaki later on. Theories are worthless unless they're tested. In the interest of science, Napoleon’s troops couldn’t know what would happen up there without shooting some artillery at it to find out. Same as Hiroshima and Nagasaki later on. Theories are worthless unless they’re tested.

Well, you’d be wrong.  Napoleon’s troops did just the right thing blowing off the nose of Sphinx.

Keep in mind, these were Frenchmen. All they knew how to do at that point was try to take the heads off whatever got in the way. But they saved the Sphinx. If they'd left it alone until the British took over in 1802 the Sphinx would be in London. Housed in a wonder-of-the-world-sized British Museum. Same as everything else the British could haul off from every country they ever conquered. Keep in mind, these were Frenchmen. All they knew how to do at that point was try to take the heads off whatever got in the way. But they saved the Sphinx. If they’d left it alone…

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Posted in 2018, Art, History

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What the heck is a ‘domiciliary?

Posted on January 24, 2018 by | 13 comments

These were the Domiciliary Buildings…. they we used from the 1880s until after the Vietnam War.    One of the guys I play chess with lived in one of them a few times back in the late 1970s    They were full back then.

There was a time when the Doms had residents from the Mexican War, the Civil War, the Spanish American War and World War 1.   They kept them separated by wards because they all thought their war was the ‘Big One’ and tended to try to injure one another over it.

Back then they fed everyone in a single building, had formations most days with everyone required to wear a uniform and turn out on the streets.   And they were kept busy repairing, landscaping, even digging clay for the bricks to build and repair the buildings on the campus.

The old house I live in was built in 1896 by these old guys, and it’s easy to see they weren’t carpenters.

Beginning January 1, 2018, they began some renovation on the old ‘dom’ buildings.    Some entrepreneur was given a 99 year lease on the buildings and they’ll have the interiors, currently death traps, torn out so’s the buildings can be rented out as apartments.

They’ve already done that to a few others not shown here, and the campus has around 200 residents living in the four buildings.  Maybe more.     When they’ve done the other thirteen old ‘dom’ buildings this place is going to be jam-packed again, but with all sorts of people I imagine.

Time hurries on.

Old Jules

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Posted in 2018, History, ks, Leavenworth, VA campus, Veterans

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Photos VA Chapel and Weston, MO house courtesy of Jeanne

Posted on January 24, 2018 by | 8 comments

These are photos posted after the first time I ever saw this place back in early 2014. Jeanne took most of the pictures and I just walked around amazed at the place. But back then I was still in the process of dying on her couch and didn’t have a lot of energy.

All in all it hasn’t changed much.    Just a bit more run down and crumbling.

Anyway, I sure as heck never dreamed a few years later I’d be living here. Old Jules

So Far From Heaven

IMG_2234 Possumly Jesse James, or a Younger or Dalton or someone else lived here, or visited here, or rode a horse by the place and gazed at it as he/she went by.

IMG_2237 !895 Chapel for VA Center at Fort Leavenworth in seriously bad repair. Protestant downstairs, Catholic further downstairs though the signs are somewhat misleading. No harm in a protestant attending Mass or a Catholic racking up some fire and brimstone occasionally, I reckons.

IMG_2245 Interesting stained glass work. Dunno whether it’s Catholic or the other one.

IMG_2238 Gargoyles are shared equally by Catholics and Protestants.

IMG_2239 The VA hospital environment surrounding this seems obliquely appropriate.

IMG_2240 The metalwork on those doors is probably symbolic of something, but everyone who once knew what it was is dead.

IMG_2243 This end of the building is in bad repair threatening collapse in places, but ain’t likely to get any better.

IMG_2249 Directly across the street from the chapel. It’s…

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Posted in 2014, 2018, Jeanne Kasten, ks, Leavenworth, Senior Citizens, VA campus, Veterans

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