Small Business

Small Business

The Business Watch

by Richard E. Noble

If you are about to open a small business be prepared to meet members of The Business Watch.
I don’t know if they are a Fraternal Organization, like the Elks or the Moose or the Knights of Columbus, or what, but you can be sure they will be there. They will pop into your business even before you open, just to check you out. They usually make some excuse - like they need to use a bathroom, or to ask if you would like to make a donation to the sightless, blind, burnt-out or diseased people of the world; or contribute to the United Undisputed Church of the One and Only, Really and Truly, Cross My Heart and Hope to Die, Really, No Kidding, True God. But what they really want to know is what the hell you are up to, and what makes you so foolish to think that you could ever open anything here in this wilderness that could be successful.
When and if you are stupid enough to tell them your idea, they will shake their head and say “tish, tish, tish”. Then they will tell you about their brother-in-law who tried the very same thing years ago and lost everything; or who is about to do the very same thing just down the road - but better than what you have in mind and with more money than you have. Or, they will tell you what a wonderful idea you have and then when they leave you will hear them laughing all the way to the parking lot.
When you finally open your small business, members of this Business Watch will drop in all the time to inform you of the number of cars that are parked at your competition; or to inform you that they were just at your competitor’s and had a wonderful time and, of course, so did the rest of the community who were ALL there.
If they happen to come in when you are slow, they will look at you very sadly and say; “Well, you’ve done your best.” or “Has it been like this all day?” or “Have you ever thought of serving soup and sandwiches ... or giving out free samples? ... or putting an ad on national TV. You know what this town really needs is a bowling alley or movie theater.”
If they happen to come in while you are busy, they will stand in some in-the-way spot with a shocked look on their face, just grinning stupidly, while trying to get your attention. When they do get your attention they just shrug their shoulders, say nothing, and keep grinning bewilderingly. Obviously, they are in total shock - as you should also be - at what appears to be the success of what anybody should consider a completely ridiculous idea. Occasionally, if they do think of something to say, they might ask you if all these people are a part of your family reunion or something, or if a tour bus got lost in the area.
They usually try their best to order or buy nothing. Their main goal is to take up as much room as they possibly can; occupy all the bathrooms; keep all the help not doing what they are supposed to be doing, while pretending to be your oldest and best personal friend. If they get your attention, they will ask about your wife or family, show you their last operation scare, pictures of their grand baby, their son in uniform or they might want you to go outside and take a look at their new car - or pet ... a new baby gorilla.
Sometimes they just drop in to say hello and give their kids a place to play for an hour or so.
They know about every impending disaster, hurricane on the way, tornado on the bay, the legislature having plans to discontinue the road out in front of your business, famine, contagious disease and possible war.
If you sell food, just before they sit down to eat, they will tell you how they recently got food poisoning at the best, most successful eatery in the community, and had to be rushed to the hospital at two o’clock in the morning to have their stomach pumped. After which they usually ask if what they are about to order is fresh or frozen, or prepared today. But usually they just want a large glass of water with lots of ice, and don’t be afraid to charge them for it, they advise. If you do charge them, they will either give you a thousand dollar bill, ask if you’ll take a personal check, or run out to their car for an hour, gathering change up off the floor, but all the while remembering to leave someone inside apologizing in a loud voice for not having the money ... TO PAY FOR THE GLASS OF WATER.
When and if they do come in to buy something, it is usually on the Fourth of July weekend, or Memorial day and they arrive unannounced with two or three hundred of their friends, or the entire congregation from their church, or (da-da-da-da, da-da-da! anybody play the banjo?) the entire family reunion.
They always need desperately something that you don’t have: a Band-Aid, aspirin, high-beam headlight bulb, or an emergency room intravenous feeding machine.
Their interesting news usually consists of telling you that the kiddy pops you gave out for free last week turned their kids poop blue. Or that they sent a large group of friends down last week and you were closed. “When are you open anyway?” they ask constantly even if you are open seven days a week.
“Do you really make any money here?” is a common Business Watch Group question: ‘Why did you pick this spot?”; “You’re not from around here, are you?” Often they want to show you that HUGE obstacle in your parking lot that they didn’t see and just ran over, damaging their drive train and bursting the oil pan on their 1953 Oldsmobile.
Sometimes they will walk in, holding their knee painfully, asking if you have insurance. Other times they just like to stop out in front of your place for a family picnic, or to wash and dry a few of the baby’s diapers on your picnic tables or drop off last week’s trash in your dumpster.
On occasion they might just park and yell to one another from out their car windows, or just listen to their boom box in front of your entrance for an hour or so.
They love to talk about the local real-estate and how ludicrously expensive everything has gotten around here ... “Why even this dump that you have here is probably worth a fortune,” they suggest.
They love to use your business phone to make hotel reservation in Dallas, or to call back home to find out how Elmer is coming with his Key-mo. Sometimes they leave the water running in the bathroom just to see if you are really paying attention. They will often take something off your display shelf, bring it to you, point to the price tag and ask you if you are really serious. They usually leave the object right there for you to put back.
If you manage to keep the doors open for more than a year and take in more money than you pay out for a month or two, they spread the rumor that you have more money than God, and are one of the cheapest S.O.B.’s that was ever born.
Sometimes you will even know them. You will wonder how long it has actually been since you had last seen them before you opened this business. They will then spend a quarter, after which they will ask if you could possibly sponsor their son who is number 2543 on the list of Questa hopefuls in the upcoming, possible, maybe someday Olympic trials in Bangladesh.
If one of your employees falls down or cuts themselves in front of one of them, they usually have a good supply of business cards from personal injury lawyers that just happen to live near-by.
But, let me be the first to wish you the best of luck on your new business idea. By the way, why are you opening a business anyway? Are you just trying to hide some cash from the IRS or do you seriously think that this foolish notion of yours has some kind of remote possibility of being a success? Do you know that one out of every five small businesses in America fail in the first year? That’s about the same success rate as marriage. How long have you been married anyway? Are you prepared to end your marriage if this business gets difficult? But seriously, is there something wrong with you? Are you incapable of working for other people? Are you too stupid or obstinate to get a real job? Do you hear voices? Don’t believe what they say. Take it from me, you are just crazy!
Listen to me, the reason you see so many people still operating their own little, small business is because they are now so far in debt that even if they close the place down they couldn’t get a job that would pay them enough money to pay off their loans - no matter what the hell they used to be! If they own the building, you can be sure they have exhausted all the equity and even if they could find some sucker to buy the place - they wouldn’t realize a dime. They have to stay in business! They have no choice! Believe me; they ain’t making no damn money!

Massachusetts v Hunt

Massachusetts v. Hunt

by Richard E. Noble

In 1842 Judge Lemuel Shaw of the Supreme Court of the State of Massachusetts handed down the first judicial decision in the United States that labor unions were not illegal, criminal conspiracies. It was contended that seven bootmakers (cordwainers) who were members of the Boston Journeymen Bootmakers Society conspired together to compel Isaac B. Wait, a master cordwainer, to terminate Jeremiah Home. Home was a journeyman bootmaker who refused to join the Boston Society. The seven men involved told their boss that if he did not dismiss the worker in question, they would no longer provide him with their services. The boss took the workers to court. He contended that their action was illegal. It was an action that threatened the competitive success and goodwill of his business and infringed upon Mister Home’s right to seek fair employment. For the first time in U.S. History, possibly world History, a judge decided that workers could unite into a labor union.
The judge concluded that competition is often detrimental to businesses, but as long as no one is acting criminally, using violence, or breaking a law, the rights of the workers must be judged equally with the rights of the employers. The workers involved were not acting violently, or breaking any legal contracts that they had engaged in with their boss. Their action therefore could not be considered to be in restraint of free trade. They were not petitioning for higher wages, fewer hours or even asking for better working conditions. Mister Home could join the labor association or go someplace else to work. Mister Wait could hire Mister Home and lose his other workers, or he could fire Mister Home and retain his present staff. No one was being intimidated or threatened. The seven workers could quit and Mister Wait could hire seven more new workers. If bootmakers were in short supply, Mister Wait would simply have to weigh his alternatives. This action on the part of the union members was competitive but not illegal or criminal. Everyone involved had choices. The bootmakers Society was not a labor monopoly. All that was involved would depend on the free choices of each of the parties as to who would be injured, or if anyone were to be injured. But, nevertheless, any injury was not due to any act of force or violence. All actions being taken were within the legal rights of each of the citizens involved.
This decision simply recognized the right of workers to legally combine in a union or association. Nothing more than this was decided. This was, more or less, simply a recognition of the obvious. Workers had already been combining to form benevolent and social organizations. Workers who were not hired under any contract agreements already had the right to quit their present employer and seek employment elsewhere. Workers had the right to compete among bosses and with other workers for their positions.
This law really established nothing. But prior to this decision all of the above had never actually been granted legal sanction. Workers did these things but nobody said that they had a legal right to do such things. This decision wasn’t much of a step forward for labor, and it was only in the state of Massachusetts that such worker respect had been granted. It would be another century before any serious steps would be taken in the direction of labor and labor rights on a national or federal level. Even then such steps would be small and contested violently. *

*This essay is based on information gathered from the following books: The Annals of America Vol. 7, p 61; “Labor Problems in American Industry”, Carroll R. Daugherty.

Mein Kampf

Mein Kampf, an Analysis

Chapter 3 – Part I

by Richard E. Noble

In chapter four of Mein Kampf, Adolf continues with his theories of correct population control. Controlling the birth rate of your nation is unnatural, as he has just pointed out, and if you try, nature will have her revenge, by eventually destroying your race. If you do as the French - using birth control methods - you will limit the natural growth of your nation, and consequently confine it to a limited territory, which will eventually lead to its conquest by an overpopulating nation of lesser culture. So controlling the size of your nation by birth control methods is out. This method also leads to other ‘unnatural’ hazards.
“...Because once propagation as such has been limited and the number of births reduced, the natural struggle for existence, that allows only the very strongest and healthiest to survive, is replaced by the natural urge to ‘save’ at any price also even the weakest and even sickest, thus planting the germ for a succession that is bound to become more and more miserable the longer this derision of Nature and of her will is continued...”
Again, Adolf has this misconception with the term ‘fittest’. If the fittest meant the physically strongest, then certainly the Dinosaurs, or the gorillas, or the lions, or bears would be ruling the planet earth. But the strongest creatures do not rule the planet, the cleverest, or brightest, or most intelligent in an organizing way has so far been the conqueror. Man, not “A” man, but Mankind dominates the planet at the moment and he seems to owe it not to brute strength but to his ability to organize and form political units. How it all began, I really don’t know, but if we follow Adolf s theory to its root source, we come back to a Rambo type cave man who controls the cave man world in some mysterious individual way. This, of course, is impossible, at least, it seems impossible to me. How would we then account for the development of societies, and nations, or communities?
A one man Rambo, and his ‘woman’ and offspring, might account for a family, or clan, but how does he evolve from there? If brute force and power are the only qualities at Adam Rambo’s reach, I don’t even see how he could propagate the earth. From what I know of woman, they don’t work that way. My guess is that Adam Rambo would have been Bobbitized very early on in his career.
On a second note, if Darwin coined the phrase ‘survival of the fittest’, I am sure that he regrets the remark. He would much rather have said, ‘the survival of the most adaptable’, I have no doubt.
I was reading a History of Civilization book a while back and the author made this statement or something to this effect. He said that the family unit of the human species developed because of the year-round sexual availability of the female. I was never able to get past that statement to continue reading the book. What does the year-round sexual availability of a woman have to do with the establishment of a family? We had lots of year-round sexually available woman in my neighborhood when I was growing up but this did not lead me to start a family. I can’t even extrapolate a scenario from the statement. What has the year-round sexual availability of the female got to do with anything? Now you say in some areas of the animal kingdom, females go into ‘heat’ periodically. And so? Some form family units and some don’t.
My explanation of the evolution of the family unit would be explained by the bond of love that exists between a man and a woman. If there were no such thing as love and only lust, for example, the woman would make lustful contact with a male, then retire to a cave and breed her young, and exactly how she would do that - without help from other creatures - I can’t really say. But for some reason the physically weaker female, especially in her reproducing condition, brings on the supportive, compassionate, protective, loving qualities of the male (some males). And through these qualities of love, engendered within the male, a family results. Without these feelings of compassion and love primarily on the part of the male, there would be no family. And this fact of life in the evolution of the human species is as true today as it ever was historically. Love is the basic root quality that establishes the family, and the community, and the society. Love is the glue that binds us one to the other, and when we lose it, we crumble as a family, as a group, as a society, as a nation. The notion that the strong should not take care of the weak is a denial of the basic human condition.
The mother takes care of her weakling, incapable child. The Dad takes care of his temporarily incapacitated wife. The whole human condition is involved in the strong taking care of the less strong. The self-sufficient providing for the insufficient. Even War is not a battle of the survival of the fittest, entirely, as any soldier will tell you. It is one man backing up another at the risk of his own life. It is the strong protecting the weak, and often the strong dying on behalf of the weak. For the strong to deny their obligation to the weaker among them is truly an act of cowardice, and ingratitude.
The Adolf philosophy is not only a cruel philosophy, but one also filled with ingratitude, cowardice, selfishness and a basic denial of the human instinct.
Adolf also seems to down play his own mental capacities. His ability to organize, manipulate, propaganda-ize and utilize others in his cause. A weak, handicapped man in a wheelchair with superior mental abilities of the above type could out-survive even Adolf at his own game of ‘the survival of the fittest’. In fact, just such a man did, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He had the help of another old codger walking with a cane, Winston Churchill. Not to mention, that a simple minded half-wit, with a mail order rifle could have blown his head off and ended the whole damn thing. One of the very types that Adolf would have deemed unfit and on the roster to be put to sleep in one of his death factories of the future.
The whole problem of the human condition, according to Adolf stems from Malthus. Malthus said that food production increases arithmetically, while people population increase geometrically. Adolf, like many, many others is very much occupied with this foolish proposition. (See entry on Malthus on this blog)
“… finally the time comes when it will no longer be possible to satisfy the needs, and famine will have become the eternal companion of such people. Now Nature has to help again and to choose among those she has selected to live, or man will again help himself, that means that he turns to artificial restriction with all the grave consequences for race and species alluded to. [Race will become corrupted by the preservation of the weak. Its territory will become limited and conquerable.] Certainly the time will come, in consequence of the impossibility of adapting the fertility of the soil to the number of the increasing population, when the whole of mankind will be forced to stop the increase of the human race … nature did not reserve this soil in itself for a certain nation or race as reserved territory for the future, but it is land and soil for that people which has the energy to take it and the industry to cultivate it ... He who is the strongest in courage and industry receives, as her favorite child, the right to be the master of existence ... The culturally superior, but less ruthless, races would have to limit, in consequence of their limited soil, their increase even at a time when the culturally inferior, but more brutal and more natural, people, in consequence of their greater living areas, would be able to increase themselves without limit. In other words: the world will therefore, someday come into the hands of a mankind that is inferior in culture but superior in energy and activity. .
Adolf missed the boat again. This is not what will happen, it is what has already happened, and he is one of the distressful parts of it. His whole point here seems to be that the nation with the greatest land area to expand within will be the dominant nation or nations of the future.
“...The greater the amount of room a people has at its disposal, the greater is also its natural protection; because military victories over nations crowded in small territories have always been reached more quickly and more easily, especially more effectively and more completely, than in the cases of states which are terrestrially greater in size .
Obvious exceptions to this idea would have to be both Great Britain and Japan.
Next Adolf goes into the British method of expanding its nation ... colonization. He is pointing out what his country, Germany, has done wrong in the past.
“… Thus there remained but two ways to assure work and bread to the increasing number of people.
3) one could either acquire new soil in order annually to send off the superfluous millions, and thus conserve the nation further on the basis of a self-sustainment, or one could set about,
4) through industry and trade, to produce for foreign consumption and to live on the proceeds.
That means: either territorial policy, or colonial and trade policy.
Both ways were examined, investigated, recommended, and fought, till finally the second one was carried out.
The healthier of the two, of course, was the first.
The acquisition of new land and soil for the settling of the superfluous population has no end of advantages ... Obviously, such a territorial policy, however, cannot find its fulfillment in the Cameroons, for example, but almost exclusively only in Europe. One must coolly and soberly accept the point of view that it certainly cannot be Heaven’s intention to give fifty times as much land and soil of this earth to one nation as compared with another. In this case political frontiers must not keep us away from the frontiers of eternal right. If this earth really has room enough for all to live in, then one should give us the space that we need for living.
One will certainly not like to do this. Then, however, the right of self-preservation comes into effect; and what has been denied to kindness will have to be taken with the fist ...“
Basically Adolf’s conclusion is that of a criminal mentality. If we substitute the concept of money as opposed to soil and land, and interpret his words as a defense of his individual actions rather than as a representative of a group, it becomes more obvious. Adolf is basically saying; If it is true that there is enough money in the world to sustain everybody, then where is my share? If through circumstances beyond what I consider a decent effort, you deny me my share, then I must resort to the basic principle of life, and simply take from those around me what I need for my survival.
If one man thinks like this he is considered a criminal, if ten thousand think like this, we have a revolution, if entire nations think like this, we have war.
But Adolf has here hit upon a truth of the human condition. If the land and the means of sustaining ones existence runs out, or if nature provides insufficient land for its burgeoning population then something has got to give. [A qualification in this scenario would be “sustainable land” – land capable for providing food; not simply space.] Colonization had been the main outlet for the surplus population of Europe, now it was running out and becoming competitive, and this land was not free and empty of human population and cost in lives. So if we look at artificially controlling our population as suicidal, as Adolf does, and colonization as basically the slaughtering of indigent populations, and re-settlement of your own kind, why should one bother building ships to go across oceans, when it would make much more sense to simply seize the contiguous land surrounding one’s nation. This is a difficult argument to deal with, other than to say; if you and your friends try to take my house, I will kill you. And to this attitude, Adolf is in complete agreement.
What has happened in this regard since the time of Adolf is that food production techniques have surpassed anyone’s expectations, and nations have incorporated artificial population control methods and policies. But, in truth, I don’t think that there is any sense in trying to deny the truth of Adolf’s scenario in this regard. It is a problem today, just as it was then. Today we allow peoples of less powerful nations to die in mass numbers, so that we may proliferate those of our ‘own kind’. And even worse than this, backhand annihilation goes on not only for the propagation of ‘our kind’ but for the propagation of an indulgent lifestyle. This is very disconcerting to anyone with a proper conscience. I have no answer at the moment. We all seem to be the captives of our very own systems for survival and national and international economic theories and policies, and no one seems to be able to come up with any realistic, practical alternatives. So at this moment, the prosperous of the world simply turn their heads, or simply deny the responsibility entirely. In this regard, this particular argument of Adolf’s could still be used to rally the unfortunate, and promote hatred towards the better off in our world of today.
Many disagree with even what I have just stated. They contend that Malthus’s theory has never really been the case or the problem. Food production and technology, along with Man’s ingenuity, have out raced the suggested problem. The real problems are economic and social. The world continues to have adequate food supply, they contend, but the problems of distribution, land reclamation, ignorance, economic dogmatism and political rivalry are the true causes of poverty and starvation today. We are not well fed here in America, at the expense of those living in Bangladesh or Afghanistan. They are the cause of their own problems. We and other more successful nations could possibly do more to help them, but they must also be willing to help themselves. This may be truth, but difficult to prove to the starving.

Nazism Backers

Nazism: Backers and Supporters

by Richard E. Noble

The list of Adolf’s and Nazism’s backers and supporters actually staggers one’s wildest imaginings. But let me just mention a few whose names you might recognize.
Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, Charles Lindbergh; all three men were known anti-Semites. Edison, Ford’s former employer, is said to have been Henry’s mentor and inspiration in this area as well as others. Lindbergh helped to train Goring’s air force, and he and Henry both received medals for their efforts in support of the Nazi cause from Adolf Hitler. Hitler is quoted to have said;     “We look to Heinrick Ford as the leader of the growing Fascist movement in America.”
Chase National banking, Standard oil of New Jersey, Sterling Products, General Aniline and Film - these were all Rockefeller companies.; ITT, Sosthenes Behn, was executive owner; R.C.A corporation, headed by Colonel David Sarnoff; James D. Mooney, president Chevrolet Motor Company; Edsel Ford, almost indicted for treason; Montagu Normand, Governor of the Bank of England; Neville Chamberlain, Prime Minister of England and major shareholder in Imperial Chemical Industries, partner of I. G. Farben; B.I.S., Bank of International Settlements - fore-runner of World Bank - a Nazi money laundering machine; Allen and brother John Foster Dulles, head of C.I.A. and Secretary of State respectively, both worked for Sullivan and Cromwell law firm handling the American interest of I.G. Farben and other German Companies; Joseph P. Kennedy, American Ambassador to England was an accused anti-Semite; Nancy Astor and the “Cliveden Set”, super wealthy international group of Nazi supporters; Lord Beaverbrook, owner of ... Daily Express, Sunday Express, Evening Standard; Lord Rothermere, wealthy newspaper magnate; King Edward VIII, and bride, American Divorcee, Mrs. Simpson (spies for Hitler); Pope Pius the XII; The Du Pont family of Delaware, owners of controlling interests of General Motors, active Hitler supporters and though Jewish themselves, anti-Semites - they were also involved with I.G. Farben, founded The Liberty League, and financed Clark’s Crusaders (radical Fascists organizations); J.P. Morgan Banking system - Morgan Banking, Du Ponts, and General Motors actually planned violent overthrow of Roosevelt Government; Prescott Bush, George Hurbert Walker, Averell Harimam - all connected with Thyssen in money laundering/banking scandal involving the Union Banking Corporation.

With Families like the Fords, the Du Ponts, the Rockefellers, the Kennedys, the Bushes, the Morgans, and businesses and organizations like Ford Motor Company, General Motors, Remington Arms, Krupp, I.G. Farben, Standard Oil, Chase Banking, National City Bank, The Texas Company, RCA, GAF, the BIS (Bank of International Settlements) and so many others, too many to mention, supporting the Nazi cause, one has to wonder how Hitler and his Nazis were ever defeated. Obviously men like Franklin Roosevelt and Morgenthau acted heroically, but there must have been some loyal super wealthy Capitalists whose money and efforts countered these fascists and fascist sympathizers in their attempt to rule the world; don’t you think? Or was it that the big boys simply play both ends against the middle no matter who happens to be dying? If that was the case then, why would it be any different today?

[Update to Morganthau Library: Curiously enough, in reading a biography of J. Edgar Hoover, “J. Edgar Hoover” - The Man and the Secrets - by Curt Gentry, on pages 389-390, Mr. Gentry tells about Agents from the FBI gaining entry to the Library and actually snipping out sections from the Dairies with scissors.]

Books used in gathering information for this article include: Hitler and his Secret Partners 1933-1945 by James Pool; Who Financed Hitler 1919-1933 by James Pool; Trading with the Enemy 193 3-1949 by Charles Higham; Hitler’s Secret Bankers by Adam LeBor; The American Axis by Max Wallace; The Duchess of Windsor by Charles Higham; The Arms of Krupp by William Manchester; The Secret War against the Jews by John Loftus.

Nuremberg Trials

Nuremberg Trials

by Richard E. Noble

After W.W. II an international tribunal was set up in Nuremberg. Its purpose? Well ... that’s the question.
One faction says that the tribunal was set up to kill loyal Germans who had done nothing more than their duty as good soldiers, faithful to their country. The real purpose for the trials being retribution and revenge, naturally stimulated by the aggressive nature of War.
Another faction says that the whole thing was a sham, set up by American Nazis, to protect and free their cohorts, conspirators and companions. They claim that Truman was, to say the least, soft on Nazism, and that the Nuremberg Trials was but an initial step in the trumped up establishment of the Cold War, and the continued advancement of the ‘Military Industrial Complex?
After the War, Winston Churchill was in favor of summary executions without the benefit of trial for all Nazis. General Eisenhower was even of a harsher viewpoint. He wanted every registered or known member of the Nazi Party shot, right down to the local bugermiester. And, of course, Uncle Joe Stalin would have killed all of Germany, every man, woman and child, without any second thoughts since this would be nothing more than what Hitler had outlined, proposed, and attempted for the Russian nation and its people. Secretary of the treasury, Morgenthau proposed a plan for the pasture-ization of the German nation. Germany would be stripped of all of its industry and machinery, and reduced to farm land ... for ever more.
In view of these facts, I think that the point of view that the ‘poor’ German Nazis were mistreated at Nuremberg can be put aside. But then must we accept the second point of view that Truman was a Nazi, surrounded by Nazis who set up the Nuremberg fiasco to free his buddies?
Well, in consideration of the results of the trials one could certainly be justified in holding this view. Only the worst and most obvious offenders were executed. For the most part only Military generals and Hitler’s henchmen in the Government hierarchy were hanged. The rich industrialist, who established, and backed Hitler, and murdered millions in their ‘slave’ factories were given no more than a slap on the wrist; and thousands, if not millions of outright killers in the S.S., S.A. and the Einsatzgruppen weren’t even brought up for cause. But nevertheless there is a third point of view.
With these trials the crimes and atrocities of Hitler and his Nazis would be exposed before the world and the German people.
Roosevelt felt that with this exposure the German people would lose the ability to glorify and make heroes of their fallen Nazi leaders. And secondly these trials would serve as a further attempt on the part of Civilization to tame and subdue the wild, belligerent human beast under the guidance of accepted and agreed upon standards. Standards that would one day hopefully become the rule of law, and guarantee a future for ‘civilized’ mankind.
As amazing as it may seem, the Nuremberg trials established the idea that out right aggressive War should be considered a crime.

[If you would like to read more on the conspiracy theory of freeing the Nazis after World War II – The Secret War Against the Jews by John Loftus and Mark Aarons is the most serious indictment  that I have yet read – or you can simply punch into your search engine the names Allen Dulles and John Foster Dulles.]

Hiroshima

Hiroshima

by Richard E. Noble

Hiroshima is a book written by a man by the name of John Hersey. Mr. Hersey was born in Tientsin, China in 1914. My guess is that John Hersey is no longer with us - if he is ... you have my apologies John.
Mr. Hersey has written a good number of books - and I have read none of them other than this one; sorry John but, as you must know/have known - there are so many books and so little time.
This book is a short book, only 152 pages. Yet it has taken me a very long time to complete. I think I have been working on it for over a year now. The problem is not that it has been boring. The problem is that every time I finish a paragraph, I set the book down in my lap and start meditating on what I have just read.
The book covers the lives of six “hibakusha” - A-bomb survivors. It covers their lives from the day the bomb hit them until …?
In this updated version of the book, Mr. Hersey returns to the lives of his main characters forty years after the original publication of the book and gives a follow-up.
I really don’t know what to say about this book. On the front cover it states - “Everyone able to read should read it.” I disagree. No one should read this book; or should I say - No one should ever had have to read this book. This book should never have been born. This event should never have happened. This is a true life horror story - depicting, vividly, fleshless faces and living, walking, talking human animals whose very eyeballs have been melted in their sockets and the liquid from their once eyes, running down their charred skulls. This book, if it were not true, would be considered too ridiculous to consider.
The characters lives are at the same time courageous, sad, useless, poignant, compelling, pitiable and insignificant. But what do you say?
What point did Mr. Hersey have in mind in writing such a book, I ask myself? What lesson is to be learned from reading such a book?
When I finished reading another controversial book years ago, Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler, I asked myself the same question. I said to myself - if the lessons learned from reading that book could be condensed into one sentence what would it be? I think my conclusion satisfies both these books. I decided on the following: When you hear men talking of War as if it is a positive experience - beware.

The Pill

Birth Control through the Ages

from “The PILL” by Bernard Asbell

by Richard E. Noble

Pliny (23-79 AD.) “If a man makes water upon a dog’s urine he will become disinclined to copulation.” (Yeah, but what about the Dog?) He also suggests that; “If a woman’s loins are rubbed with blood taken from the ticks upon the back of a black wild bull, she will be inspired with an aversion to sexual intercourse. (Yes, and so too, the tick gatherer, and tick blood spreader - I would imagine.)
ibnal Baytar (Thirteen centuries later): “If a woman urinates in the urine of a wolf, she will never be with child (Of course, and not to mention, “with friends”, either)
Dioscorides: “The menstrual blood of a woman appears to prevent conception when they spread themselves with it.” (I should certainly think so. It would definitely slow me down.) He also suggested eating the kidney of a mule. (He suggested this on his TV show “Dioscorides Live” which was seen nationwide at the time.)
Aetios of Amida (sixth century): Advised woman to wear cat liver in a tube on the left foot or wear the testicles of a cat in a tube around the umbilicus, or carry, as an amulet around the anus - the tooth of a child; or wrap in stag skin the seed of henbane deluded in the milk of a mare nourishing a mule, carry it on her left arm - and don’t drop it! (This has worked for almost all women other than Sophia Loren.)
Albertus Magnus: “The ancients say that if a woman hangs about her neck the finger and the anus of a dead fetus she will not conceive while they are there.” (True, but her house will more than likely be blown up by Right to Life advocates of whom Albertus Magnus was their first champion.)
Shen Nung, Chinese Emperor (273 7-2696), he advised men to have sex often but don’t ejaculate. He wasn’t so concerned with controlling the birth rate as he was in producing sons. This technique returned sperm to the brain and made it stronger. It was later called Coitus Reservatus, (even later to be known as Spermus Backeruptus, the leading cause of fidgeting, nocturnal emissions, the electrolux syndrome and acne in teenage boys.) He also suggests that if your wife persisted in having girl babies, drowned them.
This practice is not to be confused with Cloitus Interruptus, more commonly described by clerics and rabbis as “plowing in the garden and emptying upon the dunghill.” This practice was condemned by Thomas Aquinas to the many thanks of housewives all over America.
Soranus (98-138 A.D.) He suggests that immediately after the man ejaculates the woman ought to ... “get up and sit down with bent knees, and in this position, provoke sneezes.” And Rhazes a thousand years later offered that ... “immediately after ejaculation, let the two come apart and let the woman rise roughly, sneeze and blow her nose several times, and call out in a loud voice, and jump violently backwards seven to nine paces and squeeze her naval with her thumb.” (And the male should lie on his back and light up a Lucky Strike. Hey, come on, sex should be fun for everybody, not just the girls.)
This book The Pill by Bernard Asbell besides being full of useful and energizing information is more than interesting. It is a social as well as a religious experience. One thing is for certain - trying not to have babies has been going on for centuries; thank God.

It's All About Love

Hangin’ Out

by R. E. Noble

It was a long, long time ... a long, long time
that we were all just one of the guys
just hangin’ out, sittin’ up on the wall.

Just hangin’ out ma, just hangin’ out!

Sometimes we were just there.
Sometimes it was a ball.
Now I’m older and that’s all the past.
Often I wonder if it’s my memory’s lapse,
Or did I really know any of those guys.
We’re they really pals, buddies, friends?
Their memory gets fuzzy.
I tell myself that there’s only today.
They never knew me, and I never knew them.
They’re just a bunch of ghosts in my memory’s way.
But then when I’m huddled in one of those lonely corners
with all the dark shadows, hard knuckles and calloused hearts,
I hear a sigh, a creek, a crack, a cry,
And then there’s a tear in my eye.
I see a laughing face, then feel a slap on my back.
It could be Tom, or Dutch, Chucky or Jack.
And all of a sudden,
I’m up on the Corner. I’m on the wall.

I’m hangin’ out ma, just hangin’ out.

I’m on the corner;
I’m in Costy’s yard.
I’m down at Nel’s;
or in Meachaou’s back seat.
I’m up Joe’s cellar;
or behind the Social -  a little stick ball,
or down the beach.
I’m just standin’ on the Corner
or in the middle of Lawrence Street.

I’m hangin’ out ma.

I’m just hangin’ out with my friends, my buddies.
Up on the corner.

Hangin’ out ma, just hangin’ out.

I’m up the Corner.
I’m on that old bench.
Hangin’ Out.
I with my old buddies.

I’m hangin’ out ma, just hangin’ out ... I’m just hangin’ out.

Hitler’s Religion

by Richard E. Noble

Hitler believes in God. He believes that God is manifested through Nature. By observing Nature and Her goals and methods we come to an understanding of God.
God is cruel. God is powerful. God is without mercy but the Truth and purpose of His ways and methods, though apparently reason-less and haphazard, are truly methodical, plainly obvious and can not be denied. We can verify this by simply looking at our lives, our history, and the natural processes of all living things.
The first principle of  Adolf’s God is death and/or killing. God kills all living things. God is the creator of death and the apparent murderer of all mankind and creation. With life comes death. But in death we find God’s purpose.
God’s reasons in killing and destroying all living things are for the promotion of perfection. God’s goal in creating species is their eventual perfection. The human species, as with all living species, is being guided by the hand of Providence towards perfection. Perfection will eventually be achieved by the survival of the fittest. The ‘fittest’ of whatever species will conquer and destroy the unfit, and eventually dominate and bring the species to its natural objective ... perfection. This is the Will of God. This is the plan of God. And if one looks at Nature closely, through all of Her cruelties, be they flood, famine, disease, pestilence or War, one sees the Hand of God at work.
It then logically follows that to assist God in His goal of the eventual perfection of all species, one should actively participate in His plan. To do the work of God on earth is to promote the perfection of the species and this is most easily and directly accomplished by eliminating, destroying, exterminating and killing the inferior.
The superior should be breed and promoted and the inferior should be killed and destroyed. To participate in the achievement of these goals is to act virtuously, and in accordance with the principles of Nature and the Will of God.
What we, as humans, have interpreted as Evil, is really the Hand of God working in its cruel, but necessary, way to promote its goal of the perfection of the species. Interfering in the work of God, by encouraging inferiority, of whatever breed or species, is the true nature of Evil. Protecting the sick, diseased, inflicted and dying is Evil. Compensating for the weak, the unproductive, the mistakes of Nature, is evil. To be a positive participant in attacking true evil is not only virtuous but courageous, even if at this moment in time it may seems murderous or cruel. To do the work of Evil is to promote the survival of the inferior. To do the work of God is to destroy the inferior.
The conundrum of the philosophies of ‘God’ has forever been the justification of good and evil. Adolf justifies, or rectifies Evil, and the cruelties of life, by creating a finite God who is seeking perfection through the processes of natural and social evolution. God, acting through Nature, and the processes of natural selection and natural destruction, and adhering to the basic principle of the survival of the fittest, is leading the world and its creatures through Divine Providence, to its eventual heavenly goal of
PERFECTION.


[This is my personal interpretation, based on incites from my studies of the work Mein Kampf.]

The Universe

By Richard E. Noble

They tell me that Albert Einstein is the modern day father of a new concept of the Universe. I am told that Albert has said that the Universe is ‘finite’ but yet ‘unbounded’. This supposedly means that the Universe is limited in the amount of matter (planets, stars etc.) but, because space is curved, you can take off in any supposed direction and never fall off or come to the end. Space is curved, it seems, because of the basic properties of matter, Gravity, Electromagnetism, the Weak forces, and the Strong forces.
The problem with this theory, my interest in philosophy tells me, is the notion that in this theory Space is considered to be ‘nothing’ or a non-entity.
Space according to Einstein’s theory has no attributes other than those donated to it by matter. In other words, if we can imagine removing all of the matter (stars, planets and whatever) from the heavens, the heavens will disappear also, and we will then have “nothing”.
If we put all of the matter in the Universe into one spot, as it is proposed in the Big Bang theory, what happens to the Strong Forces, the Weak Forces, Electromagnetism, and Gravity? Since there is no other matter for the Big-Bang-matter to interact with then the forces that comprise ‘Space’ no longer are, and Space should have disappeared, and if there is no ‘Space’ then where is the Big bang matter that now comprises the Universe? (Carl Sagan’s answer: “It is everywhere.” ?)
What happens to ‘motion’? What happens to whatever is surrounding the tiny ball which is to be the predecessor of the next Big Bang? Is this ball of matter stationary or in motion? If it is stationary, what is it stationary in? And if it is moving, what is it moving in? What keeps it functioning wherever and however it might be? If it is everywhere, what keeps it there?
Space, it seems, has no discernible effect on matter, and as of yet has not been detected by any of man’s science, but yet it has to be, for without it matter can not function, or exist. My mind can conjure Space without Matter, but it cannot conjure Matter without
Space. Space may not be aether as once thought, but it does seem to me that it must be more than just a phenomenon or attribute of Matter. It may not figure mathematically, or as a part of the study of physics but it certainly must be considered conceptually, and metaphysically. Space, I think, must be considered something in and of itself, philosophically, but what it is, I have no idea. But THAT it is, seems to me to be unquestionable, and objective and not subjective as Sartre and others contend.

War For An Afternoon

Oradour-sur-Glane

“War for an Afternoon” by Jens Kruuse

by Richard E. Noble

Oradour is a very small town in southwestern France. It is the scene of a World War II atrocity. The German SS in an act of reprisal against acts of ‘terrorism” wiped out the whole village.
Shirtless bakers and farmers in rolled up work sleeves, women, and a young school teacher with her whole class of little children in their little wooden shoes were paced off to a horrible death. Approximately 680 men, women and children were executed.
The males were separated from the females and children. With the women and children safely sequestered in the local church, the men were then brought to their knees with machine guns. They were shot in the legs, so as not to die immediately. The SS soldiers then covered all of the victims with brush and straw and set them on fire. Their screams could be heard far and wide.
Next the SS soldiers went to the church where a similar execution was repeated with the women and children. Low machine gun fire cutting them to their knees, followed by incineration of the moaning, crying, pleading victims. By one miracle or another several of the town’s people escaped. They told their stories of brutal German soldiers murdering their loved ones. Shooting old woman and men, who were too sick to rise, in their beds; busting open heads with their gun butts, booting and kicking women and children who were moving too slow or protesting, and in several instances the soldiers were laughing and joking while in the act.
After the war an attempt was made to round up the German SS who participated in that slaughter and bring them to justice. Twenty-one German soldiers were apprehended. All pee-ons, no officers or generals could be found or apprehended. The authorities had sixty-five names. Of the sixty-five, fourteen were actually Frenchmen who were fighting on the side of the Germans. Only seven Germans were caught, the rest were acknowledged to be in hiding.
The first challenge was to the court itself. The laws dealing with international war were limited. Was this court illegal and attempting to enforce laws made “after the fact”? Second, could any soldier on either side be charged with a crime for simply doing his duty?
In all countries, including our own, a soldier’s duty is to do or die, not to reason why. A soldier is given an order by a superior.
He must obey, or suffer consequences ranging from death to imprisonment. He must obey even if this law be criminal in nature. He can lodge a protest later. The soldiers further claimed that their sensitivity towards murder and/or killing and the morality of individual conscience was drummed out of them as a matter of course in their military basic training. Military officers make the same claim - only doubly true. They must be the example to their men. In effect, all officers and soldiers are free in time of war by the catch 22 of the code of military structures all over the world. As soldiers bound to duty they are charged to operate without conscience. They are no longer morally or legally responsible for their actions. An officer may be responsible for giving the order but he is relieved of the burden of his decision by the law in many countries and the Declaration on Human Rights made by the United Nations that no person can be punished for a crime that he, himself, did not commit. At Nuremberg a new international standard was attempted under the charge of “Crimes Committed against Humanity”.
Whether this new standard of humanitarianism was actually achieved or not is still debated.
The French soldiers further contended that when their country surrendered to the Germans, they in effect, abandoned them and the lives of their families to the enemy, and that this new French government had no claim to be punishing anybody. All of the consequences were initiated, first of all, by the French government’s own treason or cowardice.
Many of the French defendants had fought on both sides during the War. A good many were from the Alsace or Lorraine area and were impressed into the German military as young teenagers after their area was occupied. They claimed that their lives and the lives of their families back home were under constant threat of death from the German regulars and authorities. This trial was tearing the French public apart, but it continued.
Finally the government declared an amnesty for all soldiers who fought in the war on either side. But the judge refused to release any of the prisoners, most of whom had now been under custody awaiting trail for eight years or more. He said that this case had nothing to do with Military Law or any codes dealing with collective guilt. This was a “good old penal code” violation. Certain individuals had been accused of killing over six hundred individuals and burning down an entire town. The trial would continue and the defendants would be judged on an individual basis.
The opposition to the arguments of the defendants was clear and simple. Thousands upon thousands of honorable brave Frenchmen had stood up to this exact challenge by the occupying enemy and been executed. Many of their families were also
executed. Many of these people were tortured and then executed. The soldiers who committed the atrocities at Oradour were nothing more than cowardly traitors to themselves and their country. They did have a choice, no matter what they claim. They could have stood up to the German Terrorists and died in front of a firing squad, rather than becoming cowardly terrorists themselves.
The trail continued and decisions were made. The verdicts ranged from the death penalty to two years in prison. But this did not stem the public upheaval. Each side was outraged by the decisions. One side claiming that the penalties were too severe and the other saying that all of the traitors should have been shot. The streets all over France were erupting in violence, the legislature stepped in. In a very heated debate it was decided to let the verdict stand as declared, but the penalties not enforced. All of the defendants were secreted out of town and back to their individual communities.
The mayor of Oradour removed the Croix de guerre that had been awarded by the state from the town hall and personally handed it back to the representative of the state.
The Legion d’honneur given to the families of the victims was returned in a similar manner.
A monument that had been built to honor the victims and provide a place for their bodies was left empty, and is still empty today.
Two new monuments were erected at the town of Oradour. One exhibiting the names and addresses of the Alsatian SS men. On the other the names of the 319 deputies who had voted for their amnesty. By 1966 these monuments had also been removed.
“War for an Afternoon” by Jens Kruuse is the book describing this story. It is quite a read; a real life adventure in the morality and ethics of everyday war.

A Summer with Charlie

by Richard E. Noble

This is one of those stories that is supposed to make you cry. If you read it and you don’t cry, you’re a better man than I am, Charlie Brown! This is a short story, but it tags all the bases. It deals with the “big stuff’. It deals with life, love, morality, sex, death, religion, friendship, boys and girls, growing up, home, neighborhood and country. For me it is a trip down memory lane. It’s the old days, the old places and the old “gang”. Despite the seriousness of the subject matter, it is a story of memories, youth and laughter.
I feel like a scientist observing the universe in this book. I can tell you about the planets and the stars. I can theorize and analyze. I can tell you a lot of things. I can explain to you a lot of stuff. I can describe events in detail. I can tell you how. I can tell you where. I can tell you when. But I can’t tell you why.
When I was young, I thought of love as a passion. It was a drive, a compulsion, even, in some strange ways, a duty. Now that I am old, I don’t know what it is. I don’t know why it is. I observe it once again like the scientist observing the planets. I don’t know why it happens. I don’t know where it comes from. I have no explanation for “that” look in a girl or boy’s eye; for all those mysterious feelings.
I once thought that it was all about hormones. All my hormones have pretty much dried up and have now turned into liver spots; yet I still love. I still have love. I realize now that life is, as the philosophers say, a phenomenon. Death is the same.
I recently read a book by a man who had lived through both World Wars. He saw a lot of men and women executed. He wrote a section on observing how they reacted to the experience. How some went off kicking and screaming; how some were defiant; how some fell to their knees and begged. Instead of naming this book, “A Summer with Charlie”, it could just as well have been called, “Watching Charlie Die”.
In my life, I have watched a lot of friends, relatives and loved ones die. I have witnessed them turn like the leaves of autumn. I have seen them change from living, laughing, vibrant things, into cold, lifeless phenomena. It is a sad thing, but a happenstance that we will each experience very personally. Once again, I can describe the how, the where, and the when, but I can not tell you why. And if the truth be known, nobody can. Not your priest, not your rabbi, not your preacher. They have been trying for centuries. They are all guessing. No matter how confident they may seem, it is all conjecture. No one knows why. Maybe there is no why. In fact, there is no science that deals with the why of anything. We don’t know why the tree, the bug, the ant, the human, the universe. We can only deal with the how, the when and the where of it all.
Ever since it happened, I promised myself that I would write this story if I ever had the time, the money and, hopefully, the talent. Well, I’ve found the time and the money; the talent has been illusive. I finally had to give up waiting for it to come and take matters into my own hands.
This story is a description of the time ... my time; the place ... my place, my hometown, my growing up; and events - the events of my life and those of some of my buddies. It is what happened.
I hope you all enjoy this book. And strangely enough, I hope that it makes you cry. I hope it makes you laugh also.
This is not a new story. People have been dying for a long, long time; even youngsters like Charlie. You may not be planning for it right at this moment, but your plans could be interrupted; mine also. Death is not something that we like to dwell upon but it does one well to think about it every now and then.
What makes this story unique is that it happened to me and some of my teenage friends. It was an experience that affected all of us, and for the rest of our lives. None of us would ever be the same. Each of us was marked and bound together. The memory of our experience with Charlie that summer would be forever a part of our being. Charlie was one of us. He was one of the guys, one of the old gang. He was our buddy. He wasn’t old enough to be dying. But he did ... and we watched. Charlie said that he didn’t know how. He didn’t know how to die. We all watched Charlie die and we learned how to do it with grace and style. I can only hope to do it as well myself when my turn comes along.


[For more information about my books “A Summer with Charlie” and “Hobo-ing America” e-mail me!]

Mein Kampf - Adolf Hitler

Chapter 2 - Part 5

by Richard E. Noble
I’m getting a little confused as to who Adolf is talking to. He is certainly no longer talking to the poor, homeless, huddled masses. He seems now to be talking exclusively to the elitist class - the bourgeoisie; or at least to those individuals of whatever class that are of the opinion that they are better than those they find around them. So, in effect, he is talking to a part of all of us, isn’t he?
Adolf is an elitist, monarchist, man of the people - if that is a rational possibility - a critic of all authority; a man who is able to put himself above all the institutions of his society, and yet maintain a simplistic evaluation of the way things should be. A man very much concerned with the ‘how’ of things and very little concerned about the ‘why’; and not at all, it seems as to who or what is right or wrong.
He has no analysis of why World War I came about, as we find in the accounts of Winston Churchill. What were its causes? The only concern is with how we can re-establish ourselves and win next time. An example of pure competitive instinct. The world is a game to be conquered or dominated in whatever way one can figure out, and to the victor belongs the spoils.
Chapter four is entitled Munich. In this chapter we learn Adolf’s concept of God and His Will. God is the all powerful creator of this universe and nature is one of His regulatory tools. God controls, defines, and purifies the human species through his tools of nature. Nature (and God) is cruel and hard, often merciless. But He does what must be done to promote the survival of the fittest.
Of course if promoting the survival of the fittest was God’s intention, why didn’t He simply create the fittest from the very beginning? Why did he create so many unfit species, and then find it necessary to destroy them? It seems that God didn’t know what He was doing and then had to use cruelty to establish His true intentions. Too bad that God wasn’t a little brighter right from the beginning.
Adolf looks upon Mother Nature and her proliferation of storms, disasters, and disease, as God’s Will and His Divine Plan - which is, of course, the purification of the human species. And, it almost goes without saying that the best and most perfect example of the human species is Adolf, himself, and his “chosen” people.
Adolf, the Moses of the Germanic tribe, is taking up the banner and going to lead his people to the Land of Perfection. It is going to be a rough trip to the Land of Perfection, and it is going to take a lot of blood letting. But killing is the way of God. Death is of the Divine Will. And the fact of this is obvious, for does not God kill us one and all, indiscriminately and at his whim? Adolf has a unique understanding of population control, and, of course, it is all a part of God’s plan.
“...One could follow the French example, artificially restrict the increase of births and thus avoid overpopulation…”
But, of course using one’s brain and mentality to control Nature (The Will of God) would be ... ‘unnatural’. So let’s do it God’s way.
“... Nature, herself, in times of great distress or bad climatic conditions, or where the yields of the soil are poor, steps in by restricting the population of certain countries, or races; this however is a method that is as wise as it is ruthless. She does not restrict the procreative faculty as such, but the conservation of the propagated, by subjecting them to such severe trials and deprivations that all less strong and healthy are forced to return to the bosom of the eternally Unknown. What she allows to endure beyond the inclemency of existence is tested in a thousand ways, hard and well suited to continue to procreate, so that thoroughgoing selection may start again from the beginning. Thus, by acting brutally against the individual and calling him back to herself the moment he is not equal to weather the storms of life, she conserves the strength of the race and the species itself and even spurs it towards the highest achievements …”
Well, in one way, this almost sounds too stupid to believe, but in another he is almost a purest in traditional religious thinking. What God has created let no man put asunder. God is obviously a cold, hard, cruel, vicious thing. He has set up His system. We can observe this system from observing Nature. Nature leads its beasts to procreation. This is natural, and shouldn’t be interfered with.
This is kind of the old male chauvinist attitude to pregnancy. “Well, doctor, I know that this is her twenty third baby in twenty three years of marriage, but if she dies, she dies.” Adolf certainly seems to have his Roman Catholic attitudes toward birth control in tact here. Don’t interrupt the act of propagation, let God pick and choose those that he wants to live or die. Keep on screwing and let God pick those who “will return to the bosom of the eternally Unknown.”
Adolf is not the first to advance the notion that War, pestilence, disease, and famine are God’s built in methods of birth control and population control. I have heard this from Christian and non-Christian alike for as long as I can remember. I consider such
reasoning as not only an insult to the intellect of man but also as an insult to the intellect of God.
Marx, in response to Malthus on this subject, said that this attitude was a slander to the dignity of Mankind. But one must remember that almost all Religions believe that this life and its cruelties are a condemnation put upon mankind by God because of the failure of our free will. That our life on this planet is a trial of our character (remember Job), and a purging of our soul. God put us here to be punished, and Adolf has no problem with this whatsoever. Not only is he willing to be punished, himself; he is perfectly willing to punish others on behalf of God and Nature. Again we see Adolf the evangelist; the interpreter of God’s plan; the man with a spiritual vision for the eventual purification of the human race - which is the intended goal of God and Nature anyway. So why shouldn’t he, and great men of God like himself, encourage this process in any way they can?
We could only hope that Adolf's mother could have been as farsighted as her son. Adolf, without any doubt, is a man who internalized death and destruction. Witnessing the death of his mother and father and thousands and thousands of his comrades in World War I, did not stifle his Faith. Faith that there is a meaning and a touch of the Divine in all that happens.
He finds in the cruelty and injustice of this existence, a Divine Plan. He has no problem in accepting death, disease, and destruction, even terror and wholesale slaughter. This is all a part of a plan “that is as wise as it is ruthless”. Adolf actually takes religious thought to a logical conclusion.
Religions agree that life is a cruel and torturous punishment, but this is to be endured for a reason, the attainment of ultimate purification in a life beyond. Most religions along with their optimistic view of eternal purification, though, inject an attribute of kindness and love. God wants us to learn the lesson of love, they tell us. And we learn this through kindness towards one another and charity towards the less fortunate. But this is where Adolf differs with conventional religious thought.
“...Because, once propagation as such has been limited and the number of births reduced, the natural struggle for existence, that allows only the very strongest and healthiest to survive, is replaced by the natural urge to ‘save’ at any price also the weakest and even sickest, thus planting the germ for a succession that is bound to become more and more miserable the longer this derision of Nature and of her will is continued ...“
So Adolf does believe that there are parts of our human nature, or natural ‘urge’ that should be overcome. The urge to reproduce should not be overcome; the urge to cruelty and torture should not be overcome; because these are, in effect, correct inclinations as can easily be observed in the Natural processes. What should be overcome in the Human natural inclination is the tendency towards kindness. Those feelings that lead one to protect the weak and inferior should be guarded against. Because if allowed to dominate the thinking of a nation, these feeling of sympathy and compassion will lead to the nations eventual extermination. The dictates of nature will see to it.
Again, we could only wish that Adolf''s mother and father were aware of these natural imperfections on the part of their human nature. For when they gave birth to helpless little Adolf and realized his helplessness, and his inability to survive without constantly looking to them, they should have simply hit his head on the corner of the kitchen table, and kept screwing until they gave birth to a child that sprung from the womb performing hand sprints, and was fully capable of sustaining its own existence.

[This is a part – entry # 6 - of a continuing series analyzing Adolf Hitler’s autobiography Mein Kampf on this blog. Click on Search This Blog for previous entries.]

Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)

Autobiography

By Richard E. Noble
I was watching “Book Notes” and this famous author was talking about the fact that as a youth he was forced, as were all grade-schoolers of his day, to read the autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. He hated it, the book being so “dull, pompous and laden with platitudes”, he said.
I’ve just finished reading the Autobiography of Ben Franklin, and I have gotten a belly laugh out of just about every chapter. The man is hilarious. I really haven’t decided whether the whole book is an outright tongue-in-cheek put-on, or that old Ben is just such a practical, unemotional fellow, that his guidelines for living a virtuous life sound like a biology professor trying to explain to a slow student how to rationally distinguish his left hand from his right.
The story of his courtship with “Miss Read”, his eventual wife, I’m sure, is not something that “Miss Read” cut out of her husband’s book and hid away in a trunk of loving memorabilia in an upstairs attic, along with her first love poem and a piece of her wedding cake. She was “deserving ... pitiable and a good and faithful helpmate”, says Ben. And, believe it or not, she nearly lost Ben’s attentions by her inability to get her parents to cough up one hundred pounds as her dowry. In fact, she did loose Ben for a good period during the negotiations, and in the interim Ben being left hot to trot explains that; “In the meantime, that hard to be governed passion of youth had harried me frequently into intrigues with low woman that fell in my way.” He goes on to explain his thankfulness at not catching “distemper” or something worse.
His battle with being a perfect, virtuous individual he compares with a man attempting to buy a shinny ax. After a few hours and some time at the hard work of turning the wheel for the blacksmith who is trying to get the man’s desired ax to shine, the customer decides that a speckled ax will do just fine. This becomes even funnier when you remember that Ben is talking about his own moral character here. So when put next to the hard work of becoming moral and virtuous, Ben’s decision is that he would just as soon have a speckled soul to carry to his Maker. Oh, my goodness!
And this has got to be the best one of all. Ben is going into his shop on Craven Street one morning where upon he finds a “poor ... very pale and feeble” sickly woman, sweeping the walk in front of his door. He asks her who hired her to sweep his walk and she replies; “Nobody; but I am poor and in distress, and I sweeps before gentle folks’ doors and hopes they will give me something.”
Oh, my, doesn’t that nearly break your heart? So what does old compassionate Ben do? Why he offers the feeble, poor, pale, very sickly woman a shilling to sweep the whole darn street. When she comes for her shilling he presumes that a woman in her obviously poor condition couldn’t have done a very good job, so he sends his servant, out to check her work. Jeeves reports that the poor, dying, old lady has really done an excellent job - so what does Ben conclude? - that she deserves, possibly, a permanent, full-time job back at the Franklin plantation or something of the like? Not quite: “I then judged that if that feeble woman could sweep such a street in three hours, a strong, active man might have done it in half the time.”
Ben Franklin, the grandfather of compassionate conservatism - and possibly several illegitimate children - so, what’s new.

William Z. Foster 1881 – 1961

“Pages from a Worker’s Life”

by Richard E. Noble

Who the heck is William Z. Foster? I had never heard of the gentleman and my guess is - neither have most of you.
I have recently been acquainted with Mr. Foster through his book, “Pages From a Worker’s Life”. I have also come to find out that this is not the only book that Mr. Foster has written. He has been quite prolific, and is very, very well known in certain circles.
J. Edgar Hoover, I have no doubt, had a very extensive file on William Z. Foster. Mr. Hoover, I’m sure, has Mr. Foster listed as a top ten American Scumbag of all time. But in reading the biography of the now deceased J. Edgar Hoover, I find that it becomes more difficult determining top American Scumbags as the years roll by. Yesterday’s hero may be today scumbag and yesterday scumbag may become one of today’s heroes. From what I have read so far on these two men, I am more attracted to Mr. Foster than to Mr. Hoover.
“Pages from a Worker’s Life” was great. There is no doubt about it; Mr. Foster was an American Workingman. The man lived quite a life.
He belonged to the Bulldog’s gang in the infamous four corners section of New York - recently made into a big movie. He worked the turpentine plantations in Northern Florida in the “peonage” days, as he calls it. Peonage is a fancy word for slavery. I’ve heard it referred to as “wage slavery”, but as Mr. Foster’s describes it, there really wasn’t much “wage” connected with it.
Foster was a miner, a railroad worker, a factory worker, a homesteader, worked the carnivals; told of a very interesting experience in a fertilizer factory - which sounded like it could have been a chapter in Upton Sinclair’s “the Jungle” (he worked as a meat packer too). He was even a shepherd.
He sailed around the world, before the Mast, like William Henry Dana. His tale was not as “sophisticated” and well spoken as Mr. Dana’s, but, I’m sure, much closer to truth and reality - the uncut version, I would say. Mr. Foster was not the son of a wealthy ship owner and he harbored no future plans of attending Harvard when his trip was over. He was also not overly concerned about who might be offended by what he had to say.
Then came his life as a Hobo. If you hold any glamorous notions about the Hobo-ing life, “beat” your way over the “big Hump” (Rocky Mountains) riding the “rods” under some boxcar with Mr. Foster, going West in the dead of winter. Not very romantic, let me tell you. He nearly had his toes frozen off.
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Then follow Billy the Bum as one of the “floating workers” army of the I.W.W. - (Wobblees/Industrial Workers of the World). It was somewhere around this point in his life that J. Edgar probably became aware of Mr. Foster’s personage - Mr. Hoover being then very active in A. Mitchell Palmer’s army and actively promoting the Red-Scare of that era, post World War I.
Mr. Foster’s association with the Wobblees got him to Germany, France, Italy, England and Russia as an American Union worker representative. As a hobo and a sailor he had already been to Central and South America. All of this was somehow accomplished with very little money - almost nothing. He tells of being in Germany attending some big international union gathering and being arrested that evening as a vagrant which could have gotten him a number of years in a foreign prison.
Mister Foster becomes an active participant in the worker revolution of the period. Many people today don’t know that there ever was a worker revolution in the U.S.A. - or any place else in the world for that matter. He is at one point or another a Wobbly, a syndicalist, a socialist, an anarchist, and finally starts his own group. A group well known today as the American Communist Party.
It is difficult to be an American and think of a Communist as anything but a bad person. But in the early days of the radical labor movement, the American Communist Party was one of the most active, most idealistic, and socially inclusive of all the radical labor groups. Mr. Foster was a zealous adherent of the Marxist communist philosophy. He thought the Russian Revolution to be the greatest step ever taken in history on behalf of the workingman. He thought Lenin was the berries and Uncle Joe Stalin, a Russian and world hero. He was in Russia at the time of the Revolution. He listened to Lenin and Stalin speak.
He talks glowingly of the early achievements of the Russian Revolutionary experiment. He gives a vivid description of the early poverty, starvation and general squalor; the intensive opposition - the sabotage and foreign inspired intervention. “In years to come the Soviet’s winning of the Arctic will probably be considered the most important economic development of this period,” says Mr. Foster. “It is the completion of man’s conquest of the globe ... In the summer of 1935, I saw some of this vast Arctic development via the new Stalin Baltic-White Sea Canal.”
The “what" canal? Have you ever heard of that one?
Well, William claims that it was an even greater achievement than the Panama Canal - and it didn’t take so long. And he goes on:
“The new Stalin Constitution is by far the most democratic in the world, guaranteeing the people political freedom, religious liberty, the right to work, the right of the worker to his product and the farmer to his land, the right to organize, the right to education, the right to full medical care, the right to rest and recreation, and the most complete system of social security to be found anywhere. Old Russia, the home of hunger, misery, ignorance and oppression, has now become a land of song, laughter, culture, hope and happiness.
The accomplishments of the Soviet government are so huge and unmistakable that all the world is being compelled to recognize that the new socialist system is a success.”
Well? Very interesting. Mr. Foster wrote this in 1939. He closed his book with an update of the Russian accomplishments in World War II - which are equally spectacular - and much closer to the truth.
I must admit that my reading of the achievements of Joseph Stalin are not quite so glowing as Mr. Foster’s who died in 1961. I seem to remember something about purges and gulags and then there were all those Polish generals and those ten to twenty million missing Russian peasant farmers.
Let’s see, who shall I choose as my hero, Joseph Stalin or J. P. Morgan? ... William Z. Foster or J. Edgar Hoover?
I really enjoyed Mr. Foster’s book. He was a worker;I have no doubt - he was in the mold of the zealous true believer. None of his contemporaries have anything but praise for his abilities, his temperament and his ideals. I feel pretty confident that he was probably a nice guy. I’m not so sure about J. Edgar Hoover or Herbert Hoover for that matter.
Joseph Stalin? I really and truly have my doubts. F.D.R. thought that he could work with the man. Winston Churchill thought that Uncle Joe was a better choice than Adolf Hitler - but that still leaves us a lot of room for consideration. I mean, if my wife said of her relationship with me - “I have been able to work with the man and he is a nicer man than Adolf Hitler,” I don’t know if I would find that, all that complimentary.

Chicken Wars by Jack & Anne Rudloe

“Chicken Wars” by Jack & Anne Rudloe

Book Review

by Richard E. Noble

Well, if you are anything like me, you have been asking yourself for decades when - oh please God when - will somebody come along who will stand up for the rights of the American processing chicken?
Finally ... finally, at long last, a book is here for all of us chicken lovers and we owe it all to the very creative and imaginative efforts of Jack and Anne Rudloe - our well known and well documented panhandle resident biologists.
What a book! I loved it. Anne and Jack truly take up the cause of chickenhood everywhere. Superchicken has arrived and he is armed and dangerous - and very funny.
Superchicken, Augustus Herkissing (formerly, in a previous life - Henry Kissinger) the champion of chickens everywhere, has been sent to our present day world via a heavenly council. He has been sent to earth to free the chickens and lead them to the Promised Land.
Kissinger - I mean Herkissing is at first appalled at the thought of being reincarnated as a chicken, but after getting his feathers he takes up the role courageously.
He is found floating down the Lockaloukee River by adorable little Jennifer and her chicken rancher daddy. The brave little Herkissing gets the country folks attention by standing up to a menacing hawk.
At this point the initial conflict begins. Tenderbird, the chicken processing giant, does not tolerate their chicken farmers or members of their families harboring any pet chickens. And from this point onward the story evolves into a classic tale of adventure, culminating in a massive nationwide chicken revolution.
I am not going to tell you the whole story - it will be a lot more fun for you to read it yourself.
On the serious side, the book points out and graphically describes the true and horribly inhumane state of affairs that exists all over America and, I dare say, the world with regards to present day civilization’s methods of rendering what were once barnyard livestock into food for the masses.
Since my wife and I were both one time chicken factory employees - Carol in hearts and livers and Richard snipping gizzards - we know the story first hand. We have seen it all up close and personal. What the Rudloes describe is no exaggeration, no far-flung “humaniac” melodramatic fabrications. So if you would like to know “the other side of the story” or garner a more insightful view of the evolution of the grocery store chicken or the boneless, skinless chicken breast that you have grown to know and love from watching the Galloping Chef on the cooking channel, pick up a copy of “Chicken Wars” by Anne and Jack Rudloe. It’s an eye-opener, besides being a hen house full of fun.
In addition, this book is packed full of information about the local outdoors - the birds, the bees, the katydids, the cicadas etc. It is not the conventional philosophy of the tree-hugging humaniac. There is even a defense of Cock Fighting, not to mention the heavenly glory of the backyard chicken bar-be-que and chicken eating in general. It is the work of two very practical minded animal lovers.
The whole point of the book is that the human race has lost its contact with the Great Agreement. Like Rousseau’s Social Contract this is a supposed agreement between animals and man that took place when Adam and Eve were expelled from the Garden of Eden. It was a simple Agreement in which some of the animals decided to join domestically with the humans while the others, less trusting of human nature, decided to weather the perils of the wild. In the Agreement humans agreed to love the animals and treat them with decency and respect, in return for their fellowship and contributions to their food supply. Of course, Mankind via Agribiz has grossly violated this Agreement - thus the necessity for a Divinely inspired Super Chicken.
This is a fascinating book - great for the kids; great for the adults; and a laugh a minute for the intellectually inclined. You can purchase this book on line for $14.95 at www.gulfspecimen.org/chicken.html or pick up a copy at the following locations: Downtown Books in Apalachicola, Tattered Pages in Crawfordville, Borders Bookstore in Tallahassee (Apalachee Parkway) and, if you take a trip over to The Gulf Marine Laboratory in Panacea, Jack and Anne will be more than happy to autograph a copy for you.

Bloggin' Be My Life - The Last Hundred Years

Understanding the Last Hundred Years

by Richard E. Noble

Understanding the last hundred years, takes us back almost two hundred years. The key to the last hundred years, I think, begins with the Industrial Revolution. The Industrial revolution changes the whole political, economic, and social structure of the world. It shatters previous economic and social systems and establishes a counter elite to challenge and rival the old Aristocracy. Along with this new Aristocracy a whole new population of poverty stricken are born and concentrated in the new manufacturing centers called, cities.

The social outrages caused by competition and over production produce organized labor and Utopian solutions to people problems in the form of Socialism and Communism.
Socialism, Communism and organized labor in opposition to monopolized Capital, lead to protests, riots, strikes, and social disorganization in general. Social disorganization and general discontent, lead to a first hemorrhage in the form of World War I.

World War I does not serve to stem the tide of social discontent but intensifies it until a socialist/communist world wide revolution begins.

The Russians are the first to crack. They walk off the battlefield in 1917 and into a civil war and socialist/communist revolution at home. Wilson stems the tide of socialist/communist agitation in the U.S by entering the War in Europe.

The German, French, and English Governments were all on the verge of collapse. Soldiers had turned their guns around in the trenches and were shooting their own officers. Wholesale desertion was rampant. Civil war and socialist/communist revolution intensified in the German homeland until their government, as with the Russian government, also collapsed. Post War socialist/communist anti-capitalist agitation in England, France, and the U.S., and the “successful” Russian Revolution led to free world capitalist fear and paranoia. Capitalist fear and paranoia led to big money investments in any anti-socialist/communist government and especially in any governments counter to the principles advocated and demonstrated in the New Russia.

This economic capitalist backing leads to the prosperity of European dictators, and the collapse of the economies of warbling socialist agitated democracies - the Depression.

A second hemorrhage occurs with the eruption of World War II. World War II stems the tide of unemployment and economic collapse in the Democracies. Capitalist investment flows back into Democracies to counter dictatorships that had grown out of control by previous anti-Russian western Capitalistic investment. With the Defeat of Germany in World War II, the capitalist intramural war ended between the democracies and the anti-Russian dictatorships and the original Capitalist anti-Russian economic policy was re-established with the Cold War and Capitalist re-investment in non Russian Communist Europe via the Marshall Plan.

The Cold War divided the world into two major camps, and competition between these two camps has been the story up until the recent Russian collapse.

The world is now under the dominance of one major superpower. World history is at a cross roads. The future will be determined by either positive investment and shared international development to increase prosperity and meet new world population demands, or old antagonism and conflict/destructive investment ... maintaining status quo and reducing new population growth through war.


[ This piece was written in the 1980s with the collapse of the Berlin Wall.]