“Eisenhower in the Footsteps of Hitler,” 1951.

He could do anything as an artist, including turn sweet dull old Ike into a blood-dripping demon.

Bored, mute, incontinent, unable to read (she had loved literature), she shared an institution with people so demented they often shrieked. She wanted but was unable to be dead, and the staff dealt with this by stuffing her with antidepressants. Covid finally saved her.

Since, like UD, lots of people visit their dead but not dead aunts in institutions, lots of people support medically assisted dying. My aunt had been all her life a very proud woman – proud, really, to a fault – and UD saw clearly with every visit how humiliating it was for her, how grindingly absurd, to hang around, heart beating.

Beating in the state of Maryland, seventy percent of whose people support medically assisted dying, while its politicians dither.

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An essay like Elaina Plott Calabro’s in The Atlantic is a fine example of first-rate propaganda on this subject. Most propaganda is crude and icky, but her essay is a lesson in the deployment of powerful sophisticated propaganda. Anti-MAD propaganda. Let’s see how she does it.

Her title is brilliant, intellectually and graphically. Big black slasher-film letters, each of which spits further gouts of black, dominate the first page. It’s a fucking ENORMOUS headline.

And here’s the content: CANADA IS KILLING ITSELF.

Now, given that Canada’s population has recently “soared” to 41.5 million, this might seem a strange headline, but it can’t be denied that the combination of style and content, right from the get-go in this essay, has you thinking THE HORROR THE HORROR. Red slashes across the letters, their own letters drawn from what we are to take to be the Kafkaesque administrative paperwork of Canadian MAD, create a loud lurid BUREAUCRACY KILLS effect. Before you even start reading!

The first few paragraphs deepen, with stylistic skill, this sense of the sickening surreality of a state killing its citizens, and the emergence of a class of doctors positively slobbering at the thought of their next victim.

[M]edical professionals who decided early on to reorient their career toward assisted death no longer feel compelled to tiptoe around the full, energetic extent of their devotion to MAID. Some clinicians in Canada have euthanized hundreds of patients.

Dance dance revolution! Come to mama!

And now the writer poses some quite stupid questions, like this one:

If autonomy in death is sacrosanct, is there anyone who shouldn’t be helped to die?

Uh, yes, there are many people… uh… most people… who shouldn’t be helped to die, no matter how keen you are on the autonomy thing.

It all reminds UD of this Onion article:

‘GRAND RAPIDS, MI—Dr. James Munson, known to millions as the infamous “vehicular manslaughter doctor,” participated in his 23rd doctor-assisted vehicular manslaughter Monday, running over an 81-year-old Michigan woman.

Munson, who was arrested and charged with first-degree vehicular manslaughter in the incident, hit Mildred Peters of Portage, MI, with his 1994 Ford Escort in a supermarket parking lot, killing her instantly.

“She was clearly in terrible pain,” said Munson, who did not know the woman. “She was moving very slowly, and it was a struggle for her just to push the shopping cart to her car. I don’t even think she would have been able to lift her groceries into the trunk without help. All this woman wanted was to die in a dignified, painless manner. Thank God I was able to give her that chance.”

According to witnesses, after saying a prayer and lighting a candle, Munson got in his car and accelerated to an estimated 80 mph, hitting Peters head-on with the controversial four-wheeled euthanizing device.

Munson’s lawyer, Donald Ranieri, defended his client in a statement Tuesday. “Dr. Munson’s only interest is in easing the terrible pain of the nation’s elderly,” Ranieri said. “It is his deep conviction that no one should have to suffer through life with Multiple Sclerosis, arthritis, or high blood pressure.”

When informed of the incident, Peters’ daughter expressed relief that the woman’s suffering had finally ended.

“It had been years since my mother was able to live a normal life,” said Jayne Peters-Williams, 48. “She was so weak, she couldn’t climb long flights of stairs. She needed help getting in the tub. And if she just wanted to read, she had to put on a special pair of glasses. What kind of a life is that?”

“My mother’s suffering is over at last,” Peters-Williams said. “As her crumbling, withered body soared through the air after being hit by Munson, for one shining moment she was finally free.”

Last month, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a federal ban on physician-assisted vehicular manslaughter without patient consent. Michigan is one of just five states that permit assisted vehicular manslaughter with consent of a family member.

The nation’s leading ethicists are divided on the issue of automotive euthanasia. While some, such as Hemlock Society president Milton Habisch, call it a “clean, effective” way to end the agony of chronic pain sufferers; others assert it creates more problems than it solves.

“The procedure is far from perfect,” said Elaine Curtis, co-director of the San Francisco-based What About The Children? foundation. “In 1991, his car ran out of gas just before he was about to hit a Goshen, IN, woman suffering from back pain, and he was forced to borrow the bicycle of a nearby child, riding over his victim an agonizing 175 times until she finally died of internal bruising.”

Dr. Munson’s controversial suicide device is controlled by two foot-activated levers, one for acceleration and one for braking. By pressing down hard on the acceleration lever, the machine increases in velocity to the point where anyone it is aimed at can be killed quickly and painlessly. As an added precaution, Munson anaesthetizes himself with a fifth of gin before each procedure.’

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Calabro’s Canada has mucho Munsons milling about, eyes out for the next Mildred Peters.

Here’s one of the Munsons, it seems; all creepy sterile anonymity in a queasy blue filter, and backgrounded by ghostly body linens.

My point ain’t that the author is necessarily wrong to worry about hard euthanasia cases, as well as about a tendency to broaden – call them admissions standards. My point is that she should not have laid on the propaganda so thickly. To the extent that the reader is aware of this manipulation, her argument suffers.

“The policy at Wesleyan is that our [country’s] president shouldn’t say stupid shit.” 

Comments in response to the FB announcement of gunfire at the Cuyahoga County Fair, Ohio.

https://www.facebook.com/cuyfair/posts/1213538350817112?ref=embed_post

Kids are out of control.

Had my one year old with me. Glad we left before this all went down.

Seriously why do people take guns to a fair?

This is so messed up. This is suppose to be a family fun event not for stupid people to be started crap and shooting people up in front of innocent people. Pretty soon there isn’t going to be anything for us to take our kids to because of this. So sad.

Can’t even enjoy fairs anymore. Summit County Fairgrounds had several incidents, with Stark County Fair and several others coming up. Anyway to increase security? “Random pat downs” , metal detector wands?

It was a miserable experience tonight kids out of control

It happened right in front of me. Once in a year thing, ruined.

He wrote The Story of Ferdinand.

Their dorms are alive with the sound of murder, all because LSU doesn’t give a shit who it recruits for football as long as they can play the game.

This is a very old story, one that UD has blogged about for years: LSU routinely recruits criminals. It really doesn’t care. Players come from bloody cities like Alexandria LA and bring their big guns with them.

Sometimes they bring their friends, too, like a recent recruit who turned out to be hiding two buddies – both murder suspects – in his dorm room. Big ol’ guns too? Big ol’ guns too.

It must be really wild to teach at LSU.

Coverage only cuz took place in Times Sq.

Next time, look sharp! Fourteen year old massacrist, real body count, mass panic pls.

Mr UD helpfully points out that my confident assumption the Anaconda Montana mass murderer was dead, up in them thar hills, was dead wrong. They’ve captured him.

**********************

His niece speaks up:

“We as people failed… failed to report suspicious behavior because ‘that’s just Mikee’…”

Man, it’s gotta be said that when dangerous people are heavily armed, living in a place where being visibly heavily armed is no big deal, you got BIG problems.

Gevalt. TOLD you this is a rich country.

So the city of Montreal is now officially taking down the Welcome to Montreal — women cover themselves here sign, due to loud and broad objection from its secular citizens.

But local hijab enthusiasts are complaining that women who dress in order to be invisible are in danger of being made invisible if the city takes down a sign depicting them as draped up and down in order to be … invisible…? Head neck hair torso arms legs all invisible but God forbid you make hijabis/body drapers invisible? Don’t make no sense.

Become what you are, sillies. If you’re dedicated to hiding the female body, go right ahead. But don’t complain that we’re erasing you.

The higher bond happened (a million bucks), but UD thinks the prosecuting attorney means cannot be overstated, cuz it’s hard to know how much higher you can go than 73 unsecured guns, multiple explosive devices, and plenty of methamphetamine all over a house with two kids, in an attached townhouse community.

Barbara, a reader, sent me this story out of Washington State, and UD is grateful she did, since these facts, in this our current USA, don’t add up to a big enough story to have appeared in UD‘s Google News searches…

His four year old son took Neff’s Glock from under his arm while he was sleeping (sleeping here is a euphemism for in meth oblivion), wandered over to the bathroom where his mother was showering, and shot her in the arm. Not sure who called the police (the father was still noticeably out of it when they arrived), but searching the house must have been quite a hoot.

Notice no neighbors have yet appeared before news cameras to say Well, they kind of kept to themselves but they seemed okay because… because why? WHY? I’ll tell you why! They don’t want to get detonated by their very own private Hitler, as in, THEY ARE SCARED FUCKING SHITLESS.

******************

And what to do with the children? Hm hm hmmmm. They love Daddy Demento! They love Dishrag Mom who, you know, KNOWS there’s something… uh, WRONG with Daddy and the guns and the meth and the bombs and the sketches he draws of murdering the neighbors but she loves him and he needs her and after all he’s not wrong that life sucks and killing yourself and your family I mean he’d never DO it but she can understand how …

What to do with the children when it’s actually hard to imagine a more disgusting domestic setting? Everyone hates the idea of foster care, so we have to hope there’s at least one non-degenerate family member or very close friend who knows and loves the children… ?

On the up side, Master Meth is out of the picture; someone else is going to have to clean and care for his 73 weapons while he’s in jail for the next ten years. But state officials have sympathy (we all do) for Women Who Love Not Wisely But Too Well, and while she will be facing drug/negligence/whatever charges, she probably won’t get any jail time…

OTOH it’s only a matter of time before she falls in love with someone even worse (let’s assume she’s also addicted to meth) and invites him to help raise the little ones plus he’ll knock her up a few times. No good options for the two innocents.

With the understanding that we can never assert anything with real confidence about any particular suicide, UD will nonetheless speculate that the death of a mad child-massacrist’s mother on August 1 had something to do with this emotion.

Her motive might have been a simpler one – she feared going to jail for whatever she might have contributed to her daughter’s notorious crime – but I don’t think she was likely to have been indicted. Her ex-husband, with whom the killer lived (he gave her the guns she used), is currently on trial.

But this woman – at various points in her life an addict, married to the killer’s father three times in a turbulent union clearly destructive to the killer’s mental health, and the mother of one of America’s most hideous shooters – might well have decided she’d had enough of the mess. She might have decided she didn’t want to testify in her ex-husband’s trial. She might have decided she hated herself too much to go on.

We’re revisiting the Red River massacre of 2023 — after which the town of Red River NM, population 500, decided no longer to host the Red River biker rally, attendees 28,000 — because the Sturgis SD biker/GUN rally is just wrapping up… And UD wouldn’t mind knowing how that went, public safety-wise.

This was Day One. How did the rest of the week go? I’ll try to find out.

… and through seven long years he stole and stole and stole from it. His reported haul was $1.4 million, but I’m thinking that’s all they could trace, cuz for a serious larcenist, capable of watching closeup while patients suffered due to … mysterious underfunding, less than three or four million over that period of time is unthinkable.

This story is about the perils of hospitals (and universities — recall the University of Louisville) which become stinky pigsties. They start attracting only pigs, and things get worse and worse. Nor are these pig pits about to detect the rootin’ going on inside them. By definition the only people left in the sty are thieves or idiots.

‘After Dershowitz Dustup, Islanders Line Up for Pierogi‘

‘Hundreds of people attended the West Tisbury Farmers’ Market this week to show support for the pierogi vendor who refused to sell dumplings to prominent attorney Alan Dershowitz at the market last week…‘