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The Week’s Most Stoned, Boned, and Bemoaned Headlines

“VEE HAFF VAYS OF MAKING YOU NOT TALK.”
Last week saw the 79th anniversary of Pearl Harbor, a.k.a. the day the Japanese favored the world with a strikingly vivid real-life illustration of the phrase “biting off more than you can chew.” Pearl Harbor Day is certainly an appropriate time for reflecting upon what a terrible, terrible world this would be if the Axis powers had won World War II.

Imagine Germany in 2020 if the U.S. and Soviet Union had not beaten some democratic sense into the totalitarian Nazi state. Imagine a Germany that had not been immolatingly guided into embracing the sacred tenets of freedom and human rights. A Germany not brought to heel in 1945 would surely be a monstrous, oppressive society that tortures 92-year-old women just because they don’t parrot state doctrine.

Oh, wait; that’s Germany today. Sorry, Hitler!

Ursula Haverbeck is 92 years old, and “free and democratic” Germany just can’t stop imprisoning her. One could reasonably ask why any major world power—or, frankly, any minor world power—would feel the need to keep locking up one elderly woman. What manner of criminal mischief could this senior scofflaw possibly be engaged in to merit repeated stints in the pokey? Did she plow through an open-air market in her Volkswagen? Is she a suspect in the disappearance of Hansel and Gretel?

Nope. She won’t stop saying that Auschwitz wasn’t an extermination camp. And the fact that one insignificant old lady holds a view that the state finds objectionable is something that free and democratic Germany simply cannot allow.

In 2016 Haverbeck was sentenced to ten months imprisonment for saying hurty words about Auschwitz. When she was released, the state asked her, “Has your punishment taught you to stop holding your opinion?” Haverbeck said no, and she was sent back to the pen for another two and a half years.

A few weeks ago, she was released again. And again, the state asked her if she would recite history in the manner that free and democratic Germany insists it must be recited.

Unfortunately, the villainous granny still refused to parrot the scripted words that the free-thought-loving, human-rights-respecting German government was forcing her to recite, so back to jail she went last week.

As reported by Der Tagesspiegel:

Ursula Haverbeck repeatedly claims that there was no mass murder in Auschwitz. She was just in jail—and was immediately put on trial again afterwards. The 92-year-old was sentenced to one year imprisonment just one month after her release from a prison in Bielefeld. She was released at the beginning of November after serving a total of two and a half years.

In the words of Tagesspiegel, “She kept asserting that Auschwitz was not an extermination camp.” And the German government has pledged to continue imprisoning and re-imprisoning this frail nonagenarian until she quits “asserting” stuff that the government considers untrue.

Thank heavens the Allies prevailed in Germany. Otherwise, who knows what kind of dictatorial nightmare that nation might be today?

“MARKET ECONOMICS, MAN…I’M FREAKIN’ OUT!”
Stoners just can’t catch a break.

You’d think this would be a Golden Age for pot smokers, a Renaissance of sorts during which potheads could revel in the joy of victory. Over two-thirds of U.S. states have now decriminalized marijuana for recreational use. Last month, Arizona, Montana, New Jersey, and South Dakota became the latest states to make lightin’ up legal, and last week the U.S. House voted along partisan Democrat lines (though joined by five Republicans) to decriminalize weed federally.

So this should be an absolutely blazin’ time for our country’s Cheeches and Chongs, right?

Not so fast…don’t get naked and grab the bongos just yet, McConaughey. There’s, like, a downer in the brownie. The massive taxes and regulatory fees slapped on the legal cannabis industry by politicians who are, like, not cool, bro, have made the price of legal weed skyrocket nationally. A 2019 report by California-based Confident Cannabis found that the rapidly climbing prices are driving more and more tokers back to the black market. “The prices are huge,” said Confident Cannabis’ VP for marketing—a man named Brad Bogus because of course he’s named after a Jeff Spicoli phrase. “They’re way bigger than they used to be,” Bogus declared, before pausing to spend an hour staring at his hand.

Even Matt Gaetz, the only Republican to cosponsor the House weed bill, warned that politicians mainly want to legalize pot in order “to do a great deal of social engineering to create new taxes and new programs and redistribution of assets.”

Gaetz voted for the bill anyway, because he was totally wasted.

Funny enough, New Jersey was proving Gaetz’s point even as he was making it. Last week the Democrat-controlled Senate and Assembly advanced bills (sponsored by the state’s Legislative Black Caucus) that would slap legal weed sellers and growers with a “social equity excise fee” to compensate blacks who are arrested for buying weed on the “unregulated market” following legalization.

In other words, pot’s been legalized, but—knowing that legalization will likely hike the price beyond what the average brutha can afford—legal growers will be hit with a massive fee in order to compensate “people of color” who are arrested for buying on the black market, which will only raise the price of legal pot even more as growers and sellers are forced to pay for people who are not their customers, and as the cost of those fees are passed on to actual customers, it will push more of them to buy from the black market, where legal growers will again have to pay to compensate them when they’re arrested, thus kicking up the price even further.

That’s the kind of inevitable failure-loop that could’ve only been created by two types of people: fried-brain stoner burnouts, or Democrats.

Legalized pot’s turning into a real bummer, man.

FORTUNATELY, FECES ODOR MASKS THE SMELL OF SMOKE
Still, the news isn’t all bad for stoners.

The current generation of children probably has a very difficult time believing that San Francisco was ever a great city. Indeed, when grandparents speak of the time when Frisco was a global vacation hot spot known for its tourist-friendly districts and streets so attractive that half the shows on TV were shot there, the grandkids are likely to dismiss such talk as the fables of an old fool, a story about an Atlantis that exists only in mythology.

But those who defend the city where the streets are paved in dirty needles and bum-poo claim that their town is better than ever because freedom, comrade. Every sidewalk is a bed for weary schizophrenics; every pot and planter a makeshift toilet where the homeless can expel the remnants of the stale pizza slices and dried box-cheese they picked from the trash earlier that day. After all, what’s more charming than a city where dogs have to clean up after their owners? It’s like a wacky backwards storybook land!

And backwards it is. Because while the city leaders allow anything—and that means anything—to occur on the streets, they’re now regulating what people can do in their own homes. Like smoking. Last week the San Francisco Board of Supervisors voted 10 to 1 to make it illegal for apartment residents to smoke tobacco in their own homes.

This is the same town that refused to close gay bathhouses at the height of the AIDS epidemic, because “privacy” trumped health concerns.

But now, the city cites “health concerns” as the reason for prohibiting what residents can do in the privacy of their dwellings.

It’s almost like the city government itself is made up of street-shitting schizos with severe dissociative disorders, but in fact that would be an improvement in leadership.

While debating the SanFranStasi bill, lawmakers heard from panicked potheads, who were concerned that the smoking ban might make life harder for roommates who won’t let Dave in because he’s not there, man. So the supervisors amended the ban. Smoking marijuana in your home will remain totally legal. Only smokers of tobacco will be prosecuted.

Whew, that was a close one. For a moment there, it looked like the city couldn’t get any more retarded.

It’s good to know that in these troubled times, some things never disappoint.

IF “NORTH POLE” IS NAZI, IS SANTA’S WORKSHOP A KONZENTRATIONSLAGER?
Have you ever found yourself having to use a phonetic alphabet to spell out a street name, or your own name, to an English-challenged individual on the other end of the phone?

“My address is 115 Cedarwood Street.”

“Que?”

“115 Cedarwood Street!”

“Que?”

“‘C’ as in Charlie, ‘E’ as in elephant, ‘D’ as in David, ‘A’ as in apple, ‘R’ as in Robert…”

“No entiendo, señor. I get dee soopervisor.”

[Pause]

“Herro…我可以帮你吗?”

Frustrating, isn’t it? But stop thinking about yourself for one damn minute. Has it ever occurred to you that the words you use to represent those letters might be…racist? Indeed, that they might be Nazi?

Germany is finally having a long-overdue reckoning regarding the Holocaust. All those other previous “reckonings”—the brutal denazification programs, the Morgenthau Plan, two-thirds of all Berlin women raped, Stalin’s eastern concentration camps, the nation split in half, seventy years of reparations, and prohibitions on the speech of native Germans—mean nothing compared with what’s happening right now: Germany is finally purging Nazism from its phonetic spelling table.

See, in 1934, the Nazis switched some of the words and names. As reported in The Guardian:

“Samuel” was replaced by “Siegfried” to represent the letter S, “Zacharias” became “Zeppelin” for Z, and “David” was switched to “Dora.” The preference was for Nordic names to replace Jewish ones, and where no suitable ones could be found, such as N (originally “Nathan”), an object or placename, such as “Nordpol” (north pole), was chosen instead. In the Nazi’s [sic] pseudoscientific ideology, the north pole was seen as the original home of the Aryans.

(Actually, the “Aryans came from the North Pole” thing was created by a dark-skinned Hindu Indian nationalist, but don’t tell that to The Guardian.)

Michael Blume, Germany’s “anti-Semitism czar,” claims that the Hitler-era phonetic alphabet’s staying power is “proof in itself of a deep-seated antisemitic and racist mindset in Germany.” Or it could be proof that only well-paid “anti-Semitism czars” who need to justify their existence consider the issue of any importance.

The Guardian decried Germans who merely see the phonetic alphabet as “a practical method for spelling out names over the telephone” without realizing that they are being genocidal by saying “‘S’ as in Siegfried” instead of Samuel. But the BBC pointed out that replacing the Hitler names with the old Jewish names might upset Germany’s burgeoning Muslim immigrant minority (“‘S’ is for Saleem”).

As the Deutschen volke are left to sort out their mess, one can only hope that nobody in the press notices that the phonetic alphabet officially adopted by the U.S. culturally appropriates “Zulu” for Z.

Good thing Al Sharpton can’t spell.

IF FREE SPEECH BE THE FOOD OF HATE, SPEAK ON
It’s pretty much “settled science” on the left that free speech is a bad thing that must be curtailed in order to preserve and protect “democracy.” Sure, it’s never quite explained how depriving “the people” of the ability to receive and convey information helps “democracy,” which in theory is supposed to be about “the people” having a voice in public affairs. But c’mon now, asking too many critical questions is just downright undemocratic.

Last week, a New Yorker writer named Steve Coll, who claims to be a journalist much the same way Jim Jones claimed to be the Messiah, penned a piece slamming Mark Zuckerberg for “his passion and profound belief in free speech.” Zuckerberg of course doesn’t even remotely possess such things, but the fact that Zuck let’s any conservatives have a Facebook page, the fact that he hasn’t banned everyone who isn’t to the left of AOC, equals “free-speech fanatic” on Coll’s grading curve.

“Free speech” has been “weaponized,” Coll lamented, and therefore we need far less of it.

You know, to “save democracy.”

Additionally, Richard Stengel, a “team leader” of Biden’s transition squad, wrote a WaPo op-ed last year demanding less free speech as opposed to more. One can assume that this will be the official policy of the Biden administration.

The idea that less speech is good for a free nation is actually rather new, even among liberals, and certainly among people who consider themselves knowledgeable about the Constitution. Almost a hundred years ago, Justice William Brandeis, in his historic combination concurrence/dissent in Whitney v. California, declared: “If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence.”

“More speech, not enforced silence” is the guiding principle of a new platform created by marketing and advertising executive Jim Rowbotham and IT specialist Larry O’Neill, cofounders of Insultor LLC.

Behold the InsultA sites: InsultALiberal.com and InsultAConservative.com!

Taki, founder and publisher of Takimag, sees these sites as just what the doctor ordered for an ailing First Amendment:

Here at last is the answer to the Facebook-Twitter biased monopoly and censorship. A new interactive website has arrived on the digital scene. It is the answer to media censorship, trolling, and privacy invasion incited by our political views. It means no more biased censors, fictional fact checkers, and hateful comebacks. It is a safe haven for people like us who are mad as hell, and won’t take it anymore. InsultALiberal.com and InsultAConservative.com are structured for anonymity. All you need to do is send your email address and a self-coined nickname. There are no ads. You remit a measly monthly or annual due. You can rant or comment in 281 characters or less at any or all spaces listed. Your limit per-site space is one daily. Threads are scrubbed forever every 48 hours. No one can track or attack your comments. No more bullies, no further riches for Zuckerberg and Dorsey.

So there you have it. A place to get mad as hell and speak your mind freely.

A radical notion in these times of silence and suppression.

And a final word from a man who is himself one of the greatest champions of a free, unmuzzled, and honest press in the world today:

Keep reading Takimag while having the best and healthiest Christmas and New Year. —Taki