Stop the Presses! Cheney Dies, We Reflect on Published Knowledge

    While family visits Meinz, or Mainz, or wherever the Guttenberg press was invented, in the heart of Germany, perhaps formerly Prussia in the times of the princes and feudalists developing their gears and letter blocks, and their ways of speaking and writing and then publishing, their Deutschish tongues and vowels and consonants. 

    My wife thinks she could learn to sprecken it if she was there for six months. Fiel gluch, meine fraulein! Who knows? We can never tell where we will end up. It would be painful for me to learn it. Not enough speakers, not far enough from my Germanic English native tongue.

    I speak Spanish, and then learned Portuguese, with Arabic over the years... French pops in there, also closer to my native understandings...

    So, certain people think that I write some stuff on everyone that dies. Okay, not true. Many people die that I never even know about! Hundreds and thousands have died in Afghanistan lately, from earthquakes. Then there are the drug runners on the open seas in the Caribbean and the Pacific.

    Oh, Hegseth and Trump, you make quite a team. Maybe Vance gets some love for these deaths too. Not as bad as the medically deprived in Africa by the US AID cuts, but rather constitutionally challenged acts of death hits against the boats.

    Dick Cheney died, age 84. He did a lot in our country, and a lot abroad, like what we did in Iraq. I am not as concerned as much about the lack of found Weapons of Mass Destruction as I was chagrined by the firing, dismissal of half a million Iraqi police and troops. No money, no bueno, Dick. Ay yai yai.

    Your daughter now has quite the legacy. She likely would not have rose to her status without you, who knows?

    84. You were rich and powerful; some thought it was all about lucre and might.

    Maybe? You were a patriot, but maybe an elitist.

    What else?

    My daughter published! So awesome. She wrote about a totem, of sorts, if I may, which I have seen going back through the years, the Venus figurine, with over-emphasized body parts, which she wrote as conjecture that perhaps that is the perspective of the female looking at her own body. Maybe so. But, as a dude, I can see why male artists might hyperbolize those body parts, too.

    Publishing and research makes me search my memories, and leads me to think of the papers that I wrote growing up, many of which had their bibliographies and works cited, based on books, magazines, articles and essays that we would find in the good old days before the Internet. We could type our papers, or print them on the old noisy printers that we had in the days of the perforated sides. I kept a few of them, which may be among my boxes in the attic of my house, well into the 21st century.

    I have a hard time throwing those works away. Many have the comments of the teachers who graded them. Mr. Courtney gave me wonderful superlatives, like complimenting me on subjects of which I reported that he "had never heard of", or "knew little of". Wow!

    To teach a teacher! 

    What is better?

    To teach ourselves. To reach the masses. To strive for education, enlightenment, stretch the mind and the soul.

    To learn, to share, to celebrate, commemorate, the living and the dead.

    Rest in peace, former Vice President Richard Cheney, master puppet manipulator, uber patriot, or whatever people will think of you. Iraq is doing okay in 2025, no?

    The bio weapons that Saddam gassed Kurds with in Halabja perhaps moved to Syria (when our troops occupied the Land of the Two Rivers) where Bashar Al-Assad would later gas his victimized minorities.

   Good riddance, despotic and cruel beyond words Arab strong men, and torturers!

    Cheney was better than you, in the end; but look where he came from.

    The U.S. has more freedom and power, and perhaps it is easier to be a fairer power broker here than in the Middle East.

    Publish that.

    Cite that.