The Protesting from the Left

The left picks and chooses randomly who or what they are protesting or boycotting on any given day. Nothing makes sense as the protesters are useful idiots who protest for a wage.

The leftist pawns block the stores, shouting against Trump deleting DEI policies, calling out those who are pro-Israel and companies that support and sell Israeli products, and protesting those who co-operate with ICE such as Target.

While calling everyone they are told to disagree with fascists, the protesters inconvenience and harass minimum wage employees and customers who shop daily for food and necessities in places like Washington, D.C.

The leftist alphabet soup causes make little sense to the average American. One day they protest for gay people, another day they protest in support of Palestine where they kill gay people, another day they protest for women’s rights, and yet another day they protest the deportation of criminal aliens who rape and kill women.

And the following day, paid protesters, carrying identical, nicely printed signs, shout, and protest in support of illegals and Islamists. They consider these “refugees” equally protected under our U.S. laws and the U.S. Constitution, even though they are not American citizens nor admitted here lawfully. They were spread around the country in the most conservative locales in the dead of night, under the Obama and Biden administrations.

The problems that the Obama and Biden refugees create are self-evident in the state of Minnesota where the Somali population has reached critical mass.

Somalis are here allegedly for “freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom of press, equal protection under the law,” but their stated goal is Sharia Law in the enclaves that they built for themselves. They want Little Somalia with Sharia Law where they will outlaw freedom of religion, speech, and press. If anyone insults Islam, they receive the death penalty.

People forget that Egypt used to be Christian for six centuries and that all north Africa used to be Christian until they were conquered by Islam.

Seventy thousand Muslims invaded Spain in 711 A.D. under the command of Gen. Tariq at a mountain, Jabal in Arabic, (hence the name Gibraltar today) and it took Christians a long time to get rid of the invaders.

Muslims conquered one kingdom at a time and there was little resistance – so Christian kingdom after Christian kingdom fell prey to the Muslims invaders.

They were finally stopped in 732 A.D. outside Paris at the battle of Tours, one hundred years after the death of Mohammed in 632 A.D.

According to the New World Encyclopedia, the Ottoman Empire (Türkiye of today) waged wars in Europe for three hundred years, including areas of Hungary, Poland, and Greece.

The Romanian Principalities were a buffer zone between the Ottoman Empire and Western Europe. Starting in the 1400s with Vlad Tepes, the Romanian principalities fought the Ottomans for five hundred years.

A hero to the Romanian people to this day, Prince Vlad was born around 1430 and, as a boy, was held hostage by the Turks in a fortress called Egrigoz (“Crooked Eyes”). The violence and savagery encountered taught Prince Vlad survival.

As an adult he disposed of Turkish prisoners and his adversaries in the most gruesome way, by impaling them with a metal stake. His nickname became Vlad the Impaler.

When Turkish emissaries failed to remove their fezes in his presence, Vlad had them nailed to their heads. In his short reign of 10 years, Vlad had put to death at least 50,000 people. He was allegedly killed in 1476, but we do not have a historical account of what happened, only an empty tomb.

It is historically accurate to say that he saved Christian Europe from Islamic conquests and he supported peasants against the ruthless boyars (feudal lords of Eastern Europe); he restored order in a principality torn by civil strife and constant invasions by the Ottoman empire demanding heavy tribute in gold.

It was thus surprising when Western Europe began importing Muslims in the 21^st century from the Middle East and Africa, Muslims who built enclaves in large cities across Europe; areas became quickly no-go zones for the local population.

These military age Muslims became wards of the welfare system and brought in their wives, children, and extended families who were also added to the welfare rolls.

They made no efforts to become contributing members of society, while making constant demands and complaints which were addressed by politicians and the law to the detriment of the locals who were discouraged to protest or verbalize their complaints by the fear of imprisonment. Rapes were unpunished and swept under the rugs of justice.

This self-destruction of western society has unfortunately spread across the Atlantic Ocean to the United States and Americans, just like Europeans, are allowing their society to destroy itself from within. Islamists, who have made their way to our shores with the help of the Obama and Biden administrations, use our tolerance and the legal system against us, winning places in society and in politics that are off limits to Americans.

The red-green axis of power (communists, climate lunatics, fascists, and Islam) is becoming stronger. Americans are doing nothing to defend their culture, their country, and their civilization. On the contrary, the young generations protesting for hire in support of criminals and of Islamists, are aiding and abetting the destruction of their own civilization and future.

 

Our Lives and "The Lives of Others"

“Das Leben des Anderen” is a 2006 German drama that describes in painful detail what life was like in the communist East Berlin of 1984, almost six years before the fall of the Berlin Wall, how ordinary and not so ordinary citizens were spied upon by their government, using agents of the infamous Stasi, the German Democratic Republic’s secret police. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n3_iLOp6IhM

The movie is not important because it showed how a famous actress was spied upon, her life, trials, and tribulations and the spying minions who answered to the Kommunistische Partei (Communist Party). It is important because it shows the drab and meager daily life of fear, uncertainty, and horror that people in general endured under communist regimes.

Like the actress in the movie, homes were bugged; all telephone conversations were recorded and listened to. All incoming and outgoing mail was opened, read, and copied by small bureaucrats whose job was to report anything out of the ordinary and catalog their daily blogs.

The secret police did not have sophisticated wireless technology to spy on citizens like we have today. They also did not seek nor need warrants to record everything people did or said in their homes, cars, on the phone, social media sites, or by email. They had the oppressive power of government on their side and technology was not advanced to the level that it is today.

There are so many ways now to cheat and steal personal and corporate information online and on the Dark Web that ethical hacking, penetration testing, and cybersecurity expertise have become real job descriptions.

Computer experts, in cooperation with law enforcement agencies, have infiltrated the dark web globally to expose child predators and human trafficking by capturing live podcasts of predators. This is the positive side of online hacking.

It is not just the utility companies scanning our homes via smart meters for presumably just water, electricity, and gas consumption patterns; other companies and individuals invade our privacy via wireless devices, listening and watching everything we do and say, without a judicial warrant; we are being scanned from every direction 24/7.

Companies listen to our phones and bombard us minutes later with ads for products and drugs we discussed privately on the phone or searched online.

Thanks to social media, no informers must be hired to spy on us, we volunteer information daily. The huge databases that our government and private agencies are building on us would be the envy of the Stasi and of any former communist dictator’s spying soldiers and primitive machines. Without advanced technology, the Stasi was quite successful in keeping their population under control.

People under communism were asked to divulge to the Financial Police (that would be the equivalent of the IRS) what they owned, how much money they had hidden in the house, how they purchased certain goods, and why they ate sometimes better food than what was available on the market. Community organizers, not unlike ACORN, patrolled the streets. In exchange for better rations of food or a small monthly stipend, individuals were assigned per block of apartments to record the comings and goings into each apartment.

GPS tracking in our smart phones, cars, boats, appliances, cable TV, cameras, social sites, credit card purchases, streaming, online purchases, flights, and shopping enable faceless individuals to track us and our lives daily, information that is stored in all the AI data centers now mushrooming all over the country. Once all cash is replaced with digital currency, governments will be able to control us, reward, and punish us, from birth to death.

Satellites can take pictures with extreme accuracy. Drones can spy in your bedroom as you sleep. Smart meters relay information to the mother ship about your gas, electricity, water consumption, your appliances, whether you are home, if you are using medical devices, and sports equipment. Appliances can talk to the grocery store and place food orders for you. The utilities companies can turn off your electricity, water, A/C, and gas whether you want it turned off or not.

Content usage is monitored and access blocked or allowed based on politics. Leftist business owners firewall sites that contradict their views. YouTube takes down videos that offend liberals, thus stifling freedom of speech. Academia censors conservative professors by denying them tenure.

Facebook has censored conservative users, writers, and content developers for years. Publishers often turn down good conservative writers. MSM promotes political correctness and liberal views.

No matter where you turn, agents and technology are watching you - they are empowered by non-elected government bureaucrats and corporatists to spy on the “lives of others.”

 

The Black Plague and Pandemics

Everyone has heard of the ten plagues of Egypt from the Book of Exodus – blood, frogs, lice, flies, livestock, boils, hail, locusts, darkness, and first-born. Then there were the waves of the Black Death, the plague that encompassed most of Europe and it changed the face of Europe forever.

Albrecht Durer depicted the awfulness of the Black Death in one of his black ink etchings, bringing attention to the repenting frenzy of the strange penitents known as the Brotherhood of Flagellants.

The order included both men and women. They believed that, if they whipped themselves to bleeding or allowed a Master of Pilgrimage to do the whipping, ripping their flesh with a scourge of leather thongs and pointed metal studs, then the plague would be lifted. The penitents endured this horror for thirty-three and a half days during which time they were not allowed to clean or treat their wounds. They had hoped to appease God in this manner. Thankfully, Pope Clement VI outlawed this strange sect in October 1349.

To the people of fourteenth century Europe, the plagues were God’s punishment for their sins. Twenty-five million Europeans died within four years, 1347-1351. They believed that self-punished might appease God to relent this scourge.

Nobody understood that plague bacteria were carried in the fur of black rats and spread by flea bites and from bodily fluids of infected humans. The bacillus Pasteurella pestis lives in the bloodstream or the stomach of a flea. The fleas’ favorite rodent for residence is Rattus rattus, the black rat.

Trade caravans from Central Asia, where the plague was endemic, carried the plague to China then to Crimea, and then by ship to the Mediterranean coast via trade routes and finally across Europe. It was believed that the rats fled from droughts or floods to China.

Not many Europeans were spared. Isolation, segregation, and heat worked to stop the infection and its spread.

The Archbishop of Milan ordered the first three houses where the bubonic plague was walled in with all the sick, dead, and healthy entombed within. The city was spared and nobody else got sick.

In his Decameron, the author Giovanni Boccaccio described the isolation of ten young patricians in a palazzo to avoid contact with people in plague-stricken Florence. They kept themselves entertained by telling stories as written in the Decameron. Segregation worked for them and for the area of present-day Poland which was spared the plague because a quarantine was imposed. Quarantine was isolation for forty days.

Pope Clement VI isolated himself at Avignon, France. He sat for weeks in summertime between two large fires constantly stoked. It worked because fire and heat repelled the fleas.

An English nobleman ordered the nearby village to be burned to the ground. No fleas, rats, or disease reached his castle, and his property was safe. It seemed that overpopulation and overcrowding in unsanitary conditions contributed to the spread of the plagues.

The plagues came in three forms, bubonic, pneumonic, and septicemic.

The bubonic variety appeared as swollen lymph nodes called buboes or boils in the armpits, groin, or the site of the flea bite.

The pneumonic variety infected the lungs, causing coughing and spitting of blood.

The deadliest was the septicemic plague where the bloodstream was invaded by bacteria and death occurred within hours.

Not everybody died of the plague. Many improved and their recovery was considered a miracle. Doctors prescribed bleeding, laxatives, enemas, burning of the buboes (sometimes it worked), aromatic woods burned to purify the air, rosewater and vinegar sprinkled on floors, special diets, and other strange concoctions.

The Black Death encompassed most of present-day Europe, all the way to Russia and the Black Sea, Constantinople, and Greece.

Following the loss of such a huge European population, the labor market changed; workers could ask for higher wages. Merchants had to sell grain and other commodities for lower prices.

As the population began to increase after the Black Death ended, new waves of plagues occurred centuries later. The epidemic of 1665 in London affected the population less as doctors learned better ways to control it. Still, thousands died. The 17^th century solution was to kill cats and dogs, the poor creatures that could have reduced the rat population carrying the fleas.

One of the famous plagues that hit the Roman Empire hard, the Antonine Plague, put an end to Pax Romana, according to Colin Elliott. Pax Romana represented two centuries of Roman domination of Europe, North Africa, and West Asia.

Millions died in the Empire, the population decline was so severe that a financial crisis followed, and borders were weakened. The 165 A.D. plague even killed one of the emperors. The pandemic lasted until 180 A.D., affecting the entire Empire. Marcus Aurelius could not save the Empire from pestilence, nor from the many other disasters of that time.

Interestingly, Marcus Aurelius only mentioned the Antonine plague once in all his twelve books of Meditations.

The second outbreak occurred in 251-266 A.D. which aggravated the effects of the earlier outbreak. Some historians are convinced that these plagues were the beginning of the ultimate fall of the Roman Empire in 476 A.D. The pandemic was a huge source of social, economic, and political disruption within the Roman Empire.

Galen described the symptoms of this pandemic. Some of the symptoms resembled smallpox and others appeared like the buboes of the plague.

As we have experienced, even with modern medicine and aggressive government intervention, the world suffered immensely from the Covid-19 pandemic.

 

Drab Grey Socialism and Communism Are Popular in the U.S.

If you ask the young American generations if they believe that capitalism is evil and socialism is good, they will answer with a definitive “yes.” When asked to explain the fundamental differences between the two and whether socialism is the steppingstone to communism, silence will follow.

They repeat the media sound bites that socialism is for “the people” and “things are free.” They do not know exactly what is free, but they enumerate things they want such as free abortions, free food, free housing, free schooling, free transportation, free day care, and free travel. None of these were free in socialist countries ruled by the Communist Party and nor are they free under capitalism. There is no such thing as a free meal, someone must pay for it.

The answers are sad, as they reveal the fact that young Americans have no historical idea about the end-product, communism, and its murderous and sordid history. They believe the media’s and the Democrat Party’s NGO’s disinformation machines that feed them lies daily on every platform possible.

Young women and Jews turned out in droves to vote for the self-described communist for Mayor of the largest U.S. city, a young man with no working experience, who had been an American citizen less than eight years. He promised rent control housing and city-run grocery stores among other things.

Communism has been promoted in public schools and in academia as the future of all Americans. Teachers shamelessly avoided teaching the subjects they were assigned and pushed political activism; they promoted communism verbally or through clever choices of class activities and assignments that had little to do with the subject matter and all to do with their political ideology of Democrat Socialism, a term invented by the left.

Imagine my surprise upon the realization that the corporate globalists have decided in the last few years to transform the face of our colorful society into a drab and communist-looking tapestry: the exterior of buildings, the depressing colors, the lack of colors and offerings in stores, the promotion of grey, ash, concrete grey, black, white, and brown, to include cars, a bothersome uniformity which I recognized from my previous 20 years lived under communism. Why would communism pick such drab, dark, dull, and uninspired colors? Because they wanted to keep the population under their control, oppressed, depressed, and sad. Everything became a soul-less grey and darker grey, barely lit train station as if to conceal the stains of misery.

I have noticed after the lockdowns that all public buildings, restaurants, fast food chains, and even apartment complexes had undergone a similar transformation of dark grey, black, brown, and beige everywhere.

Fast food buildings removed large windows and added small, prison-like windows, and the previously happy colors and signs disappeared. The choices of towels, furniture, cars, clothes, and other products have narrowed to the same basic colors, grey, black, white, beige and brown. Many excused this trend as minimalism. I knew it as Bauhaus utilitarian ugly.

The Bauhaus or Staatliches Bauhaus (state building house) was a German art school which existed between 1919 and 1933. Its vision of mass production and function was quickly adopted by all former Iron Curtain countries in Europe which started churning out ugly concrete block apartments where the helpless populations were herded into from their former homes and farms which the Communist Party had confiscated.

Walter Gropius’s (1883-1969) vision from Weimar spread into modern design, modernist architecture, graphic design, interior design, industrial design, and typography. The Bauhaus school was closed in 1933 under pressure from the Nazi regime who considered it “a center of communist intellectualism.”

Bauhaus spread internationally to the United States and to Tel Aviv via Jewish Bauhaus architect immigrants. According to some sources, “The White City of Tel Aviv has the highest concentration of Bauhaus architecture in the world.”

As Bauhaus spread increasingly across the world, selected and pushed by globalist corporate controllers, it is no surprise that the color chosen for this decade is grey and the style is Bauhaus utilitarian.

Recently, while visiting my favorite department store which was always decorated by red, white, and green everything, long before the Christmas season, I was unpleasantly surprised to see the Christmas decorations in the form of a grey table with grey chairs, grey plates, black glasses, and white napkin holders. One solitaire painting of a red bush surrounded by green background was overlooking the dismal and funereal décor.

It is not just about depressing the population with ugly buildings, cars, and grey, it is about the global transformation of the west into a socialist/communist society to better control the hapless population in every way.

The freedom to choose anything will completely disappear once digital currency will be imposed on all citizens.

Ronald Reagan aptly said, “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.”

And that refers to the freedom to choose anything we want or dream of, including the colors in our lives.

Cash is King and Freedom

My grandmother always kept cash under the mattress, and my grandfather stashed his precious silver and gold coin collection in a tin box which he hid in a special place he thought was safe. But I knew about it because I saw him one day.

When the Russian soldiers “liberated” the country after WWII, they confiscated most valuables they found, including cash. Whatever they missed, the Bolshevik communists behind them confiscated the rest, even digging up his small tractor he had buried in the garden.

The communist economy, from then until December 1989, was cash-based and barter-based, nobody had checking accounts and credit cards were something nobody knew existed in capitalism. The bartering as a medium of exchange was out of necessity to survive.

Everybody carried around large amounts of rolled up cash because people never knew when they walked by a grocery store with a long line of people, waiting for certain staples of food that would be delivered and, if they had the money, they stood in line to buy whatever was sold because they would need it, if not today, for sure tomorrow or in the near future.

Cash is a convenient medium of exchange; often the exchange happened between an underground-economy seller and a customer who did not want to stand in line and was willing to pay the price asked.

Cash is used for purchases from sources other than stores, for paying someone to mow the lawn or do a simple repair job. Illegal gambling is a cash-based part of the economy. Drug trafficking and human trafficking are also based on enormous amounts of cash, and no legal records are ever kept. And the government never receives any taxes.

People have used commodity money to pay for goods and services. Commodity money is an object used as a medium of exchange; such commodity money has value in alternative, non-monetary uses. Examples of commodity money could include cattle, stones, candy bars, chocolate, panty hose, gold, silver, copper, cigarettes, soap bars, woodpecker scalps, porpoise teeth, giraffe tails, etc.

Bartering can be useful in smaller, rural areas but it is much harder in large cities because it is based on the coincidence of wants. Our economy is much more complex to allow a smooth provision of goods and services just based on coincidences of wants.

The problem with commodity money is that it has be easily divisible, readily identifiable, uniform, storable, durable, and compact. Of all the commodity money, gold and silver hold the most value, are most compact, and do not require refrigeration. Currently, gold has already surpassed $4,000 per troy ounce which is approximately thirty-one grams.

Gold and silver coins had been struck for 2,500 years. Paper money was invented by the Chinese in the eleventh century, and Marco Polo brought the idea of cash to Europe.

Ironically, the modern Chinese were the first to implement digital currency on their billion plus citizens, all tied to the social credit score system. This allows citizens to have an economic life, travel, fly, go on vacations, medical care, school tuition, food, and other necessities based on their social credit score, i.e., how they behave in society and whether the government approves of their behavior, what they say and do.

Cash is king and represents freedom, but the globalist plan wants to replace it with digital currency across the globe, removing any possibility of hiding sources of income, wealth, and economic activities that do not generate taxes for the globalist government. The digital currency becomes the absolute tool to control all economies, all income, the ultimate mean of power and control.

As more and more places refuse to take cash as a form of payment, our cash will disappear from the global and domestic markets. The “greenbacks,” named so after Salmon P. Chase, Secretary of the Treasury to Lincoln, who picked the green color for our legal tender banknotes, will disappear.

All our freedoms depend on cash, however devalued the "greenbacks" may be because of the overspending by Congress and the constant printing of it by the Treasury.

 

 

 

 

Hurry Slowly

It is early October, the days are cooler, trees are shedding their yellow and brown leaves, but my lilac and azaleas have bloomed again. The azaleas did not surprise me, they are biannual bloomers, but the purple lilac did. The flowers appeared on the tip of dormant branches after the green leaves have turned brown and fallen off. The blooms are still fragrant despite their smaller size and the lack of leaves. One guy was complaining in a highly surprised voice on a reel video that his apple tree bloomed this October as well and he could not explain why.

Today I walked in the green grass that grew tall as if to make up for the dry summer when the arid lawn turned into a carpet of scorched yellow. No amount of watering helped and I finally gave up.

The footpath to the lake, well-tracked by deer coming through daily, is semi-green, even as the weeds have started dying. I am walking on the same path my mom used to stroll daily with our beloved cat Bogart. She used her straw hat to shield her eyes from the sun and the handle of an old broom to steady her gait through the tall grasses.

The neighbor on the other side of the pond used to mow the weeds surrounding the pond because he was afraid mom would get bitten by a snake crawling from its nest or from the water to warm in the sun. There was no young snake wrangler Gabe to protect her, so the best move was to mow the tall grass, carving a safe path for my elderly mom.

Her picture walking this path has made it into my children’s book, Being Bogart. I cherish that moment in time and the memory of it when I snapped the picture. I still have her colorful straw hat, resting by her glasses and the last piece of crocheted doily she made from memory with red thread during her art classes. Red was mom’s favorite color.

Today I am wearing a white straw hat which I purchased on Hollywood Beach during a hot August day while strolling on the boardwalk with my daughter Mimi and my husband. We bought new beach shoes too that day and we tried them in the crystal blue waters of Florida’s Atlantic Ocean.

This straw hat reminded me that I have finally become my mother after all, salt, and pepper hair too, more salt than pepper, a slow and unsteady gait helped by my regular hiking sticks. Regaining my ability to walk after a severe relapse of MS with transverse myelitis is giving me a new appreciation for life and for the ability to walk however slowly.

Years ago, when mom started walking unhurriedly because of arthritis and ageing, we were at the track, and she implored me to slow down at her pace. Sometimes I did, sometimes I did not – I walked faster or ran. As a young person, I took my ability to walk and fast for granted. Little did I know that fate was going to teach me a very painful and valuable lesson – if we are lucky to live long enough, fast walking or walking at all becomes a thing of the past.

Now it is my turn to feel what mom must have felt in the twilight of her physical ability but never expressed to me so clearly how disappointed she was that I rushed life and did not heed the old Latin saying, Festina lente, (Hurry slowly).

Now MS has forced me to slow down in many ways, and I came to the realization that I am my mom now - life and mobility are precious.

My hat is not mom’s gardening hat; it is more fashionable but still a hat which I must embrace with twilight dignity.

Bacon, Beans, and Moldy Flour

John Wesley Powell's expedition floating down the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon in 1869 was running low on food rations; the storage had flour, smoked bacon, and beans but they were becoming increasingly moldy from the frequent dunking by the large waves and rapids. Every member of the expedition was dreaming about real food with each moldy meal they consumed. Hunting was eluding them and so was fishing. If they spotted a deer or a goat, it disappeared before they got closer to it. One day, one of the expedition's adventurers, Hawkins, was seen carrying the sextant up a hill. Not being known as a scientific mind, Powell asked him what he was doing with the sextant. Hawkins replied, "I am measuring the latitude and longitude of the closest pie."