Sunset Over an Empire

As the sun is setting, it is casting long shadows of objects on the white sandy beach. I never get tired of watching its beauty reflected on the ocean whipped endlessly by the currents. If the weather cooperates, we have a good chance of experiencing again the sunset’s beauty across the sky.

The churning ocean, the shimmering lakes and rivers, the land, the deep gorges, the forests, and the mountains, will be bathed in the last hues of intense orange, pink, and purple before darkness falls.

But the sunset of our ‘empire’ we call a constitutional republic is hard to watch. Its demise is painful, sad, and depressing because it is self-destructive and purposeful, aided by the ignorance and laziness of we the people.

Many from the left seem eager and willing to replace capitalism with communism. The answer to the obvious question of why is simple. Because they have no historical background or actual knowledge that would help them understand the evils of communism. Teachers, Hollywood, and the press have lied to them about communism, directly, or by omission.

One public school teacher in Arlington, Virginia, told her class that “communism is people continuously giving gifts to each other.” Tell that to the millions living under communism who received the gift of a bullet for not bending their knee quick enough to the theft by the communist rulers.

One American commented that her “grandfather received the gift of ‘beatings’ every night for months until he was forced to give up his farm to the lazy people in the village.”

E. Merkel wrote, “Americans frequently quote parts of the New Testament and say that it supports Socialism/Communism. Which of course betrays the fact that they have no understanding of Christianity or Christian principles. With the original first century Christians, giving was completely voluntary, out of the goodness of their hearts and knowledge of the ‘gift’ they had been given. Socialism/Communism completely removes the ‘voluntary’ aspect.”

Few Americans understand what communism is. Although they are told by those who survived the communist regime and fled it, Americans turn a blind eye and deaf ear. The most basic questions they should ask themselves is, if communism is so great, why were millions of communist subjects killed by the Communist Party, and why so many escaped and fled to this country if communism was so great?

“Communism indoctrinates children to make up false accusations against their parents and neighbors; the culprits are disappeared but the snitches are assured the favors of the communist police state. Communism destroys beautiful art, buildings, and statuary they label bourgeois. They destroy beauty because not everyone and everything else is beautiful. They have misery, starvation, and murder in gulags. After the Bolsheviks’ initial promises never panned out, people realized that they sold their souls to the communist devils for lies.”

Under the communist regime, people were isolated, worn out, hungry, and deprived of their ability to resist. Remember the isolation from loved ones, from church, from social gatherings, social distancing, solitary confinement, and forced isolations during Covid-19? We were forced to comply or else be arrested, just like they forced us to comply with the communist party rule.

Because people were paid so extraordinarily little, they could not afford to travel far and certainly not abroad. They thus restricted our movement to a small radius of the place where we were born and lived. Village people were not allowed to move to the city without the explicit approval of the Communist Party.

Information was censored, meetings and gatherings were forbidden, media was dominated by the state rule 24/7. No other views were allowed. Again, this is remarkably like the 2020 Covid-19 lockdowns and how the police state managed the population and curtailed its freedoms. I could go to the swimming pool at the gym, but I had to wear a mask.

We were worn out by tension and fear under communism and by the inability to find enough food or any food at all, medicines, medical care, and by having to stand in interminable lines for basic food items like bread, milk, sugar, flour, and cooking oil.

Remember the contradictory “advice” and constant fear drilled into Americans from the White House platform of Dr. Fauci about Covid-19? You had to stay home, not permitted to socialize, or exercise even outdoors in large parks.

They closed National Parks, state parks, and even regional parks. They closed clean and safe building facilities and brought out port-o-potties in a huge state park nearby. When parks were allowed to reopen eventually, people were wearing masks alone in the woods; that is what abject fear had reduced them to – automatons who did things that made no logical sense.

The Communist Party cultivated an environment of fear and despair, not unlike the Covid-19 lockdowns and the accompanying irrational fears created by carefully crafted public announcements and artificial decrees that violated people’s rights and freedoms. The futility to resist eventually dominated everybody’s behavior. They knew who was in charge, the police state, and they had guns and lots of jails.

Even though demands were illogical and contradictory, people were habituated to following orders or else they were refused basic needs. Why the arbitrary six feet between people and all the other arbitrary and ridiculous dictates? If people disobeyed, they were refused entry into grocery stores, restaurants, public places like parks, pharmacies, etc. Similar scenarios happened under communist rule. People had to obey, or they had their freedoms taken away for good and their families never saw them again.

Why did the communists allow snitches and their own echelons of apparatchiks to shop for better and more food than the rest? To show everyone who was in charge and to create and maintain an army of faithful foot soldiers.

Why were entire economies shut down then only a few businesses were allowed to reopen at a reduced capacity? The virus recognized those to be safe and stayed away?

Surveillance was developed around the world, money created from nothing to pay people to stay home and “be happy,” medical care and hospitals became torture places instead of deliverers of care; to this day, people do not trust them and doctors because they refused care when people needed it.

Why shame people and ostracize them when they were non-compliant? It is a tactic that the communists used a lot. Fear and a sense of helplessness and dependence heightened to unbelievable levels. Depression, despair, divorces, and suicides increased.

Trivial demands split society and families, i.e., family members had to stand apart and wear masks to dinner in their own homes, random limits on the number of people allowed to be in a group, even in their own homes, the use of sanitizers endlessly during the day and on all objects people touched.

The habit of compliance drilled into people’s minds is evident today when some people are still wearing masks, still injecting themselves with Covid-19 vaccine boosters, and still sanitizing their hands with chemicals instead of washing them.

People have become so irrational and woke that, even when presented with factual and logical evidence to the contrary of what they believe, they reject those facts and stick with their irrational beliefs.

Yuri Bezmenov said in a 1984 interview about the four stages of ideological subversion, that when human beings reject reality in front of their eyes, the brainwashing is complete. FULL INTERVIEW with Yuri Bezmenov: The Four Stages of Ideological Subversion (1984) (youtube.com)

When that happens to many Americans, the sun will set on the most successful constitutional republic in the history of the world, and the ‘empire’ will rest at the bottom of the dustbin of history and darkness will fall enduringly.

 

 

 

 

Gabriel the Snake Wrangler

The river and the owl are talking to the night. The moon is casting dancing shadows in the forest when the wind is rustling through the verdant canopy and the pond nearby. I am mesmerized by the phantasmagorical visions created by the wind.

The sounds, the darkness, the moonlight, the visible stars, the dancing shadows of light streaming are the only evidence of life. But there is a web of life out there in the woods and in the pond.

Creatures large and small, birds, butterflies, a lone blue hummingbird come out of the woods during the day, grazing, or munching on acorns, weaving a beautiful carpet of life on which we all tread from time to time, aware of ticks and throngs of mosquitoes.

Many animals visit my yard, and I watch them in silence. One hummingbird flew by one September day; I have not seen any all summer long. The occasional human walks this far around the pond or to the edge of the woods. The most frequent visitor is Gabriel. His head of blond curls shines in the sunlight against the always green weeds and the shimmering pond.

This amazing and fearless nine-year-old little boy is a snake wrangler. Although color-blind, his passion is to catch and release snakes around the pond. He finds them in the corner of the pond where they built a nest under a pile of rocks. There are some venomous varieties, but Gabriel somehow can tell them apart by the pattern on their heads and bodies. He knows where to find them because snakes seldom venture out further than the 100-ft radius from their den.

Gabriel is amazing! He loves nature and all its critters. They do not raise children like this little boy anymore. Kids were raised into strong little humans who did chores around the house, cut wood, spent time in the wilderness and learned survival skills.

Playgrounds are silent and motionless now. Children stay indoors, seldom go outside to play, scrape their knees, run, to learn to take falls in stride, play in the park in the sandbox, on the merry-go-round, climb the jungle gym, and ride their bikes. If they do play outside at all on their playdates with other highly protected children, they wear helmets.

The Marxist Foxes in the Henhouse

The Marxist Foxes have been in our henhouse for a long time. Most people were not aware or listened to Hollywood vilifying Joe McCarthy by calling everyone admitting the existence of communism among us as McCarthyism – a dirty word in the world of leftist political correctness (PC) promoted heavily by the media, educators, and academics alike. In this atmosphere of public indoctrination, the new world order (NOW) thrived.

Woodrow Wilson’s famous Fourteen Points, the last of which called for the creation of the League of Nations (1920), was written by Colonel Edward Mandell House. This League of Nations ceased to exist on April 20, 1946, when it handed all its assets to the United Nations. “

Less than a month after Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt issued a ‘Declaration of United Nations.’”  The U.N. introduced in 1961 a Program for General and Complete Disarmament in a Peaceful World which planned to transfer all nations’ military power to the U.N. which would have only police power. The idea of a global military power under the U.N.’s control failed, and the global governance/new world order was redesigned.

The new design was the U.N. Agenda 21/Agenda 2030, using climate change control as a weapon for everything. The lynchpin became Sustainable Development (SD), the transfer of wealth from rich nations to poor nations, and the destruction of western capitalism. The accidental travelers of the climate change industry were more than happy to undersign and follow this process.

Maurice Strong and Mikhail Gorbachev “promoted the creation and distribution of the Earth Charter with the idea to replace the Ten Commandments with their idea of global green religion.” www.earthcharterinaction.org/content/pages/Read-the-Charter.html

Dr. Robert Muller developed the World Core Curriculum based on James Lovelock’s Gaia Hypothesis, the idea that “earth itself is a living organism, the giver of life, that every species is equal in value; and that both animate, and inanimate objects have rights.” Textbooks and television shows are promoting this idea to students across the U.S.

As bizarre as this sounds, Muller claimed that “every species is a cell in the global organism and that the evolution of the United Nations represents the development of the earth’s brain.”

Less than a month after the creation of the United Nations, UNESCO was formed in 1945, with its first director at the helm, Julian Huxley. Julian, an evolutionary biologist, was Aldous Huxley’s brother, the author of Brave New World.

The very first project of UNESCO was to teach the world’s educators how to indoctrinate their students to be citizens of the world. Students were taught that “nationalism was bad and had to be replaced with the idea of world citizenship.”

The United Nations has devolved from being the peacekeeper of the world into something else, with a myriad of NGOs. For a long time, U.S. presidents have appeased and allowed communist tyrants and other dictatorships in the United Nations as allies and pacified them with financial help.

Thus, the scourge of communism was never really defeated in 1990 as stated by the media, historians, and other colluding organizations. The taxpayers unwittingly assisted its move across the Atlantic to the United States where it took solid roots and started growing like a wildfire.

H. W. Bush’s New World Order is now in the last stages of implementation thanks to the United Nations and its NGOs funded by U.S. taxpayers. The U.N. is also aided by the Fifth Column in America which is sympathetic to and collaborating with our enemies.

Ever since Cecil Rhodes established The Secret Society in 1891, a group of highly influential individuals who shared his vision, and Edward M. House formed The Inquiry in the U.S., the fate of the world was sealed.

Upon Cecil Rhodes’ death, Alfred Milner took over and the group was renamed the Chatham House Gang because they bought the Chatham House where they met.

Edward M. House’s group, The Inquiry, became known as the Council on Foreign Relations and the Chatham House Gang became the Royal Institute for International Affairs.

Woodrow Wilson made significant efforts to establish a global association of nations. He “filled his administration with members of the Council on Foreign Relations and they developed his legislative agenda.”

According to Curtis B. Dall, Roosevelt’s son-in-law, “… most of his [Roosevelt’s] thoughts, his political ammunition … was carefully manufactured for him in advance by the CFR-One World money group.” (The Rise of Global Governance DVD, Part 2 at 9:24)

The CFR was so influential that they wrote George W. Bush’s “Security and Prosperity Partnership” which proposed to erase the borders with Canada and Mexico, creating the North American Union, not unlike the creation of the European Union.

The New World Order/Global Governance includes all policies/schemes created by non-elected bureaucrats from international institutions that “… limit the social, educational, financial, and business behavior of individuals, organizations, and companies.” These non-elected bureaucrats form a group who believes that a “benevolent government populated by the enlightened intelligentsia should manage society.”

The other players in this global governance/new world order are the World Economic Forum (WEF), the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), the Bilderbergers, and the Trilateral Commission.

CFR has a membership of 5,000 with a select group at its core. According to Alex Newman, CFR has a “’corporate membership’ that includes the world’s largest bailed-out mega-banks, Big Oil, Big Pharma, crony capitalists, the military industrial complex, publishing houses, and much of the establishment media.”

U.S. Admiral Chester Arthur, a CFR member for 20 years, wrote in his book, Kissinger on the Couch, that “within the CFR there exists a ‘much smaller group but more powerful … made up of Wall Street international bankers and their agents.’”  This faction is “headed by the Rockefeller brothers.”

The Trilateral Commission is more elite and international, founded in 1973 by the late globalist and self-described conspirator for a one world order David Rockefeller. He was a CFR member since 1941and chair of the board from 1970 to 1985, and honorary chair until his death in 2017 at the age of 101. (Alex Newman, “Deep State: The Invisible Government Behind the Scenes, 2020)

Bilderberg was founded in 1954 by “former Nazi SS member Prince Bernhard” and met initially at Hotel de Bilderberg in the Netherlands, hence the name. It is a “forum for informal discussions, designed to foster dialogue.” Analysts refer to the Bilderbergers as the secret global government.

According to Alex Newman, each meeting has “between 120 and 150 attendees, most of whom come from Europe and North America, representing every tentacle of establishment power.” The world’s most influential people and useful journalists are invited to attend – “Big Government, Big Green, Big Media, Big Oil, Big Espionage, Big Banks, Big War, Big Internet, Big Foundations, Big Communism, Big Data, and most of the other important ‘Bigs.’” (Alex Newman)

The World Economic Forum (WEF), founded in 1971 by a German engineer, Klaus Schwab, is a non-governmental organization (NGO) based in Geneva, Switzerland. It is funded by its 1,000 member companies, each with more than $5 billion in capital, with the goal of “improving the state of the world by engaging business, political, academic, and other leaders of society to shape global, regional, and industry agendas.”

WEF claims that a globalist world is best managed by multinationals, government, and civil society organizations via initiatives like the Great Reset and Global Redesign. Citizens need not participate as the rich and powerful know best what is good for them.

To achieve the New World Order fully, all of America’s historic principles must be destroyed – borders, sovereignty, freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, the right to bear arms, all divergent opinions, and historical facts.

Covid 19 lockdowns served as a beta test for the New World Order – the controllers wanted to know how far they could push the population in the face of abject fear.

WEF admitted that “Covid 19 was a test of social responsibility – a huge number of unimaginable restrictions for public health adopted by billions of citizens across the world.” They were testing us to see how we would comply with a “new normal.” And the global population responded quite obediently when faced with the world’s largest psychological experiment. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/09/my-carbon-an-approach-for-inclusive-and-sustainable-cities/

Billionaires and corrupt politicians are working non-stop with other globalists to achieve the New World Order by 2030 with the help of groups of elected and unelected individuals, most of whom work in the shadows.

 

 

Art Presenting Communism Truthfully

I came across one episode of a popular series, Northern Exposure, that ran in the 1990-1995. Highly popular then, it received many accolades, and the main actors were nominated for and received several awards for their excellent performance.

The streaming episode in question, number 25, entitled Zarya, aired during season five. For me, it was shocking because the entire show advocated for capitalism and against communism. There was even a brief plug for the crowd pushing global warming caused by CO2.

I was accustomed to Hollywood supporting all socialist and communist causes, praising the tyranny that had killed one hundred million innocent people around the world, including my own dad.

I knew that public school students and college students only received a cursory introduction to the evils, misery, famine, torture, and death that all communist societies inflicted on their citizens with the Communist Party at the helm.

The communist ideology, adopted by socialist republics in lock step with the Soviet Union, originally stemmed from Karl Marx, Lenin, and Stalin. All these countries were socialist republics run by the Communist Party under the guidance and advice of the Soviet Politburo apparatchiks.

The episode presented an imaginary and secret visit by a Soviet delegation led by Lenin to Alaska post the tumultuous times when the Soviets deposed the Romanovs in Russia.

As truth has become a victim of the lies spewed by politicians, the mass media, academia, and the government, it is important to describe what some of the characters said during this highly interesting episode of Northern Exposure.

One of the Russian characters, Mikhail Borisovich, a medical doctor who accompanies the group, refuses to go back to Russia with Lenin, not because he had lost faith in the Bolshevik Revolution, but because, as a scientist, he was no longer sure that “life can be reduced to class struggle, to dialectical materialism, or any set of formulas. Life is spontaneous and it is unpredictable,” he said to the fictional Lenin.

The show ended with the fictional narrative that, “after his return from Alaska, Lenin instituted the New Economic Policy which allowed for limited private enterprise. The policy revived the Soviet economy but was scorned by hardline party members. After Lenin’s death, Stalin abolished Lenin’s reforms and returned the Soviet Union to ‘Pure Socialism.’”

The loose connection to the show’s location, the fictional Cicely, Alaska, was brought about by the fact that Tsar Alexander II had ceded Alaska, his country’s last remaining foothold in North America, to the United States for $7.2 million.

The real Lenin did propose a New Economic Policy (NEP) in 1921 where a mixed economy with a free market and capitalism, both subject to state control while operating on a “profit basis.” The economy was mixed when the Soviets revoked partially the complete nationalization of industry and allowed a mixed economy to exist for a short while.

The show’s storyline reveals what Lenin’s communist-controlled society wrought: confiscation of private property, total control by the state, politically and economically, hunger, starvation, and the lack of basic goods and freedoms.

A very hungry Comrade Borisovich is plied with the abundance of decent food in capitalism, and he eats the offerings on the capitalist table like the starved and hungry socialist that he was – a doctor working for Soviet Polyclinic number 6. His female interlocutor reminds him that on Nevsky Prospekt, he could not buy a new pair of socks nor needle and thread to darn the ones he has.

The fictional Lenin visits the local shop to buy bunion shields. He explains to the elderly shop owner that, “unfortunately, for all the triumphs of our Revolution, the quality of shoes has declined.” The well-informed shop owner tells Lenin that she has read about his Soviet Union. “If you remove the profit incentive, you get shoddy merchandise.”

Lenin counters that “the middlemen, brokers, like the owner of this shop, are economic parasites.” She tells him proudly that she is the owner of the shop. “You mean your husband,” he replies. “I mean me. Why would you presume otherwise?” Lenin replies, “given the subservient position of women in capitalist society.”

“You utopian social engineers are all alike,” she replied to Lenin. “If Karl Marx had made some capital instead of writing about capital, things would have been much better.” Lenin was shocked that such a “well-adjusted woman could live in a bourgeois society.”  He was accustomed to Soviet political commissars controlling everything and everybody.

Capitalism is not perfect, but it does not deny the existence of the soul, of God, of the inventive minds of people who are unique individuals with God-given rights to explore all possibilities and opportunities to become the best that they can be, not hobbled by the communist police state.

It is surprising that Hollywood produced this episode in 1993, so soon after the “fall” of the Soviet Union in 1990. It would be ideal if public schools in the 21^st century America would teach students in detail how socialism and communism had enslaved and terrorized millions around the globe. This education would dispel any positive opinions young people have about communism.

The Globalist Communists

The communist tyrant Ceausescu’s favorite descriptor for any person who held anti-communist views was “reactionary.” He even called Republicans “reactionary.” Any human who was not a communist was a “reactionary.”

Since he took power in 1965, Ceausescu was the absolute ruler of everybody and everything. His dear leader portraits were hung in public buildings, offices, courts, classrooms, stores, on building fronts, and stores.

Anything the tyrant wished became law with a scrawl of his pen. He could make life unbearable for anyone. All the domestic media belonged to him and entertained his every whim.

Scinteia (the spark) was the “official voice of the Communist Party.” As the main indoctrinating rag, Scinteia dedicated its front page to stories of what Ceausescu did the day before, “praising his leadership in every facet of life.”

Every day the radio and television broadcasts ended with the lying praise, “to the most adored and esteemed son of the Romanian people.” People who were not boot lickers of the Communist Party, hated his guts.

From time-to-time important people defected to the west; Ceausescu was humiliated and took such defections personally. The defectors were painful thorns in his side, and he ordered their immediate capture and assassinations.

It was not enough that he subjugated an entire population with his Communist Party philosophy of imprisonment, famine, and death. It was not enough that he stole their freedom, dignity, pride, and basic human rights. He wanted more, way beyond the cult of personality which he had built around his persona. He wanted to be the ultimate lord and god over their lives.

All came to a halt one day, not because people finally had the courage to revolt, they did not. Not because they were armed, they were not. Not because they were organized, they were not. (They snitched on their own families to get a few extra crumbs of food.) Not because the church united them, it did not. (The church worked with and for the Communist Party and against its own parishioners.)

Ceausescu was deposed in a KGB-GRU directed coup which installed its own Gorbachev protégé, Ion Iliescu, to power. The same Communist and Security police individuals stayed in place. Ceausescu and his wife were summarily executed, following a brief army-directed trial on Christmas Day 1989.

People do not realize that they can vote themselves into socialism/communism regimes easily if they are not careful, but they cannot vote themselves out of socialism/communism.

After the Ceausescus’ double execution, “unfair and unfree elections took place, giving victory to Communists.” NSF (National Salvation Front) suppressed opposition parties and publications. The Security Police intimidated people like before.

Funderburk wrote that NSF-Iliescu-directed ‘miners’ beat up anti-Communist demonstrators and trashed the opposition parties’ offices. Under the new communist rule, the economy worsened during the winter of 1990-1991 when inflation tripled; wages stayed the same except for the miners’ wages.

The military-intelligence coup was planned months in advance by the Soviet KGB and GRU. They conspired with a pro-Soviet group in Bucharest to remove Ceausescu by using a popular uprising against Ceausescu. It was done to preserve communism and reorganized it under different communists. The army was told to side with the demonstrators and against the Ceausescus.

Funderburk wrote, “The coup was masterfully staged and televised to the world.” Even the victims of the “revolution,” shown as dozens of bodies allegedly gunned down by Ceausescu forces, were actually “bodies in a pauper’s grave in advance stages of decomposition.”

The National Salvation Front (NSF) President, Ion Iliescu, was a life-long communist, Central Committee member, and a friend of Gorbachev from their college days in Moscow.

The NSF Prime Minister, Petre Roman, belonged to one of the oldest communist families in Romania and close friends with Zoia Ceausescu (daughter of Nicolae and Elena).

Local and county-level Communist officials just changed their hats of allegiance to NSF.

NSF gave freedom of travel and emigration, allowed contacts with the West, small private enterprises, and created the “appearance of political participation for non-communists.”

But the electoral campaign and the actual election were a sham. NSF controlled everything – information, jobs, salaries, police operations, communication, television, radio, transportation, access to media, and every facet of life in Romania.

The opposition to the NSF commies had their offices ransacked, people beaten, some beaten to death, campaign headquarters broken into, all materials destroyed.

The election was stolen long before the actual balloting took place. Election day violations were widespread, ballot boxes were stuffed, ballots were pre-stamped for the Front (NSF), police agent monitored the polls, manually placed people’s ballots in boxes, and intimidated voters – secret voting was not possible.

Howard Phillips, an observer, witnessed widespread fraud at numerous voting precincts in and around Bucharest. He wrote, “in a country where going against the government can cost you your home, your job, your freedom, or even your life, it takes unusual courage for an impoverished peasant to risk voting against the NSF in such circumstances.”

The fraud was so unbelievable that over 17 million votes were cast in a country where the electorate was only 16 million. Yet the regime in Washington categorized the May 20, 1990, elections in Romania as fair.

Thus, the stage was set for the globalist communists to thrive over the next three decades. New foxes were in the henhouse.

 

Ways to Die in National Parks

Before we started on our journey to the Grand Canyon, I read the glossy travel brochures, the history behind important places, rocks, trails, the history behind its exploration, the original trailblazers, their victories, and failures. I was excited and ready to explore even though I had no intention of going down into the canyon based on my age and physical abilities.

Upon return, I brought three books which cured me of the desire to explore on foot anything having to do with national parks and the dangers hidden behind the beautiful landscapes, the rock facades, the verdant mountain forests, and the wild animals residing within.

Recently, while on the official boardwalk of a Yellowstone Park thermal area, the tourists were too close to an erupting volcano, and did not run away immediately; they appeared stopped in their tracks, mesmerized by the sudden explosion of hot mud and gases. Only when they felt the heat and smelled the burning ashes did they decide to run away. I hope nobody got burned from that sudden and unexpected eruption.

To say that there are hidden dangers in parks, it is a mild description of all the things that can kill you. I know that we cannot spend our lives worrying about things that we have little control over, but we can be meticulous and not throw caution to the wind just because the view is breathtakingly beautiful and nature has its plans anyway, why fight it?

I learned that a gorge’s vastness, a park’s natural beauty, and wild animals can kill in so many ways. Experts claim that most of the time accidents and deaths happen because humans are uninformed, take foolish chances, don’t know much about their environment, step into wild animals’ habitat without being prepared or are prepared and die anyway, are not aware of dangers, don’t value their lives enough to take basic precautions, have really bad luck, or think that they are invincible in the face of terrible odds. Thus, people continue to tempt fate and die unnecessarily because of:

-         Scalding in thermal baths accidentally or on purpose to take in hot baths, not knowing that some water holes have temperatures more than 150 degrees Fahrenheit; some tourists accidentally step on a thin crust of dirt which gives way into a 205 degrees Fahrenheit water hole; others fall in while walking in the dark, drunk, or lost.

-         Drownings in deep lakes and due to swift currents in rivers such as the mighty Colorado; clothing bogs down with silt and even good swimmers are pulled to the bottom and drown.

-         Accidental falls of all types.

-         Falling trees and branches.

-         Falling rocks from above (usually thrown carelessly by people on the rim, not thinking that they would dislodge larger rocks which would strike people below who would be killed).

-         Struck by lightning  (being on mountain top ridges and on high rocks; the most dramatic instances were recorded near the Old Faithful geyser in Yellowstone in 1966 when a bolt of lightning struck the cone of the geyser, it traveled via a wire underneath the wet boardwalk, jumped to it and injured numerous people; in 2005 a bolt struck fifteen yards in front of the boardwalk at Old Faithful, causing crowd pandemonium and 11 injuries).

-         Hot springs which appear innocuous and cold.

-         Grizzly bears attacks (they need little provocation to attack, kill, and feed on humans).

-         Bison attacks (park visitors usually get too close to take pictures with or pet huge animals who can stomp them to death).

-         Poisonous gas (hydrogen sulfide gas and carbon dioxide which emanate from the geysers and are also found in caves or in trenches or dug holes).

-         Ingesting poisonous plants like water hemlock, confusing it with an edible plant.

-         Poisonous mushrooms (there are six types in Yellowstone National Park, i.e., the death cap, the destroying angel, the deadly conocybe, the deadly cort, the deadly galerina, and the conifer false morel).

-         Falls off the rim of a gorge or inner gorge like the Grand Canyon.

-         Falls while rock climbing or rappelling.

-         Fatal goring by mountain goats (it is rare, but it happens)

-         Attack from coyotes and wolves.

-         Attacks from a pregnant elk or a momma bear with cubs.

-         Attacks from mountain lions.

-         Poisonous snake bites while far away from any medical help.

-         Scorpion bites especially in Arizona’s Grand Canyon.

-         Death from avalanches and freezing (at least six people died this way inside Yellowstone National Park).

-         Freak accidents such as death by a cave-in when an embankment broke free and buried Peter Hanson in 1907 – he died of asphyxia in Yellowstone.

-         Falling trees which suddenly hit and kill people while hiking, walking, or camping below (trees can fall because of high winds, blizzards, logging or cutting incidents, or plain rot that finally overcomes the precarious balance of nature).

-         Hypothermia sometimes strikes even when prepared with adequate clothing if items get soaked.

-         Heat stroke (below the rim in the Grand Canyon, temperatures rise way above the temperatures around the rim, to 120 Fahrenheit plus, killing those hikers unprepared or physically unable to withstand such hot temperatures for extended periods of time).

-         Suicide (hurtling through empty space in free fall, Thelma and Louise style, is a nightmare that some people have experienced purely by accident, i.e., backing their cars over the rim, forgetting to put on the parking breaks, or deliberately by driving their cars over the rim of a deep gorge, or deliberately jumping to their deaths; Michelle Shocked wrote in her song “Over the Waterfalls,” It don’t hurt you when you fall, only when you land).

-         Forest fires (in Yellowstone National Park 15 firefighters lost their lives).

-         Earthquakes (on August 17, 1959, an earthquake measuring 7.5 on Richter scale killed twenty-eight people in the Madison Canyon just northwest of Yellowstone).

-         Drowning in the rivers and lakes of national parks.

-         Diving (into unknown depths with skull crashing sharp rocks; crushing vertebrae and instant paralysis from hitting shallow bottoms of pools which appear deeper than they are).

-         Horses, mules, and wagons (crushing passengers when they overturn).

-         Accidental and self-defense shootings (Whittlesey wrote that there were at least ten such deaths in Yellowstone National Park).

-         Murders (Lee Whittlesey documents several murders in Yellowstone and a few are documented in the Grand Canyon).

-         Missing and presumed dead.

-         Gas stove explosions (a few died grizzly deaths while camping in Yellowstone).

-         Deaths on the park’s roads and in the air above a national park (Grand Canyon holds the record for the one-time, largest number of deaths in the air, 178, from the collision of two commercial airplanes in 1956).

For national park visitors, hikers, campers, explorers, fishermen, hunters, and fun-seeking persons who are oblivious to potential dangers, this list should be a good starter to remember that nature is not a Disney ride, wild animals are not our friends, they should never be approached, photographed too close, or petted, and warnings from the park rangers should be carefully considered and followed.

Note: I have read by now several books on accidents in the Grand Canyon, Yellowstone National Park, and other national parks and I can honestly say that my encounter with the chasm at Grand Canyon was a type of "fatal attraction." On one hand I was in awe of its magnificent beauty and geological significance, and on the other hand I was utterly terrified of it.

 

                                     

Praise from Dr. Kurt W. S. Smith

During my years of teaching, I crossed paths with remarkable students who left a lasting impression. One such student was Kurt Smith, class of 2006 at the Mississippi School for Mathematics and Science in Columbus.

Mississippi has many talented people, and a few develop their aptitudes to the fullest extent and become excellent professionals and outstanding Americans who love what they do for a living and return to Mississippi to pass on the baton of excellence.

During my twenty years at MSMS I have fond memories of students like Jennifer S., who became a successful engineer and marathon runner, Ben H., financial advisor and excellent Mercedes mechanic. Shannah T. H. advocates for rare diseases, giving platform to those who had no voice before and saving her daughter in the process; Melissa H., an excellent elementary school teacher and long-distance runner and an avid world traveler; Melissa M. A., excellent mother of three boys and an advocate for juvenile diabetes. Some former students are gifted engineers and doctors who care for all Americans. Bryan, a young medical doctor with a Ph.D. in medicine, studies prions in mad cow disease; Joe S. and his friend Michael H. whom we took to baseball games at MSU are medical doctors, saving women’s lives; Katie D., excellent RN and mother of five; the Italian class I took to Ole Venice (18 miles away) as a reward for earning college credit through a standardized test; Emily S., a medical researcher; and Nate W., an engineer who runs his wife’s medical practice in rural Alabama. These are just a few of the students who left a clear and lasting imprint in my fond memories.

This May 2024, Kurt W. S. Smith earned his Ph.D. in Linguistics after an undergraduate in German and International Studies, with a minor in Italian and Spanish, a master’s degree in German and Teaching English as a Second Language, and another master’s degree in business administration. He also worked for more than ten years in higher education administration at Ole Miss.

Kurt’s doctoral dissertation dealt with the “utilization of authentic reading materials in ESL textbooks and the role that textbook-based tasks serve in enabling language classrooms to mirror the target environment.”

Kurt proposed a “new Continuum of Authenticity Scale technique to measure the authenticity of materials in textbooks beyond the current binary model.”

At his dissertation defense, Kurt thanked “my MSMS language professor, Dr. Ileana Johnson, for inspiring me with a zeal for language learning and for modeling authenticity in the classroom environment.”

Kurt wrote on the MSMS alumni webpage, “Dr. Johnson was the kind of professor who, in addition to teaching me in German class, also let me sit in on her Italian and Latin classes because my schedule was too full to formally register for them, and she privately taught me and another student Russian lessons during her office hours. The earliest foundations of my dissertation were rooted in how she would bring in sales receipts, brochures, newspaper clippings, and other seemingly mundane artifacts from foreign cultures as windows of authenticity for students to see true representations of language as it is actually used in the target environment as opposed to a reliance on the completely pedagogically invented texts found in textbooks, with their invented characters, invented scenarios, inauthentic passages, and obviously fake dialogues. Indeed, her subtle rebellious contempt at having to use a textbook in the first place helped to shatter the within-the-box thinking that had been instilled in me for the prior ten years before attending MSMS. (What? But how can you have a class without a textbook? You can’t question the paradigm.)” It turns out that she could.

Ten years later, as a researcher-teacher, Kurt described how he scrapped the textbook for the course he taught and developed an “open-source course packet instead, filled with authentic materials from the target language and culture that complimented the learning objectives of the course, expanding on the approach Dr. Johnson so effectively modeled.”

Kurt celebrated his doctoral graduation with a pilgrimage trip to Italy with his family and was pleasantly surprised how easily the “language came back to me, with vivid memories of how I learned functional words and authentic language skills in Dr. Johnson’s class.”

Posting on the MSMS alumni website, Dr. Kurt Smith wrote, “I just wanted to share with the rest of the MSMS family how impactful and life-changing the MSMS experience was for me, and how the passion and personality of one phenomenal professor set me on a path to improving humanity’s understanding of language pedagogy.”

As a life-long teacher and a consummate professional for thirty years, I had seldom received praises or recognition from my colleagues, the dean, or the professional field in MS for a job well done, nor did I amass the Department of Education certificates on the “I love myself educational wall” other than my four college diplomas which I earned while raising a family of four as a single mom. I was content with the stellar results of my students.

Kurt’s writing brought tears to my eyes and made me realize that some of my students did recognize the quality education they received from me. And Kurt is a shining example of my exceptional students.