Old Age is Not for the Faint of Heart

If you ask people on the street, when do they consider a person to be old, the answers will be as varied as the people asked. Nobody knows exactly what makes a person old because they use different variables for their definitions. Some quote the life expectancy for men and women in their country, but the numbers are quite different as well. What exactly is life expectancy?

Isidore of Seville wrote in the seventh century that “there are six stages in a lifetime: infancy, childhood, adolescence, youth, maturity, and old age.” He defined old age as beginning at 70.

In the thirteenth century, Phillipe de Novare wrote The Four Ages of Men, in which he chose old age as sixty. He subdivided old age into two stages, senectus (Latin for old), elderly but still active, and senium (senile), a stage in which the mental and physical abilities waned to a level akin to dementia.

In our society, old people are spoken of as seniors. Seniors can be someone fifty-five plus, 60, or 65, depending on who makes the decision to put people into categories. And then, there is the unkind definition of old people as “units,’ enshrined into the Affordable Care Act.

If you are sixty-five or older, you are in the eighteen percent population group in America today. People live longer due to better medical care, better food, better housing, vitamins, medicines, vaccines, better education, more schooling, and overall information which humans across the centuries have lacked. Some live longer thanks to genetics and having children with a person who also has a healthier genetic code. Other groups interbreed which causes their heirs to have severe health issues which shortens their lifespan with or without proper medical care.

Most people believe that life expectancy before modern medicine was quite low for everybody, yet there are records of many people who lived to a ripe old age.

It is true that a lot of women died giving birth and many children did not live past a certain age due to unsanitary conditions, lack of proper nutrition, healthy food, water, and good shelters. Thirty to fifty percent of all births ended in the death of the newborn. Mothers and their newborn often died during birth or shortly after. If babies survived infancy and turned seven, their odds of survival increased considerably.

Men tended to go to wars either to make a living for their families or because they were indentured by their lords. Elite men tended to die in battle or from battle related injuries. Life expectancy was hard to calculate, and it depended on variables such as the person’s age, gender, and socio-economic status.

The richer the person, the longer their lifespans. They had better living conditions, better housing, better food, and a varied diet. However, if they married within the family, their children had serious health problems.

Looking at tax records, Lucie Laumonier, discovered that 885 inhabitants of medieval Florence were ninety and older. She wrote that in 1425 Florence, 20 percent of the population was sixty or older and, “in the Tuscan countryside, the percentage of elderly people would have been even higher, around 24 percent of the population.”

Elderly people were asked at times to remember how certain things were organized in the past in the area in which they lived. In 1330s a 70-year-old woman was asked to remember how the Montpelier herb market was organized in her youth.

To calculate life expectancy before our modern time, historians used archeological evidence, documents, and demographics. Wills, tax rolls, parish registers of births and deaths, and the age of those described in documents. Accounting of castles and manors described the population and the needs within. 

Skeletal remains were evaluated for tooth layers and cement layers, like tree rings. Spinal changes, hips, and joints were also analyzed for age determination at the time of death. Because they were not complete, census records gave an approximation of population and age distribution. The data was never accurate because nobility tended to have more documentation of death, wills, and general demographics than the rest of the population.

It suffices to say that life expectancy determination is a modern construct.

Invisible Force of the Grand Canyon

Two years ago, Dave and I visited the Grand Canyon, the South Rim. When the colossal chasm of rock and chaos, colored in purple, orange, pink, beige, and brown opened to my view I was overcome by a feeling of dizziness that I could not explain.

I was nowhere near the lip of the gorge, yet some invisible force was drawing me to it into this spell bounding rocky miracle and promising to slide me into the tranquility and silence of the sharp-edged gorge, pulling me with an invisible power.

While Dave, with his sandaled feet scampered below the rocks, a very dangerous move, I stayed as far away from the lip as possible. I got vertigo and could not explain why.

I learned since then that thousands of visitors experience a destabilizing force and adjustment when gazing inside the canyon for the first time. A number of them have become so dizzy that they actually toppled over the edge.

One example is a 1989 visitor from Japan, Yuri Nagata, who, when she was admonished that a German woman lost her balance and fell to her death three days earlier when she was watching the sunset, Yuri became wobbly and plunged over into the slope below, rolled several yards and then skidded over a 360-foot cliff. Yuri screamed all the way down to the horror of onlookers.

Conservatism Took A Serious Dive

Conservatism is on life support, and globalism is taking root everywhere like a rapidly propagating weed. The only thing left for globalists to do is to install digital currency across the globe while peppering urban areas with data centers for perfect control and their takeover will be complete.

The first Google search of the definition of conservatism is “commitment to traditional values and ideas with opposition to change or innovation.” A ridiculously biased definition, skewed towards the leftist belief and propaganda that conservatism is bad and thus opposed to change and innovation. Conservatives have patented many inventions and innovations across the centuries that contributed to the development of the western world and culture.

The second definition of conservatism from a Google search is that conservatism is a “political view in favor of free enterprise, private ownership, and socially traditional ideas.” The entire western world is built on free enterprise, private ownership, and the rich who advocate for socialism and communism live by and stay rich with the help of private ownership of the means of production, not the government ownership of the means of production, which is socialism, the steppingstone towards communism.

Michael Savage authored a book a decade ago in which he declared that “conservatism is dead.” He seems to have been proven correct, at least in Virginia, now run by a very leftist governor and the leftist Democrat Party.

Following the Commonwealth of Virginia referendum on April 21, 2026, in which Democrats have made a decisive and shrewd move to hijack the vote in the state of Virginia with a confusing wording, asking low information voters if they wanted to vote Yes on a gerrymandered map which would give Democrats a 10-1 advantage in future voting, thus assuring that Virginia would be an entirely blue state in perpetuity. The move is called gaslighting, ‘Blame what you are doing on your opponent!’

It was no surprise that the YES vote won and that 49 percent of Virginians who voted NO have lost most of their representation in Congress. This begs the question; how much effort have Republicans expended to inform the voters? In northern Virginia’s most populous counties the NO signs were rare, and nobody seemed to speak on behalf of reason and logic.

B.H. Obama and Hakeem Jeffries were busy, speaking all over Virginia, even in churches, in support of the YES vote and blaming the “evil Republicans” for trying to steal votes from the disenfranchised Democrats forced to bring I.D.s to vote and destroying democracy in the process. Supporters cheered.

Many voted YES in the referendum while loudly proclaiming their disdain for President Trump. It was not a logical vote based on facts; it was a vote based on the Democrats’ hate for President Trump.

The Republican side was hiding and remained silent. After they lost the referendum, the phones started ringing for donations to the RNC.As the Republican elephant is cowering more and more in the shadow of the mighty Democrat donkey, and the Democrat-controlled judicial system and the government bureaucracy are placing more rocks in the spokes of the conservative politicians' bicycles, it is more evident that President Trump will be the last duly-elected Republican President.

The massive cheating at the polls will allow the Democrat Party to install its totalitarian power around the country with the help of digital currency control and AI surveillance.

In such an environment, Republicans could eventually claim that they tried so hard, but, they are in a minority. At least, they will get a symbolic seat at the table that divides the political spoils. 

Gray, Concrete Gray, and More Depressing Gray

In 2020 I was looking to purchase a new SUV and, repeatedly, the dealers stocked only black, silver, and gray.

I attributed at the time the lack of color and choices to the reduced inventories and manufacturing shortages due to the Covid 2019 pandemic Necessary chips for cars were in short supply. It would be four years before I could buy my desired red color but not necessarily the make and model I wanted.

Perhaps car manufacturers want to move cars quicker and thus the bland choices of paint colors.

Perhaps Minimalism has blanketed the world, and we are just now noticing the trend. Maybe the many shades of gray indicate 21^st century sophistication.

Healthy subjects in a study conducted by the University of Manchester in 2010 chose yellow as the color that governed their mood. Anxious and depressed subjects participating in the study chose the color gray because it represented “a dark state of mind, a colorless and monotonous life, gloom, misery or disinterest in life.” Depressed people “tend to describe life as ‘monochromatic’ or as having ‘lost its color.’

Then I started seeing a lack of color in department stores and furniture upholstery – offerings were grey, beige, black, and greyer. The furniture, whether plastic or wood, was gray.

Accessories were gray, towels were gray, shoes and tennis shoes were gray, plates, napkins, carpets, backpacks, coolers, tapestries, plastic, and glassware were all gray. There was so much gray to give a survivor of communism a permanent headache and depression. The color gray was even declared the “color of the decade.”

It was apparent to me that 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 buildings’ exterior, the depressing colors, the lack of colors and offerings in stores, the promotion of gray, ash, concrete gray, puke gray, drab gray, beige-gray, petroleum gray, black, white, and brown, became a bothersome uniformity which I recognized from my previous twenty 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, sad, and depressed. Everything became a soul-less gray and darker gray, light gray, medium gray, with barely lit train stations and stores as if to conceal the stains of gray misery.

After the lockdowns many public buildings, restaurants, fast food chains, and even apartment complexes and homes had undergone a similar transformation to dark gray, various shades of gray, black, brown, and beige. Maybe paint was only offered in gray and it was cheap?

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 hues of gray, black, beige, and brown. People excused this trend as minimalism. I knew it as Bauhaus utilitarian ugly.

Granted that lighter colors are less showy and easier to match more tastes, then why the previous opulence of colors and choices? Was it that the well-heeled wanted simpler and minimalist lines to show off their good taste? There is no denying that something painted in less showy colors sells much easier and quicker.

Austrian architect Adolf Loos said in his 1908 essay “Ornament and Crime” that “evolved people gravitated toward clean lines and plain surfaces,” unornamented and clutter-free.

Le Corbusier, the “father” of modern architecture, wrote that “color is suited to simple races, peasants, and savages.”  Well-to-do Americans call those who like bright colors, “Lilly Pulitzer people.” The Lilly clothing line is famous for bright hues of pink, blue, yellow, orange, and green.

The Bauhaus was a German art school which existed between 1919 and 1933. Its vision of mass production and function was adopted by all former Iron Curtain countries in Europe; they 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. An occasional crumbling concrete piece looked like a loose tooth hanging from its dirty gray façade.

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 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 gray and the style is Bauhaus utilitarian.

When I visited my favorite department store which was always decorated with red, white, and green way before the Christmas season, decorations displayed a gray table with gray chairs, gray plates, black glasses, and white napkin holders. One solitaire painting of a red bush surrounded by green background was overlooking the funereal décor.

This is not just about depressing the population with ugly buildings, cars, and shades of gray, it is about the global transformation of the west into a socialist/communist society to better control the naïve population in every way. And the quickest way will be via digital currency sold as convenience.

How Useful is Gold

Gold is useful or useless, depending on who you ask. Gold serves its purpose for coinage, store of value, portability, collectors, medicine, chemistry, electronics, and on the finger of every engaged or married couple around the globe as a symbol of the circle of life and forever love.

Gold used to be a universal yardstick of coinage value in market exchanges. Gold was helpful because it did not die on the way to the market, held its relative value in any amounts, did not tarnish, and it was the gold standard around the globe since 2500 B.C., relatively speaking.

Gold stopped being the universal yardstick behind the value of every currency after 1971, when the U.S. discontinued redeeming its paper currency with gold. That is when money became valued by government fiat (Latin for ‘let it be’).

Major trading nations had a fixed, official rate of exchange (1944-1971) tied to the U.S. dollar. Each dollar could be redeemed for gold at $35 per ounce. In 1971, the Nixon administration abandoned the gold standard and, since then, currencies have floated daily in value against each other, influenced by supply and demand, and by the monetary policies of various governments in their efforts to ‘manage’ their specific currencies. Some countries pegged (linked) their currencies to the value of the U.S. dollar or used the U.S. dollar.

Brics countries (Brazil, Russia, China, India, and South Africa) have agreed to trade in their own currencies and crypto currencies, via a payment called BRICS Pay.

There are countries that experience wild and rapid changes in the value of their currencies for various reasons, i.e., they cannot issue their own currencies, their economies are in turmoil, runaway inflation, deflation, defaults on loan agreements, huge balance of trade deficits, and bad economic policies that exacerbate the situation.

Gold reserves and a strong currency have always been stability goals. The value of gold has exploded to the highest level of $5,500 and recently to $4,600 per troy ounce (31.103 grams).

The spot price of gold represents the real-time market value for immediate delivery of 0.999+ pure gold. The global trading of exchanges COMEX in New York and the London Bullion Market Association (LBMA) determine the price.

Price factors are supply and demand of gold, economic uncertainty, inflation rates, currency strength (especially the U.S. dollar), central bank policies, and geopolitical events such as wars.

Gold has always been a sign of wealth, a store of value, and a metal traded as gold bullion. According to Ed Conway, “Great Britain has no goldmining, no significant gold reserves, but is one of its biggest producers. That is because much of the world’s physical gold passes through London on its way somewhere else.”

How useful is gold in our modern society? Aside from store of value in the bank vaults of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, wedding bands, engagement rings with precious stones, and shiny jewelry, there are not many applications for gold.

One could say that we could live comfortably if there was no gold unearthed from mountains, a very toxic process with cyanide and mercury that hurts the environment, especially the rivers and soil.

A wedding ring required long ago one third or less of a ton of ore extracted from the earth in the traditional mining way, with a pickaxe. Experts say that today it takes 4-20 tons of rock blasted from a mountain to make one gold band.

After rocks are blasted from the side of a mountain in massive quantities, they are crushed and ground into a powder, then mixed with a cyanide solution which separates the gold from the rest of the dust. Do cyanide and mercury used in the process leech into the environment? Sometimes they do and low fines are levied.

John Maynard Keynes once called gold “a barbarous relic.”  Gold does play a small role in electronics and chemistry, about ten percent of demand.

There are so many other materials in the world besides gold, without which life would be much more difficult, but simpler as judged by minimalists, environmentalists, and conservationists - sand, salt, coal, iron, gas, fossil fuels, lithium, bauxite, and copper.

 

 

Colors and Poppies

When I was a child, my friends and I would walk away from our concrete block apartments to the nearby wheat fields guarded by two scary-looking men armed with axes. The desire to find and pick red poppies in bloom was stronger than any fear these men inspired. As little girls, we did not understand why it was necessary to guard a simple field of wheat with axes.

We eventually made the connection between the seeds of wheat and the ability to turn them into flour from which our mothers would bake bread. Because flour was in short supply and rationed, we had to line up daily to purchase ready-made bread before the communist-owned store ran out. 

Nobody in their right minds would have stolen wheat from the Communist Party that owned the field and all the means of production. They owned all the people too, including us. Our parents trained us all the time to keep our mouths shut and never say anything in public that we heard at home or else we would never see our parents again.

We reached the edge of the wheat field. The purplish-blue butterflies were out in force, flying by in their airy dance. We each caught one for a moment in our cupped palms, felt its velvety wings touching our skin, then released it giggling.

We were not too afraid of the guards with axes because we erroneously thought that they were there to protect us from harm.

We were happy and looking forward to finding the small patch of red poppies we spotted from our fifth-floor balcony the day before.

The intense poppy red was a sharp contrast to the colors that surrounded our lives. Color was often denied in our drab existence. Uniforms and regular street clothes came in basic groups such as brown, black, navy, grey, ink blue. White and ink blue shirts completed our uniform palette.

Beautiful flowers with stunning colors and shapes, often planted on small balconies in clay pots, was our way to escape the sad and grey world of the Bauhaus minimalist existence the Communist Party leaders forced us to survive in.

Grandma and mom’s siblings who lived in the country had a small patch by their homes in which they planted both vegetables and fragrant roses.

Occasionally we would find fabrics with a splash of red or pink and women bought yards to make dresses for little girls. The rest of us wore the basic and depressing colors of communist control – shades of grey, brown, black, and navy blue.

We walked joyfully that day, with a spring in our steps – Milica, Viorica, Dorina, and I. We reached the poppy patch, swimming through dense and tall blades of wheat, oblivious to the micro cuts we got from the plants hitting exposed skin.

As we started to pick a few poppies, the guards appeared out of nowhere, waving their axes and shouting for us to disappear before they hurt us for crushing the wheat.

I am not sure how much wheat we trampled; but we were running for our lives, so we thought, out of breath, and with tears streaming down our faces.

Clutching a few poppies to my chest, we ran in the direction of our apartments, crossing the railroad tracks separating the apartment buildings from the fields. I placed my poppies in a glass of water on the windowsill, a vibrant reminder of God’s beauty.

Our parents had no idea where we had been because we never told them. We were sure to be punished if we did. I never forgot the incident and never went back. My exploration streak would find plenty of wonders in my grandparents’ villages.

Years later I finally understood what the two men with axes were guarding. It was not the wheat harvest; it was the hidden poppies, the opium crop of those who had planted it.

The communist government ignored the illegal activities of its agents.

Control Grid and Nudge

What is control grid? Catherine Austin Fitts talked about the concept of control grid snapping into place quickly and becoming fast reality.

Control grid is “a process or infrastructure that allows digital technology to be used to assert phenomenal control and surveillance of people.” At the heart of this control grid is ‘programmable money.’

Programmable money is not exactly a currency but digital money that comes with a set of rules that can be enforced by banks. Bankers, who traditionally run monetary policy, could run fiscal policy as well via programmable money.

During Covid, if you left your house when told not to, if you tried to spend your money via digital currency, the banking system would invalidate its use because you left your house. The money becomes programmed with AI to enforce a certain set of rules that would go against your wishes.

Such programmable money allows bankers to control not only monetary policy, i.e. interest rates and the money stock, but also fiscal policy, currently performed by Congress and the President, who levy taxes, authorize spending, and allocate funds, by replacing Congress and the President with a set of rules for the digital money that is only controlled and enforceable by the banks.

A large infrastructure of surveillance is required to achieve control grid such as digital I.D., hardware locally and globally, i.e. cameras in neighborhoods that track cars coming and going in the 15-minute cities, cell towers everywhere, satellites to beam in Wi-Fi, tracking everyone everywhere, control weaponry and autonomous weaponry, and data centers to store all the information.

There are three elements to the control grid:

1.      Local hardware and infrastructure which includes the data centers (AI control centers that manage all data); the social credit system becomes most important to enforce rules and the data must be stored in data centers; examples include spatial control, movement control of people via kill switch in cars, money won’t work more than a mile from your home.

2.      Digital I.D.

3.      Programmable money.

Central banks are setting up the world so that they can control our finances in real time with the equivalent of a social credit system, Catherine Austin Fitts added.

Biometrics or facial recognition is part of the digital I.D. system and plays a key role in tracking our movements and facilitating surveillance.

People are promoting the use of cash instead of credit cards and trying to keep analog alive. However, if you go to a large store and purchase something with cash, even though your smart phone may be left in the car, as soon as you resume your use of the phone, ads will pop up, trying to sell you the very product you purchased with cash. How is that possible? Biometrics in the store have recognized your face.

Our local grocery store has cameras everywhere not just to prevent theft but to recognize who you are and how often you shop in their store and what products you purchase regularly.

Banks control how much of your own money you can withdraw as cash under the excuse that you might be the victim of fraud by a third party and they are trying to protect you. This is called ‘nudging.’

In the financial system, banks use ‘nudging’ under the guise of “subtle interventions to help consumers make better informed decisions about their money without restricting their freedom of choice.”

On the other hand, cybercrime is real. Banks and customers tend to lose a lot of money to cybercrime. But do we need banks to control our cash finances?

The reality is that ‘nudging’ is used in the banks’ interest, and it is restricting one’s freedom of choice when the ability to withdraw certain amounts of cash money is declined by banks.

The Federal Reserve, our central bank, has managed our monetary policy since 1913. Politicians determine fiscal policy. With programmable money, the bankers can assert control of fiscal policy, a form of financial coup d’etat. With the control grid enabled by programmable money, the legislators eventually become more or less ‘show and tell’ without any fiscal policy power. They just become figureheads.

If central banks are not on board with programmable money, those countries, like Iran and the Brics nations create great “leakages” in the model of the banking system’s programmable money with digital I.D. The only option to bring the ‘leakage’ countries into the fold of programmable money with digital I.D. is regime change.