The Modern Scarlet Letter "M" for Mask by Mimi Johnson

Wikipedia Photo

I am privileged, as liberals like to tout, that I live in a state, that for all intents and purposes, has remained somewhat sensible during this insane and what I consider, unnecessary lockdown.  In the beginning of this fiasco, my company was deemed “essential” and therefore have stayed open through all the insipid social changes.  Initially, we were not allowed to wear masks or gloves in the workplace, which was fine by me, as I found them cumbersome and infringing on my ability to breathe, however, about 4 weeks in, all of a sudden, they were mandatory.  I found this quite odd and in my rational mind, I had to ask questions and cause a “disturbance in the force.”

This new policy caused me more duress than the virus itself.  It became evident that the company was not interested in our safety by any means, but more so for their financial safety.  If anyone were to contract the virus, they would be open to various lawsuits. Since I often question everything, I asked if it were possible to avoid wearing a mask due to personal reasons, especially since in 4 weeks’ time, no one in my location had shown symptoms or been diagnosed with the virus.  The response was swift and unapologetically “no.” In fact, I was asked why I was being so “defensive” about wearing the masks. I felt judged because I questioned this decision, when two days prior, the items were vehemently not allowed.  Needless to say, I now don a mask that is ironically manufactured in China, have no choice over my own personal health, and in order to stay gainfully employed, must comply and not question it. 

So, I begrudgingly began wearing this ill-fitting, strange smelling mask, not for my protection but for “others.” Not only is it physically uncomfortable, but for someone who works in customer service, it does not allow you to communicate effectively with people in person and definitely not over the phone.  Day after day, customers come in and self-righteously comment on how we choose to wear the mask, mainly below the nose so we can breathe effectively, continually treated like a diseased pariah that is committing horrible crimes against humanity. Customers have even gone as far as complaining on surveys that my associates removed their mask momentarily to answer the phone.  Oh, the horror of attempting to communicate effectively with customers on the phone!  The injustice!

I think the pinnacle of my COVID-19 experience happened recently at Trader Joe’s.  Although NC does not require wearing masks in public, Durham County Mayor has put orders in place that you may not enter an establishment without a mask.  For this reason, I generally travel to the neighboring town of Chapel Hill, to do my shopping.  I always keep a spare mask in the car just in case the establishment requires one, but on this day, it was 85 degrees, and I was not interested in wearing a mask to buy vegetables.  I made my way to the door, which now has a stanchion maze in front of it, effectively putting each customer on parade in front of others.  As I walked past each of the masked faces, I felt the red-hot flush of judgment sweep across my body. It was a clothed Cersei Lannister moment, walking to my shame.  I immediately began checking myself for garment malfunctions, but deep down knew why I was getting the stares, I had committed social justice suicide and now might as well pin a scarlet M for mask on my shirt. 

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel, “The Scarlet Letter” seems like such an apropos metaphor in this instance.  We currently follow and worship the CDC like they’ve been bestowed the divine right of Kings by the Catholic church, much like we revere Priests and Reverends, insert Reverend Dimmesdale, society is Hester Prynne, in a secret romance with liberal ideology and the guilt placed upon anyone disagreeing with their sentiments, and society’s chaos is the evil offspring of that dalliance.  As I continued my “walk of social shame,” I held my head high, and continued to the back of the line.  I was not going to bow to the ridiculous constructs of liberal puppets and be shamed into drone thinking.  As I am standing there in the brilliant and abundant sunlight, relishing in my freedom, I could not help but notice the social distancing stickers on the sidewalk.  Ironically, they were not even 6 feet apart.  I began laughing uncontrollably to myself thinking how ridiculous and asinine this entire debacle had become and how these managers either were not able to measure 6 feet accordingly or were just lazy, either way, the hypocrisy was on full display, but no one was paying attention. 

This seems to be the constant theme of our entire society: never paying close attention to details.  Social isolation has not only affected immunology and mental health, but has also seemed to digress our Evolution; everyone acting like savage Neanderthals, hoarding supplies and food, as if they’re in constant threat of a neighboring tribe coming to raid their findings. Our modern society took thousands of years to cultivate and develop, yet in a span of two months, we have managed to ruin infrastructures, like an episode of “Life without people.” I do not know whether to be impressed or frightened. 

I, for one, am ready to change the narrative, are you?

The Face Maskers in the Midst

The Ship of Fools - woodcut

I have spent a lot of time since early March in the woods, in the company of birds, geese, a wild rabbit, a fox visiting my yard daily, squirrels, a racoon, five deer who enjoy the grass in our back yard at dusk, one coyote, wasps, bumblebees, a majestic eagle, a water snake, the river, flowers, grasses, two ospreys, and a lot of mud.

The daily trips to the woods saved my sanity when everything around me turned irrational and abnormal, “socially distancing” from other humans as if they had the bubonic plague, the “new normal” as the Democrat leaders turned Stalinists and their lackey main stream media have been telling us non-stop for twelve weeks now.

Insane lefties took up the crusade of forcing everyone to wear face masks outside, in the woods, in state parks, in the house, in stores, while jogging, biking, in grocery stores, and in their own cars when they were driving alone.

A fashion industry has quickly popped up with useless face masks of various shapes, sizes, thickness, colors, and messages that fit the submissive and scared to death personality of the wearer. One famous individual expressed herself with a crocheted mask with holes.

We must wear a face mask at the bank, coupled with seeing eyeglasses, and it seems that it is now legal to do so. Who would have thought that looking like a robber would be acceptable and necessary in a bank, but here we are. 

I used to walk across a fishing pier where two ospreys were nesting. I enjoyed photographing them while the male was bringing his mate fish in his beak. But the governor closed the pier and the occasional 5-6 fishermen had to move alongside the river’s edge, clustered together under the railroad bridge. How else could they tell each other tall fishing tales and drink beer? Humans are social creatures and need other people to remain sane and healthy. And the catfish and snakeheads fed their families. Thanks to the governor’s crazy policies, the fishermen are now unemployed and unable to provide for their loved ones.

The governor left state parks open but closed the bathroom facilities – too much to clean properly, the ranger explained one day. But they brought in unsightly port-o-potties which had no hand sanitizer and were sprayed by a park employee with Lysol spray. Who can argue with the logic of a governor, who is a doctor, that a port-o-potty with exposed fecal matter and urine is cleaner than a restroom?

People could stand on the river’s sandy beach and fish or exercise, but nobody could sit in a chair or on the sand – it must be crawling with Covid-19 viruses. How in the world have we ever survived so far on thousands of crowded beaches around the world without social isolation or physical distancing! How lucky we were! It is a “miracle” that Dr. Fauci and Dr. Brix saved us on time. It was worth every penny of the six trillion dollars in debt and the millions of permanently unemployed.

Arbitrary rules of physical distancing euphemistically called “social distancing” were established, a form of social isolation which varied across the globe, from 3-6 ft, even though a cough or a sneeze can travel much farther, 18-24 ft.

Then the leftist and regressive population, whose agenda was never about liberty of any kind, started to turn into the Gestapo, vociferously shaming anybody who dared to show up without a face mask - How dare you endanger my fragile health? Go home and hide under a rock! Worse yet, the left turned into the Stasi Karen(s) and called the police on face mask violators.

And the police, being the vigilant defenders and protectors of the law that they are, started arresting parents playing with their children, church goers, partiers in private homes, restaurant patrons who violated totalitarian lockdown orders, towed their cars, fined citizens for daring to open up businesses, and for eating inside restaurants or bars.

People became so conditioned that, while walking in the woods to get fresh air, they wore masks alone and with their spouses and children. Shrill women were shouting twelve feet away from other humans, “stay away from me,” as if they were aliens in the invasion of the body snatchers.

Irrational and panicked, these individuals have lost whatever sanity they have ever had. I can now fully understand how the lynching of innocents happened when crowds reached a frenzy of hatred towards helpless humans exercising their right to exist.

People now cross the street to avoid each other and make no eye contact or attempt at any human interaction. We have become invisible to each other, “contactless” humans.

Parking fee collection during pandemic in northern Virginia state park

Photo: Ileana Johnson, early May 2020

A park employee was collecting parking fees one day using a fishing net with a long handle. The drivers had to put their money in, and the attendant retrieved the said cash from the net following the “contactless” dictates of the non-stop PSAs.

“Contactless,” “safe,” “stay safe,” “safe distancing,” “together alone” (an oxymoron), “new normal” became the indoctrinating phrase of the new generation of supine and scared humans who would rather exchange their freedom for temporary “safety.”

The extreme cowardice and almost overnight submission to totalitarianism without a whimper or logical argument and questioning were painful to watch.

Saturday Lunch

Today we decided to have curbside pickup from Red Lobster for our weekend meal as we've done with other businesses since this lockdown began.

It was a nice, sunny day so we decided to sit upfront on the white benches and eat part of our food. As hubby was trying to juggle not dropping too much catchup, tartar sauce, or his soda on his white shorts, I was watching the noisy, multi-lane road full of cars, with anxious drivers speeding dangerously fast and reckless, like a bunch of convicts just out of lockup, who stole cars and tasted freedom after months in jail, and were eager to get away from the cops.

The traffic at the Target store nearby was heavier than usual and the same middle-aged panhandler was sitting in the shade with his homeless cardboard sign. He had been there for at least five years that I can remember. If he had built two bricks a day, I think at least one room and a bathroom might be finished by now.

We need the sun now more than ever but I have a sense of unease that I cannot shake. I am not going to wear the governor's soon to be mandated facemask and may have to pay a fine or go to jail, a prospect that gives me communism PTSD. Virginia has gone beyond socialism, it is on its way to a tyrannical communist government ruled by the Democrat Party.

The “New Normal” or Modified Normal

Social conditioning is defined as the process of training individuals in a society to respond in a manner generally approved by society and various peer groups and their interests.

In a classic textbook method of social conditioning, all commercials and MSM news reports now contain the line “the new normal.” If the idea and concept reflected in a new euphemistic phrase is introduced and repeated it at nauseam, people will accept it eventually as “the new normal.”

The oft-repeated “social distancing” phrase is also played across the country in supermarkets, on radio, and on television until people accept it as part of life. There is nothing social about hiding from people and running scared. It is really “physical distancing” to avoid infection during a pandemic.  Sadly, fear becomes part of everyday life and people begin avoiding each other in all social interactions that are part of being human.

We know from the bad experience of dictator Ceausescu’s orphans raised in state institutions after having been given up by their parents who either could not feed nor want them, that those infants who were never touched, hugged, rocked, and interacted with, became severely autistic and rocked themselves non-stop in order to soothe the inner need and desire for human contact and love.

The “new normal” represents the fear of one’s own shadow, the fear of government, the fear of not wearing masks, the fear of coughing in public, the fear of one’s neighbors, the fear of quarantine, the fear of getting sick, the fear of other people, the fear of being outside without a mask on, and the fear of existing outside of one’s home which has become a prison of sorts in which the owners are both the inmates and the jailers.

Orwell wrote through his “1984” character named Winston, “To a future or to the past, to a time when thought is free, when men are different from one another and do not live alone – to a time when truth exists and what is done cannot be undone: From the age of uniformity, form the age of solitude, from the age of Big Brother, from the age of double-think – greetings!”   (p. 28)

The dystopian novel described a time when “nothing was your own except a few cubic centimeters inside your skull.” (p. 27) We do not seem to be so shocked anymore by the dark human nature described in Orwell’s novel. Life imitates art and we are getting accustomed daily to this “new normal” indelibly etched into our collective psyche by the powers with a globalist agenda of population control, vaccines, chip implantation, and 24/7 tracking of every move we make.

The ideas described by Orwell have come to pass and currently surround us everywhere, i.e., thought police, technology giants censorship of our freedom of speech and of our thoughts expressed on social media, thoughts packaged as hate crimes or racism, liberals triggered by the existence of divergent thoughts and ideas, doublethink, doublespeak, “Freedom is Slavery,” “Ignorance is strength,” enemies of the Democrat party must be silenced, thought crimes, and the government’s version of the “Ministry of Truth.” Undesirable people are disappearing, professionally “annihilated, abolished, and vaporized.”

United Nations has been peddling 17 sustainable development goals for decades under Agenda 21 now morphed into Agenda 2030, packaging and repackaging them under different euphemisms of global control, until the United States was brought to its economic knees by a virus and forced to accept them under the much-touted aegis of the Green New Deal. The poster child of this Democrat legislation was Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), the former bartender. We did not take her seriously but, with her powerful backers, she was able to implement most everything in this “deal” which is neither “new” nor “green.”

The restriction of travel and the generalized panic and fear have reduced air traffic to insignificant amounts. Airlines lost billions in revenue and experienced a severe reduction in travel by 95 percent. Airlines like United mothballed 25 percent of their air fleet. Air traffic may eventually exist just for the rich elites and well-heeled politicians on the taxpayer dole.

U.N. Agenda 2030 wanted to reduce our carbon footprint by pushing limited travel by trains, buses, and bikes, keeping the population stacked in high-rise apartments with no parking, five-minute walk from work, play, school, shopping, and living.

Traffic on once crowded highways has disappeared. People are not going anywhere out of fear, because places are closed all over, or because of restrictions placed upon them by governors eager to control the masses while they take vacations and trips to places now denied to the average American.

Democrats have been pushing for a universal basic income for their base, and people scoffed and doubted them. But now the Democrats won. Americans who do work, work from home, while the rest are staying hidden and idle at home, waiting for the government paycheck to arrive so they can live and pay their bills.

Technocracy News expressed what many of us have been thinking, that we need clarity from our President and a concrete date when the economic lockdown of healthy Americans will end, “not in stages, not in phases.” According to Technocracy News, President Trump’s advisers were wrong:

“They convinced the president to make bad decisions based on faulty science and speculative computer models stocked with false assumptions. They are up to their necks in conflicts of interest, mostly having to do with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and its many global partners pushing mandatory vaccines and global ID system that can be used for tracking individual Americans.” https://www.technocracy.news/

The “new normal” is not normal at all. There is nothing normal about living in fear, hidden, like an animal in a cage, waiting to receive a handout from the government that taxes those who do work.

There is nothing normal about closing schools indefinitely and having to follow one-way lines into and out of grocery stores.

There is nothing normal about having empty hospitals and furloughed medical personnel and doctors while people are dying from cancer, heart disease, and other non-Covid-19 virus related illness, or suffer in severe pain because their medical problems are judged non-essential by all-knowing politicians.

Perhaps one unintended consequence of this “pandemic” may be the dismantling of the goal for mega-cities which the environmentalists at the U.N. have been pushing for decades and the dispersion of people into less populated areas.

Retail in a physical space as we know it will disappear, replaced by online commerce.  Shipping methods will explode, and product choices will become scarce. Environmentalists will be happy as less resources will be used to manufacture what they deemed as too many goods and services. The U.S. economy will shrink as two-thirds of our GDP is consumption.

Remote work and schooling will become the new wave of commuting in the U.S. Physical schools and bussing many disappear over time. Office buildings may become obsolete.

Domestic travel will slow down as the middle class will have to deal with the loss of millions of small businesses and a disappearing middle-class disposable income.

Stronger border controls and mandatory quarantines for those with and without fever will result in much less international travel. International travel may morph into travel of the affluent who make the rules. Perhaps this will be the modified normal. https://quillette.com/2020/03/25/the-coming-age-of-dispersion/?fbclid=IwAR3D8ZZ2h2SMe0qFcISKnKYq6GsKHZIWiVKevcQf2-YbqW1UfDIcNUnTAHQ

Nursing Home Pandemonium

My dear mother whom we love and cherish is locked up in a prison not of her own making, in pain and suffering, on oxygen and not understanding why she cannot come out of her room.

Her prison is tightly monitored by staff who were unable to stop the spread of the Covid-virus. Formerly free of it, she was moved from her private nursing home room to a semi-private room, in the very same bed and room just vacated by patient Marlene (not her real name) who was Covid-positive and sick.

Marlene had been moved with the other 75 Covid-positive patients the very same day that my Covid-negative mom was moved into her bed before the room was thoroughly sanitized. To say that the move was irresponsible, it is an understatement. Nobody from the nursing home bothered to call us and let us know of her status or their plans to move her. 

After the fact, a corporate marketing guy from Colorado, not a caretaker or a doctor, called us first to let us know that she was Covid-negative, and a second time to tell us that she was moved from her room.  We made numerous phone calls to the nursing home, but they remained unanswered.

Communication and information from the nursing home has been almost non-existent. The phone rang unanswered and all voicemail calls and questions we left remained unreturned as well. Mom was locked tighter than prison. Wheeling her out of her room to a glassed lobby through which we could have visited for five minutes happened only once.

As some patients went home for brief visits and came back carrying the Covid-virus, the movement of patients even within the nursing facility stopped. The residents became prisoners in their own rooms and the virus spread. Eighteen patients alone in the Arcadia section were sick with the virus. Four staff were Covid-positive as well, a total of 21 as of two weeks ago, as admitted by administration. This prompted the Health Department of Virginia to come and test everyone last Friday, May 15.

Residents have died but the true cause and statistics were not known to the public or to the patients’ families.

The “corporate people” (as one nursing home employee put it) came last week and must have ordered, possibly per Health Department of Virginia instructions, the grouping of positive patients with other positive ones (75) and the negative patients with the rest of the negative ones (26).

Was it wise to move the 26 negative patients into rooms vacated by positive Covid-patients? I am not sure what the intent was with this move, but I know that mom came down with pneumonia three days after being moved from her room. Coincidence? I do not believe in coincidences; I believe in cause and effect.

The emergent evidence of the “plan-demic” has shown that the worst attributes of small-minded people drunk on their own power and control, were magnified, and have robbed the U.S. population of their Constitutional freedoms under the guise of protecting them.  

Euphemistic terms such “social distancing” should be called what they are, “isolation,” there is nothing social about hiding in your own home, behind a mask, or snitching on your neighbors and businesses that may not follow the lockdown dictates.  

The elites videotaping themselves in their mansions to prove that “we are in this together” is so hypocritical to most who have lost their jobs permanently, their businesses, and may or may not have enough savings to feed their families and pay their bills while millionaires are well set in their banks and trust funds.

“Be safe,” and other phraseology invented for the benefit of robbing us of freedom of movement, assembly, right to make a living, and freedom of religion, should have been really called what they are, forced imprisonment into our homes and servitude to dangerous vaccines produced in a hurry, chip implantation, and personal control through data.

Many people were not safe in their homes just as the 101 nursing home residents in northern Virginia were not safe in their lockdown, most of them were positive and many symptomatic.

For the “greater good” is offensive. No good can ever come out when the government chooses who is “essential” and who is “non-essential” to society and to the economy. Nazi Germany picked winners and losers and it did not end well for the Jewish people.

The “new normal” is offensive too. There is nothing normal about anything that has happened to us in the last ten weeks and is still happening.

Egomaniacs and megalomaniacs with a Messianic complex have crawled into the limelight, mostly Democrats at local and state levels, placing healthy people in quarantine as well as sick ones far beyond the normal 40 days, prompting many Americans to demonstrate against insane executive orders and to demand that their churches, schools, small businesses, and doctors’ offices be open after ten weeks of lockdown in various states.

Sound reasoning, proper science and medicine were the last employed in the decision-making process of government in many countries that followed the U.S. lead and example. Sweden who allowed herd immunity to take its normal flu toll has not been any worse off in the number of patients infected and the number of those who have died.

Instead of locking down healthy people, we should have protected the most vulnerable, the elderly in the nursing homes. Instead, we have exposed them unnecessarily and thoughtlessly because they have few lobbyists and champions who defend their rights.

Stop waiting for a new vaccine. Flu vaccines are only partially effective as the viruses mutate. Even Bill Gates admitted, “The efficacy of vaccines in older people is always a huge challenge, it turns out the flu vaccine isn’t that effective in elderly people. And that actual decision of, ok, let’s go and give this vaccine to the entire world, governments will have to be involved because there will be some risk and indemnification needed.”

Update on my mom: She is now free of oxygen and feeling better. The drug cocktail is working and she now breathes on her own,  97% oxygen saturation. I am really happy; yesterday she told me she was hungry. 

It is unforgivable that the nursing home moved her from a private room where she was Covid-negative, into an infected room previously occupied by a Covid-positive patient who was sick. And the room was never properly sanitized. 

Week 9 of Forced Quarantine for Healthy Americans

Everybody must have bought all the toilet paper they needed because now grocery stores have toilet paper. I am not so sure if the food supply is adequate because the hoarders stopped panic buying but the shelves still look empty at my local grocery chain.

The draconian social distancing rules have added more lines, arrows, policing, one entry and one exit only, 50 plus lines of people outside Costco and Wegman, waiting to get into the grocery store to buy their weekly necessities. Before this opportunistic viral plandemic, most grocery stores stocked three days’ worth of groceries, now it looks more like a couple of hours’ worth.

The progressive population around me still wears N-95 masks for walks in the woods and give the rest of us dirty looks for NOT wearing facial masks. We are there to get fresh air, not to catch viruses which are abundant in nature and have always been. I am not so sure THIS virus even exists in nature.

Stores are still closed for the good of the fearful and the moronic inhabitants of northern Virginia who don’t seem to listen or behave well, the governor and other local powers that be told us, we keep having cases of new infections among the illegal construction workers who don’t care about viruses, they just want to feed their large families and work in close proximity to each other, building more townhomes and apartments for the Democrats flooding the area.

Since we have not declined our infected numbers, as prescribed by the doctor-in-chief, Fauci, the governor was petitioned by the third layer of government, the local ones, to extend our quarantine for the healthy indefinitely.

The street are completely dead and silent, save for the wild animals coming out of the woods in the absence of humans, looking for food, and crossing the streets in the middle of day and walking behind our homes – coyotes, foxes, deer, racoons, and the ever-present squirrels which have multiplied since the lockdown weeks ago – nobody drives much to kill them accidentally.

The cops are everywhere, bored but ever-vigilant for the few unlucky drivers who venture out to essential stores such as grocery, pharmacy, Walmart, Target, Home Depot, Office Depot, liquor store, the legal marijuana shop, and who happen to speed on an otherwise empty highway.

On weekends, when the traffic picks up a bit, it is obvious that people have forgotten how to drive properly during their nine weeks of forced quarantine for the healthy. They look tired, harassed, old, and like woolly mammoths with unkept hair of all colors flying in the wind like SOS banners.

The parks are still closed but people are inventive – they park on the side of the highway and enter the parks on foot or pretend to go fishing with their children. To be sure to not be stopped, they all wear facial masks, some of them professional grade for good measure.

The gas stations seem deserted because nobody has anywhere to go much but gas prices remained steady at $1.89/gallon.

People give themselves haircuts or learn to wear caps and hats again with their favorite team that is no longer allowed to practice or play.

High school and college graduates’ families have made makeshift podiums in their front yards to make-believe that their graduating children will have a memorable experience – Covid-19 Lockdown Graduation 2020.

After having cleaned their homes to a sparkling shine and planted all the flowers allowed because vegetable seeds are forbidden in some states or cannot be found, people stay on social media too long, desperate for human contact, especially on Facebook but are angry because they are being put in Facebook jail for their opinions even though we have a constitutional right to free speech.

Facebook hired censors to shadow-ban us and to factcheck our thinking and our opinions against such vaunted leftist opinions from media such as USA Today, Yahoo News, Washington Post, Huffington Post, New York Times, etc.

We are allowed medical Zoom conferences with our doctors who hide behind their computer screens at home instead of practicing medicine in their offices and touching patients they are supposed to help.

Pharmacists yell at customers who dare come too close for comfort even though they are now hiding behind six feet of space, masks, a counter, and tall Plexiglas for their protection from the unwashed and contagious masses.

The banks are also closed for our protection but it does not matter because, after Nancy Pelosi passes another $3 trillion stimulus package to pay their crony capitalists to remain in business and the ever-climbing unemployed to stay home and not ever work, your money will be worthless against rising prices deriving from the upcoming galloping Weimar Republic-style inflation.

We are thankful that we still have trash pickup as we generate tons of garbage from staying home. The mail runs much earlier than usual because there is not much correspondence, bills to pay, or ads as stores have remained closed for at least two months and are not planning on opening soon, many having declared bankruptcy. But Amazon, FedEx, and UPS are busy delivering groceries to neighbors and whatever else they shopped for.  Mountains of cardboard boxes are waiting on the curb to be picked up by recyclers.

Some have asked me recently if this reminds me of living under communism. The answer is yes and no. The lockdown seems like prison, but it is a gilded prison by comparison as we have all the luxuries of western wealth and civilization that we did not have under communism. Deliveries of goods, food, and prepared food did not exist then.

The censorship of speech, assembly, religion, is fast developing into a much stronger censorship than we had under communism and it is more insidious as today’s technology makes spying on people so much easier and cheaper.

The Democrat Party has turned into the Socialists and Communists we feared, yielding a lot of power over our lives.

Our President today has been neutered quite effectively for the “collective good.” The communist dictator we suffered under yielded absolute power.

There are isolated cases, for now, of people violating lockdown orders, and paying fines and going to jail, but I am not sure communists have released hard-core criminals from jail for their own health. That is something entirely different that no communist regimes have engaged in. Many were sent to gulags for their political leanings, speech, associations, and thought. For now, we are just censored in the U.S.

Constitutional rights here have been suspended just like they were under communism. They were spelled out on paper but the Communist Party, like the Democrats, did whatever they wanted with their citizens who were locked down between borders and inside their homes.

A semblance of healthcare was provided under communism, best for the elites, like today. We did not have virtual conferencing and virtual doctors then, hospitals were not closed for lack of patients, we just did not have many hospitals or drugs to treat the sick. Today, people are scared to go to hospitals and their doctor’s offices are closed. You must take your own temperature and blood pressure.

How close are we to communism? In some ways we are quite close, in others, we still have a bit to go. But, at the rapid rate of freedoms lost, it will not be long before we live under a totalitarian regime in the U.S. as well. I just hope that the food and drug shortages to come will not be as severe as I have experienced in my first twenty years of life under communism.

From our vantage point, although in the grand scheme of things, it does matter where this not-found-in-nature Covid-19 virus has originated, like the Roman soldiers, who only cared abut the pebble in their shoes, the average American wants to live in a free and dignified way. Yet, the more we ask for freedoms we have lost, the more we are ignored and hear the chains rattle.

The Fabric of Society is Badly Frayed

“An evildoer listens to wicked lips, and a liar gives ear to a mischievous tongue.” Proverbs 17:4.

The Corona virus which has originated in Wuhan, China, has fundamentally transformed the globe, and facilitated the last nails in the economic coffin of the West, particularly in the United States.

Whether it was a planned lockdown or one of opportunity to destroy a booming economy for the sake of political destruction of an opponent the Socialist left and its media lackeys hate so much that it has morphed into a Trump Derangement Syndrome, remains to be seen in the outcome when the volcanic ash settles on what is left of the economy. One thing is certain, if the lockdown continues, the middle class will be wiped out financially and so will small businesses.

Sadly, thousands of lives have been lost due to the “pandemic’ predicted by faulty computer modeling. The losses occurred because medical systems were inadequate in their response, overwhelmed because they did not know how to treat patients properly and lacked the resources.

The lock-step media fearmongering, panic, and hype which had reached global proportions, suffocated earnest attempts to deal with the novel corona virus. In addition to the innocents who have died from a virus that does not exist in nature, the global economy crashed, and it will take a long time to recover. In some states in the U.S., for every person who has died with the COVID-19 flu, 3,000 or more people have lost their jobs permanently. Unlike the U.S., most countries do not have the “luxury” of printing endless trillions, creating runaway or galloping inflation.

The dilemma remains, do we protect the medically weak and allow the healthy to become weak themselves in a prolonged and forced quarantine at state and local levels, or do we let “herd immunity” take over as it happened in Sweden?  

People are emerging scared of their shadow, hateful of others even more so than they were before, and living a virtual existence locked in their own homes and minds, fearful and resentful of their neighbors, snitching on them in case they are seen as a threat to their existence and survival, encouraged by their governments to turn in potential offenders to the Orwellian lockdown for the healthy masses. It would certainly make the Stasi quite proud. Nobody must pay them to become a Snitches-R-Us tyrannical society.

Unfortunately, the wealth that we once had, when ordinary people had access to culture, restaurants, entertainment, is gone. Many had already lost patriotic conscience to the indoctrination in schools and by the media. They’ve lost values and lived in total confusion, have lost the zest to live in harmony and peace, they’ve lost respect for humans with whom they disagreed, for moral values, for religion, and for the desire to respect their wiser elders, men of worth, and the history of their country. The moral role models were replaced by the scum of society with money and a nefarious agenda.

Who would have thought possible that the only Americans courageous enough to protest the infringement on our Constitutional rights to freedoms of assembly, religion, speech, and the right to make a living, would be cosmetologists and barbers?

The “never let a crisis go to waste” millionaire crowd in Hollywood is urging the government to end capitalism as they lecture us from their state-of-the art mansions built on the foundation of capitalism and free markets and telling us hypocritically that “we are in this together.”  When the masses are losing their jobs permanently and small businesses are devastated, the lefties could not care less, they’ve already made their millions and wealthy lives in Hollywood, let the rest suffer in their penury, waiting on government to give them $600 a week to survive on with printed inflationary money.

“CDC estimates that the burden of illness during the 2018–2019 season included an estimated 35.5 million people getting sick with influenza, 16.5 million people going to a health care provider for their illness, 490,600 hospitalizations, and 34,200 deaths from influenza.” https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/2018-2019.html

Last year more than 34,200 people died of the flu but nobody was scared because the media and constant public service announcements (PSAs) did not tell us to panic, be scared, hide behind a mask, and wash our hands. We were not placed under quarantine, stores were not forced to close, the economy did not shut down, and the quarantine “breakers’ were not put in jail or on ankle monitors. Criminals were not let out of jail for fear that they might develop the corona flu and die in prison. They are now walking among us, waiting to pounce and commit new crimes.

We will eventually find out if this World Health Organization (WHO) declared “pandemic” was a Plan-demic, Panic-demic, Progressive-demic, Politic-demic, Pander-demic, Poverty-demic, a Psycho-demic, or a huge mistake. One thing is certain, as George Orwell said, “The people that elect corrupt politicians, impostors, thieves, and traitors, are not victims… but accomplices.”

Until then, stay in your homes, wear masks everywhere, even in the woods, and social distance from other humans. The lockdown will last until most small businesses will be unable to recover and the vultures will step in to pick the carrion.  Sick, broke, and dependent will be the easiest way to control the masses.

It is sad that the strong fabric of society is so badly frayed and tattered and in dire need of mending.

The World Blew a Major Gasket and Globalists Cheered

The world blew a major gasket over the Coronavirus and destroyed booming economies. How will it handle the next health crisis, put everyone in shackles and those who cough and sneeze in quarantines (Latin for 40 days) that last a vague and undecided time? As my wise grandma used to say, “the country is burning, and the old lady is combing her hair.”

The virus is real and treatable, however, according to the Washington Times, “COVID-19 will go down as one of the political world’s biggest, most shamefully overblown, overhyped, overly and irrationally inflated and outright deceptively flawed responses to a health matter in American history, one that was carried largely on the lips of medical professionals who have no business running a national economy or government.” https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/apr/28/coronavirus-hype-biggest-political-hoax-in-history/?utm_campaign=shareaholic&utm_medium=facebook&utm_source=socialnetwork&fbclid=IwAR0ABYRu4VAqiEG259cThCgL0ENmA-C81k3W_jLPjhBR7LKAENASW0G3UTU

Depending on where you live, the government either ignored the crisis, i.e., Sweden, and let the herd immunity run its course, or instituted a complete lockdown of the country and of the economy similar to a martial law, with police and the military controlling the comings and goings of the population who were only allowed to go to grocery stores and pharmacies.

People who had other ailments stayed home for fear of dying of COVID-19 in the hospital and some died in their homes of heart attacks or other perhaps treatable illnesses.

Elective surgeries were no longer performed, hospitals were mostly empty, staff and doctors laid off, some doctors offered on line conferences (the patients had to take their own temp and blood pressure), or people languished in pain at home.

A beauty salon operator who defied her business closure order by the state and local governments in Texas went to jail for 7 days, the length of time her salon had been opened without the government’s permission. Hailed as a hero by many, she defied the judge’s orders to stay closed; she explained that making a living to feed one’s hungry family and to pay the bills is not a crime.

The spineless faction of America who hides behind masks in their own cars, homes, and in the woods when alone, chastised her for putting them in mortal danger. They believe that giving up constitutional freedoms is fine if they have their temporary safety. Government stimulus money and unemployment are welcome because they do not have to work – “free money” falling from the proverbial money tree.

Lei Fang and colleagues wrote in the Lancet, Respiratory Medicine, on March 26, 2020 that they extrapolated results from a molecular study of coronaviruses, which showed that this group of viruses uses angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2) to target cells on the epithelium of the lungs, intestine, kidneys, and blood vessels. Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), which causes coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), would probably share these properties. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7194728/

The scientists also wrote in the Lancet that “The fast-developing pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), which is caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), was first reported from Wuhan, China, and has spread globally.”  

By March 22, 2020 “among 191 patients hospitalized with COVID-19, the most significant comorbidities with significant effects on mortality were hypertension (30%), diabetes (36%) and coronary heart disease (15%).”

“In an analysis of 201 patients with COVID-19, 84 (42%) patients developed acute respiratory distress syndrome, with hypertension (27%) and diabetes (19%) as the most common comorbidities.” https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7194912/

In 1984 Dr. Fauci became director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). In this position, he would have known about the article published in the Virology Journal on August 22, 2005, “Chloroquine is a potent inhibitor of SARS coronavirus infection and spread.”

The scientists reported that “chloroquine has strong antiviral effects on SARS-CoV infection of primate cells. These inhibitory effects are observed when the cells are treated with the drug either before or after exposure to the virus, suggesting both prophylactic and therapeutic advantage.”

“Chloroquine is effective in preventing the spread of SARS CoV in cell culture. Favorable inhibition of virus spread was observed when the cells were either treated with chloroquine prior to or after SARS CoV infection. In addition, the indirect immunofluorescence assay described herein represents a simple and rapid method for screening SARS-CoV antiviral compounds.” https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1232869/

For 15 years Dr. Fauci must have known that both chloroquine and its milder derivative hydroxychloroquine (HCQ), sold as Plaquenil (hydroxychloroquine sulfate), and given to patients for treatment of malaria, Lupus, and rheumatoid arthritis, will both treat a current case of coronavirus (therapeutic) and prevent future cases (prophylactic), making HCQ a cure and a “vaccine” of sorts. The 2005 article stated that “concentrations of 10 μM completely abolished SARS-CoV infection.” They added “chloroquine can effectively reduce the establishment of infection and spread of SARS-CoV.” https://principia-scientific.org/fauci-knew-about-hcq-in-2005-nobody-needed-to-die/

As non-scientists, we must still ask particularly important questions:

(1) If we knew since 2005 that HCQ was effective, why have HCQ, Zithromax, and zinc not been widely used on COVID patients instead of ventilators?

(2) And why have we allowed draconian governors to lock down healthy and frightened populations panicked by the media for so long, eight weeks and counting, instead of allowing herd immunity to take place?
(3) Why have so many life-altering decisions been made not just in the U.S. but all over the world, destroying strong economies such as the U.S. - to develop a vaccine 18 months from now?

(4) Why have we been so decisively influenced by faulty computer modeling?
In the process, people resigned themselves to this forfeiture of so many freedoms in exchange for an imagined temporary safety offered by governments in control. Among the many losses were freedom to earn a living, of speech, of movement, of assembly, and of religion.

The mayor of Kansas City, Missouri demanded that churches record the names and contact information of everyone who attended a “religious gathering” so that the Kansas City Department of Public Health could “quickly trace, test, and isolate individuals.”  https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/may/5/kansas-city-church-surveillance-about-unamerican-i/

I am really stunned and frightened that this is happening in America, in the “free world.” Such neighborly snitching and informing only happened under fascist and communist tyrannical regimes, not in an open society.

Defectors from Globalism, Where Would You Go?

The true Iron Curtain which ran for hundreds of miles between

East and West Germany

Photo: Dr. Aurel Emilian Mircea

During the Soviet and Eastern Bloc decades of communism, which dominated almost the entire 20^th century, fundamental dissenters to the communist ideology who were locked up between the borders of a tyrannical system rarely matched by history were considered dissidents. They were forced to live a life of harassment and poverty below the average proletariat’s impoverished lifestyle, being denied basic human rights.

But some citizens chose to escape their physical and mental communist prison at any cost to them or their families and became defectors. Politically, the definition of a defector sounds ordinary, “a person who gives up allegiance to one state in exchange for allegiance to another, in a way which is considered illegitimate by the first state. More broadly, it involves abandoning a person, cause, or doctrine to which one is bound by some tie, as of allegiance or duty.”

But a defector, whether it was a famous, infamous, or ordinary person, absconded in order to find freedom of mind, body, and spirit. More broadly, they wanted to find freedom which they were denied – religious, educationally, economically, physically, politically, etc.

In a pejorative sense, in the free world, a defector was anyone who switched loyalty to another religion, sports team, political party, a rival faction, a “traitor” to the original side. I do not know how they can be traitors to a cause or ideology they’ve never embraced in the first place, it was forced upon them by heavily armed men on a tyrannical quest.

There is a long list of defectors from the former Soviet bloc countries. The most famous is the two-star Romanian Securitate general and personal advisor to Nicolae Ceausescu, the brutal dictator of the Socialist Republic of Romania. Gen. Pacepa defected to the free West in 1978 in the American Embassy in Bonn, West Germany; he was sentenced to death twice in absentia with a $2 million bounty on his head. The dear leader even sent Carlos the Jackal to assassinate him unsuccessfully.

There was Nadia Comanici, the famous Olympic gymnast, who defected weeks before the Romanian revolution in December 1989.

An air force cadet, Mihai Smighelschi, flew in 1987 his Aero L-39ZA Albatross jet trainer aircraft from Buzau, Romania to Kirklareli, Turkey, where he landed on a dirt road. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Soviet_and_Eastern_Bloc_defectors

There are thousands of untold stories of defectors who walked away from conferences, chess tournaments, gymnastics competitions, classical concerts and ballet performances, swam across the Danube River while being shot at by border guards, hiding inside car seats or engine compartments, crawling under barbed wire, jumping from trains into large rivers and lakes and swimming to freedom, flying light aircraft low in order to avoid detection, and many who escaped by visiting friends and family, overstaying their three-month visas, and never returning to the communist hell they’ve escaped.

In each case, the defectors were stripped of their citizenship from their home countries, of their life possessions, savings, and private property if they had any, and their families left behind were tortured, mistreated, beaten, and stripped of their private property which did not even belong to the defector. Such was the totalitarian socialist life dictated by the Communist Party. Under their control, you had no freedoms and certainly you had no way to redress any wrong.

You were told what to do, where to live, how to live, where to go to school, where to work, where to travel, what to eat, how much to eat, how to behave, how to exercise, locked down in your own little world dictated by all mighty communists and their informants, enforcers, the police, the security police, the economic police, the border police, and the army.

People were prisoners in their own countries, their homes, and minds. Doctors were even sent to homes to check on the medical and physical welfare of children to make sure that they were raised in the right socialist environment in order to become good and compliant socialists.

Having felt on my own skin the socialist oppression under the boot of the Communist Party, I watched in dismay as one virus, which killed less people than the seasonal flu, become an instrument of oppression and an excuse to install a political global control which someone had termed “corona communism.”

Never have I seen Americans, so fond of their freedoms spelled out so clearly in their founding documents, compliantly and peacefully watch them disappear virtually overnight under the guise of “protection” from a virus.

Millions of healthy people around the globe were quarantined in their own homes by draconian state and local governments who used the police and the military to enforce compliance – healthy people forbidden from walking and sitting in the woods, parks, beaches, and other recreational venues. Everything was shut down except “essential businesses” which were randomly chosen based on their crony capitalist size.

Avicenna, who came up with the idea of quarantine for SICK people, would have laughed today to see healthy people being quarantined for more than 40 days, affecting their natural immunity in doing so.

During the 14^th century, in order to protect coastal cities from infection by plague epidemics brought in by ships, vessels arriving in Venice from infected ports were required to sit at anchor for 40 days before landing.

But the current lockdown (quarantine) of healthy people all over the world, not just in the U.S., is something that we have never experienced before to this extent.

Why did Americans fold so quickly to the irrational power and control of two CDC doctors, the World Health Organization’s (WHO) chief whose faulty computer modeling predicted millions of casualties in our country alone, and globalist political hacks at all levels of government? Certainly, the globalist media fanned the flames of fear and irrational panic of instant death and destruction.

It is a good question to ponder as we struggle to restart the comatose economy at -4.80% GDP in the first quarter. As more and more small businesses are going belly up due to forced closures, and even large retailers are filing for bankruptcy, are we just sinking into an even more serious recession in Q2 or is there something more nefarious at play?

I hope that some Americans will not be forcefully vaccinated with the rushed corona vaccine nor microchipped to prove their compliance. They will become defectors in their own countries because there is certainly no where else to defect to on the planet that offers the freedoms they have been enjoying and taking for granted for such a long time. But the skies are getting darker and more ominous with each day of forced lockdowns and closures of “non-essential” businesses. Defectors from encroaching globalism, where will you go? The “no borders” are being squeezed tighter.