Sacher Torte, Christkindlmarkt, and Ötzi

We were driving 96 miles north one cold December B.C. (before COVID-19) from Verona, Italy to Bolzano, as fast as the autostrada and the traffic allowed us. We were going to visit the Christmas market in Bolzano among other things.

Because Bolzano is so close to Austria (called Bozen in German), we were also hoping to find my favorite dessert, Sacher Torte. 

For those of you who do not understand why anyone in their right mind would drive 96 miles to buy a Sacher Torte, you are happy with the birthday cake from the closest grocery store or Walmart, you obviously have not grown up under socialism where Comrade Ceausescu kept us starving, food and basics were scarce, and chocolate was more valuable as commodity money than as food. But once you taste good chocolate after such communist party starvation diet, you will definitely develop the ability to taste good chocolate from the ordinary variety.

This Sacher Torte, if you like chocolate mixed with fruit in your cake, is a closely guarded trade secret, created by Franz Sacher. They sell the original Sacher Torte in Vienna at the famous Sacher Hotel, in Innsbruck, in Graz, in the duty free shop in Vienna's airport, and at the Sacher Shop in Bolzano.

Our Volvo rolled smoothly through the beautiful landscape – nature is breathtaking in the Alps even in winter and Bolzano is the “gateway to the Dolomites.”

South Tyrol in northern Italy is a fascinating area and its capital, Bolzano, is the largest city in Süd Tirol, with a metro area population of 250,000. The locals speak both Italian and German, having been part of Austrian territory prior to WWI.

The famous Christmas market, Christkindlmarkt, opens here from the end of November to 6^th of January. The Christmas atmosphere is provided by eighty exhibitors who sell food, arts and crafts, the delicious German pretzels, and the famous Gluhwein.

The Christmas market, also known as Weihnachtsmarkt, is a street market that celebrates Christmas during the four weeks of Advent. The market, as the name clearly states, originated in Germany but it is now held in many other countries in Europe and even in the U.S. where there is a large population of Americans with German ancestry. The celebration goes back to the Middle Ages, the 1500s and some parts of the Holy Roman Empire, including eastern regions of France. It was an opportunity for joy, light, and merriment during the cold and dark winter season.

Piazza Walther takes on a special advent atmosphere where Santa Claus could land any moment with his sleigh and reindeer. Opened in 1991, Piazza Walther’s Christkindlmarkt, the largest in Italy, showcases Künstlermarkt & Schau, the charity market, and the children’s Christmas market. The square was named after a 13^th century German minstrel. Bolzano has only been Italian since the end of WWI, therefore it retains its German character.

Bolzano was recognized internationally under Italian control in 1919. Italian troops had entered Tyrol and occupied Austrian areas south of the Brenner Pass in 1918. The area has been transformed to reflect the Italian population, but the German character and way of life are unmistakable.

Children learn in school both Italian and German. Some families speak at home a third language, Ladin, spoken in the Dolomite Mountains of Northern Italy, a language similar to Swiss Romansh and Friulian.

We strolled casually past the South Tyrol Museum of Archeology, briefly glancing at the silhouette on the sign which depicted a man dressed in primitive-looking clothing. It turned out that this was the town’s most famous resident, dating back to 3300 B.C.

Ötzi, also called the Iceman, is the natural mummy of a man frozen in the Alps between 3400 and 3100 B.C. His remains were found in September 1991 in the Ötztal Alps by a hiking couple at the border between Austria and Italy. People jokingly swear that Italians moved the border to claim the mummy’s body for their museum. The courts eventually decided that his body, still frozen in a glacier, was found within Italian territory.

As the mummy has been thoroughly studied, scientists were able to speculate about his last days on this earth and determine his health condition, his diet, and how he succumbed to his left shoulder wound in which an arrowhead had been embedded. Because he was carrying an expensive copper ax, much has been written and discussed why he was murdered and, if he was wounded and eventually died for his expensive copper ax, why was it still in his possession. His discovery gave scientists the opportunity to study the life of Copper Age (Chalcolithic) Europeans.

Kept in a freezer with a small window for viewing, the now maroon-colored mummy and all his belongings (copies) are displayed in the museum. Curators have speculated and crafted a possible life this mummy may have had. They studied the contents of his full stomach, his nails, his purse with dried mushrooms, his clothing, his hair, his shoes filled with straw for warmth, and his 61 tattoos most of which were not visible with the naked eye.

The mummy had intact blood cells and it allowed the Innsbruck Medical University to perform DNA tests on Ötzi in October 2013. From over 3,700 Tyrolean male blood donors, 19 were found to share a particular genetic mutation with the 5,300-year-old mummified man. In the autosomal DNA, he seemed to have been related to Sardinians and Corsicans.

Ötzi’s DNA analysis revealed high risk of atherosclerosis, lactose intolerance, and that he suffered from Lyme disease but the Borrelia burgdorferi was of a different species.

The strain of H. pylori bacteria found in his intestinal tract was like three modern individuals from Northern India. The contents of his stomach were analyzed and found to contain an omnivorous diet. Because he died with a full stomach, researchers were able to discover many other details about Ötzi’s life and his last days.

Helmut and Erika Simon found the mummy on the melting glacier in the Alps and were awarded eventually in court €150,000 in recognition of Ötzi's discovery by her and her late husband and the tourist income that it attracts.

The case dragged in court for years as many other opportunists came forward to claim the reward prize. As some of the people involved with the discovery have died, conspiracy theorists even invented a curse of the mummy.

On a second visit to Bolzano, we made a lengthy visit in the museum dedicated to Ötzi.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Socialist Citizen

Professor Emeritus Michael Walzer paraphrased Marx’s description of the socialist citizen (from The German Ideology): “Imagine the day in the life of a socialist citizen. He hunts in the morning, fishes in the afternoon, rears cattle in the evening, and plays the critic after dinner. Yet he is neither hunter, nor fisherman, nor shepherd, nor critic; tomorrow he may select another set of activities, just as he pleases.”

The envisioned socialist citizen in America will engage in “participatory democracy.” In theory, a participatory democracy’s citizens would have individual participation in political decisions and would make policies that would affect their lives directly and there would be no elected representatives making such decisions.

The socialist republic I grew up in had this type of participatory democracy in place. People in good standing with the Communist Party could make pre-determined suggestions during union meetings but the Party had the ultimate decision-making power. The rest of the population, who were not members of the Communist Party had no input in the decision-making process. The Party tried to keep membership selective to about ten percent of the population.

Was this socialist society a “self-governing community of equals?” No, citizens were only equal in their poverty, neediness, misery, and lack of human rights and freedoms. They could not do as they pleased and be what Marx called “social men and women, organizing and planning their own fulfillment in spontaneous activity.” They were serfs to the all-powerful state ruled by the Party.

Often academic and philosophical theories, even those well intentioned, diverge greatly from the reality of implementing such theories. Other times dangerous philosophies can cause misery and death to millions around the globe. Such was the power of Karl Marx’s ideas.

Self-government takes a lot of time, self-control, and is very demanding, if it is implemented correctly, socialists argue.

“The idea of citizenship on the left has always been overwhelming, suggesting a positive frenzy of activity and often involving the repression of all feelings except political ones.”

Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), a socialist, considered the father of modern left-wing, had disparaged the worth of one’s private life. As the main philosopher of the French Revolution, he attacked private property and “declared the government’s goal should be to provide freedom, equality, and justice.” The idea that government can provide freedom is contemptible.

Citizen must be, above all, “dutiful,” placing “common good, the success of the movement, the safety of the community, above their own delight or well-being, always.”

Such “virtuous” citizens could be produced by rote indoctrination, transformation, or rigorous instruction/brainwashing.

Rousseau suggested the creation of the “virtuous” citizen through an “authoritarian family, a rigid sexual code, censorship of the arts, sumptuary laws, mutual surveillance, and the systematic indoctrination of children.”

Sumptuary laws refer to limiting private spending on food and personal items. I am familiar with this form of socialist oppression as the dear leader always rationed our food, issued rationing cards, punished food hoarding and black marketeers, and passed laws that decreed how many calories per day people engaged in various professions could consume, and how much they could weigh.

Socialism is coercive, forcing its citizens to “volunteer” for action and to labor on weekends for the public good in addition to their jobs in factories or offices wherever they are deemed to further the political or economic socialist cause.

Students are exploited and forced to work with no pay for weeks during the crop harvest season and the crop planting season.

Citizens living in a socialist state are forced to donate time and energy to the socialist cause and the “participatory democracy” in which they are just warm bodies for political optics, filling the auditoriums or the dear leader’s parade grounds. It is “popular participation” but not voluntary – it is demanded by the state and driven by the fear of punishment.

Walzer wrote that “participatory democracy means the sharing of power among the [socialist] activists. Socialism means the rule of the people with the most evenings to spare.” If citizens” do not govern themselves, they will, willy-nilly, be governed by their activist fellows.” Who were these activist fellows of the 20^th century who ruled behind the Soviet ideology with an iron fist? They were “full-timers, militants, and professionals.” (p. 310)

The militants, in Walzer’s opinion, represent themselves. So, in a future socialist society, he recommends that participatory democracy must be paralleled by representative democracy.

Why was the rest of the socialist society I grew up in suppressed by the militant apparatchiks/activists on the Communist Party payroll? The main reason was that none of the citizens were armed (guns were the first things confiscated by activist goons, followed by private property) while the Communist Party engaged a huge and well-paid military, a large cadre of informers, a large police force, security police, and economic police.  Nobody could make one wrong step without the state knowing about it. And they did it without the help of high tech.

People stayed away from the Communist Party membership ranks because they were not committed to the cause they saw daily as a big, blatant lie, they were morally beaten, economically beaten, starved, and deathly afraid.

Citizens created undergrounds to bypass the oppressive world of the Socialist/Communist Party ideology. They learned coping skills to avoid the socialist apparatchik tyranny in which freedom of speech and assembly were deadly.

Today, three decades since the “fall” of socialism/communism in Eastern Europe, citizens have regained their freedom of speech and assembly but sadly now nobody listens to them, especially politicians.

The press repeats the same globalist lies to their people thus colluding with corrupt politicians in their efforts to install a new world order, socialism on such a grander scale that Marx and Stalin would be shocked.

Social Justice in Sports, Bread and Circuses

On any Sunday, the government-owned stadiums across the socialist country I knew, ruled by the Communist Party, were filled with men cheering their favorite soccer teams, throwing empty beer bottles at other spectators, letting out temporary steam from their miserable lives during the week, a sort of Roman “Pane et circenses,” bread and circuses, for the oppressed proletariat.

There were no concession stands, no food sold, just beer brought from the outside. The fans often injured other fans and fights broke out that the police were not eager to disperse. They were told to leave them alone. The soccer players and coaches were not immune from injury either.

Sports but especially soccer could exist in the former Soviet satellite countries to pacify the proletariat. Other sports were used to glorify, in competitions with other countries, the existence of the socialist state which controlled everything including athletic training, domestic competition venues, medals, and small earnings to athletes and their families – gold dust in the eyes of the beholder.

In the U.S., organized sports have become something else, tools of indoctrination into the much-desired transition from the maligned capitalism, which gave so many associated with sports a vast and unimaginable wealth, to socialism, which allegedly is going to make everyone equal under the leadership of the Democrat Socialist Party.

NBA’s Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf, born and raised in Gulfport, MS, chose not to stand for the national anthem in 1996 and said that he did so because the American flag was “a symbol of freedom for some, … a symbol of oppression and tyranny to others.” Many wondered if he struggled with such an imagined dilemma when he spent money received from playing basketball as point guard for the Denver Nuggets.

The American left started to influence professional sports by declaring football dangerous and prone to injuries that were unfair to millionaire athletes, causing them severe brain and joint injuries. It is also true that student-athletes are not protected by financial remunerations and healthcare like the professional players are. Both groups experience brain and bodily injuries, some of which are quite debilitating and affect their long-term health. Some professional athletes experienced degenerative brain damage such as ALS. Players died from dehydration and heat exhaustion - thirty lives were lost in 18 years. 30 NCAA Football Players Have Died During Workouts Since 2000, HBO Reveals | American Council on Science and Health (acsh.org)

One can imagine and surmise that professional and collegiate sports are headed for the chopping block after such oft-repeated declarations and heated discussions against team sports. Who can tolerate so many human casualties?

Then the left decided to use sports for the “greater good,” to transform it into a democratized” platform of “social justice” advocacy, pushing “economic democracy.” If you wonder what direction that kind of rhetoric will take, it is the direction of socialism and eventual communism.

Americans were asked, “what dreams would you pursue if your basic needs were met?” What would you do with your time if everybody were on basic government dole and equal income?

During King Henry the VIII’s time, his poor subjects received leftover food from his 12 days of Christmas banquets and these scraps were called “dole.”

Dole is a fitting description in modern times when you consider that millions of subjects trapped under Soviet socialist countries in Europe during the twentieth century received scraps (dole) from the centralized state economy controlled by the Communist Party.

It is hard to enjoy organized sports today when highly paid players who live in mansions and opulence none of their spectators would ever dream of, lecture their fans about morality, wealth, greed, social justice, racism, questioning their history, their patriotism, and the love they have for their country.

It is no surprise that the NFL viewership has dropped by 17 percent, by their own admission. Fans, called racists by the players, chose to stay home, turned the television sets off, and stopped buying jerseys and other sports memorabilia. Vilifying and questioning the fans’ patriotism and political affiliation, destroying the golden goose so to speak, does not seem to be a particularly good business model in team sports.

Sports, like everything else the left promotes, has become a social justice and civil right issue. They believe sports should challenge imagined and manufactured racism and should be a “refuge for all who want to play, a place where oppression is challenged.” What oppression they are talking about, I have no idea, as I see no oppressed people around me, on the contrary, they are free to do as they see fit.

Sports, in the radical left’s view, should eliminate “sexism, toxic masculinity, and homophobia.” Sports teams should be forces “for the greater good.”

This rhetoric sounds familiar to me as the socialist society I grew up in emphasized “the greater good” to the exclusion of the individual who had to accept his/her paltry station in life and never strive for anything better unless the tyrannical government decided to give certain people with athletic talent the opportunity to succeed on the dear leader’s behalf.

The left objects to sports being used to promote patriotism and militarism and any symbols associated with them, the flag, uniformed military, and the national anthem which they despise.  It has become familiar to see athletes speak badly of their country while abroad competing in international sporting events and even in Olympics. They present themselves as global citizens, not Americans.

Radical lefties want to use sports to reflect their philosophy of civil disobedience and hatred for their country, hatred for capitalism which has made so many of them rich beyond anybody’s dreams of success. They wish to exploit sports for their envisioned social justice.

Wealthy athletes with God-given talent and exorbitant contracts kneel during the national anthem because they are not proud of our country – they see our most tolerant nation as oppressing black people and people of color.

From our reality-based vantage point, we are not oppressing anyone, people are free to make their own choices in life, athletes included. Americans must deal with the consequences of their deliberate acts and must take responsibility for their failures instead of blaming the non-existent construct of “systemic racism” and bogus “white privilege.”

 

Leftist Democracy is Suffocating

While attending school in the socialist republic paradise ruled by the Communist Party, the curriculum was determined by the communist educators and activists in good standing with the party. As students, if we tried to question the exact narrative printed in the books or repeated by teachers, we were usually told, “democracy has gone to your heads,” how dare you question the wisdom of the party?

This was not unlike what is happening today in American colleges and universities where divergent opinions from the progressive philosophy are not allowed to exist. Yet the same academics shout from the rooftops that non-leftists are endangering “democracy” by their mere existence.

The word “democracy” means different things for different people, depending on their ideology. Merriam-Webster dictionary defines democracy as “government by the people, rule of the majority, a government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised by them directly or indirectly through a system or representation usually involving periodically held free elections.”

Would that be “free elections” like the most recent presidential election when a new president-elect emerged, frail, sickly, and unable to gather more than 30 people to his rallies, aided and abetted by fraudulent mail-in ballots, “computer glitches” which added hundreds of thousands of new votes to his count in the middle of the night, opposition ballots disposed of in dumpsters, and boxes of favorable ballots delivered in the middle of the night in unmarked vans?

As I clearly recall, we had “democracy” in name only in socialism, under the rule of the Communist Party, it was their way or the gulag.

Leftists invoke “democracy” every time they want to achieve their goals which are usually not good for the American people. The left are really adept at accusing the other side of what they are doing, hijacking the concept of “democracy” to suit their globalist, anti-American agenda.

Blaming capitalism for the ills created by the left is something that the brainwashed useful idiots protesting in the streets and on campuses will never understand because they have lost contact, or never had it in the first place, with reality and historical facts.

“Empowering workers” and “worker power” have been tried before in the twentieth century with disastrous results in countries like USSR, Poland, Bulgaria, Romania, China, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, North Korea, Cuba, and many others ruled by the Communist Party.

Labor activists with plenty of money to burn, money donated by billionaires, used political action, the lying media, protests, and riots, as a form of bargaining to replace the enormous collective bargaining power that unions used to have.

Social justice, racial justice, jobs with justice, fake systemic racism, fake white privilege have become the rallying cry and excuse to destroy capitalism and anyone who stands in their way of bringing back communism, more destructive than ever and on a global scale.

The left is “radically reimagining and redefining” the mission and goals of societies and families across the globe and nobody will stand in their way. Sarcastically stated, what can possibly be more “democratic” than that? Erase borders, education, faith, family, history, nationality, confiscate wealth and redistribute it from producers to welfare recipients, and you have the Democratic Socialism envisioned by American Democrats.

The Democratic Socialism the left is building and advocating in the twenty-first century will drive us exactly in the direction of an “increasingly unstable, undemocratic, unequal, and unsustainable world” they are so busy criticizing capitalism for.

And the future of American workers will be quite bleak as the left pretends to protect them with clever rhetoric, while importing more and more illegal workers into the U.S. and outsourcing more well-paid and skilled American jobs to foreign guest workers who work for a fraction of the pay.

Leftists take pride in making their followers believe that their brand of “democracy” pays workers living wages for doing precious little and gives them free everything that makes life enjoyable.

The “democracy” I experienced under socialism was quite oppressive and the Party paid their workers, the infamous proletariat, barely survivable wages, with no way to improve one’s station in life or their families’ financial future.

The Democratic Socialists of America, founded in 1982, had about eight thousand converts by 1989. Today claims are made that 57 percent of Democrats have a favorable view of socialism and 37 percent of Americans have a positive view of socialism. If you are to believe such Gallup polls, of the 252 million voting-age Americans, 93 million (17 and older) view socialism in a rose-colored glass light.

In a short period of time, the United States moved from America-loving to an America-hating field primed for socialism and global communism.

What enabled such a significant change? The main culprits seem to be the academic halls of powerful indoctrination, Hollywood, billionaire donations to political non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and the misinformation of the main stream media fed gradually over decades by Jimmy Carter’s Department of (mis)Education.

The leftist brand of “democracy” is suffocating our formerly free society, turning it into a third world cesspool which will be problematic to escape, given the technocratic control over all levels of government, a swampy multi-headed Hydra fed with our tax dollars and foreign interference in political and economic affairs.

When this leftist brand of “democracy” crashes and burns, the politicians et al, who enabled it, will be long gone and dust in the ground but the globalist citizens, formerly Americans, will suffer the consequences for generations.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Radical Democrat Socialism American Style

When the radical socialists in Congress and in the streets of America started giving more and more rhetorical and chanting time to Democratic Socialism, half of America were enchanted, and half of America laughed. Such a construct aimed at re-defining socialism the American way was not to be taken seriously but it was. Young Millennials, egged on by seasoned members of the Communist Party USA, were going to build a better America, a Democrat Socialist America, free of capitalism.

Their explanation was that all the former Communist Party tyrants who obliterated over 100 million of their own people and enslaved the rest for most of the twentieth century were bumbling idiots. These American socialist wannabes who did not understand economics, politics, or knew geography at all, were going to do it better and thus succeed.

Now the Democrat Socialist whippersnappers have the chance to build their American-style socialist “paradise” with the newly “elected” duo Biden/Harris. Eighty million Americans genuinely believed that an octogenarian with severe health issues and a 47-year lackluster career in Washington would be the best president for the United States. As Newsweek magazine wrote on its cover on February 16, 2009, “We are all socialists now.”

If you ask most of the resident supporters of socialism, what is democratic socialism, you will get just as many confused looks, lame attempts at definitions, and the lack of understanding of what they support. They want a “socially owned economy,” a “workers’ self-management within a market socialist economy,” and a “decentralized planned socialist economy.” But they have no idea what it means.

Millennials do not understand how a capitalist economy functions, what is the role of capital and profit in the development of a free market economy. They are also highly ignorant of what drove into the ground the mis-managed centralized economies of all the socialist countries of the twentieth century. They could research the economy of Venezuela, Cuba, North Korea, and China today but that is too much to ask of such brainwashed generations.

Even though the Communist Party through the Bolshevik activists promised worker self-management and a socially-owned economy, the proletariat was not allowed to manage themselves and received nothing except a meager pay, hard times, starvation, misery, long food lines, shortages of everything, endless rationing, labor exploitation by communist unions called syndicates, and gulags funded by the Communist Party that lorded over them with an iron fist via its Central Committee, the security police, and its highly centralized five-year planning of their devastating economies.

Had these American radical Marxist activists known a smidgen of history, they would have realized that the democratic socialism repackaged lies presented to them in the 21^st century are repeats of those told a century ago by Bolsheviks dispatched around the globe by a well-funded cadre of communists on the payroll of bankers from the U.K. and America.

American students are now scholarly weak, ignorant, and thoroughly indoctrinated. They do not understand that security and prosperity cannot be legislated. You cannot make people equal by force of law, nor can you change their biology. You cannot steal from some and give to others in the name of social and economic justice.

You cannot legislate equal opportunity and equal outcomes. You cannot legislate inequality out of existence. Humans have been unequal since the beginning of time. Wealth and income disparity exist in the socialist economies centralized by the Communist Party and tech oligarchs.

Putting mom and pop stores and restaurants out of business creates more exploitation by large corporations that will function as oligarchies ruled by a centralized political committee of Democrat technocrats and billionaires.

Destroying the middle class is the dream of the Communist Party USA. The middle class is what made America successful and allowed a myriad of opportunities for all Americans to better themselves economically.

Millennials should listen to and learn from those who escaped from the prison of the workers’ socialist “paradise.” We lived under “Democratic Socialism.” It was neither democratic nor did it care about the poor masses. On the contrary, the rulers stole all the wealth and property and put everyone in prison who was considered “bourgeois.” And you were part of the imagined “bourgeoisie” if you owned a home or some land.

Under socialism ruled by the Communist Party, everyone was equally poor, miserable, and exploited with paltry wages, and no opportunity for education and progress. The poor people, that is the proletariat, had no opportunity for the constitutionally guaranteed self-governance; if they tried to demand anything they were promised, they were summarily dispatched to a gulag from which they never returned or worse yet, shot in front of their families to teach them a lesson they will never forget.

Democrat Socialists focus on redistribution of wealth by confiscating from those who worked to build wealth and giving it to those they see as having been exploited for the choices they made in life. D. Hamilton wrote that a “social democratic or democratic socialist America” must protect minorities from “predatory private employers” who focus on profit and “exploit people and the planet.”

To redress this exploitation, he proposes a federal job guarantee, a child trust, and reparations in a race-specific program. It is a welfare, wealth-redistribution scheme which, in his view would address the racial and economic injustice in this country.

To support his federal job guarantee (full employment) idea, Hamilton uses India’s National Rural Employment Guarantee Act as an example of promotion of full employment and alleviation of poverty.

Looking at India’s exodus of labor to America’s high-tech jobs and our hiring of Indians (outsourcing) to do jobs that Americans used to do, highly skilled and educated Americans who are now unemployed because of it, it is easy to see that a job guarantee does not alleviate poverty.

Under the socialism I grew up in, everybody had a job, but it was not worth much economically and it only paid survival wages, way less than minimum wage in America. My people were what Roosevelt called “necessitous men” who were not “free men.” Again, security and prosperity cannot be forced and legislated by politicians, bureaucrats, and philosophers.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said that “what socialism means is to guarantee a basic level of dignity. There is no other force, there is no other party, there is no other real ideology . . . that is asserting the minimum elements necessary to lead a dignified American life.”

Asking those who fled the socialist paradise she advocates, at great cost to them and their families, the stories are quite similar.  Living under socialism was starvation, no human dignity, a huge loss of personal freedoms, abject poverty, hunger, lack of necessities, lack of proper medical care, lack of medicines, severe oppression, loss of individuality for the good of the collective, justice for the Communist Party rulers only, and loss of private property and land.

Millennials should listen to those who escaped the socialist “paradise” Ocasio-Cortez promotes from her congressional platform.  Millennials should ignore the political rhetoric coming from highly unenlightened politicians with an agenda.

 

The Corona-19 Virus is Cunning and Discriminating

 

As a logical person, I am in awe that this Corona-19 virus is so brilliant – it knows exactly when to strike the unexpected. No worries though, the governors of some states are even smarter, they have curfews in place to prevent their citizens from being unnecessarily attacked by this cunning virus. Apparently, citizens are no longer capable of taking care of themselves and must let daddy-government tell them exactly what to do to protect themselves from this viral menace.

To avoid wearing your own bacteria-infested mask to the grocery store, I suggest an uncomplicated move – claim gubernatorial exemption for CS or CSL. I have not used it myself, but I was told by some who tried CS that it worked. What is CS and CSL, you ask? CS is a condition that many no longer harbor, Common Sense, and CSL is even rarer still, Common Sense and Logic.

The Corona-19 virus is also very discriminating, it knows not to attack humans whose fingers touch the payment keypads covered in plastic, they only contaminate fingers that touch the keypad directly. Amazing!

The governors whose jobs are to protect the people at all costs, know to close bars at exactly 9 p.m. or else the clever Corona-19 virus, which becomes viciously contagious a minute past that time, would kill us all.

And the grocery store cashiers no longer pack our groceries for fear of spreading the Corona-19 virus through contact. But the packers took the food out of a box to place it on a shelf, the baker mixed the dough that made the bread, customers come and go touching the merchandise, putting it back when they change their minds, the food gets placed by customers on the conveyor belt, and the cashier picks it up and scans it. How many hands have touched the precious food we bought? It is impossible to count or estimate, yet they refuse to pack our groceries in a paper or plastic bag. Order groceries online and they pack them neatly, going through several hands before being dropped on your doorstep.

A young man at the park reaches from his booth to the car window with a fishing net, collecting the money that has been already handled by the driver and possibly thousands of other hands if it is cash, and then touches it when he brings the net into his booth. Does it make any sense? Of course not, but he suffers from the same extreme condition of Irrational Panic and Fear Syndrome (IPFS).

At the McDonald’s drive-thru, my bag of food is presented on a tray and a hand also extends a scanner so I can scan the credit card myself, without the cashier touching it. He does not want to touch my food because of Covid-19, he says, we must be safe and stay healthy. I hear this phrase every time I encounter another human being. But the cook has already grilled my food and touched it numerous times, someone wrapped it, and touched it again when it was placed in a bag. The virus is so clever that it knows not to attack in those intermediate handling steps.

People meet and greet by bumping or tapping elbows. Seems like ages ago, we were told to cough and sneeze in our sleeves, it is much more sanitary. So, the virus discriminates and does not attach to a sleeve or an elbow and never transmits during tapping of elbows. Viruses must know that hand shaking, and hugs are the way to jump from person to person.

The most interesting environment for viruses must be restaurants. The person must wear a mask from the door to the table, which can be as close as 6 feet away because the virus knows you are all exposed during that space and it will float directly to you and infect you. Once you sit down, your air space is safe, and the mother ship will not get sick. The virus does not dare invade the space around and above your table. Never mind that the air conditioning ducts are circulating and blowing air and so are the fans above.

Benches have been removed from all department stores and even chairs are roped off. The blue benches around Walmart are taped with signs stating that, because of Covid-19, nobody can sit down. This smart virus knows when a person is resting for a few minutes and will jump at the opportunity to infect him/her. But at a pub, you are not allowed to stand and drink. The virus then knows you are drinking alcohol and thus a prime target for infection. Park benches are also taped and off limits to strollers.

Protesting and rioting shoulder to shoulder of thousands of people is a scary environment to a virus. Corona-19 does not dare show its face. But in churches and meetings of more than 10 people, the virus can be quite deadly.

The Corona-19 virus does not seem to mind or care about the crowds shopping at Walmart. A mass of humanity bumps into each other all the time, wearing a flimsy mask that the virus flies through any time it wants but it chooses instead to leave people alone. It might be a good idea to hold family reunions and church services on isle 28 at Walmart.

Life is upside down and bizarre right now, made so by people who suffer of an acute case of Irrational Panic and Fear Syndrome (IPFS) and by “important” people and power-mad politicians who get up every morning thinking of more novel and draconian ways to control and manipulate the masses because they can. For logical and rational people life is insufferable right now.

 

Epidemics and Pandemics in Weird History

Ebola - photo Wikipedia

The Plague of Athens (430 B.C.) occurred during the Peloponnesian War. It killed an alleged 100,000 people in 3 years which was about 25% of the Athenian population of the day. The symptoms included high fever, diarrhea, and a pustular rash. The Athenian general Thucydides wrote that the population was so panicked that they were sure nobody would survive. “People did not know what would happen to them so they became indifferent to every rule of religion or law.”*

The Antonine Plague or the Plague of Galen (165-180 A.D.) was either the measles or smallpox and killed 60 million people. One of the casualties was Lucius Aurelius Verus, a Roman Emperor, who had an adoptive brother, Marcus Aurelius.

The Plague of Cyprian 249-262 A.D. was potentially a type of flu, smallpox, or perhaps Ebola, expressing itself with vomiting, blood shot-eyes, blindness, bleeding, lack of hearing, coordination.  It killed 5,000 people a day in Rome. It was named after Cyprian, the bishop of Carthage, who recorded the event.

The Plague of Justinian affected the Byzantine Empire in 541 A.D. It is possibly the first recorded pandemic, during which 10,000 people a day died, and 100 million people around the world perished. According to historians, it may have originated in China, spread through trading routes, and lasted 225 years before it finally disappeared.

Smallpox, caused by the variola virus, was first identified in the riddled with pox marks mummy of the pharaoh Ramses the fifth.

Malaria is the most persistent of pandemics. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), “ An estimated 20 per cent of the world's population — mostly those living in the world's poorest countries — is at risk of contracting malaria. Malaria causes more than three hundred million acute illnesses and kills at least one million people every year.” https://www.who.int/medicentre/

The Black Death or bubonic plague is the most infamous pandemic in human history recognized by high fever and oozing sores called buboes. It was a recurring threat for more than a century when a high percentage (30-60%) of the world’s population was wiped out.

The Cocolitztli epidemic of 1545-1548 in Mexico killed an alleged 5-15 million people. The symptoms included high fever and bleeding. It was possibly a salmonella outbreak.

The Moscow Plague killed one third of Moscow’s population in 1770. This late bubonic plague caused widespread rioting and food shortages.

The Spanish flu was the pandemic of 1918 which infected one third of the world’s population. It is estimated that 20-50 million died in two years. This flu was caused by a H1N1 viral strain. Kansas had the first case on a military base. Because Spain covered the pandemic cases in its country, as opposed to other countries that censored their cases of the flu, the pandemic was named Spanish but it is unclear where it originated.

The 100-Year Third Pandemic was the bubonic plague of 1855-1955 which is believed to have originated in China. Historians wrote that Paul-Louis Simond discovered in 1898 that brown rats were the source of disease and that discovery led to the creation of a vaccine.

“Paul-Louis Simond (30 July 1858 – 3 March 1947) was a French physician, chief medical officer and biologist whose major contribution to science was his demonstration that the intermediates in the transmission of bubonic plague from rats to humans are the fleas Xenopsylla cheopis that dwell on infected rats.”

The Swine flu of 2009-2010 was an H1N1 viral strain that killed 200,000 people, most of whom were not associated with farming or pigs.

The Ebola epidemic of 2014 in West Africa lasted two years and devastated countries like Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Guinea. There were 28,616 cases recorded and over 11,000 people died. Caves were searched to look for diseased bats thought to be the carriers of the virus. Monkeys and chimpanzees were also considered as the viral source.

Of the 75 million people affected by HIV/AIDS, a disease believed to have originated in 1920 in Africa, 32 million people died. The disease attacks the immune system and is spread through intimate contact.

*See Weird History video for further details

 

 

 

 

Draconian Quarantine Now and Then

The Romans did not know about bacteria or what caused diseases such as malaria and dysentery, but they made sure that their soldiers were exposed to fresh, clean air and water, and the military castra were located far away from such sources of “miasmas.”

In the first century B.C., a writer named Varro spoke about the “minute creatures which cannot be seen by the eyes, float through the air, enter the body through the mouth and nose, causing diseases.” Vegetius suggested in the 4^th century A.D. that castra must be carefully located away from swamps and daily exercise does the body “more good than doctors.”

Through their health and engineering practices, scholars believe that the Romans probably prevented many deadly epidemics. On the battlefield the medici, with experience acquired from the Greeks who practiced far superior medical practices, tended to wounded soldiers.

A descriptive account survives of an officer who fought during the reign of Augustus (27 B.C.-14 A.D.). He wrote, “There was not one of us, not of those above or below rank, who fell ill without having his health and welfare taken care of by Tiberius [future emperor] with as much care as if this was his chief occupation despite his other weighty responsibilities. There was a horse-drawn vehicle for all who needed it, his own litter was at the disposal of all, and I among others have enjoyed its use.  Now his physician, now his kitchen, now his bathing brought for his personal use ministered to the comfort of all who were sick.”

Evidence dug up in Scotland, showed a hospital, valetudinaria, built during the Roman occupation, which had proper drainage, a sewage system and was divided into wards which indicate that the Romans were knowledgeable of the value of isolating the sick in order to prevent the spread of infectious diseases. It is important to note that the sick were isolated.

Putting people in quarantine, a word derived from Italian (via Latin) “quaranta giorni,” 40 days, started as a method to prevent the spread of the Black Death in fourteenth century Europe, protecting coastal cities. According to the CDC, “ships arriving in Venice from infected ports were required to sit at anchor for 40 days before landing.” http://cdc.gov/quarantine/historyquarantine.html

Despite such quarantine measures, 25 million people are said to have died in Europe within four years (1347-1351) of the plague, a quarter of Europe’s population.

Isolating the sick in places where the plague flared up or self-isolating healthy people from the public saved Pope Clement and large areas in Poland where quarantine was imposed. When the plague hit Milan, the archbishop ordered the first houses to be walled up and the dead, the sick, and the healthy, to be entombed within, halting the spread of the plague in his city.

But the plague recurred in 1665 London. The diary of Samuel Pepys describes the thousands of victims in this Black Death outbreak. Nobody understood how the disease spread until the twentieth century. The Londoners solution to dealing with their plague outbreak was to kill dogs and cats, the very animals who could have controlled the black rat (Rattus rattus) population that carried the plague-infested fleas with the bacillus Pasteurella pestis.

In 1967 when quarantine responsibility in the U.S. fell on the CDC, there were 55 quarantine stations and 500 staff members with quarantine stations located at every port, international airport, and major border crossings.

According to its website, by 1995 only seven quarantine locations remained but with the acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) epidemic of 2003, the CDC expanded to 18 stations with more than 90 field employees.

Quarantinable diseases listed in Executive Order 13295 were “cholera, diphtheria, infectious tuberculosis, plague, smallpox, yellow fever, viral hemorrhagic fevers (Lassa, Marburg, Ebola, and Crimean-Congo, South American, and others not yet isolated or named), and severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), which is a disease associated with fever and signs and symptoms of pneumonia or other respiratory illness, transmitted from person to person predominantly by the aerosolized or droplet route, and, if spread in the population, would have severe public health consequences.” Measles, mumps, rubella, and chicken pox were not included in the list. 03-8832.pdf (govinfo.gov)

The Executive Order 13375 of 2005 amended the list by adding “influenza caused by novel or reemergent influenza viruses that are causing, or have the potential to cause, a pandemic.” https://www.archives.gov/federal-register/executive-orders/2005.html#13375

Healthy people who were asked to wear a mask for 14 days (to flatten the curve) back in mid-March are finding themselves ten months later facing new draconian orders from some state governments to not only wear masks in perpetuity, but with more restrictions of small and medium size businesses, gyms, churches, schools, stadiums, cinemas, theaters, and any venues involving more than 10 people. Some states went as far as mandating fines for people having more than 6 family members in their homes.

Furthermore, there are cancellations of national holidays and the potential of being required to carry a vaccination passport for a vaccine that has been hurriedly developed at warp speed. The  media-anointed president-elect wants to lock down the entire country until such time that nobody will die of Covid-19. 

If we are to believe the inflated and manipulated statistics purveyed by the media, casualties have dropped significantly for many diseases but have sky-rocketed for Covid-19.

Nursing home patients, the first required to take the COVID-19 vaccine, are currently prisoners in their respective facilities, with no way to exit or see their families, get a haircut, or see their doctors outside of the facility unless they are moved each time into an isolation room with their personal belongings for 14 days, then moved back to their private rooms once the clear is given.

It does not matter that they have been tested numerous times and were proven COVID-19-negative, the imprisonment continues for their own good.

One can argue that jail inmates have more rights and freedom than the elderly in nursing homes ruled by draconian measures. One can also argue that this imprisonment is akin to the Archbishop of Milan entombing the healthy and the sick during the Black Plague. How else can one describe the total physical isolation and mental desperation of patients in nursing homes where even Face Time with loved ones on a cellular phone is restricted to 15 minutes a week unless they are in isolation in which case, even that is taken away?