Global Warming and Other Fairy Tales

As I contemplate the very cold weather we’ve had recently across the U.S., with temperatures dropping by as much as 50 degree Fahrenheit in one day, during which time in New York and Buffalo people were buried under many feet of snow, some freezing to death, the global warming charade, renamed climate change when nobody was buying the global warming narrative, I wonder why Al Gore and other millionaires and billionaires have not sold their mansions by the ocean yet, or why they are not under the water as they have predicted?

We are warm in our homes thanks to coal miners and pipelines that deliver oil and natural gas to our homes, we are not warm because of solar panels covered in snow and ice and frozen blades of wind turbines.

New Yorkers found out the hard way last week that their electric garbage trucks fitted with snowplows could not run more than four hours and then the electric batteries died. The lithium batteries drained fast in the bitter cold. https://www.technocracy.news/bust-nyc-electric-garbage-trucks-lasted-only-4-hours-in-cold/

Perhaps future scientists will figure out how to harvest and channel the possibility of plentiful and lasting renewable energy for the benefit of all mankind, but right now we need cheap electricity from coal, gasoline, and Diesel to support our large economy and the private use sector. And developing nations need electrification and cheap energy to reach the development levels of the west.

World Governance, proposed and forced on humanity by the New World Order of elite billionaires and their “civil society” useful idiots, has been promoted for the last fifty years by United Nations to the planetary public under different names, U.N. Agenda 21, Smart Cities, Regionalism, Visioning, ICLEI, now renamed Local Governments for Sustainability, Global Warming, Sustainable Development, Climate Change, and the Great Reset of the World Economic Forum, to name just a few. No other ambassadors of the global warming fleecing narratives of fear mongering and guilt are more prominent than the faces of Al Gore and Greta Thunberg. www. https://iclei.org/

Harvey Rubin, former Vice Chair of ICLEI, wrote that in a sustainable world “individual rights must take a back seat to the collective.” I am painfully familiar with this “collective,” having lived under communism for twenty years.

A video dated October 2, 1992 and taken from a C-SPAN archives shows discussions on the U.S. House floor about U.N. Agenda 21 in which both Democrats and Republicans are in favor of conforming fully to the recommendations of U.N. Agenda 21. Nancy Pelosi introduced a bill to follow the 1992 Rio Earth Summit to conform the United States to U.N. Agenda 21, its sustainable community practices, and to follow international law. http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=XUBwIJWH7ew#

I became aware of the Sustainable Development insidious slithering around the globe at local and state levels about fourteen years ago. At that time, it was taboo even among conservatives but particularly in the RINO and establishment GOP, to mention U.N. Agenda 21. Those who knew the truth behind the U.N. Agenda 21 elected to call it “property rights.” The plan was to guilt the developed world and even force them by government fiat to transfer as much western wealth to the third world countries heavily represented in all forums of the United Nations.

The upcoming World Economic Forum conference in Davos, Switzerland, will take place on January 16-20, 2023, and will focus on six major themes:

1.      “Ukraine shines a light on importance of global cooperation” (I would not call being entangled in a war global cooperation, when innocent people die, people who had no idea why they are being bombarded and their lives destroyed; perhaps better education and health might be a better use of resources toward the goal of global cooperation.)

2.      “Three interconnected crises – climate, food, energy” (it is important to point out that the climate has been changing for millennia, it is not man-made, should not be tampered with, and food and energy crises have been created on purpose by government decisions and dictates

3.      “Don’t use the “recession” word – unfortunately economic recession is already here across the globe; it is disguised under the euphemisms the radical left is creating to hide the real and very impactful problems

4.      “Preparing for the next pandemic requires ending health disparities” (Dr. Malone believes that this topic is designed with Africa in mind and its low vaccination rates in countries with so much sunshine and Vitamin D.)

“Investing in health systems and regional bodies like Africa CDC and African Medicines Agency must be a key priority,” said Paul Kagame, President of Rwanda. “We have to act in the full expectation that there will be another pandemic.”

5.      “Gender, inequality, and jobs of tomorrow” (The constantly harped upon gender inequality and climate inequality show the worst trends in third world nations, not in the west. The jobs of tomorrow cannot be entirely technology because we cannot eat technology. We must plant crops to eat and there must be enough CO2, the gas of plant life, in the atmosphere for plants and trees to grow. With reduced CO2 and reduced fertilization, as the globalists set stringent goals, driving farmers to bankruptcy, and, without sunshine, we will not be able to have crops and we will starve to death. Bill Gates, in partnership with academia, wants to spray more chemicals into the atmosphere to block out the sun’s “harmful” rays to prevent the unproven “global warming.” Climate has changed for millennia due to solar activity, volcanic activity, and oceanic currents, not human activity.)

6.      “Our future is digital” (obviously pushing digital currency so that governments can most efficiently control populations, income, health, spending, education, housing, travel, car use, taxation, savings, and everything else that makes life worth living, all based on a Chinese model of social credit score)

Since the global warming scam failed for lack of scientific evidence, the World Economic Forum (WEF) and the United Nations are pushing the Fourth Industrial Revolution, following their Great Reset. When this Great Reset is going to be completed, we are not sure, but Klaus Schwab told us in his book, Covid-19: The Great Reset, when it started.  This Fourth Industrial Revolution consists of “the convergence of the physical, digital, and biological worlds.”

Through its WEF’s Project MainStream, the goal is to transition the planet to a “circular economy,” in their vision “effective flows of materials, energy, labor, and new information interact.” Who decides what is effective, how much, based on what criteria, who decides, and where it would “flow” remains to be seen.

They suggest four ways to achieve this “revolution:”

1.      Constant tracking and elimination of CO2 (CO2 is the gas of plant life – greenhouses add CO2 to their buildings to increase plant and tree growth)

2.      “The democratization of information and transparency that comes from digitized assets gives new powers to citizens to hold companies and countries accountable” (Based on what happened around the globe in the last three years, it is a one-sided, leftist stream of information in which governments conceal and twist the truth and control populations; there is no transparency and citizens are powerless to do anything about it.)

3.      “New information flows and increasing transparency can help shift citizen behavior on a large scale, as it becomes the path of least resistance within a new set of business and social norms.” (The lockdowns, giving large businesses, liquor stores the status of essential businesses while denying small businesses, churches, and restaurants the right to stay open, false information, false science, refusal of treatment to sick people with a medicine that worked, and forced inoculations have proven that citizens have no recourse to comply and the governments becomes ever more intrusive, powerful. and controlling.)

As an example, Klaus Schwab uses OPower, “peer comparison to entice people into consuming less electricity.” Utilities have used Smart Meters to cut off power to customers during peak usage to “nudge” people into consumption reduction for higher kWh prices and saving the planet from an imaginary and invented Armageddon.

4.      “Innovative ways and new business and organizational models” to change consumer behavior according to the elitist visioning plans.

They envision self-driving vehicles which require 5G antennas installed every so many feet to make them self-drivable, sharing the economy (your business, home, food, clothes, financial assets, land, savings, and everything else you have acquired through hard work and inherited from your parents and grandparents), higher asset utilization rates, i.e., “capture, reuse, and ‘cycle’ materials when the appropriate time comes.” It is not clear nor explained in the book when this appropriate time comes.

According to Klaus Schwab, the crux of the fourth industrial revolution is the economics of carbon capture and storage which will most definitely result in famine around the world as agriculture cannot thrive without CO2, sunshine, a fertile soil with rotating crops, and fertilizers which are currently also under the globalists’ scrutiny of interdiction. Many European farmers were driven out of business due to new rules and regulations which forbade them the use and availability of fertilizers.

We are already decades into the one world governance’s implementation and U.N. Agenda 21, renamed and re-euphemized as Agenda 2030. Many of its dictates are already implemented at every level of government around the world with the full knowledge of those proposing it and passing it.

Control is already in place in:

1.      Energy production, delivery, distribution, and consumption via Smart Grid, Smart Meters, Renewable/Clean/Green resources, and regional plans

2.      Food growth and production via FDA regulations

3.      Education via Common Core

4.      Water use via irrigation denial in agriculture, destruction of dams and reservoirs

5.      Land ownership and use

6.      Finances via use of digital currency and abolishing cash

7.      De-population via sterilization and eugenics

8.      No borders, no sovereignty

9.      No national language, history, no citizenship just a global citizenship, a multi-cultural hodge-podge

10.  Mobility via city plans to a 5-minute walk/bike to work, school, shopping

11.  Less car use and more rail use

12.  Homestead in high-rise tenements to designate formerly private land for wildlife habitat.

One World Governance requires that every societal decision be based on the environmental impact on global land use, global education, and global population control and reduction. Welcome to 2023!

 

Mom Lived a Life Filled with Hope and Love

The room is mostly empty. Her bed and favorite pillows are gone, donated to patients at the nursing home who don’t have relatives to care enough to visit them or are long gone. Her clothes have been donated as well, the new stuff she did not have a chance to wear still hanging in her closet.

The nightstand holds her glass case and her favorite knick-knacks she could not part with. The dresser and the chest of drawers contain memorabilia she collected over the years, photos, and a few frames with her portraits and those of her two granddaughters and two great-grandsons.

The room is white walled with oil paintings of landscapes and an icon with her favorite rosary blessed by the Pope which we brought back from the Vatican years ago. She liked to pray every night and sometimes in the morning. She crossed herself at every meal like a good Orthodox would do.

She never wore the scarf required by modesty and church attendance for married women in her country – she loved her soft, thick hair colored auburn and we jokingly called her Lucy.

Her baptism name was Niculina (Nicole), but her two brothers and three sisters called her Bibica. Her husband of seven decades called her his Mimi, a term of endearment. To the rest of the family, she was Mimi as well. To her granddaughters, she was Maia, short for Mamaia (Grandma).

Mom loved to walk her oldest granddaughter, a precocious three-year-old, in the nearby cemetery at the university. And Eileen asked her with the innocence of toddlers, “Maia, when are you going to die so I can come see you at the cemetery?” That innocent question has finally come to pass, and mom’s soul flew into the starlight; grief enveloped all of us like a thick fog.

Her semi-bare bedroom and the bathroom, have an echo of emptiness as I step on the cold marble tiles. It is not just hollow of her earthly presence, but it is empty of her happy soul, of her laughter, her chatter, of her tears, her pain, and her loving advice. Bogart can no longer jump and purr in her lap when she watched TV. Her Romanian soap operas were legendary, and she loved to watch them with her adult granddaughter.

Gone is her zest for life and her almost childish happiness at Christmas when she strung the lights everywhere and placed ornaments in the fir tree. Gone is her soothing voice that seldom rose in anger. Her suite is quiet, so quiet that I can hear the rain drops outside. It is an almost eerie quiet, as if rejecting every earthly sound.

She is no longer coming down the steps slowly and carefully, afraid of falling. She is gone in the light, energy that is no longer here. If physicists are correct that energy is never lost but transferred, then where is she?

If something cannot come from nothing, energy cannot be created nor destroyed, but rather transformed into various forms, then where is her power? There was so much light and energy about my mother, what was she transformed into? Is she our guardian angel? Is she the monarch butterfly who found us in the cold October day at Lake Champlain in Vermont? Is she the black and white butterfly who flew about and around our bodies and faces when we took a walk in the woods the morning that my mother died? Is she the dragon fly that surrounds us on the deck, her favorite spot to watch nature and animals?

I talk to her every day, but it is a lonely monologue, not a spirited day-by-day dialog with a human being with a heart, mind, and soul. People tell me that she is in a better place, but what does that mean? What better place? I miss her laughter and her voice. Despite the many hardships she experienced under communism, she always kept a positive outlook – nothing phased her too much and always joked about it.

Mom’s ashes rest in a box in her favorite room to sit down and relax after a walk with Bogart at the edge of the woods. The small altar contains a lock of her hair on top of the urn, her last photo, a large candle which burned at her memorial, her glasses, the last doily she crocheted without a pattern, from the memory jumbled in her dying brain, the crochet needle, her favorite icon and rosary, and her straw hat. She tended to many vegetable and flower gardens wearing that hat.

Mom wanted to be with her siblings, in the family crypt in Romania. The war in Ukraine and the fear of traveling so close to a war zone is depriving mom for now of having her final wishes fulfilled. When the war is over, I hope to be able to carry her urn then to Romania and have mom finally laid to rest in her chosen spot.

For now, I feel like she is home, where she wanted to be before she developed dementia. She was a home body, the perfect domestic engineer who kept us fed, in clean clothes, and a home that was spotless.

My children’s friends were always welcome in our home even though mom could not speak English. But she spoke the language of welcoming strangers in our home, offering them good food, an occasional coke hidden in the unused dishwasher, and simple desserts. Nobody knew her recipes, they were in her head, a pinch of this, and a spoon of that. Once her brain started dying, the recipes were gone too.

The greedy corporatists, who locked the population down for two years to sell their vaccines, have robbed mom and me of the opportunity to see each other as much as we wanted. I could not touch her, I had to see her through a window and on Face Time. As her mind died faster for lack of conversation with me or the staff and complete lack of any mental stimulation from the nursing home which used the Covid lockdown as an excuse to abuse and neglect all elderly by locking them up in their rooms, she sunk into total inability to recognize us. Some days I was her mom, other days her sister, a friend, and even though it was painful to see her decline and the complete erasure of our shared past, I knew her and loved her and that is all that mattered.

I fought hard to force the nursing home to bring her out onto the patio for fresh air while I was made to sit six feet away from her, both with a mask on. When nobody watched, we removed the masks and we talked, smiled, and was able to touch my mom and give her kisses on her forehead and cheek. I read her Romanian fairytales and showed her family pictures. It was the only time that the nursing home treated her with humanity – they washed her and dressed her.

Maybe she is in a better place, without pain and neglect from the abusive west African nurses’ aides and CNAs. No matter how many times a week, each week, I would go to visit mom, varying the times, I would always find them lacking in their care.

After mom’s passing, I made a complaint to the Virginia Department of Health, the department of nursing home certification, they made a two-day unannounced visit, and they found all my allegations to be true. Unfortunately, they stopped short of accessing her medical records since she was deceased, and the nursing home declined them access to mom’s records.

If mom is in a better place, I hope that she knows that I tried my best to care for her health and needs, but my hardest was not good enough against the blatant neglect and abuse of Manor Care Health Services.

Mom lived a life filled with hope and love. She never gave up! Mom’s memory on this earth is eternal in the minds of her immediate family and the friends she made in America.

Many of her extended family members have already passed on. We will all eventually pass into anonymity and oblivion as if we never existed, our names inscribed on a cross, a plaque, a brick, a bench, or a columbarium nest. Our lives are transitory.

We are not exactly sure why God created us, gave us life in the first place, and why He takes it away when the time comes. Mom’s time was on June 9, 2022, at 12:12 a.m. She is probably in Heaven, teaching the Angels how to crochet her favorite pattern, grapes and leaves, and how to garden properly and share the vegetables with neighbors. She fed and cared for so many people during her ninety years of life.

Who Was Solomon Katz and Why Does It Matter?

Solomon Katz

Communists did a pretty good job of concealing, locking up, and destroying historical records. Non-communist party members were not allowed access to historical documents in libraries or in archives.

The graduates of one of my hometown high schools, Liceul Constantin Dobrogeanu-Gherea, did not know who this Russian man was. This Bolshevik was born Solomon Katz in Ekaterinoslav, the Russian Empire, in 1855, and died in Bucharest, Romania in 1920.

Educated in the Russian empire, Solomon Katz came to Romania in 1875 to escape the tzar but three years later was kidnapped by the tzar’s agents and jailed in Russia. He escaped from captivity and returned to Romania in 1879 when his socialist activity began as editor of the Contemporary, The Social Magazine, and Social Critique.

A member of the Social Democrat Party of Romania, he became the founder of the platform of the Workers Social Democrat Party established in 1893. Solomon Katz took the fake Romanian name of Constantin Dobrogeanu-Gherea. He certainly did not hail from the Dobrogea region of Romania.

Lev Trotsky praised Solomon Katz’s communist achievements, writing that many ministers, diplomats, and prefects had learned the “political alphabet” from Solomon Katz, a.k.a. Constantin Dobrogeanu-Gherea.

Katz guided the first generation of Romanian socialist workers to the Marxist platform. Katz was one of the first “scholars” who guided all socialist parties towards the Russian Revolution.

Solomon Katz became one of the “parents of Romanian sociology.” His son, Alexandru Dobrogeanu-Gherea, eventually became one of the founding fathers of the Romanian Communist Party.

As students we had no idea that this Russian Jew and his son were the reasons for our daily misery. He was considered the most prominent Marxist theorist and thinker in Romania, literary critic, sociologist, journalist, politician, and restaurant entrepreneur in my hometown of Ploiesti.

This business side of C. D. Gherea is little known. He invented the catering service for the Ploiesti train station restaurant and held its sole concession from 1882 until his death in 1920.  Young boys sold sandwiches and glasses of beer from baskets to hungry travelers who did not wish to disembark on the train platforms to buy something to eat and drink as their luggage could have been stolen in their absence. Trains did not have dining cars back then.

As it is often the case, no matter how communist a famous person like C. D. Gherea was, he was not communist enough for Elena Ceausescu, a woman with barely an elementary education, so the high school’s name, Constantin Dobrogeanu-Gherea, was changed to Nikita Stanescu, a famous Marxist poet under Ceausescu’s communist regime.

Stanescu, born and raised in Ploiesti, was a talented town boy who attended a high school highly controversial to the communists because it was named after the Saints Peter and Paul, and communists can’t have religion mixed in with atheism.

But Nikita Stanescu, a very handsome man by any standards, was Elena Ceausescu’s favorite poet. She was so concerned about his health, that she sent the minister of health to his home, to treat him for the severe alcoholic addiction that was killing him. Stanescu was alleged to have drunk two liters of vodka a day, that is half a gallon, yet he never got drunk.

Close friends say that the more Stanescu drank, the more creative he became. The treatment he received in Mangalia, which Elena Ceausescu spent millions on, vitamins and other drugs, extended Stanescu’s life by a couple of years. He died at the age of 50 with a completely cirrhotic liver.

To a graduate like me and former teacher, to name a high school after such a drunk, talent set aside, is problematic – he was certainly not a role model of good behavior. However, as a communist poet, everybody in the communist world sang his praises and awarded him many famous prizes.

It is easier to understand now why our history teacher never answered questions from students that would have deviated from the communist historical narrative and instead, she said, “democracy has gone to your heads.” Avram was trying to say that democracy of any kind, including constitutional democracy was incompatible with communist tyranny or any other tyranny for that matter.

We are watching in the U.S. the communists in charge of our country altering history, dumbing down the curricula, changing names of schools, universities, roads, buildings, museums, ships, stadiums, football teams, destroying statues of people they do not like nor respect, and installing unknown Marxist activists, local and from around the world, in lock step with the global communist movement pushed by the U.N., using global warming scheme, conventions, agreements, accords, and programs that have now taken complete control at every level of government in every participating country.

Just like Solomon Katz emigrated from czarist Russia and changed Romanian society for almost a century, to benefit the Russian Bolsheviks whose communist ideas and platforms he was implementing, foreign nationals today are bribing groups and individuals at all levels of government to make sure that the global communist government will dominate the world, with a few billionaires at the helm. President Donald Trump was but a four-year bump in their plans, but they managed to neutralize him in an all-out assault unlike any other and rendered the country ungovernable.

The Worst Are Leading Western Society on the Wrong Path

If you are wondering what happened to the American people and the West in general, on the road to committing societal suicide in short order, F. A. Hayek has a plausible answer in his book, The Road to Serfdom.

Hayek, an economist and philosopher, a pioneer in monetary theory and proponent of libertarianism, lists three reasons why the worst elements of society have formed such a strong group of sycophants with homogeneous views on the direction that the western, free market societies must take to become the communist utopia-that-never-was.

1.     "The higher the education and intelligence of individuals become, the more their views and tastes are differentiated and the less likely they are to agree on a particular hierarchy of values.”

However, the education system has made sure that the miseducated are more homogeneous in their indoctrinated views and beliefs via the generalized teaching method of what to think, not how to think.

2.      The ‘docile and gullible’ have no strong convictions of their own and are easily swayed to accept a “ready-made system of values” if “drummed into their ears sufficiently loudly and frequently.”

This is where the lying mainstream media comes into play, with their daily scripted and identical reports distributed to them by the socialist Democrat party.

3.      It is “almost a law of human nature” that people tend to agree more on the negative rather than the positive. Therefore, it is easier for people to agree on “the hatred of the enemy” or “on the envy of those better off.”  

The clever narrative becomes ‘we’ vs. ‘they’ and the fight crystalizes under the banner that ‘they’ are the enemy which must be destroyed.  The Soviet totalitarian leaders have vilified the ‘kulaks’ (Russian peasants as defined by Stalin’s regime) and the Germans vilified the ‘Jew.’ (F. A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom, University of Chicago Press, 2007, pp. 160-161)

The common enemy today labeled by bureaucrats and career politicians as dangerous are the ordinary Americans who love their country, their families, their Christian faith, and who reject the woke-ism of current young generations indoctrinated into believing that everything good about America, its economy, its history, its culture, its values, are evil.

These indoctrinated generations, whether in America or other western nations, believe that anything goes, socialism is great, being responsible humans and citizens is passe, free stuff is the way of life, jobs are for dummies, sex and gender are fluid, and biology is a construct to keep them oppressed.

To say that the worst and not the brightest among us are leading our country and western civilization in the wrong direction is an understatement, they are destroying it, and the damage is already at the point of no return.

Congress screamed insurrection when a few hundred Americans entered their hallowed grounds through the opened doors, taking selfies in the Chamber, but are turning a blind eye and deaf ears when five million illegal aliens have invaded our southern border and are now walking among us, all over the country, unvetted, unchecked, unvaccinated, possibly criminals, murderers, slavers, sex traffickers, and gang members. Can we get our country back after this massive invasion? Probably not.

Can we reverse fifty years of miseducation in public schools and in the high-priced colleges around the globe? Probably not without a lot of misery, sacrifice, and decades of determined efforts from millions of people.

How can all these young people today, with children of their own, help change the miseducation they received and that of their children when they have no memory nor role models to follow in order to cause a positive change to return our country to its former glory?

Worse yet, because of technology, human connections, social skills, and the ability to empathize have declined. Sherry Turkle of MIT wrote that “44 percent of teenagers never unplug from their devices” even when watching movies, eating, playing, or during meals with friends, in school, or with family.

Teenagers are so consumed by social media and influencing that they become unable to focus, to listen, to make eye contact, or read body language, an important non-verbal component of communication. It is easy to see that such humans are easy to sway in the wrong direction, a direction that often undermines their own interests.

As some psychologists remarked, once technology and social media were unleashed, humans have proven unable to be satisfied with being bored, relaxing, doing nothing, and enjoying it. They became irritable, stressed, scattered brained, unable to focus, tense, and anxious without constant stimulation from electronic devices.

Herbert Simon was right when wrote in the 1970s that too much information created a dearth of attention. I certainly saw plenty of that in the classroom from teenagers to adult students in college. People became, as Simon said, “overwhelmed and on overdrive, in a state of constant stress.” This state of constant stress caused “exhaustion, frustration, resignation, and even despair” in many people.

An important question must be asked, how capable are these narcissistic people, who are staring constantly into their smart devices and taking selfies, to lead society onto the right path of survival and excellence when they have little general knowledge and understanding of economics and history? Do they even care, in their drug-induced stupor, how many lives socialism and communism have destroyed in the 20^th century or that they are repeating history and expecting a different result?

 

 

Worrisome Predictions for 2023

Roman street vendor in Pompeii

In our western, vastly declining world, it is depressing and scary to make predictions for 2023 because we never know what other variables may intervene that may skew our reasonable forecasts based on current facts.

Several podcasters have made projections recently as we approach the end of 2022.  Some of the predictions are based on common sense, available data, economic trends that don’t seem to add up, others can be found in plain sight, and others are based on events that are unfolding as we speak.

Several medical doctors have predicted that vaccine deaths will accelerate, and infertility and stillbirths will “explode” around the world. This is certainly based on statistical data coming from various countries that have reported a drastic decrease in births, including South Korea and death statistics. Whether there is a correlation between Covid-19 vaccinations, increased death rates, and infertility or stillbirths, that remains to be studied over time.

Larry Scott Spiegelman, MD., OBGYN in South Florida said that studies on infertility looked at sperm counts before and after vaccination and found absolutely no change. “And to date nobody has shown any signs of infertility as a result of the vaccine up to 42 days after receiving a full dose.”  What about after 42 days? The Truth About COVID-19 Vaccines and Infertility | Resource | Baptist Health South Florida

Following the dictates of the Paris accord, It is not difficult to see that Europe is committing government-sanctioned societal suicide by destroying the fossil fuel industry that provides them with the energy necessary to run a developed economy.  They are also destroying fertilizers and the farmers’ ability to grow food.

The climate change globalists consider domesticated animals too flatulent and, to reduce the methane gas, humans should kill off as many farm animals as possible and eat fake meat or insects.

Crop failures and food scarcity are on the horizon when all fertilizer producers, including those in Ukraine, are taken out of production.

The Russian-Ukrainian war added more fuel (no pun intended) to the European fire of destruction of the fossil fuel industry, oil, and gas.

BASF, one of the largest conglomerates in Germany, is moving its operations permanently to China where energy is cheaper and plentiful. https://www.ft.com/content/f6d2fe70-16fb-4d81-a26a-3afb93e0bf57

The nuclear industry and the hydroelectric power generation are also taking a hit, replaced by wind and solar energy generation which does not even come close to providing the Europeans and other developed nations with what they need in terms of industrial and home energy.

Inflation will accelerate, a no brainer, based on the expensive energy and shortages of so many goods and services and the inability to produce and deliver goods across the world in a timely fashion.

Money, including the U.S. dollar and the petrodollar, will be replaced by government-mandated digital currency which will control where you spend your money, how much, whether you are a compliant-citizen, and your social score is good enough.  

You will be allotted gas credits each month, based on how far you are allowed to travel in your current car which may or may not be electric but it will have a kill-switch; how much money you can spend on medicines, which doctors you may see, whether you will be allowed into a hospital or not, which schools you may attend, and where you can work.

You will be taxed at higher and higher rates, whatever the government and their “banksters” will decide, and you will be allowed so much for food per day, based on caloric intake permitted by your job. Rationing of money, goods, and services will be controlled by government with their fingers on your digital currency.

The escalating inflation will trigger more government bailouts/handouts for collapsing industries like the Teamsters Union. Biden used $36 billion from the American Rescue Plan, the $1.9 trillion corona virus relief package signed into law in 2021 and gave it to the Teamsters Union to prevent severe cuts to the retirement incomes of 350,000 Teamster workers and retirees, a very convenient bailout for his supporters harmed by the very inflation Joe Biden’s policies have created. President Biden releasing $36 billion to aid pensions of union workers (cnbc.com)

More fuel scarcity will be caused by Joe Biden’s policies and the climate change industry which will demand climate lockdowns based on consumer behavior and social scores.

There will be more population revolts across the globe against governments that have stolen elections like in Brazil, angry that gasoline and natural gas are expensive and in short supply on purpose. Revolts will also flare up more against new pandemic-induced lockdowns.

There will be more pushbacks against social platforms like Twitter and Meta who still suspend access and the freedom of speech of conservatives and libertarians.

Twitter employees, behaving like the immature and entitled children that they are, have suspended President Trump, the most powerful president in the world, from their social platform, but allowed the Ayatollah on Twitter.

What would have happened if Iran had attacked the U.S. and President Trump would not have been able to communicate with the American people on our own social platforms? Have these Twitter employees, behaving like their office is a day care, gym, coffee shop, yoga meditation, and sandwich bistro, thought about the countrywide consequences of their hatred for Trump?

People are going to continue home schooling, as the quality of education in the U.S. is getting worse, and the transgender revolution is destroying the family and morals.

As inflation spikes and food shortages will become more common, people will do more home gardening, bartering for food, swapping seeds, swapping services, and building more community gardens than are currently in use.

Mike Adams predicts that the dollar might be replaced with Goldbacks and junk silver. Goldbacks are notes which contain a certain minimum of gold foil imbedded into the currency which will not have a face value and are issued with different state names on it. https://www.apmex.com/product/204989/1-utah-goldback-aurum-gold-foil-note-24k?msclkid=914e821026ae143e3f06e18a35151466&utm_source=bing&utm_medium=cpc&utam_campaign=CPA%20-%20Gold&utm_term=gold%20backs&utm_content=Goldbacks

Junk silver represents coins circulating before 1965 which contain 90% silver. Their value is based on the content of metal and not on the collectability or condition. They have value but collectors are not interested in them as coins.

Finally, another worrisome prediction involves the scarcity and distribution of medicines and medical equipment, which will affect the overall health and survivability of the population in general.

 

Christmas Cards

My Christmas card a few years ago when my fur baby Bogart 
was still alive.

I grew up with many old-world traditions, some fun, some different, none of which included the lovely gift of card writing at Christmas time. 

In my adopted country, I learned to love the simple gesture of sending a card during Christmas, to remind friends and relatives that they matter to us, that we are family, perhaps through friendship or through acquaintance. 

Sir Henry Cole, the founder of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, is credited with the invention of the first Christmas card in 1843. With the help of the Penny Post, everybody could afford to send greetings to loved ones.

In 1875, Luis Prang made the first American Christmas card in his Boston print shop. Today Americans send 1.6 billion cards annually and who knows how many electronic animated cards. I get at least a couple every year and they are delightful.

As a writer, it gives me joy to send cards, to remind in writing to the few left in my family that we all matter to each other, and celebrations like Christmas are not just to decorate a tree, have a party, get an ugly sweater, be ”merry” and drink, eat a lot of special foods that moms, sisters, aunts, grandmas have prepared with love, but to let one another remember that we matter, that we live, and that we still exist in this world that nobody truly understands and appreciates.

My mom left this world six months ago. There is not a day that goes by that I do not think about all the wonderful people, things and memories she created on this earth and left behind. It would take another lifetime to remember them all.

As I get older, I have fewer and fewer relatives and friends left, and this year, so far, I got four cards, but I am happy that those four are alive and doing well.

Merry Christmas and Healthy New Year 2023!

Pigments, Purple, and the Phoenicians

Herodotus, the “father of modern history,” a Persian subject, wrote his famous book, Histories, a detailed account of the Greco-Persian wars, the lives of important kings, and famous battles such as Marathon. He provided a cultural background to battles from the standpoint of geography, ethnography, and historiography.

His contemporaries accused him of providing “legends and fanciful accounts” in his Histories. Herodotus defended himself that he wrote what he “saw and [what was] told to him.” But a large portion of his accounts have been confirmed by modern historians and archeologists.

Herodotus traveled extensively, collecting materials and impressions for his book. On this journey of historical discovery, Herodotus, not a rich man, was probably a sailor and merchant, the preferred trades of most adventurers of those times.

Herodotus wrote about the Phoenicians, inhabitants of a coastal strip of land in the eastern part of the Mediterranean, land that is today Lebanon. The Bible refers to these Phoenicians as Canaanites.

Phoenicia translates as the “land of purple.” Famous for their rare and beautiful purple dye, Phoenicians from the cities of Sidon and Tyre also made fine glassware, colored beads, bottles, vases, goblets, delicate carvings of wood and ivory, richly embroidered fabrics, and decorative items made of precious metals.

Homer described Sidonian silver as “the most beautiful in the world.” When craftsmen from Tyre built Solomon’s temple and palace, they decorated it with exquisite ornaments of gold and silver.

Invaders forced the Canaanites in 1200 B.C. to start a maritime empire as traders along the Mediterranean between 12^th and 8^th centuries B.C., covering its ports of the known world at the time.

Inventors of glass blowing and of an alphabet that eventually became the basis of most written alphabets, the Phoenicians were also recognized for their purple dye which Imperial Romans used to color their official togas adorned with Tyrian purple.

Purple symbolized power and rank in the Roman Empire. Emperors adorned their bodies with purple tunics, senators wore tunics with a double purple stripe down the front; and other nobles wore a narrow stripe down from each shoulder.

The purple dye survived as a commodity long after the western Roman Empire had fallen. Europeans bought the dye from Levant through the Middle Ages. Phoenicia had fallen by then to the Saracens (North African Muslims).

How did the Phoenicians make their sought-after and expensive purple dye? Their shores were blessed with two kinds of shellfish, the murex and the buccinum. Each had a long sack or vein filled with a yellow fluid which turned purple when exposed to light. In the Phoenician main cities, Tyre and Sidon, the dye harvesting became a major industry.

To trap the mollusks, the fishermen gathered them in deep water in narrow-opened baskets baited with mussels and frog meat. Once trapped, the shells were brought to dye pits where the sacks were removed, pulped, and heated in vessels made of lead in the process of removing any other biological matter present. According to historians, a “fixative” was added to make the dye color fast.

The mollusk pits were located away from residential areas as the smell around them was quite unbearable and it took three days for the fluid to dry. Tons of shells were found near Tyre and Sidon, evidence of the massive overfishing which caused near-extinction of the murex and buccinum in the waters of Phoenicia.

It was estimated that 10,000 shellfish produced just one gram of Tyrian purple dye, just enough pigment to dye the hem of one garment. Wearing something dyed fully in some shade of purple would have cost a fortune.

Next time you wear purple, remember the expensive Tyrian purple. Beautiful pigments have been a luxury for century for most humans, only the rich could afford stunning-colored silks and cloth.

Some paint pigments were rare and quite expensive during George Washington’s time. For example, he imported a beautiful teal green color paint from England to have his dining room walls covered in this shade at Mount Vernon.

Another rare and expensive color is Lapis Lazuli blue. As a matter of fact, the only people who used it first were the ancient Egyptians. Lapis Lazuli blue was priced as its weight in gold. This Lapis Lazuli blue did not come to Europe until the 14^th century.

A more recent color is YInMn Blue, discovered by researchers at the University of Oregon in 2009, used in plastics and industrial coating by 2017 and accepted as safe by EPA in 2021. A mere 1.3 oz. cost $179.40.

Old Masters’ pigments were made of various minerals and clay. An interesting color, Prussian Blue, was invented in 1710, the first modern synthetic pigment made by oxidation of ferrous ferrocyanide salts, replacing the expensive lapis lazuli dye. Cobalt Blue was invented in early 19^th century.

A perfectly red color is vermilion, a scarlet pigment from a mineral, cinnabar (kinnabari in Greek) born from volcanic activity and alkaline hot springs. The crystals are red in color but also contain a heavy silvery-white toxic liquid metal element of mercury. Cinnabar used to be called “dragon’s blood.” It was used in antiquity by many cultures.

Luxurious color hues, azure blue, flaming reds, vibrant greens, pure gold were shades that once only the rich could afford. The vast array of artificial colors today gives us a range of beautiful garments that are in some way, richer than the richest royals ever had and any ordinary citizen can afford them. It does not cost a fortune to have one’s favorite gown dyed a certain color.

Having grown up in the poverty of communism, our clothes and school uniforms came in the ugliest, drabbest shades of black, brown, ink blue, and grey. But, using plant pigments she found in the country, grandma was able to dye scratchy wool yarn strange shades of green, yellow, ochre, and a washed-up maroon. I made a promise to myself that, if I was ever able to afford beautiful clothes, I would only wear bright colors, hence my fascination with Lilly Pulitzer prints and vivid colors.

The Bubonic Plague Pandemic of 1348

Walsham le Willows today

The bubonic plague pandemic of 1348 England killed off a third of its population. As many as three generations of men were killed, allowing a single male heir, sometimes a woman, to inherit property from multiple peasant farms, making them more economically sound and increasing their wealth.

The bubonic plague was caused by a bacterium, Yersinia pestis, previously unknown to 14th century English. The black ‘buboes,’ which were used to describe the pestilence in the 17^th century as the Black Death, emerged in the area close to where the bacterium entered the body. Contact with donated clothes after the death of a family member spread the plague like wildfire.

There were three types of plague, based on the route of infection:

1.      Bubonic plague was spread by fleas from small animals and body fluids from dead ones – 30-90% of those infected die within ten days unless treated with antibiotics.

2.      Septicemic plague was spread by infected blood from flea bites.

3.      Pneumonic plague was caused by exposure to the cough (airborne droplets) of an infected individual or may have been the result of the initial flea bite and then following septicemic plague infection. This type is almost always deadly unless treated with antibiotics.

After the plague ended in 1349, the nobility could not find people to fill positions [wages rose to such an extent that a law was passed to convince peasants to accept wages from the pre-plague period; it did not work] and were forced to offer incentives never before given to the peasant class. For example, records reveal that a peasant was seen plowing the land in noblemen’s attire, with holes and tears, but a nobleman’s clothing nevertheless, as an incentive to do the work.

In the village of Walsham, about 100 miles north of London and 26 miles west from the port of Ipswich, the Black Death [the name was not used until seventeenth century] arrived in 1349. Out of the 1,200 residents on tax rolls, half died from the plague. Expecting the Black Death to arrive, records show that some peasants decided to go to the pub and get drunk instead of showing up for work. They knew death was imminent, why not have fun one last time?

In one family, William Cranmer’s family, the tax records show that three generations died within a couple of weeks, the grandfather, the father, and the brother of Olivia Cranmer. She was mentioned previously in tax records as having had to pay a few shillings in penalty taxes for having given birth to a child out of wedlock. The landlord of the manor had her married to a landed farmer named Robert, who also died of the plague.

The death records from the bubonic plague were accurate because each peasant had to pay a death tax, i.e. a horse, a cow, a yew, or whatever animal the family had.

As a survivor, Olivia inherited a total of 40 acres of land. But how was tax on the property going to be paid since women were not allowed to own property? To fix this problem, the lord and the tax collector allowed Olivia to become a landowner legally, thus being able to pay taxes on her 40-acre farm.

Olivia lived comfortably into her sixties, a remarkable age in medieval times, but especially since she survived the bubonic plague. She was in good condition financially, as she received a pension.

Many women in this period benefited from the Black Death financially. They were even allowed to become apprentices in different professions, traditionally only performed by men.

Waves of subsequent bubonic plagues followed, and it will be 300 years before the population of England grew to the pre-pandemic numbers of 1348.

The Cranmer Farm still exists today in the village of Walsham and farming continues on the same acreage as it was done during the medieval period by William Cranmer when the plague hit in 1349 and claimed the lives of so many of his family members.

Historical Narratives and Should We Change Them to Fit our Modern Culture?

As history is being modified in front of our eyes, to match the narrative of the ruling political class and of the billionaire elites running the tech industry and other crony capitalist empires, one wonders what parts of our history that we believed to be true and accurate have been embellishments of writers from long ago, with their own agendas, or perhaps writing years, decades, and centuries after the fact?

Are historical events based on fact, are they part of surviving records, or have they been orally transmitted, or mis-translated unintentionally from an obscure language and text by a scribe or scholar with good or nefarious intentions?

Pictograms on cave walls, on exterior rocks, before writing had been invented, hieroglyphs on pharaonic tombs, cuneiform writing on tablets, recorded important events in the lives of those who existed thousands of years before us.

Was writing invented to record major events in people’s lives, such as wars, conquests, tribal leaders, life under rulers, births, marriages, disasters? Did people attempt to give more meaning to their lives, to prove that they had existed?

People across the centuries left behind poems and books, epic poems, works of art, their autobiographies, biographies of others, built fancy mausoleums, pyramids, cathedrals, churches, monuments, arches, aqueducts, ancient roads like the Roman Via Appia, still existing in some parts of Italy today, and statues that commemorated their existence, moments in time, significant achievements, defeat, and victories in their lives.  

Their efforts, if they survived the ravages of time and of robbers, and the destruction of those who disagreed with them or fought them in wars, became sources for historical record, including famous epic poems in various cultures such as the Odyssey and the Epic of Gilgamesh from Mesopotamia, the earliest surviving literary text and the second oldest religious text.

Another epic poem, the Iliad, attributed to Homer, although not a historical work, was used at times as a building block for our collective history. But it was not written until the sixth century B.C. in Homeric Greek.

The world’s recorded history probably started with Herodotus when the Roman orator Cicero called him “the parent of history” two thousand years ago. He began writing history the way we understand history today, not the will of some gods from the Roman or Greek Pantheon, but history with real and specific causes, a systemic investigation of geography, geology, politics, and economics.  

Herodotus (484-425 B.C.) wrote his Histories, a detailed account of the Greco-Persian wars, the lives of important kings, and famous battles such as Marathon, Thermopylae, Artemisium, Salamis, Plataea, and Mycale. He also provided a cultural background to the battles from the standpoint of geography, ethnography (the scientific description of the customs of individual peoples and cultures), and historiography (the study of historical writing).

His contemporaries accused him of providing “legends and fanciful accounts” in his Histories. Herodotus defended himself that he wrote what he “saw and [what was] told to him.” But a large portion of his accounts have been confirmed by modern historians and archeologists.

Herodotus was born in Halicarnassus, part of the Persian Empire at that time; although a Persian subject, he spoke Greek in its Ionian dialect. He was likely schooled in this dialect and studied the works of the Greek poets Homer, Hesiod, and Sappho. The writing gift ran in the family – his uncle Panyassis was a famous poet.

Herodotus traveled extensively, collecting materials and impressions for his book. On this journey of historical discovery, Herodotus, not a rich man, was probably a sailor and merchant, the preferred trade of most adventurers of those times.

It is evident from his book that he admired Athens very much and it stands out in his writings. While in Athens, he met a lot of influential people, i.e., Pericles, a politician and general, dubbed “the first citizen of Athens,” and Sophocles, the Greek playwright.

In 446 B.C. Herodotus read his Histories in Athens publicly - he was so admired that he was rewarded with ten talents, a considerable sum of money in antiquity, with specific weights in gold and silver.

Traveling as a citizen without a country, Herodotus wandered until he established himself in the city-state of Thurii (the modern Calabria in Italy) where he became a citizen, and it is believed that he wrote his Histories in this town, in Ionian dialect, and it is here that he died at the age of 55.

History (from the Greek word, historia, inquiry) studies and documents the past. But history is not just documents, it records in writing the memory of others, the discovery and collection of facts, and how they are interpreted by using written documents, oral accounts (skewed perhaps on purpose, or lost by the passage of time), artifacts, and studying new or old materials such as dirt strata, fauna, flora, tattoos, utensils, pottery, weapons, etc.

Modern historians debate constructively or not, how to interpret new evidence and sources. Should we judge history and change it based on our modern standards of morality and culture that may differ from the past?

Searching for the past allows us to better understand the present. But we should not alter the past to appease those who are offended by historical facts that they deem unacceptable in our cultures today. No matter what historical sources we reference and consider, whether we agree with them or not, all comprise the history of humanity, a history we can learn a myriad of lessons from, a history which is evidence of our collective existence across the millennia.