The Globalist War on Humanity and Nudging

The globalist war on humanity continues. The billionaire crowd of the World Economic Forum and U.N. cohorts are attacking humans from every angle because their goal is to reduce the global population to a billion by any means necessary in order to “save” the planet from an imagined Armageddon hundreds of years from now. They are putting in danger 345 million poor people who cannot afford to eat and heat their homes due to escalating energy prices, prices made so high through political decisions toward fossil fuels created by President Biden in his first day in office.

“A new United Nations report on hunger shows that the number of acutely hungry worldwide is increasing as fuel and food prices soar. The war in Ukraine has intensified the crisis.” https://www.dw.com/en/un-record-345-million-people-marching-to-the-brink-of-starvation/a-62389284

Human behavior is regulated and controlled by a small group of people who know better what is best for humanity in order to sustain life on planet Earth which is an imagined danger. Such dire predictions have been made constantly for the past hundreds of years, none of them proven true, all of them based on computer modeling and assumptions made by persons who do not have the scientific qualifications to make such dire predictions.

According to some, the global population would serve the future planet best at half a billion or a billion people. What exactly are they planning for the other 6-7 billion humans?

Paul Ehrlich wrote in 1968 his book, “The Population Bomb,” advocating for a “green revolution” as a way to avoid world-wide famine. He wrote that “in the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.”

As I remember the 1970s, the western economies did well, and nobody starved to death. On the other hand, people living under communism in various countries did suffer from hunger and malnutrition due to poor economic planning and political ideology. Currently, it appears that the green politicians and billionaires from developed nations are causing world-wide famine.

Ehrlich argued that there cannot be more people on Earth than we can feed. “Clearly, other things being equal, fewer people will do less damage to the planet.” … “Population growth puts increased pressure on everything else …”

One of the subtle goals of U.N. Agenda 21/2030 has been to “nudge” people to behave the way globalists think we should behave. Nudge is a concept in behavioral economics and other fields.

The nudge concept was popularized in the 2008 book, Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein. Nudge units exist at the national level as well as international level such as World Bank, United Nations, and the European Commission.

If nudging is unsuccessful, authorities move to unsustainable rhetoric, change economic policy to affect pricing, supply and demand, tax the undesirable behavior, and enforce punishments for those who violate directives.

One example of nudging, presented as helping consumers save energy and money on gas bills, came from our gas company. They compared our gas use to other homes in the area (shaming or praising) and attempted to “explain” why our gas use was higher than the previous year, i.e., “using more hot water than usual or a long-term guest may have raised your energy use.” There was no mention of the fact that temperatures may have been colder or that older people cannot afford to drop temperature in their homes 5-8 degrees F from 68 degrees recommended because they would get sick.

Such intrusion disguised as a home energy report raised alarm bells in my mind. I recognize this nudging and shaming/praising because in my former life under communism, activists would visit homes and urge wearing extra layers of clothing in frigid temperatures inside our apartments, all for the good of the country. The commies in power were warm in their abodes. No matter how little gas or water we received on the strict daily schedule, we were using too much, they said.

As good citizens, the communists told us, we were to sacrifice more - cook less, bathe less, and shiver, they said. "We are building a socialist man." Eventually, they were not nudging us anymore; they were threatening us with punishment if we did not comply like good little collectivists.

 

The war in Ukraine and deliberate policies from Washington to make fossil fuels scarce and very expensive in order to discourage consumption and make room for their green energy, wind and solar, have made people in poor countries even poorer and right down desperate. For example, in Romania, energy prices are huge. The minimum income is $400-500 per month, yet the average December natural gas bill and electricity were a combined 2,900 lei, approximately $750.

 

Before the U.S. became a crony capitalist economy protected by the political class, goods and services were delivered abundantly, based on supply and demand, and a company did not care how much consumers used any product or service as long as they paid for them. We certainly had plenty of natural gas, there was no shortage until the “green” globalists decided to advance their green energy agenda to the detriment of fossil fuels.

 

The insidious side of nudging may not be obvious to the young and old who prefer a communist economy to a capitalist economy. But they must be careful what they wish for. Once they are under globalist [read communist] control fully, it will be impossible to vote it out at the increasingly globalist-controlled ballot box.

 

 

Nicholas of Cusa

Across the millennia, there were many learned men who contributed to the development of science and society in general without being well known or famous for their accomplishments. One such person was Nicholas of Cusa (1401-1464).

The son of a fisherman, Nicholas was born in 1401 in Kues, a small town by the Moselle River in southwest Germany. Catholic Cardinal, philosopher, theologian, astronomer, mathematician, and jurist, Nicholas was most famous for his denunciation of the Donation of Constantine as a forgery.

As a scientist, studying plant growth, he established that air had weight. His concept of the infinite made possible the theory of relativity in the twentieth century.

Before Copernicus and Newton, he hypothesized that the Earth revolved on its axis around the sun. He even worked out the specifics of the Gregorian calendar long before 1582 when Pope Gregory XIII implemented them into practice.

One of the first maps of Europe is attributed to him. He is alleged to have discovered, as a collector of rare manuscripts, the Natural History of Pliny the Elder, and many lost comedies by the Roman Plautus.

He endowed an old people’s home in Kues, and left it its entire personal library which was quite extensive for the time. Books were very expensive and rare then and only the rich could afford to own them. This fabulous collection survived intact to this day.

The eighth century document called the Donation of Constantine was an alleged edict by the Roman Emperor Constantine the Great in 315 A.D. who stated that “Silvester and his successors,” are to rule over the city of Rome and all the provinces, districts, and cities of Italy and the West … forever.”

Pope Silvester, the Christian Bishop of Rome, had baptized Constantine and cured him of his leprosy. Constantine, ever so grateful, donated half of his empire to the church forever. Following this edict, Constantine allegedly “vacated the Lateran Palace and carried away the first 12 baskets of earth from the site on the Vatican Hill of what was to become the Basilica of St. Peter.”

Nicholas of Cusa researched the eighth century document of the Donation of Constantine and found it to be a forgery. It contained many historical errors:

1. It talked about the city and the power of Constantine even though Constantine was still in Rome in 315 A.D. and his capital had not yet been established.

2. It called the Bishop of Rome a pope two hundred years before the title came into use.

3. It appeared that Constantine called himself the conqueror of the Huns, fifty years before they set foot in Europe.

4. It recorded the only mention that Constantine had given the church half of its empire; such a generous donation would have been mentioned in other records again and again.

5. Bishop Eusebius of Caesarea, Emperor Constantine’s contemporary biographer, had never heard of the Donation.

Nicholas of Cusa presented his findings in 1433 to the Council of Basel, and they were accepted immediately. He was anointed Cardinal by Pope Nicholas V and, even though he worked tirelessly on behalf of the papacy, he is remembered mostly for his scientific and academic endeavors.

 

Central Bank Digital Currencies

“… the oppressor would not be so strong if he did not have accomplices among the oppressed.”  - Simone de Beauvoir

The Covid-19 viral pandemic has accelerated the implementation of most of the 17 goals of the U.N. Agenda 2030. One such goal still remains unresolved, the central bank digital currencies (CBDC), sold as wholesale and retail. The wholesale CBDC would be used by financial institutions while the retail CBDC would be used for consumption.

The globalist plan is that, instead of using fiat currencies, paper money and coins, all governments would issue a credit-based system whereby balances and all transactions are recorded digitally. Once paper money and coins disappear from circulation, no new money will be printed or issued.

The immediate problem with such entirely digital transactions is that the banksters plan to make digital money expire if they are not spent. Additionally, the government will control everything you spend and will approve or disapprove your spending if they deem it helpful or harmful to your health, you are spending it on things not approved by a bureaucratic entity, and balances and expenditures will be tied to social credit scores based on the Chinese Communist Party model.

The primary reason for such a centralized digital system is power and total government control over the lives and activities of all citizens on the planet. Citizens would become totally dependent for their existence on a government who can and will take things away at whim if one does not behave appropriately.

Investopedia attempts to explain that the goals of a CBDC is to “provide businesses and consumers with privacy, transferability, convenience, accessibility, and financial security.” If a person gives total control of its finances to an unseen, unaccountable government entity, he/she will not have privacy, financial security, transferability, accessibility. He/she may have convenience. But convenience for whom?

Other lame reasons for adopting digital currencies are simplicity – there will be no need for a “complex financial system;” cross-border transaction costs would be eliminated; and illegals would not incur money transfer costs.

After Covid-19, the proponents of CBDC argue, people were not using cash anyway for fear of contamination. Proponents also argue that CBDC is good for people who do not have access to banks (5% of adults do not have a bank account). Could it be possible that it is their choice not to have a bank account?

Proponents of CBDC also argue that 13% of adults with bank accounts use services like money orders, payday loans, and check-cashing services which the government deems ‘expensive.’ The real issue here is that such money is usually untaxed. The government wants to make sure that all earned and transferred cash must be taxed and not earned under the table in cash.

“A CBDC also provides a country’s central bank with the means to implement monetary policies to provide stability, control growth, and influence inflation.” This is not true. Each country has a central bank already which is engaged in monetary policy, controlling the money supply, and the interest rates. Government activity, direct and indirect, actually causes inflation through its out of control spending and printing of money without any backing of goods and services. To say that a digital currency would actually curtail government spending is ridiculous.

Proponents of digital currencies argue that such a digital currency would avoid the volatility in the market, another false statement. During a financial crisis, there will not be enough bank liquidity to facilitate withdrawals when most customers would need their money.

Proponents of CBDC admit that privacy is an issue with digital currencies because authorities [read government] would have total power to monitor all transactions for financial crimes, social crimes, money laundering, and financing terrorism. Additionally, hackers and thieves will have a centralized hub to steal from, a much easier job.

It is not comforting to see what third world countries have adopted the CBDC system: the Bahamas, Antigua and Barbuda, St. Kitts and Nevis, Monserrat, Dominica, Saint Lucia, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Grenada, and Nigeria. India’s central bank announced that it would introduce a digital rupee by the end of 2023. Sweden, with its 9 million citizens, experienced a reduction in the use of cash so it is developing an e-krona. What Is a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC)? (investopedia.com)

The Chinese are already offering discounts to their own citizens if payments are made in their country’s central bank digital currency (CBDC). One example, if passengers on buses, subway, and rail services pay fares from a digital yuan mobile wallet issued by the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, they pay as little as 0.01 yuan for their trip. It is safe to say that a Chinese national is totally controlled by the CCP from cradle to grave.

To say that all this was not carefully orchestrated, it would be an understatement. During the Covid-19 lockdowns in 2020, the use of cash and coins was discouraged everywhere under the pretext of shortage. Signs appeared by cash registers everywhere, “does not take cash,” and to this day the signs are still up.

When Elon Musk bought Twitter, many thought that he bought it because he loved freedom of speech and he proceeded to clean house and release documents that the American citizens were eager to see. But that was not the reason he bought Twitter. He wants to make it into a hub for everything, including financial transactions. If he succeeds, his company will be the sole purveyor of the government’s digital currency, health care, food, education, entertainment, travel, and everything else highly controlled humans will do.

As the dollar continues its downward spiral due to high inflation caused mainly by government destruction of our fossil fuel energy industry, its green energy, build back better plans, the out-of-control money printing and government spending of trillions of dollars we do not have and are not backed by any goods and services, the petrodollar just took a huge hit.

The Saudi Minister of Finance, Mohammed Al-Jadaan, told Bloomberg TV during a World Economic Forum (WEF) interview that the Saudis “will gladly accept all currencies for settling oil transactions.”

For a long time the United States had agreed to protect the Saudi Kingdom in exchange for the Saudis demanding U.S. dollars for all oil transaction settlements. This allowed the U.S. dollar to have currency dominance and to export inflation to the world. This arrangement is ending, and few will understand what happens next.

We are at the crossroads of the dollar losing its prominence and value in the world and the danger of accepting a digital currency controlled by an all-powerful globalist government in exchange for an empty promise of “convenience.”

 

St. Simeon and His Pillars

No other human is more famous than Simeon Stylites the Elder, who is alleged to have lived for 36 years on top of a tall stone pillar about two feet wide. Why anyone would deprive himself of living his life to the fullest is quite bizarre.

St. Simeon advocated that, since Jesus suffered, his followers should follow his example of endless pain. As a monk in his native Syria, Simeon chained his right leg to a rock and performed miracles by healing the sick who flocked to see him. We are not sure if miracles were performed but writers about them seem to believe so.

Records show that Simeon walled himself during Lent and allowed all sorts of vermin to crawl on his body as a form of suffering. If historical record is correct, he never harmed any of them.

Simeon’s fanatical reputation grew far and wide and people traveled hundreds of miles to see him. He eventually grew weary of the attention and decided to escape the crowds by living on a pillar, closer to God, away from the daily pressures of the world. It was his effort of living on a deserted island without actually leaving his hometown.

At the age of 33, in 423 A.D., Simeon chose a stone column in his village of Telnishe in north Syria. The remains of these columns can be seen today. The initial column was 6 ft tall; over the next six or seven years he changed columns, eventually settling on a 72 ft high pedestal. For 30 years he never came down and had food and water brought up by ladder. The top of the column was 2 feet square, probably surrounded by a railing that would keep Simeon from falling down while he was sleeping. He was exposed to all elements and all seasons.

Simeon spent his entire life on fasting and prayer. His disciples listened to every word he shouted down to the base of the column and even counted the number of times that he prostrated during prayer.

Simeon was so famous for settling disputes that evidence exists in a letter in which some priests pledged, at Simeon’s determination, that they would never charge more than six percent interest on money they loaned. The usual at the time was twelve percent.

Simeon’s influential reputation extended to letters he wrote to people in power such as the Roman Emperor Theodosius II on behalf of the Syrian bishops, or a letter to the Patriarch Basil of Antioch in which he argued theology with them.

It is easy to consider St. Simeon as a fanatic and eccentric whose self-mutilation served very little purpose. But his Lebanese followers could argue the contrary.

When Simeon died in 459 A.D., his death was kept a secret to prevent his followers from dismembering his body for religious relics. Some teeth were stolen anyway as holy relics. He was eventually buried in the Church of Constantine in Antioch. Parishioners thought that his fanatical fame and deprivation would protect them from earthquakes which were occurring frequently in the area.

The cult of stylitism (living on a pillar) never took hold on religious followers but there were enough converts through the twelfth century. Some stylites lived in huts on top of a pillar, others lived in the hollows of the pillars. One notable convert lived ten years in a tub suspended between two pillars.

The most masochistic of St. Simeon’s disciples was St. Alypius, who is alleged to have lost use of his feet from standing on a pillar for 53 years near Adrianopolis (Edirne, Turkey today). For the next 14 years he was on his side on the pillar.

Christian monasticism did not limit itself to a monastery or a pillar like St. Simeon. A good majority of monks who wished to isolate themselves from the world during those times lived in caves dug onto the surrounding hills.

Maita's Grapes

Maita's Grapes

My grandmother Maita had a small vineyard and an orchard on the slopes of the steep hills surrounding her village home where she had and raised eight children. After grandpa died at a young age, she was left at 32 with eight mouths to feed.

They eked a survival living from the orchard and vineyard until one day, the entire slope came crashing down, the fertile terrain with the orchard, vineyard, and her home sliding on top of a thick layer of salt all the way down to the bottom of the ravine.

Luckily her children were grown, they had moved on to their own homes in the village or to the city to make a living in the factories dotting the landscape.

Maita bought a house with a small piece of land and moved to the middle of the village on a more level ground, no more climbing, and close to the only asphalted road where the bus would stop once a day. That home is still standing today, empty and abandoned as her last son passed away three years ago. She no longer had to climb steep inclines to get water in buckets balanced on a heavy stick on her tiny shoulders, to go to church, or to visit her neighbors.

This new home had a few fruit trees and two small grapevines flanking the short walkway from the metal gate to her front door. She made tzuica liquor out of prunes, jams, preserves, and marmalade out of fragrant quinces, apples, pears, and peaches from her orchard, and table wine from the black grapes, nothing fancy.

Her eight children took turns supporting her financial needs the best they could. She was never high maintenance – she ate a lot of beans and soup during lent, and occasionally she cooked an entire chicken outdoors on the spit, in a cast iron pot. Maita made her own bread and canned vegetables for the winter months. She was so healthy that she never took one pill and never set foot in a hospital. We really saw her as invincible and believed that she would live to be 100 just like all of her siblings. But God called her to Heaven when she was 90.

Maita was such a stoic in her simplicity, and seldom complained. Her conversations were brief but her eyes bore through your soul.  I don’t think I ever appreciated the hardships she must’ve gone through to raise her four daughters and four sons and to feed them all on her own. We just took her petite and wiry frame with her piercing sky-blue eyes for granted.

Her simplicity in life and strong determination must have rubbed off on my dad. No matter how dire our financial and living circumstances were, my dad never gave up.  He was as generous as Maita, with a tendency to spend his last dime on family if he saw the need.

I never fully understood the hardships my mom and dad had to endure to help our family survive under the boot of communism until I became a parent myself. Granted that life and parenting in capitalist America was so much easier, still, good parents everywhere must struggle and grapple with dilemmas and choices daily.  

What seems hard and insurmountable in some societies, it is easy in America because people have plenty of food, running water, indoor plumbing, a roof over their heads, and a bed to sleep in peacefully. America has not experienced starvation since the Great Depression when soup kitchens helped many survive.

We take for granted the fact that we can walk into any grocery store and find full shelves every day and all we have to do is check off the list, fill the cart, pay, and take it home.  Some people pay with their hard-earned money, others use government welfare credit cards, paid for by the largesse of other Americans who work and pay taxes. That was not the case under true socialism. If you did not work, your family did not eat.

During flu season in winter, many children got sick in school and had to stay home to recover. We did not have medicines or vitamins, so we had to suffer with high fever for days until such time that we recovered.

Daddy was always afraid that his only child would die, so he always asked me in between my feverish delirium, what I wanted to eat. I could not eat, of course, I had no appetite and mom had precious little in the pantry, but I always dreamed for something extraordinary which I knew, daddy could not find – grapes and cherry compote.

Daddy would kiss my feverish forehead and leave the apartment. He would be gone all day and, by night fall, he would come back with a small bag of withered grapes, almost to the point of raisins, and a small jar of cherry compote. I never questioned how he found these, how much it cost in cash and his time. I could not even eat them, but my eyes lit up momentarily with happiness and that was enough for daddy. He prayed silently that I would survive the bad bout with the flu (gripa).

I was in the grocery store yesterday and even though it is January and winter, I saw an abundance of grapes, white and red, seedless of course, coming from far away Peru. They looked beautiful and unblemished but tasted very sour.

It must be the composition of the soil or the variety of grapes, because they are never tasty like the American grape varieties. Yet it is still an abundance for January, coming all the way from South America and provided by free markets, something we never had under the socialist economy run by the Communist Party. We had to eat whatever it provided us, or we starved.

Maita’s grapes were always a treat in the fall – we knew the green ones were ready to eat when the color turned a light green with golden hues. She would say to me, “the grapes are turning gold with rusty edges, let’s go pick some off the vine.” She taught me how to appreciate other fruits and to be able to tell with precision when a fruit is ripe or not.

 

 

Flowers, Books, and Meritocracy in Communist Schools

My Second Grade Class

I found a rare book in my home library collection with personal significance. The pages are all yellowed and fragile enough that, if not handled with care, it will disintegrate. The published date is 1966, more than half a century ago.

At the end of second grade, school year 1966-67, my overall class average out of 30 students was very good. I was 8 years old and my average qualified for second place. My parents were blue collar workers (the proletariat) and always emphasized the importance of education; it was their pride and joy that their only child would do well in school. 

As was the case in the communist run schools of that time, each year four students with the highest overall averages received a bouquet of flowers, a certificate signed by the teacher and the principal, with first, second, third place, honorable mention, and a book to inspire students further in their studies.

The ceremony was always held outdoors on a sunny day. The black and white photograph shows the four of us on stage, dressed to the nines in pioneer uniforms with the red communist scarf, receiving the certificates, the books, and the flowers.

My book was titled "Illustrious Figures of Antiquity," and it cost 8.50 lei in 1966-67 when it was published which, at the forced exchange rate of that time, of $1 per 12 lei, it would have cost 75 cents.

I was not able to fully understand the book's content until the 8th grade, of course. I was not a genius to comprehend the historical figures of antiquity and their contributions to science, philosophy, art, mathematics, astronomy, and medicine. However, the point I am trying to make is that education and meritocracy were important at any grade level, during the era when the socialist man was being fashioned by the schools into the communist man.

Meritocracy and good performance in school were rewarded and recognized each year. Nobody would have dumbed down education or have taken away awards from good students in order to pacify weak students. There was no such thing as diversity and equity of outcomes. If you performed well, you were rewarded for your hard work and success. If your performance was weak, you did not receive certificates of participation.

Re-reading the book now, ever so carefully, I see all the dialectic materialism influence (communist), author’s views permeating through the historical record and its analysis.

Obviously, the author was a communist party card carrying member and apparatchik in good standing, otherwise his book would have never been approved for publication or even seen the light of day. Only authors approved by the censors of the communist party would have had their books published. The rest would just distribute their writings in pamphlet form in the underground.

The published world today is very much dominated by leftist communist influence, with bookstores overflowing with books written by the darlings of the radical left, and very few conservative authors see their books in print unless they are famous and publishing houses see an immediate profit motive. Most conservative authors are forced to form their own publishing houses or self-publish.

The larger point to be made here is that education, after weeding through the communist party indoctrination, was quite good when compared to the western education then and especially now, with noted exceptions of the manufactured history, which justified the communist party platform.

 

Hippocrates and Modern Medicine's Hippocratic Oath

The old medical tradition goes back to 400 A.D. to the young Greek medic Hippocrates who established his practice in Cos. At that time sanatoriums existed which were dedicated to Aesculapius, the god of healing, and medical procedures involved praying to gods and various superstitions.

Hippocrates learned his trade from his father and expanded his knowledge by traveling to Egypt to learn their medical practices of the time which included novelties such as having a clinical observation chart/sheet of the patient, using white and clean linen for babies and patients, watching closely the nutrition of newborns and toddlers, exercise and play in fresh air.

Upon his return from Egypt, Hippocrates realized that Greek medicine had to be revised from the priestly medicine to a new medicine based on rigorous experience and proper rationalization. This new medicine would become the Hippocratic medicine.

The island of Cos (Kos)

The classical Hippocratic Oath stated that a future physician, swearing by Apollo the physician, and Aesculapius the surgeon, Hygeia, and Panacea, and all the gods witnessing his oath, will engage in ethical treatment of patients, to his utmost power and judgment.

In healing the sick, the doctor would order the best diet for his patients, and made sure that they suffered “no hurt or damage.” The physician promised not to give poison to anyone, nor medicine to a pregnant woman, with “a view to destroy the child.” The doctor promised to behave and use his knowledge in a “godly manner,” referring to the gods listed above. The Hippocratic Oath: The Original and Revised Version - The Practo Blog for Doctors

At the young age of 22, Hippocrates established his medical school in Cos, based on the close relationship between theory and clinical practice, theory and experience obtained by taking care of the sick. The therapy side of medicine included hygiene, baths, physical exercise, diet, plant-based medicines, minerals, and animal-based cures. The Hippocratic medical school practiced medical investigations as well.

It was said that Hippocrates did not believe that diseases were connected to gods, but that they had an actual material reason, thus incantations and offerings to the gods were not helpful.

Hippocrates established the foundation of modern medicine during his 47 years of medical travels to care for both famous and ordinary patients. His fame and medical practices had spread around the world of antiquity and eventually made their way across the centuries into modern medicine.

After his death in 377 B.C., Hippocrates became the hero of many legends and medical traditions. Even in death, it is alleged that a tree by his tomb in Larissa had a bee hive which produced honey with an emollient effect on children’s skin problems.

Hippocrates left in his Corpus Hipocraticum, the combined 73 volumes of knowledge and experience of his practice, a trove of cultural, educational, philosophical, and scientific knowledge for centuries to follow. The Hippocratic writings were published in Alexandria, Egypt, a century after his death.

A Latin manuscript found in the National Library of Paris talked about Hippocrates and his discovery that Athenian black smiths who worked with fire and forges, did not get sick with the plague so he recommended “purification” of the city air. The text concluded that the grateful Athenians erected a statue to Hippocrates when the plague ended. However, Thucydides, who described at length the period of the Plague of Athens in the second year of the Peloponnesian war in 430 B.C., does not mention Hippocrates at all. Close to 100,000 people died from the plague which entered Greece through its city port of Piraeus.

The profound thinking of the genial doctor is expressed in one of his famous aphorisms with which he instructed his students, “Life is short and Art is long; opportunity is fleeting, experiment treacherous, and judgment difficult.”

Hippocrates was saying that a physician’s life is short when compared to the vast art [of medicine], art which depends on how quickly the doctor chooses the right moment to intervene, an art hindered by its two enemies, empiricism and dogmatism.

Fast forward to the twenty-first century and medicine appears to be preoccupied more with biopolitics and biopower exerted by the New World Order, more specifically transgenderism and transhumanism, instead of healing the sick and treating those suffering as has been the case in the twentieth century.

I was amazed in 1978 at the level of medical care Americans could receive, the potential for healing with modern medicines, tools, and surgical skills, and how caring and doting many physicians, surgeons, nurses, and other medical professionals were when compared to the awful socialized medicine we had received under the socialist dictatorship of the communist party where I had fled from.

In 2023, after three years of Covid-19 lockdowns and other detrimental developments, we are way past Kafka’s “Metamorphosis” in which Gregor Samsa wakes up one morning and is transformed into a huge cockroach.

We humans of any age are suddenly a huge burden and a “plague on the planet” and our numbers must be culled to a billion as repeatedly uttered by globalists and eugenicists.

Klaus Schwab of the World Economic Forum fame said that “A systemic transformation of the world will lead us to a fusion of our physical, our digital, and our biological identities.”

Yuval Noah Harari, chief advisor to the World Economic Forum (WEF) explained that “We will use nanotechnology and a direct brain-computer interface to upgrade Homo Sapiens into beings who are much more different from us than we are from animals – into gods. We will replace natural selection with intelligent design—by us.” (AAPS News, Vol. 78, no. 12, December 2022)

Medical care has taken a huge hit during and after the Covid-19 pandemic, distrust and fear keeping many potential patients from seeking medical care for chronic conditions and sometimes emergencies.

Doctors and nurses feared their own death and it drove them to remake their clinics, pretending that they practiced care via tele-medicine. Some doctors, even foot doctors, became irrational and to this day, are still requiring their patients to wait in the parking lot until the office deems it safe to call the patients to come up one at a time. It is not a very efficient way to run an office as there is nobody else in the waiting room. Everyone is heavily masked, including the patients.

We saw the doctors who took the CDC hard line. They failed miserably their Hippocratic Oath and potentially harmed their patients by sending them home to a certain death in some cases, without any treatment until such time that ventilators became their final destiny and eventual death.

It seems that corporate America and especially universities are expanding into healthcare for profit in the march towards the Sovietization of America. Doctors spend more time updating their computer charts in the ten minutes they spend with each patient than they talk to patients, look him/her in the eyes, and touch their bodies.

The virtual medical appointments were generally a waste of time and resources for a percentage of patients. Some sick people stayed away from ERs for fear that they would be put on ventilators. Other people resented the masks and the constant Covid-19 testing and chose to stay home instead of having elective out-patient surgery or a direct visit with their doctor.

Hippocrates thought of means to heal his patients quicker, better, easier, and with the least amount of suffering. Modern medicine should seek the same.

In his “About the Proper Behavior,” Hippocrates wrote that medicine should be guided by simplicity, modesty, good reputation, sound and logical judgment, peace, caring, moral purity, knowledge of usefulness, and of life’s practices. Doctors should be of good moral character and with a largesse of the soul and mind.

Hippocrates wrote, “When there are more procedures, a doctor should choose the least showy. He, who is not trying to deceive the eyes of the ignorant through a false demonstration, is truly an honest man and a real doctor.”

Hippocrates stated that “honest doctors must give the patient the assurance that he/she is not abandoned. When the illness is serious, the doctor must neglect his own interest, applying the treatment even though he may risk getting nothing after the patient heals.” (On the Articulations, written in 400 B.C.)

Modern medicine does have honest doctors like Paul Marik, Robert Apter, and Mary Bowden who have sued the FDA, CDC, and the Health and Human Services (HHS) for interference with the doctors’ ability to treat Covid-19, more specifically the “FDA’s disparaging, misleading statements to many influential organizations about ivermectin.” Ivermectin could have saved lives, but the “FDA broke with both law and traditions by interfering with the practice of medicine, i.e. with the authority to prescribe drugs approved for human use for an ‘off label’ indication.” https://tinyurl.com/3y9x4ubd

The American Association of Physicians and Surgeons wrote in its amicus brief: “Defendant FDA has improperly exploited misunderstandings about the legality and prevalence of off-label uses of medications, in order to mislead courts, state medical boards, and the public into thinking there is anything improper about off-label prescribing.” https://tinyurl.com/28ukattt

“In ruling against patients seeking access to ivermectin to treat Covid-19, as recommended by their physicians, multiple courts have relied on the misinformation and improper interference by the FDA as a basis for denying access now.” https://tinyurl.com/28ukattt

Hippocrates would probably be shocked about most doctors today who ignored their Hippocratic oath and chose the path of least resistance to deal with the onslaught of Covid-19 patients who were sent home to recover on their own without treatment until such time that they were too far gone and went to the ER.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Reminiscing with Milica on Epiphany

I just spoke to my childhood friend Milica for 45 minutes. It is January 6, 2023, Epiphany for Christians, Boboteaza” in our Romanian Orthodox faith. We were reminiscing about our life in the communist apartment block, the togetherness in misery, pain, and other little things in life that stood out in our memories.

She remembered my dad on this day, gathering the children to take them to church. My grandmother Elizabeta was deeply religious, she fasted every Lent, and his sister Leana was a cantor in her village church. Emilia went to ask her dad if she could go, and her dad replied, “only if you are going to wear your pioneer uniform and red scarf.”

Emilia’s dad was a communist activist at the factory where he “worked.” His job was to indoctrinate the workers who were not yet convinced to fully support the communists, and to rat out those like my dad who were totally against the communist party and its dictator.

Her dad had a soothing voice, sounded convincing in his erroneous arguments and judgment, and had a towering presence that we kids feared. In exchange for his “work,” the party gave him a salary and extra rations of food for his family of four. His apartment was the same size as ours, but they always had food and sometimes things we had not seen or eaten in years.

Milica’s mom was a skilled seamstress and made extra money which allowed them to buy things and provisions on the underground illegal market. We girls, the five of us, would sometimes have treats at Emilia’s apartment if her mom felt generous that day to share with us whatever she was cooking. It was not often, but it was something to look forward to.

My dad disliked Milica’s father because he was a snitch and a communist stooge. I did not realize that Milica resented her dad’s activities when she found out later in life. When he died, she said, she threw out all his books and propaganda materials, i.e. The Communist Manifesto and other Karl Marx works, Lenin, Frederick Engels, and Stalin pamphlets and books. I wish she had preserved them for posterity, to teach those that come about the evils of communism. She said, half-jokingly, I could have sold them for good money today.

When I told Milica about my former students and about 50% of Americans who think communism is preferable to capitalism, she was shocked. She was saddened that America, to whom most of the world look up to for trends, advice, and inspiration, is going to be communist. She said, “Then we are all going to be communists again and they are going to confiscate our private property.  Are they crazy? Do they not realize how badly we lived for decades and how we barely survived?”

 

Information Asymmetry and the Newspapers

 

You can tell a lot about people, by the newspapers they read:

People who read the Washington Post THINK they OWN the country.

People who read the New York Times KNOW that they RUN the country.

People who read the Washington Times THINK that the Washington Post RUNS the country.

People who read the Wall Street Journal THINK they OWN the country.

People who read USA Today could not care less who runs the country as long as the weather map is in color. 

– Paul Harvey

 

Prison Dining in Volterra

On our last visit to Italy, we stopped in the beautiful town of Volterra, Tuscany. Volterra is a “walled mountaintop” dating back to the eighth century B.C., with structures from the Etruscan, Roman, and Medieval times.

On our way there, we found a citadel built on the highest point of the hill overlooking the town.  From below the Tuscan road, it looked like two small bastions joined by a wall, a “curtain wall.”

As my husband was driving, I looked up the history of Fortezza Medicea (Medici Fortress) of Volterra to find more information about its history. Built before De Medici’s rise to prominence and power, the fortress was built by the Duke of Athens who was governor of Florence in 1342.

The second fortress was built by another Florentine ruler, Lorenzo the Magnificent, in 1474, following the sacking of Volterra by Florentine troops in 1472. The Florentines were interested in Volterra’s alum. As a chemical, alum has many household and industrial uses.

The two fortresses are linked by a stone “curtain wall” and today it houses a medium security prison. What is so interesting about this prison, is the fact that on certain days tourists can dine in a restaurant operated by prisoners who are neither chefs nor cooks. The brochure stated that inmates are appropriately supervised, and tourists are checked before being allowed into the prison.

The prison administrators decided to open a restaurant in 2006 to rehabilitate prisoners who were serving no less than 7-year sentences. The menu was rather simple, and diners had to go through a screening process and reservations had to be made in advance.

Somehow, the idea of eating meals cooked by inmates, who were not just white-collar criminals, probably injured other human beings, did not appeal to me at all. Americans love such unusual experiences, but I was raised in Europe and under communism at that, so I have a healthy dose of caution when it comes to dangerous situations when the potential of being poisoned or sickened by inmate food was the least of my worries. What was in the back of my head were hostage situations, murder, escapes, and other violent encounters in a stone-walled medieval prison built and reinforced to withstand the volleys of Renaissance era heavy canons.

 I did not tell my husband about the prison restaurant, just the history of the fortress. To this day, my husband resents the fact that I did not allow him the pleasure of dining on prison food in a fortress. As a military man, he is fascinated by the history of medieval armory and castles built as defense for the population and its rulers.