Myakka River State Park Adventure

After a few beach days with an angry ocean with rip tides and dark colored water, we decided to visit again the beautiful Myakka River State Park, one of Florida’s oldest and most diverse, wonderfully preserved wilderness areas.

Myakka River flows through 58 square miles of prairies, wetlands, hammocks, and pinelands. Hammocks are usually hardwood trees that grow on elevated areas, a few inches higher than the wetlands. Sometimes they grow on slopes between wetlands, mixed with conifer trees.

Myakka River and two shallow lakes attract a rich population of birds, alligators, small deer, and a rich flora. It is a perfect place for bird watching, hiking, gator watching, biking, kayaking, and canoeing. The camping areas are tucked in the safer zones of the park.

The forests appear impenetrable at times but the scenic and meandering 7-mile drive along the Upper Myakka Lake is perfect for those who are afraid of actually venturing through the dense brush with low-lying ground. I was surprised that bicycles were allowed both on paved roads and on dirt roads.

There are over 39 miles of hiking trails and dirt roads leading to the very remote interior. The 1.2-mile loop Boylston Nature Trail and the River Trail north of the main park bridge are potential hiking options. Dry prairies seem to flourish in the park and a couple of small Florida deer met us in such an area.

Hurricane Ian had caused severe damage to the park and to its infrastructure and it has not yet completely recovered. Camping is available but not all areas can be accessed for now.

Rentals, the Outpost, and the Lazy Gator Café were available on this day. While close to the boat launch, I saw a gator floating closely to the asphalt, watching me, then diving quickly. He was definitely stalking me.

By the main bridge, an older gator was resting on the bank at the foot of the bridge, about 12 feet from the sign that read, Beware of Alligators. Of course, my husband had to have his picture taken by the sign, knowing that the enormous gator was resting too close for his comfort. He seems to forget that gators can run much faster than humans. Lucky for him, the gator was not hungry.

To access the Wilderness Preserve one must have a permit. The Canopy Walkway and the Nature Trail were open. Evidence of uprooted large trees was everywhere. One side of the wooden tower built by volunteers is 24 feet tall, while the other tower is 76.1 feet, with a breathtaking view of the entire park as far as the eyes can see. The suspended walkway between the two towers is rocking – it was built so on purpose, to sway with the wind.

I looked forward to the Bird Walk until I realized that the wet terrain was lower than the parking lot but at the same level with the lake water, which was full of gators, eight of which were on a feeding prowl. We walked to the four steps which gave us access to the wooden bridge called the Bird Walk. We did not see many birds from this bridge, but we certainly saw plenty of gators of various sizes, something I have never seen in the wild before. On the way back to the car, I believe I walked the fastest I could across the muddy terrain at the same level with the gator-infested Upper Lake.

To my surprise, three crows landed on the wooden bridge railing, and one decided to be stupidly brave, standing on the sea grass floating on the lake. A gator was gliding fast towards her. A blue heron braved the shallows, further away from the deep water, hopefully safe from the gators. I took her picture quickly and walked fast through the exposed land to the car. At 11 MPH, with some gators sprinting 30 MPH on short distances on land, nobody can possibly think that humans can outrun gators, but the adrenaline rush gave me a renewed desire for speed. A human could zigzag and outrun an alligator for a longer stretch on land. Gators prefer to attack on the edge of the water and drag their prey to the bottom where the death roll ensues.

We left the park and drove back to the beach where the ocean was furiously pounding the shore and the surf created fantastic shapes in white foam which disintegrated on the beach. The riptides were relentless, and the guard towers were still flying double-red flags.

 

 

 

Viral Neo-Communism

The virus of globalist neo-communism has spread around the world with massive help from United Nation’s Agenda 21 now morphed into Agenda 2030, its myriad of paid NGOs, Marxist billionaires, the global warming lie turned into the very profitable climate change industry with its “green energy” agenda, and the Great Reset of the World Economic Forum and its affiliates. This type of neo-communism, rebranded as “woke,” is more dangerous than ever as its social engineering goals threaten to control every facet of our lives, and puts in jeopardy the very existence of humanity itself.

The lessons of the old communism are no longer taught in our public schools or universities. Consequently, the new generations find communism in general quite attractive considering the media propaganda that the “oppressed” will get everything free and a living wage without working.

This newfound love of communism has spread around the world, at the same time, and with the same widespread narrative. The old communist guard misses the economic and financial perks they received from the Communist Party, while the elderly, having to suddenly function in a world alien to them, are nostalgic for the good ole days of communist oppression.

The best explanation of life under the Communist Party is reflected in the quote from Elena Ceausescu, the wife of the communist dictator Nicolae, who allegedly said to a high-ranking government employee who displeased her, “The house you enjoy with your precious wife is not yours. It belongs to the Party. So does your car, and everything else you have. That is Communism, Monsieur, in case you have not learned. In Communism, no one has anything for himself. You are rewarded only as long as you are useful to the Party.” (Red Horizons, Lt. Gen. Ion Mihai Pacepa, Regnery History, 2018, pp. 217-218)

Elena Ceausescu and her dictator husband, Nicolae, were proud that they had installed a security agent for every 15 citizens, economic police, regular police, and the army.

We are not sure who coined the phrase “useful idiots” or Bogdan Raditsa’s “useful innocents,” referring to those who do not understand communism but promote it ardently. The young American generations today certainly fit that description quite well.

Klaus Schwab, the founder of the World Economic Forum, made it clear that by 2030, “you’ll own nothing, and you’ll be happy about it.” What he did not say is that by then, you will also have no human rights left.

The U.S. will no longer be the world’s leading superpower. We will eat much less meat, it will be a treat, not a staple. You will be eating crickets and worms. You will not be using natural gas, fossil fuels, air conditioning, stoves, furnaces, air conditioners, and other modern amenities. A billion people will be displaced by the social engineering of “open borders’ designed and implemented by billionaires, presidents, U.N., and their affiliates. You will pay to emit carbon dioxide and there will be a global price on CO2. Government will be totalitarian, with no checks and balances. All for the good of the planet, your health, and the neo-communist common good.

The Covid lockdowns were a neo-communist test for the globe as to how far abject fear of death could be driven into the population daily and how far they could push the people under the yoke of control in the name of health and the common good.

Marxism is alive and well in the World Health Organization (WHO), the United Nations (U.N.), and the World Economic Forum (WEF). They are supported by private billionaires and our taxpayer dollars. Violent revolutions brought Marxism to Russia, China, Cuba, and South America.

But non-violent revolutions have been achieved step by step, decree by decree, law by law, with international treaties that do not benefit the countries involved at all, endless executive orders, and other means. Suddenly you lose your sovereignty and your rights to an organization that is not accountable to anyone but is funded heavily by U.S. taxpayers. And you cannot do anything about it.

Suddenly American citizenship means so little when the southern border is allowed by our own government to be invaded by thousands of illegals flown in or bussed in by coyotes or by catholic charities, illegals who, most recently, have rushed the border in the middle of the night, chanting, “si, se puede,” (yes, we can) which happens to be the socialist Democrat Party’s rallying cry of its members during elections. So far millions of illegals have been bussed in with the blessing of our own Democrat government and its paid NGOs.

Several years ago in Geneva, on March 6, 2009, then U.S. Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, presented the Russian Foreign Minister, Sergey Lavrov, with a red industrial button with the word “reset” on it. The translation into Russian was incorrect, instead of “reset,” it was “overload.”  The Russian went along politely with the snafu. The idea was that, by pressing this button at the same time, Russia-U.S.A. would reset their relations and forget everything that has ever happened in history.

Is it coincidental that the World Economic Forum’s Founder and Executive Chairman, Klaus Schwab, used Covid-19 lockdowns as an opportunity to “suggest” how to govern countries and individuals into a global reset to “create a more inclusive, resilient, and sustainable world”? Sustainable is the lynchpin word for global Marxism, as powerful and essential as the word “woke” for communist social engineering.

It is because of these globalist social engineers from WEF, WHO, and UN, with their manufactured crises, that people have suffered terrible government lockdowns, imposed self-isolation, economic hardships, loss of homes, loss of jobs, loss of businesses, eviction from rented homes, loss of significant education, loss of proper medical care, psychologically intense stress, food and other necessities shortages, and physical security threats to their wellbeing.

Social engineers forced the redefinition of “humanness,” they drove people apart by creating an endless pandemic, masking, and fear of death. Governments decided which businesses were “essential” and important to stay open and which had to close.

They forced families to make “moral” and “immoral choices” in how they treated their families in terms of gatherings and visitations. They locked old people in nursing homes. They prevented loved ones from having funerals for their relatives. They forced churches to close when people needed God and faith the most.

Doctors made unethical and questionable choices when they refused proper treatment to their patients who later died at home or in hospitals. Unethical doctors pretended to practice medicine online while harassing their patients and pressuring them to get vaccinated with an ineffective and untested dangerous product. Thousands died and were maimed in the process.

Schwab included in his Great Reset consumption. “Never let a crisis go to waste” is the Democrat motto. As the economy degrades from high inflation caused primarily by too much government spending and money printing, a tax on the poor who live on limited income, variety and availability of products have disappeared as fast as many companies have gone bankrupt.

Globalists have always frowned about people’s “conspicuous consumption” which cause, they say, “environmental degradation and climate change.” Yet the biggest spenders and contributors to any conspicuous consumption are the rich who fly around the world in their private jets, sail in huge yachts, live in meg-mansions, and drive many expensive automobiles. We must drive tin cans or stay at home, while they indulge their every whim in luxury.

Schwab suggested in his book, Covid-19: The Great Reset, on page 244, that we must take the bull by the proverbial horns and use the pandemic as “a rare but narrow window of opportunity to reflect, reimagine and reset our world.” Unfortunately, this reimagined world he is talking about is the totalitarian globalist world ruled by a few and the rest of us are not happy with their social engineering.

 

 

  

Yearning to Find That Special Thing and Place

Everybody comes from somewhere special, a farm, a lake, an island, the desert, a faraway mountain, a town, a hamlet, a large city, a foreign country, or a place no one else has heard of. And each person has a story, real or fantasized.

If you ask each person, their place is the best in the world, the most beautiful, most bountiful, most colorful, and so special that tomes had been written about it, yet here they are. They are so far away and yearning to get back to that amazing place they identify with – a place of wonder, love, friends, cherished memories, and family, with all the things they perceive as missing in the present.

People adorn their cars with flags and bumper stickers, names of the places they miss, and photos of deceased loved ones. They wear memorabilia on their sleeves or place things in their yards and homes that remind them of their homes. The yearning is so raw and powerful, exposed to the world to see, that you can’t help but wonder why they left in the first place.

But they can never go back home again or to that unique place for many reasons. The most profound is that home and everything around it they remembered has moved on and changed. Whatever one is searching for, it is no longer there. Landscapes change, natural disasters remodel the earth, buildings are demolished to make room for parks, new areas develop, high rises are built, streets are redrawn, regimes change, people get old and move on, and people die. The obsession, the place, the person, the unidentifiable “je ne sais quois,” is no longer there.

The new home overwhelms life here and now; time robs everything and everyone; people try to adjust to the new place, the new reality, and time continues to fly, hour by hour. Humans make new friends, build families, bring old ones with them, but that something special from long ago is missing – a certain food, a smell, a custom, a song, a mysterious perfume, flowers, a lilac bush, or grandma’s garden with scented roses in full bloom.

The smell of machine oil brings back memories of my grandfather. His repair shop with a myriad of old tools, under the lean-to by the adobe house, had been torn long ago by his grandson who inherited the house. It was personally sad to see it gone. But his cellar was still there, and I did not have to go down the steps to smell the cool and earthen damp air, the potatoes, the onions, the garlic strung up on braided stalks, and the fresh apple scent, it was all in my olfactory memory.

The fragrance of the white mulberry tree I found one day in Virginia, and the sweet aroma of its fruits brought back memories of my childhood adventures to the corn field and the lone and majestic walnut tree behind grandma’s house. I wished to go back to see those trees one more time and, when I did, they were gone. One succumbed to disease and the walnut tree had been cut down because it got so massive that it was shading the rows of corn too much. The delicious walnuts of my memory were no longer there but I could still recall my stained hands from picking walnuts when the green shells were falling off, but it had plenty of dye left in the pulp.

As we age and become wiser and more in touch with our purpose on earth, we yearn to return to our roots in the never-ending circle of life, but the roots are no longer there either any more than the memories of those with whom we shared a common trunk and branches – they have all scattered into the winds to set roots elsewhere or to enrich the earth.

NOTE: What is that special thing and place you want to return to?

Power Hungry Communists Then and Now

The seizure of power is the main objective of a revolution. And certainly, the communist revolution had the same goal. Lenin’s book, Toward the Seizure of Power, explains that “The question of power . . . is the fundamental question which determines everything in the development of a revolution.” That was certainly the goal of the 1917 Bolshevik revolution.

The Bolsheviks and Lenin destroyed the czarist regime. And they were not restrained by any traditional moral, legal, or ethical principles. Marx and Engels had declared that “there were no eternal moral laws,” and Lenin wrote that “morality is entirely subordinated to the interests of the class struggle of the proletariat,” and that “morality taken outside of human society . . . is a fraud.”

Communist propaganda then and now describes the Bolshevik seizure of power as a ‘proletarian’ revolution. It was actually “an armed insurrection by a relatively small group against an almost powerless government.”

Lenin and his Bolsheviks did not have the overwhelming support of peasants and workers as they had claimed, they constituted a minority and remained so long after the seizure of power. They added more converts by promising ‘Bread, Peace, and Freedom!” The Russians wanted those promises but did not want Bolshevism.

Lenin sought power to advance communism through the “dictatorship of the proletariat,” with total disregard for individual freedom. He even told the masses in detail in the summer of 1917 how he planned on ruling through his dictatorship of the proletariat, using “naked force and terror.”

The “dictatorship of the proletariat” in communist ideology implied a transitional form of government from capitalism to pure communism and was described as an “era of socialism.” Even Marx wrote that the “state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.” To further the deception, all Soviet satellites were called socialist republics.

Lenin wrote that force and violence were essential in overthrowing capitalism. Capitalism could not be reformed, had to be destroyed and replaced with the dictatorship of the proletariat. In this new form of governance, the means of production were owned by the state. The state also had complete power, unrestricted by laws, crushing all opposition, real or imagined.

“The seizure of power is a matter of insurrection; its political purpose will be clear after the seizure,” Lenin wrote. Power had to express itself through violence and force, unrestricted by any laws.

Violence and force were excused for the ruling communists. They were allowed to oppress the masses and ethnic minorities among their peoples. The Communist Party (CP) excused violence and force because the bourgeois minority, they said, had exploited the masses under capitalism and therefore the CP members could use any means necessary to teach them hard lessons that capitalism and private property were evil and anybody who tried to have more than what was approved by decree was therefore open for severe punishment. Hoarders of food and other necessities were imprisoned, if lucky, or executed.

Josip Broz Tito is an example of how an early communist organizer used the crisis of fascist Germany invading European countries to rally his people under the leadership of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia to take up arms against the fascist aggressors. Tito was so convincing that his cause was just that in 1945 he became president of Yugoslavia. The Yugoslavs repealed the Nazis only to replace the fascist yoke with the communist yoke.

The communist party of the Soviet Union who terrorized and oppressed its people for 72 years, never relinquished the power they had taken in 1917 by force. They pretended to resign but went underground in 1989 to regroup and reemerge as an even more powerful brand of communism, globalism, now sold in the U.S. as the “woke” movement. No matter what the euphemism used, it is still communism.

Once the Bolsheviks took power, they restricted the publication of any opposition newspapers and outlawed all political groups. Freedom of the press and freedom of speech were eliminated.

Cheka (Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counterrevolution and Sabotage) oversaw the crushing of all opposition to the Bolsheviks. Cheka was controlled by the Council of People’s Commissars, chaired by Lenin.  Cheka had the unchecked power to arrest, imprison, shoot on the spot without due process, and execute anyone who was on their radar for any reason.

The Russian people did not go quietly into the night after the Bolshevik seizure of power. Military resistance developed into civil war by 1918 and spread widely by 1920. But the Bolsheviks won, and the win was attributed to Leon Trotsky as commissar of war. A former journalist in New York City, Trotsky reorganized the Red Army. The dire economic situation at the time worked in his favor as well. Bolshevik agricultural policies produced a short-lived economic recovery in 1921 which further confused the population.

Lenin’s absolute power ended with his death in 1924. But the world communist movement he established continued to suppress all political opposition, applying strict censorship over all means of communication; trade unions became wards of the state and Cheka terrorized everyone.

It is interesting to note that in 1917, when Lenin and his Bolsheviks started the reign of terror in Russia, William Tyler Page, a descendant of one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, wrote “The American Creed.” It was accepted by the U.S. House of Representatives on behalf of the American people.

I believe in the United States of America as a Government of the people, by the people, for the people, whose just powers are derived from the consent of the governed; a democracy in a Republic; a sovereign Nation of many sovereign States; a perfect Union, one and inseparable; established upon those principles of freedom, equality, justice, and humanity for which American patriots sacrificed their lives and fortunes.

I therefore believe it is my duty to my country to love it, support its Constitution, to obey its laws, to respect its flag, and to defend it against all enemies.

Having lived under communism for twenty years, I appreciate the freedom we have in the United States more than other citizens born and raised in this country who take their abundant life for granted. I respect its laws, I fly the American flag proudly every day, and I support the Constitution.

Unfortunately, the thirst for global power in the hands of a few billionaires and the U.N. is moving all countries further and further to the radical left of global communism.

The fundamental transformation of our country promised by President Obama in 2008 is unfolding fast before our eyes and we are powerless to stop it.

The manufactured global warming and the climate change industry are just smoke and mirrors to mask the total globalist power and control by a few billionaire communists over our lives from cradle to grave.