Our Lives and "The Lives of Others"

“Das Leben des Anderen” is a 2006 German drama that describes in painful detail what life was like in the communist East Berlin of 1984, almost six years before the fall of the Berlin Wall, how ordinary and not so ordinary citizens were spied upon by their government, using agents of the infamous Stasi, the German Democratic Republic’s secret police. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n3_iLOp6IhM

The movie is not important because it showed how a famous actress was spied upon, her life, trials, and tribulations and the spying minions who answered to the Kommunistische Partei (Communist Party). It is important because it shows the drab and meager daily life of fear, uncertainty, and horror that people in general endured under communist regimes.

Like the actress in the movie, homes were bugged; all telephone conversations were recorded and listened to. All incoming and outgoing mail was opened, read, and copied by small bureaucrats whose job was to report anything out of the ordinary and catalog their daily blogs.

The secret police did not have sophisticated wireless technology to spy on citizens like we have today. They also did not seek nor need warrants to record everything people did or said in their homes, cars, on the phone, social media sites, or by email. They had the oppressive power of government on their side and technology was not advanced to the level that it is today.

There are so many ways now to cheat and steal personal and corporate information online and on the Dark Web that ethical hacking, penetration testing, and cybersecurity expertise have become real job descriptions.

Computer experts, in cooperation with law enforcement agencies, have infiltrated the dark web globally to expose child predators and human trafficking by capturing live podcasts of predators. This is the positive side of online hacking.

It is not just the utility companies scanning our homes via smart meters for presumably just water, electricity, and gas consumption patterns; other companies and individuals invade our privacy via wireless devices, listening and watching everything we do and say, without a judicial warrant; we are being scanned from every direction 24/7.

Companies listen to our phones and bombard us minutes later with ads for products and drugs we discussed privately on the phone or searched online.

Thanks to social media, no informers must be hired to spy on us, we volunteer information daily. The huge databases that our government and private agencies are building on us would be the envy of the Stasi and of any former communist dictator’s spying soldiers and primitive machines. Without advanced technology, the Stasi was quite successful in keeping their population under control.

People under communism were asked to divulge to the Financial Police (that would be the equivalent of the IRS) what they owned, how much money they had hidden in the house, how they purchased certain goods, and why they ate sometimes better food than what was available on the market. Community organizers, not unlike ACORN, patrolled the streets. In exchange for better rations of food or a small monthly stipend, individuals were assigned per block of apartments to record the comings and goings into each apartment.

GPS tracking in our smart phones, cars, boats, appliances, cable TV, cameras, social sites, credit card purchases, streaming, online purchases, flights, and shopping enable faceless individuals to track us and our lives daily, information that is stored in all the AI data centers now mushrooming all over the country. Once all cash is replaced with digital currency, governments will be able to control us, reward, and punish us, from birth to death.

Satellites can take pictures with extreme accuracy. Drones can spy in your bedroom as you sleep. Smart meters relay information to the mother ship about your gas, electricity, water consumption, your appliances, whether you are home, if you are using medical devices, and sports equipment. Appliances can talk to the grocery store and place food orders for you. The utilities companies can turn off your electricity, water, A/C, and gas whether you want it turned off or not.

Content usage is monitored and access blocked or allowed based on politics. Leftist business owners firewall sites that contradict their views. YouTube takes down videos that offend liberals, thus stifling freedom of speech. Academia censors conservative professors by denying them tenure.

Facebook has censored conservative users, writers, and content developers for years. Publishers often turn down good conservative writers. MSM promotes political correctness and liberal views.

No matter where you turn, agents and technology are watching you - they are empowered by non-elected government bureaucrats and corporatists to spy on the “lives of others.”

 

The Black Plague and Pandemics

Everyone has heard of the ten plagues of Egypt from the Book of Exodus – blood, frogs, lice, flies, livestock, boils, hail, locusts, darkness, and first-born. Then there were the waves of the Black Death, the plague that encompassed most of Europe and it changed the face of Europe forever.

Albrecht Durer depicted the awfulness of the Black Death in one of his black ink etchings, bringing attention to the repenting frenzy of the strange penitents known as the Brotherhood of Flagellants.

The order included both men and women. They believed that, if they whipped themselves to bleeding or allowed a Master of Pilgrimage to do the whipping, ripping their flesh with a scourge of leather thongs and pointed metal studs, then the plague would be lifted. The penitents endured this horror for thirty-three and a half days during which time they were not allowed to clean or treat their wounds. They had hoped to appease God in this manner. Thankfully, Pope Clement VI outlawed this strange sect in October 1349.

To the people of fourteenth century Europe, the plagues were God’s punishment for their sins. Twenty-five million Europeans died within four years, 1347-1351. They believed that self-punished might appease God to relent this scourge.

Nobody understood that plague bacteria were carried in the fur of black rats and spread by flea bites and from bodily fluids of infected humans. The bacillus Pasteurella pestis lives in the bloodstream or the stomach of a flea. The fleas’ favorite rodent for residence is Rattus rattus, the black rat.

Trade caravans from Central Asia, where the plague was endemic, carried the plague to China then to Crimea, and then by ship to the Mediterranean coast via trade routes and finally across Europe. It was believed that the rats fled from droughts or floods to China.

Not many Europeans were spared. Isolation, segregation, and heat worked to stop the infection and its spread.

The Archbishop of Milan ordered the first three houses where the bubonic plague was walled in with all the sick, dead, and healthy entombed within. The city was spared and nobody else got sick.

In his Decameron, the author Giovanni Boccaccio described the isolation of ten young patricians in a palazzo to avoid contact with people in plague-stricken Florence. They kept themselves entertained by telling stories as written in the Decameron. Segregation worked for them and for the area of present-day Poland which was spared the plague because a quarantine was imposed. Quarantine was isolation for forty days.

Pope Clement VI isolated himself at Avignon, France. He sat for weeks in summertime between two large fires constantly stoked. It worked because fire and heat repelled the fleas.

An English nobleman ordered the nearby village to be burned to the ground. No fleas, rats, or disease reached his castle, and his property was safe. It seemed that overpopulation and overcrowding in unsanitary conditions contributed to the spread of the plagues.

The plagues came in three forms, bubonic, pneumonic, and septicemic.

The bubonic variety appeared as swollen lymph nodes called buboes or boils in the armpits, groin, or the site of the flea bite.

The pneumonic variety infected the lungs, causing coughing and spitting of blood.

The deadliest was the septicemic plague where the bloodstream was invaded by bacteria and death occurred within hours.

Not everybody died of the plague. Many improved and their recovery was considered a miracle. Doctors prescribed bleeding, laxatives, enemas, burning of the buboes (sometimes it worked), aromatic woods burned to purify the air, rosewater and vinegar sprinkled on floors, special diets, and other strange concoctions.

The Black Death encompassed most of present-day Europe, all the way to Russia and the Black Sea, Constantinople, and Greece.

Following the loss of such a huge European population, the labor market changed; workers could ask for higher wages. Merchants had to sell grain and other commodities for lower prices.

As the population began to increase after the Black Death ended, new waves of plagues occurred centuries later. The epidemic of 1665 in London affected the population less as doctors learned better ways to control it. Still, thousands died. The 17^th century solution was to kill cats and dogs, the poor creatures that could have reduced the rat population carrying the fleas.

One of the famous plagues that hit the Roman Empire hard, the Antonine Plague, put an end to Pax Romana, according to Colin Elliott. Pax Romana represented two centuries of Roman domination of Europe, North Africa, and West Asia.

Millions died in the Empire, the population decline was so severe that a financial crisis followed, and borders were weakened. The 165 A.D. plague even killed one of the emperors. The pandemic lasted until 180 A.D., affecting the entire Empire. Marcus Aurelius could not save the Empire from pestilence, nor from the many other disasters of that time.

Interestingly, Marcus Aurelius only mentioned the Antonine plague once in all his twelve books of Meditations.

The second outbreak occurred in 251-266 A.D. which aggravated the effects of the earlier outbreak. Some historians are convinced that these plagues were the beginning of the ultimate fall of the Roman Empire in 476 A.D. The pandemic was a huge source of social, economic, and political disruption within the Roman Empire.

Galen described the symptoms of this pandemic. Some of the symptoms resembled smallpox and others appeared like the buboes of the plague.

As we have experienced, even with modern medicine and aggressive government intervention, the world suffered immensely from the Covid-19 pandemic.

 

Drab Grey Socialism and Communism Are Popular in the U.S.

If you ask the young American generations if they believe that capitalism is evil and socialism is good, they will answer with a definitive “yes.” When asked to explain the fundamental differences between the two and whether socialism is the steppingstone to communism, silence will follow.

They repeat the media sound bites that socialism is for “the people” and “things are free.” They do not know exactly what is free, but they enumerate things they want such as free abortions, free food, free housing, free schooling, free transportation, free day care, and free travel. None of these were free in socialist countries ruled by the Communist Party and nor are they free under capitalism. There is no such thing as a free meal, someone must pay for it.

The answers are sad, as they reveal the fact that young Americans have no historical idea about the end-product, communism, and its murderous and sordid history. They believe the media’s and the Democrat Party’s NGO’s disinformation machines that feed them lies daily on every platform possible.

Young women and Jews turned out in droves to vote for the self-described communist for Mayor of the largest U.S. city, a young man with no working experience, who had been an American citizen less than eight years. He promised rent control housing and city-run grocery stores among other things.

Communism has been promoted in public schools and in academia as the future of all Americans. Teachers shamelessly avoided teaching the subjects they were assigned and pushed political activism; they promoted communism verbally or through clever choices of class activities and assignments that had little to do with the subject matter and all to do with their political ideology of Democrat Socialism, a term invented by the left.

Imagine my surprise upon the realization that the corporate globalists have decided in the last few years to transform the face of our colorful society into a drab and communist-looking tapestry: the exterior of buildings, the depressing colors, the lack of colors and offerings in stores, the promotion of grey, ash, concrete grey, black, white, and brown, to include cars, a bothersome uniformity which I recognized from my previous 20 years lived under communism. Why would communism pick such drab, dark, dull, and uninspired colors? Because they wanted to keep the population under their control, oppressed, depressed, and sad. Everything became a soul-less grey and darker grey, barely lit train station as if to conceal the stains of misery.

I have noticed after the lockdowns that all public buildings, restaurants, fast food chains, and even apartment complexes had undergone a similar transformation of dark grey, black, brown, and beige everywhere.

Fast food buildings removed large windows and added small, prison-like windows, and the previously happy colors and signs disappeared. The choices of towels, furniture, cars, clothes, and other products have narrowed to the same basic colors, grey, black, white, beige and brown. Many excused this trend as minimalism. I knew it as Bauhaus utilitarian ugly.

The Bauhaus or Staatliches Bauhaus (state building house) was a German art school which existed between 1919 and 1933. Its vision of mass production and function was quickly adopted by all former Iron Curtain countries in Europe which started churning out ugly concrete block apartments where the helpless populations were herded into from their former homes and farms which the Communist Party had confiscated.

Walter Gropius’s (1883-1969) vision from Weimar spread into modern design, modernist architecture, graphic design, interior design, industrial design, and typography. The Bauhaus school was closed in 1933 under pressure from the Nazi regime who considered it “a center of communist intellectualism.”

Bauhaus spread internationally to the United States and to Tel Aviv via Jewish Bauhaus architect immigrants. According to some sources, “The White City of Tel Aviv has the highest concentration of Bauhaus architecture in the world.”

As Bauhaus spread increasingly across the world, selected and pushed by globalist corporate controllers, it is no surprise that the color chosen for this decade is grey and the style is Bauhaus utilitarian.

Recently, while visiting my favorite department store which was always decorated by red, white, and green everything, long before the Christmas season, I was unpleasantly surprised to see the Christmas decorations in the form of a grey table with grey chairs, grey plates, black glasses, and white napkin holders. One solitaire painting of a red bush surrounded by green background was overlooking the dismal and funereal décor.

It is not just about depressing the population with ugly buildings, cars, and grey, it is about the global transformation of the west into a socialist/communist society to better control the hapless population in every way.

The freedom to choose anything will completely disappear once digital currency will be imposed on all citizens.

Ronald Reagan aptly said, “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.”

And that refers to the freedom to choose anything we want or dream of, including the colors in our lives.