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.

 

So, You Want to Buy a Car?

Here is another element of socialism/communism that most of you don’t realize what it is - the ability to buy high-priced items such as a car or a house.

For one, poor people, and we were all equally poor, could not afford a car or a home. Should they have saved and scrimped their entire lives collectively in the family, the economic police were always on the prowl, looking for people who had more resources than the socialist/communist man was allowed.

Single family homes were out of reach for the proletarian masses. They had to rent the concrete and steel high-rise apartments while giving up to government confiscation of their single-family homes and their land for “the good of the people,” who needed more agricultural land.

As a socialist/communist economy was not based on supply and demand, just on the centralized government’s five-year economic plan, there was always a shortage of most consumer goods, including cars. It is true, you could only purchase the one model produced in the country, the Dacia. A Dacia cost around 70,000 lei during the 1970s while a concrete apartment cost around 30,000 lei.

To put the car price into proper perspective, the average salary then was about 800 lei per month. A person would need to save his entire salary for 87.5 months (about 7.5 years) to buy his own Dacia, assuming that the spouse would pay the bills and provide food and clothing.

A buyer had to pay upfront the full price of the car and wait for it to be produced and delivered by the factory whenever they felt like it, the wait list, or the assembly line permitted.

Sometimes the wait was as long as 10 years because the inept economic planners under communism were unable to deliver even the most basic goods like food and medicine, much less a car.

The wait for phone installation was 14 years. You had to go to the post office to order the phone service, pay a fee, and wait. We would ask the frowning clerk jokingly if they would install the phone in the morning or afternoon and she would say, irritably, “what difference does it make, it’s 14 years from now!” Our answer would always be, “the plumber is coming in the morning.” She never appreciated the jocular tone of our sad reality. We got our phone service when I finished high school and dad had applied for it when I was of kindergarten age.

The Communist Party elites, on the other hand, could get whatever they wanted, whenever they wanted. A simple phone call did the trick and the requested item(s) arrived at their house in a relatively short period of time, depending on the type of merchandise.

Another element of communist life was the lack of basic health services and pharmaceutical drugs. We are not there yet in America, but the variety is dwindling for over-the-counter drugs in highly populated areas.

In the socialist economy controlled by a one-party rule, the Communist Party, even vitamins and aspirin were missing on shelves and medicines had to be compounded, providing that the ingredients were available on the market. The capsules that contained the compounded powder were huge and made of dissolvable paper. I cannot tell you, as a child, how difficult it was to swallow these horse-sized capsules filled with bitter tasting, choking powder.

In our American economy, the shortage of goods in highly populated areas is quite steep, including cars. Unless you are extremely rich and buy a high-end priced car or a Tesla, you can no longer walk into a dealership and expect to leave with a car that day even though you may have the money, all of it.

In the Biden economy, you have to reserve a car, put down a certain amount, and wait 6 to 8 months to receive it. For now, it is 6-8 months, but the wait time will increase as we slide more and more towards an inept socialist economy which is not based on supply and demand but is controlled centrally by one party, the communists. Today, the controllers are the socialist Democrat Party and their enablers, the establishment Republicans.

The moral of the story is, be careful what you wish for. Keep vilifying capitalism’s free markets and wishing for a socialist/communist economy, and you shall get it.

Why is Gas so High?

For those Americans who are foolishly claiming that the skyrocketing price of oil is Putin's fault, here is some news for you - it is entirely the Biden administration's fault. When he took office, gasoline was $1.69 a gallon in my town, it is now $4.55 per gallon while Diesel is $5.55 per gallon. We need plenty of affordable gasoline and Diesel to run our complex and very large economy.

He closed oil leases, fracking, offshore drilling, and the XL pipeline which was delivering gas from Canada. He did this on day one and the price of gas started to escalate immediately. Crude oil is being transported by rail (powered with electricity created with Diesel and coal) instead of the much cheaper pipelines which crisscross our country from Alberta, Canada and other places.

It was Biden's plan all along to destroy the fossil fuel industry in order to replace it with the pie-in-the-sky green energy delivered by expensive, inadequate, and insufficient solar and wind power.

The U.S. became overnight an oil importer again instead of an oil exporter as it had been under the Trump administration.

OPEC took advantage of this situation of a weak and partisan president and refused to increase production, thus further escalating the price of crude oil per barrel.

Speculators entered the fray and affected the futures price as well on the Chicago Board of Trade. This often happens when the political climate is poor, people fear their incompetent government, and the future looks bleak.

The fact that Democrats and some Republicans have voted to print dollars without any backing of goods and services, creating high inflation, highest in forty years, and then spending trillions of dollars we don't have, like drunken sailors, has devalued our U.S. dollar which is the currency in which crude oil is priced and quoted around the globe.

Supply and demand for crude oil, gas, and Diesel are also out of whack due to the economic effects of the lockdowns and other labor and economic decisions made by U.S. corrupt politicians, further exacerbating the price increases.

One caller to the WMAL station in Washington, D.C. area, stated on Friday that she has 7 children and must fill up the van with gasoline every four days. Each time it cost $100. This translates into $750 a month just for gasoline. Middle class Americans must decide whether they eat, drive their cars, or pay their mortgages/rent.

This terrible economy is entirely Biden's fault and the fault of those who voted for him and thus for the destruction of our economy.

Your unwise vote is putting most of the middle class in a poor house filled with shortages and high inflation. The economic and energy situations are quite dire.

 

Farming Practices, Food, and Shortages Caused by Inept Governments

I was watching with fascination a documentary about monastic farm practices in Tudor England.  A historian and two archeologists introduced the viewers and the visitors to farming methods, tools, food, clothing, and customs from 500 years ago by actually tilling the soil, planting crops, harvesting them, building tools from that period, cooking, burning crockery, churning butter, raising sheep, pigs, and chicken, hunting, fishing, and living, at least on screen, like the monks had done during the fifteenth century. What Life Was Like In The Tudor Era | Tudor Monastery | Absolute History - Bing video

What was fascinating to me was the fact that many of the implements and practices from the Tudor period looked familiar because I had seen, experienced, and used them on my grandfather’s “private” small farm as a child growing up in socialist Romania.

The wooden butter churn was quite recognizable and so was the wooden plow pulled by oxen. Grandpa used to cut hay by hand with a scythe, gather the hay in piles with a home-made wooden rake, and then used a wooden pitchfork to move the hay unto a cart and then to the dry loft for use during the winter.

The family planted the garden in straight rows with deep separation ditches between the seed line (the seeds were spaced out enough to allow for plant growth) to enable water flooding from the creek when rain was scarce, and irrigation became necessary to keep the plants alive.

When the Colorado beetles started devouring every plant in their small gardens, they used powdered DDT to kill them as directed by the government that sold it. No amount of picking the bugs off the plants made any difference in the infestation. The fruit trees were attacked by fruit flies. There were so many open outhouses in the village.

The dirt had to be prepared by hand, using a metal hoe and hard labor to cut the hard-crusted topsoil and make it crumble enough for seeding. All this backbreaking work had to be done in their spare time as each villager owed a certain number of work hours per week to the cooperative farm “owned” collectively by the villagers.

Each peasant home raised a pig for slaughter at Christmas, chickens, ducks, geese, and the occasional rabbits. Some even had a milking cow, and many had sheep. The village shepherd, an actual paid position in the kolkhoz, took the cooperative farm’s cows each day to graze outside the village and returned them in the evening. These cows had either been confiscated by the cooperative farm or were in the ownership of a specific peasant who still had to make produce donations to make up for the cow that they were allowed to keep.

Inhabitants were forced to toil and put in the crops and harvest them. They had no choice as the Bolsheviks confiscated most of their lands and forced them into a collective farm. This collective farm or kolkhoz as the Russians called it, had to be tended to collectively by all villagers. They were left with enough land for the home they lived in, a yard, and a plot for a small garden.

The peasants in the kolkhoz were paid as salaried employees based on quality and quantity of labor contributed. The left describes the kolkhoz as a voluntary union of peasants, but it was hardly voluntary when their land was confiscated by the state authorities in power and, to survive and eat, they had to work for the state-controlled kolkhoz.

Land had been expropriated from the peasants in 1929 in the Soviet Union and later in Romania (there were state farms as early as 1945), after the king abdicated and the monarchy ended in 1948. The royal family’s thousands of acres of agricultural land, forests, several castles, and palaces were confiscated by the communist regime. A king’s inheritance: The properties of the Romanian royal family | Romania Insider (romania-insider.com)

According to Romanian agricultural sources, 75 percent of all arable land belonged to cooperative farms and 17 percent were state farms which were formed as early as 1945. The rest (8%) were small private farms which brought their harvest to the government-sanctioned markets for sale. In mountainous regions where cooperative farms were not feasible to organize, locals grew food for their own extended families.

State farms were a socialist enterprise. They received the best land from the state and were allowed to use the state’s machines, chemicals, and irrigation water. Such advantage increased their crop yield when compared to cooperative farms. The communist government told the state farms how to operate, peasants were paid a fixed wage for their labor and had no rights to a private plot of land for their own gardens.

Cooperative farms also took their production orders from the socialist government, but they technically “owned” the land and basic equipment. “The cooperatives were told what crops to grow, how to grow them, and how much to deliver to the state.” The peasants were forced to work at least 300 days per year on the cooperative and, if the cooperative had no work for them, they could be transferred to other farms or to construction and lumber work sites. These cooperative “farmers” earned an income of only 60 percent when compared to others and had much smaller pensions. It is safe to say that income equality meant misery for some. 

“In the late 1980s, the systematization program aimed to subordinate privately owned land and private plots on cooperative farms to the regional agro-industrial councils and thereby tighten central control of private farming. Systematization would eliminate many of the plots, as villages were levelled to create vast fields for socialized farming. This policy directly contradicted the government's mandate in the 1980s that the population feed itself by cultivating small plots (even lawns and public parks had been converted to vegetable gardens) and breeding poultry and rabbits.” Romania - AGRICULTURE (countrystudies.us)

This period coincided with a period when the Communist Party told all citizens how many calories they were allowed consume per day according to their profession, how much they should weigh, and the shortages of food were quite severe.

The ruling Soviet-style state maintained operational control via “elected” chairmen and political units in the machine-tractor stations which furnished heavy equipment in return for payments of agricultural produce. And the terms were never favorable to the peasants, only to the ruling regime. Often these tractors were not operational for lack of parts or lack of people who could fix them.

Among the many horrible decisions made after the Bolsheviks took power, one stands out. The “agricultural communist planners” ordered the slaughter of thousands of workhorses during the first three decades of communist rule. The horses were replaced by tractors. The number of tractors grew from 13,700 in 1950 to 168,000 in 1983. But in 1986, the regime rulers reversed their management practices through the National Council for Agriculture, Food Industry, Forestry, and Water Management and called for reducing the number of tractors in service by one-third and replace them by horse-drawn equipment. Eighteen to 25 percent of all harvesting and hauling was to be down by horse-drawn equipment by 1990. So much for 500 years of agricultural progress. Romania - AGRICULTURE (countrystudies.us)

Mechanizing agriculture raised the possibility to grow more grain and corn but there were some problems. Much of the workforce left in agriculture were elderly peasants who were not seeking better paying jobs in factories within commuting distance. The elderly did not have the expertise to fix these tractors when they broke down nor did they know how to operate them properly. Often crops rotted in the fields because there was nobody left to harvest them.

Poor crop rotation practices yielded smaller crops and droughts plagued the arable lands that were not connected to irrigation. Additionally, only 34-36 kg of fertilizer were used per acre, an inadequate amount.

“Furthermore, much of the best farmland had been severely damaged by prolonged use of outsized machinery, which had compacted the soil, by unsystematic application of agricultural chemicals, and by extensive erosion.” Romania - AGRICULTURE (countrystudies.us)

In the 1970s, the socialist regime I grew up under and its “private” farmers, still used agricultural implements that were 500 years old, the same ones used in the monastic Tudor period. Agricultural progress must be slow in socialist regimes.

Not only did a major agricultural country had very thin and gaunt people, some of whom starved to death in winter, but severe food shortages plagued the country in the 1980s while the socialist centralized planners, political and community organizers, were selling the good crops to the west for hard currency, currency which they used to support their lavish lifestyles and to develop impractical and unprofitable industries across the country.

People were employed for meager wages in factories but had to struggle every day to find food, standing in long bread and grocery lines and for other necessities.

Wallachia, the breadbasket of the country, was once a proud producer of cereals in the Bărăgan Plain, a steppe famous for its black soil, perfect for growing grain in general. On a visit in 2015, I noticed the unplanted fields, then occupied by unsightly windmills turning in the wind, none of which, I learned later from an official with the energy ministry, were connected to any power grid. The windmills had been donated by the EU and had been hurriedly placed across The Bărăgan Plain. What happened to the breadbasket of Wallachia?

According to official online sources, Romania, an EU-member since 2007, imported food from the EU in 2006 worth 2.4 billion euros, up 20 percent from the previous year. Romania exports to the EU 64 percent of agri-food products and imports from EU countries 54 percent of food. Romania imports substantial quantities of grain and 2.8 percent of the country’s GDP is derived from agricultural activity.

In the U.S., about 2.7 percent of the population are farmers who grow food and feed the rest of the country. More family farms are being sold to large agri-businesses or are being paid by the government not to farm certain crops, or to burn the yield entirely to manipulate the market price.

As we see dozens of food warehouses going up in flames recently around the U.S., one wonders, would our fast-becoming socialist country eventually starve its citizens, or might they have to fight for limited sources of food like we had to do in the 1970s and 1980s socialist Romania? I hope not.

 

 

 

Diet in Socialism or Capitalism

My childhood grocery store in 2015

Thanks to food additives, semi-prepared foods in grocery stores, lockdowns, a more sedentary life in front of a computer screen, larger portions of food in restaurants and burger joints, ever present sugar in every type of food consumed, and less daily walking than the average human, Americans have added more pounds to their frames.

According to most nutrition experts, who constantly push a vegan diet, vegetarian diet, salads, lots of cardboard-tasting kale, low carb diets, and many other restrictive food consumption methods, to be overweight in America is a shame and a severe health hazard.

Food has always been plentiful in relatively free societies if the government does not interfere with the economy through price controls, the supply of goods, or create severe inflation via out-of-control money printing and spending.  

Food is quite scarce in socialist societies ruled by the incompetent and evil Communist Party.

As food becomes scarcer in our stores due to the supply disruption of Covid-19-driven government rules and mandates, as your favorite ingredients to cook meals at home become more expensive due to escalating inflation caused by Biden regime’s disastrous economic policies and performance, people will be thinner. I call it the Biden diet.

I still remember the communist diet Ceausescu forced all Romanians to survive on. Some of us looked good very thin but many were gaunt and pale, far from healthy, and quite malnourished. He called this diet the “scientific diet.”

Former Ambassador to Romania (1981-1985), David Funderburk, wrote in his book, Pinstripes and Reds, “The scientific diet with little or no meat was one of the sickest jokes played on the Romanian people. When the average Romanian was doing without meat, standing in long lines day after day, and scrambling around for scarce rationed items such as cooking oil, coffee, milk, eggs, cheese products, and other foods, as well as shampoo and soap, Ceausescu warned the people of the dangers of overeating. Claiming falsely that Romania was among the world’s leaders in per capita calorie consumption, Romanians were advised to eat less meat.” (p. 78)

Romanians were told that the scarcity of food was caused by greedy black-market speculators who bought out the entire supply and sold it for profit and by other criminals in society. The truth was that there was plenty of food produced but it was sold abroad for hard currency and the Romanians were delivered scraps in stores.

In late 1984 and early 1985 shortages were even more drastic, deliveries of food reduced by 50 percent. I can attest to such shortages during our 1985 visit when for six weeks we had to struggle to find food every day, sometimes taking the bus halfway to Bucharest, stopping in several villages to purchase eggs, milk, cheese, butter, potatoes, or chicken at black market prices as the stores were empty.

Why would Ceausescu order that the food be sold as export to other countries? He wanted to industrialize the country very fast and needed the money to finance monstrous industrial projects that were a drain on the economy but created jobs for the political prisoners who were forced to dig and build Ceausescu’s massive industrial projects for free.

In 1982, Romania’s per capita meat consumption was the lowest in the Western world. At the time, a U.S. Department of Agriculture study showed that “East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary, had over three times Romania’s meat consumption. Poland, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, and the Soviet Union had roughly three times Romania’s per capita meat consumption.” Romania’s annual per capita meat consumption in 1980 was 24.2 kg (53.35 lbs.), the Soviet Union 58.3 kg, East Germany 85.9 kg, Hungary 73.0 kg, while U.S. had 112.6 kg. (The New York Times, August 25, 1981)

People stole whatever they produced in the factories they worked in and bartered it for food stolen by others in their places of employment to survive. Ceausescu dealt with his lies and the mismanagement of the economy by sentencing to death those who stole to survive and were caught.

Funderburk wrote about three workers sentenced to death for stealing meat from a packing plant in Tirgoviste in December 1983 and about peasants who stole corn, wheat, and livestock from forced co-operative farms.

People were told to eat more rabbit instead of pork, chicken, or beef. Never mind that only a few farmers raised rabbits for their own families and high-rise city dwellers did not have that luxury to raise rabbits or chicken. Apparatchiks indoctrinated people that rabbit meat was part of Ceausescu’s “scientific diet.”

Growing up in Romania and becoming an adult, I never recall eating beef at home or in my grandparents’ village at all. Our staple of meat was either chicken, pork at Christmas time, rabbit stew from grandpa’s yard, and sometimes fish from the market. To this day, beef is not in my diet.

We can all stand to lose a few pounds, but do we want to lose them through voluntary diet and exercise, by cutting back on caloric consumption, or the socialist way, because the grocery shelves are bare, and the meat is too expensive or unavailable to the masses?

 

 

Snow and Food

Now that Sf. Ioan Botezatorul Orthodox traditions have ended on January 6, we are preoccupied with abundant snow and ice. The state park nearby is closed indefinitely as the damage from one foot of wet and heavy snow is too extensive and too dangerous to allow the public inside the park’s 508 acres of forested land and trails.

Humans cannot be trusted, they are too dumb to avoid uprooted trees and broken branches. I wonder how we survived for so long prior to the federal and state government daddy telling us what to do all the time?

The forecast predicts more snow and inclement weather to the delight of children and adults alike who secretly wish for more paid snow days.  Teachers, who have not taught much for the last two years, are up in arms if the schools do not close pronto.

Store deliveries of food and other necessities have come to a halt during last week’s snow emergency botched by the Virginia’s Department of Transportation. Roads were unplowed and people could not get out of their driveways, everyone was snowed in.

Supplies had already slowed down for months now due to Biden regime’s economic policies and preposterous Corona-virus never-ending mandates, job-killing economic payouts to people to remain on unemployment and welfare, and abject fear driven non-stop into the weak-minded population who remained shut-in for fear of death.

On my almost daily trips to the grocery store, I found the shelves emptier than before, with merchandise spread out to give the impression that shelves were full; but to the trained shopper’s eye, they were at least half empty. The milk and dairy refrigerators were empty, an entire wall of nothing. Where is the abundance I saw when I first set foot in an American grocery store, shortly after arriving from a communist country?

Empty shelves bring back painful memories of starvation and standing in endless lines daily for groceries in hopes that something will be delivered and we would have food that day. We are not there yet in America, but in this part of northern Virginia, it is closer and closer. When Walmart has so many empty shelves, it is extremely worrisome.

America is socialist now and it seems bleaker than ever, as the Democrat socialist regime in power aided by RINOs at the federal level, and in many Democrat-controlled states, are driving the economy into the ground. Yet everyone seems to want socialism despite people like me telling them, be careful what you wish for because nothing is free. Every decision has an opportunity cost.

There are beautiful vineyards in Virginia, dedicated to wine making. But our grapes, fresh fruits, and vegetables in grocery stores come from California, Florida, Washington state, Chile, and other countries like Peru and Mexico. I buy grapes from Chile and, invariably, when I bring the bag home, a weak bee crawls out of the package, and sometimes a Japanese beetle or two, stowaways from a warmer climate and from another world.

When grapes are too expensive, I replace them with a box of raisins. Raisins were a real treat in my childhood when chocolate was not available. In winter time, after searching all day, my dad would bring home a rare treat, a bunch of grapes, so dried out on the vine, they were practically raisins. Thus I was introduced to raisins, nature’s sweet treat, no sugar or other preservatives added.

The type II diabetic rates in the communist country were quite low for the simple reason that nobody was fat and everybody was hungry most of the time. Extreme thinness and low type II diabetes was one silver lining to our misery. We survived in a socialist economy run by the incompetent Communist Party apparatchiks who were well fed and rotund and did not care that we were not.

                                                                    Photo: Ileana Johnson

A Hard-Cheated Pyrrhic Victory and a Mute Wedding

As I watched millions of well-fed, educated Americans dancing in the streets, cheering, and gloating over their hard-cheated pyrrhic presidential win to install the much-desired socialism, touted in the press and academia, all I could think about was the 100 millions of people who had lived and died under a socialist dictatorship ruled by the Communist Party and other millions who risked their lives to flee such a socialist society. And I was numb that people can be so naïve and easily swayed by clever rhetoric, just like people were enchanted a century ago by the Bolsheviks. I never once met an American who fled to Cuba or North Korea unless they were criminals sought by the law. But I sure met a lot of defectors and refugees from tyrannical regimes who sought shelter in America.

While a student in the 1980s at a southern university, I met dozens of people from Iron Curtain countries, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Soviet Union, East Germany, Romania, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, who had left everything behind in order to escape to the freedom of the west.

We formed a union of sorts, sharing food from our respective cultures, learning about our new country, loving and respecting America who took us in, and speaking against the oppressive regimes we had fled from with just the clothes on our backs in some cases.

Now it is entirely different. Americans have been convinced that socialism is great, and they must have it at all costs, including a pyrrhic election victory. What is a pyrrhic victory? It is a victory won at such a damaging toll to the victor that it looks more like a defeat because it will destroy any long-term progress.

Pyrrhus of Epirus was a Greek king who opposed the expansion of early Rome, often compared to Alexander the Great in his tactical war efforts. But some of his victories were won at such a great loss to his troops and kingdom that history remembers him as having won battles with such unacceptable losses that the term “pyrrhic victory” was coined in his name.

Which brings me to the presidential election – a pyrrhic victory won at all costs, losing the soul, honor, integrity, and Constitution of a nation in order to achieve the promised socialist utopia of a globalist cabal who stopped at nothing to fundamentally alter its foundations and Constitution through technology, hacking, deceit, mass media indoctrination, unethical activist judges, utterly corrupt politicians, and fraud.

While America’s young generations are dancing in the streets with joy that a man with incipient dementia and a Marxist have won the White House, I see pictures flashing through my mind of people escaping from tyrannical socialist societies through Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin, cutting through barbed wire, dodging bullets, flying low in makeshift aircraft, stealing a train and braking through a barrier, digging tunnels, swimming across the Danube and other treacherous rivers, floating in makeshift boats, a dingy, fighting sharks across 120 miles of ocean from Cuba, stowaways on ships, on plane cargo holds, fitted inside the seats of cars, or too close to the engine compartment, all to flee to the freedom of the west.

I see a young woman holding her breath while the airport checkpoint officer discovers that she has not signed her legal passport. Instead of being turned away, the guard demands a carton of Kent cigarettes to allow her to sign the passport in front of him. And she complies – the $20 carton of cigarettes at the time was a cheap escape from imprisonment within socialist borders.

I see another woman being stripped of her jewelry because the socialist law does not allow anybody to leave the country with any gold and silver except a tiny wedding band.

I see people’s homes, personal belongings, savings, and land being confiscated by socialists and distributed to their Communist Party activists for their personal use. I see people being hauled to jail for non-compliance, protesting their incarceration until the prison door is slammed shut.

I see people standing in line to find food, toilet paper, paper towels, and sanitizing products, just like the recent lines we had to stand in at our local grocery store for months after Covid-19 lockdown. People were irritated and impatient, herded like cattle behind yellow lines, set arbitrarily six feet apart. Shelves were bare for a while but imagine doing this every day to get food?

Imagine the online ordering and curbside pickup going away if there is no adequate production planning, manufacturing, and delivery because the government is run by inefficient socialists in the same vein as Venezuela?

Starry-eyed people who get mad because their latest XBOX supply runs out before they can hit the order key on their computers, will discover a new reality, a reality of shortages of essentials.

A good friend, who read my first book, Echoes of Communism, was skeptical and could not understand how the entire population was so deprived in their daily lives by a small percentage of activists who belonged to and were loyal to the Communist Party who indoctrinated everyone initially into the “wonders” of socialism.

The day his wife called him in a panic that the shelves of their local grocery store in Virginia were bare because of the first Covid-19 lockdown, disruption of production and delivery in March 2020, subsequent hoarding of essentials, and when their refrigerator was nearly empty, he understood. They felt for a few days what we felt every day for 49 years of oppressive socialism. Once installed, the socialist republic rule of the Communist Party did not go away, the suffocating control grew like kudzu, one foot per day.

The Silent Wedding, a movie made in 2008, artistically wove the alleged “real” story of a couple’s wedding from an isolated village in Romania. The ceremony and the reception that followed, held in March 5, 1953 (a Thursday), was allegedly interrupted by a communist activist from the city and a Soviet officer who brought the news that the USSR tyrant Joseph V. Stalin had died and thus seven days of international mourning were decreed in which public celebrations of any kind were prohibited. The celebrants held a mute wedding.

Likely a fictional event, this artistic story brings to mind the fact that Americans are not allowed to celebrate Thanksgiving this year in their homes with more than six people as guests, a breaking of familial tradition disrupted and imposed by state governments around the country.  Neighbors are encouraged to snitch, [and they did already in New York] if such draconian executive orders are violated.

Ten months since the first Covid-19 lockdown, healthy people are still forced to wear masks for the good of the collective, not for their own protection, since masks are not really effective as it is stated on the manufacturer’s packaging.

This is America, of course, shortages of food and necessities cannot happen here, we have an abundant economy, optimists and the naïve repeat ad nauseum. What will happen to this horn of abundance when the socialists just elected will enforce their New Green Deal, and solar energy and wind power will not even begin to supply our country’s huge energy needs? How will cars run? How will truckers deliver food? How will products be manufactured and hauled? Joe Biden’s fairy dust?

When Joe Biden’s rhetorical pixie dust, which blinded many to choose socialism, will lift, they will be left with very little to go on and will be begging the omnipotent government to feed them and house them. Computers, technology, social media, politicians, and the mass media produce nothing of consequence that sustains life, they manufacture hot air, advertising, socialist indoctrination, and are quite good at spending trillions of other people’s money.

 

 

 

Toilet Paper with Wood Chips

Photo: Ileana Johnson

Huffing and puffing, I lug the large package of toilet paper from our local Costco into the house. It’s not that the price is better; I just don’t want to go to the store more often than I have to. I stood in lines enough during my twenty years of living under the boot of communism.

I am always tempted to ask the cashier if that’s enough toilet paper for the average food intake. I never do it because the cashiers are all foreign, barely speak English, and my meek attempt at potty humor would be met by strange stares.

I kept a pink sample of pink toilet paper I brought with me from our first trip back to Romania after communism had “fallen” 25 years earlier. The tissue looks like crepe paper with splinters of wood embedded here and there, visible to the naked eye and painful to the rear end. Progress after decades of dictatorial communism is very slow in some aspects and fast in others.

It is still an improvement from the years I grew up when toilet paper and other necessities Americans take for granted were so scarce, people lined up for blocks to buy a couple of rolls and many left disappointed when the month’s delivery ran out.

People carried emergency walking-around cash and jute expandable shopping bags just in case they ran into a long line which may have been formed for something they needed, i.e., toilet paper, shampoo, oranges, butter, bananas, flour, oil, and sugar. Nobody knew exactly what was on sale that day; asking people around did not help, they did not know either; eventually, as they inched closer to the window, they found out what was delivered that day that people lined up for blocks for a chance to get the rationed amount.

Now in the twenty-first century America, the Snowflake college students are “triggered” by banana peels carelessly discarded on a tree. It makes one wonder, what is the progressive-approved non-racist method of disposing of banana peels after one eats a banana?

During the 1977 earthquake in Romania, the American Bible Society donated Bibles printed in Romanian which were meant to be distributed to the thousands of people who had lost their homes, their loved ones, and felt defeated. Biblical passages would have been inspirational and calming at such a time of profound grief. Instead of distributing them, Ceausescu’s regime recycled them into toilet paper. The print was so good or their recycling so bad that, one day, I found an entire roll of toilet paper with faint words, still legible, which turned out to be passages from the Bible. As scarce as toilet paper was, we kept it in the pantry because it was too sacrilegious to use it in this way.

As Americans, we never think how grateful we should be every day to the Scott Brothers of Watertown, Massachusetts, who invented the toilet paper in the 19th century!

Since people were embarrassed to buy it, the Scott Brothers thought they had a dud invention on their hands until they had the brilliant idea to give it freely to hotels. Hotels agreed to place it in rooms because they were fed up with their small pipes being clogged all the time. Until then, people used corn husks and newspapers which clogged the small sewer pipes. Customers loved the toilet paper for that very reason too and began buying it. And the rest is history.

In Romania's outhouses, we used corn husks and communist party propaganda newspapers because we did not have Sears and Roebucks catalogs or any catalogs for that matter. Once in a while a German tourist would leave behind one of their catalogs and we enjoyed looking at the abundance of everything we did not have, so we never used those for toilet paper. We especially enjoyed wiping with pages which had the dear leader Ceausescu's face on them.

Later on, when toilet paper was finally made, it was coarse light brown paper with wood chips still embedded in the paper, or, if white, it had faintly visible words on it from the books which were recycled into toilet paper.

I still have the few strips of pink toilet paper embedded with wood chips. I showed it to a lot of my former students but it did not seem to make any impact on brain-washed students who love communism and Che Guevara. Listening day and night to Hollywood and the academia extolling the wonderful virtues of communism, young people aspire to overturn their wonderful country built by capitalism and replace it with the tyrannical and egalitarian notion of communism. They believe this because they are young, idealist, often fat and well fed, restless for violent action, and never had to stand in line for anything except the latest electronic gadgets or concert tickets.

 

 

Food Lines Coming?

Food line in Venezuela
Photo: Wikipedia

Americans willingly stand in line for hours waiting for a store to open during Black Friday or to purchase tickets to a sought-after football game or concert.  They don’t mind freezing in the cold, sleeping in a tent on the side-walk hours and days before the store opens – they want to save $50 for a television set, find a toy that everybody else wants for Christmas, a popular electronic gadget, first issues of geek gear, or tickets to a favorite concert.

What if Americans had to get up early in the morning every day and run around numerous stores in town in order to find food, basic staples, and gas? Ask anybody this question and they will roll their eyes because, in their lifetime they’ve never had to suffer shortages of anything, they only remember abundance in the land of plenty.

Could that ever change? Of course not, most Americans would say. I and my fellow survivors of communism know better because we stood in such lines, I call them the lines of survival. We suffered the indignity of having to do without food, even after standing in lines with thousands of other people, only to find out that the supply ran out, or eating spoiled food that had to be boiled again in order to destroy the bacteria and make it edible.

This is what happens when a previously successful free market society is turned upside down by the socialist ideology utopia -- the free market collapses and is replaced by an inadequate and inept government control of the economy which results in serious disruptions to planning, production, and delivery of goods and services. The economy is no longer driven by supply and demand but by the central planning of government socialist bureaucrats who fill their coffers first and ignore the needs of the population at large while making grandiose speeches about how much they are helping the poor.

Most recent case in point is Venezuela. Hugo Chavez destroyed a formerly prosperous nation with his social justice drivel. He brought the Castro-style clinics to Venezuela and destroyed the country’s healthcare.  He disrupted the food production and supply. Now that the oil revenues are down due to collapsing oil prices, the country is really suffering. Foreign currency is in short supply, inflation was 64 percent in November, and imports caused shortages of toilet paper, detergent, and car batteries.

According to Andrew Rosati and Noris Soto, the food shortages are so serious that the food distribution was placed under military protection. Thousands of people lined up for blocks, trying to find chicken, toilet paper, and detergent. Price controls imposed by government will guarantee that the lines and shortages will continue. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2015-01-09/venezuelans-throng-grocery-stores-on-military-protection-order.html

Americans have had their experience with price controls at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, and it did not end so well. Washington’s army almost starved to death. Farmers sold their produce to the British for gold instead of feeding the continental army for a measly price that did not cover their costs and survival of their families.

Dealing with a serious economic crisis in a socialist manner, the Interior Minister, Carmen Melendez, sent “security forces to food stores and distribution centers to protect shoppers.” While stores after stores show empty shelves and security does not allow photographs, rationing forces citizens to fight over whatever is available for sale, jumping the line and starting fist fights, shoving, and hair pulling incidents. Bloomberg reports that one shopper looked for diapers for 15 days. “People are so desperate they’re sleeping in the lines,” a shopper was quoted.

Because President Nicolas Maduro promised to tweak by decree the government-controlled exchange rate system set at 6.3 bolivars per U.S. dollar, companies fear devaluation and are not sure if they’ll have enough resources to restock inventories or even find inputs needed.  Meanwhile the black market is booming with an exchange rate of 187 bolivars per dollar.

The country was in bad economic shape previously due to years of Chavez’s mismanagement of the economy but at least they had good oil revenues which accounted for 95 percent of Venezuela’s exports. With oil prices dropping so low in recent months, revenues from oil exports were cut drastically.

How Obamacare is Destroying our Health Care

Romanian hospital 2014
Photo courtesy: Digi24 on line

Virginia is one of the few states in the nation who has taken the bold step to automatically enroll all Virginians covered by the traditional Medicare/Medicaid plan into a Humana managed health care plan. By managing elderly care (read rationing), money will be saved by denying needed medical tests, surgery, care, and physical therapy to elderly Americans who have paid into Medicare/Medicaid for decades.  How else will millions of illegal aliens recently granted amnesty by executive action receive free ObamaCare?

There is an option to opt out of the Humana managed care in Virginia and return to the traditional Medicare/Medicaid plans but few patients understand the language in the letter or are able to read it for themselves. This is one of the veiled moves to strip Medicare of $719 billion dollars in order to help fund and support the (Un) Affordable Care Act.

If you like your rationing of care, you can keep your rationing of care. If you like the loss of your well-trained physician, you can keep your third world doctor who is yet to be licensed in this country.

If you enrolled in a plan that fit your budget and your medical needs last year, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has proposed the rule to strip that option from your list of choices, they are going to enroll you this year by December 25 into a cheaper plan of their choice. Too bad you forgot to choose a plan annually. They will select what is best for you, without knowing your medical history, your financial situation, your current treatment under a specialist, and maybe take away access to your favorite doctor who did not play by the new government rules.

When the open enrollment ends, the government would have effectively stuck you with a plan you did not want. Rep. Mark Meadows from North Carolina wrote, “I sent a letter to CMS demanding they immediately strip this provision from the pending rule and abandon any future attempts to single-handedly choose Americans’ healthcare plans.” I am sure the bureaucrats will listen, just like they listened when a majority of Americans asked them to defund ObamaCare. http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/dec/19/rep-mark-meadows-obamacares-christmas-surprise/

Because there is a “war on doctors,” as Dick Morris so aptly described it, we will eventually have a sort of CastroCare in this country that Americans are not prepared to deal with but will be forced to accept it.

The double reimbursement for procedures that doctors in a hospital setting receive when compared to doctors in private practice, will eventually regulate doctors into a 8-4 hospital employment which I witnessed recently when my mother was in a hospital for 8 days and I never saw the doctor visit her once, she was treated by a nurse practitioner the entire time. There was not much hands-on care, just robotic, computer-driven medical care delivered by inadequately trained people. They were more concerned about her falling out of bed and a lawsuit from a potential fall than anything else. She was discharged without a proper diagnosis.

The forced electronic medical records-keeping will make it more difficult and expensive for private practice physicians who would be forced to spend a large part of their day on record-keeping and data entry instead of treating the patient.

In addition to reducing doctors’ income, physicians retiring early because they do not want to practice government-regulated medicine, Congress won’t expand residency programs to train more doctors.

Residency programs are funded by Medicaid/Medicare which gives higher reimbursement rates to teaching hospitals. Since the government refuses to pay for more residency programs, Americans should prepare themselves for substandard care delivered by nurse practitioners, nurses’ aides, and ER treatment replacing high quality medical care.

Hospitals are busy buying up private practices of retiring doctors in order to “capture their patients.” Most physicians are busy forming Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs) which combine multiple care providers under a hospital umbrella which has better access to capital.

This will lead to a doctor passing the care of his/her patients after the end of the shift to someone less qualified whom the patient has never met.

I recall the EU-modeled socialized medical care in 2012 Romania where I saw no doctor or RN anywhere in the large hospital in which my uncle was a patient. His wife delivered all his care, meds, diabetic shots, bandage changes, bed linens, bathing, towels, food, and trash removal. She was the de facto medical person caring for her own husband who would otherwise die of medical neglect in one of the largest hospitals in the capital. Incidentally, the courtyard was littered with stray dogs and we had to pay 5 euros to the gate guard to gain access into the hospital with five dingy floors and no operational elevator.

Online magazine Digi24 reported on December 17, 2014 that patients’ rights are often trampled on by medical personnel who refuse medical services unless the patients offer them personal benefits in the form of bribes. The accompanying photograph published by Digi24 is visual confirmation of the unsanitary conditions in some socialized medicine hospitals. http://www.digi24.ro/Stiri/Digi24/Actualitate/Sanatate/Ministerul+Sanatatii+intreaba+pacientii+Cat+de+multumiti+sunteti

According to Zoel M. Zinberg, associate clinical professor of surgery at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City, “The new breed of physician-employees will split their allegiances between their employers and their patients.” The employer’s goals of making money and saving a buck every which way and the patient’s welfare will not coincide, and the physician will seldom be allowed to use his best judgment in treating a patient. He continued, “Salaried employees and independent professionals behave differently.” http://www.city-journal.org/2014/eon1218jz.html#.VJO-l_vj7J4.facebook

Dr. Zinberg cited a recent study in Health Affairs which found that …”practices owned by hospitals had 50 percent more preventable admissions than practices owned by physicians.” He concluded that “The days of the family physician who made house calls are long gone. The doctors who would squeeze you in for a visit on short notice and take your calls after regular business hours are disappearing.” http://content.healthaffairs.org/content/33/9/1680

The less discussed issue of economic side effects of the Affordable Care Act should not be overlooked. Casey Mulligan, professor of Economics at the University of Chicago, in his speech
delivered to Hillsdale College on October 24, 2014, explained the three taxes in ACA, two taxes on full-employment and one on income. All three combined have a net effect on employment (3 percent less) and on Gross Domestic Product (2 percent less).  He concluded, “If you like your weak economy, you can keep your weak economy.”