The “New Normal” or Modified Normal

Social conditioning is defined as the process of training individuals in a society to respond in a manner generally approved by society and various peer groups and their interests.

In a classic textbook method of social conditioning, all commercials and MSM news reports now contain the line “the new normal.” If the idea and concept reflected in a new euphemistic phrase is introduced and repeated it at nauseam, people will accept it eventually as “the new normal.”

The oft-repeated “social distancing” phrase is also played across the country in supermarkets, on radio, and on television until people accept it as part of life. There is nothing social about hiding from people and running scared. It is really “physical distancing” to avoid infection during a pandemic.  Sadly, fear becomes part of everyday life and people begin avoiding each other in all social interactions that are part of being human.

We know from the bad experience of dictator Ceausescu’s orphans raised in state institutions after having been given up by their parents who either could not feed nor want them, that those infants who were never touched, hugged, rocked, and interacted with, became severely autistic and rocked themselves non-stop in order to soothe the inner need and desire for human contact and love.

The “new normal” represents the fear of one’s own shadow, the fear of government, the fear of not wearing masks, the fear of coughing in public, the fear of one’s neighbors, the fear of quarantine, the fear of getting sick, the fear of other people, the fear of being outside without a mask on, and the fear of existing outside of one’s home which has become a prison of sorts in which the owners are both the inmates and the jailers.

Orwell wrote through his “1984” character named Winston, “To a future or to the past, to a time when thought is free, when men are different from one another and do not live alone – to a time when truth exists and what is done cannot be undone: From the age of uniformity, form the age of solitude, from the age of Big Brother, from the age of double-think – greetings!”   (p. 28)

The dystopian novel described a time when “nothing was your own except a few cubic centimeters inside your skull.” (p. 27) We do not seem to be so shocked anymore by the dark human nature described in Orwell’s novel. Life imitates art and we are getting accustomed daily to this “new normal” indelibly etched into our collective psyche by the powers with a globalist agenda of population control, vaccines, chip implantation, and 24/7 tracking of every move we make.

The ideas described by Orwell have come to pass and currently surround us everywhere, i.e., thought police, technology giants censorship of our freedom of speech and of our thoughts expressed on social media, thoughts packaged as hate crimes or racism, liberals triggered by the existence of divergent thoughts and ideas, doublethink, doublespeak, “Freedom is Slavery,” “Ignorance is strength,” enemies of the Democrat party must be silenced, thought crimes, and the government’s version of the “Ministry of Truth.” Undesirable people are disappearing, professionally “annihilated, abolished, and vaporized.”

United Nations has been peddling 17 sustainable development goals for decades under Agenda 21 now morphed into Agenda 2030, packaging and repackaging them under different euphemisms of global control, until the United States was brought to its economic knees by a virus and forced to accept them under the much-touted aegis of the Green New Deal. The poster child of this Democrat legislation was Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), the former bartender. We did not take her seriously but, with her powerful backers, she was able to implement most everything in this “deal” which is neither “new” nor “green.”

The restriction of travel and the generalized panic and fear have reduced air traffic to insignificant amounts. Airlines lost billions in revenue and experienced a severe reduction in travel by 95 percent. Airlines like United mothballed 25 percent of their air fleet. Air traffic may eventually exist just for the rich elites and well-heeled politicians on the taxpayer dole.

U.N. Agenda 2030 wanted to reduce our carbon footprint by pushing limited travel by trains, buses, and bikes, keeping the population stacked in high-rise apartments with no parking, five-minute walk from work, play, school, shopping, and living.

Traffic on once crowded highways has disappeared. People are not going anywhere out of fear, because places are closed all over, or because of restrictions placed upon them by governors eager to control the masses while they take vacations and trips to places now denied to the average American.

Democrats have been pushing for a universal basic income for their base, and people scoffed and doubted them. But now the Democrats won. Americans who do work, work from home, while the rest are staying hidden and idle at home, waiting for the government paycheck to arrive so they can live and pay their bills.

Technocracy News expressed what many of us have been thinking, that we need clarity from our President and a concrete date when the economic lockdown of healthy Americans will end, “not in stages, not in phases.” According to Technocracy News, President Trump’s advisers were wrong:

“They convinced the president to make bad decisions based on faulty science and speculative computer models stocked with false assumptions. They are up to their necks in conflicts of interest, mostly having to do with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and its many global partners pushing mandatory vaccines and global ID system that can be used for tracking individual Americans.” https://www.technocracy.news/

The “new normal” is not normal at all. There is nothing normal about living in fear, hidden, like an animal in a cage, waiting to receive a handout from the government that taxes those who do work.

There is nothing normal about closing schools indefinitely and having to follow one-way lines into and out of grocery stores.

There is nothing normal about having empty hospitals and furloughed medical personnel and doctors while people are dying from cancer, heart disease, and other non-Covid-19 virus related illness, or suffer in severe pain because their medical problems are judged non-essential by all-knowing politicians.

Perhaps one unintended consequence of this “pandemic” may be the dismantling of the goal for mega-cities which the environmentalists at the U.N. have been pushing for decades and the dispersion of people into less populated areas.

Retail in a physical space as we know it will disappear, replaced by online commerce.  Shipping methods will explode, and product choices will become scarce. Environmentalists will be happy as less resources will be used to manufacture what they deemed as too many goods and services. The U.S. economy will shrink as two-thirds of our GDP is consumption.

Remote work and schooling will become the new wave of commuting in the U.S. Physical schools and bussing many disappear over time. Office buildings may become obsolete.

Domestic travel will slow down as the middle class will have to deal with the loss of millions of small businesses and a disappearing middle-class disposable income.

Stronger border controls and mandatory quarantines for those with and without fever will result in much less international travel. International travel may morph into travel of the affluent who make the rules. Perhaps this will be the modified normal. https://quillette.com/2020/03/25/the-coming-age-of-dispersion/?fbclid=IwAR3D8ZZ2h2SMe0qFcISKnKYq6GsKHZIWiVKevcQf2-YbqW1UfDIcNUnTAHQ

Tales from the "Corona" Woods

Hiking in the Woods
April 21, 2020

Hubby and I hiked in the woods 2 miles yesterday evening. It was cold, the Hawk was blowing 21 MPH and the occasional gusts were quite strong. The trees were creaking loudly and swaying quite far at the top. White Oaks (Quercus Alba) are tall, tending to grow 100 ft. There were many broken limbs along the way. The wind was howling when the gusts crested. But when it died down, there was so much beauty and calm in the verdant undergrowth.

We filled our eyes and ears with the happy chirping of birds, and our lungs with fresh air. Squatso, the girth-challenged squirrel, was darting from branch to branch, as if following us along the trail. We found few humans around, thank God, and an inner peace that only another hiker can understand.


April 22, 2020 – Earth Day
Tales from the Corona Woods

Today’s 3.5 mile hike was more eventful than yesterday.

Wide portion of the trail

Photo: Ileana Johnson

We met a woman who was being dragged in the opposite direction by a large and very friendly Labrador who wanted to say hello to us. One very hostile sleaze stack caught up with us – she was walking really fast and her face was covered by a mask. She almost fell into the thorny bushes trying to avoid any human contact with us. Maybe we should have walked closer to her to force her off the trail? Nah, we are nice people. We know what those bushes are!

By the time we got to our trail, hubby told me that some woman in Montclair posted on the neighborhood watch a black bear sighting. Montclair is not that far away but the bear would have to cross a major highway to get to our woods. The bear probably denned in the Prince William National Forest which had been closed by order of Virginia’s governor trying to protect us from the Corona virus pandemic. Since there were no more campers in the 16,000 acre forest, the bear must have gotten hungry for human scraps so he went looking for better foraging.

Old Oaks

Photo: Ileana Johnson

We joked about it but we jumped when we heard the cry of a fox really close by. We stopped on thetrail and, in the silence, we heard the cry again. We turned around, and, about ten feet from us on thetrail, jumped a beautiful racoon from the foliage. It gave us a curious look and disappeared in the dense brush on the other side. Hubby handed me the camera but it was too late, so I handed it back. Wrong move! In the next 20 seconds, a beautiful red fox jumped onto the trail after the racoon but saw us and changed her mind, and jumped back into the green thorny bushes. We started laughing really hard because we thought a bear was going to jump out. Fun hike!

Thorny bushes

Photos: Ileana Johnson

Grocery Lines and Social Distancing

"Social distancing"

Photo: Ileana Johnson

I was shopping in our neighborhood grocery store chain and found out accidentally that employees have their own stash of merchandise in the back from which they can purchase what they need without having to fight the crowds for the items in high demand.

Some stores, to their humanitarian credit, have made it easier for senior citizens to shop by opening up early for an hour for their shopping convenience without other customers knocking them over in the race to get an item. It was so bad that rude and rapacious customers even took items from the carts of much slower elders.

This reminds me of the lines we had to stand in daily in order to buy our necessities. The deliveries for the day ran out rather quickly, sometimes before we made it to the front of the line, but communist loyalists, friends, families, and those willing to bribe the salespeople were always able to buy what they needed, sometimes they did not even have to stand in line, they could show up earlier in the day, before the store opened and the lines formed.

As the supply of goods is disrupted by the government-imposed lockdown for our own collective good, and to save our lives, grocery stores have been trying to provide a modicum of normalcy and controlled order in the constant fear and panic driven by the media and by public service announcements.

While in a Food Lion store, Lynda van Liew Fairman complained to the manager about the constant repetition of the PSA intercom announcement made by “a creepily calm woman” to keep six feet of space between shoppers. “I told her they need to stop running it as it is belittling and keeps the fear building. We’re not 3rd graders having to constantly be reminded to walk in a single-file line on the right side of the hallway on the way to the cafeteria. This is absurd and offensive. It’s like we’re in a bad sci-fi movie or a Twilight Zone episode! We are not mindless automatons.”

The manager replied that she had no control over what was played on the Muzak, it came from [the ghost entity called] “corporate.” Obviously we are controlled by the unseen “corporate” and the bureaucrats in government. Perhaps it is insurance companies requiring the intercom message for those stores that are deemed “essential” and must remain open.

In my neck of the woods in the commonwealth of Virginia, made more draconian and socialist over the Easter weekend by more executive orders of the Democrat governor with a medical degree, grocery stores and Walmart are half-full. They have cleverly spaced out what other merchandise they do have that is in low demand right now, but shelves are still bare and hoarded items are not there very long. They get swiped and disappear before they are even taken out of boxes.

The supply disruption in the economy is barreling down the tracks at high speed. What else can possibly go wrong when dairy farmers are dumping milk in the fields as their contracted customers, restaurants and schools, are closed, six meat packing companies are shuttered due to employees sick with the pandemic coronavirus, a quarter of the labor force is unemployed and rising, and the national product is not made in necessary quantities to match demand, while grocery stores, anticipating shortages and slow deliveries, are limiting the number of items that can be bought, or are price-gouging customers.

The need for food drove us to a larger urban area but then, as we were 20 miles away from home, the realization hit us that we had no place to go to the bathroom. Everything was closed or open for curbside delivery only. Luckily we could drive back home rather fast as the major interstates were unusually traffic free.  

At least in local parks, even though the public restrooms were closed, port-o-potties were brought in. We were told that bathrooms were too hard to clean properly and people could not keep six feet of “social distancing.” I always wondered how they came up with six feet of “social distancing.” Why six feet and not five or seven? A sneeze travels at speeds of roughly 250 mph.

The experience brought back the memory of visiting Italy where we had to buy something in a store or restaurant in order to go to the bathroom. There were some pay restrooms but there were few and far between if we walked in urban areas. The auto grills were great on the Italian autostrada.

As evidenced by comments on social media, many naïve Americans have tremendous confidence that the President can handle the economic problem. He is a smart and knowledgeable man but there are limits to his power, he certainly cannot control the economy, it is driven by supply and demand and invisible pricing forces, Adam Smith’s “invisible hand.”

And the other half of America criticize him for being “a dictator and a fascist” for either not having responded soon enough to the virus crisis or for having exceeded his powers. No matter what he does, the discontented half of America, who happens to be progressive and anti-American, blames him quite irrationally for everything, including the existence of the Covid-19.

The lack of proper information and unnecessary government control gone-berserk have made Americans leery of government control and have adopted and started to believe in various conspiracy theory scenarios which gave rise to even more irrational and rational hoarding and uncertainty.

Animals Need Social Distancing Too

Corona virus

Photo: WebMD.com

A comedic uncle called today to ask how we are surviving in our lockdown quarantine, if we have food and medicine, if we are lonely, cabin feverish, closer than ever, or ready to kill each other.  

He told us that his son and best friend were coming out of their police-imposed two-week quarantine upon their return flight from a European Union country. The police made sure they went straight home and stayed there for two weeks. In order to provide groceries and medication for his elderly parents, his son could now receive a special travel document within the city presentable to police roadblocks upon request.

My uncle did not seem to be too upset about the lockdown  – having survived decades of totalitarian communism, he was used to road blocks, travel restrictions, curfews, and those aggressive and drunk on their power comrade underlings shouting, “show me the papers.”

We were all used to being told which buildings we could enter, which zones we could access, which stores we could shop in, and which were verboten to the proletariat minions.

We walked slowly past areas out of reach for us, wondering what was behind the tall walls, the wired fences, and behind the fancy closed gates and doors with armed guards in sight, patrolling back and forth with menacing looks.

Even the dollar shops, not the type where items cost a dollar, but those which sold goods in hard currency, German marks and U.S. dollars, had guards posted outside to make sure no unwashed masses made it passed the doors. Merchandise that we could only dream of was on sale for foreign visitors, the communist elites and their cronies, who could own foreign currency without the fear of being jailed or worse.

The city hall was off limits to foreign nationals and it upset foreign visitors greatly that they had so little freedom of movement – they could not wait to go back to their countries like the U.S. where people were allowed to enter any public buildings.

The population learned to despise closed doors and lack of access because it infringed even further on their loss of personal freedom. Few remembered the time during the monarchy when they could have walked freely into any buildings. But when the socialists took power, everything changed and the collective memory disappeared, subjugated to the new socialist indoctrination.

It was bad enough being kept prisoner within the borders of the country, without any possibility of ever escaping to the free world even for a short visit, but to be told that you could not enter certain places in your own country, was much worse.

It’s not that we were envious. We just wanted some freedom of movement, choice, and speech. We could see how the elites lived, where they lived, how they drove personal cars while we walked, took the bus and the train, how they went on lavish vacations, to restaurants that we were not even allowed in, much less afford to dine there on a bare minimum salary.

So, we all learned to despise locked doors and gates, those who locked them and kept us away, and the heavily armed menacing guards who kept us at a safe distance.

To this day, my heart skips a beat when someone wants to see “my papers” and I get angry when I see a closed door or gate to something that taxpayers like me have paid for to develop, i.e. a park, a museum, a forest, a memorial, and a famous landmark maintained with taxpayer money.

The huge national forest nearby was closed. Sixteen thousand acres of thick woods with endless trails, waterfalls, and creeks seemed like a good place to get away from people and keep a safe distance from human contact and potential spread of the Corona virus, but the benevolent bureaucrats who care so much about our health thought otherwise and locked us out. After all, it is for our own good, for the collective good.

Even the boardwalk over the swamp was closed as well, perhaps animals, birds, fish, turtles, beavers, and snakes need six feet of “social distancing” too.  One young man, ignoring the locked gate, had jumped the fence and was walking alone on the boardwalk, enjoying the serenity and sounds of nature. Nobody was going to keep this guy away from nature, not even a locked gate.

Do we really understand that quarantine was designed to restrict the movements of the sick or the potentially sick while the movements of the healthy are being restricted by bureaucratic authoritarianism?

It is very difficult to discern facts from misinformation coming from the global and national main stream media, various government entities, and individuals in positions of power, so ordinary and confused citizens imagine biological, economic, and psychological warfare coming from China in partnership with international communists/globalists and the domestic segments of both knowledgeable and ignorant “resistance,” the one that never stopped trying to get rid of the duly-elected President Trump.

After ruminating over the locked gates, we went back home to start our third week of government-imposed “lockdown/social distancing.” I don’t know why but the feelings of dread I had under the socialist regime decades ago enveloped me again and hung like a heavy cloak.







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