Survival and Respect for Our Food Sources

I am obsessed with the show ALONE for several reasons. Number one is the killing of animals which I could not do. I do eat chicken and fish and I know how and where that meat comes from.

I watched my mom kill chickens and saw her holding its head while the body was dancing in the grass, dying. She then submerged the whole thing in boiling water to make it easier to pluck its feathers. I always left the tiny apartment because the smell made me sick to my stomach.

When I was growing up, I knew grandpa slaughtered a pig every year for the extended family during the Christmas feast, The red blood splattered in the white snow remains in my memory to this day. In retrospect, it did not look like a humane killing and the pig knew what was happening to him.

I remember grandpa burying a pig one year, far in the woods, because the village vet tech told him that it had trichinosis worms, and it was not fit for human consumption. 

A few of my childhood friends died of parasitic infestations, the result of living off the land, just like these contestants on ALONE. The children who died were not lucky to be live close to a medical clinic that could have treated them. There was no doctor assigned to the village even though it was only 10 km from a large city. The bus ran twice a day, but people had little money to travel.

I remember when Mom’s youngest sister used to take me and my best friend Steluta to the Prahova River. The water had the clarity of crystal and was so cold, coming down from the mountains. There were natural pockets between large boulders where the water was deeper, and large fish were trapped.

Prahova River

We played in the water with fishes swimming around us. We were hungry all the time, but it never occurred to us to try to catch any. We were afraid that someone would report us to the communist government, and we would go to jail. Technically everything belonged to the party, including the river, and we did not have their permission to fish.

The ALONE survival show brings to life for me the reality that every day we live, some creatures die to keep us alive. We just do not realize how much killing we do indirectly because someone else does the killing for us.

The reality show’s participants have revealed survival skills, gathering, hunting, fire building, shelter building, bow hunting, primitive survival, endurance in the face of starvation, standing up to large predatory animals, basket weaving, tool-carving, and other skills. They all have shown respect and gratitude for what they fished, hunted, and killed to eat. It was not pretty, but it was life.

Survivalists knew what plants to collect to supplement their food and which have medicinal properties. In our modern world, we are entirely removed from such knowledge, and from our meat sources if we consume meat.

Urbanites, who often are vegetarians, do not have gardens and have no idea how to plant, grow, and harvest vegetables and legumes; they are just as far removed from their food sources as meat eaters are.

A lady survivalist snared a squirrel. Momma squirrel came immediately, trying to revive her baby, and she was making all these crying sounds and chittering loudly. It was heartbreaking!

A survivalist from West Virginia who hunted and killed with his bow and arrow a beaver in Labrador, Canada, contracted giardiasis, a parasitical infection from the beaver meat - he called it ‘beaver fever.’

He had to undress down to his underwear and swim in the freezing water to retrieve the dead beaver’s body which was floating in the middle of the river. Hunger was stronger than the potential for hypothermia.

Within hours of consuming the undercooked beaver meat and fat, he got so sick that he had to tap out to seek medical attention. Was it the revenge of the beaver for killing him/her and leaving his/her mate alone for life? I have empathy for both the man and the poor beavers. But then larger animals maul humans all the time as well if they are in their habitat or vicinity, and they happen to be hungry.

Joe Keller wrote about his haunting hunting encounter. “I shot a deer once. Never again. There were two of them that jumped over a stone wall in the woods. The first was a doe and the second was a spike buck, three-four years old. I shot the buck, and it dropped on the spot. The doe was about 30 yards away and turned around. I called for my brothers-in-law, and they came running. We were all bent over the dead buck and the doe, its mother, stuck her head in-between us and tried to get the buck to stand up by nuzzling it a few times. She looked at us, as if we could help her. After a couple of minutes her eyes got watery, her head drooped, and she slowly plodded herself way away from us. I have not killed as much as n insect since that day. It still haunts me.”

The worst health scare in the Alaska wilderness of this reality show was the case of a young man who contracted trichinosis and it attacked major organs so severely that he was hours from death. His former 32-year-old heart resembled the heart of an 87-year-old. It took him months to recover from the damage to his organs and he suffered from debilitating congestive heart failure.

Watching these survivalists choke down roasted crickets, worms, and other bugs convinced me even more that the globalist plan to destroy our food sources and supply and replace them with farmed bugs in the name of saving the planet from an invented global warming is not for me.

 

Competition and Meritocracy Still the Key for Success

Photo: Ileana Johnson 2016

Competition for survival and success are inscribed in our DNA. We are born to compete. Humans who put forth more effort are more likely to succeed. Others are satisfied with less, act accordingly, become followers, and complain bitterly about the eventual outcome and their station in life.

Even animals in the wild compete for survival; some develop special skills that allow them to rule over an area or a pride, and other animals of the same species recognize and yield to their superiority.

But in the human world government, with input from the vaunted halls of academia, has passed laws, imposing societal ascendency based on skin color, ethnicity, and a certain socio-economic background, not necessarily on meritocracy.

“Meritocracy is a political philosophy holding that power should be vested in individuals almost exclusively based on ability and talent. Advancement in such a system is based on performance measured through examination and/or demonstrated achievement in the field where it is implemented.” (Wikipedia’s definition)

Merriam-Webster defines meritocracy as “a system in which the talented are chosen and moved ahead on the basis of their achievement” and “leadership selected on the basis of intellectual criteria.” But liberals demand vociferously that “diversity” and non-Caucasians must be chosen over scholarly meritocracy in all fields of endeavor.

First used in 1958, meritocracy refers linguistically to the power of merit.  “An anti-meritocratic system would reward the undeserving.” Being undeserving could also be argued about nepotism and about those with seniority who may or may not be more meritorious than others.

A bogus “white privilege” created by academia is blamed for all societal ills and for the inability of certain groups to be in charge exclusively and for some individuals to succeed. In their twisted economic view, the choices that an individual makes in life, the academic and technical preparation for the real world, experience in a certain field, investment in human capital, should not count at all. The only things that must matter are race and gender.

When someone is admitted to college based on family tradition, the amount of money a family donates to an endowment, relatives and close friends, that is not merit, it is nepotism. When someone is admitted based on their race, ethnicity, or their socio-economic background that is affirmative action and quotas. It is certainly not meritocracy.

I personally prefer to be helped by someone who acquired degrees and skills based on their merit. I want to be treated by a doctor who passed exams without correction to his/her scores based on race, who learned his/her trade by being at the top of his/her class, based on merit. I want a real engineer to build our roads and bridges, not a community organizer. I want to fly on a plane built and serviced by someone who studied real math, not Common Core math.

Just because you cannot pass a science, math, or high school chemistry class but excel in community organizing or theater does not mean that everyone else should follow your communist “lead.”

You can’t build a society on Marxist utopian ideology, it has been tried around the world and the 100 million innocents who died as tortured and starved subjects of this tyrannical ideology are turning in their graves right now seeing the Millennials who are yearning for Bernie Sanders’ socialism and Mao’s communism.

You cannot survive with community organizing and gender confusion studies. If you don’t want to starve, others must be responsible adults to produce the food you consume, the lattes you drink, the precision electronic gadgets you use, and the cars you disdain hypocritically. Someone responsible must know how to build your houses to last, your yachts, your planes, your boats, your private jets, your computers, and all the things the duplicitous rich consume while telling us to downsize our lives to shipping containers in order to save the planet.

Some succeed in life based on genetic looks, genetic athleticism, inheritance, ethnicity, or the color of their skin, but others have to work hard to make progress on their own merit and ability.

Ours is not a “white culture of meritocracy,” as a course at the University of Colorado-Colorado Springs seeks to change. It is a culture of hard work and success and it so happens that the majority of the population so far in this country has been white. https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/may/10/university-of-colorado-colorado-springs-course-see/

As advertised in the proposed course at UC, indicators of “white culture” are “individualism, consumerism, meritocracy as an ideal, superficiality, competition, ambition, productivity, [and] extreme exploitation of labor/resources for profit.”

In this course, in which collectivism and racism are center stage, groups must learn to work together in order to “interrupt white privilege and racism in their immediate environments.” The organizers have created another fascistic venue to express insane and irrational hate against the western civilization that pays everybody’s bills, and against white people.

The socialism that took roots in Germany in the 1930s brainwashed the youth to implement their desires to restrict free speech, gun ownership, and other freedoms that interfered with their ideas of a dictatorship of the oppressed. 

Presently, schools and universities in this country have entrenched political correctness (PC) into our culture, forcing the masses to speak and behave a certain way lest they be marginalized, converting Americans into “idealized citizens,” a mirror of Germany’s “brown shirts.” If challenged on these issues, the PC crowd labels the challengers “fascists” when in reality the PC enforcers are the fascists.

In a column written on February 27, 1982, titled Susan Sontag Provokes Debate on Communism, Sontag is quoted as saying in a February 6 speech at Town Hall, “I would contend that what they illustrate is a truth that we should have understood a very long time ago: that communism is fascism – successful fascism, if you will.”

The same tactic was used during the Russian revolution, during the collapse of Venezuela, and during Pol Pot’s government in Cambodia – the ignorant were incited, the successful were blamed for their failures, and the establishment was driven out and replaced with a dictatorship of the lowest of the low who happened to be communist community organizers in good standing.

Competitors were murdered and a few lucky ones were driven out with their lives.  As a famous talk show host said on his radio program, doctors were made dishwashers, and dishwashers became surgeons. Societies devolved into chaos for many decades and mountains of skulls were built from the people whose opinions diverged from those of the young communist organizers.

How do we change the outlandish psycho-babble created and pushed by liberal college professors around the country, dangerous ideas and rhetoric that promote and incite violence?

The college course accreditation process would be a start. Credentials of insane and tenured college professors must come under scrutiny. Alumni endowments should cease until such time that colleges become again places of free exchange of ideas instead of the radical breeding grounds and nut farms they have become. As one reader said, "liberals are two clicks away from teaching alchemy, astrology, charms, and potions.”

Personally I am proud of who I am, of my merit, and of what I have achieved through very hard work. Although there were many variables that I had to address along the way, such as the absence of luck, no college tradition in my family, blue collar background, gender discrimination, economic destitution at times, I am proud to be white.

I cannot change and do not wish to change the melanin content of my skin any more than a black person can change their skin color. Our parents and God have created us this way.  But the color of our skin should not define who we are or who we can become. This country has so many opportunities to succeed, all we have to do is apply ourselves and work hard to be the best we can be. I and many others like me are proof of that opportunity.

People must remember that we are not genetically altruistic and humans thrive on competition not collectivism. Society progresses when individuals with unique talents and efforts are promoted based on merit, not on entitlements, quotas, and inferior skills.

If we want society to devolve to the lowest common denominator, then by all means we must continue the destruction of the freedom of speech through political correctness (PC) invented and dictated by tenured professors with a self-loathing complex and now imposed by society-at-large as the norm.

Highly adept at deception and disinformation, communist agitators use specific language and divisive means to promote their utopian agenda. The novice and the naïve are easily swayed by socialist rhetoric and empty promises. It is perplexing to see how droves of young white people hang onto every word uttered by their socialist guru, Bernie Sanders, a white man from the whitest state in the Union who got himself elected to Congress and mesmerizes them with the promised Western European socialism as the only hope for minorities in this country.

Eating Some of the Crust of a Loaf of Bread

Photo: 1 decembrie.com

I can sleep better at night now that the specter of global communism has temporarily dissipated from our America with the election and confirmation by the Electoral College of our 45^th president, Donald Trump.

One cannot imagine my temporary relief and inner peace, not having to hear Hillary’s hectoring voice, giving us lectures on social justice, equality, racism, bigotry, and white privilege, while banking billions of other people’s money. 

Her voice reminded me of Elena Ceausescu, the “mother,” co-creator and conspirator of our communist misery and exploitation we had to endure for decades. She and her husband brought an entire nation to its knees with a Stalinist police state that was state of the art at the time.

On a really cold day like today, 22 degrees Fahrenheit, I remember my gloveless fingers turning red in the frigid air but holding on tight to my precious loaf of bread called "franzela." I had waited in line for a long time to buy it and nobody let me ahead of the line because I was a child, it was a fight for survival.

No crayons, coloring books, or puppies to comfort and shield me from the harsh reality. I was fighting, in a small way, for our daily existence. There was no safe space for me to crawl into except my mother’s arms. And she was too busy to give hugs to her scared and cold little girl who did not understand that other people, in faraway lands, lived much better lives even in their darkest days. There was no time or place for pampering, we had to become hardened and learn fast how to survive.

We did not need a “safe space” from reality, reality was surrounding and suffocating us, there was no other place to go. If we had the easy and coddled life of precious American snowflakes, full of awards, rewards, and undeserved and unearned praises, we would have never wanted to escape to an imagined “safe space.”

As a six-year old, if I did not lose the money along the way, and if I found bread at the communist corner store, I ate a good portion of the crust on the way home, knowing that mom would be mad and there would be consequences. But I was so hungry and the loaf was still warm from the oven. That loaf of bread had to last a few days with mom’s soup made from bones bought at the communist butcher shop and stripped bare of any meat. We were only entitled to 2.5 kg of meat per month, with rationing cards.

Look around you, at the abundant grocery stores, your warm homes, with water, electricity, natural gas, stove, microwave, dishwasher, refrigerator, and plenty of food. You have indoor plumbing, bathrooms, a washing machine, the latest devices money can buy, TV, a myriad of channels for entertainment, warm clothes, multiple pairs of shoes, a warm bed, and lots of books and toys.

What are you really missing in your lives, in your standard of living? Who is exploiting you and controlling your minds? Your college professors and community organizers are filling your minds with imagined racism, bigotry, and intolerance you harp about non-stop, while looting and destroying other people’s property in the process of demonstrating your lunacy. Count your blessings before you wish for socialism and communism!

When I first started teaching full time in the 80s at a preparatory school for college in the south, I used to tell my classes stories of what life was like under socialism/communism; it was not the failed multicultural socialism you admire in western Europe. It was the socialism in Eastern Europe, behind the Iron Curtain.

When students asked questions, I told them frankly how it felt to be exploited by communism, to have your spirit destroyed, to be kept hungry, cold, and without hope for any future; what it was like to be stripped of all personal possessions, land, home, and individuality, to be stuck in tiny cinder block apartments, to be jailed because you had something extra in your home that was not reported to the all-mighty Communist Party that had every right to confiscate what you owned and distribute it amongst themselves as a reward for their “purity of Marxist thought.” And there was no law or justice to protect and defend us. And we had no guns because they had been confiscated as well.

When students joked, “yeah, you had to walk uphill barefoot in the snow to get to school,” I realized quickly that students had been so thoroughly brainwashed that they laughed and giggled at my stories, so I stopped telling them anything. The reality of the cruel communist life was just a joke to them.

It was impossible to educate people who had been so methodically programmed by their activist socialist teachers before me. Logic would have dictated that they would have asked themselves, if socialism was so great, why were all these people leaving their countries and their loved ones behind, everything they’ve ever known and loved, often at great risk if they defected, to come to the United States, to the west? And why are not Americans flocking to move to the then USSR, Cuba, China, or North Korea, their utopian paradise?

Why are all these “refugees” from the Middle East coming to the United States, into small and conservative communities around the country, if we are such a racist, intolerant, and bigoted country? Do they enjoy our generous welfare system offered to them on a silver platter, a ridiculous system that does not require anything of them in return, not even assimilation?

If you don’t fight to preserve your country, if you don’t stop listening to the brainwashing from schools and the MSM, how long is it going to be, young know-it-alls, before these “refugees” colonize you and your “social justice” narrative? They are already on their way colonizing and Islamizing Europe.

 

Cooking Was Not Fun Because It Was Survival

Mamaliga with sourcream

People have asked me why I never really enjoyed gourmet cooking nor was I interested in developing such talents beyond feeding my family an inexpensive meal. As a woman, mother, and wife, that is anathema to a failed human being. How can you not be interested in providing the most delicious, appealing, and nutritious meals for your family?

To understand where I come from, you must walk in the shoes of women and children under the communist regime where I grew up, women with children in tow who had to stand in line every day at an early age if they wanted to buy bread and basics. Moms sent their children to stand in the bread and milk lines, and they stood in the meat and fresh vegetable lines and canned veggies in winter. Fresh was a stretch even in summer time, we had to contend with wilted seasonal spinach, green beans, and peas and shriveled potatoes and apples. Meat meant choice cuts of fat attached to bones with which mom used to make soup. Refrigerators were rare and expensive and freezers did not exist for us, window sills doubled as such in winter time. Crows loved our storage system.

We ate well when grandpa dropped by and brought us a chicken, a pat of butter, and a quarter of a gallon of milk from his country “farm” where he raised rabbits, chicken, a sheep, a pig, and a cow. His farm consisted of a small barn and enough land to have a garden and space to grow some rows of corn.

The communist cooperative grew wheat and the crop was split among the villagers who toiled in the fields each day after the communist party received its demanded quota. It was almost like paying the mafia. After the communist party (the mafia) confiscated their lands for “the good of the people,” these former landowners had to work the land, put in the crop, harvest it, really backbreaking manual labor, and then pay the lion’s share to the land confiscator, the communist party. What a deal!

How can anyone be interested in fancy cooking when ingredients were impossible to find, when we lived from day to day on most basic foodstuff after we stood in endless lines daily?

Can spoiled Americans understand how it feels to enter a grocery store and see rows after rows of empty shelves? Can they imagine real lines for food extending sometimes for a mile, winding around the block and the entire neighborhood?

Can they imagine the fist and tug-of-war battles for a merchandise deal they see on Black Friday magnified to the point of exhaustion? If fat Americans give each other black eyes and bruises over a television set, an electronic game, or other silly gadget in order to save a few bucks while claiming that they are exploited, marginalized, poor, and downtrodden by non-existent “white privilege,” how would they react when faced with severe shortages of food and water? Unbelievably, the next day after they give thanks for what they already have, they pull each other’s hair out fighting for a TV that was probably cheaper a few days earlier.

Normally people fought for the five salamis hanging in the deli window, or a hundred bottles of cooking oil, or a few pallets of sugar and flour, that day’s delivery to the store. Even with rationing coupons, there was never enough food or necessities because planning was centralized, not based on free market supply and demand, it was based on five-year plans crafted and decided by uneducated communist bureaucrats who had no idea what they were doing nor did they care as long as they had their own grocery stores, department stores, doctors, clinics, pharmacies, and hospitals.

It was a privilege to find some food with shorter lines around Christmas time when the communist government supplied more pallets to grocery stores in order to pacify the stupid masses and to continue the real exploitation of the proletariat by the elites who pretended to be taking care of them, to be shielding them from the “evil” capitalists.

We were thin from lack of food, but we were not healthy. Pharmacy shelves were empty too, even vitamins and cotton balls were hard to find. There was a thriving black market at ten times the price that most people could not afford on the government-dictated meager salaries. Equality was painful, miserable, and stomach growling and churning.

I am hearing this tune again from bratty liberal kids who demand social justice and equality.  P.J. O’Rourke called them “spoiled, miserable, unsatisfied, demanding, ill-disciplined, despotic, and useless.” Somehow, in an alternate universe, these “sniveling brats” blame capitalism for the generational welfare that fat and comparatively well-off Americans accept and demand from the Democrat Party that keeps them “poor.” Personal responsibility is an alien concept to most who are accustomed to being taken care off by taxpayers’ generosity.

Poverty is a relative term and most people ill-define or misunderstand poverty. According to the World Bank, almost 600 million citizens of the globe make less than $2 a day. Are you poor compared to them?

When people tell me how rewarding it is to cook fancy meals for their families, I just see spoiled individuals who have so much to be thankful for but have no idea how lucky they are to be given so many choices by a free market system promoted by capitalism, not by the socialist egalitarian non-sense.  

Americans don’t understand the concept of the starving goose of socialism who was kept pacified and faithful by feeding her one kernel a day, just enough to prevent starvation. This way, she always knew who her masters were and was kept under control, no leash necessary, just a barbed wired fence to keep geese from escaping.

 

How to Lose Weight in 21 Days, "Naked and Afraid"

You don’t have to back away from the table, you don’t have to exercise, all you have to do is agree to appear naked on camera, “survive” 21 days in a remote location such as an uninhabited tropical island paradise, a jungle, or an African country with inhospitable terrain to city folk, fend for your own meals, water, and shelter, while trying to stay away from major predators, sun burn, sun strokes, bugs, snakes, crocs, caimans, scorpions, lions, hyenas, water-borne diseases, and other creepy crawlers. At the end of your weight loss, you will be picked up and brought back to civilization svelte, tanned or ultra-burned, smiling and dirty, a new and improved you with a higher survivability rating than when you first started.  What a fantastic diet!

In the quest to shock and to titillate our bored senses, reality TV has pushed the envelope a tad further with its newest show, “Naked and Afraid” on Discovery Channel. I don’t know about you, just dreaming about being naked in public makes me wake up in a cold sweat. Being naked with a total stranger of the opposite sex in a dangerous environment for 3 weeks and in front of millions of viewers is enough to give anybody a panic attack or worse, a heart attack.

A carefully selected couple, perhaps someone with no inhibitions about nakedness and lacking the component of fear is dropped in the middle of Africa, let’s say, Tanzania, on a deserted island in the Pacific, or an island in Costa Rica or Panama.  A male and a female must survive naked for 21 days, providing their own food, shelter, and water. Each “survivalist” has prior experience in outdoor challenges in the U.S., comes with one chosen implement, and a camera to film each other’s misery while the crew is at a distance, enjoying the spoils of civilization, making sure that nobody dies.

The challenges include fighting hypothermia, sun burn, proper shelter, proper nutrition, proper hydration, fighting off predators, building a fire, maintaining it, keeping warm, keeping clean, building tools to fish with, capturing animals and killing them for a protein-rich meal, sending smoke signals, and building a raft that will withstand flotation for two people in preparation for the escape to the much maligned civilization.

The producers rate the Adam and Eve’s adaptation techniques and give them a score before and after the show. I can understand the shock value in ratings and the interest to make money on the part of the producers and the interest in ratings for the cable channel. I am interested in the motivation of the participants in this odd experiment.

It does not take a brain surgeon to figure out that the naked explorers want their hour of fame, publicity, possible future gigs, and a career in television.  Perhaps some honestly want to challenge themselves and their endurance, adaptability, survivability, and to earn bragging rights to the world. I am not sure how much set up and editing goes on behind the scenes, or how much of the time the two adventurers are actually totally alone in the wilderness.

Could it be an insidious attempt to indoctrinate people into the liberal mantra of “living simply,” getting us used to live with less food, houses, cars, roads, land, medicine, doctors, civilization in general, in an attempt to implement the environmental preservation Shangri-La dreamed up for decades by environmental alarmists who decry man-made bio-diversity destruction, and advocate for population reduction, one of the tenets of Agenda 21?

The reality show appears unnecessarily dangerous, nonsensical, and contrived at the same time. Take for instance the case of the couple dropped in Tanzania. He does not figure out that even the natives do not walk barefoot in areas overgrown with thorny bushes and plants. He fashions sandals out of tree bark after a long thorn embeds in the sole of his foot. Only the intervention of a doctor who stops the show, drains his severely infected wound, and treats him with antibiotics, saves him from certain death from septicemia.

Is the show meant to portray men as the weaker of the two genders when faced with unusual challenges? One very fair-skinned man suffered severe sun-burn from day one. His olive-skinned partner was able to withstand the tropical sun’s punishing rays much easier.

Do they work together in spite of the nakedness and fear to overcome the dire circumstances? Did the producers try to say that we, as a society, are too soft, fat, and civilized and would thus be unable to compete or survive in the harsh environment that native populations adapted to?

When the couple finishes the ordeal and is picked up at an agreed location marked on a map, they are weighed. Each participant loses anywhere from 18-40 pounds depending on their arrival weight and their gender. What a torturous and unhealthy way to lose weight fast! Protein deficient, dehydrated, sun-burned, infected, and bitten so bad by sand flies that one participant looked like a pin cushion with swollen feet the size of the Michelin Man, this seems to be a dangerous way to lose weight. I can only hope that no tropical flies deposited eggs under their skin. They may have some unpleasant parasites to deal with later.

I promise to stay away from chocolate and lose weight, just in case someone decides to drop me off “naked and afraid” on a tropical island paradise full of sand flies, malaria-carrying mosquitoes, dangerous reptiles, and other poisonous critters.