Today I did something different. I haven’t worn a muzzle yet. Not once. Today I had to go the bank and Safeway. I have a large sheer floral patterned shawl. I can see through it fine but no one can see my face.
I put the scarf fully draped over my head and face and put a hat on to hold it in place. Went into the bank. I needed to withdraw more cash than the ATM allows. I handed her my driver’s license and bank card, as I do when I get cash.
She said she had to see my eyes to ID me. I said, no you don’t; do you ask people in burkas to do this?
I told her this was my religious covering. And it was. For today.
She asked me three security questions. I answered them. She still wouldn’t give me my money.
She called a manager who went through all those questions and then some. They hemmed and hawed. I told them I was getting hot and I didn’t want to faint on their floor and they were discriminating against me by detaining me. Read More »
TOM was born into a large Italian, working-class family in Norristown, Pennsylvania in the 1950s. His mother used to have her hair done once a week on Fridays, escaping from housework and her six sons. The hair salon was a place of relaxation and renewal. She returned home redolent of hair spray and didn’t wash her hair herself before the next Friday.
I wonder now if his mother’s happiness after those visits inspired Tom to become a hairdresser himself, much to the dismay of his father, who was in construction. Tom went ahead because it was something he loved to do. He opened a salon with his wife, also a hairdresser, a little over 30 years ago, and I have been going there since not longer after it opened.
Tom is gregarious, likable, devoted to his clients and to his family, well known on the local baseball field and at church. His salon business has thrived over the years, which is not surprising because he is really good at hair. Many people in town have sat in his chair. It’s a middle class clientele, including children, women, and men, with plenty of old ladies, some like his mother who get into a weekly routine.
Today was the first day I saw Tom since February. His business was shut down for 14 weeks. On the day after Gov. Tom Wolf announced the state was closing “non-essential” businesses, the local police, as if to underscore the dictatorial nature of the decree and as if Tom, a middle class business owner, was a potential criminal, called him at home to make sure he was not opening.
When his wife phoned me yesterday to remind me of my appointment, she left a message, “Don’t forget to wear a mask!” she said.
Blasted! I thought about it and called back. I really can’t wear a mask, I said apologetically, and would have to cancel my appointment. I didn’t feel like causing any waves (no pun intended). His wife said, “Oh no, don’t worry about it. That’s fine. Come on in.”
So I went without a mask. “You’re going to look a lot better after this,” Tom said. It’s true, I badly needed a tune-up.
Tom, who was wearing a mask himself, sprayed the plastic robe with a bleach mixture. He only has one of his customers in the shop at a time, as ordered by the government, and so is working at 50 percent capacity. Tom is a very mainstream kind of guy, so I expected to avoid the outrageousness of what had happened to him and other small businesses. I was eager to catch up on his personal life though; we always spend the whole time gabbing. Read More »
1. Critical theory is taking socially binding norms and flipping the narrative to make them pejoratives, pathologies, and oppression that must be fought in order to destroy the strengths & defenses of a society, like what HIV does to the immune system
2. Critical theory as it applies to men and women is taking something as socially binding as the natural differences in mental and physical talents and abilities between men and women, and making them a pejorative called “sexism”
3. Critical theory as it applies to family is taking something as socially binding and natural as loving and caring for your family, and making it a pejorative called “patriarchy”
4. Critical theory as it applies to biology and marriage is taking something as socially binding and natural as saying a man is a man, a woman is a woman, and a man and a woman make and raise children, and making it a pejorative called “heteronormative”
5. Critical theory as it applies to pregnancy is taking something as socially binding and natural as being pregnant with a child, and making it a pejorative called a “punishment”, “parasite”, “medical condition”, “fetus”, or “choice” Read More »
“I HAVE PAID no poll-tax for six years. I was put into a jail once on this account, for one night; and, as I stood considering the walls of solid stone, two or three feet thick, the door of wood and iron, a foot thick, and the iron grating which strained the light, I could not help being struck with the foolishness of that institution which treated me as if I were mere flesh and blood and bones, to be locked up. I wondered that it should have concluded at length that this was the best use it could put me to, and had never thought to avail itself of my services in some way. I saw that, if there was a wall of stone between me and my townsmen, there was a still more difficult one to climb or break through, before they could get to be as free as I was. I did not for a moment feel confined, and the walls seemed a great waste of stone and mortar. I felt as if I alone of all my townsmen had paid my tax. They plainly did not know how to treat me, but behaved like persons who are underbred. In every threat and in every compliment there was a blunder; for they thought that my chief desire was to stand the other side of that stone wall. I could not but smile to see how industriously they locked the door on my meditations, which followed them out again without let or hindrance, and they were really all that was dangerous. As they could not reach me, they had resolved to punish my body; just as boys, if they cannot come at some person against whom they have a spite, will abuse his dog. I saw that the State was half-witted, that it was timid as a lone woman with her silver spoons, and that it did not know its friends from its foes, and I lost all my remaining respect for it, and pitied it.
“Thus the State never intentionally confronts a man’s sense, intellectual or moral, but only his body, his senses. It is not armed with superior wit or honesty, but with superior physical strength. I was not born to be forced. I will breathe after my own fashion. Let us see who is the strongest.”
[UPDATE, JULY 17, 2020: Deaths are now lower in only 12 states, stable in four states and up by one by two percent in nine states. Please check figures weekly at CDC site for overall mortality. Overall mortality for the United States is up by eight percent from the previous three years.]
DID YOU know that overall mortality is lower this year in 26 states than it was in recent years (2017-2019)?
Oh, you hadn’t heard that, you say? What a surprise. We only hear the bad news.
Check out the figures from the Centers for Disease Control. And please accept my heartfelt apologies for bothering you with facts.
IT’S SAD that so few Americans consider their civil liberties worth defending and actually believe we are experiencing a public health emergency (other than a crisis caused by delayed medical treatment due to extended lockdowns). A little bit of research on the Internet will expose the lies, but most people are too lazy or indifferent to do it.
Here is one woman in Pennsylvania who stuck up for her right to shop without a mask. She understood that this was not just about wearing a mask, but about fundamental freedoms. She made one big mistake, however: She opened the door when a police officer later came to her home. Ultimately, nothing serious happened to her, but she was harassed and threatened by the police.
This is not about masks. It’s certainly not about public health. It’s about power and control.
ACCORDING TO the Centers for Disease Control, total deaths this year in California, as of July 14, are not significantly higher than in the previous three years. The total mortality from all causes this year is 101 percent of total deaths on average in the years 2017-2019.
And where does he get the authority to order closure or restrictions of businesses? There is no public health emergency in California. None. There is no basis for emergency closures of businesses. What a power trip it must be for a civil servant (that is all a governor is) who is making a nice living on the public dollar to order ordinary people to stop making a living.
“We’re continuing to see hospitalizations rise and we continue to see an increase in the rate of positivity in the state,” the governor said. (Source)
The state is continuing to see hospitalizations rise because elective surgeries were canceled for months and people have been flooding hospitals for delayed treatment. The rate of positivity increasing means, if you put faith in a highly unreliable test, that people are achieving immunity to the virus. Most of these positive cases aren’t even sick.
Maybe hospitalizations are also rising because people are sick of lies.
Newsom should be held personally responsible for damaging the livelihoods of millions of people. Here’s more from Peggy Hall, who says there is no law that businesses have to close (Part 2 is here):
“WE know that wearing a mask outside health care facilities offers little, if any, protection from infection […] The chance of catching Covid-19 from a passing interaction in a public space is therefore minimal. In many cases, the desire for widespread masking is a reflexive reaction to anxiety over the pandemic.”
THE DEATH rate from CV-19 was far higher in New York City than anywhere else in the country. The “epicenter” was Elmhurst Hospital in Queens.
In this lengthy interview, Erin Marie Olszewski, who was a nurse at Elmhurst during the virus season, says patients who came in without the virus but suffering from respiratory problems were sedated and put on ventilators, which eventually killed them. She provides video evidence. Many Covid patients were also sedated (making it impossible for them to clear their lungs by coughing) and put on ventilators, which is now believed to have been a death sentence for many. New York hospitals were receiving $29,000 from the federal government for each patient put on a ventilator. Gov. Cuomo publicly promoted the use of ventilators, and the state health department ordered hospitals and doctors not to use the drug, hydroxychloroquine. [Caution: Controversy rages about hydroxychloroquine. I am not qualified to assess this drug.] In neighboring Connecticut and Pennsylvania, the overall mortality this year is not higher than it was on average from 2017-2019. In New York City, it is 208 percent of what it was in those years.
Olszewksi is the third nurse who was working in New York City to speak out against what they contend was disastrous and deliberate medical mismanagement of mostly poor patients suspected of having the virus. Given that nowhere else in the country saw anything close to the New York death rate, this mismanagement for political and financial gain is one of the few plausible explanations for the anomalous conditions in New York. A full public investigation into treatment of patients in New York City should be launched. Read More »
JORGE BERGOGLIO, aka “Pope” Francis, worships man. In a particularly vivid display of this reverence, he kissed the feet of politicians from South Sudan this week. His famous knee problems did not prevent him from getting to the floor.
Humble pie. A true pope would consider this kind of groveling before any politicians an affront to papal dignity.
But it is highly unlikely that Francis would have kissed the feet of just any politicians, as much as he might have embraced their politics. It’s not surprising this type of display was reserved for Africans.
Similarly, does he urge Japan or Kenya to take in millions of immigrants from alien cultures? No, he urges Western countries, and Western countries only, to subsume their own cultures and keep open their borders to all who seek entry. The European man, whether he lives in Italy or America, is urged to destroy the stable cultural environment in which he thrives, not Asians and Africans.
But why is this?
The Vatican II religion is a cult of man. The worship of man inevitably leads to the cult of the Other, to the worship of man most foreign to the culture of Europe, the wellspring of Catholicism on every continent.
The late Lawrence Auster explained this phenomenon:
As human beings we are free to deny God, but we are not free to do away with our need (because it is built into our nature) for something that is beyond us, that transcends us and provides the meaning of our existence. So, when people deny God, who is, as it were, the “vertical” transcendent, they start to look for a “horizontal” transcendent substitutes. This horizontal transcendent is, pre-eminently, other people. Furthermore, as I said, since God is that which is most Other from ourselves, the more different other people are from us, the more they seem like God or fulfill the function of God in our psyches. Thus the worship of man devolves into the worship of other men, other cultures, other peoples, combined with a contempt for our own. This is the mystical cult of multiculturalism—the uncritical identification with the Other, whoever the Other may happen to be.
[From the forthcoming Our Borders, Our Selves: America in the Age of Multiculturalism]
For multiculturalists, “diversity” is just a code word for a forced, homogenous sameness. They seek to destroy the true diversity of peoples created by God. They are opposed to nature and to the adoration owed to God alone.
They kiss the feet of not just any man, but the non-European most of all.
Walk into a “Catholic” church today in an American suburb, and you will probably see a smiling picture of an African somewhere in the vestibule. Not that Africans can’t be just as much part of the universal Church or aren’t worthy of charity. But the ubiquity of African faces sends a political message. “See, we are multiculturalists too.” It’s pandering and demeaning to Africans, who must in many cases see through the vanity of it all. It’s all about the goodness of the worshipper, not the object of such attention, who is deprived of his real humanity when he becomes an idol. Read More »
SUSAN Rosenberg, who is on the board of directors for the fundraising arm of Black Lives Matter, is a convicted domestic terrorist with longstanding connections with Communist organizations: Read More »
NOTE: This essay was intended for Mother’s Day, 2020. But, like so much of life this spring, it was sabotaged.
ALAN writes:
When the motion picture “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” was made in 1961, it was as hip as could be. That must have been why it did not impress me favorably when I first saw it by chance one evening many years afterward.
Recently I decided to watch it again, but still it did not impress me: Not the story, not the glamorized depravity, not the incidental party scenes, not the 1960s-hip sound of bongo drums (a sound I never could tolerate), and not the too-glib, too-fast speech given to Audrey Hepburn’s character. I thought Buddy Ebsen and the cat were the two best characters in the story. It is noteworthy also for having been made at a time when American libraries were still using card catalogs (shown in one scene).
But amid such dross, it may be possible to find an element of merit. For me, that element was the song “Moon River.”
My mother enjoyed watching “The Andy Williams Show” on early-1960s television and I knew that he adopted “Moon River” as a theme song. But I never paid much attention to that program in those years. It was not his recording of “Moon River” (splendid though it was) but the romantic, wistful recording by Henry Mancini’s orchestra and chorus that lodged most agreeably in my memory. I distinctly remember sitting on our living room floor in 1962 and listening to that record. At age 12, I had no idea what a “moon river” might be and I made no attempt to make sense of the lyrics, but I thought the song was enchanting.
Words that meant little to me in 1962 now overflowed with meaning:
“Two drifters…off to see the world, There’s such a lot of world to see..…”
Fifty-eight years later, those words by Johnny Mercer, the loping tempo at which they are sung by the chorus, and the slightly-melancholy sound in the melody at that point now conjured up memories of years when a vast, unexplored territory called Life lay entirely in front of me. I was too young then to realize how my mother must have enjoyed guiding me through “such a lot of world to see” and thereby reliving that adventure through the eyes of her young son. Read More »
