rheumatic fever

The Emperor’s New Clothes- and the NWO’s New “Great Plague”

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Most of us learned the story of the Emperor’s New Clothes by Hans Christian Andersen when we were children. (For those unfamiliar with the story, it is available on Amazon Kindle at a very affordable price.)  The moral of the story is that people (including the emperor himself) were deceived by an out and out lie.  The emperor was supposedly wearing the most lavish and expensive and beautiful clothing- but only the very intelligent and learned would be able to see them.  The ruse went on, with the people as well as the emperor pretending that the emperor was wearing the finest of finery because no one wanted to admit that they weren’t intelligent and enlightened enough to see his “clothes.”  That is, until a child on the emperor’s parade route screams out, “He’s NAKED!”

So what does the naked emperor have to do with the current COVID-19 hysteria?

The moral of the story of course.  The people, as well as their public servants, are letting themselves be held captive to an out and out lie.  Our government does not want to admit that they crashed the economy and put millions of people out of work out of fear of a disease that will be proven to be less lethal than the seasonal flu that hits every year. We accept that the seasonal flu that kills thousands of the ill and frail every year is normal, just like we accept traffic deaths and suicides and the greatest holocaust of our time, the gratuitous killing of millions of unborn human beings in the name of “choice.”

The COVID crisis is a “plandemic,” if I may borrow a new word, put in place by various consortiums of world governments.  I’m not the garden variety conspiracy theorist but the behavior of the American far left (i.e. the Democratic party, which has been overrun with socialists, globalists and Marxists) is anything but in favor of American hegemony or the best interest of individual American citizens.  They are getting progressively more dishonest and progressively more anti-American and anti-Constitution by the moment.

So here’s the globalist far left game plan: Let’s take a disease that is less lethal than seasonal flu and turn it into an excuse for global panic and isolation.  Let’s shut down the economy and show those capitalists that the people really want a nanny state and need a one world government to protect them from all this “evil.” 

It’s a page from Saul Alinsky’s wonderful (insert sarcasm here) tome “Rules for Radicals” – Never let a good crisis go to waste. And if you have to manufacture the crisis, oh, well.  Marxism was never about telling the truth.

This current plandemic doesn’t smell right on many levels.  Why is Walmart “safe” but church isn’t?  If this disease were so horrid and deadly, millions of Walmart shoppers would be dead and dying.

Why are our First, Fourth and Tenth Amendment rights being steamrollered for this?

For those who weren’t taught the Constitution in school (I am showing my advancing age here) the First Amendment violations I speak of are censorship of free speech, forbidding peaceable assembly, and forbidding the freedom to worship.  The Fourth Amendment is violated when shop owners are forbidden to use their skills or property to earn their living- their livelihoods are being effectively seized and shut down by governmental decree. Restaurants and hair dressers will lose their licenses to operate should they try to do business amidst the COVID frenzy. The Tenth Amendment is being violated as states interfere with the First and Fourth Amendment rights, which is beyond their authority to do.  States cannot make laws that violate the Federal Constitution.

There are some who argue that reopening commerce and public spaces will allow this virus to spread.  Funny how states are not demanding antibody testing to support their claims of how deadly COVID is.  There is a wealth of anecdotal evidence that suggests that COVID made its rounds through much of the US in January 2020, long before the hype began. It would not be surprising that the demand for antibody testing is being suppressed, for if the truth comes out that the disease was widespread, was minor in almost all cases, and has run its course, the excuse for hobbling the economy and destroying people’s businesses and livelihoods evaporates.

The emperor is naked, folks.  We are killing ourselves and running people into poverty and ruin because nobody in positions of power is willing to admit they were wrong.  The models were skewed from the beginning and based on bogus data. The data is still being falsified, even down to hospitals claiming every death is COVID even if it is a car accident or a beheading, so they can get the extra cash.  And if we blithely go along with the ones who hold the reins of power, we are pretending to see clothes on a naked emperor too.  It’s all about governmental overreach and certain people lining their pockets.  As always, follow the money.

I do have a few side notes I will add to my opinion here. For the past 40+ years, since I had rheumatic fever in 1979, I am extremely vulnerable to strep infections. I have a far greater statistical risk of contracting strep throat, getting rheumatic fever again, and dying from it than I do of dying from COVID.  I have always been a bit hyper aware of keeping my hands washed and keeping away from people who are known to be carrying illness for that reason, but that is just common sense.

I cannot lock myself away in quarantine my entire life, even though contracting any kind of strep infection is a serious and a very real risk for me. I have to go out and live and wander about in the common sea of contagion. And the reality of life is that we all do.

Granted I have some small recourse, if I know I have been exposed to strep at home or work I can get a course of penicillin that should keep the strep at bay.  In the past 40 years I have had to do this about five times.  However, with the heart valve and joint damage I already have, I am very aware that a second round of rheumatic fever can kill me.

The bottom line is that life has risks.  The average person has a greater risk of falling in the shower and dying than dying from COVID. The average person has a far greater risk of dying in a car accident than dying from COVID. But are we banning showering or driving (and for God’s sake, don’t give the Marxists ideas!)?

The COVID crisis has given us a good warning of the dangers of poor hygiene, overcrowding and poor sanitation. Its prevalence in the prison population definitely gives credence to the spread of contagious disease and overcrowding.   Public places have long since been filthy and havens of disease.  Schools are a great example of this. As soon as kids are in school in the fall, the contagious disease and parasite fair begins.  It’s not just schools, though. Public restrooms are not always kept clean, and individual people are absolutely filthy in leaving their trash, urine and feces where they do not belong.

If there could be one good takeaway from COVID, it should be a renewed awareness of personal hygiene and cleanliness in public places as well as the detrimental effects of overcrowding.  Packing office workers into cubby farms in poorly ventilated rooms with no windows is not a hygienic practice- one person gets sick, the whole room gets sick. Some degree of social distancing is a healthy thing all the time.  Ventilation, natural light, and space need to be part of everyone’s work environment as much as possible.

While greater sanitation and less crowding will help reduce the spread of ALL contagious diseases and parasites, COVID is proving out to not be the Great New Plague that the far left wanted.  It certainly has caused certain state and local governments to use the Constitution as toilet paper yet again, but the far left has been working toward undermining our Constitutional rights for years. Yes, we should be more aware of sanitation, hygiene and avoiding overcrowding, but we should have been doing that all along. The response to COVID has been akin to taking a machine gun to kill a fly. The fly goes on blissfully unharmed, but the collateral damage inflicted is catastrophic.

Let’s be aware of contagious disease because it has been and will always be all around us, but let’s also keep ourselves and our environments clean, avoid overcrowding, and get back to work!

Repression is How I Roll, (Not to Mention Denial), and Stuff I Gotta Do

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Focus on the cute dogs…

People like me to be around when they have a crisis, which sort of sucks for me, because I have enough crises without any external help.  Why?  Probably because I don’t let pesky emotions get in the way of what needs to be done.  I am, of course, the queen of the delayed reaction, which usually comes unbidden at the least convenient of times when nobody sees, nobody cares, and frankly, emotions are things I very seldom wish to share anyway.  I don’t feel a damned thing during a crisis.  I simply fly on adrenaline and the advice of my rational mind.  The problem is when that runs out and I am left to process what happened, be it a day later, a week later, or as normally the case, ten to twenty years later.  That’s when I go to the zoo.

Lately I’ve been completely fried and I can’t really explain why.  I know the whole business of Dad having heart surgery was rather disconcerting, but all through the process he has done extremely well with very few complications, so I really don’t have any reason to be a basket case about it.  I was afraid that he might develop cognitive deficiencies (which can and does happen to some people following open heart surgery- I’ve known people who this has happened to- it’s rather obvious and disturbing to witness) but so far I’ve not seen him have any memory lapses or any kind of strange behavior that could be attributed to hypoxic episodes (there’s a lot of medical jargon in the preceding link, and it is a bit dated, being from 2003, but it’s understandable enough to scare the holy bejeezus out of me.)  Suffice to say that hypoxia is the condition of not having sufficent oxygen to the brain or other essential organs, and it’s a common complication of heart surgery.  I’m infinitely grateful that Dad seems to be with it upstairs.  He’s been managing his shop affairs from the day after his surgery via phone and hasn’t missed much.  If I know him, since he got sprung from the rehab last week, he will go up there and at least do his own paperwork and administrative hoo-hah.  Today he will probably be released to drive again- let the mischief begin, although it will be several months before he will be able to actually work on cars again.  It’s only been 5 weeks since his surgery.  I’ve had major surgeries, but both of mine were abdominal (I didn’t have my sternum cut in half and wired back together,) and I wasn’t 66 years old.   I am delighted to see him getting around so well after a relatively short amount of time.  This being said, after both of my surgeries (especially after the hysterectomy) it took me at least a year to actually feel somewhat normal, like everything was actually healed and so forth.

The main difference between me and my mother is I try to deny having anything wrong, while she tries to make up even more stuff. As if I need any help.

Maybe the part of this that is bumming me out- and it shouldn’t- is knowing that I’m not getting any better.  It actually pisses me off, because I don’t like to admit it when I’m not well- my physical infirmities underscore my weakness and I really hate that.  I need to go back to the Dr., but I am loathe to because I know I’m going to have to go through the process again.  The heart palpitations are back with a vengeance and they’re not sporadic anymore. They’re pretty much constant.  Part of the reason I couldn’t sleep at all Monday night (and spent all day yesterday in bed, as much as I absolutely hate calling off for any reason) was that every time I laid down to sleep my heart would pound and pound and I’d struggle to catch my breath.  I felt so bad Monday night that I toyed around with calling the squad on myself, but the only thing that kept me from it was knowing that Jerry was butt drunk and he would probably end up getting a nice little ride in a cop car for being drunk and disorderly and/or interfering with emergency personnel.   So I figured either I would feel better or die.  So far- not dead- but not even close to being OK either.  I know I have two damaged heart valves and irregular rhythm (rheumatic fever, the gift that keeps on giving) but either a.) my blood pressure meds are not adjusted right or b.) something has gotten worse since the echocardiogram in 2001, or c.) both.

Supposedly my mitral and aortic valves both leak.  At least they did in 2001.

Yes, I need to call for a Dr. appt. The only thing I fear is that when I describe this messed up shit to them they will tell me to go to the ER.  I want to wait until my appt. in August and then see if I can get back in to the cardiologist and deal with it then, but as shitty as I feel right now, August is a long, long way away.  The bad thing is I know he will want to do the monitor and the echocardiogram, etc. again and I don’t want to waste his time if it’s the same shit from 2001 all over again.  Yes I feel a lot worse than I did in 2001, even though back then my blood pressure was sky high (190/120 or thereabouts most of the time) and they played hell getting it down to a reasonable level.  I hate going to the ER, and I will really hate it if they tell me it’s something stupid, that I’m a nutzoid hypochondriac, and I wasted my time.  I don’t like sitting in those nasty plastic chairs surrounded by the contagions of humanity.  The pisser is, I really hate not sleeping worth a shit and feeling like I can’t breathe, and that weird creepy tightness like something is sitting on my chest, and the feeling that my heart just plain isn’t working right.  I also wonder just how weird it is for my blood pressure (which is generally high and notoriously hard to control) to be running with numbers like this morning’s-  97/61.  I usually struggle to keep my blood pressure down in the 140/90 range so something is really bizarre here. That’s why I sort of suspect my blood pressure meds, but the Dr. only upped the dosage ever so slightly on one of the six meds I take for that.  The effect should not be that dramatic.

Even though I am feeling genuinely physical effects, and I’m still tired as hell even after sleeping all day yesterday, I don’t want to go through all the medical hoo-hah and then have some wise ass tell me it’s all in my head.  But if I have another night from hell like Monday night, I will sit out front and call a frigging cab to take me to the ER.  Unless of course, Jerry is sober.  Then I will call the squad, because he can’t drive for shit at night.

Mortality, cont., Simple Thanks, “Sin Boldly,” and Whatever I Fear

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I know it might be considered a bit morbid to troll about in old cemeteries.  As a kid cemeteries used to scare the living hell out of me (along with just about everything else, so go figure) but today I find certain cemeteries to be particularly serene.  In spite of the “buy one get one free” sign in front of the cemetery (Chapel Heights Memorial Gardens) where my grandparents are buried, it’s actually a very peaceful place to hang out.  People fish in the creek that runs in front of the cemetery which could be seen as irreverent by some, but I don’t think my grandparents would mind.  They always enjoyed fishing.

I’ve always loved willow trees.  This is the view of the creek that runs in the front of the Chapel Heights Memorial Gardens.  The peculiar thing about Chapel Heights, as far as cemeteries go, is that the only grave markers they allow are simple flat ones- like Grandpa’s Army marker. There are no obelisks, or statues, or ostentatious carvings. From a distance it simply looks like a park.  The beauty there is more natural than historical.   When the weather improves some (but before the mosquitoes take over) I will need to take another roadtrip up there to just sit and hang out for an afternoon.

My favorite cemetery (now that does sound morbid, but what the hey) from a historical perspective, is the Marion Cemetery – right across from the Harding Memorial on SR 423. The Merchant Ball is there, and you can see where it rotates on its base even though no one can explain how or why it does.   Some of the best examples I have seen of maudlin Victorian era gravestones anywhere are in the Marion Cemetery.  I have taken pics of a few of them (the one at the top of this page is one of my favorites) but I don’t have enough space in my memory card for all the really good ones.  I could literally spend a week in there wandering about and taking pics of cool old Victorian headstones.   There must have been a lot of people in Marion back in the day with a LOT of scratch to spend on their dead relatives from the looks of the monuments in the Marion Cemetery.  Today the place is so poor I’m surprised that anyone who dies now gets a burial or a grave marker at all.  If I would have to make an educated guess, cremation has probably become the dispatch method of choice for the dead, simply for the cost effectiveness.  From another practical viewpoint, I have to wonder about the wisdom of burying dead people in a reclaimed swamp.  Burying people in the ground- even in concrete vaults and steel coffins- doesn’t strike me as being terribly sanitary considering the high amount of rainfall and the poor drainage that is inherent to Marion County- and the rest of Central Ohio.

I am thankful the dryer works.  It can dry a large load in about 90 minutes which is encouraging.  90 minutes is a lot faster than 3 hours plus.   It feels good to have the laundry caught up. It is a relief to know that if I want to wash the dogs, or wash all the living room quilts that cover the furniture, I can.   I washed my bed sheets and blankets yesterday.  Since the dogs like to sleep in the beds I have to wash everything often, otherwise it ends up covered in hair and smelling like dog funk.  I’m glad that Lilo is really the only one of the three that ever gets much of a funk to her.  Clara has almost no odor, likely because of her short coat and sparse undercoat.  Sheena I can’t really explain.  She should reek to high heaven with her thick undercoat,  (Heidi and Kayla were purebred GSDs- and they both reeked no matter how often they were bathed) but for a dog with such a thick coat Sheena is remarkably clean-smelling. 

As far as my ongoing quest to live authentically (which is how I understand Martin Luther’s instruction to “sin boldly”- here is a link to a better theological understanding of that instruction) I can only appeal to the grace of God to overcome my fear.  I can only trust that He will give me the courage and the discernment to do the right thing- and the forgiveness I inevitably need when I screw up.

I’d like to have a spontaneous and unfettered approach to life.  Not being dead broke all or most of the time would help, which would require me to (somehow) get Jerry to pay for his fair share of things instead of just footing the bill myself because I know he throws major fits every time I request money.  He can go to the hell hole and blow hundreds of dollars and to him that’s quite fine, but if Steve-o needs $50 to pay his electric bill and I don’t have it, it’s a Federal case.  Jerry can be generous when he wants to be, (especially to his family, except Steve-o of course) but he simply doesn’t get it. No matter what method I use to explain it to him- spreadsheets, calendars, letting him see my bank statement, etc. he just doesn’t get it that I’m not randomly blowing money on frivolous and unnecessary things (such as beer, cigarettes or gambling, but I digress.) 

One time when I asked him for money because I was dead broke after paying the car insurance, he actually accused me of having an illicit drug habit!  I don’t.  I can’t even drink with the medical issues I have. Most of the illicit drugs out there would probably kill me outright.  He should thank God I’ve never been into crystal or the white powder, or I’d probably ripped his head off and shit down his neck hole years ago.    

Technically one could say that I do have a “drug habit” – but all the drugs I take are prescribed by my Dr.- and are pretty much essential to keep me vertical and above ground.  Otherwise I wouldn’t bother with expensive (though non-frivolous) things like blood pressure meds and insulin.  It’s not like I have the Dr. write me scripts for high dollar face Nair and that stuff that’s supposed to make your eyelashes grow.  (WTF?)  I simply don’t make enough money to pay for everything – stuff like car payments, the exorbitant amounts for various insurances, scripts, groceries, gasoline, etc. and so on- for both of us.  If I did have enough money to pay for it all, believe me, I wouldn’t ask.  I would just pay and keep my mouth shut.

I do draw the line at a few of Jerry’s vices.  I refuse to buy his beer, smokes, or to support his gambling habit. 

In his favor he does pay his own truck payment, and he has to buy his own beer, smokes and lottery tickets. 

Very few things terrify me and stress me out more than arguments about money.  I’ve never been a person of means, and I’ve had to scrape and pinch and rob Peter to pay Paul my entire life.  My parents were never people of means either.  Their most heated and (verbally) violent arguments were always centered around money and (almost always) the lack thereof.  Nothing would send Dad into a rage quicker than anything involving money.   I can’t blame him.  There were times when we were growing up when he had to make the choice between paying the mortgage and utilities or buying food or medical care. 

As a kid I remember weeks of eating pretty much nothing but Cream of Wheat or no-name Mac & Cheese to get by because there was no money for food.  I remember going without things like glasses or dental visits for years at a time, because there was no money in our household for preventive care. Before I could drive it really didn’t matter if I had glasses or contacts or not, so I just dealt with it.  Ignoring my health is likely how I ended up with rheumatic fever too, (you get it from untreated strep infections) because it came to a point when I would refuse to tell anyone I was sick, and I’d even try to deny it even if I was clearly deathly ill.  I knew they couldn’t afford the Dr. visit or whatever scripts he might prescribe- and I didn’t want to hear their fight about how much it cost and how they don’t have the money after the fact.  Now I have permanent heart valve and joint damage.

I should know better at this point in my life.  It’s not about lack of money, but how “household” money is being used.  Right now Jerry pretty much pays his truck payment and sustains his own vices and thinks that’s all he needs to do- while I’m footing the bill for Steve-o,  as well as Jerry’s scripts, Jerry’s food, all the insurances, etc. he insists on having even though it’s overkill, and so on. 

I am dead afraid of letting him get a taste of reality because I know he will do anything he can to punish me for it.

Why I am browbeating myself for expecting Jerry to act like an adult and take responsibility for his fair share is beyond me.  I’m glad he bought the dryer, because I really despise crunchy clothing and I’m not going to the laundromat, but in perspective, that dryer cost less than one month of all the various life insurance that gets deducted out of my checking account- on his insistence- every month.  The dryer is also a replacement for the one I bought for $350 back in 2000 that he has had the use of for the past 11 years, if you really wanted to play tit-for-tat.

I don’t think I owe him obeisance for anything.  For all intents and purposes I kiss his ass to keep the peace- but I of all people should know that feeding alligators only makes them hungrier.  Appeasement is Obama’s foreign policy and it’s not working for him either.

I know what I’m doing.  I don’t like it, but I need to find the courage to change it.