Posts Tagged ‘covid19’

Frenzy

Posted: June 2, 2020 by julietteochieng in News/opinion
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by baldilocks

What to make of a year in which there has been a worldwide pandemic punctuated by American mass rioting-looting-killing?

It’s only the beginning of June.

A lot of people will have a list of people to blame for the calamities which seem to have engulfed us – and they will probably be mostly correct. But my view is that this is a spiritual issue. Law enforcement personnel, politicians, regular citizens, terrorists and their fund sources, and all the rest of humanity are prone to the spirits they allow to rule them, whether the spirit is good or evil.

And there is only one that is good.

I say repeatedly that mobs are demonic. Here’s how those demons operate: they plant their anger and malevolence into human beings and when such human beings gather together, those emotions feed on each other and rev up the gang into a frenzy of violence and, often, horrific bloodshed. Any target of such violence will be unrecognizable after the mob gets through and this applies to human beings and to property. All rationality is banished – if it ever existed in the first place.

Therefore, we see mobs do mindless things like burn down their own neighborhoods or murder the pillars of their own community or attempt to murder innocent passersby or shoot at houses or gang rapes.  Mobs do things as a corporate body that some individual members of the mob would never do by themselves. And later, after the horrific event is over, individuals will often have no memory of what they were thinking during the mayhem. It’s because something else took over.

I’ve already told you how individuals can protect themselves from the demonic. However, I have a hunch that these spirits know that they are already defeated and decided to have a nationwide party before they are conquered.

That, I contend, is what we are seeing now.

The other emotion which these entities feed on is fear and it’s understandable that many are afraid right now. Heck, we’ve been told since mid-January that leaving the house could result in our deaths. Well, guess what? That is true. But the key to defeating fear is to step out of the house in faith and in wisdom.

Ask me how I know.

This frenzy of demons will end, and we will look back at it and wonder if it was a mass nightmare we all had.

But we will wake up. That’s what I think.

Juliette Akinyi Ochieng has been blogging since 2003 as baldilocks. Her older blog is here.  She published her first novel, Tale of the Tigers: Love is Not a Game in 2012.

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Report from Louisiana: Phase 2

Posted: June 1, 2020 by Pat Austin in Uncategorized
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By:  Pat Austin

SHREVEPORT – Louisiana is expecting news today from Governor John Bel Edwards regarding moving into Phase 2 and reopening the state.

Whatever else this pandemic has been, it has certainly been the cause for many businesses and restaurants to close permanently. Maybe they were already on the brink of closure and Covid just pushed them over the edge—I don’t know. It seems now that people are just “over it.” I’m seeing fewer people wearing masks than I did a week or two ago. The rioters and looters on my television aren’t wearing masks, either, for the most part.

Louisiana State University has released their plans for reopening the college for the fall semester; plans include social distancing, increased sanitation measures, and random testing of the campus population:

Random testing between 10 and 16 percent of the populations of all LSU System campuses statewide for COVID-19 this fall. Participants would be selected randomly from lists of students and employees, and those selected would be encouraged to participate in the testing, although, not required. Anyone who tests positive for COVID-19 would be interviewed in an effort to determine who they have been with recently so that accurate contact tracing can be achieved. Every effort would be made to locate and test anyone believed to have been exposed. The goal of this plan is to determine the incidence of the virus on LSU’s campuses and to locate and mitigate any possible clusters of the virus.

The public school system in which I work has not yet released any specific plans, but the discussions sound much like everything else with social distancing and increased sanitation. I’m having a hard time envisioning my 15 and 16 year old students practicing social distancing in the hallways and the very small classrooms. On our campus there is just not a lot of room to spread out classes to keep kids six feet apart or have smaller classes.

Will they have to wear masks? Will I have to teach theme, symbolism, and literary analysis through a mask?

It is hard to imagine.

I have seen discussion in neighborhood social media groups with parents who will opt to home school rather than send kids back to “an environment of fear.” So be it.  That, too, will be interesting to monitor. For example, mine is a Title 1 school in a high poverty neighborhood and not many parents are interested in home schooling their kids. That is not to say none will or that all of our kids are in poverty; that’s not the case. There is a high percentage that are and many struggle just to have regular meals.

The virus numbers do seem to be leveling off, but our challenges are not.

Pat Austin blogs at And So it Goes in Shreveport and is the author of Cane River Bohemia: Cammie Henry and her Circle at Melrose Plantation. Follow her on Instagram @patbecker25 and Twitter @paustin110.

The desecration of the Cook County Forest Preserves

Posted: May 31, 2020 by John Ruberry in culture, economy, News/opinion, politics
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By John Ruberry

One respite from the hectic way of life in Chicago and its suburbs are the 70,000 acres that comprise the Forest Preserve District of Cook County. I run on trails there that are near my home. I take nature photos there. Others walk, ride bicycles, or just sit and collect their thoughts. Some picnic in the preserves, whether it’s a family or a group of hundreds.

On there is a seamy side too. Some parking lots at the preserves are popular spots for romantic hookups, once in a while some of those large picnics turn violent, occasionally the bodies of murder victims are dumped there, and the Forest Preserve District has a reputation of hiring otherwise unemployable Democratic Party patronage workers. Charles “Cap” Sauer ran the preserves for years. He once confided to Chicago newspaper columnist Mike Royko about some of his workers, “They know that if they are going to receive a day’s pay, they must give me at least a half a day’s work.”

Despite little or no evidence that outdoor activities pose COVID-19 risks, the FPDCC is making using the preserves more difficult and less enjoyable for the owners of them, that is taxpayers, even though exercise is essential for maintaining good physical and mental health. 

Many forest preserve parking lots, which are often strewn with potholes, are closed on weekends and even daily in some cases because of alleged overcrowding. Oh, if a parking lot is full, drivers do what? They leave. Public washrooms are closed. Where are people supposed to relieve themselves? As a runner, I know how to, let’s say, improvise a short distance from a trail. Let’s say you’d like to sit down during a long walk and you don’t care to plop down on the grass. There’s a rare bench here and there but during normal times people find a picnic table. At most of the preserves near me the tables are now stacked. wrapped in police tape, and barricaded by snow fences. There are “snitch signs” placed all through the preserves asking those full-bladdered visitors to rat-out large groups. Even though for most people their forest preserve experience is a solitary one, as it is with me, or it’s done in twos-or-threes.

Story continues below the photograph.

Barricaded picnic shelter with stacked tables at St. Paul Woods Forest Preserve

Water fountains have not been turned back on after being shut off last year for the winter. Yes, today is the last day of May. Oh, there is no shortage of FPDCC workers–none have been laid off.

Those most revealing sign is one outside St. Paul Woods here in Morton Grove. “Keep it moving. No picnicking. No congregating.” Or as Dean Wormer famously phrased it in Animal House, “No more fun of any kind.”

How did it come to this situation? Yeah, I know, the coronavirus outbreak. Cook County has over 5 million residents. There have been 45,000 confirmed cases of it in Cook with about 2,100 confirmed deaths. And of course most of those fatalities consist of people who were already quite ill.

But we got here because Cook County voters elected a hardened leftist,  Chicago Democrat Toni Preckwinkle, as president of the Cook County Board of Commissioners. Part of that job is overseeing the Forest Preserve District. Leftists remind me of the smug titular character in the underrated Coen Brothers movie Barton Fink. He loves “the people” but Fink doesn’t like people. The same goes with Preckwinkle and other leftists in government. And their idea of government is that we are a government with a people, not the other way around. 

These are their woods, not ours.

Stay out of my parking lot! 

Stay away from other people! 

No water fountains for you!

Hold your bladders!

No more fun of any kind!

John Ruberry regularly blogs at Marathon Pundit.

Blind obedience to the government has never been an American virtue

Posted: May 28, 2020 by Jon Fournier in Uncategorized
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Every time I see large groups of individuals gather to protest the draconian restrictions many governors have placed on their citizens I am happy.  I am also relieved to know that decades of progressive indoctrination has not squashed this in everyone, even though educators and the media have made great inroads.  Far too many have blindly accepted the trampling of their rights and far too many oppose the efforts of their liberty minded friends.  Of course the liberal media has done an excellent job vilifying those who demand a return to the good old days when freedom and liberty were the only normal we accepted.

I am extremely happy and relieved that the mass protests have not resulted in spikes in   virus cases.  It it did happen I know the media would have trumpeted that news loudly. 

When researching last week’s article I came across the perfect example of the type of liberal indoctrination that takes place.  This example was this definition of the rule of law I found on the Merriam Webster Dictionary “a situation in which the laws of a country are obeyed by everyone.”  When I saw the definition I was angered because it goes against so many important principles that are at the core of our great republic.  These principles have been core principles since the first sparks of the American Revolution began.

There is nothing more American than taking a stand against unjust laws.  That notion was at the very heart of the American Revolution.  Thomas Jefferson immortalized this principle when he wrote this in a letter to James Madison:

I hold it that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical. Unsuccesful rebellions indeed generally establish the incroachments on the rights of the people which have produced them. An observation of this truth should render honest republican governors so mild in their punishment of rebellions, as not to discourage them too much. It is a medecine necessary for the sound health of government.

I want to make it clear that I am in no way advocating armed rebellion now or ever.  Nonviolent civil disobedience has always proved to be far more effective.  I am extremely grateful that we have the Second Amendment to protect our God-given natural right to bear arms which is our ultimate defense against a tyrannical government.

We must only accept laws that are just. If they are not we must speak out and protest.  Questioning unjust laws does not mean we do not value the rule of law, it means we properly understand it is a two way street. 

For the rule of law to apply the laws must also be passed by those who have the true authority to pass such laws.  Governors issuing stay at home orders and lockdowns most likely do not have the proper authority under the state constitutions therefore they are not valid laws.

The US Constitution is the supreme law of the land in the United States.  Laws that violate the Constitution are not valid therefore the rule of law does not apply.  We should protest unconstitutional laws more readily.

Many states, including Massachusetts, are way too slow with their reopening process even though the curve of the Coronavirus has trended downward and not just flattened. I am hoping the protests soon kick into high gear.

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