Dr. Ileana Johnson Paugh, Ileana Writes is a freelance writer, author, radio commentator, and speaker. Her books, “Echoes of Communism", "Liberty on Life Support" and "U.N. Agenda 21: Environmental Piracy," "Communism 2.0: 25 Years Later" are available at Amazon in paperback and Kindle.
I’ve been trying to purchase a new Toyota hybrid car for quite awhile. The dealer lots are quite empty. Customers are told that they must “reserve” a car in order to purchase. That never happened before in America in any previous administrations. In the meantime, Toyota recalled a few thousand electric cars before they rolled out to the dealers.
Social activists in this country are not familiar with the sordid history of Marxism but are nevertheless brainwashed and absurdly convinced in their ignorance that communism is the best answer to their imagined problems and their failures of personal responsibility.
Ardent Marxists and accidental social activist travelers are convinced by Marxist academics and seasoned NGO lobbyists that they must replace with socialism the western “rotting” capitalism that enabled so many in this country to live the most prosperous lives in modern times.
There is a reason morality and Christianity have fallen so low in the west. The new Marxists take to heart and believe Marx’s pamphlet entitled The Communist Manifesto. They are convinced that “communism establishes eternal truths,” while promising “to abolish all religion and all morality.”
A famous acquaintance told me that our country is run and controlled by technocracy, control by those who own technology. Technological corporatism is enabling government control around the world, led by the U.N. and NGOs endowed by woke corporatists and member countries.
The west is controlled by globalist Marxism, more powerful than the former Soviet style Marxism. It is a 21st century technocratic Marxism on steroids with the addition of a powerful technocracy that did not exist in the former Iron Curtain countries. The former Soviet Marxists had to employ an army of informants who spied on their neighbors and their families.
A friend had asked me recently about the velocity of circulation of money in an inflationary economy like ours.
Velocity of circulation of money is better understood through the quantity theory of money model.
Our dollar is deemed fiat money because our government said so a long time before people began questioning the out-of-control printing of it. The dollar has not been backed by gold since 1971 during the Nixon administration. The dollar is only worthy because the government says so and we must take its word for it.
Fiat means "let it be" in Latin.
For those Americans who are foolishly claiming that the skyrocketing price of crude oil and gas is Putin's fault, here is some news for you - it is the Biden administration's fault. We need plenty of affordable gasoline and Diesel to run our complex and exceptionally large economy.
When Biden took office, gasoline was $1.69 a gallon in my town, it is now standing at $4.79 per gallon while Diesel is $5.55 per gallon.
He closed oil leases, fracking, offshore drilling, and the XL pipeline which was delivering gas from Canada. He did this on day one and the price of crude and gas started to escalate immediately. Crude oil is being transported by rail (powered with Diesel or electricity created by burning coal and other fossil fuels), instead of transporting it via the much cheaper pipelines which crisscross our country from Alberta, Canada, and other places.
I was watching in fascination a documentary about monastic farm practices in Tudor England. A historian and two archeologists introduced the viewers and the visitors to farming methods, tools, food, clothing, and customs from 500 years ago by actually tilling the soil, planting crops, harvesting them, building tools from that period, cooking, burning crockery, churning butter, raising sheep, pigs, and chicken, hunting, fishing, and living, at least on screen, like the monks had done during the fifteenth century.
We already live in an advanced cultural Marxist society even though half of the country is still lulled in the false sense that we are still a Constitutional Republic. We have archived documents in museums that state that we are, but we have lost this Constitutional Republic bit by bit over the last 40 years to judicial activists on the bench, corrupt politicians elected by ignorant citizens, legal aliens, and illegal aliens who do not speak English nor know the history of the United States.
When I was growing up, most citizens living under the socialist republic were not allowed to visit abroad, immigrate, or emigrate. The borders were shut tightly, holding everyone inside like a giant maximum-security prison controlled by the Communist Party and its dear leader.
The government had an anti-emigration policy, immigration was suppressed, and travel abroad was tightly controlled and only allowed to those who had a clean record, deemed so by the Communist Party who investigated a person's lineage, political activity, land ownership, real estate, and private property. Emigration, the actual moving and settling permanently in another country was highly discouraged and so was immigration, the temporary movement of people from one country to another.
Modern politics have morphed into an all-out assault against our country and against its Constitution. If the Con-Con movement succeeds, the Constitutional Convention will be assembled to amend the Constitution to allegedly reign in the political corruption in Washington. The political class does not follow our Constitution as is, what makes one think that they will follow it with more amendments? And what will prevent a runaway convention in which delegates might replace our Constitution with their latest version?
Human capital is defined by economists as the amount of skill found in the workforce. It is "measured" as the amount of education and training of everyone. Economists also talk about investment in human capital and human capital theory. Such a "theory" highlights the expenditures made to increase the productive capacity of various workers, either through education or training.
The cost of education and training is usually borne by everyone, but some companies do pay their employees to invest in their own human capital and give them time off with or without pay. Investing in a person's ability to be more productive is important.
The sunshine and balmier weather is giving some American people a reprieve from having to use so much energy to heat their homes as prices escalate due to the draconian measures the Biden regime had adopted on his first day in office – executive orders that shut down the Keystone XL pipeline, off-shore drilling permits, and drilling on federal land.
We had been an oil exporter during the Trump presidency, but we have become an oil importer from Russia during the Biden regime. This is not a good time to become dependent on such a bellicose country which is now helping escalate the price of gas and fuel around the world.
Poor neighbors such as Romania have found themselves having to pay 450 euros for a month’s electric bill when the country’s average salary is 350 euros. How are poor people supposed to keep warm or find affordable fuel for their cars? Is an energy crisis looming?
One of the proud moments in my life was the day when I became a naturalized American citizen, following a long journey of four years which included tons of paperwork, interviews, expensive fees I could barely afford, and many trips to the Immigration office at a time when I was a mom, a wife, a daughter, and a student.
A lot of humans have died from heat exposure, in freezing temperatures, in wilderness, in war trenches, frozen on Mt. Everest, marching in war convoys, marching to concentration camps, inside concentration camp barracks, in gulags in subzero temperatures, submerged in icy water, in crashes on mountain tops or jungles, hiking, mountain climbing, and in many other horrible conditions.
Angel, a Jew sent to Auschwitz in Nazi Germany, witnessed an entire ward freeze to death overnight, without beds, heat, and food. She alone survived with an old man because she spent all night trying to warm him up, rubbing his hands, legs, face, and neck. When the sun came up, there was an eerie silence around them, they were surrounded by frozen corpses. Nobody should suffer such inhuman conditions.
Thanks to food additives, semi-prepared foods in grocery stores, lockdowns, a more sedentary life in front of a computer screen, larger portions of food in restaurants and burger joints, ever present sugar in every type of food consumed, and less daily walking than the average human, Americans have added more pounds to their frames.
It is bitter cold outside, it feels like 11 degrees Fahrenheit. The relentless Hawk is blowing arctic air, exacerbating the wind tunnel effect surrounding our house. Luckily, we are warm and cozy inside thanks to capitalism.
When I was a kid growing up with my maternal grandparents, their tiny adobe style mud-brick winter house had two rooms, a barn for the animals, a tiny kitchen, and the hay loft for cats and mice. They never heated the big brick house because it required too much wood which they did not have. The communist farms had already deforested anything that could be cut down and used for wood.
For the past two years, I was dismayed at how many of my friends were watching and discussing on social media the series, 'The Walking Dead', and its companion, 'Fear the Walking Dead', two related shows about an apocalyptic world when Earth is struck by a mysterious virus originating from space.
Invest in inflation. It’s the only thing going up. – Will Rogers
The left is trying to justify the escalation of inflation as “Inflation isn’t inexorably a bad thing. In fact, it used to be considered good.” This is another overt attempt to habituate American consumers to soaring prices and to a new low standard of living and to shortages of food, goods, and services, a diminished quality of life. What scaremongering about inflation gets wrong - The Washington Post
In the 1980s, the environmentalists believed that using paper grocery bags harms the environment by excessive deforestation, so they moved in the direction of replacing the paper grocery bags with plastic ones. It made sense, plastic bags made from petroleum by-products were certainly cheaper and more plentiful.
Fast forward to 2021, environmentalist governments in counties like Fairfax, Virginia, moved to replace the plastic bags with paper bags by charging a tax of 5 cents per plastic bag previously given free (included in the price because nothing is free). Furthermore, a fine of $500 will be levied on anyone who dares to leave grass and other yard clippings on curbside in plastic bags other than heavy paper bags.
The silence of the falling, sticky snow is shattered by limbs creaking, crashing in the woods with a loud thud, a collective sigh of nature burdened by the heavy, pristine white blanket. The trees look like white giants with droopy arms dragging the ground.
It is the first snow of winter and of 2022, eight inches accumulation so far, and still falling hard. The hawkish wind is blowing it sometimes sideways, drifting in sudden gusts a few inches that fail to remove any significant amount of snow, already stuck like glue to the ground and on all horizontal surfaces no matter how small.
It’s finally 2022 and humans are making resolutions for the New Year, leaving behind 2021, the year of Fright and Flu. A saturating rain is drenching the woods. The distant river is shrouded in a greyish fog, concealing the silhouetted trees with exposed skinny branches stretched to the sky but meeting half-way the low ceiling. The animals appear in hiding, save for a few chirping birds and the occasional sparrow.