When the Covid pandemic first struck a very good friend retired here in Cuenca, Ecuador, told me his concerns and fears at what was about to happen. A former Naval Officer and medical doctor who specialized in holistic medicine before retiring to Ecuador, he published an article of concern and prediction in our leading expat website, Cuenca Highlife. He was vilified by many for what he wrote. It turns out that this article, published in May, 2020, was prophetic. Read it and remember this was in the early weeks of the pandemic.
My dear friend was in Mexico the following December, contracted Covid, was hospitalized in San Diego where his wife was refused permission to see him and died of pneumonia at age 90.
I’ve not written for some time. I can only blame laziness. But it has also been a very, very busy time. I have said from time to time that I never needed a social calendar until I retired. Just wait, you’ll see.
Time for some Pros and Cons on moving to and living in Cuenca, Ecuador where I’ve lived these past eight years. I’ve told friends for some months now that once the worse restrictions of this so-called pandemic have passed there will be a surge of expats into Cuenca. My reasons for thinking this is that many Americans will find they are no longer employable for any number of reasons. They will be faced with a retirement earlier than they expected and when they run the numbers they will see they cannot afford to live in the U.S. except as a pauper. So here are the Pros and Cons of Cuenca.
The agenda to drive universal vaccinations of the populace has forced the medical community and politicians into a corner when it comes to the question of natural immunity. They can’t say it’s not a reasonable question, nor can they say it’s already been answered properly. They just say this organization or that doctor or some study shows that even those with natural immunity must still get vaccinated. When pressed, they invoke the logical fallacy known as begging the question; they use the affirmative answer to the question of whether people who have recovered from Covid-19 should get vaccinated as the evidence that they should. The numbers don’t back up this claim. In fact, those who have recovered from Covid have far greater immunity than those who are simply vaccinated. Perhaps a quarter of the U.S. population has already had Covid and doesn’t require the jab. So the logical question is: Why insist on it? The answer, of course, is population control and maintaining a perceived state of fear to advance a political agenda. Read it all here. 
With my third entry in this ongoing series let me go to the beginning. Why become an expat? Why leave the country of your birth and nationality to live among strangers in a very different culture, perhaps one with earthquakes and volcanoes? My primary reason for moving abroad was that I always wanted to. I grew up reading Burroughs, Doyle [his lost world stories, not Sherlock Holmes], and later Graham Greene whose books were largely about expats getting into trouble. My goal almost from the first was to retire to another country. As I grew older and saw how narrow the lives of most of the elderly were, primarily from lack of money, I became convinced I didn’t want that for myself.
On April 30, 1977, 14 courageous women set aside fear and their families’ warning to leave their homes and confront the military dictatorship that had stolen and murdered their children. The went to the rotary outside the Presidential Palace and with signs and photos began a procession of protest. That day marked the first weekly march by the mothers of Argentina’s “disappeared” against the dictatorship that had carried out the systematic murder of thousands including their children. This simply action, repeated again and again, led to the collapse of the government and the restoration of democratic rule. Since then more than 1,000 torturers and killers have been tried and 700 sentenced. The fate of most, though not all, of the “disappeared” has been established.
One of the lessons we’ve all learned this year is that ‘experts’ have been utterly politicized. And if you aren’t one of the experts who go along with the PC ones you are deleted from Social Media, denigrated by MSM or professionally destroyed. I no longer believe anything I read that conforms to the PC take on events. But worse, I can no longer trust those in opposition as they seem to have their own agenda. We are cast adrift in world determined to make us all victims living in a perpetual state of panic and fear. Read more here. 
In the 1950’s I owned our black and white television set late night Friday and Saturdays after my folks went to bed. Whatever movie was showing, I watched. In those patriotic days the set was full of movies made during or about the Second World War. Heady stuff for one so young. A few of those movies have stuck with me over the years, Thirty Seconds of Tokyo, for one where the director had to good sense to create tension by omitting the nearly obligatory music for the run to Japan. All you hear are the clipped voices of the crew and the relentless drone of the airplane engines. Then there was The Steel Lady with Rod Cameron. It’s a B movie and until last night I was at a loss to understand the hold it had on me. Without exaggeration I’ve chased this move for 40 years, first on late night television [again], then on cable, then on VHS, then DVD, finally on the Internet. No luck. Until…. last night. I searched the title as I have every few months and there it was, in full and in surprising clarity, on YouTube. And I was not disappointed.
It looks like Bill Gates has got his wish: population reduction, even elimination. And it didn’t take a toxic vaccine that diminishes a woman’s fertility rate. Turns out we’ve been doing this to ourselves for decades with no end in sight. At least since the 1970’s the ability of men and women to produce children has been in steady decline until today it is at half the rate it once was. Since 1973 male sperm is down 60%. A woman today in her twenties has the same fertility rate as her grandmother did at age 35. In addition the size of a penis has diminished as has the size of testes. It turns out all the things we depend on for our quality of life are filled with toxins that take a relentless toll on us over the years and our bodies don’t shed them. They just keep building up. These toxins are everywhere. They are in plastics, clothes, cleaning products, fragrances, soaps, electronics and carpets, just to name a few.