Jus’ connecting the dots here, so don’t shoot the messenger…

Three Red Banners’ is a PRC slogan which calls on the Chinese people to build a socialist state which consists of socialist construction, the ‘Great Leap Forward’ and the people’s commune.

One of the many things I enjoy is the study of semiotics or iconography, or whatever the heck you call it. And I found this to be most interesting as I drove through Reno, Nevada, yesterday afternoon.

While I’ve seen these signs from time to time around Northern Nevada, I never gave it much thought. But then because of all of the news regarding Joe Biden and his son, Hunter, being involved with the Chinese, I found this not only to be more than interesting, but a startling and subliminal inference.

That being said, I am not really implying anything, I’m jus’ tossing this out there for you to make your own decision about the true meaning represented in the Biden/Harris signage. In the end — it may mean absolutely nothing and is simply the product of my over-active/over-imaginative mind.

And as an interesting side note: 2020 ÷ 666 = 3.033033, which according to Biden’s signs is also his campaign text number of 30330.

Mind blown?

Went to the store. Woman pointed the temp device at me. ‘Poop.’ I forgot what I was there to get. Men in Black?

It had been a direct flight from the mainland of China to the mainland of the U.S. and back again with none of the trained professionals taking the time to sleep. Instead, they now sat around the cramp conference table of the 707, drinking coffee, chain-smoking nervously, all studying and discussing what each in their respective fields had noted during their investigations.

These were some of the most intelligent, highly-regarded, well-trained and respected people in their disciplines; Nobel prize winners, university professors, hospital department heads, private pathologists and virologists and federal medical professionals. And when finished with the third round-table discussion, they did it some more.

At first they called it Bat flu, then Wuhan flu, the China flu, and 2019-nCoV before settling on the fanciful sounding, “Novel Coronavirus.” This made this disease sound as if it had been created in a petri dish, which it had, in a fun-filled lab, which it had not, and thus much less scary, which was the final consensus.

Once deplaned, each embarked back to their separate lives, their separate homes, separate families and friends and their separate work places, carrying in pockets, jackets, briefcases and binders, their face mask labels reading, “Made in China.”

2020 Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden at one time tried to block the evacuation of tens of thousands of South Vietnamese refugees who had helped the U.S. during the Vietnam War. As a senator, Biden was adamant that the U.S. had “no obligation, moral or otherwise, to evacuate foreign nationals,” dismissing concerns for their safety as the North Vietnamese Army and Viet Cong swept south toward Saigon in 1975.

As South Vietnam collapsed at the end of the Vietnam War in the spring of 1975, President Gerald Ford and the U.S. government undertook to evacuate thousands of South Vietnamese families who had assisted the U.S. throughout the war. The leading voice in the Senate opposing this rescue effort was then-Senator Joe Biden.

Hundreds of thousands of South Vietnamese allies were in danger of recriminations from the Communists, but Biden insisted that “the United States has no obligation to evacuate one — or 100,001 — South Vietnamese.”

In April 1975, Ford argued that, as the last American troops were removed from the country, the U.S. should evacuate South Vietnamese who had helped the U.S. during the war, too.

“The United States has had a long tradition of opening its doors to immigrants of all countries … And we’ve always been a humanitarian nation,” Ford said. “We felt that a number of these South Vietnamese had been very loyal to the United States and deserved an opportunity to live in freedom.”

But Biden objected and called for a meeting between the president and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to voice his objections to Ford’s funding request for these efforts. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who led the meeting, told the senators that “the total list of the people endangered in Vietnam is over a million” and that “the irreducible list is 174,000.”

Biden said U.S. allies should not be rescued: “We should focus on getting them (the U.S. troops) out. Getting the Vietnamese out and military aid for the GVN (South Vietnam’s government)are totally different.”

Kissinger said there were “Vietnamese to whom we have an obligation,” but Biden responded: “I will vote for any amount for getting the Americans out. I don’t want it mixed with getting the Vietnamese out.”

Ford was upset with Biden’s response, believing that failing to evacuate the South Vietnamese would be a betrayal of American values: “We opened our door to the Hungarians … Our tradition is to welcome the oppressed. I don’t think these people should be treated any differently from any other people — the Hungarians, Cubans, Jews from the Soviet Union.”

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee recommended that the bill be passed by the full Senate by a vote of 14 to 3. Biden was one of just three senators on the committee who voted nay. The conference report also passed the Senate as a whole by a vote of 46-17, where Biden again voted against it.

Saigon fell on April 30, 1975, and hundreds of thousands of South Vietnamese who did not manage to escape the country were eventually sent to reeducation camps, where they were abused, tortured, or killed.

Despite opposition from Biden, and other leading Democrats, the U.S. military evacuated over 130,000 Vietnamese refugees in the immediate wake of the collapse of South Vietnam, and hundreds of thousands more were resettled inside the U.S. in the following years.

“Do you hear that?” she whispered.

“No,” I answered.

“Sounds like a ‘clickity-clack.’”

“Must be coming from the neighbors. How long have you been awake?”

“A couple of minutes.”

“Was it the sound that woke you?”

“No. I had a strange dream. That’s what woke me.”

“Wanna tell me about it?”

“I was dreaming that the old manual typewriter in the other room, the one your friend gave you, was working all by itself, writing a story.”

“I wish it worked like that,” I said, knowing what tomorrows story would be.

“Shh,” she urged, “Did you hear a ‘ding?”

“No.”

My cellphone changed the word ‘hungry’ to ‘horny’ which is sadly the most accurate autocorrect mistake so far.

We’re all wearing masks and yet I can’t understand why everyone gets mad at me for peeing in the swimming pool. After all I still have my trucks on.

Went to Walmart today and saw a 20-something woman slap a disabled, wheel-chair bound WWII Army vet from behind and on the side of the head. I said nothing as I walked over a slapped her hard across the face.

Then I called the cops and shielded him from her until they arrived. The elderly vet, smiled and with tears in his eyes, simply looked up at me and said, “Thank you.”

Yeah, I’ll be your Huckleberry!

It’s like this — doing right can be frightening. Doing right, though never truly hurts. Being arrested is temporary. Court room and jail time is also temporary. In the end I wanna hear: “Good and faithful son.” For me, that’s the take away for defending the defenseless.

And yes, you can call me an asshole for striking a woman. I don’t give an eff.

The two stucco houses sat facing one another, across the long-time quiet street. Each home had a large picture window in front, and that’s how he came to see her.

She was the most beautiful girl he’d ever seen and he had no way of getting her attention. Neither one, it seemed, were allowed to leave their homes due to the pandemic.

He waved, jumped up and down, did somersaults and even screamed at the top of his lungs, till he lost his voice. And still she did not look his way.

It wasn’t until a springtime thunderstorm did she finally look across the street. The sudden flash of lightening startled her and she looked to see him smiling and waving frantically.

She stood in front of the window and waved back, excited to suddenly have a friend. Then she held up a single finger and disappeared from the room.

When she returned, she held a piece of paper against the window. It read, “Can you sneak out?”

Without thinking, he shook his head yes. Quietly, he opened the front door and sprinted across the street.

Once at the window, he looked in and found the girl was nowhere to be seen. Then he back away from the window, having noticed that he had no refection.

Frightened, he raced home. Once inside he look across the street to find the girl standing in the window, looking very confused.

“What happened?” she mouthed.

“I don’t know,” he responded, raising his hands, gesturing that he didn’t know.

That’s when he saw it – or rather –didn’t see it. His hands were suddenly invisible and his forearms were beginning to disappear.

He looked at the girl and could see that she too was vanishing, piece-by-piece. She looked panic-stricken and ghastly pale.

He race back to the door and swung it wide open and indicated for her to do the same. She did.

They stared at each other for a few seconds, as each of their bodies continued to fade away. Then they ran to one another and hugged.

Sharing their fear, they burst into a single bright flash of energy and evaporated. Neither knew that they had long been dead because of the virus and were only memories trapped in each others picture window.

So a burglar broke into our house. I aimed the little red dot at his crotch and let the cat do the rest.