Viral Survival

by Pete Thorsen

  Viral

  Survival

  Pete Thorsen

  Released on Kindle & in Print

  September 2016

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher/author, except that brief selections may be quoted or copied for non-profit use without permission, provided that full credit is given. This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and events are used fictionally. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead is entirely accidental.

  Chapter 1

  “Hey Jim, you coming to the bar with us?”

  “Not tonight guys.”

  “Your woman sure has you trained well.”

  “Just in case you don’t know, I’ll tell you that there’s a lot to be said for trying to keep peace in the family. You guys go ahead and have fun.”

  The guys always asked me if I wanted to go with them on Fridays to the bar and, once in a great while, I did go with them, but not lately. I was not into the bar thing and it was sure expensive. I went on occasion just to keep up the comradery between all of us.

  My wife Bea (short for beautiful) had no problem with me going to have a drink with the guys but I did have the nearly thirty mile drive home every night. The drive was a small price to pay for having a home in the country and away from Minneapolis. It was bad enough living near Forest Lake, which had been just about engulfed by the Twin Cities.

  They have been called the Twin Cities for many years. I am talking about Minneapolis and St Paul, in Minnesota of course. That is where the baseball team the Minnesota Twins got their name I would think, though I have never been a sports fan.

  On Friday nights the drive home was certainly no fun, even when I was totally sober. I’m not sure where everyone was going, but every Friday night there was a mass exodus heading north out of the Twin Cities. All those people on the highway heading north certainly did not own cabins up there, although I’m sure some small number of them did. I’m just not sure where the ones without a second home went to. I know in the summer the city people went north to fish and in the fall it was north to go hunting and in the winter it was north to ride their snowmobiles.

  It made no difference if I took I35 or if I took highway 61, they were both crawling with cars and trucks every single Friday. Not that there wasn’t also plenty of traffic every other day too. Many people living north of the Twin Cities have always gone down there to find work. The larger cities have always provided a source for jobs and better wages than the more rural areas could provide.

  Tonight I made it home in one piece again and I could settle down to the nice supper Bea had made us. She said it would be a few minutes yet so I turned on the evening news which I knew was a bad idea but I did it every night anyway.

  The news was always bad and many aspects of it made me angry. Tonight they were showing scenes from last night’s rioting in that town where the big black guy had been shot by the white policeman. The news said they expected the rioting to actually be worse tonight. The black guy had been shot some time ago and the shooting had been ruled as justified but they are still rioting.

  They rioted and looted some stores and even though there was a very large police presence the police made no arrests.

  What was the problem? Didn’t the police think looting was a crime? I bet the looted store owners sure thought it was crime. There was other news too of course but it was just as bad. I was glad when Bea told me to shut the TV off and come have some supper.

  Bea and I talked during our supper together and after we were done eating and the dishes were done she went in and switched the TV on to one of her shows while I fired up our computer to see everything that was really happening in the world, and to try and pick out the facts from all the fiction found there.

  A running joke on the internet was that “it must be true if it’s on the internet.” Just like the TV news, the internet news has to be checked thoroughly and sifted through to find the small tidbits of truth.

  The TV news is almost always so slanted in a way that makes it turn into almost total lies. They manage to bend the truth so far and show only one side of things in their concerted effort to get the whole American population to see everything just the way they want them to.

  At its very least they try swaying the listeners into thinking one way or the other by just using certain words or phrases in place of others during the stories. That in itself is not lying but sometimes it can come very close. The internet is not much better, but if you search enough you can at least find the real truth. Or at least as much of the truth as the government allows us to see. At the very least you can get different viewpoints of just what is going on and make up your own mind from there.

  More and more we are getting glimpses of how much our government is watching us and trying to control us. This information came out through an inside man who had turned whistleblower and explained to us just how much our own government is watching everyone. The NSA records every landline and every cellphone conversation in the great United States and that is just for starters.

  Every single conversation on any phone is recorded. They might not care when you and your mom were on the phone talking about whether your baby would be a boy or a girl, but they still record and file it away. And if you or your mom would say one or more of the key words, then the computer recording the conversation would flag the recording so a human would listen to it and determine if you required further surveillance.

  When this information of spying on citizens surfaced everyone in the world laughed at America, “The Land of the Free,” where everyone was recorded. They stopped laughing when it came out that our NSA also recorded everything they said too. Then they became enraged.

  But, of course, it did no good.

  What could anyone do about it? I suppose they could ask us to stop eavesdropping on all their calls—and some countries did do just that—but it is done in secret, so even if our government said, “Okay, we will stop spying on you,” who would believe that statement?

  Members on both sides of our Congress got mad when they found out all their calls (whether personal or job-related) were captured and stored for posterity. They could get mad too but they couldn’t stop it.

  And of course, it was not just the listening in and recording of all our phone calls that the NSA and other US government agencies were doing. All of our internet activity, from what sites we look at to what was in all the e-mails we sent or received, was dutifully scanned, recorded, and filed away. All regular US mail was not opened but it all went through scanners so the government knew who sent a letter or package to whom which was then recorded with the date, both names and addresses, and along with the package weight and physical size.

  All bank records, all credit card records, all debit card records, all medical records, and the list of stored information was almost limitless and ever-increasing. No wonder the NSA had to build a huge new complex out in the desert of Utah to store all this information. This rural standalone complex used as much electric power as a whole city and used a large amount of river water which was just used to help cool the hundreds of massive computers there that produced so much heat.

  The building cost was supposedly around one and a half to two billion dollars and the computer costs were an estimated two billion dollars additional, but all the actual costs were of course classified and very likely much higher than the estimates. And additions were ongoing of course since computers became both more advanced and more needed. The complex is using over one and a half million gallons of water per day for cooling and an estimated forty
million dollars of electricity per year for the computer operations.

  There was more of course. Many states and cities put up red light cameras and speeding cameras. These cameras did not only take pictures of speeders or those running red lights but every single car and truck that passed by them. All recorded and stored so the government could track where and when everyone was traveling. And if they needed to look for someone they had all those video images stored and filed.

  This was still not enough so they also came up with license plate readers. These readers that scanned for vehicle license plates were placed on police cars and also in stationary positions across the whole country. They would automatically and continuously search out and find any license plates in their scan area and record the plate state and number to allow the government to track and record everyone’s movements.

  For the police they could now just drive down the street and the plate reader would look at and record every license plate from every vehicle and the GPS location of that vehicle. The reader would not only notify the officer if the car had a current year license but also notify the officer of information on the vehicle’s owner. Wants and warrants on the owner, driver’s license status, parking tickets, unpaid child support, and a host of other information would be at the officer’s fingertips. And all of that could now be done totally automatically and with incredible speed and accuracy.

  With newer technology constantly being invented and incorporated into government surveillance and policing policies, everyone (whether a good guy or a bad guy) was always under the microscope. And with so many countless laws on the books that were still constantly being expanded, it was almost impossible for any person not to break one or more laws every day of their lives without even knowing about it.

  Of course, there are plenty more things that are ever changing for the worse too, and some days the things I learn are almost overwhelming to me. And with the more I learned it made me wonder every day just how much more was also going on that was classified, or that I at least knew nothing about.

  Like many people I thought the classic book 1984 was more than just a piece of fiction. It was instead a glimpse at our future.

  Chapter 2

  My job at a small manufacturing business seems to be fairly secure. With real unemployment so high and so many businesses closing down all the time it is hard to know for sure if your job really is secure or not. Even old, well established businesses are closing. Yes, new businesses are opening, but we are ending up with a net negative scenario with more closing than those opening. The economy is in bad shape no matter what the President and the news media say about it.

  Supposedly, in some states the real estate market had at least partially come back, or even climbed dramatically, but here in Minnesota that is just not the case. Everyone is struggling here and a large percentage of the existing mortgages are still underwater where the owners owe more on the mortgage than the property is worth.

  If your mortgage is underwater you can only look at the new lower interest rates, because you can not re-finance your home. Well, you could if you had enough cash to pay down your mortgage so it would then become an attractive loan for a bank to re-finance…but who has that much unused cash lying around?

  State governments, county governments, and city governments are all trying to make more cuts and increase taxes just to stay afloat. On the news they said that one week the paychecks for police in Chicago could not even be cashed due to insufficient funds. It has since been resolved but it just shows how close to the edge even a big city like that is to total bankruptcy. And that is the third largest city in America.

  One of the really big problems for all these entities is their pension commitments. They just do not have the money to meet their commitments on these deluxe pension plans. I’m sure they knew when they voted for these inflated deluxe pensions that they were unsustainable, but they voted for them anyway because they did not care. In most cases the elected officials knew by the time it became apparent that the pension plans could not be funded that the ones who voted for them would be long retired and out of office.

  Now it is time to pay the piper and they just do not have the money. At this point even if they renegotiated with the unions and made cuts and also raised taxes they still could not end up with enough money to fully fund those deluxe pension plans. At this point only bankruptcy protection is an option where they would hopefully end up only paying pennies on the dollar. Only then could they hope to crawl out of that big hole they have dug for themselves.

  But before they could file for bankruptcy they had to exhaust every other option possible. Plus, no one really wanted to go into bankruptcy. So they made dubious financial moves and made some cuts and did whatever else they could think to do.

  Often these elected and appointed officials would raise taxes as a ‘temporary’ means to meet their current budgets. But piling more and more taxes on the taxpayers could only be done for so long. In most cases the taxpayers were now in just as bad of financial shape as the government entity.

  All this is happening at the same time as the federal government and the media are touting our great ‘recovery’ that the United States is currently enjoying. The only bright spots are in the stock markets which are constantly setting new record high numbers. At least they were until recently when we started having many ‘down’ days on the markets. But even with the markets fluctuating wildly almost every day they are still near those record highs.

  The official unemployment numbers are way down also. At first glance this seemed good but, like most of the numbers and information coming out from the current administration, they are either totally bogus or did not tell the real story. With these low unemployment numbers one glaring problem is the many millions of people who had simply given up on even looking for a job because it was hopeless and so they are no longer counted among the ‘unemployed.’ There are now about one hundred million working-age Americans that are neither working nor looking for a job.

  Also, more and more of the current jobs are changing to low paying positions or part time positions which are also low paying. Often times many people have to work two or more part time jobs (if they can even find them) just to stay alive. The manufacturing jobs that were once the backbone of the middleclass have mostly been shipped overseas now. The middleclass is almost a memory now, just like those good paying jobs.

  Racial tensions are at or close to all-time highs, which this administration just seems to fan even higher. With the masses getting ever poorer while the top tier of the rich are getting ever richer, even more tension has come to the surface. Here again this administration has constantly fanned those flames of resentment between the haves and the have-nots.

  Our country is seriously divided in so many portions it seems. Poor against the rich, black against the whites, citizens against the illegal aliens, Democrats against the Republicans, those with jobs against those without jobs, and environmentalists against those who thought they were just more practical. The list goes on. There is just so much division in this nation and every day it seems to get worse.

  The nation is having the same exact problems that many new marriages face; bad financial problems lead to blowing other differences way out of proportion until there is a bad break up. It happens to a lot to marriages and it sure seems to be happening to the once-great United States also.

  And instead of trying to calm things down and make everything better, this current President and his administration keeps on fanning the flames higher. Now he introduced his new task force on 21st century policing. A part of this is his COPS program; Community Oriented Policing Services. As part of his programs the feds are trying out their policies in six American cities where they are implementing federal policies and ideals into these local police forces.

  In effect they are federalizing these six police forces; something that the US Constitution expressly forbids I believe. The cities chosen for this pilot program are Minneapolis, Fort Worth,
Pittsburgh, Stockton, Birmingham and Gary, IN. Unfortunately, the first one on this list is where I work and travel to every day.

  I do not trust this government of ours at all, and I am deeply concerned about what impact this federalizing of the police will have on me and other citizens who live and work here, as well as the citizens of those other cities.

  Now our President has an even more bizarre plan for cities and police forces. This time it is a United Nations plan called the Strong Cities Network. This is even more concerning to me because the UN is involved. I fail to see why any of our cities would want to be connected to the United Nations in any way. They are cities, not sovereign nations after all.

  This program’s directive is building social cohesion and community resilience to prevent violent extremism across cities on an international basis. What exactly does that even mean? If it involves violent extremism then it obviously involves the police forces and likely also federal police forces. And that is just one aspect of this program I’m sure.

  I find it very disconcerting that this is happening at the same time as the police forces are becoming much more militarized thanks to the federal government policy of giving all police departments a lot of free lethal military hardware. I am left wondering if the two separate programs are really separate at all or instead part of a long term plan.

  One of the first changes that is being made here in Minnesota is that vehicle insurance companies are being required to supply each insured vehicle with a RFID tag besides the printed card we are now familiar with.

  This new tag is then placed on the outside of each vehicle. This tag will have the current status of that vehicle’s insurance. Now with all police cars in the state being outfitted with RFID readers the cops can check the insurance status of every vehicle in the state for the required insurance just by simply driving past.