America and Soccer Fans Are the Best

Soccer in America has not caught on or amassed a huge fan base comparable to the beloved American football and baseball even though officials claim that there are 136 million soccer fans in North America.

European fans of soccer’s World Cup and Federation International de Football Association (FIFA) changed how Americans view soccer and how Europeans and other foreign nationals view America.

For decades, the mainstream press in Europe and in America always portrayed America as a violent and horrible place to visit and Americans as bumbling, uncultured, uneducated, loud, and mean spirited. Not anymore!

The 2026 World Cup became the biggest free advertising platform for the beauty of America and its lovely people. FIFA estimates that the Men’s World Cup attracted an audience of 3.5 billion people from the estimated 3.5-5 billion fans globally in South America, Africa, Australia, the Middle East, and Europe.

The Scots, with their large army of fans in kilts and bag pipe players, and the Viking fans with their rowing chants became the biggest free advertisers for America on social media platforms.

The Scots emptied bars of beer in Boston and Miami. The cheering for their team was infectious. They were happy that their team made it to the World Cup after 28 years. Many fans spent their lives’ savings coming to America for this event and were quite happy about it as a once in a lifetime occasion.

The Orange Legion, made up of passionate Dutch supporters has brought the Orange Bus to every European Championship and every World Cup since 1970s, sending the bus by ship to reach their destinations.

The Orange Bus is the central point of the Dutch rallies and has traveled to South Africa, Brazil, and Qatar. It arrived in America in Galveston and then traveled north to Houston. The fan group is known for high-energy marches, 2.5 miles or longer, and synchronized dancing.

The Vikings fans with their orange bus and the Scots who traveled across America from Boston, following their teams, taught Americans how to be devoted, highly entertaining and synchronized fans.

Once the bagpipes left the Boston area, the song, No Scotland, No Party, became the siren call of other game locations.

What did the European fans find out about America?

American people smile to strangers, are fun, friendly, welcoming, and happy.

America is vast and beautiful with majestic landscapes and long roads.

American healthcare is the best they have ever encountered.

American food is delicious and as varied as its diverse population. Portions are much larger than European ones. Buffets are everywhere. Waffle House serves food at 2 a.m. Yeast rolls and bagels are delicious.

Buc-ee’s is the best and largest gas station they have ever seen and the stores and restrooms are immaculately clean.

Parking lots are plentiful and found adjacent to the places Americans go to shop and eat, not miles away from a venue.

Americans love their cars and drive miles and miles to their favorite restaurants and stores. I am one of those Americans who used to drive 67 miles to a favorite mall and restaurant in the south.

America is young when compared to senescent Europe, but it showcases many well-preserved historical places, museums, amazing parks like the Grand Canyon and Yellowstone, and natural wonders with archeological sites.

More Americans own homes than Europeans do and Airbnb houses brought many international fans together.

European fans enjoyed American life in general and American hospitality, including that of police officers.

Novelties like the Bass Pro Shops and the ice machines were on the list of things Europeans loved.  I am not sure how much hunting and fishing there is in Europe. But, if you ask for ice, you are eventually offered two cubes per glass with an irritated face. They believe drinking anything cold is not good for your health.

European fans happily discovered that air conditioning is present everywhere and people do not develop pneumonia or sore throats from A/C like Europeans believe. Unlike Europe where electricity is expensive on purpose “to save the planet,” Americans can afford to run their air conditioners and other appliances at the same time, without short-circuiting the entire block.

The moral of the story about all the free and positive advertising America received? Never trust the mainstream media! People with similar cultures have more in common than the talking heads are allowed to think and speak. Americans are a proud and friendly people who love sports and a good party.

 

 

 

  

Electricity Was a Luxury under Communist Rule

Today, when I enter a public building or store where the lighting is dim, I am immediately transported to the depressing life we lived under communist rule. The immediate reaction is to exit the building.

My entire childhood, grandma’s house, six miles from the biggest refinery in the south, was illuminated by an anemic oil lamp. Years later, their village finally got electricity.

A 40 W bulb was dangling from the ceiling, too weak and inefficient to even light up grandma’s small bedroom. Things and people inside looked yellow and sickly.

The six-mile road from the city to the village remained a gravel road until the communists were dethroned. The rickety bus we traveled on to see grandma had a large hole in the floorboard and fumes and dust billowed inside. There was no running water and no septic tank, just an outhouse. We pumped water from a well.

We did not complain because there was nobody to complain to, the Communist Party bureaucrats ran everything, with the greatest ineptitude. They provided sporadically our electricity, water, hot water, gas, steam heat, food, health care, and concrete apartment housing in which we were forced to live. Their rules and governance were neither efficient nor humane.

When I left in late 1970s, people were desperate to escape the life of misery they endured under the boot of the Communist Party’s socialist republic regime, but few were able to. I considered myself lucky to leave even though I left behind everything I loved, my parents, my family, and my friends.

When people thought that life could not get any harder, it did. The dictator decided in 1981 that Romanians should sacrifice more and live by the light of candles and oil lamps - electricity was cut off daily at sunset. If people had refrigerators, food inside spoiled. Elevators for high rise apartments (nine stories) stopped between floors when the power was cut off, and the unlucky riders were left stranded inside.

In 1981 Ceausescu’s regime also invented a new program called “rational illumination.” According to this irrational program, a two-bedroom apartment could only have one 40 W bulb. An energy snitch was assigned to each bloc entry to check apartments for violators. If the bulb was 60W, a fine was given on the spot. TVs could only run two hours a day. The programs were not great, but it was the interdiction that angered the population.

This forced rationing of energy intensified in 1984-1985. It was bad enough that people had to ration food, water, gas, hot water, steam for heat, and even space, but energy? While the people tripped in the dark, Romania, a major producer of oil and gas, was exporting energy elsewhere so the country could pay its debt to the west.

Without electricity life was even harder in wintertime. Heating with steam was minimal at best. People slept with their clothes on. Windows were covered with comforters to stop the frigid air from coming in. The room temperature was 45 Fahrenheit, and people had to wash with freezing water, dress in darkness, and travel to work on streets without lights. The regime touted on its national radio the “bright accomplishments of socialism.”

Ever the survivalists, people bought large bags of candles and built a reserve in their closets. Students studied by candlelight or oil lamps inherited from their grandmas.

The bizarre situation of living in a modern city in high-rise apartments with elevators that did not work and older people stuck in their apartments because they were unable to climb stairs daily, was best described by the coined phrase “blindman’s Sunday.”

The communist system was so irrational that people kept mostly in darkness could watch their dear leader, during the two hours of television allowed, dedicate energy from power plants and hydropower plants for export while Romanians stayed in darkness and their food spoiled in refrigerators in the heat of summer. In winter, window sills became their refrigerators but had to fight the clever crows.

Restaurants and cafeterias were permitted to have three items on the menu. It is unclear why there were only three since the atheists did not believe in the Trinity. Food portions were weighed in grams and people were assigned specific caloric daily values according to the exertion in their professions. Customers ate in semi-darkness.

It is hard to imagine electricity as a luxury good or service, but it was. We take electricity for granted in this country, cheap and easily available energy. Considering the massive development of energy-gobbling data centers, we should not.

As Romania has proven, electricity was a luxury which the police state gave and took away as it pleased. One communist dictator kept twenty-three million humans in darkness for years, with light from candles, while exporting their energy abroad.

The moral of the story is, stay away from socialism, communism, and any other ism that guarantees free everything because there is no such thing as free, someone has to pay for it. 

Remember that there is no such thing as democratic socialism, it’s a Democrat Party invention, but there is socialism. The goal of socialism is communism. Communists lie and never deliver on their empty promises. Communism never ends well when their reign of misery and poverty grips peoples’ lives.

Life and Time

On any given day, there is a huge three-lane parking lot of cars moving at the speed of snail in both directions of I-95, while the two-lane EZ-Pass is almost empty because nobody can afford the confiscatory fees set by the “investors” who were given free reign to the taxpayer-built road. Time is money and life but on this suffocated road time seems still. Our lives ticktock away while we wait to move a few feet before we stop again as if we have all the time in the world.

Time has little significance when you wait in endless lines under socialist societies run by the Communist Party to buy bread and rationed kilos of flour, rice, oil, and sugar.

Time is not important when you visit the one doctor assigned to 10,000 patients in the area, wait in a crowded room the entire day, and receive a prescription for your temporary ailment, prescription that you cannot fill because the pharmacies are empty. Survival and the black market preoccupy us, not time.

What happens when immediate survival and looming starvation are most important variables? How do we view time then? Standing hours in long lines makes time unimportant.

How do we use our limited time on earth? It depends on each person’s idea of living, fast or slow. How do we frame time delays caused by life’s variables? How do people accept them?

Delays are not something people in western societies think much about in terms of time wasted that can never be brought back; we are always in a hurry, and delayed gratification is forgotten because we have so many choices that frame time and possibilities differently.

How people tolerate and react publicly to delays is another matter. Impatience and tolerance for delays are easy to see in people’s actions and in the incidence of sidewalk and highway rage.

Impatience to time wasted can be measured by the number of seconds of sound bites we are willing to listen to or watch. Yet people glare at inserted ads without questioning time wasted on those cumulative moments. Those trying to make money are robbing you of time.

Oliver Burkeman wrote that calculations have been made to determine how long a shopper is willing to wait on slow-loading pages on electronic devices. It was calculated that, “if Amazon’s front page loaded one second more slowly, the company would lose $1.6 billion in annual sales.” (p. 163, Oliver Burkeman, “Four Thousand Weeks, Time Management for Mortals, 2021)

Our impatience is strongly related to the realization that the average human lives a short 4,160 months if they live to be 80 years old?

Most people stopped reading books with the excuse that they have no time to read. There is a huge flood of information that requires their precious time. Yet they trap themselves on social media surfing for hours or playing games to escape reality.

Prior to 2008, we had to wait a long time for the dial-up modem. Before that we had cable and a myriad of channels, but Baby Boomers had a simpler life and four channels to waste time on.

We spend a third of our lives sleeping yet nobody stops to think what they could do with some of that time if our bodies did not need sleep to stay alive.

Are we “speed addicts” or just realize suddenly, thanks to technology, how limited our time on earth is? Perhaps we experienced a traumatic event, and it brought the realization of finite time, if nothing else bad happens?

Once this level of realization is reached, time seems to fly even faster. We appreciate time deeply, we tune in to surrounding nature, and a profound awareness of limitations vis-à-vis the remaining months of life. The tendency to distraction becomes smaller. “Being alive becomes the sum of everything to which you pay attention.”

Distraction is seen as divergence from your timed life, an accumulation of lapses in focus. Burkeman wrote about the “attention economy” which persuades you to direct your attention to things that are not important in your finite life.

Social media is a huge life interrupter and time stealer. It redirects your attention to “Reels,” sound and video bites, sometimes educational, but often worthless entertainment. Ads for that magical ingredient that might cure what ails you, traps you for forty minutes before you find out at the end what it is.

I often waste my time with amateur photography. I have taken over 24,000 photos and videos of museums and places I may never visit again. Instead of enjoying those moments more, I spent time capturing them on film so that I can re-visit them later which seldom comes. My husband jokes that, during our hikes through the woods, I have taken photos of the same trees, during different seasons.

We are all guilty of utilizing and wasting time in diverse ways based on our temperament, hobbies, habits, and skewed valuation of time on earth or lack thereof.

 

 

 

Data Centers, Smart Meters, Ring Cameras, AI, and Flock Cameras

In the rush to develop as many data centers as possible, taking prime land out of agricultural use, using massive amounts of water and electricity in those specific areas where the data centers are located, it is obvious that such massive centers are used for total AI surveillance of the population.

Data centers are most certainly related to the smart meters’ rollout in the last two decades, ring cameras on every house and apartment, and to the deployment of flock cameras as well.

A flock camera is an automated license plate reader (ALPR) camera which is installed with a solar panel above at intersections for “public safety” which capture 6-12 images of every car that crosses the intersection.

The reason the cameras are identified as flock cameras is because of Flock Safety, the company “that creates and sells access to highly connected video hardware and software.” According to some data, there are 80,000 flock cameras around the country.

Allegedly there are some companies that support Ring Community Requests which “allow law enforcement and other public agencies to access video recordings from Ring’s network of outdoor cameras if their owners allow it.”

It is claimed that flock’s customers are local governments. The capabilities of these cameras have been expanded. To learn more about them, go to Find Nearby ALPRs | DeFlock

According to this site, “automated license plate readers are AI-powered cameras that capture and analyze images of all passing vehicles, storing details like your car’s location, date, and time. They also capture your car’s make, model, color, and identifying features such as dents, roof racks, and bumper stickers, often turning these into searchable data points.”

The cameras record everybody regardless of whether the driver is suspected of a crime or not. Police can track criminals via cell phone data pinging cell towers, but they must have a warrant. Flock cameras do not require a warrant. The Creepy Reality Behind the License Plate Cameras in Your Town | PCMag

Benn Jordan wrote that “The municipality does not own the camera, Flock and Google own them and they get the data. They have drones and pan-tilt- zoom cameras that recognize people and zoom into their faces. You can even see what they are doing on their phone. Their ALPR cameras can recognize people. They do store pictures of people. I know this because I have accessed the footage and found pictures of myself. I am not a car or a license plate.” https://www.pcmag.com/explainers/the-creepy-reality-behind-the-license-plate-cameras-in-your-town

Highway patrol officers will not need to fine you for disobeying the traffic laws, the flock camera will record you and a ticket will be mailed to you. Every interstate in America will have these cameras, placed there without your consent. Flock camera fines will become the norm and not just a pilot program in places like I-95.The Creepy Reality Behind the License Plate Cameras in Your Town | PCMag

Smart Meters, with or without your consent, spy on customers without a warrant, recording from the Mother Ship called Utilities Companies, your electrical consumption, what devices you have in your home, which ones are being used, the times, and your peak consumption.

On the hottest or the coldest day of the year, they have the right to cut off your electricity or make your house colder in winter and hotter in the summer by re-setting the thermostat. Smart Meters can track your fridge, freezer, TV, and other electronic devices in your home. Water and gas consumption can also be tracked through Smart Meters attached to your home.

All the information collected, either via Smart Meters or via cameras, can not only be accessed by hackers but can also be sold to third parties without your knowledge and consent.

Last, but not least, there are health safety concerns about Smart Meters which are usually dismissed or ignored by utilities companies. https://emfsafetynetwork.org/smart-meters/smart-meter-health-complaints/

People living around data centers complain about the noise. Areas such as Lake Tahoe have been told to look for other energy suppliers for the 49,000 population because the current utility company will need to provide all their energy for the data center’s growing demand. https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/05/energy-supplier-abandons-lake-tahoe-residents-to-serve-data-centers/

These “improvements” in peoples’ lives are not really developed to make our lives easier and better; they are developed to fulfill the globalists’ narrative of total surveillance and population control because the planet is in danger from real or imaginary foes.

  

Tarpon in the Atlantic Ocean

Internet photo for size

Beach day was a thing of epic proportions as my daughter jokingly explained to my shocked husband who was standing on the shore, watching everything unfold. Not even Herman Melville could've predicted what I encountered in the crystal-clear, five-foot Atlantic water.

We knew we were swimming dangerously in the 300-foot proximity to a large fishing pier on Lake Worth Beach, a long extension from the famous Benny’s on the Beach restaurant. It is never a good idea to swim or play so close to fishermen who throw fishing chum in the water because large fish come for an opportunistic easy feed. Last time we were here, the emerald water was saturated with needlefish of all sizes and juveniles of other fish.

As I was standing in very calm ocean water, deep to my chin, the serenity of the beach was broken by the long shadow of a large creature whose fin was slicing quickly through the water in my direction; I froze as I knew that it was swimming quite fast and my feet were sinking in the yellow sand, capturing my water shoes like glue; I closed my eyes as the fish almost bumped into me but veered left at the last second before making contact with my left side. It had a greenish blue back, with shiny silver, armor-like scales, a large dorsal fin, and a pink mouth. In the moment, the fin traveling in the water could have been a shark – I would have never known the difference. I panicked to the point that my chest hurt, and I could hardly breathe when a man swimming rather closely with his two sons yelled shark.

My daughter was near me, however, when this man yelled shark, I panicked even worse. My ability to move fast through water was hampered by the sinking sand and by my teal water shoes. Ever since I was barbed by a sting ray, I always wear shoes in the water.

I was the only one who seemed to care that there was a shark in the water. My husband, watching from the shore as I flailed with my daughter, who was attempting to drag us to the shore, just stood there frozen. We got to the shore, and my pulse was racing like I had run a marathon, which is impossible because I'm handicapped.

My husband was still sitting there, perplexed as to what had happened. The lifeguard rode up on his scooter and told us that it was a large tarpon and we were safe. But safe is a relative term – safe from being attacked, safe from being bitten, safe from being bait for the tarpon’s apex predator, the shark?

The large eyes, the upturned lower jaw, the pink mouth, the large size of this predatory fish, the fact that it can breathe air, it has a swim bladder that functions as a lung, and two rows of upper teeth, can pose a serious risk if it feels threatened.

I cannot tell you the scars on my soul from feeling so lost in that water; I thought for sure we would be the next snack for this creature which was circling the water for food. We were no threat to this tarpon but I am positive that he did not know that; after all, we were invading his home, the beautiful ocean.

For the next hour or so, we watched this tarpon (Megalops atlanticus) chase two teenage swimmers who were bold enough to go in.

The moral of the story is, never bathe in the Atlantic Ocean but especially within sight of a fishing pier. I knew better but I did it anyway.

 

 

"Democracy Has Gone to Your Head"

Mrs. Avram was my high school teacher, a smart and beautiful Jewish woman who did the best she could to impart lessons of history to the children of mostly proletarians, all made equally poor, miserable, and oppressed by the communist regime.

She tip-toed carefully in our class in selecting which topics to emphasize and which to leave unspoken because she knew, the fear of being ratted out to the party apparatchiks and being sent to a gulag was very real.

She never discussed democracy per se, as the definition would have not clearly explained what was going on in the socialist republic ruled by the tyrannical Communist Party which made rules, laws, and decrees as they saw fit, twisting the law to their needs and ends, by planting fear among the masses with the possibility of arrest and imprisonment for non-compliance to their agenda.

Our history lessons contained half or partial truths, manufactured events, and glorifications of the Communist Party and its most worshipped leaders. We were required to memorize dates and people lionized by the party as the revolutionaries who brought about change and helped install the communist dictatorship we were forced to endure.

History books never called the dear leader’s reign a dictatorship and our country was not a democracy; it was instead a socialist republic. The dictator was glorified in every medium as the father of the nation and his wife the mother of every child alive. The children belonged to her and to the state.

To impress whoever was listening, Mrs. Avram made sure that her star students in each class would read verbatim special paragraphs from the history books, textbooks written in language approved and supervised by the Communist Party activists and librarians working for and informing the Security Police.

Students were not encouraged to ask questions during class or any other time. We were to write down everything the teacher said ad litteram and we were to repeat her statements exactly if asked orally or if we had to write essays for “teza,” a semester exam.

I do not know why, but one day I decided to ask her a poignant question, and it took her by surprise. As she did not have a previously approved paragraph to recite back to me, she said the only thing that she could think of, that would not get her in trouble, Ileana, democracy has gone to your head.

Did she mean that I had gone too far with my question, it was too deep for an actual classroom discussion that had not been approved by the Ministry of Education, did she not want to get in trouble by straying from the exact pre-planned lesson, or was it a hot potato that she did not want to touch?

She never answered my question, leaving me to wonder to this day what she meant exactly or how she defined “democracy.” Did she mean demos, Greek for people, and kratos, Greek for power, power to the people? Did she mean the principles of social equality?

Surely, she knew that we were not socially equal by any stretch of imagination as we lived in a state of communist dictatorship and there were two classes, one of communists and their informers favored by the party, and the poor and subjugated proletariat. Intellectuals like her were skirting a narrow ledge of peaceful co-existence to be left alone by those terrorizing the rest of us.

I never got a chance to ask her personally or see her again on my visits to Romania after the Ceausescu tyrannical regime was no longer in power. As a Jewish person, her relatives from Israel had bought her freedom with a $5,000 fee Ceausescu’s government levied on each Jewish person whose relatives had the money to buy relatives’ departure to Israel.

After 1990, people had better lives, more food, more light, religious freedom, mobility, travel, voting, and could speak their minds freely. But the globalists in power no longer listen or care about what people have to say; politicians beholden to the highest bidder do whatever their handlers order them to do. Politicians have a price and do not listen to their voters.

 

The Invisible and Expendable Grey-Hairs

For a long time, I have colored my hair because I wanted to look professional every day. But that changed a year ago when MS knocked at my door and the fourth neurologist consulted said that it is better not to add any more chemicals to my skin. Was that good advice? If you consider all the toxic MS drugs that can cause so much more harm than a hair dye on the scalp, the hair coloring interdiction was a bit over the top.

It took about five months for my natural hair color to express itself, free from previous years of dyeing it, and, wouldn't you know, it is snow white in the front and salt and pepper in the back, my least favorite colors.

Suddenly, I became invisible and expendable everywhere. A lone gentleman would open a door for me instead of slamming it in my face or stepping on my toes. And on Mother’s Day a rose was offered “for grandma.” I happen to be a proud grandma, but there is no sign that I am one other than my grey hair.

I became the invisible and expendable white-haired senior on top of having to adjust to my new disabled state when walking short distances and balance are precious commodities. Was it easy to adjust to this unwanted category?

In America, unlike other cultures who respect, praise, and care for their elders, senectitude is considered bad and the old, in most families, are thrown into nursing homes, never to be seen or heard from as long as the hefty bills are paid up.

Living in northern Virginia (NOVA) with a physical handicap and being old and grey-haired adds another layer of problems.

There are classes of bureaucrats and of foreigners from various countries, here legally and illegally, who follow their traditions from the culture they left behind where well-paid employment and generous welfare were not available.

The foreign workers treat their own elders with respect, but they abuse American seniors because they are the people they dislike. I have watched them over eight years, several times a week, abuse sick and elderly American patients in nursing homes.

Shopping in northern Virginia brings more evidence of foreign employees ignoring elderly Americans who often dislike shopping online. The associates are mostly foreign and help their own in whatever language they speak and ignore Americans waiting patiently in line.

Restaurant service in NOVA also ignores seniors waiting to be seated and gives preference to groups who do not speak English and are chatting in their native tongue.

Grocery shopping in NOVA has been a better experience since I have used Wegmans exclusively for eighteen years. They pride themselves with their “impeccable” service. Wegman is a private company with 110 stores in the northeast and $3-4 billion in revenue. They own buildings and parking areas.

Crime has been low at Wegmans except for the occasional grocery thief arrested by police or the bumper scrapes in the parking lot. But all went awry yesterday with my simple mistake.

I went inside for a 30-minute shopping with my grocery list in hand. I paid for my two bags of groceries and my two gallons of tea and left; except my car was no longer where I left it, a black SUV without a handicap sticker was parked in the spot.

Thinking that I did not remember well where I parked, I scanned all the possible places; it donned on me that I forgot to hang the handicap sticker, I left it behind the visor. Surely, they did not tow my SUV, I thought.

I went inside and talked to the assistant manager and the asset protection guy who had a bank of computer screens attached to the numerous cameras in the store and in the parking lot and asked them if they had my SUV towed. The answer was no, they did not, the towing company just randomly drives around all day to catch people like me.

I did not believe that, when gas is $4.50/gallon, a towing company would waste gas driving around. The store had called the tow truck and because their location was only 1.8 miles from the store, he was able to tow my vehicle in record time.

It was 96 degrees Fahrenheit, the hottest day so far, with a heat index, and here I was in the infernal heat and humidity, a grey-haired senior with MS, waiting for an Uber to arrive so I can retrieve my SUV.

After paying the towing company $210, and the Uber driver for the $13 ride (1.8 miles), I got my SUV and showed the tow truck driver my handicap placard behind the visor.

In my seventh decade on this earth, I got another lesson in being old and grey-haired. No matter how many times one shops weekly in the same store, the elderly are invisible and we get fully punished for being forgetful.

I asked the assistant manager at Wegmans why they did not make a PSA like, ‘the driver of such and such vehicle, your SUV is being towed.’  Crickets.

Wegmans made so many PSAs ad nauseam during Covid – ‘stand in line, wear your mask, enter and exit the right door, stay 3-6 feet apart, follow the designated yellow line on each row,’ etc.

I returned the groceries; the asset protection guy felt sorry for me and offered water, and then both employees disappeared to their office. I will never shop again at Wegmans because their touted service failed miserably to protect old and disabled people like me.