Forbidden Tradition, Church, Food, and Drink

Watching young people all over the world clamoring for communism while waving red flags and Palestinian flags is depressing beyond description. These indoctrinated young people were never taught in schools what communism did to all the people who lived under its oppressing boot. Here are a few examples of life under the Communist Party state.

Christmas was erased from calendars, and the subjugated people did not protest. The Christmas Tree was renamed the Winter Tree. December 25 and 26 were normal workdays. Church attendance was frowned upon, and only old people went to regular and holiday church services. Nobody had any Bibles as they were forbidden. Traditional carols and caroling were forbidden and replaced by patriotic songs on TV and radio, singing praises to the dear leader and his wife. People were allowed to celebrate the New Year and nothing else.

The Press was controlled by the Communist Party and only what they approved was printed, broadcast, or distributed. In the northern part of Bucharest was a building which looked like a copy of the Soviet architecture in Moscow. It was called The Free Press House. It was expressly built to print Scinteia, the Communist Party newspaper. Its original name was Combinatul Poligrafic Casa Scinteii.

Built in 1952-1957 on land where horse races were held at Baneasa, the shockingly large building was paid for with forced subscriptions of 20-30 lei from workers who had money taken from paychecks every month without their permission. The average salary of a worker was eight hundred per month, but nobody dared to object the monthly “contribution” for the propaganda printing house.

The building is an identical copy of the Lomonosov University building in the former Soviet Union, another place of propaganda and indoctrination into communism. The Culture Palace in Warsaw, Poland, was also an identical copy. It was Stalinist-approved and dictated architecture.

The Romanian Free Press House as it is named today has decorative elements borrowed from Curtea de Arges Monastery, Cozia, and Horezu, which embellish the frontispiece of the building and four towers were inspired from Sucevita and Dragomirna. So, the Stalinist building is decorated by Romanian folkloric and church freezes in a country where the regime jailed priests if they did not follow the communist dictates.

The 96-meter-tall building was constructed to resist earthquakes. Boris Caragea sculpted a 7-meter-tall statue of Lenin in 1960 which was placed in the front courtyard. In March 1990, following the anti-communist coup, the statue was taken down in three days. All that was left was the base. In 2016, on the same base, a new statue was erected called the Wings, dedicated to the heroes of the anti-communist resistance.

The building was taken over by various printing houses of newspapers and magazines after the anti-communist revolution. Its name was changed to the “House of the Free Press.”

Sadly, the first elections held after the communist dictator was deposed on Christmas 1989, elected another communist president who had been Ceausescu’s best friend and installed all the former communist cadre back in power.

It is important to mention and to remember that once socialism and communism are installed, it is near impossible to vote the country out of communism unless bloodshed takes place.

Food was difficult to find on the market, but alcohol was cheap and easy to acquire. The population was skinny and malnourished. People stood in endless lines daily for pathetic supplies that were not sufficient for twenty plus million people, thus rationing coupons were introduced.

An interesting story reveals how Pepsi had made its way to Romania. The first bottle of Pepsi appeared in 1967 while the communists were in power. How did Pepsi appear during full communism before the reintroduction of capitalism in 1990?

In 1959, a guy who eventually became the CEO of Pepsi had a brilliant idea to sell Pepsi beyond the Iron Curtain and presented President Khrushchev with a glass of Pepsi Cola.

In 1966, the communist regime of Romania built a department in a factory called “Munca” in Ovidiu, near the town of Constanta, a section which bottled Pepsi Cola to be sold in the resorts at the Romanian Black Sea shore. The first bottles of Pepsi rolled out in May 1967 and produced seven million liters per year. Coca Cola only arrived in 1991.

To Romanians Pepsi represented a delicious meal and a vacation on the seashore, relaxation from the drudgery of work. Pepsi was something that the proletariat could afford to buy if they had the money to go on vacation by the Black Sea.

The state paid for the Pepsi concentrate with Romanian wine and then mixed the concentrate with CO2 and bottled the Pepsi on site. The Soviets made a similar exchange deal but with vodka.

In the 1980s when the food situation and shortages under the communist regime became more dire, Pepsi drinks became a sort of medium of exchange. It was sold on the black market or exchanged for other goods. It was where I had my first bottle of Pepsi in 1977.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Special Salts and Guano

The Chinese scraped a white tangy salt off rocks called huo yao, the fire drug, which we know in the west as “the salt of the stone,” saltpeter. In a mixture of charcoal dust and sulphur, you have a remarkable eruption.

Scraping saltpeter off rocks was not exactly a reliable way to gather massive quantities of it. Extracting it from manure spread over land was also a slow and smelly process. For every pound of manure, a few crystals would grow.

In the mud areas of the River Ganges in India, the local population had been using saltpeter for a long time in their agricultural practices of fertilization with manure. The first documented reference to saltpeter is found in the early 17^th century when the English East India Company considered importing it from India in the early 1620s. The first recorded shipment to England was made in 1626. Saltpeter became one of the most important items traded by the English company.

On the three Chincha Islands located 21 km off the coast of Peru, on a group of rocks inhabited exclusively by flocks of birds, boobies, cormorants, and penguins, over thousands of years, bird droppings had formed a crust over a hundred feet deep, one of the finest natural fertilizers called guano.

The Inca called the bird droppings huanu, hence our term guano. Sprinkling it onto their fields as fertilizer, Incas valued guano just like gold and considered the killing of birds a capital crime.

Peru started trading the guano in 1840, after using Chinese labor to harvest the highly flammable fertilizer. By late 1850, the Chincha guano was exhausted when the workers struck rocks. Economists calculated that by 1860, 4,000 Chinese workers had died working in extremely noxious conditions. Peru’s source of riches was exhausted in two decades.

Peru had another unique salt called caliche found in the northern reaches they controlled in the Atacama Desert. The word caliche is derived from Quechua and it means salt.

Caliche appeared as a crust found by a stroke of luck by locals traveling from the Andes foothills to the Pacific Ocean. While making camp for the night and building fires, they noticed rocks on the ground sparking and igniting.

The explosive and fertile caliche is made up of sodium chloride (table salt), nitrates, iodates, sulphates, and chlorides. The caliche is slightly different from saltpeter in that it has sodium nitrate rather than potassium nitrate.

Nobody is quite sure how the caliche appeared in the northern parts of the Atacama Desert. According to Ed Conway, there are theories:

1.      The product of an eerie fog that often forms across the desert at night and morning.

2.      These salts washed down from the Andes.

3.      Caliche was deposited here by an ancient sea.

Even though the deposits were mostly located in Peruvian and Bolivian territory, according to Conway, it was “enterprising Chilean immigrants who discovered most of the caliche, did most of the mining, and forged the all-important links with English and German financiers who provided the capital for their businesses." [mid 1870s]

The greedy decision by Bolivia to enact a retroactive tax of ten cents per quintal (100 lbs.) of nitrates exported from the area, even though they signed a treaty in 1874, pledging not to impose taxes on mineral exploitation, gave rise to a serious conflict. The railway’s manager, George Hicks, refused to pay and sought refuge on a Chilean warship stationed off the coast. Chilean troops occupied the area and the port a few days later.

Following the Ten Cents War which lasted five years (1879-1884), fought between Chile, Peru, and Bolivia over the nitrate-rich Atacama Desert region, Chile won “control over the most important mineral resources in the world - not just the nitrates of the Atacama, but the world’s biggest reserves of copper and lithium.” Bolivia lost its coastline and Chile became “a resource superpower.” (Ed Conway, Material World, p. 170)

 

 

 

 

 

Globalization and “Decivilization”

Our modern economy is based on efficiency, specialization, and globalization. Economists define efficiency as “the absence of waste when an economy wastes none of its available resources and produces the maximum amount of output that its technology permits.”

When a country leans heavily on specialization, it devotes resources to only a small proportion of the world’s productive activities. How does the country satisfy its other needs? Enter globalization.

Merriam-Webster dictionary defines globalization as “the development of an increasingly integrated global economy marked especially by free trade, free flow of capital, and the tapping of cheaper foreign labor markets.”

Manufacturing, production, and supply chains in the U.S. were moved to China, Vietnam, and Mexico because of cheap labor and less regulations.

Economists argued in textbooks that everybody is better off in globalization, but that is not true, ask the Rust Belt workers who lost their jobs in the quest for globalization. Ask engineers and other professionals in the U.S. who had to train their replacements from India after they were fired from their jobs.

Globalization has driven the modern economy of the last four decades. We no longer manufacture goods that are essential to the existence of our domestic market. It was painfully clear when, during the Covid-19 pandemic, there were severe shortages of goods resulting from interrupted supply chains coming from China and other countries who manufactured goods that we no longer produce in our own country because we were following the globalization’s economies of scale and cheap labor abroad.

Globalization has provided advances in the standard of living, infrastructure, in health care, education, and population growth in less developed countries.

In the case of a pandemic, a natural disaster, and war, countries will be forced to look at ways to produce domestically what their needs are.

In the developed world, the population no longer knows how to grow a garden, how to plant a sufficient crop to feed everyone, how to preserve their own food, sew, make necessary repairs in the home, hunt, or fish. In our economy, goods are discarded and replaced, seldom repaired.

In the absence of other specialized countries providing what we need daily, “Decivilization” will follow. “Decivilization” as defined by Peter Zeihan is “a cascade of reinforcing breakdowns that do not simply damage, but destroy, the bedrock of what makes the modern world function.” With so many skills that we have lost, it is easy to see how such breakdowns can occur in a large economy.

We cannot eat technology, gadgets, or other things that drive our modern lives. We need food, medicine, clean water, gasoline, natural gas, and electricity.

We have become incompetent at tasks that are necessary for survival. We saw what happened to Zimbabwe when the population was forced to survive on subsistence farming.

Venezuela imported two-thirds of its necessary food before the economy collapsed and the population was forced to eat animals from the zoo. Their oil production crashed so much that farmers did not have enough fuel to plant crops. It was “the worst famine in the history of the Western Hemisphere.” (Peter Zeihan, Mapping the Collapse of Globalization, 2022, p. 64)

The more recent developments in Italy showed how dependent the southern population was on the delivery of food trucked from other parts of the country. Their grocery stores were empty for weeks as the truckers went on strike on Italy’s highways to protest the soaring prices of Diesel. Europe’s fuel prices have always been higher than in the U.S., but the wars in Ukraine and Iran have driven prices even higher.

The United States is sufficiently diverse in resources that it can make the economy work by being inventive. But most countries could be severely impacted if the flow of goods and services obtained globally is interrupted. In such a case, the political and economic map of the world will change. The urban areas will suffer the most.

Another variable that can also interfere with the global flow of goods and services between countries and continents is a natural disaster on an unprecedented scale, i.e., mega volcanic eruption, mega tsunami, earthquakes, solar flares.

The supply and demand in a globalized economy will be impacted if development slows due to the lower birth rate which in western nations is already below replacement value.

Moving cheap labor into Europe and the U.S., disguised as migration, may seem as a fix, but most of these economic migrants become welfare burdens to the taxpaying population.

Shortages of goods and services globally will force populations to take care of the needs of their own countries, the global flow of goods will stagnate, and the bedrock of our civilization will unravel.

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I Love Capitalism! I hate Socialism!

As a naturalized American by choice, I love my adopted country in which I spent my entire adult life. I grew up under a socialist republic and a socialist economic system run by the Communist Party apparatchiks. My twenty years there can help me make a clear and realistic comparison of the two economic systems.

It is obvious that I love the freedom of capitalism otherwise I would not be here. I hated socialism, the steppingstone to communism so much that I left behind everything I knew and loved, my mom and dad, my large extended family, my friends, and so many memories.

When the communist dictator who ruled the country with an iron fist for over four decades was executed in 1989, the people were elated that they did not experience the communist “paradise” Marx proposed theoretically, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs." They could only imagine how much worse the Communist Man would have been after the failed and miserable Socialist Man.

Under socialism, the government controls all the means of production, dictates all quotas and makes five-year plans for the economy.

Paul B. Skousen defined Socialism simply as “the government force to control and change society,” and how it “progresses like a snake eating its tail.” Skousen wrote about the seven pillars of socialism:

1.      All-powerful rulers (the government and the communist party)

2.      Societal division into castes (India) or classes (proletariat and the party members)

3.      All things in common (everything allegedly belonged to the proletariat but nothing belonged to the people if they wanted to claim it)

4.      All things regulated (by a myriad of laws and constant decrees)

5.      Compliance is forced (large standing army, police, security police, and economic police; citizens are not allowed to own arms)

6.      Control of all information (two newspapers allowed; printing only party indoctrination and opinions)

7.      No unalienable rights. (rights were given by the party and taken back at will)

Under socialism we had no rights. We could not speak our opinions to neighbors, friends, family, or at work. We could not express dissatisfaction with the regime. We disappeared overnight if we did, never to be seen again, or perhaps years later after hard labor in a gulag or in a re-education camp.

There were two papers, Scinteia (The Spark) and Romania Libera (Free Romania), the Communist Party’s platforms of misinformation and communist indoctrination. We hated them so much for the constant lies that we used them as toilet paper. It was also necessary because we could not find toilet paper on the market or it had wood chips imbedded in the sheets (ouch).

When I first stepped into an American grocery store in winter, I was shocked at the shelves bursting with food of all kinds, fruits, and vegetables. I had to remember to close my mouth. Such “evil” capitalism, providing plenty of food for its citizens and a good life!

Our socialist shelves were empty and the meat department sold bones for soup. Vegetables were not available, save for a few wrinkled and sprouted potatoes. Lines were endless every day for bread, milk, butter, flour, rice, cooking oil, and other necessities. And the quantities were rationed.

Socialized medicine was free, unlike capitalism, but doctors were overwhelmed by the number of patients, and wrote prescriptions, knowing that we would not be able to find the drugs prescribed because the pharmacy shelves were bare.

Shop clerks and pharmacists sold the few items supplied to family, close friends, and for bribes. Shortages were constant because the centrally planned economy was a failure.

The black market was alive and well, however, if marketeers were caught, they served years and years in prison, plus restitution of whatever the government decided.

Nobody must do without drugs in the capitalism system. There are many ways for people unable to buy medicine or medical care to find help in capitalism.

The socialist justice system found a person guilty as charged and a lawyer had to prove his/her innocence in a court of law overseen by the Communist Party workers and activists.

Shockingly, even though a person is innocent until proven guilty, people get away with crimes under capitalism over technicalities or a corrupt judicial system. They are innocent until proven guilty and the evidence of guilt sometimes is questionable or not enough.

I love capitalism because I was able to educate myself to the level that I wanted. I did not have to have a family with a history of Communist Party membership and activism to be allowed in college. Meritocracy was important but so was the affiliation to the Party. The children of the Party got in college first, no perfect exam scores necessary.

I love capitalism because I can attend any church I want. Nobody questions my love of country if I believe in God, own a Bible, and go to church.

Socialism frowns on people attending church and believing in God. Churches are allowed for baptisms, weddings, and funerals, and as a way for priests to spy on their parishioners. Most regular church goers were old men and women.

The titles of books I could purchase and own were approved and published by the party’s printing house. If anyone owned more personal things than their neighbors, or books, tapes, records not approved by the party censors, then the economic police would come knocking and that person would go to jail after the police confiscated everything for “evidence” and disappeared the items for later distribution to party loyalists.

I can own a car or two under capitalism; I can drive a car, and I can learn to operate other vehicles if I choose. I can have my own phone, my own typewriter that is not registered with the police, my own computer, and other electronics.

In capitalism I could go on vacation if I saved enough money, I could get a passport to fly or sail anywhere in the world I desire to go. The socialist system’s police or the communist party would tell me no.

The Communist Party, not unlike the current Social Democrats, promised people “no religion, no countries, open borders, no possessions, and no worries.” What a bad life that was! If we crossed the border we were shot. The party kept us locked inside borders with high wire fences and heavily armed guards.

I can have a Christmas tree and decorations all over my lawn under capitalism, and, unless there is an HOA, I do not need permission to do so. People celebrate Christmas under capitalism, although lately the Muslim contingent of the American population is offended by our Christian symbolisms.

We had to work at Christmas time during socialism, and the government changed Santa Clause to Mos Gerila (Old Frozen Man). The communist party encouraged the celebration of New Year and forbade caroling.

Private ownership of anything in socialism was highly discouraged and punished with prison as bourgeois. I can own anything I want under capitalism if I have capital to pay for it.

Borrowing money in socialism was prohibitive and driven by extremely high interest rates in the 30-40 percent range. There was only one bank, the Party’s bank.

Every move in socialism was regulated, penalized, fined, taxed, and restricted by the Party rulers and prison was assigned at random.

Under socialism, government-sanctioned rights are the norm. As Skousen wrote, “When a government selectively protects some rights and ignores others, especially property rights, then socialism has started.”

I like capitalism because the health care system provides care to everyone, legal citizen or not, able to pay or not. They can pay later or use previously purchased health care insurance. Most doctors are well trained, and medicines are available without having to bribe the medical staff.

Under socialism, doctors were poorly paid, poorly trained, and did not care much about the outcome of patients from surgery. To this day, many who grew up under socialism are scared to go into hospital even though the medical system has vastly improved over decades of free market system.

Education was good under socialism although it had a large component of communist indoctrination. In capitalist society, unfortunately, the formerly spectacular education has turned into an indoctrination venue for socialism and socialist activism. Sadly, most young people are ignorant and lost in their devices and technology.

Over the years, the socialist indoctrination amplified in schools, slowly at first, but by now America is on its way to become a socialist country run by Socialist Democrats even though capitalism made them economically well off when compared to all other western nations.

We are at the point of no return because the Democratic Socialists of America Party has adopted the socialist platform of the twentieth century’s former Iron Curtain socialist countries run by the Communist Party. One interesting question remains; will Americans accept the government’s ownership of the means of production?

 

 

 

Equitable Distribution of Robotic Output to Non-Working Humans

As the recent riots in France organized by the Red-Green Axis and Labor Unions have shown, global communism in the twenty-first century is here to stay. It has failed miserably everywhere in the twentieth century and left behind one hundred million dead in its existence since the Bolsheviks took power in Russia. The dead were not necessarily all sent to gulags to die or were executed. The majority were starved to death by their own Marxist government.

The French and other European countries have generous social/welfare programs and spend as much as 40 percent of their GDP for that purpose. They have free health care, paid parental leave, paid family leave, free childcare, free pre-school education, five weeks of paid vacation annually, 35-hour workweek, generous unemployment, housing benefits, and heavily subsidized higher education.

As artificial intelligence and robots take over and the techno world elites promise that work will become obsolete for humans, an important question emerges, how will the spoils of robotic labor be divided among humans? What is the equity in that?

Elites have decided that a new kind of Marxism must emerge to “equitably divide” the output of the robots for all the non-working humans.

Karl Marx wrote in his 1875 Critique of the Gotha Programme, referring to free access to goods and services, “To each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” (Jeder nach seinen Fähigkeiten, jedem nach seinen Bedürfnissen).

A communist system will offer abundance of goods and services that would satisfy everybody’s needs and wants. In reality, no such abundance existed under socialism, the precursor to communism. People were left hungry and wanting for basic needs, services, goods, medicines, and food.

Marx wanted output to be divided equally among all, regardless of each individual’s contribution to the production process. If you complied with the ruling Marxists, then you lived and ate bones and scraps they provided after the best of everything was sent to export. If you did not, then swift prison and execution was your fate.

While the Soviet socialist republics and their satellite countries suffered economic deprivations, the free-market capitalists prospered at all levels of society. Unarmed, dispossessed of their property and lied to by their Communist Party governments, the Soviet satellite countries could not mount a serious fight against the twentieth century Marxist governments.

Marxists were materialistic in their vision, never cared much for the humanistic side. Humans like self-determination, not the promise of an „equitable“ division of robotic production.

Human objection might be silenced by the accusations of the invented „hate speech“ and „disinformation.“ The global governments define the two terms loosely because they engage themselves in similar activities. They want to twist their interpretation any which way they desire.

Free markets meritocracy not equity has allowed citizens to raise their standard of living through effort and hard work. Will they be willing to sacrifice their own desires and aspirations of a better life and subjugate themselves to a global government and their „equitable“ division of labor output? Will they submit totally to faceless robots and their technocratic owners? Will they submit willingly to the World Economic Forum’s promise that „you will own nothing and will be happy?“

The tech elites‘ Marxist vision demands that we cannot be the agents of our own lives and must give up our individual goals. But the human spirit „requires autonomy, and that cannot be replaced by automatons.“

The globalist elites pushing the new vision of „equity“ are using the main stream media to brainwash the population into believing that the system is going to work. Edmund Burke wrote that „all men have equal rights, but not to equal things.“ Since this equity among humans involves robots who do the work, how is this equity going to work? How is the economic pie resulting from the robots‘ work going to be divided?

Most importantly, will humans accept a „less than fully human life powered by robots?“ What will they do with the life they have on Earth? Additionally, will robots and techno elites care for their medical needs?

 

 

Communists Irradiating Dissidents

One hideous practice to control speech during Ceausescu's communist regime was inviting outspoken anti-communists and dissident writers and poets to meet with a Securitate colonel at the Secret Police headquarters. The invitees would show up out of fear and were shown into a bare waiting room painted in drab and depressing gray.  

After waiting patiently for a few hours in total silence, the person in question was told that the colonel was not available and the appointment had to be rescheduled. 

Six months and sometimes a year later, depending on their genetic makeup and the length of irradiation, most of those invited to Securitate headquarters came down with cancer of unusually large tumors. Few made the connection between their visits to Securitate headquarters and their devastating illnesses. 

We learned this horrible truth in 1988 from Gen. Mihai Ion Pacepa, the head of the Romanian Securitate police who defected to the west and spent the rest of his life in a secret location in the U.S. 

Gen. Pacepa revealed the existence of the evil program to kill opponents of the communist regime with lethal doses of radiation. The scary waiting room where the dissidents had been waiting for the invisible colonel to arrive was equipped with a cobalt device that radiated them.

Salt, an Element of Life

In the elements of life category: salt.

Salt, NaCl, is essential to life, in a rather precarious balance - too much is bad and can kill you and too little is dangerous and can kill you as well. Salt without iodine is also an issue.

During the Roman Empire, salt was more precious than gold and Roman soldiers were paid in both coins and salt, salarium.

The Latin word for salt, salarium, gave us the English word, salary.

We can produce salt in three different ways:

1. We can evaporate it from the ocean in a painstaking process. The neolithic people in Boulby processed salt at scale thousands of years ago.

2. Rock salt can be mined from the ground, a process that is quite old too. For example, the Khewra salt mine in Pakistan dates back to Alexander the Great. This Khewra salt is sold under the name of Himalayan pink salt. The Khewra mine is not really that close to the Himalayan foothills; it is about 200 miles away.

In north-west Austria, the Hallein mine is so old that they found within it the skeleton of a Celtic miner who had been trapped there thousands of years ago. No longer exploited, this mine is now an exploratory cavern with its own funicular railway.

3. The least difficult way to exploit underground salt is to bring it up in the form of brine, without any humans ever setting foot in the mine. This is called "solution mining." Brine is brought up from underground with pressurized water. This solution has a 30 percent salt content. To get an idea of how much salt is in this brine, compare it to sea water which only contains 3 percent salt. However, the electrolytic process to extract the salt uses a lot of energy and does release pollutants which are being carefully disposed of now, hopefully.

No dynamite or drills are used, just pressurized water.