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.

No dynamite or drills are used, just pressurized water.

Adakaleh, the Island that Became the Romanian Atlantis

Adakaleh, a small island on the Danube in central Europe, about 2 km in length, transported the visitor back to the time of the Ottoman Empire, a piece of land quite possibly taken from the imaginary One Thousand and One Arabian Nights stories we secretly read in high school.

The population spoke Turkish and delighted in growing roses, serving Turkish delights for dessert in the afternoon, and making unfiltered coffee in heated sand, so bitter that one’s numbed tongue failed to register the amount of caffeine poured from tiny copper pots, with enough grounds left to read one’s future in the images on the insides of the cup.

The tiny island survived wars of nations and fights against the Ottoman Empire, a no man’s land that no longer exists on any map. The entire island is now submerged in the Danube’s waters transformed into the hydro-power lake of the Iron Gates I and II (Portile de Fier).

At a depth of dozens of meters, a diver can find the fortress wall, narrow paved streets people no longer walk on, and lost homes submerged by a development agreed upon by the former Yugoslavia and Romania on which territories the Danube traversed. A few powerful men decided to drown a part of history in the name of progress.

In the twenty-first century, the Danube, the second largest river after the Volga, flows 1,775 miles from the Black Forest Mountains in Germany through (or borders) countries before it flows into the drainage basin by Black Sea – Austria, Slovakia, Hungary, Croatia, Serbia, Romania, Bulgaria, Moldova, and Ukraine. The river was once a frontier of the Roman Empire.

Close to the Romanian town of Orsova, the island was a strategic point for centuries in the conflicts that Europe had experienced, particularly the advancement and occupations of the Ottoman Empire. Fortified by Austria in the 18^th century to keep the Ottoman Empire at bay, the island was eventually occupied by the Turks, fast becoming an enclave with a strange statute unlike any other.

The Treaty of Berlin in 1878 redesigned that map of Europe but forgot about Adakaleh Island and left it off the redrawn maps. Adkaleh, between Serbia and Romania, became an autonomous entity which had no taxation on goods. The Turkish locals fished, grew roses, made rose oil for perfumes, and planted tobacco. The Adakaleh cigarettes were famous all over Europe. The lack of taxation made them more desirable.

The 600-1,000 inhabitants had a strong Turkish culture and followed the call to prayer by the central mosque. Kings and famous people visited Adakaleh for its unique culture and place in Europe. It was an interesting ethnic bridge between Serbia and Romania.  

The island’s history entered an extinction path when the communist governments of Yugoslavia and Romania decided in the 1960s to build a hydropower station and a dam exactly where Adakaleh Island was located. Nobody asked the Turkish inhabitants what they wanted to do and there was no vote. People were told that progress requires sacrifices.

Locals were given two options, they could move to Turkey, their historical homeland, or move to the region of Dobrogea by the Black Sea where there was already a Turkish community also left behind from the many incursions of the Ottoman Empire into Romania. Romania had fought the Ottoman Empire for five hundred years as a crossing portal to the rest of Europe.

A tomb and a few fortress walls were moved to Simian Island for historical reasons. Old people on the island lost everything they had ever known. In the 1970s, when the dam was completed, the deep and placid lake bore no trace of the formerly thriving island. The soul of the community, with all the homes and narrow streets, was sunk in the dam’s deep waters.

Adakaleh Island became a Romanian Atlantis deep beneath the waters of the Iron Gates I and II.

 

 

 

 

Grief and Loss

When someone passes away, the grief is overwhelming. We carry grief around for a long time and cling to all precious memories with that person.

We lose a loved one when he/she dies and a second time when we finally let go. But letting go takes a long time; each person carries this grief into every facet of life for a long time. The longer you have lived with this person, the longer and more difficult the grieving period is.

When I lost my mom four years ago, my grieving was as profound as the deepest oceanic trench. My mom lived with us my entire life except for two years when we were separated by a large ocean. By contrast, I only lived in my dad’s house for twenty years. When he died, at the age of sixty-one, the pain was equally profound. He had sacrificed himself for the good of our family and for the good of the extended family.

Each person goes through the five stages of grief in vastly different circumstances. People experience denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance in their own personal way. One never knows when a part of grieving comes and goes because, most importantly, there is no timeline for grieving.

Sadness, anger, guilt, fear, and confusion come and go, alternating in intensity. Insomnia, headaches, and fatigue can be quite intense in some. Concentration falters and people forget things that are less important to them when compared to their painful loss. Some cry a lot [like me], withdraw from daily life or from things that had given them satisfaction and pleasure previously, and change routine.

People grieve over the loss of loved ones, health, illness, friendship, ability, mobility, security, divorce, separation, and an empty nest.

 

 

 

 

Equality of Outcome Is Equality of Misery

“All men have equal rights, but not to equal things.” – Edmund Burke

Vilfredo Pareto, an Italian mathematician trained in physics and mathematics, was interested in many fields of study, i.e., sociology, civil engineering, economics, political science, and philosophy. As a Renaissance scholar at the Lausanne School of Economics, he contributed to elite theory.

Elite theory argues that real power in any society is held by a small group with access to high paying jobs, resources, and organizations. This group includes politicians, federal judges, corporate executives, billionaires, military high ranks, university professors, think tanks, and the mainstream media.

Pareto analyzed choices that consumers made and drew conclusions important to the area of income distribution. He helped develop the area of microeconomics. The concept of Pareto efficiency in microeconomics was established based on his claim that income follows a Pareto distribution, a composite of his observations that 80% of wealth in Italy belonged to 20% of the population.

Income distribution reflects how a nation’s total income or Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is distributed across the nation’s population.

The Pareto Principle is a rule based on observations that “80 percent of effects tend to come from 20 percent of causes.” This can be money, wealth, time, or other variables.

A good expression of “misery loves company” is the communists’ effort to make everyone equal, paying them equally, and working them equally. The result was an outcome of equal misery.

The Social Democrat fringe of the left is seeking equality of outcomes and are enforcing DEI hiring practices of diversity, equity, and inclusion. Regardless of a person’s motivation, ability, achievement, training, education, the left wants equality of outcomes at all costs.

The amount of skill embodied by the workforce is defined economically as human capital. Human capital is measured by the amount of education and training. One variable that was never considered was ability and the type of education that a student pursues. It is painfully evident that many young Americans opt for higher education in fields that are not helpful in finding professional employment. They have a useless college diploma. Their levels of ability to survive as young adults in a more complex society are lower than previous generations.

The population at large produces value within any group but there are intrinsic disparities in achievement based on the dramatic differences in ability and the tendency to want to work an eight to five job.

The over-achiever 20 percent of the population have high ability and high propensity to work and thus produce most value within any group – innovations, inventions, solutions, and opportunities.

The other 80 percent of the population produces some value as well, however, regardless of their contributions, they demand the same equal reward (outcome). They want to rig the system in such a way that everybody, regardless of their individual contribution, receives the same equal reward. They demand equity in the name of fairness.

In the communist system, when the motivated workers received the same pay (reward) as those who pretended to work and hid during the workday or presented doctor’s excuses for weeks on end for non-existent illnesses (after they bribed the doctors), the high producers stopped working so hard and became slackers just like the unproductive workers. The pay remained the same and the workers, blue or white collar, followed the motto, “we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us.”

The result was equal misery for all. Nobody contributed more than the least of them and the race to the bottom began and stayed there for decades. The enforcement of equal outcomes under socialism/communism produced equal misery, uniformity, depression, and oppression. Did the Communist Party in charge of the country care about the state of the population? No, those in power only cared about themselves and their immediate families.

 

 

 

 

 

The Uniform Uglification of American Life

If walls could talk, they would tell stories about historical turmoil, beauty, wealth, and the uglification of architecture. Trends come and go but people forget the history behind such trends, whether they were long or short-lived.

The evidence is out in the open, for all to see. People are busy and overlook the ugliness surrounding them, an ugliness which is meant to be depressing and demoralizing.

Beautiful architecture is happy and exalting. That is why we visit art museums, palaces, European churches, and art galleries. For a few minutes of our lives, we want to experience beauty, creativity, and unimaginable opulence.

In 1960s America, many beautiful and historical buildings were torn down, replaced by ugly concrete and steel towers, utilitarian and easy to maintain. A quick search reveals that historic buildings were demolished across the United States because of “economic pressures, urban renewal policies, shifting architectural tastes, and limited preservation awareness.”

About the same time, the Soviet-controlled Iron Curtain countries also destroyed historical buildings and replaced them with ugly concrete blocks of utilitarian communist Bauhaus architecture, a resilient, simple, ugly, grey concrete and steel buildings, monuments to the Bolshevik communist revolution, no elements of former bourgeois society despised by uneducated communist agitators and rulers.

Bauhaus architecture was the child of Walter Gropius in Weimar and the German Bauhaus school founded by him in 1919. Depressing and plain, made of glass, steel, and concrete, it was Gesamtkunstwerk (total work of art) which became part of the modernist architecture exported all over the world.

Bauhaus existed between 1919 and 1933. Its vision of mass production and function was adopted by all former Iron Curtain countries in Europe; they started churning out ugly concrete block apartments where the helpless populations were herded into from their former homes and farms which the Communist Party had confiscated.

Walter Gropius’s (1883-1969) vision spread into modern design, modernist architecture, graphic design, interior design, industrial design, and typography. The Bauhaus school was closed in 1933 under pressure from the Nazi regime who considered it “a center of communist intellectualism.”

Then there is former President Obama’s library, a modernist form of ugliness, a cross between a high security prison and a Star Wars movie set.

Significant and beautiful buildings from various monarchies in Europe were destroyed by Bolsheviks to make room for their hideous communist-style architecture which was depressing and demoralizing to look at. The destruction was called systematization of society, testing how much the population was willing to accept the communist oppression before they snapped.

After the Covid lockdowns I noticed the emergence of a dispiriting trend of change of all the formerly happy buildings of fast-food restaurants. The building remodeling was the same, shades of grey, light grey, dark grey, black, and brown, all dispirited and depressive colors. It was a twenty-first century form of minimalism and sophistication, I told myself. But mood is mood and I could not argue in a positive way about the blanket of grey.

Healthy subjects in a study conducted by the University of Manchester in 2010 chose yellow as the color that governed their mood. Anxious and depressed subjects participating in the study chose the color grey because it represented “a dark state of mind, a colorless and monotonous life, gloom, misery or disinterest in life.” Depressed people “tend to describe life as ‘monochromatic’ or as having ‘lost its color.’

Then I started seeing a lack of color in department stores and furniture upholstery – offerings were grey, beige, black, and more grey. The furniture, whether plastic or wood, was grey.

Accessories were gray, towels were gray, shoes and tennis shoes were grey, plates, napkins, carpets, backpacks, coolers, tapestries, plastic, and glassware were all grey. There was so much grey to give a survivor of communism a permanent headache and depression. The color grey was even declared the “color of the decade.”

It was apparent to me that corporate globalists have decided in the last few years to transform the face of our happy and colorful society into a drab and communist-looking tapestry. I recognized the bothersome uniformity from my previous twenty years of life under communism.

Why would communism pick such drab, dark, dull, and uninspired colors? Because they wanted to keep the population under their control, oppressed, sad, and depressed. Everything became a soul-less grey and darker grey, light grey, medium grey, with barely lit stores as if to conceal the stains of grey misery.

After the lockdowns public buildings, restaurants, fast food chains, and even apartment complexes and homes had undergone a similar transformation to various shades of grey, black, brown, and beige. Maybe paint was only offered in grey and it was cheap?

Fast food buildings removed large windows and added small, prison-like windows, and the previously happy colors and signs disappeared. The choices of towels, furniture, cars, clothes, and other products have narrowed to the same basic hues of gray, black, beige, and brown. I knew it as Bauhaus utilitarian ugly.

Granted that lighter colors are less showy and easier to match more tastes, then why the previous opulence of colors and choices? Was it that the well-heeled wanted simpler and minimalist lines to show off their good taste? There is no denying that homes and cars painted in less showy colors sell much easier and quicker.

Austrian architect Adolf Loos said in his 1908 essay “Ornament and Crime” that “evolved people gravitated toward clean lines and plain surfaces,” unornamented and clutter-free.

Le Corbusier, the “father” of modern architecture, wrote that “color is suited to simple races, peasants, and savages.” Rich Americans call those who like bright colors, Lilly Pulitzer people. The Lilly clothing line is famous for bright hues of pink, blue, yellow, orange, and green.

Bauhaus spread internationally to the United States and to Tel Aviv via Jewish Bauhaus architect immigrants. According to sources, “The White City of Tel Aviv has the highest concentration of Bauhaus architecture in the world.”

As Bauhaus spread increasingly across the world, selected and pushed by globalist corporate controllers, it is no surprise that the color chosen for this decade is grey and the style is Bauhaus utilitarian.

When I visited my favorite department store, which was always decorated with red, white, and green way before the Christmas season, decorations displayed a gray table with gray chairs, gray plates, black glasses, and white napkin holders. One solitaire painting of a red bush surrounded by green background was overlooking the funereal décor.

This is not just about depressing the population with ugly buildings, cars, and shades of gray, it is about the global transformation of the west into a socialist/communist society to better control the naïve population in every way. And the uniform uglification of architecture is just one way to do so.

 

 

 

George Carlin, a Genial Comedian

The most genial comedian was George Carlin. His ingenious pistol delivery of truthful political commentary was unmatched by any comedian before and since.

No topic was off the table:

1.      “Save the planet, save the trees” – the motto of the people who do not know how to save themselves, much less the planet. The planet is fine, it has been here for four and a half billion years; it is the people who are not fine.

2.       Tired of Earth Day and sanctimonious environmentalists, “white bourgeois liberals.” They only care about a safe, clean place to live for their families. They don’t want a wall around the southern border to stop illegal immigration, they want a tall wall around their homes.

3.       Tired of bicycle paths that seldom anybody uses.

4.       Humans have been here for 100,000 years; are we putting the planet in jeopardy? We are putting the wallets of middle class in jeopardy, forced to drive tin cans, exposed to geoengineering, eating fake meat, sweat in their homes, all in a bogus effort to “save the planet,” an effort which benefits the climate change industry.

5.       The planet survived through “volcanoes, earthquakes, plate tectonics, continental drifts, solar flares, sunspots, magnetic storms, magnetic reversal of the poles, hundreds of years of bombardment by asteroids, comets, meteors, worldwide floods, tidal waves, worldwide fires, land and oceanic erosion, cosmic rays, and recurring ice ages.” Plastic bags, straws, and aluminum cans are going to have an influence?

6.  The planet will be fine long after we are gone and there will be nothing left behind of us, “maybe a little Styrofoam.” We are just a surface nuisance in the grand scheme of the planet’s survival.

Seven offensive words banned the genial George Carlin from radio and television. After that, he performed on cable and in clubs where FCC rules did not apply.

Today those words that got George Carlin banned are found in many lyrics of ghetto rap music, music that Americans of all stripes play in their cars and as entertainment everywhere.

Ateneul Roman, a Historic Concert Hall

The beautiful concert hall, Ateneul Roman, was built on land owned by the Romanian Association of Equitation. The association was planning to build a circular arena for equitation however, for an unknown reason, the project was abandoned after the circular foundation was built.

When the land was sold, the decision was made to build an opera house, Ateneul Roman. The French architect, Albert Galleron, did not demolish the foundation, instead he decided to build on top of it.

The problem was that the state did not have money. Enter Scarlat Rosetti, who made a huge donation, but it was insufficient. The state decided in 1885 to run a public fund-raising lottery promoted under the banner, “dati un leu pentru Ateneu.” (give a coin for the Ateneu). Surprisingly, thousands of people bought tickets with the silver coin (4.17 g silver) called ‘leu’ and 12,300 tickets were sold.

In the presence of King Carol I, the foundation stone was placed on October 26, 1886. Ateneul Roman was inaugurated two years later on February 14,1888.

The forty-one meters tall cupola was built with twenty steel arches weighing forty-two metric tons. It was shipped in pieces from Germany and assembled in Bucharest. The most beautiful feature of the building is the twenty-five meters long and three meters tall fresco of various scenes from Romania’s history. The painter, Costin Petrescu, spent five years creating his masterpiece, consulting at times with historian Nicolae Iorga, to make sure that the details were historically accurate.

After the communists took power in 1948, the beautiful fresco was covered with a red velvet curtain, which ultimately saved it from destruction. The fresco’s images of kings, churches, palaces, and other bourgeois symbols offended the ideological sensibilities of the communists.

For decades, the communists destroyed everything that reminded them of the old regime, beautiful statues, buildings, paintings, art objects, books, and frescoes.

Without explanation, in 1966, the red curtain came down. The communists moved on to other places to destroy and forgot about Ateneul Roman. However, the last scene of the fresco, which depicted King Carol II and his son Mihai, was destroyed, and replaced by a frame of communist agitators with their hammer and sickle red flags.

If this is reminiscent of the destruction of statues of American heroes in 2020-2021, the renaming of schools, streets, roads, highways, universities, it is because the destroyers are the twenty-first century communist agitators who are attempting to take over America. That is how communists operate and communism spreads!

 

                                                

The Story of the Communist People's House

The People’s House, described as hideous by the West, now renamed The Palace of the Parliament, stands out as the heaviest building in the world, around four million metric tons, with 365,000 square meters, and eighty-four meters in height. It is about two percent larger than the great pyramid of Giza. The building is so heavy that it sinks 6 mm every year. It is the most extreme example of the communist systematization program (urban planning) when architectural gems were demolished to make room for Ceausescu's grandiose plans.

One of its engineers spoke about the two anti-nuclear attack bunkers beneath the building with twenty kilometers of tunnels, large enough for electric cars. The allegation that the tunnels reach Otopeni airport has not been proven.

It is said that the origin of the building was Ceausescu’s visit in North Korea in 1971 when he experienced monumental buildings and large boulevards. The idea grew in his mind for a magnificent palace when the earthquake of 1977 turned many buildings in downtown Bucharest into rubble.

He ordered an entire area, Uranus Izvor, about seven square kilometers, erased completely. To realize his dream, tens of thousands of people were forcibly removed from their homes, old churches demolished, Brancovenesc hospital, 37 factories and workshops, Mihai Voda Monastery, and the National Archives were demolished and moved elsewhere.

The beautiful Vacaresti Monastery, with its galleries and shady porticoes was gone, replaced by Ceausescu’s self-glorifying palace, a monstrosity with thirteen floors and 400,000 square feet of empty marbled and chandeliered space and a central reception area the size of a football field, adorned with gold leaf and pink gypsum with a five-ton crystal chandelier hanging over the staircase. This is truly an entrance worthy of Versailles.

At the time when ordinary citizens were forced to live in semi-darkness, with one 60-Watt bulb in their cold apartments, this chandelier burned more electricity than two Romanian villages. The palace consumed eighty-five thousand watts of electricity.

The billion-dollar building’s unfinished roof is part of the one-third of the building which remained incomplete by the time the megalomaniacal Ceausescu was executed. Five years under construction, the building was incomplete because Ceausescu visited his palace often and ordered parts of it that had been built (staircases, rooms, decorations) to be destroyed and built again. His palace was five times larger than Versailles. His dream destroyed so much of the Romanian soul and its history.

The People’s House was built around the clock by soldiers and “volunteers.” The chief architect was a twenty-eight-year-old woman named Anca Petrescu who supervised seven hundred architects. The materials, walnut and cherry wood, marble, and stone, were extracted from the Carpathian Mountains. The chandeliers were made from 3,500 tons of Romanian crystal. The wool rugs were so large that they could not have been manufactured in the factory, they had to bring the looms inside, and the rugs were woven for each room as needed.

Ceausescu’s palace was built as a symbol of communist power at a time when the population was standing in endless lines daily for bread, cooking oil, flour, rice, and other necessities. Everything was rationed, people were told how much calories to consume according to their profession, medical care was rationed, medicines were rationed, and people were cold in their apartments and had to endure the lack of water and rationed electricity delivery.

The building was never finished and inaugurated before Ceausescu’s execution on Christmas Day 1989. It remains unfinished today, a symbol of the megalomaniacal communist regime ruled by one obsessed man and his insane wife.

 

Roman Coins, Impossible to Spend

Ostia was the major port hub in the Roman Empire from which the Roman Empire managed trade across the Mediterranean – grain, timber, olive oil, luxuries, silk, and wild animals for gladiatorial games.

We know that Rome traded with the East for spices, ivory, jewels, and other luxuries from existing documents and a wall painting found at Ostia dating from second century A.D. which depicted a Roman trading ship being loaded with goods.

Trading land routes were blocked when the powerful Parthian Empire in Persia cut off established trading roads. Hippalus, a Greek merchant from the first century B.C., learned how to use the southwest monsoon to sail to and from the Indian sub-continent. When he provided a good geographical map of the winds, other merchants took advantage of this opportunity and trade flourished. For forty days in July and August, merchants voyaged from Arabian ports to the Malabar ports in the southwestern coasts of India. In December and January, same merchants returned via the Red Sea or the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean. Trade routes stretched as far as Sri Lanka, Burma, Malaya, and even China.

During the reign of Augustus (27 B.C. to 14 A.D.) commerce with India satisfied the demand from rich Romans who purchased jewels, silk, pearls, and other luxuries. One ship brought curiosities, a man born without arms, a large river turtle, snakes, and a “partridge as big as a vulture.” Roman design export bowls of Arretine ware (Arezzo, Italy) were found in old trading posts in India. More than 120 ships sailed each year on the monsoon from Roman-controlled Egypt to India. Alexandrian Greek merchants provided all the raw materials and luxuries that the Roman Empire demanded. Exotic and rare pearls and gemstones were brought from Sri Lanka.

The Greek merchants paid the Indian traders at first with gold coins. Although the Indians could not spend the currency, the fact that Roman gold and silver coins were always dependable in the amount of gold and silver contained, the Indians used it as store of value in the form of bullion. Pliny wrote that the quality of Roman coins, the same weight and content in gold and silver, made Roman coins so desirable to collect. The King of Sri Lanka was impressed by the “honest traders of Rome.”

The first Roman coins were found in India in 1775. Archeologists and historians at the time assumed that the coins had been abandoned or lost in extenuating circumstances, buried, and forgotten. However, more recently, historians believed that Indians kept the coins not as a medium of exchange but as bullion. It is a known fact that Indian girls’ dowries are composed of gold jewelry and gems which the brides wear with elaborate wedding dresses made of colorful silks.

However, when the silver coins were debased under Emperor Nero, the Indian merchants’ confidence in Roman coins waned and traders used other substitutes for exchange such as high-quality tableware, glass, linen, coral, lamps, wine, and fashioned gems. Eventually, Arabs and Persians took over the trade as the Roman trade with India came to a halt in the third century A.D.

Venice, Built on Tree Trunks in a Lagoon

Romantic Venice was a city built on a lagoon. It was first a refuge for Romans to flee from barbarian invaders such as the Huns and Germanic tribes in Northern Italy during the decline of the Roman Empire which fell in 476 A.D.

The early Venetian settlers made homes from reed, wood, and clay on the marshy islands of the Venetian Lagoon, on patches of dry land. Because their first church, San Giacomo di Rialto, was consecrated on March 25, 421 A.D., the traditional date of Venice’s founding was 421 A.D. Its first Dodge (leader) was elected in 697 A.D.

To build more and heavier structures, millions of tree trunks from ancient forests, alder wood, oak, and larch, were driven into the soft lagoon mud. These trunks were petrified when exposed to salty, oxygen-free water, and formed a base of stony pillars. On top, horizontal planks and Istrian stone were laid to make it even stronger.

It is alleged that 100k alder tree trunks support the San Marco’s Campanile or Bell Tower. It collapsed in July 1902 due to structural failure after 1,000 years of existence and was rebuilt and rededicated in 1912.

There are sixty-two easily accessible islands by boat, water taxi, and water bus but, depending on who you ask, there are more than 120 islands, some of which cannot be easily accessed or not at all. One is an actual cemetery, and another is a place where the black plague victims were housed.

 

Vindolanda

An interesting example of democracy is found in the Roman Middle Republic when soldiers elected their own Centurions. It was quite common to see a 22-year-old Centurion serving on his second or third campaign. Who were the Centurions? Like the soldiers they commanded, Centurions were part-time militiamen. We know about this election from Polybius who described the process.

An interesting example of nepotism and friends in high places comes from Roman times. 

The Vindolanda tablets discovered south of Hadrian’s wall provide an insight into life on the Roman frontier in Britannia.

The posting for a soldier in this particular garrison was difficult.

Tablet number 891 which was discovered in 2017 refers to the earliest period in the fort’s occupation between 85 and 92 A.D.

The tablets survived because they were thrown away into the fort’s ditch, among many discarded military pieces that are now archaeological treasures.

In this letter, the writer asks for lighter military duties for a friend named Crispus. The writer uses flattery to appeal to the officer Verecundus’ “justice and kindness.”

Another interesting find among the tablets of Vindolanda is a diploma from Cheshire issued in the reign of Trajan to a Spanish DECURION by which he is granted Roman citizenship and the right of legal marriage with a present or future wife.

A DECURION was the leader of 10 Roman cavalry legionnaires.

When the Cows Come Home

This idiomatic expression in English refers humorously to an argument without a conclusion, something that will last not just an extended period but potentially forever.

The same phrase has a concrete meaning in Romanian and brings to mind a childhood experience from long ago and a shepherd named Nae whom everyone called Nea Nae, a form of respect, like an uncle.

Nea Nae was the village drunk in my maternal grandparents’ village. He was also the cows’ shepherd. The village had about 10,000 inhabitants with a population density of 215 people per square kilometer. Homes were clustered close to each other with enough yards for an outhouse and a garden.

The village, now called a ‘commune’ (interesting choice of words), was surrounded by pastures and co-operative plots of land, owned by the Communist Party government, and a few individual parcels on which villagers planted crops and shared the harvest with the state (not willingly).

Most homes had a milking cow, chicken, rabbits, ducks, and a pig, with a menagerie of outdoor cats to keep rodents under control. And this is where Nea Nae came into play. The villagers hired him to take care of the cows, sort of.

Every morning, Nea Nae followed the large herd of cows coming out one by one from each yard to the grazing pasture outside of the village, rotating the pastures in various ends to keep the grass growing. Before the sun set, he followed them back to the village, and one by one, the cows entered their respective yards, knowing exactly where their homes were. So much for the bad publicity that cows are dumb. They were smart enough to follow Nea Nae’s directions to the pastures and back home to the right yard. Each home was separated for privacy by tall wood fences, but the gates were opened by the owners, and the cows miraculously knew which yard was theirs.

‘When the cows came home’ was a real spectacle to watch. Sitting on my bench perch facing the unpaved road, I witnessed the cows return home from my grandparents “ulita” (road) many evenings. The cows never fell in the deep ditches dug up for irrigation and rain drainage on the side of the road. They slowly moved on to their destinations. The cow patties left behind were like land mines to avoid at all costs when we played.

Nea Nae, a kind and gentle soul with a well-tanned and ruddy complexion, was already tipsy by then. He went home to eat and then to the “circiuma” in the middle of the village to finish off drinking with his friends. They drowned their sorrows with him daily.

The villagers drank the cheap alcohol religiously provided by the state to keep the masses compliant and working menial and difficult jobs for subsistence level pay.

Nea Nae used to say that he was never going to die in his own bed because he was seldom in it. He slept on the floor partly under the bed most of the time, after he fell off from the very narrow twin bed he owned.

He used to be married in his younger years, but his wife had left him on account of his alcoholism. They passed each other in the village like strangers who only say hello. His only child, a daughter, checked on him from time to time. But the village did a much better job of keeping up with Nea Nae because he was their cows’ caretaker and cows were important for survival.

On the few times when he ran out of money and was temporarily sober, I listened in awe to the petite Nea Nae spinning tales to his neighbors who listened to him mesmerized as well even though they knew none of them actually happened. He was such a gifted storyteller who had missed his calling. The sad thing was that he could not read. 

Under Nea Nae's watch, the cows always came home to their barns.  

Globalism Is The New Communism

I spent my first twenty years of life in my parents’ apartment. They had a hard time being approved for this apartment because they were not communist party members and the waiting list for the unprivileged proletariat was quite long. Communists, their paid informers, and activists had first dibs.

The tiny cubicle of reinforced concrete was divided into five spaces: bath, kitchen, living room, one-bedroom, small pantry, and one hallway. The entire place was about 650 square feet of space barely big enough for one person, about the size of an average hotel room today.

The bathroom was equipped with a small tub, a sink, a commode with a pull chain from the ceiling water tank, and a tiny window with exterior slats of concrete, and a lovely view of the world through prison-like bars. They were so heavy that, when we had a strong earthquake in 1977, one of the concrete bars broke and was dangling from the reinforced wires like a loose tooth. Last time I visited in 2015, the bar was still there, dangling loose.

The police state we lived under charged the “classless” society lower prices than the true cost to keep the proletariat happy and especially the country folks whose farms and modest homes were confiscated by the forced party cooperatives.

If some renters were behind their water, electric, rent, and gas bills, the total was divided by the number of apartments and everyone paid equal shares. The rest also paid for those who were behind. Eventually they were made to pay it back from their paychecks. Nobody was on welfare. No matter how much electricity, gas, or water each apartment consumed, the total was calculated and equally divided for each apartment.

You had to work if you wanted to eat. The food was of low quality, sold in endless lines, and with rationing coupons. Each family was only allowed so much meat, sugar, flour, butter, cooking oil, and rice per month.

My mom and dad’s apartment was an improvement from living in the same tiny apartment with another family of four who stole our food. Prior to that, mom and dad rented a bedroom from an old lady who lived at the edge of town, so far out that the party had not decided to demolish her little place yet in their haste for modernization.

Dad hated the communists and was not shy about making his feelings and thoughts known about all the parasitical propagandists employed in each factory by the dozen. They also hated my dad with so much passion and often hired goons to beat him up to silence him. One such beating caused him massive health issues and he died paralyzed, helpless, and untreated in one of Ceausescu’s horrible “free“ hospitals. He died on May 13, 1989, a few months short of seeing the demise of his foe, Ceausescu, on Christmas 1989.

My Dad worked hard every day for 43 years in one refinery after another since he was eighteen and left his home in the beautiful hills of Valea Dulce (Sweet Valley), leaving behind eight brothers and sisters, who were raised primarily by my grandmother, after my grandpa passed away at a young age. He now rests on the hill overlooking the green valley below, gently swept by the changing winds.

I spent many summers with my grandma and my cousins, playing by the nearby river and valley when they tended their sheep. The village was too hilly for co-operative farms to exist, so the communists left it alone. People raised grapes and fruit trees on the slopes with rich soil.

As early as I can remember, dad cursed Ceausescu out loud and hoped vociferously to see him dead someday.  Sadly, my dad died seven months before the dictator and his wife were executed after a brief kangaroo trial. 

I had hoped that the revolutionary front would give the Ceausescu dictator and his wife a fair trial but, since his ousting was a coup, not really a revolution as it was presented in the media, the coup organizers were eager to get rid of him so that nobody would find out the truth about the so-called “revolution.”

The young protesters present in huge crowds all over the city were shot as collateral damage by the Securitate men and their mercenaries. Curiously, the TASS agency, the Soviet news outlet, were present in the town of Timisoara, two days before the so-called “revolution” began there.

Dad would have been so disgusted when, on the first free election after 45 years of Ceausescu’s reign of communist terror, 83 percent of the population voted again for a communist government ruled by Iliescu, Ceausescu’s good friend and confidant who participated in the coup d’etat. Three months of revolution and freedom was not enough to erase 45 years of communist dependence.

Allegedly, more than 10,000 innocent civilians who came out to protest Ceausescu’s regime were killed by Army and Securitate agents who, although had been collaborating since 1984 to depose Ceausescu, opened fire on demonstrators in Timisoara and Bucharest while claiming that the sharp shooters were foreign mercenaries.

Thirty-six years since the “revolution,” the neo-communists are still in power today with each new parliamentary government that comes and goes. The children and grandchildren of the “revolutionaries” are communists themselves, thanks to the socialist indoctrination in schools. And the old people are nostalgic about the crumbs that Ceausescu gave them once a month to keep them in line. Dad would have been so disappointed that people were so easily indoctrinated and bought!

And then things got worse. It took only 36 years since the “fall” of communism in Europe for the leftist activists to repackage communism as globalism with money from the many NGOs funded by George Soros.

American leftists got busy immediately destroying the capitalism that made them well-off economically and replacing it with socialism, the steppingstone to communism. They gave it a new name, Globalism, and they called themselves Democrat Socialists.

The march to global communism continues in the west with not much opposition from people who love their countries. They think that it will never happen to them.

 

Noblesse Oblige and Virtue Signaling

For twenty-nine years I took students to Europe on spring break to experience the rich history and culture. I certainly could not have afforded the trips had it not been for the generous program that allowed the leader to travel free as long as six students accompanied her.

The bus driver on a trip to Italy pointed out that there are buses of American students on spring break in many places in western Europe. “They are rich kids when compared to European kids. Do you see any buses full of European students on spring break across America,” he asked. He was right. There were none.

The only mass encounter with American landscape and culture took place this summer during FIFA World Cup. Every European soccer fan asked gushed about America, they were pleasantly surprised because their mainstream media always trashed America and the noisy Americans as if there was nothing good about our beautiful U.S.A.

There are some Americans who visit Europe upon graduating from high school. They are white rich liberals/progressives who go backpacking to Europe to find themselves, staying in hostels to pretend that they are poor, wearing torn jeans and shoes with holes in them to show their fake allegiance to the poor. I have never seen white, rich Europeans backpacking through America and staying in hostels here.

We are lectured by the white progressive rich in America who promote socialism with their wealth platforms of privilege, and virtue-signal their goodness in so many offensive ways.

They spew the communist ideology because the American education system told them that socialism, the steppingstone to communism, done the right way in America, would succeed this time even though it failed everywhere else it had been tried. Millions of its victims cannot speak for themselves anymore and those who survived are ignored.

One bragged about her rich family who helped her buy her first home in a very affluent and expensive real estate market just like her parents’ home which was bought by their parents. She held the keys beaming with unearned pride and began to lecture about the inequality and “institutionalized discrimination and the racial wealth gap” in our country between the haves like her and the have-nots like the rest.

She continued her rant of privilege while acknowledging her “wins in the system, a system that works for me, but we must make it more just.” She conveniently forgot to mention how she was going to make the “system” work for all and she made no pledge to donate her “unjust privilege” to the unprivileged or underprivileged.

A French expression, noblesse oblige, meant once that nobility obliges a person of high nobility to perform social responsibilities. However, rich Americans are not nobility, they promote socialism and communism while trashing the very capitalist society that bought them wealth, and their constant virtue signaling is not a form of noblesse oblige. It is just a form of social media narcissism, a “look at me, I am such a good person because I say so.” It is self-absorbed content with the goal of getting likes and admiration from total strangers. Narcissists suffer from a personality trait characterized by vanity, grandiosity, low empathy, and the sole desire for admiration. Virtue signaling is all about one’s grandiose ego.

 

 

 

                                                                                   

Jean Raspail's Imaginary End of Europe

There are many instances when reality imitates art and others when art imitates reality. Such is the case of the French writer Jean Raspail’s book, The Camp of the Saints, which was not received well by the mainstream media of the 1970s nor is it received well by the current mainstream media which decided to ignore its existence, ban it, or classify it as a fringe creation of a conspiracy author. Most recently, Amazon erased the sale of Raspail’s book from its platform.

Raspail was considered a racist and xenophobe and his book a creation for the fringe “white supremacist circles.” The media screed trashed it non-stop even though the book received France’s most important literary awards.

Editions Robert Laffont, the publishing house that owns the original rights to this book, has authorized its most recent translation.

Why in the world would the mass media and globalist controllers deem Raspail’s book a racist malignancy and everyone who reads it a racist? For the simple reason that his fictional book accurately predicted mass migration and its destruction of western civilization.

Jean Raspail’s imaginary characters, hordes of Indian invaders, are not so imaginary in twenty-first century Europe. Raspail wrote his book, The Camp of the Saints, in 1973, half a century before the current mass invasion of Europe and North America began.

Raspail, unlike Orwell and Huxley, does not present the outcomes of a dystopian society but the dystopia as it unfolds step by step as the result of “modern spiritual self-hatred” of western civilization, in this case in France.

The “nihilism of guilt” forces logic-minded scholars to bend over backwards to avoid the left’s reproaches by turning on their friends and joining the ranks of the left in condemning Raspail’s book.

Raspail (1925-2020) loved to travel and often mourned the disappearance of indigenous tribes. He judged New York a “desert” because “we no longer run into an Algonquin.” His two favorite themes across his 40 books and a dozen novels are ‘literary royalism’ and ‘love for places and peoples distant in time and space.’

Raspail’s offense, as perceived by literary critics and the western media, was that he dared to write about the fate of the indigenous people of Europe and whether their fate would be like the peoples who had vanished because of European colonization. He imagined the “end of European and Western civilization” when France is invaded by a horde of immigrants from India.

The media sees his third book, The Camp of the Saints, not as a literary reflection of the death of the West, direct result of the massive immigrant invasion, but as a racist and xenophobic expression of his imagination.

He describes the “myth of the noble savages” who are vulgar in their “crudeness, sexual promiscuity, and repellant hygiene.” The migrants are “materially and culturally destitute” and are looking for a better life, primarily an immediate “deliverance from poverty and from the often-brutal oppression and inequalities of non-Western societies.”

The French government becomes paralyzed as they have no idea what to do with this army of immigrants. Civil society collapses thanks to the do-gooders who withdraw from public life in the face of the invasion. The immigrants’ lives are not improved at all, so they install their own dictator-generals and Brahmins in the French government, imposing the very same society they had fled.

The invaders take over civic functions and French society. Academia describes “mass immigration as morally required and inevitable,” thus eventually causing the death of France and of Europe.

Raspail satirizes the “left-liberal Catholicism” which sees Christ in the invading migrants. Vatican sells its treasures to win the approval of the Third World while turning their backs on their own flock.

The intellectuals, who prepare the way for the immigrants to land safely, are assassinated by the army of migrants after the French army deserts. “The left-wing militias who welcome the migrants are killed or become servants, peasants, and prostitutes.”

The Camp of the Saints brings to life the leftist view that “The First World must be taught to be ashamed of itself, to believe that its death will be its greatest gift to humanity.” The West must submit to the morally superior non-Western “Other.” And the “Others” turn to violence, destruction, and murder of the welcoming locals and of those who objected to their landing on Europe’s shores.